The Power of Zazen
Photo by Isabell Winter
What is the role of inner transformation in a journey towards a more peaceful and just world? How does the cultivation of mindfulness and wisdom lead us towards right action, as individuals and as a collective?
In this talk, Zusei speaks on the power of meditation to call us forth to wise change-making.
“‘My actions are my only true belongings,” the Buddha said. “My actions are the ground upon which I stand.” So what ground will we choose to stand on? What will we leave in our path?”
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Towards the end of 2012, the Dalai Lama made the following statement: “If every 8-year-old child in the world is taught meditation, we can eliminate violence within one generation.”
It’s a strong statement, a compelling statement that over the last five years has been quoted hundreds of thousands of times. Immediately after it came out, a number of articles and commentaries started to circulate on the internet—most of them positive, but some of them not. One, in particular, was an article by a writer named Be Scofield in Tikkun magazine’s blog, and it caught my attention. Scofield is an activist and yoga teacher. She has a master’s in divinity and leads workshops on white privilege and institutional racism.
In this article she argued that the Dalai Lama’s statement was not only incorrect, that it was also irresponsible, because it could turn us away from having the real conversations that would actually lead us away from violence, she said. Her first argument is that the term “violence” is ambiguous. Isn’t killing someone who’s trying to rape you also violence? Some would call abortion violence, eating meat, participating in capitalism, a broken prison system. So, she says, first we have to agree on what it is we’d be eliminating.
Her second argument is that historically there have been spiritual and religious traditions, based on various kinds of meditation, that have actively supported or perpetuated violence. Sexual abuses within the Catholic church and their cover-ups immediately come to mind, or their equivalents in our tradition. We also know there’s been Zen teachers who enthusiastically, vigorously supported war and the killing that comes with it (some of them are in our lineage). And Scofield argues—as others before and after her have—that you can use meditation or yoga to become a more efficient killing machine. Around that time, a photo of two Navy Seals in full combat uniform, doing warrior pose appeared, but, someone said, they do look very calm and peaceful… And although I’m certain this is not what the Dalai Lama had in mind—you can use meditation in this way.
Then she has a very interesting sentence: “An increase in presence in the world does not increase justice.” By “presence” she means a “raising of consciousness.” And she quite pointedly says that inner transformation doesn’t necessarily lead to social transformation, and that thinking that it does is the danger. By only working on yourself you won’t change the world, she says.
Now, the reason this interests me is because I agree with her statement about transformation; inner transformation won’t necessarily lead to social transformation. It also interests me because I work with children—have done so all my life—and I feel passionate about the importance of teaching them to be still and quiet, to be self-aware, and kind, and yes, to be present. Now, I wouldn’t presume to judge whether the Dalai Lama is right, but I do think that meditation is an excellent place to start. I doubt that he himself meant that meditation alone will take care of all our conflict. Meditation itself will not effect change, of course not. But we—the ones meditating—hopefully will, and if and how we do so is up to us. Not just individually, but the families and societies and countries we are creating, have been creating, for millennia.
Institutional racism, genocide, mass incarceration—our current political and social climate—didn’t spring up from the ether. They didn’t spontaneously generate from the fabric of the universe. We created them, a lot of mes that became wes created them. So how do we un-create them? How do we create something else?
One of my favorite anecdotes, which I’ve quoted often enough that it’s in danger of becoming trite, but I’ll quote anyway, is that of A.J. Muste, the Dutch-American minister and peace activist. Muste stood outside the White House every night during the Vietnam War, holding a candle, regardless of the weather. One evening, a reporter approached him and asked if he really thought that by standing there holding a candle night after night, he would change the policies of the country, to which Muste replied: “Oh, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m not doing this to change the country. I do it so the country won’t change me.”
I do zazen, not in order to change the world, but so that the world won’t shape me in its image. I do it so I won’t be swept up by the current of grasping and gaining and fighting and accumulating. So that others won’t decide what kind of life I should live.
Is meditation the only way to go against this current? No, but it’s an extremely powerful way, if what we truly want is transformation.
