Zen in Flux

At Zen Center this morning, our lay training group met to discuss what the purpose and focus of our group should be. It's been about two and half years since this experiment began, and although some things have changed, I really think the heart of our work has been to unearth models for doing/embodying Zen practice as lay people in the 21st century.

Given that the forms and many of the emphasized teachings we inherited from our Japanese ancestors were designed with monastics in mind, this has been kind of a koan for our sangha. None of us are quite sure what it is that this group is doing together. We are filled with questions about Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, and the rest of the Eightfold Path. We are often challenged by what "commitment" means when everyone is living diverse lives, with a diverse set of issues and needs. We aren't even sure what the word "training" means in a lay context.

I know this is also going on all over the Buddhist world these days. Indeed, there seems to be a lot of flux in general in our world right now. Perhaps it's just that the truth of never ending change is simply more manifest - literally in our faces. However, something about the speed of flux feels - on a deep level - different from even the recent past.

Anyway, I want to offer you all some of what we are calling the "purpose points" for our Lay Training Group. These are things we came up with this morning, but I see them as the fruit of decades worth of individual and collective practice. Everyone in the group has been a Zen student for a decade or more, which makes it all the more rich in my view.

At the same time, I'd say we are mucking around in a semi-dark cave. Grounded enough that we are able to hang with uncertainty. But also aware of the fact that in some ways, we don't know any more than a total beginner.

Here are some of the highlight "Purpose points," in no particular order.


1. Balance – Structure/open inquiry

2. Shared leadership of larger community

3. Focus on practice in daily life, sharing/exploring how to do "lay practice"

4. Embodying active listening

5. Intimacy

6. Repentance to each other

7. Community/connection/friendship

8. Ritual and organized dharma study

If anyone out there has experienced similar group processes in their spiritual community, I'd love to hear from you in the comments section. And of course, all comments are welcome, regardless of whether you have similar experiences or not.

Beware of the Consumer Driven Mentality

This Yoga Journal article has some interesting stuff in it. I've always liked the idea of envisioning yourself as already awakened, and doing things in your daily life from that place. However, I'd like to take up the following paragraph to consider a little more closely.

This all-or-nothing notion of enlightenment is deeply rooted, and insidious. I often get questions from students who experience an expansion of consciousness and then worry, "But if I keep doing this, will I have to give up my family? Will I lose my personality?" If we think pursuing high states of consciousness means giving up other aspects of life, it won't seem like an attractive option. On the flip side, we may be attracted to the idea of enlightenment yet imagine it to be a way of bypassing ordinary challenges and irritations, and then we may get discouraged if we don't experience an immediate transformation, or get frustrated when we aren't lifted miraculously beyond the everyday demands of work and family relationships.

While I agree with the insidiousness of that all-or-nothing view many folks have around enlightenment, I find the downplaying of renunciation troubling. Although I think Sally Kempton is mostly pointing to not having to give up your most important relationships, or all your possessions, it's really easy to mistake that caution for a declaration that we can basically have it all. It takes effort to break through the consumer driven mentality so many of us are surrounded by and internalized, and as such, it's important for writers and spiritual teachers to take that mentality head on, to assume that it may still be present in the audience members, be they serious students or simply interested parties.

The way I see it, even if you maintain certain relationships, careers, and whatnot, the more committed you become to living a spiritual path, the more likely it is that you'll shed parts of your life that once might have been cherished. In other words, renunciation - either deliberately or more naturally unfolding, will be a part of your life, and it's important to figure out ways to speak about that without sounding dour and/or severe.

When I look at my own life, there are definitely things that have diminished or disappeared completely. And while some of these changes are normal shifts that can happen to anyone, some it is clearly a result of spiritual commitment. Entertainment, like music concerts and sporting events, play a much less central role in my life these days. Friends that were once central figures in my life are no longer so. I don't watch TV anymore; I go shopping much less than I did in the past. I used to be fairly obsessed with "looking good," and more recently appearing "Zen-like" - neither of which have such a major hold on me anymore.

However, more than any of that, I believe that commitment to a spiritual path often leads to a slow abandonment of selfishness and self-cherishing. That is, if you learn to be honest with yourself, and apply the teachings you're studying in a deliberate, sometimes ruthless manner on a consistent basis.

