Category: Koans

Ordinary Mind is Tao

Jeff

Yesterday Full Moon Zen and Providence Zen Center held a joint retreat at PZC, with about 30 people participating. The theme was Two Traditions, One Family. The late Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, who founded the Kwan Um school of Zen (and PZC as its primary center in North America), and the late Japanese Zen Master Taizan Maezumi, who founded the White Plum Asanga, our lineage, were good friends. Yesterday’s retreat was both a tribute to their friendship and an expression of the abiding friendship between our two Zen families. Yesterday we juxtaposed many of each Zen stream’s forms (chants, koans, etc.), highlighting mostly similarities, and also some differences, in these two expressions of the Dharma. For example, we chanted the Heart Sutra in Korean, Sino-Japanese, and in our respective English translations. Kwan Um and the WPA each include koan practice, so we picked a koan used by both families (Case 19 in The Gateless Gate) as the prompt for a short talk by each of the four teachers present, Zen Master Tan Gong; Kwan Haeng Sunim, JDPSN, Fran Jindō Ludwig, Sensei; and myself. Here’s the text of my talk. A recording of all four talks follows.

This is Case 19 in The Gateless Gate:

Joshu asked Nanchen, “What is the Tao?”

Nanchen said, “Ordinary Mind is the Tao.”

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

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

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

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

With these words, Joshu had sudden realization.

This is the koan that gave us Mu.  But don’t think you’ve found the source of Mu, at least if you think the source was hidden before you encountered this koan.

Here we see Joshu, who would become a great teacher, had his own questions as a young seeker.  This was long before another nameless seeker asked him if the temple dog has Buddha nature.

We ask these sorts of questions because we doubt.  Here we see young Joshu’s doubt.  Joshu doesn’t confess his doubt, but his question reveals it.  “What is Tao?” he asks.  “I’m lost.  I’m feeling uncertain,” he’s saying.

Nanchen zeroes in on Joshu’s doubt.  “If you really want to attain the Tao of no-doubt,” Nachen says—to realize it as you—you must stop seeking it as knowing (rather than not-knowing) and as right (rather than wrong).

We don’t find our way in the realm of ideas.  We won’t find our ultimate home in fixed principles of any kind, whether the dogma of a religion, of a philosophy, or of the political right or left.

We seek and need kinship, of course, but being part of a tribe bound by ideas will never fully satisfy.  Members of these tribes still lay awake at midnight with existential questions on their minds and hearts. 

If ordinary mind is Tao and Joshu’s ordinary mind doubts, then the Way Joshu seeks, the Tao of No Doubt, must contain doubt. 

Joshu’s question, our questions, do not resolve as we imagine they will, through syllogisms.  They resolve as we open to, deeply penetrate, accept, and settle into our experience. Just this. We must allow just this to penetrate us.  We discover ourselves as just this.

As we do, our old questions aren’t so much answered.  They just lose their force.

There are no silly questions we can bring to a Zen teacher along the Way.  Yet maybe we should question the nature of our questions a bit more; question the nature of the answers they seek.

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.

The Wheels Have Come Off

Jeff

I gave this talk on November 2, 2023.

This is Case 10 in The Gateless Gate and its verse:

The priest Yuean (Geban) said to a monk, “Xizhong (Keichu) made a hundred carts.  If you take off both wheels and the axle, what would be vividly apparent?”

The Verse

Where the wheel revolves,

Even a master cannot follow it;

The four cardinal half-points, above, below, 

North, south, east, west.

The prominent Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron has a popular book titled When Things Fall Apart.  I’m almost certain I read it decades ago, but it’s been so long I honestly can’t recall, much less remember what the book says if I did read it.  I suppose this proves her point:  Things truly do fall apart, like our memories.  

Presently it seems like the world is falling apart.  Wars in Europe and the Middle East are inflaming conflicts here that, so far, are mostly rhetorical.  Let’s hope they stay mostly rhetorical.  January 6th, awful as it was, gave us just a glimpse of how bad things really could get.  Then there is a climate crisis, a teen mental health crisis, an opioid epidemic, global recession fears, migration crises, mass shootings . . . I could go on.  There is always good news, and I suppose each era brings convulsions of some sort, but still it feels like the wheels may have come off the cart for good this time, and the axle with them.

It’s tempting to make this a talk about impermanence.  That’s one too-obvious Dharma point to make.  Things are always falling apart in a sense.  And, of course, there are always highs and lows; no highs without lows; and, viewed from the perspective of the Absolute, ultimately no highs or lows.  True as all these insights may be, they don’t offer much reassurance or other forms of support when things are especially bleak.

What else is there to say in times like these?  And what to do?  It shouldn’t be surprising that we may feel disoriented and uncertain, perhaps even completely lost, when things seem to be falling apart all around us, inside us, or both.

Our practice teaches to and helps us meet experience, whatever it is.  Not to separate from our experience, outside or inside—and there isn’t really a separate outside and inside.  Just this.

