 Wise Heart
Jack Kornfield's brilliant synthesis of deep Buddhist practice and modern psychological insight has made him one of the most influential spiritual teachers of our time. Steve Silberman tells the fascinating story of Kornfield's voyage — both literal and philosophical — from West to East and back.
Jack Kornfield is dancing.
With a fluid arc of his left hand, he plucks a sheet of paper from a
stack beside his chair onstage at Spirit Rock, a Buddhist retreat
center in the hills above San Francisco. Leaning forward, he stitches
lines from a T.S. Eliot poem into a talk on meditation, along with
quotes from Alice Walker, Nelson Mandela, Chuang-Tzu, an Afghan taxi
driver who drove him to the airport, and his own daughter, Caroline.
Kornfield calls this his “jazz”—his way of spontaneously
weaving a tapestry of voices to illustrate the relevance of Buddha’s
teachings in everyday life.
Tonight a couple of hundred
people, from tattooed dharma punks to grandmothers in tie-dye, have
come to hear Kornfield’s jazz. Still boyishly slender, with huge
ears and a brushy mustache, the 65-year-old former monk doesn’t
look much different from the former Peace Corps volunteer with a
freshly shaved head who was ordained in a Thai temple in 1969. That
day, he was on his way to becoming a novice in the forest monastery
of Ajahn Chah, a renowned Theravada meditation master with a network
of practice centers throughout Southeast Asia. Today, Kornfield is
one of the most influential Buddhist teachers in the Western world.
Before cofounding
Spirit Rock in the late eighties, he helped create the Insight
Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts—the first retreat
center in America dedicated to the 2,500-year-old form of meditation
called Vipassana, which employs mindfulness of breath, bodily
sensations, thoughts, and emotions to ground the racing mind in the
here and now and penetrate the nature of reality. A psychologist and
a Buddhist teacher, Kornfield is the author of such guides to mindful
living as The Wise Heart, A Path with Heart, and
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, as well as numerous audio books
and DVDs. He has organized councils of Buddhist teachers to meet with
the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala; taught loving-kindness meditation to
inmates at San Quentin prison; hosted men’s groups for former gang
members in Los Angeles with poet Luis Rodriguez and storyteller
Michael Meade; and led a peace march alongside rabbis, sheikhs, and
imams through the streets of the Holy Land.
His Monday night dharma
talks in this room, however, are home. As Kornfield scoops up another
poem from the stack, reading it in the distinctive singsong melody of
his speech, it’s as if the books and papers beside his chair
comprise a river of human wisdom that he ladles out to the world, one
soul-sustaining sip at a time. “Listen with an open mind but don’t
try to remember this stuff. There’s no quiz at the end,” he says.
“It’s more of a reminder of something that you already know is
true deep inside yourself. And if it’s not, just let it pass by.”
For some of his friends in
the room, one of the most gratifying things about tonight’s talk is
that it’s happening at all. A year ago, Kornfield was giving a talk
in Barre when he lost consciousness and dropped to the floor. When he
woke up, he says, “a dozen doctors were peering down at me.” At a
neurologist’s office a few days later, he and his daughter Caroline
heard that the initial diagnosis was of something grave,
degenerative, and possibly life-threatening. “You don’t look so
good, Dad,” Caroline said. He told her how much he loved her. “Oh
Daddy,” she replied, “I wanted you to be here for my wedding and
to be the grandfather for my children.” They both wept.
A day or two later,
Kornfield attended a council of senior teachers at Spirit Rock.
Another teacher present at the meeting, Sylvia Boorstein, author of
Happiness is an Inside Job, says that he conducted himself
with composure and dignity. “We always start by going around in a
circle and telling each other how we are,” she recalls. “That
morning Jack said, ‘I have to go first.’ If it was a rehearsal
for how any of us should do it if we reach that point in our lives,
Jack did the rehearsal really well.”
