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!

No Plan B: On Enlightenment

Jeff

This post is based on a teisho I gave on May 7, 2020.

My Mom recently encouraged me to begin watching The Voice, one of the many talent shows on TV these days.  Amazing, undiscovered singers are mentored by big name artists, performing throughout the season for viewers like me, who eventually whittle down the group and pick their favorite from those who survive to the final round.

James Taylor was the guest uber-mentor this season.  I’m a huge JT fan—have been since my early teens.  JT and his music were my companion through some dark and happy times.  I don’t watch much TV, but JT was the hook that got me to watch a first episode.  And hooked I was!  The show is wonderful.  I became so invested in the contestants and so moved by how each of them gave it all up for us.

At the end of one of the mentoring sessions, JT said to two of these contestants, “I was so lucky.  I didn’t have a Plan B.  My wish for you is the joy of a life in music.”  This was so moving.  James said it so sincerely.  You know this guy.  He’s nothing, if not sincere.

Those of you who know JT’s story—he was an addict early in life, who came very close to the edge—will know he really meant it:  “I was so lucky.  I didn’t have a Plan B.”

No Plan B.  This is the perfect way to think about enlightenment in Zen.

Giving a talk on enlightenment these days is sort of a risky thing.  It isn’t talked about much anymore.  There’s a teaching logic to this, I suppose, and there always has been.  Through the ages, the notion of enlightenment has been dangled relatively sparingly, and often rather playfully—as bait, as catnip.  In truth, the call of enlightenment is omnipresent, voiced by rice fields, gardens, pillars, hedges, and walls, as Dōgen proclaimed.

Today, however, there’s also something else going on.  Talk of enlightenment is disfavored, perhaps even radioactive, in some circles, and mostly for other reasons.

One of these reasons is that, in some Zen sanghas, pursuit of kenshō experiences has been promoted with almost militant zeal, and that vibe feels oppressive to many students.  Kenshō means “seeing into one’s true nature,” and sometimes this happens suddenly and powerfully.

These experiences do happen.  The Zen literature attests to them.  In the koan collection titled Transmission of Light, for example, we read of “an open awareness, wondrously clear and bright” (Case 24); a “realm of open clarity [that] is brighter than the morning sun” (Case 35); “mind [that] has no borders, no boundaries, no sides or surfaces” (Case 23) and “an independent view that dissolved the universe” (Case 36).

These experiences are profoundly transformative, yet the Zen literature also regards them as an initiatory awareness, not as an end in themselves.  They’re like stepping through the door, into the vestibule.  They must be integrated, seasoned—over many years.  Fetishizing these experiences is counterproductive.

In fact, one of the oldest debates in Zen is about whether such sudden illumination experiences are essential, or whether enlightenment is something that happens gradually.  “Sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly” is the shorthand way of expressing the consensus view on how that debate has come to be resolved.  Both experiences are valid, in other words.  My own view is a bit different:  “Sometimes swiftly, always slowly,” is how I would put it.

In this era, in our cultural context, there has been a shift away from militant pursuit of kenshō; of fetishizing that which we’re told not to fetishize.  In our era, we tend to focus almost exclusively on another key teaching:  That we are all, already Buddhas; that ordinary mind is enlightenment, as Dōgen emphasized.

This shift in emphasis is appropriate.  As Zen reached the West, some of the teachers who transported it here, who were weary of what the tradition had largely become in Japan—a system of performative rituals, divorced from authentic practice—found a generation of seekers eager to devote themselves to contemplative spiritual practice.   Perhaps the monastic intensity and strictures that were features of the communities many of these teachers trained in and later established, and the zeal with which they promoted the notion of enlightenment to the receptive audiences they found, was overdone.

But where we are today strikes me as something of a counter-reaction, and I think there’s a risk of losing touch with something immensely valuable—something that is not mutually exclusive with current efforts to present Zen in kinder, gentler, and otherwise more accessible and approachable ways.  These enlightenment experiences can be immensely meaningful.

And, in fact, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and not only on the cushion.  One teacher I know had his big breakthrough experience eating a grain of rice during a meal on retreat, feeling a profound sense of connection, grounded-ness, and gratitude, as he did.

