On Anger, War and Famine in Gaza, and Reversing Vicious Cycles

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on April 10, 2024. A recording follows the text.

This is an excerpt from a sutra in the Pali Canon:

Monks, there are these three kinds of persons found existing in the world.  What three?  The person who is like a line etched in stone; the person who is like a line etched in the ground; and the person who is like a line etched in water.

And what kind of person is like a line etched in stone?  Here, some person often gets angry, and his anger persists for a long time.  Just as a line etched in stone is not quickly erased by the wind and water but persists for a long time, so too, some person often gets angry, and his anger persists for a long time.  This is called the person who is like a line etched in stone.

And what kind of person is like a line etched in the ground?  Here, some person often gets angry, but his anger does not persist for a long time.  Just as a line etched in the ground is quickly erased by the wind and water and does not persist for a long time, so too, some person often gets angry, but his anger does not persist for a long time. This is called the person who is like a line etched in the ground.

And what kind of person is like a line etched in water? Here, some person, even when spoken to roughly and harshly, in disagreeable ways, remains on friendly terms with his antagonist, mingles with him, and greets him.  Just as a line etched in water quickly disappears and does not persist for a long time, so too, some person, even when spoken to roughly and harshly, in disagreeable ways, remains on friendly terms with his antagonist, mingles with him, and greets him.  This is called the person who is like a line etched in water.

These, monks, are the three kinds of persons found existing in the world.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a very hard time watching the news lately.  I ate dinner alone in front of the TV the other night.  I could barely manage to nourish myself after seeing images of kids in Gaza dying of starvation.

For so many, their spirits, and now their bodies, have been utterly crushed.  Today is the beginning of Eid al Fitr, the feast marking the end of Ramadan.  There traditionally are celebrations after prayers—prayers in which Muslims pray for peace and mercy.  Like us, they also pray for the wellbeing of all beings.  It’s hard to imagine these prayers and these celebrations in the midst of what Muslims in Gaza and Muslims the world over are experiencing.

It’s so sad that we repeatedly enact these cycles of violence.  It so often seems one person’s or group’s spirits get activated and elevated in an angry way to crush another person’s spirits in response to some real or perceived offense.  That prompts those who’ve been harmed to retaliate.  The vicious cycle goes on and on.

It seems Gautama Siddhartha often was asked by monks in his community, and by others he met, how to deal with anger and conflict.  To be honest, some of his guidance seems a bit too demanding and idealistic to me; unlikely to be accepted and practiced by most people.  In one sutra, for example, he admonished his monks to be tranquil even if someone “were to sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handed saw.”

To be fair, the Buddha was talking to monks in his community when he said this—advanced practitioners, we might say—and he likely was pointing toward what the Zen tradition later came to call the Absolute: the radical emptiness that escapes everyday sensible awareness for most people most of the time.  The perspective from which there is only non-killing.  The perspective from which “my” life isn’t really “mine.”  From which there is no isolated me and mine; only Life (with a capital L) and, whatever I am, I am one with Life in life (with a small l) and in death.  

From the absolute perspective, there is no birth and death, only Life.  If only we could all grasp this, I imagine the Buddha is saying with this provocative example, perhaps nonviolence, nonkilling, would become the norm from a relative, sensible perspective, too. 

Still, the teaching I read a moment ago seems more approachable for most of us, so perhaps better to emphasize.  Perhaps if each of us can progressively shift from being a person who is more like soft ground than stone, and then from one who is more like water than soft ground, we have some hope of reversing the vicious cycles to which we contribute.  To sparking virtuous interpersonal and cultural cycles in which our hearts are less and less inclined toward violence of any form, to any degree.

So, let’s continue to let our practice soften us.

Precariousness or Suffering: Will the Real Noble Truths Please Stand Up?

Jeff


I gave this talk yesterday at our Full Moon Zen Thursday evening sit. A recording follows the text.

This is a passage from the Pali Canon:

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

These, of course, are the Four Noble Truths Shakyamuni Buddha is said to have shared in his first talk after his awakening experience. So very familiar to us, they obviously focus on the fact of suffering, its cause, the possibility of ending it, and a method for ending it.

A few weeks ago I read an article by Jonathan Gold, a scholar of Buddhism, that asks if the Buddha truly said “suffering” in this sermon. He reconsiders what the Buddha meant if he used a different word, “precarious,” instead of “suffering.”

This isn’t Gold’s idea. It was first proposed by the linguist Christopher Beckwith, who noted that a Greek Philosopher called Phyrro of Elis heard the Four Noble Truths and other Buddhist teachings in oral tradition long before the Sanskrit and Pali word “dukkha” was recorded in the early Buddhist scriptures. Dukkha is the word we translate as suffering.

Phyrro traveled to India in the 4th century B.C.E. with Alexander the Great’s army. The first Buddhist scriptures were written about 300 years later. Phyrro’s much earlier writings that were influenced by his encounter with Buddhism use precarious, not suffering.