A painful rehearsal is what
it turned out to be. The neurologist’s diagnosis proved incorrect,
and in the past few months Kornfield’s tremors, dizziness, and
other symptoms have lessened. Still, the ordeal was a potent spur to
his appreciation of the fragility of existence. “When you love
people and love this world, which I do, even if you have a lot of
detachment and equanimity, that love of life is enormous,” he says.
“I could feel my body contract with fear and anxiety, you know—how
is this going to be? It didn’t sound like an easy way to die,
but a pretty hard one. So I had to practice with that.”
Over lunch in a Marin County
café, Kornfield brandishes something he just received in the mail:
his Medicaid card. “If I’m given another ten years,” he says,
“how can I best serve dharma and fulfill my life? What if I don’t
have that much time left? These are the things I’m thinking about
these days.”
Kornfield’s refuge for
that kind of contemplation is a hut at the end of an unmarked trail
at Spirit Rock. A stone Ganesha guards the door of this modest
dwelling, sparsely furnished with a writing desk, a futon, Buddhist
and shamanic art, and a dozen shelves of books. “There’s no
toilet, so I have to go outside in the middle of the night to pee,”
he says. “But that means I see the stars.”
Growing up as the son of a
gifted biophysicist and tinkerer who had a dark and disturbing side,
Kornfield has been seeking solace in the cosmic perspective since he
was very young. To the delight of Jack and his three brothers, their
father Ted once rewired an old radar screen to build the first TV set
in their neighborhood. But he was also prone to paranoia and violent
outbursts. In The Wise Heart, Kornfield describes the bruises
his dad’s rages left on his mother’s arms, and the empty bottles
she would conceal around the house in case she needed to defend
herself. To escape their arguments, young Jack would flee to a
neighbor’s yard, stretch out under an apple tree, and gaze at the
sky. “It was an early form of detachment,” he says, “a way of
sensing myself as part of a bigger story than my family story.”
At Dartmouth College in the
early sixties, he took a course in Asian studies from Wing-tsit Chan,
a leading scholar of Chinese philosophy who would lecture sitting
cross-legged on his desk. Under the influence of Lao-Tzu, Ginsberg,
and Dylan, Kornfield became a hippie at a fraternity school,
attending a Be-In in Manhattan, and venturing to Haight–Ashbury to
explore LSD. “At their best, psychedelics opened me up to an
enormous range of archetypal experiences, shamanic experiences,
visionary experiences—even genuine experiences of transcendence and
enlightenment,” he recalls. “The tricky part was embodying these
realizations after the experiences were over.”
With the Vietnam War raging,
Kornfield signed up for the Peace Corps, and asked to be shipped off
to a Buddhist country. Sent to Thailand, he made his way to a remote
and impoverished region of the jungle near the Laotian border, where
he heard rumors of an American monk living in the ruins of a nearby
temple. Kornfield persuaded one of his friends with a Jeep to drive
him there, where he found a young man from Seattle who had come to
study with Ajahn Chah and had taken the name Sumedho. Because
Americans were still rare in Thailand, they tended to be coddled in
local monasteries, but Sumedho reassured Kornfield he would get no
special treatment if he meditated with his teacher. “This is the
real deal,” he promised, “the tough training.”
Indeed, one of the first
things that Ajahn Chah—an ochre-robed bhikku with a mischievous
grin—said to Kornfield when he arrived at the monastery was, “I
hope you’re not afraid to suffer.” This confused Kornfield, who
thought the good news about Buddhism was the third and fourth noble
truths—the ones about cessation of suffering. Ajahn Chah explained
that there were two kinds of suffering: the usual kind that generates
more pain and confusion, and the kind that can lead you to freedom.
There was plenty of the
latter available at his monastery, called Wat Nong Pah Pong. In
accordance with the Vinaya, the Buddha’s rules governing
monastic conduct, only one meal was eaten each day, in the morning,
and it was gathered by the monks on an alms round to a village five
miles away. Ajahn Chah would often talk for hours as the bhikkus sat
around him on a stone floor. He also had an uncanny ability to sniff
out attachments. Serenity-loving monks would be assigned to huts by
noisy intersections, while those terrified by wild animals were
dispatched to sit in the woods alone at night. The first time
Kornfield ever gave a dharma talk, it was at Ajahn Chah’s
insistence—at two in the morning, with no preparation, in Lao, for
an audience of hundreds of monks and lay practitioners.
