He goes through a number of different versions of this, and the descriptions may seem abstract and sometimes are hard to follow. But I hope if we keep that basic idea in mind — that we don’t want to dissolve fundamental relationality into a spurious kind of unity — then I think we’ll see how he treats things that we might from one perspective think of as the kind of Zen sicknesses we’re warned about in practice, and see what kinds of parallels and differences there are.

I’m going to begin reading on page 83.

“The same thing happens if we look on absorption or entering into the self, whether by means of the self’s deliverance from all being that is conditioned by I, or by its being understood as the one thinking essence, as the essential element in the religious act.”

By the first way of looking on this act, it’s imagined that God enters the being that is freed from I. That, I think, is a common enough idea — that we empty ourselves of self or ego and create a space for God to enter, and that this is being merged in God. By the second, the being takes its stand directly in itself as though it were the Divine One. That’s a kind of “above the earth and below the heavens, I alone am.” Absolute subjectivity.

“By the first way, in a supreme moment, the saying of Thou ceases, for there is no more twofold being. And by the second, the Thou does not in truth exist at all, for there is in truth no twofold being. The first way believes in the unification, the second in the identification of the human with the divine.”

Both of those are very often recommended to us in spiritual practice — unification or non-separation, or the identification of the human with the divine. Both assert a state that is beyond I and Thou, and that is his ultimate criticism.

“The first, as in ecstasy, that one becomes. The second, as in the self-observation of the thinking subject, the one that is and that reveals itself. Both abolish relation. The first, as it were, dynamically, through the swallowing up of the I by the Thou, which is now no longer a Thou. And the second, as it were, statically, through the self-recognition of the I, which has been freed and become the Self, as that which alone is.”

“The doctrines of absorption appeal to the great sayings of identification.” He’s saying this is often what passes for religious experience, as mysticism, as if this is what we’re all aiming for.

“The one above all, the Johannine: ‘I and the Father are one.’ The other, the teaching of Sandilya, the Brahmin Hindu: ‘The all-embracing — this is myself in my very heart.’ The ways these sayings lead are opposite to one another. The first arises in the life of a person of mythical proportions and advances to a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrine and then only leads to the mythical life of a person.”

“The Christ of the Gospel of John, the Word that once became flesh, leads to the Christ of Eckhart, perpetually begotten by God in the human soul. The coronation formula for the self in the Upanishad — ‘This is the real, the self, and thou art the self’ — leads in a shorter space to the Buddhist formula of dethronement: ‘It is not possible to lay hold of a self and a self appertaining in truth and reality.’”

But he says the doctrine of oneness cannot be substantiated if you read the Gospel impartially, section by section, because the Gospel really is all about relation.

“Rather than ‘I am Thou and Thou art I,’ the Gospel speaks of the Father and the Son, God and man, and these are indissolubly a real pair, two bearers of the primal relation, which from God to man is termed mission and command, from man to God looking and hearing, and between both, knowledge and love. This is the relation.”

“All modern attempts to interpret this primal reality of dialogue as a relation of the I to the self, or the like, are futile. They take their place in the abysmal history of distraction of reality.”

He really wants to insist on the primacy of relation, and anything that wants to dissolve that is a pernicious abstraction.

But what of mysticism? Does it not inform us how unity without duality is experienced? May we dispute the truth of its account?

“I know not of a single, but of two kinds of happening in which duality is no longer experienced. These are at times confused in mystical utterance. I too once confused them.”

The first is the soul becoming a unity. This is something that takes place not between man and God, but in man. Power is concentrated. Everything that tries to divert it is drawn into the orbit of its mastery, its exaltation.

“This is the decisive moment for man. Without it, he is unfit for the work of the Spirit. With it, he decides in his innermost being if this means a breathing space or the sufficient end of his way.”

He says this one kind of mysticism — of what we might call seeing the absolute — is but a first step. Do we think of it as a breathing space before we go out into the world, into meeting, into relation? Or do we rest there, satisfied? This is an admonition we might find in Zen. To encounter the absolute is not yet enlightenment.

The other form of mysticism, of overcoming dualism:

“The other happening lies in the unfathomable nature of the relational act itself, in which two, it is imagined, become one. One and one are united. I and Thou are absorbed. Humanity, which has just before confronted the Godhead, is merged in it.”

“But when man, illuminated and exhausted, falls back into the cares of earthly affairs, and with knowledge in his heart thinks of the two situations, is he not bound to find that his being is split asunder and one part given to perdition? What does it help my soul that it can be withdrawn anew from this world here into unity, when this world itself has of necessity no part in the unity? What does all enjoyment of God profit a life that is rent in two? If that abundantly rich heavenly moment has nothing to do with my poor earthly moment — what then does it have to do with me, who have still to live, and in all seriousness still to live, on earth?”

There he talks about the pitfall of an experience of unity with God, or oneness, or emptiness, that inevitably becomes contrasted with our ordinary life of duality on earth. If we think that the real thing is that unity, what does that turn our ordinary life into? It simply becomes something that we’re always trying to escape back into this mystical experience. That again is a kind of Zen sickness that we might recognize. Experiences of oneness that seem to put us in another realm are just experiences, he says. They’re not showing us how things really are, but rather they are another kind of It, something that we create and hold on to, but which ultimately turns against us because it makes our ordinary life seem either unreal or unworthy.

Now he’s going to say something about the alternative to this kind of attempt to overcome dualism. Dualism being such a dirty word right now. He, in a sense, wants to rehabilitate the idea of dualism.

“In lived reality, there is no unity of being. Reality exists only in effective action, its power and depth in the power and depth of action. Inner reality exists only if there is mutual action. The most powerful and deepest reality exists where everything enters into the effective action without reserve — the whole man and the God all-embracing — the united I and the boundless Thou.”

“The united I — for in lived reality there is the becoming one of the soul, a concentration of power, the decisive moment for a man. But this does not involve, like absorption, disregard of the real person. Absorption wishes to preserve only the pure, the real, the lasting, and to cast away everything else. But in this concentration, the instinctive is not thought too impure, the sensuous is not thought too remote from its course, what is concerned with emotion is not thought too fleeting. Everything must be gathered into the orbit of its mastery. This concentration does not desire the self that is set apart, but the whole, unimpaired man. It aims at, and is, reality.”

Let me paraphrase that again. Absorption, the pursuit of oneness, wishes to preserve only the pure. But the concentration of the self that he’s talking about, of the united I of I-Thou, doesn’t exclude anything. The instinctive is not excluded. The sensuous is not excluded. Emotion is not excluded. Everything is gathered into the I.

“The doctrine of absorption demands and promises refuge in the one thinking essence — refuge in pure subject.”

We encounter this in a number of places, a kind of Advaita practice which says what we are is pure awareness without content.

“But in lived reality, there is not something thinking without something thought. Rather, is the thinking no less dependent on the thing thought than the latter on the former? A subject deprived of its object is deprived of its reality.”

This is very important, and it was also a fundamental tenet of the phenomenology being formulated by Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century, a little before Buber’s time — that consciousness is always intentional, always has aboutness. It always has object and content. The idea of pure, contentless awareness is a kind of philosophical or religious myth. And yet it’s something we encounter over and over again in lots of different places.

But here Buber is articulating what I think is the correct kind of picture of oneness as interdependence or non-separation from the world of content. We are one with the world not because we are part of a single homogenized substance, but because we’re co-constituted by it. There’s nothing inside us that wasn’t outside. Whatever we think, we think in the language of the world. Whatever we see or feel exists because of perception and sensory stimulation. There is no inner that is not created by an encounter with the outer. We cannot have an inner without an outer.

Buber here is making a point that I’ve made before — that the pursuit of a pure inner, a pure awareness free of any kind of dependence on an outer world, is a kind of curative fantasy of autonomy and purity that seeks to save us from the vulnerability of actual interdependence.

“A subject deprived of its object is deprived of its reality.”

The fantasy of a condition of absorption resembling deep sleep, which is by nature without consciousness and memory — awareness without content — these, he says, are the loftiest peaks of the language of It. This is the creation, the reification of inner experience.

I’ll end with a little bit of what he says about Buddha here.

“Buddha describes as the goal the sensation of pain, that is, of becoming and passing away, released from the cycle of births. ‘Henceforth there is no return’ is the formula of the man who has freed himself from the appetite for living and thus from the necessity to become ever anew.”

“We do not know if there is a return. We do not extend beyond this life the lines of this time dimension in which we live. But we do know that if there is a return, we would not seek to escape it, and we would long not indeed for gross being, but for the power to speak in each existence in its own way and language — the eternal I that passes away, and the eternal Thou that does not pass away.”

It’s a kind of Nietzschean idea — instead of cessation, an affirmation of eternal return. If there is a return, why would we avoid it?

“The Buddha knows the saying of the Thou to men — witness his intercourse with his pupils, in which, though high above them, he speaks very directly. But he does not teach it, for simple confrontation of being with being is alien to this love where all that has become is limitlessly comprised in the breast.”

He certainly knows, too, in the silent depth of his being, the saying of Thou to the primal cause, way beyond all those gods that are treated by him like pupils. This act of his springs from a relational event that has taken on substance. This act too is a response to the Thou, but about this response he preserves silence.

His succession among the people, that great vehicle, has contradicted him magnificently. It has addressed the eternal human Thou under the name of Buddha himself, and it awaits as the Buddha that is to come, the last of the age, him by whom love is to be fulfilled.”

I take that to mean the great irony is that Buddha, despite all his efforts at proclaiming emptiness, has himself become a Thou — addressed as God is addressed by successive generations. Almost despite himself, he embodies our relation to the divine.

I’m going to stop here. I want to say that for me, the crux of Buber is in the affirmation of relation, and where that relation is between individuals, between individuals and nature. That this is not dissolvable into some unitary essence or being. This, I think, is the deep wisdom of intersubjectivity and interdependence. The Thou of the divine — I could not follow him there. That honestly has no meaning to me.

In this section, I see all the ways in which we might talk about the perversion or corruption of the mystical, the way in which experiences of unity become It rather than Thou. They take us out of the world of relation and into the realm of reification of private experience as ultimate reality. These are, I think, very cogent warnings to anybody who practices.

There’s something in Zen practice that always runs the danger of eliminating the individuality of the other. In talking about non-separation, we are in danger of losing track of empathy with otherness. So Buber’s a good corrective to that, I hope, and I hope we can continue to explore that in our discussion and Q&A later. Thank you.

I’m going to start at page 63.

“The aim of relation is relation’s own being, that is, contact with the Thou. For through contact with every Thou, we are stirred with the breath of the Thou, that is, of eternal life.”

The mention of eternal life here reminds me of what he said earlier about the present — not a moment in time but an eternal present. Perhaps there’s a connection there.

“He who takes his stand in relation shares in a reality that is in a being that neither belongs to him nor merely lies outside of him. All reality is an activity in which I share without being able to appropriate for myself. Where there is no sharing, there is no reality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no reality. The more direct the contact with the Thou, the fuller the sharing.”

Let me move down a page or so to where he talks about individuality.

“The person says, I am. The individual says, I am such and such. ‘Know thyself’ means for the person, know thyself to have being. For the individual, it means know thy particular kind of being. Individuality, differentiating itself from others, is rendered remote from true being.”

“We don’t mean by this that the person in any way gives up his special being, his being different — only that this being is not his observation point, but simply there, the necessary and significant conception of being. Individuality, on the other hand, revels in its special being, or rather mostly in the fiction of its special being, which it has made up for itself. For to know itself means basically for it, for the most part, to establish an authoritative apparent self capable of deceiving it ever more and more fundamentally, and to procure for itself, in looking to and honoring this apparent self, the semblance of knowledge of its own being as it really is. Real knowledge of its being would lead to self-destruction — or to rebirth.”

In other words, the kind of self-knowledge the individual seeks is a knowledge that ignores or cuts the person off from others and from context. It’s a kind of self-awareness that is inward-looking and autonomous. And this is, as in Buddhism, delusion.

“The person looks on his Self” — and he capitalizes Self. “Individuality is concerned with my” — he capitalizes my — “my kind, my race, my creation, my genius.”

So the person is the person of relation, of contact and context. The individual is the separate I. Individuality neither shares in nor obtains any reality, because reality is always shared. It differentiates itself from the other and seeks through experiencing and using to appropriate as much of it as it can.

Let me skip ahead a little bit more.

“He who speaks the separated I, with emphasis on the capital I, lays bare the shame of the world spirit, which has been degraded to spirituality.”

It’s a curious notion, the idea of a world spirit. This is a kind of Hegelian concept. Whatever that is — say, the eternal Thou — the individual reduces it to a personal experience and therefore degrades it to spirituality - spirituality being a private state of consciousness which you cultivate.

So what is the contrast with this? He’s going to give three examples: Socrates, Goethe, and Jesus.

“How lovely and how fitting the sound of the lively and impressive I of Socrates. It is the I of endless dialogue, and the air of dialogue is wafted around it in all its journeys, before the judges and in the last hour in prison. This I lived continuously in the relation with man which is bodied forth in dialogue. It never ceased to believe in the reality of men and went out to meet them. So it took its stand with them in reality, and reality forsakes it no more. Its very loneliness can never be forsakenness, and if the world of man is silent, it hears the voice of the daimonion say Thou.”

So Socrates embodies this classical idea of dialogue, of knowledge through questioning rather than knowledge through private contemplation. Even as he is forsaken by his community, put to death by the judges of Athens — if the world of man is silent, it hears the voice of his daimon. He always was connected with an eternal Thou, we would say.

“How lovely and legitimate the sound of the full I of Goethe! It is the I of pure intercourse with nature. Nature gives herself to it and speaks unceasingly with it, revealing her mysteries to it but not betraying her mystery. It believes in her and says to the rose, ‘Then thou art it,’ and it takes its stand with her in a single reality. So the spirit of the real remains with it when it turns back to itself, and the gaze of the sun abides with the blessed eye that considers its own radiance. The friendship of the elements accompanies the man into the stillness of dying and becoming.”

“This is the sound through the ages of the sufficient, true, and pure saying of the I by those persons who, like Socrates and Goethe, are bound up in relation.”

And we remember that the Thou is encountered not just person to person, but also potentially in man in relation to nature and man in relation to art.

His third example is Jesus.

“It is the I of unconditional relation in which the man calls his Thou ‘Father,’ and in such a way that he himself is simply Son and nothing else but Son. Whenever he says I, he can only mean the I of the holy primary word that has been raised for him into unconditional being. Separation never touches him; his solidarity of relation is the greater. He speaks to others only out of this solidarity.”

“It is useless to seek to limit this I to a power in itself, or this Thou to something dwelling in ourselves, and once again to empty the real, the present relation, of reality. I and Thou abide. Every man can say Thou and is then I. Every man can say Father and is then Son. Reality abides.”

He’s going to then contrast these supreme examples of I-Thou relationship with the supreme individual, and his example is Napoleon.

“The word I remains the shibboleth of mankind. Napoleon spoke it without power to enter into relation, but he spoke it as the I of consummation. He who strives to say it as he said it only betrays the desperation of his own self-contradiction.

What is self-contradiction? If a man does not represent the a priori of relation in his living of the world, if he does not work out and realize the inborn Thou on what meets it, then it strikes inward. It develops on the unnatural, impossible object of the I — that is, it develops where there is no place at all for it to develop. The self-contradiction is the I trying to make itself a kind of self-sufficient object. The individual I does not recognize that its a priori true nature is its connectedness, its embeddedness, its relation. Individuality is an attempt at self-sufficiency.”

Here it may sound like something very similar to the idea of separation in Buddhism. But what’s interesting — and what the next section I’m going to read shows — is that in a way he says the ultimate fantasy of the individual I, its perversion of reality into spirituality, is a kind of self-generated fantasy of oneness. So much of what gets called mysticism is not a genuine relation with reality, but a kind of self-indulgent, self-obsessed fantasy of union with something abstract, rather than a genuine relation.

Let me read the section where he talks about this kind of attempt to retreat into something like spirituality.

“At times the man, shuddering at the alienation between the I and the world, comes to reflect that something is to be done. And when in the grave night hour you lie racked by waking dreams — bulwarks have fallen away and the abyss is screaming, and note amid your torment: there is still life, if only I got through to it! But how? How?”

So this man, in the hours of reflection, shuddering and aimlessly considering this and that — and perhaps away in the unloved knowledge of the depths within him, he really knows the direction of reversal, leading through sacrifice, but he spurns this knowledge. Mysticism, he says, cannot resist the sun of electric light. He’s calling mysticism the kind of sacrifice of individuality that he intuits is necessary but doesn’t want to face. He calls thought, in which he rightly has great confidence, to his aid.

“It is in truth the high art of thought to paint a reliable picture of the world that is even worthy of belief.

And thought paints two rows of pictures on the right wall and the left. On one, the universe — the tiny earth plunges from the whirling stars, tiny man from the teeming earth, and now history bears him further through the ages, to rebuild persistently the anthill of the cultures which history crushes underfoot. Beneath the row of pictures is written: one and all. On the other wall, the soul — a spinner is spinning the orbits of all the stars and the life of all creation and the history of the universe. Everything is woven on one thread, and is no longer called stars and creation and universe, but sensation and imaginings, or even experiences and the conditions of the soul. And beneath that row of pictures is written: one and all.

Henceforth, if ever the man shudders at the alienation and the world strikes terror in his heart, he looks up to the left or to the right and sees a picture. In one, he sees the I embedded in the world, and there’s really no I at all, so the world can do nothing to the I, and he’s put at ease. Or he sees the world as embedded in the I, and there’s really no world at all, and that puts him at ease.”

