Journey to Awakening
Photo by Danielle Barnes
In this talk Zuisei delves into what it is to experience the vast spaciousness of our ordinary, day-to-day lives. From engaging with our ancestors—whether mythical, spiritual, or flesh and blood—to reflecting on our present and ever-changing paths, how many ways are there to acknowledge the infinite stream of space and time in which we flow? How might this nurture our practice, our kindness, our clarity?
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hello everyone. It's so good to see you—to be here with you. I missed you. It was good to have time off, but I missed you. And, as always, a lot has happened in the last couple of weeks. There is, of course, the vaccine rollout and the spate of attacks on people of Asian descent, the Derrick Chauvin trial, killings in Michigan and Georgia—on and on and on. And, in the midst of it all, some of us deliberately taking time to turn inward, to create space, to feel what comes up as we go about our days, to look closely, to see carefully—and to do our best to work with what is in front of us, skillfully.
I was thinking—maybe every generation thinks this—that this is the most trying time. Every generation is trying in its own way. So, we have to have tools to navigate the difficulty and also have ways to appreciate the beauty, the magnificence of life. The post that I did last week really was that – still finding, in the midst of such turmoil, beauty and the fact that we, as human beings, relentlessly turn towards it, this beauty. I think that is a big part of why we're still here, really.
I was also thinking of Shantideva in The Way of the Bodhisattva, and how he devotes the first chapter to gratitude and reverence. What would this world be like if we each could start our day that way, in that spirit of gratitude, of reverence, of love and appreciation? If policemen turned to their wives, their partners, each morning and expressed their love and appreciation for them, for their children, for their own lives, instead of being trapped in these cycles of fear and protection. Because there's another kind of protection and that is what we're developing here, together.
I hadn't taken a real vacation in a couple of years, but I hadn't taken two consecutive weeks in more than 15 years. It was delicious to move at another rhythm that is not dictated by schedules and deadlines and tasks to do, money to make. Two weeks filled with life—ordinary, very ordinary, life. I spent quite a bit of time with people outside, much more than I do during a regular week. I went for long walks, went to the museum, applied for jobs, had minor surgery, you know, just life. You really feel yourself differently when there's space around you. I wasn't just going from one thing to the next, but I was really very consciously moving through space and time.
I've mentioned this before, but I’ve been sitting with and attending teachings by a couple of women teachers in the Insight Tradition. This is really one of the things that I continue to be struck by—the spaciousness and the warmth of their teaching, their groundedness. I hear them speak and I think to myself, They know what they're talking about because they've lived it. They're not speaking from what they know, but from where they live. They're rooted in land and in lineage.
I was part of a retreat where the teacher introduced herself with her pronouns and included the Indigenous name of the place where she lives. I’m in Brooklyn, and the Indigenous name for this land is the land of the Lenape. It’s the land of the Original People—that’s what their name means— who were pushed out by European colonizers in the 18th century. So, I'm sitting here in my small room, in my small apartment, in my small building in New York City. And I’m sitting in the middle of this historical stream on what was Native American land and acknowledging that fact. It reminds me that I'm part of that stream.
This reminds me of the week when I received Dharma Transmission. There is a week when you're in a room, quite literally, for most of the week, and you're just doing prostrations—over and over and over again to the lineage: the men, the women—historical and mythical—who have devoted their lives to the dharma, to being clear and to being free. I felt suffused by that lineage in a way I had felt before, but not like that. When you're doing hundreds of prostrations a day it's in your body, it's in your cells.
One of the teachers in this retreat I mentioned brought up the word, sati, that we use for mindfulness. You can translate it as “calling to mind,” but she said it’s to re-member, to bring together these different members, these different parts—disparate parts. To recognize that we're all part of this one vast body.
In general, Western spiritual practice tends to be still quite individual in focus. We go on retreat to realize ourselves so we can do some good in the world. But we're never alone and no one ever realizes themselves alone, not even the Buddha, who was very much a part of a lineage of seekers. So, I try to re-member that when I'm speaking the dharma it’s not just me speaking. If I’m doing it half decently I’m bringing into this room, this digital room, all of the various strands, all of the various threads of the web of life: this Indian lineage, Asian lineage, Chinese, Japanese, then American, male and female, neither male nor female.
There is a kind of antiphon that we use in our liturgy: All Buddhas throughout space and time (or space-time as one of my friends says, given what we know)/All Bodhisattvas, Mahasattvas, (all the enlightenment beings, all of the great beings—Buddhist and non-Buddhist)/Maha Prajna Paramita, the great perfection of wisdom. When we chant that we are invoking all of these Buddhas, we are inviting them into the room, and it's really an invitation they don't need because they're here. They are always here—all those beings who have turned toward awakening, toward clarity and kindness and liberation. I’ve been making that a more deliberate part of my own liturgy each morning: to re-member, to bring together, and to acknowledge and offer reverence and gratitude for all of these many beings. I ask them for help and protection, and they respond. They've never yet failed to respond. Someone once said to me,”You have a guardian angel”. I said, “No, I have many.” I have many guardians who guide and protect me. They also kick me in the butt once in a while, but lovingly.
