Nothing Special: Living Zen Page 6

  In a sense, Zen is a religious practice. Religion really means to rejoin that which seems to be separate. Zen practice helps us to do that. But it’s not a religion in the sense that there’s something outside of ourselves that’s going to take care of us. A lot of people who practice Zen have no formal religious affiliation. I have nothing against formal religion; in all religions there are some remarkable people who truly practice and know what they’re doing. But there are also people who have no connection with formal religion whatsoever, yet who practice just as well. In the end there is no practice except what we’re doing each second.

  Because true practice and religion help us to rejoin what seems to be separate, all practice has to be about anger. Anger is the emotion that separates us. It cuts everything right in two.

  STUDENT : Is not this practice very difficult to do entirely by oneself? When one of my belief systems breaks down, I feel betrayed and need some support from others.

  JOKO : “I feel betrayed” is, of course, just another thought. It is more difficult to practice alone, but it’s not impossible. It’s useful to come to a Zen center to get a foundation, then maintain some contact long distance and come to sit with others when one can. When one practices alone, it’s like swimming against the current. In a community of persons practicing together, we have a mutual language and common understanding of what practice is. Still, I have some excellent students who live far from Zen centers and who talk with me on the phone. Some of them are doing very well. And for some, the struggle of a practice done with such minimal support may be the most useful thing.

  Justice

  As we become increasingly sensitive to ourselves and the transitory experiences of our lives—our thoughts, emotions, sensations—it becomes obvious to us that the underlying stratum of our lives is anger. When someone insists, “I am never angry,” I am incredulous.

  Since anger and its subsets—depression, resentment, jealousy, backbiting, gossip, and so on—dominate our lives, we need to investigate the whole problem of anger with care. For a life free of anger would be the promised land of milk and honey, nirvana, an existence in which our own worth and that of others is a blessedly confirmed reality.

  For the psychologically mature person, the ills and injustices of life are handled by counteraggression, in which one makes an effort to eliminate the injustice and create justice. Often such efforts are dictatorial, full of anger and self-righteousness.

  In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion. Not me against you, not me straightening out the present ill, fighting to gain a just result for myself and others, but compassion, a life that goes against nothing and fulfills everything.

  All anger is based upon judgments, whether of ourselves or others. The idea that our anger must be expressed for us to be healthy is no more than a fantasy. We need to let these judgmental, angry thoughts pass before our witnessing, impersonal self. We gain nothing by expressing them. It is a mistake to suppose that our unexpressed anger hurts us and that we must express it and thereby hurt others.

  The best answer to injustice is not justice, but compassion, or love. You ask, “But what am I to do in this difficult situation? I must do something!” Yes, but what? Always our practice must be the basis for our actions. An appropriate and compassionate response does not come from a fight for justice, but from that radical dimension of practice that “passeth all understanding.” It’s not easy. Perhaps we must go through agonized weeks or months of sitting. But the resolution will come. No person can provide this resolution for us; it can be provided only by our true self—if we open wide the gates of practice.

  Let us not adopt some facile, narrowly psychological view of our lives. The radical dimension I speak of demands everything we are and have. Joy, not happiness, is its fruit.

  Forgiveness

  Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy.

  Søren Kierkegaard

  Who is it that you cannot forgive? Each of us has a list, which may include ourselves (often the hardest one to forgive), as well as events, institutions, and groups.

  Isn’t it natural that we should feel this way about a person or event that has injured us—perhaps severely and irrevocably? From the ordinary standpoint, the answer is yes. From a practice standpoint, the answer is no. We need to vow: I will forgive even if it takes me a lifetime of practice. Why such a strong statement?

  The quality of our whole life is on the line. Failing to grasp the importance of forgiveness is always part of any failing relationship and a factor in our anxieties, depressions, and illnesses—in all our troubles. Our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive.

  So why don’t we just do it? If it were easy, we would all be realized buddhas. But it is not easy. There is no use in saying, “I should forgive, I should, I should, I should….” Such desperate thoughts help very little. Analysis and intellectual efforts can produce some softening of the rigidity of nonforgiveness. But true or complete forgiveness lies on a different plane.

  Nonforgiveness is rooted in our habit of thinking self-centered thoughts. When we believe in such thoughts, they are like a drop of poison in our glass of water. The first, formidable task is to label and observe these thoughts until the poison can evaporate. Then the major work can be done: the active experiencing as a bodily physical sensation of the anger’s residue in the body, without any clinging to self-centered thoughts. The transformation to forgiveness, which is closely related to compassion, can take place because the dualistic world of the small mind and its thoughts has been deserted for the nondual, non-personal experiencing that alone can lead us out of our hell-hole of nonforgiveness.

  Only an acute realization of the critical need for such practice will enable us to do it with strength and determination over the years. A maturing practice knows there is no other choice.

  So, who is it you cannot forgive?

