Reverence and Irreverence

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Sunday morning meditation and Dharma Talk with Kim Allen - Reverence and Irreverence. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Kim Allen at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 12, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Reverence and Irreverence

There was once a cave meditator who wanted to practice by himself up in seclusion in the mountains. He finally got together the conditions to be able to do that. He had some benefactors who were supporting him by having food and other supplies dropped off at a place nearby that he could get to, so he didn't have to walk several days to get back to the village. He had support, and in his little cave, he had a nice altar set up with a Buddha image and some other sacred items. He would light incense and make offerings every day. He practiced very diligently in the cave, did that for some years, and found it deeply beneficial. He was often grateful to the benefactors supporting him.

Then one day, he heard that they were going to come visit him in his cave. His response at first was to spruce everything up, sweep it out really well, clean off the altar, and make it beautiful for them when they came. Then this thought came into his mind: What am I doing? I've been meditating to let go of the ego and the self, and here I am putting on a show. So he picked up a handful of dirt and threw it on the altar. Later, he said he was recalling that time and that it was the finest offering he made on the whole retreat.

Introduction

The topic for today is reverence and irreverence. It may be that one or the other of those is very meaningful to you, and you've practiced it or consider it part of your life. Or maybe they're not so clear, and don't feel as relevant to you. But the suggestion for today is that both are important ingredients in our practice and on our path, and it's worth getting to know both reverence and irreverence.

We may see ourselves as definitely having one of those and not the other—that gets to be a common pattern. But reverence and irreverence are actually both practices that we can do, and as such, each one can be done skillfully or unskillfully. We'll probably sometimes need each of them in their skillful form along our path.

If this idea of reverence and irreverence isn't something that you think about very much, or maybe something that you kind of avoid thinking about, then this talk might be especially relevant for you. We can start by asking: what is reverence? What are we talking about? I would say it's a range or a spectrum, and on a basic level, it means taking something seriously.

Early in my practice, I was talking with someone who had practiced much longer than me. He was a person who often spoke very directly—it was a little bit his character—and he said to me, "Kim, you don't take yourself very seriously." He meant that in a particular way. He meant that I wasn't taking my spiritual longing seriously, or my interest in the Dharma, my path, my deepest aspirations. Early in my practice, I didn't quite know how to relate to that. I didn't feel up to that. From my background, I didn't have the qualities to be able to take that seriously and bring that forth in myself. That came later. So, I felt a little uncomfortable acknowledging how much I cared about the practice, how much I cared about the Dharma, and how I might even have awakening as an aim. I wasn't really ready to say that, and he picked that right out. I'm grateful for that. When I reflect back on this older friend, I realize that he is one of the most reverent and the most irreverent people that I know. He has both of those very well developed, and it's admirable.

The spectrum of reverence starts with taking something seriously, and it extends out to even feeling awe or wonder—being willing to devote one's heart or one's life to something that feels valuable and meaningful. There can be a real strength to this quality of reverence. But at times, maybe even often, our reverence can get a little bit misdirected. There is skillful and unskillful reverence and irreverence. There are four combinations, and I want to talk about all four of them so we get a map of this space. They're not merely opposites; there are four distinct quadrants.

Unskillful Reverence

We'll start with the quadrant of unskillful reverence—cases where our reverence is somewhat misdirected, if we even have it.

What is it that we're taking seriously in our life? Are there things in our life, our mind, or our heart that we are paying homage to that maybe don't deserve that level of devotion? I want to read a couple of lines from a verse, and then we'll talk through what it means. This is from the 37 Practices of the Bodhisattva^[1]:

Locked up in the prison of their own patterning, whom can ordinary gods protect?

It's a little bit poetic. It's talking about the ordinary things in life that we place our trust in: pleasure, the things that we like and enjoy, maybe wealth, power, health and fitness (our body is feeling good right now), our relationships, learning, physical safety, ethical purity, even meditative bliss or meditative enjoyment. Now, many of these things are good. That's where it gets entangled and confusing. These are good things that are worth having in human life, actually all of them. But they become problematic when they rise to the level of being revered.

