“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Not many books on Zen have achieved the notoriety of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The message is simple and straightforward, yet the instruction runs counter to our ordinary way of living.
All of us aspire to become an expert, and few indeed are those who think of themselves as a beginner. Our desire for being someone special works against such simplicity. We reason if the solutions of yesterday worked, then why not apply them again today.
The answer to that thought ought to be self-evident in the West, but due to the lack of familiarity with Eastern Wisdom, it has not attained the status it deserves. The reason is that yesterday was, and today is today. Nothing in life is constant, and as circumstances change, the challenges change as well.
Change is inevitable and continuous. There is nothing spiritual or psychological about that. Change becomes a problem when we desire to turn continuous change into an ideology of permanence. When that conversion occurs, it becomes like trying to bulwark the tides with the consequent result of pulverizing us into the sand.
How we manage change in our lives determines the quality of how we experience life and what we create. All of us want goodness and resist adversity. That is a natural way, but neither of these remains permanent. Thus, we have a choice to savor the good and accept the inevitable loss. Facing what is, as a continuous beginner—versus trying to force what we want as an expert—opens up many possibilities that are not available to those who resist and cling.
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| The winds of change. |
At the current time, conditional uncertainty and instability are running rampant throughout the world, and this is causing big problems for business maintenance and expansion. Few companies know which end is up—where to locate their facilities; to close a factory (or not) to quarantine workers due to rampantly spreading viruses (never seen before); how many employees to hire (at what price) or fire; when, if ever, trade wars will end and bring stability back to a manageable level; to invest (or not) in productivity measures—which reduces their short-term P/E ratio if they do invest, and thus reduces demand by investors to purchase their public offerings.
All of that has no geographic restrictions since the entire world is going through the same turbulent conditions at the same time, increasing the odds of a global recession (or worse yet, a sustained depression). Not only is “no man an island,” but “no company is an island.” While we may wish to Make America Great Again, we might as well wish for Santa Claus, so long as we believe such a thing is possible, at the expense of other nations. The notion of making a nation great (at the expense of other nations) has about as much chance of success as making yourself great at the expense of your partner. Being self-centered, whether with a partner or other nations, is doomed from the outset.
There has never been a time like this in history where trade is more interconnected than now. And this interconnection has become common-coin with people around the world, due to the Internet. Conditional interdependence is now perfectly obvious (to those who care to see the handwriting on the wall—some don’t—which is amazingly puzzling). We are creatures of habit, holding onto “the way things used to be” and paying mightily for our ignorance. Now we are fighting for survival against a coronavirus, never encountered before, and discovering the conditional differences between those who have chosen to throw caution to the wind and those who are willing to do the necessary (but undoubtedly not the convenient) to minimize the damage. For reasons not universally obvious, there are those who choose to attempt to bulwark the ever-changing tides of life and prefer to see life through the lens of “never change” instead of “ever change.”
Many years ago, when I first began my Zen practice and inquiry, my entree primer was a book written by Alan Watts—The Wisdom of Insecurity (catchy title) that did indeed captured my attention, and I thought, how is insecurity “wise?”. After having read that book I began to see how wise insecurity actually is since Watts spelled out what was, and is, perfectly obvious (every conditional thing is changing all of the time, whether we notice it or not). The wisdom is to not hold onto stuff that changes because it creates suffering, in two different ways: Either because we hold onto what we like and love (assuming it will remain static, but it doesn’t) or we resist what we don’t like and love, but it comes upon our shores anyway. Now we have invented a slogan that captures the essential idea: “What goes around, comes around.” And some people refer to this pattern as karma—an essential aspect of understanding the dharma of the Buddha.
However, as said previously: We are creatures of habit and learn slowly, most vividly through suffering. Nobody enjoys suffering yet nobody can avoid it. The very first truth of the Four Noble Truths is “life is dukkha”—translated into English as suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, etc.. When first I read this truth, I had not yet understood (or even been exposed to) the difference between conditional life and unconditional life. Consequently, I digested this first truth as an inescapable death sentence, which of course it is so long as we see life as purely conditional—everything is changing and dukkha is unavoidable. What a bitter pill to swallow! As the saying whimsically goes, “Nobody gets out of here alive.”
