After an intensive day of sitting and walking meditation at a desert retreat, a student asked meditation teacher Jack Kornfield:
“Here I am sitting on my ass for two weeks dealing with a lot of pain and gaining insight into the nature of my mind, while the problems of the world grow steadily worse. What I’d like to know is how can meditation practice be brought into line with enlightened social and political action, or whether they can be brought together, or should I choose one or the other?”
What follows is a condensed version of Kornfield’s reply. A therapist and a teacher of Vipassana meditation, Kornfield is the co-founder, with Joseph Goldstein, of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and leads meditation retreats around the world.
Kornfield’s remarks originally appeared in The Esalen Institute Catalog and were also included in The Path Of Compassion: Contemporary Writings On Engaged Buddhism, a thoughtful and provocative collection edited by Fred Eppsteiner and Dennis Maloney. Published by White Pine Press and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, the book may be ordered for $9.95, plus $1 for shipping, from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, P.O. Box 4650, Berkeley, CA 94704. Highly recommended.
We’re thankful for permission to reprint Jack Kornfield’s talk.
— Ed.
How can we reconcile the question of service and responsibility in the world with the Buddhist concepts of non-attachment, emptiness of self, non-self?
First we must learn to distinguish love, compassion, and equanimity from what might be called their “near-enemies.” The near-enemy to love is attachment. It masquerades as love: “I love this person. I love this thing,” which usually means, “I want to hold it, I want to keep it, I don’t want to let it be.” This isn’t love at all; it’s attachment, and they’re different. There’s a big difference between love, which allows and honors and appreciates, and attachment, which grasps and holds and aims to possess. The near-enemy to compassion is pity. Whereas compassion is a sense of our shared suffering, pity says, “Oh, those poor people! They’re suffering; they’re different from me.” This sets up separation and duality. The near-enemy to equanimity is indifference. It feels very equanimous to say, “I don’t give a damn, I don’t care, I’m not really attached to it,” and in a way it’s a very peaceful, relieved feeling. Why is that? Because it’s a withdrawal; it’s a removal from the world and from life. Can you see the difference? Equanimity — like love and compassion — is not removal. It’s being in the middle of the world and opening to it with balance, seeing the unity in things. The near-enemies — attachment, pity, and indifference — all are ways of backing away, or removing ourselves. It’s not a departure from the world that meditation leads to, but a deeper vision that’s not self-centered. It moves away from I and other, from that dualistic way of viewing to a more spontaneous, whole, unified way.
Vimala Thakar has been a meditation teacher in India for many years; in many ways, she is a Dharma heir to Krishnamurti. After she had been working in rural development for many years, Krishnamurti asked her to teach, and she became a powerful and much-loved meditation teacher. Now she has returned to her rural development work, and she’s not teaching as much anymore. So I went to her and asked, “Why did you go back to helping the hungry and homeless after teaching meditation?” She was insulted by my question. She said, “Sir,” — as Krishnamurti does — “I am a lover of life, sir, and I make no distinction between serving people who are starving and have no dignity in their physical lives and serving people who are fearful and closed and have no dignity in their mental lives. There’s no difference to me. I love all of life, and the way that I give is to respond to whatever’s presented to me.”
It was a wonderful response! There’s an Islamic phrase that puts it together: “Trust in Allah, and tie your camel to the post.” It’s both sides: pray, yes, but also make sure you do what’s necessary in the world. It’s a balance between what Don Juan called “controlled folly” and “impeccability.” Controlled folly means seeing that all of life is a show of light and sound and that this tiny blue-green planet hangs in space with billions of stars and galaxies, and that people have been here for only one second of world time compared with millions of years of other changes. This context helps us to laugh more often, to enter into life with joy. The quality of impeccability entails realizing how precious life is, even though it’s transient and ephemeral, and how, in fact, each of our actions and words affects all the beings around us in a very profound way.
I could make a very convincing case to you for the practice of sitting meditation — just to do that and nothing else — and an equally convincing case for going out and serving the world. Look at it from the first side. Does the world need more oil and energy and food? Actually, no. There are enough resources for all of us. There is starvation and poverty and disease because of ignorance, prejudice, and fear, because we hoard and create wars over imaginary geographic boundaries and act as if one group of people is different from another group somewhere else on the planet. What the world needs is not more oil, but more love and generosity, kindness, and understanding. Until those are attained, the other levels won’t ever work, so you really have to sit and meditate and get that understanding in yourself first. Only when you have done it yourself can you have the skill to help change the greed in the world and to love. Thus, it’s not a privilege to meditate, but a responsibility.
As for the other side, well, I only have to mention Cambodia or Somalia or Central Africa or India, where the enormity of suffering is almost beyond comprehension. In India alone, 350 million people live in such poverty that they have to work that day to get enough food to feed themselves that night, if they’re lucky. I once interviewed a man in Calcutta who was sixty-four years old and pulled a rickshaw for a living. He’d been pulling it for forty years, and he had ten people dependent on him for income. He’d gotten sick once for ten days, and after a week they ran out of money and had nothing to eat. How can we let this happen? Forty deaths per minute from starvation in the world; $714,000 a minute spent on machines to kill people.
Both arguments are quite convincing, aren’t they? The question is how to choose what to do, where to put our energy in life — even which spiritual path to follow. Spirituality in this country has blossomed and it’s exquisite! It’s also kind of confusing. There are so many ways to go — how to decide? How can we choose what to do this year, today? For me the answer has been simply to follow the heart. Sometimes it’s clear that we must take time to meditate and simplify, to do our inner work. Sometimes it’s clear that we must begin to act and give and serve.