These experiences bring insights; they help us cultivate wise hearts.  In a flash, we know we’re at home in the universe. The film has melted and we have merged, if only for a timeless moment, with the light that projects all images.  It’s like walking through a door into a room, and, once through, the walls, floor, and ceiling disappear.  There is no inside or outside; no up or down.  An experience like this is not a thought; it’s an undeniable and unshakable realization.  An awakening.  Dōgen, and his teacher before him, called it “body and mind falling away.”

Though we can be too precious about these experiences, we shouldn’t be dismissive of them either.  We need more wise hearts in this world, and we should welcome these experiences for what they contribute to the cultivation of wise hearts.

At any rate, it’s not in vogue at the moment—dare I say it’s not PC—to say that kenshō is the point of Zen practice, or its cresendo moment.  There’s surely wisdom in this.  And, yet, I also think it’s a mistake to deny or ignore these experiences as one important feature and function of Zen practice.  We can’t mechanistically induce them; nor should we amplify them or regard them as essential or exclusive.  As a former teacher of mine, James Ford, is fond of saying, however, “Accidents [by which James means kenshō] do happen, and Zen practice tends to make us more accident prone.”

There’s another reason why talk of enlightenment has become disfavored.  There’s been another shift—a good and important shift—away from an emphasis on enlightenment as an individual thing and toward an emphasis on enlightenment as a collective thing in the broadest possible sense.  In our era, we tend to focus primarily on another key teaching:  That enlightenment is a quality of the universe, not something we attain personally.  It’s not a private possession, but a quality of existence that inspires compassionate action.

Today we emphasize the environment, the collective, and racial and other social and economic justice concerns.  Engaged Buddhism is about holding up, bowing deeply to, and acting in the service of, this key feature of the teachings:  our radical interconnectedness, or interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hahn calls it.

But, again, just as finding new ways to elevate and serve this feature of the tradition is critically important in this time and place, we risk losing touch with something valuable if we focus solely on social and environmental engagement.  In fact, we risk losing touch with something that must ground and guide our own actions.

Indeed, Buddhism’s founding story reminds us that these two perspectives are not opposed.  At the time of his own awakening, we hear that Shakyamuni Buddha looked up to see the North Star, touched the ground, and said, “Oh, I see.  The universe and I arise together.”

Perhaps talk of enlightenment would be more welcome, and less burdened, if its association with sudden kenshō experiences were relaxed just a bit.

I recently heard another teacher—Daniel Doen Silberberg, Roshi, who worked closely with Maezumi Roshi—say that the official definition of enlightenment with the Soto Zen tradition actually is quite different. It’s to be at one with our own karma.  To me, this simply means living your life as if there is no Plan B.

To the Western ear, the word “karma” sounds metaphysical, and probably weirdly so.  It evokes thoughts of reincarnation.  Whatever its metaphysical implications, the notion of karma points to the practical reality that effects have causes.  Our experience right now is conditioned by innumerable events and circumstances that preceded this moment, even before one’s own lifetime, as well as our own conduct, speech, and thought prior to this moment.  One practical implication of the notion of karma is that the intended and unintended ways in which we show up right now will affect our personal and collective future—though the precise effects of our conduct, speech and thought can’t always be foreseen clearly, in part because a vast confluence of causes influences our experience right now.

Still, it’s probably fair to say that we usually have a pretty good sense of whether our conduct, speech, and thought is wholesome, and so relatively more likely to be beneficial.  The notion of karma is, in a sense, encouragement to show up in an upright way.  We can think about the precepts like that:  Less with a heavy overtone of moral prescription and more in terms of probability function.  Over time, people have found that honoring these precepts, or principles, tends to enhance individual and collective wellbeing.

Anyway, to be at one with our own karma is to accept our life as it is right now—even as we also commit to changing what must be changed.  To accept myself as I find myself.  To appreciate my life, as Maezumi Roshi constantly encouraged his students to do.  To trust my experience, my talents, my quirks.  My challenges.  My growing edges.

Sometimes a felt, growing edge is a nudge to look at something about oneself.  Sometimes it’s a nudge to look at and meet—to accept or work to change—something about the world.  It’s really always both.  My growing edges are the universe’s growing edges.

Don’t spare the Dharma assets—the ingredients of one’s life—as the Bodhisattva precept encouraging generosity sometimes is expressed.

In other words, go with Plan A, because it’s the only plan going.  Submit to your life.  There is no Plan B.

Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I’d might as well be myself, because it seems everyone else is taken.

This is what it means to be grounded.

Kenshō experiences are profoundly, and paradoxically, grounding.  They ground us in the reality of no-ground.  They can help liberate us to be ourselves; to end the search for someplace, or someone, else to be.  They’re a homecoming.  We find ourselves at and as the heart of the universe.  Home.  Always, everywhere, home.

Anyway, all of these ways of thinking about and manifesting enlightenment are right and good.  All of the above, I say.

Zen’s Ten Oxherding Pictures are a useful touchstone as we think about all of this.  In this series of images, which is a metaphor for the spiritual journey, the kenshō moment—the eighth picture—is not the terminus.  The series ends with a picture titled “Entering the Marketplace with Extended Hands.”  In other words, everyday life is where the journey resolves, with us meeting everyday life, and others, openly and generously.  Offering up what we are uniquely capable of offering up.  Manifesting as oneself.  “The God wants to know itself in you,” as Rilke wrote, expressing all this from a theistic perspective.

Back to James Taylor.  A few weeks ago, I listened to his new autobiography, Break Shot, which I highly recommend.  His is quite a life story.  He had an intense youth; he experienced some intense things.  Yet, JT’s autobiography confirmed what I’ve always sensed from his music and the handful of interviews I’ve heard or read:  He ultimately sensed how the forces of the universe were bending him, much like those notes he bends.  He submitted to his own karma; he quite literally played the music that is his life—made use of all of the ingredients of his life, even the hardest stuff—and found joy there.

JT sums up much of what I’m trying to say in the chorus of one of my favorite songs, The Secret of Life:  “Try not to try to hard.  It’s just a lovely ride.”

My wish for you is the joy of a life in music.  The music that is your life.

Chanting, bowing, and other allergens

Jeff

Some people in the West who are new to Zen are put off by the chanting and bowing.

Whenever a new student admitted this to one of my former teachers, he would simply say, “Good!”

Our chants, and the other liturgical and ritual elements of Zen practice, are very much part of the complete package. And, as we begin practice, many of us tend to bring the same this-that mind to these elements of practice that we bring to meditation and working with koans initially.

I encourage you simply to jump in. To be an instrument resonating with other instruments as we chant. To be motion as we bow.

As with meditation and koan practice, chanting and our ritual forms of practice are not really meant to be approached in a cognitive-analytical way. Dogen emphasized that zazen (meditation) is enlightenment. Same with the other forms.

This can be especially hard for Westerners to understand and accept, perhaps particularly for those of us raised in an Abrahamic religion. There’s so much emphasis on ideas and belief in our culture, and in these contemporary religions, especially. If one is a practicing Christian or Jew, one might mistakenly see a Zen chant like The Three Refuges as a declaration of an alternate set of beliefs or commitments; as something unorthodox, or at least in tension with one’s religious belief system. If one is an atheist, one might see the Zen chants, or bowing to an altar with a representation of the historical Buddha, as explicitly or explicitly an expression of allegiance to a religious belief system or to a god or messiah figure.

But, it’s not so. Zen is very different in this way. It operates on a plane that’s orthogonal to these sorts of considerations and concerns. Zen has and demands no particular beliefs.

On the other hand, attention and intention—heart—are central to Zen practice.

Actually, the whole association between religion and belief is a very Western, modern thing, and this is part of the reason those of us who come to Zen having practiced an Abrahamic religion can get tripped up by the Zen chants and rituals. In Catholicism, for instance, the idea of a creed—from the Latin “credo”—used to have a different meaning than it does today. “Credo” is likely to be translated today as “I believe,” but it used to mean something more like, “I give my heart to this.”

That’s what we’re doing in Zen: giving our heart to the practice. More as being and doing, than thinking and believing.

And coming to embrace our whole life as practice. Not believing that’s so. Living it as such. Coming to know this in our bones. Knowing to the point of forgetting.

How might this translate, say, into chanting The Three Refuges? Well, first and foremost, chant! If you need to put that critical-analytical part of yourself at ease as you do, you might think about the content of the chant this way:

“Buddha” is just our awakened nature; presence. “Taking refuge” in Buddha isn’t escapism or hiding in it, whatever that might mean. Quite the contrary. To say, “I take refuge in Buddha” today is to express my intention to opt-in to being awake and opt out of the myriad ways we tend to close ourselves to ourselves, to others, and to life.

“Dharma” means both the teachings of Zen, which are a gift that’s been passed on to us over the centuries by others like us, and all that is manifest. Ants, sticks, and grizzly bears. My cup of tea, the tire that’s just gone flat, and that approaching deadline at work. To take refuge in Dharma is to turn toward all that is, even the stuff from which I am inclined to turn away, whether intentionally or reflexively.

“Sangha” is our community of fellow Zen practitioners and, more generally, all beings. To take refuge in Sangha is to take part; to show up and claim my place. As Oscar Wilde said, “I’d might as well be myself. It seems everyone else is taken.”

As we chant and bow, we’re simply giving our hearts to this One Life we live. As we bow to Buddha, we bow to ourselves and one another—because we, too, are, indeed, Buddha. That is you and me on the altar. Extraordinarily ordinary.

I hope this provides a little encouragement if you’re finding it difficult to take up chanting and bowing as practice. And, if that is still your experience anyway, then, “Good!”

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.

 

Death and Life

Jeff

This is a teisho I gave last night, on sesshin in Connecticut, with 60 White Plums, including 17 teachers in our lineage.

We will hear our Evening Gatha* chanted a short while from now, and, in it, these lines:

Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.

Do not squander your life.

Last Tuesday night, exactly a week ago, I had a very restless night’s sleep.  I suppose it would be more accurate to say I got very little sleep.  In the early hours of Wednesday morning, perhaps 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., I woke up with a strong, clear, compelling sense that death was nearby.

It wasn’t a thought.  It wasn’t a feeling.  It was just a very clear sense of death’s nearness.

It wasn’t frightening.  It didn’t make me anxious.  It didn’t send thoughts spinning in my head.

But it demanded, and so commanded, my attention. I laid awake much of the night with, and in, this sense of death’s nearness.

I was at my office later that morning – I’m a partner in a big law firm – when, around 10:00 a.m., everyone in our Boston office received an email from our office manager, informing us that the sister-in-law of one of our colleagues, with whom I’m quite friendly, had passed away that morning. This woman had been ill with cancer for some time, and she had spent the last few months living with our colleague and her family as she approached her death.

Twenty-four hours later, around the same time Thursday morning, I was again at my desk when I received an email from one of our partners in our Boston office.  He was writing to a small group of us who are friendly with a partner in our New York office. His email informed us that an adult son of this friend in New York had been discovered dead at his home.

As if all this weren’t enough, as I was driving from Boston to Connecticut Friday afternoon to attend this sesshin, I spoke to one of my brothers, who informed me that our uncle Paul, a man in his early 80s, who had lived with diabetes much of his adult life, and had been in decline for some time, was in the hospital.  His heart had failed, he was brain-dead, and his family would soon instruct the doctors to remove life support.

As we were gathering here Friday night, perhaps half an hour before Roshi Kennedy welcomed us and we began our first sit, I received a text from my brother letting me know that Paul had passed.

It seems this sense of death’s nearness that kept me awake last Tuesday night was on-the-mark.  It was communicating something quite real.  Death is always nearby, of course.  I suppose it has just been more apparent in my little corner of Indra’s Net over the past week.

We never quite know what awaits us when we arrive for sesshin.  During these first couple of days, I’ve been very aware of death’s aliveness.

__________

I didn’t know my colleagues’ relatives who passed away last week, but I did know Paul very well, of course.  He was married to my mom’s sister, Regina, and he also was my dad’s first cousin, and, really, his best friend.  All four of them grew up in the same area north of Chicago, and the two men were acquainted with the two women by the time they all were in their late-teens or early 20s.  They got married around the same time, had kids around the same time, and packed up their families and moved to Colorado around the same time, in the late `60s, when I was eight.

