Category: Dharma Talks

Our possible impossible vows

Jeff

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave at the Greater Boston Zen Center one Tuesday night during the summer of 2012. I’m posting it now to complete my series of talks about the major elements of our liturgy.

I’d like to talk a bit about the Four Vows — how I have come to understand and experience them.

Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.

The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

We’ll often hear it said in Zen circles that these vows are impossible to fulfill, and indeed they are.

There are beings suffering everywhere that you and I will never meet; there is suffering in our midst we’ll never perceive.  There is the starving, AIDS-afflicted child in Africa, and also the colleague I see in the hall every day who doesn’t share her sorrows with me.

There are forms and causes of suffering that no person can end alone:  war, poverty, global warming.

The Four Vows are aspirational and inspirational.  They prod us to help as we can, to strive to help more than we think we can – but, of course, we cannot literally save all beings from all forms of pain, sorrow, and hardship, at least not in the relative sense of saving beings.

This is a difficult reality — downright depressing, from one perspective, if we allow this truth to sink in.  And this discomfort, if we permit ourselves to experience it, hopefully does move us to do something.

Impossible as it is to save all beings from all suffering always in this sense, however, the Four Vows also have a paradoxical, even teasing, quality.

Infinite beings.  I nonetheless vow earnestly to save each one.

Really?  You must be kidding.

Actually, our translation of the first vow doesn’t say “infinite” beings, it says “numberless” beings.

What does that mean, “numberless beings”?  Zero beings?  Zero and not zero beings?

Just as this line — each of our vows — truly and profoundly recognizes the distinctness of each and every thing, and the reality of personal suffering, it also, and equally, truly and profoundly speaks from the perspective of that being in which all beings participate.

The perspective from which there is no subject, verb and object.

The perspective from which there is no possible and impossible.

No savior, saving, or saved.

This is the perspective of the absolute to which one’s attention frequently is called by Zen teachers and texts.

Someone very dear to me is an alcoholic.  I have been pained by and struggled with this fact for years, as have others I know who care deeply about this person, who I’ll call Sam.

I have tried — many have tried — to help Sam acknowledge and address this condition.  Over the years there have been individual and collective efforts to appeal to and influence Sam through reasoned discussion, a jointly authored letter of concern, interventions of various kinds, accompanying Sam to AA meetings — you name it.

Sam has seemed to recognize his drinking as a problem and make a real effort to stop at times, but most of these periods have passed, with Sam cycling back into a phase of denial (often belligerent denial), alienation, and darkness.

Alcoholism, as I’m sure many of you know, is a complex condition, with a variety of possible contributing causes that differ from person to person.  Some are genetic; some environmental. It’s no easy thing to address. The data on long-term recovery from alcoholism are not very confidence inspiring.

The periods of struggle and darkness have been so hard for me and for others close to Sam.  There’s the sadness for Sam; the desperate desire to see him happy and well.

And there’s my own fear and anger and frustration and sense of loss of Sam as I knew him, and knew us, in the years when he seemed more in control of his drinking, rather than the other way around.

While sitting with many of you one Tuesday night about a year ago, I had this sense that Sam was sitting with us; that I was sitting here with Sam as I sit here with all of you week after week; as I sit here tonight with the heat and the whir of the fans and everything else.  I had this sense of Sam sitting here in this way, too.

This was a turning point in my relationship with Sam.

I had so wanted to save Sam, but my efforts weren’t paying off in the way I had hoped, and they likely were just contributing to our growing alienation.

Sitting in that emptiness, with the numberless beings, Sam and I somehow both seemed less in need of saving.

And our fears, anxieties and judgments, and my own and others’ efforts to make Sam a “project,” didn’t seem to have the same ability to hold us captive at that moment.  Our delusions — mine and his — indeed were inexhaustible.  Opinions, fears, judgments, emotions — all bound to keep arising endlessly.

And they could be ended — ended by knowing there’s no need to end them.  Ended by dropping the delusion label, accepting them as features of the moment, and knowing they needn’t color my outlook completely, and always, nor dictate my every action.

A Dharma gate opened during that sit, a gate that always was open, and which remains open now.  Each moment, each encounter, a gate.

The gate is open, even when I see no hope and am sure it’s closed.   The way is boundless, even when I think it’s impossibly narrow.  Sam and I are walking the path, even when I feel lost, when he seems lost.