One image that comes to mind for me right now is standing in front of one of those maps we find dispersed around cities or shopping malls with an arrow pointing to the spot where I’m standing.  “You are here,” it says.

At times like this I feel the need to acknowledge that things are a mess and I am right here in it, rather than looking away or sugar-coating a bad situation.  Our practice can help us orient and stabilize ourselves even in turbulent times, and acknowledging the turbulence seems like a sane way to begin to find our balance.  I find just connecting to experience—noting and acknowledging what seems broken, without minimizing or amplifying it—can be a helpful place to start.

Then what?  Well, I suppose it depends.   Our practices also helps us to be less reactive, or more appropriately reactive; to sense and respond to what the situation requires.  The situation itself is the map, suggesting where to go next and how to get there.  Maybe we put the wheels and axle back on the cart.  Or we pull the cart like a sled.  Or we build a new cart.  Or we just pause; wait; leave space; do nothing for now. Maybe a cart is not what we’ll need going forward.

Yunmen’s verse accompanying this koan is lovely and wise, as ever:

Where the wheel revolves,

Even a master cannot follow it;

The four cardinal half-points, above, below, 

North, south, east, west.

The master can’t follow the cart—this very being-time, that is—because she’s right here with it, in it, as it.  We are part and parcel of our experience; part of this whole world that’s on fire.  We don’t control all that’s arising in our presence, let alone on other continents, but we often can influence our own and other’s experience at least weakly, and sometimes even strongly.  We also have some agency over our response to what’s arising—to direct our arising response to what’s arising around and within us—or at least the potential to develop some agency.  Practice can help us develop more agency.  

I’m not just talking about meditation practice.  I’m talking about all of it.  Bowing as we enter the Zendo.  Playing instruments and chanting.  Lighting and placing a new stick of incense after the prior one burns down.  Each of these acts is an opportunity simultaneously to meet and respond to and co-create arising experience, and to do so with reverence.  

“Realizing this, our ancestors gave reverent care to animals, birds, and all beings,” we chanted tonight.  We’re not talking about realizing this as an intellectual idea.  Realizing as making it real.  Realizing as manifesting.  Realizing as doing; as offering an appropriate response.  

The Germans have a great way of saying goodbye:  Mach’s gut.  Make it good.

The wheels are off the cart, and the axle, too.  We are here.  What will we do?  What would it mean to make it good at this time?  Can we?

Approaching Life from the Buddha Side

Jeff

I gave this talk on September 7, 2023.

This is Case 1 in The Gateless Gate: 

A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?” 

Chao-chou said, “Mu.” 

I gave a talk in June about seeking and finding meaning.  I ended it with a quote attributed to Bodhidharma, “[T]hat which is real includes nothing worth begrudging.”  And then I said,

Nothing is excluded from the Buddha realm; nothing exists that is not Buddha.

That perspective can create some confusion with respect to questions about ethics, justice, and social action.  I’ll try to dispel that confusion in a future talk.  For now, I’ll just say that I think our capacity to respond and engage in the most skillful way possible depends greatly upon a non-conceptual awareness and experience that all is Buddha.

Tonight is that “future talk” in which I want to attempt, however inadequately, to dispel the confusion to which I referred.

So why did I begin tonight’s talk with the Mu koan?

We tend to think of the word Mu itself as the key word in this koan.  In an important sense it is, but another key word in the koan is “has,” or “have,” the verb in the monk’s question, “Does the dog have Buddha nature?”  This word is the reason Chao-chou reacts as he does.  It’s the reason he exclaimed Mu, and so the reason generations of Zen practitioners like us have been working with the Mu koan.

Erich Fromm, an important 20th century psychologist, philosopher, and social theorist and activist, distinguished between two modes of existence, having mode and being mode.

In having mode, one is consciously or unconsciously relating to other beings and things as objects and subtly or not so subtly treating them as instruments in relation to oneself and one’s objectives.  Notice that word objectives.

Ironically, this can happen even when one’s objectives seem noble, righteous, and just.  We can figure our own causes and purposes as “higher objects” to an unhealthy extent; we can idolize them.  We can elevate noble ends, whether enlightenment or saving the planet, as objects to such an extent that most other beings and things and causes are beneath our cause-objects.  We tend to think of money and drugs and fame and such as the sorts of things we are most likely to objectify in unwholesome ways, but we can do this even with things and causes we tend to regard positively. 

The monk who visits Chao-chou objectifies the dog, himself, and Buddha nature with his question about whether the dog has Buddha nature.  The question misses the oneness dimension of the interpenetrating, oneness-amidst-distinctions nature of reality.  The monk’s question implies hard ontological and existential separation.  It implies that the dog might somehow be cut off from Buddha nature.  The monk fails to see that the dog is Buddha nature and that Buddha nature, however it manifests, is not an object.  The monk is asking the question from having mode, even using the verb “to have” in his question.  This is why Chao-chou exclaims, “Mu!” 

