Tag: spirituality

Heart-Mind: Compassion as the Other Face of Wisdom

Jeff

I gave this talk on October 2, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 42 in The Gateless Gate:

Once Manjushri went to a place where many Buddhas had assembled with the World-Honored One. When he arrived, all the buddhas had returned to their original dwelling place. Only a young woman remained, seated in samadhi, near the Buddha’s seat.

Manjushri addressed the Buddha and asked, “How can the young woman get near the Buddha’s seat when I cannot?”

The Buddha replied to Manjushri, “Awaken this young woman from her samadhi and ask her yourself!” Manjushri walked around the young woman three times, snapped his fingers once, took her to the Brahma Heaven and exerted all his supernatural powers but he could not bring her out.

The World-Honored One said, “Even a hundred-thousand Manjushris cannot awaken her. Down below, past twelve hundred million lands, as innumerable as sands of the Ganges, lives the Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom. He will be able to bring her out of her samadhi.”

Instantly the Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom emerged from the earth and made bows before the World-Honored One who gave him his imperial order. Delusive Wisdom stepped before the young woman, snapped his fingers once and at this she came out of samadhi.

Here’s Yunmen’s verse:

One can bring her out, the other cannot;

both of them are free.

A god mask; a devil mask –

the failure is an elegant performance.

When I decided to talk tonight about the two major virtues Zen foregrounds, wisdom and compassion, and about the relationship between them, I went looking for a koan that would provide a good starting point. I read all the koans featuring Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and landed on this one. It’s a doozy. I think it works for my purposes. We’ll see what you think when we get to the dialogue after the talk.

You may have noticed that many zendos have at least one image of Manjushri. In the monastery zendo we use on sesshin at Providence Zen Center, you will find him in the lower right of the colorful mural behind the large Buddha statute on the altar. Manjushri is depicted holding a sword, which symbolizes prajna: discriminating wisdom that cuts through delusion, ignorance, and false distinctions. Buddhism regards ignorance and conceptual confusion as the root of suffering.

What are we confused about? The nature of our own existence. We think of ourselves, and we feel, separate, rather than interconnected; woven together as one fabric. Manjushri’s sword severs false views. It cuts the root of our suffering.

We often also find images of Avalokiteshvara, also known as Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of compassion, in meditation halls. She is carved into the front panel of the altar in the monastery zendo at PZC. Their Kwan Um School of Korean Zen is named after her, so you find her everywhere there. The white porcelain statue of a woman with many arms and hands—it’s supposed to be 1,000—is Avalokiteshvara.

In the carving on the front panel of the altar, a massive Avalokiteshvara—aka Kanzeon or Kwan Um—sits on the shore beside rough waters in which a tiny human is thrashing about. Drowning, he reaches out to Avalokiteshvara, who saves him. That human is you or me. The 1,000 hands on that white porcelain statute of Avalokiteshvara nearby are there to sense our needs and to reach out to save all of us.

We tend to dualize thought and feeling, mind and heart, in Western culture. Wisdom is associated with the mind, which we tend to associate with directed thought, so the idea of wisdom takes on a rational, analytical character. It’s solely a product of reasoning. Feeling is associated with the heart, and the heart is associated with emotion, which we tend to regard as irrational.

Asian cultures don’t dichotomize this way. Heart and mind are one. The Japanese word kokoro is translated as heart-mind. That’s heart-hypen-mind. If you ask the Japanese to indicate where in the body this heart-mind resides, they won’t point to the head or the chest. They’ll point to the belly, which is the center of our body, where our breath in meditation and our nervous system settles—where we have butterflies or not. It’s also where we have gut feelings. We associate the gut with intuitive knowledge, of course; knowledge that we feel.

Let’s return to our koan and its verse. When Manjushri arrives to meet Shakyamuni Buddha, all other Buddhas who had been with him disappear. Manjushri’s wisdom sword cuts through false dichotomies. The many dharmas, the many Buddhas, are one. Form is empty. All is Buddha. There is no Buddha to whom Manjushri can get near because all is one.

But there is a woman lost in samadhi—peaceful, even blissful perhaps, but still feeling separate. She is near the Buddha, but apparently has not yet fully realized, fully known and forgotten, her own Buddha nature. Manjushri can’t reach her.

The Buddha says even 1,000 Manjushris, with their penetrating insight into false distinctions and the emptiness of form, could not reach her. In other words, just approaching her with the idea of Emptiness and Oneness won’t reach her. 

