Sometimes I notice stress sneaking into my life. It starts accumulating under the surface of everything, making me irritable and somewhat sad.
Usually this has to do with anxiety about the future. It’s important to note this anxiety is pretty unspecific and open-ended. It’s not that I’m biting my nails because X might happen. It’s more a general sense of dread about the myriad ways everything in my life could fall apart and how things could become miserable and unworkable.
Feeling anxiety and dread about how things might change for the worse is a common and natural human experience. If you don’t feel these things occasionally, you’re probably in denial or deliberately keeping yourself numbed out.
Most people seem to deal with stress about the future by trying to convince themselves that everything will work out okay. They console themselves and others with reassurances that the worst won’t happen, or that any looming cloud is actually just a nice silver lining in a scary package. But all you have to do is look around to see that sometimes the worst doeshappen, and sometimes life can pretty damn tough.
Zen suggests we deal with our dread about impermanence another way: by facing it and accepting it. That doesn’t mean accepting whatever terrible thing comes our way without trying to make our lives as comfortable and manageable as we reasonably can. It does mean giving up the delusion that we can prevent traumatic changes by wishing they wouldn’t happen.
It’s funny how we fool ourselves into thinking that worrying improves our chance of success. Because we have the capacity to anticipate challenging and painful events we think we need to do so – all day, every day. Not just when we need to make decisions or plans. We maintain a default background of worry, keeping our eye on the moving ball of disaster.
Fortunately, it’s possible to let go of our resistance to impermanence (that is, change, which inevitably will be, at some point, uncomfortable). We can’t do it by simply willing ourselves not to worry. Instead, we stand straight and tall right right where we are. We recognize we have capacities and resources. If they aren’t enough to prevent or deal with some approaching difficulty, there’s not much we can do about that. Nonetheless we can arouse a determination to do the best we can with what we have, come what may. We realize worry only depletes our energy and compromises our life.
We can let go of worry even as we use all of our intelligence to make wise choices. This isn’t about turning off our discriminating mind and cultivating a delusion that all will be well no matter what. All will not be well. That’s one thing we can be sure of.
One of the first, basic Buddhist teachings is that all existence is marked by impermanence, and because of this we find life to be dissatisfying. We can’t hold on to anything. However, another basic Buddhist teaching is that we can overcome this dissatisfaction by letting go of desire – that is, the desire for things to be other than how they are.
The relief we obtain by letting go of worry about change is not based on logic. From the outside it doesn’t even make much sense, and mere intellectual acceptance of the premise doesn’t help. This teaching is experiential. When I let go of worry I feel better. I feel more clear, more able to respond appropriately, even more able to plan wisely. And I can enjoy things as they are, right now, instead of letting them be compromised with anxiety and fear.
Would you be willing to adopt the following Seven Principles and become a Global Citizen?
I dream of a mass movement: People everywhere – regardless of nationality, race, faith, class, political party – committing to these core principles, or something like them. Our future depends on living according to these kinds of values – as individuals, communities, nations, and as a species.
I’ve personally longed for something simple to devote myself to. There are so many causes, so many issues… but I like the following principles because they identify what matters while leaving plenty of room for each of us to find our own way to express them. Can you imagine voters, teachers, employers, politicians, and CEO’s who self-identify as Global Citizens and do their best to live according to these principles?
Do you think there’s anything essential missing from this list? Do you have any constructive suggestions to improve it?
The Seven Principles of a Global Citizen
I revere and value all forms of life; if I engage in actions that kill or harm life, I will do so only with consciousness and care, and will minimize the harm in any way possible.
I recognize it is essential to participate in ecological systems in a sustainable way; I will not engage in or condone actions that threaten the viability of the ecological systems on which we depend.
I recognize that infinite economic growth is not possible on finite planet; I will find ways to support happiness and well-being that do not require it.
I acknowledge that my well-being is interdependent with that of others; I will value and work for the freedom, dignity, prosperity, and happiness of all.
I acknowledge the importance of learning the truth and bearing witness to the suffering of others; I will educate myself about what is happening in the world even when I do not know how to respond to it.
I respect the autonomy and dignity of each and every person; I will advocate for what I believe in and take full advantage of democratic processes, but refrain from vilifying, judging, shaming, or intimidating others.
I want to do whatever I can to bring about a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world; I will work for change and refuse to succumb to despair or pessimism.
I’m probably silly to think this blog post will inspire people to sign on or work with me on this… but whenever I’ve mentioned coming up with some principles based on our Zen precepts, I’ve gotten very positive responses. In Zen we have three “pure” precepts which pretty much cover everything necessary – Cease from harmful action; Do only good; Do good for others. But then we also have ten “grave” precepts which spell out how these pure precepts look in everyday life: Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not misuse sexuality, etc.
I like to think that these Seven Principles of a Global Citizen spell out the values of many people in a way that applies specifically to the challenges we are facing in the world today. Most of these challenges are intimately connected to the ways we conduct ourselves within systems – ecological, social, and economic. It’s worth spelling things out for ourselves – how do our deeply held values and convictions manifest when participate in systems?
Another important aspect of the Zen precepts I have tried to incorporate here: the Principles clearly identify the underlying value and intention, but are open to interpretation. If they were too specific (“I will be a vegetarian, I will divest from fossil fuels”) they would not only be potentially divisive, they would violate the principle of respecting people’s autonomy. It may seem counter-intuitive, but a lasting, effective movement refrain from alienating people by enforcing a version of political correctness.
If you think I’m on to something here, please share! (Dreaming big: we could start a website where people could sign on to the Principles; we could travel the country and allow people to adopt these principles in simple ceremony; we could…)
If religion’s purpose is to help people find peace and strength and to live good lives, which I believe it is, it makes sense that people would turn to religion to explain why terrible things happen in the world – particularly terrible things that happen to individuals that apparently didn’t do anything to deserve it.
I think the most profound and true religions – or the most profound and true forms of the various religions – refrain from any definitive explanation of “why.”
Our longing to know “why” is perfectly natural and reasonable. We would like to understand the “why” so we can try to prevent terrible things happening to people, including us and our loved ones, in the future. We would like to understand the “why” so we know our own culpability in the matter (ideally we find we are free of any responsibility for a given event, but at a deep level we appreciate this is rarely, if ever, true).
Religions throughout time have offered up all kinds of answers for why terrible things happen: the whims of capricious gods that must be cajoled and pleased; the position of the stars; the will of ghosts or spirits; the people affected or involved deserved their fate because of bad things they did in a past life; the people affected or involved deserved their fate because they were displeasing to God in their current life. Whatever the answer, a religion is also obligated to provide corresponding recommendations for how to avoid similar calamity via ritual, offerings, beliefs, codes of behavior, or adepts who can intercede with gods or spirits on our behalf.
Thus, with the help of religion, out of the sadness, confusion and fear associated with terrible events and situations there can arise certainty and a plan of action. But at what cost? It’s one tiny step from explanation to blame. If you are the one who is suffering right now, what good does my explanation for that suffering do you, unless you agree it is correct and get with my religion’s program? Far more likely that you do not do either of these, and the comfort my religion provides me only serves to alienate us from each other.
What if a religion offers no explanation, but instead offers this: “In this world there is great suffering as well as great joy. It can be very difficult to find peace and strength and to live a good life in such a world, but here are some ways to do it…”
With support, then, the religious practitioner is asked to develop the spiritual maturity to tolerate ambiguity and a lack of control over the fortunes of life. Without trying to come up with explanations just to comfort herself, this kind of religious person can bear true witness to the sadness, confusion and fear that come along with terrible things. Out of this bearing witness there can arise insight into what might best be done to minimize suffering now and in the future. The easy, simple refuge of an explanation is foregone for a resilient ability to find a more poignant kind of peace without reliance on explanations.
I respect the nod to mystery that is given when religions answer the big “Why” with, “It’s part of God’s plan. We cannot possible comprehend God, so we cannot always understand his plan.” This invites us to let go of explanation. However, religions generally add, “Still, even if you can’t understand it, you can rest assured that God has a plan, and that it is a good and beneficial plan.” Oops, one step too far. Nice to think that everything is going to work out well in the end, but what kind of good plan involves the slaughter of innocent children? At some point the explanations religions offer become too ridiculous for people to accept – and then those explanations cease to provide the peace, strength and context they were intended to.
I hope religions as well as individuals will continue to grow and evolve. I hope we will all work to stay with the discomfort a little longer each time and postpone as long as possible explanations that might bring some relief but will shut down our dialogue with the world. I hope religions will begin to refrain from offering explanations when there aren’t any, but instead offer support to people to find peace, strength and direction in the midst of the wonderful, terrible, ambiguous world in which we find ourselves.
At my Zen Center last Sunday we read and discussed a beautiful teaching from Kyogen Carlson, one of my Zen teachers. It was from the chapter “Dharma Realm” in a little booklet Kyogen wrote called Zen Roots. I called this excerpt “Kyogen Carlson on the Cosmic Buddha.” We lost Kyogen suddenly last September to a heart attack, and rediscovering this teaching from him made me miss him terribly.
It isn’t so much that I miss him personally, in the sense of regular interactions, although he was generally a fun and interesting person to be around. Since I completed my junior priest training I had not seen Kyogen that often, so I can’t claim to be one of the many people directly impacted by his absence on a daily basis.
What I felt profoundly this last weekend was a longing for his Dharma. This “Dharma” includes his teaching, or his unique way of understanding and expressing Buddhism, Zen, and practice. However, that’s only part of it, because I had that aspect of his Dharma when I was holding his written teaching in my hands. The part that was missing was his living testimonial to the truth and reality of those teachings. His posture, his eyes, his physical expression that grounded the teaching in front of you in a provocative, encouraging, and indisputable way.
Anyone can write or speak teachings that sound pretty good. They may resonate with us, challenge us, or inspire us. But just because they sound good doesn’t mean they are true or effective, and just because we like them doesn’t mean we understand them. And then sometimes we don’t like teachings and we want to avoid them.
Then we encounter a true teacher like Kyogen – someone who verified for himself, through direct experience, what he taught. And someone who had achieved the spiritual maturity to abide peacefully in his understanding without needing to convince or convert others in an effort to feel more secure. Such a teacher gives you the opportunity to experience a full, embodied encounter with That-Which-You-Do-Not-Yet-Know.
“Kyogen Carlson on the Cosmic Buddha” is his take on the Zen encounter with what Huston Smith calls “The More,” and what Kyogen’s teacher Roshi Kennett called the “Lord of the House.” Vaguely theistic imagery is often troubling to Zen students, and when I first encountered it in Zen I was definitively ambivalent. On the one hand I was intrigued by the idea of having some kind of transcendent experience, but on the other I was worried that this “woo-woo” stuff was a sign Zen was going to prove itself to be based on B.S. in the long run.
I went to Kyogen with my ambivalence, hoping he would tell me to ignore all of the references to the “Lord of the House” and the “Cosmic Buddha” in Roshi Kennett’s writings because they were irrelevant to Zen practice. He didn’t. He compassionately tried to explain the presence of devotion and theistic imagery in Zen (as he does so well in his essay), but he didn’t back down. There he sat, a thoughtful but slightly wry expression on his face, a concrete testimony to a reality I had not yet experienced.
There is much more I don’t understand, and much more Kyogen could have taught me just by living his truth.
