Nothing Special: Living Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

  STUDENT: How is what you describe different from traditional shikantaza practice?*

  JOKO : It’s very close to shikantaza, correctly understood. Even in shikantaza, however, there is a tendency to blank out the mind. It’s possible to get into a kind of shimmering experience in which the subject is not included. This is simply another form of false samadhi. Thought processes have been excluded from awareness, and we blank out our sensory experience as we might some other object of awareness.

  STUDENT : You say that the true purpose of practice is to experience our oneness with all things, or rather just to be our own experience, so that, for example, we’re just totally hammering some nails, if that’s what we’re doing. But isn’t there a paradox in trying to achieve even that?

  JOKO : I agree with you: we can’t try to be one with the hammering. In trying to become it, we separate ourselves from it. The very effort defeats itself. There is something we can do, however: we can notice the thoughts that separate us from our activity. We can be aware that we’re not fully doing what we’re doing. That’s not so difficult. Labeling our thoughts helps us to do this. Instead of saying, “I’m going to be one with the hammering,” which is dualistic—thinking about the activity rather than just doing it—we can always notice when we’re not doing it. That’s all that’s necessary.

  * Shikantaza—“just sitting”: a pure form of sitting meditation, without the aid of breath counting or koan practice, in which the mind maintains highly concentrated and alert yet unhurried awareness of the present.

  Practice is not about having experiences, not about having giant realizations, not about getting somewhere or becoming something. We are perfect as we are. By “perfect” I mean simply that this is it. Practice is simply maintaining awareness—of our activities and also of the thoughts that separate us from our activities. As we hammer nails or sit, we simply hammer nails or sit. Since our senses are open, we hear and feel other things as well: sounds, smells, and so on. When thoughts arise, we notice them, and return to our direct experience.

  Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.

  When we become open awareness, our ability to do necessary thinking gets sharper, and our whole sensory input becomes brighter, clearer. After a certain amount of sitting, the world looks brighter, sounds are sharper, and there’s a richness of sensory input, which is just our natural state if we are not blocking out experience with our tense, worrying minds.

  When we begin to practice, we can maintain awareness only very briefly, and then we drift away from the present. Caught up in our thoughts, we don’t notice we are drifting. Then we catch ourselves and pick up our sitting again. Practice includes both awareness of our sitting and awareness of our drifting. After years of practice, the drifting diminishes until it’s almost gone, though it never completely disappears.

  STUDENT: Sounds and smells and also our emotions and thoughts are all part of our sitting?

  JOKO : Yes. It’s normal for the mind to produce thoughts. Practice is to be aware of our thoughts without getting lost in them. And if we get lost, to notice that, too.

  Zazen is actually not complicated. The real problem is, we don’t want to do it. If my boyfriend begins to look at other women, how long am I going to be willing simply to experience that? We all have problems constantly, but our willingness just to be is very low on our list of priorities, until we have practiced long enough to have faith in just being, so that solutions can appear naturally. Another mark of a maturing practice is the development of such trust and faith.

  STUDENT : What is the difference between being totally absorbed in hammering the nails and being aware that you’re totally absorbed in hammering the nails?

  JOKO : Being aware that you’re absorbed in hammering the nails is still dualistic. You’re thinking, “I am totally absorbed in hammering the nails.” That is not true mindfulness. In true mindfulness, one is just doing it. Awareness that one is absorbed in an experience can be a useful step on the way, but it’s not quite it, because one is still thinking about it. There’s still a separation between awareness and the object of awareness. When we’re just hammering the nails, we’re not thinking about practice. In good practice, we’re not thinking, “I have to practice.” Good practice is simply doing what we’re doing and noticing when we drift off. When we’ve been sitting for many years, we know almost instantaneously when we’ve started to drift.

  Focusing on something called “Zen practice” is not necessary. If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as “I’m a good person for doing this” or “Isn’t it wonderful, that I can take care of everything?,” then that would be sufficient.

  STUDENT : My life seems to consist of layers upon layers of activity, all going on simultaneously. If I did only one thing at a time, then went on to the next, I wouldn’t accomplish what I usually do in a day.

  JOKO: I question that. Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there’s no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.

  STUDENT : But when one of the things I have to do is think something through, and another is to answer a ringing phone, and another is to write a letter….

  JOKO : Still, each time we turn to another activity, if we are wholly present, just doing what we’re doing, it gets done much more quickly and well. Usually, however, we bring into the activity various subliminal thoughts, such as “I have to get those other things done, too—or my life just doesn’t measure up.” Pure activity is very rare. There’s nearly always a shadow, a film over it. We may not be aware of that; we may just be aware of some tension. There’s no tension in pure activity, beyond the physical contraction required to do the activity itself.

