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Arousing the Mind of Practice

Good morning everybody. Good morning. It's a joy for me to be here this morning, to be invited to come and join you here at Insight Meditation Center. I've spent some time in this space while being with the Sati Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program, but I've never had the chance to come and practice here on a Sunday morning. So I was a little bit nervous about being in a new space with new people, and now that I'm here I'm feeling much more relaxed. So thank you for welcoming me. Thank you.

When I was talking to Gil about being here this morning, and I was asking him what the order of events was, I said to him, "Well, should I ring a bell at the beginning of the meditation?" And Gil said something along the lines of, "Oh, well, we're not nearly so delineated. There's no need for a bell; the meditation just starts and flows in."

And you know, I started thinking about that. The ways in which we bring ourselves into this space, whether it's just by some simple sound, a bell. I thought of a poem that's very dear to me by the poet David Whyte called The Bell and the Blackbird, where at the beginning of the poem he says:

The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits.

So I thought, well, there could be a bell, or there could not be a bell, or perhaps there'd be the sound of a bird. What is it? What is the little sound? What is the cue that brings us here?

The place where I practice, which is Kannon Do Zen Center in Mountain View, like many other Zen centers, we have outside our meditation hall a big block of wood called a han. The name of this is a han. It's a big block of wood, and there's a mallet that comes with it. Before every session of meditation, the wood is struck in a particular way, often with great force depending on the size of the center and how far the noise needs to travel. Over the years, many hans begin to become indented, and they'll sort of have a big splintered hole in the middle of them that attests to the amount of energy and effort that has gone into striking them, calling people to practice.

Often these hans have a poem painted on them. The exact wording of the poem differs from one place to the next; it's not always exactly the same. But usually, the words are more or less to this effect. It goes something like:

Great is the matter of birth and death, Quickly passing, gone, gone. Awake, each one, awaken. Don't waste this life.

So this message is conveyed often in this very definitive sound of the wood being hit with a mallet. And the invitation is, well, whatever we're doing in that moment, whatever activity we're involved in, best to wind that up as quickly as possible and try and get to the meditation hall in time for sitting.

Well, it's part of my personality that I'm not always very good at being on time for things, and often I'm running. Often in my head, I associate the sound of the wood with great effort being exerted, and being out of breath, and trying to get to a place on time. Sometimes I think, "What's my motivation here in my hurry? What am I worried about? Am I worried about being in trouble?" Sometimes I get flashbacks to being at school, being late for class. "Am I going to get shouted at by somebody? Is somebody going to think less of me because I'm late? Am I going to disturb somebody else's practice if the meditation hall is quiet when I enter?" All these very self-centered thoughts arise, very surface motivations also. But they're the first ones that come up for me in my hurry.

So then I think, "Well, what are the deeper motivators? What's the more fundamental source of motivation for practice?" And I find this a very rousing question. For me, it's a driving question.

In the Zen tradition, we refer to the mind of practice. We talk about giving rise to the mind of practice, which is something like allowing our true nature, our original nature, to emerge, to flow freely. I think of a river flowing freely without impediments. Not a river that's dammed up or that has been prevented from taking its natural course, but the energy of that flow that has found its natural direction, and it just goes.

This kind of image is helpful to me for thinking about the sort of effort and energy necessary for spiritual practice. Because fundamentally, at least when we start practice, and even in the day-to-day practicalities around practice, we require effort. We talk about effort. Just showing up here today, getting here. Having found a teacher, maybe having put that effort in to open towards a tradition and a teaching, to learn, maybe even reading a book or two on the subject.

And then the efforts that we put into meditation itself. It can be very difficult at first just to stay put and put yourself there. Perhaps when we're first starting out, we might have been sitting for a few weeks and then think, "I don't know what's changed. My brain's still ticking over. I'm still having all these thoughts. I feel so distracted." And that can feel very demotivating. It can feel like, "What am I doing wrong? Am I doing something wrong? Maybe I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe I need to try harder, that's what I need to do. Maybe I'm not dedicated enough."

And so we try harder, and maybe that can bring us some difficulty too. Working with these levels of energy is a skill. It's a skillful thing that we work with as our practice develops. I kind of think of it a bit like salt in cooking. A little, not enough, or too much can totally ruin the dish. Knowing just how much—well, there's a skill in that.

So there's a story that came up for me when I was thinking about this. Maybe this is a story you've already heard, and it reads a little bit like a joke, in fact. There was a martial arts student who went to his teacher in great earnest and asked his teacher, he said, "You know, I'm really devoted to studying this system. I really want to learn everything you can teach me. How long will it take me to master this? How long will it take me to get to where you are?"

The teacher thought about it, casually just threw out an answer: "Ten years."

