When I first came to Sojoki Temple in San Francisco, I was surprised by the formality of the practice. I had never encountered anything like it before. As a matter of fact, I always tried to avoid any kind of formality, so I can understand why many newcomers are put off by it. But intuitively I knew that I had to do this, and when I experienced my teacher Suzuki Roshi’s composure, his magnanimous mind and totally informal presence, I began to appreciate the limitations that the structure provided. I came to understand that we are always practicing under various restrictions and limitations.

There are rules for everything. The laws of gravity are determining every move we make. I once saw a photo of a light plane stuck nose first into a tree. The caption said “The laws of gravity are strict and unerring, and must be precisely obeyed.” Gravity is pulling us down, and our life force is welling us upward. The interaction and balance of these two forces control our physical body, as well as the way we think and feel. We are all living under the influence of this fundamental restriction as well. When we examine our life, we can see that we have other restrictions and boundaries—inner restrictions, outer restrictions, mental, social, emotional, imaginary restrictions, restrictions of circumstance, time, truth and falsehood, conditioning, fear, and self-deception, to mention a few.

So the question is, how do we find our freedom within the restrictive parameters of our life? Caught by partiality, ignorance, circumstances, emotional exaggerations, and cerebral dead ends, our freedom is compromised and our suffering increases. Top athletes need strict rules and discipline to accomplish their goals, as do scientists and artists. A painter has to be able to find complete expression within the parameters of a canvas. A musician must find complete expression using a limited number of notes. People get up in the morning and go to work on time.

Zen students also have patterns that enable their practice. These patterns, which some see as formalities, allow access to a gate of a fence around an empty field. When the gate is open to the empty field, we can leave the false barriers aside—the conditioning, the fear, the self-deception—and return to the field of our original unbound nature, beyond form and emptiness. Within the so-called formality, we can find our perfect informal freedom. As our practice matures, we are able to find that freedom in every circumstance and make it available to others as well.

 ⧫

From Seeing One Thing Through by Sojun Mel Weitsman, reprinted with permission from Counterpoint Press.

The post Beyond Form and Emptiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhist traditions agree that when Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment, he was sitting in contemplation beneath the Bodhi tree. In that sense, we can say the Buddhist teachings sprang from meditation. The Buddha understood that body and mind are not separate but one, and meditating while sitting is an expression of nondualism.

In our Jodo Shinshu tradition, practicing meditation is frowned upon and considered a futile attempt at gaining spiritual awakening through “self-power.” Instead, we are urged to rely on the “other power” of Amida Buddha. This is most commonly done through nembutsu (reciting “Namu Amida Butsu”). 

Despite being a Shin priest, for many years I have sat daily in meditation. It helps me to understand Jodo Shinshu and follow the nembutsu path. My practice is the kneeling form of sitting called seiza, Japanese for “quiet sitting.” This posture of meditation, which is easier than the full lotus position used by many meditators, is not limited to any one school or sect, nor is it attached to a particular form of meditation. It was popularized by Okada Torajiro (1872–1920), who made no boasts or claims about seiza beyond telling people to simply do it. Okada Sensei greatly respected Shinran Shonin, the founder of Jodo Shinshu. Okada Sensei said, “Seiza nurtures faith constantly after awakening (Jpn., gogo no choyo).”

Seiza sitting was not unknown in Jodo Shinshu before Okada Sensei took it up. Other practitioners also devotedly practiced seiza meditation, including the notable Higashi Honganji and Nishi Honganji teachers Daiei Kaneko and Yoshikiyo Hachiya.

Years ago, I asked my teacher, Reverend Norimasa Hachiya: “Sensei, Jodo Shinshu teaching focuses on nembutsu alone. Why do you practice seiza so diligently?” He replied: “For me, seiza cultivates the proper attitude to listen to the buddhadharma quietly without hakarai (a calculating mind). For Jodo Shinshu followers, this is most important.”

His father, Reverend Yoshikiyo Hachiya, often said: “Without doing seiza, I cannot realize the dharma.” At the Takakura lecture hall at Higashi Honganji headquarters in Kyoto, he would encourage audience members to sit seiza before his dharma talks. In that way, they would cultivate the proper attitude for understanding buddhadharma through both body and mind.

Diligent seiza practice helps focus the body and spirit on the hara, also called tanden (lower belly), considered in Japan and China to be the center of a person’s spiritual and physical energy. When “Namu Amida Butsu” spontaneously arises in my mind or comes out of my mouth, it naturally resonates from my hara. The hara is where one realizes “no hakarai” (mind of “no calculation”). As my teacher said, an uncalculating mind that is free of preconceived notions is better able to listen to and perceive truth.

Nembutsu is therefore an expression of an uncalculating mind that quells the ego and allows us to enter the vast ocean of Buddha wisdom. A daily practice of seiza helps nurture the nembutsu spirit to counter the turbulence of this world and the countless blind passions with which we run amok. 

Morimoto Shonen Roshi, a Rinzai Buddhist master who was greatly admired by the scholar D. T. Suzuki, once said in a letter:

When we first consider Jodo-shu or Jodo Shinshu, they seem like schools of the “Easy Path.” Actually, it’s quite difficult to have faith (shinjin). Rennyo Shonin praised the devout follower Doshu for “consistently maintaining right faith” (shonen-sozoku). He was none other than a devoted practitioner of seiza. Seiza is the form and attitude of “consistently maintaining right faith.” Seiza itself is shonen-sozoku . . . because it is not one’s own practice, but rather, the meditation of Shakyamuni and other Buddhas in the ten directions, past, present, and future.

Rennyo Shonin (1415–1499) is considered the second founder of Jodo Shinshu. In The Sayings of Rennyo Shonin (Goichidaiki Kikigaki), he praised the devout follower Doshu as follows:

Although Doshu listened to the teachings constantly, he listened as if hearing them for the first time and he was grateful. Most people wish always to have something novel; but a person of faith feels everything is fresh and new, even if constantly repeated. Regardless of how many times they hear the teachings, they do so with open ears.

“If one entrusts oneself to Amida,” said Rennyo, “one’s entire body is wrapped in Namu Amida Butsu.” This means a true follower of the nembutsu way is filled with gratitude and joy.

Like Doshu, a person who truly has faith consistently maintains a mind of right faith. Many follow the “easy path” of Jodo Shinshu, but few become like Doshu. This type of realization is cultivated best by “sitting” rather than by reading books or listening to others.

I believe all Buddhist teachings spring from the sitting meditation (zazen) of the Buddhas. This is also true for Amida Buddha’s Great Vow (hongan), the essence of Jodo Shinshu. Zazen is a vital force that penetrates all and manifests itself in seiza.

Meditating beneath the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. Many years later, in a Tendai Buddhist monastery on Mount Hiei, Shinran Shonin practiced shikan meditation (“concentration” and “insight”; Skt., shamatha and vipashyana), which helped him nurture the power and energy of the hara. With this spiritual foundation, he was able to understand the words of his teacher Honen, “Just recite the nembutsu,” without a calculating mind. That’s why each and every day, I do seiza.

♦

Adapted from “Meditation and Jodo Shinshu” on higashihonganjiusa.org. 

