Good Enough Faith
Photo by Marissa Daeger
Faith on this path is essential. In its many forms it sparks, sustains, and guides our practice, and yet it need not be perfect.
In this talk, Zuisei explores the practice of faith in four stages, delving also into the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and more.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
This is a talk about faith. About faith in things recognized but not yet seen. Faith in the dharma and in our capacity to practice it. Faith in our original rightness; our original perfection. I often say, “We have to want to be free more than we want to be right”? For this talk I’d like to say: “We have to want to be right more than we want to be flawed” or “broken.” We have to want to be within our right, which is wholeness, and to remind ourselves when we forget, that we’ve always been of one piece. We may feel broken or divided or not quite with it at times, but we’re always, always already whole.
And it’s not like any of us is setting out to feel broken. We don’t decide to think, There’s something wrong with me. But we believe it, now and then. Something happens in our lives and we think there’s something wrong. Or maybe we don’t think it but we feel it. Something just feels off inside. And if we’re really not in touch, we may think that what’s off is outside, is someone else’s fault. So when we don’t feel right, we lash out. This type of misunderstanding is what’s behind much of the violence we see in the world. Not knowing how to deal with the hurt we feel, we hurt someone else. I think so much hatred and harm comes from the unbearable softness of being. Being human requires such tenderness. But it’s unbearable at times, to be that soft, that vulnerable.
Fortunately, we have artists and teachers telling us, showing us, how to live. In this gorgeous poem I read by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower,” he’s essentially offering us instructions for living. Good art isn’t decoration or entertainment. Good art points the way to live a life or it rebels and says, No, not that way! Not this! Good art, like spiritual practice, shows us: first, that the way we’ve been living is a bit tight, a bit crammed, a bit… unhelpful when it comes to being happy and peaceful and fulfilled. Or it shows us that we’ve gone to sleep a bit, that things feel dull. But it’s not because things are dull, but because our seeing has become blurry. So, good art, like practice, sharpens our seeing, our living.
Second, it asks, How do we best live together? How do we create more space within and around one another? How do we live and let others live? And so here, Rilke says:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
He gets right into it. We have to be quiet; otherwise how will we see and hear what’s going on? We have to be quiet, but he’s not saying we have to be calm. That will come with time. And even this quiet we can think of, not in terms of silence, but of attention. Maybe our mind isn’t quiet, maybe we’re not feeling calm at all. Our partner breaks up with us, we lose our job, our best friend gets cancer, we get sick and don’t know what’s going on.
Recently I wrote about equanimity. And I said that equanimity isn’t flatlining. It’s not indifference, it’s not passivity, it’s not resignation. It certainly doesn’t mean not feeling sad or disappointed or scared or heartbroken. It means feeling what we feel but not getting tossed out of the boat, the boat of our awareness, our centeredness. That's why I invoke the image of strapping yourself to the mast so you can ride out the waves when you’re in the middle of an emotional storm. When life is hard, you strap yourself in and ride it out. A friend gave me that image many years ago. She was referring to the story of Ulysses (or Odysseus) coming back from the Trojan war. He had to cross the ocean, coming very close to the islands where a band of sirens lived. And they were known for luring sailors with their song, making their boats crash on the rocks, and making dinner out of them. Knowing this, Ulysses asks his sailors to tie him to the mast of their boat, and to plug their ears and to ignore his orders while in the vicinity of the islands.
Sure enough, as soon as they get close, he hears the song and starts begging his men to let him go so he can jump off the boat into the ocean. They ignore him, and because their ears are plugged, they’re not affected by the song and so they sail without incident. It begs the question why Ulysses didn’t plug up his ears as well but if he had, there would be no story and I wouldn’t have a nice metaphor.
So, being equanimous means you ride the wave but you don’t fall off the boat. And I think that what’s needed to do this—what’s needed to stand on deck and stare at the oncoming storm and not lose it. Or, lose it but then recover. What’s needed is faith. We need to have trust in our ability to outlast the storm.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers of the 20th century, said that in the cultivation of faith, we go through four stages: Clear faith, longing faith, confident faith, and irreversible faith.
Clear faith is when we see the wonderful qualities of the Buddha in a teacher or in someone we admire. In a text called The Questions of King Milinda, a monk called Nagasena says to the king: A group of people are gathered on the edge of an overflowing stream. They want to go to the other side, but they’re afraid. So they stand there, looking at the stream and at each other without moving. Then one of them comes along, assesses the situation, takes a running leap and jumps to the other shore. Seeing this, the others say, “Oh, it can be done,” and they also jump. This shore is samsara; the other shore is nirvana. “Oh, it can be done,” then we go about doing it. This is faith by proxy.
Then there’s longing faith. We see wisdom and compassion, we see clarity and kindness in another, and then we want to have those qualities ourselves. I've told the story of when I first realized that I wanted Daido Roshi to be my teacher, watching him be just how he was, completely unselfconscious. He was just ambling about, his pants halfway down his butt, and I thought, I want that. I want that kind of unselfconsciousness. I recognized something in him—he was so at ease with himself—and I thought I want what he has. This is faith by aspiration.