But, we learn, there is a Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom—a Manjushri that apparently sees form in emptiness, and who can make contact with the Buddha and the 10,000 things. This bodhisattva appears, snaps his fingers, and the woman is released from her spell. Presumably she now realizes that form is emptiness.

This Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom is fascinating and illuminating. Here we see wisdom not as a detached observer or witness, somehow above it all, but in the tangled vines with us. Embodied wisdom. Feeling wisdom. Emotional wisdom.

Of course, it must be so. There is no “above”; no separate place or perspective from which we judge our own or others’ experience. Wisdom is embodied and must be embodied. Wisdom is born of experience. There is solid research showing that feeling our feelings, relating to them well, and integrating them helps us make good decisions, as if we need such geeky confirmation of something that should be so obvious. Feeling and thinking are partners.

The Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom, Manjushri’s other mask, is Avalokiteshvara—compassion. The heart-mind is in the world of form, of humans with our sense of lack and separation, feeling pain that enables us to recognize others’ pain, hearing and feeling others’ cries, knowing we’re not separate, but also not getting lost in emptiness, able to make contact, able to respond with our 1,000 hands.

Wisdom-and-compassion. We find Zen’s lost coin when we realize wisdom and compassion as its two sides.

No Self

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Zazenkai on September 13, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 19 in The Gateless Gate:

Chao-chou asked Nan-ch’üan, “What is the Tao?”

Nan-ch’üan said, “Ordinary Mind is the Tao.”

Chao-chou asked, “Should I try to direct myself toward it?”

Nan-ch’üan said, “If you try to direct yourself you betray your own practice.”

Chao-chou asked, “How can I know the Tao if I don’t direct myself?”

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

With these words, Chao-chou had sudden realization.

The notion of no self is one of the most perplexing teachings of Buddhism to many people. You and I are so obviously here together, so what could it possibly mean? 

Most humans seem to consider themselves rather reflexively to be separate beings. Beings that function and, in some sense, exist independently of other beings and things.

If we think about this for a nanosecond, however, it becomes obvious that we’re not independent at all. We’re interdependent. We depend upon clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and nourishing food to eat. We depend upon other people to help meet needs we cannot meet alone, from healthcare to being and feeling safe and loved. If we had been neglected by others for too long as infants, we would not be together now.

So, we’re definitely not physically independent or separable from our environment and social sphere. Yet, even knowing this, we continue to think of ourselves as having or being a separate self. This perspective, or mental formation, is a default setting in the human operating system. It seems so obviously true that most of us don’t even question it. In fact, we organize everything from most religious thought about this life and what may follow it, to human rights law, to our approaches to therapy around the idea that we’re separate selves and some theory of that self. The notion of separate, solid, possibly eternal selves is baked into our language and almost everything else in our culture. These days, in this part of the world and elsewhere, selves are elevated, amplified, and glorified. 

But Buddhism, and certainly Zen Buddhism, questions this default perspective or setting. It even pins much of our personal and collective suffering on it. How and why would it question what seems and feels so intuitively, obviously true to so many of us? Is there substance to this mental formation we call the self? If we go looking for it, can we find a self and fix its boundaries in time and space?

Let’s take a moment to try. Please, just close your eyes and settle in for a moment. Please look for yourself in, or apart from, this physical form we know is dependent upon the air you’ll be breathing and the food you ingested this morning. Can you find the self?

Okay. Let’s return. Did you find it? [Discussion]

If we can’t find a substantial, essential, surely eternal self, what’s the alternative? Does our inability to define the parameters of a durable, persistent, separate and separable self lead us to nihilism? No, that’s not the Buddhist view either. 

The Buddhist view is that we tend to think of ourselves as nouns, when, in fact, we are more like verbs. We are activity. Interdependently arising, interconnected activity. We are not a thing; we are experience itself.

Buddhism says our existence, our experience, has three key characteristics, or “marks”: impermanence, no self (or insubstantiality), and suffering. Each one seems to follow from the next. 

We are born into a realm that is constantly changing. Birth is change! We are change and we are vulnerable to the very change that we are; within which we exist. This sense of self with which we come equipped is useful. Would I eat, socialize, and do other things necessary to sustain myself if I didn’t think I had a self to take care of? 

But, as we’ve seen, we tend to objectify, solidify, and cling to this sense of self more strongly than is justified. We expect or want it to exist unchangingly, permanently, apart from the ever-changing stream of activity in which we exist.

