Author: Jeff

Dancing with Elephants

Jeff

 

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave on February 27, 2014 at the Greater Boston Zen Center.  It’s a reflection on a passage written by Barry Magid about the Bodhisattva precepts in the Zen tradition that we’ve chosen to focus on in our mini, nonresidential version of an Ango retreat.

 

I’ve tracked the work of a very creative social psychologist named Jonathan Haidt for nearly 20 years.  His work strongly influenced my own when I was in graduate school and, later, teaching about transformation of conflicts involving identity dynamics and deeply-held values.

 

Much of Haidt’s early work was on moral psychology.  He’s since contributed to the research and literature on happiness and so-called “positive psychology.”

 

In one strand of Haidt’s research on the psychology of human morals, he created a series of hypotheticals like this.  Fasten your seat-belts:

 

Julie and Mark are brother and sister.  They are traveling together in France one summer vacation from college.  One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach.  They decided that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love.  At very least it would be a new experience for each of them.  Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe.  They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again.  They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them fell closer to each other. 

 

After study participants read this hypothetical, Haidt asks them to respond to two questions:

 

Is this wrong?

 

If so, why?

 

Almost all study participants feel the conduct is wrong.  When asked why, they first say things like:

 

The siblings might conceive, and the child might even have birth defects. 

 

One might pass an STD to the other.

 

Their parents might learn what they’ve done, and they would be crushed.

 

They are too young.

 

There is some element of coercion.

 

This will contort their relationship, altering it for the worse.

 

As you can see, however, Haidt’s hypotheticals are carefully crafted to negate all possible negative consequences.  When Haidt points out to respondents that the consequences they fear cannot occur, many respond in exasperation, “I don’t know why it’s wrong; it just is.”

 

Haidt concludes from this line of his research and others that our morals, and so our perspectives and conduct, are strongly influenced by pre-cognitive reactions – here, disgust – and that we often construct rationales to justify these primary – and primal – reactions after-the-fact.  Our “lower” (or ancient) brain functions decide what is right and wrong, and then our “higher” (newer) brain functions, which enable functions like rational thought and language, “pretty up” the decisions, making them presentable to ourselves and other rational minds.

 

To be sure, Haidt is not trying to justify incest (nor am I), but he is exposing something about how our minds work, and the unseen problems that can flow from this (like discrimination against people who are different than us based upon pre-cognitive reactions).  The problem is that, for many of us, much of the time, our rational minds don’t quite grasp how things are working.

 

Haidt likens the situation to a rider on an elephant.  The elephant lumbers along, going where it will at its own pace, while the rider tugs busily on the reins, believing he is in control.  The rider is a bit like R2D2, constantly jabbering away as his CPU churns, having little influence on what’s happening.

 

Haidt grants that the rider does have an influence, but he believes the default balance of power between elephant and rider is roughly 90% elephant and 10% rider.

 

Haidt’s work on happiness and advice about how to find it draws upon his research on moral psychology and centers around two themes:  recognizing that there is an elephant; and helping rider and elephant get along and work well together.

 

Haidt maintains that the rider can increase its influence appreciably, to the mutual benefit of both rider and elephant.  Much of the trick here is helping the rider understand the elephant.

 

Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and rider reminds me of the koan about an ox trying to pass through an open window (Case 38 in The Gateless Gate):

 

Wuzu Fayan said, “It is like an Ox that passes through a latticed window.  Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through. So, why can’t its tail also pass through?”

 

What is this tail that can’t pass through?  What are we to make of and do with this stuckness?

 

Interestingly, Haidt – who, so far as I know, is not a Buddhist – sees meditation as one of the most valuable ways to improve the relationship between rider and elephant.

 

Our lovely Ango reading from Barry Magid draws our attention to the fact that we are both rider and elephant.  We tend to experience our elephant-ness and rider-ness as oppositional forces.  Rider and elephant engaged in a constant wrestling match.  The rider trying desperately to bring the elephant down, to subdue it.  The better angels of our nature fighting the good fight against our demons.

 

There is something to be said for that perspective on the human condition, and human moral evolution.  I believe there is an arc of human progress – that, despite the atrocities, big and small, that still are occurring everywhere, humanity is more or less continually evolving the capacity to be kinder and gentler, and the world is being transformed for the better as we do.  (Read Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, for 1,000 pages of insightful commentary on an elephantine body of quantitative data that supports this viewpoint.)  I believe that is ultimately what our Zen project is about.

 

Some of this progress no doubt has been achieved by wrestling a few elephants to the ground and restraining them there.  And, yet, we need to honor and thank the elephant for helping us survive to the point that it can be ridden, and for all it contributes to our lives today.

 

Star Trek’s Dr. Spock is all rider, no elephant.  Is that the life we desire?