But then an amazing and unexpected thing occurred: I experienced the unconditional realm, didn’t grasp the profound significance and subsequently spent the next 30+ years attempting to understand the ineffable mystery. I could not pretend the experience never happened, try as I may, but instead was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery (Note: There is no bottom; no top; no East nor West; no anything in the realm of unconditionality). Yet how does anyone pretend an experience, that never ends, did not happen? I suppose Galileo found himself in the same dilemma when he observed that the earth was not the center of the universe, at a time when The Church maintained it was. It is impossible, and when it happens, you have a simple yet profoundly tricky decision to make: To either find the truth and share it (thus ensuring slings and arrows) or keep quiet and stay in comfort.
The truth I discovered to explain the experience is the other truth, beyond the first, that Nagarjuna expressed roughly 400-500 years following the death of The Buddha. What Nagarjuna said filled in the blank of my understanding. He said:
“The teaching by the Buddhas of the dharma has recourse to two truths: The world-ensconced truth and the truth which is the highest sense. Those who do not know the distribution of the two kinds of truth, do not know the profound ‘point’ in the teaching of the Buddha. The highest sense of the truth is not taught apart from practical behavior, and without having understood the highest sense one cannot understand nirvana.”
This came to be known as The Two Truth Doctrine and can be simply stated like this: The pathway to the highest (unconditional) truth must go forward along the path of conditional truth, the latter of which is provisional (e.g., temporary and changes). And these two are interdependent, neither of which can exist without the other. This relationship is known in Buddhist vernacular as “dependent origination,” and when properly understood informs three important matters that help us all to understand every dimension of the world in which we live. The three matters are (1) absolutely nothing has independent existence (e.g, self-contained, separate or existing as an island), (2) everything is inexorably linked together, and (3) The poles of these two truths are utterly opposite in nature—One side is conditional, always changing, and full to overflowing with suffering, leads to saṃsāra and the other pole is unconditional, never changes and is Nirvana itself (śūnyatā—emptiness/utter bliss).
Uncertainty and instability are the never-ending dimensions of the contingent world in which we live, perhaps best illustrated by the consequences of the world’s largest bridge collapsing (e.g., The Three Gorges Dam), leaving in the deluge the devastation of 400 million lives. Such unplanned, collateral damage will continue to disrupt planning for the future, be that from an industrial perspective or any other conditional perspective.
We have codified this dilemma with sayings such as, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” On one level, we all know this is true. But on a higher level, the opposite is true, and that latter truth remains unknown. Too bad, because this other truth is where solace from the winds of change resides. There is no solace within a conditional and crumbling world. It is there that suffering prevails. And the only way out of misery is to awaken to both truths.
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The true doctor.
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It is our nature to esteem credentials, accolades, and titles. More times than not you’ll rely on the opinion of a doctor over that of an uneducated man, because the assumption is that a man of letters has earned his stripes and is better educated (e.g., he knows more).
Mark Twain once said: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” There’s a lot of subtle wisdom inherent in that statement. Once I had a friend who was studying for her Ph.D., and she asked me, “What do you call a person in the doctorate program who graduates last in the class?” I thought about what that might be and then she told me the answer: Doctor.
Unfortunately, our system of education is lacking. The emphasis is on rational analysis and communications (e.g., reading, writing, number-crunching, critical thinking, and rationality). All of that is fine, but it doesn’t train our trans-rational capacities: the wellspring of all thought and non-thought. Consequently, we have become a very rational, stressed out, fear oriented violent species. We can, and do, justify the most egregious behavior possible and then feel righteous about our words and actions, never realizing we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
Has that disparity ever crossed your mind? It is a puzzle, but shouldn’t be. The problem is simple (yet profound). The problem is, as expressed in the contemporary vernacular: We are not cooking on all cylinders. Translation⎯We’re out of balance and living in a dream world. We are rational, but lacking wisdom. Being educated does not necessarily make us wise, and without wisdom, rational thought, only, leads us all astray and into the conflict between the opposite quagmires of right vs. wrong.
One of the foremost examples of a wise yet uneducated man was the sixth patriarch of Chan (Chinese Zen). Huineng was born into the Lu family in 638 C.E. in Xinzhou (present-day Xinxing County) in Guangdong province, and since his father died when he was young, his family was poor. As a consequence, Huineng had no opportunity to learn to read or write and is said to have remained illiterate his entire life. Nevertheless, Huineng is recognized as one of the wisest Rinzai Zen masters of all time.
