given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
June 10, 2009
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[A long and involved talk, I kept pretty close to my notes only as I was running out of time I had to skip some of this material. Thus the written version below is more complete but maybe a bit less lively.]
I'd like to speak today about wholeness and connection. And ultimately this is about real and lasting happiness and contentment in our lives. I want to bring up some teachings from a sutra called the Tathagatagarphba Sutra and also some scientific studies about mind-body health.
We are deeply conditioned to a view of who we are as people and what our relationship is to ourselves and others. It's a view that works reasonably well most of the time for most of us. And yet under the surface there are some real problems. Some deep problems.
Under the surface many of our dear friends, our many acquaintances, and the billions of people on the planet we don't know are not all doing so well. When we talk about happiness I always want us to aknowledge first the many many people in the world who's basic human needs are not being met now or have little or no reason to believe their needs will be met in the future. And I think of the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs. It's worthwhile taking a minute to remind ourselves of this.
Maslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of needs exist. These include needs for understanding, esthetic appreciation and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied, and so on. Maslow's basic needs are as follows:
Physiological Needs
These are biological needs. They consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, sex, and a relatively constant body temperature. They are the strongest needs because if a person were deprived of all needs, the physiological ones would come first in the person's search for satisfaction.
Safety Needs
When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviors, the needs for security can become active. Adults have little awareness of their security needs except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting). Children often display the signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.
Needs of Love, Affection and Belonging
When the needs for safety and for physiological well-being are satisfied, the next class of needs for love, affection and belonging can emerge. Maslow states that people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the sense of belonging.
Needs for Esteem
When the first three classes of needs are satisfied, the needs for esteem can become dominant. These involve needs for both self-esteem and for the esteem a person gets from others. Humans have a need for a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect, and respect from others. When these needs are satisfied, the person feels self-confident and valuable as a person in the world. When these needs are frustrated, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.
Needs for Self-Actualization
When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, then and only then are the needs for self-actualization activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was "born to do." "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow#Hierarchy_of_needs)
Now there does appear to be a bit of conflict between pyschology's understanding of self and taking care of it's needs and understanding it's history and trajectory. Psychology seems to assume that there is a self there. It can't be seen or touched or measured but the experiences of people assume there is some self who's needs need to be met.
And yet the teachings of Buddhism suggest that this self does not actually existent in the way we think it does. That it is not solid and real in that way. Rather that the self is a conceptual framework we impose on top of a complex set of psycho-physical phenomena that we perceive with our senses with no real reality. And Buddhism proposes various different analytical tools, used in conjunction with meditation practice, to help us see the non-reality of the self. You could for example categorize every experience and thought and emotion you have into five different categories, or eight different categories depending on the system and when you do that you see sooner or later that there's nothing there that really could be called a self.
But this apparent disagreement about the very nature of the self doesn't mean that we don't need to take care of our self. The conditioned self is not something we well ever get rid of, nor is it desirable to get rid of it, rather the idea in Buddhist practice is to work with our relationship to our powerful concepts so that they don't lead us by the nose towards suffering. So that we are not disabled by our thinking and our concepts. Not held in suffering ourselves and therefor not prevented from engaging the world in a positive way as a helper, as a bodhisattva.
So I think we do need to have all five of these needs well taken care of to practice the way effectively. Not that doing so is a prerequisite for practice, it's more of a kind of feedback loop where as you practice meditation and mindfulness of what you are actually thinking and feeling and experiencing in your body you start to realize that the foundations might be shaky in some places. You are trying to skip over in some way your need for love, affection and belonging for example, you want to skip right to self-actualization and beyond but you start to see there are some wounds lower down. There are some needs that are not really being met that you keep coming back to in some way. Or that unmet needs are somehow reaching up through your consciousness in various ways which usually manifest in some difficulty, some suffering.
The Buddha identified three different levels of dukkha, or suffering. This is a very core teaching of Early Buddhism. The first two levels are well handled by psychology and by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Working with the third, most subtle, level of dukkha is where Buddhism really has something to offer the world I think.
