• chapter five •
The Bodhisattva must live by the sufferer’s standard, and must be effective in aiding those who suffer.
—Gary Snyder
Zhaozhou was asked, “What’s the most important matter for which I must take responsibility?” He replied, “Though you search to the end of time, you’ll never single it out.”
Care is no more—and equally no less—than the natural and deeply human response to becoming more awake. Realization offers no escape clause from the relative world of suffering and harm, or the moments when we must determine wrongdoing and decide—at least provisionally—what is right or helpful to do and needs to be done. While knowing that being “absolutely” right is always already heading toward a wrong.
Any glimpse into the non-dual, empty depth of being has to be continually reconciled with choices between one course of action and another. Realization affords the perspective of “your life is also my life,” and offers some breathing space—“I will rely on not-knowing and approach aware that I can never fully know or judge you or your motivations.” It can provide the means to inhabit the wisdom of “It’s my fault,” and the ground from which it is possible to offer an open response even in the face of abusive words. What it cannot do is float free from the relative world in the face of active harm, enslavement, injustice, danger, global warming, desecration of the earth, and any other form of conscious evil.
From an emptiness perspective, no final right or wrong can be found—“form is emptiness”; but this truth is met and fulfilled at every point with “and emptiness is form,” which finds that everything matters.
To attempt to live just from the first half of this perspective, form is emptiness, is an absurdity open to the rationalizing of criminality, floating free from any moral ground: “This act of utter violence is empty . . .” Zen, shamefully, has not been immune from such spiritual literalism; Brian Victoria’s Zen at War project, for example, disclosed its florid presence in the utterances and behavior of some esteemed Zen masters during the intensely militarized period of Japanese aggression before and during World War II.
Any genuine degree of self-mastery is a continuing effort to integrate the realization experience that sees emptiness into humble, nuanced awareness of lived human complexity, and the contradictory impulses of the self. The ethos of care that the red thread brings to light is informed at every point by the bodily, warm-blooded, human shape of emptiness. It is not a simple matter of applying rules. “Self-nature is subtle and mysterious,” as Bodhidharma’s words throughout the Zen Precepts ceremony remind us with every one of the ten “Grave Precepts.” It is self-nature, the bright, awake mind that wants to realize itself fully in what is happening, and how it is responding.
Every vow we take in the forming of a practice to deepen self-awareness has “I” in it, but that “I” is the place where form and emptiness know each other, where no-self intersects with this one with my name. The red thread is not for legislating. It is our direct plumb line into the depths of the great matter as human beings, to touch the most subtle undulations of our being and our circumstances, arising together.
A West Australian Zen teacher, Ross Bolleter, was walking with a student while wearily hearing some lengthy complaint against another student who they saw as failing to keep a precept—Not Misusing Sex, perhaps. They were abruptly stopped in their tracks to avoid stepping on two leopard slugs entwined in a slippery frenzy of mating, right on the path before them.
“Legislate that,” said the teacher. The student fell silent.
The old meaning of the word human was neither neutral nor merely descriptive. It meant “humane”—which is to be actively caring and protective toward the rights and needs and suffering of other people and creatures. Another of those words, together with frugal, we will need to restore to the lexicon of any civilizational resistance to the slowly burning planetary crisis of our time.
A seventeenth-century Polish Hasid asked his followers, “How can we know when night has ended and day has begun?” They volunteered various possibilities. “Is it when you start to see the individual trees step out of the darkness of the forest?” “Is it that moment when you can’t tell cloud from the morning mist?” There were more attempts, but no, it was none of these. “How can we tell, then?” they finally asked.
“It is the moment when you look into a stranger’s face and can recognize your own,” the teacher finally said. “Until then, the night is still with us.”
There’s generous tolerance for the other in the word humane, even when the other threatens our best-laid plans and expectations. Tolerance is a state always in modulated and negotiated tension with discomfort; its level rises in direct proportion to “forgetting the self,” as Dogen describes the wonderful difficulty of substantiating a self, once you try to do so. This self has feelings, sensations, thoughts, a history, a name, tax file number, and knows the night to put out the rubbish bins, and yet when you look deeply there is no final origin, edge, limit, or fixed address for that which you call by your own name. But its true face now swims into view wherever you look.
This is the widest possible sense of self, enticingly unknown in its depths, a fact shared by all of the other billions of us on the planet. Which transforms the encounter between self and “other.” Forgetting the “self” begins to be a process of meeting and sensing the other as implicated in your self. What wakes up is a sharper sensitivity to suffering and frailty—yours, theirs—and a lessening of interest in needing to be “right.” Taking care of things seems more to the point.
