Training is the Heart of Training;
The Heart of Training is the Heart
by Rev. Allard Kieres
Once upon a time, I was a junior in college sitting alone in a quiet part of the University of Oregon art library trying to cram for an upcoming Japanese art history final without much success. I have never been a good student, let alone a studier for tests. I had been trying throughout the term to keep up with the material, but not only did I find the subject confusing, it was primarily about memorization; and being a stoner did not help my memory. The test required knowing the who done it, what materials were used, when, where and why; and that is very boring.
To complicate matters further, not only was I a bad ‘student-slacker-stoner’; I was a bad ‘student-slacker-stoner’ with girl issues. During that spring term of 2006, a severely wounded 3 ½ year long relationship with a girl finally crawled under the porch to die. The prolonged back and forth breakup culminated one evening in a furious screaming, crying, throwing match between the two of us where everything we’d ever tried to sweep under the carpet in the previous few years was revealed for the mess it truly was. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was really traumatized by this event because I am not a ‘screamy-throwy’ kind of person. And because I also didn’t know anything about true healing, I just drank and smoked away the pain without really looking at it. This had taken place two weeks previous to finals.
So, in my sincere and hopeless attempt at studying, I flipped through my flash cards; one side a photocopy of the art piece, and the back containing the who’s and what’s. Many of the pieces we were studying in this particular class were Buddhist statues and paintings because Buddhism and Japanese culture have been intertwined for a good thousand years. And so it happened that I flipped to a picture of a statue called ‘Miroku’, the future Buddha to come: and I paused. The first real pause I’d taken in a long time.
The statue is of a person sitting on a seat with one leg resting across the knee of the other, its right hand in a pondering gesture at its chin and the most sublime and subtle smile I have ever seen. It was the smile that shot a vibration through my Heart. It is a smile that knows. It is a smile that holds what happened, is happening, and will happen with perfect equanimity and love; silently testifying to the Truth that there is something more than just our turbid lives. So, without knowing any of this except the simple fact that there was something about that smile, I abandoned all attempts at studying, put on my headphones, set Daft Punk’s song ‘Superheroes’ from their Discovery album on repeat, and just sat and stared at that smile believing that yes there has to be something more.
I have always considered myself to be a ‘Truth seeker’. I was raised Catholic, but I was never interested in paying attention to the church. Nothing ever resonated for me with the teachings and practices of Christianity. I didn’t have anything against it, it just never called anything out of me. Church was boring; and I never got the idea of God, heaven, hell, or anything else the priest ever said; if I ever even heard any of it. So, when I was thirteen or so I got the sense that I needed to do something. Why? I didn’t know and I don’t think I ever really thought it out much. I just felt I needed to make some sort of statement. So, I chose to announce that I was not buying into this God thing. I didn’t want to create a familial rift, which I would have done by flat out refusing to go to church, so I respectfully refrained from taking communion.
It was also about this time that my parents got a divorce, leaving me and my two younger siblings to live with my mom. Since mom was more relaxed about rules and bedtimes than dad, I encountered a new life of previously unknown freedom. To catalyze my newborn ramble feet, I discovered drugs about a year later with the start of high school. Not the hard drugs, which I’ve never gotten into, but drinking, smoking pot and taking psychedelics; and I entered into my philosophizing years.
During high school I developed strong friendships with a crew of guys who shared my trippy adventures and with whom, amidst the bong rips and bonfires, pondered the universe. We would talk about chaos theory, fractals, outer space, and everything scientific that felt like it pointed towards some hidden truth or was at least an interesting topic of discussion. Speaking for myself, I yearned to know what was True in a fundamental sense, even though I didn’t really comprehend what I was looking for. Why am I here? What is here? What am I? Somehow, for me, there has always been this quiet pulse whispering, ‘look deeper, look deeper, look deeper’.
Eventually we all went to the same college where we continued to exercise our minds with philosophy and drugs. At our best drug use was a vehicle for the exploration of just what is this thing we call reality? But increasingly more often as time went by, it was just to take the edge off. Sometimes I had experiences beyond just tripping out. Both during high school and college, I experienced things that I thought must be True. I felt like I was breaking through into these incredible insights as to what the universe really was, but it would all eventually fade into the mind’s fog. I could never maintain any clarity with regard to the nameless puzzle I felt in my Heart or how to address it. But when I met Miroku in the library, that was the point when things were able to start changing, and the puzzle pieces began to fit together.
