Recapitulation  2010  Feb 2010 Living Ch'an Workshop

Venerable Guo Xing Fashi vs Vancouver Olympics
by Terence Walsh and Jen-ni Kuo

Sunday February 28 was the most exciting day in the history of Canadian athletics. The last event of the Winter Olympics was taking place. It was the national sport – ice hockey – against the country’s biggest rivals, the USA. Vancouver’s streets were crowded with cheering fans staring up at huge screens fixed to tall buildings.

Meanwhile in nearby Richmond at the Dharma Drum Mountain Vancouver Center, members wondered if their Living Ch’an Workshop could possibly compete with this gigantic international event. But compete it did. The size of the congregation reached above the estimate.

The Venerable Guo Xing Fashi’s Workshop comprised teachings, exercises, group discussion and Q&A sessions to teach us how to live peacefully and enjoy every moment of our lives.

He began the Workshop by showing us a video clip of two blindfolded young ladies passionately kissing - two chimpanzees - thinking they were the young men they saw before they were blindfolded. Only after their eye covers were removed, did they realize otherwise, and were shocked and embarrassed. Venerable Guo Xing Fashi then posed this question “Did the girls’ pleasure come from kissing chimpanzees or from thinking they were kissing young men.”

Next, the Venerable showed us a series of striking photographs including a starving African child, bizarre scenes and acts, and a child’s smile. He asked us to close our eyes and led us through a relaxation exercise. Right afterwards he asked us to open our eyes and study the same photographs. This time, our reactions to the photographs were much less drastic than before our relaxation exercise.

Through a PowerPoint presentation, he introduced the concept of karmic retribution. In every moment we receive instantaneous karmic retributions from our action, speech and thoughts. Our state of mind and body is the result of the retribution we choose to bear.

He further illustrated that the results of our karmic retributions appear in our body, speech, sensation and mind. In our body, it appears through facial expressions, body language, and tension in our muscles; in our speech, it appears through the contents, choice of words, tone, and volume. Our karmic retributions also appear in our senses in the form of relaxation or tension and happiness or vexation.

By realizing the interrelated operational principle of body, sensation, mind and speech, we are able to control our instant karmic retribution. He then further illustrated, by examples, this interrelated operational principle.

First, he explained that how our body, sensation, mind and speech influence each other. For example, when we are angry, our body is tense, our mind is agitated, our voice is raised. He demonstrated that when one’s body is relaxed, it is not possible to engage in argument or get angry.

Then, he explained results are directly derived from causes; e.g., anger will cause an uncomfortable sensation, and will not lead to a joyful sensation. For example, when we are waiting for a red traffic light to turn green, we constantly look at our watch and stare at the red light, our body is tense and stiff, the stomach is tight, we feel agitated, we think there are too many red lights along the road and that they are the cause of our being late. In this moment, our state of mind is impatient. However, if we are in the car with our girl friend or boy friend, we will be smiling and holding hands, our body is relaxed and feels comfortable, we feel happy, we hope that the red light will never turn green.

Through an ingenious series of striking photographs and films, Fashi led us to realize that our reactions to the external environment, people and occurrences are merely responses to images created by the mind.

We learned that we mistake the images created by the mind for what is actually out there. By going deeper, leading us through teachings, and a series of exercises, group discussions and Q&A sessions, he showed us how to reflect inwardly, and realize that we have the choice to be happy.

We are grateful to Venerable Guo Xing Fashi for his skillful teaching technique that led us to realize that we have an option to live mindfully and joyfully every moment of our lives.

How to make my story not write its own ending

by Dr. Sattiraju Prabhakar

Pause for a moment! Just listen to those voices in your head.

                                                             … Can you hear them?

Pause for another moment! Just notice the images your mind is playing.

                                                              … Can you see them?

Now ask yourself the question: When faced with a new situation, are these voices and images telling me what to do or am “I” deciding what to do?

Many of us have a story. It seems as though the script is already written for each one of us, and we are just acting it out. You poke a person, out comes a story. You might say “what is wrong with that? I am happy with my own story”. A common observation, from time immemorial, has been that fixed scripts do not work (even Hollywood has woken to this fact! Computer Game industry thrives on the ability to take charge of your own story.). I am sure that many of us often wondered about alternate endings to our stories, but did not know how to get there. Simply put, stories are limited and our lives are not. This seems to create a lot of conflicts in our lives.

