I sent a draft of this hypothesis to a teacher of mine, Chip Hartranft, who is the rare scholar-practitioner who knows both the Buddhist and Yoga texts well. He sent back a note saying it had “problems”, and he’s right. The lists are not at all a direct parallel. But I think they’re an interesting parallel nonetheless. This post is an attempt to flesh out the idea, and I’ll repeat Chip’s critiques as I work through my idea, and attempt to answer his points. I’ll give a brief introduction to both lists first, then discuss each of the five concepts in parallel between the two philosophies.

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When the Buddha wanted to explain to his first students, the group of five ascetics, the nature and cause of suffering, he invented a concept that hadn’t been used before in the Upanishad/Vedanta yoga systems he was trained in. The concept is a way of dividing up our experiential reality into useful categories, and he used a common word to describe them: khandha, literally “heaps”. The five khandha are commonly now translated as “aggregates”, which refers to their quality as groupings. Five heaps of stuff we experience. He named the list in his first teaching, “Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dharma”, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, as the shorthand for why we suffer:

“The Noble Truth of Suffering (dukkha), monks, is this: Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering, not to receive what one desires is suffering — in brief the five aggregates subject to grasping are suffering.” (Samyutta Nikaya (SN) 56.11)

So, we suffer because we cling to these five (with the Pali in parenthesis):

1. Form (rupa) — all kinds of physical sense data including the sensations of my own body and surroundings.

2. Feeling (vedana) — the valence of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral that arises with any sense contact.

3. Perception (sañña) — the mental property of recognition and memory that arises in relation to sense contacts.

4. [Mental] Formations (sankhara) — thoughts and emotions of all kinds.

5. Consciousness (viññana) — the quality of knowing that arises in relation to any sense contact.

This list is foundational to the Buddha’s teaching because it describes the aspects of our direct experience that we cling to, mistakenly taking them to be a self or the possessions of a self (“I, me, mine”). Like many of the Buddha’s lists, it is not a list of aspects of existence in any abstract way, but a practical list to be used in the course of practice. In philosophical language we would say that the list is phenomenological, not ontological. Phenomenology is a way of describing what we can experience directly, like “this body aches”. Ontology is how we would discuss the existence of something, like “because sensation is perceived, this body must exist”. In terms of the khandha, a Buddhist phenomenological approach says, “I experience things directly, as sensation (image, sound, touch) and mental activity, and can work with my response to these experiences in order to not grasp and therefore not suffer”. An ontological approach, on the other hand, might say, “Things clearly exist” or “Things are an illusion”. Ontological assertions address the thing at the level of Being, while phenomenology addresses it at the level of sensory contact. Ontology can seem more abstract, but is a way of theorizing or mapping Ultimate Reality, while phenomenology is generally more experiential, a way to investigate Individual Reality.

The khandha, then, are a list that specifically targets aspects of our experience in which clinging leads to suffering and distress. When we cling to forms (like objects or bodies), we take them to be a self or objects to be owned (grasping), resisted (aversion), or ignored (delusion). When we cling to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of something, the experience “pleasant” becomes grasping, and the experience ”unpleasant” becomes aversion. The experience “neutral” most often simply is not noticed, and thus leads to dullness or disembodiment. This pattern is the same for all the khandha. We experience all five of the khandha all the time, and if we cling to them being any particular way, we suffer. If we stop clinging to these aspects of experience — uproot the habits of grasping, aversion, and delusion — we stop suffering.

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So I want to compare this list with another list of five aspects of existence, this one from the Upanishads, and venerated in the Vedanta and Yoga traditions, the five kosha, or “Sheaths”. The list of the kosha first appears in the Taittiriya Upanishad (TU ch. 2. I use Patrick Olivelle’s 1996 translation, though this link is to the older Müller version), which dates to around the 5th or 6th century BCE, or just a couple hundred years before the Buddha. The Five Sheaths are a series of increasingly subtle levels of the Self, and describe our bodily and energetic reality as humans:

1. Food (anna-maya kosha) — the body, seen in a very literal way, as created out of food, anna.

2. Energy (prana-maya kosha) — the energy body, or the experience of prana (energy, breath) in the body.

3. Mind (mano-maya kosha) — mental and emotional experience, especially language.

4. Wisdom (vijñana-maya kosha) — the faculty of discrimination and clear seeing, vijñana is commonly translated as “wisdom”, but other translators use “understanding” (Müller), and even “perception” (Olivelle), which might be rather confusing! It literally means something like “knowledge (jñana) that separates (vi-)”, thus discrimination is perhaps most literal. (The standard word for “wisdom” is not jñana but prajña, which is literally “highest (pra) knowledge (jña)”, so translating it as the Wisdom Sheath is perhaps misleading.)

5. Bliss (ananda-maya kosha) — not simply deep happiness, but the vast, subtle bliss of Being itself. Ananda is the final sheath, and the one that is closest to the Absolute Self, Atman. An important understanding of ananda is that it is not pleasure dependent on material (or even mental) conditions, but an extremely subtle aspect of our fundamental Nature, which is always present, though it is often veiled by the experience of the grosser levels.

The kosha are a map of the Embodied Self (atman), from the physical body through increasingly subtle levels of existence, or aspects of human experience. In the Upanishad it is described in specifically human terms, saying that these all exist in the same space and appearance as a person, or purusha. Yogic practice in relation to these kosha is to train ourselves in meditation to perceive each Sheath, and to bring our awareness to subtler and subtler experiences, till we realize, or learn to rest in, Atman itself, the Absolute Self. The suffix maya after each term refers to the illusory aspect of each level. Each level is just a covering, a veil, obscuring the fundamental reality of Atman, or Absolute Self.

We can see how this list of 5 aspects of experience is similar to the list of the khandha: both proceed from material to immaterial, gross to subtle, and both suggest that a trained yogi can experience increasingly subtle layers of experience with the goal of liberation, or realization. But I will propose that the parallel is deeper and even more interesting. When this parallel occurred to me, I went searching for it online, and (in a short search — I’m sure I could look deeper) didn’t find anything in mainstream Buddhist or Yoga/Vedanta sources, but found this in a Theosophical Society magazine, Lucifer, published in March 1893:

“The Skandhas seem to bear a striking resemblance to the Vedantic Koshas or Sheaths, but it would require one who was not only learned in both systems, but who had also some practical experience of the inner planes of consciousness, to establish a just correspondence between them.”

Well, there are now a few of us who are, at least a little bit, learned in both systems, and with some practical experience. My hypothesis is that the lists describe parallel levels of experience and reality, with the Buddhist list describing the experiential aspect that most directly relates to the project of the cessation of suffering, while the Vedanta list describes the fundamental reality operating behind each experience. Thus the khandha are phenomenological, while the kosha are ontological. This is similar to saying that the khandha are subjective, while the kosha are objective.

Did the Buddha intend this parallel or is it just a historical coincidence? I don’t know. The radical historical hypothesis would be that the Buddha crafted the khandha specifically as an answer to the kosha. I’ve never heard any teacher or scholar suggest this, but I’ll let you know if any show up to either validate or shoot me down!

I’ll address each pair of concepts in turn.

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1. Form and Food: rupa-khandha and anna-maya kosha.

Buddhist texts use rupa to refer both to the physical body AND to all kinds of physical phenomena, in other words, everything that we can touch, hear, see, smell, and taste. Because of this, the khandha of Form is often taught as referring to everything material, as in this sutta, which names it as the product of the 4 elements, experienced both internally (aspects of bodily experience that correspond with each element) and externally (as a reflection on the impermanence of external objects):

“And what, friends, is form as a clinging-aggregate? The four great existents and the form derived from them. And what are the four great existents? They are the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, & the wind property.

“And what is the earth property? The earth property can be either internal or external. What is the internal earth property? Whatever internal, within oneself, is hard, solid, & sustained [by craving]: head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, contents of the stomach, feces, or whatever else internal, within oneself, is hard, solid, & sustained: This is called the internal earth property…” (Majjhima Nikaya (MN) 28, which goes on to describe how we physically  experience each of the four elements.)

When I suggested that rupa and anna were parallels, Chip responded that rupa is broader than anna, referring to all material substances, not just the body. He’s right, it does. But I think there’s enough emphasis on rupa being body-centric to justify a strong relationship between the two. Even when external forms are discussed in the suttas, they are usually discussed in terms of the 6 Sense Bases, in other words, as subjective sensory experiences, not as somehow independent forms themselves. This would blossom in later philosophical schools as a debate as to whether so-called “external” things exist at all, or if they are simply the product of the mind.

What does it mean to assert that a thing exists, after all? In the early Buddhist view, this kind of ontological inquiry seems to have been deemphasized in favor of the pragmatic practice that leads more directly to the end of suffering: deconstruction of the stream of sense impressions and the mental factors that go into assembling meaningful experience from them. When I see a flower, I’m to note simply that three things have arisen (simultaneously and inseparably): the form cognizable by the eye, the eye organ itself, and eye-consciousness, or the knowing that seeing is taking place. Both the form and the eye itself are rupa, and the consciousness specific to the sense door is viññana. The key here is that the “external” form, the flower, is relevant to my process only when this process is happening, in other words, when I am in sense contact with it. Thus even an external form is essentially a bodily process, and can only be contacted via a bodily process.

There are also important references in the Pali Canon (the earliest extant record of the Buddha’s teaching, which I am basing my discussion on) that specifically use rupa to refer to the physical body, excluding the “external”:

“And why do you call it ‘form’ [rupa]? Because it is afflicted [ruppati], thus it is called ‘form.’ Afflicted with what? With cold & heat & hunger & thirst, with the touch of flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, & reptiles. Because it is afflicted, it is called form.” (SN 22.79)

This emphasis on personal physical experience is in harmony with the general tendency of the Buddha to interpret situations in relation to direct experience rather than as philosophical abstractions. The aspect of a sense object that is most important for the practitioner is the moment of subjective contact with it and the response that arises in the mind: either grasping or non-grasping, and thus suffering or freedom. The important reflection on rupa is how we cling to it, and thus how we mistakenly take it to be a self and think we can thus control our experience of it, as the Buddha asks his students in his second discourse, “On the Not-Self Characteristic” (using the pronoun “my” to qualify “form”):

“Bhikkhus, form is not-self. Were form self, then this form would not lead to affliction, and one could have it of form: ‘Let my form be thus, let my form be not thus.’ And since form is not-self, so it leads to affliction, and none can have it of form: ‘Let my form be thus, let my form be not thus.’ ” (SN 22.59)

Again here rupa reads as specifically describing the body of the practitioner. Because of this quite common tendency toward an interpretation of rupa as body, I see a parallel with anna-maya kosha, the Food Sheath. The Taittiriya describes it this way, paralleling the description of rupa arising from the four elements:

“From this very self (atman) did space come into being; from space, air; from air, fire; from fire, the waters; from the waters, the earth; from the earth, plants; from plants, food; and from food, man. Now, a man here is formed from the essence of food.” (TU 2.1)

So while both versions describe the nature of the human body, the Buddhist version emphasizes our tendency to cling to it. Both Buddhist quotes above describe undesirable aspects of the body: its parts (MN 28), which would become the formal practice of visualizing/sensing each one and reflecting on its impurity (asucino), and several ways that it experiences unpleasant sensations (SN 22.79). The Vedantic version is essentially a creation myth, narrating the origin of people as arising from the primal elements of nature.

Two other interesting parallels, the first from Chip:

“Actually, I see a correspondence between kosha and the Buddhist teaching of 4 nutriments (ahara) that humans crave: food, contact, volition, and consciousness.” (Chip Hartranft, personal communication)

This list of the ahara is a very interesting one, and does parallel the kosha in some ways. Food is a clear match, though this list is of nutriments the person craves more than a list of the person’s constituent parts. Still, it moves in the same pathway, gross to subtle, with substantial parallels. The issues would be with the placement of volition (the Buddhists put it in sankhara-khandha, while Vedanta puts it in vijñana-maya kosha) and contact, as well as the dissonance between the multiple usages of viññana/vijñana I mentioned above.

The other concept that comes to mind as I want to defend rupa as being centered on the physical body and its nature as arising from food is the commentarial (i.e. not used by the Buddha in the original discuses) idea of the kalapa, as the smallest unit of matter. Kalapa are the indivisible atoms of early Buddhism, and form the basic substance of rupa. Kalapa consist of 8 aspects:

Earth, water, fire, and air (the four Great Elements), and…
Color, smell, taste, and nutritive essence.

With those last four being present in every kalapa, it seems possible that kalapa may be specifically conceived of as food. And so if kalapa are the primary building blocks of rupa, maybe rupa is closer to anna, food, than it initially appears.

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2. Feeling and Energy: vedana-khandha and prana-maya kosha.

Vedana (feeling, or “feeling-tone”) in Buddhism is very specific. It refers not to all “feelings” (in the way that we use feeling as a synonym for emotion), but just to the basic valence, or tone, of pleasant (sukha), unpleasant (dukkha), or neutral (adukkham-asukha, “neither pleasant nor unpleasant”) that arises with every sense contact. And in this specificity it shines a light on the primary way that we create suffering for ourselves: based on pleasant and unpleasant sensations, we tend to grasp or push away whatever’s happening, and when neutral sensations come, we tend to space out or not notice them. Vedana is a naturally arising phenomenon, but gives rise to preference so habitually that it becomes the primary doorway to dissatisfaction.

Prana in yoga is most often translated as “energy” or “breath-energy”, so the parallel here might not immediately be apparent. Prana is described in the Upanishad (TU 2.2) as moving in five ways, which would develop into the well-known Five Pranas: outward (prana), downward (apana), centering (samana), upward (udana), and radiating (vyana). We can read from this that prana, like the wind with which it is associated (as breath), has the essential activity of movement. A simple way to generalize these movements is to see them each as manifestations of three core activities: expansion, contraction, and pausing. We can feel these basic phases in the inhale, exhale, and pause of the breath. And the Tantric tradition will emphasize the primal dyad of expansion-contraction in its description of the fundamental activity of the universe as shakti (energy), or spanda (pulsation).

What if vedana describes our habitual reaction to the pulsations of prana? When expansive energy is present we often perceive it as pleasant; when contractive energy is present we often perceive it as unpleasant; and when energy stills we often perceive it as dull or fail to notice it at all. This would make vedana clearly the aspect of our relationship with prana that specifically leads to clinging. Expansion, contraction, and pause are natural occurrences, and have no innate good or bad nature to them. But we feel these changes and oscillations as vedana, and then commonly react to them in habitual ways, namely by reinforcing preference and thus suffering.

Of course, there are many examples of seemingly contractive sense contacts (like the taste of salt, or a yoga gesture like a bandha, or swaddling a baby) that we might perceive as pleasant, thus upsetting the parallel. I would assert in response that the feeling of pleasantness in relation to a contractive stimulus is more specifically related to the mind state or energy that contact brings about. Swaddling is physically contractive, but the energetic state of being contained, grounded, or gathered can be quite pleasant, and expansive, as the mind relaxes and opens.

(This one was a stretch for Chip, and I can see how I might be contorting the teachings a bit here to fit my inspiration. Let me know what you think!)

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3. Perception and Mind: sañña-khandha and mano-maya kosha.

[The next two pairs get mushier, but if you’ve read this far, you have a taste for this stuff like I do… Hooray. ]

Sañña (perception) refers to the aspect of perception that recognizes and names an object. The Pali sutta, interestingly, uses colors as the paradigmatic object of recognition:

“And why do you call it ‘perception’? Because it perceives, thus it is called ‘perception.’ What does it perceive? It perceives blue, it perceives yellow, it perceives red, it perceives white. Because it perceives, it is called perception.” (SN 22.79. Other translations use “recognition”.)

