Nothing Special: Living Zen Read online

  JOKO : No. Intelligence is not a thing; it is not a person. It doesn’t have boundaries. The minute we give something boundaries, we’ve put it back into the phenomenal sphere of things, like a whirlpool that sees itself as separate from the river.

  STUDENT : Another of our regular Zen Center vows speaks of a “boundless field of benefaction.” Is that the same as the river, the native intelligence that we are?

  JOKO: Yes. Human life is simply a temporary form taken by this energy.

  STUDENT: Yet in our lives there do need to be boundaries. I have a lot of difficulty reconciling this with what you’re saying.

  JOKO : Some boundaries are simply inherent in what we are; for example, each of us has a limited amount of energy and time. We need to recognize our limitations in this sense. This doesn’t mean that we have to establish artificial, defensive boundaries that block our life. Even as small whirlpools, we can recognize that we are part of the river—and not become stagnant.

  The Cocoon of Pain

  When we bow in the zendo, what are we honoring? One way to answer this question is to ask what we actually honor in our lives, as shown by what we think and do. And the truth of the matter is that in our lives we do not honor buddha nature, nor the God that encompasses everything, including life and death, good and evil, all the opposites. The truth is, we’re not interested in that. We certainly don’t want to honor death, or pain, or loss. What we do is erect a false god. The Bible says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” But we do just that.

  What is the god that we erect? What do we actually honor and pay attention to moment by moment? We might call it the god of comfort and pleasantness and security. In worshiping that god, we destroy our lives. In worshiping the god of comfort and pleasantness, people literally kill themselves—with drugs, alcohol, high speeds, recklessness, anger. Nations worship this god on a much larger, more destructive scale. Until we honestly see that this is what our lives are about, we will be unable to discover who we really are.

  We have many ways to cope with life, many ways to worship comfort and pleasantness. All are based on the same thing: the fear of encountering any kind of unpleasantness. If we must have absolute order and control, it’s because we’re trying to avoid any unpleasantness. If we can have things our way, and get angry if they’re not, then we think we can survive and shut out our anxiety about death. If we can please everyone, then we imagine no unpleasantness will enter our life. We hope that if we can be the star of the show, shining and wonderful and efficient, we can have such an admiring audience that we won’t have to feel anything. If we can withdraw from the world and just entertain ourselves with our own dreams and fantasies and emotional upheavals, we think we can escape unpleasantness. If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won’t be threatened. If we can submit to an authority, have it tell us what to do, then we can give someone else the responsibility for our lives and we don’t have to carry it anymore. We don’t have to feel the anxiety of making a decision. If we pursue life madly, going after any pleasant sensation, any excitement, any entertainment, perhaps we won’t have to feel any pain. If we can tell others what to do, keep them well under control, under our foot, maybe they can’t hurt us. If we can “bliss out,” if we can be a mindless “buddha” just relaxing in the sun, we don’t have to assume any responsibility for the world’s unpleasantness. We can just be happy.

  All these are versions of the god we actually worship. It is the god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness. Without exception, every being on earth pursues it to some degree. As we pursue it, we lose touch with what really is. As we lose touch, our life spirals downward. And the very unpleasantness that we sought to avoid can overwhelm us.

  This has been the problem of human life since the beginning of time. All philosophies and all religions are varying attempts to deal with this basic fear. Only when such attempts fail us are we ready to begin serious practice. And they do fail. Because the systems we adopt are not based upon reality; they can’t work, despite all of our feverish efforts. Sooner or later, we come to realize that something is amiss.

  Unfortunately, we often merely compound our error by trying harder, or by plastering over our old faulty system with a new faulty system. It’s seductive, for example, to give ourselves over to some false authority or guru who will run our lives for us as we attempt to find something or someone outside of ourselves to take care of our fear.

  Yesterday a butterfly flew through my open door and fluttered about in my room. Someone caught it and released it outside. It made me think about the life of a butterfly. A butterfly begins as a worm, which moves slowly and can’t see very far.

  Eventually the worm builds itself a cocoon, and in that dark, quiet space it stays for a long time. Finally, after what must seem like an eternity of darkness, it emerges as a butterfly.

  The life history of a butterfly is similar to our practice. We have some misconceptions about both, however. We may imagine, for example, that because butterflies are pretty, their life in the cocoon before they emerge is also pretty. We don’t realize all that the worm must go through in order to become a butterfly. Similarly, when we begin to practice, we don’t realize the long and difficult transformation required of us. We have to see through our pursuit of outward things, the false gods of pleasure and security. We have to stop gobbling this and pursuing that in our shortsighted way, and simply relax into the cocoon, into the darkness of the pain that is our life.

