Tricycle | Awake in the World

JACK KORNFIELD was trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma, and India. After majoring in Asian Studies at Dartmouth, in 1967 he went to Thailand with the Peace Corps looking for a Buddhist teacher. Upon his return, he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology. In 1975 he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society, based in Barre, Massachusetts, which widely influenced the practice of Vipassana meditation in North America. In 1986 he became a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Today he lives nearby with his family and is devoted exclusively to teaching. His books include Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, A Path with Heart, and Teachings of the Buddha. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry will be released by Bantam Books in June. This interview was conducted at Spirit Rock by HELEN TWORKOV.

Jack, while traditional texts expound the path toward enlightenment, in your new book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, you explore what happens after the first experience of enlightenment. Is this born of a particularly Western need to bring together dharma and psychology?

I don't think there is dharma practice on the one hand and psychology on the other. I believe that sets up a false dichotomy. My teacher Ajahn Chah used to say, “There is suffering, there is the cause of suffering, and as the Buddha teaches in the Four Noble Truths, there is the end of suffering. Wherever you are, that is the place of practice.” Sometimes suffering comes through clinging to certain emotional pain or certain stories; sometimes through not recognizing emptiness, the evanescence of life, that nothing can be claimed as I or mine. The point of dharma practice is to pay attention to where there is suffering, see the clinging and identification, and release it to find a freedom of heart.

Yet in so much of traditional Buddhism, paying attention to emotional pain—and to the personal story behind it—is seen as something “other than” spiritual activity.

Well, often traditional Buddhist texts focus on achieving perfect enlightenment and then living in an absolutely free, pure state after that. But there aren't very many beings at this time that we can refer to in that fashion, even the great, respected, or beloved teachers like the Dalai Lama or Venerable Maha Ghosananda, the Gandhi of Cambodia. These contemporary masters say, “I'm still struggling with this or that, or these are things that I still work on in my practice,” rather than speak from that place of absolute freedom. And so in our times, even our elders and masters raise the question of, “How are we learning to live the dharma, to embody it in an ongoing way in our lives and not just focus on the teaching at the archetypal or absolute level?”

How would you describe your initial training in Asia? Was it along those “archetypal” lines?

I feel tremendously grateful for the training I had in the retreat centers and forest monasteries, and the kind of initiation that it offered. I was able to enter into that ancient world of the Elders that has been carried on for 2,500 years—the austere practices and surrender they require. When I first arrived in the forest monastery of Ajahn Chah, he looked at me and said, “I hope you're not afraid to suffer.” I said, “What do you mean, afraid to suffer?” And he said, “There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering that you run away from, which follows you everywhere, and the suffering that you are willing to turn and face and thereby find the liberation that the Buddha taught for us all.” That was his opening sentence.

What made you stick around?

Well, he said it with great humor. He wasn't heavy-handed. He would direct people into difficulties without subtly increasing their unworthiness or their self-hatred. He knew how to mentor people—he would look at students and say, “I know you can do this.” He would see what Thomas Merton called “their secret beauty,” their Buddha-nature, and foster that, which is what a great teacher can do.

Why did you leave your life as a forest monastic?

After my first five years in Asia—I was still quite young—I realized that I didn't want to spend my life as a celibate monk. Marriage, relationships, and living in the world were still important to me, and so I told my teacher that I wanted to return. I felt like I had learned enough of the practices of mindfulness and compassion and now I wanted to see if I could really live them in ordinary life and not in the protected circumstances of the monastery. I didn't feel that I wanted to live as an expatriate in Asia for the rest of my life. I was drawn back to my own culture.