Sangha Posts
Genjokoan #8: The Paradox of Seeking, and Everything Is Moving
[From the Genjokoan:] When one first seeks the Dharma, one strays far from the boundary of the Dharma. When the Dharma is correctly transmitted to the self, one is immediately an original person. If one riding in a boat watches the coast, one mistakenly perceives the coast as moving. If one watches the boat [in relation to the surface of the water], then one notices that the boat is moving. Similarly, when we perceive the body and mind in a confused way and grasp all things with a discriminating mind, we mistakenly think that the self-nature of the mind is permanent. When we intimately practice and return right here, it is clear that all things have no [fixed] self.
When one first seeks the Dharma, one strays far from the boundary of the Dharma.
Amazingly, this line of Dogen is pretty straightforward. As I discussed in Class #4, we start to seek for a deeper truth, or an alternative way to live. This is good, and necessary. But naturally we think what we’re looking for is something other than what we’ve always had; this ironically causes us to overlook the Dharma, which is right in front of us. All we have to do is utterly let go of seeking anything .
But we have to seek in order to realize that. This statement of Dogen’s is just reminding us of where the Dharma is, and advising us to avoid chasing it all over the planet if we can.
When the Dharma is correctly transmitted to the self, one is immediately an original person.
Shohaku Okumura helpfully points out the “original person” is a translation of honbun nin. In Realizing Genjokoan he explains, “Hon can be literally translated as original, true, root, or source, bun means part or portion, and nin is person. So this word, which has the same meaning as ‘original face,’ refers to a person who is one with the original source that exists before karmic conditioning.”
Remember that the Dharma being correctly transmitted is not in the future. It’s not something that will happen to you, at which point you’ll be reconnected to the source. The correct transmission happens only in this moment. Then what happens? You’re instantly an intimate part of the universe.
If one riding in a boat watches the coast, one mistakenly perceives the coast as moving. If one watches the boat [in relation to the surface of the water], then one notices that the boat is moving. Similarly, when we perceive the body and mind in a confused way and grasp all things with a discriminating mind, we mistakenly think that the self-nature of the mind is permanent. When we intimately practice and return right here, it is clear that all things have no [fixed] self.
It’s easy to make all of this into philosophy, or some kind of abstract theory of phenomenology (experience of consciousness from the first-person point of view). What is Dogen talking about here? Obviously, this passage refers to giving up the delusion of having an inherent, enduring, independent self-nature. But what’s emphasized here is the process of perception – the mistaken ways of perceiving that we employ every day.
What are these mistaken ways of perceiving? It’s not just about thinking that some part of us persists in an unchanging way as it moves through space, because it’s also not correct to assume you move while the shore doesn’t! Okumura explains in his chapter on this passage how, in the fascicle “The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment,” Dogen explains, “The moving together of the boat and the shore, in the same step, at the same time, in the same way, is beyond beginning and ending and is beyond before and after.”
The problem is trying locate anything that doesn’t move or change, anything that’s inherently and independently real, anything against which we can measure everything else.
In our daily lives, much of the time we locate the sense of permanence within ourselves. We move around with respect to our homes, cars, spouses, places of work, Zen Center, and meditation cushions. We’re the subject, navigating the landscape of our life, hurrying, or working, or relaxing. Sometimes the landscape changes and surprises us – delighting or upsetting us. Everything is relative to us. The world revolves around us.
This is our instinctive mode of operation. There’s no blame involved here. Of course, Buddhism explains why this mode of operation is ultimately unsatisfactory (see Class #2).
At other times we locate the sense of permanence outside of ourselves. Other things – our homes, cars, spouses, places of work, Zen Center, and meditation cushions – seem more real than we are. We grasp these apparently real, permanent, reliable things and try to orient ourselves. Who are we? This kind of question often arises when our sense of self has radically shifted for some reason.
This is obviously a troubling, dissatisfying way to operate, because those things outside us aren’t real either. (Again, see Class #2.)
What is it like when we stop trying to identify anything as permanent, fixed, or inherently real?
We wake up to life. We don’t have to figure out what’s moving relative to what; everything is relative to everything else. We don’t pin our hopes on finding something permanent, which is a great relief. We let go of the inner struggle to make sense of things, and instead live adventurously, on the edge of change, with full appreciation of impermanence. “We intimately practice and return right here.” Right here – the only place life actually is. We ride along in the boat, experiencing the unfolding of life, without having to create a narrative about what’s happening.
