MINDFUL LEADERSHIP

38196Part I – Read Chapter 4 of the text. Write a two paragraph reflection on your ideas as to how you could increase your confidence..

CHAPTER 4
THE HEART OF PRACTICE
MEDITATION is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentry into society. We call this “engaged Buddhism.” When we go to a meditation center, we may have the impression that we leave everything behind-family, society, and all the complications involved with them-and come as an individual in order to practice and to search for peace. This is already an illusion, because in Buddhism there is no such thing as an individual. Just as a piece of paper is the fruit, the combination of many elements that can be called non-paper elements, the individual is made of non-individual elements. If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply, with the eyes
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of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those who are awake, you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here: the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father- everything is in this sheet of paper. The Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that you cannot point to one thing that does not have a relationship with this sheet of paper. So we say, “A sheet of paper is made of non-paper elements.” A cloud is a non-paper element. The forest is a non-paper element. Sunshine is a non-paper element. The paper is made of all the non-paper elements to the extent that if we return the non-paper elements to their sources, the cloud to the sky, the sunshine to the sun, the logger to his father, the paper is empty. Empty of what? Empty of a separate self. It has been made by all the nonself elements, non-paper elements, and if all these non-paper elements are taken out, it is truly empty, empty of an independent self. Empty, in this sense, means that the paper is full of everything, the entire cosmos. The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos. In the same way, the individual is made of non-individual elements. How do you expect to leave everything behind when you enter a meditation center? The kind of suffering that you carry in your heart, that is society itself. You bring that with you, you bring society with you. You bring all of us with you. When you meditate, it is not just for yourself, you do it for the whole society. You seek solutions to your problems not only for yourself, but for all of us. Leaves are usually looked upon as the children of the tree. Yes, they are children of the tree, born from the tree, but they are also mothers of the tree. The leaves combine raw sap, water, and minerals, with sunshine and gas, and convert it into a variegated sap
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that can nourish the tree. In this way, the leaves become the mother of the tree. We are all children of society, but we are also mothers. We have to nourish society. If we are uprooted from society, we cannot transform it into a more livable place for us and for our children. The leaves are linked to the tree by a stem. The stem is very important. I have been gardening in our community for many years, and I know that sometimes it is difficult to transplant cuttings. Some plants do not transplant easily, so we use a kind of vegetable hormone to help them be rooted in the soil more easily. I wonder whether there is a kind of powder, something that may be found in meditation practice that can help people who are uprooted be rooted again in society. Meditation is not an escape from society. Meditation is to equip oneself with the capacity to reintegrate into society, in order for the leaf to nourish the tree.
Something has happened in some meditation centers. A number of young people found themselves ill at ease with society, so they left in order to come to a meditation center. They ignored the reality that they did not come to the meditation center as an individual. Coming together in a meditation center, they form another kind of society. As a society, it has problems like other societies. Before entering the meditation center, they had hoped that they could find peace in meditation. Now, practicing and forming another kind of society, they discover that this society is even more difficult than the larger society. It is composed of alienated people. After some years, they feel frustrated, worse than before coming to the meditation center. This is because we
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misunderstand meditation, we misunderstand the purpose of meditation. Meditation is for everyone and not just for the person who meditates. Bringing children into a meditation center is very natural. In Plum Village, children practice with adults. From time to time, we open the door for guests to come and practice with us, and bring their children. We especially take care of the children. When the children are happy, the adults are happy. One day I overheard the children telling each other, “How come our parents are so nice here?” I have a friend who has been practicing meditation for fourteen years, and he has never shown his daughter how to meditate. You cannot meditate alone. You have to do it with your children. If your children are not happy, do not smile, you cannot smile. When you make a peaceful step, that is for you, but it is also for the children, and for the world.
I think that our society is a difficult place to live. If we are not careful, we can become uprooted, and once uprooted, we cannot help change society to make it more livable. Meditation is a way of helping us stay in society. This is very important. We have seen people who are alienated from society and cannot be reintegrated into society. We know that this can happen to us if we are not careful. I have learned that many of the Buddhist practitioners in America are young and intellectual, and have come to Buddhism not by the door of faith, but by the door of psychology. I know people in the Western world suffer a great deal psychologically, and that is why many have become Buddhists, practicing medi
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tation in order to solve psychological problems. Many are still in society, but some have been uprooted. Having lived for quite some time in this society, I myself feel that I cannot get along with this society very well. There are so many things that make me want to withdraw, to go back to myself. But my practice helps me remain in society, because I am aware that if I leave society, I will not be able to help change it. I hope that those who are practicing Buddhism succeed in keeping their feet on earth, staying in society. That is our hope for peace.
