When Life Feels Like A Prison -- The Goose In The Bottle

The following Dharma talk was given at Boundless Way Temple in Worcester,

Massachusetts.

The temple is an affiliate of Boundless Ways Inn,

A multi-lineage school of Zen Buddhism.

So we continue in our exploration of koans,

And the pleasure of this for me is that I get to pick one of my greatest hits.

I get to pick one that is particularly alive for me,

And was particularly alive when I first encountered it.

And that's really what these ancient stories are for.

That not everyone resonates in quite the same way,

But that as we encounter them,

Some of them leap off the page,

Or creep off the page and into your heart.

This one did for me.

So the koan I'd like to talk about comes,

Again,

From the miscellaneous koans.

And this is this small collection of koans that happens right after we begin,

Right after the cycle of Mu.

And these are small snippets of text,

Small stories.

Some of the later ones,

As you know,

Can be very long.

They can be shaggy dog stories.

These are just little jewels.

So here's one that was a jewel for me.

It's case 21 from the miscellaneous koans.

Once a woman raised a goose in a bottle.

Once a woman raised a goose in a bottle.

When the goose was grown,

She wanted to get it out.

How can you get it out without breaking the bottle?

When I first encountered this koan,

I was like,

Huh?

And so when I have that huh reaction,

I kick into logical mind problem solving mode,

Which we've all been so well trained to do.

And I thought of all these ways.

How could you get the goose out?

Maybe there's some,

Do they have flexible joints?

What are you doing with it?

And I actually Googled the little ship building things where you build those tiny ships.

I thought,

Well,

If you could build a ship in one of those,

How could you get the goose out?

So I was doing this and just getting nowhere,

As you can imagine.

And it went on for a while and teachers would sort of smile at me as I come in with my latest effort.

And they were nice.

They didn't just sternly ring me out.

They smiled and almost patted me on the head metaphorically,

But sent me on my way.

And I just thought,

I'm getting nowhere with this.

And one morning it was like 4 a.

M.

And I'm sure you know the demons that can arrive at 4 a.

M.

And I was lying there.

It was cold.

It was February,

I think.

Really cold.

And the furnace wasn't working right.

And we didn't know what was wrong.

So the house was really cold.

So we were kind of shivering.

And I had some work deadlines and I didn't know how I was going to get them met.

And my then teenage son was mad at me about something and I was the worst parent ever.

And then this koan.

I wasn't getting anywhere with this koan.

And I was lying there just feeling so sorry for myself.

And actually,

Because of the cold,

I was lying there all curled up in the fetal position and suddenly I had this flash of the goose.

This is the bottle.

This life that I am feeling so confined by.

This is the bottle I'm in right now.

And suddenly I had great appreciation for whoever that ancient teacher was centuries ago who put this image down and taught it and said,

Yeah,

Human life can really feel like this.

It can feel so cramped and so confining and no way out.

And then,

First of all,

I remember lying there in the dark at 4 am starting to giggle and realizing that people were asleep.

My wife was next to me.

But suddenly there was this kind of moment.

Oh,

Oh.

And then I began to do what we are encouraged to do when we explore koans,

Which is to look at each part of the koan and become each part of the koan.

And it was really easy to be the goose,

This cramped creature.

And I had been put in there tiny and then I grew and I was just doing what I was supposed to do.

And I grew up and how did I know it was going to be this much of a prison?

And then I thought,

Well,

Who would raise a goose in a bottle?

Who?

And of course,

A woman can go to parents so easily.

But then,

Of course,

My karma was so much,

So many causes and conditions brought me to that place.

And if you think about it,

Think about you right now,

All the causes and conditions that bring you to this place,

To this cushion,

To moments where you feel like this is terrible drudgery and you're trapped and there's no way out.

Yeah,

We can think about parents,

We can think about great-grandparents,

We can think about the karma of being born as this gender,

As this race,

In this time in human history.

So many causes and conditions that make each of our bottles unique.

And then,

As we started to talk about yesterday in the Dharma Dialogue,

I began to realize that the person putting me in the bottle much of the time was right here,

Me.

We talked yesterday about those things that we want to get away from,

Those ways that we are,

My anger,

My anxiety.

We talked about how they can actually start out as seeming like really useful strategies and being useful strategies.

Pleasing people,

Giving people what they want,

Oh,

Such a useful strategy makes people happy.

And then they become habits,

They become the habits that we can't get away from.

And so often the things that make us want to crawl into those protective bottles in the first place are the things that start to confine us as we want to grow and as we want to spread our wings.

We also choose bottles or containers,

If I want to put it a little more gently.

We choose the container of Zen.

I mean,

Zen is all made up.

It's all a creation over hundreds and hundreds of years.

And we choose it because it allows us to bump up against all the mistakes we make in bowing in the Kin Hin line,

Ringing the bell,

Chanting.

And we choose this container because it's a vehicle for waking up.

But even this is a bottle.

And eventually as the teaching goes,

We will have to take this raft across the river and then leave the raft behind.

That even these beautiful forms of Zen,

This magnificent bottle that we choose to be in,

Is just that.

And then of course,

There is the bottle,

The confining space of being born a human,

Of having a mind and a body and a heart.

Dogen glimpsed this really clearly.

He wrote beautifully about what it must look like to a fish to swim in the ocean.

What does the ocean look like?

And what does the ocean look like if you're a bird?

And what does the ocean look like if you are a man sitting in a boat in the middle of the ocean?

Dogen had the imagination to understand how relative our sense of the world is,

How confined,

How limited.

I sometimes think that some of our sports like scuba diving or skydiving are our attempts to have the imaginative leaps that Dogen had.

This is what it's like to be a fish under the water.

This is what it's like to be a bird flying through the air.

This is of knowing what it's like outside of our human bottle.

And so the invitation of practice is just to look,

To investigate all of this.

To see the little hell realm that I was in at four in the morning and see it for what it is.

Just something that morphs and changes and is a creation of my mind.

That all those realms that you cycle through each day here on the cushion,

All to be noted,

Appreciated,

Lived,

And held lightly and let go.

Even the joyous,

The blissful,

The deep samadhi,

All just creations.

Of course sometimes we get glimpses of our true nature.

We get glimpses where there is no bottle,

Where we are truly one with everything.

And those glimpses can be magnificent,

They can be terrifying.

I think of Marianne Williamson's poem that starts this way.

She says,

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

What she's speaking to is that experience of our true nature where the bottles fade away and we are just able to spread our wings because we are one with all of it.

With the vast powerful universe,

Magnificent beyond measure.

And of course that too doesn't last.

So we come back and we find ourselves cranky or hungry or in pain and we notice again that life begins to close in and there we are,

This big cramped goose.

But this invitation of practice to keep investigating over and over again,

To appreciate every bit of it,

That is the jewel that Vazin offers us.

And this is what Uchiyama wrote about in her reading.

When you accord with Buddha Dharma,

Your true self is the entire world and in this world there is no possibility of exchange.

The life of the true self is not apart from our functioning.

Everything we encounter is our life.

Everything.

Old,

Dirty bottles,

Magnificent realms of bliss,

All of it is our life.

All of it to be investigated and all of it invited by this little koan showing us that yes,

This goose in the bottle,

This is the starting place.

This is the seed.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

Thank you.

So please sit comfortably.