Sañña is not the same as manas (“mind”, the same word in Pali as its Sanskrit cousin), and the way that the Buddha uses “perception” or “recognition” here is a tiny subset of mental activity. Most mental activity, like thoughts, emotions, and all other conceptual activity land in the fourth khandha, Formations (sankhara). Again, the reason for the narrower focus is to bring our focus to an element of experience we cling to. Sañña describes the basic activity of identification: of objects, other beings, and ourselves: we name what we sense the way we name colors. All of the khandha can be mistakenly clung to as I or mine, but this one really nails it down! If we don’t know what a thing is called — and it takes recognition (which implies Time: past and present) to do so — we can’t so easily cling to it or imagine it as anything but changing phenomena in constant flux.

And so sañña-khandha is where language, as the names of things, arises. And it is where time, i.e. memory, which is necessary for recognition, arises. We’ll see the parallel to language in the Mind Sheath, mano-maya kosha:

Manas, again, means simply “mind”, and through yoga history is used to describe many different mental factors including the activities of ego and personality. In the Taittiriya Upanishad, however, mano-maya kosha is described very specifically as consisting of various sets of verses, ritual chants, and grammatical rules in the four Vedas. What are we to make of this? It doesn’t describe “mind” in any way we are used to seeing. Even more mysteriously, this verse follows:

“Before they reach it, words turn back,
together with the mind;
One who knows that bliss of Brahman,
he is never afraid.” (TU 2.3-4)

What do words turn back from? From the Ultimate, or Brahman, the Unlimited, and therefore in some ways un-nameable or unspeakable. (More on Brahman below.)

If manas, in this early usage, refers specifically to the linguistic aspect of mind, it suddenly appears more similar to sañña than it initially seemed. Manas is perhaps the faculty of language itself, mythically embodied in the verses and chants of the primal Veda, while sañña describes the way that we use language to name sensory objects, and how these names are the fuel for mistakenly identifying with them or imputing to them an ontological solidity they do not have. As we name things, we give them a solidity that they did not previously have.

In many wisdom traditions, speech itself is the vehicle for creation: “In the beginning was the Word…” (John 1.1), or in the beautiful Sepher Yetzirah from the Kabbalah. Speech is central to the conception of creation in many ways in the yoga tradition, in the Rig Veda (10.130, in which the ritual chant itself is the shuttle that weaves the tapestry of the cosmos together), the Upanishads (Chandogya Upanishad 1.1, venerating Om, and a very mysterious creation myth in the Brhandaranyaka Upanishad 1.2, in which Death/Hunger creates the world by chanting, then copulates with Speech, gets pregnant, the duration of the pregnancy creates the time span “a year”, thus creating cyclical time altogether, and upon giving birth, roars, creating, again, speech), along with many other examples.

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Digression: nama-rupa, Brahman, Nibbana

Returning to the “words turn back” verse from the Taittiriya for a moment, one Pali scholar, Richard Gombrich, pulls out a parallel sutta (SN 1.27) that asks the same question (thanks, mikenz66 on dhammawheel.com for this): “From what do words turn back?” (Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought, 151).

This is a compelling word-for-word parallel, but it seems to be driven by an unusual translation choice. The word being translated here as “words” is sara, which can be translated either as “words” (like the Sanskrit svara) or “streams”. Gombrich says “words” is right, and the commentary that prefers “streams” is wrong, but the other translators I’ve read of this verse (the old by Rhys Davids and the new by Bhikkhu Bodhi) translate it as “flood” and “streams”.

I consider Bhikkhu Bodhi the gold standard of translators nowadays, so I assume he’s correct, but speculatively I’m interested in the “words” version. IF sara meant “words”, and otherwise the verse was the same as Bodhi’s translation, it would read like this:

“From where do words turn back?
Where does the round no longer revolve?
Where does name-and-form cease,
Stop without remainder?”

“Where water, earth, fire, and air,
do not gain a footing:
It is from here that words turn back,
Here that the round no longer revolves;
Here name-and-form ceases,
Stops without remainder.” (SN 1.27, trans. B. Bodhi except my changing of “streams” to “words”, after Gombrich. My italics.)

This substitution not only makes a lovely parallel to the Taittiriya, but links “words” to “name-and-form” in a nice way. Name-and-form (the arising-together of mental and material experience, which in the process of Dependent Origination is the precondition for the activity of the six senses) ceases at the spot where words turn back. How can there be “name” without “words”? This points again to language as the core aspect of mental activity that imputes a solidity to things — that we could say “creates” things. The compound “name-and-form” is important to the list of the khandha, so let’s stay with it for a moment here.

Name-and-form (nama-rupa) is another way of dividing up the five khandha, used, among many other places, in the Buddhist analytical texts called the Abhidhamma, which proposes a list called the Fourfold Ultimate Reality (catudha paramattha):

1. Consciousness (citta) — khandha #5, viññana
2. Mental Factors (cetasika) — khandha #2-4, vedana, sañña, sankhara
3. Matter (rupa) — khandha #1, rupa
4. The Unconditioned (nibbana) — beyond the khandha

The language element is again present here in the use of “name” (nama) as the umbrella for many kinds of mental activity, though it refers not just to language, but to all kinds of mental and emotional activity. In his critique of my initial note about this parallel lists idea, Chip brought in nama as the root of the 3 middle khandha:

“In the same vein, feeling (vedana) is nama – a mental process that is only known as the conditioned result of its contact with the sensing mind (manas) and mental consciousness (viññana). Gotama is often said to have defined nama as feeling, apperception, volition, contact, and attention (rupa-sañña-cetana-phassa-manasikara) [as in SN 12.2 on its role in Dependent Origination]. I don’t really see any connection between vedana and prana, which was regarded not as nama (nor rupa, for that matter) but as the lifeforce, as aliveness itself.

“Apperception (sañña) is also nama, being the additive (sam = with), mentally created label, feature, or category involved in distinguishing and recognizing events through a similar convergence of mental object, mind, and consciousness. It’s certainly related to the role of manas, but a narrow subset of manomayakosha, I would say. This might be more of a match, than vedana, though.” (Chip Hartranft, private communication)

So I agree that sañña is a narrow subset of manas, but like the other pairs I’ve proposed (as in my possibly fanciful connection between vedana and prana), I’m fascinated by how skillfully the Buddha emphasizes exactly the aspect we must see clearly in order to awaken: the aspect that is affected (and afflicted) by clinging. It is this that makes me see them in parallel: not that they are the same, but that in each of the five aspects, the Buddha engages in a similar maneuver, turning the ontological category in the kosha into a phenomenological project (or we could say a soteriological one: oriented toward salvation).

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4. Mental Formations and Consciousness: sankhara-khandha and vijñana-maya kosha.

This pair is the least easy to see, perhaps. Sankhara, “Mental Formations”, also called “Volitional Formations” or “Fabrications”, refers to the mental quality that gathers, assembles, or compounds other phenomena. We casually put most thoughts and emotions into this category, presumably because they are compound experiences — consisting of a mix of ego, story, desire, feeling, sensation, and other conditions. Everything assembled out of conditions (that is not one of the other, simpler, khandha) is sankhara. How might this be the experiential side of vijñana?

As discussed above, vijñana in the Taittiriya Upanishad is translated by Olivelle as “perception”, and by Müller as “understanding”. “Wisdom” is still the most used translation, however. Georg Feuerstein uses “knowledge” and suggests “higher knowledge”, synonymous with buddhi, or “higher [than manas] mind” (Feuerstein, Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga, 328). Along with these, the literal “discrimination” will also be useful here. The fifth khandha is viññana, the Pali version of the Sanskrit vijñana, generally translated as “consciousness”, not the fourth, and would seem the appropriate parallel for the Sanskrit vijñana, making this pair out of order. But the usages of the words viññana and vijñana are totally different.

Viññana as the fifth khandha specifically describes the quality of knowing a sense object. It is a much narrower quality than “wisdom” suggests. So viññana/vijñana aren’t a great parallel (unless we stretch ourselves to gloss “wisdom” as “that which sees all distinctions clearly”, which actually seems like a pretty nice definition), but are sankhara and vijñana?

The Taittiriya is mysterious here, offering as the aspects of this Sheath the five qualities of faith, truth, the real, performance, and celebration. The first four of these are interesting in relation to vijñana as discrimination. How do we know something is real? How is something performed? Through discrimination, or clear seeing of differences. What is performed here is the sacrificial ritual:

“It’s perception that conducts the sacrifice.
It’s perception that performs the rites.
It’s perception that all the gods
Venerate as the foremost Brahman.” (TU 2.5)

“Perception” here is obviously not the same as sañña, as the verse is concerned with these qualities that all revolve around doing [the ritual], where sañña is more passive, just recognizing. Read this verse with “knowledge”, “understanding”, “discrimination”, or “wisdom” in place of “perception” and feel into the gist of the verse. Knowledge itself, which is to say “the one who reifies — is identified with — self and other”, performs the sacrifice. Maybe we can gloss faith, truth, and the real as being concerned with [right] perception or higher knowledge, while performance and celebration are about assembling the proper ritual actions, and more broadly be the roots of actions itself. This points again to sankhara’s aspect as volition (cetana), and one of the common translations: Volitional Formations.

If we think of vijñana not as the broad quality of wisdom but simply as discrimination or knowledge, that which knows distinctions (vi-) between things, we can recognize a parallel with sankhara, that which forms or fabricates. Both speak to how we make sense of the world as it comes to us in an endless stream of ontologically equivalent  sensory contacts. We understand things to be separate from each other (for instance, in how we have learned to perceive distance and distinction between objects, even though we are experientially presented with a visual field that is just a mass of colors and shapes), and we group phenomena together in ways that make sense.

These higher-order mental activities are the fundamental quality addressed at this level of experience in both systems. There is no other place in the map for them, with the fifth khandha and kosha reserved for a much subtler process, and the third being much simpler. So in the fourth khandha and kosha both, we see the full-blown mental-emotional process playing out, from the parsing of sense data beyond recognition/perception (sañña/manas) into compound forms and concepts, through the arising of volition, which will give rise to action itself.

The translation of vijñana-maya kosha as the Wisdom Sheath here seems then like an incongruity unless we take it to refer to the most clarified aspect of these mental processes. It is still a covering, not Ultimate Reality, just as sankhara is still conditioned phenomena, not Nibbana. Wisdom perhaps here is then the expression of deep knowing rather than the experience of deep clarity of mind. Understanding grows from an experience of deep clarity, most specifically through contact with the subtler kosha of ananda or with Atman itself, and that understanding is expressed as wisdom.

In each of these lists, all the distinctions aside, the core teaching is not to take anything conditioned to be the self. Whether you call your true nature Atman, the Absolute Self, or practice with anatta/anatman, seeing every experience as “not-self”, the path is similar. See through the limitations of ego and body, realizing that nothing can be clung to as I or mine. From that deep release, the bliss of realization begins to dawn.

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5. Consciousness and Bliss: viññana-khandha and ananda-maya kosha.

Since we already looked at the distinctions around viññana/vijñana, I’ll just reiterate the Buddhist version. Consciousness as a khandha is very simply the experience of knowing that arises concomitant with any sense impression. It is no more than this, and so a much more limited activity than “wisdom” or even “consciousness” in the Yoga and Vedanta usage. It is an aspect of nama in the nama-rupa model, and we cling to it in the same way we cling to any of the khandha: by mistakenly reifying it, taking it as evidence of a stable self, an unchanging individual subjectivity. And like all the khandha, this leads to suffering because we will inevitably be disappointed when impermanence (anicca) of both subject and object manifests.

Ananda, ”bliss”, seems like a very different phenomena than this bare knowing. Some teachers interpret ananda-maya kosha as referring to an ecstatic meditation state, perhaps similar to absorption (jhana/dhyana), and the description in the Taittiriya might support this view. Like all the kosha, it is a veil, so not Ultimate Reality yet, even though it is mighty close. It mentions four experiences: pleasure, delight, thrill, and bliss, and supports them all on Brahman. So this bliss is “the bliss of Brahman“, as sung in the earlier verse.

However, just because these pleasures are described, I don’t see evidence to assert that they are conditioned specifically on meditative concentration. The kosha describe the constituent layers of human reality, and thus do not require any particular state to exist. Each kosha is said to suffuse the earlier ones completely, and so it is easy to imagine or craft a meditative sequence that would bring the practitioner into contact and fullness with the experience of each kosha in turn. Such a practice might lead to experiencing ananda as a blissful meditative absorption (perhaps akin to 2nd and 3rd jhana in the Buddhist model, characterized by rapture (piti) and ease (sukha)) and culminating in the deep equanimity of one-pointedness (ekagatta, the characteristic quality of 4th jhana). That’s a whole different parallel that I’m not ready to propose, but the sequence, like many in both systems, moves again from gross to subtler experiences. But meditative practice does not feel central to the description in the Upanishad, where the list of the kosha immediately follows a short creation narrative in which all things arise out of Brahman, from the elements to food to us. This is a description of reality, not a path of cultivation. (Yet. The kosha will certainly later be interpreted as implying a sequence of practice, and the yoga tradition will invent practices to access and transcend all five layers. But fundamentally I think it’s just a map of what exists.)

So then, what is ananda-maya kosha, and how might it be the ontological parallel to viññana-khandha? If we go back to the Taittiriya and focus the phrase “the bliss of Brahman”, we get a hint.

Ananda is the subtlest layer of manifestation to surround/veil the Absolute itself, Brahman. Often we see the kosha listed with (capital A) Atman at the center, because the Great Self, Atman, can be seen as synonymous with Brahman. Bliss is so central to Brahman that it is included in the list of three factors that characterize the Absolute: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, or sat-cit-ananda. It exists, is aware, and rests in subtle delight. This triad of qualities, and the dyad of consciousness and bliss will resonate forward through many yoga traditions, flowering in a slightly evolved form as the Tantric dyad of Śiva and Śakti, in which primal non-dual Being differentiates into the basic dyad of Śiva as Pure Consciousness and Śakti as Pure Energy — which is experienced by Consciousness as Bliss — or to emphasize their non-duality, “blissful Self-awareness”. (It was Tantra, specifically my recent study of the Śiva Sutras and the Pratyabhijña-hrdayam (Heart of Recognition), that triggered this whole hypothesis, which began with the incongruous parallels of consciousness-bliss and vedana-prana.)

If consciousness and bliss are the twin expressions of fundamental Being (Brahman or Atman), then what is the most fundamental experience of beings in the absence (anatta) of a fixated self (atman)? The bare quality of knowing. Viññana. The direct contact of a mental factor to the objects of sense. No deeper “consciousness” (in the Vedantic or Tantric sense) will work here, since there is no deeper thing to root it to. The only “deeper than this” we have in Buddhism is Nibbana/Nirvana (in Pali/Sanskrit), the unconditioned, unbound, timeless. Viññana is a cool (as in “cooled” from the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion) parallel to ananda if we see it in terms of the Buddha’s insistence on seeing the not-self characteristic in every experience. Bliss IS the experience of this level of subtle Being, but if we want to be free, unbound from the subtle tendency to cling to experiences (especially subtle spiritual ones) as I or mine, focusing on the bare knowing quality of experience will be more useful. Like all the others, viññana as an “aggregate subject to grasping” becomes a tool of insight when we notice again and again that we tend to reify sense contact. Releasing that habit, resting in the deep simplicity of direct contact with things, free from neurotic conceptual overlay, we finally, perhaps, stop.

