Leon Kackman, Rev. Master

 

This article was originally published, in serialized form, in the Portland Buddhist Priory Newsletter.’ It will appear in the Journal in two parts, the second one will follow in the next issue.

 

One of my favorite short pieces of Zen Buddhist Teaching is Bodhidharma’s Outline of Practice. In his opening comment to his translation of this work, D.T. Suzuki says “As long as Zen appeals to one’s direct experience, abstraction is too inane for the mind of a master.” In the study of the Zen literature, there is an ongoing process of coming to see how what is talked about applies directly to our life of practice and is not just something exotic and mysterious. Of course, there is a pitfall here: the hazard of taking something which points to a profound truth that we do not yet fully understand, and trivializing it.

With the effort to both keep from getting mired in abstraction and keep from trivializing (bringing the teaching down to my level), I thought it would be helpful to dig into this work.

I will quote Red Pine’s translation from The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma¹ for most of this.

 To Enter by Reason

Bodhidharma starts with:

Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice. To enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction and to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn’t apparent because it’s shrouded by sensation and delusion.

The “Path” here is the living Path of Zen practice; the living practice of meditation in action, not just on our cushion. Zen practice is a thing to be lived out in our day-to-day lives and isn’t just a nice thing to think about. To “enter by reason” then, is something a little different from what we usually expect from reason, expect from ‘what our thinking mind produces’. To enter by reason is the process of awakening to the life of practice, to our own deeper life, by applying the meditation of the Buddhadharma, the moment-by-moment mind of meditation, to our actual life.

To “believe* that all living things share the same true nature” is to live in faith that there is something bigger going on in this life; there is a bigger compassionate mind that permeates and embraces all beings, all of existence. We come to know this directly through the life of meditation. Because we get distracted by sensations and our accumulated confusion, we don’t yet see this bigger mind.

Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason. Without moving, without effort, they enter, we say, by reason.

“Meditating on walls” is, we say, the facing of the self: there is nowhere to hide. We sit quietly and look at what is there, not fighting with the ‘wall’ in front of us, just sitting quietly with it, with whatever arises. Facing and accepting the self is to let it be there; the mind of Zazen lets whatever arises be there, neither grasping after nor pushing away. This is not necessarily particularly comfortable, but, as we sit still, we might notice that the self, the ‘whatever arises’ also shifts and changes; our relationship to it changes; it passes away.

The meditating on the “absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage” is the letting go of our dualistic preoccupations from moment to moment; just noticing and dropping them without trying to think about or analyze them, just dropping them. The entry by reason takes a fair bit of internal study in the sense of alertness. We have to learn to pay attention to what we are holding onto and how to drop it. This is not just the study we do on our own: perhaps unnoticed here is the one who gives the instruction. Bodhidharma had a teacher, the woman Prajnatara. She not only explained the formal aspect of the Dharma to him, but also helped him to see what his dualistic preoccupations were; she helped him to see how he got distracted by sensations and what his accumulated delusions were – accumulated delusions is another name for dualistic preoccupations. In turn, Bodhidharma had students who he helped in the same way; Bodhidharma continues to offer his instruction to us, even now.

Those who live from the mind of Zazen “are in complete and unspoken agreement” with this special kind of “reason.” Living from the mind of Zazen isn’t just doing formal meditation once or twice or ten times a day. It is letting go of, turning from, dropping the activity of mind throughout the day. And, it is just getting on and living wholeheartedly the ordinary life that is right in front of us today.

Bodhidharma’s Outline of Practice starts by saying that we can either enter the Dharma by “reason” or “practice.”  I described earlier the entry by reason and what that might mean. Entry by “reason” is more like entry by ‘just letting go of everything’, by giving oneself wholeheartedly over to the mind of Zazen. D.T. Suzuki’s translation concludes this section with:

He will not then be a slave to words, for he is in silent communion with the Reason itself, free from conceptual discrimination; he is serene and not-acting. This is called Entrance by Reason.²

Before we move on to the next section, I want to point out what “not-acting” means, since it relates to the mind of meditation and not necessarily directly to action in the world. “Not-acting”, in the sense of meditation, refers to the activity the mind undertakes to either push away or grasp after some thing or sensation or thought. Keizan says that in meditation there is “no need to activate body, no need to activate mind.” When we grasp or push away, we are activating the mind or body: we can learn, through practicing the Buddhadharma, to find this serene place of “not activating” body or mind, the place of “not-acting”.

