given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
June 11, 2008
The word "discipline" conjures up a variety of different associations, some of them positive some less so. "Discipline" makes one think of monks living a disciplined life in a monastery but also soldiers living the constained lifestyle of military discipline. Discipline also has become a euphanism for "punishment" in parenting - I had to discipline my child. And in education it's become a euphemism for control, I remember being asked in teaching job interviews how I would maintain discipline in the classroom.
All of these different uses of the word have an element of strength. And they all revolve around behaviour - around what people actually do as opposed to what they say they will do. So it's a word of action. But it also seems to involve coercion and control of other beings. Which feels disturbing.
Sometimes you hear the phrase "inner discipline" perhaps the beginning of an attempt to carve out some healthy territority. Inner discipline seems to be in contrast to external discipline - to discipline emposed by others. Something you do for yourself.
Webster's gives the etymology of discipline as a noun as "Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; the Latin disciplina teaching, learning, from discipulus pupil. 13th century" So it also has it's roots in learning and teaching.
But as a noun it's first definition is punishment, followed by instruction which is shown as obsolete. A scientific discipline. Then " training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character", followed by "control gained by enforcing obedience or order, or orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior."
And lastly the dictionary lists "self-discipline" as a separate, hyphenated word with a more recent introduction into the language. First used in 1838 we have self-discipline as "correction or regulation of oneself for the sake of improvement." So that's when the enlightenment idea of self improvement came into it.
We take the idea of improvement much for granted and probably that idea of improving ourselves in some way is one of our motivations for taking up a sprititual practice, or spiritual discipline, like Yoga or Zen, but in the 13th century I don't think the idea of self improvement was so common. I wish I had a good reference on the history of thought and consciousness but I am pretty sure that self-improvement like the phrase itself is a recent idea in our history.
And as an idea it has mixed blessings. On the one hand it is very positive. There is always room for growth and improvement in life. We can all become more happy, stronger, more flexible, sexier, more joyful, and so on and so on. On the other hand it is some serious trouble. We are all therefor currently not very happy, not strong, stiff and inflexible, cut off from our sexuality, and miserable otherwise why would we need to get involved in improving anything. Improvement almost always has some element of desire, of greed even, and a big dose of non-acceptance of things are they currently are.
And even below that dynamic of improvement versus self-acceptance there is a very big assumption that Buddhism works very directly on us to deconstruct. The assumption is the assumption of our personhood. Our self. Our me-ness as a fixed and definable person at this particular point on this scale. Complex to be certain, you need a lot of different measures to describe me, but still if you have enough you can define who I am and where I am at. I am an extrovert or an introvert. I am shy or gregarious. I am smart or dull. I am spiritual or not spiritual and so on and so on. I am in balance or out of balance. We have established a strong and compelling view of who we are and where we stand. And from that point we seek self-improvement or maybe are discouraged that we don't get around to seeking self-improvement.
So if that assumption of personhood is not as solid as we think it is and if self-improvement and self-discipline is a kind of double edged sword mixed with the potential for abuse and manipulation then what is healthy discipline? Is discipline even a territory we want to be in and explore?
Our idea in practice is to work towards finding a healthy place from which to work. A healthy discipline of living. A solid and enduring way to find satisfaction, appreciation and gratitude for the great gift of being alive. That's the outcome we hope from for our healthy discipline, otherwise what's the point of making effort?
And the other downside to our usual approach to happiness and self-improvement is that we tend to look for improvements that can be measured. This makes sense and we take it for granted that we want to measure our improvement, but if you think about it that's a troublesome plan.
Before I couldn't do a handstand and now after working on my yoga for a few years I can. Fantastic, now I can add "I can do a handstand" to my bucket of self-worth. And I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, inversions are great and I'm sure they have many benefits. But you know what? Being able to do a handstand is a very temporary state of affairs. Very temporary. It's what we call in the Buddhist trade a "conditioned state" - it is conditioned, or dependant upon, a lot of factors all of them themselves ephemeral and temporary. You have to have good balance, you have have strong arms and open shoulders and a healthy back. Well maybe those conditions in a lucky person will be there more or less continually for some years but sooner or later one or more of them will be gone. Every one of us will sooner or later get sick. Every one of us will sooner or later get old. Every one of us will sooner or later die. And when those states arive we can't do handstands anymore. If our self-improvement and our self-worth are hinged on these conditional things we are setting ourselves up for a big fall. A very big fall. And that sooner or later isn't always going to be "later" like we all hope. It could be sooner. It could be tomorrow and then where are you? All of the progress, all of the abilities, all of the identity markers we are carefully accumulating in our self-improvement work will leave us. Anything that can be added will be taken away. What is healthy discipline in light of this reality of our living?
