Gratitude as Resistance
Photo by Andreas Kretschmer
How can you protect your mind in a world that seems to fuel perennial dissatisfaction? Where media and advertising fabricate desires and promise to meet them, often to our detriment?
In this talk, Zuisei shares the choice and power of gratitude. Listen as she shows how gratitude can act as a radical tool for training the mind in connection, clarity, and compassion—the foundation for wholesome action.
This dharma talk, Gratitude as Resistance, was given by Zuisei Goddard. Scroll below for video, audio, and transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ from the final talk.
Gratitude as Resistance
Good evening, welcome to Ocean Mind Sangha, a small but mighty gathering of bodhisattvas who endeavor to be and stay awake, who work to be of benefit to the world. Right? At least, that’s the idea. Let me begin tonight with a few words from that magnificent writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her equally magnificent book, Braiding Sweetgrass.
The listeners reciprocate the gift of the speaker’s words with their attention, and by putting their minds into the place where gathered minds meet. You could be passive and just let the words and the time flow by, but each call asks for a response… You have to concentrate; you have to give yourself to the listening. It takes effort, especially in a time when we are accustomed to sound bites and immediate gratification.
What Kimmerer is speaking of applies anytime people meet to speak and to listen. We have to concentrate, we have to give ourselves to the listening, because only when we do this do we benefit from what is said. Here, Kimmerer is referring specifically to a ritual called the Thanksgiving Address, a call and response liturgy in which children of the Onondaga Nation begin each school day by thanking the Earth for her many gifts. They start by acknowledging, naming, and thanking the water, the fish, then going on to plants, to fruit, to herbs, to trees, to animals, to wind, and so forth, including all of creation, as well as the enlightened teachers who “have come to help us through the ages,” all the way to the closing words:
Everything we need to live a good life is here on Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks. Now our minds are one.
In the Onondaga language, this Thanksgiving Address is called, “Words That Come Before All Else.” Gratitude, in other words, is the highest priority. It’s what comes first, and it’s a sure way to remember at the start of each day that what we need, we already have. Kimmerer calls the practice and the view from which it stems an ethics of fullness, and it reminds me of that quote a student shared with me some time back: “Enough is a feast,” which apparently Chaucer used in his Canterbury Tales. So the understanding has been around for a long time—the understanding that it is good to turn toward what we have, and be grateful. That it is good to voice that gratitude, to hear ourselves go through all the many gifts we’ve received, because it’s so easy, so tempting, to focus on what we think we lack, isn’t it?
Someone said to me, why do we so easily turn to what is bad, to what is difficult? My answer was that it probably had to do with survival, originally. We needed to know the danger we faced, we needed to know what might go wrong in order to avoid it. I think over time, it’s become a habit. The more comfortable we make life, the less tolerant we are of discomfort of any kind. It can become almost a caricature, like a privileged person going to a lower income country on vacation and being upset when things don’t work. The air conditioning breaks because the power grid is overpowered by demand, the infrastructure can’t support it, but we think it should. That’s how things should work.
In an ideal world, sure. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have tyrants and despots. We would never have had slavery and we wouldn’t have human trafficking or torture. We wouldn’t have greed and hatred and ignorance, but that’s not the world we live in. The world we live in is troubled—there’s much in it that’s not working or not working well. But what happens when before all else we put words of gratitude? How might they help us face what’s difficult to face?
The practice of gratitude isn’t about optimism or positive thinking. It’s choosing firm ground to walk on. Remember that fifth of the five remembrances: My actions are my true belongings, my actions are the ground upon which I stand. By practicing gratitude we let those actions be supportive. We get off on the right foot, so to speak. Yes, there’s a lot that needs work, and look at how much is working already. Look at how much I have, we have, that is good and true. Let me start with that. The Thanksgiving Address follows a formula:
We give thanks to all of the waters of the world [or the fish of the sea, or the plants of the earth]. We are grateful that the waters are still here and meeting their responsibility to the rest of Creation.
