Great Doubt: The Three Essentials of Zen
Photo by Janay Peters
Great Doubt is one of the Three Essentials of Zen practice. But here, doubt is neither cynicism nor pessimism, but rather a deep commitment to the ongoing investigation of a human life.
In this dharma talk, Zuisei explores Great Doubt, as well as the ways in which the cultivation of this quality leads us to a deeper understanding of the way things are. Great Doubt asks the questions: What if I’m not who I think I am? What am I? Who am I? What is life for? What is its purpose? Why am I here? Facing these questions and finding answers that will give us true, long-lasting satisfaction is the purview of the spiritual life.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei’s notes and might differ slightly from the final talk.
“What if there is Nothing?” The poet Margaret Gibson asked herself as a child. Margaret Gibson gave an interview in which she described standing on her porch at night, looking up at the stars, and out of the blue came this question into her mind: “What if there is Nothing?” And she was stunned, she said, her mind stopped, and it was still and empty. But she couldn’t stay there long, because she was afraid.
“What if there is Nothing? Well, that’s ridiculous, because who’s the one asking that,” she reassured herself. There has to be something. And using words, she re-established presence, hers and that of everything.
But that liminal moment, that space in which briefly she truly didn’t know, is the space from which spiritual practice is born.
What if I’m not who I think I am? What am I? Who am I? What is life for? What is its purpose? Why am I here?
There is that koan that every student working on koans will encounter sooner or later, When the bell rings, why do you put on your robe? Why do you do anything? There’s also a line in the Faith Mind poem that says, “To return to the root is to find the meaning.” The root of what? The meaning of what? What is the root of the breath? Knowing its root, we know its meaning, which is to say, we know its nature, its purpose, and its effect.
In my last talk I spoke of great faith. Dorothy Day said we must come to faith through the senses, through offering incense and lighting candles and singing or chanting words. It’s interesting. She didn’t say we come to it through aspiration, through belief in God or in a higher purpose. She said we come to it through things and through the senses that perceive those things. That’s the entry point. But if we’re paying attention, we’ll also see that there is more. There is something that the senses intimate but cannot quite express, cannot quite reach, and so we have to go beyond them.
Gina Sharpe story about Lyndon Johnson and Bill Moyers, who at the time was his press secretary. And one day, Johnson asked Moyers to offer a prayer before the meal. Moyers started and after a while Johnson said, “We can’t hear you, Bill. Speak up!” And Moyers answered, “Excuse me Mr. President, but I wasn’t addressing you.”
During Daido Roshi’s funeral, one of the dedications said, “In offering flowers, candlelight and incense, we dedicate their merits with deepest gratitude to Muge Daido Daiosho. May his vows be fully realized…” He’s dead, so how are his vows realized? Who is the liturgist speaking to when they’re chanting these words?
In our dedication for the Sho Sai Myo Kichijo Dharani, each morning we say:
The absolute light luminous throughout the whole universe,
Unfathomable excellence pervading everywhere;
Whenever this devoted invocation is sent forth,
It is perceived and subtly answered.
Again, who perceives our invocation? Who answers it? And what is that luminous light? What is its source, its root? What is it for?
So, first I spoke of great faith, and now I want to speak of great doubt.
I’ve often wondered why, when the Three Essentials of Zen are listed, Great Doubt doesn’t appear first: Great Doubt, Great Faith, and Great Determination. To me that order makes sense, since doubt is what gets the wheel rolling. But maybe it is because we are starting with that original perfection, with the trust that we already have and are what we’re seeking. And great doubt just gets us going on the path to realize it. It is that moment in which we look at our lives, we look at ourselves or we look at the world, and we think, “There has to be another way.” I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to find it. Maybe we pick up a book or we go online and type “Zen monastery”. We listen to a talk and ask ourselves, “Does this person know what’s going on? Can they help me?”
When speaking of faith I said how Daido Roshi really made me feel that I could do this practice, even when I doubted myself. But this wasn’t some kind of special treatment he gave me. He was like this with everyone who came sincerely looking for a path, who wanted to understand what this thing we call life is.
He was also, when necessary, very, very good at creating doubt. When I was the shuso he kept me on the same koan for the entire three months of training and I kept giving him answers and he kept saying, “No, no, no.” And first I would think, “But I’m sure I’ve seen it.” Then I started doubting myself, “Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I don’t have a clue. Maybe I haven’t had a clue, I haven’t really been practicing all these years. Or I have been practicing, but it’s done nothing for me,” which was an extremely depressing thought. I was very depressed by the end of that period, and kind of desperate.
