Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy
Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy
Robert Rosenbaum
We begin to sense that even in our difficulties, life and death, health and sickness are cousins, members of some larger family of which we are also part. Getting married, having a child, doing meditation, seeing a client in psychotherapy—all require an act of faith. Reading a book requires an act of faith: Who knows what you will find? But having faith is not a question of clinging to a particular set of beliefs. Having faith…requires that we let go of what we are clinging to.
How can we face our inner demons and the oppressive tyrants of the world without returning greed for greed and hate for hate? This very questioning is our faith, our mode of renewing ourselves, our Way of reminding ourselves to appreciate our lives.
Practice is about how, in the midst of the difficulties of our lives, we keep faith in mind.
In Japanese, the character for “mind” is the same as the character for “heart.” Keeping faith in mind is ultimately a matter of learning to live wholeheartedly.
CHAPTER 1 Full Engagement: Dogen’s Rules for Zazen
Zazen teaches nothing at all beyond being itself.
Zazen is undivided activity in which there is neither “outside” nor “inside.” Zazen is manifesting my true self intertwined with all being.
Far beyond teaching and learning, thinking, or not-thinking, we find ourselves face-to-face with our most intimate selves.
Learning how we separate ourselves from ourselves…Practicing zazen we practice just being alive and just dying; these are basic activities of being human, the rest is superstructure.
Buddhism is about “a willingness to lay down one’s life for the Truth all the time.” —David Brazier
Brazier says, “Everyone is willing to lay down their life for something. When we find out what we are willing to lay down our life for, then we know what our religion is.”
There is something disturbing about the idea of making any one object…the repository meaning of my life. To do so can burden them and entrap me. If I am doing zazen and searching for some particular truth, I mat be ensnared by a circumscribed vision of enlightenment.
Truth is, like meditation, always changing even as it stays the same; Truth is not something to be reached, but something to practice. It’s important to devote oneself not to Truth but to practicing being truthful.
I sit down on the cushion for the practice it affords in laying my life down. When I lay my life down to just sit, I learn something about how to acknowledge all my selfish desires and something about how to set them aside; I learn something about how to bring myself to practice some activity that carries me along so that I forget about myself.
The structure of zazen, where we sit still no matter what feelings or thoughts come up, creates a safe “holding environment” in whose security repressions may loosen. Feelings, thoughts, sensations emerge, and with no one there to blame or bounce off of, our projections twist back upon themselves until our innermost desires and fears are left nakedly visible. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, we do everything we can to escape from ourselves, only to find that there is no escape.
In zazen, transference and countertransference rise up together, meet each other, fight, and eventually make friends and reconcile. As emotions, fantasies, and critical judgments rise and fall, we ride waves to discover that countertransference and transference are mere solipsistic phantoms, a series of relationships that emerge among various part of our selves, each of which wants to claim primacy. Gradually it dawns on us: No simple part of our selves stands alone. Going to the root and deeper than the roots of countertransference and transference we find that the objet of our relationship is the very universe that upholds us.
The nasty boss is not there in the meditation hall...The angry mother is not there in the meditation hall…The lover who has deserted us is not there in the meditation hall…The teacher whose approval we want is not there in the meditation hall…
Because sitting in zazen provides a period of no movement, no acting on the thoughts/feelings/sensations/desires, there is no outlet for actions that might reinforce the old patterns: The only outlet is to increase awareness. As awareness widens, the automatic repetitiveness of the mind’s formations lessens. Becoming aware of the feelings as just feelings, becoming aware of the thoughts as just thoughts, becoming aware of the physical sensations as just sensations, becoming aware of the desires as just desires, space opens up, a wider container embraces experience, and freedom becomes more than just a word.
In zazen we are always giving birth to the family that is our self, experiencing each aspect rising and dying away. We discover that body and mind are as interdependent as breathing in and breathing out, parent and child, lover and loved.
Dogen’s Guidelines for Practicing the Way
The necessity of arousing way-seeking mind
Way-seeking mind…is the mind which sees the impermanence of all phenomena in the world, including the mind itself.
Once you hear the true teaching, you should practice it without fail
One phrase offered by a loyal minister can have the power to alter the course of the nation.
You should enter the buddha way through practice
You must understand that we practice within delusions and attain realization before you recognize it…Practicing brings about realization; realization finds itself through practice.
Do not practice Buddha teaching with gaining-mind
Proceed with the mind which neither clings to nor rejects anything…Practice without thinking of gaining something in return. Buddhas have sympathy for all living beings and help them through compassion, [but] everything they do is neither for themselves nor others. A practitioner should not practice buddha-dharma for his own sake, to gain fame and profit, to attain good results, or to pursue miraculous powers. Practice the buddha-dharma only for the sake of buddha-dharma. This is the way.
You should find a true teacher to practice Zen and learn the way
A true teacher has to be free from egocentric views and not fettered by emotional feelings; his practice corresponds to his understanding.
Things which should be kept in mind in practicing Zen
Brilliance is no primary, knowledge is no primary; intellect, conscious endeavor, memory, imagination and introspection are not primary. Without resorting to any of these, harmonized body-and-mind and enter the buddha way.
