Transforming Internal Formations pt. 1

You can’t directly introspect into store consciousness, so you will not be able to see for yourself exactly the structure of the seeds. Instead, you can use awareness to investigate phenomena in the present moment and see what they consist of. If you do this consistently you may come to the conclusion that the Yogacarins came to, which is that the seeds should be thought of as arising in coordinated clusters.

When you’re angry, it is not simply that something has “awakened the seed of anger.” What has been awakened is a whole complex of associated seeds coordinating experience such that there appears to be someone to get angry (namely you,) something to get angry about, and an unexamined, felt sense that anger “fits.”

Remember the example Thich Nhat Hanh gave about the boat:

A man was rowing his boat upstream when, suddenly, he saw another boat coming toward him. He shouted, “Be careful! Be careful!” but the boat plowed right into him, nearly sinking his boat. The man became angry and began to shout, but when he looked closely, he saw that there was no one in the other boat. The boat had drifted downstream by itself. He laughed out loud.

Before reading on, please pause and look back over the story. How exactly did the man’s anger fail to sustain itself? Was it one of the three factors I mentioned? Did the man transform anything? Thay will forgive us for turning his beautiful, metaphorical story into an object of analysis.

My conclusion is that, alas, the man did not transform anything. Mr. Nhat Hanh gave this example in a section on wrong perception. The man had limited information about the situation and so he did what we all do, he intuitively filled in the gaps. To say that “he” did this is an overstatement. It was an automatic function carried out by the consciousnesses. That imperfect understanding created enough conditions for anger to arise. When he got more information, namely that there was no object for his anger to land upon, the present conditions ceased to be sufficient for the arising of anger for him. That is a fact about the latent structure of his store consciousness, not about any change that happened to it in this particular situation.

For another person, the anger might not have ceased. When a seed cluster has been repeatedly reinforced over a long period of time, three things start to happen:

1. It starts to manifest with more inertia.
2. It starts to feel more generally coherent because it has manifested in many different contexts.
3. It starts to develop flexibility around which objects can sustain it.

The experiential side of such a seed cluster is what Thay calls an internal formation or an internal knot, a term derived from the word fetter from the Nikayas. Fetter here does not mean being bound generally, but something that, when it arises, seems to bind you to a certain mode of functioning.

Let’s say that the distinguished gentleman in the boat has such an internal formation. He sees his initial perception was erroneous. There was nobody in the boat to blame for the accident, but:

1. There is inertia. The anger does not immediately evaporate. This anger is a train that has only just burst out of a tunnel. It will be some time before we see the caboose.
2. It feels right. Not that it is justified, although this can lead to thoughts of justification. It feels coherent as a present moment. There is an unarticulated sense: “This is what I’m like. This is what things are like. This makes more sense than the absence of anger would.“
3. It is flexible. It will spontaneously find or produce an object if one is absent.

Well, he doesn’t laugh. Instead, the anger continues on as his conditions permit. First, he is angry with the state of rope manufacturing, which has seen a steep decline as of late, then with the man who failed to tie the boat properly to the dock, then at the general reliance on the clove-hitch by inexperienced deckhands, then he becomes angry at boating altogether, at water for yielding to boats, at himself for being in a boat, and so on until the anger has exhausted itself. All along the way, the gardening function of mind consciousness has been repeatedly calling up thoughts and images that act as conditions for sustaining the anger.

For a brief while after returning from the monastery I was able to live out my childhood dream of pursuing a career as a janitor. I worked at a preschool in a small town. Once, while crossing the playground on my way to the utility shed, I came upon one of the teachers trying unsuccessfully to console a small boy. He was sobbing because he had been forced to let someone else play with the soccer ball. I was immediately impressed by the sincerity of his tears. As I approached, the narrative shifted from the ball: now he wanted his mother. The teacher, probably trying the old distraction trick, said, “Hey, look who’s coming over here! What are you doing Mr. Chad?”

Now, as a part of the pompous display of a man truly living his destiny, I had a tendency to swing my giant janitor’s keyring around my finger. At the peak of every loop the keys would go weightless for just a moment before swinging back into my hand and landing with a satisfying chink, and indeed I was swinging them at that very moment. The boy, briefly dazed by the change of topic, stared at me expectantly. Without thinking, I responded, “Well, I’m walking over to the shed, swinging my magic keys.”

The boy’s response was immediate. His sobbing redoubled with the exclamation, “I always wanted to have magic keys!”

