The Gift of Fearlessness
Photo by Daniel Eledut
The more we practice, the more open-hearted we become, and the more able we are to practice boundless generosity. Cultivating bodhicitta— the awakening heart—calls us to let go of our conditional giving and well-wishing, and invites us to practice extending our generosity without restraint.
In this talk, Zuisei speaks on what it means to give boundlessly and wakefully, and to give what the sutras consider the most significant gift: the gift of fearlessness.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
One early winter morning, a cold, still morning like this one, two 16-year-olds from rival gangs got into a fight. They had guns. One of the boys, in a fit of anger, used his, and killed the only son of a single mother whom a month later was forced to sit in court and face her child’s killer. She stood up as his sentence was being read—25 years in prison for 2nd-degree murder—and she looked this teenager in the eye and she said, “I am going to kill you.”
The young man was led from the room to a cell, where he began to serve his sentence. Ten years went by, and one day the young man was told he had a visitor. It was the dead boy’s mother. She began visiting the young man frequently. She brought him food and books, she asked him questions about himself, she told him about her son.
Little by little, this courageous woman worked her way toward forgiveness, and the two of them began speaking together about forgiveness and reconciliation within the prison system. Five more years went by, and the young man was released. He moved next door to the woman he had hurt so deeply, so unimaginably, all those years ago. She, in turn, checked on him every day—did he have food, clothes, a job… did he know how to dress for an interview, was he cleaning his place? Girlfriend?
One day, they were sitting at her kitchen table, and the woman said to him, “Remember what I said to you, that day you were sentenced?” At first the man looked at her and said nothing, he was afraid to say anything. Finally, he very quietly answered, “Yes. You said you were going to kill me.” And the woman again looked at him head on and said, “That young man who killed my son is now dead. You are no longer that person.”
At the end of our Dana Dinner: Perfection of Giving weekend, I want to speak about a particular kind of giving, a giving that is really transformation.
In his commentary to the Treatise on the Paramis or Paramitas, Acharya Dhammapala said there are three main kinds of gifts that we can give: We can give material things, fearlessness, and dharma.
When it comes to material things, a bodhisattva gives whatever is needed to whomever needs it. They give when they’re not asked and they give especially when they’re asked. They give sufficiently, and without expecting anything in return (they give, not for their own sake, but for the sake of giving). They don’t give things that are unsuitable for those who ask for them: drink to an alcoholic, for example, they give only what is suitable and skillful. And of what is suitable and skillful, they give just enough, never too much. But they give, because they can because this is what a bodhisattva does.
To launch a boat or build a bridge is an act of giving. If you study giving closely, you see that to accept a body and to give up the body are both giving. Making a living and producing things can be nothing other than giving. To leave flowers to the wind, to leave birds to the seasons, are also acts of giving… It is because of the merit of giving, that one’s own self comes into being
This is Master Dogen in The Bodhisattva’s Four Methods of Guidance.
Giving is the first of the perfections because it is the easiest to practice, it is the most accessible. The giving of an object, the giving of our time, our attention, our care. Giving is common to all beings. It’s something that ordinary people do. It’s something that wise people do.
It is giving for the sake of letting go of yourself and your attachments. It is the manifestation of compassion and skillful means.
The gift of dharma is the methodical instruction of the Buddha’s teachings for the sake of arousing and cultivating the mind of enlightenment in others.
I’ve talked about when my cat was alive, I read her Kalu Rinpoche because he said that offering the dharma to animals will cause an auspicious re-birth. She was almost completely deaf, though, so I’m not sure how much she got. But I figured, it certainly can’t hurt. A bodhisattva instructs, inspires, guides, lives the gift of dharma through the example of their own life.
Then there’s the gift of fearlessness. In the sutras it’s defined as the giving of protection. But I think of this story I told, of the woman’s willingness to stand unafraid in the presence of her son’s killer and to not only meet him, but to “kill” him, to kill the killer in him—by loving him, no less. By giving life to that in him which she recognized as true and good.
I think of Lincoln who, during the Civil War—the bloodiest war in American history—offered a kind word about Southerners, and a woman, listening to him, reacted with shock. “They are our enemies and they should be destroyed,” she said. And Lincoln answered, “Why madam…. do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
But, who are my enemies—the enemies on the field, the enemies in my mind? Who are they and how did they end up on the other side of the line? Where is the line? Who drew it?
