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.   
 
 
 

​

Commentary by Gendo

Compassion’s Latin root means “feeling with.”  Buddhists talk about the  “meeting of subject and object.”   Christians say, ‘love your neighbor as yourself.”  Can you teach compassion? 
 
From a Buddhist standpoint, compassion is completely natural.  There is nothing to learn, nothing to teach.  It is the natural expression of your “true” or authentic self.
 
How could you possibly teach someone their own true self?  Of course, everyone has to find their own way.   Maybe there are helpful signs.  Maybe there are favorable conditions.   But you can’t do that work for someone else.

What is that work?  Buddhism calls it the work of not clinging, not clinging to ideas about your own identity.   That’s not a directive, like “you must not cling.”  Rather it is what you do when you let “nature take its course”.  Notice clinging and the consequences of clinging and you know for yourself that your true nature does not cling to anything. 
 
Every day something has to be done.  You have to jump out of the way of a speeding car, or lift your hand quickly from a hot stove.   A baby cries and you have to pick it up:   You just do it.
 
It is not clinging until you fixate an idea about yourself.  It becomes clinging when you adopt an attitude, like “I am never in the right place. ”  Or  “I’m a really smart person.”   Or even “I am so compassionate!”  It’s that “I am”, that assertion of an objective identity, that gets in the way and is different from what was, in the first place, unselfconscious. .
 
Gets in the way of what?   Change, of course.   Everything changes, including yourself. Youth becomes old age.  Pride comes before fall.  A fixated self is like trying to stand straight in a rushing river. 
 
Buddhism says that your true self is “empty.”  It’s not that your self is some great void, an emptiness that is just another “I am” identity.  The true experience of self is said to be empty of independent identity, empty of ‘self-consciousness’.  In that sense emptiness embraces everything. 
 
We commonly think of our bodies as being ourselves.  You can, of course, look at your own hand and say, “This is my hand.”   But notice that the one who sees the hand stands apart from it.  You, the observer,  and your hand are in that moment separate from each other.  You can look at every part of your body, even imagining the insides that you cannot see, and the same thing is true.  The self that observes stands apart from the thing observed.   Consider not just your body, but also its decline, in aging and death.  The one who regards all of this is detached from it.  Consider feeling and thought, both positive and negative, in the same way.   All are separate from the “you” that stands apart from them and observes them,  Self is not found in anything that we perceive as object.  The observer cannot observe itself and is, in this sense, unknowable. 
 
Just as this “I am” rests on a foundation that is empty of an observable self, the same is true of other selves.  Thus the act of greeting requires more than exchange of information.   It involves ritual, my emptiness acknowledging another’s emptiness:  bowing in some cultures, shaking hands or hugging in others.  In emptiness, self recognizes other as itself, an experience we call true (selfless) love, or compassion.  

​Commentary                                                                                                   by Gendo

    Fullness of mind is empty of self.  Isn’t that right?  When attention is focused fully on something, there is no experience of self.  When some sudden bright thing or stunning sound or strong sensation comes, there is no time to think what it is or who I am.  Looking back, you say, “It took my breath away.”  What happens without breath?  You die. 
     If that is an unsettling thought, consider that from the very beginning of life you are empty of self.  A baby responds to everything with utter unselfconsciousness.  With the constant teaching of parents, babies learn to name themselves and all things.  But first comes the fullness of experience, empty of self.  Adults, who have learned so much, are nostalgic for that innocence.  Where has it gone? 
    If you start looking for fullness of mind, you will not find it.  Why?  Because who is searching?  Your self, of course!.  It is the job of the self to divide the world into this and that, into like and dislike, light and dark, tall and short, all in relation to its own preservation.  But fullness of mind holds everything.  Originally, the mind holds everything.
     The self cannot find what is empty of self because that emptiness was never gone, only disguised as discriminating awareness!  Every first impression is empty of self, then quickly gives way to thought and name. “Look at the beautiful sunrise!”  But even as the words are spoken we have left a moment in which there is no breath, no self.  I have made on object of an experience that in the first instance was held in fullness of mind;  full, not only of sunrise , but also of night and stars; full of day the bright sunshine and stormy clouds grey and white; all in distinction to the riot of color before me; for which words are poor substitute.
     In every moment you die and are reborn.  That is the conclusion of Zen.

Comments (more or less) by Gendo offered at Puget Sound Zen Center, Vachon Island, Washington, to an audience including children.     
 
People might think of  “Buddha” as a person who lived long ago, or as a statue in front of the room.  But “Buddha” is a word (or a statue) that refers to an experience.  Like all words and statues it is different from the experience itself.
 
“Buddha” is an ancient word from the Sanskrit language of India, translated as  “the awakened one.”   It represents an experience that is like waking up from sleep, or the waking of a newborn baby.  In this case, “sleep” is the usual way of seeing things and “waking up”  is a particular, fresh understanding of the way things are.  When someone has that waking up experience, Buddha is born.  
 
The first person to describe this experience lived 2500 years ago in India.  Today (May 5, 2019) we honor him, honor that experience, its potential in each of us, and its continuing relevance to life in our time.
 
The Buddha of ancient India was a person born of a mother and father just like us.  He was born into a family of privilege, with a father who was a leader in his community.  Seven days after his birth, his mother died.  His father vowed that his son should grow up with every possible pleasure to distract from the tragedy of his mother’s death. 
 
But, as the boy grew to become a young man, he saw from his window people in the streets who were sick and dying.  He decided he needed to leave his comfortable home and solve this problem of suffering.
 
Of course, human beings still face this problem.  Everyone is born with the boundless opportunity of new life, but all must eventually  face illness and death.  Buddha’s journey is our journey and our ritual today is renewed dedication to his quest and to the timeless truth of his realization.