Wake Up

by Bonnie Myotai Treace

  Fading Smoke

  We live in the midst of dying. It has, of course, always been so. Yet in this generation, we’re also witnessing the deaths of an alarming number of entire species in what many call the Sixth Great Extinction. Our grandchildren may never see a starfish, or thrill at a murmuration. To let this in is hard. Forests burn, storms worsen, people and animals are suffering. Many of us feel responsible, yet often mutely helpless.

  One piece that often goes missing in our modern lives is the necessity to grieve. We can’t show up to take care of what needs us, can’t create the words and action the future asks of us, if our throats are choked with unspent tears and our bodies heavy with guilt, weighted down by loss.

  Zen, as well as other long-standing religions, can support us in a practice of wakeful grieving together. If practicing in a more solitary way, we also become more honest when we make time to acknowledge loss.

  One way to practice this is to light a stick of incense (just fill a small bowl with sand or rice, and place the lit stick in it), and bear witness for five to fifteen minutes as it burns away. Hold the being or beings that have died in mind, acknowledging their uniqueness, the gift of their life. As the wisp of smoke from the incense is palpable and fades, so it is with every life. This is not an easy practice and can feel awkward at first. Go through the awkwardness if you can. Trust that you can do this.

  For perhaps several days or weeks, practice coming into simple, raw awareness of impermanence in this way, seeing and letting the smoke fade, and committing not to turn your gaze from how vulnerable—and precious—each life is.

  Coffee Cup Practice

  There’s a beautiful moment in a Zen tea ceremony when the various implements that were just used to make and serve steaming cups of frothy green tea are brought out for the guests to see and appreciate. You get to really register the subtle indentations in the clay cup left by the hands that shaped it, sometimes a century or more ago. The makers’ touch, the shape and warmth of her palms, are in your hands.

  There are many opportunities to take up the ordinary objects that enable our days and to experience them fully. It only takes a minute or so, and it can be done without making a big deal of it. If you’re a coffee drinker, try it with your favorite mug, or even the humble paper cup from the cafe that your morning brew came in. Without bringing judgment to it, just feel it. See the tint on the rim left by your lips, turn it so all angles are appreciated, without letting your mind dart away. And if you do find your mind wandering, acknowledge the thoughts, and for a few moments, keep bringing your attention back to the cup. It helps, by the way, not to be on your laptop: Just take a moment to “do nothing,” to see and feel.

  As “coffee cup practice” is repeated, over time it begins to open our senses to all sorts of little things we’d otherwise skim over in all our important rushing about. A cup of coffee becomes transformed into an opportunity to relax—a mini-meditation, a letting go of tension—rather than just a chemical jazzing up of our nervous system.

  RETIRING FROM THE EGO PROJECT

  “Karen” was a regular at retreats and very devoted. I was surprised to see her in tears. She was very upset with another of the teachers and asked to see me. Earlier in the week, she’d met with her teacher, but she hadn’t “passed the koan” she had been sitting with and over the days a drama had blossomed in her mind.

  “I’ll never finish koan study at this rate; I’ll never be empowered to open my own place and share the dharma, and that’s all I want to do! There are complete assholes who have been given authority to teach, but I’m being held back! It’s wrong!” As refreshing as I found this characterization of us teachers, she was distraught, angry, convinced not only that she was right, but owed something.

  I listened, let her know I was deeply sorry she was suffering, and sent her back to talk with her teacher so there wouldn’t be triangulation and confusion. Over the next several years of her practice, I’d see her settle in, and then become angry again whenever she “failed” or didn’t get some sign of approval from the teacher. It was obvious she could someday serve as a generous provider of Zen study for others, but she might also spend her years angry, lost in a pretty classic case of what the Tibetan teacher Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism.”

  The main point of any spiritual practice is to stop working for what we might call the Ego Project. Ego’s need for comfort will “keep us in our crazy”—forever seeking the carrot of more spiritual, higher renditions of our self, as well as external validation. But to retire from the company, we only have to stop engaging with its promises. We’re not going to get better, be other, arrive at a glorious goal. It’s only when we stop turning practice into a method to “solve” our life, or get some “badge” testifying to our enlightenment, and make the radical gesture of sitting down squarely with our own pain, that our practice becomes our own. Ego is shrewd and resourceful—it can even masquerade as compassion and the desire to serve!

  Eventually, this student did indeed sit down genuinely. Her practice helped her not be so afraid, and she cultivated wisdom and compassion for many, many years. The path and practice became her life, and attaining the goals she’d set for herself fell away. The Ego Project wasn’t filling her with ambition.

  She also, by the way, is now one of the “complete assholes” . . . a wonderful teacher leading her own community.

  Love and Work

  The two areas where most of us ordinary folk find the majority of our challenges are our work life and our love life. We tend to give them the most of our time and attention, and they deliver a major portion of the pain we experience. Though Zen is not a relationship improvement program or work skills training, it does provide some insight into what’s at play. There are ways to engage love and work that are relatively cloudy and others that are relatively clear. How can we tilt toward the clearer end of the continuum?

