Glasshampton Monastery

Postscript

Now that you have finished reading this book, you have probably taken the first step of a long journey towards finding your very “own self” - the same thing as finding a long lasting peace of mind. You have probably realised that it hasn’t been easy at all. This is the reason why you need all the encouragement you can get. I advise you to read “Dear Colin, What is the Meaning of Life?” in which I talked about my own experience of struggling along this path. You can also compare the improvement of my knowledge between now and then. You can order this book from any bookshop in the UK. My second book is “Can a Caterpillar be perfect?” This book can help you to understand many issues and topics that I do not have time to explain in class nor in this book, for instance the innocent world and so on. I talked about fighting in the right battlefield when I tried to explain that the brain is not totally responsible for all our mental mayhem, as we are led to believe. As a result, prescribed drugs are not always the answer. I have tried to deal with these issues in a most scientific way. You may want to join other meditation classes once you leave my Tai chi class. There is one chapter in this book which gives you guidelines on ‘How to judge your meditation master’.

“Can a Caterpillar be Perfect?” has been published in Thailand by the Mental Health Publication.[1] It is displayed and on sale at Waterstone bookshop in the University of Birmingham, Edgebaston, Bristol Rd, Birmingham, B15 UK.

Please remember that “mental wound” is not a clear cut and straightforward notion like a physical wound where you can apply some antiseptic cream and watch it heal. Judging from your own experience, if you think that the practice I taught you in my Tai chi class can help you to relieve your mental wound, please look after it as if you would look after medicine so that it can help you whenever you need it. Remember that I am offering you a very plain glass of water: you might not feel thirsty right now and don’t feel the need to drink it. However, this glass of pure water may save your life when one day you are lost in a desert. Our life situation changes from time to time and we don’t know what is ahead of us. On the day that you feel that life is rather unbearable and you see no way out, please come back to the four foundations of awareness and start all over again. Don’t look too far away, always come back to your inner-self. Take away your mind’s clutter and the answer is there. All the words in this book might not make much sense when you are happy and luck is on your side, but when luck decides to abandon you, these words will make a lot of sense.

If you happen to keep up with the practice although you have left my Tai chi class, there is no doubt that your practice will improve as time goes by. It is very difficult to find a spiritual teacher who suits your need and to guide you along the path to ultimate enlightenment. Please keep this book in a safe place and refer to the four foundations of awareness from time to time. You might not understand much about the third and the fourth foundations of awareness now. But when your practice has ripened in the future and reached the state that you need more guidance, this book can guide you through and enable you to understand your level of practice. It could mean another 20, 30 or even 50 years time! Please remember that ultimate truth is self-knowledge. If you can see the real truth, you will know yourself that it is the one. If you still have doubt in that truth and feel shaken when someone contradicts you, it means that you have not yet seen ultimate truth. Once we have seen the innocent world or ultimate truth, to be able to confirm to ourselves that this is it, is yet another difficult task all practitioners have to do. No one can confirm for us but ourselves. Be spontaneous and get rid of that immediate doubt every time it arises. That is how you can confirm yourself.

Follow the guideline carefully, keep your mind totally still and quiet, ultimate truth is there. Spontaneity is indeed the secret of this practice! Be spontaneous and always get rid of your immediate thought, you will see ultimate truth.

I wish you all the best of luck in your spiritual journey and sincerely hope that you can finally find your true self and your long lasting peace.

Yours in the dhamma,

Supawan P.Panawong Green[2]

Munrow Sport Centre (Tai chi)

The University of Birmingham

Bristol Road south

Edgebaston

Birmingham

B15 2TT

United Kingdom

Feedback

Glasshampton Monastery

Shrawley

Worcester

WR6 6TQ

21 July 1999

Dear Supawan,

Many thanks for sending me a copy of your book “A Handful of Leaves”. I enjoyed reading it very much and found it most helpful for my own understanding and practice of meditation. You have inspired me to continue with a greater diligence! Like you, I believe that the religion of the world have much to share with each other, and the tradition of meditation preserved and still practised within Buddhism is a great treasure which more people should know about. The four foundations of awareness are a beautifully simple yet profound teaching which Christian would find great benefit in knowing more about and practising on a daily basis. I wish you all God’s blessings in your efforts to pass this tradition on to all people.

