Recently, I broke a tendon in my foot playing soccer with my grandson. If I want to avoid re-injuring myself, I am going to have to be very discriminating in what activities I engage in for some time. Luckily, each of us has the capacity to filter our experience, sort it into likes and dislikes, things we want to repeat and things we want to avoid. This is the key to successful functioning.
It’s wonderful and very important, from an evolutionary point of view, that we have this discriminating sense. However, our tendency to reject those activities that don’t support our well-being means that we also have a tendency to accept only the perfect, unblemished fruit. Zen practice teaches us to say yes to everything that happens to us, including the difficult, whether it’s loss, boredom, anger, confusion, or discomfort. Here’s a poem by Jane Hirshfield, commenting on her memory of time spent at Tassajara Zen Monastery in California: Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy, awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. One of the features of MZMC Zen practice periods is the assignment of practice partners. Often practitioners do not get assigned the practice partner they want. So, I have been referring to my injured foot as my practice partner. Right now I am post-surgery—on crutches for a few weeks and wearing a boot, which goes almost up to my knee for some time after that. I certainly did not ask for this practice partner. Nevertheless, he’s been assigned to me and if I am kind to him, pay attention to his needs and take care of him, he and I will heal together. This is referred as “self-power” in Zen, planting our “selves” deeply in the nature of what surrounds us. We can be intimate with each difficulty and fully embrace our life beyond the discriminating mind. To do this, our thinking needs to be flexible, moving beyond our calculating minds which warn us to be wary of things that are different or out of the ordinary. But what does all this have to do with nature? Nature is, in a sense, wild. Often we become afraid of anything that appears wild or out of control even though our body and our world is full of areas that are “wild.” They regulate themselves quite well and give us life. They cooperate. My foot will heal itself. All I need to do is plant myself deeply into listening to, paying attention, and caring for my practice partner. When we spend time in nature we see that wild does not mean, “crazed,” but simply “what is,” uncalculated and undiluted. As Zen practitioners, let’s take refuge not from wildness, but in wildness. In my next piece or two I will elaborate on this referring to Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra. As Terry Tempest Williams says, “To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the Wizard of Oz. I think it is quite amazing how much is in the original book by Frank Baum that relates to Zen meditation practice. Here are a few points that stand out for me about the piece, which my dad first read to me when I was sick in bed at four years old. I remember not wanting to get better until he finished the whole book. For me it has stood the test of time. Here’s what stands out for me….
It starts out with Dorothy experiencing colorless (black and white) Kansas bleakness. Her parents have died and a mean old neighbor tries to take her dog, Toto, away from her. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything. Most of us who have come to Buddhist practice were propelled by some deep satisfaction in our lives. I can remember this was the case for me and for many of my friends. We weren’t particularly interested in Buddhism as a religion, but rather saw meditation as a possible vehicle for transformation from an internal bleakness and the bleakness of a culture that we experienced as somewhat stultifying. And then, before she knows it, she, Toto, and her house are whooshed a way in a tornado and plunked down into a beautiful, Technicolor land. Her house lands on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. A good witch, Glenda, appears to her and tells Dorothy that if she wants to return home all she has to do is put on the ruby slippers on the feet of the evil witch. “Never let them off your feet for a moment and you will be able to return home.” As with Dorothy, many of us who meet our spiritual teachers (mine were Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri Roshi), engage with them because we want to access a deep stillness within ourselves, which they and other Buddhist teachers referred to as “our true home.” However, instead of telling us to put on ruby slippers they show us how to sit still on black cushions and as Suzuki said to me, “Just get up and come sit with me every morning.” Dorothy then asked Glenda if she could take her home, and Glenda replied, “No, l cannot do that. But l will give you my kiss, and no one will dare injure a person who has been kissed by the Witch of the North.” Then, “she came close to Dorothy and kissed her gently on the forehead. Where her lips touched the girl, they left a round, shining mark, as Dorothy found out soon after.” From that point on, although Dorothy doesn’t know, she is protected by the power of good. In my own case, although Suzuki never touched me literally, I felt kissed at the deepest level and protected in