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.

This is the text of a talk I gave this morning at the annual Credo service at the Unitarian Church of Sharon.

The modern translation of Credo is “I believe,” and the word creed has come to mean a statement of religious beliefs.

Being asked to talk about my religious beliefs presents something of a problem for me.  I’ve come to think beliefs aren’t the most interesting or important – or even an essential – element of religion.

In fact, I’ve come to think that metaphysical beliefs can, for many – present company excluded – be a real impediment to development of a sense of wonder and reverence, of a broad and deeply felt connection to the universe, other beings, and oneself.  For me, these are hallmark traits of mature spirituality.

Any praiseworthy ethical framework flows from this sort of orientation.

I suppose I do have my religious beliefs (including those just mentioned), but they’re quite spare.

I didn’t arrive at this perspective through a syllogistic reasoning process or an act of mental will, though I certainly have done my fair share of thinking about religion.

I was raised Catholic and still have a deep appreciation for the mystical tradition in Christianity.  I’ve always had what I’d call a contemplative orientation.

As a young child I was troubled by the confusing and inconsistent ways in which people used the word God – it seemed like the free space in Bingo, or that proverbial blank to be filled in however one might wish – and yet I felt the deepest connection to . . . to . . . to what?

I made a secret shrine in a construction zone near the new subdivision to which we moved when I was eight or nine, and I sneaked away to pray there several times a week.  I read the Bible, Jonathan Livingston Seagull – for those of you old enough to remember it – and all the Hardy Boys novels, of course, in a quiet little monk’s cell I made on my closet floor.

I eventually attended a Jesuit university.

In my late 20’s, shortly after finishing law school and entering law practice, I began to meditate.  I soon became very involved in a movement called Contemplative Outreach, which is reviving the ancient practice of silent prayer within the Christian community.  It was started by a Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Keating – a lovely man who has had a big impact on my life, and on the lives of so many others.

I also encountered Zen during this period, initially through Kyudo, or Zen archery.  I studied with Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, an archery master and the Imperial Bowmaker of Japan.  He lives in Boulder, Colorado, much of the year.

I spent a great deal of time on silent retreat at monasteries and convents in Colorado and New Mexico.

During this era, I began to feel that my world, that I myself, was divided between interior and exterior, between the contemplative perspectives and pursuits that had become so important to me, on the one hand, and the rough-and-tumble world of business and corporate law, on the other.

Unable to reconcile these seeming poles at that life-stage, in 1995 I turned down an offer of partnership in a good law firm to study at Harvard Divinity School.  I planned to get a Ph.D. and become a scholar of comparative religion.

It turned out to be an absolutely brilliant move, but not for any of the reasons I thought I was making it.

During my first year I took a class on comparative theologies in which one session’s readings, and much earnest discussion regarding them, focused on the problem of syncretism – of combining religious perspectives and forms.

In reality, all religions are syncretistic, a fact too few religious people appreciate.  The overt syncretism of Unitarian Universalism is one of the things that attracted me to it.

One of those class readings and the discussion that flowed from it revolved around questions like, “If a person borrows from Christianity and Buddhism, might his brain be reincarnated in a newborn’s body and the rest of him end up in heaven?  Are these people putting themselves in some sort of metaphysical jeopardy?”

I’m not joking.

In the very probing, yet balanced, manner of the scholars I had come to learn from, I reflected for a moment, then raised my hand and asked the group,

“Are you serious?  Who cares?”

This didn’t endear me to the professor or most of my classmates.

Around the same time, the NY Times published a huge expose about the battle of Srebrenica, which occurred in July 1995, near the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia.  Thousands of Bosnian Muslims were massacred in an assault the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia later declared to be an act of genocide, and the worst mass slaughter on European soil since World War II.  It seems NATO – the Clinton administration and other western powers – may have let Serbian General Ratko Mladic overrun a supposed UN safe zone where the Bosnians were encamped.  It was inconveniently located in territory western officials believed would have to be ceded to the Serbs in order to achieve a peace accord.

