Can You Imagine How Amitabha Must Feel?

When I first heard this story, I couldn’t see how the heartbreak Julia felt when reciting the four immeasurables verses connected with Ken's teaching story about a village elder knocking on an angry woman’s door. The story felt clever and funny, but it didn’t touch the place Julia was describing.

Recently, I listened again. I had been experiencing what feels like a consequence of practice: relationships falling away, a sense of loneliness or isolation, and grief arising in huge waves. This time, what stood out was the elder’s response. He doesn’t take sides, rebuke, explain, or attempt to fix anything. He stays, his heart breaking as he listens to her, and asks a single question: Can you imagine how Amitabha must feel? We don't know what happens for Mrs. Fong, but an unspoken implication is that the question shifts her perspective.

Compassion, Ken reminds us, doesn’t resolve suffering or make things right. It asks us to be present, without protection, perhaps the deepest form of companionship there is.

From Four Immeasurables 4

Ken: This is the fourth class on the four immeasurables. I believe the focus for practice over the last couple of weeks was compassion. Compassion being the wish that others not suffer, at least at one level. We’re working with the four lines:

May I be free from suffering, harm, and disturbance.
May I be present with everything I encounter.
May I experience the world wishing me freedom from pain.
May I accept things just as they are.
—Four immeasurables

What was your experience with this? What questions, insights, challenges? Julia.

Julia: I had two experiences that were frequent and notable. One was heartbreak. And the other one was very strong movement of energy as I did the lines.

Ken: As you did the lines. Describe the heartbreak.

Julia: [Pause] I had an increased awareness of the degree to which people suffer. And also a sense that for many people, they may not have the means available to them to help them with their suffering.

Ken: Thich Nhat Hahn tells a story of an extremely bad-tempered woman in a village in Vietnam. We’ll call her Mrs. Fong. And while she was very bad-tempered, she was also extremely devoted to Buddha Amitabha, who is the buddha of compassion.

And she would pray at the top of her voice to Amitabha every day for hours. [Laughter] People in the village found this somewhat disturbing. And because she was so short-tempered, her noise pollution was creating a body of resentment in the community.

And the elders met together to talk about what should be done. One of the elders said, “I know what to do. Leave it to me.”

So the next day when she was right in the middle of her prayers, he went over to her house and knocked on the door and said, “Mrs. Fong, I'd like to speak with you.” There was no response. After a few minutes, he knocked again, and said in a somewhat louder voice to be heard over her prayers, “Mrs. Fong. You know who it is. Please come down. I’d like to speak with you.” And the only indication that there was any effect was an increase in the decibel level of the prayers. So finally he knocked very, very loudly, and said, “Mrs. Fong. I really must speak with you. Please come down.”

The prayers stopped. There was a sound of a mala or rosary being slammed on the table. Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! The door was thrown open. Mrs Fong said, “You are disturbing me in my prayers!”

And the elder looked at her and said, “I’m very sorry. Obviously you are very agitated by this and very disturbed. But I’ve only been calling you for a few minutes. Can you imagine how Buddha Amitabha must feel?”[Laughter]

And what you say, Julia, is very much to the point. The immeasurables build on each other. When we start with equanimity, through equanimity, we come to the understanding that everything everybody does, they do for one and one reason only. In that moment, they think that what they’re doing, or what they’re saying, is going to make their world a little happier, or a little better.

Of course, because of the confusion, it often has the absolutely opposite result. But that’s why people do these things, to relieve some pressure internally or externally. “It’s just going to make things a little better.” Because they can’t stand the ways things are right then. Or they think, maybe it’s very good, and they just want it to be a little better. And they ruin it by their action. But that’s why they do things; that’s why we all do things. We think it’s going to make our world a little better. and in that way, a very profound way, we’re all the same.

Then in loving-kindness, we connect with this deep yearning, which drives our actions. We want to be happy. We tend to make a mess of it, because even though we want to be happy, we don’t really see things very clearly, so the actions we do aren’t really appropriate for the situation. So, it makes a mess.

As we come into touch with our own wish to be happy, it actually becomes quite easy to wish that others be happy, too. It doesn’t mean we have to like them. A lot of people confuse loving-kindness with liking. But there’s a difference between liking people and wanting others to be happy.

Then we come to compassion, which is the wish that others not suffer. And as we cultivate compassion, then as Julia describes, there’s a heartbreak. Because in order to cultivate compassion, we have to see the suffering that is there. And we tend to see it, not only in others, but also in ourselves. And the more intimately we become acquainted with our own suffering, the more clearly we understand that the process of suffering—how we create our suffering—operates exactly the same way in everybody else. Again, there’s no difference.

And now it’s a very short step to that heartbreak. Because we see and know how people are creating suffering for themselves all the time. And our heart goes out to them. And that heartbreak is not pity. It’s not feeling sorry for others. Each of those sentiments has an element of separation, and possibly an element of arrogance, superiority. In compassion, there is no sense of superiority. There’s just being present with the pain and suffering, our own and others. And when we do that, we experience a broken heart.

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Niguma's Wishes

This exchange between Joe and Ken, from Learning from the Lives of the Lineage Holders, planted a seed. I didn’t realise it at the time, and it took years to germinate. When I first heard this conversation, the language of illusion, magic, and annihilation didn’t have a place to take root. But something in the way Ken spoke—and in Joe’s hesitation—lodged itself in memory.

