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Practicing in Accordance with the Dharma

In the Buddhist teachings, there's a phrase that has caught my attention over the years: "practicing in accordance with the Dharma." It's used quite a bit by the Buddha in the teachings. It's not just a one-time thing that he says in one little place; he uses it fairly frequently and brings it out in his talks.

One way that the Buddha talked about it is that practicing in accordance with the Dharma is one of the key factors that supports us to wake up. It's a key factor, and a bit more poetically, the Buddha said that people who practice in accordance with the Dharma beautify the Sangha^[1]. How about that? They beautify the Sangha.

Today I wanted to explore this phrase a bit. The Pali for it is dhammānudhammappaṭipatti^[2]. I think there are several different dimensions to what this can mean, and some of that variation has to do with the range of meaning of the word Dharma itself, which is a vast term that can cover a lot of territory. The word itself covers different domains. In addition, there are said to be about a half-dozen qualities of the Dharma, which is not the focus, but they'll sort of come in as we're talking about it.

The Dharma can be the teachings of the Buddha. This is a Dharma talk, and we're focusing on the Buddha's teachings, so here, being in accordance could mean something like following the instructions. We're not just getting information in a Dharma talk from a teacher. That might be part of it—there are explanations, there are descriptions—but there are also instructions, among other things: things that we can do, or perspectives that we can take, that will help us move toward freedom from suffering.

You may have gotten instructions at some point on mindfulness of breathing, or on mindfulness of emotions or mind states—mindfulness of aversion, for example. Maybe you were told to feel the aversion in the body, or to name it—recognize that aversion has come into the mind and name it in order to create a little gap before we just act on the aversion. These are examples of instructions that we get for how to live with our body, mind, and world in a way that's relatively free. If we're following those instructions when a strong emotion like aversion comes up, then we could say that we're practicing in accordance with the Dharma, within what the Buddha taught.

I wanted to offer this story that's found in Gil Fronsdal's book, A Monastery Within. Identical twin sisters found their way to the monastery. At first, it was very difficult to distinguish one from the other, and the monks and nuns often confused them. Not only did they look the same, but they also had the same mannerisms, identical ways of talking, and as nuns, they wore the same robes. In addition, they both had extremely aversive personalities. They were astute observers who seemed always to see what was wrong. After some months, marked differences began to appear between them. They remained as aversive as ever; however, one sister became more and more dour and discouraged. The other became increasingly happy. Soon enough, the first sister left the monastic life, though this did nothing to improve her dark state. The second sister went on to become the guest master, and many of the monastery guests remarked how her happiness was contagious. The first sister directed her aversion outwardly. When she suffered, all she could see was what was wrong with the world. The second sister looked inward. When she suffered, she focused on being averse to her aversion, and toward whatever clinging created it. The first sister was crushed by her aversion; the second was liberated by hers.

We get these instructions, and it's consequential whether we follow them or not. It's interesting to observe in ourselves whether we always follow the instructions. Sometimes we just forget, of course, or it happens too quickly and we didn't have a chance. But we can start to see with the mindfulness practice that other things get in the way of our actually following these instructions. It's normal that there's some challenge for us, because not all of us is on board with this process of waking up, right? Our doubt is not on board. Our ignorance is not on board. So when we run into those things, they can sometimes get in the way. Maybe there's fear. Maybe there's ego: "I want to do it my way, why should I listen to the teacher?" The mind is very tricky. When it's putting up doubt or resistance, we literally might not hear the instructions accurately.

Some people worry a lot about whether they're doing it right in practice. I want to address that directly. With this phrase, "in accordance with the Dharma," I hope that the word "accordance" feels a little bit more accommodating than the idea of "doing it right." There's a little aversion in whether I'm doing it right or not. Maybe we could ask something like: "Are we in harmony with what the Buddha offered?" If you're someone who is frequently concerned about whether or not you're doing it right, maybe you could ask instead, "Am I in harmony with what I understand of the teachings?" That might soften it a little bit.

