Meditation Paramita
Photo by Jorg Angeli
In the fourth talk in this series of ten talks on the paramitas or perfections, Zuisei speaks of meditation as the practice of seeing ourselves in the totality of our beings.
Meditation is about exercising both sharp concentration and clear seeing. It is recognizing that there is much in our lives that is extraneous but, as the author of the Cloud of Unknowing says, there is one thing that is necessary. What is that one thing?
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Meditation Paramita
First, having read the Book of Myths and loaded the camera and checked the edge of the knife blade, I put on the body armor of black rubber, the absurd flippers, the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner, but here alone.
There is a ladder. The ladder is always there, hanging innocently, close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it; otherwise, it is a piece of maritime floss.
I wanted to speak today about meditation or dhyāna, Paramita. And this is part of the six Paramita sequence. So it's the Mahāyāna listing of the Paramitas. It doesn't actually appear as part of the ten Paramitas. There it's named upekṣā or parami, or equanimity, which is also one of the four immeasurables. And I spoke of it also as one of the factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. And there it was, or the way that I spoke of it, was the classical definition of the four jhānas, the states of meditation. So I wanted to deal with it a little bit differently today.
I came across this poem by Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck. She was a well-known poet, and she refused the National Medal of the Arts in the 1990s in protest of a vote: Newt Gingrich had just voted to remove funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. And so, in protest, she refused this award. She said art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power that holds it hostage.
But I came across this poem, and I wanted to talk about this work of diving into the wreck. It doesn't have to be a wreck, and I don't want to focus on the wreck, but it's a good image because it describes well our hesitancy to dive, our propensity to just stay on the surface, skimming, reluctant to go deeper and meet what we might find.
While the ladder is always there, hanging innocently on the side of the schooner, if we don't use it, as she says, it's just another piece of maritime floss, or it's decoration. It looks good, but nothing more.
Facing the Mind
A number of people have said to me recently that they're finding counting their breath boring, that it's too simple, and they need something more challenging, more engaging. And I said, really, and really look closely at what is really going on. Because in my mind, boredom has no place in the mind of a practitioner. There's no room for it. There's no room for it to be. There's nothing for it to hold on to, to grasp.
When your mind is fully engaged, there's no gap. We know this. We hear this all the time. So there's no gap. There's no space for boredom to slip into, for dullness, familiarity, complacency. All of these can only appear with distance. And you don't need much. You just need a tiny sliver for that thought to slip through.
Really, most of the time, what's happening when we say we're counting our breath is we're on automatic. And I've said this before: because counting is so familiar, so habitual, we just do it. It doesn't require much effort for us to do it, and so we just do it.
In the background, just underneath the surface, there's a steady stream of thoughts, flowing right under the surface. And, of course, this is not counting your breath. This is thinking. This is telling yourself you're doing one thing while doing another, usually because we don't want to work too hard. We don't want to concentrate—we want to concentrate enough, but not too much.
I think we all do this at some point, whether it's the breath or working on a kōan, or that open awareness of shikantaza. I certainly went through many times when I thought to myself, "I can't bear to do another one of these, another one of these kōans." But it's just a thought. It has no substance. If I do nothing, if I don't move toward it, if I don't hold on to it, it passes like every other created thing.
Shikantaza, which I think is challenging because of its subtlety—are you watching? Are you really aware of that stream of thoughts, or are you just sitting there thinking? Are you being swept away by the content? Can you tell the difference?
In the Tibetan Mahāmudrā practice, distraction is not a problem. The instruction is to be fully aware that you're distracted. To ask yourself: Where are these thoughts coming from? Shugen Sensei touched on it yesterday. What is a thought to begin with? Where does it go when it passes? Where does it go?
Rather than getting caught up in the stories, in the content of thought, we're directly looking at the nature of thought itself—a nature which is no different from the nature of mind, from the nature of self.
I remember speaking with my father at some point and trying to describe to him the hard work of being still and silent, and the many hours I was spending doing nothing but watching my mind, and how mysterious and right it felt. To do this and to feel that, for the first time in my life, I was actually getting a sense of who I was.
In the beginning, I wasn't trying to see emptiness or anything. I didn't even know what that was. I had no sense of it. I didn't actually know what I was doing, but I couldn't not do it. I've said this before: I picked up a book on Zen. I don't even remember which one. I remember that I was in a hotel somewhere in Europe, and there were those bedside tables. I opened the drawer, and there was a Bible and this book on Zen.
So I started to read the book on Zen. I started to sit on my own. And I knew, at that instant, I didn't know what else, but I knew that I would always do that—that in some form or another, I would spend the rest of my life spending some time during my days sitting, looking at my mind. I couldn't even say it in words back then, but I knew I had found this incredibly powerful entry point into myself.
It was while I was working on Moo that I began to hear this voice, which had actually been there for a little while, but it became louder and more insistent. I started to think, you know, maybe I am gay after all. It was perfectly obvious to everyone but me. It took me a while. It was right in front of my eyes, and I couldn't see.
