What's Zen in a nutshell? Part II

Picking off from last time.

Huh?  Who were you talking to there?

Ohhh…nobody.  Nobody at all.

Ummmm….ok.

Now I’ll go through the five key concepts one by one.  Please forgive me for not going into too much detail, as this’ll just be a big picture explanation.

1. Just This.

One of Suzuki Roshi’s students asked him, “What is nirvana?” He said, “Seeing one thing through to the end.”  Seeing one thing through to the end is just this.  In the sense here, Suzuki Roshi isn’t talking about setting some big goal, like starting my new online baking business and then seeing it through to completion.  He’s talking about the here-and-now.  Seeing washing dishes through to the end.  Seeing talking to my wife through to the end.  Seeing washing my hair through to the end.  Seeing just sitting through to the end.

Usually, we don’t see things through to the end.  We listen to our wife, but we’re thinking about what’s for dinner, when that upcoming report’s due, how you’re going to cover the mortgage this month, the fight we watched last night, and so on.  There’s a haze, an anxiousness, a greed that obscures things. We spend most of our lives in a fog of half-heartedness.  Neither here nor there.  Neither listening nor planning.  Never really give ourselves completely to what it is we’re doing.  Just this says: stop with all that.  When washing dishes, just wash the dishes.  When having a nasty conversation with our wives, just have a nasty conversation with our wives.  When we’re super sick with cancer, just be super sick with cancer.  When you’re sitting, just sit.  That is the gateway to nirvana.

Of all concepts, this is king.  The beginning, middle, and end of the path is just wholehearted activity.  And all of the books of philosophy, the wisdom and insight of generations, all of the koans are distilled in this approach. For this reason, Zen’s got a thousand paths.  There’s the Zen of archery, the Zen of poetry, the Zen of tea, the Zen of gardening, the Zen of architecture.  Whatever you can think of, there’s a Zen of it.  Zen’s the religion of just this.

It sounds simple. It is simple.  Yet who can really just eat, just drink, or just play football?  So often our minds are raging around, full of anxiety, doubt, dissatisfaction, excitement.

But it can’t really be that simple, can it?  After all, isn’t there more to Zen than just mopping.  Doesn’t seem very inspiring to me.

It’s not if you need wows and glitter.  Zen has that too.  We’ve got uncountable Buddhas and Buddha realms on the tip of a blade of grass.  We’ve got a thousand-armed Bodhisattva with a thousand ears to hear and respond to the cries of the world.  We’ve got a crazy old geezer who clubs his students over the head to enlightenment.  Sure, we’ve got tricks.  But as Suzuki Roshi used to say, “The world is its own magic.”

Magic isn’t something fantastic waiting in a cave in an exotic land.  This is magic.  This is the miracle.  Just us sitting down talking here like this.  As Suzuki Roshi liked to say, “The world is its own magic.”  Zen worships that.  And both you and I are a part of that wonder.  Isn’t it awesome?

As regards the question “Is Zen really just mopping?” No.  It’s not just that.  It’s a culture and path of awakening.  But if I was going to boil it down to one thing, I’d say it’s just this.  Just mopping.  Just spitting.  Just pissing.

But how do we do that, right?  ‘Cause if it was really that easy, we’d all be Buddhas.

There’d be no purpose of you coming here and me blathering on-and-on.  Yet, here we are.  To help make that a reality, there’s the four areas of development: physical, social, concentration, and wisdom. But no matter how complex the practices we have or the quandaries we’re faced with, it all comes back to this simple principle: wholehearted activity.  Just being.

2. The Four Areas of Development: Physical, Social, Mental, and Wisdom.

Although meditation and insight’s given a lot of attention in book Zen, I spent 6 months off-and-on at Tofuku-ji, a Zen temple whose history, rules, and training system go back to its founding centuries ago.  At Tofuku-ji, there’s dozens of rules for every minute task, ranging from how you wash your bowls, to how to use the toilets, and even how to place your futon when you first wake in the morning.  Worse, even the slightest infraction would get you a withering dress-down, a smack across the face, or, as I witnessed one morning, a snowball shoved down your robes for being a millisecond off beat. It’s a harsh, demanding place that isn’t just sitting around meditating and discussing Buddhist scriptures.

