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Precious teachers · Buddhistisches Tor Berlin Podcast

0:10
I'm going to give a very personal talk and I'm going to
0:13
talk about, I'm going to talk quite a little bit myself.
0:17
I feel a bit embarrassed talking so much about myself, but I want
0:21
to talk mostly about my teachers and my interaction with my
0:25
teachers. So my talk is my precious
0:27
teachers and I'll start off when I was 22 and it was 1977 and I
0:36
was travelling in India and I'd spent about three years just
0:42
travelling and I was looking for something, but I didn't know
0:47
what I was looking for. I'd been like when I was at
0:52
school, I couldn't see the point of a career.
0:56
I, we used to have these career interviews.
0:59
I'd had no, I had no idea what it was all about.
1:03
I had no interest in a career at all.
1:05
I had no interest in having a family and I had no interest in
1:12
settling down in a way. And I just felt there must be
1:16
something more in life. And this was the 70s and it was
1:20
quite a wild time. In a way it sort of reminds me
1:24
of Berlin now. You know, everything was
1:26
available. Lot of we're all young, we're
1:29
all very young at that time. There's a lot available, lot of
1:32
people experimenting with drugs, hallucinogenics, lot of a lot of
1:37
different gurus around, some very good, some very crazy, all
1:42
sorts of new therapies, all that sort of thing.
1:44
So it's a real melting pot. The 70s in in England at the
1:48
time. And I think I knew even from
1:54
quite an early age, even as a schoolboy, even even as even
1:57
when I was about 13, I knew that you grew old, you got sick and
2:05
you died eventually. That's what happened.
2:08
And I thought that life must be more than that, There must be
2:13
more to life than that. And I didn't know what to do.
2:16
So I went travelling and I went travelling for about 3 years and
2:19
I ended up hitchhiking to India when I was 22.
2:23
And I'd done the whole hippie trail thing, you know, smoking
2:28
lots of dope in Kashmir, in Afghanistan and all that.
2:32
And I got disillusioned with that.
2:35
I got disillusioned with it and I knew that wasn't the way.
2:38
And then I found myself in the, in the bazaar in Old Delhi and I
2:43
bumped into a French guy who I'd, who I'd met in Ladakh.
2:47
And I just found myself asking, where can I learn meditation?
2:52
And he, he was older than me. He'd been in India for a long
2:54
time. He knew about this.
2:56
And he said there's a there's a Burmese teacher called Goenka
3:00
and he's leading a 10 day Vipassana course in Maharashtra.
3:05
It starts in about 10 days time. Lots of nods around, very
3:09
popular. This was the man himself.
3:11
I think his retreat centre just been open for about a year or
3:14
two. And it was up in the hills and
3:17
it was, it was sort of crazy. I never meditated before and
3:21
suddenly we were doing 10 hours meditation a day and without any
3:26
sort of seating gear at all. We just had to use what we had
3:30
sitting on the stone floor. And one day of mindless of
3:33
breathing and then nine days of focusing on the impermanence of
3:39
sensations in the body. And I think it was a bit
3:45
extreme, but, but I, I certainly had meditation experiences.
3:53
I think if you're doing that much meditation, you're bound to
3:55
have experiences. But it's sort of, it's, it
4:02
stirred me up. It, it, it freaked me out a bit,
4:07
but it also, it also convinced me that I was a Buddhist.
4:12
And it wasn't the meditation itself.
4:15
It was at Goenka in the evening. We'd give these little Dharma
4:20
talks and he'd talk about the precepts, he'd talk about the
4:26
life of the Buddha, the threefold way of ethics,
4:30
meditation and wisdom, and so on.
4:33
And I was hearing values that I knew, I really believed.
4:39
I just knew them to be true. Straight away I knew them to be
4:42
true. And I knew that this is what I
4:43
believed and what I'd always believed.
4:46
And I knew what my life was about, you know, and it was
4:51
about, it was about practicing the Dharma, practicing Buddhism.
4:54
But there wasn't very much I could practice with Goenka
4:57
because all we did was all that. All that was available was 10
5:01
day meditation retreats. And I wasn't going to do another
5:05
one of those too soon because I already had enough from that.