I had no idea what Niguma’s warning meant. Only much later did I begin to recognise the enormity of what Ken is pointing to here: that awakening manifests as the collapse of the structures we use to manage experience. What has to die is not just a habit or a point of view, but the whole sense of self that stands between us and fully experiencing life.

Joe names something deeply resonant when he says how hard it is to go here—how we resist even as we long for it.

From Learning from the Lives of the Lineage Holders 2

Ken: I just want to turn to the other section of Niguma’s where Khyungpo Naljor has this encounter with her. Just to review very quickly: there’s Khyungpo Naljor seeking with very deep devotion, very deep longing to meet her. Eventually finds her—she appears. Offers his gold, she just throws it away, scatters it in the jungle. Says, “I don’t need it,” and confers empowerments, and then this wonderful song that samsara is propelled by the forces of attraction and aversion, and when you know their nature then everything is like gold. And that we live in illusion, experience a suffering that’s like an illusion. When we practice it’s like ... illusion’s not really quite the right word, it’s like magic. And so the suffering arises like magic, we do a practice which is like magic, we experience an enlightenment or awakening which is like magic, all through the power of faith.

Ken: And when I first heard those lines, many, many years ago now, they just struck me so very, very deeply. One of the ways that we’ve been talking about this is by going into the experience of things and experiencing them completely. When you experience something completely you know what it is. You know what it is, you know its nature. What is the nature of thought?

Student: It comes and it goes.

Ken: Yeah, and it’s empty. What is the nature of emotion? Okay, what is the nature of all experience? We just did the Heart Sutra on this, you guys should know this—it’s empty. When you know your experience completely you know that’s its nature. Now, that knowing is not an intellectual knowing—one can read about this, and yeah it’s all there-but the actual knowing, when it arises, isn’t an intellectual knowing. It's a knowing which comes from being one with the experience. And that’s how you know its nature, because you’re one with it and there’s no separation. And at that point there’s no confusion, so it doesn’t matter what arises, it’s just an experience. Like a dream, like a mirage, vivid—very clear—but no confusion. And this is what Niguma is pointing to here. Okay? Joe.

Joe: She also threatens him or perhaps more correctly warns him that she will eat him.

Ken: Yes.

Joe: Because he will be annihilated which is perhaps one of the reasons why we don’t go here—why it’s hard to go here.

Ken: Yes, that’s the act of manifestation of awakening. You’re not going to survive this process ideally. Not and have the same habituated way of relating to things—that has to die, quite right.

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Looking for Truth

The habit of looking for something solid to hold onto, something to take comfort in—a final account of how things really are—is deeply seductive. In this passage from A Trackless Path, Ken undercuts that impulse.

Resting sits at the heart of this passage, and the way Ken speaks about it is highly precise. When resting is deep, experience doesn’t dim or recede; it becomes more vivid. Knowing and what is known are no longer separate, and the knowing itself can’t be grasped or located. Experience doesn’t disappear; it loses its apparent solidity.

Then he points to what happens next, and to a real pitfall. Because this way of experiencing is so striking, it’s easy to take it as the truth and begin to hold onto it. The moment it’s treated as something to believe in, it hardens, and everything that had briefly fallen away—identity, hope, and fear— quietly creep back in.

The more we chase truth, the further we move from immediacy. When identity loosens, action happens without calculation. Compassion isn’t generated or applied; it arises naturally when separation drops away.

From A Trackless Path 10

Ken: So, we’re always looking for the truth for how things actually are. In a certain sense, it may seem strange to say this, there isn’t any such thing. During this retreat I’ve consistently emphasized letting the mind rest. I'm not even going to talk about mind here. When we rest very, very deeply there isn’t a shutting down of experience, there’s actually awakening of experience. When we rest very deeply we experience everything much more vividly. So that there’s that awake quality.

But in that deep resting, the way we experience is that what arises is not separate from the knowing. Is not separate from mind. And that knowing quality is experienced as having nothing to it. There’s no form, no substance, no quality. Almost no quality we can ascribe to it, which is often referred to as emptiness. But that’s just how we experience it when we rest that deeply.

And because the knowing and the experience are not separate, then experience arises as empty. Which doesn’t mean to say it goes away. It just loses its seeming tangibility.

Now it’s a way of experiencing things. And it is so deep and so vivid that people say, “This is how things are.” Out of that, what tends to happen is people attach to it as being true in some sense. This actually takes us in the wrong direction. Because when we experience things that way, any sense of identity has subsided because of the depth of the resting.

And that freedom from identity, and that freedom from hope and fear because experience doesn’t arise as good or bad anymore—it just is—this is what allows us, or enables us if you wish, to respond to what arises in experience with what we call compassion but is just the natural expression of awareness. And we respond to the experience of suffering and struggle and pain without actually any real thinking. It is just the natural response because of … I don’t know what to say. And that is the direction this practice takes us. The continuing search for truth, or something like that, takes us away from that just responding naturally to what arises.

And in that natural response, because of the quality of experience, our habituated conditioning doesn’t arise. And the lack of separation means that what arises as a response is appropriate for the situation. And that’s why it’s called compassion. It’s also why it ends suffering.

So it goes on to say:

Samsara is destroyed at its root:
I don’t need to discard anything.
My mind is buddha:
I don’t need to hope for anything.
It’s always been this way:
I don’t need to cultivate anything.
Isn’t this a better way to work?
—Recognising Mind as the Guru

And then we discussed the other lines earlier. But just to review. We look and look at mind. What do we use to look at mind? Well, we use mind of course—knowing. What if any sense of mind drops out? Well, now you’ve got nothing to look with. You’re just present. That’s why he says, “What’s the problem?”