What does this look and feel like in everyday life? When you find yourself stuck in your personal narrative (as Barry Magid says in his book Ordinary Mind, when you’re caught in the delusion of the “isolated mind”), you look up and notice what’s around you. When you find yourself pulled toward this and that, hoping it will make you happy or give you the relief you seek, you also look up and notice what’s around you.
Whatever kind of effort you find yourself making to find something fixed, you simply notice that’s what you’re doing. Then, hopefully, you will have spent long enough in spiritual practice to have the faith to let go of your effort – to stop trying to make sense of things, or get ahead of life. Then you wake up to life as it is, which isn’t fixed, but it is real. You breathe a sigh of relief, no matter what’s going on, because real you can actually deal with.
Click here to read Domyo’s entire series of commentaries on the Genjokoan.
Genjokoan #7: Learning the Self
[From the Genjokoan:] To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things. To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off.
As Shohaku Okumura says in Realizing Genjokoan, the word translated as “to study” is narau, which means “to get accustomed to,” or “to become familiar with.” This isn’t intellectual study.
To put it another way, “to become familiar with the Buddha Way is to become familiar with the self.” I also like the translation “to learn,” which makes it, “to learn the Buddha Way is to learn the self.”
What is the nature of this self we are becoming familiar with, or learning?
We are taught in Buddhism that we should see beyond, and let go of attachment to, our “small” self – the karmically conditioned self, the self of details and relative relationships: our body, thoughts, emotions, opinions, desires, possessions, abilities, etc.
Do we study this “self”? Isn’t the point to forget that self? Aren’t we told from the beginning that this small self is empty of inherent, enduring self-nature and doesn’t even really exist the way we think it does?
But we do study the Buddha Way, at first, by studying the small self. It’s the only self we know. And we “study” it even though, as Okumura points out, this suggests a separation between “I,” “the self,” and the “Buddha Way” – and there really is no such separation. At first, however, we feel there is – and that’s where we have to start.
In zazen, and in whatever stillness we can summon in the rest of our life, we pay attention to ourselves. This doesn’t mean getting caught up in the details, but observing carefully. What do we think? What do we feel? What triggers us? When do we feel small and defensive, and when do we feel relaxed and intimate? Why do we feel what we feel? What do we fear? What do we hope for? Who do we think we are? What is it like when our self-consciousness falls away for a moment? What makes that happen?
We don’t have to intellectually investigate these questions, and we don’t have to go through them systematically like a course of required study. We just cultivate awareness of what’s going on in our life. We become familiar with our own living.
The online Oxford dictionary (www.oxforddictionaries.com) defines self in three ways:
- A person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.
- A person’s particular nature or personality; the qualities that make a person individual or unique.
- One’s own interests or pleasure.
We let these conventional aspects of self go when we sit zazen. Eventually we start to see how ephemeral all the aspects of small self are. We gain insight when we manage to maintain awareness through moments when, as Okumura says, we open the hand of thought and we are nobody.
And yet – we’re still there. Who’s still there? Why do we continue to talk about self? Why does Dogen say, “Sitting is itself the true form of the self?” Why does he say “All things coming and carrying our practice-enlightenment through the self is realization?”
Even though in a moment of prajna all things participate in this reality together and it’s not a matter of self realizing something outside of self…
there remains an aspect of our experience that can be called self.
It’s the self that, as Okumura says, is “one with the universe,” but it somehow still makes sense to refer to self. Why? When the self is one with the universe, doesn’t that mean self is obliterated because there is no individuality? Doesn’t that mean there is essentially no self? Isn’t self an illusion?
What self is left, and what does self mean if it isn’t about distinguishing us from others?
I think our deeper self, our “true” self, our self which is one with the universe, is more or less synonymous with life. Or, more accurately, living – because it’s about moment to moment unfolding, not a concept that can be delineated and put on a shelf (such that you could place “life” in a box next to “death” or “non-life”).
Our actual experience of living in a moment of prajna is the interpenetration of absolute and relative. Our life is not our own, our experience of living is without boundary. There is no territory that belongs exclusively to the self. And yet there is living, and that living is manifesting, in part, through our body and mind.
However, we don’t think about our unique body and mind in a moment of prajna. We don’t reflect, “Wow, look at that, the universal manifesting through my small self! So really, the universal depends on my small self to manifest! Cool, I do exist!”
Instead, in a moment of prajna you just are. Yes, there’s a body and mind there, but ultimately there are no distinct things such as you, body, mind, universe, moment, or prajna.
We sometimes call this aliveness “self” (often self with a capital “S,” or “true self”) in order to point to the vivid reality of direct experience. You can only participate in reality using your body and mind. You can’t leap into another realm of existence. Your aliveness remains, you simply recognize all things are also aliveness. So in some senses this is about an expanded sense of self – but with no central reference point.
