Steve Gross gives the sixth talk of the Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind 2025 Series on “No Trace.” This series of talks is given by senior Everyday Zen teachers on the chapter of their choice from Suzuki Roshi’s book “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind.
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James Flaherty gives the second talk of the Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind 2025 Series on “Study Yourself” This series is part of five class talks given by senior Everyday Zen teachers on the chapter of their choice from Suzuki Roshi’s book “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind.
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Judith Gilbert gives the first talk of the Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind 2025 Series on “Prologue: Beginner’s Mind.” This series is part of five class talks given by senior Everyday Zen teachers on the chapter of their choice from Suzuki Roshi’s book “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind.
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We cannot continue offering teachings online without it. Thank you!
Norman gives the 14th talk of the Tassajara Winter 2019 Practice Period on “Going Home.”
Norman gives a talk on Dogen’s “The Point of Zazen” as the fifteen and final talk of the session and the 13th talk of the Tassajara Winter 2019 Practice Period
Kathie Fisher gives a talk on “Only a Buddha and a Buddha” as the fourth Sesshin talk and the 12th talk of the Tassajara Winter 2019 Practice Period.
Norman talk on Dogen’s “Katto – Twining Vines” as the third talk of the Session and 11th talk of the Practice Period.
Kathie Fisher gives the second Session Talk (10th of Practice Period) speaking on Koans.
Hakusho Ostlund gives a talk on to “Diligently Care for and Collect Body and Mind” as the second Session talk (9th talk of series) of the Tassajara Winter 2019 practice period.
Norman’s gives the eighth talk at the Tassajara Winter 2019 Practice Period speaking on “Buddha’s Parinirvana.”
Norman gives his third and last talk in his series on “Six Subtle Dharma Gates.”
Kathie Fischer gives a dharma talk on “Taking Refuge in Buddha, My Own Material Body” to the Tassajara 2019 Winter Practice Period.
Norman gives his second of three talks on the Six Subtle Dharma Gates to the Tassajara 2019 Winter Practice Period
Kathie Fischer gives a dharma talk on the Story of Hui Neng to the Tassajara 2019 Winter Practice Period.
Norman gives the first of three talks on the Six Subtle Dharma Gates to the Tassajara 2019 Winter Practice Period.
Kathie Fisher gives the second talk to the Tassajara 2019 Winter Practice Period on
“Wild Ones.”
Norman gives his first talk Introducing the 2019 Tassajara Winter Practice Period.
Norman presents his second talk on Mindfulness and Compassion to the Dharma Seminar at the Mountain Rain Zen Center in Vancouver, BC
Chris Fortin and Sue Moon give dharma talks at the 2016 EDZ Women’s Retreat on Mother Prajna Paramita
Celebrating the Memory of Susan B. Jordan-an evening of teachings, meditation and discussion with her teacher, Zoketsu Norman Fischer.
Norman’s wit and wisdom inspired Susan to incorporate the principles of meditation into her everyday practice of law.
First – can we have a little meditation practice? Feisty as she was, Susan was very seriously devoted to her meditation practice, and so I think to honor her, the best way to begin is to sit – to sit in silence. I’ll give some brief instructions. For those of you who knew Susan, this is a good moment to feel as if in the silence and presence of your sitting you are sitting with her – that your heart can open all the way to the place where she is…
The world is a sad and difficult place. I doubt that anything we will do or can do will change that. Today is May 23 – Susan died May 29, 2009, nearly three years ago. The flyer for this event shows her standing in front of an airplane, probably hers. As you all know, she flew airplanes, and died in an airplane. I find it still, even now, hard to believe, because Susan was such a vital and passionate person. I can still hear her voice and see her face. Her absence for me is suffused with the strength of her presence. She had tremendous presence and tremendous power for justice. She began I think as a teacher, wanting to help children. But social injustice so rankled her that she became an attorney in order to do battle with it, and she spent most of her life fighting for the accused and the wronged and the disadvantaged, fighting for justice. I think this effort made her very powerful, but it also wore her out, and she got sick and had to stop for a while. That’s when she began her spiritual practice and developed her taste for silence – which led her step by step to an appreciation of the tragedy of our shared human life, and of love. And then she began applying that appreciation to her legal work – to finding out how she could continue to fight for justice and at the same time keep a radically open heart. This was something she was just in the midst of exploring with when she died. She was a strong voice for this exploration, and she was beginning to speak out for it at our Lawyer’s Retreats and elsewhere. She was eloquent and completely convincing when she told her own story and explained why spiritual and meditation practice had becomes so central to her life.
I got to know Susan as a member of the Lawyer’s Working Group, a project of contemplative mind in society, an org I am affiliated with. This is a group of about 15 lawyers that’s been meeting for nine years now, in an on-going discussion of how to apply the insights and personal changes that come about through meditation practice to work in the law. In our meetings Susan was always a pretty fierce discussant. She insisted on truth, and on going as far beneath the surface of what you were saying as you had to go to get to what you really felt, to what really mattered. She was always extremely sensitive to gender and power issues in our discussions – constantly pushing the group to examine these things, and to get past them to something more real and more satisfying. Our group truly misses her. I truly miss her. She was an extraordinary soul.
Meditation is very popular these days. Everybody now knows it’s good for you, good for your health, reduces stress, makes you more peaceful. Charlie Halpern of our Working Group tells me that Justice Breyer of the US Supreme Court practices meditation every day in his chambers as a way of treating his heart condition. So this is good, very good. But also, if you practice meditation thoughtfully and with a searching mind, as Susan did, you find that meditation can also be more than a way to calm you down. It can become a life path, a way of seeing and living. And then, inevitably, it will change you, transforming your life. If you are a lawyer, it will transform the way you view and perform your work. The Working Group some years ago drafted a document that attempts to describe some of the ways meditation practice can revolutionize a lawyer’s work life. Called “the Meditative Perspective,” this document lists some of the significant ways meditation practice can influence a lawyer’s perspective and activity:
ÔÇó Patience and sustainability. The meditative perspective changes problems into challenges, and strengthens vigor and commitment. Its helps us to approach situations with a fresh perspective.
ÔÇó Wisdom. The meditative perspective helps us to to see things as are, not as we wish they were. Consequently our decisions come from a more expansive place of understanding.
ÔÇó Passion. The meditative perspective helps us to transform anger and self-righteousness into energy to serve one’s clients and justice.
ÔÇó Honest self-reflection. The meditative perspective fosters honesty with our experience and relationships. It makes denial, distraction, and the demonization of others more difficult.
ÔÇó Calmness. The meditative perspective promotes stability and calmness. We can know and tame our emotions rather then be victimized by them.
ÔÇó A sensitive and realistic sense of ethics. With the meditative perspective we become more aware of the discomfort that comes with unethical conduct, and resolved not to allow it. Confidence in this brings courage and strength.
ÔÇó Integrity in the midst of complex situations. The meditative perspective helps us to hold and maintain a clear vision of the values we are trying to promote in our work in the law. It helps to ground us in these values.
ÔÇó Compassion. The meditative perspective helps us to appreciate on a visceral level the interconnections between people. It promotes empathy with clients, colleagues, opponents, and neutrals. It heightens sensitivity to suffering and opens the heart, allowing us to move towards difficult situations and handle them with a greater sense of ease.