Those who long to leave the world and practice buddha-dharma must study Zen
The dharma turns you, and you turn the dharma. When you turn the dharma, you are leading and the dharma is following. When dharma turns you, the dharma is leading and you are following. These two aspects are always present.
The activities of Zen monks
Please try releasing your hold. Open your hands. Just let everything go, and see: What is body and mind. What are daily activities?…Ultimately, what are mountains and rivers, the great earth, human beings, animals, and houses? Take a careful look at these things again and again: it is clear the dichotomy of movement and stillness does not arise at all. However, at this time, nothing is fixed.
You should practice everywhere toward the way
The Buddha-Way is right under your feet. Immersed in the way, clarify it right on the spot. Soaked through by enlightenment, you completely forget yourself. To be immersed in the way means to forget any traces of enlightenment…let body and mind drop off; throw away delusion and enlightenment.
Immediately hitting the mark
To realize buddha directly through nothing other than your body and mind is to accept the Way and hit the mark immediately. Not trying to change your body or mind, just following the realization of the true teacher completely, is called being here or settling down. To follow buddha completely means you do not have your old views. [Freedom from the Known] Since you just settle down right here, you do not seek a new nest in which to settle.
CHAPTER 2 Building the Sanctuary: Dogen’s Guidelines for Practicing the Way
Practicing Buddhism we become aware of mpermanence and its two correlates: suffering and release from suffering.
Usually, when we first begin to practice, we are looking for a way out of suffering. Gradually, our practice affords us a way in.
“Practicing without fail” simply means practicing all the time…
True ordinariness is special, for it embraces life as it is.
…enlightened Zen practice takes place in the midst of delusion.
How do we arouse practice in the midst of delusion, and experience this practice as enlightenment?
Mindfulness is the Buddhist term for a kind of awareness that bypasses the “should and shouldn’t” of experience and returns to the experience itself. …stepping back from experience to increase perspective while simultaneously immersing itself deeper into the experience.
Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”
Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan said, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is nearest.”
In materialistic, individualistic society we’re encouraged to worry about whether we’re getting our money’s worth, to ask: “What do I get out of this?” This can happen not only in psychotherapy, but in spiritual matters as well. If I take a week of scarce vacation time to spend sitting in a meditation retreat, I can start worrying whether “I’m “wasting my time” if I don’t have some “enlightenment experience.” Worrying about gain inevitably involves worrying about loss, but if we spend our time trying to calculate our “net profit” from an experience we won’t pay as much attention to the experience itself.
The world is too big for us to restrict it to our personal rules of gain and loss. We are embedded in the world and depend for our very existence on all around us: all our ancestors before us, all that follows, all who coexist with us. We are not alone. We practice not for ourselves, nor even for others, but with everyone.
The antidote to Zen sickness is not to obtain enlightened bliss, but to realize our interdependence with all beings. We get isolated and blinded if we practice psychotherapy or Zen to gain something for ourselves, but we keep falling into the trap. Fortunately, there is a simple antidote: to practice giving. Giving transforms us by taking us out of ourselves: it inherently connects us to others. Giving is the foundation of both psychotherapeutic and Zen practice. Dogen reminds us that although “…the mind of a sentient being is difficult to change, you should keep on changing the minds of sentient beings…This should be started by giving. Mind is beyond measure. Things given are beyond measure. Moreover in giving, mind transforms the gift and the gift transforms mind.”
shinkan-taza: no goal, no technique, just sitting, being open to whatever came.
Coming home to one’s self is, ultimately, discovering that our house houses the whole of our experiences, including unpleasant ones.
When we seek a teacher, we let go of our view that we know it all or know enough to manage solely on our own. Seeking outside ourselves for a teacher, we have some presentiment that what we can know about ourselves is intertwined with what we can know about others. As we listen and take in the perspectives of others, letting our own and others’ perspectives interact, we expand a bit and realize our interbeing; when we seek a teacher this way, we are letting go of self-centered views of becoming a teacher ourselves.
In contrast, when we seek teachers with the idea that they know it all, or we idealize their wisdom as superior to our own, we run the danger of just swallowing another’s self0views and pasting them onto our own. Then there is no teacher and no learning, only the passing of dogma from one person to another.
…the purity of intention that underlies our seeking can get lost if we locate teachers only outside ourselves. We will wind up not trusting ourselves if we don’t recognize the teacher that lies at the heart of our, and our clients’, seeking.
I am not enlightened if I say, “I am enlightened and you are not.” I am also not enlightened if I say, “You are enlightened and I am not.”
The heart of enlightenment involves interbeing, being together with the whole of the great earth and all its creatures. In contrast, the heart of suffering involves being apart, imprisoned in self-views and the pain of disconnectedness.
As Zen students, we increase our sense of disconnectedness if we think we lack something that our teachers can provide.
We have very naive views of time and place. In our search for stability and control over our lives, we try to hold onto a frozen self-image that is timeless and placeless; we then view time and space as something outside us and separate from our selves. We see our selves as traveling “through” time and space but not being “of” time and space. One form this takes is to think to ourselves, “It takes time for a person to change.”
