A Whip for a Good Horse: Reflections on Torei Enji

Torei Enji, a disciple and dharma heir of the great Japanese Rinzai Zen teacher Hakuin, once wrote a letter to a samurai to encourage his practice. This letter is now known as "A Whip for a Good Horse." Before I dive in, a note on the title. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha states, "Be like a good horse; touched gently by the whip, the horse moves forward with power and energy. Have an abundance of confidence, good conduct, effort, concentration. Be aware and attentive. Put aside this great mass of suffering." So the title of this reading is inspired by the Buddha's teaching, which invites us to be responsive in our practice in order to alleviate suffering for ourselves and all beings.

Part 1

In Part 1 of this abridged letter, as demarcated in Living Vow Zen's sutra book, Tori Enji writes: “Contemplating these four transcendences – impermanence, suffering, emptiness, selflessness – and seeking the way of enlightenment is called the four seals of the Dharma. This is the essential gateway. When you understand the mind darkened by ignorance and see its real nature, then ignorance becomes identical to the enlightened nature. Then the 12 links of dependent origination all accord with the right way and eventually arrive at the great realization of liberation." 

Last night I watched this animated series called Midnight Gospel. It is bizarre. And I highly recommend it. The animation is two dimensional, colorful, murderous scenes of creatures disemboweling each other. What it actually is is a podcast, and the interviewer, Clancy Gilroy played by Duncan Trussell, questions guests. There are eight interviews and they took these interviews, which are genuine, and animated them, creating these simulated realities that these characters travel through as they talk. 

Many of the interviews are actually about meditation, and he interviews a number of meditation teachers and folks of some renown, but my favorite episode is the last where he actually interviews his mother. She is dying; she had stage 4 cancer in real life, and he asked her if he could interview her for his podcast. She agreed, and their conversation is just beautiful. 

But facing his mother's death for this interview is a very powerful lesson, and she's able to remain very present with him in this interview and to meet him in his emotional breaking down, his witnessing of her imminent death, and they talk very openly about it. And this ability for them to be there together in this grief is just such a powerful healing moment for both of them, especially for him -- to be with her and love her so openly and devotedly. 

But what’s interesting is that the pathway to his healing love is directly through his grief. They talk about how in every person’s life a tornado comes, metaphorically speaking, and you’re left changed by that forever. These are the moments of reckoning and transformation that are available to us all. 

Undoubtedly we’ve all faced these moments in our lives, losing people whom we adore –  these transcendencies including impermanence and suffering as part of the essential gateway. I think we might prefer if the essential gateway were fun happy roller coaster rides and movies and cotton candy, and of course those are also dharma gates, but Buddhism includes acknowledging what we think of as suffering in our lives and practicing with that in a very conscious way, which is quite different from maybe our ways of dealing with pain or suffering that we have practiced over the course of our lives. We may find at some point that we've tried everything else, many different strategies, and nothing else really worked to alleviate suffering, so we come to practice Zen both hopeful and perhaps a little bit defeated having worked so hard at keeping an awesome body, and it falls apart, or at protecting the people we love, and still harm comes to them. And that sense of activity wears us out. Chogyam Trungpa says, “It's hopeless, it's truly hopeless,” and the same podcast narrator talks about how Trungpa really meant it. 

It does seem that the dharma gate for many of us is this courageous willingness to turn toward that which we may have spent many years avoiding -- life as it actually is, which includes pain and loss -- and perhaps we've realized that setting the graveyard behind rows and rows of evergreen trees doesn't mean that people don't die. Hiding them from view does not mean we don’t lose people we love. Watching beautiful young people on TV doesn’t mean we don’t get older. We can’t escape into these fantasies, and this is the beginning of the path, almost a path of giving up, a path of realizing, "it's hopeless. It's just hopeless. I just can't do it anymore. I just can't fix everything. I can’t even fix myself." It’s like swallowing a hot, iron ball in your gut and there's nothing to be done with it, and it may form as a kind of burning anxiety or a grief that sneaks up on us in quiet moments. We feel it in so many different ways, this this kind of underlying existential dread that we often just avoid by scrolling on our phones, massive amounts of a beer or whatever... It may be we each have our different ways of escape, but we find that it's there waiting for us. We shut off the phone, lie down in the dark, and there’s our demon. 

What a powerful thing this practice is, the courage to decide, "I’m going to stop running away. I'm going to just face it. I'm just going to face the thing that frightens me. I'm just going to be with it. I'm not going to escape into chatter. I'm not going to escape into false promises. I'm just going to sit here and be with whatever this trouble is."  We turn the light around and shine it within. 

