Understanding the I
Photo by Daniel Mirlea
Where can we go to see and be seen through, completely? Facing reality, facing ourselves—this is the work that’s needed here and now.
In this talk, Zuisei touches on the bare and spacious zazen practice of the Soto Zen priest Kosho Uchiyama, the secularization of Buddhism, and Yuval Noah Harari’s twenty-first lesson for the 21st century, meditation. Highlighting the importance of study in the context of practice, Zuisei points to the pressing need to understand ourselves—the “I” from which all conflict, all suffering arises.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
This past Sunday, I drove up to Zen Mountain Monastery. It was a wintry day, and there was a light coating of snow on the ground. The previous day was the first snow in New York City, cold and overcast. I guess it fit my mood. I had a little bit of a nostalgic feeling. As I drove into the monastery, I felt the same fluttering in my stomach that I felt, for more than 20 years, pretty much every time that I left for more than a day. Always, as I was driving or walking in, if I had taken the bus, I would feel this fluttering mix of slight anxiety and anticipation, a little bit of angst and excitement. Actually for the briefest moment, as I was driving closer, I thought of turning back.
It reminded me of many years ago doing one of the wilderness retreats at the monastery. The ones that we did on campus were to teach people how to actually camp and backpack. Not car camping but how to really camp in the woods, to tree your food, and to even do a little survival camping if you needed to do that. There was one long-time student, who signed up for the retreat. It started on a Tuesday afternoon and went until Sunday. So, Tuesday afternoon comes, all the participants are arriving, we're helping them to set up their tents. Then it's three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock, and Paul has not shown up. Finally, at dinner time Shugen Sensei walks up to the monastery across the road and tries calling him. It turned out that Paul had stopped in Kingston and checked into a hotel because he was so petrified of doing the retreat. He was completely a city person. He became so petrified of spending the week in the woods that he thought, I can't do it. So, he checked himself into a hotel 20 minutes away. Shugen Sensei really calmed him down and said to just come. “Worst case scenario you absolutely hate it and can't do it, then you just walk across the street and stay at the monastery in one of the dorms. Really it’s not that bad, so just come.”
He agreed with much trepidation, and he arrived. The poor guy was petrified. You could see it in every cell of his being. But as the week progressed, he slowly started to ease into it. At the end, the retreat would close with a 24 hour solo. So from midday Friday to midday Saturday, everybody would go up on the mountain. We would pack everything up. We'd walk up the mountain, and then everybody would choose a spot that was far away from everybody else. You couldn't be within eyesight of any of the other campers. The three of us, usually Shugen Sensei, Ryushin Sensei and myself, had a base camp, so if anybody ran into trouble they could come and check in with us.
So at the end everybody goes off to their solos, a number of them relatively anxious about spending 24 hours plus in the woods completely by themselves. But by this point, they've learned how to build a fire, they know how to tree their food. They have all the basics, but none of them really has ever actually spent time alone in the woods. They go off, and they do it.
Saturday afternoon rolls around, and now Paul is not back. All of the campers are coming, three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock—Paul doesn't come back. Finally, around six-thirty, he rolls into camp. I swear that to this day, I really wish I had had a camera. I mean, he had turned into a woodsman. I mean, he didn't want to leave. He said he really had to pull himself to come back into civilization. I really wish we had had the before and after because the transformation was palpable.
I was remembering this incident as I was driving into the monastery. I was thinking how that slight fear, that slight anxiety, is fitting. What Paul had was that sense of being by himself, right in the woods, in an environment that was unfamiliar to him. If you really think about the monastery itself, you know you are entering an environment where you're going to have to face yourself. You're going to have to face reality, the world inside and the world outside, which as we know, are not two things. That this is a place where you come to see and to be seen through. I'm certainly not the first or the last who expressed trepidation as they were getting close.
It was really good to be there. It had been a couple of years since I had stepped on the grounds, and it was really good to be there even though my teacher wasn't. I found out a few days before that he was going to be away. I was so disappointed. I was so sad. Even that was really good to feel, to feel again what I feel for him and the relationship that we have formed over three decades. Afterwards, I thought it was actually good to be there without him, he is such an integral part of the place, to feel it on my own. And then of course, to think, I'll just have to go back to see him.
