Bodhidharma And ACIM

Written by Rev. Tony Ponticello Friday, 30 November 2007 12:00

(On Sunday November 4, 2007 Rev. Tony Ponticello addressed the congregation
at the Community Miracles Center in San Francisco. What follows is a lightly
edited transcription of that talk.)
Good morning everybody. Thank you for being here. I want to talk today about
the legend of Bodhidharma, how it relates to A Course In Miracles and how it
relates to my own life.
Bodhidharma by Yoshitoshi 1867
Bodhidharma is, possibly, a mythological Buddhist
figure. The word, Bodhidharma itself is not a
formal name. It is two Sanskrit or Pali words put
together. Bodhi which means: awakened,
knowing or enlightened and "dharma" which
means: one's righteous duty. Bodhidharma then
would mean someone performing his righteous
duty of: enlightenment, awakening and knowing.
Someone who was on a Bodhidharma path would
be doing his duty and bringing enlightenment or
awakening to where it was needed.
This is the legend of the great Bodhidharma as I
heard it and I understand that, depending on who you talk to, the legend is
different. Bodhidharma, was a Buddhist monk early in the history of Buddhism.
Buddhism originated about six centuries B.C. Its been around a long time. After
Buddhism was about 11 centuries old, exactly when isnt known, but it was near
the end of the fifth century A.D., there was a Buddhist monk meditating in a cave.
Enlightenment eluded him. He couldnt quite get there. He had his moments
but it didnt quite happen for him. At some point he got the idea that it was never
going to happen for him in this cave. His truth was that it wasnt going to happen

until he shared Buddhism with others. He left his cave, around the area of Nepal
somewhere that is the cradle of Buddhism, and he traveled across the Himalayan
mountains. This was a rather daunting task, and he went into China. He was
responsible for teaching Buddhism there and he is credited with bringing
Buddhism to China.
His awakening, then, was getting the knowledge that his path wasnt in that cave.
His path was getting out of the cave, mingling with people and bringing Buddhism
to places that didnt have it, in this instance to China. He crossed the mountains.
He went into a strange land. Understand that, at this time, China was a very
different land than he had been living in. It had different customs and a different
language. He also had no idea as to how these different people in China were
going to take to what he would be bringing them. It was a risky venture. It was
very risky getting there. As I said, the Himalayan mountains were very daunting.
Lets think about the Himalayans for a minute. They are the tallest mountain
range in the world. These are really big mountains. Its a vast mountain range. I
looked up a little bit about the Himalayas. There are over 100 mountains that are
over 7,200 meters. That is about 24,000 feet high. Think about it, 100 mountains
over 24,000 feet really tall mountains. Mount Everest is in the Himalayas. Its
the tallest mountain in the world at 8,848 meters or just a little bit more than
29,000 feet tall.
Himalaya literally means, the abode of snow. All of these tall mountains are in
snow year long. That is what the name actually means. Crossing the Himalayas
is no small task. Its a huge task, especially considering the time when this monk
was doing it and the resources that he had to do it with, which were nothing.
(laughter) He was a monk who had renounced worldly resources. Bodhidharma
got himself across the Himalayas and brought Buddhism to China where it was,
actually, embraced. I believe it was a great demonstration of the grandeur that
this monk had tapped into when he was in that cave.
It is sometimes said that enlightenment always alluded Bodhidharma. He didnt
get enlightenment in the cave nor did he get it in China because he had
embraced a worldly mission that was fraught with times of peril. This mission
anchored him to the world of illusion. As I talked about several weeks ago, I
believe that we can be enlightened and still have our doubts and fears. (See
"Enlightenment And Doubt") We have our moments when we think things arent
working and actually embrace tasks in the world that are hard to achieve. We can