ÔÇó Focus. With the meditative perspective we are less obsessed with a stressful emphasis on achievement, so there is more moment to moment focus on every situation, whether it is drafting a document, talking on the phone, meeting with a client or co-counsel, or speaking in court. Such clear and focused presence enhances effectiveness.
ÔÇó A whole life. Lawyers who are influenced by the meditative perspective bring to their work the values and styles they hold in their personal and spiritual lives. For them it is neither desirable nor possible to conduct themselves professionally in ways they would find uncomfortable in their private lives.
ÔÇó Awareness. Of our own condition and that of others. Of our own needs and motivations and the needs and motivations of others. Of the total situation in which we finds ourselves.
ÔÇó Skillful listening and communicating. The meditative perspective promotes empathetic and accurate listening. We listen better to clients, colleagues, opposing counsel, judges, and ourself. With listening comes clearer and more effective communication.
ÔÇó Creativity. The meditative perspective, in promoting flexibility of mind and heart, and the ability to let go of habitual patterns when necessary, allows us to open to novel strategies to solve problems and accomplish objectives.
Maybe we can simplify this and say that meditation can bring you to a place of compassion and empathy – to understanding your own human feeling with generosity, and through that understanding, to understanding the feelings of others. It can bring to your life a lively bright presence, patient, enduring, focused on the good and on kindness. The document I just quoted from was not written as a theoretical or an aspirational piece – it is a description of how the lawyers in the group have come to feel about their own lives and the impact meditation practice had had on them, as members of a very difficult and often too stressful and contentious profession.
I remember once Susan telling us about how she applied all this in the Lynne Stewart case. Lynne Stewart is a famous New York attorney who was, like Susan, constantly defending the defenseless. In the 1960’s she worked a lot with William Kunstler defending political prisoners. In the mid 1990’s Lynne was defending the Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman on terrorism charges, and was herself convicted of illegally passing prison notes from Rahman to his associates. Susan had been brought in during the sentencing phase of Lynne’s trial – when Lynne was facing up to a 30 year sentence. I don’t remember too many details about this but I remember Susan saying that the team of attorneys handling the case were always arguing with one another, and this contentiousness made getting anything done very difficult. Susan described how she let go of all arguing and just practiced quiet concern for the members of the team, listening more than speaking, and in this way was somehow able to have an impact, and bring things around, creating harmony within the group. As she thought through the strategy for presentation of material to the judge she suddenly had an insight, that, like all profound insights, was completely obvious. She realized, she said, that the judge was not a rational justice machine, he was a human being with a heart . And that the trial’s result would be better if the judge was appealed to on the basis of his heart, rather than rational contentious political argument. Using this insight, the team was able to get a short 28 month sentence for Lynne, possibly without further jail time, which at the time was perceived as a tremendous victory. Not long after this I ran into Lynne Stewart in a restaurant in New York City. I was with some friends who knew her, and they congratulated her on how things had turned out. When I told her that I was a friend of Susan Jordan, Lynne’s rather beaten-up looking face immediately brightened into a huge smile. “Susan is the greatest person and the greatest lawyer on earth.” she told me. Because a felony conviction brings automatic disbarment, Lynne later appealed the conviction, and this raised the stakes. In November 2009 (about 6 months after Susan’s death) the original sentence was lifted and a much longer one applied. Lynne is now appealing this sentence but is serving time in prison.
It may seem a bit naive or maybe even foolish to believe that simply sitting in silence could have such effects as claimed in the Meditative Perspective document. Maybe so. But sitting – if you sit still and silent with your mind and heart open – you do begin to feel and see your life differently. You begin to see that your thoughts come and go, none of them stay. Even your most cherished belief is a thought that comes and goes, just like a sound comes and then melts into the silence. You begin to see that certain kinds of thoughts are inherently painful and others and inherently peaceful. You begin to feel safe enough to bear witness to deeper levels of thinking and feeling and with this you begin to have a more appreciative sense of your own struggles, your own strengths and weaknesses. When that happens, little by little, you become more appreciative of others, and more able to understand that others too – even others who maybe threaten or oppose you – also have their struggles and their needs and desires. That they, like you, are human beings with human hearts. It naturally becomes more difficult for you to override your feelings, to ignore you most tender and best impulses – more difficult to demonize others and reduce them to cartoon-like enemies. And if, getting up from your meditation cushion, you begin to pay attention in a similar way to your life, to what you say and do and feel all day long, and to how and why you do what you do, day after day, week after week, you begin to study your own suffering. You begin to see the many ways in which you make good situations bad, and bad situations worse with old conditioned habits of mind and emotion. You realize how foolish this is and you realize you don’t have to do it any more. You begin to behave differently. So no, this is not magic, and it is not a magical effect of silence. It takes time, it takes intelligence, and it takes courage and commitment. But it does happen, if you will let it. It certainly happened to Susan. It made her life happier, more peaceful, more loving.
It would be wonderful if this were enough. It would be wonderful if simply by meditating and working on your own heart you could bring justice to the world. No doubt the meditation and the personal work helps a lot – it helps you, it helps your friends, it helps your clients and associates. But all of us are still living in a difficult world, where the political arrangements, in many cases, probably most cases, are very bad, if not very very bad, and not so easily turned around.
I have studied Buddhism and meditation for a long time, and it often strikes me that the concept of justice is unknown in Buddhism. As far as I know, there is no word in Pali or Sanscrit or Tibetan Chinese Korean Vietnamese Burmese or Japanese Buddhism that corresponds to our word justice. There are many discussions about compassion and caring and love in these languages, many discussions of ethics, of not killing not stealing not lying and so on – but no discussion of justice per se. There is of course in Buddhism a very sophisticated and complex – and mostly misunderstood – theory of karma, natural moral law – but this is not the equivalent of what we mean by justice. And you could very easily and I think accurately fault all traditional Buddhist societies for being essentially unjust societies – maybe having, admirably, cultures of kindness and graciousness – but not of equality of justice or opportunity. Traditional Buddhist societies are all essentially feudalistic, and Buddhist religious establishments throughout history have always been aligned with rulers and ruling classes who enjoyed absolute political and economic power over their subjects. So the application of categories like justice – especially social justice and human rights – to Buddhist thought and to the process of meditation practice – is something unique to our time and place. It is something new to Buddhism. In fact now in Korean and Vietnamese and Chinese and Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism you do have words that are the equivalent of justice – but these words have come into these languages, I am pretty certain, as a result of the encounter with the West.
I am actually not sure what justice means. I looked it up in the dictionary, but, like most words, the words that define justice (like right or righteous) raise more questions than they answer. When I watch the police shows on television – and there are many of them – I get the impression that justice means that the bad guys get put away, or if not put away then killed by the end of the show. This usually happens, and when it doesn’t, you know that something is left hanging, something left undone. Several of the shows have an ongoing theme of revenge – the main character’s husband or wife or mother or brother was killed long ago by someone and show after show there is a recurring brush with this killer and near misses in his apprehension – and the tension and suspense builds. The evil person must be brought to justice, and if not, there is something out of control in the world. The need to bring evil doers to justice has been an international theme of the last decade or so. So justice seems to have an element of revenge or punishment in it.
