On Mindfulness • Interview

Photo by Mickey O’neil

The term mindfulness is ubiquitous these days. But its origins can be traced back to the teachings of the Buddha, whose main practice was anapanasati, “mindfulness of breathing.”

​In this interview, Zuisei discusses some of the misunderstandings of mindfulness, as well as its true potential to help us cultivate awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

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.

On Mindfulness - Interview

Hi, welcome to the ZMM Podcast.
I'm Hokyu Aaronson, and whether you're coming to us through the Zen Mountain Monastery website, or via iTunes, or any other podcast delivery system, we're happy to have you with us.

If you've been following the podcast, you'll know we like to use the forum to get better acquainted or reacquainted with some of the guest teachers who visit Zen Mountain Monastery, or the Zen Center of New York City, to lead retreats throughout the year.

We also take the opportunity from time to time to chat with one of our own teachers about a program they're leading, or just to discuss a topic of interest to the Sangha.

Today we're speaking with none other than our own Zuisei Goddard for a little bit of both. She'll be leading a retreat next month called Taming the Mind: Shantideva's Teaching on Guarding Introspection. That'll run here at the monastery from April 21st to 23rd, 2017.

And as you'll hear once we start discussing it, this approach with Shantideva as our guide will be of interest to anyone looking to refine their meditation practice with timeless wisdom and direction from one of the great masters of the Buddhist tradition.

So a little about our guest, who's walked up one flight of stairs to join me today. Zuisei was born in Mexico City and moved to the U.S. when she was 18, studying literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

She first came to Zen Mountain Monastery just a year after graduating and found her calling in the rhythms and ritual of monastic life. She ordained in 2001 and spent 14 years as a monastic before returning to lay life. That shift had little impact on her relationship with the practice or the Sangha, as she's continued her role as director of operations at Dharma Communications, the monastery's outreach organization.

She also moved into a teaching role when, in 2014, Shugun Sensei recognized her as a Dharma holder in the Mountains and Rivers Order. She makes her home just minutes away from the monastery's gates in Mount Tremper, New York, with her partner of many years.

Hi, Zuisei.
Hello.

So the retreat description for Taming the Mind makes it clear that we're looking at how to guard our minds against the kind of erosive or corrosive behaviors that we've been accumulating over the course of our lifetimes, or perhaps longer. It sounds like this would be anything from garden-variety distractiveness to compulsive storytelling, where we spend a lot of time on the cushion or off rehashing stories to ourselves about where we fit in the world and how to rank all the people and things we come in contact with.

Who Shantideva Was and Why His Teaching Endures

And I love that you've chosen Shantideva as our principal guide in this journey. So first, I'd like to back up a second. Let's talk about who exactly was Shantideva, and where does he fit in along the development of Buddhism in India and beyond?

Well, Shantideva was an eighth-century Buddhist monastic and scholar, you could say, teacher, who is better known for The Way of the Bodhisattva, or it's also translated as The Guide to a Bodhisattva's Way of Life. He was said to be a student of Nagarjuna—not directly—but he followed the school of Nagarjuna, the Madhyamaka school.

And because The Way of the Bodhisattva is framed, you know, he touches on a number of teachings that are really fundamental to Buddhism, from the six paramitas. Just the fact that he is using the word mindfulness, and he uses a very powerful image of the wild elephant that is being tamed through the rope of mindfulness and the hook of alertness.

He understood very well, and he himself said at the beginning of the teaching that he wasn't teaching anything new. It's just his poetic and very powerful way of speaking, you know, about the mind, about ethical conduct, about the need for good teaching, good companionship, which I think had a profound influence, especially in the Mahayana teachings.

Especially that chapter, I believe the ninth chapter on wisdom, or the tenth chapter, where he actually very systematically goes through some of the teachings of the Madhyamaka school. And it seems it's also taking the opportunity to refute other teachings, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, that I'm guessing were prevalent at the time.

So there's actually not a lot written about him, and there is, in fact, conjecture that there were two Shantidevas, though the second one seems to be the one who lived in the eighth century and went to Nalanda University. Even the story of how he came to teach there is shrouded in a kind of mysticism.

But I have always found his particular way of teaching extremely powerful, and I think it's the kind of teaching that you either love or hate. You relate to it right away, or it takes you a while to enter, because he can be pretty fire and brimstone at times, and his imagery of hell and death approaching is definitely not for the faint at heart.

Yeah, I mean, he speaks of kind of getting off track and losing one's rope that binds us to our attention as falling into a hell realm. But of course, that's kind of skillful means in itself, to remind us that there can be grave consequences to not being mindful, right?
Right.

He doesn't pull any punches. I mean, he's saying you don't have much time. In fact, you don't know how much time you have, so don't waste it.

