Reading this book, I sometimes wonder,
“Is it worth it? All of this time spent on meditation, all of this concern?
After all, I’m pretty old, and I’m never going to escape samsara in this lifetime. I’m a householder, and even after years
of mediation and having spent 10 days living and meditating like a Buddhist
monk, I’m not sure that I’ve made a dent in taming my monkey mind. My prospects are bleak. And if that isn’t bad enough, I live in society that is
perhaps the worst of all possible worlds for hoping to achieve nirvana.”
If you pick up this book and
read it in the hope of finding words of praise and encouragement, you’ve chosen
the wrong book. Buddha takes no prisoners and neither does Ophuls. Whether he’s
talking about meditation or the social world, he isn’t sparing in his
assessments. Yet for all his bluntness, he encourages by throwing down the
gauntlet of an impossible quest. For every time you read something that
suggests your situation or your efforts are hopeless, Ophuls seems to
acknowledge the quandary and say “do it anyway”. And why not? If we don’t try,
we fade off into oblivion without having attempted the noble quest. As a
practical matter, life can be bad. And life can be worse. We can’t escape old
age, sickness, and death, but we can experience the “The Heart-ache, and the
thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to” with greater or lesser equanimity and therefore greater
or lesser suffering.
Another reason to continue this
book (and the path it recommends) comes from Ophuls’s pithy writing. As Ophuls
notes in his beginning remarks:
So Buddha Takes No Prisoners is a different kind
of meditation book— one that is quite idiosyncratic, not to say iconoclastic,
by traditional standards, because it has no pretensions to orthodoxy . It also
tries to inject a note of playful irreverence into what is usually taken to be
A VERY SERIOUS MATTER. I want to emphasize the word playful: my aim was to
produce something that would be fun to read and, above all, fun to write, while
still being instructive. Otherwise, why bother?
Id. “Not another meditation book!”
In fact, Ophuls does provide
fresh and engaging ways to consider meditation and the aims of the Buddhist
tradition. I came away with some memorable insights, such as this one
about the realization of what it’s all about:
[M]any years of intensive spiritual practice had
succeeded in clearing [Buddha’s] mind, and one day an early childhood memory
bubbled up. Left to himself under a tree by the side of a field in which his
father was supervising the ritual plowing, Siddhartha had relaxed into a state
of pure presence— a condition of open, amplified awareness in which he saw
everything perfectly, just as it was. Feeling with his whole body and mind the
clarity, grace, and power of that remembered state, Siddhartha knew he had
found the way forward at last.
Id. (p. 8)
We all probably have some like
memory of pure presence, of open, unencumbered awareness with which we can
identify Buddha’s experience. So this is what it’s all about! This insight
alone is worth the price of the book. It gives one a sense of the grace that we
seek through meditation, not simply relaxation or some trance state, but an
experience of an ineffable relationship with the world.
Another key insight is that
meditation is all about purification. We all have a Buddha mind, it’s just
covered in dross. Ophuls recounts the ways in which meditators have often
described the mind and then he adds an even better metaphor of his own:
[M]editation is like taming a wild beast—
traditionally, a spooky horse, a mad monkey, a drunken elephant , or a
bewildered ox . But the real beast is, of course, you, so think of it as
housebreaking your inner hyena.
Id. (p. 14)
Your “inner hyena”? Ophuls later refers to us humans as the “two-legged
hyenas” and notes that “[o]ur hyena nature is always scheming, conniving, and
chiseling, always maneuvering for advantage. Only the saints refrain—on their
better days.” Id. (p. 45). This isn’t your garden variety, soft-soap, self-help
book.
Ophuls emphasizes that meditation is a matter of purification, which is
in turn mostly a matter of renunciation. Now how welcome are those words in our
culture and in our minds? Nice in theory, but do I really have to give up
[cherished pleasures and junk of your choice]? This is where Ophuls pulls no
punches (or takes no prisoners). Yup, that’s what it’s about: purging the dross
of the mind. It ain’t easy. Meditation may be seem like the ex-lax of purging,
but sooner or later, you’re going to have some uncomfortable episodes. For this
aspect of meditation, you need endurance and toughness to work through it.
Indeed, it’s not just the mind; oh, no, it includes the body as whole, which is
the home of the mind. (The mind is not located exclusively in the brain.) Ophuls
explains:
To free your mind, you
must dissolve these physical blockages (and, of course, vice versa: to free
your body, you must untie your mental knots). The fireworks generated by the
collision between healing energy and coagulated defilement will take different
forms— and can be more or less intense depending on individual karma—but
physical purification and transformation are always an intrinsic and integral
part of the meditation process.
Id. (p. 32)
For instance, following a mediation retreat that I attended,
a guy that I thought could have been an American pro-football player told me
that he balled like a baby during one period of mediation as a damn of physical
and emotional pain broke in him. This is not the stuff of wimps.
