Category: Practice

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!

Meditation Myths

Jeff

I gave this teisho Thursday night.

I’ll start and end this talk with verses from Transmission of Light, one of Zen’s koan collections. This opening verse is from Case 7:

Though there be the purity of the Autumn waters
Extending to the horizons,
How does that compare with the haziness
Of a spring night’s moon?
Most people want clear purity,
But though we sweep and sweep,
The mind is not yet emptied.

I hear many people say they’ve tried to meditate, but have given up because they can’t stop their thoughts.

This is a misconception of what’s supposed to be happening in meditation, and I’m sure it’s one of the biggest reasons people don’t start or give up.

There’s nothing wrong with thoughts or thinking. Thoughts are just the mental activity that arises all the time. Thinking is giving our full attention to thoughts; conjuring thoughts, engaging with them, directing them. Our capacity for thinking is marvelous and immensely useful.

And, many of us, much of the time, are trapped in an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, in which our endless internal dialogue is all we perceive, and our main way of knowing ourselves.

In meditation, we take the lid off of this echo chamber, this hall of mirrors. In meditation, we see and hear this dialogue, and we discover it is not all there is. In fact, it’s just one feature of what is.

And, in truth, it isn’t a particularly good portrait of who and what we are. It’s an isolating perspective. For all the good our thinking sometimes can achieve, it also can contribute greatly to our own and others’ suffering, when we only inhabit the myopic world of thought.

So, what are we doing in meditation as we take up the practice?  Well, in a nutshell, we don’t try to stop or resist thought or other mental activity — but we do gently relax its grip on us when we find ourselves lost in thought. We don’t engage with our thoughts or other mental activity the way many of us tend to do reflexively at other times.

So, for example, if I notice the thought “this seems to be going well” or “that was a car passing,” I don’t respond to that thought with another one.  When I think “this seems to be going well,” I don’t then actively think, “but I’m going to bail early if my foot won’t wake up, because I’ll fall over when it’s time for walking meditation.”  When I think, “that was a car passing,” I don’t then choose to think, “I wonder if that was Ginny coming home from the grocery store.”  I just gently return my attention to my breath.  If the response comes anyway, I just gently return to my breath after that.

If my lower back hurts, I don’t think about whether it’s okay to reposition a bit, I just do the least needed to reposition.

Sometimes you’ll hear it said that very experienced meditators reliably go through every meditation period with a completely quiet mind; without mental activity.  This is simply not true.  I know this from my own experience.

(Brain scientists are learning that meditation alters patterns of brain activity over time, rather than quieting mental activity altogether—whatever that might mean.)

Sure, there will be times and states that seem more clear and spacious, in which thoughts arise less frequently and assertively, and in which our attention is more relaxed, still, undisturbed, and focused, but focused on nothing in particular. These times may become more frequent and last longer over years of regular practice.  Our tendency to get trapped in loops of discursive thinking will diminish, and when that sort of mental activity occurs, one likely will be quicker to notice, and to disengage.  But a completely quiet mind?  Without thoughts, ever?  No.

What we eventually experience, as a sort of base stage to which one returns, is a relaxed, receptive (but non-striving) alertness.  It will feel open, spacious, grounded, calm.

It’s not a blankness, or fog, or half-sleep sort of nothingness.

If you just find yourself being less anxious about periods when the thoughts keep coming, or of active thinking, that’s progress. When you eventually find yourself unconcerned about whether you’re making progress, even better.

What’s happening in meditation isn’t mainly happening on the plane of thought anyway. The goal isn’t perfect mind control, whatever that might mean.

Our problem in meditation, even at the beginning, isn’t thoughts. Our problem is thinking the problem is thoughts. Being sure that, in meditation, as in the rest of our lives, I’m doing it wrong; that there’s something wrong with life, and with me.

The very part of oneself that brings some of us to Zen practice is also the very part that tries to sabotage Zen practice once we start it. It’s the part that compels us to search for something other than this, because this just couldn’t be right or enough, could it?

