Global Buddhist Community
Practice off the Cushion An Interview with Simon Child, Part 1
The interview is translated into Chinese and published in Issue 489 of Humanity Magazine (May 2024), in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of Master Sheng Yen's passing.
Editor's note:
Simon Child (1956 - ) is a pediatrician from the UK. He came into contact with meditation in the late 1970's, and began following Master Sheng Yen's guidance after being introduced to the Master by John Crook (1930 - 2011), one of the Master's Dharma heirs. Simon received the Dharma transmission in 2000 under the Dharma name: Jinghong Chuanfa" (淨宏傳法), meaning "pure greatness, transmission of Dharma." Afterwards, he joined Crook in developing Chinese Buddhism in the West.
On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Master Sheng Yen's passing, Humanity Magazine invited Simon to share his way of practice and personal experiences. In the interview, apart from sharing how he conducts practice in his daily life, Simon emphasizes that there is no way he replicates Master Sheng Yen's teachings in terms of the transmission of Chinese Chan practice. Moreover, his approach to propagate the Dharma must be different due to the differences in time, space, and cultural backgrounds. However, the most important thing is to grasp the true essence of Buddhist teachings, thereby not deviating from Orthodox Buddhist teachings.
Simon Child (1956 - ) is a pediatrician from the UK. He came into contact with meditation in the late 1970's, and began following Master Sheng Yen's guidance after being introduced to the Master by John Crook (1930 - 2011), one of the Master's Dharma heirs. Simon received the Dharma transmission in 2000 under the Dharma name: Jinghong Chuanfa" (淨宏傳法), meaning "pure greatness, transmission of Dharma." Afterwards, he joined Crook in developing Chinese Buddhism in the West.
On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Master Sheng Yen's passing, Humanity Magazine invited Simon to share his way of practice and personal experiences. In the interview, apart from sharing how he conducts practice in his daily life, Simon emphasizes that there is no way he replicates Master Sheng Yen's teachings in terms of the transmission of Chinese Chan practice. Moreover, his approach to propagate the Dharma must be different due to the differences in time, space, and cultural backgrounds. However, the most important thing is to grasp the true essence of Buddhist teachings, thereby not deviating from Orthodox Buddhist teachings.
1. After receiving transmission, how do you deepen your personal practice?
My principal practice is the cultivation of ongoing awareness during my life, my activities and my interactions, the continuation of Silent Illumination practice off the cushion. Of course I also practise on the cushion, though not as intensively as in the past.Practising off the cushion has several powerful advantages. Firstly, there is the sheer number of hours available to do it! Except during very intensive retreats, everyone has more hours off the cushion than on it, and all of those hours are available for practise.
Practice in everyday life is live, in-the-moment practice, experiencing your actual reactions and interactions as they happen, offering an opportunity to catch yourself about to follow habitual tendencies which may be deeply ingrained but inappropriate or harmful in the current interaction. In formal sitting practice we may recognise some of our bad behaviours and vow not to repeat them. Our behaviour during the hours after we get off the cushion is both the true measure of the effects of our practice and also the only opportunity that we have to put such vows into effect.
Practice must and will continue forever. Even if I ever imagined that my mind had become completely clear and awake, how could I be certain that it would not relapse from that state, perhaps getting caught and attached to some phenomenon arising only a minute later or a year later. Shifu used to tell stories against himself in order to dispel any ideas that his practice was complete, such as how he dreams, how he fell asleep in meditation (when suffering from severe jet lag!), and how he once dropped a bell during a service. We all need to practice with that degree of humility.
2. What do you consider the key factors in the transmission of Chan teachings?
There are several strands to transmission of Chan Dharma. Just as a rope operates at full strength only when all its strands are intact, it is the same with transmission of Chan Dharma, we must attend to many strands. 1. Attracting people to explore Chan and its practices. Modern society with its extensive and rapid communications creates a huge marketplace of different spiritualities, in many cases with active and expensive marketing. Somehow Chan needs to be chosen for exploration by someone browsing for a spiritual practice. Personal contact and recommendation is important.
2. Transmission to the next generation requires education about the Dharma. This is particularly important in Western society where Buddhadharma is not well known and even less well understood.
