given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Sangha-led Sunday Retreat, Bellingham Dharma Hall
January 07, 2001
From the archives: Tim's first formal Dharma Talk given six months after his ordination as a priest.
Good morning. Thank you all so much for coming today. It really is an amazing and precious thing when a group of people gets together like this. Supporting ourselves and each other to settle more deeply into our lives - our joys, our suffering, our funny lives. Somehow so complicated. Somehow so simple. There are a few people who can do this kind of practice on their own - but for most of us we need the support of a schedule and a group of people like this. We can all thank each other for having the courage and conviction to do this today.
As most of you know this is the first time I've done the practice of giving a talk. In one sense it's pretty surprising that I'm doing this - you can imagine the insecure thoughts that arise! I'm not good enough or deep enough or spiritual enough or smart enough or whatever enough to do this, surely. In another sense it feels perfectly natural.
I used to think that there was a clear dichotomy between Zen students and Zen teachers. We're the confused students here and over there is the wise, enlightened teacher. But know I see more and more we are all just confused human beings doing our best practicing together. We are all teachers and we are all students. It's like the famous saying of the T'ang dynasty Zen teacher Zhaozhou when he set off on his long pilgrimage when he was already an established teacher. "If I meet an elderly person who can benefit from my instruction I will teach him. If I meet a young girl with something to teach me I will learn from her." It also makes me think of when I was leaving Green Gulch after my longest stint there and Norman said something like "it's been nice practicing with you." I was so flattered. I was the one who should be thanking him for teaching me and here he is thanking me for something. I thought he was just being nice at the time, but now I see. Even someone who feels like they are a totally newcomer is contributing so much to our practice. Just showing up is a very deep teaching for all of us. So thank you for teaching me today. Just sitting, just bowing, just walking around, each practice a deep way to interact, a deep way to learn and to teach each other about this ancient deep way of life. About this natural way to just be a human being.
Anyway, Norman did give me the green light to engage in the practice of giving the dharma talk today. He suggested that I warn you that I'm a "baby priest" - just ordained last June. I don't have anything that brilliant to say to you. But maybe I can at least provide a little break from sitting.
In Zen we talk about each activity as a practice. It's a really good word to remind us what the nature of doing any activity is. We're just practicing. Giving it a try. Doing our best. We don't expect to do it "right" and we're not worried about doing it "wrong." We're just doing whatever it is. Just talking care of what needs to be done. Part of our tradition on a day of retreat is that someone gives a talk so today I'll do the practice of talking about the Dharma.
Keep in mind that it's just a new practice like any other. The first time one does a new practice, like ringing the bells for service or being the work leader, it's often a strong and instructive experience. We can feel very vulnerable. Fear of failure usually arises. And then once we've muddled through, what a relief! And even if we make the big mistake we're worried about - it's okay somehow. Often there's a big release of energy. You can learn a lot going through this process over and over - I recommend it.
The process of doing a new Zen practice is really the same as living every new moment in our lives. It's just that the structure of Zen, the simplified life we live for a few hours or a day in the zendo, helps to clarify our experience. The way our mind works is often more obvious in the context of practice: all of the silly, amazing, boring, repetitive, surprising thought patterns that coalesce around us and form who we think we are rise into the quiet of our practice and we can catch a glimpse of them as they arise and recombine with the next thought that arises. Just a quick glimpse before we get swept away again by our belief in the reality of our thoughts and ideas.
Actually every new moment in our lives is really like doing a new practice in Zen. Every moment is brand new. Totally fresh. And in each moment we try to respond to this new set of circumstances. It's just that we rarely notice the freshness of each new moment. The complete newness of every experience. No two days are the same. The world is different. We are different. Constantly changing. And yet the momentum of the ball of thoughts and habits that we construct ourself with usually just carries us right past this freshness.
But occasionally we glimpse something from between little gaps in this hazy ball of thoughts and emotions. We see a flower with fresh and open eyes - startling beauty jumps out at us and all thought stops for a microsecond. Or we hear a few notes of music - totally clear so beautiful, rising out of the background noise for an instant. Or a jolt of clear pure love arises out of nowhere when we're holding a loved one's hand. Sometimes we don't even notice these experiences with our cognizant mind, but we have a ghost of a feeling, a hazy glimpse out of the corner of our eye, that they are happening. I actually don't know why these experiences often happen after doing a bunch of zazen. It's a complete mystery what sitting still and following your breath has to do with it. Maybe that's just it. It has nothing to do with anything. That's it's magic.
