Possibility
Photo by Marcis Berzins
Do you ever pause in the midst of your life and ask yourself, what is my role in all of this? What is my agency?
In this talk Zuisei addresses the need to train the body, mind, spirit and heart, the need to learn endurance, flexibility, and kindness, the need to be here now. In the spiritual path, all action is rooted in the clarity and wisdom that arise out of stillness and silence. And out of this wisdom comes hope—or possibility.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hello everyone, good evening. Yesterday morning, when I woke up, the city was covered in fog. It had that particular quiet that is present when you can't see the sun, no different from when it's snowing—a kind of hush. It made me think of the different gradients of silence.
I went through my morning routine, which involves tea and a chocolate chip cookie, I sat, and then I went out for my run through the quiet Brooklyn streets. I was feeling the wonder and the fragility of this human life, this very delicate balance that determines whether we are here or not, whether we're conscious or not, able-bodied or not, free or not. I was feeling extremely grateful that I am all of these things—well, the free part I'm still working on—but that I'm here, that I'm conscious, that I'm able-bodied, at least now. And as I was running back, I was thinking of this seven year-old boy whom I teach. He's not big in size at all, but his presence is very big. His relationship with space and with things is a little bit challenged. He doesn't always know where he ends and things begin. He can be a bit rough. He's kind of this small package of what can sometimes be our own fumbling as we move through life, bumping into things and people, breaking things. But he's a kid, so in him it's acceptable, if you will.
So, I was asked to teach him to be a bit more aware of his actions, aware of his speech, aware of his energy and how he uses it, and aware of things. We've been meeting every week for some months now, and I've gotten to know him a little bit. I was looking for different ways to engage him. Of course, we're doing this via Zoom which adds a little bit of a challenge to it, especially because I didn't know him before. So, I came up with the idea of a Ninja Academy, Nico's Ninja Academy. I know it sounds a little bit like it's run by the mafia. I don't know why I came up with that name, but that's the name that came to me. In this academy, there are the neighborhood kids like Loud Emily, Billy the Destroyer, Bull-in-a-China-Shop Harry. They come to train with Nico, the Ninja Master, and also with this boy I'm working with. I set down Five Cardinal Rules which are: Ninja Focus, Ninja Voice, Ninja Flow, Ninja Chi—as in energy—and Ninja Kind. I won't put you through what all of these are.
As I was working through this in the last couple of weeks, it reminded me of a dream I've always had of a Bodhisattva Academy, a training place for the systematic learning on how to be a human being. I mean, people train to be Navy Seals, free divers, stockbrokers, and chefs. In fact, I work with a previous stockbroker who was very high up in one of the big firms on Wall Street. He has described working hundred-hour weeks. Now, there's one-hundred sixty-eight hours in a week, so if you're working for a hundred of those hours imagine everything that you're not doing, from spending time with family to basic human functions. He has described a little bit of what that was like, and how he got through it. It was not pretty. So, we train for all sorts of things without giving it a second thought, devoting those ten thousand hours that are supposed to develop our mastery. In this Bodhisattva Academy, we would train for awakening, for attaining depth and humanity, clear comprehension, as the sutras call it. Of course, these academies already exist; monasteries are exactly this. They train the body. They train the mind, the spirit. They train the heart and the brain—at their best. At their best that's what they're meant to do. Sometimes you can get caught up in bureaucracy.
Years ago, when I was still at the monastery there was some kind of bureaucratic muddle that we were wrapped in. I described this to a friend, and she just wrote me a one line email that said, "Institutions: where Utopia goes to die." [Laughter] I thought that was perfect; I still have the email, actually. But when they're working, when these academies are working, they are archives of sanity, as my teacher used to call them. And this isn't just monasteries; it's also retreat centers. In my vision, in my dream, it wasn't really a monastery. It was more like an academy where people would come and really study and train, but then they would go out. They would go out into the world. They would learn about resilience, endurance in the face of difficulty, flexibility, kindness, kindness, kindness.