even seem like we are failing at times. That isnt antithetical to enlightenment. I
like to think of Bodhidharma as an enlightened person who got his enlightenment
in the cave. He received it and carried it forth with this grand mission. I believe,
even though he took on this worldly mission, he certainly was still an enlightened
person.
I talked about his mission being a grand one. All of us have grand missions in life
regardless of what our life may seem like. A Course In Miracles talks about
grandeur. I always love these quotations about grandeur. There is one paragraph
where grandeur is mentioned four times. Im just going to read part of it.
Yet your grandeur is not delusional because you did not make it. ... your
grandeur is of God, Who created it out of His Love. From your grandeur you can
only bless because your grandeur is your abundance. By blessing you hold it in
your minds, protecting it from illusions and keeping yourself in the Mind of God.
(Tx.Or.Ed.9.52)
I believe the Bodhidharma tapped into the abundance of the grandeur that was
the essence of his being and then took on his grand mission of crossing the
Himalayas and bringing Buddhism to China. That was a blessing from the
abundance of his grandeur. I believe we can all get blessings from the
abundance of our grandeur when we go within and take on what Holy Spirit tells
us to do.
A Course In Miracles says, You do not ask too much of life, but far too little.
(Wk.Or.Ed.133.2) We frequently dont ask enough of life. Theres a common
world thought that we should be humble and not ask too much of life but ACIM
always counters that thought. The Course tells us that true humility is accepting
our grandeur. When we accept our grandeur we can accept grand and abundant
things in life grand and abundant missions in life. I believe this is what the
Bodhidharma did and I believe that he was an enlightened person because I
define enlightenment very differently than other people do.
A Course In Miracles merely defines enlightenment as understanding. The
Bodhidharma gained a great understanding of what his mission in life was and
thus gained a great motivation to accomplish this mission even though some
people perceived it as a worldly one. Many of his fellow monks in that cave may
have thought this as well. However, look at the blessing that this was. Look at the
blessing that he provided for China and then later Japan because Buddhism

soon spread to Japan. A whole section of the ancient world got blessed because
of this blessing from the abundance of the Bodhidharmas grandeur.
One of the reasons I have always liked the story of the Bodhidharma is because
he had originally intended to find enlightenment in a very lonely and isolated way,
by meditating in a cave. He then found that it wasnt going to work for him that
way. For him, it was going to be out there mingling with people, with all people:
common people, communities of people, and cities of people. A Course In
Miracles has this passage that has always been very significant for me. It is
impossible to remember God in secret and alone. For remembering Him means
you are not alone and willing to remember it. ... The lonely journey fails because
it has excluded what it would find. (Tx.Or.Ed.14.55) For Bodhidharma the lonely
journey wasnt working. It was excluding something that he, at least, needed to
find. He wasnt going to find his realization, or his mission in life, by just sitting
there in that cave. He had to get out and get amongst the people. He had to
share the enlightenment he had. He had to share his spiritual path and I like that.
There are a lot of those kinds of ideas in ACIM especially since the Course calls
us all to be teachers. Its training us to be teachers. It is continually training us to
share our knowledge and to share our path in innumerable ways. We do it by our
words; we do it by our actions. We do it by mere demonstration and being a
witness for our lives what our lives have become, the blessing that they have
become because of the spiritual path that we are on. We share that blessing
from the abundance of our grandeur with everybody that we encounter just by
being who we are.
A lot of the Buddhist path has an historical emphasis on renunciation or
asceticism. I think its easy to understand why that is there if you look at
Buddhism a little bit, especially the historic origin of it. Lets look at the person
who started Buddhism, the Great Buddha. The name Buddha, of course, simply
indicates that he was the enlightened one. That was not his given name. His
given name was Sidhartta. Sidhartta was a wealthy prince, the son of a powerful
king. This was the most opulent, rich echelon of society. Sidhartta was a very
wealthy man from a very wealthy family. Even in his early adulthood Sidhartta
had three opulent palaces to live in at different times of the year depending on
the season. Depending of the climate he would move to a different palace to
adjust to the more ideal climate. He had an arranged marriage when he was 16
years old.

