Existential Buddhism: Authentically Buddhist?

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Every now and again I find myself investigating the relationship between my Buddhist practice — what I’ve been labeling, for better or worse, Existential Buddhism — and what I suspect the Buddha actually taught.  My personal path values presence, relationship, compassion, authenticity, flourishing, and living a fully-realized life.  There are significant elements in Buddhism, however, which lean in a somewhat different direction — towards celibacy, monasticism, asceticism, non-attachment, and the extinguishing of desire.  Is my Buddhist practice really Buddhism at all, or is it some hodgepodge of Buddhist, Existentialist, Scientific Rationalist, and Perennial Philosophic ideas that have gone through some sort of intellectual blender to create (at best!) a kind of neo-or quasi-Buddhism?

In thinking about this question, I revisited a piece I wrote almost a decade ago [1], and found the questions and answers I struggled with then still meaningful today.  I presented the issues in a dialogue between two imaginary characters — Bertie, who represented my rationalist side, and Ananda, my Buddhist side.  Their dialogue went something like this:

Bertie:  I think you’re being dishonest with yourself.  I want to return to an earlier question as to whether what you’re espousing is really Buddhism or not.  I think what you’re doing is adopting some Buddhist ideas about mindfulness, emptiness, impermanence, and non-self that happen to dovetail with Western ecological insights, quantum physics, cognitive science, phenomenology and existentialism.  I think you’re melding them together, however, into a philosophy that’s no longer authentically Buddhist at its core.  The aim of your philosophy seems fundamentally different from the aim of the Buddha’s philosophy: Your philosophy is about engagement with life and living one’s life in a philosophically justified way.  The Buddha was interested in disengagement from life and the ending of rebirth, not about finding a meaningful life in the world.  In many ways your belief system seems more Jewish than Buddhist: it celebrates and blesses creation and places the highest value on ethical life.  In contrast, Buddhism seems disenchanted with creation and seeks annihilation.

 

Ananda:  And I think you’re mistaken in thinking there’s this thing called “Pure Buddhism,” and that I’m adulterating it with Western ideas.  There’s no such thing as Pure Buddhism.  Buddhism has always been a philosophy in active dialogue with pre-existing cultures and philosophies.  Tibetan Buddhism is the end product of a dialogue between Indian Mahāyāna and Tantra, Chinese Ch’an, and Pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bön beliefs and practices. Zen is a distillation of the dialogue between Indian Mahāyāna and Chinese Taoism filtered through the lens of Japanese culture.  What could be more different than the spare aesthetic of Japanese Zen and the colorful profusion of Tibetan Vajrayāna?  Which is more truly Buddhist?  The Buddha’s original teachings, to the extent that we can discern what they were, arose as a protestant-like response to Brahmānic practice, and incorporated much of the pre-existing Vedic cosmology and prescientific understanding of the natural world into itself.  Western Buddhism is just the latest version of an ongoing philosophical and historical dialogue, and it’s only natural that it be a dialogue with the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as with Scientific Rationalism and Existentialism.

 

Bertie:  Perhaps, but I still think you’re evading my main point: Your philosophy is a philosophy of full engagement with the world and Buddhism is a philosophy of withdrawal from the world.  You’ve turned Buddhism on its head to suit your own purposes.

 

Ananda:  I don’t think so.  I think the real Buddhist message is mindfulness in each moment, non-identification with the perceptions, sensations, thoughts, cravings and aversions that arise in each moment, and the realization in each moment of the transience and interdependence of all phenomena.  This mindfulness and insight leads to a life in which one no longer pursues self-aggrandizement, permanence, the accumulation of goods, or the pursuit of transitory pleasures; as a consequence, one lives compassionately and wisely in harmony with the world doing what each situation requires.  It doesn’t require withdrawal from the world, but the release of one’s grasp on it.  That’s Buddhism.

Many cultures of awakening derive from the Buddha’s teachings — diverging from them in some places, incorporating new elements in others  – all of them deserving to be designated as a “Buddhism.”  Existential Buddhism is one of many authentic branches on the Buddhist tree.

Ananda thinks so, too.

Bertie, on the other hand, still wonders.

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  1. [1] Segall, S. (2003). “On Being a Non-Buddhist Buddhist.” In Segall, S. (2003). Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings. Albany: SUNY Press. ↩

The Thicket of Views

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In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the Buddha cautions Vacchagotta, the wanderer, against adhering to the “thicket of views,” i.e., forming an opinion one way or the other about a variety of metaphysical topics (Is the cosmos eternal or infinite? Are materiality and consciousness the same or different?  Do Buddhas still exist after death?)   The Buddha tells Vachagotta that any position one can take:

“is a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. It is accompanied by suffering…. and does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation; to calm, direct knowledge, full Awakening…”

Anyone can have opinions.  They come cheap.  I have a million myself  — If you want one just ask.

How’s President Obama doing?  Gay marriage: good or bad?  Are karma and rebirth real?  “The Tree of Life”: Cinematic magic or pretentious bore?  It’s amazing how much of an expert I am on everything!

In case it’s somehow escaped your notice, the Buddhist Blogosphere might more properly be called an “opinion-o-sphere.” The “Maha Teachers” Council: Promise or menace?  Stephen Batchelor: Visionary or turncoat? The Mindfulness Movement: diluting or spreading the Dharma? Buddhism: Religion or philosophy?  The Pali canon: Authentic words of the Buddha?  Genpo Roshi:  Sufficiently contrite?

We Buddhists are as contentious a group as any on the planet.  One might have hoped we would have turned out better — but we seem to be suspiciously human.

It’s fun to have opinions — they keep the conversation lively.  In any case, it’s  impossible not to form them.  The question is whether it’s possible not to be overly attached to them.

Zen Master Seung Sahn wrote a book entitled Open Mouth Already a Mistake[1], and was famous for admonishing students to “only keep ‘Don’t-Know’ mind.”  In a similar vein, Larry Rosenberg reported seeing a bumper sticker years ago which read:  “Don’t believe everything you think,” and thought it offered sage advice.  Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s “Beginner’s Mind” is the touchstone of American Dharma, but admonitions to take opinions lightly have been part of practice forever.  Bankei (1622-1693) advised us not to “side with ourselves,” just as the Buddha himself warned millennia ago of “the thicket of views.”

The truth is, all of our interesting and colorful opinions seem to have very little to do with the progress we make, or fail to make, in our practice.  If anything, they separate us from the clear, still place we aspire to. Our practice is best when we have little or no concern for what others do or think — and even or especially what we ourselves think — and pay attention, instead, to how we unfold in our own unique dance with the present moment.

