• chapter four •
Someone of deep realization—how is it that such a person is sitting on the point of a needle?
—Miscellaneous Koans
I was participating in what slowly became a most remarkable land-healing ceremony with an Aboriginal elder. After painting himself up he began carefully applying ochre markings to my forehead and shoulders as well. I asked why I needed them. “So the spirits can see you,” he said, mildly surprised by the question.
Though Dongshan spent his whole life at the temple, he could not locate so much as a trace of the local tutelary earth spirit in the grounds of the temple, search though he might. But one day a monk was scattering some leftover grain in front of the kitchen. Dongshan saw this and chastised him angrily: “How could you be so wasteful of community supplies!”
At that moment the earth spirit detected Dongshan and paid him homage. It seems he’d been keen to do so all along. He just couldn’t spot him until this tiny flare of anger lit up the human landscape.
Dongshan, like the elder teacher who said, “I have already become like this,” was difficult to see clearly, if you were looking with earth-spirit eyes that take in a seamless reality, a concordance of infinitely woven and fluid relationship, rather than a vast array of discrete “things.” Beings were already hard to see as separate from the earth, through the eyes of an earth spirit. And Dongshan had become more and more “like this,” making him an especially tricky customer. But at that moment, Dongshan became visible, as a man roused to anger and intent upon restoring the frugal practice of the monastery to the mind of someone in error. A person of right and wrong appeared for a moment—and the earth spirit finally could see the lineaments of human being.
Mind you, that frugal cast of mind is the mind of the earth: The precursor to the Kyoto Protocol was the Stockholm Conference, and here is its official final statement issued in 1972:
Life holds to one central truth: that all matter and energy needed for life moves in great closed circles from which nothing escapes and to which only the driving fire of the sun is added. Life devours itself: everything that eats is itself eaten; every chemical that is made by life can be broken down by life; all the sunlight that can be used is used. Of all that there is on earth, nothing is taken away by life, and nothing is added by life—but nearly everything is used by life, used and reused in thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains of plants and animals and back again to the beginning.
Dongshan’s anger in one sense was in accord with a passionate subduing of himself to the mind shared with the earth. No wonder the earth spirit paid him homage. But how interesting that it took a moment of the “passions” to let the mind of the earth spot Dongshan! A moment when the point of the needle unseated Dongshan just enough to break into anger and become visibly human. And a moment when the point of the needle no doubt reached the monk, in a valuable way.
Anger is one of the most interesting of the strong emotions that Buddhism traditionally works to extinguish, because it can save as well as destroy. “This must stop!”—the roused clarity of indignation at abuse or exploitation, the nonnegotiable “No!” that’s a first move of stopping and ameliorating harm and damage to people and the earth—can be a surge of empathic and compassionate anger that knows clearly what must be opposed at a critical moment.
Yet even that anger can grow caught in right and wrong. When we are so very right we are already subtly wrong. Anger motivated by what is completely clear and clean right to the bottom is rare upon the earth. Especially since we are all so implicated in each other. In the case of harm to the earth, for example, who among us is without damage to the earth and can cast a first stone? As Robert Hass posed the dilemma, that leaves no one and nothing out of this critical moment in human time and its only means of resolution: “We are the only protectors; and we are the thing that needs to be protected; and we are what it needs to be protected from.”
Actually Dongshan’s anger accords closely with this closed loop of understanding and mutuality that encircles the earth; it was on behalf of the sanctity of community, and the complete naturalness of protecting that which protects, that he chastised that startled monk.
As we struggle to make a demanding turn from “subduing the earth” to recognizing and subduing the alienated “extractive” mindset that overwhelms the ability of the earth to self-renew, anger can both rouse and divide people in their responding. Like all the strong emotions, anger remains an informative yet tricky character. While it can rouse people to action, anger is unlikely to evoke much of the real depth implicit in “a communion of subjects,” which motivates the collective strength of community.
