People go to great lengths to eliminate troublesome feelings. “I’m tense; I have to do a workshop to relax.” So they do the workshop, and it makes them relaxed—but for how long? Wanting the tension relieved is like looking at the locked door, trying to figure out how to open it. If we’re obsessed with opening the door, we may find techniques to open it momentarily; but then we find ourselves right back in our lives, just as they were, living in the same old house. Instead of obsessing about the locked door, we need to be going about our lives, which means cleaning up the house, taking care of the baby, going to work, whatever.
STUDENT : A friend and I were just talking about how hard a year we have both had. Throughout our twenties and thirties, we both had hope that things were going to get better for us. Now, in our forties, we’ve come to the sinking realization that that’s not going to happen: our lives are not going to get better!
JOKO : Paradoxically, this painful disillusionment with the future helps us to appreciate life as it is. Only when we give up the hope that things will get fixed can we come to the realization that things are fine as they are.
STUDENT : Recently I’ve had a similar realization. For years I have been telling myself that my life will be better when I have saved up enough money to go into semiretirement. I’ll have more time for volunteer work; I’ll be able to sit more consistently, do more reading, and so on. Now I’m beginning to realize that what I need to do is right here at work. If I’m trying to get something finished, and someone comes in and distracts me, that’s just what I need to do at that moment. What I ought to be doing is just what I’m doing.
JOKO : In closing, let’s ask ourselves, “How am I trying to unlock the door as opposed to simply living my life?” We’re all trying to unlock the door, to find the key or formula. We’re looking for the perfect teacher, the perfect partner, the perfect job, and so on. To notice that we’re trying to unlock the door is immensely valuable; it helps us to see what our lives really are.
Wandering in the Desert
Wandering in the desert, looking for the Promised Land: this is our life. The discipline of sesshin intensifies this impression of wandering; sesshin feels confusing, discouraging, disappointing. We may have read books that paint a pretty picture of the Promised Land, what it’s like to achieve awareness of buddha nature, enlightenment, and so on. Yet we find ourselves wandering. All we can do is simply to be the wandering itself. To be the wandering means to be each moment of sesshin, no matter what it is. As we survive, living through the dryness and thirst, we may come to a discovery: wandering in the desert is the Promised Land.
That’s very hard for us to comprehend. We know our pain and suffering. We want the suffering to end. We want to reach a Promised Land where the suffering doesn’t exist anymore.
In working with those who are dying or severely troubled, Stephen Levine observes that true healing happens when we go into our own pain so deeply that we see it is not just our pain, but everyone’s pain. It’s immensely moving and supportive to discover that my pain is not private to me. Practice helps us to see that the whole universe is in pain.
A similar point can be made about relationships. We tend to think of relationships as discrete in time: they begin, they last for a time, and they end. Yet we are always in relationship, always connected to one another. At a certain point in time, a relationship may manifest itself in a particular way, but before that manifestation, it already existed, and after it “ends,” it continues. We continue in some sort of relationship even with those who have died. Former friends, former lovers, former relatives continue on in our lives and are part of who we are. It may be necessary for the visible manifestation to end, but the actual relationship never ends. We are not truly separate from one another. Our lives are joined; there is just one pain, just one joy, and it is ours. Once we face our pain and are willing to experience it, instead of covering it up, avoiding it, or rationalizing it, a shift occurs in our views of others and of our life.
As Stephen Levine states, each moment of persevering with our difficulties and suffering is a small victory. In staying with pain and irritability, we open up our relationship to life and to others. The process is slow; our pattern does not reverse itself overnight. We fight a constant battle between what we want and what is, what the universe presents to us. In sesshin, we see that battle joined more clearly. We see our fantasies, our efforts to figure things out and pursue our pet theories; we see our hopes of finding a door into the Promised Land, where all struggle and suffering will cease. We want, want, want: a certain person, a certain kind of relationship, a certain kind of work. Because no want like that can ever be completely fulfilled, we have ceaseless tension and anxiety that go right along with our wanting. They are inseparable twins.