But as strict as Ajahn Chah
was about the Vinaya, he had an open mind about the dharma, and
encouraged his students to meditate with other teachers as well. When
Kornfield heard that disciples of a Burmese master named Mahasi
Sayadaw offered highly systematized methods for attaining states of
meditative absorption known as the jhanas, Ajahn Chah
suggested he go see for himself. On a yearlong retreat with a monk
named Asabha Sayadaw, practicing Vipassana in silence eighteen to
twenty hours a day, Kornfield broke through to subtle realms of
awareness that he describes as the “particle physics” of
consciousness. “My mind became so still. I could see thoughts not
only when they arose, but before they arose, like that feeling when
you’re about to burp. My body would dissolve into twenty kinds of
light—light like the full moon, light like your body dispersing
into fireflies,” he recalls. “Then I went through stages where
there were ten thousand grains of sensation in every instant of
consciousness, where the smallest movement of your arm was like the
shifting of a sand dune—all those little particles arising and
passing out of emptiness.” Through this step-by-step process, he
learned how to cultivate the state of clarity and balance that
Theravadin elders call “high equanimity.”
When Kornfield returned to
Wat Nong Pah Pong, he couldn’t wait to tell Ajahn Chah about all
the profound experiences he’d had. His teacher listened, smiled,
and replied, “Good. Something else to let go of.”
At first, when he came back
to America in 1972, he tried to maintain the life of a Thai monk at
his mother’s house in Washington, D.C. “I was eager to show my
family and friends what I’d been doing all those years,”
Kornfield says. “It wasn’t like now, when you can attach photos
to email and tweet about your meditation. All my mom had seen was
these blue air-mail letters every few months. I wanted to see if I
could embody these teachings in the West.”
Doing alms rounds in the
city and refusing to handle money, however, turned out to be awkward.
Kornfield would persuade his mother to drive him to the Thai embassy,
where he’d show up with his bowl and ring the bell: “They’d
know what to do. They’d say, ‘Oh sure, let’s see what we’ve
got in the fridge.’”
Kornfield discovered that
trying to live as a monk in the West without the support of a
monastery was not healthy for him. He describes this turning point in
A Path with Heart, in a poignant memory of meditating in a
Fifth Avenue spa in Manhattan while waiting for his sister-in-law. He
glimpsed a group of women in disposable nighties, their cheeks
slathered in mud packs, giggling at him and his robes. Finally one
exclaimed, “Is he for real?”
Even returning to lay life
required special planning. Finding a Japanese temple on
display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Kornfield decided to
conduct his disrobing ceremony there. He asked for the help of
curator Chimyo Horioka, who had succeeded D.T. Suzuki as president of
the Cambridge Buddhist Association. With Horioka-san as his witness,
the American bhikku chanted, lighted candles, and wept. “I was
leaving behind a kind of simplicity, and a commitment to dharma with
every fiber of my being, in every waking moment, that was truly
beautiful,” Kornfield says. “So even though it was the right
thing to do, it was also a great loss.”
The stepping-stone to the
next phase of his life turned out to be a place where he might never
have found himself as a monk—a swanky Cambridge cocktail party. The
host was psychologist David McClelland, who had helped both Tim Leary
and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) get jobs at Harvard.
Also on the guest list was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama
who was then planning to launch a college in Colorado inspired by
Nalanda University, the famed center of Buddhist scholarship that had
thrived in India for a thousand years. It would be named after the
renowned Indian mahasiddha Naropa.
