If religion’s purpose is to help people find peace and strength and to live good lives, which I believe it is, it makes sense that people would turn to religion to explain why terrible things happen in the world – particularly terrible things that happen to individuals that apparently didn’t do anything to deserve it.
Periodically Zen Buddhists gather for sesshin, or 5-10 day silent meditation retreats. During sesshin participants follow a rigorous schedule from dawn until dusk that includes 5-10 hours a day of seated meditation (and sometimes more).
Sesshin is a powerful tool for spiritual transformation.
A little like a meditation marathon, sesshin requires enormous endurance. Experiences during sesshin include periods of bliss, boredom, profound stillness and peace, agitation, exquisite appreciation for just-this-moment, tremendous aversion to just-this-moment, deeper concentration than is usually possible outside of sesshin, and periods of having to endure compulsive thought patterns that repeat endlessly like broken records. Experiences include profound insights of either a universal or personal nature, and seemingly prolonged periods of frustration, fruitless striving, sleepiness and dullness. There can be periods of great physical or emotional discomfort or pain, and periods when we settle so completely that this pain is transcended.
And usually you will experience at least a little of every of one of these things over the course of a single sesshin.
The irony is that when you tell people you are going to a meditation retreat they often sigh enviously because they think you are going away for a week of pleasant peacefulness. Ha! You think, “If they only knew how I was going to spend my vacation time, they would think I was crazy.” And, sometime during the sesshin, when you enter your fourth or fifth straight hour of painful, dull meditation, you will probably think you are crazy, too.
What keeps people coming back to sesshin, despite the sometimes grueling nature of it? It’s not the moments of a sesshin that are peaceful and pleasant, although those are very nice. It’s the overall effect on our Zen practice and our life.
Spending a week in sesshin is comparable to spending time in graduate school, or in an intensive training course, the subject matter being your own mind. You may learn a great deal studying in your spare time, but nothing compares to setting aside the time and energy to delve as deeply into a subject as you possibly can.
What we study in sesshin is not about the content of our mind, although we will end up learning a great deal about that. What we are focusing on is how we use our mind. Or, actually, our “body-mind,” because there is no separation between our body and our mind. We ended up with this human body-mind, and it is often assumed that by the time we have turned 18 – or, perhaps, 21, or 30, but certainly by 40 or 50 – we know how to be that body-mind and fulfill its full potential. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are infinite ways to screw up this human life, or at least to compromise it. We unknowingly dwell in delusion and misunderstanding, and create suffering for ourselves and others – deliberately or with the best of intentions. We let skeletons hide in our closets until they bust out at some moment we are at our most vulnerable. We let our fears control us and chase away the intimacy we crave. On the other hand, there are infinite ways to deepen, expand, clarify and intensify our experience of this human life. No subject can be studied completely, to the point that everything is known, so of course this is the case with so profound a subject as how to best use this incredible instrument called a human body-mind.
If you are suffering deeply, going to sesshin to face that suffering can seem very daunting. Indeed, your experience of sesshin may be quite challenging as you try to allow yourself to see and fully experience what is troubling you. It is generally always worth it.
If you don’t think sesshin sounds worth it because your life is good enough as it is, that’s fine. However, to quote one of our zen ancestors, “When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.”[1] Of course something is missing; in an infinite universe, how could you have it all?
[1] From the “Genjo Koan” by Eihei Dogen, translated by Kaz Tanahashi.
Every time we sit down in meditation we are challenged to face our shit. What is really going on in our body-mind? What ideas are we stubbornly holding onto? What are we afraid of? What would we rather not deal with – anger, resentment, longing, dissatisfaction, numbness? What, or who, are we rejecting? What aspect of our lives makes us want to act selfishly or childishly – by throwing a tantrum, blaming others, or refusing to participate?
We don’t have go seeking for our shit when we meditate. Zazen, seated meditation, doesn’t have to become a grim session of taking account of how crappy our life is or how flawed we are. We also need to be open to awareness of the joy and positivity in our life; we have to be completely open to awareness of everything as it is. However, we are much more likely to be open to the positive stuff than we are to the negative stuff, so facing the shit takes some intention and courage.
I like to think of “opening the doors of my mind” during zazen to whatever might wander in. The Zen ceremony of Segaki ritually enacts this process when the doors of the temple are opened wide and the hungry ghosts – or manifestations of unresolved stuff – are invited to enter. It is surprising how effective this ceremony is. Many people report unresolved stuff coming up for them as they sit zazen in the day-long retreat that follows the ceremony in my tradition. In the evening there is a ceremony to send the “ghosts” on their way, but it often takes much longer to become familiar with a new ghost, learn what it has to teach, and then take the actions necessary to truly send it away.
When I open the doors of my mind as I settle on the meditation cushion, I always feel some trepidation. What am I going to discover? What am I going to have to deal with? Am I going to have to change?
When I finally summon the courage to face my shit I am always surprised to find that – no matter how bad it is – it is less anxiety-provoking to face it than it is to avoid it. Finding something behind the door can be scary and might require serious action, but in the long run it’s better than sensing there’s something behind the door but just wondering how terrifying it might be. When we really face our shit there is often some sense of relief. In addition, avoiding or denying parts of our reality increases our sense of separation or isolation from our whole life and from the people and situations we encounter. When we are one with our shit we are more fully present with everything.
