Awash with Joy
Photo by Ben White
We don’t always know we’re perfect, we don’t always feel complete, yet fundamentally, both are true of who we are.
In this talk Zuisei highlights Zen as a path of transformation. She shares her personal journey with sadness and leads an intimate exploration of how practice can change the ways in which we relate to ourselves and to each other. In this way, darkness becomes light, and sadness, joy.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Last weekend, I was thinking about what I wanted to speak about today. I had a sense of a general theme based on a book that I've been reading on Yogachara, which is an early philosophical school in Buddhism. It deals with the way the mind interacts with the environment, among other things. The book is also talking about dependent origination, the Buddhist teaching that nothing exists independent of other things. Dependent origination—that chain of causation—leads to all of us being here tonight, for example. All of us being here tonight depends on all these different causes and conditions interacting with one another. When you look at them closely, or, in a sense, when you look behind them, you see that there is no independent self. There's no one steering the ship. Instead, there is just this series, this collection of causes and conditions. So, for example, for you to be here tonight: you registered for the talk; you have the time and space to do this; you live in a country that is not persecuting Buddhism; you're fed, you're clothed, and you are taken care of enough that you can devote time and space to this kind of study, which is no small thing. Buddhism takes it very seriously. In fact, it is a rather extraordinary set of circumstances.
There's a story in the sutras which says that the likelihood that you are born as a human being, that you have encountered the Dharma, and that you are able to practice is as rare as a one-eyed turtle that lives at the bottom of the ocean. In one version of the story, she comes up to the surface of the ocean, once every 100 years. In another version of the story, she comes up every 1000 years. She comes up at exactly the same time that a log is floating by. Since this is the ocean there are air and ocean currents that make all sorts of debris float around. But she's able to, with her one eye, see this log and find her way to climb through it. Not only is the log there at the right time, it has a hole that is exactly the right size for her to swim through and wedge herself in so that she can sun her back and cool her belly in the ocean. The likelihood of this happening every 100 years or every 1000 years is equal to the fact that you're here tonight. So whenever you feel a little tired or a little despondent just think of that.
Actually [the sutra] says to be born in human form, to have encountered and be able to practice the Dharma, and to find a teacher. I was thinking about what an interesting process that is. I've read and heard some very dramatic stories of how somebody finds their teacher or their teacher finds them. I remember reading somewhere about a woman who was at a public talk with 2000 people. The teacher was up on stage and somehow they locked eyes across all of that space and time, and she just knew. She just knew that he was the teacher for her. There's people who have dreamt of their teachers before they've actually met them. I was thinking that my stories were so undramatic. Maybe the story with Shugen is just a little dramatic, the story of feeling seen for the first time. But really by that evening he'd probably completely forgotten that we had talked or didn't remember who I was.
With Daido Roshi it was completely undramatic. I didn't know him. The first time I was at the monastery I didn't meet him because he was away. So, I went into residency not having met him. I got there and he found out that I could type, so I became kind of his assistant. It gave me quite a bit of time to spend with him. Actually, it took me a while to appreciate how special that was. I figured he just needed somebody to do his letters for him. One day we were walking out of the studio where he usually worked. We were going back to the monastery for lunch or something. I was walking right behind him. Those of you who met him know he was very tall, and he always was kind of stooped. He always wore these cargo pants and shirt, no matter what the weather. Long sleeve shirt rolled up, and these cargo pants which were always kind of falling down his butt. So, I'm walking behind him and taking him in as a person. I'm seeing his pants falling down, and I'm thinking, I want that. I want that unselfconsciousness. I want that total sense of ease with myself, because at the time I did not feel that at all. I was in my 20s, and I did not feel that at all. That's what I thought he could offer me, before I knew about anything else. Here was a person who seemed so at ease with himself and with the world, and I wanted that.
Going back to tonight. Here you are, experiencing this time. It feels like you are the one experiencing it. Except you, too, are a set of conditions that has come together for the time being. When these conditions change, you and I will no longer be. What the Buddha saw was that behind these conditions is a lot of space. There is no unchanging person. There are just the conditions themselves. Intellectually, it's a little hard to grasp because this experience feels so real. And yet, physics has corroborated this, right? The universe and each of us is made almost entirely of space. Buddhism has known that for 2,500 years. It's interesting since our experience is often the opposite of spacious. We feel harried, hurried, and overwhelmed. We feel cramped, we feel burdened. Still, what we're made of, what our lives are made of, what all of this is made of, is a lot of space. In a nutshell, that chain of dependent origination is showing us that when you take apart the various conditions, the person is not really there—not in the way that we think.
