An interview from the Wisdom Podcast.
In a recent episode of the Wisdom Podcast, publisher Daniel Aitken interviewed Joseph Goldstein, cofounder and guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. In the condensed conversation below, he shares his experience learning and practicing deeply across different Buddhist traditions.
Daniel Aitken: What did you love about meditation practice? Can you remember a time when you were just sitting there going, "This is what I love."
Joseph Goldstein: Even though from the very beginning I knew this [vipassanā] was the practice, I just totally connected with it, it was not easy at all. I'm not one of those people who just sit down and have fantastic concentration. In fact, I had zero concentration. I had studied philosophy; in my mind, I would just sit and think. So it was a struggle in the beginning—it was a struggle and the body was uncomfortable. So the first period of practice was not easy. But I never had any doubt, which really served me well, even though it was difficult and I wasn't a natural.
I feel very fortunate that Munindraji was my first teacher, because he was very open-minded. He himself, after he had studied with Mahāsi Sayadaw, went around in Burma and studied, I don’t know, thirty or forty different techniques. So he understood very well that there are many approaches and he was not at all the type of teacher that tried to confine you. He was always encouraging. Munindra, he said something that really resonated with me. It showed his confidence and his fearlessness, in a way. He said, “It’s fine to study with anybody. The Buddha’s teaching doesn’t suffer in comparison with anything.” He was not afraid of people, and I really appreciated that openness.
DA: You also studied with Tulku Urgyen and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. How were you integrating those teachings?
JG: There were two levels of integration. One was on a practical level, on the practice level. And one was on the theoretical level. Once, I got a somewhat deeper understanding of the empty nature of awareness. Something actually quite interesting happened in that two months with Nyoshul Khen, and this was a real turning point and influence in teaching vipassanā. He was giving a talk on bodhicitta. As the expression of compassion, that aspiration to awaken for the benefit of all beings, we might say it’s implicit in the Theravada teachings. It’s not explicit. Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche was giving a talk on bodhicitta, and I had—there was kind of a moment, it was just a realization or understanding of compassion as being the activity of emptiness. That it wasn’t two different things really, because before that I had of course read about the bodhisattva vow and it always seems very inspiring, but I never quite connected with it because it just seemed impossible. OK, this is a beautiful aspiration, but how am I going to save all beings? But in this understanding of bodhicitta, of compassion being the activity of emptiness, it’s spontaneous. It’s not resting on the shoulders of itself.
That was really a beautiful opening, seeing that the very understanding of emptiness, of self, of nature, of emptiness, manifests as compassion. That was a big shift and in understanding that, I felt much more at ease in talking and bringing the idea of bodhicitta into the vipassanā teachings, because it just seemed natural.
DA: That was a nice integration, where it’s, “Hey, the bodhicitta is not some sort of constructed thing that is ‘this,’” that has to be made and is beyond most people’s abilities. It’s actually our very nature.
JG: Yes. Exactly. So that was a really meaningful shift for me. And of course there was the philosophic difference, which drove me crazy for quite awhile, and which actually prompted my investigation and writing of One Dharma, because I was trying to reconcile two very different views of enlightenment or awakening. In the Burmese tradition enlightenment or nibbāna or the unconditioned is beyond awareness. Awareness is seen as another conditioned state. In Dzogchen, and also I think perhaps somewhat in the Thai tradition of Theravada, they hold the view of an unconditioned awareness, so here I was having spent twenty or thirty years immersed in one system, “the unconditioned is beyond awareness,” and then these great teachers, “there’s an unconditioned awareness.”
DA: You were like, “That doesn’t compute.”
JG: Exactly, exactly. It didn’t compute at all and I was going back and forth, “who’s right?”
This was also at that two-month Dzogchen retreat. I was really driving myself crazy with this, because it basically was the most important question of my life. My life had been devoted to awakening; well, these are two very different views of it. And I struggled with that quite awhile. It was like a koan, you know; I couldn’t spit it out and I couldn’t swallow it, in good Zen fashion. At a certain point there was just a resolution, and I talk about this in One Dharma. There were two big realizations, which put my mind at rest. One was that, with regard to full enlightenment or full awakening, I didn’t know. I just knew that this tradition says this, this tradition says that, and I didn’t know, from personal experience. I realized I didn’t have to have an opinion about it, because any opinion would not be based on anything I knew. So that was very relieving—that I don’t have to have opinions about things I don’t know, as mostly we do. We have lots of opinions about things we don’t know anything about. So that was a relief.
The second piece, which really helped, I referred to as “metaphysics as skillful means.” So rather than take these teachings as statements of absolute truth, I came to understand them as skillful means for freeing the mind. It didn’t matter that they were saying opposite things—are they working to free the mind or not? Metaphysics was not the essential point; the essential point was the freedom. So when I finally could resolve it in that way, then it became easier to practice in different traditions and to learn, there’s this way and this way…
DA: And the metaphysics used as skillful means will unravel the whole thing so that you’ll end up with the right metaphysics anyway! So it doesn’t matter!
JG: And maybe it’s beyond metaphysics! Maybe all of the descriptions are limited by virtue of the fact they’re still concepts. So that was another integration that was essential for me.
DA: I was wondering about your perspective on the Dharma and how has it arrived in the West. What’s your perspective on how it’s going here?
JG: What to say? My perspective is as one other—I forget, it might have been a Zen master, years ago, when somebody asked of him that very question, he said, “We’ll know in 500 years.”
Because so many teachings now have come to the West and it is being passed on by different generations, I have seen just that there is a wide, wide spectrum of understandings, a wide spectrum of depth of practice, a wide spectrum of vocabulary. Now of course the whole movement of secular mindfulness, which is huge now in this country—my sense is that as long as there are teachers and places where people have the opportunity to practice the depth of the teachings, things will be fine.