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Basic Zen – Ethics (Talk 2 of 2)

Norman talks about Right Action from the Zen perspective.

Ethics (Talk 2 of 2)

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | May 1, 2001

 

Transcribed and edited by Murray McGillivray and Barbara Byrum

Last time we were talking about ethics in Buddhism, and we were discussing the difference – if there is a difference – between the kind of ethical teachings that we received as children and what we are aspiring to now. It was very interesting, because you don't usually think about that. What did you receive as a child as far as a sense of the ethical universe?

I think we're all, to some degree or another, conditioned as westerners by our Judeo-Christian background. Ethics – right and wrong – is not just a matter of judgment or convenience. It's Judgment with a capital J. If we do good, then we are embraced and held by God, and if we don't do good, we are rejected out-of-hand by a stern, father-like figure. So even though very few of us believe this image of God, it's still very compelling, and there are shadows of it, I think, in our hearts and minds. So we have a tremendous psychological investment in being good, which is tied up with our sense of worthiness or unworthiness as human beings.

When the Ten Commandments were given on Mount Sinai, it is such a dramatic thing – thundering noise and smoke and clouds and fire. And then about two and a half minutes later they build a golden calf, and they're bowing down and making sacrifices. They have to smash the Ten Commandments and start over again. So that's the story that we all have somewhere in our psyches.

Of course, as we all know, in classical Buddhism the metaphysical ground for this question of good and evil is totally flipped. There's no imagery whatsoever of a stern God, no theistic imagery. It's a practical matter, and this is why good conduct, which includes the almost systematic cultivation of a warmhearted feeling for others, is considered to be a necessary part of the inner housecleaning without which the path is impossible. The point of ethical conduct is simply to purify the mind and heart so that you can do meditation. And when you do meditation, then there can be insight. If there's insight into how things are, then there's liberation; there's freedom from suffering; freedom from the conditioned world. Freedom from the world of good or bad! There's a kind of sense of possibility of living a joyful, free life. It doesn't mean a licentious liberation. "Now that I'm ‘liberated' I can do whatever I want-yes, I can do whatever I want!" But what I want to do is goodness. I think that's the sense of it. So in other words, rather than doing goodness under compulsion, one does goodness as an overflowing of one's spirit in just being alive. There's a sense that for the arhat, the "perfected one" in the classical Buddhist path, all of his or her actions will be naturally good actions. They will be wholesome actions, without restraint.

There's an interesting sutra in the Majjhima Nikhaya, Sutra 39, the Maha-Assapura Sutta, in which the Buddha explains the entire path. He gives the thirteen steps, one building on the other, toward the goal of liberation. First of all – and this is, I think, instructive – you have to cultivate or give rise to a feeling of shame and fear of wrongdoing. Some of you know these terms, hiri and atapa in Pali. This sounds like guilt to us; we immediately project guilt onto that. But it doesn't mean guilt. It is the unwholesome feeling of dread, or some sort of negative uncomfortable feeling when you do something that is unwholesome, that is not profitable for the path. You have to have a feeling that you don't want to do that because it makes you feel bad.

First you have to have an inner sense that you feel uncomfortable, even if nobody sees, and second, it matters to you if somebody does see and complains to you. These two characteristics, which are slightly different from one another, are called the Guardians of the World, and they are the first things that you have to develop. Then, after that, you have to purify your verbal conduct. Then you purify your mental conduct, which means the kind of thoughts that you validate and the kind of thoughts that you let go. Then you have pure livelihood; restraint of the senses (you're present with sensuality, rather than grabbing); moderation in eating; wakefulness or alertness; and then the ninth is mindfulness and full awareness. This gives you the capacity to abandon the hindrances of sense desire, sloth, ill will, restlessness and doubt. These gradually melt away, and then you can concentrate; you can really meditate deeply. And when you can do that, you get knowledge of the marks of conditioned existence: impermanence and non-self. Then you get liberation and happiness.