5:09
But there was no Sanger, there was no spiritual community,
5:12
there was no friendship and I had a sense that I needed
5:17
something more than just meditation.
5:21
Cutting a Long story short, I knew I had to change my life.
5:25
I knew I couldn't carry on travelling and I didn't know
5:29
what to do. My brother and sister were art
5:31
college and they said to me why don't you go to art college?
5:35
I said well, I haven't done any art.
5:36
And they said well if you've had an interesting life, you can get
5:39
it at art college. So, so I got interviewed at this
5:43
place in, in Watford, in, in the South of England and I got
5:48
interviewed by a guy called Peter Schmidt.
5:51
And Peter Schmidt, he's German. He was from Berlin.
5:54
Actually he was, he left in the 30s.
5:57
He was Jewish. He was German Jewish.
5:59
He left in the 30s and he moved to England and he interviewed me
6:05
and he said, did you do anything else?
6:10
He looked at my work. I'd got, I'd got a bit of a
6:12
portfolio together. He said, did you do anything
6:14
else while you were in India? And I said, yeah, I did a
6:16
meditation. I did a Buddhist meditation
6:18
course. And he said, oh, I'm a Buddhist.
6:22
And and so he said, have you got any questions for me?
6:26
And I said, yeah, can you recommend me a book on Buddhism?
6:29
And he said Meditation in In Action by Cheolkyang Trumper.
6:35
I made a connection with him. Three days later I got an
6:38
invitation to the course and I got on the course and on the
6:41
course I learnt to draw and to paint and to sculpt and all the
6:45
rest of it. And but we used to meditate with
6:49
Peter in his office at lunchtimes and a few of us, we
6:53
just used to sit down and meditate with One day Peter said
6:58
there's an English Buddhist talking in India tonight, would
7:02
you like to come along? So I said, yeah, of course I'd
7:04
come along. And it was in a big hall in
7:08
London and the speaker was Sangaraksheta and he was giving
7:13
a talk on authority and the individual in the new society.
7:18
And I wasn't that impressed with him at the time.
7:21
He didn't look like a guru. He had long, greasy hair.
7:25
He had sideburns, he had glasses, a terrible, terribly,
7:30
badly dressed. And he had this sort of voice
7:35
with a twang in it, which I thought it was a Jewish, I
7:37
thought he was Jewish, but it was actually because he'd lived
7:39
in India and he had this twang in his voice.
7:42
But he said one thing, he said you can change.
7:45
And I really wanted to change. And I started going along to the
7:49
London Buddhist Centre, which had just opened.
7:54
And at first, I wasn't convinced by what was then called the
8:00
Western Buddhist order. You know, I just thought, OK,
8:03
they're not, they're not Eastern.
8:05
They're not like Goenka, who was Burmese.
8:08
They're Westerners. Maybe they're just sort of plain
8:11
Buddhism, You know, maybe, maybe Buddhism is an Eastern thing and
8:15
you can't really do it. But what I noticed was that they
8:20
were people like me. You know, they had long hair,
8:23
they've had background of dropping out and so on.
8:26
And they were looking for something and these were order
8:30
members. So they had these funny things
8:33
round their necks, but there was something about them.
8:39
They had this quality of friendship between them and I
8:43
wanted part of that. And I thought, well, look, I
8:46
can't become Goenka, but I can become an order member.
8:50
And I started, I started going along to classes and I still
8:54
wasn't totally convinced. And then I was on a retreat in
8:57
Scotland and I was talking to an order member and I always
9:01
thought I'd just go back to Goenka.
9:03
And I said to this Order member, the good thing about Goenka is
9:08
you can practice the highest at the highest level, you know, you
9:11
can gain insight without having to change your life.
9:15
You can live your own real life and you can practice at the
9:18
highest level and gain insight. And this Order member said to
9:21
me, well, we see things differently to that.
9:25
We see things more that if you practice the Dharma, it needs to
9:31
change every aspect of your life, every aspect of your life.
9:36
And that really gave me that. I thought, yeah, that's true.
