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Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind 3

Series of talks based on Suzuki Roshi’s book “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind” In this series, only small portions of the book are addressed and not a total overview of the writings.

Zen Mind Beginner's Mind (3 of 4)

Series of talks based on Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | January 20, 2008

 

Abridged and edited by Ryūsen Barbara Byrum

 

When I read through Suzuki Roshi's words, I don't get very far, because after the first page I think, "Wow! What is he saying? What does he mean? Isn't that wonderful!" And I can't go any further! That's what happened this time. I was reading Part 2, but I only got as far as the first page. So I thought I would comment on the first page, read the whole of what he says, and then make a few comments.

Suzuki Roshi, as you know, didn't write this book. It was constructed from talks of his, and the editors hit on the brilliant idea of giving each talk a little title, so the title here on page 53 is "Single-minded Way." He says,

The purpose of my talk is not to give you some intellectual understanding, but just to express my appreciation of our Zen practice. To be able to sit with you in zazen is very, very unusual. Of course, whatever we do is unusual, because our life itself is so unusual. Buddha said, "To appreciate your human life is as rare as soil on your fingernail." You know, dirt hardly ever sticks on your nail. Our human life is rare and wonderful; when I sit I want to remain sitting forever, but I encourage myself to have another practice, for instance to recite the sutra, or to bow. And when I bow, I think, "This is wonderful." But I have to change my practice again to recite the sutra. So the purpose of my talk is to express my appreciation, that is all. Our way is not to sit to acquire something; it is to express our true nature. That is our practice.

I couldn't agree more. Isn't that a wonderful and simple thing? When we say, "How great it is to be alive, and what a precious thing it is just to have life," we all know this is true, and nobody disagrees. And yet we never think of that. We go crashing through our days with all our busyness and all our trouble. And we never stop to remember how precious our life is and to appreciate it and to express that appreciation in everything that we do. We would have a life of joy if we could do that. Sometimes life is hard. Of course, there are many problems. No doubt about that. But we are alive, and it is as rare as dirt on a fingernail.

Suzuki Roshi is saying, "It's not a complicated thing, folks! It's not a bunch of really complicated meditation techniques and different things to chant. You're alive and what luck! Be glad!" It's very heartfelt. It's very simple, and it's very modest. This is not a very fancy thing, right? I think that for those of us who practice the way of Suzuki Roshi, it's very difficult to find something more true than this very simple thing.

You could say it's not even a spiritual teaching at all. There's not that much to it. But what a great thing to practice together – just to breathe, to be quiet, to walk up and down, to hear the ocean with friends. To practice with people that one knows and has come to trust and love over time. To come together as we do – month after month after month; year after year after year – in mutual appreciation and regard. To enjoy our dharma relations and the poignancy of them, as we all get older and more enfeebled.

So then he says,

If you want to express yourself, your true nature, there should be some natural and appropriate way of expression. Even swaying right and left as you sit down or get up from zazen is an expression of yourself. It is not preparation for practice, or relaxation after practice; it is part of the practice.

So, it's interesting. If you carried that far enough, the sitting doesn't actually start when you arrive here. It starts when you wake up in the morning and intend to come and drive here. And come to think of it, it doesn't even start then. It starts the night before, when you go to bed and prepare yourself at night to go to sleep. You get my drift. There is no preparation for anything. There's no time when the practice began and it wasn't there beforehand. There's always the practice – wherever we are, whatever the moment.

So we should not do it as if we were preparing for something else. This should be true in your everyday life. To cook, or to fix some food, is not preparation, according to Dogen; it is practice. To cook is not just to prepare food for someone or for yourself; it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook! That is also an expression of our sincerity, a part of our practice. It is necessary to sit in zazen, in this way, but sitting is not our only way. Whatever you do, it should be an expression of the same deep activity. We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else.

A full engagement with life could be your life all the time. Accepting each moment of life could be a profound engagement with the truth. Every moment – as Suzuki Roshi says – even when you're cooking, even when you're cleaning, even when you are sitting around loafing, or even when you are going to work. We usually see our life as routine, or more or less boring, or more or less unsatisfactory. We're looking for something special – a great vacation or a better job or a different relationship. But more and more I can be present in my living. More and more I can understand that everything is an opportunity to appreciate life and to fully engage with life. I know pretty clearly that it is the quality of attention that I bring to something that makes my life alive. And that's what Suzuki Roshi is telling us here.

He goes on,

The Bodhisattva's way is called the "single-minded way," or "one railway track thousands of miles long."

The railway track is always the same. If it were to become wider or narrower, it would be disastrous. Wherever you go, the railway track is the same. That is the Bodhisattva's way. So even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only one way. His way is in each moment to express true nature and true sincerity.

This is one thing about our practice that is really true. It's very boring. When somebody comes the first day, you give them instructions: "This is how you sit. This is how you breathe." The instructions that you give somebody the first day are the beginning instructions and the intermediate instructions and the advanced instructions. That's it! And then somebody thinks, "Well, what do I do now? What's next?" Sorry – that's all there is. There's not much to this. It's pretty boring. It's always the same thing: just sit, just be present. Then they ask, "Can I take the advanced course in being present? Is there advanced presence?" No, I guess not! If you're present with your life, you're just present with your life. There isn't an advanced course. Pretty boring, and at the same time, pretty thrilling.

So he goes on with this railway track image:

We say, "railway track," but actually there is no such thing. Sincerity itself is the railway track. The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track: beginningless and endless track. There is no starting point, no goal, nothing to attain. Just to run on the track is our way. This is the nature of our Zen practice.

So again he uses the word "sincerity." And he didn't mean by sincerity what we generally mean by it. What he meant was, "Giving yourself wholeheartedly to whatever it is you are, or whatever it is you are doing at that time." Just not holding anything back. Not doing anything fancy or anything extra. Just taking on every task with your whole heart. Then you realize that is what sincerity means – just giving yourself to what you are and what you're doing. So you drive along on one track, and the scenery keeps changing, but it's basically the same track and the same ride.

This makes me think of something I often say to people who leave a long retreat or sesshin, where many powerful experiences have occurred, and they say, "How can I preserve this? How can I make sure that I keep living like this, as I've been living for this last week in sesshin, when everything was so vivid and I had so much peace? How can I preserve that? How can I keep that going?" And I usually say, "You know, the practice is not a state of mind. It's not a desired state of mind that we're trying to produce. States of mind are changing all the time – it's like the scenery along the track. Sometimes isn't it great when we do have that kind of calm and that kind of peacefulness and that kind of vividness of life. This is terrific when it happens, and we hold it as precious. But we know that's just the scenery. Next minute it will be something else. It may be misery or confusion. These things come too.

I would describe the track as a thread that goes through all the different states of mind that come and go. When we know what that thread is, and when we are always in touch with that thread – and maybe we can call that thread "sincerity," or "commitment," or "vow," or "motivation" – then it really doesn't matter what the scenery is. It's always beautiful. Even when we're passing by beautiful, soaring mountains or the slums of the city, we can see the beauty. And we know we're always on that track. We're always on that train, and we can feel the movement. We can feel ourselves in connection with that train.

So I know there's no end point, and I'm not trying to get somewhere. We say, "If I could only get this right and perfect this," but now I know that there is just riding on that track. And it's wonderful that I have more track to go. And he is also saying that "no end" means that you die and still you're on the track. Still it goes on.

And then he says something very surprising:

But when you become curious about the railway track, danger is there. You should not see the railway track. If you look at the track, you will become dizzy. Just appreciate the sights that you see from the train. That is our way. There is no need for the passengers to be curious about the track. Someone will take care of it. Buddha will take care of it. But sometimes we try to explain the railway track because we become curious if something is always the same. We wonder, "How is it possible for the Bodhisattva always to be the same? What is his secret?" And then we start thinking about that, but there is no secret. Everyone has the same nature as the railway track.

Actually, we're not supposed to understand our lives. How could you understand your life? You would have to be somebody else standing outside of your life to analyze it and understand it. Who could do this? No one. If you think you understand your life or someone else's life, think again. The only thing you can be sure of, if you think you know something, is that it's wrong. All knowing is partial. We know something, more or less, that was true at the time we thought we knew it. Is it true today? Maybe. Maybe not.

So this is a practice of tremendous humility, and simultaneously with that, tremendous trusting. Because why do we think we have to know something? So that we can get it right? So that we can protect ourselves? So that we can advance our interests? If you know how limited that is, the only choice you have is to trust life. Buddha will take care of the railway track. Buddha will take care of your life.

There were two good friends, Chokei and Hofuku. They were talking about the Bodhisattva's way, and Chokei said, "Even if the arhat [an enlightened one] were to have evil desires, still the Tathagatha [Buddha] does not have two kinds of words. I say that the Tathagatha has words, but no dualistic words." Hofuku said, "Even though you say so, your comment is not perfect." Chokei asked, "What is your understanding of the Tathagatha's words?" Hofuku said, "We have had enough discussion, so let's have a cup of tea!" [And Suzuki Roshi comments on this little story.] Hofuku did not give his friend an answer, because it is impossible to give a verbal interpretation of our way. Nevertheless, as a part of their practice, these two good friends discussed the Bodhisattva's way, even though they did not expect to find a new interpretation. So Hofuku answered, "Our discussion is over. Let's have a cup of tea!"

I think the sense of the story, if I am not mistaken, is that even if any enlightened one, a Buddha, were to have afflictive emotions – anger or hatred, for example – still the Buddha would not use dualistic words. He would not say, "That's bad. That's good. That's right. That's wrong. That's practice. That's not practice." The Buddha would never use dualistic words, even if it were something that was unwholesome or not good. We can take this to mean that he would not reject anything. If you say, "That's wrong, that's bad," you're rejecting it, casting it aside, and you're not accepting or embracing it. Everything is to be embraced. Everything is part of the path. Everything brings us to awakening.

So there's no such thing as good or bad emotions. There are difficult emotions, afflictive emotions, painful emotions, but every emotion, every thought that we will embrace, will bring us closer to the heart of the matter, closer to our lives. And again, it comes back to what Suzuki Roshi is saying early on in this piece. It has to do with the extent to which we are able to be present – really present with what is going on with us. And when we are able to be present, bad turns into good. You see the good in it, and you don't have to twist it around to make it good. It ripens into good in the warm glow of your presence.

When Suzuki Roshi says the Buddha has no dualistic words, this is Suzuki Roshi's own way of talking. He is all-inclusive, because he never talks with dualistic words. This is why generations of practitioners have found his words so encouraging and inspiring. To speak with non-dualistic words means always to speak with full inclusion. Nothing is left out. No one left out. Everything and everyone is included. And not because we think, "See what a nice guy I am? I include everybody. I'm broad-minded. Aren't I nice?" But this is the way it is. We are all included. It's not a matter of being nice or being generous. "Well, you might be a little inferior, but look how nice I am. I accept you anyway. Isn't that good? I'm very compassionate, don't you think?" [Laughter]

It doesn't mean that there is no good or bad. It doesn't mean that there are no distinctions. It just means that those distinctions exist on a level beneath which is all-inclusiveness. There is always another side, and that's reality. There's always another side. Whatever we say, whatever we think, whatever we see, whatever we feel, there is always another side. And that side is also true. And if we live that way, knowing that's so, if we understand that that's so, and we speak that way, it's a different life. It's a different way of being.

This is not a thought or a philosophical position. This is what is important about seeing life without two kinds of words – seeing life whole, seeing life in any inclusive way. We become, as Suzuki Roshi apparently was, very tolerant and very accepting of everything. And very loving. And very kind. When we see this truth that he is pointing to here, there are no two words. There are no dualistic words. This is not a comment about use of language; it's a comment about how we embrace our lives.

But actually, this is not the point of the story. As Suzuki Roshi said earlier in this passage, we understand that when we study or have seminars or discussions, practice is more than this. It includes it, but it is more than this. Just as these two monks brought up the dharma and studied the dharma together, they realized, "Well, we discussed it for awhile, and that's the end of it, and now let's have tea. Okay, that's enough. Seminar's over. Forget about it." Dharma was something we tried to understand at that time, and it's different now. So let's have a cup of tea, and let's not get hung up on defending something we said or something we believed the dharma says. Yes, to study the teachings is a practice; it's an activity that is very fruitful for us to engage in. But when it's time, we'll set it aside and return to silence and have a cup of tea.

