Category: Dharma Everywhere

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.

Rōhatsu 2023

Jeff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Zen, we call this the samadhi of play.

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

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

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

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

Buddha Nature as Activity

Jeff

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

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

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

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

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

The teacher only fanned himself without a word.

And the monk saluted him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wandering as Path

Jeff

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

This is Case 98 in The Blue Cliff Record:

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

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

Tianping raised his head.

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

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

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

“It is I.”

“Wrong.” Tianping was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does Tianping seem to learn on his pilgrimage?

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

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

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

Remembering (and Missing) Herb Kelman

Jeff

I spent last week in Washington, D.C., in meetings with a group of Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers colleagues and I have accompanied and worked with for nearly a decade. This initiative is convened by the Herbert C. Kelman Institute for Interactive Conflict Transformation in Vienna, Austria. The Kelman Institute was named in honor of one of my main mentors in the field of negotiation and conflict resolution, Herb Kelman, who fled Vienna with his family when he was 11 following Kristallnacht. I was thinking about Herb a lot and missing him last week. Herb died in 2022, just before his 94th birthday. Several of his colleagues and students eulogized him at a memorial service in September 2022. I’ve posted my remarks below, as well as a few photos of Herb. Donna Hicks, Dan Shapiro, and I later offered tributes to Herb as a scholar-practitioner through the seminar on international conflict analysis and resolution named in his honor at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. I wanted to post something about Herb here, in part, because I posted a tribute to another of my mentors, Roger Fisher, in 2012 after he passed.

Many of us here today participated in a festschrift for Herb on the Harvard campus about 20 years ago. Reflecting on his career up to that point, Herb said something like, “Others think big.  I always have thought small.  I want to start thinking bigger.”

As I recall, Herb went on to explain that he had long focused on understanding individuals—our attitudes and actions and how to influence individuals positively.  He then applied what he had learned about individual perspective change to dyads and small groups, perhaps most notably through development of the Interactive Problem-Solving approach to conflict resolution and his work on morally blind obedience to authority.

This focus on individuals and small groups always was aimed at broader societal and global change, of course, but now Herb apparently was thinking about possible systemic interventions at a very large scale.  He mused about work he might do with the United Nations—in retirement, nonetheless!  I don’t know precisely what he might have been thinking then, but I don’t believe he ultimately changed directions in a major way.  Herb mostly continued to think and do “small” as he apparently defined it.  Like others here, I teach, write, and practice in the conflict resolution field, and I’m constantly in awe of the major impact Herb’s “thinking small” has had on our field and in the world.

As I was preparing my own remarks for that festschrift I had a conversation with Herb in which he said something else that has stuck with me.  I had been asked to comment on two very different presentations, one by Shoshana Zubhoff at Harvard Business School, who would be speaking about what she calls organizational narcissism, and the other by Luc Reychler of Catholic University Leuven in Belgium, who would be speaking about the idea of peace architecture.  I turned to Herb for suggestions about how to contend with two such diverse topics, particularly since my own work, on religion, conflict, and peace and what I now call negotiating across worldviews, differs so much from theirs.  Herb had no suggestions, only general words of encouragement, but he told me in passing how incredibly happy and proud he felt because those he mentored closely were doing such varied things.

And so I submit to you that the close mentoring of so many of us that Herb did over his long career is another way in which Herb focused on the individual and thought and did “small” with huge impact.  Herb’s mentees are making major contributions in fields of scholarship and practice as diverse as business, child advocacy, conflict resolution, education, human rights, genocide studies, international relations, law, medicine, peace studies, poverty reduction, psychology, public health, social work—the list goes on and on.

Herb said many other things over the years that will stick with me but let me share just one more.  It’s the last thing he said the last time I saw him while he still was able to communicate.  Donna and I were visiting about three weeks before Herb passed away, and he was in bad shape.  We mostly just sat at Herb’s bedside holding his hand, because his breathing and speech were so labored.  As we prepared to leave I asked Herb, “What do you want us to know?”  He responded to my question with another question: “What will it take to bring more people to love?” Herb said.

