Real Altruism

By: Norman Fischer

Real altruism isn’t self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, a guilt-driven sense that we should be good, we should be nice, we should be kind. It is the profound recognition that self and others are not fundamentally different, only apparently different. Because of this the range of activity and feeling of bodhicitta is much wider than we would expect. A whole world of altruism and its effects upon up before us. We now see that the only we that we could lover ourselves is by loving others, and the only way that we could truly love others is to love ourselves. The difference between self-love and love of others is very small, once we really understand. Taking this truth into our hearts and actions is truly life changing. And once we open to it, it becomes impossible to go back. It becomes impossible to fool ourselves anymore with selfishness and resentment. To be sure, we will probably have plenty of selfish and resentful feelings, but now we know them for what they are, and they are far less compelling, because we have seen for ourselves how stupid, how childish and blind such feelings actually are.

From: Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong

The Inconceivable Vow

By: Taigen Dan Leighton

A key aspect of Bodhisattva practice is the commitment or dedication to the way of awakening and to carrying out this commitment and practice for the benefit of all. The aspiration to care for and to awaken all beings (in Sanskrit called bodhicitta, literally “enlightening mind”) is considered mysterious and auspicious. This heartfelt care for suffering beings and fundamental questioning into the meaning of our lives arises unaccountably amid the multitude of psychological conditionings in our experience, known and unknown…

Although bodhisattva qualities may unfold over great stretches of time, the initial aspiration of beginners seeking the Way is said to be identical in nature and value to that of an advanced bodhisattva.

From: Faces of Compassion: Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and Their Modern Expression—An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism

The Serious Problems of Life Are Never Fully Solved

By C.G. Jung

The serious problems of life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and the purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrification.

Finding Out For Yourself

By Charlotte Selver

I don’t want to take away from you your discoveries.  I don’t want to give you pre-chewed knowledge.  I think you have enough of that.  You have to get going yourself.  One thing you probably have noticed—not only in what we say but in what we do in class: that the emphasis is on finding out for yourself.  Not saying, “This is right,” and “This is wrong,” you know.  Not giving instruction as to how to accomplish something, but giving the person an occasion to find out for himself.  This is very basic in our work!  Giving the honor to the person to explore, and not to teach him how things “ought” to be.

Zazen is Not the Same as Meditation

By Rev. Issho Fujita

Meditation practices which emphasize something psychological—thoughts, per­ceptions, feelings, visualizations, intentions, etc.—all direct our attention to cortical-cerebral functions, which I will loosely refer to as “Head.” Most meditation, as we conventionally understand it, is a work that focuses on the Head. In Oriental medicine we find the interesting idea that harmony among the internal organs is of greatest importance. All the issues associ­ated with Head are something merely re­sulting from a lack of harmony among the internal organs, which are the real bases of our life.

Because of our highly developed cor­tical-cerebral function, we tend to equate self-consciousness, the sense of “I,” with the Head—as if the Head is the main char­acter in the play and the body is the ser­vant following orders from the Head. However from the point of view of Oriental medicine this is not only a con­ceit of the Head, but is a total miscon­ception of life. Head is just a small part of the whole of life, and need not hold such a privileged position.

While most meditation tends to focus on the Head, zazen focuses more on the living holistic body-mind framework, al­lowing the Head to exist without giving it any pre-eminence. If the Head is over­functioning, it will give rise to a split and unbalanced life. But in the zazen posture it learns to find its proper place and function within a unified mind-body field. Our living human body is not just a collection of bodily parts, but is an organically inte­grated whole. It is designed in such a way that when one part of the body moves, however subtle the movement may be, it simultaneously causes the whole body to move in accordance with it.

The entire article may be found in the Spring 2002 issue of Insight Journal, a publication of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.

