| Tairyu's Indestructible Dharma Body | |
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Today’s teisho will be on Case 82 in the Hekiganroku, the Pi-Yen-Lu, the Blue Rock Collection. Case 82 is entitled, “Tairyu’s ‘Indestructible Dharma Body.” ENGO'S INTRODUCTION The fishing line at the end of the rod—the one with eyes will know. The spiritual activity which transcends the ordinary—the enlightened one will discern. What, then, is the fishing line at the end of the rod, and the spiritual activity which transcends the ordinary? See the following. MAIN SUBJECT A monk said to Tairyu, “Man’s body will ultimately decompose; what is the indestructible Dharma body?” Tairyu said, “Flowers cover the hillside like brocade, SETCHO'S VERSE The question came from ignorance; I laugh heartily to hear the saying, He held the crystal whip and smashed the jewels; Three bells This is a beautiful morning for zazen. Of course I suppose I would have said that it was beautiful no matter what. But it is!! It’s a beautiful late October morning. From where I sit, I can look out and see the yellow leaves, the yellow-orange leaves of the maple tree. And from the dining room we can see the blood-red leaves of the dogwood outside. It’s really beautiful. We’ve been doing sesshin here for a long time now and it’s always a thrilling experience—there’s no better word than “thrilling”--to have autumn sesshin here. At the start of the day, well before the sun was coming up, we were sitting together very deeply. It’s always a pleasure to sit with people who are practicing wholeheartedly. Some of you have managed to attend the retreat in spite of very difficult circumstances. Making time for sesshin is often a challenge because our culture is not, I would say, balanced or humane. For one thing, we are workaholics. You probably know that in the United States we have fewer vacation days than any other industrialized nation in the West. The French and the Germans get at least a month off every year. In fact, I’m told that the Germans get six weeks of paid vacation with, of course, universal medical care. I understand that working people in Europe are actually under a lot of pressure not to skip their vacation time—to skip your vacation is considered unsociable. Imagine if your boss would get angry at you for taking only three weeks off a year! You might have been following the news about French workers who are rioting because the government in Paris wants to raise the retirement age to 62. In the United States, of course, that would be considered early retirement. But what we take for granted here in the U.S. the French see as a betrayal. Like their revolutionary ancestors, they are actually going to the barricades, blockading gas stations and holding fiery demonstrations. You might also be aware that the French socialists tried to shift the whole country to a four-day work-week. Now, all of this is simply unthinkable in America--absolutely unthinkable. And in the developing world it’s even less of a possibility. Then, of course, there’s China. China today has become an economic giant; its people work very, very hard. A huge sacrifice of human lives has been required for China’s rise. And the Japanese, too, are a nation of workaholics. I was reading recently that Japanese men in upper management often die in their fifties--very young-- from stress related disorders, because they are expected to put in sixty or seventy hours a week. Ultimately the stress kills them. Yet they have an ethic—the Bushido code, the warrior code--which teaches that you are supposed to go down fighting. And they do--they go down fighting. It’s too bad we all live this way because we can see from the countries where people have more leisure time that they are generally happier. The happiest countries in the world are primarily the countries in northern Europe, although there are a few other countries as well—several in Latin America and few in Asia. The little Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan does quite well, I’ve discovered, in measurements of “gross national happiness.” It’s a pity that we haven’t learned from them to have more balance in our way of life, but we haven’t. Instead, we face tremendous pressure all the time, running faster and faster without knowing where we’re headed. To keep running so far and so fast is nothing short of crazy, but it’s hard to stop, perhaps impossible. It’s especially hard for an isolated individual to say, “No, I’m going to make some time for life, for my life!” Coming to sesshin is a way of pushing back in this pressure—pushing back against the regime of endless work, which was not created by people who had your best interests in mind. I think it’s quite remarkable that China has developed in the way that it has, leaping to the front of the line. It’s a tribute to the hard work and the intelligence of the people in China. But on the other hand, in ancient times the Chinese were really much wiser, with a deep understanding of the richness that comes from taking time to appreciate life without expectations. There is in the tapestry of Chinese culture this vibrant