Full Transcript

Okay. Good morning, everybody. On the way over the pass this morning, it was really foggy. It was quite clear where I live, but then suddenly fog, fog, fog, fog, fog. And it took a little longer than usual to get here. While I was driving, I heard the Katie Lang song, "Closer to Fine." I don't know if you know this song, but even though I shouldn't have, I wrote down some of the lyrics. My car does drive itself part of the time. And it was really striking to me, this one little couplet, the words for this:

"I wrapped my fear around me like a blanket.

I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it.

I'm crawling on your shores."

All of that seems like the Buddha's teaching to me. He taught suffering and the release of suffering. He taught us how to be happy, how to live with what is, how to be closer to fine with just how it is.

So of course, that reminds me of an old Zen story. This last week, my friend Tim Tolan at Milwaukee Zen Center, he was at Ryo Manji with Shuso. And this was his koan. I sat through his Shuso ceremony. So I want to tell you about this koan. Tim, you've heard this one before, just the koan. It's really lovely. It's number 69 from the Blue Cliff record. You've heard it before, maybe. Nanshwan or Nansen draws a circle.

So there are three Dharma brothers in this story, and they're climbing up a mountain together, kind of on a pilgrimage to pay respects to the Chinese national teacher. When they get halfway up the mountain, one of them, Nanshwan, says, he draws a circle on the ground, and he says, "If you can speak to his other Dharma brothers, if you can speak, then we can go on." One of the Dharma brothers said nothing with his mouth, sat down right in the middle of the circle. The other Dharma brother made a small bow. One translation says a small bow. The other translation says a curtsy. We could talk about what that curtsy could mean.

So if you can think of this circle as representing the universe, ultimate truth, Buddhism, everything everywhere all the time, what can you say about the truth that will remain the truth after it's been said or expressed? But then again, if you don't communicate something about the truth, no one can understand. The pointer to this case has a couple of lines. I'm not going to do the whole pointer, but I think this is helpful: "Sitting inside the circle, there's no place to bite it."

So we're going to come back to this koan later, but maybe let it run on an alternate radio station while we're talking.

I've been reading, thank you, Tim, Bu Sholan's new book. It's called "Singing and Dancing are the Voice of the Law." You might remember Bu Sholan. He came and was a guest on our online sangha last year. I think it was last year. It could have been the year before. Time has become very, very fluid. And he's very famous in my mind and heart for saying, "Pick up the crying baby," which was a great teaching for me. And so you can see and listen to his talk. It's on our YouTube channel. I'm pretty sure that talk. This is a really wonderful book. I'm really enjoying it. I'm not done. This book is a commentary on Hakuin's song of Zazen, which so far sounds to me like a yay, Mahayana Buddhism song, but I'm really loving his Bu Sholan insights.

So Bu Sholan says this about Zazen: "Over time, you will start becoming aware of the dynamic of resistance and surrender over and over and over again. We fear our suffering and offer resistance. Then we surrender and move into it with grace and increasing ease. If you remain distant and aloof, like not feeling and not feeling witness, you're stuck. Notice the more fluid and graceful this flowing dynamic is, the more you expand into lightness, freedom and joy."

So in our practice, we talk quite a lot about suffering, this deep awareness of one's own pain. And through practice, we may come to understand this awareness of deep suffering is actually a Dharma gate to compassion. This is the way to happiness, to be and accept the deep suffering is also the mountain path. I know that in my practice, I've learned to deeply trust this pain, that the way in which I experience feeling separate or notice other people separating me. This is an essential component to my own happiness that is right inside of everything, the circle. This is actually the place of my awakening, and hopefully everyone is practicing being willing and courageous.

I know that I've experienced over and over again that being okay, even with acute pain, I am also naturally able to stop separating myself from others. And remember, the Buddha taught us not to believe what we're told, but to actually experience this ourselves. We have to kind of prove it to ourselves. And this is where I've proven it to myself, where I continue to find out for myself that this practice is liberative, that happiness is available right here in the circle of everything happening right now.