Isn’t it interesting how this is phrased? Waters have a responsibility to the universe, and we’re grateful that they’re meeting it. Are we? Doesn’t seem like we are. Then we have the call:
Can we agree that water is important to our lives and bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to the Water? Now our minds are one.
Every time, we give thanks, we acknowledge that responsibility being met, we ask, can we agree of the importance of such and such, can we then send greetings and thanks, and finally, “Now our minds are one.” Our minds were always one, but with this expression of gratitude, we say, It is so. We let it be so.
The Antidote to Modern Craving
Lately I’ve been thinking of gratitude as a form of resistance. Resistance against our perennial dissatisfaction, which in Buddhism is called craving (tanha), and was identified by the Buddha as the root of all our suffering. We want what we don’t have. We have what we don’t want. What we do want and have, we can’t keep. Tanha is that endless desire. It’s endless because it’s not even about the thing, it’s about wanting itself. Wanting is its own engine, gratitude is an excellent brake.
Gratitude is also an excellent form of resistance in an economy that thrives on creating a need where there is none, and then promising to meet it. I was reading an article about these Orbs that a company called World has installed in cities around the world. It was, of course, founded in part by Sam Altman, who started OpenAI. These Orbs are essentially eye-scanning devices whose purpose is to verify that you’re human because apparently that’s something that we now need: to verify our humanity, particularly on the internet, which now has more bots than humans operating in it. The argument of the founders of World is that soon banks and other companies will require these verifications in order to do business with you. You’ll first have to prove you’re not a bot. They may well be right. There are also countries fighting the technology, citing all sorts of privacy issues.
The practice of gratitude isn’t about optimism or positive thinking.
It’s choosing firm ground to walk on.
The ethical questions that Buddhism will be facing in another 10 to 50 years, we probably can’t even imagine right now. Yet, some teachings will always be relevant. The Buddha said: “Reverence, humility, contentment, gratitude, and the timely hearing of the Dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha—this is the highest blessing.” On one hand, it might seem… disingenuous to speak of reverence and humility and contentment in a world that is so lacking in all of these, but the fact is, there are still people and communities who understand that without these qualities we’re little more than consumers, waiting for the next startup to tell us what we need. Without these qualities, we cannot take in the teaching of the Buddha, nor anything else that’s important. Reverence and gratitude and humility and contentment—a deep satisfaction with who we are and what we have—soften us. They ready us for the work that might be needed to protect, both our humanity and the planet we’re living on.
Engaged Buddhism: Speaking with Your Actions
Some years ago I spoke of Srdja (Seeryeah) Popovic, the Serbian man who wrote Blueprint for a Revolution after helping to topple Milosevic and went on to train thousands of peaceful activists all over the world. He says that the success of any resistance movement is humor, and a low bar for participation. Anyone has to feel that they can do something with little or no risk. He gives the example of miners in Santiago, Chile, who in the 1970s convinced taxis and buses to start driving at half speed down the street in protest of Pinochet’s rule. Everyone was afraid; he was torturing, executing, or disappearing anyone who opposed him. Driving slowly wasn’t illegal, so there was nothing the police could do. Once the people saw this, they took courage and they too started walking slowly on the sidewalks, until the city was barely moving.
In Poland people put their televisions on wheelbarrows and wheeled them through the city in protest of the fake news the government was dishing out. It was something they could do. Hundreds of people walking through the streets and chatting as they wheeled their televisions along. Simple, irreverent acts that nevertheless sent a clear message: You cannot control us, you can’t convince me that what you have to give me is more than what I already have. Group after group, after training with Popovic and his crew, eventually saw, Wait, they are the few, we are the many, there are things we can do.
What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn’t you dance it? Wouldn’t you act it out? Wouldn’t your every movement tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all.