And just before sesshin, when I had to start working on the koan I would present in my first talk, he passed me. He passed me with an answer I had already given and had repeated in desperation at least a couple of times. “But, but…. I said that months ago!” I said. “Oh, did you?” he said, very innocently, and he rang me out. I was furious, until I saw what he was doing. “Don’t think you know,” he was telling me, in the midst of this important rite of passage, don’t get cocky, because there’s worlds you haven’t seen. And it was exactly the right medicine for me at the time. I didn’t like it. I hated it in fact, but even then I could appreciate that it was what I needed. It’s what I needed, with someone else he’d be extremely supportive and affirming.
The thing was, he was not afraid of my discomfort, of my not knowing. I was uncomfortable, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t afraid to leave me in a state of tension and let me figure it out. It’s a state so uncomfortable, that you’ll do anything to find release. But the insight that you may glean from it depends entirely on how that release happens. Avoidance is a kind of release, but it’s not resolution, and it almost never leads to insight.
The comedian Hannah Gadbsy says that a joke is composed of two things: tension and release. She has a show that has gotten a lot of attention recently. A very unusual comedy show. And in it, she builds this tension masterfully. Like all performers, she’s using this medium to tell a particular story—her story. But as she gets deeper into her routine it becomes more and more uncomfortable, more pointed, more raw. She’s telling what it was like for her to grow up as a lesbian in Tasmania where homosexuality was a crime until 1997), and what it’s like to grow up as a woman in a world made by and for men. And just when you think you can’t take the tension anymore, she throws out a joke and you laugh and you breathe again. Until she reaches a point where she doesn’t do that anymore, there’s no more relief. And she says, “This tension?—it’s yours, I won’t help you with it.” No one can help you with it. And if they do, that’s not real help.
We have to be willing to hold that tension ourselves, that’s the only way through it. We have to be willing to truly not know, and at the same time we have to want to know, badly. We have to really want to know. We have to really want to understand ourselves and our world. And we can’t do that if every time things get uncomfortable with what we can’t yet see we distract ourselves, or act out, or conk out. We need all our energy to hold that tension until it breaks and reveals something we could not see before.
Of course, that’s uncomfortable. Of course we all have moments when we think, “I don’t want to deal with this.” Whether the “this” is “this this” or the world “this” I don’t want to deal with this. But staying here is like being in an elevator stuck between floors. There’s no life there. So we need to find something we do want to deal with. We need to find something to start with. Something to get the gears going again.
There’s a story about an ascetic called Dighanakha whose nephew became a disciple of the Buddha. And Dighanakha wanted to know what this teacher—who at the time was largely unknown—had to teach. So he went to him and said, “What is your teaching? What are your doctrines? Because for my own part, I don’t like teachings and doctrines, I don’t subscribe to any of them.” And the Buddha says to him, “Oh, okay. So do you subscribe to your doctrine of no doctrines? Do you believe in your teaching of not-believing?” “Uh, uh…,” says Dighanakha, “Whether I believe or not believe is not important.” The Buddha says, “Once you’re caught in doctrines, you lose all your freedom.”
My teaching is not a doctrine or a philosophy, the Buddha said. It is not the result of discursive thought or mental conjecture… Mental conjecture and discursive thought about truth are like ants crawling around the rim of a bowl—they never get anywhere.
My teaching is not a philosophy. It is the result of direct experience. Which means you can confirm it through your own experience too. I teach that all things are impermanent and without a separate self. I teach that all things depend on all other things to arise, develop, and pass away… My goal is not to explain the universe, but to help guide others to have a direct experience of reality. Words cannot describe reality. Only direct experience allows us to see the true face of reality.
Dighanakha is impressed. He got what the Buddha meant, but then he asked him, “But what if someone does see your teaching as doctrine?” And the Buddha gives the famous analogies of the finger pointing at the moon and a person who uses a raft to cross to the other shore but does not then carry the raft around on their back.
The finger just points, it is not the moon itself (though, from another perspective, it is, in fact, the moon). The raft is for crossing over, not for carrying on our backs. And yet, this is exactly what we do, isn’t it? We carry around our beliefs and our biases—all our opinions about what the world is or should be, what we and others should be. And although this raft is heavy, and it’s uncomfortable, it is also comforting, it gives us a sense of presence, of solidity.
Still, the raft doesn’t address the very thing that brought us to practice. We have to address that ourselves, why am I doing this? What is it for?
How is it that people go around and pick up random things and carry them about?
Like the porter who heaves market baskets from stall to stall as they keep filling up,
and he lugs his burden and never asks, Sir, for whom is this feast?
How is it that one just stands here, like that shepherd,
so exposed to the energies of the universe,
so integral to the streaming events of space
that simply leaning against a tree in the landscape
gives him his destiny; he need do nothing more.