The Buddha’s way is our way.  There’s no Buddha but us Buddhas.  We can’t help but embody Buddha.

The Buddha way is unsurpassable because it is none other than this.

Right here.  Right now.

This very moment that has arrived.

And this can’t be surpassed, much as we might try in our own ways to transcend it.

Sitting here with Sam, I knew Sam was Buddha, that I was Buddha, that our struggles are the Buddha’s struggles.

Realizing this, encountering Sam in daily life has been different.  Less tension-filled.  For me for sure, but also for him in relation to me, it often seems.

For my part, I’ve found it easier just to be with Sam.  And, when it has seemed appropriate, to encourage in a gentle, un-pushy, less needy way that Sam seems actually to experience as encouragement.  I do think I’m increasingly meeting Sam as Sam, and not as someone who is constantly falling short of my own selfish, idiosyncratic image of what a “perfect” Sam would be.

Sam has been in a considerably better space at the moment, and he has been for some time, but I’ve also found it easier — though not entirely easy — not to freak out completely when there are signs that maybe things won’t be better indefinitely.

[Sam’s condition very much has been up and down during the nearly three years since I gave this talk.]

I’d like to think this capacity to relate to Sam and his condition a bit differently has been one small factor among many others that are helping him deal with his condition differently.  I honestly don’t know.  When we have visibly cheered up someone who was crying, or found a cure for some disease or whatever, it’s more clear that we’ve made a difference, that we’re saving beings.

I do know there’s been a small, but important, shift in our relationship. This shift certainly has helped me, and I do think it likely has helped Sam just a bit.

I can trace that shift back to the realization, sparked by sitting with you, that Sam and I and our struggles are part of this greater stream of life, and that things are always okay from that perspective — or, rather, things just are.  Suchness.

So perhaps holding these twin perspectives together — the relative and the absolute; the reality that there is terrible suffering we should work to end, even though we can’t possibly end it all, and the reality that all is ultimately as it should be at this very moment, which is simply to say it’s the only way it can be, actually as it is — and letting these perspectives be “not one, not two,” can help motivate us to act skillfully to do some good in the world; to avoid a detached complacency, on the one hand, or despair and/or less skillful action, on the other.

Perhaps our impossible vows are possible after all.

Dedicating our practice

Jeff

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave at the Boundless Way Temple on February 19, 2015, during our annual Coming and Going Retreat. It is the next in a series of talks I have been giving about the major elements of our liturgy.  A recording of the talk, along with many other lovely talks from the retreat, can be found here.

I went skiing with two Swedes a few weeks ago. At the end of the day, I asked them – rather innocently, I thought – “Did you have a nice time?”

One of the two, who has become a close friend over the past five years, and who now lives in the U.S., said, “It was a great day.”

Our other companion, who I’d just met, said nothing. I looked at my friend, wondering whether he’d had a bad day, despite outward appearances.

My friend explained that this is an awkward question for Swedes. Theirs is a fairly collectivist culture, and yet also a fairly competitive culture. This question puts Swedes in a bind.

On the one hand, everyone is supposed to have an equivalent experience.   That’s the ideal. On the other hand, people really don’t have precisely equivalent experiences, and people do desire to have a comparatively good experience.

My friend has known me long enough, and been immersed in U.S. culture long enough, to have felt compelled to respond to my question. Not so for the other Swede.

From this cultural frame of reference, revealing how he felt about the day – good, bad, or in-between – would have been to engage in a comparison of experiences, which is verboten.

Because we do have different experiences, and experience things differently, my skiing companions explained that this taboo often leaves Swedes feeling jealous, but not having any way to contend with that feeling. As a result, they said, it can be hard for Swedes to take joy in others’ joy.

My friend tried to explain how these cultural patterns are born of the cold and darkness that makes life up north so hard. They’re a recipe for group survival in harsh conditions.

I told them that the ideal I’m more acclimated to, at least in my little corner of the U.S., is taking joy in other’s joy, even though most of us probably practice it quite unevenly. It’s a nice idea, they agreed.

I was also thinking, of course, of one of the closing dedications for our sutra services:

Buddha nature pervades the whole universe, existing right here, now. The wind blows, waves fall on the shore, and Guanyin finds us in the dark and broken roads. We give thanks to all the ancestors of meditation in the still halls, the unknown women and men, centuries of enlightened women and men, ants and sticks and grizzly bears. Let wisdom go to every corner of the house. Let people have joy in each other’s joy.

