The Diamond Sutra says when the water is still, the moon appears. So if we think of like a container of water is shaken up, it is not still, you can see little fragments, you don’t really see a clear image of the light. But if the water can become very still, you can see a perfect image of the moon in the water. It is the same with our practice. If we can make the body still, we can make the mind still, we can see the light that’s within ourselves.

I.  Train the body

There are 5 very basic fundamental steps for us to accomplish this mission that we set out on; it’s very simple. We sit very still like a colossal bell; we have our back very straight like a pine tree; empty the mind, relax the body, and focus and empty the mind.

So what I’d like to share with you first, is just how I help people to establish these first few steps; these first steps in this meditation, rather than you try to find your own way through the forest, and give you maybe a path you can try. If it works for you, maybe it becomes part of your practice. If it doesn’t feel right, you can just let it go.

Well, if we just all make a meditation mudra and we’ll just do a few minutes maybe ten minutes of meditation. I will talk you through this process, and you can give this a try. The first thing we need to be aware of is the breath. We all know belly breathing is the breathing we do. We know the breath goes deep into the body and we feel the abdominals expand when we inhale, and we feel them collapse back on themselves when we exhale.

But we can be aware of a much more subtle version of the breath. When we breathe in, don’t just be aware of what is happening with the belly. Feel the nose, feel the nostrils expand to accept the air, feel the temperature of the air coming in, from the air, from the room.  It should be cool; it should be invigorating, you should feel the energy, the life of this breath coming in to your body. When we breathe out, feel the air that was in our body that circulated around that we pulled the nutrients out of; we pulled what gives us life from it, and then we take what’s left and we express it back into the world. We feel the nostrils expand again; we feel the air flow naturally, without being forced, no muscle tension. We feel the air flow back out of our body into the world, warm now from being in our body.

What was of the outside world now comes into our body and becomes part of us through the breath. What was part of us is expressed back into the world. This shows complete inner connectedness between us and everything else in the world simply through breath.

And try to keep the duration of the breath, the length of the in-breath and the length of the out-breath about the same. The in-breath coming in is energizing; it invigorates us, charges us up. The out- breath relaxes us. We want to find the balance point, the center point between being excited and being relaxed. Find the perfect point. And the way we do this is by breathing in for the same length of time that we breathe out, find the center.

So, just take a couple of breaths and try to feel those things, the subtlety of the breath, the expansion and contraction, the temperature of the breath and stabilizing, finding the center point. Now, establish some anchor points, feel your thumbs touching, feel your tongue curled back and touching the roof of your mouth. And now move your awareness to the top of your head, and as you exhale, feel it soften and relax. Feel the pore is open; the skin becomes softer to the point where even the weight of the hair you can feel pulling against the skin.

Now imagine like a bowel of warm and very soothing oil being poured on the top of the head. This very slowly flows down across your face. And everything that it touches softens and relaxes. In particular be aware of the forehead; if we get angry or frustrated, confused over the course of the day will pull the skin very tight on the forehead. Allow this to just soften and relax, and the emotions associated with it just flow away. And then just feel the same softening and relaxing feeling flowing down across the rest of the face, the nose, the lips, the chin. Each time you breathe out, exhale, feel the face soften and relax more deeply, more completely.

Then feel that sensation flowing down on to the neck and as the neck relaxes, it becomes like a pillow, and the weight of the head settles a very natural angle into the soft cushion created by the relaxed muscles of the neck.  The angle doesn’t change, just straight down, relax. Just feel the muscles get soft.

Then feel this softening and relaxing flowing across the shoulders, feel the weight of the arms pulling against the shoulder joints and allowing the body to relax. And each time you breathe out, allow it to relax a little deeper and a little more completely. As the muscles relax, the skeleton, the bones are what hold the structure of our seated posture. So we want to make sure the back, the spines, are very straight. So as the muscles relax, they actually help the bones to be straighter in our posture.

Be aware of the function of the heart, and the breathing. As we breathe, we bring oxygen, air into the body to nourish us. It mixes with the blood and the heart flows this out to the body. This is same way that we allow all the other muscles in the body to relax, allow the heart to soften and relax, to be slower in its beating, to move larger volumes of blood and oxygen and chi into the body with less effort.

And then feel the same softening and relaxing flow into the hips, through the legs, and through the feet. So, now the body, from the top of your head down through your toes, should feel very soft, very relaxed, with the skeleton - the bones, holding the position - very straight and all the muscles completely relaxed. The relaxing of the muscles allows us to make more contact, more solid contact with the earth, just like the colossal bell. And the skeleton, the bone, holding the position, just like the pine tree holding us very straight.