That is when things become gods. They're ordinary gods—they're just ordinary things—but we can make them into gods in some way. If we do that, what we're doing is buying into the worldview or the psychological pattern that they uphold, and we're trying to use that to protect us. "If I just had enough money, then I would be safe." That's a worldview. It's not that we shouldn't have any money, but that worldview is dangerous to buy into. Or, "My physical health is who I am." Very dangerous to buy into. We've done this in some ways, and the problem is that all of these things are transient. They're not true protection, and they're not really totally in our control, are they? So there's always a little bit of stress if we've made these into gods. These are the ordinary gods that most of the world reveres at some level.

Ordinary gods can also be more subtle. They can be psychological patterns in our mind or our mental habits. For example, we get stuck in various views, opinions, and ways of perceiving things. We may be very attached to our political perspective or some ways of seeing the world. Sometimes we're not even aware that that's what we've done. If you do mindfulness meditation, you'll eventually see some of these patterns in the mind. We can also get stuck in stories about our life: stories about how we got here, stories about who we are, stories about what we're doing. Again, it's not that we wouldn't want to have any of that—we need some sense of who we are in our life—but these things are so easy to get hooked into. They shouldn't really be taken so seriously that they're made the foundation of our well-being.

It can be humbling when we realize what we have allowed our heart to get entangled with. There are many people who come to meditation practice and to Buddhism because there has been some kind of a shocking event in their life that revealed that these gods were only ordinary and were not protecting them—loss of a job, death of a loved one, a change in our health. Maybe some of these things resonate for some of you in this room as to why practice became meaningful to you. It's not always like that, but they can jolt us into seeing our misplaced reverence. They have a way of bringing into focus what's really important for us.

Skillful Irreverence

Let's shift then toward the quadrants that are associated with irreverence. They're not just quite opposite; each quadrant is distinct, not just the negation of the others. If we decide that we're not going to revere bodily health, financial success, and learning (education is one that I find valuable), it's not that we turn around and reject these things and say none of this matters. It's not about nihilism or cynicism. We've looked at unskillful reverence; let's turn to skillful irreverence.

Dharma practice, and especially mindfulness practice, helps us to see through things that we might have been stuck with. If we continue with the practice, we have to see more and more—it's just how it works. The mind gets drawn to seeing because that's what we're practicing. We're practicing paying attention in the moment to what's going on in the body, in the mind, in the heart, in the emotions. Eventually, if we continue to take data in that way, moment to moment, the mind is going to start to see patterns. Mindfulness has a way of breaking things open or differentiating experience so that we see different aspects of it and are not fooled by the solid-seeming nature of it that we saw at the beginning.

One term that's used for this in the practice is nibbidā^[2] in Pali. It's often translated as "disenchantment," but it's not a bad kind of disenchantment. It actually means that we're no longer charmed or enchanted, as if a spell had been cast on us. It's a minor form of waking up to see through things and realize, "Oh wow, I was really caught up in that." So it's a positive term.

Once we have some experience with seeing through things... For example, it's fairly common for people to come on retreat, spend a few days meditating, and realize in that time that they view everything through a certain lens, like the lens of fear. It's common for people to say, "I had no idea that this was underlying so much of my life." That is a seeing-through. It's a moment of no longer being caught under the spell of fear. You wake up to it. You see it. It doesn't mean it's over, but seeing it is so important.

Once we have some experience with seeing through in certain ways, then we gain the ability to be skillfully irreverent toward some of the mind's tricks, some of the mind's patterns, and also some of the cultural patterns that are out there in the world.

Jack Kornfield^[3] says that he was going through a period of seeing a lot of patterns in his mind, and he started naming the different ones that he found. He had a certain voice in his mind that was critical of everything he did: "Oh, you're probably going to mess that one up too." He couldn't necessarily stop that voice from coming—we don't get a choice about that—but when it would come, he would bow to it. He had a name for it, and he would say, "Thank you for your opinion," and move on. There was a way that he could lighten up a little bit and be a little bit irreverent toward that voice because it wasn't helping him.