The first level of dukkha is called dukkha-dukkha, obvious pain. Such as physical pain, illness, aging, the suffering born from the experience and our conceptualizations about aging, death and bereavement. And note that Buddhism doesn't make the same kinds of distinctions that we do between physical pain and emotional pain, nor does it have a categorization separating emotions from thoughts. The thought-emotion-psychical experience of immediate pain or unpleasantness is dukkha-dukkha.
The seocnd level is vipariname-dukkha - the suffering born of change. So this is something important to study, how do you think about and respond to change? We know change is completely inevitable in all places and situations. There is absolutely nothing in the phenomenal world that isn't changing, and yet to we really get that at a deep level? Do we accept that? Or does it cause us pain and suffering. Janet and I recently bought a car which was a kind of intense experience for us and one thing that struck us was different people's attitudes towards car maintenance and repair. There actually are some people do seem to more fully accept than others that cars wear out and break - they plan for that, they do the regular maintenance, they have money set aside, they know that fixing the car is just a simple part of being a car owner. And when you talk to them about the used car they're selling there's a certain attitude that comes across. While other people, probably most people, basically think that cars should be unchanging and never wear out and that when something goes wrong it's shocking, it's bad luck, it's an act of God almost. These are not the people who take such good care of their cars because they think their cars are not changing, are not wearing out a little more every time they turn the key. So our attitudes towards change clearly affect our suffering around change. But if we can work with our attitudes about the changing of physical things can we also work with the same attitudes that treat each other as essentially permanent.
And it seems that the suffering born of sickness, old age, and death does touch on both of these two types of dukkha. There's the psychical and emotional pain of being sick, we hurt, there are unpleasant states arising in the mind, there is dukkha-dukkha, the pain of having pain. But there is also our attitude towards it, why do I have to get sick, I shouldn't get sick, last year I didn't get sick like this, when will I get better? And so on. We add more suffering through our psychological habits and pathways through the vipariname-dukkha, the suffering born of change, or you could say the suffering born of not fully accepting the reality of change.
And how can we fully accept and work with the reality of change according to Buddhism? We'll get there in a moment but first we have to consider the third, most subtle, form of dukkha, of suffering. This is samsakara-dukkha. The suffering of conditioned, or assembled things. This is essentially the suffering of thinking that things are real. The suffering of believing in psychical and mental things. The Buddhist understanding of how the unenlightened mind works is that it has a powerful reflect to take in perceptions and assemble them into concepts. And low down in that concept building faculty is a powerful dualistic impulse. As we assemble these conceptual fabrications - a chair, the sun, a person, a thought, an emotion, whatever it is, we sort of impregnate that fabrication with a sense of good or bad, of like, don't like. And then we have a swirling and reacting and reactive world of concepts and preferences. And living in the middle of this swirling kaleidoscope of samskara we can't find lasting happiness. We can have a nice line up of conditions from time to time where things are pretty happy making but then you turn around and it all swirls and reorganizes again. The things we are basing our happiness on are essentially unreliable since they are changing and impermanent. It's like our mind is a snow globe. It settles into a nice arrangement - a beautiful winter scene - and then some event or shift or change grabs the snow globe and shakes the darn thing up again. Do you know what I mean?
The interaction between Maslow's heirarchy of needs and the Buddha's teaching of the three levels of suffering seems to be that if your hierarchy of needs is well met - you've got food in your belly, love in your heart, you're feeling confident in yourself and your abilities and you're getting to do things that are deeply fulfilling - even when all that is happening there is still the suffering of samskara-dukkha, the suffering of basing the whole thing on conditioned, assembled, conceptual objects which we take for reality. They just aren't solid and there's no where to rest.
So then it seems like we're broken in some way. We have what we need but we are still not perfectly and deeply happy? How could this be? What is wrong with us?
As I understand it conventional psychology is not too concerned with this question of complete unconditional happiness, it's more or less out of scope. Psychology is interested in people becoming reasonably happy and adjusted to our circumstances, resigned to the little problems of life but basically okay.
