I’d now like to talk about the mythological Buddhist layman, Vimalakirti, who is considered an embodiment of a life based on the second middle way, which became important with the rise of Mahayana Buddhism a half century or so after Buddha’s death.
The first middle way, which is carefully articulated in the Pali Canon lays out the ideal life of a Buddhist meditation practitioner as a mid-point between indulgence and austerity: “Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. There is an addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is an addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.” Extreme spiritual austerities were highly valued in Buddha’s time and during his six-year spiritual quest, he practiced many forms of self-mortification which including activities like starving himself. However, these activities did not help him get any closer to liberation. After he did attain enlightenment he taught about a middle way, but this middle way seems severely austere by 21st century American standards, although it was not during the time in which he lived. This early middle way was passed on from generation to generation and adhered to by serious meditators, predominately monks, nuns, and priests. It included celibacy, wearing discarded rags sewed together as clothing, staying away from money, and not eating after noon, all to aid practitioners in letting go of attachment to the world. It is true that lay people were not expected to do these things but starting in India and continuing into China and Japan, there was the sense that when householders reached a certain age, they too could take up this way of life. We can assume the celibacy mandate was violated frequently over the centuries, as it was in Christianity. Nevertheless, it endured until the Meiji Restoration in the late 1800s in Japan when both clerical meat eating and marriage were de-criminalized. Even my own teacher could never rise to a high rank within the Soto Zen lineage, because he had married. However, this middle way is radically different than the middle way which developed 500 years later in early Mahayana Buddhism. It is personified by Vimalakirti, who had extensive wealth, as well as a wife and children. This middle way, which was articulated clearly by the Buddhist teacher, Nagarjuna, is called the empty middle way, or the non-dual middle way. Its basic teaching is that the division that we make between good and bad, up and down, or any polarities, is incorrect and somewhat arbitrary, since all life is a flow of interbeing. Even the so-called “middle” is empty of a separate fixed identity, and consequently it includes all life within it. While this teaching has been emphasized for the last 2000 years in Mahayana circles, the first middle way has carried such force that there are only a handful of examples after Vimalakirti of monks orlay people who are considered exemplary in their manifestation of this. Nevertheless, there are many Zen stories which point to the importance of living from the empty middle. There is, for example, the encounter between Yumen and one of his monks: “A student of the way asked Yunmen, “What is Buddha?” Yunmen replied, “Dried shit stick.” And there is the equally well-known story of one monk berating another one for violating the rule about not touching women by carrying a nun on his shoulders across a flooding stream. His fellow monk replied “Oh, is she still on your shoulders? I put her down when we left the stream.” So, the teaching is there even though exemplars of it are few and far between. Vimalakirti is the first and only scriptural example of someone living and teaching from this empty middle. Since I have encouraged people I have ordained over the last twenty years to make their families and their careers part and parcel of their Zen practice, I find Vimalakirti’s life and teaching of special significance.
