Life of a Meditator: An Interview with Bhikkhu Anālayo 2023

Life of a Meditator (Part 1) An Interview with Bhikkhu Anālayo

2023

https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/life-of-a-meditator-part-1-an-interview-with-bhikkhu-analayo/

Q:

 Bhante, you spend much of your time in solitary retreat;

 perhaps you could tell us more about how you came to develop such a strong interest in meditation in the course of your life and also how that relates to your scholarly activities.

 It would be interesting to know more about your personal history.

 Maybe we can get started with the question:

 How did you come into contact with meditation?

A:

 When I was about eight years old, I started practicing Judo, a Japanese martial art.

 At the beginning and the end of each training session, we would all sit in silence.

 That was basically my first encounter with meditation.

Martial arts continued to be of much interest to me for a considerable part of my life.

 From having trained in Judo, I proceeded to practice Aikido, another Japanese martial art.

 Both are what we could perhaps call grappling martial arts.

 Aikido has very beautiful circular movements, which fascinated me.

 It is also one of the very few, perhaps even the only, martial art that is entirely defensive.

 There are no aggressive motions.

 During that period my interest in meditation also started to grow, and I eventually practiced Zen in the Soto tradition.

In order to study also some striking martial arts, I later trained in Baguazhang, which comes from China and also incorporates circular movements.

 Finally, I ended up training in Chen-style Taijiquan, which moves the energy in circular ways, spiraling through the body—very powerful.

 By that time, I already had a strong regular meditation practice.

 Chen-style Taijiquan became my favorite of these four and, although I am no longer a martial artist, I still do some of the basic exercises related to the energy work in this form of Taijiquan.

Besides introducing me to meditation, I think the many years of martial arts training have strengthened my self-discipline.

 It is due to that training that I can put myself to any task I decide I want to do and then I just get it done.

Q:

 What religious upbringing did you have as a child?

A:

 I had a very traditional Catholic upbringing.

 Every Sunday we went to church, and we said prayers before and after every meal.

 But when I was about twelve years old, I stopped participating in that and eventually left the Church.

 I think I need to explain a bit the background to that decision.

From the age of ten I had been very interested in the evolution of species.

 I would go on excursions organized by the Museum of Natural Sciences in my town to search for fossils.

 I was actually the only kid on these excursions;

 the others were all adults.

 I found this so fascinating:

 you break open a stone, and inside you find the remains of an animal or plant that lived many millions of years ago.

 Then you try to identify what type of animal or plant this was, in order to locate it within the overall evolution of species.

 For example, birds evolved from reptiles, which at some point started to jump from one tree to another, to avoid predators.

 In the course of many generations, they developed wings.

This fascination is something that, at least according to my mother, also informs my later academic research:

 the wish to understand how things line up over time and what conditions influenced them.

 Often, when I had made some academic discovery, my mother would say:

 “Look, my boy has found another fossil.”

 I think she was right;

 it was and still is the same type of fascination, of wanting to find out, and the wish to place things into a historical perspective.

But that type of perspective did not sit well with the Catholic authorities of my childhood, who were insisting on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.

 Yet, I had myself broken up those stones and seen the fossils.

 I failed to see how the evidence I had witnessed myself could be reconciled with the idea that God created the world in a few days.

 So eventually I refused to go to church on Sundays or to participate in meal prayers, and as soon as I became old enough to be able to do so legally, I terminated my membership in the Church.

This reflects another characteristic trait of mine, in that when I feel I am supported by the evidence, I am willing to stand up against the rest of the world.

 If someone presents reasonable arguments or evidence, I am happy to change my opinions.

 But I won’t be swayed by the majority.

 For me at that age to stand up against the whole family, against the parish priest, and against the teacher of religion at school was quite something.

 But I pushed through, as none of them could counter my arguments.

 Similarly, in my academic work, many of my major discoveries result from not going along with the majority.

Q:

 Besides your interest in martial arts and in the evolution of species, was there anything else that made you develop a spiritual interest?

A:

 Yes, something happened when I was about thirteen or fourteen years old.

 In our family, the person I felt particularly close to was my grandfather on my mother’s side.

 My parents were so busy with work that they simply did not have much spare time, but he always had time for me, and he loved me very much.

 If he went travelling, he would bring me gifts, and we often spent time together talking.

 One time, when I was alone with him, he had a heart attack and died right in front of me.

For me this was a somewhat traumatic experience—the sudden loss of the person I loved so much.

 I couldn’t cry, though.

 I was just totally quiet, withdrawn into myself and watching what was happening, seeing how others reacted in a way that to me seemed to be reflecting their underlying fear of their own deaths.

