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Judith Simmer-Brown to Distraught Shambhala Members: “Practice More.” (Notes and Transcript)by Matthew Remski
August 6, 2018
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On Saturday, August 4th, senior Shambhala International teacher Judith Simmer-Brown gave a talk in Boulder as part of a series called “Conversations That Matter”.
The title was “Caring for Community,” and it was structured around a set of slogans called “The Four Reliances”, which are meant to help Buddhist practitioners separate out mundane and spiritual concerns.
In this context, the slogans were offered to help Shambhala practitioners in particular renew their commitment to the group’s ideas and practices, in the midst of continuing revelations of abuse within the group itself. They advise the practitioner to see immediate and obvious circumstances — and their interpretation of those circumstances — as ephemeral (or at best instrumental to a higher purpose) and to develop a depersonalized, non-judgmental, and non-verbal devotion to the group’s content.The “Four Reliances”, featured in several Buddhist texts dating back to the first century CE, are:
1. Do not rely on the personality or individuality of the teacher. Rely on the Dharma teachings themselves.
2. Do not rely on the literal words. Rely on the meaning of the teachings.
3. Do not rely on merely provisional teachings. Rely on the definitive or ultimate teachings.
4. Do not rely on conceptual mind. Rely on the nondual wisdom of experience.
The presentation series is hosted by the group’s flagship Center, founded in 1970 by Chögyam Trungpa. Simmer-Brown’s talk was livestreamed for members of the public who registered via the Zoom platform. I registered under my own name, and recorded the event. No copyright notice or privacy request was posted.
Appropriating a popular concept from trauma-recovery discourse,
Simmer-Brown explained that her talk would offer “foundational things that we need to know in order to be resilient practitioners.” In the Q&A that followed, she suggested that such resilience could be nurtured by the activities of the very group that had caused the trauma. “Our confusion and pain,” she told one questioner,” might drive us more deeply into practice.”The appeal from group leaders to double down on group practice in the face of group abuse is a common theme in the crisis responses of yoga and dharma organizations. When the news of Pattabhi Jois’s decades of sexual assaults on his women students began to go mainstream, a common insider response was to repeat Jois’s most famous aphorism: “Practice, and all is coming.”
As the Shambhala foundations shake, many devotees are likewise relying on beloved sayings of Trungpa, such as: “The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.” (Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, 2009, p. 17). A similar theme grounds the
recent remarks of Susan Piver, as well as
Pema Chödron’s 1993 and 2011 responses to Trungpa’s own abuses.
In my notes on Chödron, I use Alexandra Stein’s lens of disorganized attachment within cults to examine the double bind this advice presents: the group has been revealed as harbouring or enabling abuse (as the
leaked notes from the July 2nd Kalapa Council phone call show); and then the group and its practices are positioned as the best way for members to soothe themselves in relation to that abuse.
In short: the member is asked to move more fully towards and into the group that has caused harm. They are asked to seek refuge in a space that has proven itself unsafe.
I’m posting a transcript of the event below. I do this at the risk of shaming the speaker should they take the critique personally, instead of as a public figure with powerful cultural influence.
I believe the transcript presents a unique opportunity to witness in real time how the leadership of a high-demand group, regardless of intentions, will so often have nothing to fall back on during an ethical crisis except the very ideological content and behavioural advice that may have covered over, worsened, or even caused the crisis in the first place. The conflict of interest is blatant.
Analyzing this happening in real time can, I hope, aid cultural fluency in the mechanisms of undue influence at work in many yoga and dharma communities. I hope it will help members of similar groups see more clearly how they can be asked to give their labour — financial, intellectual, and emotional — while simultaneously dealing with having been violated by the group.
The transcript shows how the logic of the in-group cannot admit outside information. Indeed, it cannot even admit inside information: the actual allegations are never named. (Information and message control is essential to any high-demand group.) By marginalizing and minimizing the allegations and offering no outside resources — such as in the areas of restorative justice or trauma care — the talk creates the impression, supported reflections on “The Four Reliances”, that not only is the group ideology all that is available to help, but that leaders like Simmer-Brown have adequate answers to the problems in the organization they have led for decades.I’ve left out the names of the community members who ask questions or comment, save for one. Kathleen Moore spoke fifth, and gave me permission to disclose her name.
