Mahayana Buddhism | Contemplative Inquiry

May 16, 2024

SEEING BEYOND SIGNS

“A sign is what characterises the appearance of something, its form. If we recognise things based on their sign, we may think that this cloud is different from that cloud, the oak tree is not the acorn, the child is not the parent. At the level of relative truth, these things are helpful. But they may distract us from seeing the true nature of life, which transcends these signs.

” ….

“You are always changing form. You are browsing through a family photograph album, and come across a photo of yourself as a young child. Where is that little child now? You know that it is you. You have the same name, and yet it doesn’t look like you. Are you still that child or are you someone else? This is a practice of contemplating your own signlessness. Today you look, speak, act and think differently. Your form, feelings, perceptions and consciousness are all very different. You are not fixed and permanent. You are not the same person, but you are not a totally different person either. When you are no longer caught in specific images or appearances, you can see things more clearly. You can see that the little child is still alive in every cell of your body. It is possible still to listen and take care of the little boy or little girl in you at any time.” (1)

(1) Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Penguin Random House UK, 2017

August 27, 2023

THE WISDOM OF COMPASSION

“Toward all beings maintain unbiased thoughts and speak unbiased words. Toward all beings give birth to thoughts and words of kindness instead of anger, compassion instead of harm, joy instead of jealousy, equanimity instead of prejudice, humility instead of arrogance, sincerity instead of deceit, compromise instead of stubbornness, assistance rather than avoidance, liberation instead of obstruction, kinship instead of animosity.” (1,2)

Humanism extends our circle of care to all humans, clearly a high bar in our current state of culture. Druidry, certainly an animist Druidry embracing deep ecology, asks us to extend it further – to all beings. At first glance, it seems like a complicated and demanding ask in a world where life lives off other life, and where cooperation and competition necessarily co-arise. Yet for some people this stance towards the world is (or becomes) natural.

The passage in my first paragraph offers guidance on the Bodhisattva path in Mahayana Buddhism. Followers of the path let go of any quest for personal liberation to work for the liberation of all beings. Sometimes this is understood as a postponement of personal liberation, but the deeper insight is that ‘personal’ liberation makes no sense. In an interconnected and interdependent cosmos, only the liberation of all counts as any liberation at all.

In the Diamond Sutra (3) the definition of ‘beings’, put into the mouth of the Buddha himself, is as broad and inclusive as possible: “however many species of living beings there are – whether born from eggs, from the womb, from moisture, or spontaneously; whether they have form or no form; whether they have perceptions or do not have perceptions, we must lead all these beings to the ultimate nirvana so that they can be liberated.” Then the Buddha adds: “And when this innumerable, immeasurable, infinite number of beings has become liberated, we do not in truth think that a single being has been liberated”.

Thich Nhat Hanh (3) understands this last statement as saying “a true practitioner helps all living beings in a natural and spontaneous way, without distinguishing the one who is helping from the one who is being helped. When our left hand is injured, our right hand takes care of it right away. It doesn’t stop to say: ‘I am taking care of you. You are benefitting from my compassion’. The right hand knows very well that the left hand is also the right hand. There is no distinction between them. This is the principle of interbeing – co-existence, or mutual interdependence. ‘This is because that is’.”

I am not a Buddhist. I do not share the classical Buddhist views of karma and reincarnation. I do not associate final physical death with the term ‘liberation’. But I am aware of not, ever, being on my own – even when being, in the world’s terms, solitary. Apparent boundaries between me and my world are too soft: relationships are happening all the time. With this sense of the world in mind, the words below, repeated from the first paragraph, seem like common sense.

(1) From the Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-five Thousand Lines translated into English by Edward Conze, Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975 and cited in (2), below

(2) Red Pine, The Diamond Sutra: the Perfection of Wisdom. Text and Commentaries translated from Sanskrit and Chinese Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2001 See: https://www.counterpointpress.com

(3) Thich Nhat Hanh The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Diamond Sutra Berkeley, CA Parallax Press, 201

NOTE: Versions of the Diamond Sutra appeared as written texts in Sanskrit in the 2nd century C.E. and this version was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in the early 5th century C.E. Works of this kind were used more for recitation and chanting in monastic settings than they were for silent reading.

