Haryo Young, Rev. Master

 

This is an edited version of a talk given after the Wesak Festival at Shasta Abbey in May 2022. Transcription by Willie Grieve.

Well, good morning, and thank you all for coming. It’s gratifying to see so many people after these two years of drought; and as we start to open up slowly, it’s nice to see you all coming again. And I’d like to thank Rev. Master Meian for inviting me to say a few words.

Today we celebrate the life of the Buddha in its entirety – the birth, His life of teaching and His death – with a certain emphasis on the birth of the Buddha because of the ceremony we’ve just done.

When you read what we sang today, or read stories of the Buddha’s birth, the accounts usually contain some miraculous aspects: trees consciously bending down; the Buddha taking seven steps; lotus blossoms appearing where he stepped; His being born from the right side of his mother, or him stating “I alone am the World-Honoured One”. And one might ask – is the truth of Buddhism dependent on those aspects of the story of Buddhism being true?

I wasn’t there, so I cannot speak with absolute certainty as to what happened, but my guess is that much of what is written down is the result of generations of the story of his birth being transmitted orally. And of course a story is easier to remember if it’s interesting, so I think some of what we have are embellishments to make the story more memorable.

I also think there’s some symbolism included: seven is often a number associated with stages of spiritual progress in religion. And the infant’s stating “I alone am the World-Honoured One” may be an addition to encourage faith. (When do you hear anyone claiming “my religion is second best!”) I can understand the value of adding elements to the story that factor in our human nature and help us to just get on with our practice and not wonder whether there’s something else that’s better out there. Seeing it as a skilful means of transmitting a story that inspires confidence and faith in those who hear it makes sense to me; but it needn’t go beyond that, to talking down or denigrating what others do as lesser.

When I became a monk some years ago, I was fairly naïve. I was following more the path of discipleship than that of ‘becoming a monk’. I didn’t ask: “What does this mean, and what does that mean?” I just bowed when we bowed, and did what we all did. So I can’t tell you the meaning of some of the things that we have in our practice.

I created a personal meaning for various aspects of our practice. For example, the Buddha on the altar has always symbolised the Buddha within me, the Buddha within all of us. In pouring water over the baby Buddha, as we did today, we can look at that water as symbolising the cleansing power of compassion and acceptance, for ourselves, as well as for others. So if you’re wondering about the meaning of something, you can ask about it, or you can find a meaning for it within for yourself.

What do we actually know for sure about the Buddha’s life? The teaching was transmitted orally for generations before being written down. We can assume He existed; that He was born, that He taught, and that He died. The true facts of his life may not be known, but the validity of Buddhism is not dependent on the absolute truth of the story: the truth of Buddhism is proved by doing the practice, by applying the teaching.

In terms of what words the Buddha actually spoke so long ago – well, it obviously wasn’t English for one thing, so there’s the matter that translating is not an exact science. There’s also the aspect of consistency of an oral transmission. I don’t want to under-estimate the accuracy which can be maintained if someone’s practice is to hear something and pass it on orally. At the same time, I know how things can change quickly. I know I’ve given a talk, and five minutes later someone will say – I really like what you said about such and such; and that was news to me!

I would guess that the earliest Scriptures are likely to be the most accurate, but in terms of knowing the absolute accuracy – did the Buddha say those exact words, and what did he mean by them – well, I don’t think we need to do that. I don’t know that we even could.

So what do you have to believe in? I think a bottom-line thing is that you have to believe you can change. I think most of us have come to practice Buddhism because of the wish for some sort of change. If we were completely content, we’d just be at home watching television or whatever. But usually there’s something we want to add to what we’ve got; something that inspires us, that we think we don’t have. Or something we’d like to fall away; some aspect of suffering that is hard to endure, and that we want to become less.

So it’s necessary to believe you can change. But you also have to be willing to look at yourself, and do whatever work that’s required. Buddhism offers a way to do that work. It’s not the only way to do that work: it’s just a particular way to do it. And it’s a way that leads us in a direction of suffering less and finding pleasure, joy, happiness in life.