Gold’s article examines multiple Buddhist texts, substituting “precarious” wherever “suffering” appears. He thinks this resolves many questions generations of scholars have had about the Buddha’s supposed use of the word “suffering.” I won’t try to summarize all his examples, but here’s one:

Scholars wonder why the Buddha would say the whole of life is suffering when so many of our experiences are pleasant: eating ice cream, holding a baby, smelling the roses. We might feel a sense of loss when these experiences end, but does that mean we were suffering during them? Buddhist teachers have been glossing over this and other problems with the word suffering forever or making rather contorted arguments to dispense with them.

But it’s not so hard to accept the notion that the pleasant experience of holding a baby is precarious, in the sense that it won’t last or that this little love ball might puke in my face while I’m holding her. Pleasant experiences sometimes turn unpleasant. Even when they don’t, they end.

If we substitute “precarious” for “suffering” in the Four Noble Truths, I imagine we get something like this:

One:

Life seems precarious.

Two:

Maybe what makes life seem precarious isn’t so much the obvious fact of impermanence, but the way we tend to respond to it: compulsively chasing after or trying to cling to experiences we find pleasant and compulsively avoiding or trying to push away experiences we find uncomfortable.

Three:

We can end, or at least dial way down, this feeling that we’re riding a rollercoaster with our eyes closed, alternately wishing it would end or begging for more.

Four:

We do that, well, by doing. By orienting differently in and to life. The Buddha embraced eight specific perspectives and practices he found helpful. He thought we might find them helpful, too.

Here’s another way to say the same thing, drawn from modern research on how our minds work, rather than the Buddha’s ancient personal experiment. When focusing on a task, like feeding a baby or washing the dishes, you can either have what researchers call a “state orientation” or what they call an “action orientation.”

If you have a state orientation, you’re focusing primarily on yourself: Do I feel prepared? Does the baby like me? The dishwater feels cold. What if I screw this up?

If you have an action orientation, you’re focused on the task itself, without concern for your emotional or physical state. You’d flinch and do something about it if the baby puked or the water were scalding hot, but you’re not obsessing about that possibility.

You won’t be surprised to hear people with an action orientation are more successful at whatever they’re doing. And I also doubt you’ll be surprised to hear this notion generalizes to the whole of life. If we go around chasing states, constantly asking ourselves whether we’re happy, that’s a recipe for unhappiness.

The Buddha apparently spent years chasing a blissful state. Many of us enter this path looking for a state of existence or nonexistence that feels more reliably pleasant; less precarious. The insights and guidance the Buddha ultimately offered seem more about how to set our intentions and act, and about not separating from our experience, whatever our state.

Perhaps ironically, we tend to find the stability we’re seeking by unifying with the shifting ground of experience, being and doing without fuss.

The Thing Speaks for Itself

Jeff

I gave this talk today at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit.

This is Case 3 in The Gateless Gate:

Whenever Chu-Chih (J: Gutei) was asked a question, he simply raised one finger. One day a visitor asked Chu-Chih’s attendant what his master preached. The boy raised a finger. Hearing of this, Chu-Chih cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. As the boy ran from the room, Chu-Chih called to him. When the boy turned his head Chu-Chih raised a finger. The boy was suddenly enlightened.

When Chu-Chih was about to die he said to his assembled monks, “I received this one finger Zen from T’ien-lung. I used it all my life but never used it up.”

Surgeons and those who work with them tend to be a close-knit group.  Like all humans, these people make mistakes, and, like many close-knit groups, they tend to circle the wagons when mistakes happen.

Lawyers representing patients harmed by surgical mistakes or representing loved ones after a patient had died from medical malpractice used to have a hard time getting redress.  One common malpractice scenario was leaving the little surgical sponge used to soak up blood during the procedure inside the patient’s body after she was sewed up.  The sponge would cause an infection.  Often, the patient died.

The rules of legal evidence generally require proof of what happened—of who did what when—to assign responsibility and assess penalties.  Members of surgical teams accused of malpractice would simply stay mum, refusing to respond to questions about how an obvious mistake happened.  They maintained a conspiracy of silence.

For a long time, the legal system didn’t quite know how to deal with this.  Plaintiffs’ lawyers lost cases, and victims or their families, some poor already, went uncompensated.

Then some insightful lawyer stated the obvious, arguing in court that the thing simply speaks for itself.  The judge agreed, and now we have the legal doctrine of Res Ipsa Loquitur, Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.”

This practice-journey we’re on together is our conspiracy of silence.  But it’s a different sort of conspiracy.  We’re not trying to conceal what can’t be concealed.  We’re allowing ourselves to notice and accord with—and as—that which is constantly revealing itself.

For 25 minutes at a time, we loosen our grip on our stories and yield the floor to silence.  Stories are powerful, especially arresting ones like Chü-chih cutting off the finger of a boy who didn’t yet know this life, his life, speaks for itself.  

We know from archeological sources and other evidence that our capacity for storytelling is ancient.  Our interest in story and capacity to understand it seems to be one of the most fundamental and enduring aspects of brain function.  Brain damaged kids with IQs as low as 20 still comprehend stories, even though they comprehend little else.  Kids organize play around stories. Humans of all ages construct their sense of self in narrative terms.