 

Most of all, we need to see and understand the elephant as best we can.  There is wisdom in our elephant-ness.  The elephant can look clueless and heartless from the rider’s perspective, but that is not the whole story.  As riders, we must straddle our elephants securely as we reach for the stars.

 

The ride can be most gratifying for this elephant-rider duo, this elephant-and-rider one-o, when there is mutual respect between them.

 

Barry Magid shines a light on our elephant-ness and reminds us that true wholeness, that true wisdom, requires an appreciation of how our own and others’ elephant-ness is woven into the fabric of our individual and collective experience.   And how the deepest understanding and fullest, truest embodiment of the precepts demands this appreciation.

 

This definitely comports with my experience in every realm of life: relationships, work, even – and perhaps especially – religion/practice.

 

“We must come to terms with both sides of who we are,” he says.  “Practice will not lead us into a state of harmony by eliminating some aspect of who we are.”

 

If and as we seek peace with our elephants, we just might find that our elephants become more receptive and responsive to our wizened riders – though I would note, as I’m sure Barry Magid himself would, that practice won’t necessarily lead us into a constant state of harmony even if we embrace all aspects of who we are – or, rather, it may eventually awaken us to the harmony that’s always been there, but it won’t necessarily always feel pacific.

 

I’ll close with the lovely Mary Oliver poem titled Wild Geese:

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Remembering Mandela

Jeff

I never met Nelson Mandela, which I regret, because that probably would have been possible even just a few years ago. Mandela was one of the five Nobel Peace Laureates who gave the Peace Appeal Foundation its original mandate. That was late-1999/early-2000.

I became involved in late-2000, when Hannes Siebert, who served in the South African Peace Secretariat under Mandela, and was the driving force behind formation of the Peace Appeal, walked into our office at Groove Networks to request help tuning the product to his needs as the new external advisor to stakeholders in the peace process in Sri Lanka. After we sold Groove to Microsoft in 2005, I joined the Peace Appeal’s board.

We could have traveled to South Africa years earlier, when Mandela was in better health. It wasn’t possible to see him when we were there this March. He was too frail.

The Peace Appeal Foundation is a small part of Mandela’s legacy. He has certainly touched and influenced my life by helping launch it. I have heard Hannes say that he has devoted his life to Mandela and his legacy by committing himself completely to conflict resolution work (at considerable personal cost, in his case, I would add).

We sent a reflection on Mandela’s life to our supporters via email (copied below) and devoted our homepage to him.

The Power of Forgiveness:
Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Nelson Mandela

By Shirley Moulder and Derek Brown

A generation from now when parents, teachers, politicians and others seek to describe moral courage and distinguished leadership, there will be one person from their lifetimes whose name will rise to their lips: Nelson Mandela. There are very few true global heroes; Mandela was one.

Though millions across the globe have been awed and inspired by a man who chose reconciliation over revenge, moral leadership over personal gain, and justice over tyranny, Mandela was first and foremost a South African, whose dedication to his country has only been matched by his countrymen’s reverence and dedication to him.

In 1990, upon his release after 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela gave a speech in Cape Town demonstrating the qualities that would cement his reputation. He concluded his speech with the same words which he spoke at his own trial in 1964:

“I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Mandela thankfully lived, leading his country in one of the 20th century’s most profound political transformations. In the process he has become an icon to much of the world for his statesmanship, his dignity, his tolerance and ability to forgive, and his commitment to non-violent political change.

His status as a global hero is all the more remarkable in our media obsessed age, where leaders are subject to intense scrutiny of their personal lives, not just their political careers. No statesman or woman today has enjoyed the near uniformity of approval which was bestowed on Mandela.

Despite this seemingly heavy burden of respect, Mandela wore the label of hero lightly. He took the limelight when it was necessary, but was happiest when stepping back to let others take the lead. He often described himself as just “a country boy.” Those who worked with him spoke of his ability to identify what was needed and to pursue it with single minded determination. In his post-presidential years, he was a tireless advocate for children’s education, devoting much of his time to raising funds for new schools and education programs throughout South Africa and the world.

The most important legacy of Nelson Mandela, in his life as well as in his death, may well be his remarkable ability to bring parties of all persuasions together, ultimately transcending the deepest divisions, suspicions and even hatred – a skill which only grows in importance in our world.

His cohort of political activists, many of whom were defendants with him at the time of the Rivonia Trial in 1964, represented a multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-religious panoply of South Africa; black, white, Asian, Xhosa, Zulu, Jewish, Muslim, Christian. Following his release from jail, this cohort was transformed into a remarkable coalition that included representatives of the government which imprisoned him – a coalition that brought a post-apartheid, democratic South Africa into being.