Trungpa Rinpoche took
Kornfield aside to ask him about his training. One of the innovations
that the lama was planning for his new school was to bring together
representatives of the three major historical streams of
Buddhism—Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana—so they could learn
from each other. Naropa Institute would also offer courses in
psychology, music, dance, and poetics, recognizing that these too
could be expressions of contemplative awareness. Trungpa Rinpoche
asked Kornfield to consider teaching a Vipassana course at Naropa’s
first summer session. Kornfield declined, explaining that he had
never taught at that level. Rinpoche replied, “Then it’s clear
you should be teaching,” and enlisted him on the spot.
Shortly after that, Ram Dass
organized a “dharma festival” in Boston, and Kornfield offered to
host out-of-town visitors. One of his guests was another former Peace
Corps volunteer who had just gotten back from Asia: Joseph Goldstein.
After a series of spontaneous experiences of insight, Goldstein had
become a student of a teacher named Anagarika Munindra. A brilliant,
impish Pali scholar in a white robe with an easy laugh and a
disarming manner, Munindra-ji, like his teacher Mahasi Sayadaw,
enthusiastically promoted the practice of Vipassana for lay people.
In the two millennia since the Buddha’s death, meditation practice
had been primarily limited to monks. Lay Buddhists could earn merit
by offering material support to monastics in exchange for their
wisdom, but this meant that for most people, deep realization could
only come in a later, more auspicious incarnation. But Mahasi Sayadaw
and Munindra-ji insisted that even busy householders could reach
enlightenment in this lifetime if they practiced mindfulness with
sufficient diligence.
In the vast halls of Mahasi
monasteries throughout Burma, Thailand, and Ceylon, thousands of lay
people practiced mindful sitting and walking for sixteen hours a day.
“One of the first things Munindra said to me when we met was that
if I wanted to understand the mind, I should sit down and observe
it,” Goldstein writes in his foreword to a new book by Mirka
Knaster called Living This Life Fully. “The great simplicity
and pragmatism of this advice struck a very resonant chord within me.
There was no dogma to believe, no rituals to observe; rather,
there was the understanding that liberating wisdom can grow from
one’s own systematic and sustained investigation.”
When Ram Dass volunteered to
teach a workshop called “The Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita” for
Naropa’s first summer in 1974, he asked Goldstein to be one of his
teaching assistants, leading a course in meditation. Kornfield
delivered a talk on the gathas, the Buddhist verses of
gratitude said to all beings at mealtime. The launch of the new
school turned out to be a huge success. Instead of the few hundred
students expected to show up, more than eighteen hundred people made
a pilgrimage to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to take classes
from Tibetan lamas, Zen roshis, and counterculture luminaries like
Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Bateson.
By the following summer,
Kornfield and Goldstein were teaching Vipassana as a team, forging a
collaboration so intimate that Goldstein still refers to it as a
marriage. The two slim, swarthy young yogis even looked like
brothers. “Jack and I were on the same wavelength,” he recalls.
“We were so enthusiastic about what we had learned and so
appreciative of each other. We had very different speaking styles,
but we seemed to complement each other really well. I’m a rather
linear speaker, but Jack is highly associative, and he’s a
wonderful storyteller. It was so exciting. We were reasonably good
teachers, but even more than that, we caught this huge, growing wave
of interest in the dharma. We were right there.”
Also right there was Sharon
Salzberg, who was several years younger than Kornfield and Goldstein,
but already a dharmic prodigy. She had met Goldstein at a retreat for
Westerners in Bodhgaya led by S.N. Goenka, another leader of the lay
“Vipassana revolution” in Asia. A former businessman, Goenka
promoted dhamma not as a form of Buddhism, but as a universal
path to liberation. Through Goldstein, Salzberg met both Munindra-ji
and Dipa Ma, a housewife who had taken up meditation in middle age
after the sudden deaths of her husband and daughter. In a tiny room
above a metal-grinding shop in Calcutta, Dipa Ma and her surviving
daughter would receive visitors, showering them with love and
home-cooked food. To Salzberg and Goldstein, she was a living
embodiment of metta, the Pali word for loving-kindness. Dipa
Ma predicted that Salzberg—then barely out of her teens—would be
a great teacher herself one day.
