When I first heard Ken tell this story about Lama Tenpa—making the point that different things work for different people—I felt a sense of permission.
As someone who doesn’t visualise, I’d already learnt that many practices don’t translate well into my experience. So hearing Ken say, so plainly, that what matters is finding a way of practice that speaks to you and actually changes you when you do it, was deeply encouraging. It shifted the frame from “try harder” to something more fruitful: pay attention to what works. Ken calls this approach pragmatic Buddhism.
When I first heard Ken talk anout Lama Tenpa I was practising in a dharma centre context, in a very traditional setting. I had little opportunity to ask practice questions of my teacher and spent a long time stuck, spinning in confusion, doing practices that didn't bring about change. It took several years to recognise and acknowledge that I was stuck.
Now I hear this passage as an invitation to trust my own knowing. When you do, your path of practice becomes your own. It may not fit any system, but when you find what works, it changes you utterly.
From A Trackless Path 12
Ken: Well, people work in different ways. Our retreat director when I was in the three-year retreat was Lama Tenpa. Mahamudra was his practice—he didn’t do anything else. And he’d come over to the retreat sometimes, he’d say, “You know I really should offer a few tormas to Mahakala. Oh, I’m too lazy.” And by lazy he meant that he sat about twenty hours a day and he slept for about four hours sitting up. So very lazy person. And in the second retreat he didn’t teach the four immeasurables at all. And I worked with him. When he got to taking and sending he didn’t even teach taking and sending—just a very little bit—he had them doing something else.
I had a really knock down, drag ’em out argument with him about that because it had been a really important part of my training in the first retreat. And finally after listening to me, basically yell at him for half an hour he just looked at me and said, “Ken, that worked for you. It doesn’t work for me.” You know, mahamudra really, really worked for him.
And four immeasurables was very important part of my own practice, which is one of the reasons I teach it—because I think it’s very, very important. For other people it’s Avalokiteshvara. Other people it is resting with the breath. There are many, many practices, and the important thing is to find a way of practice that speaks to you. I really hope you can move in that direction. And then it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing because you have something which speaks to you and brings about change in you when you do it. And that’s what’s really, really important.
Once you get into a center-institutional thing and people are doing this practice, and this practice, you get into this comparison game: who’s getting ahead of whom?
One of my students at an retreat many years ago—it was an insight retreat—I gave them a couple of options. One was to do the traditional insight practices and the other one was to work with Nasrudin stories. She was pretty good practitioner, so she was working on her third Nasrudin story in this particular retreat. At the end of the retreat [laughs] she says, “How many other people got to three?” And I said, “You’re never going to know,” [laughs] because it was the comparison game again.
And this stuff comes up all the time, and it’s worse than useless—it’s counterproductive. It works in the wrong direction. And so to the extent that it’s possible I’m trying to create a way of practice... None of you, at least at this point, I don’t feel any of you are in competition with anybody else.