Cultivating Wisdom
Photo by Joel Filipe
In the eighth talk in a series on the Eight Awarenesses of Enlightened Beings, Zuisei speaks on the seventh awareness: cultivating wisdom.
Wisdom is the highest state we can obtain on the path—a complete integration of presence, compassion, and equanimity. It is understanding that all things—all things without exception—are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. But this is not a problem. Wisdom is accepting, and therefore finding freedom in the fact that this is how things are.
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.
Cultivating Wisdom
The Waking
By Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
I learn by going where I have to go. The seventh awareness of an enlightened being is cultivating wisdom. And wisdom, prajna, is both the beginning and the end of the path.
It's the beginning—beginning in the sense that it's the ground that we are walking on, and the end, because it needs to be realized. It needs to be manifested in everything that we do. Master Dogen says, Wisdom is aroused by hearing, reflecting, practicing, and realizing.
Yasutani Roshi said that our Buddha nature has the great function of deepening illumination endlessly through practice. And he also said that practice—our Shikantaza specifically—is like being, like sitting in the middle of a clearing in the deep woods. And if you imagine you're sitting there and that there is ultimate danger about to strike, and you don't know what it looks like, and you don't know what direction it will come from.
And so it's a very unusual, but I think that this is a very powerful metaphor for Shikantaza, because if you imagine that moment, you are there sitting quietly, and suddenly you hear a sound, and your whole being is on the alert, and yet is completely, completely still. You're waiting to see if it manifests, where it will manifest, but there's not a cell in your body that is passive. All of your senses are open; they're receiving, but your mind is not moving, because you know you can't afford to be distracted even for a moment.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Imagine your Zazen being like that, the perfect balance of alertness and stillness. And he said that this is what it means to sit as enlightenment itself—that this is what it means to take in everything and not be taken in. This is what it means to be wisdom.
This is a little bit of an aside, but this past weekend, we were doing the family camping retreat, and we had a very gregarious four-year-old who heard that we were going to meditate. And we were sitting together one morning, having breakfast, and he turned to me and said very seriously, "You know, I had to meditate in pre-K," and I'm thinking, that's great. And he says, "It was horrible."
I think, well, that's not so great. I said, "Why? Why was it horrible?" And he says, "Because I had to be quiet, and it was just so boring." And I said to him, "Well, Sam, you're not the first one who's ever thought this, and you probably won't be the last."
He wasn't comforted by that. He actually sat very well later on. In the path of purification, Buddha Gosa says that wisdom is understanding, but he makes a distinction from the more ordinary kinds of perception, of knowing.
The knowing that is present in perception and in consciousness. And so he says, if you take a young child, a peasant, and a money changer, and all three of them find some coins on the road, the child will see the coins, will see their shape, their color, will be compelled by their shininess, but they won't know their value or their function. The peasant will see the coins, will see the coin shape and the color, and know their value, but he won't be able to tell whether they're real or forged.
The money changer will see the coins' shape, their color, and by weighing, by inspecting them closely, may even know if they're real or not, may know their age, and the town where they were minted. And so, in other words, she will know everything there is to know about these coins. And this child is perception; the peasant is consciousness; and the money changer is understanding.
And so true understanding is also, or it includes, understanding the three marks of existence—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, which leads to our suffering, and no self. And wisdom is understanding that all things, all things without exception, are in fact impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. And wisdom is also understanding that that's not a problem—that that's not a drawback—that's not a fault in things, as long as we don't expect them to be different from what they are.
And that's the catch, because we so often want or try to make reality in our own image. I had a message that I, my roommate from college, called me, and it just reminded me that throughout my whole first year of college, I refused to wear a winter hat. Even though I had transplanted myself from Mexico to Philadelphia, it was 30 degrees, I don't like the cold, and I just wouldn't wear a hat.
And worse, I was always complaining about the cold. So finally, my roommate turned to me one day and said, "Jesus Christ, why don't you just wear a hat?" And I looked at her, surprised and said, "Because that would be giving in to the cold. I'm not going to do that."
I mean, how deluded can you get? How willful can you get? And I've come a long way. I wear hats now, but that is such a metaphor for my willfulness and for my stubbornness, so often, so often, and just refusing to accept reality in its own terms. I will have dominion.
My partner calls that attitude. And so, at a very basic level, waking up is really seeing when your view is unskillful, when it's not helping you, it's not serving you or anybody else, when it is not real, at a very basic, very fundamental level. And deciding to at least try to look for another way, to begin to wonder, "Is there another way?" The Buddha said, "When your friends have wisdom, you are without greed."
