Tag Archives: Zen

Practical Zen: An Approach to Secular Ethics

[This is a talk more or less as I gave it at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture on October 23, 2016. It is based on a chapter in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.]

Hello. I’m so pleased to be here today. Many years ago I lived in New Jersey. And in those days I often attended lectures hosted by the Ethical Culture Society in Teaneck. So I come here with an appreciation of what you’re about.

I have been a formal student of Zen Buddhism for nearly 30 years. Zen is my spiritual path. However, let me assure you I’m not here to sell you on Buddhism, but simply to offer a perspective adapted from Buddhism for your consideration. I’m calling it “practical Zen” because I intend to avoid the enigmatic one-hand-clapping stuff and keep this talk grounded in our common experience.

Let’s begin with a quote from a Chinese text that is not Zen, but Daoist. This is paraphrased somewhat from the Dao Dejing, verse 18 in most translations. This passage describes a series of fallback positions.

When the Dao is lost, we fall back on virtue.
When virtue is lost, we fall back on humanity.
When humanity is lost, we fall back on morality.
When morality is lost, we fall back on religion.

If I could provide an executive summary of this talk, it would be that to move toward a more ethical culture we need to climb back up this ladder, at least to virtue. And if you want to go for broke and aim for the Dao, great.

So let’s talk about how we might do this.

There’s a basic Buddhist teaching that says what we might call psychological impulses, including our emotions and thoughts, are the forerunner of all actions. One aspect of that is that the way we conceptualize the world around us conditions how we relate to the world. So the first step in considering a moral course is to look very closely at how we conceptualize morality.

I looked “morality” up in an English dictionary and found “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” Another definition says morality is “beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.”

But the fact is, we don’t agree about what’s right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Especially as our communities and nations become more diverse, we more and more often are butting heads with people who have entirely different beliefs about what right and wrong, good and evil even mean.

Where do these beliefs come from? I never heard of people putting them to a vote. Some of us are stuck in the idea that morality is about following absolute rules that are eternal and unchanging because God said so, even if those rules are making everyone miserable. And to an increasing degree, that rigidity is tearing us apart.

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Is there another way to define morality? The Sanskrit word found in early Buddhist scriptures that is translated into English as morality or ethics is sila. Sila has a connotation of harmony; it’s acting in a way that allows people to live in harmonious families and communities. Sila involves cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security. Rules can be useful to help with that cultivation, but by themselves they are not the be-all and end-all of morality.

Buddhism does have moral rules, of course. Monks and nuns have hundreds of rules. Laypeople have five. We call them Precepts. The Precepts for laypeople are very basic ― don’t take life; don’t take what is not given, don’t misuse sexuality, don’t deceive others, avoid intoxicants. Those are the five Precepts every school agrees on; Zen throws in a few more. The Precepts are something like training wheels. We practice the Precepts in order to cultivate morality, humanity, virtue, compassion, kindness, and all that stuff, which is where true morality originates.

There’s an American Zen master who is also a Unitarian Universalist minister named James Ford. James Ford wrote about the Precepts recently,

“Frankly, there are times we just need the rules. Much of our lives we’re wandering around in the thickets. Haven’t a clue. We’re lost. And the precepts can become a life line thrown out to us. Sometimes we just have to grab that line. Sometimes we just have to follow the rules. …

… But if we live only in the realm of rules we are strangled by dead letters. And not only are our own lives constrained, we become caricatures of our true potentiality.”

Some rules really are necessary. Rules about theft and homicide, for example. Without some rules, we humans would never have left the caves. We’d still be huddled around our little fires, guarding our flint arrowheads from those people in that other cave. Civilization wouldn’t be possible.

But we’re still left with a lot of rules that seem to serve no useful purpose. We’re fighting over who can use which public restrooms, for example, because of some people’s rigid ideas about morality. We’re fighting about reproductive rights, about who can get married, and who has to bake wedding cakes.

What’s the point? What does denying people the right to follow their hearts, or in the case of the restroom issue, their bladders, have to do with cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect and security? In this case, rigid rule-following is having the opposite effect.

Another way to understand the religiosity-morality connection is explained in a book I bet some of you have read, which is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt provides a rigorously tested argument that we feel before we judge. The moment we are confronted with a moral question, something in our subconscious or intuitive mind churns up feelings about the question that determine our position. Our rational mind then constructs a narrative that explains to us what we think and why we think it. This happens so quickly we usually aren’t aware that’s what we’re doing.

Haidt’s explanation of how we respond to moral questions is very similar to what many Buddhist philosophers have taught for centuries, so it’s good to see science catching up.

Anyway, according to Haidt’s hypothesis, as much as we all want to think we are rational and logical and think the way we do for serious reasons, the fact is that we all allow rudimentary emotions to dictate what we think, at least about some things.

