The Way of Stillness and Silence
Photo by Ronald Cuyan
In this talk, Zuisei speaks on the power of silence and stillness to connect us to the present moment and the truth of things . In a world where we are increasingly disconnected from presence, silence is a tool—a technology, if you will—to come back to ourselves.
“Silence and stillness are the ground from which clear movement and action springs forth,” Sensei says. “To be still and silent is not to be passively waiting, it is to be full with the potential of now.”
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.
The Way of Stillness and Silence
Some time in 1970 or 1971, there was a French sailor by the name of Frank Mulville, and he sailed solo, single-handed, across the Atlantic to Cuba. He had an experience of what he called bliss. He described feeling really in love with the ocean, the solitude, the silence, his boat (that was named Iskra). And he wanted to, in a sense, step back and look at what was happening. And so, he decided to tie himself with a rope, when his boat was still sailing, to tie himself and float away from the boat, so that he could look at it from a distance.
And this is how he describes it:
It made me feel quite dizzy to look at her. She seemed the most lovely thing, dipping in and out of sight, as she mounted the long Atlantic swell and then slipped into the hollows. This, it struck me, was the supreme moment of my life. I had never achieved anything to equal it and I was never likely to again. This was the ultimate experience; it was my dream and I had it. Why not let go of the rope? To melt into the sea at this apex of experience was the only thing left. Nothing that could happen in the future could better this.
And mystics, for example, have described these sometimes very strong experiences of bliss during meditation. Also in daily life, people who spend time in the wild report a sense of the complete rightness of things, including, very much, themselves—their wholeness.
And so he says:
I stayed at the end of the rope for a while and then I began to get frightened. I glanced deeply into the womb of the sea and watched the shafts of sunlight as they spent their energy uselessly in its density. I slipped the bowline off my shoulders and hung for an instant at the very end of the rope, my fingers grasping the bare end of life itself. Then I hauled myself back, hand over hand.
This is the moment of reckoning, this moment of hanging at the end of the rope. And it’s a moment that every practitioner must face if we sit long enough. And it really forces us to ask what happens, what is there, at the limit of what is knowable. And in that moment, do we hold on or do we let go?
For a while, sometimes a good long while, zazen is really just about taming our minds, quieting our minds. They are noisy. They’re unruly. They’re anything but calm or centered. And I often think of water striders: we’re just flitting about on the surface, skimming the surface of our minds. But if we’re following the zazen instructions that we’ve received, if we’re sitting well and as deeply as we can, as wholeheartedly as we can, eventually we do settle into a deeper level of stillness and silence. And we begin to notice, sometimes for a short period, sometimes for a period of zazen or longer, that our minds are steady. They are becoming quieter. That we’re able to stay on the breath without distraction. We can focus without pushing, without tightening.
And that’s when we begin to sense that there’s more. I was saying to somebody earlier that we are floating, in fact, on the surface of the ocean. And our feet are dangling and we can sense that there’s a whole world, a whole universe down there beneath our feet. That there’s miles and miles of water that we have not yet seen, we have not yet explored. And we want to—and it is frightening. And we know also without knowing that what is stopping us is that rope tied around our shoulders, the one who is still watching, and even sadly, measuring our progress. And we know that we have to let go of the rope. And the thought is terrifying, because we have no idea what we will meet. We’re afraid we’ll meet nothing; we’re afraid that our very being will disappear.
People describe this often, this experience of feeling like they’re right at the edge and not being able to take that next step, because what if I disappear? What if I lose myself? It feels like a kind of death. And we speak about it, in fact, in those terms in Zen—the great death. But it’s not what we think it is. It’s the death of an idea, of an illusion. But thinking about this, even knowing it, doesn’t make that any less frightening at that moment. And so, that’s why we cannot give too much weight to our thoughts. As Shugen Sensei recently has been repeating or rephrasing, he says, You have to be disinterested in your thoughts. You have to not be interested in your thoughts. And he clarifies that it’s not the content of your thoughts—it’s not that if you’re thinking about something that is very important to you that that thing is not important. It’s the thoughts themselves that we need to let go of. Therefore that instruction: See the thought, let it go, and come back. Come back. To what? To yourself. But what is that?
