We took the trip to Japan because my teacher Maezumi Roshi was insistent. We were unprepared for how the trip transformed itself from obligation into privilege, and how we also were transformed in the process. Because of this, it became a sacred pilgrimage. We were moved deeply to be standing small in the presence of huge Buddha images in Zen temples filled with the energy of thousands of people practicing over hundreds of years. On our last day, trying to squeeze in one more sight, we dashed to a long dark wood building over seven hundred years old called Sanjusangen Do (Hall of Thirty Three). Stepping into the dim barnlike structure, we stopped in awe, moved to tears at the sudden sight of one thousand life-sized images of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, like a golden army with forty thousand arms holding every needed tool. They stood still and serene for our inspection during the day, but gave the sense of being poised, ready at the slightest signal to pour out the doors of the wooden building housing them, and disperse under cover of night to relieve the suffering of the world.
In Japan we were no longer members of a strange minority religion. We entered the huge stream of faith and dedicated practice that had been flowing for two and half millennia, and we felt the power of that practice to inspire humans to give their lives to build temples, make gardens, and create works of spiritual art. We saw that this great river had been flowing on, despite the centuries of human frailty, greed, and political machinations, to bring relief to those who suffer. Our wavering faith was renewed.
At one temple we joined in a celebration of the Buddha’s birthday. In this rite a line of people chant and walk slowly in a serpentine form in front of a statue of the baby Buddha, which stands in a small open-sided building covered with cascades of fragrant fresh flowers. As they pass the bower, they pause to offer incense and to pour sweet tea over the baby Buddha.
For several days before the Buddha’s birthday we had been working nonstop from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. taking care of kenshukai. These are young people newly hired by Japanese companies and brought to the temple for a few days of Zen boot camp. If they couldn’t make it through this, they wouldn’t get the jobs. During this time we were feeding and training between fifty and a hundred extra people. “We” were a motley group of staff in full-time training at the temple, about twenty Americans and Europeans. We communicated in English, Japanese, Spanish, and French, with bits of Greek. Our own zazen was crammed into the early morning and late night hours. Many people were nodding off, exhausted during evening zazen. Tempers were on edge, occasionally spilling over when, for example, the cook was told an hour before lunch that there would be twenty-four extra people arriving.
All of this activity and tension dissolved the morning we began the Buddha’s birthday chant. We were suddenly all united in a beginning-less, endless ribbon of humans walking the path like Jizo Bodhisattva, inspired by the birth and life of that one most human being to realize our own continual awakening to each new breath. In an instant all our difficulties and failings were put into perspective. For over twenty-five hundred years, millions of practitioners of the Buddhist Way, none of them perfect, have upheld this Way, have been rods and staffs and bridges and roofs and pillars that have enabled this wonderful practice to be handed down to this place and time where you sit as you read this book.
The most important foreign territory we have to explore is the land that lies within our own body/mind/heart. Ultimately we must sit down on the seat of zazen and undertake for ourselves this long, exciting, difficult, and most rewarding of journeys. This is the journey undertaken by the Buddha, by Jizo, and all other awakened beings. It is our duty. It is our privilege.
Seeking Religious Freedom
Master Hima on Mt. Godai had a forked stick. When he saw a monk coming he would hold it up and say, “What kind of demons made you take up this pilgrimage?”
The American pilgrims came to the New Country fleeing religious persecution. Are we also subject to persecution? Who persecutes us most severely? Who has the greatest potential to destroy our spiritual life? It is not others. The harm others do to us is very small compared to the harm we do to ourselves. We are the biggest threat to our own spiritual health and freedom.
There is a demon, a deadly part in us that says, “You’re not doing this practice right. Everyone else is sitting better than you are. You got started too late. If you can’t do it right you might as well forget it.” Or more vicious versions. ‘You’re an idiot. You don’t deserve peace and contentment in life. You shouldn’t even have been born. This is sham. Your whole life is a sham.”
These inner voices persecute us and destroy our religious potential, the potential to open to our innate wisdom and compassion. How do we deal with them? As the American pilgrims did, as Jizo Bodhisattva and all spiritual pilgrims do, by leaving home. First, leave the place and circumstances where these energies have set up housekeeping, have dug themselves in. Strike out for a place of freedom. This is one reason we go on retreat.
Second, take away their fuel, their lifeblood, which is the internal process of comparing, judging, and criticizing. We quiet the mind. If we ignore the welter of internal voices, they lose energy and interest. If we can get some space between “them” and “us,” if we step back even a bit, we decrease their power to harm.
Jizo Bodhisattva is able to move through hellish and heavenly realms without becoming entangled or entranced. This is because she knows that they are all a fabrication, an imaginary but sometimes frightening landscape woven in the desperate shuttling of the loom of small mind. Jizo and all the saints are “in the world but not of the world,” embraced and protected by the One Great Mind. This aspect of radiant assurance is shown in paintings as a golden halo.