When trying to summon the courage to face our shit during meditation (or anytime) it can be helpful to recall the sense of relief or presence that can be achieved by doing so. Sometimes it also helps to imagine the worst that is likely to come through the doors of our mind and ask ourselves if it would be the end of the world (it rarely would be). Alternatively we might talk ourselves into facing our shit by noticing how tired we are of running away from it.
Once we are determined to be still no matter what comes at us, we expand our awareness by letting go of any idea about our life, our body-mind, or what we should or should not be experiencing at this moment. Then our shit can arise and find itself recognized and embraced – because, after all, it’s not coming at us from outside, it was already here.
I spent last week at a conference for Soto Zen priests. There were 90 of us at the Soto Zen Buddhist Association (SZBA) gathering. We were defined as much, or more, by our differences as by what we held in common. In the 45 years or so that Soto Zen has been developing amongst western converts in America, priests and lineages have stayed quite true to the American ideal of individualism, freedom and innovation. Within lineages there has been some degree of conformity, but between lineages there are often vast differences, especially regarding priest training. For example, in one lineage it is expected that an ordained person will spend at least 7 years in a monastery before becoming an independent priest. In another lineage ordained people typically stay in the monastery for their entire lives. In yet another lineage, lay practitioners with jobs and families are ordained and become independent priests without ever living in a monastery or residential practice community. We are like a herd of cats.
This is why it is so remarkable that this group of priests is striving so hard to stay together – to find out what we hold in common, or what we want to hold in common. At first glance the only thing we could find was this: we all feel passionately about being priests. We all feel that we deserve to be priests, that being priests is one of the most important things in our lives, and that priests are vital to the flourishing of Soto Zen.
This is not much to start with, in one way. All of this passion could just be ego-delusion. We might just be clinging to a role or a label without much to substantiate our claim.
Nonetheless we keep up the dialogue with one another, constantly seeking for things we agree on and trying to minimize the divisiveness caused by the many things we passionately disagree about. Why? Why don’t we all just go our separate ways? It’s a free country. Nothing is stopping any of us from calling ourselves Soto Zen priests and functioning as religious leaders for anyone who cares to come practice with us.
The longer I am involved with the SZBA the more deeply I understand why we stay together. It is a difficult thing to describe, but this starts to get at the heart of the matter: together we can create something greater than any of us could create by ourselves. Or together we can create something greater than any of the lineages could create by themselves.
Exactly what this “greater thing” we are creating will be we don’t even know at this point. Nonetheless we can sense its character when we taste the satisfaction of completing a communal project – one that required us to speak up for our positions but also listen to others and find a creative way to function together. We can sense the character of this “greater thing” when we grudgingly learn to respect and even like colleagues that hold views very different from our own. We especially sense the character of what we are creating together when we feel the growing power and stability present in a group of peers that has tested, questioned and come to understand and trust one another.
Frankly there have been times when I wish I could simply set the agenda and the standards and force everyone else to comply. At other times I wanted to give up and take my toys home, feeling like whatever is being created together is so far from my ideals that it is irrelevant to me. I am grateful that I have not done any of these things. Even though at times I find myself thinking of a phrase I learned from a friend of mine, “It takes all kinds. Unfortunately.”
I imagine this is something like what the founding father felt when they created the United States of America against all odds. It’s really pretty amazing.
Have you ever heard someone – usually not a Buddhist practitioner – summarize the central Buddhist teaching as “life is suffering?” Sometimes people end up with the impression that the Buddha’s teaching was something like this: “Generally speaking, life is a terrible experience. The best thing to do is withdraw from life as much as possible, literally and emotionally.” Put another way, when people hear that the Buddha counseled “detachment,” it can sound to them like he advised his followers to make a practice of disassociation so they could live out their lives with a minimum of pain. This view of Buddhism can make Buddhist practitioners appear at best like cowards, and at worst, cold and heartless (if, perhaps, admirable in their self-discipline).
Sadly, this is a complete misunderstanding of a teaching that is absolutely central to Buddhism. It is important that it be properly understood so people don’t reject or misuse a teaching that could, potentially, be a profound source of liberation.
Part of the misunderstanding of the Buddhist teaching about the nature of human existence arises from difficulties in the translation of Buddhism from one language to another. The word that is typically translated as “suffering” is dukkha. Dukkha, at least as used by Buddhists, is a word that has no simple English equivalent, and most Buddhist scholars agree the word suffering is too limited in its meanings to serve as a direct translation. Thus, dukkha has been alternatively translated as anxiety, uneasiness, stress, unsatisfactoriness and discontent. According to Monier-Williams in his Sanskrit-English Dictionary, duhkha means “uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult.”
If we give up trying to translate dukkha into one word, it could be said that it is an existential sense that things are not as they should be, which manifests in human experience in varying degrees between despair (things are vastly different from the way things should be) and a vague uneasiness (things are not quite as they should be). By “existential sense” I mean a perception based on our experience of the world as self-conscious beings. Whether we are philosophers or not, the nature of our existence and our relationship to the world is of supreme importance to us. We are sentient beings who are acutely aware of our existence, and therefore our potential non-existence. When humans contemplate this great matter, we typically experience dukkha.