 There was a large number of people at the funeral, since he had been highly respected by everyone.

 But they all quickly shifted from grief to drinking and eating, as if nothing had really happened.

 They right away tried to distract themselves with something else.

My grandfather’s death really made me realize that I needed to face mortality—both my own and that of others.

 This has been a theme that has continued throughout my life.

 Every day I practice recollection of death.

 Moreover, if I want to do something, I will do it right away and wholeheartedly.

 Because who knows when I or others will die?

 So my grandfather had in a way given me the most important gift he could ever have given me.

 He left behind this central message for me:

 Face mortality!

Q:

 That is indeed a powerful gift.

 Moving on from your childhood experiences, what motivated you to go to Asia?

A:

 The decision to go to Asia was somewhat accidental, so I need to give a bit of background as to how this unfolded.

 My interest in the evolution of species had gradually shifted to the history of human civilizations, so when I went to university, I decided to study history.

 I also felt a need to do something that not only produces knowledge but also helps others, as I had become aware of my own privilege in being born in Europe, compared to the situation of many in what we now call the Global South.

 So I developed a special interest in Latin American history.

There was only a single professor for this branch of history at my university, and I ran into a problem with him regarding the topic to choose for my master’s thesis.

 He wanted me to do some rather boring research, because he wanted to use the results for a book he was planning to write.

 My research was to be on the economic relationships between the banker family Rothschild and the state of Jalisco in Mexico during a particular decade.

 This would have required spending many days in dusty archives collecting data.

 But I wanted to do something related to my ideals about human rights and democracy.

 My whole motivation was to make the world a better place, rather than just assembling some dry facts.

 Even though I made it clear that I definitely did not want to do that, he kept pushing, and I kept resisting.

Since there was no way of getting around him, I decided it is better I leave for some time to go travelling.

 I had been working in various jobs while at the university and had saved quite a bit of money, allowing me to go abroad for an extended time.

 Because of my ongoing interest in martial arts and meditation, I decided to head for India and China.

 The plan was just to take an extended holiday, not to stay and live there.

 I had lived abroad earlier, spending about two years in Italy working as a model and learning the language, a year working in the UK to improve my English, and a year in Mexico studying for a semester at a local university and improving my Spanish.

 Each time I had decided to go and live abroad, but this time the idea was just to travel a bit to get out of that impasse with my master’s thesis.

Q:

 As you just went for an extended holiday to Asia, in what way did this lead to you becoming a monk?

A:

 I first went to India, studying Hatha yoga up in the Himalayas and also spending time at the burning ghats in Varanasi to reflect on mortality.

 When my visa was about to expire, I was advised to go to Thailand to get a new visa for India and that a good place to stay while in Thailand would be Wat Suan Mokkh.

 So, from Bangkok airport I went straight to Wat Suan Mokkh to sit a retreat on mindfulness of breathing.

The retreat at Wat Suan Mokkh was a major revelation for me.

 So far, my meditation had just been sitting silently, without awareness that there was more to meditating than just that.

 During my involvement with Zen, I had not come to know much about the Buddhist background and my ideas about meditation were mainly focused on how to behave at the bodily level:

 how to get up, walk, and sit down again, and then how to stay seated without making any motion.

 But the detailed instructions on mindfulness of breathing given at Wat Suan Mokkh made me realize that, besides sitting still, there is also something to be done with the mind.

 Moreover, I discovered that there is a rich and sophisticated philosophy and culture in the background of such meditation practices.

 I was so impressed and amazed.

At the same time, however, I also realized how thoroughly distracted my mind was.

 They rang the gong to signal the beginning of the sitting meditation, and I would be aware of my first breath and then just be lost in thought until they rang the gong again to signal that the period was over.

 Alternating with the sitting, we were told to do walking meditation by choosing two palm trees and walking back and forth between them.

 I would regularly walk past my second palm tree, because by the time I reached it I had completely forgotten what I was doing.

At the end of the retreat, I came to the conclusion that, although meditation is much more profound than I had thought previously, I was not the well-suited for it.

 My mind was too distracted.

 So, I thought I should better forget about meditation and just practice martial arts.

Ajahn Buddhadāsa – Image from Suan Mokkh Monastary

On the last day of the retreat Ajahn Buddhadāsa gave a Dhamma talk, and something he said at that time, which unfortunately I no longer remember exactly, gave me the confidence that I could do it, however distracted I may be.

 He turned my life around at that point, as I would otherwise not have continued dedicating myself to meditation.

