Category: Practice

Verse of the Kesa

Jeff

I gave this talk on Thursday, November 10, 2022, at the Greater Boston Zen Center. A recording is available here.

I want to speak briefly about the Verse of the Kesa tonight.  This is the short verse people are chanting silently to themselves before our sits when you see them kneeling at their cushions with their rakusus on their heads.  I’ve recently started using an alternate version of this verse, which I prefer to the one I was taught.  

The version I learned, and which most of us here chant, goes like this:

Vast is the Robe of Liberation,

A formless field of benefaction.

I wear the Tatathagata’s teachings,

Saving all sentient beings.

The alternate version goes like this:

Vast and wonderous is the Robe of Liberation,

Formless yet embracing every treasure.

I wish to unfold the Buddha’s teaching,

That I may help all living things.

Subtle differences.

The first line adds “wonderous” alongside the adjective “vast.”   I like that.  A sense of wonder, of awe, is at the heart of our practice.  To wonder is to not know—to not know in a very positive way.  To marvel.  To be awestruck.  

We’re not trying to understand in a narrow sense in Zen; to reduce existence to syllogistic formulations.  To sum it all up.  We’re cultivating an ever-deeper realization that we’re part of it all.  We’re learning to recognize ourselves and all else as Buddha.  We’re feeling ourselves ever more tightly woven into the Robe of Liberation.

The second line:  I always have loved the image of a “formless field of benefaction,” yet I think the alternate version both captures its spirit and adds something lovely. 

“Formless yet embracing every treasure.”  Emptiness, the Absolute, manifesting as the 10,000 things, each a treasure.  I like that word “embracing.”  It evokes the ideal of agape, of the highest love, for me.  To embrace also is to hold.  Each treasure, including you and me, held.

The third line:  I like the formulation “I wish to unfold the Buddha’s teachings” much more than “I wear the Tatagatha’s teachings.”

“I wish” speaks to our intention, our aspiration, as we step onto and continue walking along this path.  And “unfold” suggests ongoing discovery and learning.  Buddha—this—is ever revealing its teaching, and yet ever mysterious.  The vast universe is ever pouring itself out, wonderously.

It’s possible to hear “I wear the Tatagatha’s teachings” in a way that seems more pridefully descriptive, with an air of exclusivism, though I’m not suggesting that’s intended.  The intention is that I’ve accepted the teachings completely—so completely I’ve wrapped myself in them.  Yet I suppose it’s possible to hear these same words in a tribal or sectarian way: Buddhist doctrine is my uniform; that with which I identify and which identifies me distinctively compared to you.  

And the last line: I like “That I may help all living things” so much better than “Saving all sentient beings.”  Having been coerced in my youth into converting for a period from Roman Catholicism to a fundamentalist strain of Christianity, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with this notion of “saving” others.  I don’t care how you spin it, I just don’t like that idea.  Even viewing it from what we call the intrinsic perspective in Zen, from the perspective of the Absolute, where there is no one in need of saving, it still smacks of absolutism and missionary zeal to me.  Helping, however:  Yes, I can pledge to try to help.  

And why limit our sphere of concern to sentient beings, however broadly we might define sentient?  Why not try to help all living things?  Yes, I like that better, too.  And, by the way, all is alive, including the zafus and fish drum.  The whole of this vast and wonderous Robe of Liberation is alive.  All is Life.

Kesa means robe.  Buddhist renunciates have made and worn a robe of died fabric scraps since ancient times.  Our rakusus are mini robes.  No one is quite sure when and why they emerged, but it happened in China, most likely in response to persecution of Buddhists as Buddhism fell out favor and Buddhists were persecuted for several years during the mid-ninth century.  Monks may have made rakusus to wear under their street clothes, much like the tallit worn by Orthodox Jewish men.  

Dogen saw Chinese monks wearing rakusus and chanting the Verse of the Kesa and brought these practices to Japan.  Dogen gave important talks about the kesa.  He put these practices and what they symbolize at the heart of the expression of Zen he taught.

Now we have these practices.

I was poking around the web as I wrote this talk, taking in what others have said about the kesa and the verse we chant as we put it on.  I found a lovely website called Zen Universe that’s maintained by three Zen adepts in Eastern Europe.  Their page on the kesa is wonderful.  It includes this passage:

Heaven and earth, the entire universe, are one single kesa.  No world exists outside of the kesa.  We do not fall into hell or rise up to heaven – we go nowhere, we come from nowhere.  There is only one kesa.  We owe it to ourselves to wear the kesa.

When we wear our kesas we affirm to ourselves and others that there is only one kesa.  That we “do not fall into hell or rise up to heaven.”  That we ourselves and all others have never needed saving, though we might need some help realizing this, and it is right and good to offer what genuine help we can give.But here’s the point I really want to make, and that I hope we all internalize.  Whether you’ve taken Jukai or not, please think of getting dressed each day as putting on the kesa, because that is what we’re doing.  We can say the Verse of the Kesa, or just call it to mind for an instant, as we put on our jeans.  Let’s see the ordinary clothes we wear, and our pajamas too, and our very skin, even when we’re alone in the shower unclothed, as the Robe of Liberation.  Because they are.

Zhuangzi’s Grief

Jeff

I gave this talk, as guest teacher at the Greater Boston Zen Center, on Saturday, October 30, 2021. If you prefer to listen, you can access the audio recording on GBZC’s website.

I’m part of a reading group that’s focusing on Chinese literature this year.  Our guide is a Chinese-American poet who grew up in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution.  I thought I’d open with a story from the ancient Daoist text known as the Zhaungzi, named after its author.  

This translation is from a much more recent book called The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us about the Good Life, which I highly recommend.  

Zhuangzi’s wife died and Huizi went to console him.  He found Zhuangzi squatting on the floor with his legs open, drumming on a pot and singing.  Huizi said, “You lived with her, raised children with her, grew old together.  To not cry at her death is bad enough, but drumming on a pot and singing—what could you be thinking?”  Zhuangzi said, “Oh, it’s not like that.  When she first died, how could I not grieve?  But then I looked back to her beginning, before her birth.  Not just before her birth, but before she had a body.  Not just before she had a body, but before she had qi.  In the midst of that amorphous chaos, there was a change, and she had qi; the qi changed, and she had a body; her body changed, and she was born.  Now there is yet another change, and she has died.  This is like the change of the four seasons: spring, autumn, winter, summer.  Now she is residing in the greatest of chambers.  If I were to follow her sobbing and wailing, it would show I understood nothing about our destiny.  So I stopped.”

I’m visiting you at a time when people the world over—and no doubt some of us here—have experienced and are continuing to experience extraordinary loss and hardship. Over the past 18 months, a global pandemic has claimed millions of lives; lives have been lost to hate crimes and some responses to them; political unrest here and elsewhere has claimed lives; storms, fires, and other extreme weather events have taken lives, homes, and livelihoods.  

During the past year, my wife and I each lost our fathers, hers to COVID and mine to declining health in old age.  Our family also lost two dear friends, one 95 when she passed and the other only 12.  Several of our close friends have experienced similar losses or will soon.  

Everywhere one turns these days, hearts seem laden with loss and hardship.  This is always true, of course.  The pandemic and the other extraordinary things I just mentioned have been occurring alongside the ordinary march of old age and illness that ends in death.  

What are we to make of this story about Zhuangzi, as dark clouds gather above us?

