​                                                                                                                               Commentary by  Gendo

"As our insight into the fundamental equality of everything deepens, we develop the ability to manifest as we truly are. This manifesting is called the “path of compassion.” (Joshu Sasaki )
 
From the perspective of Zen, fundamental equality is knowing the “other” as none other than myself; a proposition echoed in the Christian idea of “loving your neighbor as you love yourself.”  Zen teaches that compassion is not simply an aspiration.  It is who we are.
 
Thirteenth century Zen teacher Dogen said:  “To study Zen is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be illuminated by all things.  To be illuminated by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other:” in other words, compassion.
 
On examination, ‘self’ is hard to pin down. This head, this hand, this foot are “mine,” they are “me.”  But who is observing this?  “I am” of course.  And yet this “I am” cannot be observed without an observer self that stands apart, an observer that can never be observed!   Even the self we call “tree,” means different things to different people, depending on where you live,.  And tree changes; grows, drops its leaves and collapses in old age.  There are other things that happen in and around the tree, like animals that dropped the seeds that grew there, the mushrooms that help nourish the tree, the water and sunshine that give it life.  Are they not also “tree?”
 
Buddhism concludes that consciousness of ’self’ is an act of discrimination; one thing distinguished from an infinity of interrelated possibilities, possibilities that are ultimately empty of separate identity.  The whole picture of any object includes that emptiness from which it is born and to which it returns.  We are born from unconsciousness, identifying self and other by the efforts of our parents and teachers, by the desire to live and thrive.  And, with death, we return to unconsciousness, empty of self and other. 
 
On examination, this life cycle is reproduced in every moment of awareness.  Every instant of consciousness begins with raw sensory awareness empty of identity, empty of self and other, transformed by discriminating mind into separate name and form, “me” here, ”it” there.  And just as quickly, some new experience takes its place.
 
“Buddha” means “waking up,” waking to the dynamic nature of experience, of our experience, also called the ‘Tathagata,’ meaning, ‘thus come, thus gone.’  You and I,  and all the selves that comprise our world, are coming into being, and returning to emptiness over and over again, an activity of fundamental equality experienced as compassion.

Halloween - a paramita
 
The trees
Have lost their leaves,
Frost has killed the garden.
Gather potatoes
Onions and carrots,
Stash and horde because
Who knows what lies ahead.  
 
Now the dead rise up
And remind us
Of their fate.
Specters of Sawain
At the door
The goblin,
The skeleton,
The politician
Avoid them
Hide in darkness
And they will
Play their tricks
 
Tricks are averted
By one measure
Give of yourself
And death transforms
Into something ordinary
Like the kid next door.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

“Good friends, people of the world originally have the knowledge of bodhi and prajna within them, but they cannot realize it themselves because of the wandering of the conditioned mind…” ( Huineng, Platform Sutra, chapter 2)
 
 “Prajna,”  an ancient Sanskrit word meaning insight or wisdom, is one of the so-called “paramitas” in Buddhism, (generosity, ethics, inclusiveness, resolve, meditation, wisdom), practices that help us  ‘cross over’ the turbulent river of birth and death.  ‘Paramita,’ another Sanskrit word, means ‘perfection’ or ‘having reached the other shore.’   Prajna’  is the row boat, but it is also the far shore itself. 
 
There is something wonderful about that far shore.  You know it’s there and want to get there. But there is difficulty – it is far away, beyond clear sight and knowing – and rivers can be dangerous.  At first thought, I can’t get there from here – no boat, no wings.  Something else is required. 
 
It’s like being young and believing you can solve everything yourself, but around middle age (or older) waking up and realizing , ‘I might not live forever.”  All of a sudden life and death are a problem “I” am not going to solve.   We start looking for help.  Maybe Zen practice will get me there! 
 
But Huineng says you already have the knowledge of prajna!  It is only due to the “conditioned mind” that you can’t get there!  In other words, the “I” that cannot solve life and death is a condition of mind,  a concept that,  whatever its usefulness,  is limited. 
 