We judge Zen and our practice just like we judge everything else.  And it creates distance.  Separation. It separates me from my own life.

On the other hand, Zen and other contemplative practices are sometimes criticized for being anti-intellectual and quietistic, in part because of this suggestion that thinking—and, particularly, rational thought, which has been so fetishized since The Enlightenment, which is such an ironic term for Zen types like us—defines what it is to be human, or at least what is best about being human.

But Zen has no issue with thoughts and thinking. Its leading lights have produced endless volumes of conceptual, discursive literature, and they show no sign of stopping. Some of our practices other than meditation invite reflection, like certain verses, such as the Meal Gatha (in which we’re asked to reflect upon how our food comes to us) and our dedications (in which we’re asked to remember specific other people and commit our practice to their memory or well-being).

Zen is not anti-intellectual, but its core practices—meditation and koan introspection—aim to help us grasp what thinking cannot.

We tend to see our intellects as the whole of who and what we are and intellectualism as our only, or as our best and highest, capacity. Because of this tendency, we may believe we can think our way out of or through everything. Many of us come to a practice like Zen in search of something we think thinking will help us find, and so we tend to approach practice that way.

In reality, our thinking mind tends to spin up predicaments and dilemmas that aren’t there, and then tries to think our way out of them, which thinking can’t do. Our thinking creates the hall of mirrors then tries to plot our escape from it.

But we can’t think our way out of the existential trap our—amazing and otherwise useful!—capacity for thought thinks we are in.

The Zen path invites us to step off that hamster wheel.

Zen exposes our questions and dilemmas as baseless, as hollow—as empty!  It acquaints, or re-acquaints, us with the possibility of a different, and ultimately more satisfying, experience.  One that’s always right here, right now.

The Zen path doesn’t really lead to answers to our questions.  Rather, our intellectual questions tend to lose their force, sometimes swiftly, sometime slowly.  They begin to lose their death grip on us as we begin to touch our own experience differently.  As a different way of relating to life, of being in the world begins to take hold of us; as we begin to develop a different sense of who and what we are.

Buddha. Or, as Meister Eckhart said, “Though we don’t realize it yet, we are all sons and daughters of God.”

This new sense isn’t any less intellectual than our sense of sight. We can get very brainy about seeing, and analyzing and describing sight, but that is thinking about our sense of sight, not sight itself.

This new state of being, or orientation to life, isn’t any less intellectual than our sleep state. We can get very brainy about sleep, and analyzing and describing sleep, but that is thinking about our sleep state, not sleep itself.

We have no quarrel with sight and sleep, but most of us struggle to stick with meditation and Zen practice. Most of us struggle with our experience of life. We need to give up the fight, and our practice—with which many tend to struggle, to fight, at first—helps us do that.

Don’t let your practice become part of the struggle. Go easy on yourself. Lower your expectations at first. Sit for five minutes a day at first, if that’s all you feel you can manage initially, but stick with it. Every day, or most days, at least. When you feel you’re ready for five minutes more, start sitting for 10 minutes a day. Lower the bar enough to sustain your practice. Don’t judge it; just do it.

My 11-year old daughter sometimes fights sleep, even as she seeks it. I tell her that thinking about not falling asleep—the loop she gets stuck in, telling herself she can’t do it—is what’s keeping her awake. A few times I’ve laid next to her, holding her and encouraging her to follow her breath into sleep. At other times, she lies alone struggling. Either way, she eventually falls asleep! And then she has sleep, she is sleep, instead of being captive to thoughts about sleep and no sleep. Her fear of letting go into sleep has lost its grip.

Meditation practice is the same way. There have been countless times over my years of meditation practice—in the early days, or in the seventh hour of the first day of sesshin, or on the seventh day of sesshin—when I was struggling so; when the thought “I can’t make it” would arise. Then, “Ding! Ding!” The session was over. A session of mostly struggling and discomfort as meditation. And, then, getting up and carrying on with the rest of the day, the rest of the retreat . . . as meditation.