The post Meditation and Jodo Shinshu appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I’d like to talk about emptiness as a way of perceiving. The writer Gay Watson explores a translation of sunyata—first offered by T. Stcherbatsky—that is far richer than the mere lack that “emptiness” connotes: relativity. All phenomena arise in dependence, or relative to, conditions; or, per one interpretation of quantum theory, they exist solely in relation to being observed. Since, according to this interpretation, our act of perceiving is fundamental to the fabrication of our constructed reality, I wonder, could this be one reason the Buddha included perceiving (samjna) in the five aggregates as an essential constituent of our conscious experience?

The word emptiness tends to bring up an image of a dark abyss, a black hole, and people think, “There’s nothing! It’s all empty.” Or worse yet, “Nothing matters.” But relativity, as this translation suggests, means that what we perceive is relative and relies on our framework of recognition (e.g., biological, evolutionary, cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural). It also depends on all the causes and conditions that have supported its existence.

For example, given dissimilar sociocultural conditioning, a member of the East African Maasai tribe would have a different perceived reality in front of a laptop on Zoom than a Silicon Valley engineer would. More radically, different sentient beings have distinct umwelts, or experiential worlds, where their understanding of reality is shaped by their specific biological and cognitive characteristics. The perceptual world of a dog consists of an exceptionally complex landscape of smells and high-frequency sounds, all of which are absent from our subjective reality. Furthermore, whatever is perceived in these disparate umwelts is not independently existing but codependently arising based on many causes and conditions. The creation of a sound requires a vibrating source with the appropriate properties, a medium through which sound travels, energy to create the vibration…just to name a few. Underscoring the immense scale of interdependence, the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Therefore, what we perceive as reality is neither real—reified, fixed, independently existent—nor nonreal. Just as a dream is neither real nor nonreal, so is life. Everything is a dream, but it’s not just a dream—a dismissive stance that veers into nihilism. Life is a dream, and it’s not a dream. In this practice, we neither take an ontological stance that things are rigid as we perceive them to be nor do we deny their existence—neither of the extremes is helpful. The Middle Way of sunyata is to honor relativity and avoid the extremes of independent, reified existence on one end and nihilism on the other.

The late great teacher Rob Burbea talked about life as theater. Imagine you have a front row seat at an engaging play and are fully immersed in the story. You feel the pain, joy, and frustration of the actors. And yet, you realize that it’s theater. Each actor has a role to play. It’s not real! But if we think it’s just theater, we demean the value, the beauty, the grace of the art form. Life is theater in its most beautiful and sacred sense. We can engage with life—this theater-like dream—knowing that we are playing a character in relation to all other characters. The script is not fixed. It has infinite possibilities, albeit each with varying probabilities. And we have an incredible gift: the freedom to choose our perspective, the way we see.

While our minds might crave certainty, relativity invites us to open up to a whole range of possibilities. In this openness, different perceptions can be explored. We’re always looking in a particular way, after all, never putting our lenses down. For example, we can become aware of how we are perceiving, fabricating our reality, starting with moment-to-moment subtle recognitions of arisings in the body-mind and expanding to the stories we concoct about ourselves, others, and the world. Paying attention with interest and curiosity often naturally shifts our perspective. Or, we can intentionally try on (but not force) perceiving from the spacious vantage point of love and letting go, which is the opposite of contraction, clinging, and separation—aka selfing.

Selfing is clinging to negative self-preoccupation. However, developing a healthy sense of self that has integrity and is upright, confident, and beloved is necessary for this path of awakening. It’s often said that you must first know and love the self—“this being who is me,” with all its conditioning, neuroses, and particularities—before you can let it go. If we try to relinquish this self before developing a sense of confidence and care, our practice becomes mired in spiritual bypass. Using sunyata as a hammer to squash and get rid of the self, as some well-intentioned practitioners subconsciously attempt, is painful. Let’s remember the Middle Way. There is this dear being who navigates life, suffers, loves, loses. And yet this is not the whole view. There are more dimensions. Instead of fixating on the perception of my self and my life through a straw—“This is me, this is what I want, this is what I hate, this is me, me, me”—can we expand our perspective to see with love and humor, 360° internally and externally, not taking this self-sense too darn seriously? Remember life as sacred theater.

While navigating different perspectives, it’s also important to maintain flexibility. If I see a friend, it’s not helpful to say “Numerous causes and conditions are giving rise to an image of you being recognized and delight being experienced” instead of “I’m glad to see you!”

On the other hand, if I’m feeling annoyed, it might be helpful to access other ways of looking. I can see that this friend, just like me, experiences causes and conditions responsible for creating the person that they are. I can recognize their narrative. I could have been born as them and they could have been born as me. In some ways, I am them. We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together. We’re not separate. It’s not me versus them. It’s us.

We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together.

I notice the impermanent and dreamlike nature of our interaction, and in that moment, my heart opens to tenderness for both of us. We are co-creating and living this mysterious dream together. Or, in the words of Nagarjuna: “Whenever there’s a belief that things are real, desire and hatred spring up unendingly; unwholesome views are entertained, from which all disputes come. Indeed, this is the source of every view; without it, no defilement can occur. Thus, when this is understood, all views and all afflictions vanish entirely. But how may this be known? It is said that when one sees that all things are dependently produced, one sees that all such things are free from birth.”

In Pali, the term yathabhuta nanadassana is often translated as “seeing things as they are.” But this translation posits an ultimate, correct way of seeing things, whereas a more appropriate translation is “seeing things as they have come to be” or as they have come to be seen. Bhuta is the past participle of the verb “to be.” So instead we could say, come and see things as they have come to be perceived, as they have dependently coarisen in our seeing. And when we see in this way, there’s an opening. Emaho! Marvelous! This way of seeing makes life even more mysterious, precious, sublime. It expands the heart in the beauty and generosity of letting go rather than clinging to rigid assumptions and presumptions.

Ultimately, emptiness—as a non-fixed, nonfabricated way of looking—and love and compassion are intertwined. One leads to the other. Love and compassion are particular ways of looking. When we look with kindness and benevolence at ourselves, others, and the world; when we cultivate the way of seeing that is metta, love with no strings attached, we loosen the sense of self and tune our ability to see its fabricated nature. The arrows of love and emptiness fly both ways.

Some years ago, I dedicated a year of my life to the practices of the heart, in particular to metta and compassion. It was a wonderful practice period that gave rise to many insights, including one that I rarely talk about because it’s hard for me to put into words. It was an opening into a perspective that may be described as a glimpse into the “mind of grace.” It was a perspective of complete love and unconditional compassion for everything beyond time and space. No separation, no boundaries, no self—love infused with emptiness, emptiness infused with love. I humbly offer an invitation for you to explore the interchangeable nature of love and emptiness for yourself.

It is said that awakening is an accident, and when we keep practicing, we become more accident-prone. So keep practicing, so that different perceptions pop up when you least expect them and they gradually become readily accessible. Keep relaxing the habitual patterns of perception, and try to see, without forcing, through the eyes of love and nonseparation. You might then notice that you’re looking at every human being as if they are your kin—sibling, mother—and you want to be of service, to help, to heal. But know that you can never go back, because there’s now a crack in self-preoccupation, and the crack is where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen beautifully said.

Trust your own ability to see—because you can. The Buddha said that if it weren’t possible to awaken, he wouldn’t have shared the teachings. So take heart. Borrow trust—from a friend or teacher who’s further on the path, if you need it—and then verify for yourself how love and emptiness are intertwined.