In the last paragraph Suzuki comments on the line "Let's have a cup of tea":

That is a very good answer, isn't it? It's the same for my talk – when my talk is over, your listening is over. There is no need to remember what I say; there is no need to understand what I say. You understand. You have full understanding within yourself. There is no problem.

So we can appreciate that. We don't have to deny our own experience. He's telling us that it is not so important to understand what he is saying, or to understand what it says in the sutra, or to understand what the great masters have said. If you think that you don't understand, then just notice that that is an experience that you have. The truth is that if you're a human being, if you are trying to love, if you are trying to live in some truthfulness, this means that you do understand.

So I will conclude my talk by saying, "Don't try to understand what I am saying. Or think you don't understand what I am saying. And goodness knows, you shouldn't remember it, and try to recall it, and think about what it is. Or quote me to anybody! You should have your own understanding. Isn't it nice that we just had fifty minutes to share this time together, and now it's over."

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Zhaozhou’s Dog (Mumonkan 1 / Shoyoroku 18)

Koan on Zhaozhou’s Dog as published in case 18 of the Book of Serenity and case 1 of the Gateless Barrier or Mumonkan. “Does the dog have Buddha Nature?” Yes and no. To take up Zhaozho’s way of practice is to feel and to live beyond our human need to define and understand — even as we go on defining and understanding.
Two versions of this story. The first, abbreviated version (found in Mumonkan, Gateless Barrier, whose stories tend to be more drastic and more stylized) is best known:

"Does the dog have Buddha Nature?" a monk asks.

Zhaozho says,"Mu!"

In the Book of Serenity the story goes like this:

A monk asks Zhaozho, "Does the dog have Buddha Nature?"

Zhaozho says, "Yes."

The monk says, "Since it has, why is it then in this skin bag?"

Zhaozho replies, "Although he knows better he deliberately transgresses."

Another monk comes along: "Does the dog have Buddha Nature?"

"No," Zhaozho says. (The Japanese word "Mu" means " no.")

The monk says, "All beings have Buddha Nature, why not this dog?"

"Because he still has a mind," Zhaozho answers.

The dog, of course, is not only a dog or a cat or a cow; it is also us. We not only have Buddha Nature, we are Buddha Nature through and through. We are fine the way we are, whatever we are. We are complete; nothing is missing, nothing is extra. We are already home in our lives, as and who we are, each of us a Somebody (the particular karmic bundle that we manifest in this lifetime) and a Nobody (the basic being-ness that we share with everything). Nevertheless, we have to leave home. And then we have to return. This, you can say, is the mythical journey we call practice: we are perfect, we are home. But we don't experience this and we don't believe it so we feel exiled from home. So we leave home. We then make the tough journey back — hard practice, suffering, sesshin, zazen, trial and error, life's bumps and bruises. Eventually we get there, we return home, back where we started from, back to where we've always been.

Why do we have to go through all this trouble? In our hearts we know better, we know who we really are, but we forgot. It seems to be part of our nature to forget. And, forgetting, we get into all sorts of trouble in the unique set of ever-shifting true and false stories we call our life. This trouble is discouraging. It makes us disappointed in life and in ourselves. We thought things were supposed to turn out well, and that we were supposed to be perfect, but it is not that way. Naturally we blame ourselves or we blame someone else or we blame life for all our failures. But there is no one to blame and no reason for blame. The trouble we get is the trouble we need so that we can have a good adventure as we find our way back home.

The dog has Buddha nature: our flaws and disasters are essential and beautiful. The dog has no Buddha Nature: our flaws are also terrible and consequential. We may be perfect in our being what we are, but as soon as we act, as soon as we speak, trouble ensues. Evil is not a mistake that needs to be purified or blotted out. Evil is inseparable from who and what we are and what the world is. "We have no Buddha Nature" expresses the tragic side of our lives. Terrible things happen, we cause them or we don't, and we suffer. Why do they happen? Because we have a mind, because we are sentient, expressing, desiring, creatures and we cannot escape this nature. If we were stones or trees no one could murder us or diminish us. Even a great hurricane would not harm us. But since we are human beings with human minds even a cross word can wound our souls. Knowing this is how we are, and through long reflection on our experience finding patience with it, through the suffering and bitterness we feel, we finally come to forgiveness. We forgive ourselves and each other. We forgive the world. We know there is a way to live, a way to make effort for the good, in this world as it really is. We see through our stories and the stories of others, hearing the music in them, without being much annoyed by the noise. We are more willing to be amazed, to listen, to be sympathetic, even to our enemies.

The Jewish theologian and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel says:

"What we face in penetrating the self is the paradox of not knowing what we presume to know so well. Once we discover that the self in itself is a monstrous deceit, that the self is something transcendent in disguise, we begin to feel the pressure that keeps us down to a mere self. We begin to realize that our normal consciousness is in a state of trance, that which is higher in us is usually suspended. We begin to feel like strangers within our normal consciousness…" (p 62).

Let me back up to the Gateless Barrier version of the story. Does the dog have Buddha nature? Mu! Or No! But this no doesn't mean no. It's a no that is meant to convey a reality beyond discursive thought. It's a word, in other words, that is meant to function not as a word but as a meditation object. In his famous commentary to the case, Master Wumen (compiler of the Wumenguan) explains how to work with Mu. Just immerse yourself in this one word Mu, he says. Breathe into it day and night with all your might; repeat it to yourself until it disappears into a feeling in the guts; don't think about it, don't try to figure it out, don't worry about getting it right or getting it wrong: just give yourself to it without stint until everything in your life seems to be just a reflection of Mu. And then eventually, without your intention or skill, but as a kind of accidental by-product of your devoted effort, Mu will break through, and you will see reality as it is, empty and free. You will know who you really are, have always been, and will always be, and what the world is, was, and will be. Everything will be Mu and Mu will be joyous emptiness, free of all fear and limitation, nothing and everything at once, a big silly joke and also the deepest of all possible truths.

This method of focused concentration on a word or a syllable is common in mystical traditions. Such a technique focuses the whole energy of one's being on a meditation object with enough intensity to lead to a breakthrough moment, a moment of mystical union. Zen is famous for this, but you find it in Christian, Jewish, and other mysticisms as well. In his commentary, Master Wumen, who himself had a breakthrough experience after six years of practice with Mu, makes it clear that he considers work with Mu to be the essential practice of Zen, and Zen teachers who follow his school usually emphasize Mu as the primary practice.

Thomas Cleary's translation of Wumen's commentary reads in part, " for ineffable enlightenment you need to interrupt your mental circuit. If you do not interrupt your mental circuit then your mind will be attached to objects everywhere."

What happens when you focus your mind intensely on a single object for a long time is precisely that: your mental circuit, your usual identity-based flow of thought and feeling, is forcefully interrupted. You suddenly enter a mode of cognition that is firmer and more direct than thinking or feeling. In the original Chinese, Cleary's "interrupt your mental circuit" is "cut off the mind road." And," If you don't cut off the mind road you will be a ghost, clinging to bushes and grasses." In Chinese as in Western folklore, ghosts don't have feet to plant themselves on the earth, so they are blown around all the time like bed sheets. They have to cling to bushes and grasses to stay put. When we are "attached to objects everywhere" inside and out, we are like ghosts — clinging to whatever unsatisfactory shred of identity or possession or emotion or belief we can find because we have no way of being deeply rooted in our lives. When we cut off the mind road, interrupt the mental circuit, glimpse life beyond thinking and feeling to the root of thinking and feeling, we grow feet; we are firmer, stronger; we can plant ourselves on the ground.

In Soto Zen too we recognize the necessity of cutting off the mind road, although generally for us this is accomplished more gradually and gently, through focused zazen over a long period of time. And most Soto Zen traditions place the need to cut off the mind road in a wider context of other equally important spiritual values and experiences. There's even a tendency in Soto to underemphasize this practice because it is so seductive and can so easily lead to excess.

If you study the sayings and doings of Master Zhaozho, you find that he was a rather mild mannered and quiet person, quite unspectacular in his presentation. He is considered one of the all time Zen greats not because of the crackling brilliance of his responses or the strength of his deeds but for the simplicity of his expression. He has the capacity to express life's profound truths in plain yet apt language that does not startle or shock, but gently points to the ineffability of the ordinary. In this sense, Zhaozho was the least "Zen" of the old Zen masters, which is why he was such a favorite of Dogen and Suzuki Roshi. This is the Zhaozho we see in the longer version of the story.

It has always seemed to me that the Zhaozho of Wumen's Mu koan reflects more the personality of Wumen than that of Zhaozho. I don't know whether it was Master Wuman or another teacher who truncated the story of Zhaozho and the dog to make it seem more "Zen."

A monk asked Zhaozho, "Does the dog have a buddha nature or not?"

Zhazho said, "Yes."

The monk said, "Since it has, why it is then in this skin bag?"

Zhaozho said, "Because he knows yet deliberately transgresses."

Another monk asked Zhaozho, "Does a dog have a buddha nature or not?

Zhaozho said, "No." ("Mu"— in Chinese, "Wu")

The monk said, "All sentient beings have buddha nature, why does a dog have none then?"

Zhaozho, "Because he still has a mind."

This dialog is neither a scholastic analysis of buddha nature nor a Zen imperative to interrupt mental circuits. It is a simple yet elegant statement of the paradoxical nature of human life.

Do we have Buddha nature, are we essentially holy and perfect and beyond all limitation? Of course we are. Then why we are we such a mess spiritually, and why must we bear the indignity of embodiment, shitting, pissing, growing old and dying? We know better but we do it on purpose, Zhaozho says. Why do we do it? Because it's the only way we can express our gratitude for the immensity of what we are.

Do we have Buddha nature, are we essentially holy and perfect and beyond all limitation? Of course not: to think so would be immense arrogance. If we asserted and believed in our Buddha nature we would be missing the reality of our pathetic human vulnerability. Anyway, there's no such thing as Buddha nature; it is simply a designation, a phrase in the English language. Whatever we might mean by "Buddha nature" is empty of any idea of Buddha nature just as whatever "I" really am is empty of all ideas of I.

Yet the sutras teach that all beings have Buddha nature. How is it that we have none? Because we have minds that distinguish one thing from another, and so propel us into desire and action. Because minds have an idea of "Buddha nature" they have no Buddha nature. Because minds are beyond all ideas of Buddha nature they are Buddha nature. The intelligence, the emotion, the will, want this question of Buddha nature resolved. But it's not a question to be resolved. Every moment is new and calls for a fresh response.

The introduction to this story in the Book of Serenity reads:

"A gourd floating on the water — push it down and it turns; a jewel in the sunlight — it has no definite shape. It cannot be attained by mindlessness, nor known by mindfulness. Immeasurably great people are turned around in the stream of words — is there anyone who can escape?"

Although Master Wumen wants us to experience reality beyond our word logic (and we must do this), in the end we are stuck with words — with discrimination, desire, action — for this is our human life. The wisdom Zhaozho is showing us in this story is a wisdom that operates both beyond and in the ordinary world, the world of language and desire. Our human condition is paradoxical because our minds operate through separation and reification, through definition and objectification; but our life is larger than our mind. To take up Zhaozho's way of practice is to feel and to live beyond our human need to define and understand — even as we go on defining and understanding. There's no way to do this without contemplative practice of some sort — whether our practice is to immerse ourselves in Mu, just do zazen patiently for many years, or some other way to allow our fundamental nature to grab hold of us by the scruff of the neck so that we can experience our lives as the really are. But there is also no way to do this without some ability to hold our minds and emotions in a new way, a lighter and more open and willing way, so that our everyday words, thoughts, and deeds are reflective of a larger life than the one we can name and think about.

® 2006, Norman Fischer

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Not Knowing is Most Intimate

Many teachers have made this one phrase, ‘not knowing is most intimate,’ the heart of their teaching, repeating it over and over again. But what does it mean and how can we make use of it for our lives?

Dizang asked Fayan, "Where are you going?"

Fayan said, "Around on pilgrimage."

Dizang said, "What is the purpose of pilgrimage?"

Fayan said, "I don't know."

Dizang said, "Not knowing is most intimate."

This is one of the greatest teaching stories in all of Zen. Many teachers have made this one phrase, "not knowing is most intimate," the heart of their teaching, repeating it over and over again. But what does it mean and how can we make use of it for our lives?