The NY Times article contained a picture of a Muslim woman hung from a tree limb, a rope around her neck.  She killed herself to avoid being killed.  I broke down in tears.

I knew then that the academic study of religion, or of theology, at least, was not my calling – at least not then.  I retooled my program, and my path, by combining my legal background with my interest in religion and international affairs.  I created a course of study in international conflict resolution, and eventually ended up teaching and practicing in this area at Harvard Law School for several years after I graduated.

I eventually returned to private law practice, but I’m now also part of an NGO that helps create and support broad-scale peace processes to end civil wars, as well as broad-scale national dialogue processes to help avert them.  We helped end Nepal’s civil war in 2006.  Our current project is in Lebanon, and it’s beginning to spread elsewhere in the Middle East.

The meditation practice I began 20 years ago seems to have contributed to the progressive dismantlement of the religious conceptual framework I inherited.  I sat alone during 10 years in the middle of those 20, until eventually finding a spiritual home in the Zen tradition.

I’m part of an emerging western Buddhist community called Boundless Way Zen – BoWZ for short.  Last year I became one of its very junior teachers.  BoWZ has a strong, if informal, connection to Unitarian Universalism.  Our most senior teacher, James Ford, is minister of the First Unitarian Church in Providence.

I consider myself nontheistic, which I prefer to the term atheistic.  For me, non-theism is about being religious without embracing the idea of god or standing in opposition to the many wonderful people who do.

A revered, ancient Zen teacher once said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”  That’s certainly my experience.

This “not knowing” is not the “I don’t know” of agnosticism.  It’s not the product of indifference or laziness or resignation.

It’s a full-to-the-brim sort of not knowing.

Unlike the author of the author of the late 14^th century classic of contemplative Christian spirituality, The Cloud of Unknowing, however, I don’t experience this “not knowing” in theistic terms.  That just doesn’t resonate with me, particularly not in terms of the person-like images of God presented in the Hebrew Bible and some of the sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth.

For me, this not knowing can’t be contained.  In words, in beliefs.

Or, rather, it’s contained by, and it contains . . . this.

Just this.

Nothing extra.  Nothing less.

Now I look back at that nine-year old praying at his shrine – or throwing a ball, or chasing his dog, or hugging his parents, or staring at the night sky – and understand why Jesus pointed to children, and the lilies in the field, when adults asked him how to enter the Kingdom of God.

He also reminded them that “the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Here, now.

These hands.  No hands but our hands.

My family is new to this community, yet Esther and I saw immediately how it accommodates a range of religious perspectives, including those that emphasize belief more than mine does.  I’m so impressed by the open-mindedness and big heartedness that makes this possible.

Just this includes everything.  In the words of another revered, ancient Zen teacher, there is “nothing worth begrudging.”  Nothing that can’t teach us; no fact, experience or viewpoint that can’t serve as grist for our individual and collective mills.

The modern meaning of Credo is “I believe,” but I understand its ancient usage conveyed a somewhat different meaning – something more along the lines of “I give my heart to this.”

And, I do.

This post is based upon a Dharma Talk (my first) that I gave on October 25, 2011.

I take refuge in Buddha

I take refuge in Dharma

I take refuge in Sangha

The Three Refuges we chant during our Zen liturgy seem to me to be the closest thing we have to a creed in this non-creedal religion. Creeds are statements of belief. In some religions they are the litmus test for “true believers.” They often require one to submit to improbable metaphysical claims and rigid authority structures.

I was a questioning Catholic 20 years ago when I first encountered Buddhism and the refuges.  Elements of the Nicene Creed, which Catholics recite, always have been hard for me to swallow; certainly in any literal sense. Creeds of any kind – even the UU Covenant – tend to press my buttons to some degree.

I know from talking to other members of our sangha that I’m not the only person who has been agitated by one of the traditional Zen forms. Bowing. Chanting. The Four Vows. Whatever. For me, it was the Three Refuges.

