Episode #623: This is the third episode in a series of talks with Tempel Smith, who shares his deeper impressions of Burmese Buddhist culture, and how he became a bridge for other Americans to understand it better.
Tempel starts by continuing his reflection into the polarities that defined his early life experiences, mainly in terms of social engagement versus quiet meditation. As a young monk in Burma, he tried to consciously negotiate those apparent tensions, and questioned whether they could be integrated into a single practice. However, when he attained deeper states of calm, he realized that they were not, in fact, contradictions.
Another dissonance he reconciled for himself was cultural: being a Western practitioner in a Burmese Buddhist context. Westerners often want to do “a stripped-down Buddhist practice that doesn't have ritual and doesn't have community.” But in the end, he feels they lose out. While noting that the teachings of most Burmese monks encourage strict silence and an exclusive focus on meditation, Tempel found these guidelines produce very different results in Burmese yogis than those coming from abroad. As a teacher, he has seen Western students develop remarkable insights during courses, yet be unable to integrate them into daily life. The Burmese, however, see practice and their culture/society as intertwined.
Tempel had previously led meditation retreats for youth, but with these insights, he wanted to expand their Dharma experience into social engagement and community building. His idea developed into a three-month trip to Thailand, India, and Burma, where Tempel exposed the group to various aspects of Buddhist life. The result was transformative. Rather than Westerners opening their hearts through intensive retreats with less integration, the hearts of these youth opened instead through engagement with Burmese Buddhist society, which was deeply inspiring.
“You let your activism and your meditation harmonize, and you get a liberated mind!” he notes in closing. “That's what 30 years of practice has shown me and what I'm trying to help people get to their own integrative mind state. And then the suffering falls away of the mind and the beauty flourishes.”