I also think about Sylvia Boorstein^[4], who has a nice set of words that are useful for how to practice. She says we should practice with gentleness, precision, and humor. The order is important, but the humor part—she says you have to sometimes just laugh at what the mind comes up with. "Wow, where did that come from? Where did that thought come from?" It's very freeing to be able to smile a little bit at the antics of the mind. I know we can't do it all the time. We're still practicing, we're still getting caught up. But when we have those moments to be skillfully irreverent of what the mind comes up with based on habit, it is very freeing.

This can extend even into some of the conventional norms in society. We see that they're just conventions. Again, it's not that we wouldn't have ways of doing things in society, but it's nice if we can see through those a little bit. There's a fellow who drives around Santa Cruz in a custom camper. It's painted with his own artwork, and it says "Peace and Freedom" in big letters. It has streamers and decorations. You can't miss this thing when it's driving around. It's all done in a humorous and yet serious way of poking a little bit of fun at people just going about their conventional lives. He has this way that wakes people up a little bit with his tricked-out camper.

It can even extend into the spiritual or religious realm. I think about how the Dalai Lama^[5] laughs at the pomp associated with his position. He takes his position seriously; he acts as the bodhisattva of compassion for our world. But the price of that, in a sense, is that when he goes places, there's gold brocade, fancy things, and people always attending to him. He has a way of very gently showing that he sees through that. I remember watching a video of him where they had a very high, beautiful seat for him to sit on to give a teaching. He came, did his bows, got up on the seat, and noticed that it had been padded and was very soft. He realized it was a little bit bouncy. He paused and just bounced on it for a moment, and then he went back. You could see him thinking, "Look at that, I bounced when I was five years old on a chair." He takes his position lightly in a skillful way. This is skillful irreverence, a certain lightness of being.

There's a prayer in Vajrayana^[6] practice where one asks, "Give me energy to see through life's illusions." Wouldn't that be nice if we could always see through life's illusions beforehand?

Unskillful Irreverence

Here in the United States, I would say that we have a culture of celebrating certain types of irreverence. It's a little bit in our nature that we have that quality somehow, but we can pay a price for that and sometimes slide into the quadrant of unskillful irreverence. Skillful irreverence can go too far. Often, we can be cynical. We can have sarcasm about our approach to life.

My father says that when he was in his twenties, he was once told by an older mentor that he was not quite mature yet because he still sometimes used sarcasm. He never forgot that, being told by this older guy that he wasn't quite mature yet when he was thinking he was hot stuff as a twenty-something guy. He realized over time that sarcasm doesn't always serve us.

Other aspects of unskillful irreverence include that we don't often take some elements of spirituality seriously, such as devotion and prayer. In the Western version of Buddhism, those were actually deliberately stripped out when they were brought here because the teachers thought that Westerners wouldn't like that sort of thing. It might be true, but if you go to Asia, people are so devoted. At least in the places that I've been and seen, there's a lot of devotion. There is the acceptance of using prayer, and there's a lot of heartfulness. You can feel it in the energy of the temples there. There can be a way that we don't honor that quite in our version here.

Sometimes we also feel too irreverent to be willing to surrender in our practice. This practice ultimately asks us to give up quite a lot, renouncing aspects of our attachment to self, renouncing some of what we thought was so important earlier in life—those ordinary gods. If we have too much irreverence, there's even some ego in that irreverence. We may not be willing to give up what this practice asks us to let go of to be truly free.

We might be irreverent toward things that are really quite beautiful if we were willing to open to them, and that can leave a hole in the heart. It doesn't allow our heart to be completely filled by our practice. Something would be lacking in our spirituality, some juice not quite there, if we're not willing to touch into the heart dimension, the letting go, the giving up, the surrender.

Every few years here at IMC, we have a refuge ceremony. People who are interested can come and formally take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. There's a little ceremony that Gil Fronsdal^[7] does. I did the ceremony in 2008, and I was not too keen on this idea. But I was getting more involved in IMC, had joined the board at that time, and somehow it felt right. You take a few class sessions and then there's a ceremony at the end. I kind of thought in my mind, "Well, okay, I'll do this thing. It's the thing to do here at the center." I don't think I was disrespectfully irreverent, but nonetheless, I was taken by complete surprise that I was deeply moved by the simple act.

