A Record of Awakening
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About this ebook
‘the rare and inspiring example of a life consistently and uncompromisingly dedicated to the practice of the dharma.’ - urgyen sangharakshita.
the remarkable fruit of more than twenty years’ immersion in buddhist practice: a practice that has been both deep and far-reaching.
in this book david smith, ‘an ordinary working-class chap’ who came across buddhism, shares his extraordinary inner experience. taking us through his journey – from initial practice in the zen tradition and three years as a theravadin monk to his recent years as a lay practitioner in east london – he describes the basic principles of his practice and the process whereby the ‘tap root of ignorance’ is cut and the awakened mind is born.
his account reminds us that the awakened mind is within the reach of every one of us prepared to make the effort.
Aloka David Smith
I was born in Oxford, England, in 1946, and I've been a practicing Buddhist for nearly 40 years. I began training with Zen, practicing with the Venerable Myokyo-ni, a teacher from the Rinzai school, at the Buddhist Society in London. This was my practice for more than five years, before travelling to Sri Lanka in 1980. Here I lived for three years as a Theravada monk under the guidance of the Venerable Dhammaloka Maha Thera. It was while I was in Sri Lanka that my spiritual breakthrough took place in 1981, and it is this that forms the framework of my first book, A Record of Awakening, published in 1999.On my return from Sri Lanka I matured my practiced by essentially living on my own for a number of years in east London. At the time of my breakthrough in Sri Lanka my teacher told me I should travel and begin to teach, but it was to be around 20 years before I took that role by leading retreats at several retreat centres of the Triratna Community in the UK and abroad. My association with this movement came to an end in 2006.My second book, Dharma Mind Worldly Mind, was published in 2002.My third book, A Question of Dharma, was published in 2008.My fourth book, The Five Pillars of Transformation, was also published in 2008, with a second edition in 2009.My fifth book, Blue Sky, White Cloud. has now been published.DharmaMind Buddhist GroupAs well as being a guest leader of retreats at various Buddhist centres around the country and abroad, I have also been leading my own Dharma group for several years, whose practice framework is within the all-embracing spirit of Mahayana Buddhism, and focuses primarily on the formless approach to practice known as "silent illumination" of the immanent model. This independent Western Mahayana Buddhist group first started in London in 1997, and is now located in Birmingham, where I have lived since 2001. We moved to our current meeting venue located at the Friends Meeting House in Kings Heath, in January 2007. A superb facility ideally suited to our needs.The name 'DharmaMind' is my term to denote the type of mind that it is crucial to cultivate in order to aspire to freedom from self and enjoy happiness of heart. The heart and spirit of our training is closely allied to Chan, Zen and Dzogchen - a practice of 'no-practice' that embraces all of life, which is practiced in the body through direct experience, before thinking. It is a practice whose spirit nurtures the ability to live life without the burden of spiritual ambition and goals, and which has the delicious taste of freedom from attachment.The group has now grown beyond the weekly and monthly meetings that had been its limits over the early years. Retreats are now scheduled at various locations and local groups are being set up as an ongoing development. For more information on these activities go to the Group page.Āloka David Smith.
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A Record of Awakening - Aloka David Smith
A Record of Awakening
Practice and Insight on the Buddhist Path
By
Aloka David Smith
Smashwords Edition
Copyright David Smith 2012
What others say about this book…
Amazing book - If you are of Buddhist leanings, this book is enlightening. It really gave me the felt-self of the awakening that so many have spoken of, including the Buddha. It is so personal and honest that reading it gave me hope. I highly recommend it to serious students of the Path.- Bruce Gibbs (California USA)
Inspirational - Record of Awakening is a book that I have often returned to since my first reading, several years ago. Always finding it inspiring. Many books give instruction upon practice, many give accounts of the heroic struggles of ancient masters. In this book I read the account of a living person, that seemed so ordinary, yet whom spoke of extraordinary spiritual matters; from his own direct, lived experience.... - D. Quirke (Ireland)
I think that this is one of the most useful and original books on Buddhism that I have read in a long time. The author is a matter-of-fact Englishman who has achieved great spiritual insight, and does about as much as anyone can to explain the inexplicable. He starts at the beginning of his own journey, and describes what he realized and how his realization grew as time went on. He does this in simple English, and then tries to show how it fits in with traditional Buddhist theory. This makes his work substantially different from most Buddhist literature, which, whether written by Asians or Westerners, which starts with the intellectual framework developed in another age and in another culture. - Highland (USA)
Great Little Book! A friend of mine studies dharma with David Smith, and pointed me in the direction of this book. It's a great read, from an extraordinary man who has actually done some amazing things in his life (would you give up all, and go to Sri Lanka to become a monk for several years - nope, me neither). However the whole book is humble and beautifully plain
- by that I mean, David just says everything as it is. This book encouraged me to buy his second book, Dharma Mind Worldly Mind, and that book is a stunning read. Very inspirational, not instructional, just mind-awakening! Get them both - after writing this review I really need to read them both again. They will change the way you view your dharma practice that's for sure. I. Baxter (England)
About the Author
First Published in 1999
By Windhorse Publications
Second Publication in 2002 by
Aloka Publications
Email: dm@dharmamind.net
Web: www.dharmamind.net
Copyright ©David Smith 1999
British Library Cataloguing in Publications Data:
A catalogue record of this book is available
From the British Library
Ebook: ISBN 978 0 9542475 4 6
Paperback: ISBN 0 9542475 1 5
The right of David Smith to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Preface
PART ONE
Practice and Insight on the Bodhisattva Path
Awakening
First Bhumi
Reflections on the Breakthrough
Fifth Bhumi
Conclusion
PART TWO
Interview with David Smith
Glossary&Publications
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to Sara, Vessantara, and all at Windhorse Publications, for helping me put together this work. Their selfless effort is testament to their practice of the Buddha Dharma. Also to the Venerable Sangharakshita for his encouragement and help, and to the Venerable Hitesi for his sympathetic-joy and useful comments and suggestions regarding Part I.