Sometimes it’s helpful to accentuate the anxiety, to reach a point where we just can’t stand it. Then, we may be willing to back up and take another look at what’s going on. Instead of endlessly concerning ourselves with what’s wrong out there—with our partner, with our job, or whatever—we may begin to shift our relationship to what is. We learn to be what we are at this moment in this relationship or in a tedious aspect of our job. We begin to see the connection between ourselves and others. We see that our pain is also their pain, and their pain is also our pain. For example, a doctor who makes no connection between herself and her patients will see patients simply as one problem after another, to be forgotten when they walk out the door. A doctor who sees that her own discomfort and annoyance are her patients’ discomfort and annoyance will be sustained by this sense of connection and will work more precisely and effectively.
The everyday tedium of our lives is the desert we wander, looking for the Promised Land. Our relationships, our work, and all the little necessary tasks we don’t want to do are all the
gift. We have to brush our teeth, we have to buy groceries, we have to do the laundry, we have to balance our checkbook. This tedium—this wandering in the desert—is in fact the face of God. Our struggles, the partner who drives us crazy, the report we don’t want to write—these are the Promised Land.
We’re experts at producing thoughts about our lives. We’re not experts, however, at just being our lives, our pain and pleasure, our defeats and victories. Even happiness can be painful, because we know that we may lose it.
Life is very short. The moments that we now experience are quickly gone forever; we’ll never see them again. Each day that passes takes with it thousands upon thousands of such moments. How will we spend the little interval that’s left to us? Will we spend it spinning out thoughts about how terrible life is? Such thoughts are not even real. We will have such thoughts, but we can know that we’re thinking them and not get caught in them. When we can sit with the bodily sensations and thoughts that are the pain, the suffering transforms into the universal, which is joy.
The point of our lives, as Stephen Levine says, is to fulfill that which we were born for, to heal into life. That means to heal out of the pain of our personal, separate, constricted “I want,” into openness. The point of our lives is to be openness itself, which is joy. Joy includes suffering, happiness, everything that is. This kind of healing is what our lives are about. When I heal my pain, without any thought at all I heal yours, too. Practice is about discovering that my pain is our pain.
So we can’t end our relationships. We can walk out, get divorced, but we can’t end them. When we think we can end them, everybody suffers. We can’t end our relationship to our children; we can’t even end a relationship with someone we don’t like. Such an ending would require us to be something we’re not and never will be, which is separate from others. When we try to be separate, the suffering begins all over again.
As Stephen Levine says, we are born to heal into life. That means healing into our pain, and healing into the pain of the world. For each of us, that healing is different, but the basic purpose is the same. We need to hear this truth and remember it over and over and over, a thousand times
. To do the work, we have to go against the current in our society, which tells us to look out for number one: everyone for himself or herself. Daily practice, doing sesshins, maintaining contact when we live at a distance, all are helpful if we are to do this work, the work of healing into life, and come to see that we have even now reached the Promised Land.
Practice Is Giving
Practice is truly about giving, but that can be easily misunderstood, so we must be careful. Recently I read a book by a woman who was called “Peace Pilgrim.” In three decades she walked more than twenty-five thousand miles, carrying her only possessions with her, witnessing for peace. Her book shows that she really understood practice, which she describes very simply. She says that if we want to be happy, we have to give and give and give. Instead, most of us want to get and get and get. That’s the nature of being human.
It took Peace Pilgrim many years of hard training to transform her life. For her, that training was totally to give. That’s wonderful—if we understand it correctly. Beginning students typically have self-centered ideas about practice: “I’m going to practice so I can be thoroughly integrated.” “I’m going to practice so I can be enlightened.” “I’m going to practice in order to be calm.” Instead, practice is about giving, giving, giving. But we make a mistake if we simply adopt that as a new ideal. Giving is not about thinking. Nor should we give in order to get some results for ourselves. For most of us, however, giving is confused with self-centered motivations, and this remains true until our practice is very solid.
We must ask ourselves, “What is giving?” This can keep us busy for many years. For example, should we give others whatever they want? Sometimes—and sometimes not. Sometimes we need to say no, or simply stay out of the way.
There is no formula, so we’re bound to make mistakes—and that’s fine. We practice with the results of our actions, and this will take time. Perhaps after many years we begin to grasp the real nature of giving. A Zen teacher in Japan requires new students to practice for ten years without working with him personally. When the students return to him after ten years, he tells them to sit another ten years. Though that’s not my way of teaching, he has a point. It takes time to discover what our life is.