That’s not to say there are no such things as facts, reality, or truth.  It’s just that reality is often more slippery, nuanced, and multifaceted than what we’re able to capture in our net of words — and that the deepest and most meaningful truths often elude language altogether.  Alan Watts used to joke that his business was “effing the ineffable.”

As we say in Zen, there is just “this.”

That’s my opinion for today.

 

 


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  1. [1] Barry Briggs has pointed out this attribution is in error.  While Seung Sahn coined the phrase, the book is actually by his Dharma heir, Wu Kwang (Richard Shrobe). See Barry’s correction in the comments section. ↩

A Place to Hang My Hat

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After fifteen years of Buddhist practice, I’ve finally decided to become a Buddhist.  It’s been a slow process.

At first I was a Jew practicing meditation and learning about the Dharma.  I tried as hard as I could to retain my Jewish religious identity while absorbing what was valuable from Buddhism.  I had friends who were Jewish-Buddhist, as well as teachers who managed to straddle the divide.  There came a time for me, however, thirteen years ago, when that was no longer tenable, and I resigned from my Temple.  I wrote a letter to my rabbi:

“My reason for leaving is my own particular spiritual journey over the past several years which has resulted from my encounter with Buddhist beliefs and practices.  I’m afraid that encounter has left me feeling neither particularly “Jewish” nor particularly “Buddhist;” I seem to be equally ill at ease within both traditions.  For a while my lack of a spiritual home was unsettling, and I retained the hope that I could find within Judaism what I was finding outside of it.  Over time I have become more comfortable with my homelessness; this Diaspora seems like the most authentic place for me to be right now.”

In 2003 I published “On Being A Non-Buddhist Buddhist” which expressed my continuing homelessness.  I felt at the time that “being a Buddhist” was an oxymoron, since Buddhism meant, to me, giving up all identifications and just being present.  I wrote at the time:

“Let’s face it: Buddhism is just another religion, and religion is always an escape from uncertainty, an attempt to explain the inexplicable with the implausible.   Why leave the Jewish religion you were born into to just to join another illogical escape from life’s ambiguities that once again requires reliance on spiritual and textual authority?”  I added,  “My native Judaism… requires…  suspensions of logic.  One is asked to believe in a supernatural Being who stands outside of the material world, and whose existence leaves no material footprint.  One is asked to believe that this Being dictated the Torah to Moses, even though all available evidence suggests that Moses never wrote the Torah…  and that it, like the Buddhist Sūtras, is a compilation of the works of various authors who had their own unique agendas to pursue.  One is asked to assume that this Being is very much concerned with whether or not one mixes meat with dairy products, or whether one has trimmed the foreskin of one’s penis.  None of this makes very much sense, and I am unwilling to state, like the second century Christian Apologist, Tertullian, that “credo quia absurdum est” (“I believe because it is absurd”)….  I’m not about to replace the superstitions of Judaism with the superstitions of Buddhism with its colorful heaven and hell realms and celestial beings.” [1]

That’s where things stood for the longest time.  I’ve often wondered why I couldn’t keep my Jewish religious identification as many of my Jewish-Buddhist teachers and friends did.  The answer is that my personal Jewish roots while, ethnically meaningful, lacked spiritual depth.  There wasn’t all that much to hold on to.

My grandparents and parents spoke Yiddish together when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying, but otherwise, Yiddish was a dying tongue in our home.  My grandfather went to the temple on the High Holidays, but rarely at any other time.  My father  didn’t read Hebrew, never went to Temple, and hadn’t been Bar Mitzvahed  (rumor had it his father had a falling out with the rabbi).  My mother took me to “visit” my grandfather at Temple on the High Holidays, which meant I got to play with the fringes of his prayer shawl and hear the sound of the ram’s horn.  My parents kept a kosher home, but ate shellfish and Chinese food when dining out.  After my grandparents died, my parents gave up keeping kosher at home.

We lit candles on Shabbat, but didn’t go to temple, celebrate Havdalah, or say blessings before meals.  Our home observance of Jewish holidays were defined by what we couldn’t do: no driving, writing, cooking, watching TV, or turning on the lights (but also no praying, singing, dancing, story telling, tzedakah, or celebration.)

My mother’s religion was one of piety and respect for her parents’s traditions, but she wasn’t interested in religious matters.  While we weren’t the type of Americanized Jews who had a  “Hanukkah bush,” my mother took me to Macy’s each December to sit on Santa’s lap.  My father was a closet agnostic with a strong ethnic identification.  He was proud of being Jewish, but didn’t believe in God.  I never found out about his agnosticism until a few years ago.

My father took an interest in Temple, but not to pray.  He organized a Bingo game to pull the temple out of financial difficulties, joined the men’s club for socializing, and eventually became its President.  When the congregation tried to dump our rabbi, my father defended him and helped him keep his position.  Our rabbi was a learned man, but cold and remote. His sermons — filled with an outdated moralism coupled with virulent anti-communism — were far from inspiring.

I went to Hebrew School three afternoons a week.  My teacher was a delightful young Orthodox woman whom I had something of a crush on.  She married a Hasidic rabbi, and I had the pleasure visiting their home to celebrate Shabbat in the Hasidic style. The joy of that Shabbat with her family and friends stays with me to this day:  I learned that religion could be more than a set of prohibitions and restrictions which occupied a small unhappy corner of one’s life, but could be a full-time commitment celebrated through story, prayer, dance, song, charity, and righteousness.  I developed an interest in becoming religious, and fantasized about becoming a rabbi.  I wore a tzitzit katan under my outer garments, prayed with tefillin, and went to temple every Shabbat.  My parents became alarmed that I was becoming too pious.  They needn’t have worried, though. This period didn’t last very long due to two other influences in my life.

The first was my interest in science.  I loved reading about physics, astronomy, and paleontology, and my parents did everything they could to encourage my interest.  My father helped me with science fair projects, took me to a rocket show at the New York Coliseum where I met Werner von Braun, and enrolled me in a summer biology program where I met Nobel Prize winner Edward Tatum.  I volunteered in the cardiac research unit at Maimonides Hospital.  I soon discovered that a literal belief in Genesis and the laws of astrophysics and biology didn’t mix.  I know many modern Orthodox Jews find a way to reconcile Orthodoxy with science, but I couldn’t.  I remember being at a Science Fair where two Orthodox boys commented on my project on DNA, saying I couldn’t believe in both Darwin and the Torah.  Perhaps foolishly, I believed them.  I decided I believed in Darwin more.

