Equanimity Paramita
Photo by Keith Hardy
To cultivate equanimity is to cultivate a stable quality of mind that is not swayed by externals— it’s a mind that is stable and resilient. Zuisei says: “It’s not unfeeling, it’s not uncaring, it’s not cold or distant or even protected. It is unshakeable. It is a mind free of suffering.”
This talk is part of a series of talks on the Ten Paramitas.
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.
Equanimity Paramita
A disciple of the noble ones, devoid of covetousness, devoid of ill will, unbewildered, alert, mindful, keeps pervading the first direction with an awareness imbued with equanimity. Likewise the second, likewise the third, likewise the fourth. Thus above, below, and all around, everywhere in its entirety, she keeps pervading the all-encompassing cosmos with an awareness imbued with equanimity. Abundant, expansive, immeasurable, without hostility, without ill will. She discerns before this mind of mine was limited and undeveloped, but now this mind of mine is immeasurable and well developed. Whatever action that was done in a measurable way does not remain there, does not linger there.
Equanimity is the tenth of the Paramitas, Paramis or Paramitas, the virtues of an enlightened being. It is also the fourth of the Brahma Viharas, the four immeasurables. May you be filled with happiness and the root of happiness. May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering. May you never be separated from boundless joy, which is free of suffering. May you remain in perfect equanimity that knows no desire or aversion. In one way, you could say equanimity is the pinnacle of these two practices, the perfection of perfection, if you will, according to the Pali Canon.
In the Mahayana school, there are only the six Paramitas in wisdom. Wisdom is the last one. It is really seen as the anchor for all the other Paramitas. Without wisdom, they are not, in fact, a perfection. I was wondering if this was intentionally changed, because wisdom also appears in the list of the Ten Paramitas, but not at the end. I just was wondering whether this was changed when Buddhism went to China, and the Mahayana school was developed, maybe because equanimity can seem, it can be misinterpreted as being cold or distant or detached, uncaring. I too have been kind of tiptoeing gingerly around it. I kept, you know, I knew that it was coming, and I kept thinking, you know, how am I going to talk about it so that it doesn't seem clinical and cold, removed, you know, like a samurai killing someone with perfect equipoise.
I was thinking about writing this talk, and an image came to my mind. It must have been maybe three summers ago, I was in New York City, I was in Brooklyn, and I was going to the temple, and I was riding the subway. It was pretty empty, the car, and it was me and probably a couple of other people. Almost directly in front of me was a young man, probably in his early twenties. He looked perfectly ordinary. He looked kind of like an all-American, an athlete, probably. He was wearing these ragged jeans, and there was a backpack at his feet, and he was reading a book that he was holding on his lap.
At first, I just noticed him, and then I did whatever I was doing. Something kind of pulled my attention again, and I turned to look at him again. The feeling is hard to describe, but it was as if the entire car and all the people in it and the track that we were on and all the buildings that we were passing over, because it was one of the overhead lines, and with all this jumble of people and cars, everything was being pulled into his being. It hit me at that moment: I had never seen anyone be so still outside of the Zendo. Even then, rarely, very rarely, I had never seen anyone be so still.
I kept pretending not to stare, but I was. He was reading, I think, but he was a very slow reader, because it was a while before he would turn the page. Even then, when he did, he would just take the corner of the page with his fingertips and move it over and then return. His hands were holding the book on his lap, and it was like he had never moved. I was mesmerized, in fact. I felt so drawn to him. I had this very strong feeling that his movement then would be very graceful, that there would be something so beautiful and centered about him. I wanted to wait until he got up and got off the subway so I could just watch him walk away.
My stop arrived, and I thought I could just go one more stop. I did, and he was still not moving. I went another stop and thought I was going to be late for the temple. What was I going to tell Shugan? “Sorry, I was late. I was following a young man around.” I had to leave and turn around. As the train was leaving, I was still watching him through the window, just waiting to see if I could see him move.
Stillness in Motion
Actually, that began for me a very deliberate exploration of stillness and movement and their dynamic. I write about it, and it's a dance that I have always found fascinating and very powerful. This image came up in my mind as I was thinking of this talk. Because of the weekend retreat that we did on the still point, I wanted to talk about stillness, really stillness of mind, of stability of mind.
What struck me so about this young man was not simply that he was still, but that he was completely unified. You see people read all the time, on the subway, at the airport, in the waiting room, and the feeling you get is that they are filling time. I have done that. We are just filling time. He was in it. It was like he was not there, in fact.
This stillness of mind, this immovability of mind in Buddhism, is called equanimity. It is rare, extremely rare, and yet it is necessary for this equipoise of mind, of being, really, where body, mind, and awareness are all unified. It is, of course, one of the reasons that we so emphasize the stillness in Zazen. It is not just for the sake of remaining still; as long as the body is moving, most often—not always, but most often—the mind moves. An unstable posture makes it that much harder to establish a stable, unmoving mind. Without that stillness, that deep abiding stillness, you get thrown about by every passing wind, every storm, every cloud.