And now allow our attention to go to mind. When the body is relaxed, you need to start to look at what is happening with your thoughts. It is very, very difficult to stop and force thoughts to not occur. But what we can do is make them very simple. So just allow a single thought to occur, to arise in your mind and then let it fade away. Allow the thought to be just like a breath. It arises, dwells for a moment, and then fades. Our normal feeling when a thought arises is to attach some past experience to this thought, or to attach some future expectation. Try to resist doing that, and just allow the simple thought to arise, look at it, and realize this is revealing something of yourself. Don’t change the thought, don’t judge it as good or bad, just allow one single thought to arise and fade.

And just a few minutes to feel what that feels like, the body very relaxed, and try to simplify the mind. OK. You can open your eyes now. Still try to stay very centered, very still in the mind, don’t lose what we got from stabilizing the body, and simplifying the mind. You can open your eyes, and we’ll talk about this a little bit. If you need to move around and relax, and relax the legs and the back, that is OK, but what I want you to do is try to hear what I have to say and try to feel what I have to say, and not worry so much about being too straight and rigid in posture.

We just touched on several of the dimensions of Chan; the Chan that Shifu teaches has four dimensions. There is the physical body dimension, then the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and then we get to the light or the wisdom dimension. Now everybody wants to get to that top dimension, everybody wants to get to the light. They want to get to have this wisdom, this enlightenment state. It’s everyone’s goal. And oftentimes people think that the steps along the way are just that, just stepping stones to get there; they only build the foundation, but

they’re not important parts of the practice. But I see the practice more like a flower. If you think how a lotus flower grows  First, it has to grow roots into the ground, and these roots have to get nutrients and nutrition, and nothing can happen unless these roots are well established. And then, once the roots are deep into the ground and very strong, the stem can start to grow up towards the sun toward the light, and if that is strong enough, then it can open leaves, and get even more light in.

And if all the conditions are right, and everything is been nourished correctly, then beautiful flowers can open. But, each of these parts is equally important, you can’t have the beautiful flower without good roots, you can’t have the beautiful flower without strong and clear stem and leaves. So each part, although there’s a sequence, the roots come first, then the stem then the leaves, then the flower. So it has to go in sequence, but each part is equally important.

Many years, I ran a traditional Chinese medicine clinic as a part of our meditation center. One day I had a young lady that was referred to me because she had been to many western doctors, and none of them could help her with her condition and her health was deteriorating badly. And when she walked in the door of the clinic, she looked literally more dead than alive. You could see there was just very little flicker of life left in her. So I just did an evaluation of her channels, of the energy flow through the channels through the organ systems. I came to the lungs. Normally, a person that doesn’t practice meditation, they don’t do belly breathing. They breathe with lungs, so you can see the lungs they’re like a balloon. They inflate out; they go back in with each breath. You can see this movement; you can feel this movement, normally very easily.

Generally, the emotion, that’s associated with the lung channels, the flow of energy through the lungs, is a grief emotion. Maybe someone close to you dies or maybe someone abandoned you or rejected you, and you feel this emotion and created an attachment to it, and can’t let this grief emotion go. Normally, when someone has one of these grief events in their life, even if they don’t do the practice, they’ll breathe and they’ll let it slowly kind of dissipate out of their system and this sadness will eventually go away. If we do the meditation practice, and can breathe the belly breathing, we’ll bring in much stronger nutrients and bypassing the lungs so it allows us to be much stronger as we heal, and allows this to purify from our body.

So I asked her if someone had recently died, someone who was close to her, and she broke down and just started profusely crying, extremely sad. And she said that she was going to tell me something that she really hadn’t shared this whole story with anyone else before. She would tell me what recently happened to her. She said a few months ago, her life was very normal. She and her husband and her daughter that was in middle school were planning some school events. They were planning a vacation for the next summer. Life was very normal. And then she received a phone call that her grandmother had died. She was very close to the grandmother, so she was very upset, very sad. And she and her daughter went to make the arrangements for her funeral. And on the way to make the arrangements for her grandmother’s funeral, they were in a terrible car accident; a drunk driver hit their car and killed her only daughter.