And like all the strong emotions, anger is complex, occupying a wide spectrum of energy and ways of living out that energy. There’s the anger that slowly eats the soul, brutalizes others, kills or suffocates lives, including the one consumed by it, or prepared to indulge their rage in grandiose terms. Anger dismisses boundaries and is aggressively prepared to judge and invade another. There is cold anger that immobilizes relationship, hot anger that scares, bottled anger that hangs in the air as threat, passive aggression that plays the victim and denies all knowledge of any destructive agency . . . Hot or cold, anger is painful to feel, a most painful needle to sit on, painful to suffer as its victim. Momentarily satisfying to explode, immediately shameful when the impotence within it is so openly displayed. And even more shameful when you recognize its impact on the ones you love.
And yet . . .
Frailty in Emptiness
The passions—including the powerfully compulsive ones—are all intensely human dharma gates. Animals display many of these strong states along with us, but perhaps what makes the passions human, and certainly what makes them dharma gates, is that we identify them, can ponder them, resist or indulge them, avoid or form a more self-aware relationship with them—and in orthodox Buddhist terms, can ideally pacify, cool, and subdue them to the point of “blowing them out.”
But the Red Thread koan exposes the deeply instructive entanglement of human frailty with boundless emptiness; rather than bowing to Buddhist orthodoxy it reasserts that even the most realized states of mind are not detached from the vermilion thread of vividly human life, its hot states, cold states, terrors, and wonders.
Zhaozhou opens the door to this radically inclusive mind when he said, “Buddha is compulsive passions, compulsive passions are Buddha.” Might they be gates to awakening? What kind of open response might find them gateless and beckoning toward more complete life, rather than closing shut upon a besieged-feeling self and sending it on a search for purity?
His words draw awakened mind and strong states of emotion into a congruity to be discovered, identifies a mutuality to be explored. Zhaozhou is daring us to realize these two as not two; to see how they cannot be separated, but arrive exactly together. To see compulsive passions and Buddha mind as empty, inseparable, and at home in the plenum. Equanimity is nothing if it recoils from this. But this is just the start of the human business with the passions.
A monk asked, perhaps rather shocked, “In whom does Buddha cause passion?” If Buddha is compulsive passions, what hope is there for anyone! What can be done with endless blind passions? They’re painful, frightening, tearing down your careful equanimity. How can we escape, get clean as a whistle, pure as snow, scot-free from all such suffering? Zhaozhou “reassured” him, “Buddha causes passions in all of us.”
The monk asked, “How should we get rid of them?” Zhaozhou simply turns the question round as a light that illuminates the monk’s fear and may let him see through it: “Why should we get rid of them?”
Even if we could escape the strong currents of feeling that come with being alive, this side of the grave, what would that leave of us? Realization itself is a kind of marvelously coherent register of ecstasis: a quietly but deeply impassioned refining fire of awareness. The path to it and beyond is strewn with bright and solemn feelings, emotional and physical pain barriers, through which to see always more deeply into the nature of this self. Realization is not a finalized state but just initiation into practice in a new, more exacting register.
Bodhicitta, the desire to awaken, the motivating force of every step of practice, is itself a constellation of strong emotion and discipline—a kind of rigorous love and loving rigor. And it is human—a humanness shaped by an exceptionally focused intention to no longer stand subtly apart from this.
Wave after Wave
Xuedou (1105–1192) said, “The dragon’s jewel is found in every wave; looking for the moon, it is found in this wave, in the next.” I find this a beautiful image of the ever-shifting sinuous movement of luminous mind as it freely swims and rides the very element of “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” in wave after wave of human circumstance.
Dragons are said to enjoy their jewels. Though no dragon has ever mentioned why, in every culture dragons seem to possess jewels, sometimes guarding them very jealously. The implication is that these are the jewels of great price, inviting great effort to reach for them. I take the dragon’s jewel in Xuedou’s words here to be prajna, the adamantine human faculty of awakening. “Looking for the moon” means seeking enlightenment; the moon in the night sky is the old way of evoking “the mind awake,” the light of clarity brilliant in the dark of non-differentiation.