Moore was the partner of the late Bill Scheffel, who died of suicide on July 8th. He immolated himself in his car a week after giving a despairing address to a community gathering to discuss the scandal.Moore issued a direct and personal appeal for accountability amidst a culture of silencing.
Moore described having been isolated by the community after Scheffel’s death, pushed to the margin as an outsider, as someone willing to discuss toxic dynamics within the group. This follows, as she says, a pattern that impacted Scheffel himself. She began by reading a quote from Scheffel’s address:
I’m in a world of pain. When Trungpa Rinpoche died, there were many forces at work. Now there’s a phenomena of you’re either in or out. We are no longer a society. We’ve become a church. Society has division, diversity and dissonance. The rank-ism [here] creates distance and has broken me.
“Since he died,” Moore continued, “his friends who are mostly senior students of Trungpa Rinpoche, almost all of them teachers, are saying things like, I killed him, that I’m responsible for his death. No one will say this to me. I hear it from others who’ve heard it and believe those people. But what I’m experiencing is incredible amounts of silence.”
Instead of directly answering Moore’s public appeal to suggest policy that would address ways in those who criticize the group are marginalized,
Simmer-Brown offered to meet with Moore in person.
“It sounds like this may be a more personal conversation between you and me and I would be delighted to talk with you one on one about that,” said Simmer-Brown, effectively silencing a discussion about silencing, and further blurring the lines between public responsibility, private resolutions, and perhaps even therapy.
It’s important to understand that in this and similar sub-cultures, private meetings with teachers are highly valued and largely understood as intimate transmission moments.
The assumption is that far from being confrontational or eliciting accountability, the meeting will offer the leader an opportunity to communicate some deeper, secret truth that will give the member relief.After offering a private meeting, Simmer-Brown then went on to self-reference, talking about her own periods of outsidership in relation to the community.
The appeal to private reckoning is not only used to evade public accountability. It can also be used to deflect the institutional responsibility that organization leaders hold.Simmer-Brown is not just a rank-and-file Shambhala member. She is one of forty “Acharyas”, authorized by Ösel Mukpo (now
accused of forcible confinement and attempted rape) to transmit initiated or restricted group content in retreat settings. In her public life, Simmer-Brown is the author of the feminist-inflected study of the “Dakini” principle in Tibetan Buddhism. She has served as the Chair of Shambhala’s Teacher’s Academy, Chair of Religious Studies at Naropa, and has sat on the Board of Shambhala International. Beyond her group, Simmer-Brown also serves on the steering committee of the Contemplative Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion.
But throughout Saturday’s event, Simmer-Brown repeatedly defaulted to the private register. The effect, in part, was to deinstitutionalize her relationship with Mukpo, and restricted her criticisms to the intimate level of disappointment.
She did not use the terms that would be necessary on an organizational level to analyze events and reform structures, such as “power imbalance”, “assault”, or “victim”. Simmer-Brown has a long history with Mukpo, she explained, having bonded with him in sorrow over the deadly sexual abuses of Tom Rich, Trungpa’s appointed successor, and having played a key role in soliciting the sympathies of Tibetan luminaries, on Mukpo’s behalf, at the time.
