Placing Ourselves in Suchness, Part Two
Photo by Mathew Schwartz
In the second half of her talk on suchness, Zuisei speaks further on the nature of reality and our place in it.
“Our lives are just long enough for us to ask, ‘What is this?’ and to find an answer to that question. But they are too short not to ask at all.”
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.
Placing Ourselves in Suchness, Part Two
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in the city called Placing Ourselves in Suchness. When I was reading over it the other day, I felt I hadn't really dealt with the most important part of the talk, so I decided to return to it. This is Placing Ourselves in Suchness, Part Two.
For that talk, I used primarily a poem by Joy Harjo, which I will return to in this passage from the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra:
My own self I will place in suchness, and so that all the world might be helped, I will place all beings into suchness, and I will lead to nirvana, the whole immeasurable world of beings.
With that intention, should a bodhisattva undertake all the exercises which bring about all the wholesome roots?
This is the vow that a bodhisattva makes on the path. This is their intent to lead to nirvana, to freedom from suffering, the whole immeasurable world of beings.
Of course, the first question begging to be asked is: how do we place ourselves in suchness?
I've been speaking recently about some of the teachings of the Yogācāra and the eight levels of consciousness, the image used in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra of the mind as the ocean, and as a wave.
That eighth consciousness, as you know, the storehouse consciousness, the ālaya vijñāna, is the bottom of the ocean, the depths, the ground from which all of the seeds of our karma sprout, bloom. Manas, love of self, looks upon a wave of that ocean. It is the ocean, but it looks at a single wave, and it falls hopelessly in love. It immediately attaches to that wave and makes it its possession. In doing so, it becomes very small.
It's as if sensing, experiencing ourselves as that ocean, that vastness, is too much. It's like we freak out and need to contain that immensity. Right there, on the fly, we just cobble together a raft. We feel a little safer, a little more contained, secure. Yet very quickly we realize that it's still a very flimsy vessel. We get insecure again, grab a bucket of paint, and we just paint a huge X on the side of the raft to mark our spot. The spot still seems small and vague, so we let ourselves float a little bit more, and then we mark another spot, and we mark another one, securing our territory.
It's all made of passion, which we would call zeal and aspiration, and a deep desire to, in fact, be free.
All the while, we're that whole ocean, and we can't—we sense it. I think we all have a sense of it, but we can't touch that vastness. It feels as if we're separate. Manas acts as a kind of filter between the storehouse consciousness and the six senses through which we perceive reality. The catch is that manas cannot perceive reality directly. The storehouse consciousness can, and so can the senses, the six senses. But manas cannot; the self is in its own way. It's like a veil. We're in the peculiar position of having to work hard to realize ourselves. Yet we can't realize ourselves. We can't do it. When we do realize any bit of truth, we see that there was no self to be liberated. The Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra says this: there's no self to awaken, and there never was. That's the liberation. Still the work must be done, or we wouldn't see this.
The work really is to liberate the seeds and the storehouse consciousness from manas' grip, from its infatuation. The way to do that is to place ourselves in suchness, which is a little bit of a funny way of saying it, since there's no place where suchness is not. Given that it is always present, it is seeing that suchness right now. It is letting go of that self so that we can perceive reality directly.
The Yogācāra says that there are three main fields or modes of perception, and the first one is direct. It is the field of suchness in which there is no mediation. We perceive directly. The second is the field of representations, and the third of mere images. As I said, manas can only perceive the last two.
The example that I gave of the field of representations is that, when we fall in love, most of the time we're not really falling in love with a person. We're falling in love with our representation, our idea of them. When our relationship is based on this idea, and not on the person as they are, eventually we will become bored or disappointed, because inevitably at some point our partner will stop acting out our fantasy. They were never a fantasy to begin with. They're alive and they're changing and developing and growing, and struggling with their own representation of you, their own disappointment of you. Life in the realm of representations is very disappointing. That is where we live most of the time, in our projections, in our wishes, in our expectations, which ultimately are unsatisfactory.
