If you don’t like the story of your life, maybe it’s time to fire your scriptwriter.
—Jun Po Roshi
Our sense of self, known popularly as our “ego,” has been discussed a great deal in this book. We’ve talked about how, as humans, we tend to believe that we’re permanent, and that our stories about ourselves are as solid as the rocks and stars. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth—as a sudden illness, an untimely death of a loved one, or an abrupt change in relationship or work can show us. Even a cursory glance inward reveals that our sense of self is fluid and unstable. “We” disappear in deep sleep, are not really “conscious” when we’re dreaming (unless we’re lucid dreaming). Alcohol, drugs, dementia, fatigue, trauma, and many other things can all strongly affect and disrupt the ego. It is because of this that Jun Po likes to say that we are more like a process than a self.
From the ego’s perspective, this insight can be terrifying. If I’m not real and stable, if I’m not my stories and my dramas, my body and my hormones, my relationships and my ambition, my opinions and my politics, who am I really? When I strip away all the impermanent parts of myself—thoughts, feelings, stories, flesh and blood—what is left?
This question—who am I?—is one of the foundations of Zen, and many other spiritual disciplines as well. It is a question that Jun Po uses to see if he can push his students into stepping outside of the box of ego altogether.
This chapter, more than any other, gets into the paradox that Zen and Enlightenment present, a paradox that is only resolvable from a deeper insight into the nature of your own mind. Talking about something as difficult to understand as Enlightenment is, in a way, like discussing something like love. We know what love is, and how it feels, and what the world looks like from that view, but it would be very hard to explain what love is to someone who has never experienced it. In fact, it might be impossible.
Here Jun Po and I will be talking about something that might not make sense until you have an experience of this truth for yourself. Read carefully, and listen to the voice within you that is, even now, whispering the truth of your deepest self.
Enlightenment isn’t just waking up to a new truth or a new emotional understanding, it’s stepping out of the box of you completely. Zen calls this the “gateless gate.” Once you’re on the other side of Enlightenment, you see that there was no gate you had to cross, no place you had to go, no understanding you had to internalize. It is right here, right now, closer to you than your own face.
The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang onto, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.
—Trungpa Rinpoche
What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan.—Zen Master Hakuin
The day of this interview I’m still at Jun Po’s house in Wisconsin, and the early spring weather has once again turned cold. We’re hunched at his living room table, hands around cups of coffee. The topic today will be Awakening, and Jun Po’s intensity is plain to read on his face. His blue eyes are piercing and steady, and he welcomes me to the conversation with a silent nod.
KA: I’d like to pick up the pace of our discussion at this point. We’ve covered a lot of territory these last few weeks; I think that there is more than enough explanation if people find a statement by you confusing.
JP: [Nods.]
KA: Great. So we’ve covered the first two koans in Mondo Zen: “Is there such a thing as pure listening?” and “Where is this deeper listening located within your body?” Let’s move onto the third koan. Care to give it to us?
JP: “Who are you—who am I—within this deep, heartfelt listening?”
KA: Who am I within this deep, heartfelt listening? I remember, when I first was asked this, being uncertain of the question.
JP: [Nodding] You understood the question, as I remember. You just didn’t want to admit it to yourself. That is entirely the point. Who are you within the greatest depth of your heart and mind?
KA: I’m imagining someone reading this, unsure what to do. Unsure how to get there, to the heart of the question.
JP: So let’s slow it down. You’re not getting there. There is no there, there. Not there, Kogen—here. Language is so important—if we think we need to get “there,” we’re already lost. Awakening is closer to you than your own face, remember. To answer your questions, though, if you can’t get here, then I would ask you, Who are you from your surface mind?
KA: Are you asking me?
JP: Play along with me. Who are you?
KA: A writer, at least today.
JP: So you told me what you thought. Are you your thoughts?
KA: Some days, without question.
JP: And how are those days?
KA: Not so good, mostly. Heady. Moody. But no, I’m obviously more than just my thoughts.
JP: [Laughing] Imagine that. Who are you? You’re not a writer when you’re not writing. You’re not a thinker when you’re not writing. So who are you?