In “being mode,” one relates to others and oneself as distinct but not separate.  Others have different attributes, capabilities, and perspectives, and different injuries and blind spots, but they’re not objects that can become instruments for pursuing one’s objectives.

Dōgen calls being mode coming at life from the Buddha side.

Our existence within having mode can be quite subtly persistent.  Having mode can continue to have us for a very long time after one begins to develop insight and even has a profound kenshō experience.  To be very clear, Zen teachers aren’t immune from this. 

One of the most subtle and confusing realms in which having mode can continue to have us is the realm of our justice projects, as I suggested a moment ago.  We can pursue good causes too righteously and with an obvious or poorly concealed hostility that objectifies and instrumentalizes others, our adversaries, and sometimes even our allies.

I think it was 1996 when I first heard the beautiful, wrenching, challenging poem Please Call Me by My True Names, which Paul, our Ino, read earlier tonight.  I believe that’s the year it was first published.  I was a student at Harvard Divinity School.  One of my professors, Diana Eck, a famous comparative religion scholar, had assigned it in a class I took.

The poet seems to be identifying equally—not seems, he clearly is identifying equally—with the starving child and the warmonger, the girl who has been raped and the rapist, the political prisoner and the corrupt politician.  As you can imagine, this poem sparked a lot of intense debate in our class.

From one perspective this poem seems to promote, or at least justify, quietism.  Contemplative religious traditions—and I do think Zen qualifies as one in a particular sense—sometimes are criticized as encouraging navel-gazing passivity in the face of injustice.

But, of course, the poet here is none other than the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, whose name is synonymous with Engaged Buddhism; with Buddhism’s turn toward social action.  During the Vietnam War, Thay, as he was called—Thay just means teacher, like our Soto Zen word Sensei—was one of those monks who ventured beyond the monastery to help and protect those outside it, and to protest the war.  Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work and peace activism.

So what is going on here?  Thich Nhat Hanh clearly was not not neutral about things going on around him.  He was not living in a some relativistic, value-free zone.  He was no passive bystander to injustice.

How does someone both write this poem and speak truth to power, as he clearly did?

Perhaps the question one really should ask is how else can one speak truth to anyone with any hope of being heard and achieving lasting, positive change?  With any hope of dampening flames, or even extinguishing the fire, as opposed to fighting with flames of one’s own that incinerate what they touch? 

Through his writing, activism, and other activities, Thich Nhat Hanh provided us with one remarkably positive example of how to approach injustice “from the Buddha side,” as Dōgen put it.  From the perspective of oneness, of wholeness, of integration, of nonseparation.  He was channeling the Buddha’s words and example, as expressed in *An Unending Truth, which Paul also read earlier.  Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, read in the light of his life work, is a profound expression of Buddha nature in its most mature and compassionate presentation.

Martin Luther King himself struggled mightily with questions about means and ends as he advocated for racial justice.  Even as his civil rights activism became increasingly more assertive toward the end of his tragically-shortened life, love for others—not least of all those he sought to influence—remained his guiding principle.**  King didn’t regard or treat those he sought to influence, including those who fought to maintain the status quo or who embraced his vision but wanted him to be less assertive, as objects.  His flame illuminated, first and foremost, and, yes, at times, it also generated some heat.  But it did not scorch, let alone incinerate, what it touched.  

King understood that means and ends are not separate.  He understood the means are ends.  He strived to avoid undue harm as he worked to address specific harms.  He engaged in activism from being mode, not having mode.

Even in the later, more assertive stages of his work as an activist, King continued to seek consensual outcomes.  That remained his prime and ultimate goal.  Even though his activism clearly exposed how many white people still regarded and treated black people as objects, he knew that treating those white people as objects would neither change hearts and minds nor promote any form of lasting, positive change.  He knew two wrongs truly never make a right.

So the first koan most of us take up, which seems to point to something we’ve been missing about the nature of reality, is also very much about grounding our actions in the ground of being.  That is where our actions have their most secure moral foundation.

I hope what I’ve said tonight helps clarify why I said earlier that our capacity to respond and engage in the most skillful way possible depends greatly upon a non-conceptual awareness and experience that all is Buddha.  It depends upon a shift from having mode to being mode.  Buddha nature is something we are, not something we have, and the depth of our embodied recognition of this greatly influences not just the moral quality of the ends we pursue, but also the moral quality of the manner in which we pursue them.

* An Unending Truth (by Shakyamuni Buddha, from the Dhammapada; tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu; adapted, abridged) 

Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart. If you speak or act with a darkened heart, then suffering follows you—as the wheel of the cart, the track of the ox that pulls it. 

Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart. If you speak or act with a calm, bright heart, then happiness follows you, like a shadow that never leaves. 

“That person insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me”—for those who brood on this, hostility isn’t stilled.