When you understand that much of “morality” is about rudimentary emotions and biases, you might also understand why conservative and dogmatic religions of all persuasion tend to get hung up on sex and on keeping women under control. This tells me that the men in charge of things are channeling their own anxieties about sex and women and projecting them into their scriptures. In doing so, they sometimes wander quite a distance from what their scriptures actually say, revealing how pathologically deep those anxieties are. And because they have the authority of institutional religion behind them, these men are given great moral authority in our culture. But in truth, often what we’re seeing from religious authorities is plain old bigotry. And religion is just being used as an excuse for it.

I feel strongly that one of the many steps we need to take to restore some sanity to this fractured nation is to de-authorize religious authorities from dictating morality to all of us. As a diverse society, we require a secular basis for our common ethics.

While we’re on the subject of thought and actions, I want to talk about good and evil. The way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

For example, on September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush said this at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:

“Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Rid the world of evil? That really should have set off a lot more alarm bells than it did.

Here’s another quote: In a New York Times column published February 11, 2004, David Brooks wrote, “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the weapons of mass destruction, our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.”

Now, what might we infer about “evil” from these quotations? The first suggests that “evil” is something tangible, with some sort of finite mass and material substance, and if we just work hard enough we can whittle ‘er down and be done with it.

The second suggests that evil is a quality or attribute that some people possess, and others don’t. And once evil has infected “the souls of our enemies” there is nothing to be done but to eliminate them.

Of course, it’s likely “our enemies” feel exactly the same way about us.

People are seduced into evil because they don’t recognize evil as evil. They mistake it for justice, or righteousness, or even God’s Will. And the seduction begins with the thought that “I’m a good person,” and “his hatred of me is evil, but my hatred of him is justified.” As soon as we identify ourselves as “good” and the Other, whoever they are, as “evil,” we’ve well on the way to giving ourselves a cosmic permission slip to do whatever we want to be rid of them. You see the problem.

I say this seductive impulse is at the root of most of the mass atrocities humankind has inflicted on itself through the ages. That’s why the way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

Please understand that I’m not saying people or nations shouldn’t defend themselves from those who intend to do them harm. What gets us into trouble is thinking that we’re entitled to Holy Retribution, or that we are somehow qualified to pass judgments and inflict brutality on entire populations, because we’re the good guys.

I used to run into the words good and evil in Buddhist sutras, and these words often nagged at me as being out of place. So I had something of a breakthrough when I found out that the Sanskrit or Pali words being translated as good and evil actually mean “skillful” and “unskillful.”

I’ll give you a mindfulness exercise. Very Zen. Sometime, either now or while you’re sitting in a quiet place, think the word “evil.” Don’t contemplate what it means, just hold the word in your consciousness. And as you do that, pay close attention to the subtle emotional cues within your body that are triggered by the word “evil.”

Now, think the word “unskillful.” If you are tuned in to yourself, you might notice a different reaction. It’s very subtle, but it’s real.

At the very least, maybe we’d be less likely to bomb people for being unskillful.

Zen teachers say it’s important to appreciate that “evil” really has no substance and no independent existence. It is no-thing. It does not infect people. Evil “exists” only in intentions, actions and consequences.

If we understand that neither we nor our enemies are intrinsically good or evil, does that change how we see traumatic events? Speaking as an eyewitness, as I’m sure some of you are, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers easily was the most terrible thing I ever saw, but I honestly don’t see why hanging the label “evil” on it makes any difference. It was what it was. But my perspective enrages some people who clearly think it is vitally important to label the event as “evil,” and if we don’t we’re somehow being soft or letting the terrorists win.

There’s some kind of magical thinking lurking around in there, somewhere.

I don’t agree entirely with the postmodernist view that good and evil are purely relative or matters of subjective judgment. Skillful or unskillful are not just relative. Causing harm to another is unskillful. Wasting natural resources or adding to global climate change are unskillful, even if they aren’t covered by the Ten Commandments. That’s the problem with moral rules left over from the Bronze Age; we’ve got different problems now.

And then there’s “moral clarity.” In the U.S. many religious conservatives place great value in “moral clarity,” which I define as a state of mind achieved by staking a fixed position on a presumed moral high ground and then ignoring the details of human life that fog the view.

For example, I have read many essays arguing for criminalizing abortion that go on and on about the humanity of the fetus without mentioning the pregnant woman at all. If she is mentioned, she is considered to be a kind of niggling technicality. Or worse, she is portrayed as weak-minded or otherwise unqualified to make her own moral decisions.

The “moral clarity” crowd must never admit that the woman is a valuable and intelligent human being who may be in a terribly difficult situation, because empathy and compassion for her would block their “clarity.”

In short, moral absolutism requires ignoring genuine human life experience. This makes its rigid application anti-human and oppressive.

I want to cite the late Robert Aitken Roshi, who was one of the most revered patriarchs of American Zen. In his book The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics, he said, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines, including Buddhism, are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Does moral absolutism even work? There is data showing us that rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancy are higher in conservative “Bible Belt” U.S. states than in more liberal ones, and this pattern seems to replicate itself worldwide.