After my moment of stillness in the art library that particular spring, I went to Los Angeles for a summer internship as a production assistant during which time I began to actively look into Buddhism. Out of that pause had come a strong sense that I needed to change something in myself, and what ‘came up’ was to be a more honest and good person. To my amazement, as a result of putting this into practice, I began encountering really interesting coincidences that helped move my life in a positive direction; and two very important things shifted for me that summer.
First, I began to trust that there is a flow to this seemingly chaotic unordered world. I opened up to the possibility that the universe was actually trying to get my attention. It was pointing to Buddhism. Second, I knew that the universe was cyclical and that karma existed. I learned this because, coincidentally, the apartment I rented just happened to be in the home town of that girl. She and her family just happened to be there that summer visiting friends and extended family. So of course, as is natural with someone we’ve been in a serious long-term relationship with, when we found this out we had to see each other. It was the first time I had seen her since our breakup, and I began to slip backwards toward the abyss. 3 ½ years of habit, confused further with broken love and a good helping of my own lonely neediness, were strongly pulling me towards her. But somehow I saw it.
I saw that I had a choice. Toeing the edge, and looking over that cliff, intending to jump; it hit me like a ton of bricks: dude, you’re gonna start it all over again; this will only lead you to suffering. I was able to walk away and never go back. And because I was able to walk away and turn towards the Unknown that I was beginning to hear calling quietly in my Heart, I saw something that I had done to her during our relationship that was cause for much suffering; and I knew that the conditions of our break up were the karmic consequence of my own previous actions coming back at me.
The man I rented the apartment from was a spiritual old hippie. From the very first night in L.A., through it all, he was a huge help in encouraging me to go deeper into this flowering new awareness. He is more a Hindu than a Buddhist, but when I talked to him about all these insights, he didn’t miss a beat: trustit. He lent me the autobiography of the 14th Dali Lama and I felt the same sort of thing I had felt when looking at Miroku’s smile. I didn’t yet know the details about Buddhism, but I was impressed by how the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans carried themselves through their struggles. I was also impressed with the language, the Dalai Lama and, it seemed, Buddhists in general used to explain and relate to reality as they saw it. Buddhism was beginning to feel like the way, and I now found that my search had a label: Enlightenment.
On paper these things can make a nice concise story, but this was a long and labored process. Though I was beginning to think about spirituality and the universe in new ways, I was still a drunk, I was still a heart broken needy boy, and I still caused trouble. So, stagnant with the unknowing of how to proceed, I started my senior year and my insights faded to the back burner: but they didn’t disappear.
That October I got a little help when the Universe banged me on the head. Two of my friends and I took an unintentionally strong dose of LSD and I experienced something I was not ready for. I, alone, innocently wandered off away from the house, having entered into some sort of mind state in which I had no discrimination. I drank muddy gritty water out of a sewer gutter and I felt no disgust: it was just muddy gritty water.
Turning around from that gutter, I was startled to see a dazzlingly bright white light about ten feet in front of me. As I experienced it, looking into the light felt like looking into awareness. But an awareness unlike anything I had ever dreamed of. It had a radiant, vibrating presence that was not necessarily physical or seen or even felt; though it was, too, all those things, but rather more like being known and experienced on a level beyond anything I‘d ever imagined possible. It was vast and boundless. The feeling of depth it had along with this incredible ‘knowing’ that it emanated made me think for sure, but again not in a calculated or intellectual way, it was a knowing, that I was seeing the ‘Source of all the Knowledge and Wisdom in the Universe’: Enlightenment. It was so profound and precious. I cannot explain how intense and joyous it was to look at it. It felt like being complete.
I couldn’t believe It. Imagine the joy of being a crazy, searching, wandering ‘puzzle-head’ and then actually encountering the very thing you’ve been looking for, which you didn’t really know you werelooking for or even fully believed existed in the first place. I was compelled to run to it, jump into it, and become one with it. Imagine my confusion and despair when I realized that my sober friends were bandaging my blood gushing forehead and putting me into an ambulance bound for the hospital and stitches! I had run at full speed and leaped head first into a 5 ft high lamppost in a neighbor’s front yard. Bummer.
The danger and delusion with taking drugs, especially in an effort to investigate reality, I had now finally learned, is that I hadn’t done the work. I had not ‘earned the treasure’: I was stealing It. What I experienced was so far beyond my untrained context that I just wound up banging my head on It. I thought certainly there has to be a better way to reach Enlightenment. I was finally fed up enough with drugs to open up to the idea that they were not the way to do it, and I never used psychedelics again.