The two families ultimately settled in small, rural, mountain towns a few hours apart.  We saw each other regularly, on holidays and some weekends, when I was between the ages of eight and my late-teens – the age range my own kids are in now.  We have a daughter who is about to turn 11 and a son who is 14.  Paul and Regina returned to Chicago around 30 years ago, and I saw them much less frequently after that.

I have many lovely, vivid memories of Paul during those years:  Perilous toboggan rides.  Fly fishing, just with Paul, in a beaver pond near their home (where, sadly, there is now a shopping mall).  My first record album, which Paul and Regina gave me one Christmas or birthday.

I turned 57 last month.  For the first time, retirement age seems right around the corner, as if I could almost reach out and touch it.  How did that happen?  Where did the time go?  And, yet, I definitely can touch those times with Paul, now nearly 50 years ago.  They’re right here, still.

Time truly passes by swiftly.  And its pace seems to accelerate as I get older.  Perhaps you’ve noticed this, too.

__________

About 20 years ago, at a much earlier point in my career, I was offered a full-time teaching job, at a good university in the Midwest, in a field I care about greatly:  international conflict resolution and peacebuilding.  I had done graduate work in this field, both as part of my legal studies and apart from them, and I’d done a bit of publishing and applied work in the field by then.  I very much wanted to devote all my time and energy to the field, and this job seemed like my ticket.

It also was a much earlier time in my relationship with my wife, who already had her dream job, teaching full-time at a good university here on the East Coast, in a field she cares about greatly.  She did not want to change jobs.  It became clear to me that, had I pushed for a move, it would have put a terrible strain on our young relationship.  So, I let that job go.

But I was angry and resentful for several years.

Little by little, I would find ways to deepen and expand the scope of my commitment to the conflict resolution field: I arranged some part-time teaching near home.  I continued to publish.  I took on new practice-oriented activities.  Fast forward to today, and I’m quite content with the package of things I have in my life, including activities and experiences I value, and that I presumably would not have, if I had taken the full-time teaching job.

But it would be some time – longer than I care to admit – before I would realize, before I could realize, that the opportunity I lost 20 years ago was not that job.  It was the opportunity to appreciate my life, and to be a good friend and companion, during those years when I was angry and resentful.

__________

How do we squander a life?  How do we squander life?

By not sitting, and by not living, with confidence, as we were told Friday that Roshi encouraged everyone to do on the first sesshin he led after becoming a teacher.  By not living with confidence that the life we’re actually living, right here and now, is the life we’re meant to be living, right here and now.

Sure, sometimes change is in order.  When the call to change is strong, clear, and compelling, we should summon the courage to change.

Perhaps more often, however, we are called to change in place, and that call can be harder to hear.  Sometimes we don’t want to hear it, and, hearing it, we turn from it.

How do we squander a life?  How do we squander life?

By not sitting, and by not living, with joy, as Roshi also encouraged everyone to do during his first sesshin as a teacher.  By not welcoming the joy and potential for joy that presents itself right now, whatever our circumstances.

How do we squander a life?  How do we squander life?

By not being a good friend and companion, as Charles [Birx, Roshi] summed up the call and fruits of Zen practice during his teisho yesterday.

__________

My wish for each of you – each of us –  as we end another day of sesshin and go off to sleep, is that you fall asleep knowing you have lived today.  That you fall asleep alive.

And my wish for each of us, as our lives come to an end, as did the lives of the Dear Ones who departed last week, is that you die knowing you lived.  That you die alive.

This life, this alive, like Zhaozhou’s Mu – his no which is the yes that has no opposite – is, of course, that life which is not death’s opposite.

I’ll end with a brief koan:

Two monks who had been away from the monastery for the day passed a funeral as they returned.

One monk slapped the lid of the coffin twice, glared at the other, and asked ferociously, “Dead or alive?  Dead or alive?”

The other fired back, just as ferociously, “I won’t say!  I won’t say!”

Like the second monk, may we always refuse to take the bait when the Great Matter of life and death is framed like that.

May we continue to seek and find and live and give and share that life which is not the opposite of death.

__________

* Evening Gatha:

Let me respectfully remind you,

Life and death are of supreme importance.

Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.