For me, this snapshot of Zhaungzi during his experience of loss is evidence of the fruit our practice can bear.

We should first note that Zhuangzi’s response to his great loss is not spiritual bypass, stoicism, or ascetic detachment.  Zhuangzi felt and grieved his wife’s passing.  His first response—his primary response—was to wail and sob for some time.  

But his loss obviously did not crush his spirit.  In fact, his spirit ultimately seems enlarged by this difficult experience.  Zhuangzi embraces the aching part of himself.  It has a welcome seat at the table—and, for Zhuangzi, we’re all sitting together at a very, very large table.

One does not get the sense from this story or others in his book that Zhuangzi approaches practice as an effort to discover and perfect his essential, “true self,” whatever that might mean.  Zhuangzi’s persona and response to life are simple, earthy, and right on the surface.  The picture of Zhuangzi that emerges is that of a tender, vulnerable human being with a wise, open heart.  This tender heart opens to its own stirrings, to silver linings, to the whole of his life as the life of the cosmos.

Realizing, maintaining, and sharing this orientation to life is what Zen practice is about. 

We can and must work to end this pandemic and strengthen public health efforts globally; address climate change; counter hate and violence; and more.  If and as we make progress in these areas, however, we will continue to experience everyday losses and hardships.  

Zhuangzi’s sorrow and his joy are related; they’re of a piece.  As we know, true joy doesn’t arise from the temporary satisfaction of compulsive, personal cravings, or the temporary avoidance of what makes us anxious.  It arises as we lose and find ourselves in and as the vast robe of liberation into which we and all else are woven.

This robe of liberation includes our sorrow.  We won’t experience true joy if we’re defending ourselves against our own pain and sorrow and closing ourselves to others’ hardships.

When people first hear about the Four Noble Truths, some think the Buddhist path is aimed at insulating oneself from suffering; at bypassing—not touching—that which feels painful.  But it’s quite the opposite. 

So much energy today is directed toward finding and magnifying the self—polishing a version of oneself, putting it on display, and defending it.  Sadly, even spiritual practice and our service commitments sometimes are coopted by this program.  If we seek and magnify ourselves in that way, however, the magnifying glass ultimately concentrates the heat we were hoping to escape, rather than reducing it.

We’ve recently been exploring differences between Chinese and American conceptions of the self in the reading group I mentioned, so our guide encouraged us to watch a documentary called The Century of the Self.  It’s about the evolution of modern conceptions of the self in America.  

The late American playwright Arthur Miller is quoted in the film.  He’s reflecting on the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, who committed suicide soon after an intensive, weekend-long therapy immersion experience with proteges of Sigmund and Anna Freud.  I’m not against therapy, even in its contemporary psychoanalytic forms, but I do think Miller’s critique nicely diagnoses one illness that plagues our culture more generally.

He says:

“My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call `happiness.’ There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling [a person], rather than freeing [a person]. Of defining [the self] rather than letting [the self] go.”

Zhuangzi isn’t valorizing suffering, and neither should we, but nor does he push it away.  Our awakening is an awakening to the contingency and vulnerability of our creatureliness—of all that is dear to us and everyone we love. 

And to the vitality and expansive mystery of our existence.  Our practice is a practice of caring for ourselves and each other as the contingent, vulnerable, and imponderably vast beings that we are.

Nonsentient beings expound the Dharma

Jeff

I gave this talk during our Full Moon Zen sit on August 26, 2021.

From the Record of Tung-shan (aka Ts’ao-tung):

Tung-shan accordingly took leave of Kuei-shan (aka Isan) [whom he had asked whether nonsentient beings expound the Dharma] and proceeded directly to Yün-yen’s. Making reference to his previous encounter with Kui-shan, he immediately asked what sort of person was able to hear the Dharma expounded by nonsentient beings.

Yun-yen said, “Nonsentient beings are able to hear it.”

“Can you hear it, Ho-shang (another name for Yun-yen)? asked Tung-shan.

Yun-yen replied, “If I could hear it, then you would not be able to hear the Dharma I teach.”

“Why can’t I hear it?” asked Tung-shan.

Yun-yen raised his fly whisk and said, “Can you hear it yet?”

Tung-shan replied, “No, I can’t.”

Yun-yen said, “You can’t even hear it when I expound the Dharma; how do you expect to hear when a nonsentient being expounds the Dharma?”

Tung-shan asked, “In which sutra is it taught that nonsentient beings expound the Dharma?”

Yun-yen replied, “Haven’t you seen it? In the Amitabha Sutra it says, `Water birds, tree groves, all without exception recite the Buddha’s name, recite the Dharma.’”

Reflecting on this, Tung-shan composed the following gatha:

How amazing, how amazing!

Hard to comprehend that nonsentient beings expound the Dharma.

It simply cannot be heard with the ear.

But when sound is heard with the eye, then it is understood.

Today has been a scorcher in Boston.  The Earth is screaming, “Summer!”—and, also “Ouch! Climate change!”

Yet it’s almost September, and Fall is poking through.  Some trees are beginning to shed their leaves.  Birds and squirrels are busy gathering provisions.  Duck and geese are on the move.

The central character in the story I just read, Tung-shan, lived and taught in the 9th century.  In this story, he’s still an ordinary monk, wandering around visiting monasteries, seeking out teachers.  Later, he becomes a teacher who is regarded as the Chinese founder of the Soto Zen stream in which we’re situated.

In Tung-shan’s day, people were obsessed with a certain type of philosophical question. It’s a question that continues to preoccupy philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, ecologists, and ordinary people, like you and me, to this day.

I seem to be alive and conscious. You seem to me to be alive and conscious. But, what else is alive and conscious? Birds? Trees? Stone walls?

Chou-chou, the teacher who gave a provocative “No!” when another young monk asked him whether the temple dog had Buddha nature, was a contemporary of Tung-shan.  

In the story we’re looking at tonight, Yün-yen, one of the teachers Tung-shan visited, gives Tung-shan the same answer Chou-chou gave the young monk who questioned him about the dog.  But, Yün-yen gives that answer in the form of a provocative “Yes!”

Yün-yen affirms that birds and trees expound the Dharma. Everything hums the song of the universe.

Tung-shan had been trying to reason his way to this realization, but seemingly wasn’t getting anywhere. He put his hand to his ear, hoping to hear what he thought he was listening for. His thinking mind was sure it must be hidden; an esoteric, coded message of some kind. A riddle only the thinking mind could solve. But all he heard was birdsong or silence—and, well, that just couldn’t be it, he thought.

Tung-shan sought answers in the sutras, as if words on a page could resolve the matter and put his heart at rest.

This encounter with Yün-yen does seem to have been a turning point for Tung-shan.  That’s evident from the verse he composed after it.

After this encounter with Yün-yen, who eventually made Tung-shan one of his successors, Tung-shan realizes we can’t “hear” birds and trees expounding the Dharma with the ear. We hear it with the eye.

In other words, we develop a new kind of insight; a new kind of perception.

Zen practice is about learning to hear with our eyes in this way.  It invites a shift in our perception; in our orientation.

This shift is what we call enlightenment.  It’s not something we can grasp for and achieve, like running a six-minute mile or baking a souffle that doesn’t collapse.  It’s something we seep into, and that seeps into us, through our practice.  Like tofu soaking up soy sauce; soy sauce permeating tofu.

Dōgen described the shift this way:

“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters,” he said.

