The Fourth Bodhisattva Vow, Part 2
Image by Dogo Nunes
This talk is part two of two exploring the Fourth Bodhisattva Vow: The Buddha Way is unattainable; I vow to attain it.
In this talk, Zuisei elaborates on the importance of letting go of our desire for a future state or an outside thing, and to instead come into our direct experience—to open to what is right here. She says, “Instead of putting our effort on attaining, we focus on practicing. Instead of having living in our out of fear of what might be, we focus on living.”
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is lightly edited for clarity.
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
This is What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte
The Last talk I gave on Fourth Bodhisattva Vow I spoke of belonging, of a feeling of rightness, feeling a part of, an intrinsic part, of this world and how this relates to the unattainability of the Buddha Way. I wanted to continue that theme, because we're a people so focused on attainment, on getting rather than being. It is what we base our self-worth in, whether that attainment is of power, money, fame, love, adulation having things, in our world, means we've made it, we're successful.
And that doesn't change just because we enter into spiritual practice. All of us, all of us get caught up in all the things you can attain: robe in all its varied colors and associated meanings, rakusu, titles, imagined perks. The more we attain, the more spiritual we become, right? More enlightened, the more protected from our suffering.
It's such a disappointment when we find out that spiritual practice doesn't conform to our usual framework. We want it to, and we really try to make it be like everything else in our lives even though we know that it can't be the same, otherwise we'd already be free. Maybe practice doesn't really work, maybe this enlightenment thing is just a hoax or worse, what if it works, but not for me, what then? Where does that leave me?
Whyte says:
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Can we hear this? That we are not troubled guests? Can we hear that we're not accidents, but heirs to our humanity and its infinite potential? Can we not only hear it but trust it? Trust that we are threads of the fabric of the universe?
Diana Nyad swam 110 mi. from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, her fifth attempt, with a jellyfish-proof mask on her face. It took her 54 hours, she was 64. Of her age, she said, “I feel that right now I'm in the prime of my life.” And all the women in the audience cheered. She doesn't know that if you live awake, every day you're at the prime of your life.
There are those who are unwilling to stand on the sidelines of their lives, they are willing to fail and fail and fail because, for them, there is no arriving without many, many missteps, stumbles. For them, there is no failing, there is just living, there is just doing what they have to do, what they must do.
If you ever doubt yourself and think, I can't do this: practice, your life, your relationship, remember: there is another world in this world, and it holds our inheritance, yours and mine, it holds each of our lives, whole and undivided, if only we can see it.
Whyte refers to that moment between sleep and waking, a moment of tremendous possibility, the moment before we start making plans, which inevitably narrows that infinite potential into one or two avenues. Notice that moment, he's saying the moment when the frighteningly honest world and everything else began.
The thing is, that world and that honesty is only frightening from the threshold, it’s only frightening when we stand outside looking in through the door and it's dark and we can't see clearly and what we can see we don't know what it is. From within, that world is neither frightening nor honest nor dishonest or anything. It is not even a world, and yet….
And yet, there is a small opening. It's actually an enormous fissure, a gully, a valley but from the outside, it appears as just a crack, enough to squeeze yourself through and find, as you do so, that there was no wall, no barrier, but that which you created in your mind. It’s not that we make things up, it’s that we see, partially, things as they are, and because we often don't like it, we create all these lines. We feel safe within boundaries, then we rail against themselves. We’re such interesting, contradictory, suffering beings.
A student who said she realized how she created her suffering: “My husband was supposed to pick me up, it was late, snowing, I was in a funk, so I stood in a puddle.” If I'm going to suffer, let me do it right!
A brahman once asked the Buddha, “Will all the world reach awakening, or half the world, or a third?” (Just tell it to me straight: how many people will become enlightened?) But the Buddha didn't answer. Ananda, concerned that the brahman might misinterpret the Buddha's silence, took the man aside and gave him an analogy:
Imagine a fortress with a single gate. A wise gatekeeper would walk around the fortress and not see an opening in the wall big enough for even a cat to slip through. Because this gatekeeper is wise, he or she would realize that they couldn't determine how many people would come into the fortress, but it did tell them that whoever came into the fortress would have to come in through the gate.
Someone asked me the other day, Mu, the first koan, is not really necessary, is it? He meant, I don't need Mu to see the absolute, do I? To realize myself? He was feeling a little impatient, he thought he'd seen it, anyway. Well, the Buddha never worked on Mu, so is it necessary to realize yourself? No, yet thousands, if not millions of men and women have used it over the last 1,500 years or so, as a gate, as a gate into the world where everything began, as a gate into the night greater than the one from which we've just emerged. Why have they used it? Because it works, because it's skillful as a gate.
“So you might, you might,” I said, “consider it as a skillful means, which it is, as a way to squeeze yourself through the gate so you can see that you were actually walking on an open field. There was no fence and no gate but don't be too quick to dismiss it. If it was good enough for the great master Zhaozhou,” I said, “surely, my very young friend, it can be good enough for you.”
So, to enter, we must come through the gate, and the only way to do so is to put one foot in front of the other and if with every step we ask ourselves: how far, how far, how far? The destination, ironically, moves farther and farther away. It doesn't, actually, but it seems to, because all of our energy is on arriving, rather than traveling, like sitting for half an hour waiting for the period to end, feels like four hours, doesn't it? Sit, on the other hand, completely immersed in your breath, and time disappears, goes by like that.
