The Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, 1708: a resting place for the body, mind and spirit. Each zone of the monastery was assigned a different part of the self to heal. The body was to be looked after by the kitchens and the dormitory, the mind by the library and the spirit by the chapel. (illustration credit 4.16)
Nevertheless, as Tony now explains, this sombre picture of one part of ourselves does not have to define all that we are, because we are endowed too with the rare ability, reinforceable through spiritual exercises, occasionally to set aside the demands of our egos and to enter into a state of what Buddhists call anātman, or egolessness, during which we can take a step back from our passions and think about what our lives might be like if we were not burdened by the additional and painful need to be ourselves.
It is a sign of the Western bias towards the intellect that it comes as a surprise to be told that we should begin the business of setting aside our egos not primarily through logical argument but rather by learning to sit on the ground in a new way.
As Tony specifies, our capacity to reorient our priorities will critically depend on our ability to stand up, shake our limbs loose for a minute and then rearrange our bodies in the Vairocana seven-point meditation posture. For a group of novices this is, inevitably, something of a struggle, since many of our bodies are no longer quite so young, and all of us seem afflicted by the self-consciousness that naturally results from contorting oneself in one’s socks in front of strangers. A certain amount of giggling and even the occasional fart ensue as we strive to imitate Tony’s position, which is reputed to be the same one adopted by the Buddha and his disciples as they meditated under a sacred Bodhi tree in the eastern Indian state of Bihar twenty-odd centuries ago. The instructions are precise: our legs must be crossed, our left hand must rest on top of our right in our lap, our spine should be straight, our shoulders lightly stretched, our head inclined forwards, our gaze directed downwards, our mouth slightly open, the tip of our tongue touching the roof of our mouth, our breathing steady and slow.
(illustration credit 4.17)
To answer our longing for calm, Western consumer society has over the last fifty years refined the concept of sunbathing; Buddhism has taken over a thousand years to perfect the art of meditation. (illustration credit 4.18)
Gradually the group falls into line, and the room grows silent save for the hoot of an owl in a distant field. Tony guides us to focus on the unremarkable yet rarely remarked-upon fact that we are all breathing. In our first steps towards mastering the ānāpānasati (‘mindfulness of breathing’) meditation, we recognize the extraordinary challenge posed by sitting quietly in a room and doing nothing other than existing — we apprehend, in other words, the draconian grip which the priorities and projects of our egos have on us. We take note of our tendencies towards distraction. As we strive to attend only to our breathing, we sense our conscious minds shooting this way and that on their customarily frantic itineraries. We realize how absurdly difficult we find it to take even three breaths without being seized by an anxiety-charged idea, and extrapolate from that how uncommon it must be for us to inhabit any experience without becoming enmeshed in the tendrils of our ātman.
The purpose of our new seating position is to open up a modest distance between our consciousness and our ego. As we feel ourselves breathing, we notice that our physical beings have rhythms which play out without reference to our ego-led desires. The otherness of the body is one aspect of a vast realm of anātman which the ego does not control or understand and to which Buddhism now seeks to introduce us.
(illustration credit 4.19)
Because it is the ego’s habit to try to exploit and use as an instrument all that it encounters, it is unaware of the body except insofar as it is useful to its projects for sensory gratification. It is latently resentful of and appalled by its fragility. It does not want to think of the strange ways of the liver or of the mysterious doings of the pancreas. It orders the body to stay faithful to its tasks, hunched over the desk with back muscles clenched into a state of obedience and anxious expectation. Yet now, suddenly, the ego is being asked to cede control to nothing more distinguished and productive than the act of breathing, that background process of inhalation and exhalation which has been going on largely unnoticed and unappreciated since our birth. Taken aback, it experiences some of the same confusion that a king might feel upon being forced, due to unexpected circumstances, to spend a night on a hard bed in a humble inn.
With all our attention directed towards our breathing instead of the ego’s demands, it starts to give up some of its claims on consciousness and lets in data which it ordinarily filters out. We become aware of things, both internal and external, that have nothing to do with our usual concerns. Our consciousness shifts from a focus on breathing to an awareness first of our limbs, then of the skeleton that supports us and the blood that is continuously moving within us. We become alive to the sensitivity of our own cheeks, the small stirrings of air in the room, the textures of our clothes against our skin.
Later in the morning, we go outside for another spiritual exercise called a walking meditation, pioneered by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. We are instructed to empty our minds and wander the landscape without asking anything more of it than to observe it, freed for the moment of those ego-dominated habits of ours which strip nature of its beauty and give us a misleading and troubling sense of our own importance in the cosmos. Under tutelage, we proceed at a camel’s pace, our consciousness untroubled by any of our ego’s customary ambitions or chidings — in a state as much prized by Buddhism as it is reviled by capitalism, and known in Sanskrit as apranihita, or aimlessness — and thereby become newly attuned to a thousand details of our surroundings. There is a shaft of sunlight filtering through the trees, in which minuscule particles of dust are dancing. There is the sound of running water coming from a nearby stream. A spider is making its way across a branch above us. Buddhist poetry is dominated by records of similar encounters with just such tiny facets of the world, which reach our senses only after our egos have loosened their grip on our faculties.
‘Coming along the mountain path
I find something endearing
about violets’
reads a poem by the Zen poet Bashō. Working our way through the undergrowth, we become disinterested surveyors of our own existence, and hence ever so slightly more patient and compassionate observers of the planet, its people and its small purple flowers.
(illustration credit 4.20)
3.
The specifics of the exercises taught at Buddhist and other retreats are perhaps not as significant as the general point they raise about our need to impose greater discipline on our inner lives.
If the predominant share of our distress is caused by the state of our psyches, it seems perverse that the modern leisure industry should seek always to bring comfort to our bodies without attempting simultaneously to console and tame what the Buddhists so presciently term our ‘monkey minds’. We require effective centres for the restoration of our whole beings; new kinds of retreats devoted to educating, through an array of secularized spiritual exercises, our corporeal as well as psychological selves.