Meditation in Action opens with a brief description of Buddha's life, tracing the story and growth that lead to his insight and enlightenment. A prince who gave up his riches and his birthright who became an ascetic practicing yoga and self-punishment in effort to cleanse himself of the world's suffering. Realizing that this pain was not inherently a path to enlightenment, but a part of the fundamental nature of reality, he developed methods and reasons for looking at the "true nature" of the world and delivered that teaching throughout India, walking on foot and teaching through simple conversation.

The core of this method is Meditation, and this essay serves as an introduction to how Buddha got to meditation as a way to process, understand, and ultimately change the nature of his suffering.

The Quiet Understanding of the Buddha

Chogyam uses the example of the Buddha here to show that even the most holy people can be moved through self-discovery and action in ways that they can't learn from teachers or books or "merely conforming to an already established pattern."

In talking about how the Buddha taught, it was not a simple excitement or sermon or essays, it was a quiet understanding and wisdom which an early acolyte will fail to capture without spending a lot of time with it building that quiet understanding:

Just as it was for Buddha, so for us the excitement and the novelty of being in a strange country would not wear out for several months. One would write letters home as if possessed by the country, intoxicated with excitement and the strangeness of it all. So if one returned after only a few days or weeks, one would not have learned very much, one would merely have seen a different country, a different way of life

Chogyam talks here as well about the importance of finding your own understanding of what you're looking for before you set out to conform to a religious or political structure -- after all, it may not be the thing which truly allows for you to exist freely. "unless one is able to overcome this excitement, one will not be able to learn, because any form of emotional excitement has a blinding effect. One fails to see life as it is because one tends so much to build up one’s own version of it."

Ego, I, and Mine

Skandha and meta-physics

Buddhist meta-physics does much to talk about the lack of a true inner-ego or inner-mind, and this essay and this book as a whole does a better job than most of explaining this in an approachable manner.

The key insight of the Buddha was that the Future does not exist and that the Past does not exist, except as […]. The Concepts we live with, the "ideas, hopes, fears, emotions, conclusions, are created out of […]," these are all lenses we use to process our sensory input and combine with those inputs to form a Self.

Buddhists call these Skandha, The Five Aggregates.

From the […] and the […], Buddhism derives concepts ...

... like Karma which is […].

"Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there"[fn:1]

To get to that "true nature" view that Buddhism strives for, we must break down the Habit of categorization, that there is Good and Bad behavior and it's our job to categorize this. Jesus Christ has spent many sermons arguing the same things[fn:2], that we must move past the Concepts of right and wrong, because even as they are useful in our own lives and in determining our own behavior, they are powerless concepts when applied to others because our view of the universe is unique and indeterminable.

Building a perspective and ideology which allows you to more easily see things which are good or bad through first hand experience, rather than through the dogmatic list-making which people fall habit to is critical and critically difficult.

Meditation and mindfulness are quickly introduced as a tool to cultivate this sense of 'present understanding.' With Meditation "we can examine ourselves each time, and go beyond mere opinions and so-called common sense conclusions."

Building this skill takes more than reading or listening to a Guru in the same way that learning to navigate a city requires doing it actively. "If we go somewhere on foot, we know the way perfectly, whereas if we go by motor car or airplane we are hardly there at all, it becomes merely a dream. Similarly, in order to see the continual pattern of development, we have to go through it manually." Similarly, if we think there is a some profound "lifehack" method "which offers a quick way, we would rather follow that than undertake arduous journeys and difficult practice," which Chogyam uses to underscore the 'true importance' of asceticism: doing the work itself rather than punishment or suffering.

Therefore I shall remain silent in the Jungle

Buddha discovered all these insights and leaped to teach them -- "because he had achieved something, he felt that he should save the world" -- but this is an impossible dream and he quickly had to give it up. "He knew some of the answers for dealing with life and for finding the true meaning, or suchness, in the world of samsara. But he was not quite sure how to present this and he almost decided not to speak."

When Buddha gave up that desire to teach and decided to reserve himself was when the final hurdle was overcome, when a true selfless compassion was able to arise in him. No longer a teacher, no longer carrying the idea that he had to save people, but whenever the opportunity came up he was able to deal with it spontaneously and correctly and justly and spread his wisdom simply through Good Action. Chogyam uses this to point out that as long as we don't retreat from a situation, it will present a way to make use of it positively.

Footnotes

[fn:1] Sufi poet Rumi

[fn:2] I think the theological intersections of these religions are really kind of fascinating, try to talk about this a bit below in ruminating on Meditation