So in one moment, she lost her grandmother and her daughter. The person that hit their car had very strong government connections, he went to the police, and said the accident was her fault, and so for her to fight this in court, wiped out all of their life savings; all the money her family had saved over their years of working was completely lost in trying to fight this lawsuit even though they were completely innocent. Because of all the stress and grief and anger and frustration, the marriage fell apart, and her husband left her. And on the day she came to see me, she had been told that morning she was fired from her job because she wasn’t doing a very good job.  She was hit with so much grief, so much emotion, so fast that it was more than her body could tolerate.

You feel her lungs to the point where she could hardly take a breath; she couldn’t take enough of a breath to get enough nutrition into her body to allow her to heal. And she was very close to death.  The only thing I showed her how to do was belly breathing. I said:  bypass your lungs, let the breathe come deep into your body, feel the belly expand, let the breath dwell for a moment, pull the energy from this breath, and do this every day. She came to the meditation class a few times, and said she was starting to feel better, and then she disappeared, and I didn’t see her again for maybe one year.

The next time when I saw her, I didn’t recognize her.  She looked 10 years younger, she has sparkle in her eyes, you could see the light, and she healed. She was able get strong enough from just learning the belly breathing to allow herself to let go of some that tension. She was always going be sad; she lost her daughter that her marriage didn’t work through this very difficult time. But she was able to heal and she was happy in her life again, and moving forward, and growing and using this life to be beneficial now, and she was sharing. She wanted to come back, so that she could learn how to do this belly breathing so she could share it with other people.

The reason that I tell this story, is because so often when we think about the physical part of practice, we think of it as just being a form, it is just a foundation we establish so we can get to a higher level. But this foundation, this physical part of the form, is incredibly important right now; it is the roots that we can grow from. And we don’t get a lot of time to develop this, we’re spiritual beings that existed long before this body, and will be spirit again after this body, our time in this body is done.  So we only have some number of years to be able to experience what it feels like in this body, to grow and evolve to be something stronger than we were before we had the chance to be in this body. So every part of the practice is equally important; don’t ever think that something is insignificant.

Everything that Shifu has taught you, everything that your laoshi has taught you, is very important, and you have to put all the pieces together to be able to realize what all is available to you. So, if we understand the importance of growing these roots, how important the belly breathing, relaxing the body, healing the body, the next dimension that we can grow to then, once we create these strong stable roots, is how do we clear the conscious mind. So, if we’ve established the first dimension of a good strong body practice, and we are stable, we are relaxed, we can belly breathe to where we’re getting good flow of nutrition, then the next step to grow is to grow the stem and the flower, and that is the clear and purified conscious mind.

II. Train the mind

The conscious mind can be very difficult to work with. The mind wants to go very fast and in many directions all the time. We are rewarded in society for a mind that can go in many directions at the same time. We get promotions at work if you can be juggling with many different tasks and projects at the same time. But in Heart Chan practice, we want to do exactly the opposite. We want to let the conscious mind be very simple at first, and then be very pure. The model that we have to do this is to relax and simplify the mind. The problem is, as soon as we simplify the mind is when we invite the monkey mind to come in and play and be at its worst.

For example, I walked outside this morning, and I feel the sun on my face and it feels very warm and very refreshing and I feel, ah, what a beautiful morning. The sun is beautiful. And then I think, oh, the sun is so bright. I should put my sunglasses on. But I left my sunglasses in the car. And the car is out of petrol and I have to get petrol for the car. But I need to go to an ATM first because I don’t have enough money for the petrol. And then if I do those things I will be late for a meeting. So this day is ruined. It’s going to be a terrible day. And I get all the way to this very bad, terrible feeling because I walked outside in the sun. So we have to train this monkey mind. But it is very difficult because the only thing we have to train the mind with is the mind itself.  And the way we do this is we don’t think about our thoughts.

The thoughts are going to arise, especially early on; you are not able to take the mind to just no-mind state. Too big of a jump. So what we try to do first is just to make the mind very simple, one thought at a time. But one important piece, we don’t think the thought, we’re aware of the thought, same like we do with the breath. We don’t think about the breath, or count the breath, we’re just aware of the breath. It’s same with thoughts. You don’t think about the thoughts, you just let it arise and fade, just like the breath. Whenever a thought arises, our first tendency is immediately attach some past experience, try to categorize this thought and link it to something that happened before. Or to attach it to some future thing, future expectation. So we immediately change that original thought to something that happened before in the past or something we think might happen in the future. By just being aware of the thought, we strip away that past and that future and only look at the thought that’s occurring at this current moment.

