(Please note: The following first draft of a review is based on an uncorrected manuscript. A Trackless Path is scheduled for publication in November, and a corrected version of this review will be published here, in The Buddha Diaries, and elsewhere at that time. This prepublication note appears in this small venue because... well, it's on my mind.)
I had to get past the thought of writing a “review” of Ken
McLeod’s A Trackless Path before I
was able to read the book. I had
to get myself out of the way, along with my reactive need to understand it all,
and the duty I felt, as a “reviewer”, to describe it and communicate its depths. A hard task—and I’ll have to admit I
was not completely up to it: here I am, after all, writing a “review”!
Simply put, the book is an introduction to, a translation
of, and a commentary on a short text—a poem by the 18th century
Tibetan mystic Jigme Rinpoché, The Vision Experience of Ever-present Good. (There’s more to the title, but
that would take us out into territory too esoteric for this brief review.) Having written about several of
McLeod’s books in the past, starting with his challenging and exhaustive handbook
of Tibetan Buddhism for the Western mind, Wake
Up to Your Life (2001), I know well enough that they require a lot more of
the reader than simply turning the pages and following a narrative or
conceptual thread. To read this
current book is to make a commitment to a frequent pause for reflection or the
translation of an idea into practice, to backtrack or fast-forward between passages
or chapters, to agree that the path through its pages is indeed “trackless,” in
the sense that the reader must devise his or her own way. We should start,
McLeod writes, from “an acceptance that to know directly the mystery of
awareness, the mystery of this experience we call life, we have to let [the]
conceptual mind go.” Read,
he instructs us, “as you might read a poem, paying attention not so much to the
meaning of the words but to what happens to you as you read.”
That said, if your mind is ready for the journey, A Trackless Path will open it up and
point you in the direction of a dizzying new adventure into mind itself. It’s not easy. When I say that it is a struggle to
read, this is intended not as negative criticism but as praise. Like everything, it seems, when it
comes to Buddhist teaching or Buddhist practice of almost any kind, it’s
simple, but it’s hard. I keep
struggling with Jigmé Rinpoche’s text, even as the text itself keeps reminding
me that the whole point of his teaching is NOT to struggle, but rather to let
go the struggle. To rest. To do nothing…
A mystic is one who has direct, unmediated access to the ultimate
mystery of being, and mystery is by definition inexpressible and
unexplainable. No matter his
insight or his eloquence, the mystic’s interpreter is doomed to failure: words
just don’t cut it. The best he can
do, as McLeod explicitly reminds us, is to point: Look! There! It’s up to us readers to follow the
clues and open ourselves up to that which cannot be expressed in words.
Jigmé Rinpoche writes about dzogchen, the “great completion” practice that leads the
practitioner to the “ever-present good”.
“In […] dzogchen practice,”
writes McLeod,
a distinction is made between
mind and mind itself. The former
refers to how we ordinarily experience life, filtered and distorted by reactive
patterns. The latter refers to a
knowing, an openness, present in all experience. That open knowing is free from distortions and projections.
“Mind itself,” he continues, “is not a thing. There is an experience of such vast
openness that practitioners are often moved to say, ‘There is nothing
there.’” He uses the analogies of
stillness and silence to help us understand this concept—or, at times, the sky:
The sky is the sky. No matter what arises in it, violent
hurricanes or typhoons, calm breezes, fog, sun, mist clouds, snow, rainbows or
the aurora borealis, the sky is still the sky… It remains what it is—open clear
space. Nothing defiles it, nothing
sullies it, nothing debases it, because there is nothing to define, sully or
debase. The sky is originally pure…
To know mind itself requires that we let go of the
conceptual mind, that we go beyond all beliefs and dogmas, that we learn to “do
nothing,” but rather to simply “rest in awareness”. McLeod offers us this instruction:
Rest in the field of everything
you experience, and then pose the question, ‘What experiences all this?’ Do not try to answer the question. Just pose it and see what happens. You may experience a shift. A knowing quality becomes more vivid,
perhaps with a sense of vastness or greater space, too. Rest right there.
To do nothing, of course—to not answer the question—this is the hard part, because our minds
are conditioned to be active, alert, to wrangle the question, to formulate the
answer. But to do this is to
defeat the purpose of the exercise, which is to afford us direct, undistorted
entry into the mystery, which I take to be the “ever-present good.” This direct awareness practice takes us
past thought and belief, and into a place where “awareness is not an observer,
an awareness in which thoughts, feelings and sensations form and dissolve like
mist or like clouds in the sky.”
Okay, so here we are—if you’re anything like me!—befuddled
once more in concept, in trying to understand. The trouble for most of us is that this “do-nothing,” effortless
access to awareness is the result of literally years of study and practice. “Texts
such as these,” McLeod reminds us, “are quite misleading for the average
Western practitioner, because we do not appreciate how condensed they are in
terms of time. Each verse assumes
months, if not years of practice”.
For this reason, a book like A
Trackless Path is not for everyone, as McLeod is at pains to point
out. It takes this amount of work
and effort to arrive at no-work and no-effort. It takes this amount of seeing to arrive at seeing
nothing.
And yet… On each page of this text, I think I glimpse the
truth, though it eludes me all too often because I “think” I see it. As one with
some years’ modest experience in meditation practice, I find myself able, at
moments, to let go, to relax into pure awareness, and actually catch a
glimpse. At such moments, I find
myself—prompted by the directions McLeod points out—at the edge of nothing, a
vertiginous feeling that is at once thrilling and unnerving. On each page I find my heart
beating—you know that feeling?—in recognition
of some glimmer of possibility that I’m as yet unable to completely grasp, all
the while with the understanding that it’s only when I stop trying to grasp
that I may have the chance to “get it.”
This is what makes the reading of this book, for me, an
always exciting and rewarding challenge.
I can’t quite put the experience down in words—but you’ll know what I
mean when you read it.
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