Healthy discipline needs to help us reorient away from a focus on results. And it seems like healthy discipline needs to help us refocus on this very moment of experience. What is the quality of my living right now? Is there joy? Is there appreciation? Is there gratitude?
Because there actually is a happiness that's not dependant on any accomplishments or conventional improvements. There's the happiness of deeply resting in the present moment and appreciating that which is actually happening. This happiness gets many names which tend to flip us right back into accomplishment and accumulation mode so it's a little tricky for us because we have a strong tendency to want to accumulate something and get something.
The healthy discipline I'm talking about has to do with radically taking care of ourselves. And in this taking care of ourselves we realize there was really never a self there to take care of in the first place, so we take care of ourselves as a method for taking care of the whole world.
The particulars of what a life of healthy discipline are seem to vary tremendously for people,there isn't any one recipe. Some form of spiritual life seems to be a fairly universal component. Some way of returning to the immediacy of this moment of our actual living and getting beyond our ideas about ourself in some way you can really feel. Something that becomes little by little ingrained in us. Something that gives us a renewed and renewable sense of possibility beyond the confines of this small person. Some lived way of expressing this life beyond our concept of it. And I think this needs to be really something we do, something we live. Thinking and reading can support and encourage us in this but the spiritual life is somehow beyond the concepts that are the medium of thinking and reading.
You could also say that the practice of healthy discipline is the practice of precepts. That's one enumeration handed down to us of what healthy discipline might look like in a life. The negative consequences of lying and stealing and insulting others short circuits our efforts towards healthy discipline while the positive consequences of kindness, speaking carefully and truly, bring harmony to the mind and energize our practice of healthy disipline.
Discipline does seem to have some measurable and concrete aspects. Measurable things aren't all bad, we live in a measurable world it appears. For example a discipline I work with is sitting in meditation every morning. This is a measurable thing. Either I do it or I don't. Maybe I pull off my full routine with an incense offering, bowing, sitting for 30 min, a little yoga. Or maybe I just manage the incense offering or sitting down for a minute. I do know that doing something everyday in this way really helps my life in a short term and a long term way. But it's a concrete thing, either I do or I don't or somewhere in between. It's something I can see and measure. That's one part of discipline. You have to actually do something.
And yet if we are too focussed on the doing we have problems. Many problems. We get upset when we don't do. We feel guilty and that makes it harder to continue. We measure ourselves against some internal standard or we measure ourselves against others. And depending on conditions we either always come up short or we are prideful about how good we are at it. We are guilty or haughty. Neither seems so healthy.
So discipline needs to include also the unmeasurable to approach being healthy discipline. The paramitas and other pracitces point to this unmeasurable aspect. Our healthy discipline needs to be fueled not by a score card but by the power of our aspiration, by our intention, by our vow.
In Buddhism we take up the discipline of meditation practice and everything that goes with that as part of our vow to support all beings in their awakening. We recognize that doing the practice has benefits for ourself but that aspiration to help everyone is what drives the bus. The deep intention to live a life of service and support for all from a deep place of balance and wisdom, to live a life of compassion is the vow we aspire to. So that's a key part of healthy discipline. It's not just trying to be good and take care of ourselves, it's to live a life that's based on an endless and expansive vision of a world full of joy, of a world at peace. To live a life based on that premise. And this is hard to do, the world weighs heavily on us, so many things are not going well. The news is full of suffering and disaster. The current spiral of the economy has people talking all kinds of "end times" talk just now, it's a very good time to practice. So our discipline is to get up each morning and as we awaken to re-awaken that vow, that potential of human life.
So I think a healthy discipline includes these two aspects. The concrete day to day things we are trying our best to do and also keeping our deepest aspirations alive. Renewing them each day.
A Buddhist list worth considering as a guide to healthy discipline is the list of the paramitas of "perfections" - unlike many Buddhist lists these practices are listed in the positive and affirm us in our efforts to wisely extend into the universe to generate benefit. They deserve a whole series of talks really but in brief there are the the practices of Bodhisattvas that purify karma and benefit others. There are 6 original, core paramitas, and 4 that were added later. All 10 are worth our attention.
They are 1) Dana paramita - generosity. The Diamond Sutra promotes this practice as does the Buddha in the teachings in the Pali Canon as the key to all practices. I love this quote from the Buddha talking about the incredibly positive benefits of generosity which you might have seen on our newsletter. "Oh monks, if people knew, as I know, the result of giving and sharing they would not eat without having given, nor would they allow the stain of stinginess to obsess them and take root in their minds. Even if it were their last morsel, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared it, if there were someone to share it with. But monks, as people do not know, as I know, the result of giving and sharing, they eat without having given, and the stain of stinginess obsesses them and takes root in their minds." This makes me think that our household is trying to give 5% of our income to charity and the main obstacle for me is just getting around to it. I guess if I knew as the Buddha does the real results of generosity I would have that giving way higher on my priority list.
