From "An End to Suffering" by Pankaj Mishra:
According to the Buddha "the states achieved by meditation, no matter how deep, were temporary, 'comfortable abidings,' as he put it, 'in the here and now'. One emerged from them, even after a long session, essentially unchanged. Concentration and endurance were important means, but without a corresponding moral and intellectual development, they by themselves did not end suffering."
Suppose we substitute "keiko" for "meditation," is this also true of Shintaido?
(This is like an essay question on an SAT test - no, not really - but please feel free to post your thoughts.)
Posted by mandragore at March 23, 2005 07:19 PMDear Michael,
Here are my thoughts. If the only definition for keiko is meditation and meditation is defined as individual practice, then perhaps his statement is true. Meditation without service does not equal change. However our Shintaido keiko also includes partner practice and connection with nature and ten. Thus we can also take the changes we experience in keiko and share them with others. One step is to share our individual change and insight with others in keiko; another step is take our experience into the everyday world. I am reminded of the definition of Samurai as "to serve" and our keiko is based on this Samurai tradition. So Shintaido is not only meditation, it is practice and connections at many levels. Meditation is a tool for a warrior to succeed.
Connie Borden
I particularly like the term "comfortable abidings".
One spring gasshuku in Japan about 25 years ago, we were divided into three groups. We intermediate students were working on tenshingoso kumite. Aoki-sensei was working with the advanced people, but suddenly he appeared in the middle of our group. "You're not really cutting your partner," he said, "just licking each other's wounds," and walked off. Leaving a lot of puzzled faces behind him.
The comment made sense when I started teaching. Most of my students, naturally, like to feel comfortable. Part of my job as their teacher is to make sure I don't encourage them just to lick each other's wounds, but also to be effective with each other. Easy to get stuck in "comfortable abidings!"
Posted by: Lee Seaman at April 5, 2005 12:07 AMDepending on how an individual defines what keiko is to him or her, keiko can be a place for mere fantasy that has nothing to do with reality or a training field that connects mental and physical world. Dojo is a sterile environment where one has pre-assigned tasks to do and gets responses from understanding kumite partners. So, the dynamic in Keiko is certainly not the same as those in work place and family. But, it is a physical world and not an illusion created in our minds. And every aspect of keiko has a symbolic counterpart within ones life. Unlike practicing meditation alone, physical keiko and kumite, as Connie said, constantly give us feedback on whether or not ones thoughts and actions are indeed effective and valid. The reverse is also true. Spiritual training becomes richer when one chooses to practice "Jizai," where each world (spiritual practice and the world outside dojo) becomes a learning field as well as a practicing field for the other.
Shin Aoki
I read this question as: What might we, as Shintaido instructors, do to nurture the "moral and intellectual development" of our students? (I'm not a big fan of the word "moral" but since it was probably translated from Sanskrit I'll let it slide).
I'm under the impression that in the Rakutenkai days, Aoki-sensei often gave members "extra-curricular assignments" that were treated as a type of keiko outside the boundaries of what happened in the dojo (which, as Shin mentioned, can be thought of as a sterile environment -- both in a negative sense, as in not fertile and creative, but also in the positive sense, such as the controlled environment of a laboratory).
I don't know exactly what kinds of assignments he gave them -- perhaps anything from reading Dostoyevksy to following Aoki as he walked quickly through crowded Tokyo streets (Minagawa mentioned that one).
The kind of thing I'm thinking of extends beyond suggested readings in advance of attending a gasshuku, though it falls in the same vein. It has something to do with expanding one's world-view.
Recently I've been reading a very interesting book called "Yoga: it's Beginnings and Development" by Karel Werner. The author is a Czech who emmigrated to England just as the Soviet Union suppressed the Czech attempts to liberalize Socialism in 1968. He was one of the first people to introduce yoga in Czechoslovakia. Under Communism, it was tolerated so long as it was treated only as system of physical exercise. Dr. Werner had other ideas, and prior to emmigrating to England was subjected to interrogation by the secret police etc.
Werner writes from the perspective of both a scholar and an experienced practioner, and one of his arguments is that early Indian Buddhism can be considered a subcategory or type of yoga. His argument is based both on the historical context, and on the common elements of the yogic and early-Buddhist world-views.
