Category: Beyond Belief

No Self

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Zazenkai on September 13, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 19 in The Gateless Gate:

Chao-chou asked Nan-ch’üan, “What is the Tao?”

Nan-ch’üan said, “Ordinary Mind is the Tao.”

Chao-chou asked, “Should I try to direct myself toward it?”

Nan-ch’üan said, “If you try to direct yourself you betray your own practice.”

Chao-chou asked, “How can I know the Tao if I don’t direct myself?”

Nan-ch’üan said, “The Tao is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine Tao, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation?”

With these words, Chao-chou had sudden realization.

The notion of no self is one of the most perplexing teachings of Buddhism to many people. You and I are so obviously here together, so what could it possibly mean? 

Most humans seem to consider themselves rather reflexively to be separate beings. Beings that function and, in some sense, exist independently of other beings and things.

If we think about this for a nanosecond, however, it becomes obvious that we’re not independent at all. We’re interdependent. We depend upon clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and nourishing food to eat. We depend upon other people to help meet needs we cannot meet alone, from healthcare to being and feeling safe and loved. If we had been neglected by others for too long as infants, we would not be together now.

So, we’re definitely not physically independent or separable from our environment and social sphere. Yet, even knowing this, we continue to think of ourselves as having or being a separate self. This perspective, or mental formation, is a default setting in the human operating system. It seems so obviously true that most of us don’t even question it. In fact, we organize everything from most religious thought about this life and what may follow it, to human rights law, to our approaches to therapy around the idea that we’re separate selves and some theory of that self. The notion of separate, solid, possibly eternal selves is baked into our language and almost everything else in our culture. These days, in this part of the world and elsewhere, selves are elevated, amplified, and glorified. 

But Buddhism, and certainly Zen Buddhism, questions this default perspective or setting. It even pins much of our personal and collective suffering on it. How and why would it question what seems and feels so intuitively, obviously true to so many of us? Is there substance to this mental formation we call the self? If we go looking for it, can we find a self and fix its boundaries in time and space?

Let’s take a moment to try. Please, just close your eyes and settle in for a moment. Please look for yourself in, or apart from, this physical form we know is dependent upon the air you’ll be breathing and the food you ingested this morning. Can you find the self?

Okay. Let’s return. Did you find it? [Discussion]

If we can’t find a substantial, essential, surely eternal self, what’s the alternative? Does our inability to define the parameters of a durable, persistent, separate and separable self lead us to nihilism? No, that’s not the Buddhist view either. 

The Buddhist view is that we tend to think of ourselves as nouns, when, in fact, we are more like verbs. We are activity. Interdependently arising, interconnected activity. We are not a thing; we are experience itself.

Buddhism says our existence, our experience, has three key characteristics, or “marks”: impermanence, no self (or insubstantiality), and suffering. Each one seems to follow from the next. 

We are born into a realm that is constantly changing. Birth is change! We are change and we are vulnerable to the very change that we are; within which we exist. This sense of self with which we come equipped is useful. Would I eat, socialize, and do other things necessary to sustain myself if I didn’t think I had a self to take care of? 

But, as we’ve seen, we tend to objectify, solidify, and cling to this sense of self more strongly than is justified. We expect or want it to exist unchangingly, permanently, apart from the ever-changing stream of activity in which we exist.

And our resistance to accepting the fact that the first mark of existence, impermanence (or perpetual change), also applies to oneself—in other words, our resistance to the second mark of existence, no self—leads to the third mark of existence: we suffer. 

We see this suffering all around us, don’t we? Especially in this time and place in which we each of us feels compelled to precisely define, and refine, and project “who I am,” distinctively and essentially. We suffer if we don’t feel sufficiently recognized for our distinctiveness. We suffer even among companions who recognize one another’s distinctiveness. We suffer as groups that regard themselves as distinctive square off against other groups who see their respective forms of distinctiveness as opposed, and perhaps even as negating one another.

Buddhism invites us to examine and see through the illusion of ontological separateness. To hold our “selves” and other “selves” with a light, loving touch.