Simmer-Brown is now “mad at him about certain things and disappointed about certain things. And am shaken about various things. But my love for him abides.”Simmer-Brown makes implicit use of her credentials and her public register, however, in her role as a scriptural explicator. The text upon which she was commenting, she said:
is an early teaching that came from the foundational Canon, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, teachings given by the Buddha shortly before he passed. And in reading these teachings, I realize there was a crisis in the sangha then, when the Buddha passed, particularly because he did not appoint a Dharma heir and there was no clear direction forward. The teachings that I will be presenting to you came from this early period of Buddhism, but they became very important as well during the Mahayana period. Obviously people went back to these teachings over and over and most recently Mipham the great in the 19th century, wrote a text where he talked about these Four Reliances and talked about their importance as a way of really knowing how to stabilize our practice in difficult times. The original teaching was published in a Sutra called the Catuḥpratisaraṇa Sutta, which means the Four Reliable Refuges, and then the more recent teaching that came from Mipham the Great, came from a text called the Sword of Wisdom where he taught a number of classical topics. It’s said that Mipham the Great composed this text, the Sword of Wisdom, in a single day in 1885, and it consists of 104 verses bringing in foundational things that we need to know in order to be resilient practitioners.
There are several problems here. There is no “Catuḥpratisaraṇa Sutta” (the term is a garble of Sanskrit and Pali) in the Pali Canon. The Four Reliances is a Mahayana idea, which means that it dates to as many as five centuries after the Buddha’s death, and is at considerable variance from the Pali content. Comparing the succession issues in the Buddha’s time to repeated and ongoing abuse crises at Shambhala International is a false equivalency that covertly compares Trungpa to the Buddha himself.
Lost on many outsiders will be the implication of using Mipham the Great as a primary reference. Ösel Mukpo is said to be the reincarnation of this philosopher. In other words: Simmer-Brown is using teaching content that ostensibly comes from the past-perfected mind-stream of an alleged abuser, in order to address the crisis caused by that same abuse. The implication is that the Mukpo’s “wisdom” is somewhere, somehow intact, untouched by the present circumstance, which it can now help to heal.
The citation and its usage spin in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that allows Mukpo’s current “personality or individuality” to be bypassed in favour of relying “on the Dharma teachings themselves”, which are elided with the perfected Mukpo, who resides in the great beyond.It does not matter whether these interpretive issues are oversights, educational gaps, or outright manipulations. The net effect is deceptive: the whole premise of the event is that the presenter is authoritative when it comes to scripture, transparency, and community care.
So: there is a general promotion of group practice as the answer to group abuse. There’s quote from Thrangu Rinpoche that minimizes institutional abuse as the Guru’s “foibles” or “defects”. There’s a comparison between the online explosion of outrage and a “storm” — a code word in Tibetan Buddhism for ephemeral phenomena. (Far from ephemeral, it is the very reason Simmer-Brown is giving the talk.) And there is the continued use of honorifics to refer to Trungpa — even as the larger community debates whether his image should be banished from shrine rooms around the world.
A more sophisticated mechanism of psychosocial control on display here is the persistent dismissal of “concepts”, “premature conclusions”, and “taking sides”. These basic ethical functions are said to be “more painful than” non-dual experience, in which one cannot take a position.One of the questioners agreed with this premise.
“I think conceptuality can be so tricky,” they said, “and so sneaky and nefarious and easy to mistake for experience and so I’m wondering if you could speak more to like how we can identify operating from a place of our nondual wisdom experience instead of conceptuality.”
“Well,” replied Simmer-Brown, “and as we know Buddhist tradition particularly in Tibet is just full of beautiful concepts and concepts are, are useful and they have their place, but there’s no substitute for practice.”
In my notes about Chödron, I suggested that it is up to Shambhala International to show how such invocations of mystical union do not encourage members to use their group-given practices to dissociate from their agency in the light of conflict and abuse. I believe the same test applies here.
Perhaps the most disturbing language that Simmer-Brown uses involves a reinforcement of the hard line between the insider and outsider status that Moore illuminated. It comes through a discussion of
the hierarchical difference between “hindrance doubt” and “questioning doubt”, and the roles each play in the life of a Buddhist. The former is worldly and paralyzing, while the latter is to be nurtured and embraced as a path to integrity.“The profundity of the Shambhala teachings for me,” said Simmer-Brown,
has been the ability to relate to the great doubt of our culture, the doubt in basic goodness. The Sakyong has said, the Dorje Dradul has said, that the little doubts are invitations for deeper investigation. The great doubt in basic goodness is what really has become a blight on our society and has led us toward the setting sun. So as practitioners, our primary path is working in a healthy way with the doubts. Doubts, plural, have a beautiful place on our path, including doubts about our teachers, doubts about lots of things, but if we begin to doubt the fundamental goodness, then we have given into the setting sun world.