There are other ways you could read Kempton's paragraph above, I simply wanted to highlight what I feel is a commonplace lack of challenging the basic, collective conditioning that hinders so many of us. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.

Buddhist Lay Practice in History

The Eighth Century Chinese Chan (Zen) Master Layman Pang understood that Buddhist practice does not have a fixed form to be followed by all. But while he is remembered amongst the famous teachers of the past, in my opinion, it was the synergy of the family as a whole that led to such great understanding.

Here is a snippet of their story:

Originally from Hengyang in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, Pang was a successful merchant with a wife, son, and daughter. The family's wealth allowed them to devote their time to study of the Buddhist sūtras, in which they all became well-versed. Pang's daughter Ling Zhao was particularly adept, and at one point even seems to be have been more advanced and wise than her father, as the following story illustrates:

“ The Layman was sitting in his thatched cottage one day [studying the sūtras]. "Difficult, difficult," he said; "like trying to scatter ten measures of sesame seed all over a tree." "Easy, easy," Mrs. Pang said; "like touching your feet to the ground when you get out of bed." "Neither difficult nor easy," Ling Zhao said; "on the hundred grass tips, the great Masters' meaning."[1] ”

After Pang had retired from his profession, he is said to have begun to worry about the spiritual dangers of his material wealth, and so he placed all of his possessions in a boat which he then sunk in a river.

There are so many learnings to be gleaned from this tiny bit of narrative about them. Notice the way material possessions are dealt with. They clearly benefited from having some wealth, given the freed time for Buddhist study it allowed them. In fact, you can take from this that if what you have materially gives you more time to study and practice, then it's beneficial in your life. Yet, at a certain point, there was also a realization that attachment to possessions is commonplace, and a great hindrance, and thus needs to be abandoned. The dramatic sinking of the family's valuables puts one hell of an exclamation point on that teaching, but I do wonder if it might have been more powerful to hear that the Pangs gave their wealth to another family or individual desiring to have time for study and practice. This is one of the challenges I have always had with the heavy emphasis on poverty and material renunciation in the old stories. That works fine for monastics and wandering individuals, but it's unrealistic for most lay practitioners. With that, I still think theirs is an example for all of us today, who struggle with views about both wealth and poverty.

The second learning from this story is the relational quality of practice. This simple story of a father studying the sutras, and a mother and daughter responding to his comments with their own insights is an important reminder to those of us who have been steeped a bit too much in "just sitting" practice. Chan/Zen is relational. Awakening is relational. Whatever wisdom Layman Pang developed over his lifetime and infused into his poems and sayings came together through studies and practice with his family, interactions with his customers (as a merchant), and practice with other Chan teachers of the day. Even if we each must break through the veil covering the truth on our own, it's our relationships (both with humans and with the entire universe of beings) that provide the ground for awakening.

A third learning, which maybe is less apparent, is that if you look closely enough at the old stories, you'll discover brilliance that hasn't been elevated into the traditional canon. We know very little about Ling Zhao, yet her appearance as a young woman of wisdom is just one of many examples throughout old Buddhist stories. And you can bet that for every Layman Pang and Ling Zhao, there were plenty more who lived unrecorded lives, perhaps completely unrecognized outside of the small community they came from.

It tended to be the monastics who were educated, who wrote down the stories, and who passed along what was considered to be the teachings of the day. So, we're left with a partial record of events, persons, and practices - one that privileged monastics, privileged men, and privileged those who had wealth in their lives at some point.

Even so, this doesn't mean we can't uncover some of the wisdom of great lay practitioners of the past. We can. This little story offers a lot, and it's just one of many. Instead of relying solely on the teachings of modern and current practitioners, I think it's wise to dig into the past - to glean what we can from those who came long before us.

Zen and the Three Stages of Efforting

I had a full day at the zen center today, mostly participating in a half day retreat/workshop on chapter 28 of Dogen's Shobogenzo. I'll write something about it another day; I have a bit of a headache from working with it all day. Before Dogen, we had meeting of what we have been calling our "lay training group." We dug in deep on the question of what is "lay Zen practice" anyway, something that I think many practitioners around the world are trying to figure out to some degree or another. I was also scheduled to give the talk for the group, and so I did - about Right Effort, which fits right in to considerations about how rigorous people who live in the world of jobs and bills and family might practice.