“That person insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me” for those who don’t brood on this, hostility is stilled. 

Hostilities aren’t stilled through hostility, regardless. Hostilities are stilled through non-hostility: this is an unending truth.

Unlike those who don’t realize we’re here on the verge of perishing, those who do: their quarrels are stilled. 

** See Livingston, Alexander. 2020. Power for the Powerless: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Late Theory of Civil Disobedience. The Journal of Politics 82(2): 700-713.

Which of Me Is the True Chi’en?

Jeff

I have fallen behind on posting talks and other musings and news. Here begins a flurry of catch-up posts. This is a talk I gave on January 12, 2023.

This is an extended version of Case 35 in The Gateless Gate:

Ch’ien was the beloved only child of a merchant who one day announced he had found a good husband for her. But her cousin was her secret lover and they had known each other since childhood.

That night the cousin, distraught, set off up the yellow river, but he saw running along the banks a form in the moonlight, and it was Ch’ien, and she joined him. They settled upriver and had two children, and made a life, but she longed to see once again her home and her father. They returned and Ch’ien waited in the boat while her husband approached the house to see what sort of a reception he would get.

To her husband’s surprise, the father was delighted to see him. The young man confessed, “Ch’ien ran off with me that night, and we lived together and had two children. She is waiting in the boat, eager to see you.” And the father said, “Is this a joke? Since the time you left, she has been sick in bed, unable to arise or speak.” The father told the woman in the sick bed what he had heard, and at this, she rose to her feet and stepped out the door. At that moment, the woman from the boat herself arrived at the garden gate. The two women walked towards each other, embraced, and became one.

Wu-tsu asked a monk, “The woman Ch’ien and her spirit separated. Which is the true Ch’ien?”

Fran and I have been reflecting on and talking about shadow work and its relationship to Zen practice for over a year. (Fran initiated and has been driving this discussion, and I am grateful to her for that.) The term “shadow” is from Jungian psychology. It’s the idea that there are elements of oneself that are hidden to us but still influence what we feel, think, say, and do.

It’s important to understand that shadow elements are neither good nor bad. Anger may be a shadow element for some of us—an emotion one has difficulty discerning in oneself and expressing in functional ways—but anger is not bad. If the conscious part of oneself is cut off from anger we are more likely to behave passive-aggressively to get our needs met in relationship. As a result, we may not be very effective at meeting our needs and we may damage our relationships. Others are likely to feel manipulated or feel we’re hard to read and something of a burden. Maybe some people even will take advantage of us because we can’t let them know we’re upset by their behavior. When we do express anger, it’s likely to be expressed explosively, because angry energy has been building up for so long—most of a lifetime, perhaps. If we had been in touch with it all along, if anger were not in the shadows, it could be channeled and expressed more constructively. Anger calibrated, expressed, and channeled constructively sometimes even can help us do great things, like standing up against human rights abuses.

It’s not just feelings and impulses that we tend to think of as bad, like anger, that can be banished to the shadows. Our capacity for love, healthy pride, and courage can reside there, too, similarly limiting one’s capacity to show up as the best version of oneself.

What does all this have to do with this old Chinese fable that Wu-tsu used as a koan? I see it as encouragement to call forth our shadow elements and embrace them.

Like many good stories, there’s a central moral dilemma, and moral dilemmas often divide us—not just divide one person from another but divide one person internally. Chi’en is a young woman in a traditional, patriarchal culture in which family is a primary value and social structure. Respect for and obedience to one’s elders is a key requirement in this culture. Chi’en would have felt duty-bound to respect her father’s judgement and wishes about her marriage and obligated to stay near her birth family to care for her parents in old age. Even today, Chinese culture is relatively more relationship-based than many Western cultures. It places relatively more emphasis on group harmony and stability. The needs and preferences of individuals are important, yet they tend to be addressed in what might seem to many of us to be more nuanced (and, from our perspective, often less personally satisfying) ways within one’s web of close and distant relationships.

Add up all these factors and we can imagine that Chi’en would have felt as if she had little personal agency to declare her true love and speak and act against her father’s wishes. (In fact, I know from reading the work of a Chinese-American expert in Chinese moral philosophy that Chi’en might even have thought of her flight from home as something she had to do for her family, because remaining home as a malcontent would have made life intolerable for them.) We can imagine that a young woman like Chi’en, in this family and social context, might be conditioned to repress certain feelings and impulses that can help make us happy and whole, but which would have felt risky to express—feelings and impulses like eros and a sense of our own worth, power, and agency. But those feelings exist as shadow elements nonetheless.