This is also Robin Wall Kimmerer. Imagine having no voice to speak your knowledge. Well, then you speak it with your body, you speak it with your actions, with your very being. Zen is great training ground for this kind of expression. Liturgy shows us how to do this, sitting shows us how to do this, koans show us how to do this.
By the way, this fall our study for ango will be on koans. There are enough of you working on koans that I want to speak a bit more about what these are and how they work. One way to think about a koan is to see it as embodied experience. We think that because we know something intellectually we understand it, but intimate knowledge, direct knowledge, goes much deeper than that. It puts us in touch with the essence of a thing, not its description, not its label, its category, its genus, its species. What is treeness itself? What is catness or breathness—the very thing that makes a thing uniquely itself? That’s what Zen teaches us to see.
Resisting the Illusion of Disconnection
It’s been almost ten years now that I told the Ursula LeGuin story, “She Unnames Them.” It’s a very short story that appeared in The New Yorker in 1985. In it Eve, of Adam and Eve, decides to return all the names of the animals to silence, and in this way, free them into their isness, this essence I’m speaking of. She starts with the whales, dolphins, seals and sea otters, and they all take to their namelessness gracefully. Of course, probably all those names were weighing them down. Next she unnames the yaks, who at first put up a fight . Yak just sounds right to them, and they’ve been called that for as long as they can remember. The females convince the bulls that from a yak’s perspective, the name is redundant, so they too agree to do away with it.
Horses, cows, sheep, pigs, mules and goats all give up their names happily. The same is true for chickens and geese, turkeys and guinea hens. When she gets to pets, the problems start. The cats, of course, deny ever having had any names other than their self-given ones, and those no one knows but them. Dogs and parrots insist on keeping the names their owners gave them. Eve has to patiently explain that all they’re giving up is their common name. They can keep calling themselves Bootsie or Cisco if they want, but they’ll no longer be called dog or rabbit or crow. Eventually, with a bit of nudging, they too agree to give up their names.
Insects and fish let them go without pause, until finally, there’s no one left to unname, and Eve realizes that what she hoped for has come to pass: Scales, feathers, fur are all there, but somehow, they are no longer contours. They’re no longer lines that establish where one animal begins and another ends. So they all move through the air and sea, on land and under it, exactly as they were always meant to do: as one great, unified body. No one can tell any longer the hunter from the prey.
Then Eve thinks, Well, I can’t be the exception, so she goes to Adam, who’s busy doing something and doesn’t even look up.
Eve says, “You and your father gave me this, and it’s been very useful, but it just doesn’t fit lately, so I’m giving it back. Oh, and I’m going, dear. Take good care. I hope the key to the garden turns up.”
She walks away without Adam much noticing, her words slow and tentative as the steps she took “going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.”
Before he died, my grandfather lost his nouns, and so his words became just as tentative. He couldn’t say plane, so he’d say that box in the sky. His descriptions weren’t as poetic as LeGuin’s, but they worked, and I wondered what was happening in his mind as these categories disappeared. I hope that things got closer, so close that they became one, as they’ve always been. Even if they didn’t, I hope he was grateful for what he had. I hope that he could see how much he had and how much he gave during his life, and that he trusted this would continue once he was gone.
This is my wish for each of us, that we let gratitude be the thread stitching together our days. That we be always able to see the gift, and appreciate it. That we let gratitude be an antidote to despair or impatience or anger or dissatisfaction or helplessness, that we start our days, and end them, with thanks giving.
We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we have named, it is not our intention to leave anything out. If something was forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their own way.
And now our minds are one.¹
- Excerpt from the Onondaga Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address (Words Before All Else). This prayer comes from the Haudenosaunee people and is spoken by the six Haudenosaunee tribes, including the Onondaga Nation, in their respective languages.
Explore further
01 : The Practice of Gratitude with Zuisei Goddard
02 : Opening into Reality with Zuisei Goddard
03 : Human Action with Zuisei Goddard
Gratitude as Resistance, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Video, audio, and transcript available.