I’d like to say more about one of my favorite passages from the early Zen prose-poems, Trust in Heart-Mind, attributed to Seng Tsan, the third ancestor in our Chinese lineage:
“When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way, there is no objection to anything in the world. And when there is no objection to anything, things cease to be in the old way. When no discriminating attachment arises, the old mind ceases to exist. Let go of things as separate existences, and mind too vanishes. Likewise, when the thinking subject vanishes, so too do the objects created by mind.” One of our tasks as Zen practitioners is to cultivate awareness of our minds and emotions without “objecting to anything” we experience. In our meditation practice, the first step is to cultivate awareness of our thoughts and emotions. The second step is to hear and validate even our darkest thoughts or emotions. Our limbic system which processes our emotions, does not mature as we age, so dark emotions come up for all adults, even Zen teachers! If we do not repress them or chatter to ourselves about them. we can free ourselves from their “stickiness.” As neuroanatomist Jill Taylor says in My Stroke of Insight, our higher cortical functions take “new pictures” of a thought or emotion that is coming up in the present. When we compare the new information with the automatic reactivity of our limbic mind, we can reevaluate the current situation and purposely choose to neither indulge the emotion nor repress it. Taking these two steps in our meditation happens quite naturally as we slow things down in our meditation. Jill says, “Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert in the limbic system. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. A persistent meditation practice is the best way to do this. However, if you continue to feel fear, anger- the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.” Each time a negative emotion comes up, we have a chance to become aware of it, radically accept it and as we do this we naturally settle into a deep calmness and feeling of connectedness with the world around us. When this happens, we no longer pour fuel on the fire of the specific emotion with our thinking. As Seng Tsan says, “we are undisturbed in the Way.” and when there is no objection to anything, things cease to be in the old way. When no discriminating attachment arises, the old mind ceases to exist. A year ago, I went to Duluth to visit my friend, who had just had her leg amputated above the knee after being run over by a city bus. As she described her experience of being pried out from beneath the bus, she was very calm and matter of fact. Her small mind was so undisturbed, that each time I asked her about the intensity of her anger and sadness, she pointed out the glorious view from her room of Lake Superior and the waves lapping against the shore. It was as if her accident brought her to the realization that she was more than just a single wave, herself, or a single constellation of waves but the entire ocean. Her “old mind,” her baggage-carrying mind had ceased to exist. This is what Jill Taylor experienced also, as a result of her stroke. Each of us can let our “old mind” drop away through a consistent meditation practice. But I don’t want to be too idealistic about this. Even though the “old mind” drops away, we never know when our limbic system is going to get set off and it comes roaring back. How many times have I come home after a few days single minded meditation in a retreat setting and my limbic system gets set off by an encounter I have with a family member? Luckily, it is possible for all of us to let 90 seconds pass when a strong emotion comes up and just breath while the fire of the emotion peters out. When this happens, small mind vanishes: “Let go of things as separate existences, and mind too vanishes. Likewise, when the thinking subject vanishes so too do the objects created by mind.” The more we learn to be aware of our waves of emotion as they emerge, the more we realize that the waves are not separate from the ocean. We can appreciate them as they are rather than getting bowled over by them. When this happens, the separate thinking subject vanishes. My younger grandson, Logan, had a really difficult time learning to swim. Each summer for several year we took him to swimming lessons. Whenever the teacher tried to get him to relax in the water, he froze up. One day several years into the process, he finally relaxed into the water. When I looked down at him at the end of the lesson, his mind was “undisturbed in the way” and he exclaimed, “Look Grandpa, I just floats!” Through your meditation practice, you can learn to “just floats,” too. In my last piece I talked about two lines from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu:
He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm. He who rushes ahead doesn’t go far. The next two lines read: He who tries to shine dims his own light He who defines himself can’t know who he really is The poor hare/rabbit doesn’t realize he has a great light within him, which illuminates everything in its warm glow. So he is continually trying to shine by winning, winning, winning. But there’s always someone else ahead of him or catching up to him, and he gets exhausted. The turtle, on the other hand, knows how to go inside his shell where it is totally dark and he finds safety there. By losing himself in this darkness, he emerges with a wonderful feeling of lightness, a quiet joyfulness in which he feels connected to all life including the poor hare who is continually racing around him. And when he emerges and takes one step, he feels supported by everyone and everything he sees. He has no interest in being anything more than he is already, so he even enjoys the mud, with all