We chant “Life as it is the only teacher,” and many of us may be wondering what lesson is life trying to teach us this week? I thought I would try to address our response to the election in terms of what we’re beginning to discuss in Suzuki Roshi’s commentaries on the Sandokai.
All of us no doubt have been inundated with lessons from one pundit or another about why things turned out the way they did. And while we might think that many of these discussions about how the Democrats didn’t pay attention to the working class or how people misjudged misogynism or racism in the country or one thing or another, we don’t think that answering the question is necessarily the job of our practice. That’s the level of problem, which is very real, but we’re trying to find if there is a level of koan in how we approach or engage events like this and our responses to them.
Suzuki Roshi, in discussing the Sandokai, speaks of the Mind of the Great Sage of India as Big Mind, and this is a mind that sees the wholeness of things, that sees things from the perspective of nonseparation. In general, when we look at his opening commentary, Sandokai is presented not so much in terms of our usual translation of absolute and relative, but more in terms of the whole and its parts, and his examples tend to be: Do we focus on separate things, separate things which may affect or interact with each other, but whose nature is basically separate and thing-like, or do we have a perspective in which everything is part of a whole, in which there’s no need to pick out individual parts or rather what we see and accept and participate in, is everything just happening all at once and together?
So in a way, it sounds like his translation of Sandokai is more in the direction of the relation of wholeness and difference. This may be a subtle distinction between that and absolute and relative, but while we can think about absolute from the perspective of the oneness of all things, the absolute is also encountered in just this and nonseparation with any particular activity or moment. We find the absolute in just doing the dishes, just listening to the sound of the wind, just looking out at the horizon. In what can be described in ordinary terms as a relationship between two things gets dissolved into a nonseparate participation in the moment, in this particular activity, this particular perception.
When Suzuki comments on the title, Sandokai, he describes one of the characters as the relation of wholeness and particularity like that of shaking hands, of being in a kind of friendly relationship. We might say it’s like the harmony of wholeness and difference, the being in the right, mutual relationship, because one is not going to obliterate the other. The Sandokai is not saying that it’s wrong to see difference, but rather it’s wrong to get preoccupied with separate things or notions of separate self or autonomy. All that’s delusion. Or what you have to do is only see things from the perspective of wholeness or oneness. That’s not what it’s about. Further on he’ll say, To encounter the absolute is not yet enlightenment. To encounter wholeness is a necessary step in our practice, but it’s not meant to obliterate our perception or understanding of difference. Separateness and wholeness are both inescapable aspects of our experience, of our identity.
We can get ourselves in trouble if we tilt too far on one side or the other. Typically we say to be stuck in difference is the ordinary world of delusion. We don't see any other way. But only to try to live in the world of wholeness and nonseparation is a kind of Zen sickness, and usually there’s a way in which it’s an attempt to bypass the real suffering and difficulty that the world of difference subjects us to, and so there we can have the fantasy of using zazen as a retreat to the world of samadhi, to the world of nonseparation, and we can create this wonderful bubble for ourselves, which on one hand is a great revelation if we allow it to show us that the ordinary way of seeing things is not the only way. We don’t have to get stuck in thought, in reactivity. There’s an alternative to that. But that alternative is not something we can allow ourselves to be addicted to, such that we bypass dealing with the world of difference.
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of walking into a Zen center and seeing everyone sitting still and silent in disciplined rows, everything acting in harmony, and when the bells rings, it looks just magnificent! These people have really got it together. They really know how to concentrate, to be silent, to be present. It’s a beautiful picture. Then when the period ends, they all get up and they start talking and you might listen to them and find out all the stuff that’s been going on in their heads and you see how they treat each other, and all the ordinary problems of emotion and jealousy and competition, all just comes right out again. When they're all sitting there in silent rows, it sure looks good.