Because the arhat is unconditioned, lives in the unconditioned, and is beyond conditions, there is the important question whether an arhat, the perfected one, is immune from causality. This is discussed in many sutras in the Pali Canon. In the first part of my remarks about the Pali Canon, it's pretty clear that everybody is subject to karma, retribution from past action. There is no wiping out karma. Karma is indelible. However, because of subsequent actions that are powerfully wholesome, you can purify yourself, so that, although the karmic results still come to you, they don't come to you as virulently as they might have otherwise come. Regardless of how they come to you, because you're purified you receive them in such a way that it mollifies their strength. In the Buddha's life there are many examples of bad karmic results coming to the Buddha after his enlightenment. He was famous for having stomach aches. Did you know that? The Buddha had a lot of stomach aches and backaches and various kinds of ailments. How could the Perfected One have ailments? Well, bad karma in a past life.

There's another interesting sutra, the Mahakammavibhanga Sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya, that's very hard to read because it's a formulaic repetition and very lengthy, but what it basically amounts to is that there are people who do very bad actions and get excellent results – happiness and wealth. There are other people who do very bad actions, and terrible things happen as a result. There are people who do good actions, and terrible things happen as a result – they lose all their money, their house burns down. And other people who do good actions and very good things come as a result of that.

So whatever you think of that, the point of it is that there's an acknowledgement in the earliest Buddhist teachings that karma is not linear and simple-minded. One cannot predict outcomes. However, it seems to be, and this is the main thing, that the truth of karma is yogically affirmed. In other words, in the West reason and empirical evidence are sufficient to ascertain the truth of something. During the Christian eras there was an additional way to ascertain, which was Scriptural. But in Buddhism the way to ascertain truth has always been the verified experience of a yogic adept. So if a Buddha sees the truth of karma, then that's considered to be the authoritative truth of its being so.

But we don't need to depend on the authority of the Buddha. I think that throughout our own experience of meditation, it becomes very clear, by minutely observing the mind, how bad, unwholesome activity leads to fairly quick, negative short-term results. And the opposite is true. I firmly believe, based on my feeling of knowing it from experience, that if I make effort to do what's good, the results of that will be positive. And the reverse is true. Even though I don't necessarily anticipate that everything will go great for me in my life, nevertheless, it's not a contradiction to believe that. I do believe it quite firmly.

This is a practice: to cultivate positive conduct and to let go of negative conduct. It doesn't flow from my inner worth as a human being one way or the other. It's a potential that I have to cultivate. I think that this early Buddhist teaching is also a Zen teaching. I don't think that Zen denies any of this or has any improvement whatsoever to make on it. If you study Dogen, you see references to this kind of paying attention to conduct. But of course, in the Zen approach these kinds of teachings are not seen as literal. They're seen as metaphorical or as skillful means. In Zen and other kinds of Mahayana Buddhism, there's a kind of a collapse of goal and path together, instead of a linear, almost scientific, way to get results. Mahayana Buddhism is a basic deconstruction of that whole idea and says that in every moment of the path the entire result is there.

That's why in Zen the sensibility about right conduct is a little bit different. Instead of being only a question of housekeeping and a preliminary to meditation practice – although it is that also – every moment of conduct is the whole path. So when I practice right conduct, I'm not just doing some preliminary work so that I can get to the goal that I'm seeking. Every moment of conduct – on the cushion, off the cushion, whatever I'm doing – brings up the whole truth and challenges me utterly. Furthermore, while in the classical teachings with the graduated path, with the linear, logical approach, it almost seems clear: This is good, this is bad, this is wholesome, this is unwholesome. In the Zen or Mahayana approach, however, with the totalizing of each moment of conduct, it becomes much more difficult to discern. The ambiguities of conduct are clear. We all know this from studying the precepts. The different levels of understanding the precepts acknowledge that this is so. So conduct then becomes much more problematic.