After their Naropa days,
Kornfield, Goldstein, and Salzberg were in high demand as teachers.
Couch-surfing from retreat to retreat, they eventually yearned to
create their own home base for intensive practice. A nun attending
one retreat mentioned that the Catholic church was selling off a
former seminary in Massachusetts. With the help of a loan officer who
was under the impression that the Insight Meditation Society was the
International Meditation Society (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s
organization, made famous by the Beatles), the first Vipassana
retreat center in the U.S. was born.
The early days in Barre were
largely improvisational, with debates about such basic issues as
whether the Buddha should be represented in the meditation hall, or
if Vipassana should be presented in secular form, as Goenka advised.
In the end, chanting, robes, and other exotic trappings were kept to
a minimum, in part because Americans often came to meditation seeking
an alternative to the hollow observances they saw in the churches and
congregations they grew up in. “We didn’t have a grand vision of
how things would develop—it was really a blank slate,” Salzberg
recalls. “Our mantra in the beginning was, ‘We can always close
it in a year if it doesn’t work out.’”
It worked out—even, as
Salzberg puts it, without adult supervision. “I don’t think any
of us thought we had the skill to imitate what we’d found in the
temples of Asia,” Kornfield says. “Almost every other Buddhist
community in America started with an elder who came over from Asia
and established a center here. So you’d go to a Tibetan meditation
hall and feel like you were in Tibet, or walk into a Zen center and
it felt like a little piece of Japan. But when our teachers came,
they taught us, they blessed us, and went home. They said, ‘Do it
your way.’ That made an enormous difference. We weren’t expected
to create temples. We were expected to offer the teachings.”
As they had at Naropa, the
teachers at IMS worked in teams, which offered students a chance to
hear the dharma in a chorus of different voices. If you wanted to
glimpse the empty nature of phenomena, Goldstein’s elegant lectures
on shunyata might speak to you. If you were drawn by the
Buddha’s emphasis on compassion, Sharon Salzberg’s talks on metta
would touch your heart. And if you craved body-centered practice, the
slow, balletic style of walking meditation that Ruth Denison had
studied with her Burmese teacher, U Ba Khin, might be just what you
needed. The teachers at IMS were more like peers than gurus—they
were kalyana mitta, spiritual friends.
To help his students cope
with challenges that hadn’t come up in Asia—notably including
relationship issues and a culture that encouraged scathing
self-judgments—Kornfield started broadening his approach to include
insights drawn from other traditions, particularly Western
psychology. In 1977, he earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from
Saybrook University (then called the Humanistic Psychology
Institute), in a program started by Gregory Bateson and Rollo May.
By presenting time-tested
methods of sharpening awareness in a straightforward American idiom,
IMS inspired a wave of mainstream interest in meditation. Informed in
part by his experiences in Barre, Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote the
best-seller Full Catastrophe Living, which promoted the
practical virtues of mindfulness outside of a Buddhist context.
Kabat-Zinn’s secularized version of Vipassana, the core of the
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, is now taught in
thousands of clinics and hospitals worldwide to ease chronic pain,
lower blood pressure, and accelerate healing.
In time, however, even
spiritual friends can drift apart for a while. Goldstein and Salzberg
undertook grueling retreats with Mahasi Sayadaw’s stern successor,
U Pandita, who taught that Vipassana was “a war between healthy and
unhealthy mental states.” While Kornfield had deep respect for U
Pandita, he felt that his influence at IMS was a mixed blessing.
“Joseph and Sharon turned back to this Burmese teacher whose great
emphasis was effort and striving,” he recalls. “That wasn’t
good for most Western students. It triggered their feelings of
self-judgment and unworthiness very strongly. So I felt it was
important to continue to build on the things we’d learned in the
West, rather than turning back to the traditional way.”
The former monk had another
reason to think about moving on. He had fallen in love.