And if we take that other image of standing at the edge of a precipice: We know what’s behind us, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we’ve been living there. We’ve gone its length and its breadth and we know that it’s not satisfying. And that is why we’re standing right there, at the edge of a chasm, with our toes curled over the edge. And we know the only way forward is to jump. But into what? And that is the thought, What if I lose myself and don’t come back? What if what’s at the bottom just devours me, consumes me? What if I like it and I choose not to return?
I think of all our great myths, the hero descending into the depths to fight the dragon, descending into hell, descending into the bottom of the ocean, entering a desolate desert that stretches as far as the eye can see. And that they do it alone, because they have to, because you can’t really bring anyone on this voyage.
And that although there are maps, hundreds, thousands, millions of maps, they are of little use at that moment of being right there on the edge in the actual travelling. They point the way, and they can give us great comfort in the fact that so many people have travelled the same way before and they have come back. And they have lived to tell the tale. But we’re still the ones who have to jump off the face of that cliff and see what’s at the bottom. And it is true, the story of the lone hero, but of course that’s just one piece of a story. There’s always more to the story. Those millions of people who have in fact made that jump, that dive, regardless of age, of gender, intellectual capacity, regardless of religion— As long as human beings have walked this Earth, they have also died this death. And perhaps a truer name (but I don’t know if that’s the right word), a different name, is freedom. It's the unbinding, the birthless, and the deathless.
There’s a koan that says that when you die once, you cannot die again. And we should reflect on the applications of this. When you die once, you cannot die again. And another way of saying it is that when there is something that is not born, it cannot die—ever. So this self that we’re so terrified of letting go of, what if we begin to see that it is actually never there to begin with? Not in the way that we thought, but there’s actually no one jumping. There is no cliff. There’s no precipice.
And yet, standing at the edge of that cliff, the fear is very real. And it takes quite a bit of determination to not let it stop you. That is the eighth paramita: determination. The unshakeable resolve to do anything that will benefit others, that will benefit ourselves. And it is accompanied by compassion and skillful means. But it’s also the determination to practice very simply, very directly, very wholeheartedly. To study our minds and to use what we see in order to benefit all beings, in order to benefit the world. All worlds.
The four skilled determinations are: to not be negligent of discernment or right view, to cultivate wisdom, because without it we’re already on shaky ground; to guard truthfulness; to be devoted to renunciation of what is unskillful; and to train in equanimity. And of course these are four of the other paramitas, the perfections, these virtues of a great, enlightened being. (Of an enlightenment being—that’s one translation of bodhisattva I’ve always liked.) So, determination is needed, of course, to practice all of the paramitas. And they actually depend, all of them depend, on every other one. It’s a very intricate, tightly-knit web whose strands are so intimately entwined. As Daido Roshi always loved to say, with the net of Indra, You touch one strand of the web and the whole web is affected. You cannot isolate any of them. And all of the paramitas without exception have as their characteristic the benefit of others. As their function—the offering of that very help.
Khandro Rinpoche, Tibetan teacher, says in the West we sometimes put a lot of weight and a lot of emphasis on what we’re doing with our mind and liturgy and our aspiration, our vows, which of course is very important. But she said the moment it becomes abstract, it becomes abstract. So, if you’re vowing everyday to save all sentient beings, but you’re not doing anything about it, what’s the point? So, she said, somebody walks by with a broom. You take the broom from their hands, and you say, Let me do this. It’s very nitty-gritty. It’s very ordinary and very real. So we don’t get lost in the ether. The function of the paramitas is to offer that help concretely and without hesitation. Their manifestation is the wish for the welfare of all beings, the realization of all beings. And their proximate cause is great compassion and skillful means. Then of course as long as we’re filled, we’re preoccupied with ourselves, it’s very difficult to help others. We can’t even see the other, we just don’t have the space. And so our practice is the study of the self. Is the forgetting of that self.
So, you’re standing at the edge of that precipice, at that very limit, that very boundary of your experience and your mind is still and it’s quiet. Perhaps your heart is pounding. You want to jump—and you don’t. But you do. You do, or you wouldn’t be on that seat. And sometimes you’re pushed from behind; sometimes there’s a word. Sometimes the slap of the kyosaku, a sound, is all it takes. Sometimes you just get bored. You get bored and exhausted with your hesitation, with your known, recycled storylines. You are no longer willing to stay on the sidelines. And so you take that step. And then immediately you think twice. You turn around and you grab onto a branch, so you’re holding onto it by your nails.
