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Awakening, Buddha Nature, and Our Subtle Body

Your own mind, uncontrived, is the body of ultimate enlightenment. To remain undistracted within this is meditation’s essential point. Realize the great, boundless, expansive state.

— NIGUMA, FOREMOTHER OF THE SHANGPA LINEAGE, FROM HER SONG OF REALIZATION

Suzuki Roshi, the preeminent twentieth-century Zen master who helped establish Zen in America, once said, “Realizing emptiness is like drinking milk at the mother’s breast.” This means that resting in emptiness nourishes and sustains us. It enables us to grow. A mother nursing her baby is an image of profound connection. This counteracts the notion that realizing emptiness brings us to a disengaged, uncaring attitude, as if emptiness means, “It’s all empty, so nothing matters.” The vast open expanse, inseparable from awareness itself, is called Prajnaparamita, the Great Mother.

One of my other teachers, Kalu Rinpoche’s close beloved disciple, Bokar Rinpoche, once said to us, “There is the nothing-to-do and the must-to-do.” That is, there is nothing to do because we are already awakened, but what we must do is discover and realize this for ourselves; otherwise we remain caught in our habitual patterns of ignorance and suffering, failing to reach our full potential.

This section goes in depth into Buddhist teachings in order to set the stage for the Love on Every Breath meditation.

Philosophical Underpinnings

The Love on Every Breath meditation helps us to connect with our awakened nature of wisdom and love. It helps us live moment to moment from our inherent kindness and goodness. It helps us unlock the unlimited wisdom and love at the core of who we are.

Understanding the philosophical underpinnings of Buddhist meditation in general, and Vajrayana meditation in particular, fundamentally supports this process and enhances the power of our meditation to benefit ourselves and others. Buddhism at its core seeks to alleviate suffering. This is what motivated the Buddha to teach and what the entire path of Buddhist practice is designed to liberate us from. The word dharma in this context means “the teachings of the Buddha.” Dharma helps to alleviate the root of our suffering. Buddha taught that life is characterized by suffering, and the reason we suffer is because we are ignorant of the nature of reality and of who we truly are. In Buddhism, to awaken means that we penetrate the veil of ignorance to realize the true nature or truth of our mind and reality. All Buddhist meditations are designed to assist us to awaken. The Buddha taught that we inherently have the seed potential of enlightenment and, in fact, are already awakened. In a Buddhist context, the English words awakened and enlightened mean the same thing and are used interchangeably. I usually use the word awakened because it implies a process, and awakening is a process.

In order to better understand the Love on Every Breath meditation, we will go over apparent truth and genuine truth, as well as “true nature” and “buddha nature,” and how this relates to what is called the “subtle body” and the breath in Vajrayana Buddhism.

It is helpful to look at the larger context of the Vajrayana. Vajrayana is a part of the Mahayana. The Sanskrit term Mahayana, or “Great Vehicle,” is called the Buddhist vehicle of the bodhisattva path. Yana means vehicle in the sense that it takes us to the other shore. This is a famous Buddhist metaphor for awakening from samsara, the cyclic existence of suffering, to the freedom and peace of nirvana. The Mahayana encompasses the meditations and their foundations, the philosophical teachings. Together these enable us to achieve the goal of the bodhisattva ideal and path — complete awakening to liberate ourselves and all sentient beings from suffering.

Buddhism teaches that what we usually think of as reality is in fact an illusion. It’s not that things and beings don’t exist at all — they just don’t exist the way we usually think they do. It is an illusion that we are separate beings. The Mahayana standpoint is to fully embrace the illusion with love and caring. Our suffering hurts! Other people’s suffering hurts! We deeply feel pain, joy, and the myriad of human emotions. Our path is simultaneously one of realization and love. What we do makes all the difference in the world. Each moment we are experiencing past karma and creating new karma. When we are triggered emotionally, we can stop for a moment before reacting and consciously respond to what is arising. We create our state of mind. If we rest in loving-kindness with others and ourselves, this then is the consciousness we live in.

The Two Truths

Every school of Buddhism has philosophical teachings that form the basis for the various meditations. One of the most important philosophical tenets is called the two truths, which refers to the nature of reality. These two truths are genuine truth and apparent truth, which are also translated as ultimate truth and relative truth. It is very useful on the path of awakening to discuss the two truths. I will do so from a Vajrayana perspective, the larger context of this meditation.

