An edited transcript of a Dharma talk given at Shasta Abbey in 2018.

You are perfect, just as you are, but you could use a little improvement.¹

This is a rather well-known, and to me stunning, quote from Shunryu Suzuki Rōshi, who was the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. I thought I’d start this morning by talking about the ‘needing a little improvement’ part of this. I’ll say, first, I would revise the quote: “We are perfect, just as we are, but we could use a little improvement” (‘we’ instead of ‘you’).

It’s easy to recognize how we can use some improvement, and it’s a commonplace image in our training and practice, the image of walking a path toward Buddhahood or Enlightenment, somewhere where we don’t need improvement. We even call it ‘the Path’, and capitalize the P. This notion of training as walking along a path from one place to another, to some kind of goal: this image is embedded in the most fundamental teachings of the Buddha.

After the Buddha was Enlightened, when he gave his first sermon, he talked about the four Noble Truths, which, as most of us know, are that suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end, which is called Nirvana, and there is a path to the end of this suffering called the Noble Eightfold Path, which has eight aspects to it: right view, right intention or thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right meditation.

We also have any number of practices that we do. My Master used to call them the ‘tools in our toolbox’: things like the Precepts – not to kill, not to steal, not to lie, etc; the Paramitas, which are generosity, virtue, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom; the Four Wisdoms – charity, tenderness, benevolence and sympathy; the four Brahma Viharas, which are similar – loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. All of these are qualities of mind and heart that we can cultivate through practice.

There’s letting go of the defiling passions, attempting to rid ourselves of afflictive emotions: greed, anger, hatred, despair – that sort of thing. As we do these practices, the notion behind what we’re doing is that this enables us to come closer and closer to Buddhahood. So we’re walking this path towards Buddhahood. We could say that delusion is converted into Enlightenment and the ordinary person into Buddha. So, we’re ordinary people, and we need to become Buddha.

Reverend Master Jiyu expressed this very well and famously in her translation of the mantra that comes at the end of the Scripture of Great Wisdom. She translated it as:

Going, going, going on beyond, and always going on beyond, always becoming Buddha. Hail!

It’s normally translated as:

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone way beyond,
Awakened. So be it! ²

So you can see how she has taken something that has been placed in the past tense and presented it as something that we are doing constantly for our whole lifetime.

Now I should say – to step back a little bit – that I just listed a number of tools that are in our toolbox, and many of you are familiar with them, and so I’m not going to explain them any further this morning, but those of you who aren’t familiar with them can use these as sort of tantalizing nuggets for further discovery and exploration.

Okay, so Reverend Master Jiyu has us ‘going, going going on beyond’. In my own daily training, it’s like I’ve got this project going. I’m trying to be mindful all the time. I’m trying to be mindful as to whether I’m doing all those things that I just said we could be doing as aspects of our practice. I’m reflecting on every moment as it passes. “Was I irritable? Did I lack generosity? Could I have done that more skillfully?” And all day, I’m watching my states of mind to make sure that I’m working towards loving kindness and patience and that sort of thing. Or I’m asking myself, “Has my mindfulness lapsed? Is my every-minute meditation constant? Am I trying hard enough?”, etc. So that’s my own attempt to walk this path. And this is wonderful practice, isn’t it? These tools that we have are beautiful, and it’s wonderful to be able to have the opportunity to work on them, with them, especially together with other people. We might think of this as the path of purification, this path from delusion to enlightenment, from ordinary person to Buddhahood.

Recently, a monk of our Order pointed out to me that there’s actually a shadow side to this description of walking the Path, and it’s something I’d never really noticed before, I found it really helpful to take this into consideration, so I wanted to pass it on to you.

What this person said was that all this trying to be good – this trying to become something so august as Buddha, trying to remove delusion and become Enlightenment, which takes so very many kalpas, eons of kalpas – all this ‘trying hard’ is a trap. And this word ‘trap’ resonated with me. All of this is trying to achieve a goal that can never be achieved. Try as we might, we never get there. As we walk toward it, it recedes. It’s a little bit like if something’s an infinite distance away, any closer you get, it’s still an infinite distance away.

In fact, the more we try, and the harder we work, and the more we train, and the more sincere we are, we don’t get any closer to this goal, which is ever receding, and we are never good enough. All this trying, and I’m sorry to make things worse, all this trying to be good – a good monk or a good trainee, a good practitioner – may only be an expression of self, the very self we are trying to tame as we march toward Buddhahood. Our attempts to quiet the self only reinforce it: self-absorption, leading to further self-absorption. You can see how we’re in this trap. We’re in a pickle. And it turns out that ‘being good’ is very self-centered. All the time we thought we were being good!

The bigger the self becomes, the more separate we become: a separate me walking the path trying to be good. “How well am I doing?” This undermines our attempts to integrate with emptiness or to recognize our interconnection born of our insubstantiality. So, again, all our attempts to be good only undermine the goal. I think of this as an occupational hazard for monks and laity alike, and a recipe for suffering. It creates suffering instead of bringing an end to it. If we go back to the Four Noble Truths, what we’re up to is, there’s suffering, and we’re coming to know its cause so that we can bring an end to it and attain Nirvana, but all our work along the Path seems to be just adding to that suffering as we try harder and harder to be good. And, for some of us, the result of all this is irritation, frustration, anger – all those mind states we’re trying to eradicate. Once again, there’s the pickle. All this ‘trying to become Buddha’ leads to exhaustion, to hopelessness, to despair.

But if I make only one point in this talk, this is the point I want to make, and understanding this has changed my whole life of practice. This walking the Path, which is such wonderful practice, has a shadow side to it. Recognizing that shadow side can be very helpful. This may particularly resonate with me because of my own particular kōan, which I could summarize as me incessantly asking the question, “Is this good enough?” And the answer always being, “No”.