And in this podcast, he sits down with his mother and he says that her dying, it's so hard, and she says, "yes it is," and he says, "so what do you do?" and she says, "you cry!” How’s that for a beautiful dharma teaching? How about you just be what you are. If you're scared, just be scared. This benefits all beings. Being with our own pain compassionately allows us to do the same with others without needing to push them away.

But we have a kind of protective set of mechanisms at work most of the time. Trungpa calls it the armor we put on. I think of it as the hamster wheel of escape -- the many things that we do to try to avoid feeling what we just feel. And as I say, they don't really work, these escapes. The pain, the trauma, it all just gets stored up in the cells of our bodies, one wound after another, and when we sit on the cushion at first, even for a while, we begin to metabolize these wounds. The cells of our bodies, they begin to unfold and release what we have been holding for years, in fact what we have probably inherited after countless generations, woven into the cells of our bodies. This is our store consciousness, our habit minds, much of it unconscious, at least initially. We might like to keep it that way, but in sitting, it all begins to emerge and unfold. And we think, why did I start this practice? I feel worse! That’s often true, we often can feel worse maybe even for a while. 

But with practice, with just ongoing courage – even perhaps after taking breaks when we lose our faith – but once we’ve begun to taste this practice in a deep way, we may realize that nothing else is as deeply healing. Because when we allow ourselves to be exactly what we are, our tears fall, and every tear is healing not only ourselves but the world. Generations worth of wounds healed. 

And what they talk about in the end of this podcast is the way that this grief is of course just another face of love. In the Buddhist tradition we tend to use the word compassion. Just compassion. A great kind of beauty in it. We have to experience that for ourselves. We have to see that for ourselves. Our great fear of death even. We may have a fear because why? Because we love life! it's so simple. We don’t want to lose everything and everybody we love. 

Why would we try to pretend, "I'm cool with losing you."  It hurts. That's part of love; that’s part of the beauty of love. Avoid the that particular face of love -- grief, and maybe the fear that we have about losing people, losing things, losing situations, losing places and life that we love -- if we avoid feeling these things, then we avoid the love too, because they are one. We can end up living a kind of plastic brittle existence, our heart not really touched by the intimacy of life. 

And I think we come to practice because we want that back. We want to feel alive again. 

So no, it isn't always easy. It hurts to have the heart break and open, but it's worth it because in that breaking open, we find our deep appreciation of life and the people in our lives. 

You may find yourself randomly dancing in the kitchen sunlight. Touched by the beauty of life.  Maybe with tears in your eyes.  

So this dharma gate of suffering, often felt because of impermanence, reveals to us love and selflessness, because we find that everything we encounter, even these deepest fears, are shapeshifting and have no fixed essence but transform before our eyes, often into compassion and joy when we allow them to unfold. 

We just have to BE it, not separate, and it unfolds, and we find there's actually nothing there to hold onto, and this is a dharma gate to impermanence and boundlessness that doesn't separate and protect and isolate itself out of fear of pain.

This is the essential gateway. "When you understand the mind darkened by ignorance and see its real nature, then ignorance becomes identical to the enlightened nature."

Of course we can do things to alleviate suffering where possible. But that’s not really what our sitting on the cushion is about. Our zazen is about meeting ourselves exactly as we are, giving ourselves permission to be exactly as we are. This mind of ignorance, of shame, of grief -- we imagine, “this can’t be enlightenment!” It can’t be my anger or my fear. We just believe that narrative so deeply, believe that we're supposed to be something other than what we are. It can't be my trauma or our collective trauma. And so we continue down that that path of trying to escape what we are, which is utterly futile, repressing things – but it is just what we are in the moment. So we are actually lying to ourselves. That is what is so futile about it.

What a courageous thing to sit here together, to decide to allow our hearts to just be as they are, to stop running away. To let ourselves love and be heartbroken and to feel it all, to let our hearts be touched by the world, to let ourselves be intimate with the world, with this moment. And to do this with the support of each other, to know that everybody here is in it with us. We’re not alone in this journey, in this practice of meeting ourselves and each other in this profoundly intimate way, this so vulnerable path. 

Then we see that our grief is our love, that this thing that we have been thinking cannot be "it" is precisely "it,' is precisely emptiness, is precisely selfless, boundless intimacy. “Then the 12 links of dependent origination all accord with the right way, and we eventually arrive at the great realization of liberation."

Not liberation from what we are, but liberation into what we are.  

Part 2 

Part two of Enji's letter deepens his themes by discussing three important Buddhist teachings -- the twelve links of dependent origination, the six realms, and the six paramitas. (I have given separate talks about each of these teachings, and you can find them on Morning Star Zen Sangha's website. I invite you to check them out.) Below, I consider a bit more philosophically what Enji implies about how these 3 important teachings relate with each other, then dive into parts 3 and 4 of his letter. 

