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Practicing Zen This Very Moment

Excerpt taken from Everyday Zen: Love and Work

I’d like to talk about the basic problem of sitting (Editor's note: sitting here refers to zazen or zen meditation). Whether you’ve been sitting a short time or for ten years, the problem is always the same.

When I went to my first sesshin many years ago, I couldn’t decide who was crazier—me or the people sitting around me. It was terrible! The temperature was almost 105 degrees every day of the week, I was covered with flies, and it was a noisy, bellowing sesshin. I was completely upset and baffled by the whole thing. But once in a while I’d go in to see Yasutani Roshi, and there I saw something that kept me sitting. Unfortunately, the first six months or year of sitting are the hard ones. You have to face confusion, doubts, problems; and you haven’t been sitting long enough to feel the real rewards. But the difficulty is natural, even good. As your mind slowly goes through all of these things, as you sit here, confusing and ridiculous as it may seem, you’re learning a tremendous amount about yourself. And this can only be of value to you. Please continue to sit with a group as often as you can, and see a good teacher as often as you can. If you do that, in time, this practice will be the best thing in your life.

It doesn’t matter what our practice is called: following the breath, shikan-taza, koan study; basically, we’re all working on the same issues: “Who are we? What is our life? Where did we come from? Where do we go?” It’s essential to living a whole human life that we have some insight. So first I’d like to talk about the basic task of sitting—and, in talking about it, realize that talking is not it. Talking is just the finger pointing at the moon.

In sitting we are uncovering Reality, Buddha-nature, God, True Nature. Some call it “Big Mind.” Words for it that are particularly apt for the way I want to approach the problem tonight are “this very moment.”

The Diamond Sutra says, “The past is ungraspable, the present is ungraspable, the future is ungraspable.” So all of us in this room; where are we? Are we in the past? No. Are we in the future? No. Are we in the present? No, we can’t even say we’re in the present. There’s nothing we can point to and say, “This is the present,” no boundary lines that define the present. All we can say is, “We are this very moment.” And because there’s no way of measuring it, defining it, pinning it down, even seeing what it is, it’s immeasurable, boundless, infinite. It’s what we are.

Now, if it’s as simple as that, what are we all doing here? I can say, “This very moment.” That sounds easy doesn’t it? Actually it’s not. To really see it is not so easy, or we wouldn’t all be doing this. Why isn’t it easy? Why can’t we see it? And what is necessary so that we can see it? Let me tell you a little story.

Many years ago I was a piano major at Oberlin Conservatory. I was a very good student; not outstanding, but very good. And I very much wanted to study with one teacher who was undoubtedly the best. He’d take ordinary students and turn them into fabulous pianists. Finally I got my chance to study with the teacher. 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.

What had happened in those three months? I had the same set of ears I started with; nothing had happened to my ears. What I was playing was not technically difficult. What had happened was that I had learned to listen for the first time…and I’d been playing the piano for many years. I learned to pay attention. That was why he was such a great teacher: he taught his students to pay attention. After working with him they really heard, they really listened. When you can hear it, you can play it. And finished, beautiful pianists would finally come out of his studio.

It’s that kind of attention which is necessary for our Zen practice. We call it samadhi, this total oneness with the object. But in my story that attention was relatively easy. It was with an object that I liked. This is the oneness of any great art, the great athlete, the person who passes well on the football field, the person who does well on the basketball court, anybody like that who has to learn to pay attention. It’s that kind of samadhi.

Now that’s one kind, and it’s valuable. But what we have to do in Zen practice is much harder. We have to pay attention to this very moment, the totality of what is happening right now. And the reason we don’t want to pay attention is because it’s not always pleasant. It doesn’t suit us.

As human beings we have a mind that can think. We remember what has been painful. We constantly dream about the future, about the nice things we’re going to have, or are going to happen to us. So we filter anything happening in the present through all that: “I don’t like that. I don’t have to listen to that. And I can even forget about it and start dreaming of what’s going to happen.” This goes on constantly: spinning, spinning, spinning, always trying to create life in a way that will be pleasant, that would make us safe and secure, so we feel good.

But when we do that we never see this right-here-now, this very moment. We can’t see it because we’re filtering. What’s coming in is something quite different. Just ask any ten people who read this book. You’ll find they all tell you something different. They’ll forget the parts that don’t quite catch them, they’ll pick up something else, and they’ll even block out the parts they don’t like. Even when we go to our Zen teacher we hear only what we want to hear. Being open to a teacher means not just hearing what you want to hear, but hearing the whole thing. And the teacher’s not there simply to be nice to you.

So the crux of zazen is this: all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we’ve got in our heads to right-here- now. That’s our practice. The intensity and ability to be right-here- now is what we have to develop. We have to be able to develop the ability to say, “No, I won’t spin off up here” to make that choice. Moment by moment our practice is like a choice, a fork in the road: we can go this way, we can go that way. It’s always a choice, moment by moment, between our nice world that we want to set up in our heads and what really is. And what really is, at a Zen sesshin, is often fatigue, boredom, and pain in our legs. What we learn from having to sit quietly with that discomfort is so valuable that if it didn’t exist, it should. When you’re in pain, you can’t spin off. You have to stay with it. There’s no place to go. So pain is really valuable.

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.

One mark of a mature Zen student is a sense of groundedness. When you meet one you sense it. They’re with life as it’s really happening, not as a fantasy version of it. And of course, the storms of life eventually hit them more lightly. If we can accept things just the way they are, we’re not going to be greatly upset by anything. And if we do become upset it’s over more quickly.