Dragons, which, from a Chinese point of view, call up the most creative energy of earth and of mind that flows direct from the mysterious source, or Dao—are themselves found always in waves or ripples of water or cloud, never more than half-emerging, never separable from their element and self-nature, now appearing now disappearing but always present in wave after wave, ripple after ripple.
In every wave of circumstance that troubles or rocks the heart, it seems worth really looking hard: Is that dragon, is that wave? Can difficulty ever be separated from dharma gate? Pablo Neruda once remarked, “I have never seen a wave I did not admire.” This is exactly the sense of curiosity, wonder, and inevitable gratitude that builds when practice is seen not as a dream of purifying the mind, but a radical move of noticing and including—the mind and heart that ultimately can find no outside to Mind.
But from the orthodox Buddhist point of view, even the human experience of love that weaves us into life is viewed with formal reserve and wariness. Infinite pains are taken to remove the heat of passion.
The four “Brahma Viharas,” or “noble abodes” of the heart, skillfully parse love into the forms it takes when self-centeredness and self-consciousness have been tamed, lie low, or drop away: They are the responsive and impartial states of loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. All four rest in tranquil awareness, many careful steps of perspective away from the powerful bonds of attachment to another being—marking even a carefully practiced distance from sheer love of being here alive, or fulsome embrace of difficulty as also marvelous, a thing of wonder.
Indeed, from a traditional Buddhist perspective, the final attainment is stepping free forever from the hellish tedium of life after life on the wheel of suffering. The wild, mixed, and hazy forms of human love, seen with these eyes, are snares of attachment that fatally bind you to the wheel of life and death. It’s not hard to see where the sexual pull of women becomes essential to despise; men naturally aim to be Buddhas, but women by nature plot to hold them back with love, children, the daily round of a householder’s responsibilities . . .
Love is not simply posited as a negative emotion, as the undeniable beauty of the four Brahma Viharas makes clear (as long as “equanimity” is understood as deeply generous tolerance rather than “detachment”). But any form of strong, earthy, or “worldly” attachment to another must be avoided, as doomed to be transient and contingent. So the bonds of love are a hindrance to be removed by seeing through to their transience, and the thirst of clinging can’t be slaked but can be cooled, by reflecting on the corruptibility of that which is desired. What fades is contingent, what is contingent is mixed, lacks purity. End of story.
Mixed
Yet we live inside contingency. If you yearn for something pure, the universe is pure contingency. Nothing that is will last—everything is momentary, brief, but also interdependent, empty of any shred of separation. Love—the deep bonds of human attachment to another, to home, to the earth itself—along with the pain of impending mortality, is surely the source of human yearning to preserve what is most dear and yet plainly impermanent. Meanwhile love is also what draws us past the locked-in mind that fears falling into the unimpeded shock of realizing ourselves empty of any shred of separation.
Conventional Buddhist understanding identifies dukkha—suffering, anguish, emotional craving—to arise exactly where we let ourselves get caught in the jaws of attachment and impermanence. Suffering is seen at this point to be indistinguishable from an impossible yearning for that which might be unchanging, non-contingent, in the face of the clear revelation of the universe: that one thing is continually becoming another within an untraceable weave of colliding, coinciding, and interacting influences. Karma. Or if you like, implacable cause and effect.
Yet, Nagarjuna said (in words that anticipate Zhaozhou’s “Buddha is compulsive passions”), “Whatever is contingent is naturally at ease.” Nagarjuna was the second- or third-century founder of the Madhyamaka stream of early Buddhist philosophy of emptiness (shunyata), and part of the Mahayana revolution within Buddhism. So where’s the “naturally at ease” within the savage fact of our precarious, contingent lives? To be contingency and to know it, to embrace our sheer precariousness without reservation, seeking no escape clauses: The way of ease opens there.
