Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

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ANTONIA DORTHEA SUMBUNDU has been practicing meditation for more than 30 years and has had the good fortune to practice and study with a number of great teachers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and Insight Meditation tradition. Originally trained as clinical psychologist, Antonia has had a long term interest in clinical applications of meditation. She has been teaching and lecturing on MBCT internationally for many years as a trainer and supervisor for Oxford Mindfulness Centre before shifting to teach meditation in a broader context and serving as a dharma teacher for an international meditation community. In 2010, she was awarded a Master of Studies in MBCT by the University of Oxford and in 2022 she completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training program.

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Teachings

Whilst much of his teaching happened within the cloistered walls of Gaia House, Rob’s vision of the Dharma resisted any constraint. Through his talks and personal guidance he opened up conceptions of the Dharma that made students radically question everything they thought they knew, about what the Dharma was and where it could lead. He would advocate active and at times even disruptive participation in the world, in the spirit of the Bodhisattva ideal. Activism was effectively legitimised and encouraged as a profound avenue of practice, both for cultivating and for giving expression to the liberated heart. It was a talk from 2011, The Meditator as Revolutionary, that inspired so many of his students to take their practice off the cushion and into the world. Listen to one of Sumedha's talks given on the Rest and Renewal retreat at Gaia House January 2023: The Beauty of Renunciation, Aligning w Life (Nekkhamma Pāramī) (Duration 43:52) Listen to one of River's talks on Dharma Seed: The Story of Ptolemy the Tortoise and Mettā (Duration 46:24) But I remember getting the idea of that from him. It’s a certain translation of the word saṅkhāra, fabrication. The experiment thing, I think…I don’t know, maybe it’s just a kind of personality type I have. I was a jazz musician for a long time. It was my work before I was a full-time Dharma bum. I think that kind of idea of improvising and being creative and trying things out, it’s just, it’s kind of my type, maybe, to a certain extent. That one, for me, for example, takes me automatically to a very, very deep level of unfabricating. For someone else, they might not find that argument convincing, or they might not be able to work it quite dexterously into meditation. Maybe something else works. But basically a rational argument has to be woven in to the present moment meditation with all that delicacy and subtlety, and then it can function really, really powerfully.

Michael: If someone is pursuing this path of meditating on emptiness and they’re largely doing it on their own, maybe they’re listening to your recordings on Dharma Seed or reading the book or whatever, but they’re mainly doing it on their own, how do they know that they’re getting somewhere with it?But I think there’s different elements that come together. One is the sort of basic, overarching concept of the whole path and method and what we’re doing, this idea of two strands of ways of looking and fabrication that I outlined. I don’t quite remember when that really got clear, but it was fairly early. Just having that conceptual framework of what practice was doing – and not just emptiness practice; any practice – that kind of allowed everything else to fit into a context. It contextualized everything else. I can remember certain periods where insights just took these quantum leaps to another level of depth, and they were really exciting times. But exactly what stimulated them, I can’t remember. I remember reading Gampopa, a Tibetan teacher from, I think, the twelfth century. He has a book that’s usually translated as something like The Jewel Ornament of Liberation or something like that in English. There were just a few lines in there about the emptiness, if I remember, of atoms, and the emptiness of time. They weren’t really meditative instructions, but somehow – and again, I can’t quite remember how – somehow I took these teachings, which one could just read and sort of say, “Okay, that sounds cool,” somehow I took it and found ways of turning them into meditations that for me were very, very powerful. The Circle of Darkness and Fire is a more programmatic piece, less abstract perhaps, than Amāra Vigil. In the course of its long opening, three musics appear in succession, each with their own characteristic musical language: a music of mystical contemplation (transcendent and timeless, a sort of ‘alpha and omega of creation’); a ‘Dance of the Earth’; and a music ‘of demons’. As the piece unfolds, each of the three musics takes its turns on the stage, affecting, and sometimes infiltrating, the others in the process. The ‘demonic’ music – which, while always retaining its own essential harmonic vocabulary, manifests over the course of the work in various and sometimes quite gesturally disparate guises – keeps interrupting and trying to overcome the other two. Only the transcendent contemplative music remains essentially untouched, unperturbed by the battles that play out.

Michael: What I specifically mean is rather than, for example, doing a yidam practice with a Vajrayāna deity, one might use archetypes as well as just regular objects and experiences. NATHAN GLYDE has been practicing and studying meditation since 1997, and sharing teachings on retreats since 2007. In 2004 he co-founded SanghaSeva whose retreats emphasise wisdom and compassion in ecological and humanitarian service.So all the practices in the book, as far as I remember, if you engage them – whether they’re analytical meditations or what we’re calling more fully experiential, phenomenological – to some degree or other they will support, they will engender, the fading of perception, because they’re not fabricating. Because the ways of looking are part of what fabricates, they’re part of what stitches reality together – this object, that object, this self, that self, and also time. So any of these meditations, what we’re calling phenomenological right now, or analytical, they basically form ways of looking that will, to some degree or other, create more fading – or allow more fading we should say, more accurately.