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In my first piece on Black Elk and Buddha I talked about the importance of the circle, which includes all life within it, as both the Lakota and Buddhist traditions teach. The Zen teacher Dogen uses particularly beautiful imagery in evoking the circle. He says:
“All existence is one bright pearl…. One bright pearl contains the inexhaustible past, existing throughout time and arriving in the present. The body exists now and the mind exists now, but nevertheless it is one bright pearl. A stalk of grass, a tree, the mountains and rivers of this world are not only themselves — they are one bright pearl.,,, The whole universe is one bright pearl. There is neither beginning nor end, and all space and all time is condensed into this one point. This body is the one body of Truth. This body is one phrase. This body is bright light. We cannot help but love this one bright pearl that shines with boundless light like this.” This reminds me of a Chinese Zen story from the Blue Cliff Record. A student asks his teacher, “What is the essence of prajna?” The teacher replies, “The oyster swallows the bright moon.” The Sanskrit word prajna means wisdom in Zen, but a deep wisdom that precedes knowledge. Pra (like our prefix “pre,” meaning “before”) and knowledge, jna, which is a dividing up of things. The wisdom of undividedness. This reminds me of the wisdom that the Lakota elders teach emanates from “the unbroken circle.” How is an oyster swallowing the moon being wise? Maybe that’s how it produces its pearl. When I was a kid, we used to ride our bikes to the yacht harbor not too far from my house. Along the edge of the water were scores and scores of small oysters which we pulled out of the bay and tried to pry open. But their shells, were incredibly thick and difficult to open. Like us, oysters are resistant and strong. Yet, unlike us they have no eyes or ears to protect themselves, so they need to “clam up” just to survive. But something wonderful is happening inside that shell. As pieces of sand accumulate, the oyster can’t break them down or get rid of them, so instead she creates a beautiful case. She would like to get rid of them, because they are abrasive and cause her to suffer. But if she does absolutely nothing about them, just stays still, encasing them, they transform themselves into a pearl. Any of you who have sat for hours in meditation retreats, know how difficult it can be to do this without repressing or indulging whatever constellation of thoughts and emotions have lodged in your psyche. We want to just cast off the shell of ego, just get rid of the abrasive piece of sand and open to the great interdependent circle of like the Zen and Lakota elders tell us about. But paradoxically, we can only produce “one bright pearl” by spending time doing nothing at all. The only way to grow the pearl is to quietly remain immobile in our shells. To transform sand takes grit; the patience and persistence of the second and third paramita, which are so important in meditation practice (or accomplishing anything, for that matter). Can we do this in periods of adversity like many of us are experiencing now? Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania has been studying self-control and grit to determine how they might predict both academic and professional success. Her research suggests that grit is a better indicator of success than factors such as IQ or family income. This is not at all surprising to me. As I tell my students over and over, all you need is patience and persistence to grow your own bright pearl. In her TED talk Duckworth says, “Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Angela’s research suggests that grit is not related to talent. She refers to the growth mindset, proposed by Carol Dweck at Stanford University which I have talked about in Dharma talks over the years. Growth mindset is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. It can change with an individual’s efforts. Dr. Duckworth is saying that grit definitely matters much more than intelligence or any factor when it comes to succeeding at something. The most important factor in success at anything is continuing your efforts without giving up even when you’re faced with failures, regardless of how many times you fall down. I have supported many students at Zen center over the years. And each one who has an aspiration to open up to their still natures, I encourage to sit, sit, sit, sit. If someone attends even half of the eighteen retreat days that we have per year, or spends an equivalent amount time doing hanblecyas or vision cries, the rough piece of sand within them invariably loses its edges and becomes round and smooth. And at some point, the oyster swallows the moon! As Black Elk said, “I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children.” Or as Dogen said, “The entire universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.” Perfect, without corners, formed by fully digesting whatever suffering enters into our psyche. Can you do it? No, the pearl can only create itself as you quietly sit quietly and non-judgmentally, cradling the piece of sand. As some of you know, I spent several years working with Elmer Running, who, like Black Elk, was a teacher in the Lakota tradition.