Now, now, I’m not advocating shoving snowballs down monks’ robes.  I’m pointing to the seriousness given to things like how you put your chopsticks on your bowl after you finish your meal (physical development) and how much you contribute to your local community through a lifelong commitment to your parish (social development), not just sitting down and waking up to your nature.  By developing in these four areas, it’ll support us in realizing that lofty goal of…just pulling our socks up and just lacing our shoes.  Wow.

My parents would be so proud of me if they could see me just pulling my socks up after years of Zen study.

That’s the spirit.  Amazing.  Wonderful.  Boring as.

Physical Development: This is your relationship to the physical world, including your own body.  It’s about what type of food you eat, how you spend your money, whether you live in a shack or a mansion, how big your carbon footprint is, and what time you wake up in the morning.

Social Development: This is your relationship to the human world.  It’s about who your friends are, whether you’re honest or not, whether you cheat on your wife and who you vote for.

Mental Development:  This is your mental fitness.  It includes how emotionally resilient you are, how motivated you are, how focused you are, and how well you can manage your own emotions.

Wisdom Development: This is your insight into the nature of reality.  There’s three types of wisdom: mundane, spiritual, metacognitive, and ultimate.  Mundane wisdom is the intellectual ability to pay your taxes on time and manage your money.  Spiritual wisdom is taking that same ability of being able to pay your taxes and manage your money to spiritual topics, like how to manage your time to ensure you’re making spiritual progress.  It also includes having a thorough understanding of Zen principles and being able to apply it to various situations.  The third type is metacognition.  It sounds fancy, but it boils down to being a good manager of your mind.  If you’re upset, you know it and know how to deal with it.  Finally, ultimate wisdom is insight into the fundamental nature of reality: oneness.

3. Wake Up // Grow Up // Clean Up // Show Up

This format is from Ken Wilber and maps nicely onto the Four Areas of Development.  It’s also something sorely lacking in Zen.

Waking up is recognizing oneness and integrating that into your day-to-day experience.  The Buddha or Rinzai are paragons of awakening.  They’ve profoundly recognized what’s at the bottom of this life business.  But, importantly, Ken Wilber points out that this is just one area of development with only slight connections to other areas.  Rinzai, for example, might have an unshakable recognition of oneness, but he might still make horrific political decisions (showing up) or be a shattered grumpster with an abusive streak (cleaning up).

Growing up is seeing the world in more complex, nuanced ways.  Someone who’s grown up in the field of business, for example, sees past particular events and into the deeper causes driving it.  Great examples of this is Warren Buffet and Elon Musk.  They can just see things that other people can’t because of how sophisticated their understanding’s grown.  But, just as with Rinzai, Elon’s technical brilliance doesn’t carry over well to other areas, like waking up.  He’s not going around bouyed by a serene confidence in the indestructible oneness that he is.  He sees costs/benefits and how a product can be improved.

Cleaning up is healing trauma and getting your psyche in order.  A lot of the older Zen teachers completely looked past this aspect of development.  They were awake, but also creepy, arrogant, petty, dramatic, and worse.  Sasaki Roshi, for example, was beloved by his students and trained many inspiring disciples.  He also was a pervy old man that used his prestige to shag girls.

Showing up is bringing your values into the world.  That means instead of just preaching about love and compassion, you actually go out there and support policies that create a more loving and compassionate world.  You protest a new coal power plant that’s going to be built nearby.  You go to local government meetings to get your voice heard.  You engage in the world to concretely make it a better place.  The older generation of monks also fell quite short in this area, with some notable exceptions like Thicht Nhat Hanh.  On the flip side, there are people like Greta Thunberg who might be an informed, passionate change maker, but might also be angry, unloved, and not awake.  Ironically, a lot of the folks I met at the San Francisco Zen Center where burnt out activists.