some fundamental way by the power of good which seemed to emanate from him. Then Glenda the Good sends Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road to find the wizard of Oz who will help her get home. When I coach people to walk on the path, I talk about not worrying about or judging progress, but just take one small turtle-type step at a time. And I counsel them just as the Good Witch counseled Dorothy that, “It is a long journey, through a country that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes dark and terrible.” This means that sometimes you will feel like you are on the wrong road. As Garcia Lorca says, “To take the wrong road is to come to the snow, to come to the snow is to get down on your hands and knees for 20 centuries and eat the snow of the cemeteries.” When we give ourselves away like this, surrendering to all of life and even death, there’s a great opportunity to let go of our small chattering self and open up the vastness of the universe. To do this we need to move beyond our ideas about good and bad, up and down, to a land like Oz which as Frank Baum says is, “beyond rules and uncivilized.” As Dorothy moves along the yellow brick road, she accompanied by three companions. We can see each of these of aspects of ourselves. We need the courage of the Lion to continually practice; the discriminating intelligence of the Scarecrow to sat on the path; the heart of the Tin Woodsman to stay open and available to whatever emotions we experience. And like each of these friends of Dorothy’s, we continue on the path even though we are plagued by self-doubt and feel incompetent and incomplete. Even though threatened by the Wicked Witch, Dorothy and her companions often feel happy and hopeful. Sometimes they feel alone and afraid, but the dark moments always pass. Like Dorothy, all each of us needs to do is stay true to ourselves and stay on our path, even if it seems rough or difficult. We can view Dorothy’s little group as a Sangha, who support each other regardless of what happens. If we walk far enough,” says Dorothy, “we shall some time come to some place.” Along the way Dorothy and her companions get waylaid in a poppy field. These flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever. How easy it is for us to get seduced spiritual beliefs, practice, or ritual that makes us high or to think we have discovered, “the one true way.” This makes me wonder whether Frank Baum had been exposed to Karl Marx who died less than 20 years before The Wizard of Oz was first published. Here is Marx: Religion is the opiate of the people—referring to “functions in society that were similar to the function of opium in a sick or injured person: religion reduced people’s immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions, but it also reduced their energy and their willingness to confront the oppressive, heartless, and soulless. In the poppy field Dorothy, as the smallest, falls victim to these opium-like flowers. “If we leave her here she will die,” said the Lion. “The smell of the flowers is killing us all. I myself can scarcely keep my eyes open, and the dog is asleep already.” “Run fast,” said the Scarecrow to the Lion, “and get out of this deadly flower bed as soon as you can. We will bring the little girl with us, but if you should fall asleep you are too big to be carried.” The allegiance that the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion have toward Dorothy creates a supportive bond that enables her to keep moving along the path regardless of what happens. She only has a Sangha of four, but that’s plenty to sustain her even in the darkest time. Maybe Sangha is the most important component of a spiritual journey. But Sangha only needs to be 2 or 3 people who are willing to give and receive heartfelt support from each other through thick and thin. Dorothy is able to awaken from the intoxication of the poppy field with the help of her friends and they finally enter the Emerald City. Each then meets the Wizard of Oz. To Dorothy, the Wizard appears as a giant head, to the Scarecrow, a beautiful woman, to the Tin Woodsman a ravenous beast, and to the Cowardly Lion, a ball of fire. On your own spiritual quest each of us may see different deities, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Brahma, Buddha, or some other form of a higher power that seems outside of us. The Wizard tells Dorothy and her friends must first defeat the Wicked Witch of the West before he can help them. And in the process of defeating the Witch, both she and her fellow travelers have to face themselves. The journey was beset by danger because the powerful Witch knew that they were coming. She tried to destroy them in a number of different ways. First she sent forty wolves to terrorize them; then a flock of crows to peck their eyes out, and finally swarms of black bees – but each of these were defeated. To me this is reminiscent of Buddha’s sitting determinedly under the Bodhi Tree even as Mara sent army after army of threatening beings to get him to stop his meditation. But Buddha sat unflinchingly through it all. Finally, the Witch sent the Winged Monkeys after the travelers. The sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air. There was a rushing of many wings, a great chattering and laughing; and the sun came out of