I think that biggest-of-all questions is what animated the “thinking small” work to which Herb devoted his life.  I likewise see this universal question propelling the very particular work of so many of his mentees.

And it’s not just us.

I keep coming across Herb’s name, and ideas, and evidence of his influence in unlikely places, like Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.  (Most of us know about Herb’s little run-in with Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary, who he thought should take a more responsible approach to human subject research, shall we say.)  I’m a Zen practitioner, so you can imagine how surprised I was to see Herb’s work cited in Robert Wright’s book, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.  Really?!  Herb’s work is discussed in a book about Buddhism?  Unbelievable.

In Zen, we say our teachers don’t die, they just go into hiding.

Everywhere.

In and through each of us and so many others, Herb is hiding in plain sight—everywhere.

Emptying our Teacups and Teachers

Jeff

I gave this talk on April 22, 2023. A recording follows the text.

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

As I read a text like this for the first time, my mind usually begins doing its sorting thing, quite naturally and imperceptibly. It immediately notes key words, like “teacher,” “professor,” “inquire,” and “Zen” and the standard concepts they represent. It makes standard associations among these concepts and other features of the text. Finally, it reaches a conclusion in light of these associations, in the form of the major point the text seems to convey.

Our everyday minds rely heavily on default settings and heuristics. The mind sifts phenomena according to categorizes and patterns. Actually, it’s not just passively perceiving and interpreting our experience. It’s playing an active role in constructing it. Our everyday minds shape reality, literally filling in “data gaps” with what we expect to perceive and then responding to that construction as if it were a solid object wholly external to us.

Most of us likely think, for example, that the route from our eyes to our brain is one-way; that our eyes register comprehensive visual data and send it to the brain, which then combines it with other sense data and memories to reach a conclusion. That’s not true. Most of the signals in our visual system travel the other way. The brain is telling our eyes what to see.

This functioning of everyday mind serves us well for many purposes much of the time. Returning to our text, there is nothing wrong with seeking insight and utility in the point the teacher-character in a story like this seems to be making—and arriving at the standard conclusion about it. I do think the teacher-character in this story (and in many other Zen stories) is making an insightful and useful point.

Yet it’s important to be aware of how our everyday mind works, because meeting constructs—meeting our pre-existing ideas about anything or anyone—is not meeting the thing itself. In reality, there are no things to meet. There is only meeting and the fleeting opportunity to shape experience.

For some time now, it’s been my practice to keep sitting with a text a bit longer—days or weeks, if I have time—noting my early cognitions, but not latching onto them immediately as the only take-aways, or even the main ones. When I can do this, a kind of softening often occurs, and a previously unseen opening may appear, offering something new; some fresh way of experiencing the story. The characters, and happenings, and even the seemingly obvious point of the story often become less solid, more permeable and yielding, more like the cells in a living organism and the mutually supportive interchange between them; or like living things in a thriving ecosystem. The seemingly solid elements of the story begin to decompose.

As I sat with this story about the professor who calls on Nan-in for a week or so before sesshin, my attention eventually settled on, and I began to center in, the tea and the teacup. What is this tea? What is the experience of tea? What is this teacup? What is the experience of teacup?

The tea flows from the spout of the teapot, crashing into the bottom of the teacup, rushing up and tickling its sides. The tea settles in the cup as it fills, but soon it’s escaping over its edges. The teacup seems so solid and still as the tea it can’t grasp or ultimately contain keeps flowing.

But the teacup, solid as it seems, actually is no more graspable or containable than the tea; the tea no less solid and still than the teacup. Both comprised of elements. (Imponderable elements. Like the word Zen, I don’t really know what the word element means as I use it. Does anyone?) Elements in constant flux, some, like those posing as teacup, just appearing to us to stand still. All these elements, part of this vast, flowing tea-river we inhabit.

Tea and teacup—at once constructs and ultimately real. Visitor, teacher, and teaching, too. Teacher is not only a construct but also a real role that comes with real responsibilities and real opportunities to be usefully present to others. Teacups really make it easier to drink tea.