We are surrounded by thunderous examples of exquisite silent design and millennial-old care. The impossible way that ancient dragonfly wings work, or the amazing rear rudder winglet of the common housefly, for example. The miracle of the way the human heart-lung works in every one of us who still lives. The fact that fingernails and bird feathers share a common origin, as do the epithelial cells of skin and brain—that infinitely enfolding surface of “touch.” The shapes of that tree in the wind, the decisive curve of the swallow’s path . . . It never stops offering.
“I place my feet with care / in such a world,” remarked the poet Wendell Berry.
The Sufferer’s Standard
The Song of Solomon says, “I sleep, but my heart wakes.” Or, I “forget the self” and caring naturally appears. Gary Snyder’s koan-like demand, “[We] must live by the sufferer’s standard,” begins to resolve when we look at things this way. “Must” may sound like an injunction taken out against errant humanity; but I hear in it something more engaged and engaging, like “There is no choice.”
The Mahayana impulse has as its heart a stubborn willingness to be with suffering, to stand in natural solidarity with it and remain (even painfully) present to it rather than to retreat to a distance from worldly matters, with the final goal arriving in a Nirvana free forever from the bittersweet torment of endless rounds of “birth and death.” That escape attempt is very understandable, from the point of view of the experience of suffering; yet paradoxically avoids the exacting point of view that suffering affords.
Suffer (from a root word conveying “undercarriage of a cart”) literally means to bear or take the weight of something, and such willingness shapes a more creative, attuned, and effective response to any crisis. We begin to live by the sufferer’s standard when it grows impossible to avoid saying, “This, too, is me.” So to live by the sufferer’s standard is to stand in natural solidarity with all sentient beings, who by nature will suffer, and die. This means admitting to sharing the responsibility for the pain and the grief and the damage of our interwoven lives and actions. Which in turn yields the generosity of care.
In his final hours, the poet Bashō (1644–1694) saw that his followers were busy trying to catch and remove the many flies crawling avidly on the window screen next to his bed. His last amused words were, “The flies are delighted to have a sick man around unexpectedly!” He died not long after. I love his candid connection with his own impending mortality, and that he takes some wry consolation in the joy of flies drawn to the odor of his own decay. Pesky flies, himself, no great difference. His followers were distressed and tried to drive the flies away but Basho was glad to find someone made happy by the scent of his own mortality.
The four noble truths of traditional Buddhism delineate what was actually termed “the truth of suffering.” The fact of suffering is easy to establish, although for good reason, experience can be a useful substitute to keep at hand for much of what is bundled into the word.
Jack Kerouac even had the audacity to substitute the word joy, creating the Four Noble Truths of Joy: There is a truth of joy; there is a cause of joy; there is no end to joy; and there is a path to this no end to joy. This is no idle or disrespectful wordplay but a vigorous upturning that takes care to reveal something vital about how suffering empties into the full range of joy, which is so wide and so whole in nature even grief’s agony can live there. I think of lament, and how close it lives to both agony and joy at once. It’s a marvelously mixed universe, this human being.
But our own difficulty, recognized and borne, is the gate to the truth of suffering—that suffering is not singular but is the life of all sentient beings, and this understanding opens up into intimacy of feeling with the other. And so through the gate of suffering, love appears, and the mystery of who we really are brightens exactly where the sense of “me” softens and loses its painful edges in the sharing of suffering, the realization of its truth.
Knowing less about “me,” I inhabit and sense more of what I am. “I” joins hands with the Unborn. And as Linji said, “When you know who you are, you can be of some help”—or as Snyder puts it, “be effective in aiding those who suffer.”
To be still attached to the red thread is to fully accept the mixed and vulnerable nature of human beings, and that the business of clarity is an endless one. To see that it cannot be cut is to stand in solidarity with that fact. Whereas to set out for a beachhead of purity or stainless perfection, en route to a final destination of stepping free from regrettable life itself, is to condemn the red thread as a restraint upon purity and perfection that must be cut away. When all the time it is the human bloodstream of self-nature, that has no beginning and can have no end.
It is an inextricably mixed world: Plaque forms on the teeth; bacteria urbanizes in sink scum; minute creatures populate even our own eyelashes, generally causing no offense in their miniscule lives; weevils add valuable protein to stored white rice; and the propensity of human beings is to perpetually seek to move off to something more comfortable from what is happening in the unflinching present. In such a world, suffering appears in the midst of great beauty, and beauty in the teeth of tragedy. It is the mixed, relative world that we’re here to embrace and serve, if we’re to make the fullness of the mystery clear—that not only is form emptiness, but emptiness is form. The alternative, of banking upon the absolute, is less than truly human.