None of this is heady or meant to be figured out by analysis. It’s meant to be practiced, to be known experientially, firsthand. Find out what happens when you widen your view, consider the causes and conditions of your or someone else’s perspective, or intentionally infuse generosity of spirit into your way of seeing. Maybe the heart releases into more freedom, more care. We can know for ourselves that compassion is the natural response of the heart to suffering. When we’re not entangled in selfing, we want to alleviate pain, to help, to be of service. Ehipassiko. Come and see for yourself.

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in April 2021 titled “Emptiness: The Womb of Love and Service.”

The post Dreaming Together appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The spiritual path is in desperate need of rebranding. It is plagued by two massive problems. The first is the use of the word “spiritual”; the second is the use of the word “path.” In tandem, these could be the two worst things that ever happened to the spiritual path.

Let’s start with the notion of “spiritual.”

The term is placed not merely in contrast to the material, but often in opposition to it. “Spiritual” then invites a host of insidious and dismissive interpretations. It implies a dangerous transcendentalism: in order to be spiritual, you need to get away from the material. Spiritual is good, material is bad—and never the twain shall meet. With this wrong view, those of us embarking on the spiritual path are often setting out toward some version of heaven. The journey then devolves into escapism, and we get lost.

The Buddhist psychologist John Welwood noticed this trap years ago and coined the term spiritual bypassing to describe the avoidance tendencies we all have as spiritual practitioners. In more than forty years on the path, I’ve noticed that it’s not a matter of whether a meditator will be snared by this pathology, but rather when. It’s completely understandable. The material world sucks; get me out! Or more accurately: the real world sucks; take me to the unreal. But when we confuse renunciation with avoidance, all sorts of problems pop up.

Although we might say that the way out of samsara is renunciation—which is an integral component of the path—what exactly is it that we are renouncing? If we answer the world of conventional appearance, we’ve again gone astray. Samsara is not a place; it’s a state of mind. What we really want to renounce is our inappropriate relationship to matter, not the material world.

Likewise, we might say that the spiritual path is a journey to nirvana. But where exactly is that? Nirvana is not a place where we’ll arrive at some point in the distant future. Nirvana is also a state of mind. And it’s available right here and now.

So what really sucks? Our relationship to the material world. What do we really want to get out of? A samsaric state of mind. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Trungpa Rinpoche said, “There is no way out. The magic is to discover that there is a way in.” If we go deeply into matter, we will find spirit. If we go deeply into ourselves, we will find everything that we seek. Then we can realize that, ultimately, samsara is nirvana. This is real nonduality.

We turn to the spiritual path because we’re hurting. The First Noble Truth that suffering exists finally hits home, and we set out on the path to alleviate that suffering (the Third Noble Truth). But following a genuine path is not about feeling good (unless we’re talking about basic goodness). It’s about getting real. And getting real means embracing all of reality, including the material. This requires embracing and including your smelly body, your messy emotional life, and all the sticky things in between. It requires embracing all that you see—not just what we think of as “spiritual.”

“Waking up” is common parlance on the path, but it’s more about “waking down.” Instead of looking up to the heavens, do a face-plant onto the earth. Really feel the soil in your eyes and you’ll finally mix dirt with divinity. Matter and spirit are just two ends of the same spectrum of reality: matter is just gross (reified) spirit; spirit is just subtle (dereified) matter.

The notion of “path” adds insult to injury. A path to where? To enlightenment, awakening, and nonduality? But where exactly is that? Take a close look and you’ll discover that it’s a path to nowhere, or to now-here.

Set this magazine down. Take a few deep breaths. Now look up. That’s it! What you’re looking for is hiding in plain sight. That’s, ironically, why you don’t see it. It’s like trying to look at the inside of your eyelid; it’s so close, you can’t see it. When we think of enlightenment, most of us are looking for a Hollywood-level experience—a “spiritual event.” But it’s more like Oklahoma (I love Oklahoma)—something very ordinary. . . and material.

On the spiritual path, you can walk right past the ordinary on your way to the extraordinary, failing to see that enlightenment is truly extra-ordinary. This is why Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, “Enlightenment was my biggest disappointment.” For the glory-seeking ego, awakening is the ultimate letdown, a real downer—into reality.

Stand up with me and clear the space in front of you. Now take the most important step of your life. Step toward yourself. Where would you turn? Where would you go? This is the kind of path I’m talking about.

You don’t need to have any special experience to be free. You don’t have to go anywhere.

You don’t need to have any special experience to be free. You don’t have to go anywhere. Thinking that you do pulls you away from that which you truly seek. To set forth on a path, you need to assume the absence of what you’re seeking. To search for the truth, you need to deny that it’s already here. But the path is perceptual, not actual. Just recognize what is forever right in front of you. As it says repeatedly in The Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Recognition and liberation are simultaneous.”

Many of us on the spiritual path are driven to experience something other than what we’re experiencing right now. That’s not a desire for enlightenment. That’s a desire to escape. Pema Chödrön wrote The Wisdom of No Escape to counteract this motivation. If you’re looking for anything other, you’re on a dualistic path. Sengcan, the Third Zen Ancestor, said in the Faith Mind Poem: “Even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray. Just let things be in their own way.”

Trungpa Rinpoche, in one of his seminal teachings, said, “We could say that the real world is that in which we experience pleasure and pain, good and bad. . . But if we are completely in touch with these dualistic feelings, that absolute experience of duality is itself the experience of nonduality.” Be one hundred percent present with whatever is happening—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that’s it!

This implies that you never actually attain enlightenment—you simply cease to be deluded. How can you attain something you already have? Trying to get close only draws you away. As the Dzogchen master Longchenpa said, “If you want to experience natural mind, you can do it only by not wanting to.” At the highest reaches of the pathless path, trying to attain enlightenment, and even meditation itself, are subtle forms of distraction. They are a dis (“away”) and traction (“to draw”)—a “drawing away”
from reality.

So what should we do? Nothing. But do it really well.

So what should we do? Nothing. But do it really well. This is the art of meditation at the most refined level of “nondistracted” nonmeditation. Don’t draw apart, or dis-tract, from anything. Don’t let the feeling that you can attain awakening only through practice, or even meditation, distract you. And definitely don’t let the spiritual path distract you.

These absolute-level teachings transcend but include the relative truths of the path. They lead us to the end of the path, not as a final destination but as the realization that enlightenment is a false destination. And so, although we need the path provisionally, we also need to let it go. Zen teacher Norman Fischer said, “There is nowhere to go and no way to get there. We have been there all along.” Stop deferring your enlightenment. Stop rescheduling your appointment with reality.

The post The Two Biggest Problems with the Spiritual Path appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many of us struggle with how to get practice out of our head and into our body. We’re conditioned to lead with the head, to use our capacity for thinking and judging in everything that we do, and it filters into zazen. It can take the form of tension or rigidity. It can manifest as pain in our joints or our back. And we may be so used to conducting our lives this way that we’re not even aware of our discomfort—until we start sitting, and, with a new awareness of what’s going on in our body, we notice it for the first time.

When we’re engaged in activities like driving or walking or brushing our teeth while caught up in thoughts—say, thinking about a conversation that hasn’t even happened yet—we’re not aware of what’s going on in our body. At that moment, we’re so in our head that we’re effectively disembodied.

Philosophy and religion often present a dualism between mind and body, or spirit and matter. In some belief systems, the body is seen as impure, as if the mental realm were more valuable, more noble or virtuous than the physical realm. And the same goes for experiencing emotions, which involve bodily responses and bodily sensations. They’re often treated as something that we need to keep under control, so we won’t be judged as weak or unstable. But when we suppress or hide our emotions, we run into all sorts of problems, not just in terms of our own sense of well-being but in our relationships with others.

