Pangloss, the philosopher on duty in Voltaire's Candide, tries again to explain at the end of the book how all those murders and rapes, wars and natural disasters ultimately lead to a better world, even to the best of all possible worlds. "That's nicely said," replies Candide, who has had it by now, "but we have to cultivate our garden." All that philosophizing about the ultimate doesn't make the world a better place. If we want to make something of it, we'll have to roll up our sleeves.
Cultivating, bhavana in Pali, is also a central concept in the teachings of the Buddha. But what do we cultivate and where do we do it?
Many people think it must happen during meditation. There's something mythical surrounding meditation. At the very least, you should find relaxation and peace, stop your thoughts, get rid of unpleasant emotions, be present in the here and now. For practitioners with a Buddhist background, the aspirations are much higher: enlightenment, nirvana, satori, kensho, the death of the ego, the unnamable it, the absolute reality...
The classical image is that of the Buddhist who withdraws from the world to achieve the ultimate in seclusion on his cushion. Accordingly, numerous passages in the Pali Canon are interpreted as if they were about meditation, and bhavana is translated as meditation.
A typical example is metta-bhavana, meditation on loving-kindness. Nothing in the metta sutta explicitly says it's about meditation. Kindness seems to me something to cultivate in daily life, not just in meditation.
This brings us back to the tension between religious and secular as Stephen Batchelor defines it in "After Buddhism". The question then becomes: is our practice a religious practice leading to something ultimate, or a secular practice helping us live a good life together in this world? To stick with the metaphor of "to cultivate our garden": do we take the spade in our hand to dig a deep hole in our garden, hoping to find treasure at the bottom, or to till the soil? It's a choice again.
Many people hope and expect that this can and will happen in meditation. We're not discouraged by the fact that we've never met anyone who has achieved this and that no one has ever been able to explain to us in an understandable way what exactly this means. Not to mention the fact that different traditions and even different teachers within the same tradition disagree on who has achieved what.
I wholeheartedly agree with Batchelor that all these mystifications are unnecessary. They lead to confusion and abuse at best. Batchelor explains it through four tasks that we have to cultivate here in this world. We discussed the first one in the previous talk: to face reality even though it's unsatisfactory, impermanent, and without solidity (dukkha, anicca, anatta).
What becomes immediately visible when we decide to face reality with an open mind and an open heart is how our minds resists this. There are things we want to appropriate. Others we try to exclude. We cling to some. We want to get rid of others as quickly as possible. It's the reactivity of our mind that colors the reality in which we live. It's also that reactivity that makes us cling to "certainties" out of fear of the unknown.
The second task is to interrupt this reactivity. We see our mind reacting, we recognize it, we let go without getting carried away by it. It's not suppression, it's reclaiming our freedom. It's a middle way between ignoring and being carried away.
The third task is to recognize that and see what arises, even if only in small moments, when we're not completely determined by that reactivity. These are moments of freedom, of space, of courage, of trust, of compassion.
Batchelor argues that this is the meaning of nibbana. Not a mystical ultimate experience in which all reactivity ceases forever, but the opening up of a space in which we can move freely in this moment. This space is always there and has always been there. It's our natural perfection. We don't need years of hard Buddhist training for it. It's just there.
But it's something we easily overlook. And if someone tries to convince us that we can only achieve it after years of intensive practice, we're even further from home. This is where meditating can help us. We sit down and observe, not to achieve some experience, but to see and recognize what has always been there.
Meditation is the ideal place for this. In the metaphor of gardening, it's the greenhouse, a safe place where we can allow something to sprout without it immediately becoming overgrown, so that we can then transplant it into the open ground. It's something we have to do season after season, endlessly, without ever being "there”.
So there's nothing wrong with metta meditation either. It's the place where love and compassion can sprout. Turns out we are not only driven by greed and aversion. There's an alternative to our reactivity. We bring that into our daily life. That's where it happens. That's the fourth task: cultivating our lives in the light of this. As Candide also discovers : "we have to cultivate our garden". That path lasts a lifetime.
June 2016
This is the third in a short series of Zen talks inspired by the book “After Buddhism” by Stephen Batchelor.
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