Liana Chenoweth, a young
artist from Long Island, plunged right into the deep end of Buddhism,
signing up for the famed three-month silent retreat in Barre in the
fall of 1978. Naturally contemplative and inner-directed, she kept to
herself after the communal periods of sitting and walking, sleeping
in a cave guarded by three sentinel oaks.
As the weeks unfolded in
silence, Kornfield could see joy blossoming in her face. After the
retreat, they became a couple. A few years later they moved to the
Bay Area, where a group of people who had practiced in
Barre—including James Baraz, Anna Douglas, Howard Cohn, Sylvia
Boorstein, and Wes Nisker—were thriving. Kornfield started giving
popular Monday-night talks around Marin County, and soon the hunt for
a retreat center for the burgeoning West Coast sangha began.
The Kornfields were married
at the top of Mount Tamalpais in 1984, and their daughter was born
that fall. While Caroline was still in preschool, she would pull up a
bright green mat given to her by Ruth Denison to sit beside her
father while he meditated. Growing up in the retreat centers of
Switzerland, Bali, and Thailand, she felt like she had whole
villages—from retreat managers to cooks—looking out for her. “My
parents were both incredibly good at teaching me to appreciate both
cultural differences and similarities,” she says. “They showed me
how various religions use rituals and stories to help people live
their lives in the most loving and responsible way possible.”
She also got used to
well-meaning Buddhists blurting out things like, “You must feel so
blessed to have Jack as your father. He’s just so calm and mindful,
such a luminous being! I can only imagine being around him
every day.” After being around her father for twenty-six years,
Caroline says in an email, “I never thought of my dad as being
either enlightened or not, but as far as his being luminous goes, he
tries to leave work at the office ;)” A law student at the
University of California at Berkeley, she spent this past summer in
Cambodia, investigating the brutal history of the Khmer Rouge for the
War Crimes Studies Center.
With the help of his
daughter and Liana, who also became a psychotherapist after studying
Jungian “sandplay” therapy with Dora Kalff—a student of Jung’s
who was inspired by the construction of Kalachakra mandalas—Kornfield
was able to start healing the wounds from his upbringing. Caroline
recalls taking a walk with her dad one day and finding a set of rusty
wheels in a ditch; they threw the wheels in the car, bought some
plywood, and built a go-kart that was used for years in Fourth of
July parades. This same passion for building, repairing, and
arranging things just so—a benevolent echo of his father’s
tinkering in the home lab—spills over into Kornfield’s teachings,
she says. “My dad can beautifully imagine whole events and then get
all the fabric, stones, bowls of water, flower petals, and candles
that he needs to create that sacred space.”
The search for a perfect
home for the West Coast sangha went on for years. Finally in
1988—four days after Kornfield gave up hope of ever finding the
right spot—a pristine 408-acre parcel of the San Geronimo Valley
became available a mile from the Kornfields’ house in Woodacre.
With the help of an anonymous donor, the sangha paid the Nature
Conservancy one million dollars for the land. (It was good karma all
around, as the money was spent defending rainforests in the Amazon.)
Named for a serpentine boulder that was sacred to the Miwok Indians,
Spirit Rock officially opened its gates for retreats ten years later.
By embracing innovative
approaches to teaching, community building, and practice, the center
has become an R&D lab for the future of American Buddhism. One of
the major contributions that Spirit Rock has made to the dharma is
the concept of embodied enlightenment, a path of practice firmly
grounded in day-to-day experience and informed by Western psychology.
The impetus behind this approach, Kornfield says, was the need to
address a problem for Buddhists that John Welwood calls “spiritual
bypass.” Instead of dealing with family wounds and other
deep-seated emotional issues, some meditators try to route around
them by forcing themselves to practice harder. It doesn’t work. As
the surface chatter of their minds becomes quiet, they can become
overwhelmed by long-suppressed emotions.
Kornfield found that some of
the same methods of working with feelings that aided his clients in
psychotherapy could help his students go deeper in their practice.
“The standard instruction in most Buddhist traditions would be that
this is all makyo, illusion. Just be mindful of it, name it as
emotion, and let it go,” he says. “But as we became more and more
skilled, we realized that the personal and universal couldn’t be
separated, and that what people were experiencing—including all of
their trauma, history, and longings—was in fact the place of their
dharma.”