The subtle nature of the experience of dukkha can be understood further from its etymology. Sargeant (2009, p. 303) explains the historical roots of duḥkha and its antonym sukha:
It is perhaps amusing to note the etymology of the words sukha (pleasure, comfort, bliss) and duḥkha (misery, unhappiness, pain). The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning "sky," "ether," or "space," was originally the word for "hole," particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan's vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, "having a good axle hole," while duhkha meant "having a poor axle hole," leading to discomfort.
For me, it helps to demystify dukkha to imagine someone getting nauseous from riding in a cart that keeps swaying from side to side who is thinking to himself, “Oy, this is very uncomfortable.”
Dukkha – discomfort, stress, discontent – obviously arises when we encounter experiences that cause us suffering, like physical pain, illness, loss, trauma, not getting what one wants, old age and dying. But it also arises when we experience happiness, joy, boredom, enthusiasm and whole host of other things. Even the most positive, rewarding and enjoyable experience is at least slightly colored by the fact that it will end, or by the fact that at the same moment innocent people are in the midst of terrible suffering. Most of us experience at least a low-grade dukkha all the time. It is like a mild depression we don’t notice until we come out of it, or an ache we have gotten used to. The vague sense that things are not quite as they should be pervades everything.
Why do we feel the subtlest kind of dukkha, even when everything is going great for us? Underneath all of our more blatant resistance to difficulty and pain, the problem is basically this: we want things to rely on, but all things are impermanent and empty of any inherent, independent, enduring self. Including us. We may not even understand what is bothering us, but the intuition that absolutely everything is impermanent is unnerving.
Every mobile creature on the planet, from an amoeba on up, moves away from things that cause it harm or pain, and toward things that protect and nourish it. This is how separate units of life survive, reproduce and evolve. The desire to look after ourselves is extremely powerful, especially in a creature like us that has a strong memory of its past and the ability to imagine its future. But the amoeba doesn’t care that all things are impermanent and empty; it just goes on about its business of self-preservation and promotion without a conscious sense of self. Human beings, on the other hand, identify our bodies, sensations, perceptions, thoughts and consciousness as “self.” As one moment flows into the next we have a sense of continuity that we assume is the enduring part of who we are.
The assumption that there is an enduring part of who we are is wrong. In reality we are only flow. Our self is a composite of materials, processes and emergent phenomena that produces a sensation of an inherent, independent, enduring self. This sensation is extremely adaptive, but in a very intelligent animal it can produce a side-effect of existential angst. What does such an animal do when it suspects it actually has no definable boundaries and is only flow? What does it protect and promote? What can it rely on safety and refuge?
To the sages of the Buddha’s time there appeared to be only two responses to dukkha:
The Buddha realized everything was impermanent and empty of an inherent self, so he knew #1 was not an option. He refused to accept #2. Fortunately, he saw a third option:
The Buddha discovered a simple way for human beings to free themselves from the anxiety-provoking experience of dukkha: let go of the thought that things are not as they should be, particularly the thought that all things, especially us, are permanent and have an inherent, independent, enduring self. Put another way: don’t fight the nature of the universe, change your mind.
If this sounds to you like a defeatist approach that would lead to more suffering, you haven’t actually tried it.
Monier-Williams (1899, 1964), A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, London: Oxford University Press
Sargeant, Winthrop (2009), The Bhagavad Gita, SUNY Press
In working with the Precepts, I have found it useful to “translate” them for myself, using words that capture, for me, the flavor of how each Precept manifests in my life. I imagine that every person will have their own translation of each Precept, depending on their karma. Contemplate them and see for yourself! The official translations used at Bright Way are in bold italics; my interpretations follow, in plain text.
Do Not Kill – Cultivate and Encourage Life
Do Not See Anything as Separate from Yourself – See and Honor Every Being and Thing as a Manifestation of Buddha Nature
Do Not Steal – Honor the Gift Not Yet Given
Do Not Place Self-Interest before Consideration for Others – Trust That You Have All You Truly Need
Do Not Misuse Sexuality – Remain Faithful in Relationships
Do Not Use the Power of Sexual Attraction Merely For Pleasure, Or For Building and Maintaining Your Sense of Self – Negotiate the Intricacies of Human Intimacy with Care, Respect and Honor
Do Not Speak Dishonestly – Communicate Truthfully
Do Not Hide Your Mistakes or Your True Nature with Coarse Or Subtle Lies – Speak From Your True Heart
Do Not Become Intoxicated – Polish Clarity, Dispel Delusion
Do Not Take Refuge in Distractions – Cultivate the Clarity and Energy Required For Practice
Do Not Dwell On Past Mistakes – Create Wisdom from Ignorance
Do Not Dwell Unnecessarily On the Past or Future – Have Faith in Your Ability, and the Ability of Others, To Grow and Change
Do Not Praise Self or Blame Others – Maintain Modesty, Extol Virtue
Do Not Compare Yourself To Others – Honor Each Person’s Unique Process and Manifestation
Do Not Be Mean With Dharma or Wealth – Share Understanding, Give Freely Of Self
Do Not Worry About Lacking Anything – Take Every Opportunity to Be Generous
Do Not Indulge Anger – Cultivate Equanimity
Do Not Justify Self-defensiveness or Territoriality – Do What Needs To Be Done With an Attitude of Acceptance and Compassion
Do Not Defame the Three Treasures – Respect the Buddha, Unfold the Dharma, Nourish the Sangha
Do Not Give Energy to Skepticism or Cynicism – Cultivate Faith In, and Reverence For, That Which Is Greater
Spiritual longing, like any desire, can cause great distress and be an obstacle in spiritual practice. It also is a great force that can propel us along a difficult path and drive us to investigate the deepest and scariest spiritual questions, so I heartily encourage it.
