Treasure
Photo by Andre Mouton
In this talk Zuisei asks us to bring out our perfection—that is, “to bring ALL of ourselves into the moment where our life is happening.”
Drawing on buddhist texts, as well as the quiet mystery of a secret treasure hunt and the folklore of San Miguel de Allende, a little town in Mexico, Zuisei reflects on what it means to know all of ourselves and each other as treasure. If we really knew this, she asks, how would it affect the way in which we live our lives?
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
It's Monday and a woman gets out of bed. She sits at the kitchen table having a bowl of Cheerios and milk. Next to her, outside her window, you can see a little bit of fog that is settling over the tops of trees. They are just beginning to get bare, getting ready for winter. A moment later she stands in front of the bathroom mirror and brushes her teeth. Carefully, she pulls out a gray cardigan from a row of identical gray cardigans hanging in her bedroom closet. She puts it on. She puts on a coat, a scarf, and a bike helmet, and she bikes to work in the chill morning air. She returns home as the sun is setting. Not too long after, she goes to bed. Tuesday, she gets up. She has her Cheerios. She brushes her teeth, gets dressed, goes to work, and comes home just as she's done every day for a while now. Just as she will most likely do day after day. And all around her change is happening, but she hardly feels it. Inside her little cocoon she is safe.
Then one day, she closes her closet door after getting out her cardigan. Right there, written on the mirror, there's a sign that says, "Come on an adventure. Coffee." She stops. She stares at the sign, looks around, wondering who could have written it. Then she decides to trust. She decides to step forward into what she doesn't know. She jumps on her bike and heads downtown to her local coffee shop.
She goes in and stands in line which she never does because she usually does not go into this coffee shop. She's only there for a couple of minutes before her name is called out. So, she goes up to the counter, and there's a cup right there with her name. She takes it and looks around. There's nobody there—nobody looking at her. She takes the lid off and takes a little sip. It's coffee, it's delicious, so she just drinks it. She drinks it all the way to the bottom and wipes a little foam off her lip. As she's checking the cup again to make sure that there's nothing left she sees that there's something written inside the cup. She looks a little bit more closely, and there's just a single word. Treasure.
She decides it's another clue. She jumps on her bike again and bikes to the other side of town where there is a vintage bookstore. It's called Unexpected Treasures. She goes in and starts pulling books off the shelves one by one, opening them, looking for a note in one of them. She takes one, flips through a book and puts it down. She takes another one, flips through it and puts it down. She keeps running her fingers over the spines looking for what the clue could be. After a while there are piles and piles of books around her, and the light has gotten darker. Finally, she's sitting on the floor unsure of what to do next. She's about to give up, about to leave.
As she's heading out, she sees an envelope on a shelf with her name. She takes it, opens it, and inside is a map. She unfolds the map and sees there's a route very clearly marked with a big X at the end of it. She recognizes the map as a section of the woods near her home. She goes there.
Following the route, she sees the trees are marked with red ribbon. As she's looking at these different markers, she finds an actual cross on the ground and next to it a shovel. She takes the shovel and begins digging. She digs and digs and finds a little wooden box. She takes the box, wipes the dirt off, and opens it. Inside is a photograph of a waterfall. She looks around. There's no waterfall that she can see. But then she sees another tree with a red ribbon on it. So she goes to it. It's a trail.
She follows the trail all the way to the end, and there she finds a waterfall, exactly like the photograph. There's something on the back of the photograph, some kind of writing that she can't quite read. She goes behind the waterfall. There's a cave. At first it’s really dark so she can't really see. As her eyes get used to the darkness, she sees propped up against a rock, a full length mirror. She walks up to it, stands right in front so she can see herself, takes the photograph, turns it around, and there she sees, in the mirror, a word written on it—Treasure. She gets a little teary. There's more, but that's really, in my mind, where it ends.