Mandela’s ability to work across political divides in South Africa would have warranted him a special place in history by itself. Yet it was his extraordinary ability to inspire and connect with people that vaulted him into the rarest pantheon of global statesmen and women. One of his many acts of political genius and moral leadership was portrayed in the movie “Invictus.” When racial divisions still threatened the dream of a united South Africa, Mandela donned the captain’s jersey of the South Africa’s newly minted world champion Springboks rugby team, and walked onto the field post-game – amidst thousands of white fans, many waving the nationalist flag of 1928 – to present the trophy to the team. With this simple act, he managed to win over millions of skeptical white South Africans to the cause of a new, multi-racial and democratic South Africa.

Even in these past months of his declining health, he brought unity amid diversity in his nation. Across South Africa, from the Johannesburg to Mandela’s ancestral home community of Qunu in the Eastern Cape, people have publicly honored the man many call “Madiba” (his ancestral clan name), or simply “Tata” or father. In the all-white Afrikaner community of Orania in South Africa’s Northern Cape province (home until her death of Betsie Verwoed, widow the former Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoed who was architect of the apartheid system), the community began praying for Mandela daily this past summer.

The collective reverence that has gripped most of South Africa these past months, and indeed much of the world, comes at a time when tremendous political divisions threaten to divide the country. (Less than 12 months ago, the cover of the Economist magazine featured South Africa with the cautionary heading “Cry, the beloved country” raising questions about South Africa’s political and economic leadership). These challenges serve as a reminder that the South African national journey will be an ongoing project as it seeks to fulfill the vision that Mandela so tirelessly pursued.

The highest honor we can pay this extraordinary man, whether we are citizens of South Africa, the United States or elsewhere in our world, is to renew a commitment to his vision of democratic and free societies in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. Let Mandela’s dream live on.

The authors, based in Johannesburg and Charlottesville, Virginia, are board members of the Peace Appeal Foundation, founded in 1999 with the support of five Nobel Peace Laureates, including Nelson Mandela,
F.W. de Klerk and Desmond Tutu.

Healing Myself

Jeff

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave at the Greater Boston Zen Center on Tuesday, November 12, 2013.

 

Healing myself and others, I vow to save all beings.

— from the Bodhisattva Precepts (BoWZ shorter version)

 

 

 

Sometimes a word or phrase will jump out at me as we chant or recite it during the liturgical portion of our service.  One word or phrase seems elevated above the rest, like a sonic bubble bursting through the surface of awareness.

 

This happened recently when we were reciting the shorter version of the Bodhisattva Precepts.  The phrase “healing myself” leaped out.

 

“Healing myself and others, I vow to save all beings.”

 

I’ve held this phrase as a little koan during the weeks since.  As a pebble in my palm.

 

How is it that we heal ourselves by vowing and working to save others?  How is it that we save others as we do this?

 

It seems fair to say that we’re conditioned to think of ourselves as separate beings, and that this gives rise to a fair amount of psychological (and, by extension, possible physical) suffering.

 

There no doubt are many practical benefits – physical, psychic and social – that flow from a strong self-sense.  We are embodied in a realm in which all is constantly in flux – where things, including us, come into being, cease to exist, and change states between those two moments.  Where we inevitably experience harm and loss between our coming into being and our ceasing to exist.  We’re no doubt programmed for protection of the skin bag that we are during this brief life, and this self-sense seems to be part of that program.

 

This program is only part of the picture, however, and yet it tends to monopolize our attention.  For many of us, it is the overwhelmingly dominant perspective.

 

Despite the fact that many Asian cultures are considered to be, and likely are, more communally-oriented than US and European cultures, this sense of psychic, even cosmic, isolation seems to be a pervasive feature of human experience.  Buddhism, with its many forms of antidote to this experience – its many ways to help us open our eyes, minds, hearts, arms and hands to the reality that we are and always have been thoroughly part of it all – arose from and has thrived in the cultures of Asia, after all.

 

In reality, though we are distinct, we are not separate.

 

The kind of suffering that the Buddha, and all teachers that have followed him, experienced and diagnosed and developed an approach to alleviating is the suffering we experience when we don’t genuinely feel – don’t know in our bones, know beyond knowing – that we are truly part of it all.

 

All in.

 

One common dictionary definition of the word “heal” is to “make whole.” I heal myself as I become whole.

 

From the Buddhist perspective, whole really means everything – the whole universe, the whole shebang.  From the farthest reaches of space-time to the poodle in your lap.  The stuff we understand and the stuff we may never understand conceptually, but which we stand under and stand in and embody, whether or not we’re capable of wrapping our minds around it.

 

All right here.  All me.

Sure, we can’t both ride that bike at the same time.  We have to develop wise and compassionate norms about how to produce and allocate and consume resources, and we have to develop wise and compassionate norms about treatment of beings in all the ways we are distinct in our not-separateness.

This is all part of what it means to be whole, personally and collectively.

But the not-separate orientation seems to be harder for many of us than managing our distinctiveness, our individual existence (hard as that is).

