Avoiding Idle Talk
Photo by Ernie A. Stephens
In the seventh talk in a series on the Eight Awarenesses of Enlightened Beings, Zuisei speaks on the eighth awareness: avoiding idle talk (she changed the order of the talks in order to end with wisdom).
Master Dogen said, “To totally know the true form of all things is the same as being without idle talk.” In that complete knowing, there is no room, no opportunity, for idle talk. Knowing the true form of a thing, there is no one to speak about it idly, or to speak about it at all.
Words cannot express the reality. Live words can point to it, but they are not it. And yet, since we have to speak, how do we do so in such a way that we practice abstaining from thought and language that keeps us bound? How do we create space to rest in a deeper sense of knowing and trusting in our innate goodness?
Recorded at Zen Mountain Monastery 07/16/2017
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Avoiding Idle Talk
Master Dogen said,
“Having realization and being free from discrimination is what is called avoiding idle talk. To totally know the true form of all things is the same as being without idle talk.”
So, to totally know the true form of all things is the same as being without idle talk. And avoiding idle talk is the last of the Eight Awarenesses of an enlightened being. And in our school, it's the last teaching of the Buddha.
That's it. That's my talk. Um, it's actually tempting…The way I was feeling this morning, and with this cough, I didn't feel confident I could make it through both the interview and the talk. So, my apologies for not doing the interview. And the scrambled the order of these awarenesses a little bit.
But I wanted to save Cultivating Wisdom for the session. And Gokhan gave a talk on avoiding idle talk just a few weeks ago. So I'll try not to repeat what he said.
There are many ordinary forms of idle talk that we all engage in and can recognize. This is talk that has no other purpose but to elevate, to distract, to disparage, to compare. And even St. Benedict recognized, you could say, the danger of idle talk and built a safeguard in his rule.
He said, above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so assiduous as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not harm himself, but also distract others. And Benedictines in general are wary of idleness.
And they, like us, work a lot. Their motto is ora et labora, pray and work. Apparently, one sister changed it to ora et laborara, laborara, laborara.
Some of our residents would probably say the same. So there's talk whose purpose is, as I said, just to distract or to create a kind of buffer between you and me. But I would also argue that there is a kind of idle talk that can bring us closer.
I've seen people, women especially, who do it well. They'll praise another woman's perfume or a piece of clothing or ask for a recipe. And if the purpose is not to ingratiate, but if it's done out of a true sense to come closer, to connect to the person that you have in front of you, and usually in a setting like this, it's usually somebody that you don't know, or someone you don't know well. And so it's a kind of chitchat that reminds us that fundamentally we're the same, right? We're human beings. And life is scary, or it can be.
And so, right now, why don't we just meet on this safe ground and see where that takes us? And so maybe, in that sense, it's not exactly idle, but it's not deep either. It's like icebreaking talk. And I was thinking about it, we're getting ready to do a family retreat next week.
I was just thinking about the kids and how we do a bit of this kind of icebreaking, because the groups that we have, they only come once a month. And so we have them for three hours, and then the next month, it may be the same group, but it's often not. And so there's a little bit of bringing the group together that we do.
So we have a name game that we do every time. And sometimes it works very well. And sometimes you can tell where it just kind of leaves them cold.
And there was one that was, I don't know if it was the most successful, but it's certainly the one that I remember the most, where you had to say your name and your kind of favorite injury, the scar that you had. But they really got into it. And at a certain point, we actually had to stop it because the parents started to get into concussions. So we cut it at the pass. But it's this kind of, you could say, low-level or high-level, depending on how you're thinking about it, talk that just has that purpose, just to make us a little more comfortable. And then there is talk that is just idle, period.
I've told some of you the story when I was 16. Me and my best friend went off to the beach together. And there was a group of five of us, five girlfriends, but their parents were not as progressive as ours. So they didn't let the others go.
And they let me and my best friend go, mostly, they had no reason to distrust us. So we went. And it was a time when you could actually do that in Mexico.
I mean, I wouldn't do that now. I wouldn't travel alone, pretty much anywhere, really. So, but then it was okay. And we went and we went to a couple of clubs.
We were at a club one night. And I was feeling playful, which happens so rarely that when it does, it's like, I take the opportunity.
