Mind Full to Mindful: Zen Wisdom From a Monk's Bowl

by Om Swami

Living a graceful life that has meaning and happiness is an art anyone can master. Essentially, that is what Zen is about: a state free of conditioning so that the mind can rest and rejoice, so it may go with the flow of life without the anxiety to always get somewhere. Life is here. Now. Though it is easier said than done, it is possible. This is awakening in a nutshell: to have a graceful response to everything life throws at you without losing your sense of serenity and inner calm. Life and our emotions needn’t be as serious an affair as we have made it out to be. To be enlightened is to take things lightly (though not for granted), to laugh away the whims and irritabilities of life. We tend to take ourselves too seriously, making that the root cause of most of our agony.

When our mind that is full of conditioning starts to empty itself by way of mindfulness and a natural awareness, a sort of calm rises to the brim of our consciousness. What if we could do away with our conditioning and have a mind that would not be so quick to judge everything around us? While our ability to make quick judgements has an evolutionary basis and allows our mind to do more by going back to the patterns it knows, this ability is also the cause of most of our emotional and mental suffering. Whenever something doesn’t fit in our conceptual reference, we struggle to cope with it. Unlike other forms of meditation where you go through rigorous practices to tame your mind, in Zen, I don’t have to go anywhere. Everything I need to be happy is here. I don’t have to concentrate or build my concentration. Not all meditation means sitting down in one rigid posture. Walking, eating, doing the dishes, everything we do in life can be done in a manner that it turns into meditation. The way a child lives merrily, or at least freely, from one moment to another, a Zen practitioner aims to be mindful of the ‘natural’ flow of life, the nature of things.

The word Buddha in Sanskrit means jagrita, awake.

Buddha always carried his begging bowl and wore his robe. A lot of people think, ‘Why didn’t he just sit back and enjoy?’ Enlightenment isn’t something you have; it’s something you are, something you do.3

When you children peel a tangerine, you can eat it with awareness or without awareness. Anything you do in life – there are two ways to do it. You can either do it with awareness or without awareness. When you do it with awareness you are awake; when you do it without awareness, you are sleeping. Most of our reactions are without awareness. What does it mean to eat a tangerine in awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you are aware that you are eating the tangerine. This is called being in the present moment.4 Maintaining awareness of the present moment requires doing one thing at a time so as to focus on your chief activity. Multitasking is the nemesis of mindfulness. If I am eating food and not thinking about other things and not watching the TV, not on a phone call, not sending a text message while I am eating, then I am actually aware I am eating my meal. As Buddha said, ‘You fully experience its lovely fragrance and sweet taste. When you peel the tangerine, you know that you are peeling it; when you remove a segment and you put it in your mouth, you know you are removing a segment and putting it in your mouth.’ This comes only when you slow down a bit. Imagine peeling an orange, removing a segment, putting it in your mouth and biting down onto it. Its juices bursting in your mouth and hitting your taste buds; your mouth feels alive with the tangy flavour. This is called eating with awareness. Nearly everybody is rushing to get somewhere. And when they get to th...

The tangerine Nandabala offered me had nine segments. I ate each morsel, in awareness, and saw how precious and wonderful it was. I did not forget the tangerine, and thus the tangerine became something very real to me. If the tangerine is real, the person eating it is real. That is what it means to eat a tangerine in awareness.5 Millions of us climb stairs everyday and yet if you ask them how many stairs they climbed, they wouldn’t have a clue. This is just about how mindful we are. Zen is breaking the automaticity of our actions and infusing them with mindfulness. Everything we do then becomes meditation, leading to greater peace.

Zen is when your mind is just quiet. It’s not chattering; not rambling, not talking to you or anybody else; not thinking about the past, not thinking about the future. That is when your mind is perfectly, 100 per cent silent. Then you gain incredible insight into the nature of things, into the nature of your own life. Your mind starts serving and not ruling you. It would come only when you summon it and not barge into your life and your actions. This is what good meditation does to a meditator. Surely, we need to think to perform numerous tasks throughout the day, you might say. I agree. But there’s a difference between your mind thinking on an intended line of thought versus endlessly blabbering. Zen is having your mind in tune with your intentions, actions and speech. Of

Your mind is not chasing after thoughts of yesterday and tomorrow, but is dwelling fully in the present moment, children. The tangerine is truly present in your life. Living in mindful awareness means living in the present moment. Your mind and body dwelling in the very here and now. A person who practises mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that others are unable to see.