To Enter by Practice

As we begin to look at the next section, it is useful to note that these two means of entry are not really separate and to note that they intertwine with each other. The next section begins with (and, again, I am using the Red Pine translation):

To enter by practice refers to four all-inclusive practices: Suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma.

First, suffering injustice. When those who search for the Path encounter adversity, they should think to themselves, “In Countless ages gone by, I’ve turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions. Now, though I do no wrong, I’m punished by my past. Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open heart and without complaint of injustice.” The sutras say “when you meet with adversity don’t be upset because it makes sense.” With such understanding you’re in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path.

We enter the life of the Dharma “by practice” when we study our minds and try our best to adhere to these four practices. There is a verse that encapsulates these four practices from a hymn we sing at the festival ceremony in memory of Bodhidharma that goes:

Acceptance of suffering
Sitting unmoved
The seeking of nothing
Enlightenment proved

These four practices correspond to the Buddha’s four noble truths: the truth that suffering exists; the truth that there is a cause of suffering; the truth that there is a cessation of suffering; and the truth that there is a way, a means, to take steps to find the cessation of suffering.

Suffering Injustice: the Acceptance of Suffering

So, the first practice: “suffering injustice”. Suffering injustice, or the “acceptance of suffering”, is a very difficult thing to practice on the ground, in an instance-by-instance way, in our actual life. It is one thing to accept that there is suffering ‘out there’ in a general way, but when it comes right down to it, when we ourselves are in the midst of specific suffering, it is another matter to accept, “with an open heart and without complaint”, the suffering that we are experiencing. Bodhidharma’s advice for “those [of us] who search for the Path”, when we encounter adversity, is to accept responsibility for it: this is not usually our first reaction. Instead of thinking, ‘this adversity “makes sense”’, we think ‘this must be someone else’s fault; I am a good person, or at least a not very bad person, so that other person over there, if they would just be kinder or wiser or more skillful, then my life would be OK.’

Before I continue, I want to emphasize that taking responsibility, in the way that the Dharma teaches and that Bodhidharma is talking about, is not about blaming or judging ourselves. I will cover this in more detail later, but I wanted to say this at this point to highlight that there is a different way of understanding taking responsibility in the realm of Dharma practice.

The reality is, as long as we are in this world, we will only encounter other limited human beings. These other human beings, no matter how enlightened they are or what fine characteristics they have, cannot take away or prevent our suffering; they cannot prevent or take away the consequences of our choices. Also, they cannot do the work of finding enlightenment for us; if we want to know what the Buddha knew, for ourselves, we will have to go there on our own. “The Buddhas do but point the way.”

This practice of suffering injustice is very difficult and, for myself, it often takes at least a few tries to get to it; it is difficult, but it can be done.

While this teaching is pretty simple (if there is suffering in me, I can take responsibility for it, I can accept it), there are some obstacles to it, and people of our era have a very difficult time with it. One obstacle to taking on this practice is that we are trained by worldly influences to look outside of ourselves for the source of our suffering. When we hear this teaching about “suffering injustice”, we jump to the conclusion that having this attitude (that we can take responsibility for our suffering and its cause within us) means that other people’s wrong actions are then somehow justified and we should somehow capitulate to their wrong actions. We can think that we are being told that it is the victim’s fault; this is not it at all.

I look at this teaching as if it were just for me, as if it were the medicine only for what is going on in my own mind. The matter of the wrongness or rightness of another person’s actions and how to respond to them is a different question; from the point of view of Dharma practice, an important but secondary question. Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett taught that Buddhism is a religion for spiritual adults, for people who take responsibility for their own suffering. At some point, we might need – it might be essential – for us to ask the question, ‘how do I respond to the harmful actions of another person?’  This first step of taking responsibility for our own suffering, helps immeasurably in clarifying this other question: right now, “how can I accept… with an open heart and without complaint of injustice” the suffering that is arising in me? Far from enfeebling me, this acceptance of my own responsibility is profoundly empowering and makes clear that my peace of mind is not dependent on another person’s delusion or enlightenment. Taking responsibility may actually lead us to the necessity of speaking out, and gives us the grounding to do so effectively.