We’re often completely lost in our stories, as if our personal stories or the stories told by the groups to which we belong encompass and make sense of all there is to perceive and experience.  I don’t think we can completely escape our stories, but I do think we can interrupt stories that are too narrow, too partial, too parochial, or too fixed.  We can widen the aperture of the lens through which we let the light of experience in, and through which we channel the light of the world.  We can discover ourselves situated in a story vaster than we had imagined.  

So vast that simply going mum and being it is an appropriate response.

I’m partial to mysteries.  This story we live is a mystery.  A mystery that speaks for itself.  Everywhere and always.

In our meditation practice, we raise a finger to it, and as it.  Like this.  [Raising finger.]  Shhhhhhh.

Ordinary Mind is Tao

Jeff

Yesterday Full Moon Zen and Providence Zen Center held a joint retreat at PZC, with about 30 people participating. The theme was Two Traditions, One Family. The late Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, who founded the Kwan Um school of Zen (and PZC as its primary center in North America), and the late Japanese Zen Master Taizan Maezumi, who founded the White Plum Asanga, our lineage, were good friends. Yesterday’s retreat was both a tribute to their friendship and an expression of the abiding friendship between our two Zen families. Yesterday we juxtaposed many of each Zen stream’s forms (chants, koans, etc.), highlighting mostly similarities, and also some differences, in these two expressions of the Dharma. For example, we chanted the Heart Sutra in Korean, Sino-Japanese, and in our respective English translations. Kwan Um and the WPA each include koan practice, so we picked a koan used by both families (Case 19 in The Gateless Gate) as the prompt for a short talk by each of the four teachers present, Zen Master Tan Gong; Kwan Haeng Sunim, JDPSN, Fran Jindō Ludwig, Sensei; and myself. Here’s the text of my talk. A recording of all four talks follows.

This is the koan that gave us Mu.  But don’t think you’ve found the source of Mu, at least if you think the source was hidden before you encountered this koan.

Here we see Joshu, who would become a great teacher, had his own questions as a young seeker.  This was long before another nameless seeker asked him if the temple dog has Buddha nature.

We ask these sorts of questions because we doubt.  Here we see young Joshu’s doubt.  Joshu doesn’t confess his doubt, but his question reveals it.  “What is Tao?” he asks.  “I’m lost.  I’m feeling uncertain,” he’s saying.

Nanchen zeroes in on Joshu’s doubt.  “If you really want to attain the Tao of no-doubt,” Nachen says—to realize it as you—you must stop seeking it as knowing (rather than not-knowing) and as right (rather than wrong).

We don’t find our way in the realm of ideas.  We won’t find our ultimate home in fixed principles of any kind, whether the dogma of a religion, of a philosophy, or of the political right or left.

We seek and need kinship, of course, but being part of a tribe bound by ideas will never fully satisfy.  Members of these tribes still lay awake at midnight with existential questions on their minds and hearts. 

If ordinary mind is Tao and Joshu’s ordinary mind doubts, then the Way Joshu seeks, the Tao of No Doubt, must contain doubt. 

Joshu’s question, our questions, do not resolve as we imagine they will, through syllogisms.  They resolve as we open to, deeply penetrate, accept, and settle into our experience. Just this. We must allow just this to penetrate us.  We discover ourselves as just this.

As we do, our old questions aren’t so much answered.  They just lose their force.

There are no silly questions we can bring to a Zen teacher along the Way.  Yet maybe we should question the nature of our questions a bit more; question the nature of the answers they seek.

What is going on in meditation, anyway?

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sit on Thursday, February 1, 2024.

A close friend of mine who began practicing a secularized form of mindfulness meditation a couple of years told me last week that he’s become more curious about what he’s been doing.  He has settled into the practice he took up, but that practice is unrelated to any tradition, any historical or social context, that situates it and offers a broader perspective and supportive scaffolding.  He has questions about what he’s doing and experiencing that his meditation coach, who mainly works with companies and businesspeople, doesn’t seem to be able to answer.  He’s been reading some Dharma books—mostly written by the Americans who popularized Theravadin approaches to meditation, like Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg.  I gather he appreciates what he’s finding there, yet he is eager for more, and not just what’s available through reading.  He has signed up for a couple of meditation retreats and is looking forward to them excitedly, if also with a bit of trepidation.

I had recommended a Zen book to this friend about a year ago and sent him a link to my blog, where I post the texts of many of these talks. He thanked me for these resources last week—and said, with a wry smile, that he didn’t understand any of it. I thanked him for the feedback.

This friend is a very smart, deep-thinking person.  I know a Zen teacher who seems to take pride in the fact that his talks have become more and more obscure and elliptical over time.  I suppose there’s a case to be made for being obscure and elliptical, at least as one tool in a Zen teacher’s toolkit.  This Zen teacher wouldn’t be the first to try to describe the indescribable this way.  But that’s not what I’m trying to do most of the time.