The others are structured the same way.

I have studied with many capable gurus:
Each guru has given me his or her own advice.
All advice comes down to one point—mind.

And it would be interesting to go through and substitute heart all the way through this ’cause that would give it another flavor.

Mind [or heart] that is my guru,
I look at you,
Listen to you,
And seek your instruction again and again.

Do you get the feel of this? And I’ve talked about very deep listening. In a sense we’re learning how to listen to nothing. And when we can really listen to nothing, then stuff becomes very clear.

So, perhaps this is a little helpful to you.

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Mistaking Effects for the Method

This reflection grew out of a conversation with a practice friend. She was struck by the distinction Ken makes between the methods and results of practice, and she wondered whether confusing the two might be strengthening self-absorption. The question felt precise and unsettling, and it held up a mirror I couldn’t easily look away from.

In this passage from a class on the Eightfold Path, Ken talks about mistaking effects for method. This confusion happens easily and often goes unnoticed. Experiences such as relaxation, clarity, or compassion are taken as things to produce, rather than as effects that arise when attention is brought to what is actually happening. Practice quietly turns into self-monitoring: Am I relaxed yet? Am I compassionate yet? Am I doing this right?

Ken’s example makes the mistake unmistakable. Telling someone to relax doesn’t relax them; it tightens them. Relaxation is an effect, not a method. The method is what we do to cultivate attention. When that distinction blurs, effort goes into trying to reproduce experiences instead of meeting experience.

This is where self-absorption can strengthen itself without being noticed. Trying to generate compassionate effects keeps “me” at the centre of the frame—how I’m doing, how I’m coming across, whether I’m getting it right. Being present with pain—my own or someone else’s—removes that reference point. There’s no control there, no performance, just attention and relationship. That’s why it’s unsettling, and why it matters.

From Eightfold Path 1 and Purpose, Methods, Effects, and Results in Meditation

Ken: I came to the conclusion, and I learned this from a number of different sources, that what is presented as the eightfold path, what constitutes right view, what constitutes right intention, are descriptions of the results when you really practice them. They’re what you evolve to or what you end up at.

And one of the problems in practice that I’ve encountered over and over again in teaching is that people try to use the results as the method of practice. Just to give you a very simple example of that, which several of you have heard me talk about before. If you say to somebody, “Relax,” what’s the first thing they do? [Laughter] They tense up. Because relaxation is the result of a certain effort. If, on the other hand, you say to somebody, “Take a deep breath; [breathes in deeply] now let it out slowly, [breathes out slowly] and do that again." And you do it once more for good luck. How do you feel? More relaxed.

And many, many of the instructions for meditation, or what are presented as instructions for meditation and instructions for practice, are actually descriptions of the results. And yet we tend to interpret them as prescriptions for action. And that just gets us into a big mess.

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Just Rest

In this class on mahamudra Ken speaks plainly about limitation. He describes his experience on the three-year retreat of wanting to go straight to the heart of practice but not being able to. Instead of labelling that as a failure, he names it for what it was: a lack of capacity at the time. That acknowledgement sheds light on an important aspect of practice: it isn’t about doing what’s most advanced or most elegant, it’s about doing what is actually possible, even if that comes with a sense of guilt, awkwardness, or falling short.

He then jokes about people “practising the meditation of a groundhog.” It’s a joke about hibernation, trading on an image of withdrawn stillness—unresponsive, unaware. Ken is poking fun at a common pattern: people sit, grow quiet, drift into a blank or foggy state, and take that to be deep practice. Resting without awareness easily settles into dullness, and that quality doesn’t stay on the cushion. Over time it shapes how a person meets the world. His humour softens the warning.

Seen in that light, the practical instructions that follow—posture, hands, eyes—take on a different significance. They aren’t techniques for producing an experience, but ways of supporting clarity. Nothing is forced. The body finds its own straightness. The eyes are left alone. Attention rests rather than strains. This is an invitation to rest while staying present. The refrain at the end is an invitation to drop chasing and rehearsing. Don’t pursue the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present. Just rest.

From Learning Mahamudra 1

Ken: On a personal note, I’ve always found meditation practice extremely difficult. And Kalu Rinpoche, my teacher, always encouraged us to go right to the heart of the matter. He was not interested in getting lost in some of the complexities of meditation practice, or different kinds of meditation practice. He always just went straight for the heart, straight for the essence.

But I wasn’t able to do that. And part of me really wanted to meditate resting on the breath. Whenever I asked Rinpoche if I could just meditate resting on the breath, he would always say to me, “There’s no breath in the bardo. There’s no breath after you die, so why are you wasting your time?” [Laughter] And he was quite right.

But in all honesty, it wasn’t the most helpful thing to me, because I did not have the capacity. So, I meditated on the breath anyway. I felt terribly guilty doing so—because it was all I could do. I had my own difficulties. That was all I could do. So, do what you actually can do.

There are an awful lot of people who think they’re practicing mahamudra and dzogchen but—as more than one teacher said, actually they're practicing the meditation of a groundhog. And that’s what they end up becoming.

So, I’m going to start with the subtler form and work down. But I really want you to take this to heart.

When you practice meditation, posture is quite important. I said earlier—when we were beginning meditation period, before we had our class—you sit in attention. What that’s going to mean, if you’re sitting in a chair, like I am, you’re just going to sit straight.