Who is this advice really for? Is it right to suggest that those who turn away from the group altogether are no longer working with their doubts “in a healthy way?”
Why is “doubt in the fundamental goodness” of the world and existence presented as the likely outcome of disillusionment with institutional abuse? What is the “setting sun world”? It is the world outside of or beyond the “Great Eastern Sun” of Shambhala.
Through entrainment or conviction, Simmer-Brown seems to be suggesting something that cannot be said outright:
If by some indefinable measure, members’ doubts about their teachers cease to be “healthy”, not only do they run the risk of giving up on their own “fundamental goodness”, they’re actually no better than those who inhabit the “setting sun world”, where the Shambhala teachings are invisible.
For some members, this could amount to a furtherance of disorganized attachment pattering: a threat of banishment, disguised with something that sounds like love.I’ve found Stein’s framework so useful in my life and work. I’ll end by introducing another framework. Perhaps it’s now up to Shambhala International to show how events like Simmer-Brown’s talk are not continuing acts of “institutional betrayal”, as outlined by Jennifer Freyd.
Freyd says institutional betrayal occurs when environments are created where experiences of abuse are more likely, and more difficult to report. Project Sunshine provides many textbook examples of longterm institutional betrayal within Shambhala International. Saturday’s event continues the theme: don’t name the actions, minimize them if you do, and always make their effects abstract against a more-important spiritual backdrop.
In their landmark study, Freyd and Parnitzke Smith found that: “sexually assaulted women who also experienced institutional betrayal experienced higher levels of several post-traumatic symptoms. This pattern of results may offer an explanation for the increased difficulties observed following abuse experienced in institutional settings such as the military… institutionalized childcare… and cases of domestic violence involving failed attempts to seek help from the justice system.
“It appears that the added betrayal surrounding sexual assault exacerbates what is already a traumatic experience for most women.”
____
Transcript key:Vidyadhara: “Awareness-holder”. Honorific for Chögyam Trungpa
Dorje Dradul: “Ultimate warrior”. Honorific for Chögyam Trungpa
Sawang: “Earth lord”, likely dynastic heir. Honorific for Ösel Mukpo, Trungpa’s son, prior to his becoming the “Sakyong” (“earth protector”), in 1995.
Prajna: Internal wisdom.
Garchen: A tantric practice retreat at which various levels of initiated practice are bestowed upon group members. Simmer-Brown is referring here to this recent event.
Terma: Received, found, or channeled religious content, often revealed to initiates as liturgy for Tantric practice. The recent Garchen, for instance featured a transmission of the “Scorpion Seal” terma, said to be channeled by Trungpa in the early 1980s, but revealed by Ösel Mukpo decades later.
Great Eastern Sun: Epithet for the mythical land of Shambhala.
Setting sun world: Everywhere other than the mythical land of Shambhala.
Rigdens: Kings of the mythical land of Shambhala.
TranscriptHost:
Well good morning everyone. Good to see you. Here it is. My pleasure to introduce someone who needs little introduction, perhaps many of you. We have the, uh, the privilege of hearing from Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown today. The Acharya Judith, as you know, is a senior teacher in the Shambhala lineage and has just completed her 40th year on the Naropa faculty as a distinguished professor of contemplative and religious studies. And so with that, thank you for being here Judith.