Around the period of time when Buddha was alive, yoga was being developed primarily by independent practitioners who lived in the forests, unaffiliated with any ashrams, monestaries, or institutions (two of these were Siddartha's teachers before he became "the Buddha"). So yoga, and Buddhism as an outgrowth of it, can be seen as a kind of underground grass-roots movement -- in contrast to the brahman Vedic priesthood, who had an institutional investment in preserving the orthodoxy and the status quo.
So, I think another way to read Michael's question is:
What is the underlying world-view of Shintaido?
What is the dominant orthodoxy that it is challenging (or at least we hope it is)?
best - David
Posted by: David Franklin at April 6, 2005 03:44 AMI recently viewed a "Life & Times" documentary about Gautama, and found it strange in the first place his whole concept about stopping, avoiding, overcoming suffering.
Isn't suffering the stuff that evolves, transmutes and transforms us into that which we can't even imagine?
If I wanted to avoid suffering I certainly wouldn't be practicing keiko. Not that I tend towards sado-masochism, but the ongoing process that keiko offers, for me, actually allows me to take on MORE suffering. Yet, it is not a painful or burdonsome suffering, it is a liberating and joyful act of fully embracing that, and thus being able to move through whatever challenge presents itself.
Cheers,
Michael
Very interesting commentary. I think the transformative aspect of Shintaido, what makes it as deep as meditation, is latent in the movements but only when coupled by a consciousness able to make kinetic (energy) out of the potential. Without the latter, we are just "licking each other's wounds," as David F. stated, quoting Aoki-sensei. That has been, for me, more challenging than the movements: I am constantly challenged to re-see myself, and what keiko can allow me to be, every time I practice. It is when I touch the depths of that vision -- and if it is a suffering, it is also a transcendence -- that I feel my body, mind, and spirit truly understand Shintaido, if only for a moment.
Posted by: Roby Newman at April 7, 2005 10:28 AMRoby, that bit about "licking each other's wounds" was part of Lee's comment.
Posted by: David Franklin at April 8, 2005 08:12 AM
I take the question to be whether meditation or keiko is enough, by themselves, to 'end suffering', which I take to mean 'to change the world', ie how we see the world.
Recently I saw a movie depicting the life of Siddharta(?) and it struck me that he had made a naive judgment about the people and their lives that he encountered beyond the bubble of his castle. It seemed to me he had no basis on which to make a value judgment about what he saw, because it was beyond his experience. And I thought maybe he got it all wrong - this decision that what he saw amounted to unnecessary suffering. Anyway it was just a movie and I can't really say with any conviction one way or the other, and I am also not conversant with buddhist doctrine. But religions have been known to make sandhills on pinheads, or something like that. Anyway, I question this notion of 'suffering'. I think that has to be clarified. The dictionary says 'suffering' means 'to bear'. I guess buddha is not the only one to observe that 'life is suffering' or that there seems to be a lot of suffering. I'll put that to one side for now. And if it turns out that life is not meant to be suffering, what would be the point of meditation, or keiko for that matter?
I have not still-meditated very consistently in my life, preferring to walk or swim as well as move-meditate through keiko forms, and from that point of view, I would say that the interaction of moving-meditation and my life has a steadily transformative effect towards integrating the parts, furthering the wholifying and unifying, healing and development of my being, beyond what I can think rationally with just my mind. I would qualify that by saying that it is in proportion to my life's aspiration or something intrinsic in me, ie there is some reciprocity to the interchange. So, I suppose I am disagreeing with the argument that one is unchanged, even apart from whether there needs to be some 'corresponding intellectual or moral development'.
Then I consider the impression, from the statement, that meditation is dettaching from life and then returning to it - if one is returning from 'comfortable abidings in the here and now', and things are unchanged, it seems that there is some sort of a divide between the two states. I used to feel like the dojo was a kind of bubble away from life but not in a detached way, rather that it was an intensified space that sped up or amplified/intensified 'my life in the context of the whole of life'. I remember Egami's analogy of being put through a washing machine, meaning I suppose that you got thrown about and came out clean. It was (I'm thinking of group keiko in Tokyo) like the here and now is a hyper-reality (including beyond the temporal or local here-and-now) and one has been engaged in the process with not only the mind but body, heart, soul, past, present, future, and with blood, sweat and tears, so to speak. So, while a kind of bubble, keiko never felt to me like the feeling of 'open your eyes now' meditation. Life was more, not less, 'in your face'. The forms 'facilitate' or invite this.
