Come and See: The Posture of True Meditation
Usually when we think about our meditation practice, we think about the experience during, the after effects, or the long term impact on how freely we feel when we move around our lives.
Take a moment to consider this question:
How do you approach your meditation?
Are you rushed and squeezing it in? Are you insistent on a particular experience? Are you clenched and determined to make it through without distractions? Are you shielding yourself against your mind? Are you already comparing yourself to how you were in the past on your best retreat or to someone you know or admire, wishing you had the experience you think would be the best kind?
The practice of “come and see,” ehipassiko in Pali, is so easily accessible to anyone. And yet, in fact, it is so rare to truly come across. That posture means you are not grasping after something. You are not already knowing. You are not judging and insisting. You are not anticipating or rejecting.
When I did my first Vipassana or insight retreat in Bodh Gaya in January 1985 at the Thai Temple, I arrived by train, bus, and bicycle rickshaw. That last leg, by rickshaw from the Gaya train station, started before dawn. The January air was chilled, and the wind tore right through my cyclist’s cotton shawl and turquoise checked dhoti. The pedals squeaked each turn, and a gently waving shroud of mist rippled over the dry riverbed to my left, a desert where during the Buddha’s time was once a thick tropical forest.
The talkative Indian man in my train car on the daylong journey from Delhi, as the 975 kilometers clicked off, one-by-one, click-clack, click-clack, putting distance in space and time between its passengers, the modern city, and a place in many ways little changed from 2,500 years ago had warned me of this deserted road.
“Beware the dacoits!” He admonished. “The bandits come out of nowhere and they’ll steal every last thing from you.”
I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. hadn’t learned yet, even after a couple of years, that when friendly fellow passengers cautioned me, they had my best interests in mind. They were fulfilling their paternal duty as they would for their own long-braided daughters. I was too preoccupied, wondering how I’d do in my twenty days of silence, rising before dawn and retiring late at night, sitting and walking, sitting and walking, as Sidhartha Gautama had done thousands of years before me.
I was checking my intention and motivation. I was egging myself on to be more sincere, to seek nothing less than full enlightenment, and to be determined to not move, not flinch, not be distracted. Periodically, I would let my right hand’s fingertips drop to the padded train seat, “As the earth is my witness,” I’d think. The gesture the Buddha made as he sat under the Bodhi tree and vowed to himself and the universe, that he would not move until he had penetrated the true nature of reality and was free from illusion, delusion, greed, lust, sloth, laziness, enmity, and anger.
As each shrill round of the rickshaw pedals cried out warnings like ravens in the dark, I shivered at shadows, looking around each denuded tree for dacoits. When my rickshaw wallah stopped to smoke a bidi and rest, I chanted mantras in my head to distract my mind, calm my nerves, and appeal to the protection of the devas, even though the tradition I was about to practice in raised an eyebrow at too much faith and superstition.
“Ehipassiko.” I thought to myself.
Come and see.
Like a child, looking at his mother’s outstretched hand to carefully choose the ripest of the fruits she held out for him,
ehipassiko is an attitude of curiosity, wonder, openness. That is what meditation is. Not a pressure to tie oneself up like a pretzel into shapes the knees,
ankles, and all the rest of the limbs are reluctant to twist into. Not a test of wills with the mind. Not a bashing of the ego to get it to comply like a docile and dull sheep. The fruits of meditation are as open as an upturned palm. Nothing hidden. Nothing secreted away. The meditator, dropping expectation, belief, indoctrination, and limitations, approaches the open hand, curious, free from veils of fear or delusion.
By the time we arrived, safe and sound, into the dusty center of Bodh Gaya, just stretching into morning activity, wood smoke from the three chai shops on the central square was beginning to curl above the mud-walled cooking stoves. Sleepy-headed youngsters were splashing their faces at the village water tap and haphazardly rinsing glasses for morning chai.
I thanked and paid my driver. Ordered ginger chai and butter toast and made my way by foot back out of town to the Burmese Vihara where I would wait a day or two until the ornate gold painted doors of the Thai Temple opened, and registration would begin by the barrack-like kutis where I’d stay for the duration of the retreat.
Open-handed. Without expectation or judgment. Curious and awake. Alert and relaxed. Unmoving and without tension. The posture of meditation.
On retreat, one session led into the other. Breathing, walking, eating. My cushion became my refuge. The marigolds were so fragrant their scent colored me orange when I slow-walked down the path. Lifting, moving, placing. Alert, attentive, aware. Open handed.
After dinner on the night of the full moon, we walked in silence to the great Mahabodhi Stupa, rising tall, shading the site where Sidhartha penetrated the last veils of ignorance and became the One who is Awake. We sat and walked through the damp chill of the night. Silent pilgrims sometimes came by with big tin kettles of sweet milk tea and throw-away pottery cups to leave a steamy chai by each meditator’s seat.
That night, as anticipation bled into nervous cold then into blank dullness then into frightened shadows, I sat, inner and outer, in an open handed posture. “Come and see for yourself.” the bodhi leaves rustled and whispered.
By the indeterminate light of dawn I was calm. Each night’s watch had passed.
A serenity washed through me, cleansing as a cold morning bath.
Those of us who had stayed all through the night silently rose, moving without words as one, out of the stupa grounds, down the empty road, past the rice fields, to the temple gates, where the guard let us in. Like the bhikkunis and bhikkhus of Nalanda, in procession, we joined the breakfast line for suji porridge, steaming coarse yellow semolina mixed with buttery ghee, maple brown jaggery chipped off from fat cakes of dried cane juice, a few fresh coconut chips and raisins in honor of the full moon.
The rest of the retreat passed in an unbroken stream. Open handed. Curious. Alert. Insights to see and let slip through the fingers of an upturned palm.
No striving, no compensating, no insistence, no distraction. Seamless with this fourth quality of the dhamma, come and see. Nothing occurred outside the posture of curious acceptance of what was occurring in the moment, simply because it was occurring. Wisdom arising from unclouded seeing of the effervescent nature of thought and feeling, and the presence of unbroken awareness throughout it all.
The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, to be seen here and now, timeless, inviting verification, pertinent, to be realized by the wise for themselves.
Aṅguttara Nikāya 11.12, Mahanama Sutta translated by Venerable Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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On March 28, 10AM-1PM US EST I’ll be leading a virtual meditation retreat to go into this more and to share that posture of ease.
I invite you to join me. We’ll drop into meditation where you can come and see for yourself.
All proceeds from the retreat go to fund teen mindfulness programs.