Last week, Gokhan and I were driving up from the city, and the weather was incredible. First there were very dense clouds. I thought there was a fire somewhere. I kept looking for the fire, but it turned out just to be clouds. It was fog as we crossed the bridge. Then it started to hail, and then it cleared up. Not one, but two full rainbows appeared right in front of us. Gokhan was asking what people who first saw a rainbow thought, where it came from, the source and the endpoint of a rainbow. I was curious, so I did a little research. The typical leprechaun’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is always unattainable. It was also seen as the gateway between the human realm and the god realm. In Cherokee lore, it is the border of the sun’s coat, which I thought was nice.
When I started to read about what actually makes a rainbow, I thought it was a perfect image for equanimity. Light hits a raindrop; some passes through, but some gets deflected back. It is refracted off the back of the drop and diffused. According to the wavelength of that ray, it gives the different colors we see: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. I was thinking of the mind. Equanimity is not armor, a shell where nothing comes in and nothing passes through. It is actually like this, where a ray of light, a ray of energy—let’s say it is a feeling, an emotion—comes through and is refracted, therefore diffused. It has a chance to move through you, which reduces its power. You are feeling it completely.
The image I have had of equanimity is that you just don’t feel, that you are so cool and collected that nothing moves you. A more accurate understanding is that you feel completely, but you are not moved by it. You are not thrown by what you feel because it just moves. It is, in nature, like a raindrop. It is not solid. The energy has a chance to move through.
In the Sutras, equanimity is remaining unmoved in the face of gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Unmoved is not unfeeling. It is not uncaring. It is not cold, distant, or protected. It is unshakable. It is a mind that is infinitely knowing pleasure and pain, honor and dishonor, and therefore free. A person who remains in perfect equanimity does feel pain and pleasure. They know intimately the nature of pleasure and pain. Knowing their nature, they are not taken in by them. When pain arises, they are that pain. They feel it. They are that pain. When pain passes, they let it go. The same is true of gain and loss, fame and disrepute.
Meeting Life as It Is
There is a story of Master Hakuen. Who knows if it is true, but it is a nice story. A young, beautiful woman lived near his temple. One day, she came to her parents and confessed she was pregnant. Furious, they tried to make her confess who it was. At first, she wouldn’t say, and finally she said it was the priest, Hakuen. The parents were irate. They took the baby and went to Hakuen’s door, saying, “How could you? We are here to give you your baby.” Hakuen just looked at them and said, “Is that so?” He took the baby. By this point, the news had spread all over town. He had lost his reputation, but he did not care. He got milk from neighbors and everything he needed to take care of the baby.
A year went by, and the young woman could not bear it anymore. She went back and confessed it was really the fishmonger’s son who got her pregnant. The parents were embarrassed and apologized profusely to Hakuen, asking if they could have the baby back. Hakuen said, “Is that so?” and passed the baby along, giving it to them.
In a moment where the ground opens up under you, what do you rely on? How do you take the next step? When life changes as you know it, how do you proceed? When a baby is brought to your doorstep and what you expected does not turn out as planned, how do you take the next step? If the room is dark and our eyes are closed, we can assume we will crash into the furniture. We have to first open our eyes, then let in a sliver of light, at least at the beginning, letting it grow gradually into a beam, a floodlight, until there is light everywhere. This is very much what practice is: seeing the spectrum of our experience and not being blind to any of it, which takes time, definitely takes time.
Equanimity is the characteristic of promoting neutrality, but a better word is unity, of illuminating, of showing what is there, what was always there to begin with. That swirl of coral, tangerine, and mauve clouds we were driving under after the rainbow appeared different to Kokan and me, from that car we were driving, from the mountains we were passing, just as the young man appeared different from me, the subway car, and the buildings. Fundamentally, they are not different. The function of equanimity is to see things impartially, without preference, because being unified, there is no need to pit one against the other.
The Faith Mind Poem says basically exactly that: “The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. To set what you like against what you dislike is a disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.” That is really it. Equanimity is a mind that is not disturbed. It is open. It is aware. It is undisturbed by what appears before it, regardless of what that is.
How we react to any given moment is always in our hands. We are the ones building the road.
Shugun Sensei always says that if we are practicing, we do not need to be surprised by what appears before us. We do not need to be caught unawares or afraid, because it is all part of us. It is all part of that mind. I remembered, as I wrote that, that sometimes the Dharma appears in unexpected places. The story Children of Dune by Frank Herbert had a line, a little mantra at one point that stayed with me all these years: “Fear is the mind killer. I will face my fear. I will let it pass through me.” I have actually used it as an invocation. When everything is illuminated, fear still arises, but our relationship to it changes, sometimes dramatically.