David Smith
PREFACE
In the autumn of 1997 I received, out of the blue, a draft copy of a booklet that used as its framework the Ten Stages of Bodhisattvahood. The booklet was accompanied by a letter in which the author, David Smith, requested that I might find time to read it and then let him know what I thought, as he would value my judgement greatly. He went on to inform me that he had been a practising Buddhist for twenty years, and that the ‘unfolding of the Dharma’, and the experience and insight he had tried to express in the booklet, had taken place during the short while that he was a monk in Sri Lanka, after having done his formative training in the Zen tradition in London, Where he now lived.
People often sent me manuscripts to read and comment on, and sometimes these were so bulky that I had to put them to one side for several weeks or even months. My unknown correspondent’s ‘Practice and Insight on the Bodhisattva Path’ consisted of only 14,000 Words, and as his letter had, moreover, aroused my curiosity, I read it almost immediately and at a single sitting.
It was a remarkable document. The first thing that struck me about it was the fact that it was a record of the author's own living experience, as he called it. Nowadays hundreds of books on Buddhism are available in all the major Western languages. Most of these are either of a purely academic nature or rehashes of existing works. Only a few of them are based on personal experience, and only too often the experience itself is one—sided and the claims made on its behalf immoderate. David Smith’s booklet, on the contrary, was the fruit of more than twenty years of Buddhist practice — a practice that evidently had been both deep and comprehensive; and though the experiences and insights of his time in Sri Lanka were, no doubt, extraordinary, he wrote about them in a style that was sober and down-to-earth.
As I went through the draft of his booklet, that autumn day in 1997, I was irresistibly reminded of the Platform Scripture, the reading of which had played such an important part in my own ‘awakening’ (to use David Smith’s language) nearly fifty years ago. Like Hui Neng, David Smith was no scholar. In his own words, he was ‘just an ordinary working-class chap with average intelligence and an ordinary education’, and one who carried around, moreover, ‘as much baggage
as most Western people do’. Like Hui Neng he was consistent and uncompromising in his commitment to the Dharma, and like Hui Neng he had only a limited acquaintance with the Buddhist scriptures.
The only scripture he actually mentioned in his draft was the Lankavatra Sutra, and even this he mentioned only indirectly, when expressing his ‘eternal gratitude’ to D.T. Suzuki’s important and influential Studies in that work. His scheme of the ten or stages of the Bodhisattva Path appeared, however, to be taken from the Dasabhumika Sutra though his experience as he progressed through the bhumis as far as the seventh, on which he was still working, had not tallied with those described in the sutra. Indeed, at the outset of his booklet he declared bluntly that the little he had come across in the scriptures on the subject of the Bodhisattva Path and the ten stages had been neither useful nor accurate. Ninety percent of it had not conformed to his experience. He did not, I noted, say that his experience had not conformed to what he had found in the scriptures.
Nevertheless, I was struck by the essential orthodoxy of his position, even though some of his expressions might not have been in accordance with the strict letter of Buddhist tradition. I was also struck by his insistence that, after what he called awakening, the everyday, deluded mind continued to exist, alongside the Awakened Mind, and that from the first to the last there was a great struggle, or ‘holy war’, between these two minds, as the former sought to transform, and free itself from, the latter. Obviously this corresponded to the well known division between the Path of Vision and the Path of Transformation, though David Smith’s description of the relation between the two was more dramatic than mine, and though he envisaged awakening not in terms of Stream Entry but, apparently, in terms of the Arising of the (real) Bodhicitta. At the same time, ‘awakening was neither Zen
nor Theravada
, but a merging of the two — with an extra flavour.’ In his own living experience he had, it seemed, succeeded not just in synthesizing, but even in transcending, the two separate traditions, at least in respect of their separateness. He was also concerned to emphasize that a strong concentration was essential as a prerequisite to insight, that insight could be developed in connection with dreams, that bowing was an important spiritual practice, and that one should not believe that only monks could attain insight. One could practise the Dharma perfectly well in lay life.
By the time I finished reading ‘Practice and Insight on the Bodhisattva Path’ I felt that I had come across a treasure. I felt that through the booklet I was in contact with a fellow Dharma-farer, even a kindred spirit, and was anxious to meet him in the flesh. At the end of his letter he had said that he looked forward to my reply and that if I should think a meeting would be necessary he would be grateful for that also. As it happened, I had already made arrangements to spend some time in London the following month, and wrote to my unknown correspondent accordingly. The result was that one afternoon he came to see me at my flat in the London Buddhist Centre.
In his booklet David Smith had described himself as being ‘just an ordinary working-class chap’, and indeed that was what the robust, cheerful, fiftyish man sitting opposite me in my study looked like. Passing him on the street, one probably would not have given him a second glance. All the more remarkable, therefore, was the contrast between the ordinariness of his outward appearance and the extraordinariness, as I knew it to