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The Teachings of Dipa Ma - Shonin Ashton, Zen Teacher · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello, and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:19
  Shonin: This is the third full day of retreat, walking the ancient way. Welcome to some people who are not on retreat. I see you, and also some people online are joining us. So to bring you up to speed a little bit with what we've been doing here, how we've been practicing, we began with Hogan sharing his concern about the impact of media on all of our lives, the attention economy which fragments attention always drawing us away. Of course, this has been a problem with human minds forever, but it's especially intensified at this point.
• 1:16
  It decreases concentration and gets into the body. You see your phone and you feel that urge to pick it up. So to help that, we've surrendered our phones so that we don't have to even think about them for the retreat. But as an antidote to this scattered, fragment mind that we all know, this addictive quality of media, he has introduced the practice of chanting the Buddha's name. You got to hear...
• 2:01
  You got to participate in that for the last two periods. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But this this retreat is named the ancient way Sashin. In past, I think it was called walking the ancient way. But this is really a personal question, not just the name of a retreat.
• 2:28
  The question is, how do I walk the ancient way just as those who have gone before have done? Or how do we walk this ancient way now in this time with our culture, with this body, this heart mind, these cell phones, iPads. And luckily, we're not alone. We don't have to figure this all out by ourselves. We have our teachers, and we have all those who have come before us, have shared their wisdom with us, men and women from so many different traditions, people who have practiced deeply, sincerely and very generously shared their wisdom.
• 3:36
  You know, there's a list. We chant in the morning, all the names in the chant book, but so many more, known and unknown. So today, I'd like to share a story with you about a story of a woman who walked the ancient Buddha way, A woman whose life was transformed from a life of suffering, ignorance, confusion, sorrow to a life that was filled with kindness and peace and given in service to others. This is a story of a woman who's named Deepa Ma. She was born in the early part of the nineteen hundreds, 1911 in India.
• 4:41
  She was the oldest of six children and raised in a Buddhist family. As was the custom for girls, they were educated only up until the fifth grade. So she took great joy in school. She was smart, and she loved the education that she got. She loved learning.
• 5:07
  But when she was very young at the end of fifth grade, her formal education ended. And as was the custom, she was married to a 25 year old man from the next village. He was an an engineer who was working in Burma, so he... After one week, she met him at 13, 12, and then he moved away, and she moved in with his parents who lived far away from her own parents. So she she was taken from her family home to live with the in laws for two years while her husband was gone.
• 5:59
  Her new life was hard. She was very lonely. She was young. She was unprepared for the life that she was given. After two years, she moved to Burma to live with this man that she had met for one week, and she was totally unprepared for married life.
• 6:27
  She had received an education in how to keep the house, but no one had told her anything about sexual relations between husband and wife. Luckily for her, her husband was very kind and patient. And over the next two years, they fell in love and formed a beautiful relationship. At that time in India, a woman's value was being a mother, of giving sons to the family. And she was unable...
• 7:05
  Or they together were unable to conceive a child. This was a a deep sense of sadness for her and a sense of shame, actually. At one point, when her husband went home to his family, they had secretly arranged for him to jettison her and have a new wife for a chance of grandchildren. He refused this and went back to her in Burma where they continued to live. When she was 18 years old, her mother suddenly died.
• 7:49
  She'd only been able to see her mother a few times, and she was deeply saddened by this. As is the case sometimes when someone has a physical or an emotional shock, a physical shock, an ailment follows, and she developed typhoid fever. It was misdiagnosed for a long time. She ended up in the hospital. And this began a series of problems with health that she was to live with for many years.
• 8:26
  She recovered and moved back home, and her father sent her younger brother who was just an infant at the time of her mother's death to live with her and for her to raise. So she took on the raising of her son... Of her brother. She and her husband were active in the local Buddhist community. But even then, she had a strong desire to meditate and was told that it wasn't it wasn't time, that this was something that women, mothers, householders did after the demands of caring for family was finished.
• 9:13
  She was told, Just wait. Just wait. She continued Buddhist practices. They went to the local temple. She was able to get some books in her native language, Bengali, and with the help of a nephew to study some texts.
• 9:38
  And then the war happened. So from 1941 to 1945, the Japanese troops were in Burma. They occupied it. So she lived through that. After the war was over, her little brother went back home again, and she thought, Oh, now, now I can learn how to meditate, now I can practice more deeply.
• 10:11
  She felt such a calling. And then at 35, after twenty years of inability to conceive, she was pregnant. She carried this baby all the way to term. The baby lived for three months, and then the baby died. She again was heartbroken, overcome with grief, so overcome with grief that she developed heart disease.
• 10:46
  Once again, she was incapacitated. Four years later, she found she was pregnant again at 39. She was overjoyed. She carried this baby to term as well and had a daughter. In fact, her name, Deepa Ma, is not her actual name.