Tonight, I’d like to offer one take on what’s going on in meditation.  I hope this talk will seem more approachable, and perhaps useful, to my friend, and that there’s something in it for us, too. 

Let me start by offering a metaphor for our experience of self as we take up meditation. It’s an image of two containers.  I recently ordered a box of Mason jars to make Japanese-style pickled vegetables, so let’s imagine a jar inside a box.  I’m the jar and the universe we inhabit is the box.

There’s activity inside the jar of self that is me; there’s other activity inside the box that is the universe; and these spheres of activity, inside and outside me, often seem to be related.  If something “good” presents itself in the box, in my corner of the universe, like tasty food or a loved one, a “good” feeling arises in the jar of self.  Likewise, if thought of or desire for something I perceive as good arises in the jar, I might take this as a queue to act in relation to something else in the box.  Perhaps I start thinking about my wife, so I text her to say I’m thinking of her or to suggest go out to dinner over the weekend.  We also can imagine examples of activity “inside” and “outside” the jar of self that have a negative valence.

But this initial image is too simple, static, predictable, and mechanistic.  We need to complicate it a bit.  These containers don’t always feel stable.  The jar of self is moving inside a box that is moving, and things are moving inside each of them.  Our own thoughts and feelings about things shift.  Loved ones aren’t always available and don’t always respond as we wish.  And so we may feel disoriented much of the time; we’re constantly called upon to reorient.

Both we and the world around us are changing constantly, and some part of us wants what’s inside and outside oneself to stay in a fixed state that feels safe, secure, and satisfying.  This part of us responds to the tumult and its desire for stability by acting in ways intended to manage what’s going on inside and outside the jar of self.  Sometimes we can manage things to a point of reasonable satisfaction for a while, but eventually something arises in the current of experience that challenges our capacity to cope.  Something arises inside the jar or inside the box that exceeds the present boundaries of our comfort zone.  Life shows us that our power to control it, to make it conform to our ideals and other wishes, is limited.  Experience is dynamic, partially unpredictable, and not contained or containable.

Meditation is one way we can respond to this situation; to the seeming tumult and our usual ways of responding to the tumult.  Like other potential responses, meditation is an activity.  Even though it looks passive, it’s another form of action.  It’s a period when we choose to sit and simply attend to whatever is going on inside the seeming jar of self and inside this seeming box in which we jars find ourselves.

By the time many of us come to meditation in late adolescence or adulthood, we may have noticed that some of our default responses to the tumult can be rather reactive, even compulsive.  We often respond to activity inside and outside in predictable ways that may be more a product of evolutionary and/or early life conditioning.  Much of the time we act very unlike we’re acting as we meditate.  We act, well, even more actively, in ways we think will stabilize or better our experience, keep us safe and happy. 

But our actions don’t reliably produce desired results; when they don’t, we tend to generate more activity—whether visible to others or just more and more rumination within the jar of self—that never fully or permanently delivers the results we think will satisfy us.  The logic of our thought and actions so often is about trying to contain and control experience, as if we really were jars inside a box.  We want to bottle up and preserve what’s pleasing and to quarantine and cut off what’s not pleasing. 

We can think of all this in terms of Buddhism’s three poisons.  Greed is compulsive grasping for thoughts and feelings inside us and configurations of beings and things in the broader universe that we experience as pleasant.  Hatred is compulsive avoidance or pushing away of thoughts, feelings, beings, and things we experience as unpleasant.  Delusion is about our false thought streams, our false narratives—and all narratives, even our presently most comprehensive narratives, are at least partially false.  They’re incomplete, or they will be soon, as the world continues to turn.  We tend to invest our narratives—even our best ones, even the one I’m offering now—with more explanatory power than they deserve.  We’re really trying to fix ourselves, our identities, as we do.

In meditation, stuff arises: mild pain in a foot, the pleasant smell of a cake baking, my narratives about this or that, boredom.  We’d normally act differently to these stimuli, but, in meditation, we choose just to sit and attend.  We choose that activity instead.  We choose just to abide.  We learn we can abide; that we can cope.  We adopt a stable orientation in this realm of shifting experience. 

As confidence in our capacity to do that consistently grows, interesting things begin to happen.  Our comfort zone during time off the cushion also begins to expand.  Our need to contain and control declines.  We might feel relatively more calm some of the time.  We may become less reactive; more truly agentic.

In meditation, we’re separating from our habitual ways of relating to activity inside us—what we contain, so to speak—and outside us, within the larger container that contains us.  Paradoxically, in this realm as others, we must separate to connect—genuinely connect with our own experience and with others.  As poets and astronomers know, it’s so much easier to connect with the moon and stars than with ourselves and our loved ones, because of their seeming vast distance from us.  Telescopes and poems about stars are efforts to draw them closer.

In mediation, we discover that, for 10 or 15 or 25 minutes at a time, we can endure that discomfort we thought we couldn’t endure; we can resist that temptation we thought we couldn’t resist; we can cope with boredom.  In fact, we start to notice, just sitting here, just being here without trying to distract ourselves, that doing that isn’t boring.