My first readings of the story render the characters in it as little figurines in fixed positions, with fixed positions. A visitor who is too full of herself and her own ideas. A teacher who who offers a wise and insightful teaching, cleverly communicated. Or, looking at it from a perspective 180 degrees opposed to that, a teacher who is a bit too clever and theatrical and a visitor who could be forgiven for finding little value in this encounter.

It’s not that my first take on a story like the one we’re exploring here is wrong. It’s true that Zen and other contemplative practices invite us to empty our teacups of some of our ideas to make room for the intimate experience of life itself. It’s just that my first interpretation is just that, an interpretation. Even our best ideas—including ideas about emptying our teacups, and about emptying teachers and teachings, and about emptying our stories—are still just ideas, no matter how insightful they are or how much they seem to improve upon earlier ideas.

We can and should cultivate and share new ideas, about Zen practice and everything else. We can and should discard old ideas that no longer suit our purposes for more useful ones. And we also should remain alert to our tendency to reify and fetishize ideas, even our new and improved ones. We can refill our cup after we think we’ve emptied it, making it too full again. In fact, we tend to do this repeatedly.

Always there is more to a story than meets the eye; more to be seen and felt if we can enter the story and abide in and remain present to all that’s emerging and yet-to-emerge. Always more of the whole to be encountered and integrated. That “more” often includes what we have abandoned; often we must rediscover, refigure, and reclaim what we’ve rejected. We must transcend it and then (re)include it, as the philosopher Ken Wilber says.

There’s always more to this, because this is not an idea. If we think the story has ended, and that we’ve now got the point—if the space we think we’ve emptied becomes too full of something else, even, perhaps especially, “Zen”—we’re missing the point.

And the tea.

May our cups runneth over.

What is Enlightenment?

Jeff

I gave this talk on Saturday, November 5, 2022.

This is Case 6 in The Gateless Gate, The World-Honored One Twirls a Flower:

Once, in ancient times, when the World-Honored One was at Mount Grdhrakūta, he twirled a flower before his assembled disciples. All were silent. Only Mahākāśyapa broke into a smile.

The World-Honored One said, “I have the eye of the treasury of right Dharma, the subtle mind of nirvana, the true form of no-form, and the flawless gate of the teaching. It is not established upon words and phrases. It is a special transmission outside tradition. I now entrust this to Mahākāśyapa.

The title of this talk is “What is Enlightenment?” I want to respond to this question very directly today. This always has been a tricky thing to do, and it’s especially tricky these days.

It’s always been tricky because—as so much Zen literature tells us—words can’t capture it, even as they are it. We can never get our minds around it because we are trying to make subject object, and there ultimately are no objects; no subject either, really. It’s sort of like wrapping paper trying to wrap itself.

Speaking about enlightenment is especially tricky, or maybe even dangerous, these days because the Zen tradition is evolving in important and necessary ways in response to justifiable critiques of how some of our predecessors have represented and related to the notion of enlightenment. Enlightenment sometimes has been portrayed as a personal attainment that elevates one above others in presumed worldly and metaphysical hierarchies.

This representation of enlightenment is misaligned with Western Buddhism’s growing—and very welcome—emphasis on social justice, on the natural world (with us very much just one feature of it), and on less hierarchical, more egalitarian forms of community life. Zen’s core teachings arguably always have pointed us in these directions, but there’s too often been an element of pride, elitism, and authority games in how enlightenment has been represented in practice. The notion of “Zen stink” is a corrective to all that, but also proves its existence.

Anyway, like others who have been aware of the challenges and dangers of addressing this topic directly, I feel compelled to do so periodically. People frequently ask me some version of this question, and maybe the same happens to you. The word enlightenment is so magnetically attractive to so many people, there’s so much confusion surrounding it, and this confusion carries real potential for harm. As one of my favorite law school professors used to say, there’s good confusion and bad confusion; productive, generative confusion and unproductive, even harmful confusion. The idea of enlightenment, as opposed to the reality of it, seems to produce both types of confusion.

I guess this is all a way of saying, here I go. I’m doing the best I can, and I hope this is useful to some of you.

I could have opened this talk with any number of readings, but I chose the famous koan I read earlier for several reasons. In Zen lore, this is where it all begins.