A single flower blooms, and throughout the world it is spring.

Buddha clarified further, addressing all his monks but looking at Mahakashyapa, ‘Everything is there, Mahakashyapa. Everything is just there. Nothing needs to be done. All you have to do is enjoy the beauty of this flower, with the mindfulness that this flower is not going to last forever – this will one day wither.’

Japanese texts say that the first Zen sutra uttered by Buddha was Hana Wahraku, Ben Koku Na Haru which means that a single flower blooms, and throughout the world it is spring.

Your mind can also be compared to one. When your mind blooms, the whole world is in spring. When it experiences autumn, no matter how much beauty there is in the external world, all feels lacklustre. Everything is doomed and in gloom. Therefore, Zen says, let me simply focus on my mind. Because if I keep my mind in a state of bloom, the world is automatically beautiful.

You are a flower and you have a beautiful life. Believe that. Compare your lifestyle to those of billions of people, who can’t even afford to live a basic life.

Remember where you are in your life and what you are blessed with already. If this is not enough, if this still seems inadequate for you to experience happiness in life, then tell me, what would make you happy? Nothing else.

Zen says, just let me be in the present moment, that even breathing is a blessing. If I can’t be happy with what I have now, I can never be happy with whatever I may have in the future. It is all but apparent that every time and under any circumstances, you will have at least one difficult person in your life. You will face at least one big challenge. And you will have to deal with at least one adversity, whether that is mental, physical, emotional, psychical, psychological or spiritual. This is very much a part of life. But in all this, to be able to flow is Zen.

When I say to people, ‘Just sit and be aware; you don’t have to do anything,’ they think it isn’t sufficient. As if they have already mastered the art of sitting still! If I give them a mantra – and it is very rare for me to give someone one – they will chant it for a few weeks, maybe months, and then come back to me and say, ‘Okay, what’s the next step?’

This is very material thinking. There is no next step. If you can’t become one with yourself using any given path, there is no ‘next step’ that will ever get you there.

I am not interested in teaching ten thousand moves that you may do only once or twice. I am only interested in teaching you that one, winning move that you will practice ten thousand times. That will become your perfect move.’

Zen is unique because it is not about sitting down and engaging your mind in any form of one-pointed concentration, which almost everyone finds challenging and tiring, even unrewarding. Zen says just do whatever you are doing with mindfulness.

Practising Zazen (sitting-down meditation) will help you be more aware while doing all the other activities from bathing to washing dishes, but mostly the focus is to just enjoy everything we do or have to do in our lives. For if I’m doing anything in my life out of choice, there’s no reason to complain and if I don’t have a choice then there’s no sense in complaining.

Zen meditation is taught in a disciplic succession: from a guru to a disciple, and so on. As you become more mindful, one of the incredible things to happen with meditation is that you slow down. Your mind slows down, but it becomes far mor...

Mindfulness makes you calm and that calmness makes you more mindful. They fuel each other, going hand in hand. To be calm and mindful, in your daily lives, it is important to understand the impermanent nature of everything that exists, everything that is perceivable.

My life is like a flower. I was sowed at some point in time; I became a bud, was born, and bloomed like a flower. It doesn’t matter how much I protect myself, how fragrant I am, how alive I may be – one day, I am going to wither away.

Thinking about the unthinkable

In Zen, you sit cross-legged: half or fully cross-legged. That’s the first element. Your back is straight, not stiff, and your neck slightly bent. Your gaze is normal and straight. You keep your eyes open; at the most your eyelids may be halfclosed. In fact, in most of Buddha’s paintings or sculptures, his eyes are half open and half closed – as if you don’t know if he is about to close his eyes or he has just opened them. That is the mystical gaze of a Zen meditator. Your teeth are slightly parted, barely touching each other. Your tongue is touching your palate and your lips are gently joined. Hold a soft smile. The idea is that your body should be so comfortable that you forget about it like a musician who has become one with their instrument. Your body should be resting in its natural state because Zen or meditation should be your most natural state. A comfortable but good posture allows you not to be distracted and to simply maintain your centre of awareness. Your elbows should be in their natural posture, each forming an ‘L’. If you meditate with your arms outstretched, they will begin hurting within the first thirty to forty-five minutes.

