Renunciation Paramita
Photo by Ave Calvar
In the third talk in this series of ten talks on the paramitas, Zuisei speaks on the importance of renunciation:
“What if we think of renunciation as the protest against anything that gets in the way of our clear seeing? Renunciation of noise, of distraction, of self-serving thoughts, of doubt, of arrogance, of greed and fear and laziness, harshness and the need to control.”
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.
Renunciation Paramita
I have been studying the ten Paramitas, the virtues of an enlightened being, and I had planned to talk about renunciation, Paramita. And then the attacks happened. And I still want to talk about it, but with a slightly different focus.
The characteristic of these Paramitas, of these virtues, is to benefit others. Their function is to offer help without hesitation. Their manifestation is to wish that all beings attain Buddhahood, attain enlightenment. And their proximate cause or their root is great compassion. And skillful means.
The traditional definition of renunciation, Paramita, was really in a monastic context. So it was a renunciation of sense pleasures, renunciation of existence, of the desire to be, but also renunciation of lay life and all of its responsibilities. And this was with the recognition that it was more difficult—not impossible, but more difficult—to realize oneself. But when I was looking at the word itself from the Latin renunciare, it means to protest against. And so when you think—even, you know, when we take a moment of silence like this, which really transcends religions, right, we do this in the face of something so large and difficult and painful. And what we're doing in a moment like that, I think at least part of what we're doing is protesting against our busyness, protesting against our momentum and our activity, and saying, this requires something different; this is important enough that I need to stop and bear witness in any way that I can.
So protesting—renunciation, protesting against or taking a stand against what? Myself, really, fundamentally. That's what it is, because the self is not what I think it is. As I said to some of you when we were doing Beginning Instruction in Zazen, it feels solid, you know, and after all, here I am, and it feels very real and very intractable at times. And yet, as you begin to practice, and certainly the more you practice, the more you realize, first of all, it's not what I think it is. Second of all, it doesn't need to be shored up. It's like propping up fog or water, which is foolish in a way, and yet this is what we spend our entire lives doing—fighting for this self and its beliefs, its opinions, its preferences. And in a small scale, it just looks like self-centeredness. In a large scale, it looks like war.
So renunciation is to protest against the autocracy of the self, what I like to call the empire of me, declaring a coup—a peaceful coup—against the status quo. And it's not even the status quo. That's what's paradoxical about it. There's no one on the throne, you see. We march here and there to imaginary orders. We pay a tithe. Actually, it's much more than just 10% of our income. The cost of the self, the empire of me, is much higher than that. And all along, it's the reverse of the emperor's clothes. All the clothes are there, but there's no emperor. There's nobody wearing them. And it starts so early. That's the thing. I mean, it probably is beginningless. But we were working with the kids yesterday. We had a family retreat. And it's sobering, I have to say, to see how early: This is mine. This is me. This is mine. No, I don't want this. How early it starts. And in a way, there is no way around it. But how I wish there was, you know, when I have a three-year-old in front of me, a four-year-old in front of me, and I want to say, this is going to be really hard. Just start right now. It's going to be really hard. And of course, you can't. You have to let them be a three-year-old. And in the other way, you can't let go of what you don't have. So there is all the work—those of you who are parents know—all the work of building up, cultivating a healthy, a strong sense of self. So hopefully one day, they'll be able to release it. They'll see the need to release it. So we do make these buildings, these castles, out of fog. But it's still fog. So sooner or later, we have to see that. Because if we don't, we suffer. This is our world. And we wonder, why does it have to be so hard? And it doesn't. That is what the Buddha saw. It doesn't have to be this hard. It doesn't have to be what we're seeing day after day. And if one human being realized it, all of us can.
There is an urgency in human life—the gift we have been given. We have this body, this mind. We can wake up.
We were asking the kids before, and up at the monastery in Zen Kids, we're actually talking about truth, but we asked some of them, "Did you dress up for Halloween?" And they said, "Of course." And one of them said she dressed up as a princess's kitty. So not just any kitty, a princess's kitty. It was very specific. And we said, "Well, so when you were the princess's kitty, where was Evy?" And she just looked at us. And I said, "You know, so right now, who are you?" And she said, "Well, I'm Evy." I said, "Well, so where's the kitty?" She's like, "It's gone." I said, "But where did it go? Which one is the true you?" You have to start them early, like I said. You know, when you wake up in the morning, you have a bad dream and you're kind of out of sorts, is that you? And then you go to work, and your boss tells you, "You got that promotion." Now you're delighted, you're thrilled. Is that you? What happened to the one who was out of sorts? You go on the subway, you're not looking where you're going, and somebody bumps into you and calls you a name, and now you're insulted, you're hurt. Is that you? What does it mean, really, to renounce your sense of self, which you have been building so carefully all this time?