Yesterday I attended a rally in downtown Portland against fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. I went by myself and incognito (that is, no one could tell I was a Buddhist, let alone a Zen priest). That was fine, but I did find myself wishing a had bunch of Buddhist buddies with me, and that we could march together behind a banner saying “Buddhists for Climate Justice” or something like that. The rally was organized by the Oregon AFL-CIO, so the trade unions were there in that public kind of way – many of them in uniform, complete with safety vests and hard hats.
I also realized that, dammit, if I wanted to be able to march publicly as a Buddhist, I was going to have to get some Buddhists together and engage in dialogue about what we should march for, when, and how. We might even need to engage in some kind of democratic process.
The idea of making such an effort, frankly, makes me want to pull my hair out. I picture endless, complicated doodle polls trying to find a time for all interested parties to meet. I imagine drawn out, repetitive discussions that call into question the basic premises of the discussion itself. I picture tabling any action for months, waiting for consensus on things people have little time to think about.
You can probably guess from this I’m an impatient person. I always tended to charge off in some direction and then work with whoever comes with me. However, I am now ready to acknowledge the power that results from the result of a democratic process. And although I posted information about yesterday’s rally on all of my social media outlets, I saw only one other Buddhist there and she had come on her own.
I worry that even a bunch of relatively like-minded Buddhists will never agree on anything. Take demonstrating against the TPP, for example. I picture members of whatever direct action Buddhist group we formed arguing that they believe what the government has posted about this new trade deal, namely, “President Obama’s trade agenda is dedicated to expanding economic opportunity for American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses. That’s why we are negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 21st century trade agreement that will boost U.S. economic growth, support American jobs, and grow Made-in-America exports to some of the most dynamic and fastest growing countries in the world.” (From the Office of the United States Trade Representative website.)
I would feel quite unqualified to argue the minutiae of trade deals with anyone, but I find it pretty convincing when the AFL-CIO comments on the TPP, saying, “The AFL-CIO has provided the administration with ideas about how to improve the U.S. trade positions so they work for the 99%, not just the 1%. Unfortunately, it is an uphill battle; the global corporate agenda has infused trade policy with its demands for deregulation, privatization, tax breaks and other financial advantages for Big Business while shrinking the social safety net in the name of ‘labor flexibility.’”
I find the AFL-CIO perspective convincing not because I’ve got a PhD in economics (I don’t). I find this convincing because I can’t find anything in the store manufactured in America anymore. I find this convincing because one working adult used to be able to support a family, and now middle and working class families struggle even if two adults are working full time. Our past trade deals have not delivered on the promises attached to them.
Parts of the secretly constructed TPP have been made available by Wikileaks, and from what has been seen so far, the agreement appears similar to past trade deals in that it primarily serves the interests of multinational corporations while only giving lip-service to worker protections and the environment. The Northwest Labor Press talked to Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon): “These things can change at any time,” DeFazio told the Labor Press by phone, “but the last time I checked, the environmental provisions were meaningless and the labor provisions were non-binding, yet the ‘investor-state’ provisions were stronger than ever: Corporations can sue the United States of America for a loss of anticipated profits – to undermine environmental, labor or consumer protection laws.”
Many people are realizing that free trade deals pose one of the biggest threats to mitigating climate change. In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein reports on an interview with Steven Shrybman, an international trade and public interest lawyer, who said, “‘If the trade rules don’t permit all kinds of important measures to deal with climate change— and they don’t— then the trade rules obviously have to be rewritten. Because there is no way in the world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade rules as they are. There’s no way at all.’”
Adding insult to injury, Congress is considering “Fast Tracking” the TPP. This would require Congress to hold a yes-or-no vote on the deal within 90 days of the time the president submits it, with limited debate and no amendments. You’ve got to wonder why that’s necessary.
Could I get a bunch of Buddhists to agree to protest against the TPP, or at least against fast tracking it? Or to allow the group they belong to publicly protest it, even if they aren’t personally involved? I wonder. Is it worth the effort? I like to think so. We’ll see.
Yesterday I was walking my dogs in the sunshine. When I turned my mind to climate change I felt… well… remarkably untroubled. The temperature was perfect, about 65 degrees. There was a slight breeze that made the daffodils and camellias wave gently back and forth. All was right with the world, at least here. Runaway global warming, massive storms, droughts, widespread extinctions, political unrest, and the other ills that climate change is likely to bring? Well, there’s always something. We’ll deal with it somehow.
Aren’t we funny creatures? At the exact same time that I am convinced we must make massive changes in the world – now – to prevent widespread suffering, destruction, and death, I experience moments of, “Eh, whatever. Have you noticed the jasmine is blooming?”
Never mind the fact that it’s MARCH in Portland, Oregon, and it’s supposed to be 45 degrees and raining more or less constantly. Never mind the fact that when I moved to Portland 23 years ago you didn’t see the sun between October and June, except for what I liked to call the occasional “sucker hole.” It’s just kind of hard to be upset about the weather when it’s so pleasant. (Apologies to the people elsewhere on the continent suffering severe water shortages or ridiculous amounts of snow.)
Maybe we can’t really trust our sense of urgency to let us know whether something is actually urgent. I’ve certainly been overwhelmed with a sense of imperative about things that later proved to be pretty unimportant except for the projections of my own delusions. And then there are problems in the world that our friends or neighbors believe should merit our full attention and response – but we just listen politely to our friend’s concerns while hoping they will change the subject soon, and then get back to planning a barbecue.
Lately I’ve personally been very consumed by the process of selling our condo, buying a house closer to the zen center I lead, and finding ways to make part of my living as a writer. There are all kinds of exciting and stressful projects to contemplate: Refinishing floors, packing, locking loan rates, emails, blog posts, rss feeds, guest teachers at the zen center… not to mention walking dogs and getting rid of an ant infestation.
Oh yeah – and all of this activity is carried out with the background assumption that everything will stay more or less the same for at least the next 30 years that we’ll be paying our new mortgage. Many experts on climate change are suggesting this is an increasingly risky assumption to make…
Zen Master Dogen warned us that even if you attain great spiritual development, if you miss the fundamental matter, “You are playing in the entranceway, but you are still short of the vital path of emancipation.” And yet he also wrote, “Going forward is, after all, an everyday affair.” When I read that line I always think about things like sweeping floors, enjoying a good meal, and having heated discussions about the Dharma.
We just keep living, trying to avoid the extremes of complacency and panic as we go.
There are two kinds of expectations. One is a belief that something is likely to happen. The other is belief that something should happen: Someone should be able to achieve something or act in a particular way, or circumstances should unfold in a particular way. This second kind of expectation is what we’re referring to when we say we have high expectations for someone, or for the world. It’s usually meant to be a compliment.
For example, I cherish an expectation that people will be responsible for their crap and reasonably considerate of others.
The thing is, high expectations for people or for “the world” cause us great distress. (By “the world” I just mean the various circumstances unfolding around us, from the personal to the global scale). When our expectations are disappointed – which they inevitably will be – we suffer.
To continue with my example, the other day I was cleaning out my basement storage unit in preparation for moving. I live in a apartment-style condo building, and some of my neighbors had taken advantage of the fact that my storage area was empty and unlocked. It was filled with various kinds of debris – old chunks of plaster, huge empty cardboard boxes, a big bag of trash, you get the picture. Had it it just not occurred to people that someone else would have to clean up their mess? Or were they perfectly aware of it, leaving behind their debris while feeling vaguely triumphant? In either case, the situation was clearly opposed to my expectation that people will be responsible for their crap and reasonably considerate of others.
As I carried other people’s stuff out to the garbage and recycling, I was pissed off. I stomped and slammed things. The recycle bins resisted accepting the huge cardboard boxes even after I had broken them down, and in the process of shoving things into the bin the lid fell down on my arm and left a bruise. I cursed.
The funny thing was, earlier in the day I had been writing the first version of this blog post, all about how wise it is to have no (versus low – more on that later) expectations for the world. I wrote about how joyful and liberating it can be to approach life without preconceptions and expectations. I was thinking about how it helps to drop any and all expectations about the The World – that is, the Big World of politics, economics, injustice, global warming, that kind of thing.
Of course, the same joy and liberation was possible in the midst of my fury over having to deal with other people’s trash, if only I dropped my expectation about how people should be. But dammit – people should be responsible for their crap and reasonably considerate of others! It’s just a fact.
From the Zen point of view, my distress was completely unnecessary. I was causing my own suffering by resisting reality-just-as-it-is. Was it really causing me suffering to spend 30 minutes cleaning up after unmindful or inconsiderate people? All it involved was carrying stuff about 300 yards, outside to the trash cans. The actual work and time was no big deal at all. What made it painful and infuriating was my own resistance to the situation.
Is is possible, with practice, to simply drop your expectations (or any other kinds of concepts or thoughts, for that matter). It can take a while to learn how, but through mindfulness and meditation you can discover the way you hold on to certain mental phenomena, sustaining and protecting them. A choice can open up when you realize one of your ideas or expectations is causing suffering; you can let it go. You usually pick it back up again, out of habit, but then you keep letting go.
The biggest challenge to letting go of our expectations is usually not finding out how, but working on our willingness to do it. Frankly, it seems pretty crazy. In my storage unit example, I unconsciously assumed that letting go of my expectation about people being considerate would be equivalent to letting them be inconsiderate and walk all over me. At some level I was convinced that my expectation was keeping the world at bay. It didn’t necessarily give me the results I want, but it functioned like a levee to keep a flood of selfishness and irresponsibility from sweeping through my world.
The sad thing is, we stress ourselves out because we think our minds are keeping the world under control, but they’re not. This is the essence of Zen teaching. We superimpose a conceptual layer over everything and mistake it for reality. But reality doesn’t need our mind, except as a dance partner. Without our conceptual overlay, we meet reality directly and our best, most sincere, most skillful response arises. We think it’s necessary to decide something is good, or bad, or irrelevant and then deal with it. But it’s not. In a this-moment dance with reality we’ll know what to do. Maybe we’ll take a stand and point out an injustice with a loud, strong voice. Maybe we’ll shrug. Maybe we’ll laugh.
Oh – but it can be so hard! I don’t want to drop my expectation that out of compassion and respect, people will refrain from killing, oppressing, and raping one another. I don’t want to drop my expectation that people will wake up to their interdependence with all living things and stop decimating our planet.
But when I do manage to let go of these expectations? The perceived responsibility for holding the evil in the world at bay with my mind drops away. I stop interpreting every event in terms of how it fits with my expectations. Any manifestation of kindness, wisdom, and progress become amazing phenomena I have no right to expect, rather than pathetic drops in the bucket compared to my ideals. The World in its ambiguous majesty reveals itself before my eyes.
I hope human beings will get it together before we make our planet uninhabitable for most of the beautiful species living on it. It doesn’t hurt to want something, or even to long for it or work tirelessly for it. Hope depends on our heart, not on our mind. We don’t know if our hopes will be fulfilled.
Which brings me to the incredibly important difference between no expectations and low expectations. Low expectations are still expectations. They still come between us and reality, and they also make us bitter and sad every time we perceive they have been fulfilled yet again. It’s the people with low expectations for the world who pronounce, in dead tones, statements like, “Oh well, there have been extinctions before. Human beings are just on a path of self-destruction.” These kind of statements can make it sound like people with low expectations are liberated from the worries the rest of us have, but underneath such comments is either great suffering or great denial.
