Category: Zen

As we can all see, systemic discrimination is overtly thriving in our polarized society.  This problem is so big and multifaceted, I sometimes despair as to how can I enter such an opaque and deep-rooted problem.  Where is the entry point? Where is the Gate?  How can Zen Practice help?

During Zazen, I began to approach the problem of discrimination as a Koan.  What is this Koan of Discrimination asking of me?  Where do I enter the complex flow of feeling and ideas wrapped up around discrimination?  What can I do?

As I have done so many times after my ordination, I turn to the Pledges of a Novice Priest for insight.  The sixth pledge is the most poetic and sometimes the most inscrutable.  “I will open the Gate of Enlightenment, stand just outside that threshold hearing the cries of existence, and help usher all creation through.”  In the Koan of Discrimination, this pledge manifests itself as Compassion as the Entry Point to Discrimination. 

Sometimes Compassion can manifest itself as the Sword that Kills.  An example of this would be a frank conversation with a friend who is gripped by fear of loss and clings to discrimination as a defensive mechanism.  I call this the zero-sum-game mentality, where the idea of unity is forsaken for a reality where there are only winners and losers.

Sometimes Compassion can manifest itself as the Sword that Gives Life.  An example of this would be to offer an opportunity to someone who is the victim of discrimination (remember, perpetrators can also be victims).  Offer an ear, advice, an internship, a job, training, an interview, money, time, talent.  Anything that is feely given is a treasure.

I know on the surface, this sounds inadequate.  But, if each one of us were to express Compassion to another with just one small act of Loving-Kindness, each of these acts, collectively will work to bring unity out of the future.

Any ideas how will you express the Koan of Discrimination through the Gate of Compassion?

The Buddha taught there are three things that make all the difference between your practice being merely a way of bringing temporary relaxation, peace, and bliss, or of becoming a powerful cause for your enlightenment and the enlightenment of others. These are sometimes referred to as the Three Noble Principles.

Good in the beginning:  Arousing bodhichitta, (spontaneous wish to attain enlightenment motivated by great compassion for all sentient beings), as a skilful means to ensure that your practice becomes a source of merit for the future,

Good in the middle:  Maintaining the view of the nature of mind, the attitude of non-grasping free from conceptualization, that secures the practice so that the merit cannot be destroyed by circumstances, and

Good in the end:  Sealing the practice properly by dedicating the merit, which will ensure that it continually grows ever greater.

The current civil unrest gripping our nation is surely having a strong emotional impact on all of us.  I believe that the Three Noble Principles cited above can be a gateway to understanding our times and ourselves.  As Zen Practitioners, we practice to maintain and express a deep appreciation of our lives through the direct experience of not knowing.  This relinquishing of our empty, self-imposed sense of control over our lives creates the space necessary for us to freely act authentically and appropriately to each situation and idea we encounter.

The freedom to act authentically and appropriately is a heavy responsibility which is why we must examine our emotional and cognitive reactions to situations and events before we act.  Please, let us take the time to examine our response to this difficult time, especially our habitual “knee-jerk” responses as these are typically manifestations of fear, anger and uncertainty.

When the Buddha taught that it is Good in the beginning, Good in the middle and Good in the end, he was not only referring to our practice but also to the ever changing dharma world as a whole.  Reminding us that everything is perfect just as it is. 

Now, this reminder does not mean that we are “cosmic door-mats” and we should just take it!  It is a reminder that only through realized and carefully deliberate compassionate action can our collective consciousness more closely resemble an Enlightened Consciousness of Equanimity.

I believe it is our responsibility as Zen Practitioners to truly try and live for the enlightenment of ourselves and the enlightenment of others through compassionate,  action born from a place of loving-kindness during these difficult and trying times.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf,

“and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Covid-19 has given us a lot of time to think about what to do with the time we have.  The situation is forcing us to decide what to do because the previous dynamics of our lives has been overtaken by the events of this pandemic.  Are you focusing on one thing to get done, or on the many things that attract your interest?  Are you becoming expert at one thing or apprentice at many things.