If we regard ourselves and others as activity, as experience itself, our perspective on life, and how to conduct our lives, shifts. We become much less focused on objects (nouns) we can have or avoid, and much more focused on improving the quality of our shared experience; the interconnected activity that we are manifesting right here and now. And now. And now. And now.

The contemporary Zen teacher Yamada Koun Roshi, said, “The practice of Zen is the perfection of character.” If there is no self to perfect, then what are we perfecting through Zen practice?

Activity. Experience. The quality of our shared, interdependently co-arising experience.

Machs gute. We want to “make it good,” as the Germans say.

This activity is as vast and boundless as outer space. Let’s make it good. Together. 

Together, because there is no such thing as apart.

Even This Perishes

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 55 in The Blue Cliff Record:

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly

destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other.”

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

Sleep. Morning dew. The chill in the air. Feeling happy. Feeling sad. This day. Tomorrow. This life. All life.

Impermanence is a core tenet of Buddhism. Why? Because it’s observably true. How can we deny the reality of change?

Another core tenet of Buddhism is that our default mode is to resist the reality of change. We cling to whatever evokes pleasurable feelings. We’re averse to whatever threatens to take away pleasurable feelings. We remain willfully ignorant to the reality of impermanence; to our inability to avoid change.

This koan probes the furthest reaches of Zen Buddhist notions of impermanence. The monk accepts that the morning dew, and even our whole universe, will vanish. But what about this?

We Zen types are always point to this. Just this. But what is this? Is this permanent?

No, the Dasui says. Even this perishes. It perishes with the tea and the teapot. With the moon and the stars.

As usual, the answer to the koan is in the question. The monk divides the world into this and that. Destroyed and not destroyed. 

And, as usual, the question is about oneself. The monk has some insight into the Great Matter. He’s seen into emptiness—and has become identified with it.

If emptiness is not destroyed, might I live on?

Just as form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness truly is no other than form. When all the many universes are destroyed in the kalpa fire, their moons and stars with them, emptiness perishes with them. And you and me with them. This is no thing.

This koan is about as close as Zen gets to dogma on physics and metaphysics. As physics and metaphysics, this perspective undoubtedly is debatable. But we know the Buddha declined to engage in metaphysical speculation. I don’t think Dasui is engaging in metaphysical speculation either.

The monk is still looking for something permanent to hold onto. He’s searching for the ultimate and equating it with permanence. Dasui is channeling the ancients that preceded him, and foreshadowing the ancients that will follow him, like Dogen, who tells us that hitting the mark—finding what we’re seeking—is knowing we never have another nest than this fleeting moment in this fleeting life in this fleeting universe in which to settle.

Dasui is advising the monk, and advising us, that, whatever perspective you may have on physics or metaphysics, it’s best to live in accord with the observable reality of change, including the ways we ourselves, and our own perspectives, are susceptible to change. Orienting ourselves in this way invites and enables, in turn, a particular orientation toward our actions, or activity, another key Zen theme that Dogen emphasized in his teaching. It opens us to newness and the possibility of an appropriate response to what’s arising here and now, rather than to our prior, fixed and, quite possibly, misguided views on ourselves, others, and the situation in which we now find ourselves–views on which we may have a death grip and which we may layer over our immediate experience, strangling the life from it. I’ll return to and develop this theme in my talk during our upcoming Zazenkai.

I’ll close by reading our koan again . . .  

Rohatsu 2024: Enlightenment Beyond Belief

Jeff

I gave this talk today at our Rohatsu Zazenkai. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 32 in The Gateless Gate, A Non-Buddhist Questions the Buddha:

A non-Buddhist in all earnestness asked the World-Honored One, “I do not ask about words, I do not ask about no-words.” The World-Honored One just sat still. The non-Buddhist praised him, saying, “The World-Honored One in his great benevolence and great mercy has opened the clouds of my delusion and enabled me to enter the Way.” Then, bowing, he took his leave. Ananda asked Buddha, “What did the non-Buddhist realize that made him praise you so much?” The World-Honored One replied, “He is just like a fine horse that runs even at the shadow of a whip.”