Now, I suggest you don’t try to hold yourself straight like this, because you just get tired. Just let your body be, find its own straightness. Straight back is actually quite important because the straight back allows the energies of the body to move and circulate, and come into balance, which creates the conditions for awareness, and presence, and balance in the body. And that’s very helpful.

If you’re sitting on the floor—sitting on a cushion—which is the traditional meditation posture, then let your legs rest flat on the floor, making kind of a triangle. You want to use a cushion, which raises your butt off the floor, so that you can actually sit with a straight back without straining.

I find it’s best to position the hands in one of two ways. One is to position the hands on your thighs, so that your elbows are directly below your shoulders, so there’s no strain in the back. The other is the traditional meditation posture of placing one hand on top of the other.

And there are some people who say it should be the right on top of the left, and there are those who say it should be the left on top of the right. It’s obviously very important. [Laughter] You hold your hands like that.

And this is what Nyishul Khenpo, another one of my teachers, would say: “And there are those who say your thumbs should rest just touching. And there are others who say your thumbs should be spaced just far apart enough that you could slide a piece of paper through.” That’s obviously another extremely important distinction.

He said that when he heard that, he realized that people will argue about anything. But what is important, if you’re sitting in this posture, is that you hold your elbows out a little bit. Not like this—this closes in the chest so it constricts the breath. You hold your elbows out a little bit.

You’ll find when you sit like this that, in the beginning you may have a tendency to put your chin out or up, or something like that. What I find very helpful is to imagine that you’re hanging from the top of your head. Like there’s a hook right there.

When that happens, your chin will come in slightly and your head will move back on your spine. Your head and spine are lined up. That’s the whole point of the posture: your spine is supporting you. You’ve got your shoulder yoke here that’s being supported.

You’re actually sitting the way you’re meant to. You’re being supported by your spine, and everything’s hanging from your shoulders. Instead of what a lot of us do—and which I did for many years—is this. You see how that is? I’m holding myself up.

How am I holding myself up? With my shoulders. Do you know how tiring that is? And I bet at least half of you walk around your lives doing that all the time.

So, you get the feeling for this. There is a natural straightness, and there’s a firmness in the posture, but there’s also a relaxation in the posture. And that’s very important.

There are a couple of other little things to take note of. One is to curl the tongue slightly so that the underside of the tongue rests about half an inch back from the upper teeth. A couple of reasons for that: it reduces the formation of saliva, but it also completes a circuit of circulation of energy in the body, so that mind and body come into balance.

It may feel a little odd, but you get quite used to that quite quickly.

Last point is eyes. There are all kinds of things about certain gazes when you’re meditating, but what I’d like you to do with the eyes when you meditate is exactly what you do with your ears.

Everybody’s going, what does he mean? What do you do with your ears when you meditate? Anybody?

So, try doing the same thing with your eyes. Just do nothing with your eyes. You’ll find that they come to rest in a certain way on their own.

It’s a lot harder to do nothing with your eyes, because we’re so used to paying attention to things and looking at things—computer screens, traffic, reading, and so on.

So, you just rest. And what’s very important in the physical posture is that it has that quality of resting. [Pause]

And then …

Don’t pursue the past.
Don’t entertain the future.
Don’t think about the present.
Just rest.

[Pause]

Again. Set your posture so you’re sitting straight, yet relaxed. Let the breath settle so it’s also natural. And …

Don’t pursue the past.
Don’t entertain the future.
Don’t dwell on the present.
Just rest.

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Don't Miss the Point

This passage from a retreat on mind training articulates a principle that runs through all Buddhist practice: move into the experience of whatever is arising. The forms differ across traditions, but the orientation is the same. Don’t try to reach any particular state; instead meet experience directly.

Seen this way, the huge variety of methods taught in Buddhism begins to look secondary. Whether described as endurance, as treating everything as a dream, or as resting in direct awareness, the point is consistent. Bring attention fully into what is happening, without distraction and without interference. The mahamudra formulation—no distraction, no control, no work—captures this with exquisite clarity.

What distinguishes this principle for me is how little it depends on effort in the usual sense. It’s not about improving daily experience or making something happen. Instead, the emphasis falls on relinquishing deeply ingrained habits of control and manipulation. Across traditions, practice becomes a matter of staying present with experience exactly as it is.

From Mind Training in Seven Points 2

Ken: The key principle in all Buddhist practice is to move into the experience of whatever is arising, right in the present. In the Theravadan tradition this is characterized as the courage to endure what arises. Mahayana—we cheat. Everything’s a dream. Vajrayana, or direct awareness techniques, sit and be with everything. Never lose attention for a moment. Don’t try to make anything different.

The mahamudra instructions: no distraction, no control, no work. Means you’re not distracted by anything. You don’t try to control your experience in any way. And you don’t work at to make some kind of experience happen, or some kind of ability happen. You’re just right in what is.

It’s the same right across all Buddhism. Move right into the experience and be there. The whole point of all of these different techniques is to develop that ability. Whether it’s Soto Zen, Theravadan, vipassana, visualization meditations, Six Yogas of Naropa, dzogchen. It all comes down to that point.

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Truth or Experience?

In this clip, Ken responds to sincere questions from Charles, a Buddhist scholar, who starts by asking what kind of claim is being made when experience is described as dream-like. Ken points to how easily particular ways of experiencing are mistaken for how things actually are. Experiences of stillness, openness, bliss etc. can be profoundly affecting, and may lead to declarations about the nature of reality. These follow a familiar trajectory: from experience into celebration, and then into fixation. The celebration of insight makes sense—something loosens, suffering eases, connection is felt—it’s easy to see why people are swept up by it. But the moment insight hardens into “this is the truth” or “this is how things are,” something fluid and ineffable is lost when it becomes an object of belief.