In your book, you talk critically at times about the institutions of both Buddhism and Christianity. Many of your criticism are fair and I would not disagree with you. I would, however, like to reassure you that there is a strong tradition of teaching and practice of meditation within Christianity, even if it has not been widely known up to now. Such practices have been confined to monks and nuns and have not been openly taught in the churches. This is a shame and leaves only a one-sided presentation of Christianity. Thankfully in recent years books on spirituality, prayer and meditation from within the Christian tradition have become much more widespread and many Christians now spend time on retreat exploring the further reaches of prayer or practise in groups or on their own. I would like to share with you in this letter just a few of the teachings on meditation that have come from Christians since the earliest days of the church. It may help you or Christians you work with to see how many points of contact there are between our two traditions of Buddhism and Christianity.

The practice of Christian meditation is of course based on the Bible. We only have to look at the words of Jesus to find the root of all our searching for God. For Example, in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5 v.8). Here we have the charter for all our explorations into the thoughts of the mind and heart. In the context of a debate about ritual purity – about the religious rules governing what should or should not be eaten – Jesus says: “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles…For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15 v.10,11,19). The early Christians knew well that the purification of the heart was a work requiring great energy and determination, for “all who have this hope in (God) purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1 John 3 v.3). In this process Christians seek to become one with Christ, following the command of St. Paul to “Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2 v.5), and so “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor.10 v.5). The early Christians knew that the troubles of the world are born in the hearts of men and women: “These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and you do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts” (James 4 v. 1,2). For them the answer was to be united with the love of Christ, knowing that in this way “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4 v.7).

The way to find this peace of God, in term of the detailed description of the actual practice of prayer, was not written down until the writings of the monks and nuns living in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries. One of the most influential of these people was St. Anthony of Egypt (c.251 – 356). He described the struggle with the passions of the heart as ‘wrestling with demons’. Nevertheless, after twenty years of solitude in the desert he could say: “I feel confident that if the soul is pure through and through and is in its natural state, it becomes clear-sighted and sees more and farther than the demons.”[3] His struggle with the passions brought him to an experience of the ‘bright transparency’ of the soul, a state of clear calm in the peace of God.

Evagrius (c.345 – 399) was another monk who spent many years in the Egyptian deserts. He said that “there are eight principal thoughts from which all other thoughts stem.”[4] He categorised them as gluttony, fornication or lust, love of money, discontent or depression, anger, despondency or listlessness, vainglory and pride. He taught that the way to God was through passionlessness, leading to love and finally to knowledge of God.

For Evagrius the highest form of prayer was “the putting away of thoughts.” One of the practical ways to achieve this was through constant recollection of the name of Jesus: “Join to every breath a sober invocation of the name of Jesus.”[5] Thus awareness of the breath formed part of Christian meditation from the earliest times.

St. John Climacus who lived at the monastery on Mount Sinai in the 7^th century, also wrote about the use of the breath in Christian prayer: “Stillness is the putting away of thoughts. Stillness is unceasingly to worship God and wait on him. Let the remembrance of Jesus be united with your breathing. Then you will appreciate the value of stillness.”[6] St. John Climacus also taught the by now traditional monastic values of obedience, humility, discernment, passionlessness and love. A faithful practice of these virtues, together with the practice of contemplative prayer, would bring a person to scale the ladder to union with God.

This tradition of prayer was further developed and expounded by Hesychius in the 8^th and 9^th centuries. He wrote: “Attentiveness is the heart’s stillness, unbroken by any thought. In this stillness the heart breathes and invokes, endlessly and without ceasing, only Jesus Christ the son of God.”[7] This kind of prayer, known as ‘the Jesus prayer’, sometimes consisted simply of the name “Jesus” repeated with each breath. At other times the holy name was used as part of short phrase, such as “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy,” or “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” These phrases are at first spoken with the lips, then silently in the heart, then when the practice has progressed and a quiet stillness of the mind has been reached, then the words are let go entirely and the person simply rests in the silence of God.

The longer forms of the Jesus prayer are based on two passages of scripture. One is a method of prayer taught by Jesus himself. In the parable of the pharisee and the tax-collector Jesus praises the tax-collector who prays by simply repeating the phrase “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Lk. 18 v.13). This phrase is then combined with the cry of the blind beggar on the Jericho road as he hears Jesus pass by: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me a sinner” (Mk. 10 v. 47). The Jesus prayer thus became one of the main methods of prayer in the Eastern Orthodox church, and is now practised by many Christians of all churches across the world.