As our experience begins to change, our perspective also may begin to change.  My perspective on myself, on all that’s arising inside and outside me, on life writ large may begin to change.  In one of his books about meditation that I read long ago, Thich Nhat Hahn says something like, “Once we are capable of stopping, then we begin to see.” 

The sense of being a container inside a container, of being and needing to constrain, may begin to dissolve.  We may begin to identify (if that’s the right word) with flow of activity itself.  We may begin to discover ourselves with all beings and things as one thing.  We need a new metaphor at this point.  Maybe we become more like the relatively stable, but still evolving, still slowly shifting, banks and bed of an old river.  But we’re also the water moving through it.  You may know that many rivers are deceptive looking.  They’re not like a bathtub or a pipe.  What we call a river is just the water visible on the surface.  There’s far more moving water in the ground, surrounding, mixing with, and constantly reforming the riverbed.  We become permeable like this through our practice; our boundaries become clearer and more stable feeling in some sense, and yet simultaneously fuzzier and permeable.  The boundary between inner and outer blurs.  The larger container seems boundless.  Our personal experience feels more spacious.  Less confining.

There’s much more we could say about what’s going on in meditation, and how our other practices, like chanting, bowing, reading and reflection, and working with koans and the precepts, complement it.  I also should note that practices outside the Zen tradition, including various forms of therapy and somatic practices, also can contribute to the transformation of our experience and perspective I’ve been describing.  In fact, there’s risk in meditation that we’ll get too good at distancing ourselves from what’s arising; that we’ll use meditation to bypass features of our experience, past and present, that we would be wise to examine more closely through some practice that’s better suited for that.

Anyway, there’s much more we could say about what’s going on in meditation, but let’s leave it here for now. I’m not sure I’ve achieved my goal of making what’s going on more understandable. If not, I hope your reactions and insights will help clarify things for all of us.

Rōhatsu 2023

Jeff

I gave this talk this morning at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.

Today is Rōhatsu, when Zen Buddhists celebrate Siddhartha Guatama’s enlightenment. Rōhatsu simply means “the eight day of the twelfth month” in Japanese.

Earlier this week, in anticipation of this talk, I reread accounts of the Buddha’s enlightenment in two important compilations of Buddhist texts, the Pali Canon (which is the most complete compilation of early Buddhist scriptures) and a newer translation of the Zen text Records of Transmission of the Lamp (which is an 11th century Chinese compilation of short biographies of significant Indian and Chinese teachers). I thought I was looking for a key line or two describing the Buddha’s awakening experience that might serve as a starting point for a talk about our own awakenings.

Reading these accounts again, I instead was struck by their folklore elements, and by the similarities of some of these folklore elements with the folklore in other wisdom traditions. Here, for example, is the brief passage about the Buddha’s enlightenment from Transmission of the Lamp:

“The Lalitavistara Sutra says that, `In the twelfth month, on the eighth day, at the time of the appearance of the morning star, the bodhisattva became a Buddha called “the teacher of Gods and Man”.’ At that time, he was thirty years old, which was in the fourth year of the reign of King Mu, corresponding to the twentieth year of the sexagenarian cycle.” 

That’s literally all it says about the Buddha’s enlightenment experience in this account.

It’s also Christmastime, of course. Having been raised Catholic, I sensed strong similarities and resonances between the passage I just read and some Christian texts often read this time of year. Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, is Christianity’s enlightenment moment and story. Light entering the world, and entering our hearts, during this time of year when the days are shorter, also is a theme in other traditions—Hinduism’s Diwali and Judaism’s Hanukkah, for example.

The Gospel of Matthew provides the account of Jesus’s birth.  It opens with a lineage chart (not unlike our Zen lineage charts) tying Jesus to the first Jewish prophet, Abraham, and his son, King David, thus locating Jesus in time and in society.  The Transmission of the Lamp story also locates the Buddha’s enlightenment temporally and socially in relation to the reign of King Mu.  

There’s a star in each story, orienting its central figure and signal event cosmically. 

If we consider other versions of the Rōhatsu story, we sense other similarities and resonances between it and the Christian story.  The location of each story’s event and the landscape there is described, situating the central characters and events spatially and in relation to the natural world.  In the Rōhatsu story, the Buddha even touches the Earth, which speaks to bear witness to his enlightenment. 

Spirits appear in each story—the evil spirit Mara in the Buddhist myth; an angel in Christian lore.  These are very different spirits, to be sure, but the presence of spirits in each story situates it metaphysically, in relation to the widespread human intuition that there’s something beyond the sensible realm.

In the short passage from the Transmission of the Lamp I read we’re told Siddartha Guatama was 30 years old when he had his enlightenment experience and begins teaching.  That’s about the age we meet Jesus again in the gospels, as this rabbi, or teacher, begins to share his insights. 

In the Transmission of the Lamp, we also learn the Buddha was called “the teacher of Gods and Men.”  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is called Immanuel, which means “God with us.”  These foundational figures in their respective wisdom traditions, their moments of enlightenment, and their teachings are being situated in relation to the divine, to some conception of ultimate reality. 