How Expectations Shape Experience
A number of years ago, we were with the kids, with Zen kids, and we weren't talking exactly about this, but we were talking about how we perceive, basically, how you have an object and a sense and consciousness, and when you put them together, you perceive. You see, you hear, you taste, you touch. We were making our way through the senses, and when we got to taste, we decided to show how our, especially because we're so visually oriented, how our expectations and our ideas, our representations of what we see, directly influence what we're tasting in this case. We took a bunch of Oreos and played with them. We put fish sauce in some and ketchup in others, and barbecue sauce in others, being very careful that they still looked exactly like a regular Oreo. Then we gave them to the kids. They were absolutely disgusting. They were disgusting. The outcome was as expected. They expected an Oreo, they wanted an Oreo, and then were unpleasantly surprised when they got something else, except for one of them. One of the kids actually loved them. I couldn't believe it. One of the kids wanted more of the ones with the fish sauce on them. She clearly was not stopped by her expectations or influenced by her projections.
We had different ways in which we were showing exactly that, how we, once you experience something, especially something for the first time, you store it, as Dido used to call it, the bio-computer, and then you stop looking, right? Every time you meet it again, oh, there's your… you pull up your representation of it. You don't really have to see directly anymore. At least that's what it seems.
Then the realm of mere images is the realm of dreams, of images, of visualizations. Dreams are produced by the unconscious, and therefore they're hard to manage. Images can be conscious or unconscious, so they can arise deliberately, or they can appear unbidden.
A while ago, I was driving one morning, early one morning, on Woodenburg Road towards Woodstock, and I was at that part where there's a pond on the side. There are animals crossing the road there frequently to get to the pond. That morning, there was a huge— I mean, it must have been this big—a huge snapping turtle in the middle of the road, moving very, very slowly to cross the road. I got concerned that it would be hit. I stopped, I parked the car on the side, and then I was facing this snapping turtle and trying to figure out how to move it. Because, as you probably know, if that thing bites you, it can take your finger off. It's kind of a Mexican standoff, me and the turtle. Somebody else, luckily, there was a woman riding her bike, she stopped. She said, “Well, I have gloves, I'll carry her and you take a stick so that she can grab on to the stick.” I did that, I got a huge stick, and I put it in front of its mouth, and immediately just went… She took it from the back, and then very carefully we put it back where it was coming from. We said goodbye, we thanked each other, and she rode on, I drove off.
The image that popped into my mind was a turtle just shaking its fist at me and being like, “You bitch, I wanted to get to the other side of the road.” Images just come. Visualizations are also images, but they are created deliberately, consciously, and in a very disciplined way, in order to give rise to a particular reality. In the Vajrayāna tradition, visualizations are actually called creation meditation. If we think of Zuisei as non-creation, as putting to rest that constant, constant making and proliferation here, which is in fact an advanced practice, it is how to turn your energy and focus it very strongly to create a world, a state of mind, a being, often to embody that being.
Although they're still images, they're not reality as it is. Technically, I feel that they do have their own suchness, their own truth, and therefore enormous power. When harnessed, they can be used as skillful means to direct, to protect, to illuminate this body and mind.
I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Vanessa.
To pray, you open your whole self to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon, to one whole voice that is you.
Know there is more that you can't see, can't hear, can't know, except in moments steadily growing, and in languages that aren't always sound, but other circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning over Salt River circled in blue sky, and wind swept our hearts clean with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves, and know that we must take the utmost care and kindness in all things.
Breathe in knowing we are made of all this, and breathe knowing we are truly blessed because we were born, and die soon within a true circle of motion.
Like eagle running out the morning inside us, we pray that it will be done in beauty, in beauty.
The student who sent this poem to me said it reminded him of Rilke, but softer and more patient. I liked that. Patience, śānti, as you know, is one of the pāramitās, one of the perfections whose base is wisdom. Śāntideva says that there is no evil similar to anger, no austerity compared with patience. I remember the first time I read that I was struck by that word: no austerity compared with patience. We so often think of austerity as severity, as sternness. It can be cold, it can seem aloof, hard. But this is a patience that is very simple and gentle and extremely kind. Like this poem, which says that in order to pray, we have to open our whole selves to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon. We have to bare our hearts so they can be swept clean. You cannot do that in a hurry. You cannot do it ahead of time. I had to learn the hard way that I couldn't be gentle and rushing at the same time. I could get a lot done if I was moving fast, but that didn't leave much room for anything else. It didn't leave any room for anyone else. I'm still learning to not move fast. I think of patience as the ability to not anticipate, to be fully present in the here and now. You can think of patience as the sister of suchness. Patience doesn't wait. It's not resigned. It just is. Being truly patient, you cannot even call yourself patient. You can't call yourself anything. You cannot call yourself anything. Meeting this moment, you're fully met by it in turn.