So then, just to say one more point about the Zen approach, I'll refer again to something that I talked about in the Seminar some months ago, Case Two of the Mumonkan, "Hyakujo's Fox." Hyakujo is the abbot of Hyakujo Mountain. He's giving talks every day, and there's this old guy who is constantly there attending the talks in the back of the room. One day the old guy stays behind. Hyakujo says, "Good morning." "Well," the old guy says, "I'm not really this old guy that you see in front of you. I'm actually a fox, and that's because many generations ago I was the abbot of this mountain, and as the abbot I was asked the question, ‘Does the enlightened person fall into the law of causality?' I answered, ‘No, the enlightened person is free from the law of causality,' and because of this I was born for five hundred lives as a fox. Now can you please free me from this fox birth?" The fox then asks, "Is the enlightened person free from the law of causality or not?" And the present Hyakjo says, "No, the enlightened person is not in another territory from causality." The old man says, "Oh, thank goodness, I'm freed from my fox body," and the next day they went out and found the fox's body. They bury it and give it a priest's burial – a very high, honorable burial for this fox carcass. Later that evening Hyakujo gives a dharma talk about this, and his student Huangbo shows up and says in the middle of the talk, "What if this old guy had given the right answer, then what?" And Hyakujo says, "Come closer," and Huangbo comes closer – and you can imagine this drama – and when he gets just close enough, he whacks Hyakujo across the face. I think the idea is that Hyakjo was going to whack him, but he whacked him first. Then Hyakujo says words of great approval and accord between the two of them.

The idea is that Huangbo put his finger on the accupressure point of the story, which is to say that it's not as simple as a right answer or wrong answer. It's really not the case that it's bad to be a fox and good to be a priest; that there's good karma and bad karma; and they are in quite different realms from each other. In other words, it's an explosion of the step-by-step, black and white sense of morality. The commentary says, "If you can see this" – the point of the case, – "you will know that the old man enjoyed his five hundred blessed lives as a fox." In other words, we hear this story, and we say, "Oh the wrong answer. That's terrible. He shouldn't have been born as a fox." But actually it turns out that that's exactly what he needed to do. He could accept the five hundred lives as a fox as something joyful and useful, even though it was a bad karmic result. Then the poem says,

Not falling, not evading,

Two faces of one die.

Not evading, not falling,

Hundreds and thousands of regrets.

So in actual fact, for all of us, whether we're arhats or not, freedom from karma and being subject to karma are not two different things. It's only because we are thirsting for some other territory to be in, other than the one we're in, that causes us to look at it like that. There isn't any other territory to be in. There aren't steps and stages toward a future goal that we're going to arrive at. There's the reality of our lives. If you hold to an idea of freedom or detachment or purity, and you think it's over there and you're going toward it, then you're off. That already is causing suffering. On the other hand, if you're enmeshed in your karma, without any freedom at all within your karma, then you're definitely suffering, with no way out.

So this is the radical thing about our practice – to practice ordinary conduct in ordinary life; to take on the ordinary world completely as the ordinary world; and yet to recognize the ultimate in the ordinary at all points. Our practice is knowing that there isn't any other place to be but the ordinary world as long as you're alive, regardless of what your station in life is. To be in the ordinary life without being enmeshed by it or caught by it. In other words, you enjoy your life as a fox, knowing that even though you look like a fox, you're actually a priest, or even though you look like a priest, you're actually a fox. That is, not seeing the difficult situations that happen in life as tragedies that shouldn't have happened to me, because I didn't deserve this. But rather seeing them as challenges, seeing them as vehicles, as avenues for development.

There are always thousands of regrets, no matter what happens. I think that's the nature of being a human being. But that itself is beautiful, even wonderful. I think of Issa's famous haiku that he wrote on visiting the grave of his little girl,

The world of dew is the world of dew,

And yet.

edz

Basic Zen – Ethics (Talk 1 of 2)

Norman talks about Right Action from the Zen perspective.

