Mind at Ease, Part 2
Photo by Luis Alfonso Orellana
In part two of this talk on Gateless Gate 41, Zuisei speaks on the five overarching disturbing emotions: attachment, pride, envy, anger, and ignorance, and the collective journey we are on to wake up to these patterns and remember our innate goodness.
As the Buddha said, all of his teachings were for the purpose of seeing the truth of suffering and its cessation. The way to put at end to suffering is to realize ourselves, but we cannot do it while caught in the storm of strong emotions. So we need to have a way to recognize and deal with them, and this is what so much of practice is about.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei’s notes and might differ slightly from the final talk.
Gateless Gate, Case 41: Bodhidharma’s Ease of Mind, Part 2
Main Case:
Bodhidharma sat in zazen facing a wall. The Second Ancestor, Huika, stood for a long time in the snow. Finally, he cut off his own arm and presented it to Bodhidharma. He said, “My mind is not at ease. Please, Master, set it at ease for me.” Bodhidharma replied, “Bring me your mind and I will set it at ease for you.” Huika said, “I’ve searched for it everywhere, but I cannot find it.” Bodhidharma said, “There—I’ve set it at ease for you.”
Wumen’s Commentary:
The broken-toothed old foreigner proudly travelled ten thousand miles over the ocean. This was as if he were raising waves where there was no wind. Ultimately, he got only one disciple, but even he was maimed. Alas, he was a fool indeed.
Wumen’s Poem:
Coming from the West, and directly pointing—
This great affair was caused by the transmission.
The trouble-maker who created a stir in Zen circles
Is, after all, you.
Good morning, welcome. This is Part 2 of a two-part talk on the Mind at Ease. Yesterday I spoke of the first half of this encounter which is, in one sense an expression of Huika’s great faith, great doubt, and great determination. (I also tried to qualify and contextualize the gory image of him cutting off his arm as he stands with snow up to his knees, asking for the teachings). Not to be taken factually, it is an allegorical statement of his deep un-ease, of his recognition that not all is well in the kingdom and that he needs to address the turmoil that he feels inside.
So he comes before another, in this case the great master Bodhidharma, who would become his teacher and whom he would eventually succeed, and he lays himself bare before him: “My mind is not at ease. Please, Master, set it at ease for me.”
It’s an unusual way to phrase it, if you think about it. I don’t know if that is in the original Chinese: “Please, set my mind at ease for me.” Or he is just saying, “Please help me.” But as I said yesterday, there is an element in this plea that is true: we do, to a greater or lesser extent, want someone else to take away our suffering. Isn’t this what is underneath our acting out of our unease?
If I’m uncomfortable and I don’t know how to deal with it, I might put it on you. I put my fear, my insecurity, my hope, my restlessness, on you. In general, it’s not something that we plan to do, it’s reactive. We feel attacked so we attack. We’re uncomfortable, so we poke at someone else to ease our discomfort. That’s why I think it’s such an important part of practice to build up our emotional resilience, our tolerance for difficult emotions and difficult thoughts. I realize I say this a lot. I say it because I think it’s true. Because I see in myself, and in others, how much conflict I create through my inability to feel what I feel and not react. Not fix or change or act out. Resilience teaches us to hold these difficult emotions and not project them onto someone else.
Let me be clear that I don’t mean to say by this that Zen practice is a form of therapy, it isn’t. As the Buddha said, all of this is for one thing and one thing only: to see the truth of suffering and to put an end to it. And the way to do that ultimately, is to realize ourselves. We cannot do that while caught in the storm of strong emotions. We need to have a way to recognize and deal with them.
When it comes to dealing with our pervasive un-ease, Bodhidharma points to the short-cut method: “Bring me your mind. I can’t find it. There—I’ve set it at ease for you.” We’ll come back to this. There’s also the more gradual approach. The “getting your hands dirty” approach. The Buddhist teachings recognize five overarching disturbing emotions: attachment, pride, envy, anger, and ignorance. The teachings also recognize the way to deal with these emotions through what is called “realization of the five wisdoms.” There are a couple of frameworks for this, I chose one of them.