If we can step out of our story and write a new story as we go along, while not being imprisoned by the old story, it would be wonderful, would it not? But what about “face your problems” stuff? Let us consider the computer game playing again, where we are supposed to kill some daemons. You kill one daemon, and another one pops up. You kill the second one, and another one shows up. You keep on killing the daemons. Then you realize that you cannot win this game by just killing these daemons. You need to do something more, you need to change the game such that no more daemons are even produced! There are two game strategies – find the source of daemons and destroy it; or you grow so big that the daemons look like ants, and you simply ignore them. We can apply this game metaphor to real-life. Problems are like daemons in computer games. In real-life, the two strategies of games merge to one - you “change” such that the problems do not arise and, if they arise, they do not even bother you. When there are no problems, you are free to do what you want. In a sense you are now free from any script. Your story cannot be written! Hence, there is no ending!

The problem is that if you have a story, it keeps you inside the story! Stories continue because of emotions. To be outside the story we need to break away from the emotions. How can we be free from any script? Venerable Guo Xing began the Living Ch'an Workshop by addressing precisely this question as if to set a tone for the rest of the workshop. Venerable Guo Xing continued to address this question by using a subtle meditation technique through various events in the workshop. We can appreciate this technique if we can interpret it as solving a Figure and Ground problem.

Figure1. Drawing of a vase

Let me explain what Figure and Ground problem is before we go deeper into how Venerable Guo Xing has applied this technique to various events of workshop. The Figure and Ground problem is typically used to describe several paradoxes that arise in human perception of visual information. Let us understand it first in the typical scenario in which it is applied. Look at figure1. You can clearly see a vase by just following the line in the drawing. The line clearly defines the vase. There is no surprise here. Now look at figure2. What do you see? There is a surprise – there is no line defining a single object as it did in figure1. You can see either a vase or two faces, depending upon what you consider as a figure and its background. If you consider the black area as the background, immediately you see the white vase in front of that background. If you consider the two black objects as faces, then immediately you see the white background. I simplified the process. As you may have experienced, you do not even get to pick up one object over the other in isolation.

Figure2. Two faces and a vase

The important point is that the figure and background work together in perception. You do not consider them in isolation. It is this phenomenon of togetherness (as opposed to considering in isolation) we will be using to understand Venerable Guo Xing’s workshop techniques. 

Let us extend the Figure and Ground problem, from visual perception, to more general situations we encounter meditation. As a first step, consider the familiar explanation people give while teaching relaxation exercises. Relaxation can be felt clearly in the presence of stress. That is, relaxation and stress together act similar to Figure and Ground pair. You can appreciate the relaxed state better if you have immediately encountered stress, and vice versa. If you have no experience of relaxation, you do not develop appreciation of stress levels. It appears as though the experience of stress seems to influence the experience of relaxation. Please note that we have extended the typical Figure and Ground problem usage, from explaining paradoxes in perception, to accentuating the ability to experience. That is, experiencing the figure accentuates experiencing background. This accentuation seems to happen naturally in certain combinations of experiences such as stress and relaxation. It is important to understand that such accentuation is necessary to take notice of experiencing.

As a next step, we apply Figure and Ground explanation to our “story” metaphor, which we introduced at the beginning of this message. Consider that “living inside a story” and “living outside any story” as Figure and Ground. Together they make experiencing “outside any story”, and “inside a story” much clearer to appreciate.

We are not there yet! We need two more steps to go before plunging into Venerable Guo Xing’s method. We would like to ask the question: what happens when a Figure or Ground is changed? Now run the demo of an experiment (you need Java enabled browser to view it). This demo shows (i) how the intensity of two identical grey squares appear different because of the differences in their backgrounds, (ii) the intensities of two different backgrounds are gradually varied giving the impression that the intensities of the rectangles are varied too in different ways. To understand the second point, consider that you hold the figure (rectangle) intensity and color constant, and then change the background intensity and color. The rectangle color and intensity seem to change. Let us apply this idea to our “story” scenario. Let us say “living outside any story experience” is the Ground and “living inside story experience” is the Figure. If I change the Ground, then the experience of living inside the story changes too. Our goal is to change the Ground such that the combination of  “living inside a story” and “living outside any story” gives an experience that the “living inside story” does not exist (this is equivalent to the perceptual experience of sensing that square has disappeared by changing the background).

