given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
October 26, 2008
Hello everyone thank you for coming today. I thought we'd explore together the idea of serentiy. Serenity is a calm sort of happiness. It's not the kind of happiness that depends of everything going our way. It's being settled. Senerity being able to enjoy our life regardless of whether things go our way or not. To appreciate what is. It has a quality of being relaxed but it's stronger and more clear-minded I think than being relaxed. And it's something we can practice doing. Something we can learn about. I want to try practicing serentiy with you a little bit this morning as a do-able and sensible thing to do. But I also want to talk about the way our life is bigger than just what we think about, bigger than what makes sense.
On the face of it the practice of serenity makes very practical sense doesn't it? We practice all kinds of things to get good at them, to reach a level of competence to where we can do something without thinking about it too much. My son is just now turning the corner on reading, we spend a lot of time practicing and learning all of the component elements so that we can read and reading is something our society places a high value on so probably everyone here knows how to read. Reading is a very complex and amazing activity but it's something we learn how to do and once you can read you don't usually think about it too much. The eye organ and the eye consciousness engage around some shapes that happen to be letters in the English l language and thoughts appear, reading happens, wow, it's amazing and so easy once you know how to do it.
And you can think of lots of other examples of things we had to practice to learn how to do, and that practice included sustained effort, making mistakes, and teachers and all of that. Learning how to drive. Learning how to ride a bike. Learning how to be polite and have conversations. We are walking encyclopedias of all kinds of skills. And this seems very ordinary and regular to us that we have to go through a process involving some effort and intelligence and internalizing to learn how to do these things.
And yet serenity and happiness seem to somehow be in another category in our minds. Serenity is something that just happens once in a while if we're lucky is how we think. Serenity is somehow more in the realm of magic. Or it comes to other people. People who are better than we are, or in some may more holy or more gifted, better meditators or just somehow naturally more serenity-prone.
So the thesis of my talk is that serenity is not something that happens by magic. The obvious and apparent aspects of serenity come and go according to conditions. And we can influence many of the conditions that lead to serenity or to anguish. So if we're reasonably smart, steady, and a little bit determined we can definitely increase the amount of serenity in our lives. We know many of the things that help this, we really do. We know eating and sleeping well help. We know that not taking on too many stressful jobs and tasks helps with this. We know that exercise helps with this. We know healthy relationships with friends and lovers helps this. We know simply paying more attention to the actual moment of our experience helps.
Meditation practice is a useful way to practice serenity. So let's try some meditation practice together and see how that feels.
[5 min meditation, breathing and feeling in the body, letting thoughts come and go and not identifying with them]
There are many other things we know that we can do that will make us more serene. Like smiling more. Pausing to breathe. Walking slowly. Working with little poems and phrases. These things really help. They are surprisingly hard to remember to do consistently but we can do them. So there are these techniques and practical simple things we can do to work with the conditions in our life to increase serenity and joy, definitely. So why don't we do this all the time? And what would happen if we did?
Well pause a moment and consider any thoughts that are arising in reaction to what I was just saying. Is there resistance to taking better care of your life in this way? Are you too busy? Is it "not that simple"? Do you not deserve to feel happier in some way? Or is there something deeper going on that prevents us from simply living well and enjoying our lives more.
One of the reasons is that we're caught in our story. The story of who we are does not usually include very much serentiy. We are busy. We are tired. We are stressed out. We are trying our best. We went through some difficulties and we're recovering. These things are true but they are also just a story and sometimes they hold us in our own suffering. They build around us a feeling for our life which is familiar and comforting and a way but also very limiting and constricting. And our story of "me" or who we are is so constantly, so powerful, that we really believe it and we're bound by it. So we think I'm just not a serene kind of person.
But if we raise up the intention that despite our story-line we will still practice serentiy. We will try our best and just see what happens once in a while we notice the gaps in the story, or something shocking and surprising happens, or we notice how utterly wrong our story is in some way, especially in our stories about other people. People are so pesky that way don't you think? They never really conform to our projections of them, and when we're caught in our projects we are very annoyed by this. When we are lucky enough to break free from our projections for a minute it's really quite amusing. How could we think we know how other people are thinking or feeling anyway? It's ludicrous really. We don't even understand our own feelings particularly. And so if we can understand the cracks in our story line as a teaching it can really help us. Sadly we mostly just re-weave our story to try to get it to all fit again.
It's a bit discouraging maybe being caught up in our story. You set your intention to practice meditation or be a better person or whatever it is but your story swoops in and sweeps you away again. But fortunately there is more to the story than this.
Beneath the waves of thought and storyline that drive us along, if we practice meditation or any of the quiet disciplines we become aware that beneath all this is something deep and fundamental, something trustworthy and not needing fixing and maintaining. Something broader and deeper than our story.
