given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Seattle Soto Zen
January 10, 2010
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A talk I gave at the Seattle Soto Zen group (www.SeattleSotoZen.org) on our desires for a different life and the life and teachings of Bodhidharma and his successor Huike.
As usual I think my spoken remarks are more interesting than what I prepared but in this case I did more or less stick to my "script".
Good morning, it's very nice to be among you again. It's been quite a while. We got very busy in Bellingham the last few years opening a new zendo so I'm sorry I haven't been able to get down. Of course probably many of you I've never met, so a brief introduction might be in order.
I'm Nomon Tim Burnett. I'm one of the founders and now Spiritual Director of Red Cedar Zen Community in Bellingham. We're a Soto Zen sangha much like this one. We've been practicing together in various places since 1991. I'm an ordained student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer and Norman is also the guiding teacher - sort of remote adviser - for Red Cedar. While I have spent times in monastic practice at the different practice places of San Francisco Zen Center really my training has been "on the ground" so to speak in Bellingham helping to lead the sangha there and working through the many joys and issues and challenges involved. I've been a fairly un-flashy training. A slow apprenticeship with sangha, teacher, and the dharma with the chief characteristic of just showing up steadily over time. Just coming back to the sangha. Just coming back to daily practice at home. Working in long term relationships with colleagues and now students.
In addition to the novice ordination in 2000 I was shuso, head student for a practice period, in 2003 at which time I received authorization to give dharma talks and classes and to meet with people individually in practice discussion. So my "official" status is much the same as Jeff's or Sandy's. And I'm scheduled to take the next ordination step - Dharma Transmission - in 2011 at which point I change robe colors and take on yet more responsibilities to the local sanghas and to the lineage and tradition.
And you know I never planned to do any of this. Becoming a priest is about the last thing I could have imagined would happen to me when I was younger. I just fell in love with the feeling of zendo and practice and wanted to keep practicing, that was my only real ambition, just to keep it up. I'm not even sure why I wanted to do that but I really did. So starting a sitting group was expedient means for me. I knew it was very unlikely I could hold myself to daily zazen without the support of a community.
And through the nearly 20 years of sitting with this sangha in this way I've been surprised by the fact that it really works. That a weekly sitting group and a few retreats a year really is enough, really is transformational, really works in the same mysterious way that full time residential monk practice works. They are different in form and format certainly but this kind of training matrix is not the baby version or the lesser form that can only give you a little taste whereas the real Zen is found in the big residential centers. I started out in Bellingham thinking that way. I'd spent 6 months or so at that point living at Green Gulch Farm where Jeff is now and I was sure that a weekly sitting group like this one here was a kind of pale imitation at best but still important and useful. Enough to get you started.
But now while I still treasure residential practice so much, it's really wonderful to do if you get a chance, I have been with my own eyes people gradually transformed by this style of practice. Maybe it's slower, I don't know, but it might also be healthier and more sustainable - integrated from the get-go into the lives of work and family and bus passes and mass media that almost all of us are going to live out. If you can make Zen practice a central touch stone of your life in this context then you've really got a powerful support for the rest of your life come what may. Residential practice has many powerful lessons to teach too but there is a tendency to see it when you are there as a special, privileged and true life different from the "real world" outside. And so for most people who do long term residential practice there is a very difficult period of integration and re-discovery of what they've learned when they leave the monastery. You have the big advantage of being slowly doing that integration all the time.
And I know it can be frustrating, sometimes it feels like nothing much is happening. Sometimes Zen in our lay lives coming to the center just a few times a week, I guess you know have the Sunday practice morning and also a class on Thursdays? That's wonderful. Anyway sometimes it can feel like nothing much. Like just a hobby. A club. You meet some nice people. There can be this annoying inner conflict about whether to go or not each Sunday morning I think, there is resistance and confusion and it's hard to decide on one's priorities - many other worthy things to do in this life, and goodness knows we all need to just rest more than we do - but I think whenever you make it here there's a good feeling. I don't know if I have ever regretted making it to sangha practice. There's a magic to it even when zazen is uncomfortable or the mind is racing. There's always something that happens even if you don't understand it and when your friends who don't practice ask you about you don't have a good answer particularly. So there's something to it but on the other hand the great challenge of our lay practice is that we have many doubts about whether it's really worth it. Is anything happening? Is this helping with my problems? Am I calmer? We have many expectations about practice and it's hard to see if any of them are being met. Is there any progress? And what about enlightenment? Will we one day see this light in a blinding flash and everything will be different?
The other night my wife and I watched a nice movie that she wanted to see because she was sick. A very sweet tale of love and redemption called Julie and Julia. Maybe you've heard of this movie. It tells two parallel tales about Julia Child and French cooking. Julia Child it turns out had a very wonderful marriage with a wonderful supportive man, Paul Child and her transformations of herself from a middle class girl from Pasadena to an expert and teacher of the culinary arts was all in a way an expression of their love. So that was nice to learn about. And meantime the other story was about Julie Powell, a just-turned-30 woman in New York who was feeling very stuck in her life and somehow hit upon the idea of cooking every single recipe in Julia Child's huge cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year and blogging about it. 525 recipes and some of them are pretty complicated. While working full time. Both real life stories but of course as portrayed in the movie the stories of these two woman had a very predictable sort of story arc. A vision, then a struggle, then self-doubt, then through their own pluck and the loving support of the man in their lives they triumph in the end in a single perfect moment in which it all comes together and they are so happy. Victorious. And loved.