I was thinking about all this and about a story that I really like that might work well to illustrate this. Yet, I found that every time I sat down to start working, I put it off. Invariably, I remembered something else I had to do. I had to work on my taxes. All of a sudden I had to clean my room and write that email that I hadn't written. This kept happening. In general, I'm not a procrastinator. If it wasn't for practice or if it was just a few years ago, I would just have pushed through. There's something that needs to be done, so just do it. What's the problem, just do it? Whether you feel like it or not you do it because it needs to be done. To put it in a softer way, you realize your feelings about what it is that you have to do don't have to get in the way of the actual doing.
Over time I've seen that when something like this happens, it's just another opportunity for me to see, to ask what is going on, to slow down, and to pay attention. Our actions, in general, follow an internal logic, whether we're aware of it or not, whether it's conscious or not. [Actions] are rational in their own way. So, if I'm avoiding something, why? What's underneath that aversion? As it turned out, it was just because I wasn't ready to give that talk. It wasn't the talk for this week. The talk that came up, instead, is simpler. I don't know if it's as interesting, but it's the talk that was coming up.
Let me start that by saying ever since I can remember, I've always felt this deep, deep sadness. I always marveled at people who were just bright light. People who could just let things slide off their backs. When I looked inside and around, what I saw seemed to merit a certain degree of seriousness. I was very serious, even as a child. In pictures of my brother, Derek and I, between three and five years old, he's grinning from ear to year, and I look like I'm pondering Sartre. As I got older, that sadness, that seriousness turned into a kind of melancholy. I've always hesitated to say that I was depressed because I never let myself feel depressed. I started running, fortunately, when I was very young. I think that's what saved me because running changes me for the better. The sadness, on and off, was there. I often wondered if there was something wrong with me. It's not that I didn't see that other people were struggling also, but I couldn't quite understand why I felt this way. My life in general was quite good. There were things about it that were challenging with my family, but in general, my life was good. I didn't drink, and I didn't do drugs. I was feeling my feelings, and they were just kind of a bummer sometimes.
During my 20s, I was already practicing, and I had this re-current image of a pair of hands, like zombie hands, grayish-green. They were just like coming through the earth and pulling me down. It was a recurrent image that I had. I fought this like hell to be honest with you. I really felt, if I give into this, I'll never get out of it again. I thought that the feeling would just overtake me. Maybe it would have. I mean it did overtake my mother, my brother. There are people for whom life is too much. I think that was the case for them. Now and then I wondered, is it too much for me?
Except. Except I also loved life. I wanted to do so much. I still do. Dying was not a very appealing option. Even despite the sadness I never thought I didn't actually want to live. I remember being in a car during hosan, the days off schedule, like a weekend, when I was living at the monastery. There were five of us in our 20s or 30s, and I was the only one in the car who had never seriously contemplated suicide. I've since understood why people would wish to die, but it's not a wish I actually have had. Yet, there was the unavoidable reality of my moods and of this darkness that every once in a while did overtake me.
I considered if I should take antidepressants. I confess that what stopped me was what people would think if they found out. By that point, I was in my 30s and was a senior practitioner. I thought, if people find out that I'm taking antidepressants they're either going to think I can’t hack it, or they're going to wonder whether practice actually works. It was a very unfortunate and unfair thought to have in more ways than one. Because zazen is not a magic pill. It doesn't automatically take care of your karma, that takes time. Maybe taking an actual pill would have helped me, but I didn't. I considered it even less, the longer I practiced.
Yet, over time, things did begin to change. That's why I'm speaking about this. Not because my story is particularly interesting. It's certainly not unique. I was thinking about the process of how a particular set of conditions comes together. When even one of those conditions changes, everything can change. When we speak of practice as a process of transformation, this is what I'm thinking about. How does this come about? It's not something that we can make happen. It's not something that we can will into being, but something happens. What is that?
I was speaking to someone earlier in the week. They were asking, “How can it be that I'm perfect and complete, lacking nothing, when it turns out that I've been hurting someone and I didn't even know?” I wasn't aware of it. In response, I quoted Shunryu Suzuki Roshi to them, who said, "You're perfect and complete, lacking nothing. And you could use a bit of work." Both are true. You are perfect and complete, and you could use a little work. I could use a little work. That perfection is because we are, in our suchness, in our beingness, we are indeed perfect. We do "fill the ground upon which we stand," as Dogen said. From that perspective, there's nothing to change, there is nothing to fix. There's no such thing as self-improvement because how do you improve something that doesn't exist, fundamentally? Of course, we don't always act in accord with our perfection. We don't always act in accord with another's perfection. We don't always know that we are perfect. We don't feel complete, so instead we come from a sense of lack. This can last for a long time, even with practice. It's very difficult to not get pulled by others' reactions, by others' opinions of you. Most of us want to be liked, that's natural, but how do we not give our power away. I think there's been a small shift for me. I refuse. I refuse to give away my peace of mind. I won't give it to despots. I won't give it to corrupt leaders, to cynics, to narcissists. I'm not resigned, either, but I don't want to give away my peace of mind. I've worked hard for it. And it still fluctuates.