One Body

By Zen Master Sokei An

Your body is not bounded by the surface of your skin, you know.  The sun and the moon are your body.  The ocean and rivers are your body.  The whole universe is your body.  The Buddha based his religion upon this Mind, this consciousness.  Sometimes you call it “one-body.”  Then you observe that your mind is as boundless as the sky, and the endless universe, and your present state, this moment is here…that is all.  All the teachings are in your heart, they are inherent, the intrinsic law of your nature.  You cannot find this anywhere outside yourself.

Suzuki Roshi on Sitting

You should not be tilted sideways, backwards, or forwards. You should be sitting straight up as if you were supporting the sky with your head. This is not just form or breathing. It expresses the key point of Buddhism. It is a perfect expression of your Buddha nature. If you want true understanding of Buddhism, you should practice this way. These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself the purpose of our practice. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind, so there is no need to try to attain some special state.

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

By Jane Hirschfield

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—

between you, there is nothing to forgive—

but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

Experimenting with Standing in Daily Life

By Charles Brooks, from Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

The reader who is interested in such experimentation may feel like trying it out deliberately …[as we have practiced it].  This is fine if you have the time and patience.  Otherwise, wait for some occasion when you are obliged to stand anyway.  There are bound to be plenty of them.  Perhaps you are waiting in line at the bank or in the supermarket or at some other location.  Instead of allowing your energies to sour into impatience or boredom, you may channel then into experiments like these.  You do exactly what feels agreeable and interesting, merely making the decision to forego your customary inertia and to give yourself, as fully as is practicable, to exploration.  You may explore anything that comes to you.  The only condition is that you give it your respect and time.  If you can explore without hopes or expectations, but with the same kind of care you might give to doodling at the telephone, something will come of it.

Reclaiming the Baby's Awareness

By Charlotte Selver, from Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

I wish you would once in a while look into the eyes of a healthy baby, and would see with what earnestness, interest, great power of concentration—a basic saying yes—such a child has. The child doesn’t yet want anything special; it is equally interested in everything that comes. When the child takes something and looks at it from all sides, or when somebody goes through the room and the child’s while attention follows…that is how we started. And it is also what we can come to—when this natural inner drive for full relating is unearthed and set free.

We wouldn’t be all the time so full of expectations and wishes, but we would be seeing more clearly that any world in which we live can be as astonishing as the world of the baby. And then all things are precious.

Something In Us Can Teach Us

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

In Zen they say, “Buddha is in everybody.” That's not a shallow statement. It means something. Buddha is in everybody. Buddha is in you and in you and in you and in you. Buddha is in all of us. That means something in us knows. Something in us can teach us. Something in us can inform us how it wants to be. So that we can feel whether we are coming in touch with another person in such a way that we can be open for the other person, or whether we are not open for the other. We can feel whether we speak the truth or whether we go a little off the truth. We can feel whether we're putting pressure on something or whether we only give our weight to it. We can feel whether we allow our breathing to function as it wants to function or whether we manipulate it. We can feel whether we're dealing with a person and letting the person have his own way of being or whether we manipulate him. And so on and so on. In other words we have the ability within ourselves--if we become more awake--to feel more clearly what our own nature has to tell us. That's the thing that interests me.

We Have Nothing to Teach You

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

We have nothing to teach you. We only help you to discover what is already there, inside you. Our method is that there is no method. It is a very sensitive inquiry, a very sensitive discovery which everybody makes for himself through his own experimentation into what we actually become aware of when we begin to use our biological equipment more sensitively, more sensibly. It's not an empty phrase to say, for instance, when something doesn't fit fully into reality that it is nonsense. And this sensing -- this possibility of becoming more alerted in our senses, and using them more fully and more altogether -- this is the content of our work.

A Whole-Life Path

Six Tenets of a Whole Life Path (from A Whole-Life Path: A Lay Buddhist’s Guide to Crafting a Dhamma-Infused Life, by Gregory Kramer):

Kramer identifies “six tenets” of what he calls a "whole life path". Writing from the perspective of a Theravada practitioner, he describes a practice of "the tenet sweep", where one asks, in sum, "What is my relationship to the Dhamma right now?" Kramer notes: "As you become more familiar with the content and attitude of the tenets, each bare tenet will reveal its full wisdom tone. Soon you might well be able to mentally touch each tenet using hardly any words. The tenet sweep is best undertaken with an attitude of kindness and patience. We are all ripening gradually in wisdom."