Psychology also so far has not been very concerned with our psychical presence. Psychology is interested in the mind. With how we think, how our emotions and thoughts interact, how our history colors and conditions our thinking and so forth. If there is a physical problem we go to the doctor. Such the is the compartmentalism of the scientific approach. Through definition and focused inquiry any one branch of science can discover things with breathtaking clarity and yet be completely blind to any understanding that's outside that particular discipline.
And psychology seems to also assume that there's something wrong with us. We have neuroses, we have suffered past traumas which have lasting effects, we have issues to be addressed. I think this is essentially true. If we can assume there's someone here to have anything then I think we do have these things and have some need to deal with them in an engaged and skillful way.
But the efficacy of that strong emphasis on our incompleteness and our damaged nature might be less than helpful. That implied and pretty universally held feeling that we are incomplete. That we need something. That we need to add some new understanding, some new skill, some new healing to our currently incomplete self in order to become whole. I think there Buddhism has much to offer.
But before we turn back to Buddhism, let's see if science can help us get our of our heads a little. What about our bodies? Can we tackle being happy and healthy and whole with our thinking? Let us turn to the emerging science of Behavioral Medicine. This is not perhaps the best name for what they are looking at, this is the science of how people's thinking and attitudes affect their health. And the results have been pretty astonishing for some time but somehow our idea that our mind and body are separate is so entrenched in the culture you don't hear about this stuff very much.
This is far from an unbiases review of the scientific literature, these are all studies summarized by Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book Full Catastrophe Living.
First an anecdote:
A story told by Bernard Lown, a renowned cardioloist, about an incident he observed while he was training:
This experience still provokes in me a shudder of disbelief. Some thirty years ago I had a post doctorate fellowship with Dr. S.A. Levine, professor of cardiology at the Harvard Medical School. He was a keen observer of the human scene, had an awesome presence, was precise in formulation, and was blessed with a prodigious memory. He was in effect the consummate clinician at the bedside.
Dr. Levine conducted a weekly outpatient cardiac clinic at the hospital. After we young trainees examined the patient, he would drop in briefly to assess our findings and suggest further diagnostic workup or changes in the therapeutic program. With patients he was invariable reassuring and convincing, and they venerated his every word. In one of my first clinics, I had as a patient Mrs. S., a well-preserved middle-aged librarian who had a narrowing of one of the valves on the right side of her heart, the tricuspid value. She had been in low-grade congestive heart failure with a modest edema [swelling] of the ankles, but was able to maintain her job and attend efficiently to household chores. She was receiving digitalis and weekly injections of a mercurial diuretic. Dr. Levine, wh o had followed her in the clinic for more than a decade, greeted Mrs. S. warmly and then turned to the large entourage of visiting physicians and said, "This woman has TS," and abruptly left.
No sooner was Dr. Levine out of the door than Mrs. S';s demeanor abruptly changed. She appeared anxious and frightened and was now breathing rapidly, clearly hyperventilating. Her skin was drenched with perspiration, and her pulse had accelerated to more than 150 a minute. In reexamining her, I found it astonishing that the lungs, which a few minutes earlier had been quite clear, now had moist crackles at the bases. This was extraordinary, for with obstruction of the right heart value, the lungs are spared the accumulation of excess fluid.
I questioned Mrs. S. as to the reasons for her sudden upset. Her response was that Dr. Levine had said that she had TS, which she knew meant "Terminal Situation." I was initially amused at this misinterpretation of the medical acronym for "tricuspid stenosis." My amusement, however, rapidly yielded to apprehension, as my words failed to reassure and as her congestion continued to worsen. Shortly thereafter she was in massive pulmonary edma. Heroic measures did not reverse the frothing congestion. I tried to reach Dr. Levine, but he was nowhere to be located. Later that same day she died from intractable heart failure. To this day the recollection of this tragic happening causes me to tremble at the awesome power of the physician's word.