In Western thought – which invented the idea of justice – justice usually implies God, the ultimate Judge. God ordains right and wrong. The moral law is given by God, it is far more than a mere practical matter. Last month, when voters in North Carolina were deciding whether or not to approve a constitutional ban on gay marriage, I heard a preacher on the radio say, “it’s not that I am opposed to gay marriage, God is opposed to it. It’s not a matter of what anyone wants or doesn’t want. It’s God’s law.” Maybe most of us here wouldn’t say that, and maybe the idea of God is not part of our thinking about justice, and yet somehow we do feel that justice comes from an absolute source. Justice is not merely a practical matter or a matter of preference. Something is right because it’s right – it’s more than our feeling about it. Good is good, bad is bad. There’s something very strong about this – also something scary about it.
The same scary dimension is there too in questions of social justice. It is right, it is good, that poor people, deprived people, old people, sick people, disadvantaged people, be taken care of, and someone – the state or someone else – should see to it that this happens. In states where social justice was enforced – or supposedly enforced – the results were mostly not pretty. Wherever justice needs to be imposed and forced, enforced, there is a problem – there is always a problem – and injustice results from the enforcement of a state’s conception of justice. Of course rule of law and social justice are important – they are important to me. It’s just that the effort to discover, maintain, and enforce them will almost certainly lead to problems. So far, we have not seen a just state. There are many who say that our society is the closest the world has ever come to a just state. If that is even partially or debatably true, it is a sobering fact.
So I end where I begin – with a sense of the tragedy of our human world. But this doesn’t mean that I am in despair about the prospects for us. No, I think that when we will collectively – as Susan Jordan did individually – combine our passion for justice with a heart felt development of compassion, based on an appreciation of our shared pain, we will have a better and a good enough world.
Chris Fortin speaks on “What is Zen? to the Montara Mountain Zendo group.
"What is Zen?"
~ talk by Chris Fortin at Montara Mountain Zendo, November 5, 2011
Hi everybody! What a nice day to sit! Kind of cozy and warm. A great lunch.
Brad and Barbara asked me to talk about the topic, "What is Zen?" When they asked me, it made me laugh! It is sort of like saying, "What is your heart?" or "What is the sun and the moon and the stars?" or "What is that amazing soup that we had today?" I suppose the good news is that you can come in any door you want, and just start where you are, and figure out what happens next.
The first story I wanted to tell you was something that I experienced last week. I work in Santa Rosa. If you have been there, it is a nice, safe little town. I was out on my lunch hour, and the streets were kind of full. I crossed a busy intersection, and I saw that a man had stepped into the intersection in front of the moving cars.
It wasn't what I expected – maybe in a bigger city, but in little Santa Rosa? He was defiantly and completely exposed and vulnerably throwing himself into the stream of traffic. Almost before I knew it, my body had turned around, and I was standing on the corner calling to him to come out of the street. He came out of the street, and at that point my brain was catching up with me, and I could hear the voice in my head saying, "Uh, oh, what have you done now?" because clearly I had made contact with this person who was in a lot of pain, and who was clutching a 7-up bottle to himself with a clear liquid in it, that probably wasn't 7-up.
So energetically we moved away from the street. He said, "I'm Steve. What's your name?" I said, "I'm Chris." Throughout our exchange, he was putting his hand out. I felt what he wanted was human contact. He made contact with his eyes, even though he was clearly quite drunk, and in his eyes there was enormous pain and sadness.
I said to him, "Why don't you stay over here out of the street? It is safer over here." He looked me dead in the eye and said, "Is there any place that is safe?" I said, "No, there is no place that's safe." It felt like that's where he was. He said "Thank you for not lying to me." And then he said, "You don't know what happened to me."
It was a simple question, but Steve was also asking a big question that came out in that moment. His experience was that there was no place whole. His life was shattered. The bottom of the bucket had dropped out of Steve's life.
I remember when I first started practicing Buddhism in my twenties. I went to Green Gulch and Zen Center. One of the things that I loved about Buddhism is that are four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth is, "There is suffering." Not that life is suffering, not that life is a bummer. This isn't nihilism, but just the acknowledgement that there is suffering in being a human being. I felt the same way that Steve must have felt in that moment. "Oh, somebody is willing to meet me heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye, and just acknowledge what I have known since a child. Of course there is suffering."
Although the Buddha said that fundamentally sickness, aging, and death are a cause of suffering, there is something about having a human body and being born into a human life that is extraordinarily beautiful and wondrous. In fact, we are told in Buddhism that it is a rare and precious gift to be given a human body, because we can wake up in this body, and we can ask these questions.
So the first Nobel Truth that there is suffering is where Steve and I met in that moment. The second Noble Truth is there is a cause of suffering. In the simplest way, the cause of suffering, you could say, is that we are basically always fighting and struggling with life as it is. If it is something we want, we want to hold onto it, and we are afraid somebody is going to take it away from us. If it is something we don't want, we are pushing it away. There is a kind of push-pull, with maybe a few moments of presence and rest and acceptance. So the cause of suffering is that we have resistance to life as it is each moment.
The third Noble Truth is that there is a way out of suffering. There is a way to be free in this lifetime, and it is actually what we are all here for, to wake up and become who we truly are. To answer Steve's question "Is there any place that's safe?" is to know that everything is whole and complete in each moment – even when it doesn't look that way, and it doesn't feel that way. There is another ground that we can sit down in, that is here all the time.
The fourth Noble Truth is there is a way to live this. There is a way to actualize it. There is a way to bring alive this wholeness that is inherent in our very nature. To go a step further, our very nature is the nature of everything, which is, to give a name to it, love or goodness or kindness. In some way, this was woven into Steve's and my encounter – brief, but a moment of meeting there.
This is a Zen story, and like many stories, is a story about a woman, Chiyono. She was the first woman in Japan whose enlightenment was certified by a Zen teacher, and who founded the first Zen nunnery in Japan. Her Buddhist name was Muchaku. There are two versions of this story. In one she is a noble woman, and in the other, she is a humble servant. In the version that I will read first, she was a woman of a high ranking family who married and had one daughter. In 1277, when she was thirty-four, her husband died, and she couldn't get over the grief. So she became a nun and trained under Zen master Bukko.
Here is the first part of the story:
Muchaku the nun came to Zen master Bukko, and said, "What is Zen?"
I was really happy to find this koan! Off the hook! (Laughter)
The teacher said, "The heart of the one who asks is Zen. It is not to be got from the words of another."
So Steve asked a question, and it was his heart asking, deeply, "Is there some place safe? Is there some place whole?" I think that each one of our hearts asks these questions, these deep questions that may be part of what you wrote about today in Barbara's question, "How do we want to live?" That deep part of us wants to understand life and living and how to be here. How do we manifest that which our heart does know? How do we make sense out of all of this?
Zen master Bukko's response was, "The heart of the one who asks is Zen. It is not to be got from the words of another." People can tell you things, and people can really help each other. We can read sutras in Buddhism, and we can read parables and stories from the Bible. They all help, but fundamentally it has to be something that becomes your own experience. It can happen in a moment or in a meeting. You just never know when or where. Suddenly something in your heart opens. There is the experience of knowing something that you have always known.
