Eight Realizations of Great Beings (V): Listen to Bring Joy
Photo by Janko Ferlic
What happens when you deeply listen?
The commentary to the fifth of the Eight Realizations of Great Beings says that bodhisattvas listen deeply to others in order to ease their suffering and bring them joy. Delving into the practice of listening and the parallel tracks of growing up and waking up, Zuisei inspires us to listen deeply so that we can become fully human buddhas.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hello everyone. It's good to be with you. It's good to be home. It's good to be working again and speaking in English again. I'm told that I have a little more of an accent now, which is really hard to believe after just one week of being away. But maybe it doesn't take long to pull the Mexican out of me. I don't actually talk that much when I'm down there to tell you the truth. I do a lot of listening, which is always a good thing in any circumstance. I think you can't ever really stop learning how to listen more deeply and more attentively, more fully. Of course, it also saves you from putting your foot in your mouth, which is so easy to do when you're with family. I was remembering that years ago there was a radio show with a popular therapist, Dr. Joy Brown. She used to say when you visit your family, cheerful and stupid, just be cheerful and stupid that's how you stay out of trouble.
So picking up where we left off a couple of weeks ago. The Fifth Realization is the awareness that ignorance is the cause of the endless round of birth and death. The commentary says, "Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from others so their understanding and skillful means can develop, and so they can teach living beings and bring them great joy." Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from others. As they do this, they develop their own understanding and their skillful means. Then, they teach others and bring them great joy. I think this is my favorite realization. It's always good to bring joy to others, and it's not easy to do. This realization makes it sound easy, right? Just listen to them. Just love them.
A week and a half ago before I left for Mexico, I attended a meeting of the Gen X Buddhist Teacher Sangha, of which I'm now a member. One of the participants was quoting his own teacher who said that a dharma teacher's job is to listen. And I thought, how true. The closest description, I think, to what we Buddhist teachers do is what in Christianity is called spiritual direction, spiritual guidance or counseling. The truth is that, at the heart of it, it's really much more listening and reflection than direction. I never tell people what to do. At least, I hope I don't, and if I do, tell me so that I can stop doing it. My job, as I see it, is to meet you, to be with you, and to learn — to learn to both listen and also to ask. Because sometimes what's being said is what's being meant. And sometimes what’s being said is just a pointer, a signal that tells the one listening: there's more, but you have to go further down the path, and you need to cut through some brambles, and you need to dig with a shovel if you have it or with your bare hands if you don't. You have to see what's underneath. Sometimes you are given permission to do this exploring, and sometimes you're not. So, that's the first thing to determine: do I have permission and what kind?
I want to briefly say something here about the teacher-student relationship. Next month, at the end of July, I'm going to sit Tangaryo with a couple of people who want to become students. The way that we’ve been doing it is we've been sitting together for a few hours, doing essentially a half-day sit. We will do face-to-face teaching and they, in their own words, will ask for the teachings, giving me permission to teach [them]. I'm working with all of you already, of course, but it's different when you have explicit permission from someone to guide them. It's different when you make the commitment, which goes both ways, to walk this path together and to help each other—to do everything in our power to help each other to wake up. So, we'll sit together, and then we'll chant the Karaniya Metta Sutta, and then we'll have tea. We will also exchange gifts. Traditionally, the student gives the teacher something, but I wanted to make it reciprocal. So I'll send them something, they'll send me something — I hope it’s small since I live in a New York City apartment. This just marks the bond that we are forming even more than a certificate would. I hope that soon we'll be able to do this in person.
So the Fifth Realization says that ignorance is the cause of the endless round of birth and death — is the cause of samsara, of our being born, of our dying, and of all the suffering that we experience in between. As with the previous realization, which said that indolence is an obstacle to practice, we know the truth of ignorance. Not seeing things clearly, not understanding who we are and what this world is, leads to a lot of pain and confusion. We know this. This has always been true, long before Buddhism appeared on the face of the earth. It will be true even if Buddhism disappears and is never heard of again.
If we're walking around a room with a blindfold over our eyes, we're bound to bump into the furniture. We're bound to bump into each other. This is ignorance. Turning toward practice is realizing — oh, I'm wearing a blindfold — and deciding it's time to take it off. Enlightenment is realizing there's a flashlight in our hand and turning it on. But the catch is, it's a flashlight. It can't, it won't illuminate the whole room at once. I want to think that there have been people in the history of humanity—maybe there are people now—who have just found the light switch; they just walked right up to the appropriate wall, and they switched it right on and illuminated the whole room [snaps fingers] like that. I, for one, just have a little flashlight, a tiny little flashlight. I see bits of the room now and then, and others remain dark.
