Embracing All Of Life, Even The Hard Parts

Tonight,

I want to talk about something that seems to be everywhere now.

It's this idea of what Zen is.

I see the word Zen used everywhere.

We have a television streaming service,

And at those points where the service doesn't sell a commercial,

It puts in a filler that's a beautiful landscape,

And it says,

Enjoy the Zen.

We have a nail salon in the town where I live here in Newton called Zen Nails.

Who knew nails could be Zen?

Everywhere I go,

It seems that Zen is mentioned as a way to signify a person who's really calm,

Who's unflappable,

Who's never bothered by anything or some kind of setting where you will become that person.

You'll become unshakable,

Unflappable.

And it's so puzzling to me because I just came back from two days of an intensive Sesshin where it was anything but calm.

It was anything but blissful.

My mind was doing its usual as it does on Sesshin.

There were times when it was going wild.

There were times when I was in physical pain,

When I was unhappy that I'd even come to the retreat.

If Zen is being calm all the time,

This is not my Zen.

And it reminded me of a koan that I studied a while ago and it took me a while to find it again,

But it's a great koan because it looks at this.

It's from a collection called Entangling Vines.

It's one of the later collections in our koan curriculum.

And so after I had studied and answered literally a few hundred koans,

I was deep in Entangling Vines and encountered this story.

It's called An Old Woman Burns Down a Hermitage.

And this is an unusual koan because,

You know,

These were written in China and Japan in the 8th,

9th,

10th century.

And women,

Of course,

There were many women practicing,

But they were not recorded.

Very few women's stories were recorded.

So this is one where a woman plays the main role.

So here's the story.

There was an old woman who supported a hermit.

And that meant she really,

She paid for his room and board and took care of him.

It was a way to support Buddhist practice for laypeople.

For 20 years,

She always had a servant girl who was 16 or 17 years old take the hermit his food and wait on him.

One day,

She told the girl to give the monk a close,

Warm hug and then ask,

What do you feel just now?

So the young girl did this.

She brought the food.

She hugged the hermit and the hermit responded,

An old tree on a cold cliff,

Midwinter,

No warmth.

And that was all.

So the girl went back and told this to the old woman.

And the woman said,

For 20 years,

I've supported this vulgar good for nothing.

She threw the monk out of the hermitage and burned it down.

That's the story.

So what are the ancient teachers trying to get at here?

What's going on?

I mean,

Isn't the hermit doing what he's supposed to do?

Isn't he supposed to be free of desires,

Free of greed,

Of clinging,

Of attachment?

But of course,

This is not our way.

Even so,

How many of us have done this?

How many of us have said,

I should not be upset by this.

I'm a Zen practitioner.

Or you're sitting on the cushion and suddenly you start to replay an old argument with someone and you get upset and you feel this is wrong.

This is not what Zen is.

I'm a bad practitioner.

At one of my early sessions as a Zen student,

My mind started to burn with anger about something that someone had done to someone else in my workplace that I thought was really cruel and had embarrassed this person in front of his colleagues.

And I found myself sitting on my cushion at Sashin getting angrier and angrier.

And I couldn't stop.

You've probably all had this experience.

Your mind starts filling with thoughts and feelings.

And of course,

The more I tried to stop it,

The more it exploded.

And then it was my turn to go in to see the teacher,

To go in for doksan.

So I went into my teacher totally ashamed,

Because by then I'd been practicing for a few years and I sort of prided myself on knowing the score in Zen.

And I was so ashamed and told him how furious I was.

And he asked me more about it.

And he said,

Bob,

I want you to go back out,

Sit on your cushion and become the Buddha of murderous rage.

And it was like,

What?

Like,

This is this is some wise Zen master teaching me this.

What is this?

But I was,

You know,

I was trying to be a good student.

So I went out,

Sat back on my cushion and said,

OK,

I'm just just bring it on.

And my mind did explode.

I was the Buddha of murderous rage.

And then after a little while,

It was gone.

I didn't make anything happen.

I didn't make that anger go away.

It just was gone.

That in fact,

By giving me permission to be the Buddha of murderous rage,

To feel everything I was feeling,

He allowed me to stop fighting.

And I allowed myself to truly enter into just this moment of anger,

Of rapid heartbeat,

Of sweating,

Of self recriminations,

The whole thing.

And when I stopped fighting,

Of course,

Impermanence did its work and the experience went away.

But that old hermit in the koan,

That hermit was sitting there saying,

No,

Nothing.

I don't feel anything.

Attractive young woman hugs me.

No reaction at all.

This is what we sometimes call spiritual bypassing.

It's a it's a term that was coined in the 70s by a psychologist who was also a Buddhist practitioner,

John Wellwood.

And he wrote a really useful book called Toward a Psychology of Awakening.

And in it,

He talked about this idea of using our spiritual practice to make feelings go away,

To suppress them,

To suppress any part of experience,

Thoughts,

Feelings,

Sensations that we insist should not be there because we are spiritual people.

And and our spirituality can become a kind of defensive shield.

We can dismiss the problems we're having with some vague spiritual explanation like,

Well,

Everything happens for the best.

And it can gloss over problems that in fact make those problems fester.

Some of you may have found yourself doing this.

When you're obviously angry about something and someone notices it,

You say,

Oh,

No,

No,

I'm not angry.

Trying your best.

Some of you may have met people who resort to a kind of spiritual superiority.

No,

I'm I don't get angry anymore.

I'm so awakened.

That doesn't happen to me.

Sometimes we want to pretend that things are just fine when of course they're not.

Or we want to insist that there is a bright side even when things are dreadful in the moment.

That what we find is that our practice encourages us not to be the Zen of my TV screen when it shows me a beautiful landscape.

Not the Zen of the spa that shows these people totally tranquil,

But fully alive,

Feeling everything that comes up.

And so when we practice more intensely,

Some of you come to the all day Zazen kais that we have,

Or you go to Sashin.

And what you see is that in fact,

These intensive periods of practice are actually designed to heat things up.

They're not designed to help us be calm.

They deprive us of sleep.

They make us wait to use the bathroom because there's a line.

All these inconvenient things that bump us into our desires and bring us up against our own unpleasant emotions.

And that's because the aliveness of practice is in feeling all of it,

In feeling the joy of hearing the crickets outside my window right now.

But also the annoyance of the knee pain that I've had from sitting for so many hours the last two days.

The practice is to hold everything.

And so for that reason,

I chose the reading tonight from Hogan Bayes,

The liberation from all obstructions.

You know,

It's beautiful.

If there's pain,

I choose to feel.

If there's sorrow,

I choose to grieve.

When burning,

I choose heat.

When it's my birth,

I choose to live.

When it's my death,

I choose to die.

Where this takes me,

I choose to go.

Being with what is,

I respond to what is.

So I encourage you to look around at all the ways that Zen is being used in our culture and then notice your own experience of this practice,

Of sitting even for a few moments,

And how rich and full and anything but tranquil it is.

This is the aliveness that practice encourages and gives us if only we face toward everything.

Thank you.

You