In the second part of this koan we hear that Zen is “not established upon words and phrases.” It is a “special transmission [from teacher to student] outside [Buddhist] tradition.” I think it’s very likely this stuff about the Buddha making self-aggrandizing claims about his own insight and authority and his transmission of that authority to Mahakasyapa was added to reinforce the credibility and claims to authority of early Zen teachers in whose footsteps we walk. There were a lot of disagreements among schools of Buddhism and emerging sects of Zen in those days. There still are disagreements today.

So let’s focus on the first part of the koan. The Buddha “twirled a flower before his assembled disciples. All were silent. Only Mahakasyapa broke into a smile.” I think it’s much more probable that something like this really happened.

Heard from one perspective, it sounds like this is a story about an esoteric, secret teaching only Mahakasyapa gets; a realization he alone attains. But is this the best reading of the story? This clearly is a koan about enlightenment as a core feature of our tradition. But what is enlightenment?

Here’s my understanding: Enlightenment is this unfathomably vast and wonderous universe; multiverse, perhaps. Boundless. Enlightenment is this vast and wonderous universe just as it is right now, with me as a feature of it. You and I and all features of this wonderous universe are distinct, but in no sense are we separate.

When the Buddha holds up a flower and twirls it, that is what he’s saying. This is it! Behold!

We can also talk about enlightenment experiences, and that is what Mahakasyapa’s smile of recognition represents. When we are aware that this wonderous universe, with oneself as part of it, is enlightenment, that is an enlightenment experience. The universe is looking itself in the mirror in these moments. The wrapping paper is unwrapping itself; recognizing the unity of giver, receiver, and gift, as we chant during Oryoki practice (meal practice during susshin).

But—and this is important—all those listening silently to the Buddha who didn’t flash a smile of recognition are no less enlightened—no less enlightenment, that is to say—than Mahakasyapa with his knowing smile.

Talking about all this renders the notions of enlightenment and enlightenment experiences too noun-like when what I’d really like to convey is more of a verb-like quality— changing, awakening, interbeing. That verb-like spirit is conveyed in the dedication verse we heard chanted earlier this morning: “Infinite realms of light and dark convey the Buddha mind. Birds and trees and stars and we ourselves come forth in perfect harmony.”

Have you ever seen a lava lamp? You know what I’m talking about, right? Imagine a large blob floating around inside the lamp. It’s shaped like one of those inflatable punching clowns kids play with. The blob has a large, oblong body, a thin neck, and a small head.

We can think of our conventional experience and awareness as a view from the head of this floating, shape-shifting blob when the head is all the head knows. But the whole blob is the realm of enlightenment, and the head is not separate from it. When the head realizes that— really realizes this, experientially, not just grasps it conceptually—that’s an enlightenment experience. That perspective and experience can sink into our bones, becoming pervasive and ever-present. We realize everything is the center of the universe, myself no less or more so.

What’s more: This realm of enlightenment, Indra’s Net, the Great Robe of Liberation, isn’t a blob. Not only is everything center, there’s no inside or outside. It’s boundless. It isn’t an it. Physicists like Carlo Rovelli, who have found inspiration in Buddhism, are discovering the universe is boundless and nothing exists apart from anything else. So I’m just describing the natural order, mind-blowing as this may seem from the perspective of our conventional awareness.

So what? What is this realization good for?

Well, here’s the negative response; what it’s not good for. It’s no good if we seek it and, once glimpsed, hope to possess it as a personal attainment, though many of us will try. It can’t be grasped that way—which is only to say it can’t be grasped at all.

I’ve titled this talk “What is Enlightenment?”—as a question in this specific form—for a personal historical reason. When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School in the mid-1990s, there was a modern-day New Age guru in the area that I used to see around Harvard from time to time. His name is Andrew Cohen, and his organization used to publish a magazine titled “What is Enlightenment?”

That question struck me as pompous then, at least when coming from Cohen, because Cohen himself struck me as pompous. I heard that question, coming from him, in a bait-and- hook sort of way. Like: “What is Enlightenment? Sure, let me tell you, since you’re dying to know but obviously don’t get it. It’s this thing I’ve got that you don’t have, but if you hang with me it may rub off on you.”

