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How to hold a bowl
Palzang
Veteran
One thing I've been noticing with people's reactions to President Obama's Inaugural Address (not necessarily here, but in general, including news reporters and commentators) is the degree to which people listen - or don't listen - through their own set of filters and conditioned responses and how that prevents them from fully appreciating what they're listening to. There is a teaching in Buddhism that addresses this point, and I think it may behoove us to contemplate it and apply it, as I think it applies whether we're listening to a Dharma teaching, a speech, or your own child.
Listening to teaching is like pouring milk into a bowl. If we think that we don't need the teaching or that it doesn't apply to us or that we already know all about it, then it is like holding your bowl upside down. Your bowl will be empty.
If you're sleepy or not paying attention or just focused on the dramas playing in your head, then it will be like holding a cracked bowl. The milk will go in the bowl but then leak out, so you'll be left again with an empty bowl.
If you listen to the teaching with a judgmental mind full of preconceptions and even malevolence, then it will be like pouring milk into a bowl of poison. You will end up with a bowl of poisoned milk so tainted that it can be no benefit to you.
The best way to listen is to simply hold your mind like a bowl, upright and cleansed of all impurities. This way your bowl will be full of milk, and you will be able to enjoy it and receive full benefit from it. The same way with listening, you have to train yourself to basically empty your mind and make it open to receive the teaching, and you have to train yourself to receive the teaching without making judgments about it or otherwise tainting it by putting your own spin on it.
I think that President Obama had a lot of good things to say, but I wonder how many people actually allowed themselves to hear it. The same, of course, with Dharma teachings or any time you have communication with someone. Actually hearing them can make a world of difference in how you respond to them.
Just my two centavos.
Palzang
Listening to teaching is like pouring milk into a bowl. If we think that we don't need the teaching or that it doesn't apply to us or that we already know all about it, then it is like holding your bowl upside down. Your bowl will be empty.
If you're sleepy or not paying attention or just focused on the dramas playing in your head, then it will be like holding a cracked bowl. The milk will go in the bowl but then leak out, so you'll be left again with an empty bowl.
If you listen to the teaching with a judgmental mind full of preconceptions and even malevolence, then it will be like pouring milk into a bowl of poison. You will end up with a bowl of poisoned milk so tainted that it can be no benefit to you.
The best way to listen is to simply hold your mind like a bowl, upright and cleansed of all impurities. This way your bowl will be full of milk, and you will be able to enjoy it and receive full benefit from it. The same way with listening, you have to train yourself to basically empty your mind and make it open to receive the teaching, and you have to train yourself to receive the teaching without making judgments about it or otherwise tainting it by putting your own spin on it.
I think that President Obama had a lot of good things to say, but I wonder how many people actually allowed themselves to hear it. The same, of course, with Dharma teachings or any time you have communication with someone. Actually hearing them can make a world of difference in how you respond to them.
Just my two centavos.
Palzang
0
Comments
A professor comes to ask questions of a Zen guru, and it quickly becomes apparent that the professor is more interested in telling the guru his own opinions rather than listening to what the guru is saying. The guru suggests they have tea together, and proceeds to pour the professor a cup... and continues to pour as the cup overflows.
Finally the professor cannot contain himself: "What are you doing??" he asks, "the cup is full!"
"Like this cup," the guru replies, "your mind is already full of ideas and opinions. How can I teach you if you do not first empty it?"
...or something like that
Cranky old professors are like that. They could boycot multiverses of ideas out of their dusty existence to the level Maria Theresa of Austria as seemingly chic.