Cause and effect, not punishment and reward.
But it’s common to hear people talk about how it’s someone’s “karma” to live in an impoverished country, or have a debilitating illness, or any other predicament. This shows a lack of understanding and a lack of compassion.
Such people use the word “karma” as an umbrella that covers all causes and all effects, and they do not distinguish the volitional from the random. But karma is only one of the five vinayas; there is also dharma (the laws of nature), irthu (seasonal changes and climate), biija (genetic inheritance) and chitta (the will of the mind).
So there are things that are governed by our choices. Our karma and our chitta are our own. But sometimes it’s karma, and sometimes shit just happens.
THE KARMA OF LONELINESS
Most prayers are not really prayers but letters to Santa Claus—a child compiling and sending a wish list. Whether you believe in a deity, or higher power, or however you choose to name it, if it becomes a separate place or personality for your ego to send its prayers to, you are slipping into narcissism, which is as common in Buddhism as in theistic religions.
The Christian narcissist believes that “God has a plan for me.” The New Age narcissist believes the same thing, but replaces “God” with “Fate” or “The Universe.” And the narcissist who has turned towards Zen sees the practice as a process of self-help or self-improvement, not realizing that it is the self that has caused all the problems that require help or improvement.
The sad, and ironic, thing about narcissism is that it always, with no possibility of exception, brings loneliness. Whether in religious or spiritual practice or in personal relationships, the narcissist creates his/her own loneliness—because, when you are squalling for attention from God, The Universe, or another person, you are viewing them as being separate from you, and therefore you are coming from a position of alienation.
In religious practice, if God is another existential being that you talk to, then, by definition, you are separate from God.
If you are governed by Fate or The Universe, then you are separate from Fate, and you are not a part of The Universe.
If you seek the attention/admiration of other people, or try to control or manipulate other people, then you are seeing yourself as separate from them.
This is the karma of loneliness. If you make things all about you, then there is only you, and if there is only you then you are lonely.
When you drop your self-centered story, it becomes clear that you are not separate from anything—God, Universe, a teacup or a toilet. Nothing exists independently or separately from you, and, therefore, there is no you.
Bodhidharma, the First Ancestor of Zen, was sitting in his cave, facing the wall, when Huiko showed up and demanded that Bodhidharma teach him. Some accounts say that when Bodhidharma ignored him, Huiko cut off his own arm to show his seriousness.
Finally, Bodhidharma agreed to teach Huiko, and asked him what his problem was.
“My mind has no peace,” Huiko said.
“Bring me your mind and I’ll give it peace,” Bodhidharma said.
“I can’t find my mind,” Huiko said, after a search.
“There,” Bodhidharma said. “I’ve given it peace.”
Like everyone else when they first come to religious practice, Huiko was seeking personal salvation. He wanted something he thought he did not have—peace of mind. By having him search for his mind, Bodhidharma distracted him from his self-centered story, and so when he couldn’t find his mind, he couldn’t find his suffering.
Whatever the religion—Zen, Christianity, any other—you follow, for as long as it is based on a personal quest, for as long as it is about getting something for yourself, for as long as it is about yourself, there is no peace. There is no such thing as personal salvation, because salvation and self-centeredness are opposites. When you can step out of the personal narrative and see what’s actually going on, salvation is there, and always has been there.
NO ONE IS BORN, SO NO ONE IS BORN AGAIN
What is reborn are our habits. Enlightenment is the ending of rebirth, which means a complete nonattachment or nonidentification with all thoughts, feelings, perceptions, physical sensations and ideas.
— The Dalai Lama
The profane generally imagine that Buddhist believe in the reincarnation of the soul and even metempsychosis. This is erroneous. Buddhism teaches that the energy produced by the mental and physical activities of a being brings about the apparition of new mental and physical phenomena, when once this being has been dissolved by death.
— Alexandra David-Neel
Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.
— Dogen
More often than not, when people find out I’m a Zen Buddhist monk, they immediately ask me about reincarnation. I have met people who called themselves Buddhists whose entire motivation was to avoid an unpleasant reincarnation, just like a “Christian” trying to avoid hell.
I have nothing helpful to tell such people, because I do not believe in reincarnation.
The Buddha did not believe in reincarnation (those who think he did do not understand the sutras).
Dogen Zenji did not believe in reincarnation.
Rebirth is not reincarnation.
And Buddhism is not about believing in things.
The idea that we have fixed, permanent existence, and that bodies are like clothes that we simply discard, is just primitive, magical thinking. It is a fairy tale designed to comfort frightened, childish egos, and therefore it is the exact opposite of the Buddha Dharma.
The Buddha taught anatta—“not self.” Nothing reincarnates, because nothing incarnates to begin with. Nothing comes, nothing goes, everything changes. Who would reincarnate? The person we are now? The person we’ll be next year? The person we were last year? We won’t exist in another body, because we don’t even exist in our present body. We are an aggregate of constantly-shifting phenomena, and all that gives us a sense of permanence is our memory, recorded in the brain. What gives us our fear of death, and our desire for an afterlife, is our ego’s neurotic attachment to believing in its own existence.