Crucially, each of these central figures also endures trials and tribulations and has a transformative personal experience, resituating himself with respect to himself, so to speak.  Metanoia.

By drawing these comparisons, I’m not suggesting these two wisdom traditions and their central stories, characters, messages, and aims are identical.  But I do think these stories, and others like them in other wisdom traditions, are very human.  Each displays and conveys common human concerns and yearnings. 

Perhaps the desire for enlightenment is a desire to locate oneself, to situate oneself, to relate oneself in the broadest possible sense—to one’s own self; to others near and far; to non-human beings and elements; to the universe, the cosmos; to that which lies beyond our sensory awareness; to ultimate reality.  And perhaps enlightenment is that developing sense of relatedness, of being situated, of “here-ness,” of presence.

Who knows where we come from, and where we are, but we find ourselves here as distinct beings.  To become healthy and whole as distinct persons, we must differentiate from our mothers and those close to us as a developmental imperative.  Yet that transformation also can give rise to an uncomfortable sense of apartness, of being unsituated.  Perhaps that’s a necessary life experience.  It’s a very common one, to be sure. 

For many of us, it also will feel imperative to resituate oneself in this vast universe.  The word universe means combined into one.  It means whole.  We want to know ourselves as integrated; as combined into the whole.

If we can take one big cosmic step back, we might begin to see something joyfully playful about our yearnings and transformations.  As I take that step back, I’m reminded of a quote from the early modern philosopher Francis Bacon (if you’ll permit me to borrow from another tradition once more).  Talking about the wise King Solomon from Jewish scripture, he said:

“Nay, the same Solomon the king, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of service and attendance, of fame and renown, and the like, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith expressly, “The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out;” as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide His works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s playfellows in that game.”

In Zen, we call this the samadhi of play.

Strolling outside Tuesday afternoon I sensed snow was coming.  I opened a weather app to see there was none in the forecast.  Having grown up high in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, however, I could feel it in my bones.  Sure enough, as I sat down early Wednesday morning to search for a Buddhist text to use as a touchstone for this talk, light snow—the first of the season in Boston—began to fall.  It lasted an hour or so and didn’t leave a trace.  Too insubstantial and improbable to register significantly in the meteorologists’ models, those of us who have a certain quality of situated experience—in this case, from living in the mountains—could sense its emerging presence, nonetheless.  The coming snow was registering itself in my bones.  Jeff and snow.  Not separate.

Those of us who wander on the Zen path seek knowing the whole of reality and experience this way; knowing “not separate” in our bones. Generations of wanderers have come to this experiential knowledge along this path. This deep knowledge of our relatedness is what we celebrate on Rōhatsu.

As it turns out, the quote I was looking for was not ancient wisdom within the pages of Transmission of the Lamp.  I found it in the contemporary description of this ancient text on the book’s back cover, which says, “The message of this book, that Chan practice can enable a free participation in life’s open-ended play, seems as necessary to our own time as it was to the restless times of 11th century Song China.”  Indeed.

Happy Holidays. May our hearts, well, be light.

Buddha Nature as Activity

Jeff

I gave this short talk at our Full Moon Zen sunrise sit on October 18, 2023.

This is a koan included in Genjōkōan, one of the essays in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō:

Ma-ku Pao-ch’e was fanning himself one day when a monk came and asked, “The nature of the wind is abiding and universally present.  Why do you still use your fan?”

The teacher’s answer was, “You know only the nature of the wind as abiding; you do not yet know the truth of its being universally present.”

The monk said, “What is the truth of its being universally present?”

The teacher only fanned himself without a word.

And the monk saluted him.

Activity was a key concept in Dōgen’s thought, which we inherit as a resource and as inspiration for our own journeys.  “The truth of Buddha-nature is such that Buddha-nature is embodied not before but after becoming a Buddha.  Buddha-nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously,” he said.

This might sound a bit discouraging initially.  One way to hear this is that we lack Buddha-nature until we become a Buddha.  “The truth of Buddha-nature is such that Buddha-nature is embodied not before but after becoming a Buddha.  Buddha-nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously.”  How do I become a Buddha then?  From that perspective, this seems like a real chicken-and-egg problem.

If we hear Dōgen that way, however, we’re not hearing from what he calls “the Buddha side,” or from what Erich Fromm called “being mode.”  We’re hearing Dōgen’s words from what Fromm called “having mode.”  A bit like the monk in our koan, we’re still thinking of Buddha nature as something separate from us we either have or don’t have; something we eventually can get if we don’t have it.  The monk perceives that it is abiding and universally present, but still he subtly seems to think it could be separable from Pao-ch’e’s fanning.

The monk has got it in one sense:  He gets that Buddha nature abides everywhere and always.  This is an important insight, and one gets the sense that he is rather proud of it.  I don’t know about you, but his question seems just a little too cute to me; like he’s showing off that insight just a bit.  With his response, Pao-ch’e tells the monk—nay, shows the monk—that we don’t have Buddha nature, we are it.  Then the monk truly seems to get it.