the dark sky to show the Wicked Witch surrounded by a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair or immense and powerful wings on his shoulders. The leader of the Winged Monkeys flew up to her, his long hairy arms stretched out, and his ugly face grinning terribly; but he saw the mark of the Good Witch’s kiss upon her forehead and stopped short, motioning to the others not to touch her. “We dare not harm this little girl,” he said to them, “for she is protected by the Power of Good, and that is greater than the Power of Evil.” If you develop a deep relationship with a teacher, you may be protected by your teacher’s power of good in the same way, although it does not actually belong to him or to anyone. During this part of the journey, Dorothy’s three friends manifest those qualities, which they believe they don’t have: the Lion behaves courageously, the Tin Woodsman extends his heart to Dorothy’s pain, and the Scarecrow call on his discriminating intelligence. Dorothy, herself, faces death. Like Dorothy and her friends, if we continue on the path gradually we let go of self-doubt, let go of second-guessing ourselves, let go of running away from our inadequacies. Our minds begin to function spontaneously in harmony with the cosmos, so that our brains, heart, and courage flow easily and effortlessly and even death is no big deal. At this point in the story Dorothy confronts the Witch and causes her to melt away. The monkey army that has been terrorizing her becomes her friend. In the same way, as our rigid mind set melts away in our spiritual practice, our wandering monkey-like thoughts no longer bother us and we can even enjoy them. Having succeeded at killing the Wicked Witch, Dorothy and others return to see the Wizard only to discover that he is not beautiful woman, ravenous beast, ball of fire, giant head, but only a frightened human hiding behind an image of power and omnipotence. The spiritual teaching here is that the perfect deity outside of you, whether it be Jesus, Moses, Buddha, a Bodhisattva, or guru is our own creation. The more anxious we are the more we turn toward an authority figure to save us, a phenomena which is happening on a secular level throughout the world in countries like Poland, China, Hungary, Egypt, Russia, and Turkey. This reminds me of the comment my second teacher Katagiri Roshi, made after several trips to San Francisco after the death of Suzuki Roshi. “Every time I go there to help them, he is getting bigger and bigger.” We all want a Wizard to take care of us, forgetting that the only real wizard is within. At this point in the journey, Glenda the Good reappears and tells Dorothy, “Your ruby slippers will carry you over the desert to your home,” “If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.” She returns to Kansas and discovers that Kansas/Oz (i.e. the phenomenal and the enlightened world) are not two. Waking up in her bed, she sees her uncle’s three farm hands are simultaneously the three friends that she has left behind. She could have returned home from the moment she landed in Oz! Whether Frank Baum knew it or not, he was elucidating an ancient Zen truth, since your home is always right here. As the 17th century Zen master Bankei said, instead of trying to accomplish something in your meditation or transform yourself, “Abide as the Unborn.” “Don’t get born!” Your home is right here within you. Instead of falling into identification as a “me,” a “Buddhist,” “enlightened,” “unenlightened,” “young,” “old,” etc., simply realize that, “You are unborn.” Finally, I would like to suggest that that there are four key Zen teachings in this American fairy tale: First, Accept Your Friends for Who They Are A true friend will help you on your life’s journey, quirks and all, and recognize when they need a little help too. You never know when you’ll need them around to rescue you from flying monkeys or when they will need you! Second, Find a Teacher Who Will Kiss You As Dorothy had Glenda, find a spiritual friend who will have your back and help you find your deepest courage, most discriminating intelligence, and heartfelt connection with the world around you. Third, Follow Your Own Yellow Brick Road Follow your own path, even if your sense of direction is not that clear stay on a path that deeply resonates with what’s most important to you, how, in your heart of hearts you want to be and where you want to go. And sing and skip through the journey! Fourth, Look Within for Your Power. As my own teacher said to me, “You have a great treasure within you, do not let anyone take it from you.” Fifth, Remind Yourself to Practice Remind yourself that, regardless of how confused or upset you are, if you stay with your meditation in non-judgmental awareness, at some point you will see that what you are seeking, you already are. Everything is as it is. Let’s give Dorothy the final word on this: “Toto, we’re home – home! And this is my room – and you’re all here – and I’m not going to leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all! Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home!” In my last piece, I wrote about the importance of tapping into and living from our deepest aspiration, even if it is only a “dim vision.” This term is Dogen’s, who writes that enlightenment is ever intimate with dim vision.
