When Nothing Works

This article originally appeared in Tricycle Online.

We’re halfway into another year that, like 2025, came thundering in, bringing with it great upheaval and uncertainty. So much has happened so quickly, it’s not always easy to know what to take in or how to respond. It’s not always clear what we should do that will be effective. The question in so many of our minds right now is, What do I do? What do I do that will truly help? To me, this is the purpose of the spiritual path—to show us how to act, so that we can all live well.

One of my favorite stories is an Ursula K. Le Guin story called “Things.” Set in a nameless country, the inhabitants are facing the end of the world, divided between those bent on destroying the last of what’s left, and those celebrating the End of Days. Belonging to neither camp is a bricklayer named Lif, who dreams one night that beyond the horizon lies a set of islands. It’s a place he’s never been to, has never even seen, yet he knows, with a certainty that surprises him, that if he wants to live, that’s where he must go. If the old world is dying, his only hope is to go to a new world—a world he somehow knows is possible, is real. And so, the next morning, he gets down to work. At first, he tries to build a boat to sail to the islands, but being a bricklayer and not a sailor, he does the only thing he knows: he makes the boat out of bricks and watches helplessly as it quickly sinks. Then he decides to build a path, a hundred feet’s worth of handmade bricks leading straight into the sea. To outsiders, what he’s doing seems absurd, irrational. But to Lif, it’s the only choice. He has no idea where the path will take him or if it’ll even get him there, but he knows that what’s behind him will no longer serve. All he can do is lay down brick after careful brick and trust that when the time comes to leap, all his work will help him in a way he can’t yet see.

Our lives are very much like this. We can’t really see beyond the place we’re standing, so all we can do is trust that there is a path, that we can walk it, and that it’ll eventually take us where we want to go. In Buddhism, that “place” is liberation—which is not a place at all, but a way of life in which suffering is not the norm, conflict is not widespread, and the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance are not the main drivers. To get there, we must face the end of the old world—the world of samsara—and devote ourselves to building a path to a new, functioning world. A world where our beacons are the three virtues of generosity, compassion, and wisdom. The question, of course, is how.

Recently I came across the term “applied spirituality,” and my first thought was, All spirituality should be applied spirituality, since abstract or theoretical spirituality doesn’t transform, doesn’t deliver. It’s like carrying around a beautiful map but never walking the landscape. To be effective, spirituality should implicitly function in every aspect of our lives, from the meditation hall to the boardroom, from the classroom to the court room. But the truth is, this doesn’t always happen, and it never happens automatically, so it’s helpful to make the connection between our spiritual path and our everyday lives explicit to ensure we’re in effect living the transformation we seek. This is the work of translating the dharma for everyday application, a process that we can break down into five interconnected steps: study, transliteration, practice, integration, and expression.

First, study. On the spiritual path, to study means to immerse yourself in the landscape and not just read the map. Dharma study isn’t the same as book learning. It’s not just an intellectual exercise, so it requires more of us than we realize at first. Students doing koan study, for example, often get frustrated when they don’t immediately see the answer to a koan, particularly if they have an intellectual bent. They’re used to working hard to understand, to know, and when a koan fails to yield to their effort, they take this to mean that something’s wrong—that they are somehow wrong. But dharma study is the study of reality, and reality is neither right nor wrong. It simply is. We have to meet it on its own terms, and to do this, we have to let go of what we know.

There’s a koan about a Zen teacher, Daito Kokushi, whom the emperor had summoned to become his court advisor. But Daito wasn’t interested in either the pomp or the title, so he took off his robes and went to live like a vagrant under a bridge, hoping to go under the emperor’s radar. Undeterred, the emperor summoned a couple of his officers and said, “I’ve heard this teacher loves watermelons. Go look under every bridge, and when you see an old man, offer him a watermelon and say, ‘Take this watermelon without using your hands.’ If he can answer, bring him to me. He’s our man.” The guards went from bridge to bridge offering big slices of watermelon to any men they saw, until they came to one with ratty clothes, a dirty face, but with an unusual gleam in his eye. “Take this watermelon without using your hands,” they said and without hesitation, the old man fired back, “Give it to me without using your hands.”