And it is a good world. The rain drips from the gutter in twos and threes. Floating clouds draw dark pools of shadow across the vast monolith of Uluru (Ayers Rock), that huge tuning fork of red-thread color, without even slightly troubling it. The people we love are infinite mysteries, worthy of our deepest and most aware care before they pass from our reach. The ability to suffer may be our secret dearest treasure, the very source of care.
In the record of Zhaozhou appears mention of an older woman—name once more unrecorded—whose exceptional clarity attracted many students. When her beloved granddaughter died, she wept openly and loudly in front of everyone. People were shocked. “A master like you, and you weep? Impermanence is just impermanence, why mourn like this?” She scolded them soundly, saying, “Of course I weep! These cries are for all beings. Listen, listen!”
Later, Zhaozhou heard about this and asked, “How can anyone lose by crying out?” The cries of the world after all bring Guanyin into being, usher compassion into the world, manifesting the benefit of all beings. And even before that, the cries of this grandmother were complete; when you cry with your whole body and mind, is there any crying at all? How can anyone lose by being what is, without resistance?
Vows Cry Out
Our cries do not compromise self-nature (nothing can); they acknowledge and place love and loss and redeeming care right at the heart of it. A heart convulsing in grief is intensely personal, and yet at bottom belongs to all; open, raw, and unrestricted, it reveals beyond doubt that all beings suffer pain, bringing them into focus, seeding fellow feeling. When suffering is seen clearly—and seeing clearly means being with it undividedly—then its simplest truth becomes clear: I do what I can to help. That steadfast preparedness to be with suffering—of others and of ourselves, no longer so simple to tell apart—wins us back the wholeness of the world.
So how can anyone lose by crying out? By being human to the hilt? Resentment is futile. The suffering we can’t avoid is an offer to find the truth and value of forbearance on one side, and the grace of other people’s love and care on the other, and the undividedness at the middle of both. The truth of the suffering of others interpenetrates the truth of our own suffering. This is so elemental it hardly needs stating and yet becomes puerile when offered as talk of a “need to feel compassion.” The value and truth of suffering finds its source in the real fact pain offers: that we’re all in this together; and deeper in, there is no other. No-self is compassion, which is just the natural outcome of no-other.
This realization appears steadily with every move of not rejecting pain and suffering, like groundwater filling the aquifer. Or more suddenly, like a dam breaking, and a river flowing free. But in every case it’s our personal vulnerability and brevity, together with the fact that reality has no boundaries in it and is entirely shared, which realizes the truth and value of suffering.
“The sufferer’s standard,” Snyder’s interesting phrase that turns it toward koan, can imply a benchmark (set at the point that acknowledges the suffering of all sentient creatures); or a banner taken into a struggle, clearly seen by all. The example of Christ sets the sufferer’s standard high in a Western context (which once meant “Christendom”). Christianity is strong on the imperative to aid those in need and to heal suffering, identifying with the sufferer in an unqualified way. Whereas Buddhism originally was, and often remains, more directed toward relieving and escaping one’s own personal suffering.
The red thread checks this impulse, confirming together with all life that we all move together, and we all fall down together. And here the word standard draws attention to the actual call that the suffering of others makes on us personally, how the truth of suffering sets the gold standard of our full humanity. And how a lack of response to it, once admitted, leaves us wanting. We live comprehensively distracted from so much of the shrouded or carefully distanced suffering that supports our way of life—and we live with a conscious or disowned burden of fear and shame about that. The shame, when it penetrates, is a call, to report as one who will respond.
We know no life is possible without each life falling into death, no uprightness possible without the pull of gravity holding us secure in our bone structure, drawing us steady in every step and finally falling back in the end to the earth, and this is the original solidarity. Everything moves together in this universe, things hurt, and nothing that exists will endure. To humanly realize (make real) that solidarity is the vow that is a practice.
The bodhisattva vows and all the precepts arise here to inspire and precipitate such a healing movement of mind—healing the wound in consciousness. Each is saying in effect: It’s a tender and extraordinary reality; every being is also you; every act has consequence; in such a world, place your feet with care.
When Zhaozhou was asked, “What is the fact for which we must bear responsibility?” he replied, “Though you search to the end of time, you’ll never single it out.” Nor will you ever single out yourself. Along with that, there’s no time to single it out; it is always happening only now. But what maintains this as a humanly beautiful struggle every day is living toward a vow.
A Maori friend once told me he learned from his elders that you should not wear your carved Aotearoa greenstone or pounamu neck pendant to a bar, or use bad language in its presence. You have to hold yourself toward your pounamu. All appropriate and fit responses flow naturally from that. The pounamu makes sure.