We’re like young Tung-shan, in other words. We see people and animals and plants and rocks. We’re sure people are conscious and consciousness is a good thing to “have.” The poor, dumb rocks don’t have it. Plants? We’re not so sure.

Dōgen goes on, “. . . after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; . . .”

As one begins to awaken to the awakened nature of all that is, many become lost in Oneness for a time.

Finally, Dōgen says, “after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”

Rocks are rocks, yes, but now we do hear them expounding the Dharma.  Yün-yen’s whisk is Yün-yen’s whisk—and if he swats you with his whisk or his staff, as Zen teachers were prone to do in that era, believe me, you would feel it!  Getting whacked by Oneness stings!

But now we truly know that whisk is the One.  The relative and the Absolute are one and the same.  Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.

In the countless, slapstick-style koans in which a Zen adept has a breakthrough insight when a teacher slaps his face, or closes her leg in a door, or cuts off their finger, this is what one is realizing.

And, once we realize this, birds and trees and stones are no longer dead to us; the world is alive to us experientially, not alive as an idea. I have to believe that this shift is much needed today, on a broad scale, at this moment of global ecological crisis.

We often hear meditation practitioners, and some teachers, say that mediation is about developing our powers of attention and concentration.  I suppose mediation has that effect.  

But I prefer to think of our practice as more about attending, than attention—though one must be attentive to attend.  

Meditation is about attending.  Showing up.  Participating.  Taking part.  We are just a part—and every much a manifestation and microcosm of the One as anything else.  Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

Through our practice, we open up to our own experience; to all experience.  We come to sense the hum of the universe within and without.  Let it bubble up and seep in.  

And our ideas of within and without, up and in, begin to soften.

We turn our ear to see a bird.

Open our eyes to hear it sing.

Rocky Flats, Sawada, and Bearing Witness

Jeff

AUG 4 1989; Rev. Katsuzo Sawada, a Japanese Buddhist Monk in front of state Capitol of Nipponzan Myohoji, continues protest and fast to close Rocky Flats Plant. The fast was started on July 4 by LeRoy Moore of the Rocky Mtn. Peace Center and is being carried on by Sawada.; (Photo By Duane Howell/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

My family lived a stone’s throw away from Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, and I was in college in nearby Denver from 1976 to 1980.   I lived in Boulder off and on between 1985 and 1995, first as a grad student, then working as a young lawyer.  Throughout most of this time, spanning nearly three decades, plutonium parts for nuclear bombs were being manufactured at Rocky Flats, a massive, underground, top secret facility just outside Boulder.  

I can’t remember precisely when I first heard Sawada’s steady drumbeat come and go, but it was definitely during the time I was a student in Boulder.  I was in the little cabin in Chautauqua Park where I lived, in a coffee shop, out on a run.  

The first couple of times I heard Sawada’s drum, it was a sonic apparition.  I turned to see the source of this unusual sound, but couldn’t locate it.  The next time I heard it, I turned quickly and caught sight of Sawada, taking broad, swift strides, in full monk garb, beating his hand drum.

This was Sawada’s practice.  Morning to night.  For decades.  

Sawada is part of a Buddhist sect that emphasizes walking meditation and work for peace.  Much to his parents’ dismay, he became a monk as a young man, and ultimately moved to Boulder, alone, to bear witness to the madness of the nuclear arms race.  Many years later, a couple of other monks from his order eventually joined him in Boulder, perhaps, in part, to lessen the physical toll this form of protest must have taken on Sawada.

Sawada’s presence in Boulder–the sound and sight of him at random times during the week–made a deep impression on me.  I got curious about him again a few days ago, after talking about him during our Full Moon Zen Zazenkai last Saturday.  While still alive, he is mostly forgotten now.  There is scant evidence of his life and practice online, though I did find a few crumbs, including an oral history interview that is part of a series of interviews documenting protest activities at Rocky Flats.  It seems memory of Rocky Flats, and even the Cold War itself, is fading.  I worry about that.

Boulder is and was a center of Buddhism’s transplantation and growth in the United States, so it also was interesting to find an article in Tricycle about Rocky Flats.

In 1983, years before I heard Sawada’s drumbeat, I was one of the student organizers of a massive, peaceful protest at Rocky Flats.  Nearly 17,000 people of all ages gathered to join hands around the above-ground perimeter of the facility.

Bearing witness to the cries of the world is an important ideal and practice in Zen.  Roshi Bernie Glassman, my Dharma great-grandfather, made bearing witness one of the three pillars of the Zen Peacemakers order he founded.  

I spoke about Sawada during our Zazenkai, because I was recalling and appreciating both the way in which his meditation was a practice of bearing witness, and how the monks who eventually joined him in Boulder made the practice communal, taking the baton from him throughout days and weeks to sustain the practice.  People came and went during our Zazenkai, according to their availability and needs, yet there was never a time when any of us sat alone.  I had this same sense of bearing communal witness Saturday, as we sat amidst the great turmoil and suffering of the present day.  

The world seems at full boil.  Perhaps what we do on the cushion, and what our time on the cushion inspires and helps us to do when we’re off it, will reduce the temperature just a bit.

 

On Breathing: Body Exposed in the Golden Wind

Jeff

I gave this teisho during our Full Moon Zen regular weekly practice session on November 19, 2020.  You’ll find a recording of this talk after the text.

This Case 27 in The Blue Cliff Record, one of our koan collections:

A monk asked Yun Men, “How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?”

Yun Men said, “Body exposed in the Golden Wind.”

I meditate each day in an attic office.  My cushion is placed near a small dormer window.  The top of a giant tree hovers just outside.  Its leaves were turning gold and crimson a few weeks ago, shortly after I last spoke during one of our evening sits.  One morning the wind stirred up while I was meditating.  I could hear the leaves shaking loose from the tree’s branches and rustling in the air, before falling to the ground.

I knew then that I wanted this talk to be about breathing in Zen practice.  Most of us begin Zen practice by counting our breath.  

Many people tend to regard meditation primarily as a mental practice.  Early on, and despite the guidance we receive from teachers and experienced Zen students, most of us apply great mental effort trying to rid ourselves of mental activity, as if thoughts are bad and meditation were about banishing them completely.  Perhaps the ancient Buddhist texts we encounter, which often use the term Mind (with a capital “m”) as a synonym for the Absolute or Emptiness, contribute to this confusion.

It’s true that counting the breath early in Zen practice is a way to use one type of mental activity to tame another.  The idea at that point in our practice is to substitute a relaxed, focused form of mental activity for the frenetic, loop-de-loop sort of mental activity in which so many of us spend much of our lives lost.  But that’s not because loop-do-loop, this-that mind is “bad” and must be suppressed completely.  It’s just that it tends to be our default mode; we tend to get stuck there without realizing this is the frame of mind that sustains the illusion of separateness that causes so much needless suffering. 

That frame of mind is like living alone in a castle in the sky, standing in front of a mirror in that castle, having a conversation with oneself about the world, without realizing its an extended monologue about figments of our imagination.  We think we’re making real contact with the world, but we’re not.  

Breath practice helps us gently disengage from that frame of mind just enough to begin stepping back from the mirror.  It helps us exit the castle, at least for a while.  It’s a first step along a new path that Zen invites us to travel.