It doesn't mean what we think it means. It doesn't mean to negate the self, because that's already too much, that's already too active. It's seeing the self for what it really is. And seeing, I feel, is the key word here. So what if we think of renunciation as protesting anything that gets in the way of that clear seeing? Renunciation of noise, of distraction, of my self-centeredness, my self-serving thoughts, self-doubt, arrogance, greed, fear, laziness, harshness, the need to control myself or the environment.
Facing Your Inner Demons
I was reading a talk by Ajahn Chah, who was a Theravadan teacher in the Thai forest tradition. He was well known later because he was also Jack Kornfield's teacher, and his teachings were translated. He was a very powerful, very unusual teacher. And I was reading this talk where he was talking about Dharma fighting. And so he says, "Fight greed, fight aversion, fight delusion. These are the enemy. In the practice of Buddhism, the path of the Buddha, we fight with Dharma using patient endurance." And you know, if you just read it, especially if you read it out of context, it sounds harsh—let's always talk about fighting. But he was a very gentle teacher, actually, and yet he was very direct. My favorite quote by him is: "If you have a little piece, if you let go a little, you'll have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you'll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will be free." So he wasn't harsh, but he was uncompromising.
Another one of Jack Kornfield’s teachers, Dipa Ma, once said to Joseph Goldstein, “Well, you should sit for two days.” And he realized that what she meant was: you should take your seat and stay there for two days. Don’t move. Do a period of zazen. They didn’t call it zazen, but sit for two days, for forty-eight hours. And he said, “But I can’t.” And she just said to him, “Don’t be lazy,” and walked away. She wasn’t having it. And she was a lay teacher. She had a little apartment in Calcutta, I believe. And people would always complain to her—her lay students, which is all the students she had—they would say, “Well, I don’t have time. I don’t have time to practice.” You know, one of them was a baker, and so he was working all the time. And she said, “Well, do you have two minutes?” And the baker said, “Well, yes, I have two minutes.” She said, “Two minutes of practice, right there.”
Ajahn Chah, you know, here he’s saying that there is such a thing as fighting Dharma. But look at his definition of fighting. He says, Dharma and the world are interrelated: where there is Dharma, there is the world. Where there is the world, there is Dharma. Where there are defilements, there are those who conquer defilements, who do battle with them. This is called fighting inwardly. To fight outwardly, people take hold of bombs and guns to throw and to shoot. They conquer and are conquered. Conquering others is the way of the world. In the practice of Dharma, we don’t have to fight others, but instead conquer our own minds, patiently enduring and resisting all our moods. So patiently enduring and resisting all our moods—we renounce them. We protest against them. We’re saying, “You’re not in charge of me. You’re not the boss of me. You, greed, my anger, my ignorance, my self-hatred, my ill will, my annoyance, you are not in charge of me.”
It is absolutely true that we need to take all of it in, that we need to make friends, as some teachers say, with those less savory aspects of ourselves, our demons. But I was reflecting on it. I don’t think I would use the word “make friends.” I would say that you have to face your demons with great respect and dignity, because they are there, they are real, they are true. But you don’t have to like them. You don’t have to like your pettiness, for example. You do have to see it clearly. You don’t have to like it. In fact, if you don’t like it, you are more likely to do something about it, to change it, to protest against it. It’s no longer okay for me to act this way. At that moment, when there’s that uncomfortable time, when it’s too painful to continue the way you have been, but you don’t know any other way, that period of time is actually quite difficult, because you feel the need to change, but you don’t know how. But I feel that that moment, when you say, “This needs to change. This is no longer okay,” that’s the moment of turning. And you don’t actually need to know what it will look like. You just take the next step. And because you’re practicing the next step, the ground meets you, I think, as Shugun Sensei often says. And then you take the next step.