I really appreciate our dedications. For me, they answer the “So what?” question about our practice. What is our practice about?

And I’ve always loved this particular verse.

Buddha nature pervades the whole universe, existing right here, now.

Other dedication verses also open with this reminder. I find it so interesting that this verse, which is about dedicating our practice, opens with something akin to a statement of fact; some might also say an article of faith:

We’re alive. All is alive. And all is blessed.

Notice this! Wake up!

After this or another opening reminder, other verses tend to transition into what we might think of as more clear cut dedications: to all being; to those who suffer from calamity, cruelty and war; to specific people who we know are suffering.

With this verse, we chant:

The wind blows, waves fall on the shore . . .

The alarm clock rings.

The dog scratches its neck.

An email arrives.

Buddha nature pervades the whole day.

. . . and Guanyin finds us in the dark and broken roads.

Compassion does have a way of finding us in our “dark and broken roads.” We may be particularly open to others’ helping hands and the compassion that fills the universe, including our own broken hearts, in moments when we feel lost or down. And, of course, that’s precisely the same love available, and that we may feel, in the wind blowing on our face; the surf pounding against our chest on a warm summer day; that email arriving. Whatever our current life circumstance and disposition.

We give thanks to all the ancestors of meditation in the still halls, the unknown women and men, centuries of enlightened women and men . . .

We dedicate ourselves to this practice, for all it gives us, and enables us to offer to others, with gratitude to those who have sustained it and transmitted it to us. It’s truly something to be cherished, preserved, and developed.

And we dedicate ourselves to . . .

. . . ants and sticks and grizzly bears.

Chanting and hearing this for this first time was one of the moments when I knew Zen was for me. I remember laughing out loud. I was hooked.

This is both playful and serious, of course. Matter of fact. Buddha nature pervades the whole universe, ants, sticks and bears included. The 10,000 things.

And it is our animal nature; the baser parts of our human nature. We, too, are crawling on the ground, like ants. We are dirt and sticks. We can be grumpy and brutish, like bears. We dedicate ourselves to these parts of ourselves, too. We’d might as well face them. We’re enmeshed in it all. We’re in the stew.

Let wisdom go to every corner of the house.

I hear this less as an expansionist, missionary aspiration, than as yet another reminder of what’s here already. This practice is so much about just noticing, I find; about letting be; about getting out of the way – or, rather, coming to know in our bones that we are part of this, and this is the way.

Let people have joy in each other’s joy.

Can there be any doubt that we’d all be happier if we could learn to practice this collectively and consistently? This is the pithiest little ethical mandate I know.

And, like the phrase before it, I think it’s as much descriptive as it is prescriptive. People taking joy in others’ joy. This is the way. The motion and frequency of the universe, to which we can tune in and with which we’re invited to cooperate.

Such a simple principle.

Yet, it’s the work of a lifetime, it seems.

And of generations, across cultures.

The Five Remembrances

Jeff

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave on April 30, 2014, at the Greater Boston Zen Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

 

I am of the nature to grow old;

There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health;

There is no way to escape having ill health.

I am of the nature to die;

There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change;

There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My deeds are my closest companions;

I am the beneficiary of my deeds;

My deeds are the ground on which I stand.

 

— The Five Remembrances

 

 

Tonight I’ll continue exploring features of our liturgy by talking about The Five Remembrances.

 

This short verse from the Pali Canon is as spare, and non-metaphysical, and direct – even “in your face” — as anything one encounters in religion. It tells it like it is, and does so succinctly.

 

It doesn’t make any speculative truth claims.

 

It doesn’t draw lines between chosen and un-chosen, saved and un-saved.

 

It doesn’t make any promises.

 

It doesn’t idealize.

 

At first blush, this verse may not seem to offer any comfort in light of the stark realities of this life that it describes – and, let’s be clear: comfort is what we seek.

 

This verse spoke to me deeply the first time I heard it, and it continues to speak to me deeply today. For me, personally, it is our most important text; at the core of what we do, and of what Buddhism is as a religion.

 

If we want to live fully and skillfully, we must eventually see and accept things as they are. Buddhism offers so much to help us live fully and skillfully, but accepting the inescapable facts of this-worldly life is an essential part of the equation. It is the essential part, really. Unskippable.

