Stillness
A transcript of a Dharma talk given during meditation at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey in 2019.
I invite us please to listen to this talk by allowing ourselves to drop into Stillness as a stone drops to the bottom of a deep, clear, still pool and settles. Drop off the intellect. Don’t try to understand. Just let the words pass through you as they arise and drop away.
Some years ago, while at Throssel for a six-month stay, I visited one of the affiliated meditation groups. During a discussion I was asked to choose one word which best encapsulates the Buddha’s Teaching. My mind ricocheted, wondering what one word could possibly best convey the entire richness of what the Buddha had to say. I surprised myself when I settled on Stillness. Reflecting on this question in the following days, I decided that Nonduality was a much better choice. More recently, I have come back to Stillness. I am discovering that everything else the Buddha taught derives from the practice of Stillness. In this article I hope to convey to you some of why that is so.
It seems more reasonable, when asked the question I was asked, to say something about suffering, or suffering’s end, or about Enlightenment or Nirvana, about the Four Noble Truths, or the Noble Eightfold Path, or about Emptiness, or about Wisdom or Compassion, or about meditation or the Precepts. Why Stillness?
First, because Stillness is the womb of Nonduality, of Enlightenment itself, the medium in which Nonduality is nourished and thrives. It gives birth to Enlightenment, and then nourishes it, grows it up healthy, matures it.
Second, because Stillness is our meditation practice.
Third, because Stillness is what we become as our practice deepens.
What do I mean by Stillness? It is not necessarily an absence of noise or of speaking; nor is it necessarily an absence of motion or of activity. This is very important. Let me try to convey what I am thinking of as Stillness by talking a bit about what supports it.
Stillness is supported by solitude, silence, and simplicity. These three are touted in most, if not all, religions, as necessary for deep practice, and for deep Communion – for the mystical experience. It is delusion to think we can circumvent them if we yearn for anything more than intellectual understanding. They are very hard to find in the modern world.
Solitude: This is, of course, about being alone. Not lonely, but alone. Physically alone, without other human beings around. Deeper than that, it does not depend on being alone, but on being deeply rooted in our own hearts, in the center of our being, being fully present to ourselves. It is standing in who we are, and staying rooted there; taking our own seat, and not being shoved off by circumstance, by what others think or by what the world demands. Here in retreat we can experience solitude even though we are surrounded by others. Even so, it is important to spend some time, a little time each day if possible, alone, with no one else around, and without phones, voicemail, email, TV, social media, movies, computers, etc. Solitude creates space, and makes silence possible. Within solitude we discover silence.
Silence: Absolute silence is actually impossible. In the quietest of circumstances there is still some sound, and even silence has a sound. What is important for spiritual depth is a silence of the human voice and human-made noise. It’s curious, isn’t it? Birds singing, the wind soughing in the trees, rain tapping on the roof; these seem to be what silence is, don’t they?
There is a story about Mother Teresa that I love. A reporter asked her what she says when she prays to God. “Nothing,” she responded, “I listen.” The reporter asked the logical question, “What does God say to you?” And Mother Teresa said, “Nothing. He listens.” This evokes an image of listening listening to listening listening to listening, and so on ad infinitum, like an object reflected in two facing mirrors. Silence is this sort of listening.
In silence we can hear what is within, the voice from the still center of our being. This voice can be very subtle, and we often miss it, because we cover it over with noise and busy-ness. But this is the voice of God, of the Unborn, of that which is greater than the small, self-absorbed self.
The hara, our spiritual center, located somewhere in the torso, is infinitely spacious. It is in this space that solitude and silence gather. When we are confronted with the sacred, awe and silence are our natural response. Dwelling within the hara, we live in the midst of all life as sacred, all that exists as sacred. Our respect, gratitude, and joy know no bounds.
Simplicity: Living a life of simplicity means that there is less clutter, physically, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually. Less busy-ness. Less to be concerned about. Less to take care of. Less wanting. Less attachment. We learn what we can drop off. Simplicity is a practice of letting go. It is a practice of contentment. We have more time for quiet, for solitude, for meditation. It is also kind to the environment.