 

Zen has many resources for helping us realize and lean into our not-separateness, among them:  zazen, in which we practice just being here, nothing more, nothing less; the teachings; our liturgy, in which we move together and become a chorus; koan practice, in which we join with a teacher and the many teachers of old to discover something for ourselves, and for all beings, in one of the lovely, often quirky stories that have been preserved and passed to us; and service opportunities.

 

So how does all this heal each of us and heal others?

 

As I age, and as I continue to sink into Zen practice and let it sink into me, I feel more and more insignificant, I must say.

 

What a relief!

 

Imagining ourselves as somehow capable of standing outside of or above it all, looking for that place or believing you’ve found it – well, that’s a very fragile way to go through life.

 

On an individual level, we’re healed by coming to know we’re in the soup.  We’re part of this whole mess, this whole beautiful, wondrous mess.  By aligning our perspective, our plans, and our actions with that reality.

 

And, yes, others are saved in the process.

 

This notion of saving others used to grate on me somewhat.  In this culture, notions of religious salvation and efforts to save others smacks of proselytizing in order to save others from the devil in this life and beyond.  It also can sound filled with hubris, like “Here I come!  Zen Superman to the rescue of all of humanity!”

 

But there are more nuanced ways to think about how our practice may be saving others:

 

Saved from our delusions that cast others as characters in our own private dramas.

 

Saved from the tendency to view and treat people instrumentally if we unconsciously or consciously, subtly or not-so-subtly regard ourselves as masters of the universe, rather than part of the chorus that is the universe.

 

Saved from what happens when we check out:  loss of the contributions we’re capable of making.

 

Saved by the reduction in harmful conduct that tends to come with orienting our lives in accordance with the realization that we are part of it all.

 

Saved by the generosity and compassion and skillful service that can flow from that orientation.

 

I now see this notion of healing – of wholeness and integration – as a key to understanding and living all of the precepts.  Each of the other precepts offers a specific perspective on and guidance in what it means to be healed and whole in a particular domain of life.

 

We are here, in this zendo now, to heal ourselves and one another.  To enact and honor our wholeness.

 

Our inescapable wholeness.

 

It’s lovely to be here with you, to be part of it all with you.

 

 

A koan about religious tolerance (or is it?)

Jeff

 

About a year ago, we changed the way we work with koans in BoWZ.  Rather than skipping over koans that appear again in later collections, a student now must work with them multiple times.

 

I’m currently working with Case 65 in the Blue Cliff Record.  In John Tarrant’s and Joan Sutherland’s as-yet unpublished translation of the BCR, which James Ford shared with me, the koan is titled “A Philosopher Questions the Buddha.”  This koan appears earlier in our progression as case 32 in The Gateless Gate.

 

Here it is:

 

An outsider asked the World-Honored One, “I do not ask for the spoken; I do not ask for the unspoken.” The World-Honored One just sat still. The outsider praised him, saying, “The World-Honored One with his great compassion and mercy has opened the clouds of my delusion and enabled me to enter the Way.” He then made bows and took his leave.

 

Ananda asked, “What did that outsider realize to make him praise you?”

 

The World-Honored One said, “He is like the fine horse who runs even at the shadow of a whip.”

 

This koan is very interesting to me at the moment for two reasons.

 

First, having passed through it quickly before, I stumbled on it this time.  I read it the morning I expected to present it to Josh in dokusan, then again that evening, just before we began to sit.  In other words, I hadn’t really stepped into it – entered it, and allowed it to enter me – and so my presentation of it in dokuan was off-the-mark, and I didn’t pass through it.

 

This is a really good reminder that we do not realize something unless we realize it in the moment, even if we’ve realized it before.

 

This is one way in which we can see the wisdom of working with a koan multiple times.

 

Second, this is a powerful, early example of religious tolerance in Buddhism.  I’m not sure this feature of the koan really hit me the first time around – and so we see another way in which there’s wisdom in working with a koan multiple times.

 

The World-Honored One is the historical Buddha, of course.  Ananda was one of the Buddha’s most senior and respected followers.  The Zen tradition regards him as the second Indian patriarch, just one step removed from the Buddha in the (at some points likely mythological) line of transmission that includes all living and departed Zen teachers.

 

The outsider in this koan was not a follower of the Buddha, not part of the clan.  In another translation, the koan is titled “A Hindu Questions the Buddha.”  Perhaps this “outsider” stood within the major religious stream within India then, as now.

 

This outsider clearly gets it, and Ananda, one of the Buddha’s most senior disciples, clearly doesn’t.  (Ananda apparently came to his realization very late in life, but he was revered for his big heart and incredible memory.  He is credited with preservation of many of the Buddha’s key teachings.)  The fact that an “outsider” gets it is clearly fine from the Buddha’s perspective.  In yet another translation, the Buddha is said to have been “respectful for a long time” after this man’s opening remark.