Love and Clarity
Perhaps that is a way of seeing what love might be without the fear that underpins a dream of purity, and divides reality accordingly. What would clarity be, without love? “A thousand-year-old peach pit”—here’s a glimpse of what such desiccated purity might look like in a human being. You can almost imagine the newspaper headlines: GRANDMOTHER OF SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BURNS DOWN HERMITAGE!
There was an old woman who regularly gave alms to a hermit living in a little hut she let him use. For twenty years she sent somebody to take the hermit his food each day and wait on him. One day she decided to really find out how it was with the hermit down there in the hut, so deep in his practice. So she told her seventeen-year-old granddaughter to take the food to the hut as usual, but when she got there, to sit on his lap and embrace the monk, asking, “What do you feel now?”
The young girl carried out the old woman’s instructions to the letter. But when she hugged him, the hermit sat stock-still and intoned, “An old tree on a cold cliff. Midwinter, no warmth.” The girl went back and reported her findings to the old woman, who said, “For twenty years I’ve supported this vulgar good-for-nothing!” She stormed over to the hut, threw the monk out, and to leave him in no possible doubt, burned down the hermitage!
Perhaps that dead, lifeless monk, as he presented himself to what he knew was a test, really had extinguished the fire and dried up the juice of his being, realizing the ideal of a thousand-year-old peach pit, never in danger of true life. That sharp-eyed old woman recognized an imposter, a monk sunk in quietude, sidestepping difficulty, mouthing pieties. Waking up is not dying to life but dying to a narrow view of it, waking to its unbounded quality, living into the fact of “no self, no other”—and that’s a love story!
Dogen identifies the four virtues of a bodhisattva very simply: Giving. Using loving words. Completely forgetting the self. Living by helping others. The old woman had practiced some of these but found no sign of them in that monk. Her fire scorched him even before she struck the first match. Did her anger betray the four virtues, or realize them vigorously? In any case, she certainly invested no time in a dead masquerade of sainthood—and that’s already a relief!
What can clarity be, without love? Or love be, without clarity?
Human consciousness is strewn with influential feelings, the wonderfully arresting and troublesome “passions.” Why, asks Zhaozhou, should we get rid of the great challenge they throw at our feet. His Why? also sweeps up How? If we can’t in fact get rid of any of the infinite dharmas—momentary circumstances (including ourselves) that compose singular reality, expressing the universe—we have no choice but to meet the difficult ones directly. To face them not as we would have them be, but as they are. Seeking to purify the mind of defilements evades meeting the singular reality that cannot be defiled. When Dogen said, “There is an ocean of bright clouds. There is an ocean of solemn clouds,” that entire ocean is us.
Anger usually carries a delicate freight of intelligence that needs quiet, unhurried unloading. Such as, “My anger actually tells me not that someone is wrong but that I am afraid.” Possibly then, “My anger threatens to leave me afraid so I lash out before I get there.” “My anger hides from me and only shows itself to others.” The discoveries can be painful, since so-called negative emotions can often be the richest and most valuable intelligence about the self-protective behavior that has painfully confined us.
Sometimes the delay with which this intelligence can arrive makes me think of the second brain that dinosaurs were thought to need. Their brains were at such a far distance from their vastly long tails. Central nervous system impulses might take too long for the creature to respond and protect itself in time, so a second brain somewhere in the tail was kindly hypothesized. The theory was probably more applicable to us. Our own emotional blindness is so hard to see that surely our organs of intelligence about negative emotions must lie far behind us on some far-distant dinosaur tail, only haphazardly and sometimes catching up with us later in time.
