A year ago, I was on a retreat led by Joseph Goldstein, and I admitted to him that I’d been feeling lonely. “I’ve got the antidote to that!” he said, as delighted as I’ve ever seen him.

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes. Write poetry! It comes out of the same space.”

The same space: What could that mean? And how did Joseph come to write poetry? We ended the conversation with his promising to send me some poems and encouraging me to send him mine. So here we are now, he with pages of his poetry and I with a pile of questions.

“Joseph,” I start, “I was so excited to have you prescribe an antidote to loneliness—and to discover you were writing poetry—that I didn’t ask what you meant. What is that space?”

Joseph Goldstein (JG): There’s a line that’s relevant
here . . . [he rifles through his pages]. It’s the title of my poem “Love of My Lonely Hours.” That’s the feeling.

Years ago,
winter brought joy.
Now,
love of my lonely hours
fills the winter grey silence
and poems,
like Christmas candles,
illuminate the night.

Amy Gross (AG): So the poetry comes out of loneliness?

JG: We need to parse what loneliness means, because for me loneliness has more to do with the feeling of aloneness than feeling diminished or abandoned or contracted . . .

AG: . . . which is what most people would associate with the word lonely?

JG: Yes, but when loneliness transfigures into aloneness, there’s a poignancy to that space and an emptiness and a stillness and a gentleness—it’s all those qualities that give rise to poetry.

AG: After that retreat, when I would feel a stab of loneliness, I’d remember what you said, get interested in the feeling, and almost immediately feel that I was not alone. There was a sense of communion in that space, of listening, waiting and listening. I was in some kind of dialogue. I wasn’t alone.

JG: So this ties into my one- or two-paragraph book [he grins] called “The Myth of Intimacy.” The myth of intimacy is that you need two people to have intimacy. But “intimate” is another word for this space—it’s so intimate the way it’s experienced; it doesn’t need another person.

AG: You’re reminding me of a line from Rumi: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” What are we listening to?

JG: To quote another poet, Pessoa,

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.
But I don’t want the present. I want reality.

So in a way it’s listening to—I was going to say messages, but it’s not exactly a message. It’s just opening to some underlying reality that may be obscured in the busyness of our lives. When we’re in this quiet space, we are very intimate with what’s going on. So, for example, one of the poems goes like this:

Bird song
in the open sky
of my mind

That came when I was doing walking meditation outside. The normal understanding of reality is that the birds are up there in the sky, and I’m here and I’m listening to the bird. But in that moment there was no separation between up there and in here. I think one other quality of the poetic mind space is that it’s very sensitized. It’s very delicate and sensitive to things that are normally covered over. It can be a moment of seeing something new or having a new perception. In aloneness, it has the space to flower. And it’s appreciating the stillness and quiet in which the words can sparkle.

AG: Which reminds me of your poem about how you started writing poetry:

The Muse
Something happened
in my seventy-fifth year—
a channel opened
to oceans of space,
where words sparkle
in their sparse delight
calling, calling, calling.

You’re being called. And you notice being called. In your teaching, you’ve often talked about Noticings Per Minute—“NPMs”— how, with practice, the number of thoughts, sensations, emotions noticed goes up. The more we practice, the more mind space is available to be aware, to notice. “The Muse” is saying that when you’re alone, there’s an openness, an undistractedness, so when phenomena arise, you’ve got the mind space not only to notice them but also to let them flower—flower into poetry?

JG: What I love about the practice of poetry is crafting language. That itself—there’s great satisfaction in it. There was a big turning point when I first started writing. I showed some of the work to a really accomplished poet friend of mine, and she said something that changed my whole attitude toward writing. She said it was all about revision. I had been in this very enthusiastic, rather sophomoric state where I thought every word that came out of my mind or my pen was perfect from the start, which is ridiculous.

AG: That brings me to something I read in preparing for this conversation with you. In an anthology called Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism and Contemporary American Poetry, the Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer mentions Allen Ginsberg’s famous writing instruction: “First thought, best thought.” Philip Whalen questions that, saying “‘First thought, best thought’ is different from ‘first word, best word.’” Leading Fischer to confide to the reader: “Allen does a lot of rewriting.”

JG: Exactly. I can see “first thought” as that spark of insight you might get about something. For example, I was just sitting with morning coffee, quiet, in that space of enjoying the solitude, and my mind and body went into noticing and feeling how everything was continually disappearing. That was the first thought for a poem, noticing that everything is swirling down the drain of time. But then there was a long process of building out from it and a huge amount of revision. So the final thing—final for now—was completely different from the first draft.

AG: When a moment of noticing arises, do you start playing with it in your mind, or do you pick up a writing instrument and go to a pad?

 JG: I’ll start off often with an insight, an abstract insight. Like with “The Drain of Time,” the first thing I wrote was the line that you’ve heard many, many times: “The thought of your mother is not your mother; it’s just a thought”—and then I noticed that that thought too had gone down the drain. So I was trying to build around that. But then I realized—and this is part of my own learning—it’s a little too philosophical or abstract. For a better poem, I needed to bring it down into the stuff of the world.

AG: “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said.

JG: “Show, don’t tell,” said one of the poets giving me feedback. So that’s part of my learning. Because my mind is so philosophically oriented, my first scribblings often start with the more abstract, but then I cut that away. I really love that part of the process. I think of Michelangelo, who said that he cut away through stone to reveal the figure that was there. With writing, it’s almost like sculpting space through words. Deletion is the best because then the poem gets pure and sparse.

AG: That taste for the pure and sparse seems to be a mark of contemporary poetry. In an essay in Beneath the Moon, Allen Ginsberg wrote “For most of the Moderns [Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac] . . . the motive for poetry has been purification of mind and speech. . . . Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with a phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it.” Poetry writing certainly sounds like a meditation practice: You go into the silence. Rilke says “you walk into yourself. . . .”

JG: Or walk into nonself or walk into emptiness.

AG: Rilke writes that solitude was the necessary condition for his poetry, and then, interestingly, he says this: “What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.” That’s how I’ve come to understand meditation—as meeting every little thing that arises with love. Here’s Rilke again: “There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, and difficult to bear. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, a vast inner solitude to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours is what you must be able to attain.”

JG: I think people who are somewhat experienced in meditation have already gone through what is “vast, heavy, and difficult to bear.” For me, not only is it not difficult or hard to bear, it is a joy. I love that space. And that also could be a link between the meditative process and the creative process of writing.

AG: I happened to open Maxine Hong Kingston’s book To Be the Poet. She had decided she had written her last long book—now she was going to become a poet. She was going to be in the moment. She asked two of her poet friends how to get the poems coming, one of the friends being Tess Gallagher. Both said you have to clear a day. No distractions. It sounds like retreat.

JG: Clearing space is a beautiful image, but I’ll say that having done many retreats and so cleared a lot of days already, I think it need not be a whole day—clearing the morning would work, and sometimes it’s simply the quiet space of a few moments. The mind needs to be quiet, and depending on how much training one has had in quieting the mind, it takes less or more time to do it.

AG:  For you, Joseph, in this space, what often arises is contemplation of aging.

JG: Which was not planned. That itself was interesting. I didn’t have it in my mind with a thought like “Oh, I want to write about the aging process.” These moments are just what came up.

AG: You’re asking a lot of questions. Here’s “Lazy Day at 76”:

Morning coffee
and a first glimpse
into the unknown day,
waiting for that pulse of life
to push through the pale joy
of sitting,
doing nothing.

Going for a walk
is almost too much
on this day of questionable ease:
Is it simply resting up
to save the world
or the faint glimmer of decline?
I’ll decide tomorrow
if I awaken in the morning light.

I remember your saying, decades ago, that meditation is practice for dying. I think about that a lot, more and more every year. One thing you’re doing in these poems is embodying ways to face the signposts with a level head, opening to the uncertainties around death.

JG: Yes, I just recently came up with “The Harbingers” as a title for the first group of poems because they were all harbingers of aging, dying, death. To me, practice for dying is implicit in all the questions about aging. There may be an unacknowledged acknowledgment of the fact that it’s coming, but it’s in there even if it’s not named explicitly.

AG:  I teach mindfulness to a group of elders, and, frankly, I’ve been afraid to share your idea that meditation is practice for dying. I dodge it by saying it’s practice for aging.

JG: Right, but in your class, it would be interesting to test the waters, and drop the D-word a few times, because my impression is that people, as they get older, are very aware of death and that it’s coming. It may be a huge relief for them to talk about it. It’s like something Sharon [Salzberg] said early on. When she first came to Buddhism, she was so relieved to hear the first noble truth—that suffering was acknowledged. It’s kind of the same thing with death. I think people may be relieved to have that opened up. Especially as they get older, in one way or another people know that they’re going to die, whether they really let it in or not. How can you be a certain age and not think about it?

AG: I’m going to try it.

JG: I’ll be interested to hear how it goes, and maybe you’ll say “Boy, Joseph, that was a stupid idea.” Since we don’t know how people will respond, you put it out and have to be very sensitive to the response. Some people won’t go there, and that’s fine. But other people may want to.

AG: Another remark about writing struck me as relevant to what you’re doing. Here’s the Native American poet Joy Harjo: “Poetry is going to the places that have no words and finding the words.” And that too can describe what happens on retreat, in meditation. You can be overtaken by a feeling and respond with curiosity: What is it? Where’d it come from? And then you find the words to understand what arose.

JG: Well, I think that one of the experiences people have on retreats is a very intimate experience with the breath, with the body, with emotions, because there’s no separation. That’s kind of the essence of intimacy: nonseparation. It’s just oneself getting out of the way. The Chinese poet Li Po ended a poem with these words: “We live together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.” So that’s kind of meditative. When we take ourselves out of the picture, then all that’s left is everything. To me, that is the definition of intimacy.

AG: This ties right into Norman Fischer on what meditation can do. “The grip on self can very naturally loosen, the grip on meaning loosens, and there is the possibility of entering wholeheartedly into a dark or unknown territory.”

 JG: Or into a light and unknown territory.

AG: Yes! Once again, you’re reframing the emotional tone from frightening to delightful. In fact, Fischer goes on: “An interesting footnote is that it is not a struggle. It is the release from struggle.” After that retreat with you, I was sitting at my table facing the water and sky. The table is white, it’s shiny and reflective—and a bird in the sky streaked across it. It felt like it streaked through me too. There was a recognition of nonseparation, and the possibility of doing something with that sensation—it was a poetic moment. There wasn’t the agony of writing or the anguished-writer self. It was a gift.

JG: Yes, that’s exactly my experience. Something happens, or there’s a perception or an insight, and it sparks that interest in expressing it. So where’s your poetry?

 AG: I have nothing to show—I make notes, I pull away from them. But our conversation gave me the courage to be curious: When a friend who is a poet and meditation teacher offered an evening of teaching poetry, I actually dared go to it. And then I signed up for a Ruth Ozeki writing workshop at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Before our conversation, I would have been too writing-phobic to participate. At the end of the retreat, Ruth asked us to say what our plan for writing was. I said “I am never going to write something for publication, and I’m going to really enjoy writing.” She looked a little startled.

JG: That makes perfect sense. 

The post Finding the Words appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I once fell in love with a person who interrupted our stroll in the middle of a crowded street, took my face in his hands, and told me that he never wanted to spend any time apart from me. We’d been a couple for nearly half a year and had decided to take a day trip to New Haven (where I’d gone to school) to explore the city’s art museums and my old haunts. We walked down Chapel Street on a bright spring day and ducked into a bookstore where we kissed in the nonfiction section and bought cards to write to each other. We caffeinated at a coffee shop where I used to study, and I took him to each dorm where I’d lived. We gazed up at the windows and he kissed my forehead, telling me he wished he’d known me then.

But even during our first week together, amid the fever pitch of our early relationship, a sentence arose, unbidden, in my mind: All things contain the seed of their own destruction. I was startled. The voice was kind, not dire; the words felt more like wisdom than a warning. I paid attention but ultimately dismissed them.

I had heard this lesson, expressed myriad ways, ever since I was a child. My parents, both devout Hindus, taught my brother and me that change is life’s only constant: the sky would always darken after a sunset, green leaves would always burn crimson in the autumn, and our bodies would grow feeble as the years passed. My father still reminds me that suffering ensues when we expect things to be permanent though they are not. 

As a palliative care doctor, I encounter the most marked manifestation of impermanence every day: that of bodily illness and death. There is the young man with end-stage stomach cancer that had shrunk with chemotherapy only to invade his liver and lungs quite suddenly; the older woman with Parkinson’s whose tremors were manageable until one day they grew so severe that she couldn’t walk anymore; the gentleman with heart failure who gasped when he spoke, his breathlessness worsening each day. My patients often share photos of who they used to be, their bodies fuller, their smiles wide. Sometimes memory is their sharpest pain: I felt so good a few months ago when the chemotherapy was still working. Why did it stop working? I’m taking all of my medications, so why is my breathing getting worse? 

Dying is a series of incremental losses: We become newly dependent on others to walk or change our clothes. Our appetites fade. Pain forces us to part ways with activities that once brought us joy. My patients and I often talk about living amid the chilling uncertainty that accompanies illness, and they tell me how they have coped with intense change in the past. Most haven’t deeply considered the philosophy of impermanence, but those who embrace it tell me about the freedom it confers. A body that grows weaker is slightly less shocking. Shifts in relationships are normalized. When receptivity to change supplants resistance, grief can feel like a gentler presence.

