Constance Kassor’s review for Buddhadharma:
While most English-language writings on Buddhist mindfulness draw heavily on Theravada sources, Mahayana traditions offer equally rich insights. Martina Draszczyk’s The Buddha’s Gift to the World: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Roots of Mindfulness (Shambhala) brings some of these Mahayana teachings to the forefront, presenting a carefully curated collection of excerpts from Indian and Tibetan sources.
The book’s opening chapters introduce mindfulness from different perspectives, supported by short excerpts from a number of Indian and Tibetan texts. While Draszczyk’s approach intends to “let the selected sources speak for themselves,” she also offers introductions and explanations that contextualize each passage, making the teachings more accessible and approachable. The book functions as an anthology of dozens of different texts, culminating in a contemporary Mahamudra teaching by Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche (1952-2014).
The final chapter touches on the transmission of mindfulness practices from Asia to the west, and includes several short excerpts from the writings of Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the popular secularized form of mindfulness known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The volume as a whole presents a broad-ranging overview of Mahayana and contemporary teachings on mindfulness that can be beneficial to beginners or to established practitioners.
[Please note that the text from which this excerpt derives makes use of footnotes and diacriticals; these are not represented in this excerpt.]
Excerpt:
The Path
Intention and Direction
As a starting point, the path calls for the firm intention and wish to train in wholesome states of mind and to live in compliance with the ethical precepts of Buddhist practice. In addition, we seek to achieve a degree of mental stability, establishing a working basis with manifold benefits. A calm and peaceful mind allows scope for more happiness, friendliness, and confidence. These in turn provide us with conducive conditions for looking deeply into our habit patterns and cultivating insight, which increases our wisdom and compassion. Finally, this process will lead to a point at which all delusion dissipates, and we recognize the true nature of all outer and inner phenomena.
Formal Training in Meditation
The instructions for Buddhist meditation vary from tradition to tradition. The mindfulness practice based on Theravada Buddhism and its related discourses places special emphasis on the fourfold application of mindfulness with regard to the body, to feelings, to the mind, and to dhammas, which here means a succession of approaches to deepening the practice. Practitioners learn to direct their attention to these points of reference, to sustain concentrated awareness on the present experience associated with them, and to cultivate insight into their nature. This process enables them to become more and more aware of the body and of mind states, first at rudimentary levels and subsequently at increasingly subtler levels.
Special significance is attached to the observation of the fleeting nature of physical and mental states as they arise, linger, undergo change, and finally dissipate. This gradually engenders a profound experiential understanding of impermanence, the suffering it entails, and the fact that we are unable to discover any permanent, autonomous self within the constant flux of experience.
This training is a dynamic form of practicing, of focusing, of observing, of allowing, of letting be, and of letting go. We experience the ever-changing nature of everything—of life itself—without grasping at or rejecting anything, aware, awake, and fully present. Mindfulness in this context does not aim to change the present experience. Avoiding manipulation of and interference with the present experience is an important aspect of the training, as this receptive nonintervention allows for greater awareness of both our subtle motives and our incipient involuntary reactions. Such awareness is in turn required to make our habituated entanglement in our emotional and cognitive reactions loosen its grip.
Eventually, the sustaining of a relaxed and aware state of mind in meditation enables practitioners to let go of involuntary reactions. As this experience grows more and more familiar in formal meditation, our way of perceiving ourselves and the world gradually changes from within, resulting in a greater sense of poise and equanimity. We become able to be with our experiences and to respond to them in wholesome ways. We do not simply react to our thoughts and emotions as if on autopilot; we neither suppress them nor fully identify with them. This has a tremendous impact on our way
of relating to ourselves and others in daily life.
In one way or another, the instructions for formal practice always integrate the two basic elements of Buddhist meditation mentioned above: training in calm abiding or stability and in deep insight. This holds true for all Buddhist traditions.
We learn calm abiding by mindfully directing and sustaining the attention on a chosen object. This might be the breath or other sensory perceptions such as hearing or physical feelings. It could also mean certain trains of thought (like thoughts of loving-kindness) or products of the imagination (like a visualization of the Buddha). We train in mindfully remaining with the meditation object in a relaxed but focused manner. As soon as the mind starts to wander, we note this and redirect our attention back to the chosen object. Judgments and suchlike are not called for. Like any other states of mind, we simply register them as what they are: a flux of thoughts. The power of this training makes the mind more focused and stable.