The “tenet sweep”:

1.     Ground in the Dhamma.  What teachings can I apply to my life right now?  Do I sense the working of natural laws: in my mind, in relationship, in the world?  Can I name them, learn from them?  As I study or reflect or engage in conversation, am I considering what I am saying from the standpoint of the early Buddhist teachings?  Other wisdom traditions?

2.     Engage all the teachings as practices.  Am I merely thinking about the Dhamma or actually practicing it right now?  When I read or hear about a teaching, do I put it to work in my life?  Which approaches to enacting the Dhamma fit best right now: close observation of thoughts and behaviors, deep reflection on the teaching, concrete physical actions and social engagement?

3.     Exclude no moment, experience or teaching.  Is this one moment, now, guided by wisdom?  Am in excluding anything from the path: my intimate personal life, my art or craft, my playtime?  Am I avoiding teachings that are difficult to understand?  Am I excluding teachings that challenge my belief systems?

4.     Find each teaching in the here and now.  Whatever teaching or practice I’m reflecting on or enacting, do I feel it is available for me to experience right now?  How is this teaching manifesting in my thought processes, in my bodily experience?  What is deeply true in this teaching, and how does it feel to touch that truth here and now?

5.     Let all the teachings in fully.  Which teachings are closest to my heart right now?  Which am I guarded against or pushing away?  Can I feel the possibility of an unintoxicated mind, balanced and clear?  Can I sense in my body the energy, challenge and possibility of the teachings?  Am I moved and inspired by this Dhamma-rich path?

6.     Engage the teachings individually, in relationship and socially.  Can I feel that the person I am with right now is a spiritual friend?  How am I treating them—with compassion, with generosity?  How might we engage the path together, right now, in our conversation or what we’re doing?  Could our togetherness be a doorway out of a heroic and lonely stance?  How am I supported and morally challenged by society and humankind as a whole?  How can I, alone and collaboratively, bring the wisdom of the Dhamma into these relational and social encounters?

Zen Master Seung Sahn on Chanting

Chanting meditation is an important aspect of daily Zen practice. At first you may not understand. But after you chant regularly, you will understand. Chanting meditation means keeping a not-moving mind and perceiving the sound of your own voice. Perceiving your voice means perceiving your true self or true nature. Then you and the sound are never separate, which means that you and the whole universe are never separate. Thus, to perceive your nature is to perceive universal substance. With regular chanting, your center gets stronger and stronger. When your center is strong, you can control your feelings, condition and situation.

[At Lotus Heart Zen] we practice together. At first, people come with strong opinions, many likes and dislikes. For many people, chanting is not easy: much confused thinking! However, when we do chanting meditation correctly, perceiving the sound of our own voice and those around us, our minds become clear. In clear mind, there is no like or dislike, only the sound of the voice. Ultimately, we learn that chanting is not for our personal pleasure, but to make our direction clear, in order to save all beings from suffering.

When you are chanting, you must perceive the sound of your voice, and when you do, you and the universe have already become one. Suffering disappears,; true happiness appears. This is called nirvana. If you keep nirvana, your mind is clear like space. Clear like space minds clear like a mirror. Red comes, red. White comes, white. Someone is happy; I am happy. Someone is sad; I am sad. Someone is hungry; give them food. The name for this is Great Love, Great Compassion, the Great Bodhisattva way. That also means Great Wisdom. This is chanting meditation, chanting Zen.

A Path With a Heart

From The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda

Submitted by Susan Suntree

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think is necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same; they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Darkness Is Asking To Be Loved

by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel| June 2, 2020  LION’S ROAR                          

If you’re still holding up and trying to meditate right now, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel invites you to fall down.

By now we have lost the tiny sense of peace we created for ourselves. Our composure is an idea long gone, reflected in the grinding of our teeth and locked jaws.