Yet everyday life is also a series of losses. And outside the hospital I couldn’t easily translate the philosophy I discussed with my patients into my daily life. My partner and I read each other poetry in each of our native languages and laughed when my dog gave him endless kisses. He didn’t want to disclose our relationship to an ex-girlfriend; I wondered whether I could trust him. We cooked elaborate meals for each other and sent the other home with leftovers. We talked seriously about how we’d combine our families’ traditions on our wedding day and discussed when we might have a child. When we fought about our differing communication styles, I grew distant and unable to express my concern for fear of seeming needy.

What made the relationship real was also what made it unbearable: the constant presence of change. 

While I could accept the idea of impermanence when helping my patients contend with dying and suffering, I couldn’t do the same when living my life.

Much of what I do as a doctor and a writer depends on observation: How do people behave when everything is on the line? What do they do when they think that nobody is looking? Who do they try to be, and why? Both practices demand control, the opposite of surrender. I’d told myself a story about my partner and our relationship, clinging unintentionally to a static image of each. Yet I’d forgotten that every story is ultimately about change. And while I could accept the idea of impermanence when helping my patients contend with dying and suffering, I couldn’t do the same when living my life.

A few months later I flew to New York to attend a friend’s wedding. I sent my partner photos of the newlyweds and the cake; he sent back pictures of himself cuddling my dog. The day I returned, his texts were distant. When he stopped by that night, he gave me a brief hug and spoke to me in a detached voice, as though I were a stranger. 

“I don’t think we should be together anymore,” he said.

I couldn’t find my words. I could barely feel the couch beneath me. I made sure that I was awake, that this was actually happening, that the person who couldn’t meet my eyes was the same person whose voicemail yesterday had said he couldn’t wait to see me. Shock rendered me silent: I couldn’t think to ask what went wrong, or whether he thought our relationship was worth at least a conversation about what happened. And though we agreed to take some time to consider the best path forward, he texted me a few days later, his tone formal, professional. Though he respected and cared for me, ending our relationship was the rational and logical thing to do, he said. I didn’t know what to say. I never wrote him back.

We don’t know when the diagnosis will come. We don’t know when the disease will worsen. We don’t know when love will arrive. We don’t know when it will fade. We can only know that the unexpected will happen, that certainty is a falsity, and that things will be impermanent regardless of how tightly we clench our fists around them. We mourn the brief lives of solitary moments, hoping that running reels through our minds might resuscitate them. And no matter how often my own life has shown me this truth, I relearn it in new ways each time loss arrives.

The loss of a relationship is not the same as the loss of a life. Suffering a sudden betrayal is not the same as dying from heart failure. Yet both can teach us how to cultivate a new relationship to surrender and acceptance. This doesn’t require forgetting or denying the past. It requires only that we examine it like a series of photographic stills, impressions we can retain and learn from with compassion instead of judgment.

In the days after our conversation, I lost my appetite and lay awake at night alternately crying and devoid of emotion. As I drove to work each morning, I tried to corral my emotions by remembering what I knew intellectually but couldn’t yet feel: Surrender is the path to salvation. Experiencing equanimity requires welcoming change. Embracing the ubiquity of transformation can offer transcendence. Yet I still searched for the reasons why the relationship had ended so abruptly, though this effort was nothing more than submission to an undertow: I found myself floundering in the depths, the search for an anchor perpetually elusive.

Not long thereafter, I sat with an elderly woman who hadn’t seen a doctor for fifty years. She felt her back snap one afternoon while gardening. Lung cancer had spread to her spine. She was too frail for chemotherapy. “I was fine until I suddenly wasn’t,” she said, looking out of the window at the gray sky that blanketed the city. I thought of Joan Didion’s famous lines: “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” 

As I left her room, I realized that in between the moment he’d left me a longing voicemail and the moment he knocked on my door, the only certainty was change. The way I’d felt in our first month together could never last, because it was the way we felt together in that first month. The second month existed only because the first had passed. And as time marched on, so did every sweet and hard moment of our relationship. The times when we saw in each other an unvarnished goodness coexisted with the times when the pain between us made it hard to look at one another. 

All things contain the seed of their own destruction—including the confusion and shock I initially felt. For even finitude offers gifts: though we will lose the things we can’t release, we will also lose the things we can’t wait to let go of. As I loosened my grip on the relationship I’d lost, as accepting its mystery became more important than understanding its demise, I began to feel how surrender begets both freedom and forgiveness. 

He would always be the person who bought me a beautiful card he’d never write, the one who said he’d never told anyone besides me about his depression, the one who accused me of holding him at a distance when I didn’t share my every feeling, the one whose mother had never met any of his other girlfriends, the one who gave me books I still reread, the one I’d see around afterward, both of us knowing I’d chosen to say nothing about something that had once meant everything. 

In the months that followed, when I thought of him, new lines came to mind, these from Mary Oliver: 

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. 

The post A Gift appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When regrets about my failures and misfortunes begin to overwhelm me and my life feels disappointing, I have learned to seek guidance from two of my spiritual heroes, the Zen master Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931–1995) and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Maezumi Roshi once responded to my expressions of remorse for opportunities lost as he had to many other practitioners at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Smiling gently but unable to resist the urge to tease me, he said that I had so far failed to appreciate my life. “Please encourage yourself,” he had also written, “so that your practice is fully to appreciate this transient, frenzied life as the whole self-contained, self-fulfilled life.” And Nietzsche, whose suffering and loss were exponentially greater than mine, came to believe that the ultimate challenge in life is amor fati, to love your fate. Think of “fate” here as the simple, unchangeable “given”: what simply is, whether we like it or not. For Nietzsche, self-pity, disabling regret, and disappointment that reality is the way it is or that the past was what it was were clear signs of spiritual weakness. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: . . . not just to bear the given, the necessary, still less to conceal it . . . but to love it.”

Excellent advice from both Maezumi and Nietzsche, but without serious reflection, I would have probably responded by saying something like, “Oh, sure. Of course I appreciate my life. There have been amazingly good times, times of plentitude and peace, times of friendship, love, and laughter. I reflect back on these with gratitude and appreciation.” But this response wouldn’t have satisfied these two contemplative spirits. Maezumi would most likely have sighed in loving disappointment; Nietzsche would have scowled in open condemnation. They hadn’t exhorted me to appreciate and love only the good things in life—the pleasures, successes, and victories. They had challenged me to appreciate the whole mess—pleasant and painful—and to love what can’t be changed, no matter how debilitating it has been. They had directed me to love it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because there it is: reality, staring me in the face.

But is that feasible—to love and appreciate my injuries and sicknesses, my humiliating weaknesses, my dishonesty, greed, and egocentricity, and the numerous acts of cowardice by which I have hidden all this from everyone? Am I somehow to love everything I should have done but didn’t, everything I shouldn’t have done but did? I cringe every time I bring any of that to mind. Even though I would prefer to be oblivious to all of these weaknesses of character and pretend that they don’t exist, they frequently come unbidden to mind, often accompanied by a growing sense of disappointment. Regrets, guilt, and shame don’t necessarily outnumber the successes, pride, and pleasures in my life, but they do weigh more heavily on me.

So if Maezumi and Nietzsche meant loving the whole of my life, including the humiliating failures of spirit, the challenge is magnified enormously. But why should I appreciate the unappreciable? Why even attempt to love the seemingly unlovable dimensions of my past, my character, and whatever life has doled out? Even if this demand were intellectually plausible, it would still strike me as viscerally unpalatable. But taking their admonitions seriously, given my respect for these two insightful teachers, I realize that what they were teaching was their realization that spiritual depth and human shallowness are inseparable. They are always found together.

If we have imagined that the great Zen master and the world-renowned philosopher didn’t face excruciating failures and setbacks or experience suffering or make mistakes as we have, we would be dead wrong and would have missed the point of their teachings. In fact, the tales of woe in these two lives approach tragic dimensions. They both faced extreme hardship, suffering, even humiliation, but in visionary moments, they broke through to the other side of these difficulties, tapping into an enormous reservoir of personal power. In that awareness, they witnessed the magnificent beauty of all life just as it is, encompassing, as it does, inconceivable difficulties, hardships, and challenges. They experienced the miracle that this present reality has unfolded precisely as it has.

The crucial point is this: Because we are finite beings, pain, failure, and depression are inevitably woven into the very fabric of our lives. To accept that basic fact is to finally come to terms with what it means to be human. This fundamental self-acceptance is the basis of self-respect, and self-respect is the seed and substance of an awakened life. Because the past is what it is and, as a result, I am who I am, my task is to embrace the whole of my life without denial or revulsion. Lacking that level of self-integration, I’m not really working with who I am, thereby disabling the only chance I have to make skillful, transformative moves in life. As both Nietzsche and Maezumi knew, the most vibrant individuals are those who have learned to smile upon all aspects of their experience with open, honest inclusion.

Recognizing who you are and learning to be at ease with it is the essential, nonnegotiable point of departure for any greater profundity in life. It is only through a disciplined integration of all dimensions of our past that we learn to work through the problems that have been so disabling and, on that basis, to work creatively with the world. Nietzsche called this reintegration of the past “knowledge acquired through suffering,” and it’s what Buddhists contemplate in their meditations on human suffering. These practices demand unflinching honesty, a level of truthfulness and openness about our lives that is not easy to acquire. The Perfection of Wisdom sutras upon which Maezumi’s Mahayana Buddhism was founded stress the idea that the capacity to tolerate the truth about oneself and the world—to set aside self-placating delusions and face the way things really are—is absolutely essential to the awakening of freedom in life. Nietzsche frequently wrote that one measure of spiritual strength is how much truth you can bear. Being able to maintain a courageous inner dialogue between successes and failures, joys and suffering, strengths and weaknesses requires the capacity to face the truth and to gather all aspects of your life into an intelligible whole. Love the truth, Maezumi and Nietzsche seem to be saying, whatever that is, because the truth will set you free.

This truth about my life includes far more than my own choices and decisions. It also encompasses aspects of my life that I had no role in creating—the imprints of family, community, culture, language, and the long and complicated history of our species. All of this just happened—it is my fate or destiny. It includes accidents that have befallen me, humiliations and suffering that have come my way through no particular fault of my own. We must somehow embrace not only what we did or didn’t do but also what’s been done to us and what simply happened for whatever reasons. To regret or deny or resent any part of this is what Buddhists call delusion. Maezumi and Nietzsche exhort me to embrace it all as the essential content of my life—not just to accept it but to appreciate and love it.

With that in mind, we can see that what both Maezumi Roshi and Nietzsche were pursuing was something much larger than just appreciating or loving their own individual lives. What they both aspired to appreciate and love is life itself, the agonies and the sublimities of all living beings. For Maezumi, this is the basis of the bodhisattva’s vow to absorb the suffering of all sentient beings and take the challenge to redeem it, to make it right. Maezumi called this “wisdom sought for the sake of everyone.” Beyond the Zen master’s own personal awakening, then, is the depth dimension of that goal—the awakening of their community, of the entire species so that all human beings might participate in the creation of a new world. By extending their sense of responsibility as far as possible beyond their individual lives, Maezumi and Nietzsche imagined themselves embracing all humanity and all life. And they aspired to do this not just in thought and intention but in everything they do.

Still, I wonder how to go about loving what I quite honestly don’t love. Where do I even begin? Nietzsche suggests the answer in a paragraph in The Gay Science entitled “One must learn to love.” He starts with our love of music, showing how that love wasn’t simply innate but was cultivated over long stretches of time through much listening. We listen repeatedly until the music becomes part of us. And it is not just love of music that is acquired this way, Nietzsche says. We had to learn to love everything we now love through patience and discipline until gradually a space opens within us for that new love to reside. “There is no other way,” he tells us. “Even love has to be learned.” Even the love and appreciation of oneself. So Nietzsche challenges himself: Amor fati—to love the given, what cannot be changed. “Let that be my love from now on,” he writes. “Someday I want only to be a Yes-sayer.”

Becoming a “Yes-sayer” means affirming all past and present reality as the necessary starting point for creating a new future. But how is this affirmation to be accomplished? Through practice, Maezumi Roshi says. Daily, focused, mindful practice of mental-spiritual disciplines specifically designed to enable embracing reality as it is, without excuses, avoidances, or delusions. Embracing it fully allows us to work with it by bringing all positive powers at our disposal to bear on it: presence of mind, attentiveness, energy, kindness, patience, courage, generosity, wisdom, compassion—and finally, love. These can be learned, and even if this aspiration feels like it’s too far beyond us, for Maezumi and Nietzsche, the path of that transformative learning is simple and right here where we already are: Carefully designed intentions. Daily practice. Simple steps. Just do it.

The joy of waking up to who and where you are—and loving it—is an ecstatic experience of freedom.

Although in his era Nietzsche’s culture lacked the explicit and highly sophisticated practices of interior transformation that Buddhists had been developing for over two millennia, he had mastered the essential formula—“long practice and daily work”—and attempted to apply it in his own way. Nietzsche called this kind of self-discipline “a rare and great art” and knew from experimenting with his own life that through the everyday practices of self-acceptance and self-sculpting, human beings could “experience their most exquisite pleasure.” This pleasure, the joy of waking up to who and where you are—and loving it—is an ecstatic experience of freedom. So when Nietzsche asks himself “What is the seal of having become free?” he answers, “No longer to be ashamed before oneself.” That’s saying it plainly: the “seal,” or sign of freedom, is that you have learned to love your fate, to appreciate your life, and by pushing through debilitating shame, to tap into the selfless energy of openhearted living.

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“Did the Chinese beat you?” the little girl asked me. It was the first sentence I heard when I arrived in Dharamsala on a miserably cold December night in 1983. The bus shook and rattled up the winding mountain road. I was tired and my head felt swollen, but I said, “Yes.” It sounded right.

