Context
Mingyur Rinpoche is a Tibetan tulku (reincarnation of another monk), who grew up training as a monk from a young age. He lived life as a teacher of the Buddhist tradition to all those that sought his advice. He grew up in comfortable, clean monasteries that allowed him to focus on learning the intricacies of his practice and to attain a high level of proficiency in meditation and a deep understanding of his own mind.
However, he felt like in order to attain a deeper level of understanding of his mind, he must leave the comforts of his life. In order to reach this level, he sought to shed his role of teacher and live as a wandering sage. This would allow him to get more in touch with the eternal emptiness of the mind, leave the conceptual world, and attain enlightenment.
My Favorite Parts
Impermanence
There is constant change in the world from moment to moment. Every second of life is a march towards death. The death of one night gives birth to the next day. This constancy of change is the only unchangeable thing. Much suffering comes from attempting to deny impermanence. When the world presents a new and changed reality from the one that a person has come to expect, much suffering can arise. Countries rise and fall, disease manifests, and loved ones die. A fundamental resistance to change causes a person to suffer as opposed to letting emotions rise, fill them, and depart.
Emptiness
If we can accept impermanence as a truth of the universe, we can glean that everything must be empty as well. If something did have a permanent, locked-in nature, it would just be its immutable self. However, because everything does change, we can infer that there is no locked-in essence that would prevent change, meaning that everything is inherently empty.
Meditation
Meditation is the gateway that allows one to access the deeper level of awareness and come closer to pure awareness. There are different types of meditation that revolve around focusing on a particular thing and allowing it to fill the mind. The one that I found the most interesting was thought meditation. Thought meditation revolves around focusing on the thought that pops into your head, letting it pass, and then focusing on the next thought. I almost visualize it like flipping through a deck of cards and focusing on one card at a time. This is different from my usual experience of having many thoughts come at once and switching between them quickly. Paradoxically, I noticed that once I started trying to focus on one thought at a time, the thoughts came slower and slower and my mind was actually shoving me thoughts at a much slower rate.
Plot Summary
- Mingyur leaves his monastery.
- He takes a taxi to the train station.
- He takes a train to Varanasi. He does not like the train ride and all the gross people.
- He arrives at the train station. He spends the day sitting on the floor and then sleeps in the station dormitory.
- He spends a couple days at the train station.
- He takes a bus ride to Parinirvana park in Kushinagar (site of Buddha's death).
- Meets an Asian man and teaches him about awareness and meditation.
- Spends nights in the guest house until he is out of money.
- Eats scrap leftovers from uneaten food at a restaurant and lives on the park grounds.
- Gets food poisoning.
- Almost dies, has a brush with enlightenment.
- The Asian man from earlier takes him to the hospital.
- He spends the next 4 years traveling around India as a wandering sage.
Strengths
The story in this book is very fun to read. It is a tale of adventure that is able to weave in bits of a refreshing insight into existence in the world. It is able to explain complex topics throughout the story without feeling bland. For example, I especially enjoyed the conversation he has with the Asian man where he explains the purpose behind meditation. He explains meditation in the context of the story which makes it feel like part of the story, while still being practical information the reader can learn from and implement into their own life.
Weaknesses
Some of the concepts are really difficult to understand without prior knowledge of Buddhist teaching and this can lead to very vague sounding sentences that are hard to interpret. It is also not very practical. It is an inspiring and interesting story but speaks of very nebulous ideas. The chapter on meditation was the only truly practically applicable chapter to me, a beginner. For the rest of it, I could understand on a conceptual level but I could not truly feel the concepts when I tried to integrate them on a deeper level. This takes time. This is not an "Intro to Buddhism" book to teach how to be a Buddhist, but more like a beautiful story that integrates some more intermediate and advanced ideas. Maybe for a more advanced practitioner, the book would hit harder.
What did this book teach you?
This book provides a refreshing take on the world and our existence in it. It taught me about the inherent emptiness and impermanence in everything, which is not a bad thing. The idea that there is an indescribable world beyond human concepts is a weird one that takes some getting used to in order to understand. Even Buddhist philosophy is attributing names and ideas to concepts that, at their most pure level, are un-nameable. We exist in the world with all the biological plumbing we need to access this deeper level, although it takes time and practice.
In one sentence
Don't hold on so hard to everything.
Score
9/10