2) Sila paramita - virtue, morality, practicing the precepts. And so the precepts themselves are here.
3) Ksanti paramita - patience. And not just putting up with things patience, this is the transcendent patience of Buddhas with no little worms of anxiety and impatience in there. Just breathing and being with beings giving them all the time they need.
4) Virya paramita - enthusiastic energy. This is the effort we bring to bear on our healthy discipline practices. We rouse up energy with enthusiasm and joy. We have fun with this life as we work with it. We recognize it's perfection as it is and as Suzuki roshi said that it needs a little improvement.
5) Dhyana paramita - strong concentration, as from meditation practice. Sit every day if you can. Come to zazen with the community and also if you haven't already you might consider trying the longer retreats. The word "Zen" itself is a transliteration of Dhyana, so this paramita is our whole practice in a way.
6) Prajna paramita - transcendent wisdom. We chant about prajna paramita all the time. This is the wisdom that includes an understanding of the empty nature of all things. Everything exists as a temporary constellation of factors, marked by impermanence and non-self. There's nothing there to get too excited or attached to and yet everything is beautiful and complete. To see both sides of this is the liberating insight of prajna which really loosens us up and makes things like the endless patience of Buddha possible and sensible.
7) Upaya paramita - skillful means. This can be the 2nd level of practicing the precepts - the relative level where you may need to apparently break the precepts in order to fully follow the precepts. It's hard to know what's skillful most of the time but the comitmment of upaya paramita is to keep trying to help ourselves and others in the best ways we can find.
8) Pranidhana paramita - vow or resolution. I am lately more and more interested in this practice and trying to connect with it. I am doing a class as Samish called The Precepts as Vow because I think that the deep power of vow might be a kind of missing ingredient in our practice sometimes. The antidote to mechanical and step-wise efforts. The Boddhisattva vows are a good example of vow. They inspire us at the level of vow we are energized but at the level of practical reality they are overwhelming and impossible, so it's skillful to work with a vow at the level of vow.
9) Bala paramita - spiritual power. Easily misunderstood and deserving of further study, I'll get back to you on Bala paramita.
10) Jhana paramita - direct knowledge, free from conceptual hindrances. This is the much romanticized wisdom of the Zen masters that we see sometimes in our kōan studies. That sense of doing just so, just what's needed without thinking about it or worrying about it. Just responding to the world. Jhana also refers to deep meditation states so there's a connection there. All of this rises from our deep practice of letting go.
So those are the 10 parmitas as another expression of how to live a life of healthy discipline. It's nice that they are expressed positively isn't it?
What the particulars of what our practice of healthy discipline looks like and what the obstacles are vary for each person according to our history and predilictions and background. Because of that you can never judge another's practice. We are on a journey of discovery that never ends. What is healthy discipline for me now?
I want to mention a few of the particulars I've noticed along the way so far, but the most important thing is for each of us to consider this in our own lives.
One thing I've noticed is that I used to think that the process of life and of healthy discipline was a matter of working to find a balance. To find a balanced life. A balance in activity, nourishment, friendships, I'm not sure what all but I had a strong sense that sometimes things felt in balance and sometimes they didn't and I was searching always for a balance and hoping to find it.
And it is true in my experience that sometimes things do feel more in balance than other times but I've come to realize that there is no particular state of "being in balance." No particular state which once you find it you've got something solid. As soon as you find a balance of some kind something shifts and changes and you are adjusting and looking anew for balance. In a world of continuous change there can be no fixed point of balance.
So I began to see that a life of healthy discipline is to keep the tools sharp more than anything. To stay supple and open. To be always working towards balance but with the understanding that there is no balance really. To practice with the emptiness of balance. You could say that there is balance which is constantly changing or you could say there is no balance at all, think about it in the way that helps and encourages you. So we are constantly adapting and reorienting. That healthy discipline is dynamic and responsive, not dogged and dogmatic.
Healthy discipline has to be gentle and non-aggressive or you just hurt yourself and others. Healthy discipline is warm and forgiving, but also strong and steady. But the way you get to that understanding could be to go through your own arc of doing the opposite. When I first started sitting the long meditation retreats we call "sesshin" in Zen I was very hard on myself. I was rigid and tense and caused all kinds of pain and suffering in my body and mind. I was uptight with myself and others, very judgemental. And I went through some intense pain and also some incredibly joyous releases of that stress and pain. I created a roller coaster ride for myself and for a while I thought spiritual practice was bearing down and gritting my teeth, digging in to survive the hard times for the joyful release ahead. It might be I had to go through some years of that and learn through my own experience how to lighten up, how to be gentle and joyful in my approach. I remember during meditation I used to literally see stars in from of my eyes from tensing up my face to tightly with what I thought was strong concentration.