9:41
That's true. And I think what Banti, what
9:44
Sangarashita provided me with, was a way of living a full, a
9:48
full Buddhist life, you know, in all respects.
9:51
Yeah. OK.
9:52
Meditation was important, but there's also ethics, there's
9:56
also Dharma discussion, there's friendship, there's Buddhist
10:02
ritual, there's Buddhist festivals, there's living with
10:05
other Buddhists, there's working together with other Buddhists.
10:08
And it was all taught in a way that could relate to Westerners,
10:12
people like myself. And so I thought, yeah, I'll try
10:15
this out. And very quickly I was living in
10:19
a Buddhist community and working in a Buddhist right livelihood
10:23
business. And, and I, I, I just, I just
10:32
found out, Oh yeah, I found what I found what I was looking for.
10:35
And I think a large part of this was friendship.
10:39
And in a way, you can only teach the Dharma, you can only teach
10:44
the Buddhist teaching in a, in a context of friendship.
10:48
You need to be, you need to have contact with the people that are
10:51
teaching you. You need to have a possibility
10:53
of developing friendships with them.
10:55
And in Tree Ratner, we talk about horizontal friendship,
11:00
which is friendship with peers, which we have with each other.
11:03
And then there's vertical friendship, which is with people
11:07
that are more spiritually developed than ourselves.
11:10
And Tree Ratner offers both. And the good thing is that there
11:16
are people in in the order who I've known for 40 years, you
11:21
know, who I've been in the order with for 40 years.
11:23
And those friendships have developed over 40 years.
11:27
And I think that's one of the greatest gifts in my life.
11:31
And that's that's friendship. And most of that has come from
11:35
practising within Tri Ratna for me.
11:38
So Sangarakshita is my teacher, and there's a talk that he gave
11:49
called Is a guru necessary? He wouldn't call himself a guru,
11:53
but the talk is called Is a guru necessary?
11:56
And what he says in that talk is that a guru is not necessarily a
12:04
teacher. He's not a problem solver.
12:07
He's not a father substitute. Essentially, what a guru is,
12:10
what a teacher is, is someone who stands on a higher level of
12:15
consciousness and being than yourself, and that's the basis
12:21
for the communication. So he's just being himself in
12:25
relation to you, being yourself, but he's on a high level of
12:29
consciousness. And through that communication,
12:34
you change. You change.
12:36
And my sense is that spiritual friendship, particularly
12:40
vertical spiritual friendship, is one of the ways, or probably
12:44
the way that we change most. And I want to just talk about 3
12:48
very brief examples of where Sangarakshita has been a guru in
12:57
a sense where he's actually where I've come into contact
12:59
with him on someone who's on a higher level of consciousness
13:03
than myself. And the first example I want to
13:07
give is in Croydon. And Lutter Ratner knows about
13:10
this. We were both there together and
13:14
we're in this centre in Croydon and Croydon was a centre that
13:17
went wrong. There was a very charismatic
13:21
figure who was leading the centre and it went off on a
13:26
tangent. It diverged and went off on a
13:28
tangent and eventually Sangra Akshita called all the order
13:35
members in the centre to come together and he told us that
13:39
things had to change in Croydon. And he said if, if we didn't
13:45
want things to change then we'd have to leave.
13:49
And I don't think he was quite convinced that his message got
13:54
through because there was a, there was an event going on.
13:59
It was a chairman's event going on after after that meeting.
14:03
And I think Loarta Ratner and I and another older member called
14:07
Satyadeva, we stayed on for that meeting.
14:11
And Banti, he left. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
14:17
We were at that meeting. And what I remember is Sanger
14:21
actually was really strong with us.
14:23
He was really strong. And he made it very, very clear
14:27
things have got to change. If you don't want to change, you
14:31
need to leave. And it was so strong that people
14:37
were coming up to me and probably also Ratner afterwards,
14:41
and they were saying, I've never seen Banti like that before.
14:43
I've never seen Banti express himself.
14:45
Are you OK? And I, I, I said I feel great.
14:51
And what it was was it was like I was holding onto to something
14:57
that was a negative position. And he just cut, he just cut
15:03
right through that. And he cut without wounding.