These four quadrants are related, but also discrete.  If, say, you see the complexity of the human mind, you’re in a better position to overcome any obstacles.  If you’re awake, you’re in a much stronger place to bring something more level-headed and truly caring into the world.  The biggest obstacle that I see to all of these, though, is trauma, or cleaning up.  Folks dragged down by intense inner turmoil and sorrow struggle and it makes pursuing everything else significantly more challenging.
In Zen, there’s a justified focus on waking up.  Unfortunately, that’s accompanied by fantasies that come along with it.  I’ve heard countless Zen teachers, both modern and ancient say, “Just wake up and everything will work out for itself.”

I’ve witnessed teachers dodge complex ethical questions, like “Should I donate to freedom fighters in Burma?” with evasive, “If you just recognize who thought that thought, the answer would be radiantly clear.”  Wrong.  Life doesn’t work that way.
Some Zen Masters, like Kodo Sawaki, zealously backed Japan’s imperial aspirations.  Other Zen Masters, like Sasaki Roshi, sexually abused his students.  They were both, likely, awake.  And yet they behaved in reprehensible ways which had real consequences.  If you believe that enlightenment will suddenly make you an infallible human who makes all the right decisions all the time, you’re in for disappointment.  It’s not that.  At least not in the way that most people think.  Instead, enlightenment, or waking up, is simply recognizing oneness and integrating that into one’s lived experience.  That’s also the main focus of Zen.

4. Absolute/Relative // Wisdom/Skillful Means

At the heart of Zen is the paradox of the absolute and the relative.  The absolute is the oneness that underpins existence.  In oneness, there’s nothing to gain and nothing to lose.  There’s nothing to improve and nothing to get rid of.  There’s nothing happening, no one, and no thing.  It’s perfect, whole, complete, unmoving.  But this is only a partial truth.  The other side is that there is something to gain and something to lose.  There’s something to improve and get rid of.  There’s something happening, someone, and something.  It’s imperfect, fractured, incomplete, and ever-changing. Reality is both. Reality is one and many.

Zen walks the razors edge between these two truths, with different views and practices situating themselves at different points along that spectrum.  Koan and open awareness practices lean towards the absolute truth, but they aren’t 100% absolute truth.  They both require some sort of effort and desire, however subtle, but it’s an effort and desire that will dissolve itself into the sea of oneness.  Being kind and honest leans towards the relative: having more harmonious relationships with other people, a healthier sense of confidence, and a gentler mind.  However, it’s also not 100% relative truth.  At the heart of kindness is the recognition that the difference between you and I’s illusory.  Honesty also means choosing over what’s simple and direct over the quagmire of deception. A person with a high level of integrity will have an easier time of seeing oneness than one caught-up in self-serving lies.

When you see views/practices as resting on this spectrum, it will clear up a lot of the confusion when you hear one teacher say, “There’s no right or wrong!” or “Kill the Buddha!” or “Meditation’s pointless!”  And then go off and lead a five-day retreat with 10-hours of seated meditation a day.  Views and practices are strategies for training the mind and recognizing the truth.  At times, that might mean saying there’s nothing to do and everything’s a delusion.  Or it could also be a teacher yanking on his students’ nose to remind him that it’s not all just an illusion.

5. Bodhisattva

If you stay around Zen folks for long enough, you’ll find them blabbering on about “being a bodhisattva.”  Good.  Let them blabber away.  In fact, I love a good blabber as much as the next one.  Why else would I bother with this if I didn’t, in part, enjoy hearing myself talk?