Of course, you have not always had an “I am” self.  We were not born with that state of mind.  And, we might reflect, that we will not die with it, either.  At some point, we will have to let go of everything that “I am.”  If “I am” is all there is, then this is a disturbing prospect to say the least. 
 
But Huineng suggests you already know something larger than that ‘I am’ self.   When you ‘throw yourself’ into whatever you do, where have you gone?  And what is left behind?  Is there not, in such moments, a kind of freedom and energy, focus and attention - wisdom, even - appropriate to the task at hand?
 
We assume “I” to be something objective, something concrete, this body, this identity, this physical reality.  But sometimes we say “I forgot myself,” or “I was beside myself” or “I’m dying to do that!”   From the standpoint of awareness, “self” is a fleeting experience.
 
Though born without self-awareness, we are urged by our parents to develop the language and knowledge to function in society.  But we reach a stage of maturity where we long for the innocence of childhood, and search for a way to reconcile our social selves and that original lack of self-consciousness.  
 
Zen is practice to notice that this history is present in every moment.  Every instant of sensory connection moves from raw, unselfconscious sensation to the perception, volition and consciousness that defines the social self and its relationship to the world.
 
Prajna (wisdom) is fullness of mind,  the wisdom that embraces both the coming and going  of an ‘I am’ self.  It is not to be sought after, because it is already here, if only we resolve to examine our own experience.

Commentary by Gendo

Commentary by Gendo ​(as offered, more or less, at the UUChurch in Norwich, VT)

Text: “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality, because that touchstone can only be oneself.  Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes.  And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes.  They do not relate to the present anymore than they relate to the person.”  (James Baldwin, "Letter From a Region of my Mind" - 1962)

It is tempting, in a time of threat (and there are so many threats), to withdraw to the safety of our separate identities:  my mask versus your germs, my politics versus yours, my racial identity versus yours, my zendo versus your church.  But separate identity only yields more threats: the people who don’t wear masks, the people who hold contrary opinions, the people who look different than I and my friends, the people who worship strange gods or none at all.
 
Courage is wearing a mask, not in fear of others, but in solidarity with all in preventing the spread of disease.  Courage is recognizing that my neighbors, whatever our differences, are moved by the same desire to live life well that inspires me.  Courage is paradox: affirmation and sacrifice, an act of true, which is to say, selfless, love.
 
The story is told of a young man named Huineng, who lived  in ancient China over 1300 years ago, an illiterate “Southerner and aborigine,”  who heard a Zen monk reciting a Buddhist text; and was moved to change his life, arranged for the care of his widowed mother and took off for a monastery in the North.  
 
There, he said to the teacher:  “…I want to be a buddha (awakened one).”    The teacher tested him: “You are a Southerner and an aborigine, how can you be a buddha?”  Huineng replied, “As an aborigine, my social status is not the same as yours, but what difference is there in our buddha (awakened)-nature?” The teacher recognized Huineng’s determination and ability, but was fearful of how the monks would treat this aborigine, and sent him to work in a back building, pounding rice and chopping wood;  while the monks practiced diligently in the meditation hall.  
 
Long story short,  when it came time to pick a successor, the teacher tested the monks and chose the aborigine above all others, gave him the bowl and robe that signified transmission of authority, but warned him to flee under cover of darkness.   The monks, alarmed that Huineng had stolen what was rightfully theirs, chased after him.  One of the monks, formerly an army general,  caught up with Huineng and cornered him.  But Huineng placed the bowl and robe on a rock and said, “This robe represents faith; is it appropriate to struggle over it.?”  The monk tried to pick up the robe and bowl, but could not.  
 
Humiliated, he asked Huineng instead for his teaching and was profoundly awakened by his words.  He returned to his fellow monks and told them Huineng was not to be found there and diverted them elsewhere.  Huineng took refuge in the woods and lived with a group of hunters for fifteen years before he emerged, was properly ordained and recognized as the sixth patriarch of Zen in China; known to this day as a foundational teacher of the tradition and author of the “Platform Sutra.” 
 
