Gate 95: Teach and guide living beings

To teach and guide living beings is a gate of Dharma illumination; for we ourselves neither indulge pleasures nor become tired.
化衆生是法明門、自不受樂、不疲倦故.

At Gate 93 we reviewed what we mean by teaching and guiding living beings.  This kind of teaching specifically includes demonstrating, embodying, physically manifesting something or showing a form.  Sometimes we have to make something concrete before we can understand it as practitioners or point it out to others.  Teaching and guiding living beings is how we move through the world as bodhisattvas.  It’s doing the day to day work of liberating beings by embodying the practice in a practical way: keeping precepts, engaging in the four embracing actions, being wise and compassionate in dealing with human and non-human beings.

Sometimes we’re teaching directly and sometimes we’re simply leading by example.  In that way, we’re all dharma teachers and bodhisattvas.  We don’t need to wait for a public ceremony or a special status.  That also means that dharma teachng and support is flowing back and forth among all the nodes of the network we call sangha or practice community.  It’s not a pyramid and it doesn’t go top-down; this is one reason that it’s important that we show up to practice with each other as a community.

It’s like a parachute game where everyone’s around the outside of the parachute holding the edges of the cloth, and you synchronize movements to lift it up and down or rotate it.  The parachute is round, so no one’s at the head of the line.  Everyone participates equally, keeping an even tension in connection with others.  We’re all holding up our piece of this dharma parachute, lifting it up and down, moving it around with bodies and minds, and responding to what others are doing to keep the game going.  Just thinking about it, or deciding not to play, creates problems.  It doesn’t help beings transform.  The parachute is just going to lie there.

Full-on, wholehearted participation in this one unified realityis what we do.  Sometimes that participation takes the form of activity.  Sometimes it takes the form of rest and quiet.  Resting is still wholehearted participation; it’s not being cut off.  This balance between activity and non-activity is the intersection this gate statement deals with.

Within Sanshin style, this is the element we sometimes call balancing peace and progress.  This is where we start taking practice off the cushion and trying to understand the significance of zazen and study in modern daily life.  We live with tension between chasing after or escaping from things -- and avoiding taking any action at all in order to remain calm.  Our practice of zazen teaches us how to take the necessary wise and compassionate action without fanning the flames of our delusion.  

We get these teachings from Uchiyama Roshi.  This wasn’t an abstract or theoretical problem for him; it comes from his experience as a Japanese in a changing society.  In the Tokugawa era (1600-1868), Japan was closed to outside influences, social classes were fixed, a centralized government held power, the size of the population was stable and there wasn’t much change.  Fixed social classes meant that there was no competition or freedom of choice.  A stable population doesn’t need advances in agriculture to feed a growing number of people.  Without competition, there was peace of mind.  Instead of putting energy into development and progress, it went into refining the culture, increasing sophistication and elevating its aesthetics.

During the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan began to be influenced by Western ideas about organization and  government as well as science and technology.  It had to study and adopt these Western forms of progress so that it wouldn’t be left behind or swallowed up as a Western colony, but peace of mind was lost as a result.

Uchiyama Roshi born at the beginning of the Taisho era (1912) and he saw and lived with the effects of this change in his society.  This experience prompted his question: how do we find a balance between progress and peace of mind?  He thought about how Japan was going to integrate its serene traditional culture with more driven Western development.  He studied Western philosophy and Christianity as well as 
Buddhism, trying to come to an understanding.  He concluded that the bodhisattva path and working hard for all beings rather than oneself was the answer.  I think that this is exactly what the gate statement is saying, and we’ll come back to that in the end.

First let’s look at elements in second half of the gate statement.  We can see this balance of activity and movement with rest and non-activity, but this is pointing to something rather specific.  "Indulging pleasures" here is pointing to the pleasure that comes through the discrimination of the five senses (see more about dependent arising here).  Contact between senses and sense-objects gives rise to our perceptions of things and our compulsion to label things pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  This gate is not saying that everything pleasant is bad and we should avoid being happy or comfortable, and it’s not referring here to things like sympathetic joy or appreciating things in your life and practice.  It’s saying we have to be careful about being caught up in the picking and choosing and chasing and running away.

Even more specifically, the kanji here are pointing to keeping the third precept, not indulging in sexual greed.  Historically, this meant monks not chasing after women.  In this time and place, it means something else.  Originally this was a teaching about the impurity of the body, because the point was to move on from this human realm and leap off the wheel of samsara and birth and death and land in nirvana.  In a different time and culture, we practice differently with this precept, but it’s still an instruction to consider purity and impurity.  Sex in itself isn’t bad -- it if was, all of us bodhisattvas would be here as a result of something bad.  The problem is unhealthy attachment: engaging with the other person solely to meet the needs of the small self, and expecting that activity and that person to give you everything you need to be happy and satisfied and content.

This is about managing the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance, and it’s the three poisons that make something impure.  We’re greedy for certain kinds of experiences, but that clinging makes us dependent.  We only feel OK if we can do or have or experience certain things.  Of course, that’s a problem because of impermanence.  That person or belonging or whatever we’re attached to is going to change or die or break or leave or something, and then where are we?  It makes for unhappy relationships.