I think of these places—and this, [indicates Zoom room] this is such a practice place—I think of them as eddies. In the stream, and the push, and the rush of life; the urgency of doing, and attaining, and becoming, in these eddies you slow down. You quiet down enough so that you can see—Oh, I'm floating in the water, and I'm going somewhere. Life is happening all around me. Sometimes it seems to be happening to me. So, what's my role in this? What's my agency?
Thomas Merton once said that a monk's life is pointless, in that, that is its very point. Its pointlessness is the point. In speaking of monasteries he said, "In a world of noise, confusion and conflict, it is necessary for there to be places of silence, of inner discipline, and peace, not the peace of mere relaxation," he said, "but the peace of inner clarity and love based on aesthetic renunciation." That's a bit top heavy as phrases go, ascetic renunciation, so think of it as letting go of the noise, letting go of the bustle in favor of profound stillness and silence, letting go of the chatter that covers up our loneliness, letting go of distraction or overwork that buffers us from our fear, our insecurity—essentially letting go of what distracts us, what keeps us from being close and being intimate with ourselves, with our lives here, now. These places of practice, these refuges would foster silence in our lives. And they are an ever-dwindling resource. Of course, not all silence is created equal, by any means. Here I'm really speaking of a silence that Christians call kenosis: self-emptying.
In our daily lives we produce, produce, produce—there's self, self, self all over the place. In this stillness and silence of zazen, of meditation, contemplation, we stop. Or we try. We empty ourselves of ourselves, so that life can pour through. Like the koan I spoke of before: 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? In other words, where is the problem?
I started writing this a couple of days ago and I mentioned free-divers. Coincidentally, this morning, I was reading an article in the New York Times, about a Russian free-diver, Natalia Molchanova. She set all of these world records over a number of years. This is what she said of free-diving: "Free diving is not only sport, it's a way to understand who we are. When we go down, if we don't think, we understand we are whole. We are one with world. When we think, we are separate. On surface, it is natural to think and we have many information inside. We need to reset sometimes. Free diving helps do that."
I was trying to imagine that space, to be that intimate with breath, to be that intimate with space and with silence, underwater. She actually disappeared in 2015. She was doing what for her was a fun dive, a series of fun dives with friends. She went down and never came up. They never found her. Imagine that. But she's right: when we think, we are separate. That's really the crux. Whether you're doing formal meditation, ecstatic dance, or running, or diving or surfing, it's the doing of something completely, where thinking stops. That is the key.
The advantage of meditation is that it comes with a whole framework with which to understand what happens when that experience takes place. So, it's not just being in the zone. It's understanding through and through what it means when we say [you] are whole in your body, in your mind, in your soul. It's so easy to say, but what does that actually mean?
This is my fantasy. This is my dream: a legion of Bodhisattvas doing this work. That together we'll fight the quiet fight. Stealthily, like ninjas, we would infiltrate schools, boardrooms, banks, and courthouses. We'd be in families, right in the middle of those relationships with loved ones and children, parents. We would do the unexpected thing, the revolutionary thing. When hurt, we would not hurt another. We wouldn't blame. We wouldn't justify. We wouldn't excuse ourselves. We wouldn't hate on another. We wouldn't be aggressive or passive aggressive. We wouldn't harden and we wouldn't lash out, at least some of the time.
This would absolutely require quite a bit of training. Just think of the last time that you were hurt by someone else. What did you do? What did you do in your mind? And then what did you actually do? Think of how incredibly demanding it is to just hold that hurt. To hold it and not to act it out, is in fact, a form of renunciation. I renounce my right to be right, to be vindicated. If you think about it, what good does it do anyway? Not that you should just accept the hurt, just take it. But that impulse to kick, what good does it do?
