Outwardly, her life was enviable, compared with the lives of most people in the world. She was healthy, had a comfortable home, was financially secure, was loved by her family—but it wasn’t enough, because she wanted to be special, and, as she got older, she would cry over the knowledge that she was ordinary.
She didn’t understand that nothing and no one is special. An exploding star is an ordinary exploding star. A magnificent mountain is an ordinary magnificent mountain. Einstein was an ordinary man with an aptitude for science. Shakespeare was an ordinary man who wrote exquisitely. Elvis Presley died on a bathroom floor.
Success and failure are both fictions. This woman tormented herself by thinking that her life wasn’t enough, that she wasn’t enough, because of her imagined failure to become special.
Little boys want to be Superman, because they forget that Superman is also Clark Kent. To become a man is to grow out of that narcissistic desire. Some never grow out of it, never experiencing the perfection of life just as it is, never understanding that perfection is ordinary.
WHO HATES WHAT LIFE?
Have you ever declared, “I hate my life?”
I have.
And then I looked for what I hated, and couldn’t find it. I didn’t hate the cup of tea I was drinking. I didn’t hate the chair I was sitting on, or the clothes I was wearing, or the roof and walls that sheltered me. I didn’t hate the food I was fortunate enough to eat. I didn’t hate my two arms, two legs, two ears, two eyes, and I didn’t hate that they were all functioning well. The more I looked at my life, trying to find what I hated, the more I realized that it wasn’t there. It didn’t exist.
It only existed in a story I had made up. It wasn’t about anything that was actually happening, it was about something that wasn’t happening. Life wasn’t obeying me, wasn’t doing what I wanted, wasn’t giving me something I wanted. And when I believed a story about how things should be, I could believe that I hated life. When I didn’t believe the story, but instead looked at life as it was—the taste of tea, the purring of cats, the noise of traffic, the voices of friends, the work of the day—there was nothing but love.
GRATITUDE
You can’t separate happiness from gratitude. Neither is possible without the other.
There are so many people who have managed to get what they wanted, to achieve what they hoped to achieve—and yet they’re still not happy.
They’re not happy because they’re not grateful. No matter how well things go for them, they think they deserve it, and they want more. They are never satisfied; they might experience some euphoria when they get something they want, but it soon wears off and they go back to their habitual frustration, looking for the next achievement or acquisition in the hope that it will bring fulfillment.
Just as it’s common to hear about the rich and “successful” committing suicide, it’s common to hear about people living with illness or disability or other hardship saying that their lives are happy.
The difference is in having, or not having, gratitude. To be happy, you have to be grateful that you can eat, that you can breathe, that you can feel ground under your feet and fabric against your skin, that you can see and hear, that there are people who love you. If you don’t have all of these things, you must pay attention and be grateful for whatever you do have.
This does not mean you should give up, slip into nihilism and do nothing to improve your situation, and it doesn’t mean you should force yourself into “positive thinking,” which will just make you feel worse, but it means that you can be happy irrespective of your situation. If you hate your job, you can look for another job while feeling grateful to have a job at all. If you hate where you live, you can work towards getting another place while feeling grateful that you have shelter, light, running water. While working towards whatever comes next, you can be grateful for your life just as it is—because whatever comes next won’t make you any happier than you are right now.
But, in the practice of gratitude, it’s of vital importance not to fall into the trap of clinging to the things you’re grateful for. Attaching to how things are right now brings the same suffering as attaching to an idea of how things might be in the future. To be happy, you must experience each day, each hour, each present moment afresh, as it is, and be grateful for what that day contains.
Of course, you can’t just decide to be grateful, and with that decision have your outlook change. You have to make a commitment. You have to practice. You have to show up in your own life, taking responsibility for your own happiness. There is no other way.
THE MONSTER IS COMING TO GET US
Our worst fears are, without exception, going to come true. We will die, of sickness or injury, we will lose everyone and everything, including our selves, or what we think of as our selves. The brain will turn to dust along with the rest of the meat and bone.
I said this in a Dharma talk at The Sitting Frog Zen Center, and afterward a student said, “My big fear has always been that the monster from the movie Alien will come and get me. Can you say that’s actually going to happen?”
Yes. It actually is.
When he first saw the film as a child, why was he afraid of the monster? Because it hurts and kills people. And, with no exception, we are all going to be hurt and we are all going to be killed. Time guarantees it.
So, since there is no escape for anyone, does it make sense to spend our lives trying to escape?
There is only a problem if we think of the monster as the enemy. What if we approach it with interest instead? What if we turn toward what is real, life as it is, rather than a fantasy about how we think it should be?
In his introduction to his translation of The Diamond Sutra, Red Pine concludes, “But why not be fearless? What do you have to lose?”
ZEN AND DEPRESSION
Sometimes people ask me if Zen practice can cure depression. I tell them it can no more cure a mental illness than a physical illness, and I encourage them to look into counseling and medication. I also encourage them to read the book The Zen Path Through Depression by Philip Martin.