 

(What does the outsider realize?  We all need to realize that for ourselves, of course.)

 

This case seems to me to be making a point about religion and religious boundaries, in addition to other points it’s making.  This is the purpose of identifying the Buddha’s interlocutor as an outsider (or a Hindu).  Otherwise, why not just start the koan “A man asked the World-Honored One . . .”?

 

Note that there’s a fourth character in this koan, the narrator (and a fifth, you or me).

 

The narrator ushers us into “insider vs. outsider” mode almost imperceptibly.  It’s so seemingly natural to label people according to their traits, views, and social groups.

 

But is this really a koan about religious tolerance?

 

The Buddha doesn’t seem to see this guy through a “my religion, your religion” lens, as the narrator of the koan apparently does (or else playfully entices us to do).

 

Jesus was not the first Christian, as they say, and here we seem to be seeing that the Buddha was not the first Buddhist.

 

For the Buddha, this apparently was just an encounter with another human being who saw what he saw.

 

No religion here, and so no religious tolerance either, one could say.

 

Just a genuine encounter.  Presence.

 

Appreciation without labels.

 

Appreciation whatever the labels.

 

Don’t Separate from this Skin-Bag Here and Now

Jeff

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave last night at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

 

These are the final lines of Shitou Xiqian’s lovely poem, Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage, which is sometimes part of our liturgy:

 

If you want to know the undying person in the hut,

don’t separate from this skin-bag here and now.

 

Many of us come to Zen practice with this nagging sense that there must be more to life than this.  There must be more to me than this.

 

There’s something missing.

 

And so we go looking for it.  The undying person in the hut.

 

“Dukkha,” the key word in the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths, is typically translated into English as “suffering.”

 

But it’s apparently a richly nuanced word in Pali, and the physical suffering caused by hunger or a broken bone doesn’t capture its full meaning.

 

It includes this sense of uneasiness about who we are and about this life we’re living.

 

Somehow this isn’t the real deal, the whole story, we feel.

 

It seems quite significant to me that Siddhartha Gautama chose to call attention to the fact that we have this sense of something being amiss as the first point in his first public, spoken sermon.

 

That the first thing he wants to say to us is that we should take note of and investigate this sense of uneasiness.

 

This sense of absence is so present for many of us.  It drives so much of our thought, speech and action.

 

And yet many of us never truly get close to it, get to know it.  We push it away, and so it pushes us around.

 

It seems the human heart and psyche, like nature, abhor a vacuum, real or perceived.

 

So we try to fill the vacuum.

 

Taking up the Zen path can be great way to begin to get up close and personal with this uneasiness.

 

And we also may use it to fill the vacuum for a while.

 

Much earnest practice.

 

Much reading.

 

Much speculation.

 

All with a goal in mind.

 

Much searching for a way out of our discomfort, a way into an imagined better state.

 

Like the historical Buddha before him, Shitou Xiqian is telling us in his lovely poem that this sense of something amiss might itself be a fertile place to begin to look for that which fills the void we perceive.

 

The undying person we seek is no other than this skin-bag that’s looking for the undying person.

 

The skin-bag having this experience of something missing is the path, Shitou tells us, and here and now is the entry point, the trailhead.

 

He tells us not to separate from this skin-bag, which obviously implies that this is what we’re often trying to do.

 

This practice ultimately is about inhabiting this skin-bag.

 

Becoming at home in our own skin.

 

This includes our greed, anger and ignorance.  Getting to know them; seeing how they arise for us.

 

Our aversions.

 

Our anxieties.

 

Our rough edges.

 

Even the really uncomfortable stuff.

 

Biases we discern in our thoughts, words, and actions.

 

The things we’ve said or done in the past that we just know have royally and irreversibly screwed up our lives.

 

Our bodily characteristics, and limitations.  Let’s not neglect the fact that this skin-bag is a body.

 

All the stuff we try to separate from.

 

All of it, opportunities.

 

Invitations.

 

Dharma gates.

 

Opportunities for growth, perhaps.

 

Invitations to work compassionately to right a wrong, perhaps.

 

Gates into new territory; the sense of absence a gate into a deepened sense of presence, perhaps.

 

I have long been haunted and inspired and called by a line at the end of another favorite poem, this one by the romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke.  You can take or leave the theistic perspective.

 

Rilke’s poem ends:

 

For the god wants to know himself in you.

 

What if it’s true?

 

What if what you’re experiencing right now, and this week, and in this life, truly is god’s gift to the world, so to speak, and the world’s gift to you?

 

Not in some grandiose sense, but in the sense that your life is just as it should be – which is to say, the only way it can be, which is just as it actually is right now.

 

That feeling of absence a part of it, and a prompt, perhaps, an invitation.