In the second version of the story she is a servant in a Zen convent.
One of the nuns in the convent was an elderly woman, an elderly nun, who had come to rest in her deeply compassionate nature. One day Chiyono approached her and said, "I'm of humble birth. I can't read or write, and I must work all the time. If I set an intention, is it possible that I too might attain the Way of the Buddha, even though I have no skills?"
Again, a question. Chiyono is asking, "I'm not smart, I'm not clever, but if I set an intention, if I stay with this deep question in my heart, can I too wake up and know Buddha's Way?
The elderly nun answered her [meeting her fully and completely in that moment] and says, "This is wonderful, my dear! In fact, what is there to attain? Listen carefully. The teachers of the past have said that people are complete as they are, whole as they are. Each one is perfected. Not even the width of one eyebrow hair separates them from this perfection. In Buddhism, there is no distinction between a man and a woman, a lay person, and a renunciant. There is also no separation between noble and humble, between old and young."
Of course there are men and women; and of course there are old and young; and of course there are lay people and monastics. But in the most fundamental level – whatever it is – there is no separation. We are all of the same part. We are all already fully and completely whole and perfect. And we get this amazing human body heart mind – to wake up and to know this!
Then she says:
There is only this. Each person must hold fast to his or her aspiration. Each person must hold fast to the aspiration [which actually is the root word of breath], the deep breathing of the heart, the deepest heart's desire, and proceed along the way of the bodhisattva.
In Buddhism the bodhisattva path is manifesting the deepest heart's innate and intuitive wisdom that we are of the same heart. It is dedicating your life to the benefit of all beings.
There is no higher way than this. Just hold fast, return over and over to the call of your heart, the one heart of the world. This is the way. This is the path.
If you know your heart-mind, if you know this, what teachings about the scriptures do you need? What words do you need? The teachings of the sutras are like a finger pointing to the moon. If one looks directly toward the moon, there is no need for a finger. In entering the Way, we rely on our bodies.
I love this part. It brings it right here! This is it. Zen and zazen is a body practice. You sit down on a particular place on the earth, in a particular moment, in a particular body, in the midst of happy, sad, painful – just sit down right here in this body. This is actually a physical path – just simple breath and posture.
Then she said:
Chiyono received these teachings with faith and happiness.
It's like some part of her just went "Wow! This is the truth!" Zen is a practice of faith, and it is a practice of devotion. Not faith in something else, but just a deep faith in the resonance of your own heart. We just keep following it. You just sit down in a body and trust. It opens and opens way beyond anything you could figure out.
Chiyono said:
With this practice as my companion, I have only to go about my daily life, practicing whole-heartedly day and night.
She got it. It's that simple. It's really that simple. It's not something over there. It is completely ordinary. It is completely every day, and it completely happens on the cushion, and it happens everywhere, each moment. Going home taking care of your kids. Being at work. Taking care of your car. Whatever you are doing, we bring this beautiful spirit of whole-heartedness and presence and meeting to ourselves and to everyone.
So the final part of this story:
In the eighth lunar month of the following year, the full moon was shining. Chiyono went to draw some water from the well. The bottom of her old bucket, held together by bamboo strips, suddenly gave way, and the bottom fell out of the bucket. At that moment, she was set free, and in commemoration, she wrote this poem:
In this way and that
I tried to save the old pail,
since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break,
until at last, the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail,
no more moon in the water.
The bottom drops out at last. No more moon, no more water, no more separation, no more ideas and thoughts. Suddenly she was free. Just Chiyono in that moment, right there at the well.
I thought that if we take this story, and turn it with the question, "What is Zen?" – I can't usually do the points, one, two, three, four, but l will try – and let's see what happens.
First: whole-hearted question. What is the deepest question of your heart? How do you want to live?
Then being open to intimate meeting. Each moment is intimate meeting. Actually the whole world is responding to your question all the time. It is mirror of the deepest heart question that we all have. What we realize in that meeting of each moment, and practicing with the deep-hearted question, is that we are not outside of some truth that is someplace over there. It is everywhere, and it beyond discriminations. It doesn't matter what you are, or what you think that you are, or what you think your problems are, or what you have figured out. The whole world is a manifestation of love. We each are called to take responsibility to manifest that.
Hold fast. Follow your deepest heart's question. Listen deeply. Everything is perfect and complete, beyond what we can see and know. I do not say that glibly or without the awareness that Steve was suffering, and that there are huge amounts of suffering. But if we can breathe in and out with each moment, and breathe in and out with and through this deep heart body mind, the bottom of the bucket of our ideas of limited conception will fall away. And the world opens and opens and opens. What is right there at the center is kindness and compassion.
We sit down; we return to silence; we align our bodies and hearts and minds; we don't turn away; we don't hold back. The body awakens itself to what it has always known and to what it already is and everything is. It is ordinary. It is every day. It is not something special or holy. It is right here. Whole-hearted living forever.
In the end, I think we become what we have always been, a true human being. We remember our humanity and our place in things. We get to practice kindness, because kindness is practicing us.
To close, here is a quote from the Dalai Lama: "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others, and if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." We are human, and we will hurt others. We try not to hurt, and we use whatever our experiences are to wake up. To soften our hearts over and over and over.
Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum
Most people come to Zen practice not quite knowing what to expect. Popular images of tough Zen masters, rigorous retreats, and hardwon enlightenment experiences may obscure the fact that, when you come down to it, Zen is as much about relationship and interaction as anything else.
SHAMBHALA SUN SEPTEMBER 2011
When You Greet Me, I Bow
Most people come to Zen practice not
quite knowing what to expect. Popular images of
tough Zen masters, rigorous retreats, and hardwon
enlightenment experiences may obscure the fact that,
when you come down to it, Zen is as much about relationship
and interaction as anything else. Think of the koan
literature for which Zen is famous. On the surface, these
stories flash with enigma and a wonderful patina of the
exotic (to Westerners anyway). But scratch the surface and
you realize that the stories are basically about encounters
between people.
Zen koan literature is essentially dialogic. The typical
Zen story involves two or more people, who seem to be on
intimate terms with one another, bringing up the teaching
in dynamic, even amusing, ways. Because the protagonists
know each other so well and share a serious and longstanding
commitment to the dharma, they don’t need to stand on
ceremony. Their discussions (which are sometimes wordless)
are always laconic, rough, and full of affectionate slang and
jokiness, and relationship itself—with all its glitches and contradictions—
is often the subject matter. So, contrary to expectations,
Zen stories may have something fresh to say about the
tricky and problematic nature of relationship.
A few stories might illustrate:
Longtan made rice cakes for a living. But when he met the
priest Tianhuang, he left home to follow him.
Tianhuang said, “Be my attendant. From now on I will
teach you the essential dharma gate.”
After a year, Longtan said, “When I arrived, you said
you would teach me. But so far nothing has happened.”
Tianhuang said, “I’ve been teaching you all along.”
Longtan said, “What have you been teaching me?”