Speaking for myself, I very much feel this in my own life. There have been many times during my years here where I’ve imagined other lives for myself: As a writer, an artist, a doctor, a school teacher. I’ve imagined and longed for work that puts me in contact with people who are very different from me, especially people for whom life has not been easy. For whom life has been a lot more difficult than for me.There is so much that needs tending in our world, and most of it, I will not do. I think about that all the time.
But ultimately, I always return to this life because I believe in the power of zazen. I believe in its transformative power. I believe in its protective power. I believe that it is helping me to not be changed by the world. And what I mean by that it reminds [Note: Please check highlighted for clarity.] me that there’s a whole more to life than just my life, my needs, my wants.
Just last sesshin I was doing interview and I was suddenly overtaken by a flood of feeling… and thought “I love people.” I love them, and my very next thought was: “What’s happening to me?”
Of course, it’s easy to love everyone during sesshin. Mostly, they don’t talk back. I’m working on loving you at other times… no, I’m working on showing it at other times… But anyway, it was real, this feeling, and I was suffused with it.
The Dalai Lama has also said, “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.”If we could just be kind, naturally, effortlessly, we wouldn’t need meditation. We wouldn’t need to practice to be mindful because we would be, already. We would understand, viscerally, our sacredness and that of every other created thing, and we would act in kind.
But that’s not our world, is it? Therefore, we need to understand, as clearly as we’re able, what makes us tick. We need to understand who we are. And yes, we need to fight to protect every individual’s right to the pursuit of happiness—not just on paper, conditionally, and for a limited few, but in a very practical, real, and unambiguous way, for everyone. I believe that’s what Scofield is saying, we need to act. Because that’s not just going to happen just because we’re going to sesshin or learning about the teachings. We have to care, and we have to act.
And so, the question comes up—how much do I be still? How much do I act? How? For what purpose? How do I know when to speak up, and when to be silent?
A couple of weeks ago I spoke of silence and what I believe is it’s importance for our lives. I didn’t speak, however, of the many ways in which silence can be used as a weapon to repress and subjugate and, in a way, take someone’s life. Silence and stillness can also be used to inflict harm. So again, the question for each one of us is, how will I use them?
How will I use them to teach children, not to go further into their own worlds, but to use their strength in their lives, day to day, as they’re interacting with other children and the world that demands so much from them, so early. Earlier and earlier, it seems.
So Gyokudo and Ryan and Stephanie who work with me in Zen Kids, we’re constantly asking ourselves, “What do we want to leave the kids with? How do we talk about the teachings in a way that is not abstract? How do we show them that there’s another way to live one’s life?”
I think the key is that it can’t be abstract, and the same is true for us. Doing zazen and realizing emptiness by themselves won’t make us care about the environment or social justice or religious freedom. But realizing emptiness—our “interbeing,” as Thich Nhat Han calls it—makes it that much harder to ignore that what I do to you I do to myself. Not theoretically, not philosophically, but factually.
In the early months of our Beyond Differences Group, someone sent the planning committee an article about a rising white nationalist leader, Derek Black. At 19, Black had his own radio show, and contributed frequently to his father’s website, Stormfront (followed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group). Shortly after Obama was elected, a group of white nationalists met to “take the country back.” We are, at the moment, living the product of that meeting and everything that followed.
Black was being groomed to be a leader of the movement. Actually, he was so full of conviction he didn’t have to be groomed. He knew exactly what he believed in and what was right and what he was going to do about it. But then he went to college, and everything changed.
At first no one knew who Black was, so he went under the radar in a very liberal college in Florida. He called in to his radio show and then went to class like every other 20-year-old. Then he went abroad, and someone outed him in an email sent to every student in the college. By the time he came back, the email had over 1,000 responses, and he’d become a pariah.
But he still wasn’t fazed by this. He’d always seen the other as the enemy, so who cared what they thought? He went ahead and planned another white nationalist conference, rally the troops. That was posted on the student forum, so everyone knew.