I know I often say this in the work meeting, to let the work teach you, because I find it to be so true, that when I'm able to get myself out of the way, or just quiet down enough, what is in front of me teaches me exactly, exactly how it needs to be cared for. Therefore I can know and understand its blessedness. It's not like we have to work hard to see this blessedness. We can see it everywhere, everywhere we look. When it seems like it's not there, it's not because it's absent, but because it's covered over. Sometimes it's so covered over that there's barely a glimmer of it. But it's never not there. It's finding that barest of glimmers, a little bit of light to enter with. You.
We were saying to the kids the other day, we were talking about bullying, we were saying, no one can take away from you, you. No one can take away from you your perfection. It's hard to see that. I wish I'd been able to see it in sixth grade, seventh grade, which was hellish. I could, I guess I could sense enough to know that responding back was not the way that I wanted to go, but I didn't yet, I couldn't yet touch that there was something that no matter what was happening couldn't be taken from me. When you really see that, then it's not hard at all. Thank you.
Breathing, Being, and the Unseen Strength of Women
Harjo says, breathe in, knowing we are made of all this, and breathe, knowing we are truly blessed because we were born. These two lines reminded me: there's a kōan in the Book of Serenity in which Araja invites Prajñātāra to a feast and asks why she doesn't read scriptures. A few years back, there was a theory circulating among some Buddhist scholars that Prajñātāra is actually a woman. Given how few women are mentioned in the Buddhist literature, period, and how few are mentioned by name, I'm all for this theory. I was thinking, I have to say, as I was thinking of this, because as a woman, and as a woman in the Dharma, this omission is painful. I work with it in various ways myself, but it hurts. It hurts that in this wisdom tradition that I love and trust deeply, again, as women, we're often not represented or misrepresented. We were the servants or the temptresses and the witches, the nameless bystanders. There are some stories where women are featured. Some of the stories, the women of the way, tell of the training of the Chinese and the Japanese women who became nuns, some of them masters, teachers in their own right. A number of them tell of them being harassed by their fellow monks or denied training because they were women. In extreme cases, some of them would disfigure themselves in order to prove how much they really wanted to devote their lives to the Buddha Dharma.
A tradition that says at its heart, there is no distinction, there's no high and low, everyone, regardless of who they are, what they look like, has Buddha nature and can realize it. I know that Shugun Roshi spoke about this recently with regards to the Prajñāparamitā Sūtra, and for that I am deeply grateful. I was talking to one of the female monastics, and was reminded myself that not speaking about it is a kind of collusion. It's a kind of acceptance. It's like saying, “You know, it's okay,” or “This doesn't really affect me. It doesn't affect us,” which, of course, is not true. I think of all the women who are coming forward, speaking up about the abuse they've suffered at the hands of very public figures, men in positions of power. I think of the many, many more who may not ever come forward. I read a very sobering statistic that a woman is assaulted every 45 seconds. That's 50 women just during the course of this talk. I would like to say to those who create this hurt: you're harming our body. Please don't do this. It's our body. With each new allegation, I feel myself bracing. There is another, and another. Me too, me too, me too. Me too, me too, me too.
In one sense, maybe we have to work harder to let go, to drop off body and mind, you know, as women in a female body. The hurt, the fear is so old, is so in ourselves, that we can't just tell ourselves, “Well, you know, just relax, just let go.” Unfortunately, this is the product of this kind of hurt. We become afraid. We become afraid of you, our brothers. We don't want to be—speaking for myself, I don't want to be—and yet sometimes I am. Being excluded is not the same as being raped. There is a whole range of harm, from outright hatred to indifference. At the same time, perhaps for the first time, we are speaking up. For the first time, someone's listening, and someone's doing something, here we are working hard to change the strains of this unskillful karma. Hopefully, we will continue to see ourselves and see each other, and to know that we must take the utmost care and kindness in all things, here and beyond these walls, because that's what is needed. If we're going to stop this, that is what is needed. Why wouldn't we do this, when this is what we're made of: this care and this kindness, this gentle patience, that is also fearless and undaunted.