 

We won’t live as fully and skillfully as we can unless and until these seeming barriers become gates for us.

 

And this acceptance must occur moment after moment after moment. Much of our default programming points us in another direction.

 

The Five Remembrances are aptly named. Many of us need to be reminded constantly of these facts of life, either because we try to avoid them, or because we anxiously obsess about them and need to meet them in a new way.

 

Life manifests as change everywhere and always. It can’t help but do otherwise. This is obvious enough.

 

It’s the balanced accepting part that’s hard for us; so often, some form of avoiding becomes our refuge. Repeating The Five Remembrances each time we gather makes it harder and harder to hide. More and more evident that our efforts to escape are futile, and counter-productive.

 

The first four of The Five Rembrances remind us that we are “of the nature of change,” offering us no escape from that fact:

 

  • We grow old, if we’re lucky.

 

  • We become ill along the way. Some of us are born with serious ailments, and spend our whole lives coping with them.

 

  • Ultimately, we die.

 

  • Those we love are “of this nature,” as well. No one, nothing, is immune. Partings are unavoidable.

 

Do any of us really doubt this?

 

But do we really accept it – and not just casually and conceptually?

 

So much psychic and physical energy is exerted, so much social, political and economic activity is generated, to try to evade these inescapable realities.

 

That’s not all bad, of course. Quietism and defeatism aren’t noble responses to the facts of existence. By all means, let’s cure diseases. Extend life, if we can make the time worth living. Our urge to avoid old age, sickness and death propels much valuable social, political and technological effort and innovation.

 

And it also breeds much avoidable anxiety, conflict, misuse of resources, and misdirected energy and missed opportunity. So many forms of escapism – substance abuse, consumerism, and the like all can be that.

 

As we truly accept the basic facts of our existence, we tend to cherish life more. Live and love more fully and intimately.

 

The final remembrance is equal parts prescription and description. In this realm of constant change, the only solid ground – indeed, our very being, is what we do (and say) right here, right now.

 

Our actions and speech are rubber and road, and here-now is where they meet.

 

This is it, so far as we know and seemingly can know. This is conditioned by our own and others’ deeds in past moments. This is conditioning future moments, just as past moments have conditioned the present.

 

Each of us is the beneficiary of our deeds in this moment. We lie in the beds we make, so we should make our beds with care.

 

The present is our opportunity to shape the future. What preceded this moment conditions the present, but now is our opportunity to address what we’ve left undone in the past, or know we’ve done poorly.

 

Meditation and our other practices may tend to increase our capacity to conduct ourselves skillfully, to show up as the precepts encourage us to show up. If and as we do, that can have ripple effects, seen and unseen.

 

This past weekend I was home alone organizing things in our basement – creating a craft table area for the kids, an exercise space for my wife and me, a storage area. My family came home, and our eight-year old son made a big fuss about how I was encroaching on his indoor soccer space.

 

I had little patience for this at the moment. I told him to calm down. He didn’t, so I told him to go upstairs and leave me alone. I had a project to finish, and I couldn’t deal with the whining. He went upstairs in a huff.

 

Not skillful.

 

I got my bearings, went upstairs, and asked him if he’d come back down to help me make decisions about the layout of the space, including an area for him to play with his soccer ball.

 

We talked it through, and came up with a sensible plan that satisfied everyone. He was great. So cooperative when I was truly listening to him and demonstrating concern for his concerns.

 

Such a small moment, but such a chance to strengthen a bond and to model behavior that I hope will help my son resolve conflict constructively with others.

 

I don’t want to idealize about this mundane encounter, make predictions from it or make other big claims based upon it. I can’t.

 

But I will say that the tension, and my initial response to it, were a gate, not a barrier. Past conduct conditions the present, but the main thing that imposes constraints in the present is our narratives about the past, and what’s possible now.

 

We don’t get a chance to rewrite past moments. They stand.

 

We do have the opportunity to meet this moment in an intentional way.

 

The Five Remembrances may strike us as bad news initially, but they’re really the good news. Embracing these facts of our existence, not raging against them, is liberation.

 

The good news is that everything is of the nature of change.

 

As a witty theist once said, God created time so everything wouldn’t happen all at once.

 

And, as the Germans say, machs gute. Let’s make it good.

