Nomon Tim Burnett gives the first talk of the Samish Island sesshin, on June 20, 2015. He talks about the shooting in Charlotte, NC.
1st talk at 2014 Samish Island Sesshin
ONE MORNING by Rosemerry TrommerOne morning
we will wake up
and forget to build
that wall we’ve been building,the one between us
the one we’ve been building
for years, perhaps
out of some sense
of right and boundary,
perhaps out of habit.One morning
we will wake up
and let our empty hands
hang empty at our sides.Perhaps they will rise,
as empty things
sometimes do
when blown
by the wind.Perhaps they simply
will not remember
how to grasp, how to rage.We will wake up
that morning
and we will have
misplaced all our theories
about why and how
and who did what
to whom, we will have mislaid
all our timelines
of when and plans of what
and we will not scramble
to write the plans and theories anew.On that morning,
not much else
will have changed.Whatever is blooming
will still be in bloom.Whatever is wilting
will wilt. There will be fields
to plow and trains
to load and children
to feed and work to do.And in every moment,
in every action, we will
feel the urge to say thank you,
we will follow the urge to bow.~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Good morning, I’m really grateful to be here and I’m really grateful to each and every one of you for being here. A community springs to life from this sacred ground. A community springs to life from our hearts, from our intention. From our love.
It’s wonderful to stop isn’t it? Just to be. Just to breathe. Just to step out of the frame of busy and trying so hard. To drop all that. We can’t quite explain why this is but of course we do try. 6 talks this week by myself, Michael, and Norman who is arriving tomorrow afternoon.
In case you’re curious he’s coming later this year because he was invited to give a sermon at Stanford Memorial Church – “memchu” I grew up hearing it called. His talk is part of Stanford’s graduation ceremonies. He’s giving this talk just about exactly now and will hop on a flight tomorrow morning. A nice opportunity for him to serve and offer some of our Zen attitude to the brilliant young minds of that place. Maybe he’s also considering with them the peacefulness of just being.
Why would not doing much be helpful? And of course we’re always doing something. So maybe there’s a little confusion in that very idea of not doing. We’re always doing.
We don’t really stop until we die. I recently was with someone who died. There is effort and hard work right until the final minute. Then stopping. Real stopping. It was unbelievably peaceful to sit in the room with her for a few minutes. If her body was still her exactly. I am really grateful to have received that teaching. Maybe it’s essential training to be present at a birth and at a death. How else do we start to know the dimensions of this life?
But probably we won’t have that experience this week. No one is that pregnant or that close to death as far as we know. Maybe we will. But we will also see many births and many deaths in our experience. Sometimes an overwhelming amount of things bubbling up and falling away. Some we like, some we don’t like. Even living this simple life for a week is so full. So rich.
We want it to stop in a way I guess, we hunger deeply for peacefulness and slowing down, but we don’t want it to really stop: we fear the real peacefulness of death. We are funny creatures that way.
And the minute you try to say something about this it’s a little off, a little tangled up. Better to say less probably. The standard joke is “well there was a Dharma Talk on the schedule so we have to give a talk” just follow the schedule if our first teacher at sesshin. But is there anything to be said in these talks?
Our Zen ancestors had some great ways of expressing this. Here’s a story from the Book of Serenity:
As Dongshan was presenting offerings before the image of his teacher Yunyan he retold the story from before about depicting reality. A monk came forward and said, “When Yunyan said, ‘Just this is it,’ what did he mean?”
Dongshan said, “At that time I nearly misunderstood my last teacher’s meaning.”
The monk said, “Did Yunyan himself know it or not?”
Dongshan said, “If he didn’t know it is, how could he be able to say this? If he did know it is, how could he be willing to say this?”
I’ve always loved Yunyan. He’s the one who also gave the wonderful teaching about knowing the one who is not busy. And through various strange circumstances we are in possession of a whole box of books by the wonderful teacher Darlene Cohen on dealing with our busy mind more wisely that is based on that case as we mentioned last night. I hope you take home a copy of that book and read it after sesshin.
In our story Dongshan is a teacher now and he’s remembering his teacher Yunyan’s teaching phrase, “Just this is it.” I love his humility. One of his students asks about that teaching and Dongshan says, “I didn’t get it at first.”
His student goes on with a very wise question, “Did Yunyan himself know it or not?” Meaning is there anything to get anyway? Is there some phrase, some teaching, some wisdom that’s a something that we can get, that we can understand, that we can know? We conventionally think that way of course. But is that really how it all works?
Dongshan brings up both sides of that: there is a kind of knowing but that knowing is without a separate kind of knowledge. Knowing without knowledge might be a way to describe it. “If he didn’t know it is, how could he be able to say this? If he did know it is, how could he be willing to say this?” If you know it you know it can’t exactly be said in a way.
But we have to say something, we have to do something, we do need some method, some way to work with his mind and heart. Our main method this week looks like it’s zazen – seated meditation. Of course we are doing lots of other things, but I think “zazen” appears most often on our schedule. What is our goal in zazen? What is it we hope for?
The word for this week of ritualized life is sesshin. Sesshin is composed of two characters: “setsu” and “shin” – this in the odd Sino-Japanese concoction which is the way the Japanese pronounce Chinese characters when they’re referencing them as Chinese. Kind of Church Latin in a way. Setsu means to touch or make contact with. Shin means heart or mind, heart and mind. To touch the heart. To touch the true mind.
All kinds of experiences arise in sesshin but somehow as we settle there is some kind of contact with something. How that shows up as subjective experience is all over the map of course, how could it not be? We look like we’re more or less the same and more or less doing the same thing here but of course we are all at the head of our own karmic trajectory, pushed along by our past, our habits, our tendencies the collection of thoughts and emotions that we string together into some more or less coherent idea of “me.” So each “me” meets this contact with the heart and mind differently.
