BOOK REVIEW; Howell's poems freeing body, spirit
Frederick Smock Special to The Courier-Journal
344 words
21 June 2008
The Courier-Journal Louisville, KY
METRO
11
English
(c) Copyright 2008, The Courier-Journal. All Rights Reserved.
'Hatchet Buddha' is enlightening
By Frederick Smock
Special to The Courier-Journal
The Buddha, you will recall, sought a release from human suffering. The Hatchet Buddha — represented as a female, holding a cleaver in one hand, her sex in the other — sought a release from the suffering occasioned by love. Her quest was not exclusively an ancient one.
Poet Rebecca Howell passes this figure of the Hatchet Buddha through several historical incarnations: the sometime-wife of the Hindu god Ganesha; the wife of Jonah; Joan of Arc; and, among others, the poet herself?
The women in these poems are visited by "wrathful deities" who appear as lovers (dangerous men always appear as lovers, don't they?) and who promise to combine metaphysical teachings with their ardor. But beware:
Angels are made to deliver
So when they go, a girl is left
baited and waiting
These lovers all seek one or another means of subjugating the women they visit. An over-arching theme here, within these poems, is that of the female intellect working to assert some independence of body and spirit.
In the dark, we grope
When we grope, we grab
If this love must be a wrestling
one of us will be pinned to the ground
While informed by Buddhism, mythology and history, these poems nonetheless float above the philosophical scrum, upon a felicity of phrasing, and an irresistible lightness of being. It is a high "ground" that the poet chooses for her characters.
Rebecca Howell is an intelligent and insightful poet, whose work entertains even as it enlightens. Her poems are graced by exquisitely inventive drawings by Arwen Donahue.
All the principals here — poet, artist, publisher — are Kentuckians, adding to the state's already considerable literary mystique.
Frederick Smock is chairman of the English department at Bellarmine University. His forthcoming book is "Craft-talk: On Writing Poetry."
Book Review
The Hatchet Buddha
By Rebecca Gayle Howell
Illustrations by Arwen Donahue
Larkspur Press; 47 pp. ; $24
Monday, June 30, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Joseph Needham - the man who loved China
Behind the Wall
By ALIDA BECKER
965 words
8 June 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
15
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA
The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
By Simon Winchester.
Illustrated. 316 pp. Harper/HarperCollins. $27.95.
On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University's most brilliant scientists -- and one of its most avid skirt-chasers -- lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham's extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for ''fragrant smoke.'' Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom's decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity -- including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work ''addressed,'' as Needham put it, ''to all educated people.'' The first volume of ''Science and Civilisation in China,'' published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham's lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.
Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, ''Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,'' was considered too tame), Simon Winchester's biography, ''The Man Who Loved China,'' presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities -- or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naivete by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.
Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the ''spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage'' of Needham's parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noel by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely -- the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, ''The Professor and the Madman,'' he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). ''Handsome, in a studious way,'' Needham spoke with ''a silkiness, almost a lisp'' and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.
Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.
But if Winchester's account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham's character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father's dictum ''No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?'' Isn't it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It's hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: ''She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.''
By ALIDA BECKER
965 words
8 June 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
15
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA
The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
By Simon Winchester.
Illustrated. 316 pp. Harper/HarperCollins. $27.95.
On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University's most brilliant scientists -- and one of its most avid skirt-chasers -- lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham's extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for ''fragrant smoke.'' Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom's decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity -- including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work ''addressed,'' as Needham put it, ''to all educated people.'' The first volume of ''Science and Civilisation in China,'' published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham's lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.
Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, ''Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,'' was considered too tame), Simon Winchester's biography, ''The Man Who Loved China,'' presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities -- or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naivete by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.
Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the ''spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage'' of Needham's parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noel by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely -- the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, ''The Professor and the Madman,'' he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). ''Handsome, in a studious way,'' Needham spoke with ''a silkiness, almost a lisp'' and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.
Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.
But if Winchester's account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham's character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father's dictum ''No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?'' Isn't it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It's hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: ''She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.''
Friday, May 2, 2008
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. By Pico Iyer
A timely look at the life of the Dalai Lama
Askold Melnyczuk; Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel; "The House of Widows."
Askold Melnyczuk - Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel, "The House of Widows.". Boston Globe
743 words
16 April 2008
The Boston Globe
3
E.8
English
© 2008 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
BOOK REVIEW
The Open Road: The Global Journey
of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
By Pico Iyer Knopf, 275 pp, $24
These days, everyone has advice for the Dalai Lama: monks, former monks, ex-employees of various Free Tibet organizations, government officials from China, the European Union, and the United States. Moreover, he listens: Pico Iyer presents him as open, deeply curious, committed to truth even at the expense of doctrine. At the same time, he is a philosopher, with values rooted in age-old principles. Unless their counsel accords with the wisdom of Nagarjuna (a second-century Indian philosopher, and perhaps the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself), advice isn't likely to throw him off course. A genuine anomaly, a philosopher- king-democrat, the Dalai Lama takes the long view.
"Of all the many books and films that have brought the Dalai Lama and his people to the world," writes Iyer, "I'm not sure any of them has addressed that most central of questions": Has the Dalai Lama improved the lives of Tibetans?
In reflecting on this, Iyer has written one of the most thoughtful and eloquent books yet about the Dalai Lama. Considering his subject is one of the world's most analyzed and photographed men (and recently in the public eye after last month's riots in Tibet), that's no small feat. Iyer reminds us how little of the Dalai Lama we actually see. His public persona is grounded in four hours of daily meditation, as well as numerous esoteric rituals and practices: "Like any being, Tibetan Buddhism has a daylight side and a nighttime side, a part that belongs in the public, visible world and a part that belongs in the realm of dreams and premonitions and everything that exists outside the conscious mind." The Dalai Lama (real name: Tenzin Gyatso), notes Iyer, "[tends] to shield the wider world from the esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism." Iyer reminds us that Tibetan culture is nearer to Shakespeare's, where "every comet or cloud formation is a direct message from the gods," than to our own.
As the secular head of state, Tenzin Gyatso reflects his studies in the school of Gandhi. What other political leaders approached their "enemies" by refusing to identify them as enemies? The Dalai Lama has turned his cheek so often he resembles one of those many- headed, thousand-armed deities in Tibetan iconography.
Part of the fascination of Iyer's account springs from the fact that he's had privileged access to the Dalai Lama. Iyer's father, a philosopher who studied at Oxford, befriended "the simple monk" shortly after his arrival in India in 1959. The monk's first gift to the 3-year-old Iyer was a photograph of himself seated on a throne at the Potala Palace in Lhasa. He was 5 years old at the time. Iyer's portrait presents the human being in all his poignant agony and grace.
So how successful has the Dalai Lama's approach been? On today's map, Tibet appears to be in China. At a recent gathering of the Tibetan diaspora in Boston, someone passed around a piece of Tibetan currency from before 1959. The aim was to let the young people assembled hold tangible proof giving the lie to China's claims. The bill represented another world, with its own discrete culture, laws, and values. It was not Chinese.
The assertion is both clear yet complex, partly because of the paradoxical nature of self and identity as they're presented by Buddhism. "I" and "self" are relative terms. Buddhism doesn't adapt easily to our lust for instant gratification. There are no mass conversions in Buddhism, no discount tickets to nirvana. It is also radically egalitarian: Every sentient being possesses the same spiritual potential. Asked what all his meetings with the world's leaders had achieved, the Dalai Lama replied: "One simple innocent sincere spiritual seeker - that's more important than a politician or a prime minister. When I see some result then I feel today I did some small contribution."
Reading that makes one hope the Dalai Lama's advisers are wise enough to ask for some in return.
Askold Melnyczuk; Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel; "The House of Widows."
Askold Melnyczuk - Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel, "The House of Widows.". Boston Globe
743 words
16 April 2008
The Boston Globe
3
E.8
English
© 2008 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
BOOK REVIEW
The Open Road: The Global Journey
of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
By Pico Iyer Knopf, 275 pp, $24
These days, everyone has advice for the Dalai Lama: monks, former monks, ex-employees of various Free Tibet organizations, government officials from China, the European Union, and the United States. Moreover, he listens: Pico Iyer presents him as open, deeply curious, committed to truth even at the expense of doctrine. At the same time, he is a philosopher, with values rooted in age-old principles. Unless their counsel accords with the wisdom of Nagarjuna (a second-century Indian philosopher, and perhaps the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself), advice isn't likely to throw him off course. A genuine anomaly, a philosopher- king-democrat, the Dalai Lama takes the long view.
"Of all the many books and films that have brought the Dalai Lama and his people to the world," writes Iyer, "I'm not sure any of them has addressed that most central of questions": Has the Dalai Lama improved the lives of Tibetans?
In reflecting on this, Iyer has written one of the most thoughtful and eloquent books yet about the Dalai Lama. Considering his subject is one of the world's most analyzed and photographed men (and recently in the public eye after last month's riots in Tibet), that's no small feat. Iyer reminds us how little of the Dalai Lama we actually see. His public persona is grounded in four hours of daily meditation, as well as numerous esoteric rituals and practices: "Like any being, Tibetan Buddhism has a daylight side and a nighttime side, a part that belongs in the public, visible world and a part that belongs in the realm of dreams and premonitions and everything that exists outside the conscious mind." The Dalai Lama (real name: Tenzin Gyatso), notes Iyer, "[tends] to shield the wider world from the esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism." Iyer reminds us that Tibetan culture is nearer to Shakespeare's, where "every comet or cloud formation is a direct message from the gods," than to our own.
As the secular head of state, Tenzin Gyatso reflects his studies in the school of Gandhi. What other political leaders approached their "enemies" by refusing to identify them as enemies? The Dalai Lama has turned his cheek so often he resembles one of those many- headed, thousand-armed deities in Tibetan iconography.
Part of the fascination of Iyer's account springs from the fact that he's had privileged access to the Dalai Lama. Iyer's father, a philosopher who studied at Oxford, befriended "the simple monk" shortly after his arrival in India in 1959. The monk's first gift to the 3-year-old Iyer was a photograph of himself seated on a throne at the Potala Palace in Lhasa. He was 5 years old at the time. Iyer's portrait presents the human being in all his poignant agony and grace.
So how successful has the Dalai Lama's approach been? On today's map, Tibet appears to be in China. At a recent gathering of the Tibetan diaspora in Boston, someone passed around a piece of Tibetan currency from before 1959. The aim was to let the young people assembled hold tangible proof giving the lie to China's claims. The bill represented another world, with its own discrete culture, laws, and values. It was not Chinese.
The assertion is both clear yet complex, partly because of the paradoxical nature of self and identity as they're presented by Buddhism. "I" and "self" are relative terms. Buddhism doesn't adapt easily to our lust for instant gratification. There are no mass conversions in Buddhism, no discount tickets to nirvana. It is also radically egalitarian: Every sentient being possesses the same spiritual potential. Asked what all his meetings with the world's leaders had achieved, the Dalai Lama replied: "One simple innocent sincere spiritual seeker - that's more important than a politician or a prime minister. When I see some result then I feel today I did some small contribution."
Reading that makes one hope the Dalai Lama's advisers are wise enough to ask for some in return.
Bringing buddhist principles to divorce counselling Pt.1
Divorcing Well; Bringing Buddhist Pract ice to Divorce Counseling
Prend, Ashley Davis
4012 words
1 May 2008
Psychotherapy Networker
n/a
Volume 32; Issue 3; ISSN: 1535573X
English
Copyright (c) 2008 Psychotherapy Networker. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Divorcing Well Bringing Buddhist Pract ice to Divorce Counseling
By Ashley Davis Prend
Divorcing well? Divorcing peacefully? Is such a thing even possible? Let's face it, divorce often generates mutual recrimination and fury, which can lead to ugly, expensive court battles, particularly when children are involved. During a divorce, both partners can become their own evil twins, more intent on inflicting punishment on each other than on ending their tattered marriage.
As counselors and family therapists, we want to spare our clients all this pain by preserving and improving their marriages. But when the marriage obviously can't be saved, many therapists focus on helping the partners achieve what's widely called a "good divorce": a split as humane, rational, and nondamaging as possible.
Increasingly, therapists recognize that even after a marriage ends, most couples continue to be linked together. While the death of a marriage is undoubtedly painful, it doesn't have to be pathological. If handled well, it can even become a rich opportunity for emotional and spiritual growth.
Yet, to a couple neck deep in the kind of reciprocal fury that only two people who once loved each other deeply can feel, the idea that their divorce could be an opportunity for transformation is as crazy as it is undesirable.
Is there any way to stop the antagonism? Beyond helping these self-declared enemies shed their feelings of anger and vengeance, is it possible to encourage them to be more openhearted and kindly toward each other? I've drawn six simple, uncomplicated steps from Buddhist philosophy to help hostile spouses cultivate a spirit of nonviolence, generosity, and compassion toward their ex-partners. Counterintuitive as it seems, practicing these steps can help people find the kind of inner wisdom and peace that acts as an antidote to their self-destructive and aggressive impulses.
Inherent in this approach is an expectation for people to connect with their higher nature--what Buddhists call their "Buddha-nature"--even when they're in pain. Using Buddhism as the backdrop for understanding the loss and transformation embedded in divorce, the process helps clients move past their knee-jerk emotions to a more enlightened place.
The six steps are:
1. Accept the Way Things Are
2. Choose the Road Less Traveled
3. See the Big Picture
4. Listen to Silence
5. Give Generously
6. Strive for Enlightenment
Taken together, they constitute a method that can create subtle internal shifts and powerful behavioral changes. While it's preferable for both partners to embark on them simultaneously, it isn't a prerequisite for doing divorce well. The client need not embrace Buddhism to benefit from this approach either.
Divorcing well doesn't mean that there'll be no conflict, pain, or challenging situations. It simply means that the divorcing couple, or one member of the couple, chooses to use the process for personal and spiritual growth, thereby launching them both on a healthier trajectory.
-------
I first met Ryan and Beth when they came in for marital therapy, shortly after their 10-year-old son had died of bone cancer. Understandably, they were devastated by their loss which, as is often the case, had exacerbated preexisting tensions in their marriage.
Ryan, a prominent doctor, spent many hours at work, and Beth had always complained that he was away from home too much, didn't help enough around the house or with the kids, was too tired to have sex, and didn't pay enough attention to her. Feeling overworked and underappreciated, Ryan retreated from what he perceived as Beth's harassment, responding with evasions, sullen silence, and even more distance.
Not surprisingly, they got little support from each other while mourning the loss of their son. Over several months, I helped them process their grief, but I couldn't do much to help them turn toward each other in their pain. When we ended our work together, I sensed a veil of bitterness still hanging between them. So, several years later, when Ryan returned alone for treatment and told me that Beth had asked for a divorce and full custody of their daughter, Hilary, I wasn't surprised.
Step 1: Accept the Way Things Are. What did surprise me was Ryan's adamant resistance to the divorce. He was fighting the legal process and feeling betrayed and belligerent. I think part of this was because, on some level, he had been satisfied with an emotionally distant, but stable and dependable, marriage. More than this, he feared change. Like many of us, he found it difficult to let go of old patterns, even if they'd brought him little happiness.
Ryan was active in a liberal Protestant church and found that the language and rituals of his faith were sustaining to him and yet . . . he was clearly open to learning from other spiritual paths. A central tenet of Buddhist teaching that immediately spoke to him was the Eastern perspective on change: the truth that nothing is permanent is not only understood and accepted by Buddhists, but actively embraced. Whether accepting or resisting it, change will continue to occur, and, therefore, they feel that rejecting this fundamental truth brings nothing but suffering. Conversely, accepting the inevitability of change brings peace and wisdom.
This is easier said than done, however, mainly because every change, especially a divorce, is, in essence, a little death, and human beings predictably react to death--and to endings--with anger and depression. The five stages of grief in response to death and dying first articulated by Elizabeth Ku¬bler-Ross--shock, anger, bargaining, de- pression, and acceptance--I believe apply to the divorce process. Anger is typically the most noticeable response to the grief generated by divorce.
Ryan felt betrayed by Beth's decision to leave the marriage, and angered by her aggressive steps against him. One day, he came into my office in a rage, and yelled, "She had the locks changed so I can't get into the house. Can you believe it?! I feel like breaking the door down. She had no right to change the locks without my consent."
I noticed that Ryan's breathing was shallow and his face was reddening. "Let's stop right now," I said. "I want you to tell me how your body is feeling. Just tune in for a minute, scan your body, and tell me what you notice."
He looked a bit confused but obliged and responded, "My chest feels tight."
"What about your breathing?" I prompted.
"Uhhhh, short . . . tense."
"Anything else?"
"My throat feels tight, too . . . and I'm hot. Is it hot in here?"
I then asked him to focus on his breath, following and counting each breath until his breathing was slower and steadier. Although it may seem odd to start a breathing exercise with a client who's obviously upset, I knew it would help calm him down.
I believe that deep, focused, slow breathing is one of therapy's greatest underused tools. Specialists working with panic-disordered or phobic individuals know how powerful deep breath work can be for calming the central nervous system.
Ryan isn't an angry person in general, and after he vented and used the breath to calm down, I explained to him that usually anger is an easier emotion to tolerate than pain, but that in reality, anger is a mask to cover the deeper emotions of grief and despair.
I pointed out that one thing that was so frustrating for Ryan regarding the changed locks was that he wasn't in control of the situation. When I asked him when he'd felt that way before, I knew the question would lead him back to his son's death, and that mourning the death of his marriage was retriggering his grief for his child.
Life as Ryan had known it was over. Accepting this ending, this profound and irrevocable change in his life, was the key psychological task facing him. I suggested that he start to integrate into his days a physical practice of letting go and accepting reality, no matter how painful. One way of doing this is a simple breathing technique of internally chanting a word on the in-breath and another on the out-breath. I asked Ryan to inhale the word let and exhale the word go.
He found that doing the chant when he felt mounting tension helped calm him down. Such a simple technique hardly seems powerful or grandiose enough to help people do something as monumental as accept change. Yet it releases the tight physical grasp we keep on ourselves--on our desires and expectations for the way we think things should be--and helps our minds and bodies flow with life's natural rhythms.
After a few weeks of conscious breathing whenever something seemed out of control and upsetting, Ryan found that his feelings of rage at Beth and sense of betrayal began to abate.
Step 2: Choose the Road Less Traveled. Once clients begin to feel themselves accepting reality as it unfolds, they need to choose how to accept it. One option is to accept what's happened with bitterness, animosity, and a determination to punish the ex-spouse. The road less traveled, however, is a commitment to cooperation, a decision by spouses to put the children's needs above their own, and a desire to maintain a healthy relationship with each other.
While Ryan had decided to take the road less traveled, he found that staying on it was the challenge. At first, things progressed smoothly. After attending a court-mandated "Kids First" seminar required in most states for divorcing couples, he seemed enthusiastic about trying out what he'd learned: that couples shouldn't insult their ex, fight in front of the children, or use the children as pawns
Prend, Ashley Davis
4012 words
1 May 2008
Psychotherapy Networker
n/a
Volume 32; Issue 3; ISSN: 1535573X
English
Copyright (c) 2008 Psychotherapy Networker. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Divorcing Well Bringing Buddhist Pract ice to Divorce Counseling
By Ashley Davis Prend
Divorcing well? Divorcing peacefully? Is such a thing even possible? Let's face it, divorce often generates mutual recrimination and fury, which can lead to ugly, expensive court battles, particularly when children are involved. During a divorce, both partners can become their own evil twins, more intent on inflicting punishment on each other than on ending their tattered marriage.
As counselors and family therapists, we want to spare our clients all this pain by preserving and improving their marriages. But when the marriage obviously can't be saved, many therapists focus on helping the partners achieve what's widely called a "good divorce": a split as humane, rational, and nondamaging as possible.
Increasingly, therapists recognize that even after a marriage ends, most couples continue to be linked together. While the death of a marriage is undoubtedly painful, it doesn't have to be pathological. If handled well, it can even become a rich opportunity for emotional and spiritual growth.
Yet, to a couple neck deep in the kind of reciprocal fury that only two people who once loved each other deeply can feel, the idea that their divorce could be an opportunity for transformation is as crazy as it is undesirable.
Is there any way to stop the antagonism? Beyond helping these self-declared enemies shed their feelings of anger and vengeance, is it possible to encourage them to be more openhearted and kindly toward each other? I've drawn six simple, uncomplicated steps from Buddhist philosophy to help hostile spouses cultivate a spirit of nonviolence, generosity, and compassion toward their ex-partners. Counterintuitive as it seems, practicing these steps can help people find the kind of inner wisdom and peace that acts as an antidote to their self-destructive and aggressive impulses.
Inherent in this approach is an expectation for people to connect with their higher nature--what Buddhists call their "Buddha-nature"--even when they're in pain. Using Buddhism as the backdrop for understanding the loss and transformation embedded in divorce, the process helps clients move past their knee-jerk emotions to a more enlightened place.
The six steps are:
1. Accept the Way Things Are
2. Choose the Road Less Traveled
3. See the Big Picture
4. Listen to Silence
5. Give Generously
6. Strive for Enlightenment
Taken together, they constitute a method that can create subtle internal shifts and powerful behavioral changes. While it's preferable for both partners to embark on them simultaneously, it isn't a prerequisite for doing divorce well. The client need not embrace Buddhism to benefit from this approach either.
Divorcing well doesn't mean that there'll be no conflict, pain, or challenging situations. It simply means that the divorcing couple, or one member of the couple, chooses to use the process for personal and spiritual growth, thereby launching them both on a healthier trajectory.
-------
I first met Ryan and Beth when they came in for marital therapy, shortly after their 10-year-old son had died of bone cancer. Understandably, they were devastated by their loss which, as is often the case, had exacerbated preexisting tensions in their marriage.
Ryan, a prominent doctor, spent many hours at work, and Beth had always complained that he was away from home too much, didn't help enough around the house or with the kids, was too tired to have sex, and didn't pay enough attention to her. Feeling overworked and underappreciated, Ryan retreated from what he perceived as Beth's harassment, responding with evasions, sullen silence, and even more distance.
