Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [128]
Several months after the Buddha’s death, there was a reason why it suddenly became imperative for Ananda to become enlightened. The First Council of Buddhist Arhants was to take place in order to recite and codify all the teachings spoken by the Buddha. Ananda was essential to this meeting because he more than anyone else would be able to speak and verify the sutras. However, because he wasn’t enlightened, he wasn’t qualified to attend.
Ananda did the only thing he could do under the circumstances: Almost as if he were cramming for exams, he went into retreat—a meditation marathon—striving round the clock for enlightenment. Finally it was the morning of the day before the First Council meeting, and Ananda was still meditating. Then midnight, 2:00 A.M., 3:00 A.M. on the day of the meeting, and Ananda was still striving for enlightenment, sitting in his small monastic cell. At 3:45 A.M., fifteen minutes before the 4:00 A.M. wake-up call on the very day of the meeting, Ananda finally just gave up and thought, “Well, that’s that. I am not an arhant.” Exhausted, he began to tip over from meditation into a sleeping position. Ananda stopped trying to be something he wasn’t; and then, before his head hit the pillow, in an instant he was a liberated arhant—totally awake. Ananda became enlightened finally by letting go, simply stopping and seeing things just as they are. It was the end of the struggle. No more trying to become an arhant, and Ananda became an arhant. In surrendering and giving up, Ananda got what he was looking for. By being just who he was, Ananda woke up.
Ananda had behind him a lifetime of pure effort and virtuous dedication, personally assisting the Buddha. His selfless personal service, in itself, didn’t bring him to enlightenment; neither did round-the-clock meditation. Without his service or the meditation, he would not have accomplished his goal. Yet it was in letting go and surrendering to effortlessness that he finally reached enlightenment.
As a Japanese Zen master recently said during an intensive meditation retreat known as a sesshin, “The perfect way is without difficulty. Strive hard. We are all perfect, and yet we can perfect ourselves endlessly.”
THE DZOGCHEN VIEW OF EFFORT
The balance between effort and effortlessness is the essence of Impeccable Effort and self-mastery. This is true whether we are striving to cultivate a spiritual life, a relationship, a work project, or the most indispensable art form of all: the art of living.
Jazz saxophone great Charlie Parker once said: “First perfect your instrument. Then just play.” This practical wisdom combines both the age-old adage that practice makes perfect and the Dzogchen-style playfulness that tells us that practice is perfect. The practice of Dzogchen is often described as beyond effort—not something to do, but a way of being. The emphasis in Dzogchen is on “what is,” the natural mind, a state that is beyond concepts such as effort or non-effort.
This can be confusing to new students. It’s too simplistic just to assume that if everything is perfect, then anything goes. If everything is perfect “as it is,” they ask, why bother oneself with ethical conduct, mind-training, or any of the transformational meditational practices? But this nihilistic misconception is not what Dzogchen, the practice and art of freedom itself, implies.
Padma Sambhava, one of the earliest Dzogchen practitioners, once said regarding enlightened view and action, “Although my view is higher than the sky, my conduct regarding cause and effect is as meticulous and finely sifted as barley flour.”
This means that we cannot live with our heads in the clouds without keeping our feet firmly here on earth. No matter how deep our philosophy, our view, our understanding is, we still