In other words, the I creates two versions of spirituality or idealism. Either the I is not separate from the great flow of the world and is dissolved into it, or the world is nothing but the creation of his imagination and the sum total of his experiences. Either he dissolves in the world, or the world dissolves in him. All these are grand abstractions that often pass for spirituality, and Buber says they are the fantasized anodynes of the I that won’t face the reality of self-contradiction.

“But a moment comes when the shuddering man looks up and sees both pictures in a flash together, and a deeper shudder seizes him.”

He sees both versions, and they’re contradictory to one another. Suddenly the validity of either one of them is called into question.

That’s going to bring us to the beginning of Part Three. And this is going to be the introduction of the eternal Thou. I admit that this is a concept that gives me a lot of trouble, and I’d probably be happier if we just skipped this section entirely. But he wrote it, so I think we’re going to have to deal with it a little bit. I’ll just read a little bit of the first couple of pages today.

“The extended lines of relation meet in the eternal Thou. Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou. By means of every particular Thou, the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. Through the mediation of the Thou of all beings, fulfillment and non-fulfillment of relations comes to them. The inborn Thou is realized in each relation and consummated in none. It is consummated only in the direct relation with the Thou that by its nature cannot become It.”

Now, what makes me uncomfortable about this is the tendency to abstract from each particular being to a capital-B Being. A kind of each thing is just a reflection of a larger, eternal abstraction. I think that is a very dangerous and ultimately pernicious philosophical move. And it may be where Buber’s going. Maybe he’s going to redeem himself, but I’m nervous and suspicious when I read this kind of language.

In a certain sense, it’s reminiscent of a kind of Hinduism where the Atman, the individual soul, is supposed to be a bit of the divine spark of the Brahman — the individual soul is a piece of the divine soul. This was what Buddha specifically contradicted with the idea of no-self. He did away not only with the idea of the individual personal self, but of some overarching divine self of which we’re all part. But it’s a very persistent idea, and even in Buddhism you get people treating Buddha nature as if it meant something like that.

Let me read a little more Buber about the eternal Thou, and we’ll see what we think of it.

“Men have addressed their eternal Thou with many names, and singing of him who is thus named, they have always had the Thou in mind. The first myths were hymns of praise. Then the names took refuge in the language of It. Men were more and more strongly moved to think of and address their eternal Thou as an It.”

“But all God’s names are hallowed, for in them he is not merely spoken about but spoken to. Many men wish to reject the word God as a legitimate usage because it is so misused. It is indeed the most heavily laden of all the words used by men. For that very reason, it is the most imperishable and most indispensable.”

“What does all the mistaken talk about God’s being and works matter in comparison with the one truth that all men who have addressed God had God himself in mind? For he who speaks the word God and really has Thou in mind, whatever the illusion by which he is held, addresses the true Thou of his life, which cannot be limited by another Thou, and to which he stands in a relation that gathers up and includes all others.”

“But when he, too, who abhors the name and believes himself to be godless, gives his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life as a Thou that cannot be limited by another — he addresses God.”

So he acknowledges how God, as a word or a concept, is easily misused, turned into a thing, something that we think we’re going to use to our advantage. The way an individual talks about my race, my people, my God — that’s the perversion of a Thou relationship. But somehow underlying all that, because it’s our basic nature, something of this eternal Thou can’t be contaminated and is there whether we recognize it or misuse it or not.

I don’t know what that is. I would be much happier sticking with Socrates and Goethe — Thou as relation to other people, and Thou as a relationship to the natural world and all of life. What we’re going to imagine as the eternal Thou — I don’t know, and I’m suspicious. But I’m going to leave it there for today for our discussion, and I will see if I can pick out some sections for next time to help us clarify it, for better or for worse.

Master Hōgen said to his student Shuzan, “If there’s even a hair’s breadth of difference, heaven and earth are clearly separated. How do you understand this?” The hook in there is the suggestion that understanding itself already creates a separation. Understanding implies a knower and a known. And instead, the student here simply reflects back exactly what the teacher said. No separation through identity, no separation by not imposing any kind of conceptual understanding between the self and the world.

That kind of immediacy, identity, non-separation is what’s typically privileged in the Zen dialogues, and Buber is going to be concerned with non-separation but coming from a different direction and with a different kind of way of formulating the problem and the solution. We should listen carefully for how he’s distinct in what he’s offering. All too often we imagine that all these great mystics and teachers are all really pointing to the same thing, and we tend to homogenize things together and ignore difference. Let’s try to listen for what’s distinctive in Buber.

I’m going to read through a few pages of text and comment as I go, beginning on page 11 of the text we sent out.

“What then do we experience of Thou? Just nothing, for we do not experience it. What then do we know of Thou? Just everything, but we know nothing isolated about it anymore.”

This starts off where it seems like a parallel between experiencing here and understanding in the koan. We do not experience Thou, but we want to go on and see what does that mean, because we know Thou, knowing it in its entirety. The danger with experiencing seems to be that it’s engaging only parts rather than the whole.

“The Thou meets me through grace. It is not found by seeking, but my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being. Indeed, the act of my being. The Thou meets me, but I step into direct relation with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one. Just as any action of the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial actions, and consequently of all sensations of actions grounded only in their particular limitation, is bound to resemble suffering.”

That’s a complicated sentence, and it’s using suffering in a way that we’re not used to. In Buddhism, suffering is immediately defined as the problem and the consequence of attachment, desire, and so forth. Suffering is what we are trying to eliminate. But here suffering is described in a very different way. He says the relation with Thou means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one. Suffering is an aspect of human relation. It doesn’t seem to be problematized or something we’re going to eliminate by the right kind of relation. Rather, the awareness and experience of the other’s suffering is part of our recognition of them as a Thou.

We might say that an It does not suffer. An It, an object, is just something that has things happen to it. But Thou is another subjectivity, another whole human being, and one of the qualities of subjectivity — along with choosing and action — is suffering. It’s how we recognize each other as human. It’s not something we’re here to eliminate.

The other important point I think we should always keep in mind when we read this is that when he talks about I-Thou and I-It, the I does not precede entering into these relationships. It’s not as if I’m here and then I go out and encounter an object or encounter another person. Who I am is constituted by those encounters and by those relations. I do not preexist them. I am who I am because of the relations I enter into, whether I-It or I-Thou. So this is a different kind of non-separation. It’s not based on identity, but on a different level of interdependence.

“The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou. As I become I, I say Thou. All real living is meeting.”

I become through my relation to Thou. In a sense, I only realize my humanness — you might say my full being — by relating to other human beings. If I live in a world solely of objects, or people that I treat as objects, my own humanness is never realized. It’s as if I live the life of an object in a world of objects. How do I really come alive as a human being? That is his basic question.

“The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, no fancy intervene between I and Thou.” Fancy here, I think, means imagination. “The memory itself is transformed as it plunges out of its isolation into the unity of the whole. No aim, no lust, and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou. Desire itself is transformed as it plunges out of its dream into the appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only when every means has collapsed does the meeting come about.”

Here he’s trying to talk about what kind of relationship forges the connection between I and Thou. Our usual way of talking about relationship, and we could say the typical Buddhist way, is to talk about it in terms of desire, attachment, need, dependency. In this case, he’s saying that all those kinds of uses of the other don’t constitute a genuine I-Thou relationship. We’re not connecting just in order to fulfill a need, to satisfy a desire. Connection at some level, we want to say, is taking place on a different dimension. It’s not that those are going to be eliminated or unreal. We’re not going to eliminate desire or need, but he’s suggesting there’s something more basic.

“In the face of the directness of the relation, everything indirect becomes irrelevant. It is also irrelevant if my Thou is already the It for other eyes, the object of general experience, or it can become so through the very accomplishment of this act of my being. For the real boundary, though certainly swaying and swinging, runs neither between experience and non-experience nor between what is given and what is not given, nor yet between the world of being and the world of value. But cutting indifferently across all these provinces, it lies between Thou and It, between the present and the object.”

All our usual ways of engaging run this risk of objectifying the other, and yet are potentially part of an encounter with the whole of the other. Although this boundary, he says, is constantly swaying and swinging. We may always switch back and forth between our level of engagement, but we still are groping towards what really is going to constitute an I-Thou relationship. What is the real definitive nature of that encounter if it’s not on the basis of our usual forms of desire-based relating?

“The present — and by that is meant not the point which indicates from time to time in our thought merely the conclusion of finished time, the mere appearance of termination which is fixed and held — but the real, filled present exists only insofar as actual presentness, meeting, and relation exist. The present only arises in virtue of the fact that Thou becomes present.”

This is a new idea about the nature of time and our being present only in the presence of Thou. Presence and the present are somehow very closely related here.

“The I of the primary word I-It, that is the I faced by no Thou but surrounded by a multitude of contents” — what we would say a multitude of things — “has no present, only the past. Put in another way, insofar as man rests satisfied with the things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his moment has no present content. He has nothing but objects. But objects subsist in time that has been.”

“The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring. The object is not duration but cessation, suspension, a breaking off and cutting clear and hardening, an absence of relation and of present being. True beings are lived in the present. The life of objects is in the past.”

Here it’s very interesting that the present is not just this instant moment which is constantly disappearing into the past, replaced by another present moment. The present is tied up with presence. Being present is being present with a Thou. And that relation constitutes an ongoing present. If we are in an I-Thou relation, we are continually in the present. As soon as we objectify the other, the present dissolves into the past. It holds out this promise of a kind of eternal present — living in an eternal present of I-Thou relation.

“Appeal to a world of ideas as a third factor above this opposition will not do away with its essential twofold nature. For I speak of nothing else but the real man, you and me, of our life and of our world, not of an I or a state of being in itself alone. The real boundary for the actual man cuts right across the world of ideas as well.”

“To be sure, many a man who is satisfied with experience and the use of the world of things has raised over and above himself a structure of ideas in which he finds refuge and repose from the oncome of nothingness. On the threshold, he lays aside his inauspicious everyday dress, wraps himself in pure linen, and regales himself with the spectacle of primal being, or of necessary being. But his life has no part in it. To proclaim his ways may even fill him with well-being.”

This is a swipe at the philosophers who want to substitute a metaphysical abstraction — capital-B Being or Reason or Truth — as if this is our true nature, to unite with something transcendent and abstract. He says this is the great temptation of philosophy and perhaps of a lot of religion. We wrap ourselves in abstractions, laying aside our inauspicious everyday dress, wrapping ourselves in pure linen. Just wrapping yourself up in all sorts of beautiful, transcendent philosophical fantasies. But this has nothing to do with coming into genuine relation, has nothing to do with really discovering yourself, which is only going to be discovered in relation, not in the cultivation of any private inner state.

I think that in a way may be the most radical idea here — that we can get so used to the idea that meditation, that what we’re doing, is cultivating states of consciousness. Trying to realize something that we call kenshō or enlightenment, as if that is something that happens inside us privately. This is a kind of radical denial of these kinds of private states. Who I am only emerges relationally. Who I am can only develop fully in relation, not by having something spectacular suddenly occur between my ears while I’m sitting alone.

“But the mankind of mere It that is imagined, postulated, and propagated by such a man has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken. The noblest fiction is a fetish. The loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved.”

All this transcendent philosophy is just another version of I-It.

“Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them. They wander among us and accost us. The man who leaves the primary word unspoken is to be pitied, but the man who addresses instead these ideas with an abstraction or a password, as if it were their name, is contemptible.”

Of the three examples — art, nature, and the relation with another person — it’s obvious that the direct relation includes an effect on what confronts me.

“In art, the act of being determines the situation in which the form becomes the work. Through the meeting, that which confronts me is fulfilled and enters the world of things, where it is to be endlessly active, endlessly to become an It, but also endlessly to become Thou again, inspiring and blessing. It is embodied. Its body emerges from the flow of spaceless, timeless present on the shore of existence.”

It’s a strange idea about the uniqueness of art as a mode of I-Thou, and I think we can approach this by suggesting that art is an expression of our being in the present. It is not instrumentalized. It’s not a means-to-an-end activity, and that distinguishes it from I-It work.

“The significance of the effect is not so obvious in the relation with the Thou spoken to men. The act of being which provides directness in this case is usually understood wrongly as being one of feeling. Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it. The accompanying feelings can be of greatly different kinds.”

Again, we’re trying to say, what really is I-Thou? Is this a matter of desire or feeling? He’s saying no, it’s something else. It’s love. But what is love?

“The feeling of Jesus for the demoniac differs from his feeling for the beloved disciple, but the love is one love. Feelings are entertained. Love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but the actual truth.”

That seems very mysterious. It’s not a metaphor but the actual truth. Well, what is this love?

“Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its content or its object, but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this with his very being, know this, does not know love, even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.”

I think the suggestion is that most of us misunderstand love, equate it with feeling and desire and pleasure.

“Love ranges in its effect through the whole world. In the eyes of him who takes his stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglement in bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly become successively real to him. That is, set free, they step forth in their singleness and confront him as Thou.”

The best understanding I can offer of this is that love seems to be the most basic level of recognition of the other’s subjectivity as a separate human being. It’s that kind of primal recognition of the other, not as an It, but as another person, as another subjectivity. And that recognition is prior to and more fundamental than any quality of desire or connection. And it’s something we can feel for people of all kinds — good and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly. To love them all is to recognize their essential human nature. To treat them as you’re meeting a person, not as a type. Not as somebody who’s useful or not useful, the object of your desire or not.

“In a wonderful way, from time to time, exclusiveness arises — and so love can be effective: helping, healing, educating, raising up, saving.”

All these usual ways of talking about love or connection arise secondarily from recognition.

“Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou.”

That becomes his definition. But responsibility, I take almost literally as responsiveness. Love means the responsiveness or recognition of the other as a Thou.

“In this lies the likeness, impossible in any feeling whatsoever, of all who love, from the smallest to the greatest, from the blessedly protected man who is surrounded by the love of a loved being, to him who is all his life nailed to the cross of the world and who ventures to bring himself to the dreadful point — to love all men.”

He wants to vastly expand what we usually mean by love away from this sense of the exclusive feeling I have for my loved partner, into what does it mean to recognize everybody as a fellow human being.

Finally, he says, let the significance of the effect in the third example, that of the creature and our contemplation of it, remain sunk in mystery. These are the three modes of I-Thou. He started with art, then he talked about relations with human beings, and now there’s the third — the relation with nature.

“Believe in the simple magic of life and the service of the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that craning of the neck in the creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify, but look round about you — beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn, you come upon being.”

And one more paragraph:

“Relation is mutual. My Thou affects me as I affect it. We are molded by our pupils and built up by our works. The bad man, lightly touched by the holy primary word, becomes one who reveals. How we are educated by children and by animals! We live our lives inscrutably included within the streaming mutual life of the universe.”

I think I’ll end there. Thank you.

Zen students are often very parochial. They have a tendency to think that it’s all in Dōgen. Or it’s all in Joko. That the idea of enlightenment carries with it a kind of thorough and comprehensive understanding, so that anything we need to know must be realized by one of these enlightened masters. And then when we read teachers or philosophers from other traditions, we do it in a slightly condescending way such that we will read them, and if there’s something that resonates with us, we’ll say something like, oh, they understand that — that sounds like Zen. They must have really gotten a little bit of this right. And so we read them basically judging them on how much like us they are, how much of the truth they managed to realize without the benefit of Zen.

It’s very hard for us to approach other traditions or other writers with the idea that maybe they’ve got something that we missed. Maybe there’s something that isn’t really all that well covered in Dōgen. Maybe Joko, for all her insight, really didn’t cover every possible permutation of human relatedness in a way that maybe we have to go somewhere else to fill in some very real blanks.

So I’m going to begin reading the opening pages of I and Thou. And I don’t want us to read him just with an eye to see how Zen he sounds. What he’s saying in some ways is going to be familiar. In some ways he’s dealing with issues of separation and interconnection, interdependence. But in other ways, he has a very different stance towards dualism. He’s not trying to dissolve it into oneness or interconnection. It’s not going to go away in the end. And I think we should try to read and listen with a sense that this perspective, even when it doesn’t correspond to what we already know, might illuminate a dimension that we’ve neglected.

So to begin with I and Thou:

“To man, the world is twofold in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. One primary word is the combination I-Thou. The other primary word is the combination I-It, and without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It. Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.”

So what do we have just in that opening paragraph? We’re not starting with an I or self that goes out to encounter the world or encounters other people. Our starting point, what he calls a primary word, is something that’s already compound, that’s already got this hyphen in it. I-Thou. I-It. We don’t preexist our engagements with another or with the world. Who and what we are is co-created or emerges or is somehow defined by the relational context in which we find ourselves.

Now, I-It may be the more familiar configuration for us, and it seems similar to what we talked about last week in the discussion of reification. This is where its similarity to Zen may make us think about a sense of I-It as designating separation from the world. It’s going to be overcome in Zen by non-separation, by becoming the it, becoming the sound of the raindrops, becoming the sound of the distant temple bell. But Buber moves in a different direction when he says that the alternative to I-It is I-Thou. There we’re not dissolving a distinction. We’re not moving into the absolute or non-separation. The Thou — another person is our first assumption of what that means, but he’s not going to be confined to that — for Buber, is remaining unique and distinct.

He’s going to go on to further define this idea of the primary word:

“Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations. Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken, they bring about existence. Primary words are spoken from the being.”

Now I’m inclined to stop there and realize, well, I don’t know what he means by being. “Primary words are spoken from the being.” What is that? Let’s keep it bracketed and not jump to a conclusion that we understand what that means. But the important thing here seems to be he’s saying primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them. Being spoken, they bring about existence. They involve relations, not things, and the speaking of them seems to be very crucial — the speaking is what brings the relation into focus or into being. I do not exist prior to my engagement with you or my engagement with the world.