I was born in a remote village to the northwest of the immense Tibetan Plateau. We had no running water, electricity, or paved roads. The most advanced thing, to the wonderment of the villagers, was one family’s sewing machine. In the daytime, grown-ups dug canals or worked in the fields. In the evening, at the blow of the whistle, they attended meetings at the commune hall, where cadres made them recite from Mao’s Little Red Book. It was during these meetings that people were indoctrinated along the Party line to show absolute allegiance to the leadership of the Great Helmsman. At the end of each meeting, they strained their throats shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!” Everyone learned to hold their tongue, to obey orders and instructions to the letter. No one had to think.

Occasionally, soldiers would arrive at our village on horseback, dressed in faded green uniforms and chain-smoking. They were treated with respect. Large meetings were staged in the village square, during which these important people made long speeches that were then translated for the villagers. The soldiers inspected the new canals, the commune’s prayer-hall-turned-donkey-sheds, and the barley fields where red flags fluttered. They were nice to kids, often giving us candies. They didn’t scold us or chase us away for begging them to hand out more.

Nevertheless, years later, on that wet winter night in India, I told the little girl that the Chinese beat me. “I know,” she said. “They are terrible people.”

Layers of confusion enveloped me when I was sent into exile. To begin with, I didn’t know that the Chinese were different from us. I couldn’t understand why my great-uncle hated the blue canvas shoes, steel mugs, and other items that my mother bought from the commune store; or why the Red Guards had destroyed the monastery in front of our house. I didn’t know why I had to be smuggled out of Tibet.

I have had decades to find answers to these questions, to dig into our history and the political dilemma we find ourselves in today. The years away from home have transformed me into a vastly different person from the small boy whom my parents—at my great-uncle’s advice—sent away to become a monk at the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala.

My great-uncle was the abbot of the local monastery in Old Tibet, and his faith in religion was as unshakable as his resolution not to flee in the aftermath of the occupation. This belief was based on his understanding of Buddhism and trust that ultimately ley-gyu-dey: “The law of karma prevails.” Even during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, when he became the commune’s shepherd, he continued to chant his daily mantras in the company of grazing sheep and goats, away from the prying eyes of the cadres. Until his death in 1988, he never betrayed his belief and steadfastly maintained his monastic vows.

When reality knocks at the door, other things flee through the window.

My father, on the other hand, was a product of the great historical upheaval that had turned his familiar world upside down and forced him into a new socialist world, where the old value system had no practical application in life’s daily struggle. His faith in religion was shallow and his understanding of the politics of occupation and suppression was even more limited. He smoked and drank. Worse still, he bought canned pork, fish, and chicken (Tibetans generally don’t eat these, and they were strictly prohibited in our house) while my great-uncle was away in the hills with the flock. My father also befriended some of the men who, I learned many years later, were the first to volunteer when Red Guards ordered the destruction of the monastery that my great-uncle had presided over.

Once, when our rationed stock of barley was running low, my father wanted to sell the bronze Buddha image that our family had managed to hide during the destructive years of the Cultural Revolution. A heated argument broke out between my great-uncle and my father. “You cannot sell it,” Great-Uncle said, sitting cross-legged, kneading his rosary. This was in the early 1980s when there was a slight relaxing of the policy over religion in Tibet.

“We need money to buy food,” my father said, rolling up the sleeves of his chupa like a butcher about to slaughter a sheep.

“It’s sinful. This will bring no good.” Great-Uncle didn’t raise his voice, but I noticed that his aged fingers were rolling hard on the beads.

Days later, the bronze Buddha was sold to a Tibetan merchant from Nepal for 200 yuan, a white nylon shirt, and a digital wristwatch. The watch stopped working a week later. We were, however, able to buy more barley with the money so that we didn’t go hungry.

The incident had a deep impact on me. When reality knocks at the door, other things flee through the window.

My belief in religion has been shaped by circumstances in exile that neither my great-uncle nor my father had to negotiate. When I was young, I held the naive belief that doing prostrations and chanting countless manis were the sole ways to accumulate merit, and that Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and deities would come to me in difficult times. Through my lonely and penniless years in school, I had never missed a single prayer session. My invocations, however, were met with silence. No deities jumped down from their gold-plated altars to assuage my pain. Doubt and skepticism soon took refuge in my impressionable teenage mind. I began to abhor the complex and often endless religious rites and rituals that consumed huge amounts of our time, energy, and limited resources. The more I tried to understand the association between the rituals and fundamental Buddhist philosophy, the more confused I became.

The lasting influence of Buddhism on my life is its principle—that everything is interdependent and that every action will have an equal consequence in this or the next life. This guides me through the perils of exile, and I try to conduct my life based on these values. In this sense, perhaps I am closer to my great-uncle’s understanding of Buddhism, and yet I certainly don’t share his unshakable faith. Though I don’t wave away Buddhist symbolism as easily as perhaps my father did during those terribly difficult times, my eyes always glance cynically at the rituals involved.

Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, often remarks that we have had enough elaborate religious ceremonies over the years since Buddhism was introduced in Tibet in the 7th century. He advises that the time has come for us to focus on its practical values. “My religion is simple,” the Dalai Lama has famously said. “My religion is compassion.” Even then, His Holiness still performs many rites and rituals. Furthermore, his remarks to simplify some of the extremely elaborate rituals have caused confusion and anxiety in the monastic community. Monks have been unable to decide which ceremonial rituals to discontinue and which aspects to retain.

Despite Buddhism’s newfound popularity, only a handful of parents in my generation want their children to join monasteries as opposed to the traditional practice of putting at least one child from each family in robes. We may still visit monasteries or light butter lamps on special holy days, but we do these with a pinch of salt, a dose of doubt. A friend complains that his very religious friend makes offerings of soft drinks and wine by opening them and placing them on his altar. “Such a waste,” he says. “We can’t drink them afterward.”

Born and raised in exile, today’s youth are equipped with the linguistic skills and technical know-how to absorb the shock of harsh reality far more maturely than the generation that came into exile in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This gives them the confidence to venture into other communities and to migrate to places that the older generation never dreamt of. The interactions with diverse groups of people and exposure to other spiritual practices make our beliefs less conservative. We ask more questions and rely less on faith.

However, the common dream etched in the collective consciousness is to go back to a free Tibet. Connected by the invisible thread of our common history, culture, and language, each of us has created a mini-Tibet within. As Salman Rushdie writes in his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” we know this is “one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions.” For the moment, this mini-Tibet in our heart is the home we inhabit in our dreams even as we transport ourselves into newer environments and more unfamiliar circumstances. 

From The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, edited by Tenzin Dickie © 2023. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House India.

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Japanese Buddhist temples throughout Hawaii and North America have a secret. Move past the usual public spaces—the hondo (main hall) and the social hall—and you’ll quickly discover it. Lurking behind the altar area, squatting in the minister’s office, and hiding in libraries, closets, and random corners are innumerable dark wooden boxes. Shiny with black lacquer, dusty with age, some smaller than a breadbox and others big enough to crawl into, there are the mortal remains of fading Buddhist devotion. They are butsudan (sometimes spelled with the honorific “O,” meaning “respected”): home Buddhist shrines filled with sacred objects, religious icons, loves, fears, and maybe even a ghost or two. Their presence in the back spaces of temples reveals much about changing Buddhist patterns in the West.

Historically, the majority of Buddhists have been ordinary householders with home-based practices. In many Buddhist cultures such as Japan, domestic Buddhism has centered on a home shrine or altar. That family Buddhism was brought to Hawaii and North America with the early Japanese immigrants, providing an anchor for Asian Buddhists in an often hostile land without Buddhist culture or Buddhist ancestors.

Most Japanese Americans and Canadians can call to mind a family butsudan, whether their own or their grandparents’. Ordained Jodo Shinshu minister Alice Unno is an important mentor to generations of Shin Buddhists. As she was growing up in California’s Central Valley in the 1930s, the family butsudan often occupied her imagination:

It was really important to my parents that we had an Obutsudan at home. My parents always told us that if ever there were a fire, the altar was the first thing we had to take out of the house—that and the drawer underneath it, which contained the sutras and important papers like birth certificates. I was always scared of dusting the altar because it was so special and sacred. My mother always said you shouldn’t just use an ordinary rag. There was a special cloth to clean it with. We bowed to it in the morning and in the evening before we went to sleep.

Butsudan remain cherished items in many Japanese American and Canadian homes. But many others have become orphans as patterns of religious belonging and practice shift, and they ultimately end up sheltering in nearby temples. Refugees of a secularizing society, these cast-out sacred objects wait to be adopted by new generations. But if they can’t find a new family, they face eventual destruction.

Buddhist cultures often have a tradition of domestic altars. The butsudan became ubiquitous in all Japanese households, from the lowest peasant to the royal family, during the long Tokugawa period (1603–1867) that preceded Japan’s forced entry into the modern world. Their basic shape is a wooden cabinet, taller than it is wide, with double doors on the front that open to reveal a mini-world of buddha statues, scrolls, and ihai (ancestral tablets). There are candles, memorial books, incense burners, stands for offerings, and other items that cluster around or within the altar. Butsudan range from humble to grand, with gold leaf, black lacquer, delicate carvings, hanging adornments, and other flourishes suggesting levels of devotion, sectarian affiliation, and, frankly, conspicuous wealth in some cases.

Butsudan historically held an honored place in Japanese homes, often with a separate shrine room. Devout family members gathered daily before the butsudan to pray, make offerings, chant scriptures, and commune with the spiritual figures enshrined within. Monks would visit the home on memorial days and Buddhist holidays to perform services at the butsudan.

The lack of clear distinction between buddhas and ancestors is a key aspect of the Japanese Buddhist tradition. Buddhist funeral rituals involve dressing the corpse as a monk and bestowing an ordination name on the departing spirit so that they become enlightened in the afterlife. In this way, the ancient tradition of ancestor veneration melds with the long-ago-introduced practices of Buddhism, accommodating both religious impetuses. The butsudan is the primary tool and site in this Japanese spiritual blend. Memorial plaques for deceased parents and grandparents are placed near the central buddha image, and all receive offerings and devotion. Family members take on the patina of awakened tathagatas, and buddha figures may be considered ultimate household patriarchs.

The swirl of forces that centers on the butsudan is complex. Rituals help to placate the spirits and send them away on their journey to the next life. Rites also help to hold on to missing loved ones and rebind them to watch over the family. Dharma practices inculcate values of selflessness, nondual wisdom, and transpersonal perspectives. And learning and repeating the lineage and religious procedures cultivates family identity and cultural continuity.

As such, butsudan are more than boxes. They are storytellers and lineage holders. They act as meeting places for the living and the dead, for foolish beings and compassionate buddhas. Butsudan are places of holding on and letting go, of detachment and identity formation. As sites of practice, mourning, and renewal, they are visible reminders of the competing forces that comprise the lives of ordinary people in an imperfect, challenging world.

All of this was magnified in the initial immigrant generations. Cut off from their homeland, Japanese immigrants set up butsudan when their parents died far away on the other side of the ocean. Unable to be with them in person, the butsudan provided a portal to lives and loved ones separated by water, nation, and death. The butsudan provided a way to care for departed elders, calm the mind, and hold on to a private symbol of Buddhist commitment in a place where Buddhists were often under suspicion or attack.

Given the importance of butsudan in Japanese Buddhism, why are so many coming to live at American and Canadian temples? Primarily, abandoned butsudan arrive at a temple in the wake of a death. An older family member has died, and the next generation inherits their property, including the butsudan. In the past, the newly deceased would be enshrined with an ihai. The inheritors would use the butsudan as the focus of their devotions, teaching their children the ways of respect so that they might one day receive and carry on the butsudan and its traditions.

But religiosity has decreased in newer Japanese American and Canadian generations just as in most non-immigrant populations; already into the fifth and sixth generations, Japanese North Americans and Hawaiians are not a majority immigrant group. More and more Americans and Canadians of every background are dropping out of formal religion, sometimes opting for a more diffuse spirituality or simple secularism. Even among those who retain an interest in Buddhism, the older traditions are often lost as economic and social forces cause people to live far from family in nuclear units. It was mainly the more senior, often retired generations who actively used the butsudan; they also did much of the childcare, and thus wisdom and practices were naturally passed down through the generations. Now that so many live apart from their parents and grandparents, these transmission lines are weakened or broken. Thus, when they inherit butsudan, many people are clueless about their purpose or how to use them.

Butsudan are places of holding on and letting go, of detachment and identity formation.

As such, the arrival of butsudan at temples represents a decrease in Buddhist practice in the Japanese American and Canadian subcultures. But it’s also a sign of trends far beyond the Buddhist community: the fraying of family ties, weakening of social bonds, and rise of a distracted, drifting society increasingly out of touch with the valuable aspects of its heritage.

There’s another factor to account for too: some people view butsudan as creepy. They’re dark boxes within which spirits perhaps dwell. Not knowing their function, people with minimal Buddhist training may fear that bringing one into the home invites bachi (bad luck). Rather than a source of love and respect, butsudan can provoke fear in those who only know that Grandma used to kneel and mumble in an unfamiliar language before this strange cabinet when they visited her.

But suppose the accumulating butsudan at temples indicates a decrease in Buddhist devotion and weakened family ties. In that case, their presence also indicates the staying power of Buddhist material culture and respect for family, no matter how distant. After all, lots of furniture, clothing, and knick-knacks that people inherit go immediately to the thrift store or garbage bin. But many butsudan and their associated items are recognized as sacred—if not to the new owners, to someone—and are carefully (if sheepishly) deposited at Buddhist temples in the hope that someone else will care for these things.

