Meet John

I have been studying Buddhism since around 1981, actually probably 1980 when I was at the United States Air Force Academy. I encountered a book that was about existentialism actually and that led me to discover another book which is called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, a very simple, maybe some people would think even too simple account of Zen Buddhism and that was actually the first kind of Buddhism that I encountered. But then I ended up for various reasons at Amherst College in western Massachusetts after I left the Air Force Academy and I started to study with a man named Bob Thurman and at that time he was at Amherst now, he's just retiring actually from Columbia University. And Bob also invited a Tibetan Lama by the name of Taro Tukunurpoche to come be a visiting a professor at Amherst College. Even though Taro Tukunurpoche didn't speak a word of English actually, Bob would translate, it was really quite a lot of fun.

And Taro Tukunurpoche also would do in the evenings at, Bob had a separate institution called the American Institute of Buddhist Studies which was basically his attic in this enormous house in Amherst and Taro Tukunurpoche gave courses there and I started to study Buddhism very seriously quite quickly. Sort of in Tibetan style we would say he hooked me with his goat of compassion, he sort of just got me. So I studied initially especially, so I had some exposure to Zen Buddhism and then I studied initially more intensively in Tibetan Buddhism within a very scholastic and philosophical style in what's called the Kalupa School. And then Taro Tukunurpoche actually passed away in 1991, by that time I had gone to graduate school at Harvard University where I did an MA in Sanskrit and Indian Studies and then I started a second MA in PhD in the Committee for the Study of Religion and that's where I got my PhD eventually. But when I was, I actually saw Taro Tukunurpoche for the last time during the Kala Chakra initiation, the Wheel of Time initiation in Sarnath in 1991 and he passed away but shortly thereafter I met then my current teacher Chikinimurpoche who is one of the sons of Tukunurpoche.

And he really in a way I guess I was kind of in the right place for a certain new style of practice which was more experientially oriented, still a lot of respect for and a lot of emphasis on philosophical practice but this style also was more in a sense more experiential and also emphasized a non-dual experience. So this style of practice is called both Mahamudra and Dzogchen. So Mahamudra literally means the great seal, Dzogchen means the great perfection and the style of practice in this lineage is the combination of those two which sometimes in Tibetan is called Chak Dzog, the first syllable of each of these words. So that style of practice, the non-dual style of practice really emphasizes in a sense experience but also the importance of, how shall we put it, being aware of what is happening right now and it then led me to actually connect quite directly with contemporary mindfulness and especially John Kabat-Zinn. I was trained in mindfulness based stress reduction by John Kabat-Zinn and Sakhi Santarelli and when John and I first met probably in 2007 we really hit it off because he also shares this emphasis on the non-dual style.

Prior to that and also after that I also had been doing practice in the Vipassana tradition so I've had quite a lot of exposure there and done a few retreats in Vipassana and I especially like the teaching and getting to know really as friends as well Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and I've had a good fortune of having a very strong connection with the Zen tradition, kind of the place where I started but never really studied really until starting around 2005 or 2006 when I began to work more and more with the Mind and Life Institute. I met Roshi-Joan Halifax, founder of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico and I've also had quite a lot of exposure to Zen Buddhism but my main practice and my main teacher is Chikinyin Banerbuche who lives in Bodhanaat in Kathmandu and that non-dual style that combines these two traditions, Mamudra and Zogchen, that's really my home base. So academically my academic work is focused especially on Buddhist philosophy and epistemology but I've become more and more interested also because of some just kind of happenstance circumstances I ended up working with a neuroscientist by the name of Richie Davidson when I went in 1999 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and there at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I started to work with Richie first as a translator but then later as a kind of cultural and theoretical translator of the ideas and one thing led to another and eventually I ended up holding a distinguished chair in contemplative humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds that Richie started and I suppose in some ways I helped to start at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So in terms of the scientific side of things you could say I'm kind of in the philosophical sub-discipline of cognitive science and a lot of what I work on there are theories of cognition theories of the relationship between affect or emotion in cognition and especially the way that meditative practices work like mindfulness how what are the mechanisms as we say of practices like mindfulness. So basically you could say that Buddhism starts out with the fundamental teachings of the Noble Four Truths there's suffering which we need to recognize first if we don't recognize it we're not going to do anything about it and the source of suffering the fact of cessation the possibility of cessation we can do something about it and then the path that enables us to achieve that cessation and early Buddhism then which means for the first 500 years or so of Buddhism really is focused on those teachings but also the style at least from the standpoint of later Buddhism especially what we call the Mahayana or the great vehicle the style of early Buddhism is focused more on one's own individual liberation and then starting around the time of the common era a number of things happen one of them is that it seems that in a sense there's more and more emphasis on this world not so much a kind of transcendence of this world where nirvana is somewhere else but in some sense a transformation of this world and there are kinds of practices that evolve during this period which are more and more about kind of change not trying to escape but trying to transform another way of