Numerous studies have shown the powerful interaction between how we think about things and what happens in our bodies. It's a wonder that we are still so stubbornly convinced that we are somehow not our bodies. That we think this way is pointed out by a 7th century Buddhist teaching from Dharmakirti - he wrote: say an old person whose body is deteriorating and is full of aches is given the opportunity to exchange his body for a much healthier body. For the depths of his mind would emerge a ready willingness to take part in such an exchange. This suggests that deep down, we believe in a self that is distinct from the body, yet somehow master over it.
Medical studies on body-mind interaction include placebo studies where one group is given a drug and the other group is given sugar pills but told that they are being given the same drug. There is consistently a significant effect in people receiving the placebo, sometimes approaching the exact same effect as the drug itself. Just thinking, and being convinced, that you are receiving a drug can somehow make that drug's effects happen in the body.
Another set of studies compared optimistic and pessimistic people in terms of their likelihood to become depressed or survive cancers. They defined optimistic people as those who do not blame themselves for bad events or generalize as much about problems, they do not assume that when one thing goes wrong that means other things are going wrong. They focus on the specific consquences of events rather than generalizing about negative trends. While pessimists on the other hand tend to blame themselves for things going wrong, assume that a bad event will have a larger and more lasting negative effect, and assume that one bad event leads inexorably to another. Just these different in affective style appears to predict a higher likelihood of both mental and physical problems.
A connected attributes to optimism that have been studied in Behavioral Medicine is self-efficacy. People who have high self-efficacy feel more confidence in their abilities in life. They feel more able to affect outcomes and are less likely to assume that when things go wrong there is something wrong with them. Self-efficacy is a kind of confidence in one's eventual success.
High levels of self-efficacy predict all kinds of positive health outcomes. These people are more likely to recovered from a heart attack, more able to handle pain, more able to make life-style changes like quitting smoking. There seem to be several positive feedback loops for people with high self-efficacy. For instance they are more able to keep going with physical therapy and exercise routines even when there is little sign of progress - they persevere and thus do end up healing and improving.
That all make a simple kind of sense doesn't it? Even more interesting is that have a strong sense of coherence and connection with oneself and others is predictive of several positive health outcomes. It's not just how well we feel we can interact with the world, it's also how well connected and in touch with the world, with others, and with our own feelings that affects how healthy we are.
People who are able to feel some sense of coherence, of things making sense in some way, even in outrageously stressful situations are more likely to stay healthy. And people with a strong feeling of connection to others and especially to their parents early in life strongly correlates with a decreased chance of getting cancer and other major diseases later on. In one particular long-ranging study focused on lung cancer two interesting things were found. First that men who reported the most disturbed interpersonal relationships were more likely to get lung cancer. And then of patients who have lung cancer they found that those with the poorest ability to express emotions had more than four and half times the yearly death rate than those lunch cancer patients with the highest ability for emotional expression.
And we can't talk about behavioral medicine without talking about Type A people! It turns out this term had been in psychology since the 1950's and then it got a lot of credibilty from a large study in the early 1960's of a large group of men. They grouped the men into type A and type B and checked them 8 years later for signs of heart disease. Type A's are driven by a sense of urgency. They are competitive, impatient, often hostile and aggressive. While Type B's are more easy going, feel less sense of urgency and are more inclined towards contemplation and generally more relaxed. So this famous study found that the Type A's developed heart disease at 2 to 4 times the rate of Type B's. So being uptight will definitely kill you. Although later studies suggest that it's really just the hostility of the Type-A's and that the whole division of Type A and B is probably a little wonky but still.
And Jon Kabbat-Zinn points out to create these studies you need a lot of people and a lot of years to do each study so there are probably many more links between attitude, emotions and a sense of connection and engagement and our health than we know about know.
So how does this all go together? Psychology suggests that once basic physical needs are met we have a range of emotional needs that need to be met, especially if we can heal from past trauma and work skillfully with our neuroses and issues, and then we can be pretty happy. Early Buddhism suggests there are different levels of disconnection and unhappy states culminating with some very subtle issues with how we actually construct the world with our thinking. Behavioral medicine suggests that how we feel about the world and interact with it emotionally and cognitively has a big effect on how healthy we are. And if we're healthy there is less dukkha-dukkha any way you slice it so that's good.