Taoist strand which has had a strong influence on Zen. It teaches that we shouldn’t look at life as a struggle or a war but as a kind of play, like a children’s game. The point is not to push, push, push, but to find harmony with the natural unfolding of things: Without stepping out the door Therefore the sage knows without traveling. Writing almost two thousand years ago, Lao Tzu could already see that culture was moving in the direction of ever-greater individualism and competition, and he understood that this trend would ultimately unweave the very fabric of organic life itself. But he wanted people to live in harmony—like the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings movie, or like the Navi in Avatar. And in his time, this way of life wasn’t fiction at all. Human communities all over the world still lived with few ambitions but a wealth of connections with other people and the world. I think that the Chinese people once had enormous wisdom. You know, I didn’t really grow up in Seattle, as some people think. I lived a portion of my life in Seattle, but my father was in the military and we moved around quite a bit. Seattle was the place, however, where I had my first encounter with an Asian garden, and when it happened, I was astonished to discover how relaxing it was. The next time you visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York, walk up to the Asian second on the second floor and take a look at the Chinese scholar’s studio—a complex actually shipped over from China. In the shadows of its eves you will find yourself overtaken by a calm as deep as a forest. If you go there you may never want to leave, so safe and relaxed will you feel. The complex at the Met includes some Japanese buildings as well, and they too can enfold you in a deep, majestic calm, as though there is absolutely nothing to do and we are simply free to be in the here-and-now for as long as we want to remain there. Other buildings can have this effect as well. I remember the first time I visited Santa Barbara in California with its earthy mission style architecture. Sitting beside a courtyard fountain on a summer day I instantly felt at home even though I actually had no home at the time. All I owned then was in my backpack. Yet I felt safe and sheltered. This feeling of being at home or at ease in the world is very, very important, even though we in modern times have pushed it to the margins—have buried it under a mountain of stressful routines and anxieties. In our breathless, blank-faced civilization we have almost forgotten this lesson that life actually has no a purpose. The purpose of life—if you insist on speaking that way--is actually nothing than life itself. How does the koan put it? The fishing line at the end of the rod—the one with eyes will know. The spiritual activity which transcends the ordinary—the enlightened one will discern If this is true—if we have nowhere to go and nothing to do--then life becomes like play, or better yet, like art . I suppose that fishing can be either one—play or art--so long as we understand that point is not at all to catch a fish. To live with purpose is one certainly possibility of existence, and doing so means treating every moment as a step along the path to your final destination. But when the moment becomes the destination, then play and art become possible. If you have to eat, for example, you can go to Wendy’s or McDonald’s. You can pick the food up at the drive-in window, and in a just matter of minutes, you can eat the food and have done with it. But you could also make an art of eating. On your day off you might call a friend and say, “Come over. We’ll have lunch.” And then you could go to the store. Maybe you go to the farmer’s market and buy some tomatoes that look ripe—or some dark green squash, fresh off the vine, or a sheaf of beats pulled right out of the ground only a few hours ago. Then you might come home and set to work—or rather I should say you might set to play. Cooking is Zen too, by the way, Zen off the cushion. Here’s what Lao Tzu says: Act when there is nothing to do As for those vegetables, wash them lovingly and then cut them up. Cook them as though they already contained the flavors they will have when they are done. And by the time your friend arrives, you will be prepared to receive your friend as a true guest. Whether it takes place on the cushion or off, Zen prepares us to be welcoming to the world because it frees us from the illusion that we can control the situation or that a particular outcome is supposed to take place. Long before Zen took root in China, where Taoism arose independently, Buddhists had already discovered this freedom. Here is what the Buddha says to Manjushri in The Perfection of Wisdom in 700 Lines: Manjusri: For what reason is this teaching called the