15:08
He cut without wounding. It was like a sword cutting
15:12
through, but without, without, without wounding.
15:16
And I think in that instance, he was operating as a as a, as a
15:19
Vadra guru, a bit like a Padma Sampaba.
15:22
He was throwing a Thunderbolt and we were receiving it and
15:25
people saying, are you OK? And I just felt, I felt great
15:28
and something had been cut, something had changed, something
15:33
had affected me very, very deeply.
15:36
And the next morning he wanted to see me and he was very light
15:40
and joyful, Completely different mood.
15:42
And things did change. Things did change in Croydon and
15:46
now it's a flourishing situation.
15:48
So that was the first, that was the first instance.
15:53
The second instance, I was living in Sweden and I've been
15:59
in Sweden for three years and Sona, who was the president of
16:08
the Swedish Centre, he came over and he said, look, things are
16:12
going well in Sweden. I think if you like, now you
16:16
could come and join the ordination team at Papmaloca,
16:18
which is what I wanted to do. And I was finding living in
16:21
Sweden very difficult. I was away from all my friends
16:25
and it was difficult. I didn't speak the language.
16:28
I had to learn the language. There were lots of things I
16:30
couldn't do and I had to do to be there.
16:33
And and I spoke to various people and they all said, yeah,
16:38
great idea, leave Sweden, it's doing OK, go and join the
16:42
ordination team. And then I always discussed with
16:45
Banti. I always went to see him if I
16:46
was going to make an important decision.
16:49
So I went to see Banti and he was already had his coat on and
16:53
he was ready to go for a walk. And we went off for a walk down
16:57
to the park, this in Birmingham where he was living.
16:59
We're walking down the hill and I And he said, oh, I hear you're
17:03
speaking Swedish now. And I said, yeah, that's right,
17:05
Banty, I am speaking Swedish. But did you get my letter to say
17:10
that I want to leave Sweden and join the ordination team?
17:13
He said, Oh no, no, I didn't get that letter.
17:17
I said, but I sent you that letter, Banty.
17:19
He said, no, no, no, I don't remember that.
17:22
I said, well, Sona would like me to join the ordination team.
17:26
No, I don't think that's a good idea.
17:30
So I said, well, look, Banti, I'm teaching beginners most of
17:35
the time. I'd I'd like to work with more
17:37
experienced people. No, no, no, we need our more
17:39
experienced teachers teaching beginners.
17:42
OK, so but they want someone younger on the ordination team.
17:49
No, no, no. I think it's very good that that
17:52
that it's more experienced, older order members on the
17:55
ordination team. So it went on like this and it's
17:57
like you're trying to get the conversation over here.
18:00
He's pulling it right back over there.
18:03
So we just sort of lapsed into silence.
18:05
So we're walking up the hill and he said, OK, you've been on the
18:08
chairman's retreat. Did anything else happen on the
18:11
chairman's retreat? I said, yeah, there was a
18:12
Scottish Order member there and he was talking about setting up
18:16
groups all over Scotland. So Banti said, OK, well if you
18:23
do leave Stockholm, I want you to move to Copenhagen and start
18:28
a group there. So, so then he just said, is
18:34
anybody meeting you? And I said, yeah, come to
18:36
Sheila, who's a friend of mine. He's meeting me at in in London.
18:39
And he said, good, OK, well, I'll be over in Sweden this
18:42
summer. I'll see you then.
18:44
Goodbye. And he just left, and I'm
18:49
standing on the platform at Birmingham New Street station,
18:53
just feeling like the ground's been taken away from under my
18:56
feet and get back to Sweden. Sonophones up, he said, Well,
19:02
it'll be much more difficult. You know, if you go to
19:04
Copenhagen, you have to start from scratch.
19:06
And OK, I decided I'm just going to stay in Stockholm.
19:11
I'll just stay in Sweden. And I won't put any limit on how
19:14
long I'm there. I'll just stay as long as I'm
19:16
needed and when it's time to leave, I'll know and I'll leave.
19:22
And I just decided to stay there.
19:25
And I also decided that I had very definite ideas about how I
19:31
wanted the Stockholm centre to be.