When I started practice there was a kind of ban on talking about your meditation experience. The idea was we’d just confuse each other because our experiences are so different. Someone might describe an experience you find desirable and that would trigger all kinds of stuff. Better to say nothing. Also implied I think was that the wise Zen masters should be told as they can take it all in with complete equanimity. I think we hold this a little more lightly now.
We can trust each other to have a little equanimity! Our varied meditation experience isn’t exactly a secret, but it isn’t exactly all that interesting to talk about either. Some things may be really helpful to share and helpful to say out loud to explore our patterning. And it can be profoundly helpful in releasing from our projections to hear a little about the foibles of other minds in meditation.
Funnily when I teach the mindfulness classes it’s the opposite: we do talk quite regularly about meditation experience. And that speaking out meditation experience is a practice itself. It’s a practice of describing to yourself and others experience as experience. Releasing as best you can from judgment, from summarizing, from twisting experience into future goals and past regrets. Just to talk simply and honestly about it. Here’s what I noticed. Here’s what I felt. To identify less tightly with it. We don’t need that “I” in there really: where’s what arose, here’s what happened. We don’t do that so much in Zen but internally we are talking to ourselves all the time about it right? So who do we talk to ourself about our meditation experience?
How do we approach this desire for settling, for contact with something. How do we work with our love of that expansive open feeling that comes sometimes. What about when that’s not happening? What if we feel overwhelmed instead? What if we feel resistant? What if we are just too tired? What if we just hurt? What if we get really stuck in something.
Does Yunyan’s practice of “just this is it” apply to meditation that doesn’t feel remotely like meditation?
I received an interesting list of likely meditation states from one of my teachers recently, I’m not sure where she got it, but it seems helpful.
There are 10 categories of experience in this scheme and I saw it presented as a kind of wheel with one moving into the next and back around. I don’t know that it’s always that simple but the idea of a wheel matches our experience here I think. This sense of going around and around in some way.
1st is Contact – this is what we want. That contact with the moment, with the heart, with this place, with each other; contact with peacefulness and connection. Just being present is a kind of experience of contact.
2nd is Expansion – the heart opens, the narrow feeling of “me” opens up wide, ahhhh. Wonderful. Big meditation experiences for all their joy and ultimate confusion are here. Usually the moment we get excited about Expansion and try to hold onto it it’s gone.
3rd is Overwhelm – that openness lets a lot in. Floods of emotion. Difficult memories. Worry. Pain. Why are they saying it’s peaceful to sit here? It’s horrible. Overwhelm can be so challenging. Of course we try to let it go, we return to the breath in the belly, we try not to add fuel to the fire. We seek relief. Sometimes there is no relief. Overwhelm is overwhelm. Maybe we can be with overwhelm with some awareness. And somehow even here “Just this is it” – it’s just overwhelm.
4th is Distraction – the mind just won’t settle. The famous monkey mind. We hardly know where we are and what’s happening. The bell rings and we’re surprised and maybe a little ashamed. Another good zazen period wasted. Sometimes distraction has an enticing creative quality to it – that’s kind of nice, I remember my neighbor at the Tassajara zendo telling me he’s written some wonderful plays in his mind during zazen – other times it’s just noise. So random. Where did that come from? Distraction, distraction, distraction. “Just this is it”?
5th is Unconsciousness – we go to sleep. We check out. Our body is still here, but we are gone. Vague states we can’t quite put a name on. Something almost remembered. People often come to the dokusan room looking for an escape from sleepiness. Sometimes we need to sleep. There’s an essay on giving yourself permission to have all of your experiences in meditation where he says “you have permission to go to sleep, how else will you learn about waking up?” Can we sleep with Yunyan’s “Just this is it”?
6th and 7th are Avoidance and Rejection – we want out of here, and we are totally justified in wanting out of here because this whole thing is messed up. This mushy, vague, Soto Zen retreat is not working for me. The food is wrong. The cabins are too funky. Norman’s pretty good but I don’t know about these other jokers. I have so much to do, what am I doing wasting time here? Can we recognize this as avoidance? What are we trying to avoid? Can we recognize rejection? And even here even in the middle of the mind actively trying to wriggle out can we again breathe with “just this is it?”
The 8th and 9th meditation states in this system are Feeling Fake & Numb. This is the flip side of Avoidance and Rejection in a way. Here the problem isn’t the sesshin, the problem is me. I’m not doing it right and I’ll never learn how to do it right. I’m faking it and they’ll find out sooner or later. Maybe some projection: she’s such a great meditator, I’ll never be as good as her. And a strategy for dealing with this might be to just go numb. Who cares really. I like the talks so I’ll just sit here and suffer all day until then. This numbness is it? Don’t think so. So interesting to see if we can bring up awareness in this state.
And of course they get all mixed together, we’re distracted and don’t get up to go when the han sounds. I’ll be late anyway, my body hurts, I think I’ll stay in my room. And so on. And of course these examples are a bit of a caricature – these experience states may be arising in much more subtle ways. We can use them as a kind of exploratory tool if we like. Is there contact here? Is there expansion? Are there moments of overwhelm? Was I hanging out in distraction for a while there? Am I resisting the full possibility of setting my stuff down? Is there avoidance and rejection bubbling up? As I look at the buffet table is there a flash of annoyance or rejection which I usually ignore and drop back into my breath? Is there a numbness or the self-doubt of being a fake. These states can be quite brief and subtle too, but the idea here is that there are still interesting and worthy of our kind attention.
