When I was at Eiheiji monastery in Japan, everyone was just doing what he should do. That is all. It is the same as waking up in the morning; we have to get up. At Eiheiji monastery, when we had to sit, we sat; when we had to bow to Buddha, we bowed to Buddha. That is all. And when we were practicing, we did not feel anything special. We did not even feel that we were leading a monastic life. For us, the monastic life was the usual life, and the people who came from the city were unusual people. When we saw them we felt, “Oh, some unusual people have come!”

But once I had left Eiheiji and been away for some time, coming back was different. I heard the various sounds of practice—the bells and the monks reciting the sutra—and I had a deep feeling. There were tears flowing out of my eyes, nose, and mouth! It is the people who are outside of the monastery who feel its atmosphere. Those who are practicing actually do not feel anything. I think this is true for everything. When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all that they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

So to feel something about Buddhism is not the main point. Whether that feeling is good or bad is out of the question. We do not mind, whatever it is. Buddhism is not good or bad. We are doing what we should do. That is Buddhism. Of course some encouragement is necessary, but that encouragement is just encouragement. It is not the true purpose of practice. It is just medicine. When we become discouraged we want some medicine. When we are in good spirits we do not need any medicine. You should not mistake medicine for food. Sometimes medicine is necessary, but it should not become our food.

When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all that they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

So, of Rinzai’s four ways of practice, the perfect one is not to give a student any interpretation of himself, nor to give him any encouragement. If we think of ourselves as our bodies, the teaching then may be our clothing. Sometimes we talk about our clothing; sometimes we talk about our body. But neither body nor clothing is actually we ourselves. We ourselves are the big activity. We are just expressing the smallest particle of the big activity, that is all. So it is all right to talk about ourselves, but actually there is no need to do so. Before we open our mouths, we are already expressing the big existence, including ourselves. So the purpose of talking about ourselves is to correct the misunderstanding we have when we are attached to any particular temporal form or color of the big activity. It is necessary to talk about what our body is and what our activity is so that we may not make any mistake about them. So to talk about ourselves is actually to forget about ourselves.

Dogen-zenji said, “To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.” When you become attached to a temporal expression of your true nature, it is necessary to talk about Buddhism, or else you will think the temporal expression is it. But this particular expression of it is not it. And yet at the same time it is it! For a while this is it; for the smallest particle of time, this is it. But it is not always so: the very next instant it is not so, thus this is not it. So that you will realize this fact, it is necessary to study Buddhism. But the purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of the big existence, or reality itself. When we realize this fact, there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. The purpose of our practice is to be aware of this fact.

♦

From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki © 1970 by John Weatherhill, Inc. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com.

The post The Big Activity  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Every one of us entering this world does so without knowing our identity. When we’re born, we’re ignorant of our name, nationality, or social class, for example. Yet we’re fully alive. We come into the world in our most vulnerable, pure, and natural state—but it doesn’t last long, because entering life is like being invited to a masquerade, and to join in, we must get a mask to wear. But, being babies, we can’t make our own mask, so those close to us—usually our parents or other relatives—start crafting it, and then they put it on us. The initial components of this mask include a name, gender, nationality, and in many cases, a religion. As we grow older and continue to dance along, new elements are added, slowly building up our identity. But we ourselves don’t realize that we’re wearing a mask or that it’s being made. From the outset, we’re told that our name and so on are who we are, as if these elements constituted an absolute, solid, separate, and permanent essence with which we’d come into this world. We don’t recognize them as products of our environment, which could have been very different in different circumstances. 

Think for a moment about who you would be if your parents had different beliefs, education, and resources—if you had grown up with different siblings or were born in a place where another language was spoken. What we call “I” has never been and can never be a separate and independent entity; it’s deeply and inevitably intertwined with its surroundings, without exception. 

As the dance continues, our mask continues to evolve, becoming more complex and refined. It begins to include new elements, such as specific roles: we become daughters, brothers, friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends. To these roles we add careers: we call ourselves engineers, artists, or spiritual teachers. Other subtler elements include our habits, opinions, reactions, fears, hopes, and preferences. But all the things we unknowingly overidentify with when we say “This is who I am,” are not really ourselves. The person we believe ourselves to be is not who we really are but a “persona” we’ve built—a role we’ve developed and learned to play with others. 

The word “person” comes from the Latin term persona, which means mask.

The problem with masks is that none of them are perfect. Their crafting process inevitably creates cracks, scratches, and flaws—those aspects of ourselves that we’re told as we’re growing up are “bad” or “wrong.” Eventually, we become ashamed of these parts of ourselves, doing all we can to prevent others, and even ourselves, from seeing them. Further, since we’re convinced that this mask, or persona, is our true identity, we cling to it with all our might, trying to make it presentable and permanent. This is reflected in countless ways, such as in our need to meet social standards, in the expectations we impose on ourselves or that others impose on us, and in the constructs we weave with our minds. But maintaining our persona leaves us exhausted, because no matter what we do or accomplish, it’s never enough. Who we are, it seems, is never enough. 

So we might approach this situation from a different perspective: instead of trying to polish our mask until it becomes perfect, we can start looking for the one who’s wearing it. This looking brings us to the realm of contemplative practice, where we dedicate our efforts to observing the self as it is, free from prejudices and preconceived ideas, with what Zen calls “beginner’s mind.” 

