Tuesday Night at NKT Asheville

Every Tuesday this month (though their calendar says Wednesdays), the community space above the French Broad Co-Op is used to teach beginners meditation. I attended the introductory meeting last nite, "How to Get Started." These classes are hosted by Hannah Kim (Korean-American?), a woman of about thirty who has studied dharma for 10 years, with 8 years of consistent, daily meditation. A lay practitioner herself, her classes are geared towards demonstrating the immediate benefits of making a bit of time in our busy lives for meditation practice. With this aim, she simplifies the Buddha's basic teachings so that people of most ages and backgrounds can understand them.

The class, with about seven in attendance including myself, began with a guided meditation, focusing on breath. During these fifteen minutes, she had us "take our breath" through various parts of the body, starting with the top of the head and moving through to the feet. I think this practice might be a Theravada technique, not sure though. For about the last 5 or 10 minutes, she had the group visualize the mind as an empty, blue sky. Any thought that arose was visualized as an empty cloud, which we were instructed to watch as it passed. For the final 2 minutes or so, she had us try to maintain the empty sky in our minds (though I found myself visualizing the idea of an empty sky as a cloud itself, passing as well). While I am not one who enjoys guided meditation (as my own mind distracts itself enough without someone else feeding it!), her approach and light voice made for a calming session. If you like to sit on the floor, however, bring a cushion; everyone sat in chairs but me, much the chagrin of my buttocks. Overall, a very informal sitting session: no taking refuge or merit dedications...

After sitting, she gave a dharma-talk, loosely based on a book called "Modern Buddhism" Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. Again, her manner of delivery was very elementary, but without failing to impart the proper message. She began with talking briefly about her own ups and downs regarding practice and time management (she is also a new mother), and then moved on to cosmology and the six realms. Her main point was to illustrate the incredible privilege we have in this incarnation to encounter and use Dharma ourselves and to share it with all beings. Kim recounted the Buddha's metaphor of existence/samsara as being a vast ocean in the depths of which an ancient, blind turtles lives, rising to the surface for air only once every 100,000 years. Atop this ocean rests a golden yoke, representing birth in the human realm. The likelihood of the turtle rising up within the yoke for air is analogous to the probability of being reincarnated in the human realm. While Kim repeatedly stressed the preciousness of all human life, she also presented the Dharma as being applicable in three ways: lowly, middling, and great (a trio I've come across in Dogen's "Eihei Koroku"). Lowly practitioners benefit from Sakyamuni Buddha's teachings in their immediate, personal lives. Here, Dharma is used for stress reduction, calming the mind, coping with loss, etc; and certainly this path has its true merits. Next, the middlings apply Dharma not only to their own problems, but also to close loved ones, friends, and needy folks one encounters. She described the "great" way as synonymous with the Bodhisattva ideal. These great Dharma practitioners do everything the lower ranks do, but also defer their own bodhi until all beings are liberated from the throes of samsara.

I actually had to leave about about 10 minutes before the talk was over. These meetings close with another guided meditation. Although I thought some of what she shared with us was backtracking and thus occasionally uninteresting, it was a good refresher about the fundamentals of the various sadhana we do. For me, regular reinforcement of Buddhism's skeletal structure is necessary for grounding those other practices that more involved, even if it's "just sitting."