Zen, and what it reacquaints us with, is nothing other than this vital life we are living, right here, right now. Through our practice, we come to know and live life so intimately, and not as an “it,” as an object to our subject. Subject-object is not the mode in and through which we experience or comprehend life most deeply. Rather, we come to experience life neither in subject-object mode or not in subject-object mode—trusting life “in our bones,” in and as every fiber of our being, in and as every breath we take and release, without thinking about it. Matter. Of Fact. The Great Matter.

Best as we can tell, the historical Buddha merely called this state and sense “awake.” When people asked him what he was, and what made him different than other sages, he didn’t allow them to project anything too exalted on him. He simply said he was awake—and he no doubt knew what it meant to be truly awake.

Zen practice, including meditation, helps us let go of our fear of being alive, of being truly awake to life itself, as opposed to our ideas about life and how it should be. Fear of life loses its grip on us, just as my daughter loses her fear of sleep as she melts into it, whether she goes struggling or not.

Now, about everything I’ve just said:

Please don’t receive it in the mode of “too much thinking,” as my old Kyudo (Zen archery) teacher used to say. That’s what he would say when I released a shot that didn’t come from a heart centered in the place I’ve been talking about, even if the arrow happened to hit the target. I hope what I’ve just said speaks to your heart, more than your head. A heart centered in that place is the target. The target is life itself. Your life.

As promised, I’ll close with another verse, this one from Case 9 in the Transmission of Light:

Even Manjusri and Vimalakirti could not talk about it,
Even Maudgalyayana and Shariputra could not see it.
If people want to understand the meaning themselves,
When has the flavor of salt ever been inappropriate?

Full Moon Zen launch

Jeff

I’ve been preparing to launch a Zen group in Boston, now that my family is settled here, having moved from the burbs in mid-2018.  I designed the logo below, started looking for space, and . . . the COVID-19 pandemic happened (making our Five Remembrances impossible to forget).  Then I learned that many other White Plum teachers had begun moving their own sangha’s practice sessions online (which some of them had begun doing even before the pandemic). So, I subscribed to Zoom, spun up a website, and launched.  A small, lovely group of us have met twice now.

I had thought and thought and thought about a name, which produced . . . zilch.  Finishing a sit in our attic office at dawn one day, I looked out the window from my cushion and saw the full moon in a hazy, pale blue sky.  Full Moon Zen.  Of course.  This little reflection by Kenneth Kraft, on full moon symbolism in Zen, gets it just right.

Meditation

Jeff

Meditation is what’s happening now.

Sitting meditation (zazen) is what’s happening now, while I’m sitting.

Whatever is happening.

 

Ceaseless practice

Jeff

 

This an an approximation of a talk I gave on May 31, 2017 at Bright Sea Zen, the sangha led by my dear friend, Kate Hartland.

“The meaning of zazen, the enlightenment and liberation of all living beings, is not brought forth by the power of personal effort and is not brought forth by the power of some other.  Zazen doesn’t start when we start making effort, doesn’t stop when we stop.

We can’t do it by ourselves, and nobody else can do it for us.”

From “Guidance in Shikintaza,” by Reb Anderson

I want to use this passage from one of our chants tonight to talk about the notion of ceaseless practice.

The universe practices ceaselessly.  Everything that’s happening right here, now – everything that’s happening everywhere – is the universe’s practice.  The universe is universing.  This is Buddha’s practice. It is Buddha nature expressing itself.

Buddha nature expresses itself ceaselessly.  The universe practices ceaselessly. E ndlessly flows forth; erupts; gives its all; gives it all up for the sake of . . . giving it all up.

Kate and I just had a nice visit at her house before our sit.  She definitely delivered on her promise to make a wicked grilled cheese sandwich.  The sandwich and time with her were a real treat, yet the main event was a tour of Kate’s beautiful garden.  Kate is an avid gardener, as I suspect you know.  I’ve always appreciated and admired the way so much of her teaching is inspired by what nature teaches her.