But what about when it’s someone else’s demons, their darkness? This is when we realize that practice isn’t make-believe. It’s not just doing spiritual exercises that don’t have a relationship to real life, to suffering. It’s in fact going very deeply into ourselves to recognize what can be painful, but it’s actually unavoidable because it’s true that we’re all capable of great delusion, which at a time can turn into violence. And no, we might not plant a bomb, we might not go in and shoot indiscriminately, but that seed of delusion, of separation, of fear, of hatred, is there. That’s why we call greed, anger, and ignorance the three poisons. But there’s the other side. Every single one of us also has the antidote: the seeds of compassion, wisdom, and enlightenment. And why do we choose one over the other at any moment in our lives? When something like what happened in Paris happens, it makes it very real. It brings it to the fore, and it’s right on your face. You can’t ignore it. In that way, we can’t ignore it. So it’s a moment of teaching. It’s a moment that just wakes you up, whether you know anybody who was there, whether you could have been there yourself. It’s a moment that says, “Wait a second, are you really just going to go along like you always have?” It makes you stop. And each one of us, according to our karma, will live out, will make choices, will make different choices. And according to our clarity, our wisdom, according to how we understand ourselves, how we understand each other, what we are able to see at any given time.
Ajahn Chah speaks of Sati, or Smṛti in Sanskrit, which is mindfulness. Nowadays, mindfulness has become so popular that you can tie your shoes mindfully. But really, it is the ground, the basis of clear seeing, because without it, not much can happen. Ajahn Chah says that without Sati, without mindfulness, you’re crazy. Five minutes of no mindfulness, five minutes you’re crazy. And we spend years of our lives this way. We don’t have to stretch very far. If we really take it in, those moments in our day when we go a little crazy—whether it’s with worry, with anxiety, with fear, or just when we get narrow, self-absorbed—these are moments of inattention.
Learning to See Clearly
I went for a run the other day, and out of five people that I passed on the road, four were walking with their phone. I constantly had to swerve to avoid them. And I have my opinions about this technology, but it’s not making it easier for us to pay attention. All the apps notwithstanding, it’s not making it easier for us to actually be where we are. Without attention, the odds are stacked—and not in our favor.
But then we do this. Those of you who just started, just received the instruction today, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is the most powerful way that you’ll find to look at your mind. There are other ways, of course, but in my opinion, I haven’t found a more powerful way to look at my mind clearly, which is exactly what mindfulness is: to know ourselves, our minds, clearly. That is why we place so much stress on the stillness and silence in Zazen: so that we can see, so that we can hear, so that we can feel completely, so that we’re not cut off from our lives, from each other.
Recently, in another talk, I quoted Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and she has a really beautiful section on seeing. I found a little more because, you know, when somebody’s gift is the gift of words, you want to quote them as much as possible. She says: “All I can do is hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing, just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle. It marks the literature of saints and monks of every order, east and west, under every rule and no rule, decalced and shod.” She could also have said, “bald and with hair.” And it is a struggle, she says, a lifetime of dedicated work. It’s a fight, Ajahn Chah says. It sounds kind of heavy, kind of difficult, but it isn’t, not in the doing—but it is a lifetime of dedicated work. If it weren’t, we would all be enlightened, and this would be a different world.
And yet, you cannot make yourself see. You can only lay the ground. You can only quiet the interior babble. You can only grab the newspaper gently and firmly by the corner and just flick it so it’s not in front of your eyes. Across spiritual literature, in all traditions, all the images of seeing, of light, of illuminating what is dark, point to this. Goddard used to say: you take off the blinders, you set down the pack. And it is, in fact, seeing what was always there but wasn’t visible behind a veil, behind that fog—which at times of great suffering feels more like a wall: impenetrable, unscalable. But it isn’t.
Goddard says, “One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all, and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the morning doves roost, charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused, and utterly dreamed.” It was less like seeing than being, for the first time, seen—knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.
There are these moments in practice that are like that, and they can be quite dramatic: a moment of very clear seeing. And some of them are very small, and in a way very ordinary, and yet something completely shifts. That moment when, for the first time, you see the food in your bowls during Oroki—you’ve been eating food all your life, and you realize you have never actually seen a bowl of rice until that moment. Not really. There’s the amazement in this, and there’s a little bit of sadness, I think, realizing all the things that you’ve missed over the years. But also joy, because now you don’t have to. Now you have a way to see. You have a practice. You have your breath. You have a koan, a question. You have that naked study of your mind: shikantaza, open awareness. You have a way to enter. When you’re tired, when you’re distracted, when you’re getting dull, when you’re getting complacent, when you’re falling asleep again—you have a way to enter.