Torei Enji begins this section of his letter by saying that the twelve links of dependent origination produce "obstructions" to awakening. 

The twelve links are:

1. ignorance, the root belief that things exist as separate entities with fixed essences. 
2. Volition is the desire to protect our personal existence.
3. Name and form distinguish my body from everything else and divide reality into this and that.
4. Consciousness tries to pin things down into fixed categories.
5. Sense faculties are often interpreted as inside the mind.
6. Contact is the way we view objects as external to us — the other side of this dualistic notion of senses and objects.
7. Feelings can be a burden to us when misconceived as nouns and when categorized as good and bad.
8. Craving is the way we seek "good" feelings (without recognizing that the seeking itself is painful).
9. Clinging results when we try to hold onto things that produce "good" feelings. 
10. Becoming describes the way our craving, clinging, and their corollary, aversion, become habit minds that drive our lives. These are the three poisons, the basic engine that drive us to be reborn endlessly in the six realms, metaphorically speaking. More on this below.
11. Birth is the notion of a separate self and an external world.
12. Old age and death arise once we believe we exist as separate entities.

The twelve links are experienced as obstructions to awakening when we believe that relative truths -- which are provisional designations -- are absolute truths, particularly the belief that our ever-changing self has an innate, unchanging quality (an intrinsic nature). The fundamental ignorance described in the twelve links is the belief that things exist as separate, fixed entities. Buddha said that the root of suffering is our belief in atman -- abiding selfhood. (This is why he taught "anatman" -- no separate, fixed self.) 

Based on this root ignorance about the way we actually exist, we elevate ourself over all other beings and strive to protect ourself, whom we view as our constant companion, thus breaking the precepts. It is actually rather subtle the way we do this; usually we are unconscious of this operating system. 

We need a glimpse of nonduality to realize that there is another way. We call this glimpse "awakening."

It is true in a relative sense that I am not you, and you are not me. Recognizing relative truths allows us to distinguish "between a hawk and a handsaw." However, because we tend to be Aristotelian in our logic and adhere to the principle of noncontradiction, we often neglect the awareness that we are also utterly interwoven. Both sides of this coin are true -- we are separate waves, and we are one body of water.

The twelve links of dependent origination illustrate for us how the "bureaucracy of ego" (to quote Trungpa) tends to take control. When we only perceive the relative truth of separate existences, we feel lonely and isolated from the universe. We tend to make ourselves the center of the universe with everything else existing "outside" of us. We make enemies. The lack of awareness of the way things exist on a deeper level propels us through the six realms.

Torei Enji describes the incarnations of the six realms as human, who are benign; demigods, who are jealous and angry with one another; hungry ghosts, who cling to things that are impermanent; animals, who are fearful and filled with desire; hell fiends, whose rage never dies down; and heavenly beings, whose minds are still and peaceful. As Torei Enji writes, "even in one day there is floating and sinking.... Truly we should see how much we wander in the course of a day." 

What I love about this statement is Torei Enji's humble acknowledgment that wandering through the six realms is just part of life. Why? Because the relative truth that we exist as separate beings is true to our conventional understanding, and we need this way of understanding to function in the world. We need to be able to tell a hawk from a handsaw (or edible food from poison). Indeed, there is no relative truth that we need to "get rid of" to awaken.

However, we get lost in our conceptions sometimes (we call this "delusive certainty"), then act in ways that are harmful. We need the precepts, moral guideposts, to help wake us up when we are possessed by delusions, for even with decades of practice, we will inevitably get sucked into confusion from time to time. Our path is to wake up, atone, vow, and keep practicing.

Unfortunately, when we only experience life according to the relative truth of our provisional categorizations (such as “me” and “everything else”), we get lost in the six realms and cannot wake up. We unconsciously take our categorizations, our mental formations describing "reality," as the absolute truth, and this leads us to seek permanent refuge in provisional truths that are actually ephemeral. 

Our tendency to get lost in conceptual maps is the root of samsara, the hamster wheel on which we run to secure happiness for ourselves. We aim to secure happiness in relation to something that we imagine will be permanent, whether it is a house, a loved one, great wealth, a blissful mental state, or a sense of self. These forms of self-seeking are based on the delusion that a permanent happy state can be attained by some separate, fixed entity called our self. We are lost in the pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit itself is dukkha, a kind of suffering, a lack of openness to, and appreciation of, the way things are in this very moment. We are too busy trying to become something else to realize the beauty of what is.