But when it does arrive, a spark of emotional intelligence can certainly save the many beings in our immediate reach of a lashing tail. To act upon the anger before understanding can arrive clouds the moment and cuts off all inquiry. Waiting and not reacting, painful as that can be, is where the open response begins that realizes “no-self’—completely at ease in contingency. Or as the Heart Sutra puts it, “With no hindrance in the mind, no hindrance and therefore no fear, far beyond delusive thinking, right here is Nirvana.” Some translate hindrance as “walls”—walls in the heart, walls in the mind.
Zen Master Shibayama (1894–1974) said, “You cannot study Zen apart from your actual self here and now.” What is this volatile human being? What part of it is not me? And is every part of what I find irritating or painful or threatening in other people not also me? This state of “knowing less” is the agreement to sit on the point of a keenly informing needle, which means it is very alive and fluid looking and questioning. Fairly quickly things grow calmer and in growing calmer grow more interesting, less caught in the undertow of strong feeling. An endless fight with the world is abandoned, and there’s more air to breathe.
Hot and Cold States
The koan that most pointedly addresses the latent ability to meet yourself completely in pain and difficulty is Case 43 of The Blue Cliff Record, “Dongshan’s Heat and Cold. A monk asked the teacher, “How can we avoid heat and cold?” Can’t we move somewhere safe from the humiliating extremes of being human?”
Dongshan said there was. “Go to where there’s neither hot nor cold.”
The monk was keen to explore the point with Dongshan. “Where is that place where there is neither hot nor cold?”
Dongshan replied, “When it is hot, kill yourself with heat. When it is cold, kill yourself with cold.”
“Kill yourself” is exactly the practice of letting difficult feeling provoke the skillful move of allowing it to be what it is, clear of judgment or refusal. This eases fear from the feeling and contraction can shift into something more expansive. The feeling is there without “me” importantly up in front of everything, and so what feels hot is just hot, and cold is just cold. Hot or cold pain, grief, anger, waves of emotional energy can just be, ripples passing through, the chance for insight building in their wake.
The very idea of the passions as a “dharma gate” opens the entire world of human experience (sometimes also called suffering) to the light of curiosity and something more like loving acceptance of reality. Dharma gates are not just countless, but every one of them has beauty—even when they open in extremes of shame, pain, anger, or grief—because they will not and cannot exclude human failings as the struggle to become more congruent with reality.
So there can be a strange blessing in being knocked off balance by the “hot” or “cold” extremes of circumstances, into something more interesting and generous than a carefully acceptable sense of “me.” Anger brings a ferocious slamming shut of the heart, even though it can be as hot as love. As Ram Dass suggests, the moment you close your heart to anything in the universe, that thing has you—and has you at the mercy of yourself.
But what about when you’re hammered by the strong emotions—anger, hatred—coming from another person? Managing responses then, and even sorting out “me” from “you,” becomes even more demanding in that swirl of current and countercurrents.
An Open Response to Such Abuse
The eighteenth-century Master Torei Zenji (1721–1792) in his Bodhisattva’s Vow allows no particle of matter, no moment, to be an exception to the “inexhaustible radiance” of just what is. He takes this right into the heart of experiencing hatred and aggression from another and turns that powerful emotional maelstrom in a remarkable direction: “All the more, we can be especially sympathetic and affectionate with foolish people, /Particularly with someone who becomes a sworn enemy and persecutes us with abusive language. /That very abuse conveys the Buddha’s boundless loving-kindness.” Torei’s life and practice was strongly shaped by feeling and dealing with anger and with turning it away from harm and towards discovery. If he can find something generous in the moments of being so strongly confronted and conflicted by anger and hatred, it’s worth getting interested.
But there’s something scandalous and a little perverse at first glance in daring to call such abuse a “compassionate device” to liberate us from suffering we have caused others, and from the “mean-spirited delusions” we’ve used to shield ourselves from that fact “from the beginningless past.” “Beginningless past” does not imply a state of original sin, by the way; it’s just the honest admission “We don’t even know we’re doing it, much of the time.” As social beings sensitive to negative opinion, we seem to come equipped with a tireless public relations agent always ready to contrive a more self-flattering reality.