 

The Emperor has clothes, after all

Jeff

 

This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave on March 6, 2014 at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the Boundless Way Zen meta-sangha’s three-week Ango retreat.  Audio recordings of this talk and others given by BoWZ teachers are posted here.

 

Emperor Wu of Liang invited Mahasattva Fu to lecture on the Diamond Sutra.  On the rostrum, Mhasattva Fu struck the lectern once with his stick and immediately climbed down.  The emperor was astounded.

 

Master Zhi asked, “Your Majesty, do you understand?”

 

“No, I do not.”

 

“Mahasattva Fu has finished the lecture.”

 

(Blue Cliff Record, Case 67)

 

I began looking for a koan to use as the launchpad for this talk about a week ago.

 

I poked around the koan territory I’ve been wandering in recently.  Not finding much inspiration there, I went back to the earliest koans in the miscellaneous collection and worked my way forward to where I’ve been wandering lately.  Still nothing, so I even peeked ahead of the koan I’ll next bring to dokusan.

 

No single koan lept out during this exercise, declaring, “Pick me.”  Hmm.

 

What did leap out, however, were two themes that seem to me to run through our whole koan curriculum, so I thought I’d make them the subject of my talk tonight.  I mainly want to talk about the second of these themes, but I need to touch on the first to set up the second.  I’ll come back to Mahasattva Fu’s lecture on the Diamond Sutra when I get there.

 

The first theme . . .

 

Surveying the koan curriculum brought home to me more than ever how it — and the Zen project writ large, I suppose — is, in part, about exploring our relationship with real and perceived constraints.

 

Many of our early koans seem to challenge one’s current perceptions of what’s possible, and so challenge us to take a closer look at what we experience as constraints.

 

Stop the sound of that distant temple bell.

 

Count the number of stars in the heavens.

 

Say something without moving your lips or tongue.

 

Some koans even use metaphors of physical entrapment.

 

You are at the bottom of a 200-foot dry well.  What do you do?

 

Many of us, perhaps most of us, come to Zen feeling trapped somehow.

 

Some part of me cut off from another part of myself.

 

A mind or spirit trapped in a body.

 

A solitary being cut off from the world I inhabit.

 

One being among many inhabiting a realm that can’t be all there is.

 

Some type of dualism.  Some version of heaven and earth, or heaven and hell.

 

We’re sure there is someplace else we must get, something more to know.  There must be a secret passageway to a place beyond, and we sense that Zen might offer us a map to find it and the key to open the door once we get there.

 

The early part of the koan curriculum seems to meet us where we’re at in this regard, even as it begins to challenge us to see that the “something more” we’re looking for is just this.  The “someplace else” we’re seeking is right here, right now.

 

The heat is turned up progressively, of course, as we’re challenged in increasingly direct ways.  Like this zinger (from the Blue Cliff Record), for example:

 

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.

 

Tsssssss!

 

 

And so it goes, until we come to the end of the curriculum, where, among other things, we encounter the precepts as koans.  Perhaps by then koan practice, and sitting practice, and everyday life practice have helped us let go of some perceived constraints and helped us see constraints we must accept in a new light.

 

The open secret, of course, is that the freedom we seek is found in the realm of constraints, not someplace else.

 

There is a “through the looking glass” quality to grasping this open secret, to be sure.  As we desperately strain to peer through the glass, what’s on the other side appears faint and blurry.  Passing through, I find myself.

 

Same old me.

 

Relatively speaking, there seems to be something to get.  Absolutely, not so much.

 

And this brings me to the second theme that seems to run through the koans. . .

 

Perhaps it’s more of a conceit, or a device, than a theme.

 

Like the koan I ultimately chose for this talk, the set up for many koans is an exchange between a wise teacher and a seemingly less wise student.

 

Often there also is a supporting character who is in the know, like Master Zhi in today’s koan.  Or Mahakasyapa, the student — and the only person, we’re told — who broke into a smile in the sermon where the Buddha simply twirled a flower.

 

We might more or less consciously identify with Master Zhi or Mahakasyapa as we pass through one of these koans.  We, too, get it.

 

But I’m not talking about them.  I’m talking about the seeming stooges.  The characters who are portrayed as hapless.  The characters who just don’t seem to get it.

 

Sometimes that student is a prominent person, like Emperor Wu of Liang, who also appears in a handful of other koans.  These prominent folk tend to fare especially poorly, at least on first blush.