Judith S-B: 00:01:53
I just have to take a moment to look around and see, well many old friends and friends and, and thanks for coming out on a Saturday afternoon, a beautiful day. I’m so delighted to see all of you. This has been a rough time, I don’t know about for you, but certainly for me and for our community and
my mind goes back to a major crisis in our community 30 years ago, when, after the passing of the Vidyadhara, and finding out about the illness of the Regent, and all of the scandals associated with that time and the extremely breakdown of our community in the couple of years after that, as people began to shout and vilify each other and insist that everybody take sides and to this day there are people in our community who are not speaking to each other because of the incredible difficulty and pain and heartbreak of that particular time in our community.And I have a fear of that kind of thing happening again. It was a major crisis and it’s remarkable that our community has continued in the years since then. And at least so far, while there’s storms on social media and there are things that are said around the margins, I have experienced our community as connected often in a more authentic and deeper, more honest way than we have in a very long time. And I take great comfort in that. Knowing that we don’t know what’s going to happen next.
Ironically, 30 years ago when all this was happening with our community, I was in Nepal, with my family having just directed the study abroad program for Naropa. And at the time, in December of 2008 [sic. the year was 1988], The students had just left to go home and the then Sawang who was studying at Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s monastery and had been there for the all the time that I was there. I was in Nepal that time for eight months and the
Sawang was studying at Tsechen Monastery at that time and he sent for me and took me up to the roof of the guest house where he was living and told me slowly with very deep sadness, the whole story of what had happened with the Regent and about the students who had been — one particular student who had been infected with AIDS — and all of the incredible tumult in the community. And I had known the Sawang for some time. But in that particular moment we both were weeping as we looked out in the whole area around the monastery, realizing the kind of impact that it would have on our community.And at the end of this time, while he told me of the events and I felt so heartbroken as I do now, he asked me if I would be his secretary for the months that came because he was receiving many phone calls and messages from our international community trying to pull him into one camp or another. And during the months that I worked with him with my young son in a backpack on my back, um, I was sent around to different monasteries asking for pujas and practices on behalf of our community and was tasked with telling various Lamas about what had happened and to sit with them while they wept for our community. And for the legacy of the Vidyadhara.
During that time, I came to deeply love the Sawang — now the Sakyong. Love him for his authenticity, his depth, his steadiness in the midst of a real crisis and his wisdom.
And I love him still. Even though I’m mad at him about certain things and disappointed about certain things. And am shaken about various things. But my love for him abides. So in my remarks to you, I’m speaking from the complications of the many things I feel and my own experience over my years of practice of
“Where do I find stability? Where do I find some sense of ground in an incredibly groundless situation? A situation with sometimes lots of upheaval and sometimes things are more steady for me personally and especially because as an Acharya there are many turning to me for support and help. I feel they’re tumult as well. it’s contagious. So in my life of practice and each of us have a different story, a different way of working with adversity in our lives, and adversity like this world, working with individually and as a community and as a larger community of Buddhists in the West. Having heard from many practitioners from other Tibetan Buddhist communities and other American Buddhist communities of feeling the reverberation of all of this, I wanted to just say that
for me, there’s been tremendous benefit in joining practice and study and a long life of studying Buddhist texts and commentaries and looking for my guru on every page.So the question that I bring to you today is
“How do we become resilient practitioners in the midst of a crisis like this and whatever crises are yet to come that we may not yet know about?” So are you with me so far? Okay.
I found several teachings that have been incredibly helpful to me in finding some kind of stability and the first one is the one that was advertised with this talk, the teaching of what’s known as the Four Reliances. This is an early teaching that came from the foundational Canon, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, teachings given by the Buddha shortly before he passed. And in reading these teachings, I realize there was a crisis in the sangha then, when the Buddha passed, particularly because he did not appoint a Dharma heir and there was no clear direction forward. The teachings that I will be presenting to you came from this early period of Buddhism, but they became very important as well during the Mahayana period. Obviously people went back to these teachings over and over and most recently Mipham the great in the 19th century, wrote a text where he talked about these Four Reliances and talked about their importance as a way of really knowing how to stabilize our practice in difficult times.