Your hands one on top of the other, palms facing upwards and the tips of the thumbs together forming a small circle. Rest your hands in your lap and you are at your most comfortable. The idea of this posture is to close all circuits so the flow of energy is not being discharged. We always discharge it with our limbs. You can feel that with static electricity. Perhaps I would not feel the same charge if I were to touch something with my tongue or back. I haven’t tried this, but you can try it and let me know if that’s the case (I’m simply kidding).

it’s when you forget how to breathe that you lose control of yourself. When you are angry or aggressive, you breathing is shallow; you breathe hard. When you are calm, you breathe deep and slow. If you regulate your breathing, your mind will become regulated, and as you regulate your mind, your breathing will reflect it.

If you practise it regularly, just breathing deeply will bring you back to normalcy when you are feeling restless or indisposed. Breathe deeply and gently whenever you can, and don’t hold your breath for too long. Unless you have perfected your posture, holding your breath for a long time is not a good idea. But you can hold it for a few seconds. And make sure you are not holding your breath till you go red in the face – don’t hold your breath till you exhale with a sigh of relief. Just as you should never eat to your full satisfaction, only hold your breath so that when you begin your exhalation, it’s done very gently. We must never let go of gentleness.

Just sit peacefully. Don’t think about anything. Any thought that comes to your mind – just let it come and go... These are your moments – be here, now … Don’t think of anything: don’t visualize anything; don’t imagine anything; don’t envision anything. Don’t react to any thought. Don’t think of any other moment – just be present in the present moment... If you are here now, you will smile automatically because the present moment has no stress... With each inhalation, imagine that you are inhaling positivity, loving kindness, compassion, happiness, joy and bliss. With each exhalation, you are releasing negativity, baggage, depressing feelings and suppressed emotions. Keep your head and back straight. Feel the inhalation, continue the count. In the few seconds that you hold your breath, all these positive emotions are spreading throughout your body. And you are exhaling negative feelings; emptying yourself of everything that holds you back – everything that makes you angry.

Maybe some days, you don’t feel like sitting down to meditate. When you feel that way, you could follow the Zen way, and just be mindful of the life that is flowing. The moment you make everything a ‘have to’, you’ll feel stressed about it. You’ll say to yourself, ‘Oh, today I didn’t get time. I feel bad – I could not keep up with my schedule or routine,’ or so on. Just enjoy life, enjoy living and live every moment as much as you possibly can. I reiterate, missing your practice shouldn’t become the norm. It’s just that sometimes if you do miss it, there’s no point in feeling guilty.

At times when you don’t feel calm enough to do Zazen, you may want to do wall gazing. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not interesting or calming but the results of this concentrative meditation (in wall gazing, as the name suggests, you maintain your concentration on a wall, unlike Zazen where you simply sit with a sense of awareness) are phenomenal.

My point is this: Have a ritual, something that you hold sacred to your heart, that you can do mindfully and from which you receive some energy. That’s the tea ritual. But it could just be sitting down and playing a musical instrument too. Don’t rate, berate or calibrate your life … celebrate it.

Practices like Zazen, wall gazing, Kinhin or any other will only take you so far. It’s imperative to understand the core philosophy of Zen and what better way than to turn to the words of Buddha himself found in a core Zen text:

After Buddha’s first discourse of Zen, there is only one other discourse he ever gave on the philosophy of it. It’s one of the shortest Buddhist texts. Though there is a longer version of this text too, scholars have considered only the shorter version authentic. Known as Prajna Paramita Hrydyam or Prajna Paramita Sutra, or sometimes just Hridya Sutra or Heart Sutra. In this brief but remarkable text, Buddha imparted wisdom to his most promising and one of his closest disciples: Shariputra.

o namo bhagavatyai ārya prajā pāramitāyai! Om Salutation to the blessed and noble one.10 (who has reached the other shore of the most excellent transcendental wisdom.)