A couple of weeks ago, I sat Tangaryo with four people who wanted to formalize a teacher-student relationship, Norm, Brian, Hunter, and Jess Plumb who can't usually be here on Wednesdays because she's in England and the time difference is a little much for her.
Tangaryo. Tanga means staying until the morning. Ryo means room. So, it's the room where monks would stay when they were on pilgrimage. At a certain point it became a tradition: monks would stand outside the monastery gates, in the snow, in the rain, in the sun, showing their zeal. They would be let in, eventually, and then they would go into a room where they would spend seven days sitting uninterruptedly. They would eat very little, drink very little, and they would just sit. That's it. That was the test of their earnestness. Then they would be led to their seat of practice that was, quite literally, where they lived, where they sat, where they slept, where they ate.
And, we did a very, very, short version of this. [laughs] We did a few hours of sitting, and I sat with them. Afterwards, we had tea, over Zoom. And I said to them that these heroic stories that have come down to us, especially in Zen—some of them are quite dramatic. But the real heroism, in my humble opinion, is showing up, again and again for your life; to decide to be in our lives in this moment. To say, Today I will not shut down or let myself off or let a thing slide. Today I won't turn away, I won't avoid, I won't close my eyes. Today I won't blame or project or deflect. I will own my thoughts, my actions, my words and I will relate to you with respect and with the knowledge that we're connected in a way that I can't even begin to understand—not intellectually. To me, that's really what's heroic, and also utterly ordinary. It's what we are built for as human beings. So, I said that I think of this less that they are becoming my students and more that we're standing side-by-side, facing the same direction. We're facing reality together. We're saying, help me to be and stay awake.
Over the years when I go home, my father introduces me to a friend, and they say, "Oh, what do you do?" And I say, "well, I teach meditation; I teach Buddhism." Invariably, people will smile, nod, and say, "Oh, that's so nice." [laughs] Like I just told them that I'm going off to camp. Invariably, this happens. I've been thinking, what could I say that would give this a little more gravitas? What would communicate more clearly what it is that I do? And I thought, well, I could say, "I'm a student of reality." That would still be a little abstract, but closer to the truth. I've made it my job, my business, my purpose to learn to see what I can't yet see, and I'm trying to help others to do that.
The poet William Stafford said, "Your job is to figure out what the world is trying to be." What this world really is, I think, is a more accurate way of saying it. I've been grappling, lately, with that question, Is Buddhism enough, given the relentlessness of the violence, the instability, and the conflict, the hatred? Is Buddhism enough? Is practice enough? I have come to see, again, that hopefully there will always be people doing environmental work, and social action work and people lobbying for and fighting for voting reform and campaign reform and human rights and women's rights and immigration rights. But what we can bring to this work that is unique, to the many other kinds of work that all of us do, is that willingness, that willingness to face reality, unflinchingly. We vow to see, in ourselves and in another, what we don't want to see, what we can't see. And when we don't want to, to ask with real curiosity, with real interest, what is this? How is this? How does this fit with the rest of the picture that is me? And I asked myself, "Can I do that?" And I thought, "Yes, that is something I can do." When I fail, when I don't want to look, then I ask myself why, which is still a way of looking. So my commitment is to not close my eyes. Or, if I close them, to open them again.
Watching the moon
at midnight,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely,
no part left out.
This is a poem by Izumi Shikibu, a Buddhist poet and noble woman,10th-11th century. She was said to be the greatest woman poet of the Heian period.
She encapsulated the real work, the totality of the curriculum of the Bodhisattva Academy: "To know myself completely, leaving nothing out." Conflict and violence come out of denial. When we act out, from a tantrum to full blown war, it really comes from that place of hurt. Denial, if you think about it, is such an interesting concept. It's the willful negation of what is despite evidence to the contrary. It's such an interesting protective mechanism.