Thinking about these two sisters who were both aversive, but one learned how to work within that and find freedom and the other did not, maybe one criterion for knowing if our practice is in accordance is: are our unwholesome states decreasing and wholesome states increasing, or the reverse? Are we actually becoming happier or freer in some way? We don't have to check moment to moment, because there are times where we have a period of some dukkha^[3] or some dryness in the practice. But in a long-term sequence, are we generally decreasing our unwholesome states and increasing the wholesome ones? Remember that mindfulness is wholesome, so that helps.

Of course, there's more to the teachings of the Buddha than just meditation instructions, so we should look beyond that. More broadly, being in accordance with the teachings would mean being on the path. Are we doing the steps of the Eightfold Path in our life? If we're only doing meditation—that's our thing, we meditate—but we're not paying any attention to ethics or wisdom in our life, it might be hard to get fully in tune. That would be like tuning one string of our guitar to a tuning fork. We've got that one string in tune, but we didn't check any of the other strings. How is that going to sound when we try to play the guitar? When we're bringing all the qualities of the path into a chord together, then we could say that the path is unfolding. Sometimes we're working more on one than another, and there can be periods of focus, but generally, we would want to be working on all of the aspects of our life broadly together so that they can all harmonize and unfold together.

One of the qualities of the Dharma—I said I would sometimes bring in the classical qualities of the Dharma—is that it is onward-leading, opanayiko^[4]. It means that we don't get stuck forever. We can't be stuck forever if we're in accord with the Dharma. Maybe I should name the steps of the path, just in case someone is not familiar. I'll use the word "appropriate," or "complete," or "wise" instead of "right." So: appropriate view, appropriate intention, appropriate speech, appropriate action, appropriate livelihood, appropriate effort, appropriate mindfulness, and appropriate concentration. You can see that all of those factors encompass our view of the world—how we see things, how we see ourselves—how we act through speech, action, and livelihood, and also how we train our mind through making some effort, through mindfulness, and through collectiveness of mind.

There's another teaching where the Buddha talks about how a person understands the path when they are practicing in accordance with the Dharma. How do they frame it in their mind? In general, what this teaching says is that people like that understand two things overall. First of all, they understand that thoughts of greed, hatred, and delusion are the main problems in the mind, and those thoughts are ended by practicing well. They're ended by doing practice, not because of material gains or other material circumstances. The result is that they're very careful about not extolling themselves and disparaging others. Let's say you practice for a while and you become a mindfulness teacher. You don't say, "Oh, this makes me so great." Instead, there's an understanding that what is helping the mind to purify, or improve, or get more in alignment is the practicing itself. So one focuses on just continuing the practice.

Second, which is kind of a more specialized part of the first, is that even when a person experiences what are considered attainments or important things on the path—like cultivating deep concentration, going on a long retreat, or having an insight of some kind—they understand that identifying with those things is not part of the path. Once again, always just continuing to focus on the practice is the sign of being in accordance with the Dharma. This is how we think about our path and our practice. If we're practicing in accordance with the Dharma, we're not measuring our success or comparing ourselves with others.

Another meaning of Dharma—which is related to the teachings of the Buddha—is simply nature, or how things work. As we practice with our own particular experience—whose else's experience are we going to practice with?—we sit down and feel our body and its various aches, pains, and challenges. We have our mind, the memories that come up, the emotions, and what it is that we're trying to figure out in our life right now. All of those things are part of what we can be mindful of in our experience. Yet, as we watch these specific things about us, we start to see patterns. We start to eventually see into more universal characteristics. We watch our own mind, but we're learning about how the mind works for everyone. Everyone has dukkha, and everyone has clinging unless we're totally free. So we start to see these more foundational or fundamental things that are going on, and our particular experiences are just examples of those.

We come to have our own experience with foundational Dharma principles like the Four Noble Truths or dependent co-arising—that things occur because of conditions. We start to actually see that in our experience or just generally how it is for humans. A big aspect of that is seeing impermanence. That's one thing that we often emphasize here: noticing that things change, they come and go, arise and pass. It's very hard to find something that's been constant for our whole life. There's a famous phrase that people say when they have deep insight into impermanence: "All that is of the nature to arise is of the nature to pass away." This is an insight that we can have, and I name it because in that phrase, "all that's of a nature to arise," the word is Dharma. Everything that is of the Dharma to arise is of the Dharma to pass away. That's how it is.