But, here they are. We chant them every week. And, though we don’t make much of “being Buddhist” the way some religions do – there’s no salvation, spiritual or otherwise, in simply self-identifying as a Zen practitioner – “taking refuge” by reciting and embracing the Three Refuges is the traditional way Buddhists the world over signal their commitment to this path.

I had little choice but to sit with my agitation and get to know it. Why this discomfort?

I ultimately concluded that my agitation stemmed from two sources.

First, the very idea of “taking refuge” offended me. I’ve tended to think of myself as autonomous and self-reliant. Taking refuge seemed like submission. I’ve tended to think of myself as strong. Taking refuge seemed like an admission of vulnerability, of weakness. I’ve tended to think of myself as engaged and action-oriented. Taking refuge seemed like hiding.

Second, my early ideas about what Buddhists must be taking refuge in troubled me.

What’s Buddha? Another messiah? Hmm.

What’s Dharma? Did I hear doctrine? Dogma? Forget it.

What’s Sangha? Another exclusive community? Only true believers are saved? Can’t go there.

These reactions were conditioned, of course. I’m a product of western culture, in which values like autonomy, self-reliance, strength, action and the like tend to be privileged over values like interdependence, connection, community, vulnerability, and introspection. Then there’s that Roman Catholic upbringing. There’s so much that’s rich and beautiful about Catholicism, and also much I can only relate to in a mytho-poetic way. Perhaps my reactions also were gendered to some degree.

My early encounters with Buddhism actually helped me discover the Christian contemplative tradition. D.T. Suzuki sings the praises of various Christian mystics in one of his books – names that were unfamiliar to me when I encountered them there 20 years ago. I soon learned that a form of sitting practice that’s often called centering prayer today was developed and preserved in Christian monastic communities through the ages, and that there was a budding lay movement (catalyzed by monks) that embraced it.

I sat in that tradition for many years, and I think my sitting practice ultimately contributed to the disintegration of my Christian religious worldview. (This doesn’t happen for most who sit in that context, and I’m not saying it should, but this was my experience then.) I continued to sit alone for 10 years before making my way to Zen.  And, Zen ultimately helped me appreciate the contemplative strain of my birth tradition in new ways.

I decided to take refuge on this Zen path, in part, because I began to feel that what I was looking for wasn’t to be found in solitude, at least not in my case. I wanted a supportive context, open and devoid of dogma, and I sensed I would find kindred spirits along the Zen path.

I’ve ultimately come to think of the refuges much differently since the time I first encountered them. Those old notions have been turned on their head.

These days, I take refuge from the illusion of complete separateness that seems to be the lens through which so many of us see things – our default mode, if you will. It’s the source of endless personal and collective suffering. I take refuge from my narratives and mental constructions that indulge this illusion.

I now think of this taking refuge from as more of an opting in, than as an opting out. I’m choosing to opt into life as it really is. It includes this illusion of complete separateness and all of my narratives and habits that indulge it, but the whole of life isn’t defined by that illusion, even if my subjective experience sometimes seems to be.

We are distinct, but there really is no sense in which we are separate. We’re immersed in it all. We’re of it all.

What do I choose to opt into?

Buddha signifies a couple of things for me.

It’s our potential to awaken to the reality that we’re not separate from the rest of this universe and everything else in it – we’re not a sort of two-dimensional, Flat Stanley sort of sticker of a human being laid over a flat, background universe. Buddha is oneness, and our capacity to experience this oneness – not just to intellectualize about it, but for this background reality to become our new foreground. Our new ground and no-ground.

But we’re also reminded time and again that we’re Buddha just as we are now, however we are. That each of us embodies and reflects this oneness at this very moment. So Buddha – or Buddha nature – must be me, with all of my foibles and failings, my doubts and insecurities.

Buddha when I snapped at my wife about something senseless the other day. Buddha when I apologized after 15 tense minutes had passed.