I’m struck by how often this pattern appears, not just in formal teachings but in practice more generally. A meaningful experience occurs, it brings relief or clarity, and then it quietly turns into a reference point. Ken’s reminder feels like a caution against that slide, which can lead to defending one view of reality over another. Instead, he points to staying close to how experience actually unfolds, without freezing it into a thing

Ken's full exchange with Charles is 21 mins long. I’ve included an audio clip of a core section (3 mins) with transcript, and also the full clip and transcript with the richness of Charles' questions and Ken’s responses. I hope you can find time to read/listen to the full selection.

From A Trackless Path II 6

Core Transcript

Ken: So, I think it’s very, very important for us at this point to understand this is about experiencing things differently. Now, there are experiences which arise. There you sit and the mind becomes still. “Mind” means the way we experience things—so let’s get rid of the word “mind” for a few moments. The way that we experience things becomes very still and open, and in that stillness and openness there’s no experience of something other. Does this mean that there is no I and no other? No, it is a way of experiencing. But that way of experiencing makes such a difference and is so profound and so impactful that people label it as “the truth,” when actually it’s just another way of experiencing. Not only do they label it as the truth, they celebrate it. And one of the most elaborate celebrations of it is the Avatamsaka Sutra, which is like a thousand pages, celebrating impermanence as change and the joy of change, and suffering as opening into the intensity or bliss of experience, and emptiness as the interdependence of everything, so that we’re all connected. Just thousands of pages of celebration.

Student: What sutra? Avatamsa?

Ken: Avatamsaka. It’s been translated into English a couple of times, I think, Flower Garland or the Flower Wreath Sutra. But there are many, many others. The Prajnaparamita, The Perfection of Wisdom in 100,000 Lines is a celebration of this. “You can’t say anything about anything!” And it just goes on for a hundred thousand things because they’re just blown away by this!

And then the human mind, somebody, says, “This is how things are.” Somebody else says, “That’s the truth.” And now the fixation comes and that screws everything up, as we know, time and time again. And so you get Saraha coming along and saying, “Oh, those who believe in reality are stupid, like cows, but those who believe in unreality, they’re even stupider.” [Laughter] And he’s absolutely right, because they’ve moved from this way of experiencing things to saying, “This is how things are.”

Full Transcript

Charles: A couple of years ago, I listened to your Mahayana Mind Training podcasts, and I thought, “This is great,” and I started doing taking and sending. Then I got sick, so I did more taking and sending, and I got sicker. I had to have surgery, I had complications from surgery. So I stopped doing taking and sending and eventually I got better. [Laughter]

Ken: I have a slight issue with your notion of causality here. [Laughter]

Charles: Well, actually that’s what my question is about. In that podcast you say taking and sending can’t hurt you. That’s magical thinking, okay? [Laughter] But now, when you present mahamudra, right—

Ken: Mahamudra can’t hurt you either. [Laughs]

Charles: That’s fine. You make this distinction between the world of shared experience and the world of actual experience. So the world of shared experience is the way most people relate to their lives. In the world of actual experience, there’s no inside and outside, there’s nothing grounding experience, there’s no other people, like a dream. Now, if I’m in a dream and I think about an elephant, very likely a dream elephant is going to appear. So if that’s the way things are, it seems like magical thinking would be a totally reasonable way to approach my life. Another way— [Peals of laughter]

Ken: You have some fans now. [Laughter]

Charles: And let me give you another way to get to the same point. [Laughter]

Ken: You’re sounding awfully like some other Buddhist scholars I know right now. They present me with six arguments and then say, “All the same point,” two of which contradict each other. And then say, “What do you think?” [Laughter] Keep going.

Charles: Okay so, I’m about to finish.

Ken: Oh but don’t announce it. You’ve got to work up to a nice climax. [Laughter]

Charles: Right. If you don’t even know that I have feelings, because I could be just an appearance in your dream, how can you possibly know that taking and sending won’t hurt me? [Peals of laughter]

Student: I so want to hear the answer.

Ken: So have you seen Airbender 3? Oh, it’s a pity, that’s me. Airbender 3. It’s a kid’s movie, magical stuff. [Laughter] Where shall I start Charles? Everything is a dream, right? That’s what you said.

Charles: That’s what you said. [Laughter]

Ken: But you seem to be accepting this thesis. I mean, your argument about what happened to you with taking and sending sounded like you have adopted that point of view.

Charles: Actually, I see two ways to go. And I’m not personally sure which way.

Ken: Okay, go for it.

Charles: One way is you go for this idealist understanding of emptiness where everything literally is a dream. And then I think it’s hard to avoid going to something like a traditional Tibetan world picture, where spirits and yidams appear to people. And there’s divination and magic all over the place and, yeah, that’s one way. Another way is, come up with a different interpretation of emptiness like say, Gelugpa Madhyamaka, that doesn’t have this kind of consequence.

Ken: What do you mean, the Gelugpa Madhyamaka Prasangika doesn’t have this kind of consequence?