Ethics (Talk 1 of 2)

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | May 1, 2001

 

Transcribed, abridged, and edited by Murray McGillivray and Barbara Byrum

 

The meditation practice we were doing – just to sit, not trying to do anything, or attempt to get anywhere in the meditation, but just to be there, with awareness, just simple awareness – is Buddha. Just the awareness is consciousness itself, is Buddha. It's a very profound thing, you know, to just let the mind's business rest, and just allow simple awareness to arise in response to every moment. And then you feel-you don't say these words, I think, but you feel-whatever arises is the unfolding of the dharma. That simple awareness, which isn't really you or me or anybody, is just a natural arising of awareness, is the Buddha.

But I often say, and I really feel, that our practice is all about conduct when we get up from the cushion. I guess there's so much focus on meditation because we're such an un-meditation culture that we all need a break. Also, meditation is sort of exotic and unusual and almost the opposite of what we've all been brought up into, and conditioned into. But I don't think our practice is all about meditation and that we're supposed to become experts in meditation. I think the relevance of meditation in Buddhist practice is about conduct, and you can't really have beautiful, harmonious, peaceful conduct unless you have meditation practice. In other words, to find out how to conduct yourself, to find out how to have beautiful conduct, you need meditation practice. Dogen famously said that zazen, meditation, has nothing to do with sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. That ultimately the meditation practice has to do with this quality of being completely present in the way that we were present when we were sitting-present with a kind of global acceptance of what's there.

One teacher that I have a lot of confidence in and that I look to as a mentor is an American monk ordained in the Theravada tradition named Adjan Sumedho. He was at Spirit Rock, and he called me up-I thought he was gone but he invited me up to visit him-so I was up there today and did part of the retreat with him. We were practicing like we were practicing just now, and he was saying early in the morning, as we were sitting, "Just what arises, it's like this. This is what it is. It's just like this: the feeling of the body, the mood, the thought. It's just like this. No need to evaluate it or change it or do anything with it. Every moment something comes, and it's there. It's just like that. It may be pleasant or unpleasant. Things arise. Just to see, just to be aware of them, let them be what they are."

So when we practice and train this way in meditation, that's when, I think, little by little, or perhaps all of a sudden, if we're dramatically inclined, you feel a big space opening up in all directions. In other words, I think that the feeling of "me" is a feeling that's rather confined. You feel it as something confined, and it's uncomfortable because it's very small, and that's why if something gets in the way of it, it's very annoying. But when you let go of that, in a situation like meditation, and you can just be there, you really feel a spaciousness and a relief. It's a great relief, you know, not to have to be anybody for that little short time, and in the midst of that space, I think that the feeling you're this or that, or somebody, just fades away. You don't make some big intentional effort to forget about that. You just focus the awareness on what's there, and without thinking about it, you just fade away in some fundamental sense, and life comes up. Life comes to the fore. Instead of "me," life appears. It's the flow or the rush of life that is always coming and going – it's nice, it's not nice, it's depressed, or whatever, but you know it doesn't make that much difference in this spaciousness of it. When there's room for things, they can be what they are, without any of the denial of them or trying to make them pretty. But they're not as bad when we're not trying to fight with them. Just things coming and going. And you realize after a while that this strong sensibility we have about "me" is really a very persuasive and powerful habit, and in the end, I think, one sees how unsuccessful that habit is in the light of a feeling of our being a manifestation of life. Why limit ourselves?

In a way the point is not that you find peace – although that's very nice – the point is that you train your mind in this feeling of spaciousness. The reason that I'm focusing so much on this is that I think that the feeling of spaciousness, and the experience of what your life is like when you're not putting your energy into the smallness of yourself, is the fundamental basis of ethical conduct. I think that is the source of conduct, because I think that unless you have some appreciation for that spaciousness, then ethical conduct becomes something that's very uptight. I don't see how you could actually practice real ethical conduct when you're nervous and uptight in that way, so focused on or self-identified with what's right and wrong in this small, tight way. It's very difficult for me to see how you could practice what I would consider to be beautiful conduct or ethical conduct in that condition.

I think ethical conduct really requires that we feel some palpable relationship to the bigness of life, to the flow of life outside of just our own interests. I don't see how there could be ethical conduct without some connection in that way with everybody's life, with all of life. So it's good that meditation practice is pleasant and interesting, because that encourages us to do it, and then in the process of doing it, we will bump into that space sometimes.