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August 1, 2023

LUGNASADH 2023: INQUIRY HARVESTING

A circle is cast on sand. It is almost complete. The image is that of the Wheel, tenth major trump in the Druidcraft Tarot (1). Arianrhod, as Goddess associated with the Wheel and the Milky Way, is casting the Circle of Life. The adjacent cave has resonances of both womb and tomb. The seashore is a liminal space. The Celtic Otherworld is often linked to the sea and what lies underneath its surface. This image as a whole is associated with harvesting. Arianrhod carries a flail as well as a wand and a symbolic eight-spoked wheel.

It is Lugnasadh/Lammas, the first harvest-related festival of 2023. I am sitting with the notion of ‘winnowing’ in my inquiry. In agriculture, winnowing involves blowing a current of air through grain to remove the chaff remaining after threshing. We find a reference to winnowing towards the end of the medieval Welsh poem The Hostile Confederacy from The Book of Taliesin (2):

“I have been a grain discovered,

Which grew on a hill.

He that reaped me placed me,

Into a smoke hole driving me.

Exerting of the hand,

In afflicting me,

A hen received me,

With ruddy claws, (and) parting comb.

I rested nine nights.

In her womb, a child,

I have been matured,

I have been an offering before the Guledig.

I have been dead, I have been alive.

A branch there was to me of ivy,

I have been a convoy.

Before God, I have been poor.”

It seems that winnowing (or being winnowed) is far from an end point to our journeys. The processes of life go on, very likely in unexpected ways. Any state of peace has to be found within these processes, rather than in efforts to halt or break out of them.

At Lughnasadh 2023 I find myself at ease within Druidry, though I do also continue to refine lessons from other paths that enrich my practice of Druidry. The most significant, and the best embedded, is ‘interbeing’ as a spatial relationship and its temporal equivalent ‘impermanence’. It is like a kernel of grain I have winnowed from Mahayana Buddhism to grow into another life in my Druidry. The Druid soil is fertile for this purpose, as indicated through the image of the Wheel drawn on sand, and the passage from The Hostile Confederacy in The Book of Taliesin. For me, Thich Nhat Hanh simply provides a particularly persuasive languaging of this perspective.

He says (3): “The insight of interbeing is that nothing can exist by itself alone, that each thing exists only in relation to everything else … looking from the perspective of space, we call emptiness ‘interbeing’ [NB ’emptiness’ here = empty of a separate self] ; looking from the perspective of time we call it ‘impermanence’ … to be empty is to be alive, to breathe in and breathe out. Emptiness is impermanence, it is change. …When you have a kernel of corn and entrust it to the soil, you hope it will be a tall corn plant. If there is no impermanence, the kernel of corn will remain the kernel of corn forever and you will never have an ear of corn to eat. Impermanence is crucial in the life of everything”.

There is another level to this year’s inquiry harvest. Recently I have engaged more fully with the challenge of Thich Nhat Hanh’s understanding of the Mahayana emptiness teachings, which stand behind the interbeing/impermanence insight. In the light of this understanding he finds neither an individual nor a cosmic self – and hence no ultimate reality or ground of being. “Our notion of emptiness should be removed. It is empty”. Many teachers I have worked with in the past are on the other side of this debate, finding the Divine in ‘Presence’ (Eckhardt Tolle), Pure Awareness (Rupert Spira), and the ‘Clear Awake Space’ of Douglas Harding’s Headless Way. They find God as ‘No-Thing’. For Thich Nhat Hanh, no-thing is simply nothing.