This is from a short film that Julia pointed me toward. It reminded me of another story, similar but different, that I lived, actually. It took place in a town near where we have our house in Mexico. It's kind of like an artist colony. It's a really beautiful town with small cobblestone streets I call alleyways. There is a legend there, the legend of the Loca of San Miguel—the crazy woman of San Miguel. San Miguel de Allende is the name of the town.
Right in the center of town, there's a hotel. The story went that there was a local woman who had gone crazy when her children had died very close to one another of mysterious causes. Nobody knew why. She lost her mind. She walked around the streets in rags, calling out her children's names. Somebody thought that the town should take care of her. So, they took her in and put her up in a little room that was on the ground floor of the hotel. She didn't know this, but in the room there was a window. So, somebody in the hotel decided that it would be good for business, and actually support the woman, to have people come take a peek at the Loca de San Miguel and leave a little money for her sustenance. Not very ethical, exactly, but this was the situation. So, every time somebody would come into town one of the things to do was to take them to see the crazy woman of San Miguel.
So, you know that it's not quite right, but you're also really curious. Also, you don't want to look like a wuss if you're the one who's being taken. So if somebody tells you about this you are like, Okay, I guess I'll go. The hotel is beautiful, but the side where the room is is really dark. The window is really high up. It's very small, 12 by 6. You have to step up on this rickety wooden step, reach up, and get your nose just past the sill so you can look. Then you have to really squint so that you can see into the room. Truth be told, if you're there then you're kind of scared, but you don't want to show it. You don't know what you're going to see. But you're there, so you pull yourself together and get on the little step. Everybody else is cheering you on. You get your nose just over the glass. Then, you step back, startled. Somebody has to catch you underneath because the first thing that you see when you look closely is your own eyes, white and big, just as you think you're staring into the face of the Loca de San Miguel.
I fell for it. A number of my friends fell for it. A number of my relatives fell for it. In fact, every single time somebody went, they fell for it. If you were really hamming it up, you would do the wails of the Loca that she used to do as she was walking down the street before she was put in the room. You would really build it up [Zuisei laughs] until the person essentially was looking into a mirror. The hotel has since closed down. You can no longer visit the Loca de San Miguel.
I was thinking either way, whether it's treasure or whether it's your darkness, it applies. We are the worthy ones and the crazy ones, the blameless ones and the ones who are at fault, the contrite, the defiant, the clear eyed, the confused, all of it—treasure. Depending on the circumstances of your life, depending on what kind of opportunity you've had, some of that treasure is really polished, really shiny. Some of it is quite rough. Some of it is so dark, you can't even see it.
Daido Roshi, my first Zen teacher, would speak of Sangha (a Buddhist community) as that process of polishing one another. You can think of Zen practice in general—zazen, the precepts, liturgy, the teacher-student relationship, study—as a kind of polishing. Here, the metaphor breaks down a little bit because there is this sense of going from the rough to the shiny. Really, you're either going from rough to rough or shiny to shiny, and it doesn't even matter. Those words don't even matter anymore. It is simply, as I've said in the past, getting out of your way enough so that you can be yourself more or forgetting yourself so that you can be yourself, fully. That is practice. That is the process of living. That is a commitment that we're making to one another to wake up.
This commitment is not abstract. I, myself, take it very seriously. When we enter this [online] practice space, which I believe this is, to me it's as if we are entering a Zendo. It is a little bit more laid back, but it's still a practice space in which we're being with and relating to one another. As we slowly add some of these details like the service positions—having somebody do jikido (timekeeper), having somebody do the chant at the end (liturgist)— how we listen to one another, what we say when we speak up, how we reflect one another's words with our own words— In other words, how we take care. This is true of any practice space, it's true of any space that we enter, but hopefully, as practitioners, that we're entering deliberately. We're intending to be as present as we possibly can and to bring all of ourselves into each moment in which our life is happening. I think it is less about what we're doing, but it's the fact that we decided to do it with every ounce of our being. We are sitting in this way, coming together and practicing together in this way.