Reasonable people may disagree about whether abortion is immoral, but note that rates of abortion in overwhelmingly Catholic Latin America, where abortion is nearly everywhere illegal and harshly punished, are higher than in the United States and a lot higher than in mostly liberal and allegedly decadent western Europe.

And what does his tell us? It appears that when absolutist morality is enforced, either by public shaming or by law, actual human behavior — heterosexual behavior included — is driven into the closet, leaving actual humans with no practical guidance in their actual circumstances.

I say the absolutist approach to morality gets everything backward. It creates too wide a gap between public righteousness and what people are really doing in their private lives, so that the moral rules are not really guiding anyone. And when we cede the presumed moral high ground to the absolutists, too often we squelch open and honest discussion of our real-world circumstances and behaviors.

Again, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Secular moralists sometimes propose a utilitarian or consequentialist approach to morality. Very broadly, utilitarianism is the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many variations of utilitarianism, however, mostly because people disagree on what constitutes “good.” Further, this approach often fails to provide an incentive for “being good.”

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has proposed that science can provide a basis for morality. Harris is a smart guy and he says many things worthy of consideration. But he’s written that science can “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” and “give us answers about right and wrong.” I think that’s right up there with thinking we can rid the world of evil.

I have a more radical proposal here. Some things people need to work out for themselves.

Human life is infinitely complicated and messy, and circumstances have a way of confounding application of one-size-fits-all solutions. Some things people need to work out for themselves. And that’s okay.

I propose that given the infinity of variables, no two human beings ever faced completely identical moral dilemmas.  When faced with questions about ending a pregnancy, or a marriage, or when to discontinue life support, or whether to intervene in a friend’s problems or let things sort themselves out — we need to be able to apply some subjectivity to matters that will change our lives and the lives of those around us, because we’re the only ones familiar with most of the variables.

We’re the only ones who have our medical history, or our parents, or our financial or physical resources, or our marriage, or our job, or our special needs child. Etc., etc. I think that in some circumstances we need the freedom to be subjective, to consider complex moral questions not just in the abstract but in the light of our particular life and situation.

The challenge to us as a society is to distinguish between those behaviors that cannot be allowed ― such as homicide ― because allowing them would damage civilization; and those problems that people need to work out for themselves, even if we don’t all personally approve of all the solutions. And then we have to persuade the absolutists to back off.

We can, as a society, draw parameters around moral questions — medical guidelines determining when life support is futile, for example. And I agree that science can help with much of that. And then we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done, which is argue among ourselves about where the parameters should be drawn. Maybe arguing with each other is the price we pay for freedom.

If all this sounds terribly ambiguous — yeah, mostly, it is. That’s because you and the world and human life generally are very complicated, and where there is complication, there is ambiguity.

I realize people often are uncomfortable with ambiguity. They want clear rules and sharply defined boundaries. They want all phenomena to be properly sorted into their socially acceptable conceptual boxes. That’s why some people prize moral absolutism. That’s a mostly workable strategy for getting through life, but it’s not real. It’s an artificial order superimposed on the messiness of reality.  And sometimes failing to accept reality causes more trouble than it solves.

One of the great humanistic philosophers of the 20th century, Erich Fromm, wrote that people often escape into authoritarian mass movements because they fear freedom. A lot of that fear of freedom is a fear of ambiguity, a lack of clear, bright lines that make your choices for you.

I think we see a lot of that fear in America today. And notice that some of the same people who talk about how they want to protect their freedom seem hell bent on destroying everybody’s freedom to do that. It’s like they’re protecting their freedom to be not free. But those clear, bright lines are not likely to come back, so this is a situation we’re going to have to deal with for a while.

Just about any psychologist will tell you that you can’t force other people to change. We can only look to ourselves. How do we find our own moral compass in the messiness of life?

And to answer this question I want to wade a little more deeply into Zen.

Here’s a question for you. “Can you identify yourself without reference to a relationship?”  This is a question I first heard in a sociology class. I’ve never heard anyone provide an answer; I don’t think it’s answerable. It’s something of a koan, because if you work with it you end up exploring the paradoxical nature of the self, which is a very Zen thing to do.

Many schools of Buddhism, including Zen, have a doctrine called the two truths. The two truths describe what seems to be a paradox. On one hand, we are all precious and unique individuals, worthy of respect and compassion.

But at the same time, we take our very uniqueness, our identities, from our relationships. From our roles in our families, from our professions, from the interests we share with others, from the arts and intellectual pursuits we enjoy, with our circle of associations. We are who we are because everyone else is who they are. We are not the entirely self-contained, stand-alone people units we think we are.

This interdependence extends to our biological existence as well. We depend on other life forms to sustain our lives and to maintain the conditions on this planet that make life possible. All beings are interdependent. All beings inter-exist. This comes directly from the teaching of the Buddha.