I have been all over the place on this question, developing a language and practices compatible with both views, as I slipped and slid between them. This is fine in its way, but I have wanted some kind of resolution, if only to avoid the energy drain of uncertainty around something that matters to me and to many spiritual traditions. Tomas Sander, co-writing with Greg Goode (4) has also explored the Mahayana ’emptiness’ texts. He reports that “as a person who had been seeking truth and ultimate reality” he finds a “greater sense of ease” in the approach of these texts. Unlike Thich Nhat Hanh, he does not take away an active disbelief in a cosmic ground of being. Instead, he arrives at a relaxed unknowing, a place of ‘joyful freedom’. He says: “spiritual teachings tend to have notions of absolutes, which by their very nature seem to trump everything else. None of them can claim to have an absolute, transcendent truth on their side”.

Tomas Sander finds that “it was a wonderfully freeing moment to recognize that there is no one way that reality ‘really’ is, and therefore no way to miss out on it”. So he adopts different criteria for evaluating spiritual paths. “They need to prove themselves on the level of ordinary, conventional reality with practical questions like: who does the view serve and who is being marginalized? Is the view helpful, compassionate or humane?’ I have known of and entertained this view for some time, but it has only recently clicked with me as a good way of settling this question. Metaphysical speculation will no longer be part of my inquiry. This does indeed feel like winnowing, like blowing away the chaff. The promised harvest? Druidry as joyful freedom.

(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)

(2) William F. Skene The Four Ancient Books of Wales Forgotten Books, 2007 (First published in Edinburgh 1868

(3) Thich Nhat Hanh The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2017

(4) Greg Goode and Tomas Sander Emptiness and Joyful Freedom Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2013 (Section written by Tomas Sander)

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May 11, 2023

CONTEMPLATION IN A PRIORY GARDEN

When Buddhas don’t appear

And their followers are gone,

The wisdom of awakening

Bursts forth by itself.

Stephen Batchelor Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime New York, NY: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2000

In the verse above, Batchelor is translating the first century CE Buddhist philosopher and poet Nagarjuna. In the preface to his book, Batchelor declares an intention to locate “Nagarjuna’s central and much misunderstood idea of ’emptiness’ in the wider context of Buddhist, Taoist and Western traditions” and to offer “a contemporary interpretation of Nagarjuna’s vision”. For a fuller exploration of Nagarjuna’s ’emptiness’ (sunyata in Sanskrit), see: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2021/11/08/

In the later Middle Ages, Llanthony Secunda was the richest Priory in Gloucester and its largest landlord. When the priory was dissolved by Henry VIII, all of its land and wealth were confiscated by the crown. Now, on a part of its once extensive lands, we have a garden bearing its name.

May 5, 2023

TASTING SOLITUDE

“Three months after becoming a monk, I took off to the Himalayan foothills behind Dharamsala. I was 21 years old. My backpack contained a sleeping bag, groundsheet, towel, kettle, bowl, mug, two books, some apples, dried food and a 5-liter container of water. Monsoon had just ended: the sky was crystalline, the air cleansed, the foliage luxuriant. After 3 or 4 hours, I left the well-trodden footpath and followed animal trails up the steep, sparsely forested slope until I reached the grassy ledge hidden by boulders and sheltered by branches that I had identified earlier on an earlier foray.

“Inspired by stories of Indian and Tibetan hermits, I wanted to know what it would be like to be cut off from all human contact, alone and unprotected. I would stay here as long as my meager supply of food and water permitted. No one knew where I was. If I fell and broke my leg, was bitten by a cobra or mauled by a bear, I was unlikely to be found. High in this aerie, I could still hear the distant horn blasts and grinding gears of buses and trucks below, which I regarded as an affront.

“I would wake with my sleeping bag covered in dew. After peeing and meditating, I would light a fire, boil water, make tea, then mix it with roasted barley flour and milk powder to form a lump of dough. This was breakfast and lunch – following the monastic rule, I did not eat in the evening.