That’s the first point. The second is misleading labels. If The Buddha were born into today’s world, he would undoubtedly be called “doctor” (appropriately so). He was, and remains, the most profound doctor of the mind of any time or place. The sort of doctor he would most closely approximate today would be “psychiatrist.” However, modern psychiatrists function within a presumed sphere of science, meaning measurable matter, despite the truth that the true mind can’t be found, much less be measured.
Some years ago, I read a book by neuropsychologist/philosopher Paul Broks. The book was titled, Into the Silent Land. In probing the layers of human physiology and psychology, Broks leads us through a haunting journey. It is hard not to be stunned by reading his dissecting view of what it means to be human. We take so many things for granted. That, which is inanimate “meat,” animates with consciousness, cognition, imagination, feelings, and every other aspect of our condition, and seems to float by as a given. This fundamental mystery is so ingrained into our being that it goes unnoticed, but not by Broks.
He asks alarming and provocative questions such as “Am I out there, or in here?” when he portrays an imaginary man with a transparent skull, watching in a mirror his own brain functioning. He notices, for us all, that the world exists inside the tissue residing between our ears. And when the tissue is carefully examined, no world, no mind, no ego, no self, no soul, no perceptual capacities, nor consciousness—nothing but inanimate meat is found. Unable to locate, what we all take for granted, he suggests that we are neither “in here” nor “out there;” maybe somewhere in the space between the in and the out, and maybe nowhere at all.
Indeed, as so many mystics and seers have noted: The true mind can’t be found, and none of us can study what is beyond measuring and defining. Nevertheless, it is the true mind (which can’t be found) that is the foundation upon which everything is based⎯the source of wisdom, harmony, and the lack of stress. Speaking from intimate personal experience, I can state without equivocation that once you experience your true Self-nature your world will turn over. And why would that be? Because stress is the result of craving what you have already. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to obtain what lies ever within your hand. So long as we believe we don’t have what we need, we will forever remain anxious, frustrated, disappointed, ill, and full of stress. And that makes us all sick, not to mention very, very tired.
As the Covid-19 pandemic rages out of control, addiction once again is rising to the top of the news feed. Whenever crises rise, addiction rises in tandem and those so inclined scrambles for relief.
This post is thus particularly relevant in light of the present day problems to a wide variety of a host of objective “stuff.” Our common-coin manner of understanding addiction is too limited. When we think of someone addicted we see images in our mind of drug addicts or derelicts who were unable to overcome excessive opioid consumption. Maybe we’ll even go so far as to include someone who can’t control his or her consumption of food or sex. Whatever object is chosen—another person, drugs, alcohol, food, the greed for money or sex, becomes the god we must have to fill a sensed emptiness. Rarely, however, do we consider the average person exhibiting expressions of addiction, and that’s a problem.
Addiction, properly understood at the base level is craving: an excessive desire. Everybody falls victim to that. Whenever our normal comforts are disrupted, such as now, anxiety goes wild and we crave their return. We either crave what we like or resist what we don’t. Both are forms of craving (excessive desire). To get to the bottom of this dilemma we need to ask, “which part of me is craving and why?” Someone who is complete, doesn’t crave anything, so it must be the incomplete part of us—the part of us that says, “I need that to experience myself as complete and satisfied, and without getting that I will suffer.”
Meister Eckhart (the 14th century Christian German theologian, philosopher and mystic) said, “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God. Man’s last and highest parting occurs when for God’s sake he takes leave of god. St. Paul took leave of god for God’s sake and gave up all that he might get from god as well as all he might give—together with every idea of god. In parting with these he parted with god for God’s sake and God remained in him as God is in his own nature—not as he is conceived by anyone to be—nor yet as something yet to be achieved, but more as an is-ness, as God really is. Then he and God were a unit, that is pure unity. Thus one becomes that real person for whom there can be no suffering, any more than the divine essence can suffer.”