This form of self-seeking may fold into our spiritual practice. We might imagine that the goal of practice is to be a heavenly being or to attain a fixed state called "enlightenment," and this spiritual goal drives further seeking, preventing us from appreciating what we are in this moment. Trungpa calls this "spiritual materialism." We may occasionally succeed at attaining some sort of blissful state, then think, “now I’ve made it,” feeling special. Thus the sense of self forms around a transient state, and when it inevitably passes, we may feel like failures. Failure may lead us to be jealous or angry or hungry for more bliss, our self-interest propelling us through the six realms, including hell realms, where we combat each other for our personal desires. We may criticize ourselves, believing for myriad reasons that we are not good enough. We set up our scales and measure our spiritual practice constantly. “How am I doing?” Again, at the center is a belief that there is some separate entity called a self that can be "fixed." Seeking a different life (or defending the one we have, if feeling like heavenly beings) becomes our addictive habit driven by ignorance, greed, and aversion.

What is Zen's medicine? Torei Enji suggests the six transcendences, more commonly termed the six paramitas. These are quite similar to the eightfold path. They include skillful means to help us alleviate suffering. Most fundamentally, we pay close attention to our thoughts and actions and notice how they result in either benevolent or painful states. This mindfulness helps us make decisions that are more beneficial for ourselves and others. This is an important part of our practice.

And, if we are not careful, we can find ourselves practicing the six paramitas or the eightfold path in our habitual, self-centered way, aiming to be something other than what we are or clinging to what we think we are, all driven by desire, leading us right back into the cycle of samsara. We imagine getting to the end of the eightfold path sometime in the future. We can berate ourselves when we make mistakes and glorify ourselves when we fulfill vows. All of this is extra.

Hakuin, Enji's teacher, wrote, "the six paramitas... have their source in zazen." Why? Because when we sit and look deeply into the relative truth of our separate self, we find inter-being. The notion of a separate self which is the root of our suffering is seen as merely a provisional designation with no innate, fixed referent. There is no constant companion. It’s a mirage. We also see that all mental states are ephemeral. Thus, we can stop trying to attain some permanent state for this self that does not exist in the way we thought it did. We can also worry less about getting rid of what we categorize as unpleasant states. These too shall pass. These too have no intrinsic nature.

Wisdom, one of the six paramitas, is recognizing that there is no abiding, separate self and that no phenomena exist independently or with fixed essences. Craving thus loses its grip, for we know we can't hold onto anything. As Sallie Jiko Tisdale says, "We do a lot of pushing away and grabbing onto, and they're both clinging. They're both attachment. This is fundamental Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths. Zazen is a way of cultivating a space in which everything can arise and fall, including myself, without entanglement." This initially sounds disappointing, but it is actually a huge relief to let things be just as they are. It is also a relief to stop concerning ourselves so much with obtaining things or states of mind.

It is actually possible to open beyond conceptions that divide this from that and to awaken to boundless intimacy. How? By staying curious about what is and not believing all the stories we tell ourselves. As the Heart Sutra states, there is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. This is because no aspect of the self functions without its non-self elements. If there is no object seen, there is no vision. There is no eye that functions in isolation. Senses and objects actually merge. The realization of intimacy with all beings is the medicine that heals our divided minds and world. We see through the division between self and other that drives our suffering and causes us to behave selfishly. Our inherent inter-being, discovered in meditation, is the wisdom at the root of the remaining paramitas of morality, effort, patience, and generosity. We should see “the emptiness of the three wheels -- giver, receiver, and gift” (Meal Chant). Then we are truly honoring the paramita of generosity, which is sometimes translated as “relinquishment,” for we have given up believing in separate, fixed selves. Recognizing that we are interwoven, that our well-being is interdependent, we care for all beings as we care for our own life — for all beings literally are our life. If all beings vanish, so do I.

Wisdom, the true source of all the paramitas, is the deep realization that we do not exist as absolute entities. We realize wisdom in the practice of meditation -- the effort of looking deeply into what we actually are. In realizing our lack of separate self, we care for others AS ourselves, AS our own lives. This is an uncontrived, nondualistic embodiment of the six paramitas.

Here’s the key: we lose sight of the intimacy of all beings when we aim toward being something other than what we are. Aiming to be something other than what we are is just more of the "self selfing the self" -- more dualistic practice. Off the cushion there are times we need to take action to improve things. In zazen, we are invited to let go of our expectation to be different, to begin to sense the water. The practice is to realize what we actually are, not what we think we are or should be. Thich Nhat Hanh describes this as the practice of aimlessness -- recognizing inter-being in this very moment. No need to seek elsewhere. Everything is here.

But can we aim to be aimless? It doesn’t help to think that way, but we can allow zazen to open us beyond all mental models of zazen. We just entrust ourselves to the sangha. We keep throwing ourselves into the fire of practice where our forms illuminate our true nature, which is no nature at all. Just be quiet, pay attention, and stay curious about what actually is. Let your body answer. Walk in the zendo with the sangha with no hope of getting anywhere, and the walls that seem to separate us dissolve, revealing a boundless intimacy that surpasses understanding.