Chi’en may have felt divided between the love she felt for the young man of her dreams and the obligation she felt to conform to her parents’ and culture’s expectations. She may have felt divided internally between love of her boyfriend and love of her family, including her father. Chi’en and other women then and now often have felt constrained—unjustly, or at least unfortunately, subject to other shadow elements operating at the level of a group, like one’s family or workplace, or even an entire culture—yet we can also imagine that Chi’en genuinely loved her father, even as he enacted cultural scripts that constrained her agency in keeping with prevailing social norms regarding his social role. We can feel both love and distaste for another person, and this ambivalence very often gets resolved internally by embracing one feeling and repressing the other, rather than accepting and dealing with our complex reality in a more functional way.

What is Chi’en to do with her dilemma? What does she do?

In the first chapter of this brief story, Chi’en runs away with her boyfriend and lives the life of her dreams, seemingly strong and self-possessed, showing that her capacity for love and her personal power do not reside in the shadows. (Then again, as noted above, perhaps Chi’en felt she ran away as much for her family’s benefit as for her own.) But the plot thickens when Chi’en’s heart longs for her home and father, and she returns home.

Chi’en’s husband discovers that her father is not angry, but rather is thrilled to see him. It seems there’s another Chi’en who stayed behind and has been heartbroken and bedridden ever since her father told her about the marriage he had arranged and Chi’en’s true love ran away.

Were Chi’en’s passion and personal power residing in the shadows after all? Did the man her father introduced sense that she had given her heart to someone else and decide not to marry her? Did a despondent Chi’en then withdraw from life, paralyzed?

Which life did Chi’en really live? When we ask the question that way, the story provides no answer. This is myth and allegory. Chi’en’s physical body didn’t really duplicate itself, with each double going in different directions to live different lives.

But Wu-tsu doesn’t ask the monk which life Chi’en really lived. He asks, “Which is the true Chi’en?”

If most good stories have a central moral dilemma, most also have a good twist at the end. This isn’t just a good story; it’s a great story. There are two twists at the end. The first twist is that one Chi’en returns after many years to encounter another. The second is that the bedridden Chi’en, who had been longing for her lover all these years, gets up and walks right past him. She does not immediately embrace the man for whom she has been longing. Instead, she embraces herself, and the two Chi’ens become one. She really can’t love her husband or her father fully and well until she can love all the parts of herself, healing her internal divide.

I see this koan as an allegory about the necessity of making self-integration, or atonement within oneself (at-one-ment), an important feature of what it is to be a Zen practitioner. When those aspects of ourselves that are hidden are coaxed out of the shadows and embraced, we become one. We can’t consciously be one with that which we don’t (yet) see in ourselves. We can’t be our true selves, or at least our best selves, if we don’t fully know ourselves. And the parts we refuse to know will assert themselves somehow if we don’t see and embrace them, and only to ill-effect, perhaps even causing grave harm.

We can’t be whole personally if we don’t peer into the shadows and invite what resides there to come forth, and we can’t be whole collectively either. We don’t know what happens after the two Chi’ens merge, but we’re left with this sense that the relationships among the three central characters in this story—Chi’en, the man she loves, and her father—now are on a better trajectory. You also get the sense that the father and husband have grown and perhaps glimpsed and embraced their own shadow elements, in turn making it easier for Chi’en to greet and integrate hers. Her father seems to have liberated tenderness, compassion, and self-confidence from the shadows. It must have taken all three to accept how his conformity to convention had injured his daughter and so to welcome her true love when he returned.

While I see this koan as evidence that we are encouraged to seek self-integration and at-one-ment, I don’t think Zen traditionally has offered all the tools we need to do that work. In fact, it’s possible to use our practice as a defense—to engage in what’s sometimes called “spiritual bypassing,” which is turning to meditation and spiritual practice to avoid uncomfortable emotions and experiences, much like one might turn to alcohol or gambling. I want to be quick to add that meditation, koan work, and other elements of our practice can really help us discover and integrate what’s hidden. They can help prepare the ground for and can positively reinforce modern shadow work practices. And it’s not just Zen practitioners who sometimes become curious about and explore those other practices. Psychologists have become quite curious about Zen and are exploring it and integrating it into their practices.

We’ll have more to say about Zen and shadow work in the coming weeks and months. We want to spark a broader dialogue about it and create elective opportunities to integrate shadow work into our practice.

The true Chi’en, the true you and me, is the whole person, ever more intimately known to herself. Zen practice really must be a practice—a set of practices—for ever increasing at-one-ment.

Insight

Jeff

This is the text of a talk I gave on June 8, 2023.

This is Case 20 in The Book of Equanimity:

 Master Jizo asked Hogen, “Where have you come from?”

“I pilgrimage aimlessly,” replied Hogen.

“What is the matter of your pilgrimage?” asked Jizo.

“I don’t know,” replied Hogen.

“Not knowing is the most intimate,” replied Jizo.

At that, Hogen experienced great enlightenment.

Jizo’s final remark in this koan, “not knowing is the most intimate,” is among the most profound and repeated lines in the Zen tradition, but I want to focus on the very last line of this koan instead.

