Becoming Whole
Photo by Juan Chavez
When we turn towards ourselves with intimacy and commitment, we are drawn into a more honest, complete look at who we are and what life is. In this talk, Zuisei speaks on the integrity of following the path.
“As you know, the only thing you need to do this is your body and your mind. A cushion helps, a little inspiration now and then, a teacher definitely helps…But ultimately all that it takes is for you to turn the light around, to be willing to get close.”
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Becoming Whole
Allow me, if you will, to tell you a story. And this is a story in which you are the protagonist. Let's say that you have a little coffee shop, or maybe a little bar, a small restaurant, because you have quit a job that has disappointed you. Or maybe you've quit someone, or someone has quit you. And so you've created this little place, and it is yours—a dimly lit place that is cozy, it's safe, it's quiet. And it's not that you don't feel pain or anger or sadness, but you think to yourself, you know, who can go on in life burdened like this? And so you think it's better to keep a little distance. And so this little bar—let's say it's a bar—is a place all your own. And you can be there without too many people bothering you.
You mix a nice cocktail, you put on soothing music, your wings are out of this world. And although in the beginning not too many people come, it doesn't bother you, because slowly that begins to change. And really, you're doing your thing, and you're kind of on your own. And one day a cat, a stray cat, finds its way into the alley that leads to your place. And she follows it, and she goes in, and she likes it. And so she moves in. And then others follow. And you begin to do a little business. And it's just enough to pay the rent, but that's enough for you.
And so days go by pretty much the same each day. And then one particularly slow afternoon, you see a little snake. And you don't know what kind it is, but it's probably some kind of garden snake. It doesn't look particularly poisonous. And it makes you think of a legend that you've heard, of a snake that has cut out her heart and hidden it to protect herself. And the only way to kill this snake is, of course, to find the heart, but she has hidden it so well that it's impossible. And you don't know too much about snakes, but you think this is plausible. And as I said, you know, days keep going on. One day very much like the next. And it's not, you know, you're not thriving exactly, but you're not complaining.
And then one rainy afternoon, someone walks into your bar, and the air in it changes. It was one day a man with a bluish shaved head and a dark raincoat. Or maybe it's a woman with short, stylish hair and cat glasses. And she says—and he says—that their name is Godfield. And they say, you know, I'm really sorry, but you're going to have to close this little bar. And you know, you've never seen them before. You have no idea who they are. And you say, why? And they say, there's something. There's something missing. There's something missing. And you look around, and you realize it does look a little empty. Actually, not just empty. It's like something's been taken out—vacuumed out. And they say, did you notice that the cat disappeared? And she's not coming back. You hadn't even noticed. And you say, well, they're not coming back because the cat is not coming back because there's something missing. And I have to leave because there's something missing. And they don't answer.
But after a minute, they say, well, just go far away. Pack a small bag and go. But whatever you do, don't stop anywhere. And on a Monday and on a Thursday, send me a postcard just so that I know that you're OK. But don't write anything on the postcard. This is very important. But somehow, you trust this Godfield, and so you do as he says, and you pack a small bag, and you put up a sign that says Closed for Business, and you leave. You get on the road. And one night, you're at an inn, and right across from you is an office building. And it's later in the day. It's probably late afternoon. And you see people working, and they're just doing office jobs. They're sitting at computers, and some people are typing. A lot of people are just standing around the cooler and talking. But they seem happy. They seem to be enjoying themselves. And you don't understand why this is. They seem to you to be doing jobs that are so uninspired. And you know they're doing that day after day. But they seem good. They seem happy. And somehow this puzzles you.
And so that night, you decide to send a postcard with a note because you just feel like you're going to disappear. And you write just a simple note that you're doing OK and you'll move on in the morning. And then you go to sleep. And when you wake up, it's the middle of the night, and it's pouring rain outside. And it's that twilight state between dream and wakefulness, where you hear something—you hear something outside—and you realize there's a knock on the door. And it's very insistent. And it's also consistent. It's just two knocks. It's like a boom-boom, boom-boom. And you hear this for a little bit. And all of a sudden, you know what that is. You know what's outside that door. It's like a beating heart. And you know that you can only open the door from the inside. That's the only way that it can be opened. But instead, you turn around and cover yourself with the sheets. You don't want to get too close. But the knocking now is a little closer. It's right next to your window, by your bed, in the pouring rain. And it's that same knock. And this goes on for a while. And you try to go back to sleep, and you can't. And finally, at some point, before it's light—it's just before it's getting light—you say to yourself, very low, only you can hear it, Yes, you say. I feel you. And in that very moment, the door opens a crack. The door opens a—
How to Live All of Yourself
Years ago, when I tried to explain to my family why I was in a monastery and what the hell I was doing there, what I came up with—because, you know, they didn't really know about Buddhism, and it was too abstract—what I thought I could say that perhaps they could, if not understand, relate to, was: I want to live all of my life. I don't want to just live half. I don't want to live a quarter or a tenth of my life. I want to be there for all of it. I don't want to chop out my heart and hide it behind a closed door so I can feel safe but anesthetized.