Now, what would it have looked and felt like if I had dropped my expectation about people being thoughtful and considerate as I was cleaning out my storage unit? Of course, sometimes people are oblivious, irresponsible, lazy, selfish, and disrespectful. I think a direct dance with reality would have started with acknowledging and accepting that. Then, I guess, I would have sighed and tried go about my work somewhat cheerfully, thinking of it as service to the immature people of the world.
Written as part of a Patheos symposium in response to the following prompt: “We all know the media mantra, ‘What bleeds, leads.’ Bad news sells, and there’s nothing like a juicy religious scandal to drive traffic. Yet, for every sordid religious story, there are any number of quiet stories of charity, compassion, self-sacrifice, and service. In our obsession with bad news, are we missing of the GOOD of religion? How is your tradition contributing to the flourishing of the world? How has your faith, in big and small ways, theoretical and very concrete, served humanity and the world for good?”
When I contemplate the GOOD of my religion, I immediately start to think about some kind of grand scale. Like, what good does Zen Buddhism do the United States? What good is my religion to the people who don’t practice it? What kind of positive impact does it have on poverty, injustice, and climate change?
When I think like this I get confused pretty fast, because I really don’t know. I’d like to think my religion contributes something positive to the global system in some way, but it would be awfully difficult to demonstrate.
But then I take a couple deep breaths and ask myself, “What good is religion?” I become aware of the energy center in my lower abdomen. And then I feel very clear.
The good of religion is that it keeps many of us from going crazy. Crazy with despair, depression, isolation, anxiety, a crushing sense of meaninglessness, or some combination of all of these. Crazy enough make us take desperate actions, sink into addiction, numb out with distractions, succumb to greed, devalue life, or at the very least walk through life on an aimless path while feeling only half alive.
This kind of craziness is not just a problem for people who have experienced unusual trauma or who suffer from diagnosable mental illness. It’s a problem for all of us because being human is really hard. The world can be a tough, scary, ambiguous and confusing place. We’re smart enough to see what’s coming, and to understand what’s happening on the other side of the planet. We’re also smart to enough to imagine how things could be better, and we’re well aware of how reality doesn’t measure up.
Zen Buddhism saved my life. I don’t know if I actually would ever have killed myself. Probably not. But even in young adulthood I was filled with despair and a sense of meaninglessness. Every day felt like a burden punctuated with little moments of pleasantness. I couldn’t make sense of anything for myself. When I encountered Zen – meditation, mindfulness, Zen teachings, a Zen teacher, and community – my suffering was given context. It didn’t go away, but it was ennobled. I had a path, direction, guidance for how to live, inspiration, and social support.
Zen is my worldview. Everything I experience or do takes place within this overarching, stabilizing, ennobling, sanity-making context. I imagine the same is true for sincere devotees of all authentic religions.
What good does this do the rest of the world? Well, frankly, you all benefit a great deal from the fact that I’m not crazy. We all benefit when someone is relatively stable and happy, and has a sense of dignity, meaning, connection, purpose, and support. As opposed to when someone is desperate, angry, isolated, afraid, or numb. It’s not rocket science. Those who are desperate, angry, isolated, afraid, or numb tend to hurt themselves or others. Sometimes they want context for their lives so badly they find it organizations that breed hatred and violence instead of finding that context in religion. True, sometimes the line between these two types of groups gets blurry – but that only highlights the importance of stable, time-tested, respectable religions with strong moral foundations.
At the Zen temple where I was trained it was considered very important to provide a spiritual education to children and young adults. We went about this activity passionately, and have one of the largest Zen children’s programs in the U.S. We measured the success of the program not in the number of Buddhists we churned out (which, honestly, was not that many) but in the number of young adults who graduated from our program with an appreciation for the potential value of religion in their lives. Any religion. If one of our graduates decided to embrace Wicca or Judaism or Christianity we would celebrate because we knew they had found the refuge and support elsewhere that we had found in Zen.
Not everyone needs religion, but many of us do. Our religion offers us a tradition – in many cases the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of sincere practitioners or believers. It offers us structure and context for our lives. It gives a sense of deeper meaning and purpose. It challenges us to become wiser, more compassionate, and more generous. It connects us to community.
Religion is simply the most powerful, organic, stable and persistent social security system in the world.
As I write these words, my auntie, who has lived with us for the past twenty-three years is in the next room, dying. The hospice nurse believes we have a couple of hours. I was looking at various things, and noticed I’d written a reflection on Holy Saturday a couple of years ago. Felt appropriate to reprint it today, another Holy Saturday…
Today is Holy Saturday, perhaps the strangest and with that among the more compelling days of the Christian calendar.
Jesus is dead. With that in the Christian story, God is dead.
Resurrection has not yet happened.
So many questions follow. Questions of heart. Of feeling. Of mortality.
Who are we really? Who am I really? And with that, so closely connected to that, what about death?
What about death?
Now that’s a question.
Zen likes questions. Particularly questions like this. In fact if a question can directly point toward the great matter, the deepest truth of our reality, of our precious emergence as individuals as well as how we are woven out of our encounters in a vast dance of intimacy – or, how all this, each and every thing as well as the web itself has no substance, no essential qualities, is simply brilliantly, stunningly, empty, boundless – well, then in Zen it is put to work.
We call these questions koan – literally, public case, as in a legal document. A koan is an assertion about reality and an invitation to an intimate encounter.
There are an endless number of koan.
In Japanese Zen, in both the Rinzai and the Harada Yasutani koan curricula, once one has broken open into the great matter through a minute investigation into the question of life and death aided by the pursuit of one of the “dharmakaya,” “breakthrough,” or “first” koan, pick your term, there is a short course called “Miscellaneous Koan.”
In my school, a branch of the Harada Yasutani, these were once called “Miscellaneous Koans Following Kensho,” but that usage has fallen away. That word kensho, which is generally understood as enlightenment was seen by many of our teachers to be a bit over the top, or redundant, or, probably, a little of both. But however we call ‘em, I love these miscellaneous koan. Unlike some of the cases we encounter later, they are very brief. “Save a Ghost,” “Count the Stars in Heaven,” for instance, are both the title and the whole case. Not only do they introduce us to the range of what we will encounter as we go forward in the discipline, here we learn the tropes and style of the koan way.
It is a rich time, with powerful and multifaceted pointers.
Among these, one of my favorite is called the “Stone Crypt.” It does have a bit more to it than the title, although not all that much more.
“You find yourself in a stone crypt. There is no window and the door is locked from the outside. How are you free?”
A good question, I find.
And, particularly, on this day. God is dead. You are dead.
Dead.
Dead.
How are you free?
Now, that’s something for the human heart to break on.
I find myself thinking of my family members who are now dead. My father. My mother. My son. My first wife.
Dead.
I feel the aches and pains as I straddle the middle of my sixties. And think how
I need to exercise more. I need to lose some weight.
Which, as important as that is for quality of life and maybe pushing out the parameters of the end of my life a bit, does not prevent death, my death.
I was given a button the other day. It reads “Spoiler alert: Everybody dies.”
Those who promise you will not die, well, they lie. Probably to themselves, but very much to you.
Indeed, if the Christian story is nothing more, as some tell me, than a promise I will not die, they’re lying. It is a vain denial. The universe bares witness to
this lie. It just isn’t the way things are.
But, if the Eastertide story is a doorway into another way of seeing, one that puts death in its proper perspective, then Holy Saturday in fact a pointer toward something glorious.
“You find yourself in a stone crypt. There is no window and the door is locked from the outside. How are you free?”
Knowing this precious moment contains all that was – and, all that will be – how, lying in that crypt how are you free?
5 April 2015
First Unitarian Church
Providence, Rhode Island
Today is Easter. The most holy of Christian holidays.
The Gospel of Mark is generally considered the oldest of the canonical gospels, the time-hallowed stories of Jesus and his ministry. The sixteenth chapter of Mark tells the story of Easter in its most unelaborated version.
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you. And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.
That’s it. Now, people don’t like to let things hang quite like they do in this story, and so, somewhere along the line ten more verses are added on. They are largely what would be called “theological,” that is they line out what this story is supposed to mean. As a bit of an aside I find it interesting it’s at these added in parts we get things like handling serpents and drinking poison.
Me, I’m very taken with the actual unvarnished version. It looks a lot like something happened to the women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James in Mark, but therefore also of Jesus for those who aren’t concerned that he would have siblings, and Salome. Something big happens. The tomb is empty. That could be explained easily enough. But, then who is the man in the white robe? And what does that line “he is risen” supposed to mean? What does it mean that he would be seen in Galilee? And, most of all there’s that hanging ending. What about that trembling, and their silence, their amazement, and their fear? Talk about an invitation into the world of not knowing.
The Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer tells of attending an interfaith conference hosted at Gethsemane Abbey a Roman Catholic monastery in Kentucky, perhaps most famous as the writer, social justice activist, and mystic, Thomas Merton’s monastery. Norman, a Buddhist who was raised Jewish, was surprised at the number and actually at the graphic quality of the crucifixes he saw everywhere in the monastery.
He wrote, “It seemed so sad to me. So I stood up in the conference and just asked everyone, “what are you thinking when you see these sad images.” Many Christian monks spoke passionately to this point. Most of them said that they did see suffering in the crucifixes, but they also saw love, and they saw redemption, they saw freedom, and they saw joy. The cross wasn’t just sad; it was much more than that, also.”
Then Norman concluded in his reflection, “This, I suppose, is the theme of Easter.” For me add in that empty tomb, that man making a strange assertion, and the women leaving trembling, and filled with amazement and fear, and I think Norman is pointing right. The whole pageant of Christianity plays out from this event. Now, as a Buddhist (of the liberal sort, by which I mean not inclined to the supernatural and finding reason a great light of human life) I also find in the Easter accounts, particularly Mark’s a hint of something deep and true. Some great collection of the terribly sad, and something else, its that amazement as some profound not-knowing in the face of the mystery of our lives.
Jan and I moved my mother and her sister, my auntie in with us some twenty-three years ago. My mother died five years later. Auntie died yesterday. She is very much on my mind today. Her image or something about her arises with almost everything I think or do right now. And, she was a believer. She believed in Easter, not as a metaphor for something psychological, as profound as I find that can be, but as the simple factual truth. As she lay dying these past weeks, she knew she was in some very real sense going home, going to a risen Jesus who would embrace her with physical arms. And this marks what I’m saying today. It gives my rationalist, naturalistic heart caution, and it points beyond, to things I do believe are true, deepest true.
I believe that our human condition is characterized by hurt. Now, I don’t find a lot of help in the damaged goods view of that hurt, as we get in the idea of original sin, except in so far as we have eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and with that dualistic mind have very much cast ourselves into a world filled with pain and desire, loss and longing. But, I also see that our human condition is at the same time always open to something else, to a great healing. In Buddhism it’s called enlightenment, or, and I prefer the word, awakening. And, I believe I also see that sense of awakening in the Easter story. In fact I believe Easter is the Christian story of awakening.
And, and this is important. Awakening is something more than a psychological perspective, although it’s that, too. It points to a reality somewhere between the firing of synapses in our brains and the literal bricks of gold, many mansions my auntie so really believed in. Or, maybe a better way to say it, we’re looking to a reality that is neither the sum reduction of our material reality, nor a place somewhere else. Let me introduce another story that might illuminate what this could be. It’s a famous Zen koan collected in the early Twelfth century anthology, the Blue Cliff Record. It’s the sixth story in the collection and it’s all about awakening.