I was driving by myself, and I was reflecting on our study, which we're wrapping up today— the text Understanding Our Mind, by the Zen Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh. We had agreed that we had relatively exhausted the teachings, and we decided we were ready to start something new for the coming year. I've been reading a couple of things myself that I thought could inform our study. As many of you know, I'm part of this group, the Gen X Buddhist Teachers Sangha. A small group of us has been meeting every week to do a study of Secularizing Buddhism, by Richard Payne. It's a collection of academic articles, many of them written by practitioners, who are looking at the current Western secularization of Buddhism, from a historical perspective, psychological perspective, and religious certainly. We've had some really interesting, stimulating discussions in the group. There's about a dozen of us. Almost all of us identify as traditional, religious, Buddhists. We believe in and teach Buddhism, as we understand it, and as it was handed down within our own traditions—Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana. There is, in general, a certain mistrust of the secularization process. [There's] a concern of what Buddhism may be losing as it relies more and more on psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, a kind self-help bent, and as it relies less on tradition, on lineage, on transmission (specifically in Zen, mind-to-mind transmission), and some of the metaphysical teachings that make Buddhism a tradition really based on universal liberation and alleviation of suffering. There's a general anxiety about what we may be losing.
There is one teacher in this group who actually does identify as a secular Buddhist. It's been very interesting to listen to her. Based on our discussions and my own interest, I attended a Tricycle talk with one of secular Buddhism's prominent teachers right now, Winton Higgins. He's Australian. Steven Batchelor is really the proponent of this. I am intrigued by their framework, which they generally describe as a culture of awakening. That is Batchelor's term. The emphasis is on living an awake life and carrying out what Batchelor calls the four “tasks” instead of the four “truths.” This actually appears in the sutras. There are sutras in which the Four Noble Truths are referred to as The Four Tasks—the truth of suffering, it must be recognized; the root of suffering, craving, is to be abandoned; the end of suffering is to be experienced; and the way to the end of suffering in the form of the path is to be cultivated. In this sense they’re not so different. Stephen Batchelor stresses that this is not just a paradigm. These are tasks that we need to carry out. The main difference in Secular Buddhism in general is there is an absence of ritual. There's no mention or particular interest in the teachings of karma and rebirth, or the notion of multiple lives.
I also just finished reading Yuval Harari’s latest book Twenty-one Lessons for the Twenty-first Century. It's a little bit of a depressing book to be honest. If he's right about the dangers of AI, artificial intelligence, and what it could do to our society, then it's a rather grim outlook of our future. I'm not willing to discount his vision altogether, either. He does seem to have an uncanny ability to hold the big picture in mind and to offer some possibilities of where humanity could be headed given where we've been. For me, most tellingly, is that in the 21st lesson he explores and ends his book with meditation. I didn't know that he's a long time Vipassana practitioner of more than 20 years. He originally did a retreat with Goenka, the renowned Vipassana teacher.
Harari acknowledges that meditation is not the end all and be all of the issues that we face. Even if everybody meditated it wouldn't mean that we could resolve the issues that we're facing. But he also points out that without the kind of self-knowledge that practice brings, without a clear understanding of our minds and what makes us tick, we don't have much of a chance of really tackling life's questions. This is one thing he says:
People ask, “When I die, will I just vanish completely? While I go to heaven? Will I be reborn in a new body?” These questions are based on the assumption that there is an “I” that endures from birth to death and the question is, “What will happen to this ‘I’ at death?” But what is there that endures from birth to death? The body keeps changing every moment, the brain keeps changing every moment, the mind keeps changing every moment.
The distinction that he makes is that the brain is a repository of this collection of neurons firing in response to outward stimuli, and the mind is the processing mechanism for feelings, for thoughts, for emotions, of what it is that we're experiencing. The two are not interchangeable from his perspective.
The closer you observe yourself, the more obvious it becomes that nothing endures even from one moment to the next. So what holds together an entire life if you don't know the answer to that. You don't understand life, and you certainly have no chance of understanding death. If and when you ever discover what holds life together, the answer to the big question of death will also become apparent.
Now, this text has echoes of Thich Nhat Hanh's, to be or not to be is not the question. He says, because reality transcends both notions of birth and death, of being and non-being. I agree that the question isn't, “What will happen to me after I die?” The real question is, “What is happening to me now? Who is the me that things are happening to? How do I live in the best possible way as I travel from life to death?”
In order to even begin to fathom these questions, we really have to slow down. We have to get very, very quiet and we have to look closely. Because we know that everything that is happening out there, on a macro-level, is happening here at a micro-level. We don't actually respond to what is "out there." We respond to what is happening in our bodies and minds, as we take in input from the world. So if I read, as I did this morning, a piece of news about Mississippi's 15 week abortion ban, my anger, distress, or fear is not actually based on the piece of news. It is based on the sensations in my body when I read it. This is a really important point to understand. It fits really nicely with another book that I was reading by Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist. He was saying that it's our feelings and sensations of pleasure and pain, illness, and well-being that fuel our reflection and our search. Our search for well-being which he encapsulates as homeostasis.