One of the things that I've been thinking about is the trajectory of practice. How the spiritual life is lived in a person. You could call it the journey to awakening, which of course, is never linear. In general, you can say we do kind of move through certain stages. You can think of the three vehicles of the Theravada, the Mahayana, and Vajrayana. It's a simplification to talk of it this way because you can really take each each of these and take the path to its fruition, to its end, and have it be complete. At the same time, there is something in each one that is highlighted that I think is helpful.
In the beginning, in the Theravada stage, it's really about renunciation. There’s so much emphasis, so much work that goes into renouncing. We've talked about this quite a bit together. In that moment where a disturbing emotion arises, there is the practice of just stopping and reminding yourself: I don't need to play this out.
Maybe we’ve come to practice because we're struggling in some way and we've heard that Zen or Buddhism is going to help us. It's going to give us a way to quiet down, to see more clearly, to work with difficult situations, difficult people, including This One (points to self.) So you receive instruction, “This is how you place your body, this is what you do with your mind.” You're told to count your breath, to follow your breath, to repeat a mudra. You're told you're going to practice concentration, the ability to hone in on one thing—the sharpening factor of mind. You're told you're going to cultivate mindfulness, the ability to see, to remember: the seeing factor. Then you're encouraged to let go of distracting thoughts, of disturbing emotions, so that your mind can be open and stable, that's equanimity, the balancing factor.
You take your seat, you quiet down, you turn to your breath, and all hell breaks loose. How is it that, that something so simple—following your breath—can be so incredibly hard? How come your mind is so noisy? Feelings so big? That incessant dialogue so loud? It can be discouraging in the beginning to realize how distracted we are most of the time, how divided our attention. If we want to gain clarity we have to work hard. So there's a lot of effort in the beginning. We have to be willing to set time aside to sit, to work at seeing a thought and letting it go and coming back. But also to discern: is this a thought I need to pick up or a thought I need to put down? We don't want to leapfrog over something that needs to be looked at. So, we have to move slowly, carefully. We have to give each thing it's due. We can't just jump over anger to forgiveness, over sadness to joy. And we don't have to, because when we do give each moment, each feeling, each thought its time and its place, we see that we can hold this, we can feel this. Then, we can ask ourselves, How do I work with this skillfully? We don't have to push it away.
Even to use the word renounce is tricky because it may sound as if we're saying “’Not this’ so I can turn to ‘this.’” I think it's really important to do that carefully, so that “not this” is not suppression. It's a process. We try, and we fail, and we falter, and we fall, and then the more we do it, the easier it gets. So, I think of this stage as really one of simplification. Just paring down.
Then you begin to integrate as you move into the Mahayana stage. You begin to integrate life and practice, samsara and nirvana. You start to realize—oh, It's not that one day I'm going to become this super being, and i'll never make mistakes again, and i'll never hurt myself or others again. I won't have blind spots because I will be free. There might be people who are like that who are fully enlightened. But I think most of us are going to continue to meet life in all of its complexity and in all of our complexity. Perhaps we’ll continue to struggle. But we just have so many more tools to do that with.
So, practice becomes a little more normal, a little more ordinary. It’s not a big deal that you're sitting half an hour, or an hour, or two hours, or five hours a day. It’s not a big deal that you're working with koans, or you're studying the precepts, or you're reading the sutras. It’s not a big deal that you wear a rakusu because you realize this is just a reminder: I said I want to live my life in this way. Am I doing it? Yes? How? No? Why not? What’s in the way? What do I need to do to clear the path? So, you see this is very ordinary. It’s very practical, and it's not very glamorous, actually, a lot of the time.
My father told me the following story. He's in Mexico, sitting at a restaurant with his wife and waiting for a friend. They're going to go to a wedding together. My dad's wife is with her friend and the two women are just talking—two Mexican women having a good time. My father is very quiet, so he's just being. He’s facing the ocean and just really enjoying being there. At one point he notices a sail in the distance and starts following it (he’s sailed his whole life himself). He’s watching it, and as it gets just a little bit closer, he can start to distinguish the color, the kind, and the size. He realizes it's a windsurfer. As they get a little bit closer, he sees they're actually very skilled. They really know how to navigate with the currents. So now, he's really paying attention. A few more minutes pass, the figure gets a little bit closer, and he realizes, oh! it's actually a woman. She gets closer, and he realizes not only is it a woman, she's wearing an evening dress… and she's wearing high heels. She is all made up, she is completely decked out. She's wearing evening wear, an evening dress. My dad is now quite interested in what is happening. She comes close, she comes onto the beach, just sails onto the sand, steps off in her high heels, and starts walking up the beach. Turns out, she’s the friend that they were waiting for [laughs]. At the end, my dad says, “You know, she was also a pretty good dancer.”