Charles: So far as I can tell, and it’s kind of a hard view to understand, on that view, the object, the physical object, exists in relation to the thought that knows it. The thought exists in relation to the physical object that knows it. They’re mutually interdependent. Whereas if the world is a dream, there’s nothing standing behind experience. There’s no ground. That seems to me to be a very different picture. In the picture where the world is a dream, literally, the mind event exists, but it’s empty. The physical object is completely non-existent. It’s just not there. And the way of understanding emptiness that I find in Tsongkhapa, they’re both there and they’re mutually interdependent, so neither of them is real. That’s not the same, so far as I can tell.

Ken: Hmm. What? So I have to pose a question here. Do you want me to answer your question from where I was at the time those recordings were made, or do you want me to answer the question from where I am now? [Laughs]

Charles: From where you are now, please.

Ken: Oh, okay. You are trying to determine the ontological status of experience. What did Nagarjuna have to say about that? [Commenting to the other students at the retreat] I can ask him that question because I know he knows.

Charles: Everybody who reads Nagarjuna has a different take on that.

Ken: What’s your take? What did Nagarjuna say about trying to determine the ontological status of experience?

Charles: You think Nagarjuna said something directly about that question [laughter] because you think chos (pron. chö) should be translated as “experience.” So far as I can tell, if you translate chos as experience, you go right to the idealist view, so I’m not prepared to concede that that translation is correct.

Ken: How would you like to translate dharma?

Charles: Well, I still kind of like “phenomenon,” [laughter] actually, but let’s just translate it as “what arises.”

Ken: Oh, I’m happy with that. Okay. So, what did Nagarjuna have to say about trying to determine the ontological status of what arises?

Charles: What the text says is, in effect, if you say it exists, that’s a mistake. If you say it doesn’t exist, that’s a mistake. If you say both, that’s a mistake. If you say neither, that’s a mistake.

Ken: Yes. So, what do you conclude from this?

Charles: How about this? That nothing stands on its own. That everything exists—

Ken: No, that’s not the question. The question is, from Nagarjuna’s point of view, what possibilities are there for determining the ontological status of experience? You said that if you say it exists, that’s a mistake. If you say it doesn’t exist, that’s a mistake. If you say it exists and it doesn’t exist, that’s a mistake, and if you say it neither exists nor doesn’t exist, that’s a mistake. That’s classic four gates. So, what do you conclude from this?

Charles: Suppose we conclude that it’s impossible. We can’t determine the ontological status of what arises.

Ken: Exactly. But that’s exactly what you were trying to do.

Charles: When you say that this is a dream aren’t you making a statement about the ontological status of what arises?

Ken: No. [Laughter]

Charles: Help me understand why not.

Ken: The reason I’m going into this in this detail is because it’s very, very important. Our way of thinking, largely in the West—though I’m not as conversant in French, German, and Italian, and other languages as I am in English—but our language and our way of thinking is largely ontologically based. Everything in Buddhism is experientially or epistemologically based. So, “everything is a dream” is an instruction. It’s not a statement about how things are. It’s an instruction. And it’s an instruction to say, “experience everything as a dream.” In my own understanding I’ve come to really appreciate Nagarjuna saying to just forget about trying to determine the status of what you experience. It’s impossible—you always end up in a rat’s nest.

What you can do is train yourself to experience things differently. And that is exactly what one’s doing, as far as I can tell, in all Buddhist practice, whether Theravadan, Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana. Whether it’s particular techniques like taking and sending, or the shamatha/vipashyana, mahamudra sequence. Or Vajrayana with the yidam practices and the energy transformation techniques and the six yogas, and so forth. Not one bit of it is about knowing what is true, even though that kind of vocabulary crops up all the time. It’s about experiencing things differently. Experiencing things in a way, as I said the first evening, so that we don’t struggle with experience. And it becomes quite extraordinary.

So, we go back to your experience with taking and sending. When one is ill, a way to experience that is to approach it in the instructions of Mahayana mind training. Which is to say, here’s the suffering that is arising. I’m ill, may all the illness and unhappiness and pain and misery of all beings come into me and may my happiness, health and understanding go to all beings. What actually happens to you there, that is, the progression of the illness, that’s not affected by the practice, it’s affected by a lot of other factors. But the way that you experience the illness changes very significantly because you no longer fight it. And so even though one is quite ill, one is clear and at peace. Now, clearly you had quite a significant medical condition and it kept unfolding and required greater and greater levels of intervention. But to ascribe that to this way of training your experience, is a classical example of magical thinking.

We often, I think, approach practice with the idea that, “If I know the truth, then I will be at peace.” It was quite a startling realization for me to recognize that that was completely wrong. Wrong on many counts. The most important one being, there is no truth, which is said in Buddhism time and time again in various more elaborate ways. So this business about knowing the truth is a complete pipe dream. And what I began to appreciate ... this particular formulation doesn’t come from me, but it comes from a previously rather obscure professor of economics at the London School of Economics—obscure until he wrote a certain book that got him into all kinds of hot water in England—but it’s a very good book.

Religions are not claims to truth, but ways of learning to live with what we cannot know. Okay, and we don’t know how long we’re going to live. We don’t know when we’re going to die. We don’t know how our life is going to unfold five years from now or even tomorrow. How do we live with that? There is no way of knowing, because stuff happens. We think we can have everything nicely ordered and in place and something happens and everything’s turned upside down. Well, what happens in Buddhist practice is that we train ourselves to open to whatever arises. That’s what we’re training ourselves to do. So we experience the world in a very, very different way. We don’t experience the world in terms of expectations and goals and achievements and things like that. It is a radically different way of experiencing things and it gives us the ability to meet whatever arises with a certain degree of equanimity, say, and warmth, joy and understanding, as in compassion. You’re very familiar with these.