I wrote a poem over thirty years ago, when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, about a brother who suffered so much he had to drop out of society and go to a meditation center. Since the Buddhist temple is a place of compassion, they welcomed him. When someone is suffering so much, when he or she comes to a meditation center, the first thing is to give some kind of comfort. The people in the temple were compassionate enough to let him come and have a place to ny. How long, how many days, how many years did he need to c1y? We don’t know. But finally he took refuge in the meditation center and did not want to go back to society. He had had enough of it. He thought that he had found some peace, but one day I myself came and burned his meditation center, which was only a small hut: his last shelter! In his understanding, he had nothing else outside of that small cottage. He had nowhere to go because society was not his. He thought he had come to seek his own emancipation, but, in the light of Buddhism, there is no such thing as individual self. As we know, when you go into a Buddhist center, you bring with you all the
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scars, all the wounds from society, and you bring the whole society as well. In this poem, I am the young man, and I am also the person who came and burned down the cottage.
I WILL SAY I WANT IT ALL
If you ask how much do I want, I’ll tell you that I want it all. This morning, you and I and all men are flowing into the marvelous stream of oneness.
Small pieces of imagination as we are, we have come a long way to find ourselves and for ourselves, in the dark, the illusion of emancipation.
This morning, my brother is back from his long adventure. He kneels before the altar, his eyes full of tears. His soul is longing for a shore to set anchor at (a yearning I once had). Let him kneel there and weep. Let him cry his heart out. Let him have his refuge there for a thousand years, enough to dry all his tears.
One night, I will come and set fire to his shelter, the small cottage on the hill. My fire will destroy everything
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and remove his only life raft after a shipwreck.
In the utmost anguish of his soul, the shell will break. The light of the burning hut will witness his glorious deliverance. I will wait for him beside the burning cottage. Tears will run down my cheeks. I will be there to contemplate his new being. And as I hold his hands in mine and ask him how much he wants, he will smile and say that he wants it alljust as I did.
To me, a meditation center is where you get back to yourself, you get a clearer understanding of reality, you get more strength in understanding and love, and you prepare for your reentry into society. If it’s not like that, it’s not a real meditation center. As we develop real understanding, we can reenter society and make a real contribution.
We have many compartments in our lives. When we practice sitting meditation and when we do not practice sitting, these
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two periods of time are so different from each other. While sitting, we practice intensively and while we are not sitting, we do not practice intensively. In fact, we practice non-practice intensively. There is a wall which separates the two, practicing and non-practicing. Practicing is only for the practice period and non-practicing is only for the non-practicing period. How can we mix the two together? How can we bring meditation out of the meditation hall and into the kitchen, and the office? How can the sitting influence the non-sitting time? If a doctor gives you an injection, not only your arm but your whole body benefits from it. If you practice one hour of sitting a day, that hour should be for all twenty-four hours, and not just for that hour. One smile, one breath should be for the benefit of the whole day, not just for that moment. We must practice in a way that removes the barrier between practice and non-practice. When we walk in the meditation hall, we make careful steps, very slowly. But when we go to the airport, we are quite another person. We walk very differently, less mindfully. How can we practice at the airport and in the market? That is engaged Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism does not only mean to use Buddhism to solve social and political problems, protesting against the bombs, and protesting against social injustice. First of all we have to bring Buddhism into our daily lives. I have a friend who breathes between telephone calls, and it helps her very much. Another friend does walking meditation between business appointments, walking mindfully between buildings in downtown Denver. Passersby smile at him, and his meetings, even with difficult persons, often turn out to be very pleasant, and very successful. We should be able to bring the practice from the meditation
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hall into our daily lives. How can we practice to penetrate our feelings, our perceptions during daily life? We don’t deal with our perceptions and our feelings only during sitting practice. We have to deal with them all the time. We need to discuss among ourselves how to do it. Do you practice breathing between phone calls? Do you practice smiling while cutting carrots? Do you practice relaxation after hours of hard work? These questions are very practical. If you know how to apply Buddhism to dinner time, leisure time, sleeping time, I think Buddhism will become engaged in your daily life. Then it will have a tremendous effect on social concerns. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha become the matters of everyday life, each minute, each hour of our daily life, and not just a description of something far away.
