Here Whitman appears as the embodiment of the one who has closed the distance between “the ways things are and what there is.” Here there is no objectification, no separation, no comparison, no contradiction. He knows himself as the one who has no second. The one without a second is not the ego. It is the one who exists as the affirmation of the way things are. There is no side to defend. No identification with partial views or with partial interests. There is one self-interest. All is a diverse expression of the same self-nature. The genuine self-nature of the human being is not partial; it upholds the life of the whole. Such a one can affirm like the rush of a brook; he can speak truth like a clap of thunder. He does not hold onto his truth.
I recall attending a lecture of Dainin Katagiri Sensei (later Katagiri Roshi) at the San Francisco Zen Center in the late 1960s. Sensei was lecturing on some particular point of Buddhist philosophy when a listener raised his hand and began to argue or to contradict the point that he was making. Katagiri just smiled and answered in his Japanese English, “This is not my big deal.”
It is a phrase that has remained with me all my life. Whatever it is that I can say or think or believe; whatever position I may take; whatever can be put into words; whatever I may seem to be identified with “is not my big deal.” Yet people spend their lives fighting each other over their “big deals.” The biggest deal we make is over our sense of self, our survival, and especially our own rightness. Every position and belief is an extension of that. It might be helpful in our own practice to shine the light of awareness on our day-to-day and moment-to-moment responses in order to see where our “big deals” lie.
It is recounted that Buddhanandi, a famous dialectician and debater, and seventh in succession in the lineage of the Buddha, first approached his destined teacher, Vasumitra, and said, “I have come to debate truth.” He is enlightened beyond his partiality when Vasumitra replies, “Dear friend, if we debate, it will not be truth.”
Vasumitra is not saying, “My truth is undebatable. It cannot be contradicted.” Vasumitra is pointing to prajnaparamita, that truth which is undebatable because it has no sides, no partiality; that truth which cannot be contradicted because it includes and embraces all contradiction; that truth which has no fixed ground on which the ego can stand and assert itself. It has no big deal.
Whitman’s truth, the direct realization of the way things are, is in immediate supply. It is not objectified or made distant. His utterances are naturally outrageous to those trying to maintain some rationality, propriety, safety, or control within an objectified view of themselves and the world.
This objectification of self, or ego, is a shrinking or contracting away from the divine life we actually inhabit—until truth itself becomes an idea, an object. We are trapped within our mental structures and we pray to this idea of Truth, or the Divine, to save us. This is the format of conventional religion. For that matter, it is the format of all conventional belief and conventional desire—in which the belief, or the object of desire, becomes the truth that will save us.
But Whitman, instead of projecting and shrinking, fills out and inhabits the full dimension of who he actually is, knowing truth as the simple expression and experience of his own being.
No wonder he can sing.