I think that what we can bring to this story as practioners is a two-fold understanding. The first is that there is work we can do that is beyond our thinking, beyond describable and distinguishable emotions. There is work we can do that is beyond concept. And that this work done through our meditation practice is not mental work. It is whole body-mind work. Zazen is a lived experience done with the whole body-mind. We have as part of the gift of this tradition that Asian concept of heart-mind. We have one word for the emotional heart (not the blood pump) and another word for the thinking mind. In Asian languages there is just one word as the division must never had made sense to them. In Japanese this word is shin. Shin is the last character in the En Mei Jukku Kannon Gyo and it's a pretty beautiful character written out too. So it's heart-mind-body work that we are doing in zazen. It's not something we're figuring out, it's something we're simply immersing ourselves in.
The second is that we are not trying to add something. We are not trying to fix something. That we are complete as we are. Rather than being broken machines that need fixing, or at least fine tuning if we are running pretty well at the moment, we are whole and complete Buddhas who's Buddha-ness is obscured by what they call defilements in the tradition - kleshas is the Sanskrit word. Anger, aversion, confusion, judgementalness, jealousy - these are all kleshas. As far teachings of the completeness we have both Dogen's strong emphasis on practice-enlightenment. That we don't practice to achieve enlightenment, we practice to express the enlightenment we already have. So we have Dogen and we also have the wonderful teachings of Tathagahtagarba. So I want to read you a few excerpts from the Tathagatagarbha Sutra. Sometime when we have more time maybe we'll read and study the whole sutra.
Tathagata depending on how you break up the roots means "thus-come one" or "thus-gone-one." The one who just comes, just goes. The Buddha in other words. One who just is. Nothing missing, nothing added. Just being. It's a word in both Sanskrit and Pali.
And garbha has a range of meanings all of which have to do with containers and things inside containers, especially hidden things. Gharba can mean womb, or fetus, it can mean a hidden room or sanctuary, it can refer to a husk around a seed, or the seed itself, so it's a very fluid word aparently having all to do with things that are contained and hidden and their containers.
So you've probably figured out that the sutra is about the ways in which our enlightened nature, our tathagata, is hidden from us. And that if we can receive good teachings and have faith in them we can increase our confidence in our real nature as Buddha's. So it's not a figuring things out kind of process. It's an engagement with our whole being through religious practice. Meditation is I think implied but unfortunately as sutras often do the main practice suggested is to simply study the sutra itself and have faith in it. Well I say that's unfortunate because I'm as conditioned as the next person to think there's something we need to do, to figure out, to learn so that we can perform the mechanistic act of stripping away this covering and releaving our tahagata beneath the garbha.
So here are a few of the similes from the Tathagatagarbha Sutra. To set the scene we have the Buddha seated in a powerful meditation. He's surrounded by hundreds of thousands of monks and bodhisattvas and to get things going he just created a powerful vision in their minds:
At that time, the Buddha sat up straight in meditation in the sandalwood pavilion and, with his supernatural powers, put on a miraculous display. There appeared in the sky a countless number of thousand-petaled lotus flowers as large as chariot wheels, filled with colors and fragrances that one could not begin to enumerate. In the center of each flower was a conjured image of a Buddha. The flowers rose and covered the heavens like a jewelled banner, each flower giving forth countless rays of light. The petals all simultaneously unfolded their splendor and then, through the Buddha’s miraculous powers, all withered in an instant. Within the flowers all the Buddha images sat cross-legged in the lotus position, and each issued forth countless hundreds of thousands of rays of light. The adornment of the spot at the time was so extraordinary that the whole assembly rejoiced and danced ecstatically. In fact, it was so very strange and extraordinary that all began to wonder why all the countless wonderful flowers should suddenly be destroyed. As they withered and darkened, the smell they gave off was foul and loathsome.