And this is not just an idea it's something we can experience and feel for ourselves. In Buddhism they say there are 6 senses, not just the 5 usual ones we talk about. The 6th sense is the mind's ability to produce thought and emotion. So as we get quieter our over emphasis and over attention on the 6th sense starts to balance out. We notice that we can hear more acutely. We sometimes notice that we see more acutely and clearly, and things are so beautiful when you see them clearly you know? And little by little the thoughts get less noisy. But underneath these thoughts and underneath all of our senses we start to have a sense, a glimmer at the end of our understanding, a kind of glimpse out of the corner of our inner eye that there is something more to all of this. Something deep and fundamental under all of it.
There are many words and terms for this. One is the Mind Ground. Beneath mind is the ground it rests on. I recently studied the Brahma's Net sutra which is where our Bodhisattva precepts are listed off and it talks a lot about the Mind Ground. The term in Japanese is shinji. Shin is the heart-mind, ji is the ground, ji currently means just like our use of the word "ground" - just the dirt, the floor of the world, but originally the word meant the earth as opposed to heaven, a more sort of cosmic sense of ground.
心地
When we touch the mind ground our story drifts away. It's there but it's not so real anymore. It's real like a cloud is real. Interesting and amazing in it's way but still just a cloud, just a story. And everything that arises is okay. Really okay. We are resting deeply on the mind ground. And when challenging things happen, we work with that and learn from that, when things we wanted to have happen happen we really feel what that is, notice the suffering and difficulty that arises along with the joy and accept it. When we are in touch with the mind ground this is real serenity because it's not based on the right conditions. It's okay when things are not so hot, it's okay when things are great. Life is deeply okay beyond concept and condition. Our screwups and our triumphs are okay.
But how do we touch this mind ground? Is there some technique for that? Well yes and no. No in that we can't make a project of it, we can't go running around to find it. Trying really hard at meditation is not it. Being very good and very devoted is not it. The current shuso in the Mountain Rain Zen Community in Vancouver gave a talk the other day about how hard she tried to be a good meditator when she did this 14 month retreat in Burma one time. She was trying so hard to make enlightenment happen, to find the mind ground that she started having all these weird physical problems. Very powerful retreat schedule, sitting and walking from 5am to 10pm every day, day after day, no talking, just meditation in a Burmese monastery, and she kept trying harder and hard to find it. Until she had this permanent headache all kinds of weird visual phenomena and could barely stand it. She was there during the big crack down before this last one and eventually the junta was telling all foreigners to go home and she left. In the end she said that was a good thing. She needed a break from herself in that context. So being a super-star meditator is not it. And neither is become a zealot about having the perfect diet or the perfect exercise routine and so on and so on.
Sometimes a teaching will catch you and help you feel the mind ground. These teachings doesn't really make sense in the usual way but working with a teaching or a phrase in concert with all of the good helpful things we've been talking about can really help us to access the mind ground. The broad and wide open nature of all that is.
So I want to close with a story that Dōgen tells and then have a little discussion together about these two aspects of serenity. The conventional and practical reality of our lives, how we life and how we could live a little better. But also the beyond conventional, deep and fathomless nature of our lives, the bottom line deep ground of our being.
Here's what Dōgen recounts. Do you know Dōgen? The 12th century Japanese monk who is credited as the founder of the Sōtō Zen school? He was a quite interesting and challenging character. Very critical of others and very devoted to teaching and reminding us that our actual life is beyond our conceptions so his writings can be a little difficult to read because he uses words and phrases in interesting ways to support us in going beyond conventional thinking. Luckily now there are better and better translations and more and more people are studying Dōgen. This is from a small volume edited by Kaz Tanahashi called Beyond Thinkings, A Guide to Zen Meditation, and it also has an introduction by Norman in it which is a good overview of Dōgen's thinking and how to study Dōgen.
Anyway Dōgen is quite critical of other teachers and many of the revered ancestors of Zen but in this short essay called One Bright Pearl, Ikka Myoji, which is an early chapter in Shōbōgenzō his master work he talks about a 9th century Chinese master he really likes. Xuansha was a student of Xuefeng. I hadn't heard of Xuansha before I read this but his teacher Xuefeng and especially Xuefeng's other student Yunmen are quite well known. Anyway Dōgen gives a little background on Xuansha's story first:
Xuansha used to be called Shibei, his family name was Xie. When he was a householder, he loved fishing and boating on the Natai River, doing as fishermen do. One day at the beginning of the Xiantong Era (860) a golden-scaled fish came to him without his seeking for it, and he suddenly had the urge to leave this dusty world. So he gave us his boat and went off into the moutains. He was thirty years old when he realized the precariousness of the floating world and the preciousness of the Buddha Way. Then he went ot Mt. Xuefeng and studied with Xuefeng endeavoring in the way day and night.