I was deeply changed by this experience and I was in total shock. I felt that I had experienced something really important, but I never talked about it because I thought people were just going to think I was high and crazy. Thankfully, though, I didn’t need to. A seed had been planted that only now I can reflect back upon and see. I knew from then on that Enlightenment was real. It wasn’t something that people were making up. But what was It? Where had It gone? Why couldn‘t I get It back? How then does one become Enlightened? I must have looked like Winnie the Pooh for the next two months sitting there rubbing my forehead, “think, pooh bear, think”. I needed to learn how to practice.
I eventually got the idea that maybe if I looked closer at Buddhism it might help illuminate my way. For Christmas I had received a $25 dollar gift card to a book store and so I decided to investigate. I am not a reader, and book stores and libraries confuse me. So, there I am in the ‘Buddhism’ section trying to decide which book, out of a whole wall of books, I should buy. I knew that I wanted to read what the Buddha himself had said, but I didn’t know what that was. Was there a Buddhist Bible? I had absolutely no context for what I was looking for.
I picked up book after book and one said ‘Buddha-Dharma: The Way to Enlightenment’, and I thought ‘yeah right that is so cheesy!’ So, I put it back and kept looking. Almost settling for the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which would have confused the stuffing out of me if I had ever even gotten past the first ten pages, my Heart said to look again at that ‘Buddha-Dharma’ book. I looked at the book’s price and it was $25. Ah, what an interesting coincidence. So, I bought it, and it was exactly what I was looking for. It was the Buddha’s teachings starting with His birth and going all the way through to his death in chronological order.
I read this slowly for the next few months. Then sometime in March of ‘07 I got to the story where Ananda asked the Buddha if women could be admitted into the Sangha as ordained monks, to which the Buddha replied, “no”. I thought, ‘what!?’ Everything this guy has said so far has made so much sense!”. Buddhism had really felt like the answer, that this was the way to Enlightenment. I had felt no jangles. The teachings were practical and possible. The Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, meditation: it all made so much sense. It had all felt so right! Why would he say no? It was obvious to me that there is no spiritual, universal, fundamental difference between male and female. How could something so biological and earthly have anything to do with the Universal Quest?
But this question was meritorious. It caused me to think that I must be misunderstanding something, and to seek advice. Something so new and bright in me was beginning to take root. I looked up ‘Buddhism in Eugene Oregon’ on the internet and found the Eugene Buddhist Priory, which had a Buddhist monk in residence and I thought, “Ah, maybe this monk can answer my question”. So, I emailed the monk who ran this ‘Priory’, whatever that meant, and asked if I could come and ask him a few questions about Buddhism. He wrote me back and suggested I do an introductory morning at the temple first and then get back in touch with him.
So I, having long forgotten that Saturday mornings existed, got up to attend an 8:45am intro to Buddhism and practice at the Temple. A lay practitioner gave us meditation instruction and talked about the practice they did which was Soto Zen, or ‘Serene Reflection Meditation’ as they called it. I enjoyed the class, but I was more interested in tea with that monk, which I had later that week. His name was Rev. Master Oswin and he quietly and politely cut straight through my question about women and the Sangha. He definitely answered it, but I won’t even quote it because what was really going on was his–unbeknownst to me–addressing of my True question. It is said that a good Zen master looks past the student’s spoken question, and past the question beneath the question, straight to the third question that lies beyond the first two which the student doesn’t even know they’re asking. All I know is, whatever he said to me that day worked, because I came back. The Priory, or Temple, had a weekly schedule of which its Wednesday evening and Sunday morning meditation and Dharma talk interested me the most. I immediately became a regular.
I felt such a strong connection with the practice. It was like remembering an old friend. But I still had my old habits too, and I certainly didn’t drop them overnight. I don’t remember meditating that much at home, but I definitely put whatever stillness I attained at the Priory into my daily life. My natural tendency towards pondering now had a container with which to hold it; in that, now I would think about the Dharma talks and try to understand them in order to provethe teachings true for myself. Most importantly, my Heart was saying ‘yes!’. I knew this practice was what I had been looking for.
One Sunday morning at the beginning of June, after a couple of months of practicing at the Priory, a novice monk from an affiliated monastery in northern California was visiting while traveling north to see his family. He had trained for a few years in Eugene at the Priory with Rev. Master Oswin and was back to say hello for the first time since his ordination. He seemed very nice to me and during tea the congregation was asking him questions about his new life as a monk and how he liked it at Shasta Abbey. Someone asked him the very natural question of why he had wanted to become a monk? He said that he couldn’t say why, he just felt it. He knew it was right. When he said that, it was like a bell sounded within my Heart. For the first time in my life, I became aware that being a monk was an option. My Heart smiled and very quietly said, “Yes. We should become a monk.”
