You’re familiar with the image of a wise old man meditating on a mountaintop as a weary traveler climbs the treacherous path to ask this sage for his knowledge.
But how did that wise man get up the mountain? How does he keep himself fed and warm? What if he gets tired of entertaining visitors?
Luckily, there are manuals to answer those questions.
There is a thousand-year-long tradition in Tibetan Buddhism of adherents sequestering themselves in mountain caves for years at a time to meditate and perhaps achieve enlightenment. Over that millennium, various religious figures wrote manuals of “best practices” so that the ascetics who came after them might benefit from their wisdom.
“Most of these texts present themselves as having been written for the great masters’ disciples, saying, ‘You are my followers. You want to go off and meditate like I’ve been doing for decades? This is how you do it,’” David DiValerio said.
DiValerio is an associate professor of History and Religious Studies at UWM, and he’s the author of a new book, Mountain Dharma: Meditative Retreat and the Tibetan Ascetic Self. The book examines the instructions recorded in these manuals and how they have evolved over a thousand years.
Writing and research
DiValerio’s research focuses on Tibetan Buddhism and its practitioners. Mountain Dharma is his third book, but he discovered the retreat manuals years ago while researching his first book, The Holy Madmen of Tibet. He had found mentions of a text called “Yangönpa’s ri chos,” or “Mountain Dharma.” It was a manual, passed from teacher to student, that described how to conduct a meditative retreat.
That piqued his interest. DiValerio explored further and discovered a trove of almost 30 retreat manuals. Most of these now-digitized texts are available online at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center. The site is the foremost repository of Tibetan literature on the planet. Making rough translations of the manuals from their original Tibetan took years, but as he read, DiValerio noticed that the writers’ advice addressed some common obstacles: Location, avoiding people, food, bodily threats, and the spiritual lineage. Those became the basis for the chapters in his book.
So, according to these manuals, how should one conduct a meditative retreat?
1. Pick a cave
Picking a site for a years-long retreat is an important choice. But DiValerio found that these ascetics were less concerned with the geography of their cave and more interested in how it could help them achieve their spiritual goals. Early on, the focus was on experiencing a place – watching birds come and go, lakes freeze and thaw, and the seasons change – to learn about impermanence.
But advice evolved, and the shape of the landscape became increasingly important. It was favorable for one’s chosen mountain to resemble the shape of a flower, for example.
Hundreds of years later, the guidelines changed again: “Now, the most important thing is that you go to a place that has been inhabited by some great master in the past,” DiValerio said. “Then the meditator would look at the landscape through new eyes, seeing the history of the tradition through the landscape.”
2. Avoid interruptions
Unwanted visitors were a problem for ascetics who wanted peace to meditate. They were interrupted with some frequency, said DiValerio – “The reason why you need instructions for how to avoid people is because people are always coming, right?”
One author recommended pretending to be crazy to discourage uninvited guests. Others suggested being a bad host. For example, “You can give them some food, but don’t boil tea for them, and then hopefully they won’t come back,” DiValerio said.
But language softened over time. While solitude remained essential, retreatants began to interact more with the public, especially to acquire the food needed to survive.
3. Find food
Early on, said DiValerio, retreat manuals treated food as part of the meditative experience. One set of instructions by famed ascetic Yangönpa Gyeltsen Pel discussed how an upset stomach could disrupt meditation and recommended visualization techniques to “neutralize” bad food.
A few centuries later, instructions changed to encourage ascetics to beg for food in nearby villages, but to do so in a way that did not disrupt meditation. Later still, retreatants had grown more respected and no longer had to beg. Instead, manuals detailed how nearby villagers might bring food to the meditator in exchange for performing religious rituals.
“It’s a different way of relating to the community. … We’re seeing the basic interaction between the meditator and the world of people changing over time,” DiValerio said.
4. Protect your body
Living in isolated caves in the Himalayas came with existential threats. DiValerio outlined three main categories in the book: Illness, cold, and bandits.
“If you’re living in a cave by yourself, you’re completely exposed,” DiValerio said. “There could be nefarious people. How do you prevent them from attacking you?”
The answer lay in rituals. The manuals discuss how to perform mantras and visualizations that were said to cast a circle of protection. For example, “You visualize a goddess who rides on the back of a yellow boar, and she swoops through the universe with a needle and thread and sews shut the eyes and mouths of all these evil people,” DiValerio said.
There were also rituals and visualizations to deal with illness. If they did not work, that served as a reminder of the meditator’s impermanence. But there is one visualization technique that was effective to ward off the biting cold: A yogic practice called tummo. Meditators would visualize a fire inside of their belly and perform breathing exercises.
“Scientists have proven that monks are able to raise their body temperature by doing this meditation. It’s one of the yogic practices that’s been most studied by western science,” DiValerio said.
5. Respect your spiritual lineage
Of course, a manual about meditative retreats must give instructions for actual meditation. Early advice encouraged adherents to visualize a chosen deity to embody the deity’s qualities. Through such visualizations, they might one day achieve enlightenment.
But “over time, based on what we can see in these retreat manuals, it seems like the possibility of enlightenment recedes from people’s understanding of what’s actually possible,” DiValerio said. Authors would laud great masters of old, like the famed ascetic Milarepa, for being able to survive without food and companionship, but “now in the 17th century, we’re just not capable of that anymore. Therefore, the instructions have changed.”
Historical understanding
DiValerio is not Buddhist himself, but he thinks studying this religious history is important. For one thing, the tradition of meditative retreat continues even today. In fact, his next research project focuses on modern-day retreatants.
But it’s also important because studying Tibetan asceticism could serve as a model to study other traditions, like Taoist, Hindu, or Christian ascetism. When much of modern geography, politics, and culture is grounded in religion, it’s critical to understand the underpinnings of those traditions.
He hopes that the people who read his book will gain an appreciation for the long history of Tibetan Buddhist retreats. At the very least, the next time you think of the wise old man atop the mountain dispensing wisdom, you’ll remember the manuals he read to get there.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science