Not surprisingly, they got little support from each other while mourning the loss of their son. Over several months, I helped them process their grief, but I couldn't do much to help them turn toward each other in their pain. When we ended our work together, I sensed a veil of bitterness still hanging between them. So, several years later, when Ryan returned alone for treatment and told me that Beth had asked for a divorce and full custody of their daughter, Hilary, I wasn't surprised.
Step 1: Accept the Way Things Are. What did surprise me was Ryan's adamant resistance to the divorce. He was fighting the legal process and feeling betrayed and belligerent. I think part of this was because, on some level, he had been satisfied with an emotionally distant, but stable and dependable, marriage. More than this, he feared change. Like many of us, he found it difficult to let go of old patterns, even if they'd brought him little happiness.
Ryan was active in a liberal Protestant church and found that the language and rituals of his faith were sustaining to him and yet . . . he was clearly open to learning from other spiritual paths. A central tenet of Buddhist teaching that immediately spoke to him was the Eastern perspective on change: the truth that nothing is permanent is not only understood and accepted by Buddhists, but actively embraced. Whether accepting or resisting it, change will continue to occur, and, therefore, they feel that rejecting this fundamental truth brings nothing but suffering. Conversely, accepting the inevitability of change brings peace and wisdom.
This is easier said than done, however, mainly because every change, especially a divorce, is, in essence, a little death, and human beings predictably react to death--and to endings--with anger and depression. The five stages of grief in response to death and dying first articulated by Elizabeth Ku¬bler-Ross--shock, anger, bargaining, de- pression, and acceptance--I believe apply to the divorce process. Anger is typically the most noticeable response to the grief generated by divorce.
Ryan felt betrayed by Beth's decision to leave the marriage, and angered by her aggressive steps against him. One day, he came into my office in a rage, and yelled, "She had the locks changed so I can't get into the house. Can you believe it?! I feel like breaking the door down. She had no right to change the locks without my consent."
I noticed that Ryan's breathing was shallow and his face was reddening. "Let's stop right now," I said. "I want you to tell me how your body is feeling. Just tune in for a minute, scan your body, and tell me what you notice."
He looked a bit confused but obliged and responded, "My chest feels tight."
"What about your breathing?" I prompted.
"Uhhhh, short . . . tense."
"Anything else?"
"My throat feels tight, too . . . and I'm hot. Is it hot in here?"
I then asked him to focus on his breath, following and counting each breath until his breathing was slower and steadier. Although it may seem odd to start a breathing exercise with a client who's obviously upset, I knew it would help calm him down.
I believe that deep, focused, slow breathing is one of therapy's greatest underused tools. Specialists working with panic-disordered or phobic individuals know how powerful deep breath work can be for calming the central nervous system.
Ryan isn't an angry person in general, and after he vented and used the breath to calm down, I explained to him that usually anger is an easier emotion to tolerate than pain, but that in reality, anger is a mask to cover the deeper emotions of grief and despair.
I pointed out that one thing that was so frustrating for Ryan regarding the changed locks was that he wasn't in control of the situation. When I asked him when he'd felt that way before, I knew the question would lead him back to his son's death, and that mourning the death of his marriage was retriggering his grief for his child.
Life as Ryan had known it was over. Accepting this ending, this profound and irrevocable change in his life, was the key psychological task facing him. I suggested that he start to integrate into his days a physical practice of letting go and accepting reality, no matter how painful. One way of doing this is a simple breathing technique of internally chanting a word on the in-breath and another on the out-breath. I asked Ryan to inhale the word let and exhale the word go.
He found that doing the chant when he felt mounting tension helped calm him down. Such a simple technique hardly seems powerful or grandiose enough to help people do something as monumental as accept change. Yet it releases the tight physical grasp we keep on ourselves--on our desires and expectations for the way we think things should be--and helps our minds and bodies flow with life's natural rhythms.
After a few weeks of conscious breathing whenever something seemed out of control and upsetting, Ryan found that his feelings of rage at Beth and sense of betrayal began to abate.
Step 2: Choose the Road Less Traveled. Once clients begin to feel themselves accepting reality as it unfolds, they need to choose how to accept it. One option is to accept what's happened with bitterness, animosity, and a determination to punish the ex-spouse. The road less traveled, however, is a commitment to cooperation, a decision by spouses to put the children's needs above their own, and a desire to maintain a healthy relationship with each other.
While Ryan had decided to take the road less traveled, he found that staying on it was the challenge. At first, things progressed smoothly. After attending a court-mandated "Kids First" seminar required in most states for divorcing couples, he seemed enthusiastic about trying out what he'd learned: that couples shouldn't insult their ex, fight in front of the children, or use the children as pawns
Pt 2.
However, Beth's ongoing antagonism began to erode his commitment to that path. For instance, she undermined their visiting agreements regarding Hilary, and then sent sarcastic e-mails accusing him of not caring about his daughter. Ryan fell into every trap, easily taking her bait and repeatedly arguing with her and being nasty.
I asked, "Do you like who you become when you relate to Beth?"
"No, she brings out the worst in me," he said.
"Or rather, you let her. You know," I added, "If one person changes the dance steps in a relationship, the entire dance pattern begins to change, maybe not at first, but certainly over time."
So he and I began to experiment with ways that he could change the dance. I asked him to preface his remarks to Beth differently: to start every sentence with a kind phrase and then bridge it with a however. For example, his wife had agreed in mediation to refrain from scheduling appointments for their daughter during "his" time, but she invariably forgot. Rather than just blow up at her, he said, "I know it must be frustrating to try to schedule this dentist appointment when your work schedule is so packed. However, we agreed that you'd schedule this type of appointment on "your" time. I've already made other plans for that day, and so I won't be able to take her to the appointment."
What begins to happen when people really work with this step is that they find that taking the peaceful path becomes gradually less difficult and more natural; it becomes not so much a question of trying hard as of just being.
Step 3: See the Big Picture. Seeing the big picture means gaining perspective and realizing that any event or period of time, including divorce, is only one piece of the overall puzzle of their lives. While clients may believe that their situation is dire or intolerable, we can help them expand their frame of reference by having them imagine what things might look like in 5 or 10 years.
In trying to help Ryan gain perspective on his situation, I asked him to write a list of 10 things that were better about his divorced life than his married life. He was able to think of 20 things, including not getting yelled at every night when he came home, not being criticized for being unaffectionate, enjoying his one-on-one time with his daughter, and being able to watch football on the weekend without being hassled. His new life was perhaps more complicated as a divorced man, but it clearly had its upside.
Becoming aware of improvements in his life was part of Ryan's healing, but "seeing the big picture" can also include a farther reaching vision. According to the Buddhist concept of rebirth, Ryan and Beth were joined in working out the vast moral law of causation, or karma. The main point of karma is that every human life is part of a vast, inconceivably complex pattern.
Ryan was able to see that, even though his union with Beth had been unhappy, it had produced two wonderful children who were absolutely meant to be born. Furthermore, his son's life and death had influenced many people and continued to do so through a scholarship legacy in his name. By engaging in this exercise, he could glimpse the idea that he didn't make a mistake in marrying Beth, but that both the marriage and divorce were part of an endless process of learning and growing.
Because it's often so hard to gain this long view when caught up in the emotional turmoil of the immediate, I frequently ask clients to write a letter to their future self--say, their self in five years--describing their current troubles and asking for guidance from this future, presumably wiser, self.
His future self assured him that Beth would calm down, find a new man, and stop pestering him so much. Not only that, but he'd meet a nice woman. Ryan found this letter-writing quite amusing and fun to do. It helped him see that life is full of chapters and that reality has many unseen and unimagined dimensions.
Step 4: Listen to Silence. Trying to stay true to a higher intention of integrity, strength, and cooperation in the face of daily emotional upheavals is no easy task. If people don't take the time to tune in to a quieter, inner voice of wisdom, they're sure to be thrown off track by the tide of external pressures. A daily, or at least regular, practice of sitting mindfully in silence allows us to be in the moment without judging it or ourselves, without trying to control or change anything--which has a deeply calming and centering effect on the mind and body.
When I suggest sitting in silence, many people are nonplussed. Are they just supposed to sit and think about their to-do list or what they're going to make for dinner? While there are many different styles of meditation that may focus on an image, a mantra, or a breathing technique, I recommend a simple meditation practice that I call "ABC," which incorporates several key elements. One should spend up to 10 minutes on each letter, moving sequentially from A to B to C.
A. Be Aware of the mindful moment: listen to the sounds around you, feel your body on the chair, scan your body for tension, notice the air temperature on your skin, watch your mind naturally jump from thought to thought, labeling the process "thinking."
B. Breathe: notice the breath moving in and out of the body, and how the body pauses between each in- and out-breath, observing the process, or literally counting the breaths.
C. Center: let your attention drop into the center of your body and imagine a vertical core of light within yourself, connecting to this centered, anchored place. I suggest that clients repeat a word, a mantra --perhaps peace or love--as a way of focusing the mind and staying in the core space.
Ryan was extremely resistant to the idea of formal meditation. Although we tried the ABC technique in my office, he found it difficult to still his body and focus his mind, and felt anxious in a process that made him feel as though he was "doing nothing." So I suggested that he try a walking meditation.
He committed to taking a 20-minute walk several times a week in his local woods. We discussed how to make it not just an ordinary stroll, but a focused walk, a mindful activity, a contemplative act.
I suggested that he notice every sound, step, and smell in acute heightened detail. And when his attention turned to his thoughts and feelings, I said he should try to let them pass like clouds across a clear sky. So, when he had a negative thought about Beth, such as "She's so annoying. I wish she'd quit harassing me for more money," he might take a deep breath and let the thought pass. This habit of detached observation made him feel more centered and less hooked by his thoughts.
His walking meditations gave him "big picture" help, too, since he realized that his squabbles were pretty irrelevant to the woods around him.
Step 5: Give Generously. This step can be the hardest for people who are feeling hurt or angry. Why should they be generous to this jerk, this creep, this lying, no-good spouse? Well, because being generous is what will free them from their own bitterness.
According to the Buddhist Law of Karma, whatever you put out in the world will return to you tenfold. This same wise message is found repeatedly throughout time, in our own culture: "What goes around, comes around," "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," and even the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
But how do we help our divorcing couples rise above their feelings of righteous anger, even hatred? In Buddhism, one of the principle meditative techniques for achieving a state of generosity is called the metta bhavana or just metta, the practice of loving-kindness. This practice is fivefold:
1. Direct loving-kindness toward yourself
2. Direct loving-kindness toward a loved one
3. Direct loving-kindness toward a stranger
4. Direct loving-kindness toward an enemy or someone with whom you're having difficulty
5. Direct loving-kindness outward toward your larger community, your world
And as you go through each of the 5 stages, you say or think phrases such as:
"May you be happy."
"May you be safe."
"May you be healthy."
"May you be peaceful."
Metta is the great equalizer because it binds us all to the most common denominator of human yearning: the desire to be happy, loved, and protected.
When I first described metta to Ryan, he laughed and said, "You've got to be kidding! She'd sooner see me dead on the street than wish me well!"
"It doesn't matter what she wishes for you," I replied. "Metta is about opening your own heart. The benefit is for you."
I asked him to commit to trying the practice every day for 21 days--the time necessary, I've heard, for a new habit to take hold. When I asked, "What have you got to lose?" he agreed.
He decided to practice metta in the car, using red lights as his reminder to offer a loving-kindness phrase. While he found it easy to offer metta feelings toward himself, a friend, a stranger, and the world, he always got stuck when he came to Beth. So in the beginning, he simply thought toward her, "I wish you to be less hostile." I asked him to repeat that during his stoplight mettas. The next week, I asked him "What metta phrase for Beth would you like to work with this week?" And he came up with "I don't wish you sickness."
The next week, I asked him to imagine some of the challenges that Beth was encountering in her life--to try to see life from her perspective. He found he could feel her concern about having to have a root canal and understand that she was stressed about a mutual friend's serious illness. His view began to soften as he saw through her eyes, and he agreed to offer an empathic metta phrase in positive language, "I wish you health."
Although it may seem silly to those who bank on logical and reasoned interventions, in a sense, metta is an exercise that bypasses the brain altogether, going straight to the heart. Ryan found as he worked with metta that his entire inner experience began to shift, and with it, his actions. One afternoon, for example, when he brought Hilary back to Beth's house, he found the front walkway covered with the snow. Almost without thinking, he grabbed a shovel from the garage and started shoveling the walkway and steps to the door.
Step 6: Strive for Enlightenment. When the Buddha sat meditating under the Bodhi tree circa 500 B.C., it's said that he finally reached enlightenment--"awakened" to the Truth--realizing that he was connected to all things and that any sense of separation between himself and others was an illusion. Based on this discovery, he concluded that there's no such thing as an enemy, since everyone is truly connected.
In other words, enlightenment is the deep realization that we're all involved in a rich and complex network of relationships that extends to every living being on the planet. Thinking about an ex-spouse (and even a new partner) this way provides a context for unity rather than division, and opens the way to developing a cooperative relationship.
For Ryan, trying to hold onto the fact that Beth was the mother of his children helped him remember that she'd always have a special role in his life. He further realized that if he talked poorly about Beth to his daughter, he was essentially insulting half of her gene pool, half of her heritage. This point was driven home to Ryan when he saw an art project of Hilary's entitled "My Family": a colorful drawing of Ryan, Beth, herself, and her brother in a cloud in heaven, along with the family dog.
It's hard to be hateful to someone when you know that you're connected in profound ways. And it's also hard to fight with someone when he or she won't fight back. Do Ryan and Beth have an easy, relaxed friendship now? Well no, not always. Ryan continues to see me every other month, just to check in and review interactions with his ex. Staying on the peaceful path is a journey that requires regular vigilance and support.
The last time he was at Beth's house to pick up Hilary for the weekend, they began to discuss the next summer's vacation and camp plans. Ryan knew this had been a sticking point in the past, and he didn't feel they could or should discuss this casually. He suggested that they find a time in the near future to work out the details so that they'd both be comfortable with the arrangements. Beth agreed.
And then Beth said, "You know, Ryan, I pray for you at night."
"How did you respond?" I asked.
"I told her thanks, and I pray for you, too."
Ashley Davis Prend, L.C.S.W., A.C.S.W., is a psychotherapist and grief counselor in private practice in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She's the author of Transcending Loss and Claim Your Inner Grown-Up. She's also the cohost of the mental health radio program Heart to Heart on Portsmouth Community Radio. Contact: ashleydprend@comcast.net.
I asked, "Do you like who you become when you relate to Beth?"
"No, she brings out the worst in me," he said.
"Or rather, you let her. You know," I added, "If one person changes the dance steps in a relationship, the entire dance pattern begins to change, maybe not at first, but certainly over time."
So he and I began to experiment with ways that he could change the dance. I asked him to preface his remarks to Beth differently: to start every sentence with a kind phrase and then bridge it with a however. For example, his wife had agreed in mediation to refrain from scheduling appointments for their daughter during "his" time, but she invariably forgot. Rather than just blow up at her, he said, "I know it must be frustrating to try to schedule this dentist appointment when your work schedule is so packed. However, we agreed that you'd schedule this type of appointment on "your" time. I've already made other plans for that day, and so I won't be able to take her to the appointment."
What begins to happen when people really work with this step is that they find that taking the peaceful path becomes gradually less difficult and more natural; it becomes not so much a question of trying hard as of just being.
Step 3: See the Big Picture. Seeing the big picture means gaining perspective and realizing that any event or period of time, including divorce, is only one piece of the overall puzzle of their lives. While clients may believe that their situation is dire or intolerable, we can help them expand their frame of reference by having them imagine what things might look like in 5 or 10 years.
In trying to help Ryan gain perspective on his situation, I asked him to write a list of 10 things that were better about his divorced life than his married life. He was able to think of 20 things, including not getting yelled at every night when he came home, not being criticized for being unaffectionate, enjoying his one-on-one time with his daughter, and being able to watch football on the weekend without being hassled. His new life was perhaps more complicated as a divorced man, but it clearly had its upside.
Becoming aware of improvements in his life was part of Ryan's healing, but "seeing the big picture" can also include a farther reaching vision. According to the Buddhist concept of rebirth, Ryan and Beth were joined in working out the vast moral law of causation, or karma. The main point of karma is that every human life is part of a vast, inconceivably complex pattern.
Ryan was able to see that, even though his union with Beth had been unhappy, it had produced two wonderful children who were absolutely meant to be born. Furthermore, his son's life and death had influenced many people and continued to do so through a scholarship legacy in his name. By engaging in this exercise, he could glimpse the idea that he didn't make a mistake in marrying Beth, but that both the marriage and divorce were part of an endless process of learning and growing.
Because it's often so hard to gain this long view when caught up in the emotional turmoil of the immediate, I frequently ask clients to write a letter to their future self--say, their self in five years--describing their current troubles and asking for guidance from this future, presumably wiser, self.
His future self assured him that Beth would calm down, find a new man, and stop pestering him so much. Not only that, but he'd meet a nice woman. Ryan found this letter-writing quite amusing and fun to do. It helped him see that life is full of chapters and that reality has many unseen and unimagined dimensions.
Step 4: Listen to Silence. Trying to stay true to a higher intention of integrity, strength, and cooperation in the face of daily emotional upheavals is no easy task. If people don't take the time to tune in to a quieter, inner voice of wisdom, they're sure to be thrown off track by the tide of external pressures. A daily, or at least regular, practice of sitting mindfully in silence allows us to be in the moment without judging it or ourselves, without trying to control or change anything--which has a deeply calming and centering effect on the mind and body.
When I suggest sitting in silence, many people are nonplussed. Are they just supposed to sit and think about their to-do list or what they're going to make for dinner? While there are many different styles of meditation that may focus on an image, a mantra, or a breathing technique, I recommend a simple meditation practice that I call "ABC," which incorporates several key elements. One should spend up to 10 minutes on each letter, moving sequentially from A to B to C.
A. Be Aware of the mindful moment: listen to the sounds around you, feel your body on the chair, scan your body for tension, notice the air temperature on your skin, watch your mind naturally jump from thought to thought, labeling the process "thinking."
B. Breathe: notice the breath moving in and out of the body, and how the body pauses between each in- and out-breath, observing the process, or literally counting the breaths.
C. Center: let your attention drop into the center of your body and imagine a vertical core of light within yourself, connecting to this centered, anchored place. I suggest that clients repeat a word, a mantra --perhaps peace or love--as a way of focusing the mind and staying in the core space.
Ryan was extremely resistant to the idea of formal meditation. Although we tried the ABC technique in my office, he found it difficult to still his body and focus his mind, and felt anxious in a process that made him feel as though he was "doing nothing." So I suggested that he try a walking meditation.
He committed to taking a 20-minute walk several times a week in his local woods. We discussed how to make it not just an ordinary stroll, but a focused walk, a mindful activity, a contemplative act.
I suggested that he notice every sound, step, and smell in acute heightened detail. And when his attention turned to his thoughts and feelings, I said he should try to let them pass like clouds across a clear sky. So, when he had a negative thought about Beth, such as "She's so annoying. I wish she'd quit harassing me for more money," he might take a deep breath and let the thought pass. This habit of detached observation made him feel more centered and less hooked by his thoughts.
His walking meditations gave him "big picture" help, too, since he realized that his squabbles were pretty irrelevant to the woods around him.
Step 5: Give Generously. This step can be the hardest for people who are feeling hurt or angry. Why should they be generous to this jerk, this creep, this lying, no-good spouse? Well, because being generous is what will free them from their own bitterness.
According to the Buddhist Law of Karma, whatever you put out in the world will return to you tenfold. This same wise message is found repeatedly throughout time, in our own culture: "What goes around, comes around," "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," and even the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
But how do we help our divorcing couples rise above their feelings of righteous anger, even hatred? In Buddhism, one of the principle meditative techniques for achieving a state of generosity is called the metta bhavana or just metta, the practice of loving-kindness. This practice is fivefold:
1. Direct loving-kindness toward yourself
2. Direct loving-kindness toward a loved one
3. Direct loving-kindness toward a stranger
4. Direct loving-kindness toward an enemy or someone with whom you're having difficulty
5. Direct loving-kindness outward toward your larger community, your world
And as you go through each of the 5 stages, you say or think phrases such as:
"May you be happy."
"May you be safe."
"May you be healthy."
"May you be peaceful."
Metta is the great equalizer because it binds us all to the most common denominator of human yearning: the desire to be happy, loved, and protected.
When I first described metta to Ryan, he laughed and said, "You've got to be kidding! She'd sooner see me dead on the street than wish me well!"
"It doesn't matter what she wishes for you," I replied. "Metta is about opening your own heart. The benefit is for you."
I asked him to commit to trying the practice every day for 21 days--the time necessary, I've heard, for a new habit to take hold. When I asked, "What have you got to lose?" he agreed.
He decided to practice metta in the car, using red lights as his reminder to offer a loving-kindness phrase. While he found it easy to offer metta feelings toward himself, a friend, a stranger, and the world, he always got stuck when he came to Beth. So in the beginning, he simply thought toward her, "I wish you to be less hostile." I asked him to repeat that during his stoplight mettas. The next week, I asked him "What metta phrase for Beth would you like to work with this week?" And he came up with "I don't wish you sickness."
The next week, I asked him to imagine some of the challenges that Beth was encountering in her life--to try to see life from her perspective. He found he could feel her concern about having to have a root canal and understand that she was stressed about a mutual friend's serious illness. His view began to soften as he saw through her eyes, and he agreed to offer an empathic metta phrase in positive language, "I wish you health."
Although it may seem silly to those who bank on logical and reasoned interventions, in a sense, metta is an exercise that bypasses the brain altogether, going straight to the heart. Ryan found as he worked with metta that his entire inner experience began to shift, and with it, his actions. One afternoon, for example, when he brought Hilary back to Beth's house, he found the front walkway covered with the snow. Almost without thinking, he grabbed a shovel from the garage and started shoveling the walkway and steps to the door.
Step 6: Strive for Enlightenment. When the Buddha sat meditating under the Bodhi tree circa 500 B.C., it's said that he finally reached enlightenment--"awakened" to the Truth--realizing that he was connected to all things and that any sense of separation between himself and others was an illusion. Based on this discovery, he concluded that there's no such thing as an enemy, since everyone is truly connected.