  The Talk Nobody Wants to Hear

  If we’re honest, we have to admit that what we really want from practice—especially at the beginning, but always to some degree—is greater comfort in our lives. We hope that with sufficient practice, what bothers us now will not bother us anymore. There are really two viewpoints from which we can approach practice, which need to be spelled out. The first viewpoint is what most of us think practice is (whether we admit it or not), and the second is what practice actually is. As we practice over time, we gradually shift from one viewpoint toward the other, though we never completely abandon the first. We’re all somewhere on this continuum.

  Operating from the first viewpoint, our basic attitude is that we will undertake this demanding and difficult practice because we hope to get certain personal benefits from it. We may not expect them all at once. We may have some limited patience, but after a few months of practice, we may begin to feel cheated if our life has not improved. We enter practice with an expectation or demand that it will somehow take care of our problems. Our basic demands are that we be comfortable and happy, that we be more peaceful and serene. We expect that we won’t have those awful feelings of upset, and we will get what we want. We expect that instead of being unfulfilling, our life will become more rewarding. We hope to be healthier, more at ease. We hope to be more in control of our life. We imagine that we will be able to be nice to others without it being inconvenient.

  From practice we demand that we become secure and increasingly achieve what we want: if not money and fame, at least something close. Though we might not want to admit it, we demand that someone take care of us and that the people close to us function for our benefit. We expect to be able to create life conditions that are pleasing to us, such as the right relationship, the right job, or the best course of study. For those with whom we identify, we want to be able to fix up their lives.

  There is nothing wrong with wanting any of these things, but if we think that achieving them is what practice is about, then we still don’t understand practice. Th
e demands are all about what we want: we want to be enlightened, we want peace, we want serenity, we want help, we want control over things, we want everything to be wonderful.

  The second viewpoint is quite different: more and more, we want to be able to create harmony and growth for everyone. We are included in this growth, but we are not the center of it; we’re just part of the picture. As the second viewpoint strengthens in us, we begin to enjoy serving others and are less interested in whether serving others interferes with our own personal welfare. We begin to search for life conditions—such as a job, health, a partner—that are most fruitful for such service. They may not always be pleasing for us; what is more important to us is that they teach us to serve life well. A difficult relationship can be extremely fruitful, for example.

  As we increasingly adopt the second viewpoint, we learn to serve everyone, not just people we like. Increasingly, we have an interest in being responsible for life, and we’re not so concerned whether others feel responsible for us. In fact we even become willing to be responsible for people who mistreat us. Though we may not prefer it, we become more willing to experience trying situations in order to learn.

  As we move toward the second viewpoint, we will probably retain the preferences that defined the first viewpoint. We will continue to prefer to be happy, to be comfortable, to be peaceful, to get what we want, to be healthy, to have some control of things. Practice does not cause us to lose our preferences. But when a preference is in conflict with what is most fruitful, then we are willing to give up the preference. In other words, the center of our life is shifting from a preoccupation with ourselves to life itself. Life includes us, of course; we haven’t been eliminated in the second viewpoint. But we’re no longer the center.

  Practice is about moving from the first to the second viewpoint. There is a pitfall inherent in practice, however: if we practice well, many of the demands of the first viewpoint may be satisfied. We are likely to feel better, to be more comfortable. We may feel more at ease with ourselves. Because we’re not punishing our bodies with as much tension, we tend to be healthier. These changes can confirm in us the misconception that the first viewpoint is correct: that practice is about making life better for ourselves. In fact, the benefits to ourselves are incidental. The real point of practice is to serve life as fully and fruitfully as we can. And that’s very hard for us to understand, especially at first. “You mean that I should take care of someone who has just been cruel to me? That’s crazy!” “You mean that I have to give up my own convenience to serve someone who doesn’t even like me?”

  Our ego-centered attitudes are deep-rooted, and it takes years and years of hard practice to loosen these roots a bit. And we’re convinced that practice is about the first viewpoint, that we are going to get something from it that’s wonderful for ourselves.

  True practice, however, is much more about seeing how we hurt ourselves and others with deluded thinking and actions. It is seeing how we hurt people, perhaps simply because we are so lost in our own concerns that we can’t see them. I don’t think we really want to hurt others; it’s just that we don’t quite see what we are doing. I can tell how well someone’s practice is going by whether he or she is developing greater concern for others, concern that extends beyond merely what I want, what’s hurting me, how bad life is, and so on. This is the mark of a practice that’s moving along. Practice is always a battle between what we want and what life wants.

  It’s natural to be selfish, to want what we want, and we are inevitably selfish until we see an alternative. The function of teaching in a center like this is to help us see the alternative and to disturb us in our selfishness. So long as we are caught in the first viewpoint, governed by wanting to feel good or blissful or enlightened, we need to be disturbed. We need to be upset. A good center and a good teacher assist that. Enlightenment is, after all, simply an absence of any concern for self. Don’t come to this center to feel better; that’s not what this place is about. What I want are lives that get bigger so that they can take care of more things, more people.