Then 10th meditation state is Intention. This is seen as a very powerful state in Buddhism. A quality of mind that can turn the wheel right round. Accessing a sense of Intention is how, on the one hand, we can bring our subjective experience right back around to Contact and Expansion, that’s nice, but more importantly we cultivate the Intention to be with all of these states as the practice. We take Yunyan’s teaching seriously. We honor that all states are simply what’s happening and we can turn towards even the most unpleasant state with awareness, with kindness, with patience.
So we have this kind of driver of Intention, why are you here at Samish this year? What’s your intention? It’s a little different from goals or hopes. It’s less about outcome and more about direction. Which way are you moving in this life. Intention has a quality of turning towards, of opening. Maybe it’s a kind of ambition that’s liberated from desire and clinging.
The idea here is there are no distractions. Everything that happens is practice, is path. And if we don’t like something and want to exclude it from our sesshin experience maybe if we’re lucky we’ll catch ourself. Maybe we can see it for what it is, maybe we can breathe with “just this is it”? Maybe some words from this model of 10 experiences or some other model will come to mind to support us?
We don’t think this way usually, though do we? We have this idea of distractions and all of the aspects of ourself and our experience that we would like to get rid of. Distractions can’t be meditation, distractions are the enemy of meditation.
Nomon Tim compares the stepwise psychological process of practice to the unknowable emptiness side. How to hold both together?
I want to again welcome everyone to sesshin. And as I was saying last night I hope we can really invite all sides of ourselves to sesshin. Invite all of us here. The excited one. The scared one. The grumpy one. And let all of those voices be heard.
I want to invite us not to think that because of these august circumstances we are only supposed to bring along the “Zen” version of ourselves: that projected idea of our best self who is calm and collected and grounded. If we do that our practice is not real. Is not complete. We need to invite our real experience forward to this powerful community practice to be truly real and transformational
The question is how we listen to these many voices inside us. What is our relationship to them?
I’m reminded of the Rumi poem that’s very popular in mindfulness classes, probably I’ve quoted it in the zendo before. This poem advocates a kind of radical acceptance of everything.
The Guest House, Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Jelaluddin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks
Maybe you’ve heard and contemplated that poem. What would it be to truly let everything in and greet it at the door laughing?
And it strikes me today contemplating that poem that we’ve probably all had that experience of something really terrible happening. At the time the worst possible thing. And then in the end, with time, realizing that somehow that challenging time or event led to some new opportunity, some new possibility, some new way of being. That maybe it was indeed “clearing you out for some new delight” in the end.
And yet how little we seem to be able to consider that possibility when we’re in the misery of these life challenges.
Here’s a response to Rumi’s poem:
Amy Newell – On Hospitality: A Reply to Rumi
Welcome all the visitors, you say.
Do not put bars on the windows
or locks on the doors. Do not close up
the chimney flue. Duct tape and plastic
sheeting will not keep the visitors at bay.
They’ll pound on the doors, they’ll break
your windows, they’ll breach the barricades
they’ll storm the beach, swarm in like ants
through cracks. They’ll leak like water through
the walls, and creep like mice, and curl like smoke
and crack like ice against the window glass.
Keep them out? It can’t be done, don’t try.
Welcome all the visitors.
Fine. There’s all kinds
of welcoming, however.
I do not have to throw a house party.
I will not post flyers.
There will be no open bar.
No one will get drunk
and lock themselves in the bathroom.
No one will break furniture, grind chips
into the rug, throw anyone else in the pool,
or lose an earring in the couch.
I do not have to run a guesthouse, either.
There will be no crackling fire.
And no easy chairs. I will not serve
tea to the visitors. l will not dispense
ginger snaps and ask my guests
about themselves:
“Did my mother send you?”
“Why must you plague me?”
“Why not stay awhile longer?”
“Who are you, really?”
If I must welcome —and I am convinced I must —
Let me build a great hall to receive my guests.
Like a Greek temple, let it be open on all sides.
Let it be wide, and bright, and empty.
Let it have a marble floor:
beautiful – and cold, and hard.
And should we really simply accept everything as it comes? Accept that it’s there certainly, but how to be gee
Zen seems to be so practical, so psychological, so scientific. If we do the meditation we’ll improve our psychic functioning. We’ll be able to be with all that arises with equanimity. We’ll be more grounded. More clear. More self-aware. Less triggered. And so on.
This is true as far as it goes, but it’s only one part of a rich heritage. And I think the other aspects of our practice are just as central and as important as these apparently sensible psycho-physical processes that we think about when we think about meditation. This whole thing doesn’t quite make sense in that simple a-then-b way.
In our morning service today we chanted the Heart Sutra – that great pithy, dense text on emptiness which is chanted at Zen centers all over the world, and in other lineages too. The Heart Sutra is such a universal Mahayana text. And the heart sutra doesn’t celebrate self-improvement really does it?
The Heart Sutra celebrates freedom from everything. Freedom in everything. Freedom in the senses. Freedom in the mind. Freedom in suffering even. With nothing to attain it says.
We don’t always listen to that part. Nothing to attain? What about attain a more grounded way of being? What about attaining more inner security? What about attaining more peace?
Consider the result of having nothing to attain: with nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance there is no fear.
Not just a more spacious relationship to our fear. No fear. And not that we had fear and then it went away when we heard these great teachings. No fear and there never was any fear.
Does zazen help us see our fear? Actually allow ourself to feel it? This fear we’ve held down in the dark for so long? Does it support us in allowing the scared, sad, worried part of ourself into the room like I was saying last night? Does zazen help us work with our fear? Is it our fear exactly?
