IT IS NOT ABOUT BEING A NICE PERSON;
IT IS SOMETHING FAR DEEPER THAN THAT.
What am I in service to? This is one of my favorite questions. It is an awakener. It is an awareness practice and an honesty practice. It is one of the big questions, up there with What am I giving myself to? What is my life about? Who am I? and What is God? If we are not asking these bigger questions, we tend to sleepwalk through life, skimming the surface, and acting and reacting from entrenched points of view and patterns of behaving.
Service is not a strictly spiritual idea or ideal; part of the human experience is to serve and to give back. To be human is to help in some way and to nurture the well-being of others. One of the beautiful things about service is that we are simultaneously taking part in the well-being of ourselves. This points to something essential about service: when it is done from a sense of wholeness, when it comes from an overflow and a sharing of an inner abundance, it is enriching and life affirming—not only for us, but for anybody involved in whatever we are trying to serve.
When I think about service, I think about my first teacher, Arvis Joen Justi. In my twenties, I became interested in Zen Buddhism through a book I read by Alan Watts. I cannot remember which one it was, but at the time, in the early 1980s, Watts was a popular writer and one of the first people to bring Eastern spiritual teachings to the West. His book led me to one by Ram Dass, Journey of Awakening. In the back of that book was a directory of spiritual and contemplative centers throughout the United States. At that time, there were few Zen monasteries, or temples, or yoga retreats, so the list fit on a couple of pages; nowadays it would take volumes. One of the centers was the Los Gatos Zen Group, which was about fifteen minutes from where I lived in Northern California. I was over the moon! I had no idea what this group was or anything about it, but I telephoned and talked to the woman who became my teacher—Arvis.
She gave me directions to her place in the foothills in Los Gatos. Even though it was near my home, the location seemed obscure, and I got lost a few times on the way. When I finally arrived, it was a house. I do not know what I was expecting, but I do not think I was expecting a regular house! I was not sure if I had the right address, so I checked and rechecked. Finally, I got out of my car and walked up the driveway. A small note hung on the door. It said, “Zazen” and had an arrow pointing toward the back of the building. I knew “zazen” was the Zen term for meditation, so I figured I must be in the right place.
I walked around to the backyard, climbed the stairs, and arrived at some sliding glass doors at the rear of the house. The whole thing was unusual. A woman in her late fifties or early sixties opened the back door, and I saw another sign. This one said: “Please remove your shoes.” I kicked my shoes off and looked up at the woman to find out what to do next. All she did was stare down at my shoes. I stared too and then realized how haphazardly I had kicked them off—one on top of the other. They were not placed with attention, or mindfulness, or care. I received her silent message. I reached down and arranged my shoes neatly next to each other. She smiled a big smile and said, “Welcome!”
I received a full teaching from Arvis in those first awkward moments. When she drew my attention to how carelessly I had treated my shoes, she gave me my first lesson in what it means to be aware, to be present to everything instead of to a few chosen things that you consider important. It is all about paying attention, about being extraordinarily conscious of what is happening inside you and all around you. It was a wonderful, complete teaching that still speaks to me decades later.
I meditated with Arvis that day, and I kept coming back. Over time I saw the great amount of devotion and service she offered. She opened her house to strangers for more than thirty years. Her living room was set up for meditation—black cushions laid out on top of black mats and a small bodhisattva figure at the front of the room. Everything was understated and simple. Arvis cleared her schedule every Sunday and prepared a talk. She did not ask for anything in return. I was impressed by her quiet, humble way and the tremendous strength beneath her humility—a reservoir of clarity and wisdom, of a more awakened way of seeing and experiencing.
I will never stop reflecting upon the great devotion Arvis had to serving something that was important—something she loved. When she first started to offer teachings at her house, she would sit down after preparing everything, but nobody would show up. Still, she wrote a talk, set up her meditation room, and opened her house every single week, week after week. Sometimes, out of compassion, her husband would sit with her, but mostly she sat alone.
She continued to do this for an entire year without a single person coming. That is dedication! What service to the dharma, the Buddhist teachings—not being in service to how many people appear, to numbers or normal measures of success, but to doing what she was called to do. After a year, one person came, and for the next year it was Arvis and that one person. They sat together each Sunday morning, and Arvis gave her talk to an audience of one. As word slowly spread, more people arrived, until sometimes she would have fifteen or twenty people.
Her dedication was a great teaching for me. It touched my heart because it spoke to what service is: the willingness to put ourselves in a position of giving, to be an embodiment of what we are dedicated to, and to put our life, time, attention, and energy into the most important things. Even when Arvis was sitting in her living room alone, she was in service to all the people who might show up in the future.
Many years later, I ended up being one of those people.
