Everyday Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

Most people who come to the Zen Center don’t think a Cadillac will do it, but they think that enlightenment will. Now they’ve got a new cookie, a new “if only.” “If only I could understand what realization is all about, I would be happy.” “If only I could have at least a little enlightenment experience, I would be happy.” Coming into a practice like Zen, we bring our usual notions that we are going to get somewhere—become enlightened—and get all the cookies that have eluded us in the past.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

We enter a discipline like Zen practice so that we can learn to live in a sane way. Zen is almost a thousand years old and the kinks have been worked out of it; while it is not easy, it is not insane. It is down to earth and very practical. It is about our daily life. It is about working better in the office, raising our kids better, and having better relationships. Having a more sane and satisfying life must come out of a sane, balanced practice. What we want to do is to find some way of working with the basic insanity that exists because of our blindness.

When I went in for my lesson I found that he taught with two pianos. He didn’t even say hello. He just sat down at his piano and played five notes, and then he said, “You do it.” I was supposed to play it just the way he played it. I played it—and he said, “No.” He played it again, and I played it again. Again he said, “No.” Well, we had an hour of that. And each time he said, “No.” In the next three months I played about three measures, perhaps half a minute of music. Now I had thought I was pretty good: I’d played soloist with little symphony orchestras. Yet we did this for three months, and I cried most of those three months. He had all the marks of a real teacher, that tremendous drive and determination to make the student see. That’s why he was so good. And at the end of three months, one day, he said, “Good.” What had happened? Finally, I had learned to listen. And as he said, if you can hear it, you can play it.

Our Zen training is designed to enable us to live comfortable lives. But the only people who live comfortably are those who learn not to dream their lives away, but to be with what’s right-here-now, no matter what it is: good, bad, nice, not nice, headache, being ill, being happy. It doesn’t make any difference.

This is no small investment but the payoff is extremely great. To learn to leave the suffering we create behind and recognize that we are making ourselves unhappy and it’s not the circumstances doing so requires that we retrain ourselves and that is where the devotion to practice comes in. It’s amazing but we can change our brains.

When we label thoughts precisely and carefully, what happens to them? They begin to quiet down. We don’t have to force ourselves to get rid of them. When they quiet down, we return to the experience of the body and the breath, over and over and over. I can’t emphasize enough that we don’t just do this three times, we do it ten thousand times; and as we do it, our life transforms. That’s a theoretical description of sitting. It’s very simple; there’s nothing complicated about it.

Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is. If tomorrow I have a heart attack, I can rely on that, because if I have it, I have it. I can rest in life as it is.

When we label a thought we step back from it, we remove our identification. There’s a world of difference between saying, “She’s impossible” and “Having a thought that she’s impossible.” If we persistently label any thought the emotional overlay begins to drop out and we are left with an impersonal energy fragment to which we need not attach. But if we think our thoughts are real we act out of them. And if we act from such thoughts our life is muddled. Again, practice is to work with this until we know it in our bones. Practice is not about achieving a realization in our heads. It has to be our flesh, our bones, ourself.

Practice is about breaking our exclusive identification with ourselves. This process has sometimes been called purifying the mind. To “purify the mind” doesn’t mean that you become holy or other than you are; it means to strip away that which keeps a person—or a furnace—from functioning best. The furnace functions best with hard coal. But unfortunately what we’re full of is soft coal. There’s a saying in the Bible: “He is like a refiner’s fire.” It’s a common analogy, found in other religions as well. To sit through sesshin is to be in the middle of a refining fire. Eido Roshi said once, “This zendo is not a peaceful haven, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions.” A zendo is not a place for bliss and relaxation, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions. What tools do we need to use? Only one. We’ve all heard of it, yet we use it very seldom. It’s called attention.

So it’s extremely important to remember that the main purpose of doing sesshin is this burning out of thoughts by the fire of attention, so that our lives can be dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by outward circumstances. I don’t think there’s anyone here of whom that is wholly true. Yet our practice is to do that. If we truly accomplished this burning out of attachments there would be no need to sit. But I don’t think anyone can say that. We need an adequate daily period of zazen in which we attend to what’s going on in our minds and bodies. If we don’t sit regularly, then we can’t comprehend that how we wash our car or how we deal with our supervisor is absolutely our practice.