Watching this I was thinking that we are all so conditioned to want a life like in the movies. We know there will be some struggles, sure, but we want a predictable story arc and to have it all come out right in the end.
And then we were checking out what the special features were thinking there might be some more information about Julia Child's life at least, and ended up watching most of the featurette about making the movie. Have you ever watched the featurette with the movie? They seem to have emerged as a very particular and consistent cinematic form. There's a kind of summary of the movie with lots of clips of what you've just watched and then it cuts to the different people involved in making the film talking about what a wonderful project this was. The producer talks about how she read the book and just knew this would be the perfect thing to make a movie about. Cut back to the movie. Then the director talks about how wonderful the star was, how prepared and talented and perfect she was for the role. Cut back to the movie. And then the star talks about how she couldn't have done it without the wonderful co-star and how perfect he was and was an honor it was to work with him. Cut back to the movie. And they just work there way along for about 30 minutes like that. Everything in the world of the featurette is just so perfect. The people are so talented and nice and funny. The project they did together was just so right, so well written, so perfectly thought out. It was just such an honor and a privilege and just so sincerely and utterly the best year of their lives getting to work together.
The world of the movie there are problems but they are always surmountable, we are shown that the people might have their doubts but there is no real doubt in our mind. It will work out. Everything will be fine, a happy ending is assured.
And then there are no problems at all in the world of the featurette. Everything is perfect. You have to work hard and make effort in the world of the featurette but you do so with utter grace and assurance of the perfection of the situation and that you are within a wonderful web of mutual support and trust.
And I don't think the need for these kinds of worlds and imaginary people was invented in Hollywood. I think it's as old as the human imagination itself to desire an ordered and successful life where everything works out. To hang our hopes in some imaginary characters and to live out our lives through them. Whether it's the adventures of Odysseus or Jane Bronte or Luke Skywalker or Julie and Julia we have within us this deep conditioning to desire some other life.
And in our desiring some other life we recognize also a powerful idea that we are a creature which has a particular life, a particular identity which we own, which is me, which we don't totally like in some ways perhaps but it is us and we are stuck with this me. This identity. We've like to trade it in for a new one some times but as we go forward in practice and start to examine our thinking and become more subtly away of our deepest feelings we see that we are convinced to the core of our being that there is some someone here and that we are stuck with him or her. And that on some deep primal level this is disturbing to us. We have a love-hate relationship with this self that we think we are stuck with.
Sometimes when we first take up meditation practice it's pretty disturbing to start to see more accurately the thoughts that the mind is churning up. Jealousy. Anger. Insecurity. Arrogance. Pride. We might at first think that meditation practice is causing these things but then even more disturbingly we see that meditation practice is just giving us a more accurate view of what's happening all the time in the mind. That the mind of thoughts and ideas is often off balance and out of whack. And we see the many stories we invent about other people based on very scanty evidence. Most of them untrue - maybe all of them untrue. And as we see this crazy mind of thought and emotion swirling around naturally we want out of it more than ever. We want that featurette!
So our practice could easily become a kind of escape attempt. Maybe I can escape this mind, this person, and acquire a new Zen person who is calm and kind and gentle and loving all the time. The Zen person of the featurette with no problems maybe, or at least of the Zen person of the movie about Zen practice who will have some problems but inevitably in the next 100 minutes or so emerge happy, content and fulfilled.
And if we can't escape maybe we can at least become more skillful at suppressing the dark aspects of ourself. At generating at least a more solid appearance of kindness and patience and developing inner tools for processing and diverting the thoughts of fear and anxiety and doubt that arise. Rechanneling and reinventing those feelings as best we can.
And yet that doesn't sound quite right either does it? There must be some way of working with these pesky personhood with all of it's afflictive emotions that is more transformational and honest than that.
Jeff mentioned that you've been studying Bodhidharma and the early greats of Zen in China. I was looking at the transmission stories about Bodhidharma, his student Huike, and Huike's student Sengcan who wrote the wonderful Zen poem Xing Xing Ming - Faith in Mind. And reading those stories you are really struck by a few things aren't you? First that these guys were so deeply committed to their practice. Sort of insanely off-the-scale committed. Sitting alone facing the wall for years. Standing all night in the snow waiting for the teacher's attention. Showing up for practice even if you are sick and in tremendous pain. Lopping off a limb if it seems like that would help. Committed and uncompromising in their quest to wake up from this crazy-making self-limited world.
These early Zen masters were supposedly greatly devoted to the consciousness-only teachings of the Lankavatara Sutra which basically says that we made all of this up. That this world of suffering and doubt is a world of our own making. Not us individually exactly, each of us is somehow tapping into a vast sort of collective dream of separation and individuality according to these teachings but with every thought and sense perception we have a choice.