His father, the king, had provided a very wonderful sheltered life for Sidhartta and
the king had the idea that Sidhartta should never see old age. Sidhartta should
never see anybody who was sick and that Sidhartta should never see poverty.
Sidhartta had this sheltered life that gave him a distorted idea of what the world
was like. He lived this way until he was 29 years old, quite a mature age. At the
age of 29 he had the occasion of escaping from the palace to be out among the
people. He had been strongly getting the idea that he wanted to be out among
the people.
The myth is that Sidhartta saw a very elderly man when he was among the
common people and it disturbed him. He was 29 and he had never seen old age.
The person was elderly and infirmed and this scared Sidhartta but it also
interested him. He started to have other excursions out into the world. On these
subsequent excursions he encountered diseased people and people who were
very, very poor. These were things he had never seen and he was 29 years old.
The story is he became afraid of these things. He decided that if this was what
life was leading to then he needed to find out what he should do to keep these
experiences off of him to keep them at abeyance.
Sidhartta embarked on his spiritual quest because he was trying to defend
himself against the ravages of old age and illness. This is interesting because
that is why a lot of us start out on the spiritual quest. We want to avoid these
terrible consequences of life: aging, illness and poverty. Its the same motivation
that has always been there.
In his journey he spent time with many different teachers. Many of them were
ascetics and renunciants. These were common in this age. He spent a lot of time
being a renunciant and learning how to meditate being an ascetic. He went
through a long period of his life when he would eat only one leaf and one nut per
day. That was the extent of the food that Sidhartta ate at that time. A well known
story of his life is that he got to a point when he was fasting so much, trying to
obtain this illusive enlightenment that he couldnt quite obtain, that he almost
died. He was fasting and meditating alone in the forest. He eventually realized
that he was so weak from lack of nourishment that he couldnt move. He couldnt
go get any food because he was alone in an isolated area and now he was too
weak to move. He realized that he would most likely die there by starving to
death. He had the thought that this couldnt be what enlightenment was about.

As the legend tells it, a young Indian woman happened upon him and she
actually thought, because of his strange emaciated state, that he was some sort
of forest spirit. She didnt think that he was a human. He didnt look human
enough at that point since he was so thin and starving. She fed him some milk
and sweet rice as if she were making an offering to the spirits. That enlivened
him enough to turn away from the extremes of asceticism. He let go of that way
but he still was pursuing his enlightenment through meditation. Shortly after this
he did have his enlightenment as he was meditating under a boddhi tree. It was
at the end of a 49 day meditation when he achieved this. He was 35 years old at
that time.
He spent the next 45 years traveling around that area of the world. Some
accounts say that he was reunited with his wife and family. This is the area of
northern India and Nepal. He continuously taught what he had learned and
gathered a group of disciples and teachers around him. His teaching was more
about a middle path away from the extremes of both asceticism and wealth.
Im telling you this story because its important to remember that, for Sidhartta,
the wealth and the opulence of his early life had caused him to be separate from
the experience of life which was what most people were having. I can understand
why he wanted to renounce the wealth. It had become a negative in his life. That
great material abundance, that opulence had given him a strange idea of what
life was and it wasnt normal life at all. However, lets not forget that he also
taught to turn away from extreme renunciation and asceticism as well.
I understand why, for him, renouncing all of his princely wealth was a significant
part of his path. I understand why the people who followed him took up this
renunciant idea for themselves but I wonder whether this was truly appropriate
for his followers. How appropriate was it for others to renounce? I can
understand that it was appropriate for Sidhartta to renounce because he had so
much and it was a block to his awareness so he needed to renounce it. I see a
lot of people using the idea of renunciation inappropriately. I see poor people who
try to convince themselves that they are renouncing wealth. I dont think a poor
person in renouncing wealth. I think wealth has renounced them. They arent
giving anything up. They havent been able to achieve it
I see people who talk about letting go of relationships. They dont want to be in
intimate relationships anymore. I wonder if they are really letting go of
relationships or have relationships let go of them. In other words, if you are going

to renounce something and make this into a spiritual technique, then you have to
have had it.
Sidhartta was able to renounce wealth. He was wealthy. You cant renounce
something that you actually dont have. Its not quite the same thing. Its a
confusion in the mind. I think a lot of people have taken on a renunciant path, a
path of some sort of asceticism, but they havent actually had the things that they
are renouncing. I dont think that they get the release, or the transcendence, that
they are hoping to get.
I believe we live in a vastly different time and place than Sidhartta or
Bodhidharma did. There are none of us who havent seen the ravages of old age.
There are none of us who havent seen the ravages of disease. Theres none of
us who havent seen the ravages of insanity. I see those things every day when I
walk down Market Street in San Francisco when I come to work. They are all
over the sidewalk. I dont have to give up the wealth that I do have. By many
peoples standards, certainly by the worlds standards, Im a very wealthy person.
I dont have to give up those things of the world that I have in order to see what
the world is. Renunciation wouldnt have the same meaning, or be the same
idea, for me.
Lets think more about this. Bodhidharma, the monk that brought Buddhism to
China, had the opposite thing going on for him. He already was a renunciant
living in the cave. He had to renounce being a renunciant. That wasnt really
working for him either. That wasnt making him see what the world was. What
was the world that the Buddhist monk saw while living in the cave? I think we
have a myth that they were all alone in those caves. They were not actually alone
in those caves. Buddhist monks lived within a small community and the
community was helping to sustain their lives. They took turns at their long periods
of meditation. They also took turns doing the maintenance work. They took care
of the making of their food, the clothes and those other things that they needed to
have. There was a community going on within the caves for the monks. Most
likely there were dwellings outside of the caves where some of the monk
community lived. Maybe there were gardens where food was grown. It was still a
small community, a very isolated community. It was certainly not a community
that was in touch with the vast majority of the world and the common experiences
of people in the world. It was the life of a community of renunciants. I believe that
Bodhidharma realized that this was a separation as well and that this separation
separating themselves into this isolated separate community that supported