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It is so tempting here to easily say, “Thus, Brahman = Nirvana!” But it is only possible to parallel Brahman and Atman to Nibbana if we remember that Atman (“Great Self”) does not mean an individual self. Great Self is infinite fullness, where nibbana tends to be spoken of in terms of Emptiness (shunyata) or Cessation (nirodha). They are compatible if we remember that the Absolute in Vedanta and Yoga is just as impersonal as the Absolute in Buddhism. The difference is in the idea of atman (individual self): whether we think it sustains through changing conditions and bodies or not. The Buddha famously would not say whether a self (atman) exists or not, but insisted that more important was the fact that we cannot experientially locate anything that we can identify as being that changeless personal ground. More liberating, he insisted, is to intimately sense the flux of impermanence (anicca), the unsatisfactoriness that flux creates (dukkha), and the lack of any solid self behind it all (anatta). And the laboratory in which to sense these is the five khandha. The aggregates are laid out to be a profound map of the ways we get lost, and exactly what to pay attention to if we want to get found.

The kosha, on the other hand, seem to be a map of the same territory, and even divided up in similar chunks, but with a different purpose. They show us what we really ARE, and hint at how we came into being. They offer a map of the processes that underly all of experience, and offer them at a high level of abstraction. And when we work to unbind ourselves from the specific tendencies to cling that the khandha point us toward, we might be able to sense directly, perhaps in deep meditation, the underlying quality, or flavor (rasa) of each kosha. I am made of food, moved by energy, guided by mind, deduce patterns in my experience, and finally understand that a deep and subtle ease pervades it all.

And whether in the end I experience the Infinite as expressing itself through me as an ongoing wave (atman, leading to Atman or Brahman) or as discreet particles of experience that arise and cease (anicca and anatta leading to Nibbana), the result is Liberation from ignorance, grasping, and suffering.

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This investigation has been fun, but I still haven’t found enough solid historical or textual verification to make any proper scholarly assertions.

Did the Buddha intentionally make the list of the khandha a skillful mirror of the kosha? Did he even know the Taittiriya Upanishad? (Pali scholars, do you know of places where he references this list or text?)

Is it a coincidence based on ancient Indian philosophers’ love of lists of 5 things that go from gross to subtle?

Are the connections too historically non-linear to be justification for my idea? (Like, is it just cheating to bring in a Tantric text from 850 CE as part of my inspiration around two texts from 500+ BCE?)

Essentially, I consider this an exercise in creative theology, but I will send it to some real Pali scholars and see what they say. Thanks for reading! Whatever its merits as scholarship, I hope it is inspiring and a delight for you in your own practice.

Many blessings.

Neither classical nor tantric yoga texts are much help for us here. Classical yogas like those of Patañjali, the Buddha, and the Bhagavad Gita all emphasize stillness-oriented meditation practices, with movement acknowledged (like the walking meditation alluded to in the Foundations of Mindfulness sutta, in the section on mindfulness of the body in postures) but clearly presented as secondary to sitting. If these classical texts are our guide, especially Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra – which is still used as the core text for many modern yogis who descend from Krishnamacharya’s lineage (Ashtanga, Viniyoga, and Iyengar styles) — we can assert that asana is meditation only because asana refers literally to the seated meditation posture, which is assumed to be still. So they don’t help us in our desire to call our practice of vinyasa a meditation.

The later hatha yoga texts that begin to include other postures besides sitting, like the 17th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Gheranda Samhita also do not include instructions on moving through asana, and most of the postures are seated variations intended to serve the practice of mudra (esoteric/energetic gestures) and bandha (energetic engagement points in the body). In original hatha yoga, the goal of physical practice is purification of the body and opening of the energetic channels (nadi) in order to awaken and impel (hatha literally means “force”) kundalini shakti, the “coiled” energy that sleeps in the pelvis, to move upward into the central channel (sushumna) of the body, ascending through the chakras to the crown of the head and back down. This energetic goal is associated with success in meditation (raja yoga), and the practices that cause it are mostly performed in stillness.

Movement through asana first appears in a form we might recognize in the work of the great yoga innovator Krishnamacharya of Mysore, and can be seen in his 1934 text, Yoga Makaranda, which refers to multiple vinyasa for every asana, which describe both the pathways in and out of each pose and linking poses that can be strung together in sequence. This linking then manifests in very different ways in the teaching of his students Pattabhi Jois (in the Ashtanga series’) and TKV Desikachar (Viniyoga), who uses vinyasa to refer to using the breath to move into and out of any given pose. In my class we do these “one-breath vinyasa” often, and I gratefully source my use of them to my teacher Alice Joanou, and her teaching of vinyasa krama. Krishnamacharya sourced these vinyasa to his Tibetan teacher, Ramamohana Brahmachari, and to two probably non-existent texts, the Yoga Korunta and Yoga Rahasya, products of Krishnamacharya’s imagination. As Mark Singleton’s scholarship in The Yoga Body makes abundantly clear, flowing vinyasa as the basis for the Astanga Yoga system and thus our modern vinyasa styles was essentially Krishnamacharya’s invention.

Krishnamacharya’s vinyasa are fabulous, but we’re still not at a fully-realized vinyasa-as-meditation practice. So like him, and many of the innovators of modern yoga, we are essentially on our own here, creating a new hybrid practice that serves our spiritual, emotional, and physical needs. What I want to offer, because practice like this seems to serve my students and myself (postmodern American middle-class urban yogis) very well, is a coherent understanding of how a yogi can use a series of practices in the context of a flowing asana style to focus the mind, cultivate a bright, clear awareness, and balance and increase available energy. These three goals are synonymous with three broad types of meditation we find in the yoga traditions: unification of mind (samatha or samadhi), mindfulness (vipassana or inquiry), and subtle body (sukshma rupa) or energy-oriented (kundalini or pranayama) meditations.

After a recent retreat (the final retreat in the Spirit Rock Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation Training program), I jotted down a series of steps or aspects of practice that I use to bring a full meditative approach to asana. It’s a possible map for a single (very full!) practice but also just a list of methods and contemplations to bring in to your yoga practice in whatever way works for you. The stages go back and forth between physical and mental actions, and this weaving back and forth between body and mind is central to mindful or meditative vinyasa.

Asana as meditation

0. Arriving

• Grounding attention in the body
• Deepening full-body breath: viloma, ujjayi, and sama vrtti pranayama
• Opening the mandala: chanting, remembering intention (sankalpa)

The opening to practice (sadhana), whether at home or in class, is as important as the poses and techniques we do “in” the practice. Set up a clean, clear space, with everything you need nearby — clock, props, water, clothes, music — so that you can drop fully into the zone. Turn off the phone! I love the ritual chants that open a mandala of practice. (Here’s the chants I use – mostly from the Śaiva yoga tradition with one Buddhist homage added in. Feel free to use or modify.) Again and again they remind me that we are engaged in something real, something that touches the spirit deeply, not just stretching and strengthening the body. For me, the ritual of chanting sets the whole practice in motion, and even a single OM is good. Om. Here I am. I am here. I am (the great mantra Aham: ”I am”).

From here, moving into a flow of poses. This list isn’t about what poses we do in what order, but a series of contemplations to bring into any pose or sequence of poses. My own vinyasa practice is slow and steady, emphasizing breath awareness and fullness over complexity of physical shape, and brings these foci into play:

1. Safety-oriented alignment

• Organize the limbs for joint safety and stability
• Feel the whole body in the pose

2. Steadiness of breath

• Pranayama oriented toward full-body breathing
• Amplify and lengthen the breath
• Feel the beginning, middle, and end of each breath
• Continuity of breath awareness

In a way, these first two steps are enough! The main purpose of alignment in a meditative flow is to protect the body from injury. We bring the body into a shape in a way that feels stable and sustainable, not creating extra stress — particularly on joints, and then can attend to other aspects of the experience once we know we’re safe in the pose. This release of concern is only possible when we know basic alignment guidelines well enough that we can trust ourselves to take the pose confidently, knowing that we can handle whatever variation we’re choosing to attempt. Exploring new and risky poses is fun but at these first stages will take us out of the specific meditative flow I’m describing.

Once alignment is good enough for safety, we let breath rise to foreground in awareness, and use a full breath to bring energy and attention into the whole body. Amplification of the breath, tracking the full cycle of the breath, and continuity of awareness are the first skillful means (upaya) here.

3. Refining alignment

• Alignment that supports a fuller breath
• Alignment that opens energetic channels (nadi/cakra)
• Bringing awareness to sensation at alignment points
• Deepening in stretch or strength only if breath is full and continuous

4. Refining breath

• Awareness of length, depth, and effort being applied with each breath
• Sending breath to specific (sticky, dark, hungry, ready, joyous, spacious…) parts of the body
• Balancing the effort being applied in the pose, with breath as guide — not too much force, not too little
• Full-body breathing: feel the whole form, all at once, breathing
• Extending continuity of breath awareness — feel many breaths in a row without distraction

These two are refinements of the first two. Basically: move through poses with a relaxed, bright mind, and a full, steady breath. Keep the mind in feeling contact with the breathing body. Breath so that you can feel the whole body all at once, not as parts. Let your movements be graceful and steady. These first four steps emphasize the meditative practice of integration, or concentration (dharana, the preparation for samadhi) as we endeavor to settle the mind using the full-body breath as primary focus.

5. Feel the whole body

• Sensing the body as one unified field, rather than as parts
• Continuity of awareness through movement “transitions”
• (There are no “transitions”. Every movement is part of the pose.)
• Seeing the flow of poses as revealing impermanence (anicca/anitya) or constant change
• Notice that the perception of the body as “parts” often arises when there’s strong sensation
• Feeling pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant sensations (vedana), and noting preference (grasping/resisting)
• Bringing in any Dharma inquiry as a lens through which to experience the moving body

6. Breath, energy, and awareness move together

• Orienting breath around the central channel (sushumna)
• Working with breath and awareness to cultivate and direct energy (shakti) through the whole body
• Breath awareness in vinyasa easily gives rise to pranayama and bandha
• Orient toward subtle pleasure (sukha) in both body and mind

These two steps contain the heart of asana practice as meditation for me. Using the flow of poses to both increase and channel energy — the traditional hatha yoga focus — AND steady the mind (dharana) through continuous breath awareness (pranayama). When both of these are bright, the mind can turn toward mindfulness – seeing change (anicca), stress (dukkha) in the play of preferences (how vedana leads to tanha), the nature of the body as elements (tattva), sense-impressions (indriya), or any other meditative inquiry. The key to being able to engage in this kind of inquiry is in the vinyasa style itself: the mind must be able to attend primarily to other things besides the arranging of the body in space. The repetitive nature of vinyasa flows, containing less hyper-detailed alignment exploration, the absence of demonstrations, partner poses, and other social activities in class, and the emphasis on breath continuity over acrobatics all will support a meditative flow — even at a fast or vigorous pace.

I want to acknowledge that the inclusion of mindfulness or inquiry here is a mashup, bringing a Buddhist orientation to a hatha yoga practice descended from tantra, which had somewhat different aims. Most of the Indian yogic schools describe the cultivation of states of integrated awareness and energy that lead to power or malleability of the mind, seeing clearly, and freedom from suffering/stress (dukkha), though they describe these qualities using many different frameworks. Beyond that roughly common purpose, many schools arose presenting variations on how this freedom is to be sought, and variations on what the result of practice looks and feels like. The hatha yoga texts emphasized the purification of energy channels (nadi) and the arousing of subtle energy (kundalini) over inquiry into the causes of suffering, recognizing that powerful energy in the bodymind itself can open the yogi into states of ease and clarity from which the work of clear seeing can unfold. Buddhist and classical yoga texts, on the other hand, emphasized training the mind in concentration (samadhi) and awareness (sati, mindfulness), and then turning that powerful mind toward the causes of suffering in order to uproot them. This process always releases energy in the body (called piti, “rapture”, in the Pali Buddhist texts), but that energy was seen as secondary to the processes of unification of mind and inquiry.

Many teachers, as I do, now use a hybrid Buddhist-hatha framework in yoga instead of a fully hatha/kundalini orientation because the practice of mindfulness is a more accessible and valuable tool for postmodern western laypeople than the intensive energetic process demanded by medieval hatha yoga. Of course, these aren’t the only approaches to asana out there, and my focus is maybe too text and tradition nitpicky! Most yoga classes I’ve taken, around the Bay Area scene at least, seem to hold as their philosophical orientation full engagement with the physical body in a way that is life-affirming and personal growth-oriented, with emotional and energetic opening invoked as an important part of the process. I hear little talk of liberation, renunciation, equanimity, or concentration, and more of self-acceptance, love, playfulness, vitality, strength, and physical facility. Though I critique modern posture-based yoga for orienting too little toward the traditional fruits of practice, like liberation, and wonder how deep the benefits of our asana practice go, I do see that the practice as we’ve developed it has wonderful results for many people, and I still happily teach it. Really, it’s the same in any wisdom tradition. A few inspired nuns, monks, and laypeople do intensive practice and deeply clarify the heartmind, and almost everyone else does devotional (bhakti) practice, gives donations (dana), uses the community as a social and family support, and generally keeps the religious culture flowing. This appropriate social balance is true in our yoga communities as well.

So… once the practitioner is established in vinyasa as a meditation such that they’re comfortable with steps 6 and 7, there’s the possibility to bring in any other contemplations. Psychological inquiry has a place here, including investigations of self-worth, self-love, and judgment, and many traditional Dharma contemplations, like those in the Foundations of Mindfulness: the body as nature, movement, elements, sense-impressions, impermanence/death, feeling and preference, mind states, hindrances, Factors of Awakening, Noble Truths, or any of the core reflections of a yoga system, either classical or tantric. Once the mind/heart is steady, the body in movement is a rich and available field for Dharma inquiry. These further steps then integrate the breath and awareness focus with the energetic cultivation central to the hatha yoga system, and turn the practice inward toward stillness and traditional sitting meditation.

7. Flowing between movement and stillness

• Stillness (kaya sthiram) between sequences to feel energy, vibration, presence, mind states
• Applying Wise Effort (samma-vayama) in the flow to balance energy, mindfulness, and concentration
• Continuity of awareness between stillness and movement

8. Deepen or complicate asana only with full, steady breath

• Bringing in kriya or strongly vigorous asana for deeper energetic arousal
• Steadiness of breath as the requirement for introducing advanced or acrobatic asana
• Focusing on the energetic qualities of asana with emphasis on nadi and cakra
  

9. Turning toward stillness

• In longer holds, bringing concentration, pranayama or inquiry to the foreground
• Deep release of muscular effort in asana, whether moving or still
• Softening the breath and releasing effort
• As desired: longer holds, restoratives, and savasana as doorways to stillness

This kind of meditative vinyasa prepares us very well for deeper pranayama and meditation, and often when we take stillness after a practice that focuses on breath and awareness in movement in this way, the steadiness in the room is tremendous. Pranayama that tends toward stillness, particularly kumbhaka with bandha, is particularly juicy to bring in at this point, as is simple sitting meditation, either single-object (dharana/ekagrata) or changing-object (sati, mindfulness) practices.