For me, this is reminiscent of Heidegger, who’s writing about the same time in the 1920s, when he talks about Dasein — being there, or as it gets translated to English, being-in-the-world, with these hyphens. I think the hyphens in Buber and the hyphens in Heidegger both try to point to an underlying interconnection that we ordinarily break up into separateness.

To continue with his second paragraph:

“If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it. If It is said, the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.”

So the I of the I-Thou is different from the I of the I-It. Since what I am is relation, what I am changes according to what kind of relation that is, or what I’m in relation with. The I doesn’t exist independently, pre-relation.

Then he concludes:

“The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.”

Again, that word being, and now the whole being. What do we think that means? So far I’m not sure.

“There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-It. When a man says I, he refers to one or the other of these. The I to which he refers is present when he says I. Further, when he says Thou or It, the I of one of those primary words is present. The existence of I and the speaking of I are one and the same thing. When a primary word is spoken, the speaker enters into the word and takes his stand in it.”

So here we have a sense that speaking brings forth the I. And I’m going to tentatively assume that speaking is somewhat metaphorical for a whole embodied expression of relatedness. A kind of way of manifesting ourselves in the world. When I say Thou, when I engage another from a certain perspective, I come forth as a certain kind of person when I speak it. Or if I engage the world in a certain kind of reifying, objectifying manner, I manifest in the world as a certain, very different kind of I.

“The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone, which have something for their object. I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all of this and the like alone. This and the like together establish the realm of It.”

Now, that’s a complicated and challenging notion, because we might be thinking of the I in terms of subjectivity. But he says perception, sensation, imagination, willing, feeling, thinking — all of those things can be aspects of I-It. It’s not our inner subjectivity that distinguishes us from objects in the world. Our relationship to our sensations, feelings, thoughts, and intentions can be instrumentalized, can be represented by transitive verbs, as he says.

But the realm of Thou has a different basis:

“When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing, there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others. It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing. He has indeed nothing, but he takes his stand in relation.”

When he says, when Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object — that sounds like we know where he’s going, that we’re not separating out and reifying or objectifying some object of experience. But it gets hazier after that. “Every It is bounded by others. It exists only through being bounded by others.” That’s less clear to us.

I found myself associating to Sartre’s distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself, where there’s a kind of parallel contrast between the subject, the for-itself, which is characterized by freedom, and the in-itself, the object, which is characterized by boundedness or limitation — in Buber’s sense. And Sartre has this axiom that says, the for-itself is not what it is and is what it’s not. Things are what they are. Things are defined objects that have limits and boundaries. But the subjective self, which is defined by freedom, is defined by what it’s not, in the sense that it’s defined by its range of possibility. It’s not what it is — it’s not bounded by a definition of size, shape, weight, or position. And it is what it’s not — its essence is its freedom to go off in infinite directions through choice or will.

So when he says the It is bounded by others, but Thou has no bounds — to understand that, I’m already making an analogy with Sartre and the idea of freedom. Thou has no bounds. But I’m not sure Buber is really talking about freedom here the way Sartre is. And he’s also not talking about no separation the way we hear in Zen — as a different way of talking about no bounds.

“It is said that man experiences his world. What does that mean? Man travels over the surfaces of things and experiences them. He extracts knowledge about their constitution from them. He wins an experience from them. His experience is what belongs to the things. But the world is not presented to man by experience alone. These present him only with a world composed of It and He and She and It again.”

“If I experience something, if I add inner to outer experience, nothing in the situation has changed. We are merely following the uneternal division that springs from the lust of the human race to whittle away the secret of death. Inner things or outer things, what are they but things and things?”

“I experience something. If we add secret to open experiences, nothing in the situation has changed. How self-confident is that wisdom which perceives a closed compartment in things reserved for the initiate, and manipulated only with the key! Oh, secrecy without a secret. Oh, accumulation of information. It, always It.”

Again, he’s going after the primacy of subjectivity, as if that is the alternative to objectifying the world. What if we think that objectification is the problem — just a kind of gaining idea, a manipulation of objects in the world? He says, don’t think the alternative is to dwell on inner experience. Don’t think that the secret is something deep inside you. Again, we can say he’s intimating something about what we call our true self. Is it deep inside? Is it our deepest feelings? Is it some secret in us that we have to uncover? All of that, he says, is part of the realm of It.

What he calls being, and which may have some parallels to our notions of true self, isn’t found inside, isn’t an object of experience. Some way or another, our true self only emerges in relation.

It used to be said that when a patient got to the point when they could finally free associate, the analysis was over.

We encounter a similar kind of paradox in Shunryu Suzuki’s description of beginner’s mind. He said that the beginner’s mind is open, ready for new experience, not full of the expert’s knowledge and expectations. Maybe because he was sitting in a room with Americans who seemed to know nothing about Zen and in some sense were a blank slate, he thought that they were free of all the cultural accretions of Japanese Zen.

In a way that was true, but we also know now beginners’ minds are filled with curative fantasies. Everyone comes to Zen with some picture of what it’s going to do for them. Some, certainly in those old days, had all sorts of archetypal or transferential fantasies about exotic Asian masters, all sorts of pictures of what meditation was really supposed to be like — quieting the mind, making the mind blissful, transcendent, all sorts of stuff.

So it was probably the case that if there was such a thing as a beginner’s mind in the zendo, it probably belonged only to the Roshi. It was the result of years of practice, not the first step. And we encounter this kind of paradox over and over again when we talk about just sitting or no gain. Is that something we’re supposed to endeavor to do from the very start, or is it the description of the endpoint, after decades of practice? Finally being able to just sit. Finally being able to practice with no thought of gain.

Like Freud’s patients, in a way our practice is to endeavor to do these things and then watch ourselves fail in characteristic ways. For Joko, practice meant tuning into the irritation or anxiety or anger that accompanied our moment-to-moment bumping up against the way reality wasn’t conforming to our expectations, the way our sitting wasn’t a good sitting, or the way it was supposed to be something different. We were supposed to be something different. We judged ourselves. We were anxious that we weren’t doing it right. We were annoyed at the way the zendo was operating. All these things are the inevitable obstacles or avoidances that happen when we think we’re going to just sit.

We have a sangha council coming up in which we are asked to consider the different degrees to which reason and intuition function in our practice. Reason, or knowing, is often something of a pejorative in Zen. We’re presumably practicing in some way to go beyond that, if only because knowing tends to imply a subject-object split. A knower and a known. What would it mean to dissolve that dualism?

In Zen we often encounter hyphenated words like not-knowing as an attempt to describe the overcoming of that subject-object duality. Intuition is an interesting question, an attempt at describing a different kind of understanding or engagement that also bypasses that kind of subject-object split. Another way of talking about that might be to think in terms of procedural knowledge or implicit knowing. This is the way we function smoothly in routine actions without giving them any apparent conscious thought.

People often use riding a bicycle as an example. You don’t think about how to do it, and if you try to explain it step by step you’d have a lot of trouble, but you have all this muscle memory that allows you just to get on the bicycle and start pedaling. And we do that in a thousand ways in everyday life, with things like just knowing when you walk through a doorway that you’re going to fit, that you know what a door is. You don’t have to figure out where the handle is and how it works.

There’s a new fleet of taxicabs in New York these days. It’s a rival to Uber that uses only Tesla cars, and when I first rode in one, I didn’t know how to open the door. They don’t have handles. You have to find the little button to push to open the door. So for something that is completely automatic, all of a sudden you don’t know how to do it. You have to start thinking about it. That’s the whole transition from procedural know-how to knowing something that you have to think about. I have to remember — oh, Teslas have buttons, not handles. I have to think about it for a minute.

A lot of Zen practice, we could say, involves the substitution of know-how for knowing. When we think of what happens in a zendo, particularly during sesshin, we engage in a simplified, ritualized, disciplined set of actions where we follow a simple set of cues: the bells, the clappers, and we just start having all those become second nature to us. The bell rings, we get up, the clappers hit, we bow. Whatever these things are, they start happening very automatically. We don’t do much talking, we do some chanting, and those chants become very, very familiar. In a way, we have this experience of going from a world in which we’re always thinking about things and always figuring things out to a world in which we don’t have to think about anything, in which we start just doing it.

When we start just sitting, we get into this very routinized, repetitive kind of behavior, and doing so, we occupy a different world, and occupy and become a different self in occupying it. We live in a world of procedural know-how. I think for most of us, throughout our practice, spending a lot of time just immersing ourselves in a world of know-how rather than knowing creates a profound change.

It may not sound like it’s anything very spiritual. If anything, it’s a far more routinized life than anything we manage outside of sesshin. We’re not used to thinking that routine is going to be the pathway to spirituality. We usually want to think that the road of spirituality is paved with special experiences, unusual states of consciousness. We don’t like to think that the road of spirituality is the road of repetition and boredom and just doing the same thing over and over and over again. But it looks like that’s how it works most of the time.

When we think about how practice carries over into our daily life, it may function consciously in terms of things like precepts, the vows that we consciously make or try to remind ourselves of. But I think for me, and for most people, the mark of years of Zen practice is this deeply ingrained habit of non-avoidance. Touch paper once. A bill comes in, you open it, and you pay it. Nothing piles up. You see a piece of paper on the ground, you pick it up. You see a dish in the sink, you wash it. Somebody calls, you answer it. Over and over again, there’s a kind of automatic responsiveness, a lack of resistance, a lack of procrastination, and in a way you think about things a lot less. There’s a lot less: should I do it now or should I do it later? Do I want to do it or do I not feel like doing it? It becomes remarkable when you see how much of your mental head space is taken up with all the minutiae of judgment and avoidance, attempting to micro-manage all these little things rather than just doing them.

Again, it may not sound like anything about that is very spiritual. From the outside it can look like you’re training yourself in an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I think in fact we are changed by it, and the world we live in is changed by it. When you do things from that kind of automatic procedural memory and with less and less resistance, you find that a lot of who you were has dropped away, because who you were, yourself, was this whole inner dialogue about judging and wanting and thinking and avoiding — just a lot of stuff about: do I really want to do that now? Is there a way I can get somebody else to do it? Maybe I can put it off. I don’t feel like it. All that rat’s nest of thought — a lot of that is what feels like ourself, and a lot of that simply just fades away.

And then we also find ourselves occupying a different world, because we’re in a world of importances, a world in which we’re just dealing with one thing after another, and in that sense we have a better fit with our own life. We don’t have the experience of life as a series of obstacles or intrusions. Think how often our life gets bogged down in that feeling. Interruptions. Intrusions. Things we don’t want to do. Things that we have all sorts of opinions about.

Now, I’m not saying the goal is just to be a mindless idiot, but it can sometimes feel that way. Yet there really is a way in which you occupy a different world when you operate spontaneously with an attitude of just do it, rather than seeing the world as constantly something you’ve got to manage. It’s always a little bit out of control. It’s never doing what it’s supposed to do.

Sesshin, in a sense, is that model for a world that can be difficult and arbitrary and sometimes painful, but our experience is that our resistance to it gradually drops away. We stop thinking that the solution to its difficulty is controlling it. We just let ourselves do the next thing. Okay, maybe that’s going to hurt. Okay, maybe that’s not how I would do it if I was inventing it from scratch. Maybe I don’t like what they’re serving for lunch. But all those things are how we habitually face a life of obstacles and interruptions and difficulties, and some of that just fades into just experiencing the next thing. Now this, now that. That’s what I think slowly seeps into the rest of our life.

It doesn’t sound much like a spiritual practice, except in the end, you’re not who you were, and the world is not what it was.

Hō Shan imparted some words, saying, “Cultivating study is called listening. Cutting off study is called approaching. Going beyond these two is really going beyond.”

A monk came forward and asked, “What is really going beyond?” Hō Shan said, “Knowing how to beat the drum.” Again the monk asked, “What is the ultimate truth?” Hō Shan said, “Knowing how to beat the drum.” Again the monk asked, “Mind is Buddha — I’m not asking about this. What is not mind, not Buddha?” Hō Shan said, “Knowing how to beat the drum.” Once again the monk asked, “What comes when the sage arrives?” Hō Shan said, “Knowing how to beat the drum.”

Given the weather outside, you were perhaps anticipating a koan about how in the summer the heat kills the monk. But I thought instead I would talk about a case perhaps a little more relevant to our jukai ceremony. Because in a certain way, traditionally, preparation for jukai is knowing how to beat the drum. Just learning how to hit the gong. How to hit the han. How to run the sitting and sesshin. Lead the services. Learning how to take responsibility for various activities in the zendo, whether in person or now online. All these ways of contributing to the sangha, which are not just about cultivating your own personal samadhi, focusing on your own sitting. All these ways of functioning in the sangha and the world — it can be summed up as knowing how to beat the drum.

This koan is a little bit subtle and complex, I think. We might read it from a couple of different directions.

It starts off saying, cultivating study is listening. There we can hear a kind of traditional critique of getting your knowledge or insights secondhand. You’re still caught up in words, concepts, stories about other people — in other places, with other teachers, getting their realization. And so the whole idea of cultivating study can sound somewhat pejorative — you’re still just caught up in thought. To call that listening would seem to imply a basic separation: the listener and what’s listened to. It’s not your story that’s happening, it’s somebody else’s story.

And then the second phrase: cutting off study is called approaching. Obviously, cutting off study is the right next step — to go beyond concepts and secondhand experience. But that’s called just approaching. It’s the idea that when you’ve cut off thought and had some taste of emptiness — just this, the emptiness of thought — that’s not any kind of endpoint. That’s called just approaching, that’s just your first step.

And going beyond these is really going beyond. You have to go beyond both the cultivation of study and emptiness, cutting off study. You go beyond form, you go beyond emptiness. That’s really going beyond.

But the monk says, well, what does that mean, really going beyond? And Hō Shan says, knowing how to beat the drum. So there, we might say that one emerges from emptiness into functioning. Beating the drum is an activity. It literally reverberates into the world. When we go beyond emptiness, we go into a kind of compassionate functioning.

So far so good, and that could sound like a good explanation of what’s going on. But I think it gets a little subtler when we realize that Hō Shan is quoting somebody in saying all of this. His giving you this is the result of his having cultivated study.

Now, this might start to put a different spin on how we think of study and how we think of beating the drum. The first version I gave, which seems like a conventional version, might in a certain stereotypical way correspond to a kind of Rinzai approach — where you want to cut off thought, experience emptiness, and then go beyond emptiness into functioning.

But let’s take the whole thing and do it from the other direction. Let’s think of calling that more of a Sōtō approach. We’ll start by beating the drum. Your training will start by learning to give meticulous attention to all sorts of rituals. You learn how each thing is supposed to happen. You learn all the rules, you learn all the forms. Especially if you’re in a monastery, there are all sorts of ways you’re going to put on and take off and fold up your robes. There are all sorts of bows and chants and rituals. What you do as a beginner is give close attention to each thing that you’re supposed to be doing throughout the day. And learning how to beat the drum is a description of how you give careful, meticulous, mindful attention to all the minutiae of your daily life. That could be ritualized in the zendo, or it can be out in your daily life — making your bed, doing the dishes, doing the laundry. All the things of your life that you learn to give attention to as if they were the most important thing in the world. You take care of making the bed like learning to beat the drum, to strike the han to announce the beginning of sitting.

And then the process we’re describing here starts to flow in the other direction. Cutting off study, called approaching — here it’s cutting off a lot of conceptual thinking or gaining ideas, and we’re just doing the next thing. We’re just giving our full attention to what we’re doing. And that becomes our gate into emptiness. It’s just this. Just this. It’s not the result of some big breakthrough in your meditation practice, where suddenly it’s all one or everything is empty. No, it’s just paying attention to how you place the incense in the bowl. There’s no particular thought. You’ve even sort of forgotten that this is the right way versus the wrong way — this is just how we do it. And we’re just doing it. From that approach, knowing how to beat the drum becomes how we lose ourselves in attention and activity together. And I think that’s a nice way that practice can seep into everyday life.

Then finally, we’d arrive after a lot of years of practice at being able to cultivate study. We start to see words and concepts and philosophy and the old sutras as complex tools that we learn how to use wisely for the benefit of others. And then they too become versions of beating the drum. You learn how to put all these old stories to use in teaching and in practice, so that they reverberate and go out into the world and make an impact. It’s a whole other version of beating the drum. But now the drum includes all these words and concepts that were originally supposed to be the barrier. They become the gate.

Now, we might want to add just one more dimension — perhaps an Ordinary Mind dimension — to these two. Because whichever path you take, whether you’re starting by cutting off concepts, going beyond listening, arriving at emptiness, and then learning how to beat the drum, or taking it in the other direction, there’s danger in getting into bypass, essentially.

If you come back and say, well, I’m learning how to beat the drum and pay meticulous attention to things and rituals and how I’m handling every detail, there’s the danger that we bypass what’s going on inside — inside at the level of our emotional reality. Either we can get caught up in the idea of seeing the emptiness of things and functioning from that place, or we get caught up in the idea that meticulous attention to detail is selflessness, and feel like just that kind of practice itself is going to work everything out. We run the danger of not having beating the drum be something that really operates inside of our own personal thoughts and feelings and emotions.

The monk in this case asks a whole series of questions, to which he gets the same answer: knowing how to beat the drum. But he’s asking seemingly very abstract kinds of questions. What is really going beyond? What is the ultimate truth? I’m not asking about mind is Buddha — I want to know about not mind, not Buddha. Seems like pretty esoteric stuff. And in a sense, the point in the koan is that every time, Hō Shan is dragging him back down to earth. Knowing how to beat the drum.

