Mindfulness, Detachment, and the 5 Buddha Wisdoms
Although generally thought of as a teaching that can be applied to the end of life, the Bardo teachings, and the instructions on working with the 5 Buddha Families, can also be used as a method to improve our day to day life. By using mindfulness to watch how the 5 Buddha Families arise in each moment, we can use these ideas to more easily understand the difference between a suffering approach to our world and an enlightened approach.
Because the process of Dying, Intermediate State, and Rebirth is at the end of our lives, and also because disease and accidents can cause our death to happen more quickly than we might anticipate, it would be good to have a way to prepare to have a smooth, calm, peaceful, and deliberate transition from this life to the next. We could also use death and dying to further and strengthen our own spiritual development and that way it could be a happy and beneficial event as well.
As with all things in Buddhism, the teachings say that practicing ahead of time is a good way to prepare. Buddhism also teaches that the larger world is contained within the smaller world. What this means for the process of Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth is that we need to find a more immediate example of a similar situation that we can practice in.
There is also something in the Buddha's teaching called the Lion's roar. These are confident statements about the teachings. One of these statements is that all situations can be used on the spiritual path, even if they are originally negative or appear to be negative.
With death, as well as with suffering, it is important that we don't try to avoid these experiences, but try to understand the nature and process of death, in the same way that in Buddhism we try to understand the nature and process of our own suffering. Only then can we really eliminate suffering and gain skill in working with death and the process of dying.
The Buddhist teachings state that we can view the present moment as the intermediate state between the death of the past moment and the birth of the next future moment. By interpreting the present moment in a way that is similar to the process of Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth, we can practice now in dealing with this process. Ironically, by becoming skillful with this process in the present moment, we not only prepare for our death and rebirth, but we also improve our present life as well.
The concept of the 5 Buddha Wisdoms helps to show us the connection between confusion and wisdom and the connection between the 5 Body/Mind Collections as well as the 5 elements (see diagram). We can learn how to change confusion into understanding and alter our approach to life as we're living it. We can learn that, even though we feel like we're losing the five elements and Body/Mind Collections during the process of death, in reality we cannot lose these elements or collections and only our degree of connection with these components is lost temporarily.
Once our current life dissolves, we are brought to a state of openness and potential. From that point, a set of habitual tendencies arise which brings about the process of creating our future life.
If we learn to look, in each present moment, for these same tendencies that we experience in the in-between state after death, then every moment can become a practice for improving whether we express wisdom qualities of our body and mind, or confused and suffering qualities of our body and mind. We can end up improving how our thought, speech, and action arise from one moment to the next.
This is how it happens in the present moment. With the death of the past moment, we are thrown into a space where things are undecided, where multiple ideas vie for our attention. At a certain point, one of these ideas attracts us and we set off for the new future activity. An example is during a holiday, when we've just finished breakfast and then are trying to decide what we should do that day. Many ideas may present themselves and the possibilities of what to do are quite open. We will all have tendencies on how to respond with this situation.
Some people will want to plan things out in detail. Others will want to go out for an adventure and see where the wind takes them. Others will want to arrange a party or go somewhere involving interaction with others. Still others will want to get work done around the house or even leave home and go into work at their regular job. Others will want to stay at home and read a good book and stay quietly by themselves. This shows the many types of ways that we can react to this type of open situation. Often most of us will have a tendency towards picking similar types of activity over the others.
The importance of understanding how reality and the process of Death and Rebirth works is that most of the time, our responses to the world are automatic and unconscious. By understanding the process and becoming more aware of that process, we improve the results. From the Buddhist point of view, the world and our reactions to it arise together. (see diagram).
For most of us,the root of our difficulties with reality come from our confused approach (see diagram) to our reality which Buddhism states starts at the very beginning of the process.
When we begin with a confused or misguided view and approach to our world, then the next part of our experience of the world is a sense of incompleteness. We end up seeking fulfillment from a perceived world outside of us and , as a result, create discriminations into what we feel is fulfilling and what is unfulfilling. From there, we develop emotionality in the form of longing, frustration, and indifference. At that point, we strengthen the divisions in our world through the process of accepting and rejecting various aspects of it and thereby increase our sense of separateness.
By becoming aware that this is the process that we undertake, we can develop the intention to use mindfulness to work on noticing where we use a confused approach to our world and then, because of this mindfulness, our response to our reality can be changed while we're in the process of experiencing it. (see diagram)
Through Knowledge, our approach to the world becomes more skillful. With Skillfulness, we investigate and appreciate the interconnections of the various elements of our world. Then we create balance in the world through support of beneficial aspects and removing support of harmful aspects. In the process, we resolve the apparent discrepencies and obstacles in our world and organize it accordingly.
With the Bardo experience, this starts with the tension between the extremes of self-absorption and dullness or the middle path of selfless awareness. The energy of selfless awareness appears at the time of death as the dark blue sky that we find ourselves in after we have left our body. The sense of dulled self-centredness is the soft and attractive white light that appears before us and that leads to the heavenly realms and future bardo experiences.
We also experience this in every moment of our day-to-day lives, except only in terms of thoughts, energy and feeling and not in terms of feelings, lights, sounds, and sensations.
First is the tension between how much we include in our awareness and responsibility and how much we ignore or what we feel comfortable staying aware of or responsible for. Do we include just our family in our world, or just our community? Maybe just our own country, or do we include the whole world as our home? Do we consider our family only those of our own race, or only human beings, or do we include all sentient beings?
Next is the degree of clarity and detailed perception in our minds and whether we express the energy of that clarity in the extremes of fear and anger or superiority and condescension or the middle path of intelligence, logic, and resolution.
The third choice that we can experience is also where we are aware of the balance between self and other. It also has to do with our sense of abundance. This becomes a test to see if we express this as pride or miserliness or if we express it as justice, support, and generosity.
The fourth choice is whether we tend to express our sense of relationship, appreciation and quest for unity as manipulation, longing and obsession or as compassion and loving-kindness.
Finally, there is the choice between restlessness and control, envy and jealousy or the wisdom expressions of skillfulness and creativity which recognize the transformative potential in the world around us and therefore leads to tremendous accomplishment.
Another thing that we learn from observing our reactions from moment to moment is that, each of us, under certain circumstances, tends towards the neurotic, confused expressions of these energies. Under different circumstances, we tend to express the more wisdom aspects. Mindfulness helps us to see which is which and then we learn the conditions under which we become neurotic and within which we tend to be more skilfull.
As we study the details of each of the 5 Buddha Families, we work on detaching from these energies and therefore working with them without being caught up, carried away, or overwhelmed by them. Once we are able to experience the energies in this way, we end up eliminating the confusions and negative emotions of each of the Body/Mind components and we develop the wisdoms and qualities of these 5 Wisdom Families. This shows the tremendous value of mindfulness practice and how it can help us easily understand how the world works. Becoming aware of how we react in different situations towards confusion and knowledge, mindfulness gradually allows us to follow the beneficial reactions and avoid the harmful ones.
So the practice of mindfulness may not seem esoteric or philisophical, but that is not what we are really trying to accomplish in Buddhist practice. We are trying to have a direct experience of wisdom and freedom from suffering and we are trying to achieve the elimination of the confusion that causes us to live and die with suffering. Therefore mindfulness is very much a core practice on the way to Buddhahood and on the way to understanding our world and how to relate to it.
|