Vows are like that, too: You hold yourself toward them, live your life toward them, and they make sure of you. This matter is held lightly but firmly. In indigenous Australia, the most highly significant sacred sites are rarely entered; but for miles around, all ceremonial or teaching sites face resolutely in their direction.
A vow asks that I hold myself toward life with awareness and respect, and in this way moves life in a more intent direction that’s subtly but remarkably different from “just coping.” Not only each of your immediate relationships and actions but the wider, larger fate of humanity and the life of the world begins to live in you and to ask searching questions, beginning with Who is this? And what is it, to become like this?
The prompt and implication of every vow that shapes a Zen practice is an aspect of the red thread that cannot be cut: We’re all in this together so thoroughly that we discover who we are only in the presence and reality of each other; which means taking full responsibility for our actions. And all of the vows of “refuge,” of homecoming—such as not killing, not stealing, not speaking falsely, not being stingy, not indulging in anger, not praising the self while abusing others, practicing all good—arise naturally from this generous and life-giving fact. We say, in each of the vows, effectively, “I aim not to live at the expense of others.” And asks, “Can I love what I’m doing if I know it harms the life of another being?”
Reliable
So it is a kind of process of becoming a little more reliable. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of a deep meditation in which he asked the earth a deeply intimate question—one that surely secretly nags everyone on earth by now—which was “Can I rely on you?” The earth replied, after remaining quiet for a time, “Can I rely on you?” Nhat Hanh searched his conscience closely before he answered, “You can mostly rely on me.” And the earth responded with the beautiful economy of means that comes naturally to a mutual relationship, “And you can mostly rely on me.’
Mostly able to be relied upon. Mostly is important. We are not saints, but human, and mistakes will be made and—in the presence of a vow—will make good use of us, each one the chance of fresh discovery. In this respect, every one of the vows is a sharpened awareness of the dharma gate of “mistake.”
The Vinaya (literally “the discipline,” the “leading out”) is the 227 disciplinary rules and renunciations intended to form and conform the conduct of male monastic life, and the even more ramified and numerous 311 rules apparently required by the innate unruliness of female monastics.
A young man heard about this formidable set of regulations and asked a Chinese nun, “How on earth do you manage to keep all 311 precepts?”
She replied, “I keep only one precept.”
The young man, shocked, asked, “What is that?”
“I just watch my mind,” she said.
Every vow is the act of “just watching your mind,” knowing your mind, realizing your mind, sharing that mind. At the moment of realizing a serious mistake, the vow kicks in and says something like what Torei Zenji says in “The Spur for a Good Horse”: “When you slip, get up again. If you don’t get up, you will die there.”
“Slipping” might be giving way to anger that is destructive and lashing out and setting ripples of harm in motion. Until you know you’ve slipped, you haven’t really hit the ground. In fact, the vow kicks in with the very sense of something dying, and opens the question of what rising to your feet, right where you are, might require at such a moment. The rising begins in the vow recalled. So much of human business in the world is a matter of carrying on harming, with all due diligence and agility being put to the task of remaining functionally or strategically unaware of any such thing.
But knowing we have slipped is the only possible start of not dying there. And always getting up—recovering something of the unimpeded intelligence of the self that does not end in “me”—is the impetus of living toward “vow.” Nothing can ever dream to “Legislate this.” Reality is empty and unbounded, and equally revealed as what we are. At the same time, we leave real footprints on the earth—our own, in person. A vow attends to both sides of this matter, and is subtle: It faces toward something of great value without defining or hardening into any “object,” any more than it attempts to define or limit you. In response to the nudge of a vow, we acknowledge the red thread of unbreakable relatedness, and live toward the fact that it “cannot be cut.”
Each of the Great Vows or Bodhisattva Vows of Zen recall no-self in the act of taking care of the very alive forms of mutuality that continually create, confirm, and resolve the sense of “self” and “other.” Of course each Vow is “impossible”; each presents a koan, or matter to be resolved, rather than legislated commandment or rule. But it is the valuable difficulty of an apparent impossibility that ignites and generates the heart’s energy to resolve and respond:
“The many beings are numberless; I vow to save them. Greed, hatred and ignorance rise endlessly; I vow to abandon them. Dharma gates are countless; I vow to wake to them. The awakened way is unsurpassed; I vow to embody it fully.” Each of these “Great Vows” marks a kind of ceremonial site of human response toward what is, each of them asking you to face and hold yourself steady toward a central matter of ultimate importance: This, the wholeness of reality, the red thread of humanity and all life utterly entangled with it.