Each of us should strive to awaken.

Awaken!  Take heed.

This night your days are diminished by one.

Do not squander your life.

Wash Your Bowl — Denbo Ceremony Teisho

Jeff

This is the talk I gave after my Denbo ceremony, in which I received Dharma transmission from my Zen teacher, Kevin Jiun Hunt, O.S.C.O., Roshi, and so became a Zen teacher myself.  I’ve also posted a few pictures.  The ceremony occurred on Saturday, November 10, 2018.  It was very traditional, except that it occurred at 2:00 p.m. and was attended by friends and family.  For reasons that are long outdated, these ceremonies have, for centuries, typically occurred privately, between teacher and student, at midnight.  A number of Zen streams in the West, including ours, recently have begun to open them, and to hold them at a much more agreeable time of day.  I’ve been given the Dharma name Kōgen, which means Light Source.

Gratitude is the first thing I want to express today.

Some time ago, I went looking for a new Zen teacher.  I couldn’t believe it when I found a Trappist monk and Zen teacher, all rolled into one, just a couple of towns over from where we were living at the time.  As you’ll hear in a moment, the Trappists were on the scene early in my travels through contemplative spiritual circles over the past 30 years.  So I was really excited to discover Fr. Kevin.  I wrote him a long, detailed email telling him all about my journey.  And, at this point, Fr. Kevin gave me the first of the many great teachings I’ve received from him:  He completely ignored my email!  I re-sent it a few days later, just in case he had missed it.  (Hint: He hadn’t missed it.)  He ignored it again.  That was my first dose of your wise, spare, direct, “no fuss” approach to spiritual guidance and friendship.  You’ve known just what nudges I’ve needed.  And, since our very first meeting, I’ve come to see just how genuinely you see me – and, I must say, being seen genuinely by other human beings is one of the most profound gifts any of us can receive.  From the start, you’ve accepted me without pretext or pretense, and you’ve always gently insisted that I accept myself the same way.  Thank you.

I eventually forwarded my email to Cindy, whose email address I’d also found on the Zendo’s website.  She responded right away, and very helpfully, encouraging me to come sit with the group!  And I’m glad I did!  That was another tremendous gift and teaching.  I so appreciate and admire your incredible openness, the sense of warm welcome you create, and your determination to make Zen accessible.  You have opened the door to this Zendo to our whole family.  Esther began Zen practice here, and you’ve even welcomed our kids and our dogs.  Thank you.

Tim and Sr. Madeline, thank you for being here today.  It means the world to me.  Thank for your friendship and the many wonderful teachings you’ve offered all of us.

I also want to acknowledge five other important teachers here.  First, my friend and Harvard Divinity School colleague, Charlie Hallisey.  He is one of the principal scholars of Buddhism at Harvard Divinity School, where I have done some part-time teaching the past few years, and he is one of the leading scholars of Buddhism globally.  Charlie has brought with him four distinguished Buddhist monastics from Asia – Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam – who are fellows at Harvard this year.  So this is not just an interfaith ceremony; it is an ecumenical ceremony within the Buddhist world.  It’s an honor to have all of you with us today.  Thank you.

I want to thank our Charlie (Norton) for serving as attendant today, and for all you do around this place. You are a rock.

We’re going to share a bit of food after this ceremony, and the best dishes – the ones we didn’t pick up at Whole Foods – were made by our very own Kathleen Bellicchi, who quite literally is the best cook I’ve ever met.  Kathleen, you so evidently pour your heart into everything you make, and your foods opens our hearts.  Thank you.

I want to thank my family, of course, Esther, Ellis and Carys.  For many years now, you’ve given me leave to sit for 25 minutes at a time at home, or for an evening, or sometimes two, away during the week, or for a day, or a weekend, or a week or more when I’ve been on retreat.  Walking this path runs against the main currents of our culture – and yet you always have been fully supportive of my commitment to traveling it.  Thank you.  I love you.  And, Ellis and Carys, thanks for participating in the ceremony.  Good job!

I also want to acknowledge and thank my parents and my two brothers.  They are not here today, much as they wanted to be.  They have been interested in and supportive of my meditation practice from the very start.