Buddha nature abides universally by presenting universally.  It manifests.  Buddha nature is more verb than noun.  There is no wind without blowing.  Pao-ch’e and fan together manifest as fanning.

Buddha nature is manifesting as us all the time whether we know it or not, yet we have the opportunity to know ourselves and all else as Buddha nature.  That’s the invitation and call of the Zen Way.  This is what Dōgen and all the ancients want us to realize. 

Some of our theistic wisdom traditions have their own ways of expressing this.  If you’ll permit me to appropriate a bit of nondual theistic language into our nondual nontheistic Zen context, here’s an example from Christianity.  St. Teresa of Avila, the great 16th century Spanish nun and mystic, said:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ’s compassion to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

The great Austrian poet Rainer Marie Rilke, also using theistic language, expressed the same idea and invitation in one of my favorite poems, with which I’ll close:

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions . . . For the god
wants to know [it]self in you.

Wandering as Path

Jeff

I gave this talk on November 11, 2023, during our Full Moon Zen sesshin. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 98 in The Blue Cliff Record:

While on pilgrimage, Tianping visited Xiyuan. He was always saying, “Don’t say you have understood Buddhism. There is no one who can have a dharma dialogue with me or examine me.”

One day Xiyuan saw him at a distance and called to him, “Come here, Congyi.”

Tianping raised his head.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping went on for two or three steps.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping turned and came closer.

Xiyuan said, “I have just said, ‘Wrong’ twice. Is it I who am wrong, or is it you?”

“It is I.”

“Wrong.” Tianping was silent.

“Stay here for the summer retreat, and I’ll examine this question of two wrongs
with you.” Tianping, however, departed.

Years later, when Tianping became an abbot, he addressed his assembly and said, “Once in my days of pilgrimage, I visited Xiyuan by chance, and he twice said, ‘Wrong.’ He advised me to stay with him for the summer retreat to examine this question of two wrongs with him. I don’t say I was wrong then, but when I left for the South, I realized for the first time that I had finished saying ‘Wrong.’

The Buddhist tradition begins with the story of one person’s wandering. Gautama Siddhartha leaves home and explores the world and himself, engaging in myriad spiritual experiments and enduring many privations, before finding what he was seeking.

This is an unusual origin story. Origin stories serve as anchors. They solve the “turtles all the way down” problem, among other functions. You know the World Turtle myth, right? We wonder, what anchors or supports the Earth, and so our own existence? It and we rest on the flattened back of a giant turtle, according to the World Turtle myth. So what does the turtle rest on? Another turtle, of course. And that turtle? Another turtle. It’s turtles all the way down. Infinite regress.

Many traditions get around the turtle problem by positing an absolute agent that created everything, gave us all the answers in a foundational text, and is the ultimate truth, authority, and judge on all matters temporal and beyond time. One can see how this sort of construct can be comforting and useful, for both individuals and groups, in this realm of existential vulnerability, change, and uncertainty.

Zen, and contemporary Buddhism generally, take a different approach. No turtle? What’s the problem? Or, as the ever quotable, Chogyam Trungpa said, “Existence is like jumping from an airplane. The bad news is you have no parachute. The good news is you discover there is no ground.”

The Buddha’s wandering yields the Eightfold Noble Path, of course, but that’s about our agency, not superhuman agents, and, well, it’s a path without a clear starting point or final destination. We do speak of the Absolute in Zen, but we also say it and the relative—this cushion on which I’m sitting, the cool morning air—are one and the same.

What are we to make of this tale of wandering at the start, and at the heart, of our tradition? What are we to make of the Buddha’s wandering, Tianping’s wandering, and our wandering with them? Spiritual wandering is a time-honored tradition, and some of us will put a lot of energy into it, wandering along many paths and meeting many adapts as we do.

I wandered in this way for many years. I explored several Christian denominations and multiple strands within one of them. I stepped onto the Buddhist path initially through the Tibetan tradition and also Zen Archery understood and taught as meditation. Along the way, I lived in a Quaker intentional community for two years. I later left law practice early on to study comparative religion. There were more twists and turns as I walked the straight road with 99 curves.

And then there’s the wandering we do inside. I’ve begun reading the work of a young philosopher, Zachary Irving at the University of Virginia, who is developing an empirically grounded theory of mind wandering. He works with cognitive scientists to conduct experiments that shed light on what mind wandering is and the functions it serves.

It turns out to be a rather complicated subject. There are many different types of mental activity scholars have labeled mind wandering: We can direct our minds away from the task at hand or our attention can just drift away from it. We can ruminate anxiously on something. We can be lost in thought. We can wander mentally about pursuit of a goal. And so on.

But Irving and his collaborators are homing in on a more precise concept of mind wandering that aligns with how most ordinary people like us think about it: Mind wandering as dynamically unguided attention. Unguided attention that simply shifts as time passes. Attention that isn’t guided, and which also isn’t ruminative, goal directed, or “lost” in the sense of complete absorption in thought.