And our resistance to accepting the fact that the first mark of existence, impermanence (or perpetual change), also applies to oneself—in other words, our resistance to the second mark of existence, no self—leads to the third mark of existence: we suffer. 

We see this suffering all around us, don’t we? Especially in this time and place in which we each of us feels compelled to precisely define, and refine, and project “who I am,” distinctively and essentially. We suffer if we don’t feel sufficiently recognized for our distinctiveness. We suffer even among companions who recognize one another’s distinctiveness. We suffer as groups that regard themselves as distinctive square off against other groups who see their respective forms of distinctiveness as opposed, and perhaps even as negating one another.

Buddhism invites us to examine and see through the illusion of ontological separateness. To hold our “selves” and other “selves” with a light, loving touch.

If we regard ourselves and others as activity, as experience itself, our perspective on life, and how to conduct our lives, shifts. We become much less focused on objects (nouns) we can have or avoid, and much more focused on improving the quality of our shared experience; the interconnected activity that we are manifesting right here and now. And now. And now. And now.

The contemporary Zen teacher Yamada Koun Roshi, said, “The practice of Zen is the perfection of character.” If there is no self to perfect, then what are we perfecting through Zen practice?

Activity. Experience. The quality of our shared, interdependently co-arising experience.

Machs gute. We want to “make it good,” as the Germans say.

This activity is as vast and boundless as outer space. Let’s make it good. Together. 

Together, because there is no such thing as apart.

Nothing Worth Begrudging II

Jeff

I gave this talk on July 9, 2025, at Full Moon Zen’s Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.

Today I planned to talk a bit about householder Zen—this old-new turn of the Dharma Wheel we are developing through our practice. I’m not going to do that. The readings Rick offered at our morning sit yesterday and our discussion following were so rich and deep. I want to stick with the themes we took up yesterday.

Immediately after our sit I recalled a line in Bodhidharma’s Outline of Practice that I want to use to clarify and amplify something I said in our discussion yesterday. Bodhidharma is the first of the six so-called Zen Ancestors. He’s the Indian sage who, legend has it, brought the Dharma to China, where the Zen tradition developed. This reading that’s attributed to him is very resonant with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Call Me by my True Names,” which Rick read yesterday. I’ll read the whole thing, which is rather long, and then I’ll lift out just one phrase and say a few words about it.

This is Boddhidharma’s Outline of Practice, as translated by Red Pine:

Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice. To enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction and to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn’t apparent because it’s shrouded by sensation and delusion. Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason. Without moving, without effort, they enter, we say, by reason.

To enter by practice refers to four all-inclusive practices: suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma.

First, suffering injustice. When those who search for the Path encounter adversity, they should think to themselves, “In countless ages gone by, I’ve turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions. Now, though I do no wrong, I’m punished by my past. Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open heart and without complaint of injustice. The sutras say, ” When you meet with adversity don’t be upset, because it makes sense.” With such understanding you’re in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path.

Second, adapting to conditions. As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves. All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions. If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it’s the fruit of a seed planted by us in the past. When conditions change, it ends. Why delight in its existence? But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes. Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path.

Third, seeking nothing. People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something — always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. Calamity forever alternates with Prosperity. To dwell in the three realms is to dwell in a burning house. To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

Fourth, practicing the Dharma. The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure. By this truth, all appearances are empty. Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist. The sutras say, “The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.” Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma. And since that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging, they give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment. And to eliminate impurity they teach others, but without becoming attached to form. Thus, through their own practice they’re able to help others and glorify the Way of Enlightenment. And as with charity, they also practice the other virtues. But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all. This is what’s meant by practicing the Dharma.

In a moment I’ll invite you to highlight anything in this reading that particularly spoke to you, but phrase I want to elevate is this: “that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging.” For me, this phrase seems to convey an essential point of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem.

Yesterday in our dialogue I observed how Thay’s poem seems to be calling us to see and embrace and resolve seeming polarities: generosity and greed; peace and violence; beauty and terror.

Today I just want to revise or qualify the word “resolve.” If it’s even fair to present these features of reality in a dualistic way, as polarities, I’m not sure we’re called to resolve them exactly, or that we even could. We’ve been endowed both with love and with anger; gentleness and strength; separateness and togetherness. We need both. We are both.