Suffering can exist on a variety of levels. It can exist on the physical level of pain: learning how to pay attention so that when you’re driving you don’t have an accident and suffer pain. That’s perhaps the coarsest type of suffering – physical pain – but obviously there’s emotional pain, psychological pain; and there’s the existential pain of just simply having a self that seems very perishable, very isolated, and with the anxieties and fears that can come upon one when death is at hand. Buddhism does offer ways to come to terms with all these aspects of suffering; but again, it requires doing the work to walk that path, and not just to believe that it can happen.

I look at the story of the Buddha’s life as a template for the average person’s life; it has a universal quality. The story says he was protected from seeing suffering in his palaces: don’t we do that with our children? Don’t we try to prevent them from suffering, try to minimise it, and protect them from physical harm or disturbing events that might scar them emotionally? Don’t we protect ourselves from whatever is disturbing to us, whether it’s trying to avoid confrontation, or whatever else we’ve all got on our list of things we’d like to avoid?

We try to minimise our suffering and turn towards that which is enjoyable or pleasurable; and that’s baked into us biologically – which ultimately is good. It’s an artefact of evolution, of our animal selves, but unfortunately some of that baked-in stuff still within us includes the propensity for anger; the propensity for recognising and then judging others as different from ourselves. But now we have the human intelligence to look at those parts of ourselves and say “No”. There was a reason perhaps on the animal level for us to behave in certain ways; but we don’t have to now, we can see that the reasons no longer apply. However we have to make that choice and just not say; “Well, because I feel a certain way, that’s the truth of things and justifies my actions.”

The Buddha, according to legend, saw the four sights – old age, disease, death and the wandering mendicant – which, according to the story, shook his world and got him thinking. It’s not uncommon for us to encounter those sorts of times in life which get our attention. Someone drops dead in front of you, or you get a glimpse of something more profound about life and you want to pursue it: you want to know more about it. Something may cause you to question the meaning of your life. What time do you have left? What are you going to do with it?

Just as the Buddha’s status quo was shaken by what he saw, ours can be shaken on a personal level by circumstances, and this probably happens to everyone at some point in life. Presently it feels like it’s happening now on a global basis with what’s going on with war, or economies, not to mention Africa being on the precipice of famine – which you don’t really hear much about in the news. But it’s mind-bogglingly tragic.

If we have the eyes to see, life is repeatedly showing us the reality of impermanence, and the need to really look at our lives – what are we doing with it? When I drive when I’m visiting temples I will often see an animal that’s been killed on the side of the road. I might say the Three Homages or just be still for a moment; but if I really think about it, and not think it’s ‘just’ an animal, like a fly or an ant, I realize that just as its life force was snuffed out, I’m as vulnerable as it was, and that nature doesn’t offer me any special dispensation from that happening just because I’m a human being. I then make sure my focus is on my driving since there could be a ‘wham’ for me at any instant if I lose my attention.

I don’t know when I will live my last day. None of us does. You know, if I were to ask who’s next, one of you should be holding up your hand! I notice as I get older, the backdrop against which I make choices is different. For example, on a practical level, I might be looking to buy some online data storage, and one option might be a life-time subscription for a one-time price of a hundred dollars. Or you could pay $20 per year, so five years could be the break-even point. Now I’m 71, and I have to do the calculations – how long am I going to be alive? How much do I want to buy ahead of time?

The whole mindset gets influenced by how far along you think you are. Rev. Master Jiyu used to say “There are a lot of graves in the graveyard shorter than me”, equating the length of the grave to the age of the person. So who knows, this could be my last talk. When I realised that that could be true, I started playing with the idea. What if this really was my last talk, and if it’s my last chance to pass on anything I thought worth passing on: some aspect of the Dharma, or words of encouragement.

