Norman gives his first guided meditation on Meditation as Intimacy at the workshop on Meditation as the no sphere practice of Intimacy at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman leads the workshop on the sixth and last guided meditation on Equanimity-Regarding All Beings with an Equal Eye as part of the workshop on Seven Points for Training the Heart at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman gives his fifth guided meditation on Expanding the Self as part of the workshop on the Seven Points for Training the Heart at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman leads the workshop on the sixth and last guided meditation on Equanimity-Regarding All Beings with an Equal Eye as part of the workshop on Seven Points for Training the Heart at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman gives his fifth guided meditation on Expanding the Self as part of the workshop on the Seven Points for Training the Heart at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman gives his fourth guided mediation on Tonglen Practice as part of the workshop on Seven Points for Training the Heart at the Tassajara Mountain Zen Center.
Norman gives his fourth guided mediation on Tonglen Practice as part of the workshop on Seven Points for Training the Heart at the Tassajara Mountain Zen Center.
Norman gives his first Guided Meditation on Suffering at the Tassajara workshop on Seven Points for Training the Heart
Norman gives his second Guided Mediation on The Four Great Reflections as part of the series on Seven Points for Training the Heart given at the Tassajara Mountain center.
Norman gives his third guided mediation on The Lightness of Being as part of the Seven Points for Training the Heart Workshop given at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman gives his first Guided Meditation on Suffering at the Tassajara workshop on Seven Points for Training the Heart
Norman gives his second Guided Mediation on The Four Great Reflections as part of the series on Seven Points for Training the Heart given at the Tassajara Mountain center.
Norman gives his third guided mediation on The Lightness of Being as part of the Seven Points for Training the Heart Workshop given at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Norman gives the first of a six part series on “Dogen’s Continuous Practice” at the Samish Island 2010 Sesshin. This work is also referred to as “gyoji” in Japanese and is a fascicle of Dogen’s “Shobogenzo”
Dogen's Continuous Practice
Talk by Zoketsu Norman Fischer June 27, 2010
Abridged and edited by Ryūsen Barbara Byrum
In Zen practice a lot of people find that the way we talk about the practice is very strange and paradoxical, because, in general, the understanding of Zen practice is that there is no practice, although on a day like today, we bow, we chant a sutra, we offer incense, and we sit on a cushion in a particular way. In other words, we have very specific forms that we do that you could say are the practice, but the actual understanding of all of these things is they are just one way of articulating our life. Our life is actually the practice. We chant a sutra, but the attitude actually is that there is nothing more holy in the sutra than there is in the sound of the ocean outside.
Life – real life, lived fully and engaged in with a whole heart – is the practice. That is the way we understand it. We don't think of Zen practice or religious practice as some special, extra, holy something added on top of life. It is just a way to help us appreciate the fact that life is practice. At first we naturally think we're trying to get it all right; but after awhile, most of us do come to feel that life is the practice. At first sitting on a cushion in zazen might seem pretty different from the activity of daily life; but after awhile, we don't really see it that way. Basically we see that zazen is the same as our everyday activity, which also includes breathing, being aware, sometimes not being aware, thinking, sometimes not thinking, being embodied. That's what we do every day in all our activity, and that's also what we focus on in zazen. So when you really come down to it, there's not so much difference.
In Zen the hope is not that we are going to get really good at all these forms – that we are going to be Olympic level meditators, having more robes, and bowing, and looking better bowing. Our hope, I think, for our practice is that we would get to the point where there would be no gap at all between our deepest goodness and our most sacred aspirations, and the way we come across and act in ordinary events every day. However imperfectly we manifest it, we hope to someday be able to do that, and we really understand it that way.
I am saying all this as background to this essay of Dogen's called Continuous Practice. That's what he means by continuous practice. Living our lives like that, with full engagement, with our whole hearts, all the time. That's the theme of this essay. I will read you the opening paragraph:
On the great road of Buddha ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous, and sustained. It forms the circle of the Way, and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment's gap. Continuous practice is the circle of the Way. This being so, continuous practice is unstained, not forced by you or others. The power of this continuous practice confirms you as well as others. It means your practice affects the entire earth, the entire sky, in ten directions. Although not noticed by others, or by you, it is so.
So that is the very lofty and beautiful opening paragraph. He uses the phrase, "The great road of the Buddhas." So this tells you that as Dogen understands practice, it is not a destination or a skill. It is a road. It is a way. It is a feeling by which we lead our lives. There is no standard and no template for a human life. Every life arises on the ground of its own conditions. My life doesn't look like your life, and your life doesn't look like mine. But we both have the question, "How do I truly live this life? How do I truly live what I've been given?" That question – that we all answer in our own way, for our own conditions – is the great road.
For Dogen, what's really important is that that great road has been trod in the past by the great sages. He calls them Buddha Ancestors, but it means all the great, wise people of the past – all the wise ones who have discovered the way to live a true, human life – who walked the great road and devoted themselves to walking it continually. There is nothing more wonderful, nothing more significant, for a human life than this great road. It is, as he said, continuous, sustained, and it forms, he says, "The circle of the Way, which is never cut off."
The great road is also reckoned as a circle, because it is not going anywhere, as from point A to point B. We're not getting somewhere or improving on a linear continuum. We're going in a circle! The great thing about a circle is that with every step you take, you are always coming back home. It's the paradox of a circular path that with every step you take, you are literally leaving home and then returning home. Isn't that really the truth? Life comes from nothing, and it returns to nothing. There is no beginning and no ending, though from our small, human view there seems to be a beginning and an ending. In fact, the circle of our larger life is never ending, never cut-off. No matter what we do or don't do, we are always part of this great circle of life.
Then he says,
Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment's gap.
This is Dogen's great insight, his greatest and most characteristic teaching. He is talking about the convention in Buddhism that says that first you start out with the aspiration or motivation to practice. You begin practice when the great aspiration to practice the Way arises in you. The aspiration comes to each of us in one way or another, maybe through a dramatic crisis in our life – a lot of really strong suffering. Sometimes it comes through more run-of-the-mill and vague dissatisfaction with our lives. Sometimes it comes by just some chance encounter, like we took a wrong turn, and we ended up at Tassajara, and, "Oh, that's interesting. I wonder what that's like?" [Laughter] One way or the other, we give rise to the aspiration to practice, and then we practice. This initial aspiration is always considered as something very precious and very much to be prized, because it's the beginning of this endless, circular road.
After we begin, we go on to practice, and this takes awhile, and then we eventually achieve enlightenment – a transformation that makes us different. Radically different. I think the real characteristic of this transformation is that with our awakening it is now impossible for us to go backwards. We can't walk backwards anymore. The only thing that we can do is go forwards in our practice, now with a feeling of benefitting other people. Then, after that goes on for some time, we get to nirvana, when we achieve complete peace and letting go, and there is nothing more to do. I am tracing for you the traditional process. This is the path. This is the circular road that cannot be cut off, and the path one goes on for awhile in this way. One famous text says, "How long do you go on in that way? Ten to the 25th power lifetimes." That's how long it takes to complete this circular journey. So – awhile.
So that is the background. But Dogen is saying that's not how it is. That is way too small-minded, too narrow an understanding of how this works. "Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment's gap." All these stages happen at the same time, he says. So with the initial aspiration, however unclear it may seem at the time, all the rest is already there. Nirvana is already there. This is what Dogen means by continuous practice, this circle of the way. There is no advancing; there is no hierarchy of understanding, of experience. To think so is to miss the most important point about continuous practice. Whether you are in deep samadhi on the fifth day of sesshin on Puget Sound, or downtown at a busy meeting, if you enter that moment of your life with full commitment and full letting go, that is aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, without anything left out. Practice is continuous and perfectly available on every moment. It might not feel that way to us at first, but it will eventually, throughout various conditions, throughout various states of mind. Practice is continuous.
Then he says,
This being so, continuous practice is unstained. [In later translations the word "unstained" is translated as "undivided," because that is what unstained means in dharma. It means "without divisions, without discriminations, not forced by you or others."]
So this is a very subtle and important point. Continuous practice – though I am now talking about it, and you are now listening to me and thinking about these things – cannot be identified with a concept of "continuous practice." It would then become a standard, some kind of measuring stick, which would inevitably become imposed upon you. If somebody else didn't impose it upon you, you would impose it on yourself.
I think that everybody here is an American. Right? Americans generally don't like to be told what to do. We don't like to be oppressed by others. We don't like to follow rules or to have people tell us that we have to do it this way or that way. We don't like others to define us or judge us, although sometimes in religion we allow that. In fact, we even look for it. "Would you please tell me how I should be? Would you please tell me what to do? And then by your authority, I will be sanctioned, and I will know that I am a good person." Sometimes that's how religious life works, right? As independent-minded as we are, we sometimes seek out that kind of oppression.
But, as he says, continuous practice cannot be imposed by others. And it also cannot be imposed by ourselves, because as bad as it might be to be oppressed by others, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, it's probably far worse to be oppressed by ourselves. You could always, potentially, get away from the others; but you can be plagued by yourself wherever you go! It's possible that we ourselves are the worst possible taskmasters.
Continuous practice is unstained and undivided. This is a very radical and thoroughgoing thought from Dogen. Think about it. There are no marks, no boundaries, no definitions of continuous practice, because continuous practice is exactly life itself. But it's even more than that. Continuous practice includes death. It includes non-existence too. Whatever you or anyone else would impose from outside will only stain and divide your perfect life of continuous practice. Life is pure, and it is whole, so there is nothing to force here.
When you sit in zazen, as soon as you force yourself, as soon as you try to shove your mind this way or that way, you see that it doesn't work. It just makes things painful. What you need to do on your cushion is the opposite of that. You need to enter this moment and let go of all impositions that come from fear and confusion. You need to take a breath and relax into the present conditions. The whole essence of practicing zazen is forcing nothing. Life, at every point, has its own imperatives, regardless of what you or anyone else has to say about it. Because life is always a much larger category than anything that we think about life. So we know our thoughts and ideas as thoughts and ideas. They come and go. When you sit in zazen, you try not to let your thoughts and ideas tyrannize you. Sometimes you cannot prevent that, and if you can't, at least you know what's going on, and you don't have to be quite as fooled by it as you were before. That's what is so great about zazen. It's such a simple, clear, human situation. There is hardly anything to worry about, except this moment of your life. Zazen makes it very easy for us to finally see this point with clarity.
Then Dogen says,
The power of this continuous practice confirms you as well as others.
So once you get the hang of all this, and you are simply willing to enter into a moment of sitting in zazen, letting go of your resistances and impositions and your concepts of what is supposed to happen, just giving yourself to the moment of your life, your life and the lives of others are always confirmed. Always. The world of right or wrong, of course, exists on a practical level. There is no living without discrimination and choice and preference. But containing all of that is the larger scope of life itself, existence itself. The feeling of this one, eternal moment of our lives. This is not preference – good, bad, right, wrong.
Giving yourself to this moment of your life is completely good. Completely right. Always, utterly confirmed. You are confirmed, and others are confirmed equally in that moment. All the others. Not some of the others, like "the good Zen others." All the others! What is, is. What happens, happens. This is not a complicated thing. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, and pretty immense, if you pay attention to it. Always something to be grateful for. Here we are! We did not produce this moment of being alive. We do not have that much talent. We do not have that much power. By being, we are being confirmed.
The second paragraph says,
Accordingly, by the continuous practice of all buddhas and ancestors, your practice is actualized, and your great road opens up. Because of your continuous practice, the continuous practice of all buddhas is actualized, and the great road opens up for them because of you. Your continuous practice creates the circle of the Way. By this practice, the buddha ancestors abide as Buddha, non-abide as Buddha, have attained Buddha mind and attain Buddha, without cutting off.
So, again, this is something that we gradually do come to appreciate as we continue on with our practice. At first it seems that our spiritual practice is about us. "I'm the one who got interested in this. I'm the one who came to do it. It's me on the cushion and my thoughts. I'm the one who is changing. This is my practice." That is how it feels, and that is completely reasonable and genuine. But after awhile it dawns on you that this is not only about me. I'm practicing with other people and for other people. Other people really help me. They really inspire me, and they give me strength. "My practice is not just about me, and these other guys happen to be around. Somehow they are influencing me, and I am influencing them. And they are caring about me, and I am caring about them. That begins to be part of the process for me, and I need to practice with them, and they need to practice with me."
That's what happens as a natural consequence of continuing to practice. Still later, the circle of the Way extends even further. We see that it is not just us and our Everyday Zen sangha friends who are doing the practice. You begin to get it – and, again, this is not an article of faith or belief; this is something that you begin to feel from the inside – that our practice depends on, and is a reflection of, an extension of, the practice of the buddha ancestors.
The Buddha, Dogen, Suzuki Roshi – these are not historical figures of the past, whose teachings we appreciate. After awhile, it actually feels like they are right here. It begins to feel as if we are living their lives in our lives, and that makes our lives feel different. We begin to realize that thanks to them – I mean, this is so strange, but this is what it feels like – we are becoming who we were always meant to be, but never could become! Thanks to them, we could become who we really are meant to be. That's how it starts to feel, and then it makes sense that we would chant the sutra, and we would say, "We dedicate this sutra to Buddha and Bodhidharma and Eihei Dogen and Suzuki Roshi, and all the people who transmitted the teaching from here and there." At first it seems that all religions do this. There is a lot of piety, but after awhile, it is actually meaningful to you. "Thank you, Mr. Dogen! Thank you Mr. Buddha, because it's thanks to you – and the life that I am living that is your life – that I can be free of my smallness and really live my life."
Then Dogen says,
The opposite thing comes into view also. The practice of the ancient sages depends on us.
Think about it. The Buddha's practice, Dogen's practice, Suzuki Roshi's practice is all meaningless without us. Their practice literally does not exist without us. Our activity of the present illuminates the past. It actually creates the past. Without the present, there is no past, just as without the past, there is no present. The past is not objective. It is not an object that exists somewhere that you could go and find. "Where is the past? Is it over here, over there, under the ocean? It is somewhere high up in the sky? Where do they keep it?" Well, it's an absurdity to talk like that, because we all know that the past is not an object that is kept somewhere. The past is always in relation to the present and the future, and it's changing according to the present and the future.
The buddhas and ancestors depend on us. We create their practice. Our lineage papers that we give at ordination and initiation ceremonies express this. If you open up the paper, you see that the Buddha is at the top, and from the Buddha, all the sages come – ninety-two generations down to the present generation – and my name appears, and then your name appears on that paper as the ninety-third generation. Then there is a little line that connects your name to Buddha. If you trace the line, it goes from the bottom of the page, and then it sneaks around and goes all the way back up to the top of the page, and then it comes down to Buddha. So the Buddha is your disciple. That's what it means. Buddha is your student. You are the Buddha's teacher. The Buddha is completely dependent on you for the Buddha's life. The completion and fulfillment of the Buddha's destiny will only come with your life's energy and its effects.
Dogen says,
Your continuous practice creates the circle of the Way. By this practice, Buddha ancestors abide as Buddha, don't abide as Buddha, have Buddha mind, become Buddha over and over, and on and on, and it is never cut off. [And all of this depends on us and on our continuous practice of the present.]
So continuous practice is unstained. It doesn't need us to be continuous practice, but if suffering is to be reduced, our practice is necessary. So we have to do zazen in order to remember continuous practice and to come to love it. It is, as Dogen says, the true place of refuge for everyone. He doesn't mean here that everyone should be doing zazen. No, because the truth is that this kind of practice we are doing will never be something that most of the people in the world will do. It will always be something that a few people will do. But that place in the heart that knows continuous practice, and loves it, and will let go of narrowness and selfishness. That place in the heart that feels confirmed and met and comforted by reality at every point, in all times; that place in our heart that we all have, even though we have desperately lost track of it, that place in the heart is the true place of refuge for everyone.
Norman speaks at Tassajara Zen Monastary on “Suffering”.
Norman reviews his friend Philip Whalen’s collected work.Review:
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen
Edited by Michael Rothenberg
Foreword by Gary Snyder
Introduction by Leslie Scalapino
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT
By Norman Fischer
As a cultural phenomenon, Western Buddhism has always been highly self conscious. Issues of translation, of religious renewal and decay, have been part of the discussion from the start. Despite this, Western Buddhist practitioners have been curiously uninterested in culture, preferring instead to see the Dharma as a set of scientific procedures that will produce desired impacts on the psyche.
But the fact is, religion is culture, not science.
In this light, I'm especially delighted to have in my hand the new Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, a founding document of Western Buddhist culture. To be sure, I am prejudiced: a working poet myself, I not only knew and admired Philip Whalen, I was his friend, and I have missed him daily since his death in 2002. Still, his importance as a Western Buddhist poetical pioneer is well enough established that I can be forgiven for emphasizing it again now, as this wonderful, thick, beautiful volume appears.