First of all, let me back up and say something basic about Zen practice: as one of my teachers used to put it, "Zen is a practice of phrases." The practice of phrases isn't limited to Zen, it's common in almost all religious traditions. When Christians read, memorize, and reflect on scripture, when Jews or Muslims sing daily prayers, whose words affect their hearts beyond their thinking minds, they are practicing phrases. In Zen, we practice with phrases like this: we take a phrase, like, "not knowing is most intimate," or just "not knowing," and we bring it into our sitting. We breathe with it in meditation practice, repeating it again and again, usually on the exhale, eventually letting go of the words and just feeling the breath as the phrase. We repeat the phrase to ourselves during the day, and begin to notice it coming up spontaneously from time to time. The phrase becomes a theme of our daily activity; it begins to influence us, bringing ordinary daily occurrences to a deeper and more mysterious level. The point is not to think about the phrase, to figure out what it means. The point is to keep chewing on it, holding as a talisman, until suddenly or gradually it reveals itself to us. Working with a phrase in this way we go beyond our usual understanding of things. We do not impose the phrase as something extra added on to our experience. Rather it is as if the phrase reveals to us the inner essence of our experience, which we might have been taking for granted for a long time; the phrase opens us to what matters most, to what was there all along within us, but we hadn't noticed it before. The practice of phrases brings us closer, deeper, to our lives, beyond our unexamined habits and notions.

In our story, Dizang is asking Fayan not just about pilgrimage but about spiritual practice, about life itself, for life is, after all, nothing but a pilgrimage. What's the purpose? Why are we born, why do we die, why is life so difficult, what are we always longing for something else? What do we really know of our mysterious and fleeting experience? And Fayan's response is pretty honest. He doesn't just come out with some pious Buddhist answer, though we can be sure he knows many such answers. "I don't know," he says, honestly and humbly, perhaps expecting Dizang, his teacher, to shed some light on the question. But Dizang says, I don't know is just right. I don't know is most intimate. Fayan is awakened by Dizang's response; he suddenly recognizes, as one often does in spiritual practice, that he had what he needed all along, only he didn't know it. The way is right beneath your feet, and in every blade of grass.

In Zen the word intimacy is a synonym for awakening or enlightenment. And for me intimacy is a much better word than these others. Zen enlightenment, realization, or awakening – all these words seem to imply some special state of mind or spirit, some kind of transformative mystical knowledge or experience that somehow will bring us beyond life's day to day problems to a more spiritual plane. The word intimacy is better. It sounds like we are getting closer, deeper, more loving with our experience rather than somehow beyond it. Intimacy better expresses what enlightenment really feels like I think. So how is it that not knowing is most intimate?

Another Zen Master once said, "The way is vast and wide, how could it ever be a matter of knowing or not knowing? Knowing is arrogant; not knowing is stupidity; the way is far beyond both of these." This tells us that Dizang's not knowing is something more and less than the conventional idea of not knowing, which implies that there is something to be known, only we don't know it. Too bad for us. We are stupid. Probably someone else smarter than us knows and maybe we can learn from them. We can take a training course, improve our skills, and maybe eventually we too will know. And when we know we will be the smart ones and we can start our own training course, and teach other people. Then we can feel good about ourselves, knowing how much smarter we are than the others. Meanwhile, we pretend that we know. Of course we know. We are mature people of the world, we know plenty. But deep down we know that we don't know. The things that matter most escape us entirely. But it's too much for us to admit this- certainly not to another person, and sometimes not even to ourselves. So we show up to work or to our relationships as if we know. We stake out roles, identities, skills, viewpoints, and we defend them. We get into plenty of trouble this way.

Dizang's not knowing isn't like this. It's not the opposite of knowing. It's beyond both knowing and not knowing- or, to put it another way, it's the real not knowing. When we know something and rest in that knowing we limit our vision. We will only see what our knowing will allow us to see. In this way our experience can be our enemy. True, our experience has shown us something about ourselves and about life. But this moment, this situation that faces us right now- this patient, this person, this family, this illness, this task, this pain or beauty- we have never seen it before. What is it? How do we respond? I don't know. I bow before the beauty and uniqueness of what I am facing. Not knowing, I am ready to be surprised, ready to listen and understand, ready to respond as needed, ready to let others respond, ready to do nothing at all, if that is what is called for. I can be informed by my past experience but it is much better if I am ready and able to let that go, and just be present, just listen, just not know. Experience, knowledge, wisdom – these are good, but when I examine things closely I can see that they remove me from what's in front of me. When I know, I bring myself forward, imposing myself and my experience on this moment. When I don't know, I let experience come forward and reveal itself. When I can let go of my experience, knowledge, and wisdom I can be humble in the face of what is, and when I am humble I am ready to be truly fearless and intimate. I can enter into this moment, which is always a new relationship, always fresh. I can be moved by what happens, fully engaged and open to what the situation will show me.

Good idea. Probably we have all heard about it before. But how we do practice it, how do we make it a way we live rather than a good idea we aspire to and never achieve, so that instead of something useful to us it becomes yet another way, a more spiritual way, for us to berate ourselves.

In commenting on Dizang's phrase, Chizou said, "In walking, in sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises, look into it, and you'll see not seeing – and then put it to one side. When you direct your effort like this, rest does not interfere with meditation study, meditation study does not interfere with rest."

This is the simplest thing. It's the way we practice meditation, and when we train ourselves this way on our cushions it spills over into our daily life. We sit with awareness of the body, the breath. We let thought and feeling arise but we don't make something out of it. We let it come, we appreciate it, we let it go. We don't take it personally, we don't get tangled up in it- a thought arising in the mind is just something happening, the way a bird singing in a tree or a truck rumbling by on the street are things happening. All experience comes and goes, all experience is us, our life. When we practice this way judgments begin to fall away. We forgive ourselves for being who we are. Naturally we are that. Everything just is as it is. We don't have to divide things into me and not me. Into good and bad, desirable and undesirable. We know, yes, this is a bird, it is outside, this is a thought, it is inside, but also at the same time we know, outside and inside, it is all just life. We might say, this impulse is good, this impulse is bad, but also we know, all things rise and pass away so it's ok, everything has its place. Another teacher said, "Just affirm totally when affirming, but don't settle down in affirmation; just deny totally when denying, but don't settle down in denial." When you train in being present and letting things comes and go you are training in not knowing. Within not knowing we make determinations and take actions. Every moment calls on us to respond and we do, freely and with full confidence. Sometimes affirmation is called for, sometimes denial. There are no rules. But whichever it is, we don't settle down there. We don't identify and dig in. We stand in not knowing, ready for the next moment to be different.

"In walking, in sitting, just hold to the moment before thought arises, look into it, and you'll see not seeing – and then put it to one side. When you direct your effort like this rest does not interfere with meditation study, meditation study does not interfere with rest."

All thought impulse and action comes from not knowing- whether we know it or not. In other words, this world arises moment after moment out of silence, consciousness, God, or whatever you want to call it. When we return over and over again to awareness of body, of breath, to the present moment of being alive, we are returning to this prereflective moment, this moment beyond knowing and not knowing from which all things spring. This is not something we can exactly do or even intend. We make an effort, but in the end it happens by itself: because we are that, and there is no other way. All being is that. All being arises from the silence within. But we don't settle down in that- because we can't. As soon as we try to settle down in it, we've created another moment of knowing, another moment of possession and identity- which is guaranteed to cause us and others suffering down the line. So we appreciate the almost nonexistent moment before things arise – and then we move on. We put it to one side. We let it go. We return to intimacy, to not knowing, to the simple willingness to be present with what is. Just to be there, without preconceptions. When we practice like this, meditation and non meditation are the same thing. We don't have to worry about our performance. We just do our best and accept the consequences.

A poem on Dizang's not knowing says,

Let it be short or let it be long- stop cutting and patching;

Going along with the high, along with the low, it levels itself.

The abundance or scarcity of the house is used according to the occasion;

Roaming serenely in the land, she goes where her feet take her.

I said that returning to the prereflective moment is not something we can do or intend. So it is both very easy and impossibly difficult. Easy because there is nothing to do- just keep on making effort, but an easeful effort; be persistent in your practice but don't worry about anything. Rest assured that you will get what you need and that the way will unfold before you. And difficult because we are so convinced that we need to do something, know something, be something that we are not, that we keep beating our head against a wall. But no matter how hard we beat, the wall remains, and we have a headache. Because we can't help going on being ourselves, victims of our habits and concepts. It's possible we need to beat our heads against this wall for a while – long enough to understand that this particular brand of pain is not and never was necessary, and that it is very stupid. Eventually we get it. Not knowing is most intimate. We can know something or not know something. We ought to study and learn so that we can know more, and, especially, so that we can know what we don't know, and be humble about that. Everyone knows something and doesn't know something- this is as true of the wise and the powerful as it is of the simple and unschooled. But beyond what we know and don't know is Dizang's "not knowing is most intimate." Being close to our experience, willing to enter completely, with empty hands, into every moment of encounter is something we must surrender ourselves to. Sometimes we can do this. Sometimes we can't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we keep on trying, trusting that what happens is what needs to happen.

There's another funny commentary to Dizang's not knowing that takes the form of a conversation between the parts of the face. The mouth says to the nose, "I do the eating. I do the talking. What could be more important than that? So why are you above me?" And the nose says, quoting an old Chinese proverb, "Among the five mountains the central one occupies the honorable position. So why," the nose goes on, addressing the eyes, "are you above me?" And the eyes reply, "We are like the sun and moon, we have the power of illumination and reflection. But the question is, eyebrows, why are you above us?" The eyebrows don't know anything. They have no powers whatsoever. They can't eat, speak, smell, see, hear. And yet they are highest. They reply, "We are embarrassed to be above all of you, and we have no idea why." Another master, commenting on this commentary, said, "In the eyes it's called seeing, in the ears it's called hearing- but what is it called in the eyebrows?" Then after a long silence he said, "In sorrow we grieve together, in happiness we rejoice together. Everyone knows the useful function, but no one appreciates the supreme power of the useless."

To me this is very beautiful. Life's just like that, don't you think? When sorrow comes we grieve, but it's not so bad, because we grieve together, intimately, even the trees hang low and the flowers droop, and this intimacy makes the sorrow poignant and beautiful. When happiness comes we rejoice, but we don't need to feel guilty or worried that somehow we will lose our happiness, because it isn't ours, we are happy intimately together with everyone and everything. If we are willing to grieve together with everything then we can be happy together with everything without holding back. We know the happiness won't last, that it will go, come back, go again, come back again. But that's Ok. How could it be otherwise? There's a place for the useful function, for knowing, for learning, for skill. Without the eyes, the nose, and the mouth the world as we know it wouldn't appear. But without the useless function, without not knowing, the world would never be. To practice "not knowing is nearer" is to return to the heart of the world, moment after moment. The eyebrows are very humble; they don't know anything and they don't do anything. But they are the highest of all.

® 2006, Norman Fischer

edz

The Ascent of Love

“When it comes to love, and especially to love’s necessarily erotic nature, we have to shake our heads and admit that love can be so compelling, so strong, so confusing, that it may be beyond our powers to bring it into line with our highest spiritual aspirations…”As many of you probably know, for the last several months, through our study of Emptiness, Buddhist Psychology, and Dalai Lama's book "Destructive Emotions," we've been thinking about the many ways our practice is the practice of working with our emotions. Not that we are fixated on emotion, or overly interested in it as a topic. But we can't help but notice that all day long thoughts and feelings arise in us, and that these thoughts and feelings are always associated with each other; all thoughts have some feelings that go with them, and all feelings produce thinking of some sort. It becomes difficult to tell the difference between thought and feeling, and in fact Buddhist psychology does not make any important distinction between them. They are both types of "phenomena of consciousness." So, whether we are very emotional people, or people who are seemingly less given to and less interested in emotion, there is no denying the centrality of emotion in the moment to moment experience of our living. And it may be that what the Buddha means by "awakening" isn't some rarified mystical vision of life that would remove us from ordinary human intercourse, but instead a deeper fuller and clearer engagement with our feelings, and with the connections we make with others through our feelings.

There's no doubt that our emotions are often problematical. It's no wonder we'd like to deny them, or go on to other "more important" things. Emotions are so often compelling, messy, shameful, unsophisticated. How much we're pushed around by anger, desire, shame, jealousy, and so on. To protect ourselves, we try to push all that down, deny it, reduce its importance. But this doesn't work very well. For practice, the method is always to face what we are feeling, to know it as it is, and to develop through our sitting practice, little by little, the ability to appreciate honestly what we are feeling and to be able to let go of it appropriately and naturally – not to be victimized by our feelings, but to be attentive to them, to uncover and appreciate and clarify them more and more.