 

As I surveyed our koan curriculum looking for inspiration for this talk, I found myself really appreciating these characters, the supposed stooges.  Even inspired by them.

 

Here I was, wandering around, looking for inspiration and insight . . . and I find it in other people wandering around, looking for inspiration and insight.

 

This is where much of the action is in these koans — much of the insight, the invitation and potential for us — I think.

 

“Not knowing is most intimate,” we like to say.  “Only don’t know.”

 

But is there still a hint of special knowledge in our not knowing?

 

As long as we’re identifying mainly with Mahasattva Fu or Master Zhi, perhaps there is.

 

As long as we think we get something Emperor Wu doesn’t, perhaps there is.

 

We can settle into our not knowing, and this, importantly, may make us a bit less anxious in our approach to life; perhaps relatively free of certain questions with which Emperor Wu is wrestling.  Perhaps we’ve come to feel just a bit more at home with ourselves; a bit more at home in this vast universe.

 

Mahasattva Fu, Master Zhi and, yes, Emperor Wu — each of them, and all of them together, are presenting themselves with integrity.  And each is an aspect of who we ultimately are.

 

I really appreciate how Emperor Wu, or that seemingly clueless student in so many other koans, helps us see how easy it is slip into a frame of mind in which there’s something more to get, something special, and, by god, perhaps we’ve got it.

 

That frame of mind from which we may overlook our own haplessness and ignorance, and the opportunities presented by those features of life we experience as constraints, as barriers.

 

If, on the other hand, you happen to be someone who identifies with poor, picked upon Emperor Wu all too easily — well, good for you.

 

“Emperor Wu was astounded.”  What a wonderful response to this.

 

Not knowing is most intimate.

 

 

 

Dancing with Elephants

Jeff

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Is this wrong?

 

If so, why?

 

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

 

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

 

One might pass an STD to the other.

 

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

 

They are too young.

 

There is some element of coercion.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

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

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

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

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

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

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

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Healing Myself

Jeff

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

 

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

— from the Bodhisattva Precepts (BoWZ shorter version)

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

All in.

 

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

 

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

 

All right here.  All me.

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What a relief!

 

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

 

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

 

And, yes, others are saved in the process.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Our inescapable wholeness.

 

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

 

 

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

Jeff

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

There’s something missing.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

So we try to fill the vacuum.

 

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

 

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

 

Much earnest practice.

 

Much reading.

 

Much speculation.

 

All with a goal in mind.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

This practice ultimately is about inhabiting this skin-bag.

 

Becoming at home in our own skin.

 

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

 

Our aversions.

 

Our anxieties.

 

Our rough edges.

 

Even the really uncomfortable stuff.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

All the stuff we try to separate from.

 

All of it, opportunities.

 

Invitations.

 

Dharma gates.

 

Opportunities for growth, perhaps.

 

Invitations to work compassionately to right a wrong, perhaps.

 

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

 

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

 

Rilke’s poem ends:

 

For the god wants to know himself in you.

 

What if it’s true?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Will you let it?

 

How might we meet this moment from that orientation?

 

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

 

Form is Emptiness and Other Stories We Tell Ourselves

Jeff

 

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

 

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

From the Heart Sutra

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Form is exactly emptiness.  Emptiness, exactly form.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

One angle sometimes can predominate, and sometimes intensely so.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Sometimes this perspective.

 

Sometimes that.

 

Sometimes both.

 

Sometimes neither.

 

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

 

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

 

Then it starts spinning stories.

 

This is good.

 

That’s bad.

 

I want more of this.

 

Less of that.

 

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

 

As philosophy, these words really are pretty slippery.

 

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

 

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Bounded and free.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

But only if I relate to it playfully.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

When can I stop sitting?

Jeff

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Some Buddhist teachings even seem to invite this.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I sit.  I get enlightened.  I stop sitting.

 

Results guaranteed.  Timing may vary.

 

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

 

In what sense do we need to sit?

 

Three responses that ring true to me sprung to mind.

 

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

 

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

 

Why?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Zilch.

 

Nada.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

So, there are ethical implications to sitting.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Pretty cool.  Big moral progress.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Not unlike CBT, meditation can help, I think.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And my call to life.

 

Just life.

 

Just sitting.

 

No, really, just sitting.