As we look closer, it becomes increasingly clear that all the elements that make up our mask are in constant flux. Even those as fundamental as our name, gender, nationality, and religion can change—not to mention our roles, professions, opinions, habits, and preferences. Without exception, all these elements are arising and disappearing in a constant flow. Noticing this, something within us begins to see that clinging to our persona, which is impermanent, is actually the root of our suffering.  

When we don’t see reality clearly, when we believe ourselves to be something we’re not, this distortion leads us to act in ways that harm us and others. When someone does or says something that threatens our persona—if they say: “You’re such a ____________,” for example—we feel attacked. We take it personally and maybe try to retaliate. But as we begin to see more clearly, we might sense that there must be something beyond our persona, something that was there before the mask was crafted: an original nature, a true self that we are now being pulled to discover. 

There’s a Zen koan that asks “What is your original face, the one you had before your parents were born?” The problem is that we can’t find this original nature by thinking about it. Since it’s prior to thought, it’s unknowable by it. Therefore, we can only surrender to the unknown and observe. Some practices do this receptively, by encouraging us to simply watch how everything arises and passes. An example of this is what some forms of Zen call shikantaza, which is sitting without a goal, or “just sitting.” Others do it more actively, like some Zen koans that encourage us to find the true nature of the self. 

But what if there’s no one behind the mask? As we continue on this path, we might feel fear—which, for some of us, may be mild, and, for others, intense. All our lives we’ve tried to be someone, to be something. What if, in essence, who we are is impossible to pin down? What if behind the mask, there’s only a timeless, genderless, colorless, shapeless emptiness? 

At that moment, we have no choice but to let the mask dissolve into this emptiness and discover that this is what we truly are. 

The fear of being nothing is a gateway to our true identity.

Realizing ourselves as this emptiness is discovering that which permeates and saturates everything. It’s awakening to the very nature of the mind, which is always present, whether we realize it or not. We believed we were the mask, but the moment we see through it, we recognize that we are what’s behind it: awakened consciousness without form, without boundaries, and without time. And although this may seem like the end of the journey, in many ways, it’s only the beginning. Our task now is to live from the realization of this fundamental identity within the masquerade. We understand that our “mask,” or persona, is not our true self but a relative identity, one that was initially put on us by others, but as we grew up became a co-creation. Recognizing this interdependence of the persona allows us to fully be part of a bright, mysterious, and wonderful dance—the dance of life. 

Seeing the mask—our persona—as an expression of a deeper truth, we no longer believe in its solidity or permanence. Instead, it becomes a fluid and adaptable identity that arises according to the moment. And those cracks and flaws we once felt ashamed of are now precious opportunities for transformation and growth, allowing us to dance wholeheartedly with others in a deeper expression of wisdom and compassion. 

The post Waking Up Is Letting the Mask Fall appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“We create the world with our minds.” I’ve been hearing some version of this teaching for the last thirty years, ever since I started studying Zen. The actual saying is “the three worlds (of form, formlessness, and desire) are nothing but mind,” but “the three worlds” is simply another way of saying “everything.” We create all of reality through the way we use—or misuse—our minds, which in turn extends to the way we think, speak, and act. Each of these three fields of activity constitutes a world in itself, but here I’ll just focus on speech, partly because of my own love of words, and partly because of a recent conversation that made me reflect on the nature of language and its shape shifting, shape molding qualities. In this way, language also creates worlds, and as practitioners we do well to pay close attention to the ways that our words shape our experience. 

Take, for example, the concept of “indexicals,” linguistic expressions that reference different objects depending on the context in which they occur. The words I or today are indexical because when I use the pronoun I, I’m referring to myself: Zuisei, or Vanessa. When you use the pronoun, you’re referring to you: Rosa, or Charlie, or Hiram, or the eight billion other Is that inhabit our planet. Likewise, when I use the word today today, I’m referring to November 4, 2022. If I use the word today tomorrow, or a week from now, it will mean something else. Certain classes of words are specifically categorized as indexical—personal pronouns (“I,” “we,” “you,” etc.), demonstratives (“this,” “that”), and deictics (“here,” “there,” “now”)—because they are context-dependent, as are many other terms that rely on tone or punctuation to be understood. 

“You see me through you.”

If I call out, “Lucas, baby,” when talking to my dog, the meaning of the phrase is quite different than if I yell, “Lucas!” or resignedly say, “Oh, Lucas…” There are worlds in those words, and the wonderful thing is that Lucas understands immediately what I mean, simply by the tone of my voice, and responds accordingly.

Let’s take a slightly more complex sentence. If one morning I call out, “No, no, no! Don’t eat that!” the that may be referring to a sprig of eucalyptus that fell off the dining room table after I’d made a flower arrangement, or the last chocolate chip cookie in my jar, or a glass marble that’s rolled under a chair, to name just a few of hundreds or thousands of possibilities. The implied you in the sentence could refer to Lucas, or to my friend’s baby, or to my friend. By itself, the word that means nothing—or rather, nothing specific. The same is true for the implied I and you. And yet, as soon as the words leave my mouth, the other being in the room (who may not share my language level or even my species), will immediately know what I’m referring to when I exclaim and in some way point to whatever it is I want them to avoid. That’s the magic of language.

