Forest Tradition 1

In the Forest Tradition, monks withdraw from society to live in the forests and practice meditation and ascetic practices, and seek to attain Nirvana, following the example of Sakyamuni Buddha. 

This tradition is still alive and vibrant today, although it is almost invisible to the modern world. Countless thousands of monks and nuns live in solitude in the forests of  Burma, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

The characteristic features of the Forest tradition include strict observance of the monastic vinaya; following instructions of the Teacher; application of the 13 ascetic practices (dhutanga); living in forest or natural environment; pilgrimage or itinerate lifestyle(thudong); and meditation practice.

In the modern world, forest monks have been almost totally overlooked by historians or scholars, and forest monks even escaped the notice of their contemporaries, because they avoid drawing attention to themselves. They have left few written records of their existence.

Often they did not teach or, when they did teach, had few disciples. Many forest monks never had their life stories published, whether for personal reasons or because their supporters were mainly local people who could not afford the publishing costs. Many shunned publicity for fear of being disturbed by urban tourists. And the rustic ways of the forest monks were not generally respected by the elites of their respective societies.

But forest monks have a lot of offer us, as Jasmine Saville says in her essay Forest Matters: “The wandering monks intrinsically valued nature, perceiving the self and environment parts of an invisible whole. All forms of life were fellow karmic beings, each vital for interdependent well being….the thudong way is a pool of wisdom for spiritual identity in an age of mass consumerism, anomie, addiction, and conformity.”

"In recent years the thudong traditions have gained some kudos and material support amongst urbanites. …The few remaining thudong monks remind us of the intrinsic relationship between Buddhism and the biosphere. Their lesson – that nature is a sanctuary for the mind, nurturing inner transformation. Nature is Dhamma, and so provides a fountain of mortality and ethics required for a harmonious world.”

The wandering monks felt that living in the forest was essential to self-knowledge, and that jungles, forests and mountains were the supreme environment of Buddhist education, where they surrendered to nature and the impermanence of the universe to be free from the ocean of suffering of material existence.

Forest monks are practice-oriented, focused on meditation practice, and personal experience, rather than theoretical knowledge, in contrast to scholar monks who are focus their work on study, preservation, and transmission of the scriptures.

Forest monks practice for liberation, Nibbana, fruition. They must have the previous accumulation of merit, spiritual virtues, and mental certitude (parami), to be able to survive and to follow through to the final stage of liberation.

Phra Phonim Visal of Sukato Forest Monastery in Thailand, said that the Forest Tradition points us to an older, alternative way of life:

"Such messages point to the true value of life, indicating the value of inwardness as much more important than wealth and power, that the life of tranquility and material simplicity  is more rewarding and fulfilling…Such messages are especially revolutionary for a society blindly obsessed with impoverished values. To have forest monasteries amid, or elevated above lay society, is to have communities of resistance, that by their nature and very existence, question the validity of popular values.”

The forest monks “can convey, with insistence and innovation ‘messages’ that create ‘new’ values which can bring about cultural change on a fundamental level or encourage a change in the social patterns which inflict suffering and degrade the quality of people’s lives.”

Emptiness in Theravada

There is a general misunderstanding that "emptiness" is a Mahayana teaching only, and not found in Theravada Buddhism.

Mahavagga of Samyutta Nikaya the Buddha says: “Emptiness (sunnata) is what I teach. A teaching that does not treat of emptiness is someone else’s teaching composed by some later disciple.”

Pancaka Nipata, Anguttara Nikaya says: "A discourse of any kind, though produced by a poet, or a learned man, versified, poetical, splendid, melodious in sound and syllable, is not an keeping with the teaching of the Buddha if not connected with emptiness (sunnata).”

Again the Buddha said: “And what bhikkhus is the path leading to the unconditioned? The emptiness concentration, the signless concentration, the undirected  concentration, this is called the path leading to the unconditioned.”

“Thus, bhikkhus, I have taught you the unconditioned. Whatever should be done by a compassionate teacher, out of compassion for his disciples, desiring their welfare, I have done for you. These are the roots of trees, bhikkhus, these are the empty huts. Meditate bhikkhus, do not be negligent, lest you regret it later. This is our instruction to you.”

The world is sunnata, empty.

Khuddaka Nikaya: “Because of being empty of self or of things due to self, it is consequently said that he world is empty.”

Emptiness means upekkha, equanimity,  void of lusts, which Buddha emphasized.

Ajahn Buddhadasa of Suan Mokh said, “Don’t identify as ‘I’ or ‘mine’, act with clear awareness and there will be no suffering.”

“The sunnata of the Buddha means the absence of anything that we might have a right to grasp at and cling to as an abiding entity or self…The world is described as empty because there is nothing whatever that we might have a right to grasp at. We must cope with an empty world, with a mind that does not cling.”

“Nothing to do. Nothing to be. Nothing to have.”

The Dhammapada 92 says: “The arahants have emptiness (sunnata) and signlessness as their object.

Yasam sunnicayo natthi

Ye parinnatabhojana

Sunnato animittoca

Vimokkho yasa gocaro

Akase va sakuntanam

Gati tesam durannaya

They for whom there is no accumulation

Who reflect well over their food

Who have deliverance

Which is void and signless as their object…

Their course like that of birds in the air

Cannot be traced.

In Majjhima Nikaya 121, and also 122, the Buddha recommended a mode of perception that he called “entry into emptiness” in which one simply notes the presence or absence of phenomena, without making any further assumption about them; to look at “experience” or “process” without assuming “essence.”