Tianhuang said, “When you greet me, I bow. When I
sit, you stand beside me. When you bring tea, I receive it
from you.”
And another:
One day, while Guishan was lying down, Yangshan
came to see him. Guishan said, “Let me
tell you about my dream.”
Yangshan leaned forward to listen. Guishan
said, “Would you interpret my dream for me? I
want to see how you do it.”
Yangshan brought a basin of water and
a towel. Guishan washed his face and sat up.
Then Xiangyan came in.
Guishan said, “Yangshan and I have been
sharing miracles. This is no small matter.”
Xiangyan said, “I was next door and heard
you.”
Guishan said to him, “Why don’t you try?”
Xiangyan made a bowl of tea and brought
it to him.
Guishan praised them, saying, “You two
students surpass even Shariputra and Maudgalyayana
with your miraculous activity!”
These are wonderful stories about people who
know each other so well and whose minds and
hearts are in such harmony that they don’t need
to explain or discuss. They are so close they can
communicate everything with a bowl of water or
a bow. Simply appreciating being together, sharing
life basically and intimately, they understand one
another at a level far beyond ordinary needs and
wants and arguments. Of course, not all Zen stories
illustrate this perfect accord between practitioners,
but those that do are eloquent in just this way; they
are saying that simply being together with warmhearted
kindness, dropping storylines, and appreciating
each other’s profound human presence,
is the whole of the teaching. No mention here of
meditation insights, esoteric ritual, or fancy Buddhist
doctrine. Intimate and caring relationship is
the miracle that moves Guishan so much.
Someone said to me recently, “I know your feet.”
This is a funny and intimate thing to say. In Zen
practice we spend a lot of time in the meditation
hall together, doing things in unison—sitting down
and getting up, standing, walking, and eating. It
is not unusual for us to spend a week together in
retreat like this, with no speaking or looking into
each other’s faces. But we appreciate and recognize
each other’s presence. Some of us wear robes,
and our feet are bare. We see each other’s feet and
hands, and we acknowledge with a bow each other’s
bodies in passing.
In the world at large, we can know someone
quite well—they can even be a good friend—but
we might not know their feet or their hands or fully
take in the sense of their body as they stand near us.
Though we know what they look like, we may not
really have taken in their face, or their voice, or the
way they move when they are deeply connected to
their feelings. Yet what are we if not our feet, hands,
face, voice, and the way we move?
Instead of our bodies, what we know of each
other in the ordinary world is our stories, our social
words and beliefs, our wants and needs and complaints.
A relationship operates across the divide of
two people’s needs and wants and opinions, which
may or may not, at any given moment, harmonize.
And when they don’t harmonize, then what? No
wonder relationships are so rough!
In contrast, the relationships in these Zen stories
are pristine in their clarity and simplicity. Whatever
conflict or controversy there may once have
been has been worked out through years of mutual
practice. Willing, finally, to be present with what is,
the protagonists can be perfectly present with one
another as they are. Sharing mutual commitment,
they can share life. They can know each other with
an intimacy that goes beyond the abstraction of
storyline and desire. They seem to appreciate each
other enough to feel comfortable bringing up life’s
most challenging questions.
New York Times columnist and television
commentator David Brooks has
written a book called The Social Animal
in which he summarizes the plethora of recent
studies about the brain and emotion. He quite
wisely finds this research germane to his interest
in politics and society. Most of what goes on
between us, he says, isn’t what we think is going on.
Unconscious and unintentional, our interactions
are subtle and by and large unknown to us. Our
relationships really are as mysterious and resistant
to explanation as the Zen masters of old understood
they were. We stand in each other’s presence;
we drink in each other’s being; we know and influence
each other; and we turn each other inside out
simply by being in each other’s presence. We are
always breathing, sitting, walking, and standing
together—the togetherness is just more noticeable
in quiet meditation halls.
It’s true that the Zen masters of old lived lives of
silence, meditation, ritual, lore, and teaching that
created a nonordinary atmosphere in which their
needs and desires could be clearly seen and seen
through. So over time they could realistically hope
to come to a feeling of living at a more basic, visceral
level, and, at this level, relationship is heartfelt
and clear. You drink in the other’s presence, their
hands, feet, face, and voice, and they become a true
friend. Then, over years and decades, this friendship
ripens and deepens into brotherhood and sisterhood—
true kinship of the spirit. You are living
the same dream, and you know it. You don’t need
to explain or contend.
Recently, I attended a funeral at the San Francisco
Zen Center for the priest Shuun Mitsuzen,
Lou Hartman, who had died at the age of ninetyfive.
He had been married for sixty-three years to
Zenkei Blanche Hartman, who was co-abbot of
the center with me a decade ago. To open the ceremony,
as is the Zen custom, Blanche carried Lou’s
ashes into the buddha hall and placed them on the
altar. Though there are probably very few people
who appreciate the Buddhist teaching of impermanence
as much as Blanche does, she cried quite a bit
as she placed the ashes down. So did I.
Lou had been quite famous around the Zen center
as a talker, curmudgeon, and great doubter. He
was absolutely faithful to daily meditation and ritual
practice and he took care of altars and small repairs
constantly, but he was outspoken in his scorn for
any sort of falseness or cant, was almost incapable
of taking anything on faith alone, and didn’t have
a pious bone in his body. His manner was gruff
and probably a little scary to new students, and in
some ways, despite his long marriage, fatherhood,
and many years living communally in the temple,
he was a loner. So the expressions of love and tender
regard for him that were made at the funeral
were eloquent testimony that what counts in human
interaction isn’t outward sweetness, polite solicitude,
or fulfilling others’ needs and expectations. It’s
the capacity to show up intimately and honestly,
with one’s whole self, for and with each other, over
time. It’s not necessary that the people we love be
perfect or even overcome what might be serious
personal defects. Living together for a long time
with practice as a backdrop, we can get over our
need for others to be as we wish they were, and
appreciate them for what they are.
The celibate monks of old China and the married
priests of the San Francisco Zen Center may be living
in unusual situations, but the basic template of
what they have learned from the Zen tradition about
relationships is useful for the rest of us. Though we
may not be able to replicate their lives, we can, I am
quite sure, find a way to capture the essence of the
practice that they’ve done, and it can help us with
our contemporary relationship problems. There is,
of course, some serious effort involved—meditating
on one’s own and at group retreats, listening to
teachings, and the daily effort of paying attention.
But these are efforts that can realistically and successfully
be made, if you feel it’s a priority.
The most important thing is coming back to presence
every day, back to the breath, to sitting, walking,
and standing, and remembering that this is what
we are. It’s a practice we can do with as
much integrity as Guishan, Longtan, or
Lou Hartman. We can remind ourselves
that when our passions are aroused, or
when we feel our needs are unmet, we
can return to presence and just feel whatever
we feel, with some forbearance. We
don’t need to make it go away and we
don’t need to insist that others do what
we think we need them to do.
Of course, we can’t expect our lives to
go as smoothly as those of the ancient
Chinese Zen masters whose stories I
have used here (and remember, these
are stories, not memoirs). Real life relationships
will involve negotiation, push
and pull, and, sometimes, a necessary
parting of the ways. But it makes a difference
if all of this is done with some
deeper basis, some deeper knowing and
appreciation of one another, rather than
simply needs and wants.