Whether it’s another person I’m having trouble with, or whether I’m struggling with myself—my cravings, my unfulfilled desire, the less savory aspects of my personality, my contradictions—do I relate to them as enemies, or do I relate to them as friends? And are those the only two ways to relate to them?
There are, according to a particular personality test, four kinds of personalities: the upholder, the questioner, the rebel, and the obliger. I seem to be an upholder, someone who readily accepts both internal and external expectations. (we follow rules, essentially.) When we do rebel, we do it so quietly that no one knows it’s happening—not even us.
I was a little depressed about being labeled an upholder, so I went online to find out more. One example I found said that an upholder stops at a stop sign at 3:00 a.m. in a small deserted town. Aha! Vindication! During the winter, when I’m driving over here at 3:45 a.m. I don’t stop at the stop sign before the bridge, I roll right through it, so there!
Of course, it’s never that clear-cut. I’m an upholder or a rebel, you’re either my enemy or my friend. In our minds we often want to make it clear-cut because it makes us feel safe, (an upholder created these four categories), but reality is much more fluid, much more uncertain, and therefore can be frightening.
A couple of weeks ago, Shugen Roshi referred to all the allegations of sexual abuse and harassment that have been in the news and he asked the question—several times—what are men afraid of? What is this often irrational and disproportionate violence towards women about? As if in response, writers, journalists, comedians—women and men—have been quoting Margaret Atwood, who in 1983 asked a male friend of hers: “Why do men feel threatened by women?” “They're afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then she asked a group of women students in a poetry seminar she was teaching, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed.”
As a man, as a woman, you may or may not agree with these two views. But I do think that fundamentally, there is something that we’re afraid of. And afraid, we avoid, we go numb, we defend ourselves or lash out. Most of us, at one point or another, are afraid of loneliness. We’re afraid of thoughts and feelings and actions that often contradict one another, and we’re not even sure why. We’re afraid to get close, we’re afraid of feeling apart and we will do almost anything to not feel that fear. That’s why I think it’s so important to develop our spiritual, psychological, emotional resilience. To be able to take in very difficult truths about the ways we relate to ourselves and to one another.
In the Beyond Fear of Differences work we’re doing with the residents, we watched two films which attempt to show how our very strong conditioning affects us . I’ve spoken about this before, the fact that as women, as men, we’re told who to be and how to act by our culture, our peers, our parents, the media. And I think I’m not alone in saying that after watching them I feel a bit like I’ve been put through a blender. It was very difficult to watch these films, it was very painful. It is hard to recognize and accept that we are swimming in a sea of conditioning that is as old as humanity. The currents are so powerful that sometimes it feels like effecting any kind of real change would be like reversing the tide.
It’s easy to get defensive (“I’m not that way”), or to go numb (I can’t take this). The problem is, we can’t get out of this sea, we’re in it, all of us.
It’s been interesting how, as work supervisor, I have to interact with all these guys, who are usually older, and they’re guys guys. And here I am, asking questions, and sometimes needing to tell them what to do—nicely—and they’re very nice back, but most of them call me “Honey” and they talk to me accordingly, a little more slowly, a little more patiently, explaining the same thing over and over again. I doubt they ever called Gokan “Honey.” Just as it wouldn’t occur to me to call them “Daddy.” I would never do that.
Ta-nehisi Coates said that words have meaning derived by context, “My wife calls me Honey—a passing woman on the street doesn’t call me honey. I have an intimate relationship with my wife, we hope I don’t have an intimate relationship with this other woman.”
I know the repair guys don’t mean anything by it. I sense, from their manner, they don’t want to harm me, but the moment they call me Honey, a power deferential is established. “I’m over here, you’re over there, and this is how we’ll relate to each other.”
Words have power, thoughts have power, actions have power. What we think and say and do matters, our lives matter. We need to be willing to examine what we think we know or we will keep repeating the same patterns over and over again.
This is another poem by Joy Harjo in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
This Morning I Pray for My Enemies
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
Harjo is a Muscogee (Creek) Nation poet, musician, performer who writes passionately about what it means to be a human being with the courage to name and touch painful things. Here she says “an enemy must be worthy of engagement.” This is crucial. Better an enemy, who then risks the danger, is bare to the possibility, of becoming a friend, than a non-entity. In other words, that which we can’t see, don’t know, can’t touch, we have no relationship with, we cannot transform.
And this line: The door to the mind should only open from the heart… Actually, since mind and heart are one, they open together, it’s in our misunderstanding that we separate them, it’s in our fear that we isolate them.