One day as he was lieaving the mountains with his traveling bag to visit other monasteries to further his study, his toe hit a rock and began to bleed. In share pain he suddenly had a realization and said to himself, "If my body doesn't exist, where does this pain come from?" So, he went back to Xuefeng.
In other words he'd studied hard and was heading for Buddhist graduate school which they would do. After living in a monastery for 10 or 20 years you'd go off on pilgrimage and live as a hermit for about three years to polish up your understanding. Xuansha had sat zazen like crazy to where he was very soft about the boundaries of the reality of his story and his feeling for the mind ground. He took the teachings of emptiness and the true nature of our life very seriously. That things are not real the way we think they are. So we can imagine him deeply practicing, walking slowly with his bag over his shoulder, a big moment, heading back out into the world, subtly and deeply in touch with his breathing sort of floating along like a cloud when suddenly he stubs his toe. Ouch! And it hurts! And he doesn't like it! This sucks, this is not what I planned on, I thought I had it all sorted out! What is this?!
And the impressive part of this story to me is he turns around. He probably could have just kept going and been recognized as a dharma teacher, but no he realized, I'm not done with my studies here. I have more to learn. There's such humility and honesty in that. It's hard to turn around like that and be honest about what you don't know don't you think? I've been learning some new software technology all this last week myself and it's painful and disconcerting to not know things to have to keep asking for help. I've been in touch with a mild version of this feeling all week. So he turns around and goes back.
Xuefeng, his teacher, said, "What's with the travelling bag?"
Xuasha said, "No one can be fooled."
Xuefeng appreciated his words and said, "Who doesn't know these words, yet who else could say them?" Then he said why don't you take your travelling bag and start all over?"
Xuansha said, "Bodhidharma didn't come to China. Huike didn't go to India."
Xuefeng praised him.
The last like there about Bodhidharma and Huike is Zen Code Language for saying Buddhism as it's understood on the surface doesn't hold up, there's more to this than I understood before, deeper meanings of the teachings as if there are no teachings at all in the end. Dōgen doesn't say what happened next but I imagine Xuefeng stayed another year or two to learn more with Xuefeng and then in the end he did leave and become a teacher himself.
But then the meat of the matter is this wonderful teachings from Xuansha that I want to recommend taking up if it strikes you.
Some years after attaining the way, Xuansha instructed his students, saying, "The entire world of the ten directions is just one bright pearl."
Just one bright pearl, all of this. Everything. You, me, the earth, the air, the big buildings in mid-town. The beautiful little plants growing in the cracks. The garbage. The rainforest. Everything is one bright pearl. The practice of serenity, one bright pearl. Getting up and going to work, one bright pearl.
Once a monk asked him, "I heard that you said, 'The entire world of the ten directions is just one bring pearl.' How do you understand this?"
I don't get it in other words.
Xuansha said, "The entire world of the ten directions is just one bright pearl. What do you do with your understanding?"
In other worlds, turn over this teaching again, notice how you are bound by your mind, the mind that wants to understand, can you take a backwards step and just appreciate the world as one bright pearl? Can you let go of limited views and merge with this?
And then the next day Dōgen says Xuansha followed up with the monk. Zen has such a repuation for toughness and strong interactions between teachers and students, for a kind of spiritual meanness even, but the Zen that I appreciate so much is endlessly kind and really quite sweet. I think Xuansha really wanted to support this monk in understanding this point.
The next day Xuansha asked the monk, "The entire world of the ten directions is just one bright pearl. How do you understand this?"
The monk said, "The entire world of the ten directions is just one bright pearl. What do you do with your understanding?"
Just the same thing that Xuansha first responded to the monk with but there must have been something in the monks understanding that was clear now because Xuansha praises him to end the story:
Xuansha said, "I know that you have worked out a way to get through the demon's cave on the black mountain."
How do you understand this saying of Xuansha. The entire world is just one bright pearl. Can you breathe with that? Sit with that? Walk with that? Can you like the monk allow yourself to not understanding, can you be humble like Xunasha leaving the monastery and notice the limits of your understanding of your life and be willing to study and practice, to open through teachings and practice and the great mystery of being alive to the mind ground. From there deep and true serenity is sure to come, you can't stop it. It just happens. And when you forget and get caught in your story line and need to work with your live in the conventional, conceptual side of things with all of the many strategies and good intensions and mistakes and screw ups I hope you'll still bring up this teaching. See what happens. Even now, in this situation the world is just one bright pearl. One bright pearl. Do you understand?
[discussion in groups of 3's, what helps me or blocks me from working with my life in the conventional world of forms and what helps me or blocks me from remembering my deeper life beyond forms. What increases serenity, what decreases it.]
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.