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Dharmette: Harmony of Zen and Vipassana (1 of 5)

Great. Okay, I'll wait for the stream of "no sounds" to stop, and then I'll continue. Let's see, still no sound. Yay, sound is back! Okay, great. So those of you who are new got to see a little bit how this works. Periodically, I forget to push the buttons, and so that's what happened. So to start over again:

It's my honor to begin this series of talks on the harmony of Zen and Vipassana. This week, I'll give the morning 7:00 a.m. talks like today, and the next two weeks, my good friends and wonderful teachers from San Francisco Zen Center—Fu Schroeder, the abbess of Green Gulch Zen Center, and Paul Haller, former abbot of San Francisco Zen Center in the city—will give the talks. I've been involved in both these wonderful traditions, traditions I have tremendous respect for and I celebrate their great value. I feel very fortunate to have done both. I think they have mutually supported each other in all kinds of ways in myself. So to have a chance to talk about the meeting of these two, or the harmony of these two, is a wonderful exercise for me.

Sometimes I think of Zen and Vipassana as being like a Venn diagram—two circles that overlap in some places. In some teachings, some teachers might be positioned in their mutual circle, in the place where the two circles overlap, and so they seem very similar, with very similar teachings. And some might be sitting on opposite sides of the circle, so that they don't overlap or share much. How big that overlap is, I don't know. Maybe it depends on who's defining it. But there's certainly overlap.

Where there's not overlap, there can be harmony. There can be complementarity. There can be ways in which understanding one helps to understand the other. There's a wonderful saying that I learned when I was in England, that said if you don't leave England, you don't really know England. I think if you grew up there, and you leave and come back, you see it in different ways. Sometimes being outside of a particular religious tradition for a while that we've been immersed in helps us to see with clear eyes something we've been missing before. One of those things can be to understand even better the value of the tradition.

One of the kind of wonderful coincidences of language is that the word "Zen" comes from the Chinese word "Chan," which comes from the Sanskrit word "Dhyāna." It's just a different language pronouncing the same word. In Pali, dhyāna is jhāna^[3], which means states of concentration, the practice of concentration.

Vipassana comes from the ancient Pali word for insight. Especially here in the modern West, but a little bit in India and in modern times, the word Vipassana no longer simply meant the insights that come from practicing mindfulness, but became the name for a technique of meditation practice—the mindfulness technique, in a sense. Then it became a word that began to encompass the full teachings, culture, and religion of people practicing Vipassana. So we have this very new thing that happened here, especially in the United States starting maybe three decades ago, that we started seeing this expression: "the Vipassana tradition." There were sometimes meetings or references to the "three traditions": Zen, Tibetan, and Vipassana. I was a little surprised to see Vipassana was now a tradition, when it's a relatively new word to refer to a school of meditation.

The wonderfulness of it is that in the ancient world, the insights of meditation were supported by jhāna, supported by deep concentration. In the teachings of the Buddha, the ancient teachings, these two came in harmony; they worked together, they were partners. Over time, as Buddhism developed in India, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand in different ways, meditation remained a constant in some way or another. There were people, lineages, and schools that really emphasized meditation, and Zen and Vipassana are two of them.

Once you talk about sitting in meditation and practicing meditation, there's a lot of overlap in what human beings experience. Most people, when they sit down to meditate, discover very quickly how out of control their mind is, how much they're thinking, and how many obstacles there are to being really present. So learning and developing the capacity to be present is very much the same no matter what meditation one is doing. We're developing our capacity not to be distracted, not to be lost from our present moment experience.

As we do that, we become more settled, more calm, which is more the concentration factor. But as we become more settled and more calm, we start seeing more clearly what our experience is, which is the insight, the Vipassana side of it. These go back and forth: as we become calmer, maybe we see better; as we see better, we can become calmer, more settled, or more present, whatever the language we have. Coincidentally, then, these two big traditions, Zen and Vipassana, are named after these two ancient aspects of meditation that in the ancient world were harmonious and closely connected to each other.

The general way... there are two ways of practicing Vipassana: one is directed attention, and the other is undirected attention. It will be interesting to hear from the Zen teachers if the same distinction can be made in Zen. When I first started practicing Zen meditation, I was told to direct my attention on the breathing and to count the breaths. I did that for years, and it was a wonderful practice for me. When I went to Burma, they seemingly did the same thing. They told me to focus, and they often had an emphasis on feeling the movements of the belly as the breathing happened, the hara. In Burma, they put the attention in the same place, the hara area, and to feel the movements there. This was very familiar to me; it was the same directed attention as I did in Zen.

But what happens with Vipassana practice is that the practice begins to be directed, and then as it goes along, it becomes more undirected. We'll see that in the course of these five days that I'll be teaching here, the way that we've come to teach Vipassana—many of us inside practice mindfulness in the West—is we start with directed practice, and then we begin opening up the attention to include more and more in the awareness. We begin with the breathing. The breathing is a wonderful place to calm down, to relax, to step out of the thinking mind, to see how much we're caught in thought, and then come back. We come back, come back, and then we'll go to the body, to emotions, to thinking. Then on Friday, I'll give you a little taste, a real pointer to the undirected attention of Vipassana, which maybe is similar to what in Zen they call "just sitting," or shikantaza^[4]. In Vipassana, there's often a sequential or a step-by-step approach to settling in and arriving to this undirected attention.

We begin with mindfulness of breathing, and I'd like to do a little teaching around this briefly. If we're practicing attention to breathing in meditation, it works when we're able to stay stable, connected, and continuous with the rhythm and flow of breathing in and breathing out. As we do that, because the attention is no longer going into thinking, that thinking mind gets quieter and stiller, and then things open up in a nice way. But plenty of times, our ability to stay with the breathing doesn't work.

It's like this: many years ago, I was up in the mountains here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, sitting on the edge of a creek. It seemed like the water was not flowing at all; it was completely still. Then I took a stick from the shore and put it vertically into the creek. I could see there was a little wake formed on the surface of the water where the stick went into the water, and then I could see that the water wasn't still. There was a current that was flowing.

In the same way, mindfulness of breathing is like the stick we put into the current of our lives, and we get to see more clearly how strong that current is. Especially look at the current of thinking or the currents of feelings that we might have. So it isn't necessarily that we're supposed to stay with the breath and criticize ourselves when we can't, but they just keep showing up. The breath then highlights what it is that is really flowing and moving: "Oh look at that, my mind is really busy. It was busier and more actively involved in thinking than I realized," or "I'm more interested in food than I ever could have imagined, that's all I think about." That's the beginning of mindfulness: to see clearly what's going on.

The more clearly we can see, the more choice we have about where we really want our attention to be. Do we want our attention to be hijacked by our neurosis, by our preoccupations? Or do we want our attention to be something that really enlivens us, embodies us, and brings out a freedom of life that I would like to think of as simplicity—the simplicity of just being alive and letting the lived life flow through us?

So thank you. I look forward to having this chance with you tomorrow morning. For those of you in the intensive, there will be a more formal welcome and introduction to this intensive program at their 10:00 program this morning. I look forward to seeing the intensive folks there then. Thank you.