When we start to see how these teachings of the Buddha are actually applying in our own experience—that they're true for us—we start to have a kind of felt sense of the Dharma, a felt sense of accordance. Like a feeling of alignment or attunement in the body. This relates to some of the other qualities of the Dharma. It's said to be visible here and now, sanditthiko^[5]. The Dharma is something that we can see right here. Say I walked into the room in a lousy mood and noticed a tear in the carpet (there isn't a tear in the carpet here, but suppose). Then we see in our mind, "Oh, when I'm in a bad mood, I tend to see what's wrong with the place." We see it operating right there in our mind. Whereas, if I'd been feeling happy about the spring flowers I just saw, maybe what I notice is the happy faces of the people coming in. We start to see how the conditions are flowing along, changing, and impacting my experience.

The Dharma is also said to be timeless, akaliko^[6], or immediate in another translation. In the way that natural laws always work, they're kind of there all the time in the background. We start to see that aspect of the Dharma. The word "accord" is related to words like "concord" or "discord." It's something like being in tune, musically consonant, or not dissonant. There's a way that this is really true viscerally. Sometimes we touch into it first in meditation. We're sitting, and challenging things are happening in the mind, but we start to orient ourselves toward, "Could I align with this somehow? Could my body be physically aligned? Could my mind be aligned?" We start to feel into the Dharma, and that takes us deeper than just knowing it cognitively or thinking about it.

If we really understand that things are impermanent, we'll have a different relationship to things in our life. It doesn't make so much sense to cling when we see how all of experience is changing. To be in accordance with the Dharma when we see into these foundational principles helps us get lighter and lighter in our life.

Nonetheless, it's still possible to be a little bit off. I want to name ways that we can get out of accordance. Number one is that we can get conceptual. We think about whether or not there's a rule or a principle—something I heard in a talk that I should be applying right now. Often it's skillful to start with that. For example, we learn the Five Precepts as the ethical basis for life as a layperson, and so we might think about those and consider whether or not we're applying that principle correctly. But eventually, connecting with the Dharma is not meant to be so conceptual. It's not meant to be something that we think about quite so consciously.

Just as an example, if we are applying the precepts really as rules that we may have learned and are trying to apply, we will eventually start to run into uncertainty. For example, we might know that one of the precepts says that we should not lie. We should not knowingly say what we know to be false. Clear enough, it's a rule. So then what about a trivial lie in order to make someone feel happy or comfortable? If we have a rule of always stating the exact factual truth, but we also have a value of caring for our friends, what about that classic moment when they say, "Do you like my sweater?" and you don't? It can be a real moment of uncertainty if we have a rule system in conflict with our care for this person. Practice in accordance cannot only mean following conceptual principles. It's more flexible than that. It's not so rigid. If you're wondering what the answer is, there isn't one clear answer for how to move through that moment. But if we are attuned, in accordance with the Dharma, we can find something to say somehow that navigates that.

Another way that we can get a little bit off is with the felt sense, which I pointed to second. It's closer, it's more flexible, but even the felt sense can be a little bit off. That can happen when we get focused on one particular feeling. Again, as an example, suppose we have an experience where we're feeling tightness in our chest. You've gotten attuned to the body, you're going through the world with mindfulness, and you feel that you've gotten a little bit tight in the heart area. As you're mindful of that, the tightness melts away, and you feel your heart open. It's a beautiful experience when something like that happens. We come into attunement and somehow we open. But then the mind can fixate onto that and say, "Oh, that exact feeling is what it means to be in accordance with the Dharma. That's the feeling of it—it's when my heart melts and feels open." So then after that, we go through the world continually monitoring the feeling in our chest for tightness, and if there's any tightness, we try to make it relax. I'm hamming it up a little bit, but I've done patterns like this where I had a certain experience, and then I felt like, "Oh, that's it. Now I've got it." And so then there can be a subtle trying to make that happen again, or believing that that's what the Dharma feels like.