But most of you, when you come into dokusan, are not asking what is the ultimate reality. You’re asking, what do I do about all the thoughts in my head? What do I do about my anger, or my impatience, or all the relationships I’ve got tangled up? And if the answer to those questions is knowing how to beat the drum, well, then there’s a danger of bypassing that. It’s sort of saying, don’t worry about how you’re feeling, just make sure you hit the han exactly this way, and forget about everything that’s back home and just do this. That’s good up to a point. That’s a nice way to break your preoccupation with thought. That’s part of what we do — we give ourselves some respite from our obsessions, our preoccupations, the things that worry us. We can forget them.

But we also, at some point, have to come back and get more of a sense of where they’re coming from. What are the vulnerabilities in my own psyche and in my own life that give rise to those things? We have to look at the way impermanence, the reality of change and old age and illness, gives rise to anxieties that lead us to try to control things, master things, become strong and autonomous and impervious. We have to learn the ways in which the reality of interdependency gives rise to the anxiety of vulnerability and emotional dependency. And how in our practice we all try to find some way to become completely self-reliant. Or perhaps we’re going to be subtle about it — we’ll be so compassionate and helpful to everybody else that it’ll guarantee that they’ll love us and want us and need us and never leave us. Some way in which we’ll forestall all the vulnerabilities of being dependent.

I think knowing how to beat the drum is a valuable metaphor for reminding us to take practice off the cushion, into the sangha, into the world. It’s what we hope the study of the precepts is all about, what jukai is all about. But it can’t be simply a picture of mindless — in the sense of selfless — functioning. It can’t be simply a sense that if you pay perfect attention to detail and learn to master that, you’ve mastered your emotional reality as well.

Knowing how to beat the drum — we have to come back to the place where we utilize all our psychological knowledge and insight, and learn how that has to reverberate as well through our life.

Very often you get a sense that by a lot of esoteric talk about being nobody, someone is trying to prove what a somebody they are. But the question keeps recurring, and you wonder what it is that keeps drawing people back to it. In a certain sense, that idea of no-self is meant to be a kind of relief from the tyranny of self, but when you talk to people about what that would mean to them, almost inevitably it’s some version of wanting one part of the self to be free of another. I have a lot of disturbing thoughts I want to get rid of. I have anxiety or sadness I want to get rid of. There’s always a remainder of an “I” that’s going to be left over to enjoy once and for all the peace and quiet that’s going to be achieved when that unpleasant version of self is finally evicted. We don’t really have any idea what it would mean to be free of the tyranny of the observer, or the tyranny of the self that is seeking freedom from its suffering.

I think another aspect of what is so compelling about talk of no-self is that it tends to push a button in most of us that connects with our deepest fears, and that has to do with the sense of feeling like nobody in the worst sense — a fear of being completely non-recognized, of being a kind of ghost in the world, where life is going on around you but nobody’s paying you any attention at all. And there we have this sense of being no one in the most oppressive way imaginable, where the world is populated by somebodies who are only paying attention to each other and we’re fundamentally left out. I think that all this no-self talk, in a way, draws people because it inadvertently plugs into that sense of facing a deep fear of non-recognition.

When we look at the root texts, like the Heart Sutra and the talk about the emptiness of self, it’s important first of all to realize that the self is not being singled out in any way in terms of its emptiness. It’s not as if this whole world of real things exists and only the self doesn’t, as a kind of false imaginary entity in a world of real things. The Heart Sutra insists that if the self doesn’t exist, neither does the floor you’re sitting on or the air you’re breathing or the sun that’s shining. The self doesn’t exist in the same way you can say the world doesn’t exist, but we rarely hear it formulated that way. I think that people would have a whole different reaction to it if it was put in that kind of framework, where nothing has any kind of permanent or substantial reality.

But when we say the self doesn’t exist and single that out, it strikes at an inner Descartes in all of us that wants to assume or assert that the thing we know best and with most certainty is our own private inner experience, and we can doubt everything about the world and we can imagine everything out there is an insubstantial dream, but the thing I know is my own knowing, my own experience.

The idea of emptiness, in a sense, levels the playing field. It says that we can’t know or control anything more than anything else, including anything inner. We’re not known to ourselves any more certainly than we know the world. We cannot control the content or experience of our mind with any more certainty than we can know or control so-called outer things of the world. There are many ways in which we bump up against this. Certainly, in non-Buddhist psychology we confront the notion of the unconscious, which by definition says that there are aspects of who we are that we don’t know, and that we are constantly being shaped or defined by things out of our awareness — that in a sense, what could be most essential or determining about our inner experience are things that we have no access to.

When we talk about what is actually at stake in this talk about no-self, we’re talking about issues of knowing and controlling our experience. That’s how we bring it back down to something that’s real to ourselves. How much of what’s happening to us, by us, do we really understand? How much of it is caused by conditioning — called karma, cause and effect — conditions outside of our awareness and outside of our control? How much of who we are doesn’t begin inside and emanate outward, but comes in from the outside in ways that we can’t really know about, can’t really control?

The non-existence of self is simply an assertion of its impermanence and its interdependency, not its phantom-like nature, as if we could just blow on it and blow it away and that would be it once and for all. Again, we have a certain kind of fantasy of release, but invariably it’s a release that one part wishes for from another. What we have to face, actually, is that this sense of interdependency means a vulnerability to the world and to other non-existent selves — to whom we somehow remain very vulnerable for their love and attention, recognition — and the fact of change and impermanence, which we tend to get slightly more aware of as time goes on.

In many significant ways it all comes down to our desire to control the uncontrollable, and our practice, which Uchiyama has called opening the hand of thought, is also letting go of that attempt to get a tight grip on our life — to loosen up the hand that’s trying to grasp the steering wheel of our mind and our life and make it go the way we want it to go.

We need to open that hand of control as well as that hand of thought, to have a lighter touch, and then we could be, as Chesterton described, more like angels who can fly because they take themselves lightly.

In general, in Ordinary Mind, when we reestablished the jukai ceremonies — which Joko had pretty much done away with in San Diego — I thought of it as a way to formally create a kind of training period within the practice community. Particularly, it was a way of indicating we were bringing our practice off the cushion and into relation to the greater sangha. The practice was not simply a matter of labeling your thoughts or doing your own individual practice, but was reoriented outward towards service. And so there were a lot of particular kinds of training people would do — in terms of being jikidō, and especially jikidō during sesshin, and learning all the rituals and formalities, leading the chants, and so forth.

I thought of tangaryo as an interesting addition to that set of requirements for jukai. I took the term from what had traditionally been a kind of entrance exam for would-be monks trying to enter a monastery. In the old days, the idea was you’d come to the monastery and ask to be admitted as a monk, and almost ritualistically or formulaically the head monk would say, we can’t take on any new monks here. We already have more mouths than we can feed. The teacher doesn’t want any more students. Go away, go find some other place. And the student was expected to simply sit down in front of the gate and show his determination by staying there all day and all night, and the next day, and asking again, and being sent away again, and persisting and staying. This got formalized into a way in which there was a little room set aside for the applicant monks to sit for the first day or few days of their application period. It became an expected and ritualized procedure that people knew they would have to go through. But in some ways, it becomes an expression or test of a person’s determination to practice.

What it does in Ordinary Mind is a little different, since obviously people are already coming to practice for a long time before they’re doing jukai. But what it does is symbolize a person taking responsibility for the structure of practice and maintaining it on their own. We ask that the person take their cushions up to their room and follow a schedule all on their own for the first day. Instead of sitting with the structure and support of the whole sangha, they have to be the guiding engine of their own practice. They have to have the determination to follow the schedule on their own.

Even though this is a kind of day of self-directed practice, it’s still taking place in the context of sesshin. It’s taking place in the context of a schedule that everybody else is following, and that they’re following along with people participating in the group sesshin. So what it points to for me is this interesting interplay between our own individual effort and all the enabling structure of practice.

In order for there to be a group practice, each individual person has to make a commitment and put in the time and energy to show up and take on the various roles that make practice, and especially sesshin, happen. And the sesshin is the sum of all those individual efforts. At the same time, all those individual efforts are made possible and determined by the structure and traditions of the group. Nobody is inventing all this on their own, and they’re not all doing it independently of one another, each coming up with their own ideas. Instead, we have a tradition and a structure of practice that enables and channels our individual commitment and effort. So there’s this constant dialectic going back and forth between individual effort and all the enabling functions of the group and the structure.

For our online sangha now, our virtual sangha, this is even more the case than it used to be traditionally. Every one of you who is tuning in through Zoom has to make a particular individual effort to sustain your practice. You don’t have the benefit of a group to show up to every day or every week, where you can simply just fit in. And yet we are creating online a set of virtual structures and a virtual community, a set of virtual expectations and rituals that you all can partake of. So there’s still this dialectic between individual effort and enabling conditions. And yet those enabling conditions have shifted and continue to shift.

As we approach the Garrison sesshin, I can’t help but think that it was just a year ago this week when we were preparing for Garrison, that the whole structure of OMZ got upended by the resignation of our resident. And then as a result, we had to give up the physical zendo, which had been the center of our practice for decades. We had gotten very used to one set of enabling conditions and suddenly had to adapt. Suddenly had to say, the structures we’re used to aren’t going to be there anymore. What are we going to do about that?

Well, we adapted. In a way, the same way that we adapted during COVID and created the online community in the first place. And that adaptation sacrificed many of the benefits of in-person practice but paid this unexpected dividend of creating a much larger, much more extended virtual sangha, putting people in touch with me and with each other in a way we hadn’t done for the previous twenty years.

We chant, each moment, life as it is, the only teacher. One of the things that life is teaching us is this kind of endlessly shifting set of challenges in which we have to make efforts to maintain and sustain our own enabling structure. One of the definitions of life itself, you could say, is the capacity to maintain some kind of ongoing structure and containing boundary in the face of ever-shifting environmental conditions. And that’s what the sangha has to do as well. We have to find ways to maintain identity and structure under constantly changing conditions.

We don’t have the luxury of having a kind of physical institution that’s been the temple on the mountaintop for the last hundreds of years, that’s always there, always the center of practice. What we have instead is a kind of idea of practice. An idea of practice that we carry and embody ourselves, and try to find ways to co-create and sustain and manifest, even as circumstances change.

And of course, even the people who had the luxury of that century-old monastery on the mountaintop as the center of practice — even those conditions eventually start changing. In Japan, those traditional monasteries started emptying out. There was not the community to support them, or the interest in a new generation to populate them. Practice changed. The old centers had to give way to something else. Part of the whole rise of Zen in America is due to those kinds of changes in Asia.

Sometimes those changes are very slow and incremental. Sometimes they’re all of a sudden, like we had to go through with COVID or the loss of the physical space last year. But one way or another, we have this idea of practice that sustains us. We sustain it and it sustains us. Back and forth. Over and over again.

The center of initiative seems to start with us, to hold and maintain this practice. Yet our ability to understand what practice is, is constantly shaped by our embeddedness in a community and a tradition. We uphold it. It upholds us. Back and forth. Over and over again.

Yunyan was sweeping the ground outside the temple. Daowu saw him and said, “Too busy.” Yunyan replied, “You should know there’s one that’s not busy.” Daowu said, “Well, in that case, there are two moons in the sky.” Yunyan held up his broom and said, “Which moon is this?”

Yunyan sweeping the ground, sweeping away all the dust that is gathered in the temple courtyard — we can see this as a metaphor for our practice. Wiping the dust off the mirror is a very common image we use for what happens in practice. But what is the dust? What is sweeping? What are we trying to achieve? Are we trying to achieve anything at all? So often we hear that practice is motivated by some curative fantasy or some gaining idea, some notion of fixing or purifying, emptying the mind, clearing out all the dust. And as soon as we frame it this way, we are going in the wrong direction. The Sixth Patriarch famously said that the mirror itself is empty, the dust is empty. What is there to clean off?

We can hear Yunyan’s brother monk, Daowu, come and challenge him with that. Too busy! What do you think you’re accomplishing? What is all this activity? Yunyan says, you should know there’s one that’s not busy. You should know that in the midst of all this activity, there’s one that is still.

It’s a dangerous metaphor. And Daowu immediately jumps on that. There’s another one inside of you? There’s a still person? A still self? A true self that’s separate from all this sweeping activity? If there’s one who’s still, that’s like saying there are two moons. And we encounter that kind of split, that potential dilemma of framing, a hundred different ways: our ordinary mind and the way, dogs and Buddha nature, little mind and big mind, deluded mind and true self. There are all sorts of ways we metaphorically set up a contrast, a dichotomy between what seems to be on the surface and what we hope is in the depths. We think our practice is going to uncover or reveal it if only we can wipe away all the dust that is obscuring it, and then we can see down into the real thing. All these are metaphors for what we imagine practice is about. Whenever we think this is the false self and we have to get to the true self, we’re already engaged in a certain kind of dualistic thinking that is setting up two moons in the sky — a good one and a bad one, or even sometimes just a matter of what we think is superficial versus what is deep.

But Yunyan answers Daowu’s challenge by simply holding up his broom and saying, which moon is this? Two moons just collapse into the activity itself. While sweeping the grounds, is this busy? Or is it still? We think sometimes that Zen is very profound, that it penetrates to the depths of our being, but in fact Zen is very superficial. Zen says it’s all right here on the surface. Nothing is hidden. There’s nothing behind this activity, this moment. There’s just this.

We go in pursuit of our true self. Where is that going to be found? Deep inside? Daowu might have come up to Yunyan and challenged him by asking, who is sweeping? It’s a common enough koan for students. Who are you? Who is sitting zazen? Who is sweeping the courtyard? Who is thinking? Who is asking the question? When we’re asked, who am I, we somehow get all befuddled and we try to look deep inside and figure out who’s in there. What can I possibly do to answer?

But when I ask, who is the I of “I am thinking,” is it any different than asking, what’s the it in “it’s raining”? When we say it’s raining, do we go looking for the it that’s raining? It’s just rain. It’s a strange quirk of our grammar that we put this pronoun in front of the verb. We make a split between subject and object. Instead of just thinking, we say, I am thinking. Instead of there just being sweeping, we wonder who is sweeping.

So much of what we do in practice is to try to bring ourselves back simply to an experience, a presence, of just this, just what’s happening. Not who’s doing it, not who’s willing it, not the reason it’s being done, or the goal it’s being done for. Just this, over and over again. What we seek is hidden in plain sight, so we don’t see it.

I often go back to the little drawing of the duck and the rabbit to talk about a change in perspective, seeing things one way versus another way. We might say that the duck represents our ordinary way of seeing things, and too often that ordinary way frames things in terms of what’s missing, what’s wrong, what we need to somehow discover or reveal. It separates the world into subjects and objects and then we ask, what is that subject? What is that I? The duck is just our ordinary mind doing what it does.

Somehow, sometimes, the perspective changes, and we look at the figure and we see the rabbit. From that point of view, nothing is hidden, nothing is missing, things are just as they are, and in a strange way, they are perfect just as they are, even as they go about setting up all these dualities. Oh — that’s just what thinking does. That’s just how grammar works. That’s just our language.

When that psychological shift happens, that change in perspective, we can suddenly imagine that we’re finally seeing something behind the curtain, behind appearances. We’re seeing how it really is, and we can get trapped by a whole new set of metaphors: this is big mind! This is true self! And then all over again we’re setting up a second moon in the sky. There’s ordinary mind and then, now, there’s the way, the Tao! Now I see the real thing! But as soon as we begin to talk about that kind of real thing, that true self, we’ve split it off from our ordinary mind.

When we go from seeing the duck to the rabbit, the figure hasn’t changed at all. There’s a little line on the paper, exactly the way it was before. Nothing has been added to it, nothing has been taken away. We just see it differently. We feel it differently. But it’s exactly the same as it’s always been, and yet that change in perspective makes all the difference.

In the old days, when I started out, we always talked about the difference between the psychological and the spiritual, as if these were two separate realms. Therapy helped people work on their psychological problems, but Zen was going to operate on a whole different spiritual level. Two moons. It takes a long time to come back around to the idea: there’s only one mind, there’s only this mind. Perhaps we can see it from the perspective of problems or we can see it from the perspective of a koan. When we think in terms of problems, we think we need to have a solution, something needs to change, something needs to be fixed. Sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes that’s the way to look at things. When it rains I want to go look for my umbrella. But sometimes I just walk in the rain. Maybe it doesn’t seem so bad to get wet. Maybe that’s just another experience, not a bad one, just — oh, just out in the rain.

What makes it a problem? We have to find a way to always go back and forth between these perspectives. If we see everything as a problem, our life is endless fixing. We’ll always be a day late and a dollar short. We’ll never get there. But if we get too infatuated with the other side — everything is just this! — well, then why practice at all? Why sweep up any of that dust? Why sit a sesshin?

Somehow these two figures always have to go together. We’re not trying to replace the duck with the rabbit. There’s not a good one and a bad one. They are both part of our reality. Both are true perspectives. Each one by itself is incomplete, yet at the same time they are always both present. It’s the great paradox of our practice. There’s nothing to gain, but we throw ourselves into practice. We live our life wholeheartedly, even though we wonder: where are we going? What are we accomplishing by that?

Just the experience of the wholehearted life. Just the satisfaction of sweeping the courtyard.

I’ll begin by reading a couple of quotes from her. It begins with Klein asking her how she thinks about herself, how she defines herself. She says:

“I would call myself a radical humanist. A socialist. But also an existentialist. And those three things combined are sometimes hard to think from. The existentialist part means, I think, people are thrown into life. I don’t believe in people having essences. And that leads to a certain kind of fiction, a certain kind of thought. But also a political angle. Because if you think people are thrown into life, then the circumstances they are thrown into are of absolute significance. And in 2016, the circumstances we were all about to be thrown into were my focus. Whereas in a quieter, or a more peaceful time, the idea of what you’re thrown into being the beauty of the world, nature itself, your relations with other people — this kind of private domestic world — that had to be put to one side.”