I saw Cohen around Cambridge a couple of times, always with a few fawning acolytes in tow. He clearly was as impressed with himself as they seemed to be with him. He was quite rude to them, in fact. Cohen’s organization ultimately collapsed as students, and even his own mother, came forth with allegations of psychological abuse and financial impropriety. If you relate to the notion of enlightenment that way, you’ll eventually get what you deserve—and those around you unfortunately won’t get what they deserve. It’s just rotten.

So don’t conceive of enlightenment as something in the realm of personal attainment. If we seek it that way, with neurotic compulsion, delusions of grandeur, and subtle or not-so- subtle aspirations for control, nothing good will come of it.

Many people who manifest as profoundly grounded, wise, and compassionate never have a dramatic enlightenment experience. I’m pretty sure that those of us who do are on the remedial plan. Some of us seem to need a cosmic jostling more than others. If you do have a dramatic enlightenment experience—well, good for you. That and $3.00 will get you a cup of coffee. Stabilizing, plumbing, and integrating that experience will be the journey of a lifetime.

And the positive answer to the “So What?” question? What is this realization good for, positively speaking?

It’s about the relationship between this realization and action—how we show up to life. As Torei Enji wrote in the verse Bodhisattva’s Vow, “Realizing this, our Ancestors gave reverent care to animals, birds, and all beings.”

In Western religious and humanist traditions, “contemplation” is a common word for the experience and embodied perspective we call “enlightenment” in Zen. Though he was no fan of religion, I think the great 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell got it right when he wrote about the relationship between action and contemplation; the relationship between the fruits of his own reflections and practice and how they compelled him to show up to life. In an essay On the Value of Philosophy, Russell said contemplation—or enlightenment as a personal experience, we might say—is that:

quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists [our] true freedom, and [our] liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Beyond Belief II

Jeff

I gave this talk on Saturday, October 1, 2022.

This is from the Record Dongshan (who I spoke about in my last talk, using Tung-shan, another way his name is translated to English):

When Dongshan was ready to leave his teacher Yunyan, Dongshan asked, “Later on, if someone asks me if I can depict your reality, or your teaching, how shall I reply?”

Yunyan paused, and then said, “Just this is it.”

When he heard that, Dongshan sank into thought. And Yunyan said, “You are in charge of this great matter. You must be most thoroughgoing.”

Dongshan left Yunyan and was still perplexed; he didn’t quite get it. As he proceeded he was wading across a stream, and seeing his reflection in the water, he had some understanding. He looked down in the stream and saw something, and then he wrote this poem:

“Just don’t seek from others or you’ll be far estranged from yourself. Now I go on alone, but everywhere I meet it. It now is me; I now am not it. One must understand in this way to merge with suchness.”

Let me repeat those last two lines: “It now is me; and I now am not it. One must understand in this way to merge with suchness.” One must understand that suchness is me, but not limited to me, to merge, or accord one’s experience of oneself, with suchness; with Yunyan’s “just this.

I just substituted the word “experience” for “understanding” because Dongshan isn’t telling us that we primarily must develop an intellectual understanding that I myself am suchness (though I am not the whole of it). He’s telling us we must come to know this beyond belief—in our bones. We must know it in such a thoroughgoing way that we forget it. No more wondering whether the dog, or we ourselves, or the stars in the sky, have buddha nature.

I began my last Saturday talk with a passage from the Record of Dongshan that precedes the one I just read. (You can find a recording of that talk on our website.) In that earlier reading, Dongshan asks his teacher Yunyan why he can’t hear nonsentient beings, like stone fences and tree groves, expound the Dharma. He’s read that nonsentient beings do, indeed, expound the Dharma, but he doesn’t (yet) experience them that way.

