Psychoanalysis begins with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, an unconscious that he postulated was filled with thoughts, fantasies, and wishes so upsetting to our ordinary conscious mind that they must be repressed.
Buddhism, on the other hand, begins with Shakyamuni’s experience of wholeness and perfection, a realization that what we deny ourselves is not just a vision of the forbidden and frightening side of human nature but of its wonder as well. Within the broader cultural context of Zen in America, the two traditions all too often have failed to interact synergistically, each talking past the other, each accusing the other of overlooking what is most fundamental about human nature.
My personal experience over more than three decades could be characterized as an attempt to foster a dialectic of mutual engagement and mutual influence between these two vantage points. The side of me trained as a psychoanalyst, the side that had learned how to seek out hidden trauma and vulnerability, needs to continually be reminded that, at the most essential level, nothing is missing—and nothing is hidden. Meanwhile, the side of me that delighted in the revelation of intrinsic wholeness needs ongoing reminders about the temptation to bypass the unresolved conflicts that lurk in the shadows cast by the light of realization.
We all face two challenges in accepting who we truly are. The first challenge is to accept our vulnerabilities and all those parts of our self about which we have grown up feeling ashamed and guilty, and about which we may be in denial. The second challenge is in facing the paradox of our perfection amid a life of suffering. Western psychotherapy has traditionally been focused on the first challenge, Buddhist practice on the second. While each has found ways of engaging with both sides of our nature, therapy typically runs the risk of seeing our flaws, symptoms, or deficits as central and its practice medicalized into an unending treatment of mental “illness.” Buddhism foregrounds the realization of perfection, reaching down into that deep well of no-self, to a place beyond loss and gain. This approach, especially as it developed in twentieth-century America, runs the risk of emotional bypass, of imagining that deep-seated emotional problems and character pathology can be washed away solely by sufficiently deep realization without ever having to engage psychological problems directly.
It is my hope that in the discussion of koans that follow, the two sides may be brought together and that a psychologically minded approach to traditional Zen practice will emerge.
I will begin at the beginning, with what we know of the Buddha’s life and the nature of the realization that he bequeathed to us.
The brief story of Shakyamuni Buddha’s life in the Transmission of the Lamp—an account of the lives of Buddhist masters compiled in 1004 CE that became an ur-text for the later koan collections—is a mixture of parable and hagiography, from which it is difficult to glean more than a glimpse of the person who became known as the Buddha. The mythological quality of what passed for biography in those days is exemplified by the baby who proclaims immediately at birth, “In the heavens above, and in the four quarters of the earth, there is none holier than I.”
However, the story of the infant Siddhartha also includes the early death of his mother. Although he is presented as growing up in a sheltered and privileged world, it would not be unreasonable for us to imagine this loss as fuel for his later questing. It is perhaps a measure of all historical, cultural, or hagiographic gaps that his mother’s death is never given credit for spurring his latter quest to unravel the mystery of life and death, the way it does for the great eleventh-century Japanese Zen master Dogen. It is only when as a young man, having been given a sheltered life by his father, that upon suddenly being confronted with the sight of an old man, a sick man, and a corpse, the reality of suffering and death become real to the young prince. He leaves home, which includes leaving a wife and young son, to dedicate his life to the esoteric ascetic practices of his day in his search for meaning. This paradigmatic home-leaving fits the model of renunciation that was the hallmark of all spiritual practices of his day and that continues to be a template with which we today must come to terms.
It is hard for us today to know how to imagine the forms of practice Siddhartha is said to have mastered. The Lamp records, “For the first three years he practiced the samadhi (deep meditation) of non-action, but found it no good and gave it up. The next three years he studied … the samadhi of non-thinking, but this too was no good and he gave it up.” I find it’s useful to think of them as different modes of mastery over mind and body, attempts to completely stop or control thought on the one hand and on the other to fully master all bodily needs and sensation. The Lamp goes on: “Then he went to Gaya Mountain and spent the next six years practicing ascetic disciplines together with many heretics, wearing sackcloth and eating but a little rye each day.” Whether this extreme asceticism describes actual practices engaged in at the time or is part of a myth of life-and-death commitment constructed to exhort latter-day monks is probably unknowable. But the model of pushing oneself to the brink of death in the name of practice is one that, for better or worse, has shaped what it has meant to seek enlightenment ever since.
