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Prolegomena to a Theory of Contemplative Education By Robin Kornman A lecture given at Naropa Institute on Practice Day.

I have been traveling around the country this year speaking about Trungpa Rinpoche's notion of an "enlightened society." This talk on contemplative education fits nicely under that rubric. I want to describe how the details of an enlightened society would work and certainly one of the biggest details would be the colleges how would we express the principle of enlightenment in an academic setting? Well, the answer is that colleges would have a contemplative orientation in an enlightened society they would be places where learning was conducted according to the principles of meditation. And so I ask myself, what would be the general rules in an enlightened society for contemplative education? Actually, I used to ask this question quite often in the 80s when I was public relations man for Naropa Institute. I wrote constantly about contemplative education, trying to project the vision of Naropa Institute. But Naropa had never been a planned systematic thing, laid out according to one man's vision. Like Topsy, "it just growed." But now I would indeed like to lay out and elaborate a theory of contemplative education. Or more precisely, since I was always thinking about Naropa when I thought this way, I would like to sketch out for you the outlines of a theory of contemplative education as it would relate to the academic context. Over the years I've studied what seemed to me to be the relevant texts for such an enterprise and have participated in many experiments in academic and collegiate education, both within the Buddhist world and in what is sometimes called "the Halls of Academe" the Western world of colleges and schools. Just to give you a few of my bona fides as a genuine and professional theory of contemplative education person, let me say that I have been part of several experiments in higher education and contemplative processes. The first was a school for Buddhist administrators called "The College of the Ashe Prince." I was part of a committee of fledgling scholars who attempted to give the leaders of our church lectures on aspects of world culture related to their jobs as spiritual administrators. We were to take principles from Buddhism and the Shambhala teachings and embody them in actual worldly examples such as the bureaucratic system of the Tang dynasty, or the training of a samurai warrior, or the upbringing of an ancient Indian king. We were to teach those examples to the administrators in lieu of an actual graduated course of study in Buddhist approach to educating and teaching Chinese mandarins. This was an early attempt to establish a Buddhist college, but was never taken very far. I helped start the Ngeton or Certain meaning school, a philosophical college for advanced Buddhists and that seemed to go very well. We taught the Buddhist commentarial tradition and managed to design an institution that went on for years. We studied hard, staying just a step ahead of our students at first. For all I know, the Ngeton School may still exist, transformed and hidden under another name. I taught and studied at the Sorbonne, the College de France, and the University of Paris, 10th division, known as University of Paris X. There I saw both the wonder of the classical European approach to academia and the wild, free play quality of a post-modernist experimental college, for Paris X was a true dyed-in-the-wool Marxist University "the smokiest place I've ever been in my life" a campus sized cigarette ashtray full of young people passionately advocating the strangest causes you could imagine. I have also been a professor, or as they say, "tutor" at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. St. Johns teaches the famous Great Books program; four years of deep reading of the Western classics and seminars conducted according to the principles of democracy so radical that it would be a violation for a tutor to actually give a lecture. It was there that I learned the famous saying of Aristotle to the effect that "The contemplative life is the only one worth living." It was at St. Johns that I learned the origins of the word "academic," which helped me find the key to a good theory of contemplative education. Academe as a matter of fact is the name of a grove of olive trees on the outskirts of Athens through which Plato's students strolled with their teachers, studying how to live the philosophical life. From this we have Plato's Academy, the first school of contemplative education in
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the West. Or if not the first, certainly the first famous one. So you see, the first model for contemplative education ever offered by the West was academic and relatively secular. The time of Plato and Aristotle was a magical time in world history. It was the time when the Buddha began teaching in Northern India. His school, like Plato's, was mainly peripatetic, walking around. The Buddha's sangha of monks and nuns was a contemplative school, but it was a school that for most of the year wandered from place to place, only settling down in viharas for the rainy season. This was also the time when Zoroaster was revealing his visions in Persia. It was the period when Confucius and Lao Tzu formulated their opposing and complementary approaches to contemplative politics in China. In the Sixth Century B.C. the custom in Athens and other Greek city states was to have individuals known as philosophers or sophists who would teach small groups of young men principles of thought, methods of