A metaphor used to help resolve this paradox is attributed to a Chinese master named Dushun who was born in the 6th century. This is called “Indra’s Net.”  Imagine a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each “eye” of the net is a single brilliant, perfect jewel. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel affects all of them.

This means every jewel matters. Every person matters. You matter. And everything you do affects everyone else. This is the most essential thing to understand. Everything you feel and think, everything you do or say affects yourself and everyone else. Most effects may be extremely subtle, but they’re still effects. And sometimes even subtle effects can have big real-world consequences.

And at its most basic, an ethical life is a life that produces beneficial effects.

Now, it may seem inconsistent to say that we need to be allowed some subjectivity in our moral choices, while at the same time everything we do impacts everyone else. So let’s take this to another level.

Twenty-five centuries ago, the Buddha emphasized purifying oneself of what he called afflictions or defilements. The chief afflictions are greed, hate and ignorance. This ignorance is ignorance of the inter-existence of all beings, because most of our problems come from thinking of ourselves as separated from everything else. We think that whatever is within our skin is “me” and what’s outside our skin is “everything else.” It’s this misperception that is the chief source of our fear, our greed, our anger, our hatred.

You can follow moral rules to the letter, but if you are harboring greed, hate, and ignorance, you are not living a beneficial life. You are not living an ethical life. You are not cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security.

The Buddha taught many practices, including meditation and mindfulness, to reduce our afflictions.

There’s nothing magical or supernatural going on here; it’s all about becoming more intimate with yourself. You become more aware of what jerks you around and pulls you out of harmony. You learn to let those things go. If you don’t have some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice already, I encourage you to look into one.

Finally he encouraged us to develop four particular virtues above all others. The first is metta, goodwill, or loving kindness to all beings. The second is compassion, which is the active desire to reduce the suffering of others. The third is called “mudita,” which means “sympathetic joy.” This is joy in the good fortune of others. It’s the opposite of envy.

And, finally, equanimity. With equanimity, we are not being constantly pulled back and forth between things we want and things we want to avoid; we accept what life brings us. We learn to remain in balance in the middle of chaos. We learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. And we learn to not be pulled into one-sided views. The Buddha gave many, many sermons about all of these virtues.

Now, developing these virtues isn’t something you can do in three easy steps, and none of us is ever perfect, and that’s okay. Just making the effort, even if you fall short, makes the whole universe a better place. And while Buddhism provides a lot of tools for cultivating these virtues, it doesn’t have a patent on them.

Every day we have opportunities to actualize goodwill and compassion, and to share the joy of others. Every day, there are opportunities to develop equanimity. I propose that these virtues harmonize well with the commitment of Ethical Culture to “always act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby yourself.”

For several years I was the student of a Zen teacher named Jion Susan Postal, who died in 2014. She founded the Zen Center in New Rochelle. Susan taught us to be grateful for these opportunities. She said,

“For all beneficent karma ever manifested through me, I am grateful. May our gratitude be expressed in our body, speech and mind, with infinite kindness to the past, infinite service to the present, and infinite responsibility to the future.”

And to all of you, metta.

Buddhas and Buddhas

In the last few posts I’ve been looking at Master Dogen’s Vow. Please note that a dharma master could probably write about this text for weeks. I’m just beginning to look at it myself. But I’m happy that several of you have found this text inspiring. So here’s a little more of it:

The Chan Master Lung-ya said:

“Those unenlightened in past lives will now be enlightened.
In this life, take care of the body, the fruit of many lives.
Before Buddhas were enlightened, they were the same as we.
Enlightened people of today are exactly the same as the ancients.”

(Note: “Chan Master Lung-ya” is Lung-ya Chii-tun, an important patriarch of Soto Zen who lived from about 835  to about 920 CE. Among Zennies he is associated with the famous question “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?”)

The Chan Master is trying to encourage us. “Take care of the body, the fruit of many lives” reminds us that while past actions have caused a lot of obstacles, past actions also have given us this body with which to practice.

And here’s the end:

This is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha, so quietly explore the far-reaching effects of these causes and conditions.
Repenting in this way, one never fails to receive help, deep and unending, from all Buddhas and Ancestors.
Revealing before Buddha one’s lack of faith and failure to practice  dissolves the root of these unwholesome actions.
This is the pure and simple manifestation of true practice,  of the true mind and body of faith.

This part may be a little jarring to those who are quite certain Buddhism — especially Zen — is not a religion. Because this part of the text sounds awfully religious.

When I first began to practice Zen, a lot of people were making a big deal about “self power” versus “other power” in Buddhism. Zen, they declared (with some chest-thumping) is about self-power. Other schools of Buddhism, such as Pure Land, are more devotional and rely on other power. But here we have the great Dogen himself talking about receiving help from Buddhas and Ancestors.

First, after all these years, I no longer think the self-power/other-power dichotomy really means anything. Although practice takes personal commitment and effort, you’re never really practicing by yourself. (How is that even possible? Where is the autonomous self that practices?)