As the 8th century Zen teacher Shitou says, “within darkness there is light.” A single ray of light is all we need to bring to life our deepest sense of what we want our future to be. Here are five ways in which we may develop, nurture, and keep alive a vision about our future regardless of how dim it is. First: Trust Your Dim Vision. My root teacher, Suzuki Roshi, had a dim vision of coming to an English speaking country to teach the dharma dating back to his twenties. But his teacher was not in favor of him doing this. He kept this dim vision alive as he developed a friendship with Nora Ransom, a British woman, who lived near him. She taught him English and showed a sincere interest in learning Buddhist meditation. This combined with her British disciplined orderliness undoubtedly impressed him. However, time passed and World War II raised its ugly head. Although he still had thoughts about teaching in the West, he had to pour all his energy into supporting members of the small Zen Buddhist community, which depended on him. Finally, more than a decade after the war was over when Suzuki was in his mid-50s, he learned of an opportunity to come to San Francisco and teach. He had kept his vision alive for more than three decades, but he wondered to himself, “Am I too old to establish myself in a new country?” He remembered Miss Ransom’s disciplined orderliness combined with her hunger to learn meditation and he still had this vision of teaching English-speaking people. It must have been a huge shock to him to discover that the people who began showing up at the San Francisco Zen Center were not at all like Miss Ransom. We (speaking of myself and my friends) were both disorderly and undisciplined. Yet he stayed and worked with us. Over the course of the last decade of his life, his dim vision came to dramatic fruition with the phenomenal success of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind coupled with the development of the first Zen monastery in the west. Second: Embrace Not Knowing. Life has so many twists and turns that we can never really know when and how our aspiration is going to manifest itself. But that’s okay. The best way to bring whatever dim vision we have alive is to actively fumble around. I had a student who had a dim vision of working with kids but instead went to business school and then developed a small business as his father had done. But he was not happy and kept having vague images of working with kids as his business faltered and then failed. Then he stayed home as a house husband with his own kids, then he volunteered at his kids school and finally he ended up teaching at a charter school, work which he finds deeply satisfying. But through most of his journey he had no choice but to embrace not knowing. If we think we have our future figured out, it’s likely that we are caught by a somewhat superficial view of our life. Third: Take Risks. Suzuki Roshi took a huge risk in leaving behind a familiar life to settle into a milieu as alien as that of the San Francisco beatnik and then counter-culture, in many ways diametrically opposite to the civilized, polite behavior of Miss Ransom. But he stayed with us and we stayed with him. Fourth: Make One Mistake After Another. Take my own life for example. I started off as a psychology major in college because I had a dim vision of helping people who were suffering psychologically. But I was bored out of my mind by Stanford’s focus on rat experimentation and behavioral psychology. I realized I had made a mistake in my choice of major and switched to speech and drama. After graduating I kept my dim vision alive by reading R.D. Lang and others who talked about psychosis as a spiritual journey. Then my wife and I took my sister in after she had a psychotic break—I utterly failed at R.D. Lang’s approach and after a tumultuous month we had to send my sister back to California. Then I got a job working with folks with mental health issues and seemed to be finally developing mental health competency, that is, until my younger brother’s suicide. Again, I felt like an abject failure and blamed my incompetency partly for his death. Shortly, after that I got a job, directing a non-profit agency and made a determined effort to develop community-based options for people like my brother and sister. Legislator after legislator slammed his door on me. Each time I fell on my face I came back to Dogen’s statement “A Zen practitioner’s life is one mistake after another” until I finally found a couple of key legislators who chose to help me implement my dim vision. Fifth: Keep Trying. Trust your vision regardless of how dim it is, embrace not knowing, take risks, and don’t give up just because you make mistakes over and over. As W. B. Yeats suggests in his poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” we may feel that we have lost our ability to perform tricks with our strategic thinking mind, but that may also mean that we are ready to return to the root, as in a second poem of his when he writes: Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth. Dogen refers to this as “going beyond buddha.” May we all wither into the truth! In my last piece I talked about happiness and explained that we can only experience it “now” when we are fully present, never in the past or future, where we spend so much of our lives.