  When we see the world through the lens of our thoughts, everything is a little cloudy. We turn the people in our lives into ideas, what we think about them, rather than actually being with them. Unintentionally, we can kind of degrade our colleagues by engaging them in terms of what we presume we know about them, because we stop being actually present. The good thing is that this can be turned around. Below are a few very brief exercises that demonstrate how practice can help loosen the grip thought has on how we’re relating. Use them as little bridges when you recognize you’ve become stuck.

  NOT DEFINED BY

  Most conflict has at its core a frustration of love. We know in our bones that we need one another, that this human life comes down to love, and yet here is someone intent on hurting us, or oblivious to our needs, or doing harm to someone else. Love and affection are the last emotions we’re likely to have at such a moment. Yet the pain in our being arises because we know love is possible, and it has been disappointed or betrayed.

  To work on this first requires, again, directly acknowledging the pain. All good art and all honest practice starts here. Don’t retell the story: You already know it. I’ll repeat that for emphasis: Stop telling yourself the story of what’s going on. Just breathe; be the pain for a moment. Shift your breath to elongate the exhale. Take five elongated breaths in this way.

  Now allow the thought: I am not defined by my pain or this situation.

  Just that, for five to ten breaths.

  WORK, NOT JOB

  Work is a field where fear hides in the bushes. It’s where failure bites at our ankles, along with loss and disgrace. Impermanence taints even the greatest of accomplishments, which then whisper things about death that we’d really like not to hear.

  One very quick practice: Center, breathe, then exhale and allow the thought My real work is not defined by my job. Obviously, nothing happens just by repeating words to yourself. It is only when we begin to break the habit of living in the story, or as if this is all a fill-in-the-blank test with right answers, that things shift. The mind will want to fill in that blank, give you a
n immediate answer to So, what is my “real work” then? But whatever answer you give creates an idea, and what we’re talking about is not that. The key is to just hold the question, open and real and raw.

  Epilogue

  Pour nous tous . . . revenons à nos moutons!*

  *This expression is used when conversation has strayed from the original topic, and literally means Let’s get back to our sheep! It actually means Let’s get back to the point! It derives from French literature, from a tale called “la Farce du Maître Pathelin,” written by Rabelais in the fifteenth century. The protagonist of this medieval play brings two cases before a judge, one about sheep and the other about sheets. While arguing the sheep case, Maître Pathelin regularly brings up sheets in order to confuse the judge, who tries to get back to the first case each time by saying “Mais revenons à nos moutons!” And so, moutons came to symbolize the subject at hand.

  DHARMA TALK

  Trusting Mind

  Below is a Dharma Talk on a Zen koan given by Myotai Sensei. Dharma Talks are usually presented in a zendo (meditation hall) after several periods of meditation. An announcement would be made that certain aspects of Dharma Talks may be “dark to the mind, but radiant to the heart,” encouraging everyone to hear the presentation not just intellectually, but also with the possibility of waking up to the wisdom and compassion at the heart of all things.

  A seemingly very simple koan from the Mumonkan collection: Yunmen asked his community: “The world is vast and wide. Why put on your robe at the sound of a bell?” That’s the whole koan, nothing more nor less than that statement and question. Like all the best koans, it doesn’t argue or explain much, but expresses instead what we might call an uncanny trust.

  The koan trusts our capacity to realize vibrantly and uniquely the truth of our essential freedom. Unfortunately, because trust is such a rare experience nowadays, many of us don’t know how to receive it. We get squirmy, or vaguely angry that we’re not being given the answer. Something’s not right here, we’ll quietly insist; something’s missing. We hunger for “the teaching,” as if it were dead meat, not the living beast. But Yunmen is regarded as a kind of spiritual genius in the history of Zen, largely because of his “live words”—the way he teaches without giving us anything. Why doesn’t he give? Because we’re not lacking. He trusts that this is so because he’s experienced it, and knows the same experience is directly available to us.

  The world changes when we begin to appreciate that Yunmen—and countless teachers since—have bothered to bring up this matter at all. They bother to poke healthy flesh, to shake the sleeping. There’s a generosity at work in this koan that has awakened students for centuries. We keep that generosity flowing when we practice, which is simply that trust manifesting. So, let’s look at what Yunmen is up to.

  The temple bell cuts through the silence of morning zazen. Dawn is breaking. The birds are calling. With the ringing of the large metal bell, chanting begins around you—in you. As you place your folded robe on your head, the soft weight presses against your skin. Invoking your vows, you unfold the cloth and wrap it around you, covering your left shoulder. The chanting fades. Why, the koan asks, given the endless possibilities for a new day, given this “fresh dawn,” put on this robe?

  The robe in question here is a monastic robe, because Yunmen was working with monastics, and this is what they did every morning. In this koan, he used the particulars of his own time and place. But regardless of when and where we live, each of us—lay practitioner and monastic—puts on the clothes of the day. We wear what we wear; we do what we do. So, although in one sense Yunmen is challenging his students about their monastic vows, the challenge is more basic. We’re asked, if we’re to take up this koan honestly, to first see whether, indeed, the “world is vast and wide.” The world and the self—is there a line between them that would make each partial, limited, fundamentally dualistic? If so, then “vast” is a bit of an overstatement, don’t you think? But if that line can’t be drawn—and Buddhists for centuries have noticed that when they look for that line they can’t find it—what are the implications?