John Wellwood, a practitioner and psychotherapist, was the one who coined the term "spiritual bypassing." He said, in slightly different words, that you need to have a self, a healthy self, before you can let it go. He also said:
We need a larger perspective that can recognize and include two different tracks of human development—which we might call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human person and going beyond the person altogether. We are not just humans learning to become buddhas, but also buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully human. And these two tracks of development can mutually enrich each other.
We are buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully human. So there's growing up as a human being, which all of us, all of us, have to do and keep doing, no matter how realized. And then there's waking up. And the result is a fully human buddha.
Lately, in some of my conversations I've been hearing strains of what I call the "good practitioner syndrome." The starting phrase, the red flag, is the mental phrase: if only. "If only" I was a better practitioner, this wouldn't bother me. "If only" I sat more, I wouldn't get angry the way I do now. I wouldn't be impatient. I wouldn't be jealous. For longer than I care to admit, I used to think that if only I could be like my teacher, then I'd be a real practitioner. I didn't quite say it in those words to myself, but that was the thought. What a disservice to him and to me — and to practice. The thought may not be fully formed, and so we might not even realize this is what we're thinking. But there's the expectation, subtle or not so subtle, to be better, to be wiser, to be kinder. Because isn't that what a good practitioner is supposed to be? Of course, we are practicing to be wiser, to be kinder, and to be more patient, more open, more loving. But we can't do that by leap-frogging over our own humanity. We can't do that by thinking there's something wrong with us when we are not good enough, disciplined enough, equanimous enough.
I think that's the difference between aspiration and expectation. In aspiration, we make a vow without a picture in mind. We vow to wake up not knowing what waking up will look like. That's the whole point. If we could see it; if we could know it, then we would have done it already. We wouldn't have to practice. We are really vowing to trust what we don't know, to trust what lies beyond what we can see in that particular moment. It's not like getting a degree and saying, "Well, when I finish, I'm going to get this or that job. It's going to look like this. I'm going to have these skills and this kind of knowledge." We are trusting a process that we are so in the midst of, that we can't even see it. That is why we work together, so that we can reflect one another. So we can trust the process, and let it unfold. That’s the only way it happens anyway, whether we trust it or not; it only unfolds. Better to trust it. And yet, although we may understand the difference between aspiration and expectation, it's hard to let go which, again, is understandable. If we're practicing diligently, we hope we'll see some improvement. We hope we won't hurt others in our blindness; won't hurt ourselves. And yet we do, because the process of becoming an embodied buddha is terribly messy and sometimes painful.
I wish I could tell you that the more you practice, the less you hurt, but it's not like that. In some ways, the more you practice, the more you hurt, simply because that shell, that wall you've been building your whole life, at some point just falls apart. Or, you just get tired of keeping it standing; you decide you don't want to use up more energy doing this. So it just falls apart. At the same time, you do become better at holding the hurt. Otherwise, why would anybody practice? Why would anybody be crazy enough to walk around like an open wound?
But maybe you do have to be a little crazy to practice the dharma, to spend so much time, so much energy, so many resources on finding that light switch or, if you can't, at least to find a flashlight. A flashlight that's big enough, powerful enough, to dispel the dark— to do that, not just once, but over and over and over again. You have to be determined. You have to not get discouraged when you're bumbling about the room, crashing into people and things or think there's something wrong with you for not getting it quickly. You have to not spend too much time hoping you'll be better once you get the hang of it, once you get there, wherever there is. But you dohave to be fully in your life, now with its ups and downs, now in ignorance and in wisdom. Now.
At first, there was just one tent, Patrul’s little black yak-hair tent. Over time, people came and set up tents of their own. Gradually, the tent encampment grew, from very few tents to very many. At its peak, there were hundreds of black yak-hair tents and white cotton tents gathered together in the style of nomads, sheltering thousands of devoted dharma practitioners who had come to hear Patrul teach. This encampment of practitioners was known as Patrul Gar (Patrul’s Camp).
Patrul Rinpoche, who Matthieu Ricard called the Enlightened Vagabond, was a very well-loved and very unusual, very eccentric Tibetan teacher. He lived and taught in the 19th century, and there's many stories about him. In one of them, he hears that there's a hermit in the mountains who has been practicing twenty years in a cave, meditating on the perfection of patience. So Patrul Rinpoche decides to go check him out.
