But it also put me back in touch with what I consider to be the touchstone of Buddhist practice, the felt sense of the impermanence of phenomenal existence, the illusory (and delusory) nature of the ego and/or the constructed personality, and lastly, back to a visceral discernment that this is only half the process that old Shakyamuni kicked off. This all needs to be counterbalanced by compassion.
The details are available here: http://www.bodhi.dhamma.org/. Check out the schedule and you'll have a reasonable idea of what I mean by arduous. However, I can only hint at what I mean by rewarding.
One of my bigger issues with so-called Mahayana practices is that they tend to minimize our enworldment without having investigated thoroughly, penetratively. One hundred hours of doing so is a good start and while I've engaged in variations of this type of practice, it's never been within these sets of parameters. Eyes closed and prolonged sitting doesn't give you a lot of options from running away, and all you're really doing is bearing witness to the chatter in the head and the perpetual twitching of the body. You don't do anything. This is the basis for Chan/Zen, for Daoist sitting practice and many others.and it's stuff I've done and am familiar with, but never with such prolonged intensity. I highly recommend it.
The other huge benefit to thesis that it has brought me back to the Pali Nikayas and the Abhidamma that grew from these early writings. There is great beauty and simplicity and directness in these teachings, but/and you can see how the later developments had to evolve from them. Basically, I find that everything that comprises the Mahayana is seeded in the Pali canon. It's equally obvious that the practices that characterize Mahayana had to happen to concretize the emphasis on compassion and emptiness. Additionally, Nagarjuna developed the Middle Way based on what could be called a proto-madhyamaka found in the Nikayas, if not just the nascent northern sutras.
What does this have to do with me? Well, just about everything having to do with why I'm in India. I don't know that I've framed it explicitly to myself until relatively lately, but this pilgrimage was also about investigating as thoroughly as possible Buddhism's roots and that includes practice. This is also where I have to raise questions regarding S.N. Goenka's vipassana.
While I don't doubt that his teacher derived this from his teacher, I'm not convinced that Goenkaji is correct in asserting thee primacy of the "kalapa" as the ultimate particle. He averts that a kalapa is a subatomic particle comprised of eight components and that a kalapa is indivisible, cannot be broken down further. He complicates the issue by saying that going down to the kalapa level,one can eventually go beyond it and achieve liberation.
The issue that I have with this is that no school of Buddhism would recognize the indivisibility of any entity. The beauty of the doctrine of dependent origination is seeing for oneself the emptiness of inherent existence of impounded phenomena. There have been intimations in earlier strata of Buddhist scripture where ultimate particles have been posited, but my understanding is that even these are seen to be transitory.
The other issue is that while I believe Goenkaji's spot on in emphasizing watching our internal processes and developing equanimity by doing so, I'm not so sure he's wholly correct in his assessment of mantrayana and other practices that are meant to get the practitioner to realize the emptiness of phenomenal existence. He's correct in that these can often be reduced to crutches and obstacles, but they can also be valuable tools.
Lastly, I can't find any citation that says that this is exactly the practice Shakyamuni was doing when he achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. It might have been a component, but I'm not so sure it's the whole process. Actually, it may not matter in the long run. There have been some remarkable people who have benefitted from. Goenka's teachings and I find the to be sound enough that they're part of my daily practice now.
Dhamma Bodhi in Bodhgaya, is beautifully bucolic, by the way. My friend Sanjay's dad is a managing trustee and I don't think he quite got what I was saying about meditation, but it doesn't matter; it was worth watching his face light up when he found out I was taking the course.
I wish I had pictures, but on the last day, my camera's batteries were done and my iPad washout of juice. You can't use electronics for the entire course. Then, on the tenth day, you can. You resume talking and reacclimate to communication before heading back to the world.
This is the pagoda at Dhammabodhi from the website.
Postscript:
After leaving Bodhgaya, I headed to New Delhi for a day or two. I spent a couple of wonderful hours at the National Museum. I originally went to check out a manuscript from Dunhuang, but the department was closed. Instead, I wound up looking at some of the most amazing sculpture from the sub-continent. I'll post pics later, but I'm also doing some research for a doc that I'll post for download about the influence, sometimes mutual, of Hindu on Buddhist sculpture.
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