This past Saturday (June 3rd) I gave a talk about seeking and finding meaning.  In that talk I said many of us come to practice because things seem out of joint; disintegrated.  Humpty Dumpty is cracking, or maybe already in pieces.  We’ve made meaning when all the pieces of oneself and all the pieces of the world we inhabit seem to cohere in a new way.  We’re seeking integration; a sense of wholeness.  The knowledge we seek isn’t a philosophical, theological, or scientific formulation, but the experience of knowing oneself and all else as interlaced threads of the vast robe of liberation itself.

Many koans end like the one I read a moment ago: “At that, so-and-so experienced great enlightenment.”  Reading this, we might assume the monk’s search for coherence and cohesion is over in a flash.  If this is what we expect for ourselves—that we’ll have a flash of insight that puts our heart-mind to rest once and for all—we may be disappointed.

Many Zen practitioners do have a powerful kensho experience at some point.  These experiences absolutely can, and they very often do, leave one with an abiding sense that one is not separate from it all.  Many other Zen practitioners don’t have such a singular experience, however, but instead have many less dramatic moments of non-dual insight, like a sense of the oneness of it all while watching steam dance upward from a teacup or watching the play of light streaming through a window.  Whatever our experience, the spark that brought us to practice is bursting into a flame.

But old ways of knowing and seeing, and the old habits of mind and heart that accompany them, tend to die hard.  Zen practice is a context that tests and challenges the boundaries of the ways of knowing and being we have brought to it.  It sometimes pierces, sometimes simply sidesteps our preexisting mental frames.  Chief among these mental frames is our sense of self; of who we are and how we exist. 

The moments of insight we experience as Zen practitioners are disorienting to that sense of self, with its overly rigid boundaries and its containment, command, and control projects.  Early in our practice, our self-sense may react to new insight by trying to co-opt it; to contain and control it as something “I” now “have.”  The ever-quotable Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa was fond of saying that the ego wants to be present at its own funeral.  Our insight experiences can be held in a way that’s self-referential; regarded as personal accomplishments, and so indicative of spiritual pride.

If and as we continue to practice, however, if and as we continue to nurture and fuel the flame insight experiences ignite, that rigidly bounded sense of self ultimately may be consumed by the flame and turned to ash.  Other practices, like therapy, can complement and support our practice, and vice versa (but should not be confused with it).  

Ash isn’t nothing; it isn’t mere refuse.  It mixes with the the soil that gives life.  It scatters and rides the wind in the Ten Directions.  Now we truly identify, mingle with, nourish and are nourished by all that arises.

Mature, seasoned insight is the experience of feeling centered in a universe with infinite centers.  Now we know and experience ourselves and all else as interlaced threads of the vast robe of liberation itself.  No containment necessary, or even possible.

The monk in our koan dropped his guard for a moment.  He became vulnerable; exposed.  He had been wandering around with an intense sense of purpose, but he realized he had no idea what he was looking for or even why he felt something was missing in the first place.  To his surprise, Jizo validates his not knowing; encourages him to give up the self-referential containment, command, and control project that his spiritual journey had become, and simply live into the mystery. 

This monk, like so many of us, set foot on a narrow path thickly overgrown with questions.  With this moment of initial insight, the path begins to widen, feel less vexed and more spacious.  Maybe the path eventually will disappear into a vast clearing.  Lost in it, we see nothing but the horizon in every direction.  And each blade of grass at our feet.

In-sight.  Seeing from within, not seeking a way out.  

What is this vast clearing in which we find ourselves?  Home, warm and intimate.

I think Jizo is encouraging the monk to rest his weary legs, mind, and heart.  I think the monk is on the cusp of accepting that practice is the point of practice; that his life is the point of his life.  Jizo is affirming that recognition.            

Jizo is telling the monk that he’d might as well make himself at home.

Seeking and Finding Meaning

Jeff

I gave this talk on June 3, 2023. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 12 in the Blue Cliff Record:

A monk asked Tung Shan, “What is Buddha?”

Tung Shan said, “Three pounds of hemp.”

This koan, and others like it, seems to express many of the qualities for which the Zen tradition is famous, or perhaps infamous, among them obscurity, irreverence, and paradox.

A Zen practitioner coming to a teacher with a question like this is just trying to do what human beings try to do: make meaning. The late developmental psychologist William Perry said, “Organisms organize, and the human organism organizes meaning.” We are meaning-makers.

The question, “What is Buddha?” can be reformulated as, “What’s it all about?”  And also, “Who or what am I?”  And also, “How do I fit in?”  Needless to say, if we’re asking questions like this, we’re not quite sure what it’s all about, or who or what we are, or how we fit in.  This sort of uncertainty, or not knowing, can feel intensely, existentially uncomfortable.  We want relief from that discomfort, and we start seeking relief by seeking conceptual answers to questions like, “What is Buddha?”