At the same time, body and mind – as concepts we cling to – have to drop off. We get there through studying the self however we know how to experience it. At first this may be mundane and rather grueling, like having to sit in the middle of your own mess and look at it without any distraction at all.
Gradually we become more familiar with self, and look beyond our limited sense of it. “What more is there?” We wonder. We finally get so fascinated by living this moment that we forget the details of our lives. Then all things participate with us in a moment of pure reality, and we finally identify with Something Greater. (Or, as Dogen says, we are verified by all things.) At the same time, our delusive identification with the details of our small self drops away. It has to.
What does this mean to our everyday practice? That our way, the Buddha Way, is to fully explore the matter of our living. Who are you? Do you know? Are you willing to let all things verify you? Don’t you want that kind of intimacy? It’s not far away, it’s right here.
Click here to read Domyo’s entire series of commentaries on the Genjokoan.
Genjokoan #6: Our Experience of Absolute and Relative
[From the Genjokoan:] In seeing color and hearing sound with body and mind, although we perceive them intimately, [the perception] is not like reflections in a mirror or the moon in water. When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.
Personally, I prefer the translation of the first sentence by Sojun Mel Weitsman and Kazuaki Tanahashi in the book Dogen’s Genjokoan: Three Commentaries (Counterpoint Press, 2012): “When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you intuit dharmas intimately.”
In another translation I like, Robert Aitken translates “intuit dharmas intimately” as “grasp things directly.”
What is this activity of intuiting dharmas intimately, or grasping things directly? It’s the whole goal of Zen. It’s unmitigated, direct experience through our entire body-and-mind as a whole organism.
This remarkable experience of nothing-other-than-this is most vividly and accurately described with poetic language, such as this passage from Bokusan Nishiari’s commentary in Dogen’s Genjokoan: Three Commentaries (Nishiari, 1821-1910, was a Japanese Soto Zen priest and Dogen scholar):
“Lingyun [an ancestral Zen master] had realization when looking at peach blossoms; it’s seeing forms with bright mind. Xiangyan [another ancestor] had realization through the sound of a stone striking bamboo; it’s hearing the sound and being enlightened with the Way…
“‘You intuit dharmas intimately.’ This is good. There is no dharma outside of the self, and there is no self outside of the dharma. Facing forms, the entire body becomes forms. Facing voice, the entire body becomes voice. The self and the object become not-two. At the time of ‘seeing peach blossoms,’ the entire world becomes peach blossoms. At the time of ‘hitting bamboo,’ the entire world is ‘crack!’ That’s the moment when the forms are truly seen and the voice is truly heard. At this moment you intimately intuit it.”
This complete, unmitigated experience is profound, but it’s also very simple. When there is no separation between self and the world, there is only this moment’s radiant occurrence. It’s not radiant because it’s great as compared to our ordinary daily experience; it’s radiant because that’s the nature of reality.
But then Dogen warns us that this experience of reality is “not like reflections in a mirror or the moon in water.” In what sense? What does this warning mean, and why does he offer it?
Think of the nature of a reflection. It’s two dimensional. The mirror or the water is passive and separate, reflecting something outside.
If we act like a mirror, we may be very still, clear, empty of self-concern and perceiving things in a very objective way, but there is still a sense that there’s an “I” that’s observing, perceiving, or reflecting the universe “out there.” Although what we reflect may be beautiful and grand, it’s only one side, just as a reflective surface like a mirror or water reflects only one side of something.
Instead, as I described in an earlier class (#4: The Nature of Awakening), “In the moment of prajna, or enlightenment, we all participate in this reality together. This reality includes unity and difference at the same time.” In a moment of total absorption, when we truly “intuit dharmas intimately,” there is no sense of that “I” am reflecting or intuiting. All beings and things awaken with you, through you, and you through them.
Now we get to the line that has always been troublesome to me: “When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.”
I think many people see this sentence as saying that when we “see forms or hear sounds while fully engaging body-and-mind” and “intuit dharmas intimately,” there is no sense of separation in that moment, therefore the “self” and relative reality is in the dark, or not perceptible. Presumably then, the opposite is true: when we experience a sense of self and operate in the relative world, the absolute is in the dark, or not perceptible. After all, unlike the reflection in a mirror, life is three-dimensional, so there is always a side you’re not seeing. You’re either “in” the relative, or you’re “in” the absolute.
This line of the Genjokoan has always bothered me because of this interpretation. It seems very dualistic to me, as if we’re doomed to be separate from a unified experience of reality as long as we have any sense of self, or as long as we want to operate in the relative world.