Simplicity supports solitude and silence, and the three together create conditions conducive to Stillness; they embody Stillness, and Stillness embodies them. I might add that time spent in and with nature is also highly conducive to the cultivation of Stillness. For this reason it is especially important that we treat our natural environment with love and respect.
What is Stillness like? It is vastly, overwhelmingly, spacious, a spaciousness that completely takes us over, so that no self remains within it. This spaciousness is a natural outcome of solitude, silence, and simplicity. As spacious, it is unbounded, unlimited, unobstructed, and, it is eternal. Because it is spacious, it can hold anything within itself; it can hold everything within itself, everything at once. The boundaries between inside and outside drop off, and we know from experience that all that exists is within us, and that we are in all that exists, that we and all that is are interpenetrating, flowing into and out of each other. It is not stagnant; it flows and it shimmers. It is perfect equanimity. This experience is the felt experience, in our own bodies, of Nonduality, or of Emptiness, Shunyata, the wisdom of The Scripture of Great Wisdom. It is completely inclusive. Within Stillness, nothing is divided, nothing insufficient. It is a place, a way of being, of no distress, no matter what may be present. Here is the end of suffering; here is Enlightenment.
Why does Stillness matter? It matters because it is the only path into deep listening, and deep hearing. It is our mainline, an open pipe, to the Unborn, our direct access into Love, without attachment, into the Source of who we are, our True Nature, into the Truth. Without it we can’t see what is here, and what is here is what is True. It is Original Mind, original clear, bright awareness. To be aware, to be awake, we must be Still.
It is the crucible for all mystical experience. In the spaciousness of the hara we come into direct contact with the ineffable, with what Rev. Master Myōhō calls ‘the Great Mystery.’ ‘Ineffable’ is a word that means ‘too sacred to be uttered.’
Stillness is Ceaseless Prayer. In Christianity, Ceaseless Prayer is words that are repeated all the time, so that one is never not praying. In Buddhism, Ceaseless Prayer has no words, needs no words. It is simply turning toward Stillness in every moment. What we know there cannot be uttered. This is the Great Mystery.
Stillness has inherent value. We sit within it not to get anything from it, but for its own sake. When we sit within it, it does its work on us. I am reminded of the line from The Litany of the Great Compassionate One, “Do, do the work within my heart.” We can’t make this work happen, but it transforms us — in spite of ourselves. We need ask nothing of it.
Stillness is our deepest refuge. The Japanese characters for ‘refuge’ mean, ‘to return to and rely upon.’ This place of Stillness within, which is as accessible as our own breath, is a safe harbor that we can return to and rely upon at any time. Perhaps we should speak, not of Stillness as a noun, a place, but as an action, as a practice, ‘Stilling,’ in the same way that we practice taking refuge. We can entrust ourselves to Stilling completely. We can just ‘let it be,’ as the song says, let things be, which is Stillness itself.
And when we live in Stillness, we die in Stillness. No difference.
❀
Stillness, or Stilling, is a definition of meditation practice. The two are completely congruent. They embody each other.
What do we do when we meditate? First of all, we sit down in a particular posture, a posture that has the characteristics of being upright, stable, open, and relaxed. The Japanese word, ‘shikantaza,’ means ‘just sitting.’ This is the whole of our practice. We just sit. We sit down, and we don’t do anything else. Since the posture is the whole of the practice, all we need do is place ourselves in it, maintain it, and let the meditation do us.
We don’t move, so we are sitting still, being still, already inhabiting Stillness. My Master once said, “In one sense, ‘sit still’ is the answer to every question asked in spiritual guidance. And yet, it is good to offer more.” Any spiritual question we ask can be responded to with the instruction to sit still, and this is what is indeed the important thing, and the ‘solution’ to our problems. But of course it is good for a teacher to expand on that, and offer something more helpful and skillful. So they might refer to all the other Teachings of the Buddha: suffering, its cause, its end, and the way to its end, etc. The Precepts and the Paramitas, our whole box of tools that help beyond just sitting.