meditation, and the art of speaking. The philosophers usually lived simple lives devoted to mystic ideals; ideals based on cosmologies and metaphysics that saw the world as a matter of false appearances. These illusory appearances seduced the uncontemplative away from reality and into a life of inner falsehood. From Plato's point of view, the nonphilosophers, the uncontemplative are prisoners of illusion. He describes our lot in a very specific and challenging myth. We are like people who have been locked in a cave strapped to chairs facing the back cave wall. Someone is manipulating wooden puppets behind our heads and these puppets are in front of a flame which casts vague shadows on the walls. We prisoners of mere appearance believe the shadows of the puppets on the cave walls are the world we live in, the true world. The job of a philosopher is to show you the real world, which lies outside the cave and is lit by the sun not a flickering lamp. Many of the philosophers were like this. They wore simple clothes, were satisfied with little and rejoiced in the cultivation of the truth as an intimate personal experience. They valued virtues such as equanimity, prudence, moderation, honesty, and a clear intellect with a good memory faculty. They taught the young. They taught the youthful aristocracy. In Rome their ilk taught the arts of discourse and rhetoric, which were necessary to rule. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius was an example of the fruits of this philosophical training. The contemporary French classicist Pierre Hadot wrote a book on Marcus Aurelius. He did a close study of how Marcus cultivated stoic equanimity through contemplative exercises. The book is entitled The Inner Citadel and it is having an influence in academia, revising our view of the nature of the original graeco-roman philosophers. Hadot saw Marcus as a skilled contemplative. His training at the hands of the simply clad graeco-roman philosophers made him one of the greatest rulers in history. He reminds me of certain Chinese emperors whose Confucian training made them great rulers. The Platonists, Aristotelians, and the Stoics particularly remind me of Tibetan Buddhist teachers, for all three of these schools cultivated formal contemplative practices that set the self to considering itself in a mirror of meditation. In their view, through knowing the self all is known that can be known and, in fact, everything may be known this way. American academics are not used to thinking of the Greek philosophers as meditating mystics. It is a fault in our reading of the ancients and has been the ruling point of view on Plato and the Stoics since the 18th Century when rationalism opposed the tyrants of the ancien regime and the Catholic Church. When I was an undergraduate studying philosophy and symbolic logic at Indiana University, Plato was presented to me not as a contemplative, but as a speculative philosopher. So firm was the prejudice against the idea of a meditating Plato that his descendent, Plotinus, who wrote manuals of meditation called the Enneads, was called, with an air of condescension verging on derision, a "neo-platonist." "Neo" implies that he got Plato wrong. In the same vein the meditating Confucians of the Song and later dynasties are now called "Neo-confucions." Confucians were adopting at that time elements of Buddhist cosmology and Buddhist techniques of contemplative practice and so were muddying the clear, rationalist waters of the founder with the scurrilous heterodox Buddhist intuitional arts. People who liked this combination spoke of it positively, calling it the san jiao jr he yi, unification of the three schools: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. There is a famous Chinese novel about this: Xi Yu Ji, Journey to the West. When I returned to school after years of Buddhist training, I could not help but see my seventh century philosophical heroes in a different light. Read the Meno and see for yourselves: Socrates was a real person. But as a character in Plato's dialogues he is the recognizable image of a meditating guru's playing with the minds of his disciples, leading them to experiences of the truth through his dialectic, but rarely giving out his own philosophy in so many words. The message of the Socrates of the dialogues is beyond the bounds of a literal word summary. It is about the ideal, the transcendent, and mystical experience. At one point a student of his tries to describe a key part of his technique and compares him to a sting ray. Apparently the Athenians believed that when a sting ray struck you, you become temporarily paralyzed. For example, in a dialogue of the same name, Meno asks him whether virtue can be taught or whether one must be born with it. Socrates answers by asking Meno to define virtue. Meno answers that there are many virtues depending on the situation and nature of the person. So that a man by manly and just is virtue in a man; that a woman show the virtues of a housewife is the virtue of a woman and on and on. Socrates answers that he asked for one virtue, but was given many. He wants to know what is virtue in itself. Meno has trouble understanding this concept and Socrates speaks and questions him at length to show that