Vinyasa as meditation still, in my own practice, is not a replacement for sitting in stillness. The states of inward-focus (pratyahara) and integration (samadhi) that I find possible in moving asana are nowhere near as calm or steady as those I can find in sitting, though the energy flow in my body is generally greater, and the stillness often more dramatic. What I do find is that meditative vinyasa gives rise to states of very substantial inner stillness that are immediately palpable when I stop moving. This is why pausing in the flow is so important for this style of practice. The extraordinary brightness that arises in the bodymind through steady vinyasa, when taken into sitting meditation or formal pranayama can be a very accessible doorway to sustained meditation in stillness.

After all that… we return to stillness.

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Asana-focused yogis, if you play with these suggestions, let me know what you find! Is it different from your usual yoga? What’s the result of attending in these different ways? Meditation-focused yogis, does this framework invite you into movement-based practice in a way that supports you to continue cultivating the states you know from stillness? How are they different when approached through movement in this way?

These notes describe many of the themes my own classes work with, and aren’t original to me but a compilation of techniques and orientations I’ve found helpful from my teachers in many traditions. They are born out of the same desires that seem to have motivated yogis for thousands of years: the desire to be happy in this life, and to find methods of practice that lead to that happiness and the deepest liberation possible. If you find them useful, bring these guidelines into your practice, and refine them for yourself as you explore. Vinyasa as yoga practice is less than 100 years old, and in our own lifetimes and studios has received much of its development. In the absence of historical validation for its efficacy, it is up to those of us who love it to find our own way. May we each find that which gives rise to the deepest clarity and peace, and cultivate it to its fullest potential.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, 106 this year

Yet another venerable American spiritual community is reeling with evidence of the sexual misconduct of its beloved teacher, perpetrated over decades, with many many victims and a culture of silence that is finally being challenged. This is getting really old! This time it’s hitting close to home for me, and as I begin to write this post, my heart is heavy, not only for my Zen sangha (community) now being forced to admit in public the suffering caused by our teacher’s harmful actions, but for so many Buddhist and yoga sanghas in the west in which depressingly similar abuses have unfolded.

This year’s “scandal” — which I put in quotes because the word is usually used when information becomes suddenly visible that shockingly changes everything… but this information has been known for years and as far as I can tell, few people within the sangha are “shocked” — is around the behavior of my first Buddhist teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. I studied with him intermittently from 1993-99, at Bodhi Manda in NM and Mt. Baldy Zen Center. Though I was not in any “inner circle”, and mostly just another sleepy student getting hit with the keisaku every morning, the monks, nuns, and laypeople in this story are my friends. They cared for me at a vulnerable and deep time in my life and practice, and I care for them deeply. To any of you who read this — Koshin, Kigen, Giko, Hosen, Genshu, Kido, Seisen, Myokyo, Gido, Myoshin, Seiju… and my friends not in robes, including Leonard Cohen who I knew just a little, but whose gorgeous songs are, sadly, the soundtrack to this train wreck — I send you my heartfelt compassion, togetherness in sangha, and warmth. Thank you for your bright practice example through those years, and your welcoming of this young seeker.

What happened? Joshu Roshi, over four (or more) decades, repeatedly groped, seduced, manipulated, slept with, and otherwise abused women students, dozens of whom have come forward as the story unfolds (see my friend Giko Rubin’s post for a solid and deeply felt description, also Matthew Remski’s). Much of the information has been collected at Sweeping Zen, and the revelations are now stretching back as far as his life in Japan before he came here. Newly translated documents from the 1950s reveal that his behavior was scandalous then, involved embezzlement of money in addition to sexual misconduct, and may have been the cause of his coming to teach in the west — he may have been kicked (or eased) out of Myoshin-ji, his home temple! (I did wonder why he used to say that he hated Japan, that Zen was dead there, and that he never wanted to go back…) My first powerful teacher, who I learned so much from, and truly loved as a dharma guide and elder, has caused deep harm in an ongoing way.

I want to write about something that this scandal, and others in the larger Zen community, has brought up for me. It’s more of a dharma/doctrinal reflection than part of the continued revelations of his crimes. I don’t really have new information to add, and the problems with patriarchy, uncritical guru devotion, and the abuse of power by men of flawed awakening are no news. (Scott Edelstein’s book/site, Sex and the Spiritual Teacher, is a good start for a systemic discussion if you want that.) But I’ll add my voice to those who have admitted that they knew about Roshi’s behavior, and spoke of it within the sangha, but did not go outside the community with the information. When I learned about it, the student who told me (I don’t remember who) was so matter-of-fact about it that I assumed, as the inevitable blog title says, that “Everybody Knows“. Everybody there seemingly did know, and I was told that new female students were regularly warned before their first meeting with him that this was likely.

Now that it seems as though the “outside world” actually didn’t know, I wish that I had had the depth of practice or guts to do more, to speak out, but I admit that I was so consumed by my own drama and struggle that I didn’t really notice at first. And being male, though I was told that he had occasionally (much more rarely) groped men as well, I was spared direct predation. Like others who have admitted taking part in the communal silence, I want to apologize to those harmed, and admit my passive complicity in this terrible situation. When I left Mt. Baldy Zen Center (MBZC) and Sasaki in 1999 it was partly out of discomfort with his behavior — I was starting to feel the dysfunction in the sangha, and wanted a teacher and community I could more happily devote myself to — and partly through my sense of being a failure at Zen and needing something… kinder, wiser, softer, (and which would include meditation instructions, which I desperately craved). I stumbled on Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart, and within months of my last painful Rohatsu sesshin at MBZC was on the new 2-month retreat at Spirit Rock, where I fell in love with a beautiful lineage of practice, kind and transparent western teachers, and with the dharma of the Buddha, rather than the inscrutable samurai. I never went back.

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At the heart of misconduct of this kind, for me, is the loss of sila, the ethical limbs of dharma practice. In all the Buddhist traditions, sila is most commonly expressed in the formulation of the “Five Precepts” (which expand into 8 and 10-precept versions, and then into the vast monastic rules that govern ordained life). A common Theravada (early Buddhist) version is this one, from Spirit Rock teacher Gil Fronsdal’s website:

To refrain from killing
To refrain from stealing (taking that which is not offered)
To refrain from sexual misconduct
To refrain from lying, harsh speech, idle speech, and slander
To refrain from taking intoxicants that cloud the mind and cause heedlessness

In Theravadan countries (primarily Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka) and in the Insight Meditation tradition in the west that originates in the Theravada, these guidelines are generally interpreted literally, and the implication is that their observation is effective in at least three ways for practitioners:

1. They are a training in mindfulness as we attempt to orient our actions around them.

2. They are a gift of safety for others, and so develop generosity and selflessness. (As described in this sutta, where “giving freedom from danger” to other beings is called “the first great gift… not open to suspicion… unfaulted”.)

3. They protect us from doing things that will cause future regret, censure, blame, and suffering for ourselves and others. This is important not just as a manifestation of care for others, but as a supportive condition for concentration (samadhi). It’s impossible to relax into a happy, peaceful mind when we are spinning with regret and the various mind states that result from harmful action. (I know this hindrance well!)

The sense that the precepts are a protection for yourself is a deep and powerful teaching, and one that was offered to me directly when I was temporarily ordained as a monk in Burma in 2002. My teacher there, Sayadaw U Janaka, gave me the monastic name U Silarakkhita, which means Venerable One (“U”) Protected (“rakkhita”) by Ethics (“Sila”). I loved this name, and not just because I felt lucky not to get the name my Korean friend got, “Protected by Insects”! I felt like the name really saw both who I was (a sincere seeker who wanted to walk a righteous Path), and what I was running from. I had left Sasaki only a couple years before, and definitely thought about him when I heard my new name. May I and all others be protected from harm by the power of wise action! Of course I’ve fallen off my righteous path many times, before and since, and can feel the harm I myself have caused — by careless or angry words, by a misplaced kiss, by inaction when action was called for. I am in no position to cast judgment on my Roshi in a manner that implies that my own action is beyond reproach. But I respect sila deeply, and am brought back to its centrality in dharma life again and again.

Literal practice of ethical guidelines is, of course, impossible, and an ongoing inquiry for anyone who takes the practice of them seriously. I’ve written elsewhere, for instance, about Theravada practitioners who fret over the killing of ants in their kitchen, but who regularly buy and eat meat (to choose a popular issue that I feel strongly about). The point is not that literal “keeping” of these precepts is demanded, as if all ethical dilemma were crystal clear and possible to solve without compromise, but that orienting toward them as direct guidelines for action is a valuable support for spiritual life. This view is essentially unchallenged in all the Theravada communities I’ve known, and many wise spiritual lineages worldwide. Precepts held in this way reflect the reality of the Relative, or Personal, conditioned, universe, which can be described in contrast to Absolute, or Universal reality, which is seen as unconditioned. This is a reflection on transcendence and immanence.

The teaching I’m referring to here, the “Two Truths” of Relative and Absolute, is a Mahayana doctrine that arose in the early centuries after the Buddha as a way to account for when he seemed to be teaching from different perspectives depending on his audience, and using different kinds of language in different contexts. (See Buescher, Echoes from an Empty Sky for this history.) It is a way of framing the non-separateness (“not-two”) of Samsara and Nirvana, or conditioned and unconditioned reality, and manifests most prominently in Zen as the famous formulation in the Heart Sutra, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form”, which we chanted every day at Mt. Baldy. The understanding is that everything is “empty” (shunyata) of permanence, empty of the ability to satisfy craving, and empty of anything that could be called “I” or “mine”, and so leads to knowing in a very profound way the “emptiness” of substance, or form, in the ways we conventionally understand it. This makes most of “reality” — our bodies, other people, time, relationship, contact, and all sense experience — feel pretty insubstantial! And it leads to Zen-style exclamations like the Chinese master Rinzai’s classic description of the nature of all sense experience as illusory: “like flowers in the sky! Why trouble to grasp at them?”

Emptiness is so compelling and gorgeous a concept/understanding/view/experience, that it might be no surprise that it’s emphasized more in some Buddhist schools than its relative counterpart, Compassion. If Emptiness arises out of the recognition that difference is illusory, Compassion arises out of the recognition that difference is real, and thus that harm, empathy, and care are real. “Emptiness is Form”. It has to be understood in both directions. Through compassion, we see other people, where through Emptiness, we feel like we are them (or everything, or nothing). Where all is One, there’s no relationship, no meeting, no separating, no caring. Only when Oneness is seen to separate into Two does relationship, care, meeting, and the dangerous possibility of harm arise. (This merging and separating was completely central to Joshu Roshi’s teaching, and I heard him give innumerable talks on the relationship of “one” and “zero”, “male” and “female”, and how they come together, inhabit each others’ space, separate, have a baby (the relative self), etc. Now I can’t help but hear this elaborate metaphor through other, very relative, ears! But the core teaching is true and deep.) We need to know both Truths in order to both be free from suffering and able to act wisely in the world.

Unfortunately, some Zen schools tilt so substantially toward Emptiness, or the Absolute, that they seem to denigrate relative realities like… the realness of other people, life and death, harm and care, connection. And this preference for Emptiness over Form, or Absolute over Relative then changes the understanding, and thus practice, of sila. Here is a version of the first precept (“non-harming”), in a version from the Ch’an/Zen sage Bodhidharma. This is essentially the version we used at Mt. Baldy (though I don’t remember which translation we used, and we didn’t chant it very often!):

Self Nature is subtle and profound.
In the midst of the everlasting dharma,
not producing a view of extinction is called the precept of not taking life.

So “not taking life” has nothing, here, to do with harming living beings, and everything to do with sustaining a View (drishti) that rests in the Absolute. This is a similar teaching to that which Krishna gives Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: that it’s right to kill all these warriors because they’re “already dead”, as is everybody, devoured in the ceaseless maw of time, which makes birth and death ultimately an illusion. So… I’ve had moments where I really feel like I get this, and time really seems to disappear into an Eternal Singular Now… but then the experience passes, ordinary mind returns, and it’s time to speak kindly, act generously, and take care of myself and other beings, who very much do exist! I mentioned this critique — of a misuse of Emptiness teachings — in a Facebook conversation with several teachers today that caused me to start writing this post, and Frank Jude Boccio quoted Aitken Roshi also speaking out against this misuse: “Yes, he who wields the sword is empty; as is the one cut through; as is the sword. But what about the blood and tears?” What about them, Roshi?

So here’s Bodhidharma’s precept on not misusing sexuality:

Self Nature is subtle and profound.
In the midst of the unstained Dharma,
not creating a veneer of attachment is called the precept of not misusing sexuality.

A “veneer of attachment”. Again, I get the sense that I could easily interpret this as saying, “If I don’t feel like I was attached, which is only a surface aesthetic (“veneer”) anyway, then whatever I did is fine”. And by framing it in terms of the more abstract “attachment” rather than the physical “sexuality”, the precept even more than the first one seems to slip through the fingers. One common translation of this precept doesn’t even use the word sexuality, reframing it entirely as a non-dual transcendence of attachment. These Zen precepts describe profound understandings of the awakened mind, not ordinary, confused, scared, lustful people, impulses, and actions. And they’re deep teachings, yes. But I wonder if a community, like the Mt. Baldy I remember, that emphasizes these versions without explicating commentary, and doesn’t affirm any more literal or relative ethical guidelines, runs the risk of reifying the Absolute in a way that leaves practitioners (by definition unenlightened beings) vulnerable to all the normal desires and confusions we know so well. Unprotected.

Of course, most Zen and Mahayana teachers will indeed teach these precepts with wise commentary that affirms the precepts’ profound view but also recognizes the importance of having concrete guidelines for action. When at Mt. Baldy I saw a monk making out with a student behind the zendo, or heard that a monk and student had “gone off into the bushes”, or was offered my first scotch and cigarettes after a particularly hard sesshin, or heard all the stories about Roshi, I was left with the sense that this was just normal, and not a big deal. And I got swept into that ethos myself — into the bushes, a couple sweet hookups, and one longer relationship — and some of that was unskillful, for sure, but I was not the teacher, not atop a power imbalance. Still, I was unprotected by sila. I think many of us were. And when people would question this culture, the clear implication — and some of the writings that have been posted by others have said this as well — was that if they thought it was really a problem they just didn’t understand the profound non-duality of Zen. This is a standard defensive line always leveled at critics of abusive gurus, but it is bad dharma. It is completely possible to understand the vast View of Emptiness and still respect the reality of difference, contact, relationship, harm. “Emptiness is not other than Form.” The wonderful non-dual teacher Ganga-ji, when a student proposed that it was apparent that nothing exists (and by implication, matters), said something like, “Yes, it’s true that nothing exists. It’s also true that everything exists. But it’s better to live as if everything exists.”

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One of the Zen parables that Joshu Roshi taught on, which I grew to love very much, was a story called Hyakujo and the Fox (Mumonkan case #2). It speaks to using the teachings of the Absolute to deny the effects of actions, as well as to repentance, old age, humility, and release. When I think now about him teaching this parable, then returning to his life of abuse and denial, I’m confused. I loved that old fox.

It’s a story of a Zen master from the distant past who once, through attachment to the doctrine of the Absolute, claimed that enlightened beings were not subject to the law of cause and effect. For this heretical view he was condemned to wander the back side of the hill behind the temple, reborn as a fox for 500 lifetimes. He arrives as a ghost at master Hyakujo’s zendo and asks to be heard in his repentance, and to be taught the truth. Hearing it, he announces that he can finally die, and leaves the hall. The monks walk around the hill to find the dead body of an ancient fox, and cremate it as if it were a monk. The comment verse by Mumon, who compiled the ancient collection, is this:

Not falling, not evading –
two faces of the same die.
Not evading, not falling –
a thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes.

