a buddhist perspective

When you listen to the Dhamma you must open up your heart and compose yourself in the center. Don't try to accumulate what you hear or make a painstaking effort to retain what you hear through memory. Just let the Dhamma flow into your heart as it reveals itself, and keep yourself continuously open to its flow in the present moment. What is ready to be retained will be so, and it will happen of its own accord, not through any determined effort on your part.

Similarly when you expound the Dhamma, you must not force yourself. It should happen on its own accord and should flow spontaneously from the present moment and circumstances. People have different levels of receptive ability, and when you're there at that same level, it just happens, the Dhamma flows.  The Buddha had the ability to know people's temperaments and receptive abilities. He used this very same method of spontaneous teaching. It's not that he possessed any special superhuman power to teach, but rather that he was sensitive to the spiritual needs of the people who came to him, and so he taught them accordingly.  

~ Ajahn Chah

(This entry is a follow-up to a comment on the September ninth entry. Richard's question is a good one and often comes up in discussions.)

Comment: Dear Venerable Wu Lin, Please could you comment how sui yuan [according with conditions] relates to practices such as goal setting and visualisation. It also seems to me that in Liao Fan's Four Lessons, Liao Fan makes a vow because he wants to attain specific goals.

Response: Yes, at first Liaofan made wishes and with his diligent practice of goodness, he received what he wished for. But he did not wish for a longer life than his predicted fifty-three years or for a second son. Yet he lived to write his book at seventy-four and had another son. We can see that even when Liaofan did not seek what would make him happy, he still gained happiness as a result of his good deeds.

We unawakened ones who are still working at letting go of old habits, like attachments, can still set goals. The trick is to accord as we're letting go and setting those goals.

For example, before I started this blog, I had never thought of writing one. Then one day, I realized I would not be able to leave the apartment as much because of my mother's condition. This meant fewer opportunities to teach. On the spur of the moment, the idea of a blog came to me. I could talk about Buddhism without leaving the apartment!

My ongoing goal, which led me to become a nun, has been to propagate Buddhism. The blog arose on its own—an idea that suddenly occurred to me. I needed to learn how to create a blog and will always be learning how to improve it so I have an additional goal of a better blog. But I’m not trying to force it to happen.

As with so much of the practice, there are many gray areas between the black and the white. According with conditions takes much searching for the right balance between forcing what we wish for to happen and being a couch potato.

Master Kuang-ch’in said "Treat others neither overly kind nor too harsh."

Yesterday I wrote of according with—not seeking—affinities. The master’s advice shows some ways we can do this. He’s talking about balance, about the middle way.

If we are either too kind or too harsh, we push the extremes in our relationships with others.

On the one hand, if we are too kind, although our kindness may well be sincere, we may stifle others and keep them from growing. If we are too kind while our kindness is not sincere, we are acting falsely and thus misleading others. When the individual learns of our insincerity, it is most likely that he or she will feel negatively toward us.

On the other hand, if we are too harsh we run the serious risk of fostering an enmity. While firmness is necessary at times, we need to temper it with wisdom, not with anger or other negative emotions. Without wisdom, we can force the other person into a corner. He or she might come out fighting and we will have an enmity. Or the individual may simply give up and we will have stifled the other person and hindered their growth.

So acting too kind or too harshly runs the risk of not helping the other person and fostering an enmity. No good karmic consequences. No helping others. No middle way.

My Teacher, Ven. Master Chin Kung, often speaks about how we should sui yuan, not pan yuan. In other words, we should accord with yuan rather than seek yuan. Yuan is usually translated as either conditions or affinities. By according with and not seeking conditions or affinities, we do not force them.

If the opportunity arises for us to do something or be with someone, we can take the opportunity to do so. But if it feels like we have to force something to happen then we are not according but seeking.

The problem with seeking conditions and affinities is this forcing on our part. If we force something and it is not supposed to happen, we will be setting ourselves up for disappointment as we develop expectations that cannot be met. Expectations unfulfilled, we do not gain the happiness we seek.

Finding the line between according and seeking can be tricky at first. With time and experience we will gradually learn to discover that line intuitively. When it feels like our emotions and desires are overcoming our being at ease with the situation, we may well have found our line, and just stepped over it.

If you pay attention for just five minutes, you know some very fundamental dharma: things change, nothing stays comfortable, sensations come and go quite impersonally, according to conditions, but not because of anything that you do or think you do. Changes come and go quite by themselves. In the first five minutes of paying attention, you learn that pleasant sensations lead to the desire that these sensations will stay and that unpleasant sensations lead to the hope that they will go away. And both the attraction and the aversion amount to tension in the mind. Both are uncomfortable. So in the first minutes, you get a big lesson about suffering: wanting things to be other than they are. Such a tremendous amount of truth to be learned just closing your eyes and paying attention to bodily sensations.

~ Sylvia Boorstein