Then there’s confident faith. We begin to develop the confidence that we’re able to live from these good qualities. Dogen said if we weren’t a person of suchness, we couldn’t realize a person of suchness. We cannot become what we’re not. No matter how much I try, how hard I work, I won’t become a panther in this lifetime. I’m not going to turn into an oak or a stream or an astrophysicist or a concert pianist, for that matter—not this time around. But I can be Zuisei, Vanessa, fully. I can completely become myself. How? By slowly seeing and working through what gets in the way. By slowly seeing and working through what affirms Zuisei, what gives Zuisei life.
Confident faith is knowing that wisdom is within our reach. It’s knowing that we can practice the dharma, and we can realize the dharma, and we can live the dharma. And the more we practice, the more we know this, and the truer it is. This is faith that renews itself.
Finally there’s irreversible faith. No matter how long the path, no matter how difficult it looks, we know we’re going to travel it because we can’t imagine living any other way. It doesn’t mean we don’t have doubts. We might. But we don’t let them stop us. It’s just like being fearless. It’s not that we don’t feel fear, it’s that we’re not stopped by it. We are not stopped, we are not daunted, because we know, we know. This is faith that cannot be stopped.
But in the end, you only need one kind of faith: good enough faith. Faith good enough to get you going because if you keep going, keep practicing, the rest takes care of itself.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
How far do we have to travel to find ourselves? All the way, all the way to the end—and then we have to keep going. We have no way of knowing how long it’ll take us to travel. But we trust that the path is true, and we trust that in time, we’ll get to where we’re going. And, it’s not actually that our breathing makes more space. It’s that it shows us the space that was always there. When I ask, What is breath? What I’m really asking is how large are you? How much space do you occupy? And I don’t mean, explain that to me in words. I’m not asking metaphorically. I’m asking that you be breath completely, until there’s nothing else, and there, live what breath is.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
When darkness is what we see, what we feel, what we live, we have to draw on every bit of our practice to not just give in. This line reminds me of the Leonard Cohen song: “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Forget about your practice being perfect. Forget about you being perfect. That’s a given, that’s not something you have to work at. What you have to work at is remembering.
So, if you’re buried in darkness, let that darkness be a bell tower and you be the bell. Let that bell ring so loud, so large, that the battering becomes your strength. How? Let the light get in. There’s no darkness without it. Just like there’s no light without darkness. You can’t have one without the other, and when you can’t see past your own pain, remembering that can be a big help. A huge help. So, you have to be the bell, ringing in the darkness of your mind. You have to be the bell until there’s no you, no bell, no sound.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
(I kept thinking this was a Rumi line, it sounds exactly like something Rumi would say. But it isn't.)
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
Become the bell completely—be your pain, completely. But that’s why equanimity isn’t doing nothing. It’s the first sentence of the Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” balanced by Angela Davis’ rephrasing: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” Rilke isn’t telling us to just accept our pain. He’s saying, do something with it. Turn it into sound if you’re a bell ringing. Turn it into light. Turn it into something you can do something with. Do you understand? Accept, and then change. Move back and forth into the change.
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
On Monday there was an article in the New York Times about a pianist who died recently of cancer. And as he was dying, he spent time perfecting and then recording a particular piece: Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat. The piece centers around a funeral march, and there’s one passage where the notation says that the strings—the violin and the cello—should play triple forte (in other words, fortississimo; very, very loud). And then, when you can’t get any louder, the next instruction is to crescendo. But how? How do you do that? How do you go as far as you can go—and then keep going?
When Jimon, the head liturgist at the monastery, trained me to do the bell for the bows (it starts slow: ching, ching, ching, ching, and it gets faster and faster and louder and then it crescendoes, leading into the teacher’s and the sangha’s three bows), she said to me, “The run should have such energy that at the end, you can do nothing but bow.” I was really into that so I practiced and put everything I had into it. Then I caught the teachers smiling as they looked at me. I think my whole body was levitating as I played the inkin and I’m sure I was making a face.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
The uncontainable night is the place of not knowing. In the deep dark, we can’t see, which means we can’t plan, can’t measure, can’t compare. We can’t say, Oh it’s this and not this. This is what I will do, and this is how it’ll turn out. We can’t. We can only have faith. We can only trust, and step. At the crossroad of our senses, all there is, is mystery. And the meaning there is not definition. It’s reality. He’s saying, when you stop thinking, stop measuring, stop knowing, reality will show you the way. So trust, trust that you will know, because you already do.
That’s why Rilke ends:
And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow.
The world never ceases to hear you, but it could seem that way. So say to the silent earth, I flow. Be that flow. Tell the rushing water—which is none other than yourself—I am.
That’s it. That’s all you need.
Explore further
01 : Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower by Rainer Maria Rilke
02 : Great Faith: Three Essentials of Zen with Zuisei Goddard
03 : No Longer Accepting What I Can't Change by Zuisei Goddard on Substack