There was a foreign monk at Wat Suan Mokkh who invited me to come with him to another monastery close to the seaside.

 We arrived there shortly before the annual rainy season retreat, and it is a custom in Thailand that young men, at least once in their life, take temporary ordination during the three months of the rainy season retreat and after that return to lay life.

 Preparations for that were underway, and the abbot invited me to join in.

 So I got ordained with only a rather hazy idea of what it means to be a Buddhist monk, having just arrived in Thailand a few weeks earlier, and also with very little knowledge of Theravāda Buddhism—basically only what I remembered from the Dhamma talks during the retreat.

 That is how I became a monk.

Like the others in the group of temporary ordinands, I received basic monastic training at the main monastery, but otherwise I spent the rainy season in a cave situated within the wider area of the monastery, on top of a small mountain that was surrounded by the ocean on three sides.

 In the early morning I climbed down to the bottom of the mountain to meet a senior monk who had taken the role of being my monastic tutor.

 We would go together along the beach to a nearby village to beg alms, return, and eat together at his hut, and then I would usually just go back to the cave for the rest of the day.

 It was all very romantic, had it not been for my distracted mind.

At the end of the rainy season, I asked if I could stay in robes for longer, and the abbot readily agreed.

 So I spent about two years in robes.

 During that time, I did a one-month retreat in the Mahāsi method, which I found very interesting, although it somehow did not work so well for my type of personality, as I felt a bit disconnected from my body.

 After that, I did a 10-day retreat in the Goenka method, which I believe was the first time, or at most the second time, such a course was conducted in Thailand;

 at that time they did not yet have their own center.

 That practice worked very well for me.

 The body scanning technique fitted in smoothly with my martial arts training and familiarity with the body and its energies, and it also helped me to counter my tendency to distraction by rooting attention in the body.

 This became my main practice for a long time to come.

Eventually, however, the time had come to return to Germany, as there were a number of things that needed to be settled.

 I still had an apartment in my name, although someone else was staying in it during my absence, I was still enrolled at the university, etc.

 After all, the original idea had been only to go away for a longer holiday.

 So I disrobed and returned to Germany to settle things, with the idea of returning to Asia and taking ordination again afterwards.

(to be continued)

Life of a Meditator (Part 2) An Interview with Bhikkhu Anālayo

Q:

 Bhante, in the first part of our interview you described your first encounters with meditation and how you went to Asia and took temporary ordination, until you had to go back to Germany to settle things.

 What happened next and how did you get ordained again?

A:

 Back in Germany I settled what needed to be done and also worked a bit to replenish my travel funds.

 Then I went to China, in accordance with my original plan.

 I studied Chen-style Taijiquan and also spent time at a Chan monastery in Hong Kong.

 In addition, I went to Tibet, where I experienced Buddha Purnima, or Vesak, celebrations in Lhasa, circumambulated Mount Kailash, and visited Milarepa’s cave, which was for me especially meaningful.

Then I went to Sri Lanka with the idea of getting ordained again.

 I had been a vegetarian for a long time and maintaining that had not been easy as a monk in Thailand.

 I was told that there had been a dissident movement in the Thai Saṅgha, Santi Asoke, which among other things adopted vegetarianism.

 As a result, vegetarianism, especially if adopted by monks, had acquired a bad reputation.

 In contrast, in Sri Lanka this is unproblematic, and many monks of the forest tradition are vegetarians.

In addition, I wanted to meet Ñāṇaponika Mahāthera, as reading his book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, had a profound impact on me.

 Unfortunately, when I arrived at Colombo airport, I was told that he had passed away just a few days before.

Godwin Samararatne – Image from www.godwin-home-page.net/

Since I had been recommended to go to Nilambe Meditation Center, I went straight there from the airport.

 The meditation teacher was Godwin Samararatne, and he had a major influence on me with his kind and openly receptive style.

 Central here was his mettā, and it was after meeting him that I finally made some progress in this meditation practice, after relinquishing the approach of relying on phrases.

 This had never worked so well for me, as due to my personality it tended to get me up into my head.

 By learning just to open my heart, the mettā meditation finally took off for me.

 Later I discovered that the standard approach of using certain phrases directed to specific people is in fact not found in the early discourses.

 This made me realize the importance of adopting a historical perspective on Buddhist teachings.

Godwin knew I wanted to get ordained again, so he arranged for me to receive the precepts from Balangoda Ānanda Maitreya Mahāthera.

 During my time as a monk in Thailand I had gotten quite uptight about keeping the rules that come with full ordination, so this time I decided I would remain a novice for a while to avoid such problems.