I was reading a talk on bodhicitta by Khandro Rinpoche and in it she was saying that although a simple translation of the term may be “awakened heart,” or “awakened mind of enlightenment,” another translation is “courage.” She says that by cultivating a basis of courage in our own state of mind, we are able to let go of those things that obstruct our potential to be helpful, loving, and kind to others, first of all, and then we’re able to bring about the causes and conditions of happiness in others’ lives. So this is not abstract.
If we’re vowing to wake up while we’re here and then going home and getting drunk or watching porn, something’s happening—or perhaps not happening. Something is obstructing our potential for wakefulness. I’m not talking about being a saint. I’m talking about living in harmony with yourself, your aspiration. I’m talking about aligning body, mind, and heart. I’m talking about working—harder than we think we’ve ever hard to work—to identify and be free of those things which obstruct that awakened heart.
Khandro Rinpoche says, if you want to find out if you are working with bodhicitta, ask yourself, “As a human being, is my life increasingly directed towards building up the causes and conditions that create an environment of happiness for myself and those around me?”
My way of asking this question is, “Will what I am about to say or do alleviate suffering, or will it compound it? More simply said, “Am I helping you, or am I hurting you?” “Am I respecting you, or am I demeaning you in some way?” “Am I seeing you as a person, or as property—even in some small, subtle way?” “Am I feeding my sense of entitlement, which, in this culture, is touted as our birthright?”
There are four ways to generate bodhicitta. The first is to let it arise naturally from the power of our reflection, thoughtfulness. It is sensing that natural arising of bodhicitta in our minds and not being afraid to turn toward it. It’s what brought you here—that impulse to look, to search, to awaken.
The second is by living a life of virtue, a life of basic respect and decency. It’s by cultivating, practicing, increasing our selflessness. The third comes from the strength of our zazen. Through stopping and seeing, we realize that what we think and do and say does have an effect on those around us, that it creates karma. The fourth is to draw inspiration from the life of a teacher whose vow is to cultivate bodhicitta.
Having generated bodhicitta, then you cultivate it through the Four Immeasurables: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. And to these you add effort and determination. So when the thought comes, “I am overwhelmed.” I am hurt, I want to shut down, I don’t want to deal with this, we have something to turn to.
May I be filled with happiness and know the root of happiness.
May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering.
May all beings never be separated from boundless joy, which is the root of suffering..
May they live in perfect equanimity, which knows no desire or aversion.
And Khandro Rinpoche says, this is possible, it is completely realistic, but we have to do it, it can’t be abstract. I wish that you be filled with happiness, and then I use you. I hope you’re free of suffering, but only if it doesn’t put me out.
She says, “I often tease our Buddhist friends that it’s very nice to like the idea of cultivating bodhichitta and loving kindness. You all like the idea of breathing out kindness and light, and breathing in the suffering of sentient beings in the form of black light. But I would love to see the day when the spread of loving kindness is not restricted to the breath. If I were on the receiving end, I’d like to get something other than hot air.”
It’s not enough to say to the Guardian Council that we want to wake up, that we want to serve others, that we want to free our minds. We have to be awake • and when we’re not, when we can’t, it’s good to turn to one another and say, “I’m having trouble, will you help me?” That’s what we’re here to do as a sangha, that’s our commitment, to help each other wake up.
Bodhicitta is the root from which these four branches grow and spread. Without a strong aspiration to be free of our attachments, to let go of our self-serving views, our good intentions won’t last. So we work at the ultimate level to see impermanence, selflessness, unsatisfactoriness—the three seals of existence. We work to clarify and strengthen that understanding, because that is where true transformation comes from. And at the same time, we work at the relative level to clarify our thoughts, speech and actions, because, ultimately, our actions are our inheritance, they’re the ground upon which we stand.
Master Dogen said, “Mind is beyond measure. Things given are beyond measure. And yet, in giving, mind transforms the gift and the gift transforms mind.” Maybe the silver lining of everything that we’re seeing in our country and the world is that now things aren’t hidden, which means we can do something about them. It doesn’t feel good to shine a light on our delusion but it feels even worse to try to cover it up (and ultimately, it can’t be done).
We need more than ever, fearless women and men to do this work of waking up. Neither side can do it alone, neither side is a side. If we can realize that, to start, we’ll be well on our way.
The Gift of Fearlessness, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
Explore further
01 The Bodhisattva’s Four Methods of Guidance by Master Dogen
02 : The Four Reminders by Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche
03 : Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Jo Harjo