‘Arya’ means noble and the sutra begins by offering salutations to the noble one. Offering

respects to your elders and masters is the fundamental tenet of all eastern traditions. Hrdaya is ‘heart’ and sutra is a thread that ties everything together, just like string in a necklace of pearls. Prajna Paramita are the most important words. Paramita11 is transcendental: beyond the grasp of the senses, human intelligence or consciousness. Its literary meaning is perfection. Prajna means intuitive understanding. And this is what...

As children, from the time we can comprehend, we are taught certain concepts: this is God; that is a temple; bow down here; this is moral; that is immoral; this is good; that is bad, etc. Based on these seeds of conditioning, we make all our decisions in life and our conditioning influences whether we like or dislike certain people, countries, societies, religions or sects. But that knowledge is incomplete; it is given to you by others. Prajna is a word frequently used in the Vedas as well as in Buddha’s discourses. It is intuitive understanding, not knowledge. You know how sometimes, when a husb...

That sahajajnana (natural wisdom) comes with quality practice over a prolonged period because with practice, what ancient masters called vipashya – which means insight – begins to dawn. And insight always leads to intuitive understanding. This is the focal point of Zen: a stage (or a state) where we no longer acquire wisdom or knowledge from books or methods. We get straight to the source – our own super consciousness that is flowing, a sense of being that is in harmony with everything around us in our daily lives. Deep insight arises naturally for such a practitioner.

Om namo Bhagwate. Aryayee prajna paramita: I bow down, I offer my salutations to the noble one, Aryayee, who always lived in transcendental wisdom and who imparted this wisdom.

ārya-avalokiteśvaro bodhisattvo gambhīrā prajā pāramitā caryā caramā ovyavalokayati sma: panca-skandhās tā ś ca svābhava śūnyān paśyati sma. The Noble Avalokateshwara Bodhisattva while practising the deep practice of prajna paramita look upon the five skandas (the five aggregates that give the sense of our being. These are form, sensation, perception, memory, consciousness) and saw them to be devoid of any self – existence.

Buddha is called Aryavalokitesvaro in this sutra and it’s a beautiful term meaning ‘the one who has risen above and is looking down at everything from far above’. When you are inside your home, it looks very spacious; you can move around. When you step outside and see it from a distance, it’s a different view. The further away you go or the higher you soar, the smaller it looks. Then you realize that this piece of property you struggled for, that you thought was so huge, is nowhere nearly as big in the overall scheme of things. The aerial view is enlightenment, the goal of meditation. It is what all prayers are about: to rise above ourselves. Buddha, with his disciplined practice, mindfulness and compassion, rose above the general pettiness of life and concluded that all forms, sensations and thoughts are empty. Pashyatii means he saw. He saw that panchaskandha, the five aggregates, of form (rūpa), sensation (vedanā), perception (sajā), mental formations (saskāra) and consciousness (vijāna) are empty. ‘Your thoughts, your feelings, your consciousness, O Shariputra, have no basis,’ Buddha said. Everything we experience – its inherent nature is emptiness. And emptiness must not be confused with nihilism or non-existence. Thoughts, feelings and consciousness exist in our minds and experiences but they are transient and, in the end, they don’t have any meaning at all. When we receive good news, we feel elated and on top of the world and on hearing some bad news we feel dejecte...

we are going to take our thoughts and emotions seriously, as if they are real, as if the blabbering mind makes any sense of it, it is then natural that we’ll experience more pain and suffering. On the contrary, when you are mindful and remind yourself that just because your mind is talking doesn’t mean you have to listen to it; just because you are feeling low doesn’t mean life is actually bad. It helps you to quickly transcend the restive tendencies of the mind.

