Love as Prime Mover
Photo by Alexandra Komyo Brown
In this wide-ranging talk Zuisei speaks of teaching as a learning practice at whose core is the intent to see clearly.
She also refers to the kind of wisdom that comes from our contact with the “realm of the real” and the love that results from touching that place.
“What if instead of ignorance being the primer mover in Buddhism,” she asks, “it’s really love that is at the core of things?”
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.
Tonight I want to start with a question that one of you sent me, and, by the way, thank you for your questions and emails. I’ve said before how much I love these meetings and although part of the reason is that I love to discuss the dharma, the real crux of it is the meeting of minds. It’s sharing in the wonder and mystery that is this human life; the challenge of it; the demand for a level of seeing that is sometimes daunting but necessary; the willingness to go into something deeply, deliberately, not assuming that we know, not being content to stay on the surface of things or be satisfied with what we haven’t carefully examined. So I welcome your emails, your questions, your reflections.
One of you asked why I was having a discussion after the talk. These dharma talks are said to be “dark to the mind and radiant to the heart,” an expression my teacher loved and that he borrowed from Evelyn Underhill, the 19th century author of Mysticism. She was referring to what I’d call the realm of the real ground of being, as Paul Tillich called it. That which you can’t grasp intellectually but can realize with your whole being. It’s a skill, a great skill, to speak from that place, to be able to communicate with words that are necessarily limited, the truth of the ineffable. I don’t know that I particularly do that, to be honest. I speak of what I see and sometimes I try to speak of what I don’t see, to use language and inquiry to uncover what I haven’t yet realized. I don’t think that my talks are particularly dark to the mind. Then again, I don’t think we have to leave the mind out either. These truths speak to the heart-mind, they speak to the whole person that we are. At the monastery we’d say it’s a buddha speaking to a buddha, speaking to that part of you that’s already awake.
If this is the character and the purpose, the tone of a dharma talk, then why do I want to mar it with intellectual discussion? Well, first of all, there’s a practical, and somewhat selfish component. Talking to a Zen crowd is challenging in the best of circumstances. We’ve been trained to sit still, to not vocalize or show much feeling. In general, during a silent retreat you’re speaking to a sea of blank faces. I’ll tell you, for a speaker, that is the pits. You don’t know if your words are reaching people or at what level, although sometimes it’s quite obvious when you’re not reaching them.
Many years ago, giving a talk at Fire Lotus Temple, a talk I had not thought through or constructed well, I could feel I was losing my audience until finally a woman in the back fell off her chair. She’d fallen asleep. I was mortified. So it is my job to speak in such a way that engages you, whether I get much feedback or not.
Now, add a screen to the equation, and the challenge doubles. I can’t hear you and I get only fragmented visual cues from a couple of dozen tiny images. I can be talking about the most profound aspect of the dharma and you could be scrolling through your Facebook feed or reading the New York Times. It’s one of the reasons I ask for the cameras to be on. It’s discouraging to be speaking to a black square because so much of what is happening during the talk is not my words, but our interaction, the subtle communication that takes place beyond words. You have a job too, should you choose to accept it, and that is to stay engaged. That said, having a bit of back and forth helps, dialogue helps, it makes me feel less like I’m talking into a void
But there’s more and it’s ultimately what’s important. I keep wanting to see what happens when the sharing of wisdom is less vertical than horizontal, when it’s not me expounding the dharma and you, receiving it, but us looking and listening and questioning together. One of you said to me, “rethinking teaching as practice,” which I would say is both learning to teach and teaching to learn, and also learning to learn, hopefully for you as well. To look at a form, at a teaching tool, and wonder, does this free or does it oppress? Does it bind or does it liberate? To do this well, we need all of us. I need you and your experience, your history, your embodiment and the way that it intersects with the dharma.
For example, one of you gave me feedback on the Le Guin story I told (“She Unnames Them”). You expressed your hurt at being given, again, the image of the uncaring man. The man that’s too busy or too self-involved to engage. You acknowledged that the image, the stereotype, exists for a reason and you also voiced your pain because that’s not how you want to be seen, that’s not how you want to live. I heard you. It’s not helpful or inspiring to have this image before you. It’s not inviting, it’s not saying, Yes, come in, this teaching is for you too and you can find yourself in it. I’m sorry for that and I will rethink how I tell that story from now on. Stories have power, who tells them has power, how we tell them has power. If the teaching I’m offering excludes anyone, if it negates or ignores your experience, I’ve failed. Not to mention that it is not the dharma, you see?
This isn’t about pleasing everyone either, about creating a way of practicing that fulfills our every wish, impossible, and not particularly desirable, since what we want isn’t always what will set us free. It’s not about political correctness, one of the most abstract terms I’ve ever heard, and it’s not about having all of us agree. It’s about speaking truth to the best of our ability. It’s about people, it’s about you and me, being human with, and kind, to one another. It’s about having respect for the being that we each are. As I’ve said before, we don’t even have to like each other, but as practitioners of the dharma, we can do our best to regard one another. That is what the dharma is teaching us, something, someone is. Now, how do you treat them? That’s what I’m interested in.
I want to look at the forms I’ve received and ask again, is this working? How? Let me be very clear that by doing this I’m not in any way rejecting my training, or tradition. I’ll never be able to repay the gift I’ve been given. I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel or forging my own path or creating my own brand, I’m interested in seeing and in understanding what prevents me from doing this. I’m interested in dismantling assumptions and biases and opinions that get in the way of my and your liberation. There is so much I don’t see, but I want to.