Ophuls, like about every other meditation teacher, tells us
that we’ll fail in our efforts, especially at the beginning. But he writes:
Of course, you will fail
pitifully when you try to carry out this simple program. Everybody does. But it
doesn’t matter. You simply do the best you can, and you keep doing it over and
over, not being attached to how well you are doing or to what results you
obtain. Even a few brief moments of metta and equanimity are enough to begin
the ripening process .
Id. (p. 28)
“I’m a failure.” Big deal. Get over it. “Small, small catch
monkey” as they say in Cameroon.
In what can seem like a stream of discouraging words (which
rightly taken are challenging words), Ophuls offers this point of
encouragement:
But meditation is not
like art, where a hundred years of practice will not turn a dabbler into Degas.
It is more like Edison’s formula for genius: ninety-nine parts perspiration to
one part inspiration. So practice is everything . Whatever your talent for
meditation, you cannot succeed without practicing ; whatever your lack of
talent, you can succeed by practicing. If you produce the perspiration, the
inspiration will come—
Id. (p. 50)
Toward the end of the book, Ophuls includes a chapter “Return
to the Marketplace” along with four appendices that deal with these issues more
directly in the realm of daily life, including the marketplace and the public
square. This is a value-added aspect of Ophuls’s work that I don’t find in
other fine works on meditation. How does it fit with the lives we live? (Assuming
you’re not a monk or nun.) On one hand, he simplifies the message for us:
Enlightenment shows us
that all the world’s a church, and all of life’s a pilgrimage, so we must live
accordingly: with wisdom and compassion. In a nutshell, wisdom is practicing
nonclinging, and compassion is practicing kindness.
Id. (p. 131)
But while we’re living the spiritual life, we mustn’t get
ourselves lost in our personalized versions of a spiritual trip. He writes:
The corollary is not to
be rule bound— that is, enslaved by some image of holiness that you (and
everybody else) have to live up to. Making a big deal out of spirituality or
identifying it with political correctness and your personal preferences is
delusion, not enlightenment. Spiritual trips are just as obnoxious as worldly
trips, if not more so (especially when the two get all jumbled up together). As
hard as it might be for some in the spiritual scene to accept, vegetarianism is
not obligatory, and a glass of wine with dinner is not anathema. Nor is voting
Democratic any more enlightened than voting Republican . And social workers are
no holier than sailors.
Id. (pp. 131-132)
For some, this might come like a cold bucket of
water in the face. (N.B. Voting Democratic is (nowadays) almost always smarter
and wiser than voting Republican, but it’s not a sign of spiritual enlightenment.)
Indeed, lest we all go off to live in monasteries, we must deal with the world,
and deal with it in worldly-wise ways. Ophuls notes:
[A]s long as we are
living as householders rather than as renunciates, it is entirely appropriate
to create and enjoy fortunate circumstances. Fortune fosters joy, and joy
fosters generosity and other positive, skillful qualities of mind. So we need
to find the middle way between self-abnegation and self-indulgence. We need, in
other words, to create a way of living that is simple, beautiful, and
life-affirming: a squalid hovel is a blight, and a trophy mansion an
extravagance, but a well-designed, well-built, and well-furnished home is a
blessing. To mention beauty is to come to the heart of the matter. Beauty is
not an option or a luxury, but a necessity. We need beauty in our personal
lives, because beauty uplifts the mind and reconnects it to the power and
wonder of creation. And we desperately need beauty in our collective life
(perhaps even more than we need political, social, and economic reform).
Id. (pp. 132-133)
The “perhaps” in the last sentence is
noteworthy; let’s agree that we can use both.
Just as you may think that Buddha and Ophuls are going soft,
Ophuls writes that we in the West want to have “healing” and enlightenment; we want the pleasures of life and the benefits
of renunciation. No way, he says. Freud sought to compromise with reality, to
whittle away the suffering of our neuroses into ordinary unhappiness. Buddha
wasn’t willing to take this path. Buddha goes all the way, and team Buddha isn’t
going to boost everyone’s self-esteem by letting everyone make the cut and get
a letter. No. “You’re going to have to earn
it.” (Cue John
Houseman’s sneering voice for full effect.)
In the four appendices, Ophuls situates Buddhist thought
within contexts of modern science, Western political thought, Western
psychology, and contemporary culture. As with the rest of the book, the tone
alternates between it’s all FUBAR (for younger readers: “fouled-up beyond all recourse” or something
like that) and “Okay, it’s FUBAR, let’s get to work on it”. (I wrote
earlier about the appendix on politics.)
Ophuls is like a great teacher or coach, at once demanding a
level of performance that one can never hope to obtain while providing a pat on
the back indicating that you’re getting there. Challenge and encouragement.
With this, Ophuls's book goes on my shelf (electronic shelf in this case) as
one of the best guides to meditation and what life is really about: living it with
wisdom, compassion, and equanimity.
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