  Years ago in sesshin I often had the experience of just becoming cooking or weeding or whatever it was that I had to do, but there was still a subtle subject in there. And sure enough, as soon as the sesshin had faded a little bit, I was right back into the same old stuff. I had not become one with the object.

  STUDENT : Back to the example of hammering the nails: if we’re really just doing it, then we’re not aware of ourselves at all, whereas if we remember that we’re doing it, we’re back into a dualism of subject and object and are not simply engaged in pure activity. Doesn’t that mean, however, that when we’re just hammering nails, we’re not there at all? We no longer exist?

  JOKO : When we’re engaged in pure activity, we’re a presence, an awareness. But that’s all we are. And that doesn’t feel like anything. People suppose that the so-called enlightened state is flooded with emotional and loving feelings. But true love or compassion is simply to be nonseparate from the object. Essentially it’s a flow of activity in which we do not exist as a being separate from our activity.

  There is always some value in practice that has dualistic characteristics. A certain amount of training and deconditioning goes on in any sitting practice. Until we have gone beyond that dualism, however, we cannot know any ultimate freedom. There is no ultimate freedom until there’s just no one here.

  We may think that we don’t care about ultimate freedom in that sense. The truth is, however, that we do want it.

  STUDENT : If one person is caught in an emotion of love and another person is caught in an emotion of hatred, is there a difference in how they should practice?

  JOKO : No. Genuine love or compassion is an absence of both such personally conceived emotions. Only a person can love or ha
te in the usual sense. If there’s no person, if we’re just absorbed in living, such emotions will be absent.

  In the concentrative practice I first described, since the feeling of anger is an object, what we do is just ignore it. We push the emotion to the side and empty the koan of content. The problem with that approach is that when we return to daily life, we don’t know what to do about our emotions, because they have not been resolved; they are foreign territory to classic Zen practice. In an awareness practice, we simply experience the emotion-thought and its accompanying sensations. The results are very different.

  STUDENT: In the shikantaza practice I was taught, the emotions are part of the practice: they come up and we sit with them.

  JOKO: Yes, shikantaza practice can be understood in that way. We just need to be aware of the pitfalls.

  STUDENT : In the longer, more difficult sesshins, sometimes I feel like Gordon Liddy, holding my hand over a candle in order to see how much pain I can endure. In the old style of samadhi practice, I think that the test of one’s samadhi was one’s ability to obliterate pain through bliss and concentration.

  JOKO: Right. Then the object is blanked out.

  STUDENT : In that style of practice, sesshin becomes a kind of endurance contest. Could you say something about how pain functions in this system so that it’s not masochism?

  JOKO : Moderate pain is a good teacher. Life itself presents pain as well as inconvenience. If we don’t know how we deal with pain and inconvenience, we don’t know much about ourselves. Extreme pain is not necessary, however. If the pain is excessive, it’s okay to use a bench or chair, or even to lie down. Still, there is some value in just being willing to be the pain. Subject-object separation occurs because we’re not willing to be the pain that we associate with the object. That’s why we distance ourselves from it. If we don’t understand ourselves in relation to pain, we run from it when it appears, and we lose the great treasure of awareness with its direct experience of life. So up to a point, it’s useful to sit with pain, so that we can regain fuller awareness of our life as it is.

  When I see students in daisan,* most of the time my knees are hurting. So they’re hurting: that’s just how it is. Particularly as we grow older, it’s useful to be able simply to be with our experience and live our lives fully, anyway. Part of what we’re here to learn is to be with discomfort and inconvenience. In moderate degrees, pain is a great teacher. Without some degree of discomfort, most of us would learn very little. Pain, discomfort, difficulty, even tragedy can be great teachers, especially as we get older.

  STUDENT: In ordinary consciousness, is everything besides ourselves an object?

  *Daisan: a formal interview between student and teacher during the course of meditative practice.

  JOKO : If we think of the self as one object among others, even the self is an object. I can observe myself, I can hear my voice, I can poke my legs. From that point of view, I am an object also.

  STUDENT: So objects include feelings and states of mind, as well as things in the world?

  JOKO : Yes. Though we think of our self as a subject and everything else as an object, that’s an error. When we separate things from one another, everything becomes an object. There’s only one true subject—which is nothing at all. What is it?

  STUDENT: Awareness.

  JOKO: Yes, awareness, though the word is inadequate. Awareness isn’t anything, and yet the whole universe exists through it.

  Integration

  There is a traditional story about a Zen teacher who was reciting sutras* and was accosted by a thief, demanding his money or his life. The teacher told the thief where to find the money, asking only that some be left to pay his taxes and that when the thief was ready to leave he thank the teacher for the gift. The thief complied. A few days later he was apprehended and confessed to several crimes, including the offense against the Zen teacher. But the teacher insisted that he had not been a victim of theft, because he had given the man his money and the man had thanked him for it. After the man had finished serving his prison term, he returned to the teacher and became one of his disciples.