So she calls herself an existentialist, and she’s echoing the Sartrean motto: existence precedes essence. The idea that we don’t start from any predefined human nature that provides a ready template for who and what we are, what it means to be human. And this has two different aspects to it.

Sartre tended to emphasize the aspect of freedom. If we have no essential nature, then who we are is going to be a matter of what we decide to do. Choice and freedom were paramount to him. In a way, this was in reaction to deterministic theories — whether of science, that tried to say if it’s a completely physical, deterministic universe, there can’t be any such thing as free will; or he was very hostile to the idea of psychoanalysis suggesting that unconscious forces shape and control our lives, outside of our awareness, outside of our control, and that we only think we’re making decisions, but at some level there’s an underlying psychic determinism that shapes who we are. And there was a dilemma for him in the early days with Marxism or Hegelianism that imagines a kind of underlying economic determinism to things. He was very opposed to determinism. This created complications later on, because all through the ‘40s and ‘50s he also had a radical political side, which he had identified with the Communist Party, and he had a hard time reconciling his commitment to freedom with his communism.

But in any case, Zadie Smith doesn’t emphasize the freedom aspect of no essence. She emphasizes the thrownness. Thrownness is a word I usually associate more with Heidegger, but it conveys a sense that who we are is going to be inseparable from the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And that, I think, is an important component — these two things — of what we think of as no-self in Buddhist terms.

First, this business of no essence. No essential nature. That’s one of the definitions we read about of what no-self means. But the thrownness is also another aspect of no-self. It’s another way of talking about oneness, though in this sense it’s a oneness that speaks of the inseparability of who we are and our world, the world we find ourselves in, in time and place. Too often, oneness gets capitalized and identified with something like an oceanic feeling, as if oneness were a mystical state, a particular state of consciousness. But what she’s describing is a description of the way things already are for everybody all the time. Which is, again, another way of thinking about no-self. Not as a special achievement, but as a pre-existing state of things that we need to come to recognize.

Thrownness means we’re inseparable from our circumstances. Another way of saying that is we are one with our world. We don’t have a kind of pre-existing, separate, enclosed nature — an ego or a self that is then thrown into the world. I’m not originally me, and then I find myself here in the 21st century, in America, and so forth. The me, the self, is constituted by being in this place and at this time and in these relations. This is very much what we mean by no-self.

She goes on, when she talks about identity, to elaborate this further:

“When I think of my identity, I think of myself as a Black British woman. I think of myself as a writer, a mother. A friend. An occasional drug taker. Dancer. Clubber. Many things. These things are all me. They are probably best described by your name. So what I’m trying to do when I’m writing is try to defend that fundamental sense that we are, in the end, this person. I am a Zadie, you are an Ezra. And I really think there’s a way in which you can acknowledge that truth about yourself and still do your political work, and still participate in struggle, but still know that human beings are essentially uncontainable by these terms entirely.”

When she describes herself, when she asks what her identity is, essentially she creates lists — of relations and activities. The ways in which she’s situated. She’s a writer. She’s a mother. She’s a clubber. She’s a drug taker. She’s a political activist. All these things are not something you arrive at by some act of deep introspection, looking inside and trying to find out who’s the real me. Rather, you look around, and you see all the things you do. All the people that you interact with, and the ways you interact with them.

At any given moment, one or the other could be in the foreground. When she’s out at a club with friends, the dancer and the occasional drug taker are in the foreground. She’s dancing, she’s playing. When she’s with her family, mother can be in the foreground. When she’s at her desk, she’s a writer, and that’s in the foreground.

But the other important aspect of all this is that each one of these things doesn’t exist in a separate compartment. They are not dissociated self-states, each of which exists independently of the other. Each one bleeds into the other and informs the other.

In the context of our original talk, we were looking at different translations of the Heart Sutra. And I believe Kaz was suggesting the word “boundless” as a way to talk about emptiness. Again, boundless is one of those words that to me is just too abstract, too mystical sounding. What I liked about Zadie Smith’s description is that really what she’s describing is boundarylessness. The absence of boundaries between each of these different selves. Each one informs the other. The way she’s a mother informs the way she’s a writer. And the way she’s a writer is informed by the time and place that she finds herself living. That was part of thrownness.

She says, at a different time, I could be Jane Austen, just writing about domestic relations and preoccupied with who’s going to get married or engaged, and who’s going to get this inheritance, and so forth. You need a certain kind of sense of stability in your political world in order to make that kind of thing seem like an important focus. Contemporary literary critics tend to try to flesh out the background of the world that made those kinds of preoccupations possible. Where did all that wealth and security come from? Well, it turns out a lot of it may have come from the slave trade and the wealth of the British colonies. So you can create a much thicker description of the background of domestic novels. But at a certain level, if you’re thrown into a certain situation, something is automatically foregrounded for you. If you’re born into a world of political turmoil, who’s going to propose marriage may not exactly be in the forefront of your mind.

So what we hear in what she’s writing about is this kind of enunciation of all the implications of what we mean by no-self and by interdependence. We don’t have to think of these in purely philosophical or Buddhist terms. No-self is this fact of being constituted in time, place, and relationship. We don’t start with a separate inner identity. Our identity is formed and defined in context, in relationship. Intersubjectivity, relationality, are the ground of subjectivity. Subjectivity doesn’t precede intersubjectivity. Essence doesn’t precede existence. Essence doesn’t precede relationship.

And these relationships that define us are constantly growing and changing. They don’t constitute any fixed list that adds up to our identity. When she talks about being a woman, a mother, a writer, a clubber — she might go on and list ten things. But she might list twenty. With a little imagination, maybe she could list fifty or a hundred. We could constantly expand. What are all the relationships? Some very occasional or seemingly minor. They gradually add up to who we are. The inexhaustibleness of that list is also what we mean by no-self and interdependency. If we are our relations, our relations are multiple, if not infinite, extending in every direction, to everybody and everything. We can just see that if we look at a description of how we go through our life, and what we do, and who we talk to, and what we depend on. It’s all a thick layer of interdependency and interrelation.

Sometimes we can sum up this whole package of no-self and interdependence and call it Buddha nature. But when we use a word like that, we should be clear that we want to be able to unpack it into this kind of ever-changing list of relations and connections. We’re not talking about some esoteric inner state, some level of consciousness or potentiality. Buddha is simply the one who realizes the nature of things. Recognizes emptiness, the non-essential nature of things. Recognizes interdependence. This is what we mean by our Buddha nature. It’s right in front of us all the time, if we know what we’re looking for.

Your Reverence is unwell. Is there anyone who does not become ill? There is. Does the one who does not get ill take care of Your Reverence? The old monk is properly taking care of that one. The monk said, “How about when Your Reverence takes care of that one?” Tōzan said, “The old monk does not see that there’s illness.”

In Yamada’s commentary on this, we’re told that the one who does not get ill corresponds to our essential nature, and that essential nature is the one, the old monk, who is behind the scenes taking care of the one who is ill. I think that kind of description of things corresponds to this way of thinking we’re all familiar with — the idea that we will tap into something fundamental or foundational that we can count on regardless of our circumstance.

But it was interesting to read another translation and commentary by Gerry Shishin Wick, in Maezumi Roshi’s lineage, that really sounds like he’s reversing a lot of the imagery in the koan. Let me read the version from Wick:

Tōzan was ill. A monk asked, “Ōshō, you’re sick. Is there someone not sick?” “Yes, there is.” “Does the one who is not sick look after you?” “This old monk is able to look after others.” “Ōshō, how about when you look after others?” “That having sickness is not seen.”

So here, instead of Tōzan being taken care of by the old monk that’s his inner essential nature while he’s ill, Tōzan is turning it around and saying: even when I’m sick, I’m taking care of others, and when I’m taking care of others, illness is not seen.

In many ways this koan is reminiscent of another one where one monk comes upon his brother monk who’s busy sweeping the courtyard. He looks at him hard at work and says, busy, busy. And the monk who’s doing the sweeping says, you should know there’s one who’s not busy. To which he gets the reply, well, in that case, there are two moons in the sky. The sweeping monk holds up his broom and says, which moon is this?

I think it’s a very pertinent challenge to say, if you think there’s one that’s not busy, you’re creating the kind of inner dualism. You’re creating two moons in the sky — a superficial me on the surface and a real me deep down. And while of course I think everyone would want to say that the relative and the absolute are two sides of the same coin, the phenomenal world and the essential world are just one world, our immediate subjective self and our true self is just ourself — and we sometimes call the identity of those two things no-self — yet it’s very easy, as part of a kind of curative fantasy, to split them and try to hold on to the picture of a part of ourselves that’s going to transcend or be impervious to the vicissitudes of things like illness.

I think both Yamada and Wick in the end would say that the response to this koan is something like: just be ill. And that little word “just” gets called upon to do a lot of work in Zen. Sometimes I think it gets overworked, and we lose track of what it does and does not do, what it can and cannot do.

We all know the koan that says, how do you go to a place where there’s neither heat nor cold? And we’re told: in summer, the heat kills the monk, and in winter, the cold kills the monk. The lesson is non-separation. Non-separation from the heat or the cold is the only way to go beyond heat or cold. With heat and cold, these seem like simple sensations, but very often we extend that to words like illness. Just be ill, or even just be sad, just be depressed, just be angry. As if words like illness or sadness or depression or anger were simple words like hot and cold.

There I think we have a kind of grammatical confusion where we’re led to try to take something that we treat as a kind of elemental sensation and generalize it to things that are actually quite complex and compounded, not simple at all. And that’s where I think a more psychologically minded practice has to come in.

In the case of just be ill — yes, there’s a way that in the midst of illness we can simply surrender to it, take to our beds, get a lot of sleep, don’t fight it, just let it take its course. In a way that sounds simple, but a lot of the time our experience of illness is compounded by all sorts of ideas we have about why we’ve become ill. What have we done wrong? Has my diet been wrong? Have I been failing to exercise? Do I have something intrinsically wrong with me in my genetics that I’m prone to this? Do I have some inherent damage or weakness that this illness is a sign of? Have I failed to do all the things that other people are doing to keep myself well? Illness becomes not just a simple and direct experience, but a metaphor for how we are viewing ourselves and others, in relationship to how we’re supposed to be. It’s surrounded by a whole cloud of oughts and shoulds and how am I doing.

And when we talk about emotions like sadness or anger — just be sad or just be angry — it’s not a very satisfying solution to the complex issues that have brought about that emotion. Anger always is the result of some kind of experienced or perceived injury. But what kind of injury has it been? Have I been physically assaulted, or have I just been insulted? Have I actually been insulted, or have I just not gotten the attention I think I deserve? Anger can be a very complex result of a whole chain of reactions that go way back into our early development and expectation of others.

Similarly, something like sadness. Has someone I loved or depended on died and left me bereft and mourning? Or has my favorite football team been eliminated from the playoffs? Am I sad I haven’t been able to achieve what I think I’m supposed to be able to achieve, or sad that I’m old and can’t physically do what I used to be able to do? A seemingly simple thing like sadness plugs into a whole constellation of self-images and expectations. And it’s not enough to just be sad. We have to keep taking a step back and another step back. Where is this coming from? What triggered all of this?

When we look at a koan like this and think in terms of an essential nature that grounds our being, but in some sense is separate from or behind the scenes from our surface or immediate subjectivity, we may be legitimately talking about a way in which we try to regulate ourselves. There are certain kinds of self-regulation in which when we get reactive or disturbed, we step back and take a breath and settle ourselves. We learn how, whether through meditation or something else, to just — wait, feel, feel what’s happening in this moment. We ground ourselves by being present. That’s a very useful kind of capacity to develop. But I don’t think that really is all that Zen is about, or is essentially what Zen is about.

What we do in this practice in some way is to always stay with the very thing we ordinarily try to avoid or overcome. And the problem with the practice, in a sense, is that it’s very good at giving us a certain kind of strength, endurance, and discipline, which are virtues in their own right, but can lead us in the direction of pushing away rather than embracing our vulnerability.

A lot of Zen practice, when we think of spending a day sitting still, can mean enduring a lot of pain, a lot of boredom or restlessness. We can develop a sense of confidence and mastery — I can handle this, I can do it, I won’t be knocked sideways by some pain in my knee or restlessness in my mind. There’s certainly a virtue in that, but our practice can, or our personalities can, go into two different kinds of ditches.

One is the ditch of: this is too much for me, I can’t handle it, I can’t sit through a day like this, let alone a week like this, or life is really just too much for me. I feel overwhelmed all the time. There’s just too much pain or too much loneliness. I don’t know how to get through it. And then we identify ourselves with that vulnerability and get stuck in it.

But on the other hand, and too often I think in Zen practice, we go to the other extreme. We learn to sit sesshin, and we learn to endure pain, and we become very disciplined. And then we get identified with a self that says, I can endure anything that life throws at me. We get very attached to that kind of strength, or endurance, or discipline. And we use practice as a way to disown or deny our own emotional needs or vulnerability. The problem is we can get good at that and succeed in pushing those parts of ourselves away for a long time, but rarely forever.

The one who is ill takes care of our essential nature by reminding that part of ourselves that vulnerability is inseparable from our essential nature. Our vulnerability is who and what we are. It’s just another word for interdependence and impermanence. That’s an illness that will never be cured. It’s an illness that’s synonymous with our embodiment and our mortality.

We need to use practice to embrace the reality of that vulnerability, of that interdependence. We want to repudiate fantasies of autonomy and strength, but also repudiate that kind of fantasy of helplessness — the vulnerability in the sense of always feeling unable to meet life head-on, that it’s going to be too much for us.

There’s a ditch on both sides of the road of practice. And always our task is to find the middle way.

And he goes on. He says, don’t you know that in all of China there are no Zen teachers? Well, that sounds like a pretty radical statement. And one monk has the courage to speak up and say, what about all the people who are abbots of monasteries, who are training monks and giving teishō? Aren’t they Zen teachers? Huangbo says, I didn’t say there’s no Zen. I just said there are no Zen teachers.

And we can take that to mean nobody can teach you Zen. You have to have your own experience. You have to be your own teacher.

Many years ago, when I was first talking about this koan, I turned it around and I said, there’s no Zen; there are only Zen teachers. And I was addressing what I thought was a different kind of problem, or the problem from a different direction, where we imagine that there’s some capital-Z Zen that’s a timeless teaching or realization, that somehow we’re having exactly the same experience that they had 2,000 years ago. I said, no, there’s no transcendental realm of Zen out there that’s timeless that we plug into through zazen. Zen is what teachers are doing. Zen is what you all are doing in every generation, in every place. Zen re-manifests itself, reinvents itself, continues the way we think of something like art or music. All these things are cultural products that persist down the ages but are constantly being transformed and made anew by new practitioners in new circumstances.

Evan Thompson, in his book Why I Am Not a Buddhist, made a similar point when he said we should probably think about enlightenment the way we think about love. In some way or another, love has always existed. It’s a part of what it is to be human. But love was very different in different times, in different cultures. And these cultures shaped what was meant by love. In the same way, enlightenment experiences are probably very different in different cultures, and we confuse ourselves whenever we create a fantasy of some ahistorical, timeless experience.

Now, while I think this koan presents a real truth about our having to have our own experience, it’s in a certain sense very one-sided, as anything is going to be that talks about there being such a thing as a purely private or inner experience. Because to talk that way is to neglect the dimension of interdependence, the reality that nothing we do is actually our own. Everything is part of a greater nexus and system of which we’re a part, a particular manifestation in this time and place.

Yes, it’s obviously true that sitting zazen is not the same as reading a book about zazen. But it’s also true that probably none of us would ever sit zazen if we hadn’t first read a book about zazen. None of us invented this for ourselves. Even Shakyamuni had to go out and practice first with one teacher, and then another teacher, and try out all the different methods that were available in his culture, until he had his own experience and then started crafting his own version of practice from that. But we always start from an embeddedness in a practice, in a culture.

Since everybody is busily watching the World Cup these days, we could make the analogy with a game like soccer. You can’t play soccer by yourself. There are obviously aspects of the game that you can practice — you could practice dribbling or kicking. But you can’t play the game alone. You need the whole team, and you need an opposing team to have a game. It’s a version of: you can’t be yourself by yourself. There are all sorts of capacities that can only be developed in conjunction with other people who are operating within a culture and a tradition that creates all the enabling conditions for something to happen.

Sometimes we have a picture of the paradigm of practice as the monk who goes off by himself, sits in a little hut on the mountaintop and just stays there, sitting and sitting and sitting, until he has some big realization all by himself, as if it’s a kind of one-man operation. But even that is not an idea he came up with by himself. The whole notion of being a hermit, of practice, is something he learned and inherited.

For most of us, practice isn’t a matter of going off by ourselves and doing something. It’s more like joining the soccer team. It’s more like running off and joining the circus. It’s more like going to medical school. We commit ourselves to a whole form of practice, a whole discipline, that we give ourselves over to in the faith that it will shape us in a productive way, a way we may not be able to know in advance, although we might look around and see people who have gone through that, and we say, oh, I want to be like that. I want to have what they’re having. I want to become that kind of person.

We often need those models. If we’re lucky, we encounter them in person. Very often we encounter them in books. And we say, I’m willing to put myself through something if that’s what it takes to develop those capacities. That’s what we’re doing in this practice. We’re giving ourselves over to a discipline and a tradition and a community that we allow ourselves to be immersed in and follow their rules and forms that are not of our own creation. We don’t get to decide, well, I’m going to skip that part of the curriculum. I only like this part. Sometimes as laypeople, we do get in a position where we get to pick and choose things, but it’s not always to our benefit.