KA: A feeler? [Laughing.]
JP: [Laughing] Indeed. But also not all the time. Sometimes, when I ask people this, they’ll tell me feelings like “love” or “happiness” or “bliss.”
KA: Earlier in our conversation you said that we are not our bodies, our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts. We are the pure awareness that’s simply aware of all those things. But you just said that people sometimes tell you that they are “pure consciousness” and you reject that. Can you make this clearer for anyone who might be a bit confused at the moment?
JP: [Laughing] Semantics. Nine out of ten times, when someone tells says to me they’re “pure awareness,” or “pure consciousness,” there is a ton of ego identity wrapped up in it. They’re saying I’m pure awareness, with the emphasis on the “I.”
KA: If I’m in touch with dhyana mind or nondual awareness, and I simply say my name informed by this emptiness, would you accept that?
JP: Absolutely. It’s not just what someone is saying—it must be connected with the state of consciousness that is saying it. [Pause.] So nine out of ten times, the “nice” words, like “love,” “kindness,” “heart,” and the like have a lot of ego in them. They are not speaking from realization but the idea of the realization.
KA: And they sound very New Age.
JP: Well, they sound nice. Look, I love nice, don’t get me wrong. But they’re telling me what they’re feeling. Someone who says they’re “love” is attached to an emotional state. Love arises within this consciousness. It disappears from this consciousness. Love is no more who you really are than a man who tells me he’s a banker. It just sounds better to our soft, postmodern ears.
KA: Okay, so you ask this question, “Who are you?” and I try to tell you things, and you keep shaking your head.
JP: [Nodding] Most people stick with the two most obvious ego choices, thoughts or feelings. Some people get into stories, and start telling me they’re a parent, or a “change agent” or some such thing. I ask them to go deeper into their awareness, into their minds.
Let me ask you: who are you below the surface noise of your ego?
KA: Who’s asking?
JP: [Laughing] Who indeed.
KA: When I started this practice, I would have told you that I was the shifting, changing landscape of constantly arising feelings and thoughts, all tumbled all over each other, and not a one of them permanent or lasting.
JP: And that’s reporting on those things—if you can see those things as objects in your awareness, who are you? Can you go deeper into what’s noticing the ego?
KA: Who is doing the watching, it sounds like you’re asking.
JP: That’s right. Who are you? And don’t tell me what you think or feel.
KA: If I say “writer,” you’ll ask me who I am when I’m teaching kung fu. If I say “an American,” you’ll tell me that’s an external identity that says nothing about who I really am. If I say “I’m sad,” you’ll ask me what happens when the sadness inevitably goes away. If I’m honest, I would tell you that I don’t know who I am.
The ego can’t know who or what it is, except knowing it is a temporary structure that valuates sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Any other definition I give you can be deconstructed.
JP: Isn’t that something? Now we’re finally getting nowhere! Shunyata!
KA: Okay. So from the surface of my mind—
JP: From your ego, the reflective surface of your consciousness.
KA: Yes. From my ego, I have to tell you that the knowledge that I didn’t know who I was was, quite honestly, terrifying! I had hundreds of stories, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and external feedback loops with friends and family that gave me some sense of who I was, but the harder I looked at those things the more they crumbled to pieces. Not to get melodramatic, but forty years ago my ego didn’t exist; in a few more decades, if I’m lucky to live that long, my ego will cease to exist again—
JP: A figment of divine imagination.
KA: Who the hell wants to admit they don’t know who they are?
JP: The honest ones and the insightful ones. The ones who are tired of running from the truth. But the inquiry—the insight—doesn’t stop there. Otherwise you’re left in a kind of nihilism.
KA: Yeah, I know that place. The existential cul-de-sac I spent a few years of my life inhabiting. The question, the koan, was “Who am I—within this deep, heartfelt listening?” You’re asking me to drop deeper than my reactive ego, to the part of my consciousness that can witness what’s arising within it—
JP: And possibly even deeper. Eventually, even watchers who arise inevitably fall away into the truth of impermanence.