Showing Up for Life
To do this work is to renounce anything that keeps us apart, that keeps us afraid, that keeps us angry. We protest against our endless stories and lay them to rest. I love a good story when it’s time for a good story, but I love silence too. And we need it; otherwise, we can’t hear. Stories can liberate, but they can also bind. The young men who were involved in the attacks, who perpetuated the attacks, were convinced of the rightness of their decision, the goodness of their actions. How is that possible? We look at it from the outside—how is that possible? But have you ever talked yourself into something that you realized years later was actually completely self-serving? In the moment, it made perfect sense. We’ll make sense of almost anything to get what we want. “If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace.” So we are always at the threshold, limited by what we can see.
Unless we assume, unless we truly take to heart that there’s always more that we can see, that is possible, that we should be suspicious of what we know now. We should assume there’s more than we can see. And if that’s the case, then it’s just a matter of time, of practice and time. “I renounce my right to remain fixed in my views, to keep my focus narrow and limited,” we are effectively saying when we practice. “I renounce my right to fall asleep when I get uncomfortable. I renounce my right to spend my time building myself up or tearing myself or you down. I renounce the impulse to give away my power and to let things happen to me. I renounce to let things happen to me.” In other words, to be a victim of my life, of circumstances.
In the next episode of Ocean Mind Sangha, you know, at a time in our order when things have changed—Shugun says they used to live here, and he doesn’t now. Things changed, and he had to respond. It’s easy to feel abandoned, like we’re the neglected child, the second child. Shugun Sensei wouldn’t say this himself, but I will: abandoning you is the last thing on his mind. If he could be in two places at once, he would be. If he could be everywhere at once, doing everything at once to take care of all that needs to be taken care of, of all beings that need saving, he would. And he does.
A friend of mine said that her son was having a hard time while he was in Germany. He was feeling depressed, and she said, “Go help someone else.” So he did. He volunteered for the Red Cross to work with people—he’s a social worker—with victims of domestic violence in Syrian refugee camps. Within a month, he had been hired to do the job, and he was doing it. He completely turned his life around.
For those of us who’ve made a commitment to this order, to this path, this place is here for us—absolutely. But there’s also every single person who will walk by on the street and think, “Oh, the Zen Center. I wonder what that is.” And maybe they will walk through the door like some of you did this morning. Every person who thinks, “I may want to try to sit down, be quiet for a little bit, look at my mind”—our vow is to be here for them too. To open the door, to show them how to sit, to clean the bathroom, clean the zendo, do a little liturgy, give them some food. Our job is to say in every possible way that we can: yes, there’s a place for you.
But I feel that that moment, when you say, “This needs to change. This is no longer okay,” that’s the moment of turning.
I always think the Saturday night sit is anticlimactic. We’ve done a full day, especially if we’ve done a retreat—we’re kind of tired—and it’s mostly going to be the residents. Then two people show up on a Saturday night to sit, and I realize, “Okay, that’s why I’m here. That’s why we asked you to participate in the liturgy training: because we need you.” It’s nice every once in a while to do all the positions—you do the kugyo, the don, the chanting. It’s fun, but not all the time. We need you to make the liturgy happen, to show up. As Maitreya Sensei used to say, show up and give of yourself without hesitation, because that is the function of a bodhisattva, practicing the paramitas—the virtues of an enlightened being.
Sometimes practice feels daunting. Our heads are full and noisy. There is so much suffering in the world. Peace, let alone enlightenment, feels so far away. But this isn’t theoretical. It isn’t abstract. It isn’t “zenny” or dramatic—though the dramatic moments of seeing exist. Years ago, I came in for my week here, and Shugun Sensei had just come up from downstairs. He had been doing the laundry—the temple laundry—and he was carrying the compost worms and pee in a tray. He was walking around with the tray. I took it from him. He’s the abbot of the temple, and back then, he wasn’t yet the head of the order—but he would be soon. He’s walking around with warm pee because he will do whatever he needs to do to take care of what needs to be taken care of.
That’s really what it is: human beings taking care of one another. Just picking up a little trash on the street, helping to wash the dishes after a meal, sitting down and talking to someone you’ve never talked to. This is how we wake up. We wake up ourselves, and we wake up others. And we must not forget. Things happen in the world all the time, but there are these moments when it feels just a little closer—just a little closer. Not letting it pass by. You don’t have to be walking around depressed, hopefully not. But we must not let it put us back to sleep, not go back to automatic again.
There is an urgency in human life—the gift we have been given. We have this body, this mind. We can wake up. We can choose to not forget, to not take it for granted. May all beings have happiness in the root of happiness. May they be free of suffering and have the root of suffering removed. May they never be separated from boundless joy, which is free of suffering. And may they live in perfect equanimity, which is free of desire or aversion.
Renunciation Paramita, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
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