What is an American Buddhist poetry? It's obviously not enough merely to reference Buddhist terms; for the work to reflect, through and through, Buddhist perspectives, they must be deeply imbedded in what's written, as form, as attitude, as structure and substance. As American Buddhist poets go forth with their projects, they will inevitably be building on Philip's work. He was (more than any of the other "Beat" writers, among whom he is always included) a master of form, a bold (if humble and unself-conscious) innovator. His generational American forebears, Pound and Williams, had already broken with conventional English verse, forging a poetry that was hard-edged and inclusive. But they remained magisterial in tone and spirit. It fell to Philip, influenced by his Zen practice, to let that pretence go, writing instead a poetry that was off-handed, present moment oriented, and that could include anything that came along, not because the poet wanted it to, but because it happened to be there. Philip was the first to recognize that poems are not actually "about" anything, and no one is in charge of them. So the poem's scope could be immense, its form spontaneously arisen in the course of writing. I remember first seeing evidence of this in Phil's work in the late 1960's when I was thunderstruck and suddenly liberated from my literary struggles by the elegance of these lines about not being able to write a poem:
Worry walk, no thought appears
One foot follows rug to wood,
Alternate sun and foggy sky
Bulldozer concrete grinder breeze
The windows open again
Begin
a line may
start:
spring open, like seams of a boat high on the hot sand
(from "The Best of It" 1964)
Philip was, famously, a learned man. After the Second World War (in which he served as a radio operator) he returned home to the GI bill and went to Reed College, where he took up reading and writing in earnest, deciding that he'd devote his life to these pursuits, salary or no. He spent the rest of his life living out this promise to himself, relying on the kindness of strangers, until, after stints as a high country lookout in the Cascades, and as an English teacher in Japan, he returned to America to become one of the earliest ordained Western Zen monks.
Despite his erudition, which appears throughout his poems in the form of doodles, puns, speculations, and idle chatter ("Balzac: "brillant et tres fecond… malgre certaines/imprefections de style et la minutie de qualques de-/scriptions….")/ St. Honore preserve us against black coffee/These Japanese knickknacks & from writing ourselves/To death instead of dope, syphilis, the madhouse, jail/Suicide…) Philip was given to deceptively sophisticated recitations of plain American English. Here is the entire text of a poem called "Whistler's Mother," one of my favorites:
Mother and Ed are out in the car
Wait til I put on some clothes
Ed's in a hurry. He hasn't eaten since this morning
Wait til I put on some clothes.
Mother and Ed are out in the car. Do you have any clothes on yet?
Let me come in.
Wait til I get some clothes on
Ed is impatient. He and mother are waiting. Can I come in?
Wait til I put on some clothes.
Mother and Ed are out in the car
Wait til I get into some clothes
Can't I come in? Aren't you dressed yet?
Wait til I put on some clothes
Mother and Ed are out in the car. Can I come in?
Wait til I get on some clothes.
(1963)
No one had ever written anything like this before, not even close. What's Buddhist about it? Well, not to put too fine a point on it (and I wouldn't argue with someone who called it unBuddhist), this poem reflects what's right in front of you, with nothing added, no poetical emotion, no projected meaning, not even a striking image to set it off. True, it sounds nothing like a Japanese or Chinese poem, but then this isn't the Chinese or Japanese tradition, it's the American tradition. It builds on, and takes much further, some of Pound's and Williams' use of Ammurrican slang, as well as Stein's mindless repetition. Its about the immediacy of words themselves, taken, fearlessly, to the nth degree. And it was this powerful insight ("guess what, it turns out that writing is words, how they sound, how the look lying there on the page"), essentially Buddhist in character (there's no self or person, just what arises), that influenced poets of my generation, who built on it, as Whalen had built on his predecessors. (Leslie Scalapino, in her important introduction, writes persuasively of this).
A whole other angle on Philip's immediacy in writing has to do with his calligraphic style, his doodling and drawing, that's integral to the poetry, though seldom reproduced (editor Michael Rothenberg is aware of this, and the present volume gives us a much larger sampling of this material than has been generally available before). At Reed, Philip had studied with the great calligraphy master Lloyd Reynolds, and was early on aware of the tradition of graphic poetry that was always part of the Asian tradition. Over the years Philip worked out an analogue for it in Western calligraphy, and his journals are full of drawings, drawn words, and doodles, sometimes colored and sometimes in black and white. Some have argued that a printed poem by Philip is inevitably a translation of the actual poem, which is, as with Asian poems, an original art work.
Beyond all this brilliant formal innovation, Philip is also the first poet to intimately chronicle American Zen sights and sounds. His Tassajara Monastery poems of the late 1970's are down to earth personal documents of what it is like to live a full-on Buddhist life, and his great long poem "Scenes of Life in the Capitol," takes us into the daily life of Kyoto, with its Buddhist shrines and temple bells.
So any educated Western Buddhist needs to know this book. A life's work between two covers, document of a mind in motion, Buddha Nature as screed, it tells the story of all of us who are trying to find a way to be what and as we are, as Buddhists.
Norman gives a talk on The Raw Spot.
The Raw Spot
One day in January, feeling expansive and cheerfully open to being interrupted, I picked up the ringing telephone in my study. Sherril was on the line. “Alan just died in Baltimore,” she said. “Can you to come over right now?”
Alan is Sherril’s husband and my closest friend. We’d known each other forty years, since our days as students at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, through years of Zen practice, through Alan’s becoming a rabbi and my ordaining as a Zen priest, and our establishing a Jewish meditation center together, through retreats, teaching sessions, workshops, marriages, divorces, children, grandchildren. We had shared so much for so long that we took each other’s presence in the world as basic.
I got in the car and drove to San Francisco in a daze – a daze I may never recover from.
The sudden loss of someone or something you take as much for granted as the air you breathe is not easy to digest. At first you don’t know how to think about it. You are bewildered. What just happened? I had co-led a retreat with Alan earlier in the month, and we’d parted company for the last time just eight days before he died while walking on a country lane one bright morning. He had been so completely present at that retreat, as always, and now he was – or so they told me – just as completely absent. What to make of this?
Of course I could say – and have often said – many things about such losses. Alan and I had frequently taught together about death and dying and loss and grief, it was a subject both of us had been concerned with most of our lives, as all religious people are. The Buddhist teachings on death and dying are very familiar to me, as are the many associated practices and reflections. It’s not that such practices and thoughts were not with me during the days and weeks after Alan’s death; they certainly were, and they made my experience of loss much more solid – and much more poignant. But I had always known that these teachings do not explain anything or fix anything or armor you against pain. They only clear the ground for what there is to be felt at the time of a loss: they help you to feel what I felt: the supreme oddness, sorrow, and joy of our lives. We are here. We are gone. All dharmas are empty of own being, there is no coming no going, no increase no decrease, no birth, no death, no suffering, no end of suffering. So the Heart sutra says. The Diamond sutra says that all conditioned things are to be viewed as dreams, flashes of lightening, bubbles, dew drops, magic shows. Still, tears come. There’s no contradiction.
In the days and weeks after Alan’s death I spent a great deal of time with Sherril and their children and with Alan’s siblings, who’d come from the East for the funeral. Alan had been the rabbi of a large congregation in San Francisco, and had been connected to many other meditation and social action communities, so there was an outpouring of love and support from many people. I received cards and emails from all over the world. And I was really grateful that I could cry with others when I felt like crying, and could feel so much love for so many people who also loved Alan. Loss does that: it wounds the heart, causing it to fall open, and love rushes into and out of the opening, love that was probably there all along, but you didn’t notice it because you were too busy with other important things, to feel it.
In one of our last conversations, Alan shared with me an odd and funny teaching about death. He had a sense of humor, and his spiritual teachings were often odd and funny, sometimes even ridiculous, which made their profundity all the more pungent. This teaching involved his fountain pen collection, which was extensive, and worth a lot of money. He had sold several thousand dollars worth of pens to a man he’d contacted online. Before payment was mailed, the man, some years younger than Alan, suddenly died. Since there was no good record of the transaction, the attorney who was handling the estate for the widow said he would not pay. Alan could have hired his own attorney to recover the money, but it wasn’t worth the trouble and expense, so he ate the loss. “But I didn’t mind,” he said, “because I learned something that I should have known and thought I knew but actually I didn’t know: when you’re dead you can’t do anything.” He told me this with great earnestness. As if it had actually never occurred to him before that when you’re dead you can’t do anything anymore.
In a memorial retreat we held a few days after Alan’s death, a retreat full of love and sorrow, I repeated this story. I said that since Alan was now dead and couldn’t do anything we would now have to do something because we were still alive. What that something was, I didn’t know. I only knew that somehow, in the face of a great loss, one does something different than one would otherwise have done.
So this is what I learned (with Alan’s help) about the meaning of loss: that love rushes into the absence that is loss, and that that love brings inspired action. If we are able to give ourselves to the loss, to move toward it rather than away in an effort to escape or deny or distract or obscure, our wounded hearts become full, and out of that fullness we will do things differently and we will do different things.
The Tibetan Buddhist Master Chogyam Trungpa talks about a soft spot, a raw spot, a wounded spot on the body or in the heart. A spot that is painful and sore. We hate such spots so we try to prevent them. And if can’t prevent them we try to cover them up, so we won’t absent-mindedly rub them or pour hot or cold water on them. A sore spot is no fun. Yet it is valuable. Trungpa calls the sore spot embryonic compassion, potential compassion. (Training the Mind, p16) Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action.
**
Our first response to loss, difficulty, or pain is not to want to surrender to what has happened to us, it seems so negative, so wrong, and we don’t want to give in to it. Yet we can’t help thinking and feeling differently, and it is the thinking and the feeling, so unpleasant and painful, that is the real cause of our suffering. These days many of us are experiencing troubled thinking and feeling because times are tough. So many are losing jobs, savings, homes, expectations. And if we are not losing these things ourselves we are receiving at close range the suffering of others who are losing them, and we are reading about all this in the media, which daily depict the effects of economic anxiety all over the world. We are all breathing in the atmosphere of fear and loss.
When sudden loss or trouble like this occurs we feel shock and bewilderment, as I did when Alan died. We wonder, what just happened? For so long we expected things to be as they have been, had taken this as much for granted as the air we breathe, and suddenly it is not so. Maybe tomorrow we will wake up to discover it was all just a temporary mistake, and that things are back to normal. (After Alan’s death I had some dreams that he hadn’t actually died, that it had all been some sort of correctable slip-up). After the shock passes fear and despair arrive. We are anxious about our uncertain future, over which we have so little control. It is easy to fall into the paralysis of despair, caroming back to our childish default position of feeling completely vulnerable and unprepared in a harsh and hostile world. This fearful feeling of self-diminishment may darken our view to such an extent that we find ourselves wondering whether we are worthwhile people, whether we are capable of surviving in this tough world, whether we deserve to survive, whether our lives matter, whether there is any point in trying to do anything at all.
This is what it feels like when the raw spot is rubbed. The sense of loss, the despair, the fear, is terrible and we hate it, but it is exactly what we need. It is the embryo of compassion stirring to be born. Birth is painful.
All too many people in times like these just don’t have the heart to do spiritual practice. But these are the best times for practice, because motivation is so clear: practice is not to be an option or a refinement; there is no choice, it is a matter of survival. The tremendous benefit of simple meditation practice is most salient in these moments. Having exhausted all avenues of activity that might change your outward circumstances, and given up on other means of finding inner relief for your raging or sinking mind, there is nothing better to do than to sit down on your chair or cushion and just be present with your situation. There you sit, feeling your body. You try to sit up straight, with some basic human dignity. You notice you are breathing. You also notice that troubling thoughts and feelings are present in the mind. You are not here to make them go away or to cover them up with pleasant and encouraging spiritual slogans. There they are, all your demons, your repetitive negative themes. Your mind is (to borrow a phrase from the poet Michael Palmer) a museum of negativity. And you are sitting there quietly breathing inside that museum. There is nothing else to do. You can’t fix anything – the situation is beyond that. Gradually it dawns on you that these dark thoughts and anxious feelings are just that – thinking, feeling. They are exhibits in the museum of negativity, but not necessarily realities of the outside world. This simple insight – that thoughts and feelings are thoughts and feelings – is slight, but it makes all the difference. You continue to sit, continue to pay attention to body and breath, and you label everything else, “thinking, thinking; feeling, feeling.” Eventually you are able to pick up your coat from the coat-check, and walk out of the museum into the sunlight.
Confronting, accepting, being with negative thinking and feeling, knowing that they are not the whole of reality and not you, is the most fruitful and beneficial of all spiritual practices – better even than experiencing bliss or Oneness. You can practice it in on the meditation cushion in the simple way I have described, but you can also practice it in other ways. Journaling practice can be a big help. Keep a small notebook handy during the day and jot down an arresting word or phrase when you read or hear one. From time to time look at these words or phrases (they need not be uplifting or even sensible, they can be quite odd or random) and select the ones that attract you. These become your list of journaling prompts. When you have time, sit down with your notebook (doing this in a disciplined way, at a certain time each day, is best), choose a prompt, and write rapidly and spontaneously for ten to fifteen minutes, pen never leaving the paper, whatever comes to mind, no matter how nonsensical or irrelevant it may seem. In this way you empty out your swirling mind. You curate your own exhibition of negativity. It can be quite entertaining and even instructive.
Another way to reorient yourself with your thoughts and feelings is to share them with others. If you are feeling fear or despair these days you can be sure that you are not alone in this. No doubt many of your friends and family members are feeling this as well. Rather then ignoring your anxieties (which tends to proliferate like mushrooms in the dark room of your closeted mind) or complaining obsessively about them to everyone you meet, which also increases the misery, you can undertake the spiritual discipline of speaking to others. Taking a topic or a prompt from your notebook, or cueing off something you’ve read or written, or simply distilling what you have been thinking or feeling into a coherent thought, you can speak to one or more people in a structured way. Bring a few friends together. Divide yourself into groups of three or four. After five minutes of silence to collect your thoughts, have each person speak as spontaneously as possible for five to seven minutes by the clock on the chosen topic. The others just listen, no questions, no comments. If it seems useful, one person can give feedback to the speaker. Not advice (it is a much better practice if advice and commentary is entirely outlawed) but simply reviewing for the speaker, in your own words, what you have heard him or her say. Listening to what you have said repeated back to you in another’s voice can be extremely illuminating. And forgetting about your own trouble long enough to actually listen to another is a great relief. It is likely to cause you to feel sympathy, even love. There is no better medicine than thinking of others, even if for only five minutes.
Working with these practices you’ll get a grip on the kinds of thinking and feeling that arise when conditions are difficult. The goal is not to make the thoughts and feelings go away: when there is loss or trouble it is normal to feel sorrow, fear, despair, confusion, discouragement, and so on. These feelings connect us to others, who feel them as we do, so we don’t want to eliminate them. But it would be good to have some perspective – and occasional relief – so these thoughts don’t get the best of us and become full blown demons pushing us around.
But back now to the basic meditation practice: when you sit, noticing the breath and the body on the chair or cushion, noticing the thoughts and feelings in the mind and heart and perhaps also the sounds in the room and the stillness, something else also begins to come into view. You notice the most fundamental of all facts of life: you are alive. You are a living, breathing, embodied, human being. You can actually feel this – feel the feeling of being alive. You can rest in this basic feeling, the nature of life, of consciousness, the underlying basis of everything you will ever experience – even the negativity. Sitting there with this basic feeling of being alive, you will feel gratitude. After all, you didn’t ask for this, you didn’t earn it. It is just there, a gift to you. It won’t last forever, but for now, in this moment, here it is, perfect, complete, and you are sharing it with everything else that exists in this stark, basic, and beautiful way. Whatever your problems and challenges you are, you exist, in this bright world with others, with trees, sky, water, stars, sun and moon. If you sit there long enough and regularly enough you will feel this, even in your darkest moments.
And based on this experience, you will reflect differently on your life. What is really important? How much do our expectations and social constructs really matter? What really counts, what is the bottom line for a human life? To be alive. Well you are alive. To love others and be loved by others. Well you do love, and it is within your power to love more deeply, and if you do it is guaranteed that others will respond to you with more love. To be kind to others and to receive kindness is also within your power, regardless of expectations, losses, circumstances. You need to eat every day, it is true, you need a good place to sleep at night, you need some sort of work to do, but probably you have these things, and if you do you can offer them to others. Once you overcome the sting and virulence of your naturally arising negativity, and return to the feeling of being alive, you will think more clearly about what matters more and what matters less about your life, and will see that regardless of your conditions you can participate in what matters most. You will see that in the big picture of things you have what you need and there is plenty to be grateful for – and plenty to do based on this gratitude. You may not have as many impressive appointments to keep as you did when you were busy with your high powered job. But you have more time to keep up with friends and family – to call and say hello, how did your day go, happy birthday, happy anniversary, happy holiday, and oh yes, I love you and am glad you are in my life. You may not be able to afford the fancy gourmet meal or the person who comes in to clean the house, but you can prepare with great care some steamed greens with olive oil and lemon and find someone you love to eat it with, and clean up the house yourself, noticing, maybe for the first time, how good the workmanship is on this dining room chair as you dust and polish its legs. Living more slowly and simply – although this is not what you wanted or expected – may not turn out to be so bad after all.