“On a withered tree, a flower blooms.” Or, in the Bible, “Lest ye die, ye shall not be born again.” And of course our practice is to die slowly, step by step, gradually disidentifying with wherever we’re caught in. If we’re caught anywhere we have not died. For example, we may identify with our family. Disidentifying with one’s family doesn’t mean not to love them. Or consider your husband or boyfriend or girlfriend—that need. The longer we practice, the more minimal this need becomes. The love becomes greater and the need less. We can’t love something we need. If we need approval, we haven’t died. If we need power, if we need to have a certain position, if it’s not okay with us to do the most menial job, we haven’t died. If we need to be seen in a particular way, we haven’t died. If we want to have things our way, we haven’t died. I haven’t died in any of these ways. I’m just very aware of my attachments and I don’t act on them very often. But having died means they’re not there. In this sense a truly enlightened being is not human—and I don’t know anyone like that. I’ve been around some remarkable persons during a lifetime and still I haven’t met anyone like that. So let’s be content to be where we are and working hard. For us to be as we are at this point in time is perfect.

All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That’s all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.

And everyone of us here, since the time we got up this morning, has in some way or another met our pride—every one of us. To go through this gate that is not a gate we have to go through the gate of our own pride. Now the child of pride is anger. By anger I mean all kinds of frustration, including irritation, resentment, jealousy. I talk so much about anger and how to work with it because to understand how to practice with anger is to understand how to approach the “gateless gate.”

try to step back; do and say very little; remove yourself. Then, when you’re alone, just sit and observe. What do I mean by “observe”? Observe the soap opera going on in the mind: what he said, what he did, what I have to say about all that, what I should do about it…these are all a fantasy. They are not the reality of what’s happening. If we can (it’s difficult to do when angry), label these thoughts. Why is it difficult? When we’re angry there’s a huge block that stands in the way of practice: the fact that we don’t want to practice—we prefer to cherish our pride, to be “right” about the argument, the issue. (“Do not seek the Truth—only cease to cherish opinions.”) And that’s why the first step is to back away, say little. It may take weeks of hard practice before we can see that what we want is not to be right, but to be A Bigger Container, ABC. Step back and observe. Label the thoughts of the drama: yes, he shouldn’t do that; yes, I can’t stand what he’s doing; yes, I’ll find some way to get even—all of which may be so on a superficial level, but still it is just a soap opera.

If we truly step back and observe—and as I said, it’s extremely difficult to do when angry—we will be capable in time of seeing our thoughts as thoughts (unreal) and not as the truth. Sometimes I’ve gone through this process ten, twenty, thirty times before the thoughts finally subside. When they do I am left with what? I am left with the direct experience of the physical reaction in my body, the residue, so to speak. When I directly experience this residue (as tension, contraction), since there is no duality in direct experience, I will slowly enter the dimension (samadhi) which knows what to do, what action to take.

JOKO: By experiencing the anger nonverbally, physically. You can’t force it to go, but you don’t necessarily have to visit it on other people.

JOKO: If you learn from it. I didn’t say anything about putting that anger out on others. That’s very different. We may do that sometimes. I’m not saying we won’t; still, it’s not productive to do it. The experiencing of anger is very quiet. Not anything noisy at all.

It’s not that “I” hears the birds, it’s just hearing the birds. Let yourself be seeing, hearing, thinking. That is what sitting is. It is the false “I” that interrupts the wonder with the constant desire to think about “I.” And all the while the wonder is occurring: the birds sing, the cars go by, the body sensations continue, the heart is beating—life is a second-by-second miracle, but dreaming our I-dreams we miss it. So let’s just sit with what may seem like confusion. Just feel it, be it, appreciate it. Then we may more often see through the false dream which obscures our life. And then, what is there?

“Next, you should not carelessly throw away the water that remains after washing the rice. In olden times a cloth bag was used to filter out the water when it was thrown away. When you have finished washing the rice, put it into the cooking pot. Take special care, lest a mouse accidentally falls into it. Under no circumstances allow anyone who happens to be drifting through the kitchen to poke his fingers around or look into the pot.” What is Dōgen Zenji telling us? He didn’t write this just for the tenzo. What can we all learn?

