True Nature

"The capacity of the mind is so great, it’s like space…In this world of ours, space has room for the sun and the moon and the stars, the earth and its mountains and rivers, every plant and tree, bad people and good people, bad teachings and good teachings, heavens and hells. All this exists in space. The emptiness of our nature is also like this….Our nature contains the ten thousand dharmas (things). That’s how great it is. "

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, trans: Red Pine



Right now I’m sitting in a motel room in Barstow, California, deep in the Mohave desert. I just made myself a cup of tea, and as I sip it I’m remembering Spirit Rock, and the many times during my month of silence this February that I sat on the bench in front of the dining hall with a cup of tea warming my hands, looking over the hills to the sky beyond. How much I appreciated each sip, how much I appreciated the sky and clouds as they changed, the echoes with other retreats when I had sat on that same bench, the breeze against my face.

In some ways, that’s all that happened for that month of silence. I sipped cups of tea, I sat in my room with my breath, I walked the beautiful open hills, I listened to birds. Sometimes I walked in rain, sometimes in sunlight. Sometimes my mind was clear and light and easy, sometimes cloudy. I could just leave it at that, and it would be accurate. At the end of a retreat, the teachers advise that if someone asks you about your retreat, just smile and say, “It was great.” That’s all people want to know anyway. But I want to say more, at the risk of saying less, because the gifts that come from retreat feel beyond the personal. They’re glimpses into what it means to be human, what we really are, what our minds can know and hold, what is possible.

The quote above is from a teaching given in 8th century China by a great Zen teacher, Hui-Neng. The teaching was so inspiring and encouraging and powerful that it has been read and memorized and quoted for the last twelve hundred years or so, in China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and now the West. It sounds lofty and abstract, but I think he’s just talking about something as close as this mind, right now. Space is nothing special, but it can hold everything. The human mind seems confused, but it can hold everything too: heavens and hells, happiness and sadness, birdsong and the sky and the gritty feel of sand in the palm. That’s what I saw, in this month of silence – not “saw” in the sense of “intellectually understood”, but “saw” in the sense of “directly experienced”. And it came through an unlikely teacher: pain.

Those who know me know that I’ve wrestled with a chronic illness for a long time. One of the symptoms, when the illness is active, is severe body pain, like the pain of a high fever. I was in pain when the retreat started, and for about half the time I was there. Strong pain while in silence can be quite overwhelming, because there’s no distraction, no buffer between the mind and the pain – no book to read, no movie to watch, no telephone to pick up to call a friend. I’ve left retreats because the pain was too strong and my misery was too great. But developing a relationship with the illness and with pain is important, because it’s part of my life, not anything I can push away or pretend isn’t there, and I wanted to see if something other than misery was possible.

In the first few days, I wondered whether I would have to leave. I wasn’t sure I could be in silence and hurt that much. My mind felt like a white-water river, tumultuous and frightened. But as the days passed and my mind settled, I could feel myself getting calmer and wider and happier, like that same river when it comes out of the mountains and on to the plains.

I remembered a teaching by Darlene Cohen, the author of Turning Suffering Inside Out. Darlene has had rheumatoid arthritis for thirty years, and is also a Zen teacher. One of her teachings is, “Find what doesn’t hurt, what is pleasant. That’s there too.” When we’re in pain we tend to lock on to the pain, to close down around it, but at the same time that there’s pain, there’s also sweetness – the warmth of a cup of tea, the softness of fabric against the skin – and if we’re not careful we’ll miss the sweetness altogether, lost in our bad dream. When we open up a little, there’s room for pain and pleasure, sweetness and suffering, and that changes our relationship to both.

At the same time, one of the teachers at the retreat gave a talk on a traditional Buddhist teaching about how we relate to sense experiences. Basically, every time we have a sense experience – seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, thinking – right away there’s one of three possible visceral responses to it: we like it, we don’t like it, or we’re not sure whether we like it or don’t like it. That response is almost hard-wired, although we can grow to like things we once disliked, and grow to dislike things we once liked.

What usually happens is that we miss the moment of that visceral response, and go immediately to trying to get more of it (ice cream, for instance), or less of it (physical pain, for instance). This activity actually takes up a lot of our waking energy. Traditionally it’s taught that if you can just see that initial response in a neutral way (“Oh, this is unpleasant”), without going into the cascade of “Oh, make this go away”, there’s the possibility of freedom, right in that moment.

So I applied both those teachings to the physical pain I was experiencing: I opened up my senses to the things that were happening that weren’t painful, and I just noticed when something was pleasant or unpleasant. And, miracle of miracles, I found freedom, right in the midst of the pain. I found that I could know that pain was happening without contracting around it and desperately wanting it to go away, and that the experience of not contracting was actually joyful. I could be in pain, notice the light through the leaves of the tree, feel happiness in my heart, and sip a cup of tea. Room for everything, just as Hui-Neng said. The mind vast like the sky. What a discovery.

And the strange thing was that the pain itself responded, and instead of staying steady day in and day out, it would come and go, as if it was also more free, now that I wasn’t clenched around it. And whatever it was doing, I was OK. More than OK. Really happy.

I had a dream, while I was there, that I was in a high wind, and the wind was buffeting me and pelting me with stones and silt, but my mind was peaceful and steady, even in the middle of the chaos and roar of the wind. To know that it’s possible to be peaceful in the high winds of life, and not just when things are easy ….that’s freedom.

And it’s not just possible for people who spend months in meditation. People who spend months in meditation are like astronauts going to the moon or oceanographers diving deep in the ocean – they do it for the rest of us. We may never do those things, but what they learn about the nature of the universe opens us up to new possibilities. I learned a little about my own nature, which is the same as yours – and now I offer it to you.



“In your dark house of afflictions
keep the sun of wisdom shining”

The Platform Sutra

Pause

I'll be disappearing from the blogosphere for the next month; on February 1st I'll enter a thirty day silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I thought, as my last blog for a while, that I might share some writing on the practice of silence. These are excerpts from an essay in a book manuscript that I'm hoping will find a publisher in the next year: Not Dwelling Anywhere: Essays From a Time of Pilgrimage.

"We’ve always been around – the people who go apart to some high hill or cave, the people who go on walk-about alone, the people who choose to marry Christ and listen for his whisper. Maybe others would do this if they could, but not all lives have room for such a luxury. And maybe, for some, there’s fear in the thought of silence.

I remember the first time I heard of the possibility of a silent retreat. It was the winter of 1983, I was eighteen, and I was in Washington D.C, living and working with a radical homeless advocacy group. My mother had an old friend in D.C., Tilford Dudley, a socialist lawyer who had come from Illinois during the Roosevelt. His wife, Martha, befriended me. She was a poet and birdwatcher, and I was living in the heart of poverty and concrete, faced with suffering on a scale I’d never seen before. She would scoop me up and take me on long walks along the creeks and forests outside the city, taking care of me in her quiet way. One day we were walking in the hills, our feet shuffling through dry leaves, and she began to tell me about another young friend of hers who had just returned from ten days of silence. We were both baffled by what that might be like, both intrigued. I can remember that we were walking beneath a bridge. I can remember something in me lighting up like a new star.

Six years later I finally made my way to my first retreat. It was a women’s vipassana meditation retreat, held in a Catholic convent outside Santa Rosa, California. It was late March, and the grassy hills were green as the finest brocade and covered in wildflowers. I remember two things from that retreat: realizing with relief that I actually didn’t have to believe all the ridiculous, self-centered thoughts in my mind, and moments of walking in the hills when pure joy flooded into me, so intense that I wondered whether my heart could bear it. The salmon had found its home stream.

Living in silence is not what it looks like from the outside. I think from the outside it seems like a form of asceticism, a relinquishment of community and relationship for some higher good, a voluntary descent into darkness. It doesn’t look like much fun: people in silence tend to look serious, if not downright dour. The inside of a person on retreat is a whole different story. Suzuki Roshi said, “I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing..” When I shut my mouth, I can start to hear, and it turns out that what I can hear is beautiful. Ditto with what I can see, what I can taste, what I can smell, what I can touch. Suzuki Roshi could have just as easily said that he tried to teach his students to look at a tree, to eat an orange, to meet another human being.

Ordinary life is, I think, like being wrapped in layers and layers of cotton wool, protected and defended from our direct experience. Silence unwraps some of those layers. I remember coming out of a retreat and reading a newspaper in the airport. There had been a disaster, as there are always disasters, but this one went right to my heart. I sat on the plastic chair with the newspaper in my hands and I wept. And I was glad to be weeping: it seemed like the sanest, most deeply human response to such news.

I never know what will happen on a retreat. I’ve learned over the years not to assume anything, and certainly not to plan for anything. With stunning accuracy, what needs to be healed appears, spontaneously and often in direct opposition to what I would like to have happen.

In the second year of pilgrimage, I spent a month in silence. Within the first day, a huge pain and sorrow appeared in the center of my heart. I had no idea why it was there, or what had triggered it. I’d spent my previous long retreat in a state of happiness and bliss, far beyond what I had ever known, and I half-expected to continue that bliss. Something had other ideas. For thirty long days I learned about courage. I sat with the pain, opening wider and wider to it like a woman in labor, learning to hold it with compassion, learning not to run away. When the retreat ended, so did the pain, as mysteriously as it appeared. What I do know is that those thirty days changed my relationship to great emotional difficulty, my own and that of others.

I think it can seem like a retreat is a retreat from the world, a retreat into solipsistic naval-gazing Paradoxically, to spend time with others in silence is intensely intimate. I spent a winter at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, more than ten years ago. Every morning we would wake well before dawn and walk down to the meditation hall beneath the bare-limbed trees in the cold mountain air, the way lit by kerosene lanterns. We all wore black Zen robes, so in some ways we looked alike, but by the end of the first month I could recognize every person in the dark by the way they walked, the tilt of a head, the gesture of a hand. Even from the back I knew my fellow-travelers. There were no locks or keys at Tassajara: it was inconceivable that we would steal from one another or hurt one another after sitting hour after hour together in the hall, the roar of the creek filling all our ears, the same gruel filling all our bellies. I learned to trust at Tassajara – to trust the inherent goodness and kindness that arises when those layers of cotton wool begin to come apart.

Tomorrow I’ll enter that silence again, as I have so many times before. I’ll sit with my own mind and heart, not knowing what will happen, trusting the silence. I do know that a few days into the retreat my heart will begin to open on its rusty hinges, and I’ll be filled with gratitude – for the courage of the people who sit around me, for the depth of this tradition, for the beauty of the world. Whatever else happens in a retreat, gratitude is always there, like the delicate scent of a single stick of incense, as natural as the blue of the sky."

God's Filling Station Revisited

For those who read my blog on December 3rd (God's Filling Station), you may remember that I wrote about how moved and inspired I was by an NPR interview with the lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik. Yesterday I happened to pick up an old newspaper article from December, and read, with sadness, that Richard Cizik was asked to resign from his nearly 30-year position as the Washington lobbyist for the NAE, as a direct result of that interview with Terry Gross. You can read about here.

Apparently his primary mistake was to voice some tentative support for civil unions, but it's clear from the article that there have been powerful voices within the evangelical movement who have been hoping to find a way to silence him for a long time now. He was a fervent advocate of "creation care" - Christian environmentalism - and tremendously concerned about global warming. I can only hope that voices such as his - voices of tolerance, compassion, care for the non-human world, and willingness to compromise - will continue to step forward within all religious traditions. We need them so desperately.

On a related note, I just found an article in Buddhadharma on Buddhism and a response to global climate change. That lead me to a really quite wonderful online magazine: EcoBuddhism Quarterly Review. All religions - all people - run the risk of complacency in the face of global warming. We Buddhists may pride ourselves on our tolerance, but we can indeed by self-referential navel-gazers on occasion, and we too need to be reminded of the connection between our practice and compassion for the world, human and non-human.

And Yet, and Yet....

Last night I was attending the weekly seminar that my Zen teacher, Norman Fischer, offers in Corte Madera. Two days before, Norman lost his closest spiritual friend, his anam cara of 40 years, Rabbi Alan Lew. Rabbi Lew was teaching at a retreat on the East Coast, went for a walk, and died on the side of the road.

Norman and Alan practiced together at Tassajara Zen Monastery in the 1980's, and became life-long friends there. One became a Zen priest, one became a rabbi, seemingly divergent paths, but for the last three decades they have continued to practice and teach together, illuminating each other's lives and bringing back contemplative practices into American Judaism in ways that have reverberated throughout the world and have touched hundreds or thousands of people. What finer example of spiritual friendship could there be?

I didn't think Norman would be at the seminar this week. I knew he'd been with Rabbi Lew's family since Monday, carrying not only his own huge grief but the grief of the people who most loved and needed his friend. But he came and sat and spoke to us. This month we're studying the Heart Sutra , which is the most important and widely chanted text from the Buddhist emptiness teachings...teachings that form the basis of both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.

The emptiness teachings offer a radical, fluid and open view of reality - one that emphasizes interconnection, grasplessness, boundlessness. We think we know what we are and what the world is, but it (and we) are essentially ungraspable, beyond categories and thought, not independently existing in the way we tend to think we are. This can be either frightening or freeing, depending on how comfortable one is with not knowing exactly what's going on.

There is a poem about life and reality from the end of the Diamond Sutra:

"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space

an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble

a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning

view all created things like this." (trans Red Pine, 2001)

So from this perspective, even life and death are not what they seem and there's nothing to mourn. Rabbi Lew has simply (as Norman said at one point in his talk), "radically changed form". And there's truth, and sometimes even comfort in seeing things this way. But then there is the matter of the human heart.

The 18th century Haiku poet Issa endured a life of extraordinary tragedy, including the early deaths of his wife and all three of his children. His most powerful haiku was composed at the grave of his daughter, Sato:

The world of dew

is a world of dew, and yet

and yet...

No matter what we know, no matter how clearly we know that the nature of the world and our lives is fundamental impermanence, we cry when the flowers fall, or as Norman said last night, "Love dictates that I not give up my tears."

There's a beautiful koan, a Zen story, about a woman, a student of the famous teacher Hakuin, whose beloved niece had died. She was standing in front of the altar, sobbing, when another of Hakuin's students entered the hall. He scolded her and said, "I thought you were a true Zen person. Why are you crying?" (in other words, "I thought you understood the emptiness teachings, but it looks like you don't"). She turned to him and said, "My tears are my offerings to my niece, the candles and flowers on the altar to honor her life and death."

I've heard the teachings of the Heart Sutra many times, but seeing my teacher sitting in front of us in all of his tremendous sorrow, teaching with his whole body the deep paradox of life- that everything slips away, and nothing slips away, and still we cry, still we love, still we break over and over again - well, last night I felt the Heart Sutra in my bones, in the center of the center of my heart.

You can hear Norman's talk here.

Silence and the Mind of Winter

Happy New Year! I'm humbled and awed by something I've just read, an extraordinary essay about silence by a man now silenced by Lou Gehrig's disease. I'd love to share it - if you have a moment, please read it - it's astonishingly beautiful, and utterly evocative of winter and its gifts: Winter Mind.

Here's the Wallace Stevens poem that begins the essay:

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

of the January sun; and not to think

of any misery in the sound of the wind...

from The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954, Alfred A. Knopf.

Winter and silence dance with one another....I think of the traditional Zen 90-day practice periods and the silence of the zendo in the winter dark, the rain on the roof the only sound in the whole world. Or the silence of a morning after a deep snow, the single set of footprints or the brush-stroke of an owl's wing as it swept down on a mouse the only marks of life in the whiteness.

In a month I'll enter 30 days of silence at Spirit Rock . Although I've entered into silence many times in my life, I never know what gifts will come my way from such a radical choice. I know that I'm already leaning toward it, like a tree leaning toward the season when the sap goes down into the roots and the moon tangles itself in the bare branches, dreaming in the dark.

Musings from a snow-covered houseboat

What makes community, REAL community? I mean people who take care of one another, not because they've made a New Year's resolution to be a better neighbor or friend or church member, but as naturally as one would reach behind for a pillow in the middle of the night, without weighing the trouble or effort.