Last night, I was sitting with two of my neighbors. They were having a drink and talking. There are ways I pull back if it's not my ideal situation. A couple of people are drinking. A couple of people are smoking. I'm a little uncomfortable. I'm coughing. Then I think to myself, just be here with them. Just be with them. We actually had a very nice time.
I said to Marguerite, who couldn't be here tonight, that it doesn't matter whether you choose to do a week of silent meditation or to go dancing every Saturday. Just choose and do it fully with every ounce of your being. She does, she just feels guilty about it. Why? It's your life. Just be there for it. That's ultimately what matters. We're showing up for our lives.
There's too much in the world that is superficial. There's too much that is downright harmful, of course. Shugen Roshi, my teacher, says that we practice when it's easy here with one another, with our families, with our friends, with the people we know and love. So that we can do it when it is difficult. So that we can do it with the people that we disagree with. Whose views we can barely stand. Or with those whom we see as outright harmful. What does it mean, in that case, to say that someone is a treasure? How do we not have that be a "nice Buddhist" thing to say? Yes, yes, we're all perfect and complete. No, but really.
There's that concert that happened, and this artist apparently always riles people up. There was a stampede. People were getting literally trampled to death. How do we square that with this teaching that everybody is treasure from the beginning. They don't have to do anything. They don't have to prove it. They don't even have to polish it, fundamentally. How is that? How is that? People are polluting the planet. People are making a profit on medicines that people need. Of course, bringing it back, bringing it close, how do we square it with all those parts of ourselves that we don't like, the parts that we are ashamed of? How do we bring the whole thing into line, into alignment, into harmony? When we take care of ourselves, take care of things, take care of one another, how do we do it like we would take care of our child? The Karaniya Metta Sutta says "like a mother protects with her life, her child, her only child." It has to start with a basic attitude of non-harming. Then, with a basic intent to take care. I've always thought that zazen is the most loving form of self care. The most effective, not in every circumstance. Generally. How else will you see in the midst of this chaotic world, this often chaotic mind, that you are indeed, treasure? How will you remember every time we forget? Why do you think I repeat this so often? [Zuisei laughs] Maybe I need to hear it. I do need to hear it just like the rest of us. We forget and we turn away. We turn away from the other. We turn away from all those parts of ourselves that we consider other.
I was reading in the New York Times about the big 12 foot puppet that a group essentially walked from Turkey to Britain. It took a few months over the summer. It arrived just a few weeks ago in Britain. They were walking and stopping in different cities doing different performances. The puppet's name was Little Amal. She was a Syrian child who was looking for her mother. So this was to raise awareness for the plight of refugees. She's a wooden puppet, made of wood, cloth, and paint. People loved her, and people hated her. People talked to her and shook her hand, and people threw eggs and tomatoes at her, at what she represents. Even the Pope shook her hand. They took her to Rome to see the Pope. Well, he shook her finger because it was the only thing he could reach. Very good naturedly, the Pope met with Amal. If you think about it, we're all looking for our mothers if we think of mother as home. We run around, frantically, getting, doing, trying, not knowing that like that story in the Lotus Sutra the jewel was always sewn into our sleeves. We were the jewel all along.
I've been having this email conversation with someone who reminded me of a talk I gave where I refer to the movie, Another Earth. I won't go into the whole story, but one day, Earth appears in the sky, a mirror Earth. It starts to get closer and closer. When they make contact, they realize it is an exact mirror image to this earth, which means all of us here now are over there having exactly or very closely this conversation. So, the protagonist is able to get on a spaceship and go to this other earth. The movie ends when she's face-to-face with herself. After I saw that, I thought, Okay, if I had that opportunity what would I say to myself? Knowing what I know now and not knowing what I don't know, what would I say to myself? What would be my advice? How would I suggest that I live? That's my question to you.
Explore further
01 : The Clue. Short Film.
02 : The Lotus Sutra translated by Burton Watson
03 : Little Amal, A Refugee Puppet, Looks for Home. The New York Times