The divergence between meditation and keiko gets even greater when you observe the 'after effects' or follow-up of the activity. I think an ongoing self-activation of a dialogue / process /engagement is effected through the practice. Keiko very quickly brought me to deepen my connection with my deeper or big self, others, earth and the infinite universe, and with reflection, lead me to a deepening appreciation and understanding of it all (even if my understanding or articulation of that considerably lagged behind).The culmination of this process, for me, is to see increasingly 'things as they are'. Which religions and various teachings have tried to do for us.
I guess I have to agree that yes, nevertheless, it is helpful to have the intellectual and moral development, or knowledge that assists this process. And for me, in recent years, the understanding that cosmology has provided me has acted as an accelerator of this process. So I relate to what buddha calls 'comfortable abidings' as the 'ground of all being' or quantum vacuum (which is not a vacuum anymore), space-time foam, zero point, seamlessness or pure generativity*. Science has given us the understanding that 99.99% of everything is this so-called 'empty (but full) space', out of which everything comes, including the original flaring forth (or big bang) and I think that is where meditative practices, including keiko, can lead one to. Which could be a kind of ecstasy or bliss or peaceful state.
Keiko is I believe different to some forms of meditation because it effects change at the level of this ground of being. Our individual ground of being is hooked into the whole ground of being, and when we 'touch base' with that we experience the self-organizing and self-healing effects of the primordial universe (that pure generativity that makes up 99.99% of our beings) which manifest in changes in a myriad of ways, starting from how we see ourselves, and the world. That self-organizing function could be called 'individuation' or healing.
So I would say, if meditation practice does not by itself lead to change, the keiko process of engagement with the whole of life/universe fosters self-generating activity, intuitions and receptivity to relevant intellectual input, cross-discipline knowledge/wisdom, etc. that in turn contributes to a synthesizing, or composting, process that changes the way we view life, and emanating change from that.
The expression to 'feel at home' (as used by Thomas Moore) best describes, for me, what it means to find one's place at the centre and, as cosmology shows, the origin of the universe, while others have called it 'eternity'. And so the notion of suffering is transformed. Suffering, for me, is when I lose the sense of this, when I am off-centre, and it is self-induced suffering. I become an island in my skin, disconnected and prone.
Which leads me to wonder if buddha, after first seeing 'suffering', came to a different perception down the track - he might have realized that this is caused by privilege and injustice by fellow man or wrong thinking, ie that suffering is not an inherent feature of the universe. Or that, one man's suffering is another's fulfillment, whatever.
I would add a postnote that meditation in this age, not buddha's, has a much more healing effect on people generally, because there is so much information and it's all a bit overwhelming and people develop dis-ease very easily so to have a regular 'respite' from all the noise, just that, is a very important tool for amelioration of the dis-ease. I am thinking of one psychiatrist in Australia, Ainsley Meares, who achieved remarkable healing for his patients by prescribing them to meditate for 10 minutes twice a day, to empty their minds. Nevertheless, I don't think it is in the same ball game as keiko, in terms of radical wholifying.
It was very good to go through this exercise and reflect and I'm so glad you decided to 'retie knots' Michae-sensei!! And I look forward to further such explorations. Now I will see what others have written and I might change my ideas all over again - that's fine too!
Vera Costello
vera@rabbit.com.au
Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia
* terms as used by Brian Swimme in the Powers of the Universe lectures
Nice to hear from you Vera and Michael De-C - I hope you are doing well...
mt
Posted by: mt at April 9, 2005 10:16 AMThanks Michael, yes we're doing fine.
A couple of days after doing that rant, which I rather enjoyed,I noticed the date made it 29 years since my first keiko at Yoyogi, with Lee and John's invite. So it was good to reflect.
During keiko / meditation we play and we learn how to play, but unfortunately or fortunately one day later or just or few second something about the game is change and after we will go out and we will keep going to play,
Sometimes I've found myself became too serious about Keiko and the keiko start to be rigid ,and I 've found that this can create suffering , and if look back at my first shintaido experience and i saw Alain Chevet and Collette (his wife) performing Tenshingoso kumite , i could see that they were playing and they were enjoying what they were doing and I was enjoying watching them do it, then later when I've met Michael Thompson in England and I've realized how great and interesting kind of game we are playing. An Italian writer has wrote that we have a period of our life where we are connected with all is around us and we fully express it.(Something familiar for Shintaido) , this period is ,when we are 5 month old, no barrier no prejudice, just there and looking for something interesting to play with , eyes, mouths, sounds, movement or something to grasp , or someone to enter in contact with and have an exchange of life experience .
