Form is Emptiness and Other Stories We Tell Ourselves

Jeff

 

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

 

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

From the Heart Sutra

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Form is exactly emptiness.  Emptiness, exactly form.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

One angle sometimes can predominate, and sometimes intensely so.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Sometimes this perspective.

 

Sometimes that.

 

Sometimes both.

 

Sometimes neither.

 

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

 

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

 

Then it starts spinning stories.

 

This is good.

 

That’s bad.

 

I want more of this.

 

Less of that.

 

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

 

As philosophy, these words really are pretty slippery.

 

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

 

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Bounded and free.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

But only if I relate to it playfully.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

When can I stop sitting?

Jeff

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Some Buddhist teachings even seem to invite this.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I sit.  I get enlightened.  I stop sitting.

 

Results guaranteed.  Timing may vary.

 

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

 

In what sense do we need to sit?

 

Three responses that ring true to me sprung to mind.

 

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

 

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

 

Why?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Zilch.

 

Nada.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

So, there are ethical implications to sitting.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Pretty cool.  Big moral progress.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Not unlike CBT, meditation can help, I think.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And my call to life.

 

Just life.

 

Just sitting.

 

No, really, just sitting.

 

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

 

So, when can I stop sitting?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And, finally, why would I stop sitting?

 

Or, to borrow from that lovely Christian hymn:

 

My life flows on in endless song . . .

 

How can I keep from singing?

 

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

 

My life flows on in endless song . . .

 

How can I keep from sitting?

 

 

Postscript:

 

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

 

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

 

Indeed.

Patience, donkey, patience

Jeff

I think one goal of koan practice — part of the logic — is to exhaust that seeking part of us that brings one to koan practice in the first place.

 

This certainly seems true of much of the long mid-section in the Harada-Yasutani curriculum we embrace, which includes the Blue Cliff Record.

 

I mean, there are just so many koans. It’s bound to take many years to pass through them all, even if one proceeds relatively “quickly.”

 

One does sort of get the hang of it after a while.

 

And, fundamentally, all of these many koans teach the same thing – point to that same, always different thing.

 

This.

 

Just this.

 

This overflowing.

 

There’s this old joke my dad told me when I was a kid.  I recently told it to my seven-year old son when he was getting antsy about something.

 

A sage is riding his donkey from one village to the next.

 

The donkey, growing weary, asks, “When will we be there?”

 

The man replies, “Patience, donkey, patience.”

 

(Actually, my dad, who is – shall we say – a bit rough around the edges, used “jackass” instead of “donkey.”  I rather prefer it that way, but my seven-year old wouldn’t have heard anything else if I’d said jackass.)

 

This goes on and on.

 

“How much longer,” asks the donkey.

 

“Patience, donkey, patience.”

 

On and on.

 

Eventually my son interrupts.  Smiling, because he sort of gets the point by now, he asks, “When is this joke going to end?”

 

I reply, of course, “Patience, donkey, patience.”

 

With each koan we encounter, it’s as if the universe is saying, “Same answer.  Right here.  Why do you keep looking for something else?  Something more.”

 

Just this, donkey.

 

Just this.

 

And if and as one progressively opens to this, well, yes, openings . . .

 

Every koan . . .

 

Every moment . . .

 

What’s your hurry?

 

Why not settle in – settle into this practice, to this life – and stay a while?

 

There’s no place to go after all.

 

Remembering Paul Ryan, and what he taught me

Jeff

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Paul Ryan, my best friend and the godfather of our son, died Saturday after suddenly falling seriously ill about a week earlier. We’ve just returned from Denver, where I’ve spent the past four days with Paul’s wife Pam and surviving siblings helping prepare for the memorial service, at which I spoke.

 

Paul would have been 50 on May 1st. “Great guy” doesn’t begin to describe what a joyful, inspiring, giving, loving, and loved person Paul was. There are the merely great people one knows, and then, for so many, including me, there was Paul.

 

How lucky I was to have Paul’s close friendship for 33+ years. I was a year ahead of him in college. He used to say half-jokingly that I raised him.

 

Paul was the first person Denver Mayor Michael Hancock asked to join his cabinet upon his election. He was the driving force behind many of the Hancock administration’s priority initiatives.

 

About 1,000 people attended yesterday’s memorial service for Paul. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper told me afterwards that he can’t remember a memorial service for a Colorado public official that drew more people. President Obama sent a lovely, personal letter about Paul, which the mayor read. The Colorado legislature observed a moment of silence yesterday. The city has named the 11th hole at Paul’s favorite municipal golf course after him. He shot a hole-in-one there last season. Paul was a humble guy, but he did a lot of playful boasting about that one.

