Realizing the True Self

My dear friend, the Zen teacher Dosho Port, recently posted a challenging essay on his blog.  The gist of his message was that Zen communities are not like church communities -- the emphasis, while celebrating community through practicing together -- is about waking up together.  Zen Buddhist temples are not meant to be social clubs.  

And more important, Zen teachers are not therapists, pastoral counselors, or caregivers primarily.  In those kinds of relationships, the relationship is client-centered.  The practitioner/minister/therapist focuses on the student/parishioner/client and their particular constructed stories  about reality, and especially about their unique "habitualized self."  Instead, a Zen teacher focuses on how to awaken to a recognition of the truth of the awakened heart, which exists beyond all kinds of self-identities, personal traumas and narratives. This is my version of what Dosho wrote, so my apologies to him if I missed or distorted anything.  And of course, this is what all of us human beings are doing continually!

And here is the most radical part of the essay, in Dosho's own words: 

"In Zen, the student must direct themselves toward the teacher. Why? If a student is really going to do what's necessary to awaken and go deeply into post-awakening training, it will only work in that way. Plainly put, as long as a student is making the practice about their habitualized self, they will not realize the true self. And only when the student finds the aspiration that burns deep within will they have the power for the Way."

In my experience with students, the journey within, Dogen's "backward step" and Shitou's "Turn around the light to shine within, then just return" are important pointers to a challenging investigation.  We spend so much time building up walls of protection so that we will feel safe in our constructed selves, and once we let someone else in to that tender and deep place we can feel exposed and terrified.  My sense of the Zen teacher's job is to wait for a moment when someone seems ready to open up to a different way of being, and then begin to gently probe, challenge, and affirm.  What is affirmed, of course, is not the constructed, habitualized self, which we cling to for dear life, but the unconstructed self that lies at the core of those layers of protection.  And this is where awakening comes from.  

Awakening is not a thing that happens and then is over.  It's the beginning, and sometimes only a glimpse, of the possibility of a life supported by the energy of the universe.  It is contained in every sensation in the body, every emotion and every thought.  We dismiss too much of our lives because we also have a constructed idea of what awakening is.  We can't believe that awakening includes what we don't want.   And so we exclude many doorways to awakening, because we become selective.  Everything is a doorway to awakening.  Dharma gates are boundless.  

No Other World Sesshin

photo by Pierce Butler

 This past weekend, in the midst of our recovery from the US presidential election, we had a deep and community-building on-line sesshin.  Our tanto, Jenny Smith, assisted by Pierce Butler, Sabrina Mills and David Linshaw, named the sesshin "No Other World."  This was in honor of the text the teachers (Dharma Holder Michael Herzog, David Rynick, Rōshi and me) used as the theme of the retreat, and also a poem by Gary Snyder that I read and commented on called "Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of Zen" which ends with the line "There is no other life."  Our text came from a dialogue in the Record of Xuansha:

A monk said, “I’ve just arrived here and I beg the master to point out a gate whereby I may enter.” Xuansha said, “Do you hear the sound of the water in the creek?” The monk siad, “I hear it.” Xuansha said, “Enter here.” 

In these wild times, Xuansha's teaching remains relevant and inspiring.  Whatever we may feel: grief, anger, fear, happiness, joy...and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, the teaching of the Great Way invites us to enter into this life as it is.  Here we can find the way to being a bodhisattva in this burning world.  And, there is no other world.

Ethan Nichern's Confidence

 

A few months ago I received Ethan Nichtern's amazing book, Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life's Eight Worldly Winds.  I've been interested in these teachings for many years.  My first Zen teacher used to mention the eight worldly winds at the beginning of every sesshin.  His teachings focused on how the winds could be transformed through deep meditation.  

The winds are:  pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and insignificance, and success and failure.  These pairs of opposites assail us regularly as human beings.  Nichtern is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and his book couldn't be more timely, as we all work with these worldly winds in the aftermath of the recent US election.  

Nichtern lived through an organizational crisis in his own sangha, much as I did in Boundless Way after the 2016 election.  He is open about that, and other aspects of his personal life, without getting caught in whining and "too much information."  All of the ways we process our difficulties, blown about as we are by circumstances, show up clearly and with great heart and tenderness in this book.  Free of Buddhist jargon, it's a clear-eyed guide to navigating human life in all its complexity.   I highly recommend it!