“This world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and nonexistence. But when one sees origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, ‘non-existence’ with reference to the world does not occur to one.

“The world is in bondage to attachments, clinging and baises. But one such as this does not get involved with or cling to these attachments, nor is he resolved on ‘myself.’ He has no uncertainty or doubt that mere stress, when arising, is arising; stress, when passing away, is passing away. In this, his knowledge is independent of others. It is to this extent that there is right view.” Samyutta Nikaya XII 15

The Age of Resentment

University students often, speak to me of their “despair” and “fear” as they contemplate the future of the modern world.

They are nauseated and dread-full of the culture, idiocy, deadness, absurdity of materialist consumerism.

How to teach them that “the joy-of-life is in the living,” -- the act of living?

The acts that benefit life are in themselves meaningful, fulfilling, satisfying, conducive of happiness, contentment, and peace. We don’t need, nor can we attain, satisfaction from the “results” of our actions, from implementing or imposing our agendas on the world, from getting the results we want.

The achievement of a meaningful life is in meaningful living.

Especially for us who are working for a “paradigm shift” – working to change the world – to overthrow the present order of the world – to turn the world upside down.

We must realize that what we do is insignificant, but it is important that we do it.

Thomas Merton said something useful about this:

“Do not depend on the hope of results…You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no results at all, if not perhaps the opposite results to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself…As gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”

“You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and causes…It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic…

“The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen. And we can share in them: but there is no point on building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

“The greatest thing after all is to live, not put your life in the service of a myth…If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve…Truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointment, frustration and confusion….”

***

Images are evil. But images are all we have now. We were born modern.

America has no history. America is concrete, active, speed, forward looking, productive, optimistic, pragmatic, idealistic, restless. America no “place” – no roots.

Because we Americans have no history, no knowledge, no experience, we were born modern.

The American Dream is a smiling hallucination of advertisements, of new improved manikin smiles. America is Disney Land with a death penalty.

So America needs to “wake up” from its hallucination, and needs contemplatives to sit right down in the traffic of zooming rush hours, among the skyscrapers scaffolding; sit ZEN in the cacophony of the Bus Horn Concerto – and STOP MODERN MAN. In my humble opinion.

Modern secular man hates himself, cannot stand to be “with” or “by” himself – is alienated from his own mental, interior life – absorbed, transfixed by the computer screen – externals, sensations, technology, materialism.

Modern man is alienated from nature, from his own inner life. He has betrayed himself, has “sold his soul.”

Modern man’s self-hatred is due to his betrayal of his inner nature; due to his alienation – his disconnection from inwardness, nature,  spirit, dharma. Christians would say this alienation is due to betrayal of man’s divine nature, betrayal of grace.

He fills his inner life with “stuff” to fill up the emptiness. He “stuffs” himself, through consuming.

Modern man creates an  “image” to replace the “true self” that he has lost.

He gave away “reality” and inner “truth” for the illusion, for simulacra, for the society of the spectacle, the image…and now he is “lost in the funhouse”, he is lost in the masquerade of post-modern life.

Modern people feel guilty because we are guilty.

And we “stuff” ourselves to become jaded; to become insensitive to the sorrow of this knowledge; “Stuffing” ourselves in both senses of the word: (1) incorporating, eating ourselves to death; and (2) assimilating, accumulating more and more “stuff” in mindless consuming.

We are what we eat. We are the world, and we eat the world.

Alienated from his own mental, interior life, modern man is absorbed, transfixed by externals, sensations, materiality.

The philosopher Descartes planted the seeds of modern individualism, with his philosophy “Cogito ergo sum” – “I think therefore I am.” He starts with the self-centered “self”, and works outward to understand the cosmos (Dharma/god) as “object” of objective experience.

But Dharma/god is not an object , not a thing, or “being.” God is not another “being” and there is nothing out there. And this absence is experienced as a presence.

So modern man put the “self” in the place of the god, the Dhamma.

We become sick of  this charade and deception, and are filled with resentment and revenge, and “self-destruction.” Modern man is will destroy civilization out of revenge for this meaningless life he feels trapped in.

Regeneration, reawakening to our sense of “connection” to nature, our sense of “belonging” in the world, is our only way forward. Re-embodying our own inner lives through meditation is the only way to liberate ourselves from this dilemma, this looming catastrophe.

***

In the Japanese edition of The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton said that modernism, with its “ideology of matter, power, quantity, movement, activism, and force… is the source and expression of the spiritual hell which man has made of this world, the hell which has burst into flames in two total wars of incredible horror, the hell of spiritual emptiness and sub-human fury which has resulted in crimes like Auschwitz and Hiroshima. This I must reject with all the power of my being. This all sane men must reject. But the question is: how can he sincerely reject the effect if he continues to embrace the cause?”

The practice of the contemplative life, meditation, cuts through the conditioning of modernism,  and “is a radical liberation from the delusions and obsessions of modern man and his society,” Merton said.

“It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threatens to destroy the whole race of men and the world with him. By my monastic vows and life, I am saying NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace.”

This rejection of modernism, the modern world, is an affirmation, a “yes” to nature, to the natural world.

“If I say No to all these secular forces, I also say Yes to all that is good in the world, and in man. I say Yes to all that is beautiful in nature….”

The change we need is deeper, more profound, than political change. It is a change of heart, a change of consciousness, that is necessary.

“We will never see the results in our time…[We need] a total and profound change in the mentality of the whole world…a complete change of heart and totally new outlook on the world of man….”

The basic problem is not political. It is a-political and human. We must recognize the primacy of the spiritual, that the person is not ‘post-human’.