Sampajanna: The Indestructible Heart Wish
Talk 2: Revised (Wednesday, July 25, 2001) from 4th talk given on the Order Visualisation Retreat, Vajraloka 1998
I have been speaking about developing awareness, a kind of mindfulness, of our body and our world, within a mind-only perspective. As I hope you’ll discover for yourselves, this viewpoint can be very helpful indeed when trying to deepen one’s meditation, because it reminds us that there is a link between the ordinary unenlightened mind and the enlightened mind. What’s the link? The link is that it’s exactly the same mind. It is with this ordinary mind, the one that we experience right now, that we will gain insight and liberation. Of course, we’ll have to change the way we perceive and understand this so-called ‘ordinary’ mind. But there is nothing else, there is no other medium. We are nothing but this mind; the self that we experience is nothing but this mind; and the world we experience is also nothing but this mind. So if we can really get to know this mind, this ordinary mind, we’ll be experiencing reality more and more. The key to doing this is in vipashyana meditation and reflection, of course. But meditation should never be confined to sitting meditation. Knowing the mind, in this sense, is also cultivated through a kind of mindfulness. We need to cultivate mindfulness – bearing in mind this viewpoint, remembering that this unenlightened mind is the only one we’ve got, that it isn’t going to go away! Remembering too that it’s with this mind alone that any kind of enlightenment, Bodhichitta, or any spiritual quality at all will ever be developed. No one, no Buddha or Bodhisattva, has ever done it any other way. Cultivating and living in this profound View (capital V) is of the essence of spiritual life.
As you know, when speaking of mindfulness there are two aspects. First there is sati, or awareness of what is happening. This we could call the clarity aspect. Second, there is sampajanna, which is the volitional aspect, or which even could be called the heart aspect, of mindfulness. Sati is the ‘objective’ awareness of what is going on, or of what we are doing. Sampajanna is the ‘subjective’ awareness of what we want to get out of doing it. Sati is a little like the head; sampajanna is more like the heart.
It’s interesting that when we use the word mind, we usually think of it in terms of head rather than heart. Our idea of our mind is of something taking place behind the eyes. But Buddhism, as you probably know, uses just one word, citta, for both mind and heart. So Bodhichitta can mean ‘the Heart of Awakening’ as well as ‘the Awakening Mind’. The word cittamatra, which is the doctrine of the Yogachara school, is almost always translated as ‘Mind Only’. Cittamatra is the reality that everything is mind, that everything is an experience. But if you wanted to be a bit provocative, you could just as well translate it as ‘heart only’. And it is true that we can see everything as a reflection of the heart, see everything experienced in our world as a reflection of the build-up of our desires and wants and wishes.
What we want, ‘what we really really want’, is a matter of crucial importance in spiritual life. Consider for a moment the key function of Right Resolve, the second aspect of the Eightfold Path. It is said to bridge the gap between the Path of Vision and the Path of Transformation. The Path of Vision consists of the first aspect of the path, called Right View. Here we see something of the Goal of Enlightenment and through that, we clarify our View of what we need to do in the spiritual life. The Path of Transformation consists of the other seven aspects, through which we actually start doing what we need to do. Bhante has also translated Right Resolve as Perfect Emotion or Will. It seems clear that this, the direction of the will, is the central aspect of the Buddha’s practical teaching. The Dharma is a training in the skilful direction of our will. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha says:
Those who make channels for waters control the waters;
Makers of arrows make arrows straight;
Carpenters control their timber;
And the wise control their own minds.
The Dharma is all about gaining a gentle yet powerful, sort of harmonising, ‘control’ of all the conflicting currents in our heart and mind.
As Buddhist practitioners, we channel the powerful currents of desire and will through meditation and the ten precepts. Through meditation, we become aware of our habitual tendencies and all the energy we have invested in them. Through the ten precepts, we direct that energy along new, skilful, channels of activity.
Actually, we do this re-channelling of energy in meditation as well. In fact, it’s the essence of what we do in meditation. Our meditation is essentially a harnessing of the energy of our will in order to get it more and more deeply involved in its own liberation or nirvana. This liberation is called cetovimutti or emancipation of the heart (and corresponds to the unbiased or directionless samadhi, one of the doors of liberation).
Collins Dictionary defines will simply as ‘the faculty of conscious and deliberate choice of action’. But for Buddhism, will takes shape at a deeper level; seen as something predominantly unconscious, with occasional flashes of conscious intention. There are various words for it, the most important ones being cetana, samskara and karma. In the Three Jewels, Bhante states that these three terms mean virtually the same.
To very briefly explain each of them: cetana is will in the sense of the whole force of our being constantly impelled towards now this object, now that object. It is said to operate in every single moment of our existence. We’re constantly wanting, wishing, preferring to latch on to experiences we find pleasant, and constantly avoiding those we find unpleasant. So cetana is will in the volitional sense of the mind constantly moving towards what it wants. And so it’s the heart. The heart, poor thing, can’t help itself, it just knows what it wants. It knows what it wants, and just goes for that without hesitation. We can try to hold it down, we can try to bottle it up, but even so, when we think about what we really, really want, our heart still starts getting hotter and beating faster.
