Shamatha Meditation is on Mondays at 7:30 PM, Saturdays
at 9:00AM
Regular Shamatha meditation practice is open to the public.
You can also bring family members and friends. On Mondays,
Lama Rabten also gives meditation instruction.
Nalandabodhi Vancouver offers a comprehensive curriculum
in Buddhist studies, which adapts the traditional curriculum
taught in Tibetan Buddhist educational academies for Western
audiences.
Students progress sequentially through basic Buddhist introductory
topics, the increasingly complex topics of the Hinayana and
Mahayana studies, and conclude with the subtleties of the
Vajrayana.
The core curricular materials were drawn primarily from
the teachings of The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, who designed
the curriculum as well as the advanced study program at Nitartha
Institute.
The study program involves home study, bi-weekly group discussions
and an oral examination.
HOW TO FIND NALANDABODHI:
4610 Earles Street Vancouver, BC - Canada
Info: (604) 675 9282
Meditation: Merging with the Formless Truth
By Elizabeth Reninger
Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster
than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, unreachable,
yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat. Eye cannot see it,
ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; only in deep absorption
can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless
truth. As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found
yourself; you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever
is at peace. Whole, you enter the whole. Your personal self
returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source.
~ Mundaka Upanishad
This beautiful passage from the Mundaka Upanishad comes perhaps
as close as written words can to “speaking the unspeakable”
~ to pointing to that which the tongue cannot utter (nor the
ear hear, nor the eye see) … and giving us ~ its fortunate
readers ~ a “prescription,” a practice for experiencing this
that it is pointing to, directly:
… only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent,
merge with the formless truth.
The prescription, the practice being offered by the Mundaka
Upanishad is the practice of “deep absorption,” a state of
Being that can be accessed (perhaps most effectively) through
meditation practice. So what is “meditation practice”? Let’s
explore …
In the same way that the practice of Hatha Yoga includes
(at least potentially) thousands of asanas, and in the same
way that there exist thousands of different forms of Qigong
(Taoist energy-cultivation practices) ~ so also are there
thousands of different forms of meditation practice. (I’m
using the term “meditation,” in this context, to describe
mind-training practices performed with the physical body held
in a relatively stationary position.)
Within the Mahayana vehicle of Buddhism, meditation practice
is divided, most generally, into two categories: Shamata (calm
abiding) and Vipashyana (clear seeing). The most basic form
of Shamata/calm abiding meditation ~ and a good place to begin,
if you’re new to the practice ~ is simply to sit, in a location
where you’re not likely to be disturbed, with the spine in
an upright position, relax (body & mind), and do nothing else
at all. Easy! Try not to even think of it as “meditation”
… but rather a time to just sit and be at ease, to cultivate
stillness, with nothing at all to “do,” for five minutes or
ten or a half hour. This is called “Shamata without support.”
If this was too easy, you might like to explore “Shamata
with support.” In this form of meditation practice, you use
a particular “object” as a “support” for you practice. You
can, for example, use your breath as support: letting your
awareness rest gently on the inhalations & exhalations, perhaps
counting the cycles of the breath, from one to ten, and then
beginning again. Mantras (strings of Sanskrit or Tibetan syllables)
or mandalas (visual representations of aspects of mind), candles,
or objects from the natural world (e.g. a shell or a beautiful
crystal) can also be used as support for your meditation practice.
The idea here is that the “object” acts as “support” by helping
us to keep our attention in the present moment (instead of
drifting off into thoughts of the past or future).
A more advanced practice is to use as “support” whatever
happens to be arising in the fields of the senses. So, for
instance, you could decide to use as support every sound that
you hear, or the smell of incense or perfume or food in the
room, or whatever taste happens to be in your mouth … Emotions
and thought-patterns and eventually anything at all that is
arising, can be support for our practice. How exactly these
things become “supports” (as opposed to distractions) is a
subject for a future essay … or perhaps is best left to personal
interaction with a meditation instructor. For now, the point
is simply this: eventually, every single thing in your experience
can act as a support for your meditation practice, for your
becoming more Present, more awake, more “alive” in the here
and now.
Vipashyana/clear seeing practices (also know as analytic
meditation) are meditation practices often used in conjuction
with hearing a Dharma talk or studying a particular text/scripture.
In such forms of meditation, a particular idea or concept
is taken into the space of meditation, and within that place
“held” and “examined” in a deeper way than is possible when
we’re engaging only with conceptual mind. A certain kind of
clarity and certainty can then emerge, with respect to particular
aspects of the teaching. This sort of meditation is also a
means for yogic exploration: for exploring, in very specific
ways, the working of mind, for “going inside” and having a
“look” at aspects of ourselves which we may, in our day-to-day
living, be quite unaware of.
But if you’re able to be happy with the very first Shamata(
without support) practice ~ the practice of simply sitting,
relaxing, and “doing nothing” ~ this is excellent … and will
serve you well, on your journey toward [merging] with the
formless truth … [solving] the great riddle … and [returning
your personal self] to its radiant, intimate, deathless source
… Sobeit!
Elizabeth Reninger holds Masters degrees in Sociology
& Chinese Medicine, is a published poet, and has been exploring
Yoga ~ in its Taoist, Buddhist & Hindu forms ~ for more than
twenty years. Her teachers include Richard Freeman and Dzogchen
Ponlop Rinpoche. For more essays on yoga-related topics, please
visit her website: http://www.writingup.com/blog/elizabeth_reninger
HOW TO FIND NALANDABODHI:
4610 Earles Street Vancouver, BC - Canada
Info: (604) 675 9282
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