I can share my own experience. Ordinarily I spend my year teaching meditation retreats. A couple of years ago, though, war began raging in Cambodia. I know the people there and a couple of the local languages, and something in me said, “I’m going.” I went, not for very long, but long enough to be of some assistance. This year, feeling a real need to bring a greater marriage of service and formal meditation, I went to India again with some friends to collect tapes for radio and television on the relationship between spiritual practice and social responsibility. And now I’m back teaching meditation.
I didn’t think about it much at the time. It just seemed as if it had to be done and I went and did it. It’s something immediate and personal. The spiritual path doesn’t hold out some simple solution, some easy formula for everyone to follow. It’s not a question of imitation. You can’t be like Mother Teresa. She’s Mother Teresa, and she’s wonderful. If you tried, you wouldn’t be like you. You have to be yourself. What it means is listening to your heart to know the right thing to do, and then doing it in the spirit of growing in awareness and service.
It’s not always easy. It’s not easy getting out of the womb, either. That’s simply how it is.
There’s the story of Mother Teresa and her ring. Someone said to Mother Teresa, “Well, you know, it’s easier for you. You’re not married or in a relationship.” “What do you mean?” she answered. “I am married,” she said, holding up the ring that signifies a nun’s marriage to Jesus, “and he can be very difficult.”
There are two great forces in this world. One is the force of killing. That’s how dictators run countries. They run them by killing other people — by not being afraid to kill. But there’s another great force that is equally powerful, maybe more so, and that’s the force of not being afraid to die. That’s the only force that is powerful enough to meet someone who’s not afraid to kill. Gandhi showed the power of this force. Thousands of troops came from one direction, while from the other direction came one person, Gandhi, whose strategy eventually succeeded. How did he do it? He said, “I’m going to starve. I won’t eat until you stop the rioting and insanity.” He knew that his people cared for him so much that they wouldn’t let him die. That’s what love is — putting yourself on the line. The spirit of service in little ways and big ways, that’s really what practice is: serving ourselves, serving the world around us. It’s a giving of ourselves or a giving up of ourselves to the unity, the whole, and not just this little “I.” It’s powerful and it’s joyful. It’s freeing.
One of the exquisite experiences in my travels in India was to go to the holy city of Benares on the Ganges River bank, filled with hundreds of temples and stores and markets. Along the Ganges are the bathing ghats where people come to pay their respects and bathe as a purification, as well as the ghats where they bring bodies to burn. I’d heard about them for years and had always thought, “Wow, that must be a heavy place. It must be really intense.” It was amazing to be rowed in this little boat down the Ganges in a very quiet way to where there were twelve different fires going, and six or eight had bodies on them. Every half an hour or so, they’d carry a new body down to the fires, chanting, “Rama Nama Satya Hei,” which could be translated as “The only truth is the name of God.” Yet it wasn’t heavy at all. It was peaceful and quiet and sane. It was just, “Well, that’s what happens.”
What does this have to do with meditation practice? It has to do with the recognition that, in the face of the tremendous suffering of the world, there can be joy that comes not from denying pain and seeking pleasure, but from our ability to sit in meditation, even when it’s difficult, and to let our hearts open to our experience. It’s really the nitty-gritty work of practice to sit here and feel your sadness and my sadness and our fear, our desperation and our restlessness; to open to them and begin to learn that to love is to let go of how we want things to be, and to open more to truth. To love is to accept. It’s not a weakness at all; it’s the most extraordinary power.
There’s a beautiful sutra that talks about the blessings of those who grow in this kind of love. It’s called the cultivation of loving-kindness, and it lists fifty blessings that come through diligent practice. It says that if your heart is open and loving, you will have sweet dreams and fall asleep more easily and awaken, contented, with a smile. The devas and angels will love and protect you, and men and women will love you, and weapons won’t be able to harm you. Guns will misfire and poison won’t work. People will welcome you everywhere into their countries and into their homes, and you’ll have pleasant thoughts, and your mind will become very quiet. Animals will sense this love, and they’ll love you back. Elephants will bow to you, and your voice will become sweet and soft, and your babies will be happy in the womb and happy when they grow up. If you fall off a cliff, it says, a tree will always be there to catch you. Your countenance will be serene, and your eyes shiny, and you’ll become awakened.
This is what the sutra says will happen. We don’t talk about loving-kindness early on in our retreats, for the good reason that people are sitting with restlessness and anger and knee pains. Joy, peace, and serenity are not what’s happening. But I’ll tell you a secret: true love — not the near-enemies of “I want” or “I’m in love with,” but deeper love than that — is really the same as awareness; they’re identical. It is seeing the divine goodness, the Buddha nature, the truth of each moment, and allowing ourselves to open, to accept. That’s our practice every moment, whether in sitting meditation or action meditation, whether sitting on a cushion or sitting near the barricades in protest. It’s being aware, seeing the truth which frees us; it’s opening to what’s now, to what’s here, and to seeing it as it is.
The forces of injustice in the world loom so huge, and sometimes we feel so tiny; how are we to have an impact? I’ll leave you with the words of Don Juan in Castaneda’s Tales of Power: “Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one release one’s sadness. A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. . . . Only the love for this splendorous being can give freedom to a warrior’s spirit; and freedom is joy, efficiency, and abandon in the face of any odds.”