• 11:10
  It means the mother of Deepa. She named her daughter Deepa. Mother of Deepa or mother of light. Two years later, she was pregnant again with a son, and again she carried to term, and again this baby died at birth. So She again asked, can I?
• 11:48
  Is it now that I can meditate, that I can learn to meditate? And she was told, you're too young. You need to wait. She developed hypertension, the heart problems, and was in bed for several years. She expected that she would die at any moment.
• 12:08
  She cared... Or her... She was cared for by her husband who took on the burden of family. And then in 1957, at the age of 47, he came home and said he didn't feel well, and within hours, he was dead. So in ten years, she had lost two children, a husband, her health.
• 12:35
  She was a widow with a seven year old daughter to raise, both parents dead, a fifth grade education, living in a foreign country where she didn't speak the language. She didn't know what to do or how to go on. Her health continued to decline. She felt her only hope of survival would be to practice meditation. She said she said that she would die of a broken heart unless she did something about the state of her mind.
• 13:17
  She would die of a broken heart unless she did something about the state of her mind. She managed to go to a meditation center finally. She she thought she would die there, so she left all of her positions positions with the neighbor who was caring for her daughter so that if she died, they could liquidate her assets and care for her daughter. She didn't think she would return. But she felt that it was her only option.
• 14:01
  When she got there the first day, she practiced wholeheartedly. She got meditation instruction, and she began practicing. She practiced with intensity, with wholeheartedness, and immediately was able to develop a level of concentration. Later that day, after six hours, she was walking to the meditation hall, and she felt she couldn't move. She didn't she didn't know why.
• 14:34
  And she looked down, and she saw that there was a dog biting her leg, not allowing her to go forward. The people at the center, the monks pulled the dog off, but she was afraid that the dog could be rabid, so she was taken to the hospital and began a series of rabies injections. So in the center where she was practicing, meals were served once a day, and she was gone at the hospital getting the injections, and so she missed the meals, and so she started getting weaker and weaker. And finally, she had to go home. She had to leave the center and go home again.
• 15:32
  It seems it seems incredible, this series of events that took place in her life, and yet still she held on to this feeling that this calling to practice. She went home dejected. She felt her one opportunity for enlightenment had passed, but she did not give up. She did not give up. She continued practicing as she had been taught in her six hour intro for the next two years and then had the good fortune of a family friend who told her of a meditation center nearby and organized helped her organize to go to a retreat at the center.
• 16:37
  At this time, a family member had moved to Burma, so she had someone to care for her daughter as well. So again, she went to continue practice in a more formal way on retreat. At the retreat, her concentration deepened. She practiced again wholeheartedly. And one day, she was sitting on the floor practicing with a group of other people, and something shifted.
• 17:15
  She described it as so quiet and so delicate that it seemed like nothing had happened at all. Later she would say, I I didn't know that it happened, and yet something changed in her life. And perhaps perhaps something like this has happened to you. You've come on retreat or just with your practice, and something shifts and unskillful behaviors drop away, or there's a well of patience that wasn't there before, or an impetus to kindness, or perhaps you've seen it in other people who have been practicing. There's there's a healing that happens when we touch the wholeness of this life, and it happened with this woman, with the Deepa Ma, after more than a decade of tragedy and ill health and suffering.
• 18:24
  So her blood pressure dropped to normal. Her body regained vitality. Grief and fearfulness was gone. They dropped away for her. Her life was left with equanimity and understanding, quite a dramatic shift.
• 18:48
  And yet at that moment, so quiet, so delicate, it seemed like it was nothing at all. She practiced for about two more months at the center, stabilizing the practice that she had been stabilizing concentration, touching in again and again to the source. And then later, over the next year, she frequently returned there again to touch in like a person who's so thirsty and finally able to drink cooling water. She had changed from a person who was sickly and dependent, grief stricken, into someone who was healthy and radiant. She became an inspiration for her family and friends, and people were drawn to her.
• 19:59
  They wanted to learn practice. They wanted to learn to meditate with her, and they wanted to be inspired by this connection that she had with herself. So at the age of 55, she became a meditation teacher. Her first formal student was a neighbor, a widow who was raising six children alone. She couldn't leave her house.
• 20:34
  She had a brand new baby. But because of what Deepa Ma had been through, she had a very strong belief that awakening was possible for anyone in any environment, and she devised practices to help her students carry out their practice at home wherever they were. She was very creative. For example, this woman, her first student, who had six children and a baby, she had her practice mindfulness while breastfeeding. If she could stay completely with it, that's what?
