Klein & Bodian

“I first met Jean Klein in the spring of 1988 when a Buddhist friend urged me attend one of his dialogues. I didn't know anything about Advaita Vedanta, and I certainly wasn't looking for a teacher. In fact, after nearly 20 years of Buddhist practice, I had become disenchanted with the teacher-student relationship that lies at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. Many of the teachers I knew used their power and authority to manipulate and exploit their students, and I had ended up leaving the Zen priesthood myself because I didn't feel comfortable with the identity and role of teacher that was gradually being thrust upon me. I went to my first dialogue with a blend of curiosity and skepticism…




In an attempt to get a better measure of the man, and to share his unconventional views on yoga with our readers, I decided to interview Jean for Yoga Journal. When I arrived at the house where he was staying, he came bounding down the. I stairs to meet me in a pastel jumpsuit, showing the vigor and flexibility of someone half his 76 years. As we talked I was struck by his openness, his ease, his delight in every moment, and the rapt quality of his attention. He seemed completely undefended, without a position or agenda, and his words seemed to arise not from his mind or his training, but from a deep well-spring of silence. I was intrigued...

Several months later, as we sat together for tea during an eight-day retreat, I had a shocking, visceral realization: this man didn't take me to be his student, and he didn't take himself to be a teacher--in fact, he didn't take himself to be anyone or anything at all. I had become so accustomed to teachers who had a well-established identity and agenda and saw me in terms of my place in their scheme. But here was someone who was empty, transparent, devoid of expectation--someone, in other words, who, unlike most of the Buddhist teachers I had met, actually embodied the teachings of emptiness and no self. In that moment I recognized that I had found the teacher I didn't know I was looking for…

Stephan Bodian: How would you describe liberation?

Jean Klein: I’ll give you a short answer. It is being free from yourself, free from the image you believe yourself to be. That is liberation. It's quite an explosion to see that you are nothing, and then to live completely attuned to this nothingness. The body approach I teach is more or less a beautiful pretext, because in a certain way the body is like a musical instrument that you have to tune.

SB:And we tune it to play on it the song of our own nothingness.


JK: Exactly. Liberation means to live freely in the beauty of your absence. You see at one moment that there's nothing seen and no seer. Then you live it.


SB: This is what you refer to as living free from psychological memory.


JK: Absolutely.


SB: Is it really possible to live in the world in this state of total openness and freedom from your own identity, doing the things we do – leading busy lives, taking care of family, etc.?


JK: Yes. You can live in a family perfectly without the image of being a father or mother, lover or husband. You can perfectly educate your children not to be something, and have a love relationship with them as friend, rather than as a parent.


SB: One teacher of vipassana meditation who is also a clinical psychologist has written, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody," meaning that for many people, particularly now in the West, who have been brought up in dysfunctional families, there are very often such deep psychological problems, such a deep lack of self – esteem and such a conflicted or uncertain sense of who they are in an everyday way, that they must first develop psychological and emotional strength before they can embark on the path to becoming nobody. There are people who would hear you say that ultimately we have no identity, we are nothing, we live in this nothingness, and would turn around and say, "Oh, yes, I know that." What they are really talking about is their own inner emptiness, their own inner feeling of lack or deprivation, which is a kind of sickness. Do you agree that we have to be somebody before we can be nobody?


JK: First you must see how you function. And you'll see that you function as somebody, as a person. You live constantly in choice. You live completely in the psychological structure of like and dislike, which brings you sorrow. We must see that. If you identify yourself with your personality, it means you identify yourself as your memory because personality is memory, what I call psychological memory. In this seeing, this natural giving up, the personality goes away. And when you live in this nothingness, something completely different emerges. Instead of seeing life in terms of the projections of your personality, things appear in your life as they are, as facts. And these appearings naturally bring their own solution. You are no longer identified with your personality, with psychological memory, though your functional memory remains. Instead, there is a cosmic personality, a trans-personality, that appears and disappears when you need it. You are nothing more than a channel, responding according to the situation.