3. External forms need to be shared, and culturally appropriate new forms need to be developed.
4. Methods of practice need to be taught, at beginner level and also at intermediate and advanced level, with support for practitioners to enable them to enter and develop deeper practice. This includes both formal sitting meditation practice, and meditation in activity whether that be the formal movement of walking meditation or the maintenance of practice during interaction with others at work and in the family.
5. Transmission of insight, the so-called "Mind-to-mind" transmission, is what is often considered as the actual transmission of Dharma. It is of critical importance for the continuation into the future of deep true Dharma, but alone it may not have a wide impact. The other aspects above are all necessary in spreading the Dharma effectively to benefit many people.
To enable and facilitate all the above, an environment for teaching and practice needs to be cultivated, people need to be attracted to and take an interest in the Dharma and its practice, and gathering places and a supporting institution need to be available.
3. After transmitting the dharma to Dr. Rebecca & Ms. Fiona, how do you guide them in deepening their personal practice while engaging with the wider community?
When Shifu transmitted the Dharma to me he authorized me and entrusted me to teach independently. It is the same when I transmitted to Fiona Nuttall and Rebecca Li, I authorized them and trust them to teach independently from me, and of course that includes maintaining and developing their own practice.
Naturally we keep in contact with each other as a sort of "peer support group," and I trust them to contact me if they want to ask me anything.
I used to live very near to Fiona and to meet up with her most weeks. Now I live a little further away so we meet less often, but still we can make use of electronic communications, such as telephone, email and SMS. We also led one 7-day retreat jointly in 2023.
Similarly with Rebecca, she may be a long way from me but we keep in contact using Whatsapp and email. For several years, I have not been able to travel to USA, for reasons of supervision of the construction works converting my farm property to function as a retreat centre, due to COVID pandemic travel restrictions, and also due to several family matters requiring me to stay near home. But hopefully soon, possibly in 2025, I may be able to join Rebecca again for leading retreat at Dharma Drum Retreat Centre in New York.
4. In the context of passing down the lineage in the West, how can the orthodox nature of the Dharma Drum Chan be preserved to prevent it from dilution or loss over generations?
It was very early in his monastic career that Shifu realized the importance of correct understanding of the teachings. Thereafter, throughout his life, he worked to improve people's understanding and practice of Buddhadharma. He did this through his early writings for Humanity magazine, through his extensive personal studies, and throughout his lifetime of teaching. He worked to clarify which applications of teachings were based on correct understanding of Dharma, and which were misapplications or misunderstandings such as superstitious practices misrepresented as Dharma.
As one of his Dharma successors, it is natural that I hope to continue this mission. But I am not Shifu, nor a clone of Shifu, and my personal history and life situation is very different. I live and teach in a different culture, and the people that I teach are from a different culture to the majority audience for Shifu's teachings. The problems faced in the West are different to the problems for which Shifu needed solutions. For example superstitious attachment to pseudo-Buddhist rituals is not a major issue in the West. However confusion between Buddhism and "New Age" traditions and practices is common, and we need to be able to present the Dharma as being clearly a major tradition in its own right, with its own long history and practices which nevertheless are still of relevance today.
In receiving the transmission to spread the Dharma in my own culture I hope to transmit orthodox insight and enlightenment. This is accessible to any culture if they can receive, practice, and fulfil the teachings. What I cannot even attempt to do is to preserve all the external forms used by Shifu and designed primarily for Chinese culture. I do not speak or read Chinese, I have not learned the Chinese rituals and other forms, and even if I had mastered all those I would probably find them some of them unhelpful and not well-received by my audience.
For these reasons, I would look to Dharma Drum itself to preserve the specific DDM Chan forms and structure passed on to them by Shifu. Yet even these must not be fossilized. They need to be respected and preserved to some extent, but it may also be appropriate to change and develop them, depending on the causes and conditions that arise in the future. The form of Buddhism has changed as it has migrated around the world and encountered different cultures. In the UK, we need to make some changes to external forms to engage people in the UK. Similarly, the "East" is not a fixed environment, and it may be that changes in society mean that older forms become less effective and newer forms may be more effective.
For most people, the pace of life is faster nowadays, with constant demands placed on them by additional modes of communication such as SMS, instant messaging and email, and consequent inability to hide from employers, friends and family who expect and demand an instant response. In turn, their concentration is frequently interrupted, and their capacity for sustained attention may be harmed. There is a need to some extent to adapt to this situation, for example offering the Dharma online and in shorter presentations. But if this is all we offer, then it risks becoming a superficial presentation and the Dharma is lost. We need to insist on also engaging in more traditional training such as intensive residential silent retreats so as not to lose the depth of the Dharma.