Now, many of the senior
teachers at Spirit Rock are also psychotherapists. More than most
practice places, the center embraces other ways of understanding the
mind as adjuncts to meditation, including Advaita Vedanta, the
Enneagram (Kornfield considers himself a Three, “the performer”),
and A.H. Almaas’ Diamond Approach. Classes and retreats also
incorporate ways of listening closely to the body, supplementing
mindful sitting and walking with yoga and qigong.
Although merging Buddhism,
psychotherapy, and bodywork may seem like the ultimate in fuzzy
California spirituality—and has been ridiculed as “Boomer
Buddhism” by critics such as religion professor and author Stephen
Prothero—Sharon Salzberg points out that Kornfield’s inclusive
conception of the dharma is an extension of the training he received
from Ajahn Chah in Thailand. “The monastic path is so holistic.
It’s about your relationship to your teacher and your community,
and how you sweep a path, as well as your experiences on a cushion,”
she says. “It’s about living a life, not just pursuing a method.
I think that really influenced Jack in his interest in psychology.”
In his quest for a truly
American dharma, Kornfield has helped to make the process of becoming
a teacher more transparent. The teacher-training program he
designed at Spirit Rock is more like an intense apprenticeship than a
transmission between a guru and disciple. Trainees spend four
to six years immersing themselves in the Pali canon and Theravada
history, learning dozens of ways to teach mindfulness. They also
participate in “role studies” aimed at reducing the feelings of
isolation and inadequacy that are occupational hazards for spiritual
leaders in any tradition. Kornfield’s training program has become a
seedbed of new teachers for sanghas across America and Europe.
He has also cast light on
blind spots in his own tradition. Kornfield says he has never
forgotten Mirabai Bush standing up at Naropa to challenge Chögyam
Trungpa: “If there’s no gender in emptiness, why are all the men
sitting up there and the women down here?” One of the senior
teachers at IMS, Jacqueline Schwartz, very publicly left the
Theravada lineage after informing her colleagues that she “could no
longer represent a tradition which taught and believed women to be a
lesser birth and life.” Inspired by the bravery of these and other
women, Kornfield became an outspoken advocate of reforming Buddhism
to honor the feminine. He has promoted the use of non-sexist language
in services at Spirit Rock, facilitated meetings between female
teachers and the Dalai Lama, and encouraged the decision-making
process at Spirit Rock to become more democratic, with plenty of
community input.
Spirit Rock has broadened
its boundaries in other ways as well. The center offers dozens of
retreats and daylong programs each year for practitioners of color,
gay and lesbian meditators, seniors, and other groups not adequately
represented in predominantly white, straight, Boomer-age sanghas. In
2002, it hosted the first national Buddhist retreat for African
Americans, featuring a talk by Alice Walker.
“I think Jack would have
liked to have grown up in a big family that got along well,” says
Sylvia Boorstein, who was one of his first teacher-trainees. “What
his childhood did for him is to cause him to want to make peace in
every community he’s in. He’s eager to attend to whoever is most
in need.”
A lot has changed since the
day in 1972 when Kornfield stepped off a plane at Washington National
Airport with his robe and bowl. Now there are dozens of Theravada
retreat centers in the United States, strict traditional monasteries
like Metta Forest and Abhayagiri, and thousands of Thai, Burmese, and
Sri Lankan temples serving ethnic Buddhist communities. By taking
root in American soil, the 2,500-year-old lotus has flourished and
diversified.
What hasn’t changed is
Kornfield’s commitment to his students’ realization. In an era
when some teachers downplay talk of enlightenment, he’s more
passionate than ever about what he calls the dharma of liberation. To
Kornfield, it’s only natural that the same culture that produced
Walt Whitman, the civil rights movement, and the push for marriage
equality would carry on the democratization of the Buddha’s way
begun by teachers like Goenka and Mahasi Sayadaw.