The other influence was my mother’s sister and her family.  My uncle was a photographer and avant-garde artist and their daughter hung out with folk musicians in Washington Square Park. They demonstrated as a family on behalf of nuclear disarmament, attended classical music concerts, and visited museums.  It was a whole new world to me  — modern, cosmopolitan, aesthetic, and liberal.  Its seductiveness was overwhelming.  I learned to play guitar, joined the civil rights movement, and hung out with assorted would-be poets, playwrights, actors, jazz musicians, and philosophers. By the time I left for college there was very little left  of my interest in Judaism.  I’d become like my parents: respectful of my grandparents and their ways, enjoying the familial aspects of Judaism (seders, holiday dinners), but with no real interest in the spiritual side of life.  I think that’s why my Judaism couldn’t stand a chance against my growing interest in Buddhist practice.

There are aspects of Judaism that resonate to Buddhist themes — I’m especially fond of the  Pirkei Avot, for example — and Martin Buber’s reinterpretation of Hasidic tales sounds suspiciously Zen.  But there are four basic tenets that lie at the very core of Judaism:

  1. God created the world, intervenes in it, and judges it.
  2. God made a special covenant with the Jewish People
  3. God gave the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai
  4. The Torah (and Talmud) define what is permissible and good.

If one doesn’t believe in God, his covenant, or the Torah’s divine authorship and inerrant authority, what’s left?  There’s the generalized ethical intention of the Torah — according to the Talmud, when a gentile approached Hillel the Elder (110 B.C – 10 A.D.) asking him to teach the entire Torah while he stood listening on one foot, Hillel replied: “That which is hateful to you, don’t do to others.  That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary.”  There are the wonderful stories of the Torah and Talmud that constitute a unique cultural heritage. There are the beautiful melodies of the liturgy, the sense of communal belonging, and the joyous the occasions for familial celebration.  I still love the stories and melodies, and cherish the opportunities to join together as an extended family.  I still identify as an ethnic Jew in a thousand different ways — the foods I eat, the way I speak, the way I value intellectual life and ethical conduct.  But that’s as far as it goes.

Buddhism, on the other hand, asks one to believe very little, but to find out things for oneself.  Its basic tenets — suffering is a part of life, everything is interconnected, everything changes — are  verifiable from experience.  The value of practicing mindfulness, non-clinging, equanimity, lovingkindness, and compassion are also verifiable  The harder-to-believe aspects  — rebirth, celestial beings, the surplus meaning of karma — don’t seem absolutely central to practice.  You can imagine Buddhism without literal rebirth — its harder to imagine Judaism without God.

I’m finally comfortable with identifying as a Buddhist.  After fifteen years as a non-Buddhist Buddhist, I’m taking the plunge.  I’ve decided to start the path leading to Jukai, the precept-taking ritual that means formally becoming a Buddhist in Zen.

I’m not fully sure why I’m going ahead with it.  It’s not a rational decision.  But it feels right.  It doesn’t mean I’ll stop being an iconoclast.  It doesn’t mean I’m drinking the Kool-Aid or joining the club.  It doesn’t mean I think Buddhists are better than anyone else or that everything in Buddhism is true.  It does mean I’m ready to say “this is my path,” and I’m ready to make a deeper commitment to it, rather than always standing a little bit outside.

Toni Packer, one of my core teachers, would probably wonder about this decision.  She went the opposite route, from being a Zen Buddhist teacher, to being a Zen teacher, to teaching no-thing.  Shedding all aspects of tradition and authority was an important part of her journey and practice.    Her pathless path, like Krishnamurti’s before her, is clear and unwavering.  She would ask me to question this wish for identification, for going along. “Why now?  What’s missing?  Can you name and identify the longing it’s supposed to fulfill and just see it?”

I can.

It’s finding a place in a new home and community.  A place that’s more consistent with who I am right now.

She would ask, “what’s the loneliness you’re evading by belonging somewhere?  Can you just see it?”

I can.

But even though the Buddha advised us to go into homelessness — having a home isn’t all bad.  You don’t have to always stay inside, but it’s nice to have a place to hang your hat.

 

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  1. [1] Segall, S. (2003). Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings. Albany: SUNY Press. ↩

The Second Precept

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The Second Buddhist Precept states simply:

I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.

Adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.

This means abstaining from taking what belongs to others — in other words, stealing. Unlike the Judeo-Christian Eighth Commandment, it’s not a divine edict.  It’s training in the practice of non-greed for the good of one’s character and for the happiness of oneself and others.

Most of us don’t go around breaking and entering, mugging, or shoplifting, so it would seem that abstaining from stealing should be a relatively easy matter — but it’s not. There are more subtle forms of theft — downloading and uploading copyrighted material without permission, underreporting cash income on one’s taxes, using ideas without attribution, bringing paper clips home from the office, inflating damage estimates for insurance reimbursement.  The temptation to petty larceny runs deep within the crooked human heart, and aspiring to impeccability requires some heavy lifting.

Corporations can also violate the Second Precept.  Ethical businesses obtain raw materials and labor at a fair price and create something of value which they sell at a fair price.  Ethical businesses also abstain from passing hidden costs along to stakeholders.  Companies that purchase raw materials from developing nations at unfair prices, exploit workers through unfair wages and working conditions, expose consumers to risk through unsafe products, and pollute the environment are engaging in a form of theft.  So are industries that systematically mislead others about the real costs of their products, for example, the health costs of tobacco and soft-drink consumption, or the health and environmental costs of mining and burning coal, deep sea drilling for oil, hydrofracking for gas, or storing “spent” nuclear fuel in cooling ponds.

Governments can violate the Second Precept through unjust confiscatory taxation.  Zen Master Hakuin (1686-1769) railed against the typical Japanese Daimyo (feudal lord) of his day who lived:

“a life of the greatest luxury… with never a thought of the difficulties of the common people under him. From the blood and sweat he wrings from them he is able to fill his tables with fine sake….  As there is never enough money to satisfy such appetites, he ends up dispatching merciless ministers….  Not only do officials reckon the tax rate yearly, they also raise the rate two or three times during the same year.” [1]

Closer to our own time, the American revolution was fought over taxation without representation, and some present day third-world countries are governed by oligarchies so corrupt they can only be called “kleptocracies.”