their intense practice of meditation wasnt going to work for him. I believe he
had to renounce being in a renunciant community and get out there back among
the common people in order to connect to his mission in life.
This leads me to believe, as the Great Buddha discovered, that the extremes
frequently dont work either way you go for them. The extreme wealth gives one
a strange experience that doesnt work and the extreme renunciation doesnt
work either. The Buddha found this out when he almost starved to death and
thought this couldnt be what enlightenment was really about. Extreme
renunciation doesnt work either. Theres a middle ground somewhere. I think this
middle ground is perfectly suited for our culture, this day and age, and our
experiences. Seek the middle ground. We dont have to go for the extremes to
find our own enlightenment. We neither have to be renunciant ascetics nor do we
have to live like opulent princes. We do not have to amass tremendous amounts
of wealth to feel at peace. We can be enlightened however we are in the life that
we are living.
I still believe that the task is just as daunting. We all have to cross our personal
Himalayas in order to get there. In some ways, maybe it is more daunting. You
see, there is something that is very attractive about living at the extremes of life.
It can be very dramatic and motivating. If I am going to aspire to the extreme
existence then I have to push myself. That extreme existence, in and of itself,
gives me an energy. Its the drama. If I go to the dramatic then I have all that
dramatic excitement to push me. If we are simply living among the people, living
the common life, the everyday life, then what is there to push us? Then we have
to continually motivate ourselves. We have to continually push ourselves. This
becomes our Himalayas, our abode of snow, that we have to cross. We have to
find out how to continually motivate ourselves if we travel this middle way. We
have to motivate ourselves and not get seduced into being complacent, not doing
our spiritual work and not doing our spiritual teaching.
Remember the calling of Bodhidharma to bring this new spirituality to the
unenlightened, the Chinese in this case they symbolized the unenlightened
from that time. This is the same calling that we are getting all the time through A
Course In Miracles. Become a teacher of God. Teach this new thought. Teach
this new way of living to all who we encounter. Become a living witness for it. We
all have the same calling as Bodhidharma had.

What is my own sense of challenge? I find that I have been in this role of A
Course In Miracles teacher for 20 plus years, I find that I am continually
challenged. I am continually challenged by the psychology of spirituality as it is
generally embraced by middle America, by fundamentalist Christians. The
Community Miracles Center is a unique ministry because it appeals to people
all over the country, even all over the world. We are playing in a very broad
arena. We are playing in the arena of Middle America. As we play in this arena of
Middle America, Rev. Larry and I are here at our local center in San Francisco
which isnt Middle America at all! Some listen to the sermons that we give
because Supporting Members can access them via our web site. We have
people from Middle America listening to the sermons. Weve got Middle America
reading the articles that we write that are based on the services that we give here
in San Francisco. Sometimes these thoughts, and the flamboyant way we
express these thoughts, rattle certain people who may not be aware of how
different our experience is here in the widely recognized liberal capital of the
world, than from where they live. Im not just talking liberal politics either.
Sometimes, I think this is a huge and challenging abode of snow that Rev. Larry
and I have to cross. This comes up all the time with criticism and lack of
acceptance that we get from people who are more fundamentally, and
traditionally schooled. There are many ACIM students that have come to this
from a more traditional Christian or even Fundamentalist Christian background.
These people relate to Jesus and to his writing of this new revelation very
differently than Rev. Larry and I are used to relating to it, or than we generally
speak about it.
Ive also found that because of our ministry having a large outreach through the
internet, email, our web site its a particularly daunting task to keep up with the
technology that it takes in order to do that. Its never ending. Ive been challenged
with it a lot over the past few weeks, actually the past few months, because we
are updating our web site. The web has greatly evolved since we launched our
web site eleven years ago. Its not the same internet anymore. They call it Web
2 in some places. This has to do with how web sites are designed, but its not
only a matter of design. Now web sites are run differently. They are created
differently. They are content driven. They have continually evolving content.
I remember when the web was first described to me back in 1995. It was
described as a more elaborate type of Yellow Pages that you would put out for
your business. In other words, you would put out this static stuff and then people