Or does zazen help us see there is no real fear after all, nothing that’s really real in that way?
After the Heart Sutra we’ve been chanting an an enthusiastic dedication to prajna paramita, to the Perfection of Wisdom, here personified as a female bodhisattva. “Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom, the lovely, the holy…” have you appreciated that chant?
Prajna Paramita – wisdom beyond wisdom, the wisdom that knows there is no wisdom in that fixed way that we think about wisdom and wise people and so on. Wisdom that isn’t hindered by any idea, including any idea of “wisdom.”
Our verse is actually a somewhat edited and cleaned up version of the first section of chapter VII in the Prajna Paramita Sutra in 8,000 lines which we studied last October. We didn’t have time in that retreat to appreciate this chapter so I thought this would be a good time for that. And besides we have this intention to really explore our chant books which was a lot of fun in the Fall.
Our text are from words of praise spoken by Sariputra in a conversation with the Buddha
Sariputra: The perfection of wisdom, O Lord, is the accomplishment of the cognition of the all-knowing. The perfection of wisdom is that state of all- knowledge.
The Lord: So it is, Sariputra, as you say.
Sariputra: The perfection of wisdom gives light, O Lord. I pay homage to the perfection of wisdom! She is worthy of homage. She is unstained, the entire world cannot stain her.
She is a source of light, and from everyone in the triple world she removes darkness, and she leads away from the blinding darkness caused by the defilements and by wrong views. In her we can find shelter.
Most excellent are her works. She makes us seek the safety of the wings of enlightenment. She brings light to the blind, she brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken.
She has gained the five eyes, and she shows the path to all beings. She herself is an organ of vision. She disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion. [171]
She does nothing about all dharmas.
She guides to the path those who have strayed on to a bad road. She is identical with all-knowledge.
She never produces any dharma, because she has forsaken the residues relating to both kinds of coverings, those produced by defilements and those produced by the cognizable.
She does not stop any dharma. Herself unstopped and unproduced is the perfection of wisdom.
She is the mother of the Bodhisattvas, on account of the emptiness of own mark. As the donor of the jewel of all the Buddha-dharmas she brings about the ten powers (of a Buddha). She cannot be crushed. She protects the unprotected, with the help of the four grounds of self-confidence.
She is the antidote to birth-and-death. She has a clear knowledge of the own- being of all dharmas, for she does not stray away from it. The perfection of wisdom of the Buddhas, the Lords, sets in motion the wheel of the Dharma.
What are to make of these two views of our practice?
On the one hand the doing of practice is essential. We need time on the cushion, lots of it, time to unbend, time to settle, time to soften. And just sitting there won’t do for us either. It needs to be wise carefully considered practice. Skillful practice. Guided through our own attention to the what we’re most deeply feeling and learning. Guided by our teachers whom we really need to keep in touch with. Guided by listening to our wisest friends. And little by little we grow and develop. Like lotus flowers come up from the mud.
On the other hand there’s nothing to do. The Perfection of Wisdom is wise because she does nothing about all dharmas. She’s radically okay with things as they are. She moves through reality with total grace and ease. Doing good works for all beings without being caught by beings, or even the idea of there being beings to help.
This is our rich heritage. To hold these two opposites with grace and skill. We need to practice with great care. With extreme dedication. Make our practice the most important thing, the thing through which all efforts and activities are expressed.
And we need to lighten up so completely that there’s nothing left to think or do or hold or be. Enter radically into the womb of the Tathagatha – the birth-light of being.
Here’s a nice way of approaching this balancing act of practice, I’ve been enjoying sharing this teaching from the meditation teacher Dan Nussbaum in some of my classes.
In Meditation You Have Permission:
You have permission to do the meditation practice of your choice, or, not do it.http://skillfulmeditation.org/articles/threeconditions.html
You have permission to do the meditation practice you’ve been doing all along. You have permissionto believe in it or question it or enjoy it or let it take you where it takes you. You have permission to be bored. How else will you ever get to the bottom of boredom? You have permission to try something else.
You have permission to think. You have permission to worry. You have permission to wonder if you’re doing it right.
You have permission to wonder what doing it right means. You have permission to see yourself wondering. Did you start meditation to become a good meditator? You have permission to do it wrong. But if you have permission to do it wrong, how can you do it wrong? You have permission to be bad.
You have permission to remember what it was like to be carefree. You have permission to doubt those memories. You have permission to get back to those memories whether you made them up or not. You have permission to know how you make up memories.
You have permission to go over German verbs. You have permission to think about the different grades of motor oil. You have permission to wonder, How is this meditation? You have permission to note body sensations. You have permission to do something else with body sensations. Love them. Be suspicious of them.Forbid them. Give them meaning. Question that meaning.
You have permission to have feelings. You have permission to need someone, to worry out of habit, to fear vaguely, to feel disgust, to insist on getting things your way.You have permission to let things go on. You have permission to find yourself in unexpected mind states.
You have permission to get lost. You have permission to be curious and interested. You have permission to get transfixed. You have permission to feel calm. You have permission to feel sleepy. You have permission to sleep. How else will you know about waking up if you don’t have permission to be asleep?
You have permission to know yourself in meditation. You have permission. You have permission. You have permission.
By Dan Nussbaum
(advocate of open awareness meditation, no techniques)
“Being here at Mar de Jade, naturally waves come to mind as a metaphor for the human life. So let’s explore that metaphor…”Listen to those waves.