I have found over the years that when
a couple practices together, there’s a
basis or grounding for their relationship.
Even if there are tough times, somehow
the return to basic human presence—
their own and that of others—brings
them back to appreciation and affection.
In relationship, as in spiritual practice,
commitment is crucial. In both
Zen and marriage there’s the practice
of vowing, intentionally taking on a
path, even if we know we won’t get to
the destination. Vowing is liberation from whim
and weakness. It creates possibilities that would
not occur otherwise, because when you are willing
to stick to something, come what may, even if
from time to time you don’t feel like sticking to it,
a magic arises, and you find yourself feeling and
doing noble things you did not know you were
capable of.
Real love can include desire, of course, and desire
is touchy and powerful—it can even capsize the
boat of a great Zen master! But desire is not the only
thing, nor need it define or limit our love. Insofar as
loving another is being there for him or her, come
what may, we always have to go beyond self-interest
and desire, though, paradoxically, love itself, as
ultimate selflessness, may be the most personally
satisfying experience possible. On the whole, when
people get together in intimate relationships with
some serious spiritual practice as a common basis,
their chances for success as a couple are maximized,
and, as with Blanche and Lou Hartman, that success
can deepen and be enriched with time.
In our story, Tianhuang says, “When you greet
me, I bow.” Bowing is an ancient form for showing
reverence and respect. In our culture we have
the handshake. Maybe it is more intimate than a
bow because we touch one another, warm hand
to warm hand. But they say that the origin of
the handshake is suspicion and wariness. The
handshake is a gesture of peace and harmlessness
because it demonstrates that we aren’t holding a
weapon in our hands. Our hands are empty
of aggression and we show this by offering
our hand and taking the hand of another.
So the handshake is more intimate than
the bow, but the intimacy is predicated on
the possibility of aggression. In contrast,
by bowing we are acknowledging a friendliness
and respect, but also a distance. A
bow expresses our love and respect, but
the space between us when we bow also expresses
that we understand our aloneness,
and that we can never assume we understand
one another. We meet in the empty
space between us. A space charged with
openness, silence, and mystery.
A while ago I met two middle-aged
people who had recently gotten together
as a couple. Each of them had had nothing
but troubled relationships their whole
lives through, starting in childhood,
but they were hopeful this time around.
Given their past conditioning, they were
understandably nervous and they were
seeking help. They’d already ordered several
books; they were looking into couples
therapy; and they wondered what Zen
relationship advice I had for them.
“Practice this every day,” I said. “Do it
first thing in the morning (or, preferably,
second thing, after meditating together):
Sit facing each other and say to one another,
‘I am grateful today that you are in my life.’
Say the words, even if you find it difficult.
If you don’t believe them, say so. Say, ‘I just
said that I was grateful that you are in my
life but I don’t really feel that this morning,
although I would like to feel it,’ and then
try it again. Try saying it three times, and if
you still don’t mean it, you can say so and
give up until tomorrow. Then try again the
next day, preparing yourself in advance
by reminding yourself that you really are
lucky to be alive, to be whole and healthy,
and to have someone willing to share his or
her life with you.”
None of these things are automatic;
none of them are permanent. To be alive
with others—nothing could be more basic,
yet there is no greater spiritual practice. ♦
Norman talks on Instructions for the Cook at the Insight Yoga Institute.
Norman gives his second talk on the Six Paramitas to the Insight Yoga Institute.
Transcribed and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
The way we have been talking about giving is very expansive. Giving is limitlessness itself, abundance itself, joy without any restriction. But then, we are living in a limited world that does have restrictions, and that is why the next paramita is ethical conduct. It is really the balance to this expansive feeling of gratitude and joy and sharing and love. In a way you could say that the practice of shila, or morality, or ethical conduct, is the practice of restraint.
Shila was always an important practice from the early days of the Buddha. Buddha began with the insight from his own life and experience that the nature of our conditioned existence is suffering. Although human suffering is not your fault, and not just about you, it’s endemic. But it can also be overcome. The Buddha realized that this is not so easy, and he felt that you needed to have a disciplined life. That’s where shila came in. He saw that if you are living a life of misconduct, you are creating all kinds of waves and disturbances in your own mind and in the minds around you.
Later on, during the full development of the Mahayana spirit of Buddhism, shila was understood differently. Remember that the goal shifts now from personal liberation to compassion and sharing. Ultimate giving, ultimate sharing, ultimate compassion is liberation, from the point of view of Mahayana schools of Buddhism.
Shila, or ethical conduct, became less a question of creating a structure that would make liberation possible, and more the motivation or the desire to be non-harming, to have a conduct that benefits other people, to have a kind of conduct that would make them happy. Your conduct could even inspire other people to spiritual practice and awakening. So there is a high value placed on being kind to other people, benefitting other people, and forbearing from any kind of conduct that would be harmful or hurtful or diminishing to other people.
In Zen, the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts are the heart of our practice, with the Mahayana spirit of taking these precepts not as restrictions, but as a joyful path. The precepts are understood not so much as ethical practices or rules of conduct – a list of do’s and don’ts; they are meant to describe the life that one would live if one were fully awakened buddha.
A buddha would not have to restrain herself from stealing. We might have to restrain ourselves from stealing, for example, if we felt that we didn’t have enough. But if in every moment we were practicing gratitude, and our spontaneous feeling was, Wow! In this moment everything is already given, there would never be a need to steal anything. We wouldn’t have to restrain ourselves from stealing. We would automatically be non-stealing, because that would be the fullness of our hearts.
We wouldn’t have to restrain ourselves from speaking ill of others, because we would look at other people, and we would see their wonderful qualities, and we would see their suffering. We would see their beauty, so that the only thing we would ever want to say about them is how great they are. We wouldn’t want to be gossiping about them.
Let’s talk now about shanti paramita – patience. Ethical conduct inevitably puts us in touch with some pain. When we do something harmful, or something harmful is done to us, there’s pain and there’s difficulty. Patience is really the practice of how to deal with difficulty.
In Chinese, the character for patience is an ideogram of a heart with a sword dangling over it. This character points to the fundamental nature of patient forbearance. If we are willing not to have a wall around our hearts, then our hearts are vulnerable, and that dangling dagger means that at any moment, our hearts could be broken. That’s why we make the wall, or the armor around the heart, because we don’t want to feel our hearts broken.
A bodhisattva is somebody who is willing to keep the heart open, even though sometimes that might be painful. In fact, that’s why we feel pain, right? Out of love. If we love something, we can be hurt. The practice of patience is the practice of being willing to endure the pain, because we are willing to love, we are willing to be opened up, and we are willing to accept our experience as it really is, rather than protect ourselves from it, by putting a wall around our hearts, or trying to arrange the world to fit our desires.
The word patience also implies being tolerant, understanding, persevering, constant. That’s really important in our practice. Constancy was a word that Suzuki Roshi used a lot. Just to be willing to do the practice, come what may. Rather than looking for important accomplishments or achievements or attainments or experiences, just to have a sense of constancy and patience with the practice. Sometimes the practice works well, and we are happy with it. Sometimes it works not so well, but we keep on. We practice for the sake of practice.
