Ignorance vs. Love
Photo by Veerle Contant
To live a life of wisdom and compassion, it helps to know that the trouble of suffering always emerges from ignorance. But ignorance of what? In this talk Zuisei clarifies ignorance—one of the three poisons in Buddhism—pointing out all that it obscures.
This dharma talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Ignorance
Ignorance: The First Link
We’ve been speaking about dependent origination, pratityasamutpada, the quintessential teaching about how things come to be, how they arise and pass away, and how they come together to make what we call “existence.” Tonight I want to speak about ignorance (avidya), the first link in the twelve-link chain of dependent origination. Ignorance is the “prime mover”—the root cause of our trouble. And I think it’s fair to say it’s worth understanding more clearly, given that at least as far as the Buddhist path is concerned, when we dispel ignorance we take away the single most influential factor in what keeps us bound—what keeps us repeating all the many unhelpful habits that make life so much harder than it needs to be.
Avidya, as ignorance is called in the early sutras, means “lack of light,” and we could think of it as a kind of blindness, whereas vidya means “seeing,” “understanding,” or “light.” To realize enlightenment is to illuminate what is dark, to shine a light on what is present but not seen. So let’s first think of ignorance or delusion as not seeing what’s there, as seeing incorrectly—which is what misperception is—or as seeing too much, but of the wrong thing. Because sometimes it’s our knowing that blinds us. We see—incorrectly—and then we become convinced of what we’re seeing, and then we go to war because of it, not realizing it’s not real. It’s simply not the way things are.
Khandro Rinpoche says that ignorance is very clever. It knows a lot, and therefore it thinks that the teachings and the practice must be very complicated too, because what is simple can’t possibly be enlightenment. She says, “Ignorance loves to articulate and express and be intelligent,” so it mistrusts the simple teaching that says that all we need to do is be selflessly kind. How complicated is that, she asks? Just be selfless, just be kind. And how do you get there? Compassion and devotion. Those are the two times when we are closest to wisdom, she says. Why? Because we’re not thinking about what we’re doing, we’re not measuring and scheming and fabricating, we’re not try to be anything, be anyone.
As my teacher used to say, compassion just happens—it’s like growing your hair. You don’t have to strive, you don’t have to force it. All you have to do is get out of the way and let it unfold.
Devotion is something which we don’t speak a lot about in Zen, but it’s there—in our liturgy, in our sitting, in our interactions with one another. I think of devotion as a kind of surrender. We finally decide to stop pretending to be something we’re not. We don’t have to be the smart or good student, good practitioner. We don’t have to let anyone know about the things we’re doing or studying. Instead, we can just be here now, for this moment, very quietly, very simply.
Why Zazen Matters in a World of Conflict
People right now are asking, “How does sitting zazen help with everything that’s going on in the world? What good is it to be still and quiet in the middle of a war, in the face of conflict and the endless vying for power that comes with it? What difference can zazen make when so much of what’s happening is not happening here and is out of my control? That’s the first misconception: that it’s not happening here. And the second is that it’s out of my control.
Sitting still and studying our minds helps us to see clearly the difference between what will help and what will harm.
Sitting still and quiet helps us, first of all, to stop telling ourselves stories, stop fabricating reasons why we act the way we do. Meditation calms the waters so we can see that the conflict out there is the same conflict we in here. When we get angry at ourselves or at one another, what we are doing is going to war. We’re splitting the territory and saying, this is mine, this is yours; this I like, this I don’t; this I keep, this I throw out.
And usually the things we don’t like we hide, or we ignore, or we attack, or we mask. If we really don’t like them, then we get rid of them. We kill bits of us or bits of others that we don’t want to accept.
When we stop long enough to really look closely at our minds, we realize that it’s disingenuous to say, “That’s not me. I don’t do that.” When we are still for a little while we’re able to see how this whole mess that we find ourselves in has come to be. It doesn’t shock us, it doesn’t take us by surprise. It shows us that suffering in all its forms is the inevitable result of our ignorance, of not understanding that what I do to you, I do to myself—that we’re so completely interconnected that what I do in the privacy of my own mind affects the furthest reaches of the universe.
But you don’t have to believe me. Please, don’t believe me. Sit quietly, turn inward, and see for yourself.
A bit more practically, zazen also helps us to make better choices about what to focus on and how to respond. So we’re not just sitting quietly—we also act out of a deep love and care for our world. But when we do, we do so out of clarity and not defensiveness, out of kindness and not spite.
To say it most simply: sitting still and studying our minds helps us to see clearly the difference between what will help and what will harm.
[…]
Ignorance and the Four Noble Truths
In early Buddhism—that is, in the sutras of the Pali Canon—ignorance is primarily ignorance of the Four Noble Truths. It’s not understanding that life is permeated by suffering, and that the root of that suffering is craving. It’s wanting what we don’t have—health, wealth, fame, eternal life; wanting what we have and don’t like to go away—sickness, old age, and death primarily, but also what is unpleasant, what is uncomfortable, what we didn’t ask for or weren’t expecting, what isn’t convenient, what doesn’t fit our image or our wish; and it’s wanting what we have and like to stay but it won’t, it can’t, and that makes us unhappy.