Last week I received two calls from persons looking for advice about practice. One caller said that her friend had a spiritual realization that was a bit off, and she needed the right book to set her friend straight. Another called at 1:30 A.M. to say that he had read a wonderful book about enlightenment and felt that his own practice wasn’t quite enlightened. He wanted help in figuring it out. I told him that it wasn’t a good idea to call people in the middle of the night. He said, “Oh, is it the middle of the night?” I said, “Enlightenment is about awakening; and if you’re going to be awake, you need to know what time it is.” He said, “I never thought of that.”
Enlightenment is the ability to give totally in every second. It’s not about having some great experience. Such moments may occur, but they don’t make an enlightened life. We need to ask, “What does it mean for me to give in this moment?” For example, when the phone rings, how can we give? When doing physical work—cleaning, painting, cooking—what does it mean to give totally?
Though we can’t make ourselves into totally giving persons just by thinking, we can notice when we don’t totally give. We hide our self-centered motivations from ourselves; practice helps us to realize just how self-centered we are. The truth is that at any moment, we are as we are. We need to experience this, to know our thoughts and bodily feelings, and then slowly our experience can turn itself over. We don’t have to do it. It just turns itself over. We can’t make ourselves be a certain way. To imagine otherwise is one of the biggest traps in practice. But we can notice our intolerance and unkindness, our laziness and the other games we play. As we notice how we really are, things slowly begin to turn—as they are with many of my students. It is wonderful to see. When the turnover happens, the kindness or givingness spreads. That’s what practice is about. Instead of a new ideal—“I don’t want to visit him this afternoon, but I should be giving”—we act, and experience what goes on with us.
So please: give, give, give—and practice, practice, practice. It is the Way.
Notes
Preface
As Lenore Friedman Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), p. 112. Whirlpools and Stagnant Waters
Caught in a self-centered dream The vows are as follows: “Caught in a self-centered dream: only suffering. / Holding to self-centered thoughts: exactly the dream. / Each moment, life as it is: the only teacher. / Being just this moment: compassion’s way.” “boundless field of benefaction” Francis Dojun Cook, How to Raise an Ox: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, Including Ten Newly Translated Essays (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978), pp. 24f.
Responding to Pressure
The verse of the Kesa Francis Dojun Cook, How to Raise an Ox, pp. 24f.
Gurdjieff called our strategy For an elaboration of the concept of a “chief feature” see Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
The Baseboard
The Supreme Doctrine Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 145.
275
The Eye of the Hurricane
Kyogun’s Man up a Tree Gateless Gate, Newly Translated With Commentary by Zen Master Koun Yamada (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1979), p. 35.
Integration
There is a traditional Zen story See Paul Reps, compiler, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (Garden City, NY: Anchor, Doubleday, no date), “The Thief Who Became a Disciple,” p. 41.
The Tomato Fighters
“The best athlete wants Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, with Foreword and Notes, by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), chap. 68.
Experiences and Experiencing
We would rather be ruined W. H. Auden, from “The Age of Anxiety,” in Collected Poems, ed. by Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 407.
The Icy Couch
“that this spasm, which Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 140.
“One can indeed say Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine, p. 145.
Attention Means Attention
There’s an old Zen story Philip Kapleau, ed., The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 10—11.
Transformation
As Carlos Castaneda writes Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). Wandering in the Desert
Stephen Levine observes Stephen Levine, Healing into Life and Death (New York: Doubleday, 1987).
Practice Is Giving
“Peace Pilgrim” Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, Compiled by Some of Her Friends (Santa Fe, NM: Ocean Tree, 1991). Also Steps Toward Inner Peace—A Discourse by Peace Pilgrim: Suggested Uses of Harmonious Principles for Human Living. Friends of Peace Pilgrim, 43480 Cedar Avenue, Hemet, CA 92343.
About the Author
CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK teaches at the San Diego Zen Center. Steve Smith is professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College.
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Copyright
NOTHING SPECIAL: Living Zen. Copyright © 1993 by Charlotte Joko Beck. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter
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Table of Contents
NOTHING SPECIAL
CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK
EDITED BY STEVE SMITH
Contents
Epigraph ii
Preface vii
I. Struggle 1
Preface
Nothing Special: Living Zen Page 26