Seth Eisen’s “Homo File”. Photo by Gary Ivanek

“Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.” (bell hooks, Art on my Mind)

“Asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender, with feminism. I would start by stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, being a seeker on the path. Feminist and antiracist struggles are part of this journey. I stand spiritually, steadfastly, on a path of love — that’s the ground of my being.”  (bell hooks, “Contemplation and Transformation” in Buddhist Women on the Edge)

On what ground does a person stand when declaring their existence? bell hooks’ essay in the 1996 collection Buddhist Women on the Edge begins “Asked to define myself…”. Here is already a subject. Self-definition is often a privilege of the middle and upper classes, but the request itself is also a marker of unstable social standing. For who is asked to define themselves but those whose power needs to be defined, constrained, controlled? The dominant are defined by their power and privilege, and only have to define themselves when something happens to disrupt the narrative. Asked to define herself, she wouldn’t start with race — she doesn’t have to, or doesn’t have a choice, because it started without her, long ago. She wouldn’t start with gender. This choice to not “start with” is indicative of substantial agency, but the need to do so, or to announce what one is not doing, signals the presence of external force. Her alongside orientation, “love”, and activity, “seeker”, are gestures of resistance not only to the identity fundamentalists but to the dominant power that demands she define herself in the first place. In this essay I’ll discuss pragmatic essentialism in relation to Buddhist thought, discuss social structures that support the Buddhist practices that lead to deconstruction of the self, and note some pitfalls in the import of those practices to the west. I’ll then read Seth Eisen’s queer history piece Homo File as an example of a queer Buddhist-influenced theater that performs a “path of love” as liberative stance in relation to hegemonic authority.

Subjectivity arises when the self is perceived in relation to another, and is the state of mind in play when identity, cooperation, and resistance are active. Subjectivity has an Other always in its field, and so is predicated on a dependent, or interdependent, self. Peggy Phelan writes, “ Subjectivity can only be ‘had,’ that is to say, experienced and performed (through the performance one has the experience of subjectivity), in the admission and recognition of one’s failure to appear to oneself and within the representational field.”

If one “succeeded” in appearing, the other would fade from predominance or be eclipsed by that which would now hold the center, the point at which the perspective coheres. Nevertheless, asserting identity and subjectivity are necessary and powerful when oppression is overwhelming. hooks, though she is deeply aware of and has fought against the oppression perpetrated upon black people and women, chooses to take her stand alongside, as a “seeker”, as one who is steadfast “on a path of love”. Though she references Buddhist teachings and teachers, she takes refuge not in the transcendent Emptiness suggested by Buddhism, nor in the traditional objects of refuge — Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha — but in the most sublime of “spiritual” qualities: love. This stance holds deep implications as a contemplative identity practice for engaged members of society, artists and art consumers, and members of oppressed groups, particularly in how it eschews stances of resistance and struggle. hooks’ embrace of love as fundament performs a Buddhist understanding of the self as conditioned by past, choice, and intention, and intersects with postmodern discourses of multiplicity even as such theories have faced substantial cultural drift toward fundamentalism, essentialism, and tribal violence. She writes also as a Buddhist practitioner engaging with social liberation struggles while holding a classically Buddhist utopian orientation “beyond dualisms”. She understands that discourses of multiplicity and the non-autonomous — discourses beyond dualism — are not often or easily embraced by oppressed communities that rely on essentialized traits and self-other dualisms for ontological and material survival.

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The transcendent vision of Not-Self (anatta) in the Pali Canon, in which no thing can be identified as being a stable or reliable self, and its Mahayana descendent, Emptiness (shunyata) as an ultimate quality of all things and experiences, are the taproots of the Buddhist understanding of the self — that there essentially isn’t one in the way that we tend to imagine or desire. But the crux of understanding how Buddhist ideas about self meet postmodern experience is perhaps in the social formations that surround Buddhist practice more than in the philosophies themselves. Buddhism’s famous deconstruction of the self (anatta) is predicated on there being enough stability of frame (ego, status, community, society) to support a psychological and energetic unraveling, though this predicate is only implicit in the early texts. Traditionally this unraveling, the consequence of sustained meditation and contemplation, would have been undertaken only within the social structure of the ordained sangha, which operates under a very codified and strict set of rules (the vinaya), and is the oldest continuously operating organization in the world. This incredibly stable structure is the ground — in most Asian Buddhisms, at least — that supports the dissolution of the self in intensive practice. You can go to pieces because everything around you is there to support your going to pieces! This shelter is the privilege of the monastics, who don’t have to raise families, go to work, or in any substantial way rely on ego structures for daily functioning. Lay Buddhists in Theravadan countries, for instance, historically don’t meditate much, but practice generosity and ethical action, devotional observances, and support the monastics, who reciprocate with teachings, life cycle rituals, and in some villages coordination of education, medical care, and other social services. These laity would not be pursuing practices that lead to dissolution, and if they stumbled into it, as some do, would generally immediately ordain, having recognized the import of what was happening.

When Buddhism found converts in the west it was in a psychologically-oriented middle-class with enough comfort and hubris to want to engage in the most “profound” practices, and though they formed strong lay communities (like Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and the San Francisco Zen Center), the full support structure of the monastic sangha was essentially lost. An emphasis on the deconstruction of the self, however, was retained and emphasized. The consequence of this shift is that a huge number of people (myself included), are practicing and teaching deconstructive meditations with minimal social or psychological framing structures that guarantee the safety of those who take these meditations to their natural end. This is an acknowledged issue in western Theravada, with its love for intensive lay practice, and is being addressed by many western Buddhist communities. Attraction to deconstructive practice but separation from support structures has deep implications in the unfolding of meditative communities in the west, including giving rise to work that I and many of my teachers and peers are doing to integrate trauma-healing and complementary psychological understanding and skills into the dharma teaching toolkit.

It is commonly repeated, after all, that before one lets go of the self, one has to have one in the first place. bell hooks repeats this teaching in relation to gender, saying “A central problem for women is that you can’t give up the ego and the self if you haven’t established a sense of yourself as subject”. Here psychology and soteriology can be understood as sequential: psychological process, including grounding, orientation, establishment of healthy ego boundaries, secure attachment, and emotional maturity are prerequisites for deconstructive, and liberating, inquiry. If this is the case, then the popularization of Buddhism and mindfulness might be to some extent misguided. Indeed, most people who attend intensive meditation retreats spend much of their time processing personality content rather than the traditional vipassana insights, and the question is begged whether the Buddhist practice being pursued in earnest by western practitioners is culturally or psychologically appropriate, or even as effective as the exercises are designed to be in the traditional context. Further, there is a conversation happening now in western Theravada about whether intensive meditation retreat is contraindicated for people with histories of trauma or otherwise unstable psychological histories. We may be prescribing a strong medicine where it does not serve. Buddhism was not originally intended to be a populist practice, with everyone invited to meditate, and given the impression that such practice would be good for them! Mythically, after the Buddha’s awakening, he felt that the wisdom he had realized was too subtle for people to understand, and initially decided not to teach. He changed his mind only after being exhorted by a deity (Brahma Sahampati) to see that there were in fact “beings with little dust in their eyes” who would in fact understand the Dharma. And even then he reserved the teachings on not-self for the monks and nuns, not offering them to lay people for many years. In our culture where substantial politically rightward drift is only reinforcing tribalism, paranoia, solidification of identity, affinity, and insularity, teachings on the Emptiness of self are perhaps simply not the right medicine, and should be deemphasized in favor of ethical and community-building teachings.

An integrated Buddhist response to the question of subjectivity and power alongside and in non-autonomy might be rooted in the understanding that in order for deconstructive discourses to take real root, strong support structures must be in place that affirm the subjectivity and positionality of each person and community, even if that affirmation must rely, temporarily perhaps, on undesirable (and ontologically misleading) essentialisms. Sangha in a way is such an essentialism — as its translation “community” must also be. It imagines unity where there is difference. This is the pragmatic feminist essentialism of Irigaray, and in the Buddhist west is perhaps a vital counterbalance to the practices of psychoenergetic deconstruction. A healthy Buddhist self that acts alongside hegemonic forms of power is one who holds identity and community/affinity in perspective, not as ontological absolutes, but as Skillful Means (upaya), and does not abandon them. Perhaps the wise practitioner finds or makes a safe space — in her home or church or neighborhood, alone or in a group — in which to let go of or soften essentialized identity in a way that doesn’t threaten the material and social well-being of her group. And emerging, she takes it up again, as necessary, in the struggle for justice and peace. I know that it is my hope, and the hope of those who teach Dharma, that our groups and classes are that safe space for oppressed people. And I know that we have far to go before this is really true.

There exists now a rich and growing literature on “Engaged Buddhism”, written mostly by practitioners of meditation and Buddhist contemplation who endeavor to bridge a gap between Buddhism’s clear love of renunciation and yogic disengagement and liberal-progressive struggles for justice, peace, and ecological sustainability. Engaged Buddhist discourse recognizes the power of identity constructions around race, gender, sexuality, class, size, geography, and other power-relevant distinctions, and like the feminists rightly suspicious of essentializing philosophies, which tend to either ignore oppression (when practiced by the privileged/oppressor) or support tribalism and insularity (when practiced by the oppressed). Buddhism, in its recognition of the Emptiness (shunyata) of identity and the self, can itself easily become an essentializing philosophy, especially in the hands of privileged communities who are comfortable and safe enough to even consider letting go of the shelter of self (and therefore other). It is no surprise that the meditative and philosophically subtle forms of Buddhism have generally taken root in the upper classes first when imported to a new country, while the devotional and ritual forms have remained the practice of the poor and less educated.

Engaged Buddhist approaches in both Asia and America have grown out of Mahayana traditions that emphasize compassion, and applied that compassion in service of social good. This engaged Buddhist path that is more concerned with immanence and the suffering of others than with transcendence and the end of suffering in the self is one that might be called, in hooks’ American post-Christian vernacular, a “path of love”.

Art as a ‘path of love’

Queer Buddhist performer, visual artist, and theater maker Seth Eisen uses a convivial postdramatic acting style, puppetry, drag, and aerial dance to create intimate spectacles telling stories from queer history. His recent piece, Homo File (2012) portrayed the life of Samuel Steward, who was “a college professor, a prolific author of homoerotic fiction, an influential tattoo artist, and Queer sexual rebel”, in arch and touching scenes depicting his meetings with Alfred Kinsey, Gertrude Stein (played in buoyant drag by Michael Soldier), Alice B. Toklas, and a parade of sailors and sexual partners. Eisen’s theater is warm at heart, kind toward his protagonist, with barely a dramatic arc — Steward will not hide his homosexuality and loses his university job. The piece barely mourns, pouring forward in a biography that does not attempt to package Steward into a single iconic or tragic myth but allows him to inhabit several: now he’s a tattoo artist, now writes erotic fiction, now seems a full time libertine, now is a satisfied old man (embodied as a beautiful bunraku puppet operated by the whole cast, one body taking on multiplicities of intent). The subjectivity represented in the character of Steward is that of a self that acts not in resistance to dominant forces but simply outside their ken. He is his own person, and teaches that confidence and presence of self to the audience. As a piece of queer history I don’t know how revisionist the emotional portrayal is — the piece is based almost wholly on the one published biography, Secret Historian, by Justin Spring — but Eisen’s Buddhist practice is revealed in the emphasis on Steward’s equanimity and jouissance, readable as Barthesian in his blissful invitation of encounter after encounter. The pleasure of the text that was Steward himself — and he was, covered in ink — is read by hundreds of men, each sexual encounter documented on file cards and meticulously stored. His body becomes text, jouissant, blissful, and he reads — and then writes — the bodies of his lovers, charting an intimate path through an intolerant mid-century America. Though it is a story that revolves around sexual secrecy and persecution, Homo File was never grim, and a palpable kindness filled the theater.

Because drag disrupts perception so fully, it easily becomes a manifestation of ontological Emptiness — more than just acting — especially when, as in Homo File and often nowadays, not performed with mimetic intent. Soldier was never going to “pass” for Stein, but in his masculinity, wearing thick skirt, plump belly, and grey wig, did a delightful Gertrude — the one we’ve seen in the pictures, with diminutive Alice beside her, all hospitality, gossip and expat self-assurance. Doesn’t all acting reveal Emptiness, or the insubstantiality of things? It doesn’t, when illusion is being pursued, because we’re both so used to pursuing and so used to believing that it’s very difficult to turn away (to know our own subjectivity alongside). Eisen’s transparency of material — the cast, in costume but without masks or any veiling, simply moving puppet-Steward’s limbs slowly, making him stand and walk slowly forward, their attempt at communal coordination creating a poignant old man with tottering limbs; an overhead projector serving as the screen for shadow puppets becomes a quick, erasable field for drawing, and sketches of men fly up onto it as Steward talks about his lovers, their outlines like brush calligraphy, erotic, easy, gone  — assisted me in this revelation. On the body — heart, mind — can be written, drawn, felt, any story. No one person owns a story, but sung as history in a community where queer ancestors are often unknown, stories become the bodies of the listeners, especially for those who actively seek them out. For the seekers.

In the Buddhist doctrine that pairs Emptiness with Compassion, each arises as the natural flowering of the other. Love the spontaneous activity of Wisdom, or seeing clearly; Wisdom the maturing of Love without limit. Neither requires self or subjectivity to be fixated in order to manifest. Emptiness becomes a field of potential, of the virtual, of multiplicity, in which because nothing is fixed, anything can arise. This “anything arising” depends on conditions cultivated, of course, and love is the queen of conditions.

“Hatred never ceases by hatred
but by love alone is healed
This is the ancient and eternal law.”

(The Buddha, in The Dhammapada)

Contemplative practice, framed by the various religions, is almost always represented as a Path — the changing of subjective experience from one state or understanding to another more wholesome one — that leads to a definite fruition. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, with its seven “mansions” leading to an inner sanctum where the Divine Marriage is experienced; the Sufi path from tauba, the “turning of the heart” to fruition experienced as the return to the Beloved through fana, spiritual annihilation; the path of yoga leading to liberation from samsara or the round of birth and death.

The Theravada Buddhist model preserved in the Pali Canon and its commentaries is exemplary because its mapping of subjective states is both extremely detailed and rigorously phenomenological, that is, not relying on articles of faith, mythical narratives, mystical cosmology, or speculations on the nature of reality for its pursuit or verification. The Buddha is famous for encouraging self-reliant inquiry, and not taking anything on faith, demanding that practitioners use intelligent, experiential investigation as the path to fruition.

This encouragement includes not assuming something is true even if spoken by a teacher or sage, and distinguishes the Theravada approach from later methods that rely more heavily on guru yoga and mystical transmission, as many Mahayana and Vajrayana schools do. In the Theravada we find ample evidence of a progressive “Path” (magga) orientation, beginning with the Buddha’s naming of his method “The Noble Eightfold Path” (ariya-atthangika-magga) and threading through the texts in countless ways. The end of the Path is characterized by a series of experiences that follow the non-conceptual state of “cessation” (nirodha, considered to be the perception of nibbana/nirvana), though commentators are careful to maintain a taxonomy that recognizes nibbana as “unconditioned” and therefore not a “state”, since states are conditioned experiences. (I will not unpack the dense commentaries on the nature of nibbana here.) Following cessation, the practitioner experiences various recognitions and confirmations of the experience that has just occurred, and knows that fruition (phala) has been reached. The practices that comprise the Path are known as “cultivation” (bhavana), and they hinge on the application of effort via intention. We can then speak to a dyad of action and result, here manifesting as cultivation and fruition.