This isn’t a puzzle. It isn’t a game. This koan is asking us to tend to a garden or comfort a child without using our hands, attend a protest without moving our feet, speak without opening our lips, listen without using our ears. It’s asking us to meet reality directly, to do whatever we’re doing completely, without letting our ideas or beliefs or preconceptions get in the way. If we can do that, we might be able to meet one another with greater skill—perhaps even some understanding—though our views differ wildly. At the very least, we’ll know not to get swept up by our rage, since that doesn’t help. Meeting reality doesn’t mean liking or accepting another’s position, particularly if it’s harmful. It certainly doesn’t mean condoning it. It means seeing clearly how what’s happening has come to be so that we’re better able to respond. It means knowing where we stand and what to do when the path seems to be failing us, when a chasm has opened at our feet and is threatening to swallow our work or our safety or our loved ones. 

Anything we know takes up space—the space new ways of seeing and acting need to become visible. We hold on to our knowledge because it gives us a sense of certainty, and therefore the illusion of safety. Not knowing, by definition, is uncertain, and we don’t like uncertainty. Not knowing asks us to stand at the end of our path, toes curled over the last pair of bricks, and not know what will happen next. It forces us to be with our doubt, with our questions, and this is uncomfortable. But it’s exactly what we need to find our way. Contemporary Zen teacher Norma Wong Roshi says that in transformational work, it’s the crisis that opens the way for big leaps—the crisis of confidence, the crisis of understanding. When nothing works, when we can’t see the way forward, how do we take the next step? Where do we place the next brick? Will it hold? We don’t know, and because we don’t know, we have to trust what we can’t yet see. This is the very definition of faith. Not seeing where the path is taking us, we trust the place where we’re standing, and we trust ourselves. We trust the dharma and our capacity to practice it. Then we vow to do what it takes to find and follow that new way.

The second step is transliteration, whose dictionary definition is “the act of writing or printing a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or script.” The Japanese term Zen is the transliteration of the Chinese Chan, the Sanskrit dhyana, and the Pali jhana for meditation. We can think of this step as transliterating the teachings into a vocabulary for daily practice.

I myself have done this in different ways. Sometimes I’ll take a traditional teaching, massage it a bit, and create an acronym so that it’s easy to remember—so I can bring the teaching to mind when I most need it. In the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, the Buddha offers different ways of working with unskillful thoughts, and to remember these, I created the acronym SWITCH, which stands for switch, warn, ignore, track, and chop, various techniques for working with thoughts that cause us and others harm. I also took the well-known teaching from the Dhammapada: Refrain from harm/Practice good/Master the mind and derived from it three steps whose names alliterate: Stop, Soothe, Shift. At the time I was working with a person who wasn’t too familiar with Buddhism but was desperate to find ways to deal with a difficult relationship, so I wanted to give him something that he could easily understand and remember. I said, “First, stop. Don’t react, don’t do anything that will make matters worse.” Meeting harm with harm only compounds our suffering, but it’s often our first reaction when we feel threatened. Stopping when we want to lash out is the hardest step, but it’s also the most necessary. Then we can turn toward practicing good. This can also be difficult, however, if we’re still feeling activated. So I thought, what if I change the order of the steps and place mastering the mind before practicing good? That’s what soothe is. It’s “downregulating,” to use a psychotherapeutic term. It’s calming ourselves before shifting into a beneficial course of action. Stop, Soothe, Shift.

Transliterating the dharma makes it easier for us to remember to practice, the third step in the sequence. To practice is to do, and further, to do deliberately. My own definition of practice is to do what we always do, on purpose. But for this, we first have to remember it’s what we want. Paradoxically, the most difficult aspect of practice is remembering to do it, so we have to come up with ways to help ourselves remember what we so easily forget. 

One of my friends saved the Four Bodhisattva Vows as her screensaver so that every time she starts her computer, she remembers the vows she’s made and the direction she wants for her life. Another friend was working at her desk when she took one look at the dozens of tabs open on her web browser and thought, “That’s my mind.” Now she deliberately opens only one window at a time and keeps her desktop—and hopefully her mind—uncluttered. One student repeats a short verse, a gatha, before opening her refrigerator. She has a challenging relationship with food and needing a way to remind herself to be mindful when she approaches the “danger zone,” as she calls it, she recites this verse before reaching for something to eat. It’s a simple practice that’s had a profound effect on her life. Think of the potential something like this has to help us work with all kinds of addictive behaviors. It’s going to take time to shift, yes. But this is how we do it—one brick a time, letting ourselves be guided by the question: how do I work with my mind? Even if we’re working closely with a spiritual teacher, each of us must become our own guide over time. No one knows us better than we know ourselves, so if we can be honest and persistent, there’s little we cannot do to shift, and eventually see through, our habits.