And the interesting of playing is that we have some rules but those are not dogma.
I've read with interest all the other answer and I'm looking forward to read more of that, and it's really fun have this writing keiko
A big hug to everyone
Hello again all,
I'm going to bite the bullet and answer as directly as possible:
Yes.
I think a more complete experience of Shintaido requires some kind of educational process beyond the confines of the body movement techniques we practice. Without it, Shintaido keiko could become nothing more than a "comfortable abiding," in other words an experience that we leave behind when we leave the dojo. It is an essential foundation for expanding our world-view, but ultimately by itself it is not a complete tool for doing so.
I didn't read the question as a contrast and comparison between sitting meditation and moving meditation. I read it as: sitting meditation is for Buddhists what keiko is for Shintaido practitioners; in other words, for Buddhists sitting meditation is their keiko. And just as the Buddha indicated that sitting meditation alone is not enough, we may ask ourselves if the keiko we do in the dojo is adequate to realize the purposes of Shintaido.
One thing I enjoyed about Vera's response was that while she started off in one direction, indicating that because Shintaido keiko tends toward a hyper-real in-your-face experience it may be sufficient for helping one to "see things as they are", she ended up making reference to cosmology, astrophysics, Thomas Moore etc. in developing her discussion of what Shintaido keiko is and what it does. So she showed by her own example the enrichment she brings to Shintaido by an educational process beyond the confines of the dojo (which I suspect would be reflected in one's keiko).
I also notice that two different readings of "comfortable abidings" have emerged. Lee understood it in a similar way as I did, to mean something pejorative, like a resting place that leads to complacency and therefore ultimately defeats the Buddhist aim of transcending illusion; while Vera quite cleverly turned it on its head, equating it with the ground of all being -- a blissful "place" that presumably we can "visit" during meditation (or possibly by various other means, some of them dangerous, e.g. LSD). But this still begs the question, what to we do when we "come back"?
This is at the crux of the Buddha's statement that "moral and intellectual development" is necessary. I'm also not conversant with Buddhist doctrine and have never been a practicing Buddhist, so I can only try to interpret information I have read in books. The Buddha took a two-pronged approach to achieving liberation. Both aspects are included in what Buddhists call the "Noble Eightfold Path", which includes both the practice of meditation (i.e. the "keiko" aspect) and ethical guidelines for conduct in daily life (for example, "right speech", "right livelihood" etc.). There are also guidelines for one's attitudes and ways of thinking ("right viewing", "right mindfulness" etc.), which we might say are part of the practitioner's intellectual or philosophical development.
Consider the historical context of the Buddha's life. As I mentioned earlier, Buddhism emerged from an environment in which many spiritual practitioners and yogins were experimenting with a variety of meditative and physical practices and developing their philosophies. Some of these practices were metaphysical ("the philosophical study of being and knowing"), without what we would identify as a clear moral or ethical component. Before he became "the Buddha," Siddartha studied with several of these independent forest gurus, and mentions two of them as his teachers (Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta). He incorporated some of what he learned from them into his later teachings, and it seems he considered their realizations to be valid and valuable, but not complete ("Yoga: It's Beginnings and Development" by Karel Werner, p 17). From this we can infer that Buddha's view that moral and intellectual development are necessary for achieving liberation comes from his experience observing and studying with practitioners who dedicated themselves more exclusively to the "keiko" aspect.
All this rather abstract discussion might become clearer from a more practical perspective and an example from my own experience. I recently renewed my interest in Chinese medical theory after a long hiatus, partly because I feel that my capabilities as Shiatsu practitioner are limited without more education about the theory.
I had my first exposures to Shiatsu from Michael and then from Ito. Much later (after enrolling in and then dropping out of acupuncture school) I decided to pursue Shiatsu as a profession, and attended the Boston Shiatsu School. I felt the biggest problem with their educational system was that they immediately focused too much on the theories of Chinese and Japanese medicine, without enough simple practice of Shiatsu. As a result, many of my fellow students had their minds full of fancy theories, but had a poor quality of touch, with little sense of good body mechanics or real sensitivity to energy. Those who were already naturally gifted or had some other training were often good at the qualitative side, but those who weren't good didn't really improve much during the course of their education at the school.
