| | Dear David,
Yes to all of that! I'd love to talk with you about my practice, your practice, and practice in general. And I could definitely use some help birthing the book that has been gestating inside me for some time.
Meanwhile, the Western Buddhist mushroom factory continues to operate (keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em s--t). I lay most of the blame for the mushroom phenomenon at the doorstep of Joseph Goldstein. Joseph is a great man, and I am, generally speaking, a big fan. He has done more to promote Theravada Buddhism in the US than anyone I could name. But his personality does not lend itself to straight talk. And nearly everyone in the Western Buddhist scene seems to have emulated his indirect approach. In addition, there is Joseph's chronic inability to reach the highest levels of attainment, which creates a glass ceiling for nearly everyone: "If even the great Joseph Goldstein, with his massive intellect, his access to the best teachers on the planet, and his decades of practice cannot master this practice, then how can I?" The obvious conclusion is that it cannot be done, along with its corollaries, it has not been done, and it will not be done, least of all by me. All of this is demonstrably false, about which I will have more to say later on.
As an example of Joseph's defeatist attitude, consider his oft-repeated remark, delivered with his characteristic charm and good humor to a packed meditation hall at IMS, "Are there any arahats in the house? If so the place is yours." The oldtimers, thoroughly conditioned to accept defeat, chuckle knowingly and the newbies look around nervously, intuitively understanding that they have just been given their baptism and their prognosis; this is a project destined to fail.
As for straight talk, it's not just that the IMS teachers don't speak clearly about attainments and maps of progress; it's that they are ashamed to talk about them, as though it were somehow socially unacceptable, something akin to looking up ladies' skirts. By contrast, some Asian teachers, and a few maverick Americans, of which my late mentor, Bill Hamilton was one, have adopted the simple expedient of telling the truth.
After my first long retreat, the '91 IMS three-month retreat, I returned home to Southern California and went over to Bill's house to give him my report. He listened to my story, then very clearly showed me how my experiences lined up with the Progress of Insight map, concluding that I had reached the 11th ñana (equanimity), and had been poised to attain First Path when the retreat ended. "Too bad the teachers didn't point that out to me," I complained. "Maybe I wouldn't have slacked off at the end."
"Welcome to the mushroom club," he said. "It's time for you to start planning a long retreat in Asia. It will be good for you to get First Path under your belt." That was typical Bill. He approached practice with a very goal-oriented, can-do attitude. He came to think of me as his protege, and he made it clear that he expected me to progress rapidly through the ñanas and the Paths. Soon after I met Bill, he let me know through broad hints that he had attained Second Path and was working toward Third. As you know, Third Path is considered by mainstream Western Buddhism to be extremely rare and not something to which a reasonable yogi would aspire. It is, so the thinking goes, the exclusive province of robed ascetics who live in caves, or saintly figures like the legendary Burmese woman Dipa Ma. Bill, however, was undaunted. He took a very mechanistic approach, wielding his vipassana as a tool to deconstruct the current phenomenon and move on to the next. "Whatever is here now is the door to the door to the door," he said.
While on his deathbed in 1999, Bill revealed to me that he had attained arahatship. "If I get better," he said, "I'm going to write a book. I'm thinking about coming out of the closet." He was going to tell the world that he had attained what many consider unattainable, in the process risking whatever credibility he had within the Buddhist community, where such revelations are unwelcome to say the least. He did not recover, so we will never know how the close-knit dharma community would have received his revelation. But before he died, he helped me to see that arahatship, the vaunted ideal of Theravada Buddhism, was perhaps not quite so rare as we had been led to believe. He pointed out that some of the Burmese monks, for example, were "hiding in plain sight."
A great example of this is Sayadaw U Pandita. There has always been much speculation about his attainment, of course. A monk since he was a small boy and an acknowledged expert on the vipassana technique, it is reasonable to assume that if the technique is sound, U Pandita of all people might have carried it to the highest levels. But even the half-whispered rumors generally stopped short of arahatship. Some dared to suggest that U Pandita may have attained Third Path, that of the anagami, or non-returner.
Bill, on the other hand, actually listened to what U Pandita said. Bill told me that while on retreat in Burma in the late 90s, he heard U Pandita give a talk about the Buddha's enlightenment. Speaking through an interpreter, the old monk told of how the Buddha had sat down under the Bodhi tree, resolving never to get up until he was fully enlightened. "I have practiced like that," said U Pandita.
Bill paused in the telling of the story and looked at me with a twinkle, waiting to see if I had understood the full import of Sayadaw's confession. (I hadn't, and stared back stupidly.) Bill connected the dots for me: "He got up." He got up! By telling that story, U Pandita was admitting that he was an arahat. A monk like U Pandita does not take a resolution lightly. If he made the resolution, it was because he knew he was close. If he got up from the sitting, it was because he was done.