In other words, enlightenment is the deep realization that we're all involved in a rich and complex network of relationships that extends to every living being on the planet. Thinking about an ex-spouse (and even a new partner) this way provides a context for unity rather than division, and opens the way to developing a cooperative relationship.
For Ryan, trying to hold onto the fact that Beth was the mother of his children helped him remember that she'd always have a special role in his life. He further realized that if he talked poorly about Beth to his daughter, he was essentially insulting half of her gene pool, half of her heritage. This point was driven home to Ryan when he saw an art project of Hilary's entitled "My Family": a colorful drawing of Ryan, Beth, herself, and her brother in a cloud in heaven, along with the family dog.
It's hard to be hateful to someone when you know that you're connected in profound ways. And it's also hard to fight with someone when he or she won't fight back. Do Ryan and Beth have an easy, relaxed friendship now? Well no, not always. Ryan continues to see me every other month, just to check in and review interactions with his ex. Staying on the peaceful path is a journey that requires regular vigilance and support.
The last time he was at Beth's house to pick up Hilary for the weekend, they began to discuss the next summer's vacation and camp plans. Ryan knew this had been a sticking point in the past, and he didn't feel they could or should discuss this casually. He suggested that they find a time in the near future to work out the details so that they'd both be comfortable with the arrangements. Beth agreed.
And then Beth said, "You know, Ryan, I pray for you at night."
"How did you respond?" I asked.
"I told her thanks, and I pray for you, too."
Ashley Davis Prend, L.C.S.W., A.C.S.W., is a psychotherapist and grief counselor in private practice in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She's the author of Transcending Loss and Claim Your Inner Grown-Up. She's also the cohost of the mental health radio program Heart to Heart on Portsmouth Community Radio. Contact: ashleydprend@comcast.net.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Searching for the Dalai Lama by Holly Morris
Book Review Desk; SECTBR
Searching for the Dalai Lama
By HOLLY MORRIS
1263 words
6 April 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
12
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THE OPEN ROAD
The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
By Pico Iyer.
275 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?'' a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he's getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.
In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize -- a man who embodies a ''simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.''
In ''The Open Road,'' Iyer takes a long, hard look at the many meanings of this deceptively simple man. At first blush, one might wonder why Iyer, best known as the author of many travel memoirs including ''Video Night in Kathmandu'' and ''Sun After Dark,'' would take on such a subject. The answer lies in the understanding that Iyer is not just a travel writer, and the Dalai Lama is not just a monk.
Iyer has set out to examine Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as a part of a larger set of ideas and thinkers -- a towering example of the cross-cultural interconnectedness that has been the author's particular subject. Iyer has long wondered ''how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could.'' And ''if our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance,'' he posits, ''it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.''
Confused? Me too. A bit. But that's O.K., because when you have a formidable writer who says I'm curious, catch me if you can, and a subject as rich as the Dalai Lama, it's best to just hang on for the ride.
Iyer's connection to his subject is also deeply personal. His father, a Bombay-raised Indian teaching political philosophy at Oxford, went to Dharamsala, India, to meet Gyatso in 1960, when both men were in their 20s, only a year after the Tibetan leader had fled to India ahead of his Chinese pursuers; the men started a lifelong friendship. Iyer himself first traveled to the Dalai Lama's home as a teenager, and thus began a dialogue that would cover three decades and half a dozen continents -- and become the grist of ''The Open Road.'' Weaving together these conversations (and many with the Dalai Lama's brother, Ngari Rinpoche, and other Tibetans), along with vast research, Iyer has written an original exploration that occasionally loses the scent and wanders off trail, but largely delivers a trenchant, impassioned look at a singular life.
Right off, Iyer lays out the many paradoxes of a figure he considers one of the best- and least-known people on the planet. The Dalai Lama is a religious teacher who warns of the entanglements of religion and urges people to stay with their original faiths. He is a dedicated man of science, yet beholden to hundreds of religious rites. He continues to urge a controversial forbearance (rather than direct action) toward the Chinese, even as occupied Tibet is a whisper away from gone. He is a head of state, with all the attendant duties, who meditates for four hours every morning on, among other things, the roots of compassion and his own death. In what other person does this depth of monasticism and plenitude of frequent-flier miles so live together? Iyer doesn't solve the conundrums; he digs toward the nature of what lies below. One man is not likely to have all the answers, he writes of the Dalai Lama, but -- and here, Iyer could be addressing his own narrative -- ''it's the questions he puts into play that invigorate.''
The Dalai Lama is, above all, what we want him to be. The Western world most wants him to be a fairy tale -- a saffron-robed young leader from Shangri-La, where we think a hunk of spirituality is tossed in with every drought of hot butter tea. To the Tibetan people, he is regarded as a god, but to the outside world he is ''a secular divinity of sorts, and for that there is less precedent.'' Iyer challenges us to see him as one of a group of agents of transformation like Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, people who ''change the world by changing the way they looked at the world.''
But the accessible Dalai Lama, whose voice can be downloaded as a ring tone and who crisscrosses the globe with a populist message of compassion and kindness, is only a part of who he is. He is mostly, and radically, a private man. We do not see, nor would most of us understand if we did, the vast esoteric side of Buddhism -- a complex world of oracles, ancient enmities and high-level metaphysical pay dirt -- that he also inhabits. As a monk, of course, the Dalai Lama spends much of his life steeped in the central Buddhist tenet of interconnectedness, engaged in inner work that supports, and even creates, new outward realities.
Case in point: Dharamsala. The creation of the Tibetan government and community-in-exile there is a hopeful experiment, ''as compressed and bittersweet an image of the global village as I have ever seen,'' Iyer tells us. With Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama envisioned a new, improved Tibet, doing away with many of the feudalisms and formalities of old and successfully building a refuge for, and incubator of, Tibetan culture. Iyer describes it as a remote outpost of searing spirit, entrenched longing and ramshackle reality. A place, above all, ''consecrated to the idea that the problems of one place are the concerns of every place, in our ever more linked universe.''
The Dalai Lama's commitment to modernize led, in 2001, to exiles in 37 countries electing the first Tibetan prime minister. There was a minor uproar when he included in Tibet's new constitution a clause for his own impeachment. And he has suggested he could be the last Dalai Lama. All this planned obsolescence makes Tibetans uncomfortable, but it makes sense in light of the six words into which he distills Buddhism: ''Change is part of the world.''
And what of Tibet itself? As recent events have shown, it's hard to feel optimistic. The country teeters dangerously close to extinction by absorption. But Iyer tells us the Dalai Lama rests his faith on surprise, ''the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years.'' We are reminded that the Berlin Wall came down seemingly overnight (just as it went up); one day apartheid simply seemed to collapse; butterfly wings, as the notion goes, can cause a tsunami to rise up on the other side of the world. ''Until the last moment,'' the Dalai Lama says, ''anything is possible.''
PHOTO: His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Gyume Tantric Monastery, Kamataka, India, Jan. 6, 1998. Photograph by Richard Avedon. (PHOTOGRAPH $; 2008 THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION)
Holly Morris is the author of ''Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine.''
Searching for the Dalai Lama
By HOLLY MORRIS
1263 words
6 April 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
12
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THE OPEN ROAD
The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
By Pico Iyer.
275 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?'' a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he's getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.
In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize -- a man who embodies a ''simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.''
In ''The Open Road,'' Iyer takes a long, hard look at the many meanings of this deceptively simple man. At first blush, one might wonder why Iyer, best known as the author of many travel memoirs including ''Video Night in Kathmandu'' and ''Sun After Dark,'' would take on such a subject. The answer lies in the understanding that Iyer is not just a travel writer, and the Dalai Lama is not just a monk.
Iyer has set out to examine Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as a part of a larger set of ideas and thinkers -- a towering example of the cross-cultural interconnectedness that has been the author's particular subject. Iyer has long wondered ''how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could.'' And ''if our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance,'' he posits, ''it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.''
Confused? Me too. A bit. But that's O.K., because when you have a formidable writer who says I'm curious, catch me if you can, and a subject as rich as the Dalai Lama, it's best to just hang on for the ride.
Iyer's connection to his subject is also deeply personal. His father, a Bombay-raised Indian teaching political philosophy at Oxford, went to Dharamsala, India, to meet Gyatso in 1960, when both men were in their 20s, only a year after the Tibetan leader had fled to India ahead of his Chinese pursuers; the men started a lifelong friendship. Iyer himself first traveled to the Dalai Lama's home as a teenager, and thus began a dialogue that would cover three decades and half a dozen continents -- and become the grist of ''The Open Road.'' Weaving together these conversations (and many with the Dalai Lama's brother, Ngari Rinpoche, and other Tibetans), along with vast research, Iyer has written an original exploration that occasionally loses the scent and wanders off trail, but largely delivers a trenchant, impassioned look at a singular life.
Right off, Iyer lays out the many paradoxes of a figure he considers one of the best- and least-known people on the planet. The Dalai Lama is a religious teacher who warns of the entanglements of religion and urges people to stay with their original faiths. He is a dedicated man of science, yet beholden to hundreds of religious rites. He continues to urge a controversial forbearance (rather than direct action) toward the Chinese, even as occupied Tibet is a whisper away from gone. He is a head of state, with all the attendant duties, who meditates for four hours every morning on, among other things, the roots of compassion and his own death. In what other person does this depth of monasticism and plenitude of frequent-flier miles so live together? Iyer doesn't solve the conundrums; he digs toward the nature of what lies below. One man is not likely to have all the answers, he writes of the Dalai Lama, but -- and here, Iyer could be addressing his own narrative -- ''it's the questions he puts into play that invigorate.''
The Dalai Lama is, above all, what we want him to be. The Western world most wants him to be a fairy tale -- a saffron-robed young leader from Shangri-La, where we think a hunk of spirituality is tossed in with every drought of hot butter tea. To the Tibetan people, he is regarded as a god, but to the outside world he is ''a secular divinity of sorts, and for that there is less precedent.'' Iyer challenges us to see him as one of a group of agents of transformation like Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, people who ''change the world by changing the way they looked at the world.''
But the accessible Dalai Lama, whose voice can be downloaded as a ring tone and who crisscrosses the globe with a populist message of compassion and kindness, is only a part of who he is. He is mostly, and radically, a private man. We do not see, nor would most of us understand if we did, the vast esoteric side of Buddhism -- a complex world of oracles, ancient enmities and high-level metaphysical pay dirt -- that he also inhabits. As a monk, of course, the Dalai Lama spends much of his life steeped in the central Buddhist tenet of interconnectedness, engaged in inner work that supports, and even creates, new outward realities.
Case in point: Dharamsala. The creation of the Tibetan government and community-in-exile there is a hopeful experiment, ''as compressed and bittersweet an image of the global village as I have ever seen,'' Iyer tells us. With Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama envisioned a new, improved Tibet, doing away with many of the feudalisms and formalities of old and successfully building a refuge for, and incubator of, Tibetan culture. Iyer describes it as a remote outpost of searing spirit, entrenched longing and ramshackle reality. A place, above all, ''consecrated to the idea that the problems of one place are the concerns of every place, in our ever more linked universe.''
The Dalai Lama's commitment to modernize led, in 2001, to exiles in 37 countries electing the first Tibetan prime minister. There was a minor uproar when he included in Tibet's new constitution a clause for his own impeachment. And he has suggested he could be the last Dalai Lama. All this planned obsolescence makes Tibetans uncomfortable, but it makes sense in light of the six words into which he distills Buddhism: ''Change is part of the world.''
And what of Tibet itself? As recent events have shown, it's hard to feel optimistic. The country teeters dangerously close to extinction by absorption. But Iyer tells us the Dalai Lama rests his faith on surprise, ''the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years.'' We are reminded that the Berlin Wall came down seemingly overnight (just as it went up); one day apartheid simply seemed to collapse; butterfly wings, as the notion goes, can cause a tsunami to rise up on the other side of the world. ''Until the last moment,'' the Dalai Lama says, ''anything is possible.''
PHOTO: His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Gyume Tantric Monastery, Kamataka, India, Jan. 6, 1998. Photograph by Richard Avedon. (PHOTOGRAPH $; 2008 THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION)
Holly Morris is the author of ''Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine.''
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley
Books
This is your brain on a new track
Caroline Leavitt; Caroline Leavitt is the author of "Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at carolineleavitt.com.
Caroline Leavitt - Caroline Leavitt is the author of "Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at carolineleavitt.com. Boston Globe
970 words
3 February 2008
The Boston Globe
3
C.5
English
© 2008 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
BOOK REVIEW / Self-Help
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
By Sharon Begley
Ballantine, 304 pp., paperback, $14.95
Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind
By Carol Vorderman
Gotham, 288 pp., paperback, $15
How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind
By Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
Arcade, 238 pp., $25
If you're like me, you probably exercise and eat right to keep your body healthy and buff. But what have you done for your brain lately?
For years, scientists have insisted that when it comes to the brain, we're hard-wired to do certain things in certain ways, and as we age, things like memory, hearing, and mood degenerate. Or do they? Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to grow neurons and rewire itself, was once thought to be impossible. But in the fascinating "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," Sharon Begley delves into a new science that is disproving much of what we thought we knew about the brain.
Begley, science columnist for Newsweek, begins with a little history. In 2004, prominent scientists joined with the Dalai Llama at the Mind and Life Institute to investigate how we can indeed change our very brains, grow new neurons, and increase gray matter just by changing our ways of thinking and responding to stimuli. Buddhist monks and ordinary people were asked to meditate, and it was found that this practice permanently changed the chemical structure of the brain, particularly in areas that had to do with happiness and contentment. Most interestingly, the monks' brains continued to show this difference even when they were not meditating, much the way a new muscle, built up from exercise, will remain.
In another study, obsessive-compulsive patients were asked to meditate, reminding themselves that their thoughts did not mirror reality. When PET scans were done on their brains afterward, there were changes in the areas related to obsessive behavior, proof that the brain can be stimulated to build important new circuitry.
What's even more enthralling is Begley's fascinating glimpses of what's ahead. By "repeatedly changing the sensory input" received, a dyslexic brain can begin to read easily, and memory loss might be something that can be worked off the same way a few extra pounds are.
The perfect companion book is "Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind," by Carol Vorderman. Vorderman is famous on British TV, known for both her sudoku finesse and her ability to memorize incredibly long series of numbers. Billed as a fitness handbook for the mind, "Super Brain" includes tips, recommended foods, and strategies to get your brain in optimum shape.
Divided into three sections, the book is a cornucopia of easy and fun exercises. You can boost focus by concentrating on a watch's second hand for two whole seconds (harder than it sounds) or stimulate your memory (studies have shown that remembering pushes the brain to lay down new connections) with a series of fascinating facts. Vorderman shows how breaking habits - even drinking from a different coffee cup in the morning - can change your brain, and how music can boost brain power the same way that whole grains, fresh veggies, and lots of sleep can. The book is really your own personal trainer, able to be opened anywhere, at any time.
But if the workings of the so-called normal brain are under investigation, what about the brain that is outside the norm? A lot has been written about autism, a good amount of it implying that the autistic person is locked away from us, barraged by sensory overload. Prepare to be astonished, because much of that appears wrong.
"How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind," by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, should, to my mind, be required reading for any parents struggling with a diagnosis of autism for their child, or for any professional wanting to help. Hurry past the clinical foreword by the director of the Autism Research Foundation and dive into Mukhopadhyay's insights on his condition. He explains why he screams at length (to focus and stop sensory overload) and how he is able to solve many of his own problems without the help of professionals.
Autistic people tend to be obsessive, and he cures his fear of the power going out by giving himself the constant visual clue of fans whirring in every room. Writing gives him control of his world and a way to communicate, an "impossible" feat he began when he was 6. Helped along by his extraordinary mother, who insists that "people need to believe you," he diligently practices his writing and allows doctors to test him, and he soon becomes so famous, he's the subject of an award-winning documentary. When patronizingly told he's done a "good job" at some task, he snipes, "Do they not know that I have two books published and one translated into German?"
Struggling against stereotypes, Mukhopadhyay argues that he is not "sick," as autistic people often are classified, and he rails against anyone thinking him less of a person because he's autistic. Brave, bold, and deeply felt, this book shows that much we might have believed about autism can be wrong.
"What is a mind but a mysterious possession?" Mukhopadhyay writes, but as these three books show, the scope and power of our brains are just beginning to be discovered.
This is your brain on a new track
Caroline Leavitt; Caroline Leavitt is the author of "Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at carolineleavitt.com.
Caroline Leavitt - Caroline Leavitt is the author of "Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at carolineleavitt.com. Boston Globe
970 words
3 February 2008
The Boston Globe
3
C.5
English
© 2008 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
BOOK REVIEW / Self-Help
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
By Sharon Begley
Ballantine, 304 pp., paperback, $14.95
Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind
By Carol Vorderman
Gotham, 288 pp., paperback, $15
How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind
By Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
Arcade, 238 pp., $25
If you're like me, you probably exercise and eat right to keep your body healthy and buff. But what have you done for your brain lately?
For years, scientists have insisted that when it comes to the brain, we're hard-wired to do certain things in certain ways, and as we age, things like memory, hearing, and mood degenerate. Or do they? Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to grow neurons and rewire itself, was once thought to be impossible. But in the fascinating "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," Sharon Begley delves into a new science that is disproving much of what we thought we knew about the brain.
Begley, science columnist for Newsweek, begins with a little history. In 2004, prominent scientists joined with the Dalai Llama at the Mind and Life Institute to investigate how we can indeed change our very brains, grow new neurons, and increase gray matter just by changing our ways of thinking and responding to stimuli. Buddhist monks and ordinary people were asked to meditate, and it was found that this practice permanently changed the chemical structure of the brain, particularly in areas that had to do with happiness and contentment. Most interestingly, the monks' brains continued to show this difference even when they were not meditating, much the way a new muscle, built up from exercise, will remain.
In another study, obsessive-compulsive patients were asked to meditate, reminding themselves that their thoughts did not mirror reality. When PET scans were done on their brains afterward, there were changes in the areas related to obsessive behavior, proof that the brain can be stimulated to build important new circuitry.
What's even more enthralling is Begley's fascinating glimpses of what's ahead. By "repeatedly changing the sensory input" received, a dyslexic brain can begin to read easily, and memory loss might be something that can be worked off the same way a few extra pounds are.
The perfect companion book is "Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind," by Carol Vorderman. Vorderman is famous on British TV, known for both her sudoku finesse and her ability to memorize incredibly long series of numbers. Billed as a fitness handbook for the mind, "Super Brain" includes tips, recommended foods, and strategies to get your brain in optimum shape.
Divided into three sections, the book is a cornucopia of easy and fun exercises. You can boost focus by concentrating on a watch's second hand for two whole seconds (harder than it sounds) or stimulate your memory (studies have shown that remembering pushes the brain to lay down new connections) with a series of fascinating facts. Vorderman shows how breaking habits - even drinking from a different coffee cup in the morning - can change your brain, and how music can boost brain power the same way that whole grains, fresh veggies, and lots of sleep can. The book is really your own personal trainer, able to be opened anywhere, at any time.
But if the workings of the so-called normal brain are under investigation, what about the brain that is outside the norm? A lot has been written about autism, a good amount of it implying that the autistic person is locked away from us, barraged by sensory overload. Prepare to be astonished, because much of that appears wrong.
"How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind," by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, should, to my mind, be required reading for any parents struggling with a diagnosis of autism for their child, or for any professional wanting to help. Hurry past the clinical foreword by the director of the Autism Research Foundation and dive into Mukhopadhyay's insights on his condition. He explains why he screams at length (to focus and stop sensory overload) and how he is able to solve many of his own problems without the help of professionals.
Autistic people tend to be obsessive, and he cures his fear of the power going out by giving himself the constant visual clue of fans whirring in every room. Writing gives him control of his world and a way to communicate, an "impossible" feat he began when he was 6. Helped along by his extraordinary mother, who insists that "people need to believe you," he diligently practices his writing and allows doctors to test him, and he soon becomes so famous, he's the subject of an award-winning documentary. When patronizingly told he's done a "good job" at some task, he snipes, "Do they not know that I have two books published and one translated into German?"
Struggling against stereotypes, Mukhopadhyay argues that he is not "sick," as autistic people often are classified, and he rails against anyone thinking him less of a person because he's autistic. Brave, bold, and deeply felt, this book shows that much we might have believed about autism can be wrong.
"What is a mind but a mysterious possession?" Mukhopadhyay writes, but as these three books show, the scope and power of our brains are just beginning to be discovered.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Past Lives of the Buddha - Wat Si Chum: Art, Architecture and Inscriptions. Editor Peter Skilling
PAGE TURNERS; PIECES OF WRITTEN HISTORY
521 words
27 January 2008
Bangkok Post
O5
English
(c) 2008
The secrets of Wat Si Chum in Sukhothai are tackled in new book
KRITTIYA WONGTAVAVIMARN
Past Lives of the Buddha - Wat Si Chum - Art, Architecture and Inscriptions describes the unique character and value of Wat Si Chum, one of the main monastic sites located northwest of Sukhothai and outside the city wall.
Wat Si Chum has been an object of fascination for several generations of scholars. The large mondop - a largely unadorned masonry cube with no windows and a single entrance - which dominates the site has no exact replica elsewhere in Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai or Kamphaeng Phet. The plain exterior, however, conceals mysteries: When was this unique structure built - by whom and why? Why was the site chosen? Was the temple ever completed or is it unfinished? If the latter is the case, why was it left unfinished?
The size of its Buddha image is exceptional and its captioned jataka (former lives of Gautama Buddha) carvings are as unique as its interior corridors and stairways.
Sukhothai Inscription No. 2, as the inscriptions have been named, found inside a staircase, has confronted epigraphists with insoluble difficulties. Many doubts remain unsolved: What is the significance of the 86 inscribed stone reliefs depicting jatakas, which are among the earliest surviving examples of Thai figural and narrative art, and are inscribed with one of the earliest series of inscriptions in the Thai language? How many jatakas did the founders of the temple intend to depict? Why are the jataka slabs placed where they are? Is this their original position?