It kind of makes sense, but freedom or Dharma is not any one particular feeling. It's not any one particular kind of felt sense. It's not always the same way, and we don't want to get into manufacturing feelings. So we have to be a little bit careful. We can get off track by bringing in too many theories and too many ideas, or by getting attached to a certain kind of feeling or emotion. Maybe a good image then—we're painting a bigger picture now—how do we consider this idea of accordance with the Dharma? Maybe a good image is to see it in terms of a process of attunement, a kind of dynamic balance. The way riding a bicycle is a dynamic balance. If you're riding a bike, you're almost always falling over in some direction, but you're always pulling yourself back toward being in alignment, always moving toward balance. We have a gradual practice. We're finding our way toward more and more accordance with the Dharma, but we don't always get it right. We definitely don't always get it right. And even if we do get it right for a little while, then the conditions change, and things are off balance slightly. So maybe we think more about moving toward balance instead of getting to balance and staying there. There's very little where we just "set it and forget it" in the Dharma.

I feel like as we discover what practicing in accordance with the Dharma means and what it means for us, it will take us toward the maturing of both our thought and our emotion. When our thought originally was very conceptual and a little bit rigid, we sort of move toward being more flexible in how we think and having more intuition—the sort of mature form of the cognitive mind. Similarly, our emotional heart—I don't know that they're so separate, but let's pretend for a moment—maybe we start out with a lot of reactivity and difficult experiences, and then over time that smooths out a little bit, and we move toward qualities like compassion or goodwill. Ways of understanding relationships that are part of some larger whole. It's a maturing of the emotional side. We might still be aversive like that one sister, having a critical mind that can see the challenges with things, but we move toward using that well, and we have more and more happiness like she did. Or we might always have a sensual orientation, but that can move into metta^[7], for example. Instead of love for sensual things, we move toward a universal love that connects beings together. It looks different for different people.

This maturing process can take some turns. We can often reach a new level of accordance when we give up or surrender. Have any of you seen this in your practice? Things can't change, and they're sort of stuck or dry, and we're putting in effort—and we do have to put in effort in order to engage—but at some point, what's most fruitful is to give up, to let go. Sometimes it's about us doing something in order to practice. If we don't do anything, I would guess that we will continue to keep suffering. If you just sit on your couch waiting to awaken, you probably will end up continuing to suffer. But there are also times when we're getting in our own way. Our view, our way of seeing things, is itself limiting. We grapple with that, and at some point, stepping back helps the Dharma to lead us onward.

So then a question for us is: can we learn to trust in the unfolding of our own specific experience? Can we learn to trust the flow of the Dharma? It might not look how we think it will. I want to tell a true story of an Irish Trappist monk. He was a Catholic monk, and his experience was Zen meditation. Early in his monk life, he was given a book about Zen, and he wasn't very interested in it. Somebody gave it to him and said, "You might find this interesting," and he thought, "I don't think so." The person further qualified the book by saying, "This is a Spanish translation of an English translation of the German original, and it's a bad translation." So he really wasn't very excited about reading this book, but he did agree to read it. He got two things from this book. One was instructions for how to sit on a cushion, which he had never done. He decided to try it because he was often falling asleep when he was sitting in the pew in the church. He got a big pile of blankets—he didn't have a meditation cushion—and he sat on it. He figured, "If I'm sitting in a position like this with my legs crossed, I'm not going to fall asleep as easily." The second thing he got out of the book was a koan^[8]. He didn't know the word koan, and he didn't really know what that meant, but it had this question: "What was your face before you were born?" It's a classic koan from the Zen tradition. He had no idea what a koan was or how to work with it. He didn't have any instructions for sitting meditation, and he didn't have a teacher. But for some reason in his heart, he was drawn to engaging with this practice, and so he just did his best to follow the instructions.

His fellow Catholic monastics were teasing him gently about whether he was really Catholic or Buddhist. They also asked him to sit somewhere else because it was distracting for them when he sat on his pile of blankets in the church. So he found a little room to sit by himself, and he contemplated this koan about his face before he was born. After a long time of doing that, making adjustments along the way that felt intuitively right, he really did his best. He tried and he made some changes, but eventually, he decided that he hadn't seen anything, and there was really nothing coming from this practice. He was a little bit sorry that he hadn't ever really found a teacher to learn more about it, and he decided to give up. He stood up, and in his words, "That's when I saw my face before I was born."