For about seven long years of my junior Zen training, I was in a pretty much constant state of anguish due to my spiritual longing. These years followed three or four initial “honeymoon” years, when I was thrilled with my discovery of Zen and used it to transform my life. I anticipated being able to continue to “succeed” at Zen the way I had succeeded at many other things, but soon I began to encounter teachings that would not yield to my habitual kind of investigation. I longed to understand what I could not, master what I had not, and be something I was not – at least that I wasn’t yet.
My spiritual longing was aroused by chants like this part of the Hsin Hsin Ming, or Affirming Faith In Mind (by Chinese Zen ancestor Kanchi Sosan), which we would chant daily at the meditation retreats I attended:
The Way is perfect like vast space,
where there’s no lack and no excess.
Our choice to choose and to reject
prevents our seeing this simple truth.
Both striving for the outer world
as well as for the inner void
condemn us to entangled lives.
Just calmly see that all is One
and by themselves false views will go.
Attempts to stop activity will fill you with activity
Remaining in duality,
you’ll never know of unity.
And not to know this unity lets conflict
lead you far astray.
This chant felt like a taunt after several hours of seated meditation during which, for me, there might not have been a single moment when I was not choosing and rejecting, striving and entangled. There was rarely a moment that seemed “perfect like vast space, where there’s no lack and no excess.” And if there was, it was fleeting and impossible to re-create. I was very familiar with the fact that, as the chant says, “attempts to stop activity will fill you with activity,” but the chant goes on to remind us that “remaining in duality you’ll never know of unity.” Can’t stop activity, but also can’t stop the effort unless you resign yourself to – god forbid – never knowing of unity and letting yourself get led far astray!
The Hsin Hsin Ming was far from the only teaching that aroused my longing while making the object of my longing seem very, very far away. Even the simplest of our chants, Dogen’s instructions for zazen (Fukanzazengi) tells us that if we “take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward,” “body and mind of themselves will drop away, and [our] original face will manifest.” What was my original face? Would I see it only after a dramatic awakening experience? Why couldn’t I get my body and mind to drop away, no matter how hard I tried?
My unrequited spiritual longing led to real despair. Such suffering may seem trite to some people, but then I would guess they have never experienced it. I wrote poems during this period of angst which I have saved in order to help me remember what it was like. Here’s one:
DAFFODILS
On the day of my deepest desperation,
there is not the slightest sympathy
in the gleaming yellow of the daffodils.
They simply wait
for my return.
To me, life seemed bleak and pointless. I had lost my taste for everything, so there was no distraction or solace to be found. I was on the outside looking in, separated from my original face, from unity, from the One, from Buddha-nature, from those who knew.
I remember the brilliance of the daffodils in the spring sunshine, beaming despite my suffering. The daffodils and Zen masters seemed to murmur together about the great mystery of life, just out of my hearing. They all looked down on me in pity, saying to each other, “Oh, it is so obvious, doesn’t she see it?”
For each of us our deepest spiritual longing takes a different form or attaches itself to different words, and this can also change over time. I wanted to know I was fundamentally OK – acceptable, worthy, lovable. At times I longed to be able to speak and act freely and spontaneously, as my “true self,” free from the constraint of self-consciousness. I also craved understanding. I wanted to know for myself what the masters were talking about.
And yet I kept on, because my longing was greater than my despair:
TWO CAMELLIAS
Even after all the effort,
the grief is not gone.
Having tried everything,
having mastered nothing,
there is no hope even
for temporary relief. And no one else can help.
(Consumed as they are by their own struggles, or,
victorious,
their encouragements echoing,
across the abyss
that separates sanity from despair.)
And yet it seems there is some shred of faith left:
on an aimless barefoot walk in the cold rain,
careless of broken glass
and unyielding pavement,
stooping to pick up two fallen camellias,
cradling pink rain-dropped petals
all the way home,
finding a shallow glass dish
and filling it with water,
setting the camellias afloat in it –
poignant,
superfluous
hope.
The terrible irony of spiritual teachings that arouse spiritual longing is that the Buddha’s first teaching is that craving is the very cause of dissatisfaction! But while it may seem relatively straightforward that we should let go of our desire for worldly things like fame, wealth and pleasure, how can we awaken if we let go of our desire to awaken? Should we really just give up our desire for liberation and enlightenment?
The answer is a paradoxical “yes” and “no” – typical of Zen. “Yes,” because to realize what the Zen masters are talking about, we have to let go of any idea, let alone any hope, of enlightenment. “No,” because until we understand what the Zen masters are talking about, we don’t know what it means to let go of any idea of enlightenment. There is no use in pretending to be enlightened before we are. It doesn’t help to anticipate the final answer and try to avoid going through the process to get there. Ideally we don’t give up our longing until we are truly satisfied; this keeps us motivated, searching and practicing.
After all, Zen Master Dogen made an incredibly arduous and dangerous trip to China in the 1200’s because of his spiritual longing. He wasn’t fully satisfied with the Buddhist teachings and practices he encountered in Japan, so he traveled to China where he encountered Soto Zen and achieved the understanding he longed for. Later he wrote, “Why leave the seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty realms of other lands? If you make one misstep you stumble past what is directly in front of you.” This sounds very wise, but hindsight is 20/20. I sometimes wonder whether Dogen didn’t hear a teaching exactly like that from one of his Buddhist teachers before he left for China, but nevertheless had to make the trip to truly understand it.
