A few years ago, someone who was feeling the need to meditate got in touch with One Mindful Breath, a secular Buddhist community in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand and, after taking part in a Wednesday evening online meditation, the two of us sat down for a good chat over long blacks and a slice in a cafe in Ngaio.
‘I’ve had a look through your website and its great,’ he told me. ‘Just what I’m looking for. So, good! Then I went through it all again, looking for the catch. There has to be a catch, I thought. But I couldn’t find it. So where is the catch?’
This isn’t such a silly question, and it’s one that others may be pondering. After all, when I looked at how many people had expressed an interest in One Mindful Breath over time, it became clear that few engage with us, and even fewer go on to develop a regular meditation practice. For those with an interest in numbers, here are some statistics.
❖ More than 800 people have joined One Mindful Breath’s Meetup group, but I don’t believe we’ve met more than 40 of them (May 2024 = 1470 people).
❖ A little over 300 get our newsletter, of whom perhaps 40 percent read it (May 2024 = 360 subscribers).
❖ Between 25 and 35 of these people actually turn up from time to time to our Wednesday evening sessions, our study groups and the daylong retreats.
❖ Finally, at any one Wednesday evening session we get between 8 and 15 people, depending on the weather and what else is going on in people’s lives.
So is there a catch? I think there is, and I wonder if perhaps this could be it.
Of the four elements of the Buddha’s teachings that have been identified as uniquely his – something that isn’t also found in other religious traditions of the time – one is the emphasis on becoming autonomous of others in our practice.
Stephen Batchelor presented this proposition during a presentation at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in March 2011, at a meeting organised by The Guardian titled ‘Uncertain minds: how the west misunderstands Buddhism’. An extract from this talk has been circulating as ‘Buddhism in a nutshell’:
[A] phrase you find in the early texts quite a lot: the person who has entered into the path has become independent of others in the Buddha’s teachings. And yet today so often we find this emphasis on finding a teacher, becoming devoted to the teacher, somehow almost surrendering your autonomy in order – as in the Tibetan schools would say – to receive the blessings of the lama or the guru, which to me is totally alien to the originality of what the Buddha first presented.
As well as not having gurus, for secular Buddhists there are no ten commandments (like those found in the Hebrew Bible), there are no 613 commandments (the Jewish mitzvot), nor are there five, eight or ten precepts (as found in ancestral Buddhism), or 227 rules for male monastics and 311 rules for women monastics (as in some Theravada traditions).
Rather than guide our behaviour with a legalistic list of rules, we suggest that people develop an understanding of causality, an understanding in which all phenomena arise in dependence with other phenomena:
If this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist.
From this way of looking at things, a kind of ethics known as situational ethics arises. To fully get to grips with this, we put in time developing a meditation practice in which we:
❖ embrace the difficulties and unavoidable aspects of the human condition
❖ let go of the dictates of reactivity, allowing them to just ‘be’
❖ stop, and experience the calm and clarity of spaciousness, and
❖ act, cultivating creative engagement as a way of being in the world.
Being autonomous of others and not attaching ourselves to a guru at whose feet we sit, and in whose presence we bask, means we are not relying on any kind of authority to tell us what we ought to do.
For many people, this is really hard to accept. It’s not what they want to hear. It suggests that we take responsibility for our actions, how we relate to our thoughts, and our feelings.
And that we don’t just read books about meditation, but actually do the hard yards. We sit down and practise it. Regularly. Just like we brush our teeth.
Could this be the ‘catch’ that this man was hunting for?
3 Replies to “One Mindful Breath looks great … but where’s the catch?”
Hi Ramsey and thank you for your article,
Perhaps the catch is that the buddha proposed a way to know and change oneself in depth, not just a way to overcome stress and daily difficulties. Such a high goal can only have a high price, in terms of commitment and… a certain type of stress.
Regarding the question of teachers, perhaps I think a little differently: I am convinced that when you want to learn something complex you need a teacher. The function of a teacher is temporary.
Dependence on the student towards the teacher is also inevitable, but it must be a temporary phase.
The problem arises when the teacher forgets or doesn’t know this. Thus addiction, which is a necessary phase, becomes a disease.
Great contribution, Stefano, thank you. It seems to me that what you write adds to the arguments in the post.
Learning to practice meditation sometimes felt to me a lot like learning to cross the road. As a small child I was told to ‘hold mummy’s [or daddy’s] hand’ when crossing the road, ‘and don’t let go’. At about four or five, as someone in a country where vehicles drive on the left, I was taught to ‘stop, look left, look right, look left again, and if all is clear then cross the road with care’. In countries where people drive on the right, I imagine that children learn to cross a road in similar ways.
As we approach our teenage years, though, we’ve taken this instruction to heart, and start to improvise our way across a road. If you’ve ever watched a 16-year-old crossing the road, it sometimes seems like they prefer to use their ears to their eyes.
Learning to meditate, we often find it helpful to use a technique. It might be counting the breath, loving kindness phrases, a body scan, or sound, perhaps. Teachers are very helpful at this stage, for sure.
But as our practice matures, though, we start to let go of techniques, and may question the authority of those who teach. We may learn to ‘just sit’. This is when we question our ‘addiction’ (you chose an interesting word there) to the teacher, and become independent of others in the teachings. I’d hope that people who come to practice this kind of meditation have en route developed a strong sense of ethics. Seeing as all humans are different, there’s no guarantee of this of course.
Hi Stefano.
I was interested in your comment ‘Thus addiction, which is a necessary phase, becomes a disease.’
You may be interested in the fact that we are setting up a new group called ELSA Recovery: Recovery from addiction within a secular dharma framework.
ELSA Recovery is a community in which Stephen Batchelor’s secular dharmateachings are blended with practical applications aimed at recovery from addiction.
If you are interested in this group please email ask@elsarecovery.org.
We are in the process of setting up a website at https://www.elsarecovery.org
More information will be available soon.
Warmly
Cathryn