And the next step is immediately we like to judge our thought. We like to think of this is a good thought or a bad thought, or whatever. This thought is always something of ourself that is trying to reveal to us. And when we look at this very simple thought and we immediately judge it is right or wrong, good or bad. We have to let all the judgment go and just look at the thought for what it is as an objective observer. I know that’s too big a word. Just be very objective. Just stand back like you are a 3^rd party. Look at the thought. Like any other skill, it takes practice. You have to be aware of it.

Each time you sit in meditation, you have to be aware of these thoughts arising, not attach to them, and let them go, and then carry that into your regular daily life. So this practice becomes the normal way you think, not the other way where you constantly twist in your thought into something different. And then you have some control of the monkey mind. And you are ready to move to the leaves of the stem, which is being aware of and getting some control of the subconscious mind.

Subconscious mind is much more difficult to deal with than the conscious mind. Conscious mind we see the thought, we feel the thought. Subconscious mind works in the background so it’s harder to get a handle on. But it influences us more strongly than the conscious mind does. The subconscious mind is where karma is, Karma that we created in our past, karma from our past lives, where that is in the subconscious mind and that is where influences us.

There is an old story that maybe you heard before about a man and a ghost. A man and his wife are having a conversation in the hospital. The wife is very gravely sick and will die soon. They both know that she will die very soon. And while on her deathbed, the husband says, I love you I love you forever and I love you for all time and nobody else ever in my life. And the wife kind of half joking says, you better really hold to that vow because if you ever fall in love with other women I will come back and haunt you. And a few years later, he finds a young lady he works with very attractive and he asks her if she wants to go out, see a movie, maybe have dinner. And when he goes home that night and lays down in bed, bang! there is that image of his wife saying, I told you. So he ignores and thinks no no no, that’s just in my imagination. It’s not real. So he is out on a date with this girl. When he comes home the next night, lays down in bed and his wife says, I know where you went, what movie you saw. You ate popcorn with the meal, and you have two cokes before you finish the movie. So this goes on every day, Everything this guy does, as soon as he lays down in bed every night, his wife appears and tells him everything he did that day, who he saw, what he did, which drives him crazy. He’s afraid to go to sleep, he didn’t want to lie down. His life was deteriorating pretty badly.

So he goes and sees his Zen master and says what do I do. I can’t live like this. Please help me. The Zen master wrote some instruction on a piece of paper and says, put this in your pocket and I will tell you what to do if the ghost comes back tonight. So sure enough, when he lays down that night, there is his wife and she says I know everything you did today. I even know you went to see this Zen master and he gave you some instructions to get rid of me. And she says what did he tell you. And he says he asked me to make a very simple bet with you. He said if you can guess it right because you know everything that happened; you are a all-seeing ghost. You can see everything in my life. If I ask you one simple question about myself at this point of time, and you answer correctly I will never be with another woman until I die. But if you answer the question wrong, you have to promise me to go away and never bother me again. He opened the sheet of paper from the Zen master and it says: very simple, reach into a bag of rice, pick out a handful and ask the ghost to tell you how many pieces of the rice in your hand. If she can answer the question correctly, you will never lay with a woman in your life. If she cannot, then she has to go away. The ghost disappears immediately and never bothers him again.

Why did the ghost go away?  Because the ghost only existed in his subconscious mind. As soon as he feels attraction with the other girl, the guilt he still holds inside his body created this ghost. He haunted himself. This is how subconscious mind works. He created this karma for himself and then couldn’t resolve it. But he can resolve it once he realizes it was truly his subconscious mind. Once there was an answer that wasn’t in his own mind, the ghost wouldn’t answer and has to go away.

So how we purify the subconscious mind?  It’s basically the same way we purify the conscious mind. And the conscious mind, we let the thoughts become very simple until we can just let them go. Well now we have a model for controlling the mind. If we can let the thoughts go with the conscious mind, as we feel these tendencies, these urges, these changes in our lives that are result of karma that come out of subconscious mind, we can let them go the same way. So when you sit, when you do your meditation, and you are just aware of thoughts and letting them go. You let go of the conscious thoughts. Once they are pure, the only thing left is subconscious thoughts, and you let those go also.

When a wood cutter cuts down trees, cuts down these very big trees, the way they cut them is they saw through about half the diameter of the trunk. If they cut any further, the weight of the tree will come down too hard and they can’t make the tree ….. So they cut about half way in and they take the saw, then they make a wedge of steel, and they put the steel wedge in and then hit it with the sledgehammer and they try to drive this wedge in to knock the tree over. But sometimes the tree doesn’t fall over. So this wedge gets stuck. The only way to get this wedge out is another wedge. You put another wedge on top, you hammer that in, and then the tree falls. Once the tree falls over, you don’t need either of the wedges any more. So we use the mind to clear the mind, and then we don’t need it any more.