Torei calls the alternative to this protective or deflective reaction “an open response to such abuse”; with this, he says, “we completely relinquish ourselves, and the most profound and pure faith arises.” It’s a pretty strong challenge: to open your heart in the hell of another’s enmity.
Thomas Merton’s definition of faith is “self-donation”—the self, given away. Torei calls on faith to access deep confidence in the nature of reality but also tells us that faith opens us to reality when we can faithfully give ourselves away—and there we can discover no one to feel abused, no one to feel confronted. He describes this remarkable lifting of all weight from the heart. “At the peak of each thought, a lotus flower opens,” and every point of consciousness reveals the open sky: “We see fully the Tathagata’s radiant light, right where we are.”
Right where we are, with the words I hate you ringing in the air.
Torei—and life for that matter—expects us to rise to the occasion of being human. We’re asked to be “particularly sympathetic and affectionate with foolish people” who offer only enmity and abusive language, accepting that as a radical opportunity to realize the power of getting out of our own way. This can sound like the job description for sainthood, and arguably abuse intended to break the spirit of another human being must always be named and refused.
But an open response does not rule out also openly identifying harm. Its remarkable quality is that when someone hurls abuse and you manage to let that ricochet clean through without finding you on the way, it leaves not a single trace of acrimony or disturbance; instead the ground of what can happen next is oddly tender, intimate, and open, touching “no self, no other.” The preemptive strike of anger in response to an insult simply fails to arise when there’s nowhere for insult to lodge. The open response is really the gift of not-knowing. Strangely at such a moment, the main feeling left in the air is a mild concern for the person. “I hope you’ll be okay, this is dangerous for you.”
Torei’s Vow of the bodhisattva is not directing us toward the need to be compassionate with foolish people, but stepping us through the remarkable function or workings of prajna, which turns things completely around. This turning is not a matter of letting someone’s anger remind you to “be compassionate”; that just resurrects a sense of self in the form of a “giver” of compassion. He’s identifying something far more compelling: How suffering an attack can actually yield the radical move that cannot help but transform suffering, as a deeply imperiled “me” drops away into wide-open state of no-self.
It’s My Fault
Layman Pang (740–808) and his irascibly clear-eyed daughter, Lingzhao, were walking through the city, both carrying handmade baskets for sale, when he tripped as they were walking over a bridge. The Layman tumbled, baskets went flying, and he fell facedown, sprawled on the road.
Lingzhao immediately flung herself down in the dust alongside him. He exclaimed, “What on earth are you doing?” and she explained, “I’m helping.” Pang said approvingly, “Lucky there was no one to see you.” It’s always lucky when you’re helping and compassion is so natural it passes unobserved even by yourself.
This story usually makes people laugh uncertainly—perhaps because Lingzhao is so shameless in actualizing realization right before her more famous and esteemed father, in this as well as in other stories. But Lingzhao’s action is just a complete non-“thinking” accord with the realization of “There is no other.” In a way she let him see him, even more outrageously, “It’s my fault (that you fell down).”
Don’t mistake this for taking the blame, appropriately or even inappropriately. It’s one step clear of the world of blame. From the perspective down in the dust with him, when things “go wrong,” we all fall down together. She offers herself without demur to the moment of things going awry completely in the spirit of “There is no other.”
“It’s my fault”—especially when it is not in any obvious way my fault but appears to be someone else’s—has surprising power to lift the constriction of my heart or mind. It’s a lively companion koan to Linji’s evocation of Great Doubt, “Whatever confronts you, don’t believe it.” It clears the way, lets everyone back in. In that light, “It’s my fault” is an embrace of the generosity of not-knowing, making that available as a kind of daily talismanic koan that, kept close at hand, can turn misfortune to lucky break in any thorny encounter with another.