Ministers have mixed feelings about the tide of butsudan washing up at their doorsteps. Their immediate reaction is to try to make the family feel comfortable and to express gratitude to them for not tossing the butsudan in the trash. Ministers accept that the butsudan’s journey with this family has ended and rarely try to persuade anyone to keep it.

Their gratitude exists alongside some sadness as well, as Reverend Matt Hamasaki of the Sacramento Buddhist Temple expressed:

I appreciate that people have the respect to put it someplace that it belongs. But it does make me sad that people don’t want to keep it. Within my own family, I don’t think anyone has an obutsudan except for me, and I inherited my grandparents’ because no one wanted it. It makes me sad that no one would want it. But like I said, I appreciate that they bring it to some place instead of just throwing it out.

Some ministers experience frustration over the clutter that results from so many butsudan huddling in the back of their temples, occasionally taking over whole storage rooms and crowding out other possible uses of the space. Many butsudan languish for years, with no one to take them home yet reluctance by the temple to dispose of them.

When the time comes, the decision to get rid of old, often broken-down butsudan presents its own challenges. Most ministers are unwilling to toss them in the dumpster. In Japan, the usual method for disposing of sacred objects is to burn them, mirroring the respectful cremation of bodies. Many ministers carry out a funeral ritual for aged butsudan, chanting a sutra and offering thanks for the shrine’s work to uphold the buddhadharma and care for families. Burning the butsudan can be a problem: most temples are on the West Coast, where strict fire laws prevent easy disposal. One temple used to get around this by using them as fuel for beach bonfires when they were still permitted—but even that possibility has been cut off in the new age of extreme climate change. Thus, respectful funerals for old butsudan may become another casualty of global warming.

Not all butsudan end up cremated. Some temples run butsudan adoption programs, advertising available shrines in their newsletters, displaying them at community events, and showing them to new members. In March, the Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple displayed a dozen butsudan, and all found new homes.

The community’s youngest members are also not always indifferent to butsudan and their practices. The Young Buddhist Editorial (YBE) is one of the most dynamic initiatives to recently emerge from Japanese American temples. A collective of primarily young Japanese American Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, YBE ran a special feature titled “Home is Where the Buddha Is.” Dozens of people contributed photographs of their butsudan with short remarks. For example, YBE editor Gillian Yamagiwa wrote:

My Obutsudan was inherited in 2005 from my great uncle after he passed away. Both of my aunts felt that I would appreciate the sentiment and importance of the Obutsudan the most, coming from a family that regularly practiced Buddhism. As a kid, I never really understood why we had an Obutsudan, but as I got older, I began to see it as a way to honor and remember loved ones that have passed.

Most of the butsudan in the YBE photo essay are traditional black wooden boxes, like Yamagiwa’s. But a significant minority are little handcrafted ones made as dharma school activities from materials like kamaboko (fish cake) boards or shoeboxes. Some freestyling interpretations of butsudan also exist, using statues, personal mementos, and even light-up buddha images. The less traditional shrines suggest that even if some butsudan complete their life cycle and are cremated, the impulse to maintain personal sacred space lingers. The karma of butsudan practice hasn’t been extinguished.

That ability to be reinterpreted and reborn through individual meaning-making may provide the longest staying power for butsudan in a rapidly changing world. As domestic religious objects, butsudan have often existed in tension between the orthodox views of organized Buddhist sects in Japan and the quotidian desires and needs of regular laypeople. Stored within homes rather than temples, butsudan have always had the potential to be adapted to their families’ preferences. Two stories from Reverend Henry Adams of the San Mateo Buddhist Temple illustrate the push and pull of orthodoxy and domesticity.

Rev. Adams had a traditional monastic education in Japan and recalled a story about his teacher being taken to a home to conduct a service at the butsudan. The family had set a cup of tea in front of the butsudan, probably as an offering to an ancestor who enjoyed tea during their life. This isn’t orthodox Jodo Shinshu behavior, and the officiating minister dropped a match into the teacup after lighting the candle as if to say, “Surely this is why this teacup is here—what other purpose could it serve?” As a trainee, Rev. Adams was impressed by this story, which suggested that the head minister was bold in righteously fulfilling and passing down the proper tradition from 800 years ago.

But his attitude changed after becoming a minister. He was invited to conduct a memorial service at a temple member’s home and was surprised to find several glasses of water laid out in front of the butsudan, another violation of the orthodox practice. As he noticed that the people being memorialized all had the same date of death and remembered that the member was from Nagasaki, he realized that she had lost most of her family in the atomic bombing. She told him the people injured by the bomb were terribly thirsty and called out for water as they died. So, she remembers her loved ones lost to war and offers glasses of water to honor them.

Usually, we think of ministers instructing laypeople. But here the layperson showed the minister the true potentiality that the butsudan possessed. As Rev. Adams related:

That was very eye-opening to me, you know—it meant that I needed to be much more flexible and open to appreciating the ways in which the obutsudan can serve as a focal point for people in their home spiritual lives. And in the case of this woman, it’s really her lifelong process of navigating the grief from that traumatic event of her childhood.

The ever-growing number of butsudan at temples suggests that Buddhist devotion and traditional practices are losing their grip on people’s hearts and imagination, even as some manage to find new homes and some young people work to maintain and reinvent their religious heritage. Those discarded butsudan all have stories to tell like the one from Nagasaki. Some were assembled from scrap wood during the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans and Canadians. Others have less dramatic, yet no less poignant, origins in the everyday lives of immigrants and their children discovering how to be American and Canadian Buddhists. All watched over generations of Buddhists as their families grew, played, quarreled, and went about their daily lives. Resting in the dim corners of temples, away from the bustle and chanting of the main hall, they wait to see what karma has in store for them.

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To learn more about the contemporary fates of butsudan, see Jeff Wilson’s chapter “The Afterlives of Butsudan: Ambivalence and the Disposal of Home Altars in the United States and Canada” in Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard, and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption, edited by Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

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When asked “What is the difference between Chinese and non-Chinese students?” my teacher Master Sheng Yen once replied, “When you tell Chinese people what to do, they do not challenge the teacher; they do what they are told.” This is the outcome of an ethos of Chinese society that emphasizes order and conformity; those who ask questions are often seen as troublemakers, even though all they want is to understand and learn. This is an element of much of Chinese culture and conditioning, and it shows up in all sorts of ways, including a susceptibility to strict regimes.

I grew up in Hong Kong, so of course I understood this, but because I was Western-educated—first in British schools and then at American universities—I also knew we each have our own minds and views and can each be our own person. Early in my practice, I wanted to know why and how meditation worked, and I had a lot of questions. After all, I was trained in science; I needed a verifiable explanation! That type of inquiry is not always encouraged in a Chinese environment. Even though I was completely committed to Master Sheng Yen as my teacher, there was a cultural barrier I couldn’t break through. Somewhere inside me, I was wondering if I had been going about meditation in the wrong way.

Although I’d been practicing meditation for about five years and had been “recruited” for and considered the monastic path on several occasions, I continued not to take this route. After careful consideration, I was certain I wanted to live in the world, work as a college professor, and get married—yet I still knew my calling was to share Chan teachings and the dharma. I was happy to help Master Sheng Yen offer Chan in the West by serving as his translator. That was my favorite task as a volunteer, and it was one of my life’s greatest blessings to help in that manner. Still, the question intrigued me: Could a layperson practice Chan well and share the dharma in a meaningful way? This was during the years before we would look up everything on the internet, and I was unaware of the many lay dharma teachers already teaching in the West.

I began to find my answers when I had an opportunity to meet John Crook, Master Sheng Yen’s first lay dharma heir, at a forty-nine-day retreat—seven weeks of intensive Chan practice led by Master Sheng Yen. It was very much like the intensives I’d attended at the Chan Center in the past, and I was serving as one of the translators. Six of Master Sheng Yen’s most experienced monastics traveled from Taiwan to assist him by conducting teaching interviews and supervising the meditation hall.

My experience shifted when John Crook joined us during the final week. He’d spent time in the Himalayas studying with Tibetan yogis and had devoted himself to the serious study of both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism for many years before training with Master Sheng Yen. Not only were John Crook and I both Westerners dedicated to the Chan path; we were also both trained in the sciences—his fields biology and psychology, mine sociology.

What really touched me was when I offered to explain to my fellow retreatants what the Chinese words in the texts meant so they could understand what we were reciting in the precepts ceremony where practitioners commit to the ethics of Buddhism. John Crook attended my class! Here was a contemporary of and dharma heir to my teacher and yet he came to learn from someone like me. I was moved by John Crook’s manner and how from that moment on he always took the time to give me space and to listen. He treated me as an equal, which wasn’t expected, especially when I was used to a more hierarchical environment.

A year after our first encounter, John Crook was invited to lead the Western Zen Retreat at Dharma Drum Retreat Center in New York. This was an innovation in Buddhist retreats, offering serious practice in a context more relatable for Westerners. In the traditional Chan retreats I attended during that time, the monastics discouraged asking a lot of questions. We were instructed to only ask questions related to meditation practice in face-to-face interviews with Master Sheng Yen. At this point I was doing fine in my sitting meditation, or so I thought. I had begun my practice using the method of counting the breath and moved on to working with the huatou (derived from a koan) method—using a question to focus the mind and reveal emptiness—but would not say that I actually got it. I was good at sitting still and being calm, so I didn’t have much to ask about meditation itself in the interviews, but I still had questions about suffering, how to penetrate what was going on in my mind, and most importantly, how meditation was supposed to help me with my life.

That is why there was a bigger piece to my encounter with John Crook than bridging the East-West chasm. It had to do with my meditation practice. Beginning with that first Western Zen Retreat, he showed me that what I had understood as silence was not silence. Silence does not mean to push away or avoid all noise; doing that is resisting the present moment and the joy and liberation it holds. Silence means to refrain from succumbing to our habitual reactivity that gets in the way of fully experiencing the present moment as it is. As Master Sheng Yen told John Crook, “Even under the Bodhi tree thought was present. The sutras show clearly that the Buddha was aware of his experiences in a way that could be expressed in thought.” It was during that retreat that the dharma teachings I learned began to make sense—when study and practice finally connected.

During my work with John in my first Western Zen Retreat, he made it explicit that instead of trying to let go of thought, stop thinking, or tell myself my thoughts are illusory, it was OK to pay attention to them. Thoughts are not the enemy; they are just thoughts. He helped me see how we, perhaps especially as Western-educated people, must make full contact with whatever shows up in the mind—all the thoughts and feelings, however intense or frightening they are—to fully appreciate how our minds are truly empty. It is not a matter of being in a removed position or being a detached observer for whom meditation becomes nothing more than labeling thoughts while still inhabiting a place of me versus everything else—othering, self-cherishing, reifying, and spiritual bypassing. Thanks to John, after years of trying to silence my mind and failing to gain insight, I was able to truly meditate for the first time—this was transformative.

Silence does not mean to push away or avoid all noise; doing that is resisting the present moment and the joy and liberation it holds.

In all my study of meditation I’d never heard anyone, even Master Sheng Yen, talk about thoughts in this way before. Having grown up in Hong Kong and practiced Buddhism in the United States, I am more a British-Chinese-American Buddhist than a Chinese one. Maybe there was something that “real” Chinese people understood in the nuances of the language and could get immediately from Master Sheng Yen’s teaching, but as a Westerner I’d been missing it. John Crook showed me that when it comes to Buddhism, there is much talk about emptiness, yet being willing to investigate our lives at an experiential level is an integral and often overlooked part of our practice.

It is what I now teach in retreats, because most people who are interested in meditation face challenges like mine. Connecting with the reality of emptiness, bridging the gap between concept and direct experience, can be tricky. What I do may be a little different from other students of Master Sheng Yen because I also trained with John Crook and later Simon Child, Master Sheng Yen’s second lay dharma heir, who first studied with John Crook. I am a fusion.

Since that first retreat with John many years ago, I’ve used what I learned from my teachers to help practitioners recognize how the earnest effort to block out thoughts obstructs them and causes suffering.

Seven years after Master Sheng Yen passed away, I received dharma transmission from his disciple—and my current teacher—Simon Child; I became a full heir in the Chan lineage. It is said that while speaking to a large gathering, Shakyamuni Buddha handed his disciple Mahakasyapa a single flower. He responded to the Buddha’s gesture with a subtle smile and in that moment received the first dharma transmission. Nobody in the crowd knew what was going on, and as they tried to deduce the meaning, Mahakasyapa remained fully present with the Buddha. In that interaction, according to Chan tradition, the Buddha and his disciple understood each other so perfectly that words were unnecessary.

Students, seekers, and scholars have analyzed the story of Mahakasyapa and the Buddha and imagined all the implications of how grasping at conceptual thought to understand the present moment is futile. Conceptual analysis distorts and obscures what enlightenment and dharma transmission are.

Enlightenment cannot be expressed in words or evaluated conceptually. Whenever we impose language or thought on an experience, feeling, or phenomenon, we are no longer entirely present. Whatever we are talking about is not exactly it. This is a truth many people find incredibly mysterious, and therefore the role of the Chan master is to validate and authenticate the enlightenment experience of their students. As Master Sheng Yen pointed out, only someone who has a verified enlightenment experience can confirm it in another. That is what is meant by mind-to-mind transmission in Chan.