My point here is, I think that as much as we want to talk about immediacy of experience, or direct experience, or individual realization, so much of what we’re doing is communal. It is only taking place because there’s a sangha, because there’s a tradition, because there’s a discipline. And we are participants, we’re not inventors.

I think we learn to perform this practice the way we learn to perform in a soccer match or in an orchestra or a chorus. This is a kind of participation that requires us to be supported by others, blend into what others are doing, and learn from others.

Yes, we’re all gobblers of dregs — but the Heart Sutra is dregs. The Blue Cliff Record is dregs. This talk is dregs. This is what we live on. This is what we nourish ourselves on. We are all interdependent, communal creatures that rely on one another and rely on what has gone before in order to be and become who we are.

A monk asked Jōshū, “Does a newborn baby have the sixth consciousness or not?” Jōshū said, “Bouncing a ball upon swift waters.” The monk also asked Tōsu, “What does ‘bouncing a ball upon swift waters’ mean?” Tōsu said, “Thought by thought, the flow never stops.”

This koan continues the theme we were discussing last week about the opening of Joko’s book, in which she talks about how a dog doesn’t worry about the meaning of life. One of the things we’re exploring is the way that metaphors display our various conceptions of the state that we seem to be aiming for in our practice.

In this case, the monk is asking about the state of the mind in the newborn baby, and while it may seem like an abstraction to ask, does a baby have the sixth consciousness or not, I think you can hear a real question in the monk’s asking: what is it that we’re trying to become? Are we trying to return to some primitive, original, essentially prelapsarian state before our mind was contaminated by thinking? The sixth consciousness means that which conceptualizes and unifies the five senses. Are we aiming at a state that is pure perception — pure experience that’s free of any kind of conceptualization at all?

Sometimes we can imagine it to ourselves when we think of becoming just like our dog, acting perfectly natural, concerned only with the most basic things in life: food and shelter, affection, not troubling itself with a lot of empty conceptual nonsense. Is that where we’re supposed to end up after all this? Are we supposed to be childlike? Does childlike convey a sense of constant wonder and delight in life just as it is? Is that what we’re trying to do?

But when the monk asks Jōshū and gets the reply, “Bouncing a ball upon swift waters,” the image is of something hardly calm or peaceful or immediate. It’s something that is rather out of control and turbulent. And not knowing what to make of that answer, he asks another teacher, Tōsu, who says, “Thought by thought, the flow never stops.” Tōsu is even more explicit in saying, we’re not here to eliminate thought. Thought never stops. Throw away any notion you have of clarity or calmness that’s going to result from wiping away this whole dimension of your mind.

But I think the persistence of that kind of curative fantasy is hard to overstate. No matter how much we know better, there’s a way in which we almost automatically think in terms of a good period of sitting as one in which we seem to empty our minds and feel very calm and clear and are just focused on our body and our breath. That’s what it’s supposed to be like. Then another period, when we’re restless or preoccupied — well, obviously that’s a bad sitting. We don’t want it to go like that. And so there’s very automatically, reflexively, a kind of sorting of our experience, good and bad, how we’d like it to go, what we’re trying to get away from.

In my opening remarks this morning, I referred to Joko saying her practice was, “I just sit and think.” It seems clear and straightforward and refreshing. I just sit and think. And yet actually it’s not so easy to understand what distinguishes Joko’s doing from what anybody else can do if they’re just sitting around and daydreaming. What makes her sitting and thinking practice? Or what’s wrong with sitting and daydreaming or sitting and obsessing, worrying? Why isn’t that practice?

What Joko said is in a way analogous to Dōgen, when he tries to explain zazen as “think non-thinking” — as if it’s supposed to clarify things to somebody who didn’t understand it. The first way of course to misunderstand what he was saying is to think non-thinking equals don’t think. Then you’re back with the monk in this koan who wants to go back to being a newborn infant with no conceptual contaminations.

But what is thinking non-thinking going to mean if it doesn’t mean don’t think? What does just thinking mean? One way to try to describe it is to say, just thinking is experiencing thinking like another bodily function or sensation. Thinking is just something happening in your body, the way itches are happening in your body, sensations are happening, the way sounds come to your ears. They’re just the next thing happening.

In a way it can be like sitting in a room where in the next room over, somebody’s playing a radio, where there’s a talk station in a foreign language that you don’t understand. And it just babbles on, and you know it’s talking and you can hear from the inflection that there’s obvious meaning to all this, it’s not just noise, but you don’t know what it is, and you don’t concern yourself with it particularly, you can’t make it go away, you can’t make it stop, it just goes on in the background. After a while it’s not a problem. It’s just part of the background of what’s happening.

We can say that one way to describe what’s happening is that we’re experiencing the emptiness of thought. We’re not focused on the intentionality of thought, the aboutness of thought, how it hooks into the world or has meaning. But primarily we’re just letting thoughts be a background activity in our mind. We’re never going to completely eliminate that sense of what the words mean or what’s going through our head, but there really is a kind of difference between letting the thoughts flow and being preoccupied with them — just letting one thing after another pass through your head versus worrying or entertaining yourself with daydreams or trying to figure out something or planning what you’re going to do next. All those things get hooked into the content of the words and the thoughts as if they matter. So in a certain sense there’s a kind of deep mattering going on in just letting thinking happen as a bodily sensation.

Another way to picture it is what I’ve always used with the duck-rabbit drawing to illustrate a kind of shift in perspective even though nothing has actually changed. You can spend a lot of time looking at this figure and just see the duck. It’s obviously a duck. And yet at some point you look at the exact same figure and instead of seeing the bill of a duck you see the ears of a rabbit. But it’s exactly the same drawing.

Something like that, I think, happens in what we call awakening. Nothing at all changes in our lives, and yet we experience it differently, we see it differently, we feel it differently. And in part that’s a switch into a sense that nothing is hidden, or nothing is wrong or lacking. We’re not trying to get from here to there. It’s just the sense of having arrived somewhere, with whatever’s happening, regardless of the content.

Our experience of sitting, especially sitting in sesshin, is that we will all, more or less, go in and out of that duck-rabbit perspective, to different degrees and in different ways. We may spend 99.9% of our time in duck and just have this little glimpse out of the corner of our eye of the rabbit, or we may settle into something in this kind of comfortable way of leaving everything alone, feeling our breath, letting our bodies do what they’re doing as we sit. And then we have a shift into: when is this going to be over? When is the bell going to ring? What am I supposed to be doing when this is over? And there we can just feel caught in the wrongness of everything.

I think, as our practice really matures, there’s really no difference between those things, and it’s possible for us to experience even that sense of “when is this going to be over?” as — oh, that’s just what’s happening now. It’s not that we stop having those thoughts or feelings, or our restlessness, or our planning or anything else. But there’s a way that even that is just incorporated into the background landscape of thought by thought, the flow never stops.

The experience of sesshin in particular is one of taking an experience whole. Lately I’ve been trying to let as many people as possible participate as best they can. If they can only come for a half day, we’ve agreed, okay, let people do that. But I do think that when you only come for half the day, you’re missing out on something important about the nature of sesshin. It’s not just that you’re not getting as much of something — it’s more that you’re not getting the full spectrum of the experience, which often means you’re missing out on the boredom or you’re missing out on the pain or you’re missing out on the restlessness, you’re missing out on the times when it doesn’t go the way you want it to go, which you’re a little more able to do the shorter the periods are. We get all of that in every period sometimes, but there is something different about when we have a full day or a whole weekend or a whole week, that serves up this whole spectrum of experience. And we see our natural limits as to how much is duck and how much is rabbit and what we’re able to stay with and just allow to be: this is what’s next. This is what’s happening.

There’s a way in which we can practice zazen regularly, an hour a day or whatever we do, and derive a great deal of benefit from it. It can be very stabilizing in our lives, stimulating mentally and physiologically. We may really feel like if we miss a day or don’t get to do it regularly, we feel the difference. Zazen really does something that settles us, and I think that’s all to the good, and I would encourage everybody to practice and get those benefits. But I don’t think that part is very unique to zazen, and you could probably get much of that from yoga or other kinds of practices or disciplines.

In a way, what makes zazen different is how we do it by extending it to all the times when it doesn’t seem to help, when it’s not giving us any benefit, when it’s just difficult, when it’s serving up this full spectrum of experience that’s out of our comfort zone. In that regular hour, we can cultivate a certain state or our body settles into a certain state, and we can identify with the cultivation of a particular state. What can open up in zazen after long periods, though, is this fundamental shift in perspective, which is not about the content of our experience, which is not about our feeling better for doing it. It’s about our relationship to the whole of our experience, and to the whole of our life.

I don’t know that there’s any way to further explain that or encourage people to stay with the practice as opening up that kind of possibility. I think that we all come to this practice for a lot of different reasons, and probably that basic need to just settle ourselves down, to be able to be at home with our own skin and our own mind — that’s an enormous part of practice and always will be for most of us, and I don’t mean to denigrate or minimize that. I think that’s a foundation that pretty much anything else we build is based on.

But that’s not all there is to this practice, and these other dimensions open up the longer you do it. Thought after thought, the flow never stops. At some point, all that thinking shifts, and thinking becomes non-thinking. Where we’ve only seen the duck, all of a sudden there’s a rabbit. Keep your eye out for it.

Sesshin Opening Remarks: “Which one of your many selves will join us today? Will you make room on the cushion for all of them?”

Blue Cliff Record, Case 96.

Jōshū addressed the assembly using three turning phrases. That’s the whole case.

The commentary explains it as a koan by saying that the three turning phrases were: a clay Buddha cannot pass through water; a wooden Buddha cannot pass through fire; a golden Buddha cannot pass through a furnace. Apparently, these three turning phrases were taken from the Collected Sayings of Jōshū, and there you find out he actually had a fourth one, which was: the true Buddha is inside of you.

Now, what are we to make of the three, and what would it mean to add the fourth? Each of the Buddhas, though perfect in its own fashion, has its particular vulnerability. And it’s not as if there’s a kind of increasing hierarchy of Buddha qualities, as if the golden Buddha is somehow innately superior to the clay Buddha. Because, remember, the golden Buddha can’t pass through the furnace, but if you put the clay Buddha in the furnace, that’s how you turn it into ceramics. It completely comes into its own in the furnace. But the clay Buddha, while it’s still clay, is vulnerable to water, which the wooden Buddha can float on, even though it’s vulnerable to fire. And the golden Buddha, even though it’s apparently the most valuable and beautiful, has its own vulnerabilities and limitations.

Now, if you add the fourth one, you can really get tricked. Because when they say the true Buddha lies inside of you, after hearing about these three material Buddhas with their limitations, you can say, oh well, the point of the story is the true Buddha is immaterial. The true Buddha is this mysterious essence of Buddha nature. And that’s the one thing that’s not going to be vulnerable to fire or water or a furnace of any kind. Matthew Sullivan, in his commentary on this case, says: but that inner Buddha is just subjected to a few questions, and it falls apart.

Jōshū’s teishō, in which these three Buddhas were introduced — or four Buddhas — was a teishō on the nature of no-self. And no-self was not defined by simply absence of self, or emptiness, or the void. No-self was defined by interdependency. No-self meant no single, unchanging essence. No essence that’s invulnerable to circumstance.

We can obviously connect these different Buddhas to our own particular curative fantasies of what kinds of traits we’re trying to cultivate in order to become invulnerable to one condition or another. We can cultivate endurance, so that we can pass through time, pass through pain. We can try to cultivate autonomy, so that we can pass through emotional dependency on others. Everyone comes to practice thinking they’ll cultivate some trait in their zazen that will make them independent of the things that they are most troubled by. You can even say cultivating samadhi will allow us to pass through our ordinary mind of thought and feeling and anxiety. We’ll have just pure concentration. Each one of these things works up to a point, just in the same way that the clay Buddha and the wooden Buddha and the golden Buddha each have their own virtues and capacities, and enable one to withstand things the other doesn’t. But nothing is invulnerable to everything, and the pursuit of invulnerability is ultimately futile.

When I first wrote about this case many years ago, I added one that said: a meat Buddha cannot pass through time. A human being made of meat — not wood, clay, gold — a human being is made of meat, of flesh. And it will be vulnerable to time, no matter what we do. Of course, we all devise strategies of diet and exercise and so forth to try to make us invulnerable to time as long as we can. That’s fine. But we’ll lose in the end. Eventually, we’ll all be the golden Buddha going into the furnace.

The true Buddha lies within you. This is the ultimate curative fantasy. The transcendent, immaterial Buddha, not made of anything, not vulnerable to anything. Yet really, that inner Buddha is just the sum of all these outer Buddhas. It’s the sum of all our interactions and relationships, the whole causal nexus that made us who we are and brought us to this point.

Sullivan, in his commentary, has an interesting and unusual take on the idea of no-self. He says, if we think of self in this traditional sense as the one permanent, unchanging part of ourselves, and if you want to demonstrate the reality of no-self, just think about somebody you love who also makes you mad as hell. Think about something you really want to do that makes you anxious. In each case, there’s no way to call one half of that dyad your true self. You really love them. They really make you mad as hell. You really want to do it. You’re really anxious. Your true self is not one thing. Your true self is all of it. It’s always compound and always changing.

This week I’ve been reading a biography of Søren Kierkegaard by Claire Carlisle. He is a kind of poster child for multiple self-states or dissociation. He really tried to wrestle with all the multiplicities of his character. He did it in a really remarkable way, in that he wrote one book after another, but the author for all these books were pseudonyms. He never wrote a book by the same author twice, it seemed. All his philosophical works were under these pseudonymous authors. Occasionally, after many years, he would publish something under his own name, but only when it was a Christian sermon that he had preached in a church.

These books of philosophy tended to have a very peculiar form in that they tended to be dialogues between different characters, which you could see as different parts of himself. The most famous one, which I read a long time ago, was Either/Or. It makes a nice koan. It sets up a question: do you choose this, or do you choose that?

There are two forms of life, each presented by a different character. The first one is an aesthetic form of life, a life devoted to pleasure and beauty and creating your own values and finding your own meaning in life. The character who articulates that starts off seeming very intelligent and modern and sympathetic, but after a while it turns out he’s a heartless seducer who’s just after his own pleasure, with no consideration of the effect his action has on other people.

Then we switch characters to the judge, who is a very upright character. He represents the ethical, and he does everything according to the rulebook. Very careful not to do any harm. And yet, after you listen to him for a while, it turns out his ethics is inseparable from bourgeois conventionality. There’s not much freedom or creativity or originality in that picture. He’s painted himself into a corner where he does nothing wrong, but he doesn’t really do anything very interesting either.

So you’re left with this either/or. It’s like a koan where you’re asked, does the dog have Buddha nature or not? Either answer, there’s something wrong with it. And in a way, Kierkegaard’s intention is that by eliminating these two conventional possibilities, he says, well, what are you left with? The unspoken alternative for him is a religious life.

It’s somewhat ironic that Kierkegaard is often thought of as the father of existentialism because he was preoccupied with the questions of freedom and the anxiety involved in having to choose what kind of life we’re going to lead, that there’s a kind of frightening freedom that we have. He was very much an investigator of subjectivity and of the unconscious, of teasing out all these different self-states that pull us in one direction or another. But what’s ironic, as I read the biographies, is that I think he would have hated to be called an existentialist in a contemporary sense, because what he thought he was doing was trying to preach Christianity to the Christians.

He felt like Christianity had turned into something that the judge was in charge of. Everything became ethical but bourgeois and conventional. Everybody learned to have a kind of blameless, ordinary life. But where was Christ’s suffering in this? Where was grace? Where was sin? Where was redemption?

I think he was very clever, but in some ways an incredible pain in the ass. In the one really close relationship in his life, when he almost got married — a woman named Regine — he broke off the engagement at the last minute because he feared that getting married would mean he would be happy, he would be comfortable. And how could he pursue being a true Christian in a happy, conventional life? Where was the place for him to explore suffering and anxiety and guilt and trying to be Christlike?

So he broke off the engagement, caused the woman an enormous amount of pain and suffering. Although some years later, she did actually marry a nice, normal guy and live a much better life than she probably would have had with Kierkegaard. But Kierkegaard was considered an outcast in society for having done such a thing. He then wore his outcast nature as a badge of honor for a long time. But anyway, I digress.

It’s an instructive biography, in some ways very analogous to reading Lou Nordstrom’s memoirs. It’s interesting to see what rabbit holes people go down in the pursuit of authenticity or spirituality.

What Kierkegaard presents, in relation to this koan, is that he shows a golden Buddha, a wooden Buddha, a clay Buddha, the true Buddha inside. He looks inside, finds each one of these, each kind, each as part of himself. I think he gets frightened of the golden Buddha, frightened of anything that looks precious and respectable from the outside, but is seduced by the fantasy of the true Buddha lies inside. That’s the one that becomes the real addiction. That’s the dangerous one.

So as we sit today, you can try to first identify: what’s the Buddha you’re trying to become? What’s your own golden Buddha that you’re trying — well, if I sit here well and long and hard, what am I going to become? And then be honest with yourself and watch. What are all the other Buddhas that are crowding in, asking for attention? The Buddha of pain, the Buddha of boredom, the Buddha of the wandering mind. What are we going to do with all of them? Where is their seat?

It’s interesting that this story of Gutei occurs in two different koan collections. In the Mumonkan, the more Rinzai-oriented collection, we get the whole story with the cut-off finger. But in the more Sōtō-oriented collection, the Book of Serenity, the koan just consists of a single line: whenever anyone asked Gutei a question, he raised one finger.

As I was reading Yamada Kōun’s commentaries on this case, he gave some interesting background to the more familiar stories, and I think in many ways it’s just as interesting and instructive as the more lurid case that we’re used to hearing.