Because second after second as we sit, that’s it. The old tenzo spreading seaweed—that’s a passionate life, spending his life preparing food for others.

If we cease looking, searching, what are we left with? We’re left with what’s been right there at the center all the time. Underneath all that searching there is distress. There is unease. The minute that we realize that, we see that the point isn’t the search, but rather the distress and unease which motivate the search. That’s the magic moment—when we realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way. At first it dawns on us just a little bit. And its gets clearer over time, as we continue to suffer. See, anything that we search for is going to disappoint us. Because there are no perfect beings, perfect jobs, perfect places to live.

The very peace we’ve been searching for so hard lies in recognizing this fact: I’m pinching myself. No one’s doing it to me.

It never happens all at once. Our drive to go after things is so powerful it overwhelms us. No matter what I say, after we all leave here, in five minutes we’ll all be looking around for something to save us. As the vow says, “Desires are inexhaustible.” But you won’t exhaust desires by searching; you will exhaust them by experiencing that which underlies them.

willing ness

Typo?

most

So what we’ve got to do, obviously, is to make both of us get back on Channel 4. And we say to her, “You should be like this; you should do that: that’s the person I fell in love with.” For a while both parties make an effort, because there is an artificial peace on Channel 4 (and a lot of boredom). Actually most marriages look like this after a time. Somebody said you can tell who in a restaurant is married—it’s the couple who don’t talk to each other.

Anyway, it was a good sesshin, and what I got (as I always do) is that no matter where you go, people are people: they are all wonderful and they are all troubled, as people are everywhere; and the same questions plague Australians as plague us.

only thing that works (if we really practice) is a desire not to have something for myself but to support all life, including individual relationships. Now you may say, “Well, that sounds nice, I’ll do that!” But nobody really wants to do that. We don’t want to support others. To truly support somebody means that you give them everything and expect nothing. You might give them your time, your work, your money, anything. “If you need it, I’ll give it to you.” Love expects nothing.

Practice makes it obvious that in almost all of our life we are not greatly interested in our true self; we’re interested in our small self: we are interested in what we want, what we think, what we hope for, what would make us feel good, what would ensure our health, our well-being; that’s where our energy goes. An intelligent practice slowly illuminates that fact. And it’s not good or bad that we are like that, it’s just the way it is. When we have some illumination of our usual self-centered activity, when we are aware of the grief and the agony that it produces, sometimes we can turn away from it. We may even get a glimpse of another way of being: the true self. In a concrete situation, what is

A second major obstacle is a lack of honesty about who we are at each moment. It’s very hard to admit, “I’m being vengeful” or “I’m being punishing” or “I’m being self-righteous.” That kind of honesty is hard. We don’t always have to share with others what we observe about ourselves; but there should be nothing going on that we’re not aware of. We have to see that we are chasing ideals of perfection rather than acknowledging our imperfection.

A fifth obstacle, common among people who spend much time at Zen centers, is substituting talk and discussion and reading for persistent practice itself. The less we say about practice, the better. Outside of a direct student-teacher setting, the last thing that I will talk about is Zen practice. And I don’t talk about the dharma. Why talk about it? My job is to notice how I violate it. You know the old saying, “He who knows does not say, and he who says does not know.” When we talk about practice all the time, our talk is another form of resistance, a barrier, a cover. It’s like academics who save the world every night at the dinner table. They talk and talk and talk—but what difference does it make? At the other end of that pole would be someone like Mother Teresa. I don’t think she does much talking. She is busy doing.