Tomorrow is Rohatsu in Japan, the holiday when Zen Buddhists remember Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment. I suppose this is Buddhism’s Big Bang. Pow! as our friend José Ramirez likes to say. 

This koan is perfect for the occasion. Its form is so familiar. A seeker brings a question to a teacher. The teacher responds. The student finally breaks through. It’s her Big Bang. Pow!

Your meetings with Fran and me are just like that, right? 🙂

In most of our koans, the teacher is abbot of a Zen monastery in China living hundreds of years after the Buddha died. The seeker is a resident monk. They’ve each taken hundreds of monastic vows. They’ve identified as Buddhists in every way. In what they wear, how they eat, how they pass each day and year, each full of recurring ritual forms and practices.

In today’s koan, the teacher is Shakyamuni Buddha himself. I’ve read Koun Yamada’s translation of this koan because he refers to the seeker as a “non-Buddhist.” I find this a bit amusing, because I’m not sure we can say Buddhism even existed at the time, at least not as a tradition with stably established forms and practices. The Zen tradition as we eventually would come to know it certainly did not exist yet. Other translations of this koan refer to the visitor as an “outsider” or a “nonbeliever,” as if belief had anything to do with Zen. 

While the structure of this koan is familiar, much of its content is quite different. The Chinese, who developed koan practice using anecdotes from their own experience and unique cultural context, seemed to want a handful of koans featuring the historical Buddha, perhaps as one more way to assure themselves and others they were connected to him. They crafted a few koans from snippets of much earlier Buddhist texts.

We also get this interesting exchange between the Buddha and Ananda, his cousin and attendant, at the end of the koan. Ananda often is portrayed as the Buddha’s foil in the Pali Canon and in Chinese koans. If the Buddha is Laurel, Ananda is Hardy. We’ll return to their exchange in a moment.

Let’s look at the question this unnamed seeker brings to the Buddha: “I do not ask about words, I don’t ask about no-words.” This sentence doesn’t quite form a question. It seems inarticulate—like the speaker is on the edge of his own awareness and understanding and can barely find the words to express himself. An insight is emerging, but this seeker doesn’t yet know what he knows.

He’s asking about what the sutras call form and emptiness. Form is words. Emptiness is no-words.

This seeker is sensing this seeming binary is a trap.

Form is our starting point early in life; even throughout life for many, if not most, of us. First, we take things—beings, objects, concepts—as concrete, separate things with essences.

Later one may begin to sense this understanding of things is amiss. We start to question whether things are so solid and separate. We begin to penetrate the illusion of separateness. We open to Oneness. Emptiness. 

Eventually we may come to realize form is Emptiness and Emptiness is form. But as long as we’re relying on words and no-words, things and no-things, and even if we’re saying one is the other, we’re still holding onto ideas to some extent. We’re still partially in the conceptual realm. 

The Buddha’s visitor senses that “form is Emptiness, Emptiness is form” doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.

The Buddha knows exactly where this seeker is at and what he is asking. What is the Buddha’s response? 

Presence. Pure and simple.

This response affirms what the seeker intuits. The Buddha is saying, “Yes, this is it. What you see, feel, and know is what I see, feel, and know.”

With this encounter, the knowledge that was on the perimeter of the visitor’s awareness a moment ago is now in his bones, not as an idea. Pow!

What about the Buddha’s exchange with Ananda? What’s with the horse and whip. This was a common metaphor where and when the Buddha lived—and this was high praise of the visitor.

It’s a rather grim image. Horses were trained with whips in those days, as they often still are today. Particularly willful or slow learning horses were struck with a full crack of the whip. A horse that’s a bit more insightful, we might say for purposes of the Buddha’s analogy, just needs to feel the coiled whip held against its body. An even more insightful horse just needs to see the whip. The Buddha’s visitor didn’t need much nudging. Seeing the shadow of the whip was enough.

On Tuesday I was in Washington, D.C., for a dinner hosted by Saudi Sheikh Mohammed Alissa. Sheikh Alissa heads the Muslim World League, which includes clerics and religious scholars from all Muslim countries and promotes moderate forms of Islam.