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what he seeks in a definition is the thing common to, for example, all instances of virtue which makes them all virtues. There follows a lengthy exchange in which Socrates, merely through asking questions, shows Meno that he does not know at all how to define virtue. At this point in the back-and-forth Meno has no definition of virtue. His old one was refuted by Socrates and he has not yet developed a new one to take its place. He seems to know less that he began with. His mind has stopped. This is the sting that paralyzes the disciple, for a minute before Meno could easily answer the question "What is virtue?" whereas now he hardly knows that to say at all. In Greek this state of mind is called an aporha, a gap. Now that Meno has been freed from his primitive notions of moral excellence, Socrates asks him to give a definition of virtue afresh, based on the notion of definition Socrates had just taught. But Meno is afraid to proceed further by himself and asks instead that Socrates give a definition. Socrates initiates a fresh inquiry based on new principles and axioms. It is fascinating and we are all rapt to follow his thinking. The question that initiated the dialogue, however, can one be trained to virtue? is never answered. The apparent subject veers off in an entirely new direction. To the Buddhist it is obvious that the state of mind of the student and its contrast with the exalted and free consciousness of the philosopher is the real message of the dialogue, or at least, one of them. For like Buddhist sutras and shastras, the work serves a myriad of purposes. It is multi-leveled, understated, and serves many intellectual masters at once. We understand that when you have placed a student in the gap the way to true insight has been opened. False beliefs have been set aside and an open inquiry is now possible. I have just given you a fragment of my many-leveled mediator's approach to interpreting Platonic texts. There are many in history who tend towards the same kind of interpretations, not because they have read Asian textual traditions, but because they are descendents of a certain form of Hellenism. For example, there were for centuries neo-platonists at Oxford and Cambridge reconditely running their mystical readings of Plato. There were, as you will see, a variety of traditions that used neo-platonic thought in the contemplative way I have indicated. Hadot, as I have said, is a respected French classicist who recently redefined the role of the philosopher in antiquity, understanding philosophers as meditation teachers. There are also a bunch of Anglo-American who explored Platonism in the renaissance and refurbished our notion of philosopher. Over the years I have discovered these scholars and they have shown me that until the 18th century I had many compatriots among the neoplatonists of Europe and the Roman East. Sometimes they were open and above board about their philosophical commitments; sometimes they taught their line of thought reconditely through a variety of traditions, from the followers of the Corpus Hermeticum, an ancient Hellenistic Egyptian body of mystical texts, to tarot readers, and Kaballists. In the 50s and 60s there was a special movement in Renaissance Studies that opened the way to studying Western Meditative and philosophical movement known as the Hermetic Tradition. The first notable work of this group of scholars was Francis Yate's The Art of Memory, which has become a classic of modern scholarship. It exposes a teaching on memorization used since the early days of Greek rhetoric which sounds like a tantric visualization practice. In this system of memorization speakers who needed to memorize a text would break the text into groups of words or ideas. They would then visualize a palace with many rooms and imagine symbols for the different ideas and place them in the rooms. The rooms and the symbols were to be the kinds of things the memory easily holds bright, picturesque or grotesque scenes full of ornamentation. When he gave the speech, the speaker would in his imagination walk through the rooms in order, requiring of each location (topos) in the palace the words of the lecture which had been encoded there as an imagined object. For example, you might have to mention in your speech at a certain point a lawyer named "Roper." This could be represented by a lawyer's office, full of law books and hanging from the ceiling a hangman's rope. This would work very well to bring up the notion, "my lawyer Roper" for it would be grotesque and easy to remember. These "memory palaces" were used by speakers from the time of Aristotle right into the time of Shakespeare. In fact, The Globe Theater was the last of the great memory palaces. The memory palaces are an important aspect of the contemplative training of a Platonist. Later this week I will give a talk at CACE exploring in some depth the role of memory training and the use of interior spaces in traditional Buddhist meditation. The Art of Memory having explored memory training in antiquity proceeds to examine the stages in the rebirth of Platonism in the West. It tells the story of how Lorenzo di Medici, the Florentine merchant prince who supported Michelangelo and fathered a line of European kings, brought Marcelo Ficino to Florence to translate Greek philosophical classics freshly imported from the Arab East. Islamic scholars had kept them in safe keeping for us through our period of civilizational decline. Ficino received from the East two packages of writings: the Dialogues of Plato and the Corpus Hemeticum. The Corpus Hermeticum was written supposedly by Hermes Trismeghisthus, Thrice-Great Hermes, an Egyptian priest in the time of Moses. The works in it ware intensely and exceedingly mystical, depicting an absolute beyond the relative world and beyond expression, and teaching a sort of metaphysical magic based on resonances between the astrological bodies, the cycle of elements, and the world of humans and animals. These works, translated by Ficino into Latin and accompanied by his own corpus of commentaries gave birth to Renaissance neo-platonism and a sort of homegrown Tantra of the West. I am sorry I don't have room in this lecture to explain to you some of the ideas produced by this