They may appear to stand alone but in every human interaction suggest a single process like a forming and breaking wave. The wave begins to swell with the first great vow to pay attention and hold in your body and mind responsibility toward all sentient life. Save is variously translated as “wake” or “carry across,” as in bring into the presence and response of a more awakened mind.
This wide-open mind is instantly occluded by greed, hatred, and ignorance. “Ignorance” is a far deeper matter than being accidentally or strategically unaware of the effect of your actions. It’s the original wall in the mind and base of all fear—the view that “I’m in here and you’re out there,” and greed and hatred are easy once the wall is in place. Greed, hatred, and ignorance create the gulf between self and other that fosters all our human harm and havoc. But equally, each “slip-up” prompts this second great vow of noticing—the first move of abandoning what kills or diminishes life. The wave grows definite, now, steadily shaping attention and response, delineating a practice of Mind.
Abandoning greed, hatred, and ignorance is the noticing turn toward recognition of a dharma gate—the third great vow—right there, exactly in the pain of noticing and the gathering of a deeper attention. The third great vow—to walk through every dharma gate, or to let all experience become a chance to open a radical glimpse of self-recognition—is the wave cresting and beginning to break powerfully as the fourth great vow, which is to fully embody and actively live the “impossibility” of a more and more awake and inclusive mind.
Every act of mercy (for the vows—like practice itself—are an act of love and mercy toward life) releases and brings the awareness of no-self to the project of creating a more brilliant human sanity, right where you are, starting with what’s in front of you. So a vow is a talisman, always in reach, in the life-long realization process of “Just this person.”
Which is really just the human being folding back more deeply into the terms of the earth, and the overflowing emptiness of reality, this.
The Wounding
There are quite a number of wise stories about the humble monk, Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971), told by his American students. One story goes that one day at Tassajara monastery, a student finally broke the tacit silence and asked just what is the actual meaning of those mysterious Sino-Japanese words chanted each morning during the formal act of putting on the rakusu, the small garment hung around the neck to signify the patchwork robe of the Buddha.
In English, the vow translates as, “I wear the robe of the Buddha, the formless field of benefaction, the teachings of the Tathagata, saving the many beings.” When the student asked, Suzuki simply said, “I don’t know.” But his assistant teacher, Katagiri Sensei as he was at that time, began vigorously searching through books for an accurate translation. Suzuki gestured to him, Stop!
And then he turned to the student, pointed to his heart, and just said, “It’s love . . . it’s love.”
It is love’s call on us that impresses the whole meaning of practice into our being, just as practice itself is the vow to willingly let that take place, and even to wound us in the process of opening further. The “Shodoka,” or “Song of Freedom,” has the beautiful words: “The Buddha Nature jewel of morality is impressed on the ground of my mind. And my robe is the dew, the clouds, the fog, and the mist.”
The “Buddha Nature jewel” is your true self recognized beyond doubt, but here it is called the jewel of morality that is “impressed on the ground of my mind.” There’s a most delicate hint of a wounding accepted in that word impressed. The jewel of your own self-nature is pressed by realization into the most tenderly open ground of mind and heart and leaves its indelible mark or impression. And with the desirable wounding of awareness that is called waking up, the robe of practice is nothing grandiose or separate but as natural and fluid as the dew, the cloud, the fog, the mist. Which is also to say that it has the tacit grace to express the form of no form.
When you turn your heart back to what it is you love, it’s always there. And that means in the end that we have no choice but to accept the wounding that comes with love and naturally agree to take care of things. Morality is not an abstraction somewhere out there but the matter of how we relate to the effect of everyday actions of our lives. And so it’s serious, it’s love—and when we fail to respond, it’s the abnegation of love.
Such a robe is exquisitely subtle and ordinary, dissolving even as you look at it. There’s no fancy parading in it. Zen rids itself of the stink of any special trace of accomplishment. Realization is simply the resumption of our own most natural being. After all, what can be special about that which is revealed in every detail of the universe? When nothing can be singled out as sacred, everything’s embraced that way with no great fuss. Sometimes few or no words express this matter best—like Ryokan’s legendary moments of barely broken silence.
Ryokan (1758–1831)—the wisely foolish mendicant monk, poet, and calligrapher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—was staying by special invitation with relatives one time because they hoped his presence would correct the difficult, wayward behavior of the son and heir to the clan. But to their surprise, for three days, Ryokan said nothing to his nephew whatsoever. Then, when it came time for him to leave, he sat at the doorway and called to the lad to help him tie on his straw sandals. Yasuki’s mother hid behind a screen to listen; at last Ryokan’s sorely needed wise words were to be delivered to her son! But no, silence prevailed.