We do not come and we do not go. We are not born and we do not die.
We think we are created, and that once created we live forever. The second part is true. All that begins and ends is the constructed self, the ego, which only ends because it is not real. It is a just a story, and every story has to end.
There is a cup on the desk at which I am writing. I call it a cup because it is shaped like a cup, and because I drink tea out of it. If I drop it on the floor and it breaks into pieces, will it still be a cup? A broken cup? Pieces of a cup? If I then grind the pieces into powder, and scatter that powder on the breeze, where is the cup? It is no longer a cup, because the cup was created and the cup was destroyed—but what it was created from cannot be destroyed. It did not come from anywhere, and it does not go anywhere. It was not born and it does not die. For a while, it takes a form we call a cup. For a while, we take human form. Even that form is constantly changing.
Our human form is only the form we take for a fragment of time. The universe manifests in that form, then in a different form. And so we are the entire universe. Not part of it, all of it. It is not outside us, and it is not inside us. There is no inside and no outside, no center and no fringe.
A cup is created and later is destroyed. An individual is born and later dies. Between birth and death, various selves are born and later die. But these things are created by and from that which is unborn, undying and absolute—who we really are.
/> We are the material of the universe. When we consider this from the perspective of the ego, it seems horrifying. When we stop holding on to the ego, which means stopping holding on to any perspective at all, there is nothing to be afraid of, ever, and no one to be afraid.
When were you born? When did your life begin? Was it when you left your mother’s womb? Who were you the day before that? Was it when your father’s sperm fertilized your mother’s egg? Or before that? Did it start with the birth or conception of your parents? Your grandparents? Theirs? Who were you then?
When I have a birthday, I remind myself that it is not really my birthday, but the beginning of a story, the “birthday” of an aggregate of transient phenomena that is conveniently labeled “Dogo Barry Graham.”
No one was born on that day in 1966, but on that day some of the universe’s material formed a being whose existence has been documented since then. Where is that infant now? Where is the fetus he was before? The sperm and egg he was before that? And before that? Where are the toddler, child and young man he was reborn as? All dead, all reborn as the man who writes these words, a man who may or may not be reborn and reborn again, until he “dies” (which may or may not happen an instant from now) and the atoms that form him break apart and form something else—which is also nothing else and no one else.
What comprises me was not created and cannot be destroyed. You were there when the sun caught on fire, there when the first explosion brought the universe into being.
Everything is our mother. Everything is our father, our brother, our sister, our friend, our child. Every person, every animal, every mountain, every cloud, every star. Everything, whether sentient or insentient, is what we have been and what we will be.
EVERY BELIEF IS WRONG: A TALK AND DISCUSSION
Most of us not only believe that there’s such a thing as free will, but we believe we actually have it. I want to talk a bit about what Joko Beck calls core beliefs. I just call them beliefs. Beliefs of any kind are false. There are no true beliefs and false beliefs. Any belief, by definition, is false. It’s only a story.
The problem for so many of us, though, is that we think we’re running our lives. And you get people who’ve been at this for a while who still think, deep down, they’re running their lives. That we actually have some control. To understand what is running you, you’ve got to do an awful lot of letting go.
Nobody wants to do that. You really have to hit rock bottom to be willing to do that. And even then, what happens when you hit rock bottom? You let go enough to get just a couple of inches up off of rock bottom and then you’re right back into your beliefs, you’re right back into your attachments, right back into your story about yourself.
I have a friend who I was working with recently who has an incredibly abusive abusive relationship with her mother. She was treated horribly as a child, beaten horribly by her mother, and is in post-traumatic shock. Recently she was taking care of her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s Disease. Her mother and one of her other family members want to have control of her grandmother, to get her money. And they’ve squeezed her out. She has no access to her grandmother. They gave away her dog just to spite her. I mean really, really horrible, really pathological behavior.
So she decided, understandably, to cut off contact with her mother. I asked her how she felt, what was going on there. First she said, “angry.” And then, narrowing it down a bit, she said, “resentful.” She thought she didn’t have any real investment in her mother anymore. I asked her, “Do you want her to still be your mother?” She never really actually had been her mother. “Is that what’s running you? Is that what’s hurting you? Is that why you’re angry?” And she said, “No. Absolutely not. I don’t want her to be my mother. She never was. I never had that.”
So this core belief that she had was that she understood that her mother was sick, a pathological person, but that she wasn’t attached to her anymore. She certainly didn’t want her to be her mom. She wasn’t still clinging to that, or so she thought. That had become a core belief. It became something that by this point in her life—she’s in her early 30’s—she blindly accepted, the same as we accept tap water. We have a core belief: We turn on the faucet, water’s going to come out. She was certain that she didn’t have any kind of sentimental attachment to her mother. There wasn’t this longing to have a mom. I said, “I think you need to look at what you’re holding on to. You need to see what your core belief is.”