We’ve made meaning, or made sense, when everything seems to fit together; to cohere.  We’re seeking integration; a sense of wholeness and integrity; coherence.  We feel disjointed “inside” and the world seems disjointed “outside.”  We want all the parts “inside” us to fit together harmoniously; we want all that’s “outside” us to fit together harmoniously; and we want “inside” and “outside” to fit together harmoniously, too.

Tung Shan (aka Dongshan) was the ninth century Chinese teacher to whom we trace the start of the Soto school of Zen in which we practice.  He was a famous teacher during the Tang Dynasty, the heyday of Zen in China.  Some of our most important Zen texts are attributed to him.  Hundreds of years later, Dharma heirs of Tung Shan developed koan practice based, in part, upon recorded encounters between Tung Shan and the monks he taught—stories like the one with which I opened this talk.

On first blush, Tung Shan’s response to the monk’s question—“What is Buddha?”—may indeed seem obscure, irreverent, and paradoxical.  Hearing Tung Shan’s response in this koan for the first time, many of us may think, “Huh?  The monk is asking a clear question about Buddha nature.  Why does Tung Shan respond so obscurely by referring to three pounds of hemp?  The monk is asking a serious question about a sacred matter.  Why does Tung Shan respond so irreverently, seemingly dismissing the monk’s question and referring to something so mundane.  The monk is asking a straightforward question.  Tung Shan’s response seems like a joke or a riddle, not a sincere answer.”

Tung Shan indeed is responding sincerely.  His response is not obscure, irreverent, or paradoxical.  To the contrary, it is as clear, serious, and straightforward as the monk’s question.

If Tung Shan’s response initially seems obscure, irreverent, and paradoxical to us, that’s because we’re expecting a different sort of answer.  We’re looking for, and think we are inquiring about, something extraordinary; something extra-ordinary.  Tung Shan instead points to something completely ordinary and concrete, and so his response seems wrong or intentionally confounding.

Hemp was used to make paper, cloth, and rope, among other everyday items, in ancient China.  Tung Shan’s monastery and others like it were major cites of literary production.  There would have been 30 or even 300 pounds of hemp at his monastery at any given time, used to create paper on which monks transcribed sutras, the robes the monks wore, and other everyday items.  Hemp would have been as ordinary as rice or water.

Tung Shan is telling the monk in the simplest, most straightforward way possible that Buddha is right here.  Teacup Buddha.  Morning dew Buddha.  Temple dog Buddha.  Questioning monk Buddha.

Tung Shan is telling the monk that the meaning he is seeking is in plain sight.  That the robe he is wearing, and also what’s inside it, is the very robe of liberation.  He is telling the monk that the answer to his question is not an esoteric or abstract idea, but this very life; each and every feature of it.  He’s saying that the knowledge we seek isn’t a philosophical or theological formulation, but the experience of knowing oneself and all else as interlaced threads of this vast robe of liberation.

Nothing could be less obscure, more reverent, or less puzzling than the way of being to which Tung Shan is pointing.  We simply need to welcome and live into it.  Zen practice is a context and path for living into this truth.  Our resistance to it—our desire to contain and control reality—tends to decrease if and as we walk the path.  We ultimately discover ourselves and all else as the meaning we have sought.  It was ready-made; already waiting here for us, as us.

Could the lint on my cushion really be Buddha?  Could my life really be a Buddha’s life?  As Bodhidharma, the first great Zen ancestor, wrote, “that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging.”  Nothing is excluded from the Buddha realm; nothing exists that is not Buddha.

That perspective can create some confusion with respect to questions about ethics, justice, and social action.  I’ll try to dispel that confusion in a future talk.  For now, I’ll just say that I think our capacity to respond and engage in the most skillful way possible depends greatly upon a non-conceptual awareness and experience that all is Buddha.

Thanks for listening. As always, our dialogue is what I most look forward to about our time together.

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.

Spiritual Authority

Jeff

I gave this talk on Friday, July 29, 2022, during a summer sesshin. You’ll find a recording of the talk at the end of this post.

This is the koan “Dr. Doctor Rides the Bus” from the Book of Householder Koans, a new collection of contemporary koans—koans from our time and place—assembled by Zen Roshis Eve Myonen Marko and Wendy Egokyu Nakao:

Dr. Doctor has a common cold, but he still rode the bus to work.
He began to cough and sneeze into his handkerchief. Every time
he coughed, all the people on the bus tried to cough. Every time
he sneezed, all the people on the bus tried to sneeze. Finally,
the doctor exited at his destination.
“Whew!” the driver sighed. “What would we do without good
medical advice?”

The name of the central character in this koan, Dr. Doctor, tells us we’re dealing with a revered authority figure. This isn’t just Dr. Smith; it’s Dr. Doctor.

And the first line tells us immediately that something is amiss. Dr. Doctor is riding the bus, exposing other people to their illness. Shouldn’t the good doctor know better?

