I’ll have to ask you to bear with me this morning. I have a cold. In the old days if I felt like this, I wouldn’t want to come into the zendo and be sneezing and coughing on other people and disturbing them. But because we're doing this on Zoom, I think I’m not going to be contagious and I’ll just try to muddle through as best I can this morning.
I want to try to talk about the Sandokai, the sections we’re reading in Suzuki Roshi’s Commentary. I’ll first read the version that we are familiar with from our sutra book, and then I’ll read the translation he’s using, which I see was put together by the Soto-Shu Liturgy Conference sometime later, after his death, 1997.
First, our version, which I assume was translated by Maezumi Roshi:
Each and all, the subjective and objective fields are related,
And at the same time independent.
Related yet working differently, though each keeps its own place.
Form makes the character and appearance different;
Sounds distinguish comfort and discomfort.
The dark makes all words one;
The brightness distinguishes good and bad phrases.
The four elements return to their nature as a child to its mother.
In the Suzuki version:
All the objects of the senses
interact and yet do not.
Interacting brings involvement.
Otherwise, each keeps its place.
Sights vary in quality and form,
sounds differ as pleasing or harsh.
Refined and common speech come together in the dark,
clear and murky phrases are distinguished in the light.
The four elements return to their natures
just as a child returns to its mother.
Perhaps in our discussion we can comment on some of the particular choices involved in those two versions, but I thought I’d begin by saying one way to get a handle on what’s being described here is that we’re asked to look at the difference between the properties of things and our perspectives on things.
Now the properties of things really come down to impermanence and interdependence. We will say that things in themselves are all empty. They have no essential unchanging nature. As the Heart Sutra asserts, there are no real atoms of experience. There are no fundamental indivisible building blocks based on perception of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind and so forth. But all of these take their meaning, take their nature, only in relation to each other and to everything else. When we see their essential nature, it is empty, and empty and interdependent are basically two ways of describing the same thing. Interdependent means that whatever we are exists as relation rather than as essence.
Our perspective on things can imbue the world with qualities and characteristics. The most famous example is color. The world has no color in it. Color is a function of our particular embodied life and the kind of eyes that we have that react to different wavelengths of light, subjectively, so as to perceive color differences. The verse goes on and talks about all the distinctions that we make, such as sights vary in quality and form, sounds differ as pleasing and harsh, refined and common speech, clear and murky phrases. These are all qualities that arise because of our perspective on things, distinctions that we’re making. The image here is that light distinguishes difference, and darkness dissolves all difference. Darkness becomes a metaphor for the absolute, light is a metaphor for the distinctions of the relative that arise because of our perception or cognition.
We can be tempted to say that practice is about going beyond all our perspectives and just seeing the way things really are, to see the world just in terms of its properties, impermanence and interdependence, emptiness, rather than being deluded by or even seduced by difference in the relative world. But that would create a kind of dualism in which we prioritize the perspective of the absolute and simply relegate the perception of the relative to the world of delusion, and we may say we never want to go there. But the verse is called the Identity of the Relative and the Absolute. It’s not the triumph of the Absolute over the Relative. It’s not that we’re trying to completely escape the world of the perspective. We are trying to figure out how it is that we live in both simultaneously and give each its own due, each its own place.
As we speak this morning, life, that never-tiring teaching, is giving us lessons in Los Angeles about the inescapability of impermanence and interdependence. We can look at what’s happening in those fires and just see them from the perspective of impermanence, and see that all that loss and destruction is nothing but a reflection of the underlying impermanence of everything, and it’s a delusion to imagine the permanence or invulnerability of anything in this world let alone things of our own creation.
And yet I wonder what kind of perspective that would be? Are you able to look upon all that destruction and loss of life with some kind of transcendent equanimity because you perceive it simply as the manifestation of impermanence and interdependence? That would seem to be completely inhuman. Just before we started this morning I was reading something about the artist Gary Indiana who recently passed away. He had in New York a large archive and library that he wanted to preserve and make available permanently as part of an artist colony, and so he carefully had everything shipped to its new location in Los Angeles, where apparently it arrived one day before the fires broke out in Altadena, and it was completely destroyed.
How do you look on that? If you stand back far enough, you can view it with ironic attachment, and you can say all his efforts to create something permanent were wiped out in an instant. Ah – the hubris of man – thinking anything is permanent. But of course we’re going to respond with a sense of hurt and disbelief and head-shaking at the tragedy of such a thing, and that doesn’t even speak of the loss of life that’s going on. So we have to be very careful about what we think attaining the correct understanding, or the correct perspective, is going to do for us.