Another thing that can get in the way of our practicing the acceptance of suffering is that sometimes something happens to us that is not the direct result of a mistake that we have made. Taking responsibility in this kind of case is simply to continue the training of our mind and to do the work needed to let go of duality and practice compassion; taking responsibility in this kind of case is to accept that in this world, sometimes bad things happen and we may not see the reason why. Training the mind in this way does not stand in the way of taking steps to hold another accountable if that avenue is open to us and seems good; taking responsibility just cuts the entangling tie between us and another person who has caused us harm.

One thing that is very important to remember when training our minds to take responsibility is that Buddhism and the Buddha have no interest in judging us. When we make a mistake, subtle or coarse, on the spiritual level, we feel the consequences of it; what we feel will vary depending on what we have done, but we will feel it. If we don’t feel it now, we will feel it later. It is said that the law of cause and effect on the spiritual level has no law-giver. That we receive negative consequences for negative actions is not the result of some other being’s judgement, it is just the law of cause and effect. This is equally true of positive actions, and thus we can freely give compassion, forgiveness, kindness and forbearance even to those who have not ‘earned’ it from some worldly point of view.

This is true for every being in existence.

One of the things that we might feel is a sense of shame for doing a thing that we sort of knew better than to do. Maybe a little bit of this shame is warranted or normal, but we all too often turn it into a feeling of judged guilt and a sense that our mistake is evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. This extra judging is like pouring salt on a wound and is another level of mistake that we can learn to not do. This extra shame and judging can also get in the way of our practicing the “acceptance of suffering”.

When we are plagued by this extra suffering caused by being judged, either by our own selves or by someone else, being accepted by another is such a relief, that we can think that suffering will stop when we stop the judging (mostly, we think, when we get others to stop judging us). Of course, if we were to stop judging each other, a lot of suffering would go away, but there is still the matter of accepting the consequences of the thing that started us down the path of judging. There are many things in life that, through our pettiness and ignorance, we judge ourselves and others for, that are completely irrelevant to our spiritual peace: it matters not one whit what color, sex, sexual orientation, weight, level of intelligence, state of health, or whole host of other characteristics we might have are, and, to our great relief and the relief of others, we can just let go of judging those things.

But our suffering does not stop here with this judging or not judging. The Buddhadharma invites us to look into our lives more deeply to see how we are acting now, and have acted in the past, on greed, hatred and ignorance – including the ignorance of getting entangled in the discriminative or judgmental mind. When we take refuge in the Three Treasures, we are, in effect asking them: how do I create suffering and how can I stop it? Because we are configured as we are, with the kind of minds that we have, the answer to that question will often arise as something like “do this, not that.” Practice acceptance, don’t be judgmental. Take responsibility, don’t blame others for our suffering. Practice letting go and giving, don’t insist on getting your own way without considering the effects. Practice loving-kindness, don’t be angry. It doesn’t really work to just practice the positive things if we do not recognize that we are also doing the negative things. We need to recognize the negative things and stop doing them.

Because of this ‘do this, not that’ quality, when our friends and loved ones, or the sangha and our teachers, or just life itself, points out to us that we are pursuing actions, thoughts or behavior that create suffering, we can feel judged and this can be deeply painful. Sadly, it seems to be the case that if one of our characteristic habits of mind is the habit of being harshly critical of others, then this feeling of being judged can be profoundly amplified (I know this from bitter personal experience.)

When we try to accept suffering, we can feel a kind of discouragement or despair: we see that we have some suffering but do not yet see what we can do to work with it, what we can do to change it. We might even believe that we can do nothing about it, because we have ‘always been this way’.

But by taking Bodhidharma’s advice to “accept [suffering] because it makes sense”, and wholeheartedly taking refuge in the mind of meditation, we put ourselves into the best possible place to apply the other aspects of the Buddhadharma which in turn helps us to make sense of the suffering. We can let go of fear or despair in the confidence that the Buddhadharma is a reliable help for us. We don’t have to despair because the “acceptance of suffering” is a means of entering the path, the path to dealing with our suffering in a real way.