Even if this is not what various authors and teachers have meant in their commentaries, this is an interpretation carried – consciously or unconsciously – by many Zen students: We figure that our lives will be mostly “spent” in the relative, nourished by vague memories of our past experiences of the absolute. Then, at certain times, we get the opportunity to “switch modes” and try to tap into the absolute – understanding, of course, that “we” won’t even really be there to experience it.
Dogen’s Zen has got to be deeper than that, doesn’t it? Because of my intuition that it is, I have to depart from the dualistic interpretation described above. I could be wrong, but I am interpreting this based on my own sense of the Dharma, as opposed to claiming some scholarly understanding of what Dogen meant.
I think Nishiari might have agreed with me. He interprets the meaning of “dark” in a non-dualistic way, taking it to refer to “all things merging in darkness.” In Zen, dark often signifies the absolute, or non-differentiated reality; in this case Nishiari seems to be proposing that when you intimately intuit, there is no “other side:”
“When we intuit that the self and outer realm are not two, but one, there is not a second person throughout heaven and earth. When we illuminate one side, the dharmadhatu [the realm of the absolute] becomes one side, the ten directions [all directions, or everything everywhere] become dark and all collapse.”
He continues, suggesting that through our limited, one-sided illumination we can touch the infinite:
“This one side merges with all dharmas in darkness and there is nothing left out. It’s called dark. One dharma comprehends myriad dharmas in darkness.”
All of Dogen’s teaching, all of the Genjokoan, all of our practice is fundamentally about this paradoxical nature of our existence: How we realize, actualize, and live in harmony with the absolute as a limited being. Not in spite of our limited being. Not once we transcend our limited being. Not only when we give up our limited being. Not when we discover an alternative, unlimited being. We remain a limited being and we awaken to how, simultaneously, all things are Being and there are no real boundaries around or within Being.
So, what does this mean to our practice? It means we can rely on the fact that we are not cut off from the absolute just because we manifest as a person. In a moment of wholehearted participation in reality, the self is there; it still has a limited view, but by its wholehearted participation it realizes the whole of reality through just what it can see and experience and know. This “self,” of course, is not the conventional self that is defined by our relationships and details and is actually fairly easy to forget. It’s the Self that lies underneath that – the Self that wonders about existence and absolute reality.
We don’t have wait until we’ve managed to get rid of to get rid of our sense of Self in order to intuit dharmas intimately with our whole body-and-mind. So we’d better get busy.
Click here to read Domyo’s entire series of commentaries on the Genjokoan.
Genjokoan #5: What is the Nature of Awakening?
[From the Genjokoan:] Those who greatly realize delusion are buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded in realization are living beings. Furthermore, there are those who attain realization beyond realization and those who are deluded within delusion. When buddhas are truly buddhas they don’t need to perceive they are buddhas; however, they are enlightened buddhas and they continue actualizing buddha.
Those who greatly realize delusion are buddhas.
Buddhas are awakened beings. We wonder what buddhas are like, and what awakening is life. We imagine that if we are awakened we will “wake up to” some great reality that’s different from the reality we already know. We imagine we’ll see in what way everything is perfect just as it is, or how all is one and we are not separate from anything, and therefore we’ll feel inspired to shed our egocentricity and self-concern.
But in a moment of awakening there is only awakening to the way we obscure reality from ourselves – therefore each person’s path is their own, and unique. We are not awakening to a great abstract philosophical view, we are waking up from our own self-imposed dream.
Those who are greatly deluded in realization are living beings.
There is a difference in our subjective experience in a moment of awakening, and in a moment when we are just a living being – that is, caught up in believing in our self-imposed dream. This is being greatly deluded. Sometimes the dream is pleasant, sometimes it’s not.
And yet even when we are deluded we are in realization. What does this mean? If we don’t realize, what does it mean to be in realization, and what good does it do us? Who is realizing what?
If in the moment of awakening there is no one to realize – there is just life as it is, a complete whole – realization is not something that happens to people. It’s simply true reality. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “being in” realization this way, with no one to realize, but because of true reality there always exists the potential of realization. We are constantly surrounded by the stuff of realization.
This is like the old Buddhist story of the man with the jewel sewn inside his cloak. While he’s sleeping at a friend’s house, the host sews a valuable jewel into his cloak. The cloaked man then wanders for many years, slipping into deep poverty and despondency. Eventually he visits his friend again, only to have the friend show him how was carrying wealth with him all the time, sewn into his cloak. The man had lived as if he was poor even though he was wealthy. There was a big difference in his subjective experience before and after realizing his wealth, but the reality had not changed.