Parts 3 & 4

In sections three and four of his letter, Enji invites us to more deeply comprehend "the root of all ignorance" regarding our fundamental nature, and the fundamental nature of reality. This ignorance regarding our fundamental nature causes suffering, so it is worth investigating. 

Enji invites us to deepen our investigation by asking ourselves, "Who hears? What feels? What cognizes?" In essence, he is bringing us into this moment and asking, who is hearing these words right now? We call this "inquiry practice."

I have practiced with this kind of hwadu -- a focusing question -- for many years. So it is not about getting to the final answer and moving on. We might imagine that we should answer these questions intellectually, and we can use our minds to think about such questions. But I think Enji is inviting us to use our eye of practice to explore what we are. When we think we know what we are, rather than getting caught up in the content of our thoughts, Enji invites us to ask, "who thinks that?" This way we "doubt the seer, doubt the hearer," doubt the thinker. We remain in a state of wonder. "Who am I?" For me, this is the heart of practice. That is why I called my blog, "The Wonder of Zen." 

In this practice of staying curious about what we are, we might notice senses of self that arise. The Buddha taught that there are six levels of consciousness. These are the 5 senses, plus the mind, or thinking. In Buddha's model, senses of self are constituted by those 6 senses. Because of their importance, senses of self are described as the 7th level of consciousness in Vasubandhu’s Yogacara. In this teaching, senses of self arise along with our 5 senses, thoughts, and the 8th level of consciousness, our "store consciousness."

Whether we designate the sense of self as a separate level of consciousness is not so important, but it is helpful to specifically identify senses of self because they are so important in terms of suffering. As discussed above, the fundamental ignorance that Enji describes is our tendency to objectify ourselves and objects in the world as if they were separate identities rather than inseparably intimate. We view the objects of the world as "out there" and our bodies and minds as "me." This leads to a sense of isolation, a sort of "me-against-the-world" attitude that is actually quite lonely. As Ben Connelly summarizes, the Buddha taught that our tendency to "objectify [ourselves and] the world causes us to feel alienated. It causes us to feel frustrated. We lose the things we want to hold. We harm people because we are trying to hold on, and we think we've got it all figured out and they are wrong." 

We might therefore imagine that senses of self are a problem. But senses of self and conceptions of others actually help us distinguish one wave from another in this vast ocean of being. This is the basis of healthy boundaries. We describe this capacity to distinguish "this from that" as the "relative truth," and without this capacity, we might try to eat cars. We could not survive. 

Our sense of self also sometimes offers helpful information for us in distinguishing what is beneficial from what is harmful. When I help students in my English classes, I might feel happy for them and good about my teaching. Then, as I did earlier this week when frustrated with a student, I might make a sarcastic joke, see the student's reaction, and feel bad. The Flower Ornament (Avatamsaka) Sutra describes shame and conscience as two of the "ten inexhaustible treasures" of the bodhisattva. Even the painful sense of self associated with shame can guide our actions as bodhisattvas. Inspired by this dropping sensation in my gut, I reflected on the precepts, apologized, and vowed to do better.

Vows are deep intentions that help transform our habitual responses. Accordding to the Yogacara, intentions (sometimes called impressions) integrate into our store consciousness, or our unconscious mind, which for now we might think of as our mind's past conditioning and the way it shapes our perceptions and habitual responses. In the Yogacara, this conditioning is described as the 8th level of consciousness, whereas Buddha referred to this simply as karma. This past conditioning goes back innumerable generations -- yet another example of how even unconscious aspects of ourselves are born of relation. This conditioning may sound like a fixed self, but this is not the case. In the same way that our body is conditioned by our experiences, so are our potential habit-minds. We can be mindful of our harmful tendencies, then vow to be beneficial instead. In this way, we plant new seeds that ripen and grow.

In a sense, every choice we make ripples back through time, reconditioning our past conditioning while saving others from our unkind habits. Research shows that even our memories change every time we remember, as remembering involves the imagination. If our past conditioning were a fixed entity, we could never change, but we can and do change over time. In this sense, the notion of no fixed self is liberating, opening up possibilities. For me, the engine of transformation is our Bodhisattva Vows. Working mindfully with the Precepts, we wake up to our harmful habitual responses and vow to do better, softening old habit-minds and opening the heart.

Sometimes our past conditioning is painful or frightening. We may have experienced trauma in the past. We might get triggered in the present and spin off into disproportionate feelings of shame/blame -- one of the more painful versions of self/other that there is. We may not be able to distinguish the triggering event from the conditioning traumatic experience. The Buddha taught that suffering that is not felt thoroughly repeats endlessly. Zazen can offer space for us to feel and heal those old wounds. 