thinking about this that is very important in this period is a new style of philosophy which looks at the world as being infinitely transformable this is the philosophy of emptiness that Nagarjuna develops and with that then also becomes a question of well if the world is being transformed like what's making the world of suffering what we call samsara the kind of merry-go-round of suffering what is that world of cyclic existence what's driving that is our confusion and ignorance so if we're going to remake the world we need to remake it in some other way how do we do that we replace the engine of ignorance so to speak with compassion so what drives the creation of the new world is the wisdom that sees through the notion that somehow it's objectively stuck in the way it is now so we can transform it so we need the wisdom to see that the possibility of transformation and then we need a kind of source of the energy that rebuilds the world and that's compassion so the bodhisattva is not seeking to escape from the world of suffering but rather to transform it through wisdom and compassion and those are the those are the kind of core of the bodhisattva practice you could say that then the it's it's not really a rejection of early buddhism and we see it's definitely not a rejection in fact and we see many elements of early buddhism in the Mahayana and we even see elements of Mahayana in the kinds of traditions that don't really aren't really explicitly Mahayana I'm thinking especially of the Theravada tradition but the emphasis on loving kindness and so on it's not so different in some ways but there is a new kind of emphasis on transformation of the world itself and on attaining full enlightenment instead of instead of what we call our hardship which is to become free from samsara by obtaining nirvana now the new paradigm is to become fully awakened so as to be able to help other beings to awaken themselves so that's kind of the core we could say that wherever buddhism has gone it's transformed in fact there's a kind of principle you could say in buddhism which is that which speaks about the 84,000 different kinds of dharma the 84,000 different versions of the dharma which is the teachings and the practice and 84,000 traditionally in the Indian ancient Indian world is really just a way of talking about a really big number like a whole lot so there are 84,000 different versions of the dharma for 84,000 different types of people so there are a whole lot of different kinds of people and there are a whole lot of different versions of the dharma for them but we could also think of that in terms of cultures so that the principle here is that the dharma needs to be according with needs to work with the individual capacities the predilections the personality the style of an individual but of course individuals as we know don't just emerge themselves out of out of thin air they emerge in a cultural context so part of that means also is that they're going to be cultural trends and styles that are appropriate to kinds of people who are emerging in various cultures so wherever buddhism goes in short it changes and it's supposed to change however you could sometimes say that there's a kind of struggle within most traditions face this and now i'm thinking more in my sort of religious studies with my religious studies add-on my professorial hat on most traditions face this kind of tension between innovation and maintaining some kind of a traditional continuity so buddhism also always faces that of course if we innovate too far then we've lost you could say the core of the dharma but if the dharma is unable if the teachings are unable to innovate for new contexts they're not going to survive first of all they'll become irrelevant but also more importantly in the specific case of buddhism they're they're kind of losing the mission because the whole point is not the absolute truth of the teachings since especially from the mahayana standpoint there are no teachings that are absolutely true but it's the way in which the teachings can help people to transform themselves so if one can't if one gets too stuck in a tradition too fixated on some kind of a traditional culture or traditional style then the teachings are actually in a sense destroying themselves right so they need there needs to be innovation so having said all of that i'll give me one quick example for is that when buddhism goes to china for example one of the things that people get very interested in initially when it first gets to china around the first or second century of the common era is life extension how can this make me healthier how can this make me live longer and also how can it make me wealthier actually so that might sound familiar because then when buddhism comes to the united states you find a number of people who are concerned about how buddhism is you know caught up with things like how does it make me healthier how does it make me wealthier how can it make me live longer or enjoy life more as if these were somehow things that were not part of the dharma ever in the past so that's totally untrue actually and actually in some ways it shows a certain amount a lack of understanding of how traditions themselves develop but also specifically how buddhism has developed so buddhism enters into cultures by corresponding to and attracting people in terms of what their interests are what their needs are we need to start with in an honest way where we are in our own confused and conflicted states whatever they might be so that's not a problem in itself another issue that some people have raised for example in the context of mindfulness where we have see contemporary mindfulness being taught in ways that is not explicitly buddhist is somehow that this is watering down buddhism or destroying buddhism or what have you now here i'm biased because john cabot zinn is a good friend of mine and i no one likes to see their friends being being attacked but some of these attacks i think are very unfair because it's also losing track of the fact that this precisely happened throughout the history of buddhism in china in tibet in other places where practices in a sense kind of leave their immediate buddhist context and become more generalized within the culture so that's one issue but another issue here is the way in which that is a kind of penetration of the dharma into the culture itself so that in some sense it's not actually losing the buddhist core on my view so having said all of that i think that some of the ways in which the teachings have become and which the buddhism has become transformed