If you will indulge me, another poem from my years of junior training to remind me how I felt:
ASPIRATIONS
Is an aspiration still an aspiration
when you stop believing you can attain it,
when you stop believing it can be attained?
Just one of billions –
a number beyond imagining –
and full of rot,
sainthood recedes like a puddle of water
in a hot pan.
I, for one,
had soup for lunch,
stooped to caress a cat on the sidewalk,
and drew easier breath
under the yellow-garland cottonwoods
on the riverbank.
What have I to do with saints? their
insight and perfection,
their principles and influence?
And yet, I’m not ready to fold up
in my stacks of linens
or drown in my dishwater.
Those sages agitate my living
like a mosquito near my pillow in the night.
I keep going forward,
more and more hopeless but
unable to ignore that sound.
Before we awaken to our true nature, our spiritual work is like polishing a tile to make a mirror. This image comes from an ancient Zen story about the interaction between a Zen teacher, Nangaku, and his student, Baso. Baso had been sitting constantly in zazen for ten years. In his fascicle called Kokyo (translated by Nishijima and Cross), Dogen writes, “We can imagine what it is like in [Baso’s] thatched hut on a rainy night. There is no mention of him letting up on a cold floor sealed in by snow.” Can you imagine this kind of dedication fueled by anything other than longing?
Nangaku went to visit Baso and asked him, “What is the aim of sitting in Zazen?”
Baso answered, “The aim of sitting in Zazen is to become a Buddha.”
Nangaku then picked up a roof tile and started rubbing it against a rock. Baso asked him what he was doing. Nangaku replied, “I am polishing a tile.”
Baso asked, “What is the use of polishing a tile?”
Nangaku said, “I am polishing it into a mirror.”
Baso asked, “How can polishing a tile make it into a mirror?”
Nangaku answered, “How can sitting Zazen make you into a Buddha?”
At one level this story points at the folly of our efforts in spiritual practice, when we are still stumbling past what is directly in front of us. Sometimes people in practice have some idea about what the result of practice will be, and when the master sets them to polishing a tile they figure he knows what he’s talking about and they earnestly and busily go to work. Some time later when they are getting frustrated, they think the master has made a fool of them and they get angry. They may even think they have solved the riddle of Zen practice by saying, “Forget this tile-polishing! There’s nothing to get, I had it all along, and the test was just to see how long I would go about this foolish business.” But this is not a real answer. This may make a person’s life easier, but it won’t really satisfy their spiritual longing.
At deeper level, earnestly and diligently polishing a tile is sacred activity even if you can’t make a mirror out of it. In his compassion Dogen writes:
“For several hundred years, since ancient times, most people interpreting this story – great matter that it is – have thought that Nangaku was simply spurring Baso on. That is not necessarily so… the making of mirrors through the polishing of tiles has been dwelt in and retained in the bones and marrow of eternal buddhas; and, this being so, the eternal mirror exists having been made from a tile… Tiles are not dirty; we just polish a tile as a tile. In this state, the virtue of making a mirror is realized, and this just the effort of Buddhist [ancestors].” (Kokyo, translated by Nishijima and Cross)
When we just polish a tile as a tile – when we just sit zazen – ironically our goal is realized. But this is not easy. Most of the time we keep on sitting zazen in order to become a buddha, which is a mistake, but there is no way to correct that mistake without continuing to sit zazen.
The mistake is that we are looking somewhere else for the object of our longing. We can’t help it, it’s the habit of a lifetime or more. Even looking within ourselves for the answer doesn’t help, because even that is actually still looking somewhere else. We have to stop any looking whatsoever. When someone asks you to show your original face you cannot hesitate for an instant, wondering where it is or whether you can manage to show it. It is not that you find your original face and hang onto it for such occasions, holding it up with confidence and saying, here it is! Rather, it is that you are no longer tempted leave your reality to look for the answer. It is just you meeting the challenge before you, bare and undefended. And what is this, if not your original face?
Although we need to stop looking, we should not stop longing. This is just giving up. Our heart needs to filled to the brim with longing as we finally stop looking. Usually we can only do this when we have spent a great deal of time and energy desperately rubbing a tile, and we finally give up out of sheer exhaustion.
ABSORPTION
Luminous moon,
how many anguished hours have I spent
gazing into the heavens,
longing for your bright secret? All the while bound
to the low and heavy earth
with the weight of my passion?
You are beaming with relief
like a proud parent
as I make the daring leap, call out:
Hey, moon!
How wonderful that we ended up
in the same night sky!
In traditional Zen practice we have a lot of what we call “forms.” Forms are the physical ways we do things… they include the ways we move in the meditation hall, place our shoes outside the door, the way we chant and offer incense, show respect for one another, and cook communal meals. Our forms include our rituals and ceremonies, the titles and names we use, and the rules, procedures, conduct, traditions and paraphernalia we encounter in our particular religious practice.
If you practice Zen you have a relationship to “form” whether you like it or not. You may avoid form if you practice entirely on your own, or in a rare community that has gotten rid of all forms. However, in a community setting it’s pretty much impossible to get rid of all forms, because you’re going to have to make some decision about the physical ways you do things together – an voila, forms! Even if you are ambivalent about form and engage in it simply because it is part of the whole practice package, and even if you generally try to avoid form, you still have a relationship with it.
