The Taboo of Enlightenment
Do we really believe we can awaken? Stephan Bodian talks with popular lay teacher Adyashanti.
One of the most popular Buddhist teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area these days is not a Tibetan lama or a traditional Zen master but an unconventional, an American-born lay teacher named Adyashanti. His public talks and dialogues (which he calls satsangs, a term borrowed from India’s Advaita, or "nondual," tradition) attract hundreds of seekers, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.
At a satsang I attended recently at a church near Lake Merritt, in downtown Oakland, Adyashanti sat on a large chair at the front of the hall, flanked by flowers. After a period of silence and a brief dharma talk, in which he focused on "the futility of seeking what we already are," he invited members of the audience to engage in dialogue with him.
One man asked about the value of a regular meditation practice, and Adyashanti observed, "Whenever you aren’t manipulating your experience, you’re meditating. As soon as you meditate because you think you should, you’re controlling your experience again, and you’ve squeezed all the value out of your meditation."
Again and again, he urged students to connect directly, in the moment, with the palpable truth of their own inherent nature—with the one who, in Adyashanti’s words, is "always looking out through your eyes right now." The intensity and intimacy of these encounters reminded me of a kind of public dokusan, the private exchange between master and disciple in traditional Zen.
Although Adyashanti rarely talks about Zen or Buddhism these days, he did train closely with a Buddhist teacher, spending more than a dozen years practicing meditation under the guidance of Arvis Justi, a lay teacher in the lineage of Zen master Taizan Maezumi, the founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Beginning at age nineteen, Steve Gray (as Adyashanti was then called) shifted his youthful intensity from bicycle racing and backpacking to the pursuit of enlightenment, attending weekly gatherings in Justi’s living room, sitting periodic week-long retreats with Jakusho Kwong Roshi, a disciple of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and logging three or four hours each day in a meditation shed he constructed in his parents’ backyard.
At age twenty-five, while sitting alone on his cushion, Gray had a classic kensho, or awakening experience, in which—as he describes it now—he "penetrated to the emptiness of all things and realized that the Buddha I had been chasing was what I was." As powerful as this experience had been, however, Gray knew immediately that he had seen just the tip of the iceberg. "I had discovered that I am what I’ve been seeking," he explains. "Then the next koan arose spontaneously: What is this that I am?"
Although Gray continued to meditate, absorbed by this new question, he reports that all sense of effort and anxiety disappeared. During this period, he married and went to work in his father’s machine shop. "I was happy," he recalls, "but I knew it wasn’t enough." As his inquiry deepened, his practice diverged from the traditional format, and he lost interest in doing retreats or relying on his teachers for guidance. Instead, his energies turned inward and became, in his words, "exclusively focused on realizing the truth of my own being." In addition to meditating, he spent many hours sitting in coffee shops writing out answers to the questions, or life koans, that spontaneously came to him.