It was through this process of working on Moo, which is so difficult to explain—how do you say to someone, "you're just sitting there going, Moo, Moo"—that in the process, you are becoming you. You are becoming more you and less you. All the extra baggage begins to drop away so that you're there, in fact, to see yourself fully.
I could sense, from the beginning, that I was floating on the surface of a vast ocean. I wanted to see what was underneath. Moo is not an exercise to get you to sit more. It's not a trick. It shows you directly your nature. And I don't mean just your identity, but your fundamental nature. Going very deeply to the bottom of that ocean, you can't tell one from another—you can't tell gay from straight, male from female, young or old. When you come back to the surface, back to open air and sky, you can, in fact, manifest who you truly are.
Moments That Change Everything
This is a little aside, but thinking of identity reminded me: I was listening to a talk by Khandro Rinpoche, and she said that she's always interested in asking her students how they became Buddhist. In her case, it was kind of a done deal. She said she opened her eyes at birth and there were a bunch of teachers around who said, "You're a Buddhist." So she said there wasn't much discussion.
When she asks other people, she likes to hear their stories. There was one student, a woman, who in Khandro Rinpoche's words is “very Italian”—which I take as maybe Catholic, maybe chic, not someone you would necessarily think would turn to Buddhism. She was in a bookstore, looking for a novel, and a book fell on her head. She looked at it, and it was a Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She had no idea what it was, so she just took it and put it back on the shelf and kept looking for her novel.
Again, the book fell on her head. I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but apparently it did. She flipped through it a little, put it back, and as she was leaving, a third time, the book fell on her head. She thought maybe somebody was trying to tell her something. So she bought it and became a Buddhist.
She talks more soberly about how you could spend—she says hundreds or thousands, I can't remember, of lifetimes building this karma. Millions upon billions of moments led you to that moment: the book falling on your head, sitting in a room where you have the time, the means, and the inclination to study the Dharma. Lifetime upon lifetime took you to this place. Then she says, in a moment of turning, you can throw it all away. You can do a U-turn and turn away from the Dharma in a moment of distraction, carelessness, or worse—a moment of pride or anger.
And the opposite is also true. You could live lifetimes immersed in delusion, and in a moment of turning toward what is true, everything changes. We shouldn't take these Zuisei instructions lightly.
Do not rush through working on the breath just to get to the “real stuff” of working with a kōan. Believe me, there's plenty of time for kōans. You should enjoy sitting with the breath when you can, with open awareness. It's not difficult to work automatically, certainly on the breath, on a kōan.
What we do in zazen shows directly in our lives. If we're sitting deeply, letting stillness and silence permeate our entire body and mind, that will become evident in our lives. We can't avoid it. It will show in our work, relationships, and in the pattern of our thoughts. They begin to change, to quiet down, to become less sticky. Practice is none other than our lives.
We hear this all the time, but is it true? Is that our experience? Is that where we're actually living? If it isn't, if the two don't match, maybe it's time to dive a little deeper.
When you find that thing most necessary to you, that’s where you drop your anchor.
I've been reading The Cloud of Unknowing, written as counsel to all who would undertake the work of plumbing the depths of our being. In the introduction, the writer says that a lot of the teachings of this author are based on Pseudo-Dionysius, the Europa-guide, who said this: in the practice of mystic contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all the things that the senses or intellect can perceive, all things which are not and things which are, and strain upward in unknowing as far as may be.
By unceasing absolute withdrawal from yourself and all things in purity, abandoning all, and set free from all, you shall be born up to the ray of divine darkness that surpasses all being.
A word about contemplation: it is actually understood as content-free awareness. In Christianity, it would be unity with God. We understand it as samādhi. Meditation, on the other hand, is deep reflection. It involves language and thought. It can be reflection on a biblical passage, for example. So it is active in that way.
Contemplation is really no gap, no object, no subject or object. In that way, our practice is a contemplative practice. That is why it is necessary to leave all the senses behind and the intellect, to cover them, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, with a cloud of forgetting.
To do this work, you have to deeply trust that the senses can only take you so far. They perceive much, but they cannot perceive this—not really, not quite. You have to abandon everything, all of it, to be born on the ray of divine darkness. And it is not light—light comes later. First, you rest in the depths, in the darkness, and you have to do it alone.
As Adrienne Rich says, you can't dive with a team like Cousteau for this work. A guide can help, but the one diving is you, and you can only do it alone. The author describes a cloud of forgetting below, a buffer that keeps the senses and intellect quiet. This is the instruction: the moment you see a thought, let it go.
Do we understand the power of that instruction, the momentousness of it? If we only did that—see a thought, let it go, come back—we could do this for the rest of our lives and never be exhausted. Will there ever be a moment when we can be too present, too unified?