My own personal reference point for material happiness is a memory I have of my days in Tassajara Zen monastery, where I lived for five years in my youth. Tassajara is in a narrow mountain canyon which can get pretty cold in the winter months, when very little sun get in. Our rooms in those days were unheated, so the cold really mattered. I remember winter mornings standing at a certain spot in the center of the compound, where the first rays of the day’s warm sunlight would come. So far, no material luxury I have encountered surpasses this, and I feel it again every time I feel the sun’s warmth.
**
Hard times are painful and no rational person would ever think to intentionally bring them on. Quite the contrary, ordinary human day to day life is mostly about trying to avoid the financial, health, romantic, and psychological disasters that seem to be lurking around every corner. So we do not valorize or seek out what is hard or unpleasant. Yet disasters are inevitable in a human lifetime, and it is very impractical not to welcome them when they come. Hard times remind us of what’s important, what’s basic, beautiful, and worthwhile about being alive. The worst of times bring out the best in us. Abundance and an excess of success and good fortune inevitably bring complications and elaborations that fill our lives with more discrimination and choice. We like this, and seek it, but the truth is it reduces joy. We are less appreciative of what we have. Our critical capacities grow very acute, and we are always somewhat skeptical of whatever excellence we are currently enjoying, ready to reject it in a moment, as soon as something we recognize as superior comes along, whether it is a new phone or a new spouse. When there’s less, there’s more appreciation, more openness to wonder and joy, more capacity to soften critical judgment and simply celebrate what happens to be there, even if it is not the best – even if it is not so good. It is and there’s a virtue merely in that. The sun in the morning and the moon at night. I remember my good friend Gil, like Alan also gone now, who went to India to save the miserable poverty-stricken villagers by offering them the expert eye care he had been so well trained to deliver. He was shocked to gradually realize that these poor ignorant villagers were happier and wiser than he and his well educated friends in San Francisco. This is when Gil began his spiritual practice.
In retrospect we can see that the last fifty years or so of ever-increasing prosperity and opportunity has been based on an enthusiastic, exuberant, and naive lust for material goods (as if the goods themselves, and not our satisfaction in them, were the source of our happiness) that so raised the bar on what we expect to possess – the houses, cars, vacations, gadgets, information – that we have lost all sense of proportion and have forgotten almost entirely how our ancestors lived and how most of the world still lives. The various economic bubbles that were produced by that exuberance have proved to be much shakier than they had seemed when we were in the midst of them. Most experts on the economy predict a slow period of a year or more, to be followed, inevitably, by a return to the upward-reaching growth economy we have come to feel is as reliable as a law of nature. But suppose they are not correct. Suppose we are reaching limits on a limited planet, and that we are in for a very long period of reduced circumstances. What if in the future we won’t have top-notch medical care, high performance cars, automatic houses and abundant energy. Such an eventuality might cause such a crisis of despair due to dashed expectations that it might usher in a terrible period of the sort of distopian nightmares we’ve seen in movies or novels, chaos and violence everywhere. Or the opposite – more happiness, more sharing, more wisdom, bigger hearts. More people growing gardens, cooking food, working on farms, taking care of others. A slower, more heart-felt and realistic style of life, and dying at home surrounded by friends and spiritual supporters rather than in high-tech hospitals hooked into alienating machines run by busy professionals. Probably this won’t be the case; probably the economists are right that things will return to what we have come to call normal after a while, maybe only a year or two. But even so, it would be a healthy exercise to visualize and celebrate this simpler, sparer life – and maybe even to live it.
Seventh talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls”.
First talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls” This talk is a on meditation instruction at the beginning of the workshop.
Second talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls”. This talk is followed by an excercise based on the teachings.
Third talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls”. This is a short guided mediation regarding the readings.
Fourth talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls”. This talk is followed by a brief exercise regarding the teaching.
Fifth talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls”.
Sixth talk in a series of Tassajara Workshop on Norman’s new book “Sailing Home” Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls”. This is a brief guided meditation regarding the readings.
Talk on Being A Priest given at Empty Nest Zendo retreat for Everyday Zen priests and lay entrusted.
On Being a Priest
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | May 23, 2008
Transcribed and edited by Murray McGillivray and Barbara Byrum
I want to talk a little bit about the practice of a priest, or, at least, how I understand that practice after twenty-eight years or so of trying to do it. In our meeting earlier, Chris said, "But let's also talk about the lay practitioners." I don't know exactly what Chris had in mind when she said that, but what I got out of it was the implication: "If we talk about priests tonight, are we being ungenerous, leaving someone out, or not speaking in a way that would be relevant to people who aren't priests? We need to be more inclusive. Do we think that priests are more serious, more important practitioners, a little more grave? If you're a priest, have you made a bigger commitment?
This way of thinking about things is so common for all of us. How can we ever hope not to make distinctions and then place value on our distinctions? And in placing values, place value on ourselves? How confusing all that can be! In all of the Buddhist lineages, our lineage is very unusual in that there really isn't any fundamental difference between priests and lay practitioners. One could be confused, or one could even wonder, what is going on here?
I'll tell you how I found out the difference between lay and priest practitioners. I found out the difference when I got together the three most experienced, committed, wonderful lay practitioners that I knew, and I was about to give them lay entrustment. Sue, Martha, Mick, and I were going to study together for a year before this. The first thing I asked was, "Now explain to me why you're not choosing to be priests? I want to really understand this?" And we had a long very interesting conversation about it, and this is what I remember they all said to me. In different ways, each in their own way, each with their own language, said what amounted to, "I want to be serious. I want to be committed. I don't want to hold anything back, but for some reason, it's not right for my karma to enter the archetype of being a priest." So that's how I figured out the difference between lay and priest practitioners. Being a priest is a powerful archetype that you enter for better and worse. It is a powerful archetype, so that some people think, "I don't feel that this is right for me to enter this archetype."
Entering it you will become, whether you like it or not, a figure for healing in someone's life, in someone's psyche, in someone's heart, or you equally may well become a figure of confusion and upset in someone's psyche, in someone's life, for reasons that have nothing to do with who you are, what your personality is, or what your actions have been. This is possible. I'm not at all sure that it is the best idea, given that there's so much potential trouble with this. There are those who think that we would be better off without the tradition of priests.
Certainly in my own case, it was not my idea to become a priest. I never thought of that as something I wanted to do. But here we are. We have this tradition. It's a powerful tradition; we've inherited it; and in the case of some of us, we've inherited the obligation – whether we like it or not, or whether we think it's a good idea or not – to pass it on. So we do it. I usually speak about this to individuals, but I thought I would take the occasion to speak about it, as I'm doing tonight. But in doing that, it doesn't mean that I'm excluding those of you who may not be priests, because to me, you're included in this. Everybody who can find themselves in these words that I'm about to speak to you is included in them. Because everyone can practice as a priest. Whether or not you actually decide to enter the archetype, you are able, if you want to, to take on these practices and this feeling for your life.
So when I say in my talk that a priest means this or a priest does that, this includes everybody who wants to feel that this practice is theirs. The practice that we do is just the same; it literally is the same. The vows we take are literally the same. The only difference is that one person enters the archetype and the other doesn't – at least externally. The archetype is the okesa. Sewing and wearing the okesa, and all that goes with that, is what it means to enter the archetype.
To be a priest is to renounce – to let go of and give up. When you become a priest and you undertake that obligation, and you enter that archetype, it means to be a renunciant, to let go of everything you have, and to see every person that you are and every thing that you have as only in the service of dharma. Depending on your point of view, that's a great freedom, or it's a great burden. Priests are the ones who have to do that, because when you enter the archetype, people will expect that of you, and your teacher will require it of you. For everyone else, this can be practiced with a great freedom, voluntarily. For priests it's practiced as a kind of obligation and a necessity.
My favorite line of Tung-shan, among many favorite lines of his that I cherish, is one that went straight to my heart, when I first reflected on it soon after ordination. He says, "The greatest suffering that there ever could be is to wear this robe and not understand the Great Matter." I really have a feeling for that saying.
When I was abbot in the Zen Center, people would sometimes inquire about being ordained. I would always say that there are three practices of being a priest. The first practice is to be humble, to realize that we don't know so much, that our understanding of dharma is always limited, and that our experience only goes so far. And so we don't think, "Oh, I'm a priest. I'm an expert. I know something." We're just willing to do our best to share whatever small bit of the practice we've been able to absorb. We want to share it with others as they wish and as they need it. So it makes no sense to think that you are outranking someone or somehow higher than someone or superior to someone. Be humble. This is really, really important, because there's a big tendency in every tradition for priests to be arrogant. From the side of the priest and the side of the people who aren't the priest, this tends to make for a very likely arrogance on the part of priests. So that's why it becomes so crucial to practice humility as a primary and ongoing practice.
The second practice of priests is to see everyone as a buddha, and to treat everybody that way. In the ordination ceremony it says, "Now everyone is your teacher." To see everyone as your teacher; to see everyone as sacred and special; everyone as important. Even wacky people, troublesome people, destructive people. So this is a whole practice, to see everyone as a buddha.
The third practice is always trying to help others. Priests have this obligation. I find that in recent years I keep wanting to say this word in relation to priest practice: obligation. Priests have the obligation to help others. That's what the practice of a priest is all about, to do whatever you can that someone might need. The older one gets, the more obvious it is that this is a very tough world, and every day difficult things are happening, and there has to be someone who is willing to receive all this – all this disaster – with full awareness and with the spirit that says, "Yes, I'm willing to receive all this. This is my practice. This is my obligation, and I want to try to help, even if there's not much that I can do. This is my life: to absorb all this and do what I can." And even if we can't do it very well, and I think a lot of us can't do it very well, we have to try. We have to do our best and try. Most of us fail at it; I know I usually do. One of the other big practices of being a priest is the recognition that you will not be able to be the person that you need to be, that you're expected to be, and to be humble about that failure. To live with that failure and the discomfort of it, and, nevertheless, keep trying to do what you know you need to do.
So that's the main thing: to be humble, to see everyone as Buddha, and always to try to help. That and putting on the okesa, protecting the okesa, and all that goes with that – chanting and bowing and offering incense. Putting on the okesa empowers you in that chanting and bowing in a special way, so that you can offer the benefit of that to others. You can bow and chant and offer the merit to a sick friend, a dying friend. This is really important. It's important for oneself; it's important for the friend; and it's important for others who would participate in that ritual. In the world we live in now, where there are so many people who are estranged from any religious tradition, it seems fairly commonplace that will seek out a Buddhist priest, not because they're Buddhist, but because somehow they feel that in that space they can be understood or they can be included. So I've many times participated in rituals that were not traditional Buddhist rituals, but were adaptations in order to bring in an element from our tradition to create a ritual container for a funeral, or for someone who is suffering.
I pulled out of my files this document that I want to share with you for the rest of my talk: "Being a Priest at Zen Center." As abbot at the Zen Center, I thought that we really had to try to be more explicit about some of the things that are most important to us. So I said, "Let's figure out what it means to be a priest, and see if we can write down what that is" So we did, and it took a year for a bunch of people working together to write this down. This may be an out-of-date version of it, but I just wanted to share this with you, because it actually does represent what it means to be a priest. [Sojun Weitsman, our teacher, once asked Suzuki Roshi, what does it mean to be a priest? Suzuki Roshi said, "I don't know."]
What is the Commitment of a Priest?
A Zen Priest makes a lifelong commitment through the shukke tokudo ceremony to the following:
- Accepting Shakyamuni Buddha's Way as the primary commitment of one's life; making this inner sense of renunciation explicit by wearing the okesa; and being held accountable for living in accordance with the bodhisattva vow and the precepts;
- Dedicating one's efforts to realizing the formless essence of the Buddha Way through zazen, engaging in the forms of Soto Zen, training and studying with a teacher, and awareness in everyday life;
- Supporting and encouraging everyone to be free from suffering and to awaken their own true nature; engaging in zazen and the other forms of Soto Zen as the embodiment of Buddha Nature; ensuring their continuity from generation to generation; and making available to the sangha the rituals and the ceremonies that honor significant life transitions; and proceeding in this endeavor with Suzuki Roshi's spirit of complete adherence to the essence of Soto Zen practice, while adapting its manifestation to the needs of society.
So this is something that is important to me, this kind of double plan. On the one hand to uphold the tradition and refer to it and not think that you can pick and choose your own way. And at the same time, to realize the necessity of trying to figure out how to express this to people in this time.
Expressions of Commitment
Within this general commitment there are many expressions.
And this is something that is very important to me – to recognize that all kinds of different people want to be priests and that there's different ways of being a priest.
Some priests may follow a traditional path, complete dharma transmission, and become Zen teachers in a traditional way. Other priests may make service or craft their practice. Some priests may remain for many years, or a lifetime, in large Buddhist institutions. Others may practice residentially only for a short time. Some may start large or small centers of their own. Others may fold into the world at large without beginning a group, practicing with others in a less visible way. Some may become monastics or hermits, practicing quietly and without taking much direct responsibility for the practice of others. The choice of a path within being a priest will depend on circumstances, temperament, and dialogue with friends and teachers. Paths may change within the course of a lifetime of practice. The role of the teacher within this relationship can be that of mentor, spiritual friend, or traditional hierarchical teacher.
How to Become a Priest at Zen Center
A person who wants to be a priest should have practiced and demonstrated clearly his or her informed commitment to the dharma as it is practiced in our dharma family. A candidate for priest ordination should have done at least two training periods at Tassajara, ten seven-day sesshins, evidenced a basic understanding of dharma, and have worked closely with one or more teachers.
So even though that's a Zen Center requirement, I actually have the same requirement. I don't count up the number of sesshins, but I want to know somebody for ten years and have sat with them many, many times. It takes a long time to get to know someone. And then, if they haven't done two training periods at Tassajara already, I ask them to do that, either before or after ordination. Whether or not Soto Zen will continue with this monastic formation is an interesting point, and I think that is up for discussion nationally. But so far, being a Zen priest has had a monastic formation. Even if you later don't live as a monastic and are not interested in monastic practice, everybody goes through that gate. Sometimes we do it in other ways, like [one student], for example, has not done Practice Periods at Tassajara, but has done many in the City Center, and for special reasons, that fulfilled that requirement. So it's flexible, but basically the idea is, you have done residential monastic practice for some period of time.
Why Someone Seeking Ordination Would Not Be Invited to Ordain
In reality, no sincere person is incapable of being a Zen Buddhist priest. It is a matter of heart, not skill or talent, but if a person is in a time in his or her life when he or she is emotionally unstable, it's not the right time. If the person is in the midst of a serious life transition, it's not the right time. If the intention to ordain is unclear to the teacher, the time is not right.
Sometimes that becomes difficult to discern, but the teacher feels, "I just don't think it's right." But otherwise there's no "You're not smart enough," "You're not dedicated enough," "You're not this," "You're not that." Anybody who wants to do it and really has the sincere intention is able to do it.
Training
Each newly-ordained priest will study closely with his or her teacher for a specific period of time, a minimum of four years.
I think I say to people, five years. I'm not good at tracking this, so I depend on all of you to tell me. And at the end of five years, you should come to me and say, "Let's have a conversation, it's been five years."
After that five years, by mutual agreement, the priest continues with the same or with other teachers; and all priests will maintain some contact with one or more teachers throughout their lifetime. Such contact is always essential.
No one practices without guidance. Priests and teachers are mutually accountable to each other and the sangha. So mutual accountability and mutual obligation. That's why you undertake a huge obligation if you're the person who ordains someone else. It's a mutual obligation, and it's a very solemn obligation.
As paths within being a priest will differ, so will training differ. There are some things all priests will practice for a significant amount of time, including zazen practice, work practice, doan work, [You should know how to strike the bell and do the service. You don't have to be the world's greatest expert, but you ought to know how to do the service], text study, precept study, work with teachers, training in doing practice instruction, and shuso training.
We hope every priest would do all of those things. In the case of text study, now after all my years of hoping for this, we finally have a reasonable facsimile on the Everyday Zen website of a Study Guide with fourteen topics. Each topic has texts. With the miracle of the Internet, you can immediately buy the text on some online book place. There are audio files, which are my commentary on that text. So I think going forward, I'm going to ask all priests to study the study guide. They would go through the whole thing and would have read all those texts. My whole concept here is make this doable. It might be hard, but it's practical, it can be done. I've thought about this for a long time and selected from the vastness of Buddhism – not just Zen, but the whole of Buddhism – topics and texts which I think are essential for our way of practice. I have commented on them in ways that are understandable, I hope. You don't have to be an expert or a scholar, but you would be exposed to them and you would know, "This is buddha-dharma. This is our tradition."
Completing Training as a Priest
Training is a lifetime's work. After some time has passed, a priest and his or her teacher will mutually agree that the priest has entered a stage of maturity in practice in the dharma. For some priests, completion of training is marked by the dharma transmission ceremony.
The qualification for dharma transmission is a mutual agreement that the priest has entered a stage of maturity in practice – not that they're enlightened; not that they have lightning-speed understanding of dharma; not that they know a lot of texts and koans. What does that mean? We're not sure, but I suppose there's an implication and a feeling in that phrase that I think is unmistakable: the person is a mature human being. They actually grew up, which is not necessarily what everybody does who gets older.