“My meditations included the sadhanas into which I had been initiated, where I visualised myself either as the furious bull-headed, priapic Yamantaka or the naked, menstruating red goddess Vajrayogini. I alternated these tantric practices with an hour of mindfully ‘sweeping’ my body from head to foot, noticing with precision the transient sensations and feelings that suffused it. When not eating or meditating, I intoned a translation of Santideva’s Compendium of Training, an 8th century Sanskrit anthology of Mahyana Buddhist discourses, which I had vowed to recite in its entirety while up there.

……….

“What remains of that solitude now is my memory of the sweeping panorama of the plains of the Punjab, the immense arc of the heavens, and the embrace of the mountains that harbored this fragile dot of self-awareness. Once, a fabulous multi-colored bird that launched itself from the cliff beneath, floated for an instant in the air, then disappeared from view. A herdsman and his goats came close to discovering me one afternoon. I peeked at them through a lattice of leaves as the animals grazed and the wiry, sun-blackened man in a coarse wool tunic lay on a rock.

“Supplies exhausted and text recited, I trekked back to my room in McLeod-ganj below. During my five days on the mountain I had acquired a taste for solitude that has been with me ever since.”

Stephen Batchelor The Art of Solitude: A Meditation on Being Alone with Others in This World New Haven, CT & London, England: Yale University Press, 2020

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August 13, 2022

STOPPING FOR THE ANCESTORS

“I remember one morning contemplating a mountain in the early light of dawn. I saw very clearly that not only was I looking at the mountain, but all my ancestors in me were looking at the mountain as well.

“As dawn broke over the mountain peak we admired its beauty together. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. We were free. We needed only to sit there and enjoy the sunrise. Or ancestors may never have had the chance to sit quietly, peacefully, and enjoy the sunrise like that.

“When we can stop the running, all our ancestors can stop at the same time. With the energy of mindfulness and awakening, we can stop on behalf of all our ancestors. It is not the stopping of a separate self alone, but of a whole lineage. As soon as there is stopping, there is happiness. There is peace.” (1)

When Thich Nhat Hanh tells this story, he shows us ‘mindfulness’ as an art of living. He stops, looks at a mountain at dawn. His contemplation becomes a relationship, and the relationship is extended to the ancestors. For him, mindfulness sits together with interbeing, his word for interconnectedness. It is not a personal accomplishment, but the portal to an expanded, more inclusive, experience of life.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a great advocate and teacher of formal sitting meditation. But he didn’t fetishise it. The Mahayana Buddhist world view, and particularly its ethics, mattered more. I once heard a senior Vietnamese follower (also a psychiatrist) say that she was cautious about teaching meditation in Vietnam. She said that even in the 21st century, decades after the Japanese, French, American and Chinese wars, with elements of civil war thrown in, many people in Vietnam are too traumatised to benefit from meditation. What works best is participation in the Buddhist community and its ceremonial life, in a spirit of generosity and compassion. Mindfulness is essentially a value, not a contemplative technique.

I stop for my own ancestors, of both blood and other inheritances. I become aware of holding them in my heart. I let them in as I let in the world around me, and I experience that world with them and for them. We share a brief period of deep peace, and then let it go. For me, it feels mindful, Druidic, and very natural. Something to return to, whenever the moment feels right.

(1) Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Rider, 2017 (Rider is an imprint of Penguin Random House UK)

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January 29, 2022

THICH NHAT HANH ON AIMLESSNESS

Thich Nhat Hanh, the much loved Buddhist teacher from Vietnam, died on 22 January at the age of 95. He had been unwell for some time. He is remembered as peace activist, inventor of the term ‘interbeing’ and teacher of mindfulness practice. For him, this is the practice of being aware of what is going on in the present moment. We can be mindful at any moment, whether we are sad, joyful, angry, and whilst cooking, driving or about to send an email.

I am not a Buddhist. Instead, I feel and recognise Thich Nhat Hanh’s influence on my practice of Druidry – especially my sense of at-homeness, or presence, in the living moment. In memory and appreciation of him, I want to share a piece he wrote about aimlessness as as a ‘door of liberation’ (1).