But life is short and our planning and projecting ability is part of being uniquely human. Each of us has an opportunity to move toward a future in which we live from our deepest aspiration. In my book Nothing Holy About It, I talked about Victor Frankl’s experience in a Nazi concentration camp as well as the experiences of people in the camp he interviewed after the war. Frankl claims that the only way he and others who lived happy lives afterward survived was that they shared one common denominator: each had thought hard about a life after and imagined themselves living it. They were able to do this even though, or possibly because they had been stripped of everything they identified with—the people, objects, life, which supported them. Using a Soto Zen term, we could say that each was able to get in touch with their own unique “dim vision.” The term “dim vision” was used negatively in Buddhist literature for hundreds of years until Dogen turned it on its head in the 13th century. Originally, it is a descriptor of the blind man with cataracts, who cannot see the world clearly because he is ensnared by his thoughts, memories, and their projections. This early teaching made the claim that through meditation practice we can move from this deluded state to a thoroughly enlightened one. However, for Dogen, as well as my two teachers, regardless of how much meditation we do, we are never free from delusion. But this isn’t negative. Meditation practice can both help us experience the deep happiness in the present, and see and fully accept our delusion. In order to do this we must allow ourselves to experience what William Butler Yeats referred to in the title of one of his poems as The Circus Animals Desertion. At this late stage in his life he feels that the ability to use words to create wonderful worlds that will move people has deserted him. He has lost the tricks of his trade, which is not at all a bad thing. As is the case with serious meditators, he has been stripped of everything he has learned and identified with. If you do your own stripping way, you too, can discover your own dim vision. I often refer to the meditation process as peeling layers of an onion, you cry as you peel away layer after layer, often in a manner that seems endless. But the more you let the layers of thought and emotion peel away, the closer you are to your still, empty center, your true resting place. After Yeats has done his own peeling away, there’s the last line of his poem: Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. With all of the should’s and should not’s, all of the ideas about accomplishing something or impressing others stripped away we can each tap into this rag and bone shop. And its not at all foul from the Zen sense, but fertile with the possibility. That we can live from our deepest aspirations. When Dogen writes enlightenment is ever intimate with dim-sightedness, he is encouraging us to embrace this shadow side. As the 8th century Zen teacher Shitou says, “Within darkness there is light.” A single ray of light is all we need to bring to life our deepest aspirations. Often I am asked if Zen practice increases happiness and my answer is a resounding “yes”. Research suggests that about 50% of our happiness is due to genetics and life circumstances. The rest is up to us. We either create happiness or we don’t through our habits and our outlook on life.