“perfect wisdom”? Non-existence, we might say, is like a clearing in a dark forest or an open space in a crowded city, a place where things are free to happen effortlessly without impediments. No schedules or deadline, no performance ratings. To prepare a meal for a friend in this spirit you could spend the better part of a day. If somebody later said to you, “What did you do today?” You might reply, “Oh, I had my friend Bill over for lunch,” or “I fixed lunch for Susan.” In response the person might say, “What else? You spent the whole day preparing one meal? Don’t you have something better to do?” But the Zen perspective is that everything is “better” because nothing is necessary. As the Buddha says, “There is nothing to be done.” Even though a lunch date might seem trivial, you might remember it for the rest of your life. And when it was over, you might have come away with this wonderful sense of spaciousness, of freedom. “With nothing to do and nowhere to go, this is what I did with eternity today.” Of course it’s not always possible to cook, but I try to get out of my office to eat lunch as often as I can. You know, I work all day and then I do meditations in the evenings. I’m away from home for many hours and I don’t usually really eat dinner, so I try to have a real meal on occasion, and I often invite a friend to have lunch with me at some place that’s not too expensive, a Chinese restaurant or an Indian buffet. For about fifteen years I used eat at my desk. I’d be working at my word processor and I’d be eating at the same time. And then I thought to myself, “This is so wrong. I’m eating but I barely know it.” So I made a point of having a social lunch at least a couple of times a week, a time when I could be with a friend even if it’s just for half an hour—to talk and enjoy somebody’s company along with the food. A couple of weeks ago I had a little free time, and I heard about an exhibit at MoMa of the expressionist painters, whom I love. I took off one Thursday afternoon and went to see the exhibit. Wonderful! I cannot describe the power of those paintings except to say that they embodied the central teaching of the Diamond Sutra: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” And after the show I sat drinking an espresso in the cafeteria, looking out the windows at the autumn trees. I thought, “This is the best. This is just perfect.” Of course somebody else might ask disapprovingly, “What did you do today?” And I might answer, “Oh, I just looked at pictures--some paintings at the museum.” “That’s all?” they might ask, with a scowl. “Why weren’t you doing something useful.” Someday in the future, if humans have a future, people will marvel at us. They’ll ask, “What were those Americans thinking back then?” If there are enlightened people in the future, they’ll look back at our time and say, “Oh yes, the Dark Ages. Everybody lived to work. How sad that time was, because people could have enjoyed being alive.” It’s true that we all have to work, but on occasion—it’s not always possible--your work can become your play. My job, for example, has some elements of play. I actually enjoy teaching a great deal. My students might not always like me because I ask a lot from them, but I enjoy their company, and I’m always impressed by their curiosity. Even though ours is a strange world, sometimes a frightening world, the kids I teach are typically alert, compassionate, balanced. I’m always pretty amazed because I think that our society is quite screwed up and yet my students are actually pretty nice for the most part, and remarkably open-minded. Teaching them can be like play because you never know what’s going to happen next in class. I trust that uncertainty. On balance, I enjoy the kind of teaching I do, even though grading papers can be detailed, time-consuming work. Grading a set of papers can easily eat up a weekend. Sometimes, when I’m grading, grading, grading, grading, I just have to take a time-out and go for a walk, preferably in a park or a forested neighborhood. I’m sure you’ve seen recent studies suggesting that simply being out in nature lowers your blood pressure and raises your spirits. Being out in nature is good for your mental health, and so—of course—is meditation. But the values of our culture are basically at odds with the notion that life should be like play. Instead, modern life is often remarkably inhumane. Many young people, for example, get out of college only to find the world is quite unlike their experience at school. I would prefer to think that most teachers in high school treat their students with respect. And most professors, the ones I know, at any rate, talk about their students with genuine affection. But then when students get out in the world their bosses may not treat them with respect. It’s not so uncommon to have a boss who is far from friendly and polite. Some of them are even abusive at times. The other day I was reading an article by several psychologists. I wish I had studied psychology, by the way. Some of you are planning to become clinical psychologists. I think that’s quite exciting, and I feel sure that your studies in this area will dovetail with your Zen practice very nicely. The article I read was all about a form of behavior called “dumping.” What this means is that if I’m stressed and unhappy, I will unconsciously find somebody who enjoys a lower status than I do—an employee would be ideal—and I will dump my