Wanting to Be of Help to Dharma Propagation
An Interview with Fiona Nuttall
An Interview with Fiona Nuttall
Editor's note:
Fiona Nuttall is one of Simon Child's Dharma heirs and the third generation of the Dharma Drum Lineage of Chinese Chan Buddhism. In her Chan practice over the past two decades, she has participated in seven-day retreats led by John and Master Sheng Yen. Let's see how these experiences affect her and how she helps Simon to propagate the Dharma in the West after receiving Dharma transmission.
In the 1990's, I had been attending Buddhist classes in a number of traditions. I found that I enjoyed the silence of meditation and listening to teachings, but many of the events I attended did not give the level of silence that I sought. I instinctively knew that there was more, though I didn’t know what that meant.
Encountering Chinese Chan
A work colleague told me that she had found a Zen class locally, so we decided to give that a try. We went to a community centre one Friday evening, and I heard that we would be sitting twice for 30 minutes a time and doing walking meditation in between. Interestingly, it was the walking meditation that I found intriguing. I also discovered that the class was not Zen, but Chan, and the person running the group was Simon Child. I knew at a very visceral level that I had found something important. And I carried on attending that class for years.
I talked to Simon about going on a retreat. He suggested a Western Zen Retreat with John Crook. Again, I had no real idea what I was going to, but turned up one dark October night at Maenllwyd the retreat centre in rural Wales. There was no electricity, just lamplight and torchlight.
As I got out of the car, a man came out into the yard to welcome me. I knew it was John even before he introduced himself. I don't know how I knew, I'd never seen him before, but there was a direct connection. The place was unusual but it was delightful at the same time. And it was a place where we did literally "chop wood and carry water." Sitting for eight hours a day was a struggle physically, but it was my mind that caused me most difficulties.
I discovered that John was astute and approachable in interviews. I thoroughly enjoyed his talks which set out the day for us. John was bright, intelligent, charismatic and a great raconteur. This gave him an ability to address Dharma issues in ways that seemed intelligible and that turned my practice around. Again, I knew that I had found something precious and continued to attend retreats regularly.
Between retreats, I went to the weekly Chan group and spent time with Simon. Simon was an embodiment of compassion. He was quiet and solidly dependable and he too had a deep understanding of the Dharma in everyday life. I remember the day that he told me that he had been given transmission and feeling a joy that he would carry on the tradition and lead retreats independently. He is a very different character to John, and I began to see that each person has to project the Dharma in their own way from their own heart. Later, I met Master Sheng Yen on retreats who was again, another very different person with yet another way of being and expressing Dharma.
From all these people, I learnt a great deal. John had a great capacity for taking Dharma and making it accessible to Westerners with their particular histories, personalities and cultural backgrounds. Simon has a great ability to set up systems for maintaining an institution within which Chan can flourish and where people can come and learn Dharma safely. He has a kindness in his nature that embodies compassion. Master Sheng Yen had a vision to take Dharma outside China and to oversee its adaptation into new cultures. All three men were and are astute and with incisive insight. They could see through samskaras to the humanity behind.
Shouldering the Responsibility to Propagate the Dharma
Over time, I became more involved in Dharma myself. I discovered things about myself and I wanted to help. I cooked for the retreats. I learnt to timekeep. I became a guestmaster. I made cakes for day retreats in my home town. I began to assist at retreats. It felt like a real privilege to help out. I enjoyed seeing people make their own discoveries about themselves and their communities and the wider world.
Buddhism is still in a process of assimilation into Western society. It is still changing to accommodate the cultures and mores of the European and American mind. It is working its way around secular worlds and high degrees of individualism. Mistakes have been made and will continue to be made in this process. We need not worry too much about the mistakes, so long as we continue to learn from them. There is great value in maintaining tradition because that tradition comes from centuries of learning. Buddhism has changed every time it has moved to a new culture and it will continue that process.
I suspect that part of the job of current and future teachers in the West is to be able to hold the fundamentals of Dharma and let it shapeshift into a form where it finds true expression in whatever culture and society it finds itself, and to be able to discern what that true expression is. The world has a desperate need for wisdom and compassion which Buddhism can lead us towards. That is the work.