Only priests who have completed dharma transmission are qualified to do lay and priest ordinations and to be abbots of temples. For others, a simpler private ceremony of completion occurs. The differences between the several priest paths and how practitioners of those paths will practice and work with others will be made clear through the process of training and reiterated at the completion of training.
Priests as Visible Practitioners
The style of a priest will depend on his or her activity at any given time in life. All priests will sew, receive, and wear the okesa at appropriate times. Some, particularly when living at a temple or leading formal practice, may keep their heads shaved and wear formal robes. Some may even wear Japanese-style informal priest clothing or an American version of informal priest clothing outside formal situations or the temple grounds. Others may wear their hair more conventionally and seldom or never wear formal or informal robes.
The external form of being a priest is something that Suzuki Roshi valued very much, and we continue to value it. It is something our sangha is committed to preserving, and any priest must be willing to carry this form when the situation calls for it, but not all priests need to carry it all the time. Before completion of training, the style of a priest is a subject of dialogue with the teacher. After completion of training, the priest makes personal choices, depending on temperament and circumstances.
So that's interesting. I don't know how many of you were familiar with this document, but I haven't looked at it in a number of years, and I was surprised at how much I agreed with it and felt good about it. We put in a lot of work. Sometimes it was frustrating work, but it was worth it.
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 (2 of 4)
Talk by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, based on Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind Beginner's Mind
Abridged and edited by Ryūsen Barbara Byrum
First of all, what I thought I would do in my ten minutes is to read you some stories from the little book, To Shine One Corner, edited by David Chadwick. These are little stories, tiny vignettes, of Suzuki Roshi, as told by his students.
Next to the temple on Bush street was a grocery store run by an old woman. Suzuki Roshi used to buy the old vegetables there. Finally one day the woman said, "Here are some fresh ones. Why don't you take them?" [Because he always seemed to prefer the ones that were the rattiest and oldest.] "The fresh ones will be bought anyway," he said.
One morning as we were all sitting zazen silently in the zendo, Suzuki Roshi said, "Don't move. Just die over and over. Don't anticipate. Nothing can save you now, because this is your last moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now, because you have no other moments, with no future. Be true to yourself, and don't move."
"When you prescribed a year at this place for me, you told me I would find great joy," a student said to Suzuki Roshi, as they sat sipping tea in Suzuki's cabin in Tassajara. "To find that great joy, I will first have to lose the will to live, won't I, Roshi?" "Yes," he said, "but without gaining a will to die."
My family and I returned to San Francisco after being away from the Zen Center for a year. When I saw Suzuki Roshi, I said, "I think I got a little lost." He replied, "You can never get lost."
I have a few general thoughts on reading this week's section of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I have read his book a lot of times. I don't actually go back to it and refer to it a lot. I usually read it, and then maybe I don't think about it for some years, and then I read it again. And it always strikes me as strange and wonderful. In a way, it's a very dense book. It reads along simply – it doesn't look like a complicated book. But if you start thinking about what he is saying, you have to stop on almost every sentence and say, "What does he mean by this? Why did he say that?" The whole book is really koan-like. You could really stop almost anywhere, and ponder as a koan something that he says. And yet, at the same time, the way he speaks is very simple and very casual.
So, many of the things he says – so easily and so casually – are not at all obvious or self-evident. You wonder, "What does he mean by this?" I think it's because he is never speaking, as we commonly speak, from the relative level – the everyday, gaining and losing, and not-getting-what-I-want level. He is always aware of that level. By no means does he dismiss it, but he's speaking simultaneously from that level and also from some sort of absolute level in which nothing matters and everything matters. As that little vignette says, every moment is the last moment. Every moment is the moment of death. That kind of level of speaking seems to be coming simultaneously from both the relative and absolute levels. This makes what he says so often arresting and odd, and that's why, I think, there are so many paradoxical and strange sayings.
I will share a few passages with you that caught my eye. He says on page 22,
If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself.
This is a strange thing, when you think about it. I mean, you might think, "If you discriminate too much, your mind is busy," or, "If you discriminate too much, you get nervous," or "If you discriminate too much, you get dissatisfied." But, "If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself." That's really interesting.
Of course, "discriminate" just means everyday, ordinary thinking. When do we not discriminate? Every single thought is a thought of discrimination. We're distinguishing one thing from another. We're sorting out what we want and what we don't want. We're defining something as different from something else. All of our activity and all of our thinking is exactly discriminative thinking, and the idea that the ordinary activity of our mind is limiting us – that somehow we're far less limited than that – is an astonishing thing. It's radical to think that our mind is much less limited – that maybe there's a wealth of expansiveness within us that we have no idea is there – and that we keep shrinking as we go through our ordinary life and our ordinary way of thinking. What would it be like to know that? Of course, you couldn't avoid discriminative thinking. You can't avoid thinking, and so discriminative thinking can't be avoided. But what would it be like to know that thinking is not describing things as they actually are, the way the world is, or even the way you are, but is always limiting you? What if you had a sense, at all points, of the bigger, more enriched condition of your mind and life?
Then he goes on from there:
If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself. If you are too demanding or too greedy, your mind is not rich and self-sufficient.
If you just let go and are not demanding and don't want anything, a rich, self-sufficient mind comes forward. Isn't that something, to think about that?
If we lose our original self-sufficient mind, we will lose all precepts.
Precepts, all of a sudden, come into this. Where did that come from? That seems counter-intuitive.
When your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violating your own precepts: not to tell lies, not to steal, not to kill, not to be immoral, and so forth. If you keep your original mind, the precepts will keep themselves.
Many of us here have taken Zen precepts and have studied them. Precepts always seem like rules of conduct – don't do this and don't do that. You want to do it; you're dying to do it; but don't do it – it's bad. That's how we usually understand precepts – as rules in that way. But here he is saying, "No, precepts are not that. Precepts are the spontaneous expression of a full and self-sufficient mind. You don't need to limit yourself. It's not a limitation to be kind. It's not a limitation to be generous and not stingy. It's not a limitation to always set aside causing harm." So ethical conduct is an overflow of the fullness of the mind.
Dogen-zenji, the founder of our school, always emphasized how important it is to resume our boundless original mind. Then we are always true to ourselves, in sympathy with all beings, and we can actually practice.
So to resume our boundless original mind, that's the understanding of zazen; not to meditate or understand something, but to resume the boundless, original mind. Just to sit and give ourselves to our practice is to resume our boundless original mind.
So just one more. On page 25 he is talking about zazen posture. It's from the section I was reading for you during the zazen period.
After some years we will die. If we just think that it is the end of our life, this will be the wrong understanding. [If you think that you die and think that is the end of your life, that is mistaken.] But, on the other hand, if we think that we do not die, this is also wrong. [So now we're confused. Death is not the end of our life, but we do die.] We die, and we do not die. This is the right understanding.
So, thank you! We die and we do not die. What it really comes down to is that if you think that's it when you die, there's an automatic, built-in despair and nihilism in that. On the other hand, if you think, "Don't worry. I'll go on and on and on," this is very unrealistic. Death is a big deal. Let's not kid ourselves.
Some people may say that our mind or soul exists forever, and it is only our physical body which dies. But this is not exactly right, because both body and mind have their end. But at the same time it is also true that they exist eternally. [They exist eternally…the body and mind exist eternally. Now this is really getting strange, since we know that the body disappears at the time of death, what does he mean when he says the body exists eternally?] And even though we say mind and body, they are actually two sides of one coin. This is the right understanding. So when we take this posture, it symbolizes this truth.
When we sit in this posture, we are symbolizing – or I would say we are embodying – all that he has just been speaking about. Lately I have been thinking that I would rather not call zazen "meditation." I would rather call it "Silence," or "Entering Silence." Suzuki Roshi follows Dogen's understanding of zazen, that it is a sacred act. It's an act of resuming our boundless original nature: returning to the rich and full silence that stands behind every word we speak and every thought we ever have, returning to our most true, most real self. We're not trying to accomplish something. We're not trying to improve something or achieve something. We're just taking the backward step – Dogen uses that very language – into the silence that is always what our life is. We're running around, we're busy, and we've got things to do – and so we forget about that silence. So when we sit down, we take a step back into that.
Okay. Sorry, one more. Overtime. One more, because this is the most astonishing one. It's on page 27:
When you do things in the right way, at the right time, everything else will be organized.
This is an astonishing statement that he is making. Don't worry about anything else. You don't need to worry about the arrangements outside of yourself. Just take care of yourself, and do things in the right way – by which I think he means being really present and fully giving yourself to what you do. Do them in the present, the right way and at the right time – just do that – and everything else will fall into place. The whole world will be organized. You don't need to worry about that. Imagine if you believed that and lived that. Wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't that be a load off your mind?
So I'll leave you with that. "When you do things in the right way, at the right time, everything else will be organized." I don't know about you, but I'm always worried that I'm missing something, or screwing something up, going to be late, and so on. But I don't need to do that. All I need to do is to do things in the right way and at the right time, and everything will be fine. Always.
Anyway, that is what Suzuki Roshi thought.
En esta plática, Norman propone algunas enseñanzas y actitudes que caracterizan la manera única que tuvo Susuki Roshi para enseñar el Zen en Occidente.
El Sendero de Suzuki Roshi
por Zoketsu Norman Fischer
por Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Plática otorgada en Green Gulch, 2/21/99 & 2/22/99
Hace ya varios años que tenemos el libro sobre las primeras pláticas de Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Mente Zen, Mente de Principiante) editado por Trudy Dixon. Este libro, como seguramente ustedes ya saben, es el libro sobre Budismo de mayor venta en la historia del mundo occidental. Nunca ha llegado a ser un best seller, pero se ha vendido de manera constante durante los últimos 27 años y cada año aumenta el número de ejemplares vendidos. Se ha traducido a muchos, muchos idiomas y ha sido editado muchas, muchas veces. Seguramente, al igual que la Biblia, nunca dejará de editarse. A pesar de todos los cambios en el mundo y de todos los cambios dentro del Dharma Occidental, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind aún está vigente. Yo pienso que esto es debido a que existe algo en el sendero de Suzuki Roshi, algo en el espíritu Zen de Suzuki Roshi que nos llega a todos nosotros como particularmente cálido y genuino. Aún cuando no entendemos exactamente lo que está tratando de decirnos, sentimos lo real y sincero de sus palabras. Las palabras de Suzuki Roshi, al igual que su práctica y su vida, no son espectaculares o emocionantes, ni particularmente brillantes o poéticas. Son bastante sencillas y realistas. Sin embargo, tienen una fuerte y casi, podríamos decir, universal atracción. De alguna manera se sienten muy ciertas. Prácticamente todos los linajes Budistas en el Occidente honran a Suzuki Roshi como el gran maestro fundador de Occidente. A pesar de que en Japón no era famoso o particularmente reconocido como maestro, al encontrarse con la mente occidental, su práctica y sus enseñanzas, crearon algo que es lo suficientemente fuerte como para trascender el Zen Soto japonés e incluso para trascender el Budismo.
Varias veces me he preguntado por qué es que después de todos estos años no hemos podido producir mas libros buenos de los archivos de Suzuki Roshi. Quizás sea porque estábamos demasiado ocupados o porque Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind nos intimidaba, o será que queríamos que se sostuviera por sí solo, un libro delgado, representante de todo lo que Suzuki Roshi enseñó. Hay algo bello en todo esto, pero al mismo tiempo parece que también sería bueno beneficiarnos de mas enseñanza de Suzuki Roshi y me alegra que ahora esto será posible. Acaba de salir un nuevo libro, Crooked Cucumber (Pepino Torcido) de David Chadwick. Es una biografía y contiene por primera vez, en forma escrita, muchos de las anécdotas que hemos estado relatando durante años acerca de Suzuki Roshi. Pronto también tendremos bajo la forma de un libro las conferencias de Sandokai en las que Suzuki Roshi habla sobre un texto fundamental del Zen Soto. Y Ed Brown también esta trabajando en una colección de pláticas recientes de Suzuki Roshi, por ahora un excelente manuscrito.
También tenemos ahora por primera vez cassettes de algunas de las platicas de Suzuki Roshi. Y también estamos tratando de reunir dinero para preservar adecuadamente los archivos de SR. En su mayoría esto se debe gracias a David Chadwick, cuyos esfuerzos incansables y casi obsesivos, nos han permitido llegar hasta aquí. Así que, pronto habrá mucho mas material disponible sobre las enseñanzas de Suzuki Roshi para estudiar y apreciar y esto me hace muy, pero muy feliz. Para aquellos de nosotros en el Centro Zen las enseñanzas de SR no son únicamente libros o cassettes o ideas, sino una forma de vida, una actitud o sentimiento profundo sobre la vida. Yo pienso que aquellos que estudiaron con Suzuki Roshi poseen esta actitud o sentimiento y que para ellos es algo muy fuerte que está íntimamente ligado con el afecto hacia él y con la vivencia que tuvieron de él. Pero parece ser que la actitud y ese sentimiento también se nos transmitió con éxito a aquellos que llegamos mas tarde y no tuvimos la oportunidad de conocer a Suzuki Roshi durante su vida. De cierta forma nosotros también hemos tenido la oportunidad de encontrarnos cara a cara con Suzuki Roshi en la realidad de nuestra propia práctica con nuestros propios maestros. Así que, tal parece que aquí en el Centro Zen y, en muchos otros lugares del mundo, el camino de SR sigue latiendo y creciendo.
En realidad el Budismo es una sola enseñanza. Aunque existen muchas formas de Budismo, muchas maneras de hablar acerca de las enseñanzas y muchas maneras de llevarlo a la practica, en realidad todas las formas de Budismo son solamente distintas maneras de hacer que la gente vea y tome conciencia de las verdades básicas sobre la vida humana que el propio Buda vio personalmente e intentó enseñar. Para cada era, para cada cultura e incluso para cada persona, debe haber una manera única de abordar el Budismo ya que, aunque la verdad puede ser siempre la misma, no hay verdad que sea independiente de una forma de expresión. Debido a que las personas son siempre distintas debe haber distintas formas de expresar la verdad Budista. En cada país a donde ha llegado el Budismo siempre hay personas que tarde o temprano, seguramente sin tratar de hacerlo, encuentran una expresión del Budismo que tiene sentido para la condición cultural particular que los formó. Esas personas no han creado un nuevo Budismo, solamente han encontrado una manera distinta de aclarar, de otra forma, lo que el Budismo ha estado diciendo todo el tiempo. En Japón Dogen Zenji es una de estas personas. Su enseñanza y práctica sobre el camino del Zen Soto son muy profundas y totalmente japonesas. Suzuki Roshi estudió las enseñanzas de Dogen con gran profundidad y basó su propio entendimiento en el de su gran predecesor. Con todo este nuevo material sobre Suzuki Roshi, se me ocurrió que quizá a medida que pase el tiempo veremos el Zen en el occidente como algo que surgió, al menos en gran parte, del camino de Suzuki Roshi.
El camino del Zen de Suzuki Roshi es el mismo que, pero a la vez es distinto a, otros estilos de Zen chino y japonés y también es el mismo que, pero diferente al Zen de Dogen. Pienso que a medida que pase el tiempo va a surgir una polémica interesante al intentar caracterizar el Zen de Suzuki Roshi y quizá los eruditos escribirán sobre este tema como lo han hecho durante años sobre las características del Zen de Dogen. Así que, a pesar de que cualquier caracterización va totalmente en contra del espíritu Zen – y especialmente en contra del camino de Suzuki Roshi – pensé que yo iniciaría la conversación e intentaría dilucidar cuáles son los puntos fundamentales del camino de Suzuki Roshi. Soy excelente para hacer listas de características de esto o aquello y a veces dichas listas son útiles temporalmente aunque a la larga definitivamente no lo son. Finalmente son solo cosas que inventamos, sin embargo también creamos nuestras vidas y luego, para nuestro propio detrimento, las tomamos demasiado en serio. Entonces, después de todas estas advertencias, y en un espíritu de conversación, que siempre implica un infinito dar y tomar, pensé que hablaría un poco sobre las ocho características del camino de Suzuki Roshi. Por supuesto son ocho características. No son siete ni nueve.
Ellas son: 1. No hay que tener expectativas 2. Una practica diaria diligente es iluminación 3. No apegarse a ninguna enseñanza; no hay nada especial que hacer o entender, cada momento es siempre nuevo (esto lo expresó Suzuki Roshi en la frase: “beginner’s mind” “mente de principiante”) 4. Zazen es lo más importante en nuestra practica y el verdadero zazen es toda nuestra vida 5. La bondad y la dureza no son dos cosas diferentes 6. Una relación cercana y cálida con un maestro 7. Entregarse por completo en toda actividad 8. Poner mucha atención en los detalles de forma, ya que la verdadera felicidad se encuentra aquí (una practica Hinayana con una mente Mahayana)
La primera característica es “no hay que tener expectativas”
Yo creo que la mayoría de las personas llegan a la práctica Budista con grandes expectativas. No llegamos al Cristianismo o al Judaísmo o a la religión Islámica con este tipo de expectativas y pienso que en Asia la mayoría de las personas modernas no se acercan al Budismo con la clase de expectativas que nosotros tenemos.