Zen probably won’t solve a single one of our problems. What it might do is help us relate differently to what we consider problems.
While depression is obviously agonizing, it doesn’t have to be a problem. The problem isn’t the depression, it’s how we react to it. We think people kill themselves because they’re depressed, but they don’t; they kill themselves because they believe a story that arises from the depression. Zen practice, or any other contemplative practice, won’t diminish the depression—but what if we no longer believe the despairing, frightening thoughts that come up?
Let me emphasize that I’m not saying the destructive thoughts can be stopped. I’m saying we can stop believing them, and also stop trying to replace them with other believed thoughts.
When people ask me why I practice, I sometimes quote John Cage: “It had to be psychotherapy or Zen Buddhism, and I don’t believe in psychotherapy.”
There is a tendency among some people who turn towards meditative practice to see it as a cure for every human problem. I think this is just another of the ego’s attempts to cop out and find an easy answer.
A friend of mine, who had been told by some “Buddhists” that his late brother’s severe schizophrenia could have been cured or helped by meditation, asked me if I thought that was true. I told him I couldn’t see how it would be possible for a person in such a state—hallucinating, unable to comprehend objective reality—to meditate at all, let alone to be helped by it.
I have post-traumatic stress disorder, and I am sure that the practice of Zen has not only helped me, but has actually saved my life. But, there have been times in my life when such medications as Lexapro and Prozac have also helped immensely. While meditation helped me deal with the symptoms of PTSD, medication made it easier to meditate.
Render unto meditation the things that are meditation’s, and unto medication the things that are medication’s.
ZE
N IN THE STREET
Meditative practice is widely regarded as the province of the well-fed, and being without practical use. It is actually a practice that can keep you from going to jail, or being beaten by cops. This is why I think it is important to offer meditation instruction in community centers, shelters and jails.
The myth about cops is that there are good ones and bad ones. The reality is that there are mostly only varying degrees of bad, because the conditioned police mentality is a pathological one.
Beat cops prey on poor people. If you have money and position, and talk back to a swaggering cop who has pulled you over, you will most likely receive nothing more than a ticket, if that, because they will let you go, then find easier victims, rather than risk a lawsuit from you. (This is why cops ask you your occupation, without telling you that you have no obligation to answer.) But the same does not apply to the poor or uneducated person who talks back; without fear of sanction, the cops demand deference, and the situation escalates. I have visited people in jail or in the hospital who got there just by refusing to be pushed around by a cop. I have attended the funerals of others.
Cops, high on petty authority, become aggressive when they encounter resistance. However, if you are obsequious, they often feel more powerful, and may hurt you just because they can.
The safest reaction to the aggression of a uniformed thug is no reaction at all. Not an aggressive reaction, which will only feed the cop’s aggression, and not a timid, nervous reaction, which will tell him/her that you are an easy victim. When you give a cop nothing to react to, neither yielding nor resisting, offering neither insolence nor deference, the situation is less likely to escalate to a confrontation.How do you do that? By not involving the self. Anger and fear are both born of ego. With no attachment to self, you give a cop no one to fight with, no one to control. A volatile situation then has nothing to help it explode, and anyone seeking drama and confrontation has to look for it elsewhere.
It is not just cops; the street throws any number of dangerous, often life-threatening, situations at us. Some are unavoidable, but many can be defused by letting go of any self that might want to be defended. The clarity of the awakened heart can be temporarily contagious.
COMPASSIONATE DETACHMENT
For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.
— Czeslaw Milosz
I talked with a friend who’s not a Zen practitioner, but is interested. When I remarked that in order to be free we have to have the same love for people who hate us and want to hurt us as we have for our friends and family, she asked me, “How is that different from Stockholm Syndrome?”
I think that it’s not just different from Stockholm syndrome, it’s the very opposite of it. Stockholm syndrome is a feeling of bonding with captors and torturers and other abusers—but it’s codependency, not compassion. It’s a self-centered desire for things to be other than as they are, for the abusers to be other than as they are. That attachment to a fantasy-image of the abuser is a denial of what’s actually going on and who that person is, and so it feeds and fuels the abuse.
Liberation from suffering comes with compassionate detachment—but that detachment doesn’t mean not caring, not feeling, not being involved. Compassionate detachment means intimacy with life, with reality. It means seeing and experiencing what’s going on without a story about how we want it to be. It means seeing other people’s hurt exactly as we see our own, without distinction. When the heart opens like this, no matter how hostile someone else is being, what we see is a person in pain. Life doesn’t necessarily become easier, but it becomes possible.
DELIBERATE MARTYRDOM IS SELF-CENTERED
A student asked a good question after a Dharma talk in which I said:
When it’s cold and you see a homeless person without a coat, and you’re wearing a coat, ask yourself if you have another coat in your closet at home. If the answer is yes, which it is for all of you, take off the coat you’re wearing and give it to the person who has no coat.