Many people misunderstand dharma transmission as an accomplishment. They think it represents having achieved something or attained a status. That is not an accurate understanding. Master Sheng Yen described dharma heirs as those who have accepted a heavy responsibility to carry on the lineage—tasked with finding and training the next generation of lineage holders—as custodians of that continuous thread the Buddha passed to Mahakasyapa. A dharma heir must have a stable personality and correct understanding of the Buddhist teachings; they must have given rise to bodhi mind (compassion balanced with wisdom) and made a great vow to share the practice to benefit all sentient beings. Master Sheng Yen taught that lineage transmission means a commitment to making dharma practice the most important priority in life.

As John Crook showed me, there is a power in being an outsider. Although monasticism is a means of preserving the sanctity of the dharma, it is not a requirement; the beauty of Chan is that because it is a formless practice, I do not have to refrain from activities like maintaining close ties with family or pursuing a professional career. Living in the world, I have access to and understanding of challenges like emotional relationships, political divisiveness, sexuality, ambition, oppression, and money worries. As a lineage holder yet a lay teacher, my family and my job are not a distraction from practice but rather integral to it. Life does not get in the way; it is the way.

♦

Adapted from Illumination: A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No-Method by Rebecca Li © 2023 by Rebecca Li. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

The post Translating Silence appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Anyone who has ever sat down to meditate knows how easily the mind gets caught up in telling stories and entertaining thoughts. As Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku puts it, “If we take time to focus on the stream of mental events, we soon observe that we are almost always thinking.” In one way, that seems almost self-evident, but we might still wonder why, since most of our thoughts are routine and, frankly, pretty boring. 

The same is true for the stories we tell. Whatever function they may serve in keeping our lives on an even keel, they seldom offer much in the way of new insights, greater clarity, or a sense of wellbeing. They bubble up when we’re feeling agitated or when we’re acting out of habit, and they distract us from paying attention to what is going on in our lives. 

That’s why meditation teachers generally suggest not getting involved in the stories that flicker across the screen of consciousness. When we get lost in the content of our stories, we stop being present to our own experience. We “space out,” a term we can take fairly literally, since stories lift us out of our immediate experience and deposit us somewhere else.

Things look different, however, when we start to look closely at the stories we live. And we do indeed live within stories. First and foremost, there’s the story of being a self: the story “Here I am.” It’s not a story we have to put into words, because the self-story is built into our lives at the deepest level. It’s a given, and—as the Buddha tirelessly pointed out—it has powerful consequences for how we live our lives.

Traditionally, the commitment to the existence of the self is considered a wrong view, but there is more to it than that. We don’t just see the self as being real; we inhabit a world in which the existence of the self, situated at the center of what we experience, is a given. 

To get a sense of what this means, consider this passage in a book by the naturalist Barry Lopez, describing a journey with Indigenous people of the far north:

If my companions and I, for example, hiking the taiga encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost entirely on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. . . . My approach . . . was mostly to take note of objects in the scene—the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots that I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single rigid line. My friends, in contrast, had situated themselves within a dynamic event. . . . Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.

Lopez is contrasting two different ways of inhabiting the world. His way is to put the self at the center. Events happen and objects appear, but the self, the one who experiences this, is positioned outside what is happening, “taking note” of what happens and “making sense” of it. His companions, in contrast, inhabit a world that is fluid and dynamic. For them, a story is unfolding, and their experience in this moment fits within that story. They are embedded in the world shaped by that story, much as a character in a novel is embedded in the story that the novel unfolds. 

A practice that starts from the stories we live makes this ongoing dynamic available. We need not focus solely on this immediate moment (helpful though that can be), because stories are temporal in a different way. The stories we inhabit engage past, present, and future simultaneously. Once we realize that we are always inhabiting stories, we realize that the immediate moment is not where we live our lives. We live across time, in a present that encompasses the past and future—what we might call “story time.” Any experience has its framing story, and every story, provided we let ourselves live it, offers an occasion for deeper appreciation and knowledge.

Understanding the Buddha’s teachings in this way gives them an added dimension we might otherwise miss. Consider the teaching on the five skandhas—form, feeling, perception, conditioning, and consciousness—a teaching specifically introduced to counter the commitment to a self. It’s not just about seeing experience through the lens of the five skandhas, though that’s the place to start. Instead, it’s about living a story—inhabiting a world—that unfolds through the skandhas’ dynamic interaction. When we do, the self-story still operates, but now it’s just another dimension of the understanding we have been conditioned (the fourth skandha) to accept. 

Another way to get clear on lived stories is to contrast them to told stories. Consider explanations, stories we tell to make sense of things. Why was I late for work? “Well, the bus broke down, and all the passengers had to transfer to a different bus. So I couldn’t get there on time.”

That’s an example of an explanation as a told story. Look a little deeper, however, and you’ll find a lived story: we inhabit a world where the principle of cause and effect applies, so in the story we live, offering explanations makes sense. If something happens, it’s because something else happened, and we can trace that sequence back. We don’t have to tell ourselves stories about how the principle of cause and effect operates; we just know that it does. Just like the story “here I am,” the story “everything has a cause” is something we take for granted. To be clear, calling the principle of causality a story doesn’t mean it’s false. “Cause and effect” is a true story, at least in the pragmatic sense that it applies to how we go about our day-to-day lives. 

Many of the stories we live are equivalent to what we think of as common sense: what everyone knows is true. Of course, we live other stories that are unique to us: stories about who we are and how other people figure into our lives, stories that make sense of what’s happening around us and to us. Again, it’s like being the characters who inhabit a novel. The lived stories make up the background of what’s happening. The told stories advance the plot.

If we accept that we are always living stories, we can see that a lot of Buddhist practice is about changing the stories we live, about getting us to inhabit a new story. I’ve already given one example: the Buddha asks us to question the story that puts the self at the center of experience, offering in its place the story that our lives consist of dynamic interactions among the five skandhas. The teaching on the four noble truths, and especially the reality of suffering in our lives, is another invitation to live a different story. The Buddhist scholar David McMahan speaks of the Buddha’s teachings as “laying out an entire way of being in the world.” That “entire way” is what I call a lived story.

Admittedly, the idea of lived stories can be difficult to get a handle on, largely because they are mostly implicit, abiding in the background of day-to-day life. To use one more analogy, we might think of lived stories as the architecture of our normal thinking. If, for example, you step into someone’s home, you might notice the furniture or what is hung on the walls or the flooring and so forth. But you don’t see the framing and foundation that are the structures upon which everything visible rests. Lived stories are something like that.

The dharma offers many ways to change your lived stories. For instance, you can engage your embodied experience differently, by focusing without judgment on sensations in the body. Or you can imagine the world you inhabit differently, and then let that imagined world come alive. Visualizing the Buddha works this way. It’s an invitation to let the Buddha, with all his extraordinary qualities, be present in the story you are living. The same holds at the level of doctrine: you hear the story that all conditioned things are impermanent, you reflect on it, and you integrate it into your life, which means that the impermanence of all things becomes a part of the story you live, the story that makes sense of the world. At a more fundamental level, living a story is itself an expression of the truth of impermanence. Instead of holding tightly to the fixed identity of self in a world of other fixed identities, you live (like Barry Lopez’s friends) within the flow of shifting events, where past, present, and future alike are in constant flux. 

Seeing our lives as stories we live opens up a different way to practice. For instance, suppose I find myself thinking back to the pleasant dinner I had last week with friends at one of my favorite restaurants. There are two parts to that act of remembering. There’s the content of the memory—catching up with my friends on what’s been happening in our lives, discussing plans, enjoying the food and the company. At the same time, there’s the experience of remembering—in other words, the experience of living in that activity of remembering. If the memory arises in passing, I’ll probably focus on the content. If it comes up while I’m meditating, though, I may be more sensitive to the remembering itself, letting the content of the memory slide on by. 

Something similar happens when I focus in my meditation on breathing. There is the experience of breathing—air in, air out, belly expanding, belly releasing, and so on. But there is also the lived story “I am breathing,” a story I take for granted. While it doesn’t pull me away from the experience of breathing, it conditions and limits it. My experience of breathing is shaped and confined in subtle ways by the story that the breathing is mine, that it belongs to me. 

That’s where learning to be aware of the stories we live can change things in important ways. When we excavate them from the subterranean realm of “what we take for granted,” we make available a different dimension of lived experience. At the same time, because we are focusing on the lived story as a story, we are less likely to be pulled into the story’s content, where we so often get lost. 

Consider again the story that my self is the owner of experience. The Buddha taught that the self-story, and the grasping and claims of ownership that come with it, are the source of tremendous suffering and frustration. He offered other stories in its place, as we’ve already seen—not only the story of the five skandhas but also the story that all things and all circumstances are impermanent and constantly changing, including our presumed identity as selves. If we replace the lived story of “me at the center”—the story we have been conditioned from childhood to accept—with the story of impermanence, life looks very different.

Holding the stories we take for granted up to the light of inquiry can be challenging, because we don’t see them as stories at all, but simply as how things are. Here again, the best example is the story of the self as owner. The philosopher Henri Bergson starts one of his books by saying that we are more certain of our own existence than anything else. It’s a basic fact of being human. So how can we question it? 

I’d say that the first step is to acknowledge how thoroughly our experience is shaped by the stories we live. And here we’re in luck, because that’s a practice eminently suited to these times. As a culture, we seem to be more committed to our stories, more involved in them, than any other culture in history. True, people have always told stories and always imaginatively lived in them, but today, inventing stories or adopting them has become a way of life: think of social media, conspiracy theories, and identity politics. Our forms of entertainment—movies, television, video games—feed us a steady diet of stories, and still we clamor for more. We curate our online identities on Instagram or TikTok and present them to others as stories ready to be consumed. At a deeper level, we live in a multicultural and tribalized world, one where different stories compete to define the way things are. Even if I insist that my version is the one that’s true, I have to accept that it’s a story, standing on the same footing as your incompatible story. We even are ready to consider the possibility that our waking life could be a simulation, a story crafted by someone else, in which we simply play our assigned roles (as in the Matrix movies). 

That’s not all bad. For one thing, we understand very well the danger in being so involved in stories, of living in what the writer Kurt Andersen calls “Fantasyland.” As the historian Daniel Boorstin foresaw more than sixty years ago, “we risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” For another, our openness to stories, our sophistication about how they work, prepares us to see clearly the constructed nature of the worlds we inhabit. In a sense, stories are our superpower.

If we want to take full advantage of our familiarity with stories, we need to be clear about what stories are and are not. Here, I want to borrow an important way of making sense of the mind from the Buddhist Abhidharma. A systematic presentation of key Buddhist teachings, the Abhidharma identifies six kinds of consciousness: the five sense faculties plus mind as a sixth faculty.

Each of the six has its own range of experience. For instance, when we hear a blackbird sing, hearing-consciousness hears the sound, but it does not identify the bird as the source of the sound. That identification is a story, an explanation, generated by the sixth, mental consciousness. That’s what mental consciousness does: make sense of what the other five forms of consciousness present by organizing them into a story. 

Seeing stories as the “output” of the sixth kind of consciousness helps us understand differently the role of lived stories. On the one hand, we see that the lived story informs the whole of experience. I don’t just hear the blackbird; instead, once hearing consciousness has made a sound available, a lived story emerges, along the lines of “Here I am, and what I hear is a blackbird, and here is how I feel about that, and here is what it reminds me of.”

A focus on lived stories helps us recognize that the world I inhabit and experience is much more mental—in that it is more story-driven—than we usually think. I don’t just sense a world and objects in the world; I make sense of it. 

At the same time, seeing how the lived story shapes my experience, I recognize that I don’t have to accept its content as the truth of the way things are. The story is only a story. It is one dimension of a field of experience that includes the output of the other five consciousnesses. 

All this leads to a way of exploring the mental operations quite different from what we usually think of as meditation. We don’t have to turn away from stories or drop them. We can bring lived stories into our practice. We can be mindful not just of the particulars that show up in our lives from moment to moment, but of the story we are living, the story that informs the whole. 

When we get lost in the content of our stories, we stop being present to our own experience.

To practice with stories, we need above all to understand them as stories. If we accept the stories we live as simply the truth of what is so, we are likely to get lost in their content, and thereby lose the opportunity they offer. Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message.” That holds for the stories that inform our lives. Whatever the story’s content, what the story communicates is its own nature as story. When we see that, we are ready to engage differently the experiences that constitute our lives. 

Here are a couple of suggestions for practices that can lead in that direction. The first, which I’ve mentioned already, arises with respect to the lived story “I am breathing.” There are meditative practices that suggest labeling that act of breathing as “breathing, breathing,” and that is part of it. But that focus does not directly question the story, the “transitional construction” that says, “I am the one who is breathing; it is my breath.” That’s where we want to look. 

You can use the basic meditative practice of focusing on breathing to call the self-story into question. Just let breathing breathe. When we say, “It’s raining,” there is no need to look around for the “it” that is doing the raining. In the same way, there is no need to maintain the existence of the self that is doing the breathing. When you switch in your practice from the story “I am breathing” to the story “it’s breathing,” you can be more directly aware of the self-story arising.  

You can take this practice a step further. When you “pay attention” to breathing in meditation, you actually tend to reinforce the role of the self, because the self-story tells you that it’s the self who is paying attention. Again, it doesn’t have to be that way. Awareness of breathing simply goes along with the breathing. Just as there is no one breathing, there does not have to be anyone watching or paying attention. 

