The Beginning

This blog was created to record and share my six months spiritual odyssey in India which commenced on May 1st with the beginning of the two weeks ‘Yoga Vacation’ at Sivananda Vedanta Meenakshi Ashram near Madurai. This journey really started more than thirty years ago in the mid 1970s when I first became interested in Eastern philosophy especially Zen Buddhism. I read the usual – the essays of D.T. Suzuki, the books of Watts, Herrigel, and Hesse, the poems of Rumi, the writings of Krinshnamurti and the sutras from the different Buddhist traditions. Although I read widely I was too inexperienced to fully understand what I read. Owing to a lack of commitment and circumstance I did not find any teacher or follow a specific discipline other than daily meditation practice. Though the fervour waned after a few years the experience gained during those seeking years has offered me fragmented glimpses of Buddhist teachings and left a yearning that was to resurface again thirty years or so later.

Early last year I started going to asana practice (I avoided using the commonly misused term ‘yoga’ of which asana practice is one of its eight aspects). In due course I was arduously perusing books on yoga. The reading of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (the ‘bible’ of the Yoga tradition) not only gave me an insight to yogic philosophy but also enlightened me to the remarkable similarities between the Yoga and the Buddhist traditions and the realisation that Siddhartha Gautama was a yogi before he became Buddha (the Awakened One). The practice of Yoga according to Patanjali is to calm the fluctuations of one’s mind (Citta Vrtti Nirodadh – borrowed for the title of this blog) in order to achieve the state of Samadhi (where there is no subject-object separation). In his Sutras Patanjali states that the eight limbs (parts) are 1. yama (abstinence) 2. niyama (observance) 3. asana (posture) 4. pranayama (breath control) 5. pratyahara (sense withdrawal) 6. dharana (concentration) 7. dhyana (meditation) 8. samadhi (super-consciousness state). In Western society asana practice is often confused with the traditional yoga practice as yoga is much more than asana practice and the final goal of yoga is Samadhi.

Likewise true Buddhist practices also strives to still one’s mind to the point where duality is extinguished (labelled in different Buddhist traditions as Nirvana, Satori, Oneness, No Mind, Void, Oneness, etc., etc). And in both the Yoga and Buddhist traditions one of many paths leading to this self-realisation is meditation. And it is, in my view, the different approaches to meditation that differentiates the many spiritual traditions. So, in essence, one simply just has to sit (i.e. meditate) and self-realisation would come. My interest in yoga made me restless again and eventually led to my taking a year off to immerse myself in the classical Yoga and the various Buddhist traditions.

March 2010 saw me attending my first sesshin session - a seven day silent Zen meditation retreat – led by an unorthodox American Zen Master in Australia. I struggled painfully through the first few days with numb legs and sore back but by mid-week I was able to meditate without much discomfort for four to five hours daily albeit in block of thirty minutes sitting sessions broken up with ten minutes of walking meditation. The Zen philosophy is quite simple – Buddha is within all of us and we can come to this realisation through meditation. (Interestingly the word Japanese word ‘Zen’ comes from the Chinese word ‘Chan’ – as in the Chan Buddhism, the precursor to Zen Buddhism - which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word ‘dhyana’ (the seventh limb of Yoga) which means meditation.) The encouraging experience with my first structured Zen practice has inspired me to pursue the Zen approach to meditation and, as a consequence, I decided to schedule a month’s stay in a Zen Centre near Kodaikanal in the Tamil Nadu state.