Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

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A year before he died Rob Burbea expressed his wish that a foundation be set up to house and protect the extensive body of work he would be leaving as his Dharma legacy. HAF was established by three of Rob's students in 2019 for this purpose. HAF also exists to support the teachers and sangha who are engaging with Rob's teachings.

Rob was the first to admit that his teachings weren’t for everyone or even necessary. So long as there was eros, love, a movement of the soul, it doesn’t matter what you call it or whether you even know it’s there. He wasn’t trying to start a new religion. Yet for many people he voiced a crucial insight: that the profound teachings of emptiness give rise to the possibility of holding different perspectives on reality for different purposes and cultivating a range of qualities which enrich and deepen the journey of life. I don’t know how to reconcile the creative tensions between innovation and tradition. Maybe it’s always just a tension. However, I do know I’m grateful to Rob for his teachings and his way of teaching. They have expanded and enriched the way I practice and conceive of practice and I’m sure they have impacted many individuals and communities beyond Gaia House and beyond even the Buddhist Sangha.

Michael: This is really interesting. You know, when we’re doing a more phenomenological deconstruction of, let’s say, a meditative object, it’s very often the case that it starts to kind of dissolve before the meditative gaze, right? It fades away or whatever, starts to vanish in one way or another. You seem to be describing something similar happening with this other way, with this analytical way of working. Do you get that same – I think you call it in the book a fading of perception? CHRISTINA FELDMAN is a co-founder of Gaia House. She has been leading Insight Meditation retreats worldwide since 1976. She is a Guiding Teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the author of a number of books including Woman Awake, Way of Meditation, and co-author of Soul Food. Recent books include Silence and The Buddhist Path to Simplicity. So all the practices in the book, as far as I remember, if you engage them – whether they’re analytical meditations or what we’re calling more fully experiential, phenomenological – to some degree or other they will support, they will engender, the fading of perception, because they’re not fabricating. Because the ways of looking are part of what fabricates, they’re part of what stitches reality together – this object, that object, this self, that self, and also time. So any of these meditations, what we’re calling phenomenological right now, or analytical, they basically form ways of looking that will, to some degree or other, create more fading – or allow more fading we should say, more accurately. Michael: This is your current investigation, correct? What we might call the reconstruction of things? YANAI POSTELNIK first encountered the teachings of the Buddha while travelling in Asia in 1989, and has been teaching Insight Meditation and Buddhist practice internationally for 30 years. Yanai is much inspired by the forest tradition of Thailand, and the transformative power of the natural world. He is a member of the Gaia House Teacher Council, and a Core Faculty member of Insight Meditation Society, Massachusetts. Since 2018 Yanai has devoted a significant amount of his time to activism and nonviolent civil disobedience, calling for an appropriate response by government, to the climate, ecological and social justice crises of our time. Having grown up in New Zealand, with parents of European and Asian heritage, Yanai lives with his wife Catherine McGee in Devon, England.

Rob: Yeah. I can’t remember so much what’s in the book now; I think there’s a little bit of reconstruction in the book, but yes, I think so, when it gets into the more Vajrayāna practices. One way of conceiving what we’re doing with Vajrayāna or tantric practices – one way of conceiving it – is that one has realized or become quite skilled and adept at this kind of fading of perception, and one can become so skilled at it that it’s almost like it’s a gas pedal on a car; you can press more so that everything just completely fades out, or a little less, or a lot less. So you can kind of modulate where you are on what I call the spectrum of fading, or the spectrum of the fabrication of perception. One of the things you can do is, let’s say, put the gas pedal fairly far down, but not completely far down so that everything fades; you’re retaining an almost light or insubstantial sense of the perception of the body and self and the world of phenomena. What you have there is a very insubstantial, fluid but malleable perception. Then you can actually start shaping perception this way or that. Michael: Yeah. This is fascinating. You are preaching to the choir here of meta-rationality or metaconceptuality. We talk about that on the show quite a bit, particularly with David Chapman. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s a Vajrayāna practitioner with quite a large body of work describing meta-rationality, which is essentially what you just described – being able to switch conceptual frameworks based on what’s most useful, most beautiful, most helpful, most whatever right now, and do that very fluidly. AJAHN JUTINDHARO began his meditation practice in 1982 and since 1989 has been a monk in the Thai forest lineage of Ajhan Chah and Ajahn Sumedho, living primarily in the UK. For the last ten years he has been the Abbot at Hartridge Monastery in Devon. SARI MARKKANEN started to practise Insight meditation in 2005 after years of other meditative practices. Sari has practised meditation on long retreats at Gaia House, in Finland and in monasteries in Thailand. She completed an Insight Meditation teacher training in 2020 guided by her close teachers Rob Burbea, Martine Batchelor and Caroline Jones. Sari has been sharing Dharma for many years in Nirodha, the Finnish Insight Meditation community, earlier as a Community Dharma Leader trainee and graduate. Previously, Sari taught secular mindfulness (MBSR) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) and she was a pioneer in teaching mindfulness in schools in Finland. She has written two books about mindfulness, kindness and compassion practices for children. Nowadays she is committed to serving Dharma.

He has remained an incredibly important and cherished part of my journey, and even though I am sure I was probably a less significant part of his, he never made me feel anything less than critical to his life, and perhaps more significantly to myown. So besides Thanissaro Bhikkhu, what other resources did you find that helped you do this long process of investigation into emptiness? CARL FOOKS has been practising in Mahāyāna and Theravāda traditions since the late 1980’s, starting with Rinzai Zen before settling on the Mahasi tradition in 2007. He has been leading groups since 2011 and teaching retreats at Satipanya and Gaia House since 2014. He has an MA in Buddhist Studies. Based on his deep experiential understanding of emptiness, Rob dedicated much of his time and energy during the last years of his life to conceiving, developing and establishing a new body of teachings that he called ‘A Soulmaking Dharma’.