Buddha Is as Buddha Does

Lama Surya Das

Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. Surya Das teaches and lectures around the world, conducting dozens of meditation retreats and workshops each year. Based on his relationship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Surya Das founded the Western Buddhist Teachers Network and has organized three week-long conferences of Western Buddhist Meditation Teachers with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India.

Buddha Is as Buddha Does explores the ten paramitas as the "Bodhisattva Code" for enlightened living. The ten paramitas—or as Surya likes to call them, the "ten transformative practices"—are as follows: generosity, ethics, patience, heroic effort, mindfulness, wisdom, skillful means, spiritual aspirations, higher accomplishments, and awakened awareness (as Ken comments, these can also be looked at in terms of multiple intelligences or developmental lines). Done correctly, the practice and expression of any one of these qualities is to express all ten—and yet, you really must engage each one on its own terms. Surya and Ken make note of the "two truths doctrine," and how absolute truth is that the ultimate goal and ground of all practice is always-already 100% present—whether you practice or not—and relative truth is that if you don't practice, in the words of a great Zen master, "you'll remain an idiot."

"With Heroic Effort you sometimes have to turn it over to a power greater than 'I,' and you stand aside—but it turns out that's also your own highest Self, so it heals the self/other dualism…."

In Part 1 of this dialogue, Surya and Ken discussed the first three practices: generosity, ethics, and patience. In this concluding portion of their conversation, they walk through the remaining seven practices: heroic effort, mindfulness, wisdom, skillful means, spiritual aspirations, higher accomplishments, and awakened awareness. Other topics include why at least one Buddhist luminary considers accidental "sin" worse than intentional sin, the difference between "self power" and "other power" in spiritual practice, why the insights of meditation won't stick without a sturdy ethical framework, and why the critique that meditation is merely narcissistic navel-gazing couldn't be more wrong—it is, after all, foundational to the bodhisattva's commitment to liberate all beings.

If practice is clearly part of enlightened living, both "pre" enlightenment and "post" enlightenment, what are the essential dimensions of our being that we should exercise? With a truly Integral Spirituality (in any tradition), the four basic modules for an Integral Life Practice are body, mind, spirit, and shadow. If abiding by the "ten transformative practices" is your chosen method for engaging enlightened living (in whatever tradition you choose to apply them) we could hardly recommend a better contemporary guide to that path than Surya's Buddha Is as Buddha Does—always keeping in mind the touch-points of an Integral Approach, including states, stages, and shadow, and embracing body, mind, and spirit, in self, culture, and nature.

Three of the most important elements for any contemporary spiritual path to address are states, stages, and shadow—and, unfortunately, most contemplative traditions only have a clear awareness of states, to the detriment of stages and shadow. For a full treatment of this topic, see Ken's Integral Spirituality and "What Is Integral Spirituality?".

States: States of consciousness are marked by their transient nature: they come, stay a bit, and they go. The three primary states of consciousness available to all humans are waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, and what the great contemplative traditions do is show how one can gain mastery in each of those states, and realize their ever-present Ground and nondual Suchness. Furthermore, states of consciousness can be trained in a certain order—often moving from gross, to subtle, to causal—and this is an occurrence of state-stages.

Stages: While states come and go, stages, levels, or waves of consciousness are permanent structures in consciousness, which unfold cross-culturally from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric—these are called structure-stages. Almost without exception, the meditative and esoteric traditions of the world have no knowledge of this aspect of human growth. Because these are the structures in consciousness that will interpret the significance of various states of mystical union, no tradition can afford to ignore stages of development.

Shadow: Another item not found in the traditions is an understanding of psychodynamic repression, whereby an individual literally splits off and dissociates some aspect of his or her I-ness, often then projecting it on someone else (I'm not angry, but my boss sure is). This aspect of self doesn't actually go away, it just shows up in various inauthentic or "shadow" manifestations (I'm not an angry person, but I am awful sad lately). Meditation can teach you how to transmute or transcend this shadow element (I'm sad), but not access the original impulse (I'm mad), which can exacerbate the original fracture in the practitioner's psyche.

A note on transformative practices: In an Integral Approach, "transformation" refers to movement between levels of development, while "translation" refers to activity within a level of development. Because the traditions generally don't understand structure-stages, guidelines such as the ten paramitas often serve primarily as healthy translation at a given level, although genuine transformation to a higher level can be, and often is, a result of these practices.