In Zen, we refer to body-mind, which helps to convey that the two are integrated, but it’s still just a word. It doesn’t get at the pure, direct, lived experience of being in a body. Likewise, we can talk and read and listen to the teachings and gain inspiration, but in the end, Zen is not a belief but a practice—a whole body experience. It begins with learning how to sit: the ideal positioning of our hips, head, shoulders, and the various elements that create a stable and relaxed foundation for zazen and make an effective posture for concentration. The Latin word for concentration (concentratio) means “to collect together, to gather at the center,” as in gathering our attention and placing it on the hara, a point about an inch or so beneath the navel.

And yet, our grasping, calculating mind can easily misconstrue concentration as mental activity. But concentration is a state of awareness that involves our body just as much as our mind. Taking a beginner’s mind look at posture can be very helpful, and this happens naturally for people who are new to practice. But for us folks who have been sitting for a while, it requires us to take an honest look at our posture and consider to what extent it might be helping or impeding our practice. Our bodies do change over time—because of aging or an injury or some other condition—so there’s always room to adapt and improve, keeping in mind that our sitting posture affects our ability to concentrate the mind.

Recently, I was reading the book Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice by Roshi Kosho Uchiyama, which contains a vivid description of the difference between Rodin’s Thinker and the figure of a seated buddha. Uchiyama says the Thinker “sits hunched over, his shoulders drawn forward and his chest compressed, in a posture of chasing after illusions. The arms and legs are bent, the neck and fingers are bent, and even the toes are curled. When our body is bent and contorted like this, blood flow and breathing become congested; we get caught up in our imagination and are unable to break free. On the other hand, when we sit zazen, everything is straight—trunk, back, neck, and head. Because our abdomen rests comfortably on solidly folded legs, blood circulates freely toward the abdomen, and breath moves freely toward the tanden, or hara. Congestion is alleviated, excitability is lessened, and we no longer need to chase after fantasies and delusions.”

That said, if we have a physical limitation that makes it difficult or impossible to sit cross-legged, we simply adapt as needed. There’s always a way to practice—even lying down.

Each one of us has to practice in the body that we’re in. I have a curve in my lower spine due to childhood scoliosis, and my pelvis goes out of alignment quite easily. If I’m not aware of my posture, the next thing I know, I’m leaning over to one side and feeling pain in my hip. It took me years to figure out how to work with it, and I’m still working on it. That’s my body. “Correct zazen,” to use Uchiyama’s words, isn’t a matter of having picture-perfect posture. It’s a matter of working with the various elements of zazen as a way of engaging our whole body in our practice, not just our head. “It is easy to tell you to aim at the correct posture and leave everything up to that, but it is not so simple to do. Even while we are in the zazen position, if we continue our thoughts, we are thinking and no longer doing zazen.”

At the Chapin Mill Zendo, we occasionally hear trains passing by in the distance. One moment, we hear a train coming closer and closer, getting louder and louder, and in the next moment, it’s gone. We didn’t have to do a thing about it. It just passes. Likewise, there’s a difference between chasing after thoughts and just allowing them to occur. In zazen, we’re not pushing them away, and we’re not latching on to them. We’re just letting them pass by as we keep our concentration on our practice.

As Uchiyama says, “Zazen is not thinking, nor is it sleeping. Doing zazen is to be full of life, aiming at holding a correct zazen posture. If we become sleepy while doing zazen, our energy becomes dissipated and our body becomes limp. If we pursue our thoughts, our posture will become stiff. Zazen is neither being limp and lifeless nor being stiff; our posture must be full of life and energy. . . . When we actually do zazen, we should be neither sleeping nor caught up in our own thoughts. We should be wide awake, aiming at the correct posture with our flesh and bones. Can we ever attain this? Is there such a thing as succeeding or hitting the mark? Here is where zazen becomes unfathomable.

“In zazen, we have to vividly aim at holding the correct posture, yet there is no mark to hit! Or at any rate, the person who is doing zazen never perceives whether he has hit the mark or not. If the person doing zazen thinks his zazen is really getting good, or that he has ‘hit the mark,’ he is merely thinking his zazen is good, while actually he has become separated from the reality of his zazen. Therefore, we must always aim at doing correct zazen, without being concerned with perceiving the mark as having been hit. . . . Zazen is just our whole self doing itself by itself. Zazen does zazen!”

Or, more simply, it is our body just being in a body. We already have everything we need to get our practice out of our head and into our body, simply by being in the body that we’re in, as it is, in this one moment. Not just while sitting, but also in activity. In Zen, we often talk about bringing our practice out of the zendo, off the mat, and into the world. But it works in the other direction as well. Bringing the world into our sitting is to not separate ourselves from life as it is, as we experience it through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body-mind.

In Master Hakuin’s Chant in Praise of Zazen, the final line is “and this very body [is] the body of Buddha.” What is that body? It’s not simply my particular bag of skin and bones or my particular ecosystem of microorganisms. Each moment that we release ourselves from our thoughts, we are releasing ourselves into that which lies beyond our material, physical being, beyond this body we call our self and into our True Self, which is no-self.

♦

Adapted from Practicing With Our Whole Being, an episode of Rochester Zen Center’s podcast.

The post This Very Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To know that innately we have great powers, and that we can cultivate them in our daily lives, is truly empowering. I’d like to share with you Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on the Three Powers—the most potent antidote to the feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, uncertainty, vulnerability, and confusion that many of us are suffering from.

The first power is the power of understanding. In 2001, a 12-year-old girl came to our Plum Village Practice Center in France. Her father was an alcoholic and gave her drinks from the time she was 6 years old. Every time he drank, he gave her a glass. He had many physical and mental problems, and didn’t go to work at all. Her mother had to work hard to take care of the entire family. Growing up, this girl was angry at her father for drinking and not working, and she was angry at her mother for not standing up for herself.

When she turned 11, she joined a gang. One night she got very drunk, and when she woke up, she found herself naked—she had been raped. She came to us feeling broken in so many different ways. One day one of the sisters looked at her palms and said to her, “You know, I think you will die when you are 17, and you will die a violent death.” I was taking care of her during her stay at our monastery, so she ran to the room we shared, crying and recounting to me what had happened. I held her really tight, and I cried with her. I thought quietly to myself that the sister was right. If this girl continued to live this way, she would have a violent death at a young age. It was a moment when I literally could foresee her destiny.

In Buddhism, seeing a person’s destiny is understood as a miraculous power. However, by examining our own actions, habits, and personality, we can gain the capacity to look at someone and know what will become of them. If you drink every day, you’ll most likely become an alcoholic, right? And what will your marriage or relationship be? Most likely dysfunctional. And what will your children be? Most likely neglected or abused. We can tell a person’s destiny if we just stop and look. This is the power of understanding.

I held her for a long time and then I said, “My child, you’ll be OK, because now you know the path. You know how to practice and how to take care of yourself. You’ve learned about sitting meditation, so you can sit each day with your wounded inner child. When you have strong feelings, you can do walking meditation to embrace your sadness, your anger. You know how to be there for yourself, so you can change your destiny.” Thankfully, she practiced all this, and she didn’t die at 17. She’s about to turn 34, and she comes to visit me at the monastery every so often. Her parents didn’t change much, but she changed herself and thus her destiny.

