Deepening Practice and Household Tensions (1of2) — The Living Path
Even when I was not sitting, I felt the Master’s presence everywhere, at every moment. Every hour of every day I lived in an atmosphere of familiarity, warmth, and care. My heart was as sweet as a girl experiencing her first love — or like a child always ready to nestle into her mother’s arms. Each day, beyond what absolutely had to be done, I squeezed out every available moment for sitting, because only in samadhi could I see and hear him. So housework was done less and less: no time to tidy the rooms, and cooking was often forgotten. The world outside seemed to hold no interest for me. All I wanted was time to enter stillness and be with the Master.
Naturally, the first person to be dissatisfied was my husband. He suddenly felt neglected. We had been married less than two years — he was a year older than I was. Beyond the untidy rooms and the child left looking unkempt, I had no interest in physical intimacy. I hadn’t thought of any rule that practitioners should abstain. I simply had no desire for it anymore. And from that time I began eating a completely vegetarian diet. The sight of meat made me nauseous, and eating anything with animal products gave me mild diarrhea. My husband chewed through greens at every meal, and each evening as the child fell asleep, I would turn to face south and sit. He grew restless, pained, and lost. I felt deep remorse toward him inside, though I didn’t know what to do. The drive to practice had claimed every corner of my life. I simply had no way to give it up — there was nowhere else to go. It was as if I had been drawn in by some enormous pull, and once I had entered I was no longer in control. There seemed to be some powerful force behind me pushing me onward, making retreat impossible.
I found a moment to tell my husband about my sitting practice and what I had experienced. How I hoped he would understand and believe me. He just smiled and said: “Are you telling me a fairy tale? I’m not a child. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would say this — nobody’s going to believe you if you tell them these things. Don’t talk about this to other people.” I felt deep disappointment. I knew the attempt at connection had failed.
In my samadhi I quickly completed all that the Master had transmitted. In the days of sitting that followed I wasn’t going back to review and re-cultivate what I had already learned. The Master began telling me: don’t pay attention to any of the meditative states that arise. During that period, occasionally frightening images started to appear — for instance, since spiders terrified me, I would often see spiders crawling all over my body in meditation. The more frightened I was, the larger they grew. If I thought “please don’t climb onto my head,” then in an instant my head and face would be covered with enormous spiders. At those moments I would always recall a line from the Diamond Sutra: “All conditioned phenomena are like a dream, like an illusion, like a bubble, like a shadow — regard them thus.” With that, my mind would relax, shift toward the sutra passage, and the spiders covering my body would vanish without a trace.
After some time I became able to sit indifferent to whatever arose in meditation — terrifying or beautiful, it all had nothing to do with me. The experiences grew fewer, but undirected mental chatter increased, making it sometimes difficult to enter samadhi. The Master told me: “Don’t try to manage thoughts. Let them be like water flowing past you — watch them quietly without judging them as good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Simply observe.” In this way I became a witness. (During this period I no longer needed to enter samadhi to connect with the Master — I could see and communicate with him at any time.)
As my cultivation and realization advanced, the family tensions escalated. My husband and I had small frictions. We had moved into a new apartment by then, with some financial support from my family, which considerably improved our living conditions. I had also hired a young housekeeper to help care for the child. My husband’s dissatisfaction was intensifying. I knew my performance on the domestic front had been poor during that time — though I gave everything I had, I still could not offer more to the family or to him. Most importantly, he could plainly see that my heart was not at home, not with him and the child. I believed I loved my family — I simply didn’t know where my heart was. What made things worse was that my temper was getting sharper. When my husband said something cutting or sarcastic I ought to have watched it pass the way I watched meditative states — just let it go. In theory, yes. In practice, it was very hard. I had less patience than before, became irritable more easily, and had a quicker temper. I could read clearly in my husband’s eyes that he suspected: how can someone studying Buddhism and practicing cultivation end up like this? She must have gone off the rails. I would think with a kind of self-righteous certainty: cultivation doesn’t have a fixed appearance for you to judge. This is the living path — and it looks exactly like me right now. Even I knew it was just rationalization. My anger was not an expression of wisdom. It was the eruption of habitual tendencies — greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt.
The Master told me I should practice the precept of patient endurance. I asked him painfully: why won’t some people believe what I say, even people who are genuinely kind and have strong spiritual roots? He smiled and consoled me: Haven’t you sometimes told a falsehood? The karmic consequence of false speech is exactly this. I thought carefully — I couldn’t be certain I had never told an untruth. I could only resolve not to do so from now on. I asked the Master how to practice patient endurance. He said: Don’t argue about right and wrong when things happen. Don’t cling to judgments about good and evil, beauty and ugliness in daily life. Everything happening around you now is something you must and should bear. Not only should you not argue with your husband — you must not give rise to resentment in your heart. That is the precept you must keep at this stage.
I immediately tried to follow the Master’s words, stopping arguments with my husband. Whatever he said, I made every effort to stay calm — just listen quietly, let it go in one ear and out the other. Easy to say. Inside, storms still arose. Hurt, anger, and resentment tore at my heart, my eyes filling with tears.
Out of a sense of loss or perhaps defiance, my husband stopped paying attention to me and the child. He would come home very late, sometimes having been drinking. Occasionally he wouldn’t come home at all.