The Secret of Life Is Will and Words Are Its Key
In honour of the memory of Rev. Master Jishō, and with gratitude for his life of teaching, we offer this article which is an edited transcript of a talk given at Shasta Abbey in 2007.
I do have a title for this talk. Whether I have the rest of it or not remains to be seen! “The Secret of Life Is Will and Words Are Its Key.” We’re celebrating Achalanatha’s festival today, and his mantra is: “By our own wills and vigilance may we our fetters cut away. May we within the temple of our own hearts dwell, amidst the myriad mountains. Hail, Hail, Hail.”1
Probably the hardest thing we have to do in life is to see how it is that we create suffering for ourselves and once we see that, then we have to figure out how to not do that. So that’s what I’m going to be talking about today:- how we have to see it. It isn’t the external circumstances that create the suffering. The external circumstances simply provide the opportunity, and we either take the opportunity or we don’t.
I just got back from the hermitage, and it was very easy to practice patience there because the trees weren’t making any demands. You have all these billions of trees, all sitting still, giving you a good example of how to train. So I get back here and I get 319 emails (everyone gasps). Yes, that’s the way I felt! (laughter). And about a hundred of those came from the bank, so I had to log on to my bank account and they asked me all these security questions, but I misspelled my mother’s maiden name. So they said I had to go into the bank, and I didn’t immediately see this as an opportunity to learn patience! I wanted to. My thought was: “I hope the next 200 don’t require as much patience as this one.”
Every day we are offered opportunities, and Achalanatha ‒ also known as Fudō ‒ looks really fierce; he looks really mean. But the will and the vigilance that we’re practicing here is that of the Buddha’s Middle Way. Shakyamuni tried all sorts of teachings, and the last but one was extreme asceticism. If you tried to look like Fudō all the time you’d be in extreme distress! It’s important to see that the will we exercise in training is the will of willingness. It’s a much softer thing than will power. Somebody was describing recently how he, through his will power, could simply stop his thoughts by suppressing them. That was a kind of suffering in itself. When you try to repress something that is difficult or unpleasant, it’s just the same as indulging it, it’s just the other side of the pendulum. What we have to do is change our relationship to the thoughts, change our relationship to the difficulties. So my getting upset with the banker was simply a habit. When somebody tells you that you can’t get what you want and you’ve got to go to town to correct this, then it’s: “Aargh!” (laughter).
I’m programmed to be impatient. I notice this all the time, well, not all the time, but I’m very prone to being impulsive about stuff ‒ even as a child. Thich Nhat Hanh talked about learning patience in every step. When he was four years old, his mother would bring him home a cookie from the market where she would shop. And he would spend the next half an hour eating that cookie as slowly as he could ‒ and playing with the dog, sitting in the sun, and making it this beautiful, fun thing. Well I don’t think I’ve had a meal last more than 15 minutes. I just slurp it down! What we have to do is see though this kind of behaviour, and change how we do things, because when we act on compulsive, emotional reactions, we are acting out old karma. We can learn to see with compassion ‒ that’s the crucial thing. If you look at something with judgment, you simply can’t really see it. The judgment is already the end of the road. You’ve already come to a conclusion, and what you’ve learned from that situation is: “Bad person”, right? So you can’t do anything more than that.
I learned this from an old horse. When I was seven, my sister wanted to get this horse, and she was, of course, older and wiser than me, and she wasn’t afraid of horses. But I was even afraid of a goat! I looked at this horse and it was huge! Seven year-old kid and a 20 year-old horse who had been taught all sorts of things ‒ you could ride him either with an English saddle or a western saddle, and he would break into five trained, gaited things every once in a while.
Anyway, one day, when I was eight years old, I had gotten over my initial fear of this horse, I came home from school and nobody was home, so I said, “Oh! I’ll go for a horseback ride.” And I got the saddle on, then got the bridle on, and I was standing right next to the horse and he stood on the toe of my boot, not actually on my foot fortunately, just on the boot. Well I couldn’t push him away. I didn’t think about taking my boot off, but anyway, I finally got really impatient and really angry, and I picked up the only thing I could reach which was some little twig, and I started hitting him on the shoulder ‒ I was really angry. It was some sort of signal and very slowly he lifted up one knee and he put his knee down, and he lifted up the other knee then put that knee down, and he put his head all the way down and he bowed. And the screen came down in front of my face, I could see it to this day: “Bad person”. My mother said you shouldn’t hurt animals. You could fight with your brothers and sisters, and we did, but the animals? No, you have to respect animals and treat them kindly.