It seems that Gutei was a nickname. This monk used to go around reciting one dharani over and over again, the Gutei Butsumu Dharani. He just did this one thing over and over again until the other monks started calling him Gutei, because that’s all he ever did. So it seemed like from the very beginning he had a penchant for just doing one thing.

But we’re told that after a while he went to live as a hermit and sat by himself, presumably morning and night, chanting his dharani. And all was going well for him until one day a nun on pilgrimage came by his hermitage. She was in her pilgrimage outfit with a big hat and begging bowl and staff and all that. She comes up to the hermitage, sees Gutei sitting there, and she walks around him three times, bangs her staff on the ground, and just stands there staring at him.

Gutei is a little taken aback, but he says, that’s not very polite. Why don’t you take your hat off and greet me properly and come in? She says, say a word of Zen and I’ll take off my hat and stay. He’s flummoxed. Doesn’t know what to do. He sits there a while and he finally says, look, it’s already getting dark. You shouldn’t be out on the road by yourself. Come in, have a cup of tea, and stay. And the nun says, if you can say a word of Zen, I’ll stay. Gutei again, tongue-tied. So the nun bangs her staff one more time and walks off into the night.

Gutei is feeling very ashamed of himself and says, what a failure of a monk I am. I couldn’t even say a word of Zen to this nun. I have to leave my hermitage and go find a teacher and figure out what to do. But it’s said that that night he has a dream in which the deity of the mountain appears to him and says, stay where you are. Your teacher will appear.

And sure enough, after a few days, a teacher on pilgrimage comes by — Tenryū. Gutei is grateful to have him there, immediately pours out his heart and tells him the whole story and how terrible he felt about not being able to say a word of Zen to this nun. Tenryū listens to the whole story, says nothing, holds up one finger.

And Gutei, with that, has some kind of great realization, and thereafter became the Gutei we all know — whenever anyone asked him anything, he held up one finger. And it is said that even on his deathbed, as he was dying, he said, I inherited my one-finger Zen from Tenryū, and I have used it every day and never exhausted it. With that, he held up one finger and died.

Now, I think he’s an interesting example of somebody, like ourselves, who would like very much to have one answer that would fit every question or every problem. No matter what happens, we have something to rely on, absolutely to fall back on, that we can be sure is the right answer. And in a sense, Gutei found it. With a sense of, well, just this is it. And maybe the finger becomes the symbol for just this. We might like to think that as he told his whole story to Tenryū — his shame and failure in dharma combat with the nun — that when Tenryū raised one finger, Gutei had the realization that everything he was ashamed of, that had gone wrong — that too was it. But we don’t really get any of that spelled out in these koans, and maybe that’s a little too psychologically minded for what’s going on.

What I think, though, is the lesson we should take from this story is that Gutei, in fact, gave perfectly good answers to the nun. She came and she did this outrageous behavior, and he said, what are you doing? That’s very rude. Take off your hat instead. Say a word of Zen and I’ll take off my hat. All he had to do was say, take off your hat. He’d already said a word of Zen. What is that supposed to mean? How is that different from what he already said? He had already made an immediate, perfectly good response to the situation.

And yet, once she says “a word of Zen,” all of a sudden he doubts himself. Oh, it must be something more profound, more mysterious than, it’s getting dark, stay and have a cup of tea. Is there some expression that’s more Zen than that? What’s it supposed to be? You have to do something esoteric and shout, say something paradoxical and Zen-sounding.

Gutei, over and over again, wanted to find the one thing to trust, whether it’s chanting his dharani or holding up one finger. But what’s too easy to miss is that just responding in the moment is sufficient. That’s all it takes.

Part of what appeals to me about this story is how people can get fixated on one thing, or the idea of a word of Zen. Right now, I dare say our sangha is fixated on the idea of a place of Zen. Instead of the idea that there’s one thing we have to say or do, it’s like we’re going to lose the one place where we can practice Zen. We have a physical zendo, that’s where the Zen is happening, and oh, we’re going to lose it. What’s going to happen? Where is the Zen going to go?

For years and years we’ve been chanting Joko’s line that life as it is is the only teacher. Obviously we don’t believe it. We want something much more concrete and specific and in front of us that we can trust and rely on. Life as it is is far too amorphous and uncertain to rely on as a teacher, isn’t it? But that’s what we’re going to be thrown back onto now, and we have to see whether, like Gutei when he’s confronted with the nun, our immediate responses are sufficient.

What does it mean to practice? Does practice always mean showing up at a particular place on a particular day at a particular time, and if you don’t have it, there’s no practice? That’s certainly one kind of practice, but there’s another kind of practice that we’re told never leaves us, is always available. Practice each moment in our lives. Everyday life is our practice. Once again, we don’t particularly believe that, but circumstances may force us to practice that way whether we like it or not.

We all would like to have something as simple and reliable as one finger. But really, over and over again, life is more like the nun that challenges us. Not just to say a word of Zen, but to practice our Zen, whatever we think that is, in whatever moment is challenging us, whatever shape that takes. How will we respond?

The emperor asked the national teacher, “After you die, what will you need?” The national teacher said, “Build a seamless monument for me.” The emperor said, “Please tell me, Master, what would the monument look like?” The national teacher was silent for a long time. Then he asked, “Do you understand?” “I don’t understand.” The teacher said, “I have a disciple to whom I’ve transmitted the teaching, and he’s well-versed in this matter. Please summon him and ask him about it.”

After the national teacher had passed on, the emperor summoned the disciple and asked him what the meaning of this was. And he said:

“South of Xi’an, north of Tan, in between there’s gold sufficient to a nation. Beneath the shadowless tree, the community ferryboat. Within the Crystal Palace, there’s no one who knows.”

I imagine the emperor, after hearing that answer, may have thought he should have stuck with silence.

What we have here, in a way, are two different embodiments of lineage. The emperor, in a way, is the very paradigm of lineage, of a kind of power and authority that’s handed down, usually generation after generation within a family. And in a certain sense, the whole notion of a Dharma lineage is based on, or takes that kind of lineage as a metaphor for what it means to transmit the teaching from one generation to the next. But the emperor, and we sometimes, can take that metaphor too literally. We think that what’s handed over is material or institutional. We look for continuity in a kind of very literal way.

The whole notion of that kind of institutional transmission is called into question. We wonder whether the real thing is only when you establish a long-living institution, preferably with a large building and piece of real estate to go with it. It’s going to be around forever.

In a sense, the emperor is asking the national teacher, what do you need? What can I give you that will preserve, carry on, or memorialize your teaching? He’s told, build me a seamless monument, which in a way is literally a contradiction in terms. Monuments are built out of things, out of bricks and mortar. They’re assembled out of their parts, and they may have different functions or layers to them. So the emperor can’t picture what he’s talking about and asks for particulars, and he gets this answer of silence.

The teacher is trying to point to something very different that’s going to be foundational to the idea of teaching. I won’t be around anymore, but what will continue? What is preserved? And he gets this silence. That silence, I think we should agree, is not nothing. It’s pointing to something ever-present in this moment.

But how do we experience that? The emperor calls in the disciple, who in one way is preserving the teaching, but I think notably here gives a very different kind of answer than the answer his teacher gave. In a lot of koans, a student goes from one teacher to another, not getting it, and one teacher after another gives him the same damn answer until he finally gets an idea of what an answer is supposed to look like. But here, we can say that, thank goodness, the teacher hasn’t simply cloned himself. The disciple doesn’t simply repeat what the teacher did. He doesn’t fall into the habit of, well, if the teacher thinks the best answer to a question is silence, I’ll do that from now on. It’s like saying, my teacher always answered questions by raising one finger, so I’ll do that forever.

We would like there to be as many different ways to express the teaching as there are people and moments and situations. The disciple gives an answer that’s four lines of verse that may seem very obscure, but the theme is basically: nothing is missing.

South of Xi’an, north of Tan, in between, there’s gold sufficient for a nation. He’s saying, just within the realm, you have everything you need. There’s gold enough for anything you can imagine. We don’t have to go searching for something extra, something valuable beyond what’s already here. Gold is just this metaphor for what we already have, perhaps not aware of. But we have sufficient treasure for any project whatsoever.

Beneath the shadowless tree, the community ferryboat. The shadowless tree is meant to express the idea of non-differentiation. A shadow creates a line between the light and the dark. The community ferryboat, I think, is meant to say there’s a boat, a vehicle big enough to hold the whole community. And the idea of a ferryboat carrying you to the other shore — carrying you to realization. Within the Crystal Palace, there is no one who knows. The Crystal Palace, like the shadowless tree, is an image of something completely transparent. And “there’s no one who knows” — not knowing is, again, an expression of a source not divided into knowing or not knowing, not divided into this fact or that fact, but the simplicity itself of just this.

In terms of our own life and practice, this idea of seamlessness is, I think, very interesting. I wonder how we can apply that to the way we think about our life. Because very often we have a picture of life with very distinct seams or stages. Childhood, when I went off to college, when I had my first girlfriend, when I got my first job. Life proceeds through all sorts of stages, even though, in a sense, it’s just one life, one person just going through all these different events.

Sometimes people get stuck, though. A kind of classic case is the fellow who’s a football hero in college, and that was when he was a star. That’s when he really got all the fame and attention he wanted. And afterwards? Well, he went on and became a used car dealer. There was never anything that equaled the glory of being the college football quarterback. There, his life is clearly divided into these different stages, and one of them was the real thing.

I think we can do that in less dramatic ways all the time, when we think about: what was the real thing? What was the good time? What’s the part we’d like to have back? Or maybe what’s the part that we still think we’re waiting for in the future? When is that going to arrive?

As we get older, we can look back at our youth and say, ah, those were the days. But I think the alternative that the koan points to is taking our life whole, to really experience it seamlessly. It’s now this. Now this.

In a way, it’s a challenge. But I think if you can experience it, it’s a great relief.

Zen has this kind of ambivalent relationship to teaching, to speaking the Dharma. It valorizes teachers like Bodhidharma who say practically nothing. “I don’t know.” Or even more, a teacher like Gutei who just raises one finger whenever anyone asks him anything. Roso, who may be the champion — whenever anyone asked him a question, he just turned around and faced the wall, wouldn’t speak at all.

Now, the paradox is that Zen loves telling stories about people who don’t talk at all, and the stories they tell about those people fill many, many volumes. There’s a sense in which Zen wants to say over and over again that the truth is unsayable, that what we’re after is direct experience. But this is a very complicated thing to say, obviously. And so Zen often is in the mode of “show, don’t tell.” There can be anything from the teacher hitting the student who asks a question, to just offering a cup of tea, or just engaging in some simple, immediate task at hand. There’s this valorization of simplicity and directness, as if the only thing that words do is get between us and our experience, get between us and the real world.

And this is very problematic for a number of reasons.

There is obviously a level at which words can obfuscate, can be a conceptual intermediary, a stand-in for the real thing. We always hear things like, talking about going to Europe is not the same as going to Europe. Tasting the tea is not the same as talking about tasting the tea. And there’s no doubt that many times, in many ways, we settle for a description of life rather than feeling like we’re living life, or that we can feel like all we’re getting is secondhand versions of the life or the experience that we wish we were having. Then we want the real thing. I don’t want to just hear about it. I don’t want to just read about it. I want to live it. And so instead of just reading books about Zen, we come to a zendo, we sit, we want to have the real experience.

All well and good, but at the same time, we’re cutting ourselves off from a whole dimension of what it means to be human. Because part of how we are human and how we are in the world and how we are relational social creatures is that we talk to one another.

There’s a way in which the student approaches the teacher, the teacher just hits him, as if that’s the most immediate kind of encounter we could have. We’re not going to muddy it up by talking. And there’s a certain kind of macho sensibility here, I think, in which real men don’t need words. Two men greet each other, they punch each other on the shoulder. You don’t have to say a word. All right, that’s one way to do it.

But part of what we are doing in acknowledging our interdependence is to see ways in which talking and language are the very medium in which we live. Like fish live in water, people live in language. And it’s not our goal in this practice to somehow find our way out of the water in which we live, as if there’s some place to stand outside of all of that. That’s its own particular kind of mythology.

And paradoxically, or ironically, it’s a mythology created in language and concepts. The concept of being concept-free. The whole myth of the given, as the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars talked about — that there’s this possibility of direct, uncontaminated, concept-free experience. That is a particular kind of Zen fantasy, or maybe we should even say a particular kind of Zen literary trope. It’s a kind of fable we talk about, equivalent to the natural man or the noble savage, someone uncontaminated by all the trappings of civilization and the intellect. As if underneath all of that is a true self that is immediate and direct and doesn’t rely on words and concepts in any way whatsoever.

Only people preoccupied with language try to imagine a world without it.

But part of what non-separation means, what this immediacy that we’re striving for really means, is that we see our speech, our words, our communication as themselves performative. They are inseparable from who and what we are. It’s how we are in the world and how we are with each other.

When that old teacher Zuigan asked whether his eyebrows had fallen out, one of his disciples, Ummon, said one word: kan — barrier. As if talking and words were barriers to direct experience. But that word kan, or barrier, I think also can be translated as gate. And that really is the essence of what our practice is all about. It’s the transformation of barriers into gates. We speak of a gateless gate or a gateless barrier.

In a way, you could just translate that as the unlocked door. We struggle all the time, pulling and pulling and pulling at a door that we’re convinced is locked. But in big letters on the door it says “push,” and we’ve been pulling. We don’t know how to enter. We don’t know what entering is like. We see obstacles when they’re entryways.

And of course, part of the problem is we don’t want to enter through all these gates, because the gates often say things slightly less benign than “push.” They may say things like suffering, or old age, or pain, or confusion. All these things we take to be barriers. We want to get around them one way or another. We don’t want to use them as our point of entry. But of course, that was Joko’s endless teaching. Enter here. Enter here. Enter the gate marked anger. Enter the gate marked anxiety. Enter the gate called language and words. These are just as immediate as anything else.

The other story that comes to mind comes from Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. You may remember how Gandalf is trying to lead the band through the passageway under the mountains, through the Mines of Moria. In order to enter, they come across this big stone door, and across it is written, I believe, in Elvish or some obscure language. He translates it as, “Speak, friend, and enter.” And he says, it must mean say the password and the door will open. So he tries every password he can think of, every bit of magic and incantation. Nothing works. The door is locked, won’t open. He sits there a long, long time until finally he slaps himself on the head and says, what an idiot I’ve been.

The inscription is: say “friend” and enter. All you have to do is say the word friend and the door opens. What we think is a locked door has been open all the time.

It’s paradoxical that in a sense we think the door of immediate experience is locked by language, that the thing that makes us most human is the thing that stands between us and the world. But our language, our humanness, is part of the world. Is part of what it is to be human. It’s not like we’re here and the world is over there, and there’s this big gap in between, and that gap is filled with all this verbiage that somehow has to be swept out of the way so that finally we’re going to be able to touch the real thing.

That itself is a terrible dualistic picture — a separation between us and the world as it is. Kant got stuck in that dualism, saying that there’s a world of appearances and a world of reality. But that world of reality is absolutely unknowable. He called it the thing in itself, the world free of all concepts and appearances. The only thing we can know is appearances. So how are we ever going to know the world? I suppose Rinzai would say, come here, I’ll tell you, and then hit him upside the head. As if immediate experience is only going to come physically, non-verbally.

But really, just speak friend and enter. See your speech, see your thinking, see this talking. This is how we connect one another to one another. That’s what we want to do here. It’s what we want to do after this talk. We want to sit around and talk to one another. We want to reach out and through language create this bond of sangha. That only happens by our talking to each other.

There’s a kind of bond obviously that occurs when we all sit in silence together in the zendo. That’s very real. That’s very immediate. But then we get up, we go out together, we have a cup of coffee, we walk around the block, we get to know each other. We shouldn’t think that that is somehow less real than the immediacy of sitting together. Both are necessary. Both are who we are.

It’s an interesting exercise. You might ask yourself, if you travel around to other Zen centers and see what other teachers are doing, and somebody in another center asks you, what’s Magid like? What does he teach that’s different? How would you answer that? What do you think is distinctive about what I’m saying and what we’re doing here?

So I’m going to try to talk a little bit about my own list of highlights of what I think the themes are that have emerged. And maybe the one I’ll start with is the central idea of the transformative power of leaving everything alone. Basically what we do when we sit is just leave things as they are, experiencing our mind and body in the moment, allowing them to show up in the mirror. It’s not a process of trying to change them or discipline them or shape them, but: what is it like just to stay with this moment just as it is?

In particular, I’d say one of the things I’ve stressed is how leaving things alone is not simple for us because it immediately runs up against all our curative fantasies of what we think practice is or what it’s going to do. Our whole self-organization is assembled around notions of control and fixing and improvement, and leaving anything alone is the last thing we know how to do or think to do.

Our projects fall into a couple of basic categories. One is the inner project, what I call purification — the project of trying to make the mind be what we think it ought to be, whether that’s a matter of calming the mind, purging it of what we think of as intrusive or improper thoughts or conceptions, as if we’re going to free it of any kind of conceptual intermediaries that block us from pure and immediate connection with reality. Basically, I think I’ve talked about various versions of that under the maxim that our mind is not contaminated by its contents. Zazen is not a purification process. We’re here to leave our mind alone, to watch all the ways in which we resist doing that. Not only resist doing it, but that we think our whole purpose here is to transform our mind into something else.

The other side of that particular coin of curative fantasies is the relational side. The purification side is the internal side. The relational side is one that’s typically geared towards autonomy — a way in which we rebel against interdependence, that we imagine our practice will make us either impervious to the vicissitudes of bodily or emotional or relational vulnerability, that we will somehow become stronger, more self-sufficient, more resilient. All those things are true up to a point, but there’s a way in which we have this curative fantasy that this is going to allow me to handle anything that comes my way. In particular, there’s a kind of shunning of emotional dependency or attachment or the need for love or recognition. Those things don’t get a lot of support from traditional Buddhist literature — that we might actually need love and recognition and attachment.