KA: So let me map this out for the reader. There’s my ego, which a deeper witness can watch rise and fall away, in pure awareness.
JP: [Nods.]
KA: And there’s a deeper view in which the witness itself arises and falls away, a pure view where there is no “I,” no “you,” no distinctions or separations of any kind.
JP: From this depth of consciousness, is not knowing who the ego is a problem?
JP: This level of consciousness is emptiness itself.
KA: This is known as “nondual” in some traditions.
JP: [Nodding] It is also known as dhyana mind, or Zen. Or sahaj samadhi, turiyatita, rigpa.
KA: Okay, but there is a missing piece here, namely: how do people get out of the way of this viewless view? Can you break down the steps in getting from realizing that I’m not my ego, to realizing that “I’m” actually the very emptiness out of which ego arises? There’s a sleight of hand that happened between us in the last couple of minutes that is going to be very hard to capture with the written word.
JP: [Closes eyes for a moment, pauses] Pure awareness arises out of empty consciousness, consciousness deeper than that awareness.
KA: So, you’re saying that the part of me that is just simply aware of my stories, thoughts, memories, emotions, and so on—the witness awareness—arises out of empty consciousness, dhyana mind, sahaj samadhi, turiyatita, rigpa, right?
JP: Exactly. This insight isn’t obvious to someone who hasn’t had depth experience in meditation. But we can all get there, right now. You only need to consider it deeply. Remove your blocking beliefs and then drop into the silence. You’re not just your thoughts and feelings, not your additional five senses. You know this. What/who knows this? What part of your consciousness can access the truth of this statement?
KA: And from this depth of awareness—
JP: This depth of awareness. Yes.
KA: From this depth of awareness, the answer to the koan is that I am the not-knowing.
JP: Yes, and now just drop the pronoun. Go deeper. Who are you at this depth of insight?
KA: Not knowing.
JP: [Nods.]
KA: What is a big problem for the ego, for surface thinking, isn’t a problem at all from a deeper level of knowing. I accept and understand that my deeper view arises out of emptiness, which by definition cannot be known or understood. That sound about right?
JP: That’s it.
KA: So this can get tricky. When I drop into the emptiness, there’s no one to speak. Not knowing has, as far as I can tell, never said a word. Or written a book.
JP: [Laughing] Two mirrors, one mind. And isn’t that something? Of course, once you have had this revelation, there is so much to say! We have to return to surface consciousness, to “come up” a little bit to speak; have to allow the newly informed ego to come back online. In order to speak we need to engage our ego. The question then becomes: are you Awake to the deeper truth of pure awareness, while you’re engaging and moving through your ego?
KA: Because from not knowing, there is only awareness—pure looking and pure listening.
JP: I like to say, at this depth of awareness we are aware and silent, not opinionated and noisy. From here intelligence does not deny but contains our emotionality, from here feeling is experienced as information. Got time for a story?
KA: Of course.
JP: Back in the late 1980s, I had a twenty-or-so-word conversation with Soen Roshi, my teacher’s teacher. I was in Japan, as Eido Roshi’s senior student, and we were at Ryutaku-ji Rinzai temple, located in Mishima, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. This is the temple that was founded and restored by Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku in 1761.
And my God, what a beautiful place. It is the root temple for our line of Rinzai Zen. Soen Roshi was the head abbot of that temple. So there I am, an ignorant barbarian, being led around Japan trying to not embarrass myself.
I didn’t know this then, but Eido Roshi was considering me, seriously, for his first dharma heir. The problem was, of course, that I was an American. And a troublemaker for Eido Roshi. He had asked me to first be head monk and later vice abbot of his monastery, but I agreed only if he would let me modernize Dai Bosatsu—and he agreed so long as he didn’t have to participate. [Laughs.]
So I was bringing in yoga and embodiment into Eido Roshi’s classic Zen, not to mention organic food, psychological shadow work—all kinds of stuff that doesn’t belong in Imperial Zen. But I was as stubborn as he was, and I practiced as if my life depended on it, and so Eido Roshi trusted me.