A while ago I heard a man say, “I can understand how Christ can be in me, but how is it possible for me to be in Christ?” Clearly, this person had a rather limited view of both himself and of Christ and apparently didn’t believe what his own scripture told him about the nature of God. Christian scripture says that the nature of God is omnipresent. If this man truly believed this, the answer to his question would be clear: there is no place that God is not, so how is it possible for anyone to not be in Christ? The entire sea in which we swim is God. Fish are in the water and we are in God.
In our unknowing, we imagine that we are separate from the fullness of our creator, that we are not a unit and this, in turn, leads to a deep desire to become what we are already, thus we suffer. The Buddha also spoke in the Nipata Sutra about what happens due to ignorance:
“What is it that smothers the world? What makes the world so hard to see? What would you say pollutes the world and threatens it the most?’ ‘It is ignorance which smothers’ the Buddha replied, ‘and it heedlessness and greed which make the world invisible. The hunger of desire pollutes the world, and the great source of fear is the pain of suffering.”
All people fear the pain of suffering and this makes us blind to the suffering of others. While locked in the grip of our egos, we think we’re the only ones suffering, and in that state of mind, we become greedy and uncaring. At the center of suffering lays this idea that we are separate and incomplete and that leads to the craving for what we have already.
The ancient Daoist admonition applies here, “Resist nothing and embrace everything today. The perfect day and night are within you. Let it all unfold like a blossom.” Picking and trying to retain only the good, while resisting what we imagine will darken our day, is the true addiction and that leads inevitably to suffering.
When contemplating the myriad problems of today’s world you might come up with a list such as the following:
- Unchecked global climate change (warming)
- A growing gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else
- Toxic pollution of the environment
- Loss of genuine liberties
While all of these are problems of enormous concern, there is a core root that underlies and drives them all: a misidentification of who we are individually and collectively. So long as our answer to identity boils down to a vacillating self-image (ego) the natural result is fear, greed, possessiveness, selfishness, isolation, irresponsibility, despair, and a victim mentality that leaves us all heading for a cave of seeming security.
Recently Avram Noam Chomsky observed that “As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism, or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.” While a grim statement that shocks us into states of denial and disbelief, his observations are true.
The question is, what must we all do in order to escape from this inevitable outcome? The answer is not the ostrich method of avoidance, denial, and ignorance. On the contrary what we must all do is transform our self-understanding, from an isolated individual to a connected member of the human race, which was (and remains) the solution to suffering offered by The Buddha more than 2,500 years ago. The solution does not change because the nature of being human does not change.
At the central core of all of us is an indefinable state of unconditional consciousness that is the same for everyone. The problem is that while this state is the source of all aspects of awareness, itself is not detectable and we are all prone to consider real only things with conditions that can be detected. This is a case of the eye not being aware of the eye. However, in this case, it is the inner eye (URNA) instead of the detectable eye, and as the father of Zen wrote, it is in this state of mind that all discrimination ceases to exist. Out of this indiscriminate state arises sentient discrimination that leads us to the mistaken notion that each of is a dependent ego at odds with every other human, vacillating and contingent on an uncertain world and that “ego idea” then produces the undesirable qualities listed above.
In the recent past, a form of meditation (MBSR) has become prominent in helping many to cease attachment to waves of thinking, many of which are destructive to self and others. While very helpful, it only one of two dimensions outlined by The Buddha in his Eight Fold Path. MBSR rests upon one of these two: right mindfulness (Sanskrit: samyak-smṛti/sammā-sati) and is the essential path to a genuine awakening of our true, indiscriminate nature (who we truly are). The other dimension of mind (right concentration (Sanskrit: samyak-samādhi/sammā-samādhi) is not widely known, but by any other name is Zen/Dhyāna, with a history going back into an unrecorded time, long before The Buddha.
The two disciplines were intended to be practiced as a combined pair but in today’s world, they have been split apart. MBSR has become quite useful in stilling the mind and helping practitioners to stay present instead of lost in speculation. However, the issue of identity remains an esoteric matter leaving those who practice MBSR only, still holding fast to a perceptible and insecure self-understanding. Importantly it is Zen that produces the desired result of a sense of SELF that is unconditional, whole, perfect, and unshaken. This quality alone delivers the awareness that we are all unified, none better; none diminished in any way.
As awful as the laundry list of contemporary problems may be, those and unknown others will flourish unless we can experience this state of indiscriminate, undiscovered unity, inherent in us all.