Another way of decentering the self has to do with the temporal dynamic of stories, which I spoke of above. The self operates in linear time, a time that unfolds in a sequence of moments from past to present and future. If you relax into the flow of experience, however, you will find that between any two linear moments, there is another moment that does not fit into the same linear sequence. For instance, between two moments of breathing, there might be a moment occupied by a stray thought, or an itch. Any one of those “between moments” could trigger a whole new and completely different linear sequence, with its own content. In fact, that’s what happens when we get distracted.

Here’s the alternative. Instead of getting pulled into a new sequence of linear time, keep looking for those “between moments.” Soon enough, you arrive at moments that are unnamed and thus not part of any potential linear sequence. The more you develop sensitivity to those unnamed moments, the more you free yourself from the content of the stories you inhabit—and the more you can appreciate stories themselves in their arising. And that means appreciating more fully your own life.

Many kinds of meditation involve focusing with increasing intensity on one specific object: the breath, a visualization, sound, or just about anything else. Learning to engage the stories we inhabit—the stories we live—is a very different kind of practice. Stories are complex, multidimensional. They invite us to engage our lives as a whole, and they make the whole of our lives—including the stories we tell—available to value and to explore.

One final point. The more familiar we grow with stories in operation, the more we turn away from their specified content to inhabit the field of experience to which they give form. As this happens, the hold they have on us loosens. That matters for our ability to be fully present in our lives, but it matters also for stories that take form as ideology, or as implicit bias, or in conspiracy theories or stories of tribal identity. Not tied to what such stories have to tell us, not insisting on the truth of their content, we draw closer to being free.

The post Stuck in Stories appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I came into this world with a great debt—my mother gave her own life in order to give birth to me. She already had three children, and when she was pregnant with me she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. The doctor urged her to apologize to the baby and to have the cancer removed from her stomach. Those around her, my father as well, tried to persuade her to do it, but she stood firm, vowing “This baby in my belly is going to be born.”

I was born on August 24, the day we worship Jizo Bodhisattva. After that it was too late for the surgery. Just before she died, she very clearly expressed herself to those close to her: “Even after I die, I will care for and protect this child.” She must have prayed fiercely for my protection. She died before my first birthday, and left me in the care of Jizo Bodhisattva.

When I was still very young, when I came to understand what my mother had done for me, I wrote on a piece of paper “My mother laid down her life for me. What does she mean for me to do with this gift?” I continuously wondered what it was that I should do with this life. What was my mother telling me?

A deep questioning arose in me. Whenever I felt a touch of a wind or looked up at the sky overhead, I would ask myself  “What is there down deep beneath the surface of things? There is something I feel but don’t understand. I sense its presence, but I can’t take hold of it.” My inability to answer those questions was a source of such discontentment that I always felt separated from people and things.

I would ride my bicycle home, past shops with their lights shining brightly. The streets were still bustling with people at that time. There were old people, young people, people in between, and as I rode through the streets, with groups of people passing under the bright lights, I would be asking myself “There is life, and all these people are living it. But what is this life? There is something, there is something . . .”

I kept searching, thinking that I had never really been given the opportunity to understand the reason for living. When I was seventeen, I thought I had found it.

I resolved to become like a chair. A chair doesn’t refuse its services to anybody; it just takes care of the sitter and lets them rest their legs. After it has served its purpose, no one gets up and gives thanks or offers words of kindness to the chair. It will more likely get kicked out of the way. The chair doesn’t grumble or complain or bear a grudge, but just takes whatever is given.

A chair doesn’t plop itself down on top of the sitter, right? When there is a job to be done, it puts forth all its energy without picking and choosing according to its desires. I thought “Wouldn’t it be great to have such a heart?” I wrote on a big sheet of paper “Be like a chair,” and every day I took note of how close I came. If even a little dissatisfaction arose, I would regard that as a disgraceful state of mind for a chair. I considered how thoroughly I was of use to others. If I possibly could, I wanted to put others before myself. The endeavor was not at all forced or unnatural; it arose from life itself and was enjoyable, not painful.

Then the war began. We were told by the government that Japan was in real danger. We had to fight against enemies who were portrayed by military propaganda as if they were devils themselves. My perspective was severely limited. I had the sense that I must give my own life to protect those close to me—my parents, my siblings, my teachers, my friends, my fellow countrymen. I was still bound, tied down by a false sense of place, attached to boundaries, to us versus them. I believed that there was an enemy. I didn’t have a sense of wanting to kill or to save my own life, but I wanted to give it to save others.

I volunteered to fly as a kamikaze pilot. My goal in life was already to be of service to others, so sparing my own life was not a factor for me. I gave myself to the training that was required.

I was only nineteen, the youngest one in my company. The training was very strict; they didn’t give us any leeway at all—the slightest mistake and we were out. They were not worried about the human life involved, but they wanted to protect the airplanes. So to get the license you had to be extremely careful. We had to line up in front of military officers responsible for our training, and I was asked “What is your weak point?” I answered that I was prone to act on my own authority, to decide on my own to do something and do it. “That’s not a shortcoming,” I was told. “When the control stick is in your hand, any number of things can happen, and you have to be able to decide and react immediately. You won’t have any time to consult anyone else. You must act on your own authority. So it is a strength,” they said.

Then they asked me what my strength was. “Acting with resolve,” I said. “When I commit to doing something, I don’t back down or get discouraged midway. I definitely carry through with my goal.” But now I see that this wasn’t much of a strength, because when you don’t know what’s right you can carry through with the wrong aim.

We trained hard, finishing in just one year a course that should have taken much longer. We were up against a large, strong country with powerful weaponry. Our hastily and poorly built planes were no match in combat for their fine ones. So our battalion was moved to Manchuria, where the pilots would wait for their orders to fly from there. One by one, the pilots would board airplanes loaded with explosives, take off and aim for large ships. If just one would hit right, a large aircraft carrier with one hundred or so planes could be sunk in one blow. That was what we were studying to do. We all wrote our last words, which were carefully folded, wrapped, and carried by the commander of our battalion. I wrote that I was ready to die for my country at any time, that even knowing I might die in training, I felt no remorse.

It was only five days after my graduation—August 15, 1945—that I was supposed to take my final flight. Other pilots went before me, giving their lives, and I waited my turn. Since I was the youngest, our commander was keeping me last in line. I had my last ritual sake cup. Just when I was on the verge of setting off, we heard the emperor on the radio announcing the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of the war.

I couldn’t believe my ears. I was devastated, because I was not able to do anything to protect my country. Later we learned that we had been deceived by our leaders and that it was Japan who was the aggressor. I was shocked. All my comrades had given their lives, and here I was, still alive, but to what purpose? Nothing made sense to me.

All my comrades had given their lives, and here I was, still alive, but to what purpose? Nothing made sense to me.

It was then that I tasted the bitter pain of living. I suffered the anguish of being alive when so many were dead.

I was in the 24th Company, which is the number of Jizo. The bodhisattva must have followed me right into the army, because I was saved many times over. If the war had ended even one day later, I would have flown my final flight, and I wouldn’t have been able to meet with the teaching of the buddhadharma in this lifetime.

When the war ended, I was sent to a Russian prisoner of war camp for almost a year. Many of my friends died there. We had to bury the dead, yet the ground was so frozen that we couldn’t. So many soldiers died there, most of them in their twenties, dreaming of their homelands and their families.

One day, one of the Russian soldiers asked me to drink alcohol with him. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I had no choice but to join him. Since I was so weak and had almost never drunk alcohol before, I got very sick, and I was left in bed in the hospital. The next morning most of my fellow soldiers were sent to the labor camps in Siberia, where they died. Just on the brink of death, again my life was miraculously spared. I was taken care of.

But I couldn’t rejoice in this. I couldn’t appreciate it, not yet. I felt only anguish and despair. Those who had died, was their death in vain? What is the meaning of life? These questions stayed with me. They took over my mind. I had to find out what I could do, what was in my own power to do, to somehow, in some way, make it up to all those young men who had given their lives.

I returned to Japan on June 9, 1946. I spent the next year in suffering. Just at that time of greatest pain and anguish, a concerned friend arranged for me to see a Buddhist nun: Sozen Nagasawa Roshi, the top female disciple of Sogaku Harada Roshi. When I first met her, I knew nothing about Buddhism and I wasn’t even particularly interested in it. She told me that there was a very wise man to whom I could take my questions, someone who could help me find the answer, to help me understand the meaning of life. She arranged for me to attend the November sesshin at Hosshin-ji, where I would meet him. But in the meantime she invited me to come and sit the October sesshin at her own zendo.

At sesshin, Sozen Roshi showed me the lotus position. “Zazen is sitting full lotus; zazen equals full lotus,” I was told. So I jammed my legs in a full lotus position, and the pain was intense—I was in hell after thirty minutes. The pain ran through my body as if my legs were being sawed off at the knees. One minute was eternity, but what an incredibly good thing it was that I practiced as I was instructed, without trying to sneak away from it.

Fortunately, I was told to count my breaths. The practice in her temple was to count out loud during sesshin, and I counted so enthusiastically that the glass of the windows rattled. The children who were out playing near the zendo could hear each count, and they came up to the window and peered through the curtain at me. Then, I was asked to count in a softer voice. The zazen of even a beginner manifests the whole essential nature.

After that October sesshin I went to Hosshin-ji as planned, and I was fortunate to be given an audience with Daiun Sogaku Rodaishi, the great master who was to become my teacher. He was tiny and very thin, but he had an enormous surging power. I openly talked to him about my problem, saying “I just can’t live knowing that there were so many that had to die. What can I do in atonement?”

He told me that he understood my suffering, that I could come to be at peace, that there was a way to solve the problem of life and death at its root:

You yourself, you are still alive, so that you can forever and ever follow the path of giving. You can steadily, evermore, give your life to save others. Even with the death of this body, genuine life continues. There is something that does not die. True nature does not disperse like a mist. Knowing true life, you can be at peace. If you really want to understand the meaning of life, true life, it will take all the determination and effort that you can possibly muster. You will not realize the truth if your aim is unclear and if your practice is weak. Your resolve must be absolute. You must be prepared to persevere with single-minded conviction and effort. If you can really commit yourself to seeking this truth, to this one important thing, then you can stay here. But if you are not earnest and sincere, if your commitment is lukewarm, if you won’t be able to make a complete, whole commitment, then you can go home now.

I vowed then and there to awaken to truth, to come to realize my true nature. I had no doubts. I had already resolved to give my life once in the war, so putting my life on the line wasn’t a problem for me. My answer came from the bottom of my heart: “I will give it my all, to practice just as you show me.”

I will never forget the look in his eyes at that time, when he stared right into me—this kid, still well behind in years, who knew nothing—as I vowed to follow his teaching. His eyes were small and black as coal. How they shone when he said simply “You may stay. The Way is one. You follow this one Way, this one practice. Don’t allow your value judgments to enter into it. Be a pure white sheet of paper. Let go of everything. That is the only way.”

From then on, I did give it my all. Of course, my practice was still greedy, immature, far from perfect—but I practiced just as I was instructed. Doing each one thing, this one thing, I poured my entire being into it. I hurled myself into zazen without knowing anything about ordination, without even considering the possibility of becoming a monk myself. I simply tried to listen to my teacher’s instructions.

On the first day of each sesshin, we were told: “Those who have resolved to break through during this sesshin, make gassho.” We couldn’t get by carelessly making gassho, whether we meant it or not. If you did gassho at that time, it meant you were prepared to give your life in practice. You would break through even if it would cost you your life. You weren’t permitted the luxury of that gassho unless it was life or death.

The zendo was set up to make sure that we didn’t look away from our practice. At any given time, several monitors patrolled ready to strike anyone who was looking away in distraction. The sound of the kyosaku could always be heard, cracking, urging us to stay with it, to remain attentive to our practice. From the first round of the morning till the last round at night, we were given no slack.

Going for dokusan [a private interview between student and master] with Daiun Roshi could be really frightening. He never smiled. With just a phrase, just one word from him, sweat would pour down my back. One day I remember going into dokusan, and I sniffed through my nose. I was intending to be practicing wholeheartedly and that sniff was part of it, but it must have been posturing wholehearted practice. “What’s this? Coming in here to sniffle?” he growled at me and immediately rang me out before I had even finished my prostrations. If I didn’t put myself into it one hundred percent, I was not allowed to come into the room. An instant of carelessness, grasping, or holding, and immediately—clang, clang, clang—I was out. I often thought “He sure can see it like it is, can’t he?”

When Daiun Roshi would come into the zendo, he would walk around hitting everybody with the kyosaku. He would shout “You have all your meals provided for you, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Your futon is ready for you to rest; you can sleep at night. So what are you dawdling over? Get on with it!” And then this long stick would fall on our shoulders. I felt the blows from the tip of my head right down to the tailbone.

At night, after the last round of zazen, I would go to the graveyard or to the forest or mountain and practice. In wintertime if I would grow sleepy during yaza [voluntary meditation time in addition to the sesshin routine], I would break a hole in the ice of the pond and jump in, then go back and continue my sitting. I made efforts in a way that I would not want anyone to try to imitate. I thought that I would concede my very life for the sake of dharma.

I have to mention as a caution that in giving my all to this practice I went overboard and ruined my health. That was not good, so Daiun Roshi told me to leave Hosshin-ji until I had recovered. While I was ill, I was blessed to meet and develop an acquaintance with Tenshu Nakano, an older monk and student of Daiun Roshi who took me under his wing and cared for me in his temple. That monk skillfully led me to become a monk myself. So when I got better, I returned to Hosshin-ji and was ordained.