“People tend to think that
enlightenment is only for monks who live in the Himalayas, but it’s
not. The same liberation practiced in the monasteries of Thailand and
Burma has been experienced by thousands of people in this country,”
he says. “One of the great treasures of thirty-five years of
leading retreats has been to steward generations of practitioners in
America to those depths. There’s what my teacher Buddhadasa called
‘everyday nirvana,’ where people come to classes caught in their
stories and suffering and then, through their practice, you see their
faces change and bodies lighten as the sense of liberation grows in
them. There’s been a whole body of students on our long retreats
who have experienced the dark, luminous emptiness from which
everything is born—when it all drops away, and your sense of
identity goes back to the formless and recreates itself in the depths
of meditation. It’s an honor to be a witness and a participant in
that process.”
Years of practitioners
breathing mindfully, placing one foot in front of the other, have
exerted a calming effect even on the nonhuman residents of Spirit
Rock. Deer loiter on the grass by the community hall; guided
meditations are punctuated by the gobbling of wild turkeys; cars
passing a sign reading “Yield to the Present Moment” pause to let
an orange-and-black snake cross the road.
Beneath the tranquil
surface, however, new developments are afoot. Last year’s health
scare impressed upon Kornfield that he can no longer depend on having
a larger-than-life ability to get things done. “I used to have an
insane amount of energy. Now I have only a normal amount,” he says
almost apologetically. For two decades, he’s been hosting global
conferences of senior Buddhist teachers. Next June, a couple of
hundred roshis, acharyas, priests, and lay elders from all over will
converge on Garrison Institute near New York City. On the agenda will
be a pressing need to empower the next generation of teachers while
bringing more young people into the community.
“If you look at photos
from various sanghas, you see a couple of young faces in the crowd
and everyone goes, ‘Isn’t that great?’“ says 32-year-old
Ethan Nichtern, founder of the Interdependence Project, recently
chosen by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche to be the senior
teacher-in-residence for the New York Shambhala sangha. “But that
won’t be enough. Labeling programs ‘for young people’ won’t
do it either. The trick is to attract a critical mass of young
practitioners that becomes self-sustaining.”
For some young teachers, the
historical accomplishments of Kornfield and his peers have cast a
long shadow. “The irony is, many teachers in my generation now have
much more practice under our belts than Jack, Joseph, and Sharon did
when they started IMS,” says Noah Levine, thirty-nine, a former
student of Kornfield’s who wrote Dharma Punx and Against
the Stream and now leads his own network of meditation centers
based in Los Angeles. “But now, compared to them, even twenty years
of practice seems like not much. It’s a challenge for us to earn
the level of trust and authority they had when they got back from
Asia.”
Kornfield’s response to
these concerns has been typically generous: dancing gracefully out of
the way. This year he handed the organizational reins of a retreat
he’s been leading for thirty-five years to Levine and other younger
teachers. He plans to yield the upcoming conversation about nurturing
the next generation of Buddhism to the next generation of Buddhists
themselves. “Instead of us old farts jabbering about this in the
usual way,” he says, “the most empowering thing we can do is say,
‘You show us and we’ll follow your lead.’” Long before his
most recent brush with impermanence, Kornfield was building
institutions that don’t depend on any one person—or one way of
expressing the dharma—to survive.
Sometimes, before driving
out of Spirit Rock on an errand, he stops at a hut lined with
photographs of the teachers who have been speaking through him for
four decades. Dipa Ma smiles from an old portrait, her face alert and
relaxed; Mahasi Sayadaw looks as indomitable as a mountain in his
ochre robe and glasses; the Dalai Lama and the Cambodian monk Maha
Ghosananda clasp hands while bowing deeply to each other. In 1978,
Ghosananda left his forest refuge to care for villagers fleeing the
Khmer Rouge. Hearing him chant the old sutras again, they wept.
Kornfield bows, steps into
the sunshine, and walks down the hill.
Originally published in the November 2010 Shambhala Sun magazine.
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