Interview with Lama Shenpen on her memories of Stephan Harding

Edited transcript of a conversation with Lama Shenpen on Stephan Harding.

SM: So I remember at one point overhearing Stephan Harding’s name at a sangha gathering and wondering what the connection was there. Then you and I were walking together earlier this year and you started talking about your memories of him. Could you tell us how you first came to know Stephan, Lama?

Lama Shenpen: He was studying at Oxford, doing his PhD at the same time as I was. So there was a group of friends, ecologists and so on, and they were at Wolfson College, the same college as me. So we got together and they all became interested in meditation and Buddhism. And so Stephan started to come quite regularly to Beachy Avenue to the Longchen Foundation meetings where Rigdzin Shikpo and I were teaching and then we were invited over to come to visit.

It was on one of his trips that we went together with Stephan driving down to Sharpham (retreat centre in Devon). And that was the start for him of meeting and contacting the people who would become involved with Schumacher College. That was the start of a whole thing for him, but in itself, it was a very memorable day. I've actually got a photo of him in a pub and a photo also of him and his father and stepmother having dinner at Beachy Avenue, where we used to live and hold our meetings. So there were several years he was coming along and we were friends.

Did you have the DHB training (Discovering The Heart of Buddhism is Lama Shenpen’s core training for her students) ready then?

I was looking at the timeline of when he would've left Oxford, which I suppose would have been 84. So we wouldn't have created the DHB by then. But the meditation practice would have been the same.

You seemed to be on similar life trajectories as you were both doing your PhDs at the same time. What was your PHD focused on?

I was doing it on a Buddhist text (Mahayana UttaraTantra Shastra) in the Sanskrit department. So there was really no connection academically, I was in a completely different area. My thesis was on Buddha Nature, which I was advised to do by my teacher Khenpo Rinpoche. 
And I was just reading up on Stephan before this call trying to piece it all together in my mind and I realized that actually he had added a dimension to what Lovelock had been talking about with Gaia by introducing the sense that Gaia as a whole was actually based on an intelligence of some kind - by which I mean that consciousness is primary, that everything emerges from that and it underlies everything, which is a very Buddhist point of view, especially the kind of Buddhism I was writing about in my doctoral thesis (Shentong doctrine of Buddha Nature). I was having to defend a doctrine that put consciousness as primary against those Buddhists who would not do that, but who would say awareness and mind are merely relative phenomena.

They would say It's not ultimate emptiness?

Right. Well, yes, but emptiness itself gets used in both ways. So they would call it a kind of emptiness, which I would call self-emptiness. And I was defending the emptiness that is actual reality. The totality of reality is empty of everything other than itself, i.e everything that is conditioned, relative and so on. So I was having to argue against my supervisor and my examiner who held the opposite view very strongly. 

So I was very interested in Luke's question about what I think academia could contribute to the spiritual approach and what could the spiritual approach contribute to academia.

And I was thinking about what Stephan was doing. I haven't read a lot of his work, but just from the first principle that If mind - or intelligence - is primary and in inseparable from the whole universe then you've got the same problem that I had, that anybody who tries to put consciousness as primary inevitably end up falling between two disciplines or two academic worlds of thought. 

So if you want funding for projects in this kind of area, it is very difficult because the academic world quite fundamentally rejects the sponsorship of projects which talk about consciousness and mind, which is separated out from your physics and your hard sciences. 

I read a really good philosophical essay recently about bringing the mind into these hard sciences in a quite sophisticated and brilliant way about how the mind has to be primary and yet he couldn't get any funding because of that reason.

Because although ideally, academia is in principle open to all views and you have to defend your position in a disciplined, clear and objective way, in the sense that you have good reason to say what you're saying and you can back it up with sources that are highly respected. That's the discipline of it. 

But If you can't get funding, you can't actually do what you want to do. And this happens more often than one would imagine. So in the end people have to give up an academic career because they can't live.

I want to share a quote from Stephan which speaks so directly to what you're saying because he said one of his struggles, and one of his commitments, was to the stance that life is auto poetic. That it is self-poet, self-making, as in poesis in the Greek which means to make. We think of that more now in creativity, art making. But he said one of the key distinctions is whether scientists and the academic community want to say that the earth and its beings - large and small - are life-like when they're talking about systems, such as the system of a volcano, its regulation, its semi permeable membrane.  And the way the atmosphere gets created. It doesn't have a consciousness, it's only life-like.

But in a unified theory - which is the idea that it is, everything is making itself from this background of oneness, there is an energy, a unified field of energy, which is life itself.