As we travel this path, the castle recedes toward the horizon . . . and yet it’s also right here, and we can instantly find ourselves back in it.  That’s fine.  Now we know how to find the door to someplace more spacious if we find ourselves jabbering into the mirror again.  

Eventually, we can let go of breath practice and just sit shikintaza, which is a rather formless form of meditation practice.  From here, the path opens wider and wider, in every direction.  It becomes an infinite field; one that manifests in and as our experience of life, right here, right now.

As our meditation experience shifts in this way, we might begin to relate to our breath differently.  While counting the breath, it’s pretty hard not to control it, much as I might imagine or intend otherwise.  When I stop breath counting practice, I’ll still become conscious of my breath from time to time, but I’ll be much more likely to feel as if my breath is breathing me, rather than the other way around.  To experience just breathing.  

All day long, and all through the night, breathing just happens, without willing it to happen.  I don’t even notice this most of the time.  As we take up meditation practice, we use this everyday, mostly unconscious aspect of our creaturely experience to reground our awareness; to coax it back to the here and now.

So, although many people wrongly tend to regard meditation primarily as a mental discipline, it’s fundamentally an embodied practice and experience.  In fact, it’s a practice that tends to collapse the distinction between body and mind; our mind-body dualism.

Some of us may have a sudden, profoundly transforming experience during meditation, or as a result of it—kenshō, a direct experience of emptiness.  Master Dōgen described his own kenshō experience as “dropping off body and mind,” not as a mental experience.  Whether or one has a sudden experience of body and mind dropping off, however, that same realization tends to soak into us over years of consistent Zen practice, like a tree soaking up water through its roots.

In the koan with which I opened, Yunmen’s student is using the familiar Chinese metaphor of a withering tree and falling leaves to ask his old teacher what it’s like to age and approach death.  Yunmen responds with another familiar Chinese metaphor, the Golden Wind—the wind that carries the autumn leaves away.

There’s a lovely Chinese myth about a cow herder and a weaver girl, whose love was forbidden.  (I suppose Romeo and Juliet is our Western equivalent.)  These lovers are banished, as stars, to opposite ends of the Milky Way.  Once a year, as Spring and Summer, the periods of birth and growth, give way to Fall and Winter, the periods of decline and death, a flock of magpies forms a sky bridge, allowing them to meet for a day.

There are many poems about this myth, one of which contains this beautiful line:

One meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver amidst the golden autumn wind and jade-glistening dew, eclipses the countless meetings in the mundane world.

As the wind kicked up during my morning sit a few weeks ago, a thought passed by with the leaves levitating just outside:  What is the wind, if not my own breath?

The wind is my breath, your breath, and old Yunmen’s breath.

And we are autumn’s leaves carried by that wind.  And we are the sapplings that will sprout from soil nourished by those leaves, their roots soaking up Spring’s jade-glistening dew.

Through our practice, we find our place, and our peace, as vulnerable, noble, embodied beings, exposed in the Golden Wind.

On Breathing: Body Exposed in the Golden Wind

On Chanting: Old and new, familiar and strange, known and unknown

Jeff

I gave this teisho tonight at our Full Moon Zen regular weekly practice session.  You’ll find a recording of this talk after the text.

 

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction!

I wear the Tathāgatha’s teaching

Saving all sentient beings.

This chant is called the Verse of the Kesa. Kesa is the Japanese version of the Sanskrit word kāshāya, which means robe. Zen adepts through the centuries have chanted this verse each morning, whether individually or collectively, as they put on their robes before meditation. They balance them on their heads and let them drop into their hands near the end, just as I did now.

I do this every day before I sit. This rakusu I wear, which is ochre to signify that I’m a teacher, is a simplified version of the longer and more formal patched robe worn over the shoulder by a Buddhist monk or nun. I didn’t sew this one, but years ago I sewed the traditional black rakusu worn by a student after their Jukai ceremony, in which one formally receives and takes on the Buddhist precepts as a way of life.

Eihei Dōgen, who carried the Zen tradition from China to Japan early in the 13th century, was moved to tears the first time he heard this chant and observed this practice while on retreat at a monastery in China.  He made a vow to himself at that moment:

However unsuited I may be, I will become an authentic holder of the buddha dharma . . . and with compassion show the buddha ancestors’ authentically transmitted dharma robes to those in my land.

Dōgen ultimately returned to Japan and fulfilled that vow.  Not only did he carry traditional Zen forms and practices from China to Japan—many of which you and I still uphold today—he also became a great religious innovator.  Whenever Zen migrates from one land to another, form one cultural context to another, new life is breathed into the tradition, just as the tradition breathes new life into that land and context.  This is happening now in the United States, and throughout the Western world, in these still relatively early days of Zen’s migration here.

Like Dōgen, I love this chant and practice. Well, most of it, anyway.

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction!

When I chant these words each morning, I remind myself that this is the garment I wear; the robe that envelops me, everywhere and always. This robe is a borderless, seamless field of benefaction—of goodness. At once, vast and mysterious and as concrete and visible as my tee shirt.

You and I also are that vastness and mystery, made concrete and visible. Each morning when I chant these words, I remind myself of this. Each day, if I consent and commit the way Dōgen did, I live more deeply and concretely into the mystery, and the mystery lives more deeply and concretely into me.

My life becomes more and more like that old Zen story about the monk walking through the mist.  When he leaves the meditation hall, his robe is dry.  At some point, it’s soaked through and through.  When is that point exactly?  Who really knows.  Just walk the path, and it’s happening.

I wear the Tathāgatha’s teaching

Tathātaga is a Sanskrit word the Indian sage Siddhartha Gotama, aka The Buddha, used to refer to himself.  It means “one who is thus gone” or “one who has thus come,” suggesting that he had seen into his true nature, beyond all dualities of coming and going, living and dying.  When I chant these words, I remind myself of my own buddha nature.  I also situate myself in the ancient, evolving Zen tradition.

To be honest, I don’t much like the last line in this particular translation of the chant:

Saving all sentient beings.

To my ears, this smacks of a sort of dualistic exclusivism or fundamentalism and of missionary zeal. On one reading of this line, and others like it in other Zen chants and verses, one is either saved or not, and it’s our job to save others once we’ve saved ourselves. Sure, there are more nuanced and contemporary ways this line can be spun; even so, it still grates on me a bit.

Salvation here means awakening; seeing our true nature.  This commitment to save other beings actually is viewed within the Mahayana strain of Buddhism, from which Zen sprouted, as an advance over the goal in the prior, and oldest strain of Buddhism, called Hinayana, where the focus was on personal salvation.  The Boddhisattva ideal arises with this new commitment.  A Boddhisattva vows not to transcend this realm of suffering until all sentient beings do so.

But what is a sentient being exactly?  Only humans, or also animal life?  What about plant life, and even seemingly inanimate things?  What about the biosphere and the universe as a whole?

What would it mean for a plant, or our whole biosphere, to wake up; to be saved?  Perhaps, especially now, waking up, salvation, must be as much a collective endeavor and experience as a personal one.  Perhaps it’s less about striving to escape one’s personal suffering and more about compassionately embracing our own and others’ creatureliness, and making this one life—yours and mine and the goldfish’s—as good and right as it can be.

There’s another traditional translation of the last line of the Verse of the Kesa that I like a bit better.  Rather than “saving all sentient beings,” it’s simply “to awaken countless beings.”