It's clear to me that the whole point of spiritual practice is not taking a break or having high experiences of the absolute, so much as it is just how we're living on a moment by moment basis, how we conduct our life all the time. So that's why I think in Zen practice the attitude is really good: just do the meditation when the bell rings, and then when it's not time, do something else.

The great manual of Buddhist practice by the fifth-century monk Buddhaghosa is called the Path of Purification. The goal and the path of Buddhism is the path of purification. It just seems to be the case that when you quiet the mind and let yourself just be intensely present – just there without any jobs to do or anything you're supposed to accomplish or any place you're supposed to get – then you really get to notice the condition of your mind and spirit. It becomes quite clear, if not immediately, then eventually, and you become aware of your mind, and you really see your conduct and its consequences for your life and for your state of mind. This becomes, naturally, without trying to do anything, very apparent, particularly in a longer retreat where you're sitting with some intensity.

I think we all know about karma as a doctrine, as an idea, that what you do really matters. That we all always receive the consequences of our conduct; that our conduct conditions our mind. We all know that. But when you sit, it's no longer something you believe, or something that you feel must be true. You really get to see it unfold in front of your eyes, sometimes painfully. It's not unusual in sesshin for people to feel many regrets, or shame for conduct that they've done in the past, or that they're doing now, that they didn't realize was not good conduct. Not unusual. Sometimes the painfulness of your conduct manifests as literal physical pain in the body. One way or the other, the way karma unfolds becomes clear to you without your trying.

So if you have unwise ways or selfish ways of conducting yourself, they will eventually become clear to you in your sitting practice, and the painfulness of them will be manifested. And it's not that we should be unselfish, or that the good Buddhist thing to do is to have good conduct. It's just that selfishness appears quite clearly as self-destructiveness. You really get to see that.

Your wish to let go of selfishness is not some moralistic thing, like it's good to do that. It's more like you really see how painful it is, and you really want to put it down. It becomes natural for you to do that, and you don't have to work at it, in the same way that you don't have to work at not putting your hand on a hot burner on the stove. It's not hard to train yourself not to do that, because all you have to do is do it once and then after that, you never do it again. You feel the painfulness of wrong conduct, and naturally, through the process of your sitting and getting up, and sitting and getting up, and observing how it is for you to do things the way you do them, the conduct, the way that you behave, clears up, and you just find yourself, even without any intention to do so, behaving in a different way. This takes some time, but it really happens.

So that's why meditation practice, I think, is very relevant. It's the basic ground for ethical conduct. First, you experience through your sitting that you are really not anything other than connection. In the arising of things within awareness, you feel that everything is present there. You feel, in other words, as I was saying before, that you're just in this particular place and time, and life appears like this. And that life is connected everywhere to all of life. Then, also, there is the converse: you see when self-centeredness prevails, how painful that is. It really feels like a fire that you want to put out, and, little by little, it goes out.

So based on this fundamental view of ethical conduct, coming out of meditation practice, the actual rough and tumble difficulty of getting through the day, with all the complexities that arise in human relationships, becomes something very interesting and challenging. Ethical precepts no longer appear as a set of rules for conduct or good behaviors. Instead, you see ethical conduct as an extension of the craft of awareness that comes out of your meditation practice, as applied awareness in ever more complex situations. Once you see the power of just such a simple thing as basic presence – simple, unconstructed, unadorned presence, awareness, without anything added onto it, like "me" – then you see it's really important to figure out how to apply that. Is it only something that exists when you're sitting on the cushion? How do you make that work and apply that to the very complicated situations we find ourselves in this world? It becomes, in other words, an interesting kind of craft, something very challenging.

