Guest teacher Diana Clark gives loving attention to the koan-like Bahiya Sutta of early Buddhism, imaginatively walking in the protagonists’ shoes quite as one might do for a koan. The Buddha tells Bahiya: “In the seeing, Bahiya, there will be only what is seen; in the heard, only what is heard; in the cognized only what is cognized,” at which point “you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two: and just this is the end of suffering, Bahiya.”
Some great good news here is that if a sight doesn’t imply a seer, nor a thought a thinker, then this applies to every experience, not just happy ones or meditative states. Just-seeing and just-hearing, furthermore, are by nature vacant of clinging – clinging by seeking or clinging by avoiding. And isn’t “clinging” fairly synonymous with “selfing,” with its endless complication?
The Q & A afterward addresses questions like: how are Insight Meditation and Zen alike or different? What are their relative strengths and weaknesses? How to determine when thinking is useful or not? Did repetitions and stock phrases in the Pali Suttas evolve similarly to those in Homeric verse (also an oral tradition)?
Diana Clark, PhD teaches at a number of meditation and retreat centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, but primarily at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA. She was trained to be a retreat teacher by Gil Fronsdal and Andrea Fella and has spent years participating in meditation retreats, largely at Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Society and the Insight Retreat Center.
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Photo by Mariam Soliman on Unsplash