Our mind is like a river, with many thoughts and feelings flowing along. From time to time, it is helpful to recite a gatha, a short verse, to remind us what is going on. When we focus our mind on a gatha, the gatha is our mind at that moment. The gatha fills our mind for half a second, or ten seconds, or one minute, and then we may have another gatha a little further downstream. While eating a silent meal, I recite a gatha to myself, and then I eat something. When the plate is empty, I recite another gatha, and drink a cup of tea. Suppose there is one hour of sitting in meditation, and then five hours of nonsitting, followed by three more hours of sitting, intensive practice. What is the relationship between the practice time and the non-practice time, the practice mind and the non-practice mind? Sitting is like agatha, a long silent gatha. (Maybe it’s not
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so silent.) My main concern is the effect the gatha has on the non-gatha state of mind. An automobile driver needs signs from time to time to show him the way. The sign and the road are one, because you don’t just use the sign only where it appears, you apply it all along the way, until the next sign. There is no difference between the signs and the road. That is what we should do while practicing gathas and sitting. Gathas help us get back to ourselves, and as soon as the gatha ends, we continue along the stream. If we do not realize the unity of the gathas and the rest of our life, of the signs and the road, then we would have in ourselves what the French call cloisons etanches. It means absolute compartmentalization, with no communication whatsoever between the two compartments. Not permeable. Between the gatha and the non-gatha state of mind is an absolute distinction, like the sitting and the nonsitting. How can the gathas affect the non-gatha moments? How will the sitting permeate the non-sitting hours? We must learn to practice so that one gatha, one minute of sitting will influence the rest of the day, one step made in walking meditation will have an effect on the rest of the day. Every action, every thought has an effect. Even if I just clap my hands, the effect is evetywhere, even in faraway galaxies. Every sitting, every walking, every smile will have an effect on your own daily life, and the life of other people also, and practice must be based on that.
When we practice sitting and walking, we must pay attention to the quality of the sitting and the walking, not the quantity. We
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have to practice intelligently. We need to create the kind of practice that will fit our circumstance. There is a stmy I would like to tell you about a woman who practices the invocation of the BuddhaAmitabha’s name. She is very tough, and she practices the invocation three times daily, using a wooden drum and a bell, reciting “NamoAmitabha Buddha” for one hour each time. When she arrives at one thousand times, she invites the bell to sound. (In Vietnamese, we don’t say “strike” or “hit” a bell.) Although she has been doing this for ten years, her personality has not changed. She is still quite mean, shouting at people all the time. A friend wanted to teach her a lesson, so one afternoon when she had just lit the incense, invited the bell to sound three times, and was beginning to recite “N amo Amitabha Buddha,” he came to her door, and said, “Mrs. Nguyen, Mrs. Nguyen!” She found it ve1y annoying because this was her time of practice, but he just stood at the front gate shouting her name. She said to herself, “I have to struggle against my anger, so I will ignore that,” and she went on, “NamoAmitabha Buddha, NamoAmitabha Buddha.” The gentleman continued to shout her name, and her anger became more and more oppressive. She struggled against it, wondering, “Should I stop my recitation and go and give him a piece of my mind?” But she continued chanting, and she struggled ve1y hard. Fire mounted in her, but she still tried to chant “Namo Amitabha Buddha.” The gentleman knew it, and he continued to shout, “Mrs. Nguyen! Mrs. Nguyen!” She could not bear it any longer. She threw down the bell and the drum. She slammed the door, went out to the gate and said, “Why, why do you behave like that? Why do you call my name hundreds of times like that?” The gentleman smiled at her and
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said, “I just called your name for ten minutes, and you are so angry. You have been calling the Buddha’s name for ten years. Think how angty he must be by now!” The problem is not to do a lot, but to do it correctly. If you do it correctly, you become kinder, nicer, more understanding and loving. When we practice sitting or walking we should pay attention to the quality and not the quantity. If we practice only for the quantity, then we aren’t very different from Mrs. Nguyen. I think she learned her lesson. I think she did better after that.
Part II –
1. Who is Mihaly Csizentmihalyi?
2. Compare focused attention to the concept of “flow.”
****( WRITE 300 -350 WORDS)

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