Sometimes courage means letting go of the negative identity of a social outcast.  Sometimes courage means letting go of pride and assumptions of privilege.  Either way, courage is letting go of fixed assumptions about who I am and what the world is.  It’s noticing self-absorption (maybe someone else has pointed it out) and letting go with trust in something greater: trust that love only becomes true when it is selfless.
 
Lately, I spend a lot of time walking down the road near my house.  Have you ever noticed that if you walk in a hang-dog posture, eyes on the ground, how your mind becomes lost in anxious thought?  Then if you lift your eyes, take in the surrounding lansdscape, suddenly there is a kind of freedom and expansiveness.   It’s as if suddenty and mysteriously, you have touched a source of courage and connection.  Where did that come from?  In the Judeo-Christian Old Testament thay say God’s help comes from the hills.  In Buddhism we talk about waking up to our true nature.  Whatever words we chose, may we know the courage to throw ourselves into the mess and beauty of the world and love truly.

Commentary by Gendo
 
"Going and coming freely, the substance of mind without blockage - this is prajna [wisdom]." Huineng, Platform Sutra
 
 
Zen practice is about the wisdom to live life well.  It’s investigation of what it means to be a human being, to have a mother and father, to be born, and to die.  It’s research whose subject is ourselves.  No one else can do this project for you.  Training is helpful, but, ultimately, the practice is everything you do. 
 
Training begins with zazen, sitting quietly and still.  The first lesson of zazen is not what you’re taught or read in a book.  Sitting quietly and still, you know the busy-ness, the fixations, of your own mind.  Those fixations include thoughts on the inside, objects on the outside. 
 
In stillness, the question naturally arises (no one tells you this), how do I quiet my mind?  If you try to suppress thoughts or even just ignore them, the result is just more busy-ness.  Like a cat chasing its own tail.  The one having the thought trying to suppress the thought only adds more thought!   Neither thought nor the willful effort to eliminate thought proves sufficient to free the mind from bondage (suffering), to experience this “going and coming freely,” that Huineng calls ”prajna” or wisdom.
 
But in Zazen and in life, the act of breathing offers instruction.  When some anxious fixation arises, in everyday speech we say, “Take a deep breath!”  Breath moves freely in two directions, inbreath and outbreath.  To notice breathng, is to notice activity that is “going and coming freely.”  One can interrupt breath or alter its pattern.  But let go of intention and breathing moves freely.
 
Likewise, detach from investment in your thoughts and they come and go of their own accord.  Likewise, all objects of attention come and go.  Even this life, this body, regardless of our preferences, comes and goes.  Who “I am” is, after all, more than my thoughts, more than my things, more than this body.
 
All of Buddhism comes down to the truth of our experience. The “Four Noble Truths” are themselves found by our own investigation:  the blockages of mind (suffering) , the recognition of the attachments that bind the mind (causes), the letting go that is “going and coming, substance of mind without blockage,” and the practice of wisdom in everyday life.

“The Perfect Way knows no difficulties, except that it refuses to make preferences”. (Shinjinmei, 6th Century China)
 
Gendo's commentary.

“No preferences” is not doctrine.  Strive to have no preferences?  The project is already impossible!  How can you achieve no preference without preferring it?
 
“No preferences” is just what’s happening.  There are moments, like the startling sight of a bright sunrise, like the cry of a new born baby, moments of full awareness that are, for a moment, unselfconscious,  beyond thought or opinion.  But look carefully, and those moments are happening all the time. The first instance of any awareness is an experience devoid of thought or opinion.  
 
Quickly,  those selfless moments become objects of thought - “Oh, what a beautiful baby!” – or something else we name and judge as likable or not.  We habitually separate 'self' and gaze on the objects of our preference in an act of consciousness.
 
Zen teaches that human beings have learned consciousness to protect their situation..   Of course, we prefer to cross the street safely rather than not.  We are constantly experiencing and acting on a preference.  