As a final step towards understanding Venerable Guo Xing’s Ch’an training in the workshop, let us enhance our earlier interpretation for Figure and Ground metaphor.  Look at M. C. Escher’s painting of Drawing Hands. This painting illustrates a new point that Figure (one hand) helps to construct the Ground (another hand), while the Ground helps to construct the first hand in our visual perceptual experience. Thus our perception of two objects happens by each object trying to construct the other, and both of these constructions happen simultaneously. As we said before, this simultaneous construction (more accurately precipitation) is not limited to visual experiences and can be extended to a wide range of our experiences. We can interpret the events of Living Ch'an Workshop using this explanation of simultaneous precipitation. That is, the “living in story” helps to precipitate “living outside any story” and vice versa, both happening simultaneously.

Now we are ready to go into Living Ch'an Workshop events. The workshop began with Venerable Guo Xing showing us a set of pictures. Let us go through this exercise slowly as it gives foundation for the rest of the exercises in the workshop. At the beginning of the workshop, many people in audience were in “their stories”. Our stories helped us appreciate the images shown. We reacted emotionally (because our stories provide these emotions). We already had some awareness (may be very small) at this point. Let us consider the experience of watching the images with our emotions as “living inside a story” and observing the world with awareness as “living outside any story”. Thus our watching of the images amounted to bringing these two experiences together as a single experience of Figure and Ground. Because the awareness was weak (“living outside the story” was weak), the “living inside story” experience dominates and we experience emotions.  

Then Venerable Guo Xing performed an important step – he changed the Ground (“living outside the story”). Remember the demo where the rectangle disappeared due to some changes in the background intensity and color? In order to change the Ground, Venerable Guo Xing took us through a meditation exercise. This increased our awareness levels. That is the “living outside any story” experiencing became stronger. He asked us to watch the images again, with a suggestion that we watch the pictures with the awareness developed in the meditation exercise. With this suggestion, he brought Figure and Ground together. Because the Ground has changed, when we watched the images with awareness, the emotions were experienced to a lesser extent than before. That is, the Figure and Ground combination is working towards a goal where you do not experience the Figure, “living inside a story”.

In the rest of the workshop, Venerable Guo Xing used a subtle technique, which looks so simple that it is very easy to miss its profound significance. We were asked to carry our badge on our head while balancing a ball on a narrow plastic tube. In this case, Figure is the story that has been playing out in our head or the conversation we make with our friends, and Ground is the awareness we gain by balancing the objects (badge or the ball on a tube). To understand the significance of this exercise, we need to revisit the exercise with images (previous paragraph). In that exercise, Venerable Guo Xing explicitly changed the Ground by asking us to do the meditation. Then he brought Figure and Ground together by asking us to be aware while watching images. In that exercise, Figure and Ground remained constant once they were put together. In the object balancing exercise, we allowed Figure (“living inside story”) and Ground (“living outside story”) to change while working together. This happened as we balanced objects over a prolonged period of time under different conditions. Thus each one of Figure and Ground is trying to precipitate the other while it is changing, as in Drawing Hands example. Thus we have a dynamic situation as in the demo of rectangle in front of a colored background.

Ch’an practitioners tell us that by prolonged practice of bringing attention to this combination of Figure and Ground, the story begins to disappear (as the rectangle did in our demo). We can bring in the right kind of attention to this combination by observing the emotions, tensions and attitude arising in us. Venerable Guo Xing has also used various aspects of our story to arise as Figure, such as sharing some aspect of our previous experience or giving feedback.

I would like to end this message by posing a question and then trying to answer it. Has this workshop enabled us to completely make our stories disappear? I think the workshop has provided us with important techniques that can help us deal with “living inside stories”. By diligent practice, using these techniques, we can come out of our stories and experience many possibilities.

2010 Livng Ch’an Workshop

by Martin Lin

This was the second time I participated in the Living CH’an Workshop held at the Vancouver Dharma Drum Centre. I learned a great deal when I participated in the workshop last time. In addition, Venerable Guo Xing Fashi was to lead the workshop, so I was quite excited to join this one. To my surprise, many people also came to the workshop despite a highly anticipated hockey game also took place on the same day. 

The theme of the workshop was for us to practice mindfulness and relaxation. Fashi taught us how to be mindful and relaxed through some demonstrations and hands-up practice.  For example, Fashi showed us how to relax by doing the fourth form of the Eight Form Moving Meditation (back stretching and bending) very slowly.  The key was to relax and be aware of the movement and sensation at various parts of the body, so we had to move extremely slowly.  In another exercise, we were asked to look at some pictures, in which some were appealing and some were very disturbing. Then, we were led through a sitting meditation session for about ten minutes.  When the same pictures were shown again, I felt less disturbed by the pictures that I though were very disturbing before.  This exercise showed emotions were the reflections of the mind, not an intrinsic property of the object or situation we perceive.  By calming the mind and being aware of the state of mind, we have the abilities to control what we experience; in other words, we experience what we choose to experience.  For example, when I greet a friend who ignores me, I can choose to see the friend as an impolite person and get angry; however, I can also choose to see the friend as simply too tired and forgive his ignorance.