Next, virya paramita means energy, enthusiasm, joyous effort, vitality. It is the other side of patience. Patience is not really joyful, right? It is not energetic. I think a lot of people take up spiritual practice with the idea that they will have more joy and that they will be able to overcome difficulties. Then when difficulties come anyway, they get discouraged. That’s why the practice of patience is so important. Once you can practice patience, and you can stay in the game when things remain tough, then when the difficulty is no longer present, you have more energy, more enthusiasm, more faith.
Here are some traditional aspects of the practice of virya. One is called a “strong armor.” It is a Tibetan way of talking, which means encouraging the mind to go forward like a warrior, with no discouragement, no doubts. Going forth like a hero. Having that spirit.
The second is “forcefulness,” applying effort in the moment. This is really important, because I think that spiritual practice is very easy. It’s not that hard. The hard part is remembering to do it. You go to a retreat, and you hear all these teachings, and you think, This is right. This is it. It’s so much better than the way I do things. And then the next day, you go have breakfast, and you go to work, and you do things, and at the end of the day you say, I totally forgot about all that stuff. Never crossed my mind all day long. I got involved in my work. Remembering to apply the practice is part of virya.
That means when you have difficulty or an afflictive emotion in your life, instead of avoiding, retreating, justifying, fixing, you apply the forcefulness of virya in that moment, and say, Ah ha, here is anger. I am going to practice with this anger and not do what I usually do. I’m going to practice with this anger. Be present with it. Now I’ll take a breath.
I am suggesting that you do this. Now, instead of not noticing when you are angry or irritated, now you are on the look-out. You can hardly wait for something bad to happen! You can hardly wait to get behind a slow car on the freeway! You’re waiting for that moment, because as soon as it comes, you are going to identify it: This is irritation. This is anger. This is laziness.
Remember to practice with it: I am going to pay attention to it. And then, take a breath. Just do that much. That is all you need to do. No more than that is necessary. You don’t need to make it go away. You don’t need to change it. This will change it automatically! Even if it is still there, I guarantee you that if you do these things, it will be totally different.
The third is “firmness” – smooth and even effort. If you do a retreat, this is what you have to do. You don’t say, I’ll work hard the first and second day, then I will be exhausted the third day. No, you make an even effort. This has to last my whole life through, this effort.
The fourth is “non-complacency.” The possibilities of learning and developing more in spiritual practice are literally without end. I have been doing this for forty years full time. That is amazing! I haven’t even scratched the surface, and there is still so much more that I can learn. I am not talking about books. Books are part of it. If all the things that I have been taught in the dharma were my whole hand, so far I have been contemplating about one tenth of one fingernail. Considering how many teachings there are, hardly anything. There is way more to go. I definitely won’t exhaust it in my lifetime.
The opposite of virya is laziness. That is when we forget to do the practice, because of laziness.
There are two kinds of laziness. Sleepy – like when you are meditating and can’t stay awake. The second kind of laziness is interesting. The second kind of laziness appears as energetic activity. This is when you have a tremendous amount of energy to do useless things that are distracting you from what is really important.
There is way more to go. I definitely won’t exhaust it in my lifetime. The possibilities for inner growth are endless. As a practitioner, you are always thinking, How can I understand a little bit more? How can I appreciate our life a little bit more today than yesterday? Not being complacent. The longer you go on, the easier it is to be complacent. You have to challenge yourself to never be complacent.
The Zen school gets its name from dhyana paramita, the fifth paramita. Dhyana is the Sanskrit word for the Chinese word Chan and for the Japanese word Zen. In Zen practice, everything is included in dhyana paramita, and that’s why it is hard to talk about, because you can’t tease it apart from anything else in our practice.
Zazen is not a technique to focus your mind for a given result. Zazen is a way of life, a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of living, a way of understanding life. Zazen evokes for us the deepest and most paradoxical sense of what our human life is. It’s paradoxical, because even if we don’t do zazen, zazen is still our essential life.
So in Zen it is often said that there is no such thing as zazen, since there is nothing that is not zazen. This goes to my favorite quotation of Zhaozhou. When asked, “What is zazen?” he says, “It’s non-zazen.” And then he is asked, “How can you say zazen is non-zazen?” And Zhauzhou says, “It’s alive.” To me, that little dialogue encapsulates the Zen view of meditation practice.
Our practice is shikantaza – the practice of just sitting, being alive in the present moment. Lately I have been saying, “Sitting with the feeling of being alive.” We notice all of our problems, because we are alive. But we never particularly notice, Look at this! This is life right here! Zazen is really nothing else than sitting with that feeling.
Meditation practice, dhyana, is not the invention of Buddha or Buddhism. It was part of Indian culture, and the Buddha practiced it. What was Buddhist about the Buddha’s meditation was not so much the technique of meditation, but the way in which the mind deepened in meditation and was turned toward the investigation of reality and seeing reality in a transformative way. The understanding that the Buddha had, I think, was that truth-seeing, that reality-seeing, would not be possible without a mind developed through the strength of meditation practice.
In actual practice, to do shikantaza, it helps to have some focus of concentration. Shikantaza is sitting with the feeling of being alive, but when you do that, your mind is wandering, or you can get sleepy. We use the focus of the posture, the feeling of the body sitting on the cushion, and the feeling of the breath in the belly. In the end, however, the point is to let go of everything and just sit.
One hopes that one’s meditation practice can be a source of peace and joy within one’s life, not just a chore or a duty or something boring, but something one would look forward to enjoy and through which to find some inspiration.
Sometimes I say that prajna – wisdom – is the most important of the paramitas. Sometimes it is said that it is really the only one. Another way of saying the same thing is that there is no such thing as prajna paramita outside the other five paramitas. The other five paramitas are just the expression of prajna.
The word “paramita” is usually translated as perfection, perfection in the sense of “gone beyond.” All of the paramitas are functions of the wisdom that goes beyond wisdom. The wisdom that goes beyond wisdom is not intellectual, nor an abstraction or thought. It can’t exist in the abstract. It can only be manifested through our conduct and experience, through the action of our living.
Of course, we all know about prajna paramita from the Heart Sutra: “Avalokite┼øvara Bodhisattva was deeply practicing prajna paramita,” which means she is practicing dhyana paramita,a deep meditation. In that dhyana paramita, she sees the empty nature of all phenomena.
Empty nature in Buddhism, called shunyata, is always associated with prajna. We can’t conceptualize or reify shunyata any more than we can conceptualize prajna. There isn’t something called “emptiness.” Emptiness isn’t a condition or a thing, just as wisdom isn’t something. But we need to have a way to talk about these things, so we say things like, “Prajna is the transcendent wisdom beyond wisdom. Prajna cognizes the empty nature of all phenomena.” So these two words always go together: emptiness, or shunyata, and prajna, or wisdom.
To sit in zazen is to sit in prajna. Whether or not we have some experience of prajna that we can notice, whenever we are sitting in zazen, we are being prajna. We don’t have to sit in zazen to be prajna. Whenever we are, we are being prajna.