Anyway, we go to the Ryutaku-ji Rinzai temple to visit Soen Roshi, who is just coming out of a yearlong silent retreat. He’s living in a little cottage just up from the temple. Eido Roshi takes me up there, and we step inside, and it’s eighteenth-century Japan. Just unbelievable. And Soen Roshi is preparing ceremonial tea—chanoyu—for me, an extravagant production.
JP: [Nodding] Eido Roshi insisted I learn it. Probably in an effort to make me more Japanese.
KA: You don’t practice it anymore?
JP: God, no. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it turns out I’m not, in fact, Japanese.
KA: [Laughs.]
JP: Anyway, Soen motions for me to approach him. He makes eye contact and offers some tea.
“How do you do?” he asked me, innocently.
Now, I could have said, “Hey, Roshi, I’m good. Beautiful temple. It’s an honor to meet you …” or some such crap. But Eido Roshi had trained me well, and in a microsecond I realized that Soen wasn’t making conversation but instead asking me a koan.
I experience pure panic—which later I would come to understand was pure excitement—and without a thought, I opened my eyes a little further, leaned in, and responded:
“How do you do?” I said.
And just like that, time stopped.
Soen Roshi leaned in. “Who wants to know?” he asked.
“Who is asking?” I said, lightning-fast. I leaned in, too, so that now we were so close our noses nearly touched.
“Who indeed,” Soen replied. Then, “Have a little tea.” We then had some tea in silence. It was just exquisite.
KA: What was going on? Emptiness talking to itself?
JP: I would say there were two mirrors and one mind in that ceremonial tea dialogue. It was a test. How deep was my insight?
KA: Well that certainly doesn’t put any pressure on me moving forward in this conversation.
KA: The test, then, was if you could stay connected to emptiness throughout the conversation. To mirror back his own consciousness, which is the very same as yours, and mine, and the fly that’s buzzing around us.
JP: [Nodding] Sentience—self-awareness—varies from organism to organism and person to person, but consciousness is exactly the same.
KA: Okay, so let’s bring this back to Mondo, and be crystal-clear: when someone goes through the first two koans successfully, he or she will drop through the floor of their ego, into emptiness. From here, not knowing is their view—or is the view, to be clearer. And from this depth of consciousness, not knowing speaks through their relative ego.
JP: [Nodding] The first two koans hopefully will give people an Awakening experience, what we call kensho. This is an experience, which means it is impermanent and will fade, but it is enough to realign their philosophical understanding. It gives them a taste for the territory they are so desperately seeking. With practice and training—
KA: And some luck.
JP: [Laughing] Yup, and some luck—they will eventually speak through their ego with and from deeper awareness, from shunyata. Their egos will then be permanently informed by emptiness.
KA: Because Enlightenment isn’t an experience. It doesn’t come and go, isn’t inside or out, isn’t an idea or concept, can’t be taught, and can’t be held by the ego. Enlightenment simply is, and can flow through an ego, Awakening it in the process.
KA: So when you practice Mondo Zen with people, I assume that you get responses that are all over the map?
JP: Oh, yeah. Some people will get the third koan in just a few minutes. Other people, especially people who are well-educated—they can really struggle with this, sometimes for hours.
KA: They’re more attached to their thoughts and feelings.
JP: More identified with, I’d say. Usually because they just dumped eighty grand or more in school, fine-tuning those thoughts and feelings. [Laughing] Eido Roshi grew frustrated working with PhDs, because it was so difficult to break through their thinking minds. “Stop sending me PhDs,” he once lamented. “They think they already know everything! They have too much overstanding! They need more understanding!”
KA: How do I know if I’m at the depth of mind that is truly Awake?
JP: Because you will have no doubt, Baba. [Pausing, leaning in within a few inches of my face] It will bring you to your knees, literally. It will blow your heart wide open. It will reprogram every cell in your body, and put you inside of the compassion that blazes like a white-hot sun inside of you. You will act in the world not because you want to but because you have to. Before Abraham, before the Big Bang, there is just this. [Pausing, leaning back] But you will almost certainly need a clear teaching and practice, not just a book, to get here. You may even need a teacher.
KA: Why?