  Such practice requires years of our lives. Unlike the butterfly, we don’t emerge once and for all. As we spin within the cocoon of pain, we may have momentary glimpses of life as a butterfly, fluttering in the sun. At such times we sense the absolute wonder of what our life is—something we never know as a busy little worm, preoccupied with itself. We begin to know the world of the butterfly only by contacting our own pain, which means no longer worshiping the god of comfort and pleasantness. We have to give up our slavish obedience to whatever system of pain avoidance we have devised and realize that we can’t escape discomfort simply by running faster and trying harder. The faster we run from our pain, the more our pain overtakes us. When what we depended on to give our life meaning doesn’t work any more, what are we going to do?

  Some people never give up this false pursuit. Eventually they may die of an overdose, literally or figuratively. In the struggle to gain control we go faster, we strain, we try harder, we squeeze people tighter, we squeeze ourselves tighter. Yet life can never really be brought under control. As we flee from reality, the pain increases. This pain is our teacher.

  Sitting is not about finding a happy, blissful state. The states may occur in sitting, when we’ve really experienced our pain over and over, so that finally there’s just letting go. That surrender and opening into something fresh and new is the consequence of experiencing pain, not a consequence of finding a place where we can shut the pain out.

  Sitting sesshin* and everyday practice are a matter of wrapping ourselves in that cocoon of pain. We don’t do this unwillingly. First, we may be willing to have only one little strand wrapped around us, and then we’ll break away. Again we’ll wrap it around us and again break away. Eventually we become willing to sit with that portion of our pain for a while. Then perhaps we become willing to tolerate two or three strands. As our vision gets clearer, we can just sit within our cocoon and find it’s the only peaceful space we’ve ever been in. And when we’re perfectly willing to be there—in other words, when we’re willing for life to be as it is, embracing both life and death, pleasure and pain, good and bad, comfortable in being both—then the cocoon begins to dissolve.

  Unlike the butterfly, we alternate between the cocoon and the butterfly many times. This process continues through our life. Each time we uncover unresolved areas of our life we have to build another cocoon and rest quietly in it until the learning period completes it
self. Each time our cocoon bursts and we take a little step, we are freer.

  The first, essential step in becoming a butterfly is to recognize that we can’t make it as a worm. We have to see through our pursuit of the false god of comfort and pleasure. We have to get a clear picture of that god. We have to relinquish our sense of entitlement—our sense that life owes us this and that. For example, we have to abandon the notion that we can compel others to love us by doing things for them. We have to recognize that we cannot manipulate life to satisfy ourselves, and that finding fault with ourselves or others is not an effective way of helping anyone. We slowly abandon our basic arrogance.

  *An intensive Zen meditation retreat.

  The truth is, life inside the cocoon is frustrating and heart-breaking, and it’s never totally behind us. I don’t mean that from morning to night we feel, “I am wrapped in pain.” I mean that we’re waking up constantly to what we’re about, what we’re really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that’s painful. But there’s no possibility of freedom without this pain.

  I recently heard a quotation from a professional athlete: “Love is not shared pleasure. It is shared pain.” That’s a good insight. We can certainly enjoy going out with our partner, for example, and having dinner together. I’m not questioning the value of shared enjoyment. But if we want a relationship to be closer and more genuine, we need to share with our partner that which is most scary for us to share with anybody. When we do that, then the other person has freedom to do the same thing. Instead, we want to keep our image, particularly with somebody we’re trying to impress.

  Sharing our pain does not mean telling our partners how they irritate us. That’s a way of saying, “I’m angry with you.” It does not help us break down our false idol and open us to life as a butterfly. What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It’s beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don’t really know each other; they are one image living with another image.

  We may seek to avoid the cocoon of pain by drifting into a hazy, unfocused state, a vaguely pleasant drifting that can last for hours. When we realize that’s what’s happening, what is a good question to ask?

  STUDENT: “What am I avoiding?”

  STUDENT: I might ask, “What am I experiencing right now?”

  JOKO : Those are both good questions to ask. The curious thing is, we say that we want to know reality and see our life as it is; yet when we begin to practice, or attend sesshin, we immediately find ways to avoid reality by retreating into this hazy, dreamy state. That’s just another form of worshiping the false god of comfort and pleasure.

  STUDENT: Isn’t there a flaw in seeking out suffering and focusing on it?

  JOKO : We don’t have to seek it; it’s already there in our lives. Every five minutes, we’re in trouble in some way. All of our “seeking” is to escape it. There are countless ways people try to escape, or to put a safe shell around themselves. Despite our efforts, the shell does get broken. Then we get more frantic and try harder. We go to work and find that the boss has had a bad night, or our child calls about getting in trouble at school. The shell is constantly under assault. There’s no way we can be sure of keeping it in place. Our lives break down because we can’t stand any opposition to the way we want things to be.

  Pain is constantly in our lives. We feel not only our own pain, but the pain of people around us. We try to build our wall thicker, or we avoid people in distress; yet it’s always present, nonetheless.

  STUDENT : Supposing I’m sitting, and I’m not in pain. I’m actually rather comfortable. Is it useful to remember painful times in my life, to go back to unresolved situations and try to deal with them?