So if we establish these good strong roots, we clarify the conscious mind to grow the stem. We clarify the subconscious mind to grow the leaves.  We have now put everything in its good places we possibly can to allow the flower to bloom. The flower is this light that we have inside of us. And when you can see the light, you have the access to the wisdom, to the knowledge, to the Buddha land, to heaven. You actually make connection with us. So this light is in you, it is in you right now. But it is just covered up with things, by bodies not very healthy. And it’s covered up because your monkey mind runs around too much. It’s covered up because you have all of these karma. What this teaching does, what this Heart Chan practice does is let you clean that away off the light, clean away the body practice parts, now you start seeing a bit of the light. Clean away the conscious mind you will see more. Clean away the subconscious mind.  And now the light is connection to the wisdom that’s always there. You just clean it away so you can see it and feel it.

So each part of this process, each part of this beautiful flower is equally important. Put all of your heart into growing the roots, the body part of the practice. Relax the body, hold the position right, create the feeling like you are this colossal bell back to the ground. Feel the nutrient from the earth coming in to feed your body. Do this with the breath, feel the breath come in. Bring the nutrient from the earth to you, let something of you go back to the earth. Stabilize this position. Then relax the body, relax the mind.

You can use this technique that we played with, earlier that I talked to you through the meditation. Just go to an inventory of the body. And teach your body what it feels like to feel relaxed. Once the body knows what relaxation feels like, when you relax the body, it becomes a model to relax the mind. And then you can just go through this process further simplify the thoughts, conscious mind, let it go. Simplify subconscious mind, and let them go. And next step in practice is to focus. We focus by focusing on the chakras, the energy, and the naval chakra, flowing down through creating connection all the way up to the Chan chakra. So once we relax the body, relax the mind, the next part of the practices is point by point to focus on the energy flow, nutrient points. Once you master the ability to feel the energy, to feel the movement, and each of the points, feel the connections between points and guide and allow the flow, cleansing, purifying, cultivating this pure chi in the body, then your flower will bloom.

III. Answer questions

1. About the Heart Transmission Experience

When I first met Shifu in Shanghai I didn’t have any expectation going to that meeting, I didn’t even think I would have a chance to actually talk to him. I was actually just very excited about the chance to hear him talk in a small room, and have a chance to do some Q &A. Shifu talked for about an hour and then gave us a little break. During the break, he asked one of the people that could speak English to come over and asked me if I would come up. And he said that he had recognized something about me; he had this feeling – as soon as he walked into the room – there was something different. He wanted to know if I practiced Chan, I told him yes, I had practiced Chan for 37 years. He asked if I teach, I said yes I teach. I said I had seen some of his DVDs and I was very intrigued by this Heart Chan practice, because over the past 30 plus years I had learned bits and pieces of his practice, I learned Chinese medicine, I learned meditation, and I learned how the energy flow through the chakras and qigong, but I had never met anyone who could put these altogether in one practice, and I said that is what I think he has as his special.

So at that point Shifu asked me if I would meet him privately after the main session. So, we went into the room, and we talked. He asked something about my background where I wanted to go. We exchanged and had a very good conversation, just about Chan practice, how it needs to spread in the world and how it needs to be shared; it was a good practice. He said that you don’t realize it. I didn’t ; I was slow or maybe I got enough of mind …. He said that he would like to offer me heart to heart transmission. Now, I didn’t really know what heart transmission was. I knew it was very special, and I have read obviously about how through Buddhist practice and through each generation how masters to the disciple has passed the teachings with no words, and that the entirety of the teaching can be passed directly heart to heart, and to have the opportunity to experience that is more than I thought I would have in this life time.

But I also knew, as amazing as this opportunity was, that if I accept this, there is great responsibility that goes with it also. It is not like you just get this gift and you run away and say, “Look at what I’ve got.” No, now you have the responsibility to share and show others for the rest of your life. Every day and everywhere you go you’ll have to share and help people on the path, bring more people into the practice, help people that are dedicated get to the next level, and this will be your life every day for the rest of your life, and you’re willing to accept that responsibility. My answer to Shifu was that I have been dedicated to this practice since I was a teenager, and I have been asked by hundreds of people: why do you do this practice? Why do you meditate? Why do you do Chinese medicine? My answer was: I don’t know. I only know it is going somewhere, but I don’t know where, so I just practice. I told Shifu that I had studied with masters all over the world, in Asia, in the Western world, in Europe, in Africa, in many many places, and always sought out spiritual leaders, masters and teachers. I said that his teaching is the only one that really made sense to me. Every other one had something wrong or something missing. Some of them seemed very good, but when you started practicing it is not one hundred percent good, and I knew it when I first saw one of Shifu’s lectures on DVD 3 years ago, I knew this is it. This is it, absolutely!