Personally, I do not believe that the awakened person is one who transcends ordinary human emotion. The awakened person is still capable of anger, desire, jealousy, and so on. He or she knows these feelings and respects them; and in knowing these feelings intimately and without shame or confusion, connects warmly and sympathetically with others who also have such feelings. But the awakened person is far less victimized or pushed around by such feelings. He or she is able to patiently bear feelings and appreciate them not so much as self expression or self reference but rather as the unfolding of human reality, and therefore to have enough spaciousness of experience to avoid being compelled too much by feelings. In addition, I would say that the awakened person is one who has a greater flexibility and a greater range of human feeling than the rest of us. For he or she allows feelings to come and go in response to conditions, and experiences not only the normal range of feelings but also, with some frequency, feelings like compassion, equanimity, joy, gratitude, love, aesthetic appreciation, wonder, awe – emotions that any of us are also capable of feeling, but probably feel less frequently. So I have been thinking that the awakened person is a deeply feeling person, and that allowing and living within the free and natural flow of human feeling is the main practice of an awakened person.

This is all by way of summary and introduction to what I want to address today, the most troublesome and wonderful of all human emotions, love, especially erotic love. We can have a fairly believable conversation about emotions and how to work with them so as to make them more beautiful and reduce their destructive power. But when it comes to love, and especially to love's necessarily erotic nature, we have to shake our heads and admit that love can be so compelling, so strong, so confusing, that it may be beyond our powers to bring it into line with our highest spiritual aspirations. As I often mention, Buddha decided at the beginning of his practice that it was going to be too difficult to do what he was trying to do without giving up erotic love altogether. In trying to do full on spiritual practice while remaining involved in erotic relationships we are attempting to do what the Buddha considered beyond his powers! I say this not to dismiss the possibility of our success but just to add a bit of realism to our expectations, which ought to be modest. In any case, there is something wonderful about the attempt. And it seems necessary, no matter how well we do with it. It is definitely impossible and inadvisable to limit serious spiritual practice to people who have given up intimate loving relationships.

Human culture is full of examples of the effort to ennoble erotic love, so that it retains its power and its beauty and yet sheds those aspects that lead so often to pain, jealousy, violence, hatred, exclusivity, neediness and craziness. I have always thought it astute of Freud to have considered that erotic love was at the heart of almost all human emotion and motivation, and therefore also at the root of so many of our neuroses and deep human problems. While his view is perhaps a bit one dimensional, it is also deep. So this is something for us to consider seriously. Because if our path is the bodhisattva path, built on a foundation of wisdom and compassion, and if we are really trying to love sentient beings, and to be concerned – viscerally, passionately, and as selflessly as possible – for others- then probably we can't abandon or transcend erotic love. Even if we are celibate, we need to have real passion, real warmth, for others, and if we are not celibate, we need to find a way to love one person, or one family, without the exclusivity, possessiveness, and neediness that always leads to dissatisfaction, hatred, and anger, and to extend that love to others, finally even to everyone. This is an ideal, I know, but spiritual practice is always idealistic, a hike toward the horizon of the ideal. One never arrives at the horizon, which remains exactly the same distance ahead no matter how far we go.

If you want to learn about suffering, love. Loving is the best way to find out about suffering. So we're not looking for a way to eliminate suffering from love, and I don't think we'd want to do that, or could do that. Compassion means to suffer with another. How could we actually care about someone if we are unwilling to suffer? But it would be good, and it would be in accord with the path of awakening, to find a way to love that doesn't make more suffering, or make the sort of virulent suffering that love gone wrong so easily erupts into.

On my recent trip abroad I had a chance to finish a wonderful book that brings up this question, Martha Nussbaum's "Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions," a tremendous treatise, really, about emotions, and how they have been understood and worked with throughout the history of Western thought. Martha Nussbaum is an extraordinary thinker, full of warmth and a down to earth personal perspective, and at the same time a master of four of five different intellectual fields, through which she courses easily. The last section of this great book takes up the question of erotic love and reviews the various attempts to perform what she calls "the ascent of love," that is, the purification of erotic love, the lifting of it toward its highest human expression, purifying it of its smallness and painfulness. She discusses in her final two or three hundred pages Plato, Spinoza, Augustine, Dante, Emily Bronte, Mahler (one of her heroes), Walt Whitman, Proust, and Joyce, and analyzes in critical detail their views of love.

In the context of our practice, we can note two extremes in the way we approach the question of love. On the one hand, we make love rarified and abstract. We love humanity, we vow to "save all sentient beings," and we really feeling that we are doing this, while in reality we are removing ourselves from any real contact with others. I think this is a real danger in intense spiritual practice, this impulse to leave the ordinary world of fleshly needy human beings- one's self included- behind, and take refuge in God or enlightenment. To me this isn't actually taking refuge in God or enlightenment- at any rate what I'd consider God or enlightenment. It's an escape into abstraction, a flight from rather than an immersion in the actual present moment of our living. In Zen we call this "the cave of emptiness." Being caught by emptiness. It's all too common, especially for people who take up spiritual practice as a way to cope with tremendous emotional pain. This probably includes to one extent or another all of us, since to be human, to have grown up in a human family with parents in an imperfect world, is to have automatically been emotionally scarred to one degree or another.

At the other extreme, one could so psychologize one's practice that it becomes entirely self-referential and one's very focused on one's need for relationship and warmth and love and so on but in reality it's all about me, my fulfillment, my friendships and romances, and there's really not much actual love involved because there isn't much ability to see and experience that another person is actually that – another person – which is to say, unknowable, immense.

For us the hope is and the journey is to avoid both these pitfalls and to be able to remain engaged on a basic grounded human level with others who we know as others, and yet at the same time identify with, recognizing that self and other is a constant negotiation or conversation, and that we are most fundamentally that conversation, and can never be separate from it. This is how I understand the Buddha's teaching of non-self : that we are as the Lotus sutra says, "only a Buddha and a Buddha," co-creating each other with the whole universe on each occasion. We are not separate, nor are we the same.

There is a deep and I would say confused tradition in the West of the holiness and transcendence of erotic passion. This tradition begins in Judaism and early Christianity, develops through the Renaissance with the chivalrous tradition of courtly love, goes through the Romantics who sexualized it (in our recent culture the Beats were followers of the Romantics). In the Christian tradition the excessive and chaste love of Jesus is a passion without boundary that justifies almost anything, including seeking or causing death, as a love offering. You see a similar feeling among some of the Sufi and Hindu poets whose intoxication with God is infectious. There is something beautiful in all these traditions, but the flaw in them, as far as I can see, is that there such a totalization of the feeling of love that it swallows up actual people, burning up the individual in love's conflagration.

It's easier probably to love all sentient beings, or God, or humanity or love itself, than it is to love one person, or even one's self. In our practice, which allows and seems to encourage down to earth committed relationships and family life for even the most committed practitioners, we are gifted with the supreme challenge of practicing the ascent of love in a very personal and everyday way. We join together human being to human being- "body to body, mind to mind, true nature to true nature," as one version of our wedding ceremony puts it. It's never easy but I think it is possible for two people to join together in this way and help each other grow truly as human beings through the path of shared daily living. I have found this to be a tremendous practice, a beautiful basis for the development of compassion and loving kindness toward everyone: if compassion is my commitment as a priest and a practitioner then how can I not begin at home, and this means mostly noticing when I am not compassionate and loving, and how that is. In my very real and daily encounters with my family members I often don't live up to my highest aspirations, but I always try to pay attention, and to be honest and present with what I am actually feeling and how I am actually behaving. There are beautiful moments of real love and appreciation of course, many of them, but there are also times of annoyance, anger, confusion, resentment. These seem necessary and real: the full picture seems to require them. They sweeten the pot.

In the final analysis, as Martha Nussbaum points out at the end of her book, with her discussion of Joyce's Ulysses, the ascent of love depends also on love's descent: while we hold high ideals and aspirations, and work all the time to purify ourselves of narrowness and destructive emotions, we also recognize our ordinariness and celebrate it. To be a human being is to be messy, smelly, and flawed as well as noble and spiritual. And this is perfection: our very imperfection can't ever be dispensed with. When you reflect on it long enough you see how radically this is so. It's the nature of rupa, flesh, to be corrupted, to return to the earth. And it's the nature of mind to rise up, returning to heaven. Yet body and mind are not two substances, they are one flow. Only within our conceptual world do they appear as separate. Only in the conceptual world is there an opposition between perfection and imperfection, between love and resentment. When we sit in zazen we demonstrate this directly and train in it: rooted in the body, on the earth, held on our seats by gravity, we also rise up, feeling the lightness of the upper torso as our spirit lifts us with a light touch. For a little while we can let go of concepts and simply experience love without anything extra.

This poem of Galway Kinnel's was in a late July 2004 edition of the New Yorker:

Shelly

When I was twenty the one true
free spirit I had heard of was Shelly,
Shelly, who wrote tracts advocating
atheism, free love, the emancipation
of women, the abolition of wealth and class,
and poems on the bliss of romantic love,
Shelly, who I learned later, perhaps
almost too late, remarried Harriet,
then pregnant with their second child,
and a few months later ran off with Mary,
already pregnant herself, bringing
with them Mary's stepsister Claire,
who very likely also became his lover,

and in this malaise a trios, which Shelly
had imagined would be "a paradise of exiles,"
they lived, along with the specter of Harriet,
who drowned herself in the Serpentine,
and of Mary's half sister Fanny,
who killed herself, maybe for unrequited
love of Shelly, and with the spirits
of adored but often neglected
children conceived incidentally
in the pursuit of Eros – Harriet's
Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelly
and consigned to foster parents; Mary's
Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse,
Shelly's favorite, dead at three; Elena,
the baby in Naples, almost surely
Shelly's own, whom he "adopted"
and then left behind, dead at one and a half;
Allegra, Claire's daughter by Byron,
whom Byron sent off to the convent
at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five –

and those days before I knew
any of this, I thought I followed Shelly,
who thought he was following radiant desire.

® 2004, Norman Fischer

edz

Three Ways to See Zazen

Sometimes when I get far afield with my practice, as I can too easily do, I have to bring myself back. I am doing a million things – there is poetry, my family, household chores; I am reading the bible, or science- it is all very interesting. But then I have to stop myself and ask, what am I doing? Where is my anchor, my home? What’s my basic commitment?Sometimes when I get far afield with my practice, as I can too easily do, I have to bring myself back. I am doing a million things – there is poetry, my family, household chores; I am reading the bible, or science- it is all very interesting. But then I have to stop myself and ask, what am I doing? Where is my anchor, my home? What’s my basic commitment? How does all this fit together? I have to be my own boss, my own good teacher. And then I remind myself: there is zazen. Zazen is the anchor, my home, my hearth, the warm fire that keeps my life on its right course.

These days I have a good spot for doing zazen, a little room upstairs in our house with a zazen platform and a cushion. I have an altar in three tiers. On the top I have a small statue of Shakyamuni making the earth-touching mudra. He is sitting on a beautiful small altar made for me by the sangha at San Quentin that Lee de Barros leads. On the next tier stands a beautiful wooden Kuan Yin statue that my dear friend and teacher Phil Whalen gave me. Below that is a Japanese Vairochana Buddha on a throne, a lacquer piece that Hoitsu Suzuki Roshi gave to me. I get out of bed in the morning, light some incense for all these luminaries, who carry with them so much memory and friendship and support, and then I sit down. It’s quiet and dark and I simply sit there, breathing in the semi darkness, with just a candle burning. These days it takes dawn a long time to come but eventually it does. My sitting seems timeless and it is wonderful. I wake up very happy to do it. It keeps me honest all day long.

Dogen wrote somewhere, “The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It has nothing to do with sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. It is the dharma gate of repose and bliss.” I appreciate that saying. Our zazen is not something we are supposed to do, not something we do because it does something for our lives, it’s not a skill, a technique- and really it can’t be defined or limited to what we think we are doing before dawn in our little room upstairs. Yet, at the same time, we can’t fool ourselves. We do sit down, as we have been sitting down all day today, and it is very important that we do so, and do so regularly, and live our lives in such a way- and if we sit, we will live our lives in such a way – that the sitting can always perfume our lives, pervade them, influence them in some way, we can’t really say how. But it happens. We all know that it happens.