 

What if the universe really does want to know itself in you?

 

Will you let it?

 

How might we meet this moment from that orientation?

 

How might we meet others as the universe wanting to know itself in them, too?

 

Form is Emptiness and Other Stories We Tell Ourselves

Jeff

 

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave on Saturday, August 3, 2013, at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

 

“Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.”

From the Heart Sutra

There is a risk in any religion that we’ll get lost in ideas and lose contact with the rest of life — that our ideas about our practice, the nature of reality or whatever may become a barrier to really experiencing life fully and vulnerably as it arises from moment to moment.

 

Meister Eckhart, the 14th century Christian mystic, famously said, “Pray God that we may lose God for the sake of finding God.”

 

Eckhart clearly understood that our ideas about what we’re seeking can get in the way of actually finding what we’re seeking.

 

There’s a way in which Zen is all about imploding conceptual barriers.

 

Within BoWZ, I think we’re pretty good at not approaching Zen as a thing, as a philosophy.  We’re pretty good at practicing Zen in a way that helps us lose Zen for the sake of finding life — or, better yet, at practicing Zen as nothing that needs to be lost, because Zen practice and the rest of life are synonymous in a way that enhances our experience of all of it.

 

Still, we have our concepts, sparse and spare as they may be, and so there is some risk of getting lost in them, of thinking they sum it all up.

 

The concept that’s most central to this Zen project is expressed in the Heart Sutra as the unity of form and emptiness.

 

Form is exactly emptiness.  Emptiness, exactly form.

 

We often express this same notion as the unity of the Relative and the Absolute.

 

Personally, I find this way of thinking about things very compelling as notions go.

 

It’s a good story, in part, because it’s a simple story, yet one that resists oversimplification.

 

For me, it’s also a good story, because it seems to comport with my experience.

 

There’s this particular perspective from which all phonomena, including oneself, seem distinct.  And there’s this perspective from which things seem unitary, seem as one.

 

One angle sometimes can predominate, and sometimes intensely so.

 

There may be times in our lives when we feel intensely separate, intensely isolated; in moments of great physical or emotional pain, for example.

 

And we may have experiences — in sports, dancing, on a sailboat, in the wilderness, drawing or painting, on the cushion — when we feel utterly lost in it all, as if there were no I, no me.

 

And then there’s this angle from which we may experience ourselves and all else in a both-and sort of way.  As distinct-and-not-separate.

 

James Ford often points to the shifting nature of our experience, of our perspective.

 

Sometimes this perspective.

 

Sometimes that.

 

Sometimes both.

 

Sometimes neither.

 

In this pointing we can see that form and emptiness aren’t things.

 

In fact, these terms and the relationship between them are catnip for the this-and-thating part of our mind that tends to get in the driver’s seat, assume our subject position without us noticing, and so to dominate our awareness.

 

Then it starts spinning stories.

 

This is good.

 

That’s bad.

 

I want more of this.

 

Less of that.

 

If you tend to relate to the relative and absolute as ideas when you hear those words used in our liturgy, or in a book, or in a Dharma talk like this one – if you tend to think there’s a philosophy or a grand cosmic conceptual framework embodied in those words – then I encourage you to encounter them in a spirit of playfulness instead.

 

As philosophy, these words really are pretty slippery.

 

But, perhaps we can let them be slippery like a slide.

 

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

 

We humans are storytellers.  It seems to be in our nature, and allowing ourselves to get lost in tall tales can be immensely captivating.

 

I’m rather partial to a good spy story myself.

 

Yet we can become too captive to these captivating stories, perhaps especially the most functional ones, the best ones.

 

The real deal is what’s unfolding right here, now.

 

We may tell stories about it, and we may filter it through our stories, but it’s not a story.

 

It can’t be held captive by us, and if we know we’re grounded in it, and are it, we’re set free.

 

Bounded and free.

 

Form and emptiness, the relative and the absolute, the divisible and the indivisible, the divisible within and as the indivisible:  this is a powerful story, and it captures something that serves as both challenge and invitation to our critical faculties.  One dimension of who we are — this bicameral brain of ours — seems to crave these this-and-that stories.

 

It actually manufactures these stories it craves.  Usefully manufactures them, so long as we can see them as stories, and not let them dictate our actions (though we sometimes may choose to act according to script).

 

I personally find the spare, playful story that’s central to our Zen tradition more compelling, and more comprehensible, and more comprehensive, than the much longer and much more elaborate metaphysical narratives of some other religious traditions.

 

But only if I relate to it playfully.

 

Our ideas, however appealing, and however effective as pointers, are cheap substitutes for the personal experience of really touching life with our whole being.

 

To my thinking, Zen is simply about cultivating our capacity for whole-being touching.

 

Helping us touch, moment by moment, what’s always right before us.