JP: Because the ego is tricky, and it will try and claim Awakening for itself. Things can get messy when that happens.
KA: That is a long topic in itself, and a little off-topic of this book. But I will say I’ve seen quite a few people, even people who consider themselves “gurus,” be very attached to their Awakening, usually to the detriment of themselves and their students.
JP: Regular narcissism is bad enough. Divine narcissism is especially tough to take. [Laughs.]
KA: I think that’s a topic for a different time, or maybe a different book. Let me pause here. We’ve covered a lot of difficult and beautiful territory. I hope someone following this conversation can give themselves a minute to let all of this sink in. If they haven’t been able to follow this in their immediate experience, I hope they can at least appreciate it intellectually. As you like to say, it’s part of right view.
JP: Let’s move on to the fourth koan. “Differentiate between ‘not knowing’ and ‘I don’t know.’ ”
KA: What’s going on here?
JP: Well, for most people the insight of not knowing is really new, and I like to use the fourth koan to help them play with the change in perspective, from ego to deep heart/mind. So I’ll have them answer the question, “Who are you?” with their egos, and then with deep heart/mind. A little bit of embodiment can go a long way here.
To help with the integration of body and mind and to ground the experience, I’ll have them raise their hand and make a fist when they answer, “Who are you?” First, from their ego, “I don’t know.” [Laughing] Everybody nails that one. Boy, they just growl at you, “I don’t know!” You can actually feel the visceral contraction of ego mind.
KA: Maybe it’s liberating to finally admit it!
JP: [Nodding] Then I’ll ask them to open their fist and drop the pronoun “I,” choose to release the contraction of self as they answer from their deep heart/mind. “Who are you?” They soften, and say “Not Knowing.” This is also viscerally felt.
KA: And you’re looking for what?
JP: When someone is really in touch with shunyata, the void, emptiness, not knowing, there is an opening and relaxation within their body and mind. It’s obvious when not knowing speaks through the ego versus merely the opinionated and value-weighted ego. It’s obvious to me, and it’s almost always obvious to them, too, and everyone else in the room. Usually, not knowing will lean in a little toward me, right in to the scary bald Zen guy.
KA: So koans three and four are designed to let a student play with the movement of their perspective, from an egocentric view to one that is more Buddha-centric?
JP: Yes. And to give them the embodied visceral experience of this state of consciousness.
KA: State of consciousness? I thought Enlightenment wasn’t a state of consciousness?
JP: It isn’t. But very few, one in ten billion, will just wake up. The rest of us will need to have a taste, what we call a kensho in Zen, a momentary flash of awareness that might last a few minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months, but then fade from view. Then they must work to ground this in their own experience. Again, I’m not much good to people once they leave a retreat. They will have to practice. The whole point of this process is to give a student the experience themselves, something that they can experience and differentiate in their own awareness.
KA: Otherwise, they have to keep coming back again and again.
JP: That’s right. Things like satsang—where a teacher lectures to his or her students—or transmission, are all well and good, so long as you never leave the side of your teacher. But what Mondo Zen tries to do is bring the deepest, most experiential insights of Buddhism away from the elite circle of teachers, and put it into the community’s lap.
You are this light. Adi dipa! These are not just the Buddha’s words!
KA: The fifth koan introduces something that is, to my mind, pretty tricky. Care to share the fifth koan with us?
JP: The fifth koan is, “What are you like, what are we like, at this depth of consciousness?”
KA: And here you’re looking for specific words? I remember when you first did this with me, and there were no words for me. I snapped my fingers, and you accepted that answer.
JP: As I recall, the first time you answered this koan you leaned in toward the priest who asked and snapped your fingers. In that moment, you were fully here even though you didn’t technically say anything.
At this depth of mind, soul, spirit, awareness—bud, emptiness—has never spoken. So that finger snap worked. But eventually, and more typically, I require students to speak. Emptiness has never spoken, it is true, but the ego has. We’re trying to integrate these things, to let the ego be informed by emptiness and not just to bliss out into big mind.