In zazen, it’s that moment when your body jerks. You’re feeling you’re getting quieter and quieter and all of the sudden you just bring yourself back out of your concentration. Or you have a moment, a period that is extremely still and silent, and then the next one is a circus. Inane images and stories, things you hadn't thought about in 20 years and all of a sudden they’re popping up. That one line of a song you just keep looping over and over and over again.
This is what the self does. This is what Mara does. I was speaking about Mara the other day—that aspect of ourselves that wants us to stay asleep, basically. That wants us to stay just on the surface. And it won’t give up easily. But after a while you know this. You become familiar with it. And you resolve to stay steady, to try again, as many times as you need to, to get to that edge. And you’re no longer waiting for it to just happen. You begin to learn how to bring yourself very directly to that precipice. You learn how to cultivate samadhi. And so it’s no longer having to wait for the mind to settle, but to actually, very deliberately, do that. You know what you have to do and you just go ahead and you do it. And we do this long enough, or often enough, and there is that moment when you don’t even have to jump. There is no time, in fact, to jump. The jikido strikes the bell for the period to begin; a moment later, the jikido strikes the bell for the period to end.
You weren’t there, in a way. And yet, if somebody was to walk by, they would see you sitting there. So the bell rings and you get up and you realize you are there in one piece. Everything is okay. In one way nothing really happened. In another way everything has changed. And then you begin to realize that fear of the abyss, of the unknown, of this vast, unlimited space was actually unnecessary. Because in that letting go, it is, in fact, the most normal thing; it’s what your mind wants to do. It’s what your body wants to do. It doesn’t want to hold on to a rope for the rest of your life. It doesn’t want to be bound. Then you realize this precipice is actually not a precipice at all. You took that step and you realized as you stepped into the void that you were standing on the ground, on the ground of reality. The ground of being—which is not solid at all, yet it is the firmest, most stable ground you will ever walk on.
There’s another sailor, Moitessier. This was a different time. He was sailing solo around the world and then, at some point, he decided that winning was not the thing. That it was the sailing itself that he was interested in. So he just went off on his own. And he says:
There’s a point in which there was no longer a man and a boat, but a man-boat. A boat-man. What you would call isolation, I would call communion. The things that mattered at the start, didn’t matter anymore. I want to go further, because there is something more to see.
That is the key. There is always something more to see. And we won’t know what it is, as long as we stay on the surface. As long as we stay at the edge.
There’s a very nice, very long koan, but there’s just a piece there at the end. There’s a ferryman, Chuanzi, and he’s having a dialogue with Jiashan. And at one point they’re having this interaction, Chuanzi says to him, “I’m hanging a line a thousand feet deep and the heart is just three inches off the hook.” I’ve always loved that line. He’s saying, I’m really plumbing the depths and you’re just right over here. And he says, “Why don’t you say something?” Jiashan is about to open his mouth and he takes the boat pole and he whacks him and throws him into the water. Jiashan comes up, sputtering, gets back on the boat, and Chuanzi says, “Say something!” And he’s about, again, to open his mouth and again he knocks him out of the boat. This happens three times. And the third time Jiashan is coming back upon the boat, he realizes himself and he bows. And Chuanzi says, “Now you can go and teach.”
Jiashan is leaving. He goes on shore and he’s just walking away, taking leave of his teacher. And he keeps turning and looking back. And Chuanzi calls out to him, “Reverend!” And Jiashan turns and Chuanzi holds up his oar and says, “There is something more.” And then, upon uttering these words, he jumps out of the boat and disappears into the mist and waves. There is always something more; we shouldn’t forget that. Because we get used to our particular space, a particular nook of practice. And it’s ironic, though not surprising, that often in the beginning students are so, they so want to see. And often they’re coming to practice, because they want to alleviate their suffering. So, they’re really compelled to practice and to sit as well as they can. And often you’ll hear them experiencing these moments of truly letting go of the self.