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wonderful movement of thought and philosophical praxis. But to understand who we are and do honor to our own contemplative forbears, we must acknowledge these corpuses of texts and examine them more closely. The Catholic Church had kept alive Aristotelian philosophy and the rigors of Aristotelian logical and metaphysical discourse. When you think about it, it is a hefty canon: Aristotle's works, Plato's dialogues, the Corpus Hermeticum, and the Enneads. When I first became a Buddhist, I enjoyed reading Plotinus most, because so much of his work were descriptions of actual contemplative exercises. But thanks to Hadot, who confirmed my Buddhist instincts, Plato became fair game to a meditator's reading. When you combine these strands together, you have an impressive combination of philosophical approaches. From Plato and Aristotle, you can get at the least two complete systems of metaphysics and moral philosophy. Add to this the meditation practices of Plotinus and the magical symbolic world of the Hermetic tradition and you have a complete, well-founded contemplative system upon which could be built a complete and well-rounded contemplative educational system which would be a good match for the Eastern world of Buddhist philosophy, with its sutras, tantras, shastras, analytical cognitive psychology, manuals of meditation, and huge world of literary narratives. The Art of Memory was just a first step for Yates in presenting the living quality of late antiquity's Platonism. He followed it with a study of the use of magic and meditation in the movement he was studying: Giordana Bruno and the Hermetic Revolution. He carried this neo-platonic movement forth into modern times in the third book in the series, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. These three books marked the beginning of a minor revolution in academic thinking, particularly in the field of comparative literature. It showed the magical and mystical side of the Renaissance, which turned out to have been an underground current of influence on Western Pictorial art, philosophy, theory, and religion through the often secret presence of neo-platonic mysticism. What gets me so excited about this is that it provides me with hearty native academic roots to which I can graft my hard won Tibetan lore on meditation, philosophy, and religion. I don't know whether I speak for others, but in the early 70s when I turned to Sufism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism for a path to the truth, it was because I believed that Western philosophy was in a state of collapse. It was in style to have given up on the enterprise of knowing thyself or the ultimate truth of the world. No one thought you could find answers to life's persistent questions. We were all doomed to a life of avid industrial materialism with no touch of divinity or deep meaning. There would be violence and pleasure, sentimentality and nationalist patriotism, family life and sex as a sportive toy. But nothing real, good, wholesome, or sempiternal. As a youth I agreed with Eliot's depiction of our modern life: that it was a wasteland strewn with mementos of classicism. With Western philosophy bankrupt, it followed that the Western proposal for how one was to conduct a meaningful life, namely the nuclear family, was a bankrupt civilizational enterprise. Things such as the Theatre of the Absurd and modernism were there simply to show us there was no way out for Western Civilization. It followed for me and many in my generation that the only hope one could find was in the promise of Eastern meditation and to bring us face to face with the absolute. When it came to education, this was particularly so. To paraphrase Aristotle, the only meaningful education was a contemplative education and a contemplative education meant the Eastern contemplative arts, from vipashyana insight practice to Japanese flower arranging and the Japanese tea ceremony. Now, thanks to Francis Yates, Hadot, and their ilk I know that there can be a union of East and West in contemplative education. It would take a melding of Eastern meditation practice with the magical Platonism that comes down to us from the groves of academe via the Italian Renaissance. It could be done. Let me show you how this would work. Let me sketch out for you a theory of Buddhist contemplative education and then show you a branch or two of the neo-platonic academic tree to which it could be grafted. Any theory of Buddhist meditation must begin with the presentation of vipashyana or insight practice. Although we generally begin students with training in shamatha or tranquility meditation, it is an essential point of doctrine that you cannot gain enlightenment simply by calming your mind. Whether you call it tranquility, no thoughts, or meditative stabilization doesn't matter. It is still a basic fact that clearing the mind does not in itself bring wisdom. In fact, as many of you know, shamatha was not originally a Buddhist practice at all. But one of the methods taught to Gautama Shakyamuni by his Hindu gurus before he gained enlightenment. As the story goes, when Gautama had perfected the highest stage of concentrative trance through shamatha, he realized that the blank mind he had achieved did not show him the nature of reality or solve the problem of human suffering. He then gave up his Hindu path and began an experiment in