It’s odd that zazen is something very simple and concrete that we do- we simply do it, we sit down this way, we breathe, we pay attention – and yet we seem to talk about it so much! Really what is there to say? But we say a lot. I do not think this is because there is so much theory to sitting. I think it’s because there is already so much theory in our minds. We have to talk to ourselves about zazen not so we can understand zazen but so that we can offer resistance to our natural inclination to understand it- and therefore to make it something small and manageable. When we make our zazen small and manageable and routine then we don’t want to do it so much. This is why we keep talking about zazen, endlessly, in so many ways. To defamiliarize ourselves from it. To remind ourselves that we don’t know what it is, and that’s why we are doing it. We don’t know what our lives are either- and that’s what makes them important.

In this spirit today I want to offer a few ways of looking at our zazen practice. Zazen as return, zazen as waiting, zazen as listening.

Our practice is shikantaza- just sitting. Just being present with body and breath- and with whatever is going on in our sitting. This is a tricky practice because it is so wide and so permissive. What’s the difference between just sitting and just sitting around? Between zazen, in other words, and just sitting around spinning our wheels? Well no difference at all- and all the difference in the world. The main point of Dogen’s teaching, and what makes him so wonderful, and Suzuki Roshi so wonderful, because Suzuki Roshi is a disciple of Dogen – is that he sees no real distinction between practice and awakening. Seeing self, time, and religious cultivation conventionally we would say something like this: I am an imperfect unrealized being, and I would like to improve, even perfect myself. So I will practice zazen and as time goes by I will become better. But Dogen is at pains to show us that this way of looking at practice fails to appreciate what self really is, and what time and religious cultivation really are.

Self is immense and ineffable. Time is not sequential. Religious cultivation is not an acquisitive practice in a relative realm but is rather an expression of enlightenment itself. So we sit not to achieve something over time but to immerse ourselves in the activity of our sitting, in the true immensity of our self, the true shape of time. Practice does not lead us along a linear path to realization. Practice is, moment by moment, the whole of that realization, whether we know it or not. I remember once in the dokusan room Aitken Roshi expressed this point to me. He held up his kotsu (small wooden Zen master staff) and made motions of slicing it into pieces with his finger. “Wherever you cut it,” he said, “It is pure gold inside. At the beginning as well as at the end.” So yes our practice has a beginning a middle and an end. From the outside it is that way. But at every stage it is the same- pure gold inside.

This is what I mean by return. When we practice zazen we are not going someplace, not voyaging outward. Neither are we going inward, deeper and deeper inward. We are just returning home, returning to our own place, the place we came from, go to, are now, and will never leave. Yes zazen takes effort- it might be difficult. We do make effort, it is necessary that we do. But the effort is the effort to return. To return home. To return to where we are and have always been.

But we have forgotten where we are. We are there anyway- whether we have forgotten or not. But it is painful to forget. When we sit down – even if our mind is wandering- even if we are reviewing the past or planning our day or week – simply by sitting down with faith and sincerity and making the best effort we can make, suffering through our emotional or physical pain if that is what is happening – or enjoying the peacefulness of the breath and the quiet of the universe – if that is what is happening – when we sit down we are always returning to our true home, and we are remembering that we are returning, and this makes a difference to us. Sometimes I say that zazen is something supremely useless. This is true I think. It is useless because whether we do zazen or not we are home. We are already Buddha, as Dogen felt from a very early age. If we are already Buddha, why do we have to do zazen at all? This was Dogen’s question, the question that spurred him on in his own practice. And his answer was we have to do zazen because we have forgotten that we are already home. We’re home anyway. But when we have forgotten we suffer a lot. And those we love will also suffer because we suffer.

Another way to understand- and to experience- zazen is as the practice of waiting. Waiting is now seen as something very bad. We are all so busy, we require that everything goes smoothly, that there are no delays, that we do not have to experience so-called dead time, time waiting in line, or online. So many business are always advertising about how fast and easy it is to access their goods or services. Waiting is frustrating. We tap our feet or drum our fingers against the tabletop. Hurry up! Come on! Lets get on with it. The source of our frustration with waiting is that we are waiting for something. We have action/result in mind, and there should be, we think, as little wasted time as possible between the two.

Zazen is certainly not waiting in this sense. It is waiting in the profound sense of waiting for nothing. Simply waiting. No expectations, nothing that is supposed to happen. No desired result. Just this moment of sheer presence.

Waiting – for what? If “nothing” seems too uninspiring and foreboding perhaps we can say we are waiting for God. This is the title of one of Simone Weil’s books, Waiting for God. That’s how God appears- not by summoning God, or by performing sacrifice, prayer, or something like that, so as to manipulate God, causing God to appear on demand, like a vending machine- put in the quarters and you’ll hear that satisfying clatter and bump. No, God comes when we wait. Just sitting, just being present, with a powerful and alert anticipation, a pregnant, focused, poised-at-the-edge-of-the-abyss awakeness. Hoping for, waiting for- exactly nothing. Plunging into the moment of being alive. Just that, and nothing extra.

A third way- zazen as listening. Living is being in connection with something. With ourselves, with others, with the world around us. There’s no way to live without living in connection. Even alone, far away from everything and everyone- friends appear. The sky. A tree. The sound of the wind. Memory. The face of another looming large. We are all literally born through others and when we die we will join – finally and fully- those others, mixing our very substance, body and mind, with them.

To be in connection is to listen, deeply to listen. To say and do nothing sometimes- just listen. When we do zazen we are listening. We sit with openness. Although we sit in a particular posture and often with focus on the breath in the belly these things are not the essence of what we are doing: they are just a container for it. What we are doing is listening. We are not trying to cut off our thoughts and feelings: we are open to them, listening to them. We sit with open ears, hearing the sounds of the room and outside the room. Not hearing in the usual way- with definition and annoyance or desire – but deeply listening, allowing the sound in, and allowing it to fade away. Listening to the universe, to the heart, to Buddha. And being moved by what we hear. This is also zazen.

Zazen is of course indefinable and inexhaustible. It is our anchor, our touchstone. It is what makes it possible for me- and for us – to range far afield, to be very open with our practice – because we come back to zazen. Zazen keeps us on track. If we really come home, if we really wait, if we really listen, we’ll know when we are getting confused, getting entangled, losing our way, and we’ll say so, and help each other to come back. Because of zazen we don’t have to be rigid with our practice. We can have a lot of confidence and openness and flexibility. Even in a crisis, when we discover all of a sudden that the life we thought we were living is not in fact the life we have been living and we are plunged into a deep and unsettling confusion – even then we will be ok, because zazen will catch us when we fall, and pick us up again, to set us once again upright on our cushions. Even if we are lying down at the time!

® 2004, Norman Fischer

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On Commitment in Practice

Zoketsu examines the meaning of lay and priest ordinations in our lineage.Today we’re going to do Jukai (Taking the Precepts) ceremony so it’s a good occasion to talk about commitment in our practice, and about our ceremonies of vowing.

As many of you know, I grew up in a religious household of observant Jews. We were part of a tight knit Jewish community. We kept a kosher home and went to synagogue regularly, observed Shabbat and the cycle of holidays. Unlike many people who find this kind of background oppressive and restrictive, I enjoyed it. To me it made perfect sense that there would be a way of life that you would follow, a path you’d be on, an alternative to your own whims and impulses. I took our way of life for granted and never thought about it much. I was not alone in this: no one in our community as far as I knew thought much about how we lived and what our religious practice was all about. There wasn’t even an idea of “religious practice.” We just did what we did because that was what Jews had always done. If it was sometimes troublesome we just dealt with it.

I don’t necessarily recommend this attitude, but there was something good about it. The feeling that, like a squirrel who just hides nuts because that is what squirrels do, or a bird who flies south for the winter because that is what birds do, you just do your practice because that is what you do, what you are. This still seems to me the strongest way to practice. Of course we all have our desires and impulses- and our doubts and confusion. We are all many-sided people, and it’s no good to deny that. But still, underneath it all there’s the person who just goes on practicing no matter what. Suzuki roshi mentions this attitude many times. Once he said that even if the sun were to rise in the west the path of the bodhisattva just would go on straight ahead anyway, like a railroad track going on and on into the horizon. I don’t say we’re all supposed to be like that and that we’re falling down on the job if we’re not. We all need to be the way we are. I am only saying that this life of total commitment is a wonderful way to live; I suppose my favorite way.

In some spiritual paths there is a notion of a graduated way, many steps and stages, many levels and heights to ascend. Such paths can be very exciting. You have plenty to do, plenty to keep you interested. Even in Rinzai Zen, with its koan tradition, you have a lot of excitement as you pass the various koans, and advance closer and closer to the clear completion of your study. But our practice isn’t like that. It’s very basic and simple minded. There isn’t any accomplishment or completion. There are no stages to pass through so that you know where you are. Suzuki roshi once said our practice is like walking along in the fog- you are never sure exactly where you are. But you do gradually get wet through and through. Your whole life changes, but not so you’d notice particularly. One day you just think, Oh I suppose it is all quite different for me now. Or maybe you never think that. The method is just to go on practicing in the same way day by day. Who would want to do this? And yet there’s joy in it.

So this is our commitment- not some emotional spectacular flame of experience or accomplishment or even faith, but a quiet feeling of growing certainty that this way is right for us, that the practice is important to us, and will see us through our lives, all the way out to death and beyond. This comes usually with time. Even if we feel it from the beginning, we will feel it differently, and more firmly and truly, with time.

In our tradition we have occasions that mark this sense of commitment, ceremonies we practice that will help us to recognize the commitment we already have, and to deepen that commitment. Jukai ceremony- properly called Zeikei Tokudo, Staying at Home, Entering the Way – is the main such occasion. We study the precepts seriously and personally for some time, making sure that yes we are already in harmony with them, we do see them as the way of life we are living and want to continue to live, knowing that they are deeper than we can understand now, but that we will some day understand more. And then we sew the rakesu, Buddha’s robe, putting into each stitch our vow to be one with Buddha, to return to Buddha, as the essential archetype of our lives. And then the day comes for the ceremony, and, just like any other day, we do what there is to do, we practice in the ceremony, receive the rakesu, put it on, and bow. And we wear it from then on, and it reminds us of our vow, it is an embodiment of it, as our own body and mind are too.

The truest understanding is that the jukai ceremony takes place for us on each and every moment of our lives. Every moment is a time to commit ourselves to our lives, and every recommitment is a deepening and a mellowing. We are letting go just a little bit more. Finally, at the end of our lives, we let go all the way. All the ceremonies we have- jukai, tokudo (priest ordination, or Shukke Tokudo, Leaving Home, Entering the Way), Shuso ceremony, (Head Monk Questioning Ceremony), and Dharma Transmission – all these ceremonies are symbols of the commitment of letting go that is happening every moment. These ceremonies mean nothing at all if we don’t see that they stand for the commitment that we are being called to make moment after moment. If we don’t see them that way then we are just accumulating ornaments when we receive a rakesu or an okesa, and we would be better off not receiving them.

Our American Soto Zen tradition, transmitted from Japan, has an inherent confusion about the difference between priest and lay practitioners. Fundamentally there really is no difference: basically, all Zen practitioners are priests. In fact, all human beings are priests, people on the road to full awakening and full commitment, no matter how far they get in this particular lifetime. Yet, at the same time, there are differences in dress and in a few details of the practice (only priests can officiate at services and rituals).

In all other schools of Buddhism the difference between lay and priest practitioners is not confusing, because it is a lifestyle difference that is clearly visible. Priests vow to be celibate monks- to follow the Vinaya Rules of not eating after noon, not having money, always wearing robes, and so on. You can easily see the difference between a priest and a lay person, and the reasons to choose or not choose one or another lifestyle are clear. In our tradition, which is considered strange and almost suspect by the rest of the Buddhist world, there is confusion because the vows and commitments of priests and lay practitioners are the same. The only difference is that priests make what feels like a more solemn commitment to practice for and with others forever. And because of this, priests are more obligated to do this. But often lay people make these solemn commitments too, and feel within themselves the same obligation to practice that a priest should feel.

All religious commitments are inner commitments and are therefore hard to discern. But often, as with Buddhist priests in traditions other than ours, these inner commitments have an outward sign, a lifestyle change that is easily identifiable. In our tradition the commitments are mainly inner ones, so it is more difficult to be definite about what we are doing. The only outward signs are the wearing of the okesa or rakesu, and most of the time we are not wearing them. This essential inwardness of our commitment can seem a little vague sometimes, and this might be a problem. But on the whole I think it is a good thing. It is more foggy, in Suzuki roshi’s sense. But, whether it is a good thing or not it is what we have. Much as we might sometimes think we’d like to, we can’t make up our own rules or bend the tradition according to our needs. Traditions are strong because they are traditions – they are venerable, stubborn, larger than we are, with a grander sense of history than we have. Traditions do change of course, but always too slowly to suit us.