What could I say, except that I couldn’t give him the keys? I told him I needed them for the work I was doing, and suddenly, it was not the keys, but I myself that he needed and he begged me not to go. Well, I had to go. So I offered him a hug as consolation and promised I’d see him later. As it happened, while we were embracing, his tears dried up. When I set off for the utility shed he waved me goodbye like a brave young sailor leaving home port for the first time.

Internal formations are a part of the way that we function. They are a part of the human endowment, probably because at a certain stage it is more harmful to face apparent incoherence than to face a systematically misleading coherence. The work of transforming internal formations is largely one of letting that misleading sense of coherence go.

In terms of the transformation of the seeds in store consciousness, this is achieved through insight, which leads to a disruption of any one of the three conditions mentioned above: the sense of the one who can be angry, the sense of the thing that can anger, and the sense of anger “fitting” with those two things. Deep looking meditation can be practiced with any one of these three supports, and if they are seen as even a little insubstantial, the formation will weaken. This is the ultimate aim of Buddhist meditation. Every practice and every meditation support this process.

Let’s return to the man in the boat, whose name incidentally is Joe Boatman. This time he’s out for a relaxing afternoon on the river following his extended meditation retreat. The story unfolds exactly the same as previously, up until the point of the collision. We know that there is a seed of anger in his store consciousness, because it manifested earlier. We know that normally these conditions would have excited that anger. But, lo! Anger does not arise. Why not? Because Joe Boatman has had insight into at least one of the three supports. Let’s say he had insight into all three:

1. He has released the idea that the apparent continuity of experience is ground for the assumption that there is an “I” here that can be affronted. This is not to say that he is not here, or there is no one here. It’s just that “affront” would only fit with the way he had imagined himself previously. Even if affront would fit now, why should it fit with who he will be in the next moment?
2. He has seen the dependently originated nature of phenomena such that his anger has become a bird with nowhere to land. The rope, the boat, the deckhand are all seen as manifestations of countless interlinked conditions, none of which can be seized upon as “at fault.” They are all wonders, and although they can take part in the conditioning of harm, that doesn’t mean that they are blameworthy. His idea of them as independent objects that could serve as support for anger has also been seen as something imagined.
3. The sense that anger actually fits in any case has also been seen to be something imagined. In the words of Santideva:

Finding its fuel in discontent, which originates from the encounter with an undesired event or an impediment to desired events, anger becomes inflamed and destroys me.

Therefore, I shall remove the fuel of anger, for that foe has no function other than to harm me.

Even if I fall into extreme adversity, I will not disrupt my happiness. When there is frustration, nothing is agreeable, and virtue is forsaken.

If there is a remedy, then what is the use of frustration? If there
is no remedy, then what is the use of frustration?

This insight has not produced new views. Now, he simply sees views as views. The view of self, other, and the “fit” were something extra, something that wasn’t actually required for experience to hang together. I used the word “imagined” above, but it would be more correct to say something like “instinctively imputed”. Now, when the imputation arises, it is seen as an imputation, and anger has no foothold. It may momentarily arise one last time, but it cannot bind with experience and vanishes like a ghost. In traditional Buddhist terms, the affliction has been uprooted. I, for one, would like to go on whatever meditation retreat Mr. Boatman went on!

On that retreat, Mr. Boatman had the chance to look into the conditioned nature of suffering in general. He did not investigate the dependently originated nature of boating and boating related suffering. In fact, his seclusion from boats was an essential condition for the samadhi he required to carry out the investigation. Obviously, if the general investigation led to a destruction of the root conditions for the afflicted state, we can say that there is much to recommend about his approach. But without entering into a lengthy digression about how intensive meditation retreats give rise to conditions for general insights, I must now admit that Mr. Boatman’s story is not really my story, and doesn’t really partake of an approach I can recommend.

In Plum Village, we rarely practiced sitting meditation for more than 60 minutes per day, broken up into a morning and evening session of 30 minutes each. We also had a silent walk in nature before lunch, about 60 minutes long. This hardly counts as an intensive retreat by the standards of most traditions. What’s worse: we had boats. At least two, if I recall correctly, usually used for the maintenance of the lotus ponds. Poor Joe Boatman wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Having bitten off much more than I can chew with this topic, I’ll finish for now by just saying this: despite the apparent limited intensity of practice in Plum Village, it nonetheless gives rise to the conditions necessary for transformative insight, only it does so gradually. It is because of this that I feel that it is unusually well-suited for adaptation to lay life. Next week, I’ll elaborate a little more on how old, well-established internal formations function differently than ordinary dharmas, and how a steady, gentle approach can ultimately transform them.