meditation. The experiment lead to the discovery of a new technique, a technique in which the eye of wisdom, without bias one expectations clearly saw what was before it and understood completely what it saw with a centerless panoramic awareness. He called the new practice vipashyana or insight. In Tibetan it is lhag thong clear seeing or superior seeing. It is the key to enlightenment, because although there are different levels of vipashyana, all of them see the truth and burn through deceptive appearance just the way the warmth of the sun burns through and dissolves mist. There are many canonical texts on vipashyana, but at this point allow me to rely mainly on the oral teachings of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. He called it "panoramic awareness" because it could see in one look a complex situation with many data points and in that one look underhttp://www.oocities.org/baja/mesa/8511/prolegomena.html.tmp Page 4 of 8

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stand an essence that explained all the data points and their inter-relations. Insight is studied in Western psychology, but in the West it is thought of as a momentary flash of intuitive comprehension. The state of mind psychological discourse projects is short, intense, a peak experience. It occurs rarely, usually after come prolonged intense effort to solve a problem or understand a situation using a linear sort of thinking. It is that sudden "aha," the skillful professor hopes for from his or her students and the researcher prays will come to him or her when they are as one scientist put it, "rolling around in the data." As a contemplative method it is not much: you think many thoughts, ask your question in all sorts of different ways and, if youre lucky one day, suddenly, out of the blue you have a flash of insight. In Buddhism we think of insight as a continuous state of mind and not a flash. We train in shamatha to stabilize the mind and then, standing on the abilities shamatha developed, we train in vipashyana. Eventually through our training we learn to reach the state of vipashyana and rest in it. There are classical lists of the marks or characteristics of an accomplished vipashyana practitioner and there are many techniques that can be used to bring on the state of mind. For example, there are analytical meditation practices such as the Three Prajnas of hearing, contemplating, and meditating and there are resting practices such as the one called "the mixing of mind and space." There are dialectical questions and answer practices to develop vipashyana and the famous highly athletic Tibetan debating practice. The interesting thing is that all of these techniques work because vipashyana is a state native to the human intellect. It is freely available. Despite the fabulous powers of knowledge and wisdom claimed for vipashyana, it is basically nothing more than a sort of purifying of ordinary human alertness. According to Trungpa Rinpoche, there are levels of vipashyana and the lowest level is simply ordinary everyday understanding. We call it "ordinary prajna." For example, my understanding of how to cook spaghetti is ordinary prajna. If you add a spoonful of oil to boiling water, the pasta spears will not stick together when you throw them in. The same faculty that knows how to cook pasta can be intensified into what one might call "Hinayana prajna" , the wisdom sharvakas use to become arhats. The Abidharmakosha defines this prajna as "the distinguishing of the dharmas". In other words, the ability to separate a thing into its parts or dharmas and tell the parts apart and see that the whole thing is nothing more than the union of its parts. So, for example, a chariot is made up of its yoke, tongue, wheel rims, axels, fellies, etc. and technically speaking there is no such thing as a chariot in itself. In the same way my self does not exist in itself, but is a congeries of momentary experiences. So Hinayana prajna can free me from the false notion of a self. That prajna further intensified becomes prajna-paramita, the perfection of prajna, which is the ability to see the emptiness of the self-nature of each and every dharma. This is the wisdom which brings one to the sixth level of the Mahayana Path. The continuum of prajna goes on from there into the arcane wisdoms of the Buddhist tantras. But no matter what level of prajna we are discussing, it remains one form or another of the ordinary faculty of human awareness, of day-today human intelligence. This is the great secret the Buddha discovered that ordinary awareness of the ordinary mind can see transcendent reality, the ultimate nature of things, the face of God.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay said in her first and greatest poem: O God, I cried, no dark disguise Can e'er hereafter hide me Thy radiant identity! Thou canst not move across the grass

But my quick eyes will see Thee pass, Nor speak however silently, But my hushed voice will answer Thee. I know the path that tells Thy way Through the cool eve of every day; God, I can push the grass apart And lay my finger on They heart! Let's think for a moment about the stages in the technique which brings a student forward until he or she is an accomplished vipashyana prachttp://www.oocities.org/baja/mesa/8511/prolegomena.html.tmp Page 5 of 8