In Vajrayana Buddhism there are Five Female Buddhas or Prajnas (Wisdoms) associated with the five elements of water, earth, fire, air, and space. They correspond to the realization—the self-liberation—of these five disturbing emotions. Let’s first look at greed or attachment which, as we know, is at the root of all suffering according to Buddhism. Someone asked me recently, “What do we want?” I said, “Conventionally, to want.” We want to want, because wanting feels so good. At a certain point, it doesn’t even matter what we want, because the force behind it—desire—is so compelling in and of itself. Desire is a self-fulfilling, closed system. It is a perpetual motion machine.
The thing about the pleasure of craving is that the more we want, the more inured we become to the object of our want. Which means we need more and more contact to feel the same kind of high. Rebecca Solnit speaks of this when she refers to the cycle of addiction that crystal meth addicts go through, because they increasingly need more and more stimulation just to reach a base level of pleasure. She says: “It’s as though they dug their grave with what they thought were wings.”
But the fact is, the problem is not what we want. Food is not the problem, pleasure is not the problem, comfort, intimacy, sex are not the problem. It’s that cycle of want and release, craving and pleasure, that never stops and never fulfills itself that fuels our suffering. In his last teaching, the Buddha said “Have few desires and learn how to be satisfied.” That’s it. That’s it. We can’t get rid of desire by just ripping it out of ourselves. We need to understand what it is, how it functions. We have to realize its nature. This means we have to understand what attachment really is, where it is, who is the one driving it—just as Bodhidharma is asking Huika to do (Go study mind, deeply, then come back and let’s talk about it).
So when we realize attachment, we realize Mirror-like Wisdom, the realm of Locana, whose element is water. Here we see things clearly, without distortion, like looking into a still, clear lake. All things are shown to be as they are, and our seeing contains no attachment or aversion. No movement of the mind that says, “I want,” “I have to have.”
Pride, the second disturbing emotion, is the belief that we are better than. Feeling ourselves to be separate, we compare ourselves incessantly with others in a kind of panic-stricken effort to determine how we measure up. And we prop ourselves up through a sense of pride. The opposite of pride is insecurity, but when you look closely, you see that both are solidly resting on a bed of fear. This is a particularly compelling emotion in our culture. The myth of exceptionalism, the myth of meritocracy—what else are they but pride blown up large?
But when pride is realized, it becomes the Wisdom of Equality, embodied by Mamaki, the Buddha of earth wisdom. Just as rain falls on the earth equally, so does our nature extend equally in all directions because it is one nature. Ultimately there is no high or low, no better or worse, no way to compare, no way to win or lose.
But let me make a distinction between pride that is really self-satisfaction and a kind of delight in our actions, in our experiences, our abilities. We say, “I take pride in this and that.” There’s nothing wrong with that. This really refers to pride that is arrogant, that is filled with self. And pride is closely tied to the disturbing emotion of envy. I want what you have because I think it will make me happy. Looking out, we feel our lack, or rather, what we perceive as our lack. This is a very insidious emotion because it doesn’t take much to activate our envy. And envy is always looking out.
When envy is realized we realize Pandara Vasini, the Buddha of fire. She is the manifestation of Discriminating Wisdom. She understands that although fundamentally all things, all beings, are equal. We are also clearly different. We have different identities, different histories, different relationships and experiences of this thing we call reality.
I, as a white, female, cis-gender, gay, upper-middle class Mexican who does not look or sound the way most people expect Mexicans to look or sound, I have a very specific “location,” to borrow Lama Rod Owen’s term. I am grounded in these identities, and they shape and reflect my experience of myself and the world. And no-self notwithstanding, these identities can’t be erased or passed over. To me, this is such an interesting and fruitful and challenging teaching. In a tradition that stands squarely on the understanding of selflessness, identity-lessness, how do you also fully acknowledge self and identity? How do you intersect between a clear understanding of the illusion of a separate, independent self (which is what liberation is), and a full honoring of your self as it operates in the realm of form, the realm of distinctions? This is the fierce teaching of Pandara Vasini, Buddha of Discriminating Wisdom.
Then we have anger. Anger is the manifestation of No, of aversion. Although, all of these disturbing emotions have at their heart self. The “I” that hates or is prideful, envious, etc. I think anger is particularly thorny because it is so full of self and it is so powerful. It feels good to be angry. It makes us feel like we’re in control, like we’re in charge. It’s especially difficult when we feel we have a right to be angry. Just look at the world, how can we not be angry?