I think the goal isn’t so much to resolve seeming polarities, but to harmonize them. To reduce the amplitude of our swings between them. To see and integrate the whole reality. Nothing worth begrudging. To stop oscillating among extremes. To moderate. To find and to walk the middle way.

Action

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen zazenkai on June 14, 2024. A recording follows the text.

Impermanence was the theme of my last talk, which I gave at Sunrise Sit on June 4th. I opened it with this case from the Blue Cliff Record:

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other.”

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

As you can see, we’re serious about the idea of impermanence in Zen. Even emptiness is empty. It dies with form. Don’t think of it as the ultimate ground of reality, at least if you’re imagining something that exists apart and persists forever.

I said at the end of that talk that I would connect the observable truth of impermanence, of change, to action. I’m making good on that promise now. 

Let me open this talk with another koan, a brief story, from the record of Dogen’s teaching, together with his brief commentary on it:

Mayu, Zen Master Baoche, was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?”

“Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent,” Mayu replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”

“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk.

Mayu just kept fanning himself.

The monk bowed deeply.

Dogen’s commentary:

The actualization of the buddha dharma, the vital path of its authentic transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind. The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, the wind of the buddha house brings forth the gold of the earth and ripens the cream of the long river.

Here we meet yet another monk who has gained some insight—and who is stuck in emptiness. He thinks the nature of wind somehow exists apart from wind. He thinks he’s grabbed the lion by its tail and caged it. He’s not yet become the lion.

We know the wind as it beats against us. As we move the fan. We know the lion as it roars. As we roar.

The nature of emptiness can’t be expressed as an idea (even this one): Emptiness is only ever actualized, enacted. Emptiness is expressed as action. The action of the wind. The action of my hand moving the fan.

Action is motion. The best definition of life I’ve ever heard, from a biologist, is movement. Living things are moving things. And everything is alive, even supposedly dead things. Corpses and logs are expressing a form of life we call decomposition. They’ll eventually spawn forms of life that appear to be moving faster for a while, until those life forms “die” and decompose.

Motion is change. Impermanence.

What does it mean to say the nature of wind is permanent? What does permanent mean here?

Change. Wind moves as wind.

In my last talk I also said another core tenet of Zen Buddhism is that our default mode is to resist the reality of change. We cling to whatever evokes pleasurable feelings. We’re averse to whatever threatens to take away pleasurable feelings. We remain willfully ignorant to the reality of impermanence; to our inability to avoid change. We seek a safe haven in which nothing changes, and in which we needn’t change.

Mayu is demonstrating a more viable path. The path of activity beyond ideas. The path of becoming a Buddha. Dogen said, “Buddha-nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously.” The nature of wind and wind always occur simultaneously. 

Our ideas also are activity. We must permit them to change. I never get myself into more trouble than when I cling to a misguided viewpoint or idea about some situation and myself and others in relation to it. 

It’s 90 degrees out. Mayu is hot. He fans himself. An appropriate response. 

I’ve taken offense at what someone else has said or done. My blood is boiling. I fan the flames. An appropriate response? Likely not.

How are my preexisting, fixed views conditioning the experience and my reading of it? Can I let my views be susceptible to change? Can I remain open to newness and possibility, including newness and possibility within myself? Can I remain truly present and curious? If so, perhaps I’ll use my fan to cool the room, or even to extinguish the flames, rather than fanning them.

Zazen—our practice of sitting still—is activity. It’s the activity of becoming a Buddha; of learning to act as a Buddha acts. Finding the still point on the crest of the wave of impermanence. Maintaining our balance there. Knowing how precious this passing moment is and how precious those with whom we briefly share it are. Knowing this in our bones. Moving as the wind, roaring as the lion, to enact that knowing.

Even This Perishes

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 55 in The Blue Cliff Record:

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly

destroyed in the kalpa fire — I wonder whether this perishes or not.

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other.”

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

Sleep. Morning dew. The chill in the air. Feeling happy. Feeling sad. This day. Tomorrow. This life. All life.

Impermanence is a core tenet of Buddhism. Why? Because it’s observably true. How can we deny the reality of change?

Another core tenet of Buddhism is that our default mode is to resist the reality of change. We cling to whatever evokes pleasurable feelings. We’re averse to whatever threatens to take away pleasurable feelings. We remain willfully ignorant to the reality of impermanence; to our inability to avoid change.

This koan probes the furthest reaches of Zen Buddhist notions of impermanence. The monk accepts that the morning dew, and even our whole universe, will vanish. But what about this?

