Liberation Within
Photo by Jeremy Bishop
Where and who you are are exactly right—even if where you find yourself is a struggle.
In this talk Zuisei reminds us that the focus of Buddhist practice is not liberation from anything but liberation within everything, and that when we practice with this intention, there are no obstacles in our path.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
What I want to talk about is Buddhahood. In Buddhism in general, and certainly in Zen, we speak of enlightenment as samyak-sambodhi. The Buddha's complete realization is anuttara-samyak-sambodhi. The reason I want to speak about it today is because I’ve been reflecting on what I've been hearing from you and from others recently. I’ve been thinking, I say the same thing all the time, sometimes in slightly different ways, sometimes in pretty much the same way. That is just how it is. I would bring the same things to my teacher, sometimes for years. I would say to him how I am so sorry that I just keep bringing this to him, and he would just nod. Now some of you are saying exactly the same things to me, and I just nod and smile because that's what happens. That's what it takes—we have to hear it over and over and over again. It is very much like a flower opening or like a fruit ripening. There's a point at which we're ready, and it blooms, and we get it. The nice thing is that then it's harder to forget. If you stopped practicing, you could forget, but if you continue to practice, certain things really start to go deep. So, a good part of it is repetition and being exposed to the teachings over and over again.
Lately, some of what I've been hearing frequently is a very insistent, sometimes very overt, sometimes very subtle, belief that there is something wrong: there's something wrong with me; there's something wrong with the circumstances; or, at the very least, there's something wrong with the way I'm seeing them. I want to tell you today that that is not the case. When we say the teaching that is so highlighted in Zen, that samsara is nirvana, we are exactly describing how things are. There is no point at which you will, through some great insight, transcend the circumstances in which you find yourself now, whether those circumstances are living with pain, living with emotional turmoil, or living just with your everyday blindnesses. By that I don't mean that you will always be suffering in a way that you may be suffering now, or that things will continue to be the way they are now, because, in fact, they will not. How they will change, we don't know, but they won't stay the same. What I mean is what I say often, which is what pretty much every teacher says at some point: you will become liberated to whatever extent you're able, is your karma, and is the product of your practice within the very circumstances in which you find yourselves right now. Even though we speak of liberation from, really, what we should say is liberation within.
The term Buddhahood does not appear in the sutras in the Pali Canon, as far as I'm aware. It is a Mahayana concept, and it is very much tied into the concept of the Tathāgatagarbha, the womb of vastness. There's a potential, and whether you will give birth to it or not, as I said, depends on a number of things. My first teacher, Daido Roshi, would always say (very frustratingly, I think for some), "Some may realize it, some may not.” Either way, it's okay because that does not erase or negate in any way your Buddhahood—that inherent, not just perfection (it is perfection), utter self-ness. Your utter self-ness is your Norm-ness, Adam-ness, Laura-ness that you are working so hard in this way, and probably in other ways, to more fully live. So you are working not just to become who you are, because you already are who you are, but to more fully live who you are—manifest who you are. There's that famous koan between the Ch'an teacher Nanyue and his Dharma heir Mazu Daoyi, who was his attendant at the time. Mazu is sitting in zazen and Nanyue walks by and says:
"What are you doing?"
"Well, I'm sitting zazen."
"Why? Why are you sitting zazen?"
Mazu says, "To become a Buddha."
So the National Teacher picks up a brick and starts polishing it. Of course, Mazu has to ask, "What are you doing?"
"I'm making a mirror," says Nanyue.
You can't make a mirror by polishing a brick. You can’t become a Buddha by sitting zazen. Yet, we just spent a weekend sitting zazen. That is why sometimes people think that Zen is irrational, that we just go around doing crazy things and crazy gestures, right?
