Bombadil Rinpoche

Last night our small Sangha investigated the experience of having a belief on the level of the felt sense. Interesting! This is quite a difficult thing to get hold of and I was not sure how it would go. It needed a clear distinction between the belief itself and the experience of holding it. What most of us found was that the felt sense varied with the belief: sometimes pleasant, sometimes affirming, sometimes not. These responses were still very much dependent upon the content of the belief, so a very destructive one derived from childhood obviously felt very painful but one about more happy and wholesome beliefs in the present felt good. I think when we said to ourself, ‘ I believe this …’, emphasis on the ‘I’, then the possibility of feeling the holding of the belief as opposed to what the belief causes me to feel became more apparent.

This distinction was brought out strongly by one observation that reminded us that beliefs are accompanied by a muscular contraction. This is an insight given us by Alexander Technique. This truly does focus on the experience of holding or having a belief and not at all on what that particular belief may be. The person who offered this was at pains to say that in this instance contraction was not seen as a bad thing. It was more like coming to a clear place in ourselves, kind of toned muscles, and she illustrated it with her own body, sitting up straight and coming to her centre. However, while I understood that she was saying that a contraction caused by holding a belief is not necessarily bad, I was also excited because, somewhat in contradiction, this leads directly to a profound Buddhist insight about concepts and language given to us by a first century philosopher called Nagarjuna, the creator of the Middle Way school of thought. Here goes!

The Buddha had already had the insight that while there was lots going on in us you could not find a unchanging person at the centre of it all. In Buddhist speak, this is called the emptiness of the person. Nagarjuna took this deeper - he realised that this was true of everything. The entire manifest universe was also simultaneously connected and changing - everything was empty. Knowing this he then asked how come we experience the exact opposite of this. Why do I feel like I don’t change essentially and that there’s me and everything else around me? His answer to this was, (rather simplified), that the illusion of a separate self was created by words. When we are tiny we learn to speak and when we do we create a world of separate things that appear to independently exist. This is interesting - try finding something that you don’t have a word for. Even things we don’t know or understand still have a description - they are called a ‘mystery’! And try to get a sense of something that is many or all things at once - the mind boggles. Nagarjuna realised this and created ways to really boggle our minds. It was not that seeing things as we do was wrong or could be got rid of. He said these two truths, the relative and the ultimate, were like the wings of a bird, both were necessary. But he wanted to find a means so that the presence of emptiness was also felt. To achieve this, using logic, he drove all beliefs into a corner where they could not be true nor false, nor both true and false, nor neither true nor false. Using this ultra-rigorous four cornered logic creates a mind meltdown and it was this, the experience of inconceivable space where nothing may be said, that I believe he was after.

Two thousand years later Buddhist teachers are still at the same trick. The American Zen master Bernie Glassman, late in his teaching career deliberately trained as a clown with the express purpose of upsetting the hidden fixed beliefs of his students. Putting on his red nose he attempted to disassemble their good Zen practitioner’s sense of self. The ‘self-cherishing I’ with a holy persona had no chance under the assault of the ridiculous. In a way he made himself into the famous Zen koan that, like Nagarjuna, seeks to so deeply bamboozle all ‘I-constructs’, we might say beliefs about me, so that all that is left is the inconceivable spacious awareness of the buddha-nature. The domain of doing nothing meditations. Free fall.

Which takes me back to the man with the Patched Trousers. Out all the pieces I have ever written it is this that has been read the most times. Why is this? What does he wake in ourselves? I’m not sure I know but when I wrote about him it was from a tiny glimpse of letting everything go. No Buddhism, no meditating, no endless path which I seem to have been walking for such a long time. Just being but entirely unselfconsciously. We’re back to an inconceivable spaciousness here. Like a dark night in a storm with no edges. He just seemed so free - which brings me to his name which only now has come to me. Is he not Tom Bombadil who lives in the woods with his Soror Mystica and consort, Goldberry? Unlike everyone else, without doing anything, holding no beliefs or non-beliefs, nothing whatsoever except pottering in his garden, the power of the ring can't touch him. Radical imperturbability. Just awareness.

NW. 14 May 2026

www.beginnermind.co.uk

Wearing Patched Trousers

I’m on retreat this week at Sharpham - teaching on Buddhism and psychotherapy. It’s a wonderful space - tiny bit funky but in a wonderful position looking from high up down the estuary of the Dart, very comfortable and with several lovely co-ordinators who look after us all with great care. For me it is not only an opportunity to hear what comes out of my mouth when I teach my pet subject - always a surprise - but also to deepen my own meditation practice. Along with set periods for meditation t