The puzzles it poses have generated lively and sometimes acrimonious debate. But to date no sustained study of its art, design and inscriptions has been attempted. This book presents the latest evidence and proposes a new interpretation with the first-ever English translation of the inscriptions and photographs of the reliefs supplemented by 19th-century jataka paintings from Wat Khrua Wan in Bangkok.
It also includes essays on all aspects of the temple and a discussion of the significance of jatakas in international Buddhist literature, art and ideology.
The book devoted to Wat Si Chum is the first multidisciplinary study to advance knowledge of the ancient Kingdom and to inspire similar studies of other monuments to the understanding of the complex culture of Sukhothai.
A Sanskrit and Pali scholar, Peter Skilling edited this book with four other scholars: Pattaratorn Chirapravati, a historian of Southeast Asian art and now assistant professor of Asian art and director of the Asian Studies Programme at California State University; Pierre Pichard, an architect with L'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient for over 30 years; Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, assistant professor and head of the Department of Eastern Languages at Chulalongkorn University; and Santi Pakdeekham, a lecturer in the Department of Thai and Oriental Languages at Srinakarinwirot University.
Past Lives of the Buddha -- Wat Si Chum _ Art, Architecture and Inscriptions
Edited by Peter Skilling, Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Pierre Pichard, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn and Santi Pakdeekham
River Books, 296 pages with 390 colour illustrations and 30 plans and maps.
2,550 baht at all leading book shops.
ISBN 978-9749863459
521 words
27 January 2008
Bangkok Post
O5
English
(c) 2008
The secrets of Wat Si Chum in Sukhothai are tackled in new book
KRITTIYA WONGTAVAVIMARN
Past Lives of the Buddha - Wat Si Chum - Art, Architecture and Inscriptions describes the unique character and value of Wat Si Chum, one of the main monastic sites located northwest of Sukhothai and outside the city wall.
Wat Si Chum has been an object of fascination for several generations of scholars. The large mondop - a largely unadorned masonry cube with no windows and a single entrance - which dominates the site has no exact replica elsewhere in Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai or Kamphaeng Phet. The plain exterior, however, conceals mysteries: When was this unique structure built - by whom and why? Why was the site chosen? Was the temple ever completed or is it unfinished? If the latter is the case, why was it left unfinished?
The size of its Buddha image is exceptional and its captioned jataka (former lives of Gautama Buddha) carvings are as unique as its interior corridors and stairways.
Sukhothai Inscription No. 2, as the inscriptions have been named, found inside a staircase, has confronted epigraphists with insoluble difficulties. Many doubts remain unsolved: What is the significance of the 86 inscribed stone reliefs depicting jatakas, which are among the earliest surviving examples of Thai figural and narrative art, and are inscribed with one of the earliest series of inscriptions in the Thai language? How many jatakas did the founders of the temple intend to depict? Why are the jataka slabs placed where they are? Is this their original position?
The puzzles it poses have generated lively and sometimes acrimonious debate. But to date no sustained study of its art, design and inscriptions has been attempted. This book presents the latest evidence and proposes a new interpretation with the first-ever English translation of the inscriptions and photographs of the reliefs supplemented by 19th-century jataka paintings from Wat Khrua Wan in Bangkok.
It also includes essays on all aspects of the temple and a discussion of the significance of jatakas in international Buddhist literature, art and ideology.
The book devoted to Wat Si Chum is the first multidisciplinary study to advance knowledge of the ancient Kingdom and to inspire similar studies of other monuments to the understanding of the complex culture of Sukhothai.
A Sanskrit and Pali scholar, Peter Skilling edited this book with four other scholars: Pattaratorn Chirapravati, a historian of Southeast Asian art and now assistant professor of Asian art and director of the Asian Studies Programme at California State University; Pierre Pichard, an architect with L'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient for over 30 years; Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, assistant professor and head of the Department of Eastern Languages at Chulalongkorn University; and Santi Pakdeekham, a lecturer in the Department of Thai and Oriental Languages at Srinakarinwirot University.
Past Lives of the Buddha -- Wat Si Chum _ Art, Architecture and Inscriptions
Edited by Peter Skilling, Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Pierre Pichard, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn and Santi Pakdeekham
River Books, 296 pages with 390 colour illustrations and 30 plans and maps.
2,550 baht at all leading book shops.
ISBN 978-9749863459
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Clash - Samuel Huntington
Book Review Desk; SECT7
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
1272 words
6 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
10
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say ''I told you so'' after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century -- always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.
In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,'' he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a ''borderless'' world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a ''clash of civilizations.'' Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.
Huntington's cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was ''The West and the Rest'': the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: ''The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.''
Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a ''youth bulge'' unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; ''indigenization'' had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.
Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no ''universal civilization,'' Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called ''Davos culture,'' consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.
In Huntington's unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was ''under the political control'' of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam's share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.
It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations -- Western Europe being one example, Russia another -- and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.
Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington's thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. ''The things and ways that the West took to 'the rest,''' I wrote, ''have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.'' I had questioned Huntington's suggestion that civilizations could be found ''whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.'' Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.
Huntington had written that the Turks -- rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels -- would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. ''What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?'' Huntington asked. ''At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.''
Nearly 15 years on, Huntington's thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that ''redefinition'' that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.
''I'll teach you differences,'' Kent says to Lear's servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)
I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are ''nowhere men,'' children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington's pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West -- openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is ''dubious'' whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history's passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of ''The Foreigner's Gift.''
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
1272 words
6 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
10
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say ''I told you so'' after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century -- always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.
In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,'' he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a ''borderless'' world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a ''clash of civilizations.'' Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.
Huntington's cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was ''The West and the Rest'': the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: ''The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.''
Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a ''youth bulge'' unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; ''indigenization'' had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.
Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no ''universal civilization,'' Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called ''Davos culture,'' consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.
In Huntington's unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was ''under the political control'' of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam's share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.
It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations -- Western Europe being one example, Russia another -- and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.
Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington's thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. ''The things and ways that the West took to 'the rest,''' I wrote, ''have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.'' I had questioned Huntington's suggestion that civilizations could be found ''whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.'' Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.
Huntington had written that the Turks -- rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels -- would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. ''What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?'' Huntington asked. ''At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.''
Nearly 15 years on, Huntington's thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that ''redefinition'' that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.
''I'll teach you differences,'' Kent says to Lear's servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)
I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are ''nowhere men,'' children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington's pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West -- openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is ''dubious'' whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history's passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of ''The Foreigner's Gift.''
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Deepak on Buddha
The making of the Buddha
SHEILA KUMAR
775 words
2 December 2007
The Hindu
03
English
(c) 2007 Kasturi & Sons Ltd
Spirituality
A gentle reader on the life of the Enlightened One.
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra, HarperCollins; Rs 395.
Deepak Chopra, not in the least burdened by his New Age Guru label, has gone and written a book on the early life of Siddhartha who becomes Gautama, who, in turn, becomes the Buddha. No preaching, no lecturing, just an interesting story told in a measured manner and at a measured pace. However, for all that, eventually the book does become a primer for those wanting to know something about Buddhism. Chopra states clearly in the author’s note that he wanted to flesh out the character of this famous but very obscure (his words) person. So, that’s what he sets out to do, in a style reminiscent of T.H. White’s classic on King Arthur The Once and Future King. This here is the Buddha myth in deconstructed form, complete with a last chapter that tells neophytes how to attain some amount of Buddha-hood.
Make no mistake, though, the book is quite an interesting read. The story Chopra tells has always held universal appeal, that of the young, handsome prince who gives up a life of privilege and becomes a monk, practising severe austerities till he finally attains enlightenment … and this part is really well written. En route, though, the aspirant has small epiphanies that enlighten both him and us: that things which really mean so much are as thin and fragile as tissue; that if you think you are mighty, that’s all that counts, because no one is really mighty.
Siddhartha’s father, the warrior king Suddhodana, (fear is protection; use fear like medicine, he cautions, just enough to be a remedy but not so much that it becomes poison) is well fleshed out, though Queen Maya makes only a guest appearance. The demon Mara in his numerous face-offs with the Buddha before he becomes the Buddha, of course, is evocatively etched, a truly frightening look at pain, temptation and power. A demon’s work is to amplify the mind’s suffering, Chopra tells us, and goes on to give ample evidence of the same, whether Mara is testing Siddhartha or Devadatta, another interesting character as we encounter him in this book. At one point, in a flash of pure brilliance, Devadatta realises that “the gods don’t exist. But when the horror of life finally reveals itself, somebody has to invent gods”.
Path to enlightenment
And so, despite the king’s desperate efforts, Siddhartha gets to encounter sickness, ageing and death, which sets him on the path to renunciation. He goes into an abyss and returns, having left fear behind. His hunger for a guru is all too palpable; he meets and attempts to learn from several enigmatic savants before moving on. And the reader soon sees that in his enlightenment lay Gautama’s refuge. In fact, Gautama admits to wanting to be loved for the saint he knew himself to be, to inspire others to join him in his work. He is surprised that he will need words; he had hoped to heal the world with a touch or by simply existing in it.
This is the Buddha as the world knows him. The man who agonised over every aspect of hurt and pain. Whose compassion for everything and anything was all-encompassing, whose evolution was slow, very slow. His belief in the Buddha inside every person. His journey from zealot to the truly detached one. Even his take on the fight between good and evil is inspired, as is his first test after becoming the Buddha, the taming of Angulimala. The temptation of the Buddha here is none other than his wife Yashodara, a temptation he puts behind him with almost insulting ease.
This writer’s only beef is there isn’t much emotional resonance; we see Buddha as emotional, yes, endearing, well, no. Then again, you do take some stuff away from this book. Chopra talks of how people deal with fear by turning it into rage. How karma is just the memory of past pleasure we want to repeat and past pain we want to avoid. So okay, the book does need polishing and there is no real empathy built up between the Buddha and the reader, but no matter. As a primary Buddha reader, it serves its purpose very well. At one point Chopra calls his reader as one who might be coming to Buddha from the cold…if that is the case, this book is not the worst place to begin.
SHEILA KUMAR
775 words
2 December 2007
The Hindu
03
English
(c) 2007 Kasturi & Sons Ltd
Spirituality
A gentle reader on the life of the Enlightened One.
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra, HarperCollins; Rs 395.
Deepak Chopra, not in the least burdened by his New Age Guru label, has gone and written a book on the early life of Siddhartha who becomes Gautama, who, in turn, becomes the Buddha. No preaching, no lecturing, just an interesting story told in a measured manner and at a measured pace. However, for all that, eventually the book does become a primer for those wanting to know something about Buddhism. Chopra states clearly in the author’s note that he wanted to flesh out the character of this famous but very obscure (his words) person. So, that’s what he sets out to do, in a style reminiscent of T.H. White’s classic on King Arthur The Once and Future King. This here is the Buddha myth in deconstructed form, complete with a last chapter that tells neophytes how to attain some amount of Buddha-hood.
Make no mistake, though, the book is quite an interesting read. The story Chopra tells has always held universal appeal, that of the young, handsome prince who gives up a life of privilege and becomes a monk, practising severe austerities till he finally attains enlightenment … and this part is really well written. En route, though, the aspirant has small epiphanies that enlighten both him and us: that things which really mean so much are as thin and fragile as tissue; that if you think you are mighty, that’s all that counts, because no one is really mighty.
Siddhartha’s father, the warrior king Suddhodana, (fear is protection; use fear like medicine, he cautions, just enough to be a remedy but not so much that it becomes poison) is well fleshed out, though Queen Maya makes only a guest appearance. The demon Mara in his numerous face-offs with the Buddha before he becomes the Buddha, of course, is evocatively etched, a truly frightening look at pain, temptation and power. A demon’s work is to amplify the mind’s suffering, Chopra tells us, and goes on to give ample evidence of the same, whether Mara is testing Siddhartha or Devadatta, another interesting character as we encounter him in this book. At one point, in a flash of pure brilliance, Devadatta realises that “the gods don’t exist. But when the horror of life finally reveals itself, somebody has to invent gods”.
Path to enlightenment
And so, despite the king’s desperate efforts, Siddhartha gets to encounter sickness, ageing and death, which sets him on the path to renunciation. He goes into an abyss and returns, having left fear behind. His hunger for a guru is all too palpable; he meets and attempts to learn from several enigmatic savants before moving on. And the reader soon sees that in his enlightenment lay Gautama’s refuge. In fact, Gautama admits to wanting to be loved for the saint he knew himself to be, to inspire others to join him in his work. He is surprised that he will need words; he had hoped to heal the world with a touch or by simply existing in it.
This is the Buddha as the world knows him. The man who agonised over every aspect of hurt and pain. Whose compassion for everything and anything was all-encompassing, whose evolution was slow, very slow. His belief in the Buddha inside every person. His journey from zealot to the truly detached one. Even his take on the fight between good and evil is inspired, as is his first test after becoming the Buddha, the taming of Angulimala. The temptation of the Buddha here is none other than his wife Yashodara, a temptation he puts behind him with almost insulting ease.
This writer’s only beef is there isn’t much emotional resonance; we see Buddha as emotional, yes, endearing, well, no. Then again, you do take some stuff away from this book. Chopra talks of how people deal with fear by turning it into rage. How karma is just the memory of past pleasure we want to repeat and past pain we want to avoid. So okay, the book does need polishing and there is no real empathy built up between the Buddha and the reader, but no matter. As a primary Buddha reader, it serves its purpose very well. At one point Chopra calls his reader as one who might be coming to Buddha from the cold…if that is the case, this book is not the worst place to begin.
Friday, October 5, 2007
The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan by Duncan
The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan
Rocha, Cristina
1012 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
599
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan. By Duncan Ryuken Williams. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 241. Hardcover $52.50.
Zen Buddhism has fascinated the West for a long time. The Zen boom of the 1960s was a key moment in the dissemination of this Japanese Buddhist school in popular culture. As a rule, books on Zen have focused on remarkable monks and their feats, monasticism, and studies of doctrine. Furthermore, Zen schools have been studied in isolation, separated from other Japanese Buddhist schools and non-Buddhist religions, as if they were not part of the social and religious life of Japan. However, more recently, some studies have begun to focus on another aspect of Zen-the everyday customs, beliefs, and rituals of ordinary Buddhists and temples. Following in the footsteps of William Bodiford and Bernard Faure, Duncan Williams, in The Other Side of Zen, has written a fascinating account of the extraordinary expansion of the Soto Zen sect in Tokugawa Japan by looking at Soto Zen involvement in all aspects of the religious economy of the period.
Drawing on new historical sources that have become available in the past twenty-five years (such as temple histories and logbooks, prayer and funerary manuals, sales records of talismans and medicine, death registries, diaries of pilgrims, and letters of villagers, temple priests, and government officials) as well as analyzing legends, miracle tales and ghost stories, and material culture such as tombstones and stone markers, Williams has drawn a comprehensive portrait of ''what Soto Zen actually was, as lived by ordinary priests and laypeople'' (p. 3). He shows that for the great majority of ordinary Soto Zen monks and parishioners, the Zen temple was a place for funerary and memorial rituals, festivals, physical healing (with exclusive Soto medicine and talismans), and faith healing (through the worship of deities). According to Williams, they never practiced sitting (zazen), never engaged in reciting koans, or read Dogen's writings (p. 3). Like Steven Covell in Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation (University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), which explores the everyday-life aspects of contemporary temple Buddhism, Williams does not condemn the lack of these monastic practices, which became synonymous with ''true'' Zen in the West (many Westerners have argued that Zen has degenerated in Japan). On the contrary, he argues that this very engagement with laypeople's religious needs has contributed to the vitality of the Soto sect, making it the largest Buddhist sect of the Tokugawa period.
Williams' efforts in decentering the study of Zen by shifting his attention from famous monks and doctrine to ordinary Buddhists and their behavior have a clear origin in the study of social history exemplified by the work of the French Annales School (1928- ). The Annales historians rebelled against traditional historical practice by refusing to think of history as the study of facts, wars, states, and great men. For them, it was the structures of everyday life of a given period that should be investigated, in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the ''mentality'' of the period. The key concept of ''mentality'' refers to the shared beliefs and behaviors that were so familiar that they were rendered invisible. For historians like Jacques le Goff, Philippe Aries, and Fernand Braudel, it was the attitudes and patterns of behavior of ordinary people, and not those of heroes, who could unlock the thoughts and ideas of a specific historical period. When we think of how European history and history as a discipline have benefited from the insights of the Annales School, its deployment by Williams in analyzing Japanese religious history is commendable.
In essence, The Other Side of Zen investigates one main question: how did Soto become the largest Buddhist sect in the Tokugawa period, with seventy-five thousand temples? Williams' argument is twofold. First, by attending to the ''otherworldly'' needs of parishioners through funeral and memorial rites on the one hand and ''this-worldly'' needs through prayers and rituals for rain, good harvest, protection against fire and drowning, and dispensing medicine, Soto was able to connect intimately with ordinary people's lives. Second, by incorporating indigenous pre- Buddhist beliefs and trans-sectarian rituals and deities, in addition to the specific rites of Soto Zen, the sect was able to maintain and expand its temples.
This book is based on Williams' Ph.D. thesis, and the sheer number of endnotes attests to this (of the book's 241 pages, sixty are devoted to notes). However, the text itself does not suffer from ''over-theorizing'' or excessive use of jargon. It is written in accessible language for both academic and non-academic audiences. Indeed, the use of vignettes that encapsulate the issues being discussed make for a fascinating read. For instance, we have stories of how Zen priests used magical powers to appease ghosts, erase evil karma, and deliver salvation by bestowing precepts and a Zen lineage chart (p. 43); letters containing sex scandals involving parishioners and priests (pp. 14-15); stories of miraculous cures by the ingesting of talismans (p. 103) and medicine purportedly handed down by Dogen (p. 89); and legends of Zen priests becoming Shinto deities (p. 74).
Nevertheless, I would have liked a more visual portrait of the temples and sites investigated. Although there are a few pictures of documents and talismans, pictures of the temples investigated (e.g., Daiyu zan, extensively analyzed in chapter 4) or a map with the location of the sites analyzed in the book would have helped give the reader a more concrete idea of the places discussed. But this, of course, does not in any way diminish the impressive scholarship Williams presents. Indeed, The Other Side of Zen offers a rich, ground-breaking contribution to the history of the Soto Zen sect and of Tokugawa Japan.
Rocha, Cristina
1012 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
599
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan. By Duncan Ryuken Williams. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 241. Hardcover $52.50.
Zen Buddhism has fascinated the West for a long time. The Zen boom of the 1960s was a key moment in the dissemination of this Japanese Buddhist school in popular culture. As a rule, books on Zen have focused on remarkable monks and their feats, monasticism, and studies of doctrine. Furthermore, Zen schools have been studied in isolation, separated from other Japanese Buddhist schools and non-Buddhist religions, as if they were not part of the social and religious life of Japan. However, more recently, some studies have begun to focus on another aspect of Zen-the everyday customs, beliefs, and rituals of ordinary Buddhists and temples. Following in the footsteps of William Bodiford and Bernard Faure, Duncan Williams, in The Other Side of Zen, has written a fascinating account of the extraordinary expansion of the Soto Zen sect in Tokugawa Japan by looking at Soto Zen involvement in all aspects of the religious economy of the period.
Drawing on new historical sources that have become available in the past twenty-five years (such as temple histories and logbooks, prayer and funerary manuals, sales records of talismans and medicine, death registries, diaries of pilgrims, and letters of villagers, temple priests, and government officials) as well as analyzing legends, miracle tales and ghost stories, and material culture such as tombstones and stone markers, Williams has drawn a comprehensive portrait of ''what Soto Zen actually was, as lived by ordinary priests and laypeople'' (p. 3). He shows that for the great majority of ordinary Soto Zen monks and parishioners, the Zen temple was a place for funerary and memorial rituals, festivals, physical healing (with exclusive Soto medicine and talismans), and faith healing (through the worship of deities). According to Williams, they never practiced sitting (zazen), never engaged in reciting koans, or read Dogen's writings (p. 3). Like Steven Covell in Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation (University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), which explores the everyday-life aspects of contemporary temple Buddhism, Williams does not condemn the lack of these monastic practices, which became synonymous with ''true'' Zen in the West (many Westerners have argued that Zen has degenerated in Japan). On the contrary, he argues that this very engagement with laypeople's religious needs has contributed to the vitality of the Soto sect, making it the largest Buddhist sect of the Tokugawa period.
Williams' efforts in decentering the study of Zen by shifting his attention from famous monks and doctrine to ordinary Buddhists and their behavior have a clear origin in the study of social history exemplified by the work of the French Annales School (1928- ). The Annales historians rebelled against traditional historical practice by refusing to think of history as the study of facts, wars, states, and great men. For them, it was the structures of everyday life of a given period that should be investigated, in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the ''mentality'' of the period. The key concept of ''mentality'' refers to the shared beliefs and behaviors that were so familiar that they were rendered invisible. For historians like Jacques le Goff, Philippe Aries, and Fernand Braudel, it was the attitudes and patterns of behavior of ordinary people, and not those of heroes, who could unlock the thoughts and ideas of a specific historical period. When we think of how European history and history as a discipline have benefited from the insights of the Annales School, its deployment by Williams in analyzing Japanese religious history is commendable.
In essence, The Other Side of Zen investigates one main question: how did Soto become the largest Buddhist sect in the Tokugawa period, with seventy-five thousand temples? Williams' argument is twofold. First, by attending to the ''otherworldly'' needs of parishioners through funeral and memorial rites on the one hand and ''this-worldly'' needs through prayers and rituals for rain, good harvest, protection against fire and drowning, and dispensing medicine, Soto was able to connect intimately with ordinary people's lives. Second, by incorporating indigenous pre- Buddhist beliefs and trans-sectarian rituals and deities, in addition to the specific rites of Soto Zen, the sect was able to maintain and expand its temples.