And this story is very, very, very loosely based on a story by Haruki Murakami. But when I read it, it did something, actually. It did something to me, because I recognized that impulse—that impulse to want to protect, to want to keep just enough distance. And I think when we begin to practice, sometimes we are aware—we are aware of these rooms, these dimly lit places. And we sense, sometimes as we are walking by one of them, this disturbance. But again, we choose perhaps not to see and not to get too close.
I remember for years I had this recurring dream that I was in a huge house with lots of rooms. And there was this sense that there were a lot of people in the rooms or in the house, but I never saw them. I was always going from room to room to room to room. And at first I thought, well, I live in a monastery. I mean, of course I'm dreaming about huge houses with lots of rooms. Until I started to realize, no, I'm dreaming about me. I'm dreaming about me moving through parts of myself. And I couldn't find the way out. That was always the sense in the dream—that I was wandering through this house, trying to find someone and trying to find the way out, and I couldn't. Of course, I mean, how could I? Chopped up in pieces like that.
And often we do come to practice feeling split, feeling outside of these rooms, with no way to get in and sometimes no way to get out. And yet we sense—I think we do sense—that there's something, something needed to open the whole thing up, to tear the house down, and see what comes of it. But, you know, we don't know how. Or if we do, if we have some sense, we're afraid. We're afraid to. Because we don't know what we'll find.
…to be that whole, to be that in your life, to want to do what you have to do. To me, that has always been freedom…
A couple of months ago, we were working with the kids, in Zen Kids, and we were going over the various elements. And the last one in the particular scheme that we were using was space. And we asked a couple of the kids to build a house made of Legos, and they did this beautiful, beautiful one-story house that then one of us, one of the staff, with very little ceremony, proceeded to take apart. I tried to tell him, you know, I mean, they spent quite a bit of time on this house. Maybe you should be a little more gentle. But he's not—he's actually not an ungentle guy. You know, he's very big. He's a football player, and he just started tearing the thing apart. And I'm watching the kids. Their eyes are going like this. They took it very well, I have to say. The kids, they took it very well. But what we were trying to get at is: what do you need to take, or how far can you go, and it stops being a house? I mean, if you take the roof, is there still a house? And they said, yes, it is. Well, so if you take out this door—you know, so we were basically taking the house down and asking, at which point does it stop being itself, and where does that space that fills it begin?
I had a teacher like that—a yoga teacher—that would always say that in her classes. She would say, where does your body begin, and where does it end? And then she would say, find out. Don't assume that you know. Find out.
In the Sarangama Sutra, the Buddha tells Ananda, “Take, for instance, a square box, the inside of which is seen as containing a ‘square of air.’ Now tell me, is the air seen as square in the square box really square or not? If so, it should not be round when poured into a round box.” If it's not square, then there should be no square of air in the square box, right? So if it is square, then when you pour it into a round thing, it shouldn't be round—it should keep its squareness. But if it's not square, then there shouldn't be a square when you take away the box.
And then he says, “Ananda, if you want the air to be neither square nor round, just throw the box away.” I love that. Just throw the box away. If you want to be neither angry nor sad, depressed nor confused, throw the container away. And I don't mean the feeling. I mean, you would just be dead, or you would be a robot. But throw away the label, throw away the frame, throw away the container.
The self is not what we think it is. It can be divided. It can be chopped up. But if there isn't anything to split, then where does that split come from? Because we all feel it, consciously or unconsciously. We're all walking around to some extent feeling divided. And so if it's not inherent in the self, then where is it?