We can tell ourselves that it’s all because we love the other person so much.  How can that be about our own ego?  However, do we really want the best for them, or do we want what we want, which is for all of our desires to be gratified and satisfied?  Is that really in the best interest of them or you?

If we’re chasing after sex in an unskillful way, it’s because we’ve built up a series of ideas about what the five skandhas are and what their relationship is to everything else.  That’s the karma of our habituated thinking.  Sex is just one of the human appetites that can keep us distracted and agitated, and we might think that we’re helpless in the face of the things the human body tells us it needs.  Yet Uchiyama Roshi says something really interesting in The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo:
[Y]ou come into contact with people who irritate you everyday. Finally, you cannot bear it any longer and explode with anger, or you hold in your chronic discontent and make yourself crazy. When there is a person who bugs you, it is not only because he exists, but also because of your conditioned point of view. We must understand this thoroughly.  If we have a good appetite, delicious food attracts our attention. If we feel sexual desire, the opposite sex attracts our attention. In other words, only when appetite and sexual desire exist, will the world responding to those conditions appear before us. When naishiki (the individual life force called “I”) arises, the world which “I” see, according to my conditioned consciousness will appear and seeing it, I pursue or flee from the objects that I perceive in it.  

If we’re really clear about what these five skandhas are, we’re better able to see our habituated thinking and basis for what we’re doing.  Zazen is one place that can happen.  We can drop our ideas about what the small self is demanding and see interconnectedness and be honest with ourselves.

Okumura Roshi picks up where Uchiyama Roshi leaves off:
When the three wheels [of body, speech and mind] are pure [in other words, not driven by the three poisons], we don’t take action based on the thoughts coming from our karmic consciousness.  This creates a tiny space that allows us to step back and see that that we don’t need to be driven by our ideas and emotions. Our body, speech and thought are not defiled by the karmic consciousness that comes from our past experiences.  When we encounter objects, they don’t become objects of our desire.  When we meet people, we no longer calculate how useful or helpful they are to ourselves in reaching our goals, and we have fewer problems with others.  We see that people and things don’t exist for the sake of fulfilling our own desires.  They have their own reasons for being.  Of course, we have to take care of our desires, but we can see each and every thing as Buddha-dharma.

Being free from attachment is what keeps us from getting worked up and demanding things from our lives, realistic or not, and it also keeps us from giving up, being full of despair and discouragement and just not doing anything.  That brings us to the second element, becoming tired.  Sawaki Roshi said, "The reason we human beings are often exhausted is that we do things with personal profit in mind."  When we’re attached to an outcome, then we have a yardstick.  Either I made it or I didn’t, either I was successful or I wasn’t, either I worked hard enough and tried hard enough or I didn’t.  If not, that feels like a loss, and when the losses pile up, then we can become fatigued and discouraged and give up and do nothing.  If there’s no yardstick and no competition with others, then there’s no basis for this feeling of loss or defeat.

Uchiyama Roshi says: True religion takes no notice of the human desire to make things profitable for ourselves or of our calculating measurement. If we throw away our ordinary expectations and take an attitude of settling down on whichever side of the balance we fall, it is right there that a truly peaceful life unfolds itself. Doing zazen is to stop being an ordinary person.

An “ordinary person” is living by karma rather than living by vow.  He’s not saying we shouldn't have direction in life or make effort to improve things for ourselves and others.  He’s saying we throw away our expectations of personal profit, because as we know, suffering happens because we want things to be different than they are.  Can we do our best, make good effort, and not cling to expectations about the outcome?

Elsewhere, Sawaki Roshi says: Human beings put I into everything without knowing it. We sometimes say, “That was really good!” What’s it good for? It’s just good for me, that’s all. We usually do things expecting some personal profit. And if the results turn out different from our hidden agenda, we feel disappointed and exhausted.”   When we’re feeling this persistent fatigue, it may be time to stop and look at how we’re measuring “success.”  I keep trying to do or get this thing for myself, and I keep falling short somehow -- it’s not fair!

We need to have direction and aspiration or we’d never take action, but how are we forming those goals and deciding what to aim at?  How much of our ego is tied up in that?  Is there a hidden agenda, as Sawaki Roshi says?

It’s important not to misunderstand this teaching and think that mortificationn of the body is part of our practice.  Being constantly sleep deprived or overworked or too busy to take care of our lives is not good for our wellbeing.  We shouldn’t be ignoring or minimizing that stuff.  Yet we can compare ordinary beings living by karma (getting pulled around by karma) and bodhisattvas who are living by vow.  We know when we take the bodhisattva vow that we’re never going to finish it and reach the goalpost, and yet somehow we don’t hold same yardstick up to that activity.  Dang!  I only saved 17 beings this week, and my goal was 23!  We’re OK with doing that work moment by moment and not keeping score, and we typically don’t feel disappointed and exhausted.