If I were falling out of a building, I might yell out – “Carry on friends! Don’t doubt you can prove the Dharma true for yourself if you practice!” – and that would be it. But I’ve got a little more time than that; although if I took the time to compose something, it would certainly be longer than the time we have available now. But it would probably contain something along the lines of the following:

I remember a few years ago listening to one of those late night talk-shows, which are usually about nothing particularly weighty. I don’t know what the subject was at the time, but in any case there was someone who called in and said he’d been reduced to living in a cardboard box. He’d lost everything; he was at rock bottom. And he said that something had happened to him that he wanted to share over the radio: he said he saw (and these are my words because I can’t remember exactly what he said) the glory and miraculous quality of ordinary human consciousness; and it was clear he had gone through some sort of transformation. His was not an intellectual conclusion, but a direct experience of something about his essential nature. Circumstances had taken everything away from him: he had nothing left, but somehow he found a way to look up rather than down, a way to carry on. He had nothing, and in that emptiness something had the opportunity to shine through.

Sōtō Zen is sometimes called the comfortable way. I think generally that means we don’t engage in difficult ascetic practices: we simply sit in meditation as a core element of our practice. For a westerner who wasn’t raised sitting cross-legged in meditation, I wouldn’t call it comfortable in that sense! But what I take from it is that, unlike the man in the cardboard box who had everything taken away from him, our way is to let things go one at a time as they arise, rather than suffer the trauma of life stripping us bare.

And by letting go I don’t mean cutting off or devaluing things; I mean not clinging to things in a way that denies their reality – the fact that all things change. And doing so – not clinging to things – allows us to be more at ease with the relationships we have, not only with people, but with the things of our lives. The letting go is not grasping onto something, but more like letting it fall from your hand. It’s still there, but you can pick it up as needed. It’s not a rejection or a cutting off.

Getting back to the man in the cardboard box: if he were a good communicator, and maybe had a little charisma, and could share what he found in a way that answered a need within his culture at the time, he might have started a religion. I’m sure there are many people out there who have had such deep insights into their lives, but it doesn’t go much further than themselves. If the man in the box did get the attention of others who thought: “I want what he has”, they might look at the externals of what he did, and think – “I’ll get my own cardboard box” – and do what he did.

But of course his transformation had little to do with the cardboard box: it had something to do with the process that was going on inside him. This reminds me a bit of the story of the monk who said he was sitting in zazen to become a Buddha, and the master started polishing a tile next to him to make a mirror. The disciple said: “you can’t polish a tile to make a mirror” and the master essentially said: “Just sitting cross-legged won’t make you a Buddha” – unless of course one does the inner process at the same time, which strictly speaking is independent of sitting or any outward form.

If the man in the box understood his own inner process, he might try to communicate it, knowing however that having a complete understanding of whatever process or steps he laid out was not ‘it’. The understanding of a doctrine is not the same as the understanding one gets by actually practicing the teaching. But you have to start somewhere: one starts with the known which points and leads to the as yet unknown.

And herein lies the shortcoming of most of us: that being the tendency for our intellect to focus on what it understands and just put aside what it can’t get a hold of. Our intellect attaches and identifies with what it understands; what the ‘I’ in us understands. Now this is not to say that there is no benefit to the intellect, for of course there is. It’s because of our intellect that we can realize the consequences of our behaviour in terms of what causes suffering for ourselves and others. We aren’t just at the mercy of our animal instincts: we can distinguish between right and wrong, and choose compassion over cruelty. We can choose good over evil; and by ‘evil’ here I mean those thoughts, words or deeds that cause suffering and reinforce profound separation between self and other. We can choose love over hatred; light over darkness.