But maybe we need a new last line for this era, in this land and context.  As I was reading the David Loy book, A New Buddhist Path, that I quoted from in my last talk, a phrase that seems like a good candidate last line leapt off a page:

Working for the wellbeing of the whole.

I rather like it:

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction!

I wear the Tathāgatha’s teaching

Working for the wellbeing of the whole.

Zen master Keizan urges us not to “just long for the past,” but to “avail oneself of the present day to practice Zen.”  These words are so contemporary, yet Keizan lived over 700 years ago.  He studied and became a teacher at the great monastery Dōgen founded when he returned to Japan from China.  Keizan ultimately left it to make Zen more accessible and relevant to ordinary people like you and me, including women—which, sadly, was a rather radical proposition at that time.

I assembled a very bare bones chant book as we launched this small, informal group a short while ago.  Some people today find the traditional Zen chants and verses, many of which are still recited in the West in Pali, Sanskrit or Japanese, odd and off-putting.  Others, love and are very moved by chanting.  Our chants and verses are a rich part of the tradition.  I’ll progressively be adding more of them to our chant book and liturgy. 

As I do, I plan to revisit the traditional formulations of some them, perhaps taking liberties here and there; updating some of those formulations, mindful of Keizan’s encouragement.  I want to be careful and respectful as I do, however.  We are recipients and stewards of an ancient tradition that has served countless beings very well.  These beings developed these chants for us.  These chants are recognizable to people all over the world, much like a Catholic can attend mass anywhere and feel it’s familiar, even if she doesn’t speak the local language.  There’s something really beautiful and awe inspiring about this.

Our chants take many different forms and seem to have many different functions.  Invocations.  Thanksgiving.  Atonement.  Remembrance.  Dedication.  Honoring our ancestors in The Way.  Marking the opening or the close of a meal or a teacher’s talk.  Expressing our aspirations.  Though Zen is nontheistic, some chants bear a resemblance to petitionary prayer in theistic traditions, as in the version of the dedication chant we used tonight:

Whenever these devoted invocations are sent forth they are perceived and subtly answered.

Some chants, called dharanis, are incantations that are thought to bring good fortune, to help avert calamity, or whatever.  Most have their roots in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism.  We can think of them as mantras.  Most have not been translated into English, in part because that would be difficult or impossible to do.  The literal meaning of the words is obscure, and their literal meaning is not really the point.  Our intention, in our hearts, and the experience of chanting them is the point.

Here’s one common dharani:

No mo san man da moto nan

oha ra chi koto sha sono nan

to ji to en gya gya gya ki gya ki un nun

shifu ra shifu ra hara shifu ra hara shifu ra

chishu sa chishu sa chishu ri chishu ri

soha ja soha ja sen chi gya

shiri ei somo ko

Whatever your present orientation to our chants, I encourage you to let them chant you. I’ll be chanting them in the traditional way, so just follow along. You’ll get the hang of it. Don’t let fear of making mistakes hinder you. In Zen, there is no such thing as a mistake, and everything is a mistake.

Why do we chant?  Why do we play bells and drums and wooden blocks?  Why do we balance our robes on our heads and let them fall to our hands?

In a famous koan, the great teacher Yunmen said, “The world is vast and wide.  For what reason do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of the bell?”

Today Yunmen might ask instead, “For what reason do you pull your jeans on in the morning?”

The answer for each of us is lurking in the question.

Perhaps you will also chant the Verse of the Kesa as you put on your robe—even if that means your sweatpants and hoodie—in the morning. If that seems like too much, perhaps you might at least call to mind and heart the spirit of this verse as you dress for the day. Maybe some of you will decide to sew your own rakusu and take up the Boddhisattva precepts one day. I’d be more than happy to support anyone who wishes to do that; to help you make it happen.

In the stew

Jeff

This is a teisho I gave on July 30, 2020.

I said my next talk would be in honor of Tim and Kathleen, and their lovely series of talks on Zen and cooking.  This is it.

Please settle yourselves, and close your eyes.  Gently take in, and let out, a few breaths.  Notice and feel your mind and body settling.  Notice your chest rise and fall.  Notice your heartbeat.  In that still place, with your eyes remaining closed, just listen as I read a poem by the Vietnamese Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.

Please Call Me by My True Names

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

 

You can open your eyes.

Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay, as he is known to his community, is one of the leading proponents and examples of Engaged Buddhism, a term he coined.  Martin Luther King, with whom he was friends, nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.  As a young monk during the Vietnam War, Thay became a peace activist, organizing relief efforts for victims of the war, among other things.  He was eventually exiled from Vietnam, founding the Plum Village community in France, which has grown to become a global sangha.  His 100+ books have been translated into many languages and inspired millions of people.  One bestseller, Being Peace, which I read over 30 years ago, is among the reasons I took up Zen practice and committed myself to peacebuilding work.

Zen is about waking up in the way Thay invites us to realize through this poem.  Waking up in this way is enlightenment.

When I was a graduate student in religious studies at Harvard, I took a mega-class on world religions with Diana Eck, a famous scholar of comparative religion.  She read this poem to us at the start of our unit on Buddhism.  Some students objected to it.  How could Thay seemingly put the rapist and his victim, the emaciated boy and the arms dealer, on the same plane?  How could he see himself in all of them?

Many of the students in that class no doubt were Christian.  Thay is simply expressing something in the Gospel of Matthew these students had no doubt heard or read:

God’s “sun rises on the good and upon the evil and his rain descends on the just and on the unjust.” Matthew 5:45 (Aramaic Bible in Plain English).

The sun illumines the good and the evil; rain nourishes the just and the unjust.  The peace activist risking his life to feed starving war victims, and the pirate who harms another human being because his heart isn’t open.

We are in the stew together.  Much as we pretend otherwise; much as we try; there is nowhere to hide from one another.  When we stop hiding from ourselves—when we truly open our hearts—we discover our true name.  Our true names.

What are we doing in our practice?  We’re marinating.  Softening.  Soaking up the flavors of other ingredients.  Becoming porous, so what’s inside us comes out.  Opening up, and expressing ourselves.  Our true selves.  Exposing what has been hidden.

We are not getting out of the pot; we’re not transcending this.  Quite the opposite:  We’re becoming ever more this.

The heat and pressure of that pot—of our practice, of our lives—is disintegrating that sense that I am a separate self, mending the universe and “me” at once.  As that construct, the “self,” disintegrates, becomes porous, we come to see the luminance everywhere; in everything and everyone, including oneself.

How should we respond to those who object to Thay’s poem, perhaps unaware of the life story of this remarkable contemplative, activist-poet?

Let me answer by reading a brief passage from David Loy’s book, A New Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution and Ethics in the Modern World, which I’ve recommended to you:

“If awakening involves transcending this suffering world, then we can ignore its problems.  If the Buddhist path is psychological therapy, we can focus on our own individual neuroses.  Yet both of those approaches reinforce the illusion that I am essentially separate from others, and therefore can be indifferent to what they are experiencing.  If `I’ am not separate from others, [however,] neither is my wellbeing separate from theirs. Today this means we are called upon not only to help other individuals deconstruct their sense of separation (the traditional role of a bodhisattva), but also to help our society reconstruct itself, to become more just and sustainable—and awakened.”  (Loy, pp. 63-64, emphasis mine.)

The Heart Sutra proclaims that emptiness is form; form is emptiness.  Transcendence is immanent; the immanent is transcendent.  The Absolute is the relative; the relative is the Absolute.