So I agreed to do the heart transmission, and basically my part was very easy. I just had to close my eyes, and do a deep belly breathing and try to establish a Chan Ding state. Over a few minutes’ time I had the absolutely most profound experience in my life. Immediately, everything within the field of, you don’t really see with your eyes closed, but everything was completely saturated with the brightest and deepest red I had ever seen. And then, I’m sure when Shifu first walked into the room it literarily felt like someone had attached an electrical cable to me, I could feel this tingling and sparkling sensation like an electrical current. When he did the transmission, it first felt like a bloom inside my heart, and inflated up to where it was so full and it felt like it was going to burst. Then the brightest and most intense light I have ever seen filled everything. Then it turns into the most incredibly intense white bright light that I have ever seen like someone holding a spotlight right in your face. And then Shifu says, “We are done!”

And everything in my life from that moment forward changed: the way I see the world, feel the world, and how I interact with people, is completely different from that moment, and I didn’t expect that and I had no idea what to expect, but everything changed from that moment forward.

The biggest changes were  – I’ve studied kongfu, martial arts, fighting things my whole life, and I’ve done these practices every day for 37 years up till then. Most of these kongfu practices are based on the possibility of pain as teaching: they teach the same thing, teaching to keep your mind on the current moment. If you mind wonders, boom, you got hit. And then your mind comes to the current moment or you die, or don't practice very long; so these practices are all based on pain, rather pain - I could not teach these anymore. I could not threat someone, or hit someone anymore. I couldn’t feel it in my heart, couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still practice the body forms, but no fighting, no hitting. This is very difficult for many of my students because I have 3 schools. Now I say that I can teach you the mind, I can help you correct your body moments, but you really should try Heat Chan meditation because it is better practice.

I have a much clearer feeing of people’s emotions. When I talk to someone, everyone creates this mask that we show the world where we want everyone to think everything is OK, but sometimes people are holding pain inside, maybe sadness, maybe fear; I can see this very clearly in people. Shifu gives me the ability to help people, and to be able to clear their … and make their life a little better. So, many many changes along these lines, but most of them are just a life that is now expressed from compassion. I haven’t felt the slightest bit of being angry or frustrated over anything since this moment in Shanghai.

Now many people ask me: now this has happened, will you stop working at your job and just teach Heart Chan all the time?  I said no, and I think it is very important for me to stay in the work place because there are many instructors out there that can teach people how to do meditation, how to clarify the mind, and how to settle, but you also have to have people that know how to take this from the temple and make this in your real life, in a relationship, in a job where people don’t care about your practice. They don’t support you at all. In a temple everybody is very kind to each other and very respectful; in the real world people are not kind, people are not respectful, and people are not fair.

So I have to be able to show how to take this practice into real life, and make it work because most of the people that come here to practice, they live in jobs, they have relationships and they raise children, and they have all these challenges, and they need somebody that can show them how to make this work in real life. So, for the next few years I will do this. I will study with Shifu. When he tells me where to go to teach, I will go there and teach.

2. About Miao-Tian Shifu’s Practice

There are many people that teach very good Buddhist practices. There are varied good mediation instructors and there are many good people that teach Buddhist practice. But everyone that I’ve ever met, has not got beyond form, everybody only teaches how to release the mind. The highest level in every other school, monasteries or temples I’ve been in, they teach you how to break through the mind. Shifu takes this to a much higher level; he takes this to touch your spirit. This is the goal of all these other schools but they don’t know how to get there; their path stops. Shifu knows how to get to the end, and I can feel this immediately and I know it is absolutely true.

Shifu’s practice is spiritual practice and everyone else that I’ve ever met all over the world is still stuck in form practice, and you can feel this difference very clearly.

3. About His Buddha Name

The name, by the way, is a very cool name. No…, I didn’t realize the meaning behind it, but this name, Miao, is very difficult to define, if not impossible. People will say many different words, but that doesn’t quite define it. Shifu explains. When he first saw me in Shanghai, he said, “when I looked at you, what I saw was real Chan in a human body.” He said, “This is Chan” when he looked at me. But the Chan that can be named is not the real Chan, so he had to give me a name that could not be defined.