Zen is actually extremely rational in its insistence on erasing those lines between rational and irrational, between thought and realization, despite the fact that you are working to let go of thoughts. The fact is you can realize yourself without thought or outside of thought, you can have even the tiniest insight. The constant paradox is that we're using mind to realize mind, which cannot be fathomed through mind, not in the usual way. I have been engaging with some of you doing Koans. For so long I did them myself with my teachers. I was so immersed in it, and suffering with the process. It's all I could do just to do what I was doing. Now that I'm able to have a little bit more of a bird's eye view, I'm able to feel the process a little bit more, and then work with each of you, and then see, Well, how does this work? What's the most skillful way to work with each of you? I’m learning as I do it, sometimes scaring people away, unfortunately. That's part of it. Now that I'm in this process, I once again am bowled over by the uniqueness and the power of this spiritual tool that is, yes, a koan, but it's also what I have spoken to this group about in different ways, a number of times. It is the power of inquiry, not just with the head and certainly not just with the intellect. It is the power of bringing the entirety of your being to a question.
The incredible, perhaps, unequaled power of this sort of inquiry is not only the purview of religion. I think some of the great scientific discoveries and some of the best art we have are the result of something like this—the result of a grappling of the whole being to understand and express reality. It's just that in our tradition we harness that power very deliberately. We learn how to harness it and how to use it. I see much of my work as just helping you to get rid of what we speak of as the brambles. It really is like this gnarled tangle of stuff that doesn't let you see what is right there in front of you. That is so much of what you're learning here. That is so much of what you're learning to do in zazen. You're not cutting off the brambles, you're just learning to let them wither and fall away by themselves by not fighting with them, by not engaging them.
The truth is that the moment you sit down on this cushion, and you turn toward your breath, in that moment, you're already engaging the totality of Buddhahood. It doesn't feel that way, but it's true. That's why I say sometimes, people are impatient. They want to work koans, or they want to do shikantaza. They've heard of it, they've read about it, and they just want to do it. I say to them, The Buddha didn't do a single koan in his life. He did okay. It's not necessary, it's just helpful. It's useful. As many of you know, I've actually turned the first koan that I normally work on with people, I've turned the breath into that. We're constantly engaging this very mysterious and sometimes frustrating, sometimes puzzling, process in which we are trying to stop all our doing, all our meddling, all our all our creating, so that we can see what is clearly there. At the same time, there has to be effort. We can't just sit there, as my teacher used to say, like a bump on the log. Something needs to be happening; you're engaging it. As one of you said to me just recently, It has to be active. Exactly, but how is it active without more creating? That's the question. That is so much of what we're learning. At every stage of practice, I would say, regardless of what the object of your meditation is, what it is that you're actually working with is you're learning how to do and not do, and not too much of either.
For some reason, the image that is coming to mind as I say that is of unwrapping a gift. The thing is already there, but you have to take the wrapping off, so you can see it, so you can use it. If you just leave it in the box, leave it on your shelf, I mean it looks pretty. You can do anything with it. Sometimes I look back on my own path; most of the time I did too much. I just worked too hard because I didn't know how to do it differently, I think because I wasn't ready to trust that I didn't have to. I wasn’t ready to trust that there was a very delicate balance between that effort (that striving) that the Buddha spoke of, and a real surrender into the process of allowing for that being that wanted, wants still, to manifest itself freely in a very natural way. I feel like I'm still very much learning how to not contrive in my zazen; how to not contrive when I'm working with you; how to not contrive when I'm just going about my life and working and doing things. This fatigue that I've had has actually been really helpful in a very, very ironic way; I just don't have the energy to keep forcing things in the way that I used to. I've been in this really interesting place. There’ve been days when I truly had no choice but to surrender, and what has come out about has been, first of all, so much easier. I don't want to say truer because the part of me that works too hard, tries too hard, is also true to me. It just feels more aligned and perhaps just slightly, even just slightly, more mature. I don't have to keep pushing, but I can trust that I am taken care of. Rilke has this beautiful poem, and I'm not going to remember it, but at the end of it, it says something like if you're feeling the sadness and you feel overwhelmed by the sadness, something like, know that the world has you in its hand.
I guess I'm trusting that more in my zazen and the rest of my life. No one can really tell you. I mean, sometimes you ask me, and I do my best to say what I see, or to reflect what I see that might be helpful at a particular point in your path, but really, truly, the only one who truly knows, the one who's truly the authority of you, is you.