If you’ve got a kōan like that, trying to be good really does become a trap. If you’re on the other end of the ‘pride and inadequacy’ kōan, this might come out differently for you, I don’t know. However, I said that this changed my whole life of practice. The thing that I think is really important is it didn’t change anything that I do. It simply changed my relationship to what I do. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be walking the Path. Of course we should. This is what our training is all about. Right? As Rumi says, “Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to” and ‘there’s no place to get to’ is key. I’ll come back to that point.

I’m not saying that the metaphor, the image of a path, is useless or harmful. I’m not saying that. One of the things we can see as we walk the Path, is that things actually do get better, in a sense, don’t they? Our anger drops away more readily. We do become more generous. Kindness arises – all these wonderful qualities. We cultivate them and the cultivation works, we become more still. We might even be more joyful, happier. But as I said, I think it can really help to be aware of the shadow side of the Path. We don’t need to do anything about it. It’s enough simply to see it.

As I said, I’m not doing anything differently. I’m just seeing something I hadn’t seen before, which has shifted my relationship to what I’m doing. Meditation is an aspect of our practice which is the balance, or the corrective, to this struggle to be good. Now I’m on the ‘you are perfect, just as you are’ part of what Suzuki Rōshi said. We are perfect just as we are.

Meditation, sitting in the middle of what is, in marvellous stillness, in a vast spaciousness, just seeing This, is the balance to the walking of the Path. When I give meditation instruction, I always say that there’s no goal in our practice of meditation, that there’s nothing to get to, nothing to achieve, nothing to attain, not even Enlightenment, not even Buddhahood – not peace of mind, nothing, not the end of delusion, nothing in particular. We’re just sitting with what’s there.

So, isn’t there a glaring contradiction here? On the one hand, we’re walking this Path to attain this awesome goal, and, on the other hand, I keep saying there’s nothing to attain. There’s no achievement. There’s no particular state of mind we’re aiming for. Our meditation practice isn’t about getting rid of thoughts or afflictive emotions or the pesky self. It’s being with what is, as it is, and it’s that simple. It’s almost, I don’t know, disarmingly simple. If that’s so, it seems that it would stand in direct opposition to this trying to become something, or practicing to become something. Meditation is an expression of our trust that unborn Buddha nature is right here, right now in everything, just as it is. So delusion and Buddha are not two, and we and Buddha are not two.

How can this be so? The truth with a capital T, this thing we’re seeking, and which sometimes seems so far off in the distance, is what actually is right here, right now. It’s what we’re right in the middle of right now. It’s meditation that allows us to know what actually is, which is the truth with a capital T, and stay within it, or sit within it, right in the middle of it.

Reverend Master Leandra, who was the previous Abbot at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, our sister monastery in England, wrote about this in a very helpful way, in a recent OBC Journal. She wrote:

In our tradition of Sōtō Zen, as handed down to us by Great Master Dōgen, the core of our practice is to awaken… ³

Now that’s a lovely, straightforward, simple way to put what it is we’re up to. The core of our practice is to awaken.

…that is to say, to find enlightenment within delusion. Enlightenment is not about replacing delusion with enlightenment, but in coming to “know” that we are enlightened from the first; however, we still need to deal with, or negotiate, our delusions in a manner that is constantly illuminated and clarified by enlightenment.

Okay, so enlightenment is clarifying our delusions.

This is an ongoing process of practice which continues, ad infinitum.

There’s no end, right?

We can come to realize that delusion and enlightenment are insubstantial, in the sense of not having independent self-natures; rather, they are dependent on each other – working companions that benefit one another.

So, delusion and enlightenment are working companions that benefit one another.

Delusion and enlightenment are not two, and coming to realize this is a movement towards understanding what non-duality really means.

That’s what Reverend Master Leandra had to say. To carry on from there, I would say meditation and the Path are not two. They are “working companions that benefit one another”. The same is so of ‘we are perfect, just as we are’ and ‘we need a little improvement’. They’re not two. They’re working companions that benefit each other. Meditation and the Path grow out of each other. We sit in meditation just seeing somehow, miraculously This. Just seeing alters who we are and what we do. It changes us and we act differently. We act anew. I notice, for example, hundreds of pesky little critical thoughts, and something in me says, “No, not that way, no, not that way,” very gently, very quietly, almost so you can’t hear it, and I change course. I choose another path. In this way, meditation and the Path grow out of each other. They are working companions that benefit one another.

In meditation we need only see there’s no need to do. And yet the doing happens of itself within the meditation. Walking the Path, trying to be good – which is, after all, good to do, right? – we see that our very trying undermines the goal, as I tried to lay out at the beginning of the talk. We drop the goal and return to the stillness of meditation and, out of that stillness arises the Path. Being good, i.e. keeping the Precepts, being patient, being generous, actually allows the mind to be still. It helps and supports the mind’s stillness. Our meditation depends on it – really. Our meditation depends on being good, and it couldn’t happen without it.

The question is: “Can we see how inextricably interwoven the still spaciousness of our meditation – which holds everything exactly as it is, all things exactly as they are – and the walking towards Buddhahood of the Path, can we see how inextricably interwoven these two are, and that we truly are perfect already, Buddha, even as we apply ourselves to the hard work of improving ourselves?”

May we never put down walking toward improvement as we sit completely surrounded by, and permeated by, and immersed within, the perfection of Buddha.

Notes

1. Zen Is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki; Chadwick, David Ed. Shambhala Publications, 2007, p 1.
2. The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity. Shasta Abbey Press, 1990, p. .
3. Leandra Robertshaw, Rev. Master, Departure and Integrated Return? A Personal Investigation of the Relationship Between Zen Practice and Psychology in The Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, Summer 2018, P. 33.