So about investigating our pain, I could make the argument that what happens in our practice is an open investigation of what Jung called, Carl Jung, called Enantiodromia. Enantiodromia, Enantiodromia. Enantios is the Greek for opposite, and dromos means running a course, opposite course running. Enantiodromia is the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. So if you think about equilibrium in nature, how things end up in balance, Enantiodromia emerges when any extreme is opposed by the system in order to bring things back into balance. So they turn into their opposite.

Carl Jung is the one who made this term modern, and these are his words: "This phenomenon practically occurs when an extreme one sided tendency dominates conscious life. In time, an equally powerful counter position is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control."

Here's an example you might recognize. Pet peeve. Once you become aware of your pet peeves and the identity to which you attach, you're no longer able to support them. This opposite force arises and you're like, oh, I can't do this anymore. Or perhaps we, meaning all of us, tend to habitually enact an extreme one sided tendency to see ourselves as a victim or someone else. Over time, we might actually be able to see ourselves as a perpetrator, someone else as a perpetrator, and do the same to others. Over time, we might come to see that how we see ourselves, how we otherwise other people is really us identifying ourselves to wit. That guy over there is really us. And then making that guy into the perpetrator. I am him. He's me.

So, so far in Boucher's book, he doesn't go into all the Jungian stuff. Not yet. I'm not done. He might. But he does talk about compassion arising from sadness. And that compassion for this one, of course, extends to everyone because there's no more victim and perpetrator than from their wisdom.

So Boucher wrote this: "It's important that we understand these qualities and the order in which they most helpfully arise. Compassion first, wisdom second. And compassion arises from sadness. We skip sadness at our peril. Wisdom without compassion isn't really wisdom. Compassion without wisdom isn't compassion. It's codependency and measurement. It's enabling."

So I'm really enjoying Boucher's touch on our unconscious motivations, the ways in which we keep repeating behaviors, how we habitually reenact our individualized patternicity of suffering. Like everyone else who has a practice of paying attention, I watch my patterns arise and sometimes hallelujah. I can see them before I actually speak or do anything, including the way I speak to myself about these things. This pause before I do anything is this huge, incredibly beneficial byproduct of practice. To not automatically enact one's conditioned behaviors, to take a pause to kind of like press the refresh button for a moment, to not speak, to not act, to just sit with it and do nothing to allow ourselves this incredibly luxurious space of being OK, being fine with what's happening, not trying to kill it or grab it or identify with it, but just being OK with it for a minute. It's this great gift we give to ourselves and others. It keeps us from otherizing us and everybody else. It keeps us in the circle of everything.

And I got to say we can't rush that process of waiting, waiting to allow that feeling to move through us. There are no shortcuts. And I guess the unconscious has always probably been a hot topic. But, you know, these days researchers are spending quite a lot of time looking at it, but I feel like the extent to which we've been influenced by unconscious conditioning is nothing new. And in fact, long before Freud and Jung, we had this concept of samskara, which already provided a pretty sophisticated explanation for the causal forces that shape our unwitting actions and our responses.

The word samskara comes from the Sanskrit, sam, you know the sam, complete or joined together like a circle. And cara, which is action or cause or doing. Samskara. It's commonly translated. We often hear people talk about it as habit, pattern, habit, energy. Sometimes it's called recollection. These patterns are unconscious and create the inner and mostly unseen inner drives that influence our choices on our speech and our conduct. Some scars can be either maladaptive or adaptive. Adaptive samskaras generate kind of kind and virtuous actions like we have good habits, right? They're not all sucky. Some of them are beneficial. Some of them are good. And they generate kindness and virtuous behavior, but maladaptive or negative samskaras engender craving and delusion and aversion, strengthening the bonds of karma. And I would say halting our sense of being closer to find to happiness.

So how do you know you've activated a samskara? I think you all know how you've activated a samskara. You experience this really strong emotional, mental, physical reaction, which is very difficult to let go. You know how you feel about your pet peeves, for example. And then the next stage might be you feel kind of stuck in this thought or this emotional or this physical sensation. You're stuck in a loop. And the next thing, if you're paying attention, you might be able to trace it back to an earlier experience and you think, oh, it's actually not happening here, except through my habitual patterning of it. And you may also, fourth, feel it's impossible to move off the flooded response. And this is where Zazen comes in. Zazen gives us this tool to work with these unconscious influencers through our conscious awareness of them. This is how we transform our suffering to compassion, to wisdom. This is how we release suffering. This is what the Buddha might have called happiness.