If you are still holding up trying to meditate, I invite you to fall down. Fall down on the earth. Come down here and smell the sweat of terror on your skin, overpowering the scent of agarwood. Come down on all fours and greet the darkness that reeks of death, reaches out its desperate hand and asks to be loved as much as we love the light it gives.

Breathe for those gasping for air.

Come down here on this earth and breathe for those gasping for air. Hear each scream as a bell that never stops ringing. Bury your face in the mud of this intimate place, in this shared disease and tragedy.

If you have nothing to say, now is the time for the deeper silence honed that does not apologize or seeks something kind to say. And yet the deeper silence is not quiet. It whispers in the dark and wakes you from the nightmare.

Come down here and be still on the earth. Let loose shame, rage, guilt, grief, pain, and make a river of it.

Come down here. Catch the love poems hidden in the shouting, watch the unfolding of the seasons from the ground, look up at the sky. And when it hurts from being down here so long, roll over and see what you couldn’t see from the other side.

Breathe out loud. No particular posture needed.

Fall down onto the earth. Fall off your soft cushions. Come down here. Come down here, where the only lullaby tonight will be the sound of your heart drumming the songs you were born with.

 

Equanimity: Walking the Tight Rope with a Grandmother’s Heart

By Roshi Joan Halifax on September 22, 2020

 

The Four Boundless Abodes of lovingkindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity were introduced to me by Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg in the early 1970’s. ...I was a Zen person, and a bit skeptical of such a “nice” practice. But Sharon told me to just do the practice, internally work with the phrases associated with each of the “abodes” and that they would change my life. Well, why not? I said to myself. And so I began....

 

But this evening, before autumn equinox, and in the midst of political turmoil, a global pandemic, climate meltdown, racist violence, and an upcoming election that looks complicated and compromised, my mind turns toward equanimity, the most challenging of the abodes for me...

... it was Bernie [Glassman] who gave me the strongest lessons about equanimity, that capacity to maintain balance in the midst of any conditions, no matter how strange, no matter how tough. He would sit in the charnel ground of Auschwitz and be an unshakeable presence in the midst of a grotesque and cruel history that was hard to even imagine and nearly impossible to stomach... He did this with imperturbable equanimity, a strong back, and also a soft front....

 

...One of the functions of equanimity is not to get blown off balance by any one of the “the eight worldly dharmas” of pleasure and pain; praise and blame; disgrace and fame; and loss and gain. One needs to put one’s center of mass over a base of support, like tight rope walkers..., not to be pulled off balance by the worldly winds. Equanimity protects us by giving us a base of support for the mass of our lives....

In the polarized conditions of our current world, it is pretty challenging for most of us to maintain our balance and a good heart in the midst of so much negativity and uncertainty. One doesn’t want to be a by-stander, on the one hand, dissociated from the suffering within and around us. And many of us are very socially engaged, so socially by-standing is not an option. But one of the things I have learned from being a long time Zen practitioner is the gift of the “grandmother’s heart.” Eihei Dogen puts it this way: “You can understand all of Buddhism, but you cannot go beyond your abilities and your intelligence unless you have robaishin, grandmother heart/mind, the heart/mind of great compassion.”

A good grandmother doesn’t take her life personally. She is not a by-stander but rather one who “looks over;” she has the heart of equanimity informed by lovingkindness, compassion, and joy in the well-being of others; this kind of grandmother within us offers whatever she can, without expecting anything in return.

At this time of equinox, I think we could use a big dose of “grandmother’s heart,” a bit more of justice as well as love in our world. Life is in need of balance on this day of fall equinox, 2020. And life is in the balance. May we find our way to robaishin before too much more time passes.

 

We are all on that tight rope now, no matter what party we belong to, no matter our age, gender, ethnicity, neighborhood. Let’s find that immoveable center, that plumb line that aims toward gravity. Let’s find that strong back that supports our soft front, and let’s find or call out our grandmother’s heart.