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titioner. First there is the exercise of shamatha. There is an object for the meditator, something drawn from the traditional list of thirty or so objects: blue dot, a flower, a pebble, a picture of a Buddha, the breath, whatever the object is, one sits in a stable, comfortable, upright position and then places the attention on the object, say the breath going in and out. Already we are doing something that never occurs in worldly academic circles. There is very little mind training involved in ordinary education. But whatever there is, practice in purely focusing the attention is never part of it. As experienced meditators, we know that it is hard to focus the mind on an object and hold it in still. You start to attend to the breath and in a few seconds have insensibly, unconsciously wandered away to the thoughts. You stay wandered for a few seconds, perhaps as long as a minute, before waking up to the fact that you are not on the breath. Then you realize, you are not meditating at all, you are thinking a thought in a state of distraction. Then you move back to the breath, focus on it and start contemplating again. Often it takes students several hours of practice to realize that they are constantly wandering. It takes much longer yet to establish a habit of closely controlling your attention in that you wake up quickly after having wandered. Consider the state of mind of a shamatha practitioner who has actually reached this point, the point where he or she is soon aware of having wandered. The point at which, whenever you wander you instantly pick up on the fact. This person has a clear idea of when they are awake and when they are asleep. That is, when they are meditating and doing the technique and when they have forgotten they are meditating and are sitting there thinking without being aware they are thinking. Now, it takes a bit of training to recognize this distinction, the distinction between being mindful and not being mindful. I can always tell when my students have realized this point, because they begin to complain that they are having bad, undisciplined meditation sessions. Before they reach this point, many of my students disingenuously inform me they just had a "good" meditation session. They falsely say that they spent most of their time on their breath, as if hearing this falsehood would make me pleased with their work. But it is clear they have not yet discovered mindfulness, for the signs of that discovery are the thought that you are not being mindful. Taken abstractly, it would seem to be a paradox, that the first time you see this rabbit is when you notice the absence of said rabbit. The first time you are actually mindful is when you fear you are not. I have noticed that people who have not begun to receive a contemplative training cannot understand this distinction. The ordinary person does not know what it means to be mindful. Never having worked with attention, they cannot distinguish different degrees of attentiveness. Now I tell you, this distinction is the beginning of a contemplative education. The one who knows when he or she is not mindful is conscious of the arising of emotions and discursive thoughts as an obstacle to clarity. Ordinary people cannot understand this point. For this reason, the meditation instructor rejoices when his students spontaneously complain that they are minds are "out of control." It means that they are developing a bird's eye view of their own mental condition. The first time you truly see your own thoughts is when you see them arising to obstruct your clear view of yourself. Plato has an interesting way of explaining this distinction to his students. He speaks of mind as a charioteer. The horses are the senses, the ability to attend to and receive impressions from sense objects. At a certain point Zeus mounts his chariot and journeys beyond the moon towards the transcendent realm. The other gods in turn mount their chariots and form a parade behind Zeus, who leads them riding up the vast dome of the sky to the realm of truth which is outside the dome. The dome of the sky is the firmament in which Aristotelian cosmology tells us the starts are fixed. Zeus will ride his chariot to the land beyond the moon and those who can follow will. Now Zeus' horses are the senses, his sense faculty. Zeus artfully controls his horses, pulls their heads back, and they ride up the dome of the sky. Those philosophers who can likewise control their senses follow in the train of Zeus and ride up the sky as well. When Zeus reaches the zenith of the dome, he exits and stands in his chariot on the other side of the sphere of the sky, outside the sphere. He and those who could follow him see the true world and the wonders that are beyond the heavens. Philosophers who wish to transcend this world of false appearances follow after the gods in their own chariots and follow god as far as they are able. But those philosophers who have not gained control of their senses, their vicious, untrained horses rebel against the controlling reins and they cannot be made to rise, but fall back upon those behind them in the parade. And "there is great sweating and gnashing of teeth." Not having discovered mindfulness, they never mount to transcendence. This myth defines the essence of the philosopher;s task, which is not to write books full of metaphysical speculations, but to gain control of one;s own power of attention, one's own power to give attention to objects of the senses. This kind of control of awareness, this quintessential art of contemplation is the key to transcendent wisdom. Interestingly enough, the platonic myth of the philosopher's chariot occurs in almost exactly the same terms in the Indian Katha Unpanishad. Now, when we teach shamatha practice, we give our students control of the horses of the senses, and make contemplative philosophizing possible for them. It comes about, as I have said, when the student learns through experience the meaning of the word "mindfulness," learns to distinguish between the habitual sleep-walking mind and the awake mind. At this point in Buddhist training, the student has done enough concentrative practice. He or she is ready to move on to the purely Buddhist practice of vipashyana. In terms of the Socratic myth, having tamed the horses of the senses, the philosopher is ready to conduct his chariot