If we think of time as some thing that exists “out there” that is measured by clocks, then “it takes time for a person to change.” If we think of place as some thing that exists “out there,” then I have to get from one place to another. If we think of change not as a constant flow, but as some thing which has a beginning point and end point, then “it takes time for a person to change.”
Time and place become amounts of things rather than living, breathing experiences.
The mind arises in this moment; a moment arises in this mind.
Being our self does not “take” time, because it is not being in time: Rather, it is time being.
Change does not take time: Change is time and time is change.
We cannot make here-and-now into a nest, settle in, and build a permanent residence.
Complete enlightenment and full understanding know they can never know anything fully or be complete by themselves: They know that because of the constant movement of interbeing, all we touch and are touched by must remain mysterious. Then whatever we experience…we can greet it with an open smile rather than a settled idea.
So good psychotherapy and zazen are unsettling. Psychotherapy and zazen remove the nests so that we may perch in the trees, forage on the ground, and fly freely through the skies.
Each place in our lives creates the time to be ourselves. Each moment of our lives creates the space that shelters us. We are continuously uprooted and replanted in the soil of our living and dying: The sky is our ceiling and the earth below us our foundation.
CHAPTER 3 Happiness, Suffering, and Psychotherapy: The Metta Sutta
This is the central subject matter of all koans: realization. Realization does not mean understanding, although it includes understanding. Realization does not mean awareness, although it includes awareness. Realization does not mean you “get” anything. Realization is the activity of making real, or perhaps better phrased as bringing what is real forward: real-izing.
If we reject or deny suffering, it will pursue us as surely as death itself and we will continue to squirm in fruitless attempts at avoidance. The paradox is that freedom from suffering lies in first accepting suffering fully. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism says: “Life is suffering.” Although the Third Noble Truth of Buddhism teaches there is release from suffering, we cannot realize this without planting our feet in the firm ground of the First Truth.
We tend to hold on to the idea that there is life outside of suffering. We deny we are suffering all the time. We may acknowledge that there is a lot of inevitable suffering in life, but we do so from a perspective that insists that there can be times in our lives when we will be able to avoid suffering and just feel good. We believe our lives can stand apart from and somehow exist separate from our sufferings.
Buddhism, in contrast, insists that our lives are inseparable wholes. The First Noble Truth does not say life contains suffering but that life is suffering. Because life is an inextricable whole, if we separate ourselves from our suffering, we begin to separate ourselves from our joys as well.
To say that life is suffering does not mean that life is unpleasant: It means that suffering, like any experience, has a simple facticity to it that joins it with every other aspect of all existence. The existence of suffering is no different from the existence of the sun, the moon, the tides. Life is suffering, is the arising and passing away of our experiences. There is joy, and there is sorrow, and both are suffering, expressing the momentary flow of existence. The baby being born is suffering. The stream’s rushing water meets the solidity of stone: Rock and river suffer together in this meeting and make a vast song. Love and death, birth and peace, are suffering, joined in the fact that all experience is impermanent and ungraspable.
Craving is partly a physical sensation, partly a psychological process, and partly a spiritual seeking.
When instead of accepting each experience for what it is I judge an experience according to whether or not I feel comfortable with it, rather than appreciate the object, the person, the feeling or the relationship for what it is, I look at it only in terms of what it is for me. In this way I set myself apart and fail to see the connection that already exists between my self and the rest of the world.
..but rejecting the bad and pursuing the good splits the wholeness of life: It makes both “bad” and “good” separate from an “I” that stands apart from my moment-to-moment experience.
A split arises between “me” and “my experience,” between “the world out there” and “the I in here.”
Once and “I” exists separate from the world, separated from the rest of all being, existence becomes inherently fragmented and unsatisfactory.
Buddhists go further and say that all ideas interpose a division, interposing a chasm between “I” and “it,” “me” and “you,” “me” and “my experience.” So holding onto any idea—not just “problematic” ones—is an unwitting form of greed: a grasping that removes us from experiencing the fullness of our lives. If we hold on to our ideas about ourselves, about others, and the world, we freeze what was a transient experience into an enduring filter; we live according to our ideas of the past and our dreams of the future and cut ourselves off from the immediacy of how we and life are arising together in this moment.
Unfortunately, we often fear letting go our ideas and letting ourselves come to our senses. We feel threatened by our feelings. Any intense sensation can become an addiction subject to the whims of Craving because intense feelings and sensations reinforce our ego regardless of whether they are pleasant or unpleasant; feelings seem to shout out, “This is Me! Me!” Paradoxically, however, even as this strengthens my sense of who I am, it divides me. Whether I suppress or stoke my feelings, I am treating the feelings as if “they” were somehow separate from “me,” possessions I can hoard and discard. Grasping at “me” can lead to meeting my self apart from my life; I start related to my internal feelings and to the people and things around me not as part of an integral whole, but as a means to buttress my personal sense of who “I” am, what “the world” is, and what the relationship between us “should” consist of.
Once a muscle is developed, if it isn’t exercised the muscle tightens and cramps; once a feeling is appropriated as an integral part of my identity, not expressing it can lead to anxiety or depression.
There is an alternative to throttling our feelings, letting them run wild, or retreating to the world of disembodied ideas. The alternative is mindfulness, whose cultivation directly counteracts the grasp reflex of Craving. It’s helpful to compare the practice of mindfulness with the habits Craving indulges.