But our preferences are not the whole picture.  Like it or not, the universe does not hinge on our preferences.  Self-absorption and all its miseries and delights are not the end of the story.  “The person who distrusts himself…interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes.” (James Baldwin, 1946)
 
Zen teaches that the underlying ‘truth’ of our situation is not an object..  It's nature is selfless ('true') and all embracing ('love').   It is empty of preferences, empty of opinion and thought.   But ancient Zen teacher Huineng warns: "don't cling to emptiness when you hear me speak of emptiness."   A truth fixated is no longer true!  Religions warn against golden calves and images of God, and still, people fixate the warning itself and war against sinners. “Those who find fault with others are themselves at fault.” 
  
Zen points to a stillness in the midst of paradox, in the midst of a conscious mind that discriminates good and bad, healthy and sick, right and wrong, life and death.  Suffering itself instructs: “Wake up!  No preferences! Cling to neither joy or despair. Know the 'middle way,'  Know wise (selfless) action.  Know it for yourself, without which all such words are worthless. 

      Jesus is born, Buddha is enlightened, not in the bright days of Summer but in the darkest nights of Winter.  It is human nature to avoid suffering, to cherish the summer sun.   But, inevitably, what we like encounters what we dislike; what we know will encounter what we don’t know. Summer warmth meets winter cold.  Summer sun meets winter dark.  The year we have known meets the year we do not yet know in a moment of reckoning.
    The first of Buddhism’s noble truths is suffering. Try as we might, suffering happens. To contemplate suffering reveals something other than self-affirmation, something other than the preferences that define who ‘I am”.
      As with in-breath and out-breath, what ’I like’ is already present in what ‘I dislike’.  Pleasant and unpleasant depend on each other.  Light and dark, friend and enemy, knowledge and mystery; all are partners in one dance. 
      To know the dance is to loosen the grip on partiality.  To abandon partiality is to recognize a world larger than the categories imposed by personal preference; a reality  ‘true’ because beyond self-centered-ness, ‘love’ because all embracing. 
      To act on the basis of true love is virtue, both the fruit and resolution of suffering.  Virtue manifests in many ways and one of them is generosity.  

A reflection on Climate Change.                                                                                                            Gendo

To be aware in New England in October is to be aware of change:  leaves changing in a flash of color before falling; cold nights and dying gardens; a reminder to harvest, store food, and find the snow tires.  But these are quaint melancholies beside a greater transformation.   Climate itself is changing: late frost, new storm patterns, different caterpillars and more ticks.  People who study such things warn us: pay attention!  The world that is home to all people is becoming inhospitable.  We are up against a problem and it is us.
 
Of course, Buddhism long ago identified the issue;  not climate, specifically, but us. The irony that what we desire would lead us instead to what we seek to avoid has an old name: conditioned co-arising.  It is a situation that since ancient times is illustrated by breath: in- breath and out-breath, two opposite activities nonetheless dependent on each other.   You can’t have one without the other  To indulge life excluding death, to attempt all of one without the other is the Buddhist recipe for suffering. 
 
The confusion is inherent in consciousness itself.  We fixate objects as reality.  But appearance is a matter of discrimination, one thing relative to another.  We know day in distinction to night.  We fixate one or the other, but the whole picture is that both inform experience.  The whole picture is that no object is singular and permanent.  All are interdependent and impermanent.
 
It is that fixation, without reckoning the whole picture, that Buddhism identifies as the cause of suffering.  Wanting all the energy – oil, gas, and technology - to pursue our desires without reckoning the consequences is a set up for misfortune.   We are seeing the great lengths we human beings will go to avoid that reality. 
 
The Buddhist resolution of suffering is to let go of fixation:  no clinging, also depicted as ‘emptiness.’  In Zen (under the influence of Taoism) we speak of plus and minus: two dimensions of opposing activity regarded as plus on one hand, minus on the other.  The whole picture - day/night, in-breath/out-breath, life/death - is plus and minus together;  in other words, zero.  That zero, that emptiness, embraces all the contradictory aspects of our discriminating awareness.  It is empty, yet full of everything; “Empty,” as the Dalai Lama explains, “of separate identity.”  
 
To embrace emptiness is to take responsibility.  It is ‘fullness of mind,’ (mindfulness if you like).  It is the courage to embrace all of heart and mind; to set aside self-centered preference for this or that.  It is the courage to act on the basis of wisdom and compassion.   
 
 
 

​