It’s really short.
Yunmen asked his assembly, “I don’t ask you about before the 15th of the month. Tell me something about after the 15th.” No one spoke, so he responded himself, “Every day is a good day.”
This isn’t a complete non sequitur. The 15th is the time of the full moon, and is a common metaphor in East Asia for the moment of awakening. Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to note that Yunmen lived in harsh, politically unstable times, where armies were on the march and famine and hunger and danger the common currency of the day, So it would be very hard to find the phrase “every day is a good day” as meaning “don’t worry, be happy.”
In some schools of the Zen tradition people who’ve been acknowledged as teachers, after a ceremony that takes place in private at midnight, the next day they’re often expected to give a talk on this koan. Also, just a little on that word koan. Koan has entered popular use within our English language meaning a thorny problem, or, for those a little more familiar with it as a spiritual thing, often as a question that has no answer. Neither is what koan really means, at least within the context of its use as part of a spiritual discipline. In that primary sense a koan is a statement about reality, and an invitation into presence. A koan is a pointer to the real, the deepest real, and with that an invitation to come and stand in that place.
And this is most important. It is within presence we find our awakening, our waking up from the slumber of a life that has been distracted from the most important matters. We slumber with our apparently endless desires. We slumber with our anger and hatred. We slumber as we figure something out as true and defend, fiercely that idea of true, sometimes even to the death. Sometimes our own, too often someone else’s.
Waking up is waking up from all this grasping at wanting and resenting and hating, and knowing for sure, into something else. And, and this is most important: this waking up is also our common human experience. It comes to us as Christians. It comes to us as Jews. It comes to us as Muslims, and as Hindus, and as Buddhists. It comes to us without any religion at all.
Did my auntie find this place? I don’t know. She seemed a bit too sure of the literal reality. But, then, it’s always seeing through a glass, darkly. This why a psychological definition isn’t quite right, either. We’re speaking of the great universal, the one, the open, the boundless. And we only ever come to this through the particular, or more specifically as the particular. So knowing the literal, or knowing the psychological, if we hold them with open hands, then we’re moving toward that place.
One can find that place, this place, this moment, this perspective at any time and anywhere. Although some times and places are perhaps more conducive to our noticing. And, so, Easter. The Easter of those women. The Easter of auntie struggling for her last breath. The Easter for Jan and me and those long hours sitting at her bedside. The Easter of our friends coming and helping prepare her body, washing it, and dressing her in her Sunday go to meeting dress, and with a shawl closed with one of her favorite dragon broaches.
Easter as this moment, as this mind, as this heart, filled with all its sadness and all its glory. And with our fully opening ourselves to what is, with that complete disruption of what we thought was the way things are. And with that awakening into something new: mystery piled upon mystery. Wonder, and joy, and, yes, absolutely, fear. And back to that story. The Mary’s and Salome experienced a terrible and wonderful moment; a complete disruption of what they thought was so. Where they, each of them, had an awakening, each in their own way, as themselves and no one else, finding the one awakening.
Everyday is a good day.
Nothing is missing in that day, on this Easter day. We wake up to the whole mess. And we find it really is a blessing.
With Easter we’re being invited into a new place, a moment, a stance that can change how we live in this world. So, it can be about a sweet by and bye. I have no argument. I don’t know. Or, perhaps it’s about a new attitude in the face of life and death. I don’t know.
What I find within that not knowing is something that allows both ideas, but is trapped my neither. Rather I find Easter is a response to the invitation is to not turn away from any part, the hurt, the agonies, the failures, but to open up, and to open up more, until even death is just a part of the mystery.
Find that, and then, the stories tell us, there is a new birth.
Like Spring.
Like Easter.
Like the mind of Easter. Like the heart of Easter.
Eihei DōgenIn a recently-published volume entitled “Dōgen and Sōtō Zen”, there appears essay by T. Griffith Foulk, “Dōgen’s Use of Rujing’s ’Just Sit’ and other Kōans”, given pride-of-place as the first essay in the collection. While Foulk offers some interesting and useful points on the co-evolution of interscholastic polemics in the modern versions of Rinzai (Ch. Lin-chi) and Sōtō (Ch. Ts’ao-tung) Japanese Zen teachings, and brings a sharper focus to the provenance of the term shikan-taza, which was rarely used by the 13th cent. Japanese founder of Sōtō Zen, Eihei Dōgen, one thing is abundantly clear: Foulk does not understand the meaning of “just sitting”as it has been passed on to experienced modern inheritors of that tradition. His dismissal of these inheritors as dupes of venal-minded Edō-, Meiji-, or Taishō-era Sōtō Zen apologists is careless, if not indeed callous.
It can of course be argued that expecting Foulk to have such an understanding is unrealistic. In spite of his stab at establishing “street cred” by pointing out his (unquantified) experience in practice (“Speaking as a practitioner who has trained in both Rinzai and Sōtō monasteries in Japan…”), he does not sound like a practitioner at all; rather, he sounds like an academic with an ax to grind, and none too particular about which way it cuts. Be that as it may, he has limited himself to criticizing an utterly shallow version of “just sitting”, one which supposedly dismisses all other forms of practice and eschews or even denigrates the experience of awakening. I grieve for any practitioner of whatever affinity who has been saddled with such a shibboleth. I never heard such nonsense from my teacher, nor from his own teacher, nor from any of the other teachers with whom I have had a practice connection in the course of my own training in the Sōtō Zen way. If that’s the “party-line” today, it should surely be jettisoned without delay. That said, and while I dispute Foulk’s understanding of what he has assumed to be contemporary Sōtō teaching, based as it apparently is on gleanings from texts old and new cut-and-pasted in such a way as to generate conclusions that are all but self-referential, it is not impossible that Zen practice in Japan, of any variety, is suffering from its age, and that as some have suggested, the future of Zen as a terse, poetic soteriology distilled from the teachings of Sākyamuni Buddha lies in the West. Only time will tell, of course, but meanwhile those Sōtō Zen practitioners who have come deeply to appreciate the path of zazen as “just sitting” may remain in the minority, while others expound a meaning of “no attainment” that is wide of the mark.
The list of what is objectionable is wearisome, but since it’s likely that persons not yet well established in their practice might be tempted, all unawares, mistakenly to bestow oracular powers upon someone bearing the mantle of “scholar”, something must be said. Elsewhere, Rev. Jundo Cohen has raised some of the same objections, the main one being, as suggested above, that Foulk’s target is a “straw man”, an image of Sōtō practice that may exist in the minds of some not actually conversant with “body-mind Way study”, and even in some Japanese-sourced tracts for lay faithful, but has nothing to do with the actual treasures of the lineage. On this point alone, Foulk’s article is seriously at fault.
It should be noted at the outset that Foulk’s approach is almost entirely philological,that is, based on comparative and necessarily selective readings of available textual materials, with nearly all sources drawn from the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō edition of the Chinese tripitika or canonical collection, or from the Japanese edition of Dōgen’s works, Dōgen zenji zenshū. There are other scholars who can and do contest with Foulk on the basis of his readings of ancient East Asian languages, among them Steve Heine, William Bodiford, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Shohaku Okumura, and my Dharma-brother Taigen Leighton. Here, though, I wish to note that philology has been called “…a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics”, and as such is more art than science. Thus, when Foulk presents his version of, for example, excerpts from Sung-dynasty Ch’an collections,he is no less likely to be influenced by his preconceived notions than is anyone else. These preconceived notions figure strongly in what he has written, both here in the volume “Dōgen and Sōtō Zen” and elsewhere.
Some main points in Foulk’s article may be summarized thus:
1. The Japanese term shikan-taza, or “only/nothing but/just sitting” is of relatively modern derivation and rarely used by Dōgen himself. Dōgen’s Chinese master, T’ien-t’ungJu-ching, used the term (Ch. chih-kan ta-tso), but modern interpreters have misunderstood his meaning.
2. The idea that Dōgen scorned the use of Zen stories (J. Kōan Ch. kung-an) in his teaching is a likewise modern distortion, introduced under the influence of Japanese sectarianism.
3. Such supposed mainstays of modern Sōtō Zen teaching as “no gaining idea”, “nothing to attain”, and “just to sit is enough” represent misinterpretations of Dōgen’s teaching and that of the larger-than-life T’ang dynasty Ch’an masters whose legends have come down to us.
First and foremost, while it is striking that a well-established researcher like Foulk could be so mistaken about the practice (note emphasis) of the Buddha Way as to be unable to recognize the heritage of cultivating silent, seated, “themeless” meditation, it is perhaps not surprising. Once differences in vocabulary are taken into account, device-independent seated cultivation is likely to be found wherever traditions of Buddhist meditation have become established, notably including the streams of Tibetan Buddhism variously known as “dzog-chen” and “mahāmudrā”. However, entering the heart of this practice is undoubtedly an initiatory transition. Thus we see immediately that Foulk’s dismissal of “just sitting” as a critical aspect of Dōgen’s teaching must be based on unfamiliarity, causing him to fail to recognize the pulse of this tradition in the surviving works of T’ien-t’ung Hung-chih, Dōgen, and other Ts’ao-tung luminaries.
The putative age of the term shikan-taza is essentially irrelevant except to philologists and antiquaries. As those whose understanding of Sōtō tradition has gone beyond the superficial will attest, the shorthand expression shikan-taza has nothing to do with discouraging any and every other practice aside from sitting on a cushion. It is a convenient label for a practice of seated cultivation in which the body-mind is poised in alert openness, without reaching for or pushing away anything, utilizing the balance of the human form as the natural support of the mind of non-striving (Ch. wu-wei), non-acquisition, and non-grasping. Itis not meant to convey that there is “nothing to attain”, except for the critical sense expressed in the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras, where we find the teaching that for the Bodhisattva there is no attaining, and indeed neither is there any non-attaining. This sense of “just sitting”, reflecting as it does both the Mahāyāna expression of the Bodhisattva ideal and the emphasis on not cultivating grasping states of mind found likewise in early Buddhism, is squarely in harmony with how the Mārga or Path is understood by numberless Buddhist practitioners. If there are votaries of Sōtō Zen in the world today who would deny this, I haven’t met them.
The soteriological justification of “just sitting” depends upon the understanding that each sentient being is at heart awakened. This is no less true for practitioners of “Kōan introspection Zen”, or k’an-hua ch’an. In this sense both of these stylizations of practice are part of the vast fabric of East Asian Buddhism. Only someone quite unfamiliar with Dōgen’s work could be so mistaken as to deny how greatly Dōgen valued the collections of the Zen folk tales now known far-and-wide as kōans (Ch. kung-an). We should here remind ourselves, however, that these stories are by-and-large products of an era much later than they affect to depict. In fact, they inarguably constitute a substantial literary tradition, whereas taking them to be a reliable record of enlightened goings-on requires a leap of faith. Significantly, they emerged in Sung dynasty China in the same era as did the practice of using words or phrases taken from these stories as objects of contemplation whilst seated in zazen (Ch. ts’o-ch’an), or “sitting Zen”. Likewise, the Sung dynasty saw the emergence of “just sitting”, referred to in some quarters as “silent illumination Zen” (Ch. mo-chao ch’an) as another, distinctive way of approaching Ch’an cultivation.