So I simply blocked that memory out. But 25 years later, my mother had just died, and I was in England. I was doing some memorial ceremonies for her, and the memory of this event came, it was such a beautiful teaching. This is what you do with anger. You bow to it.
But at the time the judgment had already concluded that there was nothing more to learn, so I just blocked that out. And what you have to see is that the judgment keeps you from learning from these mistakes, learning from your past actions. If you judge yourself there’s nowhere more to go, and training is about opening ourselves up to things and seeing where we break the Precepts, seeing where we get impatient, angry or frustrated. Thich Nhat Hahn’s definition of patience is the Ship and Three Drums, it’s the Chinese character which is the heart-mind on the bottom and a sharp knife on the top, and his way of interpreting that is you have to open up your heart wide enough to hold those sharp or difficult things. And that opening of the heart is what we are learning in meditation.
This is what Achalanatha is teaching us ‒ how to be still. Open your heart. Keep the Precepts. He’s holding this rope in his hands which is the Precepts; the sword in the other hand cuts through the delusion of self, and we learn to see that we always have a choice. So we sit, although we’ve made a mistake, or we’ve gotten angry or fearful, whatever it is, whatever has come up ‒ just be there with that. Know that’s the truth, that’s what’s happening. Don’t try to pretend it’s not happening. How many times have you shouted: “I’m Not Angry”? We have to open ourselves up to the truth. And the truth is that the mind chatters; we act impulsively; we’ve got all this old karma ‒ our greeds, angers, fears, frustrations and all of that, and we have to change how we deal with these things. We have to change our perception. Can you welcome the man on the telephone that tells you that you have to go to town? Can you say: “Thank you very much”? ‒ I didn’t then, but I’m learning! Maybe next time, I thought. And this did happen ‒ when I went into the bank and he fixed the problem.
The kōan arises naturally in daily life. The things that happen mean we run into the self every day. We just have to look at these things with kindness towards ourselves. The discipline in Buddhist practice is not this harsh asceticism; we don’t have to beat ourselves up. We have to learn what it is to be kind to ourselves. The Precepts are not some sort of restraint, well they are in a way, but they are not a restraint that is going to keep you from being at peace with yourself. They are a restraint that shows you how to act like a Buddha. The Precepts are not demanded of us by God. We undertake this practice so we can learn how to convert our suffering into compassion and loving wisdom. It is up to each person to make the effort of will to do that. The secret here, is that we already have the Buddha nature.
We don’t have to ‘get’ something. Western society has this assumption that there is something wrong with us just because we’re born. In Buddhism we believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity, not fundamental badness. So that fundamental goodness means that every one of us has the Buddha nature. Everyone has just as much of that Buddha nature as we need to deal effectively with this conversion of suffering.
One of my favorite stories, and I’ve said this in a number of talks, is the story of Yakusan2 who studied with Sekitō for twenty years and he wasn’t getting it. And he was getting frustrated. Sekitō finally sent him over to his friend Baso. Baso undoubtedly knew the problem, but Yakusan told Baso: “Well I’ve studied for 20 years and I’ve read everything I could of the Buddhist teachings. I just don’t get it.” And Baso looks at him with a little grin on his face and says: “Sometimes I raise the eyebrows of old Shakyamuni and I blink. And sometimes I don’t. And sometimes it’s good to do and sometimes it’s not. So what do you think?” Well, the penny dropped. Yakusan realized that he was trying to get something. He later said: “When I was with Sekitō, I was like a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull.” He wanted to get blood out of this iron bull, rather than saying that his training was the manifestation of the blood of the Buddhas. And in doing his training he had actually been acting on his own enlightenment without realizing it.