When we are living in poverty despite the jewel in our coats, we are living beings. This is not pejorative, it’s just an observation.
Furthermore, there are those who attain realization beyond realization and those who are deluded within delusion.
Dogen can’t be satisfied with a tidy analogy. If he left us with buddhas realizing delusion and living beings being deluded about, or in, realization, that would be too easy. We’d fall into dualistic thinking, wondering if we’re really awake or not, or whether we’ve found the jewel in our cloak or not. Am I a living being at this moment, or a buddha? Oh, I guess if I’m thinking about it, I’m a living being.
So he goes further: the moment we become aware of awakening, we inhabit the world of living beings again. Just being, moment after moment, is realization beyond realization.
And then we may pity ourselves because we’re just living beings at any given moment, but if we know there are moments of awakening, we are not completely deluded. At other times we are lost in delusion and believe that’s all there is in life – this is being deluded within delusion.
When buddhas are truly buddhas they don’t need to perceive they are buddhas;
This is really about what we hope for: that we will reach oneness or awakening or whatever and be able to know it – to contrast our experience as a buddha with that of our experience as a living being and say, “Oh, this is much better.” When we are living beings we imagine that when we manage to become buddhas we will be fundamentally better people, or in possession of something special. But this is not the nature of awakening.
However, we don’t need to perceive we are buddhas, or awakened, in order for buddhahood or awakening to be wonderful, essential, and worthwhile. That’s all we care about, after all. This is why Dogen says need, not just “they don’t perceive they are buddhas” – which is also true, but not the point here, because:
however,[even though they do not perceive they are buddhas] they are enlightened buddhas and they continue actualizing buddha.
Somehow, being awakened does not involve a consciousness of being awakened, but there is still awakening. Think about this. How can this be? How can we be awake without having a sense that “I” am awake? Sometimes we lose our sense of self-consciousness in activity, entertainment, or thinking, but then we cannot be said to be awake in this liberative sense.
How can we be awake – engaged, aware, alive, ready – without self-consciousness? This is our koan, or the big question in our Zen practice. We explore this question for ourselves in our zazen, in retreats, in our daily lives. It’s because this question is so central that we study the Genjokoan.
Click here to read Domyo’s entire series of commentaries on the Genjokoan.
Genjokoan #3: Mahayana Teachings and Dogen’s Take on the Great Matter
[From the Genjokoan:] When the ten thousand dharmas are without [fixed] self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no death. Since the Buddha Way by nature goes beyond [the dichotomy of] abundance and deficiency, there is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.
“When the ten thousand dharmas are without [fixed] self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no death” refers to the Mahayana teachings which arose some time later in the development of Buddhism. The Mahayana approach developed long before it was a separate sect – it tried to point practitioners back to the experiential and phenomenological reality of Buddhism. Why?
It’s easy to imagine, isn’t it, that we as a community could enshrine the Buddhist concepts of impermanence, no-self, and disatisfactoriness, and imbue them with self-nature, permanence, or as Okumura says, make them into “irrefutable truths.”
Imagine us correcting and editing one another: “Oh, don’t do that, that’s just being attached!” Or “Of course, I shouldn’t really care because everything is impermanent.” We could start to vilify “desire” of any kind, or withdraw from life because it’s just a source of samsara, or get self-righteous with the people we know who don’t practice.
We could/can, essentially, end up using the Buddhadharma as tool of self – making the self more comfortable, more sure, more immune from emotional difficulty, more superior to all those ordinary attached beings suffering in samsara.
Phenomenology is “an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.”
“Emptiness” points more toward how all things are impermanent and ultimately ungraspable, even ideas, experiences, etc. In the absolute present, there is no buddhadharma, no four noble truths, etc. – these are concepts we create and use and pass down through the generations because they are useful, but they aren’t it. This is why Dogen states the Mahayana view in the second sentence of the Genjokoan.
However, we can mess up the Mahayana view too! We can take refuge in the formless aspect of the present moment and fail to commit to anything, to express the truth, to act compassionately. So Dogen adds the third sentence, “Since the Buddha Way by nature goes beyond [the dichotomy of] abundance and deficiency, there is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.” Essentially, “Yeah, yeah, but there’s still life, isn’t there?”
Notice that although Dogen states three approaches to the teaching at the beginning of Genjokoan, no level refutes the previous, it just clarifies it and reminds us not to get stuck.
Beware of thinking you will have prajna (insight/wisdom/enlightenment) about life, or that insight into emptiness is a thing you reach for, attain, or possess. Instead, it’s a unfolding relationship with all things, which happen to be empty.