What we choose every moment will affect our habits, our personality, and our destiny. Therefore, we must choose with awareness, with understanding and love, so we can care for ourselves better.

The second power is the power of love. The need to love and to be loved is real and present in every one of us, but sometimes we get confused about what it really means. I know a woman who in her late 70s rented out her house and moved in with her boyfriend. She was sure she had found “the man,” and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Yet after only a few months she left to go back to her own house. It turned out she’d woken up one morning, and when she saw that her boyfriend didn’t have his dentures in, she thought, “Oh my god, he’s so ugly! I thought I was ugly!” So even at her age, she was taken in by her idea of love.

In Vietnamese, the word for “soulmate” is tri ky, and it means “one who remembers, knows, and masters oneself.” A soulmate is a person who remembers and knows their body, who can take care of and master their feelings and thoughts. Isn’t that revelatory? Even if someone loves us sincerely, if we don’t know how to be our own soulmate, we won’t be able to believe in the love that person is offering because we ourselves don’t know what love is.

Before I became a nun, this happened to me over and over again. I was hungry for love. My parents had passed away when I was a child, and during the short years that I lived with my mother, she was so physically and verbally abusive that when she disappeared, I was simply happy she was gone. All my life, I was always looking for someone to love me. After I became a nun I gradually realized what I was doing, and I have learned to be my own soulmate. Now I recognize this hunger in others, especially in young people who grow up without a stable home. Without consistent love from our parents or caregivers, we grow up craving that love. We crave it so badly that we throw ourselves out there. Love me. See me. Take me. Enslave me, even! We are so desperate that we’ll do anything to be accepted, even if our heart is broken again and again. But if we can learn that a soulmate is one who remembers themself, we learn to take care and not put ourselves through such painful experiences. We learn to respect our bodies, to choose where we want to be, who we want to be with, and what we want to do with our lives.

When we are our own soulmate, naturally we become a soulmate to other people.

It is a great happiness and freedom to be our own soulmate. We don’t have to compare ourselves with anyone. When we are our own soulmate, naturally we become a soulmate to other people. We are each the product of infinite conditions stemming from our parents, our ancestors, from society, education. Still, we are beautiful and whole just the way we are. Even though there’s suffering in our families, in society, in us, we can help create change. We can choose actions that are mindful, that are positive, that are wholesome. If we look at our parents and realize we don’t want to be like them—if we do nothing differently, then we will be like them, or worse. However, if we’re aware of what they do, and we use mindfulness practices to transform those habits in us, then we will change our own destiny. In that way, we are also kind to our parents. Now I’m older than my mother was when she passed away. I was kind to my mother because I was living a life of peace, of love, of healing. I helped many people. My mother wasn’t able to do that. She struggled to survive while causing a lot of pain to herself, to me, to her family. I changed all that for her. My mother has been liberated inside of me.

So when you have strong feelings, sit with them. That’s to be a soulmate. Be a soulmate to yourself—even to your bad habits. Say to them, Hello, my bad habits! Smile to them. You don’t have to reject them. Simply acknowledge them by their true names and embrace them with your mindful breathing. I know you’re there. You’re part of me. I’ll take good care of you. Please help me. Then you’ll have self-acceptance, self-embrace, self-love. As long as you still reject yourself, you cannot be happy. If you embrace and accept, then you can always take better care of yourself.

The third power is the power of healing, of transforming our suffering and bringing healing to ourselves. We can have many degrees, lots of money, and a high position in society, and yet we can feel so insecure and impoverished. It’s never enough! In Buddhism, there’s a teaching, “Know that you are enough.” In Chinese, the character for “enough” includes a head, a body, an arm, and two feet. Isn’t that amazing? Please remember this Chinese character when you say, “Oh, I’m nobody. I’m no good. I’m different. I’m weird. I don’t deserve a place in this world.” Ask yourself, “Do I still have my head? Do I still have a body, two arms (or one arm, even), and two legs?” Then you have enough. You are more than enough!

There’s a wonderful Japanese art called kintsugi. When pottery breaks, kintsugi is the art of mending it with lacquer mixed with gold dust, which means that the breaks are actually accentuated. They become more prominent, unique, and beautiful. In all of our lives there’s a certain brokenness, a certain pain. Instead of rejecting those parts of ourselves or our lives, we use a kind of kintsugi to mend them. We use mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful thinking, in order to embrace what is. We sit quietly, being our own soulmate. In this way, those broken pieces aren’t wasted or thrown away. Instead, they’re held together with love, with respect, with dignity.

When you’re going through a difficult moment, come back to your breath, do walking meditation, sit with yourself. Be present. Be still. Be kind. That’s gold. Actually, you’re more precious than gold. Remember that you are precious and powerful, and to be your own soulmate is the greatest happiness and freedom!

♦  

Adapted from a dharma talk titled Be Your Own Soulmate at plumvillage.org.

The post How to Be Your Own Soulmate appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One time when my colleague Joseph Goldstein and I were visiting a friend in Houston, we all went out to a restaurant to order takeout. As we were waiting for the food to be prepared, Joseph struck up a conversation with the young man working behind the counter. After a few minutes, he told Joseph that he’d never left Houston and went on to describe, somewhat passionately, how his dream was to one day go to Wyoming. When Joseph asked him what he thought he would find there, he responded, “Open, expansive space, a feeling of being unconfined, with peacefulness and freedom and room to move.”

Joseph responded, “There’s an inner Wyoming, too, you know.” At that point, the young man fixed a stare at Joseph and said, “That’s freaky,” as he sidled away.

But there is an inner Wyoming, a potential for openness, spaciousness, clarity, and freedom that exists within each of us. We just need confidence in it, to make the journey to that place, to discover it, nurture it, and hold the memory that it’s there, waiting for us to visit anytime.

In moving from contraction to spaciousness, it’s as if we’re sitting in a narrow, low-ceilinged, dark room—so accustomed to it that we don’t even realize we’re confined—and then the door swings open, revealing light, room to move, and possibilities that suddenly await. We don’t know just what is out there, but it’s certainly more vast and spacious than that tiny room.

My favorite way of imagining that expansive state—as someone with asthma—is “being able to breathe again.” More than just pleasure, different from indulgence, it is mostly a sensation of huge relief. It is peace.

Theologian Howard Thurman recommended that we “look at the world with quiet eyes.” It’s an intriguing phrase. It seems like with the way we so often look at the world, we resemble cartoon characters whose eyes are popping out on springs: “I see something I want! Give it to me!” Our heads rapidly turn to the object of our desire in a fixed gaze, so as not to lose sight of it. Our bodies lean forward in anticipation. Our arms extend, reaching out to acquire it. Our fingers flex, ready to grab on to what we want, to try to keep it from changing, from eluding our grasp. Our shoulders strain to hold on even tighter.

That’s grasping, contraction.

It happens in a moment, or an hour, or a day, a month, a lifetime—and it brings a lot of pain.

So, look at the world with quiet eyes whenever you can, and let go of grasping. The world will come to fill you without your straining for it. In that relaxation, you will find peace. Peace isn’t a fabricated state, repressing all woes and challenges. It is tuning into our fundamental nature.

Willa Maile Qimeng Cuthrell-Tuttleman, when she was seven years old and a student at Friends Academy in Manhattan, wrote a poem that beautifully expresses what I understand as peace.