¿Qué esperamos? Supongo que esperamos un poco de iluminación, un poco de tranquilidad o un poco de algún tipo de felicidad o alivio o profundidad en nuestras vidas. Quizás esperamos algún tipo de experiencia sensacional o un poco de serenidad o sabiduría profunda. A lo mejor ni siquiera sabemos qué es lo que esperamos sino sólo que sí esperamos algo. Quizá estamos emocionados ante la expectativa de que algo va a suceder y no sabemos lo que es. Yo creo que tenemos estas expectativas porque el Budismo, y en especial la meditación Budista, es algo totalmente nuevo para nosotros. Lo vemos como una posibilidad para nuestras vidas. Probablemente esto sea cierto pero en ese caso cada momento contiene un sinfín de posibilidades sólo que nos hemos hastiado de las posibilidades. Debido a que el Budismo es algo nuevo para nosotros todavía no nos hemos cansado de él – aunque parece ser que algunos de los veteranos por aquí ¡ya están llegando a ese punto! Esa es nuestra práctica, tratar de no hastiarse a pesar de que estemos muy familiarizados con la enseñanza y nos quede poco idealismo.
De cierta forma nuestras expectativas son buenas, nuestra frescura es buena y yo pienso que Suzuki Roshi las apreciaba mucho. Él dijo que tenemos mente de principiante: en otras palabras, tenemos grandes expectativas pero realmente no tenemos ningunas preconcepciones, por lo menos ninguna basada en la experiencia. Como no sabemos lo que estamos haciendo cuando llevamos a cabo una práctica Budista, somos libres de esperar lo imposible. Todas nuestras preconcepciones son fantásticas e imaginarias. Esa es una mente fresca para una práctica y Suzuki Roshi desde que era niño quería venir a occidente para practicar con gente que tuviera ese tipo de mente fresca y con expectativas.
Por supuesto que después él nos enseñó a no tener ninguna expectativa, ninguna esperanza (a no esperar). Y esto fue, y todavía es, una buena enseñanza para nosotros precisamente porque tenemos tantas expectativas. Si podemos usar la energía y entusiasmo de nuestras expectativas para nuestra práctica y transformarlos en la no expectativa, entonces podremos practicar bastante bien. El punto fuerte de la expectativa es que produce energía y entusiasmo pero el punto débil es que nos lleva a la codicia, al apego y a la distracción que son lo opuesto a las enseñanzas de Buda. Si esperamos algo tenemos que estar completamente equivocados acerca de la naturaleza de la experiencia y la naturaleza de uno mismo y la naturaleza del tiempo. Creemos que necesitamos algo y que es posible que lo consigamos más adelante. O creemos que tenemos un problema y que más adelante quizás no lo tengamos. Creemos que Buda vivió hace muchos años y que nosotros vivimos ahora. Pero en realidad nada de esto es cierto, son sólo proyecciones persuasivas de nuestra mente. Lo que sí es cierto es que este momento surge ahora independiente de cualquier cosa y que todo está incluido en este momento. Buda y SELF están aquí y el problema y el no-problema están aquí. Si insistimos en tener la expectativa de que las cosas van a cambiar y de que de algún modo podemos hacer que cambien, entonces no entendemos realmente las cosas o el cambio. Si logramos entregarnos por completo a este momento – y luego a este momento y este momento – sin ninguna expectativa, entonces podemos tener algo de felicidad. No es necesario que nos enojemos con nosotros mismos por tener expectativas porque es bueno tener expectativas. Pero tenemos que usar la expectativa para ir mas allá de la expectativa. Quizá podríamos decir que no tener expectativas significa que siempre tenemos expectativas pero que lo que esperamos es la nada. Una de mis frases favoritas de Suzuki Roshi,, con la cual en una ocasión escandalizó a la gente durante una conferencia es: “los problemas que tienes ahora siempre los tendrás.” Y, en otra ocasión también dijo, “He descubierto que es necesario creer en absolutamente nada”.
La segunda característica de la enseñanza de Suzuki Roshi es “Una practica diaria diligente es iluminación.”
Como todos ustedes probablemente ya saben, la escuela Zen en China se fundó sobre la experiencia personal de iluminación repentina en la mente de Buda. Habían existido muchas escuelas de Budismo en China con muchas maneras de practicar y muchas enseñanzas. La religión tiende a volverse muy refinada y compleja, y esto puede ser hermoso y satisfactorio hasta cierto punto. Sin embargo también puede hacer que esta se aleje de las verdades sencillas y profundas sobre las que se construyó. Así que, en China, los primeros ancestros Zen hicieron hincapié en eliminar la complejidad para llegar a una experiencia real de iluminación que fuera transformadora. Este énfasis es bueno y malo a la vez. Es bueno porque acaba con el escolasticismo y nos lleva al corazón del asunto, a nuestra experiencia de vida, mas que a lo que dice en el libro. Pero es malo porque tiende a privilegiar un tipo de experiencia en particular, para hacernos esperar y anhelar ese tipo de experiencia y volvernos arrogantes, y por lo mismo confundidos en caso de que tengamos dicha experiencia. Tendemos a sentir que el propósito de la práctica es producir un tipo de experiencia particular y que una vez que tenemos esa experiencia la práctica se torna irrelevante. Pero para Dogen y para Suzuki Roshi, la práctica y experimentar la iluminación son la misma cosa. Cuando hacemos nuestra práctica estamos expresando nuestra iluminación y cuando encontramos la verdadera iluminación, naturalmente practicamos.
Suzuki Roshi llegó a San Francisco en 1959 para ser el monje de la comunidad japonesa-americana en el templo Sokoji. No llegó a San Francisco haciendo mucha bulla. No había carteles, ni artículos en la prensa, ni retiros, ninguna campaña propagandística. En lugar, mas bien él practicaba solo zazen por las mañanas y si alguien venía y le hacía preguntas acerca del Zen, nada mas respondía: “me siento por las mañanas, por favor venga a acompañarme”. Su práctica era la práctica de un sencillo sacerdote, lleno de sinceridad y fidelidad. A menudo hablaba de lo tonto que él era y de cómo su entendimiento no era muy bueno. Dijo que cuando él era niño, en el templo de su maestro, todos sus compañeros huían porque el maestro era tan estricto. Decía que él era el único que no escapó, no porque fuera tan bueno o tan fuerte sino porque él era el único que no se daba cuenta que podía escapar. Él siguió con su práctica diaria durante toda su vida, pasara lo que pasara. Y en su enseñanza él hizo hincapié en ese tipo de constancia y de fe. No un ideal, una filosofía o una creencia, sino nada mas la vida simple de una practica diaria. Él hizo hincapié en la rutina y la repetición. Enseñó que practicando una y otra vez sin esperar ningún resultado sino mas bien estando lo mas presente posible en ella, algo sutil sucedería. A diferencia de otros maestros de su época y de esta, el no viajó por doquier dando platicas y sesshin. El solamente permaneció en el templo atendiendo los asuntos del templo y su práctica. De cierta manera era un monje muy ambicioso, de lo contrario nunca hubiera venido a los Estados Unidos. Pero su ambición no era llevar a cabo grandes hazañas, si no simplemente tener una gran esperanza y una gran fe y llevarlas a su práctica diaria, con la confianza de que lo que tuviera que pasar sucedería naturalmente sin forzar. Él dijo una vez que la práctica es como caminar durante mucho tiempo bajo la llovizna. Uno puede caminar y caminar y nunca sentir que se está uno mojando pero cuando llega uno a su destino, uno nota que su vestimenta está empapada. También dijo, “si caminamos juntos bajo la llovizna y tu te impacientas conmigo y quieres adelantarte, está bien. Por favor hazlo”.
Entre más practico, más me parece que nuestra iluminación, nuestro entendimiento, nuestra libertad, están en nuestra fe, nuestra confianza, en nuestra naturaleza de Buda, la naturaleza verdadera de nuestro cuerpo y mente mas allá de la apariencia que tomamos en esta vida. No estamos buscando una experiencia o un conocimiento, solo la fe creciente de que la vida es la vida y la muerte es la muerte, y de que siempre estamos conectados con esto. Debido a esto, naturalmente queremos tener una práctica, honorar a Buda, hacer una ofrenda, cantar, sentarnos, ser amables con los demás y con nosotros mismos, y hacer todo sin hacer grandes alardes. Nuestra iluminación no es un estado o un logro, es una experiencia de fe de cada momento. Pienso que probablemente es cierto que otras enseñanzas y maestros pudieran ser mucho mejores que los nuestros, más bellos o sabios o coloridos o profundos. Pero realmente esto no importa. No estamos tratando de ser bellos o sabios o coloridos o profundos, solamente estamos tratando de tener una práctica durante toda la vida día a día con fe. Esa es toda la iluminación que necesitamos y en la simple actividad diaria de una práctica encontramos la iluminación por doquier.
A fines del mes pasado tuvimos un sesshin maravilloso, un sesshin en silencio, sin pláticas de Dharma, sin cantos, prácticamente sin entrevistas, sin ningún diálogo de ningún tipo. Sólo nos sentamos y comimos nuestros alimentos y levantamos todo y descansamos y en la noche nos fuimos a dormir. Y los maestros, en vez de estar cuidando la práctica de los demás, sólo se sentaron hacia la pared ocupándose de su propia práctica. Fue muy hermoso y descubrimos que no necesitábamos ninguna inspiración especial. El solo hecho de estar vivo ya era una gran inspiración. Una tarde durante ese sesshin iba yo caminando hacia mi cuarto y sentí los rayos del sol sobre mi hombro. Fue tan cálido y luminoso, casi tierno, casi delicioso. Casi rompí en llanto, era tan bello, y entonces entendí por primera vez un rezo judío que solía practicar de niño: decía algo así “bendito seas tú Señor que creas todo un universo de tiempo y que me has otorgado presenciar éste único y precioso momento”. Algo así. Así que esta es nuestra iluminación y yo no pienso que se trata sólo de Zen o de budismo. Se trata de la vida, la verdadera vida, la vida tal y como es.
La tercera característica de la enseñanza de Suzuki Roshi es “no apegarse a ninguna enseñanza.” A veces pienso que cuando uno lee las palabras de Suzuki Roshi y piensa sobre lo que está diciendo puede uno pensar que él era una persona un tanto falta de convicciones. A menudo no toma una postura definida sobre algo y, si lo hace, pronto dirá que lo opuesto también es cierto. Seguido utilizaba la frase “el otro lado,” y cuando yo empezaba a practicar, recuerdo a mi propio maestro, Sojun Roshi, que también usaba esa frase todo el tiempo. Solía decir, “el otro lado es…” Quería decir, bueno esta es una manera de ver las cosas, un tipo de verdad. Pero luego también está el otro lado, la otra manera de verlo. Ambas son ciertas y por lo tanto ambas también son falsas. A veces la gente se refiere a esto como al punto de vista no-dual. Sin embargo, ese término siempre me ha parecido excesivamente filosófico y dualístico. La no dualidad es muy dualística porque significa que sin dualidad es bueno y dualístico es malo. Pero lo dualístico también forma parte de la no dualidad. Lo verdaderamente no dualístico es a la vez no dualístico y dualístico. Estos son los tipos de pensamientos que surgen cuando uno utiliza términos como dualístico y no dualístico, y es por eso que a mí no me gusta usarlos. Suzuki Roshi entendía la idea de la no dualidad no como un concepto filosófico sino como una forma de ser. Lo entendía como libertad, como no estar atrapado por nada, no estar limitado por puntos de vista, ni siquiera puntos de vista Budistas o puntos de vista Zen. La práctica está mas allá de todo punto de vista. Incluye todo punto de vista y honra todo punto de vista pero no se apega a ningún punto de vista. Así que, a él siempre le interesó señalarle a la gente la naturaleza pegajosa de sus puntos de vista y alentarlos a que se despegaran de ellos. Existe una anécdota famosa sobre Suzuki Roshi de una ocasión en la que viajaba a la ciudad desde Tassajara con un estudiante que era un ferviente vegetariano. En aquellos días, y supongo que aun hoy en día, la gente tenía ideas muy fijas acerca de lo que era correcto o incorrecto comer, o bueno para uno o no bueno para uno. Cuando se detuvieron en el camino para almorzar en un restaurante, el estudiante se quedó muy sorprendido y con un reto ante él porque Suzuki Roshi pidió una gran hamburguesa. Seguramente término medio-crudo. El estudiante pidió una ensalada o algo por el estilo. Pero quedó aún más perplejo cuando llegó la comida y Suzuki Roshi tomó la ensalada y, sin decir una sola palabra, le puso enfrente la hamburguesa al estudiante. Yo no creo que esto quería decir que Suzuki Roshi desaprobaba el vegetarianismo. El no estaba en pro o en contra de ningún punto de vista en particular sino más bien de cómo uno sostiene sus puntos de vista: éste era el verdadero asunto para él.
Practicar el Camino es estar presente en cada momento, lo cual está mas allá del tiempo. Suzuki Roshi habló de esto una y otra vez. Cuando uno se aferra a puntos de vista, a cualquier punto de vista, uno crea un mundo fijo, un mundo de tiempo lineal, un mundo de sufrimiento y oposición. El no aferrarse a puntos de vista no significa que uno carece de convicciones, siempre y cuando el no aferrarse a ciertos puntos de vista realmente venga del corazón de la práctica de uno. Cuando la práctica de uno es fiel, está uno bien centrado en su propia vida, lo cual no está separado del resto de la vida. Desde ese lugar la verdad es clara, no es confusa. Pero la manera de expresar la verdad puede cambiar de acuerdo a las circunstancias. Cuando la práctica de uno es fiel, uno no se confunde entre la verdad y su expresión: uno conoce la diferencia y por lo tanto se mantiene firme con la verdad pero muy flexible con su expresión. Uno reconoce lo que es importante y lo que es trivial, lo que es realmente útil y lo que no lo es. Y aún si uno no sabe lo que es útil tendrá la paciencia y la confianza de seguir adelante de la mejor manera posible, sin confundirse, atorarse o perder su centro. Este tipo de práctica es algo sutil. Tiene más que ver con un sentimiento hacia la vida que con cualquier regla o doctrina. Una y otra vez Suzuki habló acerca de la inexistencia de reglas, de procedimientos indefinidos y de que aún cuando hay procedimientos definidos uno debe entender que éstos son totalmente fortuitos. Una de mis frases favoritas de Suzuki Roshi fué la respuesta a la pregunta: cual es la esencia del Zen. Él respondió: “No necesariamente”.
El domingo pasado hablé sobre las ocho características del camino de Suzuki Roshi y hoy quiero continuar esa plática. Como dije la última vez, mis ocho características son por supuesto bastante arbitrarias, y quizás cada uno de ustedes tenga su propia idea acerca de las características del camino de Suzuki Roshi y por supuesto, no serviría de nada tomar demasiado en serio mi idea o la de ustedes. Como en cualquier enseñanza, mis palabras pretenden ser tan sólo un aliento para inspirarlos, al menos eso espero, para que encuentren por sí mismos la manera de vivir su vida plenamente. De esto se trata, no de alguna idea sobre algo. En Pepino Torcido, la biografía que escribió David Chadwick sobre la vida de Suzuki Roshi, el cuenta la anécdota de Suzuki Roshi y la Sra. Ransom. Nona Ransom era una señora inglesa muy testaruda para quien SR trabajaba como mozo mientras estudiaba en la Universidad de Komazawa. Era una mujer encantadora, muy segura de sus opiniones y de su visión inglesa del mundo, y muy crítica de la manera japonesa de ver las cosas. Como buena racionalista y buena cristiana liberal consideraba el Budismo como una forma de superstición asiática rara y pintoresca. La señora Ransom tenía una estatua de Buda en su casa como objeto de arte. Ponía sus zapatos junto a ella en el tokonoma y este acto de falta de respeto molestaba al joven Shunryu Suzuki. Pero él sabía que no serviría de nada discutir sobre el tema con la Sra. Ransom, así que un día comenzó a hacerle ofrendas a ese Buda. No dijo una palabra, simplemente cada día a cierta hora le hacía una ofrenda al Buda de una taza de té y una flor, haciendo reverencias formales. La Sra. Ransom, como era de esperarse, estaba muy incómoda ante esta situación, pero Suzuki Roshi simplemente lo hacía cada día sin explicaciones. Finalmente ella no aguantó más, le pidió una explicación y él explicó porqué los practicantes budistas le hacen ofrendas a Buda. Después de este incidente ella cambió su actitud y comenzó a interesarse en el Budismo y finalmente a practicarlo. Este incidente fue crucial en la vida de Suzuki Roshi. Se dio cuenta de que no bastaba explicar algo sino que más bien era necesario hacer algo y hacerlo con constancia y fe. Y sólo entonces, pudiera ser que una explicación fuese útil. Entonces, si hay ocho o dieciocho características del camino de Suzuki Roshi, lo importante no es lo que pensamos sino lo que hacemos. El Zen siempre ha hecho hincapié en el direct pointing, el apuntar directamente a la naturaleza de la realidad. Esto es porque nuestra mente se interesa muy fácilmente en algo y luego esto mismo la confunde. Inclusive las ideas correctas y las enseñanzas excelentes pueden ser contraproducentes si no hay detrás de estas una experiencia ya vivida, una experiencia vivida que madura y se profundiza con el tiempo. En la práctica Zen ciertamente nos interesa la mente, los pensamientos y las ideas, pero intentamos que la mente no nos maneje. Intentamos tener la mente, el cuerpo y el corazón alineados y colaborando juntos. Intentamos no preocuparnos demasiado con ideas o enseñanzas complicadas. En realidad todas las enseñanzas son bastante claras cuando nuestra vida es completa. Cuando practicamos zazen tratamos de que la respiración, la postura, la actitud y el pensamiento, se alineen y formen una totalidad. Así que con esto en mente repetiré las ocho características del camino de Suzuki Roshi que mencioné la vez pasada:
No hay que tener expectativas, la practica diaria fiel es la iluminación, el no apego a ninguna enseñanza, no hay nada especial que hacer o entender, zazen es lo más importante en nuestra práctica, el verdadero zazen es todo en nuestra vida, la bondad y la dureza no son dos cosas distintas, una relación cercana y cálida con un maestro, entrega absoluta en toda actividad y poner mucha atención en los detalles de la forma ya que la verdadera felicidad se encuentra ahí.