A key symbol, both in the Lakota and Zen traditions, is the circle. In Lakota tradition, the circle is considered a sacred space, where people meditate or pray. Within the circle, they touch the earth, as Buddha did when he was first asked to describe his awakening. Since the circle includes all life, their prayers always include reaching out to all beings from within that circle. Here’s what Black Elk says: “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is done in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance.” This is very similar to the enso in Zen, a circle drawn with a single ink stroke as a symbol of the interbeing of all life. And then we have the way we end of all of our chants at Zen center, bowing and giving ourselves away to, “all beings, bodhisattvas, mahasattvas.” Lakota people do something similar when they make an offering and wish well-being to all creatures as they repeat “all my relatives” at the beginning and end of each ritual. Similarly, we end each chant with, “All buddhas ten directions three times.” These ten directions include all conceivable directions in the universe, the ordinal, the cardinal, and the sky and earth. Here is Black Elk again: “Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. But they [Whites] put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone: we are dying, for the power is not with us anymore.” In the Zen tradition, while meditating we hold our hands in the cosmic mudra position, forming a circle; while in the Lakota tradition, the pipe with its circular bowl, is the central spiritual icon. When practitioners load the pipe with tobacco, each piece is considered to be a different species of life and when we smoke it, the heat and fire melts the separateness of each species as an acknowledgment of their interdependence. When I brought Elmer a pipe, which an aspirant does when he wants help from an elder, he said to me “if you take care of this pipe and treat it well, you will be able to help many Whites” and then we smoked the pipe together. When I had my first meeting with my Zen teacher, Suzuki Roshi, he showed me how to sit on a circular cushion with hands in the cosmic mudra. When I did a hanblecya or “vision cry” under Elmer’s supervision, I was instructed to hold the pipe which was full of tobacco for four days and four nights, being careful to not allow any tobacco to spill out of its circular bowl, since each included a species that needed to be cared for or it might perish. Continuing with this comparison, intensive meditative retreats are key components of Zen practice and vision cries are key components of Lakota practice. In Zen retreats, we meditate all day keeping our hands in the circular cosmic mudra. In Lakota vision cries, the aspirant holds the loaded pipe with its circular bowl upright for up to four days and four nights, being careful to not let any pieces fall out. When I did this under the tutelage of Elmer Running years ago, he instructed me to ask the Great Mystery, which we might call “circle of interbeing” in Buddhism, to enter my heart. In a similar vein, when I lead Zen retreats, I suggest to my students that if they sit quietly doing absolutely nothing for an entire day or more, keeping their hands in the cosmic mudra position, their mind will quiet naturally fall into their hearts, and they will open up to heart-mind or Buddha nature. Finally, here’s a quote from Dogen, demonstrating further how important the circle is in Zen teaching: “On the great road of buddhas and ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way.” As you can see, both Black Elk and Buddha, as well as their followers, describe the path to awakening as an endless circle; a dynamic spiral which includes all life. I have always been fond of Fritz Perls’ slogan, “Lose your mind and come to your senses” because that’s what meditation practice is really all about. When our worries and fears dissipate, we come into the present moment and we open up to a world of enhanced sensory perception with kaleidoscopic sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells.
The complement to sense perception is sensory interoception– sense experiences within the body, including hunger, thirst, breathlessness, pain, temperature, heartbeat, and muscle tension. Interoception is related to how we process emotion, alter our sense of the body’s physiological condition, and shift our state of mind. Some interesting studies have been done that measure the accuracy with which people recognize their own heartbeat. The chief author of these studies, Vivien Ainley, concludes that those with more highly attuned interoceptive awareness are, “more accurate on heartbeat tasks, more intuitive, experience stronger emotional arousal, have better memory for emotional material, and perhaps be better able to control their negative emotions.” A separate group of researchers at Stanford University have concluded that people with depression are less attuned to their own heartbeat than others. Their research led them to suggest that the worse someone’s interoceptive awareness is, “the less intense were their experiences of positive emotion in daily life, and the more likely they were to have difficulty with everyday decision-making.” Meditation is a way of increasing interoceptive ability. It also heightens our awareness of implicit memories. Explicit memories