In order for action to be cultivation, in other words for any activity to be part of the Path toward fruition, it needs to be accompanied by appropriate orientation and intention, which are the first two steps on the Eightfold Path: Wise View (samma ditthi) and Wise Intention (samma sankappa). Bhavana consists largely of trainings for the mind, through ethical, reflective, and meditative exercises such as concentration of the attention on one object or task to the exclusion of all else. But not all concentration is bhavana — many people concentrate: athletes, soldiers, and performing artists among them, but their concentration does not necessarily, or even often, lead to the types of fruition described in religious and spiritual texts.

In order for Buddhist maps of cultivation to be valuable in a discussion of artistic practice, not only will artistic activities have to be interrogated, but the intentions and supporting structures that surround the activities. Taking concentration as an example, the Pali texts describe two variants of mind-unification practice (samadhi): one in which a sense object (like the breath, or a visual image) is brought into attention and maintained there to the exclusion of other sense data, called “one-pointedness” (ekaggata), and leading to absorption (jhana); and one in which attention is sustained on the act of paying attention itself, and then directed to the stream of changing sensory objects (sati, or “mindfulness”) leading to inquiry and insight (vipassana). In jhana practice, the steadied mind is eventually intended away from sensory seclusion in absorption toward the meditative process itself, reflecting on the impermanence and unsatisfactoriness of the (generally very pleasurable) jhana state itself, and thus turned toward Insight. In vipassana practice, the turn toward Insight is immediate, inviting the practitioner to attend so closely to changing experience that impermanence and unsatisfactoriness are apparent even without the stability of mind cultivated in jhana. Either way, the trained mind is used in inquiry into phenomenal experience leading to the deconstruction of the habitual personality and sense of self (atta), and the end of the suffering (dukkha) caused by fixated relationships with both external objects and self. The two types of samadhi lead to different experiences, but the fruition is similar.

Orientation and intention are integral to this process. Jhana, for instance, which is the primary meditative task suggested in the Pali Canon, is intrinsically blissful, maturing into states of great equanimity and ease. But pleasurable sense experience does not on its own impel reflection on its own impermanence or other Dharma qualities. In fact, as we know from our very pleasure-oriented culture, pleasurable sense experience can easily just give rise to the desire for more. The rat on the lever — which of course turns out to be much more complex than it seems. Jhana seems to give rise to inquiry, insight, and fruition only in the presence of appropriate framing, and as such is accompanied in the commentaries by warnings not to be seduced by the pleasure, but to stay sober in the core orientation toward suffering and freedom from suffering. This sobriety is the purpose of the insight stage called “purification by knowledge and vision of what is and is not the path”, in which the practitioner recognizes that every meditative experience, even those colored by substantial clarity and ease, are impermanent and therefore unreliable. It is orientation toward the Four Noble Truths that keeps the practitioner on the Path at a stage like this. The importance of orientation (which I am using as a version of the more traditional “view” for ditthi) and intention as frames for cultivation will support a discussion of whether this model of cultivation and fruition sheds light on the rehearsal-performance dyad in the arts.

What is rehearsal-performance? Conventionally, rehearsal is the period in which people prepare a piece for public showing, and performance is that public showing. Rehearsal is preparation, which manifests in many ways — some groups practice skills of body, voice, and thought, some work to build fluency with a given text or score, some improvise and generate material, many do all of these. I will discuss mostly recent rehearsal methodologies, using as a first example generalizations about process-based theater by Eugenio Barba, recognizing a shift in rehearsal process in the 20^th century via the exercises of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold:

“[The] exercises… had nothing in common with the courses at theatre schools in which students learned singing, diction, fencing, ballet, and play interpretation. All these were abilities that could be exploited in their future careers, but were not taught by the exercises… At first the exercises appeared to be an aberration from the point of view of tradition and common sense because it was not easy to see their utility for the actor. What was the point in repeating dynamic patterns that had no direct relationship to the rehearsals, which focused on character interpretation and the immediate effect of the production on the spectator?” (Barba, “The Essence of Theater”, TDR 46.3, 2002)

The exercises that would come, in many variations, to comprise the training in many kinds of modern and postmodern theater, were not oriented toward specific theatrically-useful results (like diction), but were focused on “overcoming obstacles and inhibitions; specializing in certain skills; freeing oneself of conditioning, of “spontaneity,” or of mannerisms; the acquisition of a particular way of using the brain and the nervous system… They are pure form, a linking together of dynamic peripeteias, without a plot, but infused with information”. Barba’s description places the Stanislavsky and Meyerhold exercises in contrast to the more specifically theatrical skill orientation of the traditional courses, and recognizes that rehearsal comprises the entire course of training that precedes public showing — including more than just preparation of the specific piece to be presented.

We can then differentiate between training, as the repetition of exercises that cultivate desired qualities and skills, and rehearsal, where specific material is prepared for performance. The 19^th century piano virtuoso Franz Liszt is mythically famous for practicing 10 hours a day, with half devoted to technique and half to repertoire. This is probably an exaggeration, but not by much, and it was commonly repeated during the years of Liszt’s celebrity as Europe’s preeminent touring piano virtuoso. So training and rehearsal are separate kinds of preparatory practices, and we can look into how they each prepare the performer for public showing, then look at the moment of performance itself. I will hypothesize that training and rehearsal are methodologically parallel to one-pointedness and inquiry in Buddhist practice, and that they condition fruition, or performance, in revealingly similar ways.

Theatrical exercises, Barba’s “pure form… infused with information”, condition the practitioner in ways that support “a particular way of using the brain and the nervous system”. The exercises are mostly physical, but condition inner states in a relearning process, often through undoing — conditioning, mannerisms, habits — and thus “freeing oneself”. Meditative training does the same, likewise through a process of engaging with the basics of material and perceptual experience — “pure form”. In bhavana, physical practices (stillness, alert postures, and focused, slow movement) support a mental practice of stilling distraction and relaxing into one-pointedness. This process inevitably brings up difficult emotions and personal content, and reveals the practitioner’s conditioning and habits as they express through the process being undertaken. The cultivation of focused states and the emotional work that comes with attempting them both are supported and amplified by repetition, which is the defining activity of training both in the arts and in spiritual practice. If the Stanislavsky and Meyerhold exercises are a version of cultivation that much like one-pointedness training places the practitioner inside forms — Tadashi Suzuki’s method is more recent example — improvisation-centered methods are a training that uses dynamic situations to condition responsiveness, spontaneity, and other valuable performing skills. These trainings, like Viewpoints, Action Theater, Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation, and many others can be paralleled to the changing-object practices of mindfulness (sati) in that they do not train the practitioner specifically in one-pointed focus on specific forms, like stomping the feet in Suzuki’s method, but emphasize the process of attention and response itself as the field in which virtuosity is cultivated. Virtuosity, which originally meant “manly”, and later “dilettante”, refers now to performers and craftspeople who evince extreme technical skill, especially since the Romantic period applying to celebrity musicians. If training cultivates skills whose utility is “not easy to see”, what does virtuosity look like in a contemplative performer? Virtuosity is fruition.

Potently and paradoxically in Theravada practice fruition — comprising the experience of spontaneous cessation (nirodha) and unbinding (nibbana), the recognition (phala) of that cessation, reviewing of what led to it (paccavekkhana) and the stabilization of a new experience of (not-believing-in-)self called Stream-Enterer (sotāpanna) — is considered both to be the reason for training and not conditioned by it. Cultivation brings the mind and body to the extremely heightened state that cessation generally arises within, but because nibbana itself is understood as “unconditioned”, it can not arise as a result. Fruition therefore isn’t so much the moment of cessation as the reflection afterward that recognizes that the taints (grasping, aversion, confusion, and the sense of the self as substantial or continually existent) have been uprooted. We have a model then of repetitive training that conditions heightened states of mind and an orientation toward seeing certain qualities of existence clearly (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self). With that heightened state as support but not condition (meaning fruition is not inevitable), spontaneous moments can arise in which the sense of self and all that is known ceases, followed by the recognition of that ceasing and appreciation of the new state that arises in its wake.

Performance, as the fruition of training and rehearsal, is conventionally the moment of public showing. But what is different in the performer’s state between private practice and public showing? The performer may be nervous or have other psychological content around being seen or heard, but structurally the primary difference is in the charge or energy their directed attention brings into the system. This will give rise to a general heightening of the performer’s energetic state, but the situation is not yet electric — not yet revelation. But as many performers know, within the heightened situation of public showing there can be moments that break out of the mundane energy present, even if quite high. These transcendent moments, like those of jhana and sati, manifest the qualities described by Csikszentmihalyi as “flow”, including concentration, non-self-consciousness, and the activity being satisfying for itself rather than with a goal in mind, or autotelic.

If we distinguish moments of flow as the sought-after fruition in performance, then like in spiritual practice we have a dyad of heightened state as support, and a categorically different spontaneous experience that includes attenuated self-consciousness as the fruit. I will call the general situation of activity-while-witnessed “performance”, and the moments of spontaneous flow that stand out from what is otherwise iteration of the already known “revelation”. This enables the assertion of a basic sequence that holds for both spiritual and performance practice:

1. Training (cultivation of skills) gives rise to virtuosity (reliable heightened states).
2. Virtuosity is a condition for a spontaneous state shift into Flow, or absorption.

Derailment! I planned upon getting to this point that I would assert the parallel between cultivation-fruition and rehearsal-performance, but now can’t do so. The fruition state of Flow, or absorption, is taxonomically different from any of the Insight or Reviewing states in the Theravada insight sequence. What it is parallel to is the states of jhana. In other words, it is a more heightened state than the mundane expression of virtuosity, but it does not contain the reflective or insightful qualities of fruition (phala). This brings us back to the necessary supports for bhavana to condition Insight and not just stillness: orientation and intention. If Flow was automatically productive of the uprooting of the taints, there would be a lot more enlightened athletes, artists, and craftspeople around! That there isn’t, at least by the Theravada rubric, is because one of the conditions for absorption to crest into wisdom is consistent orientation toward the Four Noble Truths — essentially toward suffering and its release — with the intention to let go of clinging to sense experience. In the absence of this orientation, the pleasure and clarity of Flow may just give rise to the desire for more Flow, and keep performers devoted to their art, but not be a ground for profound liberation. When performers DO experience profound liberations, as they sometimes do, I would assert that there was a guiding intention behind their work that served as a fundamental orientation and therefore conditioned [standard “unconditioned” caveat here] the transformative experience. This perhaps indicates that clarification of the intentions behind making performance is an underemphasized aspect of arts pedagogy.

In discussing performer experience through training, rehearsal, and states of Flow, I have not focused on specifically “contemplative” performance as a method, style, or genre, but described a taxonomy of states common to many kinds of live performance, if not most. In terms of the audience, therefore, I’m assuming a standard theatrical, dance, or musical audience, who is involved in the performance simply through the directing of their attention onto the action, which I’ll call “observational” audiencing (a softer word for what Martin Jay and Anna Fenemore call “assertoric gaze”).

Some performers, however, engage contemplative states specifically as a central practice, both in rehearsal and performance, and the structure, vocabulary, or aesthetic of those pieces might be different from a piece that maintains a culturally standard (hegemonic) relationship between artist and audience with standard activities happening in each. In such cases, the contract between artist and audience might vary widely from the assumed theatrical contract, particularly if the artist structures the piece such that the audience members themselves enter altered or heightened states, which I’ll call “immersive” audiencing (Jay and Fenemore have “ontological vision”).

The analysis of contemplative work of this kind is a focus of my dissertation research, and recognizes that the change in audience-performer contract and relationship can dramatically change the situation in the room, ethically and experientially for people in both roles. The basic spectrum of training, rehearsal, performance, and flow/revelation will be the same in pieces that invite observational and immersive audiencing, with observing audiences generally witnessing only the last two states (in the form of the performer/other), and those vicariously, while the immersed audiences may experience the sequence much more fully for themselves, as they are taken through activities that correspond to some or all of the stages. Further research will explore the possibilities for both transference of heightened states and communication of profound understanding between performer and audience in public showing, and following the sequence of stages described here the explicit need for audience training if revelation, on the part of the audience, is desired as a theatrical goal.

In leaving no trace there is no hegemony, no oppression, no justice, no peace, and no end to hegemony, oppression, justice, and peace. There is nothing made, nothing unmade, and no separation between poles of any binary, and no end to the binary. The artist who understands Leaves No Trace creates without thinking she is creating, appreciates without thinking there is anything to appreciate or one who performs appreciation, and makes art for the good of all without succumbing to the limiting Views of “make”, “good”, “for”, or “all”.

Secure in the tenure that was never granted and thus can never be taken away, she praises the Perfection of Art thus: This! This! Also This! Everything Revealed, All at Once! No Complaints. Good night.

*

[This is a version of an essay about Buddhism and performance I wrote for my recent PhD Qualifying exams. Lots more like it, here.]

Emptiness in Buddhist thought arises in early Indian Mahayana as a flowering of the doctrine of the Three Characteristics of all sense objects as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and untenable as loci for a sense of self. These recognitions applied in the Pali Canon to moments of sensory experience of objects, not as ontological categories of the objects themselves — there was no discourse yet in Buddhist thought around things “themselves” parallel to the western tradition’s inquiry from Plato through Kant and Heidegger about the Nature, or Being, of things. The Buddha’s famous reprimand to Malunkyaputta, a monk who was consumed with philosophical speculation, embodies this early pragmatic stance: that questions about existence and causation are like a man coming to a surgeon pierced by a poison arrow but who won’t allow the surgeon to remove the arrow before the man learns every detail about the arrow’s substance and history. The Buddha tells Malunkyaputta that “The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him”.

In the centuries after the Buddha’s death, however, his teachings on the Characteristics were expanded from this austere apophatic pragmatism to become the root of the second flowering of Buddhist thought, called the Mahayana, which understood the apperception of Emptiness (shunyata) as the doorway to Wisdom (prajna) and turned the emphasis of practice away from individual cessation (nibbana, with the practitioner becoming an arhant) to universal salvation through the cultivation of Compassion (karuna, with the practitioner becoming a bodhisattva). These two foci — Wisdom and Compassion — are inseparable, and are considered to be “two wings”, both necessary for flight. With the twin expressions of fruition comes the relationship of the Relative (that which is specific, personal, material, contextual, historical, social, or in any way could be said to exist as a separate idea, identity, form, or occurrence) and Absolute (the impersonal, universal, fundamental, irreducible, all-encompassing, which does not exist in any particular time or space shy of All) as coextensive. This doctrine, called the Two Truths, rooted in commentarial inquiry into the nature of the Buddha’s discourse in the Pali Canon, reveals a beautiful ontological alternative to the western doctrines of Being, Essence, and Withdrawal.

Through the Two Truths we can interrogate objects and thus art and performance without getting caught in the problem of their existence (or our own), because objects’ existence can be held simultaneously in the light of withdrawal (Emptiness) and relationship (Compassion) both. If art consists in the crafting of sensuous or aesthetic experience, it is concerned with shaping the contact between sensing being and object. Graham Harman, recognizing the implications of Heideggerian withdrawal on “contact” and thus causation, refigures sense contact as proximity, and the effect of contact as allure. “By opening a window onto other objects, other levels of the world, allure is a phenomenon within the sensual bond that nonetheless plays out as a form of the physical/causal bond.”

