Tempel Smith, Part 3
This is the third episode in a series of talks with Tempel Smith. In the first, he described his search for the spiritual path, and in the second, he contrasted his experienced meditating in Burma with Pa Auk Sayadaw and Sayadaw U Pandita. Now, he shares his deeper impressions of Burmese Buddhist culture, and how he became a bridge for other Americans to understand it better.
He starts by continuing his reflection into the polarities that defined his early life experiences. “There was a lot trying to balance, in terms of a passion for engaging the world, while also being more deeply immersed in a spiritual tradition that had a deep skepticism that the world could be helped or fixed. And yet, in that same tradition, there's a lot of generosity, and there is a lot of service to the society.”
As a young monk, Tempel tried to consciously negotiate the apparent tensions inherent in being a social activist versus quietist, intensive meditation… and whether they even could be integrated into a single practice. He aptly likens his feeling at that time to an ox cart that is being pulled in many different directions. However, when he attained deeper states of calm, he realized that they were not, in fact, contradictions. “There are these moments of clarity, when it shows you what a clearer mind can be, [and] the agitation of these polarities resolve without negating any one of them,” he notes. “There would be these moments where it would all make sense, how you could live a life of activism and service, and it was fed by the times of renunciation, and that if some people wanted to be on one side of that axis, and some people on the other, they were not in contradiction. They actually nurture each other.”
Another dissonance he reconciled for himself was cultural: that is, being a serious Western practitioner in a Burmese Buddhist context. “When you create an intensive retreat built for Burmese people, to give them a window [of the monastic life], and then you helicopter in a Westerner… who is often fleeing their culture, if they want to come to such a different culture, and they want to do such a stripped-down Buddhist practice that doesn't have ritual and doesn't have community.” The result, in his mind, is a practitioner who focuses almost exclusively on the technique with little or no understanding of the Burmese Buddhist culture in which the practice nests. And in the end, he feels they lose out.
While noting that the teachings of most Burmese monks encourage strict silence and an intense, almost exclusive focus on meditation, Tempel found these guidelines produce very different results in Burmese yogis than those from abroad. “If you do that to a Burmese person, it ends up being bookended by rich culture; before, during, and after. They can see it, they can remember it, it's alive, and they are part of a broad Burmese Dharma tapestry, even though they're doing intensive practice. Whereas you can have an a completely naive Westerner come in and parallel those exact same practices, follow those teachings… but there's no context.” The problem is perhaps compounded for some Western yogis who fabricate an idealized, “acultural” Buddhism derived strictly from the suttas. Such a perspective can easily lead to seeing a value in remaining aloof from culture and society, leading to spiritual bypass. As a teacher, Tempel has seen Western students develop remarkable insights during courses, yet be unable to integrate them into daily life. As a result, they become serial retreatants, sitting one intensive retreat after another, with a chasm between their practice and their daily life that does not narrow much.
Tempel observed that because the Burmese did not see practice as divorced from their culture and society, the results of their practice are often very different. “Actually, friendship was a huge medicine,” he recalls of his experience there. “When I tried to be austere, my mind was more discontented… And then as a monastic, you walk through the village every day, as the Buddha wanted people to have interaction. But if you’re in a very austere mode, you’re guarding your sense doors, trying to actually not be impacted by the village life, so you can ‘protect’ your meditation. But in some of the practices, there’d be so much joy in seeing the children playing when you went on alms rounds, or seeing an elderly person cared for by their children, or seeing people sipping tea together, and it would feed the happiness of your heart! And so that was a huge shift in my perspective.”
With this in mind, Tempel returned to Burma ten years after his previous stint, but with a very different intention. “I wanted to get a feel for Burmese culture again, to hear people chanting, remember the smells of the culture and awaken myself. I didn't want to disappear into a monastery and negate the Burmese experience! I wanted to get to know the culture. I wanted to get to know people.” He also wanted to experience Burmese forms of Engaged Buddhism, and so sought out monastic schools and monasteries with social missions. Instead of month-long retreats held in total isolation, Tempel turned outwards towards the world as a way to deepen his practice.
A profound insight came from this. “I had this this excited epiphany that I wanted to bring young people over [from America] to experience Dharma culture and monasteries, and to see an integrative Buddhist picture that wasn't all about sitting on retreat.”
Tempel had previously had experiences leading retreats for youth, and now he wanted to find a way to expand their Dharma experience so they could see the parts of it that were about social engagement and community building. “I was hoping that they would catch fire so I was not the only one carrying a certain torch, but I would light a fire and they would see what I had seen at an earlier age, and then they would run with it farther than I had,” he explains. His idea developed into a three-month trip to Thailand, India, and Burma where Tempel exposed the group to various aspects of Buddhist life. The result was transformative.
“I couldn't believe I was actually showing these American kids a Dharma that wasn't about denying your passion, calming your mind down and counting your breaths. Like that plays a role, but so does taking on the caste system in India!” This was especially important for Tempel because it was a Dharma experience in which “they wouldn't have to leave a part of themselves behind,” which had been a concern of his in the usual, intensive practice format in the West. “I wanted to show them that the person who wanted to engage with the world and play guitar and sing and have adventures, and address social inequities, and take some time to clean up their hearts from their self-doubt and insecurities and capture their idealism of how they wanted the world to be, and let that come alive and show them how to plug it in!”
Of course, a big part of the success of the trip was the younger age group he worked work with. “I noticed that people in their mid 30s and beyond have kind of found some of their own center, and so they're not really looking to up-end their worldview,” he notes.
Their time in Burma was particularly special for Tempel, as he was able to address the polarities that had challenged his own practice with this new generation. “We would travel around and visit monasteries,” he remembers, “And then we would go to pagodas, and I would show that cultural practice of praying at pagodas, and then we would go to some old historic sites, so they could see the how long the country had been impassioned by Theravadin Buddhism. And then go to a school and do some service.”
Rather than those Westerners opening their hearts through intensive retreats, which he found often lacked integration, Tempel saw them open instead through engagement with Burmese Buddhist society, which was deeply inspiring. “The Insight tradition [in America], in stripping out the cultural forms, also stripped out some of this faith soaking time that is more natural if you've grown up in the tradition. Westerners have faith in the Dharma because it has made sense to them, but they don't have oceanic faith experiences, whereas [Burmese] babies are taken to pagodas.”
Reflecting on that youth pilgrimage, Tempel circles back to the start of this talk several months ago, when he spoke about his own struggles in the early years of his practice. “When I was younger, I didn't know that there was a different way to be,” he recalls. “So I had the strength of this mind that would be very good at physics or be very good at math or be very skeptical. But when I came to Burma, even as I ordained, I was ordaining for the wisdom. I wasn't ordaining for the cultural aspects of being monastic, but I did that to be polite. But then I got exposed to practices that got me a little bit more balanced, and I could see that the sharpness of my mind had to be in a much more spacious, open frame for that sharpness to be useful.” Today, he finds that besides his own inner journey deeply informing the trips he’s organized, it supports his work at places like Spirit Rock Meditation Center to help the staff examine their biases and privileges to better serve the surrounding community and ensure greater participation by marginalized communities.
“I have all that benefit of the faith mind, and it's actually helping me discern. That's actually the sweetest mind state to be in, when these factors start blending inside your mind,” he says. “You let your activism and your meditation harmonize, and you get a liberated mind! That's what 30 years of practice has shown me and what I'm trying to help people get to their own integrative mind states, and then trying to see how they fall out of integration, and why that perplexes them and then how to help somebody come back into the holistic mind states that can see things clearly. And then the suffering falls away of the mind and the beauty flourishes.”