Political conservatives sometimes claim taxation levels in the United States are confiscatory.  In fact, personal U.S. taxation levels are considerably lower than most Western European democracies.  Additionally, federal tax revenues currently constitute a smaller percentage of our gross domestic product than they did during the decade of the nineteen-fifties.

The Bush era tax cuts have, however, contributed to a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest Americans. This transfer is also a function of exponential increases in executive compensation while the hourly wages of American workers have declined.  Fortune 500 CEOs enjoyed a 23% increase in compensation in 2010 alone.  The wealthiest one percent of the country now owns 38% of all privately held stock, 60% of all financial assets, and 62% of all business equity, returning concentration of wealth to levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties and the Gilded Age. [2]  Current tax policy benefits the richest at the expense of improvements in infrastructure, education, and health care for all.

No doubt, the reasons for the increasing disparity in wealth are multiple and complex, including the globalization of the world economy, the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas, the decline of labor unions, the deregulation of the banking industry, the rising cost of energy, the failures of our educational system, and the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy.  The simple, unbridled exercise of human greed fits somewhere into the mix as well.  Not unexpectedly, the wealthy continue to vigorously advocate for a variety of policies (subsidies, incentives, tax write-offs, deregulation, union busting, shredding the social safety net, shifting medical risk from insurers to patients, ending the estate tax, hobbling Medicare’s bargaining power, etc.) that further accelerate the ongoing transfer of wealth.  We might also note that the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” decision gives the wealthy even more of an advantage in shifting the political playing field to their advantage.

The Second Precept applies to more than just the theft of property and wealth, however.  It can also apply to the giving and receiving of affection, attention, and caring in personal relationships and the sharing of tasks and responsibilities within them.  Most imbalances within relationships are not regulated by law and some are reinforced by prevailing customs, making it easier to fail to recognize them when they occur, and allowing their justification since “everyone does it.”  Focusing on the needs of our partners and dependents more than our own is an important part of Buddhist practice.  We might consider replacing the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as we would have them do unto us” with the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others as they would wish to be treated.”  This isn’t to suggest one should neglect one’s own needs — self-compassion is important too.  As Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be?  If I am not for others, what am I?”  It’s just that most of us are so self-focused that a little overcompensation in the other direction couldn’t hurt!   Is it possible to give more of ourselves emotionally — to be more generous than we are at present — without resentment — without fearing we might give more than we get in return?  Can we make that our ongoing practice?

The beauty of the Precepts is that they turn all our interactions into fields of practice in a way solitary sitting never can.  They allow us to explore the degree to which we express integrity, generosity, and compassion in our daily lives.  In following the Second Precept we aspire to more than mere equity, the fair giving of tit-for-tat, but to being open-hearted, caring, and mindful of the needs of others.

Thich Nhat Hanh has rewritten and expanded the Second Precept to make its intention clearer:

Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I am committed to practicing generosity in my thinking, speaking, and acting. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others; and I will share my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need. I will practice looking deeply to see that the happiness and suffering of others are not separate from my own happiness and suffering; that true happiness is not possible without understanding and compassion; and that running after wealth, fame, power and sensual pleasures can bring much suffering and despair. I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy. I am committed to practicing Right Livelihood so that I can help reduce the suffering of living beings on Earth and reverse the process of global warming.

The beauty of Thay’s reformulation is that it turns a negative — abstaining from stealing and avoiding greed  — into a positive — the practice of generosity along with genuine activity to reduce individual and systemic suffering.

In discussing his reformulation in depth, Thay adds:

“When you practice one precept deeply, you will discover that you are practicing all five. The First Precept is about taking life, which is a form of stealing — stealing the most precious thing someone has, his or her life. When we meditate on the Second Precept, we see that stealing, in the forms of exploitation, social injustice, and oppression, are acts of killing — killing slowly by exploitation, by maintaining social injustice, and by political and economic oppression. Therefore, the Second Precept has much to do with the precept of not killing. We see the “interbeing” nature of the first two precepts. This is true of all Five Precepts.”

Buddhist practice is truly holographic — every part of the practice contains and reflects every other part of the practice.  If all we do is practice the Second Precept, we are decreasing self-aggrandizement, increasing generosity, increasing mindful awareness of our greed, grasping, and self-justification, and increasing awareness of how we depend on and influence the interconnected web of existence.

Not a bad payoff for one simple precept.

 

 

 

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  1. [1] Katushiro Yoshizawa (2009). The Religious Art of Zen Master Hakuin. Berkeley: Counterpoint. ↩
  2. [2] http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html ↩

The Constant Gardener

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Have I mentioned that we have a beautiful garden?  Right now the irises, roses, poppies, clematis, and peonies are in full flower.  The wisteria, lilac, daffodil and tulip  blooms of the spring still linger in loving memory.  Along with these beautiful flowers, our arch enemy, bishop’s weed, aegopodium podagraria (also known as gout weed, ground elder, goat’s foot, and Jack Jumpabout) has made its nefarious return.  Bishop’s weed is a formidable foe.  It defies almost every method of eradication, and the more countless hours my wife and I spend rooting it out, the more vigorously it returns.

Aegopodium Podagraria

The other night, in his teisho, Sensei Paul Seiko Schubert discussed how meditation was like gardening.  It seemed a fitting metaphor.  After all, the Pali word for meditation is bhavana, which literally means “cultivation,” a word with clear horticultural roots.   Professor Glen Wallis has written:

“I imagine that when Gotama, the Buddha, chose this word to talk about meditation, he had in mind the ubiquitous farms and fields of his native India. Unlike our words ‘meditation’ or ‘contemplation,’ Gotama’s term is musty, rich, and verdant. It smells of the earth. The commonness of his chosen term suggests naturalness, everydayness, ordinariness. The term also suggests hope: no matter how fallow it has become, or damaged it may be, a field can always be cultivated — endlessly enhanced, enriched, developed — to produce a favorable and nourishing harvest.”

Buddhism also employs another horticultural metaphor — the metaphor of “seeds” (bija) to describe how past thoughts and actions lay down karmic traces in the unconscious which affect our future thoughts and actions.

But Sensei had a different horticultural metaphor in mind.  He was pointing out that in gardening, no matter how hard one works at it, the weeds always return.  Weeding is a constant practice, whether in gardening or meditation.

Of course there are many different kinds of mind-weeds — a practically infinite variety of desires, fears, concerns, and aversions in never-ending succession.  Sensei had one particular sort in mind, however: one that relates specifically to Buddhist practice.  These are the perennial questions of “what next?” and “what else?”