We may also need other forms of support in the "transformation of consciousness," another phrase from the Yogacara. We do need to be careful in how we interpret this phrase. This does not mean there is a "thing" called consciousness that transforms; consciousness is a dependently arisen process or flow that is always transforming, not a thing with abiding selfhood. In the deepest sense, we are simply realizing our flowing nature and the flowing nature of all phenomena. Sometimes, however, we may need to prepare the path. My personal journey included five years of therapy. One who has faced toxic racism may benefit from cultivating rich, ancestral connections and affirming communities, in part to nourish positive senses of self through supportive relationships. "Someone from a marginalised race or group may have experienced so many microaggressions that they subconsciously start moving through the world as if their personhood is not valid and welcome" (Shutz). We may need to nourish connections with our own bodies and positive senses of who we are before, or at least alongside, delving deeply into the nature of the self, or introspection can feel oppressive and triggering. Different histories and habit minds call for different skillful means, which is why we tend to consider personal practices individually during dokusan.

But the Buddha also taught that we cannot ultimately alleviate all suffering on the relative level alone. In the same way that we can have some affect on the conditioning of our body, we can have some effect on the conditioning of our habit-minds, but there is also much that is out of our control. Our body can become ill. We might suddenly lose our job or our family. Causes and conditions are endless, and they condition us. And we will all face sickness, old age, death, and losing everything and everyone we love. We can't hold onto anything, so there is no way to shore up identity. Everything is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. Clinging and aversion are painful forms of adventitious suffering -- a second arrow landing in the original wound.

Recognizing impermanence can taste like bitter medicine, but it generates "a sense of urgency" in our practice, inviting us deeper into the Dharma. Indeed, we are invited to turn toward our suffering, to hold and care for it like a child, to even love it as a manifestation of the aliveness of being. And it turns out that this aliveness can reveal to us the blessing of thusness, which is nothing other than the true nature of our suffering. What is this true nature? 

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “any teaching that does not bear the dharma seals of impermanence, non-self, and nirvana cannot be said to be the teaching of the Buddha." As Enji reiterates in these sections, when we operate only on the relative level, we tend to chase dreams of happiness endlessly and become "disturbed that [we] have lost the original nature" and "wander through the six dispositions and four kinds of births." (These are the ways we are born into the six realms described in section two above.) To be free of birth and death, we must "break up the root of ignorance" regarding our true nature.

Hakuin Ekaku, Torei Enji's teacher, wrote, "self nature is no nature." Form is exactly emptiness. The Buddha described himself as a "flowing occurrence" and challenged our notion of static selves. In looking deeply, rather than innate selfhood, he says that we find a flow of changing elements. There are no fundamental building blocks or first causes, only the flow of thoughts and sensations. Every cell in our body is replaced over time. Even our "store consciousness," our previous conditioning and karmic ripening, is modified with every new experience. There is nothing permanent anywhere. Reality and everything in it is fundamentally ungraspable. The water of the river is ever-changing. Ben Connelly writes, "letting go of the sense that we are a self experiencing things is the way to enter this mysterious flowing unfolding." So from the perspective of time, we find non-self.

This is also true from the perspective of space. TNH writes, "The self is made of non-self elements.” He likens the self to a rainbow. The rainbow is nothing without the non-rainbow elements of water, sunlight, the air, the witness, and the earth on which the witness stands. It takes a universe to produce a rainbow. 

We too are made of non-self elements -- air, words, passing feelings, the sounds of the world, and one another. In this moment, you are part of my life, and I am part of your life. My life is not a separate thing. Senses of self also arise out of causes and conditions and shape-shift with every encounter. Look deeply into them to see that senses of self reflect relations. I am only a father because of my children.

For me, the point is not to be rid of senses of self or even to be rid of suffering. It is important to fully embody roles and hearts in this world. We can even appreciate dependently arisen senses of who we are. Any of us who are struggling might remember our relationship with a parent, teacher, ancestor, or even a child that brought us a sense of strength, joy, and ease. Remembering joyful times with my children can open my heart when I’m struggling. But as any parent knows, we don't always feel like wonderful parents. Everything changes. So for me, the most profound medicine is the recognition that looking deeply into senses of self or any form of suffering, we come to see that all mental formations are inherently ephemeral, born out of ever-changing causes and conditions. Identity is not innate but based in ever-changing relations. This too shall pass. 

Recognizing identity as a shapeshifting, dependent arising rather than unchanging and innate can feel rather vulnerable, and we might wish to avoid that sense of vulnerability, but since senses of self lack any fixed essences, we don't need to struggle with them. After all, they are empty of any fixed referent and are thus not really a problem. While it is pleasant and perhaps sometimes skillful to invoke positive senses of self, our liberation does not ultimately depend on the content of our minds but on our seeing the true nature of that content, which is sometimes expressed as no nature at all. This is our true refuge, that which allows us to be a refuge for all beings, as all beings reside in our hearts. 

