Alaya

Recently, I started taking an active interest in Lojong practice, an Indo-Tibetan Mahayana mind training practice that focuses on 59 brief, pithy slogans, which are to be contemplated on a daily basis, as a means of training the mind toward both relative and absolute bodhichitta, that open, spacious frame of mind that enables us to take care of everyone and everything, and abandon no one and nothing. This is the practice that the Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche trained Pema Chodron in, and is the foundation of her wonderfully luminous teachings, that encourage us to bring Dharma practice into every aspect of our daily lives, and to look upon the "stuff" of life--both joy and terror of good and bad (as Shakespeare once put it) as the raw material for our practice--cultivating, that is, an attitude that looks upon daily life itself as our Teacher.

The website (linked above) has a function that allows one to randomly select one of the 59 Lojong slogans, along with commentary from a range of different teachers, to have sent to our Email in-box every day. I have found these slogans, and the associated commentary (especially Pema's, but also others') very useful to my practice.

The slogan I got today is rendered (by Trungpa and Pema) as follows: "Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence." The instructions interpret this to mean what Zen practitioners call "calm abiding"--that is, letting go of all discursive stuff, all the conceptual detritus that normally floats around in our brain, and simply, but lucidly, abiding in the immediacy of That that is.

Other teachers suggest that this is best done for brief intervals, since if we try to do it for longer periods of time, we can slip into mental torpor--abiding, not just in No Thought, but rather drifting into what Thomas Pynchon calls the "Thanatoid" state, like a listless couch potato sitting in front of the television. There's a subtle difference: the Alaya state is quiescent, but alert, in equipoise, noticing everything, without attachment to anything. The Thanatoid state is simply oblivious and dull.

But I love that word: ALAYA. This was the first time I had ever encountered it; it is one of those beautiful, magical words that is a mantra in itself, that is what it says. Just saying the word, rather like the seed syllable "Om," helps to induce the open, free, and blissfully empty mental state to which it refers.

I find it interesting--and it may be just a coincidence--that this Sanskrit (or Pali--I'm not sure which) word has so much in common with the various Sacred Names for God within the Levant --i.e "Alaha" (Aramaic); "Allah" (Arabic), and "Jah" (Hebrew, originally pronounced "YA-hu" but later adopted by the Rastafaris as "Jah" (with a hard "j") . Somehow, the word "Alaya" combines all of the above, referring to what Christians call the "Peace of God which passeth all understanding." It is also, of course, the mental state to which Lao Tzu alludes in his beautiful meditation instruction of Verse 16, rendered by Gia Fu Feng as follows:

"Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest in peace.
The Ten Thousand Things rise and fall
While the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish, and then return to the Source.
Returning to the Source is the Way of Nature
The Way of Nature does not change..."

One could continue this beautiful translation, incorporating the word "Alaya" for "the unchanging way of Nature" or what Gia Fu Feng (unsatisfactorily, in my view) renders as "Constancy." This would be as follows:

"Knowing Alaya is insight.
Not knowing Alaya leads to disaster.
Knowing Alaya, the mind makes room for everything.
With an open mind, your heart will make room for everyone and everything.
With an open heart, you will act graciously.
Acting graciously, you will attain a state of grace.
Being in a state of grace, you are at one with Tao [that is, with Alaya]
And though the body passes, Tao will never pass away.

Whatever the tradition--Sanskrit, Semitic, Christian, or Chinese--it's all the same stuff.

So Jah Seh!