So I think it’s very, very important for us at this point to understand this is about experiencing things differently. Now, there are experiences which arise. There you sit and the mind becomes still. “Mind” means the way we experience things—so let’s get rid of the word “mind” for a few moments. The way that we experience things becomes very still and open, and in that stillness and openness there’s no experience of something other. Does this mean that there is no I and no other? No, it is a way of experiencing. But that way of experiencing makes such a difference and is so profound and so impactful that people label it as “the truth,” when actually it’s just another way of experiencing. Not only do they label it as the truth, they celebrate it. And one of the most elaborate celebrations of it is the Avatamsaka Sutra, which is like a thousand pages, celebrating impermanence as change and the joy of change, and suffering as opening into the intensity or bliss of experience, and emptiness as the interdependence of everything, so that we’re all connected. Just thousands of pages of celebration.

Student: What sutra? Avatamsa?

Ken: Avatamsaka. It’s been translated into English a couple of times, I think, Flower Garland or the Flower Wreath Sutra. But there are many, many others. The Prajnaparamita, The Perfection of Wisdom in 100,000 Lines is a celebration of this. “You can’t say anything about anything!” And it just goes on for a hundred thousand things because they’re just blown away by this!

And then the human mind, somebody, says, “This is how things are.” Somebody else says, “That’s the truth.” And now the fixation comes and that screws everything up, as we know, time and time again. And so you get Saraha coming along and saying, “Oh, those who believe in reality are stupid, like cows, but those who believe in unreality, they’re even stupider.” [Laughter] And he’s absolutely right, because they’ve moved from this way of experiencing things to saying, “This is how things are.”

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Emotion Frames Thought

Today's passage, from a retreat called A Trackless Path, contains one of Ken’s most frequent refrains: "Go to the body first." It’s a key instruction, especially when set alongside his observation that emotion determines the framework in which thinking takes place, and thinking is often in the service of habituated patterns.

This passage contributed to changes in how I experience the body sensations and stories that arise with difficult life situations. Sensations like tightening, heat, or trembling are quickly followed by explanations and interpretations in the form of stories. They often sound reasonable and feel not just accurate, but totally right. It's taken years to realise that the core narratives I've spun are neither right or true. They've reinforced deep emotional patterns that I've used as protection to avoid facing and feeling things I haven't wanted to feel. Ken also mentions the five-step practice, which he often calls Seeing From the Inside. That practice has proved immensely helpful for working with painful internal material.

From A Trackless Path 9

Tom: So I'm sitting in my practice and some material comes up. And my understanding is that I'm to sit in awareness with that material. How can I get to the bottom of this without doing a bunch of thinking and noodling on this?

Ken: The way you get to the bottom is not doing thinking. And the reason is that most of the time thinking is in service of habituated patterns. The Age of Enlightenment suggested that reason trumped emotion. It's absolutely not true. Emotion determines the framework in which thinking takes place. And so when something comes up in your life, if you think about it—and we're all intelligent people—we find ourselves where we can think of arguments on this side and arguments on that side and arguments on three or four different sides.

And there are all of these wonderful schemes about weighting—things like that. I don't know about you, but whenever I try these, I'm always cheating in the weighting. And that's the emotional stuff running. You know what I mean?

So this thinking process is extremely unreliable. To give you an idea of how unreliable it is, World War II, the British Admiralty resisted the use of convoys for a very long time. Because their statisticians assured them that convoys made of large numbers of ships are more subject to attack. And so it would be less effective than single ships trying to sneak across the Atlantic. But the U-boats were so effective that they eventually said, "The hell with this," and they started using convoys 'cause that wasn't working. And they found that large numbers of convoys would get through.

When they went back and examined their data and analysis, the statisticians had made the error that the probability of finding a fleet of a hundred ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was for all intents and purposes the same as the probability of finding one. This is the kind of thing that if you just rely on thinking you can get into.

So something comes up, and rather than relying on thinking, what I suggested to you is you go to the body first. And you become aware of and open to the physical reactions that arise in connection with that issue. Now what happens is that as we do this we start hitting those physical reactions, story number one pops off, story number two goes off. We're just flooded with stories. And the function of those stories is to dissipate attention so that the issue is not actually felt or experienced.

Now what we do in practice then is as soon as we notice we're off in another story, okay, come back. Come back to the body. And as we do this over and over again we'll begin to be able to stay in the experience of the physical reactions, which may be various kinds of tension, discomfort, openings. All kinds of things are possible. It can be pleasant, unpleasant. There aren't any rules.

As we develop the capacity in attention to be present with those body sensations, we'll then find ourselves beginning to experience the emotional sensations associated with that. And that's similarly challenging, especially if it's a deep issue. And again there will be lots of stories. But they won't quite have the same power 'cause you've already taken a step.

Eventually we're able to be in the body sensations, the emotional sensations, and all of the stories and associations. Now we are in the complete experience. Being in the experience this way we know the stories to be stories, not true. And that is how we get out of the mind-killing.

And that's essentially what's outlined in Seeing from the Inside, it's that practice. That is actually how you get out of mind-killing, by coming as deeply as you're capable of into your own experience. Because what mind-killing is doing is shutting you down from the possibility of experiencing what is arising for you.

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A new year, on the same tracks. Or not?