And people ask, “Is there no place for anger in Buddhism?” What about in the face of injustice? What about anger as the driving force for change? There is such a thing, certainly. The problem is that anger corrodes, not just its surroundings, but also the one who is angry. Buddhism doesn’t negate that anger arises. But when it does, it asks, “What will you do with it?” How will you respond to it? And how do you understand it to begin with?
Shantideva says, “You are creating bad karma by giving me the opportunity to be angry at you.” This completely turns the dynamic on its head. You’re supposed to go “what?” when you hear a teaching like that. Unless we’re willing to stand on our head, how will we see what we haven’t seen? Unless we are willing to be shaken out of our complacency, our usual ways of relating to one another, how will we truly transform our lives?
So, when anger is seen through, when its nature is realized, it becomes all-accomplishing Wisdom, embodied by Tara. This is the cultivation of our aspiration (bodhicitta—the desire to realize oneself for the benefit of all beings) and the cultivation of compassion. Tara’s element is air, it is a bearable lightness of being. It is the impetus to come to the work of transformation out of a feeling of love and care, not anger and disillusionment.
But this doesn’t mean we need to be nice to one another in an artificial sort of way. It doesn’t mean that sometimes we’re not fierce if we need to be. If you think of the Karaniya Metta Sutta, the Buddha’s teaching on loving-kindness, there is a line that says, “Like a mother protects with her life her child, her only child… so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings.” Try to get in between a mamma bear and her cub and see how not nice a bear can be. This practice is not about being nice, it’s about being true. It’s also not about being mean or entitled or sanctimonious. It’s simply about being true, and wise, and loving.
The last disturbing emotion is ignorance which, as I said yesterday, is the crank that keeps the other four rolling. Ignorance is a deep state of not understanding. Not understanding ourselves, not understanding others, not understanding things, not understanding reality. In other words, it is a pervasive state of bewilderment. But, this bewilderment is not innocent.
I was listening to a talk by Angel Kyodo Williams, where she says exactly this. She says anger isn’t neutral, greed isn’t neutral—what makes us think ignorance is? It’s true that I cannot make myself see what I cannot see. Being free of ignorance means wanting to see what I don’t yet see. It’s finding ways to not turn away from what is not comfortable or convenient for me to see, to know, to accept. The realization of ignorance is the Wisdom of the Dharmadatu, of Suchness (things as they are). Because it’s the wisdom of things as they are, the fundamental realm of truth, it encompasses the other four. Akasadha Tesvari is the female Buddha here and her element is space.
Shibayama, in his commentary to this koan, said, “Where is the mind that is not at ease? Who is it that is seeking it? Is the mind square or round? White or red? Does it exist or not?” Practice requires that we not take our ideas and beliefs for granted, that we not assume we know what we haven’t carefully studied and deeply pondered.
“Bring me your mind and I will set it as ease.” And Huika goes searching and searching and searching for the mind, for years most likely—years of intensive practice. He comes back and says, “I cannot find it.” “There,” Bodhidharma says, “I’ve set it at ease for you.” How? There’s no mind to begin with so don’t worry about it? Is that what Bodhidharma is saying?
Now, in one sense, this is all much ado about nothing, as both the commentary and the poem say. Bodhidharma’s coming to China from India is raising waves where there is no wind. It is stirring trouble where there was none to begin with. Why do we have to go searching if ultimately we are that which we seek? Why sit for hours and hours just to be who you’ve always been. That is the great paradox of spiritual practice.
We work and we work so that we can see we never needed improving, didn’t need changing or fixing. But we do need to see and act clearly, no question about it. The nice thing is, that for every obstacle we come up against on our path, we can be certain—100 %—that someone else has already met it and passed through it. We can be certain that no matter how much we’re struggling on our cushion, struggling in our lives, no matter how much un-ease we feel, someone else has felt it too, someone else has struggled and found a way. This is why we do this work together.
So if practice sometimes feels like standing at the edge of a cliff, know this: there is a whole line of bodhisattvas stretching as far as the eye can see in both directions. And they are holding hands—with you—waiting to step off the cliff. And they’re just waiting, waiting for you to take that step, so they can take it with you.