Third, we can turn and face the voices square on. There is a story about Jizo Bodhisattva rescuing children from demons. All Jizo does is to turn and face them. That is all that is needed, to stand still and not run. There is no battle. The demons all just melt away. It is a great triumph to be able to hear the internal voices and not to believe them or identify with them.
Whenever there is a lot of energy around something, I look for the deeper truth underneath. The voice of the internal critic carries loads of energy. What is it pointing to? A simple fact. We are not what we could be. We are not enlightened. If we can hear it without self-loathing or shame, it is telling the truth. We could do better. We can awaken. That is why we practice.
What we seek is true religious freedom, the freedom to be whole and complete, the person we truly are, to live life alive to the presence of that great Body-Mind that is us. To be able not just to know it, but to function with it, as it, to use its eyes to see, ears to hear, voice to speak. To find complete health.
Seeking a Cure
Certain images of Jizo Bodhisattva have developed reputations for curing particular ailments such as eye disease or measles. People undertake pilgrimages to these temples or to sites like Lourdes in hopes of curing terminal illnesses. This is very important to remember: no spiritual path can cure the “terminal” part. We will all die. These bodies are just borrowed. They will grow old, become ill, and die. We can be cured, however, of the misperception that illness, old age, and death are unnatural. They can cease being a cause of our suffering.
There is a Zen koan about this.
Master Ummon spoke to his disciples. ‘Medicine and sickness cure each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is your self?”
This is based on a story from the time of the Buddha.
A beautiful courtesan named Salavati became pregnant. She was clever and renowned, “much visited by desirous people, and she went for a night for the fee of a hundred.” Salavati decided that if men discovered her pregnancy “all respect for me would dwindle.” She hid her condition and after giving birth, had her infant son thrown on a rubbish heap. The king’s son Prince Abhaya found the infant and named him Jivaka, which means “He lives!” The prince had Jivaka raised in the women’s quarters of the palace.
When Jivaka became an a
dult he discovered that he was an orphan. Realizing that “it is not easy to depend on these royal families” he decided to learn a craft and undertook studies with a world famous doctor at [the University at] Taxila. At the end of seven years he underwent a final examination. He was given a spade and instructed to do a walking tour all around Taxila, and to bring back anything he found that was not medicinal.
Upon his return he reported, “Teacher, while I was touring . . . all around Taxila I did not see anything that was not medicinal!” He passed his exam and was sent out to practice independently. The Vinaya records his skill in curing patients given up as hopeless by other doctors.
The Buddha’s teaching is the medicine for our hopelessness. The Buddha is very matter-of-fact. If you practice, see through your delusion and know for yourself the truth, you will recover. The Buddha’s teaching is that everything we need to be cured is present, in our human life, our breath, our heart-mind. Anything we observe with a quiet mind, meticulously and deeply, will open and reveal the truth to us. Our medicine is a blade of grass, a flower, a stone, a feather, a drop of water, a butterfly wing. We have this experience in retreat. After a few days of meditation as we turn around, look and listen, everything is bright and comes to life. Even us. Everything, anything, is a remedy, just waiting for us to be present with / in them.
The cure for our illness is to become aware of the source of our great life and then to step out of the way as it functions through us. It is never any distance away from us. We continually see it and are seen by it. We hear it and are heard by it. It is touching us in our deepest recesses. There is nowhere we cannot touch or hear it. If we put a hand out, it is there. It plays in concert with us, through all instruments. When we are awake, there is nothing that is not medicine, no place that is not a place of holy healing. Jizo Bodhisattva is the protector of this, the whole earth that is our very medicine.
A Sense of Direction
Course Corrections
We cannot be too careless on the path. Small corrections in course are very important. A student named Bob taught me this. Bob came to practice in his forties after a life of addiction to heroin and methamphetamine. He had just been diagnosed with a hereditary kidney disease that can shorten the life span and causes chronic pain. He was on methadone for pain when he first began to sit sesshin. Over a few years he gradually weaned himself from painkillers, went through a painful divorce from an alcoholic spouse, returned to college to get a graduate degree, and began a successful career in addictions counseling. He worked effectively and patiently with the emotional pain addicts face in being in the present moment. Here is the principle of small course corrections that has been helpful to him and his clients.
If you make a small change today, it may seem an insignificant alteration, not worth bothering about. In geometric terms let’s say the change is five degrees. Now move forward in time. In one year, or ten years, the result in terms of where you actually end up, is very significant indeed. This means that a small difference in how strongly we express anger, a remembering not to gossip about someone, a little more care about how we treat ourselves and others, passed through the chain of cause and effect, can make a very great difference in outcome for everyone over time. We must remember this.
One bit at a time. “Dan, dan, dan (step, step, step),” my teacher told me. That’s all that’s needed. Our best effort in taking the next step on the path. Step, step, step. Don’t count or measure them. We can’t worry about how much there is to accomplish, because we don’t really know. We can’t worry about how small each step seems, because when we let go of the frames of the squashed sense of the time and space in which we operate, small and large are not to be distinguished.
Jizo Bodhisattva has vowed to save each one of uncountable beings in innumerable hells. Does she stop to count and worry how many are left? No time to worry, just keep going. Worrying is a big waste of energy.