I was very frustrated by this, because I knew that I had a fairly good quality of touch. I was able to apply the techniques of Shiatsu to release certain meridians and tonify others, to establish a good contact with the person's energy. But I knew that I was not naturally talented; this ability was completely the result of my Shintaido education (and adjunct Shiatsu training with Michael and Ito, who taught Shiatsu in a way more more akin to Shintaido keiko). So I found myself feeling that the Shiatsu school's curriculum was poorly structured, that it lacked some crucial elements that could be found in Shintaido.
However, I have to admit that this became a "comfortable abiding" for me, or a form of complacency. Because I was able to apply the qualitative body-sense I had learned through Shintaido to the practice of Shiatsu, in the short run I was able to get good results and make clients feel good (some massage practitioners and teachers, for example David Palmer, advocate that Shiatsu/massage practitioners should limit themselves to this area, and not try to "medicalize" their profession).
But in the long run, I regret that I didn't put more effort into studying the theoretical side and putting it into practice. My capacity to really affect other people, to help them substantially change their condition for the better through Shiatsu, is hindered by my limited understanding of the theory. I have a good foundation in the ability to communicate on the energetic level and apply the Shintaido philosophy of Ten-Chi-Jin-Hitobito-Ware to touch the body in a qualitatively beneficial way. But without a deeper understanding of Chinese and Japanese medical theory, I don't really know where and when to touch. I don't really know how to diagnose the client's condition, or which meridians to touch to treat it. So my ability to realize the purpose of Shiatsu (i.e., health) is incomplete.
I am drawing a analogy here between developing the quality of touch, which is like the practice of sitting meditation or Shintaido keiko; and the study of Chinese medical theory, which is like Buddha's "moral and intellectual development."
Some Buddhists I have met maintain that it is a methodology and not a religion, in other words that you do not need to believe any dogma; you can simply try the method and discover for yourself if it is effective. But like many religions or spiritual systems, some sects of Buddhism constitute complete life-teachings, with rules of conduct (for example, vegetarianism) for serious practitioners and a developed system of ethics to support them.
My friend Vasek is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism here in the Czech Republic, and he said this: "We humans are naked in this world without some code of ethics." He has come to some Shintaido keiko, and he also had this to say: "There are some ethics inside Shintaido, I feel it. But it is not in words."
I have enormous faith -- perhaps "faith" is not best word, since there is by now also an element of experience -- in the Shintaido forms themselves and their built-in mechanisms for inspiring us to expand our world-view, as Vera mentioned. But consider for a moment that according to the theory of chakras (again, about which I have only book-knowledge), there are energy centers that have physical, psychological, emotional and mental components.
From that point of view, the "moral and intellectual development" that Buddha spoke of is not something separate from developing ourselves through body movement or meditation. We could say it's a part of keiko, even if we are accustomed to thinking of keiko primarily as a body movement activity. After all, the brain is part of the body, not the other way around. Maybe this is an overly-literal way to interpret chakra theory, but it does finally ground this esoteric discussion in the context of a simple concrete fact.
It's hard for me to imagine Shintaido becoming a systematic life-teaching with rigid rules of conduct that permeate one's daily life. It seems contradictory to the open architecture of Shintaido. But that same open architecture implies that there is something still waiting to be built and developed, presumably something that makes Shintaido more effective while maintaining the openness that is at its heart.
Posted by: David Franklin at April 23, 2005 06:33 AMI wasn't aware the Buddha had said that. How interesting. Of course, we don't really know what he did or didn't say. He lived a long time ago, and didn't write anything down.
As someone who practices both Buddhism and Shintaido, I think the answer to this question is, clearly, yes! What we do within the meditation hall or dojo does not develop all the necessary parts of us.
Michael gave me a terrible, fascinating book called Zen at War. It's about the complicity, even active involvement of Japanese Buddhists in Japanese militarism during WW2. Many of these apparently enlightened monks clearly neglected their moral and intellectual development.
I've been termed a "head person" by my Shintaido buddies since the beginning, and felt apologetic about intellectualism at times, but no longer. We need all the tools at our disposal to lead a decent life. No point in rejecting or denying any of them.
Just for the record: The Buddhist term "dukkha," (Sanskrit) is typically translated as "suffering," but this doesn't do justice to the term, which would better be translated as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (have you read it in Czech, yet, David?) According to the Buddha, we suffer because we can't bear impermanence. We want the world to be fixed and comprehensible, and we want our selves to be immortal.
-Eva
An interesting addendum to the discussion about "An End to Suffereing" -- this is an article about the new directions in psychology and the scientific study of happiness:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1793873_1,00.html
Posted by: David Franklin at October 8, 2005 10:58 AM