I was asked to speak a bit more about the topic of home in our practice and it's a concept worth coming back to over and over again because it’s so foundational in the original notion of Buddhism as a homeleaving practice. It behooves us to pay a lot of attention to what it means to be a householder for a Zen practitioner, a practitioner who stays home. What are the implications of that? And does it confine us almost by definition to a kind of second class status in comparison to the genuine homeleavers? This is an issue that has been in the background of American practice and certainly in American Zen, and in the whole tension between residential and monastic training and the kind of practice we do here.
Now there are some basic assumptions built into the idea of homeleaving as foundational to practice, and I think they are now open to question because that model of homeleaving essentially said that what we’re trying to overcome in our practice is some version of attachment. That word can have lots of meanings and implications, but in homeleaving, it literally means attachment to personal and family relationships, and these are either in or of themselves the source of suffering or hindrances to practicing to the fullest. It’s only by leaving home are we able to dedicate ourselves fully to the dharma on the one hand, but also, by homeleaving, enact in our lifestyle a disconnection, a detachment from clinging, from the security and obligation of relationship, and so that in itself represents a set of assumptions about what’s the problem and what’s the solution, and we’re looking at it from a different angle these days.
We see the problem of attachment less in terms of having to free ourselves from relationship or obligation, and more in the recognition of impermanence and interdependency. Interdependency says we’re never going to be free of context, relations, needs, other people, but the reality of impermanence says that those things will never be fully under our control, and it’s that lack of control that we need to practice with, not the removal of the connections themselves. They’re already impermanent, they’re already empty. We don’t have to do away with them. We just have to see and accept their true nature.
Along with this, an ongoing metaphor or image that what practice does is undermine our sense of self or ego, and the way it does this is a kind of skillful means of instability or destabilization, that the role of the teacher or of practice, is to constantly pull the rug out from under the student, that the problem at the psychological level is either thought of in terms of conceptualization or even thinking itself. But in any case, where there’s a certain kind of conceptual rigidity or perhaps complacency, our basic mode of practice is to shake that up, to have nothing to rely on, as if having nothing to rely on is the embodiment of emptiness and impermanence and that this is where we have to make our peace, that anything that smacks of security or stability or reliability, any of the things, in other words, that we might associate with the notion of home, are obstacles to be overthrown in the course of practice.
Now I think that there’s some truth to this, but it tends to be very one-sided. We can see it perhaps most in a society that is heavily comformest, conventional, hierarchical, where social roles are predetermined by social class, gender, things like that, and there you have a function of Zen to challenge that taken-for-granted order to shake things up, and in general, to be an antinomian influence, something that goes against the norms and hierarchies and conventions that all masquerade as common sense. Certainly Zen had that flavor when it came to this country in the fifties and sixties, and no doubt it had an element of that in the way it developed in Japan, which was a highly regimented and conformist society.
But conformity and a combination and being stuck in rigid norms is not the only form that social or individual psychopathology can take. Nowadays we might say that people come suffering just as much from the sense of fragmentation, dislocation, personal emptiness, personal lack of sense of fitting in or belonging anywhere. In a certain sense, Western Zen practitioners are all homeleavers in that they’ve left their religion of birth, Almost none of us are born into Buddhist families. We come from Jewish or Christian backgrounds, and for one reason or another, we didn’t feel at home there, and we left that home that didn’t feel like a home in search for another one, and so we came to practice Buddhism looking for something that seemed to make more sense, that offered something that we weren’t getting, that we wanted to find or build a new kind of home, in a sense of practice or system of ethics, of meaning, that seemed substantial and valid for the lives that we are living now.
This points to another aspect of practice related to the precepts. I just read about it in a book by Charles Taylor, and there he was distinguishing between the moral and the ethical dimensions of practice or philosophy, where the moral is focused on: How do we treat others? And what he calls the ethical is focused on: How do we develop ourselves to have a fulfilling life? The ethical may seem like a strange word to describe that, but I think it comes from ethics as used by Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he talks about the development of virtues and capacities as the mode of bringing about self-fulfillment or eudaimonia or happiness, and this is in contrast with the morality of someone like Kant, who wanted to look at how we can have absolute rules to govern our conduct and our sense of duty and our obligation to others.
In Buddhism, when we think about the precepts, it’s all about morality in that sense about how we should behave toward others, and the answer over and over again is some version of non-separation from others in the world, and it’s an open question about what does that have to do with our personal happiness, development or fulfillment? There’s a kind of unspoken baseline assumption that a life of non-separation is a fulfilling life, that fulfillment is blocked by narrow self-centeredness because then you’re in a sense always engaged in a losing struggle against the uncontrollable. True fulfillment is letting go of egocentric notions of happiness and living a life that is organized around either something that overtly looks like passion or something that is simply characterized by non-separation or non-resistance to the moment at hand.
Traditional practice tends to be very much about non-separation, or just doing the next thing, whether it’s sitting itself or how we conduct ourselves in the zendo, how we bow, how we walk, how we handle incense at the altar. All the minutiae of rituals, and then carrying them forward into how we function in the kitchen, what kind of mindful awareness we bring to each kind of task in our daily life. That’s basically what I describe the Zen of making your bed every morning, taking care of each thing right in front of you, and there’s no question that that kind of attention and activity leads to a certain kind of satisfaction and fulfillment. But it’s also probably the case that you would not want to suggest to a Mozart that all fullment of life comes in the way in which you chop vegetables. We would like to think that individuals have a very broad range of talents, capacities and interests that are not just self-centered conceptual thinking that we want to wear down by cleaning the toilet and chopping carrots.
So another part of the idea of home might be found in the context in which I can be fully recognized and nourished in my personal development and fulfillment, where personal isn’t a dirty word, where we don’t say the whole business of Zen is trying to extirpate the personal in the pursuit of no-self, whatever that’s supposed to mean, but that there’s some place for something we’ll think of as individual self development. In some way, even in a small group like ours, that will include things like the social and the personal, where friendship is a virtue or a capacity that we want to cultivate, that we want to give a chance to develop. Sometimes we used to hear that some people were just coming to the Zen Center for social reasons. They didn’t really want to practice, they were just lonely and they wanted something to belong to, and they wanted to have a group where they felt they could meet people and fit in. Clearly that wasn’t a very legitimate reason to come to a Zen Center. But all that might in fact be part of the home that we should not denigrate, not treat as either secondary or illegitimate. It’s part of what it is to be human, to want to connect, belong, and be in relationship.
We can think of how a Zen Center functions at some level, and how well it fulfills some of those needs for a home. And even when this is unspoken, clearly, people develop enormous attachments to centers and teachers and other members of the sangha. Even if this is sort of a kind of background to the practice, on a personal and emotional level, it’s enormously powerful and meaningful, and we ought to have a kind of vocabulary that acknowledges it and values it as a dimension of what people are there for. That’s not just a kind of attachment that we need to shake up, and people need to get over, as if the true self is separate and autonomous, and that we shouldn’t put ourselves in a position needing one another. Instead, I think our practice should always acknowledge interdependency and the point of relationship and community in recognizing that.
Well, I think I’ll leave it there. These are all different dimensions of home that I think we need to try to foreground once in a while and ask ourselves, how well our community, as it’s constituted, gives recognition and attention to these very real needs that we all bring to practice.