Being here at Mar de Jade, naturally waves come to mind as a metaphor
for the human life. So let’s explore that metaphor. Maybe that metaphor
is more useful than your current metaphor. I say this because we all live
our lives by metaphor. “Tim” and all of the ideas and emotions
and impulses that I weave into the idea of “Tim” are a metaphor
for my life. Just a metaphor. One I’ve carefully constructed for
many years, and one I’m always tinkering with. And one that doesn’t
really serve me that well. But for the next 20 minutes or so I thought
I’d forget about that one, and you could please forget about your
metaphor also. Let’s instead consider a wave as a way to express
what our life really is.
Waves are born out in the ocean from wind and they start traveling. Broad,
smooth swells of water, waves to be, start traveling across the ocean.
Sometimes the swells are very slight, if you are in a boat on the ocean
you barely feel them – just slightly rising and falling, rising
and falling, like a baby being rocked in it’s cradle. Other times
the swells are huge, when you’re boat falls to the trough between
swells you can’t see anything around you but great walls of water.
A rising and falling mass of water.
It’s hard to tell when you look at a swell or a wave if it’s
a single thing somehow moving through the water or not. Or is it a chain
reaction with no individuality at all? As one little section of the water
lifts up, another compensates by dropping down. A hand off of energy from
one bit of water to another. It all seems to add up to something that
looks like something – “a” wave, but I think if you
just look at a little section of water you don’t see a wave moving
by. You just see rising and falling. You just see energy manifesting itself
and one thing leading to another thing. But for ease of conversation,
let’s go ahead and say that a wave is a thing and that it moves.
Eventually these swells reach the shore. They might travel a mile, or
a hundred miles, or a thousand miles, but eventually they reach the shore.
When this traveling swell starts to be constricted by the rising surface
of the ocean as it approaches the shore it starts losing space below it.
The sections of water moving up and down don’t have as much room
to move down now. They are banging into that bottom and the swell starts
to be destabilized. A big long even swell with the great depth of the
sea to maneuver in is being pushed up into the air. A rounded, smooth
swell becomes a steep wave. It gets steeper and steeper. And water at
the top of the wave slamming into the air. The poor wave is being hammered
from all directions. And the top of the wave becomes sharper and soon
it has a sharp edge. And the wind starts pulling the water right off of
that top edge. Pulling it into the sky. Making a ragged edge of white
– tearing the water from the top. And the silent swell start to
talk after hundreds or thousands of miles of quietly traveling through
the ocean. The waves starts to hiss and buzz. The waves gets steeper and
steeper until finally with a crash, or a roar, or any number of complex
sounds the wave falls over, breaking onto the shore. And it’s water
slides down the slope of the ocean to the bottom. Returning to the great
ocean.
And then what happens? Is the wave gone? Is it dead? Has it been annihilated?
Where is the wave now?
All of the water that we once called our wave has returned to the mother
ocean. To circulate, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly around the Earth
until it’s time comes to rise to the surface again pulled once more
by the invisible hands of the wind into a new swell ready to travel once
more on it’s long journey. A journey surely doomed to end on some
distant shore.
Should we say then that waves are reborn?
Can we say that waves are not reborn?
Does either question actually make any sense? Does thinking of a wave
as a wave make any sense?
So we are waves. Distant and mysterious forces draw us up into existence.
And we travel on our journey. Across the great ocean. Maybe we travel
for years in relative tranquility. Maybe we break onto a coral atoll in
the middle of the ocean just a few weeks are we come into being. Maybe
we move through great storms and troubles, with lots of turbulence, and
we lose much water to the howling winds, or gain water from torrential
rains. Maybe we stay in the tropics, warm and gentle except for the occasional
hurricane. Maybe we head for the colder waters up north. But a swell is
only going to last so long. Sooner or later it’s going to be pushed,
pulled, or torn back into the water and return to the great ocean.
We do like being our own wave. We know we are not the only wave out there.
But we are our own wave. Moving up and down, rolling along. For the most
part we like to stay pretty level, keep things within bounds, stay within
our accustomed range of up and down motion. In any case, we don’t
like when part of us moves down. But we’ve learned to live with
that for the most part. We like the part of us that’s moving up.
And we’re often trying to find ways for more of us to lift up. Maybe
if we just went to more retreats more of our wave could be moving up at
any given time! But most importantly to us, we don’t want to break.
If you were to ask a wave as she approached the shore, a nice gradual,
sandy shore like here, where the wave is lifted up gracefully steeper
and steeper into a nice smooth beautiful wave how she feels, she might
say she feels great. “I’m having the time of my life. I’m
moving forward. And doing new and exciting things. That was a long slog
through the ocean, it was okay and everything, I know I had to do it,
but I graduated from that, I’m ready for the real life here at the
edge of the ocean.”
And you ask that growing wave if he knows that he will soon break and
he says, “what are you talking about? I know that sometimes waves
do have break someday but I’m going to avoid that for quite a bit
longer. No breaking for me, at least not yet.”
But if you ask a wave running up against a steep rocky shore, or a breakwater
around a harbor how he feels you’d get a different answer. “What’s
happening to me? I didn’t sign up for this! I wasn’t ready
to break and even if I had to break I know way want to break against this
thing. This isn’t fair! This is all fill-in-the-blank’s fault!”
And that wave is desperately trying to turn. To slow down. To stop. But
being wave he can do none of those things and all of his efforts just
churn up the water causing great pain and disruption.
And regardless of our attitude, when we lose part of our wave from one
condition or another we suffer. The wind blows over our surface peeling
away the top water. The water that’s been riding on top, enjoying
the view, feeling very on top of it all peeled away by the wind screaming
in pain. We don’t want to lose anything, we want to hold onto all
of our water.