“The concentration on aimlessness means arriving in the present moment to discover that the present moment is the only moment in which you can find everything you’ve been looking for and that you already are everything you want to become.

“Aimlessness does not mean doing nothing. It means not putting something in front of you to chase after. When we remove the objects of our craving and desires, we discover that happiness and freedom are available right here in the present moment.

“We have a habit of running after things, and this habit has been transmitted to us by our parents and ancestors. We don’t feel fulfilled in the here and now, and so we run after all kinds of things we think will make us happier. We sacrifice our life chasing after objects of craving or striving for success in our work or studies. We chase after our life’s dream and lose ourselves along the way. We even lose our freedom and happiness in our efforts to be mindful, to be healthy, to relieve suffering in the world, or to get enlightened. We disregard the wonders of the present moment, thinking that heaven and the ultimate are for later, not for now.

“To practice meditation means to have the time to look deeply and see these things. If you feel restless in the here and now, or you feel ill at ease, you need to ask yourself: ‘what am I longing for? what am I waiting for? what am I searching for?'”

(1) Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Rider, 2017

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November 8, 2021

EXPLORING ‘EMPTINESS’: CARLO ROVELLI AND NAGARJUNA

A modern western humanist learns from an ancient Buddhist philosopher. Carlo Rovelli’s book Helgoland (1) is mostly about the development of quantum mechanics in the early to mid-twentieth century and the scientists who developed it. The title references ‘Werner Heisenberg’s sojourn on the remote island of Helgoland working on the maths. But one chapter concerns the second century CE Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, and how his work has helped Rovelli to frame a philosophical understanding of quantum phenomena.

“When speaking about quanta and their relational nature I had frequently met people who asked: Have you read Nagarjuna? … Though not widely read in the West, the work in question is hardly an obscure or minor one: it is one of the most important texts in Buddhist philosophy. … The central thesis of Nagarjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else.

“The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate. Obviously Nagarjuna knew nothing, and could not have imagined anything, about quanta – that is not the point. The point is that philosophers offer original ways of re-thinking the world, and we can employ them if they turn out to be useful. The perspective offered by Nagarjuna make perhaps make it a little easier to think about the quantum world (2).

“If nothing exists in itself, everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else. The technical term used by Nagarjuna the absence of independent existence is ‘emptiness’ (sunyata): things are ‘empty’ in the sense of having no autonomous existence. They exist thanks to, as a function of, with respect to, in the perspective of, something else.

“If I look at a cloudy sky – to take a simplistic example – I can see a castle and a dragon. Does a castle and does a dragon really exist, up there in the sky? Obviously not: the dragon and the castle emerge from the encounter between the shape of the clouds and the sensations and thoughts in my head; in themselves they are empty entities, they do not exist. So far, so easy. But Nagarjuna also suggests that the clouds, the sky, sensations, thoughts and my own head are equally things that arise from the encounter with other things: they are empty entities.

“And myself, looking at the star, do I exist? No, not even I. So who is observing the star? No one says Nagarjuna. To see a star is a component of that set of interactions that I normally call my ‘self’. ‘What articulates language does not exist. The circle of thoughts does not exist.’ There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand that is the true essence of our being. ‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else. Centuries of Western speculation on the subject, and on the nature of consciousness, vanish like morning mist.

“Like much philosophy and much science, Nagarjuna distinguishes between two levels: conventional, apparent reality with its illusory and perspectival aspects, and ultimate reality. But in this case the distinction takes us in an unexpected direction: the ultimate reality, the essence, its absence, is vacuity. It does not exist.

“If every metaphysics seeks a primary substance, an essence on which everything may depend, the point of departure from which everything follows, Nagarjuna suggests that the ultimate substance, the point of departure … does not exist.

….

“The illusoriness of the world, its samsara, is a general theme of Buddhism; to recognize this is to reach nirvana, liberation and beatitude. For Nagarjuna, samsara and nirvana are the same thing: both empty of their own existence. Non-existent.