This book is based on Williams' Ph.D. thesis, and the sheer number of endnotes attests to this (of the book's 241 pages, sixty are devoted to notes). However, the text itself does not suffer from ''over-theorizing'' or excessive use of jargon. It is written in accessible language for both academic and non-academic audiences. Indeed, the use of vignettes that encapsulate the issues being discussed make for a fascinating read. For instance, we have stories of how Zen priests used magical powers to appease ghosts, erase evil karma, and deliver salvation by bestowing precepts and a Zen lineage chart (p. 43); letters containing sex scandals involving parishioners and priests (pp. 14-15); stories of miraculous cures by the ingesting of talismans (p. 103) and medicine purportedly handed down by Dogen (p. 89); and legends of Zen priests becoming Shinto deities (p. 74).
Nevertheless, I would have liked a more visual portrait of the temples and sites investigated. Although there are a few pictures of documents and talismans, pictures of the temples investigated (e.g., Daiyu zan, extensively analyzed in chapter 4) or a map with the location of the sites analyzed in the book would have helped give the reader a more concrete idea of the places discussed. But this, of course, does not in any way diminish the impressive scholarship Williams presents. Indeed, The Other Side of Zen offers a rich, ground-breaking contribution to the history of the Soto Zen sect and of Tokugawa Japan.
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL TIME IN DZOGCHEN AND HEIDEGGER
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL TIME IN DZOGCHEN AND HEIDEGGER
Yao, Zhihua
10884 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
512
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Time is flying. The passage of time is usually viewed as a negative thing that brings us closer to death. To the conventional mind, it seems that we are moving ever forward, from a definite past into an uncertain future. The past is over; it is unchangeable, and in a certain sense it is "out there." The future, on the other hand, seems yet undetermined. It could turn out to be one thing or another. We often feel ourselves to be helpless spectators as the scope of the determined past edges its way into an uncertain future.
As time passes, we sadly realize that we are mortal and that there is a definite end to our lives. For this very reason, some may strive to maintain a longer life in this world, while others may imagine an eternal life in another world. Concerning time, we have many puzzles to contend with, such as what eternity is, how it is related to the passage of time, whether the passage of time is irreversible, whether things past are now no-longer, whether the future is unpredictable, whether or not the present exists, and so on.
The present article is an attempt to discuss such experiences of the passage of time. Among numerous individuals who have been pondering this mundane but nonetheless serious issue, I single out two: Longchenpa (1308-1363), who represents the Dzogchen tradition of Tantric Buddhism, and Heidegger (1889-1976), who represents the School of Phenomenology in the West. Instead of speculating on an eternal life, both of them attempt to look into the very phenomenon and experience of the passage of time and reveal to us a new dimension of time, the so-called fourth time or fourth dimension of time.
This article will proceed in four sections. In the first section, I will introduce a Buddhist practice in the Dzogchen tradition that deals with the experience of the passage of time. In the second section, Longchenpa's concept of four times (dusbzhi) will be analyzed and its significance for the history of Buddhism discussed. In the third section, I will examine Heidegger's concept of four-dimensional time and briefly discuss its elaboration by later philosophers. In conclusion, I will discuss the similarities and differences between the four-dimensional time theories as found in these two diverse traditions and the possible reasons for their striking similarities.
A Dzogchen Practice
Buddhist philosophy is not the product of purely intellectual speculation, but rather relies heavily on practice and experience. In the Buddhist view, any theory or concept has to be drawn from and applicable to meditative practice, what is not being considered empty speculation. In this interaction between knowledge and practice, one gains the wisdom to see into reality.
The following is an example of such a practical instruction in the Dzogchen tradition. In The Mirror: Advice on the Presence of Awareness, Namkhai Norbu, a contemporary Dzogchen master, gives the following advice to practitioners:
The recognition of our true State and the continuation of its presence really is the essence of all paths, the basis of all meditation, the conclusion of all practices, the path of all the secret methods, and the key to all the deeper teachings. This is why it is vitally important that we seek out our way to maintain continuous presence without being pulled off course.
This means: not hanging on to the past, not going after the future, and, without letting ourselves get involved in the illusory thoughts arising in the present moment, turning inwards and observing our own mind, leaving it in its true State beyond the limitations of past, present and future. Without letting ourselves be conditioned by contaminating conceptualization, without passing judgment on the State itself, whether indeed it even exists, whether it will turn out to be positive or negative, etc., we must stay focused in this authentic condition and not try to correct it.
Although the primordial State of total perfection is completely beyond the limits of past, present and future, one is not immediately aware of this and indeed has difficulty in recognizing it when first starting to practice, and therefore it is important to be on the alert against distraction by thoughts of the "three times."1
This is an instruction on how to maintain one's "true State." To keep one's mind in this true state, one must not be distracted by thoughts of the three times. To do this, one must not hang on to the past, go after the future, or get entangled in the present moment. This is the key to meditative practice. According to the instruction, the past is no-longer, and one should not follow it; the future has not yet arrived, and one should not anticipate it; the present is momentary, and one should not dwell on it. This practice is an antidote to our ordinary experience. In our everyday life, we either live in our memories of the past, anticipate the future, or hold on to the present moment. It seems that this is the only way that we can appreciate the value of time, and live a meaningful life during the passage of time. If there is no past, present, or future to hold on to, how can we live on?
The Dzogchen master answers: "Relax." Compared to many poets who burst into tears upon realizing the emptiness of the passage of time, the Dzogchen master is more skillful and firm in teaching how to deal with this difficult situation. It is actually the very goal of Buddhist practice to see through the passage of time and to realize the very nature of reality beyond the momentary and impermanent. Here "relax" not only means to take it easy; it is also the key to practice: let it be. Namkhai Norbu points out that "Dzogchen could be defined as a way to relax completely. This can be clearly understood from the terms used to denote the state of contemplation, such as 'leave it just as it is' (cog.bzhag), 'cutting loose one's tension' (khregs. chod), 'beyond effort' (rtsol.bral), and so on."2
With respect to the past, present, and future, one may find it easier to start with giving up anticipation of the future by making no effort to achieve spiritual attainment. Then one can cut off memory of the past by negating the self to be the agent of past deeds. This way one can experience the emptiness of "no-longer" and "not-yet." In this experience, there may still be some thoughts arising moment by moment, and eradicating them is the hardest part of the practice. Since the moment of thought is always in the present, in the sense that it is here and now, it is very difficult in practice not to dwell on the present, not to get involved in present thoughts, and to let them be. According to Namkhai Norbu's instruction, one should leave these thoughts just as they are without getting sidetracked, forgetting, or letting oneself get wrapped up in them.
It is in the non-dwelling of the past, present, and future that the true state of one's mind arises. This state, also called the primordial state of total perfection, is the state completely beyond the limits of the past, present, and future. And the goal of the meditative practice is to relax, that is, to be free from the distractions of thoughts of the "three times," and to maintain the presence of the authentic state. Relaxation and realization are thus two sides of a coin; as Namkhai Norbu says: "When the mind is naturally released and present, it comes to itself in its authentic State."3 Now the questions remains: why have a positive attitude toward the present? Why let the mind or its authentic state involve itself in the present-why not just let it go as illusory thought? How do you keep its presence without being reduced to grasping the present, that is, the "here and now"?
I feel that by "to remain present and relaxed" Namkhai Norbu means to maintain the presence of the natural, authentic state of perfection. "Present" here means to let it "be present," inferring a dynamic process of presenting. It is not a dwelling on the static here and now; rather it is a continuous effort and activity to maintain "presence." This is like a rowboat heading downstream. The rower cannot exert himself, but he has to maintain a certain direction so that the boat does not run aground, but moves with the flow of the water. At this point, a distinction between two senses of "present" by Masao Abe, a Zen scholar, is helpful. One is the relative present, considered to stand side by side or parallel with the past and future, and the other is the absolute present that embraces past, present, and future as their more fundamental basis.4
Therefore, we have to keep in mind that, to follow the teaching of the recognition of our true state and the continuation of its presence, "[t]he point is not to regard the movement as a negative thing, something to be rejected."5 In a traditional Buddhist context, however, it is rather difficult to appreciate a dynamic sense of presence and to treat it positively. This is because tranquillity is generally considered to be superior to movement, and one who achieves nirvana is said to eliminate all activities. In this sense, Dzogchen and, for that matter, Zen are unique in taking movement into account.
In meditative practice, when a momentary thought arises, an authentic state of calm is seen to arise side by side with it, so the key is not to be conditioned by thought, and yet not to pass judgment on it-that is, to consider whether or not its object exists, or whether it is positive or negative. One thought may disappear in a certain period of time, and another will then arise without interruption. This is what is called "movement." In the Dzogchen tradition it is necessary to learn to work with this movement. Movement and calmness or tranquillity are seen to be two aspects of one state, and the movement of thought to be the functioning of the state of clarity. When one is actually in meditation, in the state of pure presence, there is no difference between the calm state and movement. Thus, there is no need for one to seek a state that is without thought; rather one should just maintain one and the same state of presence in one's experience. As Garab Dorje says: "If there does arise [the movement of thoughts], be aware of the state in which they arise. If one is free of thoughts, be aware of the state in which one is free of them. Then there is no difference between the arising of thought and being free of it."6 Only by not-judging and lettingbe can one maintain the authentic state of perfection, which is both of movement and of tranquillity. As Namkhai Norbu points out: " 'To meditate' only means to keep presence both of the state of calm and of that of movement: there is nothing on which to meditate."7
Then how is this true state, which is beyond the past, present, and future, related to time? Is it totally different from time or only another dimension of time? Namkhai Norbu does not state this clearly. But in emphasizing its movement, he tends to take it to be part of time and yet be beyond the "three times" in the conventional sense. By tracing back to the early Dzogchen tradition, I found a better term for it: "timeless time" or the "fourth time."
The Four Times
Longchenpa, or Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa, was an eminent Dzogchen master and adept of the Nyingmapa School. He is one of Tibet's most celebrated writers, and in his relatively short life he produced an enormous number of works, amounting to two hundred and seventy titles. Throughout these works, he reveals himself as an independent and original thinker, though, in support of his own brilliant expositions, he quotes from the vast literature that had already developed during the early phase of Buddhism in Tibet. The notion of the "four times" (dus-bzhi) is one of the most interesting ideas I have found in his extensive output.
In his Naturally Liberated Mind, the Great Perfection (Mahasandhicittatasvamutki- nama, rDzogs-Pa Ch'en-Po Sems-Nyid Rang-Grol), while elaborating on the epithet of Sambhogakaya, which includes the pure Buddha-Land, the mandala, the Teachers of Five Classes, Primordial Wisdom, retinues of disciples, and so on, Longchenpa brings up the notion of the four times. He states the third and fifth epithets to be as follows:
(3) . . . the self-precept retinues of disciples of the ten directions and four times. (Translator's note reads "Dus-bZhi: past, present, future and timeless time.")
(5) The three times and timeless time is Kuntu Zangpo time, And it is the originally accomplished and changeless state.8
The phrase "ten directions and four times" (phyogs-bchu dus-bzhi) is found in some Tantric literature.9 The ten directions include east, south, west, north, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, zenith, and nadir. The four times, as indicated in the passage quoted above, are the past, present, future, and timeless time. Some commentators take this to mean four aeons, namely the Krta, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali Yugas.10 This, however, is in contrast to the standard notion of the "three times," which is established in the Abhidharma tradition and used throughout the subsequent history of Buddhist literature.11 The additional time may be the contribution of the general appreciation of quaternity in the Tantric tradition, which, again, may have its origin in an earlier source.
The fourth time is called no-time, timeless time, Kuntu Zangpo time, state of Kuntu Zangpo, or Samantabhadra time. Among these various names, Kuntu Zangpo or its Sanskrit equivalent, Samantabhadra, is a very loaded term in the Dzogchen tradition. It refers to the Buddha of the same name, and is considered to be the symbol of Dharmakaya,12 while in Bon teachings it refers to Sambhogakaya.13 According to Guenther, the expression Kuntu Zangpo "is synonymous with rig-pa, the cognition of being qua being, or a value-sustained cognition having a strongly aesthetic character." 14
To introduce the idea of the four times, Longchenpa starts with the experience of the three times. Like Namkhai Norbu, he expresses his experience of the past, present, and future in terms of "ceased," "not-lingering," and "not yet coming," respectively:
Past-it [i.e., mind] has ceased; future-it has not yet come into existence;
Present-it does not linger. It is neither within nor without nor anywhere.
Know it to be like the sky and immune to propositions about it.15
It is interesting to note that Longchenpa's understanding of the present to be notlingering is different from that of traditional Indian Buddhism. Vasubandhu, in his early Abhidharma and later Yogacara writings, gives a consistent definition of the three times:
[T]he time periods and the conditions are established through the operation of the activity [of] a dharma: when a dharma does not accomplish its operation, it is future; when it is accomplishing it, it is present; and when its operation has come to an end, it is past.16
Among these definitions, the future as "not accomplishing" and the past as "coming to an end" are similar to Longchenpa's notions of "not yet coming" and "ceased." But as for the present, Vasubandhu understands it to mean "be accomplishing," while Longchenpa holds it to be "not-lingering." By the same token, this view is different from Nagarjuna's understanding the present to be "what is arising here and now (pratyutpanna)."17 At this point, Longchenpa comes closer to the notion of three times held among Japanese Buddhists and mentioned by Dogen in the following passage:
[A common belief] says that the past life has already perished, the future is yet to come, and the present does not stay. The past did not necessarily already perish, the future is not inevitably yet to come, and the present is not inexorably impermanent. If you learn the not-staying, the not-yet, and the no-longer as present, future, and past, respectively, you should certainly understand the reason that the not-yet is the past, present, and future. [The same holds true of the no-longer and the not-staying.]18
Here Dogen is sophisticated enough to go further than what he calls the "common belief" of three times, which is held by Longchenpa. Examining this carefully, though, one will find that Dogen is not really against this common notion, but is rather trying to emphasize the interpenetration of the three times, which obviously bears the mark of the Huayan way of thinking. In a similar way, Longchenpa, by taking this notion of three times into account, seeks to bring out a further dimension of time.
In the quotation above from Longchenpa, the mind is seen to have ceased activity in the past, not yet come to existence in the future, and does not linger in the present, and thus it cannot be located in any of the three times. For this reason, it is empty like the sky, and one cannot have any conception of it. This is one aspect of mind's nature. On the other hand, Longchenpa says that it is wrong to search for the mind either in the past, the present, or the future, for it is always there, "naturally remaining identical with itself." This self-existence, like emptiness, is beyond any conception. Thus, one should not be "seeking mind by mind." Rather, one should relax, let oneself be, and thus let the mind be. This is beautifully put by Longchenpa:
It is not in the has-been, nor is it on the side of the not-yet;
It is not in a now, but is a state naturally remaining identical with itself;
Instead of seeking mind by mind, let be.19
After one regains his true mind by relaxing and letting words, thoughts, and talk pass by, then how is this mind related to time? Is it simply beyond time? Longchenpa says the mind can be seen as the "time" that remains when one transcends the three times. In other words, when past, present, and future are not time, the mind or pristine cognitiveness is itself time:
This self-existing pristine cognitiveness, (evoked through) the Guru's sustaining power,
Is seen when words and thoughts and talk have passed away.
To see it then as time
Is (the moment) when the three aspects of time are no-time, and a "before" or a "later" can no longer be distinguished.
It is called Prajnaparamita, Madhyamika,
Zhi-byed, calming (the rush of) propositions and suffering, Mahamudra,
rDzogs-chen, the very meaningfulness of meaningfulness.20
Here Longchenpa does not show us in detail how the three times are no-time. The key point for him seems to be the making of no distinction between before and after. Moreover, he attributes this view to various traditions in the history of Buddhism, such as Prajnaparamita, Madhyamika, Zhi-byed, Mahamudra, and rDzogs-chen. Among these teachings, Nagarjuna's argument that the three times are no-time can be singled out to be representative. The very point of this argument is that time cannot be conceived of as an entity existing independently of temporal phenomena, but must itself be regarded as a set of relations among them. That is, the only mode of existence that time has is as a set of relations among empirical phenomena, or as the provisional distinction of before and after. Apart from these relations and distinctions, there is no time.21
Since the existence of the three times is based on the provisional distinction of before and after, if there is no such distinction, then there is no time in the conventional sense. But the state of mind or cognitiveness is seen to be a "time" in the sense that there are no temporal distinctions or separations, which makes this time different from the three times that are based on provisional distinctions. Longchenpa says:
In the simultaneity of rising and being free, one is free from all emotions;
Having gone beyond subjective ideas, one engages in this very reach and range of calm and peace,
In the vortex of meaningfulness, when the three aspects of time do not exist as time-
As in a phantom, not introducing any break in time.22
One distinct feature of the Dzogchen teaching is that it still names the state of no-time as a time or real time. And the concept of timeless time is unique in the history of Buddhism. In the early Buddhist literature, there is the notion of the "timeless" (akalika) in reference to the unconditional state, but not that of "timeless time."23 The Abhidharma tradition makes a clear distinction and contrast between the three times and the timeless, or the conditional reality and unconditional space and nirvana. In this tradition, space is superior to time, and cessation (nirodha) is preferable to action. Time, being a mark of the profane world, can never be considered in terms of eternity. In his Abhidharmakosabhasya, Vasubandhu indicates such a distinction by saying "the conditioned dharmas of the three time periods are karanahetu; the unconditioned dharmas are outside of time."24
Nagarjuna, as I mentioned earlier, takes time to be a derived notion, and it is only valid in the conventional sense. At the ultimate level, there is neither past, present, nor future. To show that time only exists as a derived notion, Nagarjuna argues that "in the teachings of the Buddha mostly samaya is used and it is only rarely that ka la is used."25 The distinction between samaya and kala by Nagarjuna shows that Indian Buddhist scholars in general are arguing against the view held by other Indian philosophical schools, such as Jainism, Vaisesika, and Nyaya, which takes time to be an all-pervading, partless substance.26 And the term kala is heavily loaded with this substantialist sense, while Buddhism from its very beginning has attacked such a substantial way of thinking with its fundamental doctrines of no-self, impermanence, and nirvana. As a result, it has become a taboo in the Buddhist tradition to appreciate time in the sense of an all-pervasive dynamic reality. Instead, time is only treated as a mark of the impermanent, profane conditioned world.
The first attempt to attack such a taboo can be seen in the Milindapanha, a sutra of early Buddhism, where the distinction is made between the "time that exists" and the "time that does not."27 Here one gets a hint that time that does not exist could in a certain sense be referring to timeless time. But the text goes on to say that the root of time is ignorance, and that liberation results from an evolution from the time that exists to the time that does not. This way, time is again categorized according to the dualistic distinction of conditional and unconditional realities.
To break down the barrier between samsara and nirvana, the conditional and the unconditional world, is one of the major aims of the Mahayana school. However, so far as the issue of time is concerned, they still take no-time to be superior to time and do not really appreciate time in the sense of dynamic movement. This situation did not change until the Dzogchen tradition brought together time and the timeless, allowing the timeless to penetrate into time. Having its origin in Tathagatagarbha thought, the Dzogchen program is to keep dynamic movement in its scope. As Guenther points out: "What distinguishes rDzogs-chen thinking from all other modes of thought is that it is pure process thinking."28 The Buddha nature is considered to be all pervasive and creatively transforming the conditional world, which is categorized by the three times. The key here is to appreciate not only its all-pervasive nature but also its creative action of transformation. This inevitably leads to a reinterpretation and redefinition of terms that are otherwise commonly used in the predominantly static way in which ordinary language is structured.
The concept of timeless time opens up a new dimension in the Buddhist worldview. The reason that the Dzogchen tradition still calls the timeless a "time" is that it takes both time and the timeless to be of the same nature of dynamic transformation. The no-time or fourth time is as dynamic as the three times. This is not only experienced in one's mind but also can be extended to the whole realm of existence. As Guenther says: "This meaning-rich gestalt dynamics is always and everywhere present, pervading everything from the highest imaginable reality (Kun-tu bzang-po) down to the smallest louse."29 Actually the timeless time is itself called by Longchenpa Kuntu Zangpo or Samantabhadra, which equates to the highest reality:
The primordially empty Mind, which has no root,
Is not defiled by the phenomenal appearance of samsara and nirvana.
Throughout the three times and timeless time, the state of Kunzu Zangpo,
The essence of the changeless perfection at the basis is
Undefiled by the appearances of the six objects, like the water-moon [the moon's reflection in water].30
Furthermore, he says:
The time is not a determinate event, but the ground (Being-as-such) being complete and not altering (position) or changing.
Samantabhadra time, in which the three aspects of time are timeless,
The overruling prereflectively experienced meaning in which everything is complete and alike,
Is a reach and range pure in itself from the very beginning.31
To describe the highest reality, Longchenpa adopts terms such as "the primordially empty Mind," "no-root," "not defiled by samsara and nirvana," "changeless," "perfection," "the basis," "the ground," "complete," "not altering," "not changing," "pure," "in itself," and so on. In Tibetan a single term gzhi (*asraya) is used to denote this reality. Literally meaning "ground" or "basis," gzhi is usually translated as "reason," "the whole," or "Being." According to the Dzogchen teaching, this reality is purely dynamic, and its creative, dynamic nature ensures that it is never "at rest." "This 'never-being-at-rest' expresses itself in a complementarity that . . . is imaged as Kun-tu bzang-po (the male aspect) and Kun-tu bzang-mo (the female aspect)."32
In the Dzogchen tradition, Kuntu Zangpo and Kuntu Zangmo are usually represented as an image of a naked man and woman in intimate embrace. However, one should not stick to its anthropomorphic associations. The male Kuntu Zangpo symbolizes the principle of the lighting-up or coming-to-presence (snang-cha) of gzhi, and the female Kuntu Zangmo the principle of openness or nothingness (stongcha). Their nakedness signifies that they are the purest of the pure, and no ornaments or drapery can interfere with their pure dynamics. And their intimate embrace symbolizes the complementarity or inseparability of these two principles.33
Kuntu Zangpo, being the fourth dimension of time, does not stand outside gzhi or the highest reality, but is within the unfolding and presenting of the reality. In this process of unfolding, the space-like principle of openness or nothingness can make room for the dynamics of the highest reality to be possible. On the other hand, the principle of lighting-up or coming-to-presence as dynamic "activity" (thabs) shows the very nature of nothingness or openness. This dynamic process, called "creativity" (rtsal), "play" (rol-pa), or "ornament" (rgyan), reflects the inner dynamics and spontaneity or spontaneous givenness (lhun-grub) of gzhi.34
This is called the self-organizing principle of the highest reality. And it is rather crucial whether one recognizes such a self-manifestation process as gzhi itself. If one does, one will be enlightened into the highest reality; "If, however, one does not recognize this auto-presencing of Being [gzhi] as an auto-presencing, this (failure) becomes the reason for going astray into the status of a mentation-governed (sentient) being (sems-can) within the three world spheres."35 That is, one will fall into the circle of samsara.