And we have very mixed feelings about the other waves. If they would
just all go in the same direction as us, spaced out about the same, we
don’t mind them. In fact some of our best friends are waves. We
get along pretty well. It’s nice to have a good community of friendly
waves out here in the water. But sometimes it doesn’t work out that
way. Other waves collide with us, they change our size, they mix their
water with ours, sometimes they slam into us. We hate those waves. We
blame them for their bad manners. For not turning aside and giving us
space, for moving in the wrong direction. The fact that we know full well
that a wave can’t turn itself doesn’t check our anger, or
annoyance, and our hatred particularly. I mean you’d think they’d
just now better.
Sometimes we hit a big submerged rock in the middle of the ocean. We
are dumb enough to snag on some submerged rock and we are torn in two.
We feel like such idiots when that happens. We really should have know
better. We should have listened more carefully in geography class. I’m
sure the teacher probably mentioned that darn rock. And even though we
didn’t have a sufficient amount of knowledge of every obstacle and
potential problem in the ocean, you’d think we could have been at
least paying a little more attention and avoided the darn thing. I mean
what were we thinking ramming into a rock like that?
Sometimes we pass through an area where the air is pushing down on the
ocean really hard – a tropical depression I think they call them
– and we get flattened out, squished down, really depressed. This
feels awful to us. We are flattened down almost right back into the ocean
from which we came. We blame ourselves for this too. Why am I so depressed?
Why can’t I just buck up and get out of this? But eventually we
do pass out of it and somehow we had all of our energy through the whole
terrible time and we surge back pretty much to our original size. And
then we do our best to forget all about that terrible time of moving through
the depression and basically hope that will never happen again.
We have a lot of ideas as we’re traveling along through all of
these adventures. So many ideas based on memories of where we were before,
ideas about where we’re going and what might happen next in our
journey.
But mostly we have ideas about who we are. What kind of wave we are,
what our wave values are, and how different we are from all of the other
waves. Sure some of them look a lot like us but anyone in the know can
see how unique we are. Depending on the wind and other conditions when
we were born we might be a big strong wave, a bit taller, a bit more confident
than our fellows and we might feel just a bit superior to them. I mean
we still try to be nice and all, but you know how it is with those smaller
waves.
Or maybe conditions created us as a smaller wave. A weaker wave. We can’t
see so far. The other larger waves all around us block our view. It’s
hard to feel so confident in ourselves. It’s hard to have much of
a sense of what our purpose in life is and where we’re going. But
you know we get by okay and find our niche. It’s not that bad.
Sometimes due to the various conditions in the ocean this can change
and we go from being a large confident wave to a smaller insecure wave
– that’s the worst. No one likes that. Or equally frightening,
some great force might force an insecure wave out of the quiet corner
of the ocean where we’ve made ourselves relatively comfortable and
into the lime light. We become important and famous and probably completely
unstable.
But through it all we want to hold it together. The last thing we want
to do is be torn apart and fall back into the ocean.
Our feelings about the ocean are a bit conflicted. We know that the ocean
is important. That it’s down there somewhere. It was good that there
was an ocean for us to be born from. We feel some duty to be grateful
to the ocean for being around at the right time. But really at this point
I’d be just as happy if the ocean would just leave me alone alright?
I mean I’m my own wave and I don’t know some big old ocean
messing with me.
And we do fear crashing into pieces. We don’t want to let go of
our form and slide back into the depths.
But what if we could somehow change our attitude?
What if we could really feel the ocean. What if we developed the courage
to allow our attention to drop below the surface of our wave into the
depths. What if we were to breathe down to the bottom of our wave and
see what that boundary between our wave and the rest of the ocean was
like. What if we found that in fact there is no boundary there at all.
If we could actually appreciate that and even relax and enjoy that dynamic
edge where you can’t really tell where the ocean ends and our wave
begins? Maybe it would help us relax about this fear we hold. This fear
of dissolution. Because what’s really changing when our wave’s
water returns to the bottom of the ocean?
Maybe if we truly understood our original ocean nature we would know,
we would really know, that sooner or later some of our water would be
a wave again. And letting go of our shape wouldn’t be an issue.
We would see that to think that this particular wave would rise again
just as it is doesn’t make sense. That somehow all of our water
could stay together as it travels and swirls around in the deep ocean
currents in the company of whales is not going to happen. We would understand
that is just doesn’t go that way. That it’s not a matter of
what we wish for or don’t wish for. But that sooner or later our
water will arise once again into the daylight of this world. And letting
go of our shape would truly feel like just one part in a great and natural
cycle. A cycle that we would allow to turn without fighting it.
And maybe once we understand the immensity of the ocean we can start to
feel what the ocean feels instead of just what our own little wave feels.
And then we can feel the great pull of the moon far far above us. And
feel the steady drag of the trade winds across our surface. And incredible
energy of hurricanes and storms plowing across us. And when other waves
bang into us we will able to understand the powerful forces behind their
trajectories and their shapes and attitudes. And we could sympathize with
them to the extent that it’s no problem for us if they slam into
us and reduce us. The idea of “you” hurting “me”
would never occur to us as we start to appreciate the actual oceanic context
of our life as waves.
And maybe once we mature in our understanding to where we can experience
and understand the powerful forces driving our fellow waves around we
can notice – ah ha – that those same forces drive us. And
we can stop blaming ourselves when things don’t work out the way
we’d planned. We can truly forgive ourselves. And we can stop worrying
about what we’ll break against next. Maybe it will be the beautiful
beach by Mar de Jade, maybe it will be an ugly breakwater around an polluted
harbor, it won’t matter to us anymore. We will understand that we’ve
done our best in our journey and that it’s ending now. We can truly
relax.