Our tradition tells us that the ceremony we call Dharma Transmission can only be received by priests, that is people who have received Shukke Tokudo ordination and wear the okesa. This may seem to denigrate the status of lay practitioners but I do not feel this way. It’s just the way the tradition and its the ritual path works, and when you understand it you can see the logic in it. For years at Zen Center there has been talk of making a Dharma Transmission ceremony for lay people and a few experiments have been tried, but none of them have managed to transmit the entire process of the Dharma Transmission ceremony. The ceremony is simply resistant to that. In other lineages of Zen there are various styles of what’s called Lay Transmission, but I am not sure how it’s done, and, in any case, our own lineage seems to be conservative on this point. But to me it doesn't really matter. Since anyone who wants to receive Shukke Tokudo, wear the okesa, and obligate themselves to uphold the tradition, is eligible to do so, with no one barred from doing so by reason of race, gender, age, intelligence, physical ability, skill, lifestyle, or talent from doing so, it seems as if there is no need to create an alternative.

In any case, lay practitioners can be empowered in various ways to teach Zen, and lay practitioners do teach Zen even if no one empowers them. Anyway, everyone already is teaching Zen. As I said, our tradition is very simple minded. It values above all steadiness and faithfulness. So anyone who is steady and faithful and matures in practice over a long time can and does teach Zen regardless of empowerments and rituals. There are many ways to teach Zen and what looks like teaching Zen may or may not be teaching Zen.

Personally I do not think any practitioners are more important than any others. I follow the tradition in honoring seniority; after all, if you respect the practice and believe in it, then you respect and believe in those who have faithfully practiced it for a long time. But this has nothing to do with rank or ordination, only with time and experience, regardless of wisdom or skill. Whether we are senior or junior, we are all trying our best, given our circumstances, and we are all valuable, all manifestations of Buddha Nature, all worthy of being heard. Priests are good. They inspire me. Lay disciples are good. They inspire me just as much – maybe more. And people who aren't Zen students – but just devote themselves to their practice as Jews or Christians, fathers or mothers, artists, musicians, helpers, and so on – these may be the most inspiring of all, because they are just practicing for practice’s own sake. They don’t even call it Zen, and so are not so susceptible to being fooled by a robe or a ceremony. As you know, to me openness and tolerance are the most important values. Not to hold onto your own role or your own truth as better than someone else’s but to be humble, to always be ready to listen and learn – for me this is the essence of Buddha’s teaching. Insofar as our ritual path of commitment tempts us to be arrogant and close-minded I am wary of it. We have to be careful. But arrogance and close mindedness are problems not of our tradition but of our minds. Even if we had no ordinations at all we’d still have hierarchy, jealousy, resentment, and so on.

When we practice together for a long time we feel obligated to one another, and that’s a good thing I think. You take care of me- and I am grateful for that. And I take care of you- at least as best I can. I feel responsible for you, I worry about you, I suffer with your sufferings, and I know you do the same for me. But I always remind myself that the path of the Buddha is the path of release, of freedom. The obligations we feel for each other are not stickiness and confusion between separate people who share interests and values. The source of our mutual obligation and connection is the freedom that our appreciation of the empty open nature of phenomena brings. We know we don’t need to stick to each other, get entangled with each other. In the end we release each other. Our job is to let go of each other – to trust each other that much.

When I ordain priests I always tell them there are three practices priests have to do: first, to see everyone as Buddha; second, to help everyone; and third, to be humble. Priests are not special people with deep understanding. In the Western traditions when someone becomes a priest minister or rabbi it means that they have completed their training and are professionals. But Buddhist priests are not professionals. They are just practicing. They have taken ordination not because their practice is professional grade but because they need the help that ordination will afford them. The same is true of lay practitioners. And they too should do their best to follow the three practices of seeing everyone as Buddha, helping others, and being humble. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t benefit a lot by taking on these three practices.

It is a curious thing to me how powerful religion is, especially considering that it isn’t anything at all. What are we doing when we do zazen? Nothing! What do we do when we perform jukai ceremony- nothing! All religions are like this- much ado about nothing. And yet there’s a power in them. That power can be a healing power- or it can be toxic. Over the years I have had so many troublesome conversations about the question of ordination ceremonies that I have gotten weary of them. There are no answers to any of our questions about all this and none of it makes sense and all of it is just nothing. So it is better, when you have such questions, just to look at your own mind and try to let go than to think that you are going to figure out the meaning of any of it. Lets simply make use the best we can of the tradition that has been given to us, and appreciate it.

Human beings have imagination: we can imagine perfection within ourselves and in the world around us. And we want to strive for that even though we will never reach it. To me this seems noble and good- and even necessary. Someone who is not developing, not trying for a more beautiful and true life seems a sad person to me. How could such a person look forward to an ongoing life, especially when things go wrong, and when the body ages and fails? This possibility of vowing and commitment, of walking the path and going on ahead no matter what, from the first moment of life until the last, seems the only way to me. We are lucky to have these ancient ways of realizing this human dream.

® 2003, Norman Fischer

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Bewilderment

Zoketsu discusses his own life story, poetry, being a priest, and the unknowable nature of our life.

Whenever anyone asks me how I came to be a Zen priest and abbot I always tell them it was an accident. This is really the truth. While I admire religious people, people who seem to have a religious destiny and interest – and now I know many people like this – I am afraid that I am just not such a person. Mainly I am and have been most of my life bewildered. I mean this in the literal sense- “bewildered,” meaning being aware of the many situations there are in any one situation, the many ways there always are of looking at anything, of understanding anything, the basic perplexity inherent in being human and living in a world that we make with our senses and our minds. The dictionary tells me that the “be-” of “bewilder” means be, as in “to be”; but it also means “completely and utterly.” “Wilder” means to be lost in a place where there are so many paths you can’t tell where to go. It means to be in the wilderness where there aren’t any paths at all – just open spaces or full spaces without any clearings. So to be bewildered is to see many many paths and also to see that the whole world is open and wild- and there aren’t any paths. Wherever you go wherever you are whatever happens is a path – an also a question: a path that leads to a new path. This is how I have always felt. The world is truly bewildering and this is what makes it so marvelous. You can’t explain it. Of course you can and probably will explain many things- but these are explanations, beautiful in their own way but not really telling you anything about anything. The real world- and anyone’s life- is too strange – too bewildering- to be explained.

I started my Zen practice not as a spiritual person but as an poet. Although I did not become a poet on purpose, neither was it an accident. I was forced into it by circumstances. I was born at the very end of World War II, when the soldiers were returning home from the battlefield with a great hope that things could now be normal and life could be even better now than it had been before the war. People in general are admirably able to find hope – hope keeps coming back no matter how hopeless things might seem at any given time. This is something to remember and to count on in hopeless times. To be human is to have the capacity, against all the odds, to hope. But although everyone in those days was trying to hopeful in fact they were traumatized by what had happened to them in the war. As a child I felt this universal trauma as a kind of coating on top of things, like dust that was constantly swirling around in the air and would inevitably settle on whatever you brought into the room. I could feel it but no one ever talked about it or even seemed to know that it was there- but children always know what’s there, even if they can’t say what it is. Instead they feel it mythically, and they are bewildered by it. Which is, I think, fairly normal. We all grow up knowing somehow that there’s a gap between how the world actually is – how we feel it to be – and how the adults in our world see things and explain them to us. It is one of the great travesties and mistakes of human culture that we always think of children as childish. Actually it should be just the opposite- we ought to honor children, seek their advice, and try our best to consider their point of view as being of the essence for human understanding. Of course it would make no sense to ask children for practical advice about how to run the government – this is our unfortunate task as adults. But when running the government causes us to forget the profundity of the child’s point of view we are truly sunk. Jesus said something like this I think: “You should be as little children.”

At any rate, because of this being bewildered in a traumatized world I was forced to constantly doubt the world as it was given to me to understand and to try to understand the world on my own. This was the only form of self defense I could think of. It is why I began writing poetry- as a means to try to understand what I otherwise could not understand because thinking could never get me there. I could see how limited thinking was. Although poetry has never helped me understand anything, it has helped me to keep on trying to understand by giving me a method larger than my own mind and personality. But poetry also makes it clear that the gap between how things are and how we live is immense. So poetry can make your life a lot worse. This was what happened to me.

Here is a recent poem of mine that may have something to so with this:

These pages are years, days, nights
Words pasted on like flashes of black light
Points of space that swallow apples and dates
Until all that’s occurred- places, moments, events
Folds into the general whole
As a sea humps waves that fall and spray against rocks
Then rock out again, swaying –
How the heart can be like a rock
How it can be blue, like a curtain or a sky
How it can be a royal crown upon a noble skull
Sliding out from the general scheme of things-
I walked along the shore and saw
Two dead cormorants, an eyeless pelican, flies walking in the sockets
Sky with banks of golden pearl gray cloud
A smeared rainbow flaring indistinct against the horizon –
Objects are neither solid nor discreet
Subjects repeat themselves as waves
With variations, spray, trajectory, rhyme –
Birth comes this time of year
To those who wait it, doubled

Poetry was making life really impossible so I could see that what was required was to close the gap by finding a way to turn all of life into poetry. This was the only hope. I was feeling this when I encountered the first Zen books I read, and they seemed to provide me with what I was looking for. This is how I understood Zen then – as a way to live so that all of life could be poetry- that the gap between the way things actually are and the way people live and think could be somehow closed and you could live life whole and true, and it could be beautiful and purposeful, even if things were difficult, and even if you could never really know the purpose of your life. So my motivation to practice Zen wasn’t really spiritual I suppose you could say. My motivation was aesthetic and practical. I just wanted to find a sustainable way to live. When I found out about zazen practice it immediately struck me as desperately important. I don’t know why- possibly because I could sense that in order to do what I wanted to do one needed to approach things from an entirely different angle. I didn’t like Buddhas and bowing and robes and so on – it all seemed faintly ridiculous to me, an iconoclast by temperament and upbringing – but I really liked zazen – the idea of zazen but also the actual doing of zazen. It was never boring. I could never figure it out or get tired of it because it was so simple it was almost nothing at all. I started doing zazen every day and I have continued ever since. It just so happened that keeping on doing zazen intensively required me to bow to Buddhas and, eventually, to wear robes and take ordinations. Of course I had a lot of resistance to all of that but the resistance was small compared the certainty I had that it was absolutely necessary to live in such a way that I could keep on trying to understand life. The resistance was only me and my little preferences and conditioning, whereas zazen and the necessity to keep on with it was something much wider than that. So I persisted. This may sound more noble than it actually is. The fact is, I was terrified not to practice zazen, not to live out this desperate quest for the truth. I imagined I wouldn’t be able to bear life in any other way. I could not imagine any other possibility. So I was willing to do whatever it took to go on.

Of course we all have theories – to be human is to theorize – and all our theories are autobiographical – so my theory is that to be human is to need to live a life that is whole and meaningful and beautiful, a life devoted to the pursuit of the real. It seems to me, starting with my own experience, that all human beings want and need to make this kind of effort in their living- and that this is why there is always in human cultures art and religion of some kind. From childhood we have dreams and images and longings that ripen into a vision of life that we need to understand for ourselves, uniquely. and experientially. This is why there is such a thing as spiritual path. To me, spiritual path isn’t separate or apart from ordinary life, an unusual life, an alternative to emotional life and material life. Spiritual path is simply a way to stay true to what arises in the course of a human lifetime, whatever that may be. It’s true we need some methods and some rules and some techniques and some teachings. These things are practical- like food and clothing. Maybe they are the food and clothing of the soul. There are many kinds of good food and many kinds of appropriate and useful clothing – there can also be foods that are bad for you and clothing that is uncomfortable and wrong for the weather. We need to find what works. But, in any case, the teachings and techniques and beliefs and so on of a spiritual path aren’t themselves the spiritual path. Spiritual reality, spiritual truth, is always bewildering, never entirely knowable. We can know some things. For a little while anyway we can feel we know something that is true. Mostly we can be surprised by a feeling of wonder – or a feeling of gratitude or gentle perplexity. But we can never really possess the truth. That’s a kind of craziness, to think we know the truth. My favorite line in the Zen ordination ceremony is “the path is vast and wide- not even a Buddha can define it.”

