Tricycle | Awake in the World

Tricycle: Do you think the teachers themselves are practicing enough? 

Goldstein: I don't monitor people's lives and practices, so I really don't know. I haven't yet met fully accomplished Western dharma masters. Or maybe I've met them and have not recognized them. But even if only a few in every generation come to full realization, that would be a great thing.

Tricycle: What chance do we have of maintaining the true dharma if we have generations of half-cooked understanding?  

Joseph Goldstein and Dipa Ma in the late 70s in Barre, Massachusetts

Goldstein: That's a real question. I wonder how much connection there will be to an authentic lineage of awakening in another twenty years. The amount of time that people spend training to be a teacher is getting less and less. In Asia, people will often practice for as many as ten or twenty years before teaching. Most of us who came from practice in Asia to the West started teaching much sooner than that but it was still after a substantial period of training. There are people teaching now who have practiced for only a few years. This may be because of the tremendous need. If we want to embody the highest values of awakening, our own continued practice is an essential aspect of what we as teachers need to do. If we don't, Buddhism in America might easily become a sideshow of the self-help culture. We need to keep our practice going in order to fully realize liberation, to transcend the notion of self altogether. For me, taking time to go on retreat means turning down requests to teach. For some time it felt too selfish, and I wondered why I should go on retreat myself when I could be helping other people. But then I thought, At what level am I serving? If we don't continue to deepen our own realization, we're abdicating a tremendous responsibility in the transmission of the dharma because what will come after us depends on our own level of wisdom and understanding.

Tricycle: Where are you in your own practice?

Goldstein: I've seen certain qualities like concentration and mindfulness, loving-kindness and compassion, grow much stronger over the years. And when my mind contracts, gets caught by desires or moments of irritation, I experience it quite viscerally as a contraction of energy. It can be a fleeting identification with a momentary thought. It can be an identification with a stronger emotion or with a mini-drama. But now all of that happens in a context of greater spaciousness, nonjudgment, and acceptance. Experiencing this change gives me tremendous inspiration to continue my practice. There is one phrase that many of the enlightened ones from the time of the Buddha used to express their realization: "Done is what had to be done." Can we each practice to that place of completion?

Tricycle: Is there still a distinction between when you are sitting and when you are not sitting?

Goldstein: In one way there is and in one way there's not. The way in which there is no distinction is that the nature of awareness doesn't change and what one is being aware of doesn't change. What's quite strange and sometimes surprising is that there are really only six things we ever experience: sight, sounds, smells, taste, bodily sensations, and objects of mind—thoughts, emotions, internal conditions. We have innumerable concepts and stories about these six basic kinds of experience, but when you get down to a meditative quality of awareness it comes down to these. So, nothing different happens when you are sitting in the hall or walking down the street. But in intensive practice, because we have simplified our body movements and employed tools to steady the mind, our awareness becomes much less distracted. We're not so pulled into our own experience. When a thought comes, rather than being carried away by the thought, the thought is liberated and the mind stays free. It's the ultimate radical act. If we are not aware of what is going on, particularly in our minds, if we are not aware of our thoughts or emotions, what happens? We act them out with no space for discriminating awareness. When we look at all the suffering in the world, where is it coming from? The great illumination in practice is that it is not just out there. It is not just happening in Bosnia, it is happening in us. We may not be acting out in quite such a visible way, but we are acting out in terms of relationships with other people, in terms of how we feel about ourselves.

Tricycle: Yet there seems to an increasing interest among Buddhists in Asia and America to work with problems "out there."

Goldstein: Meditation is not a hobby. It is important to address the problems of the world, of our society, to express our understanding through compassionate action. But if the world is truly to be a place of peace then we need to understand our own minds. Because what is happening "out there" is simply a manifestation of what is happening in the mind.

When we see for ourselves quite immediately, clearly, decisively, the momentary nature of all phenomena, we are released from the grip of attachment and we begin responding rather than reacting. Meditation practice takes us from the very beginning stage of calming the mind to the highest experience of enlightenment.

Tricycle: Are we in danger of losing that experience?

Goldstein: Western culture in general, and America in particular, has such an emphasis on instant gratification, on "I want it now." We once got a letter to IMS addressed to the Instant Meditation Society—basic Freudian slip. The idea of practicing over the long haul is a process of awakening, not a question of a weekend enlightenment intensive. There is the initial connection and then a real ripening. It's a challenge to inspire people to the necessary commitment to practice that is needed to actualize that ripening. It would be sad if in the course of the transmission from East to West we lost the very essence of what dharma is all about—which is awakening, not simply feeling better.

Tricycle: Considering that you refer to yourself as midway, can you take a student further than you are?

Goldstein: I've had teachers whose students—even as they were their students—had greater realization. That's a result of the skill of the teacher. So it's possible. But it is important for students to know that different people have varying degrees of realization. The Buddha taught about different stages of enlightenment. And in each of the traditions—Zen, Vajrayana, Theravada—there are a lot of maps of the stages of development that people go through. People do notice that teachers are at different levels. Students tend to be drawn to teachers who can take them on to the next step, or the missing piece. They may be with somebody up to a certain point and then if their aspiration is sincere, dharma force will lead them to the next person to help them.

Tricycle: What are the qualities that the West brings to dharma practice that are particularly useful?

Goldstein: I often think of the Missouri take on things—the "show me" approach—as very American. Not accepting things just because they are traditional is a very healthy quality. I think this fresh testing of the dharma is very much in accord with the Buddha's instructions in the Kalama Sutta. Even back then, as he said, there are so many teachers, who should we believe? And the Buddha said, Don't believe in me, don't believe in others, don't believe in something because it is written in books, but really see for yourself what practice is conducive to the weakening of greed and delusion. From the very beginning this pragmatism was in the teaching, and I think Buddhism in the West is coming back to that. If enlightenment can actually be the polestar of our practice, then I have a great faith in the unfolding of the dharma in the West. We are just at the beginning.

Read Joseph Goldstein's meditation instructions.