There’s not much in this part of the story that I can identify with or would care to emulate. Long ago I intuited that whatever is there to realize about life and death is something that is hidden in plain sight. We struggle to accept the truth that has been there right before our eyes all along. Before setting out on his journey of discovery, the young prince Siddhartha is said to have looked upon old age, sickness, and death for the first time and been shaken to his core, saying to himself that those things “must ultimately be rejected.” And yet, after all those years of struggle, the essence of his realization was precisely that old age, sickness, and death are inescapable, that impermanence is the most fundamental thing, not only about our human lives, but about everything in the universe. The intensity of his practice was proportionate to his resistance to this basic fact, and the depth of his realization corresponded to the thoroughness of his ultimate acceptance of what had been so utterly unacceptable when he first set out.
In the Lamp’s version of the actual moment of his enlightenment, it simply states that “when the morning star arose, the Bodhisattva became a buddha.” Other accounts have him proclaiming in that moment that he and all beings together attained buddhahood. This never struck me as the sort of thing I could imagine anyone spontaneously proclaiming. I was grateful therefore to come across a version of the story told by Shodo Harada in which Shakyamuni looks up at the morning star and simply says, “That’s me.” Maybe when you hear the phrase “that’s me,” you imagine the Buddha proclaiming his “oneness” (whatever you imagine that is) with the star and everything in the universe. I have a different reaction.
I imagine him sitting under the tree after all those years of struggling to master his mind and body, struggling to master the secret of life and death. Suddenly, he looks at the star, twinkling in the sky, and realizes the star hasn’t struggled at all in order to be just what it is, to be perfect, just as it is. And he thought, I too am just what I am, I’m exactly like that star, manifesting my nature perfectly moment after moment. And everything in the world, like me, like the star, is fully, perfectly, expressing its own nature. Everything in this moment is a buddha, a perfectly realized being. What a shame not to realize it, what a shame to imagine that a star—or any being—needs to become something more than it already is. What the star already is, however, is not some Platonically pure or eternal essence of “star-ness,” but ever-changing. Perfection and change aren’t opposites; they turn out to be synonyms. Not only don’t we have to change in order to become perfect, our perfection manifests moment after moment in change itself.
Paradoxically, the very depth and thoroughness of Shakyamuni’s realization of buddha nature continuously expressing itself throughout all of creation, a realization of wholeness that we all participate in, whether knowingly or unknowingly, creates a new gulf of separation. We are so in awe of the Buddha and the Buddha’s enlightenment that we make him and it into something otherworldly, something transcendent and virtually unattainable. From “can’t miss,” we somehow go straight to “out of reach.”
One day as a medical student studying psychiatry, I was sitting in a circle of patients and therapists engaged in group therapy. Suddenly, I was struck how every person in the room, patients and therapists alike, was perfectly expressing who they were, in every moment, down to the tiniest detail. How they dressed, their posture as they sat in their chair, how they tilted their heads, how they spoke or remained silent, every gesture, every intonation of their voice, absolutely nailed their character as if they were actors who had totally mastered their roles. It was astounding! How could they all have gotten themselves so exactly, so perfectly right?
But of course, how could they miss? Who, what else could they be or do other than exactly what they were doing? This was one of my first tastes of a “perfection” without content, of a “rightness” that wasn’t achieved or approximated, but totally and always right there before my eyes, no matter which way I turned.
It was also a revelation that nothing is hidden. Everyone was fully displaying who they were. There was nothing more “behind the scenes” to uncover or decipher, the way my usual psychoanalytic mindset would lead me to think. There was both clarity and acceptance of each person being just who he or she was. Remarkably, the whole distinction between who was a patient and who was a therapist was forgotten, or perhaps was reduced to a nonqualitative, nonhierarchical difference—like who was wearing green and who was wearing blue.
I am not presuming to equate this minor personal insight with the Buddha’s enlightenment. For one thing, such moments quickly pass, and our habitual sense of something being missing, something being wrong, quickly reasserts itself. But such moments give us a glimpse of another way of seeing ourselves, one which may spur us to further practice. We imagine the Buddha’s enlightenment to have been total and thoroughgoing, with no problematic aspects of his earlier character unresolved, no attachments or delusions left undissolved, no questions left unanswered. For the rest of us, realization is never once and for all, and old doubts and old habits will resurface to be dealt with over and over throughout our life.
Yet doubt and old habits are part of how we twinkle like that star. As is sickness, old age, and death. And delusion and joy—the full spectrum of life as it is. The koans that follow can all help us see who we really are, especially those parts of ourselves that we have, sadly, for one personal reason or another, tried to turn away from. We have all blinded our self to parts of life we reflexively have felt too painful to behold or face directly.
Like Shakyamuni, we must be able look up and say, “That’s me.”