This relates very strongly to this book I’m writing now on mandalaprinciple and although I wouldn't use the same words, actually I think it's the same issue really. And then talking about it in terms of mandala principle brings in a new vocabulary, a new way of talking about this sense of totality. 
I’m trying to use ordinary language as much as possible so it isn’t too technical, but I’m drawing attention to the fundamental pattern that you find in everything and that which constitutes that pattern, in terms of its boundary and its central principle and the way it’s all connected. But actually in the end you can't pin it down or reify it as being any ‘thing’, so in that sense it's empty. But in another sense It's quite structured and dynamic and emotional and it's kind of…real. There isn’t just nothing there. So If you try to analyze it, break it down and so on, you don't get anything. But in another sense it's the only thing there is.

I feel like that emotional, living quality is so important in epistemology, because for example when I get into a conversation with more materialistic-minded scientific people, I start to feel quite frustrated because they're not really speaking to my need for truth or my actual experience of truth in the way it lives in me. It’s like they're trying to cut me and themselves off from it.

And they're getting annoyed with you too!

Right. Because they’re putting all this energy into defending something and keeping a theory intact that is so structured and so it gets more and more technical and elaborate the more it tries to defend itself against a deeper truth that isn’t actually conceptual by nature, because its nature is totally open and alive and not graspable.

Yes, because although they say they're being objective, they've actually made a highly conceptual structure which they’re holding up against the rest of the world, and they've broken it up into bits. So in fact If what they say they believe were really true, they would just be a load of atoms and bits and pieces floating around in space. They would not be living the life they're leading because the only way you can lead your life really, is intuitively, by relating directly to the mandala. And how? you just do it, because you’re never separate from it anyway.

So, when you approach the world with a sense of appreciating its inherent intelligence and wholeness and you begin to live in this way all the time, you get insights naturally. They just come out of the blue and the insights always have that unifying quality to them that you recognize something directly, whether it's through art, through contemplation or through mathematics, you just recognize the truth of that, because you simply get to a point where you know it’s right - It's true, and it's beautiful. And then the whole mandala of understanding can spring out of that. But what was that that it sprung out of? You just knew…

I see. It is knowing in itself, it's the quality of knowing, gnosis. This makes me think of how Stephan talks about experiencing nature - that despite the knowledge we may have about the damage and deterioration of our landscapes and species, we can still appreciate the immediate, sensory phenomenological display of nature which is simply colour and light and is experienced in us as joy. This is in sharp contrast to the kind of knowing we’re familiar with, that knowledge is simply the apprehending and memorising of items of knowledge.

Yes, which computers can do. Computers can copy information, but computers could never copy that which goes beyond words.

It does seem that the idea of having something like Gaia Theory that is just so wholly positive (even at the level of being a theoretical model), is really needed in the world in general and in fact also in the spiritual sense, as it can fill in the blanks left where people may have made quite an overly cold reading of Buddhism, for example, (or other religions) to the effect that they inadvertently lose the heart and the warmth in their practice and the sense of positive visionary thinking required in extending that to others.

And then on the other side, even at the most alternative radical or alternative end of the academic spectrum, you still really need some kind of meditative or contemplative discipline so that it doesn’t become merely an idea or intellectual standpoint.

Unless it's on the art side.

Yes and then art and creativity is a huge part of this. So much of our need for truth comes in that experience of joy that we get when we make things, again coming back to poesis, where there is the sense of wonder, like…’I made something!’ but actually it's so mysterious. I made it, but it came through me, but from ‘what’, I don’t know…

Probably It came through an aesthetic sense which is notoriously impossible to define, isn't it? And yet you can write volumes about it.

I don't know if you have come across the architect Christopher Alexander? He wrote A Pattern Language, and Timeless Way of Building. He built all around the world and talked in a very similar way because he was describing the inner patterns - that it’s the sacred geometry that really guides us and our senses into knowing where we're meant to be and where we're not meant to be, when it's time to be active and social and when it's time to rest or to retreat. And he talks about Italian porticos and the way that they mimic trees, a line of trees and how that facilitates a certain way of being.

So it's very interesting then to think of that in the context of spiritual discipline because for me, just being with the sangha at The Hermitage (the spiritual home and base for Lama Shenpen and her students in Wales), for me it was very moving in part because of the particular way that the space had been cared for. I found even whilst being quite ignorant to so much of what's going on, the room and the place guided me, it had its own kind of power to it. 

Finally, do you have any other memories of Stephan that you could share with us?

I was going to say one thing about when he was in Oxford. At that time he was writing his PhD on the muntjac deer in the Whitten woods and so he would be staying out all night, he was very wild. Lots of hair. So it was quite fun being with him. My memory of him is a really fun-loving, nature-loving eccentric, hiding in the woods at night and coming back the next morning to tell us what happened.