I continued to give myself to the practice more and more. Daiun Roshi was very strict with me. It was taking me a long time. He continued pushing, refusing to recognize my experience, any experience that was not thoroughgoing. I made my final resolution: I would break through during the next sesshin or die. I was really serious about it; I knew it came down to this last sesshin, practicing with all my might.

I made my final resolution: I would break through during the next sesshin or die.

It must have been the seventh day of sesshin. I can never forget that morning as I sat absorbed in the samadhi of one doing, unaware of my surroundings, unaware that the dokusan bell had been sounded and the zendo was practically empty. The tanto [monk in charge of training] tapped my shoulder very gently, just a light touch—but a touch with a vast resonance. My mind opened. Even a gentle touch of encouragement can be received, can resonate unutterably, as it did for me that morning.

I flew to dokusan boldly and surely, just naturally, differently from any other time before. Up until then, if I went into dokusan and tried to say anything, Roshi would immediately ring his bell. But this time I just glided in, and Daiun Roshi breathed in deeply, swallowing me up. He stared into my eyes fiercely. For the first time a half smile appeared on his face.

That time I didn’t have to hear a bell ringing, instead my teacher said “Let’s check you.”

My responses were spontaneous, uncontrived. 

 “At last, moderate understanding,” he said, “at last.”

That night I was so filled with pure happiness that I couldn’t sleep, but I might have been dozing off and on in a state of wakeful sleep. I didn’t know if I was dreaming or not when my own mother, whom I had never seen, came to me.

From behind she wrapped her arms around me and took my hands in hers. Together, we rose into the sky. Flying through the sky, I could feel the cold air on my cheeks. She was like an angel. As we flew, she communicated this to me, though not in words but through her life: “I’m very glad; I’m so glad.” 

If I had not broken through during that last sesshin, I would not have been alive that night. I had made the final determination. But I believe that to my mother the most important thing was not that I had satori but that I had not lost my life. I believe she was expressing her deep wish that I would be protected: “I’m very glad; I’m so glad.” A mother’s mind is universal.

After that sesshin, my world was transformed. All stingy grasping fell away; all distinctions melted away. I continued to practice as Daiun Roshi instructed me, but now even if I wanted to look away, I could no longer do so. I just continued my practice. I knew true peace, that all is well. There is no inside, no outside. All is one—one all-encompassing one. This truth which I was able to accept and receive holds true, remains steady anytime, anywhere, wherever I walk on this wide, wide planet. This truth is universal. Wherever you find yourself, there is only this one truth.

Now I’ve told you the story of my experience in Zen practice, but there is a danger here. The danger is that you might get the discouraging idea that my story and experience were too dramatic and special and that you yourself could never hope to experience anything like it. This is not true. I just did the one and only thing I was told to do. I did it to the best of my ability. You cannot do what you cannot do, but you can do this one thing to your utmost. Regardless of what I did in my practice, the key remains the same for everyone—complete sincerity. You must give your all. Holding on to nothing, you must become your practice. So from my own experience, I can tell you this: If you set out to do it, it will be done—if you don’t try, it won’t be done. When something isn’t done, it is because you didn’t try to do it.

♦

Adapted from Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha: The Life and Zen Teachings of Tangen Harada Roshi by Tangen Harada, translated by Belenda Attaway Yamakawa and edited by Kogen Czarnik. Translation © 2012 by Belenda Attaway Yamakawa. Edited and revised translation © by Piotr Czarnik. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

The post Break Through or Die Trying appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Michael Imperioli has a knack for playing mobsters and villains. Best known for his roles as Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, the Emmy Award–winning actor has made a career out of exploring addiction and afflictive emotions on-screen.

Off-screen, though, Imperioli is a committed Buddhist practitioner. In 2008, he and his wife took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, and during the pandemic, they began teaching online meditation classes together, exploring Tibetan Buddhist texts like The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. Though Buddhism no doubt influences his creative work, Imperioli prefers to focus his practice on his everyday life. For him, Buddhism offers a way to liberate harmful emotions and cultivate patience and compassion on a day-to-day level.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Imperioli spoke with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen about the dangers of the instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, what The White Lotus can teach us about craving and dissatisfaction, his relationship to his dharma name, and whether he believes that liberation is possible in this lifetime.

James Shaheen (JS): You’re best known as an actor, most recently in The White Lotus and famously in The Sopranos, but people may not know that you’re also a devoted Buddhist practitioner. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Michael Imperioli (MI): When I was a teenager, I started reading Jack Kerouac, who knew an awful lot about Buddhism. I mean, if you read his poems, like The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, you really see the depth of knowledge he had about dharma. I was very curious about Buddhism through his writing, so I bought a copy of the Diamond Sutra at St. Mark’s Books [in New York City’s East Village], and I really couldn’t penetrate it. Buddhism stayed somewhere in the back of my mind until much later.

In 2007, my wife and I started going to Jewel Heart, which was in Tribeca at the time, and Gelek Rinpoche was teaching there. That was the first time we went to a Buddhist teaching, and he was our first teacher. Shortly after that, we ended up taking refuge with Garchen Rimpoche. It was funny, because when my wife and I first walked into Jewel Heart, we realized we had both been there in the ’80s when it was Madam Rosa’s, which was a very decadent late-night nightclub.

JS: I remember that. You’ve come a long way.

MI: No mud, no lotus, as they say.

JS: Absolutely. I’ve heard you say that you came to Buddhism during the height of your success when you felt that something was missing. So what was missing?

MI: Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came. I spent my late teens only pursuing acting. I didn’t do anything else. I barely traveled, I was in New York, I did every job I could. I really wanted a certain degree of success, and I was driven toward that. And when that success did come, I realized that it wasn’t an end unto itself. I felt intuitively that what was missing was on a spiritual level—that there was a wisdom that was lacking. Just doing another successful TV show or winning an Academy Award wouldn’t be the answer.

I started exploring a lot of different spiritual paths before Buddhism, not really committing to any, reading books and going to different meetings and centers. I would read stuff like Krishnamurti, and when I was reading the book, it made a lot of sense. Then the book would be over, and I just felt like, “OK, now what?” There wasn’t really a practice to implement in your daily life. And then, when we stumbled into Jewel Heart, I saw the potential for a path and a practice.

JS: You mentioned your ambition and your desire to succeed in your career as an actor, and I remember many years ago, you sat on a panel with Gelek Rinpoche and Philip Glass. Philip said that the very qualities that made him a success professionally were the same that he applied to his practice: attention, focus, discipline, and creativity, among others. Has that been the same for you?

MI: Yeah, ambition has a negative connotation in some ways, but to succeed in anything, let alone an art form, you need a lot of tenacity and perseverance and discipline and passion and creativity. A lot of those are positive qualities, admirable qualities even. Practicing Buddhism takes a lot of discipline, and it takes a lot of perseverance, commitment, open-mindedness, and honesty. I agree with Philip on that.

JS: You know, I met you after that panel, and I interviewed you in 2009. I’ve been listening to your recent interviews, and it’s pretty amazing to hear you talk about your practice nearly fifteen years later with such commitment and depth. It made me realize that it helps me to see change in others that I often miss in myself. Do you ever feel that way?

MI: Yeah, especially with my wife, because we got into it together, we practice together, and we talk about it a lot. It’s a big part of our lives. I see it in her. I see it in simple ways, like when somebody annoys you, you have an awareness that somebody’s annoying you.

When you behave in a way that lets the afflictive emotion of anger get the best of you, you see that and make amends and realize that it’s not what you want to do. I mean, I see the discipline she has and the commitment to it [in reading Buddhist texts]. That’s very clear. But in those simple, day-to-day ways, I see the practice at work. And it’s very inspiring to me to see those changes.

JS: What sort of changes do you see in yourself in your own day-to-day?

“Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came.”

MI: You know, I find that more positive people come into my life—kinder people, more generous people, more compassionate people. And that’s amazing. Ultimately, the practice is bringing awareness to your existence, second by second, day by day: What am I doing in this moment? What am I thinking? I went through most of my life justifying my emotions and my reactions: “I did this because they did that. She took too long in the line in front of me at the coffee shop, and now I’m angry.” We can justify those emotions all the time, and that’s fine. But you’ll be stuck there. Those things don’t just go away.

JS: Often I think about Buddhist practice in terms of becoming a kinder, more compassionate person, and I don’t think that’s a modest goal. But I recently interviewed Anne Klein (Rigzin Drolma), and she said she was challenged by her Dzogchen teacher when he asked her, “Do you have confidence that you can achieve liberation in this lifetime?” I’m still focused on not snapping at my partner or the people I work with, and I consider it a victory when I have the intelligence and poise to make a decision not to be that way. And yet, sometimes I go back to Anne Klein’s teacher’s question: Do I believe I can be free? Does that ever come up for you?

MI: First, I agree with you that it’s not a modest aspiration to work with those afflictive emotions and become aware of them. I think liberation is possible in this lifetime, but it takes an awful amount of commitment. I’m confident that it’s possible; I’m not confident that I’m going to get there. But I don’t really think about it that much.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said to his sangha, “So you become enlightened. Then what?” He likens enlightenment to being present at your own funeral, particularly the idea of “you” with this ego mind becoming enlightened. They’re kind of conflicting because enlightenment is the opposite of that. He’s almost saying you can’t really have your self and your ego and be enlightened.

Enlightenment is not this better version of you. It’s not Clark Kent becoming Superman. It’s something else. One of the mahasiddhas said, “I am not really impressed by someone who can turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle is if someone can liberate just one negative emotion.”

JS: On the note of negative emotions, you play Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, and he seems like a case study in dissatisfaction, addiction, and regret. Dominic can’t prevent the mistakes he has to make, although he pays for them in cash. I’ve found that practice can offer an opportunity to intervene, yet most people won’t come to the practice. How do you think of this in terms of the bodhisattva vow? Or is that too crazy a question?

MI: No, it’s not a crazy question at all. The bodhisattva vow is a really big commitment. [laughs]

JS: Kind of like enlightenment.

MI: Yeah. Maybe when you first hear about Buddhism, you think that there’s a way to reach nirvana or some place where all the suffering is gone. Then you take a bodhisattva vow, and you realize that whatever that state is, you’re not going to get there until everybody else gets there, and you’re hanging around for everyone else.

I think The White Lotus really shows the habitual tendencies that become so ingrained through your own karmic imprints from past lives, through your DNA, and through the learned behaviors that you saw in your younger years from your parents or the culture you were in. Those things can really stay with a person and stay in a family unless something cataclysmic happens or some kind of light bulb goes off—or both, maybe at the same time.

The White Lotus is interesting to me because you have very, very rich people in the most opulent, luxurious god realms, and they’re all miserable. When you don’t have those things, you might think that it would make you really happy to live like this or travel first class and stay in the best hotels. And here we have a story of these people who actually do that and are not very happy at all. There’s momentary happiness and fleeting pleasures, and yet there’s still dissatisfaction. Something is not being fulfilled.

JS: Right. There’s an interesting experiment I did when I was much, much younger. I found this apartment in New York, which was no mean feat at the time, and I really loved it. I had a view of the Hudson River, and the apartment even had a window in the bathroom, which in New York isn’t guaranteed by any means. I remember thinking, “I wonder how long before I take this for granted.” I wasn’t yet a Buddhist; I didn’t have a practice. But it occurred to me that we fall for it every time. We think, “Just this will make me happy.” And in The White Lotus, it’s really clear that we fall for it every time.

MI: Yeah, how long did it take before you took it for granted?

JS: I think it must have been about six weeks, and all of a sudden, I was in a mood again. I didn’t care about that window. I didn’t care about the Hudson River. But when I see the character you played, it would be easy for me to hate him if I didn’t also identify with him. He wants his wife back, and yet he’s in the throes of addiction—he can’t help himself, and he can’t help his son. It was such an accurate description of the samsara that we all live in, and again, I think that practice can interrupt that. Or it’s a possibility anyway.

MI: It is a possibility. But even with practice, those ingrained behaviors, especially addiction, are very hard. Pema Chödrön talks a lot about how a lot of the path is one step forward, two steps back. Maybe one day you go one step forward and only one step back, and you should rejoice in the fact that today it was only one step back. That’s progress. I think practice can help because to practice Buddhism requires real honesty with yourself. You really have to have a bold, honest view of your own mind. People can uncover this through psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists. But with Buddhist practice, it’s in a different way, sometimes a mundane, day-to-day way. You really have to make a commitment to being honest with yourself, and that’s sometimes very hard.

JS: Yeah, I’ve found that sangha and a teacher are essential in being honest with myself. Sometimes a teacher can say something that cuts right through your fabrications. I remember once I was harping on something, and my teacher looked at me and said, “Why do you care so much?” And all of a sudden it shattered. I was sitting there seeing myself as this repetitive person harping on the same thing, and I had to really consider, why did I care so much? Practice is important in relationship with others and with a teacher, without which I don’t think I’d have made any headway at all.

MI: Oh, same for me. I don’t think it really exists outside of that.

“The goal of Buddhism isn’t to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door.”

JS: In addition to being an actor, you’re also a musician. Can you tell us a bit about your band, Zopa?

MI: Zopa is an indie rock trio that was formed in 2006. We took a hiatus when I moved in 2013 for about seven years, and then two and a half years ago, we started playing again. I play guitar, and I sing some of the songs. It’s a very collaborative group. We’re influenced by a lot of the New York bands from the ’70s like the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, as well as a lot of ’80s post-punk and ’90s indie rock.

Over the years, there have been some Buddhist themes in the songs, and we have a new song that includes the Seven Line Prayer of Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan. There’s something cool about playing those songs live—those mantras and prayers have a certain frequency and resonance that I think might touch people in positive ways.