When I became a monk, Buddhism was not in our culture as much as it is now. You tended to hear about it – at least I did – if someone in your circle of friends told you something about it. I can remember a few books that were out then: The Three Pillars of Zen; The Teachings Of The Compassionate Buddha; Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (I don’t think I had read that). Of course there were the works of Alan Watts which were very popular but I just hadn’t read much of that. Nowadays it’s a very different scene. There wasn’t the internet then: now you can spend day in and day out, probably for the rest of your life, and continue to find new expressions of Buddhism. There are innumerable YouTube talks and books which point out the importance of cultivating the virtues of compassion, love and wisdom; and point out the importance of aspiring to the good, and the transforming of our selfishness and harmful behaviour. As important as morality is, it’s not a final resting place as far as Buddhism is concerned. Doing good is not a bench at the end of the road on which to sit, although I suppose it depends on what you aspire to, and by that I don’t mean to judge that to which anyone aspires.

I’m just saying there’s something beyond both good and evil; something beyond the opposites of good and evil. And to encounter that requires not getting stuck with or resting in the good; resting in love or light. Not letting them become a subtle anchor for the self. As kids we used to do an experiment where you’d hang a thread in sugar-water, and you’d come back some days later and there’d be all these crystals that had attached themselves to the thread. And the doing of good should not become a thread to which the self gets attached, and becomes hard and set, or turns to judging others.

This doesn’t mean you don’t do the right thing: you don’t forget about being compassionate and kind. But it’s something you let go of and move through as you do it. There is something beyond separate selves helping other separate selves, which of course has merit – but there is a bigger picture. Buddhism offers a more profound understanding of ‘what is’.

Now we can all appreciate the value of not acting from a selfish point of view. The problem is actually doing so when our conditioning or instincts are acting upon us. It’s not always easy to restrain ourselves in thought, word and deed even when we know it’s the right thing to do. And the problem with doing good is that we don’t appreciate that it too has some hooks; we can fail to realize that we have to walk past it as well. (Again, the string in the sugar water.) We walk past good as we do our best to do the right thing. As to what lies on the path beyond the opposites of good and evil, that’s something we have to find out for ourselves directly, so I won’t give you any definition to hold on to.

But I will say that to encounter it sheds light on how influential the workings of our minds are in creating the meaning of the reality in which we find ourselves. And you also see that you have much more ‘say so’ about how your mind works and the reality it creates. You realize you have much more say so than you had appreciated before: how to let go of the stuff of the mind; and you also have an appreciation of how to let go of the mind itself.

Rev. Master Jiyu’s University – Durham University – had a motto: ‘That which is true is greater than that which is holy.’ But I might ask: “What is greater than that which is true?” Regarding this aspect of keeping going, I found a section recently in the biography of Mae Chee Kaew, a Thai Buddhist nun considered a modern-day Arahant. She died in 1971, and I encountered a passage that I found very much to the point which resonates with our teaching of letting go, and having no resting place. I’ll quote some of it, not exactly – the vocabulary is a little different – and her practice may emphasize different aspects of the overall practice; but it does help me make a point. Her biographer wrote:

When the offshoots of delusion were completely cut, her mind converged into a nucleus of supreme, sublime radiance: a radiance so majestic and mesmerising that she felt certain it signalled the end of all the suffering that she had been striving to attain.

Having relinquished all attachment to the factors of personal identity, the subtle radiant splendour at the centre of the mind became her sole remaining focus.

Sounds pretty good! And she decided to speak with her teacher and tell him what she had found. She spoke of her progress over the past year, carefully detailing the consecutive stages of her experience and concluded “With her lion’s roar, the radiant emptiness of mind that permeated the entire cosmos and transcended all conditions.”

When she stopped speaking, her teacher looked up and calmly asked: “Is that all?” She nodded. Her teacher paused for a moment and then spoke:

“When you investigate mental phenomena until you go completely beyond them, the remaining elements of consciousness may be drawn into a radiant nucleus of awareness, which merges with the mind’s natural radiant essence. This radiance is so majestic and mesmerising that even transcendent faculties like spontaneous mindfulness and intuitive wisdom invariably fall under its spell. The mind’s brightness and clarity appear to be so extraordinary and awe-inspiring that nothing can possibly compare. The luminous essence is the epitome of perfect goodness and virtue, the ultimate in spiritual happiness. It is the core of your being. But it is also the fundamental source of all attachment to being and becoming. Ultimately it is attachment to the allure of this primordial radiance of mind that causes living beings to wander indefinitely through the world of becoming and ceasing. That centre of knowing appears as a luminous emptiness that truly overwhelms and amazes; but that radiant emptiness should not be mistaken for the pure emptiness of nirvana. The two are as different as night and day.