I remember my teacher, especially towards the end of my training, Shugen Roshi saying to me, You need to more and more become your own teacher. He felt very strongly about that. He had done that same process as he was finishing his training, then of course, as he started to teach and continue. He said, There are things that I will see that I will offer to you, but then there will be things that I won't, or I won't see in the same way. So it's up to you to recognize what those things are (What will help you?) and to nourish yourself in that way. The fact is, I think that's true all along the way, not just when you're finishing your training. It's helpful to have a teacher, it's helpful to have a guide, someone to point, but each of you hopefully is very actively engaged with yourself and your life and your practice, and asking, What do I need? What is the skillful means, not what I think it should be, but what is it truly, right now?
Many of us here have trained in a very rigorous environment. It has been so interesting and difficult and humbling and wonderful for me to be outside of that environment; to figure out how to practice with integrity in the place where I find myself both physically and emotionally, and spiritually; to not keep comparing now to how it was; and to not hold how it was as the standard because then I will constantly be disappointed; to let this be not just enough but everything I need. Sometimes it is challenging. Sometimes I do wish I could do what I did before. Of course, that too, I accept as part of this increasing acceptance of my life as it is now. I used to fight all the time. I guess I had the energy for it. I used to fight the circumstances, I used to rebel constantly. I was just very quiet about it and sometimes not so quiet. All the time fighting, I just don't have the energy for it anymore, but the nice thing is that I also don't have the will for it anymore. That's just not how I want to spend my time, not anymore, because I want my energy for this—for my life.
Sometimes I wish you knew (and I don't know how to say it so you'll believe me) that where you are in what you're doing is exactly right and exactly what you need to be doing—even when it feels shitty because sometimes it is. I mean, how many times have I said, Just living as a human being is hard. It's wondrous, but it is hard. How do we not fight that? We get these stories of the Buddha and because they're the sutras, you know, they're very cleaned up. Forget about the Mahayana, I mean that is the Buddha's radiance, his splendor, omniscience, etc. In the sutras where he's still human, we don't hear about his struggles, except for that whole sequence of the ascetic practices. I mean, he really put himself through the ringer there. Actually, a fellow teacher was just telling us the other day that there is a sutra in which the Buddha assigns a practice to a couple of monastics then he goes away. He must have been traveling. Either they did not understand the instructions correctly, or it was not the right practice for them. When he comes back they've killed themselves. Imagine what that must have felt like. That happened to the Dalai Lama as well. Every single one of us, no matter how realized, will struggle, will hurt, will regret, probably. I would imagine there was some form of regret there for him.
We have, sometimes, these very highly realized models of practice. As I was saying just a moment ago, sometimes we have very high standards for practice and I think that is wonderful. We're very lucky. I feel so incredibly lucky to have had the kind of training that I've had, and within that, if there's one thing I wish, it’s that I had started to soften just a little earlier, a little sooner. It didn't happen, so I'm not going to beat myself up for it, but now that's what I'm sharing with you. Hold both sides—that rigor and seriousness, the earnestness of our vows, of our commitment, with a very, very generous softening/allowance of how we are now in this moment.
I've said how, in some ways, I've been so grateful for Zoom because despite its limitations, it's giving us quite a bit of freedom. You can come and go in a way that you wouldn't if you were doing sesshin, certainly at Zen Mountain Monastery, in person. You can choose to lay down, and practice that way if you need to. You can take care of your baby, if she needs care, and none of that has to interfere with your practice. That's what I want to highlight. None of it is an obstacle if you don't make it into one. I have days when I wake up naturally at four in the morning and I'm ready to go. I can sit for a couple of hours, and I just do all the things that I want to do, need to do, and then there are the two nap days, and everything in between. I am grateful for both, for all of it. If you don't already, allow me to suggest that when you open your eyes in the morning, if you have an altar, when you stand in front of your altar and you're doing your morning liturgy, or you're simply just bringing to mind your aspiration, in your own words, let it include something like this:
May I not just realize but may I live into my perfection today, exactly as I am today—not later, when I will feel better, when I will have more energy, when I will be more focused, but right now. However that looks, let me offer that to the world.
Explore further
01 : The Three Hundred Koans: Case 8, Nanyue Polishes a Brick by Zen Mater Dogen, with commentary by John Daido Loori Roshi
02 : Letters to a Young Poet: Excerpt by Rainer Maria Rilke
03 : Gateless Gate, Case 36: Meeting A Person Of The Way with Zuisei Goddard