Instead of putting our effort on attaining, we focus on practicing. Instead of having lived, or worse, not living, out of fear, we focus on living.
I read this story the other day:
A woman goes to a new doctor and is getting a check-up, she's sixty, and after examining her, the doctor says, “You're doing very well for your age.” But this doesn't comfort her, so she asks, “Will I live until I'm 80?” “Well, do you smoke?” the doctor says. “No.” “Drink beer, wine or hard liquor?” “Oh no, and I don't do drugs either.” “Do you spend long hours in the sun playing golf, sailing, or swimming? Do you do any kind of heavy exercise like lifting, running long distances? Do you operate heavy machinery, for example, to do landscaping or solo flights? Do you gamble, drive fast cars or have lots of sex? Do you travel to far-flung or exotic places?” “Oh, no.” “Then why do you give a shit how long you live?”
The Buddha Way is unattainable, I vow to attain it, says the Fourth Bodhisattva Vow. I can't attain the way, yet every day I vow to do it, every day I take another step, not knowing whether the ground will be there to meet me, but trusting, trusting, that I will be held, trusting that as I walk, the ground will meet me.
Antonio Machado's poem, Juan Manuel Serrat sings it as a song:
Wayfarer there's no Way, (no path),
you make your way by walking.
Wayfarer, the only way
is your footprints and no other.
Wayfarer, there is no way.
Make your way by going farther.
By going farther, make your way
Till looking back at where you wandered,
You look back on that path you may
Not set foot on from no onward.
Wayfarer, there is no way;
Only trails of wake on water.
What is it like to live without fear? A possibility for all human beings? What is it like to not be afraid to live and not be afraid to die?
Teilhard de Chardin said, “Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.” I think this is exactly right. It’s a good way to describe the experience of gradually stepping more and more into your life, experience of waking up, which you can't do just once, you can't do just once.
It's because the Buddha Way is unattainable that we can gradually see the world being entirely lit up from within. It’s because the path has no end.
The world has always been lit up, it's us that see it gradually. Some, a precious few, then spend the rest of their lives telling others what they have seen: “making themselves visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.”
If we could each understand and accept, really accept, that this path takes as long as it takes, and that for each one of us it's different, we wouldn't chafe with impatience. We wouldn't plan our spiritual journey as if it were a career.
In a month I will have mastered my breath, in a year, at most, I will have moved on and seen through Mu, in ten years I will finish koan study or formal training then I will become a teacher and then everyone will respect and admire me and ask for my advice and “Oh, life will be so good!” And if you're not interested in that, you may just measure your progress against the progress of the people around you, your friends on the path.
My brother Derek went to bed when I woke up. Derek loved Madonna and Dolce and Gabbana. He photographed women wearing period dresses in red velvet rooms for Vogue magazine. He didn't care two hoots about Zen, but he tried to understand me. “She's ahead of me,” I told him one day after I found out my best friend had seen Mu. “I’ve worked so hard, and yet she's ahead of me.” And he just responded nnocently, “But I thought this wasn't about that”…
Oh, right, right.
You are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
You are not an accident amidst other accidents, none of you came here by accident, this morning or the first time you came. None of you found your way here by chance. We were each invited from another and greater night.
What is this greater night? The koans often refer to the traveler walking in the middle of the night. There's no moon, no stars, no light to see by. Diana Nyad swam in pitch blackness. “You’ve never seen black that black,” she said. Her team only knew where she was by the sound of her strokes. This is necessary, this darkness, it's the only way to get to the light. You have to immerse yourself in this ocean so deeply that you don't know what is up or down, where your body begins or where it ends, what is water, and what is earth. Do you understand?
Do you understand why zazen must be solitary? We sit together in this room and we face in the same direction, but each one of us must sit on our seat alone. Each one of us must attend the greater night, must experience, for ourselves, its greatness. And you know what? We can. We can.
Despite the doubts, despite false starts and the missteps, each and every one of us is able to walk through the gate, and whether it takes you 20 years or three months, that's irrelevant. I wish someone had told me this so many years ago, actually, I wouldn't have believed them.
But I'm telling you now, and you can believe me or not, it's okay, it’s still true, it is irrelevant how long it takes you to arrive, because when you do, you realize you've gotten nowhere, nowhere at all. You realize that you'd arrived the moment you opened your eyes in this world and even much earlier than that and still, you had to go through this journey. We all have to, and not just to travel, but to find our own particular path.
Rebecca Solnit: “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
The most important part of this quote is “leave the door open.” We close so many doors, so many doors out of fear of what we don't know. We decide we can't before we've even set off, we decide we won't because it's probably not worth it anyway. But Whyte says that What you can plan is too small for you to live. And he's right, thank God. Enlightenment is not what we imagined, because what we imagine is so small.
At a certain point, we have to abandon the plans. At a certain point we have to trust that the small opening into the new day is large enough for our dreams, all of them. And if you can't believe this yourself, it's good to have someone remind you.
My partner will periodically ask me, and at the most random moments, tell me, what do you dream of?It keeps me on my toes, it keeps me awake and it helps me to keep dreaming, and when I get there and see that that dream was too small, I make it larger or I dream another dream and in this way, I never run out of living.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be...
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What do you love? What do you love so much that it calls you, urgently? What will you regret not doing, if death was to come to you, as it comes to all of us? What do you dream of? Never be afraid to ask this question, dreams are all that our lives are made of, so what do you dream?
Explore further
02 : What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte
03: Never, Ever Give Up Ted Talk by Diana Nyad