To summarize, time in the Dzogchen understanding not only consists of three times of no-longer, not-yet, and no-dwelling, but also of a fourth Kuntu Zangpo time characterized by its coming-to-presence, which reveals the very nature of the highest reality, gzhi, which is self-presentation.
Four-dimensional Time
Among Western philosophers, Heidegger is one of the few who treats time seriously and brings it within the scope of metaphysics, thus breaking through the "'gap' between 'temporal' being and 'supratemporal' eternal being,"36 which has remained a fundamental distinction throughout the history of Western philosophy. By taking time to be the only secret path to being, he has totally changed the outlook of traditional Western metaphysics in the sense that he brings change and dynamics into the dominant substantialist way of thinking.
Heidegger starts his metaphysical questioning of being with human existence, which he indicates by the use of the technical term Dasein. This usage has a direct source in the approach of the phenomenological movement, which focuses on one's immanent experience and thus avoids traditional dogmatism. Though Heidegger is critiqued for his anthropological turning in the circle of phenomenology, he still operates along the lines of phenomenology with the exception that he expands a Husserlian static perception to a living experience of human existence. In this sense, he comes closer to Buddhism, whose entire strategy is to experience, analyze, and transcend human existence.
As for the issue of time, Heidegger does not attempt to provide a metaphysical definition of time to begin with, but rather starts with temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as the experience of human existence. In the experience of time, he challenges the conventional notions of the three times, and warns about keeping a distance from "all of the meanings of 'future,' 'past,' and 'present' initially urging themselves upon us from the vulgar concept of time."37 In his view, the vulgar concept of time arises from an inauthentic temporality or an inauthentic understanding of time, which is in contrast to the authentic temporality that he is exploring.
Continuing with his exploration of authentic temporality, Heidegger makes use of some new terminology. When he refers to "past" (Vergangenheit), he uses the term "having-been" (Gewesenheit). "Past," literally what has passed away, is a "no-longer" as understood by Longchenpa and by Buddhism in general. To Heidegger, this is a vulgarity and hence an inauthentic understanding of the past. To differentiate himself from this understanding, he uses the word "having-been" to indicate the sense of the "already-being-in" of the past. For him, what is past is not "nolonger- now but earlier," but, on the contrary, what he thinks of as "it is never past, but is always already having-been in the sense of 'I-am-as-having-been."'38 This having-been brings one "back to" what has been happening, thus making it "a constituent of the ecstatic unity of the temporality of Da-sein."39 It is through this crucial distinction between "passing away" and "coming back" that Heidegger contrasts the ordinary usage of "the past" from what he calls "the having-been." By the same token, Heidegger distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic understanding of having-been by the terms retrieve (Wiederholen) and forgottenness (Vergessen), respectively.
For the future, Heidegger does not pick up a new term. But the German word that he uses, Zukunft, is very different from the English "future," which, like the German word Futur, denotes a chronological sense of "later time" and indicates a rather linear understanding of time. Zukunft, on the other hand, in German can mean zukommen, or to come, and ankunft, or to arrive, and an equivalence may be found in the Old English word "advent." Therefore, the future is not denoted in a chronological sense of "not-yet-now," but instead as "being-ahead-of-oneself."40 In anticipation of going ahead of oneself, one makes the future come toward itself. Thus, anticipation is seen to be the authentic mode of the future. On the other hand, awaiting, or passively longing for a future point of time, is considered to be inauthentic. Here it is interesting to notice that the anticipation of the future is seen to be an attachment in Buddhism, which would consider an authentic mode to be nonanticipation of the future.
Among the English words for the three times, the "present" best matches its German equivalence in Heidegger's usage. The German word Gegenwart literally means to be present in a certain place or event. It refers not only to physically bringing forth something, but also to calling up something in one's mind. Thus, the present is to "be present," that is, "letting something be encountered."41 This understanding denotes the present in an active sense in that one is always encountering or being-together-with something. Heidegger also distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic presents to be the moment (Augenblick) and making present (Gegenwαrtigen), respectively. His understanding is that the moment being an authentic present "lets us encounter for the first time what can be 'in a time' as something at hand or objectively present,"42 while making present marks a general quality of the present, for "every present makes present, but not every present is 'in the moment."'43
While treating "making present" to be the inauthentic present, Heidegger does not distinguish the present (Gegenwart) from "presence" (Anwesenheit), and he uses the two terms interchangeably. This makes the phenomenon of the present more complicated. He says: "Presencing, presence speaks of the present [Aus Anwesen, Anwesenheit spricht Gegenwart]. According to current representations, the present, together with past and future, forms the character of time. Being is determined as presence by time."44 This became a topic for Derrida, and he observes that in Being and Time and in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics it is difficult to distinguish rigorously between presence as Anwesenheit and presence as Gegenwαrtigkeit, and in other works Gegenwαrtigkeit becomes more and more a restriction of Anwesenheit.45
Though not distinguishing the present and presencing or presence, Heidegger sharply contrasts the present to nowness (Jetzt), which is taken to be the key character in the vulgar concept of time. He thinks that "the present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the sense of the now that the present as presence can in no way be determined in terms of the present as the now. The reverse would rather seem possible."46 The relationship between these three concepts can be summarized as follows: "Time is presencing as present: 'present' (Gegenwart) is nothing but presence (Anwesenheit), which cannot be determined in terms of the present as the now."47 Heidegger thinks that the history of Western philosophy is dominated by this vulgar understanding of time:
For as soon as reflection on the essence of time began, at the end of Greek philosophy with Aristotle, time itself had to be taken as something somehow present, ousia tis. Consequently time was considered from the standpoint of "now," the actual moment. The past is the "no-longer-now," the future is the "not-yet-now."48
In this vulgar understanding, time is a succession of nows uninterrupted and without gaps. No matter how far one divides the now, it is still always now. In this uninterrupted succession of nows, every now is already either a just now or a rightaway. Heidegger points out:
If the characterization of time keeps primarily and exclusively to this succession, no beginning and no end can be found in principle in it as such. Every last now, as a now, is always already a right-away that is no-longer, thus it is time in the sense of the no-longer- now, of the past. Every first now is always a just-now-not-yet, thus it is time in the sense of the not-yet-now, the "future." Time is thus endless "in both directions."49
As a result, one has the one-dimensional linear time as experienced in ordinary life. This vulgar understanding can be characterized by its dwelling on nowness, which in the Buddhist view is again an attachment to be gotten rid of. Jean-Luc Marion confirms Heidegger's observation by pointing out that "This ontological overdetermination of a primacy of the present leads to a double reduction of the future and of the past: the past finishes and the future begins as soon as the present begins or finishes. Their respective temporalities count only negatively, as a double nonpresent, even a double nontime."50 Here "the present" is used in the sense of "here and now." The nowness cancels out past and future, thus leaving one attached to the static here and now.
To detach himself from the nowness or "objective present" (Vorhandenheit), Heidegger is in favor of a futural orientation: "the future has priority in the ecstatic unity of primordial and authentic temporality. . . . Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself out of the authentic future, and indeed in such a way that, futurally having-been, it first arouses the present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future."51 This way, he takes possibility to be superior to actuality. In his view, human existence is always ahead of oneself and thus keeps an open horizon of being in the future. This possibility of moving toward the future also makes time itself dynamic and breaks the chain of nowness. Here it is interesting to notice that for the same purpose of transcending static time, Derrida is in favor of the past. His key concept differance is "a 'past' that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence."52
Though the future has priority over the past and the present, in Heidegger's view the three times interpenetrate each other. The present arises in the unity of the future and the having-been, and thus the horizon of a present temporalizes itself equiprimordially with those of the future and the having-been. The same is true with the past and the future. As Heidegger puts it: "Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having-been temporality."53 This temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is a unity of motions of "toward," "back to," and "together with" that reveals itself to be an ecstatic moving out of itself. This picture of the interpenetration of the three times is very similar to the view of time in Dogen and Huayan philosophy.
Though he discusses temporality in great detail, in Being and Time Heidegger does not get into time itself, which is supposed to be the topic of the unfinished part of the book. In a 1962 lecture titled On Time and Being, Heidegger reveals a part of his thinking on time. In this lecture, the leading question remains the same as in Being and Time, and he continues his notions of the interpenetration or unity of the three times, in which each of them is presencing and revealing the others. This leads to the discussions of the dimension or dimensionality of time, ending up with the notion of four-dimensional time.
Time or temporality as explained above consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past, and present. Having-been offers the future to itself, and the reciprocal relation of both at the same time brings about the present. It is in this sense of opening up that one talks about the dimension or dimensionality of time. "Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness."54 This threefold interplay of reaching out already reveals three dimensions of time.
However, there is something more if one examines time carefully, and it is the presencing (Anwesen) that has been discussed above. As we know, in Heidegger's Being and Time, presencing is nearly identical with the present. But in his On Time and Being, he holds that though presencing is given in the present, "[n]ot every presencing is necessarily the present."55 For presencing also manifests itself in absence, that is, what has been or what is to come, and this manner of presencing by no means coincides with presencing in the sense of the immediate present. Thus, in a way, presencing is the unity of the three interplaying ways of presencing and is the very dimension that makes these three dimensions and their interplay possible. Heidegger says:
In the approaching of what is not yet present and in the having-been of what is no longer present and even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. We cannot attribute the presencing to be thus thought to one of the three dimensions of time, to the present which would seem obvious. Rather, the unity of time's three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak-not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional [vierdimensional].56
This is a most interesting statement, but, unfortunately, not many Heideggerian scholars have paid attention to it. Instead, many of us may be familiar with the concept of the fourfold world (Geviert Welt) found in the later works of Heidegger. This is a rather mystical view of the world, wherein the world consists of four elements, namely gods, heaven, earth, and mortals, and their interplay brings the whole world into a meaningful process of revealing. This worldview is called a playful mirror (Spiel-Spiegel), in the sense that each of the four reaches out in its own way while at the same time reflecting others in itself.
It is in the same manner that four dimensions of time interplay and reflect each other in a mirror-like realm. Using the metaphor of the playful mirror, if we say that object, image, and mirror are three dimensions, then the light that makes seeing a mirror image possible is the fourth dimension. It is the light that lights up the process of seeing and brings object, image, and mirror into play. In the interplay of the four, they reflect and reveal one another; thus, one sees an image in the mirror. In this metaphor, the light is not something beyond; rather it is the revealing or presencing of the thing itself. Thus, Heidegger thinks that what we called the fourth dimension of time should actually be the first, for it is the most original and determines the rest. This presencing makes the other three dimensions possible by the way it "brings about to each its own presencing, holds them apart thus opened and so holds them toward one another in the nearness by which the three dimensions remain near one another."57
In this sense the fourth dimension of time is the nearness (Nαhe) of presencing out of present, past, and future, the nearness that unifies time's threefold opening up. Meanwhile, the presencing that brings the three times near has the character of denial and withholding, for it brings future, past, and present near to one another by distancing them or holding them apart. "In true time and its time-space, the giving of what has-been, that is, of what is no longer present, the denial of the present manifested itself. In the giving of future, that is, of what is not yet present, the withholding of the present manifested itself. Denial and withholding exhibit the same trait as selfwithholding in sending: namely, self-withdrawal."58 This way it keeps open what has been by denying its advent as present, and keeps open the approach from the future by withholding the present from the approach. This is the manner by which what has been, what is about to be, and the present reach out toward each other.
Derrida is one of the very few who offer a follow-up to Heidegger's discussions at this point, and he interprets the unity of three times to be the play itself. He says: "The play (Zuspiel) also marks, works on, manifests the unity of the three dimensions of time, which is to say a fourth dimension: The 'giving' of the es gibt Zeit belongs to the play of this 'quadridimensionality,' to this properness of time that would thus be quadridimensional."59 Here Derrida draws upon Heidegger's notion of "es gibt Zeit" and thinks that the es gibt plays (spielt) in the movement of the disclosing (Entbergen), in that which frees from the withdrawal (retrait), when what is hidden shows itself or what is sheltered appears. He understands the giving to be the play; meanwhile the play is a play of gift. Thus, the fourth dimension of time is not a figure, or a manner of speaking or of counting; rather it is the giving of the thing itself. "This thing itself of time implies the play of the four and the play of the gift."60
For Derrida, this gift language is not a superficial correlation in language; rather it is deep-rooted in thought itself. He says: "That a gift is called a present, that 'to give' may also be said 'to make a present,' 'to give a present' (in French as well as in English, for example), this will not be for us just a verbal clue, a linguistic chance or alea."61 The present in the sense of gift is certainly not the present as the now being distinct from the no-longer-now of the past and the not-yet-now of the future. Rather this present speaks of presence, the fourth dimension of time. Derrida brings the ordinary experience of giving a gift to its relationship with time in a sophisticated way:
To give a gift requires that one then forget, and asks the other to forget, absolutely, that a gift has been given, so that the gift, if there is one, would vanish without a trace. If time is a calendar, a ring or annum, a circle or a cycle, then the gift calls upon us to tear up the circle of time, to breach the circular movement of exchange and reciprocity, and in a "moment" of madness, to do something for once without or beyond reason, in a time without time, to give without return.62
To give a gift is not for the purpose of exchange or reciprocity; it means giving without return. Thus, the giver and receiver both need to forget and leave no trace of the gift in their minds. This is contrary to the ordinary conception of gift, which is for the purpose of memorizing. With the vanishing of memory or trace, one goes beyond the conventional reason of exchange, and breaks the circle of time. A moment of "time without time" emerges in such an experience of a giving that leaves behind the cycle of time. Thus the present in the sense of gift is a time without time. Here it is important to notice that the phrase "time without time" comes very close to Longchenpa's notion of timeless time.
Marion, on the other hand, develops the idea of the present-being-gift in a theological context. He talks about the Eucharistic presence of Christ in consecrated bread and wine:
Not first of a privileged temporalization of time (the here and now of the present) but of the present, that is to say, of the gift. Eucharistic presence must be understood starting most certainly from the present, but the present must be understood first as a gift that is given. One must measure the dimensions of eucharistic presence against the fullness of this gift. . . . The rigor of the gift must order the dimensions of the temporality where the present is made gift.63
In Heidegger's own terms, the fourth time in the sense of presence or presencing shows itself to be letting-presence (Anwesenlassen). And letting shows its character in bringing into unconcealment. To allow presence means to unconceal, to bring to openness. This Heideggerian term of letting or Gelassenheit comes close to Longchenpa's terminology of rig-pa cog-gzhag-the letting-be that is gzhi's ecstatic intensity. 64 In unconcealing, a giving prevails, the giving that gives presencing in letting-presence. The sense of giving is enhanced by the expressions "Es gibt Zeit" or "Es gibt Sein." Heidegger thinks that one cannot say "time is" or "being is"; rather one should say "Es gibt Zeit" or "Es gibt Sein." Different from the English expression "there be," "es gibt" has the literal meaning of "it gives," from which Heidegger develops the gift-language.
Heidegger further distinguishes two modes of giving: sending (Schicken) and extending (Reichen). In "Es gibt Sein," the giving shows itself to be sending. Sending is the giving of being. The giving of being holds itself back and withdraws. Such a giving is called sending. Extending, on the other hand, is the giving of time: "We call the giving which gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time."65 In this extending there also belongs a keeping back, a denial or withdrawal. For the denial of the present and the withholding of the present play within the giving of what has been and what will be. In a denial extending, the giving in "Es gibt Zeit" opens up the four-dimensional realm. In this way, four-dimensional true time has reached us.
As Heidegger understands it, extending is superior to sending, for "[s]ending of Being lies in the extending of time, [the] opening and concealing of manifold presence into the open realm of time-space."66 Thus, one may think that the fourfold extending of time could be the "It" (es) that gives the being in "Es gibt Sein." But Heidegger thinks time by no means is the "It" that gives being, "[f]or time itself remains the gift of an 'It gives' whose giving preserves the realm in which presence is extended."67 Time as well as being remains to be the gift of an "It," which can be determined only in Ereignis.
Ereignis is the key concept in Heidegger's thought after 1936. He devotes himself to this single concept in many of his later works, some of which have been published only recently. In his notion of Ereignis, he is playing with the expression "es gibt." To a certain extent, he is obsessed by this single phrase in his later thought. He thinks that it is a common feature of Indo-Germanic languages, though in some, such as Greek and Latin, the "It" is lacking as a separate word or phonetic form, but what is meant by the "It" is still represented. He says: "The area of meaning meant by the It extends from [the] irrelevant to the demonic."68 In a certain sense, the "es gibt" stands for Ereignis. Thus, it means more than its common rendering of "occurrence," "happening," or "event"; the translations "the event of Appropriation," "Appropriation," or more recently "enowning" reflect more accurately the sense Heidegger is trying to convey.
Time gives being, and itself is given by Ereignis. Both time and being are the gift of Ereignis. "Accordingly, the It that gives in 'It gives Being,' 'It gives time,' proves to be Appropriation [Ereignis]."69 Ereignis determines the destiny of being and extends time as the region (Gegend). This way it determines time and being into their own, that is, in their belonging together. Heidegger says: "What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation."70
In their belonging together, time and being are appropriated in Ereignis. Heidegger thinks that one cannot say "Ereignis is" or "there is (es gibt) Ereignis"; rather one should say "Ereignis appropriates (ereignet)." To appropriate itself, Ereignis must withdraw, that is, expropriate (enteignet). Ereignis withdraws from the boundless unconcealment of what is most fully its own. Withdrawal or expropriation (Enteignis) belongs to Ereignis. "By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself- rather, it preserves what is its own."71 The denial or withholding in Ereignis has already shown itself in the manner of sending and extending in which "It" gives being and time.
Heidegger thinks that "[t]he discussion of Appropriation is indeed the site of the farewell from Being and time, but Being and time remain, so to speak, as the gift of Appropriation."72 This is because Ereignis gives being and time while it withdraws; thus, being or time cannot totally identify themselves with Ereignis, but remain a gift of Ereignis. In its withdrawal, Ereignis sustains an absolute otherness, which is an otherness of total presencing, enclosing the otherness of the three times. This is different from the sense of otherness developed in Derrida or Levinas, which is primarily oriented either to the past or to the future. Derrida's differance is an absolute alterity in the sense that it is a "past" that has never been present and never will be. It keeps itself to be a trace or enigma. In Levinas, however, the other (autrui) is a relationship with the future, for the presence of the future in the present seems all the same accomplished face-to-face with the other. Levinas says: "I do not define the other by the future but the future by the other, for the very future of death consists in its total alterity."73 Otherness in this sense is like the strangeness of death, which always lies in the future.
To summarize, time according to Heidegger is an interpenetration of havingbeen, future, and present in which a fourth dimension of presencing manifests itself, and time itself is the gift of Ereignis, which remains as otherness in its withdrawal.
Tentative Conclusion
As we have seen, Longchenpa and the Dzogchen tradition in general understand the past to be no-longer, the future not-yet, and the present no-dwelling. In emphasizing the character of "no," Longchenpa shows the Buddhist inclination toward the insight of emptiness. To Longchenpa a Heideggerian understanding of present as to be "encountering with" is still a dwelling, and only in a no-dwelling and freely lettinggo mind can the ultimate reality manifest itself. Heidegger distances himself from the vulgar sense of time as a series of nownesses that turns out to be the very basis of substantial thinking. But he does not venture into emptiness, instead bringing out a picture of the interpenetration or interplay of the three times.
Both Longchenpa and Heidegger go beyond the conventional understanding of time by examining carefully the experience of the passage of time. In such an experience, a fourth time or dimension of time manifests itself to be presence or presencing. Such a presencing, for Longchenpa, is the coming-to-presence of the highest reality gzhi; for Heidegger, it is the gift of Ereignis, which itself withdraws and remains an otherness. By tracing time back to Ereignis or gzhi, both of them have investigated time in great depth. Being loaded concepts in their respective traditions, both Ereignis and gzhi bring up a dynamic process which breaks down the static barrier between time and the timeless as it is manifested in similar forms in the Western and Buddhist traditions.
The coincidence between the two thinkers is of great interest and importance. Is this because I interpret the Dzogchen tradition in a Heideggerian way, or because Heidegger's thought is too Buddhistic? Unless one finds actual evidence, it remains improbable that Heidegger had read or known anything about this fourteenthcentury Dzogchen master Longchenpa. Meanwhile, I have avoided using Heideggerian terms to interpret Longchenpa as Guenther so intentionally does. Nonetheless, the similarities between their concepts of four-dimensional time are still striking.
If I am allowed to speculate on the reason for this coincidence, I would say that one possibility is that they shared a certain common source in developing their views. For instance, in the Dzogchen tradition, fourfoldness occurs not only in its understanding of time but also in the concept of the four dynamic levels, and Dzogchen thought is considered to have its origin in a contact with Greek gnosticism.74 On the other hand, Heidegger in many ways develops his philosophy by tracing back to the Greek tradition, and his concept of the fourfold world is very much indebted to the ancient Greek worldview. Although Guenther warns us not to confuse the Dzogchen notion of fourfoldness with Heidegger's das Geviert,75 their obvious similarity in terms of fourfold time may still be attributed to their common source in the Greek tradition-a topic that certainly holds much promise for further research.
Another possibility, however, is that the quaternity might be embedded in the human mind, constituting a universal way of thinking. As is pointed out by C. G. Jung: "The quaternity is an archetype of almost universal occurrence," and "[t]he ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity."76 Jung's observation is confirmed by the Tantric tradition, including Dzogchen, where the mandala, a circle embracing quaternity, is popularly used in meditative and ritual practice. One can infer from this theory that by delving sufficiently deeply into our own minds, we will reach the common ground of quaternity, at which point it is not only time that will be seen as fourfold, but also the whole of reality.
