I want to start by talking about one of those parables that we think we know so well that we stop thinking about it. I’m thinking of the story of the man who was chased by tigers. He manages to crawl down a steep cliff, where he can hang halfway down for dear life, holding on to a couple of roots of a little shrub there. And the tigers are circling. One tiger stays at the top of the cliff. Another tiger goes down to the bottom of the cliff. He can’t go up, can’t go down. And as he hangs there, he sees two little mice starting to nibble away at the branches he’s clinging to. His time is obviously very short. As he hangs there, he notices, dangling from the branch, one single berry. And he is just able to stretch his tongue out and taste the berry.
The story is told in many different places, and with strikingly different lessons. I didn’t have a chance to try to find the first appearance of it — maybe someone will Google that and let us know. But I’ve heard two very different morals drawn from it.
One was, I think, from an older and perhaps more traditional kind of source, where the man, as he tastes the berry, simply notices: sweet. His perception of the sweetness is simply something he will note but be indifferent to — the way he is going to be indifferent to the fact that the mice nibble away at the root he’s holding on to and he’s going to plunge to his death. And the lesson of practice is that we must become attached neither to the pleasures of the senses nor to a fear of death. We have to treat them as equally empty.
And the other, perhaps more common modern version interprets it as saying: even though this is our dire predicament, we’re able to just stop and completely taste the berry — fully enjoy and appreciate that moment, regardless of what’s going to come next. Two very different kinds of lessons.
In some ways this story is like the koan of the man up the tree, hanging by his teeth from a high branch, who is asked, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming?” And like the story of the man hanging off the cliff, you know that one way or another, this story is not going to have a good outcome in any conventional sense.
One more parallel: a cartoon someone sent around. It was a parody of a Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown and Snoopy are sitting on a dock overlooking a lake at night, with the moon up in the sky. Charlie Brown says, “Do you realize, Snoopy, that one day we’ll die?” And Snoopy thinks, “Yes, but every other day we won’t.” Which in some ways is like the man tasting the berry.
Now, the two versions of the story are important because, although I think we’re inclined to want the modern interpretation — savor the moment, the carpe diem kind of attitude — I think that unconsciously we all practice to some extent with the first version. That is, we wish we could cultivate a deep indifference to our fate. We would like to have practice be something that will make us impervious to the fear of death. Something that will really provide a buffer or an antidote. Something that will keep us from just the horrible fear that any moment now it could all end.
And I think that we all practice, to some extent, in a way where we try to numb ourselves. And very often we’ll call that numbing “equanimity.” But it’s really the use of meditation, or the zendo, to create an oasis or bubble of calm in which we can forget what’s coming.
Some people can’t do that. Even in the middle of meditation, there’s the intrusion of anxiety or thought or anger or feelings. And often when that happens, people feel like their meditation is a failure, that it’s not working. Yet really, in a certain way, they have the greatest opportunity, and they are not sidetracked by the temporary kind of bubble that some people are able to create around themselves when they sit.
Some months back, when Jessica’s cousin Stephen died, I read a poem here by Gary Snyder, “Go Now,” about the death of his wife. And in reading it, I could not hold back the tears, and I was reminded of the death of my wife, Deborah, in 1994. I’m sorry. A long time ago, but suddenly right then and there. And my reading of that was recorded, and apparently a lot of people who were not here heard it and had quite a strong reaction to the sound of a Zen teacher sobbing as he read a poem about loss.
Is that what we expect? Don’t we want this practice to result in some kind of equanimity? Yet we have to, over and over again, reexamine what we imagine that means.
I think that we all fear being overwhelmed by emotion — fear, loneliness, loss, anxiety. And yet when we try to put up barriers to those feelings, it’s precisely those barriers that give us the sense of feeling overwhelmed. We’re always building a wall that is inevitably breached. And when the wall is breached, we experience a flood of anxiety and a sense of impending danger — that our defenses have catastrophically come down. And the paradox is that the breach of the defense often causes us a kind of fear that’s far worse than simply allowing ourselves to have those emotions wash over us and wash through us in the first place.
And our practice, as we go along, more and more can simply be a kind of opening of the gates to all that feeling. An increasing porousness, or transparency. Yet over and over again we return to a curative fantasy of keeping things at bay, keeping things under control. Yet when that control is lost, sometimes we experience the greatest release — the greatest joy and freedom.