Craving seeks control; mindfulness rides the ebb and flow of opening up and letting go. Craving stimulates our appetite with ideas, fantasies, and images; mindfulness is a reunion of sensual and cognitive modes of knowing. Psychotherapy seeks a similar mode of existence in which thinking and feeling are reconciled to each other.
The core of Buddhist teaching is that noninvolvement is not possible: We cannot exist apart from all the myriad things that comprise and create our lives. Such engagement is the basic ground of our existence. We are connected; when you talk, I respond, and you respond to my response. Our feelings arise with each other as surely as sounds induced vibrations in the surfaces they touch. But when we are submerged by sounds we can grow deaf to their clamor; when we offer a space in which the sounds of our life may resound, a greater resonance emerges.
So Buddhist practice encourages us to let feelings freely arise and pass away, experiencing them fully without grasping them or rejecting them. This is not so dissimilar from what psychotherapy aims at; in Buddhism it is called “realizing the feelings within the feelings.” To realize our feelings within our feelings, to greet them with an open mind, we need to accept each feeling as it is. In order to do this, we need to stop discriminating among feelings on the basis of personal preference.
Once we get overly attached to picking and choosing our experiences we start rejecting not only some of our experiences but also some aspects of our selves. To heal the fissures that spring up within our selves and between our selves and the world, if we begin to by fully accepting all of our experience without discriminating between “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” the distinction between “I” and “it” also starts to drop away.
Our idea of who we are and how we exist shrinks down to a very small, circumscribed circle with ego at its center, desire as its radius, and fear as its circumference.
Love is a universal emotion that reaches out expansively, seeking to dismantle the boundaries between self and others; we sometimes run into problems when we try to reconcile these universal, transcendent aspects with the needs of a bounded personal ego. When the Metta Sutta teaches us that the way to be happy is to care for others, “suffusing love over the entire world,” it poses the koan of love, of how we balance the intimacy of connectedness with the needs of individuality.
Suffusing love over the entire world extends love to every manifestation of life. This means we seek to love each thought, each feeling, each sensation, each perception, each implies, each psychological state that arises from our selves…
…but it is important not to misconstrue the implications of this kind of love. Loving is not the same as liking. Loving an impulse does not necessarily mean giving into it; loving a thought does not necessarily mean agreeing with it; loving a person doesn’t mean we need to become involved in an enmeshed relationship. The loving balance the Metta Sutta leads us toward involves full engagement without excessive attachment.
Love cannot exist without understanding. Love is understanding. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. Husbands and wives who do not understand each other cannot love each other. Brothers and sisters who do not understand each other cannot love each other. Parents and children who do not understand each other cannot love each other.
Taking a vow need not involve building a cross of higher expectations on which we must crucify ourselves: It is more like having a map to consult when we inevitably get lost. When we take a vow to save all beings we realize we will always fall short. So taking a vow is not something we do once and then it is over and done with; once we take a vow, we have to continually renew it, time and time again.
The Metta Sutta gently urges us to constantly remind ourselves, and all we encounter that happiness is being wise; that being wise is being peace; and that being peace arises from loving all life, whatever it brings.
CHAPTER 4 Intimate Relationship: The Sandokai of Sekito Kisen Daiosho
We learn through meeting. This is why couples have an opportunity to grow through relationships: Intimate relationships offer a ground for meeting each other again and again. In meeting the other, we have an opportunity to come to know our true selves: We learn that knower, and knowing are inextricably linked. Who I am only arises with who you are: We are alone, but connected, one yet two neither one nor two.
“Are any of these realities really real?” Is there a True Reality out there? Zen practice answers clearly: “Yes—it’s just not what you think it is.”
Our ideas about our relationships are always more limiting than the acts of the relationship itself. Our ideas form pretty (or horrifying) pictures, but our lives take place moment by moment according to how we act, what we think, feel, and sense each moment. Reality is a momentary affair.
We’re all loved an none of us deserve it. Love is just the war things are. Limitless love, unborn and undying, is at the root of all existence; its self-expression is at the very base of all causes and all effects, all life and all death.
Cause and effect both necessarily derive from the great reality.
The words “high” and “low” are used relatively.
Within the light there is darkness, but do not be attached to that darkness.
Within the darkness there is light, but do not be caught by that light.
Light and darkness are a pair,
Like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.
Each things has its own intrinsic value,
And is related to everything else in function and position.
I cannot say to a client that her healing images are rooted in the universe’s caring unless I stand on the impersonal destruction of exploding stars. I cannot love my wife without realizing the deep hurts we can and do cause each other.
If we wish to bring our whole self to our relationships, we need to look without blinking at our wishes about who we’d like to be and our anxieties about who we fear we are. As Zen students, we must be honest about our delusions of seeing clearly.
Zen and psychotherapy are not about never getting angry, but about smiling at our anger. They are not about being constantly enlightened and healthy, but about finding light in darkness, darkness in light, health in sickness, and sickness in health.
We illuminate the dark alleys not by avoiding them but by exploring them with a lantern in our hand.
It’s sometimes harder to acknowledge how I can cling to false purity. We can learn from the light, but it is important not to get attached to it or take the light for granted.