 

And perhaps progressively bringing our personal — and, ultimately, I do hope — collective stories and ideas more in line with what we see and learn and feel from that touching.

 

Honoring our best stories and ideas, while holding them very lightly.

 

When can I stop sitting?

Jeff

 

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave on Tuesday, July 9, 2013, at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

 

I was semi-obsessed with the following question for a while after I began to get serious about sitting 20+ years ago:

 

Will there come a point when I don’t need to sit anymore?

 

I would ask this question of any teacher or senior practitioner who would listen.

 

Mostly I didn’t get the answer I wanted, and so I kept seeking it.

 

Finally, someone to whom I had posed my question once or twice, and who had previously just shrugged it off, said, “Sure.  Of course, there will come a time when you don’t need to sit anymore.”

 

Silly as it seems now, this somehow satisfied me, and I let go of the question.

 

Now I imagine her walking away, muttering inaudibly, “Yeah, like, when you die.”

 

My question was about the point of sitting, of course, and it assumed some ultimate goal.  Some end state, or some big “crossing the chasm” moment, at which one’s work is done, and further practice is unnecessary.

 

One can be forgiven for asking a question like this, and for holding these assumptions.

 

We are conditioned to think in functional, goal-oriented terms, at least in US culture.

 

Some Buddhist teachings even seem to invite this.

 

The Zen literature is full of stories of big awakenings, real through-the-looking glass moments when one suddenly becomes enlightened and the mysteries of the universe, and of the human heart, are seemingly resolved once and for all.

 

And the traditional literature seems to represent these big, ah-ha moments as the gold standard in Zen practice.

 

There’s also the parable in which the Buddha is said to ask whether, having crossed a river on a raft, one should then carry the raft on his back indefinitely.

 

The raft is a metaphor for spiritual practice, like sitting, of course.

 

Putting these teachings together, one could be forgiven for thinking:

 

I sit.  I get enlightened.  I stop sitting.

 

Results guaranteed.  Timing may vary.

 

I was thinking about this chapter in my own journey the other day, and I found myself asking that old question anew.

 

In what sense do we need to sit?

 

Three responses that ring true to me sprung to mind.

 

The first response:  We don’t need to sit.

 

There ultimately is no salvation in sitting.  There is no ultimate salvation in sitting.

 

Why?

 

Because we’re already saved.  Or, better yet, no saving required.

 

There’s never been any point in which we have been separate from all this – from the universe, seen and unseen.

 

Never any point at which we’ve been lost in any cosmic or existential sense, and therefore in need of saving.

 

No cosmic well we’ve fallen down, unnoticed.  No corner of the cosmos that has broken off and drifted away with us on it.

 

Sitting and other spiritual disciplines can’t do a thing to help us recover what was never lost in the first place.

 

Zilch.

 

Nada.

 

And so, from this perspective, there’s absolutely no need to sit.

 

And, yet, nagging doubt and insecurity about whether this is so brings many of us to this practice.

 

As Melissa Blacker recently said to me, “The great insight of the Mahayana tradition is that each of us is a Buddha, and the great irony is that many of us don’t experience life this way.  Each of us must discover this for him- or herself.”

 

Sitting and other time-tested practices, like koan work, can help initiate us into a mode of perpetual practice, transforming this doubt, and help us discover and come to terms with who we are in the process.

 

Sitting can help dissolve the illusion of separateness that is the source of so much personal and collective suffering, helping us see that we are distinct, but not separate.

 

The second response:  We can never stop sitting, so long as we are physically and mentally capable.

 

As we increasingly realize the fact of our not-separateness, we develop the capacity to respond to life out of this not-separate perspective.

 

Sitting, and the noticing we do while sitting, progressively helps to open up a space between stimulus and response when we are off the cushion.  A space in which the better angels of our nature may be summoned forth, and have a fighting chance among our demons.

 

So, there are ethical implications to sitting.

 

Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative, one formulation of which is that we should treat others as ends in themselves, not means to our own fulfillment, is pretty hard to observe as long as we’re overly-identified with the small “i” that’s a slave to its impulses which manifest greed, anger and ignorance.  As long as the compulsive, reactive, craving “i” dominates our subject position, all else necessarily is object, and life feels like an existential struggle.

 

In my experience, sitting and other Zen practices do help put this little “i” perspective in perspective.  Not yanking it out like a weed – as if that were possible, or even desirable – but helping one come to see it as a feature of who we are, rather than being captive to it the subject element of our consciousness.

 

I recently heard a piece on NPR about some academic psychologists who studied the capacity of inner city kids to experience this space between stimulus and response.

 

In the lab, they put two kids together, gave one a ball, and told the other that the goal of the exercise was to obtain the ball.

 

They did this with hundreds of kids, and all of them tried to grab the ball out of the other kid’s hand.  This provoked a hostile reaction, and few who tried got the ball.