We don’t realize that our idea of what will bring us happiness is very limited and inaccurate. It doesn’t deliver, and when it does it doesn’t last. But that’s not because happiness doesn’t exist, but because we’re not looking for it in the right place.
We’re like that guy looking for his keys under a streetlamp, when someone walks by and asks what he’s looking for.
“My keys,” he says.
“Is this where you lost them?” the other person asks, and he too starts looking.
“Oh no,” says the first guy. “It’s just that this is where there light is.”
Ignorance is like this; it comes with a bit of laziness. We’ll look, but only where it’s comfortable, where it’s convenient, where it’s not too scary and where we’re not put out.
A neighbor asks you to do something, or a friend, and your first thought is, “I don’t have time.” “I can’t possibly add another thing.” “I already do so much—for everyone.” The self is very predictable: it constricts around itself, protecting what little it has.
Freedom, on the other hand, is expansive. So if we’re wondering how we’re doing, how we’re living, all we have to do is look at how we feel. Selfless compassion is very simple, Khandro Rinpoche said, but it requires to let go of what we think we want, and that’s not so easy to do. We’d rather look where there’s light, where things are known, familiar, because then we can control it. And what’s familiar is this sense of me, this sense of mine, this sense of myself.
Ignorance is not knowing that there’s another way to live, which is what the Third Noble Truth says. It’s not knowing that we have a choice in our suffering, and that if we really want to be free there’s a path, the Fourth Noble Truth. There’s a path we can follow, there are practices we can do, there are teachings we can study and integrate into our lives.
So, to recap, ignorance here is ignorance of the Four Noble Truths of suffering, its root, its cessation, and the path. And in the chain of dependent origination, this ignorance leads to all kinds of unskillful actions—karma that we create in the form of our mental formations, all our many habits or tendencies which form the second link in the chain.
Ignorance is also our belief that the five skandhas of form, sensation, conception, mental formations, and consciousness are equal to a self. We take this body to be me, to be mine. We take feelings to be mine, our perceptions, our stories, and our attention—all of it we take to be me.
Think about a feeling, let’s say a feeling of joy. When joy comes up in you, it feels like it’s yours, right? Like it’s happening to you. We think, “I’m feeling joy,” and because it’s happening to me, in that moment the feeling is mine. That’s why ignorance is a form of conceit, as the sutras call this sense of “This is mine, I am this, this is myself.” But what happens if, seeing a form, or thinking a thought, or feeling a feeling, we allow a bit of space around it? What happens then to that conceit?
I’ve told the story about how some years ago I was sitting in the zendo during sesshin and I was stewing with anger, I was really caught. It’d been a while since I’d been so upset, and part of me was relishing it, I could tell. Half of my mind could see I was feeding the story that fed the anger, and half of my mind was trying to break free.
Luckily, I’d been reading the Satipatthana Sutta, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and I remembered that when you work with the second foundation, feelings or sensations (vedana), you notice a feeling arising and you simply note it, classifying it as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. You simply say, “I experience a pleasant feeling,” or, as the translation I was studying said, “A pleasant feeling has arisen in me.”
So I tried it. I sat there marinating in my anger and then I said to myself, “An unpleasant feeling has arisen in me,” and psssssst—all that angry energy dissipated, like letting air out of a balloon. And it was funny when I put it that way; I had to stop myself from laughing.
But please, don’t try this at home with your spouse or your kids. Your kid is throwing a tantrum and you’re like, “Has an unpleasant feeling arisen in your mind stream?” Or you tell your spouse, “Love has been felt.” That’s just weird, and it gives Buddhists a bad rep when we do things like take out the pronouns from a sentence.
We don’t have to be weird, we can be normal. We can recognize, “I feel angry,” and even say it if it’s helpful, while understanding in the privacy of our own minds that this anger is not me, is not mine, and that there’s not even a fixed I who’s feeling it. There’s just a succession of thoughts and feelings and perceptions—and that that’s what gives us that sense of an I. This is vidya, clear comprehension, clear seeing.
Ignorance can be very coarse: I don’t see how I’m hurting you, for example, or I don’t care. Or it can be very subtle: there seems to be an “I” here, I feel like there is, so what’s all this talk about no self?
Ignorance as Not Seeing Emptiness
Which takes us to ignorance as it’s understood in Mahayana Buddhism, and particularly in Madhyamaka, the Middle Way School, in which ignorance is primarily ignorance of emptiness, shunyata.
This is Nagarjuna, the second- and third-century monk and philosopher:
The mind which directly understands emptiness is an unmistaken mind which eliminates the ignorance that arises from the four harmful preconceptions. Without that ignorance the karmic formations will not arise, and neither will the remaining links of the chain of dependent origination.