And there's also the other side, the beginning, where he makes these great offerings of everything wondrous and beautiful, an offering of himself for the sake of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, for the sake of his own enlightenment. So he's not just out to scare you, but he's definitely out to shake you from your complacency, I think.

Yeah.

Mindfulness, Remembering, and the Wider View

That term mindfulness—is that the term sati that we hear?
You know, I don't know. I would have to check the translation that I have, a couple of translations, and I believe both come from a Tibetan text. And so I don't know, though the translation that I do have does use that phrase of taming the mind, the wild elephant, with the rope of mindfulness—but that is the English translation.

Well, I was remembering recently in a talk, Shugun Sensei was pointing out that the word sati is actually remembering. We translate it as mindfulness. What would you say is the connection between remembering?

I remember he said that the Buddha taught this as remembering everything that came before, which is really a departure, in a way, from the kind of mindfulness that we generally think of, which is just an awareness of the thing that is right before us. What would you say is the connection between mindfulness and remembering?

I've seen it translated as remembering or the ability to keep an object in mind. And I believe it's Bhante Gunaratana who says that there are three factors of awareness that you need. The first is equanimity, which is a balancing factor. The second is concentration, which is a sharpening factor. And the third is mindfulness, which is a seeing factor.

And as I'm sure you know, right mindfulness is the seventh factor in the Eightfold Path, just before concentration. And so the way that I understand mindfulness is that concentration is not enough. Concentration is the ability to focus on an object, but you need to know what it is that you are focusing on.

And so in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Buddha describes, you know, one who's taking a short breath knows that she's taking a short breath. If it's a long breath, she knows it's a long breath. If you're walking, you know that you're walking. If you're sitting, you know that you're sitting.

And I have before told a story about my first session here. I was assigned to work in the garden and I had a lot of energy. I was very excited. It was actually my first full week of sesshin. I had done a weekend before, and I had been sitting for a couple of days by that point. I was assigned to work in the garden, and Kaijun, who was our gardener at the time, assigned me to pull weeds from a bed of carrots.

Now, I had never worked in a garden before, but I thought, you know, this can’t be too hard. And I approached it as I pretty much approached anything—I was going to be the best. I was going to be the fastest. And I was just going to show her how quickly and focused I could work. I had a lot of energy.

So I put my head down and just started pulling weeds as fast as I could. And I remember at a certain point, a more awake part of me, this little voice, said, "These weeds look awfully straight." But I was doing too well to stop. So I just brushed the thought aside and kept going. At the end of the work period, I very proudly showed her my work. I had weeded the entire bed, and she had a conniption because I had pulled the entire bed of carrots.

So I very single-mindedly and concentratedly did my work with zero mindfulness, zero awareness of what was actually happening, what was in front of me. And so, in a way, you could say—and this is not certainly the way that Shugun Sensei alluded to it—that remembering is what it is that you're supposed to be paying attention to and pairing it with that single-minded focus.

Well, you brought your concentration to bear, but mindfulness would be a bigger picture, in a sense.
Yes, and mindfulness has also three aspects to it. One is alertness—you can be dull if you're going to be mindful, right? The other is resolve. You need to have that determination to stay present. And the third is appropriate attention.

Now, in the Sutras, appropriate attention refers specifically to knowing the Four Noble Truths, to knowing the truth of suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path. But you could also say in a larger, broader context that it's attention appropriate to the task at hand. And so one without the other can become, in fact, very lopsided.

And now, pulling a bed of carrots is one thing, the consequences are not that dire. But the consequences of being mindless, and perhaps with great focus, we can see everywhere. I mean, you can kill with a very focused mind. And so, the Buddha never intended, I don't think, for mindfulness to be extracted from the totality of the Eightfold Path. It's an integral factor of the whole picture, you could say.

So, with Shantideva's teaching, it's pretty clear when you're reading him that he's speaking to probably monastics at Nalanda. That's the way I've always understood it. And there's really a rigor to what he's recommending.

And it's wonderful because it's very practical advice. And it's very direct. It speaks, like, right over the centuries to challenges one might have in maintaining their practice, maintaining their awareness, and being diligent about it.

But what would you say it is about his teachings that kind of transcend the walls of the monastery? It can be hard enough to maintain that in a space that's created for us to practice a sense of life, essentially, but for those of us living and working beyond the walls of the monastery?

Well, I think very fundamentally, he is saying death is coming sooner or later. So again, both pointing to the uniqueness and the gift that it is to have a human life and human consciousness, and therefore the opportunity to awaken, he is saying, "Don't waste this time," as I mentioned before.

He is also saying what is needed. He is saying, yes, you need mindfulness, and you need that hard work. He is also saying you need devotion. You need a good teacher. You need to practice the six perfections, the way the Mahayana phrases them—the six paramitas: generosity, ethical principles or moral principles, the sila, patience, zeal or effort, vigor, enthusiasm for the practice, concentration, and wisdom, the prajna, sorry, prajna paramita.