Our relationship to what we see as dark and light determines whether we’re walking with it or standing still. If we get stuck in either, we can’t move our feet.
It’s not enough to acknowledge darkness, and acknowledge light: We must see that they are related to each other.
I can discover the very basis of our relationship in both its limitations and in our being enough to each other, limited though we are. Not being enough, we change and grow to deal with our conditions: Being enough to each other we can tolerate the changes and growth that create new ways of being with each other that still remain not enough. This way we endlessly renew ourselves and each other.
There is nothing special about perfection: If we reserve perfection for some rarefied, unusual occurrence, it becomes imperfect in its very restrictiveness. We lose perfection if we look to something beyond our immediate experience. If we focus overmuch on our vision of how we want life to be and ignore the mundane details of life itself, we may fail to realize how the special qualities of life are founded on our ordinary acts.
You cannot grasp the moon by reaching out to its reflection in the pond: You cannot heal yourself by projecting some image of yourself into your spouse and insisting that your spouse do what you “need,” and you cannot change a relationship just by talking about it.
The same is true for the relationships at the heart of psychotherapy. I don’t know how to do psychotherapy. It’s too big for me. I am learning how to sit down in my office and listen to someone. Each client teaches me a little more about how to listen. Every once in a while I even have something to say. But the therapy arises in how we look at each other, how we shake hands in the waiting room, how our eyes meet as we leave each other or share our lives together.
I also don’t know how to meditate or walk a spiritual path. So i just sit down on my cushion each day, and I bow to my friends, and to my family; I bow to my anger and suffering; I bow to my clients. As I bow, something seems to be moving.
Our lives are not a series of grand gestures, but the moments in which we make coffee, go to the bathroom, wash our hands, kiss our loved ones goodbye, work, play, and go to sleep. The sun does not set out to give forth glory: It simple burns itself up doing what’s in front of it, and in the darkness of that destruction light streams out.
There is one things of which I can be sure: However we resolve the issue, the next time we meet we will dance again.
Our lives transcend ourselves in each mundane act. Our lives are absolutely relative:
Hunting meteorites
An ordinary piece of granite
Stubbed my toe
Advising me
We both must be
Shared fragments of the sun.
CHAPTER 5 Empty Self, Connected Self: Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom Heart Sutra
For measurement one needs a ruler, some standard of comparison: The only way to measure ourselves is to compare ourselves to someone else or to some abstract standard. When we do this we treat ourselves as objects. Something measured is either big or small, good or bad. So when we measure ourselves, our self-judgements tend to lead to either pride or guilt, arrogance or depression: Whether the judgment leaves us feeling good or bad about ourselves, however, the inflation of deflation is of some image of ourselves as an object rather than the moving reality of self Its-self.
But what we are the images that comprise our selves? Experiences. Fantasies. Memories. Feelings. Habits. Thoughts. Sensations. Awareness. The Heart Sutra reminds us that these are all empty. This does not mean they don’t exist: It means that if we try to pin any of these down in isolation they will slip through our fingers.
Self is not unitary but the product of multiple drafts.
Ultimately…there is no personality “disorder” other than the disorder of thinking we have a fixed personality. Our “personalities” are temporary, partial expressions of a wider, constantly changing potentially.
In emptiness, we are not tainted or pure.
In Zen, we come to terms with our selves and find that we are both more and less than we thought.
If we can realize there is no fixed, “core” identity to the self, we begin to recognize that ultimately self cannot be damaged or mislaid.
The Heart Sutra’s revelation of emptiness asserts that no thing exists in and of itself: When it says “no body, no mind” it is, among other things, reminding us that there is no body without mind and no mind without body.
The way the body and mind present themselves to each other constitutes a critical are for defining self-identity. If we try to get to the bottom of the mind, we find the body; if we try to get to the bottom of the body, we find the mind there waiting for us…
Seeing is not a thing. You cannot grasp your sight; you cannot tell your eyes to see this book. Yet at this moment, as you read, you not only seeing, you are your Seeing.
We are not separate from our bodies. We do not “have” sensations and thoughts and feelings: We are sensations and thoughts and feelings. This is our direct experience, even though there is no “substance” to it. We cannot grasp our sensations, because the hand that grasps cannot hold itself. We cannot grasp the world “through” our bodily sensations, because we are not separate for the world; the world constitutes our body.
Our bodies rely on our minds, and our minds rely on our bodies, and both touch and are touched by the natural world in which we are immersed. Mind-body-nature form a necessary unity.
Because mind-body-nature are interconnected, each is empty: The physical world that gives rise to sensations, the sensation themselves, and our ideas about our sensations are all interconnected and always moving.
Our consciousness is dependent on the rise and fall of all the other realms of experience.
There is no contradiction between the “natural” spontaneity of movement and the need to learn the techniques for executing specific dance steps; each relies on the other. There is no contradiction between the freedom of zazen and the need for a strict adherence to the forms of right practice in particular posture, breath, and mindful attention.
The key to uniting spontaneity and formal technique is to act without any expectations or hopes of gaining something in particular. No “thing” exists as a goal separate and part from the ongoing activity of living. If there is no thing to attain, the mind is no hinderance.
