Kornfield

“Jack Kornfield describes the bruises his dad’s rages left on his mother’s arms, and the empty bottles she would conceal around the house in case she needed to defend herself. To escape their arguments, young Jack would flee to a neighbor’s yard, stretch out under an apple tree, and gaze at the sky. “It was an early form of detachment,” he says, “a way of sensing myself as part of a bigger story than my family story.”

At Dartmouth in the early sixties, Kornfield became a hippie, attending a Be-In in Manhattan, and venturing to Haight–Ashbury to explore LSD. “At their best, psychedelics opened me up to an enormous range of archetypal experiences, shamanic experiences, visionary experiences—even genuine experiences of transcendence and enlightenment,” he recalls. “The tricky part was embodying these realizations after the experiences were over.”

With the Vietnam War raging, Kornfield signed up for the Peace Corps, and asked to be shipped to a Buddhist country. Sent to Thailand, he made his way to a remote and impoverished region of the jungle near the Laotian border, to study with Ajahn Chah. His friend Sumedho, reassured Kornfield “This is the real deal,” he promised, “the tough training.” One of the first things that Ajahn Chah said to Kornfield when he arrived at the monastery was, “I hope you’re not afraid to suffer.” This confused Kornfield…Ajahn Chah explained that there were two kinds of suffering: the usual kind that generates more pain and confusion, and the kind that can lead you to freedom.

…Only one meal was eaten each day, in the morning, and it was gathered by the monks on an alms round to a village five miles away. Ajahn Chah would often talk for hours as the bhikkus sat around him on a stone floor. He also had an uncanny ability to sniff out attachments. Serenity-loving monks would be assigned to huts by noisy intersections, while those terrified by wild animals were dispatched to sit in the woods alone at night…

But as strict as Ajahn Chah was about the Vinaya, he had an open mind about the dharma, and encouraged his students to meditate with other teachers as well… On a yearlong retreat…practicing Vipassana in silence eighteen to twenty hours a day, Kornfield broke through to subtle realms of awareness that he describes as the “particle physics” of consciousness.

“My mind became so still. I could see thoughts not only when they arose, but before they arose, like that feeling when you’re about to burp. My body would dissolve into twenty kinds of light—light like the full moon, light like your body dispersing into fireflies,” he recalls. “Then I went through stages where there were ten thousand grains of sensation in every instant of consciousness, where the smallest movement of your arm was like the shifting of a sand dune—all those little particles arising and passing out of emptiness.” Through this step-by-step process, he learned how to cultivate the state of clarity and balance that Theravadin elders call “high equanimity.”

When Kornfield returned he couldn’t wait to tell Ajahn Chah about all the profound experiences he’d had. His teacher listened, smiled, and replied, “Good. Something else to let go of.”

~ Steve Silberman, Lion's Roar, June 2015

Photos ~ Hitchhiking to Haight Ashbury,1967
            ~ Ordination, Thailand, 1969
            ~ Ven. Ajahn Chah,1918 – 1992
            ~ Begging, Burma Monastery, 1971