Later he met some Zen teachers, and he actually eventually became a roshi^[9]—an authorized Zen teacher—in addition to still remaining a Trappist monk. He said that all of this drew him much closer to the deepest teachings of Jesus; he really understood how those point toward emptiness. That was his understanding. So this, too, I would say is practice in accordance with the Dharma: really bringing himself to it, really living the sincerity of his engagement with this. Maybe you'll agree with me that there's some beauty to this monk's path and how he just kept engaging.

How about us? When we engage with Dharma practice—which all of us are in some way, even if this is the very first time you came here, or the very first time you're tuning in on YouTube, you're here, so in some way you're engaging with the Dharma right now—we often find that we'll run into unfamiliar terms, like "practicing in accordance with the Dharma." As I said, this has caught my attention over the years. I didn't know at all what it meant when I read it the very first time, and I found it to be fruitful to engage over the years and consider in my own practice: "What is this? How does it unfold? What does it mean for me now?" How do we explore and familiarize ourselves with terms like this? If it feels important, relevant, or interesting, I encourage you to engage with terms even if you're not sure what they mean. We've been doing a little bit of that during this talk. I've been exploring different dimensions, trying to create a larger picture. You're welcome to take the ones that make sense to you and leave the ones that don't.

We can also step back a little bit and consider that process itself. What is it that we're doing? We might engage with a Dharma term by posing a question. That monk had a koan as a question. Some Buddhist traditions have made this into an art form. We don't do that so explicitly, but even less formally, questions are a very good way to engage with the Dharma. We can pose the question: "What does it mean to practice in accordance with the Dharma?" But the question might be, to whom or to what are we posing that question? Are we posing it to our intellect, our linguistic mind? I decided to pose this question to ChatGPT, and I thought the answer was interesting. I typed in, "What does practice in accordance with the Dhamma mean?" I'll read it in the voice that kind of goes with it:

"The term Dhamma typically refers to the teachings of the Buddha, which emphasize the development of ethical behavior, mindfulness, and wisdom. Therefore, practice in accordance with Dhamma means to practice in accordance with the ethical principles, mindfulness, and wisdom taught by the Buddha. In practical terms, this means striving to cultivate wholesome thoughts, speech, and actions while avoiding unwholesome ones. It also means developing mindfulness, or a clear and non-judgmental awareness of one's thoughts, feelings, and surroundings. Lastly, it means cultivating wisdom, or an understanding of the nature of reality and the causes of suffering as taught in the Buddhist tradition. Overall, practicing in accordance with the Dhamma means making a conscious effort to live in a way that aligns with the teachings of the Buddha with the goal of reducing suffering and cultivating inner peace and happiness." Q.E.D.

In terms of basic information content, I have to admit that this might be a lot of what I've said during this talk! [Laughter] I don't know, do you guys need Dharma teachers anymore? I would probably change a little bit of the language; I saw a few holes in the doctrine there. But it's actually pretty good information. Do you think it gets you all the way there? No. What about that Trappist monk who didn't have any of this information? He had no books, he had no teacher, he had no ChatGPT. But he did sit on a pile of blankets and sincerely apply his mind until his heart opened. In exploring a Dharma term, we are not just posing a question to our language-oriented mind. The answer to our question is not a bunch of information; it's not about the language. We're posing the question to our citta^[10], to our heart-mind, or even more broadly, to our whole body-heart-mind system. That means that we can use the whole body-heart-mind system to resonate with that question. A friend of mine said it nicely: "Accordance is multi-dimensional. Mind, heart, and body are all used to connect to wisdom and knowing in this moment—knowing right now, such that practice is in accord."

Another of the qualities of the Dharma is that it is inviting us to "come and see" (ehipassiko^[11]). Note that the body is involved. We can consider the Dharma, or drop in a question, and then feel the energetic ripples in our body. That's it. No need to cognize what's going on, create a story, or figure it out. To do this kind of full engagement with the Dharma term or question is kind of like living it—"to live the question." I'm borrowing that phrase. It comes from the Western tradition, from a work called Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. This is a fairly oft-quoted segment:

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer."