Reaching for enlightenment, long hours of meditation heighten our frustration by showing us the vastness of our ignorance and desire. Realizing self as empty, we simply sweep the Kendo’s path and sit on our cushion.
Many people have difficulty understanding how Buddhism can reconcile its teachings of emptiness with its doctrine of karma. If there is no substantial thing that exists, no “doer” behind “deeds” but only “doing,” how can we be bound by the law of cause and effect? They look at a swordfight and say, “Because sword and swordsman are empty, when one person thrusts a saber through the other’s heart there is no one who kills and no one who is being killed.” This ignores a simple fact: Ripping somebody with a slashing blade will produce a lot of blood stains. Karma is a shorthand for reminding us that volitional actions produce repercussions. Zen archery teaches us a way of shooting in which there is no separation between archer, arrow, and target, but the arrow still goes somewhere. Buddhism is not aimless but devoted to saving all beings.
We can realize that the terrain on which all growths occurs…and the space on which we meet ourselves—is not a fixed plot of land but an empty field.
Our individual self develops not by accruing experience but by eliminating certain possibilities.
If I can recognize that my “identity” is not a characteristic “in” me, but merely a tag or a marker, I can recognize that my self faces a wide range of potentialities.
If we conceive of our self as the collection of our past experiences it can be hard to find new paths. If in contrast we conceive of our self as a nexus of potentialities, with certain ones being manifested at a particular time, then changing our self does not require subtracting from or adding to the self. Self-change only requires a turning, a rediscovery of potentialities that have always been there but have been temporarily excluded. The self as an accumulation of experience is a prison; the self as empty, as shimmering potentiality, is a prism that, depending on its turning, gives forth many different colors.
If I feel I must have a unique, special self that I can grasp firmly, I may become defensive if my self seems to slip away.
Separateness and oneness are not mutually exclusive: Buddhists say that the vast sky does not hinder the white cloud.
When the Heart Sutra tells us to proclaim the mantra, it tells us we cannot rest in empty silence but must actualize its wisdom. Stepping back to emptiness, we must step forward into form; we must find stillness in motion and movement at rest. We must not get stuck on the shoals of any one partial view. That point at which history and immediacy meet, boundary and infinity intersect, touching and proceeding-from dance is our original existence its-self.
Fundamentally, empty self is connected self.
CHAPTER 6 Host and Guest: The “Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi” by Tozan Ryokai
When we experience that everything in our life is moving, including us, we may have troubles finding our bearings. The need to commence with the fundamental principle of our lives is often most urgent when it is most difficult. There are times in our lives when all our strengths seem to fail us. There are times in all our lives when we find we cannot laugh the way we used to, when we become tired of hanging on, when we pray we are met by silence, when our faith dissolves, even against our will. Our loved ones get sick and die; our love itself sometimes turns into disappointment, frustration, and anger. We age, and our memory fails; our logic deserts us in the face of strong emotion. We try to fall back on what has worked in the past, and it fails; we search for firm ground and find quicksand. Here in California, the very ground on which we stand sometimes quakes beneath our feet. We can feel suffocated, dead insides, lost.
At this moment of reading, there is a book, a chair, some light, some feeling. That’s it, neither more nor less. There’s nothing special about it. It’s quite palpable.
We are traveling toward a horizoning rather than a thing.
In Buddhism the incarnation of wisdom (the Prajnaparamita) is depicted as female, the incarnation of compassion (Avalokitesvara) is male; these are the parents of our response to the inquiring impulse. When parents respond to their babbling infant, they respond out of care and compassion. Parents do not respond to their baby’s babbling in academic English; they babble back in baby-talk that is slightly more grammatical. In doing so, the infant learns ordered speech, the parents relearn spontaneity. Our parents understand our babbling questions that seek them out, because our parents know something about seeking: Our parents sought each other out. Our mother’s and father’s impulses were given room to wander and meet each other. Our parents gave birth to us; in giving birth to us, their inquiring impulse gave brith to our inquiring impulse.
How do we integrate the Absolute and the Relative, separateness and togetherness, part and whole? In technical Buddhist terms, these involve Tozan’s Five Ranks, which describe how form and image behold each other in the larger jeweled mirror, how the relative and absolute integrate in piles of three and five:
The first rank is like emptiness. And the second one is like form is form. And the third one is form is emptiness and emptiness if form.
In order to make this less intellectual, though, instead of talking about the Absolute and the Relative or Form and Emptiness or the Real and the Seeming, as the two aspects, let’s talk about water and waves.
The first rank is the water within the waves. And the second rank is the waves within the water. And the third rank is waves are water and water is waves… no difference.
It’s a kind of pattern of our life, or outline of our life. The first rank is about water being just ware. [Water is empty of divisions; it just flows. If you try to hold on to it, it slips between your fingers. It isn’t confined in any particular shape or essential form. In the sunlight it evaporates; in the cold it freezes.] When you understand that water is just water, and you understand the nature of water completely, then it’s how you live in the various configurations of water and find your way.