Adapting to Conditions

The next section, the second of the four practices, begins with (from the Red Pine translation):

Second, adapting to conditions. As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves. All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions. If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it’s the fruit of a seed planted by us in the past. When conditions change, it ends. Why delight in its existence? But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes. Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path.

Again, from our verse encapsulating the four practices:

Acceptance of suffering
Sitting unmoved
The seeking of nothing
Enlightenment proved

We might say that our entry into this second practice is “Sitting unmoved”. “Sitting unmoved”, in this context, is the bringing the mind of meditation into every activity. Rev. Master Jiyu would describe the mind of meditation or, one who was practicing this mind of meditation, as being like a spinning top which is very active on the outside but is still at the center.

We engage in our ordinary lives with the appearance of an ordinary person, even while working on sitting still in all things. (It is possible!)

In his work A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life³ the Indian monk Shantideva (c685-763 CE) poses an interesting question:

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth

And answers it with:

But (wearing) leather just on the soles of my shoes.
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it.

Although we can become quite skillful in handling many areas that we are familiar with, we can’t possibly predict or control every condition we might encounter in our lives. But we can learn to meet each situation from the mind of meditation. And we can learn to convert the obstacles we carry around in our own minds and hearts; the obstacles to taking refuge in the mind of meditation.

“Sitting unmoved” is like giving ourselves a sturdy pair of shoes with which to dance through the many obstacles and changes life presents to us. “Adapting” our minds “to conditions”, is the conversion, the bringing to peace all of the diverse sufferings we carry around with us by applying the mind of meditation and the Buddhadharma to our lives; this is like stitching up the holes that appear in our sturdy shoes.

This process of healing our inner suffering is how we learn to “remain unmoved by the wind of joy” and “silently follow the Path”.

Seeking Nothing

The next section, the third of the four practices, is as follows (from the Red Pine translation):

Third, seeking nothing. People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something – always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. Calamity forever alternates with Prosperity. To dwell in the three realms is to dwell in a burning house. To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

Maybe you could think that practicing the Dharma is seeking something and I suppose that it is. With Bodhidharma’s Dharma practice we are seeking to end the problem of seeking; the seeking of Bodhidharma’s Dharma practice is the seeking to end craving, thirst, tanha, as in the second noble truth. We feel that there is something missing and we long for the feeling of wholeness, so we look high and low; we look in our bodily sensations; we look in the pleasures of the mind (e.g. that great feeling we get after solving a problem); we look in relationships; we look all over but at best, we only find a temporary solution and we are never at rest in our hearts.

“People of this world are deluded.” One of our fundamental delusions is that there is something missing in us and this missing thing needs to be completed by some experience from outside of us: a better job; a better relationship; a better car; a better house, garden, neighborhood. You fill in the blank. We believe unquestioningly in this feeling (it doesn’t even occur to us to question it) so we “seek”.

“But the wise wake up.” We begin to wake up when we begin to have a thought like ‘there must be something other than this constant hunger.’ This is what we might call disillusionment (nibbidā in Sanskrit); the beginning of dropping our illusions about ourselves and the world. Often this disillusionment follows on from great suffering and can produce despair and cynicism, especially if we do not see a way of coming to know that ‘something other’. The Buddhadharma is one of the ways to find and live from that ‘something other’.

One of my teachers says that it is as if we go around in our life with an empty wheelbarrow, and when we approach some experience or person or thing, we are expecting to get something to fill our barrow. But with practice, we are actually asked to empty the barrow. We are asked to let go of the things in our barrow. This teaching is so counter-intuitive to our usual way of being that it can seem frightening and incomprehensible. We can practice Buddhism for a long time before we realize that what we are being asked to do (actually asked by our own heart) is to stop seeking to fill our wheelbarrow and instead be willing to give up the things in our barrow; we can practice for a long time before we realize that emptying is what the Buddhas around us are doing. The realization that practice is about letting go, which comes from sitting quietly in the depths of our own question, is the beginning of “waking up”.

To be continued…

Notes

1. Pine, Red, translator: The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, North Point Press, New York, 1987.
2. Suzuki, D.T., Manual of Zen Buddhism, Rider & Co, London 1950, p74.
3. Shantideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, Batchelor, Stephen – Translator; LTWA; 6th Revised edition, 1999.
* I might have used the phrase, as other translators do, “to have faith” here, since to have faith is a little more flexible and does not require proof.