One of the most important teachers of the spiritual life in the Eastern church was St. Isaac of Syria. He lived in the 7^th century, mostly as a hermit, but was briefly the Bishop of Ninevah. He wrote extensively about the practice of prayer and how to find stillness of mind. He knew the importance of observing the mind:

“Every rational being suffers changes without number, and every man is different from hour to hour. A man of discrimination can verify this by putting himself to the test. If he practices sobriety and observes himself with his mind, he will easily see how his thought changes, what this change is, how his peaceful disposition is suddenly disrupted and what is the cause.”[8]

For St. Isaac, simplicity and humility were of central importance in discovering God:

“When you face God in prayer, become in your thought like a speechless babe. Do not utter before God anything which comes from knowledge, but approach Him with childlike thoughts, and so walk before Him as to be granted that fatherly care, which fathers give their children in their infancy. It is said: ‘The Lord preserves the simple’ (Psalm 113 v.6).[9]

He described the highest form of prayer as a contemplation which goes beyond all words and is even a kind of “non-prayer”.

“For the movements of the tongue and of the heart during prayer act as the keys; what comes after these is the actual entry into the treasury: from this point onward mouth and tongue become still, as do the heart – the treasurer of the thoughts -, the mind – the governor of the senses -, and the bold spirit – that swift bird -, along with all the means and uses they possess. Requests too cease here, for the master of the house has come… all there is is a single straightforward awareness which goes beyond all names, signs, depictions, colours, forms and invented terms.”[10]

Simple resting in God after all the struggles with the passions brings a person to a deep compassion, a compassion “for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists,”[11]

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, one of the leaders of today’s Russian Orthodox Church, has said of this great teacher of contemplation: “St. Isaac of Syria is acknowledged as one of the greatest spiritual writers in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.” His works are still widely studied in Orthodox monasteries and convents and beyond.

This tradition of contemplative prayer is not limited only to the Christian East. For example, in England in the 14^th century an unknown author wrote a book called “The Cloud of Unknowing” which has become a classic of Christian spiritual teaching. The author teaches that all thoughts of this world should be covered with a “cloud of forgetting”, and that a simple loving attention should be directed to the “cloud of unknowing” where God is to be found. He writes:

“Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never.”[12]

The method he teaches is to use a single word, the shorter the better, with which to concentrate the mind:

“Such a word is the word ‘God’ or the word ‘Love’. Choose whichever you wish, or another if you prefer, but let it be of one syllable. Fasten this word to your heart so that it never leaves you, come what may. This word is to be your shield and your spear, whether in peace or in war. With this word you are to beat upon the cloud and the darkness above you. With it you are to smite down every manner of thought under the cloud of forgetting. So much so, that if any thought should press upon you to ask you what you would have, answer it with no other words but this one word. And if you should be tempted to analyse this word, answer that you will have it whole and undeveloped. If you will but hold fast, be sure that the temptation will not last long.”[13]

It is a practice that continues beyond the times of formal meditation into every activity of the day, so that such people become “so attuned in grace and spirit, and so at home with God in this grace of contemplation, that they may have it when they please in the ordinary occupations of life as in sitting, walking, standing or kneeling. And yet, during this time they have full control of their faculties and may exercise them if they wish.”[14]

Eventually the person who practices this meditation will be led to a kind of “nothing and nowhere”. “And, though your natural mind can now find ‘nothing’ to feed on, for it thinks you are doing no thing, go on doing this no thing, and do it for the love of God.”[15] In the “nothing” will be found an “overwhelming spiritual light” which is in fact “All”.

When this practice bears fruits it brings “an inner happiness revealing itself in a peaceful countenance and quiet and modest bodily composure.”[16] In this way, the effect of the meditation spreads out from the person to influence the lives of the people they meet:

“Every man or woman who practices this work will find that it so suffuses body and soul, as to make them gracious and attractive to everyone who sees them… Indeed, if the least attractive man or woman were drawn by grace to work in this way, their appearance would be quickly changed to one of such graciousness, that all good people who saw them would be glad and happy to have them in their company, and would know that in God’s grace they were cheered and strengthened by their presence.”[17]

The practice of contemplative prayer reveals the grace of God’s love experienced in the everyday reality of human life.