Next we have integration. Whereas knowing a lot about the dharma doesn’t serve us—not when it comes to liberation—knowing a little about how to put it to good use does. Here, repetition is helpful. Day after day we do certain practices: we sit quietly, maybe we chant, we study a particular teaching and reflect on how we can apply it to our lives, and we do this day after day, rain or shine. In this way, the dharma becomes integrated into all our activities, showing us that practicing and living are completely intertwined.

Many years ago, when I was living in a Zen monastery, I described to a friend one of our training weeks. “But you do the same thing every day!” he said. “Oh, it’s not the same at all,” I protested. Outwardly, our schedule appeared rather uniform: zazen in the morning and evening, breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, supper at six. Silent work in the morning, regular work in the afternoon. A bit of study, a bit of liturgy, and a little free time to do as we pleased. But in its doing, each activity was unique. No period of zazen was the same, no meal, no conversation, or chant. How could they be, when I wasn’t the same from one moment to the next? Lumping together moments of experience kills a bit of our living. On occasion, our assumptions and our certainty literally kill other beings. They certainly kill wonder and any kind of deep knowing. The work in this step is to live in such a way that each moment brings more life into our lives. 

In another koan, seven sisters are going on an outing when one of them says, “Sisters, instead of going to a park, let’s go together to see the charnel grounds.” Not exactly an obvious destination for a spring outing, so what is she trying to do? What does she want the others to see? “But that place is full of decaying corpses!” another one says. “What is such a place good for?” What will that place do for me, the sister asks, caught by convention. What can I get out of it? Otherwise, why should I bother with it at all? When we see our lives as a series of transactions, its worth can only be measured in terms of gain or loss, and this makes for some meager living. The first sister replies, “Let’s just go. Very good things are there.” She trusts something the others can’t yet see, and fortunately, the others trust her, so off they go. When they arrive at the charnel grounds, the first sister points to a corpse and says, “There’s a person’s body. But where has the person gone?” “What?!” one of them says. “What did you say?” And at this, all seven sisters are immediately enlightened. 

In moments when the conventional response won’t hold up, won’t serve, life asks us to respond unconventionally. This is what the fifth step, expression, demands of us. It’s one thing to say we want to practice loving-kindness. It’s another to grapple with it in our minds as we contemplate offering it to someone we can’t abide. It’s one thing to hear that practicing like this will help us, and that it will help us build the kind of world we want to inhabit. It’s another to experience this for ourselves. In a way, expression is just another form of practice, and by necessity, it includes transliteration and integration. It asks, How do I bring to life what I’ve seen, and how do I do it in such a way that someone else will be able to experience it too? 

Someone was telling me about meeting the monks who did the 2,300-mile peace walk from Texas to Washington, D.C. The streets were packed with people wanting to greet the monks and be blessed by them, but there were also those who wanted to stir up trouble. During one inflection point in the conflict someone asked aloud, “What would the monks do in this situation? They wouldn’t respond with anger, would they? Let’s not either.” Gradually, the crowd itself diffused the tension, simply through their calm presence. The monks’ example—their clear, committed expression of the dharma in their lives—had become contagious. This is expression. This is giving form, giving voice, to that which we’ve realized. 

When nothing seems to work, when our usual ways of thinking, of speaking, of acting, have reached their limits, our task is to find other ways, other paths. First, we decide what most needs our care and attention. Then we discern what we should pick up and what we should put down, which is a form of discipline—what we call training the mind. Ranting about the state of the world won’t help us. Cultivating clarity and courage so we can respond with skill and love will. Meeting hatred with hatred won’t help us. Finding a way to face what we’d rather avoid will.

The more we study and practice, the more we understand ourselves and the world, realizing that the two are not different. The conflict we see globally is the conflict each one of us creates. Governments and corporations don’t make choices; people do. That’s why it’s so important for each of us to understand what we’re choosing, as well as be clear about the effects that those choices have on everything we see.

When I was reflecting on this process of translating the dharma into our everyday lives, at first I saw it as a spiral staircase. Study leads to translation, which leads to practice, and integration, and expression, taking us ever more deeply into our own being, our own mind. But the truth is this staircase is more like an Escher stair: each set of steps leads to and springs from another in a never-ending grid extending in all directions. Study is practice, practice is integration, transliteration is expression, expression requires study, and on and on. 

Standing at the end of the path, water up to his nose and wind whipping his hair, Lif paused for a moment at the threshold of the known, trusting this was the way to the unimagined. Then he leapt.

Photo by Ales Krivec