When he told me that story, I thought, Here's a female James Bond—the person I wanted to be my whole life. When I got to the dharma I didn't really change that much. I thought, I’m just going to cut off my delusions at the root, I'm going to save all beings, and not a hair out of place as I do it [laughs again]. I'm sorry to tell you, but it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.
In the Mahayana stage it's “just this.” 2,500 years of Buddhis history and teaching encapsulated in “just this”. Very plain, very simple. Not because you're making it so, but because that's really how it is. And there's still effort, but there's a lot less than in the beginning. Practice and life are becoming more integrated, so there is still practice. Tthere is formal practice. Sometimes people say I'm mindful throughout the day, and that's great. But it's not the same as really setting time aside, dedicated time, a cathedral-in-time, a temple-in-time, to cultivate that concentration, mindfulness, and equanimity, to look at your body, your feelings, your thoughts, your mind, to make space for yourself and others in your mind.
I wrote an article on the four immeasurables a couple years ago and that quote by Louis Masignon, “to make place for others in your mind” and he called this the science of compassion. You're not just putting yourself in another's shoes, but you're really bringing them into your mind, your being. So, in the beginning, practice is quite self-focused, as it needs to be. Now, however, you're beginning to be able to raise your head and realize there's a whole world out there. Maybe I'm doing a little bit better. Maybe I'm not suffering as much as I was in the beginning, but other people are. What can I do about this? And, this making space is both actually making space for others in your mind and making space for yourself.
I was doing this quite deliberately these past couple of weeks. I was sitting every morning and most evenings, but I was also just doing a lot of sitting on the couch just reflecting, not in any directed way, but just looking at myself, looking at my life, pondering. I have to admit I've never done that much. I never felt I had the time, or I never thought that was a good way to spend the time that I did have. Because there was always so much to do, so much to accomplish. But here I was trying to break up that constraint and to look at the whole picture in a relaxed way. So I wasn’t trying to analyze, to penetrate something, but to really just hold something in that space. So, this stage I feel it's a little more like deconstructing. It’s seeing what just is as it is.
Then you begin to see that “this” is also “that.” You enter the stage where you're really transmuting energy—the Vajrayana stage of practice—when you really do transform anger into compassion, ignorance into wisdom, greed into generosity, without leapfrogging, without avoiding. You don't have to avoid, you no longer have to renounce anger. You can see into it directly. You're free, not from it, but you're free within it. So this is a stage of indestructible liberation. You’re no longer depending so much on the props to remind you that you need to contain your anger. You’re seeing through it, so you're not bound by it.
But, be careful. This isn't James Bond-land either. Indestructible doesn't mean permanent because nothing is permanent. So, maybe in a single day I'm going to move through all three stages. If I need to refrain from my impatience, then I need to practice patience. Then I see through the nature of impatience, the nature of the one who feels it, the nature of time and what we call waiting. I realize there is no problem, there never was a problem other than the one I created in my mind. And this is very important to understand. Conflict is created. The conflict we see in ourselves, the conflict we see in the world, we create.
I don't think you can say it enough—life doesn't have to be this hard, this painful, this contentious. I mean that is Buddhism in a nutshell, the unmaking of our pain. Really the beauty, I feel, of the teaching is that all of the sutras, all of the commentaries, all of the chants, all of the meditation techniques, all of the liturgy. They are profound and utterly practical. Because they are telling you what to do and how to work with your neighbor dumping snow on your yahat to do wrd. When your mother is sick and you're struggling to juggle her care and your life. When your job is draining you and you don't know: do I stay or is it time to leave? Of course, the sutras, the teachings don't tell you directly, but they're showing you. They're guiding us to listen to ourselves, to our own wisdom, which is always present, always clear, but we have to be quiet enough to hear it. So these teachings are really showing us how to learn from the best teacher we'll ever have, which is each one of us, nobody else.
Let me end with this poem by the inimitable Mary Oliver, it's called “The Other Kingdoms”
Consider the other kingdoms. The trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding titles: oak, aspen, willow. Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north have dozens of words to describe its different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their infallible sense of what their lives are meant to be. Thus the world grows rich, grows wild, and you too, grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too were born to be.
Explore further
01 : The Four Immeasurables: A Science of Compassion by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
02 : Map of Indigenous Territories by Native Land Digital