I say that everyone without exception wants and needs to live with spiritual integrity, but I know that there is not much evidence for this. Now and in the past the vast majority of people alive are not concerned with spiritual integrity. They may say they are, but they actually aren’t. They are concerned with economic well being, with their families, with social status, power, and so on – or maybe they are concerned with mere survival. It is now and has always been a minority of people who have devoted themselves to a thoroughgoing exploration of reality. Nevertheless I believe that all human beings have that need in them, and that everyone has some native sense of its importance. Anyone is stopped short on entering a silent meditation hall or a cathedral. Taking a minute to just sit still there, anyone feels something larger and wider than the literality of mundane life. Sometimes the same thing happens when you read a poem or see a great picture. We all know about this because we all know, whether we think about it or not, that we have come here from nowhere and that when we are done here we are going to return to nowhere. The minority of people who are devoted to thoroughgoing exploration of reality, to spiritual practice of some sort, do it on behalf of all the others. In the end, this is the only way it can be done.

Another recent poem:

How can a shadow appear in a fog
Where the sun’s hidden like a flaming
Baked potato
Muffled in snow
Similarly there’s no way a person
Can reappear upon a tablecloth
Once he is gone inevitably
From any singular moment of time
Or any place which has changed
The moment the tablecloth has been whisked off suddenly
Leaving a bold or a bald table
Or the shining head reflecting light –
At this juncture a robbery takes place
Or – at least – the alarm sounds alarmingly
It may be a false alarm
But no alarm is false when it sounds

There’s a wonderful exhibit on at the MOMA- I think it is nearly over but there may be a week or so left. It’s called “Forty Years of Painting,” retrospective work by the German contemporary painter Gerhard Richter. The paintings in this show are beautiful and quite various- this is one of the main things about Richter- he doesn’t have a style- he has many styles. Growing up under the Nazi regime during the war, and then under the Communist regime, and then coming to maturity under enthusiastic German free market capitalism, he had a chance to develop a tremendous sense of doubt about how people live, what they think, and about what the world actually is. Somehow it all made him want to look more deeply at things, and to use painting as a way of looking and exploring. Through this exploration and doubt he was able to find his way to beauty. I have many favorites in the exhibition but maybe my most favorite is a small painting, done in blacks and whites and soft grays, of a roll of toilet paper hanging on a toilet paper rack tacked onto a wall. You would think that such a subject could only be painted ironically or preciously. But it is painted very straightforwardly, and it is a quietly beautiful, almost serenely beautiful, picture, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I would like to close my talk today with some quotations from Richter:

“I am fascinated by the human, temporal, real, logical side of an occurrence which is simultaneously so unreal, so incomprehensible, and so atemporal. And I would like to represent it in such a way that this contradiction is preserved.” (Gerhard Richter, “The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993.” MIT Press, Anthony d”Offay Gallery London, 1995. ed H-U Obrist, trans D Britt. p 58.)

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no directions. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn – as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts, and names for things.” Ibid. p 58.

A final poem:

Body in poses – or in poesy
Supports the floor – or the war
Clinging to the lip of a drain, resisting going down
But the inevitable wash and gurgle marches through,
Time passing as it generally does –
You remember the heart of it, little steel balls with tiny black dots in the center:
A spider going up the waterspout
Not coming in, not getting out

® 2003, Norman Fischer

edz

Practice of Forgiveness

The practice of fully feeling our pain allows us to see through it. We are then led to forgiving ourselves and becoming more aware of the different realities residing within conflict

Practice of Forgiveness

In being fully alive – through our pain and difficulty.

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | June 9, 2001

 

Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum

 

One of my practices, which I would recommend highly, is
watching morning television. It’s very
educational. It really is. The other day, an expert came on, who had
figured out a really good method for achieving happiness. You would write in a journal for twenty
minutes a day. Not randomly,
though. There were several areas of
personal concern that you were supposed to write about in a systematic way. The
categories were the physical – including your diet and exercise, emotional,
relationships, and spirituality. You
were supposed to write for five minutes on each of these four areas. What impressed me was that under spirituality,
you were supposed to write about forgiveness.
Every single day you would write in your journal about your efforts to
forgive yourself for what you had done that was harmful, or to forgive somebody
else for what they had done to you that was harmful.

 

So I thought about this afterward. It seemed really startling to me, the idea
that there would be so much hurting going on in the world. That every day – because there was that much
hurting going on in the world – every person would have to spend time forgiving
themselves and others. I had never
really thought about it quite in that way before. But as soon as I thought about it, I said,
“Of course, that is really right. People
hurting themselves. People hurting each
other with all kinds of abuse and disrespect.
Diminishment of all sorts.” The
kind of hurting that you read about in the newspaper – the violence, the anger,
the hatred; but also the more subtle, everyday kind of hurting. Hurting that comes just from failing to love
enough. Failing, little by little, day
by day. No one notices. And yet, it really is a powerful, negative
force in our lives.

 

I thought the expert had a really good idea. It really made a lot of sense. If you are going to take care of yourself –
take your vitamins and follow a good diet and all that, it would really make
sense to have a daily hygiene of forgiving.
Forgiving seems to be a really necessary practice.

 

But how do you forgive?
Well, it is not that easy. Why is
it so hard? It’s hard because it is
literally painful, and nobody wants to feel pain. It is a natural, human response to run away
from pain. So when pain is there, before
you even have a chance to feel it, you are already fleeing in the other direction,
covering it over with distraction. And
distraction takes various forms: denial, blaming somebody else, or just
oblivion. Somehow wiping it out. Forgetting it somehow. As I often say, we live in a society that is
masterful at all of this. Our society is
literally organized to promote this kind of distraction and oblivion.

 

Of course, as far as blame is concerned, we don’t need any
help for that! We automatically blame
people. So if you have ever hurt
yourself, and I think that we often do, and if you have ever hurt anyone else,
which we often do (knowingly or unknowingly), there is pain. And if somebody has hurt you, then obviously
there is a lot of pain.

 

If you are going to follow this woman’s advice and practice
forgiveness, the first thing you have to do is to allow yourself to feel acutely
the pain of that hurting. This requires work,
since most of the time, I think, that pain in
its fullness does not exist within the frame of our awareness. You need to allow it, to evoke it, to bring
it up, to bring it forth, and to let it blossom into your heart. It is very rare that we are willing to sit
still for that. But we have to, if we
are ever to forgive.

 

This is one reason why meditation practice is not always
peaceful. If you practice meditation
with a sense of really being present and open and aware to what comes,
sometimes that is what comes. Pain. Difficulty.
But actual meditation practice itself, if you follow it closely and are
honest with yourself, will naturally lead you down the path of
forgiveness.

 

So that is the first part.
To forgive, you really need to allow yourself to feel the fullness of
the pain.

 

The next thing you have to do is go to the root of the pain,
beyond the story that comes associated with it, and beyond the dismay that you
feel. You really have to go to the root
of it. The root of pain, I feel, is
really always the same. The root of pain
is existence itself. Because you are, there is this pain. If you really are going to forgive, you have
to feel the pain of the hurt all the way to its core, and see right through
it. Yes, it is true. You have been hurt. Maybe it is also true that someone has done
something to you. But if you weren’t, that would not have
happened. If you didn’t have a mind, a
body, an identity, that wouldn’t happen.
But since you do, it is guaranteed that you will be hurt. When the conditions of hurt come together, as
they will, you will be hurt.

 

The one who hurt you, the story, and the history of that
hurting, are ultimately incidental to the sheer fact of hurt being built into
the condition of life. So if you can get
to that level of experiencing your hurt, or having hurt another (because in the
end being hurt and having hurt another amount to the same thing). if you can
allow yourself to feel the pain to that level, then it is easy to forgive. It is a natural thing. The heart just opens to forgiveness, because
you see that we are all in this together.

 

So I agree with the woman that forgiving oneself, and
forgiving anyone else who has hurt you, are necessary for spiritual and
emotional health. I am not quite as
confident as she is that twenty minutes a day of journaling will do the trick;
but I am willing to believe that it is possible. You never know! But whether or not it seems true, it really
seems right that forgiveness has to be a daily, regular practice. It has to be a path that you walk down,
probably for your whole life.

 

For me, the hardest thing of all is forgiving yourself for
being yourself. I think that on some
very deep level, this is the hardest thing.
I think that we all are slightly annoyed with ourselves for being
ourselves. I have always considered it
to be the pinnacle of spiritual life just to allow yourself to be yourself, as you are. They always talk about this in Zen. They talk about it as the supreme and
indelible mark of awakening: That you simply are yourself. It sounds crazy. “Of course I am myself!” What they mean, though, is totally accepting
that you are the way you are. Forgiving
yourself for it, all the way to the bottom.
Short of this, we are always a little bit embarrassed about who we are,
thinking, “I should be better. Why is it
this way?”

 

So it is hard to forgive yourself. Very hard.
And it is also very hard to forgive somebody else. To forgive another person is actually an internal
act of your own. It is something that
you do, not necessarily for the other person, but for yourself. Because your forgiving someone cannot absolve
that person of responsibility. You
cannot take away their responsibility, because nobody can ever escape the
consequences of their actions. So
although we forgive them, our forgiveness doesn’t get them off the hook. It is a mistake to think that somehow we have
gotten them off the hook by our forgiveness.
Only they themselves can do that.
So forgiveness is for us – for the openness of our own hearts, and for
the possibility that we could actually learn how to love. I think we need forgiveness before we can
love.

 

Some of you know that Kathie’s brother, my brother-in-law,
has been ill in the hospital, so I have been spending a lot of time with my
mother and father-in-law. We were talking
in the hospital the other day. It had
been the day after this horrible bombing in Israel, in the disco in Tel
Aviv. My mother and father-in-law were
baffled by this. They could not
understand what is going on there. How
could two peoples – yes, they are different and have different world views –
fail so miserably to appreciate each other?
How could they go on for so long, persisting in hating one another, with
such disastrous consequences? How could
people hate each other just because of their cultural and religious differences? It makes no sense.

 

Well, the fact is that it does make sense. People have
very good reasons for hating one another: They hate one another because they
are afraid of one another. And since
fear is such a disempowering and unacceptable emotion on a visceral level, we
can’t really allow ourselves to feel fear.
It’s too much. So we distract
ourselves from it with hatred. Why do
they fear each other? They fear each
other because they feel on a gut level – not just because they made this up,
but because they have past experience to base it on – that the other person,
the other peoples, are a threat to their very existence. A direct threat to their whole sense of
identity. The truth of the matter is
that most of us in the world, including most of us Buddhists, base our life on
identity. If your senses of the world,
if your beliefs, seem not only different from mine, but seem somehow to
absolutely deny the reality of mine, then I am terrified to my very bones. Then I feel that there is no choice. I have to hate you out of self-defense, because
your existence threatens mine.

 

That is how hatred works on this kind of level. Nobody thinks of it like that, really. They think it is about land, or this or that. They see it manifest every day in external
events. “Members of your group have killed
my family members, have killed my brothers and sisters. have killed my
countrymen – people that I know and lived with.
They have been killed by your people, and their property was taken away;
their language was taken away; their rights were taken away. How could I be
myself if I could forgive or accept that?
How could I face myself in the morning?
It would be like denying my own existence if I were to accept that. How could I face my relatives if I were to
forgive you for having killed them? How could
I deal with my own self-loathing for having betrayed my family?” That is how hatred is created.

 

Nightmare situations happen in cultures. I saw this in Israel. Jews and Palestinians can’t talk to one
another, because they don’t even share a basic understanding about what is
going on. There is no narrative or historical
basis for having a conversation. They
even call the same places by different names, and refuse to acknowledge that
the other name exists. If you ask where such-and-such
a street is, somebody will say, “Never heard of it.” Not because they don’t know it by that name, but
because they refuse to acknowledge that other people do know it as that
name.

 

It is not that they feel that they are living in different
worlds. They both think that there is only
one reality, but that the other one’s view is distorted. They all think that their attitudes are based
on sound, historical events, but if you talk to them about the history and the events,
their stories are different. It seems as
if there are no facts at all about
the past – only faith-based myths disguised as history. So there is no way to talk about it, because
they can’t even say what happened. There
is no way to get to the peace table and agree: “This is what happened. This is where we want to go. This is what we need to do.”

 

Again, my point here is that the root of all this sorrow and
pain and suffering is identity and fear – the tremendous fear that we all have
of loss of identity.