Sheikh Alissa played a leading role in producing the 2019 Charter of Mecca, which was endorsed by 1,200 Muslim clerics and scholars. Here are the first three of its 30 principles:

  1. All people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races, and nationalities, are equal under God.
  2. We reject religious and ethnic claims of “preference.” [The idea that there is a chosen people.]
  3. Differences among people in their beliefs, cultures and natures are part of God’s will and wisdom.

In his remarks Tuesday, Sheikh Alissa said, regardless or our religious or non-religious beliefs, we all come from and return to the same source. Speaking in his religious idiom, he asked whether God wants the destructive, belief-based conflict we see everywhere today. He answered his own question with an emphatic no. Sheikh Alissa discourages Muslims from drawing hard sectarian lines within Islam or hard lines between Muslims and non-Muslims. 

Of course, a history of drawing hard lines between and within religions, isn’t unique to Islam. We see this happening in some expressions of every major religion. Buddhism doesn’t get a free pass. Some Zen teachers before and during WWII fanned the flames of ideologically based hatred raging across the globe, doing so in explicitly religious terms. Many Buddhist monks in Burma (Myanmar) support militarism in defense of ethnic and religious purity.

What the Buddha saw, and what we seek and see, isn’t something exclusive and proprietary. It doesn’t depend upon having the “right” beliefs or the “right” practices or the “right” authorizations. It doesn’t depend upon anything because it’s always right here. We depend upon it. We are it.

“I and all sentient beings and the great Earth itself attain enlightenment simultaneously,” the Buddha purportedly said upon his enlightenment. Dependent co-arising. Interdependence. 

Now, our conscious recognition of this—the personal experience of enlightenment—is likely to depend upon our openness to that recognition, and our acceptance of it once it begins to dawn. Upon turning toward, not away from, our aching for this recognition, as the Buddha’s visitor did. Upon our diligent effort to break down our own defenses to that recognition. 

Seek, and you shall find. Right under the North Star. Right under the Bodhi tree. Right under your nose.

Every Day is a Good Day

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Sunrise Sit today, the day before Thanksgiving. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 6 in the Blue Cliff Record:

Yunmen gave a teaching, saying, “I’m not asking you about before the fifteenth day of the month. Why not say a word about after the fifteenth day of the month?”

He answered himself, “Every day is a good day.”

The full moon is a metaphor for enlightenment in Zen. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the full moon appears mid-month, so the monks training with Yunmen would have heard him asking them what it’s like to be enlightened. 

They seem confounded, so Yunmen answers his own question, “Every day is a good day.” 

What does he mean? Is he taunting the monks by saying every day is a good day only after the full moon rises; only after one is enlightened? I don’t think so. 

I expect there was a long silence before Yunmen answered himself. He would have known the monks were thinking to themselves, “I have no idea what it’s like after the full moon. Why are you asking me? I can only imagine my life right now, before the full moon.” 

Living in close quarters with Yunmen, the monks also would have seen him getting sick, getting frustrated occasionally, sometimes forgetting things and making mistakes, after the full moon; after enlightenment.

I think Yunmen truly means every day is a good day, including the days before the full moon. These days when the monks think the moon is hidden and they lack enlightenment.

Yunmen’s question simultaneously meets the monks where they believe they’re at and contests their self-understanding. Yunmen is addressing seekers; people seeking enlightenment. They’re sure they don’t have it or haven’t yet found it. More than one of these seekers would have asked Yunmen, “What’s enlightenment like? I want to know. Tell me.”

Yunmen turns this question back at them. “You’re always telling me about your troubled lives before the full moon; before enlightenment,” he seems to be saying. “Tell me something about your life beyond the full moon, right here and now.”

But they’re dumbfounded. 

Yunmen’s question both confirms the monks’ belief that there’s a time before enlightenment and a time after it and challenges that belief. Yunmen implies they can describe the enlightenment experience and invites them to do so.