 

There was a story about the memorial service in today’s Denver Post, which has been writing something about Paul nearly every day since Saturday, when he passed away. My opening remarks from the service, for which I served as the officiant (or whatever one calls it) and first speaker, appear below. I’m pleased that the stories we all told drew laughs. The service was emotional, but not somber. Paul would have come back from beyond to give us all a whack on the head if it had veered in that direction. It was the perfect send-off for a friend who always kept people smiling and laughing.

 

Here are the words I wrote (and mostly stayed true to) for the memorial service:

 

Welcome. Thank you for being here to remember our dear friend Paul Ryan.

 

Thanks especially for coming in a snowstorm. This is quite a gathering. We’d need the old McNichols Arena, not the McNichols Building, for this service if the weather had been good.

 

I’m Jeff Seul, one of Paul’s close friends from college.

 

This morning we’re going to hear reflections by Paul’s family members and other close friends

 

. . . including his friend, the Mayor.

 

I suspect we’ll hear a story or two – or ten or twelve or twenty. Paul loved stories.

 

We’re also going to hear a few songs that Paul particularly loved. Not your typical memorial service stuff.

 

(Memorial cards. Silence cell phones.)

 

We’ll gather for lunch downstairs after the service. We hope you can stay for that.

 

Let me start things off with some brief thoughts of my own . . .

 

and perhaps a story or two.

 

A couple of words that spring to mind when I think about Paul are smile and loves.

 

Smile, the noun, singular

 

and

 

Loves, then noun, plural.

 

Smile.

 

That irrepressible smile.

 

Perhaps you noticed while watching the slideshow that was playing a moment ago that Paul was always the guy with the biggest smile. That beaming smile.

 

And what a versatile smile.

 

Paul could make a stranger an instant friend with that smile.

 

Snap you out of a funk with that smile.

 

Lure you into some good-natured mischief with that smile.

 

Cajole, persuade with that smile.

 

Like the time, when we were just kids, that we decided to try to ride our roughly five-foot long mountain bikes off the end of Paul’s roughly eight-foot long – and three-foot high – front porch. Paul flashed that smile and said, “You first.”

 

The laughs more than compensated for the basketball size bruise I had for months.

 

Loves.

 

Paul was a guy with many loves.

 

His love was concrete, and it was exuberant.

 

He loved what he loved, and he loved it big.

 

So many things Paul loved concretely.

 

Paul loved his family and us, his 16,000 or so genuine friends.

 

Paul’s first job out of college in which he had any hope of making a decent living was selling and leasing commercial real estate.

 

He earned his first commission check after a couple of months – a whopping $900, as I recall.

 

I was living in San Francisco at the time. Paul called to say he was going to buy a ticket to come see me for a couple of days.

 

Paul blew his entire, first paycheck just to pay a visit to a friend.

 

This continued for several months, perhaps the better part of a year. Paul would make some money and spend it to visit family and friends, and to live it up a little. He bought an old Mercedes, a piece of junk that created years of headaches for him, but which he absolutely loved.

 

It all came to an ignoble end the following April when his accountant explained that, as an independent contractor, he should have been setting aside money to pay Uncle Sam. He had a big tax bill that took years to pay off.

 

Paul loved Denver.

 

El Chapultepec. The Stock Show. Wash Park.

 

New York and Paris have nothing on Denver, in Paul’s view.

 

His position in Mayor Hancock’s cabinet was the perfect role for him, and he couldn’t imagine any job he’d rather have – ever. He’d achieved career nirvana.

 

Paul loved dogs, particularly a series of adopted dogs named Bailey, Olive and Graham.

 

I now live in Boston, and I travel to the west coast frequently. I had a brief layover in Denver several months ago. Paul and I met for lunch at the Cherry Cricket.

 

Paul asked me to walk him to his car after a quick meal. He wanted to introduce me to someone – to Graham, Paul and Pam’s adorable, three-legged golden retriever, who they’d adopted from the pet shelter recently.

 

For Paul, dogs are human, too, as the saying goes. The fact that Graham couldn’t join us for lunch was something of a civil rights issue for Paul. I had a flight to catch, but he insisted that I get into his car and sit for a while, so that Graham and I could have a proper visit and really get to know one another.

 

We did, and I damn near missed that flight.

 

And, of course, Paul loved Pam.

 

I still remember when Paul got the nerve to ask her out, having worked up to it for weeks, or even months. He was head-over-heels, when she said yes.

 

And those of us who know them together have seen how their relationship flourished from there.

 

Many of us justifiably regard Paul as among our closest friends, and know that Paul also regarded us that way. Paul loved us all, and he knew which of us was his very best friend.

 

Smile and loves.

 

Two teachings from Paul’s life, for me, are:

 

Smile big.