When it was made formal, the lights were dark, we lit candles, offered flowers, sat in meditation, and took the refuges and precepts officially. My body just felt light. It was flooded with this spiritual quality called pīti^[8] (joy). It was probably better that I had no clue I was capable of that kind of feeling because it took me by surprise, and it was so delightful. It opened something in me. [Laughter]

The remedy for unskillful irreverence—where we've gotten a little bit into that sarcasm, or ego, or "I'm not gonna let go"—is to open to healthy, skillful reverence. Some people move toward this kicking and screaming, others discover it, and others have it naturally, which is nice.

Skillful Reverence

That is the last of our four quadrants: skillful reverence.

One basic form is refuge, as I talked about with the ceremony—refuge in the Triple Gem: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. When we started in the quadrant of unskillful reverence, I read two lines from a verse about the ordinary gods. I want to read you the whole four-line stanza now:

Locked up in the prison of their own patterning, whom can ordinary gods protect? Who can you count on for refuge? Go for refuge in the Three Jewels.

This is the practice of a bodhisattva, or we could say this is the practice of a sincere practitioner. We can start out doing this at a surface level, but then we'll find that it unfolds over time. Maybe we just say the words at first. If you go to a retreat, for example, often on the first evening, everybody is invited to take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and say the Five Precepts as a creation of the community container. If you've never done that and it's a little bit of a surprise, you might just say the words and move on. But eventually, there's a way that they can start to work on us. Recalling my experience with the ceremony, I had said the refuges before that, but suddenly it came alive when I did it at the ceremony. They woke me up to looking more carefully at refuge.

Skillful reverence includes taking seriously the beauty of our own heart. Everybody's heart has beauty in it. Even just wanting to do the practice or starting to practice mindfulness, there's beauty right there. But there are also so many ways in which we are living ethically, ways in which we're offering mettā^[9] (loving-kindness), gratitude, or care to people, to the world, to animals. Everybody has something. Perhaps we have something deeper. Perhaps we have a spiritual longing that's bringing us to practice in some way. There's a word for this in Pali, saṃvega^[10]—a sense of spiritual longing or urgency.

Gil Fronsdal tells a story of a man who came to a temple. He was not too sure about practice, but somehow he was drawn to coming to the temple. He saw a statue outside the doors and sat and looked at it for a while. He was debating, "Should I really open to practice? I don't know." This was a statue that had some magical qualities through the power of the temple, and it said to him, "Why not?" He was very shocked, and the statue just said again, "Why not?" The man was so scared he ran away. Have we done that? "Why not?" Don't dismiss those deeper feelings in your heart. You don't have to speak them, you don't have to share them, but at least for yourself, please open to them at some level. Don't brush them under the rug.

There is a sutta that's about an allegorical dream. In the dream, a man has a series of choices. He's digging, and he finds things along the way. He finds a fork, and the advice he's given is, "Throw out the fork and keep digging." So he throws out the fork and keeps digging. He finds all these things—one of them is a chopping block with a piece of meat on it. It says, "Throw out the chopping block and keep digging." He keeps digging, and eventually, after finding eight or nine things, he finds a nāga^[11] serpent, which is a powerful mythical beast in Buddhism, generally benign and meant to represent great power that can come from practice. (Big things in general are just called nāgas. Elephants are called nāgas, and sometimes arahants^[12]—awakened beings—are called nāgas.) So he finds a nāga serpent^[13], and the advice is, "Stop digging. Honor the nāga serpent." The sense is that we keep digging and digging in our heart, in our life, in our practice, and in our path, and we keep finding things where we have choices. We let go of the things that are not useful. The fork is doubt—we don't need that. The chopping block is sensual pleasure—we don't need to pursue that and make it a god. Eventually, we find something very beautiful, a nāga serpent in the heart. Don't throw that one out. Honor that one.

There's also a sutta about the monastic Sangha, but we could just think of it as a spiritual community, where there's a new monk who has so many rules to follow—over 200 rules that monks follow as they go through their day. This new monk is continually making mistakes on the rules. You're supposed to admonish a monk who is not fulfilling the rules so that he can benefit from them, but the other monks sense that this monk is actually just proceeding from very deep love and faith in the Buddha. That has filled his heart, that's why he ordained, and that's all he cares about. He can't get the details right, but he has this love and faith. When they see that, they decide not to admonish him right away because they worry that it will dampen his faith, and it would be more unbeneficial for him to have that happen. Eventually, he sort of grows into being able to manage the rules, but it's so compassionate that they saw his love and his faith and let him find his way. We might consider that for ourselves as we move along with this practice—skillful reverence for our effort, our best effort that we're bringing.