But please don’t get too goal oriented about creating happiness, since happiness can only happen now. We could even say that sustained happiness is nothing more or less than a series of “nows.” The founder of Soto Zen, Eihei Dogen, suggests that happiness arises naturally when we are intimate with each moment rather than using this moment to try to acquire happiness in the future. He refers to this as practice-enlightenment, rather than doing practice IN ORDER to get enlightened at some time in the future. But what about suffering, which is an inevitable part of our lives? During my last bout of Lyme’s disease I spent about four weeks housebound, most of the time lying on my back. Whenever fear came in about whether I would ever get healthy again, I simply breathed into that fear, felt the sensations surrounding it and experienced happiness right there under the covers. It’s simpler than it seems. Here are eight tips to happiness through practice-enlightenment: 1. Stop fretting over things that are beyond your control. It’s beyond my control that I have chronic Lyme’s disease. As long as I follow certain dietary restrictions, which I have not done too well, it is generally in remission. When the Chinese Zen master, Ma Tsu, was so ill he could not attend activities in the monastery, his assistant went to his room and asked him if he was ok. His reply was “The sun-faced Buddha, the moon-faced Buddha” referring to Buddhist mythology in which the Sun-faced Buddha lives for one thousand eight hundred years. And the Moon-faced Buddha lives only one day and one night. Which Buddha do you think is happier? 2. Practice bare awareness of emotions. Emotion can leave you and those around you damaged and unhappy. But it’s possible to open to each emotion and let it pass through with absolutely no judgment, as I practiced doing while I was lying in my bed. 3. Live a life of sila/morality in accord with the core teaching that we are undivided from each other and all of life. When we act counter to this, we create feelings of regret, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness. Since we are undivided from each other, any activity that harms others also harms ourselves, and vice versa. Find your own moral compass and do your best to keep it pointed in a direction that supports this truth. 4. Engage in some physical activity daily. Research shows that keeping the body moving for as little as ten minutes a day releases GABA, a neurotransmitter that both soother and limits impulsivity. Since the time of the earliest Zen monasteries, teachers have built manual labor into the daily routine of practitioners. In non-monastic settings the kind of exercise we do is irrelevant: stretching, biking, yoga, tai chi are all good. If we don’t take care of our dharma container, happiness will be forever elusive. 5. Make your surroundings reflect your interconnectedness with the world. Create and live in spaces that are both appealing and calming. Keep your space uncluttered and adorn it with anything that evokes this: a picture of your family, a plant, or something else that helps you feel connected and contented. 6. Replace your fixed mindset with a flexible one that is oriented toward growth. Often things happen to us that appear to be more than we can handle. We feel hopeless and overwhelmed and just want to shut down. Sometimes when I get a fixed mindset how my age limits me as I approach my 75th birthday. I think about my friend, Molly. At 85 she organized and completed a campaign to raise several million dollars to support the non-profit I was directing. In ensuing years it seemed like her energy knew no bounds. I took her out to lunch on her 98th birthday and she invited me to her 100th birthday party while we were eating, adding with a twinkle in her eye, “if you are still alive.” (She died peacefully two or three weeks later) Research has been done on people who have flexible/growth mindsets. These people seem to be happier because they are better at handling difficulties. They outperform those with a fixed mindset because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new. This was certainly the case for Molly. 7. Be generous to both yourself and others. My experience in supporting Zen students over many years suggests that two things are equally important to make this work: First, don’t leave yourself out. It’s hard to be generous to others in a natural, affectionate way if you are not generous to yourself. And secondly, don’t turn “be generous to others” into a mandate that you need to do to or else. Part of developing a flexible or growth mindset is letting go of rigid mandates and the self-judgment that often accompanies them. Generosity to others is the most natural outgrowth of a feeling of interconnectedness. 8. Remind yourself that this activity, whatever it is, is the best chance you have for intimacy and happiness. The mind has a tendency either to magnify past pleasure or pain or create a future of peace and harmony or scary demons. But only in the present can we experience real joy. As the Dhammapada says, “If you speak or act with a heartmind that is calm and clear, happiness follows you, like a shadow that never leaves.” When I am asked to describe in a little more detail what the happiness of practice-enlightenment is like, I refer to the definition of “flow” in western psychology: an engaged state of focus in which we are completely engrossed in an activity, which may include losing awareness of the passage of time and other external distractions. If you want to experience this for yourself, a meditation practice is essential. And if you want to experience it outside meditation, begin working on things that you already love doing until you find what gets you flowing. Pick those that resonate and deeply enjoy and move gradually beyond these until this becomes your natural way of being. And good luck! |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
Categories |