You'd think these bodhisattvas would have seen lots of these kinds of things hanging around with the Buddha but I guess not as they were really blown away and confused by this. Especially by why this wonderful vision of flowers and Buddhas decayed into this stinky loathsome mess. But of course the Buddha was making a point. And he goes on making it in various ways for the rest of the sutra that the wonderful essence of our Buddha nature is often obscured to us.
“Good sons, it is like pure honey in a cave or a tree, surrounded and protected by a countless swarm of bees. It may happen that a person comes along who knows some clever techniques. He first gets rid of the bees and takes the honey, and then does as he will with it, eating it or giving it away far and wide. Similarly, good sons, all sentient beings have the tathagatagarbha. It is like pure honey in a cave or tree, but it is covered by klesas, which, like a swarm of bees, keep one from getting to it. With my Buddha eye I see it clearly, and with appropriate skilful techniques I expound the Dharma, in order to destroy klesas and reveal the Buddha vision. And everywhere I perform Buddha deeds for the benefit of the world.” Thereupon the World-honored One expressed himself in verses, saying:
“It is just like what happens when the honey in a cave or tree,
Though surrounded by countless bees,
Is taken by someone who knows a clever technique
To first get rid of the swarm.
The tathagatagarbha of sentient beings
Is like the honey in a cave or tree.
The entanglement of ignorance and tribulation
Is like the swarm of bees
That keep one from getting to it.
For the sake of all beings,
I expound the true Dharma with skilful means,
Removing the bees of klesas,
Revealing the tathagatagarbha.
Endowed with eloquence that knows no obstacle,
I preach the Dharma of sweet dew,
Compassionately relieving sentient beings,
Everywhere helping them to true enlightenment.
So we're sweet honey to the core but our confused and defiled thoughts buzz around us like angry bees and we give them all our focus. Have you experienced that kind of thing in meditation - just chasing your angry thoughts around and around and not being able to feel the real sweetness of just being?
“Or, good sons, it is like the genuine gold that has fallen into a pit of waste and been submerged and not seen for years. The pure gold does not decay, yet no one knows that it is there. But suppose there came along someone with supernatural vision, who told people, ‘Within the impure waste there is a genuine gold trinket. You should get it out and do with it as you please.’ Similarly, good sons, the impure waste is your innumerable klesas. The genuine gold trinket is your tathagatagarbha. For this reason, the Tathagata widely expounds the Dharma to enable all beings to destroy their klesas, attain true enlightenment, and perform Buddha deeds.”
At that time the World-honored One expressed himself in verses, saying:
“It is just like what happens when gold is submerged
In impure waste, where no one can see it.
But someone with supernatural vision sees it
And tells people about it, saying
If you get it out and wash it clean,
You may do with it as you will,’
Which causes their relatives and family all to rejoice.
The Well-departed One’s vision is like this.
He sees that for all kinds of beings,
The Tathagata nature is not destroyed,
Though it is submerged in the muddy silt of klesas.
So he appropriately expounds the Dharma
And enables them to manage all things,
So that the klesas covering the Buddha nature
Are quickly removed and beings are purified.”
This one's interesting because if reminds us we need help. We need someone we trust to look at this apparent pile of shit and say - you're gold to the core. There is so much more right with you than you think. That we can't always see below the surface without help.
"Or, good sons, it is like a store of treasure hidden beneath an impoverished household. The treasure cannot speak and say that it is there, since it isn't conscious of itself and doesn't have a voice. So no one can discover this treasure store. It is just the same with sentient beings. But there is nothing that the power of the Tathagata's vision is afraid of. The treasure store of the great Dharma is within sentient beings' bodies. It does not hear and it is not aware of the addictions and delusions of the five desires. The wheel of samsara turns and beings are subjected to countless sufferings. Therefore buddhas appear in the world and reveal to them the Dharma store of the tathagata in their bodies. And they believe in it and accept it and purify their universal wisdom. Everywhere on behalf of beings he reveals the tathagatagarbha. He employs an eloquence which knows no obstacle on behalf of the Buddhist faithful. In this way, good sons, with my buddha eye I see that all beings possess the tathagatagarbha. And so on behalf of bodhisattvas I expound this Dharma." At that point, the Tathagta expressed himself in verses, saying:
"It is like a store of treasure
Inside the house of an impoverished man.