However, as Yasuki bent down to tie the sandals, he felt the splash of something wet on his neck, and looking up, he realized it was Ryokan’s tears. Ryokan silently stood up then and left. Fortunately, such tears are inexplicable. When tears fall from no-self, who is asking whom for forgiveness? Who owns the regret, compunction, helplessness, or shame that’s in the air, and set free? But in any case, after this the boy was very changed.
Another time, during rice-planting time, Ryokan was visiting some people when to everyone’s shock the crazed priest Chika broke into the house, caked with mud from the fields, roaring drunk and seething with envy. Chika was always proclaiming to anyone who’d listen that he was about to start his own school of Buddhism, loudly disparaging people held in high esteem—especially the widely loved and revered Ryokan.
Without warning he began lashing Ryokan with his heavy, water-soaked belt. Ryokan had no idea what this was about and made no attempt to escape, which made people even more alarmed. They finally managed to pull him into another room to safety and to physically subdue Chika before bundling him out of the house.
A little while later, at dusk, heavy rain began falling. Ryokan came out of his room only to inquire with some concern, “Did that monk have his rain gear with him?” He never said anything more about the incident.
Some throw stones, some beat him with sticks
He retreats then stops, and calls to them aloud
Since this fellow has left the world
No one has heard from him
But the wind and moonlight that fill the night
For whom do they reveal their purity?
This is the final stanza of Ryokan’s poem in praise of his favorite character in his beloved Lotus Sutra, which he knew intimately. Never-Despising-Anyone was, in his eyes, the very embodiment of the bodhisattva’s faith in the value of all human beings. This happily foolish character offered full prostrations before every person he encountered, confirming his belief in their intrinsic capacity to awaken. Even when people chased him off with blows and ridicule, Never-Despising-Anyone just said, “I cannot despise you since you will become Buddha!’
The Noonday Demon
In our digitally “connected” world, there is a constant feed of suffering streaming into consciousness as news, often difficult to distinguish from “disaster porn,” that in fact feeds upon the human fascination with perpetually breaking news of disaster, famine, war, terror, tragedy, and gross stupidity, preferably happening somewhere safely “else.” Letting it flood in can deaden response, to the point of making it hard to feel or speak of it; too close to the bone and it is hard to have it spoken about. To keep it mute or hold it completely at bay is to be left heartless and sterile, protecting a self that feels far too small, avoiding at all cost being reached by the point of the needle, which in fact has no “somewhere else.” Distraction—moving off from the needle—is the usual recourse.
The seven deadly sins, or destructive states of mind—usually identified as pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed—were originally eight. The eighth, held to be the worst of all in the early medieval mind of the desert mothers and fathers, was “acedia.” Sometimes it is now rolled up into “sloth” as spiritual laziness, but in fact it cuts to a deeper matter, the self-saving, self-diminishing tendency of always moving off from discomfiting states of mind. All gathered powers of concentrated attention lightly yielded up to a shallow impulse.
However it devises to squirm or to crawl crabwise off from what it had intended to stay with, the momentarily relieved mind becomes slowly weighted down with the creeping heaviness of sadness, melancholy, self-disgust, and depression. Which is difficult to bear; along with the failure to remain as intended in concentrated yet openhearted attention, the painfulness of that fact urges even more moving off. Irresolution deepens, reliability collapses, the will withers. Gradually, acedia recommends its baseline, ambit move—of moving off from all responsibility.
It seems worth becoming sensitive toward this haunting “noonday demon,” as it once was called—the irritable and subtly nagging restlessness that afflicted prayerful focus in the sixth hour of the daily monastic schedule, around noon, when suddenly it began to seem a far, far better idea to wander over and see how that monk in the next cell was doing, instead of praying sleepily yet resolutely through the fog of being . . . or to just quickly check on the recently notified status update of a friend on Facebook . . . or to click on that link that offers seven ways to know if you have an eating disorder, or . . .
Dogen said, “When you know the place where you are, practice begins.” But in a trackless, dreamlike torpor of the mind, awareness arrives and settles nowhere quite. The Internet fits this mind of acedia just as though it were custom-made for it, right at the moment when we have the strongest and most compelling reason to be highly alert, finely knowing the place where we are, and seeing with painful clarity what’s going on in our civilizational overreach and climate crisis.
Acedia may be literally the deadliest “sin” at such a moment. It is the dark side of the moon, utterly from the practice of staying with difficult or painful things and resolving the discomfort into “this, too, is me.”
Love Becoming Complete
Finally, let me try to touch the mysterious twist in the red thread—of love completing itself in the very act of injury caused to wholeness. The red thread clarifies our fully human entanglement in emptiness—one unending and fruitful mistake, our peculiarly human ritual, of completing love.