We’re constantly deriving meaning from the world around us and we respond congruently—in most cases—to whatever we experience. Even more astonishing is that we do this consistently, even though we often have very little information to go by. This is wonderful—until it isn’t.

Take a phrase like “I love you,” the kind of statement we make all the time in all sorts of situations. If you’ve ever uttered these words, you likely assumed you knew what you meant when you said them. You knew who you (the I) were. You knew the you you were addressing. And you knew, at least vaguely, what the word love implied. But did you? Did you really know? 

Your idea of me is fabricated with materials you have borrowed from other people and from yourself. What you think of me depends on what you think of yourself. Perhaps you create your idea of me out of material that you would like to eliminate from your own idea of yourself. Perhaps your idea of me is a reflection of what other people think of you. Or perhaps what you think of me is simply what you think I think of you.

That’s Thomas Merton in No Man Is an Island. Another way of saying this might be: “You see me through you.” We don’t usually see others as they are; we see them as we are. Actually, we see them as we think we are. When I see you, what I see are my wants, wishes, habits, and well-worn memories. I don’t see you—can’t see you—because my I is in the way. So, in order to make sense of you, I make you in my own image, and then I fix you in a now that is long gone. The you I’m speaking to is not the you you were six years ago or six months ago or six minutes ago. It can’t be, given that reality is constantly shifting. This means that even when referring to specific objects, indexicals are pointing to ever-changing entities. Is it any wonder, then, that we misunderstand one another? Is it any wonder we misunderstand ourselves? 

Our misapprehension extends to everything we perceive, from things to beings of all stripes. Yet it’s in our human relationships that the gap between our fantasies and reality is most glaring because we’re so invested in wanting others to be the way we imagine them to be. Yet it’s possible to see clearly, and express what we see. The task may feel a bit like standing on a curb and trying to count the freckles on the face of a driver as a car speeds by. But this is only because we insist on fixing a rushing stream with our language. We use words to label an event that’s long gone. It’s like the story of a fisherman who, after pulling a great catch one day, took a brush and a bucket of paint and drew a big X on the side of his boat.

“What is that for?” a fellow fisherman asked.

“To mark the best fishing spot,” the first man answered.

One of my teachers memorably said, “The self can’t move at the speed of impermanence.” Neither can our words—unless we let them do what they’re capable of doing: flowing, changing, adapting to, and reflecting a reality that won’t stand still because it’s not in its nature to do so. But when we let go of the idea of a fixed self and of fixed meaning, the I and the you and the that and the now—plus all the words we can think and articulate—can shift at the pace that they need to.

In truth, all language is referential and therefore indexical because, like the finger pointing at the moon, our words denote a reality that’s always becoming. Even in its isness—its suchness, as Buddhism calls it—it never is the same for long. How do we speak then, when nothing stands still long enough for us to name it? We could begin by using more capacious language— language that wonders instead of ascertains, and that acknowledges, not just what we think we know, but the vastness of what we don’t yet know.

The poet Galway Kinnell once said: “Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.” Maybe, when talking about love, we could say, “Let our blind spots fall in love. Let the stranger in me fall in love with the stranger in you. Let the I that I’m becoming fall in love with the you I haven’t yet discovered and can’t even imagine.” That would be a more realistic way of relating to one another. And, ironically, also more loving.

Practically Speaking

• Begin with the assumption that when you see something or someone, what you’re seeing is some reflection of yourself.

• Decide you want to see more deeply, more truly, more lovingly.

• Ask yourself, “What is this? or “Who are you?”

• Follow with, “Am I sure?”

• Refuse to be satisfied with the easy answer.

• Ask again: “What is this?” “Who are you?”

• Repeat as necessary (that is, often and sincerely).

• Never stop asking.

The post When Our Blind Spots Fall in Love appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When we talk about death happening every moment, we also might have a natural question: “If I’m continuously being born and dying, then who is it that goes through all these experiences?” Once this body is dead, who has the chance to merge with the mother luminosity? If that chance is missed, who goes on to the next bardo, known as “the bardo of dharmata”? When it comes to reincarnation, who gets reborn? A similar question would be “What is it that continues from lifetime to lifetime?” Or “What goes through the bardos?”

The standard answer to all these questions is “consciousness,” or namshe in Tibetan. The word “consciousness” could mean different things to different people, but the Tibetan language is extremely precise when it comes to describing the mind. Namshe implies that this consciousness is dualistic. For instance, if Rosa sees a mountain, Rosa is here and the mountain is there: they are two separate things. Whatever Rosa sees, hears, smells, tastes, or feels seems like an object separate from Rosa.

This is how things appear to all of us, right? There’s a sense of a division between me and everything else. The experiences keep changing, but I always seem to remain the same. There’s something about me that feels like it never changes. But when I look for this unchanging me, I find that I can’t pin anything down.

I was born on July 14, 1936. My name at that time was Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. I can definitely acknowledge there’s a connection between that infant Deirdre and today’s Pema. I have memories of my childhood. The mother and father I had then are still my mother and father to me, even though they’re long gone. A scientist would say that the baby and I have the same DNA. And of course we have the same birthday. But the interesting question remains: Are the newborn baby and the elderly woman I am today actually the same person?