In light of all this, I think it's fair to say that spiritual maturity includes skillful, healthy reverence of some type. Do you dare? We have to discover for ourselves what this is. We can't borrow it from someone else or imitate it.

I would say that it even matters in secular ways out in society. We've lost touch with being reverential and daring to acknowledge what is worthy of reverence in the regular, conventional world. That may have something to do with the challenges we're seeing in our society and our world; we may not take seriously things that are worth taking seriously.

Even the Buddha felt moved to express reverence. He's the Buddha, right? But there's a discourse from soon after the Buddha's awakening where he says, "It is painful to dwell without reverence and deference." The word translated as reverence is gārava^[14], which probably most closely resembles our idea of respect. The Buddha was looking around for something to respect. He had just woken up, and he couldn't find any being in the world who was his superior in terms of ethics, meditation, wisdom, or liberation. And yet he still wanted to offer something. Waking up didn't take away that wish in his heart. So he decided that he could still feel reverence and deference to the Dharma. Isn't that sweet? This was before he had done a lot of teaching, so I don't think he's referring to all the stuff he said because he hadn't said it yet. I think he's referring to Dharma as nature, as the way things work, the order, the way things unfold, which he awoke to completely. Seeing how it all works, he could offer reverence to the beauty of the universe. I find it quite touching that the Buddha still wanted to dwell in reverence and deference, so I think it's really appropriate for us also.

I look for this in people as they practice. Does it seem that they've found something that's worth taking seriously or feeling awe for? Have they discovered something worthy of reverence? What have you found? Just reflect for a moment: what have you found that might be worthy of that?

There's an important change in people when they shift from wondering how the Dharma can fit into their life to wondering how their life can fit into the Dharma. It's a shift. Spiritual maturity might also include healthy irreverence: a certain lightness of being, bouncing on the seat like the Dalai Lama. We don't want to take ourselves too seriously in all of that. There should be a little irreverence toward the silliness of this predicament we're in, laughing at our foibles, laughing at our eccentricities, being willing to be wrong, and a willingness to let go.

Practical Tips

To end, here are a few practical tips. How might we act on some of what's been said today?

A very simple way is to invoke an attitude of sincerity at the beginning of your sit. Acknowledge as you sit down on the cushion that what you're doing matters. Why are you doing this? Why are you sitting still on a cushion or a chair for 30, 45, or 60 minutes? Feel the sense that you care about your inner life in some way, or you have a spiritual longing, or you just know it's beneficial. Even if you can't articulate anything, that's fine. Feel your sincerity, that it makes a difference to sit.

Maybe sometimes that simple sincerity or respect will open into a bigger perspective, having a sense of the lineage that brought this teaching to us and that we're participating in at that very moment of sitting. We don't take ourselves so seriously sometimes. We think, "Oh yeah, Buddhism and these ancient wisdom texts and the Insight Meditation Center, but I'm just a person who sits a little bit sometimes." No, you're participating in something big, something that's been going on for 2,600 years. The Dharma is vast and profound, and it's amazing that we found it. Think of all the people who didn't find it, or think of all the other things you could have found. Some of them are great, some might be just as good, who knows, but you found this, and it's quite good. There can be a sense of being part of something larger.

We can practice skillful reverence. We can practice skillful irreverence. Maybe we'd even get to the point of being willing to throw dirt on our altar if we noticed that we were getting attached to it in some way. But first, you have to have the altar and be revering it; then you'll learn how to lighten up on that.

Reverence and irreverence: which one might need more work? Which ones are skillful, which are unskillful? There's some ground to play with there, and I hope all of you might find something amid all of that that connects with you. These are my thoughts for today. May they be of benefit, and if any of it wasn't, you can just leave it here; I'm not attached.

I think we're right at time, so we'll end. If anyone has any questions, I'll stay here for a few minutes. Thank you.