It's—sometimes we don't even know about all these rooms. You know, we don't know we're a walking condo, and the neighbors aren't speaking to each other. You know, we come to practice, and then we start to find, as I slowly did, you know, we're walking through this huge building. And every time we don't like what we see in any given room, we just shut the door and throw away the key. And sometimes we can walk right by it, day after day, without the slightest acknowledgement that it's there.
Being Whole in What You Do
In Mexico, where my mother is buried, it's a hillside crematorium, and it's in a kind of difficult-to-get-to, at least from my perspective, part of the city. It's built into a hillside. The entrance is up at the top, and there's this winding road that takes you all the way down. On one side is the crematorium and what would be all the graves, and there's a chapel. Then, on the other side toward the bottom of the hill, is a set of apartment buildings. There used to be a huge sign on the outside of the crematorium's entrance saying "crematorium"—I think it was called the Dawn, something like that. The last time I was there, I drove right by it, and so I had to backtrack. I did that a few times—three or four times—looking for the sign, and the sign was not there. Finally I figured out where it was, and I drove in, and I said to the guard, "What happened to the sign?" He said, "Oh, well, we took it down, because the people who are living in the, or who are thinking of buying the apartment buildings, don't want to know that they're living right next to a crematorium." I said, "But they still have to drive right by it every day." He said, "Yes, but that way they can pretend that it's not there." That way we can pretend that it's not there.
So sometimes we don't know, and we find out. Sometimes we do know. We start to find out when we take our seat, and every time we take the Buddha seat, as you are doing right now, what was previously unseen now becomes visible. What was only vaguely felt now becomes known. You realize, "Oh—no wonder I've been walking around feeling like I am in pieces." Because this is what we create. This is what we create day by day. And, of course, we don't want to. I don't think any of us want to say, "You know, I want to be divided." But in our confusion, that's what we do.
Sometimes seeing these rooms is enough to scare us away. I know many people who begin to practice and get to a certain point, and then it's too much. There are many reasons—many, many reasons—why people stop practicing or do something else. But that is one of them: sometimes we're just afraid of what we'll see, what we'll find. There are teachers who have said, "You know, better not to start, because then it's hard to go back once you have." That's what I've read writers say about writing: don't do it if you don't absolutely have to. But if you are returning to that seat, then some part of you has to. Sometimes a period of zazen is all it takes.
I was just talking to somebody yesterday who said that the first time she did zazen, afterward she got up and, as she was walking away, said, "I don't know what just happened, but I feel like my DNA has been rearranged." She said once you start to do it for any length of time, it's really hard not to. It's really hard not to. It's really hard to turn away. And I don't think that's exclusive to zazen. I think that is any practice that helps you to look closely at yourself, at your mind, at these rooms. For some of us, we sense that this is what it takes—that this is the way to the medicine—that even if we get lost in the midst of all these rooms, and even if we have to tear down some of the doors, the momentum is toward wholeness, toward needing no containment, no protection, no box, no door, no nets of any kind.
I think it's the irony of the human mind to feel that distance is what will keep us safe. The challenge of practice is asking for exactly the opposite: a kind of closeness that most of us experience only in short bursts, or sometimes despite ourselves. And yet I think we all crave it. Of course I think we do; otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here, looking—sometimes for hours on end—at our minds, at how they connect with the body. If we didn't think that getting close to ourselves is how we will get close to others, how we will get close to our own life, we wouldn't do it.
They have done studies—who is "they" these days, actually? People often say that, right? You know, they have done studies—psychologists have done studies about what makes people happy, or more accurately, what people are doing when they say that they're happy. What a group of psychologists did was give people a pager. You had the pager, and at eight random times during the day the pager would go off. Your job was to stop whatever you were doing, sit down, and write in a notebook: (1) what you were doing and your level of enjoyment and fulfillment with a given activity, and (2) whether you wanted to be doing anything else at that moment.
They found that people consistently reported feeling most fulfilled, most challenged, most engaged at work. And yet most consistently, people said they wanted to be doing something else. Isn't that interesting? When people were at leisure—reading or just sitting around watching television—they did not feel the happiest, the most fulfilled, or the most engaged. But they were happy to be doing what they were doing. They were most alive, you could say, when they were working, but they wanted to be doing something else. The conclusion was that we're so conditioned to take time of doing nothing—"my own time"—as a reward for all the hard work being imposed on us. To some extent I'm choosing to work, but I have to, right? I have to pay the rent. I have to pay the bills. I do that so I can get to the things I really want to do, which turn out to be a lot of nothing, even though that doesn't make me happy or fulfilled. Isn't that strange?
