Book of Equanimity Case 28
A monk asked Gokoku, “When a crane stands upon a withered pine, then what?” Gokoku said, “On the ground below, it’s a shame.” The monk then said, “When dripping water freezes, what then?” Gokoku replied, “After sunrise, it’s a shame.” The monk then said, “At the time of Esho’s persecution of Buddhism, where were the good gods to protect the Dharma?” Gokoku said, “For the two guardians of the triple gate, it’s a shame.”
Well, it’s a shame I can’t be there in person with you. [Laughter] We always chant “Life as it, the only teacher,” and so this week, life is teaching me about Covid once again, about vulnerability, health and age, and for you all, about the best-laid plans sometimes going awry. Our challenge, of course, is to see these things not merely as obstacles to our life or to our practice, but as our life, as our practice.
We say practice is very much a matter of learning to behave well when we’re treated badly, and the more we have a particular idea about how things are supposed to go, the more we will experience life as treating us badly. This doesn’t mean an alternative of being a Polly-Anna and saying everything is fine just as it is all the time. Obviously I prefer health to being sick, but we have to find a way to live in the midst of difficulty and figure out where our practice lies when things don’t go the way we want.
Sometimes it’s only by not getting what we want, in fact, when whole new possibilities for life and practice open up to us. Now the monk in this koan, you could say, has the opposite problem. His practice has gone just the way he’s wanted, and it’s taken him into some very impressive if esoteric places. But he needs the teacher to reveal to him that all this effort has taken him down a blind alley.
We can think of the monk’s dilemma in terms of the various curative fantasies that he has enacted in his practice. His first question is, When a crane stands upon a withered pine, then what? We can take a withered pine for a symbol for the extinction of desire, the withering away of attachment. The monk says, I’ve achieved this state. Now what? Gokoku tells him, It’s shameful.
He then says, When dripping water freezes, what then? We can think of the dripping water, as a metaphor for consciousness, for thought. Maybe the monk has managed in his meditation to stop thought, to freeze his mind into a cold, quiet passivity or silence, and calls it equanimity. It’s a very impressive achievement, but a dead end. His final question gives a hint that he sees that maybe he’s taken a wrong turn because he asks, In the past, when Buddhism was persecuted, how come the gods didn’t protect the dharma? It’s a kind of: Well, if I’m doing everything right, why are things still going wrong?
In each case, we have a kind of curative fantasy of practice that has led him down a blind alley. There’s an old saying by Oscar Wilde that there are two tragedies in life: The first is not getting what you want and the second is getting it. If we get stuck bemoaning that life is unfair and keeps throwing obstacles in our path, if we get sick when we want to travel, we can’t do what we want to do, and nothing is working out the way it’s supposed to, then our life is a tragedy. It’s endlessly defined in terms of what’s wrong, what’s missing. Why am I not there yet?
The monk illustrates the second half of that syllogism. In a way, he’s gotten what he wanted. He’s attained the state of cutting off desire, cutting off thought. But it’s a tragedy because what he’s wanted has been misshapen from the very beginning. He’s been in the grip of a curative fantasy that he has not had the means to examine.
What happens when one of these curative fantasies reaches a dead end like this? Well, most of the time, people simply double down on it. They conclude, I haven’t done it well enough, or I haven’t done it long enough. I’d better try harder. It’s just very hard to even begin to think of what’s the alternative. If my whole notion of practice has gotten mixed up from the very beginning, even if I recognize that, how do I start over? How do I proceed? Has all this been a waste?
In fact, it’s not a waste to go down highways of curative fantasies. We all do it and probably we can’t help doing it. In fact, you could say that part of what practice is, is a discipline designed to draw out, to expose our curative fantasies, the same way transference is supposed to emerge in therapy. It’s not just a problem or a distortion. It’s the very way we’re going to look at who we are and what we expect of ourselves and other people, what we want, and what we’re afraid of. But we have to find a way to illuminate these dead ends when they arise and figure out how to reorient ourselves. And certainly that’s a big part of the role of the teacher here. The teacher needs to step in and say, That’s not a great accomplishment. In fact, it’s just the opposite. You’ve painted yourself into a corner. It can be a hard lesson to hear, but if the teacher doesn’t give it to us, life will give it to us one way or the other.
I chose this koan a week ago when I was assuming I’d be delivering it in the context of the Jukai ceremony, because the precepts are supposed to be our guides in practice, or maybe the guardrails of our practice, to keep it from going off into one ditch or another. Yet the fact is that the monk in this koan no doubt received the precepts and thought he was following them. It is the nature of our curative fantasies to insinuate themselves and collude with practice. The way we in Ordinary Mind typically think of Jukai and receiving the precepts, is a step in which we see practice coming off the cushion and into daily life, our interaction in taking responsibility for our relationship to our fellow sangha members, and maintaining the sangha, for taking responsibility, for keeping the practice going, committing to the teacher.
When we start practice, we can easily be preoccupied with the problems or anxieties that bring us to sit and sitting is all about what’s happening on the cushion, what's happening inside us. Are we agitated? Will we calm down? Can we sit still? Is this too painful? So almost inevitably the beginning of practice is self-centered that way. It’s what’s going on in my body, in my mind, and Jukai is supposed to be the way practice comes out into the world, into relationship, into responsibility.
And yet, for many people, they’re all too quick to not want practice to be about their own problems or feelings. They’re very eager to turn practice into, say, helping others, or being good, being compassionate. They’re all too eager to turn their focus away from their own trauma and look at helping others. It’s a syndrome long ago I started calling “Saving all beings minus one.” It’s a very common pitfall in practice for people who look at precepts about not speaking ill of the dharma or others, or making comparisons, and they stifle themselves. They try to be nice Buddhists, and it just becomes another form of accommodation or repression where they don’t ever really find a way to speak up even to themselves about what they really think or feel.
So often we used to hear the idea that we should trust our sitting, just sit, and everything will work itself out in the sitting. Well, if you believe that, it also helps to believe in many lives, because for a lot of people, it’s not going to get there in one life. It’s too easy to spend this life going down one of these curative fantasy byways. In the same way, just relying on following the precepts, it’s very easy to misread them in light of our own idiosyncratic secret practice, to co-opt them for our own unconscious psychological agenda.
What’s the way out of all this? Well, unfortunately there’s no simple answer. There’s not an extra set of psychological precepts to put into place that we can use to catch ourselves, although I try to remind people that emotional honesty may be the most important thing they bring to their practice and what they have to bring to the relationship with the teacher. Don’t use practice to try to turn yourself into the person you think you want to be or the person you think you should be. Don’t show the teacher the face you think they want to see. Use practice to be honest about who you are. Use practice to simply stay with your experience as it is. Don’t use practice to fix yourself or change yourself, to become a Buddha, to become a good Buddhist, to stop your thoughts, to control your emotions. Let practice be the place where you leave everything just as it is. Let it be the mirror that reflects everything honestly, that changes nothing and fixes nothing. Can we allow ourselves just to stay with who and what we are?
It turns out we’re so afraid of what we think we are, we’re so ashamed of how we’ve judged ourselves and what we imagine we should be and how we fall short of that. All we’ve seen in the mirror for a long time is the face of What’s wrong? Of the person we’re not supposed to be, instead of the person we simply are. If we can finally allow ourselves to genuinely just sit, just see, just accept, we’ll find that nothing needs fixing, nothing is hidden, there’s no place to get to. But it seems to be a long hard journey to get to where we started.
Good luck. [Laughter]