It was apparently at one time a commonplace in East Asian Buddhist studies that the Sung dynasty was a time of actual conflict between two celebrated teachers of each style, T’ien-t’ung Hung-chih, abbot of the monastery where later Dōgen would finally meet his teacher Ju-ching, and the Lin-chi master Ta-hui Tsung-kao. Later studies,however,have revealed no such conflict. Ta-hui indeed had much criticism to offer of what he called “stagnant water Ch’an”, where misinformed, poorly-instructed monks would sit in drooling somnolence and assume that they were nonetheless cultivating the Way. But Hung-chih, a genuine heir to the Ts’ao-tung tradition, did not reject Ta-hui’s criticism, because the latter was describing a quite obvious pitfall, one that finds no parallel in Hung-chih’s beautiful evocations of “silent illumination”, in such works as his “Guidepost of Silent Illumination”[1]. Ta-hui is typically credited with successful marketing of the k’an-hua ch’an approach, with its emphasis on intensive concentration on a “head word” (Ch. hua-t’ou, J. watō), the resultant generation of “great doubt” or an all-consuming posture of investigating reality, and thereafter a hoped-for experience of awakening, kenshō/satori (J.) wu (Ch.) etc. Later commentators appear to have overlooked the fact that Ta-hui and Hung-chih had cordial relations with one another, the spectacle of warring religious factions perhaps proving irresistible fodder for those whose bread-and-butter is scholarly exchange.
It is well for the reader to remember that there is no foolproof, formulaic way of translating ancient Chinese or Japanese into a corresponding modern idiom, particularly where the very idiosyncratic language of Ch’an/Zen is concerned. As do many scholars, Foulk presents his translations as though they were beyond question, but that is hardly the case. For instance, he seizes upon Dōgen’s essay Bendo-wa, “Concerning the Endeavor of the Way”, as cited by those who understand Dōgen’s teaching of just sitting. While some may have mistaken Dōgen’s purpose as rejecting all other Buddhist practice forms than sitting, in my experience today’s practitioners understand him to be teaching that seated cultivation is key, hardly out-of-keeping with what we construe to be Buddha’s own emphasis on dhyāna as the all but indispensable corrective for the “wrong view” (Skt. mithyādrsti) at the heart of sentient beings’ suffering, granting, as we must, that no one today can cite incontrovertible evidence of the practice in which Buddha himself engaged[2]. Further, Foulk assures us that
“…Dōgen definitely did not understand the expression shikantaza as a single noun, (i.e. the name of a particular mode of meditation practice) of the sort that we could accurately translate into English as ’just sitting”’.
Foulk’s reasoning, such as it is, will appeal only to the choir to which he is already preaching, i.e. those who would rather not understand Dōgen as teaching something distinct from the k’an-hua ch’an already well-known in his day. He neglects to explain for us that the expression Dōgen attributes to his teacher Ju-ching, includes the two-character compound ta-za (Ch. ta-tso), which combines the character for “sit” (za)with the character for “hit, strike, make, do” (ta). Soothill’s A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms (p. 188) indicates that the character for “hit” occurs in a number of usages pertinent to Buddhist practice, such as “hit the signal board”. One of them is combined with “sit”, in which case the meaning is “sit cross-legged”; the association with seated meditation is obvious. Significantly, it also occurs in compound with another character “ask,inquire”[3], producing the literal meaning “hit-ask”, or “hit-make inquiries (i.e. of the teacher”). We may easily postulate a specialized “inquire” and a specialized “sit”, each combined with the character for “hit”, whereof a straightforward connotation would be “(really) make inquiries”, or indeed “(really) sit”. Add the modifier shikan (“only,just, nothing but”), and the meaning “only (really) sit” is not far-fetched in the least[4]. Likewise, though, there is nothing here to suggest that Dōgen actually meant, “Don’t do any other practice except sitting”, let alone “awakening doesn’t matter”. As suggested above, that is as misguided an interpretation as is “Dōgen never taught ’silent illumination’ or shikan-taza.”, or “Dōgen taught that awakening should be dispensed with.” All such misrepresentations should be discarded.
It is essential to point out here that Foulk says not a single word about Dōgen’s status as a lineage holder in the Huang-long branch of the Lin-chi school of Ch’an, through his Japanese master Myōzen, a status in which he had been confirmed before ever he and Myōzen went to China. It is patently clear that Dōgen must have been thoroughly familiar with kōan-introspection practice long before he encountered his Chinese master Ju-ching who, as a Sung dynasty Ch’an master in his own right, was likewise familiar with k’an-hua ch’an. Ju-ching’s own “recorded sayings” has him recommending in a general talk the use of “the iron broom of wu (J. mu)” in order to dispell distractions in meditation. It is far from clear that any Ch’an-lineage teacher of the time, particularly as the head of one of the large public monasteries such as T’ieng-t’ung-ssu, whose abbots were governmental appointees, could have avoided being current in the k’an-hua ch’an style popularized by Ta-hui in the 12th century, some hundred years before Dōgen’s trip to China.
This confronts us with a peculiar problem. Anyone who examines what evidence we have of Dōgen’slife and times will see that in spite of his extensive experience of Zen in Japan, he seemed to have felt that something must remain to be discovered. This was the impetus for undertaking the dangerous travel that going to China entailed. If all Dōgen encountered in China was more of the same k’an-hua ch’an that he already knew, and if, as some have suggested, Ju-ching was just another Ch’an teacher in the usual vein, why would Dōgen have remained at T’ien-t’ung-ssu after meeting the abbot, whom he after often referred to as “the old Buddha”? When after some years in China Dōgen was considering returning to Japan even though he didn’t feel his search was complete, why did he bother going to see Ju-ching, a lineage master in the Ts’aotung (J. Sōtō) tradition? And after receiving Dharma transmission as Ju-ching’s heir, why did Dōgen return to Japan and emerge on the scene as a Sōtō Zen lineage holder, with a particular teaching to offer? I believe we need to dismiss the notion that Dōgen was only interested in using his Ts’ao-tung/Sōtō credentials to find a new market niche as too desperately cynical to be trustworthy. I also believe we are left with the overwhelming likelihood that Dōgen did indeed have something different to teach, and that he began to do so immediately upon his return from China in 1227.
It is generally accepted that Dōgen’s masterful essay in Chinese entitled “A Universal Recommendation of the Prinicples of Zazen (seated meditation)” (J. Fukan Zazen Gi) represents the inaugural presentation of his insight into the practice of the Buddha Way following his time in China. If we are to accept Foulk’s view, this work and, by extension, all the rest of Dōgen’s work,has been misrepresented by modern Sōtō apologists as conveying Dōgen’s teaching of “just sitting” or shikan-taza. Those with significant experience of that practice,however, will have no trouble noting the resonance of “just sitting” upon reading such words as these:
Therefore, put aside the intellectual practice of investigating words and chasing phrases, and learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest. [Emphasis mine]
Or these:
The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma-gate of joyful ease, the practice-verification of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the kōan realized. …For you must know that the true Dharma appears of itself, so that from the start, dullness and distraction are struck aside. [Emphases mine]
These two brief, well-known excerpts from Dōgen’s voluminous oeuvre contain important points. Dōgen was clearly aware of the substantial pitfalls awaiting the unwary practitioner of any style of cultivation, including k’an-hua ch’an. It was all too easy for adherents of the latter tradition to become enchanted with the Zen folktale literature, memorizing allegedly first-hand accounts of dialog-and-response exchanges from the “golden age” of Ch’an in the T’ang dynasty and, later, collections of “correct answers” which could be served up in interviews with the instructor, thus tying themselves up in “pursuing words and following after speech”. This is contrasted with the practice of simply sitting, the “Dharma gate of ease and repose”, itself the practice-verification (J. shushō) of culminated awakening. Sitting in this fashion, Dōgen says, is “the kōan realized”, apart from “ answers” derived from contemplating a hua-t’ou or head-word[5].
Dōgen uses the term “practice-verification”, or “practice-realization”, which is also found in some Ch’an folktales, in a way critically important to his teaching. Foulk however cites a mondō (classic Ch’an/Zen dialog) between Ta-chien Hui-neng, the famous Sixth Ancestor, and his disciple Nan-yueh Huai-jang in which the term occurs, without commenting on how central it is in Dōgen’s writing. Here is translator Kazuaki Tanahashi’s version of the mondō:
The ancestor [Hui-neng] said, “Where from?” Nan-yueh said, “From Mt. Sung.” The ancestor said, “What is it that thus comes?” Nan-yueh said, “Speaking about it won’t hit the mark.” The ancestor said, “Does it rest on practice and realization?” Nan-yueh said, “It’s not that there’s no practice and realization, it is just that they cannot be defiled.” Then the ancestor said, “This nondefilement has been guarded by all buddhas. You are like this and I am like this.”
Foulk’s version of Hui-neng’s last reply reads as follows:
There is a practice and verification (shushō) maintained and upheld by the buddhas and ancestors, which is called non-defilement (fuzenna).
Experienced practitioners will recognize immediately that saying that practice-realization (there is actually no “and” in the text) is undefiled is not at all the same as saying there is some practice or other that goes by the name “undefiled”.
Elaborating on this notion of practice-realization/verification in the introduction to his collection of Dōgen’s works, Tanahashi explains:
There is a tendency to view enlightenment as separate from practice and to seek some splendid insight as the goal of Zen practice. Dōgen teaches that this is an illusion. One must fully understand the wholeness of practice and enlightenment. Dōgen describes this understanding as mastery of Buddhism of the “true Dharma eye”. It is freedom from a dualistic frame of mind.
The gifted scholar and translator Thomas Cleary explains this in a note to his translation of the beautiful poem The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samādhi, attributed, not to Dōgen, but to one of the T’ang dynasty founders of the Ts’ao-tung lineage, T’ung-shan Liang-chieh (J. Tōzan Ryokai).
Referring to the lines in the poem which read “Communing with the source and communing with the process, it includes integration and includes the road; Merging is auspicious; do not violate it.”, Cleary says:
[Japanese Zen master] Dōgen emphasized that practice and realization are not two separate things; the source and the process can be called absolute and relative as a device; integration and merging refer to these -this includes the road… merging into the process, having no sense of seeking or acquisition, thus merging into the source. This wasthepoint of theTranscendence ofWisdom scriptures[emphasis
mine].[6]
Here Cleary makes a straightforward link between a T’ang dynasty Ts’ao-tung master and 13th century Sōtō master Dōgen, as progenitor and inheritor of the same tradition, respectively, as well as echoing the parellel I draw above between “no attainment” in Sōtō Zen and the Perfection of Wisdom teachings which were already ancient by Dōgen’s time. Though Foulk is apparently not interested in such connections, a great many other examples such as the above can be adduced, which the reader may pursue ad libitum.
Another point needing examination is Foulk’s apparent contention that “just sitting”, and seemingly everything elseDōgensaid,simply amountstoyet another “kōan”. HereFoulk reveals a clear bias in favor of practice rooted in the literary tradition of Zen folktales. The only way that the discerning reader could understand Foulk’s contention is if we take “kōan” in the sense Dōgen uses it in his luminous and graceful piece, Genjō Kōan, as fine a précis of Buddhist practice in the Zen vein as has ever been written. In this context kōan has been translated “the fundamental point”, the full title then being “Actualizing the Fundamental Point”. Written for a lay supporter of Dōgen’s work, the essay conveys that the whole body-mind, manifesting as the essential matter of birth-and-death, contemplated in the practice of silent sitting that would later come to be identified with the phrase shikan-taza, is in fact the true kōan, the only one that finally has any importance.