Dōgen talks about training as enlightenment, and the doing of the practice is, in fact, an enlightened act. To sit in meditation, to keep the Precepts, to do the very best you can with these difficulties in daily life, even if you fall down and fail a hundred times. If you still get up and do it, this is enlightenment. It’s not something that you have to get, or add on, you have to open your heart. It’s there already but the self is putting a kind of filter on top of that, so you can’t get to that unless you choose to make the act of will to open the heart.
And all of you have done that because you are here. Everybody who comes has had to listen to something inside themselves or they wouldn’t be here, because we don’t go beating people over the head saying: “You have to go to Shasta Abbey and meditate or we’ll beat you some more.” It took me years to come to the Zen Center because I didn’t want to be hit by a stick. What is the use of going to a place where they’re going to go around and hit you? I had to be desperate enough. I finally got desperate enough, and when I did, Reverend Master Jiyu was there.
This practice is the door to the unknown. For me, it was when I lost my job. I was upset. I walked around San Francisco for five hours or so, and I came across Zen Center. So I tried to go in, but the door was closed. They said go away, come back in a week. I got half a block away and I remembered the story by Franz Kafka about the man from the country who comes to the Gate of the Law. The door is open and the man looks intimidating like Fudō. He explains that through this door there are a thousand other doors and each one has a guard that looks just as mean and ugly as he is. If not worse! And the man was scared away. He keeps coming back but he keeps getting scared away. And finally he is about to die and the guard comes over and says, “That door was meant only for you.” So I thought I’d better go back and try again.
So I went to another door and there wasn’t a sign on it. They invited me in and I had a cookie and a cup of tea and was told I could come back at 5:30 the next morning, which I did. After the sitting they told me that Rōshi Kennett, as she was known then, was giving a talk ‒ which I went to. She talked about a man in Germany who, during World War II, was an SS officer, whose job was to mete out sentences for people who had been convicted of espionage. He had two doors behind his desk, both painted black, and he said: “Behind one of the doors is a firing squad, and I can’t tell you what the other one is – and you have to choose between them.”
And this is our choice in life. We can just do the same old thing, go to the firing squad and die at the end of our life and do it all over again. Or, we can go through the door to the unknown. She said that this is Zen practice. And I was thinking, “What kind of torture can be worse than a firing squad?!” Well it turns out behind the second door was a car with its engine running, waiting to take anybody across the Swiss border who had the courage to try it. And I don’t know how many of those people took it, but this is our choice in life. We were born with a bunch of karma and we can either convert that, and do something about the self, or we die and come back again and do it again. Firing squad or whatever, it might be cancer next time or anything, you can’t tell.
And our choice is to decide: “What am I going to do with my life? How do I see my purpose?” Because we do have a purpose. And the spiritual purpose is opened to anyone who has the courage to go through the door to the unknown. But you’ve got to confront Fudō there, and he does look fierce, but he is an aspect of compassion ‒ we like compassion to look like this beautiful lady in the painting in the Kanzeon Shrine, but compassion is sometimes the traffic jam when you are in a hurry; the man at the bank who tells you that you have to come in. We can see these little difficulties as an opportunity to learn, rather than: “Somebody’s getting at me.”
I was at the hermitage once and I saw this really big snake catch a fish, and I just couldn’t leave it. So I quickly got the snake grabbers which have a padded thing that goes around the snake’s neck. I got him in the grabbers and he dropped the fish, which fortunately got back in the pond. But the snake was angry ‒ I had just taken his lunch, probably his dinner too, and he was wriggling and he was real long, longer than I am tall, but I got him in the special bucket that had a hole in it so he could get air. I nipped into the house to get the car key so I could drive him away, and I came back out and I was a bit stressed, you know ‒ this was a big snake! Unfortunately I tripped and knocked the bucket over, and he got loose. I had to go back, get the snake grabbers and find him again. I managed to get him in there eventually. He clearly didn’t want the lid on; he was not at all happy. I had to ride in the car with this snake that was upset, and I knew that there was a little hole there in the lid. Of course I didn’t want this big, angry snake to be loose in the car. So I chanted the Invocation for the Removal of Disasters3 that we did at this ceremony, over and over, for about 20 minutes, and I took him far enough away so that he wouldn’t come back. I went down this forest path, it was a very narrow little path, and when I opened the lid up there he was, totally relaxed. He was very happy to be in this little cave. He was all curled up ‒ more relaxed and at ease than I was! And he was teaching me: “Cool it, there’s no problem here.” So, I said, “OK buddy”, but he didn’t want to get out at that point! So I turned the bucket over and planted him on the ground. But ‒ I had put him between me and the car! So I had to get a stick and I just kind of urged him to find another place to play. But this was all teaching. Everything is there teaching us. We’re the ones that have to learn. Whether it’s the man at the bank, whether it’s the snake, whether it’s the bad weather, whether it’s losing a job, whether it’s not knowing what to do with my life ‒ whatever the dilemma happens to be, we can learn from it.