In some places this wouldn't even be a question; I don't think my African brother-in-law spends a lot of time wondering about how to create community - he's part of many communities, as simply as drawing breath. But some of us seem to have lost the knack. As a neighbor said to me once years ago, with a perfectly straight face, "I'm from southern California. We don't believe in talking to our neighbors." I have a few thoughts on the ingredients of real community: proximity, mutuality, interdependence...all the usual suspects. But after the last week, I think there may be one ingredient often overlooked by the urban planners and idealists: genuine hardship or danger - the kind that makes everyone remember that none of us can make it alone.

I spent Christmas week snow-bound on my sister's houseboat in Seattle. It began snowing the week before Christmas, and just never stopped, and the snow piled up deeper and deeper on the twenty or so little Victorian-era houseboats tied cheek-by-jowl on her dock, whispering down on to every surface, turning all but the water white. Every morning I would wake to the grating of many snow shovels just outside the window of my room. I would peer between the wooden slats of the Venetian blinds, and would see all the men of the dock out clearing the snow and ice that had accumulated overnight, working together to keep us from slipping off into that cold, dark water on either side. There was talk and laughter amid the serious work, and by the time we went outside with my sister's two month old baby, the long dock was cleared of snow.

One night after dark, as I was singing to the baby so that my sister could get some work done, a neighbor came to the door, a woman in her sixties. She had noticed that the snow had slid off our roof on to the deck around the first floor, and she was concerned that the snow would unbalance us. She had two shovels; one for herself and one for my sister. Another morning I heard a commotion on a neighbor's roof: she and several other neighbors were on her slanted roof shoveling the snow and ice into the water, seemingly calm in the face of the danger of sliding into the water along with the snow. A houseboat unbalanced by snow is no joke: each is held up by a system of underwater air-filled barrels, and too much weight on one side could cause serious trouble, for the boat itself and for the whole dock.

All the houseboats are tied to the same dock with many lines, and so a problem for one becomes a problem for all. All of us had to negotiate the slippery dock to make it to the street. There was a strong sense of camaraderie and tolerance for one another on the dock, and I felt that if we had needed anything, a dozen hands would have reached out to help. It felt very different than an ordinary urban neighborhood: closer, warmer, more interdependent. But then again, people had chosen to live this way - in small spaces, close together, on floating homes that are vulnerable to the natural forces in a way we land-livers don't usually consider.


Years ago, I spent three months in the depths of winter at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, deep in the Los Padres Wilderness Area east of Big Sur. That January, it rained without ceasing, and all of Monterey County was declared a disaster area, wracked by floods and mudslides and tremendous difficulty. Tassajara is a cluster of mostly unheated buildings, surrounded by wilderness, and 15 miles in on a road that is rough even on a good day in midsummer. Multiple slides on the road blocked us from the outside world for days at a time, but we were fine, better than most of the rest of the county. There were sixty people there; we had food and geothermal energy and strong hands and a commitment to take care of each other. What would have been dangerous in an ordinary suburban community was just another winter day at Tassajara.

This summer Tassajara faced even more extraordinary challenges: a huge wildfire raged for weeks in the mountains, and eventually the fire-fighters retreated. It was too dangerous to stay and fight the fire, they said. But some of the residents of Tassajara stayed, and when the fire arrived from four sides simultaneously, they saved the place (see the dramatic story here).

We live in a big, seemingly anonymous country, where many of us feel isolated and inconsequential, disconnected from others and from our own power to be helpful, to be bodhisattvas, whether by shoveling a neighbor's roof as the water looms below, or fighting a fire to save a place you love. (Instead our biggest contribution, we're told by the news, is to go out and spend our dwindling dollars to "save" the economy.) We think we choose this way of life, like my neighbor from Southern California, but we're also trapped by it, and by the coldness it breeds in the heart.

I wonder a bit, as things get harder economically, whether there may be a place for real community to grow again, like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk, born of actually needing each other just a little bit more, born of hardship, of discovering that we are truly like my sister's houseboat community, all tied to the same dock, knowing that when one is in danger, all are at risk, and when one is helped, all are made more whole.

More Slipping Glimpser

Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right;

when I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!

It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me:

I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff.

As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping, most of the time,

into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser…..

(Wllem de Kooning, Sketchbook1: Three Americans, 1960)