  JOKO : That’s not necessary. If we’re alert to what’s going on in our thoughts and our body in this moment, we’ll have plenty to work with.

  When we are fully awake in this moment, sitting can be pleasurable, too. But we shouldn’t seek that out and try to escape the pain; then we bring into practice the false god and refuse to be awake to what is.

  STUDENT: Over time, I find that what begins to come up in sitting is not so much pleasure or pain or something in between, but just interest. Experience can be looked on with a kind of curiosity. JOKO: Yes, good point.

  STUDENT : Are we talking about the difference between the absolute and the relative? Can we say that the absolute is paying attention to everything and that the relative is pursuing only pleasure and comfort? Is relaxing into the cocoon of pain a means to arriving at the absolute?

  JOKO : I wouldn’t say it’s “a means to arriving at the absolute,” since we’re always there. But we choose not to notice we’re there and to shut out part of our experience. The absolute always embraces pain and pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with pain per se; we just don’t like it. There isn’t something called the absolute that is greater than the relative. There are just two sides of the same coin. The phenomenal world of people, trees, and rugs, and the absolute world of pure un-knowable nothing, of energy, are the same thing. Rather than pursuing a one-sided ideal, we need to bow to the absolute in the relative, as well as the relative in the absolute. We need to honor everything.

  Sisyphus and the Burden of Life

  Greek mythology tells the story of Sisyphus, king of Corinth, condemned by the gods to Hades and eternal punishment. Endlessly he had to roll an enormously heavy boulder up a hill—and when it reached the top, it would roll down again. He struggled to bring the boulder to the top of the hill, only to watch it roll back down, over and over again, for eternity.

  Like all myths, this story contains a teaching. How do you see the myth? What is it about? Like a koan, it has many aspects.

  STUDENT: The myth suggests to me that life is a cycle. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then it starts all over.

  STUDENT : It reminds me of practice as polishing the mirror, polishing the mirror, polishing the mirror. We have to do this until we give up and simply live in the moment.

  STUDENT: Sisyphus’s punishment is awful only if he hopes for an end to it.

  STUDENT: The myth reminds me of obsessive action, when I am trapped in a repetitive cycle of behaviors and thoughts.

  STUDENT: Sisyphus sounds like a person who is struggling with life and its burdens, trying to get free from them.

  STUDENT : The story sounds like our practice. If we live each moment, without a thought of a goal or getting somewhere or finally achieving something, then we just live. We do what’s next: pushing, the rock falling back, then pushing again.

  STUDENT: I think the story of Sisyphus represents the idea that there is no hope.

  STUDENT: The nature of my mind is not to be satisfied with my own accomplishments and to be more interested in the challenge of getting somewhere. Once I have accomplished something, it doesn’t mean much to me.

  STUDENT : Sisyphus is who I am. We are all Sisyphus, trying to do something with our lives, and saying “I can’t.” The boulder itself is “I can’t.”

  JOKO : A question I’d like to pose is, what does it mean to do evil? It’s interesting that somebody judged Sisyphus for doing evil, and that he was condemned to a special place called Hades. But setting such questions aside, if we can see that there is just this moment, then pushing the rock up the hill or watching it roll back down are in a way the same thing. Our ordinary interpretation is that Sisyphus’s task is difficult and unpleasant. Yet all that happens is simply pushing the rock and watching it roll back, moment by moment. Like Sisyphus, we are all just doing what we’re doing moment by moment. But to that activity we add judgments, ideas. Hell lies not in pushing the rock, but in thinking about it, in creating ideas of hope and disappointment, in wondering if we will finally get the rock to stay at the top. “I’ve worked so hard! Maybe this ti
me the boulder will stay.”

  Our efforts do make things happen, and in making things happen, we get to the next second. Perhaps the boulder will stay at the top for a while; perhaps it won’t. Neither event is in itself good or bad. The weight of the boulder, the burden, is the thought that our life is a struggle, that it should be other than it is. When we judge our burden to be unpleasant, we look for ways to escape. Perhaps one person gets drunk to forget about pushing the boulder. Another manipulates people into helping push it. Often we try to shift the burden onto someone else so we can escape the work.

  What would be the enlightened state for King Sisyphus? If he pushes the rock a few thousand years, what may he finally realize?

  STUDENT: To be one with pushing in each moment.

  JOKO : Just to push the rock and to have abandoned hope that his life will be other than it is. Most of us imagine that the enlightened state will feel much better than pushing a rock! Have you ever awakened in the morning and muttered, “I don’t even want to think about all the things I have to do today”? But life is as it is. And our practice is not about having life feel good, even though that’s a very human hope. We all like things that make us feel good. We especially like partners who make us feel good. If our partner doesn’t make us feel good, we assume that things have to be changed, that he or she needs to change! Because we are human, we think that feeling good is the aim of life. But if we simply push our current boulder and practice being aware of what goes on with us as we push, we slowly transform. What does it mean to transform?