Over the next few years this calling slowly increased as my roots in the Dharma grew stronger. I still continued to live a fast and distracted life. The adventures and lessons from those years are too awesome and numerous to recall here–but never hesitate to ask, because I love telling a good story. The important thing to know about my journey from here on was how I learned to let go.
During those years, when I really looked at my monastic aspiration my Heart said yes. But that meant I had to give up my fast lifestyle; drugs, sex, and rock and roll: a Jedi craves not these things. But I did. I spent time living as a layperson at the monastery in Mt. Shasta, and in Eugene at the Priory, and the peace and purpose I experienced was so fulfilling. Every day my Heart leapt for joy even though I was never really doing anything. Morning meditation, breakfast, working, evening meditation; whenever anyone from home asked me what I liked about it, I couldn’t ever say. I just knew. But then I’d go back out to work in the world, and the fast lifestyle would be there waiting for me, and I was a slave to it. I kept getting stuck wandering nowhere. I kept smoking and drinking away my dis-ease rather than looking at it. My problem was that I wasn’t meditating. I was not looking within. I wasn’t doing the work that it takes to go deeper into this practice: to let go. Since then I have learned for myself that meditation is essential. Like water for a flower. It takes as long as it takes for an individual to let go; and we have a direct influence on that length of time. It is always a choice.
Eventually I left home for good and moved permanently to the Eugene Priory. I had decided that if I was going to be a monk, I’d like to study with Rev. Master Oswin, who had all along been a kind and helpful teacher to me. Finally, having removed myself from the endless distraction of home, I could take a good look at myself and there was nowhere to escape. I finally had the quiet environment I needed to sit and do the work. There was nothing to numb the dullness, the agitation, the greed, the self. A metaphor that I personally use is that of Frodo Baggins and the Ring of Power. So, there I sat in the fires of Mt. Doom with nothing but me and the Ring: contemplating letting it go.
When I sat and meditated, the self would panic like a bat trapped in a shed in which I had turned on the light. Everything passed through my mind trying to take on form, to become. And so I sat and sat and sat. This is sitting on the cushion and off the cushion. Every breath, every heartbeat, dedicated to the effort of letting go this thing we call the self. To let go, to let go, what a seemingly simple act. How can so much greed, hatred and delusion come forth from something that isn’t even real? But this self is precious to us. It is something we’ve carried for so long we have forgotten what it is like without it. We believe we need it. The longing I felt for it was so great: to go and be thatboy, to go and do thosethings. The self feels so real. The Heart just sat quietly, smiling patiently; and one evening it finally clicked.
On a Wednesday night, seven months into my lay residency, Rev. Master Oswin gave a Dharma talk in which he said that the ‘puzzle’ was actually three dimensional, and that ‘training’, the practice, was the center piece, “The piece that holds the whole puzzle together”. Boom! Not flashy white light, not blissful samadhi, not profound infinite wisdom: just the quiet every moment training. The training is the Enlightenment! Enlightenment is the training! I saw with my whole Heart that the practice is the gravitational center of which the entire Universe revolves around. I was suffering and searching because I was looking outside myself for peace and happiness. I was looking to things for my peace of mind. I was beginning to see how, as Buddhism teaches, all things are fundamentally Empty. There is no inherent suffering in any external condition. I was creating the suffering whenI placed external things as this gravitational center. Anything I place at the center of the Heart is bound to fade away and disappear, because all things are bound to fade away and disappear. Realizing this, I opened the doors of my Heart, which was billowing over with junk, and finally made an Empty space on the shelf: and didn’t fill it back in.
Training is the Heart of training; the Heart of training is the Heart. Let the Heart reside within the chamber of the Heart. For that Empty center contains and is the whole Universe. This is the Heart’s True Nature. The Heart is Buddha. Though we might keep ignoring It, the Heart simply waits and waits and waits. Anyone at any time can let go, turn towards, and listen to this Heart, this Light. All our suffering comes from this ignoring. I have personally proven this true for myself by doing the practice and listening to my Heart. From this act of placing the Heart at center and listening to It, I have found a profound peace, joy and gratitude. The rest of my days since have been spent doing my best to put this into practice, to go deeper into Its meaning, and pick myself up when I fall down. Getting up in the morning with palms together, lying down at night upon my right side: I pray that all may quickly prove this true for themselves.
Rev. Allard is a resident monk of Shasta Abbey, Mt. Shasta, CA. This article first appeared in the Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, 2015.
Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple. 