19:33
And I just thought, OK, from now on I won't decide how I want it
19:38
to be. I'll just try to create the
19:40
centre that they want and so they can practice in the way
19:43
that they want to practice and even if it's something that I
19:47
don't want to be part of. And, and I realised I was a sort
19:50
of intermediary figure just to be there for a few years before
19:54
Swedish order members could run the centre for themselves.
19:57
And that's what I did. I just stayed on and I stayed on
19:59
for another three years. And I was coming back from a
20:03
soldier retreat on one of the islands and I just knew it was
20:06
time to leave Now it's time to leave Sweden.
20:08
And I went to see Banti again and I said look.
20:12
We've got so and so, we've got this people a day now, we've got
20:15
so many order members in Stockholm, the centre's more
20:18
established. How would you feel about me
20:20
leaving now and joining the ordination team at Papmaloca?
20:24
And he said I'd have no objection to that.
20:27
And so I left and I went to Papmaloca.
20:31
And what I realised was that it was the best piece of spiritual
20:37
friendship that I've ever received.
20:39
And what he'd done was he was taking me completely seriously.
20:43
He was taking me completely seriously as a Buddhist
20:45
practitioner. And I'd set out to go to Sweden
20:49
to establish the centre there. And I hadn't done that after
20:53
three years. And he wasn't going to let me
20:55
go. He wasn't just going to say, no,
20:57
it's OK, I understand, it's tough, just come back.
21:00
He was saying no, you finish what you started, you know.
21:03
And then when I'd done that, I, I was free to leave.
21:08
And what was good about that? It, it meant that when I left
21:15
after six years, Sweden was in my blood, you know, it was in my
21:19
bones. And I've made deep connections
21:21
with the people there, with the culture.
21:23
And I, I just continue to go back.
21:25
And I think now I've ordained about 11 men in Sweden and I
21:28
continue to go back every year. So that was, that was the second
21:32
thing, the last one. And maybe a little bit more
21:38
briefly in 2018, in the spring of 2018, I was doing a three
21:46
month solitary retreat in Scotland.
21:50
That means you go off on your own, you have no contact with
21:53
the outside world, no, no mobile phone, no computer, no telephone
21:57
calls. You're just on your own.
21:59
And I was on my own for three months and it was on a Cliff on
22:05
the edge of the sea. And it was winter time and there
22:09
was a wind blowing all the time and the sea was raging all the
22:14
time. And it went on like this for
22:16
seven weeks. And if I looked out the window,
22:20
there was nothing still to rest the eyes upon.
22:22
The sea was, it was just the sea moving.
22:25
And I got to point after seven weeks and, and there were sides
22:29
of me that were starting to come up like darker sides and
22:33
destructive sides. And I was experiencing these in
22:35
my meditation. And after seven weeks, I felt, I
22:39
don't really, I feel out of my depth here.
22:42
And I decided to, to cut the retreat short and to go back.
22:47
And after seven weeks, I went back and I found myself at
22:51
Adistana about a week later on an event.
22:56
And people were encouraging me. Go and see Banti.
23:00
Go and talk to Banti about your solitary tree.
23:02
He'd like to hear about it. And in the end, I did go and
23:05
talk to him. And he was 93 years old by now.
23:09
It was about 6 months before he died.
23:12
He's 93 years old. He's a frail old man.
23:14
And he was just sitting in his armchair.
23:17
And I said, Banti, I had to leave my solitary tree early,
23:22
and I want to talk to you about it.
23:24
And he leaned right forward and he was fully present.
23:27
He couldn't see, you know, he was almost blind, but he was
23:30
fully present. And I felt, I felt his support.
23:32
And he leaned right forward and I said, I said, yeah.
23:36
And he said, was it your darker side?
23:40
And I said, yes, it was. I said I had destructive tended.
23:44
I felt distracted. He said, towards yourself or
23:47
towards other people? I said both banty.
23:49
And he said, well, thank such a Raja.
23:52
People always say to me that you're a very nice guy.
23:55
And sometimes I wonder, is there something more?