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upwards towards transcendence. How is this done? By taking the mindfulness learned in shamatha practice and applying it to the knowables, applying it to the knowable phenomenal world. It is so simple, it is almost impossible to express. The ordinary awareness every healthy human is equipped with from birth has since childhood moved from one sense object to another in an endless petty pace. We have moved insensibly from dharma to dharma, from knowable to knowable according to unconscious habit patterns. But after shamatha training, the awareness can be directed by the will from dharma to dharma, from knowable to knowable according to unconscious habit patterns. But after shamatha training, the awareness can be directed by the will from dharma to dharma. It can be directed to rest on one dharma or commanded to apply itself mindfully to a problem. The well-trained horses of the senses can be controlled as they ride down the paths of sense objects. It is only then that we begin to discover the true powers of awareness. It is then that we can begin to understand complex situations panoramically, with vipashyana, in one instant, completely and beyond habitual patterns. When the Buddha discovered the power of this ordinary mind, he used it to gain enlightenment. Turning back to the West, we can say that the materialistic West never understood this point, never understood that the basic human intelligence is in itself beyond conditioning. 18th century rationalism, the philosophies of modernism, and post-modernism never copped to this point; for their method of knowing was to rely on linear thinking and enjoy only flashes of insight. Their materialist approach to education taught only this method. But we Buddhists are here to correct their poor understanding of human faculties of intelligence. We say that insight is not a momentary event, but a continuous state of mind inseparable from awareness itself. We offer our stages in mediation as the way to vipashyana, from vipashyana to maha-vipashyana, thence to shunyata or emptiness practice, then to Mahamudra (The Great Symbol) and finally to Maha Ati (the Great Perfection). From this point of view contemplative education could be seen as a structure of individual trainings all built on the basis of vipashyana. For in the end, contemplative education is simply the application of vipashyana to diverse objects and topics, for the accomplished vipashyana practitioner does everything in a special way. There is a vipashyana approach to science, a vipashyana approach to music, to mathematics, to literature, to dance, grammar, political studies and indeed every subject, every discipline in the academic world of science and the humanities. Contemplative studies in the East become quite minute in its examinations and articulations, with a contemplative approach to pictorial arts, to flower arranging, to fighting, to eating, as in the tea ceremony, etc. etc. As I have tried to suggest here with my references to Platonism and the Groves of Academe, a current of thought in the West nurtured and maintained its own approach to contemplative education based on roughly the same principles as I have just elaborated. It began with the stoics and neo-platonists, who we now know had their own sophisticated meditative traditions. Briefly lost in the Dark Ages, it was regained during the Italian Renaissance and has continued reconditely into our own century. I have no time to go into the details of their approach in this paper, I will just remind you of the educational ideal of the Renaissance man, the one with a well-rounded education replete with training in all fields of knowledge, all arts, and sports, as Ophelia said contemplating Hamlet's breath of accomplishments: "The courier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, and sword." Hamlet is a great example of the Renaissance man and, interestingly enough, a stoic-christian, thus an inheritor of two sometimes meditative traditions. The revival of platonic idealism and neo-platonic meditation combined all of the arts in a single overarching and underlying system of resonances and reflections, from the mystical profundity of Bach's "learned counterpoint" to the mysticism of Beumer and Meister Eckhardt. I do not have time here to explore the parallel Buddhist theory of the well-rounded man, but I intend to enter into the topic in some detail on Wednesday at the CACE faculty colloquim. The Buddhist renaissance man is an enlightening creature of at and learning. We have a sovereign example of such a man in the person of the founder of Naropa Institute, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. In a few days we will inaugurate a yearly conference on his philosophy and legacy. The poet, the painter, the philosopher, the politician, the linguist, the musician, the omniscient knower of the three times. By studying his life example, his Bildung, we may see an instance of contemplative education in action. A close and thorough study of the way he trained his students has and will continue to suggest to us a method of applying vipashyana to the full spectrum of knowables in an academic context.

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