Many years ago, I went to Mexico, and I wanted to visit the cemetery where my mother is buried. I had only been there once before, and my father gave me directions. It's complicated to get there. It's in a very remote neighborhood in a complicated city. He gave me directions and he said, “Just look for the sign. There's a huge sign that says “Crematorio el Crepúsculo.” You'll see it. It's right at the entrance so you can't miss it.” So, I get in the car and I start driving. I’m driving and driving and driving. Some of it kind of looks familiar. There’s an entrance that kind of looks familiar. I can’t see the sign. So I keep driving around and around for a couple of hours. I was about to give up when I saw a security booth. I stopped and I asked the guy, “Do you know where the crematory is?”
He said, “It’s right here. This is the entrance.”
“But I was here last year and there was this huge sign.”
And he said, “Oh, yeah, we took it down.”
“Why?”
He points and he says, “Well, you see those apartments down there?” “Yeah.” I see a hillside and these modern apartments.
“Well, the administration didn't think that people would buy an apartment here if they knew they had to drive past the crematory. So we just took down the sign, so that way they can pretend it’s not here.”
I swear [laughs] that’s what he said. “That way they can pretend it’s not there.” They drive every day; the crematorium is right there, and they drive right past it. That way they can pretend it’s not there.
I think that’s the critical moment in our lives, when we decide we’re done pretending. That’s when we turn. That’s the beginning of turning towards some form of practice, which is liberating but also painful and more than a little bit scary. It can also be overwhelming.
Even as I described the features of a student in this Bodhisattva Academy, these could be overwhelming. When you just list them: I’m not going to get angry, I’m not going to lash out at you, I won’t resent you. When I just list them like that... Of course, it’s never like that. You’re just practicing one moment at a time, one interaction at a time, one situation at a time.
Kuan Yin’s head exploded eleven times as she was trying to save all beings. We can expect we're going to feel a little overwhelmed now and then. That’s the thing, the more you practice you realize, as my teacher said, “May my heart break so that yours doesn’t have to.” I hear his voice saying that and I think to myself, May I be able to live up to that. But our heart has an incredible capacity to heal and regenerate, like Kuan Yin’s heads. She had help, granted. She had Amitabha putting another head and another one, giving her all those thousand hands and arms. But we realize our heart is not limited. It’s not just this organ pumping blood. We realize we have the capacity, when we fall on the ground, to use that ground to stand up. What else would we use? The very thing we fell on is what we use to pick ourselves up—the job you hate, the relationship that’s not working. The lack of umph you have today, tomorrow. You fail and you fall, and as you’re lying on the ground, staring up at the sky on your back, you ask yourself, What is necessary here? What did I miss? What do I have to do now? You check that all your limbs are working; you massage them a little bit. Slowly you get up, and you dust yourself off.
If you can’t do it alone, you reach for someone’s hand. Another person who’s standing on that very same ground, and they help you up. Because that’s what Bodhisattva's do for one another. Even two people.
If just two people come together to practice the way, that is a Sangha. That’s two people facing reality together. Two people saying I will not let the world change me; move me toward fear, or hatred. This is essentially the Bodhisattvas promise: I will not let you make me hate you. I will not join you there. I refuse to join you there. Because I have work to do. And I need all of my energy for it.
This is from “Everyday is a wide field, every page.” by Naomi Shihab Nye. And it’s not the whole poem. It’s just an excerpt:
And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.
We didn’t have to be in the same room—
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing ...
Hope was always the thing!
What else did we give each other
from such distances?
Breath of syllables,
sing to me from your balcony
please! Befriend me
in the deep space.
When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.
“Hope is the thing.” We don’t speak of hope much in Buddhism, perhaps because it implies anticipation, expectation, desire even. Which is quite alright, if you ask me. But still, let me give it a slightly different name, then. If not hope, then let’s call it… possibility.
Explore further
01 : Izumi Shikibu at Poetry Foundation
02 : Come to the Mountain: New Ways and Living Traditions in the Monastic Life by Thomas Merton
03 : Every day as a wide field, every page by Naomi Shihab Nye