Tempel Smith, Part 2
Coming Soon…
This is the second part of our interview with the meditation teacher, Tempel Smith. The first part left off with Tempel discussing his efforts to balance the divergent interests in his life. Our discussion picks up from there.
“It became really unbearable to not have more harmony inside,” he recalls, “to meet my activist Self or my quiet-wilderness-living-retreat Self, and to have these arguments about Marxist commitment to protesting, and some societal pressures to just settle down, get a job and participate [in society].” He ended up volunteering with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, working with homeless teens in the Bay Area.
Through this involvement, Tempel met a teenager on the streets who had just given birth. He was able to feel her pain and fear in a way he had never experienced from another person. This proved to be an important insight for him, pointing to the more holistic path he was seeking out. “If I tried to resolve everything just by the seclusion of retreat or wilderness living, I'd be training the heart that cared for the world. And if I tried to care for the world, I'd be overextended and insecure and scattered,” he notes. “But the only way any of it was tolerable, but then also became very inspiring, is when I had a Dharma view that embraced it all.”
However, at just twenty years of age, Tempel was still not able to integrate these two compelling tendencies in his nature. Finally, driven by a sense of “terror” in not being able to find a way to unify these divergent needs. he decided that “[t]he fastest way for me to get where I want to go,” he recalls thinking, “is to commit to deep intensive Burmese-style meditation, break through some of these habits, and then find a more integrated lifestyle. That was the best my [young] mind could come up with.”
Tempel had looked into places of practice throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, and was intrigued by the Ajahn Chah tradition, but in the end felt that “they didn't put as much effort and emphasis as the Burmese did on this very powerful submersion model of Satipaṭṭhāna or jhāna practice for weeks and months on end.” At that time, most of his IMS friends spoke of two main teachers: Chan Myay Yeiktha Sayadaw U Janaka, and Sayadaw U Pandita, both of whom taught in the Mahasi lineage. “But,” Tempel goes on to say, “everybody at the Insight Meditation Society was still talking about U Pandita as being the ‘teacher’s teacher,’ the fast track, how everybody's practice had accelerated under his teaching.”
U Pandita’s reputation was as a masterful, but stern and very demanding teacher. Looking back now, Tempel realizes that because his meditation at that time veered towards intense effort, a softer approach than U Pandita’s may have been in order. But he was assured by fellow yogis that “U Pandita will figure you out, and you'll get the teachings you need,” so he went ahead with his friend Diana Winston to the Golden Land.
They were immediately taken from the airport to the monastery. After depositing their valuables, they began practicing straight away, strictly following the strict guidance of their new teacher. “He did get a lot more effort out of me, much more Dhamma investigation,” Tempel acknowledges. But there was also a downside. “I was gritting my teeth. I was practicing like my hair was on fire, I was pushing myself. Several months of that practice really made my mind tight, like grinding granite. And that brought up a lot of hindrances.”
Tempel was asked to strictly observe the arising and passing away of all pleasant, unpleasant and neutral sensations. The style was a manner of “ruthless investigation” that he found uncommon among Western teachers, and which ultimately led to a deeper understanding of the second foundation of mindfulness.
Ironically, although he was now in Burma, he had little understanding of the country or culture. “Burma was just a completely unexamined phenomena outside the monastery walls that you would never hear about,” he says, “because it wasn't in the Dharma talks, there was no time for communication, and no time to talk with Burmese people. So then you're almost in this hermetically sealed container, inside this radically different culture.” Tempel was encouraged not to spend time learning the language or understanding local customs, as the priority was spending every waking minute with the practice.
After some time, he expressed his desire to ordain, and according to monastic tradition, had to seek the permission of his parents. After finding a phone that could make international calls, he managed to speak to his mother for just five minutes. “I have had Asian grad students,” she told her son, “and I know that family structures are important to them. Of course, I give you permission.” After that, the line went dead, and his mother burst into tears.
Now that he was a monk, Tempel was able to go outside the monastery for alms rounds, an experience that deeply impacted him. “Being able to walk through the villages every morning, receiving the generosity of the Burmese people every day, exercising, opening my perspective, some interaction with humanity again, was really incredibly sweet.”
By this time Tempel was becoming concerned about the intensity of the practice and was thinking to find a more socially engaged monastery in Thailand after his Burmese visa expired. But when he heard about the newly established Pa Auk Monastery from a Dutch monk, he decided to try it out, as he was especially keen to practice mettā intensively through jhāna meditation.
On his way to Pa Auk, Tempel visited Golden Rock in Kyaitkyo, and for the first time was able to observe the positive results of his intensive practice. “I can start to see the impact my mind has had, that I couldn't see inside the monastery. I'm traveling with these people, and my mind is really clean of greed, hatred, delusion. I'm back out in the world, learning a little bit more about Burmese customs, and being patiently taught how to be gracious inside Burmese culture.”
At Pa Auk, he would find a very different monastery than the one he left with U Pandita. The monastics and lay meditators were more relaxed, and openly discussed scripture and practice between meditation sittings. “The way that people are talking about practice, and using the discourses, they're in more active community together,” he observed. “Whereas with Panditarama, there wasn't really an active sense of community. You were a very ferocious, solitary practitioner, inside a community of other intensive practitioners, but there was no communing with each other.”
He also found the Pa Auk method quite different, particularly the absorptive states that Pa Auk taught. “It's not strenuously analytical. It was quite a contrast to his previous meditation in the Mahasi and Goenka schools, and enjoyed the freedom of having months to allow the mind to naturally simplify. While Tempel still found some types of “warrior style” instruction present at Pa Auk, it was balanced with an emphasis on relaxation and in finding contentment. And though he acknowledged that it may not have been emphasized to the degree of a teacher like Sayadaw U Tejaniya, it was still a big shift from his previous training. “I wasn't supposed to fight my mind, I wasn't supposed to be aggressive.”
After some months, he began to practice the jhānas, and with much success. “I understood more of the Theravadin context of using the cooling factors of tranquility and concentration and equanimity inside your practice, and so my mind started getting incredibly clear and tranquil. The hindrances started evaporating out of my practice, but not because I fought them.”
As Tempel progressed in samathā, he began to see lights, considered a positive sign that one’s practice is going well,. He even began to develop psychic powers, such as predicting the future. This, in particular, shook him to his core. “It really cracked my skepticism that that was all folklore,” he recalls. “That's where it really starts to change the Western perspective on cognitive development, emotional control, a greater sense of presence. Maybe there's more to this Theravadin cosmology then. But you can go pretty far into it from a Western materialist point of view and put aside some of the classical teachings. But we started experiencing them, and it really undermines this view that the Western materialist cosmology actually is the fundamental truth.”
This paradigm shift of reality began to affect his faith as well. “I was feeling that devotion to the Buddha, his teachings, the centuries of people practicing it, people rediscovering it at different times and re-encouraging that level of practice,” he says. “And then to see that it wasn't mythology, that it actually could be possibly more true than you might have imagined.”
And with that, Part 2 of our discussion with Tempel Smith comes to a close. In the next segment, we explore how he took these teachings from Myanmar back home to the US with him.