So probably one of the distinctive things I’ve been talking about all these years is that practice teaches us to learn to be dependent intelligently. Dependency is not something that is ever going to be eliminated through our practice. That’s a corollary to Joko’s notion of learning to suffer intelligently. The relational part isn’t going to go away either. We need to learn to be dependent intelligently.

Another theme — in a way these are all tied together and are different perspectives on the same thing — has to do with my favorite duck-rabbit image, which is my way of talking about the two sides of problem versus koan, of barrier versus gate. That basic shift in perspective back and forth is part of what happens in the course of practice. To see something as a problem is to look for a solution, to see something that needs to be fixed. But the other side is to see it as a koan, where what happens is we become non-separate from it. It becomes just this, becomes this particular embodiment of the absolute in the moment, in which nothing needs to be fixed, nothing is lacking, nothing is hidden. It’s just this.

And it’s important to remember that we need to live on both sides of that dichotomy. The goal is not to completely eliminate the relative, to eliminate the side of problems in our life, because that side is also the side of agency, the side of freedom, the side in which we’re able to say things could be otherwise and should be otherwise. It’s how we want to be able to respond to injustice, to the things that need to be changed. It’s a whole dimension of life that we don’t want to eliminate in the name of pure acceptance of everything just as it is. Too often that gets perverted into submission or resignation if we lose sight of the proper place of agency in our life.

But Zen in particular, I think, also tries to open this gate of the absolute, of things being just what they are. And in some strange sense, perfect in just being. This is the traditional dichotomy of barrier versus gate that we encounter at the very beginning in the Mumonkan, the gateless gate, the gateless barrier. We don’t have to struggle necessarily with a koan like Mu to try to somehow break through that once and for all. And there is no once and for all in this life anyway - we encounter it moment after moment.

I think this was one of Joko’s main teachings — that just the way we encounter each moment, we can see how we are facing it. Are we facing it as a gate, or are we facing it as a barrier? The barrier is characterized by our emotional resistance, our anxiety, our irritation, our expectation, our anger, all the ways in which we say, this is not it. Or there’s something wrong with this moment. There’s something lacking. All the ways we face life as not it.

I think our practice here is distinctive in that we try to look at each one of those little moments, a kind of bottom-up confrontation with the millions of little barriers we create for ourselves in the course of a day — not tackle in a top-down way this sense of Mu as an ultimate barrier that we’re going to break through, and then that breakthrough is going to trickle down once and for all into all the little barriers of everyday life. It can be fine to work from both directions, but I think what’s distinctive about Joko’s style and what we’ve done here is that bottom-up working with each one of those little moments.

And one of the ideas that I encountered in rereading some of these old talks that I particularly liked was the emphasis on the idea of finitude as a way of talking about impermanence. Talking about finitude as well as talking about mortality, and how we resist this reality of impermanence in our life. Mortality is the usual way we talk about things — the fear of death, of not being. It’s the thing that hangs over us and that we all struggle to deny, ward off. But like Mu, facing mortality is to face the big once-and-for-all problem. How do I face death? Well, we’re not going to really face that emotionally or realistically every day in every moment.

What we face in a bottom-up way is this problem of finitude — of things being this way rather than that. That I’m going to have this life, not a different life. That I’m going to be able to do some things but not others. That my partner is going to have some characteristics and qualities but not others. That my job will have certain characteristics but not others. That in a thousand little ways, we face this but not that. And how do we approach that? Is it a source of endless complaint? A sense in which something is always missing, always lacking. Why can’t I have the whole thing? Why do I have to agree to only have this one little part? That, I think, manifests in our life and our practice over and over again.

But life comes to us in particulars. Life comes to us here and now rather than there and then. And like with the problem of fixing versus acceptance, there are obviously ways in which we want to hold on to the sense of possibility and opportunity and making things different than the way they are. That’s obviously a legitimate side of every life. To lose that is to lose agency and to fall into resignation. But no matter how much agency we are able to exert, there’ll always be limits. Our arm can only stretch so far. We’re embodied and we’re limited. How do we make our peace with that in a way that is not submission or resignation? How do we find the fullness, the completeness in just this?

Our ōryōki practice is a version of that, where ōryōki means, if I remember correctly, just enough. How much are we able to take that attitude into how we experience our daily life? Is it enough? That, I think, is one measure of our practice, one other version of this gate-versus-barrier dichotomy. Do we see our life as enough, or are we always a day late, a dollar short, focusing on what’s missing, what’s lacking?

I think off the top of my head, that’s a set of Magid’s greatest hits over the years, the themes I keep coming back to. It’d be interesting to hear from you all if you have others that have been in the foreground that I’m not mentioning, or what you think the core of this practice is for you.

“My dog doesn’t worry about the meaning of life. She may worry if she doesn’t get her breakfast, but she doesn’t sit around worrying if she will get fulfilled or liberated or enlightened. As long as she gets some food and a little affection, her life is fine. But we human beings are not like dogs. We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.”

Now I don’t think Joko read much Heidegger, but you can use this paragraph as an introduction for Heidegger for Dummies, because one of the ways Heidegger introduces the idea of Dasein — which is his word for human being, means being there, being situated in the world — he says, Dasein is the one being for whom its being is a problem or is an issue. And this is basically what Joko is saying is the difference between herself and her dog. The dog doesn’t have any issue with how to be a dog. But human beings get very preoccupied with: what does it mean to be a human being? And how do you do it? And how do you do it well? And what does it mean to screw it up and get it wrong?

Now this is, we can say, the problem of suffering. She makes this basic distinction here between suffering, which comes from self-centered preoccupation with things like our human nature or our liberation or our enlightenment, and the kind of problem a dog might have, which is not getting enough to eat or not getting affection. We obviously will suffer if we don’t get those things too, but it seems like we’re adding this extra layer.

What this immediately raises is whether the solution to our problems is to become more dog-like, and this seems to be an option that a lot of people opt for. Sometimes they don’t think they should become like a dog. Sometimes they think, maybe I should become like a little child. I’ll go back to a place of simplicity and directness, before I developed all these cognitive capacities to create intellectual trouble for myself, and I’ll imagine that childhood is this kind of Wordsworthian state of naturalness that has gotten contaminated by adulthood and civilization, and I need to return to that in some way.

Sometimes we hear people say that what they want to do is become natural, like the dog or like the fish in the ocean or the bird in the sky, just simply being what we are and doing what we do without any kind of hindrance. And the hindrance is very typically identified with our conceptual lives — as Joko here says, our self-awareness — and so we develop these elaborate disciplines of meditation, of practice, that for a lot of people seem to be designed to free us from conceptualization, free us from thinking, and return us to this state of nature.

In our practice, we have this famous koan that asks, does a dog have Buddha nature? For most people, the question really is, do I have Buddha nature, and if I do, where did it go? Where is it? Why can’t I find it? We can say that one of the great obstacles we encounter is this very particular concept of being concept-free. It’s one of these strange paradoxes of practice that we get it in our heads that our thinking, our concepts, stand between us and the world, and we start creating what’s really a whole conceptual fantasy of immediate experience and directness, something that will return us to what we imagine is the purity and immediacy of our original dog or baby nature, and we somehow metaphorically and in our imagination plug that in for what we think Buddha nature is.

Now Sartre, in Existentialism Is a Humanism, says that because he’s an atheist, he doesn’t believe in human nature. What he means by that is religion provides us with this distinct picture of human nature that we then have to work with and within. And it’s actually very much what Joko is presenting in this first paragraph. If you’re a Christian, you have a picture of human nature as fallen, a picture of original sin, of perhaps pride, perhaps sexuality, as the thing that has contaminated your basic innocence, and somehow we need a faith or a practice of redemption to help us work through this built-in characteristic of what it means to be a fallen mortal human being.

And Joko is giving you, because she’s religious, also this picture of human nature. It’s basically in danger of being contaminated by, as she says, self-awareness, self-consciousness. If you look at early Buddhism you can say the root of suffering is not self-consciousness but desire, or attachment, and there are lots of ways we can talk about this, to put desire and self-awareness in synch with each other, primarily through a picture of desire to control things so that they wouldn’t be impermanent. I can have what I want and not have it go away. But in a certain sense, each one of these pictures denies us the naturalness of the dog.

One of the strange things about this Zen practice of ours is that it is simultaneously this long-term disciplined effort that we make to practice leaving everything alone. In our sitting, what we’re really doing is first of all sitting still, and sitting still both with our body and our mind. We can think that the point of the stillness is a kind of imperturbability or being unmovable or unflappable by whatever happens, and we can think that our mind is supposed to have a kind of parallel, a kind of absolute stillness to correspond with our physical stillness. For some people that turns into the fantasy of having the mind completely quiet, completely free of thought, completely free of emotion — the mind as the clear blue sky or the mirror that reflects nothing, just pure awareness. In a way, these are all conceptual fantasies, the paradox being that they are all about being concept-free.

We engage in this paradoxical practice of leaving everything just as it is, and we try in some sense to come to terms with our mind as it is, with our life as it is, because in Joko’s terms, we have a powerful sense that this isn’t it. And again, there’s this strange dichotomy that opens up about this notion that this isn’t it. Is that a good thing or is it a bad thing?

When Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness, nothingness, for him, was the capacity — the distinctly human capacity — to say, this isn’t it. To negate what is. To imagine that things could be otherwise. To say that things could be otherwise than what they are was, for him, the essence of freedom. And yet, we struggle to say, what does it mean to stay with things just as they are? What things should we stay with and what things should we try to change?

When Dōgen talks about the identity of practice and enlightenment, in a sense he’s saying, you don’t have to change anything. Zazen itself is the performance of enlightenment, the enactment of enlightenment. And he’s saying this to people who are already doing it. He’s saying it to a room full of monks who’ve been sitting there day after day and year after year, with most of them thinking, am I there yet? And he’s saying, yes, you’ve already arrived. This is already it! And of course everybody’s reaction was, I didn’t think it was going to be like this. I had something else in mind.

Dōgen had his own particular picture of this kind of identity of human nature and Buddha nature and practice and enlightenment such that to live the life of the monk was to return yourself to this dog-like state of being perfectly human, being perfectly Buddha. For him, being a monk was like a fish in the water, the bird in the sky. It was the full exercise of what you are. Just to live this life, to sit in zazen, is to realize the impermanence and interconnection of all things. This is your Buddha nature. This is what we practice and enact in our real lives day in and day out in this form of life.

What we do here as lay students is something significantly different in that we’re all living one form of life and saying, well, this is it. The founding statement of the Lay Zen Teachers Association says, we believe that the dharma can be fully realized, expressed, and transmitted in lay life, that there’s no particular form of life or training necessary to be a Buddhist, to be in tune with your Buddha nature, to realize who and what we are. In that sense, we take on this Sartrean freedom to say, well, it could be otherwise. We don’t have to run things here like Dōgen ran them in 13th century Japan. We won’t set that up as the real thing and see everything else as a compromise or deviation from authenticity. Authenticity is available to us right now in what we’re doing, as we do it.

A big kind of koan for everybody is really: can I experience or trust that this is it? A real practice isn’t what guys in robes and shaved heads are doing, but what you’re doing right here. This is it. Just this.

What we do in our lay practice in this very basic sense is practice over and over again with the identity of relative and absolute. By absolute we mean a sense of: this is it. Nothing is missing. Nothing is hidden. This is reality. Not in comparison to something else, not lacking or having too much of this or that, but wholly, perfectly, completely just this.

And where is that to be found? I’ll end with a little story from the Blue Cliff Record that illustrates this.

In the old days, there was a teacher who left the temple behind and went off to be a hermit, and he lived up on a mountaintop in an area of a few small farmers and villagers. He really hid himself away, practiced alone, and in order to support himself, apparently he would gather nuts from the surrounding forest and press them to make oil, which he would go down now and then to sell to the farmers in the village.

And even though he did his best to be out in the middle of nowhere and be a hermit, one way or another somehow people heard about this strange guy on the mountain, and inevitably monks would make pilgrimages to try and meet this hermit master. And one day a monk shows up at the hermitage, sees the old man inside, comes in, looks at him, just sees what looks like an old peasant, and he says right out to him, I’ve come all this way on pilgrimage to see the famous Zen Master, but all I see is an old man selling oil.

The teacher says to him, you only see an old man selling oil. You can’t see the Zen Master.

So the monk says, please sir, show me the Master.

And the old man says, “Oil! Oil! Who will buy my oil?”

But in addition to mortality, I think they are also reminders of finitude, which is an aspect of impermanence that I don’t think we talk enough about. It has its own distinct nature and issues. We might say that in general, impermanence is all about things changing and ending and passing away. But finitude refers instead to a limit on possibilities — things that will never happen. And I suppose they’re connected in the sense that if I thought I was going to live for a million years instead of at most a hundred, I could say, well, there’s always time to do everything I can think of wanting to do in a lifetime.

But part of the finite nature of our life is that we will always have a chance to do some things, but not others. And that, I think, is a separate issue in a way, a separate problem from the fact that whatever we’re doing is going to change or end.

I think I can safely say that I will live out my life without ever traveling to the Middle East or Africa or India or China or Australia. Those are simply experiences I won’t have. Sometimes limitations are a relief. I remember after yet another attempt at reading Proust, just deciding, this man is insufferable, I am never going to read this. I don’t have to read this, don’t have to put myself through that.

But for most of us, most of the time, finitude is a matter of regret. We think about what’s missing in our lives and what we will never be able to do. And sometimes instead of something like, I’ll never visit India, for some people it’s: I’ll never be married, or I’ll never have children or grandchildren, or I’ll never get a chance to study this language or pursue that career. And we’re called upon to come to terms with the fact that for better or for worse, I’m living this life instead of some other life. We have to make our peace with that in some sense, regardless of the content of our life. Because whatever the content of our life, it will always contain this but lack that.

One of the dimensions of monastic training was always a kind of embrace of that finitude, a deliberate choice to restrict possibility. Most often, the most obvious version of that was vows of chastity. I will renounce the possibility of having intimate or sexual relationships. But there’s also very typically a vow of stability. I will enter into these walls, stay within this enclosure. Sometimes it’s a commitment of years, sometimes it’s a commitment for life. I will live my life within this circle, within this community. I will not seek for anything more.

It’s interesting that in the old days, my experience of sesshin was typically of an ordeal. It was physically so difficult and demanding that the effort focused all your attention. I think what has changed over the years, or how I’ve tried to modify sesshin, is to emphasize unstructured time. Time in which you even have the possibility of getting bored. You’re not doing something painful or difficult. You’re just sitting there. And sometimes you’re sitting there during a break on a bench. Nothing particular happening. And for a lot of us, what we confront in those times is a kind of withdrawal from our habitual seeking of stimulation.

I sometimes joke that all you have to do to make a sesshin difficult for people these days is to take away their phone for a little while. Just give a person this experience of just staying still with what is happening in the moment. Maybe nothing in particular is happening, but you’re out of touch. You’re not checking in, you’re not hearing the latest from anybody or from the world. We realize how addicted we are to that level of experience.

Part of what the lesson of sesshin or monasticism can be is an awareness of how much our ordinary lives are organized in this kind of quantitative way of trying to accumulate experience — to go here, do that, see this, meet these people. We want more and more and more, better and better and better experiences. So a lot of people, when you ask them what they want to do when they retire, they say, travel. I want to go here. I want to go there. I want to have all these new experiences. I only have so much time. I want to check one more thing off my bucket list.

In a way that’s all fine, perfectly legitimate to want to travel and have experience. But there’s also this other dimension in which we settle into the fact that it’s the quality of the ordinary experience that we’re having now that in a way is much more important to our sense of the meaning of our life than whether we accumulate more and more new and exciting experiences. Someplace we can settle into: well, just this is happening. Not going anywhere in particular, not doing anything new or different. This day will be much like a lot of other days. And I just settle into that. And I think that is, for us in our lay practice, how we bring some of that experience of sesshin or monasticism into everyday life. We try to make our peace with, or come to terms with, the repetition of the ordinary. Precisely the lack of novel experience. We settle into sameness.

Now, this is not to say that we’re not going to have real regrets. It may forever feel like not having grandchildren is missing out on a kind of experience you wish you had. That’s real. But it’s part of: I’m having this life, not another life. And that’s part of what a monk does voluntarily — saying, I will give up the opportunity to have a partner in certain kinds of relationships and children and a place in the world.

Monks choose those things to renounce, but as laypeople, life often just chooses it for us. Instead of what seems like a voluntary renunciation, life imposes limits on us. Imposes lack, imposes disability or illness or poverty or loneliness. And the challenge for us is to practice with that and to figure out what practicing with that means.

This, I think, is the practice of finitude. And I think it happens at every stage of our life, not just when you get to my age and start thinking about how many years you have left. I think it’s a factor in what often gets called a midlife crisis — a certain point where all of a sudden it hits you. Is this all there is? Is this going to be my career for the rest of my life? Am I always going to live here with this person?

People sometimes get frantic and feel trapped in the life that they have. Even if it’s a good life. There’s a kind of sudden realization and terror around, well, this is all there is. What if I never get to — and you fill in the blank — go here, have sex with somebody else, get to drive a red sports car, whatever it is you think is this extra thing you need in your life to feel like you’re not missing out. I think there are all different stages in our life where that fear of missing out suddenly just stares us right in the face. And that’s coming to terms with finitude.

I’ll leave you with that. It’s a dimension of impermanence that I think confronts us all, all the time. Not just in the way we face the prospect of someday dying, but how we face living here and now in this life and not some other.