If Yunmen thinks they can describe life beyond the full moon, then perhaps it’s not the idealized life they imagine. Perhaps it’s still a life with troubles.

If only someone had just groaned about their splitting headache or the lukewarm tea.

Yunmen’s question divides time into before and after, but, as I’ve said, his response doesn’t differentiate between the days before the full moon and the days after it. No before. No after.

Troubled or untroubled. Our awareness attuned to the light that shines within or not. Grateful or not.

Every day is a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kill the Buddha

Jeff

I gave this talk on November 8, 2024, during our Full Moon Zen sesshin. A recording follows the text (which is lightly edited).

Our koan for this sesshin is Linji’s famous line, “If you meet the Buddha on a road, kill him.”

If I had to pick just one koan or phrase to sum up all Zen teachings and their spirit, this just might be it. It certainly would be among my top few. 

This line isn’t a koan exactly. It doesn’t appear in any of our koan collections. We find it instead in The Record of Linji, a compilation of Linji’s talks. He said something more like, “If you meet the Buddha, slay the Buddha,” but the line sometimes is transformed and used informally as a koan.

Linji lived during the ninth century, the heyday of Zen in China. He’s credited with founding the Rinzai line of Zen. The Zen stream we’re in is mostly Soto-derived. Maezumi Roshi, who founded the White Plum Asanga (with Bernie Glassman), initially received transmission from his father, a prominent Soto teacher who did not practice with koans. But Maezumi also studied with and later received transmission from the lay Rinzai teacher Koryu Osaka, as well as Hakuun Yasatani, a Soto reformer who studied koans with his teacher, Harada Daiun Sogaku, who had taken up koan practice with Rinzai teachers. So our stream is unusual; we’re a bit of a mix. I think we can fairly claim Linji as our own.

You can imagine that Linji got some quizzical looks when he gave the talk that includes this line. For me, this line has resonances with some of the deepest, and, I think, most misunderstood wisdom in my birth tradition, Christianity. I’m talking about one of the most remote and, for some, most suspect corners of that tradition: its contemplative or mystical strain.

I’m conscious that we’re Zen practitioners, and that Zen is a non-theistic religious tradition, and that some of us have an uneasy relationship with theism, maybe even an aversion to it. But let me take a a very brief detour nonetheless, if you’ll permit me. I promise to return to Zen soon to make the connection I want to make. 

In the Christian tradition, the notion of idolatry arises in the Old Testament, in Jewish scripture, in the book of Exodus. Many of us are familiar with this story. Moses has an encounter with God, who gives him the Ten Commandments on stone tablets to bring to the Israelites as God’s covenant with them. The first commandment has been translated several ways but boils down to something like this: “I am God. You shall have no other God before me. Don’t make graven images of me. Don’t worship anything in my place.” 

When Moses returns to camp, he finds the Israelites partying and worshiping a golden calf. Moses has a fit. He smashes the tablets and the golden calf. Party over. Fortunately for the Israelites, they repent, and God replaces the stone tablets.

In Jewish tradition to this day, in this spirit, one doesn’t use the word God. When we see God in print, we might see an asterisk in the place of the “o” (G*d). Or we might hear the word Yahweh, but see it spelled without the vowels (YHWH). Yahweh translates to something like “I am” or “He that is.” Christian monks later translate Yahweh as Jehovah.

So, as we can see, there is this uneasiness with representation in Jewish tradition; with thingifying. There’s an emphasis on being. On ultimate reality as verb, not noun. As pure, vital, vibrating presence.

To my taste, the deepest thinking, the deepest feeling, the furthest and most insightfully seeing later Christian practitioners and teachers pick up this aversion to representation and push it even further. In the Middle Ages, for example, we get the great German mystic Meister Eckhart, who was very quotable. He was famous for saying things like, “Pray God that we may lose God for the sake of finding God.”

Alright, back to Zen, and to the soil out of which it grew. Soil that’s different in some ways and not so different in other ways. 