Nagarjuna is saying that if ignorance doesn’t arise, the other twelve links don’t arise. And here ignorance is not knowing that the self and things and the chain and even emptiness are all empty. They’re empty of self existence, self nature, svabhava. They exist, but not independently, not by themselves—only in conjunction with everything else, like ocean waves.
There is no such thing as a single wave. There are just waves indivisible from the ocean. That’s exactly how everything in the universe operates.
The four preconceptions are: seeing the impermanent as permanent, seeing what is unsatisfactory as pleasurable, seeing what is impure as pure, and seeing what is not-self as self.
The first one: seeing the impermanent as permanent. Take your body as an example. You feed your body, you take it to the gym, you fret when it gains weight or when it loses it, but you most likely don’t think, “This body is rapidly decaying.” It just seems solid, and like it’ll be here always.
And even though we see people around us getting sick, getting old, and dying, there is still the insistent belief deep in our minds that it won’t happen to me. And so we feel shocked or betrayed when it does, like it’s not supposed to happen. We have a felt sense of permanence, and we believe in it as being the ultimate truth of how things are, even though it’s not.
The second preconception is seeing what is unsatisfactory as pleasurable. Scrolling on social media. You’re sitting up in bed, watching videos on Instagram or Tik Tok, and while you’re doing it, it feels pleasurable. There’s a definite dopamine hit you get every time you scroll. So it’s confusing when you put the phone away and go to sleep and find that your sleep is agitated. It’s confusing that you feel vaguely anxious and kind of… lonely. You wake up feeling irritated or bad about yourself. It’s not pleasurable, this scrolling, you finally realize—though it may still take a while to let it go.
To see what is impure as pure, the third preconception, is to see what is made up of interconnected, shifting, fragile parts as inherently whole and consistent. Like falling in love. We see the other person and for a while we love everything about them. They seem perfect, although just below the surface there are all sorts of inconsistencies and flaws, there’s conditioning and blind spots.
Purity here doesn't mean virtue. It means a kind of consistency, another type of permanence that things and people and our interactions don’t have. We want them to be perfect. Sometimes we go to great lengths to ensure our picture is perfect, and when we truly see they’re not, we hurt.
The last one, seeing what is not self as self, relates to the first three. We think there’s a fixed, independent self, the me at the center of everything. Your teacher or your boss gives you feedback, and immediately you get defensive.
But I’m really trying.
But it wasn’t my fault.
But that’s not my department, my job, my responsibility.
But no one explained this to me, so how am I supposed to know?
There are all the stories swirling around in your head, and this makes it hard to see that at the center of them there’s just thought, there’s just a feeling, maybe a sensation, a belief. And out of the combination of all these, a Me is born. A me that’s an illusion, a me that doesn’t exist apart from that moment, that set of conditions, that thought.
But here it’s important to stress that doesn’t mean that your feelings aren’t real, that relationships don’t matter because they’re empty. They matter very much. What we’re trying to see—what this whole talk is about—is pointing out that there’s the conventional way of understanding things, and that’s where most of us live most of the time.
The Ground of Interdependence
And then there’s the ultimate way of understanding things—what Nagarjuna called “the two truths.” Conventionally, Zuisei is separate from you. There is a being we can call Zuisei who experiences happiness and sadness and many more things. Ultimately, there is no being you can independently call Zuisei. There is just a process, a complicated web of causes and conditions that give rise to this sense of me.
Love is the ground and the one who walks on it. It’s the destination and the path.
So ignorance is also ignorance about these two truths: conventional truth and ultimate truth. It’s not that we don’t exist, it’s that we don’t exist independently, separately. This is called nihsvabhava, without independent existence, which in Madhyamaka is the same as emptiness. So, just as every single wave in the ocean is connected to every other wave in even the most remote corner of the planet by virtue of its water nature, by virtue of being ocean, every single one of us is connected to everything and everyone else by virtue of our interdependent nature.
This is what dependent origination points to. This is what emptiness points to. This is also—and here I’m going out on a limb—what loving-kindness points to. This is why I say that emptiness is not really emptiness. It’s not a vacuum, it’s not a void. When you go beyond all these words and ideas, when you sit in a room, mind source unmoved, filled like still water, what you eventually see is that the ground of everything—that emptiness that connects everything—what that looks like and feels like, is love.
That’s why I could argue in a talk and an article I wrote about this, that when you get very still and very close to the truth of things, you see that ignorance isn’t the prime mover at all. It’s love.
We just have to shift our way of seeing. No, not even that. We have to get out of our own way and see what has always been true. We have to bring light to what’s been always present. It’s love, coming out of the realization of our interdependence, that moves everything. Love is the ground and the one who walks on it. It’s the destination and the path.
But don’t take my word for it. Please see it for yourself.
Explore further
01 : Love as Prime Mover with Zuisei Goddard
02 : Emptiness Brimming with Love by Zuisei Goddard
03 : Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: An Introduction to Dependent Origination with Zuisei Goddard
This dharma talk on Dependent Origination: Ignorance was given by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, Zen Buddhist Guiding Teacher of Ocean Mind Sangha. Audio podcast and transcript available.