Samskara is exactly the same thing, but seen in terms of habit or tendency. What we go for, we get in the habit of going for. So craving is a typical samskara. Envy is one, hatred is another one. The whole habit-forming tendency – the whole complex of tendencies that we have towards getting attached to particular modes of behaviour – this is our own unique bundle of samskaras.
Then karma is just the same process again, the heart going for what it wants, but this time seen from the ethical point of view. The desires of our heart have consequences for our future states of being. Because what we go for, the habits we create, all build up and create a world. It is a samsaric world. It may be a hell or a heaven, it may be a nice cosy world, it may be a difficult world. Our heart creates the world. What we want is what, in the end, we get – for better or worse.
This connects to what we were saying before about the worlds we create in our waking and dreaming lives. It also relates very directly to meditation, because with meditation we engage positively with the activity of the heart. We contact it very directly, and work to re-channel our samskaras. In meditation we can dwell in the famous gap between feeling and craving. In Yogachara terms, we can remain in the space between the store consciousness and the sense consciousnesses, the point before the ego consciousness misinterprets the Alaya background and the immediate pure sense experience as ‘mine’. This is what causes the whole Wheel of Life to come into existence. And it is just in that crucial point that we can change our life, change our karmic patterns, and bring into existence the whole mandala of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. It’s exactly the same mind, exactly the same heart.
Developing Right View is essentially about grasping this crucial point more and more. The more you grasp the fact that you can change, and vastly, for the better – if you can stop reacting quite so blindly – then the more you will see this, and the less you will want to react. Then, more and more, you will want to respond in a skilful way. This is the liberation of the heart.
This point of view relates strongly to visualisation, because in sadhana practice that potential for a change of heart is so clearly, and even so dramatically, expressed. We, the unenlightened, the relatively fainthearted, are over here. The Buddha, who is filled with compassion, is over there. Just imagining the Buddha’s presence reveals that contrast. At the same time, by just imagining him, we are making a heart connection.
We are trying to move our cetana and samskara away from hatred and craving, towards the great love of the Buddha. We are trying to be receptive to the great love of the Buddha, so we can participate in it somehow. We are trying to develop the Will to Enlightenment, the great Vow, the great aspiration to truly dedicate our life to the welfare of all beings. Or at least, to want, with all our heart, to feel like doing that. And of course, this is a very great transformation. We may mouth the verses of the puja, pay lip service to the idea of the Bodhicitta, but our connection with it is often so abstract, so romantic, so idealistic. To make a heart connection we have to look at our life, look at our inner life, look at our will, look at what we actually want and desire. Bodhicitta – wanting Bodhi – can’t just come from a fine idea. The change has to come from the heart, and our heart wants all kinds of other things. We just want it all.
The Bodhisattva we are imagining can help us. It’s obvious that we can’t change just on our own. If we are going to make all those changes, we clearly need a lot of help. This is where our will becomes a prayer or pranidhana. Prayer means that we share openly what we want with the Bodhisattva. If you read that booklet on Dhardo Rimpoche, where people speak of their meetings with him, I think you get a very good idea of what this sharing can be like. (If you haven’t read it, I really recommend it.) It gives an idea of how we can open our very limited, provisional Bodhicitta to the Buddha’s unlimited, actual, real Bodhicitta.
We can say that somehow we always wanted to be able to open to this. We always wanted this hearts release, this cetovimutti, but we didn’t know about it. I think we can say that this is what all beings want in their hearts, but, again, they don’t know it, they just aren’t in touch with it. Well, we are very rarely in touch ourselves with it. We have do special practices, put ourselves in special situations, and stay in touch with special people, otherwise we just forget completely about it. In the Bodhichitta practice we reflect about the tragic situation all beings are in: that they are all desperately seeking happiness, but they are looking for it in ways that just bring suffering. That their hearts are looking all over the world for some kind of satisfaction. But they don’t know where it is. Everything they do is concerned with this search for satisfaction; even when they badly hurt one another, or themselves, they do it because they think it will bring satisfaction. But of course, as we all know from bitter experience, it is just like pouring petrol on a fire to put it out. But the heart wish, the wish for happiness, the wish to have it all and be happy, is universal. Usually it is distorted, because people are so very unclear about where happiness comes from.
The only way to get clear about this, and start gaining real satisfaction, is of course through developing wisdom, by learning where happiness really comes from. As we do so, our wanting gets more and more realistic and pure.
So in your sadhana practice, be aware of your heart, appreciate it. Appreciate it even when it shows itself in distorted forms, like resentment, envy, or self-pity. Remember that the heart never stops wanting – that’s it’s indestructible nature. So that’s how you spot it. Our mind continually seeks objects though which we hope to get some kind of satisfaction. Hope springs eternal – that’s samsara. The way to move this seeking towards nirvana is to spot the heart wish; spot it, and remind it of what it really wants. That is, to try to remember, to link in to those moments of inspiration when you remembered what you really wanted.
In the visualisation sadhana, the Buddha is there to remind you, too, of what you always wanted.