“What’s it like here?” I’ll ask, and look for them to tell me about their immediate experience. What this state of mind is like, not what arises in this state or depth of mind. Got it?
KA: Yes. Because everything arises in this state of mind, including so-called profound spiritual insights. What kinds of answers do you tend to get?
JP: It varies. Some people will say something like, “I’m deep here.” And I’ll invite them to drop the “I.” You’ll see them, literally, sink deeper into their experience. And then they might say, “Deeeep …” Sometimes people will say things like “love,” which can be tricky. I’ll explore this with them to see if they’re in an emotion, love, or if they’re really experiencing the deep compassion that arises right out of emptiness. Either way, I’ll invite them to go deeper.
KA: I was on one retreat with you, and one person said “black” and another person said “light,” and you accepted both answers.
JP: They were both describing a felt-sense of what emptiness was like for them. If you remember, I asked each of them, “How black?” and “How light?” and they both gave me a smile that stretched right into infinity. [Laughing] One said “Infinitely black,” the other said “Brighter than a supernova.” From my point of view, the first was intuiting consciousness deeper than awareness, the great void, shunyata. The other was delighting in the truth of naked brilliant awareness, dhyana, within individuated sentience.
KA: Wow! That was what you saw in those answers? That’s why you’re the master and I’m the student.
JP: No, Kogen. The teachings come from me to you, and from you back to me. Always.
KA: I have no idea what that means, so I’m going to dodge it for now.
JP: [Laughs.]
KA: What you’re looking for is to see if a student can speak directly from emptiness itself; to give voice to the voiceless?
JP: That’s exactly it. If we can’t speak from and clearly articulate the meaning and significance of realizing this depth of awareness, we can’t really live in this depth of awareness, can we?
KA: What does living in this depth of awareness mean, exactly?
JP: You have a powerful insight of the true depth of your mind. How are you going to get gas in your car, talk to your mother over Thanksgiving dinner, vote in an upcoming election, or decide what’s the best choice to make in going out for a sustainable dinner on the town?
We’ve already talked about this, but it’s easy to get real high on a spiritual retreat, but then you come back into your life, and you have no idea how to integrate that insight.
Emptiness speaks, believe me. And it acts. Otherwise, you’re in danger of becoming an arhat, one of those Buddhists who wants to transcend the suffering of the world, live in a cave away from it all, and if you’re lucky dissolve into a light beam at the end of your life. [Laughing] Pretty selfish, from a certain perspective, and pretty impractical from another. As Zen practitioners, we are bodhisattvas—embodied, compassionate, fully engaged human beings.
KA: The words that describe emptiness are things like “vast,” “empty,” “timeless,” “boundless,” and on like that?
JP: [Nodding] These descriptors must be accurate state descriptions of the deeper awareness within your mind that cannot be violated.
KA: Can we unpack that statement a little?
JP: Sure. The words a student chooses must accurately describe a state of deep awareness that cannot be easily reduced to a deeper state. How’s that?
KA: Much better.
JP: So you cannot violate, divide, or quantify empty, silent, purely aware, timeless, deathless, vast mind. I also like to ask people, when we’re really locked into a powerful dialogue, “Is there fear here?” And they’ll always smile and shake their heads. “No fear!
KA: But fear is real.
JP: Absolutely it is. But fear arises within emptiness, and from emptiness fear is experienced as excitement and opportunity. Fear comes and goes. You do not come and go when you are finally here, Awake! You will stay Awake and get to respond rather than react to the information in the arising fear.
KA: What’s the overarching point of this? I mean, why have people describe the indescribable?
JP: To name this depth is to claim this depth. These are state descriptions. You can and must describe the so-called indescribable. Because language is a signifier for something else, right? The whole point of this is to give students some language they can use, some signifiers, to return them to their experience of vast, empty silence. “Vast,” “empty,” and “silence” are just words, of course, and can easily be dualist concepts. But Mondo Zen ties these signifiers to the experience of nondual, empty mind, you see, so that you can access this experience more easily. Does that make sense?
KA: Why is it so important they claim their insight?