The danger, of course, is to say that Zen is what’s happening when they're sitting in silence, and yes, it’s very good that people can learn to do that and put all the other stuff aside for a bit, but really the task of practice is in the relation between those two things, the relation between who we are when we sit and who we are when we get up and start interacting with each other and the world again. Sometimes people get so infatuated with the experience of sitting, they’ll say, Oh I just want to be a monk, I want to live that life all the time. But of course if they go to a monastery they find there’s no escape from people as people, that they have emotions and reactivity and all sorts of the same things go on in monasteries that go on everywhere.
The lesson here about wholeness and difference can be that very often our picture of wholeness really isn’t that whole, that there are all sorts of things that we want to leave out and that we come to practice to try to leave out, and that we think that we successfully at least push aside in our practice when we enter into a certain state. It’s been sort of the hallmark of Ordinary Mind practice that we say that our sitting is not designed to create a bubble of calmness or equanimity, where we’re free of thought or emotion for a little while, but rather we’re trying to create a container where those things can be present but under a different light, from a different perspective, where we allow things to be just what they are, not controlling things, not fixing things, not banishing things.
Perhaps we have to all acknowledge that the events of the last week reveal to us how we habitually have a partial view of what’s going on, that we want to see things from our own perspective, and how that perspective almost inevitably excludes a lot of what other people are experiencing. And there it’s as if we’re trying to sit with everything that comes up except our anger. We’re never going to get angry. There’s a way in which, as a curative fantasy, we imagine a kind of harmony that isn’t real because it doesn’t really take in and accept and deal with everything that’s going on.
In a sense what happened this last week is the kind of thing that can happen to us when we sit, particularly in sesshin and we see that the whole picture that we had of how things were going, and who we were, was very incomplete. It left out a lot. When we sit in sesshin very often we find that who we thought we were, our powers of concentration or acceptance, only goes so far. All of a sudden we start hitting limits, where the pain gets so great, or the emotions or the memories start coming up. All of a sudden our mind is a lot more complicated than we like to think it is. Our world is a lot more complicated than we like to think it is, and suddenly there are all these factors that we’ve been pushing to the side, that we now have to pay attention to, whether we like it or not.
One other thing I want to say about how people respond to things like the election, in terms of their practice, is sometimes we’re led to believe that practice should put us in a state of equanimity or acceptance so we’re not bothered by events or we don’t pick and choose, that the real attitude would be to have no preference about which way things turn out. That’s dualistic thinking. We’re told we should have an open mind, not pick and choose. Right? Well, it’s good to have an open mind, but as they say, not so open that your brains fall out. Our understanding of the whole doesn’t mean that we throw out our understanding of difference. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have legitimate reactions and preferences. If your house is burning down, you have a legitimate preference that the fire department arrive in time. If it’s inescapable and it burns to the ground, it’s a reality you have to deal with, but practice shouldn’t put you into a state where it doesn’t matter.
In particular, if our practice is about including everything and nonseparation, then we have to be able to have a judgment about people or ourselves when we get stuck in separation, when in response to our own pain or anger or confusion, we choose or get stuck in a path of pushing aside something that’s part of ourselves. In the social and political realm, people can respond to anxiety or inequality with blame, with exclusion: If only we could get rid of “them.” But when we do that, and the “them” are immigrants or MAGA Republicans or Democratic elites, we create and demonize others that we organize ourselves around. We just want to push “that” out of our reality, and from a practice point of view, we can’t push part of the world out of our reality, any more than we can push parts of our mind out of our consciousness.
We can’t create an inner bubble where anger and jealousy and emotional reactivity exist anymore then we can imagine we can live in a political or social reality without inequality or racism or misogyny. These things are there and we have to acknowledge them, and we have to be very careful about how we react to them in a practice way. We have to be able to deal with the legitimacy of our own judgment just as we would in seeing ourselves get caught in reactivity, we have to be able to say that that’s not practice. That’s not what I’m trying to do, not what I’m trying to be. And that exists at the personal level and the social level and we can’t imagine that practice is going to smooth over into a kind of homogenized acceptance of everything and all points of views, as if they were all one.
To think about the harmony of difference and sameness, is to legitimize each perspective, to see how we’re all in this together and how some of us sometimes act as if we’re not, and we have to be able to recognize how that happens, when it happens, and take responsibility for it.