My potential attachment to Bright Way, continued: I talked earlier about how I can be liberated from samsara if I don’t think my life depends on my relationship with Bright Way. So, let’s say I sit and practice and study and try not to be attached. I conceive of a liberated way I want to be, an enlightened way I want to interact with the world.
I hold myself apart, taking care with my thoughts, actions, and emotions so I don’t get sucked into samsara. (Although some of us are actually better at doing this than others – many of us simply get sucked in anyway start to feel discouraged, or like we’re a failure, etc.). In either case, life becomes a struggle, and a self-interested struggle.
(It also doesn’t help to just stop practicing, because impermanence, no-self, and dukkha are true.)
So what do we do? How do we enact Dogen’s teaching, and avoid getting caught in either trap? To continue my example, I realize my liberation is constantly enacted in this daily dance of life; I only know emptiness because there are things and people and experiences that are empty, I only know non-attachment because I have loved, gotten attached and let go. Even in a moment of perfect liberation it’s experienced through my body, the floor, the light, the context.
First I give up resistance to impermanence and no-self, and this is liberating. Then I give up resistance to the ungraspable nature of liberation, letting go of setting myself up in opposition to samsara. Then I turn toward all of existence – including struggle, suffering, delusion – as inseparable from the Great Reality I want to know intimately.
Click here to read Domyo’s entire series of commentaries on the Genjokoan.
Genjokoan #2: The Basic Buddhist Teachings
[From the Genjokoan:] When all dharmas are the Buddha Dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, buddhas and living beings.
Okumura explains that the first sentence here refers to the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha – basic Buddhism, in other words.
To begin, then, let’s explore why the original Buddhist teachings are liberating. Essentially, they teach us that all things are impermanent, without an inherent, enduring self-nature, and therefore that no permanent refuge can be found in them. To seek happiness and refuge in the things of the world leads to dukkha, or a sense disatisfactoriness that can be acute or subtle. The original Buddhist teachings also give us practices for realizing this for ourselves at a deep level. But why does this help, anyway?
Basically, we want to live. It’s in our cells. We want to exist, stay alive, not die, not end. (As long as we are mentally and physically healthy, that is.) This in itself is not a problem. Animals and plants are the same, and they don’t experience dukkha. Why do we?
Because we have self-consciousness, which is really consciousness of time. We are aware of ourselves as beings who exist through time, and we are aware that beings – and all things – are impermanent and subject to change, decay, death. We naturally become very concerned about ourselves and our existence, whether we realize it or not. We want to stay alive, and know we are alive.
To feel substantial, we collect possessions, power, relationships. To feel alive we seek excitement, intimacy, novelty, beauty. To feel safe we seek understanding and control. To feel effective and powerful, we seek activities and work that affirm our abilities and worth. To feel spiritually connected to something greater – and therefore, perhaps, not quite so vulnerable or impermanent, we seek insights, equanimity, and profound experiences.
These are the activities of daily life, so what’s wrong with them? Simply that we cause ourselves suffering when we believe our life depends on them. All of these things are impermanent and elusive; if we take refuge in them we are doomed to samsara (the cycle of sometimes being on the top of the world, sometimes on the bottom).
We don’t have to live this way if we have insight into impermanence and no-self, but what does it really mean to have insight into impermanence and no-self? Clearly, mere intellectual acceptance of this – while helpful at a certain level – isn’t liberating in any way that would inspire you to use the word “nirvana.” This insight has to be real, experiential, and personal…
My own personal example: I feel a great joy at being of service to our Zen community, Bright Way. It gives my life meaning, a deeper purpose, and it’s rewarding on a daily basis. However, if I feel my life depends on my relationship to Bright Way, I invite suffering:
- worry about whether it will grow and thrive
- possessiveness of it – it needs to continue to need me
- excitement when things go well, disappointment when things go poorly
- devastation in case of loss (unforeseen things like health issues, or eventual old age and death)
- occasionally it’s not going to be enough to make me happy – then what?
Fortunately, I am familiar with another way of being: not resisting the facts of impermanence and no-self. Over years and practice and hours and hours of zazen, I have looked carefully inwards and built up the courage to really experience the naked self in zazen – moment to moment, without reliance on anything, only experience, only life itself. I have gradually gotten more comfortable with the phenomenological experience of impermanence, and learned gradually to relax into it, to take refuge in it.