let's say are ways it's responding to the western context that are actually very positive is first of all the way in which practice has become something that is accessible for everyone so one of the issues in buddhist cultures is that sometimes people are almost too humble they think that i can't practice i'm just an ordinary person there's no point in me doing meditation so when we look at the history of buddhism over the centuries we see that many in many traditional cultures only a very small number of people really engage in very serious buddhist practice and other people are certainly trying to live good lives live ethical and moral lives worshiping the buddhas and the bodhisattvas and so on but not necessarily doing serious practice because in some sense a kind of there's a sort of cultural paradigm where only the great lamas or the great monks can do this that means that percentage wise of people who really did serious practice including serious meditation practice very small percentage certainly less than 10 percent let's say of traditional tibetan culture people were doing serious practice including meditation practice so one of the things that has changed not just in tibetan buddhism but also in other forms of buddhism is that there's a way in which meditation practice in particular has become sort of popularized and accessible to lay people to all kinds of people not just westerners actually so that interest in meditation practice in the west has also led to developments in asia so we see for example the vipassana movement in berma is very much also a kind of response to this type of interest in in the west having said that so this that's something really positive actually that the encounter with buddhism the west and the encounter between the west and buddhism has led to our sort of a really great increase in the seriousness of practice more and more people thinking that they can practice and that they should practice and what does practice mean it doesn't just mean meditation it also means studying the text it means learning the philosophy and many tibetan teachers have remarked to me about how serious westerners are about this that they really you know want to learn the material they want to study and they also want to practice meditation and such uh there's a problem a couple of problems that also however come up with that so that's something very positive about the encounter one of the difficulties with that however is that then people sometimes get a little fixated maybe more than a little fixated on sort of where are they on the path and the idea that they're going to obtain actually buddhahood or in the terra vada tradition arha chip that they are you know what we call the stream enterer which is the sort of first level of a truly holy person these so this kind of fixation on you know assessing oneself and the idea that one's actually going to get there all the way to the end on the one hand we certainly want to keep that that's a very important notion that we can actually become fully awakened we can attain nirvana but on the other hand when we fixate on that it's clearly got very detrimental results and part of one of the detrimental results is that people just get confused i mean they think they're enlightened and they're not so uh that's one actually quite serious issue another issue that i think is important to recognize is that buddhism like any other uh contemplative tradition uh has texts that talk about practice and that write about practice and also has theoretical accounts about how meditation and so on works but what texts say and what people actually do almost never completely line up in fact i'll just say they never completely line up there's obviously a relationship but there are many times in which the texts speak about one thing and people do a complete something completely different or the texts say you must do this and then when you actually get into a practice community a traditional practice community and say oh but the text says you have to do that and then you know they say oh look at the bird uh you know really oh never mind you know in other words texts are not the practice and one of the issues also because of the way our education works is that we somehow think that books are where the truth is and and when we encounter a practice community it can be quite jarring to discover that you read something and like a literal translation of a of a text and it says were you supposed to do this and that and the other thing but in reality the way the practice works is totally different than what the text says so that's a very important issue that texts themselves are guidebooks and they sometimes contain very important information for us but that the actual practice is not necessarily in fact is never what the text says i'll just say that you have to have the lineage from one person to the next to the next who passes along the techniques and the styles of practice who also acts as a model and especially in the kinds of traditions that i'm involved in in tibetan buddhism the non-dual styles of ma mudra and zogchen you have to have what's called the mengok the special oral instructions so one of the dangers i think sometimes in the west is that we have a lot of access to all of these texts and we think that just reading the text is going to tell us what the practice is or we even hear from our teachers the practice but then we read a text and it says oh and says i'm supposed to do this so we think oh well he said this or she said this but the text says that so the text is obviously the thing that's true and that's exactly the opposite it's the what the person in your practice lineage says that's what you want to do and if it disagrees with the text then well if the text is the issue not that person it's the transmission of a tradition that is that is really critically important and that's something i think that's a real problem in western buddhism the other thing that we find in western buddhism that is again not really at all untraditional but it's something that buddhism always faces when it comes to other cultures is commodification so when buddhism went to china it it became a kind of business when it went to tibet it became a kind of business and there was always a struggle between the idea that it should just be open and free and the reality of making institutions especially new institutions and entirely new cultures allowing those institutions to develop and supporting people so the ideal that the dharma should be totally free often ran up against the reality of how do we actually