Then, of course, they interviewed people who did not feel this way—people for whom there was no distinction between life, work, and leisure. There was one woman; they asked her what she did during the day. She said, "I cart wool." She had a farm. "I prune the orchard, I milk the cows, I take them out to pasture." They asked, "What is it that you most like to do?" She said, "Milking the cows, pruning the orchard, taking the cows out to pasture." She spoke so simply: "You're out there, and you are in nature, and you are watching everything, and you're part of things." We hear people speak this way all the time. She said the problem is you get tired and then you have to go back in. And she said even when you have to work very hard, it is very beautiful. She never wanted to be doing anything else, really. Her free time was spent with family; she read a lot, but she didn't see it as separate. I was thinking, you know, that's how I feel about my life and my work. Even when I have to work very hard, it is very beautiful. How fortunate it is to feel that way.
They had an anecdote of an astrophysicist—Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983. He created a theory of the evolution of stars that led to how we understand them. Long before he won the Nobel Prize, he was going to teach an advanced seminar at the University of Chicago in astrophysics in the 1950s. Two people only signed up for the class. This meant he had to drive 160 miles through back roads twice a week to teach it. At the university, people expected him to cancel the course, but he didn't. For one semester he drove 160 miles twice a week through back roads to teach that class. The two students he taught went on individually to win the Nobel Prize, and later he did himself. Imagine if he had said, "This isn't worth my time." If the Buddha had said, "Nobody's going to understand, so I won't teach"—well, he did say that actually in the beginning, but then he reconsidered.
To be that committed—I'm not even sure if it's commitment; perhaps that comes after—to be that whole, to be that in your life, to want to do what you have to do. To me, that has always been freedom: to choose to do, to want to do, the things that you must do. In the Buddha's case, it's one person—one person thinking it possible to wake up, to be whole, because that's all we have ever been. I think that is what we're doing when we take refuge in the Buddha—trusting that as the Buddha awakened, we can too. I really like one account of his reflection on his own path; I like this particular wording. He said, "Before my awakening, when I was still just an unawakened Bodhisattva—being subject myself to birth, aging, illness, death, sorrow, and defilement—I sought happiness in what was subject to birth, aging, illness, death, sorrow, and defilement."
Seeking What Is Already Free
So I'm looking for happiness in those things that, by definition, cannot bring me happiness, but this is what I keep doing. The thought occurred to me: why am I subject to birth, aging, illness, death, sorrow, and defilement, seeking what is subject to the same? What if I were to seek instead the unborn, the unaging, the unailing, the undying, the sorrowless, the undefiled, unsurpassed security from bondage—the unbinding? I love that word. What if I were to seek what is unbinding? What will make me free? Not "make me free"—what is free already? What has always been free? What if I were to seek that?
And, you know, the good news, as Shugun Sensei always says, is that everything you need to do this—you already have. You just need your body and your mind. A cushion helps a little. Inspiration now and then helps. A teacher definitely helps. But ultimately all it takes is for you to sit your butt down and turn the light around—to be willing to get close, to be willing to see that the less distance, the more life.
The life. You know, the Zenda could remain empty for years, for decades, for centuries. If one person were to stumble in and dig through the rubble and find a seat and sit down—whether in the middle of a field or, I don't know, the corner of a space station, wherever we're going to find ourselves hopefully a few hundred years from now—the moment that person sits down and turns inward, the Buddha-dharma is right there. Because it's not square or round. It's not contained in this room. It can be poured out, but it can be realized. That's what one person knew, somehow, and what all these men and women for, you know, a significant amount of time now—2,500 years—have continued to realize, practice, and then bring to life: that wholeness.
So let me leave you with a poem by W. S. Merwin called "Cold Spring Morning." I thought it was appropriate. Hopefully one day it will no longer be a cold spring morning. One day. At times it has seemed that when I first came here, it was an old self I recognized in the silent walls and the river far below. But the self has no age, as I knew even then and had known for longer than I could remember. As the sky has no sky except itself, this white morning in March, with fog hiding the barns that are empty now and hiding the mossed limbs of gnarled walnut trees and the green pastures unfurled along the slope. I know where they are, and the birds that are hidden in their own calls in the cold morning. I was not born here. I come and go.
Becoming Whole, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
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