I just looked across the room, and not too far away, maybe like where kiosk was sitting, there was a guy talking to another guy, and he was introducing himself. And I read his lips. And so I knew that his name was Alberto.
So I said to my friend, “watch this.” So I went over. So I went over to Alberto, and I made this big shot.
“How are you?” I gave him a hug. And I kissed him. Have you been? It's so nice to see you again.
And he's looking at me, and I can see the wheels turning: Who is she? Who is she? But he kind of wants to know, and who is she? Who is she? I'm like, don't you remember? We went to such and such, I named another well-known club on another beach. I saw you last year. Don't you remember? He's like, yeah.
We talked for about half an hour. I walked away. He had no idea. He had never seen me in his life.
So I was completely, completely idle. But harmless, I think. And so there's talk that is silent or voiced in their way, which, and I think I took this medicine that makes me feel a little weird.
So if I start acting weird, that's why. There's talk that disturbs and agitates the mind, the Buddha said, and it can be talk that is outward-oriented, but it's very often not. It's very often us talking to ourselves. And there's talk that keeps us from seeing the true nature of things, right? This is what Master Dogen said.
And that's in one sense, that's the most pernicious kind of talk. And it's what I wanted to focus on. And so he actually says, he just says it directly: to totally know the true form of all things is the same as being without idle talk, right? So now he's speaking of another level.
And that complete knowing, there's no room, there's no opportunity for idle talk. In knowing the true form of a thing, there's no one to speak about it idly. There's no one to speak about it at all.
And one of my favorite stories in the Zen literature is that of—it's a story about Zhaozhou's cypress tree. So a monastic asks Master Zhaozhou, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming to the West?”, which really is a way of asking, “What is Zen?” What is the fundamental nature of things? And he says, “the cypress tree in the garden.” And the student says, well, don't teach me using things. Why are you, you pointing to the effable, to me, to express the ineffable?
And Master Zhaozhou says, I'm not teaching using things or using objects. And so here the monk asks again, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West?” And Zhaozhou said, “The cypress tree in the garden.”
And about 200 years later, a monk is sitting, he's traveling, he's going on pilgrimage, and he's sitting with this koan unremittingly. And I've always really imagined him wrapped up in a thick woolen robe, and he's at an inn, at a roadside inn, and it's winter. I imagine the snow piled up against the walls of the inn, and it's so cold in his room that you could see, if you could stand there, the breath going in and out.
And he sits like this, and it's, of course, because it's snowing, it's completely, completely silent, right? That very particular kind of silence of winter. And he sits like this with complete concentration, every cell in his body, every thought of his mind on Zhaozhou's cypress tree. And, and night, so he goes on one day, and then it turns into night, and then it turns into day again, and he's still, he's still not moving from his seat.
There are soft footsteps that approach the door, and then they retreat again. And as the sun starts to come very slowly up the mountain, he's still sitting. He doesn't see it. More and more, his mind is that, in fact, that body, that tree, roots going deep into the ground, branches reaching up to the sky, maybe there's a little bit of that last remnant of the moon.
That night, so now it's the second night, there's a thief who slips in through his room, in through the window into his room. I imagine him kind of rustling a little bit, and because it's dark, he doesn't see anybody else. And he's maybe rustling through things.
And all of a sudden, he turns, and the light of the moon shines through the window. And the thief is scared half out of his wits, his wits, because the only thing that he sees is this enormous cypress tree sitting in the middle of the room. So in Buddhism, the Dharmakaya, the body of reality, is one of the three bodies of the Buddha—the body of truth.
It has no limits. It has no boundaries, no characteristics, no form. And therefore, it manifests the true form of the Buddha and of all things.
So it can manifest as a cypress tree, can manifest as a lawnmower, as a pot of chicken soup, as you and me. And Trungpa Rinpoche says, in tantric terms, the Dharmakaya is Vajradhatu, indestructible space, or Dharmadhatu, realm of thusness. All the names and laws can function within it and not be conditioned by it.
Because, before, in an earlier passage, he's saying that the word Dharmakaya is conditioned. You have to speak. In a sense, it's like the Buddha has to take form, conditioned form, and then there has to be a conditioned name.
But anything, all the names and all the things and laws that happen within it, you could say, are not conditioned. And in order to experience it, you have to undo old experiences. So when the old experiences cease to function, are non-existent, that's the kind of thing it is, because the ground has no allegiance to anything.