“So is emptiness the only reality? Is this, after all, the ultimate reality? No, writes Nagarjuna, in the most vertiginous chapter of the book: every perspective exists only in interdependence with something else, there is never an ultimate reality – and this is the case for his own perspective as well. Even emptiness is devoid of essence: it is conventional. No metaphysics survives. Emptiness is empty.

“Nagarjuna has given us a formidable conceptual tool for thinking about the relationality of quanta: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence entering the equation, In fact interdependence – and this is the key argument made by Nagarjuna, requires us to forget all about autonomous essences.

“The long search for the ‘ultimate substance’ in physics has passed through matter, molecules, atoms, fields, elementary particles … and has been shipwrecked in the relational complexity of quantum field theory and general relativity. Is is possible that a philosopher from ancient India can provide us with a conceptual tool with which to extricate ourselves?”

…

“The fascination of Nagarjuna’s thought goes beyond questions raised by contemporary physics. His perspective has something dizzying about it. It resonates with the best of much Western philosophy, both classical and recent. … He speaks about reality, about its complexity and comprehensibility, but he defends us from the conceptual trap of wanting to find it an ultimate foundation.

“His is not metaphysical extravagance: it is sobriety. It recognizes the fact that to inquire about the ultimate foundation of everything is to ask a question that perhaps simply does not make sense.

“This does not shut down investigation. On the contrary, it liberates it. Nagarjuna is not a nihilist negating the reality of the world, and neither is he a sceptic denying that we can know anything about that reality. The world of phenomena is one that we can investigate, gradually improving our understanding of it. We may find general characteristics. But it is a world of interdependence and contingencies, not a world that we should trouble ourselves attempting to derive from an Absolute.

“I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking – thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change. There is no cardinal or final fixed point, philosophical or methodological, with which to anchor the adventure of knowledge.

…

“I am not a philosopher; I am a physicist: a simple mechanic. And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nagarjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestation of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent from its manifestations.

“But Nagarjuna’s emptiness also nourishes an ethical stance that clears the sky of the endless disquietude: to understand that we do not exist as autonomous entities helps us free ourselves from attachments and suffering. Precisely because of its impermanence, because of the absence of any absolute, the now has meaning and is precious.

“For me as a human being, Nagarjuna teaches the serenity, the lightness and the shining beauty of the world: we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which … there is nothing.”

(1) Carlo Rovelli Helgoland global.penguinrandomhouse.com 2020 (Translated by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell, 2021) Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time.

(2) The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika: Translation and commentary by Jay L. Garfield. Oxford: The University Press, 1995. Nagarjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the second century CE, is the most important, influential and widely studied Mahayana Buddhist philosopher. At the time of publication Jay L. Garfield was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hampshire in India Program, an exchange program with the Tibetan Universities in exile, at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. His translation is from a Tibetan, rather than Sanskrit, text.

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September 29, 2021

INQUIRY, IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY

I am looking downwards into water, identifying patterns, on a surface that swirls and moves and changes. I have the same impulse to identify patterns in my contemplative life. In essence, contemplative experience is simple, still, and drawn from wordless depths. But there’s a surface swirl that’s more agitated, largely driven by worries over naming and explaining, clarifying where my inquiry sits within human communities, and accurately representing spiritual philosophies. Here too, I am giving the surface swirl the attention it seeks. I do not ask the swirl to stop swirling, because swirling is what it does. There is value in the swirl.

I centre myself in modern Druidry, but my self-presentation from 2012 as a ‘contemplative Druid’ is slightly misleading – too narrow. I champion the value of a contemplative current within Druidry, and I am happy to describe my blog as a contemplative inquiry. But I also have a strong commitment to the life of the world and opportunities for the flourishing of all beings, within both the constraints and the opportunities of our interconnectedness. I am concerned with our planet and its biosphere; with human history and culture; with ethics and engagement; with beauty as well as truth and goodness; and with issues of wounding and healing. They are part of my inquiry. I cannot separate them from my contemplative commitment.