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| The natural way. |
A recent blogger said she was tired of waking up to the litany of gloom and doom economic news but instead has been taking refuge in the simple recognition of migrating birds. I find this perspective refreshing.
It’s so very easy to fall into a reactionary mindset of what comes our way. On the one hand who can deny the harsh result of billions (if not trillions) of dollars being drained away reacting to one crisis after another— that we create? Lives are being destroyed. On the other hand, all is well. How is it possible that such polar opposites could co-exist? Without diminishing broad-spread mortal suffering I would like to provide some insight.
Birds fly south when they deem a changing of the season, and north when it goes the other way. They do this without recognition of economic news either good or bad. Migration has been happening since the dawn of time. Animals and people move when necessary. It’s a natural way.
This natural way puts the expression “bird brain” in the most different light. The unnatural way is to first create conditions that prompt a survival mode to move (e.g., wars, violence, the devastation of means to exist such as global warming, withdrawal of support to nations that won’t do things our way, trade wars that destroy jobs—on both sides) and then build walls to stop the natural way to move.
A dog will not live in the same space where they defecate, yet we humans seem determined to so destroy our habitat it is turning into much the same thing. There are times when it seems we humans are the most brutal and stupid of all creatures!
Every day the sun rises and sets without consulting our opinions, judgments, or the news. And it’s a good thing. Think about what would happen if this was not so. Maybe the sun would rise (or not) dependent upon our mood that day. Maybe birds would fly south, or not, dependent upon economic ups and downs. If life depended, we’d all be in deep trouble since we never seem to agree on anything. We are enslaved by our differences and the results of those enslavements. We are attached to the way things should be and ignore the way they are and that creates very big difficulties.
Where is it written that the stock market always moves upward? Who says that goodness is perpetually inevitable? Where is it written that those we love will always move in directions we think they should? That one vector continues without fail? These fixed ideas (and our attachment to them) is what creates euphoria and fear, which in turn creates the ups and downs. Life is change. Birds know this and we don’t. There is a season for flying south and another for flying north. Seasons change and we need to adapt. Yet we don’t. Why?
The answer is ego possessiveness and attachment (to what we desire) and resistance (to what we repudiate). We go by way of what we see and ignore what we can’t. Birds don’t do that but we do. What we see is either beautiful or ugly (on the surface) and we respond to such appearances. If we were wise we’d notice that even our own forms are in the process of decay but our true nature is eternal.
The truth is that there was a time when I was a mortally handsome fellow and now I’m just a decaying and wrinkled bag of bones. Does it matter? Not a whit! Nobody gets out of here mortally alive anyway. It happens to us all. What can be seen will always fade but what is eternal and immortal never fades. Paradise is either here and now, or it isn’t. It all depends, mortally. And it doesn’t, immortally.
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| The hidden root. |
We live within an unfortunate protocol as the standard for treating pain and suffering, which is easily articulated by an analogy of a bandaid covering a festering wound.
Determining causes, by necessity, takes us beneath the surface to find the root. Unexpectedly, the world of medical science is now playing catch up and turning to some surprising spiritual sources that don’t fit within scientific orthodoxy but work nevertheless.
We’re all familiar with the Chinese proverb of, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The proverb seems to imply an either/or. The problem with this either/or sentiment is it assumes the man will stay alive long enough to learn to fish. In the world of today that is not a luxury, we can afford. We must do both or the patient will starve before learning. Many millions around the world die daily waiting for the fish to arrive.
In the Breakthrough Sermon, Bodhidharma said, “The mind is the root from which all things grow. If you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like a tree. All of its fruit and flowers, its branches and leaves, depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort. Those who don’t understand the mind practice in vain. Everything good and bad comes from your own mind. To find something beyond the mind is impossible.”
The Buddha spent his life ferreting out the root cause of suffering and began his diagnosis with the first of Four Nobel Truths: Life (e.g., mortal or conditional) is suffering. That observation took place more than 2,500 years ago but until recently his diagnosis ran under the radar of medical orthodoxy. Pathfinders have always made inroads by bucking the tide of conventional wisdom and this is certainly true for Dr. John E. Sarno, previously Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the prestigious Institute of Rusk Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University Medical Center.