Peace Is Friendship

Peace looks like nature
Peace smells like fresh air
Peace sounds like wind blowing through the trees
Peace tastes like bubble gum
Peace feels like a soft pillow

I have a friend who describes himself as pretty obsessive when nursing a grudge, another contracted state. He can go over and over and over the words of the misunderstanding, or his resentment at not being included, or someone’s reckless behavior. Over and over and over. After one such interlude, he reflected on the obsessive quality, declaring:

“I let him live rent-free in my brain for too long.”

Now imagine yourself going home to that blessedly quiet apartment of your mind. What a relief. You can play music. You can cuddle with your dog. You can reach out to a struggling friend. You can cook a meal, or write a poem, or maybe finally get some sleep.

Expansiveness leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil and lead us onward.

Expansiveness doesn’t lead us to a vacuous place—cavernous, muted, disconnected. Expansiveness isn’t being spaced out, floating above it all. In the sense that I’m using the word, expansiveness is energized, confident, creative, brimming with love. The subtle balances in life—of rest and action, of passion and letting go, of the power of intention and of patience—all can take place in this expansive space.

Expansiveness helps broaden our perspective, so we can think more flexibly and with a more open mind. We become better able to focus on the big picture and not feel so discouraged by the constant array of ups and downs we experience every day. When faced with adversity, we can generate more solutions. Expansiveness invites experimentation and imagination. We’re more willing to pour ourselves fully into life’s pursuits. It is the freedom of letting down the burden we have been carrying. It leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil and lead us onward.

Many years ago, I attended a stress-reduction program led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, longtime meditation teacher and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. In one exercise, he stepped up to the blackboard, and in the center, he drew a square made up of nine dots, arranged in three parallel lines with three dots in each line. He then challenged everyone in the class to take the piece of chalk and see if we could connect all the dots using only four straight lines, without removing the chalk from the blackboard and without retracing a line. One by one, all thirty of us went up to the blackboard. We tried beginning from the left, from the right, from the top, from the bottom, and returned to our seats frustrated, unable to do what he’d asked. The room was vibrating with stress.

That’s another meaning of the word dharma: actualizing that potential for freedom we all have.

Then Jon picked up the chalk and, with great sweeping strokes that extended well beyond the perimeter of the small square, did exactly what he had challenged us to do. Every one of us had presumed that to succeed we had to stay within the circumscribed area formed by the nine dots. Jon had never said that we were limited to that little space, but all of us had concluded that was the only area we could move within, the only place to find options. Not one of us could see beyond our limited sense of how much room we had to work in.

That’s another meaning of the word dharma: actualizing that potential for freedom we all have, shedding the stories others have told about us to discover who we genuinely are, understanding what we care about most deeply, what makes for a better life. Dharma is not something we are fated to, or stoic about, but the very set of practices that can lift us out of our conditioning, out of an assumed set of limits and away from what is often a pervasive resignation. We can see for ourselves the elements of life that sustain us, bring us closer and closer to the truth of how things are. Rather than the fixed assignment we are given at birth, dharma reflects a breathtaking capacity of any one of us to take a journey away from constriction and resignation to a vital, creative, free life. None of this is determined in the external conditions of who we are; it is all held in the universal potential of who we might become.

To breathe life into dharma in this sense is the journey of liberation we make. Step by step, we move toward freedom and we manifest freedom all at the same time.

♦

Listen to an interview with Sharon Salzberg here.

Excerpted from Real Life by Sharon Salzberg. Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Salzberg. Used by permission of Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The post Expansion and Contraction appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma” is a typical English translation of dhammacakkappavattana, the title of the discourse (sutta in Pali, or sutra in Sanskrit—a Buddhist scriptural text) that recounts the Buddha’s delivery of his first teaching. The elevated tone of this translation highlights the reverential image of the teaching conveyed by this discourse. And the discourse itself is revered. According to tradition, it reports the Buddha’s first teaching following his awakening, and it’s also considered first in importance among the many thousands of discourses in the Pali Buddhist scriptures. It’s a discourse with its own holiday—Asalha Puja—when some 150 million Theravada Buddhists celebrate it as embodying the Buddha’s entire teaching. There’s an alternative translation for the title, though. This alternative is just as accurate, and no less respectful than “The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma.” It may be less lofty in tone, but the alternative I’m going to suggest is more respectful of the significance of the discourse. Rather than an authoritative image of the first teaching, this alternative foregrounds the spirit of the Buddha’s teachings more broadly: the view that the teachings themselves reveal of the story the discourse tells and the doctrines it conveys.

But first, the image—the story and doctrines of the first teaching. The discourse begins with the Buddha addressing five former fellow renunciants from his pre-enlightenment life. Succinctly, the Buddha sets forth to these five disciples-to-be the wisdom that he attained on the night of his transcendence: the middle way, the noble eightfold path, and the four noble truths. Just hearing the Buddha synopsize these never-before-heard doctrines in bare outline immediately propels one of the five, Kondanna, into a vision that precipitates his enlightenment. The cries of celestial beings approving the teaching—and the commencement of its propagation—rise up through the eight heavenly realms. The 10,000 worlds of the universe tremble as a radiance heralding the advent of the Buddha’s teaching issues into reality.

The absolute confidence of the fully enlightened teacher, the potency of the doctrines, and the endorsement of the deities all contribute to an image of supreme religious authority. This image of the teaching implies a revealed, capital-“T” Truth, from an inerrant Buddha who bestows it on humanity fully-formed, inviolable and beyond question.

Beyond the portentous tone, translations of dhammacakkappavattana like “The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma” accord with the language and symbolism of the discourse. Pavattana means “setting in motion.” The Pali word dhamma is fairly represented, of course, by “Dhamma.” When dhamma refers to the Buddha’s teachings, some monastic translators always translate it as capital-“D” Dhamma—not only in titles—though the earliest scripts that record Pali have no capital letters. Some monastics simply translate it as “Truth” (yes, capital “T”), though it’s never used even to mean “truth” in the Pali Canon.  In our title, dhamma means “teachings”—specifically, the Buddha’s teachings.

Cakka certainly means “wheel.” Judging by the title, the wheel was apparently as important a Buddhist symbol when the discourse was framed as now. The point of the symbolism follows from the story in the discourse: once people start to take these teachings up, they will inevitably pass from person to person due to their intrinsic value, just as a wheel, due to its shape, will continue to roll once set in motion. 

And this isn’t just any wheel. The title brings to mind a great, massive, powerful wheel, an image of grandeur and majesty. This is a wheel that turns with relentless, irresistible momentum—perhaps with an extra associative push from another weighty Buddhist symbol, the wheel of dependent origination. The closed circle of the wheel conveys an impression of the teachings as unitary, complete, and perfect. The symbolism reinforces our sense of the first teaching as revelation.

So our usual English-language title for the discourse reflects its reverential image of the first teaching rather well. As I mentioned though, there’s an alternative that takes us beyond this image. Consider that pavattana means not only “setting in motion” but also “set turning” or “get rolling.” And that cakka means not only “wheel” but also “eye” (and by extension, “vision”), “sphere,” “circle,” “discus,” and (among other meanings) “ball.” With these meanings in view, cakkappavattana can be translated literally as “getting the ball rolling.”

As a translation of dhammacakkappavattana, “Getting the Ball of the Dhamma Rolling” has much to recommend it. It may not pack the gravitas of “The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma.” But this is what recommends it. I’m not really joking with this suggestion (though I hope you’ll see the humor)—we do well by the Buddha’s teachings to ratchet down the loftiness of our translation a peg or two.