 

And love big.

 

It’s now my honor to introduce one of Paul’s very close friends, the Honorable Michael Hancock, Mayor of the City and County of Denver.

 

 

Strange, scary, sad day

Jeff

 

This is a picture just texted to me by a very close friend in Watertown. This is the view from my friend’s front door.

 

(This friend is a well known peacemaker. I’m not identifying my friend for now in an abundance of caution.)

 

Ten swat team members searched my friend’s house a short while ago. My friend said they were as young as the young man they are trying to catch. My friend said they looked very frightened. My friend told them to be careful. They asked my friend to pray for them.

 

Early this morning I tried to make my way to Logan airport to get a flight to Denver. I learned yesterday that my best friend from college is on life support, in a medically induced coma, in a hospital there. I want to be at his side. Traffic ground to a halt around Quincy, and I knew from the developing news story that I wasn’t going to make my flight. Now the FAA has closed the airspace over Boston.

 

As if this situation — the manhunt, my friend’s serious condition — weren’t strange and scary and sad enough, the place where the marathon bombing suspects lived in Cambridge is on the same street as the Greater Boston Zen Center, just a couple of blocks away. I’ve walked by their home any number of times. Our sangha sits and chants for peace a short distance from where this tragedy seems to have been planned.

 

Strange. Scary. Sad.

 

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Beneficial Action

Jeff

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And there were some big, fantastic surprises.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I nearly fell out of my chair.

 

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

 

And we did.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And there have been some big, fantastic surprises.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And I’m incredibly happy in my marriage.

 

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

 

Fruit salads do happen, it seems.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Making use of all of the ingredients of my life,

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

We must act, well, more actively.

 

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

 

  • Do what moves us.

 

  • Act primarily for others’ benefit.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Acting with good intentions.

 

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

Stolen credit card

Jeff

I just discovered one on my credit cards was stolen earlier today.

Perhaps I walked away without it at a store.

Perhaps it fell from a pocket.

But it made its way into the hands of someone who put over $500 in charges on it before I discovered it missing and cancelled the account.

Over $500 in charges for . . . groceries.

Not frivolous things, as we saw when this happened with another of our cards several years ago.

Groceries.

Food and other necessities, it seems.

This makes me sad.

Sad that someone who likely knows he or she will only get one or two chances to use the card needs groceries badly enough to use the card for that purpose.

Somehow sad not to know this person.

And sort of sad to cancel that card.

Reincarnation, and love of life

Jeff

Reincarnation is one of those flash point metaphysical concepts in Zen, rather like resurrection in Christianity. It has its would be defenders, its would be debunkers, and its would be reinterpreters/metaphor makers.

I’m in the latter group, to the (very little) extent I’m in any of them. Mostly, I think the whole discussion is uninteresting, like just about any other metaphysical discussion, and certainly not where the real action is.

This said, I’ve long carried an image of what may happen when I die. It’s the image of a kid at the end of a trip down a slide or a roller coaster ride, with a big smile on her face, saying, “Can we do it again?”

Do I really expect this to happen? I don’t know. But this is my disposition toward life now, and, whatever happens when this life ends, I hope it’s my attitude then.

I love this life.

I realize how fortunate I am to feel this way.

I recognize it’s relatively harder for some (perhaps many) people to feel this way, due to varied socioeconomic, political, genetic, environmental, and other factors.

And feeling this way isn’t necessarily the measure of a good life or a worthy life.

Will I feel this way as I die? Again, I don’t know.

Life is hard. My life has been hard in some ways, at times.

Things change.

Attitudes can change as things change, and though I do believe many of us have a significant capacity to determine our own attitudes, even in challenging circumstances, I don’t know the limits of that principle as applied to my own life.

This attitude generally has remained a constant for me during challenging times, or has eventually returned in full force when the challenging times were especially challenging. I do think there’s a fundamental resilience that’s widely (though not necessarily universally) shared among us humans. Researchers like Daniel Gilbert seem to agree.

In my experience, there is something fundamentally solid and trustable about this ever-changing existence, if only we allow ourselves to trust.

Whatever the proximate or cosmic scale future may hold, for now I’m grateful for this attitude, and for the ingredients of my life that help sustain it: family, friends, meaningful work and other commitments, relative good health (despite some significant challenges in that arena the past couple of years), Zen practice, etc.

I have found Zen practice helpful in sustaining this attitude. If Zen is about anything, I think it is about learning to love this life, and expressing this love by honoring this life, and helping create the conditions in which others can do the same.

Here’s a short video of my daughter and me tubing in the snow yesterday. We kept doing it, again and again, for 90 minutes — an accomplishment for a four-year old, I think.

At the end of each ride she asked, smiling, “Can we do it again?”