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.
The seventh awareness of the enlightened being is cultivating wisdom. Wisdom, or prajna, is both the beginning and the end of the path. It is the beginning in the sense that it’s the ground we walk on, and the end because it must be realized and manifested in all that we do. Dōgen says that wisdom is aroused by hearing, reflecting, practicing, and realizing. Yasutani Roshi said, “Our buddha nature has the great function of deepening illumination endlessly through practice.” He also said that practice—shikantaza specifically—is like sitting in the middle of a clearing in a deep wood, knowing that ultimate danger is about to strike but not knowing what it looks like or from what direction it will come. It’s a very unusual but powerful metaphor for shikantaza.
Imagine sitting quietly and suddenly hearing a sound without knowing where it’s coming from. Your whole body is alert and completely still. You are waiting, but not a cell in your body is passive. Your senses are open, receptive, yet your mind is not moving, because you know you can’t afford to be distracted even for a moment. Imagine your zazen being like that—the perfect balance of alertness and stillness. Yasutani Roshi said this is what it means to sit as enlightenment itself, to take in everything and be taken in by nothing, to be wisdom itself.
Last weekend, during our family camping retreat, we had a very gregarious four-year-old named Sam, who at some point heard that we were going to meditate. I was sitting next to him at breakfast, and he said, “I had to meditate in pre-K. It was horrible.” I asked, “Really? That’s strong. Why was it horrible?” He said, “Because I had to be quiet. It was boring.” I told him, “Well, Sam, you’re not the first one who’s ever thought that, and you won’t be the last.” Somehow, that didn’t comfort him.
In the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa says that wisdom is understanding, but he distinguishes it from the more ordinary kinds of knowing present in perception and consciousness. He tells a story: imagine a young child, a peasant, and a money changer, all of whom find some coins on the road. The child will see the coins—their shape, color, shininess—but won’t know their value or function. The peasant will recognize their shape and color and know their value but won’t be able to tell whether they’re real or forged. The money changer, by contrast, will see their shape and color, know their value, and by weighing and smelling them, inspecting them closely, will know if they’re real or not, their make, their age, even the town where they were minted. The child represents perception, the peasant consciousness, and the money changer understanding. True understanding is also understanding of the three marks of existence—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self. Wisdom, then, is understanding that all things, without exception, are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. And wisdom is also understanding that this is not a problem. As long as we don’t expect things to be different than they are, it’s not a problem at all—but there’s the catch.
I’ve often wondered, and marveled, at people who are inherently accepting, and I’ve contrasted them with my own way of seeing the world, which can be so willful. There’s a tension between wanting what you want—shaping reality in your own image, which can lead to discovery and innovation—and having a basic kind of reasonableness, an attitude of not fighting the way things are. My first year in college, I refused to wear a hat. Even in winter, in Philadelphia, in thirty-degree weather, I would not wear a hat. My roommate, who was from Haiti and whose internal thermostat was much like mine, noticed that I was always cold and always cranky. One day she asked, “Van, why aren’t you wearing a hat?” I answered, dead serious, “Because that’s giving in to the cold, and I’m damned if I’m going to do that.”
At a very basic level, waking up is seeing when our view is unskillful and deciding to search for a more skillful view. The Buddha said, “When you, friends, have wisdom, you are without greed. Always reflect upon yourselves; do not lose this wisdom. In this way, you can attain liberation in my dharma.” When we have wisdom, we are without greed, without anger, without delusion—and therefore, we are free.
The poem I read is by Theodore Roethke. I’m not a poet nor a literary scholar, but sitting with this poem these last few days, I feel it speaks directly to what it means to awaken. Many commentators read this “waking” as life and “sleep” as death, the slow waking as the full enjoyment of life. But I prefer to see this waking as waking into the dream that is our lives, and this slow waking as the acceptance that it takes time to awaken. It can’t be anything but slow, even when it happens suddenly. You only learn where you’re going by going—there’s no other way. Even when others point the way, you’re still the one who has to go and therefore to learn firsthand where you’re headed.
I’ve mentioned before how the moment of literal waking has always fascinated me—the shift from unconsciousness to consciousness, the wonder of finding every morning that I wake up as me. Every morning, at least as far as I can tell, for the last forty-four years, I’ve woken up to find I’m still Zuisei, still Vanessa—which has its advantages and disadvantages. Of course, if I didn’t wake up as me, life would be quite difficult. If one morning I woke up as a kettle drum, another as Nolan, a blowfish, a rose, then back to Zuisei—it would be hard to keep things going. Or would it? One morning I’m me, the next I’m a power drill, the next I’m an oak. That’s a short story waiting to be written.
We do see that although things are ever-changing, unsatisfactory, and empty, they don’t turn into other things, even the ones that seem to. Dogen, in the Genjokoan, says that spring doesn’t become summer and fire doesn’t become ash, just as life doesn’t become death. Life is a period to itself; death is a period to itself.
This little detail about things being empty—what does that mean, really? Because of quantum mechanics, we know that an electron doesn’t actually exist until it is interacting with something else. The only way it exists is as a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing interacts with it, it’s not in any place, and you can’t tell where it will appear when it does—you can only calculate the probability of its location. In other words, there seems to be no objective reality to life, only a set of interactions taking place within a whole lot of space. When this theory was first proposed, even Einstein refused to believe it. It seemed too absurd to him that there would be literally nothing to grasp, no solid ground to stand on. We do, in fact, have trouble accepting reality.
Four hundred years after the Buddha and long before quantum mechanics was discovered, Lucretius intuited that the universe was made of very small particles moving through infinite space, and he said these particles don’t move in straight lines but have a slight swerve. Therefore, they collide with one another, and that collision is what brings things into being. The fact that he saw this is incredible to me. He probably just sat quietly and reflected on things—and saw truly. The emptiness we speak of is not a vacuum but an intricate web of relationships and conditionalities: if this arises, that comes to be; if that doesn’t arise, this is not. Lucretius also said the soul is not immortal, that when you die, you just die, and that the obstacle to pleasure is not pain but delusion. Once Christianity took hold in Europe, his theories were so antithetical to the Church that they found a way to discredit him, saying he’d gone mad with love and killed himself. His one poem, On the Nature of Things, containing all his teaching, was buried until the 1500s.
We not only take our waking slow; we actively fight it, especially if it’s not to our liking. That is why waking up is such a revolutionary act.
The emptiness we speak of is not a vacuum but an intricate web of relationships and conditionalities: if this arises, that comes to be; if that doesn’t arise, this is not.
Buddhaghosa says there are four kinds of wisdom: pure wisdom, the wisdom of subtle observation, the wisdom of equality, and mirror-like wisdom. Each of these corresponds to a level of consciousness. According to the Yogacara teachings, there are the five sense consciousnesses, which correspond to pure wisdom; the sixth consciousness, which is the mind and works in conjunction with the other five, corresponds to subtle observation; the seventh consciousness, or manas, is the “I” consciousness—the sense of ego—and corresponds to equality; and the eighth consciousness, called the storehouse or āaaya-vijñana, in which the seeds of all experience are stored, corresponds to mirror-like wisdom.
Each of these consciousnesses can act either as ignorance or as wisdom. The difference lies in the “I.” When the mind says, “This I am, this is mine, this is myself,” the turning begins.
Roethke says, “We think by feeling. What is there to know?” In terms of conventional truth, we only know what we perceive through the senses. But as long as we believe that what we experience we also possess—“I see this,” “I smell this”—our senses become the thieves of awareness instead of pure instruments of wisdom. I see myself instead of what I am seeing. As long as I see myself as separate from you, my not-so-subtle observation tells me that I must take what is mine before you do. As long as my ego will not allow me to see you as my equal, it certainly will not let me see you as myself, as my own body, and so I lack the wisdom of equality. As long as the “I” stands in the way, the mirror remains cloudy, dim—it reflects only what I want it to see. That is not wisdom.
We can only know what our senses allow us to know, but to truly know, we must go beyond them. Practice can feel like blind running—frightening, but also incredibly freeing. There’s a moment in this exercise I do with blindfolded runners when they’re moving as fast as they dare, and they can’t see at all where they’re stepping. That, to me, is what practice feels like at its best. You have no idea where you’re going, yet you know the ground will rise to meet you. It’s only when we hesitate that we fall—when we lead with our head instead of our being. We can only fear what we think we know.
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 often speak of fear of the unknown, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s not the unknown we fear—it’s the imagined, the probable, the partially known.
The Buddha tells a story about mistaking a stick for a snake, and it’s a sad story because it reminds us how much of our fear is projection. It gets even sadder when we realize that those who are most fearful tend to live longer and pass on those genes, ensuring that the cycle of fear continues. So perhaps the fearful live longer, but they live fearfully.
There is not-knowing that is born of ignorance, and there is the knowing that tells us when not to give in to our fear. That is wisdom. Perhaps our fate lies in what we cannot fear, because it is there that we are most open—unanticipating, unworried—and most able to meet what is, as it is.
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—the shaking of our certainty, our intellectual knowing, our beliefs about ourselves—keeps us steady in the long run because it keeps us open and inquiring. What falls away is always, and is near, and that feels exactly right. Every night I fall into sleep, and on one level Zuisei ceases to be. Every day, the understanding that I am “me” is near, but my work is to see that “me” clearly so I don’t misinterpret it. When I do, I wake to sleep and fail to wake again—I simply sleepwalk through life.
When we choose not to see, not to understand, when we turn away, we’re choosing sleep. And the more we choose sleep, the harder it becomes to wake. It’s like those dreams in which you dream you’re waking: once, twice, three times, you struggle to rouse yourself, but each time a part of you knows, “I’m still dreaming.”
While I was sick, I had a vivid dream. I dreamed I was in a car with my family—my parents, my brother, my maternal grandparents. In waking life, only my father and I are still alive. My grandfather was driving, which was strange, because in life he drove very slowly. He did everything slowly—his friends even called him “the camel.” But in the dream, he took a turn too fast, and I knew we weren’t going to make it. Sure enough, we skidded off a cliff. As we flew through space, I said to myself, very calmly, “This is it.” I wasn’t scared. I was accepting—for once—and curious. But it wasn’t it, because the crash never came. We landed softly on a ledge or perhaps the top of a tree, the car delicately balanced and about to tip over. Once I realized we were safe, I got out and immediately began telling everyone what to do: “You move to the back. You take the suitcases out of the trunk, slowly. You call 911, now.” It’s amazing how quickly you become “you” again.
Every day, the understanding that I am “me” is near, but my work is to see that “me” clearly so I don’t misinterpret it.
The Buddha said that true wisdom is a stout boat that crosses the sea of old age, sickness, and death. It is a great bright torch in pitch-black ignorance, a good medicine for all who are ill, a sharp axe that fells the tree of delusion. When one has the illumination of wisdom, even though one’s eyes are merely physical eyes, one is a “clear-seeing person.”
I think the question, for those of us who ask such questions—which is everyone, really, at some point in their 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—really see? How much do I want to live, to be in my life, 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