Allure is the activity of proximity, the scent of Compassion, or “feeling with”. Engaging in the play of proximity, we each affect each other, and objects each other, everything rubbing up against everything else. At the same time, to forget the Emptiness of things is to risk confusion about their importance, and out of confusion and panic reify the self in opposition to things, and things in opposition to the self and each other. It is from this idea of violent collision — billiard balls being separate from each other — that classical mechanics and causality arises. From the posture of the reified self, objects are beautiful or ugly, relevant or ornamental, art, craft, kitsch, or prosaic. Remembering/embodying the emptiness of both objects and self, however, objects — better read as situations — are not “art” in the sense of a created experience, but shine simply as themselves, paradoxically all the more so when there is no “themselves” to be found. There is indeed nothing “intrinsically wrong” (or right, or any ethical consideration) with objects, but liberation comes from recognizing and abandoning grasping onto, resisting, or reifying them.

Western art’s concern with the object, via aesthetics, has played out in the last couple centuries as a progressive deconstruction of the identities of objects of art, peaking with Duchamp’s readymades, FLUXUS, and conceptual art after Cage’s 4”33”. But if the art object has been ripe for deconstruction to the point of ontological dissolution, what of the artist and audience themselves? Postdramatic performance as a modality is rich with possibilities for this dissolution because of its tendency to eschew the illusion of character and narrative in favor of a ruthless embrace of non-fiction, or of the “worldliness” of the theatrical situation. Three examples reveal possibilities for the dissolution, or seeing through the fixity of, the creator, the performer, and the audience:

Creator

In thinking about performance that either represents or enacts the dissolution of the creator, the two first have to be separated. To enact the dissolution of the creator is to release work that is deeply anonymous, which often implies “not documented” beyond its direct experience. When publicized, anonymous work generates as a byproduct of its publicization a spectral or trace author, who could be individual or collective, but plays a necessary role in the assembly of a narrative around the work. The interventions on the world stage of the hacker collective Anonymous perform a withdrawal of author even as the name itself now signifies an amorphous but definitely existent authorial force, thus the capitalization. Anonymous is a singular entity, even if structurally it is an anarchic collective. Collectives, like joint authors of a book, do this all the time, often with wholesome intent, as in the Buddhist texts published by the Padmakara Translation Group, which do not list the individual translators’ names. Collaboration is a form of authorial dissolution.

Other pieces perform representations of authorial dissolution, but retain authorship as a public, economic, and professional orientation. Much group performance lives in this paradox — Meg Stuart’s Auf den Tisch! (2005-11), for example, an “improvisation project” in which she “curated” ensembles of performers for a deconstructed “conference on improvisation”. The piece is clearly labeled and known as hers, but the curated performers all were so accomplished, and known in their own right, that their contributions not only were the content of the piece but in many ways were the piece, to which extent Stuart’s hand as author was substantially attenuated. The New York Times review of the piece mentions many of the performers and reflects on the nature of improvisation, but does not mention Stuart’s oeuvre or past work at all. She has been eclipsed by the very independent contributions of her cast. At the same time, only she is the famous American choreographer in residence at Volksbühne Berlin, a growing celebrity, and the undisputed author of this piece. Auf den Tisch! performs the dissolution of authority without deeply actualizing it, leaving Stuart in ontologically stable territory even as she celebrates group improvisation as collective authorship.

Performer

Friday I went to the Berkeley Art Museum to see a piece by Tino Sehgal entitled Instead of allowing something to rise up in your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) that the wall plaque called a “constructed situation”, and which consisted of a single body moving slowly on the floor near an expanse of white wall. Every two hours a new person would enter the space and take over by lying down nearby and with a short (and interesting) period of moving in near unison till the first person left, take over and continue. My friend Jess Curtis was the dancer I saw when I arrived, and I was there because he had posted a note on Facebook saying that he was doing it. After he completed his “shift”, we talked about how Sehgal was very clear that they were not “performers”, but “interpreters”, and the implications of their names not being listed. These dancers, being paid a good wage (according to Curtis) for their presence, are in a museum, playing at the role that a statue plays: being the work of art. Curtis’s Facebook post read “I like being art!” and his moving here performs a very different public body than in his own performances, where his name and performer-nature are foregrounded. In some ways this performer-effacement is like the masked actor in a religious festival play — the role is what the audience sees, not the specific actor, and so the particularity of the actor, even if the role permits some agency (which the interpreter in Sehgal’s piece does have), is not important.

I recognized something like this when I was a monk in Burma, walking on alms round through Rangoon. When supporters would bow to me and put rice in my bowl, my instructions were to not respond, but keep my eyes down and walk simply and mindfully. I realized, after some time of being embarrassed that they would bow to me — a monk of very little accomplishment — that they were not bowing to me at all, but to the robe. As a representative of the Buddhist clergy, I would be received with respect that had nothing to do with my being a westerner or a skilled or unskilled meditator. I was simply interpreting the role “bhikkhu”, and my personal experience or identity in it did not matter much. Sehgal’s use or abuse of his chosen material — people — is interwoven with his insistence on non-documentation, which forcibly returns the viewer’s attention to the present, through denying the imperfect but easy satisfaction of simulacra, reproduction, or representation. This insistence can be read as a gesture of respect for the people he employs — they will not be doubly objectified: once unnamed in the moment of the piece itself and a second time unnamed in photographs and video of the pieces. And it makes their participation even more ephemeral than the piece itself, for while the work can be owned, lent, and sold (this version was labeled “Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, NY and Paris”), the interpreters will not travel with the piece as it is restaged. The instructions for the piece are the piece ontologically, while the contribution of the interpreters becomes the piece phenomenologically. The banks of a river define it as the particular river that it is, but the water, always different, thus can’t be called “the river”.

Audience

Audience-participation pieces have been around for decades, and structurally do blur the edges of performer and audience, creating a productive erasure of certainty and identity, but many still preserve the audience as audience. Invited to interact, we still know who is who, and that our role is fixed. More successful at destabilization/dissolution, some recent work has invited the audience to participate in ways that are designed well and controlled just enough to allow for safety and enthusiasm in the exploration, and for the audience to potentially lose themselves in the experience enough to slip out of “audience” mode and into something else (like “being myself”, perhaps). One example of a skillful participation score is Love Zoo (2004) by Felix Ruckert, a former Pina Bausch dancer who makes conceptual performances that use sensuality, touch, and audience interaction to “[question] the perception of living performance, sometimes allowing the spectator to play an active role in the performance and confronting him/her with intense emotional feelings”.

In Love Zoo, spectators are guided into exchanges with dancers and each other, using specific sets of instructions to facilitate explorations of touch, gesture, and intimacy, within a frame of consent and safety. As the piece develops, the audience members are soon interacting with each other as much as with the “dancers”, and the identity of the audience as a separate observer is in part dissolved. Ruckert refers to this piece as “a plea for promiscuity, and a manifesto for a more playful, creative, and sensual sexuality”. A question arises as to what differentiates this “piece” from a party that might also have framing rules around safety and consent, facilitation, aesthetic choices, and a focus on sexuality. Carol Queen’s sex parties, called Queen of Heaven, held through the 1990s at 848 Community Space in San Francisco fit such a description, as do many events that might be called parties, workshops, or rituals. This elision of “performance”, with its implication of performer and audience roles being separate, and social event is a thread that runs through postdramatic performance, and is a quality of some large public work as well, like Anna Halprin’s Circle the Earth dances, which use large numbers of amateur performers, and have become a kind of local holiday/festival, attended yearly by families as a community ritual event.

Presence

At the heart of postdramatic performance is the cultivation of presence as a radical gesture that collapses the distances and dyads that previously sustained the theatrical situation: performer and audience, on and off stage, actor and character, patron and worker, performance and “real life”. Presence, through contact with — or proximity to — the “real” surface of things, reveals the distinction between a thing and our thoughts about it. This training, which is what it is, as an intentional act, then can turn on thought itself, revealing the same distinction. A thought, received without recognition of it as a thought, creates the very convincing illusion of a substantial actor — called “me”. Seen in this way, thoughts confirm the reality of the actor behind the character. Hamlet isn’t real, but Branagh is. This might be a mindfulness of thought that is dramatic — reifying the actor-character process and the ontological reality of the actor, even if he is withdrawn from the surface of the character. The same thought, however, received through the lens of postdramatic performance might be seen for what it simply is — a psycho-physical experience — and thus not indicative of any withdrawn entity or actor.

Observing thought as postdramatic reveals it to be like a performer who is onstage in a transparent way, not pretending to be someone other than they are. This kind of recognition would not necessarily give rise to the thought “me”, and thus could disrupt habitual ego narratives. Presence is a tool for accomplishing such recognition. Taken further, presence can be felt as the ontological category that describes the singular Being-ness of things, and is the “fullness” (purnam) counterpart to Emptiness implied in the Two Truths. Form is Emptiness, but it is also Form. Postdramatic audiencing sees the actor as person rather than character, and thus knows thought as simply mental activity, rather than as the inner voice of the self. Deleuze grounds his post-phenomenological metaphysics in the recognition of “the univocity of simple presence (the One-All)”. Being is univocal, but is “fully compatible with multiple forms of Being”. Presence speaks with one voice, does one activity, but manifests as multiplicity. This double — or infinite — activity liberates through seeing with Wisdom and sustains relationship by arousing Compassion and Love.

This! This! Also This! Everything Revealed, All at Once! No Complaints. Good night.

I’ll be teaching Wed and Fri evenings 5:30-7pm, starting 2/13. (The Fri class will start 2/22.)

Both classes will be, like my MWF morning classes at Yoga Tree Telegraph, mindfulness-based vinyasa. Breath, attention, alignment, flow. Sweet & simple, deep practice. Always pranayama, chanting, sweat, a few bad jokes, and an orientation toward dharma.

PYS is doing a deep class special to reopen: 10 classes for 10 days for $20. Come to class!

10 days, 10 classes, $20. Through feb at PYS.

Kenji Liu activist Buddha. http://www.kenjiliu.com/portfolio/10000-dharma-doors/

I’ve never been to the Yoga Journal Conference, but came closer than ever this past weekend. Some friends told me that they were planning a protest of the conference because YJ was – for the third year in a row – going ahead with having the conference at the Hyatt Regency in SF, despite an ongoing boycott of Hyatt by their union, Unite Here. I helped out by making a FB page for the action, and soon found myself in the middle of a wild few days of blogging, chatting, and education, all aimed toward getting Yoga Journal to book its conference somewhere else in observation of the boycott. Inevitably, it’s more complex than a blog post or street protest can possibly address, but I’m happy I took part. Here’s some reflections.

The basic facts and issues are well-collected on Roseanne Harvey’s blog, it’s all yoga, baby (IAYB), in a post about our Thursday action, and this recap. My reductive, biased narrative: Hyatt is a big “evil” corporation, though they think they’re great, and the union is standing up for “justice” and fair working conditions. Yoga Journal, as a self-appointed house organ for the mainstream – read bougie – yoga “community” (YJ started grassroots, in a Berkeley living room, but has been owned since 2006 by Active Interest Media, and is the largest of their many “enthusiast magazines”. AIM is also huge in the boat show world. Ok! The CEO is named Efrem “Skip” Zimbalist III… not to cast aspersions on a guy just because he has a really WASPy name, but… he’s not Efrem “Shanti” Zimbalist, you know?) puts on these huge, corporate-style events, and is accused of ignoring for years calls to reflect the liberal values of their constituency and observe the boycott. That’s the black and white story. Maybe useful, maybe not so much. But let’s dig a little.

“Yoga means Union” is a great slogan, but how much does YJ have to do with Union (as in the “spiritual” or non-dual aspect of yoga) nowadays? Like most big magazines and media presences, it’s an advertising delivery system, and for those of us who prefer our yoga ad-free, not so simpatico a spiritual practice aid. BUT – and this is where the snarky good-and-evil narrative gets to breathe a little – many teachers who write for it, and teach at the Conference, and do lots of things that could be called mainstream yoga, are in fact deeply sincere practitioners with strong, dedicated practices. And much wisdom to share. And many many readers likewise. Sincere, heartfelt practitioners of an ancient practice that has changed substantially since its origins, and continues to do so, daily, in our classes, studios, bodies, and relationships.

So for me the issue is less the details of the labor dispute (though for a look at the major sticking point in the Hyatt/Union dispute, called “Card Check”, you could start with this and this) than issues of how we understand ourselves as modern yogis. For me this falls under the limb of the Buddha’s Eightfold (ashtanga) Path called Wise Livelihood. And the unfolding of the weekend’s protest and online conversations (and even my own sarcasm in this note!) brings me to want to mention Wise Speech as well. With Wise Action, the three practices make up the sila, or “ethics” portion of the Eightfold Path, and the practices they emphasize – non-harming, honesty, kindness, sobriety, generosity, renunciation – are explicit and implicit in Patañjali’s system as well, called yama in the Yoga Sutra. We get excited about the physical and mental transformation possible through asana and meditation, but often give short shrift to these guiding fundamentals. And for good reason… if we made them central to our practice, they would upend our lives.

For me, and many of those protesting the conference this weekend, getting YJ to ditch Hyatt is a worthy goal, but the corporatization and commodification of yoga is the deeper issue – thus revolving around how we choose to spend our resources to support our inner work and our communities. This is what Wise Livelihood is all about. How can I live, eat, shop, socialize, work, and pursue inner and outer peace in a way that is consonant with my heart’s truth? For me it means lots of education – know what my resources are really supporting – and hard choices. And compromises, natch! There’s no “pure” existence, which turns out to be excellent news. Action means relationship (which is essentially identical to “yoga means union”), and with relationship there’s always going to be gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute – the “8 Worldly Winds” that the Buddha says blow through every situation everywhere.

This post, by Matthew Remski on IAYB, describes a homegrown alternative to the slick, expensive yoga festival. I love it. A bunch of yogis just like us got together, booked a cheap space, and threw a local yoga festival on a shoestring. (I want to do one here! Call me if you’re in!) The point is that it’s the commercialization of the form that leads inevitably to conflicts like this. Do I think AIM and “Skip” the Third are going to bow to the pressure of a bunch of yoga hippies? Nah. Their other main business is running big trade shows. As Remski’s post says, “Yoga Journal hearts Hyatt”. It’s all in the family. My (compromise alert!) employers at Yoga Tree, who sponsor the conference, tell me that they’re talking with YJ to find a worker-supportive solution. I hope they do. Boy would I feel like a success then! (Hmm…)

When I teach on vegetarian practice and other thorny social issues, my main goal – as it is in my going on this week about how complex it is to live ethically – is mostly to trouble the waters for us as sincere yogis. To encourage us to not take easy routes into complacency and feeling good about ourselves, but to question our actions and the effect of our actions all the time. I have to eat my own words here, often. Sri Louise, a long-time teacher and devoted yoga practitioner, was central to the action this weekend, and is perhaps the most outspoken and uncompromising voice I know for radical ethics in the yoga world (and beyond – she’s active in many kinds of social justice work). Her style and mine differ, sometimes uncomfortably, but I do feel it when she calls us out for colluding in harmful action through our yoga – like supporting a conference that will not observe a labor boycott that even the NFL is observing. Sri troubles the water, for sure, and it behooves us as practitioners not to turn away from these issues.

This Sunday in Sweat+Study, we’ll read the last of our texts for this month, the Platform Sutra. It’s an impassioned sermon about Emptiness, or shunyata – the quality in everything of insubstantiality, impermanence, illusoriness. It recognizes that things – objects, people, situations – are so clearly just part of a never-ending flow that they can hardly be said to “exist” at all. They’re – we are – Empty. The Zen texts say, “like flowers in the sky! Why trouble to grasp at them?” Indeed. Yoga Journal is emptiness, Hyatt is emptiness, the Union is emptiness. And even “yogic” Union, as in “with the Divine”… is emptiness. In emptiness, the Heart Sutra says, there is “no ignorance and no end to ignorance”. No injustice, we could say, and no end to injustice. This recognition, and the renunciation that follows, is key to spiritual activism. We must recognize, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, that the situation is impossible, but action is still necessary. Unavoidable.