Sarno’s most notable achievement was the development of his diagnosis, and treatment of tension myoneural syndrome (TMS), which is currently not accepted by mainstream medicine. Nevertheless, according to Sarno, TMS is a psychosomatic illness causing chronic back, neck, and limb pain which is not relieved by standard medical treatments.
Dr. Sarno noted in his practice that back surgery wasn’t working; it was failing to bring effective relief to his patients. He also noted unsatisfactory results from physical therapy, as well as from steroidal injections, and all the other therapeutic techniques commonly administered. He instinctively felt that there had to be something else going on with back pain. So he began to look more deeply into his patients’ charts where he noticed that his back pain patients also had many other things going on with their health. In addition to back pain, many had bouts of the shoulder and hip pain, knee pain, foot and hand pain, skin problems, anxiety, depression, migraines, ulcers, irritable bowel, heartburn, frequent urination, and allergies. Dr. Sarno shrewdly noted that where there’s smoke there’s often fire.
After having lived forty years with the belief that I was unworthy, I stood at the abyss of such despair that I seriously considered suicide. It was at that critical point that I left the world behind and lived in a Zen monastery and discovered, that the cause of my suffering was rooted in my mind. What I had previously believed, was a fabricated idea and the product of cultural myths, judgments, and misinformation. It took me quite a long time to root out the poison that existed in thought only.
Thankfully, while there I ate a few fish, lived, and then learned to fish. And then I came to a surprising realization: If I could pass on both the eating and the learning then just about anyone could as well. After all, the wisdom of The Buddha was not mine to selfishly possess. It belongs to the global community.
Looking in the rear-view mirror appears to be advantageous to looking ahead. The past tells you from where you’ve come, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you where you’re going. It may, however, enable you to see a vector pointing forward. But what if that backward view says, you’re on the wrong road and heading for an abyss? Robert Frost best conveyed this dilemma in his poem The Road Not Taken.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both,
And be one traveler, long I stood,
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay,
In leaves, no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Frost’s poetic journey into the unknown could be seen as foolhardy unless that vector was fraught with doubts about your life and where it suggested you were going next. That was certainly true in my case. As I looked back over 40 years, I could see abundant evidence that I was on the wrong path and had come to the inescapable conclusion that something was seriously wrong. But what? At that critical juncture—the dividing of ways forward, I felt without value and was in a state of existential crisis. When every indicator says to continue with fear and tribulation, leaping into the unknown isn’t as foolhardy as it might otherwise seem.
Without a clue, I was a ripe candidate for what I later learned was called the Southern School of Chan (sudden enlightenment)—The way began by Shenhui, a disciple of Zen Master Huineng back in China during the 7th century CE and developed into what is now Rinzai Zen. As I look back, taking the right fork in the road, seems providential, and maybe even coincidental. At that time, I didn’t even know about the roots of Rinzai or how it was different from Soto. It has taken me almost that long to become educated about that leap. All I knew then was what lay behind me was self-destructive, and unless I found a better path forward, my goose was cooked.
As it turned out, my teacher was the blend of both Soto and Rinzai, and his dharma name was Eido (the combination of Eisai/Yōsai Zenji and Dōgen Zenji)—The two Zen masters responsible for fostering Soto and Rinzai Zen in Japan. I can say, without any hesitation, that under his guidance, my life was transformed, and I came to experience my complete worth.
It took me the first 40 to reach the point of sensing utter worthlessness, an instance to realize transformation, and the next 40 to mature. If there was ever proof of dependent arising, I would be it.
In the 8th century CE, an Indian Buddhist philosopher by the name of Śhāntideva said that to be able to deny something, we first have to know what it is we’re denying. The logic of that statement is peerless. He went on to say,
“Without contacting the entity that is imputed, you will not apprehend the absence of the entity.” The value of first knowing vacillating despair made it possible to see the firmness of fulfillment.
During the years following our meeting, Eido Roshi fell into disrepute for sexual misconduct. I can’t condone what he did in that respect, but I will be forever grateful for what he did for me. The founder of the Rinzai Zen (Lin Chi) used the idiom “True Man of no rank” because, within our ineffable, transcendent sphere, there is no conditional right nor wrong. Eido lived, as he taught—on two levels at the same time. The level that erred is the same level we all endure. That level is flawed, but Eido’s “True Man of no rank” was without blemish. And this is true for us all.
