| | Thank you for posting this conversation, Richard Zen. KF is amazingly articulate about some otherwise troubling distinctions.
I've been practicing only 2 years. The first full year, I attended a local Tibetan center, with geshes from Tibet, in the Gelug tradition. I left this center December 2012, for reasons I've discussed a little bit elsewhere, but which I touch on here as simply over-mystification of enlightenment, which wasn't helping me know what to do next, how to progress.
The center was very hierarchical, with newbies like me having no access to the masters but only to Western "senior" students delivering to the masses canned beginner's courses. One day when I asked a world-famous on-tour nun what, on a sensory level, experiencing or perceiving the inherent emptiness of all phenomena was "like," she flew into a rage and shamed me in front of the whole gompa. Her response was that I should never ask a teacher that question until I had studied the scriptures for many years and could teach a lesson on emptiness as well as she apparently thought she could. Only then might there be a chance that I'd have insight into emptiness.
At the same time, meditation really wasn't taught to novices. Yeah, there was Meditation 101 (literally the course name), but, truly, it was brief, broad, without depth, and generally pathetic. The very advanced students were evidently getting a lot out of meditations that involved very elaborate visualization and mantra sequences, and there were restricted classes for that sort of thing, but there seemed to be no bridge here between the pathetic novice instruction and the overwhelmingly advanced Tibetan visualization stuff.
Basically, Mushroom Factor predominated. I could smell it, and I finally departed and became a lone practitioner so that I wasn't being systematically held back and kept in the dark. I gravitated to the Thai Forest Theravada traditions and finally started learning some useful meditation know-how. Then I happened across and joined a small reading group that formed around discussing MCTB.
My sense of the Gelug tradition at that center and to some extent the Thai Forest tradition via my readings is that the emotional/moral model of enlightenment predominates. I think this may be mainly a function of the fact that Morality Training is what traditional Buddhism has novices focus on first, as a safety check. In other words, it only seems that enlightenment is being defined solely in this way by these traditions because morality work is the beginner's focus and many don't get, or aren't permitted to get, beyond that point. There is a secrecy about "technique" and perceptual effects, and as best as I could make out, this secrecy was a cultural defense mechanism because of rumored ancient dangers perpetuated by charlatans and less-than-beneficent power-seekers. More than once I heard warnings that people can go mad during advanced practices and harm themselves or others. The other reason for some of the, yes, disturbingly "cult-like" secrecy about techniques and effects was that other secular segments of society may deem advanced practitioners simply mad and brain washed, and this can be quite problematic for our lives in terms of conventional reality.
Personally, I had an interesting, morphing experience with MCTB. At first I was very resistant to many of its assertions. But came to examine my own resistance and found that I was simply disappointed that "enlightenment" was not a promise of moral/emotional perfection, a way to permanently end conventional suffering. Well, I never really believed I was ever going to hit "perfection," whatever that is, but the mechanism by which I didn't believe in my eventual perfection was disbelieving the possibility of my eventual enlightenment. Does this make sense? In other words, "Since enlightenment means negativity no longer arises, and since I don't believe that is possible for me in this lifetime, then, therefore, I won't reach enlightenment in this lifetime." I came to the early conclusion, before reading MCTB, that "enlightenment" was just a deceptive word/concept and all I needed to focus on was the here-and-now as part of whatever unfolded as the "result" of a series of here-and-now experiences.
To a certain extent, I still think this is so. Enlightenment is a word. When we debate what it is and isn't, we are debating semantics. So, for example, someone clinging to the emotional/moral model may simply dismiss Daniel as enlightened, as an Arahat, and thereby dismiss MCTB. I've met these people. But I have no reason to doubt Daniel really has experienced what he writes that he has. In other words, regardless of what label people may or may not slap on him, I think it is safe to assume he has important insights and something worthwhile to teach the practitioner. Moral/emotional yarsticks applied to other people, in my view, are often defense mechanisms. Many just don't want to confront possibilities beyond the way they've already defined their favorite terms and concepts.
This said, MCTB nods to Moral Training but says it is beyond the scope of the book (and I understand that the book cannot exhaust everything). I think I read someone else's comment here that morality is seldom discussed on this forum (though I recently enjoyed Fitter Stoke's post about his experiments with Right Speech). Although I totally "get" the corrective in MCTB, I also suspect that the traditional approaches do have a point: that drifting too far into technique without at least as much effort in the Moral Trainings and examination of emotional states produces lopsided practitioners with dangers that do apply.
Others have remarked that there is strong whiff of testosterone on this forum. I'm not intimidated by that, because I have taught college-level argumentation and generally can hold my own. However, if any of the gender oversimplifications do hold just a little bit, then maybe it isn't too outrageous for me to speculate that women and beginners may be scared away from this forum precisely because of the driven-ness in terms of technique, data, and, um, achievement/attainment. Conventionally speaking, women are socialized to prioritize human relationship over individual achievement. This means they may habituate to moral/emotional ways of evaluating reality and ways to improve experience. It is something to think on, anyway.
I find what Kenneth F. says about "stickiness" and enlightenment as unstickiness--as dropping rather than answering the question--an enormously helpful way to navigate the discontinuity between perfect "does not arise" and perceptual-threshold-only models. In this context, I'm thinking that, when the Thai Forest masters say enlightenment permits us to overcome aversion and attachment (as well as ignorance), they really are referring to this unstickiness. Ajaan Chah speaks repeatedly of a continual "letting go," which seems different from the Tibetan claims that, for a fully enlightened Buddha, even subtle negative states "no longer arise." |