A Daoist text, Discussion on Making All Things Equal by the remarkable Chuang Tzu (370–287 BC) (Zhuangzi in Pinyin), predates Zen or Chan in China by many centuries yet has many points of strong accord with it. One passage in the discourse walks us, as though along a deep inner timeline, from the original mind of vast equality, where nothing can be carved out from anything else, “forward” to the mind of complexly contingent forms of understanding which separate one thing clearly from another. And it asks, is there a kind of necessary injuring of wholeness within consciousness itself that is needed, in order to draw care, and indeed love, into being?
The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them knew that things have never existed. Those of the next stage thought that things exist but recognized no boundaries among them. Those at the next stage thought that there were boundaries but recognized no right or wrong.
Then, the fascinating rider: “Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured. And because the Way was injured, love became complete.” While a classical Daoist interpretation of the word love sees attachment as fatal ignorance of the undividable, nevertheless Zhuangzi’s three-thousand-year-old words, heard in the context of the Western mind, lay bare the red thread of humanly embodied realization.
“But do such things as completion and injury really exist or not?” Zhuangzi finally asks, returning us toward the mind of vast equality from which he started out.
We can all at least faintly recognize the earliest stage of recognition of the Dao in which the passage begins. When we were one- or two-year-olds, we did not “know” that things had ever existed. We just met each thing for the first time, and in a world in which everything arrived with the equal force of “I am,” and nothing was amazing because everything was.
Nothing quite exists at first in the way that adults have them exist—fixed, differentiated, secured, tied down. But then, to quote Saint Paul, “We put away childish things”; by slow degree, things separate out and form a hierarchy of importance. With that, we slowly adopt some form of “face”—a socially functional mask that gradually in time hardens into what is understood as adult sanity. And by then, that earliest oceanic flow of mind and world starts to be viewed through a kindly, nostalgic, and slightly patronizing haze as a lost, child-like, golden age of being.
In the earliest stages of this process, boundaries were there (though remained a little magically soft between things), but still we recognized no absolute divide of right or wrong. “When right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured,” says Zhuangzi, touching the archetypal nerve of human unease and immediate sense of how that must be ordered and safely managed. The doctrine of original sin may stir in some minds, here. But actually, Zhuangzi is pointing to how we may disturb or mentally destroy something closer to original blessing, which is the undivided flow of what is, what is happening.
Consider how the mind of right and wrong can deeply injure the wholeness of an encounter, the resilience of intimate relationship, the openness of another human being. The moment we’re so very right we’re already starting to be wrong. The Way that we injure by becoming a person of right and wrong is the ordinary way, of birds and ants, shadows, rocks, and clouds. It’s the way of lying on the heartbeat of the earth at night and freely counting the stars in the sky. The way of attending and including the whole of the circumstances that concern us to the point where we can freely say, “It’s my fault.” It’s the mind of subtly accepting what flows undividedly, without seeking to divide it. “The great Way is not difficult,” as many have repeated. “It just avoids picking and choosing.”
Zhuangzi contends that right and wrong injured the Way. This is not to say that we were driven from a paradise of being in full accord with it, but to imply that at any given moment we can injure the unfolding of things with a mind of right and wrong, condemnations we try to make stick—including condemnation of ourselves, of what’s happening, what might happen, what has happened. And even of what won’t happen; that, too, can be up for condemnation! “It’s just not good enough!” In extreme and puritanical forms, the wrongness of rightness—its tyranny—is very plain.
Injury can range from the terrorist’s obscene sense of the rightness of mass carnage, down to the smallest act of closing someone out by taking offense. Even when no offense has even been offered, we injure the openness of reality with an offended sense of “rightness” in all the countless guises it can assume—some highly noxious, some just so trivial they fritter lives away. Most simply, this tone of dissonance lays waste to much of life and limits the chance to be fully alive and at ease in each passing breath. At this level, it’s so simple it’s almost brutal.
The mind of right and wrong is often an anxious scrabbling for security or to attempt to control outcomes, render them less threatening—refusing to face up to disappointment, change, and loss with no shrinking away. Yet what does security come down to? The original Latin root, securus, means people “free from care, quiet, at ease.” True “carefreeness” stays close to what cannot be insulted by events, avoiding weighting all events with personal implication. To take sufficient care to avoid collecting such heavy baggage is to assume the courage of adversity, the stance of love. Its action rests in the Dao and responds from there.
But the end point of this falling into dividedness, we learn, is remarkable and unexpected: Because the Way was injured, love became complete. If we accept this as pointing directly into our human entanglement with emptiness, how does injury complete love?