The way is perfect, like vast space, where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. It is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. It is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. We cannot. It is like a veil, a shroud, that we have wrapped ourselves in. How could we see things as they really are? Equanimity is removing that veil. Its proximate cause is reflection upon the fact that all beings inherit the results of their own karma. All beings are heirs to their actions. Their actions are their ground.
I spoke about the five remembrances last week: I am of the nature to grow old, to be sick, to die. Everything that I love, everything that I have, everything that I own, I will be separated from. The fifth one is that the only thing I really have are my actions, the ground upon which I stand. In a moment of anger, when someone insults us, instead of lashing back, we can remind ourselves that they too are walking on the ground of their actions, the ground built by their actions, which in turn continues building a path congruent with those actions, or it can be a different path, a fork in the road, because energy can, in fact, be transformed. It is always possible to change.
Understanding our karma, we understand that we are not prisoners of it, that we are not bound by it. Not understanding it, it feels very much like we are bound, like we do not have a choice. In a moment of seeing clearly that we are the ones creating and destroying, we can choose. If we move slowly enough to think, “This is what I have always done; it does not work,” what if we just try something different this time? Every day, telling ourselves “I am worthless” creates karma, very real karma, with strong momentum. In a moment, it takes exactly the same energy to say “I am worthless” as to say “I am lovable.”
If we do not drag the weight of the past into the moment, the action, thought, or word can lie before us untouched, open to questioning, reevaluation, and change. There is karma, and there are situations we have not chosen. How we react to any given moment is always in our hands. We are the ones building the road.
I read a story about the end of the world. We do not know why the world is ending, but it is imminent. In a village, everyone is going out, getting clothes made, eating their last feasts. One man, a bricklayer, decides to build a road. He builds it straight into the ocean. He has no idea where it is going or how far he can build it, with as many bricks as he has. Yet with every layer of brick he lays down, he has more ground to stand on. The perfection of equanimity should be considered thus.
Without equanimity, offensive actions by beings cause oscillation in the mind. When the mind oscillates, it is impossible to practice the requisites of enlightenment. It is impossible to practice the Paramitas. It is impossible to see what we are creating and destroying. It is impossible, in a real way, to wake up. We practice stilling those oscillations. We practice riding the waves of anger, despair, excitement, and passion. We practice seeing the root of anger, excitement, and passion, seeing its nature. It is passing, arising, and passing, so we can in fact be free.
Awakening to the Depths
The sky we were driving under reminded me of a solar eclipse I witnessed in Mexico. The light was eerie, orange. That reminded me of an essay by Annie Dillard, who has a way of describing what she sees unlike anyone else I have ever read. I pulled it out again, and this is what I read:
“We teach our children one thing only, as we are taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet's crust. As adults, we are almost all adepts at waking up. We have so mastered the transition, we have forgotten, we have learned it. Yet it is a transition we make one hundred times a day, as like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add, until someone holds their wealth up to the surface and into the wide awake city in a form that people can use. We are hauling up our wealth to the surface. This is practice in a form that we and others can use.”
Because we can spend a good deal of time, too much time, in a darkened room, or we can spend a good deal of time out and about but with our eyes firmly shut. We can also spend time learning how to open them and keep them open. I wish the only thing we taught our children was to wake up. We do teach them to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet, but what words, what activities, what thoughts are we teaching them? So often we do not know. So often we do not know what we think or why we think it. So often we do not know what we feel or why we feel it, where it has come from.
That is why we have to look and look and look again at this mind. Its waters are not actually useless. They are not insensible, and they are definitely not private. We think they are, and that is the problem. Whether we are hauling up wealth or hauling up trash, it fills all our backyards. I saw a cartoon at the hardware store: in one square, a caveman is in what looks like paradise. A river flows, the fish are jumping, the trees are blooming behind him, and he says, “Me, not happy.” In the next cartoon, a businessman sits on a pile of stuff: refrigerators, microwaves, a tennis racket, the television, cell phones. A skeleton of the fish is at his feet. He says, “Still not happy.” That is our life. It does not have to be.
In the deeps are the violence and terror that psychology has warned us about. If we ride these monsters deeper down, if we drop with them farther over the world's rim, we find what our sciences cannot locate or name: the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether that buoys the rest, that gives goodness its power for good and evil its power for evil, the unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for each other and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. Sciences cannot locate or name the substrate, but religion has. People have.
Having no preferences does not mean that everything is rosy. Equanimity is not avoidance, it is not suppression, it is not denial. It is complete acceptance, complete understanding of things as they are, and understanding that we have, in fact, the full capacity to create harm, and we also have the capacity for infinite, infinite goodness. Equanimity is walking with full confidence on that ground, on the unified field, and not being afraid to accept and act on that given, that inexplicable, irrefutable caring for one another.
Equanimity Paramita, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.