Yunyan responds by holding up his fly whisk. Dongshan, focusing on the object in Yunyan’s hand he still thinks can be contained by concepts like “nonsentient” and “inanimate,” misses that this gesture is also Yunyan himself expounding the Dharma. As teacher and student talk a bit more during this encounter, Dongshan has an initial opening. Still, his confusion persists. He’s glimpsed something, but he doesn’t yet grasp it securely—or, rather, he doesn’t yet see that what he has glimpsed grasps him.

I ended my talk last time by foreshadowing today’s reading. I mentioned that Dongshan eventually would have a wider and deeper, more penetrating, opening when he saw his reflection in a stream. In that moment, Dongshan would realize that he, like all else, constantly expounds the Dharma. Dongshan goes on to become an eminent teacher, of course, establishing the Chinese predecessor to the Soto School of Zen (in which we are situated) and leaving us The Five Ranks, one of our most important texts.

Good for Dongshan. But what about us? Can you also hear yourself expound the Dharma? Learning to hear what Dongshan heard, resonating with what he heard, is one aim of our practice, even as our practice expounds the Dharma whether it presently feels that way or not.

Learning to hear what Dongshan heard, resonating with what he heard. Resonating.

Sometimes as I sit, as my monkey mind stills and tension I hadn’t even been aware of begins to leave my body, I sense a sort of purring or humming. It’s not a sonic sensation exactly, it’s somehow vaguely more physical. I feel it subtly coursing through my body, I feel my body as it, and yet it doesn’t seem to originate from or be isolated to my body. It doesn’t seem to originate from or be isolated to any one thing. It seems to be a feature—a base level feature— of everything. At these moments, it seems I’m just consciously tuning into and noticing something that’s always there, even during moments when I’m not tuned into it consciously. There’s really no activity on my part, and yet I become aware that I’m a part of this. I’m just opening myself to experience beyond my four walls, so to speak. Beyond, or through, all walls. I’m making myself receptive.

I don’t have any idea whether I’m describing something that’s known to and verified or verifiable by science—some sort of wave energy humans are capable of sensing, which resonates in and through all phenomena at a specific frequency. It doesn’t really matter, because I experience this sensation as a Dharma gate whatever may explain it—even if it’s a figment of my imagination.

For me this sensation is one experience that transports me out of the myopia we seem to be prone to inhabit. Our small mind awareness. When this sensation arises, small mind begins to experience itself as lovingly and securely nestled in Great Mind. I experience myself as a distinct feature of Great Mind but not separate from it.

And I realize that this experience and Great Mind and all that exits, even myself, is not my doing. I didn’t will the totality of “just this” into existence. I don’t singlehandedly sustain it. I have some limited scope of agency over my own experience and the experience of others near me. I do contribute in small, mundane, mysterious ways to creation and the maintenance of it. I have some weaker (if still significant and potentially consequential) ability to cause ripples that affect others’ experience throughout space and time.

But I realize there is no justification for the grandiosity our small minds can claim for themselves when they don’t feel lovingly and securely nestled in Great Mind. Sometimes this grandiosity shows up in our stories that claim too much credit for things. And sometimes this grandiosity shows up in our stories that pin too much responsibility on oneself for unfavorable causes, conditions, and consequences; stories that leave us feeling too much guilt and shame.

If and as we cultivate an abiding sense of small mind nestled lovingly in Great Mind, we become increasingly free to develop and express our gifts, and to enjoy doing so, without a compulsion to attract attention or to boast publicly—or, perhaps more likely for many of us, even to boast privately, by elevating oneself above others in one’s own mind. From this perspective we can take appropriate responsibility for our own conduct and its consequences, feeling remorse and apologizing when we have caused harm, but knowing with great confidence that our admission won’t be used against us in a trial in which we can be banished from the Universe.

From this perspective of small mind feeling lovingly and securely nestled in Great Mind, concepts like sentient and nonsentient, animate and inanimate, fade. Everything expounds the Dharma. I hear, or feel, and know myself expounding the Dharma in my own way, and I experience everything else expounding the Dharma, too.

Suchness.

We know the universe ultimately has “got this.” And that “this” includes me.

What teaches you this? What reminds you of this, on or off the cushion? What helps you stay centered in this awareness and to be gentle with yourself if and as this awareness ebbs and flows? I look forward to our discussion.