There is a lightness and connectedness in this experience of "non-self" -- a kind of “enlightenment,” an unburdening of this existential self-centered concern that we have carried. To taste the emptiness of the phenomenal world is beyond words — yet the ancestors point with poetry: “How boundless and free is the sky of samadhi. How bright the full moon of wisdom” (Hakuin). The world is vast and wide....

Recognizing interdependence also leads us to care for all beings as our own life. Thus, we "sport in the ocean of vows" as bodhisattvas. Because we are interwoven, what we do ripples through the interdependent web of causality, transforming karma not only for ourselves but for all beings with whom we are “quantumly entangled.” So non-self does not render life meaningless. On the contrary, since all things are malleable and interconnected, the teaching of non-self actually means that every action we take matters! So please, hear the heart's call, and do something beneficial if you can. Your action will ripple through the entire universe.

And, having said all this, even “non-separation” or "non-self" doesn’t capture the living mystery. No metaphors do. The absolute equality of emptiness and form undermines even our tendency to turn emptiness into a "thing." Yes, waves are merely water, but it is also true that each wave is a dynamic expression of the ocean, beautiful in its particularity and fluidity. "Emptiness does not negate particularity. When we cling to notions even of emptiness, we can get lost in nondiscrimination. We may "form a fixed belief that the dharmakaya (emptiness) is [our] true self. Any fixed belief about the true self is limited and false and thus an illness. As soon as you say, 'this is the true self,' it is no longer your true self. If there is any separate awareness of the dharmakaya, a view of [fixed] self still persists, so there is still sickness. Ultimately there's not even a square inch of ground on which to stand. Stop subtly looking for a place to hang your hat. Don't stand still; don't rest anywhere" (Gerry Shishin Wick, italics mine). 

We might also imagine that insight will eliminate all suffering in our lives. I do not think this is the case. Insight won’t stop "suffering" from arising, but taking off our armor, softening, allowing suffering to enter our practice and bearing witness again and again to its arising and dissolution does alleviate the suffering associated with essentialism -- the notion that things have fixed essences. As we encounter what we think of as suffering with nonjudgmental awareness, "suffering" is no longer suffering but something more like raw energy flowing through boundless awareness. It is simply "thus," an expression of the aliveness. Sometimes we call this "suchness" -- the sharp taste of lemon on a humid day, a beautiful rainbow in a gray sky, a clanging radiator on a cold evening, or the unfolding of grief and tears after losing a loved one. Suchness is just our life, exactly as it is, which is quite beyond conception.

And, attach to any idea, even “suchness,” and we lose touch with visceral presence. As Enji's teacher Hakuin wrote, "this very place is the lotus land; this very body, the Buddha.” Awakening is realizing what we actually are. No words or concept can capture the incomprehensible aliveness (though words and concepts are themselves manifestations). Words are like trying to capture the spring breeze in a bottle. There really is no last word in Zen.

So I think the most important thing is to just keep practicing. This is the heart of Enji's encouragement. Enji calls this "progressive practice." We just take the next step and "give up lesser enlightenments." We open beyond conceptual maps without excluding thoughts. Thoughts just arise and fall away. As Uchiyama Roshi wrote, "open the hand of thought" endlessly. Sit still and ask, "Who hears? What feels? What cognizes?"

What is? Not knowing is most intimate. Just allow the mystery to come forth, exactly as it is, and offer your most beneficial response. This is the life of the bodhisattva.

Sitting with sangha and koan practice with a trained teacher are powerful means to explore all these aspects of the dharma without getting stuck anywhere. We just can't do it alone, for we end up unconsciously reifying understandings and getting stuck. But with together-practice, "eventually, you return to the nature of all Buddhas. This is called fulfilling Buddhahood."

So, what is this Buddhahood?

The First Noble Truth: A Gateless Gate to the Four Noble Truths

The Tao of Pooh complains that Buddhism seems too dire with all its talk of suffering. People who are hurting want to be free from suffering and understandably want to pursue happiness. Some may also be afraid that if they let suffering be, they may become overwhelmed by it.

Of course, skillful means that alleviate suffering are helpful in some situations. For example it is sometimes possible to shift our attitudes or behaviors and feel better.

But we can become overly focused on habitually avoiding pain, and then we close off our hearts and lose the good stuff too, like love and compassion. As Gibran writes, joy and sorrow are inseparable. Look deeply into joy and sorrow is there. Look deeply into sorrow and joy is there. That which causes grief once caused us great happiness. Grief is a form of love. Only the veil of time separates them.