I still have pictures of myself as an infant and a toddler. If I try hard, I can pick out some ways that child looks similar to what I see today in the mirror. But I also know intellectually that not a single cell of my body has stayed the same. Even at present, every cell and every atom of my body is continuously changing.

I’ve tried long and hard to find a real me that stays the same from year to year—or even from moment to moment—but I’ve never had any success. (This is a worthwhile exercise, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the mysteries of life and death.) So where does this leave us in terms of the bardos?

As I said, the standard answer for what continues across lifetimes is namshe, dualistic consciousness. This is not so easy to understand. A while ago, I called my friend Ken McLeod, a highly learned Buddhist practitioner who’s written some of my favorite books, and I asked him about it. Like other students of the Dharma, he said that namshe is what goes through the bardos. But he made the point that this consciousness isn’t some stable entity that flows through everything. It’s constantly dissolving and reforming. Every moment, we experience something new: the smell of toast, a change of light, a thought about a friend. And every moment we have a sense of a self having that experience—a sense of “I, the smeller of toast.” When this moment passes, it’s immediately followed by another moment with a subject and an object. This flow of dualistic experience continues uninterruptedly through our waking hours and our dreams, through this life and across lifetimes.

But beyond this flow of moments, is there anything underlying them all that we could point to as “consciousness”? We can’t locate or describe any stable element that lives through all our experiences. So from this point of view, Ken said that another answer to “What goes through the bardos?” is “Nothing.” There are just individual moments, happening one after another. What we think of as “consciousness” is fluid, more like a verb than a noun.

Life and death, beginnings and endings, gains and losses are like dreams or magical illusions.

When Ken and I had this conversation, it gave me a better feeling for how I keep clinging to this self as something permanent, when it’s actually much more dynamic than that. It’s not some fixed, frozen thing. We can have this view of ourselves as frozen—and we can have frozen opinions of others as well—but that’s just based on a misunderstanding.

Why do we have this misunderstanding? Who can say? It’s just how we’ve always seen things. The Buddhist term for it is “co-emergent ignorance,” or, as Anam Thubten calls it, “co-emergent unawareness.” We all come into our life with this unawareness. And what are we unaware of? We are unaware that we are not a solid, permanent entity and that we are not separate from what we perceive. This is the big misunderstanding, the illusion of separateness.

Here is how I’ve heard teachers talk about the origin of our unawareness. First, there is open space, fluid and dynamic. There is no sense of duality, no sense of “me” separate from everything else. Then, from that ground, everything becomes manifest. If properly understood, the open space and the manifestation are not two separate things. They are like the sun and its rays. This means that everything we’re experiencing right now is a display of our own mind. Recognizing this union is called “co-emergent wisdom” or “co-emergent awareness.” Remaining caught in the illusion of separateness and solidity is co-emergent unawareness.

And this, of course, is where you and I find ourselves. It’s obvious that co-emergent unawareness is our usual experience. But in reality, no one and no thing in our world is fixed and static. Consciousness is a process that constantly dissolves and reforms, both now and in the bardo. And every time it reforms, it’s completely fresh and new—which means that we have an endless stream of opportunities to have a completely fresh, open take. We always have another chance to see the world anew, a chance to reconnect with basic openness, a chance to realize we’ve never been separate from that basic spaciousness—a chance to realize it’s all just been a big misunderstanding.

If you spend enough time pondering this, you might understand it with your rational mind. But then you may still ask yourself, “Why do I experience myself as separate? Why don’t I experience each moment as fresh? Why do I feel so stuck?” The reason you feel this way is that you—like everyone else—have been under the sway of co-emergent unawareness for a very, very long time. Therefore, it takes a very, very long time to dismantle.

Our misunderstanding of separateness goes deep. Even animals have an innate sense of being a separate entity. But unlike animals, we have the ability to contemplate. We can use our fairly sophisticated brains to realize that our misunderstanding is indeed a misunderstanding—that moment by moment, we have a chance, even if briefly, to merge with that basic ground again.

Even if we’re convinced of this, however, we can’t drop our familiar sense of separateness just by willing it to go away. But what we can do is start to meditate. In one session on our meditation cushion, we can see for ourselves how fluid our consciousness is. We can observe how our thoughts and emotions and perceptions appear and disappear, and how this process just goes on and on without a break.

We can also see how mysterious our thoughts are. Where do all those thoughts come from? And where do they go? And why do we get so serious about what goes on in our mind? Even though our thoughts are as elusive as mist, how can they cause us endless unnecessary problems? How can they make us worry, get jealous, quarrel with others, get euphoric and depressed?

Meditation gives us a way to see the slipperiness of our mind and of our notion of “me.” When we practice meditation, we gradually accustom ourselves to how experiences constantly flow. We see that this happens even though we can’t pinpoint any subject who experiences them.

From this point of view, there is no fixed being who goes through the bardos. Another way of saying this is there’s no continuous individual who experiences life and death. No one lives and no one dies. Life and death, beginnings and endings, gains and losses are like dreams or magical illusions.

♦

From How We Live Is How We Die by Pema Chödrön © 2022 by the Pema Chödrön Foundation. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

The post What Goes Through the Bardos? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Sanskrit the word ātman is used by Hindus for the soul, that most essential part of the self that is deeply embedded in the body but is immaterial and indestructible and reincarnates when one dies. Buddhists reject this idea as a comforting but mistaken viewpoint that does not stand up to deep empirical investigation and posit instead a foundational concept of anātman (“not-ātman” or “non-ātman”), which in Pali is spelled anattā.