Do you pine for the “way things were” or are you leaving the past to the past and taking hold of the present.  Please take the words of Gandalf to heart because time is short.  At night in the practice of Zen we chant

Time quickly passes by and opportunity is lost.

Each of us must strive to awaken, awaken.

 Take heed!  Do not squander your life.

In this era of COVID – 19 it seems like a good time to pull out a old classic Koan to help us understand what is happening to us and our collective lives during this pandemic.

At Nansen’s place one day the (monks of) the eastern and

western halls were arguing about a cat.  When Nansen saw

this, he then held up the cat and said, “If you can speak, then I

will not kill it.”  No one in the community replied.  

Nansen cut the cat into two pieces.

 This story about killing the cat is widely discussed in monasteries everywhere. Some say that the holding up is it; some say it lies in the cutting. But actually, these bear no relation to it at all.  Dogen said, “Cutting into two is easy to see, but cutting into One is invisible…”

If Nansen were COVID – 19 and the cat were your LIFE…how would you speak?  SPEAK! SPEAK!

Have you ever felt like the way life IS and the way you WANT IT TO BE are separate and different?  I think we have all felt this type of GAP from ourselves.  When we experience this type of separation, it is a symptom of lack of attention, of appreciation and of connection.  A famous Zen Koan “Ordinary Mind is The Way” describes this situation:

Joshu earnestly asked Nansen, “What is the Way?”

Nansen answered, “Ordinary mind is the Way.”

Joshu asked, “Should I direct myself toward it or not?”

Nansen said, “If you try to turn toward it, you go against it.”

Joshu asked, “If I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that it’s the Way?”

Nansen answered, “The Way does not belong to knowing or not knowing.

Ordinary mind is a mind that is intimately connected to and utterly interested in the lives we are experiencing right now.  How can I move towards something I am?  I am already IT so there is no longer an I or an IT, there is only THIS.  When we encounter life this way we enter the FLOW of our own lives and there is no separation, no GAP between the way life IS and the way I WANT IT TO BE.

So What is Ordinary Mind?

 Be Aware of your Life

Be Intimately Connected to your Situation

Be Utterly Interested in your Activities

Enter the Flow of Focused Attention

 This is Ordinary Mind

Developing a wholistic approach to life requires that we acknowledge how our habitual behaviors dictate our choices and encourage our actions.  When we function on “auto-pilot” in our reaction to life’s presentation, we may not be optimizing our response and our expression may not foster a sense of harmony with ourselves and our surroundings.

In order to have some control over our habitual responses, we need to understand them.  To foster the habits that add value to our lives and discard our negative habits.  Replacing them with new habits that will be more beneficial to our goal of realizing collective unity.  But developing new habits can be difficult due to a basic innate mental resistance to new and sometimes difficult undertakings.

We tend to start something new with great enthusiasm and find that change comes easy in the beginning.  But as the demands of change become difficult, we inevitably loose our enthusiasm and momentum.  I find may times we build change into a kind of a mountain we have to climb and we talk ourselves out of the attempt through various mental constructs (you know what they are, this is too hard…this takes too long…this is not working…).  They are typically the same excuses applied in varying ways to different challenges.

In an attempt to break down the Mental Resistance, develop a WHY.  Why are you attempting to change?  It is this WHY that will keep you going after the initial motivation of the newness of change dissipates and it will guard you against those pesky high expectations.  When the expectation is to read a book, meditate for 30 min or run 3 miles, it may be easy to do once, but our mind will tell us it is too hard to sustain as a habit so we will quit or maybe not even start. 

So, what we want to do is break the big habit that we are resisting down into a smaller, more manageable task.  This where the 2 MINUTE RULE can help.  By using this simple rule, we can begin to train our mind to see that the habit is easy.  So, if we want to read a book, read for 2 min each day.  Meditate, meditate for 2 min each day.  Run, run for 2 min. each day.  Your goal most likely can not be completed in 2 min., but the habit can be started in that time and reinforced through repetition and practice.  Because, once you start doing something, it is much easier to just continue.

In Buddhism the topic of Right Effort is one aspect of the Eightfold Path – one of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the original teachings.  Right Effort exhorts us to prevent the arising of “unwholesome states” and generate “wholesome states”. 

And what is right effort?

Here I arouse my will, put forth effort, generate energy, exert my mind,

and strive to prevent the arising of negative mental states and habits.

Here I arouse my will, put forth effort, generate energy, exert my mind,

and strive to maintain wholesome mental states and habits that have already arisen,

to keep them free of delusion, to develop, increase, cultivate, and perfect them.

This is called right effort.

You can see that the Buddha gave us a tall order in his original teachings.  This is why, I believe, the 2 MINUTE RULE is the perfect tool to help us achieve the Right Effort the Buddha so compassionately taught us to deliver to our own lives.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages across the US and the Globe, I often ask myself, what is happening in the real world outside of what FOX, CNN and MSNBC are spewing.  How have we as a Country and a People come to view increased death rates among our population as the cost of doing business for stimulating our economy?  In order to gain insight into this dilemma, I went back to my old Economic Text Books from Business School to search for answers.  Our current predicament sounds amazingly like a Liquidity Trap locked in by a quarantine.   

A Liquidity Trap is a Keynesian Economic Theory that postulates a situation wherein interest rates reach near zero (zero interest-rate policy) yet do not effectively stimulate the economy. In theory, near-zero interest rates should encourage firms and consumers to borrow and spend. However, as in the case of the COVID-19 Pandemic, if too many individuals or corporations focus on survival or failure, rather than prosperity and spending, lower interest rates have less effect on investment and consumption behavior. 

In conventional times, one remedy to a liquidity trap is expanding the money supply via quantitative easing or other techniques in which money is effectively printed to purchase assets, thereby creating inflationary expectations that cause savers to begin spending again.  This is what the Government is currently doing, but due to various stay at home orders, social distancing policies and job losses, the engine of discretionary spending has been sidelined.  This closing of our economy for public health concerns is causing frustration among those citizens that require current income to survive.  No wonder near 0% interest rates are not having a material effect on economic activity.

This brief analysis gives us a glimpse into how we have come to a place where we are contemplating “the acceptable death rate to economic activity ratio.”  How much risk are we each willing to take?  How much death are we willing to endure as some States shift their focus from the public physical health to the public economic health?

I believe this way of thinking is a moral wound inflicted by a false choice brought about by a deeply held sense of separation.  The misguided expectation that life is a Zero Sum game wherein prosperity is finite commodity and there are winners and losers independent from each other. 

In Zen we proport to practice realizing our essential nature in the myriad forms and people of the phenomenal world.  To awaken to the total interpenetrating reality beyond separation of self and other.  To remind us of our need to repent from this self-inflicted separation, we chant:

Releasing all harmful Karma,

Ever created by me since of old

On account of my beginningless

Greed, Anger and Ignorance

Born of my Conduct, Speech and Thought

Now I return to Oneness

 Maybe viewing this pandemic as an opportunity to unify rather than to continue our culture of separation could be a gateway into liberating us from this diabolical thinking that my prosperity is contingent on someone else’s hardship and death.

Yun Men (Ummon) was successor to Hsueh Feng (Seppo) and was founder of the Ummon School of Zen Buddhism.  This school of Zen is described as a Bright Red Flag upon a Distant Mountain (easy to see, difficult to approach).  Ummon’s school is deep and difficult to understand since its mode of expression is indirect; while it talks about the south, it is looking at the north.

Ummon said to the community, “Within heaven and earth, through space and time, there is a jewel, hidden inside the mountain of form.”

We all know that we are intrinsically Buddha.  But through our delusions and preconceived modes of behavior, we fail to realize this fundamental fact.  Ummon, in his unwavering compassion, gives us a glimpse into this dilemma.  Like a grandmother chewing our food for us he gives us, “there is a jewel, hidden inside the mountain of form.”  Tell me, how is it hidden when it is in plain sight?