The original teaching was published in a Sutra called the Catupratisadana sutta, which means the Four Reliable Refuges, and then the more recent teaching that came from Mipham the Great, came from a text called the Sword of Wisdom where he taught a number of classical topics. It’s said that Mipham the Great composed this text, the Sword of Wisdom, in a single day in 1885, and it consists of 104 verses bringing in foundational things that we need to know in order to be resilient practitioners.
So I’d like to share these four with you and my understanding of them because they have definitely helped me. The Four Reliances are worded, do not rely on this, rely on this, but as I understand each of the four, it’s not that we discovered the first because without the first we cannot access the second, so there’s a sense that the first is something that we turn to and we deeply connect with, but what we rely on is the second, so let me read these four through and then I’ll treat them one at a time.
They are,
the first one is do not rely on the personality or individuality of the teacher. Rely on the Dharma teachings themselves. The second is do not rely on the literal words. Rely on the meaning of the teachings. The third is to not rely on merely provisional teachings. Rely on the definitive or ultimate teachings. And the fourth is, do not rely on conceptual mind. Rely on the nondual wisdom of experience.So let me talk about each of these one at a time and they each go very much together. The first one, do not rely on the personality or individuality of the teacher. Rely on the Dharma teachings to themselves. This is a teaching which is saying that
the teacher of course, is crucial. We’ve learned to turn to the teacher. Without a personal transmission of the teachings, teachings are merely words on a page and we can’t get these teachings from words on pages. The teacher kindness through generosity, through skill is able to bring the teachings directly to us in a way that helps us really deeply absorb and really understand the teachings, but too often we get caught up
in a kind of personality cult of the teacher and we focus too much on the individual characteristics of the teacher rather than on the teacher as teacher, as the kind lineage holder who brings the teachings to us in a very personal way, and so of course we love our teachers and that’s fantastic.
We may sometimes not love them. We may in fact develop incredible antipathy toward them, but the real measure is what are the teachings that they bring us and how do we connect and understand those teachings themselves? This is what is reliable. This is the key to our connection with a teacher that can help stabilize the ups and downs that we may go through in the teacher student relationship.
Again, not to discard the teacher, but rely on the teacher as one who gives us teachings and connects us with the lineage.
The second reliance is do not rely on the literal words. Rely on the meaning. We of course need the literal words of the teachings that we receive. If we don’t know those literal words, there is no meaning available to us, and so as we studied the teachings, as we hear the teaching is, as we put the teachings, really apply them in our experience,
we need to really connect with the literal meaning of the words because the literalness of the words, but the meaning is something that is about how this dawns in us in our own experience. And so this quality of meaning dawning is the key to our contemplative meditation. The key to not just be kind of Buddhist fundamentalists about things, but to really allow the meaning to dawn afresh over and over again in our experience. The meaning changes. We go back to some of her favorite Dharma books, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism — every time I read that book, it’s a new book. Same words on the page, but it dawns in a different way. So of course without the book, without the literal words, the meaning could not possibly dawn. So this is what we rely on, the way in which
these literal words, dawn, in our experience in a fresh, immediate way. Mipham the Great spoke of the literal words as fingers pointing to the moon. We thought only zen teachers talked about fingers pointing at moons, but Mipham the Great talked about fingers pointing to the moon, the literal words pointing to the meaning as it dawns in our experience.
The third one, do not rely on merely the provisional teachings. Rely on the definitive or ultimate teachings. And this is a huge, this could lead to a huge conversation, but one way to understand the provisional teachings:
Do not rely on teachings that are limited by specific cultural context, applied to very specific cultural environment. Instead rely on those teachings that transcend culture. Of course, we live within a particular socio-cultural location, and we hear things within that particular socio-cultural location, but if the teachings are limited to that, we immediately become a very provincial exclusive sangha that doesn’t really reflect on the universal application of those teachings. It’s important to recognize those aspects of the teachings that transcend time and culture and to rely on those.