consist of factual knowledge and autobiographical information. And implicit memories are emotional responses coming from body sensations—They are feeling based rather than factual and they travel in different pathways in the brain. Both types of memories have to be integrated later to form one unified memory. Our thoughts go into, and remain in, overdrive when we are not aware of the emotional memories lodged in our body that stimulate them. Meditation is a way of increasing our awareness of implicit memories. As Buddha says in the Anguttara Nikaya, “There is one thing, monks, that, cultivated and regularly practiced leads to a deep sense of urgency…to the supreme peace…to mindfulness and clear comprehension…to the attainment of right vision and knowledge…to happiness here and now…to realizing deliverance by wisdom and the fruition of Holiness: It is mindfulness of the body.” There seem to be three layers of interoceptive awareness. On the most superficial level are the stories we tell ourselves including our reflection on these stories and attempts to can change them. A little deeper are our emotions that provide fuel for our stories, and deeper than these is our bodily felt sense. Here’s Buddha again: “I teach awareness of the body in the body… If the body is not mastered by meditation, the mind cannot be mastered. If the body is mastered, mind is mastered.” Through our meditation practice, our attention drops from our storyline to our emotions and into our moment to moment physical experience. In other words, the mind drops into the heart. We cannot will this to happen, but if we practice bare awareness, this happens on its own and we begin to rest in our natural center of being, heart-mind (citta in Sanskrit, as in bodhicitta, awake heart-mind). Here’s an exercise the Buddhist teacher Phillip Moffitt has used to differentiate between normal sense perception and interoceptive awareness: “Hold your right hand up and begin by looking at the back of it. What do you see? You might notice the skin color, the veins, and whether there are any wrinkles or scars. Now turn it over and look at your palm. You might notice its shape or the length of your fingers. Alternate between looking at the front and the back of your hand. You might observe the length of the various finger bones in relation to each other or the size of your knuckles. You might notice the pattern that the lines make in the palm of the hand. Just witness these things. Now interoceptive: rest your hand for a moment. With your eyes closed, raise your hand again. Start to move your hand in space. Let the wrist move with the hand. You might curl the fingers in toward your palm, then extend them out a little. With your attention, “feel” the thumb, the forefinger, the middle finger, the ring finger, the little finger, the palm, and the back of the hand. Now lower your hand and open your eyes.” Moffitt is talking about two very different experiences of looking at the hand. The second one is nothing more nor less than the felt sense of the body, which can only be tapped into through interoceptive awareness, what I call bare awareness. Emotions lodge in the body. Then the mind worries, and our emotional suffering grows. But through meditative awareness, we simply relax and soften through our thoughts and our emotions into our sensations. When this happens, our mind falls into our heart. The best vehicle for us to increase our introceptive awareness is meditation. For several years I supported Molly in her meditation practice. She had severe asthma that went back to her childhood. By conflating her physical experience and her mental reaction, asthma has become her identity. When I first met her, she told me that she was an “asthmatic person.” The first thing I encouraged her to do was try sitting in meditation with her breathalyzer, which she was very dependent on, by her side, but not using it until she had to. When she did this over a period of weeks, she expressed surprise that she only had mild constrictions in her throat, that most of her stress was due to anxiety about having an asthmatic attack. I helped her begin to look at her body as her teacher. Little by little she learned to be aware of not only the constriction in her throat, but her anxiety and the underlying sensations as they moved through and around her shoulders and neck. Little by little her interoceptive awareness increased and she developed the ability to sit quite calmly for long periods without using the breathalyzer. She still had asthma, but she became comfortable sitting in long retreats without using her breathalyzer at all. Once she rushed into see me for a one to one and exclaimed, “Even though I have asthma, I am not an asthmatic person and I never really was!” Maybe next time you’re feeling angry, sad, scared, or frustrated, you would like to soften into and through your emotions to your sensations. If you are kindly attentive to them, they always break up and heart-mind is liberated from its constriction. All you have to do is patiently and persistently stay with this process and you will experience a freedom beyond the limits of what you can imagine. In this piece I want to complete my discussion of six gates into a life of deep and joyful interconnectedness, using Basho’s poems as examples. Let me review what I have a touched on so far. The first gate is longing.