Let’s look at the sitting process itself. What we need to do is to be with what’s happening right now. You don’t have to believe me; you can experiment for yourself. When I am drifting away from the present, what I do is listen to the traffic. I make sure there’s nothing I miss. Nothing. I just really listen. And that’s just as good as a koan, because it’s what’s happening this very moment. So as Zen students you have a job to do, a very important job: to bring your life out of dreamland and into the real and immense reality that it is.

The job is not easy. It takes courage. Only people who have tremendous guts can do this practice for more than a short time. But we don’t do it just for ourselves. Perhaps we do at first; that’s fine. But as our life gets grounded, gets real, gets basic, other people immediately sense it, and what we are begins to influence everything around us.

We are, actually, the whole universe. But until you see that clearly, you have to work with what your teacher tells you to work with, having some faith in the total process. It’s not only faith, it’s also something like science. Others before you have done the experiment, and they’ve had some results from that. About all you can do is say, “Well, at least I can try the experiment. I can do it. I can work hard.” That much any of us can do.

The Buddha is nothing but exactly what you are, right now: hearing the cars, feeling the pain in your legs, hearing my voice; that’s the Buddha. You can’t catch hold of it; the minute you try to catch it, it’s changed. Being what we are at each moment means, for example, fully being our anger when we are angry. That kind of anger never hurts anybody because it’s total, complete. We really feel this anger, this knot in our stomach, and we’re not going to hurt anybody with it. The kind of anger that hurts people is when we smile sweetly and underneath we’re seething.

When you sit, don’t expect to be noble. When we give up this spinning mind, even for a few minutes, and just sit with what is, then this presence that we are is like a mirror. We see everything. We see what we are: our efforts to look good, to be first, or to be last. We see our anger, our anxiety, our pomposity, our so-called spirituality. Real spirituality is just being with all that. If we can really be with Buddha, who we are, then it transforms.

Shibayama Roshi said once in sesshin, “This Buddha that you all want to see, this Buddha is very shy. It’s hard to get him to come out and show himself.” Why is that? Because the Buddha is ourselves, and we’ll never see the Buddha until we’re no longer attached to all this extra stuff. We’ve got to be willing to go into ourselves honestly. When we can be totally honest with what’s happening right now, then we’ll see it. We can’t have just a piece of the Buddha. Buddhas come whole. Our practice has nothing to do with, “Oh, I should be good, I should be nice, I should be this…or that.” I am who I am right now. And that very state of being is the Buddha.

I once said something in the zendo that upset a lot of people: I said, “To do this practice, we have to give up hope.” Not many were happy about that. But what did I mean? I mean that we have to give up this idea in our heads that somehow, if we could only figure it out, there’s some way to have this perfect life that is just right for us. Life is the way it is. And only when we begin to give up those maneuvers does life begin to be more satisfactory.

When I say to give up hope, I don’t mean to give up effort. As Zen students we have to work unbelievably hard. But when I say hard, I don’t mean straining and effort; it isn’t that. What is hard is this choice that we repeatedly have to make. And if you practice hard, come to a lot of sesshins, work hard with a teacher, if you’re willing to make that choice consistently over a period of time, then one day you’ll get your first little glimpse. This first little glimpse of what this very moment is. And it might take one year, two years, or ten years.

Now that’s the beginning. That one little glimpse takes a tenth of a second. But just that isn’t enough. The enlightened life is see- ing that all the time. It takes years and years and years of work to transform ourselves to the point where we can do that.

I don’t mean to sound discouraging. You might feel you probably don’t have enough years left to do it. But that’s not the point. At every point in our practice it’s perfect. And as we practice life steadily becomes more fulfilling, more satisfactory, better for us, better for other people. But it’s a long, long continuum. People have some silly idea that they’re going to be enlightened in two weeks. Already we are the Buddha. There’s just no doubt about that. How could we be anything else? We’re all right here now. Where else could we be? But the point is to realize clearly what that means; this total oneness; this harmony; and to be able to express that in our lives. That’s what takes endless work and training. It takes guts. It’s not easy. It takes a real devotion to ourselves and to other people. Now of course, as we practice, all these things grow, even the guts. We have to sit with pain and we hate it. I don’t like it either.

But as we patiently just sit our way through that, something builds within us. Working with a good teacher, seeing what she or he is, we are slowly transformed in this practice. It’s not by anything we think, not by something we figure out in our heads. We’re transformed by what we do. And what is it that we do? We constantly make that choice. We give up our ego-centered dreams for this reality that we really are.

We may not understand it at first; it may be confusing. When I first heard talks by teachers I’d think, “What are they talking about?” But have enough faith to just do your practice: Sit every day. Go through the confusion. Be very patient. And respect yourself for doing this practice. It’s not easy. Anyone who sits through a Zen sesshin is to be congratulated. I’m not trying to be hard on you; I think people who come to this practice are amazing people. But it’s your job to take that quality you have and work with it. We’re all just babies. The extent to which we can grow is boundless. And eventually, if we’re patient enough, and work hard enough, we have some possibility of making a real contribution to the world. In this oneness that we finally learn to live in, that’s where the love is; not some kind of a soupy version, but a love with real strength. We want it for our lives, and we want it for other people’s lives. We want it for our children, our parents, our friends. So it’s up to us to do the work.

So that’s the process. Whether we choose to do it is up to us. The process may not be clear to many of you; it takes years before it becomes clear, so that you really know what you’re doing. Just do the best you can. Stay with your sitting. Come to sesshin, come to sit, and let’s all do our best. It’s really important: this total transformation of the quality of human life is the most important thing we can do.