This gate statement is intersecting teaching and guiding living beings with not getting on the roller coaster of indulging sense pleasures on the one hand and being tired and inactive on the other.  That should sound pretty familiar to us as descendents of Uchiyama Roshi; it sounds just like his ZZ diagram in Opening the Hand of Thought.  He says that in zazen while we’re aiming for nonthinking, we are usually wobbling between sleeping and thinking.  Dogen calls it dullness and distraction in the Fukanzazengi .  

It also sounds like his investigation into balancing peace and progress.  Progress can encourage competition, and the result of competition is a few winners and many losers.  Winners have power and money and sit at the top of the pyramid -- but there are no real winners because achieving power and money leads to suffering: fear of loss and no peace of mind.  If we turn our efforts to working for all beings’ benefit and development rather than competing for our own gain, we harness the energy of our discovery, innovation and building for the creation of wholesomeness and liberation from suffering.  Uchiyama Roshi's conclusion is that the best way to navigate these two sides is to walk the bodhisattva path and work hard for all beings rather than oneself.

Teaching and guiding living beings -- turning our attention away from being self-involved -- is how we stop getting caught up in the delusion of grasping and clinging and three poisons, and also how we keep from being discouraged and exhausted.  

One of the stories that gets told about Suzuki Roshi is that someone asked him how to deal with being discouraged, and he said we do it by encouraging others.  When we’re focused on the small self, we’re cutting ourselves off from the network of interconnectedness and we stop seeing the big picture of reality.  When we do, we quickly run out of resources because we think this five skandhas is all there is.

"Exhaust" means to drain.  We’re chasing and running and doing and using up all our resources trying to get what we want, and draining ourselves dry.  It feels like there’s nothing left in the pipeline and nothing more coming in.  Actually, we’re not separate from the network, and not cutting ourselves off from living beings and the rest of the universe is the reality of this moment.  If I’m trying to impose my small-self story onto reality and operating on that basis, I’m always going to run into roadblocks.  Refusing to acknowledge that my viewpoint isn’t necessarily the way things work is the most basic cause of frustration and suffering.

I used to work for a regional government agency.  It was bigger than counties but smaller than the state, and it was formed because there are some elements of functioning that don’t recognize boundaries.  Creeks and rivers and aquifers flow across counties.  Roads and bus routes don’t stop at the county line.  People live in one city, work in another, and need to make a daily commute.  However, jurisdictions would stop at a boundary, so a road that was pretty good would suddenly become terrible at a county line, or the entire region would be using the groundwater but one particular city would be affecting the water quality for everyone, or major employers would need workers but there was no affordable housing nearby and there were no buses running when second or third shift workers needed to get to work.  By creating a regional agency, the whole metro area could see how everything was connected and affecting each other whether they liked it or not, and find ways to agree to work together.  At the time, there were only one or two other regional agencies in the whole country working this way.

Keeping everything siloed and refusing to acknowledge that these systems are already connected would have meant more frustration.  We’re connected whether we like it or not, or refuse to acknowledge it or not, and recognizing the reality of that helps with the tendency to become tired and depleted.  We can stop working against what’s really happening and also we can stop feeling alone in our activity.

For us, zazen is where we inquire into the nature of indulging sense pleasures and being tired and how to navigate that.  Uchiyama Roshi says: So you have to realize that right now you are practicing zazen and it is not the time for thinking. This is correcting your attitude, correcting your posture, letting the thoughts go and returning to zazen. This is called “awakening from distraction and confusion.”

Another time you might be tired. Then you have to remind yourself that you are practicing zazen right now, and it is not the time for sleeping. This is correcting your attitude, correcting your posture, really opening the eyes and returning to zazen. This is called “Awakening from dullness and fatigue.”

Zazen means awakening from distraction and confusion and from dullness and fatigue, awakening to zazen billions of times. The zazen of living out this fresh and raw life means awakening the mind, certifying through practice billions of times. This is shikantaza. 

On one hand, it’s not time for thinking: correct your attitude and posture, let go of thoughts and return to zazen.  On the other hand, it’s not time for sleeping: correct your attitude and posture, really open your eyes and return to zazen.  Give up your sex fantasies and wishing you were somewhere other than the zendo and come back, and also stop coasting along and idly waiting for the bell to ring, re-engage in this moment and come back.  In both cases, awaken mind of this moment of actual raw reality.

Zazen is where we start dropping off body and mind and making ourselves available to all beings.  We’re not denying our own needs and the things we need to do and have in order to live in the world in a healthy way, but we also know it’s not the whole story, and swinging too far to one side or the other isn’t skillful.  This gate is a great reminder that we don’t just practice for the sake of others and leave ourselves out, just like we don’t practice only for our own personal gain.  We can see from the gate statement that teaching and guiding living beings helps and supports us as well.  We get the chance to loosen the grip of the three poisons at the same time that we’re engaged in beneficial action for others.

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Questions for reflection and discussion:

• How does the tension between action and inaction show up in your own practice life?
• In your own practice, how do you balance taking care of the physical body with not overindulging in sensual pleasures?
• What do you think about Uchiyama Roshi's comment that "only when appetite and sexual desire exist, will the world responding to those conditions appear before us."?
• What's your experience of fatigue or discouragement in your practice?  How do you take care of it?