Enlightenment begins from finding ourself in the first rank where emptiness is emptiness. Finding ourself at the bottom of the ocean, just immersing ourselves in water. As a matter of fact, thought, we can’t stay in the first rank. The rule is: you can’t stay in the first rank. We have to move out, and start swimming. And all the rest of the ranks are about how we swim, and what is the goal of swimming, actually. Where are we swimmings to, and how do we do it?
In Zen meditation we sink to the bottom of the ocean. When we go home, we find we are swimming in the waves, the turbulent sea of this ocean. But that’s also water, that’s what we have to understand. That’s what Tozan is telling us. That’s also water. The waves are water. Waves are not something apart from water.
…the only way we can realize our self at the center of the universe is by treating each and every being we encounter as the center of the universe. The difficulty in doing this comes in finding the relationship between the many parts, the many centers of the universe, the many wholes, and the Whole. How do they connect? Each piece of our experience, to the extent that it appears to have its own separate identity, starts to feel disconnected from the other pieces. Making love seems separate from arguing. Our divorce feels separate from our marriage. Our vacation feels separate from our work. Our birth feels separate from our death.
The part loses sight of the whole; it feels like it is separate from the whole, even though the whole can only be constituted by its parts.
In Buddhism, the way each mundane thing courses with the entire Absolute is sometimes called “the teaching of the nonsentient.” The teaching of the nonsentient is the teaching of ordinary life: pebbles, rocks, tiles.
Each wave teaches us; each wave rests on the whole Ocean. Each wave carries the truth of our lives, because regardless of whether the wave is large or small, rough or smooth, right now on this wave the wave is my life.
We compound the mistake of being other-centered with the mistake of being self-centered. We get confused: We seek It in others, we seek It in our selves; we seek to return to some peace we think we had before our present upset; we think that we can only find happiness after resolving our present problems. In our search, we overlook It shining forth every where, every who, every what, every when.
…as we practice letting go of our expectations and fears, we find that ground of acceptance is wide enough to support light and dark, fire and water…we rediscover our wholeness through an effortless effort that is neither turning away nor touching. Facing the mass of fire this way, instead of being tortured by our burning desires, we are warmed by the flames even as we are fuel that burns freely and merrily. Standing at the center of the pyre, acknowledging our self-centered urges and allowing them to be consumed, we have the opportunity to commune with the blaze and, moving along with it, enjoy momentary flickers of incandescent joy.
…practice does not deepen so long as we are attempting to replicate a past experience.
Sitting on our cushion, whether or not we are successful in assuming the posture of a particular form of Zen practice, so long as we are practicing not just for ourselves but for the benefit of all beings, true eternity is flowing.
At the same time, if our practice is not for ourselves, we stand in danger of feeling subordinated or dominated by others: Then we may stop serving and fall into resentful servility.
Facing a mass of fire in our daily work, we stand at risk of burning out rather than being warmed and illuminated by the flames.
We get confused if we think a talent is our talent. The Fourth Rank is about realizing that our gifts do not life in us but in an interchange; we give our talents to the Source that provides our talents. We give power to the Absolute, and the Absolute empowers us. We serve Service, and let the Service do the serving. We just need to get out of the way by doing our part and not worrying about who’s on the top or bottom.
Our lives have the complex tang of the five-flavored herb. Life is always tasty. Even if it is sour or bitter, there is a fullness to life that fills our palate as surely as there is beauty and peace in the midst of ugliness and terror. The tastes of life arise in our intermingling. Where self and other meet each other, where Absolute and relative play guest and host to each other, this is the jewel mirror samadhi: the mirror and subject fulfilling each other and shinning bright.
CHAPTER 7 Actualizing the Fundamental Point
Rainbows cannot be grasped; they move along with us. In rainbows there is no color separate from sunlight and mist, no sunlight and mist separate from color. We are rainbows dependent on special conditions in order to be ourselves: We have no existence separate from those defining conditions, which are constantly changing. We divide the rainbow by naming its colors, but red, yellow, orange, green, blue, indigo, violet don’t exist: These are colorful labels, not colors themselves.
When the two mirrors face each other, no thing appears and no thing is left out. When client and therapist come forth in this way, they appear fully. Appearing fully means that whatever is expressed at the time is completely itself. Tears are salty, laughter is infectious. What’s there is there. When the client cries, it is just crying; there is no thing other than crying in the entire universe. Even the memory of laughter is obliterated. When sorrow is completely illuminated, happiness is dark.
This being so, the client’s crying cannot be a signal for anything else. A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh just a sigh: Time does not go by but is realized as the client’s and therapist’s entire lives rise up complete each moment. If the client’s tears fill the whole universe client, therapist and tears disappear in the pristine clarity of pure experience; there is no suffering and no release for suffering. In another moment, client and therapist smile, and another universe appears.
If we are attached to either knowledge or not-knowing, this is ignorance. If we are open but unattached to both knowledge and not-knowing, this stimulates a sense of wonder and discovery.
In denying and hiding her self, Shirley could not see how she was actualized by the myriad things. In this position death becomes a frightening annihilation, a disappearance rather than a transformation. The fact is, every being has its own place from which it interacts with all being.
If we feel isolated from the chain of being, life and death seem chasms apart. In reality, however, life is just a way of realizing ourselves by remembering ourselves; death is just a way of realizing ourselves by forgetting ourselves. Each forms a mirror for the other to study itself. We find our place each moment by dying to one moment and waking up to another.