23:58
Is there a darker side? So, So he said this was
24:05
important. He said human beings are capable
24:08
of anything. He said there's no way of
24:11
knowing what comes up in meditation.
24:13
He said human beings are capable of anything.
24:15
And he said, that's why I don't want to change the wording in
24:19
the puja. Like in the puja we talk about
24:21
confession of evil. He said, I don't want to change
24:24
that word evil. He said because human beings are
24:26
capable of anything. He's I said, do you mean that we
24:29
live in very sheltered conditions?
24:31
And if we were to find ourselves in a war zone, we don't know how
24:34
we behave. We don't know what we're capable
24:36
of. And he said, yeah, something
24:37
like that. So he said human beings are
24:39
capable of anything. Anything can come up in
24:41
meditation. And then he said, but you've
24:46
been practicing the Dharma for a long time and you know that
24:51
there are certain things you're going to do and certain things
24:55
that you're not going to do, he said, So next time your darker
24:59
side comes up on solitary retreat, you don't need to
25:02
respond with fear. And that was such a relief, You
25:07
know, so I've had, I've had other solitary retreats where
25:11
this darkness has come up. And I think we all have it if we
25:14
look deep enough and this darkness has come up, but I know
25:20
I'm not going to act on it, you know, and I can just watch it
25:22
and be with it and watch it change.
25:25
And I don't need to respond with fear.
25:26
So he gave me the gift of confidence in that, in that
25:29
respect. And, and then I was going to
25:32
leave, but he just kept me there and he just kept me talking.
25:37
And I think he realised that we weren't going to see each other
25:40
again. And in a way he was, he was
25:43
giving me his blessing. And, and then when I left, the
25:48
next time I saw him, he was laid out.
25:51
He was dead and he was laid out in the shrine room.
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And we were gathered around his body and meditating in his body.
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And, you know, we were there for a week meditating around his
26:00
body and then his his funeral. And that's a whole other story.
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You know, that funeral was a bit like being in a Mahayana sutra
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for me. There was something happening at
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that funeral which wasn't just concerned with what's happening
26:15
there. It it had, it was as if a great
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teacher was dying and it was having significance for the
26:20
whole universe. And our practice exists on many,
26:24
many different levels. There are very, very deep levels
26:26
on which our practice exists, but there was something
26:28
happening there that I've never experienced before or since.
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So those that, that's my teacher Sangarakshita and very, very
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briefly, my other two main teachers are we in, in, in, in
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tree Ratner, we take Kalyanamitras, which means
26:45
spiritual friends. And when we ask for ordination,
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we take two spiritual friends. And my 2 spiritual friends are
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Kamlasheeda and Padmaavatra. And you probably know
26:59
Padmaavatra, he's the, he's the president here in, in Berlin.
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Kamlasheeda is a great, was a great meditator.
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I knew him from, I knew him for about 40 years and he was my
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meditation teacher. He was my mentor, but he was
27:14
also a very good friend. And he died about a year ago
27:18
from cancer. And I, I, I still miss him, but
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I feel in contact with him on a meditative level.
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When I meditate and bring him to mind, he's there.
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And then Padma Vadra, he's, he's one of the best speakers, one of
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the best public speakers in the in the order, if not the best.
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He's got a phenomenal memory. He remembers everything about
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the Dharma. But probably best of all, he's
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just a very, very good friend. And if you come to Padmaavaggio
27:50
with a, with a problem and talk to him one to one, he'll, he'll,
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he'll find a way of looking at it in a positive way.
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He'll put, he'll put a positive perspective on it and he'll see
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it as, as, as part of your growth.
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And I live with him at Papmaloca and I've known him for 40 years
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too. I've lived with him for 23
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years. We meet every day for half an
28:10
hour. And for me, it's his example
28:14
that, that his friendship is in the way that he lives his life,
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his generosity, the way he welcomes guests and so on and so
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forth. So that's, that's just a little
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bit of about my teachers and my spiritual friends.
28:30
And it's one of the one of the, it's the greatest blessing and
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the great one of the greatest blessings and one of the
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greatest gifts that I've had in my life, having such good
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friends in the Dharma. OK, I'll stop there.
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And I'm open to any questions. Yeah.