Everyday Buddhism 105 - Illumination with Rebecca Li

In this episode, I welcome back Rebecca Li to talk about her new book, Illumination: A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No Method. Rebecca and I had a conversation in May of 2021, about her previous book, Allow Joy into Our Hearts: Chan Practice in Uncertain Times.

Rebecca is a meditation and Dharma teacher in the lineage of Chan Master Sheng Yen and founder and guiding teacher of Chan Dharma Community, a Chan Buddhist practice and study community made up of individuals committed to cultivating wisdom and compassion for the benefit of all beings.

Rebecca has two decades of Dharma and meditation teaching experience, leading retreats or teaching at Buddhist centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. She has been featured in several Buddhist publications, including Tricycle, Lion's Roar, and Buddhadharma. 

She is also one of the founding board members of The GenX Buddhist Teachers Sangha where she continues to serve as a board member. Rebecca is a sociology professor and lives with her husband in New Jersey.

In Allow Joy into Our Hearts, Rebecca wrote about Chan Practice and she continues to teach the path of Chan Buddhism in the book we will discuss today, Illumination. In Illumination, she dives deeper into the Chan meditation of Silent Illumination and deeper still into what causes our suffering and how Silent Illumination can help us identify and help decrease the causes of our suffering.

In her book, Rebecca takes us on a fascinating, deep-dive into the method of no method in silent illumination and guides us in the mechanics of this type of practice. In our conversation we talked about, among other things:

• How, in our meditation, we turn thoughts into enemies, rather than allowing thoughts and feelings to be fully experienced and felt …
  
  
• About how tend to try to "achieve" as meditators, as if a sport …
  
  
• And about the modes of operation: craving, aversion, trance, problem-solving, intellectualizing, quietism, and forgetting-emptiness …