This means that we look closely at our actions in the light of the guidelines of non-harming, truthfulness, and generosity, being willing to change what doesn’t ring true to our values (this is the practice of renunciation, or sannyasa – the practice of letting go). AND it means we hold the results of our actions, our actions themselves, and all the inevitable compromises we face as we try to do right, lightly: in the light of wisdom. Not making them more substantial than they are. The Gita doesn’t define yoga as Union, anyway. It says “yoga is skill in actions” and “equanimity is yoga”. What I’m saying! So I happened to help organize a protest this weekend – it felt like the right thing to do, and I hope it leads to better conditions for the workers, for sure – but my primary concern is for the practice that we’re building as yogis, together, in our complicated and messy lives and communities.

I really do believe that we as sincere practitioners can find our way, with yoga, meditation, spiritual guidelines, and good teachers, within the full catastrophe of capitalist empire, toward peace of mind and heartfelt compassionate service. It means taking on discomfort and paradox along the way, as we try, each in our own way, to find the Middle Path between indulgence and self-torment (those of you who were at S+S: Buddhist, week 1, remember our discussion). Like any balance pose, it’s never stable, always falling, always in motion. May I always remember that nothing is static, and that this is both what makes change possible, and more than possible, inevitable! And since inevitable, worth not getting too verklempt about. Do your practice, in class or at home, and let your yoga and dharma, as we say at the end of class, be itself a momentum for well-being – for justice – for yourself and others, all beings, everywhere. Flowers in the sky.

Resolution and intention hinge on the power of our thoughts to both guide our actions and affect our perception of what comes of those actions. Because they guide our actions, thoughts impel the future, along with all the other conditions in play, within and (as George put it) without us. Because they affect our perception, they are the lens through which we interpret everything that happens to us. So it behooves us to think positively, no? Sure. Positive thinking itself isn’t new, of course, no more than the recognition that what we think has an effect on our “reality” — of course it does. A Buddhist version goes like this:

“We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.”
(The Dhammapada, tr. Byrom)

These verses, which open a collection of the Buddha’s verses, are both clear and opaque, depending on the translation to reveal their subtlety. Do they say what the “Law of Attraction” tells us, that our thoughts create our reality, even “making” the [external] “world”, such that was can “Ask. Believe. [and] Receive” wealth, love, and other things we want? It seems to say so, at least in Byrom’s translation. Here’s a very different translation, however, of the first three lines:

“Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.”
(The Dhammapada, tr. Buddharakkhita)

This one’s dry but perhaps clearer. What’s this “world” being made by our thoughts or mind? Mental states. That’s all — though it’s also everything, in a way. Though I far prefer the poetry of Byrom’s, I respect this translation because it speaks directly to what thoughts really give rise to, which often is… more thoughts. Thoughts give rise specifically to mental states — moods, emotions, states like confusion or clarity. They may indeed affect what we receive from the world, but indirectly, through our concepts, words, and actions. This is not to diminish their importance in determining our experience, but to recognize their place in spiritual life. In a sense, much yoga and Buddhist practice is oriented around thought and mental-emotional states — diminishing the prevalence and power of harmful states, increasing the prevalence and power of wholesome ones, especially the very wholesome mental states that are characterized by a decrease or cessation (nirodha) of discursive mental activity (otherwise known as talking to ourselves).

All of this leads to New Years resolutions, and the setting of intentions in our practice. The Buddha held intention (sankappa/sankalpa in Pali/Sanskrit) in such importance that he gave it an entire limb of the 8-fold path, and it gets translated as Wise Intention (with some older translations calling it Right Thought). Samma-sankappa is composed of three primary intentions: toward renunciation, freedom from ill-will, and non-harming. In other words, it’s not about what we want to do or gain, but what we want to let go of. Renunciation sounds austere, but just refers to letting go — of painful habits, ideas, judgments of ourselves and each other — of all that inhibits clear seeing and happiness, including things that comfort and distract us but don’t actually lead to peace of mind or ease in our hearts. If we recognize that mental states are preceded by thoughts, then we can begin to observe thoughts as thoughts, disrupting their habitual inflation, and making less likely the painful states that take root when our stories about ourselves and others run wild. These stories are seductive because they seem amazingly real but are never completely true. So believing them is like indulging in a great fantasy novel — really a blast while it’s happening, but telling me little about my actual life.

Setting intentions, then, is a beautiful and subtle practice that weaves being present with skillful relating to desire and future. Intention practice can be thought of in three parts. The first part is cultivation, like preparing a field for new planting. Before the mind can be clear and malleable enough to work with, it needs to have some ground and spaciousness. This is the level of practice that we most often engage in, working with mindfulness and concentration in ways that center and calm the mind. Having done that to some extent, like doing yoga or sitting in meditation, or walking in the woods — anything calming and centering — the mind/heart is prepared for intention-setting. The middle step is the intending itself, where we dream into possibility and plant some seeds. We allow the mind to settle, and then drop into the open space a thought like a seed into moist earth. “May deep freedom from ________ arise for me this year.” Intentions of course can be anything, from prosaic but useful: “Come on, new job!”, or big vows going all the way: “May all beings be fully liberated.” And the quieter the mind when they’re made, the deeper the seed seems to be planted.

The third, and of course liberation-oriented, step is to let it go. Rather than beginning (as I have a dozen times over the years, and I bet many of you have as well) a program of newly disciplined practice on New Years day — “From now on I’m going to do an hour of yoga, an hour of meditation, and an hour of chanting every morning from 5-8am!” — Wise Intention plants seeds like “May daily practice take deep root in my life”, but doesn’t then turn it into an expectation or stick to beat myself up with. (Remember the other two intentions toward freedom from ill-will, and toward non-harming!) We plant the seed in good soil, give it some water, and walk away. It takes sun and consistent but low-intensity tending to grow a healthy plant. Likewise our intentions. We could renew a lifestyle intention every week (a great support for daily practice, by the way), or daily, but we don’t need to renew it every hour. And most importantly, we don’t need to assess it like a business decision, looking out for profit or loss with every tick of the market. This is of course the same challenging teaching offered in the Bhagavad Gita:

You have a right to your actions,
but never to your actions fruits…

…act without any thought of results,
open to success or failure.
This equanimity is yoga.” (BG, 2.47-48)

When we let go of success or failure in an action, we let go of the very compelling fantasy we call “the future”. When ideas of future are absent, we’re left only with kind, considered action in the present, to whatever depth the conditions and our skills allow us. And so the maturing of intention is not as wishes for the future, but the brightness of action in each moment. How can my actions right now be a momentum toward the brightest future I can imagine, even as I let go of achieving that future and fall more and more deeply into the vibrating, couldn’t-be-otherwise immediacy of this moment? Because this moment also is the product of infinite, unknowable conditions, and there’s no way it could be any different than it is.

Intention is what moves us from mindfulness (bare knowing of what’s happening) to action, but it also opens into questioning who is acting in the first place. On meditation retreat, practitioners may be given the instruction to sense the moment of intention that precedes every action, no matter how tiny. This very zoomed-in lens becomes a motor not for getting more of what we want, but its exact opposite. We see more and more clearly how wanting arises, and how intentions arise moment to moment out of conditions, lead to action, and dissolve. And how everything, actually — desires, actions, results, and the self that experiences all of them — dissolves.

What then of the rest of the verse, that when you “speak or act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable”? Isn’t this a promise for the future, for the results of intention and action? It is, in a  way. But the hinge here is “happiness” (sukha). We’re not promised that speaking and acting with a pure mind will lead to wealth, success, or any kind of material or relationship gain. Those gains depend on such complex conditions that our intentions alone cannot guarantee their enactment. This is where the Law of Attraction, as well as a popular (mis)understanding of karma, falters. If we think that everything that befalls an individual is the result of his or her personal intentions or actions, we not only grossly oversimplify the workings of a very complex universe, but we lay the foundation for thinking that the successful person got there entirely through their own effort and perseverance. This very popular delusion (especially on the political Right) both demeans the hard work that many people do to survive, and is simply wrong. It is the exact twin of the tendency to blame the victim, still rampant in our culture.

I do think that the more mature practitioners of the recent memes I was softly critiquing in the beginning, like “manifestation”, understand this. The Law of Attraction is a practice of Wise Intention when we recognize that it is saying the same thing the Buddha was saying, that our thoughts create the mind states that determine whether we suffer or not in any given situation. But if we think it means we can attract wealth or love by thinking the right way, we’re taking the correspondence too far. The conditions at play are bigger than any of us as individuals, and to believe otherwise is hubris.

Where does that leave us in the setting of New Year’s intentions? Dropped into the existential mystery of existence and emptiness? All I wanted was to get myself to yoga class more often! To spend less time on Facebook! To eat less sugar! I have all the same desires. Let’s do them. Come to class! Eat well! Log off! And every once in a while, right in the middle of working hard on something — like getting out that bit of promo a week late — look up. Way up. To sense the infinite sky, which is just a signpost for the infinite mind, awareness itself, your own vast wise heart. And let it all go.

Then take a breath, look around, and keep going.

When Krishna teaches Arjuna in the Gita that we “have a right to our actions, but never to [our] actions’ fruits” (2.47), what does he mean? To say that I have a right to my actions is to recognize the power of choice, or intention, in the unfolding of our lives. We do have the power to choose what we do moment to moment. And those choices matter because they affect how everything unfolds — my own story, the stories of those around me, and the One Great Story of… this. Everything. So to those who carp that their vote (for instance) doesn’t matter, for whatever good reason — the dysfunctionality of the electoral college system, or the not-different-ness of the two parties and the lack of substantive choice here, or the disproportionate influence of billionaires on the process (all true, and more…) — it is still the case that taking action does have an effect. It can’t not. It may not have much effect, or the effect we prefer, but that’s the second part of the teaching.

We have a right to our actions — we have choice and volition — but “never to [our] actions’ fruits”. The challenging rub here is partly obvious and partly fierce. We know that causes and effects are linked somehow. We wouldn’t make goals, pass laws, make promises, plans, or for that matter apologize, process, work hard, have kids, build things, or do almost anything if we didn’t have a sense that our actions could lead to desirable results. But it’s all in the could. We have absolutely no way of guaranteeing that our actions will produce the results we want, no matter how much we enjoy thinking that we create our own reality. The conditions are just too complex. Something unexpected could always happen (and usually does). Of course, you’re saying, I know this… but do we really get it? What would happen to plans, ambition, promises, growth… in fact all of social and political life, if we really understood that to promise something is to live in fantasy. That even to HOPE is to live in fantasy; to live in an idea of the future rather than the reality of the present. What would it be like to hear a politician admit this?

“The state of the country and world is very painful. Greed, hatred, and fear drive most of us much of the time, and their manifestations will be with us forever, constantly changing in unexpected ways. As your representative I will continually attempt to feel the full complexity of the situation at hand and not delude myself or you with talk of easy solutions. Acknowledging this complexity, all of us who represent you will work humbly and hard, doing the best we can to work for prosperity, peace and safety, not just for “us” but for everyone. I don’t know what we can achieve, or what will happen. No one knows. All we can do is apply ourselves now, take care of each other the best we can, and stay open.”

That’s my stump speech. Thank you. Please remember me when you cast your vote Nov 6.

*

The framing story of the Gita is the Mahabharata, which describes the mythic conflict between two sides of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. I’m tempted to draw out a parallel here, of course — the Kauravas cheat to take power, seek to humiliate the Pandavas, and the Pandavas try at first to stay ethical but in the end succumb to dirty pool and use all means at their disposal to win. Hmm. The hero of the Gita is a Pandava named Arjuna, who asks his driver, Krishna, to take him out to the middle of the battlefield just before the fighting starts, to survey both sides. Seeing his relatives (they’re all related) arrayed on both sides, he is struck by the reality of all the suffering and death that is about to unfold and is overcome by doubt about his role and the value of fighting. Not wanting to fight, he sinks down in his chariot in despair. (Hmm. First debate? Nah…) Krishna’s encouragement to him becomes the Gita, the Beloved Song, in which the teachings of yoga are laid out, and Arjuna is taught the way to the understanding of the true self. Here’s the full verses on action:

“You have a right to your actions,
but never to your actions’ fruits.
Act for the action’s sake.
And do not be attached to inaction.

Self-possessed, resolute, act
without any thought of results,
open to success or failure.
This equanimity is yoga.” (2.47-48, Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

To truly let go of attachment to the fruits of my actions, I have to be open to success or failure. Not grudgingly, like I’m a “good sport” (and Go Giants, btw!), but really open. My first thought is “But what about my self-worth?” I’m so used to valuing myself based on my “successes” and “failures”. What if that’s not where my value lives? ”Self-possessed, resolute… open”. Equanimity not as a passive state of quiet balance but a dynamic field of activity simply free from the gripping of preference for one future over another. What if this side of the equation (the action side, or NOW) is where happiness lies, rather than on the other (the results, or THEN)? This is the assertion of the Gita, and the practice called karma yoga, the cultivation of Wise Action. We’re so results-oriented, though, that a common first response is to not really hear the part about acting resolutely, not attached to inaction, but to react: “But the results matter! The two sides aren’t really the same, and getting people to turn out and vote my way is important and takes passion!” It’s true. And maybe if you live in Ohio your vote Really Does Matter — which is just a way of saying that it weighs more than mine does here in Oakland. But as I said in the intro, if we’re yogis — and I use that as a way of honoring the practice and Path of awakening — we have another, deeper, task.

A few lines down from the action verses, the Gita offers the second of its definitions of yoga: “Yoga is skill in actions.” (2.49) Not “stopping the spinning mind”, as in Patañjali, but “skill in actions”, and of course the “skill” is letting go. Make your swing state calls, click on a few more links, send some money… whatever you want, then walk into the booth with your notes, draw all your arrows (Arjuna was the archer, after all), and then walk out, breathing the cool autumn air, and see the sky. Consider not sitting glued to a screen all evening biting your nails. Let it go. Last time it didn’t go your way it wasn’t the end of the world, and the time it did didn’t save the world, did it? Come to class Wed morning and we’ll do what we always do: laugh a bit, enjoy our bodies and each other’s company, breath, move, sweat, and be still.

*

The end of the Mahabharata is heavy. The Pandavas win the war, but only barely, and they have to play dirty to do it. By the end, almost everyone on both sides is dead, and the country devastated. The last surviving hero of the Pandavas, Yudhisthira, walks up to heaven with his dog, finally meeting his dead brothers and wife there. It’s cold comfort. All the heroes except him have died early and spent time in hell as a result of their dishonorable behavior on the battlefield, and though they are reunited in the end, the tone is somber. It’s the end of a culture that honored Dharma, and the beginning of the Kali Yuga, our dark modern era. Krishna leaves the Earth. It feels like the elves boarding their ashen boats at the Grey Havens, never to return.

Sorry to end on a down note. Come read the Gita with me and a crew of sweet yoga friends, and we’ll discuss action, Dharma, meditation, devotion, choices, gunas, and war. And so much else in this incredible text. Whatever happens in November, your life is your own, your practice your own, your mind, heart, actions, and freedom your own. Once you know that, the war is already over.