Finally, I want to thank my friends, starting with the countless people I’ve had the good fortune to sit with all these years – both Zen and Christian Centering Prayer practitioners.  A handful of you are here today; many more are not.  I also want to acknowledge my close friends walking the contemplative path within other traditions, including Islam and Judaism.  I’ve been buoyed by the friendship of all of these fellow travelers.

Last, but not least, I’m grateful to my friends from different walks of life who have come to participate in this ceremony.  All the strands of my life feel woven together and of a piece at this point, and I want each of you to know you’re an important part of the whole.  Thank you.

__________

It’s traditional for a new teacher to give a talk, and I’m going to open this talk in one traditional way: with a koan.  For those of you who are less familiar with the Zen tradition, most koans are brief accounts of interactions between a teacher and a student, or between students, or between teachers, which have been recorded and bound together into collections that have been passed down to us through the centuries.  They’re sometimes used in a very distinctive way as a teaching tool when a student meets with a teacher, and they’re also often used to open a talk, like this one.

This is Case 7 in The Gateless Gate, which is one of those koan collections:

 

A monk said to Chao Chou, “I have just entered this monastery.  Please teach me.”

Chao Chou said, “Have you eaten your rice gruel?”

The monk said, “Yes, I have.”

Chao Chou said, “Wash your bowl.”

The monk understood.

 

I began meditating about 30 years ago, as I said earlier, in my mid-20s.  That was a very stressful time in my life, if also a good and exciting time in many ways.  I had just finished law school and begun my career in the intense legal profession at a firm in San Francisco.  (Several of my lawyer friends and colleagues are here today, including my first boss and mentor at that firm, Jeff Newman, who has remained a close friend ever since.  All of the lawyers here no doubt can remember the stressfulness of that transition from law student to lawyer.)  I also was living far away from my family for the first time.  And, most significantly, I was just beginning to touch, and open up to, and work through the pain and after-effects of witnessing a very close friend’s death in a mountain climbing accident 12 or 13 years earlier, when I was 15.

I signed up for a weekend introduction to meditation program at the Nyingma Institute, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and study center in Berkeley.  I was Catholic, and I had studied with the Jesuits, but I was totally unaware at this time of the rich tradition of contemplative prayer practice, of silent prayer, within Christianity.

I definitely signed up and showed up for that first meditation experience seeking refuge, though I doubt I would have or could have expressed it quite that way then.  Life just seemed out of joint, and I was looking for a route to someplace better.

My sitting practice was irregular for the first year or two, but that weekend definitely started me on this path.  A couple of years later, I took a sabbatical year, which I spent in Berlin, Germany, as the wall was being dismantled.  There, I read my first Zen book, by D.T. Suzuki, the towering Japanese Zen teacher and scholar who did so much to transport Zen to the West in the first half of the 20th century.  In this book, Suzuki praises several medieval Christian mystics.  At the time, I found this really surprising, for two reasons.  First, a Zen teacher was pointing to Christianity, my birth tradition.  What’s up with that?  Second, though I’d studied some theology by then, I’d never heard of these people.  Who were they?

I started reading about them, and then reading what they’d written.  When I returned to the States, heading home to Colorado, I connected with the Trappists – specifically, the Centering Prayer movement a number of them had launched to bring contemplative prayer out of the monasteries and into the wider Christian world.  I sat in those circles for several years, while also sitting with Buddhists.  I moved to Boston about 25 years ago for more graduate work, and I eventually situated myself for many years in a different local Zen community.  Little did I know at any of these waypoints that I’d eventually experience the Trappist and Zen streams brought together in the likes of Fr. Kevin.

__________

In the early days of this journey, I had a burning question I would ask of any teacher or senior student who would listen:  When can I stop sitting?

I had many different ways of asking this question, like:

  • There will come a time when I don’t have to sit anymore, won’t there?
  • So-and-so (the teacher) really doesn’t need to sit anymore, does he?

In retrospect, my question was a lot like the one with which Master Dogen, who carried Zen from China to Japan in the 13th century, was preoccupied as a young monk.  His question was:  Why do we practice?  Or, to put it another way:  What’s the point of this?