We may begin through devotion to Amitabha, or faith in the Lotus Sutra, or trust in our own practice. But after awhile the self-and-other power thing all blurs together.

Those of you who are familiar with the Lotus Sutra may recognize some of that sutra’s influence here. Somewhere in the Lotus it says that only a Buddha together with a Buddha can fathom the great reality of all existence. Dogen — and 0ther Mahayana teachers — said that ordinary people do not turn into Buddhas. Rather, enlightenment is possible because Buddha-nature is already present. This is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha.

One of Dogen’s fascicles from Shobogenzo is called Jinshin Inga, or deep faith in cause and effect. This one’s as yet out of my depth, I fear, but the line “far-reaching effects of these causes and conditions” make me think of it. If you are feeling adventurous, there are translations of Jinshin Inga online.

Read more about the spiritual quest in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.

[A version of this post was published on About.com Buddhism September 19, 2013.]

Atonement

Still looking at Master Dogen’s Vow — the last post was on the third paragraph, and now I want to go back to the second —

Past negative actions accumulate and cause the arising of many obstacles to the practice of the Way.
May all Buddhas and Ancestors who have realized the Way extend their compassion and free us from these karmic effects, allowing us to practice without hindrance. May they share with us their boundless compassion, and fill the universe with the virtue of their enlightened teaching.

The last post reflected on Dogen‘s understanding of past, present and future, and of Buddhas and Ancestors. The important point is that these things are not really separate from us and from our present moment. So when we call upon the Buddhas and Ancestors for help, we are not trying to dredge some Holy Other Beings out of a deep abyss of time. They are already here.

I want to say something about “past negative actions.” This is a big sticking spot for a lot of us, I’m sure. We may bounce from blaming others, or blaming “bad luck,” to beating ourselves up over boneheaded things we’ve done.  Neither extreme is helpful.

While fully acknowledging past negative actions, we can do so with compassion and forgiveness toward ourselves. We are imperfect; we have limitations. In this way, the old, negative stuff can drop away.

Just a quick note about atonement — which seems fitting, since we’ve just passed Yom Kippur — the word atonement in general usage means “reparation,” but at etymology dictionary tells me it originally meant “the condition of being at one with others.”  Literally, at-one-ment. So, as we reflect, take time to consider how both denial and guilt separate us from others. Seek at-one-ment.

Read more about the spiritual quest in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.

[A version of this post was published on About.com Buddhism September 18, 2013.]

Buddhas and Ancestors

I want to say a little more about Master Dogen’s Vow. And I’m going to skip over the second paragraph for right now and go to the third one, because the third paragraph helps me understand the second one. The third paragraph goes —

Buddhas and Ancestors of old were as we.
In the future, we shall be Buddhas and Ancestors.
Revering Buddhas and Ancestors, we are one Buddha and one Ancestor.
Awakening Bodhi-mind, we are one Bodhi-mind.
As they extend their compassion freely to us,
we are able to realize Buddhahood and let go of the realization.

If you are at all familiar with Dogen, you may be familiar with what he wrote about time. In “Uji,” he wrote that time isn’t something that just passes from past to future:

“Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the beginning of practice. When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and no-understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and no-understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time-being is all the time there is. Grass-being, form-being are both time.

“Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

In other words, all of time is present in every moment. All beings and all worlds are present in every moment. The Buddhas and Ancestors of old are in this moment. We as Buddhas and Ancestors of the future are in this moment. Future Buddhas and Ancestors are in this moment. We are one Buddha and one Ancestor.

In Zen, often we’re told to focus on the present moment. “Present moment” can get to be a real fetish. But even as we focus on the present moment we may still be clinging to an idea of “present moment” that leaves things out. Can you focus but not cling?

Understanding “present moment” in this way illustrates, among other things, why it’s a mistake for westerners to be in a big rush to sever ties with the Asian traditions. If you’re shoving the Asian ancestors out of your western “present moment,” you’re  missing the present moment.

Reflecting on the Buddhas and Ancestors can be useful if you are feeling discouraged. You might meditate with the words of Master Dogen’s Vow. Feel the strength and compassion of Buddhas and Ancestors within you, within the present moment, and let it radiate out to all beings who are struggling and discouraged.

Read more about the spiritual quest in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.

[A version of this post was published on About.com Buddhism September 16, 2013.]

Master Dogen’s Vow

Master Dogen’s Vow is part of the common chanting liturgy of Japanese Soto Zen.  Dogen is the 13th century master who brought Soto Zen to Japan, and in Soto Zen he’s a  big deal.  But you might enjoy the vow also, even if you aren’t into Soto Zen. This is just the first verse:

From this life throughout countless lives,
we vow with all beings to hear the true Dharma.
Hearing it, no doubt arises, nor is faith lacking.
Meeting and maintaining it, we renounce worldly affairs,
and together with all beings and the great earth
realize the Buddha Way.