But these experiences are just our life as-it-is. They are just ourself getting out of the way of our life for an instant. They are enlightenment. There's a lot of fuss and bother in Zen about the world "enlightenment" - it's a concept that we hear about or read about and it sounds like the ultimate candy. A total instant out from all of our suffering and problems. We don't in our insecurity really think that we could ever get that, but still we want it. Can you hear how crazy that is? We all know that our desires and attachments and aversions are the engine driving our confusion and suffering. We can't just take that desire engine and knock it onto a new track called "enlightenment" and expect anything other than a new flavor of suffering. Enlightenment is not some big thing that's outside of us that we just have to work hard in meditation in order to grab onto. There is nothing outside of us.
Maybe that particular delusion is why Eihei Dogen, 12th century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, invented a compound word (look up in Japanese) that's translated practice-enlightenment. Dogen wants us to understand that "this is place, here the way unfolds" - enlightenment is right now. This moment. Experienced with this body. This mind. We don't get a new mind. And we can't even expect the small-minded satisfaction of walking around telling ourselves "ooh that was cool, that's enlightenment, ooh good job sitting all of these years" - Dogen says "don't think that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness."
We are working with habits of mind that are so deep. They are unbelievably deep. We really believe with incredible conviction in the story of who we are. The story of our life. We are constantly generating and revising this story. Our Zen teachers tell us, and I am deeply convinced that they are right, that this story is just a story. And it's the story of dukkha. Dukkha as most of you know is the Pali word from the Buddha's first noble truth.
After his realization deepened enough, the Buddha looked at the world with the unimaginable eyes of pure practice-enlightenment. Usually in the tradition he's portrayed as suddenly gaining all sorts of super powers like clairvoyance and the ability to look through his past lives. I think for our purposes today we shouldn't worry about whether he had such magical powers or not, but think about it in a way that makes sense for our scientific minds. He had simply stopped manufacturing his story. Completely. He was just present. Just there, breathing and alive. He still had all of his senses and his intelligence. And thoughts still arose and disappeared in his mind. But he didn't grab onto any thoughts. He'd stopped plunging into that whirling ball of thought-emotion and stopped thinking "this is me, this is me, this is me" And from this completely still and clear place he examined the way life works and he realized, wow, "the way people usually live is permeated with dukkha" - and later when he needed to formulate this into a teaching for others he called it the "first noble truth"
What is dukkha? What did he see so clearly as a deeply ingrained part of all life? Usually, as you know, it's translated as "suffering", but like many others I think that word isn't really right for us. Out of self-defense we can't really believe the idea that our life is characterized by suffering. I mean, hey, I'm feeling all right. I'm not totally happy every minute maybe, but I'm not suffering all the time. Boy you Zen guys are so gloomy!
Another translation, one that Thanissaro Bhikkhu who was here in the fall likes, is "stress." Everyone can relate to that - we all feel plenty of stress in our lives. We all have some sense that that this stress is really completely unnecessary - that it's something we are somehow adding to each situation.
But if we use stress to translate dukkha it makes sound like Buddhism is just a big stress reduction plan. That's okay I guess, stress reduction is a great thing to do. We should all pay attention to stress and take care of ourselves. But I think what we're doing here is much deeper, more transformational, more complete, than just lowering the stress meter a little. Even deeper than lowering the stress meter to zero.
My current favorite translation of dukkha - and I don't know if I heard this somewhere or made it up, so take it with a grain of salt - is "dissatisfaction" or "dis-ease." That feeling that permeates even our happiest moments, that vague feeling of "this is isn't quite it" or "this isn't exactly what I wanted" or "yeah and how long is this going to last?" - that dark background music of fear and "this isn't right" that we notice sometimes - playing quietly in the background. That feeling of things being not quite right, slightly out of phase, unsatisfactory, not quite it. And it's a feeling that's completely imbedded in our life. A feeling we can't shake going on a cool vacation, moving to a better town, buying a great new toy, by finding a better job, by having a wonderful relationship.
Maybe the definition of dukkha includes all three of these word-concepts. Dukkha manifests in different ways at different times for different people. Sometimes as totally misery and depression and real suffering, sometimes as stress, sometimes as just the faintest hint of dissatisfaction even when things are going really great for us.
The Dalai Lama reportedly said that the purpose of Buddhist practice is to be happy. Dukkha life is not sounding very happy. How does practice make us happy? How do we heal from this dukkha-flavored way of living? How do we do Dogen's practice-enlightenment? All of these ideas and analysis of our life really aren't good for much unless we can do something about it.