There always were local gods in India, in China, and in Japan. There still are, even to this day, in Japan, from which we’ve received the Zen tradition. Very local deities. In Japan, today people have Shinto weddings and Zen funerals, with a bit of Christianity mixed in along the way for some. The religious culture there is very syncretistic. But long before Buddhism arrived, and long afterwards, people have perceived gods everywhere in Japan. 

So, it’s fair to ask if Buddhism made a clean break from the theism that was pervasive in India when it arose and that was pervasive in the places Buddhism traveled over time. Not exactly. The strong monotheism that developed in the Western world in antiquity won’t contend with Buddhism for some time, but we don’t exactly see Buddhism dispatching with all hints of forms of theism before that encounter, in my view. 

If we focus solely on what the historical Buddha seems to have taught, it’s probably fair to say there was a clean break from the forms of theism present in his time. He didn’t so much reject theism, as dodge it. He seemed to say, not unlike Meister Eckhart, “Don’t get so twisted up about ideas like god.” 

But those who follow the founder of a tradition have a way of messing it up, as we see time and again. There are gods and proto gods in early Buddhism, and even Zen, I’m inclined to say. Look at this beautiful tapestry above us with its many Buddhas, and its Bodhisattvas who seem to have divine qualities. Think about our meal chants. We chant about mythical Buddhas before the historical Buddha, Buddhas yet to appear, and Bodhisattvas who are larger than life. 

But I do think most of the old Zen teachers we remember, and most present ones too, are offering us something different. Most Zen teachers throughout space and time double down on the notion that there really is no need for a reified concept of the ultimate. 

And in our koan, “If you meet the Buddha on a road, kill him,” we’re clearly being told to smash our idols. I mean really smash them. Smash them by not even positing the existence of something we could idolize. Zen doesn’t offer us a lot of fodder for that. 

But if we look—and we humans don’t have to look too hard—we can find (or concoct) ideas in Zen to thingify and fixate on. Take the Absolute and the relative, for instance. Some theists drawn to Zen might even draw parallels to God and Jesus as the Absolute manifest in and as the relative. 

But we shouldn’t read too much into or hold too tightly to these metaphors. I’d say to any theist interested or not interested in Zen, “Whatever God is to you, I sure hope God is not an idea.” 

None of these metaphors, none of these ideas, none of these concepts that the Buddha didn’t want us to get twisted up about can resolve the mystery. A mystery the resolution of which is as plain as the nose on your face. Is the nose on your face. 

The mystery doesn’t need resolving, thank you. The mystery is resolved here and now. 

We mistake so much for the ultimate, including the idea of the ultimate. That tendency can be so subtle and insidious. 

Teachings and teachers can become idols, for sure. Hopefully, any good teacher will recognize this and deflect it.

We can have our political saviors and our political devils. Some of us might want to kill those devils. But the devil is just another idol. It’s a kind of anti-God idol. 

Relationships, I think, are a domain in which we often idolize. We often expect too much of those with whom we’re intimate. It’s a kind of category error. I think one reason we can get so, so incredibly frustrated with intimate partners is that we’re idolizing them, even as they drive us mad, and we criticize them. We want them to serve a godlike function for us. To ultimately ground us, to be our salvation, to be our paradise. 

Even more subtly I can make myself an idol, good and/or bad, God and/or devil. That’s what our self-sense inevitably is, I suppose. Our self-sense, or ego or whatever you want to call it, is a facsimile of our being. It’s a partial representation of it. It’s a construct that’s useful, and with which we can become at ease if we don’t hold it too tightly. If we don’t inflate it or deflate it. If we’re humble.

(By the way, my favorite definition of humility is from a Carmelite monk who said it’s not thinking little of yourself but thinking of yourself very little.)

When we kill the Buddha, when we kill all idols, it’s only then that we’re truly able to realize ourselves as Buddha, and all others as Buddha. Killing the Buddha opens that possibility for us. It just comes storming in. 

The deepest meaning of the holy truths cannot be contained or represented. It can’t be embodied in or as just one thing, because the deepest meaning of the holy truths is nothing less than everything. Just as it’s manifesting right now. 

Another way to translate Linji’s expression “Kill the Buddha”—to translate all the teachings is—this is it. Full stop. 