May you touch the beautiful ocean nature of your life in this very retreat.
Thank you very much.
® 2005, Tim Burnett
When we practice we naturally want to get something. And since there is nothing external or tangible in Zen practice to “get,” it seems that we want to get is to be a different person.When we practice we naturally want to get something. And since there is
nothing external or tangible in Zen practice to “get,” it seems
that we want to get is to be a different person.
If we took cooking lessons and learned how to make Pad Thai we could
say, after the class, great I now know how to make Pad Thai. We can invite
our friends over and make them Pad Thai – we got something. When
we take a cooking class we also collect the experience of the class, or
at least our idea of the experience of the class. We can describe to our
friend over the bowl of noodles what the instructor was like, what the
other students said. We now have a new possession – the experience
of the cooking class and we can enjoy it and share it and own that possession
for a while.
It’s hard to do that with Zen experience although we all try to
anyway. My wife and I share pretty much everything with each other and
she is particularly good at remembering details and nuances and subtleties
of what happens and connecting them to different ideas and things she’s
read and other experiences she had years ago. So if my wife were to go
to a cooking class we would spend easily the same amount of time as the
class took talking about it. She would tell me all about every detail
and things it reminded her of and it would be very entertaining and fascinating.
After my first few Zen retreats. I felt like I wasn’t holding up
my end of the relationship very well. I would come back from being away
from her for a weekend or a week of sitting zazen and there really wouldn’t
be much of anything to say about it. During the periods of zazen I would
think of an infinite number of interesting and clever things to think
about and talk about but once it was all over somehow all of that was
gone. All of that stuff bubbled up during the retreat and it was often
very hard to stay sitting there as of those ideas, thoughts, and emotions
oozed and bubbled and jumped out at me. But once I got home there was
really nothing I could think of to say. I usually couldn’t remember
much of anything from the dharma talks either, wonderful and inspiring
as they usually were at the time I was sitting there listening to them.
What I eventually figured out to say was “It was hard, but good.”
And she was gracious enough to leave it at that.
We hear again and again the basic and sensible teachings of Zen, of Buddhism.
We hear that it really is the best policy to let go of our desires and
aversions. We hear that we will be happier, more content, and calmer if
we can learn how to just be. Learn to let some of the static and extra
angst we bring to the situation of being alive drop away. Just face each
moment with acceptance and openness.
These ideas sound great. But then the next moment something happens.
The next moment we are reactive, we are angry, we are annoyed, we are
impatient, we are not living up to any of these wonderful ideas. And we
feel that we’ve failed again. But as we gather some strength and
perseverance in doing the practice it doesn’t get us down too badly
to fail again, we can bounce back, move on, try again.
But still we carry this idea of failure. This idea of not being quite
the person we set out to be in taking on this practice for the years and
years and years it seems to take. It’s somehow been 17 or 18 years
for me now, and I know many of you have practiced even longer than that.
What do we have to show for it? Have we become different people? Have
we come calmer or more self-assured or more “zen”. Has it
all been worth anything at all?
The great and true teaching of Zen that I noticed myself slipping into
another notch more completely lately is the incredibly simple, profound,
and deeply helpful fact that this is it. This is it. This is my personality,
this is my body, this if my life. Just this life is it. It’s hard
to describe the feeling of accepting this a little more deeply. It’s
a feeling of settling in a little more, or settling down, or opening up,
of ceasing to fight against what is. This is not to say that I don’t
keep working on our practice, that I don’t keep working on my conduct,
that I don’t intend to keep studying and practicing, but somehow
my attitude shifted a little lately. A little away from trying to be someone
else, a little more squarely on just being this person. “Just be
yourself” our teachers tell us. They mean that in the deep and complete
way that is revealed to us as we start to understand our life as a dance
in the field of emptiness, not as a daily struggle to grasp something
new.
As I work with this teaching, I see that I’ve had a very strong
idea that there is something out there that will set me free. Some great
poem. Some wonderful idea. Some experience that will totally change everything.
If I were just more motivated I would find it. If I read more poetry,
if I went to more Zen retreats, maybe I should take up koan study? Maybe
I should really get serious about yoga? What about a fasting – how
come I never fast anymore? Maybe that would do it. I’m slacking
on going out to the wilderness – maybe a long backpack would change
everything.
But lately I see a little more clearly that nice as those things are
to do, they really is nothing outside that I can grasp that will set me
free. That really accepting what is it what will set me free. Or you might
say that I am free already. Completely liberated. And lately I feel that
just a tiny bit more. Maybe I went up from understanding this with 2%
of my being up to 3% or something like that. But that makes it sound like
if I do the right stuff I will maybe someday get up to 10% or hey even
15% that would feel really good wouldn’t it! It is a matter of degree
on the one hand and on the other hand there are no degrees at all. There
is really just this. Just what is.
Really accepting that this is it is liberation. Letting go of trying
to be someone else is liberation. You don’t need to apologize anymore.
As Norman said last summer you can really trust the fact that it’s
not your fault. If you really accept that this is it you don’t need
to strive anymore, you don’t need to fight what is. You make effort
out of joy, out of curiosity, out of compassion for beings, out of the
sheer pleasure of engagement with the world. And when things don’t
work out you aren’t thrown, you understand that as part of what
this is. You don’t think, “oh there is trouble so I’m
going about things the wrong way” rather you understand trouble
as part of what this is. You adjust and react to the feedback of the universe
but just as adjusting, just as reacting not as someone who has failed.
One way we can understand what we are doing in our Zen practice, then,
is emptying out. Gradually clearing out our ideas of grasping and separation.