JP: Because it shifts their perspective. They now have a deeper understanding of their deeper, spiritual nature. And because no one can give you your seat. You must take it. The insight isn’t mine to give. Even if I could give someone a complete, total Awakening, I would never rob them of the process.
KA: Even those who are suffering horribly?
JP: Especially those who are suffering horribly. [Pausing, leaning in toward me, intensity and emotion clear on his face] Get this: when you Awaken and change your understanding, you will discover that your angst is your liberation. Pain is inevitable; suffering is a choice. Any power a student projects onto me in the process of his or her Awakening they will invariably have to take back, before the Awakening process can complete itself. Understand that. I cannot help you, Baba. You must help yourself. I cannot Awaken you; you must Awaken yourself. I cannot remove suffering that I am not causing. Only you can do this.
KA: On a fundamental level, I understand that. But it seems so counter to the guru model. I mean, the whole point of you being a teacher is, from a certain perspective, to give people something.
JP: Yes, but at the same time the age of the guru is fading into history, and for a good reason. I can provide education and transmission, and practical guidance, as well as my particular opinion where someone’s insight may be blocked. But I can’t do much beyond that. The guru model never really worked that well, I would argue. You have a couple of thousand preening devotees, and only a handful that fully Awaken. I prefer to err on the side of empowering my students.
KA: I certainly understand, and appreciate, that. Every time I’ve tried to project onto you, it’s gone badly. For me.
JP: [Laughing] That’s only because I’m such an especially human teacher, Baba.
KA: I would say you’re just especially honest about your humanness. Anyway, let’s move on, then, to the sixth koan. It starts off right after a student has given you those signifiers—“vast,” “empty,” “timeless,” “fearless,” “dark,” “light,” “eternal.” What is it?
JP: “Now, leave out your words. Express your new insight with a silent gesture of embodied consciousness.” How does this depth of awareness express itself in your body? Show me!
KA: This sounds like it’s a play off the same theme you just stated—in order to not live as arhats—disembodied Buddhists in caves looking to escape the world—we need to not only give emptiness a voice but also a body. Is that right?
JP: That’s exactly it. So the idea here is for a student to stay aware of and connected to, and simply express vast, timeless, fearless, emptiness, with and through their bodies, and especially their eyes.
KA: Oh, that’s all?
JP: [Laughing] That’s all. Someone who is really dropped in, and really is timeless, fearless, and boundless, isn’t afraid of an old bald geezer sitting in front of them in black pajamas. They’re certainly able to express themselves without words.
KA: How?
JP: Spontaneously. They’ll lean in, their eyes will get bright, and usually a smile and a look of playfulness will come to their faces. Enlightenment isn’t a serious, deadly, stern affair—it’s playful, fun, light, and deeply, deeply curious! Sometimes it can have an intensity to it as well. Sometimes I need to encourage movement with hands. The point is that it’s easy to tell when emptiness has leaned out of a human body to express itself!
KA: And if someone struggles, what do you do?
JP: Well, I show them. Go ahead, ask me.
KA: What, now?
JP: Yes, now.
KA: Jun Po, show me this depth of awareness!
JP: [Wiggles his eyebrows, and makes fists on either side of his heart, then pulls his fists apart and leans in] That’s Hanuman, who pulled his chest apart to show his love of Rama and Sita was so strong they were, literally, in his heart. Or the flaming heart of Christ in those images I remember from my Catholic childhood.
KA: I love that you capture both an amazing fierceness and a real playfulness. I want to cringe and laugh at the same time.
JP: [Laughs.]
KA: We’re been at this a long time today. Let me summarize where we stand: What you’ve done is establish, with the first koan, insight into a deeper consciousness. The second koan shows that this consciousness has heart, and a heart-centered view. In the third koan, there is an identification with emptiness as not knowing itself, which is played off of the ego’s understanding that it doesn’t know who it is in the fourth koan. In the fifth, we are asked to describe pure awareness, dhyana or even shunyata, the void; and in the sixth koan to express this insight without words.
I think that’s plenty for today. We’ll pick up with the seventh koan in a few weeks. Any final thoughts?
JP: Only this: [pantomimes pulling his chest apart again].