And then, one of the guys who knew Black, an orthodox Jew by the name of Matthew Stevens, had an idea. He sent Black a text message: “What are you doing on Friday night?” he asked him. Stevens was having Shabbat dinners at his campus apartment, and he invited Black to come, and bless him, he did, he showed up with a bottle of wine. At first, only a few people showed up. But slowly, week after week, more people came, and Black kept coming, and one day they realized that they all actually liked each other. They began to ask Black about his views, and he politely responded, first to them, then on the school forum. And little by little, through contact with these people, so different from him, but whom he undoubtedly liked and considered friends, he changed his mind, 180 degrees. He changed his mind, even though his family disowned him, even though everything he had, he lost.
Meditation didn’t do this—although, who knows, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the new Black does mindfulness meditation, and loving-kindness. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Stevens has a strong and healthy spiritual practice.
The point is that distance didn’t bring about this change. Fear and certainty and anger didn’t bring it about, closeness did. Courage and the willingness to step into what would undoubtedly be uncomfortable territory, in order to make something else possible. See, that’s what zazen does, in my view. It makes something else possible. Not magically, not unfailingly. But if what we want is to live a good life, the truly good life, then the possibility is there to do something other than what we’ve always done, whether out of fear or habit or what have you, to stop and reflect, is this who I really am? Is this what I want? Is this what I believe? Is this even true?
Without space and time to think and reflect and feel ourselves from the inside, what chance do we have? We can certainly act out of anger, and sometimes that is all we have—or seem to have. If your whole life you’ve been marginalized, silenced, shunted aside, feeling angry is understandable, it may also be the needed catalyst. But no one can stay there for long without being eaten up alive.
There’s also acting out of deep care and love, out of respect and reverence for all life and that is a lasting power. Because it doesn’t take anything out of you. On the contrary, it’s a bottomless source of strength.
“Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them,” Thomas Merton said.
Meditation or not, we each have different ideas of what happiness is and how to attain it. It’s the way we are wired, which means that almost inevitably, we’ll run into conflict with one another, but that “almost” is crucial. That “almost” is the Buddha’s realization. There is suffering, but we can change that.
We don’t inevitably have to fight one another, if we understand. We don’t inevitably have to attack when feeling attacked, respond with fear or jealousy or hatred.
Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect and faith!
Remove the obstructing defilements, and clear away all your taints!
Listen to the Perfect Wisdom of the gentle buddhas,
Taught for the weal of the world, for heroic spirits intended!
This is the “Preliminary Admonition” to the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 lines. Shugen Sensei quoted it the other night. I love this opening, which very much sounds like an invocation to me. And every line is punctuated with an exclamation point. Do this and this and this. It won’t be easy, in fact, what will be required of you will be heroic, but do it nonetheless, and see what comes of it.
I think of this when I have a disagreement with someone, or when I witness two people’s conflict in the sangha. The best of worlds, really, the most conducive to harmony… and still…still we get angry, and we hurt one another in small and big ways. Sometimes the truly heroic act is a very simple act.
It is the act of refraining from opening your mouth when you want to say something sharp or harmful to another, to see the thought of ill will in your mind and replace it with compassion or sympathetic joy.
And again, just being kind to one another here won’t solve the world’s problems. But it’s a very good place to start. So, here’s what I think: That silence and stillness, meditation and prayer, are like a man, a woman, a child, holding a candle, holding it steadfastly amidst the hurricanes of life. And that this man, woman, or child, can and must travel with that light and spread it as far and wide as they can, for that is our action. No one owns that light; we can only borrow it. And we can choose to pass it on, or we can let it die. But why would we do that? Why would we do that?
I think that zazen has more power than our intelligence, our physical strength, our will, and even more than our strongest desire: the desire to be…the desire to protect ourselves—although I cannot prove this. But I have felt it.
I think that we do what we want and what we think is right and that the measure of both is based on our actions. “My actions are my only true belongings,” the Buddha said. “My actions are the ground upon which I stand.” So, what ground will we choose to stand on? What will we leave in our path?
The Power of Zazen, a dharma talk on the power of seated meditation and the importance of action by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
Explore further
01 Why the Dalai Lama is Wrong to Think Meditation Will Eliminate Violence by Be Scofield
02 : Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow (story of Derek Black)