Now Suzuki is a little ambivalent here and I think perhaps a bit misleading. He talks about the well-known koan of Where do you go to escape the heat or cold? And one of the ways we’re putting together the relative and the absolute is to not see the absolute as in some transcendent realm apart from the world, but the absolute also is manifest as non-separation from the particulars of the world. So in that koan, when the monk wants to know where he can go to escape heat and cold, he’s told, in the summer let the heat kill the monk and in the winter let the cold kill the monk – killing here means killing all separation between yourself and the heat. It’s just heat and then it becomes a heat that is not the opposite of cold. There’s no standing outside of it to make a comparison or judgment. It’s just you’re totally being what’s happening. And that represents what you get in the Heart Sutra when it says, No hindrance, therefore no fear. Just complete non-separation with what’s ever at hand, and Suzuki says things like, When you’re happy, be completely happy, and when you’re sad, be completely sad.
But then he adds something like this: Sometimes you should be a suffering Buddha, sometimes you should be a crying Buddha, and sometimes you should be a very happy Buddha. But this happiness is not exactly the same as the happiness that people usually have. There’s a little difference,and that difference is significant. Because Buddhas know both sides of reality, they have this kind of composure. They’re not disturbed by something bad or ecstatic about something good. They have a true joy that will always be with them. The basic tone of life remains the same and in it there are some happy melodies and some sad melodies. That is the feeling an enlightened person may have. It means when it’s hot or when you’re sad you should be completely involved with being hot or sad without caring for happiness. When you’re happy you should enjoy the happiness. We can do this because we’re ready for anything, even if circumstances change suddenly, we don’t mind.
Well, yes and no. Again, I think there is that non-resistance to what’s happening to the next thing that we think is characteristic of practice. We imagine this kind of enlightened state that has no resistance to life at all. I think that the extra little piece in there that he adds, and which we can feel and at the same time have to be a little careful about, is that to the extent that we just show up for the next thing, and that that becomes who and what we are: when we’re sick, we’re sick, when we’re old, we’re old, and when we have losses we have losses. Even with that, there’s a kind of not simply disappearing into what’s happening but some background sense of okayness – I don’t know what else to call it. He’s talking about this background happiness or equanimity, which I do think we could say is our default position changed in the course of years of practice. I think it’s changed from a sense of deficit or damage or lack into something that’s more like a baseline of okayness. I think that’s true and that’s good, but I think we have to be very cautious about attributing a kind of imperturbable equanimity to the enlightened master who is somehow therefore impervious to experience. On the contrary, we are open and vulnerable to experience without resistance, and I think that makes a big difference.
I always want to add some cautionary note that we don’t reify and idealize some state that if only we were in it, we would become impervious to the vicissitudes of life. The alternative here is being non-separate from what’s happening, one thing after another. The other point I might mention is that Suzuki ends by pointing to the necessity of reading and studying and understanding these commentaries. He says, in a way, too often Zen privileges not-knowing, the darkness, the kind of functioning that has no judgment or conceptual quality – all the things that we mean when we put the word “just” in front of something. Just chopping the vegetables, just doing the dishes. Right? It’s a kind of second nature enlightened mindlessness of just doing things. There’s certainly a virtue to be found in not over-thinking and not being constantly self-conscious in terms of How am I doing? Am I doing this right? What do people think of me and how do I look? Of endlessly getting caught up in how am I doing questions. All of that can be forgotten.
Part of what we do here is try to put our life into perspective and frame it in a way that makes sense, not in a way that simply does away entirely with the need to make sense. We want to understand the properties of the world: impermanence and interdependence, but we need to be able to think through and practice with: How are we supposed to live with that? How do we live in that world? How do we allow ourselves attachments and goals and ambitions knowing the reality of impermanence, knowing that there’s always things out of our control because of interdependence. This is not something that is automatically given just by our sitting. We actually have to think about it.
Thinking is one aspect of our life, just like our senses and other capacities. We want to get them in some kind of harmony, some kind of sync. We can get ourselves very entangled. For instance, when we carry around ideas of transcendent states that are going to be beyond the vicissitudes of mortal life. Those are unconscious or implicit thoughts or fantasies that we have to make explicit and engage and think through and find alternatives to if our practice is not going to go down lots and lots of blind alleys. A verse like the Sandokai, in a way, is trying to give us this condensed roadmap of how to put together the realms of properties and the realms of perspectives, the life of problems with the life of koans. How do we fit that together? That’s what we’re basically asking here.