In my next pieces I am going to discuss gates through the fences our confined, often agitated self builds to protect itself from a world it views as threatening. I will use a revision of a framework proposed by poet and Zen practitioner Jane Hirshfield in examining the teaching poems of the 17th century Zen practitioner and haiku master, Basho.
These six gates are: 1.) Longing, 2.) Uncertainty, 3.) Simplicity, 4.) Saying YES, 5.) Intimacy, and 6.) Cracking Open. In this piece I will talking about the first three. The first gate into Basho is Longing. In Basho’s The Narrow Road Within he speaks of priests, pilgrims, and poets who died on the road, practicing meditation and living close to nature. Here is his own poem about that: I am resolved to bleach on the moors my body pierced by the wind This reminds me of Ramakrishna, considered by many to be the most deeply enlightened being in India during the last 150 years. He says, “Who weeps for God? People shed a whole jug of tears for wife and children. They swim in tears for money. But who really weeps? Cry with a real cry. Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn, out comes the sun.” If we replace “weeping for God” with “weeping to open beyond ego to heart-mind or Buddha nature,” Ramakrishna sounds like a Zen teacher. Basho elaborates on this longing by quoting Kukai,“Don’t follow the ancient masters. Seek what they sought.” When you yearn for something, this can propel you to become focused and one pointed. When I get a chocolate yearning, I become one pointed in my search for chocolate until I get it. I was so unfocused on my studies for a while in college that my roommate wondered if I was A.D.D. But when I began reading about the experiences of mystics in the east and west as they spoke of a peace which is deeper than the thinking mind, my yearning to experience this was so strong that I not only began a sitting practice, I could sit for long periods of time focusing, focusing, focusing, with considerably more one pointedness than my roommate did with his studying. Often, I say that the second step on the eightfold path, right intention or aspiration, is the most important one, since it propels us to move one pointedly along the path until the stillness which is beyond thought and yet surrounds it shows itself to us. Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, Gate 1. Permeability Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?) The second gate is Uncertainty (one of the Three Marks of Existence Buddha spoke of). How can we satisfy out spiritual longing when everything is so uncertain? Here’s Stanley Kunitz’ take on it, written before his death at 78: “There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us. Each time I think ‘this,’ it answers ‘that.’ Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness. If I then say “that,” it too is taken away. Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity. When the cat waits in the path-hedge, no cell of her body is not waiting. This is how she is able so completely to disappear. I would like to enter the silence portion as she does. To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live, one shadow fully at ease inside another.” Basho lived in the late 1600s in Japan; a time of famine, flood, social turmoil, and desperate poverty. He wrote the following poem about a two-year-old child abandoned by the side of the road a not unusual occurrence during that time of great deprivation. Basho tossed him/her food, continued his journey and then was upset and even despondent. He wrote, The cries of monkey are hard for a person to bear. What of this child, given to autumn winds? As I write this piece, our Covid epidemic continues unabated. Medical experts hoped there would be a reduction in cases during the summer. But instead, cases are increasing in most parts of the country and many hospitals are overflowing with infected people. Many people are anxious, because the future is so uncertain. We hope things will get better, but we have no idea when. A question many of us have is how to keep the strengths of our friendships alive during this time, since we are generally confined to a two-dimensional world. Even when there is no coronavirus, maintaining deep friendships can be difficult and uncertain. But friendship is mutual give and take and it’s especially important in times of uncertainty. Basho again: Now being seen off Now seeing off—the outcome-- autumn in Kiso As a lifetime traveler, he deeply values his friendships even though he continually leaving his friends during behind never knowing if he will see them again. As I sit behind my house in late September. I am surrounded by the beauty of the trees changing color, everything departing, not knowing when and even if I will see some friends more than two dimensionally and even wondering if the Zen center will be open again. Uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty. But uncertainty can also give us the chance to relate in a new way. Instead of getting caught by before and after, we can just be with what is; loneliness, sadness, even anxiety. When we do this in a non-judgmental way, our emotional heaviness drops away quite naturally and we feel a lightness and joy that is not of time. In this time of isolation and uncertainty, we have more opportunity than usual to unburden our minds of thought. This leads me to the third gate into Basho, Simplicity. He says, “The works of other schools or poetry are like colored painting; my disciples paint with black ink.” When your life is stripped of the wealth of responsibilities that you usually are juggling, the practice of doing one task at a time and fully giving yourself to it may be more much more possible. Whether I am washing the stairs with my wife or walking around the block, it is so much easier for me to be fully present when I don’t have an array of activities vying for my time. In Japanese Zen this is called the practice of “shikan” or “just to.” We may even find ourselves settling into a deep stillness right in the middles of our stair washing, a deep stillness that, as I said above, is not of time. In this piece I will talk about gathas, which are similar to mantras except that they tend to be the focus of specific activities to help us be more meditative rather than attached to sitting, itself. Gatha is a derivation of the Sanskrit word “gai,” which loosely means songs or verses that call us to the present moment. As with mantras we may join them with the breath or use them to gently disrupt our internal chatter with or without our breath. At our Zen center we used to have gathas posted in key places for activities like waking up in the morning, brushing our teeth, taking out the garbage, entering the meditation hall –and we even had one posted by the mirror in the bathroom for shaving.