So both he and Harari are bringing these metaphysical questions and grounding them in the body. They are saying that we ask the things that we ask about, we even embark on a spiritual path, not because of any abstract notion of life after death, but because of what we're experiencing now: the fear, the joy, the discomfort, the pleasure, etc. It's not abstract. It's not intellectual. It's the burning in my stomach. It's the dry throat. The firing of neurons in my brain in response to my reading the piece of news and in response to my own thoughts about myself that creates the suffering that I'm experiencing. For example, the problem is not that social media exists, but that when we created it we didn't stop to consider the social, political, or the economic impact that it would have on us. The very real impact on a teenager who already has a severely eroded sense of self-worth. What these little buttons, these likes, will do to that teenager and their sense of themselves. What the presence or absence of these likes, these digital endorsements [will do]. What the effect would be when you create a platform in which everyone can in very disembodied ways spew their rage, their confusion, and their sense of alienation. Of course, the problem is not that we create. It's that we don't often understand the consequences of what we're creating. This is a big argument that Harari is making. The problem is not that we've created artificial intelligence. It's that we don't understand where it's actually going to go, and what its effect is going to be on us.
Generally speaking, we haven't built our lives to allow for much introspection. This means that no externally oriented action, no matter how skillful, will bring us the peace that we crave so much. By this I'm not saying that we shouldn't be out protesting, lobbying, and voting. That there shouldn't be lawyers, politicians, or activists in the world. What I'm saying is that without the critical piece, the inner knowledge, all other actions prove ineffective in the long run, which takes me back to our study.
I am interested in the kind of study that transforms. I'm interested in reading books that will inspire me to reach, to work hard, to see and that will challenge me to try to be ever clearer about my place in things. I really want to encourage all of you to also bring that into your life as you're able, into your practice. When I meet with you one-on-one, I don't often hear questions about what you might be actively studying. I think it's really an important part of practice because it creates a framework for the insights that we're experiencing on the cushion. It does force us to really come out of our own little square, our own head, our own body and to make that very overt connection and translation between what is happening here and what is happening out there.
I just want to encourage you to think about how to study more actively. This is Harari again.
If you can understand what happens to you as one moment ends and another moment begins, you will also understand what will happen to you at the moment of death. If you can really observe yourself for the duration of a single breath, you will understand it all.
That's a big claim. He's essentially saying if you can understand what breath is, if you can understand the one who is breathing, you will understand it all. If you can understand what happens in that moment when the breath ends and the next breath begins. If you can clearly see this. You will understand it all. I've said before that every bit of suffering that we experience, every bit of suffering that we experience stems from the I. This one letter word, this hairline crack, becomes a chasm, the distance between heaven and earth, quoting the Third Ancestor of Zen, Seng T’san.
So what is necessary, then? Personally, I believe that it is to put everything that we have into understanding this I. Not simply to be a better version of this I — calmer, kinder, wiser. That would be great, but understanding very clearly what the whole thing rests on. I really do mean the whole thing, the whole universe. The whole catastrophe, as my teacher used to say, the whole beautiful, wondrous mess.
So, with our study, I'd like to go back, not quite to basics, not really but sort of. I'd like to simplify a little bit and read Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, which I have referenced a number of times lately. There are a couple of editions, so I will email you the one that we'll be using. It has 10 chapters, so we'll just take one each month. What I'd like to do is to ask each one of you to bring at least one question, response, or presentation to the chapter each time we get together. So, if I was asking you to give a presentation on one salient point of a chapter what would it be? As always, to have the emphasis be on how you experience it or don't experience it in your life. So it can really enliven and enrich our conversation, and it's not just me presenting you what I think is relevant in the book. Think of it as coming to the study prepared to give this little mini-presentation on one particular point that stood out for you. There's no way we could get to everyone, but everyone should be ready to do it.
[I chose] Kosho Uchiyama because he was very clear, very grounded, and fierce about practice and bringing practice into daily life. His sesshins which he did at Antaiji, a small temple in Tokyo. Everybody would just sit. There were no talks, no face-to-face teaching, No chanting, no work. Everybody would arrive. They would sit and face the wall, including him. There were no monitors, no teacher. It was just sitting. That kind of bareness is difficult to replicate. I don't know if they're still sitting like that. I think it would be very challenging to replicate over zoom. I’d just like you to get a taste of him and of that style of the practice and realization that comes out of that dedication, that commitment, and that simplicity. That bare-boneness bonus. There’s the spaciousness and the curiosity, really, to ask and live into all the important questions. So that's what we'll do.
Let me end with a poem by David Whyte. It's called Sometimes.
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
Explore further
01 : 21th Lesson for the 21st Century (pdf), excerpt by Yuval Noah Harari
02 : Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama
03 : Sometimes by David Whyte