There’s that cloud of forgetting below and the cloud of unknowing above. The author says to strain upward in unknowing. You can move deeper into the darkness, which is not what we think it is. It’s not actually frightening. Not at all. We all experience it at some point: the moment your body or mind recoils as your mind begins to settle, feeling that quiet, that stillness, and your body jerks or your mind jumps.
Discovering What Truly Matters
It’s not surprising. Your ego has been working hard your whole life to build itself up. It’s not going to just lay down without a fight. But if we’re patient and persistent, we reach the edge—the edge of the schooner, right before the dive—where there’s a kind of unease. Staying there, persistently pressing through reactive fear, keeps us settling. Once you’re in the water, it’s just a matter of letting go and slowly descending. Your body acclimates, and your mind does too.
Every once in a while, you’re brought back to the surface, and you do it again. Each time, you realize you can stay under a little longer, that it’s okay, that it’s not dangerous the way you thought. This gives strength and confidence for the next dive.
The author says: “The active life is troubled and busy about many things, but the contemplative life sits in peace with the one thing necessary.” What is the one thing necessary? If we can answer that, the lion’s share of our work is done. Most of our floundering and struggling comes from not being clear about that one thing necessary.
We sit down to do zazen, but once there, we often go over a conversation, right a wrong, get work done, process what your therapist or teacher said. But is that really the one thing necessary during this time? Is that how we reach the heart of who we are?
The further we move and clarify our vision, the more we ask ourselves: what is the one thing necessary? Even in the midst of zazen, when we know where the stories lead, it sometimes feels like we don’t control our thoughts. The stream comes too fast. We have instruction for this. First, ignore them. If you don’t feed a thought with awareness or attention, it loses momentum. If it’s important, it will be there later.
The moment of true release—truly letting a thought go—you do either by not feeding it or, if you can’t, by moving toward it, surrendering to it. Stop fighting, because the thought needs you to keep fighting. Letting go, it loses power. Gradually, we clear the flotsam so we can navigate with ease.
When you find that thing most necessary to you, that’s where you drop your anchor. Sit with all the height, depth, length, and breadth of your being. You can’t do this halfway. We must sit high, with the full power of body and mind. We must sit deep, gathering all energy and attention into this one thing—breath, kōan, awareness. We must sit long, with every ounce of yearning to see more clearly. We must sit wide, wanting every being in the universe to be free, knowing that as we become free, every being becomes free.
In the beginning, it feels awkward—like wearing a tight rubber suit, awkward flippers, and a mask. Little by little, we become used to this process. Thoughts lose their charm. Then we can swim light and unburdened.
A couple of weeks ago, I did a hermitage. It was ambrosia. I hadn’t done one in a while, too long. Fall had just passed its peak; all the golds and reds were turning rusty. Beaches in the fall are my favorite—deep copper, somehow putting me somewhere in the past, like the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Black topolos were past their peak of purple. I had almost a week ahead. There was a full moon. One night, going out for food, I saw a floodlight-like glow out of the corner of my vision. I thought, I don’t remember houses this high. It kept getting brighter until I realized it was the moon. Enormous and yellow, I traced its arc through the night. It was magical.
I did a lot of night sitting. It gives access to parts of the mind not available during the day. Lines blur. What seems solid becomes porous. I wasn’t sure where my body ended or the floor or walls of the cabin. I usually do hermitage at Dogan Hermitage because I like sitting outside on the porch. This time, up on the mountain, it felt like sitting outside. The stove added to the feeling of permeability. When you sit like that, with so much space, it extends forward and back. It’s easier to let go. There is nowhere to escape. Nothing to do but you and the one thing necessary.
Some people say, “I had a great hermitage. I caught up on sleep.” I think: why waste this time? You don’t get this time like this, not even in Session, certainly not as a resident. Wide open space—a gift. What a shame to let it seep away, to indulge a fantasy because you worked hard in the last period.
If you ask me about moderation in contemplative work, I will say: none at all. In everything else—eating, drinking, sleeping—moderation is the rule. Avoid extremes of heat and cold. Guard against too much or too little reading, reflection, or social involvement. In these, keep to the middle path. But in love, take no measure. Indeed, I wish you never cease this work of love, this work of contemplation.
Shugun Sensei says it often: don’t save anything. Save it for what? For when? We have a little time left in the Session, as the Shusso pointed out earlier. The ladder hangs innocently on the schooner—actually, no, there is no schooner, just the ladder. Several fathoms long, the deeper you go, the longer it gets. There is no point of arrival. Isn’t that wonderful? The further you go, the darker it gets until darkness becomes indistinguishable from light. Then you think you’ve arrived, but there’s still more.
All we need is a little courage—just a little—to place your foot on the first rung of the ladder, hand firmly on the handrails, the other foot hovering in midair. Because you know where staying on the surface will get you, and that’s no longer what you want for your life, you step—fearful at first, perhaps uncertainly—but you step nonetheless into the unknown.
Meditation Paramita, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.