Zen teaches, and helps us come to realize, that this land is the Pure Land.  This realm of suffering is Nirvana.

Many of us are compulsively searching for and trying to construct a personal Heaven on Earth, all the while oblivious to the reality that Heaven is Earth; Earth is Heaven.  Or, as the prophet Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.”  In other words, right here, now.  In our midst.  Hidden in plain sight.  Shining in and through everything.

Yet, while the Absolute and the relative, the higher and the lower realities, or truths, are the same, they also are different.  Not one, not two.  David Loy makes this point nicely, connecting it to the imperative that inner transformation lead to outer transformation, to social and environmental action, at least on a small scale; at least in the context of our day-to-day interactions with other sentient being and what our deluded consciousness calls the material world.  In the brief portion from Loy’s book I’m about to read, he is commenting on a long quote by someone else that he’s included in his book:  It’s an account by the English minister and poet Thomas Traherne of his own enlightenment, expressed from a Christian perspective.

Relating Traherne’s personal story to the Buddhist perspective on kenshō experiences, Loy says:

“In Buddhist terms, the `higher truth’ that [Traherne] describes so well is sundered from the conventional `lower’ truth that we are more familiar with.”

Buddhism’s higher truth is that this very world of suffering is Nirvana.  Heaven.  One feature of the lower truth is that, for most of us, we don’t yet see this, and so we think, speak, and act in ways that pile needless, avoidable forms of suffering on top of the forms of suffering that are unavoidable as embodied beings.

Loy continues:

“Traherne’s heavenly world has no problems; each luminous thing is a way that `empty infinity’ presences, including the children playing in the street . . . but do they go to bed hungry at night?  Although everything manifests eternity . . . in his day many of those particular manifestations died before their second birthday.  Yes, the `higher truth’ is that they really didn’t die because they had never been born; from the perspective of the lower truth, however, there is birth, and death, and suffering.  Patriarchy and slavery were the norms in Traherne’s time.  His society was organized hierarchically, for the benefit of those at the top of the class pyramid—something that seems to be increasingly true of our society.”

We, and our intentions; the commitments we make, including our commitment to practice; the values and goals we embrace; the insight we cultivate; and our words and deeds all matter.  They are the activity of the infinite, whatever their quality, but only a certain quality of activity will produce the relative reality—the Beloved Community—that MLK and John Lewis envisioned.

A kenshō experience and $2.00 will buy you a cup of coffee.  Enlightenment in the sense that Thay shows us through his poem, and the poem that is his life, is well seasoned; marinated through-and-through.  It manifests outwardly in the large and/or small ways he exemplifies, not just inwardly.

God has no hands but these hands, as the Christians say.  The universe has no hands but our hands.

We sit here in the midst of a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.  The pot is boiling, with us in it.  How can we stay as we are?  How can we remain impervious to the pressure and the heat?

How can the door of my heart, the door of compassion, remain closed?  How can these hands not be lifted and lent?

Enlightenment: So What?

Jeff

This is a teisho I gave on July 2, 2020.

My last couple of talks have been about enlightenment in Zen.  I want to bring this series of reflections on enlightenment full circle for the time being.  It’s always a broken circle, of course—an enso.  We come full circle, but there’s never closure.  The universe, and our lives as the universe, are always erupting.  We’re dynamic activity, not a thing that can be grasped or contained.

The first of my prior two talks provisionally resolved around the idea that enlightenment ultimately is about being at one with our own karma.  Accepting ourselves as we are, and living as if we have no Plan B.  I’ll extend that theme tonight.

In that talk, I also suggested that there’s a trend these days to deemphasize kenshō (or sudden awakening) experiences, and I expressed some misgivings about that.  I suggested that kenshō can help ground and orient us, potentially helping us show up to our lives more awake, effectively and compassionately, including work we may do as agents for social and environmental change.

In the second talk, I focused on the great faith, doubt, and determination that generations of Zen adepts have seen as necessary ingredients of practice, if we wish to realize our true nature as the dynamic activity of the universe, not as a subject in a realm of objects.  In other words, to experience kenshō—not as an idea, but as an experiential awakening.

Tonight, I want to talk about refinement and integration of these powerful awakening experiences, should we have one.  In retrospect, I probably should have flipped the order of my first two talks—but then, I really didn’t have a destination in mind when I began these reflections.

I’ve been listening to a series of Dharma talks by Joseph Bobrow Roshi, a Zen teacher in Los Angeles, that are featured at the moment on Tricycle’s website.  Bobrow Roshi was a student of Robert Gyoun Aitken, Roshi, who, together with his teacher, Yamada Koun Roshi, produced the translation of The Gateless Gate—the collection that contains Mu—from which I read from during my last talk.

In his series of talks, Bobrow Roshi outlines a traditional progression, or way of thinking about our journey in Zen practice, that I’m also addressing in these talks on enlightenment.  It’s a progression from (1) sitting with great determination and absorption in our practice, which puts us in harm’s way of (2) sudden realization (a kenshō experience), followed by (3) the ongoing refinement and integration of that experience.

It’s this third stage of the journey—the progressive refinement and integration of that glimpsing of our true nature—that I’m focused on in this talk.  Yamada Roshi himself was implicitly referencing this part of the journey when he summed up the whole of Zen practice and its goal as ultimately about the refinement of character.

Before I go any further, I want to reemphasize something you’ve heard me say several times before, and which Bobrow Roshi also emphasizes in one of his talks.  There are many people who are present in the ways I’m about to describe, who either aren’t Zen practitioners, or who are, and yet never report having a kenshō experience.  I regard the progression I just described, as you’ve heard me say before, as the remedial plan, even though many Zen types tend to think of themselves as doing something advanced and esoteric; as holier than thou.  At least we’re sane enough to sign up for the remedial plan!  Many people who might benefit from it don’t.

How can you tell someone who is awake, but doesn’t report ever having a kenshō experience?  Someone who is not on the remedial plan?  They have a twinkle in their eye, and they are completely at home in their own skin, from situation to situation, and with others and the skin they inhabit.  When you are in their presence, you never question whether they are present.  Whether they truly see you, are listening and responding to you . . . in a way that makes you feel seen and heard.  You are being received, and you feel that way.  The whole world is their comfort zone—even the situations that make them uncomfortable.  They are full of life, in their own unique way, and yet never filled up.  They’ve already arrived at the place of forgetting to which the remedial plan leads.

What do I mean by that?  Let me read you a few passages from the chapter on Dogen’s own spiritual journey in Transmission of Light, another koan collection from which I’ve been reading in these talks.  It’s hagiography, and likely part fiction, but it conveys important truths, even if so.

We read that, “[w]hen he lost his mother at the age of eight, Dogen’s grief was most profound.  As he watched the smoke of the incense rising at her funeral, he realized the transience of life, and from that point on he determined to seek enlightenment.”

Many of us take up Zen practice, or get serious about it, finally practicing with great determination, when something rocks our world.  Shakes us to the core.  This can be a confrontation with mortality, like it was for Dogen (and also for me), or it can be some other sort of profound loss through which we’re forced to see that familiar ways of knowing oneself and functioning cannot accommodate the whole of reality.  Try as we might to force reality back into the box that we want to contain it, it won’t be contained.  This is a profoundly uncomfortable experience.