La vez pasada hablé de las primeras tres características y voy a repetir brevemente algunas de las cosas que dije acerca de ellas para los que no estaban presentes, luego intentaré decir algo acerca de las otras cinco.
- No hay que tener expectativas: Todos llegamos a la práctica con expectativas: ser iluminados, volverse sabios o serenos, o incluso simplemente encontrar alivio a nuestro sufrimiento. Yo pienso que Suzuki Roshi apreciaba la intensidad que provoca nuestro anhelo por resultados, pero también vio que era esencialmente equivocado porque se basaba en el auto-aprecio en lugar de en la apreciación de nuestra naturaleza de Buda. Cuando apreciamos nuestra naturaleza de Buda tenemos confianza en lo que ocurre y no nos preocupamos por mejorar. Al final soltamos algo en vez de tener expectativas y al soltar podemos permitirnos aceptar cada momento tal como es, pase lo que pase. De esta manera podemos encontrar la felicidad bajo cualquier condición.
- La fidelidad a una práctica diaria: Suzuki Roshi no ponía énfasis en ser brillante o perspicaz, más bien enfatizaba la simple práctica diaria y constante. En su propia vida él era muy constante. Se sentaba con nosotros todos los días, llevaba una vida tranquila de templo y no viajaba mucho enseñando por aquí y por allá. Para él la iluminación se encontraba en la práctica diaria misma, no en experiencias espectaculares o descubrimientos profundos. Veía la fe dentro de la práctica como su propia recompensa, fe no en el sentido de creencia sino en el sentido de confiar en nuestra propia naturaleza verdadera.
- No apegarse a ninguna enseñanza. No hay nada especial que hacer o entender: Mi frase favorita de Suzuki Roshi fue su respuesta a la pregunta ¿cuál es la esencia del Soto Zen? Y él contestó, “No necesariamente”. Una y otra vez Suzuki Roshi hizo hincapié en que no existía una enseñanza fija, nada en lo absoluto que fuera identificado o definido como el único camino. Mientras que la verdad puede ser clara, la expresión de la verdad siempre está cambiando, momento a momento. Así que estar establecido en el Camino es tener conciencia y flexibilidad y no apegarse a nada. A pesar de que existen varias reglas y maneras de practicar no existen reglas reales o absolutas. Esto sería una pequeña revisión de lo que hablé la vez pasada.
- Zazen es lo más importante en nuestra práctica y el verdadero zazen es todo en nuestra vida: Suzuki Roshi definitivamente hacía hincapié en la práctica del zazen, tomar nuestra postura físicamente sobre el cojín. Y todos sus discípulos que enseñan el Dharma, ponen mucho énfasis sobre este punto. En este sentido él siguió el camino de Dogen. Dogen escribió en Zammai o Zammai: “Sentarse en la postura de meditación anima un cuerpo erguido, una mente erguida, un cuerpo-mente erguido, un ancestro Buda erguido, una practica de iluminación erguida, una coronilla erguida, un flujo de vida erguido. Cuando uno se sienta en la postura de meditación la piel, la carne, los huesos y la médula de un ser humano se energetizan inmediatamente en el Rey de los samadhis. El venerado del mundo siempre se sentó en esta postura de meditación y todos sus discípulos lo transmitieron correctamente. El venerado del mundo les enseñó a los humanos y a los devas cómo sentarse en esta postura de meditación. Es el sello de la mente transmitida correctamente por los Siete Budas Originales”. El Buda Shakyamuni se sentó en esta postura de meditación bajo el árbol bodhi durante cincuenta pequeños eones, sesenta grandes eones o innumerables eones inclasificables. Quizás se sentó durante tres semanas o quizás solo durante algunas horas. De cualquier manera el sentarse de Buda es lo que hace girar la prodigiosa rueda del Dharma; dentro de ella está su guía eterna. No hace falta nada, están aquí presentes todos los pergaminos amarillos y rojos de los Sutras. En este momento de permanecer sentado Buda ve a Buda; todos los seres alcanzan el estado de Budeidad. Así que nuestra práctica es muy sencilla, vergonzosamente sencilla. Se trata sólo de sentarse de esta manera, erguido, respirando y poniendo atención en nuestra vida. No hay nada más que eso y sin embargo todo está contenido dentro de esta práctica. De cierto modo ésta es una idea bastante extraña. Vemos a la verdad, la religión o a la espiritualidad como algo grande y misterioso y definitivamente no como algo físico. Sin embargo, Suzuki Roshi nos enseñó que la verdad es solamente sentarse de esta manera, de ésta manera particular. Y yo encuentro que esta enseñanza es bastante problemática porque podría parecer como si las personas que no son capaces de permanecer sentados y torcer sus piernas como nudo no puedan practicar Zen. Y ésta es una idea muy extraña, ¿no creen? Tener una religión en la cual una persona enferma, anciana o discapacitada no puede practicar. Algo aquí no suena bien. En una ocasión Suzuki Roshi regañó a una persona que tenía una actitud de superioridad porque se levantaba tempranito cada mañana para hacer zazen mientras su esposa permanecía en la cama. Le dijo: “si tu crees que tú te levantas a hacer zazen y tu esposa está dormida y no está haciendo zazen entonces en realidad tú no entiendes nuestro zazen”. El verdadero zazen no se limita a un estado mental o postura en particular. El verdadero zazen es la suprema realidad en sí y la realidad suprema es la esencia misma de cada momento de nuestras vidas. Sentarse fielmente es tomar conciencia sobre este punto, así que cuando nos sentamos, sabemos que todos los seres están sentados con nosotros. Y cuando nos levantamos del cojín sabemos que el sentarse continúa. Así que la sencilla idea de Suzuki Roshi sobre zazen, al igual que la idea de Dogen sobre zazen, es difícil de captar para nosotros. Quizás no se puede captar. Tenemos que practicar personalmente, específicamente, con este cuerpo, con nuestras piernas y brazos y pulmones y corazón, nuestro propio cuerpo, no solamente nuestra mente en todo su detalle. Y sin embargo, al hacer esto tenemos que apreciar que este cuerpo específico, en todo su detalle, no es solamente nuestro propio cuerpo. Es todo el universo. Así que en realidad sí tenemos que sentarnos a la manera de zazen. Yo pienso que no hay gran práctica de zazen si no hacemos zazen. Pero también tenemos que entender que zazen tampoco es en realidad zazen. Es solamente la vida, nuestra práctica es la vida.
- La bondad y la rudeza no son dos cosas diferentes: Suzuki Roshi tuvo un entrenamiento estricto en su juventud. Su primer maestro Gyokujun so-on era muy estricto. Hoy en día podríamos inclusive denominarlo como una persona abusiva y preguntarnos si algo andaba mal en él. Quizás lo enviaríamos a ver a un psiquiatra, o quizás Suzuki Roshi tendría que ir a un psiquiatra para resolver sus vivencias. Sin embargo, Suzuki Roshi lo quería mucho y sentía que su enseñanza y su rudeza fueron muy importantes para él. Yo recuerdo haber estado muy sorprendido hace algunos años cuando alguien me dijo que Suzuki Roshi insistía mucho en que el Centro Zen comprara una granja y que por eso adquirimos Green Gulch. La razón por la que quería que tuviéramos una granja era para que cuando los tiempos se tornaran difíciles y escasearan los alimentos, pudiéramos producir alimentos para nosotros y para otros. A mi manera de ver las cosas en una América nacida después de la segunda guerra mundial parecía casi inimaginable que llegara el momento en el que fuera difícil conseguir alimentos. Pero Suzuki Roshi conocía los tiempos difíciles, sabía lo que era no tener suficiente comida. En los primeros tiempos del Zen en China también hubo tiempos difíciles, el Zen fue reprimido, corrieron a los monjes de sus templos y hubo muchos levantamientos, revueltas y hambrunas. Así que Suzuki Roshi y la escuela de Zen misma se formaron en medio de las dificultades. Suzuki Roshi sabía que la vida Zen, que la vida humana, requiere de una gran fuerza. Pero dentro de esta fuerza se encuentra la verdadera bondad ya que la fuerza trae consigo constancia y la verdadera abundancia no es una emoción o un sentimiento, sino la habilidad de ver claramente y ser constante y esto requiere de una gran fuerza. No existe una bondad verdadera sin fuerza. Suzuki Roshi era muy querido por su bondad y el no se consideraba como un maestro estricto. Sin embargo, él entendía la virtud de ser estricto y había una gran fuerza detrás de su bondad. El no era dulce ni sentimental.
- Una relación cercana y cálida con un maestro: A casi todas las personas que tuvieron contacto con Suzuki Roshi les afectó profundamente dicha experiencia, y para mí es muy inspirador escuchar con qué calidez y cercanía hablan de él sus estudiantes incluso ahora, veintiocho años después de su muerte. El mismo tuvo varios maestros importantes durante su vida y confiaba plenamente en ellos. Como ya lo mencioné, su primer maestro So-on era una persona un tanto cruel y frecuentemente le negaba a Suzuki Roshi aquellas cosas que él tanto deseaba. Sin embargo, Suzuki Roshi siempre aceptaba sus instrucciones y se dio cuenta que el rendirse ante su maestro era el mejor entrenamiento. También sabía que So-on, a pesar de su manera ruda de ser, lo quería muchísimo. En el camino de Suzuki Roshi, se pone énfasis en la relación maestro-estudiante como una necesidad misteriosa mas sin embargo cálida. Sin esta relación la alquimia de la transformación no puede ocurrir. La enseñanza toma lugar no con palabras sino en una huella mucho más sutil, una comunicación casi física que se da en el compartir la vida diaria juntos. Un maestro Zen no es un gurú. El o ella es una persona común y corriente con la cual hay que confrontarse. El o ella tendrá varias orillas ásperas debido al karma. Al mismo tiempo la relación con su maestro no es la misma a una relación humana común y corriente. Es nuestra oportunidad para desarrollar una profunda fe y confianza en el Dharma. Confiamos en nuestro maestro no como una persona sino como el Dharma mismo. Cuando el maestro o maestra lanza su vida a la casa de Buda y cuando nosotros hacemos ese esfuerzo también, entonces ambos nos re-encontramos en la casa de Buda, no en nuestra propia casa. Así que es posible que tengamos, o no, todo tipo de problemas personales con nuestro maestro, pero si nuestro maestro es genuino y si nuestro esfuerzo es bueno, estos problemas personales no son tan importantes. Nosotros mismos encontramos la confianza en nuestra naturaleza de Buda a través de la relación con un maestro. Cuando confiamos en él o ella incondicionalmente, no como una persona sino como Buda, en otras palabras, como lo más legítimo de nuestro ser, entonces hemos hecho nuestro trabajo y siempre estaremos agradecidos a nuestro maestro, incluso en el caso de Suzuki Roshi y So-on en donde aparentemente no existía un gran afecto.
- Entrega absoluta en toda actividad: Suzuki Roshi seguido hablaba sobre la naturaleza del tiempo: de que no es un despliegue de cosas de una manera linear o acumulativa sino más bien la profundidad y consumación que ocurren a cada momento. Por lo tanto, practicar en el tiempo significa que debemos entregarnos plenamente a cada actividad, no importa cuál sea. Con frecuencia él utilizaba la palabra sinceridad para decir simplemente: realizar una actividad con energía y entrega total, sin importar lo que sentimos sobre dicha actividad. Zazen es el centro de nuestra práctica pero zazen es solamente ser uno mismo y ser uno mismo es estar presente en todo el universo en cada momento. Esta es la razón por la que todo lo que sucede, cada actividad en la que nos involucramos es decisiva y completa. Cuando abordamos el mundo con nuestra mente ordinaria inspirada por el ego, tenemos muchas evaluaciones sobre nuestra actividad. Esta actividad es buena, aquella es mala, esta actividad es interesante, aquella no lo es, esta actividad es más importante que aquella. Este tipo de evaluaciones absorbe nuestra atención y no podemos estar realmente presentes muy seguido en nuestra actividad. Y aún cuando estamos presentes existe el apego y el apego es como ponerse un par de anteojeras, solo vemos la mitad del mundo. Pero cuando intentamos poner atención en nuestras preferencias sin validarlas vemos que toda nuestra actividad es un campo de profundidad, que cualquier gesto o esfuerzo puede traer consigo la realidad en su totalidad. Esa es la razón por la que hacemos hincapié en el trabajo sencillo dentro de nuestra práctica. Vemos el trabajo como zazen mismo, como, podríamos decir, una forma de devoción o veneración, o una forma de ofrenda. Esto es especialmente claro cuando hacemos limpieza y Suzuki Roshi, durante su vida, llevó a cabo una práctica de limpieza. Hay una anécdota famosa de un día que llegó temprano a la asociación budista de Cambridge donde iba a dar una plática. Todo el mundo estaba ocupado limpiando el lugar para la llegada del gran maestro de Zen Suzuki Roshi. Pero, por error, él llegó con varias horas de anticipación y dejó a todos algo turbados. Él dijo, ¡Uy! va a venir el gran maestro de Zen, tenemos que preparar, y se quitó la ropa hasta quedarse en kimono y se puso a limpiar con todo el mundo. Para mí la práctica de limpieza es muy importante. Limpiar era algo en lo que yo nunca pensaba realmente, pero aprendí a través de mi práctica que cuando barro el piso en realidad estoy barriendo mi mente y todo el universo. Si puedo ordenar una esquina de mi recámara entonces frases enteras se ordenan. Hoy en día en nuestra práctica honramos las preferencias de las personas y entendemos que a veces es difícil para algunas personas hacer ciertas cosas y que quizás deban hacer otras cosas. Últimamente en el Centro Zen algunas persona a veces se niegan a realizar ciertas tareas que se les pide hacer y honramos esa negativa y sus razones. Pienso que está bien que hagamos las cosas de esta manera y que podamos tener compasión los unos con los otros de esta forma. Pero sería una lástima si olvidásemos que a fin de cuentas necesitamos liberarnos de las preferencias y entregarnos por completo a lo que sea que hacemos. Este es nuestro ideal, esta es nuestra meta. Así fue el entrenamiento de Suzuki Roshi y así fue como él nos instruyó.
- Poner detenida atención en la forma como medio de liberación: Suzuki-Roshi sufría cuando tenía que enseñarle a sus estudiantes (libres pensadores norteamericanos con inclinaciones individualistas) que tener la opción de elegir y expresarse por uno mismo, no es lo que aparenta ser. En realidad la verdadera libertad no se encuentra en poder ejercitar las preferencias de uno, sino en encontrar espacio y auto-expresión total dentro de cualquier forma que aparezca. Una vez dijo que cuando cada quien usaba la ropa que le gustaba y aparecía con su propio lenguaje corporal, era difícil para el ver la verdadera individualidad de cada persona. Pero que cuando cada uno se ponía su túnica negra y se sentaba sobre su cojín, exactamente de la misma manera, entonces se hacían evidentes las maneras en que cada uno era único. Esta parecería ser una afirmación paradójica pero, en realidad es totalmente cierta. Al soltar las preferencias, que de hecho son sólo hábitos y condicionamiento, nuestra verdadera, nuestra más profunda individualidad, nuestro propio giro particular en la naturaleza de Buda, puede manifestarse. Es con éste espíritu que Suzuki-Roshi hacía hincapié en la forma, de inclinarse correctamente, de caminar y estar de pie con el decoro apropiado, de acatar todas las formalidades del templo, desde el tocar la campana hasta ingerir los alimentos en oriyoki. El nos enseñó que hacíamos esto, no porque era la manera absoluta de hacer las cosas, la mejor manera, sino porque la práctica formal es para nosotros una vía para encontrar una gran apertura interior, una libertad más genuina de la que nuestro condicionamiento podría producir. Muchas personas encuentran que la práctica de Zen tiene un régimen muy estricto, demasiado tieso y formal. Pero nada más se ve así desde fuera, en realidad cuando el cuerpo es guiado por la forma puede haber un espíritu elevado por dentro, una verdadera libertad y una verdadera belleza. La práctica formal no es la mejor manera de vivir o la manera Zen de vivir, es únicamente una manera arbitraria de hacer las cosas. Pero yo no conozco nada más efectivo para ayudarnos a soltar nuestra profundamente condicionada naturaleza, que es la fuerza que nos une a nuestro sufrimiento. La práctica formal trabaja con el cuerpo al nivel más inconsciente, y si no nos encontramos a nosotros mismos ahí, pienso que va a ser muy difícil que encontremos nuestra naturaleza de Buda y la traigamos al frente de batalla en nuestras vidas. Suzuki Roshi hizo hincapié sobre esto en una época en los Estados Unidos en la que dominaba la expresión personal desenfrenada. Él tuvo que tener mucha paciencia con los hippies y con otras personas que llegaban al zendo con sus propias ideas de cómo vestirse, caminar y sentarse. Pero él era muy paciente y siempre le divertía lo que la gente hacía. No era una persona cerrada y yo creo que él apreciaba la gama de colores con que la gente tomaba la practica formal. Sin embargo, él sabía que había mucho sufrimiento en medio de esta supuesta libertad de la gente y sabía que la única manera de mostrarles esto era ayudarlos a encontrarse a sí mismos con las formas de la práctica. Así que con constancia y con una voz amable animaba a la gente una y otra vez.