For most of us, our relationship to form changes over time and occasionally makes big evolutionary leaps. In my case, I converted to Zen from religious non-conformism and spent many years devouring the details of the forms in an effort to perfect them. Then, even though I had become a monk, I began to think the forms were stupid, pointless, and a big cramp in my style. Rather ironically, then, I was put in the position of shuso, the one who helps to maintain the container of form for the whole sangha. I knew that whenever I approached someone to correct or instruct them about a form, they could see me as a glowing bodhisattva, a bigoted tyrant, a nit-picky irritant, or simply as a fixture of their practice environment, like the hot water pot or the bell calling them to zazen. To face these possibilities calmly, I have not relied on confidence in myself. Rather, I have relied on a growing confidence in the wisdom of these forms.
I want to roughly describe a series of different relationships to form, based on my own experience and my observations of others. I don’t mean to suggest this is an exhaustive list, or that the different relationships always unfold in this order. However, I hope these descriptions might be useful for understanding and accepting the viewpoints of others, and for reminding us that our own viewpoints are subject to change. Whatever category or categories you might fall into, engage that relationship wholeheartedly: explore it, question it, feel it, accept it, and do not compare it to others. The most important thing I have learned is that the form works its own magic on us, below the level of our conscious minds.
First, new practitioners of Zen often engage the form as if The Form Is the Key. At some level we hope that if only we can bow in all the right places at all the right times (gracefully and reverently, but also without any ego involved), finally fold our oryoki cloth in a perfect rectangle, finally zing the teacher with our understanding in sanzen with just the right mix of deference and attitude, the reward of Zen will be ours! This big, complicated, puzzling, frustrating spiritual practice will yield to our efforts (we hope). Sometimes we see the teachers or fellow practitioners that inspire us performing some simple action like putting their shoes straight and our heart almost breaks. We had no idea there could be so much subtlety to placing one’s shoes, or that we could be so very far from embodying our own ideals.
Later, such practitioners have either given up Zen because they felt they could never master all those forms, or they have come close to mastering them and realized they still don’t have It. Eventually, no matter how difficult you find it to learn forms, you can move through a Zen environment performing complicated and graceful maneuvers (that look really good to newcomers) and still feel dead inside. You can practice diligently long enough to earn a fancy name or vestment, yet still feel like these are pasted on over your anguish.
Then we arrive at a rather tense relationship with form: I’ll Do It Only Because You Make Me. Many people start here, and never go through a honeymoon with form. Here we can feel a bit like our deepest longing is being held hostage. Some aspects of Zen have changed our lives or touched us so deeply that we know we must keep coming back. But then our teachers and seniors insist that we engage in certain activities, and surround ourselves with various paraphernalia, that may be meaningless to us at best and repulsive to us at worst. We are constantly on our guard against being bamboozled into something that compromises our integrity, independence, values or self-image. It can be extremely difficult for some of us to participate, for example, in a ceremony if we suspect it is getting everyone all worked up emotionally to the point that they are losing their better judgment. Some people absolutely cannot practice where the kyosaku (“encouragement” stick) is used to strike people during meditation, even when it is totally voluntary, because of the suggestion of violence, punishment or intolerance. Others are repulsed by the system of ordinations, wagessas, rakusus, and kesas, seeing it as being ripe for abuse by egotistical competitive types.
This can be a very difficult relationship to have with form, and many people stop practicing Zen because of it. Some of us strive to find ways to practice only those parts of Zen that seem pure, or fundamental, or at least acceptable to ourselves. We dream about how wonderful practice must be at centers where one gets ordained, or we only feel comfortable meditating if there is a beautiful rock on the altar instead of one of those troubling, baggage-laden (usually male) Buddha images. Or we participate at a traditional center, but duck out right before the irritating or aversive form is about to start.
If we decide to stick it out, though, we may arrive at yet another relationship with form, perhaps best called, Whatever. This is the “whatever” that is said with a small shrug. It is not tuning everything out, nor is it a bleak indifference. It is more good-natured than that. We can say this about the forms when we begin to notice how impermanent and ephemeral our small selves are, how often we are wrong, how limited is our view, how profoundly we change over time. Then we start to take ourselves less seriously. It is not that we shrug and say, “Ah, violence? Who cares?” It’s more like we shrug at ourselves. When our inner champion for social justice is on her soapbox, crying out against the patriarchy we are helping to perpetuate by reciting the lineage of (almost all male) teachers from the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, we smile gently at her and say, “Hmm. You may have a point there. But is this really about justice, or is it about you? What are you so afraid of?” Because we are holding ourselves more lightly, we can start to take the risk of experimenting. Reciting the lineage of male dharma ancestors one more time is not likely to forfeit all the gains women have made, so what happens if we do it wholeheartedly, just once?
In a particularly open and quiet moment, we may come to see the forms as an Existential Lifeline. Just for a moment, we see what is right in front of us as if we were seeing it for the first time – fresh, without filters, without judgment. If our eyes happen to rest at that moment on a sunset or a stoplight or a coffee mug, we may have a very interesting experience. If we happen to be sitting, or bowing, or chanting, or putting on our wagessa, or caring for an altar, or reading a scripture, or facing a teacher, we may receive a piece of the transmission from our dharma ancestors. It is almost like they have left their initials carved into the rock next to particularly stunning, remote waterfall. The message is: we were here, isn’t this place amazing? Then all of the forms appear to serve one purpose, and that is merely to call our attention to the wonder of our existence. In themselves, the forms are indeed empty and many of them are utterly arbitrary, but they are also profound and precious.