So back to our koan. Suddenly one of the monks heading up the mountain stops the path and says, hold it. He draws a circle on the road and demands that someone says something before they can go on. One of the others, brothers, steps into the circle and sits down. The other brother makes a small bow. So if we say the circle is wholeness or oneness or everything or a womb of it all. For me, this idea of it being a womb kind of helps me understand the curtsy translation, because women would often make a small bow, curtsy, a small bow to keep their clothes from getting in the dirt, I guess. And they're not going to be women because they have nicer clothes. And so this small bow could be admitting the feminine right then. That circle is the womb is the feminine. They've been going on a mountain path, which is straight. So this is yin and yang. That's one way of looking at that small bow. Maybe it's an acknowledgement of the feminine.

Perhaps this koan is reminding us that we're all already encircled. We're all already in the circle. No one can get a bite out of it because none of us can get it at all. We can't remove ourselves from the wholeness, even though we do a lot of behaviors that remove ourselves from the wholeness, we think. Perhaps this koan is reminding us that we already embody the truth in ourselves. There's nowhere we have to go. We don't have to go up the mountain. Just sit down in the middle of our lives and wake up.

The ancients, that means the Buddha and Jung and Freud and Boucher. Ask us to dedicate ourselves to a way which align us with this deeper reality, which includes material and motivations that we're not always conscious of. They're not even easily accessible unless you're willing to sit with them. And the question is, are we willing? Are we willing to sit here without any expectation of results? This is a challenge for most of us because we really want results and we really want to be in charge. Well, I'll speak for myself. I really want to be in control and I want to know what's going on. And that's not the right question, as Kohen Sensei once said. That's not the question. In fact, in Zazen and maybe in life, we actually aren't doing anything that we could say we're in control of. We're simply allowing life to be our teacher. We're allowing what is already doing us. At least that's how it feels to me.

So we can experience shikantaza, our practice of just sitting as effortless, like breathing. Breathing just happens without you trying to breathe. Sitting shikantaza, we can just let things be. We can receive information through all of our senses and we can leave it alone. We can stop interfering. We might say, as often said, we might get out of our own way. We can see our own resistance and say, OK, we notice what's arising and we can let it go. In other words, we sit down in the middle of the circle, the circle of our own lives, where we are, the circle of all those circles of all of our lives, where this is happening right now. And this right in the middle of the messy, painful, joyous, chaotic thing of our lives. There's no place else to go and nowhere else where we're going to be more one with everything. There's just this where it's happening. And this is where we have to sit to awake. So we have to let it move us to awareness, to compassion, to wisdom. We have to sit down in the middle of our own suffering, right in the middle of this ever widening Sangha, which is everybody everywhere all the time, and open ourselves up, open all of ourselves up to this troubled beauty.

So there's two things I'd like to end with. One is the end of Katie Lang's song, the refrain, closer to fine. The refrain says, "The less I ask the source for some definitive, the less I ask the source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine." So that's a teaching. The more we can admit we're already in the circle, but the circle contains everything we need to wake up, the closer we are to fine.

And the last thing I want to give you is a Buddhist joke, which is relevant, at least in this mind and heart, it's relevant. Once upon a time, there was a great teacher. He was kind of a guru. And there were students clamoring to see him clamoring, clamoring. This one guy had been trying to get to him for it's like a New Yorker cartoon, climbing the mountain, trying to get to him like these monks paying homage, climbing the mountain, climbing the mountain, climbing the mountain. Finally, he gets an audience with this great, great teacher. And he gets up there and he just spills his life and tell me, tell me, what's it all about? And the great teacher bows to him and says, "I'm going to give you a mantra. I want you to just chant this mantra all the time. This is the mantra. Om Wadi Gu Sayam. Om Wadi Gu Sayam. Om Wadi Gu Sayam. Like Sayami, Sayam. Om Wadi Gu Sayam." So the guy says, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." And he heads down the mountain and he's chanting "Om Wadi Gu Sayam. Om Wadi Gu Sayam. Om, what a goose I am." And he's liberated.

Thank you for listening. I'm going to stop recording. Hang on.F