We’re grounded in everything, all at once, all the time. We must discover that ground. We must discover the self as that ground. 

The bad news is there’s nothing discreet we can hold onto. The good news is there’s no risk of falling. 

Just don’t try too hard to define everything; to contain it. Let it be. Let it be you. When we do our three bows, we’re honoring the three treasures. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. 

Let’s honor the three treasures. Let’s honor ourselves; let’s honor everybody else; let’s honor everything. Let’s just not idolize things.

So, if you meet the Buddha on a road, extend a hand. Offer him a place to rest his weary frame. A meal, a cup of tea. Pour one for yourself, as well. Sit down and enjoy his company. Offer him the pleasure of your company.

Nothing Twice

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on July 17, 2024. A recording follows the text.

This is a translation of “Nothing Twice” by the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:

Nothing happens twice,
Nor will it ever. For this reason,
We were born without proficiency,
And will all die without routine.

Though we be the most obtuse
Pupils in the school of this world,
We will never be held back to repeat
A single winter or summer.

No day will be repeated;
There is no such thing as two similar nights,
Two identical kisses,
Two equivalent gazes into someone’s eyes.

Yesterday, when your name
Was said by someone as I chanced to overhear,
I suddenly felt as if a rose
Had fallen in through an open window.

Today, when we are together,
I’ve turned my face toward the wall.
A rose? What does a rose look like?
Is it a flower? Or perhaps a stone?

Why are you, O evil hour,
Thus admixed with needless fear?
You are — and therefore you must pass.
You will pass — and therefore you are beautiful.

Smiling, in a mutual embrace,
We will try to find accord,
Although we are as different from one another
As two drops of pure water.

Our group meets most days. Follows the same routine. Bows. Bells. Chants we chant again and again. Sitting still in the same posture as before. Rehearsing familiar forms. Talks and dialogue on familiar themes.

All this seeming sameness is a call to awaken to the reality of nothing twice.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus tells us no one can step in the same river twice, because it’s not the same river and we’re not the same person. We can take his thought further: no one can step in the same river once.

What is “this river”? What is “once”? Useful constructions, but constructions, nonetheless. All impermanent. Nothing ultimately graspable.

Dōgen equated ungraspable activity with Buddha nature, with emptiness, with realization.

From not one perspective, the perspective of our everyday perspective, ceaseless, ungraspable activity. From not another perspective, absolute stillness. 

Just this not one, not two perspective.

Nothing happens twice,
Nor will it ever. For this reason,
We were born without proficiency,
And will all die without routine.

Though we be the most obtuse
Pupils in the school of this world,
We will never be held back to repeat
A single winter or summer.

No day will be repeated;
There is no such thing as two similar nights,
Two identical kisses,
Two equivalent gazes into someone’s eyes.

Yesterday, when your name
Was said by someone as I chanced to overhear,
I suddenly felt as if a rose
Had fallen in through an open window.

Today, when we are together,
I’ve turned my face toward the wall.
A rose? What does a rose look like?
Is it a flower? Or perhaps a stone?

Why are you, O evil hour,
Thus admixed with needless fear?
You are — and therefore you must pass.
You will pass — and therefore you are beautiful.

Smiling, in a mutual embrace,
We will try to find accord,
Although we are as different from one another
As two drops of pure water.

Enlightenment is Nothing Personal

Jeff

I gave this talk on May 1, 2024, during our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit. A recording follows.

This is part of the Zen teacher Reb Anderson’s guidance to us on shikantaza, which is included in our Sutra Book:

Zazen does not prefer success over failure, or enlightenment over delusion. If we are enlightened, we sit still in the middle of enlightenment, with no preference for it. If we are deluded, we sit still in the middle of delusion, with no aversion to it. This is the Buddha’s zazen.

Zazen practice is selfless. The goal of zazen is the liberation of all living beings from suffering, but the goal is exactly the same as the practice. In realizing this goal, one becomes free of self-concern and person al gain; and becoming free of self-concern and personal gain actualizes the goal. Nevertheless, zazen’s an initiatory awareness: it opens the door to a full understanding of how self and other dependently co-produce each other. This is the samadhi of all Buddhas.