All the passengers riding with Dr. Doctor seem to believe coughing and sneezing is what they should be doing too. If Dr. Doctor is saying or doing it, it must be what they should do, right? The driver even praises the good doctor’s example as Dr. Doctor leaves the bus.

Replace “bus” with “zendo,” replace “Dr. Doctor” with “Sensei” or “Roshi,” and it becomes clear this koan is inviting us to take a hard look at authority in the realm of spiritual practice.

Let’s imagine the story continues. That night, one of the passengers starts feeling sick. Now her coughs and sneezes are real, not feigned; Dr. Doctor really was ill, after all. Now this passenger also is exhibiting these symptoms, but maybe she tells herself it’s okay. She denies or suppresses doubt. Or maybe she calls a co-worker with whom she rode the bus and learns he also now has these symptoms, but they minimize their own feelings of discomfort. These colleagues assure one another it’s no big deal. The koan tells us Dr. Doctor has a common cold, not something more serious, after all.

Let’s say they both go to work the next day, and one goes to dinner with friends that evening. That weekend, someone who was at that dinner, infected but not yet coughing and sneezing, visits his aging mother in her nursing home. Several residents catch the cold, and one particularly vulnerable person doesn’t survive it. Dr. Doctor’s conduct, and the riders’ acceptance of it, has caused great loss and pain.

Like one of my favorite novels, Catch 22, we the readers of this koan readily see there’s something wrong with the picture it paints, even though the characters in it do not. All of them—Dr. Doctor, the bus driver, and all the passengers—are just too enmeshed in the field they inhabit. They are not really subjects in it, they are subject to it.

I’ve extended this koan’s story in a dramatic way, with a tragic conclusion. This community knows all too well that such tragedies are possible—that teachers can behave in inappropriate ways, whether minor and seemingly benign or wildly inappropriate, and that they can fail to realize the depth and breadth of the harm they are causing. Authority figures even may come to believe, consciously or not, that they’re so special the rules don’t apply to them. One key teaching of this koan is that we need to be on guard against this. We need to be aware of our own needs and desires that can create a propensity toward enmeshment and blindness. We need to heed signs, including our own discomfort. That teaching is critically important.

There’s another teaching here I’d like to spotlight: It’s no good to imitate, whether in our individual practice or as a community. We should always be open to good ideas and examples wherever we may find them, yet we always need to tailor them to our needs, circumstances, concerns, and objectives. That’s the balance we need to strike. No other response is truly agentic.

Many people who feel burned by an authority figure, or by our institutions or systems, not only lose faith in the authority of others; they also subtly lose touch with and lose faith in themselves. When this happens, we are prone to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. We can reject what is still of potential value and legitimate use to us.

Most of us eventually get burned and disillusioned by someone or something we’ve looked up to or relied upon to a greater or lesser degree. This community suffered something cataclysmic, yet who among us had not at least experienced a mild loss of faith in another authority figure, institution, or system at some earlier point in our life?

I’m a parent to two teenagers, and I see daily how skeptical they have become about many of our institutions and the adults in my generation. This is understandable, and I share their perspectives to a great extent. Yet I also know they presently are painting with a very broad brush—or erasing with a very, very wide eraser—as they react to what rightly concerns them. As teens, they have not yet developed confidence in their own capacity to separate wheat from chaff, so they are inclined to reject all people and ideas associated with what they have received, reactively pivoting toward what they imagine to be its opposite.

We’re adults, and so we’re hopefully less inclined to do that. Still, when Dr. Doctor has let us down, and we begin to wonder whether the whole medical profession has let us down too, it’s natural to question whether there was ever anything of value there in the first place. It’s possible there was not, but another possibility is that this moment in which we find ourselves is offering us an opportunity to separate wheat from chaff; to discover the real pearl of great price within the shell, the outer packaging, on which we previously were focused.

I’ve always loved that old Zen proverb, “Barn burnt down. Now I can see the moon.” In one way or another, it seems our Zen barn eventually needs to burn to the ground. How I wish it always were a controlled burn that didn’t leave someone scarred and in mortal pain. Controlled or not, however, our barn must burn down to reveal the moon.

We must sift through the ashes in the light of the moon, deciding what’s left of the barn that is still useful. We must decide what to construct in its place—a structure that fits and suits us, now with skylights to receive the moonlight. We must find our own style; our own way of receiving and expressing the Dharma in the context of our own lives, personally and as a community. Many of the forms, practices, and structures we have received from China, Japan, and our forerunners in the West have enduring value to us, but we must honor them by adjusting, stretching, and supplementing them as fits our time and place.

Each of us must discover ourselves as the stable ground and structure we are seeking. Any authority figure worthy of one’s respect and admiration will want nothing less for and from us. They will simultaneously strive to provide an example worth imitating and they won’t accept mere imitation.

Here’s the verse that precedes the koan with which this talk began:

Depending on circumstances,
Everything is medicine,
Everything is disease.
Doctors are no exception.

Indeed.