Here are a few samples: Driving a Car (Andrew Weiss) This car is my legs. It goes where I choose. When I drive with awareness, Everyone lives in safety. Turning on the Television (Andrew Weiss) Mind and television. Receive what I choose. I select well-being And nourish joy. Preparing Food (Andrew Weiss) Earth, water, sun, and air, All live in this food I prepare. Before Taking Food (Thich Nhat Hanh) My bowl, empty now, will soon be filled with precious food. Beings all over the world are struggling to live. How fortunate we are to have this meal. Gathas are used with any specific activity to help us move into what is called the Threefold Purity; no idea of actor, action, or acted upon. Here’s another example (author unknown): Feeding Cats in the Morning Breathing in I hear the sound of a snapping lid Breathing out I smell beef or chicken Spooning food into your bowl before the sun rises I bid you good morning, my feline friend As with mantras, we can compose our own gathas inspired by our daily experiences, as above. It’s good to choose an activity that we regularly perform. We create and memorize the gatha, then we recite it each time we engage in the activity. When we do this persistently, our activities may become a sort of meditation in motion. Here are three simple steps to take once you have selected a gatha (You might follow the same steps for a mantra). Recite, Synchronize, and Simplify. As an example, here’s one that I wrote to use during my daily walk to the lake near my house. Looking at Bde Maka Ska, Seeing my true nature in its reflection, Heartmind at peace Step One: I stop before going down to the lake, aware of my inbreath and my outbreath. I observe the beauty of the lake’s shimmering surface. Then I recite the entire gatha. Step Two: I synchronize with my breath: “Looking at Bde Maka Ska,” I breathe in; followed by “Seeing my true nature,” as I breathe out; followed by “in its reflection,” as I breathe in. Finally, “Heartmind at peace,” as I breathe out. Step Three: I shorten the mantra or gatha after I have practiced with it and internalized it. Breathing in, I say, “looking.” Breathing out, I say, “seeing my true nature.” Breathing in and out, I say “Peace.” I continue this as long as I am with the activity. Here are some other examples of gathas: 1.) If you find yourself habitually checking the upcoming weather on your phone, turn it into a meditation practice. As you click the icon, breathe in and notice the temperature. Regardless of how hot or cold it is, exhale and silently say, “This is.” This may help you short-circuit all the junk you say to yourself (e.g., “yuk, it’s going to snow, or rain, when is it ever going to get warm? What am I doing living here? etc.) Instead, you can embrace the weather just as it is, which can bring you great peace of mind. 2. A student I have worked with has become addicted to checking social media throughout the day. Regardless of what the icon is, whether it’s on Instagram or something else the habitual clicking it open becomes a drug for our restless little self. This student’s practice has become: before clicking the icon, taking a breath and observing his state of mind; seeing whatever’s going on and then noticing any judgments he has about his habit—realizing his urge to distract from himself from whatever activity he has been engaged in. 3. I have been supporting someone who finds Tik Tok her link to the outside world during the pandemic!She admitted that she continually asks herself, How many likes and follows did I get? For which posts? With my support, she has developed the following practice: Breathing in when she clicks, and saying, “watching my thoughts.” And then as she breathes out, releasing them as she says, “returning to my body.” Then attending to any part of her body that holds tension: her throat, belly, jaw, feet. And repeating that as appropriate. 4. When taking a shower, you can turn a series of robotic movements into an exercise of feeling good: I breathe in, feeling the warm water. I breathe out letting go of worries and concerns. Then you can shorten this to: Warm Water, letting go, Warm water, letting go. I encourage you to come up with your own words or phrases to help cut thru your chatter during your meditation or outside of it. Whatever actions are mindless and automatic in your life could use mantra or gatha support since anything can be the seed for spiritual transformation. We can turn all our rote activities into little gateways into a deep quietness. Little by little, the tangle of our thoughts loosens, and we crack open to feel a connection with all life. When we do this, the mind drops into the heart and joins with the breath and activity, returning us to our deepest self. In my next posts I am going to talk about mantras and gathas. A mantra is a syllable, word, or group of words that has psychological or spiritual power. Early mantras go back 3000 years where they were first used on the Indian continent. Here are a couple of definitions:
1.“Man” is an abbreviation of mind and “tra” means protection. Our original, still mind is always here but our worries and fears leak all over everything, so we do not notice it. So a mantra protects us from leaking; 2. “Man” is wisdom and “tra” is compassion. The two are joined together. We need wisdom to experience a compassion which is deeper than our social conditioning. In both traditional Hinduism and Buddhism, the teacher selects a mantra for the student based on both its meaning and vibration. Use of a mantra induces the deep absorption known as samadhi along with the calmness and spaciousness that accompanies it. The earliest mantra seems to have been “Aum.” According to Indian tradition, “Aum” contains every vibration that has ever existed or will exist and begins and ends many mantras. More than 15 years ago, I visited Bhutan. As we drove and walked through the countryside, I saw Om mani padme hum etched into rock outcropping after rock outcropping. I spent about three days at a monastery only accessible by trail and joined with the monks as they worked their “malas” or prayer beads, reciting the phrase, which means “jewel in the lotus,” over and over. The lotus is honored in Buddhist teaching because it grows in muddy water. As I write this, we are surrounded by the muddy water of both the pandemic and the social turmoil and unrest in our country and in my neighborhood; an opportunity we have to each cultivate our own lotus flower. Mantra use is not limited to Eastern culture. My Catholic grandmother used to work her prayer beads continually with the Hail Mary or Ave Maria prayer. We can liken mantra recitation to rubbing a flint against a stone: the friction of the syllables ignites fire which burns up our incessant remembering, regretting, and rehearsing. As we come back to our word or phrase again and again, its resonance cuts through the intensity or persistence of our chattering and sooner or later we crack open. As Tina Malia says, “mantras start to feel like your friends- even lovers.” The most frequently recited mantra in the Zen and Tibetan traditions is the one which is toward the end of the Heart sutra. In the Zen version it goes, gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate and the Tibetan version adds Aum to the beginning. Its meaning is “gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond.” We have gone beyond what is known as The Three Poisons. The first, greed, refers to grasping at anything or everything that will alleviate our suffering. The second, hatred, refers to pushing away everything that interferes with our grasping, and the third, ignorance, refers to our tendency to ignore everything else. Once we have gone completely beyond, we enter the womb of our mother and the mother of all Buddhas, the goddess Prajna Paramita. When we do this, we experience her womb as our very own and exclaim at the end of the chant, bodhi svaha, or waking to joy. The Heart Sutra mantra and the one monks immersed themselves in while I was visiting Bhutan are just two of scores that you can use for your own meditation practice. Here are three more in simple English which you might useful: 1. May I meet this moment fully. May I meet it as a friend. In the first sentence you are affirming that an alert and balanced mind is a possibility for you, and in the second sentence, you are drawing on your heart-mind’s natural kindness. 2. Real, But Not True Notice that your thoughts and emotions and acknowledge that they are real, but not necessarily true. If you unintentionally stand up a friend, you may be mad at yourself and even sweat at yourself. This is all real, but if you can just be aware of your emotionally tinged thoughts, you will see that going on and on about your misstep is covering up your own still, joyful center, referred to in the literature as heart-mind. 3.Things As It Is This is my first teacher’s expression which many have used as a mantra, e.g. all the specific “things” related to the coronavirus may be tinged with unpleasantness, and at the same time they are all a manifestation of one seamless reality. I first got introduced to choosing mantras that resonated with me when I was at a retreat on the East Coast with Thich Nhat Hanh many years ago. He suggested “deep” on the in-breath and “peace” on the outbreath or “present moment” on the inbreath and “only moment” on the out breath. After my experience with him I realized that anything can be your mantra if it engages you and helps you cut through your chatter. The 19th c. poet Tennyson discovered that he could calm his mind way down by merely sitting still and repeating his own name over and over. He was startled to discover that, “my individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being. . .the loss of personality seeming no extinction but the one true life.” Using this very loose sense of mantra, as I reflect on my own life, I think I have used four different ones at crucial times: When I was 4 and 5 years old, I experienced some deep loneliness, as I lived at the end of a long, windy road with my family. There were absolutely no kids around except my little sister, who didn’t count! So I had imaginary friends, including Bobby Shafto, from my nursery rhyme book and whenever I felt down or lonely, I would repeat to myself the first lines of the rhyme as I looked out to the Pacific Ocean “Bobby Shafto’s gone to see, he’ll come back to marry me…pretty