JS: The name of your band is also your dharma name, Zopa. When did you receive the name, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?

MI: When I took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, I got the name Konchog Zopa Sonam. Zopa means patience in Tibetan, and the day I took refuge, he said, “Patience is the key to your practice because when you lose your patience, you lose your love.” At the time, I was still very new to Buddhism, and I took that as a pithy Hallmark card nugget—I didn’t really take it to heart.

Years later, I said to myself, “The day you took refuge with him, he said this to you. Maybe you should give it a little bit more importance. Maybe you should really look into what it means for patience to be the key to your practice.” Since then, I’ve started to take it more seriously and really focus on it as much as I can or as much as my awareness allows me to.

Trungpa Rinpoche said that if you’re a dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. It’s not just something you do because you want to be kind. It is an obligation. Not only that, but it’s also an opportunity to practice. When you feel yourself becoming impatient, you can become aware of that and choose to bring some patience into the situation. These little annoyances become opportunities for practice.

JS: We recently had the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk on the podcast, and she said that a lot of our artistic practice is waiting and trying to get out of the way. Does this resonate with you, and how do you think about the creative process?

MI: God, yeah. Especially on a movie set, you spend most of the time waiting. But also with writing, if you’re working on a writing project that’s going to take some time—let’s say you set up a schedule to write Monday through Friday from 10 to 3—chances are you’re not going to be literally writing fingers on the keyboard for five hours, and there might be a big chunk of that time where nothing’s happening. You’re not really waiting for inspiration because you can’t wait for inspiration—you’d probably wait forever. But you have to trust that there’s some other process going on subconsciously and that for those hours that you’re there, there is some kind of alignment where you’re in tune with the story or the character. Even if you’re not actively writing or actively imagining it, somehow, your consciousness knows that that period of time is related. You have to trust that, and there’s a lot of waiting involved.

JS: More generally, how does practicing Buddhism shape your artistic work?

MI: Typically, I don’t like talking about this because the goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door. But I do think that meditation can help with focus. Art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing onstage as an actor or as a musician, sitting down writing, or acting a scene. The more focused you are in the moment, the better, and I definitely think meditation can help with that.

JS: So in other words, it’s an ancillary and unasked-for benefit. But you pointed out something very important, I think: the instrumentalization of our practice in order to get something. Any of us can fall into that.

MI: Yeah, back to Trungpa Rinpoche: it’s kind of like being present at your own funeral. The fact that this 2,500-year-old tradition is still in the world and there’s still a lineage and a connection to that wisdom is so unbelievably precious that to instrumentalize it for some worldly purpose really runs counter to it. If you’re making a commitment to practice, at some point, there’ll be shifts in everything: in the way you interact with and perceive the world. They may be little shifts, but they’re there.

♦

Listen to the full conversation on Tricycle Talks here. 

The post No Mud, No Lotus appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I came to Buddhism in this way: in 1985 I was staying at my sister’s house on Page Street, across from the San Francisco Zen Center. My sister and brother-in-law were members of the Zen community, and they often took me across the street to listen to dharma talks. They also had a shelf of books about Buddhism, which I read with great surprise, because a lot of it was familiar to me from Western philosophy, especially the existential tradition of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. Like Buddhists, these philosophers tried to liberate transcendence from theology and dogma.

More importantly, Buddhism’s openness to the transcendental felt familiar because of my love of the arts. William James long ago captured my sense of art’s spiritual purpose in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902):

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.

Over time my interest in Buddhism became warmer and more personal. First, it helped to change me morally; I came to understand some of the ways in which I was the cause of suffering for myself and others. It also helped to calm what was at the time a very alienated inner life, an agitated loneliness. It began to “settle my dust,” in Lao Tzu’s phrase. In short, Buddhism changed me for the better. I’m still changing, and I hope still for the better.

During this same period of my life, I was maturing as a writer of fiction, first, and then, beginning with my 2004 book The Middle Mind, as a social critic. Oddly, writing social criticism did not feel distant from Buddhism. I was interested in knowing what part of our collective unhappiness was caused by what Buddhism calls samsara, the causes and conditions into which we are born and through which we have no choice but to create what the Buddha called an “acquired self.” I became a watchful critic of American causes and conditions. A vigilant habit of mind took root. I took to heart what the signs at train stations and airports instruct: “If you see something, say something.”

I am now seeing something in American Buddhism. Historically, when Buddhism arrived in a given country, it appeared as a counterculture of values and meanings different from the values of the established culture. And yet, in most places, Buddhists had little choice but to reach an accommodation with economic and military powers already in place. As David Loy expressed this quandary in a powerful essay published in Tricycle in 2009, “Buddhism has historically tended to passively accept, and sometimes actively support, social arrangements that now seem unjust.”

North American Buddhism has for the last few decades been making its own accommodations with power, especially in relation to corporate capitalism’s version of a mindfulness practice based on neuroscience. Buddhism has again been used to sacralize power, or, as the people in marketing might explain, it has been used to “enhance the corporate brand.” As Loy further argues, “[Buddhism] is currently being used by some to justify the authority of those with political and economic power and the subordination of those who have neither.”

I think Loy points to a worthy question, namely, how can we in the Buddhist community function, as a community, in a way that best expresses our deepest shared values? I don’t think corporate Buddhism is interested in this question.
Buddhism may be the fastest-growing religious community in the US, but a part of the reason for this is that a version of mindfulness has been separated out from the whole of Buddhist teaching and practice and offered broadly as a form of stress reduction, especially in the corporate workspace. Thus, Amazon’s WorkingWell program, with its AmaZen meditation booths (or “despair closets”), where warehouse workers can go to “focus on their mental well-being.” Or Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which offers “a way to help people cope and navigate complexity and change in the workplace” by offering not only stress reduction but also the dubious notion of “emotional intelligence,” what the Harvard Business School has called a “must-have skill” for managers. At best, corporate Buddhism offers only what Karl Jaspers called a pseudo-virtue: “A luxury of fortunate circumstances in which I can afford to be good.”

But Buddhism has always offered itself as something going against “the stream of the world.” It has been about liberation from, not capitulation to, conventional reality. For us, that reality surely includes soulless jobs, a social system organized around money, and a vast shadow world dominated by corporate culture. Carl Jung described this culture as a “gloomy hole in the wall.” In contrast to this gloom, Buddhism encourages us to slow down and open up, open up to experiences outside of those offered by your boss or by neuroscience’s psychological materialism. It encourages us not only to reduce stress but also to recognize its causes. Thai Forest Master Ajahn Chah had a revealing simile for this situation.

It’s like falling from the top of a tree to come crashing down to the ground below. We have no idea how many branches we’ve passed on the way down.

Corporate mindfulness finds the sufferer and offers aid, but it has nothing to say about the cause of the suffering. If asked about the tree, it says only, “What tree?”

In emphatic contrast, Buddhism says, “Hey, noble one, you just fell from a tree, you hit every branch on the way down, and yet you’ll get up tomorrow morning and fall from the same damned tree unless you change, unless you wake up.”
Buddhism is not about neurological flesh machines that can be made to work more efficiently. For me, Buddhism’s unique quality is emotional—its happy gloom. No other religion is so certain that nothing can be fixed, certainly not the “world,” whatever that is. And no other religion is so insistent that the context for life is samsara, suffering and change.

But there are stranger things than this. Buddhism also suggests that suffering is our teacher. Without the dissatisfaction and ignorance that so easily make their way among us, there would be nothing to wake from, and thus no way to experience transcendence. But it’s hard to be grateful for such teachers when there are so many of them, beginning with the ancient triad of aging, sickness, and death. On top of that are piled familiar cruelties: dehumanizing work, poverty, racism, gender bigotry, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism of left and right, the slouching beast of environmental catastrophe, and, most recently, the fatalism of Vlad Putin’s nuclear extortion in Ukraine, because of which I cannot know in this moment if the sentence I’m writing will ever be read. And all of this is the eternal consequence of the three poisons—greed, anger, and delusion.

So, yes, that’s the gloom for sure, but what’s the happy part? The happy bit is that although there are three poisons, there are also three jewels: the teacher (Buddha), the teaching (dharma), and the community of students (sangha), for all of which we should be duly grateful. But there is a caveat to the happiness provided by the jewels, because these two groups of three are not opposed to each other, as if it were a case of sin versus virtue, or good versus bad. They cannot exist in opposition because they are sunyata: “empty of self-existence.” Instead, they are mutually dependent. Without the poisons, there would be no jewels, and no need for a Buddha, his wisdom, or his community. This mix of happiness and gloom—maybe we should call it “happygloom”—is why in the Buddhist cosmology depicted in the Wheel of Life the human realm is the optimal realm for reaching liberation. The heavens of the gods are just too happy; the hell realms, too gloomy.

The Christian contemplative Thomas Merton believed religion is “sorrow, pouring itself out in love and trust.” In stark contrast, contemporary secular Buddhists argue that Buddhism is not a religion at all. It is a “science of mind,” and neuroscience is its gospel. But had the Buddha been asked if his teachings were religious or secular, he would likely have smiled and said nothing. Like the origin of the universe, the question is undecidable. After all, what is a religion? For existential theologian Paul Tillich, our true religion is “our ultimate concerns,” whether a god, science, money… or the discovery of our true nature. The better question, then, might be, “What isn’t a religion?”

It is true, however, that Buddhism shares important qualities with other more self-certain religions, two qualities in particular: transformation and transcendence. In a conventional sense, Buddhism is a religion because it is about transformation—becoming who we really are, discovering our buddhanature. This process is Buddhism’s own “amazing grace”: “I once was lost, but now I’m found.”

In an even more profound sense, Buddhism is religious because it teaches us to open up to the transcendent. In substantial part, we in the West are open to the Buddha’s openness because of our experiences in the natural world and in philosophy, art, music, and poetry, all of which the Concord Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of as “native gold.” Walt Whitman’s famous lilac tree, “blooming perennial,” is native gold—“every leaf a miracle.”

Because of these culturally embedded spiritual traditions, Buddhism feels to us like something valuable that had been lost but that now has been returned to us through “re-collection,” an inward gathering of what had fallen into forgetfulness. It is not a “truth” that has been returned; it is a trustful sense of presence. Through what the modernist composer Olivier Messiaen called “la présence divine,” we learn that we are metaphysical creatures after all. We live our ordinary lives in a supernatural manner, although we are rarely aware of the fact.

At times, our metaphysics are mistaken, as with our sense that each of us has a unique self or ego, a vainglorious thinking substance that looks upon the external world as something it might make use of. But then there are love and beauty, neither of which can be explained neuro-mechanically or in any other way, and yet, even though we can’t say precisely what they are, it is not possible to imagine a fully human life without them. They provide a foundational metaphysics, a metaphysics we can stand on. And the arts provide one way to know that.

Karl Jaspers wrote: “I really love transcendence only as my love transfigures the world.” An image of this transfiguration can be found in Piet Mondrian’s painting The Flowering Apple Tree. The whole of creation flows through the trunk of the tree as if its being were at the intersection of multiple currents purling in the tree’s heartwood and then flowing up through branch, blossom, and fruit. The lumber industry can tell us about the fact of a tree and its commercial value, but Mondrian knows the tree’s magic. Knowing this doesn’t require irrational belief, it only requires caring enough to hear what F. Scott Fitzgerald called art’s “high white notes,” when the work transcends the secular purposes of the marketplace and becomes an expression of spirit’s essential freedom.

Or consider the world-breaking and world-making implicit in Vincent van Gogh’s still life of boots. Van Gogh bought boots at flea markets and walked around in them until they were just filthy enough, just as filthy as the world. Still life was originally a decorative genre suitable for the homes of Netherlands Burghers, the lowest of the pictorial genres. Van Gogh holds the still life genre up by its ankles and shakes the coins and stolen silverware out of its pockets, and then transforms it.

The viewer should not look at the painting with a mind that wonders about the “subject,” these less-than-ordinary boots, and then asks, “Why has he painted dirty boots?” Neither is the painting about the conventional pleasures of trompe l’oeil: “They look so real that I could put them on!” No one would ever want to put on such boots. Nor should the painting be looked at as a sentimental object of sociological indignation in the name of the poor. Rightly viewed, the painting transcends boots, pleasure, and art itself.

The boots abide in the here and now. We should let go of the need for the boots to carry some particular meaning that can be praised or blamed. The painting acknowledges the suffering of the people who must wear such boots, but it also honors what Kant called “the sublime,” the “boundlessness” of the boots. The painting is not technically masterful in a conventional sense; in fact, Van Gogh’s thick impasto—like something painted with a butter knife—is indifferent to technical excellence. Instead, in Baudelaire’s phrase, it “lulls infinity in finitude.”

He suggests that there are other worlds we might inhabit, worlds where what seemed squalid is made pure.

Van Gogh’s sense of the beyond provides powerful spiritual meaning. It is, in its own way, akin to Buddhist transmission rituals—an intimate inward grasping of the world that comes alive when given outward form.

But Van Gogh’s painting also has a very practical meaning. The painting doesn’t leave us in a radiant beyond; it returns us with renewed interest to the world we live in. It presents us with an intimation of a world that is better than the one we endure. It is an epiphany, certainly, but also a vision of what we want in the here and now, the sacred restored to the lives we actually live. Van Gogh urges us to stop living for the false happiness provided by transient things, by boots so dirty they seem to be rotting before our eyes. He suggests that there are other worlds we might inhabit, worlds where what seemed squalid is made pure.

Like the Buddha, Van Gogh asks us to join him in renewing the world.

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