 

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

 

So, when can I stop sitting?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And, finally, why would I stop sitting?

 

Or, to borrow from that lovely Christian hymn:

 

My life flows on in endless song . . .

 

How can I keep from singing?

 

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

 

My life flows on in endless song . . .

 

How can I keep from sitting?

 

 

Postscript:

 

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

 

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

 

Indeed.

Beneficial Action

Jeff

This is an approximation of a Dharma Talk I gave last night as part of our 2013 ango at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester, Massachusetts.

A recording of the real deal is posted here, along with talks by other BoWZ teachers on this and other passages from Dogen’s Four Bodhisattva Methods of Guidance.  

 

This is the third of Dogen’s Four Bodhisattva Methods of guidance:

 

3 “Beneficial action” is skillfully to benefit all classes of sentient beings, that is, to care about their distant and near future, and to help them by using skillful means.  In ancient times, someone helped a caged tortoise; another took care of an injured sparrow.  They did not expect a reward; they were moved to do so only for the sake of beneficial action.

 

Foolish people think that if they help others first, their own benefit will be lost; but this is not so.  Beneficial action is an act of oneness, benefiting self and others together.

 

To greet petitioners, a lord of old three times stopped in the middle of his bath and arranged his hair, and three times left his dinner table.  He did this solely with the intention of benefiting others.  He did not mind instructing even subjects of other lords.  Thus you should benefit friend and enemy equally.  You should benefit self and others alike.  If you have this mind, even beneficial action for the sake of grasses, trees, wind, and water is spontaneous and unremitting.  This being so, make a wholehearted effort to help the ignorant.

 

 

The first time I read this passage a few weeks ago, the phrase “moved to do so” leapt out at me.

 

For me, being moved to do something is often an important pointer toward beneficial action that is an “act of oneness.”

 

In my experience, it’s too easy to allow oneself to be “tracked” into a job or another commitment that is not the deepest expression of who we are.

 

Perhaps a bit counter-intuitively, this sometimes can take the form of doing “good works” half-heartedly, when what we really want to do is something that superficially seems less civic oriented, but is something that we genuinely feel more drawn to do at the time.  We can berate ourselves for not doing more of what we think we should do with our talents for the sake of humanity.

 

One example of the latter experience in my life was the time I left a developing career teaching and practicing in the conflict resolution arena to join a tech startup.

 

It seemed like such a fork in the road.  Or, to mix metaphors, it was one of those apples and oranges moments.  I like both, and it seemed I had to choose one or the other.  It seemed I couldn’t have a fruit salad.

 

I sat with this decision problem for months.  I was really excited about the startup. It was doing something pretty cool, and the energy gathering there was palpable.

 

I thought I should do something more for the world, however, and that the conflict resolution work was it.

 

In the end, feeling a bit guilty about what I thought was a cop-out and a betrayl of principle, I joined the tech company.

 

And it was great.  An excellent move on every level at that life-stage.

 

And there were some big, fantastic surprises.

 

Shortly after we released our first product – which is a secure, online communication and collaboration tool – in the fall of 2000, this South African guy named Hannes Siebert walked into our office.

 

He said he was an early adopter of our product, and that he had a few feature requests.

 

We wouldn’t understand his world, he said, but he was dealing with an enormous, and enormously challenging, collaboration problem, and maybe helping him would produce features that others also would find useful.

 

Hannes explained that he had just been appointed as the neutral facilitator in the conflict in Sri Lanka, following a major impasse in the peace process.

 

He hadn’t yet been able to get the parties meeting face-to-face again, but he had revived the process online, using our software.

 

I nearly fell out of my chair.

 

“I do understand your world,” I said.  “We can help.”

 

And we did.

 

Our software became central to a new phase of the process in Sri Lanka.  It later was used by international election monitors, including Jimmy Carter, to help ensure the integrity of a national election there.

 

Hannes’s visit to our office marked the beginning of my involvement with the Peace Appeal Foundation, the conflict resolution NGO Hannes co-founded earlier that year with several other people, including five Nobel Peace Laureates.

 

And it marked the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration with this remarkable peacemaker.

 

We’ve since worked in Nepal, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, and, most recently, in Myanmar/Burma, where we’re seeing terrible violence among Buddhists and Muslims, but also glimmers of hope, I believe.

