Post #3: Practice as if Your Hair Were on Fire?

30 April 2023

“One should more readily look with indifference upon one's burning clothes and head than to be slack in one's effort to understand the Four Noble Truths by exercising mindfulness and clear comprehension.”

—Samyutta Nikaya 56:34

Don’t believe the hype, goes the familiar refrain. But I’m not so sure; or rather, I suspect that there is something to it in this case. The Dhamma is a big deal.

So why does the hype still bother me, then? After all, I’ve gone gung ho on the Dhamma before, fast-paced retreats and pilgrimages and all, so why shouldn’t others do the same? Let them, by all means! It’s just that these days I seem to find myself … not in the right mood for it, one might say. It’s such a long path; that took a while to sink in. And how much sense does it really make to run when it’s not a 10k, or even a marathon, but a journey all around the world, on foot? Does not everything depend, even when it’s “only” 10k, on pacing oneself and not racing off at the outset even if one is chomping at the bits? Slow and steady is better than burning yourself out in a big but unsustainable blaze. It’s less about speed than direction, and above all about not stopping.

A human birth is a great opportunity, I really do believe that. If you are lucky enough to get exposed to a teaching that inspires you and conditions are right for you to practice, all the more wonderful. So when the motivation strikes, why not ride it out for all it’s worth? The house is on fire, after all, we should be under no illusions about that, melancholy as it is. Aging, sickness, and death are crowding in on us from all sides, even if we can keep them at bay for the time being, and who knows for how long. It could all be over from one moment to the next. So why not seize the day and go all-in, especially if the fruits in this life, both for oneself and others, are evident enough?

I have no objections: go right ahead. It’s just that this spirit of enthusiasm, inspired as it may be, can leave one a little too eager to drop everything else, or at least lose focus on the worldly things that need addressing. I’ve been there too. Practical problems call for practical solutions, not for endless efforts at “coming out them” on the mat. For what it’s worth, my practice seems to have been moving ever more in the ordinary and everyday direction, towards a sense that the whole thing is perhaps not such a big deal after all, but just something valuable to do, and to keep doing. The special effects, the sparks and the fireworks, may still come occasionally, but they are not the point of the exercise; equanimity is, and a little more calm and fortitude in facing things as they are, not as one would like them to be, yatha-bhuta.

In the hothouse conditions of the intense silent Vipassana retreats I do, usually for ten days but sometimes for longer, it’s very easy to believe that one is really playing for the big stakes, nothing short of enlightenment or liberation itself. And it may be true, too; I don’t mean to make light of that ultimate dimension of things. It may well be so, and if you are looking for a way out of Samsara, I wish you all the best, with all my heart, for finding a quick and easy karmic exit, as they say in Burma (more or less). It’s the orthodoxy all right, and I don’t wish to take issue with it. But as a matter of my own practical experience, there have been so many times now that I’ve made the rocky and often disenchanting transition from the hothouse back to the more chilling atmosphere outside that I am, these days, less concerned with my prospects for liberation and more with how to live in the two worlds side-by-side with a modicum of harmony. It’s not just that after the ecstasy comes the laundry, as Jack Kornfield has put it, but that the laundry always comes first if one is not prepared to go naked, and the dishes, and the toilet bowl too.

Others may wish to devote themselves to the practice full-time, and there is a tendency among more serious practitioners to become more and more exclusively focused on the Dhamma as they move along, both in their talk and in their actions. Once again, I have no objections to make, but it’s not for me. Neither the shaved head nor the robe, nor life suspended forever between quick-paced retreats, holds much appeal to me as things stand. I meditate to live; I don’t live to meditate. I recognize the logic whereby, if one looks closely enough, whatever comes into existence may turn out to be only suffering arising (Samyutta Nikaya 12:15). Hence the Buddha’s startling pronouncement that “just as even a trifling amount of feces is foul-smelling, so too I do not praise even a trifling amount of existence” (Anguttara Nikaya 1:328).

Very well, let that stand as a road-marker for those who aspire to the High Path, the king’s road of soaring peaks and stunning vistas that the rest of us only know from the picture books. I bow to the rarified beings who can hope to reach so high, but it’s not for me. I am not done with the film of shit, sometimes thinner sometimes thicker, in which all the world is supposedly covered, as a doctor friend of mine once told me in the jungle. I pay my respect to the Way of the Mountains; all I would insist on is that running alongside, at a lower but more fertile altitude, there must always be the Way of the Valley too, less spectacular but more verdant, where the food gets grown, the toilets get installed, and the books get balanced occasionally.