I had brought these very questions to Sensei in dokusan that evening. “I’m wondering if I should be doing anything more with my practice?” I asked.

“What did you have in mind?” Sensei replied.  I confessed I wasn’t sure, and Sensei responded with “Just sit.”   “If there’s something else you need to do,” he added, “it will emerge from your sitting — no one else can tell you what your practice needs.”

Sensei was pointing out that in both beginning and mature practice the same questions  arise, but the answer is always the same: just return to awareness, sit quietly with the question, and allow what’s needed to emerge.  In Zen there is no beginning practice and no advanced practice.  There is just returning to awareness.  Nothing is missing.  Nothing needs to be added.  There is no “next” or “else.”

I heard a charming gardening fable when I was interning at the Center for Mindfulness, Medicine, and Society in 1996.  It’s one that’s made the rounds over the years in various forms.  Marsha Linehan incorporated one version into her Dialectical Behavioral Therapy workbook for patients.  The fable tells of a gardener who’s tried everything to rid his garden of weeds.  In exasperation, he contacts a famous expert who inquires whether he’s attempted a variety of remedies.  When the gardner replies he’s tried all of them, the expert pauses and reflects, and finally replies “all I can suggest is that you learn to love the weeds.”

We shouldn’t be distressed or disturbed when mind weeds that we thought we uprooted long ago return once again.  We should treat them like old friends.  It’s not that we are doing our practice wrong.  It’s just the nature of things.  The weeds come back.  We must be constant gardeners.  The path of practice is unending.  We return to it again and again.

Be diligent and light of heart.

Apologies to John le Carré for appropriating his title for this post!

 

 

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Finding The Right Teacher, Finding the Right Practice

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Lama Yeshe and Jan Willis, 1974

Wesleyan University Professor Jan Willis tells a beautiful story [1] about finding her teacher, Lama Yeshe. The first time she heard his name mentioned:

“I began to experience a strange, though pleasant, sensation.  It was unlike any sensation I had ever experienced before: a sort of warm tingling feeling that began at the nape of my neck and then radiated downward and outward to encircle my whole body.  Then, as though I had suddenly stepped into an invisible field of static electricity, I noticed that the hairs on my skin stood up erect.”

Before meeting her future teacher, Willis had a near death experience in a terrible automobile accident while hitchhiking from Paris to Lyon. After Willis’s first meeting with Lama Yeshe in Nepal, his parting words were:

“Lama is so happy you… have come, especially after… you know… that bad thing in France.”

She had never discussed her accident or traveling in Europe with him.  How could he have possibly known?

Their’s was a magical connection from the very first.

If you have a story like that to tell, then you too have met your teacher.

If you don’t have a story like that, how do you find your teacher?  How do you discover which tradition to practice with?  One of the Tibetan schools?  Zen?  Pure Land?  Theravada?

There are so many choices — 84,000 Dharma doors.

For most of us, our journey begins from the time we first learned about the Dharma.  It seems pure happenstance, how and when we first learn of something.  Of course, some would say it’s no accident — that our opportunities to learn the Dharma are a function of our karma.

I’ve written before about my first exposure to Zen at a series of Alan Watts lectures at my college.  Those lectures kindled my interest in Buddhism, but didn’t lead to my finding a teacher.  At least, not immediately.  Think of it as a seed that had been planted, but the conditions were not yet ripe for it to come to fruition. Some of my contemporaries did find teachers.  One friend went to Rochester and became a Zen priest under the guidance of Philip Kapleau Roshi.  I, on the other hand, had just graduated college, was looking for work, was thinking about a career, was getting married.  Running off to Rochester – never mind Katmandu!  — was not in my plans.

My introduction to practice came years later when Ferris Urbanowski, one of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR teachers, came to Connecticut to give a talk.  I’d seen Jon’s work on a PBS Bill Moyer’s series called The Healing of the Mind and was immediately hooked.  Watching the filmed images of Jon teaching meditation to chronic pain patients awakened the seed planted years earlier by Alan Watts.  As a psychologist, I’d treated chronic pain patients with biofeedback and hypnosis with limited success.  I was intrigued by the possibility of using meditation to ease their suffering.  When I attended Ferris’s workshop, I thought I was acquiring a skill to help my patients.  Instead, as I meditated for the first time under her guidance, I discovered something of vital importance for myself.  At the end of the workshop I asked Ferris if I could train at the Center for Mindfulness.  She told me I’d first need to cultivate my own meditation practice and then complete at least one ten-day retreat before applying.  I began sitting daily, did my first ten-day retreat at IMS with Ruth Denison, and did my internship at the Center for Mindfulness.  I was off and running.

Ferris, Jon and Ruth were fabulous first teachers, but neither Ferris nor Jon billed themselves as Buddhist teachers, and Ruth, who was authorized to teach, was on the other side of the continent.  I began searching for local teachers I could learn more from.  I attended the Buddhism in America conference in Boston in 1997 where I heard Dharma talks from a variety of teachers from different traditions.  Two of them “clicked” for me: Larry Rosenberg and Toni Packer.  I then went on a number of retreats with both of them and am deeply grateful for what I learned.

What made Larry and Toni “right” for me?  For one thing, they didn’t have inflated egos.  They didn’t call themselves “Enlightened.”  They didn’t surround themselves with  admirers.  They didn’t project themselves as charismatic leaders.  They didn’t ask for submission, obedience, agreement, or belief.

The first thing I felt with both of them was “safe.”  I didn’t have to surrender my intelligence or my independence.  For better or worse, that’s what I needed.  You might argue that I overvalue intellect and independence — that these are attachments I need to work on — but I could never have gotten started by surrendering them.

Another thing that attracted me to Toni and Larry is that they didn’t push aspects of the teachings that would have been too much of a stretch for my analytical-empirical mind.  I could explore everything Toni and Larry talked about on my own to see if it was true for me.  Teachers who might have stressed rebirth, celestial beings, special powers, etc. would have lost me at “hello.”

Finally, as I spent more time observing Larry and Toni I could see that they were trustworthy and that they embodied the Dharma in their own lives.  Who they were was consistent with how they presented themselves and what they were teaching.

To summarize, I started with them because they were 1) nearby, 2) non-threatening, 3) trustworthy, and 4) allowed me to absorb the Dharma with my analytical-empirical approach to things 5) without surrendering my independence.  That’s what I needed to start out.  As I’ve continued my journey I’ve met many wonderful teachers.  It may be that as I go on in the Dharma I may need teachers who offer something different — something more challenging — something less compatible with my natural approach to the world and my view of myself.  We’ll see.