  Such stories sound romantic and wonderful. But suppose somebody borrows money from us and doesn’t return it. Or someone steals our credit card and uses it. How would we respond? A problem with classic Zen stories like this is that they have the feel of long ago and far away. With that distance from our time, we may fail to get the point. The point is not that somebody took some money or what the master did. The point is that the master did not judge the thief. It doesn’t follow that the best thing is always to give the thief what he wants; sometimes that might not be the best action. I’m sure that the master looked at the situation, saw immediately who the man was (perhaps just a kid who picked up a sword and hoped he could seize a little quick money), and intuitively knew what to do. It’s not so much what the master did as the way he did it. The attitude of the master was crucial. Instead of making a

  *Sutra: a traditional Buddhist text, often chanted aloud.

  judgment, he simply dealt with the situation. Had the situation been different, his response might have been different.

  We don’t see that we are all teachers. Everything we do from morning to night is a teaching: the way we speak to someone at lunch, the way we transact our business at the bank, our reaction when the paper we submit is accepted or rejected—everything we do and everything we say reflects our practice. But we can’t just want to be like Shichiri Kogen. That’s a pitfall of training, to conclude, “Oh, I should be like that.” Students do great harm by dragging such ideals into practice. They imagine that “I should be selfless, giving, and noble like the great Zen master.” The master in each of these stories was effective because he was what he was. He didn’t think twice about it. When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be. If we can use the stories rightly, they are wonderful. But we should not simply try to copy them in our lives. Intrinsically, we are perfect in being as we are. We are enlightened. But until we really understand this, we will do deluded things.

  Zen centers and other places of spiritual practice often ignore what has to happen to a human being for true enlightenment to take place. The first thing that has to happen—with many steps, many byways and pitfalls—is the integration of ourselves as human beings, so that mind and body become one. For many people, this enterprise takes an entire lifetime. When mind and body are one, we are not constantly being pulled this way and that way, back and forth. As long as we are controlled by our self-centered emotions (and most of us have thousands of these illusions), we haven’t accomplished this step. To take a person who has not yet integrated body and mind and push him or her through the narrow concentrated gate to enlightenment can indeed produce a powerful experience; but the person won’t know what to do with it.

  Momentarily seeing the oneness of the universe doesn’t necessarily mean that our lives will be freer. For example, as long as we worry about what someone’s done to us, like taking our money, we are not truly integrated. Whose money is it, anyway? And what makes a piece of land ours? Our sense of ownership arises because we’re afraid and insecure—and so we want to own things. We want to own people. We want to own ideas. We want to own our opinions. We want to have a strategy for living. As long as we are doing all these things, the idea that we could naturally act like Master Kogen is quite far-fetched.

  The important thing is who we are at any given moment and how we handle what life brings to us. As body and mind become more integrated, the work becomes paradoxically far easier. Our job is to be integrated with the whole world. As the Buddha said, “The whole world are my children.” Once we are relatively at peace with ourselves, integration with the rest of the world becomes easier. What takes the greatest time and work is the first part. And once that has been relatively accomplishe
d, there are many areas of life that have the quality of an enlightened life. The first years are more difficult than the later years. The most difficult is the first sesshin, the most difficult months of sitting are in the first year, the second year is easier, and so it goes.

  Later on another crisis may arise, perhaps after five or ten years of sitting, when we begin to understand that we are going to get nothing out of sitting—nothing whatsoever. The dream is gone—the dream of the personal glory we think we’re going to get out of practice. The ego is fading; this can be a dry, difficult period. As I teach, I see people’s personal agendas cracking up. That happens in the first part of the journey. It’s really wonderful, though it is the hard part. Practice becomes unromantic: it doesn’t sound like what we read about in books. Then real practice begins: moment by moment, just facing the moment. Our minds no longer are so obstreperous; they don’t dominate us anymore. Genuine renunciation of our personal agendas begins, though even then it may be interrupted by all sorts of difficult episodes. The path is never direct and smooth. In fact, the rockier the better. The ego needs rocks to challenge it.

  As practice progresses, we notice that the episodes, the rocks in our path, are not as difficult as they once would have been. We don’t have quite the same agenda that we had before, not the same drive to be important or to be judgmental. If we sit with even forty percent awareness, little chips come off of our personal agendas. The longer we sit, the less eventful our sitting becomes. How long can we stand to look at our ego stuff? How long can we look at it without letting it go and just returning to being here? The process is a slow wearing away—not a matter of gaining virtue, but of gaining understanding.