  This morning I had a call from a former student who has lung cancer. In an earlier operation, three-quarters of his lungs were removed, and he’s devoting himself to sitting and practice. Some time after the operation, he began to have troubles with his vision and with severe headaches. Tests revealed two brain tumors: the cancer had spread. He’s back in the hospital for treatment. We talked about the treatment and how he’s doing. I told him, “I’m really very sorry this has happened for you. I just want you to be comfortable. I hope things will go well.” He replied, “That’s not what I want from you. I want you to rejoice. This is it for me—and it’s wonderful. I see what my life is.” He went on to say, “It doesn’t mean I don’t get angry and frightened and climb the walls. All those things are going on, and now I know what my life is. I don’t want anything from you except that you share in my rejoicing. I wish everyone could feel the way I do.”

  He is living from the second viewpoint, the one in which we embrace those life conditions—our job, our health, our partner—that will be most fruitful to all. He’s got it. Whether he lives two months, two years, or a long time, in a sense it does not matter. I’m not suggesting that he’s a saint. He will have days of extreme difficulty: pain, anger, rebellion. These things are going on now for him; yet that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. If he were to recover, he would still have all the struggles and difficulties that everyone else does, the demands and dreams of the ego. These things never really go away, but how we hold them can change.

  The shift from the first to the second viewpoint is hard for us to comprehend, especially at first. I have noticed in talking with people who are new to practice that often my words simply don’t register. Like a cat on a hot tin roof or drops of water in a hot frying pan, the words touch momentarily and then jump off and vanish. Over time, however, the words don’t bounce off so quickly. Something begins to sink in. We can hold the truth longer about how life is as opposed to how we think it might be or should be. Over time the ability simply to sit with what life really is increases.

  The shift does not happen overnight; we are much too stubborn for that. It may be accelerated by a major illness or disappointment, by a profound loss or other problem. Though I don’t wish such crises on anyone, they often bring about needed learning. Zen practice is difficult largely because it creates discomfort and brings us face-toface with problems in our lives. We don’t want to do this, though it helps us to learn, and prods us toward the second viewpoint. To sit quietly when we’re upset and would really like to be doing something else is a lesson that sinks in little by little. As we recognize the value of practice, our motivation to practice increases. We begin to sense something. We gain strength to sit day after day, to participate in an all-day sitting, to do a sesshin. The desire to do this hard practice increases. We slowly begin to comprehend what my former student meant when he said, “Now I know what my life is.” We’re mistaken if we feel sorry for him; perhaps he is one of the lucky ones.

  STUDENT : You say that from the second viewpoint, we demand that our lives be more fruitful. Do you mean fruitful to one’s practice, or what?

  JOKO : Fruitful for life. Fruitful for life overall, including as much of life as possible. That sounds very general, but when it happens in our life, we understand it. For example, perhaps we might go and help a friend to move, even when we’re really tired and don’t want to do it. We put ourselves out, we inconvenience ourselves, not to be noble but just because it’s needed.

  STUDENT: When I hear stories like that, I immediately want to start making plans to do fruitful things.

  JOKO : Yes, we can make anything into an ideal to pursue. If we do this, however, we quickly encounter our own resistance—which gives us something to work with. It’s all grist for the mill.

  We don’t have to push ourselves to the point where we fall apart. We shouldn’t set ourselves up as a martyr; that’s just another ideal, an
image of how we should be as opposed to how we really are.

  STUDENT : When I plan how I can make my life more secure and comfortable, I imagine that it will make me happy at last. But then a question arises: “Will I really be happy?” I notice in myself an anxious grabbing after security and happiness, and behind that ideal is a feeling of dissatisfaction, because somehow I know that’s not going to be it, either.

  JOKO : There’s some value for us in chasing after such dreams, because when we’ve achieved what we thought we wanted, we can see more clearly that this doesn’t give us the satisfaction we craved. That’s how we learn. Practice is not about changing what we do so much as being very observant and experiencing what’s going on with us.

  STUDENT: That process of chasing dreams seems endless. Does it ever fade?

  JOKO : It does fade, but only after years and years of practice. For years, I began every sesshin with a sense of resistance: “I don’t want to do this because I know how tired I’ll be at the end.” Who wants to be tired? That resistance has faded for me, now. When sesshin starts, it starts. If we’re practicing, ego agendas slowly fade. We shouldn’t make that fading yet an

  other agenda item, however. We shouldn’t think of practice as a way to get somewhere else. There’s nowhere to get to.

  STUDENT : In my life right now, I’m making a lot of new friends and contacts. It’s exciting. I don’t know who’s helping whom—whether I’m giving to them, or they to me. Is that related to practice?

  JOKO : Practice changes patterns of friendship away from calculating costs and benefits for oneself toward simply being more genuine. In a sense, we can’t help others; we can’t know what’s best for them. Practicing with our own lives is the only way we can help others; we naturally serve others by becoming more who we are.