When I do so, there is liberation from samsara (moment by moment) because I know my True Life does not depend on anything. We ordinarily think our life is contained in this body and mind, that it’s intimately tied to the well-being and happiness of the conventional self (if I am happy, empowered, safe, free, etc., my life is good and I don’t have to worry, but if I am stressed, sad, depressed, facing failure or difficulty, oppressed, etc., my life is under threat).
All of these things affect us and the quality of our life (they are, as Uchiyama Roshi would say, the “scenery of our life”), but when we stop conceiving of a self “here” that wants or must endure that “over there,” there is no longer a sense of vulnerability. We ride the waves instead of holding desperately to a rock and getting buffeted by them.
Click here to read Domyo’s entire series of commentaries on the Genjokoan.
Dispelling Illusion
Excerpted with permission from Idiot's Guides: Zen Living by Domyo Burk
No matter how many things you recognize are not part of your self-essence, you can still persist in believ-ing you have one. After all, it just feels like you do. Even if you manage to let the mind settle in zazen, and refrain from identifying any of your thoughts and feelings as self, there’s you sitting zazen!
Many Zen teachings and methods are aimed at getting you to drop this self illusion. One of my favorites is to imagine that you are long dead, but somehow, strangely, still aware. If you like, you can imagine your bleached-out skull sitting in a deserted, sunny meadow (go ahead and make it sunny, this isn’t supposed to be depressing). You have been dead for 100 years, so all the people who would personally remember you are also gone. Anything you worked for or possessed in life has disappeared or belongs to someone else. Many of the things you cared deeply about look very different, because things have changed so much. Your inventions or passions or causes may be obsolete. Given all of this, who are you? You can still imagine inherently ex-isting, but in what way? Then you think of being dead 300 years, or 500. This is a good exercise for focus-ing in on your belief in self-essence.
If you keep studying your self illusion, in the course of meditation you can notice something radical: when you are thinking, you have a conviction of self-essence. When you aren’t thinking, or at least not doing so consciously, the sense of self isn’t there. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to make this observation, be-cause the second you make it you are thinking. After a while, however, you are able to notice the moment of self-concept arising. Noticing it arise, you know there was a period of time when it wasn’t there.
This absolutely convincing sense of inherent, enduring existence—on which you have based everything—comes and goes! You’ve already stripped away all the things the self identifies with, and now you’ve called into question the only piece of evidence you have left: you feel like you inherently exist. If you don’t have that feeling for a period of time, either your feeling-sense is fallible, or … maybe … you don’t exist the way you think you do.
“If you realize that your activities are not based on thought alone, you let go of thought. Strangely enough, whether you think about it or not, the heavy meal in your stomach gets digested completely. When sleeping, we continue breathing the neces-sary number of breaths per minute and the ‘I’ continues to live. What on earth is this ‘I’? I can’t help but feel that this ‘I’ is the self that is connected with the universe.” — Kosho Uchiyama Roshi (1912–1998), from The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo
The Empty World
Excerpted with permission from Idiot's Guides: Zen Living by Domyo Burk
One Big Reality
One of the first things you realize once you get a good look at reality is that a lot of the things you previously thought were real were simply your concepts about the world. It’s kind of like you’ve been wearing a pair of glasses all your life that gave everything a certain hue and were covered with little stars. Naturally, you thought the world was that color, and you probably built your worldview around the constant presence of stars. And now they’re gone!
When you view reality without the filters of your preferences, expectations, and concepts, you notice that it’s your mind that creates the differentiation between things. All along you’ve believed that your mind was doing you a big favor by pointing out distinctions that actually existed, but now you see how conceptual distinctions are just an overlay on reality. Things are complete just as they are, without reference to one another. By its very nature this observation is difficult to explain using words and concepts, but suffice it to say things are not actually separate from each other. You create the separation in your own mind.
Now, obviously the world is populated with things that don’t overlap in space and time: people and objects, places and actions. Zen is not denying any of that, which would be silly. The point is that those objects don’t require any conceptual differentiation to keep them apart. The world does not depend on your mind! This may sound ridiculously obvious, but at some level you think it does.
There’s no reason for there to be a you separate from me unless we need to engage in a practical interaction where such a distinction is useful, such as when we conduct a business transaction (it matters that you are the one paying me). When we pass each other on the street and exchange a smile, there is no need for you versus me. We are simply part of one big reality that manifests in many ways.
Because we are all part of one big reality, you can also say that all beings and things are interdependent. Whatever you do affects my reality, and vice versa. My unique position in the universe is in part characterized by your presence, and because we share a big reality anything each of us does affects the other. This accounts for the fact that at a certain level, your suffering is my suffering, as discussed in the chapter on the precepts.