Lately I’ve been hearing people talking about how their mind is racing, and they can’t sit still because they can’t stop that. Well, you can’t. You can’t stop that mind, and you don’t have to try. You have to shift your attention. It’s like thinking that you own your mind and you can do something because it’s there inside of you, and you think you own it. Well you don’t. You don’t have a deed to it. You don’t have a mortgage on it. You don’t even have a registration certificate! What’s important is to recognize that that mind is just babbling on, and the more you train, the more you meditate, the less energy you give to that mind. And what you’re doing in meditation is just sitting. Instead of focussing and thinking, you just sit. Let that mind do its babbling over there and don’t get involved with it.
You can’t actually make it go away. It’s like Yakusan being able to see the Buddha Nature not only in himself but in all beings. He couldn’t, and you can’t do it perfectly. Sometimes the will is adequate and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the words are adequate, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes both will and words are adequate, sometimes neither are so. And you can’t depend on anything, either inside or outside. Everything is in the process of change.
Ajahn Chah used to teach that you can’t understand the Dharma through words. You can only understand it when you put it into practice. When the Buddha taught the Kalamas, they asked him: “How do we know what we should believe? We’ve got all these different teachers coming here, and they all have different teachings, and we don’t know how to deal with that.” And he said: “Well, take the teaching and put it into practice and see if it works.” That’s frequently translated as the Buddha having said: “Don’t believe anything that I say just because I said it.” That’s not what he actually said. He said: “Put it into practice because this is how you will understand the Dharma.” You hear the words, but the practice is something else. If you practice with those words, you’ll start to see those words differently. There’s a shift in perception that accompanies the doing of this practice. Because you learn when you can shift from, “I don’t want this to happen” to, “OK, let’s try this out.”
For example, for 20 years I was in the temple at Santa Barbara and I figured that by the time I got back here I’d washed enough plastic bags. So on kitchen clean-up I said, “I don’t do bags.” Some years into this I got this very clear message that said, “You’re missing out on something here.” It still took me another five years to change back, to actually admit that I do bags, because I do them at the hermitage, or anywhere I have to.
When there’s something you don’t like, or don’t want to do, that’s a clue that there’s ‘self’ involved. You have to see how that’s still holding onto some anger. In my case it was more like impatience. I don’t like plastic bags because they’re collecting in the Pacific Ocean in areas as big as Texas, and somebody’s going to have to figure out how to deal with these billions of plastic bags that are there. I was thinking about that the other day and realizing that I added one. In 1984 I scattered the ashes of a friend who had died, and his family wanted me to open the bag, out in the ocean, and scatter his ashes in the ocean. I did that, and I did a little prayer, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the bag. And I realized I had just dropped the bag in the water because I didn’t know what to do with it. That wasn’t a good thing to do.
It’s useful to notice, whether it’s from 30 years ago, or from yesterday, or just this morning ‒ noticing, “That wasn’t a good thing to do”, but noticing it in a compassionate way. Not, “You’re a bad person ‒ you put that bag in the ocean.” It’s, “Oh, I don’t want to do that anymore.” And this is the shift in perception from “bad person” to, “Oh, I can learn from this.” We have to be able to make this shift. It’s a bit like being in a place where your car is in reverse, and you have to put it into neutral. Meditation is neutral. So you’ve got to bring stillness to the situation, and then see if there’s another gear you can put the car in. One that says: “I’m not going to act out of anger here, I’m going to let go of that fear.” I made a list of my fears once, and you know what? They weren’t so bad. But still, a snake in your hand that’s wriggling around, and bigger than you are…! Fear comes up, OK?