But that’s another point altogether.  Where were we?  Right, bodhisattvas.  Bodhisattvas are literally beings of awakening and it’s one concept which made Mahayana Buddhism, of which Zen’s a subset, distinct from Hinayana Buddhism.  In Hinayana Buddhism, the goal’s to get to enlightenment as swiftly as possible to ditch this miserable world for good, assuring that you’ll never reborn in any form forever onwards.  In Mahayana, the goal’s to stay in the world and keep helping other beings until we all awaken together.  It’s almost like Christ, except you just keep getting crucified until everyone stops being such a knucklehead. Nothing sums up that intention better than the Bodhisattva vows still chanted daily at Zen monasteries the world over:

Sentient beings are numberless
I vow to liberate them.

Desires are inexhaustible
I vow to put an end to them.

Dharmas are boundless
I vow to master them.

Buddha’s way is unsurpassable
I vow to become it.

Sound impossible?

Don’t even know where to start.

Good.  Then go and do it!

Huh?

Exactly.

You trolling?

Most definitely maybe.

But, joking aside, the vows reflect the absurd predicament that we find ourselves in.  We live as creatures in an impossible world full of possibility.

What does that even mean?The world’s impossible because of it’s interconnected and fleeting nature.  Oneness shows us the futility of trying to improve or change things.  Impermanence shows us the futility of trying to accomplish anything.  Hence, the impossibility of our human condition.

But, on the other hand, there’s infinite potential.  If everything is one, undivided whole, it also means that anything can spring forth from the unformed mass, like the singularity that predated the Big Bang.  And if everything changes, then anything can become anything else.

Because of this, we make friends with impossibility and potential.  We make fools of ourselves. We try, again-and-again to do the impossible.  We try to help everyone, even though we can only affect a few.  We try to extinguish our desires, yet they’re the very lifeblood of our existence.  We try to master the vast dharma, yet there’s always something new to discover.  We try to perfect the Way, yet it ever lies beyond our grasp.

5. Three Jewels: Teacher/Teaching/Community

The teacher here is traditionally the Buddha himself, but, for me, it includes the Zen ancestors who kept this tradition alive until present.  It also includes your teacher now.

In whatever tradition you train in, the teacher is supreme.  Not the dharma.  Not the community.  The reason: it’s got the most gravity of the three of them.  When I was a monk, I lived with my teacher for years.  I heard him piss in the morning.  I watched how he received guests and how he dealt with stubborn, spoiled children.  I saw how he handled mentally broken but self-righteous monks.  He did it with an otherworldly grace that I’ve hardly seen elsewhere.  I absorbed that.  I absorbed the stillness of his presence.  I absorbed the humility and sweetness that perfumed him.  This was far more valuable than a thousand sutras.

Buuuut the teaching, the dharma, is also important.  First, teachers can do some crazy stuff.  Having a philosophical and ethical standard borne from generations is a useful measuring stick.  And, ultimately, this is what the teacher should be sharing: the views and practices that lead to awakening.  Since Zen is a living tradition, that means what that is is constantly changing.

Finally, community, or sangha.  Having friends to discuss and practice with is invaluable.  Although there’s a millenia old tradition of hermits in Asia, almost all monks practiced in small tight-knit communities.  There’s a saying, “Trees in a forest grow straight; trees in isolation, crooked.”  I loved to dismiss this as the ignorance of monks who weren’t truly dead-set on enlightenment.  Long periods of living in solitude made me realize how right they were.  Seclusion’s addictive.  No one to guilt you for waking up late.  No one to compare yourself with.  No one to rope you into drama.  No one to call out your BS.  It’s very comfortable, especially for someone with a solid meditation practice.  But it’s also deceptive.

I’ve met monks who’ve spent decades living in seclusion.  Almost all of them are the biggest jerks I’ve ever met.  Sure, they can probably out meditate me, but they also seem to find the sound of old ladies clanging dishes together unbearable and are about as self-righteous as they come.  Living outside of a community, they become oblivious to their blindspots and oft turn into crusty, out-of-touch grumpsters.  Living with others corrects that and brings people back to earth.