The comparative approach has long been accused of being an exercise in magic. Now, however, our comparison of four-dimensional time in Dzogchen and Heidegger does seem to have something to do with magic, insofar as it involves the fundamental mystery of the human mind. That fourfold time is inherently a part of the mysterious processes of the human mind is a source of profound wonder-but equally intriguing are the astonishing coincidences in the thought of Longchenpa and Heidegger as they independently developed this idea.
Yao, Zhihua
10884 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
512
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Time is flying. The passage of time is usually viewed as a negative thing that brings us closer to death. To the conventional mind, it seems that we are moving ever forward, from a definite past into an uncertain future. The past is over; it is unchangeable, and in a certain sense it is "out there." The future, on the other hand, seems yet undetermined. It could turn out to be one thing or another. We often feel ourselves to be helpless spectators as the scope of the determined past edges its way into an uncertain future.
As time passes, we sadly realize that we are mortal and that there is a definite end to our lives. For this very reason, some may strive to maintain a longer life in this world, while others may imagine an eternal life in another world. Concerning time, we have many puzzles to contend with, such as what eternity is, how it is related to the passage of time, whether the passage of time is irreversible, whether things past are now no-longer, whether the future is unpredictable, whether or not the present exists, and so on.
The present article is an attempt to discuss such experiences of the passage of time. Among numerous individuals who have been pondering this mundane but nonetheless serious issue, I single out two: Longchenpa (1308-1363), who represents the Dzogchen tradition of Tantric Buddhism, and Heidegger (1889-1976), who represents the School of Phenomenology in the West. Instead of speculating on an eternal life, both of them attempt to look into the very phenomenon and experience of the passage of time and reveal to us a new dimension of time, the so-called fourth time or fourth dimension of time.
This article will proceed in four sections. In the first section, I will introduce a Buddhist practice in the Dzogchen tradition that deals with the experience of the passage of time. In the second section, Longchenpa's concept of four times (dusbzhi) will be analyzed and its significance for the history of Buddhism discussed. In the third section, I will examine Heidegger's concept of four-dimensional time and briefly discuss its elaboration by later philosophers. In conclusion, I will discuss the similarities and differences between the four-dimensional time theories as found in these two diverse traditions and the possible reasons for their striking similarities.
A Dzogchen Practice
Buddhist philosophy is not the product of purely intellectual speculation, but rather relies heavily on practice and experience. In the Buddhist view, any theory or concept has to be drawn from and applicable to meditative practice, what is not being considered empty speculation. In this interaction between knowledge and practice, one gains the wisdom to see into reality.
The following is an example of such a practical instruction in the Dzogchen tradition. In The Mirror: Advice on the Presence of Awareness, Namkhai Norbu, a contemporary Dzogchen master, gives the following advice to practitioners:
The recognition of our true State and the continuation of its presence really is the essence of all paths, the basis of all meditation, the conclusion of all practices, the path of all the secret methods, and the key to all the deeper teachings. This is why it is vitally important that we seek out our way to maintain continuous presence without being pulled off course.
This means: not hanging on to the past, not going after the future, and, without letting ourselves get involved in the illusory thoughts arising in the present moment, turning inwards and observing our own mind, leaving it in its true State beyond the limitations of past, present and future. Without letting ourselves be conditioned by contaminating conceptualization, without passing judgment on the State itself, whether indeed it even exists, whether it will turn out to be positive or negative, etc., we must stay focused in this authentic condition and not try to correct it.
Although the primordial State of total perfection is completely beyond the limits of past, present and future, one is not immediately aware of this and indeed has difficulty in recognizing it when first starting to practice, and therefore it is important to be on the alert against distraction by thoughts of the "three times."1
This is an instruction on how to maintain one's "true State." To keep one's mind in this true state, one must not be distracted by thoughts of the three times. To do this, one must not hang on to the past, go after the future, or get entangled in the present moment. This is the key to meditative practice. According to the instruction, the past is no-longer, and one should not follow it; the future has not yet arrived, and one should not anticipate it; the present is momentary, and one should not dwell on it. This practice is an antidote to our ordinary experience. In our everyday life, we either live in our memories of the past, anticipate the future, or hold on to the present moment. It seems that this is the only way that we can appreciate the value of time, and live a meaningful life during the passage of time. If there is no past, present, or future to hold on to, how can we live on?
The Dzogchen master answers: "Relax." Compared to many poets who burst into tears upon realizing the emptiness of the passage of time, the Dzogchen master is more skillful and firm in teaching how to deal with this difficult situation. It is actually the very goal of Buddhist practice to see through the passage of time and to realize the very nature of reality beyond the momentary and impermanent. Here "relax" not only means to take it easy; it is also the key to practice: let it be. Namkhai Norbu points out that "Dzogchen could be defined as a way to relax completely. This can be clearly understood from the terms used to denote the state of contemplation, such as 'leave it just as it is' (cog.bzhag), 'cutting loose one's tension' (khregs. chod), 'beyond effort' (rtsol.bral), and so on."2
With respect to the past, present, and future, one may find it easier to start with giving up anticipation of the future by making no effort to achieve spiritual attainment. Then one can cut off memory of the past by negating the self to be the agent of past deeds. This way one can experience the emptiness of "no-longer" and "not-yet." In this experience, there may still be some thoughts arising moment by moment, and eradicating them is the hardest part of the practice. Since the moment of thought is always in the present, in the sense that it is here and now, it is very difficult in practice not to dwell on the present, not to get involved in present thoughts, and to let them be. According to Namkhai Norbu's instruction, one should leave these thoughts just as they are without getting sidetracked, forgetting, or letting oneself get wrapped up in them.
It is in the non-dwelling of the past, present, and future that the true state of one's mind arises. This state, also called the primordial state of total perfection, is the state completely beyond the limits of the past, present, and future. And the goal of the meditative practice is to relax, that is, to be free from the distractions of thoughts of the "three times," and to maintain the presence of the authentic state. Relaxation and realization are thus two sides of a coin; as Namkhai Norbu says: "When the mind is naturally released and present, it comes to itself in its authentic State."3 Now the questions remains: why have a positive attitude toward the present? Why let the mind or its authentic state involve itself in the present-why not just let it go as illusory thought? How do you keep its presence without being reduced to grasping the present, that is, the "here and now"?
I feel that by "to remain present and relaxed" Namkhai Norbu means to maintain the presence of the natural, authentic state of perfection. "Present" here means to let it "be present," inferring a dynamic process of presenting. It is not a dwelling on the static here and now; rather it is a continuous effort and activity to maintain "presence." This is like a rowboat heading downstream. The rower cannot exert himself, but he has to maintain a certain direction so that the boat does not run aground, but moves with the flow of the water. At this point, a distinction between two senses of "present" by Masao Abe, a Zen scholar, is helpful. One is the relative present, considered to stand side by side or parallel with the past and future, and the other is the absolute present that embraces past, present, and future as their more fundamental basis.4
Therefore, we have to keep in mind that, to follow the teaching of the recognition of our true state and the continuation of its presence, "[t]he point is not to regard the movement as a negative thing, something to be rejected."5 In a traditional Buddhist context, however, it is rather difficult to appreciate a dynamic sense of presence and to treat it positively. This is because tranquillity is generally considered to be superior to movement, and one who achieves nirvana is said to eliminate all activities. In this sense, Dzogchen and, for that matter, Zen are unique in taking movement into account.
In meditative practice, when a momentary thought arises, an authentic state of calm is seen to arise side by side with it, so the key is not to be conditioned by thought, and yet not to pass judgment on it-that is, to consider whether or not its object exists, or whether it is positive or negative. One thought may disappear in a certain period of time, and another will then arise without interruption. This is what is called "movement." In the Dzogchen tradition it is necessary to learn to work with this movement. Movement and calmness or tranquillity are seen to be two aspects of one state, and the movement of thought to be the functioning of the state of clarity. When one is actually in meditation, in the state of pure presence, there is no difference between the calm state and movement. Thus, there is no need for one to seek a state that is without thought; rather one should just maintain one and the same state of presence in one's experience. As Garab Dorje says: "If there does arise [the movement of thoughts], be aware of the state in which they arise. If one is free of thoughts, be aware of the state in which one is free of them. Then there is no difference between the arising of thought and being free of it."6 Only by not-judging and lettingbe can one maintain the authentic state of perfection, which is both of movement and of tranquillity. As Namkhai Norbu points out: " 'To meditate' only means to keep presence both of the state of calm and of that of movement: there is nothing on which to meditate."7
Then how is this true state, which is beyond the past, present, and future, related to time? Is it totally different from time or only another dimension of time? Namkhai Norbu does not state this clearly. But in emphasizing its movement, he tends to take it to be part of time and yet be beyond the "three times" in the conventional sense. By tracing back to the early Dzogchen tradition, I found a better term for it: "timeless time" or the "fourth time."
The Four Times
Longchenpa, or Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa, was an eminent Dzogchen master and adept of the Nyingmapa School. He is one of Tibet's most celebrated writers, and in his relatively short life he produced an enormous number of works, amounting to two hundred and seventy titles. Throughout these works, he reveals himself as an independent and original thinker, though, in support of his own brilliant expositions, he quotes from the vast literature that had already developed during the early phase of Buddhism in Tibet. The notion of the "four times" (dus-bzhi) is one of the most interesting ideas I have found in his extensive output.
In his Naturally Liberated Mind, the Great Perfection (Mahasandhicittatasvamutki- nama, rDzogs-Pa Ch'en-Po Sems-Nyid Rang-Grol), while elaborating on the epithet of Sambhogakaya, which includes the pure Buddha-Land, the mandala, the Teachers of Five Classes, Primordial Wisdom, retinues of disciples, and so on, Longchenpa brings up the notion of the four times. He states the third and fifth epithets to be as follows:
(3) . . . the self-precept retinues of disciples of the ten directions and four times. (Translator's note reads "Dus-bZhi: past, present, future and timeless time.")
(5) The three times and timeless time is Kuntu Zangpo time, And it is the originally accomplished and changeless state.8
The phrase "ten directions and four times" (phyogs-bchu dus-bzhi) is found in some Tantric literature.9 The ten directions include east, south, west, north, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, zenith, and nadir. The four times, as indicated in the passage quoted above, are the past, present, future, and timeless time. Some commentators take this to mean four aeons, namely the Krta, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali Yugas.10 This, however, is in contrast to the standard notion of the "three times," which is established in the Abhidharma tradition and used throughout the subsequent history of Buddhist literature.11 The additional time may be the contribution of the general appreciation of quaternity in the Tantric tradition, which, again, may have its origin in an earlier source.
The fourth time is called no-time, timeless time, Kuntu Zangpo time, state of Kuntu Zangpo, or Samantabhadra time. Among these various names, Kuntu Zangpo or its Sanskrit equivalent, Samantabhadra, is a very loaded term in the Dzogchen tradition. It refers to the Buddha of the same name, and is considered to be the symbol of Dharmakaya,12 while in Bon teachings it refers to Sambhogakaya.13 According to Guenther, the expression Kuntu Zangpo "is synonymous with rig-pa, the cognition of being qua being, or a value-sustained cognition having a strongly aesthetic character." 14
To introduce the idea of the four times, Longchenpa starts with the experience of the three times. Like Namkhai Norbu, he expresses his experience of the past, present, and future in terms of "ceased," "not-lingering," and "not yet coming," respectively:
Past-it [i.e., mind] has ceased; future-it has not yet come into existence;
Present-it does not linger. It is neither within nor without nor anywhere.
Know it to be like the sky and immune to propositions about it.15
It is interesting to note that Longchenpa's understanding of the present to be notlingering is different from that of traditional Indian Buddhism. Vasubandhu, in his early Abhidharma and later Yogacara writings, gives a consistent definition of the three times:
[T]he time periods and the conditions are established through the operation of the activity [of] a dharma: when a dharma does not accomplish its operation, it is future; when it is accomplishing it, it is present; and when its operation has come to an end, it is past.16
Among these definitions, the future as "not accomplishing" and the past as "coming to an end" are similar to Longchenpa's notions of "not yet coming" and "ceased." But as for the present, Vasubandhu understands it to mean "be accomplishing," while Longchenpa holds it to be "not-lingering." By the same token, this view is different from Nagarjuna's understanding the present to be "what is arising here and now (pratyutpanna)."17 At this point, Longchenpa comes closer to the notion of three times held among Japanese Buddhists and mentioned by Dogen in the following passage:
[A common belief] says that the past life has already perished, the future is yet to come, and the present does not stay. The past did not necessarily already perish, the future is not inevitably yet to come, and the present is not inexorably impermanent. If you learn the not-staying, the not-yet, and the no-longer as present, future, and past, respectively, you should certainly understand the reason that the not-yet is the past, present, and future. [The same holds true of the no-longer and the not-staying.]18
Here Dogen is sophisticated enough to go further than what he calls the "common belief" of three times, which is held by Longchenpa. Examining this carefully, though, one will find that Dogen is not really against this common notion, but is rather trying to emphasize the interpenetration of the three times, which obviously bears the mark of the Huayan way of thinking. In a similar way, Longchenpa, by taking this notion of three times into account, seeks to bring out a further dimension of time.
In the quotation above from Longchenpa, the mind is seen to have ceased activity in the past, not yet come to existence in the future, and does not linger in the present, and thus it cannot be located in any of the three times. For this reason, it is empty like the sky, and one cannot have any conception of it. This is one aspect of mind's nature. On the other hand, Longchenpa says that it is wrong to search for the mind either in the past, the present, or the future, for it is always there, "naturally remaining identical with itself." This self-existence, like emptiness, is beyond any conception. Thus, one should not be "seeking mind by mind." Rather, one should relax, let oneself be, and thus let the mind be. This is beautifully put by Longchenpa:
It is not in the has-been, nor is it on the side of the not-yet;
It is not in a now, but is a state naturally remaining identical with itself;
Instead of seeking mind by mind, let be.19
After one regains his true mind by relaxing and letting words, thoughts, and talk pass by, then how is this mind related to time? Is it simply beyond time? Longchenpa says the mind can be seen as the "time" that remains when one transcends the three times. In other words, when past, present, and future are not time, the mind or pristine cognitiveness is itself time:
This self-existing pristine cognitiveness, (evoked through) the Guru's sustaining power,
Is seen when words and thoughts and talk have passed away.
To see it then as time
Is (the moment) when the three aspects of time are no-time, and a "before" or a "later" can no longer be distinguished.
It is called Prajnaparamita, Madhyamika,
Zhi-byed, calming (the rush of) propositions and suffering, Mahamudra,
rDzogs-chen, the very meaningfulness of meaningfulness.20
Here Longchenpa does not show us in detail how the three times are no-time. The key point for him seems to be the making of no distinction between before and after. Moreover, he attributes this view to various traditions in the history of Buddhism, such as Prajnaparamita, Madhyamika, Zhi-byed, Mahamudra, and rDzogs-chen. Among these teachings, Nagarjuna's argument that the three times are no-time can be singled out to be representative. The very point of this argument is that time cannot be conceived of as an entity existing independently of temporal phenomena, but must itself be regarded as a set of relations among them. That is, the only mode of existence that time has is as a set of relations among empirical phenomena, or as the provisional distinction of before and after. Apart from these relations and distinctions, there is no time.21
Since the existence of the three times is based on the provisional distinction of before and after, if there is no such distinction, then there is no time in the conventional sense. But the state of mind or cognitiveness is seen to be a "time" in the sense that there are no temporal distinctions or separations, which makes this time different from the three times that are based on provisional distinctions. Longchenpa says:
In the simultaneity of rising and being free, one is free from all emotions;
Having gone beyond subjective ideas, one engages in this very reach and range of calm and peace,
In the vortex of meaningfulness, when the three aspects of time do not exist as time-
As in a phantom, not introducing any break in time.22
One distinct feature of the Dzogchen teaching is that it still names the state of no-time as a time or real time. And the concept of timeless time is unique in the history of Buddhism. In the early Buddhist literature, there is the notion of the "timeless" (akalika) in reference to the unconditional state, but not that of "timeless time."23 The Abhidharma tradition makes a clear distinction and contrast between the three times and the timeless, or the conditional reality and unconditional space and nirvana. In this tradition, space is superior to time, and cessation (nirodha) is preferable to action. Time, being a mark of the profane world, can never be considered in terms of eternity. In his Abhidharmakosabhasya, Vasubandhu indicates such a distinction by saying "the conditioned dharmas of the three time periods are karanahetu; the unconditioned dharmas are outside of time."24
Nagarjuna, as I mentioned earlier, takes time to be a derived notion, and it is only valid in the conventional sense. At the ultimate level, there is neither past, present, nor future. To show that time only exists as a derived notion, Nagarjuna argues that "in the teachings of the Buddha mostly samaya is used and it is only rarely that ka la is used."25 The distinction between samaya and kala by Nagarjuna shows that Indian Buddhist scholars in general are arguing against the view held by other Indian philosophical schools, such as Jainism, Vaisesika, and Nyaya, which takes time to be an all-pervading, partless substance.26 And the term kala is heavily loaded with this substantialist sense, while Buddhism from its very beginning has attacked such a substantial way of thinking with its fundamental doctrines of no-self, impermanence, and nirvana. As a result, it has become a taboo in the Buddhist tradition to appreciate time in the sense of an all-pervasive dynamic reality. Instead, time is only treated as a mark of the impermanent, profane conditioned world.
The first attempt to attack such a taboo can be seen in the Milindapanha, a sutra of early Buddhism, where the distinction is made between the "time that exists" and the "time that does not."27 Here one gets a hint that time that does not exist could in a certain sense be referring to timeless time. But the text goes on to say that the root of time is ignorance, and that liberation results from an evolution from the time that exists to the time that does not. This way, time is again categorized according to the dualistic distinction of conditional and unconditional realities.
To break down the barrier between samsara and nirvana, the conditional and the unconditional world, is one of the major aims of the Mahayana school. However, so far as the issue of time is concerned, they still take no-time to be superior to time and do not really appreciate time in the sense of dynamic movement. This situation did not change until the Dzogchen tradition brought together time and the timeless, allowing the timeless to penetrate into time. Having its origin in Tathagatagarbha thought, the Dzogchen program is to keep dynamic movement in its scope. As Guenther points out: "What distinguishes rDzogs-chen thinking from all other modes of thought is that it is pure process thinking."28 The Buddha nature is considered to be all pervasive and creatively transforming the conditional world, which is categorized by the three times. The key here is to appreciate not only its all-pervasive nature but also its creative action of transformation. This inevitably leads to a reinterpretation and redefinition of terms that are otherwise commonly used in the predominantly static way in which ordinary language is structured.
The concept of timeless time opens up a new dimension in the Buddhist worldview. The reason that the Dzogchen tradition still calls the timeless a "time" is that it takes both time and the timeless to be of the same nature of dynamic transformation. The no-time or fourth time is as dynamic as the three times. This is not only experienced in one's mind but also can be extended to the whole realm of existence. As Guenther says: "This meaning-rich gestalt dynamics is always and everywhere present, pervading everything from the highest imaginable reality (Kun-tu bzang-po) down to the smallest louse."29 Actually the timeless time is itself called by Longchenpa Kuntu Zangpo or Samantabhadra, which equates to the highest reality:
The primordially empty Mind, which has no root,
Is not defiled by the phenomenal appearance of samsara and nirvana.
Throughout the three times and timeless time, the state of Kunzu Zangpo,
The essence of the changeless perfection at the basis is
Undefiled by the appearances of the six objects, like the water-moon [the moon's reflection in water].30
Furthermore, he says:
The time is not a determinate event, but the ground (Being-as-such) being complete and not altering (position) or changing.
Samantabhadra time, in which the three aspects of time are timeless,
The overruling prereflectively experienced meaning in which everything is complete and alike,
Is a reach and range pure in itself from the very beginning.31
To describe the highest reality, Longchenpa adopts terms such as "the primordially empty Mind," "no-root," "not defiled by samsara and nirvana," "changeless," "perfection," "the basis," "the ground," "complete," "not altering," "not changing," "pure," "in itself," and so on. In Tibetan a single term gzhi (*asraya) is used to denote this reality. Literally meaning "ground" or "basis," gzhi is usually translated as "reason," "the whole," or "Being." According to the Dzogchen teaching, this reality is purely dynamic, and its creative, dynamic nature ensures that it is never "at rest." "This 'never-being-at-rest' expresses itself in a complementarity that . . . is imaged as Kun-tu bzang-po (the male aspect) and Kun-tu bzang-mo (the female aspect)."32
In the Dzogchen tradition, Kuntu Zangpo and Kuntu Zangmo are usually represented as an image of a naked man and woman in intimate embrace. However, one should not stick to its anthropomorphic associations. The male Kuntu Zangpo symbolizes the principle of the lighting-up or coming-to-presence (snang-cha) of gzhi, and the female Kuntu Zangmo the principle of openness or nothingness (stongcha). Their nakedness signifies that they are the purest of the pure, and no ornaments or drapery can interfere with their pure dynamics. And their intimate embrace symbolizes the complementarity or inseparability of these two principles.33
Kuntu Zangpo, being the fourth dimension of time, does not stand outside gzhi or the highest reality, but is within the unfolding and presenting of the reality. In this process of unfolding, the space-like principle of openness or nothingness can make room for the dynamics of the highest reality to be possible. On the other hand, the principle of lighting-up or coming-to-presence as dynamic "activity" (thabs) shows the very nature of nothingness or openness. This dynamic process, called "creativity" (rtsal), "play" (rol-pa), or "ornament" (rgyan), reflects the inner dynamics and spontaneity or spontaneous givenness (lhun-grub) of gzhi.34
This is called the self-organizing principle of the highest reality. And it is rather crucial whether one recognizes such a self-manifestation process as gzhi itself. If one does, one will be enlightened into the highest reality; "If, however, one does not recognize this auto-presencing of Being [gzhi] as an auto-presencing, this (failure) becomes the reason for going astray into the status of a mentation-governed (sentient) being (sems-can) within the three world spheres."35 That is, one will fall into the circle of samsara.