its unsanitary grittiness. In fact, that is his natural home. In this way, he is in the same lineage as Lao Tzu and a series of holy fools including Han Shan, San Simeon, St. Francis, Ryokan, and Ikkyu. This is a lineage that’s not hard to join. All you have to do, as Lao Tzu says above, is stop trying to define yourself and just be who you are. The 9th century poet Han-shan says, “Instead of seeking to find the Tao, notice that your nature is already complete. What Heaven bestows is perfect. Looking for something else leads you astray. Leaving the trunk to search among the twigs, all you get is confusion.” Han-shan, who had been well trained in Zen, but now lived high on cold mountain, would stroll for hours in the corridors of the monastery below, occasionally letting out a cheerful cry, or laughing or talking to himself. When driven away by the monks, he would stand still afterwards, laugh, clap his hands, and disappear. By going into our shell regularly through our meditation practice, we can settle into just being who we are instead of worrying about who we have been or who we might be. We realize that our “nature is already complete.” We can bask in the stillness that’s right here as we rest by the trunk. To do this, all we need to do is stop searching for the twigs per Han Shan or cut off all the dead wood, as the 17th century Zen adept Basho suggests in the following poem: Cutting a tree, seeing the sawed trunk it grew from: tonight’s moon. As we cut away dead wood of our repetitive anxious chattering, our mind becomes very quiet and suddenly cracks open and we see the radiant, still moon right in front of us shining its glow everywhere. Rigid rules of conduct or elaborate rituals are no longer needed, since they distract us from deeply enjoying being wherever we are. Right with the darkness of this pandemic is where we appreciate the light of the single moon. In this piece I would like to reflect on a couple of verses from Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, composed in China around the time of Buddha:
He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm. He who rushes ahead doesn’t go far. Often, I talk about the difference between the tortoise/turtle and the hare/rabbit. The rabbit is running, running, running, trying to win the race. He may run three laps around the lake surging forward on his tiptoes without seeing the sky, the trees, or even the kids playing in the water, because he is so intent on getting somewhere, becoming someone, or just winning. The turtle just takes one step and then another, one breath and then another, appreciating and reveling in the greenness of the grass, the blueness of the sky, the stillness of the lake… and when he gets a little excited or anxious about winning or losing the race with the rabbit, he just draws his head and legs into his shell and rejuvenates himself by doing absolutely nothing. At some point the turtle realizes that his inner world and his outer world are not separate and that he has already won the race, while the poor rabbit is always judging and comparing himself to others and misses the deep happiness of just being. Through turtle practice we learn to stand firmly where we are. As Lao Tzu’s fellow Taoist Chuang Tzu says, “Sink into your rootedness in the great mystery. Your vitality and power are hidden there. A wedge cannot enter as long as you are just who you are.” This is the secret to the turtle’s imperturbability and longevity. You may wonder how you can settle into this imperturbability yourself. Miles Davis was asked how to become a trumpet playing master. He said, “It’s simple. Just blow, blow, blow.” Meditate, meditate, meditate. There will be times which are boring and times that are frustrating, as blowing, blowing, blowing must be, but this continual, non-judgmental effort is the core of our Zen practice. It’s hard work and we are bound to feel at times like we are not making progress. It may even seem that our meditation is nothing but unpleasant work. But Is it possible that our meditation can be play as much as it is work? Did you know that turtles love to play and that a happy turtle is a playful turtle? When I was a boy, I had a turtle who loved to play with an empty shell I put in his tank. He would slide the shell across the tank bottom and chase it. He even played with snails I put in his tank. And when I took him outside to my yard he would dig, dig, dig in the ground with great abandon and then look up to me in what seemed like a grin. Humor, laughter, and play breaks down the division between the beautiful and the ugly, the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane. Here are two stories: 1.) A Zen student went to a temple and asked how long it would take him to gain enlightenment if he joined the temple. “Ten years,” said the Zen master. “Well, how about if I really work hard and double my effort?” “Twenty years.” 2.) Seeing his teacher on the other side of a raging torrent, a student waved his arms and shouted out, “Master, master, how do I get to the other side?” The master shouted back, “You are on the other side.” This teacher is pointing out that if we don’t rush ahead, but instead sink firmly into the earth which we are standing on, grit and all, whatever happens, we are always “on the other side.” The Chinese poet Yuan Mei wrote, I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited for a poem to come… then I laughed and climbed the mountain, and leaning on my staff, I laughed again. I’d love to be a master of the blue sky’s art: See how many sprigs of snow-white cloud he’s brushed in so far today! Even though there is a 2000-year gap between Lao Tzu and Yuan Mei, I think they are best friends! |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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