stress and unhappiness on them. A person might do this unconsciously, but the phenomenon is real all the same. Let’s say that you’re coming into work whistling cheerfully, while at the same time your boss is stressed and unhappy. Once he sees you—quite unconsciously—he approaches you seeking the relief that comes from “transferring” his unhappiness to you. After he has made you unhappy and stressed, he walks away whistling cheerfully. We should be careful not to be too hard on bosses—people in middle management. They have no power to make the rules and yet they are required to enforce them. They get an email from upper management that says, “You’ve got to squeeze more hours out of the same number of workers who will make the same amount of money.” Once a boss knows that his unit’s productivity isn’t adequate, he becomes fearful and frustrated, and he tries to transfer those emotions down to the next level of the chain. When you’re the low guy on the totem pole, all the dumping follows gravity until it’s loaded onto you. This is why the world of work can be especially hard at the entry level. But it’s stressful up and down the chain even if you own your own business. My brother was in business for himself, and at times I used to envy him. I used to muse to myself, “He’s an independent entrepreneur. No one can tell him what to do.” When I had a bicycle, he owned a BMW. But his life was very stressful. He sometimes had to go to court with a lawyer because his suppliers wouldn’t ship the right items and then they would deny they had made a mistake. He once told me the story about an afternoon when he was outside mowing the lawn of his nice suburban house. While he was preoccupied with the grass, his accountant drove up and said, “Peter, I just went through your books. You lost $25,000 last month.” My brother told me that his knees gave out--just like in a comedy, except that it wasn’t funny. His knees crumbled under him and he fell right down into the grass. So this is life. It’s not hellish but it’s challenging. People aren’t always compassionate. And when boss yells at you, remember that it’s not necessarily personal. When we’re criticized, we often think, “Oh, I’m no good—I knew it.” The boss comes out of his office and he lights into you. Immediately you might think, “This is my first job, and --oh my god--I’m already a failure.” But don’t take the criticism to heart. Sometimes you just have to remind yourself that your boss couldn’t have done better himself if he were in your shoes.” If the boss decides to dump on you, remember that you don’t have to internalize his unhappiness. Instead you should try to take good care of yourself. I don’t mean you shouldn’t think of others --not at all. I mean that you should try to treat yourself with loving kindness no matter what your boss has to say. Some people forget this lesson when they practice Zen and as a result they can become quite hard on themselves. They mistakenly believe that Zen is all about overcoming the self. And indeed, when we sit down to meditate, we sometimes enter a truly selfless state. That, as you know from your own experience, is absolutely true. There is a state in which the self disappears—there’s nothing but a pure awareness in which both subject and object have merged, or else they disappear altogether. When that sort of thing happens for the first time you might think, “Ah, now the self has been overcome!” But have you noticed that the self always returns quite tenaciously? You might hear someone, some guru, say, “The self? I’m over it.” But actually, that’s impossible. It’s impossible because sooner or later you will move from that selfless state back into a self. Awareness needs a home and that home is you, even though it’s just a temporary situation, like staying in a motel room. And so instead of thinking about Zen as the overcoming of the self, I would suggest looking at the matter differently. For as long as we’re alive, self and no-self are both aspects of the real, and they can exist in balance, in harmony. Ultimately there is no permanent self, isolated from everything else. You’re here on earth for a while and then you’re gone. In the Diamond Sutra the Buddha says that a person’s life is over the blink of an eye. He declares that life is as evanescent as a bubble. When you’re young, life might seem interminably long. But as you get older life begins to appear astonishingly brief. “That’s it?” you might say with surprise one day. And yet, even though life is impermanent—fleeting--it’s not over yet. You’re still here and the way you’re here is tremendously important. Instead of thinking about Zen as an overcoming of the self, you should see your practice as an artful way of being here, an artful way of inhabiting the self. Ultimately self and non-self are the same, just as form and emptiness are one. When you sit down on the cushion you will enter a state of being in which the small self disappears absolutely and there’s just this emptiness which is pulsing with life, radiant and pulsing with life. Beautiful! Then you find yourself right back on the cushion in this body, and you have to