Always reflect upon yourselves; do not lose this wisdom. In this way, you can attain liberation in the Dharma. And I think of that very, in a sense, precarious or delicate balance between that hunger and greed because you need to want to know.
You have to want to see deeply. You also have to be increasingly comfortable with not knowing. You have to want to know and not cling to that knowing or that wanting.
You have to be infinitely determined and just as infinitely patient. This poem that I read is a well-known poem by Theodore Roethke called The Waking. And, I'm not a poet or a literary scholar, but as I've been sitting with it in these last few days, and to me, it really speaks very, very simply in one way and very directly to what it means to awaken.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Many commentators read this waking that he speaks of as life, and sleep as death, and the slow waking—the full enjoyment of life. But I guess I prefer to see this waking as this waking into the dream that is our life, seeing that dream nakedly. And this slow waking as the acceptance that it takes time—that it takes time to wake up.
It can't be anything but slow, even in those moments when it happens suddenly, because it's the work of lifetimes to truly wake up. And you do only learn where you're going by going. There is no other way.
Even when someone else points, you're still the one who has to do the going, and therefore learn firsthand where it is exactly that you're headed. And also how often we enter into practice thinking that we know, in fact, what it is that we're looking for. And finding through practice itself that what we were searching for was different than what we thought.
Perhaps it is liberation, freedom from suffering. Perhaps it is just, just. Perhaps it is that alleviation from pain.
Perhaps it's a community, a place where we feel we can belong, that relationship with a teacher. And so it's not that there's any right or wrong answer. I think it is really just a matter of remaining awake as we're traveling because sometimes our original intent changes.
So it's continuing to wake up within that waking up. As Master Dogen says, you continue, you hear, you reflect, you practice, and you realize. And that just continues over and over again throughout our practice life.
And I've mentioned before how that moment of literal waking has always fascinated me—that moment in which I shift from unconsciousness to consciousness. And the wonder, the sheer wonder of the fact that every morning I wake up as me, as far as I can tell.
That every morning, for the last 44 years, I have woken up to find that I'm still Zuisei. I'm still Vanessa. Which has its advantages and disadvantages.
But that even when things are impermanent and changing, they don't change into something else. If I didn't wake up as me every morning, life would be challenging. If I woke up as a blowfish one morning, and a kettle drum another, and a roast another, and then again I’m Ziuisei, it would be challenging, I suppose, unless we were in a completely different paradigm.
That would make a great short story, following that train of thought. In general, we see that things don't turn into other things, even when they seem to. Remember Master Dogen, when in Genjo Koan, he says that life doesn't become death, just as fire doesn't become ash.
That life is a period unto itself, and death is a period unto itself. This moment doesn't lead to the next moment because this moment is everything. And this little detail about things being empty—what does that really mean? Science has shown that because of quantum mechanics.
We know that an electron doesn't exist unless it's interacting with another, or unless it's being observed by someone. So the only way that all of the particles that make up our universe exist is as a set of interactions, a set of jumps from one interaction to another.
And when they're not interacting, they don't exist. You can't locate them in space, and you can't even tell for sure where they're going to appear. When an electron jumps, you can't tell.
You can only predict the probability, more or less, of where it will land, which means there is no objective reality to life. Which means that in the last century, we confirmed what the Buddha saw 2,500 years ago.
When this theory was proposed, even Einstein refused to believe it. He thought it was absurd that there wouldn't be any solidity—that there wouldn't be anything that we could grasp. No ground to stand on, quite literally.
And yet, this is how it is. That emptiness that we speak of is not a vacuum but a set of interactions, a set of relationships, of conditionalities, as the Buddha said. When this arises, this comes to be.
When this is not, this does not arise. But for you, I am not. And I had just been reading a book about Lucretius and his poem On the Nature of Things, and he was 400 years after the Buddha, long before quantum mechanics was discovered.
He intuited the same thing. He intuited that the universe was made of these infinitely small particles that just moved around very quickly in a whole lot of space. And he said, “they don't move in straight lines.”
They swerve very slightly. And because they swerve, they collide with one another. And that is what brings all of this into being.
He said, "Rivers going into the ocean.”
I saw this perfect nest with two robin's eggs just outside the office building last night. I mean, the improbable color of a robin's egg.
Why is it that sky blue color? And it's just perfect sitting in that nest with a mother pretty upset because I was coming out and disturbing her babies. And to me, the fact that he saw this, that he knew this—I would imagine he probably did this as the Buddha did it—he said very quietly, very still, and reflected on the nature of things.
And he saw truly; he saw accurately. He also said that the soul is not immortal and that when you die, you just die. There's nothing after.
And that the obstacle to pleasure is not pain but delusion. But once Christianity took hold his theories were so antithetical to the church that they couldn't accept them. They had to find a way to discredit him.
So they said that he was mad, and that he'd gone mad with love, and that he had killed himself. And his poem got buried for about 1,500 years. So we not only take our waking slow; we actively fight it.
When it's not to our liking, when it threatens our sense of stability, a sense of security. And I think that not only in you could say in historical terms and more universal terms, but all of those moments in which we choose sleep, where we choose to turn away from that waking, really for no other reason than fear—fear of what we're seeing, or fear of what we think we're seeing, fear of what we think is coming with that wakefulness—that is why waking up is such a revolutionary act.
That's why it is so powerful to meet both the waking and the fear so steadfastly, as we've been doing all this week—quietly, gently when it needs to be gentle, firmly when it needs to be firm, but meeting it—in a sense, very directly—refusing to go back to sleep.
Buddhaghosa says there are Four Kinds of Wisdom: there's a Pure Wisdom, the Wisdom of Subtle Observation, the Wisdom of Equality, and Mirror-like Wisdom. And each of these corresponds to a level of consciousness.
So the Yogacara says that there's the Five Sense Consciousnesses—eye, hearing, seeing, smelling, taste, touch—and they are Pure Wisdom. The Sixth Consciousness, which is Mind, which interacts with the other five so that we can perceive reality, is Subtle Observation. The seventh consciousness, which roughly corresponds to the ego, the sense of "me," of "I," is Equality Wisdom.
The Eighth Consciousness, which is the Storehouse Consciousness, the alaya-vijnana, where all the seeds of experience are stored—that is the Mirror-like Wisdom. And each of these consciousnesses can manifest either as ignorance or as wisdom. The difference? The eye.
The koan that I did for Maishusha Hosen some years ago now is not speaking about this specifically, but it's Fayan, they're opening up the well in his monastery, and he turns to a monastic and says, "You know, when the eye of the spring is obstructed, sand is in the way. When the eye of the way is obstructed, what is in the way?" And the monastic can't answer. And so Fayan himself says, "The eye is in the way."
And the eye is E-Y-E, although it still applies. When the eye of the way is obstructed, what is in the way? The eye is in the way. Redke says, "We think by feeling what is there to know."
So you could say, in terms of conventional truth, in terms of truth, period, we only know what we perceive through the senses. But as long as we believe that what we're experiencing we possess—I see this, I smell this—the senses will be the thieves of our awareness, as they're so often called, instead of pure wisdom. I will see myself seeing instead of actually what I'm seeing.
As long as I see myself separate from you, my not-so-subtle observation will tell me that I need to take what is mine before you do. As long as that sense of self, as my ego, tells me that you're not my equal, it certainly won't let me see you as myself, see you as one great body. And as long as the eye is in the way, the mirror is cloudy; it is dim or only reflects what we want to see, which is not wisdom.
But see through this eye, and everything changes. Rather, everything stays exactly as it is. Now you can see it.
Now you can see it clearly. And I marvel at that. I wonder at that. I marvel at that.
How we can, and I experience it in myself, I see it in others, through practice, how we're not able to see, not able to see, not able to see—and therefore struggling—and struggling—and struggling. And then in a moment, in an instant, something shifts.
Someone says something. You read a line in a book. You go outside, and the breeze hits you in just the right way, and something shifts just enough—just enough—that you're able to see what three seconds before you couldn't see.
I find that incredible. And of course, it's not just that moment. I understand there's everything that comes before, everything that will come later.
But that moment, that moment of shift, that moment of understanding, I find incredible. I find amazing. And so, in one sense, it's true; we can only know what our senses know.
But in order to really know, we have to go beyond the senses. When I do my running retreat, one of the practices that most people, not everyone, but most people enjoy the most, is blind running. So I have people pair up, and one person is blindfolded, and the other person is seeing, and they're running with their arms interlocked.
And, you know, we do a number of repetitions until, at a certain point, if they've gotten comfortable enough, the blind person is running as fast as they dare without being able to see at all where it is that they're stepping. And it is frightening. It is frightening, especially in the beginning, but it's also incredibly exhilarating, freeing, because you can't worry about where you're going.
You have to trust this person. You pretty much don't have a choice, so you hope that they're, you know, with it. And if you're able, if you're able—and not everybody's able—but the moment you can see that moment when it turns, when the person is really able to let go, and they just go.
And it is, it's like being a child again, in the sense of feeling completely unfettered. And I think that practice, you know, when it's at its best, it's very much like that. You can't know where you're stepping, but you know, somehow, you know that the ground will be there to meet you.
But in order to really know, we have to go beyond the senses.
So it's only when we hesitate that we fall. When we lead with our head instead of letting the ground tell us where it is that we need to go. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. And I know that we speak of fear of the unknown, but I don't think that's true.
I think it's fear of the imagined, fear of the probable, fear of the partially known. And I quoted a couple of weeks ago, John Powell, from that series of clips we were watching for the Beyond Fear of Differences work, who's talking—he's talking about bias and how it works in the unconscious. And he was also talking, you could say, about the biological basis of fear.
And he says, if you're walking along, you're in the woods, and suddenly you see a snake, you'll get startled, right? You'll perhaps jump back. And then you look a little more closely and see, oh, it's a stick. Oh, it's a stick.
Great. I thought it was a snake. Next time you're walking along in the woods, and you see a stick—
And so you're not afraid; you keep walking, except it's a snake. And it bites you, and you die.
It's a sad, sad story. He says, and he says, but then the story gets even sadder because the people who are more cautious, who are not fearful, are no longer here. Those who are will survive, will procreate, and pass on those fearful genes.
Therefore, we remain fearful. We live longer, but we live fearful lives. Is there another way? So there is not knowing to be fearful, which is a form of ignorance.
There's knowing when not to give in to our fear, which is wisdom. We hear that so often that the Bodhisattva is not fearless in the sense that they don't feel fear. They feel fear.
In our terrible and marvelous world, our world, sometimes the right response is fear. So it's not being blind or stupid, but it's out of a field of fear, but it's not stopped by that fear. Perhaps, you know, this line that our fate is in what we cannot fear—maybe because it is there that we are most awake.
We cannot fear it because we are closest to it. Closest to what? This shaking keeps me steady; I should know. What falls away is always and is near.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. This shaking of our certainty, of our intellectual knowing, of our beliefs about ourselves, keeps us steady in the long run because it keeps us open and inquiring, wondering: what is this really? And what falls away is always and is near.
That's exactly right. You know, every night I fall into sleep and, on one level, Zuisei ceases to be. And then every day, the understanding that I am me is near.
But my work is to see that I may not misinterpret it. While I was sick, I had a very vivid dream with one of those afternoon deep sleeps when you wake up and you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. And I dreamt that I was in a car with my family, with my parents and my brother and my maternal grandparents.
And in life, only my father and I are still alive. And it was one of those windy roads—like there's so many that we have in Mexico—where you have the mountain on one side and the precipice on the other. And my grandfather was driving, and he was driving really fast, which was very unusual because in waking life, he drove very slowly.
He did everything slowly. His friends called him the camel. So it was very unusual that he was the one driving very fast.
And I could tell, as we're taking a turn, I could tell it's like we're not going to make it. We're not going to be able to take it. And we didn't.
And so we just skidded off the cliff. And as we're flying through the air, I remember thinking to myself very calmly, "This is it." And I wasn't afraid.
Maybe some part of me knew that it was a dream. I was accepting for once and curious. And then it wasn't it because we landed softly, as you do in a dream.
It was either a ledge or the top of a tree. I'm not sure. And the car, like in the movies, is perched, balanced, about to fall over.
And the moment I realized we were okay, I kicked into gear and started telling people what to do: "You go to the back. You take the bags out of the back very slowly. You call 9-1-1." And immediately, I was coalesced into me again. Very quickly, I regained my sense of control—or so I thought.
The Buddha said, "True wisdom is a stout boat which crosses a sea of old age, sickness, and death. It is also a great, bright torch in pitch-black ignorance, a good medicine for all sick people, a sharp axe which fells the tree of delusion." When one has the illumination of wisdom, even though one's eyes are merely physical eyes, one is the clear-seeing person.
I think the question, for those of us who ask this sort of question, which is really all of us at some point or other in our lives, is not who do I want to be, or what do I want to do with my life. I think the real question is: How hungry am I to see? How much do I want to live? How much do I want to be in my life? How much do I want to be of life right now?
Cultivating Wisdom, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard.
Explore further
01 : Eight Means to Enlightenment by Master Dogen
02 : The Waking by Theodore Roethke
03: Visuddhimagga