He goes to the cave; he pokes his head in the door, and says, "Hey, what are you doing here?" The hermit just opens one eye. He’s sitting and says a bit gruffly, "What do you want?" Rinpoche comes in and crouches right in front of him and just looks at him without saying anything. So the hermit asks again, "Who are you? Where do you come from?" And Patrul says, "I come from behind my back, and I'm going in the direction I am facing." "Okay," says the hermit. "So where were you born?" "On earth.” "What do you want?" he asks, trying to hide his frustration. "Well, I was just curious to see what you were doing here." "Oh okay,” he says, “well, I've been practicing here for twenty years, devoting myself single-mindedly and whole-heartedly to the perfection of patience." And Patrul starts howling with laughter. He pokes the hermit in the ribs and says, "Eh—what a great scam! These locals, they must be very gullible. So how much are you making?" The hermit says, "How dare you?! You just barge in here. You give me all these crazy lines, and now you're insulting me. Get out! Get out of here!" Patrul very calmly gets up, looks at the hermit, and nicely says, "So, where's your perfect patience now?" And in a flash, the hermit's anger just freezes. It stops. He takes a deep breath, and he starts meditating, the story says, in earnest for the first time,
A moment, a teaching moment like that, is most effective when you don't expect it. The hermit had no idea who Patrul was. He was dressed as a beggar, which is how he usually dressed. When people praised him, he got angry. “It's very dangerous for a teacher to be praised,” he said. In fact, he was giving a talk, and somebody sent him a letter of praise. He stopped the talk, and just left for a couple of days. He said, "I really had to collect myself and make sure it wasn’t going to get to my head in any way.”
One of his teachings was what he called The Three Opportunities. He says that the first opportunity to practice is right at the very moment that you wake up. Instead of jumping out of bed in a rush, we relax our minds and check our intention.
I think I've mentioned before that Thomas Merton said, "If the first thought that you have when you wake up is one of God, you're a monk." I think he meant you have a religious bent, if that is your focus. What is your first thought when you wake up?
The second opportunity is on your way to receiving the teachings. In Patrul Gar, students had to squeeze through a very narrow passage to get to the teaching tent, Patrul’s tent. He said that during that squeeze, you should remind yourself to cultivate bodhicitta, to refrain from harm, to do good.
This reminded me of another talk that I read by Khandro Rinpoche, who tells of the hundreds of people gathered to see the Dalai Lama and to hear him speak about compassion. But there were only a certain number of palm fronds, which I guess they use for one of the ceremonies, so people were shoving each other to get a palm frond so they could go listen to the teaching on compassion. She would say, "What are you practicing?"
We don't have to squeeze through anything. But in those few minutes before the talk starts, you're getting your tea; you're getting settled on your couch or your zafu, you can still ask yourself, "Where's my mind? Why am I here? What do I want? What am I looking for?"
The third opportunity happens during the teaching itself. In Patrul’s own words, it’s another chance to set our intention. This is how he said it:
Each instant, put your heart into it again. Each moment, remind yourself again. Each second, check yourself again. Night and day, make your resolve again. In the morning, commit yourself again. Each meditation session, examine mind minutely. Never be apart from dharma, not even accidentally. Continually, do not forget.
But please don't take this literally if it's going to turn you into a good practitioner again. “Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from others,” this realization says. Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from themselves as well. They don't chastise themselves or beat themselves up. They do, but that's when [they] forget that they are bodhisattvas. They know they don't have time to waste on such things. They need all their energy; they need all their focus; they need all their intention, their aspiration, because it's hard enough to be here fully, to listen deeply, to bring others joy. And it's also quite simple. We make an intention. Then, we trust that the Buddha in us will know what to do because he or she or they do—they do.
Let me end with another one of Patrul’s teachings:
Use the time of your life. Develop your inner happiness. Recognize the impermanence of all outer pleasure. Live as a Yogi (simply) Do your spiritual practices. Work as a bodhisattva for a happy world. Become an Amitabha a buddha of love and light. Turn your world into the paradise Sukhavati, (the Pure Land, or land of bliss) by unfolding the enlightenment energy within you. Search for a spiritual master who knows the goal of enlightenment. Change your world into a place of grace, by understanding all phenomena as opportunities for practice. Dedicate your actions to the benefit of all beings. Send all beings light. Live for the happiness of all beings. So you get the energy of light.
“Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from others so they can teach living beings and bring them great joy.”
Explore further
01 : Advice From Me to Myself by Patrul Rinpoche, translated by Constance Wilkinson
02 : Human Nature, Buddha Nature Interview with John Welwood by Tina Fossella