The Buddha taught that genuine truth is beyond the dualisms of apparent truth, beyond the polarities of nonexistence and existence, of nihilism and eternalism. This truth is what Buddha called the “middle way.” Further, the phenomena of sights, sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts, and emotions that we constantly experience are ever-changing, insubstantial, and conceptually designated. All that appears to our senses and our mental faculty arises due to causes and conditions. Apparent truth is the truth of causality: Everything is interdependent. Appearances are not only ever-changing, but the causes and conditions that produce them are empty of true existence. They appear to exist. In actuality they don’t exist the way we think they do. But neither are they nonexistent. We live our lives in the apparent truth. The mystery of reality is beyond duality of existence and nonexistence, of subject and object, of one and many.

Realizing the nature of mind and phenomena is the crux of realization in Buddhism. The Buddha taught that the fundamental cause of our suffering is that we think we are individuals. We take the fact that we have a body, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and consciousness as evidence that we are a self, separate from all else. Everything else becomes “other,” and duality is created. Our dualistic worldview is created by this split of subject and object. As the subject, we want to acquire the objects we see as beneficial to us, and we want to get rid of that which we deem unhelpful. We are indifferent to other phenomena that we consider unimportant. As we grasp at objects that do not truly exist (they are not separate, solid, or permanent), we are frustrated and dissatisfied with the results of this process. True satisfaction and happiness come from realizing the genuine truth beyond this apparent reality.

Genuine truth is the unchanging, nondual, irreducible nature of mind and reality. It is pure, uncontrived, unimpeded awareness. All that is, all phenomena, has the same true nature and manifests inseparably as the union of form and emptiness. The two truths are inseparable. The true nature of apparent reality is genuine reality.

It is said that the Buddha realized the genuine truth of all that is, and he fully understood apparent reality and how it functions. He could see all the causes and effects playing out. He sometimes talked about what he saw and knew on the apparent level, for example, explaining to people what they had done in a past life. On the Buddhist path we train in realizing and resting in the simultaneity of genuine and apparent reality. Nevertheless, it is realization of the genuine truth that sets us free.

When we realize genuine reality, love arises as a response of our true heart to ourselves and others. In the words of the third Karmapa,^* Rangjung Dorje (1284–1339 CE), in the Aspiration of Mahamudra Prayer:

While the nature of beings has always been full enlightenment,

Not realizing this, they wander in endless samsara.

For the boundless suffering of sentient beings

May overwhelming compassion be born in my being.

While such compassion is active and never ending,

In the moment of compassion, its essential nature is nakedly clear.†

This conjunction is the undeviating supreme path;

Inseparable from it, may I practice it day and night.³

This quote from one of the most beloved prayers of the Tibetans acknowledges the genuine reality that beings are awakened but do not know it. The Karmapa prays for monumental compassion to be born in himself to address the apparent truth of the suffering of beings. In the midst of vast compassion, the experience of the emptiness of self, the emptiness of the activity (compassion), and the emptiness of the one receiving the compassion, the 24/7 meditation is resting in the union of these two truths. Love meets the insubstantial, rainbow-like suffering of beings, soothing the pain. Resting uninterruptedly in the two truths is called stabilization. Generally, this is quite a process, as we get thrown out of our realization by the strength of our habitual patterns and back into duality as soon as we get triggered mentally or emotionally. Resting in true nature and meeting our experience with love purifies and liberates our karma, and it brings all our qualities into full manifestation.

What is our true nature? What is the genuine truth? These are not seen as two separate things in Buddhism. The genuine truth is that everything seems to exist but is empty of actually existing. Phenomena like trees, mountains, rivers, animals, humans, buildings, and cars appear to exist but do not. In an apparent sense they do, of course. True nature is that phenomena and emptiness are connate, inseparable. Genuine reality is referred to as appearance-emptiness, awareness-emptiness.

The vast empty nature of everything is called shunyata. It is the union of form and emptiness. In the Heart Sutra, the most famous Mahayana scripture, Chenrezig states:

Form is empty, emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, formation, and consciousness are empty.