Anyway, I mostly got rather polite replies contesting the premise of my question.  But, I persisted – and I’m sure I became ever more annoying to these good people from whom I was insisting upon receiving an answer they never were going to give me.

I’d been told many times that I was free to stop sitting whenever I wanted to.  But what I really wanted to know, of course, was that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – that better place I was seeking – and that I was going to find it.  Convinced I didn’t have them already, I wanted the Keys to the Kingdom.  I wanted to know The Secret.

One day I asked one of these people my stale question yet again – Can I stop sitting someday? – and this time she just rolled her eyes and said, in a tone I can only describe as a mix of exasperation and sarcasm, “Sure, like when you die.”  And then she walked away.  That was a tremendous gift.  I resolved then and there to shut up and just keep sitting.

__________

I’ve always loved the koan with which I opened this talk.  It’s so simple, short, and truly, truly sweet.  Some people who are new to Zen, or who just encounter it casually, and even some people who have been at it for some time, assume there’s something esoteric about Zen.  If that’s your assumption, you might be inclined to think Chao Chou is being cagey when the teaching he offers the young monk in this koan is to ask whether he’s eaten breakfast and then to tell him to wash his bowl.

But, it’s not so.

Zen has no secrets.  Or, you could say, it’s all an open secret.  Zen points to the open secret that is this very life.  My life.  Your life. Our life together.  For those of us who are seeking, the answer we seek is hidden in plain sight.  And, we find what we’re seeking simply – simply! – by opening ourselves completely, giving ourselves fully, to this vital mystery that’s as plain as the nose on one’s face.  That is the nose on my face; on your face.

The young monk in this koan comes looking for guidance and reassurance, just as I did years ago. There’s genuine integrity in our seeking; in our innate conviction that wholeness is the natural order of things.

And, in fact, the universe is whole, we are whole, even when things seem broken.  Even when we feel lost and broken, as I was feeling years ago.

And Chao Chou’s response, his guidance, really couldn’t have been more straightforward and helpful: Just attend to the here-and-now.

The impulse that makes one curious about meditation; the person who shows up at our door seeking spiritual or physical nourishment; the dirty bowl in the sink:  This is it.  What we seek is manifest, right here, right now.

I love the way this koan ends.  Many koans end with a student experiencing realization, but that’s almost always expressed much more dramatically, like “Suddenly, he experienced great satori [great enlightenment]!” or “Hearing this [what the teacher said, of course], he experienced great realization.”

I like this formulation much better.  “The monk understood.”  Whatever the monk understood, and however deeply – whether he experienced great satori, or simply knew it was time to shut up and just keep sitting – it was enough.  Always enough.

__________

Like Dogen in his early days, perhaps like the young monk in this koan, I used to think there must be some end to this, some final goal or destination, and once we reach it, practice ceases.

But our practice, our life, which is the universe’s life and practice, begins long before one becomes a Zen practitioner, and it continues whether or not we meditate.  It continues as our meditating or not meditating.

This path is completely open-ended, completely boundless.  A path without boundaries.

And, so, we are always, already home.

The fact that many of us don’t yet reliably believe this – or, rather, don’t yet reliably experience this – is the main reason a tradition like Zen and its practices exist in the first place. “Belief” in the way we typically use that word, in a cognitive sense, isn’t really what it’s about.  Belief in that sense eventually begins to feel arid and hollow; it just won’t do.  What we really seek is knowing in our bones, beyond belief.

It’s all just like the young monk’s bowl.  So concrete, so tangible, so present – and, yet, it cannot, it will not, be reduced to, or contained by, our ideas about it.  Turn that bowl round and round in your hands as you wash it.  Just like this life we live, this path we walk:  What is it exactly?  Where does it begin?  Where does it end?

__________

I’m excited to continue this journey in this new role, helping support others in their journeys as best I can, as others have supported me so generously for so long.  I’ll continue to need your support, of course, and I’ll welcome it.  I’m also excited about some of the things we see emerging as Zen becomes more firmly planted in the West, including its turn toward social and environmental justice concerns and its deep encounters with other traditions, both religious and secular.  I also look forward to doing my part to contribute to these developments.

Thank you. Thank you.

This is a recording of my talk, kindly provided by my Dharma brother Charlie Norton,

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.