SIMPLE BEING, SIMPLE KNOWING

Week of Monday, August 8, 2022

The Buddha taught the skills of happiness in many ways. 

All of his lists of meditation practices—the Four Noble Truths, the Five Spiritual Faculties, the Seven Factors of Awakening, the Noble Eightfold Path, many others—are about this one thing:

How to be happy.

Many times, the Buddha didn’t teach happiness as a long list of practices. Rather, he used a single powerful image or phrase to teach the whole path of happiness, and how to achieve it, in a single stroke. 

If we learn to practice happiness in this way, we too can learn how to be happy, anytime, in a flash. That happiness may last a lifetime or just a few seconds. But once we learn how to be happy by being simple, we’ve learned life’s profoundest lesson, and we can apply it in countless daily life situations, for our benefit and for all beings.

Sometimes, the Buddha emphasized the importance of staying simple in our practice, even before he explained the “how to” of the practice.  

Time and again, he implores us to realize how our minds so often are lured in, as if by a tout at a county fair, to complexity and abstraction, which leads inevitably to suffering. Instead, he says, backing it up with “how to” lessons galore, we can choose to stay simple, within our direct experience, which always flows on to ease and happiness. 

One time, to emphasize simplicity, the Buddha held a few leaves in the palm of his hand and asked a group of disciples, “Which is greater, the number of leaves in my hand, or the number of leaves in the forest?” “In the forest,” the disciples answered. “In just this way,” the Buddha said, “I learned a great many things about nature and the universe from my awakening. But I purposely teach only the small handful of things a person needs to know, in order to be happy.”

As for the specifically simple “how to’s,” the Buddha again taught many different means. Different people naturally incline to one or another different mode of simplicity, he said, and he wanted to give everyone a simple method that was suited to their uniqueness. 

But one path the Buddha recommended to all seekers. This was the meditation that he called “anapanasati;” or “The Breath of Love” as I call it; and popularly known as “watching the breath.” In this method, people seeking happiness progress through deeper and deeper levels of consciousness, looking closer and closer towards that spot where we begin to create suffering within ourselves. So that then, by virtue of knowing what happens at that spot, we can immediately stop creating internal suffering for ourselves. Which is always how internal suffering is caused. Some amount of suffering from external sources happens, and we can’t do much about that; but all internal suffering we cause ourselves, internally. And for that very reason, it’s within our power to stop that, and instead to start creating internal happiness.

The simplicity of the Breath of Love lies in simply remembering to keep the mind’s attention focused on the sensations of breathing in, and breathing out, over and over through the journey towards the roots of suffering in the mind. By bringing the mind’s attention to the breath in this way, one suddenly realizes, quite often to one’s initial shock and amazement, that the ability to notice what’s happening in mind and body is greatly enhanced—and not diminished—by keeping one’s mental attention aware of the breath at all times. 

Freed from entanglement in thinking by this simple method, the mind expands in pure awareness.

This huge insight leads to liberation, by simply watching the breath. 

The Buddha taught two related paths to awakening, that we can choose to interweave, as we wish, within the Breath of Love: the Path of Knowing, and the Path of Being.

In the Path of Knowing, a practitioner chooses to return attention to awareness, instead of the breath. In the Path of Being, attention is drawn to pure being. The Buddha taught each of these paths in depth. 

The most famous of all Buddhist teaching stories, for example, illustrates the Path of Knowing. In this story, shortly after his awakening, the Buddha’s radiance as he walked along a road attracts a group of strangers. They approach and ask him: “What are you? Are you a divine being? A sky spirit? A wizard? A human being? “No, none of those,” the Buddha answered. “I am awake.”

When you are awake, you know. And this is exactly what the Buddha said that he was, in his utmost essence: A simple knowing. That which knows. That may sound puzzling, but at least we can recognize the simplicity of the Buddha’s definition of himself as a knowing. And we can also catch a glimpse of how simple it might be for each of us to know ourselves in just this same, simple way—and be like a Buddha.

Another of the Buddha’s core teachings, the Three Refuges, highlights the Path of Knowing as above all other paths to happiness. In this practice, people draw their attention to three contemplations in turn—to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. 

Each of these refuges for the beleaguered human spirit can be understood on two levels, the relative and the absolute. At the relative level, the Buddha is the historical man, Gautama Buddha; the Dhamma is the Buddha’s teachings; and the Sangha is the group of meditators and Dhamma practitioners. At the ultimate level, the Buddha represents the “awakeness” or “awareness” highlighted in the story just told. The Dhamma represents the laws of nature or reality; and the Sangha represents the whole and single nature of the one consciousness that is shared among all beings. 

That the first refuge represents simply “awakeness,” as the Buddha defined himself, is the Path of Knowing to perfection. It teaches that if we come to the point of understanding our own selves as made of knowing—awakeness or awareness—this is the path, and the realization of the path, at a stroke.