Buddhism offers a path to be free in the deepest sense, to be free not from but amidst suffering, to be free to feel both joy AND sorrow. 

Yes, there’s joy too! But we usually don’t need as much help accepting joy in our lives. Buddha shared the first Noble Truth that life includes suffering to specifically name it as a gateway to insight. He was saying, “Let’s begin by acknowledging and turning toward that which we usually try to deny. We’ve tried endlessly to avoid suffering by indulging our many desires and fantasies. How’d that work out? How about if we try something different.” 

Photo by Sandra Raponi

We do need help caring for and looking deeply into our suffering. That’s why the first teaching Buddha offered after his awakening was, “Life includes suffering.” There is not only light; there is also shadow.

We may want to skip this teaching to get to the "good stuff," but that's just more of our dualistic thinking trying to take charge again. That's just more being driven by desire to avoid life as it is, which Buddha clearly states is the source of our deepest pain. We might imagine that we can bypass looking deeply into our suffering and skip to the enlightenment part. We may chase mental states, seeking to be something other than what we are and running on the hamster wheel of self-improvement, ironically getting more self-involved and worn out. We may go into denial and repress our feelings. In this practice, our pain lingers under the surface of a mask that we wear. We may even judge ourselves and others when we feel unhappy, as if it is a failure of our practice. Ironically, the longing to escape pain is actually the greatest suffering. It can even take the form of suicidal ideation. 

Trungpa describes these strategies to avoid pain as the armor we wear, and it’s a heavy burden. We put on this armor imagining that we can separate ourselves from the causes and conditions that give rise to suffering in the world. Underlying this hope to protect ourselves is a belief in ourselves as separate entities, a "distorted view of reality, with each of us as selves at the center of their own universe, and everything else arrayed around us as our objects" which we try to manipulate for our own ends. "That leads to... anxiety about the preservation of the welfare of the self. All of this leads to greed, anger, fear, conflict, and general unhappiness" (Garfield).

We may try to gain control over anything that causes us suffering, but we just aren’t in control of many of the most important aspects of our lives. We did not choose when we were born, and we don’t get to avoid sickness, old age, death, and losing everything and everyone we love. The more we meditate, the more we see that we don't really have control over our thoughts and feelings either. As Trungpa says, “it’s completely hopeless.” This is why there are Buddhist books called The Wisdom of No Escape, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, and If You’re Lucky, Your Heart Will Break. Most of us need permission to simply feel our feelings and be whatever we are. Sangha is a safe place to have a broken heart. I wish it for you.

Why? Because when we turn toward the relative truth of suffering, toward what we think of as suffering, we find the absolute truth that there is no suffering. Buddhism is not so dire after all! 

One painful obstruction on the path is the delusive certainty that our life is Samsara and not Nirvana. Samsara is actually not separate from Nirvana. Indeed, get rid of Samsara, and there is no Nirvana. Get rid of the mud, and there is no lotus. Get rid of sorrow and there is no joy. Get rid of delusion and there is no enlightenment. Get rid of suffering and there is no compassion. Emptiness is exactly form.

We need encouragement and courage to look deeply into suffering with the eye of practice to see this for ourselves. We need to practice taking off our armor and opening our hearts. We practice opening our hearts while doing zazen. Practice does not mean believing our stories, getting caught up in them, and enacting them. It does not mean indulging self-reifying mental formations that might lead us to cause harm. Practicing zazen means sitting still, being quiet, and paying attention -- actually feeling all our sensations, including joy and pain, rather than getting wrapped up in our ideas. It means watching suffering arise and dissolve. It means watching senses of self come and go. Zazen is a great teacher, far better than philosophy. 

In zazen, rather than discovering any fixed essence in our suffering, we discover impermanence and flow. We also see that there is no innate, separate self to protect. 

Just like suffering, the self is made of nonself elements (water, wind, thoughts, feelings, etc.), all of which are constantly changing. We can let go of the relentless quest to control our experience and be the vastness unfolding. This is a practice of compassion: letting be. This is a practice of wisdom: looking deeply. This is a practice of vulnerability: opening to the thusness of our lives. This very life is boundless! It is not bounded by suffering after all. But we must see this for ourselves in practice.

In zazen, we become a refuge for ourselves and all beings. We discover an utterly reliable beauty, aliveness, and spaciousness that does not depend upon the content of our minds. This is the deepest form of liberation. This is the third and fourth noble truths realized: there is an end of suffering, and we find it right in the midst of suffering.

"When you understand the mind darkened by ignorance and see its real nature, then ignorance becomes identical to the enlightened nature" (Torei Enji). Turn around the light and shine it within, and the universe sings in our hearts. This is the most profoundly salvific Dharma.