Faith in Zen
Photo by Annelisse Fifi
In this talk, given during a zazenkai or all-day sit to mark the Buddha’s enlightenment, Zuisei reflects on the Buddha’s path to liberation, stressing that 2,600 years later, each of us is doing the same thing: taking our seat and, as Zuisei puts it, “letting go of the known and trusting the unimagined.”
Exploring the role of faith in Zen practice, the essential and often challenging nature of the teacher-student relationship, and the need for clear motivation, Zuisei points out that the dharma has less to do with spiritual achievement and more with how we live—simply, humbly, ordinarily—day to day.
Zuisei draws on the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, Dogen’s Fukanzazengi, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and the poetry of Joy Harjo.
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.
Faith in Zen
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01 : Great Faith with Zuisei Goddard
02 : Formal Training at Ocean Mind Sangha
03 : The Love between Parent and Child with Zuisei Goddard
In search of what is wholesome, seeking the supreme state of sublime peace, I wandered by stages in the Magadhan country until eventually I arrived at Uruvela.
There I saw an agreeable piece of ground, a delightful grove with a clear-flowing river with pleasant, smooth banks, and a nearby village for alms-going.
The thought occurred to me: ‘This will serve for the striving of a clansman intent on striving.’ And I sat down there, thinking, ‘This will serve for striving.’
Good morning. Welcome to our Buddha’s Enlightenment Zazenkai or All-day Sit. Every year we do some form of intensive sitting—in previous years we’ve held a sesshin during this December weekend—to commemorate the occasion of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the event that started it all when it comes to us Buddhist practitioners The moment in which the Buddha realized himself, as well as the many moments that preceded it, and the moments that flowed forth from his realization, his enlightenment.
This excerpt that I read comes from the Ariyapariyesana Sutta or The Noble Search. It describes the moment in which, having left behind his teachers, the various ascetics Siddhartha Gautama studied with after leaving his family and his palace life. After spending six years among a number of wandering mendicants, mastering what they had to teach, excelling in the various practices, the Buddha-to-be realized he was no closer to his goal. He was no closer to putting an end to the suffering that caused him to leave home in the first place. After doing all sorts of ascetic practices, not eating, not moving, not breathing, he gets to the very limit of life. He comes to the brink of death where he thinks to himself, “Wait a minute! Why don’t I feel free, after all this? I don’t think this is the path. There must be another way.” And off he goes, searching for the right place to settle down in meditation, the place that will be “just right for striving.”
It’s a passage that makes me think of Fukanzazengi, Master Dogen’s instructions for zazen, where he says:
For zazen, a quiet room is suitable. Eat and drink moderately. Cast aside all involvements and cease all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do not administer pros and cons… At the site of your regular sitting, spread out thick matting and place a cushion above it… Once you have adjusted your posture, take a deep breath, inhale and exhale, rock your body right and left and settle into a steady, immobile sitting position. Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen.
Create a space that is suitable for sitting, for striving, both inside and outside. Simple, practical instructions to do a simple practice—simple, though not easy. The Buddha must have known, after all those years of striving before Uruvela, that what he was trying to do wouldn’t be easy. And yet he said to himself, Let me strive a little more. Remembering the meditation he’d fallen into organically as a child, and the peace that it’d given him, he thought, Could this be the path? Let me try. Let me see what happens when I let go of everything I know and discover what I couldn’t possibly imagine.
Are you here for the dharma or are you here for yourself?
Every single person who sits down to do zazen, this is what they’re doing: letting go of the known and trusting the unimagined. This is what each one of us has done, is doing now, whether we’re conscious of it or not. So trust, faith, is an important aspect of practice—it’s a central aspect, in fact, along with doubt and determination, as the three pillars of Zen are called: great doubt, great faith, and great determination.
Sometimes, those who’ve turned away from a theistic tradition come to Buddhism with relief. They say, Buddhism is not a religion. Well, I’m sorry to break this to you, but it is. Buddhism is the fourth or so largest religion in the world. But because it’s not theistic—it doesn’t posit the existence of a god—some people prefer to think of it as a philosophy, as a way of life. That’s fine. But if we define religion as a tradition possessing narratives and mythologies A body of teachings contained in sacred texts and carried out through rituals and practices in holy places, then Buddhism most certainly fits the bill.
My own definition of a religion—admittedly an idiosyncratic one—is that it must show us how to live, how to live well. And Buddhism certainly does that. But regardless of what we want to call it, this practice does require a certain level of faith. Because we can only see as far as we can see, and when we begin to practice, what we see is quite limited. So we have to trust what we don’t yet see. We have to trust that because others have walked the same path, we can too. That waking up to who I am, to reality, is doable, accessible, to me in this life—at least, that’s what Zen would say, since we don’t concern ourselves too much with future lives. It’s always this life, this moment, this person now.
I think of it as having faith in myself, faith in the dharma, and faith in my capacity to practice it. And sometimes one of these is lacking, so it’s helpful to have help, to have guidance, to have someone cheering you on and saying, No no, don’t stop! You can do this. You can definitely do this, because millions of people before you have.
Clarifying the Teacher-Student Relationship
Periodically I bring up the teacher-student relationship in Zen, and I speak of its importance and its uniqueness among religious traditions. There are slight differences in how this relationship is seen and carried out among the schools or the lineages of Buddhism, but here I’ll focus on Zen because it’s the tradition I was brought up in, of course.