get up and go to the bathroom. There are bills to pay, mouths to feed. I think it’s a big mistake to imagine that Zen is going to help us escape from the self, or that we’re going to transcend the self—that sort of thinking makes our lives unskillful and artless, even desperate. The life of the self can be difficult. We all have endless problems and multiple sources of stresses, and when we sit down on the cushion we can experience the “no-self” as a tremendous liberation, as indeed it is. When I come to sesshin I sometimes carry a lot of stress myself, and sitting in sesshin can feel like the rediscovery of a peaceful, calm place that is beautiful, restorative, refreshing. And then, when the sesshin is over and I leave, I can deal with my problems more skillfully. My life becomes happier, richer, because I’m living artfully by blending the no-self with the self. As far as I’ve been able to determine, this is what it means to live a Zen life. The Zen life is all about the freedom that comes from the sheer aimlessness of existence. There is no purpose to any of this, and for that reason, we should live naturally—that is, by following our True Nature. For one person, that might mean becoming a monk, for another it might living in a home, holding down a job and raising a family. As you know, monks and nuns live in monasteries, sleep on the ground and have no personal property. They get up every day at 3:00 or so, and when it’s time to eat they’re served rice. If someone asks what’s for breakfast, the answer will always be “Rice.” “What’s for lunch?” “Rice.” “What’s for dinner?” “Rice.” One way to think about those people is that they’ve made a tremendous sacrifice. But in another sense, they’re haven’t done anything hard at all. What looks from one point of view like a very strenuous road, could be seen from another point of view as absolutely effortless—play. If those monks and nuns stay long enough in the monastery, they might think, “This is heaven. I’m so happy.” But not everybody’s True Nature is like that. You might try to live that way and find it makes you abjectly miserable. “This is horrible,” you might think. “I’m starving for excitement and affection.” And you might leave the monastery thoroughly convinced that you’re a failure as a Buddhist because you can’t live like a monk.” But actually reaching that conclusion would be a big mistake. Some of you have heard of Soko Morinaga, formerly the abbot of Myoshinji in Japan. All his life Morinaga Roshi had nothing—virtually no personal property, no wife, no children, no immediate family. For him, that arrangement seemed effortless—he said so himself, and I believe him. On the other hand, many people would find Morinaga’s choices quite depressing. And if Morinaga had lived differently, he might been miserable—living up in Short Hills, let’s say, with his wife, three children, and Wall Street job. As he set off toward Manhattan every morning at 7:00 this hypothetical Morinaga might have looked through the windows of his train, sighing at the sight of the tree-covered hills and longing for the day when he could put it all aside. I’ve known accomplished Zen practitioners who were married, some who were celibate, some who had children, some who never did. As Layman Pang says, “Every snowflake lands exactly where it should.” You have to find the way of life that’s most alive for you—and “most alive” will also feel most effortless and free. Nobody else can tell you how to live that way: you have to find out for yourself. We can waste so much of our lives trying to please others--our parents, friends, authorities-- that we might not know what we really want to do or who we really are. But I think that Zen can be helpful because it reminds us that everything--absolutely everything--will finally come to nothing. Shakespeare will someday be forgotten; Michelangelo’s greatest sculptures will erode into grains of sand. Precisely because it all comes down to zero, nothing in the future or the past can justify your life now. Life in the “now” has to be lived for its own sake. Do you see where the koan’s taking you? A monk said to Tairyu, “Man’s body will ultimately decompose; what is the indestructible Dharma body?” Tairyu said, “Flowers cover the hillside like brocade, When we think about an indestructible body, we might imagine it as something we’ll acquire when we go to heaven after we die, or as another state that exists on a higher plane—maybe an astral dimension. But actually Tairyu’s indestructible body is always right here. The trick is to inhabit it naturally. But how exactly do we do that? Maybe your father wanted you
to be a lawyer and you went ahead and finished school at Cornell.
Now you’re successful—you have money and prestige--
but you find it harder and harder each day to get out of bed
and go to work. This sort of thing happens all the time, but
it’s quite a shock to be, say, forty-five and suddenly
to realize, “I don’t like what I do and I don’t
know who I really am.” You might also be afraid that
if you go down that road, it will lead to absolute ruin. “Oh
my god,” you think, “I might just quit my job.