From a broader viewpoint, we can understand the doctrines announced in the first teaching not as the foundation of the teachings that would follow—for instance, the gradual training, the dependent origination, and the three characteristics of existence—but rather as interlocking with and complementary to them (and sometimes as complicating or contradicting them). For instance, the first teaching posits the four noble truths—the Buddha’s teaching on the nature and resolution of suffering— as encompassing all of the other teachings, just as the expanse of the “elephant’s footprint” (as in MN 28) accommodates the footprints of every other animal in the forest. But the doctrine of the three characteristics—the main topic of many other discourses—offers a similarly comprehensive map of our existence, one we can understand in turn as encompassing the four noble truths.

Actually, the three characteristics make an uncredited cameo in our discourse—in Koṇḍañña’s pronouncement as he opens his eyes (literally, his “dhamma eye”) to the Buddha’s first teaching. Koṇḍañña exclaims, “whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing” (yaṅkiñci samudayadhammaṃ sabbantaṃ nirodhadhamman ti). With this declaration, he bears witness to anicca (“transience” or “impermanence”), the first of the three characteristics this doctrine ascribes to all phenomena. The other two, anatta (“lack of immutable self, soul, or essence”), and dukkha (“imperfection,” “unsatisfactoriness,” or “suffering”—the subject of the four noble truths), intertwine with and are entailed by this first characteristic. A key point is that these three characteristics, again, mark all phenomena.

So this teaching extends to the teachings themselves. The ideas expressed in the Buddha’s teachings—and certainly the texts that record them—are anicca, subject to change, and therefore we must consider how they may have changed since the Buddha’s time. Viewing them as natural phenomena (as opposed to supernatural ones), we’d imagine them to have evolved. In their passage through the minds of countless human beings over the course of Buddhist history—for several hundred years as oral tradition, and then for several thousand through imperfectly-transmitted manuscripts—they would have developed into just the intricate, overdetermined web of ideas that we now regard as Buddhist ideas.

From this perspective, the Buddha’s first teaching in the discourse reads less like a first presentation of new ideas than, in the words of scholar Richard Gombrich, “a set of formulae, expressions which are by no means self-explanatory but refer to already established doctrines” (my italics). Johannes Bronkhorst points to versions of the discourse in other canons that omit the four noble truths entirely, arguing on this and other evidence that this doctrine represents a later addition to the Pali Canon version. The four noble truths and perhaps other core doctrines may have originated not as chronologically first or even early teachings, but as systematized formulations from a later time.

Gombrich cautions, “of course we do not really know what the Buddha said in his first sermon.” This acknowledgment of uncertainty resonates with the teachings of Thai forest master Ajahn Chah, who saw uncertainty itself as an aspect of anicca.  Rather than regretting or denying uncertainty, Ajahn Chah encourages us to observe it, reflect on it, and meditate on it. “Whatever pops up,” Ajahn Chah teaches, “just stick this one label on it all—‘not sure.” He explains, “what we call uncertainty, here, is the Buddha. The Buddha is the dhamma. The dhamma is the characteristic of uncertainty.”

None of this diminishes the value of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta or the ideas it conveys. From the viewpoint of anicca, we don’t need an inerrant Buddha whose words are true because he said them, or because someone said he said them. We don’t need a fully-formed, beyond-question dharma. Such conceptions of the Buddha and the dharma incline us towards—as surely as they are products of—the authoritarian religious impulse. (If “authoritarian” seems excessive here, reflect that authoritarianism, at root, simply means commitment to authority—typically, an idealized, original authority—as a first principle.)

Buddhist ideas, like any ideas, are true or useful not because of who said them, or how ancient they are, or whether they reflect the intended meaning of a sacred text. They are true to the degree that they correspond to how things are. And they are useful to the degree that they are beneficial. The four noble truths are both true and useful not as revealed dogma but as sources of insight to spur our own wise responses to our deepest problems. We oughtn’t to locate the truth or goodness of the Buddha’s teachings in their origins or in orthodoxy. We can have truth—if only imperfectly—for our authority, rather than authority for our truth (to paraphrase Lucretia Mott).

We are as prone to the authoritarian religious impulse as the ancient monastics who enshrined it in some but not all of the canonical teachings, as well as orthodox traditionalists through the ages who infused some but not all of our Buddhist practices and traditions with it. We can rely not on unquestioned tradition, but rather on our clear-eyed, self-aware discernment, which values tradition critically and creatively, recognizing and resisting the authoritarian impulse.

We can regard the Buddha as a wise but human teacher, an innovator who introduced a set of original, insightful, useful ideas, or perhaps just the germs of such ideas (and possibly, some less useful ones). We don’t need him to have been inerrant, omniscient, or otherwise perfect. We can understand the Buddha’s ideas as natural phenomena, rather than supernatural ones—and therefore, in dharma terms, as anicca, uncertain and subject to change.

Our English title for the discourse on the first teaching is also anicca. Where now we have “The Setting In Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma,” the phrase cakkappavattana may once have had just the same idiomatic meaning in Pali as “get the ball rolling” does for us today. In English, the idiom simply means, “get something started.” The narrative frame of the discourse, if not its image of the first teaching, suggests that the Pali phrase did have this idiomatic meaning. Getting something started is just what the Buddha does in this discourse. This is ample cause for celebration on Asalha Puja, also known as “Dhamma Day.”

To understand the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta strictly from the orthodox, authoritarian viewpoint—as announcing not just the start, but also the middle and end of the dharma (the “Truth”)—is to miss the point of the dharma itself. So let’s update our title here. “Getting the Ball of the Dhamma Rolling” sets us up for a discourse in a modern sense of “discourse”: a conversation we can join.

The Buddha got the ball rolling. We can pick up the ball of the dharma and roll it further along ourselves. We can be “Buddhists” as followers of a human Buddha, a teacher who offered his valuable discoveries for others who came before, and now us, to take up, practice with, benefit from, experiment with, modify, and improve.

♦ 

This article is adapted from the author’s website, findingsanti.org.

The post Getting the Ball Rolling appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There is an old expression that says “you can’t get there from here,” meaning you can’t get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re starting from. You need to know two things to go anywhere: where you are now and where you are going.

Nichiren taught that our defilements lead to awakening. This idea was so central to his ministry that it frames the daimoku, the title of the Lotus Sutra, Namu Myohorengekyo—on every mandala he ever inscribed.

The defilements (Sanskrit: kleshas) are mental states that disturb the mind and give rise to unwholesome actions. They arise from the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion, and are a natural part of life. Klesha can also be translated as “affliction.”

Some think Buddhism’s goal is to eliminate defilements because they function to obscure our buddhanature, but the Lotus Sutra, which is the basis for Nichiren Buddhism, states that there is no difference between our defilements and awakening. Though they seem to be opposites, they are simply different sides of the way things are. Awakening is not the eradication of defilements but a state in which we are fully aware of all aspects of our lives, good and bad. The Lotus Sutra refutes the doctrine that the purpose of our practice is to transcend life, to escape samsara, to “reach” nirvana, thereby confirming Buddhism as a positive, life-affirming religion; one whose objective is liberation through engagement.

As Robert Frost wrote, “the best way out is always through”—in other words, we learn from dealing with the difficult things. Defilements then become the motivation to seek awakening, the fuel to spur us to practice with confidence and trust in the universal process-flow of buddhanature. Rather than seeking to get rid of our defilements, all our characteristics and qualities become the focus of our meditation practice. We accept ourselves fully as we are, good points and bad points included, without rejecting anything in order to go someplace other than where we are right now.

