For my first post to this new blog, I’d like to use a quote from Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind:
‘To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point. We just do what we should do. Like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.’
Thank you Suzuki Roshi! This is really a quite an arrow to the heart, particularly in light of all that has been going on in our sangha as of late – the upcoming Jukai, the efforts with the zendo ceiling project, the new web site, and certainly not least of all for me, my own impending ordination as a Zen Buddhist priest.
Now and again, we are visited by students taking a world religions survey class at area universities, and a question I can usually count on being asked goes something like ‘So, what do you Zen people believe?’ At one level, it seems to be an obvious question to ask, but actually it is quite an odd one because ‘belief’ as such has little, if anything at all, to do with Zen practice.
Most of the other religious teachings I’ve studied focus if not exclusively then at least much on story, and when this is the case there is always a division between those who take the story to be true and those who do not. A clear ‘us’ and ‘not us’ is here made obvious, and I suspect that this has always been one of the functions of such mythic tales, be they ancient ones detailing the likes of long forgotten Mesopotamian deities like Anathaunta the goddess of the ocean, or relatively modern ones such as the story of Joseph Smith Jr’s discovery of holy golden plates buried in his yard which he then translated and published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon.
Now, in Buddhism, there are stories to be sure – lots of em. But they are never articles of faith, at least not for me. If scholars were to somehow prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that neither the historical Buddha nor Bodhidharma who brought the teachings of the Buddha to China ever existed it wouldn’t change a thing in my spiritual life – really.
For the aspiring comparative religion scholar, the question of what the various religious movements hold as articles of faith is a necessary question, but for me a more interesting, intimate, and ultimately helpful question is the one directed at the stories we chronically tell about ourselves to ourselves.
Knowingly and unknowingly, we all have composed extensive personal mythologies, and their tangled epic complexity easily rivals the work of any religious tale. Often they start innocently enough, or at least seemingly so, with something like ” I was born on…..” and just then we are claiming our innocence while standing around, plainly holding a bag of stolen goods. Usually though, we just get right to the point with favored ‘quickie myths,’ simple fables like ”I’m right” or “I’m a failure.”
Be they epic or not, both the common collective stories of our society and personal stories of our lives certainly have the effect of creating deep feelings in us, and at a certain stage in our development it’s a healthy thing that they do. The trouble is that these stories easily outlive their use, overextend their reach and just generally get in the way – not unlike some overly long nose hairs forever left untrimmed.
Where real Zen practice helps is in getting us in touch with the heart of ourselves. It gives us a gateway into the intimacy of our lives and to the life of the universe we live in by directly questioning the biggest, most pernicious belief that is also seemingly the smallest and most innocent: the story of ”I.”
Speaking of stories, let me quote a helpful little snippet from an old Zen exchange recorded in the Blue Cliff Record. This snippet recounts the encounter between Bodhidharma and the Emperor Wu of China and goes thus:
Emperor Wu of Liang asked Bodhidharma, “Who are you standing before me?”
Bodhidharma said: “I don’t know.” The Emperor did not understand.
That’s the snippet.
And so, here’s a question about Bodhidharma’s “I don’t know” and the Emperors ‘not understanding:’
Are they the same or different?
I’d answer it for you, but I see that it’s time for me to get off this computer and go trim my nose hairs!
From Hongzhi—