One way to evaluate our practice is to see whether life is more and more OK with us. And of course it’s fine when we can’t say that, but still it is our practice. When something’s OK with us we accept everything we are with it; we accept our protest, our struggle, our confusion, the fact that we’re not getting anywhere according to our view of things. And we are willing for all those things to continue: the struggle, the pain, the confusion. In a way that is the training of sesshin. As we sit through it an understanding slowly increases: “Yes, I’m going through this and I don’t like it—wish I could run out—and somehow, it’s OK.” That increases. For example: you may enjoy life with your partner, and think, “Wow, this is the one for me!” Suddenly he or she leaves you; the sharp suffering and the experience of that suffering is the OKness. As we sit in zazen, we’re digging our way into this koan, this paradox which supports our life. More and more we know that whatever happens, and however much we hate it, however much we have to struggle with it—in some way it’s OK. Am I making practice sound difficult? But practice is difficult. And strangely enough, those who practice like this are the people who hugely enjoy life, like Zorba the Greek. Expecting nothing from life, they can enjoy it. When events happen that most people would call disastrous, they may struggle and fight and fuss, but still they enjoy—it’s OK.

What is the difference between taking reasonable precautions, and ceaseless worry and mind-spinning? There’s a famous Buddhist parable: a man was being chased by a tiger. In his desperation he dove over the side of a cliff and grabbed a vine. As the tiger was pawing away above him he looked below and saw another tiger at the base of the cliff, waiting for him to fall. To top it off two mice were gnawing away at the vine. At that moment he spotted a luscious strawberry and, holding the vine with one hand, he picked the strawberry and ate it. It was delicious! What finally happened to the man? We know, of course. Is what happened to him a tragedy?

Interesting story. I love tigers, and strawberries too. Maybe tell the tiger to eat the mice and let you and your vine be, but what a story you get to tell when you get to the other side.

“Oh, you beautiful creature. We are one. Please eat me.” The story is not about being foolish—even though on one level, the man and the tiger are one. The man did his best to protect himself, as we all should. Nevertheless, if we’re left hanging on that vine, we can either waste that last moment of life or we can appreciate it. And isn’t every moment the last moment? There is no moment other than this.

under the assault of sesshin, sitting motionless for long hours, the dishonesty and evasions of the mind become crystal clear. And the tension created by the cunning mind also begins to be felt. It may take us aback to realize that nothing outside of ourselves is attacking us. We are only assaulted by our thoughts, our needs, our attachments, all born from our identification with our false thinking which in turn creates a closed-in, separate, miserable life. In daily sitting we can sometimes avoid this realization. But it’s hard to avoid it when we sit eight hours a day; and the more days we sit, the harder it is.

Tragedy always involves a protagonist engaged in a struggle. But we don’t have to be a protagonist, engaged in an endless struggle with forces external to ourselves. The struggle is our own interpretation, ending in ruin only if we see it as such.

Another way, which is our practice here, is slowly to open ourselves to the wonder of what life is by meticulous attention to the anatomy of the present moment. Slowly, slowly we become more sophisticated and knowledgeable, so that (for example) we may know that when we dislike a person, the left corner of our mouth pulls down. In this approach everything in our life—the good and bad events, our excitement, our depression, our disappointment, our irritability—becomes grist for the mill. It’s not that we seek out the struggles and problems; but a mature student almost welcomes them, because we gradually learn from experience that as this anatomy becomes clear, the freedom and compassion increase.

Some years ago in a workshop I did the eye-gazing exercise with a young woman who said her life had been shattered by the death of her father. She said that nothing she had done had given her any peace with this loss. For sixty minutes, we looked into each other’s eyes. Because of zazen practice, I had enough power that it was easy for me to keep my gaze steady and unbroken. When she wavered, I could pull her back. At the end she started to cry. I wondered what was wrong, but then she said, “My father hasn’t gone anywhere! I haven’t lost him. It’s fine, I’m at peace at last.” She saw who she was and who her father was. Her father was not just a body that had disappeared. In the wonder, she was reconciled.

We can practice observing ourselves becoming angry: the arising thoughts, the bodily changes, the heat, the tension. Usually we don’t see what is happening because when we are angry, we are identified with our desire to be “right.” And to be honest, we aren’t even interested in practice. It’s very heady to be angry. When the anger is major we find it hard to practice with it. A useful practice is to work with all the smaller angers that occur everyday. When we can practice with those as they occur, we learn; then when the bigger uproars come that ordinarily would sweep us away, we don’t get swept away so much.

There is just life living itself: hearing, touching, seeing, smelling, thinking. That is the state of love or compassion: not “It is I,” but “It is Thou.”