However, in Zen, interdependence is not a philosophical theory to account for how morality functions, it’s a direct experience you can have. Although when you have it, it’s likely to feel surprisingly familiar. After all, you are part of the big reality whether you feel like it or not.
Bright and Precious
Viewed without the filters of conceptualization, the one big reality you’re part of appears bright, luminous, and precious. There’s no accounting for why this is, it’s just been proven again and again through the personal experiences of people from all kinds of spiritual traditions (as well as people without an identified spiritual practice). The filters with which you habitually view the world darken and limit it, while reality itself, even the ugly parts, is starkly beautiful in a strange, surprising way.
Sometimes you’ll hear this Zen teaching phrased as “things are perfect just as they are,” but to me perfection invites too much comparison, and anything you compare will fall short. I prefer the word “precious” because whether something is seen as precious is entirely up to the beholder, and you can hold something as precious that appears ugly, useless, or meaningless to someone else. Preciousness is about the viewer, not the inherent characteristics of that which is viewed.
I know a man who managed to drop his conceptual filters completely for the first time while looking at a can of tomatoes. Tears ran down his face as he suddenly appreciated how amazing and beautiful this tomato can was. Now, by regular standards there is nothing remarkable about a container of vegetables, but if you let go of any comparisons, any expectations whatsoever, the situation is very different. The entire universe in all its wonder and benevolence manifests right there in whatever is in front of you.
This may sound far-out, but imagine you live on another planet where life is very different from Earth, and a can of tomatoes falls from the sky. Without any earthly context or comparisons, it’s likely to be an object of wonder to you. What are these markings on the outside of the can? Why are there ridges along its sides? How do you open it? Who thought to put mushy red things inside a metal shell?
Eventually this ability to see things in such a direct, fresh way occurs not just in momentary peak experiences, but every day. The shape of a glass, the color of leaves on a tree, the sound of your child’s voice—any of these can suddenly appear to you without a filter, complete and luminous phenomena in and of themselves. From time to time they probably do, you just may not appreciate why.
Not Misunderstanding Dukkha
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:
- Keep trying to change conditions so we won't feel resistance to them, and ultimately find something permanent to rely on
- Live with 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:
- Let go of the resistance to things as they are, and of the search for something permanent to rely on
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
The Experience of Not-Self
Last week our Sangha worked with the mindfulness task of watching our hands as if they belonged to a stranger. This reminded me of the Buddhist teaching of not-self.
As I did this task, I noticed that it was very easy to imagine my hands belonged to a stranger. They seemed to move on their own, or at least they were usually one step ahead of me. They performed their complicated maneuvers with amazing grace and precision, before I had even consciously formed any intention to complete the task they were undertaking.
When I say that my hands seemed to perform their tasks without “me,” I am describing an experience of not-self. As I observe them, my hands do not seem to be part of my self-identity. For most of us this begs the question, “Where or what is my true self, if it doesn’t (for example) include my hands?” Or, “Who directs the hands?” Or, “What is the nature of the self if so much of it is unconscious?” We might turn toward those actions of body, speech and mind that feel unambiguously self-generated and try to trace the intention back to locate our self.
This is a natural response when we endeavor to understand our true self-nature. It is probably impossible not to try and locate a self within us, just as it is nearly impossible not to flinch if something is headed for our face. Over the course of spiritual practice we will search for our self again and again, even when we try not to.
The tricky thing is that our self cannot be located. Our true self-nature is no-nature, to quote the Zen masters. Our life is a flow of dependently co-arisen phenomena that features a certain continuity due to the law of cause and effect. This continuity can be mistaken for an inherently-existing, independent, substantial self, and that mistake is the source of suffering. As long as there is a substantial “me,” that “me” needs to be protected and maintained against a universe that frequently seems to be against me.
To be liberated from the delusion of an inherently-existing self, we do not find our “true self,” because there isn’t one. Rather, we recognize in phenomena over and over again, “Not-self, not-self, not-self.” We turn the light of awareness on our experiences and recognize that none of them qualify as being part of the inherently-existing, independent, substantial self we so dearly hope exists.
Eventually, having failed to find a single thing that confirms the existence our inherently-existing self, the thought occurs to us, “What if there isn’t one? What if I made the whole thing up?” For a moment we dare to drop the paradigm of self, and the world appears to make a whole lot more sense. Many of the questions and issues that plague us when we are caught up in self-identity view simply drop away. Our attention turns toward the miraculous unfolding of this experience we call a human life.
It takes countless instances of recognizing not-self before we can loosen our grip on our conviction that the self inherently exists. A moment of noticing the fact that our hands seem to move without “us” becomes a moment of teaching.