Dogen deeply explored every strain of Buddhism that existed in Japan in his youth, searching for answers.  Nothing satisfied.  In his searching, we see Dogen’s great, desperate faith in the reality of his discomfort and where touching it might lead him.

One teacher told him to visit the one Zen teacher in Japan at the time, the Rinzai master Myozen.  He studied with Myozen for three years, and even received Dharma transmission from him, but still continued to search.  Dogen traveled to China, visiting teacher after teacher.  We read that, “[h]aving thus engaged with various teachers, Dogen became very conceited and thought there was no one in Japan or China equal to himself.”

As he was about to head back to Japan, someone suggested he visit the old master Rujing.  Dogen recognized immediately that this man was different.  We read that “Dogen went to him to resolve his doubts,” presenting himself humbly.  Great doubt, despite all his apparent certainty and confidence!

One day, after Dogen had spent years practicing with Rujing, Rujing entered the meditation hall to find a group of monks, with whom Dogen was meditating, dozing on their cushions.  Rujing admonished them, saying, “`Zen study is a matter of shedding body and mind.  It does not require incense burning, prostrations, recitations of Buddha names, repentance ceremonies, or scripture reading.  You accomplish it by just sitting.’ Hearing this, Dogen was suddenly enlightened.”

In other words, the props to which many of these students were clinging, and the way they supposedly were practicing—just going through the motions, sleeping rather than sitting—wasn’t actually about showing up.  It was just for show.  Rujing saw right through that.  Meeting life that way must drop away.  Body and mind, the reified, but ultimately insubstantial, ways in which we know ourselves, also must drop away.  Rujing’s admonishment was like a sword that cut through Dogen’s “body and mind” as he sat there, and he suddenly experienced his true nature.

Rujing encouraged Dogen to return to Japan, to live in obscurity for a time “and mature your enlightenment.”  Dogen did so, and the rest is history, as they say.  He eventually became a great religious innovator, founding the Soto school of Zen and attracting a large following that includes all of us, as we sit here now.

As this story of Dogen’s journey ends, Keizan, our storyteller, reveals what it means to “mature your enlightenment,” to refine one’s character.  He writes, “If you have any thought at all of having some enlightenment or attainment, it is not the Way.”

Having strived for enlightenment, we ultimately must forget about it.  Having crossed the river on the raft of “Zen,” we must leave it behind (even as we continue to give our hearts to Buddha, Dharma, Sangha).

But, let’s not kid ourselves:  If we’re on the remedial plan, its stages are pretty much un-skippable.  We must practice with determination and humility.  We must surrender everything we cling to; everything familiar that gives us false comfort.  We must let go of our certainties and truly not know.  Only then will be in harm’s way of seeing our true nature.

Our true nature is radiant and boundless.  Anyone who experiences this will experience it as such.  And, when one does, one knows that the whole of existence is one’s home and comfort zone.

But this realization must become integrated and seasoned.  That radiance is not a flame that completely burns away our sense of personal identity or immediately melts all of our attachments.  (To paraphrase Rilke, God, or the universe, wants to know itself in you, after all.)  The old self dies hard, and will try to claim the realization as its achievement.  We ultimately must drop all thought of enlightenment or attainment to attain enlightenment.

If and as enlightenment deepens and matures, as it did for Dogen, we increasingly will manifest as someone who is at home in the universe.  As we do, or conduct will increasingly align with our highest values.  We will be able to distinguish between a genuine value worth serving, and a feature of our comfort zone that isn’t really a value to be served.

If we instead fetishize a kenshō experience, mistaking it for mature enlightenment, we will surely do harm.  I am convinced this is why some senior Buddhist monks in Myanmar can be so jingoistic, treating people deemed not to be ethnically Burmese as subhuman.  I am convinced this is how some spiritual teachers become sexual predators.

“What is it like after enlightenment,” a student asked a teacher?  “Same old me,” the teacher said.  Same likes and dislikes; same quirks; same proclivities and hang-ups.  We are stuck with them, but no longer stuck there.  We have our feelings of resistance and discomfort, our likes and dislikes, but we are no longer paralyzed by and captive to them in quite the same way.

This is liberating.  We meet the dog as Buddha, forgetting we ever questioned whether it has Buddha nature.

One sheds one’s own doubts about having Buddha nature or not, while still feeling empathy and being a resource for those who doubt it; who can’t yet quite see their own true nature.  One feels even more empathy for those who don’t doubt; who cling to their fragile certainties, so evidently in pain.  Those who aren’t even moved to sign up for the remedial plan.  In the Asian imagery of Zen, these are the restless and hungry spirits, lurking among, and trying to hide behind and cling to, thin blades of grass.

We want the whole world and all beings to awaken in the way all Buddhas, past and present, have, and our relationships with other beings and all of nature to accord with this awakened nature.

Social and environmental action that flows from mature enlightenment is powerful.  We are seeing some amazing examples of this today.

Angel Kyodo Williams, another teacher in our lineage, is one of these examples.  She was the second black woman to become a Zen teacher.  She is sharing Zen with people of all colors, something white teachers largely have failed to do, and otherwise functioning as an enlightened advocate for racial justice and social change.  Here is an excerpt on enlightenment from her first book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace:

“Any intention at all toward enlightened being has to have a foundation in moral consciousness.  You cannot walk tall and master your life without morality, no matter how skillful you are in every other area.  Without morality, enlightened being is not possible. Without a strong moral foundation, whatever we think we know about being compassionate and honest falls apart.”

The point here isn’t that enlightenment reveals a rigid, universal moral code to us or inscribes it in our DNA.  The point is that a genuine determination to practice and aspiration toward what Kyodo Sensei calls enlightened being arises from turning toward what is unsatisfactory, what is painful, about our own life, and about our collective experience.

A strong moral foundation arises, and our character is refined, as our sense of self extends endlessly in the ten directions.  We begin to see how a narrow view of who and what we are has had us clinging to and hiding behind blades of grass—be they unjust social structures that have privileged us at others’ expense or limiting narratives about who we are that we absorbed in childhood, in either case causing us to produce (often unintended) harm to others.

As Kyodo Sensei said in a recent interview, “This means that, in terms of values, we can be more spacious.  [We] can afford to be okay with people who are really, really different.  We can be curious about it, because our sense of threat is diminished.  Because our identity is not prescribed by sameness and being afforded belonging because of sameness. . .. Our sense of thriving is [now] embedded in a sense of movement and spaciousness.”

May we all realize our true nature so, so thoroughly that we forget it.  Just are it.

The world depends upon it.  Never more than right now.

Great Faith, Great Doubt, Great Determination: On Mu

Jeff

This is a teisho I gave on June 7, 2020.

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

Chao-chou said, “Mu.”

Mumonkan, Case 1

Chao-chou’s Dog, or Mu, is Zen’s most famous koan.  It’s the first koan a student normally receives; the first koan in The Gateless Gate, which is the first collection of koans one normally encounters.  In fact, Mu is said to be the first koan given to Wumen himself, the 13th century Rinzai Zen master who compiled the whole collection.

Even if the monk in this koan was a relatively new student of The Way at the time he asked Chao-chou his question about the Temple dog, he already would have known the doctrinal answer to his question; the correct conceptual response.  Yes, of course, the dog has Buddha nature.

Wumen is said to have sat with this koan—sat with Mu—for six years before penetrating it.  Even today, older teachers I know tell me about students who have sat with this koan even longer.