  This is the first entry point into the koan: realizing the unbounded. Placing ourselves in reality, where we’ve always been, however unaware. This is where zazen itself opens the door, revealing what we’ve perhaps spent a lifetime trying to hide. To take up a koan outside of zazen can be a little like trying to explain the color blue to someone who’s always been blind. Blue is there, but no way to see it has been developed. One glimpse, and suddenly all those songs about blue skies can stir in you in ways you couldn’t imagine before.

  Zazen is critical.

  I haven’t met anyone in long-term Zen training who hasn’t gone through times when they step away from zazen, only to find that their “life song,” if you will, has become abstract, distant from the vitality they once accessed when sitting meditation was a part of every day. Even the great, charismatic voices of the spirit, if they’re not drawing directly from the unbounded, begin to move us less deeply. It’s as if they’re teaching something they remember, not something as immediate as a taste on the tongue. I can’t encourage us too strongly to make zazen a daily practice. Even though no one has ever sufficiently explained why it makes a difference, it does. Maybe it’s enough to just say that beyond mental focus and the discipline of letting passing thoughts actually pass and not become obsessions—inarguably helpful capacities to develop—there is a direct expression in zazen of the unbounded mind. Without zazen, it’s just too easy to tacitly wait for our real life to begin. “It’s alive!” as they always used to say in those great sci-fi movies in the 1950s, poking some lump with a probe and leaping back. The next scene, Yunmen whispers, is up to you.

  Okay, so the daybreak of each moment is vast and boundless, Yunmen says. Now what? We’re left alone with this one, and no teacher can give us anything but their trust in our capacity, alone in a world that is boundless. “I, alone between heaven and earth,” the Buddha said, enlightened by—and enlightening—the morning star. Transforming the habitual loneliness of separation into the true aloneness of intimacy is the fundamental human project, our real life’s work. That transformation frees us to love without depending on response or gratitude. It frees us to do what we’re called to do without hedging the bet, limiting the risk.

  A student of mine had been told he was likely to die. His pancreas was basically melting, and his body was raging with fever and breaking down in what seemed like endless ways, with every day bringing something new and horrible. Then he hit a period of remission. He found himself aware that he was ready to die, having developed a certain peace with that knowledge. Then someone asked him if he was equally ready to live—and whether his son might not need him to stay alive if he could.

  He wrote, “All through my practice I thought what was driving me was my fear of death. At that moment, I realized what I was actually afraid of was really living.”

  I’m happy to report that he then essentially began to “kick butt,” as they say, and reorganized his treatment team. He has come back not only to full functioning, but to a frankly frightening vigor. And you can’t get away with the slightest insincerity with him.

  Real koans, whether we find them in our body or in an old collection from Zen’s history, are like that, so bare to the bone, so unclouded by excess, that to meet their demand we have to be almost unbearably spare. We can’t carry anything into the room, any protection, any buffer. As with death, we stand suddenly naked and alone. After a shared tragedy, people are washed clear for a while, after the wringing grip of intense grief. We are left with this sparseness—a tenderness that is practically edgeless. When the mental clutter begins to reassemble, many find themselves grieving not only for the dead, but also for the passing of that quality of spare tenderness. Daily routines can heal, but they can also put our hearts to sleep. Grief will continue to change us, to take another turn. Wisdom will call us to express really living in increasingly vital, compa
ssionate, and creative ways. Distraction and confusion will call us to despair and depression. Sitting clearly in our lives, we’ll notice the possibilities of each call. We’ll be able to manifest according to trust, rather than fear. Just be awake, and strength and clarity will find you. Don’t try to get through by losing yourself in rote activity, or by ignoring what you feel. Be awake, returning again and again to the moment.

  Yunmen’s koan is haunting: when we press the what, the why, and the how, we live our lives in the context of vastness. One of the classic descriptions of the training period we call Ango is “pure, vast, genuine, ocean gathering.” The image is helpful to an extent. We can imagine an all-water universe, in which individual beings are the waves, and the vastness of being is the ocean. We can take a wave’s-eye view, and know how a wave may “think” whatever it does doesn’t matter. It’s “going” nowhere, because it’s an all-water world. It may “feel” peaceful about its situation or “believe” that it’s all pointless and sad. Then imagine the ocean’s-eye view, along with the wave’s continuity within it, and the wave “realizing” it is none other than the mighty ocean itself. Can we imagine the boundless life of that wave—endlessly, intimately realizing every trough and rise of the sea? What is that? Without resorting to the image of the water-world—or an explanation of any variety—can we respond vitally to Yunmen’s koan, to the koan of our life? What is it to not be a robot, to not go on automatic, to not be lost in an ocean of pointlessness? “It’s all very well,” Aitken Roshi once wrote, “to contain the vast, wide world. It’s all very well to cast off body and mind and find Mu everywhere. But can you step from a 100-foot pole without falling on your face?”