To summarize, time in the Dzogchen understanding not only consists of three times of no-longer, not-yet, and no-dwelling, but also of a fourth Kuntu Zangpo time characterized by its coming-to-presence, which reveals the very nature of the highest reality, gzhi, which is self-presentation.
Four-dimensional Time
Among Western philosophers, Heidegger is one of the few who treats time seriously and brings it within the scope of metaphysics, thus breaking through the "'gap' between 'temporal' being and 'supratemporal' eternal being,"36 which has remained a fundamental distinction throughout the history of Western philosophy. By taking time to be the only secret path to being, he has totally changed the outlook of traditional Western metaphysics in the sense that he brings change and dynamics into the dominant substantialist way of thinking.
Heidegger starts his metaphysical questioning of being with human existence, which he indicates by the use of the technical term Dasein. This usage has a direct source in the approach of the phenomenological movement, which focuses on one's immanent experience and thus avoids traditional dogmatism. Though Heidegger is critiqued for his anthropological turning in the circle of phenomenology, he still operates along the lines of phenomenology with the exception that he expands a Husserlian static perception to a living experience of human existence. In this sense, he comes closer to Buddhism, whose entire strategy is to experience, analyze, and transcend human existence.
As for the issue of time, Heidegger does not attempt to provide a metaphysical definition of time to begin with, but rather starts with temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as the experience of human existence. In the experience of time, he challenges the conventional notions of the three times, and warns about keeping a distance from "all of the meanings of 'future,' 'past,' and 'present' initially urging themselves upon us from the vulgar concept of time."37 In his view, the vulgar concept of time arises from an inauthentic temporality or an inauthentic understanding of time, which is in contrast to the authentic temporality that he is exploring.
Continuing with his exploration of authentic temporality, Heidegger makes use of some new terminology. When he refers to "past" (Vergangenheit), he uses the term "having-been" (Gewesenheit). "Past," literally what has passed away, is a "no-longer" as understood by Longchenpa and by Buddhism in general. To Heidegger, this is a vulgarity and hence an inauthentic understanding of the past. To differentiate himself from this understanding, he uses the word "having-been" to indicate the sense of the "already-being-in" of the past. For him, what is past is not "nolonger- now but earlier," but, on the contrary, what he thinks of as "it is never past, but is always already having-been in the sense of 'I-am-as-having-been."'38 This having-been brings one "back to" what has been happening, thus making it "a constituent of the ecstatic unity of the temporality of Da-sein."39 It is through this crucial distinction between "passing away" and "coming back" that Heidegger contrasts the ordinary usage of "the past" from what he calls "the having-been." By the same token, Heidegger distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic understanding of having-been by the terms retrieve (Wiederholen) and forgottenness (Vergessen), respectively.
For the future, Heidegger does not pick up a new term. But the German word that he uses, Zukunft, is very different from the English "future," which, like the German word Futur, denotes a chronological sense of "later time" and indicates a rather linear understanding of time. Zukunft, on the other hand, in German can mean zukommen, or to come, and ankunft, or to arrive, and an equivalence may be found in the Old English word "advent." Therefore, the future is not denoted in a chronological sense of "not-yet-now," but instead as "being-ahead-of-oneself."40 In anticipation of going ahead of oneself, one makes the future come toward itself. Thus, anticipation is seen to be the authentic mode of the future. On the other hand, awaiting, or passively longing for a future point of time, is considered to be inauthentic. Here it is interesting to notice that the anticipation of the future is seen to be an attachment in Buddhism, which would consider an authentic mode to be nonanticipation of the future.
Among the English words for the three times, the "present" best matches its German equivalence in Heidegger's usage. The German word Gegenwart literally means to be present in a certain place or event. It refers not only to physically bringing forth something, but also to calling up something in one's mind. Thus, the present is to "be present," that is, "letting something be encountered."41 This understanding denotes the present in an active sense in that one is always encountering or being-together-with something. Heidegger also distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic presents to be the moment (Augenblick) and making present (Gegenwαrtigen), respectively. His understanding is that the moment being an authentic present "lets us encounter for the first time what can be 'in a time' as something at hand or objectively present,"42 while making present marks a general quality of the present, for "every present makes present, but not every present is 'in the moment."'43
While treating "making present" to be the inauthentic present, Heidegger does not distinguish the present (Gegenwart) from "presence" (Anwesenheit), and he uses the two terms interchangeably. This makes the phenomenon of the present more complicated. He says: "Presencing, presence speaks of the present [Aus Anwesen, Anwesenheit spricht Gegenwart]. According to current representations, the present, together with past and future, forms the character of time. Being is determined as presence by time."44 This became a topic for Derrida, and he observes that in Being and Time and in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics it is difficult to distinguish rigorously between presence as Anwesenheit and presence as Gegenwαrtigkeit, and in other works Gegenwαrtigkeit becomes more and more a restriction of Anwesenheit.45
Though not distinguishing the present and presencing or presence, Heidegger sharply contrasts the present to nowness (Jetzt), which is taken to be the key character in the vulgar concept of time. He thinks that "the present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the sense of the now that the present as presence can in no way be determined in terms of the present as the now. The reverse would rather seem possible."46 The relationship between these three concepts can be summarized as follows: "Time is presencing as present: 'present' (Gegenwart) is nothing but presence (Anwesenheit), which cannot be determined in terms of the present as the now."47 Heidegger thinks that the history of Western philosophy is dominated by this vulgar understanding of time:
For as soon as reflection on the essence of time began, at the end of Greek philosophy with Aristotle, time itself had to be taken as something somehow present, ousia tis. Consequently time was considered from the standpoint of "now," the actual moment. The past is the "no-longer-now," the future is the "not-yet-now."48
In this vulgar understanding, time is a succession of nows uninterrupted and without gaps. No matter how far one divides the now, it is still always now. In this uninterrupted succession of nows, every now is already either a just now or a rightaway. Heidegger points out:
If the characterization of time keeps primarily and exclusively to this succession, no beginning and no end can be found in principle in it as such. Every last now, as a now, is always already a right-away that is no-longer, thus it is time in the sense of the no-longer- now, of the past. Every first now is always a just-now-not-yet, thus it is time in the sense of the not-yet-now, the "future." Time is thus endless "in both directions."49
As a result, one has the one-dimensional linear time as experienced in ordinary life. This vulgar understanding can be characterized by its dwelling on nowness, which in the Buddhist view is again an attachment to be gotten rid of. Jean-Luc Marion confirms Heidegger's observation by pointing out that "This ontological overdetermination of a primacy of the present leads to a double reduction of the future and of the past: the past finishes and the future begins as soon as the present begins or finishes. Their respective temporalities count only negatively, as a double nonpresent, even a double nontime."50 Here "the present" is used in the sense of "here and now." The nowness cancels out past and future, thus leaving one attached to the static here and now.
To detach himself from the nowness or "objective present" (Vorhandenheit), Heidegger is in favor of a futural orientation: "the future has priority in the ecstatic unity of primordial and authentic temporality. . . . Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself out of the authentic future, and indeed in such a way that, futurally having-been, it first arouses the present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future."51 This way, he takes possibility to be superior to actuality. In his view, human existence is always ahead of oneself and thus keeps an open horizon of being in the future. This possibility of moving toward the future also makes time itself dynamic and breaks the chain of nowness. Here it is interesting to notice that for the same purpose of transcending static time, Derrida is in favor of the past. His key concept differance is "a 'past' that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence."52
Though the future has priority over the past and the present, in Heidegger's view the three times interpenetrate each other. The present arises in the unity of the future and the having-been, and thus the horizon of a present temporalizes itself equiprimordially with those of the future and the having-been. The same is true with the past and the future. As Heidegger puts it: "Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having-been temporality."53 This temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is a unity of motions of "toward," "back to," and "together with" that reveals itself to be an ecstatic moving out of itself. This picture of the interpenetration of the three times is very similar to the view of time in Dogen and Huayan philosophy.
Though he discusses temporality in great detail, in Being and Time Heidegger does not get into time itself, which is supposed to be the topic of the unfinished part of the book. In a 1962 lecture titled On Time and Being, Heidegger reveals a part of his thinking on time. In this lecture, the leading question remains the same as in Being and Time, and he continues his notions of the interpenetration or unity of the three times, in which each of them is presencing and revealing the others. This leads to the discussions of the dimension or dimensionality of time, ending up with the notion of four-dimensional time.
Time or temporality as explained above consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past, and present. Having-been offers the future to itself, and the reciprocal relation of both at the same time brings about the present. It is in this sense of opening up that one talks about the dimension or dimensionality of time. "Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness."54 This threefold interplay of reaching out already reveals three dimensions of time.
However, there is something more if one examines time carefully, and it is the presencing (Anwesen) that has been discussed above. As we know, in Heidegger's Being and Time, presencing is nearly identical with the present. But in his On Time and Being, he holds that though presencing is given in the present, "[n]ot every presencing is necessarily the present."55 For presencing also manifests itself in absence, that is, what has been or what is to come, and this manner of presencing by no means coincides with presencing in the sense of the immediate present. Thus, in a way, presencing is the unity of the three interplaying ways of presencing and is the very dimension that makes these three dimensions and their interplay possible. Heidegger says:
In the approaching of what is not yet present and in the having-been of what is no longer present and even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. We cannot attribute the presencing to be thus thought to one of the three dimensions of time, to the present which would seem obvious. Rather, the unity of time's three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak-not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional [vierdimensional].56
This is a most interesting statement, but, unfortunately, not many Heideggerian scholars have paid attention to it. Instead, many of us may be familiar with the concept of the fourfold world (Geviert Welt) found in the later works of Heidegger. This is a rather mystical view of the world, wherein the world consists of four elements, namely gods, heaven, earth, and mortals, and their interplay brings the whole world into a meaningful process of revealing. This worldview is called a playful mirror (Spiel-Spiegel), in the sense that each of the four reaches out in its own way while at the same time reflecting others in itself.
It is in the same manner that four dimensions of time interplay and reflect each other in a mirror-like realm. Using the metaphor of the playful mirror, if we say that object, image, and mirror are three dimensions, then the light that makes seeing a mirror image possible is the fourth dimension. It is the light that lights up the process of seeing and brings object, image, and mirror into play. In the interplay of the four, they reflect and reveal one another; thus, one sees an image in the mirror. In this metaphor, the light is not something beyond; rather it is the revealing or presencing of the thing itself. Thus, Heidegger thinks that what we called the fourth dimension of time should actually be the first, for it is the most original and determines the rest. This presencing makes the other three dimensions possible by the way it "brings about to each its own presencing, holds them apart thus opened and so holds them toward one another in the nearness by which the three dimensions remain near one another."57
In this sense the fourth dimension of time is the nearness (Nαhe) of presencing out of present, past, and future, the nearness that unifies time's threefold opening up. Meanwhile, the presencing that brings the three times near has the character of denial and withholding, for it brings future, past, and present near to one another by distancing them or holding them apart. "In true time and its time-space, the giving of what has-been, that is, of what is no longer present, the denial of the present manifested itself. In the giving of future, that is, of what is not yet present, the withholding of the present manifested itself. Denial and withholding exhibit the same trait as selfwithholding in sending: namely, self-withdrawal."58 This way it keeps open what has been by denying its advent as present, and keeps open the approach from the future by withholding the present from the approach. This is the manner by which what has been, what is about to be, and the present reach out toward each other.
Derrida is one of the very few who offer a follow-up to Heidegger's discussions at this point, and he interprets the unity of three times to be the play itself. He says: "The play (Zuspiel) also marks, works on, manifests the unity of the three dimensions of time, which is to say a fourth dimension: The 'giving' of the es gibt Zeit belongs to the play of this 'quadridimensionality,' to this properness of time that would thus be quadridimensional."59 Here Derrida draws upon Heidegger's notion of "es gibt Zeit" and thinks that the es gibt plays (spielt) in the movement of the disclosing (Entbergen), in that which frees from the withdrawal (retrait), when what is hidden shows itself or what is sheltered appears. He understands the giving to be the play; meanwhile the play is a play of gift. Thus, the fourth dimension of time is not a figure, or a manner of speaking or of counting; rather it is the giving of the thing itself. "This thing itself of time implies the play of the four and the play of the gift."60
For Derrida, this gift language is not a superficial correlation in language; rather it is deep-rooted in thought itself. He says: "That a gift is called a present, that 'to give' may also be said 'to make a present,' 'to give a present' (in French as well as in English, for example), this will not be for us just a verbal clue, a linguistic chance or alea."61 The present in the sense of gift is certainly not the present as the now being distinct from the no-longer-now of the past and the not-yet-now of the future. Rather this present speaks of presence, the fourth dimension of time. Derrida brings the ordinary experience of giving a gift to its relationship with time in a sophisticated way:
To give a gift requires that one then forget, and asks the other to forget, absolutely, that a gift has been given, so that the gift, if there is one, would vanish without a trace. If time is a calendar, a ring or annum, a circle or a cycle, then the gift calls upon us to tear up the circle of time, to breach the circular movement of exchange and reciprocity, and in a "moment" of madness, to do something for once without or beyond reason, in a time without time, to give without return.62
To give a gift is not for the purpose of exchange or reciprocity; it means giving without return. Thus, the giver and receiver both need to forget and leave no trace of the gift in their minds. This is contrary to the ordinary conception of gift, which is for the purpose of memorizing. With the vanishing of memory or trace, one goes beyond the conventional reason of exchange, and breaks the circle of time. A moment of "time without time" emerges in such an experience of a giving that leaves behind the cycle of time. Thus the present in the sense of gift is a time without time. Here it is important to notice that the phrase "time without time" comes very close to Longchenpa's notion of timeless time.
Marion, on the other hand, develops the idea of the present-being-gift in a theological context. He talks about the Eucharistic presence of Christ in consecrated bread and wine:
Not first of a privileged temporalization of time (the here and now of the present) but of the present, that is to say, of the gift. Eucharistic presence must be understood starting most certainly from the present, but the present must be understood first as a gift that is given. One must measure the dimensions of eucharistic presence against the fullness of this gift. . . . The rigor of the gift must order the dimensions of the temporality where the present is made gift.63
In Heidegger's own terms, the fourth time in the sense of presence or presencing shows itself to be letting-presence (Anwesenlassen). And letting shows its character in bringing into unconcealment. To allow presence means to unconceal, to bring to openness. This Heideggerian term of letting or Gelassenheit comes close to Longchenpa's terminology of rig-pa cog-gzhag-the letting-be that is gzhi's ecstatic intensity. 64 In unconcealing, a giving prevails, the giving that gives presencing in letting-presence. The sense of giving is enhanced by the expressions "Es gibt Zeit" or "Es gibt Sein." Heidegger thinks that one cannot say "time is" or "being is"; rather one should say "Es gibt Zeit" or "Es gibt Sein." Different from the English expression "there be," "es gibt" has the literal meaning of "it gives," from which Heidegger develops the gift-language.
Heidegger further distinguishes two modes of giving: sending (Schicken) and extending (Reichen). In "Es gibt Sein," the giving shows itself to be sending. Sending is the giving of being. The giving of being holds itself back and withdraws. Such a giving is called sending. Extending, on the other hand, is the giving of time: "We call the giving which gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time."65 In this extending there also belongs a keeping back, a denial or withdrawal. For the denial of the present and the withholding of the present play within the giving of what has been and what will be. In a denial extending, the giving in "Es gibt Zeit" opens up the four-dimensional realm. In this way, four-dimensional true time has reached us.
As Heidegger understands it, extending is superior to sending, for "[s]ending of Being lies in the extending of time, [the] opening and concealing of manifold presence into the open realm of time-space."66 Thus, one may think that the fourfold extending of time could be the "It" (es) that gives the being in "Es gibt Sein." But Heidegger thinks time by no means is the "It" that gives being, "[f]or time itself remains the gift of an 'It gives' whose giving preserves the realm in which presence is extended."67 Time as well as being remains to be the gift of an "It," which can be determined only in Ereignis.
Ereignis is the key concept in Heidegger's thought after 1936. He devotes himself to this single concept in many of his later works, some of which have been published only recently. In his notion of Ereignis, he is playing with the expression "es gibt." To a certain extent, he is obsessed by this single phrase in his later thought. He thinks that it is a common feature of Indo-Germanic languages, though in some, such as Greek and Latin, the "It" is lacking as a separate word or phonetic form, but what is meant by the "It" is still represented. He says: "The area of meaning meant by the It extends from [the] irrelevant to the demonic."68 In a certain sense, the "es gibt" stands for Ereignis. Thus, it means more than its common rendering of "occurrence," "happening," or "event"; the translations "the event of Appropriation," "Appropriation," or more recently "enowning" reflect more accurately the sense Heidegger is trying to convey.
Time gives being, and itself is given by Ereignis. Both time and being are the gift of Ereignis. "Accordingly, the It that gives in 'It gives Being,' 'It gives time,' proves to be Appropriation [Ereignis]."69 Ereignis determines the destiny of being and extends time as the region (Gegend). This way it determines time and being into their own, that is, in their belonging together. Heidegger says: "What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation."70
In their belonging together, time and being are appropriated in Ereignis. Heidegger thinks that one cannot say "Ereignis is" or "there is (es gibt) Ereignis"; rather one should say "Ereignis appropriates (ereignet)." To appropriate itself, Ereignis must withdraw, that is, expropriate (enteignet). Ereignis withdraws from the boundless unconcealment of what is most fully its own. Withdrawal or expropriation (Enteignis) belongs to Ereignis. "By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself- rather, it preserves what is its own."71 The denial or withholding in Ereignis has already shown itself in the manner of sending and extending in which "It" gives being and time.
Heidegger thinks that "[t]he discussion of Appropriation is indeed the site of the farewell from Being and time, but Being and time remain, so to speak, as the gift of Appropriation."72 This is because Ereignis gives being and time while it withdraws; thus, being or time cannot totally identify themselves with Ereignis, but remain a gift of Ereignis. In its withdrawal, Ereignis sustains an absolute otherness, which is an otherness of total presencing, enclosing the otherness of the three times. This is different from the sense of otherness developed in Derrida or Levinas, which is primarily oriented either to the past or to the future. Derrida's differance is an absolute alterity in the sense that it is a "past" that has never been present and never will be. It keeps itself to be a trace or enigma. In Levinas, however, the other (autrui) is a relationship with the future, for the presence of the future in the present seems all the same accomplished face-to-face with the other. Levinas says: "I do not define the other by the future but the future by the other, for the very future of death consists in its total alterity."73 Otherness in this sense is like the strangeness of death, which always lies in the future.
To summarize, time according to Heidegger is an interpenetration of havingbeen, future, and present in which a fourth dimension of presencing manifests itself, and time itself is the gift of Ereignis, which remains as otherness in its withdrawal.
Tentative Conclusion
As we have seen, Longchenpa and the Dzogchen tradition in general understand the past to be no-longer, the future not-yet, and the present no-dwelling. In emphasizing the character of "no," Longchenpa shows the Buddhist inclination toward the insight of emptiness. To Longchenpa a Heideggerian understanding of present as to be "encountering with" is still a dwelling, and only in a no-dwelling and freely lettinggo mind can the ultimate reality manifest itself. Heidegger distances himself from the vulgar sense of time as a series of nownesses that turns out to be the very basis of substantial thinking. But he does not venture into emptiness, instead bringing out a picture of the interpenetration or interplay of the three times.
Both Longchenpa and Heidegger go beyond the conventional understanding of time by examining carefully the experience of the passage of time. In such an experience, a fourth time or dimension of time manifests itself to be presence or presencing. Such a presencing, for Longchenpa, is the coming-to-presence of the highest reality gzhi; for Heidegger, it is the gift of Ereignis, which itself withdraws and remains an otherness. By tracing time back to Ereignis or gzhi, both of them have investigated time in great depth. Being loaded concepts in their respective traditions, both Ereignis and gzhi bring up a dynamic process which breaks down the static barrier between time and the timeless as it is manifested in similar forms in the Western and Buddhist traditions.
The coincidence between the two thinkers is of great interest and importance. Is this because I interpret the Dzogchen tradition in a Heideggerian way, or because Heidegger's thought is too Buddhistic? Unless one finds actual evidence, it remains improbable that Heidegger had read or known anything about this fourteenthcentury Dzogchen master Longchenpa. Meanwhile, I have avoided using Heideggerian terms to interpret Longchenpa as Guenther so intentionally does. Nonetheless, the similarities between their concepts of four-dimensional time are still striking.
If I am allowed to speculate on the reason for this coincidence, I would say that one possibility is that they shared a certain common source in developing their views. For instance, in the Dzogchen tradition, fourfoldness occurs not only in its understanding of time but also in the concept of the four dynamic levels, and Dzogchen thought is considered to have its origin in a contact with Greek gnosticism.74 On the other hand, Heidegger in many ways develops his philosophy by tracing back to the Greek tradition, and his concept of the fourfold world is very much indebted to the ancient Greek worldview. Although Guenther warns us not to confuse the Dzogchen notion of fourfoldness with Heidegger's das Geviert,75 their obvious similarity in terms of fourfold time may still be attributed to their common source in the Greek tradition-a topic that certainly holds much promise for further research.
Another possibility, however, is that the quaternity might be embedded in the human mind, constituting a universal way of thinking. As is pointed out by C. G. Jung: "The quaternity is an archetype of almost universal occurrence," and "[t]he ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity."76 Jung's observation is confirmed by the Tantric tradition, including Dzogchen, where the mandala, a circle embracing quaternity, is popularly used in meditative and ritual practice. One can infer from this theory that by delving sufficiently deeply into our own minds, we will reach the common ground of quaternity, at which point it is not only time that will be seen as fourfold, but also the whole of reality.
The comparative approach has long been accused of being an exercise in magic. Now, however, our comparison of four-dimensional time in Dzogchen and Heidegger does seem to have something to do with magic, insofar as it involves the fundamental mystery of the human mind. That fourfold time is inherently a part of the mysterious processes of the human mind is a source of profound wonder-but equally intriguing are the astonishing coincidences in the thought of Longchenpa and Heidegger as they independently developed this idea.
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