4. About Chan in China

I had a very strong feeling when I moved to China several years ago. One of the things that was most confusing, most frustrating to me when I moved to China – I moved here because finally I can get to the source of Chan, the real knowledge, and I have a chance to be in the land where it was developed to the highest level. Then I moved to Shanghai, nobody has ever heard of Chan. For one year I go to temples, I go to shifus, I go to Kongfu masters and I go to Taiji masters and qigong masters, and nobody is Chan; it is gone from China for two generations now. Nobody knows. So, I think after a time that maybe what I’m supposed to do -  because only foreigners now, people that live outside of China still have this connection - so, I think maybe my role in life is to bring Chan back to China because people wanted it very much. They want this practice, they know they are missing spiritual practice, but they don’t know what it is and where to get it. Then I meet Shifu. He tells me: no, I came to China to learn, to meet him, and then my job is to take this back to the West. So I will be back to the English speaking countries at some point.

5. About His Parents and Friends’ Attitude

Both of my parents are still alive and both of my parents are very strong Christians – Catholics. They spent their whole life as Catholics, but they’ve always supported me exploring these other things. I’ve shared with them and they are very happy. They have Shifu’s books. They read and they believe this is good practice. What I try to share with them is that they can have this practice in their life too, and they don’t have to give up their Christian religion at all. They could use this Chan practice to see their Christian practice more clearly. They can still keep this connection, they can keep these words, this form. It’s fine. They understand, and they are very strong supporters. They see a change, yes they think it is very good.

I went back to America for maybe one week last December, and everyone that I see from this area that had known me when I was growing up in upstate New York could see this.

6. About  Purification of Karma

As far as karma goes, this complete purification was a very amazing feeling.  I have worked many years doing meditation practice, doing clear your mind, and this can clear a lot of karma out of your body.  You can clear the physical karma out, you can clear the mental and emotional karma out, but there is spiritual karma that is still there, that you can’t get.  When Shifu does this purification of karma, you can feel it completely gone.  I think everyone, at least I know I did, there are things in my life, maybe you regret, and you think you could have done better, done differently.  Maybe there are people that you had hurt emotionally somewhere in your life.  You carry this, you feel bad about this, even later in life.  After Shifu does this, I feel it’s OK, it’s gone.  I don’t feel this attachment to any of these regrets or old pain, and you can feel that it goes back longer than just this life time.

After the second time, Shifu tells me: I cleaned your karma back many generations, back to infinity.  Karma is completely cleaned. Well I think it sounds like it’s a very cool thing.  My karma is completely clear, and what I think in my mind is all my bad karma is gone.  And then I came back here, Kuan Yin Temple, I sit here and doing meditation at night, and I see the twinkling lights and I get this feeling of this enchanting feeling. It hits me that he didn’t clear away my bad karma, he cleared away all karma, so any good karma I’ve accumulated, any bad karma that I’ve accumulated, it’ all gone, and he took me to some place above karma, beyond karma.  I asked him if this was true, and he just kind of smiled and nodded at me.

7. About Effort

The answer that comes to me is maybe the easiest way to understand is it is like a business model.  If you were trying to make an investment, if you want to make more money, you invest some money.  And then you get a return on this investment.  If you invest $1.00, maybe you get $0.20 back and you make some profit.  If you invest $10,000, maybe you get $5,000 back.  So the more you invest in, the bigger the return.  This practice is the same.  If you just only come here once a week, that’s very good practice and your life will improve. If you can meditate every day for about 1 hour of your time every day, you’ll see your return goes up 100 fold.  If you can stay with the practice and go through and be very dedicated…, the more you put in, the more you get back out.

For everybody this path is different.  The process is the same, but what you feel, what you experience, it’s you.  What I share, what I felt will be different than what you feel.  And everyone else that walks this path will have different amazing experiences, because you are a unique different person.  But this path, this process will work, absolutely work, for you the same as it will work for everyone else.  So it’s just how much you put in, is how much you will get back.  It took me a very long time, so I might not be the best model, almost 40 years of practice to get to this point.  You maybe can do this much faster.

8. About Spiritual Karma

Spiritual karma is beyond thought and words.  And to try to explain it in words is too abstract.  It’s something you feel, you know is there, and I think where you get to the spiritual karma - because this karma is a hindrance- it’s kind of like you hit the wall or if you think of it as something that covers up the light. So when you get to the point where you think you have done a good job cleaning the body karma, you feel OK physically, and then you think you’ve done a good job cleaning out the mental karma, but there is still something left that you can’t define.  This is the spiritual karma.