 

Though the war in Sri Lanka ended tragically, the software created by the company I was part of has been a critical tool in every peace process in which the Peace Appeal Foundation has been involved since then.

 

Not every story like this ends this way, I know.  It was incredibly fortuitous that Hannes walked into our office that day.

 

The larger point for me is simply that there’s integrity in doing what we genuinely feel moved to do.

 

We can’t predict – let alone control – the future, so sometimes those inner movements can be our best guide.

 

Years of sitting, and koan work, and, most of all, just living life have taught me that it’s usually dangerous to try to force answers to the big questions.  The right answers to the big questions often feel right, in my experience.  We feel moved by them, moved to act.  They often arise spontaneously – spontaneous is another word we find in Dogen’s text – but after long periods of sitting with the question.  Perhaps years.  They feel like authentic expressions of who we are.

 

And then there are the times when this is all wrong.

 

After we sold that tech company, I had to decide what to do next.

 

I had several opportunities to run young tech companies, and that’s what I wanted to do.

 

But the opportunities I was most interested in would have required a move or some other sacrifice by my wife, who had not yet earned tenure at the university where she teaches.  The things I wanted to do would have disrupted her career.

 

The very least favored option on my list of job prospects was going to work at a big law firm.  I’d left that world long ago, and I wasn’t particularly eager to return to it.

 

After months of searching for almost any other alternative that I thought would make me happier and would align with my wife’s career, however, that’s exactly what I did.

 

And it’s been great.  An excellent move on every level.

 

And there have been some big, fantastic surprises.

 

My firm has been very supportive of my work with the Peace Appeal Foundation, and has even provided pro bono services in support of some of the processes in which we’re involved.

 

I have been invited to serve on the boards of some interesting startups, and my firm has allowed me to do this.  I’ve been able to be involved with multiple companies at once, not just one.

 

Other interesting opportunities that may become deeply meaningful to me and be very beneficial to others are emerging.  Opportunities that never would have come my way – indeed, never would have come into being at all – if I had not joined my firm.

 

And I’m incredibly happy in my marriage.

 

The fruit salad that began with an apple and an orange has gotten ever more colorful and delicious.

 

Fruit salads do happen, it seems.

 

As I’ve sat with Dogen’s passage over the past several weeks, I’ve also come to see him pointing to the value, at times, of doing what we do not feel most moved to do.

 

We can’t predict – let alone control – the future, so sometimes the needs and priorities of others can be our best guide.

 

“Foolish people think that if they help others first, their own benefit will be lost; but this is not so,” Dogen tells us.  “Beneficial action is an act of oneness, benefiting self and others together.”

 

The lord of old interrupts his dinner and his bath to make a wholehearted effort to help others.

 

In a nutshell, I hear Dogen advising us in this passage to do what we’re advised to do in our lovely, shorter version of the precepts:

 

Making use of all of the ingredients of my life,

I vow to take up the Way of Not Sparing the Dharma assets.

 

The ingredients of our lives include our opportunities, our likes, our preferences, our off-beat – and even mainstream! – interests.

 

The ingredients of our lives also include our seeming constraints, our dislikes, others’ preferences, and others’ interests.

 

It’s not either-or.  It’s not self versus other.

 

Of course, discerning what to do in a given moment can be tricky.

 

Like so many Zen practitioners, I have found zazen and koan practice immensely helpful training for sitting with this koan that is my life.

 

I have found them precisely to be this unfolding koan that is my life.

 

Sitting – whether on the cushion, where we’re not especially encouraged to engage in discursive thought, or off the cushion, where that can be a useful component of our deliberations – is a form of action, of course.

 

Eventually, however, in most situations, we must stand up.  Take a step.  Make a move.

 

We must act, well, more actively.

 

Dogen provides us with two helpful decision principles, I think:

 

  • Do what moves us.

 

  • Act primarily for others’ benefit.

 

It’s lovely when we feel these principles are served equally well by some choice that is available to us, but that won’t always be so.

 

When it’s not, I have found it helpful to bear in mind that I just might be surprised by what follows that first step.

 

We can’t predict – let alone control – the future.

 

The best we can do is make good use of the ingredients of our lives.

 

Doing our best to discern what’s right at this particular juncture.

 

Acting with good intentions.

 

Knowing, and trusting, that whatever we do from this frame of mind and heart is an act of oneness that benefits self and others alike.