Over the years I’ve been exposed to a variety of traditions.  I started out in the Insight Meditation tradition, which has sometimes been described as Theravada practice with a Mahayana frame. I’ve practiced with non-teacher Toni Packer in her non-tradition.  I’ve received pointing-out instructions for Dzogchen practice from a Tibetan lama.  I currently practice with Zen’s White Plum Asanga tradition.  All of these traditions stress the cultivation of awareness.

What brought me to my current practice community?  It’s nearby.  I like the leadership and the teachers.  I like the sangha members.  It stresses the practices, values and teachings that are important to me: awareness, compassion, and non-clinging.  There isn’t a lot of talk about reincarnation or celestial beings.  It’s a congenial practice home.

Is it the “right” place for me?  Is it the “best” practice for me?  Where is the all-knowing Celestial Judge who could possibly answer that question?  It’s the one my karma has led me to, and I’ll continue to follow it as long as it continues to be of benefit.  Or until my karma brings me to the teacher who makes my hair stand on end.

Here’s my advice on how to find a tradition and a teacher.  Try a few out.  See what’s a good fit — a place where you can practice with sincerity and without giving up what you value in yourself.  See if you seem to be benefiting.  See if the teacher is genuinely there to benefit others and isn’t simply on an ego-trip.  There isn’t one true school of Buddhism.  There are 84,000 Dharma doors.  You only need to find one that works for you.

When you find one that’s congenial, try sticking with it.  Don’t keep looking for the perfect place, the perfect practice — the one that will magically make you enlightened within a year.  The perfect place is wherever you happen to be.  The perfect practice is your own awareness here and now, and compassion for the people you encounter every day.

Thanks to Terry Sherwood for suggesting I write on this topic.

 

 

 

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  1. [1] Willis, Jan (2001). Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman’s Spiritual Journey. Riverhead Books: New York. ↩

How to Listen to a Dharma Talk

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I once heard filmmaker Stan Brakhage tell a story about a movie theater that opened in some unnamed African country.  The theater opened with King Kong and the moviegoers loved it.  A few weeks later the owners tried a new movie, but this time the audience rebelled.  They wanted King Kong again.  And so it went.  The theater showed King Kong for years.

If you have young children, you know what it’s like for a child to latch onto a story and want to hear it over and over again.  There’s something sweet and reassuring about old favorites, even after the excitement of newness is gone.

Dharma talks are a lot like that.  They’re always the same: suffering, attachment, mindfulness, letting go, loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom, awakening.

The Buddha said I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the release from suffering.  I guess the Buddha couldn’t count very well, because that’s actually two things.  But the Buddha said it over and over, thousands of times in long discourses, medium length discourses, short discourses, numbered discourses, and miscellaneous discourses –  the whole Sutta Pitaka.

I’ve listened to nearly one thousand Dharma talks over the past fifteen years.

The Dalai Lama. Toni Packer. Thich Nhat Hanh. Henapola Gunaratana.  Bhikkhu Bodhi. Tsoknyi Rinpoche.  Joseph Goldstein.  Sharon Salzberg.  Larry Rosenberg.  Sylvia Boorstein.  Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Lama Surya Das.  Stephen Batchelor.  Robert Thurman. Narayan Liebenson Grady.  Michael Liebenson Grady.  Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Peter Matthiesson.  Grover Genro Gaunt.  Claude Anshin Thomas.  Gavin Harrison.  Jan Willis.  Sulak Sivaraksa.  Myoshin Kelley. Ajahn Amaro. Rebecca Bradshaw. Christina Feldman.  Michelle McDonald. Alan Wallace. Ruth Denison. Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia. Robert Kennedy Roshi.  Paul Seiko Schubert.  Michael Koryu Holleran. Tsultrim Allione. Annie Nugent.

I’ve even been guilty of giving a few myself.

Toni Packer sometimes begins talks by asking “is it possible to listen freshly?”

Toni Packer

What does it mean to listen freshly to something one’s heard a thousand times?

The mind is like a Greek chorus listening in and ceaselessly commenting.

“That makes sense!”  “That doesn’t make sense!”  “I agree!”  “I disagree!”

The mind can’t help itself.  Usually when teachers say something we agree with they’re brilliant, when they say something we disagree with they’re wrong.

“Listening freshly” means two things. (Let’s see if I can count better than the Buddha.)

First it means not assuming we’ve heard something before.  We actually haven’t heard this particular talk before.  This particular talk may say something in a way that allows something new to click, or that helps new questions to arise.  Thinking you’ve already heard something before is a way of shutting down and preventing the possibility of discovery.  So first and foremost, “listening freshly” is adopting an attitude of openness.

Secondly, “listening freshly” means listening to everything that’s going on.  The speaker’s words.  The sounds of birdsong in the background.  The Greek Chorus in your mind.  When thoughts like “I agree” or “I disagree” arise, can they be bracketed off and seen as conditioned responses to what’s being heard without assigning them a truth value?  The speaker’s words sink in, and reactions arise.  Watch the entire movie.  It’s King Kong.  Again.  You may learn more about the Dharma from observing your reactions with genuine interest and non-attachment than you do from the speaker’s words themselves.

I’ve recently been re-learning this lesson as I’ve been listening to Dharma talks in my zendo.  As my faithful readers may remember, my particular zendo has a Jesuit priest as it’s roshi and another Catholic priest as a visiting sensei.  Getting used to this has not always been easy.  I was raised within the Jewish faith and attended synagogue until I was fifty years old.  I never set foot inside a Church until I attended a friend’s wedding in college.  With a history of nearly two thousand years worth of persecution by Christians, sitting in the Episcopal Church, where my zendo is located, still carries some negative connotations.  My initial entry into Buddhism was made easier by the fact that most of my earliest teachers were either Jewish or half-Jewish in origin.  If my current zendo had been my first Buddhist experience, I might never have become a Buddhist practitioner.  This is not a negative statement about my zendo, but a statement about the power of conditioning.  We all come from somewhere and have attachments that can close us off to what is actually transpiring in the moment here and now.

What’s actually transpiring in my zendo?  It’s a beautiful structure with a vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows.  The building creaks and groans in the wind when the weather is stormy.  Cicadas chirp outside in the summer.  It’s a wonderful place to sit.  It’s a friendly community, and we all sit together with inspiring sincerity and determination.