It is not up to me or anyone to judge and condemn his actions. The Buddha said, “Do not be the judge of people; do not make assumptions about others. A person is destroyed by holding judgments about others.” Sage advise we should all take to heart.
Eido Roshi died February 18, 2018, at Shōgen-ji, Minokamo, in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and will be buried at Dai Bosatsu Zendo (where we met so many years ago, and the place of my transformation) on Tuesday, April 24, 2081. Gassho Eido!
The culmination of every spiritual journey is the realization of completion and unity. Many religions claim we are incomplete and must find the road to a far distant heavenly home.
Johnny Cash made famous the song In the by and by there’ll be pie in the sky, meaning there will be a reward waiting for us in heaven if we do God’s will here on earth. Because we imagine incompletion we seek completion. Because we misunderstand our source and ourselves, we desire fulfillment even though we are from beginning to the end already full. Our cup runs over with goodness and we remain thirsty for what is already ours.
Acceptance of the already and not yet is a seeming paradox. How can both be true at the same time? The answer as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, is, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Our true nature is spiritual, complete and there is nowhere to go. Our mortal nature is phenomenal, in a process, and we search for the already. We are like the man who looks through lenses, searching for the eyeglasses that sit upon his nose.
It was Zen Master Huang Po who expressed the doctrine of One Mind: “All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning: is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons.”
Thus the idea of mind over matter is absurd. The mind is the matter in the exact same way that Emptiness is form (The Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sūtra). Every atom of our material body is nothing other than the perfect integration of the One Mind and looking elsewhere for what is already ours is a fools journey.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is a story that reveals this truth. The message of the Prodigal is the same as contained in the Song of Zazen written by one of the Zen giants (17th-century Hakuin Ekaku). Here are his words:
“How near the truth, yet how far we seek. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’ Like the son of a rich man wandering poor on this earth we endlessly circle the six worlds. The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.”
What can be seen blinds us and keeps us ignorant of what is unseen. So, on the one hand, we are deceived by the conditional, discriminate nature of what we can perceive and on the other hand, our true nature is unconditionally indiscriminate, ineffable but full. And out of our sense of incompletion, we are consumed by desire, not realizing that we already possess what we seek.
The noble winning poet Rabindranath Tagore captured the journey beautifully when he wrote, “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”
So on this spring day, reflect on the labor of your life. Are you laboring for becoming complete? Or are you laboring to accept your never-ending completion? It makes a difference.
Do you have any idea who you are? Begin with this simple understanding: An idea is a mental image, otherwise known as a thought. When you imagine yourself you form an image. It may be a composite image constructed with many parts such as your standing vis-à-vis others, the values you hold dear, or just about any other contribution. But in the end, you have an idea about yourself, which you assume constitutes your being.
This process forces the matter of selfhood. Are you the result of this process—a composite image (a self-image)? Or are you the one who conjures up this image? If the former then you are in constant motion with continuously changing vagaries. In other words there is no permanent you, instead, you remain vulnerable and never at ease (e.g. dis-ease). On the other hand, consider the possibility that the real you is not, and has never been any sort of image but is rather the never-changing and constantly present, ineffable imaginer: The one doing the imaging that can never, ever be imagined.
In today’s world, we have a different name for a self-image. It goes by the name “ego” which if researched means “I” as when we say things like “I am a special being” (of some sort). And this ego understands itself as being uniquely different, special and in conflict with every other ego. It’s a world of me against you and if I am to win, you must lose.
Now this other entity, the imaginer, has no defining characteristics. If it did then it would be constrained to some characteristics but not others. One characteristic only has meaning when understood against some other characteristic such as up vs. non-up (otherwise known as down). Can anything be both at the same time? Our ordinary answer to that questions is no due to meaning and understanding, which is to say that everything can only be understood and have meaning when compared to something else: thus discrimination and discernment.
But how about this: My imagination is the same as your imagination and neither of these can be understood, just recognized as the wellspring of every thought and image. The imagination has one purpose only: to imagine. And the imagination has no limits or forms of difference. In truth, the imaginer is exactly the same from one person to another. We are all just a commonly shared mind without limit or constraining dimension.