Awakening is not the eradication of defilements but a state in which we are fully aware of all aspects of our lives, good and bad.

The Lotus Sutra states that “even without extinguishing their defilements or denying their desires [people] can purify all their senses and eradicate all of their misdeeds.” It also teaches us that awakening does not lie in subjugating delusions one by one in order to attain enlightenment. Chapter 16 of the Lotus Sutra tells us that “ordinary mortals, just as they are, are buddhas. . . . We burn the firewood of defilements and behold the fire of enlightened wisdom before our eyes.”

Our destination is our vow to do good, to do no harm, and to seek awakening for ourselves and others. Our starting point is accepting and embracing all of our qualities, good, bad, and neutral. We won’t arrive at our destination by denying or suppressing anything—that never works. Things always pop up again and again, usually in the most unpleasant ways and at the most unfortunate times.

The Lotus Sutra says, “Good people should enter the abode of the Tathagata.”  This abode is the four brahmaviharas: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. We hold everything in and around us, even the most embarrassing and terrible things about ourselves, even our defilements, with the same lovingkindness and compassion that a parent would have for their crying child.

We begin our journey of awakening by observing all our characteristics, patterns, and behaviors just as they are. We accept that we are not perfect and, frankly, may never be perfect. But we try our best. And when we fail, we notice it, accept it with a smile, and without self-criticism simply begin again, and again, and again. We can get there from here.

The post You Can Get There From Here appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I’d like to say a few words about the fundamental understanding of the spiritual path and meditation practice. Some of you have been practicing for a while and probably have heard this several times already, but it bears repeating and is also an introduction to the profoundness of the meditative insight and the spiritual way of life.

When you are doing anything in life, there are always two of you, so to speak. There is the one who thinks “I am walking, I am sitting, I am chanting.” And there is also a deeper self which most people are not aware of—the self that knows this. When you are walking, when you are going to the supermarket or going to the movies, you think “I am going, I am going, I am going.” You don’t realize that every step that your body takes has something that is knowing that your body is taking that step. For every breath that you take, the breathing activity does not know that it is breathing. There is a knower of the breathing activity.

This body that is walking and breathing is walking a path. This body that walks and breathes and talks is walking on a trail, and the name of that trail is “Birth, growth, old age, decay, and death.” That is the trail that every one of us is walking. One may think “Now I’m going to college, now I’m going to a career, now I’m going to be a famous writer, a famous musician.” This is all part of the path. You are walking down the path, and you come to college thinking “Oh, this is the time to be stressed out, this is the time to meet people.” Then you go into a career: “Oh, this is the time when I am supposed to be fulfilled.” Then you come to a place called retirement, the golden years, so that when you are seventy-five years old, you can hit a little round ball on the grass.

This is the path that life is. It is not that you achieve anything—nothing is permanent, you are always moving, and all the time something deeper than that is within you. True self, or the God, or the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. And what the Kingdom of Heaven does, what the God does, is to be aware of you. God is the pure knowing.

“Birth, growth, old age, decay, and death.” That is the trail that every one of us is walking.

If you take up a meditation practice, what you are trying to become aware of is that your mind is identifying itself as the body, and says “This is what I am; I am David, I am Sue.” The mind, which is identifying itself as the body, is going to be informed that it actually exists in another mode as well, which is the awareness of the body. The practice is essential and very simple. The reason it is simple is that it does not require the thinking activity.

When you come into the meditation hall—and as your practice deepens, this includes anything that happens in life, not just in the meditation hall—things are precise and simple, very straightforward. You don’t have a choice of how you take your tea or how your body is postured. Even if you have your cell phone in your pocket, you cannot text. This is called the nontexting posture. It was not always called the nontexting posture, but nowadays it might be called the nontexting posture. The mind cannot control the body, saying “Let’s go here, let’s go there, I want to do this, I want to do that, what do I do now?” The mantra of the thinking activity is “What’s next?” That is its mode of operation; it cannot rest in the present moment. When it rests, it dissolves, and in that dissolution, in that moment, the mind awakens to its original luminosity, which had been obscured by thinking.

The practice is, when you walk, be aware of walking. When you are sitting here, use your will to make contact with the body, instead of to converse about it. There is a term in our tradition called the sword of wisdom. You learn to exercise the sword of wisdom, so that wisdom changes the object you are experiencing from the mental gossip to the physical body—that is the wisdom practice. When you are walking and you are daydreaming about this and that, wisdom says “No, come back to walking.” That walking is now your mode of existence, you are existing currently in the present moment. You are aware of walking, and the awareness that you did not know existed before starts to come within range of your own experience.

I am now old. I am at the end of the walk. And once upon a time, I had a good basketball jump shot. When I was younger—was that “me,” or is “me” the old guy? And if you say it is the same guy, what is the same, what part is the same? Not a single cell, not a single nerve, not a single synapse. There is no connection, but there is a chain of causation. If you take an apple seed, plant it in the ground, water it, and watch it become a tree, is the seed the same as the tree? No. Is it different from the tree? One can’t even answer a question like that, it doesn’t make sense. There are no words to describe the conditions of being of anything.

There is something constant through all these years, and that is the light that is illuminating you. Once you enter the spiritual path, your life is no longer about fulfilling your individuality, that is an impossible thing. Your individuality is a journey from a womb to a coffin. Regardless of how much money you have, regardless of how much fame you have, regardless of how accomplished you are as an athlete or a musician, this is the path. Spiritual wisdom says that if you make that individuality into something very important, you will have difficulty with its inevitable disintegration. You will fear it, because you have thought, “What I am is now disappearing.”

There is within you that which is beyond birth and death, beyond success and failure. It just knows that you are, and it is. When you come into the zendo and make a bow, know that this is not the place where individuality is important, this is a place where individuality is humbled. “Whenever I associate with others may I view myself as the lowest of all.” Very different from teachings at the university and the college, or teachings in the office where you are under the pressure of being rated, and your worth is based on performance. No, as a performer you are impermanent, don’t make a fuss. Before you have to exit stage left, you should realize that within you is that which is eternal, which is unaffected, which is present within all things as the core of their being, and which is pure spirit, completely nonmaterial.

There is something constant through all these years, and that is the light that is illuminating you.

How do you become aware of the inner illumination? How do you become aware that there is a deeper knower? The path will always be in the present moment. It will always be when “I” stops, when the mind stops. Society devalues moments of stopping. But these are actually the great moments. When the thinking mind is not present, the song of a bird is wonderful, and something smiles on you—the basic simplicity. You experience the all-pervading goodness of your own being when it is not being tormented by the obsession with personal affairs.

For those of you who are beginning the practice, when breathing in, be aware of breathing in; putting on your coat, be aware of putting on your coat; putting on your shoes, be aware. And smile at how pleasant it is when your existence is that simple. You have not been put here to be judged or to prove your self-worth. Your self-worth is that you exist. You have already fulfilled your purpose for being here by hearing a bird or seeing a snowflake. That miraculous activity is your fulfillment—please do not miss it.

♦

From A Temporary Affair: Talks on Awakening and Zen by David Radin. Reprinted by permission of Monkfish Book Publishing Company (2022) Rhinebeck, New York.

The post Left Foot, Right Foot appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.