It is probably this aspect of the form with attracts us to begin with. Many of us grew up without being exposed to the practice of taking care without any underlying motive. Sure, we knew how to take care of something expensive, or how to take care when we were about to take a big test. But to carefully place our shoes straight or eat mindfully so our silverware doesn’t bang noisily against our bowls? Personally, when I first started encountered Zen, I found the concept completely radical. The reverence and appreciation these Zen people seemed to have for their lives! I wondered, “How do I get some of that?”
Later, even the stoplight and the coffee mug may begin speak the dharma of the ancestors to us. Everything becomes (at least in some moments) rich and luminous and poignantly precious. Putting on our coat becomes as reverent and important an activity as putting on our robes. Having dinner with a difficult relative becomes as engaging as a koan. Learning to dance reveals as much about ourselves as reflecting on the precepts.
Ironically, although it is often Zen practice that has allowed us to experience life this way, this is also one of the times when we are most likely to give it up, or at least find ourselves drawn further and further away from it. Our response to form becomes It Is All The Same. Everything is dharma, everything is practice, so why limit ourselves to a prescribed set of acceptable behaviors? Why spend our vacation time staring at a wall, when we can explore the dharma through passionate sex? Why continue to perform the same stale rituals over and over, when there is a world full of spiritual traditions out there to explore? Many of the people in the world who describe themselves as Zen Buddhists, but do not affiliate themselves with any group or particular lineage, preach the dharma of “it is all the same.”
When we recognize the truth of sameness, when we gain faith that everything, in a sense, is holy, we may also experience a fair amount of anger towards our spiritual traditions and advisors. It can seem as if they have tricked us by convincing us there was something inherently lacking or defiled about the world or about ourselves. Perhaps they just wanted to recruit more followers, or perhaps they are much less wise than we thought, but they have distracted us for too long with all their forms and ideals. Now we have discovered the inherent purity of ourselves and of all things, and no one is going to put us back in that prison of shame!
Once again, though, if we still stay with the form, our relationship to it can shift in a very significant way. We may notice that our spiritual advisors were not imprisoning us in shame. We were imprisoning ourselves. Having discovered that there is nothing inherently lacking in ourselves or in the world, we have liberated ourselves from ourselves. If there is anyone that needs to be carefully watched lest they capture us again, it is ourselves.
Yet, even when proximity to the form is no longer threatening, there remains an important question: why would we bother to keep holding the form after it no longer seems to serve any purpose for us personally? Why would we continue to enter into the formal spaces, which often just cramp our styles? This was a critically important question for me, as a monk. I realized that as a religious non-conformist, my personal definition of “conform” was “to give up one’s intelligence and will; to lack creativity; to huddle together like sheep out of fear.” I was shocked to look up the word and find it meant “to act in accord or harmony with a standard or norm.” What was I missing here?
When our view broadens, we create space for regarding form as The Creation of Sangha. This is about conforming with each other so that we create something in common and move in harmony together. In order to create anything together, we have to compromise with each other. Each of us has to sacrifice some of our independence, willfulness, personality and flavor not because those things are bad, but because we value and want to support our common endeavor. Imagine what it would be like if the temple was simply open on Sundays for several hours for “spiritual practice,” and no other forms were applied. Imagine people coming into the zendo, doing fast or slow walking meditation here and there, bowing in the corners, doing yoga, coming and going, perhaps carrying on conversations and strumming on guitars. Perhaps that sounds like heaven on earth to you, but ask yourself how supported you would feel in your spiritual practice, especially when the going got hard. Would you be able to meditate as deeply if the person next to you was doing Chi Gong, or reading a book of poetry?
Every sangha and its attendant forms is an imperfect package. Some of its forms may be deep, beautiful and meaningful, and some of its forms may be anachronistic, awkward and inefficient. When we have invested deeply in the sangha over time, we may be able to negotiate to change some of them. Most of the time, though, we simply engage in the forms because that is the way we do things when we are together. In one sense, the more standardized the form, the more inclusive is the group. It is a very moving experience to go to Japan and see Zen Buddhists straightening their shoes, bowing, and sitting zazen just like we do. We belong to the same group.
Over the long haul, do you believe the sangha is important, to you and to others? If so, then support it. Every time you straighten your shoes, you are addressing the sangha: “I value being a part of this community.” When you come to sit with others, even though your practice at home is strong, you are saying, “This community has been of great benefit to me, and I want it to continue for my sake and for the sake of others.” Especially when you compromise something of yourself by following a form, you are saying, “Though my community is imperfect, it is doing the Buddha work.”
A friend of mine recently asked me how I view after-death experience.
This is a somewhat awkward question for a Zen teacher to answer. On the one hand I view after-death experience as irrelevant to how I decide to live my life. The Buddha aptly categorized the issue of what happens after death as a question “which does not tend to edification” – that is, to the instruction or improvement of a person morally or intellectually.1 Furthermore, the Buddha taught that the religious life has nothing to do with the answers to such questions and in fact the pursuit of the answers may fatally distract one from the critical task at hand: spiritual liberation and wisdom in this life.