We have turned into very unnatural beings. But with all our difficulties, we have an opportunity open to us that no other animal has. A cat is the wonder; but the cat doesn’t know that, it just lives it. But as human beings we have the capacity to realize it. As far as I know, we are the only creature on the face of the earth that has that capacity. Having been given this capacity—being made in the likeness of God—we should be endlessly grateful that we have the opportunity to realize what life is and who we are.

Hmmm. Agree about a cat being a wonder, but they know it. The rest I’m not so sure about.

We never grow by dreaming about a future wonderful state or by remembering past feats. We grow by being where we are and experiencing what our life is right now. We must experience our anger, our sorrow, our failure, our apprehension; they can all be our teachers, when we do not separate ourselves from them. When we escape from what is given, we cannot learn, we cannot grow. That’s not hard to understand, just hard to do. Those who persist, however, will be those who will grow in understanding and compassion. How long is such practice required? Forever.

One sure clue as to whether we’re being motivated by aspiration or expectation is that aspiration is always satisfying; it may not be pleasant, but it is always satisfying. Expectation, on the other hand, is always unsatisfying, because it comes from our little minds, our egos. Starting way back in childhood, we live our lives looking for satisfaction outside ourselves. We look for some way to conceal the basic fear that something is missing from our lives. We go from one thing to another trying to fill up the hole we think is there.

Over and over again the Zen masters say to place no head above your own, and add nothing extra to your life.

Zen practice isn’t about a special place or a special peace, or something other than being with our life just as it is. It’s one of the hardest things for people to get: that my very difficulties in this very moment are the perfection. “What do you mean, they’re the perfection? I’m gonna practice and get rid of them!” No, we don’t have to rid of them, but we must see their nature. The structure becomes thinner (or seems thinner); it gets lighter and occasionally we may crack a hole right through it. Occasionally. So one thing I want you to do is to identify for yourself what it is in your life right now that you’re not willing to have be as it is. It could be troubles with your partner, it could be unemployment, it could be disappointment with some goal that has not been reached. Even if what is happening is fearful and distressing, it’s fine. It’s very difficult to get that. Strong practice is needed to make even a dent in our habitual way of viewing life. It’s hard to get that we don’t have to get rid of the calamity. The calamity is fine. You don’t have to like it, but it’s fine.

The first step in practice is to realize that we have erected this superstructure. And as we do zazen (particularly as we label our thoughts) we begin to recognize that we’re almost never just living our life as it is. Our lives are lost in our self-centered thoughts, the superstructure. (We are presuming that we want to see through this superstructure. Some people simply don’t. And that’s OK too. Not everyone should be doing a practice like Zen. It’s demanding, it’s disillusioning. It can seem forbidding when we are new to it. That’s just one side of it. The other side is that life becomes vastly more fulfilling as we practice. The two sides go together.)

Ordinarily we think a disaster is an event like the sinking of the Titanic. But when we are lost in our ideals and our fantasies, pleasurable as they may be, this is a disaster. We die.

Remember the tale of the man being chased by a tiger? Facing death before him and behind him, he eats a strawberry, exclaiming, “It’s so delicious!”—because he knows that for him, it is his last act. Now let’s return to our first list—what paradise isn’t—and give it a fresh slant. “I’m so miserable. And it’s so delicious!” “I really failed. And it’s so delicious!” “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. And it’s so delicious!” “I’m so lonely. And it’s so delicious!” When we thoroughly understand this, any circumstance of life is paradise itself.

“Let go of and forget your body and mind.” What is meant? “Throw your life into the abode of the Buddha.” What is the abode of the Buddha? He refers to human error in his first words: “Let go of and forget your body and mind.” Instead of referring everything to the comfort, protection, and pleasure of body and mind—which we do—he asks us to “throw your life into the abode of the Buddha.” But where is the abode of the Buddha? Where are we to throw our life? Since Buddha is none other than this absolute moment of life (which is not the past or the present or the future), he is saying that this very moment is the abode of the Buddha, enlightenment, paradise. It is nothing but the life of this very moment.

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained. Why? Because you cannot avoid this moment. You may not be awake to it, but it is always here. You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeing it.