And if quit my job I’ll probably wind up as a bum sleeping
on the street.” But when you calm down you can plainly
see that you’ll always have more choices than just these
two—continuing along the path your father chose for
you or becoming a total derelict. Instead, you might make
more time for other things—hiking or sailing, or taking
painting classes. Or perhaps you’ll change the kind
of law you practice. Or you might find a new form of work
that keeps you off the street but brings you greater satisfaction.
Experiment. As you all remember very well, in Genesis Eve brings sin and death into the world by eating the apple from the Tree of Good and Evil. But Cole Porter says she had to do it! Eating the apple, he insists, will “lead you to the light.” How can that be possible? From the Zen standpoint, the life well lived is not necessarily the one that takes place in a monastic cell with no furniture. Or the one that leads to an apartment in Manhattan. Instead, the life well-lived will always be the one that make you feel more fully alive. The key is being present in a wholehearted way, but the path to wholeheartedness is not an easy one, nor is it always obvious. Our expectations pull us in one direction; True Nature pulls in another. When we don’t know which voice to listen to, we can feel trapped, frustrated, even depressed. We tend to trust the voice of authority, but authority is often wrong. My mother always hoped that I would choose to be a doctor. But even though most people think of medicine as the most prestigious of the professors, doctors actually have a higher-than-average incidence of depression and substance abuse. In fact, women physicians have twice the rate of depression of the general population. Some people explain the drug abuse by saying that doctors have greater access to many addictive substances, but they must be taking them for some reason. My own doctor—Dr. ----, seems to love his work Every time I go in to see him he checks my blood pressure and my weight and he says, “Oh, if only more of my patients were like you. Your blood pressure is perfect. Your weight is perfect. You could even gain a few pounds if you wanted to.” I don’t really think he wants me to put on weight but he’s paying me a bit of a compliment for taking such good care of myself. He often tells me that many of his patients have problems with their weight and, as a result, they face complications like diabetes and high blood pressure. It must be rather challenging to see mostly sick people all day long—people who are sick and even dying. Somehow my doctor seems to take it all in stride. It interesting that he practices meditation. I didn’t start out looking for a doctor who does. I simply hoped to find an internist or GP who lived within striking distance of my house. Even though I’ve been his patient of many years, I never knew until recently that he practices meditation, which is perhaps not so surprising because he emigrated here from India. One day out of the blue he told me about a yoga studio where he often goes. “I’ll tell you,” he said, wagging, “someday I’m going to leave all of this and spend the last part of my life in an ashram, practicing yoga and meditation.” That was a bit of a surprise to me: maybe he didn’t love his job after all. Maybe he too was feeling a bit trapped. Perhaps we could use Porter’s advice. Experiment. Recently I was reading about a doctor who had grown completely disenchanted with the standard form of practice, which forces you to see each patient for about five minutes. So he and several other physicians he knew came up with a revolutionary idea. His patients would become his subscribers. Now they all pay him a flat annual fee, which gives him a stable income while limiting the number of patients he sees. Now, whenever his patients come to visit him, he can talk to them for as long as they want. He feels that he’s doing better medicine, and they are happier about the treatment they receive. How can we live naturally? Experiment! A monk said to Tairyu, “A man’s body will ultimately decompose; what is the indestructible Dharma body?” Our biggest problem is that we keep trying to escape from who and what we really are. But what we really are is actually unknowable, and so even working eighty hours a week can’t bring our minds to a place where we can rest. Worse yet, trying to transcend this predicament by engaging in some sort of mystical ascent is like trying to pull yourself off the ground by tugging on your hair. It’s painful and it violates the laws of gravity! You know, a dog doesn’t try to be human being, a zebra, or a cat. Instead, it simply walks around and barks and wages its tail. That’s the naturalness of a dog. But what does a truly natural human do? She grades papers, runs a marathon, cooks lasagna, studies Spanish, does IT, raises her children, scuba dives, or flies a jet—anything, in other words, that makes her feel that she belong in the world here and now. Do you want to see your Dharma body? Trust the moments when you feel most alive. What could be better than that? Three bells. 12.27.10
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