Zazen, sitting meditation, is the core of the answer to dukkha. For some mysterious reason that I don't begin to understand, just sitting down and settling the mind allows our life to transform. It's not something we can do in our usual way. Usually we think "I am Tim, I want to learn how to ski, okay I am trying to make a parallel turn, okay I did it, okay I can ski better now" - can you hear how self-focused that way of thinking is? I am me and I need to know this or do that, and now I have. I got something. It's mine. Me, me, me. And it does work after a fashion. I did get a little better at skiing when I went with my family for Christmas vacation. But this approach is also very limiting. It's the dukkha way of doing things. Athletes talk about entering non-thinking mental states when they are doing their best work. When people are really doing something well and naturally, they aren't constantly thinking "I do this, now do that, me, me, me" they are just doing it. And just letting it do them. It's actually impossible to really be experiencing or doing anything completely while thinking about doing it.
Zazen is remarkably intolerant of our usual self-conscious approach. Or maybe zazen just makes it more obvious that to think that there is an "I" that does things is a self-limiting and foolish fantasy. Zazen is something we can't do in our usual way. We can try. And all of us will try - it's the way we're used to doing things and it's so deeply ingrained that we don't even know we're doing it half the time. But we don't have to worry, zazen will teach us the error of our ways sooner or later.
This is a point I'm constantly learning and re-learning. I think I've told the story of my first 7-day sesshin to some people. Sesshin is our intensive meditation retreat - zazen, kinhin, zazen for most of the day. It's very wonderful and sometimes very difficult. An important and deep practice.
I was 21 years old and it was the end of a 6-week practice period at Green Gulch Farm in California. We'd been sitting 4 or 5 periods of zazen every day for those weeks and I thought I was getting the hang of it. So once sesshin came - 11 or 12 periods every day - I figured I just needed to work out a survival strategy to get through it.
I can't remember everything I did, but I do remember calculating how many periods there were in the whole 7 days and counting down. -ding- end of period, okay 57 periods left to go. Pretty horrifying if it had been a difficult period. Naturally I would project into the next 57 - 57 more period of that misery! At one point I seriously considered leaving, but the sesshin was at their zendo in San Francisco and I didn't have a car there. Plus the embarrassment of showing up at Green Gulch early to get my stuff. So I kept at it.
I would try so hard in each period. Clamping down on my breath. Counting with fierce determination. Scrunching up my face so bad that I started seeing spots most of the time. So determined. Thinking "I can do it, I can do it." At one point my head just couldn't take it anymore and there was some kind of release of energy that made me start laughing. "ah ha" maybe I'm getting somewhere - just try harder, harder, harder. I was so miserable! So agitated! So determined!
And the emotions were wild too. I completely fell in love with a woman sitting opposite me and made up all kinds of stories about who she was and what I would say to her and her to me once we could start talking at the end. I think I hated one of my neighbors. And not just like I thought she was cute and he was annoying. Full blown love and full blown hate. Very intense. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. Harder harder. I was my own worst enemy. I was totally obsessed with posture too, trying so hard to sit up straighter and making my back and shoulders into a complete agony of tension and stress.
But somehow I got through it and I started the process that sesshin of studying this question of effort. If we can't force zazen to work, how do we do it? We are taught techniques like counting or following the breath. We are taught to let go of our thoughts. But how? How do we do that with out causing the suffering I caused myself that sesshin?
One of my teachers, Blanche Hartman, went to see Suzuki roshi once after she's been practicing a few years. She was finally feeling some comfort and ease in her zazen and she wanted to tell Suzuki roshi how great it was that she finally could do zazen better. It was the only time he got mad at her she said. He was completely furious. He jumped up and yelled "you don't do zazen! Zazen does zazen!" We wanted to jolt her a little I guess, help her move deeper, beyond the self-centered idea of "I" can learn how to zazen.
And yet this "I" is what we start with. It's our tool. We can't just get rid of it. And even if we did learn how to rid ourselves of "I" - that's no good you can't do much in the world without your "I" - you end up a kind of blissful vegetable. Sometimes in the context of sitting "I" drops away for a little bit and that's wonderful. But we just allow it to come right back. That's it's nature.
So what I'm trying to get at is the question: what kind of effort do we make in practice? what does it feel like to make a skillful effort in zazen? how to do we use our upside down way of thinking and being to merge with the infinite no-self of zazen? how do we let zazen do zazen? how do we let zazen do us?