Arvis was willing to serve the dharma quietly and humbly. She did not need the temple, robes, and official ceremonies, although when it came to the Buddhist teachings she could be extremely direct; there was no messing around, and you could see her dedication to the truth. Arvis spent more than thirty years carrying on a lineage of truth teaching, as her teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, and his teacher, Hakuun Yasutani, and his teacher’s teachers had done for more than a thousand years. These were people who served what they loved. From her point of view, even when sitting alone she had great company—a long lineage of dharma teachers.
In the present moment, we are all serving in our own way; we are all being part of a lineage. Whether we want to or not, we are all passing something on, and we are all affecting one another, consciously or unconsciously. But do not just ask yourself what lineage you came from; inquire into your lineage going forward. What are you contributing to? What are you serving?
It is so easy for us in the West. We are so conditioned to be in the consumer mind-set, always asking, What can this do for me?—as in, What can this movie do for me? What can this person do for me? If it is a spiritual teaching: What can this teaching do for me? If it is a walk in the woods: What can this walk do for me? It is an attitude, and it is a stance. What gets lost is the acknowledgment that we are taking part in one another’s lives; we are affecting the world and the beings around us. This brings up the whole notion of what we are in service to. What is our life an expression of ? What is our contribution?
Even though it is not especially hip or popular nowadays, this idea of the necessity of service has been a part of every spiritual or religious tradition. It is not about being a nice person; it is something far deeper than that. It is about connecting to what is important in our lives—to what has been called “the deathbed virtues.” David Brooks, a commentator and author, distinguishes between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” Résumé virtues are the things you tell someone like an employer when you are trying to sell yourself. They are what you have accomplished and succeeded at, what you are good at, and what makes you money. Then, as Brooks said, there are our eulogy virtues—the ones you might want mentioned when you are being remembered at your funeral. Our eulogy virtues connect us to the deepest part of ourselves: the effect we have on people and life around us.
Contemplating eulogy virtues helps us look inward and circles us back to the notion of service. What am I in service to? How can I be in service to the deepest thing I know? Contemplate this. Sit with the questions and be with them in quietness. Our most important thing may be truth, freedom, enlightenment, love, or compassion. We find what is important when we look at what we devote our time and attention to. Time and attention are our two most precious and guarded commodities as modern human beings. Think about it: most of us will give our money to a cause before we give our time and attention to it.
I am not suggesting that we impose a new idea of what we “should” be doing: “I should be contributing in this way. I should be contributing in that way.” The “should” obscures the natural goodness and inspiring energy of the heart, and so we must be on the lookout for our mind turning service into obligation. It is more about every moment of clarity, insight, or revelation having as its corollary a possibility to be put into action or to be in some way expressed. We think in big terms—it seems like today everybody wants to change the world—and sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of people do not want to be bothered with taking part in service to something unless they can create a public, visible effect or unless their actions can have a cosmic significance. That is not service; it is egotistical self-aggrandizement. Real service is a humble energy. It is looking for where you can serve the thing you love. How can I participate in what I love? How can I be a living expression of what I love? Not in a perfect way—you can disappear into a lot of self-judgment if you look at it through that lens—but in aspirational, small ways.
There is another way of looking at service. When Arvis silently directed my attention to how I had placed my shoes, she gave me a glimpse of how being in service to one thing is reflective of how I am in service to everything else. She demonstrated the importance of not dividing the world into “These things are worthy of my attention and my love and my service, but these other things are not,” which is looking through a dualistic and self-centered lens.
People sometimes say to me, “Well, you are a spiritual teacher, so you get to serve all the time.” Imagine if the only time I was in service—the only time I served the dharma—was when I was onstage in front of a bunch of people. That would be extremely limited. It would make me a performer, and my dharma would be an act—something I did not do in the rest of my life. I teach because my teacher asked me to, because I was called to do it, and so I do it joyfully even when it is challenging, or I am tired, or I am getting on another plane and I have to be away from home. There is a reason behind all of this: I am serving something I see as truly valuable.
However, that is not the only avenue of service, for me or for others. Much is in the moment-to-moment unfolding of human life: the encounters with the world around us, with the way we place our shoes, with the next person we talk with, with the next situation we are in. During those moments in your own life, ask: What am I in service to? When we are serving the qualities of life that we consider most valuable, there is a fringe benefit, as we tend to be far happier when we are in service to the things we love than when we are just trying to acquire more of what we love.
If you are in the position of a consumer, you feel “less than”: there is a feeling of not enough, of I need more and I want more, and it leaves you feeling inadequate. Instead, start your day thinking, Today I am going to undertake one act of service for somebody or something as an expression of what I value in my heart and of what I love. I am going to make a gesture in that direction, even if it is only a small one. You will be amazed how wonderful it feels to take part in and be aligned with service. We are never in as much joy as when we are engaged in the well-being of others. That is one of the beautiful things about serving, along with the possibility that someone or something else may benefit. I find myself in a real state of gratitude and appreciation for anybody who has been in service to me or to something important, like Arvis was to the dharma for all those years. That gratitude allows me to do what I do. It fills me with a wonderful feeling and inspiration when I ask, What am I in service to?