Wandering off the Path
We are never off the path of pilgrimage. We are only confused, temporarily made deaf and blind by the clamor of our minds. Although we are never off the path, there are detours and blind alleys. We may perceive these as “being off the path.” How do we know when this is occurring?
We can wander off the path bit by bit or quite abruptly. It is my experience that once I stepped firmly on the Buddhist path, karma speeded up. By this I mean that when I stray off the path, the consequences of my straying come back to “hit” me very quickly. If I become overconfident, within minutes or hours, something occurs to take me down a peg. If I lack empathy, watch out! I’ll have to suffer the same pain.
At ZCLA I worked at the center’s medical clinic as a Western doctor and also did acupuncture. Several residents came to me over a few weeks’ time to be treated for hemorrhoids, apparently brought on by hours on the sitting cushion. As I treated them I thought, “Hemorrhoids, schmemorrhoids, what’s the big deal? I sit as much as they do and I don’t get hemorrhoids. They must be doing something wrong when they sit, and obviously, I’m sitting right.” Within a week I had bad hemorrhoids. They hurt! A lot! I had not had enough sympathy for my patients. The hemorrhoids were stubborn too. I had to try every remedy I recommended and find some new ones before I got rid of them. I quickly became a much better hemorrhoid doctor. Too bad, it seems we humans learn most rapidly when we are in pain. This is how Jizo Bodhisattva became so wise. All Buddhas and bodhisattvas have bodies and minds that feel pain and once also suffered.
How do you know whether you are on or off the correct path for your life? The Buddha said that we can tell whether we are on the path by the fruits of our activity, the results of our thinking, our speech, and our bodily action. If the effects are wholesome or good, then we should continue in that way. If the effects are unwholesome for us or others, then we should not continue.
Sometimes we wander off the path so gradually that we are not aware that it has happened. One day something happens to make us realize how far off we are, and we are shocked or saddened.
I was asked to visit a forty-year-old woman in the last days before she died of liver cancer. In outward appearance she was a skeleton covered by yellow skin, lying in a big white bed. She asked me to teach her to meditate. I taught her the meditation on listening to sounds, since the sense of hearing is said to be that last to fade during the transition of death. She enjoyed the meditation and said at one point during it she thought death had come, and found it very pleasant and tranquil possibility. She was a little disappointed to come back.
As I prepared to leave her room, I began removing my robes. She told me she appreciated my wearing the Zen robes, which are Chinese T’ang dynasty in style. She had been a brilliant scholar specializing a certain period in Chinese history, able to read ancient Chinese characters. She looked at me wistfully and said, “I was always too busy learning and studying. I planned to practice Zen ’later.’ Now there is no later. I wish I had practiced.” I heed her words.
The image of Jizo Bodhisattva in his monk’s robes reminds us daily of the path of practice. It is always open, always awaiting our “later.”
Wandering that Is Not
It is important to distinguish wandering off the path from a needed sabbatical. When we are deeply immersed in the practice, we can lose perspective. Sometimes we need a break, to stop meditating for a few days or even months. When we start again, we can see afresh what regular meditation does for the body and mind. Our desire and dedication for practice became newly informed and much stronger. We can see the effects of even a brief one- or two-day sabbatical. Not to meditate for a day feels like not sleeping enough or like not brushing your teeth. My mind-heart feels sticky and dirty. Meditation becomes a health-care essential.
There is another distinction to make, a variation in practice that might be mistaken for a wandering. I call this a plateau. This occurs after a period of intense practice, usually a long sesshin, when important shifts in the sense of self have occurred. It feels like surgery has been done, h
unks have fallen away, and a rest is needed. We cannot work full out for too long. We need a time to rebalance the system, to incorporate what has occurred and see how it informs our life. During this time a more relaxed but very regular daily practice seems best. The temptation is to say, “I worked very hard, I need a complete break.” But not to practice during this time means important doors close again. What has been gained slips quietly away and eventually the work has to be done again. Daily practice is vital at these times.
It is like training for a marathon run, putting all you have into the race, breaking through some barrier, and then reverting to couch potato. After the event, good nutrition, regular stretching, exercise, and maintenance runs are important to keep the benefits to mind and body fluid and functioning.
There are statues and paintings of a seated Jizo Bodhisattva. These remind us of the importance of resting in practice. There are two kinds of resting: refreshment and refuge. Refreshment means to rest body and mind. Even the Buddha needed to lie down to rest his back when it was painful. The body wears out and must be attended to. Meditation is the best rest and refuge for the mind. Refuge means to rest in the lap of the Buddha, to find sanctuary in the One Mind.
Returning to the Path of Practice
Wandering off can be a deep crisis of faith. Or it can be the wandering off that occurs daily, hourly, even minutely. Our practice consists of noticing and returning. We tend to become exasperated when our minds wander off the practice. “Not again! You idiot! How many years have you been practicing and your mind still wanders?”
Jizo Bodhisattva Page 17