You create the spiritual karma the same way you create the other karma.  It happens in past lives.  You know there are physical things that maybe you do wrong that you’ve gained bad karma, or maybe there are physical things that you do good, you gain good karma.  It’s the same at the spirit level.  When it clears out, it clears out the same way as the other karma.  When it clears out, you know that you are on the right path because the light gets brighter and you can feel it.

But words will never capture, and no matter how I try to explain it in words, I can’t transfer it, but when you feel it, there’s no doubt.  I feel bad that I can’t give you a better answer.  But I honestly don’t know how to express in words.  But when you feel it, you will have no doubt.  If you have doubts, if you think you are clearing out spiritual karma, but you are not sure, it’s not spiritual karma.  When it is, you’ll know for sure.  And that’s the best I can offer.

9. About Attending Chan Classes

I don’t understand Shifu’s words at all.  But, it’s very similar to – almost like the heart transmission experience, I can feel.  I can feel, like today for instance, Shifu’s teaching was very light, very happy energy through his whole talk.  So when I start to feel this energy, I just close my eyes.  Just like I’m in meditation and I feel what he’s teaching; I don’t listen to what he is teaching.  The sensation I was getting today was extremely light.  I can feel like I’m almost going to float off the ground.  It’s a very strange feeling. I feel extremely light, like not even touching the ground.  It got to the point where my legs which usually don’t hurt very much, hurt very bad today because it was almost like they didn’t have support.  They’re like floating off the ground and you could feel this.  And the colors were very intense.  And flashing of lights get very intense, and the different parts of this feeling.  And I can feel my own energy purifying and I can feel my own clarity of thought getting clearer.  But I don’t understand any of the words at all.

When I meet with Shifu privately, I will go in usually with a list of questions, things that aren’t clear, things that I need to verify.  And someone will transfer those to him as a translator.  And he’ll answer.  But when he provides me with actual teaching, there’re no words.  This practice is very much beyond words.

Words are just to help, and guide, someone else sharing their experiences so that you kind of know that you are on the right path. If you have some confusion or frustration, it helps you, but it’s not necessary at all in any phase of the practice.  For example, if we try to do the seated posture and we try to sit straight. If you sit with your bones very straight, muscles very relaxed, you can stay in meditation for a long time.  If someone tells you that, you can advance very quickly.  You’ll find this same answer by yourself if you bend over, you get very uncomfortable.  It gets very sore. It hurts.  You’ll even quit meditation or you’ll learn.

If I sit straight it’s much more comfortable and the energy flows.  Chi flows through the body.  If my body is bent over, it’s like a hose, you try to water the garden and you try to water the flowers.  If the hose is bent no water will come out or very little.  But if I hold it straight the energy flows very well.  So if no one ever teaches you that, you’ll find it on your own.  You’ll discover that if I sit straight I can sit very long and the energy flows very well.  If someone teaches you, you can do it much faster.

With no offense to instructors, because I have great respect for them.  A Chan teacher cannot teach you anything.  You already know everything inside your own body, inside your own mind, and inside your own spirit.  All they can help you do is be more efficient and not take so many side paths in discovering, but it is already all inside of you and you have to discover it yourself and you have to take every step yourself. Nobody can do any of this practice for you. So all instructors can do is help make corrections along the way and help you process, but it’s already all inside every one of us.

Just one other thing to share. These kinds of shared practice sessions where you come to the temple, take a class, are very very important.  You can learn this sitting by yourself.  You can understand the very basics of seated meditation, how to breathe, and go sit by yourself and you would get there, but it is a very slow process and you’ll make many errors, and maybe get yourself so far off track that maybe you’ll quit. But if you come to practice and you have an instructor, and have other people to share with, they can help you see this practice from more perspectives because normally we only see life from our own experience, from our own mind, our own values, and our own emotions.  And we are generally pretty sure that we are right.  But then if you share this same experience with other people, you will see that other people are right too.  They look at things from different ways and so it broadens your ability to see a path.  So now your path isn’t so narrow and so difficult to stay on.  Your path gets wider and you can follow this path much more easily if you share this experience with other people.

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*  Jue Miao Miao Ming is an American nuclear physicist, currently working in Shanghai, China. The above sharing was given at Cihang Guanyin Temple, Xinzhu, Taiwan, on October 22, 2011.