 In the end, I remained a novice for twelve years and only then took higher ordination, which Pemasiri Mahāthera kindly facilitated.

Q:

 How did you become involved again with academic study?

A:

 That was also something Godwin organized, though in this case without me wanting it or even knowing what he was up to.

 My own expectation had been that, once ordained again, I would do full time meditation practice, similar to the time when I lived in a cave in Thailand.

 But he had the idea that I should pursue Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya and do research on mindfulness.

 He had it all set up with the professors before even telling me, and with his kind and gentle ways overcame my resistance.

 When I finally agreed, I decided that I would nevertheless make sure my meditation practice did not suffer by determining that I would only spend the first half of each day in studies and for the second half retire to my hut to meditate.

 This worked out quite well.

The hut in which I was living was at the back of Udawattakele Forest, within easy walking distance of the Forest Hermitage, where Bhikkhu Bodhi was living.

 While doing my studies and research on the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta, which had become the topic of my Ph.

D. thesis, I would regularly go to visit him, and he kindly took on the role of guiding me in the study of the Pāli discourses.

 He had given a series of talks on these at the Buddhist Publication Society, and I got hold of the numerous recordings and listened to all of them.

 Together with my questions that he patiently answered, this laid a good foundation for my understanding of the Pāli discourses.

In addition to benefiting from his tuition, I also had regular meetings with Bhikkhu Kaṭukurunde Ñāṇananda.

 In his lay life, he had been an academic in the field of Buddhist Studies, but then he took robes and went to live at Nissaraṇa Vanaya, a forest monastery dedicated to intense insight meditation.

 During his stay, he had given a series of thirty-three talks on Nibbāna in Sinhala, which had been recorded and subsequently published.

 He had just started translating the first of these talks himself into English, and Godwin had passed on the tape for me to listen to.

 I was thrilled by the depth of his exposition and immediately went to visit him in the cave in the Kegalle area, where he was staying at that time, to put myself at his disposal.

 I suggested that he continue translating his talks, and I would take care of the rest.

So I regularly received the latest tape with his translation, transcribed the talks, and then searched for and supplied references to the Pāli originals.

 He had an amazing memory and could quote all these passages in Pāli, so my task was to find their location in the Pāli texts.

 Working with these talks had a deep impact on me, and I regularly visited him to get some points clarified or just for Dhamma discussions.

In this way, what officially was a Ph.

D. research became a way to immerse myself in the teachings of the Pāli discourses, under the kind guidance received from Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Kaṭukurunde Ñāṇananda.

In addition to these two, Bhikkhu Ñāṇadīpa also had a deep impact on me.

 He lived a very solitary life, so it was not possible to have regular contact with him, but the meetings I did have with him, together with his exemplary lifestyle and thorough acquaintance with the Pāli discourses, have been a strong source of inspiration for me.

 For some time, he only allowed visitors on three full-moon days in the whole year.

 He just lived out in the open in the forest by himself.

 If villagers offered to build him a hut for the rainy season, he would only accept the simplest construction, and it should have only three walls, so that one side was left open and he could remain in constant contact with the forest.

 He did not even use a mosquito net.

 When I asked him how he managed without any protection against mosquitos, he replied:

 “After about three years, you don’t feel it anymore,” adding that with some of the biting ants that live in the Sri Lankan forests, it takes longer than three years.

 I found his renunciation deeply impressive and feel very fortunate to have met him.

Q:

 What motivated you to return to the West?

A:

 The main motivation was repaying the debt of gratitude to my parents, otherwise I would have stayed in Sri Lanka.

 By then I was in charge of a small meditation center on the outskirts of Kandy, had finished my Ph.

D., was regularly teaching meditation, and was otherwise happily living the life of a meditating monk.

 No reason at all to leave a wonderful place like Sri Lanka, the country with the longest history of Buddhism in the whole world.

However, my parents had retired, and it became clear that they would greatly benefit from my presence.

 After some initial resistance, particularly by my mother, they had accepted my becoming a Buddhist monk and were even slowly opening up to the possibility of doing a bit of meditation.

 They were able to provide me with the basics needed to continue my monastic life in Germany, namely offering me food every day and letting me stay by myself in an annex to their house, so I decided to go.

 Originally, the idea was just to stay there for a while and then return to Sri Lanka, but that stay became much longer than I had originally expected.

I shifted from doing retreats half of the day to doing them half of the week:

 at first, three days per week and then four days.

 My life with them was already rather secluded, as I did not connect much with Western Buddhists.

 My whole experience of Buddhism had been in Asia, and I had difficulties bridging the cultural gap.