As soon as you heard that, you probably started to think about what coat you might be wearing, a favorite coat—probably an expensive one—that you don’t want to part with. That doesn’t matter. Give them the coat, no matter what coat it is, because it’s not yours. If you have another coat at home, the coat you’re wearing doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the coatless person shivering in the street. If you continue to wear the coat, remember that it’s a stolen coat. That person is shivering because you stole their coat...
If you don’t get that, it’s only because you believe there are things you can have that are yours. You think you can own a coat, you think you can own food, and, worst of all, you think you have a self that you own. For as long as you cling to your coat you will cling to your illusion of self, and for as long as you do that, no matter how much you supposedly own, you will suffer. No matter how many warm coats you have, you are freezing. No matter how much food you have, you are starving.
The student asked, “Suppose I have $500 in my pocket and I’m on my way to pay my rent, and a homeless guy asks me for help. Should I give that money to him?”
I pointed out that I hadn’t said that if you see someone without a coat you should give them yours. I said that if you have another coat, then the one you’re wearing belongs to the person in front of you who needs it. If you gave the guy your rent money for that month, would that prevent him from becoming homeless? It would certainly ensure that you became homeless. So, at best, you’ve replaced one homeless person with another, and, more likely, you’ve simply rendered another person homeless.
Deliberate martyrdom is vanity, not compassion. Compassion only arises when attachment to self is acknowledged and seen through rather than cherished and believed. When we remove our concept of self from the story, it stops being a story. It becomes actuality, and we know the right thing to do—or, more accurately, the right thing does itself.
A LEASH AROUND YOUR NECK
Tokusan was studying Zen under Ryutan. One night he came to Ryutan and asked many questions. The teacher said: “The night is getting old. Why don’t you retire?”
So Tokusan bowed and opened the screen to go out, observing: “It is very dark outside.”
Ryutan offered Tokusan a lighted candle to find his way. Just as Tokusan received it, Ryutan blew it out. At that moment Tokusan was enlightened.
One of the toughest challenges any Dharma teacher faces is in keeping students from viewing him/her as a superior or even perfect being. Especially in America, a messianic culture where religion tells you that you need a deity to make you happy, and TV shows like Sex in the City tell you the same lie from a secular angle—that you must find The One, the person who can make you happy.
This is poison, but it’s tasty poison, and Americans can’t get enough of it.
The reality is that nobody can make you happy. Nobody can enlighten you. Nobody can empower you in any way. You have to do it yourself. The Buddha didn’t do it for anyone other than himself—he taught his students how to do it for themselves.
And yet people still look toward supernatural beings, or flesh-and-blood people, to fix them, make them happy, tell them how to live. It seems that so many people would rather live a life of slavery, with everything decided for them, than take responsibility for themselves.
These are the people who imagine Dharma teachers as otherworldly beings with supernatural powers. If you suffer from a debilitating mental illness, or are just badly damaged emotionally and not dealing with it, you might meet with a teacher, and when he/she sees what’s going on (because it’s obvious to anyone who looks) and tells you, it can be easy to imagine that this person has wisdom so great that it’s a superpower that lets them see right through you. (I’ve had students who were standing there quivering with anger, and yet were stunned by my mind-reading ability when I said, “I think you’re an angry person.”)
This is a view that unethical, power-tr
ipping teachers will encourage. Ethical teachers will only turn you back towards yourself. An ethical teacher will not give you the approval you want or the disapproval you fear, because that’s just a way of taking control of you. It’s how dogs are trained, and the vow of a Dharma teacher is to help the student realize their own Buddha-nature, not to train the student to be an obedient pet.
No Dharma teacher is wiser or more enlightened than you. The Buddha wasn’t wiser or more enlightened than you, because you are the Buddha. What makes the Buddha, and every other great master, different is that they realized their true nature. No teacher can give you something, because you already have it. You just have to see it, then know it, and then go beyond seeing it and knowing it and fully realize it. A teacher can guide the way, but you have to walk by yourself. Anyone who claims to be able to take you there is really just fastening a leash around your neck.
When people ask to be my students, I ask them what they want. If they want me to teach them something I know and they don’t, I can’t help them. If they want to become aware of what they already know, what they were born knowing, I can help them.
A lot of people want me to help them get to somewhere else. I can’t help them. A few people want me to help them get to where they already are. I can help them.
THE COIN LOST IN THE RIVER
Yunmen was asked, “What does it mean to sit and contemplate reality?”
He answered, “The coin lost in the river is found in the river.”
We may feel lost, but we never are. Lost by whom? What is actually happening, right now, outside of whatever story we’re telling? Everything is precisely where it is, precisely what it is.
When we first come to Zen practice, we want to become better, brighter, shinier. We’re hoping we can escape pain and grief. We think things should be different. We think we should be different.
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