Gratitude by Norman Fischer

All my life I have been contemplating a question of Heidegger’s that has always struck me as strangely profound: Why is there something, why not rather nothing?

Have you ever thought about that? We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn't working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all? Why should anything exist at all? Really there's no reason for it. Why not nothing rather than something? Nothing would be simpler.

… It would appear that none [of the creation of the universe] of that had to happen. Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it, and our recent appearance in this universe, although connected absolutely to all of it, the necessary causal fruition of it all, is literally gratuitous.

It seems to me that gratitude then isn't so much an emotion or a feeling as an actual fact, maybe even the primary fact, of our being at all. If we are, in other words, we belong, radically belong, are possessed by, embraced by, all that is, and gratitude is literally what we are when we are most attuned to what we are, when we plunge deeply into our nature, and stop complaining.

…When we do [sitting meditation], zazen, as Dogen tells us, we are not examining ourselves or trying to make personal improvements. We are sitting within Buddha's heart, releasing ourselves to that aspect of ourselves that deeply belongs to the universe and is grateful for it.

The Shambhala Warrior Prophesy

From Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Chapter Five, A Wider Sense of Self, pp. 100-102.

A story that inspires us both is a twelve-centuries-old prophecy from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  The heroes of this story are called Shambhala warriors.  The term Shambhala warrior is a metaphor for the Buddhist figure of the bodhisattva, one who deeply understands the core teaching of the Lord Buddha.  That central doctrine is the radical interdependence of all things.  When taken seriously, this leads to the recognition that if one person has the capacity to be a bodhisattva, then all others do too. 

Here is a particular version of the prophecy as it was given to Joanna by her dear friend and teacher Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche of the community of Tashi Jong in northwest India.  Read it as if it were about you.

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger.  At that time great powers have arisen, barbarian powers.  And although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common.  Among the things they have in common are weapons of unfathomable destructive power and technologies that lay waste to the world.  It is just at this point in our history, when the future of all beings seems to hang by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

You can’t go there, because it is not a place.  It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors.  You can’t tell whether someone is a Shambhala warrior just by looking at her or him, because these warriors wear no uniforms or insignia.  They have no banners to identify whose side they’re on, no barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy or behind which to rest and regroup.  They don’t even have any home turf.  The Shambhala warriors have only the terrain of the barbarian powers to move across and act on. 

Now the time is coming when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors – moral and physical courage.  That is because they are going right in the heart of the barbarian powers to dismantle their weapons.  They are going in the pits and citadels where the weapons are made and deployed, they are going into the corridors of power where the decisions are made.  In this way they work to dismantle the weapons in every sense of the word.

The Shambhala warriors know these weapons can be dismantled because they are manomaya, which means “mind-made.”  They are made by the human mind and thus can be unmade by the human mind.  The dangers facing us are not brought on us by some satanic deity or some evil extraterrestrial force, or by some unchangeable preordained fate.  Rather, these dangers arise out of our relationships and habits, out of our priorities. 

“So,” said Choegyal, “now is the time for the Shambhala warriors to go into training.”  “How do they train?”  Joanna asked.  “They train in the use of two implements,” he said.  Actually, he used the term weapons.  “What are they?” Joanna asked, and he held up his hands the way the dancers hold up the ritual objects in the great lama dances of his people.  “One,” he said, “is compassion.   The other is insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena.”

You need both.  You need compassion because it provides the fuel to move you out to where you need to be and to do what you need to do.  It means not being afraid of the suffering of your world, and when you’re not afraid of the world’s pain, then nothing can stop you. 

But by itself that implement is very hot; it can burn you out.  So you need the other tool, the insight into the radical interconnectivity of all that is.  When you have that, then you know that this is not a battle between the good guys and the bad guys.  You know that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.  And you know that we are so interwoven n the web of life that even our smallest acts have repercussions that ripple through the whole web, beyond our capacity to see.  But that is kind of cool, even a little abstract.  So you also need the heat of the compassion.