• 21:24
  Four or five hours of mindfulness practice a day? It's a long time breastfeeding newborns. She believed that awakening was possible for everyone, that it was possible in any environment, and she was very creative about how she went about teaching her students and practicing herself. Deepa Ma is, you know, an inspiration for me combining practice and home life. But it's also been quite wonderful to see how her teachings have aligned with the teaching that Hogan and Bon Show have been giving us in this retreat.
• 22:50
  So what I'd like to do now is share with you some of the practices that she emphasized with her students. The first one that she emphasized was choose a practice and stick with it. This this week, we were introduced to the practice of chanting the Buddha's name. Buddha. Buddha, the one who knows, the awakened one, is that chanting our name.
• 23:29
  We were... We have been encouraged to stick with that as a practice. Choose a practice and stick with it. See the change over time. Appreciate the impermanence of it.
• 23:48
  Appreciate learning over time, chanting silently or chanting aloud. We've been encouraged to allow the vibration of sound and the single-minded concentration on the name to begin this process of unifying, harmonizing body and mind. This antidote to scattered concentration. Keep returning to the name Buddha, cutting through the mental chatter, cutting through the doubt or irritation, and returning over and over again. So it's been a body practice on one level, just feeling the vibrations throughout the body, perhaps noticing, ah, they're not in the right shoulder quite as much as they are in the heart, or feeling the change, the intensification of the vibration over time or the diminution when the body tenses.
• 25:14
  How is it for you? What do you notice? It can be a breath practice, coordinating Buddha and breath however you like. The Buddha on the in breath and the da on the out breath altogether. An exploration of breath, where do you feel it?
• 25:41
  How far down in the body does the breath go? Is there tightness? And this rhythmic chanting, this relaxation, clarity of mind that comes can allow us to really look carefully and and and notice what happens to this body when it breathes. Short or long, deep or shallow, it doesn't matter. It's what...
• 26:11
  What's happening. Or it can be a concentration practice, staying with the breath, being one with the breath the whole breath cycle, the whole Buddha. Holding so lightly to that intention of keeping the mind and the breath and the sound all one. Perfect unity with the breath. No gap.
• 26:50
  This allows the self to begin to drop away or perhaps just loosen it up a little bit from this tight grip that we get. A prayer, a prayer as the name Buddha goes out, the vibrations go out to all of you. I receive your prayer, an opening, an offering. What else has it been for you? I've felt very supported, a beautiful reminder when the mind drifts away and I hear the tones.
• 27:30
  This chanting is... Teaches us about impermanence. The breath comes and goes. The sounds rise and fade. It teaches us about interconnection.
• 27:44
  We're all singing together. Sometimes it teaches us about suffering and about unity, about coming together. Here's what Deepa Ma says about this. For those beginning a spiritual journey, she was adamant about commitment to one style of meditation. Don't give up and jump in from practice to practice.
• 28:20
  Find a technique that suits you or that you're asked to do, and keep going until you find the edge, the point where difficulties arise. A common mistake many western westerners make is to interpret difficulties as problems with a particular practice. I found I found that really interesting. We think that difficulties arise, so we need to stop. But difficulties arise, so that means, oh, we're doing it right.
• 28:56
  In fact, difficulties are usually a reliable sign that the practice is working. So difficulties come up, and we just go back. So simple. Just go back and chant the name again. And enfold the agitation or the annoyance or the bliss all part of the present moment, all part of that chant.
• 29:28
  It's an interesting experience to see what does that feel like to include that in. What does it feel like to welcome the moment, to welcome it on a granular level, on a cellular level. What does that feel like? She also advised, lived, practicing with patience. Patience is forged by constantly meeting the edge.
• 30:21
  If you stay with your meditation practice, it is inevitable that difficulties will arise. In most in the most challenging situations, merely showing up and being present may be all that's possible, and that might be enough. And sometimes an energy surge happens, and it's so uncomfortable in the body, and just staying with it, just being patient, just sitting is enough, all. This from a woman who had seen her mind go through every kind of suffering and was able to sit through it. Later, when she came out of that fire, she...
• 31:05
  There was something very determined, almost frightening about how she could look at you because she had seen herself. There was nowhere to hide. She exemplified that you can't just sit around thinking about getting enlightened. You have to take hold of these truths at the deepest level of the heart. Practice daily.
• 31:30
  That's another one. The beautiful thing about sashin is it's it's baked into the system. But at home, that can be a challenge if you live, if you're a householder, like Deepa Ma was, like the woman with six kids, like a retiree with no schedule particularly. Still, it's a challenge. The practice is so interesting because we think that it should progress a little bit every day if you practice.
• 32:09
  And if that's not what the picture that you're seeing, that something has gone wrong. But that's not always the way that it unfolds. I'm an adult learner of the recorder, and I've learned about... It it was really quite surprising practicing the recorder. I I thought that if I just play the same four notes in a row 10 times in a row, I'd get faster and faster at it, and then it would sound beautiful.
