DILIGENCE

​Where does diligence, the motivation to practice, come from?  Zen tradition insists that what motivates is not some text, not words, written or spoken, not some dogma, but our own experience.  In short,  it is suffering that motivates the search for something else.
 
Implicit in suffering itself is already the knowledge of something else.  Isn’t that right?  Why would you suffer in the first place, if you did not already have a sense of something different?  This, I suggest, is where attention to breath becomes a teacher.  We would not know inbreath if we did not also have an experience of outbreath.  One is implicit in the other.
 
If the resolution of suffering is inherent in suffering itself, what stands in the way?  It is, of course, avoidance.  Like cleaning the house.  You may want a clean house, but there is work involved.  And that work involves paying attention to dirt, attention to things you might rather avoid. 
 
Our classic avoidance strategies are what Buddhism calls “the three poisons.”  One is anger.  Rather than facing suffering, find someone or something to blame.  That’s usually not hard to do.  Something didn’t work out as we expected, as we would have preferred.  Rather than examine our preferences, our actions, why not, instead,  blame the people, the situation that failed our expectations. 
 
Second is greed.  Drown sorrow in pleasure.  Sometimes pleasure is food or drink.  Sometimes pleasure is busy-ness: work, travel, entertainment, the daily crossword, wherever you lose yourself in distraction.  Maybe it is wealth and appearances.  All of which has its place, until it becomes an obsession. 
 
Third is delusion.  Suffering that presents as an endless, dark hole of misery invites creative avoidance.  Pretend it didn’t happen.  Adopt a “stiff upper lip,”  a posture of “such things don’t bother me,” or “ just forget about it,” or create an alternative reality, some conspiracy theory. 
 
Such strategies are “poisons” because, however comforting, they fail to heal the situation and serve only  to extend it, like throwing something in the closet imagining it to be gone, when instead it lingers, to be confronted again and again.  Like a personal trauma unaddressed that becomes a generational one.
 
 “Kicking the can down the road” may solve an immediate, personal need.  But, finally, personal needs are a collective problem.  Finally, we are confronted by the necessity to, “open up our small mind,”  to reckon interdependence, to reckon the interdependence that, like inbreath and outbreath, is both pain and gain, both life and loss.  
 
The reckoning of interdependence is also what in Buddhist tradition is called wisdom, the wisdom of the middle way, not fixating either despair nor joyful pride.  The dynamic interplay of plus and minus, of subject and object, is, afterall,  who we are,  what the world is.  To get stuck in one or the other is ignorance, what activates that warning sign called suffering.
 
To act on the basis of such wisdom is, I suggest, diligence;  diligence that Buddhism calls “paramita,”  one of those rafts that help carry us across life’s stormy waters. 
 
Diligence, I suggest, is paradoxical.  It is determination that , at the same time, recognizes difficulty.  The American Heritage Dictionary describes diligence as “painstaking effort.”   Not inflicting pain, but, rather, taking pain.  The combination of determination and insightful recognition is, I suggest,  that “fullness of mind” ("mindfulness"),  beyond preoccupation with personal preferences. 
 
In that sense, diligence is responsibility, the responsibility to act in awareness of our interdependence, with each other, with the world of our experience; awareness that turns out to be skillful.   
 
In recognition of the serious work of diligent practice, Zen tradition upholds the practice of “vow,” the practice of commitment to live and act on the basis of diligence,  adherence not to a concept, but to the truth that is our true nature.
 
The power of diligence is the power of that truth; what, I suggest, we are moved to reclaim in times of uncertainty and change.    Great diligence counters cruelty with fearlessness, speaks truth to power. Great diligence is commitment (as in our Zen Center's statement of purpose) to “understanding the nature of suffering and its resolution, to acting on this insight to the benefit of everyday life.”