One of the things I have experienced this fall is what I will call the three stages of efforting. Perhaps this could be refined into even more subtle breakdowns, but what I have seen again and again are appearances of the three that I will talk about now.

Stage 1: Self-Driven Effort

This is the kind of effort we normally think of when the word effort comes up. It's that pushing, sometimes forcing exertion done to achieve some goal. You push down hard on the shovel head, and soil and rocks come up. You see your mind wandering in meditation and you drag it back to your breath or some other focus.

One of the troubles with this kind of effort is that it's usually done in service to an "I" that you believe is in need of something. It's often also attached to a particular outcome. And there frequently is at least a bit of violence involved, and sometimes much more than that.

Stage 2: Jumpstarting Effort

Jumpstarting effort begins the same way that self-driven effort does, but it's employed differently. It's a push at the beginning to get the ball rolling, but once things are going, it drops away. An example from my meditation practice might help here. One of the phrases in the Anapanasati Sutra, which we've been studying at zen center this fall, is "gladdening the mind." So, during one period of zazen, I decided to ride that phrase on my breath, to work with it. I began by actually saying the phrase to myself as I breathed in. "Gladdening the mind." Breathing out, "Gladdening the mind." This initial push went on for a few minutes, and then it just dropped away, and there was just riding and maybe gladdening going on. So, that's what I mean by "jumpstarting" - it's like the jumper cables on a dead car battery. You don't drive around with the cables on; you only use them to get things going.

Stage 3: Selfless Efforting

This is the point at which the efforting is coming out of total connection to the present. It doesn't feel like "effort" at all, and yet something is happening. It isn't "you" doing it; it's the functioning of the whole works of life. Here, there is no attachment to a particular outcome, nor any specific goal desired to be achieved. You might be aimed in a particular direction - like getting the garden bed ready for winter - but what's happening isn't hitched to achieving that.

From my experience, this is a place of great trust. You have to trust in what's emerging, moment by moment, for this efforting to emerge itself.

Now, perhaps you're thinking that stage 1 is bad and stage 3 is wonderful. I'd like to discourage that kind of thinking.

The first three or four years I practiced Zen, I was very much living a stage 1 effort. Not always, but frequently. I sat hours and hours of zazen. I read piles of dharma books. I pushed myself to do retreats, even when I didn't have much energy. When I saw my mind wander while sitting, I'd get rough, thinking I was failing or not doing good enough because I was always thinking and feeling shitty. (This could be called being "too tight.")

After a certain point, the experience I had began to shift towards the other two stages of efforting. There was more flow, more spaciousness, and less pushing really hard. But at the same time, I was also experiencing what I'd call "burn out" from the previous years, so while things started to open up for me, I also got lazy, and almost quit formally practicing all together. (This might be called being "too loose")

Going through jukai and then becoming part of this lay practice group brought about a refocus for me. And what once was needed - stage one effort - came back into play. It can be considered "wrong effort" in that it's self-driven, but at the same time, I seemed to have to do some of that pushing and driving myself again into order to remind myself why this kind of working in the world isn't terribly helpful. This, to me, is a way to understand how samsara can be said to contain a gate into nirvana. Another way to put this might be to say sometimes you have to do something wrong in order to see how to do it right.

The fascinating thing about these stages is that during a single period of meditation, or while doing a single task, you might experience all three of them, maybe multiple times. You're mopping the floor. It's really dirty in one corner, and you get frustrated, and start pushing hard on the mop. Then you see the rest of the floor, or look at the mop in a certain way, and that efforting drops away. Then maybe the phone rings, you stop, answer the phone, come back, and need to jumpstart the process with a bit of effort, which leads you back into the flow of the moment, and there you are, flowing with the mopping, until you think about your cranky co-worker and get upset and find yourself back at pushing the damned mop across the floor.

I think, in the end, lay practice life is exactly like this. There are times when you have to push, have to ramp it up. There are other times where you subsist well on less formal practice, going along applying what you have learned with an interspersing of jumpstarting. And for some, it's just functioning in that self-less efforting. They do lots of formal practice, or not. But whatever their life is in the moment, it feels fairly effortless, even though the person might be quite busy in a conventional sense.

Anyway, this is what I have seen and experienced recently. Perhaps it might be useful for someone out there. In any case, it's really interesting to take a look at how effort works in your life. Go ahead and check it out for yourself. Maybe you have something to add that I have missed.