The source of the paradox of our human condition is the fact that our minds can only perceive through separation and reification, through definition and objectification. Life, which we also are, is larger than our thinking and our feeling. To practice prajna paramita is to see the empty nature of phenomena. This requires that we cut off the mind road, so that we can feel our life as life, beyond our human need to define and understand.
We need a contemplative practice of some sort, being seized by the scruff of our necks and shown our lives as they really are, not how we want them to be, or how we think we can understand them. It also requires an ability to hold our minds and emotions in a new way, a lighter, more open way, so that everyday words and deeds are reflective of a larger life than the one we can name and think about.
Norman gives his first talk on the Six Paramitas to the Insight Yoga Instiute. Unfortunately his introductory talk on Zen Meditation did not tape.
Six Paramitas Talk One – Insight Yoga Institute
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | Oct 14, 2010
Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager
The Six Paramitas – generosity, ethical conduct, energy, patience, meditation, and wisdom – describe the Mahayana path. But another way to think about the paramitas is that they are not practices or anything special. They are just descriptions of how someone would be who is fully present, with a good heart. You wouldn’t have to necessarily think about them as some intentional practices.
Somebody who is awakened would be generous. He would be someone upstanding and ethical, with enthusiasm and energy for spiritual practice. She would have patience, endurance, and the ability not to get freaked out when there were setbacks, but to go forward in a dignified way. He would be fully present and would probably have a naturally easeful meditation practice. Maybe, she would feel like she carries some quiet within herself at all times, and she would probably have a deep wisdom. He would be somebody who seems to appreciate our deep inner connection as human beings and the natural world as well.
Dana paramita is the more important of the paramitas, because you could say that generosity and giving and sharing are the beginning of the Mahayana path. The broadest way of understanding dana paramita is the sense of the natural abundance of being itself, the generousness of time and space, and the ongoing unfolding of being alive. There is something inherently generous in life. Life is always making more life. Life is abundant. All the time, there is an explosion of life. It’s not something that you need to create, as much as something that you need to allow. In this fullest sense, the practice of dana, or generosity, is living fully and openly and whole-heartedly.
The Diamond Sutra, the Mahayana sutra which emphasizes the teaching of emptiness, says that the real practice of giving goes beyond our concepts of giving. We have to see through the concepts: I’m over here. I’ve got this. You’re over there. You don’t have it. I am now going to give this to you, and now I can give myself credit, and you’re going to be grateful to me. That way of giving is inherently stingy. It assumes that I have something that you don’t. True giving is the recognition that nothing I have has ever been mine. You, as a person who might look like the recipient of the gifts that I am giving, are, in fact, non-separate from me. It’s just a natural flow of one thing to another. So this is saying that giving means going beyond the conceptual framework of giving, receiver, and gift. There is no separation, except in concept, between the giver and receiver and gift.
This is the giving that is understood in Mahayana Buddhism; perfect giving transcends any idea of giving. Dana Paramita, the perfection of giving, is giving beyond giving, giving without any idea that there is something that I have that I can give, or someone outside of myself who would receive it.
Traditionally it is said that there are three things that are given. The first kind of giving involves material possessions: giving money, giving food, giving clothing. The second kind of giving is not a material thing, but good, spiritual teachings, or, simply kindness: giving a kind word. The third kind of giving is the gift of fearlessness. This is a beautiful thing. Imagine if someone could give you the gift of fearlessness, so that having received it, you wouldn’t feel afraid anymore; the things that make you feel fearful or constricted would be removed.
To give the gift of fearlessness is to have complete confidence that there is nothing to fear – even loss, even death. When we can feel this level of confidence in ourselves, we see that all living being are this magnificent, incomprehensible, sacred mystery. When we approach everything in this way, we are giving the gift of fearlessness. If you meet somebody who approaches you like that, you feel it. People say this about His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They feel a sense of their own sacredness as human beings. They said that about our teacher Suzuki Roshi. When you were with him, you felt good to be yourself – not that he was patting you on the back all the time, or boosting your self esteem. He was just treating you as if you were a sacred, mysterious human being that he was ultimately interested in and didn’t really understand.
In his discussion of dana paramita, Thich Nhat Hanh offers many other things that can be given, beyond material things, teachings, and the gift of fearlessness. He says, “We can offer to other people our joy and our happiness and our love. We could be joyful ourselves and offer this joy to other people.” This, to me, is something really astonishing, because when you think about it, most people in our world, in our culture, feel slightly guilty about being happy. I think this is a very deep thought. I don’t think this is a small thing. When we come close to our own happiness, to feeling good about our life, something deep inside of us says, Isn’t your happiness selfish? Is it right for you to be happy?
The idea that you could be happy for others, that you could have joy with the intention of offering it to everybody you meet, is a revolutionary idea. When I was installed, years ago, as abbot of Zen Center, I remember being impressed with this teaching. Being the abbot is a very big, complicated, busy job. I said to people, “My number one priority as abbot is my own personal happiness.” Everybody was shocked by this, “What?” they asked. I said, “Well, yes, I know that when you are abbot, the head of a religious organization, your state of mind affects everybody. So I figure that the best contribution I could make to Zen Center is to be abbot of Zen Center and be happy and offer that happiness to everyone else.”
It is beautiful to think of one’s own happiness as a possibility for generosity – to offer joy to other people. Now that doesn’t mean, of course, being an idiot and going around saying, You have just been foreclosed on your house? Be happy! No, no, it doesn’t mean that. It means that when you have ease and happiness in your own heart, share that with other people in the appropriate way for their circumstances. This can be a beautiful gift.
Thich Nhat Hanh also mentions sharing our own true presence with someone, being present in ourselves and with the other person. Really listening to what another person is saying to you. Being there with the other person, not for what they can do for you, or for your sense of evaluating them. Isn’t that what we do when we meet somebody? Right away we are evaluating. You meet somebody, and without your even knowing this is going on, you think, How do I stand in relation to this person? Is she more beautiful than I am? Younger? Older? We don’t necessarily think these things consciously, but we are almost always figuring out our position in relation to another person. What if we could just give the other person our presence without that, and just receive the other person wholeheartedly? That is the gift of our true presence.
Next he mentions the gift of our stability. He means, I think, that if we are stable, we can receive another person’s pain and hurt without needing to protect ourselves against it – just being able to receive it. This also happens a lot, doesn’t it? When someone is in trouble, it is a quandary for us. On the one hand, we feel like avoiding her. It’s a little too much for me to take in her problem. Or, we do the opposite. We rush to her with the idea that we will fix that problem. We’ll make it go away, because we don’t feel stable enough to be able just to receive it, even if it is an unfixable problem.
Last he mentions understanding. Can I really understand another person’s situation? Deeply understand it with sympathy? Can I see that person for who she is and appreciate what she is up against and what she has been through?
So you see, there are many things besides “stuff” that we can give people. In a certain way, stuff is the least of it. Sometimes if the stuff that you are given comes without any of these other gifts, it is only stuff. Sometimes you are not happy to receive it, because it is really the love and the respect and the understanding and caring that goes with the gift that we really appreciate.
Norman speaks at Tassajara Zen Monastary on “Suffering”.
Talk on Guided Meditation on Core Values given at Google U.
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