The rāja asks Prajñātāra, “Why don't you read the scriptures?” Prajñātāra says, “I don't dwell in body and mind when breathing in. I don't get involved with things when breathing out. I always reiterate such a scripture, hundreds, thousands, millions of scrolls.” Shuken Roshi called kinhin a sutra. Breathing in and breathing out are Prajñātāra's sutra. I don't dwell when breathing in. I don't get involved when breathing out. She's that close. She's not saying she doesn't care. She cares completely. She could also have said, “Breathing in, I know I'm breathing in. Breathing out, I know I'm breathing out. Breathing in, I breathe with the entire breath body. Breathing out, I breathe out with the entire breath body.” She breathes in, knowing we are made of all this, and breathes, knowing she is blessed.
It is to be made of all size and tears. It is to be made of all faith and service. It is to be all made of fantasy, all made of passion, and all made of wishes. All adoration, duty, and observance. All humbleness, all patience and impatience. All purity, all trial, all obeisance. This is from Shakespeare's As You Like It. Sylvia, the shepherd, is explaining what it means, what it takes to be in love. Except for fantasy, this could just as well be describing the spiritual path. Maybe we should keep fantasy in there, since that's usually part of the picture. I think they're an excellent description of what it takes to place ourselves in suchness.
There's definitely some sighs and tears of sadness, of joy, of disappointment, of deep, deep pleasure, of contentment, of fulfillment. There's really a lot of feeling happening, more and more. It is tobe made of all faith and service. It is to be made of giving, letting it go, offering, and responding as well as we can, to the extent and to the depth of our clarity, our understanding, and then our ability to manifest that moment to moment. It's made of trust in our indomitable nature, in our wish to be awake more than we think we want to be numb, to be protected, to be contained. It's all made of passion, which we would call zeal and aspiration, and a deep desire to, in fact, be free. A deep desire to no longer fear that immensity and the wildness of that ocean, its unpredictability, its aliveness. You don't know what will happen next, but you don't need to. Whatever presents itself to you, you just respond, you meet it, and you respond.
It's made of reverence and responsibility and respect, and even, let's call it, veneration. Veneration for truth, for goodness, for wisdom, for the universality of that Buddha nature. Prajñātāra asked Bodhidharma, “What among things is greatest?” Bodhidharma said, “The nature of reality is greatest. Is greatest.” Breathe in, knowing we are made of all this. Breathe, knowing we are truly blessed because we were born, and die soon within a true circle of motion.
Our lives are just long enough, just long enough for us to ask, “What is this?” And to find an answer to that question. They're too short not to ask at all. They take infinite humility and matching patience and impatience. They're too short to rest in our certainties, in our half-knowledge.
Seeing Deeply, Bowing Fully
In another part of the Sūtra, the Buddha asks Subhuti, if somebody touches an elephant, touches the leg of an elephant, and then the Buddha says, would it make sense for them to… I don't remember exactly how the quote goes… but would it make sense for them to know the shape or the size, the nature of the elephant, just by the nature of the leg? Subhuti says, “No, of course not. Exactly.” Being awake requires that we be willing to not assume that we know and understand what we have not carefully studied and deeply pondered.
You know, Master Dōgen says, “Study deeply and study more.” There is no point at which we will say, “That's it, I have seen everything there is to be seen.” That is the best of news, because that means there is always something more that we can clarify. The path will be challenging, but we wouldn't really expect it to be otherwise. We're speaking of a total transformation, a revolution of mind. The Bodhisattva knows that it will be challenging, and they're undaunted by that challenge. Doesn't mean they don't struggle. Doesn't mean sometimes they don't know how to proceed. Doesn't mean sometimes they don't make mistakes, or they fall short, or they misstep in some way. It just means they're not stopped by that challenge.
It's totally transformed, we realize nothing has changed. Hogan Sensei said the other day: everything was pure from the beginning, from the beginning and all the way through. That's why it deserves our respect. All of it. It's pure from the beginning and all the way through.
As for obeisance, you know, Jima used to say that the run, the run on the inking that the dōan does, that it should sound in such a way that it should have such spark, such energy, such life, that at the end of it, the only possible is to bow. That's how she would train the dōans. The only possible thing is, you have to bow if you're doing that run correctly. That's not true just of the inking run. That's true of our lives. When we are able to see their blessedness, to see their beauty, despite the pain, including the pain because of the pain, the most appropriate response is definitely, definitely a bow.
Wow.
Placing Ourselves in Suchness, Part Two, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
Explore further
01 : Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo
02 : Placing Ourselves in Suchness, Part 1 with Vanessa Zuisei Goddard