Kate’s garden is radiant now.  Many of the flowers are erupting.  The universe erupting as Kate’s flowers.

And, later in the year, when the flowers die, their death is the universe erupting, too.

It’s the same with us.  Each of us is the universe universing.  We are flowers blooming. Our lives – our thoughts, speech and action – are the universe erupting.  And our deaths are the universe erupting, too.

And, yet, many of us, much of the time, don’t seem to regard our lives this way.  We have this gnawing sense of separateness, of isolation, of not-okayness.  And we often, in more or less unconscious ways, respond anxiously to this sense, and often in ways that tend to compound it.  We take refuge in thought, speech or conduct, in situations we create or gravitate toward, that are about escaping from the here-and-now.  That aren’t about nearness to it and intimacy with it.

Why is this?  I don’t know. In some religious worldviews, it’s a mark of our fallen nature.  In some, it’s a pathology; a kind of sickness.

I’m more inclined to see it in the spirit of what Zen types call the “samadhi of play.”  Why shouldn’t the one wish to flow forth and know itself in the many; in and as myriad dharmas, “the 10,000 things”; as you and me?  And why shouldn’t the many, why shouldn’t you and I, truly feel distinct and separate, with the twinge of discomfort that entails (even as it also creates opportunities for joy).  And why shouldn’t all delight in discovering, and constantly rediscovering, oneness-in-manyness and the boundless love manifested in and generated through all this?

But these are just ideas, and, so far as I can tell, the universe universing doesn’t seem to be dependent upon my own or anyone else’s ideas about it.

This is the “we can’t do it for ourselves” part.  We can’t do it for ourselves, because it’s already done.  From this perspective, there’s nothing at all to do. Polishing ourselves – trying to be wiser, more virtuous, more spiritual; shinier, newer or whatever – it’s all futile from this perspective.  This is a come-as-you-are universe.  The universe goes on erupting, despite and as our efforts, whatever our efforts may or may not be.

So why practice?  We practice because of the opportunity it provides to become more and more aware of the universe universing, and to discover ourselves as participants in the universe universing.  It helps us not to resist our participation, just as we are here and now.  To attune.  Zazen tends to help us attune.

This is the “nobody else can do it for us” part.  Nobody else can live our lives, and nobody else can sit for us. Nobody else can practice for us.

Sitting is optional . . . we’re part of it all, no matter what, and the universe goes on practicing as me, whether or not I sit.  Yet this attunement, this particular quality of willing participation, can matter so much personally and collectively.  So much individual and collective suffering is attributable to our resistance; to our attempts to take refuge in someplace other than this.  Someplace we think promises something more.

The quality of our lives – our thought, speech and actions – may begin to change as we attune.  The universe goes on erupting despite our efforts and as our efforts, no matter what, but we do have agency.  We participate.  We have the ability to influence the universe erupting as our efforts.

So what we realize from our practice is simply that we are part of the universe’s ceaseless practice.  We realize that we are already home.  That we are practicing ceaselessly, too.

This isn’t exactly a destination, at least not in the way we’re accustomed to thinking about destinations.  The universe’s practice is completely open-ended.  And our practice must take on this open-ended quality, too.

Time and again in our practice, we must confront the idea that there is a goal, a destination, an ultimate point.  This idea can arise in many different ways, sometimes with a positive, sometimes with a negative tinge: a belief that there’s something wrong with my sitting practice, or that my practice is going really well; a belief that I’m virtuous or not virtuous; a belief that I’m not enlightened and never will be or that I’m finally realized.

However this idea arises time and time again, time and time again we must let it go.

So it’s all sort of like the line in that old folk spiritual:  “My life goes on in endless song. How can I stop from singing?”  The universe goes on universing as me no matter what.  Goes on in endless song.  So why not sing in tune?