Sometimes the will is adequate and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes words are adequate and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes will and words are adequate and sometimes they are not. The secret here is that you have what you need to realize your full spiritual potential as a human being. It’s in there already and you can access it. And you access it through the practice. Fudō looks really scary and mean, and so does the snake, or so does whatever it is you don’t want to do, or don’t like.
Ajahn Chah made a big thing out of, “If you don’t like something, do it.” If there’s something you haven’t dealt with in terms of letting go of the self, well it’s going to keep coming up until you look at it. And you’ve got to look at it with compassion. You’ve got to see that you can change how you view it. You can’t change the person that you don’t like, but you can start to see with the eyes of the Buddha. That person has the Buddha nature even though some Buddhas teach us what not to do. They’re still Buddhas.
Reverend Master Jiyu used to say that about a certain President. Well, we have another current example, he’s helping us learn that some Buddhas are teaching us what not to do. They’re still Buddhas, and they’re still making their mistakes publicly which is actually a gift to us because when somebody makes mistakes like that we know instinctively, “Oh, I don’t want to do that.” It can encourage us to realize: “If I am concerned only with myself, how can I help all beings? What do I have to do to help all beings?” Well, you’ve got this ‘filter self’. It’s like living in a cage. And you can only see as far as the bars of that cage, and you’re the one that has the key to that cage. You can change what it is that you do. You can change how you think about things; you can change how you deal with the stuff that is difficult or unpleasant. You can avoid getting too excited about the good things, and too angry about the bad things. You can find the Middle Way. And this is what the Buddha’s teaching is. It’s not ascetic, you don’t have to beat your head against the wall in order to find the truth. You don’t have to starve yourself like the Buddha tried to do. You have to find the Middle Way ‒ what’s reasonable, what’s helpful. We think: “How can I learn to be at ease because I can’t help others until I can find the Buddha nature within myself?” But it helps to try! Even if you don’t feel like you have the Buddha nature, do something for somebody else. Give to the person on the street with the sign that says he’s out of money, give him some money or give him whatever, give him a smile. Treat him with respect. Treat him with kindness. Treat yourself with kindness. See where it is that you create suffering, but see it with kindness, because until you do that, you can’t change it.
Karma is created by volition. It is your intention that is important. The Buddha’s teaching about karma came out of a teaching of karma in India. At the time, some people believed that if you accidentally stepped on an ant, you killed it and you had the same karma as if you had intentionally tried to kill it. And he said, no, if you don’t have any intention of hurting the ant or anything else, that is a different karma. You might see it later and realize it wasn’t a good thing to do, but it doesn’t create the karmic consequences of intentionally, volitionally trying to create harm. And we do it just by reacting. Recently a mosquito was on my wrist and I just went like that. (Brushes arm.) Just instinct; just a jerk reaction. And I realized that it was, in a way, intentional. I wanted him not to bite me. You have to recognize that. Just be honest with yourself. It’s actually such a relief when you don’t have to pretend this didn’t happen. But it’s not always easy to be that honest. You have to train yourself. This is what our practice is about. It comes out of compassion.
Rev. Master Chūshin’s phrase in his hymn, “…the radiant Buddha mind which fills and contains all things.” This is a clue. Everything, every being, everything is filled with compassion, love and wisdom. It fills us, it fills the universe but we don’t necessarily recognize it, because we are not seeing with the eyes of a Buddha. We don’t realize that this little cage of self is keeping us from realizing this infinite compassion, love and wisdom that fills the universe and fills us ‒ fills everything.
This is about the secret of life. The secret is that you don’t lack for anything. The secret is that you have all you need and you have to practice to find that. You have to do the training that opens the door so that happy meeting can take place.
Notes
1. P.T.N.H. Jiyu-Kennett, The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity, Mt. Shasta: Shasta Abbey Press, 1990, p. 263.
2. Denkōroku or The Record of the Transmission of the Light. Rev. Hubert Nearman, O.B.C., translator, Shasta Abbey Press, 1993. Ch. 37, p 191.
3. The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity, p. 266.