And so he's laying out, through The Way of the Bodhisattva, that all of your life needs to be examined. It needs to be carefully, not just looked at, but taken care of. I think in his beautiful descriptions of these offerings that he makes at the beginning, he's both readying his mind to both accept and offer the teachings in the way that he can. But he's also saying that, in itself, is the path.

It is that mind of surrender, if you will, that there is something so much larger and vaster than me, you know, myself. And so that's, you know, whether you're practicing in a monastery or practicing at home, that is still true.

Mindfulness, Discipline, and the Direct Path

And he makes me think of a teacher that I would have loved to meet, Deepa Ma, the Bangladeshi teacher, teacher of Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, among many others, who was a lay teacher. She was never ordained. She wanted to, but she was married. Her husband didn't want her to practice even, and so she had to wait until he died. And she started practicing very late in life.

From the few accounts that we have of her teaching, she was an extraordinary teacher. And her students always complained to her, saying, "You know, my life is too busy. I don't have time to practice." And she would say, "Do you have time to take a breath?" Yes, of course. Be mindful right then, you know, in that moment.

And she was also, at the same time, uncompromising. I love a story that Joseph Goldstein says: She said to him, "Sit for two days." And knowing her, he knew she meant sit for two days straight.
Yeah, wasn't a metaphor.
No, it wasn't like "sit a lot" for two days—two days in samadhi, which apparently she could do with great ease. And he said, "I can't do that." And her response was just like, "Don't be lazy."

So she would say, you know, be mindful as you pull that one weed, but every inch of the universe, every molecule is in that pulling of that weed. Yeah.

And it again sounds like that's how she lived her life. Whether she was taking care of her grandson, or she was hanging the laundry, or she was teaching in her tiny little apartment in Calcutta, I believe.

Shantideva says, "We can never take and turn aside the outer course of things, but only seize and discipline the mind itself. And what is there remaining to be curbed?" So he's saying, you know, once you discipline the mind, it takes care of everything else, in a sense.

In the classic Zen teachings, and even contemporary twentieth-century, at least, let's say, we don't encounter the term mindfulness as though, I mean, of course, there's an emphasis on concentration. But why do you think that the Zen teachings put so much emphasis on this kind of direct pointing that makes it seem as though mindfulness was just a given?

Well, I wonder if it is because, in the context in which they were training, although a lot of the teachings—for example, on the four jhanas and beyond, the deep meditative states that the Buddha described—were, in a sense, the steps just before his enlightenment. Zen doesn't speak about them either, and yet these experiences happen in our meditation.

And so, you know, the word on the street, if you will, is that so much of Zen was a reaction to the great complexity and detail of the Theravada teachings and the endless lists, and the very methodical, analytical approach to the mind that, you know, starting with China and then Japan, the cutting method, if you will, of just going to the pith of realizing this moment, realizing not only self-nature but the nature of all things through a word, through a sound, through a hit.

It does feel to me like it was kind of like a funnel. Because when you read Dogen, for example, you see that he was steeped in the Sutras. He was steeped in the Madhyamaka teachings, in Nagarjuna. So it wasn't that he wasn't studying it. It's just almost as if everything got funneled and condensed into, well—and he actually does refer to some more of these teachings, the Sutras especially—but it's almost as if, especially with Koan study, everything got condensed to the realization, the result, if you will, of all of that study.

And so that was my training for many, many years. And I just found naturally that as I, you know, evolved a little bit as a practitioner, I became drawn to these earlier teachings. All of a sudden, I could read them. And I wanted to read them.

It is that mind of surrender, if you will, that there is something so much larger and vaster than me,

I am fascinated by the fact that the Buddha and all those who followed after him, that there's really no state of mind or of being that you can experience that hasn't been cataloged by someone. No affliction that someone hasn't experienced and said, "Here's the antidote for it." So really, if at any point you're having trouble with your practice, you can just go to the Sutras and know that somebody was there, stuck, and figured out a way to unstick themselves, and this is how they did it.

Tibetan Buddhists also speak about training the mind very deliberately, and using, again, conduct and images and visualizations and mantras. So I think a lot of it was just different styles of the different schools, but I don't believe that the teachings are not contained in Zen. It's just that they're not always spoken of explicitly.

Yeah. And also it might be another matter of what we have translated so far for us from the tradition.

So again, the program we're talking about is called Taming the Mind. And if you want to go further into it than what we've discussed today, you'll just have to join us here on the weekend of April 21st to 23rd.

But you can check out the actual description for the retreat on the monastery's website, zmm.mro.org. And you'll find links to our entire summer programming there as well, which recently went online.

Once again, thanks for listening to the ZMM Podcast. And until next time, take good care.

On Mindfulness - Interview, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.