And I think, in a subtle way, it gets harder the longer we practice, because we get tired of working so hard. We think, It’s not necessary. My life is pretty good now. I’m not in the throes of suffering anymore, so maybe I can take it easy. And it’s not a matter of being frantic about it, but I think it does require a deep desire to always be able to go deeper, to always see a little bit more than what we have seen. So, no matter how far we think we’ve come, how much we think we’ve seen, it is incumbent upon us and no one else really, to strengthen our determination to keep going. Passing koans is staying on the surface. And I don’t mean seeing koans, I mean passing koans. Worrying about who’s ahead or behind, who has more or less power, robe, rakusu, staying on the surface.
Please, take this in. It’s important, because we form our modes of being. And then we just enter into practice, because that mode didn’t work and now we just create a new one. With, perhaps, a little more desire to be awake, but it’s not that difficult. I’ve always felt this very strongly. It’s not that difficult, at any moment, to just go to sleep a little bit and then start just skimming again. And we impute power and we give time to all sorts of things that are really not that important. This is exactly how we stop ourselves. This is how we give away our power. This is how we let someone else tell us whether we should jump or not.
Practice is about realizing our own power. Which has nothing to do with name, position; with years of practice. The span of a human life is just long enough to give us that sense of urgency. It’s not so short that it drives us into a panic. It’s just long enough to keep moving us forward. And actually, in one way, it doesn’t matter how much time we have (which, of course, we don’t know how long that is) because this is the moment that we have.
And having used that image of the cliff, let me say at the same time that I think most of the time, it’s more like diving into the ocean. There are those moments of a sudden shift, a leap, but really most of the time, in my experience, is just a gentle, gradual submersion. Sometimes it’s imperceptible. And once again, we can take comfort from the fact that so many have travelled before us, that they have let go of that rope. And they realized themselves as indivisible from water, from wind, from sky.
“Vivo sin vivir en mi,” said Saint Teresa of Avila. “Muero porque no muero.”
“I live without living in myself and I die, because I am not dying.” I die, because I have not died to myself, and therefore, I can’t really live.
She was one such traveller. I talked about determination, and she founded 17 convents, single-handedly. And every year she would travel to every one of them, by foot, by donkey. In one trip, she was crossing a river that was very swollen and she took a misstep and fell into the water. Then she came back up. But the wagons that they were travelling in got swept and all of their stuff, all of their possessions, were swept down the stream. She was just really at the limits of her patience and her endurance. She became quiet and turned inward and heard God say, “This is how I treat my real friends.” And she said, “Well, no wonder Your Lord has so few, then.” [Laughter] And of course she was very accomplished in contemplation. She wrote The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle, her biography.
And she speaks of this work like the work of tending a garden. In the first level, it’s like drawing water from a well, so it’s hard work. And you have to do all of it. It requires great effort. And then in the next level, you set up a water wheel, a system, like an aqueduct. And so, you’re setting up the container if you will, which is really zazen in that that constant coming back, letting go of a thought and coming back, begins to direct the flow of thoughts. Then it requires a little less effort. It still requires quite a bit, but now you have a way to hold the water.
And in the next level, you just use water from a river, from a spring. It is directed. You plant your garden right in the path of the water. And this is when samadhi begins to be able to turn outward into activity. And then there’s union, which is like rainfall. It permeates everywhere. And she says, “Here the soul becomes courageous, no matter how dry the soil is.” Becomes courageous. So no matter what you see in front of you—bad period of zazen, good period of zazen, long spells of, you think, nothing happening—you’re not daunted. You don’t turn away.
And she also said, “It is of great importance, when we begin to practice prayer [zazen] not to let ourselves be frightened by our own thoughts.” And when we begin to look closely at a thought, we realize what is it that we’re afraid of. They’re not other, they’re not wrong. They’re not actually even in the way when we see them clearly. But we must see them clearly. And it really takes just an instant to let go. A moment of courage that’s infinitesimal in duration and boundless, immeasurable in scope. That is what’s so…about this practice. The thought of it is always harder than the actual doing. And it’s not at all, the thought is this big compared to the actual experience.
There is still time in this day. Whether you feel the rope that is just firmly tied around your waist, or it’s up on your shoulders, whether you’re holding it with both hands, or just one hand, one finger still holding on— There’s always, always, just a little bit of letting go that is needed. And we can always, always, do that. So let’s not wait.
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