Buddha as my mind wanders on or off the cushion, brooding about some perceived indignity, anxious about the demands of work and family life, plotting to better my lot, or whatever.

Dharma includes Buddhist texts and teachings, of course, but, more broadly, I see it as the 10,000 things: ants and sticks and grizzly bears, the steam rising from my teacup, that noxious pile of trash, my kid’s tantrum, you and me as distinct beings, and all the rest. It’s the diversity that exists within the oneness. It’s what each being and thing has to reveal to us.

One of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had was several hours spent sitting alone in the branch of an old tree on a moonlit night. The learning didn’t result from that experience; it didn’t consist of thoughts I thought while I was up there, or after I climbed down. The experience was the learning.

That experience and others like it help prod me beyond belief, beyond the false certainty of our creeds and fixed views, which come in so many forms in religion, in politics, in families, in one’s conception of oneself.

What could it possibly mean to believe in a tree? To believe in moonlight?

I’m reminded once again of Dogen’s lovely verse:

Entreat trees and rocks to preach,

and ask rice fields and gardens for the Truth;

ask pillars for the Dharma,

and learn from hedges and walls.

We engage texts and ideas with our whole being, holding them lightly even as we revere the better ones, but, just as importantly, we engage fully and openly with this universe and all that arises.

Sangha, for me, is our little sitting group and our broader Zen family, and it’s also the broadest community that’s the unity of Buddha and Dharma. The community of the 10,000 things, all of them Buddha, all of them Truth, all intermingling and utterly interdependent.

The tragedy of the human condition, in my view, is that too many of us believe and feel we are utterly separate, and so think and act in ways that reinforce those beliefs and feelings in ourselves and others.

There’s also blessing in this; there’s no doubt some evolutionary necessity to this illusion of separateness. But, we also have the capacity to experience not one, not two, and to make that the orientation from which we think and act, from which we express our distinctiveness.

The term spirituality is problematic even for theists, I think, and it’s doubly so for anyone who considers him- or herself non-theistic. I’ve come to think of it as a sense of connectedness to oneself, others, and the universe – and the felt quality of those connections. Sangha.

So, for me, the refuges have come to serve as a reminder that there’s nowhere to hide. We’re in the stew, and there’s no way out of the pot.

These days I try to take my refuge in:

• The special mess that I am, including my fears, my insecurities, my shame, my greed, anger and ignorance
• The 10,000 things, especially the 5,001 to which I’m particularly attracted or averse, and which therefore have much to teach me
• My utter inseparability from, and therefore complete vulnerability to and dependence upon, all of this

This may all sound a bit free-form, and in an important sense it truly is. But these free-form thoughts can be stood on their head, as well. I also want to stress that I do experience Buddha, Dharma and Sangha in the more formal ways those terms are used – the historical Buddha’s teachings and example (and the example of our many other teachers), our Zen practices and texts, and our community – as a refuge. They form a context in which I try to summon forth and present “the better angels of my nature” with the support and companionship of others who are trying to do the same.

The question that agitated Dogen and animated his practice for years was, “If we’re already Buddhas, why must we practice?” There are many possible answers to this question. For my part, I take refuge on this path and in this community because I need to in order to do my best to show up to life in the way I truly want to show up.

I suspect the illusion of complete separateness never loses its attractive force. The trick, I think, is to see it as the doorway of compassion – compassion for ourselves, as well as for others. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha – they prod me toward that doorway, and help me find it again when I’ve lost sight of it.

I’ll conclude with a thought and an image.

The thought is about this word “creed,” which is from the Latin root for belief. “Credo” often is translated “I believe.” But, it’s apparently a modern definition. I’m told the ancient meaning of “credo” was something more along the lines of “I give my heart to this.”

I like that.

The image is this: A revered, ancient Zen teacher is said to have spent his final, dying days walking around a pole in his room, on which he had inscribed the words Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

He clearly found his refuge there, all the way to the end. What a powerful image. What a powerful, final teisho for his community, and for all of us.

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

I can, and do, give my heart to that.