If we neither shrink form our lives nor fear our deaths, we immerse our selves completely in our activity and forget our selves. If we forget ourselves, we leave room to be actualized by myriad things. “Those who get the message of the lute forget its strings.” The lute player becomes the lute and is actualized in notes forming melodies. Working at her job in the library, when Shirley is absorbed reading a novel, she becomes a book; when she helps someone research a topic, she becomes a host for knowledge and knowledge seekers. Like all of us, Shirley is a book, but not just a book: She is also a whole library.
Zen students go to Zendos hoping to find a special place where they can meet their selves. We tend to think our quest requires a journey to some other place than where we are, that we need to meet some other person than who we are. We have troubles seeing that every moment, every place we are immediately our original self.
When we are upset we say, “I’m not myself.” At such times we lose sight of who we are because, unable to embrace our wholeness, we get caught in a partial view: Lost in the woods, we see only trees. Feeling depressed, the whole world seems to be sadness far from any proposal of joy. Sick with cancer, our body seems immersed in dying far removed from any prospect of life, abandoned by our lover, we feel we are unlovable far from any project of intimacy.
Each moment we express our whole life, but only as we are at that moment.
Time does not flow from past to future…We do not move through time, but in our moment-by-moment existence, in our constant changing, we expressed time. As we respond to each moment, our facial expression changes: Expressing ourselves, we give time a human face
When our expressions of our self change, we don’t turn into something else, we simply are a new person each moment. We can never change who we are, but we can be ourselves differently each moment, a whole new person in a whole new universe.
Our lives are always burning fiercely: As fuel and flame meme teach other, each flicker of the blaze is all-consuming, no matter what its particular expression.
Our practice lies not in riding ourselves of our problems but in finding our problems again and again, each time in more subtle forms, until we are on intimate terms with them. Then we start to experience freedom. This is not a freedom from fear and sadness, for these are still frequent companions in a world filled with suffering and hurt. Rather, this is a freedom from isolation and disconnectedness, a freedom that celebrates the realities of our lives.
In Zen practice, and life, there are no insignificant moments, nor does anything special happen.
Practicing with each other, we do not attain realization: Practice simply puts our realization into play. Our realization is our enjoyment of each other’s play, our play expresses our delight in each others’ practice. In this practice-realization, mastery involves responsiveness; it requires a deepening of the relationships in which we engage and are engaged, a willingness to being called to our calling. Master is not a matter of achieving domination and control of our subject, but a matter of coming forth together with our subject.
When some realization comes forth in our practice of either Zen or psychotherapy, it is not my or your accomplishment. Realization is larger than us: As we touch it and are touched by it, it fills us completely and enlarges us beyond our small ideas of ourselves. If we try to take individual credit for it or copyright it, we diminish it and, losing contact with It, feel once again diminished ourselves, bereft of any master. True mastery leads not to pride, but to unfathomable wonder.
Each being, each physical object absorbs heat and radiates heat: We are constantly exchanging energy with each other.
If we want to understand what’s real, we have to make it real: We have to realize every bit of It ourselves.
We actualize the fundamental point swimming at the meeting of wave and water, breathing at the intersection of wind and air, living in the service of the larger firmament of love. We do this by studying ourselves, asking, “Who am I?” We all want to discover, “Who am I?” We want to discover our true nature. But we run into problems because we think our true nature is like some elemental ogre, buried deep and out of sight.
Prospecting for who I am, I hope to make some discovery that will enrich me personally and allow me to stake a valuable claim. Although I may fear that my inner core consists of some base substance as dull and heavy as lead, still I hope to find gold deep within the mine of my self. But as I continue my search, I begin to discover that this “who I am” is like the wind: It reachers everywhere I see, everything I touch. In some kind of simple alchemy, it turns out that wherever I am, there I am.
Practice without realization would be a mindless golem; realization without practice would be a disembodied ghost. Practice and realization always arise together and help each other out. Practice and realization always arise together and help each other out. Practice and realization intersect at the horizon of our lives: the cloud meeting the mountain, dry granite glistening moistly in a shaft of sunlight, ocean touching the sky.
Practicing our realization we begin to understand: this mind, right here, this moment, is Buddha: Treat it with respect. Realizing our practice we begin to understand: This body, right here, this moment, is enlightened delusion: Treat it with kindness and compassion.
“Instructions for the Zen Cook,” Zen Master Dogen:
“When making a soup with ordinary greens, do not be carried away by feelings of dislike towards them nor regard them lightly; neither jump for joy simply because you have been given ingredients of superior quality to make a special dish…a dish is no necessarily superior because you have prepared it with choice ingredients, nor is a soup inferior because you have made it with ordinary greens. When handling and selecting greens, do so wholeheartedly, with a pure mind, and without trying to evaluate their quality, in the same way in which you would prepare a splendid feast. The many rivers which flow into the ocean becomes the one taste of the ocean; when they flow into the pure ocean of the dharma there is no such distinctions as delicacies or plain food, there is just one taste, and it is the buddhadharma, the world itself as it is…Never feel aversion toward plain ingredients…male the best use of whatever greens you have.”