Eido-san in Olympia says that the only mistake you can possibly make in practice is to not make effort. There are no other mistakes. Everything you do it completely fine. You can't screw it up. What a relief! You just show up. Just make effort. Just effort.
But what kind of effort should we make in practice? In zazen? Try really hard and push push push? Relax and just hang out? Somewhere in between?
I did a little poking around in the stories our Zen ancestors. This isn't a new question. Here a few things I found:
Here's a famous dialog between Master Zhaozhou when he was a student of Nanquan:
One day, Zhaozhou asked Nanquan, "What is the Way?"
Nanquan said, "Everyday mind is the Way."
Zhaozhou said, "Does it have a disposition?"
Nanquan said, "If it has the slightest intention, then it is crooked."
Zhaozhou said, "When a person has no disposition, then how does he know that this is the Way?"
Nanquan said, "The Way is not subject to knowledge, nor is it subject to no-knowledge. Knowledge is delusive. No-knowledge is nihilistic. What the uncontrived way is truly attained, it is like great emptiness, vast and expansive. So how could there be right or wrong?"
At these word Zhaozhou was awakened.
(repeat story)
Zhaozhou's asking "what is the way?" is the same as our question today. What is this we're trying to do? How do we do it? What kind of effort do we make?
Nanquan's answer is very famous. "Everyday mind is the way." There's nothing special that we're trying to grasp. We're not trying to attain some new improved mind. Just this mind. Everyday mind.
Zhaozhou's response to this is the same as what we would say I think. Okay then, if it's just everyday mind how will we know? If we are okay just the way we are why practice? How do we even know if we are practicing? Zhaozhou says is "Does it have a disposition?" How will I recognize this everyday mind?
Nanquan's answer is "If it has the slightest intention, then it is crooked" reminds me of my first sesshin again. Very crooked practice! But again, how can we function without any intention. Why would we ever sit down for zazen? Zhaozhou is still unclear on this too, so he asks "When a person has no disposition, how does he know that this is the Way?"
I'll read you Nanquan's answer again. It answered Zhaozhou's question, but I don't think we can understood it with our intellectual minds so well. Nevertheless with these good stories it's good to just hear them and let them sink in.
Nanquan said, "The Way is not subject to knowledge, nor is it subject to no-knowledge. Knowledge is delusive. No-knowledge is nihilistic. What the uncontrived way is truly attained, it is like great emptiness, vast and expansive. So how could there be right or wrong?"
(pause)
When Dogen was a young man in China studying with his teacher Rujing, he asked Rujing the same question. Rujing brings up another way of approaching our question of how to practice.
Dogen asked: "When we students practice the way, how should we cultivate the mind in the midst of ordinary activity, while walking, sitting, standing or lying down?"
Rujing replied, "When Bodhidharma came from India, the body and mind of buddha-dharma truly entered China. Here are some things to pay attention to when you first undertake dharma study: don't spend a long time sick in bed; don't travel far away; don't read or chant too much; don't argue too much; don't overwork; don't eat leeks and onions; don't eat meat; don't eat impure food; don't listing to singing or music; don't watch dancing women; don't look at mutilated bodies; don't look at pornography or talk about sex; don't be intimate with kings or ministers; don't eat raw or unripe foods; don't wear filthy clothes; don't visit slaughterhouses; don't drink aged tea or take medicines for mental diseases like those they sell at Mt. Tiantai; don't eat fungi; don't pay any attention to matters of fame or fortune; don't eat too much cream... don't wear quilted clothes but wear only plain cotton clothes; don't pay attention to shouting and load noises, or watch herds of pigs and sheep; don't stare at big fish, the ocean, bad pictures, hunchbacks or puppets; instead look at mountains and streams.
"Illuminate the mind with ancient teachings and read sutras that contain complete meanings. Monks who practice zazen should always have clean feet. When the body and mind are confused chant the beginning of the text called Œthe bodhisattva precepts'. And don't associate with small-minded people."
No subtle instructions about the mind here! Very simple, practical advice for his student on how to live. I think we can take some of the details with a smile as we are in a different cultural milieu from 12th century rural China, but the point of paying attention to how we live our whole lives is well taken, don't you think? If we choose to live crazy mixed up lives all day associating with people and things that cause stress and confusion and then plunk down on the cushion expecting clarity... But as bodhisattvas we are also committed to engaging with suffering, so we don't go hide in a cave either. We need to be skillful about what we expose ourselves to is the message. Perhaps for us the way to follow Rujing's advice to Dogen is to practice with the precepts.