It turns out that such dynamically unguided thought is associated with creativity; with the development of important types of personal agency; and with the default mode network, a part of our brain scientists still don’t understand fully but which is involved in things like our perception of beauty, feeling connected to others, and construction, maintenance, and dissolution of the boundaries of the self, or our sense of personal identity. Interestingly, scientists have found that meditation causes structural changes in parts of the default mode network.

Our practice of shikantaza sounds a lot like Irving’s notion of mind wandering. In shikantaza, we don’t focus on anything in particular, such as our breath. We gently disengage when we find ourselves ruminating, reasoning, plotting our way toward some goal, or just lost in thought. Dynamically unguided attention seems like an apt description of the state our minds are in much of the time we’re on sesshin.

I should end this meandering talk at some point, so let’s rest where we began.

Years later, when Tianping became an abbot, he addressed his assembly and said,
“Once in my days of pilgrimage, I visited Xiyuan by chance, and he twice said, ‘Wrong.’ He advised me to stay with him for the summer retreat to examine this question of two wrongs with him. I don’t say I was wrong then, but when I left for the South, I realized for the first time that I had finished saying ‘Wrong.’

What does Tianping seem to learn on his pilgrimage?

He seems to learn there’s no place to go. That wherever you go, there you are. That we are as we wander, and that we can wander in place.

He seems to learn he’s the bottom turtle. Or, rather, that he and all else, including the vast space below, above, and all around, together are the bottom turtle.

Some of us do seem to need to wander a bit to make our way home. I say there’s nothing wrong with that.

Encouragement Talk

Jeff

I gave this brief encouragement talk on Friday, November 10th, during a Full Moon Zen sesshin. Our theme was “wandering” and the text we examined is Case 98 in the Blue Cliff Record:

While on pilgrimage, Tianping visited Xiyuan. He was always saying, “Don’t say you have understood Buddhism. There is no one who can have a dharma dialogue with me or examine me.”

One day Xiyuan saw him at a distance and called to him, “Come here, Congyi.”

Tianping raised his head.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping went on for two or three steps.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping turned and came closer.

Xiyuan said, “I have just said, ‘Wrong’ twice. Is it I who am wrong, or is it you?”

“It is I.”

“Wrong.” Tianping was silent.

“Stay here for the summer retreat, and I’ll examine this question of two wrongs
with you.” Tianping, however, departed.

Years later, when Tianping became an abbot, he addressed his assembly and said, “Once in my days of pilgrimage, I visited Xiyuan by chance, and he twice said, ‘Wrong.’ He advised me to stay with him for the summer retreat to examine this question of two wrongs with him. I don’t say I was wrong then, but when I left for the South, I realized for the first time that I had finished saying ‘Wrong.’

Each of us has wandered onto this Zen path somehow, and into this zendo.

We encounter one another as fellow wanderers in a land we once were too certain we knew well.

Now we wander together with not knowing mind.

Where are we going? We don’t know.

What must we do? Eat our rice gruel. Wash our bowls. Chop wood. Carry water. Ring the bell. Bow.

Take good care of one another.

And when the sun has set and the moon has risen, close our eyes, and sleep.

Nothing more is asked or required of us. Nothing more we must do to be worthy of our place in this strange familiar land.

Perhaps there’s a more fundamental way in which the seeker in our koan felt he was wrong. Perhaps the teacher in our koan sensed it. Perhaps that wrong is a sense of existential (even ontological) lack or separation.

Perhaps that sense of lack and separation fuels our twin fears: our fear of death and our fear of life.

Perhaps the teacher’s declaration “wrong” when the wanderer stepped this way, and the teacher’s declaration “wrong” when the wanderer stepped that way, were benevolent nudges—encouragements, invitations for the seeker to know and declare of and for himself, that his existence, that all existence, is not wrong.

Perhaps the teacher wanted to make himself available to the student over the summer to help that message sink in, and also just to enjoy the student’s company.

Perhaps the student declined the invitation because, down deep, the message he’d just received already was beginning to sink in, even if it would take him years to fully realize he was done saying wrong.

Is that sense of lack and separation we yearn to mend wrong?

Could we have the dew laden grass, the birdsong, the falling flower petals, winter frost without out it? Delight in being distinct from these things, and the joy of discovering ourselves one with them, without it?

Perhaps the old teacher’s two wrongs helped make right what never was wrong to begin with.

Happy Dharma Transmission News

Jeff

I gave Dharma transmission (Denbo) to Fran Jindō Ludwig on Saturday, November 4th, having given Fran Preceptor transmission (Denkai) a bit earlier.  Dharma transmission is the process by which one becomes a Zen teacher.

Roshi Kevin Jiun Hunt and Roshi Cindy Kin Ryu Taberner and Zen Master Tan Gong (a guiding teacher of the Providence Zen Center in the Kwan Um school) were present for the Denbo ceremony, as were about 15 members of our sangha.  Two pictures from this happy occasion are attached.

Fran lives in Connecticut and is actively involved in our Full Moon Zen sangha based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Readers of this blog who don’t know Fran can read her personal statement on our website.

May Fran have many more years of Zen service for our benefit and the benefit of all beings!