Many of us give ourselves to spiritual practice because we feel a deep longing to move beyond our screen of incessant remembering, regretting, and rehearsing that keeps us feeling cut off, isolated, and even lonely. And as we dive into a meditation practice, we may begin to realize that our screen shields us from the second gate: unpredictability and uncertainty in our lives and in the world. As we deepen our awareness of how uncertain everything is, especially in times like these, may call us to enter the third gate: simplification of our external life, so we can simplify the space in our heads. A couple of more poems on the gate of simplicity: Snowy morning alone, still able to chew dried salmon. Here is Basho on a cold morning, aging, and alone. He is eating dried fish, commoner’s food, and yet expressing a deep satisfaction with his life stripped to its bare essentials. the basho thrashing in wind rain drips into an iron tub a listening night Basho named himself after the basho, the fragile and yet resilient banana plant/tree which grew right outside the door of his hut. The banana tree bends in the wind, but seldom breaks. We can imagine its bamboos leaves torn by a fierce typhoon—a huge sound and then the plink of the rain against washtub—near, precise—a sound so intimate that each clink includes all life within it. Are you taking advantage of the limitations forced on us by this pandemic to have listening morning and listening evenings? I hope so! Do you find that you are more aware of the sounds, sights, and textures in the world around you than you were before the pandemic? I hope so. You may be ready to enter the fourth gate: Saying Yes. Here’s something the from the early 20th century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy: “For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great yes or the great no. It is clear at once who has the yes ready within him and is saying it. He goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d still say no. Yet that no drags him down all his life. “ Say Yes Quickly Forget your life. Say, “God is Great.” Get up. You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray. You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many. Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, “How are you,” and no one says, “How aren’t you?” Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight, thrashing in the dark. Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. Is what I say true? Say yes quickly…. you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe. Both the first line and the last line of this poem reminds me that my second teacher talked about the positive energy evoked by saying “yes.” He referred to the two years he spent in a Zen monastery, where the expectation was that whenever he or any of the monks in training was approached about anything by a senior monk he would immediately exclaim “Hai,” or “Yes.” And the psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who worked with seriously depressed clients taught therapists to ask clients anything which would require a “yes” answer. Once they had answered “yes” once, they were very likely to begin saying yes to any number of things and this usually affected their state of mind. Erickson called this “developing a yes set.” Here’s a poem by Basho on this theme: For one who says “I am tired of children, there are no flowers. I talked to a mother recently who is exhausted, because her two boys who would normally be in school and at camp, have been housebound for five months with no end in sight. The main feature of her spiritual practice these days is saying yes to them in the middle of her exhaustion. Now I’d like to touch on the fifth gate, Intimacy. The gate of intimacy is also the gate of meditation, since a meditative mind is the best tool for exploring a single moment’s precise perception and depths. If you see and hear for yourself, all things speak with and through you. As Basho wrote, “To learn about the pine tree, go to the pine tree…to learn about the bamboo, go to the bamboo.” After Basho moved out of the Zen monastery he lived in while in his early 30s, he spent the rest of his life as a wanderer, concerned not about destination but the quality of attention—in other words, he practiced intimacy: If we were to gain mastery over things, their lives would vanish under us without a trace. And here’s another one: Growing old eating seaweed teeth hitting sand He shows us how to be intimate and deeply appreciate the simple objects of daily living. Here’s a final one: Coldness deep rooted leeks, washed white. We can imagine him pulling leeks out of frozen soil, washed them in icy streams—coldness in hands, whiteness of leeks penetrating his body and mind. The sixth gate is: cracking open. To enter this gate, we need to first enter the gates of longing, uncertainty. simplicity, saying yes, and intimacy. The basho or banana plant including the one growing outside his door is an example. Not only are they resilient, when the water from a storm penetrates the stem, water pours out from its roots. This cracking open of the ego shell happens when thelife force is no longer stifled by thinking mind. As the Chinese Zen poet, Li Po, wrote, several hundred years before Basho: Meditation on Ching Ting Mountain The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me until only the mountain remains. Here’s my favorite poem by Basho about cracking open: On this road walks no one this autumn eve Basho has moved beyond the personal self, beyond being sad and bereft. Even though he is alone, he is rooted in deep calmness of the autumn evening. Once Basho said to one of his students, “The problem with most poems is that they are subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or objective,” the student asked. “No, I mean subjective or objective,” Basho replied. We discover this for ourselves when we crack open beyond the limitations of “self and other.” Here’s a second poem about cracking open: Cutting a tree seeing the sawed trunk it grew from: tonight’s moon. We can imagine Basho cutting a tree, pruning away dead wood and seeing the moon right in front of him; a metaphor for the mind that becomes very quiet and suddenly cracks open, and experiences everyone and everything bathed in luminosity We start by longing for something deeper, experience uncertainty, we simplify, we say yes, we practice intimacy and crack open as bodhisattvas, but this is not the end of our journey, since as my first teacher said, “There are no enlightened people, only enlightened activity,” a wonderful practice we can do for the rest of our lives. |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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