survive that's one issue but then of course once people start to survive they maybe want to do a little more than survive you know it's to have a robe maybe a little fancy silk under the robe wouldn't be such a bad thing and you know some nice shoes and a watch or two and then you know before you know it the commodification is beyond just the the survival and support of the institutions it's you know greed which what a surprise of course that's going to happen so we also are dealing with that now in the west at a certain point it's sort of evened out in china in tibet as well there still like can be you can say there's you know commodification is an ongoing feature of buddhism wherever it runs wherever you find it and there are people who are much more strident about eliminating that commodification and there are other people who are almost encouraging it and you know in the in the long run i think there's no question that buddhism does best when it's not overly commodified in that way if we can support the institutions without turning this into a business that's obviously the best but this is an issue right now that we face in the west in part because we're not even really used to you know institutions that run like that that are not kind of everything is about exchange it's about you know capital i'm going to give you something and you're going to pay me for it and the idea that i give you something for free we think oh i couldn't be worth anything then right or there must be a trick in there or something like that so it's some well we're going to be working on this for for a while i would say finding a way of really being able to not turn it into uh you know a business exchange still working on it so one of the things that uh i mean depression is complex and there are actually many different uh different forms of depression the statistic that depression is going to become the major health problem or issue in 2030 according to the world health organization is it could be a misleading statistic because as we saw for example the largest decrease in cancer deaths has just recently occurred in the past year i can't quite remember their percentage and so part of the reason for that is we've been effective in our in our public health campaigns about smoking so in some ways you could say that's a good sign because it means that lots of other health issues are being dealt with effectively however it's also clear that rates of depression are rising there's no question about that rates of depression and anxiety both and often they're comorbid they often occur together and it's not clear what what the causes exactly are but we do know some things i think in general terms and some of the buddhist practices that we explore in this course could be potentially very helpful for dealing with depression so one of the features of depression that is uh you could say really like a sort of prison the the the sense of being imprisoned in one's depression is just the feeling that nothing can change and that one is kind of stuck in this world of one's own depression and that's just who i am i am a depressed person and that image of self of being kind of stuck in that image is something that letting go through the practices can be very helpful in dealing with so and that's just mean finding that space that sort of moment of where the story of the self just sort of fades away and there are kinds of practices that we try to explore in the course that really try to offer the possibility of that opening of the letting go and just seeing that the world that i think i'm in is in some ways just my own mind and that my mind has infinite possibility it is not fixed in the way that i'm experiencing it so that's one issue that sense of just letting go and openness is so just that moment and this is somewhat similar to where i'm involved in some research on psychedelics and psychedelics you know there there there are issues with them and one wants to be very cautious but also in a similar way we some of the effectiveness of psychedelics or treatment resistant depression seem to be coming from this moment where it's sort of like a reset button suddenly that story of the self is gone obviously if we can get there through meditation practice that's a little bit safer and probably more effective over the long term so that's a key aspect of this style of practice which is just the letting go another feature of depression that i think is really fairly well established again it may be not in every case but it seems to be quite frequent there's a high correlation between what we call self-focus and depression even the number of times one uses the first person pronoun in the day can correlate with this if i use i and me a lot in the data you know as i'm going through the day this is actually discovered by accident at one point in a certain study then that seems to correlate quite highly with my likelihood of experiencing depression so self-focus is maybe part of that sense of being stuck in the prison of one's depression and so other focus being able to engage in this way and to sense that social connection doesn't have to be anything dramatic it doesn't mean we have to become saints or completely altruistic but just that sense of engagement and social connection that can also be very helpful and that's also something we explore in the course and of course that's a key element in that bodhisattva practice and a third item that i think is very important for dealing with depression is actually the way in which in just very concretely we can get stuck in rumination not all forms of depression involve rumination but it is often a feature where we're just sort of stuck thinking about something this kind of level of cognitive inflexibility which seems to be true not just of depression but also of anxiety and possibly obviously obsessive compulsive disorder that there's something about that kind of cognitive inflexibility which may somehow feed our our depression and one way to deal with that is to just have that a skill even of what we call de-ratification the capacity to just recognize that thoughts are thoughts so that in the moment of being stuck in the rumination it's just i just simply see through my thoughts i see that what's happening the story that's being presented to me is really just thought and that can be a very powerful way of diffusing and dropping out of the rumination that doesn't mean it won't come back but it is something that as we do repeatedly we start to develop a different relationship to our thoughts so that perhaps we're not quite so stuck on them