Bobby Shafto.” I felt much better after I had been doing this for a while and continued to use this to settle myself down throughout my childhood. The second one is the “gate, gate” mantra from the heart sutra. When I was having an especially difficult time staying focused during a seven-day retreat, Suzuki Roshi suggested that I make it the focus of my meditation since I was experiencing difficulty. I found this very helpful. For years I repeated the mantra when I was experiencing difficulty in my meditation. The third mantra that I have used arose after I began giving dharma talks at around the time I got ordained as a Zen priest in the late 1970s. After each of my first few talks, my inner critic/tyrant would go on and on about the inadequacy of my talks and the impossibility that I could ever actually teach the dharma. Once, when the inner critic was getting revved up, I said to myself “nice boy,” “nice boy, Tim” which seemed to calm the critic way down. I did this for a while until giving talks became quite natural for me. The fourth mantra is one that I am currently using. When my son was about to get married more than 20 years ago, my wife and I went to India to meet his fiancé’s extended family. In temple after temple I heard people call out resonantly “Amma” as they prayed. “Amma” in both Sanskrit and Hindi means mother, as in the dark mother Kali, from whose womb the universe is born. Kali’s equivalent in Buddhism is Prajna Paramita, the mythological mother of all the Buddhas. Ever since that trip, anytime my mind clouds over, I repeat “Amma” over and my cloudy thoughts part. And it works! In my next piece, I will focus on gathas, which are slightly different from mantras, but can help also help us return to the original stillness of heart-mind. In Not only Buddhists, but also Western mystics, point to the importance of death to open us up beyond the limitations of what we consider to be our self:
“No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead.” -St. Gregory “The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead.” -Meister Eckhart “We are in a world of generation and death, and this world we must cast off.” -William Blake Even though it’s instinctual for us to love life and hate death, this drive inhibits our ability to see clearly. What would it be like if we started perceiving the world in terms of life-death instead of viewing birth and death as separate phenomena? The paradox is that these two opposites are interdependent as all opposites are: there is no life without death and no death without life. We have created this dualism based on our instinctual drive to survive. Can it really be un-created or deconstructed? Zen master Bankei suggests that it can: “When you dwell in the Unborn itself, you’re dwelling at the very wellspring of Buddhas and patriarchs.” And Dogen said “We discriminate between life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other…that’s the problem.” But what’s the solution to this problem? There’s really only one- immediate experience-experience in which there is no mediator. Even Buddhist teachings, ritual, and meditation may serve as mediators which block this way of being. Each may also provide the environment which allows us to live with immediacy, but that’s the most they can do. Can we let go of the entire structure of our beliefs and experience our moments with no mediator? The Heart Sutra, which is chanted most mornings at Zen temples throughout the world, says Yes. After deconstructing all Buddhist beliefs in the first three quarters of the piece since, as the sutra says, all forms are empty, we wake up (bodhi) to an unfettered and immediate joy (svaha). And this waking up is not to life or death but to life-death. Most religion is preoccupied with what happens after death. That’s why there’s so much focus on heaven, hell, purgatory, bardo realms and reincarnation in the world’s major religions. But this focus is totally irrelevant, since there is nothing more or less than life/death, death/life, life/death. As Lao Tsu reminds us, “Ordinary people do not see that life and death are one process, both present in each single occurrence. Humans appear and disappear, but the life force burns forever.” We can only do this through letting go completely of Tim, Tom, Patricia, or Pamela, as mediators of our experience. But this does not mean that we no longer experience normal emotions, since as the Heart Sutra says, not only are forms empty, emptiness is form. This emptiness takes certain forms, for example, Tim, Tom, Patricia, and Pamela. After his baby died, the Buddhist teacher Issa wrote the following haiku: the dewdrop world is the dewdrop world and yet, and yet Grief, joy, sadness, happiness are quite wonderful when they are experienced without dissecting them through thought. William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with a piece of sand.” If this is true so much more is eternity in love with our happiness and grief. We may think we embrace the core teaching of Buddhism that everything changes, but do we really? So many of us are distressed and despairing about the interminability of the Covid epidemic, even if no one we know has gotten sick and died.