It's easy to meditate – sitting on a cushion – when you set aside time for it and the conditions are very good. But those moments are quite rare, it turns out. How do you meditate when the conditions are terrible? When somebody's shouting at you next to your face and your heart is pumping? Or when you're in a tremendous hassle with a relative over sums of money, or with a colleague over the way you do something? How do you meditate then? That becomes a very interesting problem, you know, and you really want to figure that out; you really want to work on that.

So then, how do you do it? This is where all the various traditional moral precepts, Zen precepts, and all the different moral teachings, come in. In a way, and I'm not going to go into the sixteen Bodhisattva precepts now, and there are different versions and moral codes, but in a way most of them come down to the same thing. As Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It pretty much comes down to that.

So you're always returning. You know, you realize, from your experience that it's very reliable, even though it may go against social convention or what we're told on a popular level, you realize that unselfishness and inclusiveness is very reliable. Ultimately, in the long run, that it is the essence of right conduct. I think anybody would at least subscribe to that as an idea. Whether they feel it or not is another story, but everybody would subscribe to that as an idea.

The more complex the situation is, the more difficult it is to know "That's right," or "That's wrong." Very difficult. Especially, I think, when it comes to another person. It is almost impossible to say "That's wrong!" Very difficult to say, I think, what somebody else should do. To me it's just like a nonsensical thing, to look at somebody else and say, "You broke a moral precept!" I mean, it might look that way; it might be that you can't see it any other way; and it might also be that because of the situation you might be required to make such a judgment and do something about that. Maybe you would have to do that. But you would never really know what that person's circumstances were, or the trajectory of cause and conditions that caused that action to take place. You would never really know.

It's easier, I think, to make a judgment about oneself. For oneself, it's possible to feel inside, "That was really the wrong thing to do. I know that, because I can feel that." You could see the consequences of those actions, and you come to uncover your own motivations. But it is very difficult in the case of another person, based on the recognition that it really is hard to tell in complex situations what's right, and that you never really know.

That's why it seems to me that in ethical conduct the most important thing is to maintain a spirit of flexibility and openness. Even though very often you really have to act, and sometimes you have to act decisively and strongly, you have to admit that if you really think about it, you don't quite know what's right. When we have to act decisively, that's when we really get agitated and think, "This is RIGHT, and that's WRONG!" I think that makes our decisive action much more difficult-much more difficult to accomplish skillfully, and especially much more difficult to sustain, because I think we all really know that we don't know. And the more we assert our knowing what's right, the more we feel inside that small voice of doubt, which we ought to be acknowledging from the start.

This flexible, open attitude that I'm speaking of is based on two factors. First, in our meditation practice you really know that our connection to our heart and compassion are the most important things. You know that connection to life is the most important and most fundamental thing. So you always know that although something may be wrong, it should be done, because of compassion. You can't be too focused on right and wrong when you have compassion as a motivation. And secondly, there is the recognition of the spaciousness or the just-is-ness of things – that experience, to which you return over and over again, and which you more and more inspires your life. How could you see anything being right or wrong in some ultimate sense in the midst of the experience that things just are. That's all. It's not right, not wrong. It just is.

Because of compassion, you really have to be flexible and have a spaciousness and wideness about what's right and what's wrong. So again, I'm talking about an attitude. This is the attitude that I think naturally you have with your practice. You may find it necessary sometimes to take action in the world, or in your personal life, that's strong and uncompromising, based on a judgment that you are forced to do that. And then you have to choose what's right and act. These are the defining moments in our lives, when, by circumstances, that's what we have to do. But still, I feel that this attitude that I'm speaking about of openness and flexibility around the fundamental nature of right and wrong still has to be there. We still have to recognize compassion as the fundamental thing, even compassion toward our enemies. And even though, in this human world, we're forced into these kinds of actions, and we have to play out our roles, we have to remember, and allow ourselves to be conscious of the fact, that we don't really know what's right.

So I feel very sure myself so far – I say so far because I don't know, maybe tomorrow it will all look different – that if we maintain an attitude like that , we will maximize, first of all, our ability to sustain those courses of action, and secondly, our success in doing them. If we're not successful in the short run, then for sure in the long run, in the big scope of things, we can be successful.