So thinking about such things, it’s a going back to the time of the Vidyadhara, and his love of Oxonian English, and how he loved to have us drill in a Oxonian in English pronunciation. I don’t think that it was meant that we are all to be speaking in Oxonian accents to each other all the time or carrying on particular British table manners, some of the odd ways that he wanted us to do ballroom dancing. I don’t see those as transcending culture. The principles behind them do transcend culture in some kind of way. So this is a very provocative one and raises the question for me about such things as patriarchy. Is Patriarchy a culturally specific form? The perhaps does not fit in a western Dharma situation of this time. What kind of ways can we apply the sense of respect and dignity without employing cultural forms that are perhaps not appropriate or relevant for our time and place? It raises lots and lots of questions like that and these conversations are happening all over our Shambala world. What kind of governance structure do we need? What kind of way can we cultivate dignity and kindness in our society without falling into too narrow a cultural form? What are the definitive transcultural values that we can carry into the way Shambhala should look?
I think the main thing that we understand that I should speak only for myself,
the main thing that I understand as the transcultural values of Shambhala have to do with honour and virtue, kindness and community and always lineage. How do we understand “lineage” in this particular point in time?
Then the Fourth Reliance do not rely on conceptual mind. Rely on nondual wisdom experience. This is an incredibly important one and one that I work with every single day because in these particular times with everything flying around, concepts are flying like crazy. Mine are, I don’t know about yours, my mind looking for a place to land wants to come up with some kind of conclusion or position. But conceptual mind is not reliable, and of course concepts still keep coming up all the time, but can we rely, especially on our nondual wisdom experience as the precious treasure of our lineage, more precious than any conceptual teachings that we may have received. Can we
allow ourselves to hold paradoxes, complexity in our experience without trying to boil it down to very simple conclusions at any given moment. What is it like for us to rely on the nondual wisdom of experience? That’s really the challenge. It’s a challenge I’m facing every day. I’m sure a lot of us are.
Those are the Four Reliances and I have two other things I’d like to share with you if I may go on and then we will have a discussion.
Shambhala teachings have put a great deal of emphasis on the notion of freedom from doubt. That’s a very difficult teaching these days, given how many of us are caught up in many doubts. So I think this is an important teaching to reflect on what is meant. Freedom from doubt, if you may remember the Vidyadhara or the Dorje Dradul talked especially about freedom from fear, but in our current explication of the Shambhala teaching. So we see that freedom from doubt is more important and I find it very helpful to go back into my Buddhist studies about this and do you use them as a way to reflect on the Shambhala teaching about freedom from doubt? Because I do find that freedom from doubt is really important, but what kind of doubt?
The early teachings of the Buddha talked about two kinds of doubt. One kind of doubt is the kind of doubt that gets you stuck on the horns of a dilemma. It’s sometimes called the hindering doubt or skeptical doubt. And in Theravadin Buddhism, it’s one of the five hindrances to be caught in doubt, doubt that paralyze a shoe
that makes you feel you cannot continue, that you cannot practice, you cannot go along with your path, and there’s lots of that kind of doubt around now. T
he Buddha warned about this kind of doubt because it does freeze us in paralyze us, but he talked about a different kind of doubt, a doubt that could be called questioning doubt or it’s doubt that’s connected with the kind that inspires deeper investigation and the development of prajna.How do we bring doubt onto our paths such that we can go more deeply and go for deeper, more profound understanding rather than the more superficial understanding that we’ve had in the past. This is what’s talked about in the famous Pali Sutta called the Kallama Sutta which talks about the importance of questioning doubt, the kind of doubt that opens up what’s what we’re looking at. Rather than closing it down and freezing it. I dare say that none of us could be practitioners for even a second or third day without working with our doubt in a healthy, inquisitive way. I certainly would not, and working with doubt has been a major part of my path all the way along and it’s probably what has constantly drawn me to join practice and study together. It’s this magic combination of practice and study together that allows my hindrance doubt to turn into questioning doubt, and to open up a deeper and deeper appreciation for aspects of the path. The profundity of the Shambhala teachings for me has been the ability to relate to
the great doubt of our culture, the doubt in basic goodness.