A large part of the workshop was to put mindfulness and relaxations to practice. We were given a thick straw and a ping-pong ball. We then had to walk around the main hall holding the straw with the ping-pong ball on top of it. I did poorly in this exercise as my ping-pong ball kept falling off. However, I could be mindful on my feet every time it fell off.  Later in the day, Fashi geared up the exercise by asking us to place our name tags on top of our heads, which demanded more mindfulness and relaxation. However, toward the end of the day, Fashi geared up the exercise again by asking us to hold, in addition to what we were already holding, a thin straw in another hand with a marble ball on top. I couldn’t even stand still for one minute while holding three things, but I was not afraid nor did I ever feel frustrated. Considering that I was somehow a perfectionist and a nervous type, this was quite an accomplishment.

The last lesson was on letting go and make peace with whatever we experience. This was an important lesson because many people nowadays suffer from depression, which comes from trying hard to control things instead to letting things be the way they are. Fashi used the word ‘king’ as a verb when he gave examples, showing how most of the time we demand to get our own ways instead of understanding the true nature of the situation or things we are facing. The word ‘understanding’ shows real insight into things comes from ‘standing’-‘under’ things. In other words, fully accepting and embracing things. Without clear insight, people try hard to change things they cannot change. They become frustrated, angry, and depressed. However, depression can be avoided by being relaxed and mindful. This is because relaxed people do not waste energy on getting nervous. Instead, they are able to clearly aware their surroundings and experience, thereby obtaining insights into things. Awareness and insight developed from mindfulness calm people down and make them appreciate their experience. When people are satisfied, they can live a peaceful and happy life. During a group discussion session, we were discussing about satisfaction, an elderly lady in our group, Emiko, stated she was very satisfied with pretty much everything in her life. Her words were not hollow. She spent a day laughing and appreciating everything we did. Her deeds were the best examples of what Fashi tried to teach us.

The day ended quickly. I was again felt quite fulfilled and satisfied. I greatly appreciate the kindness of Venerable Guo Xing Fashi and all the Dharma Drum volunteers for providing such a spiritual feast.

Reflections on the Living Ch’an Workshop

by Jessica Wu

Last Sunday (February 28), I attended DDMBA’s Living Ch’an Workshop. To learn the Buddha Dharma through a workshop sounds new to me. In fact, I wasn’t sure what to expect since it is neither a dharma talk nor a traditional meditation class. Although the center informed us that the workshop aims to bring Ch’an into daily life, this goal still seemed abstract to me because I wasn’t fully aware of the meaning of Ch’an.

Anyway, on 9:30 in the morning, I joined around thirty five other English-speakers in the Ch’an hall. The workshop was entirely led by Venerable Guo Shiin Fa Shi, who started the day by showing us a video clip of a blindfolded girl passionately kissing a chimpanzee, thinking it is a boy. Coincidentally, I have seen this clip before and found it amusing. Seeing it again though, I found myself filled with great doubts—how is this relating to Ch’an??? Perhaps like me, many participants did not grasp the clip’s meaning until Fa Shi asked “Do you think the girl’s happiness comes from the boy or from herself?” Fa Shi’s question had made a vivid shock on me. I began to feel that the concept of “everything is created by the mind” is slowly coming to life…

Later that day, Fa Shi guided us to observe our (and others) physical/mental reactions under different circumstances and taught us to relax and become mindful through a series of activities. I realized that Fa Shi did not mention a single word of “Ch’an” or “Dharma” the entire day, but we definitely gained some direct experience on how to control our mind through shifting to right perspectives and adopting methods of awareness and relaxation. This experience made me feel more confident on both the Buddha Dharma and on myself.

Coming out of the temple, I felt I’ve tasted a bit of sweetness of Ch’an. It also left me with an urge to have my concepts clarified and a motivation to keep my practice going. (Oh, I hope the workshop could last for more days!) I find this way of learning is effective because it helps us to apply right views into the everyday contexts. I think Fa Shi must have undergone numerous works in order to show us that Ch’an is approachable and is alive. I feel very grateful for this opportunity; hope more and more people can feel the innumerable benefit of Living Ch’an. 

Thank you DDM!  J