We Zen types are always point to this. Just this. But what is this? Is this permanent?

No, the Dasui says. Even this perishes. It perishes with the tea and the teapot. With the moon and the stars.

As usual, the answer to the koan is in the question. The monk divides the world into this and that. Destroyed and not destroyed. 

And, as usual, the question is about oneself. The monk has some insight into the Great Matter. He’s seen into emptiness—and has become identified with it.

If emptiness is not destroyed, might I live on?

Just as form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness truly is no other than form. When all the many universes are destroyed in the kalpa fire, their moons and stars with them, emptiness perishes with them. And you and me with them. This is no thing.

This koan is about as close as Zen gets to dogma on physics and metaphysics. As physics and metaphysics, this perspective undoubtedly is debatable. But we know the Buddha declined to engage in metaphysical speculation. I don’t think Dasui is engaging in metaphysical speculation either.

The monk is still looking for something permanent to hold onto. He’s searching for the ultimate and equating it with permanence. Dasui is channeling the ancients that preceded him, and foreshadowing the ancients that will follow him, like Dogen, who tells us that hitting the mark—finding what we’re seeking—is knowing we never have another nest than this fleeting moment in this fleeting life in this fleeting universe in which to settle.

Dasui is advising the monk, and advising us, that, whatever perspective you may have on physics or metaphysics, it’s best to live in accord with the observable reality of change, including the ways we ourselves, and our own perspectives, are susceptible to change. Orienting ourselves in this way invites and enables, in turn, a particular orientation toward our actions, or activity, another key Zen theme that Dogen emphasized in his teaching. It opens us to newness and the possibility of an appropriate response to what’s arising here and now, rather than to our prior, fixed and, quite possibly, misguided views on ourselves, others, and the situation in which we now find ourselves–views on which we may have a death grip and which we may layer over our immediate experience, strangling the life from it. I’ll return to and develop this theme in my talk during our upcoming Zazenkai.

I’ll close by reading our koan again . . .  

Every Day is a Good Day

Jeff

I gave this talk at our Sunrise Sit today, the day before Thanksgiving. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 6 in the Blue Cliff Record:

Yunmen gave a teaching, saying, “I’m not asking you about before the fifteenth day of the month. Why not say a word about after the fifteenth day of the month?”

He answered himself, “Every day is a good day.”

The full moon is a metaphor for enlightenment in Zen. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the full moon appears mid-month, so the monks training with Yunmen would have heard him asking them what it’s like to be enlightened. 

They seem confounded, so Yunmen answers his own question, “Every day is a good day.” 

What does he mean? Is he taunting the monks by saying every day is a good day only after the full moon rises; only after one is enlightened? I don’t think so. 

I expect there was a long silence before Yunmen answered himself. He would have known the monks were thinking to themselves, “I have no idea what it’s like after the full moon. Why are you asking me? I can only imagine my life right now, before the full moon.” 

Living in close quarters with Yunmen, the monks also would have seen him getting sick, getting frustrated occasionally, sometimes forgetting things and making mistakes, after the full moon; after enlightenment.

I think Yunmen truly means every day is a good day, including the days before the full moon. These days when the monks think the moon is hidden and they lack enlightenment.

Yunmen’s question simultaneously meets the monks where they believe they’re at and contests their self-understanding. Yunmen is addressing seekers; people seeking enlightenment. They’re sure they don’t have it or haven’t yet found it. More than one of these seekers would have asked Yunmen, “What’s enlightenment like? I want to know. Tell me.”

Yunmen turns this question back at them. “You’re always telling me about your troubled lives before the full moon; before enlightenment,” he seems to be saying. “Tell me something about your life beyond the full moon, right here and now.”

But they’re dumbfounded. 

Yunmen’s question both confirms the monks’ belief that there’s a time before enlightenment and a time after it and challenges that belief. Yunmen implies they can describe the enlightenment experience and invites them to do so.

If Yunmen thinks they can describe life beyond the full moon, then perhaps it’s not the idealized life they imagine. Perhaps it’s still a life with troubles.

If only someone had just groaned about their splitting headache or the lukewarm tea.

Yunmen’s question divides time into before and after, but, as I’ve said, his response doesn’t differentiate between the days before the full moon and the days after it. No before. No after.

Troubled or untroubled. Our awareness attuned to the light that shines within or not. Grateful or not.

Every day is a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving.