A tearful phone call from a friend this summer prompted a Dharma reflection for me. She sounded spiritually distressed. Her practice and the love of the Dhamma were strong however the slippery minefield of concepts was tripping her up. She lamented how she wasn’t sure that she was learning. If someone asked her to define ‘muditā’ for example, could she? Was she applying these elusive concepts correctly in the right moments? “Is anything sticking, going in?” she asked me.
I could relate. A memory came to mind from a retreat when I decided that I couldn’t teach anymore because I didn’t know anything. The teacher who I reported this decision to, with much compassion, responded that she too had felt that way sometimes, “The Dhamma is so vast.” Crucially, she then suggested I look that doubt straight in the eye and continue.
As practitioners, we’re called to live the teachings rather than theorize about them. We’re training our bodies, hearts and minds not to achieve but to keep arriving at the truth of our present moment’s experience. In this way, understanding unfolds. As Rainer Maria Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet, “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
We hear the Buddha’s teachings first with the mind. We reflect on them, practice them, and gradually they move from something we understand intellectually to something we know in our bones—to something embodied and deeply integrated into who we are. Vasubandhu describes the progression essentially as: having heard, one reflects; having reflected correctly, one engages in cultivation.
Wisdom through hearing/listening (sutamayā paññā) — receiving the teachings intellectually through hearing, study, or reading.
Wisdom through reflection (cintāmayā paññā) — contemplating and questioning the teachings until they become personally understood and meaningful.
Wisdom through meditation/cultivation (bhāvanāmayā paññā) — directly experiencing and embodying the truth through practice, so that it is no longer merely something you know about.
In my friend’s case, I knew her to be heart-led, intuitive, and sincere with embodiment. Perhaps the medicine was to renew faith and stay focused on direct experience. This was enough. However, as Joseph Goldstein has encouraged, “studying the Dharma can give us access to enlarging our understanding of the Buddha’s teachings because our personal experience is always limited.” Thus if more study was called for, then pursuing that, but not seeing conceptual blocks as a lack of progression.
I discovered this directly. Last year, I had the good fortune to sit a month-long meditation retreat and then later traveled to India to check in on my elderly parents. It was a difficult trip, mired in a few untenable dilemmas due to mental illness and physical diminishment. In other words, I was triggered at every turn and my nervous system was on high alert, but I didn’t keel over. Long after I returned home to the United States, I remembered that during challenging moments, I had noticed something sliding in. I didn’t think then, “Oh I’m applying equanimity here.” Equanimity arose. I literally felt the support of the earth element shoring me up. I had the space to respond to things rather than explode or act unskilfully. I was able to be fully present with the suffering of my parents and understand what was controllable and what was asking for surrender. It was clear that when I first heard the formal teachings on equanimity early in my practice, a part of me had recognized those qualities and found them very appealing. I had read books where equanimity was fleshed out, heard many Dharma talks on the topic, and discussed it extensively in my Kalyana Mitta groups. But my experience of equanimity was only revealed to me through practice. When I needed it, equanimity showed up. The small ‘I’ had nothing to do with making it happen. As Andrea Fella put it, “The brahmaviharas are the map of the heart when it stops clinging.” Embodied, consistent, dedicated practice is when the fetters of greed, hatred, and delusion begin to fade, our conditioned habit patterns shift, and true transformation becomes a reality.
It’s all a marvelous mystery. Keep on.