• 32:47
  But in fact, what happens is I I have to pay really close attention to what the exact finger movements are and and go very slowly, and it doesn't necessarily get any better during that session. I go to bed, and the next day if I pick up the recorder or the next couple of days, all of a sudden, there it is. It's like, oh, when did that happen? It somehow integrates on its own time, not when I think it will happen. And we have to have a little bit of faith that with regular practice, the mind and body change.
• 33:27
  They open, and we're able to accept the insights and to recognize them when they when they happen in their own time. Practice daily. She says, practice now. Don't think you can do more later. Seize the day.
• 33:55
  See through stories. Heard this one before? See through stories. She talked about this like stories were nesting dolls, like those dolls where one is inside another, inside another, inside another. And and once you start in on a story, then another one emerges from inside of it and another.
• 34:26
  And you keep opening and opening them until finally at the end you get there and it's empty. There's nothing. There was no no kernel to begin with. There's just this. So let the stories go.
• 35:02
  She said that the mind is mostly stories. No. She did not say the mind is mostly stories. She said the mind is nothing but stories, personal dramas that we create. She challenged her students to let go of their belief in stories.
• 35:20
  In an interview with a group of students, someone asked, what is it like in your mind? What is it like in your mind? She closed her eyes and said, in my mind, there are three things, concentration, kindness, and peace. No stories. The last doll was opened in the space, concentration, loving kindness, and peace.
• 35:54
  The student said, Is that all? She said, Yeah. That's it. And the room was silent. What is it for you?
• 36:08
  When you put the last story down, what remains? Have fun along the way. That was another one that she said. I think that's great. Have fun along the way.
• 36:37
  A student asked, what's the place for fun in Buddhist practice? This all sounds very dark and gray, getting rid of passion, getting rid of anger, getting rid of desire. It seems like a very gray existence. She bursts out laughing. You don't understand.
• 36:58
  There is so much sameness in ordinary life. We are always experiencing everything through the same lens, the lens of our stories. Once greed, hatred, and delusion are gone, you see everything fresh and new all the time. Every moment is new. Life was dull before.
• 37:18
  Now every moment, every day is full of zest and life. I recently had the opportunity, question mark, of having my two four and seven year old grandchildren for the weekend. And wow, talk about zest for life. They they were amazing. They were joyous, and they were so creative.
• 37:48
  They weren't they weren't held by any fixed belief of what anything was. The the footrest became the seat for a coach, and some blocks became the line for the horses, and one became the horse and the other the footman, and they they played Cinderella in the front room for a half an hour. It was it was really interesting to see them pick up an object because they didn't see it as an object. They thought of, like, what could I do? Like, what could this be?
• 38:20
  And their minds just were open to anything. And when we can let go of these fixed beliefs and stories, it frees that creative mind up, and along with it comes joy. Another thing she said was any situation is workable. This is from a woman who was told time and time again that she had to wait. So many tragedies occurred in her life, but she felt this urge to practice, and she found a way.
• 38:59
  And she encourages us to find that way even if you're going to school and you have kids and you want to practice, or you're living at the monastery and there's the wake up bell and you're so tired, or whatever the situation is. We have this creative mind, and we can find a way when that that knowing, that draw to really know ourself, the true, you know, what we are is there. She said med... Meditation integrates the whole person. It's this this act of coming to stillness and balance and touching who we really are that integrates us and allows us to go out into the world.
• 39:59
  Buddhists speak metaphysically of leaving the world and coming back to the world, but in truth, there's never leaving the world nor returning. We can't leave or return to our essence, to the truth of our being, because it is and has always been here. It is and has always been here. I shared this story of Deepa Ma with you because I find her so inspiring. She was a householder.
• 40:36
  She journeyed from a young girl with no education. She lived through sorrow and suffering, personal tragedy, lack of physical health, all that dropped away, and she was left with concentration, loving kindness, and peace. We all have the same Buddha nature that Deepa Ma had. She touched what we touch. She was infused with the same Buddha nature that it fuses every cell of our body.
• 41:26
  What is left when stories, when personality, when clinging and grasping drop away in you. Look. Touch it. So many people have come before us. So many people have walked this ancient way, this path leading from confusion and isolation, the need to grab on, and they've walked this path to ease and freedom.
• 42:05
  Their teaching, the wisdom that they shared, looks different through the lens of culture, through the lens of different personality, through time periods, but it's all wondrously consistent. It's all pointing to discovering who we really are, what we really are. It's all pointing at or encouraging us to know the essence of this life, the truth of this life. I'd like to end by by sharing with you the back... The writing that's on the back of my raksu.
• 42:58
  It says, before the ancestors came, the way already pervaded everywhere, simply unite with it and serve. Thank you.
• 43:23
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendesk dot org. Your support supports us.