I also celebrate the influence of ‘nondual’ currents outside Druidry. Nondual is a translation of advaita (not-two) in classical Sanskrit philosophy. It describes the divine/human relationship. Its original home is the Advaita Vedanta path in India, but there are nondualists in other world religions, including the Abrahamic ones: Sufi currents in Islam, Jewish Kabbalah, contemplative Christianity. In Christian terms, you would say that we are all essentially Christs – in a creation of one Light and many lamps. In some interpretations, nonduality does not apply only to humans, but to all lives in the cosmos. Some iterations of nonduality – Mahayana Buddhist and Taoist in particular – avoid the language of divinity, preferring terms like ‘true nature’ or the deliberately undefinable ‘Tao’.

I have engaged with current nondualist teachings for some years, most recently with the Eckhart Tolle community – https://www.eckharttolle.com. I have learned a lot from them. In this blog’s About section, I say: “My inquiry process overall has helped me to discover an underlying peace and at-homeness in the present moment, which, when experienced clearly and spaciously, nourishes and illuminates my life. It is not dependent on belief or circumstance, but on the ultimate acceptance that this is what is given”.

I could maintain this stance as a humanist or existentialist, but my deepest intuition is that the ‘present moment’ (or eternal now), fully experienced, links my passing personal identity to a cosmic one, a ground of being that is my true nature. Belief has come in: ‘willingness to follow one’s deepest intuition’ is one definition of faith, and I have surprised myself by becoming a person of faith in this sense. The purpose of continuing inquiry is to keep me open to new experiences, understandings, and connections, as well as teaching me how best to live from the peace and at-homeness of the centre.

My inquiry is a self-directed enterprise that welcomes input from multiple sources. But I draw on two main centres of community wisdom and support. The first is OBOD Druidry (https://www.druidry.org), with its embrace of the earth and its loyalty to the world of space and time, nature and culture. For many of us this includes the sense of a living cosmos and a divine ground. The second is the specifically nondualist Headless Way, based on the work of the late Douglas Harding (https://www.headless.org). I have started to think of myself as a Headless Druid, in a modern kind of way, whilst also aware of older traditions in which decapitation is indeed the gateway to a larger life:

‘It’s off with my head’, says the Green Man,

‘It’s off with my head’, says he.

Green Man becomes grown man in flames of the oak

As its crown forms his mask and its leafage his features;

‘I speak through the oak’, says the Green Man.

‘I speak through the oak’, says he.

William Anderson Green Man: Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth Harper Collins: London & San Francisco, 1990.

September 1, 2021

MADE OF THE SUN, MOON AND STARS

“Just as a wave doesn’t need to go looking for water, we don’t need to go looking for the ultimate. The wave is the water. You already are what you want to become. You are made of the sun, moon and stars. You have everything inside you.”

If I had authored the words above, they would be a clear statement of my stance as a modern Druid. In fact they were written by the Vietnamese Zen monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who has spent the latter part of his life making Buddhism accessible to westerners. For me, this shows the wider resonance of his core understanding. Indeed he continues by using the language of a third tradition – the best known to most westerners – to develop his theme.

“In Christianity there is the phrase, ‘resting in God’. When we let go of all seeking and striving, it is as if we are resting in God. We establish ourselves firmly in the present moment; we dwell in the moment. We rest in our cosmic body. Dwelling in the ultimate doesn’t require faith or belief. A wave doesn’t need to believe it is water. The wave is already water in the very here and now.

“To me, God is not outside us or outside reality. God is inside. God is not an external entity for us to seek, for us to believe in or not to believe in. God, nirvana, the ultimate, is inherent in every one of us. The Kingdom of God is available in every moment. The question is whether we are available to it. With mindfulness, concentration and insight, touching nirvana, touching our cosmic body or the Kingdom of God, becomes possible with every breath and every step.”

Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Penguin Random House UK, 2017

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Tag: Mahayana Buddhism