We're doing the work of realizing that perfection and bringing it to life. The work itself is practice, right? There's realization and there's practice. We could borrow the phrases that the Buddha used to describe the Four Noble Truths. He said that the truth of suffering must be understood. The truth of the root of suffering, craving, must be abandoned. The truth of the end of suffering must be realized. And the truth of the path, the Noble Eightfold Path must be developed. We work to understand and realize that perfection. We work to abandon that which gets in the way of our seeing. We develop, and we practice the path that will get us there. There, remember, is really nowhere. Really it means being here, actually here. When I was trying to explain to my father why I was in a monastery saying that I wanted to realize suffering was so abstract. I didn't even feel that. I didn't see my life as suffering. But I said to him that I don't want to miss a 10th of my life, a quarter of my life, half my life. I want to be there for it, whatever it brings. Buddhist or not, that's hard to argue with.
I was thinking about this presence, and could it be that it is, perhaps inevitably, coupled with joy? Could it be the reason that I no longer see those hands dragging me down? I have had my moments. Certainly, I've had my moments this past year, but I don't struggle against the darkness so much. I'm not present, always, not by a longshot. There's a koan in which the monk says something like, I am almost always intimate with this. Which I think is a nice way of saying, I'm working on it. I'm working on it.
It does seem, from my limited observation, that this presence brings with it, at times, a considerable amount of joy. I've had some of you describe to me the joy of seeing the food in your bowl for the first time, that leaf of spinach, like you have never seen it before. The point is that this particular kind of joy is not dependent on good things happening and bad things staying away. It's much more basic than that. Perhaps it is like that love that we have been speaking of as the prime mover as the ground of being. I think it's really the simple joy of living, of being in your life.
This in no way negates the difficulty and the challenge of living. I've said it before, the world is a difficult place. A human life is a difficult life. It is also wondrous and full of possibility. The longer we practice and the more we are able to turn towards the possibility instead of the lack, then we won't be as swept up by a wave. We know [the wave] passes whether it is very localized, your daily life, or whether it's global, our world situation. I think the more you see and understand that these cycles repeat and repeat and repeat, then they will change. So when you see, in the distance, that wave coming, you have time to strap yourself to the mast of your boat, with your mind and your awareness. Then, you ride the wave to the other side. The difference is not that there are no waves, you just get better at riding them.
Even having said that, I'm trying to put words to an experience that can't really be quantified. I used to be very sad, and now I'm less so. When it comes down to it, I don't really know why. I know that things have changed. I went through a period at the monastery (I think it was my second year) where I was afraid every single day. I could not for the life of me tell you why. I was just afraid. Then, one day, it went away, and I never knew why. So, I do what I know. I keep sitting. Sometimes literally sitting, sometimes walking through it, sometimes giving it space. The main thing that goes with that presence is to not push anything away. One of you said recently that zazen allows everything in. Exactly. That's exactly right. It is like a power wash. It comes in, you get thoroughly spun in this system, and it moves out. I’m oversimplifying. But…
This story that I love to quote is of A.J. Muste, the Dutch-American minister and peace activist. Every day during the Vietnam War, he was standing outside the White House, holding a candle, rain or shine, snow.
A reporter went up to him and said, "Reverend Muste, do you really think this is going to change the country's policies, you standing here with your candle every night?"
And Reverend Muste says, "Oh no, sir, you have it all wrong. I'm not doing this to change the country. I'm doing this so the country won't change me."
I sit to let the change happen from the inside out and not the other way around. I sit in order to know who I am, in order to know who you are. I sit to understand that magical third thing that happens when we come together. I sit in order to see what I don't yet see, to better understand what I'm confused about. I find that as I do this, this most mysterious thing happens. Often I'm not even aware of it until after, like walking through a fine mist or fog then when you come inside you realize you're completely drenched. As I sit here quietly with my breath, doing very little else but being with my thoughts, being with my feelings, being with sensations—why is it that afterward, I find that everything is brighter and sharper and clearer? If you think about this, we really take it for granted, we trust that meditation is going to make things better. Why? How? How does it do that? If everything is what it is, then what's happening that I do see things brighter and sharper and clearer? What's happening that every once in a while I do see and feel others more? Every now and then you're lucky enough, fortunate enough, that something even more happens. You realize, through this simple act of doing nothing, things are actually awash—awash with joy.
Explore further
01 : The Dalai Lama on the Four Noble Truths by the 14th Dalai Lama
02 : Paticca-samuppada-vibhanga Sutta: Analysis of Dependent Co-arising translated by Thanissaro Bhikku
03 : Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki