The way things are is what there is. That sounds pretty self-evident. Almost a truism. But wait a minute. Isn’t that exactly what our minds don’t accept as true? Somehow we need to wedge a little space in there—between “the ways things are” and “what there is”—for the realm of the way things should be, the way I need them to be, the realm of being that is subject to my approval or disapproval. This opens up a vast virtual realm in which we lead our lives, consciously or unconsciously: the realm of judgment and desire, the realm of “the way things aren’t, but should be.”
But isn’t even this realm of resisting and wanting and judging also part of the way things are? Absolutely. Which is why it might be said that it’s all perfect, really, from the absolute point of view. But the point is: it’s not perfect for us. We suffer. The imaginary distance that we place between “the way things are” and “what there is”—and then somehow manage to insert ourselves into the middle of—opens a seemingly wide arena of suffering. That’s the first truth taught by the Buddha. The Buddha’s teaching doesn’t begin with logic or philosophy. It begins with the ache in our gut and proceeds from there.
And the second truth is that this suffering proceeds from the activity of desire and grasping, forcing or resisting, owing to our ignorance of the fundamental perfection of the way things are, which we could call the Buddha Nature, or the Tao. And the fundamental experiences that arise from this grasping and resisting—greed, anger, inertia, restlessness, and doubt—are understood as compulsive mind states that distract us from ever rediscovering the actual nature of things.
The Prajnaparamita scriptures are said to reflect the second period, or turning, of Buddha’s teaching. Prajnaparamita translates roughly as “transcendental wisdom,” or “the wisdom that has gone beyond.” The scriptures are written in a language that is largely paradoxical, because what this transcendental wisdom has “gone beyond” is the stuckness and limitation of our everyday concepts and mental categories. They are calling us back to, or invoking, the absolute nature of the way things are.
We might think of prajnaparamita—transcendent wisdom that sees all things and beings as empty of any independent existence—as a remote or sublime detachment. But it is in fact the greatest intimacy. For here, in the reality of prajnaparamita, there is nothing, no objectification, to keep us separated from our experience. Nothing to keep us separated from the objects of our experience. No one or anything to be separated. We are siblings arising every moment out of the same body of emptiness, Mother Prajnaparamita, The-way-things-are-is-what-there-is. Compassion arises naturally as a family affair; or, even more intimately, as the heart of one same body. Thus, the prajnaparamita literature is imbued throughout with two great themes, paradoxical to our conventional minds: the emptiness and insubstantiality of everything, and universal love, manifesting in the selfless perfections of generosity, compassion, patience, commitment, meditation, and insight.
Dogen Zenji, a great Japanese zen master, says, “The sounds of the boatmen rising from the river are my Beloved little Shakya”—his endearment name for Shakyamuni Buddha, or Buddha Nature itself. Brother sun, sister moon; comfort and discomfort; hot and cold—are these not also our beloved little Shakya?
There is an old zen recounting of the master and his disciple sitting together in the summer heat of southern China. The disciple observed: “In this region the summers are brutally hot, the winters unbearably cold.” His teacher replied, “Why don’t you go to that place where there is no hot or cold?” The student asked, “Where is that place where there is no hot or cold?” And the master replied, “In the summer, we sweat. In the winter, we shiver.” Here the master has intimately expressed the inseparable relative and absolute in one stroke.
Certainly in the summer we will sweat. And in the winter we will shiver. And we are also free to do the things that are done in response to that. We step into the shade. We fan ourselves. Or we find a warmer coat or build a fire. That is the simple realm of how things are. But once we seize on the words “hot” or “cold,” that opens the door to too hot or too cold, the realm of our subjective approval or disapproval; the realm of attachment to our projections; the realm of suffering. If our responses and actions arise from the full embrace of the way things are, we achieve our freedom. Putting on a coat is a free and loving act. If we inwardly resist the way things are as the basis for our action (“Goddamn it, it’s too cold around here”), we achieve only more suffering.
The teacher is kindly inviting his disciple back out of the tyranny of his objective categories, the separative activities of his mind, and his suffering. At the same time he is inviting him back into the infinite, intimate, ungraspable dimension of the way things are, here and now, beyond the mind’s projections and the mind’s stories. The way things are is already prajnaparamita—the wisdom, or truth, that is beyond the realm of all our concepts and all our suffering. The very ground of our awareness is not other than prajnaparamita; not other than the way things are. It is the naked surrender, or offering, of our awareness, in simple openness to the way things are, that actualizes Buddha’s third and fourth noble truth: liberation.
I can still subject myself to the mental tyranny of hot and cold. But not on the occasion of writing this poem. That imaginary distance vanished, along with the imaginary me. I was like the man in the ancient fable who, wandering in the woods, comes upon an undiscovered race of people who are entirely happy and entirely at peace—although once he returned to his daily life he was never able to find his way back. Fortunately, the way back is given to us by such generous teachers as each sound that falls upon our hearing when we are just listening.
This poem is really an invitation to investigation. Taking the first line, “The way things are is what there is,” I might tell you as a student, “Go home and take a week, and see if you can find any exception to this, and come back and let me know. But remember to include everything!” You’re sure to end up with a smile on your face. Why? Because in the process, the nagging unconscious distinction between “what is” and “what ought to be” melts away. Or regarding the second line, “The way things are is what is meditating,” I might ask, “See if you can find anyone other than that.” And the nagging distinction between “ourselves” and “what is” melts away.
Strictly speaking, however, we are not normally capable of such an investigation. To be able to investigate truly we must “employ” a naked awareness that is not lost in images or abstractions. Normally we live within just such a realm of images and abstractions and shuffle them around and come to new conclusions that are just new images and abstractions. But in truth, we have no actual or direct experience of what we are thinking or talking about. This is the dream world—the world of delusion—we all inhabit. We casually speak of “me,” “you,” “the mind,” and all the content of our feelings and beliefs as if they were real experiences, as if they were more than reifications and images that refer to no independent, fixed, or concrete reality.
Do we know what a “me” is? “Me” is a complex of images and assumptions that build and build; that we identify with and live with daily. But what does it actually refer to? To truly investigate this, the mind must be still for a while. Awareness must function.
Let’s just sit—until we can distinguish the animated cartoon of our mental activity from the clear, steady light of the bulb of awareness that projects the images upon the screen. Until there is just that natural ground of awareness illuminating all phenomena. Until even the idea of restlessness, the sensations of restlessness, and all our reactions to the ideas and the sensations, are just so many more leaves stirring in the wind. Until the play of light and shadow in the room is no different than the sensation of your backside on the cushion, the subterranean call of the ache in your back or the thing you left undone. Now the secret joys and generosity of the breath, now the bird call, now the sound of the rain, the call of wood and carpet and the geometric array of forms, the movement of thought or desire or subtle trepidation, the thought “I,” all empty into the common fabric of the way things are, ungraspable, all as expression of the one ground of being, which is both and neither subjective nor objective, according to no fixed idea, not of light or dark, not even of being or non-being.
Only then may we discover whether or not this “I,” this precious “I,” this curious, creative, longing, and long-suffering “I,” this I-hymn of creation, is anything other than “the way things are,” which includes the capacity to say “I.” Gone then is the need to attach to this I or to reject this I; nor indeed is there anyone to do it. Gone then is the need or the ability to “know” the way things are; nor is there anyone to know it.
Apart from the mind’s projection, the way things are is not a way. “No suffering, no path, no attainment of wisdom,” says the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. The way things are is not a thing. “No realm of sight, taste, touch, consciousness,” it says again. So even the phrase “what there is” must point beyond itself to a complete and inclusive emptiness or openness. This empty and open realm is the light of our own awareness. It is the complete availability to mystery, to radiance without contraction or separation, to unknowing awakeness, empty of projection, able to play in this moment.