Immediately, the formative Western archetype of Christ presents the same deep logic: the one who takes the ultimate wounding and sacrifice of self in order to complete the ultimate healing of the world. True, in every shamanic tradition, a healer accepts a near-mortal wounding or illness as the transformative opening of the path. Love is realized in such sacrifice, acquiring the power to turn harm toward healing, grief toward praise.
This matter of how love becomes a little more complete appears in small things, too. Consider how the difficult things in life draw up resources in love. They draw up as well an ability to sacrifice self-interest for something bigger than this self. Staying up all night with someone who is sick, putting plans aside to stand by a person in need, giving up your comfort, your food, your house, your bed, to shelter another. Unhesitating sacrifice—giving up your life for another in some form great or small—takes place at the dissolving point of self. When that is willing, and conscious, it has transformational power. It resurrects something more alive than small self-comfort, gives life another chance, lets love be present and felt.
The strange logic here is that redemption needs betrayal and betrayal opens forgiveness: Thus, because the way was injured, love becomes complete. The meaning of redemption is not even on the horizon, until betrayal has singed your life. There’s an ancient Jewish contention that redemption is older even than creation. The injury to creation opens the way that will complete the love realized in the matter of deepest human value: redemption itself.
But it also seems to hold true that the human grasp on love is always close to being shaken. Each time that happens, we darken; and yet every darkening brings with it new potential. Because love’s been more completely revealed—even in its very betrayal—we can now see it with more clarity. The mended bowl can have its own surpassing beauty and value. At least it has that chance.
So difficulty is less a problem than a necessity; it makes the Way genuine. Right and wrong are mysteriously needed to injure the Way so that love can appear and we can let love complete us. Our difficulty, our wounding, turns out to be made to exacting human order. And the suffering that clarifies what is true harm forms the entire ground of moral response and ethical choice, of deciding what wrongs are crying out to be righted and what a fitting action might be. And so love defines care, and in doing so, becomes more complete. And this becoming goes on and on without end. Can the mind ever truly “fully awaken”? Perhaps in exceptional circumstances, just for a time—but it is vital for human beings always to smile at any such absolute proposition.
Masato Ogata is known in Japan as a philosopher-fisherman who used to live on fish from Minamata Bay and suffered crippling neurological damage (known as Minamata disease) from the infamous mercury waste pollution that corrupted the flesh of the fish and shellfish of those waters. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Chisso Corporation manufactured acetaldehyde used in the production of plastics, and mercury from the production process spilled into the bay. At the time, Minamata residents relied almost exclusively on fish and shellfish from the bay as a source of protein. Though no one knew until decades later, the heavy metal bioaccumulated in the food supply. Ogata knew Chisso bore full legal and moral liability for the harm but in the end he chose to say: “Chisso is me.”
Following Ogata, in the light of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, “Tepco is also me.” Every one of us has authorized Tepco in some measure—lived in tacit agreement with the premise of Tepco that unlimited energy is worth the hazard of virtually unlimited risk—and so nuclear waste is also me. Unlimited level of demands upon the earth is also me. Though we search to the end of time, we’ll never single out our responsibility, let alone ourselves, from the whole shebang. If we can’t go to that fact, we can’t make the vital move, which is to acknowledge this is a crisis and move society toward a compact with the earth’s renewability. Until “global warming is also me” is said, no honest moves with lasting traction can appear. A crisis is a deeper form of healing trying to bring us to earth. And to care becoming ever more complete.
A final glimpse of the strange logic of love “becoming complete” can come from Zen Master Raven, that old stooped alias for Robert Aitken. Raven conducted Zazen meetings and discussion under the tall spruce tree in the forest, and a wide assortment of animals gathered, and pondered together. Gray Wolf was one of those people who “seemed to attend meetings against her better judgment.” Practice always draws diffidence, stiffness, fear, resistance to the surface—where there’s finally a chance to notice and heed the real force of a life-restoring hunger.
One evening she came by anyway and said, “In every service I renew my vows to save the many beings, but really how can I do that?” Raven said, “It’s your precious keepsake,” leaving great latitude here to discover just how the questioning heart that a vow brings into being may become a precious keepsake. In any case, Mallard piped up and asked, “How can a vow be a keepsake?” Raven said, “It reminds you of a loved one.” Gray Wolf sat back and said nothing further. It seems there is considerably more road of self-saving resistance stretching on ahead for Gray Wolf.
So—it reminds you of a loved one. Who is that one? What is this self? Can it possibly be separate from the breeze and the leaves, the shadows playing over the faces of the people, the feelings in your own heart?
Including even the darkest doubts, the most savage, torn feelings?