As we let go of our gaining ideas over and over and over again (including our gaining ideas about supposedly losing), we tend to begin to manifest a positive quality of poverty of spirit.  By this I mean simply that we become more at ease with our practice and with ourselves and our lives.  We tend to increasingly practice without striving.

Another word for this quality of practice with poverty of spirit is reverence.  Simple reverence.  Reverence with a light touch.  Reverence with a sense of humor.  Reverence that is loving, but not too precious.

Reverence for the 10,000 things.  Reverence for your own life and experience.  Reverence for others’ lives and experiences.

Experiencing things this way is a cue that our personal practice is aligning with the ceaseless practice of the whole universe.

The universe, you and me practicing together.  Each breath.  Each step.  Each supernova bursting.  Each grilled cheese sandwich.  Each flower blooming.  Ceaselessly.

 

Jerusalem’s Holy Esplanade

Jeff

I was in the Middle East last week for meetings and work related to a project exploring the recent tensions regarding the Holy Esplanade (the Noble Sancturay to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews) and the ways in which this holy site figures into the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and possibilities for its resolution. It was a fantastic, intense productive week, which included many related activities, like visits to the site and time spent in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank, from which the first and second Intifadas began. The Second Intifada was sparked by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Holy Esplanade. 

A (Zen) Valentine’s Day Reflection

Jeff

Love is the frequency of the universe.

We vibrate to it whether we know it or not.

Some people seem to oscillate (in their own ways) in that frequency without knowing it, and without needing to know it.

Some people, at some points in their lives, seem to feel out of sync.

Zen practice is one way to tune in if we feel out of sync, if we doubt.

(Deep bows to great doubt!  Doubt that softens hard hearts, helps timid hearts find courage.)

Zen practice helps us deepen that sense of synchrony and to celebrate and honor this once the feeling passes (and even if it doesn’t).

If and as we tune in . . . no separation.

Buddhahood, Enlightenment, Awakening: a quality of the universe, not something we attain.

So lovely, so reassuring, to know it, if ever we’ve doubted.

 

 

 

 

Cultivating the Empty Field

Jeff

My dear friend Kate Hartland gave a wonderful Dharma Talk at the Greater Boston Zen Center last night.  She spoke about the writing/poetry of Master Hongzhi collected in the text, Cultivating the Empty Field.  Hongzhi was first to spell out the approach to meditation we know was shikantaza, or “just sitting.”  He was a major source of inspiration for Master Dogen, founder of the Soto stream of Zen.

(Kate is a Dharma Holder in Boundless Way Zen.  You can learn more about what that means here, if you’re curious.  Part of what it means for me, practically speaking, is that I see her less often these days . . . and I miss her!  Kate and I sat together for many years as part of the former Ralph Waldo Emerson Zen Sangha (affectionately known as “Waldo,” which was the name of the dog my family had when I was a kid), and then as part of the GBZC, once we got our permanent digs in Cambridge.  A couple of years ago, Kate started, and she continues to lead, Bright Sea Zen in Weymouth.)

One of the many golden nuggets in Kate’s talk was her take on this notion of cultivation – of human agency.

Weeds will grown in an empty field, of course.  Indeed, fields full of “weeds” often look really lovely.  There truly is nothing we must become; nothing we must do.

This goes on happening, regardless.

And, yet . . .

We have this wonderful opportunity to act, to influence, and to do so intentionally.  (In fact, we leave a mark whether we act intentionally or not.)  We can plant flowers, so to speak, and so help shape the field into something it might not otherwise become.  Not something “better,” mind you, but something else to behold.  Something in which we’re participating, and know we’re participating.

Something expressing and reflecting our best intentions.

It’s so lovely when our own best intentions are sensitively and skillfully integrated or aligned with others’ best intentions.  The field becomes yet something else to behold.  Something in which you and I are participating together, and in which we know we’re participating together.

Shaping and being shaped by it.

Shaping and being shaped by one another.

That’s what Zen practice is about, really.

And that’s what work life, and home life, and all else are about – with a Zen heart.

Thank you, Kate.