And there are many other wonderful stories and sayings we can study and contemplate. And all of the exchanges between master and student are essentially this same question.
Zen people are famous for saying, with deep and complete conviction, "I don't know." And that's probably the answer to our question. We don't really know how to do zazen. We practice with this spirit of questioning, this spirit of not knowing. We breathe in I don't know. We breathe out I don't know. We live I don't know. I don't know is open to anything. I don't know allows zazen to get through.
But again, how on the practical level to do we do it? How should we count our breath? How should we sit? Why do we keep showing up? What are we doing here?
Well like I say I don't really know, but I do have a few practices to suggest. Maybe they can help you to explore this question. If none of these ideas grab you, please don't worry about them and continue practicing in whatever way makes sense to you.
The first is to practice relaxing the face. You can establish this practice during zazen and then try it throughout the day. Since we tend to live in the front of our heads, we store tons of anxiety and stress in our faces. That energy can really block us. Start with the forehead. Feel your forehead, let the skin and muscle drop and let go. Breath into it... Feel the eyes, let them relax down and back, let them sink into the eye sockets. Breath into your eyes... Feel the cheeks. Let them sag, let them drop, there's nothing you need to hold onto with your cheeks. Breath into your cheeks... Feel the jaw. Feel the front of the jaw, feel the middle of each side of the jaw, feel the very back of the jaw where the joints are with the skull, let the jaw slide back into the head, let the tongue relax into the jaw. Let the jaw drop and relax. Breath into the jaw.... Then do a brief scan of each area of the face: where does the tension return first? That might be an area to concentrate on relaxing during zazen. You can visualize the breath moving through that area as you follow the inhalation. Breathing in through the forehead, or the eye, wherever it is for you, and down into the abdomen and up and out. Letting the breath carry the tension away.
(pause)
The second practice idea is to practice loving your distracting and difficult thoughts. I'm just starting to experiment with this. I'm starting to see that in my letting go of my thoughts there's been an element of repression of pushing them away, of trying to disconnect my idea of myself from those thoughts. Instead when a thought arises during zazen, try this. "hello thought of jealousy you are a part of me and I treasure and love you" and then let that thought fade happily away. Take care of the thought. Give it love and a moment of attention. Appreciate that each thought is a natural part of the working of the mind. Don't push it away. Often when we think we are just letting of a thought, our effort is more like "ick - go away I don't like you" and that creates discord and dis-ease, dukkha, in our sitting and our life. It can initially be a silent verbal thing as I describe it here, but then let that fall away into a feeling. And you can include the breath, the exhalation is a powerful cleansing wind that naturally carries all difficulties back into the void of emptiness. Give the thought the gift of the healing wind of that exhalation.
(pause)
And a third general thing I want to suggest is to give your exhalation more space. We tend to be very inhalation-focused. We want to suck in oxygen as fast as possible so we can zoom around and get everything done. The exhalation is sort of a necessary inconvenience to get out of the way before the next inhalation. Without trying to control the breath, just give the exhalation more attention. Let it happen fully. Express the joy of letting the stale air out. Give the gift of carbon dioxide to the world's plants who need it to live. Don't rush it. The exhalation is giving yourself back to the whole world. It's letting go our greedy idea of separation. It's allowing ourselves to flow out into the whole universe. Letting go completely. Let's try that for a minute. Let the inhalation take care of itself and give the exhalation the love and respect it deserves.
(pause)
Well I hope that by making all this noise there has been some benefit. My hope is that by doing the talk I could just take the role of reminding us all what we already know. In our heart of hearts we know that practicing the way is the only way for us. We know that we have to give ourselves to this practice and get out of the way. But we really don't want to! So we have to remind ourselves and sometimes we delegate someone to give a dharma talk to help us remind ourselves of our true intention.
It's like the practice of the 10th century Chinese Zen master Ruiyan Shiyan (rway-yahn shi-yahn) who made it a daily practice to talk to himself:
Ruiyan went to live at Ruiyan Monastery in Taizhou where he sat on a large rock.
Each day he would call out, "Master!"
Then he would answer, "What?"
"Stay alert!"
"Yes!"
"And in future don't be deceived by anyone!"
"Yes, yes!"
The effort we make in zazen is like this. There's really nothing we have to do. Just sit down. Settle down. Just sit. But we forget. We have to remind ourselves. "Tim!" "Yes?" "Pay attention!" "Yes, yes!"
Thank you.
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.