So when the old experiences cease to function, you can be a cypress tree. You can be a stick of incense. You can be a mat.
You can be a bridge. You can be a mountain. And we could also say that when the old experiences cease to function, the ground has allegiance to everything without distinction.
So that cypress tree is pledged to the soil that it stands on, and the wintry sky, and the passing clouds, and the waning moon, the cold night air, and the monastic sitting unmoving. It is in allegiance with all of these things, and is therefore inseparable from them. And so Trungpa Rinpoche also speaks of the other two bodies of the Buddha.
The Trikaya is the three bodies of the Buddha. And the second one is the Sambhogakaya, which is the reward body, the body of bliss. And then the Nirmanakaya, which is the manifestation body.
So when the old experiences cease to function, you can be a cypress tree.
And he speaks of, because he's speaking from a Vajrayana perspective, they are in relationship to a fierce deity, Vajrayogini. And so in Tibetan Buddhism, both the emptiness and the potentiality—so what can arise and function out of that emptiness of shunyata—are embodied in the form of a Dakini, a female spirit called a sky-goer. And so Vajrayogini is both a Dakini of great power and a female Buddha.
And she is also said to be the fundamental essence of all the Buddhas, including these three bodies. And so the Dharmakaya is the absolute primordial mind or its basic spaciousness. It is this ground that has no allegiance or has nothing but allegiance, you could say.
It is also, more simply, mind and thoughts. The Sambhogakaya is the emotional and energetic body. So it manifests as concepts and as speech.
And the Nirmanakaya is the physical body. It is form, it is action. It is also the manifestation of all the Buddhas who have ever lived.
Shakyamuni Buddha is the historical manifestation, you could say, of that primordial Buddha. All the Buddhas who've ever lived and who will ever live. So Vajrayogini, in her fierce, even frightening manifestation, I believe she's portrayed with a necklace of skulls, which was not about death.
I can't remember exactly what it was. It was pointing more towards impermanence, but it wasn't death, like bodily death. And she has fangs.
And she may even have a weapon that she's holding. And she encompasses these three bodies. And of course, we could ask, well, what does this have to do with me? What does it have to do with the fact that I suffer knowing these three bodies? What does it have to do with my partner leaving me, or my child getting sick, or my job being taken away from me, my life catching fire? How does seeing the true form of things help me? And that's not an idle question.
Whenever we hear these teachings, we hear and chant, participate, we do the chants. I've always liked that story, and Shugan Sensei tells it often also.
Dongshan is probably standing very much in a room like this, and he's doing service. And he's chanting along. And he's saying, there's no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, as all of us chanted this morning.
And he stops and says, well, wait a second. I have eyes. I have ears. I have a nose. I have a mouth. Why is the Heart Sutra saying this? Why do all the schools of Buddhism chant the Heart Sutra every day? What is this? And that's really the kind of mind.
That's the kind of inquiry. It's not just, well, in this case, you're hearing about the three bodies of the Buddha. Well, that's nice.
I know that's a Buddhist teaching. Okay. And then you go about your day.
What does this have to do with me? What does this have to do with my life? Why have teachers for millennia spoken in all these different ways? Sometimes ways that seem very direct and, you could say, very practical, perhaps very relevant to my everyday life. So I believe it's also Zhaozhou.
Somebody asks him probably something similar. What is the nature of Zen? And he says, “Have a cup of tea.” And we sort of get that a little bit better.
Yes, it's all about being completely present in the moment with this cup of tea, the taste in my mouth. We sort of get it. What about those three bodies of the Buddha being in that cup of tea? And how does not just knowing that—certainly not knowing intellectually— but how does hopefully realizing, at some point, how does that help you? How does that transform your life? Does it? That's really the question.
And those of you who did the yoga retreat yesterday with Barbara, I hope you have some sense, and I think all of us really understand that our emotional body, our physical body, you could say, our psychological body, our spiritual body, our mental body, our breath body, right, all of them need to come into alignment. When they don't, when they're not, we feel it. It manifests perhaps as illness, or it manifests as unease, or it manifests as confusion, manifests as suffering. So when our understanding is cloudy, our actions can be haphazard.