On each moment of reality we hold a sort of atom of experience and out of habit we add a very powerful sort of wrapper onto it. The wrapper of "me." An experience of vision occurs and we add the idea of "me looking at you," "I am looking" "I am hearing." We continually cement this notion of identity and separation by adding this me to our experience. And that according to Buddhism is a primary root of our problems. This powerful idea of a separate person.
And these consciousness-only teachings, building on earlier teachings about perception and mind, suggest that our thoughts and emotions are really no different from our sensory experiences. A sound. A vision. A thought. Just different psycho-physical phenomena that we map this me-idea around. It is obviously silly to think that I am what I see, but that I am what I think is more convincing isn't it?
These teachings suggest that every thought or sensory event is a little nugget of experience into which we pour this convincing fiction of identity. And into that identity glue to make it all hold together we also add permanence. And the resulting sticky mass is the grit of discontent and unhappiness.
And so looking at this whole mass of me-concept held together through this process of mis-interpreting experience in this low-level fundamental way it's no wonder we are attracted to the perfect world of the movies and the featurettes. We want to swap out wholesale the composite personhood we've constructed in this way for a better version. A version that is also created out of our me-based fantasy but a much better one.
Of course we know that all of that is not going to work. And yet we keep trying to make it work. You can watch yourself doing this, can't you? When you meet someone who seems so great, so hip, doing the kind of work you wish you were doing or acting in the way you wish you were acting or in the kind of relationship you wish you were in or so on. There's that sense of yearning and desire. To be that person instead of you. Do you know what I mean?
And so we sit down to practice directly with this process. The great genius of zazen is it's baseline simplicity. It's in essence a process without method. We sit down to just watch all of this unfolding. To watch sensations of body and mind come and go. To watch thoughts arise and hook onto other thoughts and eventually fall back into emptiness. We sit down with great patience to give the whole process light and space in faith that it will naturally straighten itself out.
The thing about this ego-glue of self identity is it turns out to be a very weak glue. It seems strong because it's so constantly applied but actually it's not so strong at all. It doesn't adhere to things so well really. If we can manage to take the slightest little break from applying it constantly to every atom of our experience is breaks down and actual pure and direct experience busts through quite beautifully. We've all had experiences of this. Just seeing a flower or a sunset or our beloved. Just being.
This whole idea of me can fall apart in quiet, subtle ways that might barely notice - there might just be a little feeling of peacefulness as we allow thoughts to come and go instead of jumping on them and believing in them so strongly. There might also sometimes be strong experiences of the whole façade breaking down and reforming. I think there's a whole class of so-called enlightenment experience that are just that. And there are some practices that push you towards that kind of experience but on the whole we find in our practice that the big push is easy subverted by ego into yet another identity generating game so best to leave that. Best to be patient and quiet and steady. That is our emphasis in this way of practice.
Best to allow the mind to settle and return to the breathing and the body and have faith. Many of us come into Zen practice thinking it a method - a sort of scientific and reliable method in which x effort over y years should have z result. Well it turns out the human heart-mind is more complex than that and things don't proceed with us in a step-wise manner like that. It turns out that a big, big part of this practice is just having faith in it. Having faith that the bonds of attachment and ego and self are not as strong as they seem, that little by little sitting here patiently, doing our best to apply what we learn on the cushion to our lives and to hold to our intention to be soft and awake, little by little there is always awakening happening. And that our big problems are not really big problems, we are just so utterly convinced that they are.
I'm doing some work in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction with another Zen student named Kurt Hoelting who is also a commercial fisherman. He shared with this group of veterans we're working with the other day a wonderful analogy from his times fishing for salmon in Alaska. He said he'd learned you have to keep your gear in the water. That even if you've been out for a few days and haven't caught anything and there's a storm coming if you pull your gear, your nets, out of the water and make for the harbor there's no way you're going to catch any fish. And inevitably the other fisherman who stayed out through that stormy night all caught lots of fish on the next tide. And so in the practice of Zen it's the same - keep your gear in the water even when you don't feel like it. Be steady in practice. Keep at it. And let the fish come when they are ready to come. There is technique and choice and as lay people we have this great challenge to integrate this all into our lives but that technique is for the purpose of creating space to get that gear in the water and trust in the vast ocean to take care of us.
And when we catch ourselves longing for some other life, for life in the movies, for life in the featurette we can remind ourselves that this will never work. That the only way is to turn towards our actual experience right now and shine the light of awareness on this whole process of creating the great fiction of a self. Little by little it will release if we let it.
And then what shines through the gaps in clinging is the possibility of fully embracing this life as it is. Of happiness that comes through radical acceptance and merging with all that arises without sorting and judging and analyzing so much. A life with the basis of just being instead of getting and having. A life lived in love with life. Not a naïve life, a realistic life in the truest sense of a life that is honest and real about reality as it is.
Maybe poems say this all much better.
Love After Love, Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
The Indigo Glass in the Grass, Wallace Stevens
Which is real -
This bottle of indigo glass in the grass,
Or the bench with the pot of geraniums, the
stained mattress and the washed overalls
drying in the sun?
Which of these truly contains the world?
Neither one. Nor the two together.
Thank you very much. [Questions if time]
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.