Yet Foulk insists that “just sitting” is but another kōan. This becomes even more perplexing when we read the following:
One thing that Dōgen did not do with Kōans, however, was to use them as objects of contemplation in the manner recommended by Dahui [Wade-Giles romanization: Ta-hui]. That Chan master advocated fixing the mind on the “keyword” of an old case, such as the single word “none” (mu) in the famous kōan “Zhaozhou’sDog”.
Well then, what did Dōgen allegedly do with kōans? According to Foulk:
There are no records that show exactly how Dōgen employed Kōans when instructing close disciples who entered his room in the abbot’s quarters for individual consultation, but similar lacunae are the norm when it comes to the discourse records of most Chan and Zen masters of Song dynasty China and Kamakura Japan, including those who belonged to the Linji lineage in the generations following Dahui.
This is the same Ta-hui whom Dōgen sharply criticized on a number of occasions, but Foulk avers that.
Indeed although Dōgen certainly knew Dahui as an eminent ancestor in the Linji branch of the Chan lineage who was worthy of emulation, there is nothing in his writings that suggests he was aware of any special meditation techniques attributed to Dahui.
So if we take Prof. Foulk as our guide, apparently all we really know is that Dōgen, a brilliant, deeply educated child of the Japanese aristocracy whose reading knowledge of Chinese was immense, drew inspiration from the Sung dynasty literature of Zen stories, and used those stories “somehow”inhis teaching, but not in the way championed by Ta-hui, who had died thirty-seven years before Dōgen was born.
For those who are able to see that there is indeed a practice of “silent illumination” or “just sitting” (Ch. chih-kan ta-tso, J. shikan-taza) or zazen or what-have-you, the teaching of which Dōgen encountered in China in the tutelage of his Ts’ao-tung master Ju-ching and for the promulgation of which he returned to Japan, there isn’t much question: Dōgen used the rich and deep inheritance of Zen stories over and over again to illustrate the principles of zazen in which he had been initiated, to his great delight and lasting gratitude, leading to his completing his “life’s study of the great matter”, i.e. the fruition of his experience of zazen as “body-mind away fall” (J. shinjindatsu raku), and“practice-realization one suchness” (J. shushō ichinyo).
While Foulk proclaims himself to “…have demonstrated in this chapter that Dōgen did not teach the practice of ’just sitting’ as that is understood by modern scholarship…”, it is perfectly clear that Dōgen did teach “just sitting” in the way I have outlined and been instructed by my teachers. Why an academic would attempt to marshal arguments to the contrary is mysterious, leaving one to wonder if he was “encouraged” to write his misleading essay by persons unknown who feel they have some stake in this game. The fact that Foulk’s piece has caused some of those persons to charge up and down brandishing Dōgen and Sōtō Zen jihadi-style and proclaiming a new era of revanchiste Sōtō Zen free from such encumbrances as zazen (“just sitting”) and “no gaining idea” suggests what I have long observed, namely, that touching the heart of “just sitting” is no easier than making one’s way through collections of Zen stories, and that cavalierly mixing these two streams in one’s own practice can prevent one from ever actually understanding the meaning of “just sitting”, whether it’s called shikan-taza or not. When one doesn’t understand that meaning, one can always simply assert that there’s no such thing, and that therefore if we’re committed to practicing in the Zen tradition we must apply ourselves exclusively to k’anh ua ch’an. To such misguided persons I would make the following request: Please stop pissing in the well where others have come to drink.
2. Adherents of Theravāda Buddhism understandably regard the scriptural canon recorded in the Middle Indic Pāli language as representing the historical Buddha’s actual words. Unfortunately, no robustly historical or empirical connection exists between Buddha’s era and our own.
3. Apologies for my current system’s inability to print Chinese characters reliably; please see Soothill’s dictionary.
4. I’m well aware that my own surmises, as are everyone’s, are open to being the prey in “games philologists play”, with which I’m distressingly familiar. A favorite one is “Only I know the real meaning of the medieval Japanese version of the Sung dynasty Chinese version of the alleged T’ang dynasty version of this expression!”. These games are literally endless; the reader may play along if s/he wishes.
5. Contemporary Rinzai priest Victor Hori, speaking of modern-day practice in that style, refers to a teacher saying that he wasn’t interested in students presenting “the right answer”. Rather, he was eagerly waiting for the student to evince profound joy. Anyone who asserts that only k’an-hua ch’an gives rise to such joy is either seriously misinformed, or being mendacious.
There once was a Zen teacher, we won’t say Master as that would be inappropriate, who prepared himself everyday for death. This teacher was quite old and everyone had no trouble telling him so. Eventually he believed them.
“I’m old,” he would say, not paying particular attention to who might be around him, but verifying what the whole town knew. So, one day the teacher said, “Enough!” and with that, retired.
As he sat in deep meditation, small sparks would capture his attention. They would quickly spark and just as quickly disappear. The teacher opened his eye, then jumped up shouting, “That’s the answer!” But no one knew what the question was.
A studied life is nearly always filled with insightful flashes with private meanings flashing across our everyday mind. One insight: being a Zen teacher is an exercise in futility; being a priest, not so. One can no more “teach” Zen than one can “teach” bicycle riding. The newbie must just ride, sometimes falling down, yet always getting up and doing it again and again until, “presto,” there she is, flying along with the wind. The teacher has taught nothing.
Being a priest, on the other hand, is not being a teacher, per se, but in the example of his or her being the priest is teaching Zen. How one walks and talks, sits or lays down; how one eats, goes to the bathroom, and attends to relationships; each are teachings in and of themselves, but not intentionally so. This is the best kind of teaching.
Because a truly mindful life can be an unintentional teaching and is just life as it is lived, we students of such a teacher too often fail to appreciate what is right in front of us. I often say I learned more about Zen from studying my reactions to my teacher than anything he ever said. I learned from his woodworking, his tinkering with race cars, his closely held values, as well as his form as a priest leading a service. But most of all I learned from our kitchen table talks.
We fought a lot, mostly about politics (he was such a conservative) and the fact that he had a hard time with my desire to practice what I called “Street Zen.” At the invasion of Iraq my teacher supported President Bush! What sort of priest supports an invasion of another country? Answer: my teacher.
My biases became so evident in our talks that they lived on my sleeve. My job, he insisted, was to process them, deconstruct them, and let them float away…empty artifacts of mind. In this, he pointed out, my resistance was my teacher.
If we are not paying attention to our internal dialogue and if that dialogue takes us away from the moment right before us, we are lost, slipping more deeply than ever into the mud that traps us. Robert Bly, the American poet, said something like, “If you don’t like the mud you are standing in, change it!”
My mud has been like concrete: war, divorce, loss, all resting heavy on my shoulders. At 68 years old I have retired and live in a body punished by time and myriad experiences. It is a challenge at times just to stand up. With each breath some pain or other arises, whether it be physical, emotional, or spiritual. Yet, I stand, but I do not stand alone. There with me are my students and my student’s students. Teachers all. This is how it is in Zen. What I ask of myself now is simple: As I live out my life what is my unintentional teaching? When this question is in front of our eyes we can see our karma in action.
Editor’s note: “This is an address Eihei Peter Levitt wrote to his sangha one morning during his study time.”
Dear Sangha
I was thinking, during my zen study time this AM, about the difference between the gaining way and our way. Ideas of perfection are the gaining way, since there is nothing to perfect and no one to perfect this nothing to perfect.
But, as has become clear in recent discussion, many people continue to ‘use’ our practice to do what cannot be done. We do it in small or large ways. It’s a bit like a child’s prayer whose sole content is “please grant me what I ask.”
I do not say this to diminish the sincerity of the request or approach to practice in any way, but just to highlight it. Such an approach continues the subject-object dualistic approach, not only to the world, but to our own practice and our own life. Maybe not the best way.
When we hold out ideas of perfection, we are emphasizing the delusion that we are not already perfect, just as we are, even though we may not believe it, experience it, or ever know it in any way. I may not know someone in particular in Afghanistan exists, but that does not constrain her existence to a state of nonexistence, and some day, who knows?, we may meet.
Same with buddha me, and buddha you (who are attending Buddha U. every time we sit down for zazen, and then get up.)
When we practice perfection, there is an element of obsession in it. I gotta have gotta have gotta be gotta dance gotta be a buddha gotta meet that girl (guy).
Fun, but no cigar.
When we practice menmitsu nokafu, taking care of what is right there, completely, intimately, with the intimacy of an intimate family member caring for an intimate family member, there is no gaining idea in it. We are simply expressing intimacy. We don’t have to reach for it, or try to do it, we do it. In such moments, intimacy is expressing intimacy. Far beyond the words it just took to say it, it is already true. We know it. What we care for knows it. Intimacy knows it. The world knows it. Knowing knows it. Not-knowing knows it.
There!
Please drop all gaining ideas and since this moment is not occupied, however preoccupied it may be, please do it now. Our gaining ideas are well entrenched in our psyches, but they will not help us to enjoy one featherweight breath, much less know what to do with a life, or how to help when that opportunity is before us.
Please consider, and thank you for your sincere practice.
gassho
Two Poems by Peter Levitt
New Year
The Circle
Sometimes seeing what is not there,
other times not seeing what is,
our legs become tangled,
our hands can’t stop wringing
against themselves. Still,
we live mid-stagger
with pure hearts,
let no one’s ignorance
fool you. People do not
become buddhas. Buddhas
do not become human life.
Unborn and undying
like a torn leaf
in an autumn shower,
when was wholeness
ever not whole?
She said, “You go all around the subject,” and I said, “I didn’t know it was a subject.”
Robert Creeley
To walk in a circle once,
that is, to walk around
in a circle one time,
it is a circle. No doubt.
To walk the circle again
it is still a circle, but
the one who is walking
has changed by walking
it a second time, and
if the one who is walking
has changed, the circle
has changed as well,
since the circle that once
described the walker
has now been described
by the one walking it
a second time. It is
no longer just a circle,
innocent, an empty
moon, a mouth
open in awe
or yawning. No.
Its perfect silence
has been forgotten.
Now it is the place
where someone walks,
walks twice, walks
off their obsession,
with an upturned collar,
a bent head, the sound
of scuffling shoes.
And now here it comes
again, a third time,
to drive all doubt away.
Now the circle is no longer
outside the walker, it is
a feature of the walker’s
mind, an attribute that can
not separate from the walker,
even if it knew to try.
True, if observed from above,
the walker and the circle
might seem two objects,
one active, the other passive,
or incidental, hardly an object
at all, not the one thing
they have become
as a result of the walker’s
effort, for that is what it is,
the walker walks with a limp.
Visiting my teacher’s temple, I sit with others for two hours each morning. This is a wonderful opportunity and I am grateful. And this morning, as the second period drew to a close, I noticed that I had not been resting, was not deeply at peace. Zazen is a time to set aside busy thoughts and do nothing, a vacation. I love it. So why did I spend my time in plans and memories? Working?
An answer to that question came to me a few years ago, and has been in my mind again recently. Every thought that intrudes on the quiet space says “look at me!” It says “I exist.” More specifically, it is my own mind saying “I exist.” It also says “This is who I am.”