So, as I keep saying, I’m very slowly feeling my way into a form of teaching that I hope is skillful, that brings youinto the process more so we can help one another. With great respect and admiration for a tradition and its teachings and the teachers who’ve given me the life I have, and for which I have nothing but gratitude, I’m stopping and seeing. I’m trying to begin again and again, so as to not take any of it for granted. Sometimes I’ll give a talk, and maybe there’ll be time for questions after, maybe not.Other times I may do a mondo and present a topic and just do discussion, we’ll see. Let’s find out together.
Not long ago I came across the notes for my first talk, my shuso talk, which I gave in 2006. It once again confirmed my fascination with seeing and blindness, because I chose a koan in the True Dharma Eye: Master Dogen’s 300 Koan Shobogenzo. In it, Fayan is essentially doing work practice. I’ve always had a particular love for Fayan because of his way of using language to teach, very simple, very direct. Often he would just repeat the student’s question or statement and not offer any other explanation.
Baoen says to Fayan:
“I don’t ask any questions because I’ve seen the great matter. When I asked my teacher, ‘What is the self of the practitioner?’ he said, ‘The fire god seeks fire.’”
“Those are good words,” says Fayan, “but I’m afraid you don’t understand them.”
Baoen launches into an explanation, “The fire god belongs to fire, fire seeking fire is just like the self seeking the self.”
Fayan says, “Yes… no. Sorry.”
Baoen is very upset and leaves in a huff. But then he reconsiders, comes back, and apologizes.
Fayan says, “Why don’t you ask me?”
“What is the self of the practitioner?” asks Baoen.
Fayan says, “The fire god seeks fire.” At that, Baoen had a great realization.
Reflect for a moment, on the many times this has happened in your own life. Your teacher says something, or your therapist, or your partner. You hear it, you hear it, you hear it, for years perhaps, until one day, you really hear it. For some reason, one day it goes in. Why not before? And what needs to happen to get to that place? To be ready to listen, to see?
In the koan I spoke on, Fayan and a student are out doing work practice. They go take a look at the monastery’s well, which is clogged with sand. Fayan says, “When the eye of the spring is obstructed, sand is in the way. When the eye of the Way is obstructed, what is in the way?” The student doesn’t say anything. Fayan answers, “The eye is in the way.” When the eye of the Way is obstructed, what’s in the way? The eye is in the way. What is that? What is in the way when we don’t see? What helps to clear the Way for seeing, for living? This is what this koan is pointing to.
Let me just take a moment here to say something about koans. I generally don’t give talks on koans, not the formal talks on koans that are a feature of Zen. I tend to include them as stories, teaching stories, but, in my mind, at least, I’m acknowledging that their power lies in their directness, and in the kind of asking they demand of me. Koans are, in fact, dark to the intellectual mind, in part because you do need to understand the context, the language, the imagery and therefore need to engage the intellect somewhat. Some koans are very simple and don’t really require much knowledge but all of them are bringing you into the realm of the real and so, a koan teaches you how to ask a question with your whole being. Every ounce of you engaged, asking, which is very useful when a life koan presents itself to you: A diagnosis, a death, financial stress, political instability. What do I do? we wonder. How do I act? How do I take care of this and of myself?
My suggestion: get quiet first, get very, very quiet, and then ask. Then get very quiet again and listen. Your wisdom never fails, not if it’s coming from the realm of the real. When it does, you know with a knowing that is before words. Despite what I said last week about unnaming the named, it’s also important and necessary, critical even, to name what we see arising out of that wisdom. That’s why we’re sitting here, doing this, otherwise we could just do zazen. That is yet another reason that I insist on dialogue, to name what needs to be named. How much time and breath have we wasted over the last four years saying, This isn’t us. This is not who we are, what this country is.But it’s clear that this is who we are. This is some of what we are and we should name it, and having named it, then ask ourselves, What do we do? How do we act? In the sense that it comes from the place that recognizes what’s needed for us to live in accord with the way things are.
Many years ago Hogen Sensei said to me, “Zuisei, you just have to love them.” At the time I brushed away the advice as naïve, too soft and hardly, hardly adequate to meet the cries of the world, I mean, you can’t love a tyrant, a rapist, a demagogue? You can’t love people who show, through blatant word and action, that they don’t care, or can you? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to care, not despite but because of our limitations? The word love doesn’t appear in the sutras, not by itself. It appears as maitri or metta, lovingkindess, perhaps so it wouldn’t be confused with the limited version of love most of us know. Remember that lovingkindness is, as the first of the Four Immeasurables, well, immeasurable. It knows no bounds.
Cultivating this kind of love may seem daunting, but that’s only and always from the outside. We don’t have to be heroic, nor do we have to beat ourselves up when we don’t want to do the work. We don’t have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. Remember that famous Mary Oliver poem, “Wild Geese”? She says we “only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves.” This body, and this body, what does this body love?
As the years go by I wonder more and more, what if it’s not ignorance that is the prime mover, the driver that keeps the cycle of samsara turning, what if the prime mover is actually love? What if, when we go to the realm of the real, and we return, we realize we know, that this is the only true response? After decades of practice, the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” Could it be that he knows what he’s talking about?
To end, let me read you this fragment from Ada Limón’s “We are surprised.”
Miracles are all around.
We’re not so much homeless
as we are home free, penny-poor,
but plenty lucky for love and leaves
that keep breaking the fall. Here it is:
The new way of living with the world
inside of us so we cannot lose it,
and we cannot be lost. You and me,
are us and them, and it and sky.
It’s hard to believe we didn’t
know that before; it’s hard to believe
we were so hollowed out, so drained,
only so we could shine a little harder
when the light finally came.
Explore further
01 : The Three Hundred Koans (pdf) by Zen Mater Dogen, with commentary by John Daido Loori Roshi
02 : We Are Surprised by Aida Limón