 

I think that we have to respect identity and fear as
powerful motivators in our lives. I
think we can’t kid ourselves about that.
Probably, if we could only realize and respect how powerful those
factors are in motivating us, that in itself would be a major political
breakthrough. Just to realize that would
be a huge advance, I think, because this is what motivates all of us in our
social contacts and our relationships.

 

We always need to know how to negotiate and have some
realistic, hard-nosed ability to make trade-offs; but I am convinced that real
reconciliation, real change of heart, is possible and necessary, not only for
individuals, but for whole societies. It
begins with internal, spiritual work that we do on our cushions and in our
lives. And it continues, when we get up
from our cushions, with how we meet each other – with the heart of forgiveness,
the heart of reconciliation.

 

Internal work. But
not just internal. I think of some lines
from the poet Robert Creeley:

 

Inside and
outside.

Impossible

Possibilities.

 

I always think of those lines. They cheer me up.

 

edz

Liking and Disliking

An exploration of alternatives to the wild ride created by the conditioning of our “likes” and “dislikes”. If we live on this basis we become a victim of reality. The alternative is to be present moment to moment. Zoketsu also discusses the nature of consciousness.

Talk given: One Day Sitting, April 28, 2001
Edited and transcribed by Barbara Byrum

 

The dharma, or the teaching of Buddha, is something very profound, and the other day I had a particularly profound experience of the teaching when I was opening up a bottle of Calistoga water. My wife taught me how to do it slowly, little by little, so that it doesn’t gush out all over. So I was doing that, and I saw the bubbles coming up to the surface, to the top, and I looked at those bubbles and thought, “Boy, that is amazing!” I thought it was really extraordinary how the bubbles rise up to the top of the neck of the bottle like little jewels, like little diamonds rising up the neck of the Calistoga water bottle. It reminded me of the little diamonds that you also see on the ocean waves when it is sunny out, twinkling, and so beautiful, so amazingly bright, and then gone, even before you see them. So quickly appearing and then gone, that you wouldn’t even think they were there. You can’t even say they’re there, that’s how evanescent they are.

So when I saw that, seeing the bubbles coming up in the Calistoga water, I thought to myself, “That’s just how desire arises, like little diamonds, naturally in response to conditions, just the way those bubbles in the water rise quite naturally in response to conditions.” I know there is a physical explanation for why those water bottles have bubbles rising up in them like that, and there is a physical explanation for the diamonds on the ocean waves, but whatever the explanation is, it really amounts to the basic movement of life, the basic shape and activity of what is. That’s how it is with inanimate things like water, gas, or light, and also we are exactly same way: we have this desire, this life force, arising in us automatically, just like these bubbles. We go on, we go forward, and our life force rises up. Our desire, our longing is natural. It’s our life. It’s our existence. And even though we think that we get old and die, actually the life force within us inexhaustibly comes up, and there is no end to it. It dissolves and disappears almost as if it were never there at all, just like those bubbles, and then another one comes, endlessly.

So, to me, this process of life, this pattern, this process of being, is something so beautiful and so natural. I think that our whole troubles start when we try to contain all that, when we try to define it, and we try to tame it. We try to get it the way we want it.

Life is fundamentally a wild system. It’s not tamable, but we think that that’s awful and that we’ve got to tame this thing. So we try to tame it, and it can’t be tamed. The wildness of life is not disorderliness. Actually wildness is quite organized, quite careful, and very precise. It’s just that it’s not orderly and precise according to our personal plan. It’s got another bigger scope, a bigger vision than we could possibly have. So we find ourselves unable to release ourselves to the wildness that is our own life because it is frightening. So naturally we try to tame it, we try to organize it after our own fashion, according to our own preferences, and that’s where all of our suffering in this life comes in. We want to contain life inside of ego, and you can’t do it. You feel overwhelmed by life. You feel confined by life. You feel constantly, subtly, but inexorably under attack.

I myself am so very limited. I myself is something very, very small. I myself goes according to likes and dislikes, which I have inherited according to my conditioning, just as all of us have. And that’s good. Likes and dislikes, conditioning, our history, are wonderful. They’re like weeds or flowers growing up. It’s natural. It’s beautiful. My likes and dislikes are like bubbles in that bottle of Calistoga water, beautiful little diamonds sparkling on the ocean.

The problem comes in when I start to say, “Well, I like that, so I should be having it. Where is it? I want it. How come it’s not here?” Now I am complaining. Or when I say, “I dislike that, so it should be gone. Why is it still here? I want it out of here.” In other words, when I believe in the literalness of my likes and dislikes, I try to organize my life around them, and when it doesn’t work, I am very disappointed. That’s how I start to suffer.

And then I notice that when I start to suffer, the people around me are also suffering, because being the kind person that I am, I spread my suffering around to everybody in the vicinity. They are probably doing the same to the people around them, and in this way we create the mess that we usually have in this world.

So, this is not a complicated thought. We all can understand this, and yet we can’t help ourselves and do it almost all the time. Actually, the more you notice your mind, the more you see that on a moment to moment basis you are attaching to or rejecting almost every moment of your life . You are creating suffering by confining and trying to tame a beautiful world.

I had a chance to really go into this quite a bit the other day when I was leading a sesshin in Mexico. I had a tremendous toothache. Toothache pain really gets your attention. It’s a really strong pain. You know, it’s really strong. I kept checking it out, yeah, it’s still there. Little cold water – yeah, it’s still there. Anyway, one thing that I saw right away (since I’m a genius, you know, and I figure these things out) was that I didn’t like it. I really, really didn’t like the pain, and then, after awhile, I would get angry at the dentist, whom I saw right before the trip.

It didn’t take me very long to realize that it wasn’t the dentist’s fault. To be mad at the dentist was not going to have much relevance here in Mexico with my toothache! Then I realized that as long as I persisted in validating the idea that this toothache pain should not be there, the more that I gave credence to that thought, the worse the pain was. Interesting, right? And it actually made the pain worse.

On the other hand, when I gave myself to the pain, when I just became the pain, so that there wasn’t anyone left over anymore to complain about it, or wish it wasn’t there, it was a lot easier to bear. But even then, I saw there was some little person over in the corner there who still didn’t like it. But I could prevent myself from making such a big deal out of the fact that that person didn’t like it.

So I am not trying to fool you, tell you a fairy tale, because pain, especially toothache pain, is definitely an unpleasant sensation, but it doesn’t have to be tragic. Furthermore, since this place was right on the ocean, even while I had a strong toothache pain, there were these little diamonds sparkling on the ocean. Even in the middle of the time when the pain was strong, there were little diamonds on the ocean. There was also a nice breeze blowing through the coconut palms, and they were moving around, and that was very beautiful. And it was still for me a wonderful pleasure to be able to sit in zazen.

So at the same time that there was a very strong and noticeable unpleasant sensation of the toothache pain, there were also many pleasant sensations going on at the same time, which began to be more noticeable the more I stopped trying to eliminate the toothache pain, being mad at the dentist, and whatever things I was doing, and just be the pain. And then I also saw pleasure at the same time. So even though there might be something unpleasant going on, there is also possibly something pleasant going on, which you will notice if you allow yourself to stop resisting what is unpleasant and just be the unpleasant sensation. If I could keep my awareness open and unprejudiced by the pain, then I found that even if there was toothache pain, I still could be a fairly happy person.

The truth is that liking and disliking is a very, very flimsy basis for living. Liking and disliking is actually something very weak, because if that’s your basis for living, then most of the time you are a victim of circumstance.

And that’s how the world goes. We can’t really control and dial up what we want and dial out what we don’t want. We can’t control the world around us; we can’t control what other people do; we can’t control our own bodies, and maybe you’re finding, to some extent, that you also can’t control your own mind. Have you noticed?

So, that’s shocking, isn’t it? You really don’t have any control over the arrangements, which is why liking and disliking is such a very, very shaky basis on which to live. If liking and disliking is your basis for your life, then you are constantly at the mercy of reality. Liking and disliking as a basis of living shuts us down and leaves us helpless, and definitely suffering a lot of the time.

The Buddhist analysis of consciousness shows that liking and disliking arise on every moment of consciousness automatically, whether we intend it or not. Liking and disliking arise automatically on every moment of consciousness, in response to everything that arises, moment after moment after moment. This desire is the nature of life. It’s not that it’s bad. So the problem is not the liking and disliking. The problem is that we take them as the absolute basis for our lives.

The alternative to that is what we are trying to practice today. To be present with what is. To be present with the liking and disliking. Just to be the liking and disliking. To allow the liking and disliking, without grabbing hold of it and shutting ourselves down, and shutting down the rest of the world, that is always coming forth in a magnificent way.

You know, life heals us. We don’t need to go to a healer. Life heals us, if only we would notice it, if only we would allow it. We have what we need every moment, if we only let it be.

What I really want to talk about today is the need for discipline in spiritual practice. I think any type of spiritual practice that would be effective would be disciplined, and discipline means going beyond liking and disliking. That’s what discipline actually is. And it takes a little bit of effort because it is so natural for us to base everything on our likes and dislikes, that it takes discipline to get to a play where we are no longer victimized by likes and dislikes.

Discipline means, basically, to pay attention, to keep coming back over and over again to where you are. To keep coming back over and over again to what actually is, and not to get caught up in all the likes and dislikes, and the thinking and all the confusion that comes in their wake. The word discipline comes from the word disciple. You follow someone’s way, and you accord with that way, you align yourself with that way, you become in agreement with it. And the word disciple comes from a root word that means to teach, or to be in agreement with, or accord with.

So in spiritual practice discipline means that you become your own disciple. You find a true accord with your natural and most essential self that exists in a wider sphere than your liking and disliking. To be disciplined means to be making the effort to be present enough to find accord in this realm of the openness of consciousness, without trying to limit it and push it around.

We spend our whole life trying to whip consciousness into shape according to our idea, and it never is that way. It’s always what it is, no matter what we do. So it’s good news that the purity of consciousness is never marred by our confusion. Even when we’ve been thrashing around like this for millennia, consciousness is undisturbed, and therefore, at any moment, fully available to us, right where we are.

That’s why we have to be disciplined. Disciplined means to be careful enough, to be present enough to let go of the chains of our habitual views and to see what’s really been there all along. To stop being hypnotized by our long habit, reinforced, to be sure, by everybody that we know, by our background, by everything that is in our vicinity.

Nevertheless, we have to be disciplined enough not to be hypnotized by our self centered habit, by our limited view of liking and disliking, our limited conception of me, myself, here, and the object over there, vaguely separate, and probably threatening. Discipline means to be joined with everything, to be in accord with everything, just as a disciple is joined and always in accord with her master.

Discipline is to pay attention. Attention means to let go of being somebody and going somewhere, just allowing awareness presence to come forward. Allowing it to be what it is. Stop setting something up that prevents it, because it is so exhausting to be somebody. And we put so much into this tiny little person that always has so many problems and is so beleaguered. But it isn’t necessary to do that. Instead, we can just be with our life. We can just be our life instead of being somebody. We can just be our life, including our likes and dislikes, but without having to be somehow under the compulsion of them all the time.

Nobody really understands anything anyway. It’s all a big mystery. Nobody knows why is there life, where did it come from, where is it going, what’s the future, what’s the past. Nobody can understand the myriad, infinite conditions that move life along its destiny, whatever that might be. So we don’t have to figure it out. It’s a fruitless effort to control and figure out our life. Instead, we should just pay attention in such a way that we can enjoy the pattern and the power and the majesty of life. That’s the great human possibility, to be able to be there for your life, to appreciate whatever what it may be.

Every life is a beautiful story which one never really knows the shape of until it’s over, and then wow! That’s why eulogies are always so great. But the story is going on all the time, and the great human possibility is that we would release ourselves to that story and become it. It’s something really magnificent and always interesting, and the alternative to that is something that seems so small and so not worth it.

For me, as I get older at an ever more rapid rate, I find more joy in practice all the time. By joy I don’t mean that I am giddy and that I am thrilled every minute. Sometimes, you know, I have a toothache and I don’t like it. But still there’s a quiet joy that you feel in just allowing life to unfold. And that means all of life, not just the part you like, but the whole thing, even the tough parts, the toothache parts, the sickness part, the old age part, the death part, the loneliness, the failure, the pain, the frustration. That’s part of it too. That’s also life. And all of that can be quite bearable, and you can even appreciate all of that if you aren’t so fixed on like and dislike. And the truth is, you better appreciate it all, because it’s coming anyway, and you don’t have any choice. You can’t avoid life. You are life.