Think about that! Better yet, don’t think about that. Just recognize this: You and I are the same non-thing, without limit.
In your mind’s eye picture yourself on a boat floating down a river. Some parts of the river are tranquil pools and some parts are roaring rapids. The river flows continuously with every inch different from what existed the moment before and the water under our boat just keeps changing.
We imagine the boat offers us security from the surge. And while we are in those tranquil pools there is very little risk; we just float along enjoying the day and basking in the calm. But the boat moves and the roaring rapids follow the calm, which at times puts holes in the bottom of our boat. So then we have a choice to either fix the holes or sink.
This imaginary reverie is a parable that speaks to attachment and identification. None of us is flowing down the river of life alone. Instead we choose to ride in big or small boats with others who make the same choice. But there are different boats on this river populated by people not like us. And then an unfortunate thing happens: We begin to attach our identities to our boat and when we do, we stop being able to even see the holes, much less repair them.
Everyone rides a boat. The name of our boat may be a particular political party, a family or gang, a union, a nation or a religious institution, or any one of a near infinite set of other configurations, with which we choose to identify. The boat becomes our identity and we cling to “our” boat for fear of drowning since none of us has ever learned to swim. The circumstances of our life are constantly changing like the river. The water is just water. Circumstances are just circumstances. The water is not to be feared and water doesn’t create suffering. It is our fear of being free of our boat that creates suffering. We can’t imagine that we can swim but instead remain prisoners on our boat.
In such a state of mind, we become defensive and hostile. When someone in one of those other boats criticizes our boat we suffer because our boat has become who we experience ourselves to be. To criticize our boat feels like the same thing as criticizing us. So then we put a shot across their bow and they respond in kind. We end up sinking their boat and they sink ours. Nobody wins. But the truth is that we are not our boat. Instead, we are swimmers, having never learned to swim, who have chosen to ride on boats. There is nothing about changing circumstances that produce suffering. That is purely the result of identifying with boats. Those boats are our ego we assume will carry us through the tides of life. But the boats/ego are not who we are. We mistakenly cling to these artificial identifications. Maybe we all need to get off our boats and find out that we can swim and survive.
I’ve been a student of Zen for more than 40 years. During that time I must have read hundreds of Buddhist and Zen books. To be honest nearly all of them were profound yet abstruse.
Transcendent truths can be perplexing for a number of reasons. Since language is limited and reading is language-centered, this constrains understanding of changing time and cultures. It’s an oil and water conundrum. Additionally, what is considered truth is a variable depending on a host of changing conditions. Mining profound treasures involve a lot of digging and dirt tossing. And after the mining, you still have a problem: How to transmit the gold to others.
Long ago Lao Tzu addressed this problem when he said, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” That is indeed a perplexing communication challenge. As I’ve worked through this challenge I have struggled to distill and shift out the dirt so that I could speak simply of matters that are anything but simple and obvious.
I’ve studied the writing of the great sages and seers to understand their wisdom. Jesus chose to speak in parables. The New Testament is full of his parables. The Buddha chose similar methods. Both were so erudite their own disciples rarely grasped their insight. And while these methods worked with some, the vast majority still didn’t understand. Life’s greatest truths are not so evident. I’m no sage but I use their communications methods since I am persuaded that if I can find ways to share the wealth of my own mining then a lot of people can begin to find their own treasure.
One of the most valuable communication tools used by The Buddha is known as “Upaya” — expedient means. The principle is simple: Teach people at their level rather than your own. This method is extraordinarily wise. Imagine what would happen in a Kindergarten class if the Ph.D. teacher tried to teach nuclear physics by employing high-level jargon. It doesn’t mean that young people one day won’t be capable of becoming nuclear physicists. But there is a huge difference between knowing something and being an effective teacher. All of us have experienced both and all of us prefer good teachers.
What I have chosen to do is adapt. I use, as much as possible, simple language with graphics and other devices that aid in the learning process so that matters of great profundity can be grasped by people not yet schooled. They know precisely the nature of their own dilemma but they don’t know the nature of the solutions. Transcendent truths provide the solutions they seek. It is my job to speak simply of these truths. All I do is haul water to thirsty horses. The horses decide if they want to drink.
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