But why is just sitting so crucial? When we sit down, we still ourselves so that we can be with what is. That is all, and this is revolutionary, because usually we are trying to escape what is. Just this is it! What is here, right now, is our only concern. We are totally with what is, just this. With our whole body, mind, spirit, psyche, we ask, “What is this?” Nothing more. Having asked, knowing what is here, the ‘just this,’ we do nothing. We are still. We don’t move, either externally or internally. We don’t react, we don’t fix, we don’t try to change anything, we don’t make it better. This is all-acceptance, that well-touted key to the Gateless Gate.
Just sitting here, with our whole body, our whole mind, our whole spirit, our whole heart, fully engaged, experiencing ‘just this,’ we can’t help but know, from experience, in our bodies, the reality of impermanence and the reality that there is no separate, fixed, unchanging self. That is, we experience, directly with our bodies, what Emptiness is, Shunyata. We can say, then, that zazen is Emptiness, wisdom, prajna, this clear seeing that is the nature of our minds and which is direct access into Nonduality.
To say it differently, when we sit in zazen, we are just being what is, just this. We become all this is, right here, right now. Whatever distinction there is between subject and object drops away and there is no difference, no differentiation. This self which is not a solid, separately existing thing, is seen in connection to all that is, like a jewel on Indra’s Net. We see clearly that we are suffused by all of Reality, and that we in turn suffuse all of Reality. No separation, undivided. This is what Nonduality is. Stillness is to sit in its center. We could say that Stillness is the medium for Nonduality, like air for humans, water for fish, space for the universe.
Nonduality is a word we use in Buddhism to denote something other than the opposites. As you know, in Rules for Meditation Dōgen writes that “when the opposites arise the Buddha Mind is lost.” Opposites are things like short and tall, hot and cold, light and dark, subject and object. This last one, subject and object, is perhaps the quintessential opposite. When we see in this way, we see things as separate and divided, ourselves as separate and divided and, hence, lonely. The Buddha taught that this is the fundamental delusion. When we sit in zazen there is fundamental unity, there is only ‘just this.’ There is only connection. This is what Nonduality is. It can be said that Nonduality transcends the opposites, but I think it is more accurate to say that it encompasses them. Nonduality holds all things within itself. This is the fundamental act of religion (or spirituality, if you are afraid of that word), to hold contradiction, and, larger than that, to hold all things without exception.
Rev. Master Jiyu gets to the point here when she says, “All is One and all is different at the same time, and when we realize that, we are Enlightenment itself.” ‘All is one’ and ‘all is different’ logically contradict each other. And, it’s not just that both are true but that both are true at the same time. This must be obvious to us all. You are not the person sitting next to you, and you are not separate from, divided from, different from, the person sitting next to you.
To cite a more mundane example of how we can be caught in the contradictions of the opposites: We have a Precept that says, “Do not kill.” We know that it is wrong to kill, that it causes suffering. But we’ve just run over a racoon (or maybe I should say rabbit for European readers) and it isn’t dead. It’s near death and in agony. Do we leave it there in the road to suffer, or do we run over it again to put it out of its misery, and then move it respectfully to the side of the road? It may be that the latter choice keeps the Precept better than the former. Or, let’s say we have been sexually abused. Since, according to our understanding of Emptiness, there is no doer who does the deed, no deed, and no one to feel the fruit, there is no one to be harmed. And yet, if this has happened to you, you know that you are harmed, and even that that harm is not confined to you but affects those close to you as well. This person who is harmed needs kind, compassionate attention, needs help to heal. From this point of view we could say that Emptiness and compassion, the two sides of our Zen practice, contradict each other. Yet both are necessary, and both must be held together. We can’t opt for one and drop the other.
Rev. Master Jiyu called this ‘holding together’ the ‘Third Position’. We might, along with the Buddha, call it the Middle Way. ‘Third Position’ is another way of saying ‘meditation.’ It is not the midpoint between two opposites. It is holding them both at once. For Dōgen, the most vexing opposite, the one at the center of his own kōan, was training and Enlightenment. As you know, he asked, with a certain amount of anguish, “If we are already Enlightened, already Buddha, why do we have to train?” This is the question which opens Rules for Meditation. He answered the question when he realized deeply and profoundly that training IS Enlightenment. Training is being Buddha. I find it equally important to flip these sentences to say, “Enlightenment is training. Being Buddha is to train.” This is why Dōgen writes, in another part of the Shōbōgenzō, that training is ceaseless. We can’t stop being Buddha, can we? once we know what it means to be Buddha. To recognize that we are Buddha, and yet imperfect, need training, and to be and do both at once is the Third Position, and we take up this position whenever we sit down in zazen posture.