Occasionally a teacher will mention God during a Dharma talk, or even Jesus.  As a Jewish agnostic, my mind goes into overdrive whenever that happens.  “Buddhism is non-theistic!” As a member of an historically persecuted minority, I don’t want to hear Jesus talk.  “That was a perfectly good Dharma talk until he dragged Jesus into it!” My fellow sitters, who are mostly Christian in background, are probably comforted by the reference, just as I was comforted by my early exposure to Jewish teachers.  “What I’m doing here really isn’t apostasy.” All of it, the raised hackles or the comfort, conditioned response.

The hard thing is to hear what the teacher is saying behind the words.  What he means by “Jesus” or “God” may be what I mean by “dharmakāya.”  Or maybe not.  Can I “listen freshly?”  Is there something in his experience that can reverberate in mine?  Something beyond conditioned responses?

It’s not for nothing that the Buddha’s first disciples were called śrāvakas, or “hearers,” those who actually heard the Buddha speak.  That’s our aspiration too, to be “hearers.”

Larry Rosenberg used to say (maybe he still does) that watching our own conditioned responses over and over is like watching “Gone With the Wind” one thousand times.  It’s a great movie, but (unlike the King Kong audience!) we eventually tire of it and are able to drop the story.

That’s our job in Dharma practice.  Dropping the story.

Dharma talks — stories to end stories.

 

 

 

 

 

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Is Buddhism Non-theistic?

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You often see the claim made that Buddhism is a non-theistic religion.  As is often the case, however, things are never quite so simple.  There are ways in which the claim is true,  ways in which it’s untrue, and even ways in which it’s just quasi-true.  It makes my head hurt just to think about it.

The claim of Non-theism is true in the sense that there is no God in Buddhism who is a Creator, Judge, or Deity-in-Charge.  In Buddhist cosmology the universe has always just existed and is continually evolving and devolving based on causes and conditions.  There’s no First Cause or Prime Mover setting the machinery in motion.  In addition, the fate of human beings is determined by their own actions in accord with the laws of karma.  There’s no Divine Intercessor putting one’s merits and demerits onto a permanent record card that follows one around over countless lifetimes.

The claim of Non-theism is not completely true because the Buddhist suttas and sutras make reference to all sorts of supernatural beings who inhabit the universe, from ghosts, demi-gods, devas, and brahmās to celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas.  The Buddha, himself, is often described as “a teacher of gods and men”.  The ghosts, devas, and brahmās are reborn into their own realms, and the celestial buddhas reside in Pure Lands.  As you might imagine, all of this leads to a very complicated cosmological space.  At times these beings visited the Buddha in our world.  At times he went to their realms to teach the Dharma.

In the Brahmajāla Sutta, the Buddha describes how a brahmā may come by the mistaken belief that he is the “Great Brahmā, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, the All-Powerful, the Lord, the Maker and Creator, Ruler, Appointer, and Orderer, Father of All that Have Been and Shall Be.”  The Buddha sees this delusion as an natural consequence of the particular way the universe happens to expand after periods of contraction.  During this expansionary phase one of the beings residing in the Ābhāsvara realm (which corresponds to the second jhāna) is reborn alone into the lower Brahmā realm (corresponding to the first jhāna) through exhaustion of his accumulated merit.  Forgetting his former lives, he imagines having come into existence spontaneously and without cause. Brahmās are long-lived beings and over the eons this solitary brahmā becomes lonely and wishes for company.  When others come to co-inhabit his space through the natural process of rebirth, the brahmā mistakenly believes his wish for company made it happen.  This is the start of his delusional grandiosity.  The gods within the Buddhist cosmology are not omniscient, and they apparently need Buddhas to help straighten themselves out.

Do contemporary Buddhists believe in ghosts, devas, and brahmās?  It depends on whom you ask.  In traditional Asian Buddhist cultures literal belief remains widespread.  For example, Mirka Knaster quotes John Travis regarding Munindra’s teachings:

“I listened to him go into great detail, sometimes for two hours.  There was this incredible excitement about the Buddhist cosmology.  You felt like you were surrounded by devas and all kinds of unseen things, in some way.  He had that twinkle in his eye about the unseen.  It was not just a belief system for him.”  [1]

Western Buddhist communities, on the other hand, are often made up of converts who have left a prior theistic belief in an Abrahamic Sky God behind.  They often view celestial beings as outdated cultural vestiges which can be safely jettisoned without changing the essential meaning of the Dharma.  Western Buddhists are the foremost promulgators of the idea that Buddhism is non-theistic.

There are three additional issues, however, which complicate the relationship between Buddhism and theism even further.

Deity yoga is a practice within the Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition.  In deity yoga, a particular deity/bodhisattva/Buddha (the lines between these concepts get quite blurred) is taken as one’s yidam, or tutelary deity.  One engages in complex mental visualizations of one’s yidam, then engages in a process of imitating and merging with one’s yidam, and finally one dissolves the merged self/yidam.  The yidam is seen as having an existence within relative reality (within a Pure Land saṃbogakāya realm), but as being essentially empty in terms of absolute reality, so that it’s both real and unreal at the same time.  In yet a third understanding of the yidam’s reality, the yidam is a representation of one’s own unrealized Buddha nature.  Finally, the yidam is a means to exploring the reality of identity itself.  We have our usual view of ourselves as limited and unable to become a Buddha.  In deity yoga one practices giving up that limited self-view and tries on a different narrative in which one has the unlimited wisdom and compassion of a Buddha.  In the end both narratives yield to the realization of emptiness.

Asking a celestial Buddha for assistance is a practice within Pure Land Buddhism.  Pure Land Buddhism teaches that one cannot reach enlightenment through one’s own efforts, but if one recites the mantra of Amitābha Buddha one will be reborn into his Pure Land after death and will achieve enlightenment from there.   Having faith in a Buddha’s divine intervention seems similar in some ways to theistic beliefs and practices in the West.  Keep in mind, however, that Amitābha Buddha is neither a creator nor a judge.  He offers assistance to all who recite his mantra.  Prior to achieving Buddhahood,  Amitābha Buddha was a simple monk who declared an intention to create an ideal realm for Buddhist practice.