When this happens, all things become charged with the presence of God. God is found in all the events of life and in all the particularities of the present moment. The French Roman Catholic Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751) talks of this in terms of the abandonment of the self to the providence of God in “the sacrament of the present moment.” He writes:

“This discovery of the divine action in all that passes within us and around us is the true science of things. It is a continual revelation of things; it is a ceaselessly renewed commerce with God; …In its depths it is peace, joy, love and contentment in God, seen, known (or rather believed) to be living and always working in the most perfect way in everything that happens. It is the eternal paradise… When God gives himself in this way, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and this is why nothing seems extraordinary. For this path in itself is extraordinary and it is quite unnecessary to adorn it with irrelevant marvels. It is itself a miracle, a revelation, a continuous joy, apart from our trifling venial faults, but it is a miracle which, while it renders marvellous all our everyday life of the senses, has nothing in itself that is marvellous to the senses.”[18] The life of contemplation is simply the most natural, ordinary life; but to reach this natural state may be the work of a life-time.

In this letter I have talked about just a few of the teachings on meditation in the Christian tradition. I have not even mentioned people like the Rhineland mystics Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck, nor the 16^th century Carmelites St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, nor even the teachers of prayer in our own century such as Thomas Merton of John Main. In sharing what I have written above I am not trying to say that Buddhist and Christian meditation are the same or that Christians have no need to learn from other religious traditions. All I am saying is that there is a great wealth of experience and teaching from which we can all learn, Buddhist and Christian alike. The teachings of the Buddha are a precious gift to the world and have greatly helped me in my own practice as a Christian. I hope that in the future there will be much more sharing between practitioners of the different faiths, and that together we will, as the Buddhists say, ‘enter Nirvana’, or as the Christians say, ‘know that we and God are one.’

Yours sincerely,

Brother Nicholas Alan

The Society of Saint Francis

As a Christian I went to Tai chi with and for my husband in order to help him with his blood pressure. It was with some trepidation that I found myself entering the class. However as a teacher Supawan did not try to change personal belief, but allowed me an opportunity to explore my own faith by sharing and gaining insight into her own.

Rather than compromising my faith, I feel that it has expanded my belief in God, and given me a fresh understanding into the teaching of Jesus. It has given me another dimension to my faith, exploring a mental habit, which I feel is akin to prayer.

The four foundations of awareness, which are practised through the movements of Tai chi, have allowed me to experience a holistic state of mind, body and spirit working together. This has provided a natural quiet place void of feelings, which I believe is the stillness of God.

Within this stillness, I have been able to experience and appreciate the natural world and feel part of it. This has enhanced my spiritual love of God, and encouraged me in my Christian faith to really appreciate, and cultivate thoroughness about the Kingdom of God.

Whilst my husband has discontinued his classes I have continued to attend because I have been impressed by the genuine kindness shown by Supawan, not only to myself, but to other member of the class. Reading her work and going to her class has provided me with answers to questions, which I could not find in conventional Christian teachings.

Sue Normandale

2 September 1999

[1] Mental Health Publishing House 14/349-350 Rama 2 road (38), Bangmod, Chomtong, Bangkok, Thailand

[2] By the time this book is published, I have already finished the first part of my latest book title “The User Guide to Life”. This book will also be published by The Mental Health Publication soon.

[3] Early Farthers from the Philokalia, translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G.E.H. Palmer (Faber; 1954) Page 110.

[4] The Study of Spirituality, edited by Cheslyn Jones et al. (SPCK; 1986) p.59f.

[10] Heart of compassion: Daily readings with St. Isaac of Syria, edited by A.M. Allchin, Translated by Sebastian Brock, (DLT, 1989) p.20,21.

[12] The Cloud of Unknowing (Penguin, 1961) P.60.

[13] The Dart of Longing Love: Daily readings from The Cloud of Unknowing, edited by Robert Llewelyn (DLT, 1983) p. 18.

[18] Self-abandonment to Divine Providence, Pere J.P. de Caussade S.J. (translated by Algar Thorold) (Burns, Oates and Washbourne Ltd; 1933) p. 145-146.