Another teacher that makes his confession by way of innuendo is Christopher Titmuss. Two different people have told me that when asked about his own attainment, Titmuss said, "This Christopher doesn't suffer." While this is coded speech, it is not hard for a Buddhist to decipher. Using traditional language, the only person who does not suffer is the arahat. It's interesting to me that Titmuss is no longer welcome at IMS. I know that the official reason has to do with allegations of misconduct with students, but I also wonder if the IMS folks were happy to get rid of him given that he is so politically incorrect regarding his attainment.
It seems that arahats are not so rare after all. I've mentioned several who have come clean, at least for those willing to read the not-so-subtle code. Surely there are more hiding in plain sight who haven't seen fit to say anything. By the way, what is an arahat? Whether there are few arahats or many, or for that matter, any at all, depends entirely upon what the definition of an arahat is. By one popular definition, an arahat is a kind of superman who does not experience human emotions. He has "overcome greed, hatred, and delusion." In other words, he does not experience fear, anger, hate, lust, envy, nor any other "negative" emotion. By this definition, it's not surprising that there don't seem to be many around. In fact, I doubt there has ever been a person like that, Siddhatta Gotama Buddha included.
My own preferred definition is much less ambitious and, I believe, much more useful. Moreover, I believe it is what the people who originally coined the word meant when they said it. An arahat is someone who has come to the end of a particular developmental process. The process of which I speak is familiar to anyone who has had a spiritual opening. Once it is set in motion, there is a kind of visceral pull that propels one to practice more. There is the feeling that one is moving toward...something...one knows not what. But there is the pull. It will not be denied, and you ignore it at your peril. Almost all yogis know this pull. But some yogis also know the end of it. These yogis are arahats.
An arahat is not a superman. An arahat is off the ride. Viewed through this lens, the old stories suddenly make sense. According to the suttas, it was fairly routine for someone to walk up to the Buddha and say something like "Done is what needs to be done. There is no more becoming in this or any future life." Why did they say it like that? Because that's what it feels like. How do I know? Because it happened to me on June 13th, 2004, while walking under a pepper tree in New Mexico. A circuit was completed that day. A palpable energy that had been working its way through my body for 24 years completed its circuit and has been recycling ever since, stable, without any sense that anything else needs to be done.
It would be impossible to overstate what a profound change this caused in my understanding of my own life. The pull I spoke of earlier, the sense of "being on a ride" and needing to see it through to its conclusion had been the overriding fact of nearly my entire adult life. Suddenly, it was over. What should I do now? At the very least, I would have to find another project. All of this was clear in a moment. I chuckled, turned to an imaginary Buddha standing next to me and said, "Done is what needs to be done. You got nothin' on me now." I understood that there was not, had never been a Buddha outside of me. I was finally free...but it wasn't me. It was just a constellation of thoughts and sensations that had grown used to thinking of itself as Kenneth.
There is infinite opportunity for misunderstanding here, so I want to be as clear as possible. Being done refers only to that particular physio-energetic development involving an energy that the Indians call kundalini. It doesn't mean, contrary to hyperbolic legend, that the arahat has "erased all karma," "perfected him or herself," etc. Those are children's stories, told by charlatans or starry-eyed apologists. Here we arrive at the realm of the "enlightened asshole" you mentioned earlier. As Ken Wilber so brilliantly points out, if you want to be a good person, you will have to do the work that leads to that. Simply being enlightened will not make you a nice guy. The evidence for this is all around us, as we see that it is not exceptional, but rather the norm for enlightened teachers to get caught with their pants down. If we were to give up our childish expectations of saintly behavior from our sages, we would not be at all surprised when they succumb to the same human temptations that plague all of us.
I understand that many will not accept my definition of arahat. They will mumble something about "higher standards" and go on believing in superheroes. But I think there may be some people ready to take a mature and realistic look at what enlightenment can and cannot do for us as individuals and as a society. For them, the empowerment of knowing that enlightenment even to the level of arahat is possible for anyone, will outweigh the disappointment of having to give up the myth.
In this letter, I've just talked about one half of what I see as the big picture, i.e. the developmental half. The other half, the big half, ha, ha, is Realization of what is already the case. Realization does not require any development at all.
Development is something that happens to somebody. Realization happens to no one.
Also, on the developmental front, there is a world of things to say about the nuts and bolts of the Four Paths, the sixteen ñanas, the samatha jhanas, and the details of my own experience with all of that.
David, I know that when my wife and I first met, she wrote to tell you that I claimed to be an arahat, so I wanted to get that elephant out into plain sight as soon as possible. You should have a fair chance to distance yourself from me and my politically incorrect ideas if you are so inclined, ha, ha. But seriously, I think it would be hard for me to write a book without including that little detail, even though the non-dual part of the book would downplay the importance of any individual attainment. Whereas the Theravadans would say that the important thing is development, and the advaitists and zen people would say that the important thing is Realization, I agree with the Tibetans that the ideal is both development and realization.
Who?
David, I invite your comments, and am especially interested to hear about your own experiences with regard to development and awakening.
More later,
Kenneth Folk
December 2008
***
I've started this thread as a place for people to respond to the "What is an arahat? (A letter to a friend.)" page. Let 'er rip! |