The meaning of zazen, the enlightenment and liberation of all living beings, is not brought forth by the power of personal effort, and is not brought forth by the power of some other. Zazen doesn’t start when we start making effort, doesn’t stop when we stop.

We can’t do it by ourselves, and nobody else can do it for us.

Enlightenment is nothing personal. Many of us come to spiritual practice seeking to attain something personally, but sincere practice will simply help us come to see what’s present everywhere and always.

Yes, this increased clarity of perception may well feel preferable to the experience that preceded it—much like when we’re sitting in the optometrist’s chair and she flips to the lenses that give us 20/20 vision. I’m having a personal experience, but 20/20 vision isn’t especially for me, any more than sunlight or fresh air is especially for me. The signals riding the airwaves to which I tune in when I switch on my radio aren’t especially for me. I’m just tuning into them now. Others also are tuning in, enjoying the music.

If and as I deeply realize that the enlightenment of Buddha, of the universe, of all beings, is nothing personal, then in a certain sense, I realize my life also is nothing personal. My life is the universe’s life, the Buddha’s life. My life is life in and as the universe, in and as Buddha.

From the un-attuned perspective Buddhism calls delusion—which also and equally is a feature of the universe’s enlightenment, the Buddha’s enlightenment—what I’m saying may sound rather scary. The so-called deluded perspective very much wants enlightenment to be something personal; something extra special it can attain, contain, and cling to, even as it professes a desire to release itself into it. What we realize through practice is that each of us is an ordinary sort of special—and equally so. As we realize this, experientially, in our bones, not as an idea, personal experience is transformed into something at once intimately personal and nothing personal.

As I was about to begin preparing this talk I walked into our kitchen, in bare feet, to get something from a cabinet. I stepped into a patch of salt left on the floor, and it felt rather gross. Someone had filled a saltshaker or measured salt for a recipe on the counter beneath this cabinet and spilled some on the floor.

My first impulse was to ask whoever made the mess to clean it up. But I paused and thought, well, perhaps that someone was me and I didn’t notice or had forgotten. And even if it wasn’t me, it was me, because I’m part of it all. It’s nothing personal, I thought, then swept up the salt.

This felt like right conduct for me in the moment. I’m often advocating personal responsibility and accountability in our family, perhaps moralizing a bit too much about that at times. Personal responsibility and accountability are important, but for me the universe’s teaching in the moment was to approach the salt on the floor from a different perspective. Nothing personal.

Fran said something to me about koan practice at sesshin that has stuck with me, and which applies to every element of our practice, I think. She said koan work reduces the distance between subject and object. Notice she didn’t say it eliminates the distance between subject and object. Nonduality encompasses duality. They mysteriously co-create each other; are one and the same. Not one, not two.

We exist in subject-hyphen-object relationship. Subject and object without a hyphen implies existential separation. The opposite of separation is fusion, I suppose, and it would imply the complete merger and disappearance of subject and object. We and all else exist as subject-hyphen-object.

Better yet, we exist as connected subjects. The shift in perception we’re talking about, the attunement to the universe’s enlightenment, is mature, abiding awareness of our existence as a connected subject in an enlivened realm full of subjects.

My life is distinct, but not separate. We’re all jewels in Indra’s Net. Enlightenment is a property inherent in the net, not one some of its elements have and others don’t. Some elements may be relatively more awake, or tuned in, to their enlightened nature; others, less so.

But, truly, enlightenment is nothing personal.

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 Case 19 in The Gateless Gate:

Joshu asked Nanchen, “What is the Tao?”

Nanchen said, “Ordinary Mind is the Tao.”

Joshu asked, “Should I try to direct myself toward it?”

Nanchen said, “If you try to direct yourself you betray your own practice.”

Joshu asked, “How can I know the Tao if I don’t direct myself.”

Nanchen said, “The Tao is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine Tao, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation?”

With these words, Joshu had sudden realization.

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.