Thus, Shariputra, all phenomena are emptiness: They have no characteristics, no birth, no cessation, no stains, no freedom from stains, no decrease, and no increase.

Thus, Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no tactile sensation, no phenomenon; no eye-faculty potential, no mental-faculty potential, no mental-consciousness potential, and nothing in between; no ignorance nor any ending of ignorance, no aging and death nor any ending of aging and death, and nothing in between.⁴

Genuine reality is not simply emptiness. Awareness itself is empty, yet present. All that is, is the union of awareness and emptiness. However, we have split reality into a dualistic experience. Awareness is said to be luminous clarity.

The most profound realization in Tibetan Buddhist teachings is called “realizing the true nature of mind.” In this usage, mind means awareness or consciousness. There isn’t a reality outside of mind. Everything is inseparable from mind, from awareness or consciousness. This does not fit into our concepts of what is true at all. It doesn’t seem logical to us. This is why it is said that reality as it is (dharmata in Sanskrit) is beyond concept. It is not possible to have realization of true nature through the thinking mind. The thinking mind operates in a dualistic way. Thinking is basically a binary process where truth is either this or that. But genuine truth is beyond polarity. Realization of genuine truth happens in direct experience. We need to have stable concentration, called samatha in Sanskrit, and then direct our concentration to investigate the nature of reality in our direct experience. This is called vipashyana‡ in Sanskrit, meaning “insight” or “inquiry.”

Kalu Rinpoche illustrated our own inner awakened nature to us once by holding up a large, pristine crystal and covering it up with many layers of his robe. He explained that the robe symbolizes the many layers of ignorance that hide the beautiful awake radiance of who we truly are. The path in Buddhism is peeling off the layers. Meditation, study, and living with kindness and integrity allow us to move past the obscurations blocking us from reaching awakening.

Who we truly are is luminosity, clarity, and emptiness. Who we truly are is the inseparable union of wisdom and love. Who we truly are is radiant goodness. This is our buddha nature, which is a seed, our potential for enlightenment. However, buddha nature is not a thing — if we look for it, we won’t see it. This is called “being empty of being a thing.” We know that our mind is not a thing. But we think that our mind is dependent on our brain, encapsulated in our body. This is not the case. Who we truly are is deathless and birthless. Consciousness can and is obscured on an apparent level, but not in actuality. It is primordially pure.

From the perspective of genuine reality, we are already awakened. The difficulty is that we do not realize who and what we are. One of the Sanskrit terms for our innate awakened nature is tathagatagarbha. Tathagata means “thus gone one,” gone beyond samsara. This refers to all the buddhas, the fully enlightened ones. Garbha means “potential” or “seed.” Buddha means “awakened” or “enlightened.” Our buddha nature is the seed potential we all have for full enlightenment. The seed will grow into a vibrant, alive plant if given the right conditions. Not only that, it is the part of us that is always awake. That has always been awake. We are usually completely out of touch with this aspect of ourselves. Of course, in actuality, our buddha nature pervades ourselves as well as all that is, but from a relative point of view, we can speak of it as a part of ourselves.

There is a famous metaphor for our buddha nature. We are walking along a dusty road and feel something in the dust under our feet. We reach to pick it up, clean it off, and it turns out to be a jewel! Do we keep it with us, or do we throw it back onto the ground? This is our situation. There is a jewel, our buddha nature, inside of us, covered over. Are we going to pick it up and cherish it or ignore it, leaving it on the road in the dust?

Jennifer Welwood captures this in her poem “The Jewel Inside”:

The jewel inside has grown dusty.

What out there could have captured you so

That you forgot all about this one?

Feel the tragedy of that error.

And see: Even now, the tears of your grief

Are washing the dust away.⁵

Our Awakened Nature and Our Shadow Side

The Love on Every Breath meditation helps us to connect with our awakened nature. We become aware of this by noticing in the moment, and in later reflection, those instances where our spontaneous goodness emerged, the times when our hearts were moved and we simply acted. For example, people who leap to help another in distress, even at the risk of their own safety. We all have the inherent tendency to come to the aid of someone in distress. We can also see in ourselves the kernel of goodness that underlies what we do. For example, the teenager who wants to go to college to become a teacher, so she can help inner-city kids learn and grow, or the man who shields another with his body. For some of us, the layers covering our altruism are many, but nevertheless it is there in all of us. As we become aware of this basic goodness in ourselves, it gives us a glimpse of our awakened nature. We begin to have a felt sense of our inherent goodness and loving-kindness. It’s like the sun poking its head out from behind the clouds. It is helpful if we acknowledge this in ourselves and in other people. We can learn to rest in this more and more and cultivate the closeness with our essence.