Deep insight is cultivated by deeply investigating the nature of phenomena, of our present experience. Practitioners eventually become able to “perceive the truth only and to not perceive that which is not the truth.” In the process, preconceived ideas and superimpositions—in short, all delusions—dissipate. In meditation, practitioners observe that feelings, thoughts, and emotions and the identification with a supposedly unchanging self are fleeting; that any mental event is devoid of intrinsic existence, and that the body—in fact all bodies, whether our own or other people’s or whether “bodies” of sound, smell, taste, or of touchable things—is subject to a constant process of change. This naturally weakens the involuntary clinging to reality to which we are accustomed. Or to put it in different terms, we eventually deconstruct the habit of clinging to an “I” and “mine,” to a “self ” and “other,” thereby transforming our relationship with the associated thought and feeling processes.
As mentioned above, meditation instructions vary from one Buddhist tradition to another. There is no uniform practice. Teravāda Buddhism often teaches simple techniques such as focusing on the breath to achieve calm abiding and deep insight. Mahayana Buddhism, as transmitted, for instance, in Tibet, teaches both simple methods and instructions in a wide variety of highly complex techniques. Yet, all of these Buddhist methods aim at stabilizing the mind and attaining insight as well as cultivating loving-kindness and compassion.
Calm abiding and deep insight mutually support each other. A classical Buddhist analogy compares insight lacking in mental stability with a candle in a drafy room. The candle illuminates the surroundings only for brief moments and keeps going out. Insight that is embedded in a stable state of mind is compared with a candle burning in a place that is sheltered from drafs. It shines steadily and illuminates its entire surroundings. An analogy by a modern-day commentator compares the development of calm abiding as fostered in Buddhism with erecting a telescope on a stable mounting, making available a kind of contemplative technology. The stability of calm abiding enables practitioners to engage in contemplative research, that is, the practice of deep insight. This is an apt picture in that Buddhism is indeed a science of the mind. Its objective is to understand how the human mind constructs its world of experience, takes it for real, and suffers as a result. Moreover, Buddhism examines the ways in which these distortions can be deconstructed, and how the human mind can let go of delusion and achieve liberation from suffering through the power of insight. In principle, both stability and insight are needed, and in practice they reinforce each other: It is easy for a stable mind to gain and sustain insight, and the quality of insight makes it easier to stabilize the mind. In formal meditation sessions the focus can be either on calm abiding or on deep insight, and in the end they are cultivated in combination. They can be practiced while sitting, standing, lying, or moving; with ritual and without, with recitations and without, with visualizations and without. The important point is that we set aside time for practicing during which we concentrate fully on the chosen meditation object, in a conducive environment, and with the clear intention to train our mind. This might be compared with working in a laboratory: formal meditation means spending time in a mental training laboratory, maintaining an attitude of interest, wakefulness, and friendliness toward our present-moment experiences.
A very widely used method is training with the breath as a support—a technique that is generally employed in sitting meditation. Another popular method is walking meditation, in which the focus is more on the process of movement. In principle, we can consciously direct the attention to the inside (breath, thoughts, feelings, concepts) or to the outside (sense objects). The scope of attention can be made narrower or wider. We can deliberately confine our attention to a single object or we can maintain a very open presence without choosing a particular meditation object.
Informal Training in Everyday Life
The informal training is based on the formal training. The difference between these two is that the informal training does not require dedicated time slots. Training informally means training in everyday life. Here too, a clear intention and commitment to train are required to counteract the habit of forgetting our mindfulness practice and being distracted. To train in mindfulness and awareness step-by-step in our life, we can start out by consciously setting aside short periods in our daily routine, maybe the first
moments of having tea or coffee at breakfast. Training here means being fully awake and present. Aware of thoughts and feelings, we unequivocally decide in favor of wholesome mental states and actions. Eventually this practice of awareness weakens our destructive tendencies and opens the gate to positive and constructive ways of living.
The experiences and the stability gained in formal training feed into our informal training. Te more informal training permeates everyday life, the more it in turn enhances the depth and maturity of formal training. The interplay of formal and informal training will lead to greater inner balance and improve our capacity for concentration and for cultivating peaceful and constructive relationships with ourselves and others. It will also promote the process of realizing that we are indeed responsible for ourselves, for what we think and feel, and for how we act. Developing this wisdom coupled with compassion will contribute to greater stability in leading an ethical life.
From The Buddha’s Gift to the World: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Roots of Mindfulness by Martina Draszczyk © 2024 by Martina Draszczyk. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