There’s one final issue concerning Theism and Buddhism which is probably unique to Western Buddhism.  I currently sit with a Zen group that meets in a church, has a Jesuit priest as its roshi, and a priest who’s a former Carthusian monk as a regular visiting teacher.  Dharma talks sometimes include references to Jesus and/or God.  I personally don’t find god-talk helpful to my Buddhist practice, and I’ll say more about my personal reactions in a future post about how to listen to Dharma talks.  But it’s evidently helpful to those who are using it, and I suspect to more than a few of my fellow listener/sitters.  I imagine their concept of God has evolved from a concrete, personified creator-controller-and-judge deity to something coexistant with creation itself, maybe a synonym for the ground-of-being.  You can certainly find strains within the Christian mystic, Sufi, and Kabbalistic traditions to  support such a view.  There are those who believe in the concept of the perennial philosophy, the idea that the mystical experience has the same content regardless of religion, and that underneath the hood all religions point to the same experience.   I think that many of those who are comfortable with god-talk in a Dharma talk believe there’s no fundamental contradiction between being a Theist and practicing Buddhism, or at least practicing Zen.

I recently heard Roshi Robert Kennedy, who’s both a Jesuit priest and a Zen master, talk about this issue with great subtlety.  He considers himself a Zen practitioner, but not a Buddhist.  He understands that the Buddhist and Christian views of the ultimate nature of reality are not really reconcilable, but he also believes that sitting zazen is a practice without theological content.  You don’t have to believe in anything to sit.  I suspect roshi believes that the truths (with a small “t”) that emerge from sitting are not the provenance of any religion and that sitting assists our maturation as human beings regardless of our religious beliefs. But I don’t want to put words in Roshi’s mouth.

So is Buddhism theistic or non-theistic?

As Suzuki Roshi was fond of saying, “not always so.”

 

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  1. [1] Knaster, M. (2010).  Living This Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra.  Boston: Shambhala, p. 26. ↩

Metamorphosis

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It’s official:  I’m an ex-psychologist.  My license to practice expired last month.  It’s been a long time coming.

I first aspired to become a psychologist forty-three years ago.

 

VA Traineeship 1971

Graduation 1977

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becoming and then being a psychologist was an important part of my life. I gave up practice over four years ago but hung onto my license. Maybe I’d come to regret giving it up.  Maybe I’d need to return to work.  Letting go of the “maybes” was a slow process.

When I started college I planned to become a biochemist.  It turned out I was more interested in Civil Rights and the Vietnam War than equilibration constants and soon switched majors to political science.  When I became disillusioned with improving the world through political action I turned to saving it one-life-at-a-time through psychology. It was a slow way of fulfilling the Bodhisattva Vow to liberate all beings, but, hey, it was a start.

Preparing for my preliminary exams stressed me out so much I was developing an ulcer.  My wife asked “what would be so terrible if you failed the exams?”  “Then I’d never be a psychologist!” I whined. “Poor you!” she replied with benign sarcasm. “Then you’d just be like the other five billion people on earth who aren’t psychologists.”

I’ve finally joined the five billion.  Only now it’s nearly seven billion.

Letting go of my license isn’t the end of it, though.  Like everything else in life, it’s a process. Yesterday I was in the garage looking through piles of old lecture notes, publication drafts, correspondence with editors, and xeroxed copies of articles I’d used for teaching.  Was I ready to put them in the trash?  And what about the hundreds of books taking up valuable real estate on my bookshelves? I’ll probably never read them again.  Am I ready to donate them? Will anyone have them?

Let go.  Don’t hang on.  Be ready for what’s next.

A friend of mine, the son of an African chief, had a mother who sang a Praise Song to him every morning while growing up.  The song was sung at his wedding and one day will be sung at his funeral. The song existed long before he was born, but when he was born a new verse was added specifically for him.  The song defines him.  It tells how his ancestors came to the valley to become warriors and chiefs.  It tells what his qualities are, what his duties are to family and tribe, what he will one day accomplish.

The song is a powerful metaphor for identity:  the narrative we create and reinforce about ourselves.  We can allow that narrative to define us.  We can treat it as real, as if it had totemic power — or we can see it transparently as story, aware of how it fails to define and constrain our complex, elusive, ever-changing selves.

Life is never static, but flows like a river.  It’s essence is change.  We shed identities and try new ones on for size like snakes shed their skins.  Last month I was a psychologist.  Who am I now?

Already a new narrative takes its place — grandfather, writer, piano student, cancer survivor, diabetic, social activist, Buddhist — a new set of identifiers.

When I’m on the cushion, though — who is it that sits?

“Eno said, ‘Do not think good, do not think evil.  Now, what is your real self?’

Myo asked, ‘Beyond these secret words is there a secret deeper still?’

Eno said, ‘I have told you nothing secret. See your true face, it is all there.’”

– From the Mumonkan, Case 23

 

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Are We There Yet?

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Robert Kennedy, S.J., Roshi

I recently attended a talk at Fordham University by Roshi Robert Kennedy.  A Fordham student asked Roshi, “What’s the biggest obstacle for beginning Zen practitioners?”  He answered that at first Zen students are infatuated with the idea of practice and meditate with enthusiasm.  Then after a year or two, not so much. They haven’t gotten enlightened and their problems haven’t changed — their practice hits a wall.  At this point students focus in on the imperfections of their teacher and other sangha members and wonder if there’s a better practice somewhere else.  A lot of Zen students drop out.  Those who persist eventually develop a more mature view of practice:  Enlightenment is no longer just around the corner — or even if it is — sitting won’t make it happen.  As Ma-tsu inquired, “How can polishing a tile make a mirror?”  We just do the work — without expectation of gain — because it’s the work of being human.

Roshi’s words resonated because I’d recently completed a teleconferenced Dharma course offered through an on-line organization. The course was fine, but I was struck by the achievement-oriented striving permeating many of the participants’s questions.  They’d read about Daniel Ingram’s stages of enlightenment and wanted to know exactly where they were along the path.  Some of them despaired because they couldn’t afford to go on long retreats or take time off from work to do so.  How would they ever achieve stream-entry? They were in a hurry, and Enlightenment was their destination.

Practicing “like your hair’s on fire” is all well and good — practice needs sincerity and determination.  But in practice, as Ayya Khema noted, we’re “being nobody, going nowhere.”  Larry Rosenberg says pragmatic Americans want to know the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B, but in meditation we go from Point A to Point A.  We stay where we are, over and over.  We’re always beginners — no starting practice, no advanced practice — just practice.  We’re in it for the long haul.

If we practice in this way, without gaining idea, our practice takes care of itself.

Where are we on the path?

We’re always here.

 

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