 

The researchers did the same thing with another large group of kids, but this time they told the kid whose job it was to get the ball that one way to get it was to ask for it.  Most asked, and most of the other kids happily offered up the ball.

 

Based upon this research, the scholars started a program in several inner city neighborhoods to teach kids basic cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.  CBT is about learning to insert a mental break between a trigger event and one’s response.

 

The communities in which this program was introduced experienced a 40% reduction in violent crime, including the murder rate, compared to control communities where there was no such program.

 

Pretty cool.  Big moral progress.

 

But here’s the thing:  A year after the program ended, crime was back up to where it had been before the program was introduced.

 

We are conditioned by eons of evolution in a “tooth and claw” environment.

 

We likely have limbic system set points for fight or flight behavior.

 

Our higher brain capacities have some margin to dampen or override this conditioning, but it takes effort and vigilance.

 

Not unlike CBT, meditation can help, I think.

 

If one were to stop meditating, would one’s “response space” diminish?

 

I don’t know.  I suspect it depends somewhat on the individual.

 

For my part, I do think I’m as or more subject than most to what I experience as a law of mental entropy – a tendency to revert to “lower order” mental functions and behaviors – when my commitment to practice wanes.  I’ve noticed this during the couple of extended periods when I’ve sat much less regularly than I ordinarily do.

 

The third response (which feels like my primary reason for sitting and embracing other Zen forms these days):  Sitting is simply a loving, reverent response to life.

 

It’s an organically arising, expressive of sort of thing.  I suppose it’s a poetic thing.

 

Sitting just feels to me like a lovely response to the call of life.

 

And my call to life.

 

Just life.

 

Just sitting.

 

No, really, just sitting.

 

(The other day my daughter, who is nearly five, walked into the room when I was meditating.  “What is meditation, Daddy?” she asked.  “Just sitting,” I said.  “Oh, I thought so,” she replied, and then left.)

 

So, when can I stop sitting?

 

Well, for me, there are three answers from this vantage point:

 

I can stop right now, because there was never any need to sit in the first place.

 

I should sit until I can’t sit anymore, if I want to continue to summons forth the better angels of my own and others’ nature, and to give them a fighting chance.

 

And, finally, why would I stop sitting?

 

Or, to borrow from that lovely Christian hymn:

 

My life flows on in endless song . . .

 

How can I keep from singing?

 

I can’t carry a tune in a paper bag, so for me it’s:

 

My life flows on in endless song . . .

 

How can I keep from sitting?

 

 

Postscript:

 

Our Dharma talks at the Greater Boston Zen Center are increasingly becoming duets.  After I concluded this talk, Josh Bartok offered a lovely “coda,” as he called it.

 

One point Josh made is that we ought not to confuse sitting with practice.  They can (and hopefully do) merge into one another as we sit, yet we sit (and do koan work, etc.) to cultivate that practice spirit and capacity that we then express in all else we do.  And we cultivate that practice spirit and capacity in all else we do, and then bring it to our sitting (and koan work, etc.).

 

Indeed.

Patience, donkey, patience

Jeff

I think one goal of koan practice — part of the logic — is to exhaust that seeking part of us that brings one to koan practice in the first place.

 

This certainly seems true of much of the long mid-section in the Harada-Yasutani curriculum we embrace, which includes the Blue Cliff Record.

 

I mean, there are just so many koans. It’s bound to take many years to pass through them all, even if one proceeds relatively “quickly.”

 

One does sort of get the hang of it after a while.

 

And, fundamentally, all of these many koans teach the same thing – point to that same, always different thing.

 

This.

 

Just this.

 

This overflowing.

 

There’s this old joke my dad told me when I was a kid.  I recently told it to my seven-year old son when he was getting antsy about something.

 

A sage is riding his donkey from one village to the next.

 

The donkey, growing weary, asks, “When will we be there?”

 

The man replies, “Patience, donkey, patience.”

 

(Actually, my dad, who is – shall we say – a bit rough around the edges, used “jackass” instead of “donkey.”  I rather prefer it that way, but my seven-year old wouldn’t have heard anything else if I’d said jackass.)

 

This goes on and on.

 

“How much longer,” asks the donkey.

 

“Patience, donkey, patience.”

 

On and on.

 

Eventually my son interrupts.  Smiling, because he sort of gets the point by now, he asks, “When is this joke going to end?”

 

I reply, of course, “Patience, donkey, patience.”

 

With each koan we encounter, it’s as if the universe is saying, “Same answer.  Right here.  Why do you keep looking for something else?  Something more.”

 

Just this, donkey.

 

Just this.

 

And if and as one progressively opens to this, well, yes, openings . . .

 

Every koan . . .

 

Every moment . . .

 

What’s your hurry?

 

Why not settle in – settle into this practice, to this life – and stay a while?

 

There’s no place to go after all.