If we usually don’t see our true nature, we also don’t see our shadow side. Both of these are incredibly important, as getting in touch with our basic goodness not only is the path to realization but helps us face our shadow. Connecting with our basic goodness is not about feeding the ego. It’s not narcissistic and doesn’t increase our narcissism. It joins us with our humility and compassion. The more we can feel our true goodness, the more we are able to look at, be with, and work through our shadow material. Once we know that our neurotic, confused, insecure, aggressive parts are not who we are, it gives us courage to consciously work with our shadow side. Otherwise, it is too scary. If we don’t have enough sense of our basic goodness, the ego will block us from looking at our more neurotic parts because it can’t handle it. It’s too disconcerting. It feels dangerous to the ego.

We defend against seeing our negativity, our control issues, and our ego strategies. We can’t bear to face them because we think that is who we are. When we know that is not who we are, we become willing and courageous enough to face ourselves. We can transform. We can allow our negative patterns to be liberated by not acting them out. For most of us, this is a long-term project. It doesn’t happen overnight. We have to quiet the voice inside that tells us we are not up to the task. But what is the other option? Not waking up? Life will provide us with suffering either way. Then our happiness is always transitory, dependent on good circumstances. And good circumstances are not always under our control. This is an opportunity to turn our suffering into the path of awakening.

Subtle Body Teachings

The subtle body is not physical reality but rather a pattern in the interface between mind and body. It is the intersection of our material and nonmaterial manifestation. It is a phenomenon and, as such, is an apparent truth, just like our physical body. On the path of awakening it is purified, transformed, developed, and eventually awakened. Awakening is not only mental. It happens in the entirety of who we are, including in the physical and subtle bodies.

Centuries of meditation and yogic practice have brought understanding about the subtle body, which comprises what are called in Sanskrit nadis (channels, pronounced “nadees”), prana (movement, air principle, closely connected with the breath), and bindu (energetic aliveness or vital energy in every molecule). In Tibetan these are called tsa, lung, and tigli. The chakras are energetic centers within the central channel.^§ In Love on Every Breath, we work with and in the heart chakra. The central channel is said to be about a dime’s width, and it runs from the root chakra in the genital area straight up to the crown chakra at the top of the head, slightly in front of the spine. The prana runs through the central channel as well as through the other eighty-four thousand channels said to be in the subtle body. For unawakened beings, the prana is restricted, running through the channels that are wired according to our neurotic habit patterns and karma. The suboptimal wiring of the channels creates blocks and detours in the flow of prana, causing the prana to flow in less-than-advantageous ways. It is said that after enlightenment, the nadis in the Buddha’s subtle body were completely rewired in the optimal way. Researchers who investigate the relationship between meditation and the brain are finding that this rewiring is not metaphorical, but actual.⁶

The Importance of Posture and Eye Placement

Posture is critical for meditation and for rewiring to occur. There are various points of posture, but the first step, and most crucial, is to sit upright. This allows the subtle body channels to straighten and the prana to flow in a proper way. It allows for natural presence to open and stabilize. You want to be comfortable without tension. If normally you do not have great posture, sitting up straight may be uncomfortable at first and take a while to get used to. It is good to have someone well versed in meditation posture check you out. Oftentimes, we can’t tell for ourselves if we are leaning to the front or back or to one side. It is optimal to sit cross-legged but it is not necessary. Masters agree that sitting in a chair is fine, as long as the posture is correct. You may need a pillow under your bum to ensure that you are not leaning back. Many chairs are angled the exact wrong way for good posture. Once you are seated properly, relax into your body, maintaining your healthy posture. Again, relaxing may take a bit of time, but if you stay with good posture and consciously let go of tension, it will become comfortable.