The passions may rise endlessly but they come to our notice one offer at a time—often a compounded offer, but nevertheless what appears is one chance at a time. Just to offer “It’s my fault!” inwardly to a confounding moment when strong feelings are erupting can almost playfully turn a moment of feeling strongly confronted into a fascinating chance to rediscover open and unbounded existence.
This is not to load yourself with blame or guilt; in a far more playful move it simply lifts from the other person the load of judgment and blame before you can settle it on their shoulders. Despite the loaded-looking word fault, it’s not a heavy koan: It sees fault grow transparent, more see-through. The surprising thing is how rapidly the situation lightens. It’s playful—seriously playful, like Lingzhao with her old dad.
So “it’s my fault” finally comes down to the lovely gesture of just allowing what is to be what is, wiping away “fault.” Not only does fault begin to disappear but my grows hard to hold on to as well, along with a sense of “me” as opposed to “you.” It grows harder to find the one who must be blamed, or to know the actual use of being “right.”
The open response is a process of coming clean with a fundamentally blameless reality, and a little more congruent with it. The blamelessness of the clear blue sky and the leaves turned to the wind is very clear and simple. To be a little more congruent with that is ease within contingency. So the open response of “It’s my fault” is a very simple pocket-size koan that seems to open a rich vein of inquiry every time I let it enjoy the situation a little more. Each time it lets me recognize myself in what I felt to be so out of kilter and riddled with compulsive passions.
To paraphrase Torei Zenji extremely loosely: Even the moment of a curse is a chance to fall out of hell.
Hazy Moon
This unnameable mystery we call self-nature is shared by every being and indeed, as Torei puts it, by “each moment, each particle of matter.” It may be relatively easy to lend ourselves to that possibility. But the implication that this radiant self-nature is also shared by every state of being, every inner emotional detonation of feeling and poisonous thought and act, every mood, even the long-form moods that we begin to call “personality” . . . This requires that we acknowledge and include the most dire human failings, fallings, collapse, and limitedness as empty, equal, and open—still attached to the red thread. To value them as radiant with self-nature, in thoroughly human form.
Pablo Neruda’s autobiography is wonderfully titled I Confess That I Lived. Events overtake our best intentions in almost every moment of conscious life. When you closely examine the dream of purity it is almost always revealed as an attempt to manage some form of self-hatred founded in fear.
If we are unaware of this—and sometimes even if we are—terrible things can be enacted in the name of purity, in some ways more injurious than the things that can flow from grotesque self-indulgence. And we can do terrible things to ourselves in the name of purity. It sometimes feels that every hurtful act is the secret export to others of some discomfort, disgust, or impurity we find intolerable in ourselves. So the pursuit of a mind and heart swept clean and pure is a form of curse that is never owned but endlessly passed on.
Perhaps the deepest meaning and intent of the great human archetype of a lost or sundered paradise is the tremendous joy of finding it again, complete and at rest even in the very teeth of every “problem.”
Of finding not purity restored but something more like joy reconciled—reconciled with what we are and have ever been. This would be a restored state of creative peace with human frailty—with humanness itself. Such a reunion with who we really are is not recovered purity at all. It’s actually meeting ourselves whole. And that has to include every particle within the great, rich, hazy mixture that we human beings are.
The richly telling expression in Zen for this dearly important matter is “the hazy moon of enlightenment.” Dogen’s successor, Keizan, wrote an exquisite account of it:
Though we have vast billows ranging
to the clear blue sky in autumn,
How can it compare
to the hazy moon on a spring night?
Some people want it pure white,
But sweep as you will,
you cannot empty the mind.
“Though we have vast billows ranging to the clear blue sky in autumn”—that’s an image of vast emptiness, all the forms of the world just vast billows of emptiness, as far as you can see right to the great autumn sky. A very dynamic image of everything at rest in wave after wave of change, ocean after ocean washed by bright clouds, solemn clouds.