Traducido por Eugenia Doniz (Xalapa, México) donizvinaver@hotmail.com
Comentarios del caso 25 del Blue Cliff Record
Desprendimiento
Comentarios del caso 25 del Blue Cliff Record
por Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Comentarios del caso 25 del Blue Cliff Record
por Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Plática de dharma impartida en Tassajara, febrero 16, 1998
La manera de ser feliz, de acuerdo a Buda, es simple: sólo despréndete. Si te desprendes de mucho tendrás mucha felicidad; si te desprendes de poco, tendrás poca felicidad; y si no puedes desprenderte de nada en absoluto, tendrás mucho sufrimiento. La práctica del desprendimiento se recomienda no porque sea una buena idea o moralmente superior en algún modo, sino porque es práctica, y además, realmente es el único camino. Porque no importa si logramos desprendernos o no, las cosas se van sin que podamos hacer algo por evitarlo. Más vale desprenderse y cooperar con la manera de ser de las cosas que intentar infructuosamente de resistirse a la irresistible forma de la realidad.
Pero desprenderse es duro porque la mente humana desea aferrarse: es un hábito enorme y muy antiguo. De hecho, el aferramiento es todo lo que conocemos, es literalmente lo que somos; y no queremos desasirnos de nosotros mismos. Soltar se siente como la muerte y tenemos miedo a la muerte porque significa nuestro fin. De hecho desprenderse es una especie de muerte; algunas veces puede ser literalmente la muerte: tendremos que desprendernos de nuestra vida en algún momento. Pero ya se trate de lo que llamamos muerte o sólo de un desprendimiente cotidiano, de todas maneras se trata en realidad de muerte. Cada momento tenemos que morir, cada momento morimos a este momento de nuestras vidas. Se va para no volver. Si es un momento maravilloso se irá; y si es un momento terrible, se irá de igual manera. Cada momento muere a sí mismo; y es así como cada momento de nuestras vidas se encarga de sí mismo completamente; cada momento contiene en sí mismo su resolución propia, perfecta. Practicar el desprendimiento es participar en esta muerte-momento-a-momento que es la vida: desprenderse es unirnos a nuestra vida.
Esto, de alguna manera, suena drástico y sé que a mucha gente no le gusta oír este tipo de cosas. Desprenderse realmente es morir, pero morir no es sólamente morir: morir es libertad, liberación, paz. Morir significa dejar a un lado la carga de nuestra vida y salir a las montañas en una gran excursión yendo de aquí para allá como una nube. Morir significa que no nos aferramos a nada relacionado con los seis sentidos: todo lo que oímos, olemos, saboreamos, tocamos o pensamos lo apreciamos por lo que realmente es; no lo “yoisamos” ni tratamos de retenerlo fijamente: sólo lo dejamos ir y venir; lo dejamos nacer y morir como de hecho nace y muere momento a momento. Esta es la manera más bondadosa de vivir y la única manera de amar: dejar que cada cosa sea lo que es y luego dejarla ir, dejarla ser libre. Tratar de retenernos a nosotros mismos o retener nuestro mundo o a otra persona en un lugar es imposibe. Nada puede manetenerse en un sitio. La vida está llena de presiones, estrés, cargas; y es por eso: porque estamos tratando con todas nuestras fuerzas de manener fijo aquello que no se puede mantener en un lugar; estamos intentando preservar lo impreservable y fijar lo no fijable. De hecho todo tiene integridad tal y como es; todo está rodeado de un espacio inmenso: cada uno de nuestros pensamientos, aun nuestros sufrimientos, ciertamente los árboles y pastos, el sol y la luna y las nubes, nuestro cuerpo humano: todo pasa y reaparece como es, operando en conjunto en una maravillosa armonía del libre pasar, si tan sólo se lo permitimos, si sólo nos despredemos y le permitimos ser de esa manera en el curso de nuestro vivir.
La vida de desprendimiento es la vida de libertad. El desprendimiento no significa que seamos distantes a todo o que no exista calidez o que las cosas no nos importen; la palabra desprendimiento es buena porque sugiere distancia y en el amor siempre debe existir alguna distancia, espacio o apertura. En la vida cotidiana de los humanos siempre existe algo de deseo: si no existiera el deseo, no podría haber vida. Pero si uno se aferra al deseo con demasiada intensidad, éste se vuelve algo muy restrictivo. Si en nuestro amar existe mucho deseo al que nos aferramos fuertemente, entonces nuestro amar se vuelve también limitante y de pronto ya no es amor sino dependencia, o aun antipatía; el verdadero amor exige cierta distancia, cierto desprendimiento. Con los ojos del desprendimiento podemos ver que el objeto de nuestro amor no puede ser poseído, no es algo a lo que podamos aferrarnos. Cuando digo esto puede parecerles trágico. De alguna manera es trágico; trágico si no te gusta y no lo quieres aceptar. Pero si lo aceptan, verán que la imposibilidad de poseer o aferrarnos al objeto de nuestro amor es algo bueno porque si pudiéramos, no se trataría realmente de un ser viviente; sólo sería nuestro invento, y los inventos no son objeto de amor. Todo ser viviente necesita su propia integridad y su propia libertad y espacio: así que siempre debe existir cierta distancia y desprendimiento en el amor. Y el deseo —si lo estudian con cuidado y muy de cerca— posee esta característica: el deseo tiene espacio a su alrededor si se lo permites, si no insistes en atestarlo. Pero como regla general atestamos nuestro deseo y entonces se convierte en algo doloroso pues nunca puede ser satisfecho. Esto es lo que son los fantasmas hambrientos: seres que atiborran sus deseos en rincones pequeñísimos y experimentan los sufrimientos indecibles de un desear interminable y nunca satisfecho. Todas las adicciones son así. Esta es la mente de la adicción, la mente atestada de deseo del fantasma hambriento. Pero si practicamos el desprendimiento y abrimos espacio para nuestro deseo y el objeto de nuestro deseo, si permitimos a nuestro deseo ser lo que es y después irse, entonces no tenemos que sufrir y sí disfrutar de nuestro deseo y su objeto ya sea que lo satisfagamos o no. De hecho todo está ya desprendiéndose: tú y yo estamos desprendiéndonos. Así que no existe necesidad de satisfacer nuestro deseo. Algunas veces cuando está bien que lo hagamos lo hacemos, pero aun entonces no poseemos nada. Sólo disfrutamos algo por un momento y luego lo dejamos ir. El deseo, entonces, puede surgir y no es preciso que sea un problema tan grande.
Lo mismo ocurre con la aversión. La aversión es inherentemente desagradable, pero el deseo, que parece ser agradable superficialmente, es también desagradable cuando está a tope. Ya que la aversión es inherentemente desagradable, podría pensarse que nosotros desearíamos desprendernos de ella automáticamente. Pero no es así; deseamos deshacernos de la aversión o sentirnos mal con respecto a ella; en otras palabras retrocedemos ante nuestra aversión: sentimos aversión hacia ella, lo que significa que deseamos su desaparición en este momento porque no queremos sentir el desagrado que nos produce. No sabemos cómo hacerle un espacio, dejarla ser y desprendernos de ella. Así que de alguna manera estamos alimentando nuestra aversión al ser agresivos hacia ella. En lugar de esto necesitamos aceptarla y permitirnos sentir completamente el displacer que nos produce, estar en paz con ella y dejarla ir. Entonces la aversión tampoco constituye un problema tan grande.
No tenemos que vencer nuestra naturaleza humana para ser felices. Eso no funcionaría. Es como si un general mandara escuadrón tras escuadrón de tropas en misiones suicida contra un muro enorme e inexpugnable para tratar de penetrarlo lanzándose contra él. En lugar de esto sólo tenemos que enviar uno o dos exploradores pacíficos a caminar despacito a lo largo del muro hasta descubrir la manera de rodearlo. Es necesario aceptar los hechos y las consecuencias reales de ser humanos. Esa es la manera de ser felices y de ayudar a otros a ser felices.
Registro Blue Cliff, caso 25: Una vez el ermitaño de la cumbre de la Flor de Loto levantó su bastón y lo mostró a la asamblea. Dijo, “Cuando los antiguos llegaron aquí, ¿por qué no se quedaron?”
No hubo respuesta de la asamblea así que se respondió a sí mismo, “Porque no ayuda al Camino”.
Una vez más dijo, “Y, ¿qué con eso?” Y se respondió a sí mismo, “con mi bastón sobre mi hombro no pongo atención a la gente; voy derecho hacia la miriada de picos”.
El otro día estábamos hablando sobre Iron Grindstone Liu, que vivió en una ermita en Kuei Shan. Yo estaba diciendo que ella había cumplido su estancia en el monasterio y se había graduado a una ermita, donde vivía una vida sencilla y tranquila. De hecho en las historias zen abundan estos ermitaños que vivieron anteriormente en los grandes monasterios. Pienso entonces que debe haber sido una práctica muy común el que, una vez saturado de la vida monástica hasta el punto, como dice Han Shan, de haber olvidado el camino por el cual llegaste, renunciabas a ella, la dejabas ir, para errar como la nube que se interna en las montañas. La Grindstone era así; y he aquí otro ermitaño que vive en la cumbre de Flor de Loto, donde, cuenta la historia, permaneció durante muchos años, y que, cuando alguien iba a visitarlo, levantaba su bastón y decía: “Cuando los antiguos llegaron aquí, ¿por qué no se quedaron?”
En la tradición monástica cristiana existe también el ermitaño. Los cristianos entendieron que hay dos tipos de práctica monástica: la cenobita, donde los monjes viven juntos haciendo de la vida comunitaria el centro de su práctica y la llevada a cabo por los ermitaños graduados de la vida cenobita. Esta última es necesaria porque te enseña las virtudes de la bondad y la tranquilidad; aprendes a meditar, a llevarte con otros, a sobreponerte a los defectos más odiosos de tu conducta interior y exterior. Este es un prerrequisito para la vida del ermitaño, que es una vida, como dirían los cristianos dedicada a la contemplación de Dios, o como diríamos nosotros, a la libertad producto del reconocimiento del aspecto eterno de las cosas ordinarias. Extrañamente, en el zen chino una imagen de la vida eremita es Hotei, el Buda gordo, en camino de regreso al mercado con una enorme bolsa de regalos. A diferencia de los ermitaños cristianos, que eludían el mundo, los ermitaños del zen chino no eran antisociales. En lo más profundo de su ser estaban fuera de la sociedad pues eran libres de ella, pero no eran antisociales. En todo caso, a medida que pasó el tiempo la vida del eremita fue desaparaciendo más o menos gradualmente tanto en el cristianismo como en el zen. Al principio la gente decía que nadie estaba listo para esa vida, pero más tarde llegó a ser vista como algo negativo. Thomas Merton luchó durante veinte años para convencer al abad de su monasterio cenobita de que estaba listo para la vida del ermitaño, y finalmente lo convenció. Creo que lo mismo sucedió en el zen. La práctica cenobita es muy fuerte y muy útil y como es comunitaria tiende a crear instituciones. Y las instituciones son muy poderosas y tienen una forma de protegerse a sí mismas. Enfin, en la antigüedad en China había aún muchos ermitaños como el de la cumbre de la Flor de Loto.
En el zen todos los monjes deben tener un bastón de viaje que simboliza la vida del monje: sin hogar, errando de un lugar a otro para estudiar el Camino. En otras palabras el bastón es símbolo del despertar mismo. Así que el ermitaño quiere decir: “Cuando los antiguos lograron despertar, ¿por qué no se albergaron en el despertar?” Durante veinte años nadie fue capaz de responder a esta pregunta así que un día se dirigió al monasterio para ver si los monjes podían contestarla, y cuando nadie fue capaz de hacerlo él mismo contestó: “Porque no ayuda al Camino”.
A mí me gusta mucho el beísbol, y como todo aficionado al beísbol, estoy convencido de que la vida es muy parecida a jugarlo. Tú eres el bateador y hay un picheo tras otro. Si no le atinas a un picheo, te olvidas y te aprestas para el siguiente. Si haces una carrera, tienes que olvidarte de eso y prepararte para el siguiente picheo. En el beísbol el promedio de fallas es tremendo: cada vez que está uno al bat hay un promedio de cuatro a seis picheos; así que batear diez veces implicaría unos cincuenta picheos. Si le pegas sólo a tres exitosamente lo estarás haciendo muy bien; así que en el beísbol un promedio de 90 por ciento de fracasos es muy bueno. Pero no lo piensas. Sólo te importa un picheo: éste. Es por eso que los despertados no pueden permanecer en ese estado: si se quedan ahí con la carrera anotada la última vez, perderán el picheo que viene ahora. Haber hecho una carrera en el último picheo no es ninguna ayuda para este picheo de ahora. En otras palabras, el ermitaño nos está diciendo que la única manera es soltar, soltar, soltar, momento a momento. No hay nada qué hacer, qué saber o qué poseer. Sólo estar preparado para vivir.
Para reforzar y aclarar este punto aún más el ermitaño continúa: ¿Y qué con eso? ¿Cómo es? ¿Cómo se hace? Y contesta: “Con mi bastón sobre el hombro no pongo atención a la gente: voy directo a la miriada de cumbres”. Aquí “gente” no significa necesariamente gente; significa el apego a la gente, o se refiere a la gente dentro de nosotros, nuestras ilusiones, que son bastante adherentes. Así que paso frente a todas —quizá con una sonrisa como saludo o un gesto de los hombros: bueno, pues, ni modo; con amor quizá, pero a la distancia— y me voy hacia los miles y miles de picos, azules y verdes, que se extienden hasta donde alcanza la vista. Continúo así hasta desaparecer entre las cumbres.
Es todo por hoy. Que todos desaparezcamos en la cumbre de cada momento y encontremos ahí una felicidad duradera.
traducción/translation: Guillermina Olmedo zentient@pvnet.com.mx
Teaching item description.
In a dream I have had, someone asks me to write a piece about
my life. They want me to write about my early religious life and training,
how I became interested in Zen, any events, characters, things that seem
important and salient to me in my spiritual development. In this dream
I sit with a blank stare looking at the person who is asking me for this
writing. I have no idea what he is after, why he interested in such stuff,
how to go about writing this material, because I recognize in the dream
that I can’t say no to his request.
I suppose I have an anti-biographical bias. I’m not sure why. I
notice how interested people are in biography. I am a poet, and I note
that most popular poems are forms of biography. But I write lyric poems,
which is to say poems that are not about me or how I feel but about the
world, and words, and all the things that can’t be said. Biography
is a mystery to me. The story of anyone’s life: how immense, ineffable,
impossible! So many dubious assumptions not even noticed in raising the
prospect, “Tell me about your life.” Still, we want to know,
and we want to tell. That in itself may be the most important thing about
the story.
I discovered the most important facts of my spiritual biography a year
or so ago when I realized two things, first, that, having be born at the
end of World War II, I grew up surrounded by people who were traumatized
and didn’t know it. I probably should have guessed this years ago:
when I was seven or so years old and playing on the roof of our building,
which afforded a view of the bridges that fed traffic into our town, I
managed to fly a red and black Nazi flag that my father had captured in
the War. Traffic stopped, panic ensued, and my father was summoned home
from work to take the flag down. That might have been a clue that people
were by and large on edge all the time. The second important fact is the
realization I recently had that I must have been enormously effected in
my early life by the fact that I grew up in a household of Yiddish speaking
people, in which my grandfather was ill and always on the point of dying.
This cast a pall over everything, and since the family drama was conducted
in a language I didn’t understand, gave every moment a mysterious
sense of dread, confusion, and expectation. I remember I had an English-language
bible record that I played over and over again. When the voice of God
came on I’d hide under the dining room table to listen with great
fascination (did I imagine that God does not look underneath furniture?).