I’d like to unpack this just a little. Reading this, you might think this vow is way beyond where your practice is right now. Maybe you have lots of doubts. Maybe you’re nowhere close to renouncing worldly affairs. But here is another way to look at it.

As a young monk Dogen was driven by a particular question. His teachers told him that all beings possess Buddha Nature. If so, he wondered, why is it necessary to practice? His resolution to this question is central to his teachings.

We usually think of practice and enlightenment as a  linear process — we practice for awhile, and then maybe we “get enlightened.” However, Kazuaki Tanahashi writes that Dogen also saw this process as circular —

For him, each moment of practice encompasses enlightenment, and each moment of enlightenment encompasses practice. In other words, practice and enlightenment–process and goal-are inseparable. The circle of practice is complete even at the beginning. This circle of practice-enlightenment is renewed moment after moment. . . . In this view you don’t journey toward enlightenment, but you let enlightenment unfold.

So faith — in the sense of trust or confidence — is already present. Enlightenment is already present. You don’t have to “get” it;  just let it unfold. The vow is an expression of what already is, even if we aren’t aware of it.

Read more about the spiritual quest in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.

[A version of this post was published on About.com Buddhism September 12, 2013.]

Saying Too Much

In Zen — and I’m sure this is true of other Buddhist traditions as well — students are sternly warned not to talk about a kensho or “enlightenment experience” to everyone and his uncle. It’s fine to discuss these things with a teacher, but not to others. I know of at least three reasons for this.

One reason to keep silent about some things is to avoid jealousy or competitiveness among students. Another is that it creates expectations in less “advanced” students about what such an experience might be like, and expecting an imagined experience can get in the way of the real thing.

And the third reason is that most people will misunderstand everything you say.

In his book There Is No God and He Is Always With You, Brad Warner says that he “stupidly” wrote about a kensho experience in his first book, and he describes how people who have read the first book utterly misinterpret what he wrote. And these are people who found the first book inspirational.

He has a blog post up now recounting a Twitter conversation with another such person. The questioner can’t get past thinking about enlightenment as something separate from the “enlightened being,” something to possess or be touched by or otherwise experienced, and Warner keeps saying no, that’s not it.

And the questioner accuses Warner of being evasive, but I don’t see that he is. He’s said all he can say. He’s said too much,  perhaps.

Let me be clear that Zen is not an esoteric tradition. There are no secret teachings that are given only to high-level initiates. By now just about everything Zen has to say about anything has not only been made public but has been published in multiple languages.

But on an individual level, even genuine insights and experiences can contain dangers. If we blab too much, if we turn a mystical experience into a public narrative, the way we understand the experience can change also. Keeping it bottled up is not good, either, however, because then it becomes something to cling to. So do talk about it, but talk about it to a teacher.

Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World

[This post originally was published on About.com Buddhism on August 12, 2013.]

Names and Labels

Many years ago, I “got into” Zen through Taoism, particularly the collection of verses called the Tao Teh Ching (or Daode Jing). Early Zen appears to have been influenced by Taoism, so it wasn’t much of a leap.

Now I’m reading a new book called Walking the Way: 81 Zen Encounters With the Tao Teh Ching by Robert Rosenbaum, and I’m enjoying it very much. The 81 “encounters” are reflections on the Tao Teh Ching’s verses, and some are quite lovely. Here’s a bit —

“Your name is a summons, not a self. Whatever names have been bestowed on you, whatever names you have created for yourself, are only pointers, motes of dust that enable our thoughts to condense and identify an object; you are a way seeking itself. Names can give the illusion of some unchanging essence “underneath” the name, so don’t be deceived; the real you does not stop or start, but swirls and streams.”

Of course, all names of things are motes of dust that enable our thoughts to condense and identify. This reminds me of another quote I’ve posted before — Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer wrote,

“In Buddhist thought the concept “emptiness” refers to deconstructed reality. The more closely you look at something the more you see that it is not there in any substantial way, it couldn’t be. In the end everything is just a designation: things have a kind of reality in their being named and conceptualized, but otherwise they actually aren’t present. Not to understand that our designations are designations, that they do not refer to anything in particular, is to mistake emptiness.” [“A Few Words About Emptiness,” PDF]

If designations for tangible things (in a relative sense) such as [your name], computer, chair, cat, friend, whatever, designate things that actually are not present, how much more so is something intangible not present? Ideologies, political theories, belief systems, have no substance whatsoever, for example, yet we argue about them all the time.

Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World

I’m thinking of the endless argument that Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion. Someone with the least understanding of dharma ought to know that as soon as you say “I am” or “it is” or “they are,” you’re in trouble. Sometimes you have to make those designations to communicate, but ultimately there’s nothing there to argue about.

[This post was originally published on About.com Buddhism on June 4, 2013]

Submission or Surrender?

(Following up the last post) I want to say a little more about the new book by Zen teacher Barry Magid, Nothing Is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans. This book is not primarily about teacher scandals, but there’s a lot in it that speaks to why they happen.