Over the years I’ve wondered whether there are other relationships that resemble this teacher and student relationship in Zen, but I haven’t yet come up with a good parallel. Your teacher is not your parent, not your therapist, not a teacher in the usual sense (they’re not a professor or even a mentor in the strict sense). They’re not your friend or your peer—although on another level, they might very well be. And “guide” doesn’t quite fit the bill either because sometimes their guiding may not look like it at all, may not feel like it to you. At times in the relationship, it might not look like the teacher isn’t helping you, On the contrary, it’s like they’re hindering you—like they’re in the way, purposely obstructing you, your development, your growth. Or like they’re not there at all, like maybe they don’t care.
Sometimes it’s not easy to remember that the teacher’s sole imperative is your liberation. That that is their vow. But we get caught, we get caught in our stories, and we forget. Something happens and we think, The teacher doesn’t like me, the teacher doesn’t understand me, or doesn’t trust me, or doesn’t see me. Maybe this is true, but I’ll speak for myself: there is nothing I want more—nothing I want more—than your freedom. There is nothing that I want less than to stand in your way. And every day, I strive to make choices in such a way that I’ll you along the path, although it might not look like it on the surface. So one thing that helps with this kind of faith is to be very clear about what we’re doing here. To know what this relationship is and is not, and why.
Do you remember the passage in the Vimalakirti Sutra of Shariputra and the chair? Vimalakirti was a householder, not a homeleaver, as monastics or ascetics were called. He was a lay practitioner said to be as enlightened as the Buddha. In the sutra that bears his name, there’s a section in which Shariputra, one of the Buddha’s main disciples, looks around at Vimalakirti’s tiny, empty house—there was no furniture except the bed where Vimalakirti was laying—and wonders where all the thousands of bodhisattvas and disciples who showed up to visit Vimalakirti in his sickness are going to sit. Vimalakirti reads Shariputra’s mind and says, “Reverend Shariputra, did you come here for the sake of the dharma? Or did you come here for the sake of a chair?” Why are you here, in other words? What’s your motivation? What is your goal?
When someone asks to be a formal student, this is what I encourage them to be clear about: what’s your motivation? What’s your goal Because if your goal is to jumpstart your practice, I can tell you right now, it won’t work, not in the long run. It won’t work to take jukai, the Buddhist precepts, for that reason either. It’s actually the other way around. By the time someone becomes a formal student, it’s because they’re already a student—of the dharma, of themselves, of life. They’re already on the path, and they want to make that commitment public.
When someone receives the precepts, it’s because they’ve been living their life in accord with Buddhism’s moral and ethical guidelines. Their life is already a life of service in some form, a life of striving to be kind and wise and compassionate. Their receiving a name and a rakusu, the Buddha’s robe, is an acknowledgment of the fact of that they’re already living their life in alignment with the buddhadharma. Do you understand? They’re already there; the ceremony just makes it known.
So when I say, let’s wait a little, what I’m saying is, help me see that you’re already doing what you say you want to do. It’s not a matter of counting off years or fulfilling certain requirements—that’s part of what I saw so clearly during my mini-sabbatical last month. All the hours of sitting I could do, the retreats I could finish, the requirements I fulfill are no match for my actual living of the dharma, day to day, very simply, very humbly, very ordinarily in my life. Because what happens when we do it the other way, is it doesn’t take. Someone becomes a student too soon, or takes jukai too soon, or becomes a shuso too soon, and it doesn’t take. It doesn’t last.
Of course, I can’t control—and wouldn’t want to control—what someone chooses to do with their life. Sometimes things change and what seemed important at one moment isn’t important at another. But again my vow, my priority, is your liberation. That’s what I’m most interested in. That’s what my striving as a teacher is for—the dharma for the sake of the dharma, to greatly paraphrase Vimalakirti. That’s what I want for you too. Anything else is a distraction within the path of practice, is a detour that maybe we can avoid, maybe not, bu tI’d like to try.
When Intention Is Revealed
Let me tell you a story. As I was finishing my training, my teacher told me he had the intention to transmit the dharma to me, to have me become a teacher. Earlier he’d made clear, to me and to the sangha, and not just with me but with teachers who’d come before me, that to become a dharma holder—as I was at the time—was not a guarantee of receiving transmission. It was a kind of trial period, and the result could go either way. So I was pleased when he told me I would become a teacher—too pleased. Because at one point I asked him when it was going to happen, since everyone was asking me, I said, and the moment the words left my mouth, something in him went hard. His face became a wall—someone who’d been unconditionally loving with me in all sorts of very difficult situations for years, all of a sudden was unreachable. He didn’t say a thing, and the transmission didn’t happen, not then, and I didn’t know if and when it would. And I was livid, I was hurt, I was so filled with my own… my own… ME, I was filled with ME. And it almost cost me my relationship with my teacher. I think if I hadn’t trusted him the way I did, I might have left, and what a loss that would’ve been. What a shame! Reverend Shariputra, are you here for a chair or are you here for the dharma? Are you here for the dharma or are you here for yourself?
It took me years and a lot of avoidable pain to understand—well, first to see, and then to accept, which was very, very painful—how full of myself I still was, despite all my hard and well-intentioned practice. All the ways in which I did what I did for the sake of many other things: power, admiration, love, attention—not just my own and others’ liberation. I was there for the sake of the chair.
Oh, but is there such a thing as a pure intention, someone might ask. Maybe not, but there is certainly such a thing as a clear intention. And what I want most for all of us is to be clear. Because of this clarity, good things happen. Let me end here. And because in a little while we’ll do oryoki, a ceremony that highlights our interdependence with all life, I’ll end with a poem by the magnificent Joy Harjo.
We teachers often quote poems because they, like koans, point directly to truths that although evident, we’re often too busy or too confused to see. But a koan, a poem just cuts through, making visible what was never invisible.
Perhaps the World Ends Here
by Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
This dharma talk on Faith in Zen was given by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, Zen Buddhist Guiding Teacher of Ocean Mind Sangha. Audio podcast and transcript available.