It goes on and on, confirming my reality, asserting my stability as an independent and permanent entity.
That is what thoughts are for.
There is also something about conversation. I heard this from Roy Dopson, an Advaita teacher who visited Vairochana Farm. Then I started observing myself in conversation.
We speak to assert our existence and to have it acknowledged by others. They affirm that I exist, and various items about myself. I bet you can see this too. I can particularly watch it on Facebook, because there will be an interaction and then it stops. Then there is a response. I find myself enormously involved in how other people respond to my comments or posts. Sometimes I feel relieved. In conversation, if I successfully make a statement and others agree, I may feel relief or even jubilation.
We talk in order to confirm that we exist and have certain attributes – wise, funny, good, courageous – or sometimes their opposites. Because being bad is preferred to not existing.
In the Samdhinirmocana, there is a long discussion of the delusion that we are permanent independent beings, with certain attributes that are real. This is a delusion.
We are really afraid of not existing.
Even if we intellectually understand that lacking a permanent independent existence with fixed attributes is not the same as not existing – that actually it is like being a real, living person instead of a statue – we are still afraid of it. What amazing anxiety exists around this refusal to be fully alive and in the moment.
I am here to attest to this anxiety. I know better, yet I just spent another 2 hours (maybe one and a half) with my mind wandering and working instead of taking a much-needed break.
And why am I writing this? Well, maybe it will help me to quit my addiction to personal existence. Maybe it will help someone else. And maybe it will make me famous as a wise person. I cannot ignore the last reason. Because I am an addict. As with any addiction, honesty is essential to recovery.
May all beings be free from suffering, from attachment, to delusion – may all beings be happy.
I have no children of my own, so any descendants of my sister will be my closest relatives in the distant future. My nephew and niece are 10 and 12 years old right now; if they have children about age 30, my grandnieces or grandnephews will be born around 2035; if they in turn have children at about age 30, my great-grandniece – who I am calling Emily because I’ve always liked the name – will be born around 2065 and come of age around 2085. That’s 70 years from now- far enough in the future that I can imagine the global impacts of overpopulation and over-consumption will have changed life as we know it. I write to Emily because it helps me process what’s happening on our planet, and because I want her to know I cared about her – because as she looks back, I think she’s going to doubt that.
Dear Emily,
You probably wonder what we were thinking. I imagine you looking at the pictures and statistics from our time and wondering how we could turn a blind eye to the damage we were causing. How we could happily and obliviously go about our personal lives while participating in a system of infinite growth on a finite planet. How we could be so stupid, selfish, and cruel.
Frankly, I ask myself the same questions. I’ve asked them for the past 40 years of my life, but with each passing year the whole situation gets more and more critical. I see some evidence that people are getting worried. I suppose that’s a start. But I see no evidence that we’ve started the kind of change that’s going to be required to alter the course we’re on. That’s all we can conceive of right now are incremental little things that don’t impact our daily lives much, like buying organic produce or increasing the fuel efficiency of passenger cars.
Emily, I can give you lots of excuses, but I know they’re all going to sound pretty lame. What I care about more is letting you know how much pain we’re in, and how difficult this is – even for those of us still living in peace and material prosperity. Most of us don’t consciously acknowledge our stress yet, but we’re experiencing increasingly intense levels of cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand we have our personal lives with their births, deaths, celebrations, music, joy, projects, friendships, adventure, and challenge. We cultivate gardens and enjoy watching television shows about murder mysteries and zombies. On the other hand we are aware of extinctions, climate change, starvation, ecological collapse, and immense injustices caused by greed. We know that if we fully comprehended any one of these disasters we would be crushed with grief and despair. The personal lives for which we feel such gratitude would seem like inconsequential daydreams in comparison.
Let me give you a real-life example. My husband and I just bought a house. We are very excited about it. It’s a modest house, relatively speaking, although of course it’s much more than most of the people in the world have. It’s got wide eaves and bracken ferns coming up in front. Inside it has a spacious, meandering feel, and lots of closets. We especially love the walk-in pantry, and look forward to cooking more meals at home instead of eating out so much.
The large back yard is especially lovely, and I am amazed how powerfully grounding it is to get outside and do yard work! Almost all of my typical work involves sitting at the computer, and most of my leisure also entails staring at a screen of some kind. Contrast this to spending 1.5 hours mowing our lawn with a manual push-mower (yes, my neighbors probably think I’m crazy) – ah, what joy! No thought is required. You just start at one end and keep going until you’re done. At first it may look like an insurmountable task, but eventually the project is finished, how amazing.
I have been so caught up in buying a house, selling a condo, and moving, I have hardly had any time to think about the state of the planet. I have just committed to a 30-year mortgage, even though none of us has any idea what the world is going to be like 30 years from now. Underneath my joy and excitement simmers a sense of foreboding.
I just can’t reconcile my lived experience with what I know is happening, but I’m trying. The other day I discovered an amazing book, Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER), that may give me a way to integrate The Global Emergency into my reality a little bit more. OVER communicates primarily through images – incredible photographs carefully chosen to portray the global impacts of over-development and overpopulation. Statistics are one thing, but witnessing it – letting the image seep into your brain and trigger things in your heart – is quite another.
You can view the whole book online, but after paging through part of it this way, I wanted to have a physical copy to contemplate. In the middle of one of my house-related errands I stopped by our local bookstore and bought one. The book is huge and heavy, and came protected in shrink-wrap. Buying it felt like a significant, emotional, and spiritual act. I didn’t open it until a couple of days later, when I could sit down with it and give it my full attention. I plan to work my way through it slowly, and then start over.
Looking at images of global devastation of people, ecosystems, and species is awfully sad and overwhelming. At this point, Emily, many of us still have a choice about looking. If we get too obsessed about the terrible things that are going on, we start alienating our friends and family. Again there’s the clash between our everyday lives and the larger reality. It’s very easy to make people feel defensive or guilty about their choices – which only makes them less inclined to look at what’s going on.
So I quietly page through my global disaster tome, write to you, and plan where to plant native strawberries in my new yard. It’s crazy-making, but I’m doing the best I can. At least, I think I am.
Editors note: This is a piece Shikan Hawkins wrote months ago that he has sent for publication today. Thich Nhat Hanh has since returned home to Plum Village following rehabilitation.
Some of you may be aware that Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh suffered a serious stroke recently. He remains in a coma, still breathing on his own. He has dedicated his life to spreading the Buddha’s teaching of compassion and love to relieve human suffering. His sangha is named the Order of Inter Being. He teaches that if we are willing to experience things as they actually are, we will realize that we ‘inter are’ with all beings and all phenomena. Our living presence is alive, and our aliveness is the spirit of inter being. Thich Nhat Hanh is referred to as Thay by our sangha. Thay means teacher in Vietnamese Buddhism. Thay offered us a song that we sometimes sing together as the sangha body:
No coming, no going, no after, no before I hold you close to me, and I release you to be so free Because I am in you, and you are in me, Because I am in you, and you are in me
Buddha’s first noble truth is that life is suffering. The way we inter are with all beings involves suffering. He didn’t mean that life is always the experience of suffering for everyone. He meant that life is suffering under certain conditions. And those conditions according to Buddha are caused by our clinging. Suffering is caused by clinging to thoughts, clinging to sensations, clinging to sights and sounds. And it naturally follows that the experience of clinging is based on the strong sense of a someone who is clinging to something separate from what they imagine that they are.
The bedrock of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness practice is the practice of being aware of present experience, with the attitude of acceptance. This includes awareness of the experience of being something separate, and clinging to something else that seems separate from what we are. The experience of being separate is really just that simple, it’s not conceptual, it’s not some theory about the experience of separation. It’s just the experience of saying ‘there is that chair over there, and here I am, separate from that chair.’
The spirit of inter being is also just that simple. It’s not some theory of being. The reality of inter being is realizing that what appears separate isn’t really separate from the awareness that is observing it. The awareness looking out from our eyes right now reading this page isn’t separate from the words and the page itself. The same holds true for all of our experience. Awareness isn’t separate from the experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, or thinking. Whatever we see, hear, feel, and think is one with the awareness that we actually are.
Thay says that we free ourselves from suffering by learning to cultivate insight into the deep roots of our suffering. As Buddha said the deep roots of our self clinging is what keeps us bound to the seemingly endless wheel of samsara, the seemingly endless round of suffering of the world of birth and death. If we want to remove the weeds from our yard, we need to pull them out by the roots. Otherwise they just quickly grow back. When we are lazy, and don’t want to make the effort to get down to the roots of our mind weeds, we just push them away or indulge them without awareness of their roots. They not only grow back quickly, but we actually reinforce their hold on us; if we feed the energy of clinging to them, that clinging energy grows stronger. As Buddha said, the clinging to our experience is made possible by our clinging to this sense of being a separate self. The two arise together, and reinforce each other.
What is different about mind weeds and weeds in our yard, is that our yard weeds are removed by pulling them out by the roots. With mind weeds, we shine the light of awareness on them, and let spirit dissolve and transform them, rather than just trying to DO something with them. The spirit of inter being is always dissolving the roots of our self clinging, we only need to be willing to be aware of this, and stop our self conscious efforts to resist the process.
The fixed belief in the separate entity we call ‘me’ is the necessary mind weed by which we experience and cling to all of sensory experience as ours. So mindfulness practice is shining the light of awareness or spirit onto that sense of being a separate self. And it is the awareness of sensing a separate self with the attitude of acceptance. What is actually witnessing our experience is always just allowing it full expression. There is no attempt to manipulate any object of experience. Allowing the full expression of our experience is one with spirit’s continual dissolving and transforming it. Whatever we think, feel, see, or hear are not fixed entities. They are continually changing and transforming. We project the solidity of our fixation on being a separate self onto the world we imagine to be separate, and thereby fool ourselves into believing that it is solid. This is not something to try to believe. We will actually experience it through surrendering to the spirit of inter being showing us how things really are. The experience of ‘me’ witnessing, or ‘me’ attempting to manipulate the process is completely irrelevant to the process itself.
If we learn to be willing to join this witnessing, we will also learn to allow all experience its full expression. Witnessing consciousness can just allow every experience to just be as it is because there is no sense of a separate self to cling to the experience and try to hold onto it, or push it away. When we join this witnessing of our sense of a separate self with the attitude of acceptance, we begin to experience that sense of being separate as an expression of the witnessing awareness itself. That sense of being separate is beginning to be seen as it really is, free of separation from the witnessing awareness of all experience. This witnessing is always seeing through the separate nature of all experience. It is always dissolving the root of separation appearing as real to the clinging consciousness of a separate self. So clinging to a sense of separation to relieve suffering is like pulling off the top of the weeds in our yard, and hoping they won’t grow back. Self conscious effort, MY effort is the deepest root of our suffering. Just allow the light of awareness to shine on the sense of separation, where is the actual thingness of it?
For suffering to be real, there needs to be an actual painful sensation with the accompanying fixation on this sensation as being something bad. If we join spirit’s witnessing of our painful experience, we will begin to see that our fixation on something bad itself isn’t fixed. It changes and transforms along with the subtle variations of the flavor of the painful sensations themselves. This seeing, this sensing, is the seeing and sensing of the spirit of inter being’s continual dissolving and transforming of all of our experience. Just being aware of this with the attitude of acceptance is offering all of our experience to spirit itself. And it is the realization that all of our experience is a wonderful gift from the universal heart of inter being.