Our speech is equivocating, at best, or divisive, at worst. Patanjali called asana a firm, stable, relaxed, and comfortable posture. And it refers directly to the seated posture, which was how yoga began, but you can extend it to all the postures.
And of course, we won't be comfortable until we really understand ourselves. I won't be comfortable until I understand you to the best of my ability. And so we really don't need to know a thing about these three bodies of the Buddha, but we need to know everything about this body.
That's the only way that we will have realization and be free from discrimination, as Master Dogen says. Without being clear about this, we can be clear about that. And our world is a perfect example.
It seems that the more we know about that, the less we really understand this. The less we understand what's really going on here. And therefore, our struggle as individuals, as a country, as a species.
And it doesn't have to be like this. That's the Buddha's third noble truth. It doesn't have to be a struggle.
I had a lot of... a bit. I had a bit of time to myself in these last few days. A bit of time to be with this body.
And normally, when I feel sick, my experience just narrows drastically. And, that still happens. At some point, when I'm sick, I invariably, at some point, feel sorry for myself.
Actually, let me be kinder. At some point, I just feel the vulnerability. What a fragile, vulnerable proposition it is to be a human being.
Luckily, I haven't yet had any serious illness. But I get sick, unfortunately, frequently enough that I feel that. It's like, oh, the balance is quite delicate.
It's quite delicate. So I was feeling that. But also, at a certain point, as I was lying in bed, I just reflected and felt that, my illness, my aging, my death, eventually, are really just a dot, right, in that sea of existence, in which all manner of bodies are growing old or dying.
I ate a banana that was slowly turning, oxidizing. The bacteria in my body that I was working so hard to expel, were hopefully dying by the millions. The hydrangeas in our yard that look so alive, so full of life, in the fall, would start to decay, would eventually die, and hopefully be reborn again in the spring.
And it was comforting. It was deeply comforting to feel myself a strand of this web, to feel a part of this body of reality that does not grow ill or die. I mean, my own sickness would change, and it would pass, or it would not pass.
In either way, I was not and had never been apart from this web. I also realized how much I don't know about this body and this mind. There's what I think I know and what I have slowly, slowly learned.
But that is really still so much, the tip of the iceberg. And it reminded me of that John Powell video that the residents watched recently for our Beyond Fear of Differences work. And Powell is a professor of law in African American and ethnic studies at Berkeley.
And he does a lot of work around racism, but also understanding bias, and understanding its, you could say, its neurological basis. He was saying that basically our unconscious functions on the basis of bias. It doesn't matter whether we think we're good people or not.
All of us are biased. Because our unconscious processes 11 million bits of information per second. Eleven million bits.
And your conscious, our conscious mind can only process 40. So basically, that means that most of the time we're walking around is like a driverless car that just got the instructions punched in by a whole group of people, actually, nothing to do with you. And once you're born, and then you contribute.
That is making decisions based on what, on these biases and stereotypes. And you can't, you can't tell yourself, well, I'm just not going to be biased. Because he says, so imagine that you're building a bridge.
Let's say, from your, from your unconscious, the conscious, and to the rest of your body, your brain, you're building a bridge that is designed to hold 11 million cars per second. It's designed to hold 40 cars per second, and 11 million cars show up. So you're going to have a traffic jam that will last hundreds of years.
And so, you can't shut down the bridge either. So we have no choice. In other words, the unconscious is really driving most of our actions.
Or it's maybe a little bit like getting our news from the tabloids. And so it's a little unsettling to think about it. It's a little unsettling.
And yet, so he calls this implicit bias or implicit social cognition. So that's a little more neutral term, you could say. And so this is activated in us involuntarily.
And without our intentional control. And that's why we can say, well, I just won't be biased. And so we have to have a way to sort through all this information.
That means that, and of course, it very much depends on the society that we live in, on the norms, and then the biases that we've created over hundreds of years, sometimes millennia, about what it means to be male or female, white or black. Big or small, this or that religion. I mean, talk about idle talk, in a sense, except it's not really idle, because it manifests, it can manifest in very hurtful ways.
In a sense, to even get to the point where you acknowledge that there truly is so much that you don't know about this, how this works, to me seems kind of crucial to get anything, anything done. And then he also says, well, but you can't just change it at an individual level. It's good and it's necessary, but it's not enough.