As for eye placement, in Vajrayana Buddhism, we meditate with eyes open. An exception to this is when you are doing a meditation involving lots of imagination or visualization; then it is okay to close your eyes. When your eyes are open, let go of the tendency to grab on to the visual field. This is an unconscious tendency — we can become aware of this and let it go. Instead, let your gaze be soft, and let your eyes look slightly downward, at a forty-five-degree angle. Let your eye consciousness be open, without grabbing on to anything visually. Don’t block your field of vision either. For Love on Every Breath, have your eyes open for the first and last step of resting in awareness. In the creative phase of the meditation, when you are visualizing, it is fine to close your eyes to aid concentration.

Eventually, keeping the eyes open during the creative phase is valuable in order to be able to rest in awareness during our moment-to-moment daily experience. In this way we can mix meditation with daily life. This also helps with realization of our true nature. If all our senses are open, without any grabbing on or pushing away, we can rest in the vividness of our present experience. Eventually, we can come to realize the essential, unchanging, and self-liberating essence of all our experience. In our Mahamudra tradition, specific instructions and inquiries done in meditation help bring this to fruition.

Activities like yoga, meditation, qigong, and tai chi can rewire our subtle body. The channels open and straighten, allowing prana to circulate more evenly and fully. However, our mind also needs to change; we need to work on disengaging from and releasing unwholesome habit patterns, or the rewiring won’t stick. You may have noticed this if you have done a lot of yoga — you can feel incredibly good after a yoga session, until your normal neurotic patterns rear their head, and if you act them out, they may affect the body. For example, when I was doing hours a day of hatha yoga in my early twenties, sometimes I would feel so light that I would eat too much after yoga. It felt like I was taking two steps forward, one step backward.

Watching the breath also helps bring the mind to peace. Every time we relax and become present in our basic meditation practice, our prana settles down because mind and prana are strongly linked. This is one of the reasons that meditation de-stresses us. The subtle movement of prana in the body and the mind intimately affect each other. If the mind is agitated, there is corresponding agitation in the subtle body, affecting the physical body. This happens with emotions as well. An easy way to understand this is in the experience of anxiety or fear. When we are anxious, we may feel butterflies in our stomach or our heart may be racing. If we are suddenly afraid, we may get the feeling that our heart is in our throat. The latter is the prana rising up the central or side channels too quickly. Tibetan Buddhist yogic literature states, “Where mind goes, prana goes; where prana goes, mind goes.” When we actively engage with our breath with specific breathing practices, called grabbing hold of prana, both the mind and the movement of energy in the body can be directed toward awakening, toward the cultivation of love and other qualities.

Love on Every Breath works with the breath as well as with our spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and subtle body aspects all at once to hasten awakening. The breath is used as a tool for awakening our love and heart chakra. This is different from the way most meditators watch or follow the breath, as a way of stabilizing the mind in concentration. In this meditation, one directs the breath in and out of the heart center, bringing the mind and awareness into the heart center. The breath is employed as part of an internal transformational process.

A Subtle Body Experience

Transmission of awakened mind from a teacher to a student, through touch or mind-to-mind connection, can be powerful. For a student, it can be simply an “aha moment,” an energetic opening experience, or it can occur in other ways. I had a subtle body energetic experience of this in my late twenties while in the Himalayan foothills. The sixteenth Karmapa had his main monastery outside Tibet in Sikkim, a country annexed in the midseventies by India. In those days we needed a special permit to go to Sikkim, due to border issues between India and China. These permits were quite complicated to obtain, but I managed to get one in Darjeeling. I made my way, with a friend, to Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, and the next day, in an old English jeep from the 1940s, piled high with huge sacks of cilantro and filled with people. It was 1978, and in those days, the only cars available were old jeeps that the British had left behind when they gave India its independence in 1947. We climbed into one, and off we drove to His Holiness Karmapa’s monastery. We jolted along the curvy mountain road for about an hour, until we arrived at the gates of the temple compound.

That first trip I stayed just four days. An extraordinary thing happened on the last day. My friend had already departed, so I went to say good-bye to Karmapa on my own. When greeting or taking leave of a high lama, it’s traditional to offer a kata, a white silk scarf, which is symbolic of offering our pure heart. Early morning, kata in hand, I went to see His Holiness to give him my deep gratitude and to say good-bye. He was in his private home on the monastery grounds, sitting in a room with many windows looking out onto the evergreens and snowcapped mountains.