The Sakyong has said, the Dorje Dradul has said, that the little doubts are invitations for deeper investigation. The great doubt in basic goodness is what really has become a blight on our society and has led us toward the setting sun. So as practitioners, our primary path is working in a healthy way with the doubts. Doubts, plural, have a beautiful place on our path, including doubts about our teachers, doubts about lots of things, but if we begin to doubt the fundamental goodness, then we have given into the setting sun world.
And this is our greatest challenge, to entertain and work in a healthy, ongoing, inquisitive way with the doubts that come up without falling into the despair that human goodness is not possible, is not manifest in our world. This is really our lifeline for practice. And for me personally, this has been a challenging time. But the fundamental conviction in the power of basic goodness is what gives me the core of what I feel I can rely on in what I have received in the Shambhala teachings. And I feel completely committed that the purpose of my life is to preserve and practice these teachings about basic goodness.
There’s one last thing I’d like to share with you. Have many more things I could say, but um, I don’t want to talk too long. I want to allow time for all of you. I want to say that in my years of practicing with the Sakyong and seeing him on his journey, I’ve seen difficult times for him. I’ve seen challenges for him, but in general,
the Sakyong depicted in the news stories is not the Sakyong I know. And so maybe I’ve missed something along the way. And it absolutely breaks my heart that there have been women who have been harmed by his conduct and I realize that we as a community did not do enough to take care and to find out what happened with this women. So I hold this paradox in my heart as my path of warriorship. My love and respect for the Sakyong, his teacher and what I’ve gotten from him, and my heartbreak about the harm that has occurred that we as a community, the Sakyong as teacher did not take care of and address. So I just want to say this. Holding this paradox is my path of warriorship that sends me into lots of ups and downs.I wanted to read the last thing, a quote from Thrangu Rinpoche, which I have seen on the Internet. It was sent me originally by a dear friend from Halifax, is a quote that comes from a talk that Thrangu Rinpoche gave in 1997 at Rigpe Dorje center in San Antonio, Texas, and it was published in 2001 in a publication, let’s see, I want to make sure I get the name of the publication correct. It’s his commentary on creation and completion that — my pages are messed up. Here we go it’s in the Shenpen Ösel is the name of the Journal, a Kagyu journal which publishes teaching some remember. So keep in mind this is a teaching that came in 1997. Thrangu Rinpoche has always been for me a Dharma uncle. I’m one of the lamas who he’s one of the lamas that I was sent to talk to 30 years ago about what was happening with the Regent and I will never forget how he sat and wept with me in his monastery in Boda and his kindness. So he’s Dharma uncle still. He says:
Devotion is necessary because fundamentally we need to practice Dharma, and if you have 100 percent confidence in Dharma, then your practice will be 100 percent. If you have less confidence in Dharma, then your practice will be less intense. The less intense your practice, the less complete the result. Therefore it is essential to have confidence in and devotion for Dharma itself. There has to be trust in the Guru. If you trust the Guru, then you will trust the Dharma and if you trust the Dharma, then you will practice it. However, faith in one’s Guru does not mean blind faith. It does not mean believing my Guru is perfect even though your Guru is not perfect. It is not pretending that your Guru’s defects are qualities. It is not rationalizing every foible of the Guru into super human virtue. After all, most Guru will have defects. You need to recognize them for what they are. You don’t have to pretend that your Guru’s defects are qualities because the object of your devotion is not the foibles, quirks and defects of your Guru, but the Dharma that your Guru teaches you, you are not practicing the gurus foibles. As long as the Dharma you receive is authentic and pure then that Guru is a fit object for your devotion, the results that you get you get from the Dharma that you practice. You need to recognize the defects of your Guru as defects. You don’t need to pretend they are otherwise. The Guru’s defects cannot hurt you because because it is not they that you create and cultivate, you follow the teaching of the Guru and trust, meaning, trust principally in the validity of the teachings themselves.Thank you for listening and in our discussion, I would first like to entertain questions or comments about what I’ve said and then we’ll open it up more fully to additional things you might be reflecting on today.