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The chapter on surrender versus submission shows the issue from the students’ perspective.  The koan discussed in this chapter is Tung-shan’s Cold and Heat from the Blue Cliff Record. Very basically, it’s about things we try to avoid. A monk asked Master Tung-shan (Tozan in Japan) how to avoid cold and heat. Master Tung-shan said, “Let the cold kill you. Let the heat kill you.” This is metaphorical killing; the death of discriminating mind that is averse to discomfort — surrendering to cold and heat. There’s a lot more to it, but let’s leave it at that for this discussion.

If you do a keyword internet search for “Buddhism surrender” you get a lot of articles and quotes about the importance of surrender. We surrender our egos to wisdom; we surrender our lives to dharma. As part of that, many of us enter into a formal practice in a particular tradition, with other students, and with a teacher.

So here we are, in some kind of institution participating in long-established practices with other people. We choose to submit to this, even the parts that are boring or make our legs hurt. Our reasons and motivations may differ, but usually we submit to this in the beginning because our lives are bleeped up and we want to make them better. We may also have deep and inexpressible spiritual yearnings for something else that “normal” life doesn’t seem to offer us.

So we submit to a path of practice. What seems to happen next, in some sanghas, is that people sink deeper and deeper into submission. If the teacher is exploitative, students wall up the parts of themselves that are uncomfortable with it. They get caught up in the role of good little soldier dharma students and laugh about the woman who complained that roshi groped her in dokusan.

Roshi may encourage this submission by telling his students that it will help them kill their egos. However, submission and surrender are not the same thing. Barry Magid, who is also a psychoanalyst, writes,

“Psychoanalyst Emanuel Ghent has suggested that the longing for liberation inherent in genuine surrender lies behind the maladaptive compromises involved in submission and masochism. He went so far as to call masochism a ‘perversion’ of surrender, a way in which our longing for genuine release at the deepest level is hijacked by submission to another person’s will.”

Drawing upon Ghent’s work, Barry Magid lists the characteristics that distinguish surrender from submission. I’m not going to go through the whole list in this post, but I want to mention the first couple of items.

First, although the process of spiritual surrender may be guided by another, spiritual surrender is not to another.

Second, surrender is not voluntary. Submission is something you choose to do, but spiritual surrender happens when conditions are ripe for it. This reminds me of the Buddhist understanding of renunciation. In Buddhism, renunciation happens naturally when we thoroughly perceive how our grasping and clinging is causing our difficulties. It’s an act of liberation, not self-denial.

I want to emphasize that the solution to the pitfall of masochistic submission is not to avoid teachers and dharma centers. That’s just another avoidance, another kind of clinging, and it’s not going to help you surrender. And I sincerely believe the majority of teachers and dharma centers in the West are not exploiters. But there is a difference between what is nourishing and what isn’t, spiritually speaking, and it’s good to be able to tell one from another.

[This post originally appeared on About.com Buddhism on October 2,2013.]

Stuck in the Void

[This post originally appeared on About.com Buddhism on September 30, 2013. It sort of goes with the last post, on “Dark Nights and Dukkha Nanas.”]

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I’ve written a review of  Nothing Is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans, a new book by Zen teacher Barry Magid. I recommend this book highly to anyone already engaged in Zen practice, Soto or Rinzai. But I think a lot of what it says applies to other schools of Buddhism as well.

Part of the book looks at the question of “how good teachers do bad things,” or how teachers recognized for their insight can turn around and exploit students. This isn’t a problem limited to Zen, of course.

However, speaking specifically of Zen, it’s possible for a student to take a slam-bang nose dive straight into sunyata that leaves his inner demons/neuroses/issues unexamined and untouched. This is certainly not inevitable, and  teachers I have known have all explicitly warned us students not to let this happen. But I know it does happen.

This is explained as being stuck in emptiness. The student experiences the ephemeral nature of self and the inter-existence of beings, but the heart of compassion does not open. Of course, the way it’s supposed to work is that realization of sunyata, the perfection of wisdom, naturally gives rise to compassion. I still trust that it does. But maybe there are realizations off-center from perfect that don’t quite do the job. Magid writes,

“Not only did realization fail to heal the deep divisions in our character, more and more it looked as if for many people, and in particular for many Zen teachers, practice opened up bigger and bigger splits between an idealized compassionate self and a shadow self, where split off and denied sexual, competitive, and narcissistic fantasies held sway.”

I should mention that Barry Magid is an honest-to-gosh psychoanalyst as well as a dharma heir of the late Charlotte Joko Beck. Normally articles and books blending Buddhism and psychology strike me as glib and superficial, but here is an author who understands both disciplines deeply. A lot of what he says rings true for me. Comments?

