Gradually sudden / suddenly gradual

We contain the buddhas and the buddhas contain us

When I am told by the Buddha that I will be a buddha, I can project that buddha I will someday become looking back at me as the prelife of his buddhahood, as a form in which his buddha-hood appeared. When I think of that buddha, I and the buddha who is me in the future, who sees me also as a buddha, are two buddhas; it is this wisdom that is the knowledge existing only for “a buddha together with a buddha.

Brook Ziporyn. Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism. (pg 89).

So I suspect that letting-go doesn’t make any sense at the beginning of the path; the sudden path must come as the endpoint of the gradual, or at least as an endpoint. When you’re at conscious incompetence (let alone unconscious incompetence), you can’t just jump straight to conscious competence. You need something to do, to practise – in order to get yourself up to not-doing. Sometimes people do famously have moments of sudden liberation (what in Zen is called satori 悟) early in the process – but those moments drop away, and they are lost without an effortful process of getting back to them.

Amod Lele. Sudden and Gradual Together.

As an undergraduate I had the good fortune that comes from clueless overconfidence and was allowed to take Luis Gomez’s graduate Buddhist studies course on the Samye Debate. Conveyed by the king of Tibet, Trisong Detsen, the debate was held to decide whether Tibet should adopt the Indian or Chinese Buddhism. These two schools differed in their approach to the path - the Indians believed in a gradual path, and the Chinese a sudden path. The gradual path was represented by Kamalasila. In the Bhāvanākrama, he describes an incremental path very similar to one you might read about today — consisting of concentration and insight meditation, cultivation of compassion and so on. The sudden path was argued for by Moheyan, and though the writings of his we have are incomplete, the idea he espoused was that gradual cultivation is unnecessary, and that by simply letting go, one could attain enlightenment in one instant. Although the Indian side won the debate (perhaps because a long staged path is better for a monastic context), the sudden school continued to have an influence, particularly through Dzogchen.

Neither side is wrong exactly. But there’s something deeper here — it’s not just that that both methods are valid, it’s that they are not two — sudden and gradual are non-dual. There are sudden awakenings that are nested inside gradual ones, and gradual ones inside sudden. Here are a few stories:

You practice and practice a bunch of “do-nothing” meditation and, predictably to you, nothing happens. You let go of striving. And then - in some unexpected moment, or from a powerful experience with a teacher, or an offhand remark that hits a certain way, the koan is directly understood. It’s a huge rush, energetic stuff happens, there’s a phenomenological shift. Vivid, dream-like, fresh, loving, sacred. Even so, the consequences of that sudden realization can take quite a while to fully integrate. In this case, it fails to fully integrate. You reify that realization and come to think of yourself as a god, harming students. Sudden awakening gone wrong. Or even gone right, there’s a more common story where the integration takes time and the blossoming of wisdom and skillful means takes a while. Even though the flash of insight was so powerful, relationships are so complicated, and you struggle with how to behave. Then, you note how the ground of being is always right here, even through all the bullshit and struggle that continues to mark every human life. You laugh at the cosmic joke, realizing that the work of love and care is what really matters.

Another story. You practice and practice. The factors of awakening are established - your concentration improves with breath meditation, your conduct improves, compassion meditations give you self love and increasingly, a genuine desire for the well-being of others too. You do some view based practices but they don’t quite land. But you don’t trust it, you don’t have confidence in the view. It doesn’t quite make sense philosophically, or maybe you know it but you can’t accept it. Or you have some limiting belief that now is not the right time, that it will mean the death of ego, or if you awaken that you won’t have preferences anymore or care about the things you care about now. Whatever it is, it’s just one of these things - one errant cloud obscuring the vast sky. Then one day, you realize it was there all along, it’s beautiful, but it’s also so close. You laugh, realizing that the work of love and care is what really matters.

Two old spiritual friends meet. They share their stories with each other, realizing their stories are essentially the same - their’s is a view that goes beyond the temporal. Awakening isn’t the first moment that bodhicitta, your buddha nature, acts through you — it’s the first moment you realize it. In a way, it’s not that special, since what matters is how you manifest in the world. From the perspective of the buddha-to-be, there is total non-dual continuity with the person pre-recognition. Of course in another way that moment is crucial, since that recognition of what you already are has a profound impact on personal well-being. Ultimately, your experience of mystical connection will be just that - your experience. Let go of any idea of how it might be. Drop the stories (including the ones above) and get out of the way.