We could never get wise enough to understand our mind completely. It’s as vast and empty as space, there’s only so much we can control. It’s lot simpler to flow in a state of harmony – something we can do by being virtuous and mindful. The mind will not stop rambling till our last breath. Consider a person who is eighty-five years old, a child who is ten and someone who is forty. They have similar challenges. They all, at times, feel left out, sad or angry and frustrated. But above all, they feel empty. The more you fill your life with pleasures, the emptier you feel. We feel that way because the essence of everything is emptiness. We are inflating balloons of different sizes, launching them into the air. But they are going to deflate no matter how much we inflate them. We are constantly looking to other people to make our decisions, to fill our emptiness.

We think that if the other person is doing something, we have to as well. I have to grow up, educate myself a particular way and get a job. I have to make money – otherwise, I am not successful. I have to be a certain way, or I won’t get married. I have to produce a couple of kids, and then I have to go through the challenges of life. Have to, have to, have to. All these ‘have to’s: I have to pray; I have to go to a temple; I have to behave in a particular manner. This person’s car is bigger than mine. He looks very happy, because his Facebook pictures show that and so on.

are constantly seeing what other people are doing and somehow comparing that to our own accomplishments. Measuring our own happiness based on what others have is a terrible way to size yourself up. It is a pointless thing to do. It is far more meaningful to compare yourself to your past. If you are doing better than before, you are progressing. You could be perfectly happy with a beautiful little apartment until somebody shares pictures of theirnew home with you on Facebook, or they visit and say, ‘I just bought this new home, and I’ve got a huge garden.’ Suddenly, you think, why couldn’t I have that? Your joy instantly evaporates. The strange thing is that your visitor is probably looking at pictures of bigger homes on some real estate website. It’s a vicious chain.

You would always draw that strength from whatever it is that you are focusing on. It’s a simple law of nature. If your centre of awareness is a positive thing, you are drawing your inspiration, attention and energy from a positive source, bringing positivity into your life. I think that’s why people go to gurus and saints – they are looking at somebody positive, smiling, and that gives them energy too. If you are going to meditate and your centre of awareness is a negative person, thought or emotion, it would only worsen your own feelings of negativity. You cannot come out of a negative emotion simply by wanting to come out of it. Shift your centre of awareness.

In Zen or in meditation, the idea is that you get to choose where you have your centre of awareness. If you can choose it, there will be very few problems in life then. Of course, there will be some pain, but with less suffering. Pain will still to be there: painful people, challenges and circumstances – they won’t go away, but you won’t suffer on account of such things. That comes when the boat of our consciousness is tossed around by the ruthless waves of discursive thoughts, when the tides of emotions take us on an inconvenient ride of highs and lows. Mindfulness helps you check the weather (by calling the weather station … not the abbot) before you venture into the ocean. Nothing Matters. Eventually.

All the forms that feel real are only so for a period of time. Ultimately, it’s all empty. Imagine this: a six-foot-tall person who is well-built is cremated upon his death, and turns into a handful of ash. If forms were permanent and not empty, perhaps fire wouldn’t have transmuted a corpse turning it into dust. This signifies emptiness. All that seems to exist – where has it gone? This constant evolution and transformation in the grand play of our vast universe is an expression of impermanence. The sutra says that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. They are not different from each other. If I subject a small tissue of my body, let’s say tissue bit of the skin, to greater magnification, there will come a point when I’ll only see space. I won’t see any physical. And Buddha says, ‘Yad rupam sa sunyata ya sunyata tad rupam’ (That which is emptiness is bodily form; that which is bodily form is emptiness.)

They are identical and the same holds true for your thoughts, consciousness, tendencies and all the knowledge and wisdom you possess. It’s empty. All our fights, our grudges, even our emotions have no meaning in the end, they are empty. Today you feel immense love for somebody. Suppose you find out that he or she is cheating on you, you will come to hate that person. Where did that love go? Something that felt as real as the Himalayas, disappeared like a lone cloud on a sunny day. It is all transient, temporary, impermanent. And because it’s impermanent, it’s rarely worth brooding over.

Without such mindfulness, we are repeatedly bothered and nudged by the same negative emotions. The cyclical nature of our thoughts and feelings is like riding an ever-moving Ferris wheel, each emotion being a different basket we sit in every time we ride, which is pretty much all the time. A distressed patient once went to a doctor and showed him his ears, which were both badly singed. ‘Oh dear!’ The doctor said.‘What happened to you?’