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6 EASTERN HORIZON | LEAD ARTICLE

I have been practising the Dharma since I was a student. and you get more and more perspectives on no-self.
I mainly practise samatha meditation in the Thai
tradition with the Samatha Trust, and my regular daily I feel that meditation is very important, but meditation
practice is breathing mindfulness. This tradition was is not just about sitting down and watching your breath.
introduced to the west in the 1960s, and it is from the A lot of Buddhist practices such as chanting, devotion,
old meditation systems in Thailand. In this system, there offering incense and listening to a text get side-lined,
are some vipassana elements, but a lot of emphasis is but these are all bhavana, and people fail to realise
put on the cultivation of calmness and happiness. how important they are. There was something about
Buddhism coming to the west which I feel has been a
Samatha Trust is a lay organisation, and we have centres little deracinated. This was understandable because
in Wales, Milton Keynes and Manchester. It is a very there were not many people who were Buddhists in
balanced system and I have been practising with them the west, but it is important to respect these practices,
for some years. I honestly do not know how I could have which were very important in Asia. When you are paying
managed without these practices. They help restoring homage to a shrine, you are not only making a gesture
my mind, give me fuel to carry on, cheers me up and before a meditation practice, but also freeing yourself
offer fresh perspectives. from what was happening before, and opening yourself
up to the possibility of change and transformation. You
What are the inspirations behind ‘The Art of are in effect doing a meditation when you prostrate and
Listening’ and what are the key messages/lessons chant the refuges and precepts. I wanted to show how
you wish to convey through this book? much listening to a text can be a meditation practice.

Although the book only took me a year to write, it is As the teachings of the Buddha have been passed on
based on a lot of the research I had done for a series of orally for generations before being written down,
lectures and Dharma talks previously. The theme was how do you verify the authenticity and originality of
about how long Buddhist suttas were intended as oral oral literature?
literature, and people loved listening to them, including
their repetitions, the languages and the beauty of A lot of these are guess work, but if you look at the
imagery. My argument is that, listening to the text and linguistic layers, for example the words being used and
letting it work on you is a kind of meditation practice. the vocabulary, we can tell that they are early literature,
This was how they were introduced to me. Years ago, just like the Vedas.
my teacher Lance Cousins had a small group to listen
to these texts and I thought it was just wonderful. You The Vedas were passed on for thousands of years
just listen to the text, and it does something to the through family lines, even before Buddha’s time. This
mind. The book is about the different texts and how is a very good system. You just learn a small portion
they work on the mind in different ways. Some of them in your family, and when you have enough families
are really shocking and you have to be awake and then you get the whole text, and they make sure that
some of them are calming and beautiful, and they exert this carry onto the next generations. This practice can
different effects on you. If you understand Pāli, it would only be sustained if you have enough families involved.
be wonderful to listen to the text in Pāli. However, my Obviously, Buddhist texts cannot be passed on this
argument rests on the content in any language. The way way because monks and nuns would not be married,
these texts are structured is very sophisticated and they but there are special groups that chant the long texts
are beautifully composed. Everybody has heard of the or short texts. They would repeatedly rehearse the
Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutta (Satipatthana chant and learn them. This is a very reliable form of
Sutta), but actually if you look at how it works it is very transmission. In fact, there are some monks in Burma
who can chant the whole Tipitaka. EH
skilled. It takes you gradually step by step: you start off
with the body under a tree with breathing mindfulness,