The healthy discipline of life, I learned little by little, is learning how to be strong and steady without adding tension and stress. Supple instead of rigid. By following my suffering I find out about the places that are not so supple. When I get caught and upset I see them and can work with them little by little.
A big element of healthy discipline seems to be forgiveness. If you screw up you feel it, you feel the effects in your life, in your body and mind, you feel the effects in the others you may have harmed but you also forgive yourself. And you understand from this experience that others who do harmful things are themselves just doing their best and screwing up too. You don't need to add your mistakes to a big burden of guilt that you carry around. You screw up, applogize, learn, and as best you can you move up and attend to the next moment. You take up the practice of return.
In sitting meditation itself the very act of gently returning the awareness of the present moment, to the breathing is wonderful training for healthy discipline. Can you notice that your attention has drifted and bring it back without blame, without self-loathing, without anger, without disappointment, without impatience, just bring it back. Just return to what is actually happening in this moment. Doing this is all by itself wonderful training in healthy discipline. It's so simple. So simple. But very profound and important.
Here are a few other things I've learned so far in no particular order:
Doing a little every day is a much, much, much better plan than doing some huge amount…someday. Don't try to practice for hours every day. Don't think you'll never be able to meditation regularly at home and just wait for a retreat next year sometime to give you a kick in the pants. Just do a little, do a little regularly, start small, increase so gradually or don't increase at all, find steadiness and patience in your daily practice.
Bring up the non-measurable parts of your healthy discipline regularly. Reflect on how you want to be living and what your deepest wishes are. This may sound a little hokey, but it's worth doing. Find ways to remind yourself that your true life is bigger than this stuff you can see.
Get support and be aware of the powerful effects of our conditioning to always go it alone. We are Americans and we think we can do it all on our own if we just try hard enough. Crazy talk! Get help, get support, put yourself in situations where you are more likely to live in a healthy way and do these things you know deep down to be beneficial. Avoid situations that lead to unhealthy choices. Realize the very limited reality of our willpower and don't fall into some idea of "testing yourself" to see if you're good enough. Forget about purity and goodness anyway, life is too short for that. Focus on living and get help, get support. Find a supportive community, cultivate supportive friendships. The Buddha said that good spiritual friends are not just half of the spiritual life, that good spiritual friends are all of the spiritual life.
De-emphasize measurement and progress. Be sensitive to your feelings and how you're doing, much more sensitive probably would be good, but don't try to measure your progress, forget about that. You are in no position to judge anyway, just keep feeling your way forward and listening to what life is trying to tell you. Feel with your deepest heart if you're clicking with your healthy discipline and just keep on. The healthy discipline of living is by its nature a life-long project. There is no end point, no goal you will have reached when everything is all better. There is progress sure, but don't try to measure it. Just enjoy it.
When conditions in life change, what you can do changes. Healthy discipline is not to become an immovable rock untouched by changing conditions. This is so obvious but we can be such dolts about this. When you have a baby, or are injured, or have a chronic health issue, or someone close to you dies. Or when you move or change jobs or any of a thousand different changes you might not be able to just keep on with your plan. It can be hard to accept this. We get a bit mechanical in our discipline sometimes. I do 30 minutes of yoga every morning, no excuses, that's what I do, that's what I need to do, if I don't do that I'm a wreck. You might be able to sustain that idea for some years but then something might happen so that you can't do it, you really just can't for a while, or maybe you never will again. Don't add fuel to the fire, let go of the narrative about your discipline and be patient, allow yourself time to adapt and find a new way to express your healthy discipline. Trust in your practice and your integrity. It will work out. Adjust and change and be patient.
Finally, healthy discipline includes letting go of healthy discipline, letting go of trying, learning to just be In your skin and enjoy and appreciate the great gift we've been given. This gift of being alive and born into fortunate circumstances. We are all so lucky and often a bit short on appreciation. So healthy discipline includes learning more about the joy of our living and really inhabiting that.
And little by little trust the deepest feelings of your living. It actually really doesn't matter if you can sit still for 30 minutes or do a handstand or be kind and patient in every interpersonal situation. Those are just details. What matters is to be little by little more sensitive to the deep interconnected bedrock of our living. The field of energy or whatever you want to call it that we are all living in the middle of. Each of us just another manifestation of life itself and all of us completely together in one life. This is reality beyond our concepts of reality and the way one feels it or tries to describe it is different for each person but trust that there is something solid. It can't be grabbed or held or hoarded, it can't be rushed, if can't be forced but it's there. A real life of joy and acceptance which doesn't require the conditions to be the way you want them to be really is possible, I have faith in that.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.