On the other hand, as a Zen practitioner I am committed to facing everything in order to see the truth. When my friend asked his question, I noticed that I had been dutifully avoiding the question of after-death experience. This made me determined to examine my own thoughts on the subject – but not in order come closer to any objective truth about the matter, which I believe is difficult if not impossible in any case, and a distraction besides. Rather, I wanted to examine my own mind for what might be lurking there: feelings, assumptions, anxieties or judgments around the possibility of after-death experience.
It seems to me that the pivotal question about after-death experience is, “to what extent do ‘I’ experience it?” Clearly, whatever “I” there is that might experience something after death will not have a physical body, so this “I” will be substantially different than my before-death existence. The idea that our thoughts, memories, personalities, loves, intentions, etc. continue to manifest free of the body in some kind of soul or essence or “life-energy” seems preposterous to me. My personal experience has borne out the Buddhist teachings: our “self” is a flowing, dependently co-arisen phenomenon. We are who we are in dependence on and relationship with our physical form, our brains, our environment, our culture, other beings – in short, everything. There is no independent, enduring, unchanging thing we can point to and call the essence of our self. A different “self” arises for us in different situations, throughout the day, and over the course of our lives. Even if there is some kind of essence or life-energy in us, you can’t just pop it out of a body and that body’s context and have it remain a neat package of all the most unique and sentimental aspects of a person. This, frankly, seems to me like mere wishful thinking, especially when it is coupled with the belief that the neat packets of people-essence collect over time in a great repository where they experience everlasting life. However, this vision is the central tenet, the pivotal teaching, of many religions, so I am sorry if offend anyone by speaking frankly.2
Now things get a little trickier, because I personally know a few people – people I respect and trust – who say they have experience with spirits or ghosts. I do not have this experience myself, but I cannot easily discount it. How does the possible existence of spirits or ghosts fit with my view of after-death experience, if I don’t believe in a soul?
Notice that I did not state the view that we do not have any kind of life-energy that might separate from our body upon death. I simply proposed that such an energy is not going to pop out as an ethereal duplicate of our embodied sense of self, like all of a person’s essential programs and data get downloaded onto an invisible computer disk for complete transfer to another manifestation. It seems extremely unlikely, what with the way energy of all kinds usually dissipates when it is released. But who knows – maybe “life-energy” acts differently (although I hate to speculate about some previously undiscovered form of energy or matter). Maybe “life-energy,” when it is very strong, has its own gravitational pull and remains coalesced.
Even if we have some kind of life-energy that remains collected after death, perhaps even with some kind of shape and characteristics (let’s call it a spirit), what would be the nature of this phenomenon? Given our plentiful stories of forlorn or vengeful ghosts, I get the impression that persistence of a spirit is often the result of painful or negative impulses or mind-states, like the desire for revenge, an unrequited passion, or an inability to accept a difficult reality. Being pulled into a future existence (of some sort) by such unresolved issues seems to me like remaining in bondage. I hope that before I die I have managed to thoroughly examine my mind and heart and resolve anything that might clutch me to its bosom in the transition of death.
Still, it appears that troubled ghosts are not the only kind of spirit. Tibetan tulkus are supposedly the result of spiritual adepts who deliberately chose, upon death, to send their life-energy toward a rebirth in another human form (starting from the moment of conception). The advantage of doing this is that the reborn person inherits some of the dead adept’s spiritual strength and wisdom, and their ardent intention to be of benefit to others. It’s a “leg-up,” if you will, in the new being’s spiritual practice. If this is possible (and I am not saying it is), than it seems that a spirit can also be the result of selfless and positive impulses or mind-states, like a pure altruistic desire to be of service.
Should we aim to retain some kind of self-existence after death, especially if there is a potential to pay our good qualities forward into some other being (or beings)? I, for one, am not inclined to try, because I think this is a very tricky business. I strongly suspect that if we have a selfish motivation for lingering as a spirit or taking some kind of rebirth, we are enslaving ourselves – and I don’t think many of us will develop the spiritual mastery required to be free of all selfish motivation, especially during the transition of death.
If we can, instead, offer to pay our good qualities forward in an open-handed way, I think we will have all of our bases covered. That is, we can avoid lingering after death in the bondage of self-attachment, and we can also take advantage of any potential to put our life-energy to good use after our death. When we offer ourselves in an open-handed way, we are not expecting anything in return. We are not offering up the best we have only if we can be there to see it used. I don’t blame people for being rather obsessed with the possibility that they will have some degree of self-consciousness after death, it seems rather natural to wish for such a thing. However, in my experience self-concern is the recipe for suffering, while letting go of self-concern is liberation that allows for full life and intimacy with the universe. I view the transition of death as the ultimate opportunity for letting go of self-concern. And what happens after death? It is impossible for me to imagine the fate of human beings after death as anything but utterly mind-blowing and profound beyond imagining – because that’s my experience of the universe so far. Why would the nature of the universe change after death?
1 The Lesser Mâlunkyâputta Sutta, Sutta 63 of the Majjhima-Nikâya, http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/bits/bits013.htm
2 This is one good reason not to speak frankly. In fact I have great respect for many individuals who hold beliefs like the ones I describe, and I am sorry if I offend them. Still, I think that every once in a while it is good for each of us to speak our truth without restraint.