And we need to work to address the meanings, the associations that we have built over these hundreds and hundreds of years. We need to change those meanings, which really, in a sense, as Bodhisattvas, that should not come as a surprise, right? I can't realize myself.
I can't realize myself without you. I need you to help me to see what I cannot see.
There was a professor at Stanford who was doing these tests about priming, basically these experiments. He had a group of all women who were going to take a math test, and he had two groups with exactly the same level of experience. One group just took the test, did well.
The other group, the test group, he said, right before they took the test, he said, I so enjoy teaching here at Stanford because there are so many smart women. They took the test, they did terribly. Terribly.
The reason is that women, we believe and we're told, women aren't good in math. And so when he primed the salient stereotype, or you could say, identification characteristic, female, something happened. That activated in the women's unconscious mind, and they did terribly.
Now, he repeated the experiment, and he said, I really love—he had another group of women, and they were all Asian this time. And so they come into the room, they sit down, he says, I really love teaching here at Stanford because there are so many smart Asian women. They aced the test.
I can't realize myself without you. I need you to help me to see what I cannot see.
Because the salient stereotype, in this case, is that Asians do very well in math. And so that got activated. And he said, this kind of experiment has been replicated over and over and over again.
So, think of the four immeasurables as a kind of priming, a skillful priming. The very opposite of idle talk.
May you be filled with happiness and know the root of happiness.
May you be free of suffering and know the root of suffering.
The first two. So when I am doing that, I am saying, I wish you happiness, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity.
And I’m saying that I wish that for you because you're a human being who deserves these qualities. Regardless of my beliefs about you, regardless even of what you may have done. I'm looking, you could say, beyond or under what our society, and therefore my unconscious, might call your worth.
And I'm saying, because you're alive, you deserve these things. Because you are thus, you don't even have to be alive in the sense of sentience. Because you're thus, because you're in front of me, you deserve this.
You don't need to prove your worth any further. Your actions may need work, as mine do. But your fundamental worth is not in question.
And that is seeing the true form of things. That is not separating myself or elevating myself, buffering myself from you. Think of the Karni Yameta Sutta as a kind of priming.
You're chanting it every day. I'm saying, I want to be a person skilled in goodness. I'm reminding myself that I am of that nature.
And I'm invoking that reality so that when the time comes, I can act accordingly. Think of Sang Tsong's Faith Mind poem.
In this world of suchness, there is neither self nor other than self.
To come directly into harmony with this reality, just simply say, when doubt arises, not to. Simply say, “I am not this. This is not mine. This is not myself.”
Simply say, “I will not other you.” Think of the Buddha's instructions on the four foundations of mindfulness.
Your fundamental worth is not in question.
If you're caught, a feeling of fear, of anger, of resentment, of anxiety, say to yourself, an unpleasant feeling has arisen in me. And watch what happens to that feeling. There is a song of praise for Vajrayogini, and the end of it goes like this:
Self-born great bliss, O Vajrayogini,
Unchanging wisdom Vajra of Dharmakaya,
Non-thought, unconditioned wisdom, absolute Dharmadhatu,
We prostrate to your pure non-dual form.
Eternally brilliant, utterly empty,
Vajra dancer, mother of all, I bow to you
The essence of all sentient beings lives as Vajrayogini.
From the milk ocean of her blessing, good butter is churned,
which worthy ones receive as glory.
May everyone eternally enjoy the lotus garden of the co-emergent mother.
Our essence lives as the form of this great enlightened mother, this sky-goer.
Fierce as fire, soft as butter when needed,
both male and female, or neither male nor female,
blessed and blessing all the worthy ones—that is, all of us.
And this non-thought, unconditioned wisdom,
this absolute Dharmadhatu is our home.
Or rather, our birthplace.
It's where we come from, it's where we return to when we stop talking.
It's what we experience when we have the courage to be still. Truly, truly still.
Because it does take courage to see and accept our awakened nature. Many, having caught a glimpse, have turned away from it. So it takes courage and humility to accept our greatness.
And I mean great as in vast, as in immeasurable, as in limitless, unfathomable.
But if we can, if we can accept it, even a little bit, then we can live and act as the true persons of the way that we are.
Avoiding Idle Talk, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard.
Explore further
01 : Eight Means to Enlightenment by Master Dogen
02: Guide to Dakini Land (book on Vajrayogini)