 So I chose to keep to myself, as I felt a bit like a fish out of water.

 It took me quite some time to bridge that gap between the traditional form of Buddhism I knew from Asia, which, in spite of my Western upbringing, I felt to be my spiritual home, and Western approaches to Buddhism.

Q:

 How did you get involved with comparative studies?

A:

 My mother wanted me to continue my research activities by doing a habilitation thesis, which in the German university system follows after a Ph.

D. and is the basis for becoming a professor, and this time I did not put up resistance to pursuing academic study further.

 By now I had realized that good knowledge of the teachings, in particular adopting the historical perspective, can be of considerable support to meditation practice.

In the course of my research on the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta, I had come across information about the Chinese parallels, so at the completion of that research I was left with a curiosity about these parallels.

 I got in contact with Bhikkhu Pāsādika, who facilitated me doing habilitation research at the University of Marburg.

 Since the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta was in the Majjhima-nikāya, it was natural for me to choose the whole collection for a comparative study as my habilitation thesis.

 This then led to a large number of discoveries and publications.

Q:

 How did you come to the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS)?

A:

 Bhikkhu Bodhi had returned to live in the US and was staying in a Chinese monastery in New Jersey, so I visited him there.

 Joseph Goldstein had sent a message that he would like to meet if I should ever be in the area, so I went to BCBS to give a talk there, and we met and quickly became friends.

 I started to teach courses at BCBS and also at Spirit Rock, the Insight Meditation Society, and Forest Refuge, sharing my approach to meditation based on what I had found in my research.

It took a while for me to learn how to present my practices in the West, as the way I had been teaching in Sri Lanka was quite different.

 But once I managed to bridge the gap, things went well.

 I particularly like BCBS, situated as it is in a triangle with the Insight Meditation Society and Forest Refuge as two places offering the opportunity for deep meditation practice.

 In that setting, BCBS can provide an important input from the teachings that can orient and deepen meditation practice.

 This is precisely what I also hope to offer to the growth of Dharma in the West, so BCBS is in a way a perfect fit for me.

Q:

 Can you describe the meditation practices you teach?

A:

 There are basically four practices that build on each other, all of which are grounded in an embodied form of mindfulness that is open and receptive.

The first combines the four satipaṭṭhānas into a continuous meditation, based on those exercises that stand out as the common core between the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta and its Chinese Āgama parallels:

 Contemplation of the body comprises just the anatomical parts, elements, and a corpse in decay, the last of which I use to introduce the all-important recollection of death.

 Then contemplations of feeling tones and mental states, leading up to a cultivation of the awakening factors as the fourth satipaṭṭhāna.

The second practice concerns the sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing, based on the understanding that this practice is not about just focusing on the breath to the exclusion of everything else but rather about using the breath as an anchor to explore various aspects of subjective experience (mirroring the four satipaṭṭhānas, in fact).

The third practice is cultivation of the four brahmavihāras, the divine abodes, where my approach is based on reducing the use of phrases and concepts to a minimum in order to be instead with the direct experience of each of these four abodes.

 Abiding in mettā, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity then takes the form of a boundless radiation in all directions.

The fourth practice is emptiness meditation, based on the Shorter Discourse on Emptiness, number 121 in the Majjhima-nikāya.

 Although my approach is firmly grounded in early Buddhist thought, I greatly benefited from practicing in the Mahāmudrā and Chan traditions.

 In fact, as an aside, it was Godwin who took me along to Nepal to meet Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, from whom I then received the pointing-out instructions.

 These had a profound impact on my practice.

So the way I teach emptiness follows the progression in the later part of the Shorter Discourse on Emptiness:

 infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and signlessness.

 Signlessness in particular seems to have much in common with both Mahāmudrā and Silent Illumination in Chan practice.

 Based on previous training in satipaṭṭhāna, mindfulness of breathing, and the brahmavihāras, the practice of emptiness can fully unfold its liberating potential.

These same practices are also what I do myself.

 Since coming to live in the US, I shifted from four to five days of retreat per week, and right now I am transitioning to six days per week.

 In addition, I also do longer periods of continuous retreat.

 I plan to continue to teach a little bit and still do a bit of writing, though much less than I have been doing up to now, but what I mainly hope to do with however much time remains for me is just to live the quiet life of a meditator.

Q:

 Thank you, Bhante, for the interview.

Bhikkhu Anālayo is a scholar-monk and the author of numerous books on meditation and early Buddhism.

 As the resident monk at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, he regularly teaches online study and practice courses and undertakes research into meditation-related themes.