At the start of a new year, it’s almost automatic to feel the pull to change something about ourselves. To set a new direction, make a resolution, finally get it right this time. Even when we’re sceptical of that impulse, it tends to reappear in subtler forms: doing the opposite, rejecting goals altogether, declaring ourselves “aimless.”

In this exchange, Ken points to something more fundamental. When change is driven by comparison, hope, or identity—whether we call it ambition, discipline, or spiritual practice—it often keeps the same pattern running, just dressed up differently. First, last, middle; aim or aimlessness—the train stays on the same tracks.

What he offers instead isn’t a fresh start or a better version of ourselves, but a different relationship with action and time. We still plan. We still take care of what needs to be done. But without depending on the future to justify the present. On New Year’s Day, that translates into neither a promise of reinvention, nor a wish to abandon responsibility, but rather an intention to meet the new year as it actually unfolds. Happy New Year!

From A Trackless Path 9

Paul: So my second question was, you spoke about idealism last night. And then ideology. And I was wondering if aimlessness was a possible cure for this?

Ken: What do you think?

Paul: I think yes.

Ken: Say more. Somebody hand him a shovel, please. [Laughter]

Paul: Well, you said idealism is a form of hope, a basis of comparison. So, the practice of aimlessness, which I admit I don’t understand that well but, it seems to be pointing in the direction of you have no sort of attachment to the results of your actions.

Ken: So, how do you know whether to turn left or right?

Paul: I guess you have to know where you’re going.

Ken: And if you have no aim? Have you studied Alice in Wonderland?

Paul: No.

Ken: Next retreat, required reading for everybody. So Alice is coming along—I think she’s left the White Queen’s party. She’s pretty disoriented by now with all the ups and downs, and ins and outs, and backwards and forwards of Through the Looking Glass. She runs into a Cheshire Cat who’s sitting up in a tree with a grin. Have you ever seen a cat grin? This cat was grinning. “Please, sir, which way should I go?” says Alice.

“Well,” says the Cheshire Cat, “That all depends. Where do you want to go?”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” said Alice.

See, aimless, right?

Then the Cheshire Cat said, “Well, then it doesn’t really matter which way you go, does it!”

And Alice says, “Well, as long as I get somewhere.”

To which the Cheshire Cat replies, “Well, if you go far enough you’ll be somewhere.”

What do you think?

Paul: I guess she wasn’t very idealistic in the first place.

Ken: Well, that was a jump. How’d you get there?

Paul: She wasn’t like, “I have to go to this particular place, and that’s the only place I can go.”

Ken: And so do you think this works for her, being aimless?

Paul: From what I know of the story, no.

Ken: Okay. When we’re trying to change how we approach the world we have to be quite careful. One of the things that’s good to keep in mind is that the opposite of a reaction is still a reaction.

So, I have a student—this is so absurd—he always made it a point to be first in line. So I told him, “I want you to change this.” You know what he did?

Paul: He always went last.

Ken: Exactly.

Paul: He always went last in line.

Ken: That’s exactly what he did. He was always the last in line! So I said—and this is where it got really absurd—“First, clearly defined position, last. You gotta do something different here.” You know what he did? He made sure he was exactly in the middle!

So, the pattern that’s running in this case is: I have to be in a special position. And he just kept redefining it. Okay?

Now, if you think of a pattern or a reaction as a set of train tracks and the train’s going, [makes steam engine sounds] “choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo” people think, I’m gonna change the behavior. They pick up the train, they turn it in the other direction. And now it goes, [makes more steam engine sounds] “choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo choo.” The problem is it’s running on the same set of tracks.

So having an aim. Being aimless. Same set of tracks. Now what? The real challenge here is how do you get off the tracks? How are you going to do that?

You’re so glad you asked this question, aren’t you? Well, let me give you a little help. There’s a book How to Cook Your Life by Dögen and Uchiyama. Dögen writes the root text. It’s instructions to the head cook in the monastery. Commentary is by Uchiyama. And I think it is one of the best books I’ve come across that really describes how to live in awareness. You might find it helpful. You have the book? Yeah. How many times?

Paul: Three or four.

Ken: Good. Yeah. So there’s a section in which he’s commenting on Dögen’s instructions, “When all of these matters are taken care of then the officers meet and can set the menu for the next day and prepare tomorrow’s gruel.” Say, oatmeal.

And Uchiyama’s commentary goes something like this: When you are preparing tomorrow’s oatmeal, you are not setting up a goal for tomorrow because you have no idea what is going to happen. In the night there could be an earthquake, fire, riots, whatever. So you actually have no idea whether that gruel is actually going to be served or not, or anybody’s going to eat it. But you prepare tomorrow’s gruel as tonight’s work. You do what needs to be done. Not with any aim for the future but because it is tonight’s work.

Because the human condition is, there is an order to life, there is structure, and so forth. And it is subject to disruption at any time because of impermanence. The order you can view as the karma element. The disruption is the impermanence element. And we live in this absolute paradox which, in traditional terms is, "We’re definitely going to die and we have no idea when." Or in more everyday things, "Yes, I need to plan to do this and yet I have no idea whether I will experience the results of my efforts."

This is quite different from clinging to an aim and the result, or being aimless and having no result. You follow? So, whether it’s in family, or in our work, we think about what is necessary—to take care wife, family, so forth—or our responsibilities at work, but we do so without any expectation of experiencing those results.

And that becomes quite powerful. Because when we are not attached to the experience of those results, which is the direction most people go, then we find we’re much freer to see what really needs to be done. If you see what I mean.

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