The owner is not aware of it,
Nor can the treasure speak.
For a very long time it is buried in darkness,
As there is no one who can tell of its presence.
When you have treasure but do not know of it,
This causes poverty and suffering.
When the buddha eye observes sentient beings,
It sees that, although they transmigrate
Through the five realms of reincarnation,
There is a great treasure in their bodies
That is eternal and unchanging.
When he sees this, the Buddha
Teaches on behalf of all beings,
Enabling them to attain the treasure-store of wisdom,
And the great wealth of widely caring for one another.
If you believe what I have taught you
About all having a treasure store,
And practice it faithfully and ardently,
Employing skillful means,
You will quickly attain the highest path.
Did you catch in the verse in this one that the treasure is in their bodies. This is an embodied feeling, we feel it in our gut, in our bones, it's not an idea. It's not even a feeling really but we have to use some word to point to it. Let's do one last one.
“Or, good sons, it is like a man with a statue of pure gold, who was to travel through the narrow roads of another country and feared that he might be victimized and robbed. So he wrapped the statue in worn-out rags so that no one would know that he had it. On the way the man suddenly died, and the golden statue was discarded in an open field. Travelers trampled it and it became totally filthy. But a person with supernatural vision saw that within the worn-out rags there was a pure gold statue, so he unwrapped it and all paid homage to it. Similarly, good sons, I see the different sentient beings with their many klesas, transmigrating through the long night of endless samsara, and I perceive that within their bodies is the wondrous garbha of the Tathagata. They are august and pure and no different from myself. For this reason the Buddha expounds the Dharma for sentient beings, that they might sever those klesas and purify their Tathagata wisdom. I turn the wheel of the Dharma again and again in order to convert all worlds.”
At that point, the World-honored One expressed himself in verses, saying:
It is like a traveller to another country
Carrying a golden statue,
Who wraps it in dirty, worn-out rags
And discards it in an unused field.
One with supernatural vision sees it
And tells other people about it.
They remove the dirty rags and reveal the statue
And all rejoice greatly.
My supernatural vision is like this.
I see that beings of all sorts
Are entangled in klesas and evil actions
And are plagued with all the sufferings of samsara.
Yet I also see that within
The dust of ignorance of all beings,
The Tathagata nature sits motionless,
Great and indestructible.
After I have seen this,
I explain to bodhisattvas that
Klesas and evil actions
Cover the most victorious body.
You should endeavor to sever them,
And manifest the Tathagata wisdom.
It is the refuge of all –
Gods, men, nagas, and spirits.
This one reminds us to see the wonderful and beautiful core in what appears to us to be ordinary. Just a piece of junk in a field but really it's solid gold. Just a weed in a crack but really it's the miracle of life and an incredibly complex little being too. Just another day on the job or another phone call with our mom or our friend but really a miraculous interaction in which Buddha meets Buddha with incalculable joy.
So I'm not sure I have a clear conclusion from this little adventure between East and West. I guess I'm trying to say that we are the inheritors of two powerful traditions and that the understandings of these different traditions overlap in all kinds of ways. And that all traditions seem to little by little be coming across the sense of wholeness and completeness - of connection and interconnection - as central to health, happiness and real well-being.
I do want to encourage us to practice with our whole bodies and notice where we're tight and convinced that we're broken in some way. It might be that complete faith in our Buddha nature with the support of teacher, community and tradition is really what we need. It could be that simply working with our attitude to be more positive is what we need.
I don't know really and I'm probably reaching a bit far in this talk. But I hope it will generate some interesting discussion. Let's form into groups of 4 this time and bring up the question: "Am I whole and complete?" or "What do I feel is preventing me from feeling whole and complete?" or "What is the next step in my journey towards wholeness?"
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.