And yet he lacks in his restless gaze
the tranquil solace of the herd,
has nothing but world, world, each time he looks up,
world in each downward glance.
This is the second poem of Rilke’s “Spanish Trilogy.”
We can certainly pick up random things and lug them about without asking why. We can pick up our thoughts, our habits, our feelings and carry them from one place to the next without trying to understand what led to them or what they produce. But it’s not a very satisfying way to live, and it doesn’t create harmony.
Sharon Salzberg tells the story of a group enrolled in an 8-week meditation program. At the end, they were told to come to the lab for the follow-up. Except the follow-up was really happening in the waiting room of the lab, though the subjects didn’t know it. And in that waiting room, there were only a few chairs. And all of them except one was taken up by actors on their cell phones. Then a person came in on crutches, looking like they were in terrible pain. And the question the researchers were asking was: Who will give up their chair? The actors who were sitting weren’t going to do it. So the subject had to be the first to make a move and give up their chair.
It turns out, subjects who’d gone through the 8-week meditation course were more likely to get up than those who didn’t do meditation. So the conclusion was, meditation leads to compassion. But then Salzberg went further and she said, Did anyone wonder why there were so few chairs in the room to begin with?
She called this “systems” thinking. And she stressed that it doesn’t just happen because you sit down to meditate. That it’s a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. And kyodo williams, who was part of the interview, said, “It’s not a skill; it’s a necessity.” That’s the challenge.
The person on crutches will most likely ask that question at some point, “Why are there so few chairs?” because the lack of chairs affects them. Those already sitting comfortably—what do they have to do to make that leap? What do I have to do to care about immigrant children or black people being shot or the possible loss of choice of what women can’t or can’t do with their bodies, or marriage equality if these things don’t affect me directly?
“Answering that question,” kyodo says, “is the only thing that will lead to true change.” And really, the answer is in the same place where the question is arising from. The power of zazen lies in our ability to hold and answer that question. Then we get off the cushion and act.
But what about this man that Rilke says by simply leaning against a tree he is given his destiny? Because it is absolutely true, in one sense he doesn’t need to do anything else. He never fails to cover the ground upon which he stands. But what does that actually mean, practically speaking?
And what about his restless stare? He looks up, he sees world. He looks down he sees world, world inside, world outside. And it is overwhelming. So where is this purity, then? Where is this perfection that we speak of all the time? Why isn’t it manifesting? Is it manifesting?
Buddhism speaks of buddha nature, and some teachings refer to this buddha nature as “the working basis.” We can call it the “ground of being.” It is an essentially undeluded consciousness—that absolute light that pervades everywhere and the potential for buddhahood. It is the very nature of the mind itself.
In one of the sutras, the Buddha speaks of this essential consciousness. He says:
“This mind is luminous, but it is defiled by stains and taints that come from without. The mind itself is luminous and cleansed of stains and taints.”
This means that these stains and taints, our confusion and delusion, our prejudice, our hatred, our greed, anger and ignorance, are produced. We have to create them. They are not inherent to the mind. That means that at the basis of everything, there is a bright, clear light,
Not produced by causes, not changed by conditions,
It is not spoiled by confusion
Nor exalted by realization.
It does not know either confusion or liberation.
This is the power of letting our actions stand on the ground of our practice. This is acting, moving from stillness, moving from clarity. This is looking up and seeing world as me. This is knowing myself as integral to the streaming events of space.
Even if I shut myself in a room and never go out, that truth is still true, I am still integral to the streaming events of space. I am still shaping that very space
A rabbi would always tell his students, “Pray well and sincerely, placing the prayers on your hearts.” “But why on our hearts and not in them?” his students would ask. “You place them on your hearts, so that when your hearts break, the prayers can fall in,” said the rabbi.
This is what happens on the path—your heart breaks over and over, it’s the only way to let the light in, as someone once said. But the heart is an incredibly resilient organ. It is like Kuanyin’s head. It explodes and it coalesces again, a little stronger. And it shatters again, and it comes together. And because it’s so resilient, it can hold all of the movements of my mind and body. The times when I don’t want to deal or when I am overwhelmed. The times when I fall short, when what I say I want to do and what I do don’t match. The times when I just want to stay in my chair and not worry about anyone else. It can hold all of it. But because it’s my heart, and because it’s beating, but it won’t let you stay there.
And you know—that perfection? It is the ground upon which we stand.
Explore further
01 : A Conversation with Margaret Gibson
02 : Spanish Trilogy (II) by Rainer Maria Rilke
03: Metta Hour Podcast with Sharon Salzberg and Rev. angel Kyodo williams