could find out more about you. It was supposed to be like a huge ad. The idea
that your content had to be continually evolving, evolving almost on a daily basis
that wasnt in our first conceptualization of how to be on the web. We designed
things that took awhile to design. The idea of changing it continually you didnt
have time to do that.
However, the internet has evolved. So now we have embraced this new
technology and it has been very challenging. Its been very challenging for me
intellectually just to learn it. I had these creeping thoughts come into my mind. I
used to be able to learn new s--t easier than now. (laughter) Is it because Im
55? (more laughter) Is it my aging brain? You see, I cant wrap my mind around
this new technology. I sit there looking at the computer trying to read the code
and .... Then I read the manual .... I dont get it. Is this the old age thing that
Sidharttas father didnt want him to see? (more laughter) The king didnt want
Siddhartas to see how the mind grows feeble as it gets older. I look at people
who are older than I am and I think, Are they slower mentally than I am? Ive
got all this zoobie going on in my head about it all. I have to work at this all the
time. This is part of my personal challenge, my Himalayas that I have to cross. I
am crossing them right now.
What I also realize, just like Bodhidharma did and just like the Buddha did, the
way that I have been traveling I cant keep traveling in that same direction. You
get to the point where you have a branch in the road and you have to go one way
or the other. A Course In Miracles speaks about this.
When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you
cannot go ahead. You must go either one way or the other. For now if you go
straight ahead, the way you went before you reached the branch, you will go
nowhere. The whole purpose of coming this far was to decide which branch you
will take now. The way you came no longer matters. It can no longer serve.
(Tx.Or.Ed38)
The way we were going isnt going to work anymore. Bodhidharma in the cave
realized this. The way he was going, sitting in the cave meditating there with his
fellow monks, wasnt going to work for him. He had come to a branch in the road.
He had to do something different. The Great Buddha obviously had the same
thing going on. The opulent life of a prince wasnt going to work for him any
more. He had to go some other way. Then he had to realize that the rough road

of being the extreme ascetic wasnt going to work for him either. He had to find a
more middle ground to take.
We continually, in our spiritual path, move along these road ways and reach
branches. When we reach these branches we must go one way or another. We
cant continue to go the way that we used to go. However, we can tap into that
divine center that is within us and find the way that is right for us to go. This is the
great blessing that we as spiritual people, we as A Course In Miracles students,
have. We have a continual training that teaches us how to go within and connect
with a larger aspect of mind that gives us the guidance we need when we come
to these branches which we will continually encounter.
Sometimes the task is daunting. Sometimes we have vast mountain ranges of
difficulties to travel through. When we get to the other side of these mountain
ranges we dont know how the new people in this foreign land are going to take
to us ... (laughter) ... because their language and customs are different. Maybe
its ancient China. Maybe its present day Middle America. However, we follow
that guidance and we tap into the truth. We cross our Himalayas. We enter the
undiscovered country and we are at peace because we know we are there
because spirit guided us.
Thats how I think Bodhidharma and A Course In Miracles are linked. Thats my
talk today.

2007, Rev. Tony Ponticello, San Francisco, CA All rights reserved.

Rev. Tony Ponticello

c/o Community Miracles Center
2269 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
(415)621-2556
miracles@earthlink.net
www.miracles-course.org

This article appeared in the November 2007 (Vol. 21 No. 9) issue of Miracles
Monthly. Miracles Monthly is published by Community Miracles Center in San

Francisco, CA. CMC is supported solely by people just like you who: become
CMC Supporting Members, Give Donations and Purchase Books and
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