The Buddhist critique of ātman is subtle and goes beyond simply denying that a self exists. At the heart of the matter is how to regard the very word “exists.” According to Buddhism, phenomenological events do occur, but ontological entities do not underlie them. The functions associated with a self, such as thoughts and emotions, “exist” in the sense that they happen, but it is a projection of our language and imagination to say further that a solid entity, a spiritual essence, an unchanging substance or a transcendent energy therefore “exists” as something beyond these occurrences.

The processes known as the five aggregates really do take place: Bodies unfold as transient material configurations in a changing material environment; feelings of pleasure and pain arise and pass away according to circumstances; the mind perceptually interprets the information flowing in upon the senses to create stories; emotional responses take place every moment and result in volitional actions; and awareness of all this unfolds in a stream of conscious moments, one following another. The Buddhist insight is simply that there is nothing that remains constant amid all this change. No agent is in control of what happens, and there is no one to whom it all belongs. Even rebirth is a flowing on of the stream from one life to another: the one who is born is not the same as the one who dies.

Early Buddhists emphasized that there is no person within the five aggregate functions outlined above, and therefore the interdependent psychological factors co-arising to construct lived experience are best described by the word “non-self” or “not-self.” Later Buddhists extended this thought to declare that there are no substantial realities underlying the interdependent metaphysical phenomena making up the entire cosmos—it is all best described as empty of self.

The concept need not be as mysterious as it is often taken to be. Just see the difference in your own experience, next time it rains on your picnic or someone cuts you off in traffic, if you don’t take it personally. This is just what is happening; no self, no problem.

The post What’s in a Word? Anattā appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The post The Transformative Power of Wise and Compassionate Action appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Just sit with it,” many teachers used to instruct; when letting go gets gnarly, the gnarly get going. They took as given what is not a given: the capacity to stand affliction. It’s painful to face fixed, emotionally charged, repetitive storylines that exert such a grip, not to mention unhitch from them. We’ve ingeniously constructed them to keep traumatic experience at bay, so we’re seriously invested: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. True divestment takes time and practice.

When a particularly sticky thread has you in its grip, watch it carefully, observe the subtle interplay of thought, feeling, sensation, and mental reaction as it generates and maintains anguish. As the thread untangles and you’re no longer in the grips of a repetitive afflictive loop, when you have available awareness to invest, return and invest it here and now. The tangles of the “mind” are endless; you can spend a lifetime trying unsuccessfully to comb them out once and for all.

We also hold hidden requirements: this is how it is, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. Deliverance beckons, if only… [fill in the blank]. We cleave to fixed versions of self and of self with other beings while searching for liberation. Curiously they make us feel more secure. These requirements, along with insufficient capacity to withstand pain, obscure and imprison us. We chase out through the five senses, restlessly searching for relief. This is tanha, [or thirst], and it breeds more dukkha. With dedicated attentiveness, unhitch from reliance on words and mental formations, letting the garden variety kind pass and unraveling the sticky, fixed, and repetitive ones. This is part of working with attachment. Take note: Zen is not Mr. Clean: good for tables, counters, windows, floors, and bathtubs. Awakening doesn’t grant an exemption from emotional pain that may need attention in other healing settings.

See why it’s so appealing to offload the whole kit and caboodle?

Just as we can (incorrectly) imagine no-self as a vacuum, so can we imagine in a rather concrete way the whole self as a cabinet full of stuff, all kinds of elements, brought together, hanging in balance. Rather, when it feels together, when we’re not turning away, when there is a robust enough sense of self, personhood, and agency, then capacities are growing to withstand, tolerate, and learn from our experience, especially when it’s afflictive. We may even realize that the feelings, thoughts, sensations that are so difficult to face, that we push away or get tangled up in, are themselves expressions of awakening. Samsara itself is nirvana. When these capacities are operating well-enough, the self, the person, and the agent are absent; invisible supports that facilitate letting go of needing to be self-obsessed. No-self, true self, and whole self are simply irrelevant and not in play.

Why this splitting hairs? Who cares? And why does it matter? I’ve seen scores of people, many experienced Zen practitioners, who still harbor the idea that the purpose of zazen is to stop thoughts, and that the painful ones in particular can be suppressed or eliminated. The result is a flattening out of liveliness, a loss of energy, a stiff, zombie manner and practice; all personal contents, and qualities, flushed out of the system. This can paralyze and tie us up in knots. A sense of distinctive dharma expression and the activity of personalizing our practice often don’t materialize, or are dry, truncated and impoverished. Agency, voice, empowerment, vigorous expression and responsiveness, are impaired.

I recall a meeting with a Zen student where what unfolded finally was his shame at feeling proud about something. Maybe he’d got a job he had worked toward. He realized that he’d been unaware of judging this as self-centered and realized that this had been jamming up his practice and his life. Someone who feels elated at finding a nice place to live after a long search has a good enough sense of self to be able to let loose with glee. This is the obverse of being self-aggrandizing, self-absorbed, and self-inflated. Likewise with sorrow. Is self a klesha here? A toxin? A defilement?