What if it is really really true that awareness itself is always already seeing through the separate nature of sensations? What if it is really true that the spirit of inter being is always deeply sensing, transforming, and loving all of our experience as a free gift to us? Can we be willing to trust this gift? Can we be willing to trust this gift on its own terms, not on our terms? Can we be willing to give up our bargaining with and for truth? Are we willing to receive this free gift unconditionally, just as it is being offered to us, free of any and all conditions? What else besides our living presence is actually truth worthy? What else is trust worthy?
Stay with the path for long enough, and finally we’ll begin to realize we’ve spent aeons trying to flee from this truth. We’ve spent aeons clinging to trusting what we think is real and true. And the whole time we have been enslaved by the suffering of clinging to our desires and fears, vainly attempting to make them the truth, vainly attempting to make them real. Clinging to vanity is always in vain, because the self that is separate and proud isn’t the truth, it isn’t real. Stay with the path long enough, maybe we can finally realize that this free gift really is free.
Seeing through the separate nature of sensation, seeing through the separate nature of all experience of being a separate self, is seeing from the viewpoint of unity, seeing from the viewpoint of the spirit of inter being. Spirit transforms the sense of separation from our experience, but this doesn’t mean we cease to feel the pain of sensations. The pain can actually hurt more, but bother us less. It bothers us less because we are learning to embody our inter being with the joy and hurt of all beings.
Safe Harbor: Guidelines, Process, and Resources for Ethics and Conduct in Buddhist Communities is a book I edited in the 90s at Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Then as now concerns about sexuality, authority, and appropriate boundaries continue to arise in our communities. If the Dharma is truly to provide refuge then teachers and practitioners need to understand our own shadow side, and learn how to take care of each other.
This book features practical articles by Chozen Bays & Keido Les Kaye, an introduction by me, and a selection of model guidelines and grievance procedures from several centers. It also includes a section on resources — some of which might need some updating — and a good bibliography.
My how things can change with a paradigm shift and a change in actions.
For years in editing this website, and long before that, I had led a fairly sedentary lifestyle. I smoked cigarettes religiously. I ate fast food and junk. I drank a lot of cola. I wasn’t taking care of myself at all. I was all mind and no body. I honestly felt like I might be close to death for several years there. But then I just kind of had enough. It was one of those moments where you either continue going down a path of misery or you make a change in direction for your life. I decided to make the change.
On October 31, 2014 I quit my 20 year smoking habit and have not looked back. I began doing what push ups I could manage. At the time I think I could barely manage 6 or 7. Today I can do 300 in an hour. I started hopping on an elliptical and doing cardio, breathing life back in to what must have been dying lungs. I started eating right and, in time, my body has been thanking me — as has my mind. I can honestly say that I’ve had almost zero signs of depression since making these lifestyle changes and it’s felt terrific.
It was a lesson for me, as I assumed for many years that the depression I was experiencing was beyond my control. It was something I was just going to have to deal with because the world kind of sucked. I’ve since found that to be very untrue. For me, I was playing a significant role in my depression. My outlook about life was skewed. I was cynical and pessimistic. And, like I said, I wasn’t taking care of myself.
I’ve also gotten far more active in the dharma during this time, attending local meditation groups in the Greater Cincinnati area and even starting a small sitting group in my community here of Sardinia, Ohio. We’re just a group of folks who get together to sit with one another.
Taken at the start of my journey. Feeling down but determined to change.
I will say that there are times that I feel like I’m in unfamiliar territory, almost as if I’m not myself. I think that’s because I was depressed for so many years. I didn’t know much of anything else, let alone a different way of feeling or being.
Slowly but surely I am feeling more at home in my healthy body, but I admit it still feels like quite the shift. Body and mind really aren’t separate at all. Also, our bodies want to thrive. They want us to take very good care of them, as they are the vessel that feeds our mental state. I encourage anyone out there suffering with depression or feeling kind of hopeless to do what they can to be proactive. Do what you can to take control of your life. There are most certainly things beyond our control, but there are also things we can do to make our lives turn for the better.
Oh, and it’s time to start sweeping the cobwebs around here, too. Stay tuned!
I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve been feeling uninspired and somewhat discouraged. I even went so far as to tell several of my friends and family members that I was “done with Buddhism.” I was getting to this place where I recognized how much I’ve projected my hopes and dreams onto this tradition, and felt very keenly that Buddhism isn’t actually so different from any other religion. There are groups doing the same, prescribed activity together, there’s belief, there’s a practice based around the hope of future salvation or happiness, there’s an ethical and social code. There are leaders who are enlightened/ authorized/ mature on one end of the spectrum, and people who are hapless/ unenlightened/ immature on the other, and who thus depend on the former category of leaders to substantiate and legitimize their spiritual growth.
Gross. Give me my projections back.
I’ve been jogging a lot lately, and it makes me feel incredible. So I got to thinking: if I have vigorous exercise that makes me feel great, zazen, and a pretty good personal ethical system, do I really need this whole Buddhism thing? What’s the use of “Buddhism” if I can be happy without it? I expected this to be a liberating question, but instead, it made me profoundly depressed, because the last ten years of my life– and especially the last five– have been utterly devoted to this practice.
But then this morning, in between sleeping and really waking up, I remembered the promise I made to myself when I ordained. The precepts for monastic ordination in Soto Zen Buddhism are the same as the equivalent ceremony for lay people, so there are no specific rules or vows for monks and nuns. However, what that ceremony personally meant to me, what I promised to myself when I shaved my head, was that Buddhism was going to be the focal point of my life.
I didn’t vow to wear monastic robes. I didn’t vow to shave my head my whole life. I didn’t vow to be celibate or live in Japan or be poor or obedient. I didn’t even vow to leave home. What I did do was receive the Sixteen Precepts and promise to make dharma practice the center of my life.
As soon as I remembered that, I felt as if something hard inside me had melted. It was an incredible relief, to feel space open up inside of me where before was a kind of closed, hard finality. Recognizing that my promise was about personal commitment– and not about being perfect, good, or wearing, believing, or thinking anything specific– gives me incredible freedom to continue practicing. When my promise to myself is about commitment, and not about perfection or a certain type of thinking, then the practice can be alive. It can move, change shape, and grow. It can continue.
When I was at Nisodo, I worked in the kitchen five months out of the year, every summer. The summer Ango is the most difficult Ango because it’s the longest, and temperatures in the kitchen can rise to 35 degrees. There are no fans, air conditioning, and the kitchen crew works all day long on their feet. It’s grueling, and since you’re sleeping in a room with the same five women you work with, personality clashes are inevitable. The second summer I worked in the kitchen, I got in some really horrible, awful, screaming arguments with another nun.
It got so bad that I almost considered leaving, so I went to Aoyama Roshi for advice. She told me that I needed to become “like water.” Then she asked a Japanese nun to translate one of her essays on the subject, called “Like Water, Like Air,” into English. I helped edit the translation and typed it up on my computer. This is an excerpt:
The most important thing in Zen practice is to practice “no self.” Dogen Zenji said, “Even if you sit zazen until the floor breaks, if your zazen is from the ego then all your effort will be in vain.”
I’d like to use the following metaphor of water and ice. Water and ice are the same material, but ice is solid, and if water freezes in a cup you cannot put it into another container. If you try by force, both the cup and the ice will break. But water can be poured into any cup; it can flow through any tiny space. Water does no damage to its container. If you are using water to wash the floor, water becomes dirty in order to make the floor clean.
If you are like ice, then you can make other people turn to ice. Flowers and fish will freeze, too. But if you are like water, fish can live, people can swim, and boats can sail by…
Since we are all imperfect people, we often collide with others. On such occasions, we usually blame the opposite side. But think about it: if one side is like water, there is no conflict at all. If any trouble happens, it’s clear both sides are being like ice. So we can say that if seeing another person’s “ice” makes you realize you are also like ice, you can bow to that other person’s ice as Buddha.
If you do not realize that your selfish “ice” is harder and bigger than someone else’s, I think you cannot learn, or follow the Buddha’s wisdom, and your ice cannot be melted.
At the time, I thought “becoming like water” meant not taking myself so seriously and learning to not be “right” all the time. And of course, this is part of the teaching. But now I see that being “like water” is about much more than just avoiding conflict and arguments.
The word for “Zen trainee” in Japanese is unsui, which means “clouds and water.” In the olden days, monks would travel from monastery to monastery with no fixed abode, and so they were thought to be like clouds and water, constantly in flux. “Clouds and water” is about physical transience, but also a kind of mental flexibility. This is the mind I want to have: a mind that keeps moving, that flows.
The mind that gives us space and flexibility to change our shape is a mind like water, and that’s the mind I want to have. I don’t want to be stuck in one way of being or viewing the world. I want to be in the position that is always moving. When I thought I was “done with Buddhism,” the sad and painful part wasn’t that I thought Buddhism was insufficient; the pain came from deciding, and knowing with certainty, that I was “done.”
I do still want to take back my projections. I don’t want to depend on external approval for my sense of self-worth. I want to stand on my own two feet. But I also want to be like water. I need to be like water, because it’s too painful to be hard like ice. Can I “listen to myself” and “stand on my own feet” while still being selfless like water?
Actually, I think I can. I can “listen to myself” and still flow like water in the same way that I can hear the sound of a mountain stream. Just because it’s flowing and constantly changing doesn’t mean it’s not there, and that I can’t listen to it. And just because it’s there doesn’t mean it can’t keep flowing and flowing and flowing.
Zenshin Tim Buckley, founder and teacher at Great River Zendo in West Bath, Maine, passed away today at 72 years due to lung cancer. He was a student of Yozen Peter Schneider in California and in 2014 received transmission of the dharma from him. He was one of the early guys at San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara, receiving the precepts from Suzuki Roshi himself in 1969. He would later ordain as a Soto Zen priest with Yozen Schneider Roshi in 2011. Zenshin’s “other” career was in cultural anthropology, having previously taught anthropology and Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
I had the pleasure of spending a month on retreat with Zenshin last year at Empty Nest Zendo in North Fork, California, there for their SPOT program. A very tall and serious looking man in his later years, he was nothing but warmth when you scratched under the surface. I remember how good he was at telling a story — he had a way with words and you could honestly gather that Zen practice had touched this man’s life very deeply. He’d tell us about his travels and sailing and his time studying with Harry Roberts learning of the Yurok Indians. He also invited me to visit his zendo for Zen in America when I’m in his area and I’m sad I won’t get to see him again. As luck would have it I did do an extended interview with him at Empty Nest for the film. I’m glad I caught a bit of Zenshin on film. I realize as I go forward in making this that others I meet along the way may very well pass, as well.
Actually, it was during the SPOT retreat that Zenshin first began showing signs of what would later be diagnosed as lung cancer. I remember he started to have a persistent cough and, being the man of strong will that he was, it was only when Grace Schireson insisted that he go to a doctor that he took some time to rest.
I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to spend the time I did with this man. You can read a great interview with Zenshin Buckley over at David Chadwick’s cuke.com.
Sometimes I notice stress sneaking into my life. It starts accumulating under the surface of everything, making me irritable and somewhat sad.
Dogen and Soto Zen
Living Zen: The Diary of an American Zen Priest
Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990