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The Tibetan Art of Living
(Wise
Body, Wise Mind, Wise Life)
by
Christopher Hansard
The Tibetan Art of Living is not usually a book I would
read, but I picked it up in a New Age shop on a recent visit to Glastonbury.
After skimming through one or two pages a few paragraphs intrigued me.
I tend to be a rather sceptical person, but I keep open
minded about subjects preferring to EXPERIENCE truth rather than conceptualise
it. Before going any further in the
review of this book, let me explain…
I see an experience as something that is absolute truth –
you know it because you experience it. On the hand, a belief is something that
may or may not be true. I see it like this…
Books generate beliefs, and truth will either be realised or not
realised by what you experience after digesting the content of a book and
“looking” for yourself.
What follows are the feelings that were generated in me as a
result of reading this book. Some are positive and some are negative. With this
genre of book, each reader would get his/her own unique experience. Here’s
mine…
Christopher Hansard, author of The Tibetan Art of Living,
asks us to treat his work primarily as a book of self-exploration, which
inspired me to buy the book, because he is asking his readers to explore and
not necessarily form beliefs of what he has written. He says, “when you can understand the roots of your suffering,
you can become stronger through the wisdom of knowing how and why your illness
has been caused.”
As a psychotherapist, I can agree with this and to a degree,
his other claim that our well-being and good health is dependent on the unique
way each of us interprets the energies generated by our brains.
He talks about an ancient form of Tibetan culture called
“Bôn” than precedes Tibetan Buddhism by around 17,000 years. The founder of Bôn was Tonpa Shenrab Miwo
who was born enlightened and helped others cure their suffering. Like Buddha he
gave them a formula of living and mindfulness that helped them transcend and
transform their suffering into health and well-being.
In the opening chapters Hansard takes his reader into an
analysis of how most of us tend to see the world from our past experiences – in
other words, how we are living in the past.
We tend to re-act (i.e. act again) to situations the way we have been
conditioned to react and we rarely respond spontaneously, even when we think we
do.
Illness is a matter of karma he claims – I can agree with
that to a degree, but tend to think, what about the karma of a new-born baby
who arrives in the world with a terminal disease through no fault of his/her
own? A mystic might say that it is his
karma from a previous life. But that is asking for a big leap of faith from me,
since most of us do not have memories of previous lives and are being asked to
just accept it as if it were gospel truth. So here the book poses a question,
but I like being presented with such questions, to which as yet (for me), there
are no apparent answers.
So what we need to do is to learn to live in the present
moment, letting go of the anticipation of “what if this/that happens…” and the
regrets of “if only I had done this/that…” This Hansard says, it the essence of
Tibetan Spiritual Teaching. And the potential to live in this way resides in
all of us. We need to learn to allow every experience to come to us without
judging it, simply accept what is.
This may cause some confusion in some. So… If a person finds
he has a terrible illness, does it mean do nothing, and just die of it? No, I don’t think it means this at all,
because ignoring it, is not accepting it. That is not doing nothing – it is doing
something, namely “ignoring it”. If one
is to respond (take responsibility) to such an illness, he/she would take off
to his doctor or specialist, fully accepting of what’s going on in his/her
body. But many of us do not do the “fully accepting” part. We divert our
attention away from the problem and hope that medical science can save us.
Still, I digress.
Coming to the second chapter, the author claims that we are
born without a soul. This is something he is asking his reader to accept as
true and I believe he believes it himself. To me I would prefer statements such
as this not to be made. For a start they contradict other “gurus” of
enlightenment who claims that the soul of a new-born baby is absolutely pure,
and then slowly, as life conditions him/her, that purity is lost. Babies have
no souls? That they have to create one?
It can’t be proved or disproved.
He goes on to explain how he created his soul with a teacher
in New Zealand and his description reminded me of someone who has taken an
hallucinogenic drug. I find this sort
of thing very difficult to accept. Not that I am saying he is wrong, but that I
cannot accept something to be true unless I experience it.
In Zen practice this sort of imagery is called makyo –
hallucination brought about by intense zazen (meditation), that is nothing more
than the ego attempting to thwart a practitioner from realising true
enlightenment. I have experienced makyo
on several occasions and I do not feel that it was anything to do with creating
a soul. I do not know whether I have a
soul or not. If I did pursue my soul, according to Zen, it would be something
else I would become attached to, and true spiritual enlightenment involves the
release and freedom from all attachment.
So I must ask myself, if this the absolute truth, or an
embellishment to make the book sound more interesting? Well I have got to
admit, it does make interesting reading.