I recall going to dokusan, [a private interview between a Zen teacher and disciple], with Maezumi Roshi after my father died in 1977. I entered the room and said, “I’m Joe and I’m feeling sad; my father just died.” Roshi replied, “When your father dies and you feel sad, that’s sad Buddha.” How liberating! In 1983, Thich Nhat Hanh walked from his stone cabin along the stream into the old Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery dining room, which was packed to the rafters with earnest priests and laypeople, sitting with their best posture, albeit a bit stiffly. Thay arrived and sat silently, with a half-smile. After a while he said softly, “Does the silence bother you?” People shuffled around to be or at least appear more at ease. “Please,” he said, “Enjoy your breathing.” There was a collective sigh. Ahh, many tight chest muscles loosened; enjoying the body and the breath wasn’t indulgent. If we’ve offloaded our humanity and important capacities, how can we embody our experience of awakening with all beings? Yamada Roshi arrived at the Maui Zendo in 1972. In the depth of sesshin, prior to teisho, [a talk by a Zen master], we could hear him coming at fifty paces, clanking down the long wooden hallway in his wooden zories, [or sandals], the strong whiff of after shave lotion preceding him. Was he acting like a special case, self-inflated, breaking our rules about walking silently and not using perfumes? I found him Bien dans sa beau. At ease. The Dalai Lama and Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh are often asked if they ever get angry. As true persons, they always respond that they do. It’s how they construe and respond that’s key. 

So, returning to our question, Who cares? We should. In today’s world, we need all hands on deck; energized, vital, responsive. It’s relevant because models, say, of no-self and emptiness, inform. Even in Zen, where they are generally considered conceptual formations and eschewed, they still exist and inform. Ideals and myths and dreams are fluid like true no self, yet this does not prevent them from powerfully informing our conduct, being and impacts.

Self has many faces: When is it a klesha? An obstruction, a defilement? We know self can tyrannize, ourselves and others. Torturous, ruminating, or nursing resentment, an arrogant or entitled kind of self-activity afflicts. And collectively, consider ideology, how it conceals malign motives revolving around rank, as in power and control; simple self-aggrandizement, with no concern for the other.

Yet, self-experience can be benevolent, expansive, connecting; it can build capacities for the journey ahead. Feeling happy, encouraged, gratified at how a common project has gone, for example; is this “self-referential?” We need to tease this out, to assure that ours is a sustainable, human myth. (More on this [in two chapters of my book, A True Person of No Rank: Awakening Buddha’s Dream to Save the World,] where we examine a wild card we do well to take seriously: the unconscious.)

I hope that the way I am using (some might say misusing) “a true person of no rank” [in my book] illuminates how the personal and impersonal, the particular and the universal, and maybe the emotional and the spiritual intersect, and how this intrinsic interplay makes possible ongoing personal character development and being-of-service in the world, without the usual inherent conflict.

♦

Excerpt courtesy of The Sumeru Press Inc. For further information about the book or to order a copy, please visit https://sumeru-books.com

Read an interview with Joseph Bobrow on A Person of No Rank: Awakening Buddha’s Dream to Save the World here.

The post True No-Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We often hear about the Buddhist teaching of no-self. But what does it actually mean to live without a self? In his new book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, scholar Jay Garfield argues that shedding the illusion of the self can actually make you a better person. Drawing from Buddhism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield explains how the notion of self is not only wrong but also morally dangerous. Once we let go of this illusion, he contends, we can lead healthier and more ethically skillful lives. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Garfield to talk about the ethical perils of the self illusion, the freedom that can come from moments of selflessness, and how we can let go of our selves to reclaim our humanity.

James Shaheen (JS): Your new book is Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self. Can you start by sharing a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Jay Garfield (JG): A central doctrine of Buddhist philosophy is that we don’t have selves, or that we are selfless persons. That doesn’t mean that we don’t exist; it means that we exist in another way. We don’t exist substantially or intrinsically or independently; our existence, like the existence of everything else, is interdependent, conventional, and constantly changing. In the book, I try to draw the reader’s attention to what we instinctively take ourselves to be and then to reconstruct what we actually are in order to refute that innate misconception without falling into nihilism and without failing to construct any kind of positive account of our own identity as persons.

JS: You write that the illusion of the self contributes to an attitude of moral egoism that obscures our own identities from us. What are some of the ethical consequences of a belief in a self?

JG: This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s one thing to think abstractly about the metaphysics of bodies and minds and persons. But it’s quite another to think about who we are and how we ought to think about our interactions with other people, particularly in ethically charged situations—and most of our lives are ethically charged in one way or another. In game theory, rationality is defined as the disinterested pursuit of our own immediate self-interest. In other words, I’m rational if I adopt a strategy that makes sure that I’ve got more chips at the end of the game than anybody else, and I’m irrational if I undertake behavior that takes other people’s utility into consideration when that utility doesn’t affect my own. That’s a recipe for a very narrow kind of egoism whereby the first thing I’ve got to do is care about myself. Everything we do, we do because we rely on our interactions with others and what others have done for us. And anything that could possibly increase our own happiness is something that should also be increasing the happiness of others, or we fail to recognize our profound interdependence. When we focus on the self as an independent, substantial thing different from everything else, that gives us permission to take our own narrow self-interest as motivating and to ignore the demands of morality. That’s an extraordinarily pernicious thing, and I think that it has visible and obvious consequences in our culture. It generates a kind of competitiveness, a view of life as a kind of zero-sum game, and it also justifies some of the worst aspects of consumer capitalism including income inequality, racism, and other forms of oppression. I believe that a lot of inequality is honestly traceable to the self illusion and to the way that this self illusion is not only accepted but endorsed and encouraged.