In his commentary on The Scripture of Great Wisdom, Shohaku Okumura quotes Pingala, a third or fourth century Indian scholar and writer on Buddhist thought:
Pingala’s conclusion is that “unless one sees the Buddha’s peaceful dharma by extinguishing views, we see being and nonbeing.”1
Being and nonbeing are a way of talking about existence and non existence, a very classic kind of opposite that is found throughout Buddhist teaching, and also in the early Mahayana scriptures. Okumura again:
The Buddha’s peaceful dharma is reality itself free of all dichotomies. This reality is blissful and precious.
‘Peaceful Dharma free of all dichotomies’ is actually what Nonduality is. We might think that much of life isn’t particularly blissful. You can sit here in meditation and be in a lot of pain. We experience physical pains in all kinds of ways and some of it’s chronic for some of us, and this can be a very difficult and not very blissful thing to train with. We have problems, terrible things can happen to us. Life can be pretty awful at times. Not to be too pessimistic about it. But no matter what, there is an aspect of bliss when we can just be with what is, close to it, intimate with what is right here. It’s very hard to do this. But I promise you that it is true. When we can be with what is, somewhere in there is an aspect of bliss. Okumura continues:
We don’t usually see reality itself but only our preconceptions: things we like or dislike, something useful or useless, something desirable or undesirable.
I might add that it is our preconceptions which are not blissful.
We divide reality into categories, running after things we desire and trying to avoid those we detest. Our life becomes a matter of chasing and escaping. That is our usual way of life.
Dividing reality into categories is to discriminate. Reading the above brings to mind for me a very strong sense of what suffering is, and in what way we are not free – chasing and escaping.
In this kind of life there is no stable foundation, no peace, because we are always escaping from or chasing after something. There’s no time to rest, to just calm down and be right here. Letting go of thought in zazen for ten minutes or for a day or for five days is very precious. The blissful Dharma, true reality, is revealed when we let go and become free from our fixed views.
I would add that this is the whole point of zazen: to be free of our fixed views, and that this is how Nonduality becomes a lived experience, something we know for ourselves, rather than another concept or fixed view.
I described earlier how Stillness does not mean no movement or no action. Stillness does not stand against activity. That would be to set up yet another duality. Once again, we must hold apparent opposites together, each on the palm of one open hand – two open hands, at once. However, it is very important to be clear and honest with ourselves. We must be willing to admit to ourselves when we are using activity to avoid Stillness, because sometimes Stillness scares us, or seems boring, or … you fill in the blank. Activity can be a way of blinding ourselves, keeping us from seeing what it is that we are really up to. It can be a way to define ourselves through our work, or what we offer to others, or some product we make, or some identity we think we have to have, which gives us, in our own eyes, value. We must be clear when we are doing this, and return to Stillness — and then do the activity from within the Stillness. Does this activity cause no harm? Is it good to do? Can I remain Still while I do it? If I am Still while doing it, how does that change the outcome, the effect it has on others?
Sitting still in zazen is the holding of these contradictions, the holding of all the disparate aspects of who we are, in one whole. This is Nonduality. We could also say that it is the Buddhist teaching of Totality. Nothing is left out. It is sufficient as it is. Dōgen teaches us that zazen and Enlightenment are one. This living within Nonduality is Enlightenment itself. When we sit, we manifest Stillness, Nonduality, and Enlightenment all at once. Stillness, Meditation, and Nonduality are three ways of looking at the very same thing; Enlightenment itself.
Over the years of sitting in meditation and bringing the mind of meditation into our daily life, Stillness deepens. It becomes who we are. We turn to it, settle into it, reflexively, like a good habit. From within it, all the rest of our living pours forth like a fruitful fountain. Let us not forget it. We can return to it always, rely upon it always. This is our life of ceaseless practice, boundless Enlightenment.
Note
1. Okumura, Shohaku. Living by Vow, Wisdom Publications, 2012. p. 162.