My next posts are going to be about death. Death of beings we care about leaves a hole in our hearts, whether it’s the loss of people, animals, or a committed relationship. And fear of death is built into humans’ DNA. As soon as we are conscious enough to become aware of ourselves, we become aware that we will die. It’s instinctual: we want to stay alive at all costs and will do almost anything to accomplish this. This is not surprising because to be self-conscious is to cling to ourselves as living beings. Over the last few years I watched as my own younger grandson began to develop his sense of self as well as the fear of loss and death that always accompanies this. Other animals do not seem to dread death, because they are not aware of themselves as alive. However, some still grieve deeply when they lose loved ones. And if death itself weren’t difficult enough for us to deal with, our culture promotes its horror in books, movies, and the internet. In 2019, four of our best reviewed films were The Irishman, 1917, Joker, and Parasite, in which fear of death and the horror surrounding it was the most prominent theme. We fear death of ourselves and those we love because we feel that there is nothing in our innermost being which is safe. But is it possible to open up to that “nothing” and realize that it does offer us the only real protection we have? Supposedly, Hui Neng became enlightened when he heard the phrase from the Diamond Sutra, “develop a mind that clings to nothing.” Could it be that if we pour our whole being into this “nothing” we will experience a great wonder and deep joy suggested by the poet Anthony Machado? Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!-- that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me, water of a new life that I have never drunk? Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!-- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!-- that a fiery sun was giving light inside my heart. It was fiery because I felt warmth as from a hearth, and sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes. Last night as I slept, I dreamt—marvelous error!-- that it was God I had here inside my heart. This has been the core teaching of the mystics east and west since time immemorial. They teach that ego can die without physical death and without consciousness coming to an end and that this experience can be like “sweet honey” or “a fiery sun within my heart.” I am quite happy that so many more people are developing meditation practices than in the past. A deep and committed meditation practice gives us readiness to die to all our thoughts about who we have been, who we are, and who we might become. Serious practitioners in Indian and Asia practiced meditation within cemeteries for hundreds of years as a both reminder of transiency and an encouragement to plunge into ego death, themselves. Ikkyu was a Japanese Zen master who paraded around his village with drawings of emaciated skeletons to encourage people to meditate with vigor and seriousness. I am encouraged not only by the rising interest in meditation as potential death practice, but also by the serious resurgence of the psychedelic movement in our country, since Michael Pollan published his best-selling book about the contemporary use of psychedelics. In 2018, he wrote about using psychedelics to help seekers die to their small selves. Since then psychedelic use has been gaining traction, so much so that our own Food and Drug Administration will begin to sanction their controlled use soon. When I was practicing meditation in the 1960s, I took large doses of LSD twice and both times died completely to “Tim” as I opened up to a timeless spaciousness. The second time at the height of my feeling of blissful freedom from self, I heard or imagined I heard Suzuki saying to me that what I was experiencing was wonderful and that I could learn to do this myself by intensifying my meditation practice. I did and it worked! |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
Categories |