Another of the Buddha’s powerful teaching stories teaches the Path of Knowing vividly. In this story, Bahiya, a spiritual teacher like the Buddha, but unlike the Buddha in that he was not enlightened, travels to meet the Buddha and learn from him. Intuiting that he is near death, Bahiya implores the Buddha several times to give him the instructions for instant enlightenment. The Buddha resists at first, but finally relents, giving Bahiya these instructions: “Bahiya, experience this way, that in seeing is only the seeing; in hearing is only the hearing; in smelling is only the smelling; in touching is only the touching; in tasting is only the tasting; and in thinking is only the thinking. Experience in this way, and you will be free of suffering.” 

Bahiya followed those instructions and was instantly liberated. 

This is a Path of Knowing teaching, as the Buddha’s instructions to Bahiya was to pay attention every moment not to the abstractions that the mind creates to interpret all of the input from the six senses, but instead to the pure knowing of the activity of each sense itself. In other words, the Buddha was telling Bahiya that if he could separate the stories his mind was telling about the way reality is, from the way that reality actually is, then he would be liberated. Which he was. 

The Path of Being directs attention to a person’s essence as pure being, as opposed to the Path of Knowing. Many stories in later Buddhism, hundreds of years after the Buddha died, such as in Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhism, describe the Path of Being. 

In one Zen story, called the Flower Sermon, the Buddha wordlessly holds up a white flower to a large audience of monks, most of whom are puzzled about what the Buddha is trying to teach. 

However, one monk, Mahakasyapa, smiles when he sees the flower, and afterwards the Buddha confirms the monk’s enlightenment. 

The Buddha had been wordlessly inviting the monks to see not the beautiful form of the flower, but rather beyond its form, to its essence as pure being. 

 It was not a complicated or difficult thing!

It is only a complicated and difficult thing to the human mind which loves to indulge in complexity and abstraction, even when pure, raw, simple life—simple being—is staring you in the face.

If you write an academic treatise on the Flower Sermon, you certainly are missing its point, which is a pointing to pure, simple being.

This is the same simple being that you are; that I am; and that all beings are, without exception. Just pure, simple being. That’s all. 

Because words are concepts, they tend to invite a person to stay in the world of concepts and to miss the reality of actual being. 

An exception is the language of poetry, which is a mode of speech that is expressly designed to point beyond its own conceptuality as language, into the simple reality of pure awareness.

The Tao Te Ching, the classic Chinese Taoist scripture, is full of pointers to pure being. Its first verse is a song to pure being: 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.  The name that can be named  is not eternal name. 

The unnameable is the eternally real.  Naming is the origin  of all particular things. 

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.  Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. 

Yet mystery and manifestations  arise from the same source. 

The source is called darkness.  Darkness within darkness.  The gateway to all understanding.

 You can practice with the poem, not trying to understand its meaning, as you would an essay or a textbook. Rather, see which lines resonate with something deep within you, something that feels like the truth. “Darkness within darkness,” for example. Doesn’t that sound very much like the experience of meditation, especially with the eyes closed? This, the Tao promises, is “the gateway to all understanding.” 

 In Christianity, pure being is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Words like the Tao beckon us to experience something inexpressible, that is nevertheless the most real thing, and thus the most enduring and the most reliable thing, that we could ever experience. 

Such as the pure being that, in our essence, we are. 

You can let your idea of yourself explode beyond the borders of all your previous ideas and beliefs, expanding instead into the new and ever-vaster territories of the unknown. 

The poet William Blake experienced pure being this way:

To see the World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour

Now, we can humbly and realistically acknowledge that try as we might, for every moment that we might touch pure being in this way, there is plenty about daily life that doesn’t feel this way at all.

The daily grind; the aches and pains; the emotional tension; what people say and how we react to what they say; what’s on the news; our nightmares and insomnias. There is so much about daily life that draws our attention away from knowing our pure being as our essence, and from grounding our life in that stillness and beauty. 

In such moments, when we feel at a great distance from knowing our pure being, we can always find it in the background, and pull it forward into the foreground, says Rupert Spira, the non-dual teacher:

“Most of our attention is involved in thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving. All these constitute the foreground of our experience, while the simple fact of our being lives in the background. 

“Because our attention is involved with the foreground of our experience, we overlook the simple fact of being in the background. So, here, we take a step back from the content of experience and rest in the being that shines in each of us as the knowledge, ‘I am.’ Experience seems to obscure being. 

“In meditation, being outshines experience. Numerous times throughout the day, return to this pure “I am,” allowing it to emerge from the background of experience and pervade the foreground.” 

When the gravity of experience, pulling on our attention, is so great as to be insurmountable, then it’s often best to shift back to watching the breath. As we do so, remember that the Buddha’s full practice, the Breath of Love, offers us far more than just calming and settling our minds after a few minutes of observing the in-breath and the out-breath. It offers a full path to awakening, after which, and indeed at many points during which, we’re sure to have moments of knowing our true essence as knowing, and as being, as one.