“If you’re a character in a play, your existence and your reality depend upon all the other characters.”

JS: You suggest that we are persons rather than selves. What do you mean by “person,” and how is a person distinct from a self?

JG: A person is in some sense a substitute for the self. That is, it’s a more realistic way of thinking about our identity than the self is. Persons are constantly evolving sequences of psychophysical processes, interpreted as real through the social, political, and biological conventions and ways of behavior that we have. I argue that persons are more like roles than like actors. Now, that doesn’t make them unreal. Hamlet is a real role. But Hamlet can be played by Sir Laurence Olivier or by Benedict Cumberbatch, and we don’t suddenly have two different Hamlets. We’ve got the same role, and it’s a role that’s constituted by a whole set of conventions: by norms of the theater, by scripts that have been written, by ways Hamlet has been played in the past. As persons, we’re governed by complicated sets of conventions and interpretative practices. We exist only because those practices exist. As biological members of Homo sapiens, we’re responsible to genetics. As persons, we’re responsible to culture and to others, and we are constantly changing, open-ended phenomena, not isolated, self-existent phenomena. We are part of a spatial, temporal, and social complex, not standing outside of it in a dualistic relation. We’re interdependent with one another, and so our domain of concern includes all other persons, just as if you’re a character in a play, your existence and your reality depend upon all the other characters in the play. We couldn’t have Hamlet as a one-character event. We need Ophelia and Polonius and all these other characters to make the role of Hamlet possible.

JS: You write that persons live on the “cusp of fact and fiction,” poised between the biological, the psychological, and the social. What does it mean to live on the cusp of fact and fiction?

JG: Fact is cognate with factory, and it refers to things that we make. Fictions refers to things that we make up. It’s easy to forget that fictions can constitute kinds of facts. It’s a fact that Hamlet is a fictional Danish prince. When I think about fictions, I think of things that humans bring into existence. Among the things that humans bring into existence are human beings, or persons. We’re brought into existence by the network of social and biological conventions in which we participate, by the narratives that we construct for ourselves and that are constructed by others around us. So the social, the biological, the factual, and the fictional all come together in personhood.

JS: So how does seeing ourselves as persons rather than as selves inform how we can live a moral life?

JG: Once we see that we are not solo improv stand-up players but rather members of a vast improv collective, we recognize that the only way that I can succeed is if we succeed. The only way I can be happy is if we’re happy. And the only way my life can be meaningful is if our lives are meaningful. I think the recognition that our identity is co-constituted and the only kind of identity that we have is interdependent allows us to respond to others with gratitude, with care, and with friendship. And that’s the moral attitude that I think we ought to be encouraging. No matter how egoistic we may be, I think each of us will find that we’re happier when we shed our egoism and discover that the world is full of sources of happiness, and most of them aren’t me.

♦

Listen to the full interview from our podcast series Tricycle Talks here: 

The post To Be or Not to Be appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Charlotte Joko Beck, the founder of Ordinary Mind Zen School, used to describe the self as a “whirlpool in a river.” Not some massive wave out at sea, but just like when you’re watching the flow of the river and the banks send waves ripples backwards and forwards and little whirlpools form. Branches get caught in it, leaves, a bit of dirt. They swirl round and round. The whirlpool lasts for a second, a minute, an hour. Maybe it’s there most of the time, but it’s changing every second and it’s gone, just back into the river, the flow of the river.

Joko was arguing that that’s a pretty good image for the self. We aren’t permanent. We aren’t stable. From my point of view, what’s really important is that the whirlpool is made of river. It’s not separate in any sense from the river. It doesn’t even have any definite edges, any definite boundaries. It’s just here, and we can see it pulsing, fluid, and changing, and it’s gone. That’s actually a nice image for a Zen Buddhist idea of the self. 

And yet, most of the time, in most respects, we like to think of ourselves as something much more hard and permanent… like a billiard ball. The billiard ball doesn’t change. It bumps into things. It pushes them out of its way. And it’s part of a game. We think: Am I winning? Am I losing? That’s how we tend to live. And it’s even enshrined in things like the basis of our laws. Everything is about the individual, increasingly so. This is part of what it is to be a modern human being.

So what’s the consequence of trying to live like a billiard ball, imagining that we’re a billiard ball? It sets up tension within ourselves. It sets us in competition, one with another. We forget and entirely deny our whirlpool nature.

*

I have a dharma friend who recently sent me a wonderful beachscape picture. It’s a Welsh beach, and in it, sea and sky and spray and sand mix, meld, blur together. Looking at it, I think: That’s the sea. That’s the land. But where’s the edge? Where’s the boundary? You can’t really tell.

That reminded me of the Chinese character that comes into Japanese as yugen. You can translate yugen in a lot of ways. Let’s go with “mystery.” This character is actually the character for mountain, and between the prongs of the mountains are little characters that mean mist. So it’s mist in the mountains, when everything becomes a blur, hard to define, hard to pin down. That’s pretty much the texture of life.