The clear blue autumn sky is the sky of everything given away. That generous no-self—pure gift. That’s a tremendous matter, in Keizan’s eyes, and true. But not yet fully habitable. Human beings can’t be there long. Autumn implies the marvelous, fruitful dropping away of body and mind. But the dropped-away body and mind needs human eyes, hands, feet. The absolute quality of Keizan’s image—brimming to the point where sky and ocean can’t be told apart, has yet a tinge of purity that can and will bedevil human beings.
Spring comes with drifting seed and mushroom spores, the lovely dust of new life pushing into the air, the easing outbreath of the earth after the desolation of winter, the dreams and tender confusions of human beings floating together with this softening haze.
Referring us back to the bracing image of autumn, Keizan asks us to consider: “How can it compare to the hazy moon on a spring night?” I hear him placing beyond praise a moon of awakening that is deeply hazed with humanity. Nothing is wasted if it’s truly and humbly human.
“Some people want it pure white, but sweep as you will, you cannot empty the mind.” It doesn’t take long to learn in meditation that if you work to empty the mind of everything by sweeping each thing away, you simply fill it with sweeping each thing away. Luckily, you cannot empty the mind or heart; wave after wave, it never stops flowing; in wave after wave, moon appears.
It is human-shaped, the realization of emptiness that sets us free. We are blessed indeed, with the hazy human moon of enlightenment.
For us, the perfection of each moment is found right in the innermost midst of imperfect life. How could it be otherwise? We are each other—and so an impure, mixed, and marvelous thing from the beginning.
As human beings, we’re everything our consciousness can possibly include—wonderful and terrible. Sometimes I think the greatest danger on the planet is the unearthly human dream of perfection itself. Have a look around you. Go back as far as you like in human history and have a look at how millions have died at the hands of the perfection plans of others, and how many are dying of that right now, even just in the name of someone else’s “perfect lifestyle.” How the planet itself is beginning to die from our toxic dream of a perfect life—a perfectly easy and comfortable, technologized, and disembodied life in which the troubling thorn of embodied being and its natural precariousness and tumultuous emotions can be extracted from human life and set aside.
A dream of emptying the mind secretes a fear of the mind and its prodigious productivity, and with that a fear perhaps of reality and its ceaseless change, the troubling fact of one thing always becoming another, and therefore the disappearance of one thing after another. To sweep the mind clear is a dream of purifying reality itself, at some level, bringing it down to the measure of a very human fear. Suffering after suffering arises exactly here where reality, un-“corrected,” is seen as something unfairly to be suffered.
What emotion can possibly ever be simply or completely negative? Love itself is a “difficult emotion,” which can fuse even with hatred, envy, deep self-doubt. Longing can be a difficult emotion, fused with fear of loss or rejection. If we find ourselves to be unworthy of love, love can be a terror greater than death.
Every one of the difficult emotions that visit us and disturb a settled account of reality equally bring with them the power to restore concordance between no self, no thing, everything present, in heightened form. The harmonic resonance of the whole is there to find even in the circumstances tossed to us by “the passions.” The practice of meeting them fully is the first move toward “become like this”—like the underlying agreement all things have always had with each other, a perfect fit.
And so human nature, and its surface mismatch with our deepest self nature, causes passion in all of us—invaluable passion, if we know how to quieten things down enough to tune accurately to such a wild-looking signal.
Rumi’s image of the subtle presence of this indelible self-nature in which everything rests, even in the midst of uproar, is “the quiet bright reed song,” that continues (like the stars) through night and day. It can’t die away, even if we die, but when it dies from awareness, he says, we die. We fade, in the midst of life.
So let us roundly cherish the hazy moon of spring, the essential humanness of realization, the provenance of this opening into what is most entirely ourselves. Not the good bits, not the bad bits, but all of it, all of us. What can possibly defile all of it? As Emily Dickinson said (though she forgot to begin with “Luckily”—)
All —
is the price of all—
And when we let that all touch and bring us back to rights, all is given.