Dark Nights and Dukkha Nanas

Westerners have been playing with eastern mysticism, and now some of them have had “bad trips” being called “dark nights of the soul.” There’s an article on The Atlantic website by Tomas Rocha, titled “The Dark Knight of the Soul,” about a psychology professor investigating the dark side of meditation. The professor, Dr. Willoughby Britton, is working to “document, analyze, and publicize accounts of the adverse effects of contemplative practices,” the article says.

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However, there’s nothing discussed in the article that would be particularly surprising to any long-time practitioner of Zen, Vipassana or other traditional Buddhist meditation practice. It’s pretty much a catalog of the stuff teachers warn us about, actually. And it’s all been documented and analyzed in commentaries going back more than a couple of millennia now, albeit in language a western psychologist might not understand.

Here’s the trajectory, as I see it: First, people don’t take bhavana seriously. And then they say, hey, there’s something to this; and they rip it out of its religious context and turn it into a self-improvement project. And then it gets popular, which means somebody can make money from it, so people with only a half-assed idea what they are doing set themselves up as experts and instructors and open spiritual retreat centers. And then when people who are not being properly guided start to wash up on the crazy shore, some other westerner assumes nobody has noticed this before and investigates it. Brilliant.

Off the top of my head I can think of a couple of Zen dharma heirs with Ph.D.s in psychology and one, Barry Magid, who has an  M.D. in psychiatry, all of whom speak English and even live in the U.S. So it’s not like people with deep understanding of both the practice tradition and psychology can’t be consulted on this. Oh, well.

Most of the negative experiences seem to be related to people doing intensive meditation retreats being led by people not grounded in a Buddhist tradition, or in which participants receive little or no individual guidance and are being pushed into satori before they are ready.

For example, one of the people interviewed in the Atlantic article appears to have had a strong experience of self falling away on his first retreat — and it doesn’t say what sort of retreat this was — but he was unable to integrate the experience with his day-to-day life, and it tore him apart. This sort of integration is a lot of what traditional monastic life, with its quietness and many forms and rituals, is about. To experience something that intensive and then be dumped back into “normal world” with no follow-up guidance is asking for disaster, yes. This is not news.

This guy did more meditation retreats but apparently did not seek out a dharma teacher for personal, one-on-one guidance about what he was going through, at least for several years. And it’s not clear to me that the people he finally did consult were dharma teachers, either, but whatever. In a monastic setting, his issues would have been recognized and a teacher who knew him personally would have guided him through it.

This is exactly the reason Brad Warner has called out Dennis Merzel on his “big mind” retreats, btw. And I acknowledge it doesn’t help when someone like Merzel, who really was given dharma transmission awhile back, ditches the tradition and sells easy enlightenment to the masses for his own profit. Merzel is making a good living marketing satori-palooza blow-your-mind enlightenment but gives no individual guidance, except maybe to those willing to fork out enough money for it. One poor guy who wrote to Warner about Merzel had been pushed into talking about his spiritual and sexual issues in front of the entire assembly of 250 or so retreat participants instead of privately in dokusan, which is not how it’s supposed to be done.

Another person interviewed in the Atlantic article had hallucinations. This is common, especially on long retreats. Usually this doesn’t mean anything; it’s just your nervous system mis-firing. In a Zen setting if a student begins to hallucinate during meditation and tells the teacher about it, the teacher will most likely show the student how to adjust his practice so that the hallucinations stop. But the guy in the article got no help and just freaked out.

The traditional Buddhist meditation practices are not to be messed around with by amateurs. They are powerful means intended to, among other things, deconstruct the way we are conditioned to perceive and understand ourselves and reality. They are not primarily intended to help one de-stress or relax; releasing stress is more of a side effect. In a traditional setting, a student works with a teacher who knows him personally, and the teacher will prescribe to the student what he is to do in his meditation, based on that student’s individual development. Even within the same monastery or dharma center, students in different stages of their spiritual development usually will not all be meditating in the same way, although of course you wouldn’t know that by looking at them.

Yes, meditation can occasionally be blissful, and it can occasionally be disturbing, but one is not “good” and the other “bad.” They are what they are; it’s what you do (or don’t do) with those experiences that matters, and that’s where working personally with a skilled teacher is essential.

The traditional meditation practices have a way of reaching into your psyche to find ugly and deeply buried stuff you didn’t know were there. This is a feature, not a bug; dealing with your personal negative baggage is part of the “process,” so to speak. I mention “dukkha nanas” in the title of the post. “Dukkha nana” roughly means “insight into what makes you miserable.” In advanced Vipassana, I am told, a student looks deeply into his own misery in order to gain insight, and this is not for the faint of heart. But a student would not do this without first building a strong foundation of practice and spiritual maturity.

Just taking something like mindfulness out of its context as part of the Eightfold Path is a bit problematic. I don’t doubt mindfulness by itself has therapeutic value, and I’m happy if mindfulness therapy helps people. But mindfulness without context, or with a self-centered context, could just as easily reinforce negative qualities as positive ones. It should be applied with some caution, and it isn’t always.

See also “Buddhist Meditation and the Dark Night” at About.com Buddhism.