*

Think of it like painting by numbers I used to love them as a child. You got a canvas, and you had a picture on it with all the outlines drawn in very carefully. In each little patch, there was a number that told you which color to put in. The colors were selected for you. All you had to do was put the right color in the right place, and magically, the picture appeared. 

In a way, that’s exactly what we’re doing most of the time, most of our lives. In order to live our lives, we need to draw the outlines, and we tend to draw them in conventional places. So when it comes to relationships, we tend to see ourselves as separate, as identifiable as distinct from “you and you and everybody else.”

Our society invites us to think of the self in terms of a billiard ball, in terms of being separate, identifiable the whole time. How do we create identities? To be a man or to be a woman, to be Black or to be white, to be able-bodied or to have a disability, to be seen in terms of my sexuality as normal or abnormal—all of these things can have a really important impact on me. It’s the distinctions, what makes things identifiable, that are important in our society. These are all the lines that our society draws and offers us, and we follow the lines. 

The billiard ball idea of a self wants me to see myself as permanent, as separate, as a psychologically integrated, normal individual whose every deviation from that is some kind of pathology that needs to be corrected, a symptom that needs to be treated. And that’s how we treat ourselves: endless self-improvement. Why aren’t I this? Why aren’t I that? Why aren’t I better? And so on.

*

In Buddhism and in Zen, we talk of emptiness. Obviously, the easy mistake to make with that is that things are unreal or they don’t exist. It’s more accurate to say that what we mean by that is that everything is relational. There’s not actually a grounded distinction between things. 

Things blur. Things are mysterious. Everything is gray. Everything is yugen. It’s all interbeing. It’s all interdependent. It’s all relational. It’s all connected. Now, that can sound very mystical, very woo woo, as my own teacher Barry Magid says. But it’s not. It’s absolutely particular, concrete.

We could say that the problem is simply one of perception. I misperceive myself. 

I misrecognize myself thinking and imagining that I’m a billiard ball, desperately trying to be the best billiard ball I possibly can and win all the time. But actually, I’m a whirlpool, flickering in and out of existence, from one moment to another. 

♦

This excerpt has been adapted from Malcom Martin’s Dharma Talk, “You Can’t Be Yourself By Yourself.” Watch the full talk here.

The post Whirlpools and Billiard Balls appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We often hear about the Buddhist teaching of no-self. But what does it actually mean to live without a self? In his new book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, scholar Jay Garfield argues that shedding the illusion of the self can actually make you a better person. Drawing from Buddhism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield unpacks how the notion of self is not only wrong but also morally dangerous. Once we let go of this illusion, he argues, we can lead healthier and more ethically skillful lives.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen sits down with Garfield to talk about the ethical perils of selfhood, the freedom that can come from moments of selflessness, and how the brahma-viharas can help us let go of ourselves and reclaim our humanity. Read a few excerpts from their conversation below, and listen to the full episode here.

***

What “no self” really means

A central doctrine of Buddhist philosophy is that we don’t have selves, that we are selfless persons. That doesn’t mean that we don’t exist; it means that we exist in another way. We don’t exist substantially or intrinsically or independently, but our existence, like the existence of everything else, is interdependent, conventional, constantly changing.

What it looks like to forget yourself

Whenever we’re called upon to think about who we are, we fall into the trap of reifying ourselves. But we don’t do that all the time. There are a lot of times when we do succeed in forgetting ourselves, maybe in the contemplation of beautiful art or in listening to music, maybe in a deep and meaningful exchange with a close friend, maybe when we’re playing a sport or engaged in practicing something in which we’re highly skilled, where our sense of self and of subject-object duality just vanishes and we suddenly realize, at a certain point, that we haven’t been thematizing ourselves for a very long time. And of course, the moment we realize that, we’ve rethematized ourselves. But at least in retrospect, we recognize that we do have these moments of non-egocentric consciousness.

When we drop subject-object duality

The fact is that we’re at our best when we’re experts. That’s almost tautological. And so we find ourselves at our best when we drop that thematization of ourselves and that subject-object duality… When we’re spontaneous, we are at our best.

The paradox of self-illusion

One of the paradoxes of the self-illusion is that we’re driven to it in order to give our lives meaning or substantiality, to make it something worth caring about. The cruel irony is that nobody would care about a completely independent, inaccessible being outside of space and time that’s unrelated to everybody else. We build something that’s totally fictional but also not even desirable as that bulwark, and we neglect the fact that if we simply pay attention to who we really are and that our being is, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, interbeing, then that interbeing is a really beautiful way to be. We don’t need the myth of the self to give our lives meaning.

“Second persons are actually prior to first persons”

We can only come to understand ourselves as sentient, minded beings by already having that concept to apply to ourselves, and the only way we can develop that concept is by seeing that sentience, that mindedness, that personality instantiated in others. So second persons are actually prior to first persons.

“A vast improv collective”

Once we see that we are not solo improv stand-up players but rather members of a vast improv collective, we can recognize that the only way that I can succeed is if we succeed. The only way I can be happy is if we’re happy. And the only way my life can be meaningful is if our lives are meaningful.

♦

Listen to the full podcast with Jay Garfield here:

The post How to Live Without a Self (and Be a Better Person) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.