The monk in this story isn’t really asking about the dog, of course.  He’s asking about himself.  He’s asking, “Do I have Buddha nature?”

Why?  Why did this monk ask a question to which he already had an answer?  Why did Chao-chou answer “Mu,” which means “no”?  Why did Wumen himself, and countless students after him, labor over this koan for years before passing through it?

It’s simple.  The monk in the koan, and Wumen, and these many students of The Way realized at this point in their journeys that, although they “got it” conceptually, they still didn’t really get it.  They could recite the canonical answer, but it didn’t satisfy.  They knew, or at least could sense, that cognitive knowing—belief in a proposition—wasn’t really knowing.

They doubted what they supposedly knew.

This admission may seem like a sort of undoing; like the opposite of progress.  In truth, it’s a huge step in right direction.  This doubt is an opening.

Another 13th century Rinzai master (Gaofeng Yuanmiao) famously said that the “three essentials” of Zen practice are great faith, great doubt, and great fury.  Great fury often gets translated in a watered down way, as “great determination,” but I like great fury much better.

Depending upon who and where one is at this particular moment, maybe an existential question like “Do I have Buhha nature?” doesn’t have much urgency.  In this part of the world, many of us live quite comfortable lives—a fact that is all the more apparent during this triple public health, economic, and racial justice crisis.  Maybe you’re not very concerned about whether you have Buddha nature or not, let alone with whether you’ll ever realize it.  But, you’re here, and I assume you’re not here for the coffee social following the service.  Zen isn’t particularly known for that.  Maybe you’re just becoming a bit more curious about why other people seem concerned with these questions, and why you don’t.  What am I missing as I think nothing is missing?

Most of us are lost in our narratives much of the time; lost in inner chatter that we mistake as reality, but which is really just a thin veneer that separates us from the deeper reality of our lives, of who we are. Zen bids us to penetrate this veneer.

If we begin to notice our everyday condition, even just a bit: that’s a speck of doubt; a nascent question.  Even if our questions begin tepidly, skeptically, perhaps even arrogantly— more as an expression of self-satisfied, or blasé knowing, rather than genuine, humble curiosity and not knowing—great doubt is bound to blossom eventually, if we sit with that speck of doubt long enough.  Early in Zen practice—and “early” may mean years and years—our job is just to sit with our doubt.  To welcome it.

Great faith simply means developing unwavering trust in our own experience.  Not to separate from our experience.  Particularly our questions.  Our doubt.  Our not knowing.

We need to abide with the doubt.  Let it grow.

Our impulse is just the opposite.  We usually rush to fill in the blanks.  To fill in our not knowing with pseudo-knowing.  We must resist that impulse with great determination.  Great fury!

Your determination may start as an act of will, but great determination ultimately is not an act of will.  It’s a force of nature that overtakes you.

Many people these days come to Zen practice seeking stress or anxiety reduction, or mindfulness-as-self-improvement, or self-mastery.  Our practice may deliver these things, but it offers so much more.  The mind and heart that seeks these things is not the mind and heart of a genuine—or at least not a mature—student of The Way.

In his commentary on Mu, Robert Aitken, the contemporary teacher who produced the translation of The Gateless Gate I prefer, quotes his own teacher, Yamada Kōun Roshi, who said:

“Make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word `Mu.’”

What is Mu?  Yamada Roshi and Aitken continue:

“Don’t consider it to be nothingness.  Don’t think in terms of `has’ or `has not.’”  Mu is not nothingness or somethingness.  Fixed notions of “nothing” bar you from true intimacy. . . . “Has” and “has not,” like self and other, arise with the concept of human skin as some kind of armor.  Actually, your skin is as porous as the universe.

What is it to sit with Mu, to become intimate with Mu?  Yamada Roshi and Aitkin answer:

“It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball.  You try to vomit it out, but can’t.”  Sitting there, big with Mu, letting Mu breath Mu, you are completely caught up in your zazen.  This is the red-hot iron ball you can neither swallow nor spit out.

That is Great Doubt!  Great faith in one’s experience!  That is practicing with Great Fury!

The mind and heart of a genuine student of The Way will not settle for less than the whole shebang.  Zen practice is not about seeking bigger and better ideas about myself, my life, or the universe.  It’s not about becoming a shinier, or more perfect, or more masterful self.  A calmer or less anxious self.  These are just ways to continue seeking safety in stories about ourselves and the universe.  To thicken our armor.  To separate from our experience, to avoid life, rather than stepping into the vastness.  Into the void.  Without a rope.

The word religion is thought to come from the Latin, religare, “to bind,” as with a rope.  To secure ourselves.

This is Zen’s great jest.  It playfully declares that the truth is just the opposite; that true security comes from discovering we’re cosmically untethered.  Zen coaxes us toward the realization that there is no rope, and no post to which we could bind ourselves.

Not even a ripcord to pull.

Withholding.  Protecting.  Grasping.  These are the behaviors that get us into trouble, time and again. That prevent all possibility of genuine intimacy with the world, with others, and with oneself.

Seeking bigger and better versions of myself, my life, or the universe; striving to become a shinier, more perfect, more masterful, calmer, less anxious or more secure self.  These are just ways the ego—that blank-filling part of oneself—tries to find a way to be present at its own funeral, as the Tibetan crazy wisdom teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, was fond of saying.

Trungpa Rinpoche also said something very quotable about stepping into the void:  Giving yourself completely to your practice is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.  It’s terrifying, of course.  But we already know the bad news:  We have no parachute.  When we truly give in to our practice, when we truly let go of our impulse to know, and all the subtle ways it continues to try to contain us, we discover the good news:  Although we have no parachute, there is no ground.

To practice with Great Faith, Great Doubt and Great Determination, to really sit with Mu, is to let whatever doubt you now experience about who and what you are and how you’re approaching life—whether that doubt is a mountain or a micron—snowball.  That doubt might start as a single snowflake.  Maybe there’s not yet much energy behind you’re not knowing.  Fine, sit with that.  Whatever hint of curiosity and doubt brought you to Zen practice, whatever keeps you on the cushion:  Stay with that.

Sitting with that genuinely, resisting the impulse to pivot away from doubt, to fill in blanks:  Well, that snowflake of doubt tends to build into a snowball of Great Doubt.  Stay with your experience and see where it leads you.

The not knowing with which we begin is not ultimately replaced by the sort of knowing we expect to find.  Great determination won’t lead you to more satisfying cognitive answers to whatever questions you once had.  Doubt won’t be replaced with tidy answers; it will be transformed and transfigured.  You will discover what Master Dizang meant when he said “not knowing is most intimate.”

In Zen’s Ten Oxherding Pictures, the Ox is a metaphor for Buddha nature; the true source.  A Buddha is simply one who is awakened to this source, and who knows oneself as a manifestation of this source.

The eighth Oxherding picture, which is the crescendo moment in (though not exactly the apex of) spiritual practice, is titled “Forget Both Self and Ox.”  This is the verse that accompanies it:

Whip and line and you and the ox, all gone to emptiness,

Into a blue sky for words too vast.

Can a snowflake survive the fire of a flamepit?

Attain this, truly be one with the masters of the past.

Wise old Chao-chou forces the monk in this koan to sit with his question.  “Does the dog have Buddha nature?” the monk asks.  “Who, or what, is asking?” Chao-chou responds.

Can a snowflake survive the fire of a flamepit?

Can you become a red-hot snowball of doubt?

Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!