Gradually cleansing ourself of our ideas about accomplishment. Gradually
releasing ourselves from this deep compulsion to try so very, very hard
to be someone else. This is really it. I hope that you can appreciate
the joy and potential of releasing into that deep truth of Buddhism, but
please don’t worry about it too much. It’s just an idea after
all. Thank you very much.
Nomon Tim Burnett, a long time student of
Zoketsu's, is the Resident Priest of the Bellingham
Zen Practice Group
Tim suggests some strategies and attitudes to help us in approaching the task of sitting every day at home.
We go to the zendo to sit with everyone and once we’re there it’s no problem. We just follow the
schedule. The bell rings and we remember the instructions – settling into our seat, following our
breath. We are more or less distracted by thoughts arising in the mind. But at some deep level there is
no problem. Our neighbors are sitting so quietly – the energy of the room floats through us. We don’t
wonder about progress or obsess too much about doing it right. With the support of sangha we just sit.
Very naturally being with Buddha.
And then, the next morning at home it is a different story. Should I sit this morning? Or turn over and
sleep a little longer? A million potential problems arise with the idea of sitting. There isn’t enough
time. We don’t have a nice enough sitting spot. It’s too cold. I’ll sit later if there’s time.
And if resistance or circumstances overwhelm our intention to practice we feel guilty. And we are
burdened by that guilt. What a failure I am – that’s two (or three, or four) days in a row I didn’t sit.
And the weight of that burden strengthens our resistance. It becomes clear we are fundamentally not wise
enough or strong enough to really practice. Maybe later on. Once we’re out of school or have a different
job or more free time. After the next retreat maybe.
Everyone has some resistance to practice. Even the Buddha on the night of his great enlightenment was
strongly beset by resistance. Personified by Mara, the evil one, who marshaled armies of pain, squadrons
of doubt, and sensual distractions of every description. How did the Buddha get through the night? I
think because he didn’t fight his resistance. He recognized resistance. In the Pali suttas, Buddha
always confronts Mara head-on, recognizing him and speaking directly and kindly to him. Saying “I see
you there Mara. I recognize resistance as resistance. I hear what you are saying but I will keep
practicing regardless of what you say..” And then, kind of like a cartoon villain, Mara vanishes in
disgust.
For daily sitting to function in our lives, it can’t be a daily battle between us and the forces of
Mara. That’s too exhausting! But when Mara comes, we recognize resistance for what it is. We notice how
it feels in the body. We bring forth our intention to practice. We gently return our awareness, over and
over, to the breath and the posture.
And when we end up going along with Mara, we make the best of it. We pay attention to how that is. And
we forgive ourselves, over and over. We pat ourselves kindly on the back and say “oh well, better luck
next time.”
Resistance is a pattern of thoughts and desires. When the question of whether or not to sit arises in
the mind, resistance has a lot of traction. But when we can just sit down, with the same simple everyday
spirit we bring to brushing our teeth, there is less opportunity for resistance to arise. It’s helpful
to focus on sitting as just sitting. That’s your only goal: just to sit down for 20 minutes or half an
hour each day. Let go of thoughts about having deep states of concentration or accomplishing anything
beyond making a gentle steady effort to pay attention. And when you’re done, forget about it until the
next day. Trust zazen to take care of itself. Trust zazen to take care of you.
Some strategy is worthwhile. Actually make a plan for sitting. Trying to sit whenever it fits in is not
a plan. Assess your daily and weekly schedule. Where is there a little give? Where can a half-hour be
opened up? Then make a commitment to yourself. It might help to tell a dharma friend your plan, the
power of embarrassment is strong and can be harnessed for good purposes. I told my friend I would be
sitting this morning, so I’d better do it!
Include in your plan, though, a time to reassess. To make an endless vow to practice is powerful and
good. To make an endless vow to sit at 5:30 am every day forever is unrealistic and doomed to failure.
Sitting every day at 5:30 am for a month, though, might be very possible. At the end of the month you
can have a little party for yourself. You did it! Now what? Is the plan working? Is it nurturing and
supporting your life? There is always some refinement needed. And circumstances are always changing.
Many people find sitting early in the morning, before any of the busy activities of the day have take
hold to be helpful. Zen teacher Jack Duffey recommends putting your zafu in the bathroom so you’ll see
it without fail first thing in the morning. Why is that zafu there? Oh yeah, sit now. But any time of
day can be good. Lunch time. Evening. In the monastery they tell you when to sit, lay people don’t have
it so easy. We have to figure out when.
And be prepared for change. I sat every morning before my wife got up for several years. Then we had a
baby and everything changed. I had to reassess. It didn’t make sense to sit then anymore. I had to be
more flexible. Change my plan. It was very disconcerting. Even the most successful and reliable plan is
subject to change and revision.
There seem to be periods of time when it works well to sit alone at home, but then there are times when
it’s better to sit with others. In Bellingham, there is morning sitting at the Dharma Hall at 6:30 am on
weekdays. And other regular times are starting to happen. But having support in daily sitting doesn’t
necessarily mean an organized group. It could just be getting together with a friend once or twice a week
to sit.
Dogen says “have no designs on becoming a Buddha” and he also says we are “already actualized Buddhas
who go on actualizing Buddhas.” So we do need to practice to express our Buddhahood. But true practice
is beyond the realm of desire. It happens daily in our lives whether we like it or dislike that
particular day. But it’s not something we do to get anywhere or get anything, either. When you sit. Just
sit. Really. That’s all there is.
by Tim Burnett, proofread by Connie Martin.
® 2002, Tim Burnett