The radiant mind is the original mind of the cycle of constant becoming; but it is not the essence of mind which is free from birth and death. Such radiance is a very subtle natural condition whose uniform brightness and clarity make it appear empty. It is the very substance of mind that has been well cleansed to the point where a mesmerising and majestic quality of knowing is its outstanding feature. When the mind finally relinquishes all attachments to forms and concepts, the knowing essence assumes exceedingly refined qualities. It has let go of everything… except itself. It remains permeated by a fundamental delusion about its own true nature. Because of that, the radiant essence has turned into a subtle form of self without you realising it. You end up believing that the subtle feelings of happiness and the shining radiance are the unconditioned essence of mind. But emptiness, radiance, clarity and happiness are all subtle conditions of a mind still bound by delusion. When you observe the emptiness carefully, you will observe that it is not really uniform, not really constant: sometimes it changes just a little but enough for you to know that it is transient. Try imagining yourself standing in an empty room: you look around and see only empty space everywhere. Absolutely nothing occupies that space, except you standing in the middle of the room. Admiring its emptiness, you forget about yourself. Once the mind has let go of phenomena of every sort, the mind appears supremely empty, but the one who admires the emptiness, who is awe-struck by the emptiness – that one still survives. The self as reference point which is the essence of all false knowing remains integrated into the mind’s knowing essence. The self perspective is the primary delusion. You forget that you occupy a central position in that space. How then can the room be empty? As long as someone remains in the room it is not truly empty. When you finally realise that the room can never be truly empty until you depart, that is the moment when that fundamental delusion about your true self disintegrates.”¹

So here we have her teacher pushing her beyond perceptions of emptiness, radiance, clarity, happiness, experiences of joy – pushing her beyond them, saying “Keep going, don’t stop there”.

He’s not disparaging them: he’s just saying there is more. Which reminds me of our underlying maxim in zazen, where we don’t try to achieve any particular state – nor is there a state in which we rest, however wonderful it may be. It reminds me of the phrase ‘beginner’s mind’ and also: “It is difficult to keep the initial humility to the very end”.

As I mentioned before, aspects of Buddhism (which aren’t necessarily unique to Buddhism) such as different forms of meditation, have made their way into our culture a considerable amount, but I hope that Buddhism does not devolve into just a therapeutic tool to improve the life of the self, but continues to lead one to a place of liberating insight into what the self actually is or isn’t.

Speaking as a monk, I hope the master-disciple relationship does not fall into disuse or fade from the scene because the mere appearance of hierarchy is deemed not politically correct. I also hope that Masters do not tarnish the relationship by letting their humanity get the better of them. And I hope the master-disciple relationship in its various forms does not lose its efficacy because Masters are afraid to be Masters, lest they be accused of not being sensitive enough or nice enough to their disciples; or are afraid to give hard teaching that challenges the disciples and students, especially at those critical make-or-break times in the disciple’s or student’s spiritual life.

In other words, I hope Buddhism does not lose its edge as it grows in the West. I hope it continues to challenge us to be more than we appear to be.

Religion can become like a golden cage in which it’s easy to see the gold, but hard to see that it’s a cage, and yes, one may walk happily and freely within the cage, but still not know freedom in its deepest sense.

 

Note

1. Bhikkhu Silaratano. Mae Chee Kaew – Her Journey To Spiritual Awakening & Enlightenment. Forest Dhamma Books, 2009, pp. 191-197.