When I was seven my grandfather died. I have no memory of this. Don’t
know if I attended the funeral or burial, but I doubt that I did. I do
remember being a lonely boy. Mostly an only child (my brother was born
when I was five) and living far away from other children, I spent a lot
of time alone or in silence with my grandmother, now a widow who was cheerfully
awaiting her own departure, which she always felt was immanent. We’d
spend hours looking out our second story window at the cars going by on
the street. Since there weren’t many of them, each car was an event,
suddenly appearing and then just as quickly gone, in an otherwise still
and quiet scene. At night there were the lights that you saw approaching
before the car itself appeared. Death, sadness, mystery, seemed to be
my playmates. I took this for granted. I was probably quite unhappy but
I don’t remember that.
I was nine or ten years old when our small congregation hired a young
lively Orthodox rabbi, just out of the seminary. A slight, energetic,
and intellectually restless man, Rabbi Maza was as free-thinking as he
was committed to his tradition in all its details. Lacking anyone to talk
to in our small and largely uneducated community (He was from Jewish New
York, and used to lively discussion) he took me on as a protege. So from
ten years old till fourteen, I was a very religious boy, studying not
only Torah and Talmud with the rabbi, but anything else we could get on
our hands on, from Plato to Freud. I became proficient in prayer, could
read the vowelless Torah script, and often led the services that I attended
daily. I remember how much pleasure this gave the old men, all of them
immigrants from Europe, to see a young American boy so fluent in Hebrew
and so resonant with the old melodies. I enjoyed the chanting and took
pride in it. Everything about Jewish religious practice pleased me. It
was complicated and challenging and you could get good at it.
When I was fourteen the rabbi left town to take on a congregation in
New York, no doubt a relief to him. At the same time I was beginning high
school, having friends, dating, playing sports. I was an absolutely normal
American small town boy. Whatever dark thoughts I had had as a child,
whatever religious feelings I had had as a pre-adolescent, simply disappeared.
They came back to me in my twenties, years of torment and suffering. I
had no good reason to suffer, other than the fact that the world appeared
confusing and impossible to me, but this was only a feeling I had. Still,
one doesn’t need good reasons to suffer. Reasons or no reasons suffering
feels like suffering. Through the suffering I developed an interest in
questioning life’s oddness and unworkability, an interest that I
felt had always been with me, but that I’d forgotten about for a
while when I was busy having fun. That interest led me, step by philosophical
step, to Zen, the only form of Buddhism that was being written and talked
about in the West at that time. It appealed me to immediately, largely
because I had become a poet by then, and Zen seemed inherently art-friendly.
I ran into someone who had practiced at San Francisco Zen Center with
Suzuki Roshi. I learned how to do zazen, which the zen books I had been
reading never mentioned, and took to it immediately. As soon as I could,
I moved to California (as exotic and far away to me as India was to my
contemporaries), made contact with the Zen Center, and went off on my
own to practice, a copy of Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” in
my knapsack. I did a lot of solo backpacking, days of sitting, writing,
reading, being a hermit. This went on for some years. Finally I saw that
more organized practice was necessary and I went to the Berkeley Zen Center,
and later to Tassajara where I lived for five years or so. I liked the
Berkeley Zen Center and Sojun Weitsman, my root teacher, was quietly supportive
of me. His zen was simple and plain, and that suited me. I liked the more
official San Francisco Zen Center less well, but it was tolerable, and
it gave me the chance to practice full time for about twenty-five years,
for which I am grateful.
In those twenty-five years I had the chance to do a lot of zazen, and
to encounter many teachers. Also many students, whose lives were always,
against the silent backdrop of Zen practice, starkly revealed, giving
me a profound picture of the human heart. The time went by very quickly.
I learned many things about communication, organizations, cooking, farming,
accounting, and other such things, without really trying to learn anything.
I’m afraid I have forgotten most of what I’ve learned. In
meditation I had a lot of strong experiences, even memorable flashes of
transcendence, but nothing that distinguished me as an exceptional practitioner.
There were some exceptional practitioners, and I admired their achievements.
I have had a career as a Zen priest. Ordained in 1980 by Zentatsu Richard
Baker, a teacher who was always very kind and supportive of me, if a bit
too busy to particularly notice me (nowadays he tells me he did notice
me), I received Dharma Transmission quite unexpectedly from Sojun, was
elected some years later, by an odd process of elimination (there seemed
to be no one else willing or able to do it), co-abbot of Zen Center, served
a five year term, respectfully declined a second term, and went off on
my own in 2000 to establish the Everyday Zen Foundation. I remember that
I had had a hernia operation about a week before my very complicated Abbot’s
Stepping Down Ceremony that was held in February of 2000, and was still
in recovery, walking with great difficulty and concentration, which made
the ceremony more impressive I think.
Reviewing all these apparent facts organized around what anyone would
conventionally call a person’s life I wonder what it all means.
People often ask me how Zen practice has changed or influenced my life.
This is a hard question to answer. I am sure I must be different from
the sad boy of five I once seemingly was. But I can’t say how. Every
day I have new problems, nothing is solved. But I am willing for that
to be the case, possibly forever, which I suppose is my main achievement.
Fifth of six talks by Norman from the 2002 Dharma Seminar, on Suzuki Roshi’s collection, “Not Always So.” (The first talk of the series is not available.)
Not Always So (Part 5 of 6)
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | December 1, 2002 Dharma Seminar
Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum
We are starting with the last section of the book, “Wherever You Are, Enlightenment is There.” I remember this talk. It was so wonderful, and I remember reading it many times in manuscript over the years.
“In our practice the most important thing is to realize that we have Buddha nature. Intellectually we may know this, but it is rather difficult to accept.” Well, yes, you know, it is rather difficult to accept. When you hear that we all are Buddha nature, that we all have Buddha nature, it sounds nice. Buddha nature is good, it can’t be bad. But why it’s actually hard to accept is because it is also bad. It’s bad because to realize that we are Buddha nature, to have Buddha nature, is to realize that we die. We are dying every minute. To realize Buddha nature is to realize impermanence and that we fundamentally don’t know what’s going on. To realize that we are not in control of what happens, that we can’t know what happens…all those things are very hard to accept. So, Buddha nature sounds good, but the fact of the matter is, we can’t accept it, and we won’t accept it because it frightens us. It frightens us to live our real lives.
So there is a lot of suffering that we have to go through in order to appreciate our Buddha nature. To know that this is so for us, we really have to accept our inability to control life, accept impermanence, and accept that what we don’t want will appear. So to put Buddha nature on the good side, to make it so pretty and so positive and so spiritual, to accept Buddha nature because it is so nice… is to make a cartoon out of Buddha nature. Buddha nature is accepting the reality of life, including suicide, war, oppression, starvation. One works one’s whole life and beyond to alleviate these things, but one also knows there will always be such things as long as human beings remain human beings, until the next eon and Maitreya Buddha.
“Our everyday life,” he goes on, “is in the realm of good and bad, the realm of duality, while Buddha nature is found in the realm of absolute, where there is no good or bad.” Which means we have to accept – from our point of view – to accept good and bad, to accept Buddha nature. “There is a twofold reality. Our practice is to go beyond the realm of good and bad and to realize the absolute. It may be rather difficult to understand.” And, again, I would say not so difficult to understand – it’s difficult to realize, difficult to live, difficult to accept, as he says in the beginning, rather difficult to accept.
He then quotes Katagiri Roshi’s teacher: “Hashimoto Roshi, a famous Zen master, said that the way we Japanese cook is to prepare each ingredient separately. Rice is here and pickles are over there. But when you put them in your tummy, you don’t know which is which. The soup, rice, pickles, get all mixed up. This is the world of the absolute. As long as rice, pickles, soup remain separate, they are not working. You are not being nourished. This is like your intellectual or book knowledge. It remains separate from your actual life. Zazen practice is mixing all the ways of understanding and letting it work together. Even though you say, ‘I have Buddha nature,’ and you may believe it and have faith in that, that alone is not enough to make it work. If you do not have a friend or a sangha, it won’t work.”
It’s interesting, isn’t it? In other words, this faith, a true faith in our Buddha nature is not something that we cook up on our own. It’s something, he’s saying, that is created through the dynamic of our working with our teachers and our sangha.
Then there is the wonderful image of the kerosene lamp. He is delivering these talks at Tassajara, where, as you know, there’s no electricity, only kerosene lamps, so the kerosene lamp is the kind of iconic image of Tassajara life. My first book of poetry, which was written after living in Tassajara for a few years, had on it a drawing that I made of a kerosene lamp.
“To have a so called enlightenment experience is of course important, but what is more important is to know how to adjust the flame in zazen and everyday life. When the flame is in complete combustion, you don’t smell the oil. When it is smoky, you will smell something. You may realize that it is a kerosene lamp. When your life is in complete combustion, you have no complaint, there is no need to be aware of your practice. If we talk too much about zazen, it is already a smoky, kerosene lamp. Maybe I am a very smoky kerosene lamp. I don’t necessarily want to give a lecture. I just want to live with you – moving stones, having a nice hot spring bath, and eating something good. Zen is right there. When I start to talk, it is already a smoky lamp. As long as I must give a lecture, I have to explain ‘This is right practice. This is wrong. This is how to practice zazen, and so on. It is like giving you a recipe. It doesn’t work. You cannot eat a recipe.” So it’s in your life, it’s in your living, not objectifying some teaching as something outside of ourselves. He calls enlightenment experiences “so-called” experiences. There is more than a little skepticism here. Yes, we should try to concentrate and have important experiences. But more important is knowing how to live. This is now, after all these years, so painfully obvious. Do we even need to say it anymore?
“To live each moment, becoming one with everything, is the point of Dogen’s teaching and his practice…You might think that you could practice zazen much better if you had no problem, but actually some problem is necessary. It doesn’t have to be a big one. Through the difficulty you have, you can practice zazen. This is an especially meaningful point, which is why Dogen Zenji says, ‘Practice and enlightenment are one.'”
I think somewhere, maybe in this talk, he says that there is always a problem. There is always something. The nature of this world that we live in is that there is always a problem, but if you view it as a problem to be gotten rid of, then problems proliferate and become very annoying. If you recognize that a problem is just what you need for your practice and make use of it, then it doesn’t really appear as a problem. It’s what you need right now, even if you don’t like it.
“Practice is something you do consciously, something you do with effort. There! Right there is enlightenment.”
So that’s interesting. Everybody is always practicing. It’s not like there is practice and non practice. Everybody is always practicing, and everybody is always in the Way, the dharma. So we can’t go wrong, and we can’t not do it. We can’t feel pressure about it, because whatever way we go, it’s all right. And yet, he’s saying here – earlier he said you need a sangha and a teacher – here he says you need to make effort, because without that effort, it’s just a game; we’re just we’re fooling ourselves. So somehow our effort activates practice. It is something we have to do consciously, intentionally with our effort, and in the effort itself is the adjustment of the flame, is the enlightenment.
“Many Zen masters missed this point while they were striving to attain perfect zazen: things that exist are imperfect.” Everything that exists is naturally imperfect. “That is how everything actually exists in this world. Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality. It is true intellectually and it is true in the realm of practice. True practice is established in delusion, in frustration. If you make some mistake, that is where to establish your practice. We talk about enlightenment, but in its true sense perfect enlightenment is beyond our understanding, beyond our experience”.
Perfect enlightenment is beyond our understanding, beyond our experience. We can have various experiences that we can call enlightenment experience, but as soon as it enters this world of existence, it is already imperfect. As soon as we objectify it and say, “Oh, I had that experience,” it’s useless. I mean it’s useful in that it encourages us to practice, but in and of itself, such experiences are not useful unless we just take them as encouragement to go on.
“This is called I – don’t – know zazen. We don’t know what zazen is anymore. I don’t know who I am. To find complete composure when you don’t know who you are, that is to accept things as it is. Even though you don’t know who you are, you accept yourself. That is ‘you’ in its true sense.”
The next talk is called, “No Sticking to Enlightenment.” This was a talk he gave, it would appear, at the end of Sesshin. He was telling people, in effect, now that you have sat for seven days, and you’ve had this deep experience of Zen, don’t stick to it. Don’t think that now you are returning to some corrupt, messed up world. This is not only Suzuki Roshi’s and Dogen’s teaching, it is really where the Zen school begins. It’s an interesting conversation about what makes the Zen school, what are the characteristics of the Zen approach to Buddhism. Maybe it’s in the Sixth Ancestor sutra, a suspect sutra maybe, but nevertheless it may be there that the Zen teaching coalesces as a distinct school of Buddhism. In that sutra it’s taught that meditation practice and everything else are not different from one another. Meditation practice is living an awake life. It is not a special practice that you do sitting down and breathing. It’s about living, about living an awake life. Meditation and wisdom are the same thing, the sutra says.
So that’s really the most important insight of the Zen school. Suzuki Roshi quotes here from that Sixth Ancestor sutra: “If you dwell on emptiness and stick to your practice, then that is not true zazen.” So even if your zazen is great zazen, totally concentrated and everything is wonderful, if you stick to it, already it falls off the mark. “When you practice zazen, moment after moment,” not just on the cushion, “you accept what you have now, in this moment, and you are satisfied with everything you do.”
So you accept whatever is. This is it: absolute truth appearing to me now in this moment. Whatever it is, you accept that. This is terrible, absolutely terrible, but this is it. This is the truth. This is the way the truth must manifest for me, right now, in this life at this moment. And there’s a kind of satisfaction because you just accept it. You don’t have any complaints. This is a different attitude from, “Oh why this? Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Can I get rid of this? Maybe I’ll do a little Zen. I’ll go to the dharma seminar, that will fix me up. That will help.” Instead of this is it. That is zazen!
“Even though it is difficult, and even though you are busy, you will always have the taste of calmness in your mind, not because you stick to it, but because you enjoy it. When you enjoy it, you don’t have to stick to it. So if you have a real taste of our practice, you can enjoy it all the time, whatever you do.” And you stick to it when you identify it as something. We don’t know what practice looks like because this moment that we are living now we have never lived before. So we actually don’t know how practice is going to appear in this moment.
I think he really means this. You enjoy what is, even if you don’t like it. Even if things are really, really terrible, you enjoy it because you don’t stick. That’s why things are so bad for us, because we’re sticking to something that we preferred before, something that we would rather be living than this. If we’re willing to live this, whatever it is, even if it is something really bad, there’s enjoyment in our life. That’s not sticking to our practice.
“You may think you have attained enlightenment, but if you are busy, or are in some difficulty and think you need to have the experience again, that is not real enlightenment, because it is something you are sticking to.” Then he says, and we should all listen to this one, “Your busy life itself is enlightened activity.” What a challenge. “Your busy life itself is enlightened activity.”
There’s a wonderful part here about making a date with your girlfriend. As I was telling you last time, one of the things you don’t appreciate when reading the book but do appreciate when hearing it on the tape is that he is constantly laughing throughout these talks. He’ll stop and then laugh for two or three minutes and then go on. And you know he must have been just chuckling for quite awhile when he said this: “Nowadays young people are dating, but enlightenment is not something you can meet on a date. If you organize your life, get up at a certain time, get your bag lunch, and leave for work, then if you have a girlfriend or boyfriend, you will meet them.” Thoroughly ridiculous! What is he talking about? There is no need to make a date; they’ll just show up somehow! If you get up at the right time, get your bag lunch, don’t make a phone call, they’ll just be there at the right time! “At a certain time she will come to the corner where you usually see her. That is our way. “ What is he talking about? [laughter]. If you get up in the morning, don’t call up your girlfriend, she will just be there, that’s Zen!
“It is rather foolish and troublesome to make phone calls. Even if you make a date by telephone – ‘Hey, I’m leaving now’ – if she doesn’t come to the corner, you will be disappointed. If you do not make a date, and she comes to the corner, you will be really happy.” [lots of laughter] But actually there’s a point to it, you know. There’s a point to it. It’s better to go out on the street and see who shows up. When she’s not there, you don’t care; it’s all right, she’s not there. Naturally she’s not there, but when she’s there, it’s a great thing!
And then he says, as if that weren’t ridiculous enough, “That is how you attain enlightenment. It is not a laughing matter.” [laughter] He obviously said that because everybody was probably falling on the floor laughing, just as we are. “It is not a laughing matter. I am talking about something real. Not to make any date means not to expect or stick to enlightenment.” Or anything, in other words.
“When you are encouraged by enlightenment, then seeing her, even just a glimpse of her, is enough.” So now the girlfriend becomes enlightenment. So you don’t need to make an appointment with enlightenment and try to make sure that you’re with her constantly. When you bump into her, and even just catch a glimpse of her around the corner, that’s enough. And of course one thinks of the great tradition in literature of romantic love – all this love poetry addressed to the elusive object of love – like Shakespeare’s sonnets addressed to whom we don’t even know, is it actually someone, anyone? – and maybe it never really is anyone, a person, who you could call up on the phone and then live with, and he or she would make a mess, not do the dishes, be late to meet you keep you waiting a long time, and so on – it’s not that kind of lover. The lover never appears at all. It is so much better that way. Or, as Suzuki roshi says, the lover maybe appears, and maybe you get a glimpse of her. Even more wonderful!
“All day long you will be happy. If you are demanding too much of her, then it already means that you stick to enlightenment.”
So there’s a lot there to think about and appreciate.