Next the author goes on to the subject of food and diet,
with some practical advice about the effects of dieting and the diet obsession
of the modern age. And then there is some interesting things about work and
career and how it can revitalise you rather than wear you out. And the benefits
of sharing, giving and taking that really reiterate what both Buddha and Jesus
taught.
The book then goes on to outline the benefits of meditation
and gives exercises to enhance the five senses using meditation and
visualisation. Working through the
book, I have used some of the meditation and found the results to be quite relaxing
and revealing, and whilst I am more inclined to use Japanese zazen to still the
mind, the exercises the author outlines can only do good and are much easier
than the strict Zen practice I use.
Visualisation of colour and chanting sound is used.
Karma is life, life is karma – without it we learn nothing.
Once we have learned that karma is constant, is the law of cause and effect,
and is present in all life, we can then begin the task of transcending it. All this is very much in most Zen and other
spiritual books, but the way the author explains it in very easy language,
would be of interest to a person just starting out on the task of questioning
the meaning of life.
Creating good karma begins with observing our automatic and
negative response mechanisms in daily life and changing them into deeds of
kindness and compassion that will naturally occur when the essence of our Being
can shine through our conditioning.
A whole chapter is devoted to inspiring the reader to become
aware of what karma he/she is creating using case histories of some of the
author’s students. Through self -knowledge, a single thought can change your
life forever, he claims. He is not
talking about over-optimistic thinking here because for to become
overly-optimistic is not an energy that is unrefined and as a therapist, I can
fully agree with that.
Wisdom is available to everyone, if we would but connect to
it. Its underlying essence is force or
energy that holds the spiritual and material world together. After reading this, I had to think a little
but then it occurred to me that it is more than likely true. I’ve been doing
zazen now for around 25 years, and there is a wisdom that has been produced
that has seen me through some of the worst times of my life.
During the bad times when I experienced multiple
bereavements of my parents, brother-in-law, uncle all within a period of two
years, a profound experience of the impermanence of life came into my
consciousness and I experienced that that was the way of things and I felt a
transcendence of my grief that words cannot explain. The intellect cannot
provide that sort of wisdom. What
became very apparent was that my search for happiness was preventing me from
getting it - that what I thought was happiness, wasn’t true happiness.
Hanson states that Tibetan Bôn followers all believe that
life has meaning that empower our wisdom through eight mental building blocks –
four negative (loss, shame, guilt and suffering) and four positive
(achievement, fame, approval and happiness) and in agreement with the Zen
tradition that I follow, the negative cannot exist without the positive and are
of equal value to us regardless of what we may feel about them. What comes next
are analogies and anecdotes that I found quite pleasurable and inspiring to
read.
He then talks about living more with the mind focused in the
here and now, and how to free oneself from anticipation, regret and anxiety, by
outlining a series of meditation exercises that can be used for aspects of
one’s life such as the emotions, intellect, health, adaptability, friendship,
morality, honesty and karma.
Hansard states, that according to Bôn, our emotions are the
origin of our physical health. What this statement does is to make one think,
but it would not be true for the reader unless he/she experiences it for
him/herself – would not be true unless the link was made and consciously
recognised.
The books continues focusing on the subject of the cyclical
nature of our mind and body with advice on how to tune into the energies that
flow through the body, harmonise with them and remove any blocks that are
found. Apparently there are ten painful
extremes that we all have to go through in some part of our lives and
meditation and advice is given to assist us through these periods.
Something referred to as the Three Humours is touched upon.
These are terms for personality types and how they need to be in balance to
sustain health and well-being, and the author discusses ways of rectifying any
imbalance that may occur. The Three
humours are named as wind, bile and phlegm and put me in mind of a sort of Feng
Shui for the mind and body as too much of one Humour would cause in an
imbalance in another and would need to be addressed.
And so the book goes on to many other subjects all with the
basis that, according to Tibetan medicine, day-to-day life is a psychosomatic
experience, and as our psychological nature interacts with the world about us,
we create good or bad health.
To summarise:
Personally, I found the book to be an excellent read, some
things I agreed with, some things I did not. Although I read it from cover to
cover, I wouldn’t regard it as a book to read in this way, but one to refer to
from time to time, using either the chapter contents at the front or for more
specific information, the index at the back.
I think what needs to be considered when reading these sort
of books is that the reader is reading about the author’s experience and not
his/her own. Even though what is written may be true, to the reader unless
he/she can totally identify with it, it will be conceptual information and not
experiential information (experience).
I am not saying that these sort of books have no value, on the contrary,
this one in particular can be of tremendous value if used in the correct
context and that is as an inspiration that encourages the reader to discover
for him/herself absolute truth.
Purchase of Amazon UK
Purchase of Amazon USA
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