Actually, the way I put it is, I asked her if she knew about how Bill Clinton once let a mentally retarded guy be executed when he was governor of Arkansas so he would seem to be tough on crime. So I said, “Would you like to do something about that?” Of course she said, “Yeah.”
I said, “What you would like to do is fix the law so that can’t happen, right?”
She said, “Right.”
I said, “Okay, how much of a desire did you have to confront Bill Clinton and get him to admit it, get him to cop to the fact that he did that?”
“None at all.”
I said, “Yes. You don’t have any personal investment in Bill Clinton. You don’t care about him. You just don’t want these things to happen. But what is it that you want from your mother?”
And she said, “Well, yeah, I want her to acknowledge what she did. She always denies what she did.”
Then she examined it—because I asked her to. I told her, “Just keep looking at that. What is it you want? What is it you’re attaching to? What are you holding on to?” She told me the next day. She realized that even while walking away, even while saying “I want nothing to do with this person. This is it. I’m done,” she still wanted to be wrong, wanted her mother to suddenly become a mom. And that’s what she meant by wanting acknowledgment.
Acknowledgment of what? “That she had beaten me. That she did this. She did that.” Yeah, but what does that mean? Acknowledgment of what? Is it that you still want something from her? There’s an attachment there.
For as long as we have these attachments we’re not free. And we’re not running our own lives. We think we are, but we’re not. This is why, painful though it is, and frightening though it is for anyone, I keep emphasizing this need to let go, to let go of everything. For as long as you can’t do that, your conditioning is running you. You don’t have any free will at all. I’m not being hyperbolic. I don’t mean it diminishes your free will. I mean you have none. For as long as you’re holding on to anything, the decision to go to the grocery store is not a decision you’re making. You think you’re making that decision, but you’re not. It’s a reaction. It’s arising from your conditioning, like everything else.
Does that mean that you should become nihilistic? Have an attitude of, “Well, nothing matters?” No, it’s the opposite. Nihilism in itself is an attempt to make sense of our own pain. We’re holding on to our own pain. “I might as well do whatever I want. Live in a really self-destructive way because nothing matters.” It’s one more avoidance. You see that?
The reason I’m always profoundly moved when I see people pursuing Zen practice is because it really is the hardest thing that anyone can do. Now by that I don’t just mean putting on a Japanese outfit and sitting on a cushion and doing some chanting. I’ve said this before, something that I say about Zen practice is something that a couple of different friends of mine who’re in 12 step have said about 12 step. When you look at it, the program’s rate of success seems low. It’s something like 2%. But that’s 2% of the people who just go to the meetings [but don’t do the practice]. A couple of different friends of mine who have been in it for a while said to me, “If you do it, it always works.” The success rate is 100%.
Everyone who does a Zen practice becomes enlightened. Everyone. There has never, ever been anyone who did a Zen practice who didn’t become enlightened. It’s not possible. How many enlightened people do you run across in Zen centers? If you want to meet some really unenlightened people, go to Zen centers. If you want to see some
of the least enlightened people you will ever encounter anywhere, go to a Zen monastery and find somebody who’s been there 30 years. These are the poster boys and girls for delusion, for samsara. Although I am laughing, I am not making fun of those people. We all hurt terribly.
Most of us when we come to Zen practice, actually, all of us when we come to Zen practice, we don’t really want to do it. We don’t want to let go. We think we want to do some of it. Some of us really like the robes. Some of us really like the chanting. Most of us really like the books.
Yes, reading about it is great. Reading about Suzuki Roshi, well, that’s great because if you read about how Suzuki Roshi—when he thought he had hepatitis, and there was one of his students that he used to eat chocolate ice cream with. The doctor said, “Now look, you’ve got hepatitis, you can’t eat chocolate.” And then he finds out he’s actually got liver cancer and it’s spread and there’s no hope. So he says to his student, “I just got great news. I don’t have hepatitis. I’ve got liver cancer. I’m going to die.”
And she says, “How is that great news?”
“Oh, because we can eat chocolate ice cream again. I don’t have hepatitis.”
Now, we like that. We like reading about that, huh? “That’s really inspiring. This guy’s not suffering. He’s not even bothered by the fact that everyone says he’s going to die.” What we don’t like—reading about it is fun, lying in bed, drinking a cup of tea, warm and cozy, reading, that’s fun, that’s pleasant—what we don’t want to do is what Suzuki Roshi, what Joko, what anyone who attains that state has to do, which is let go of any attachment to not being in pain. Let go of any attachment to not being sad. That’s why the best gifts that we are given are humiliation, disappointment, heartbreak, fear—and the very worse thing that can happen to anybody is getting what we want.
Kill Your Self Page 4