To live the question of what it means to practice in accordance with the Dharma is to take that question into daily life, into relationship, into work, into community life, deep into your heart while sitting on the cushion. All of those. It takes some trust and confidence to listen carefully to that question that you've posed with your whole mind, body, and heart, and then actually go into it, go with it, and actually change things in your life in order to live by that question. This is your life. It matters. It matters what you do.

Maybe you have some sense now of what it means to say that somebody who is practicing in accordance with the Dharma beautifies the Sangha. The Buddha loved to see people engaging with the teachings and really seeing how they play out in their own life. He created an environment where people could do that, where they could give themselves fully to the teachings. I've been here with the IMC community for a long time, and I can say that it's quite a good place for practicing in accordance with the Dharma. It's a place where people can try out different ways of being, where they can feel some harmony and yet enough security to be daring with how they are. There is support all along the path for engaging with our ethics, our mental training, and our wisdom. All of that is here. I think we see that beauty among us today, and we can even extend it out to the folks on YouTube who are joining us, and see how far across the world the beauty is spreading. Thank you all for your beauty and your engagement with the Dharma.

There are a few more minutes, if anybody would like to ask questions or offer comments.

Q&A

Question: I was just wondering what the Sangha is?

Kim Allen: Wow, there's a whole other explanation that we could do. I did use that term without defining it. Thank you, probably other people want to know too. Sangha is the Pali word for the community. In the West, we generally use it as the community of practitioners, so like this is the IMC Sangha, the IMC community. More traditionally, it refers either to the monastic Sangha of people who were ordained, or to people who have reached some deep insight into the teachings and can serve as guides for others. One more dimension I'll mention is that the Sangha is one of the refuges for us. The Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are the places we can orient toward to support our practice as we go along the path. Does that help? Thank you for asking the question.

Question: Could you share the name of the Trappist monk? Did he write anything?

Kim Allen: It's a good question. I didn't write his name down. I found a video where he spoke about this at a Buddhist-Christian conference. I didn't catch his name, so I'm sorry for that, but it was a recent video, and he was right there speaking, so I'm sure he is alive. Well, I'm not sure, but he was as of when he made the video! [Laughter]

Question: You talked about the twin nuns and how they were both aversive, and then one was no longer as aversive or actually followed the Dharma. How do you approach friendships and relationships in your life with people who are aversive, or become more aversive over time? How do you work with that?

Kim Allen: That's a good question. Is such a person a practitioner or not?

Questioner: Most likely not.

Kim Allen: We can't always know for sure, huh? So then what we're working with is how it feels for us in relationship with that person. It can be that we need to be in relationship with this person, that we don't have a choice. Is that the case? I have the feeling you're referring to a specific example, and we don't need more details, but is that true? Okay, yeah. So then we do still have some choice, right? We have our own sense of what's coming up in us in response to observing or experiencing that aversion. Of course, if there's any danger—if the aversion is directed toward you in a harmful way—then there would need to be some caretaking for yourself. I just want to state that right up front.

But if it's a little bit more of an observational thing, there are things that we can cultivate to protect ourselves. Certainly mindfulness, being aware: "Okay, I'm observing that." We are allowed to observe things externally, internally, and both. In yourself, probably the first cultivation is equanimity—accepting the reality. "Okay, this is what's going on for that person. I don't know what's happening inside of them, but I accept it." And then there can also be some connection, in that people who are behaving aversively and not apparently aware of it are probably suffering. So an appropriate response for you might also be compassion, for them and for you for the experience that you're having.

There are ways that we can begin to change ourselves in relationship to this energy such that it is less harmful; it's not coming into us and getting stuck. You may also need techniques to allow energy to move through, or you may physically need to move to a different place when things are happening. You can leave the room, give a wide berth, set a boundary, things like that. But generally, we have more options than we think we do. Is this helping?

Questioner: Yes, thank you.

Kim Allen: Okay, yeah. And of course, if you want to speak sometime with a teacher about the specifics of that, there might be things that I could say more specifically than in a general setting.

Looks like we're at time. Thank you, everyone. It's been a delight.