The student, very impatient and shocked, answered, "But no, I need to do it faster than that. I have enthusiasm. I will work very hard. I'll practice every day. I'll do this for ten, twelve hours, you tell me. I'll be here the whole time. If I do this, how long will it take then?"

And the teacher thought again for a moment and replied, "Twenty years."

So as that story suggests, sometimes the harder we try, the further away we get from where we think we might want to be going.

The late Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki^[1], who was a teacher up in San Francisco, used to say that the right kind of energy is very important. And if there was such a thing as bad effort, he would say that well, that's the kind of effort that moves in the wrong direction. So that would be something like maybe moving against the current. A direction that requires more effort.

I think about cycling. Sometimes I like to go cycling, and sometimes it gets very windy around here. Maybe some of you have had this experience, but I like to cycle over by Shoreline and the Baylands, some beautiful trails there. Some days I go and I'll be cycling north and there's a southeasterly wind of like 18 miles an hour, and it's really hard. It's like pushing against this wind, and I get horribly frustrated. I start to feel myself wishing for something else, wishing that it be different: "Ugh, I'm expending so much energy, and I don't have that wonderful feeling of just gliding on two wheels, which is the part that I love about cycling."

So then when we apply that to practice, that image, what does it mean when in our practice our efforts move in the right direction?

Another prominent figure in Zen teaching, and in Sōtō Zen teaching specifically, was a monk and a teacher from the 13th century called Eihei Dōgen^[2]. On the subject of effort in practice, he provided some images to his students to take away and to think about, to chew on. He said to them, "Think about the kind of effort that would be exerted by a thief trying to steal a precious jewel. Or think about the kind of effort that would arise for a warrior about to fight a formidable enemy. Or maybe the kind of energy and effort that comes up in the heart of somebody who's in love and wants to get the attention of their beloved. That sort of rich, boundless energy that would be in somebody's heart at that moment."

And so I think what he's trying to say here—not necessarily encouraging us towards theft and violence—but that the energy that's present in all of these examples, it's inherent. It's already there. It's not something that needs to be forced. It's something that can be used, tapped into.

Maybe in some ways we can all relate to this on some level. That kind of focus when we move towards an object of desire. Maybe something that we really want, a beloved person, an activity that we become fixated on. Survival, you know, whether it's just our own survival, the survival of someone we love.

I'm a parent. I think about the kind of attention and energy I put into being around my daughter when she first started to walk, or when she first rode a bicycle. My heart was in my mouth being next to her. Just every wobble! There's not much that would have distracted me at that moment. I absolutely feel like I have this biological programming as a parent to have her at the forefront of my attention, especially if there's some danger in the air.

So the effort's already there in abundance. And I think the way that I understand Master Dōgen's teaching, the way that he talks about energy in this way, is that there's an encouragement here to try and find a quality of effort that can be sustainable, that would be healthy and not be depleting. If you spend half an hour cycling against the wind, you won't get very far, and you might end up feeling very frustrated and tired physically in your body. If you turn around and point your bike in the other direction, it would be a very different kind of experience.

So how to bring that quality, or even that intensity of energy, into everyday life? Into practice? Into moments that are not necessarily exciting or fraught?

Maybe especially starting out in practice, we may just have a moderate sort of idea that, "Oh, this would be good for me. This is a good thing to do. It seems good. People who meditate, they seem to be happy, happier maybe. Maybe this is a direction I'd like to move in." Or maybe I feel very strongly about this today, but how will I feel next week, or next month, or next year? Like, how could I sustain this over time? How to really find an authentic motivation in myself in the midst of distractions and tiredness? Or maybe just too much comfort, safety. Or just moments of feeling disengaged. How to do that?

So what Master Dōgen said, he said, "Well, you can't just make this up. You can't just will it into being or think about it. This is not an intellectual exercise." It's not something that can be done by some temporary method of contemplation.

Instead, he taught this: he said that in order to arouse this mind of practice, we need to try and tap into what's already there. We need to prime the ground so that it can appear, so that it can rise up.

And his recommendation for this, he said what we can all work with is we can all practice with impermanence. Impermanence.

So what is it about impermanence? This is something that's very core to Buddhist teaching. But how can practicing with impermanence give rise to this kind of energy?

Well, at least when I think about this, the first example that comes up for me is thinking about death. It's a very obvious sort of stance for it; it seems to be the first kind of image of impermanence that rises up for many of us. Through various points in my life, especially as a young person, death, the idea of death has been quite a fixation for me.

On the one hand, it's generated a lot of actual physical fear, you know, felt sensations of fear in my body. This idea of extinction. This may be a very natural response to the prospect of extinction, is a kind of bodily fear, a kind of panic. As though I was already facing a very hungry tiger or something, sort of a flight-or-fight energy. It can be a very strong kind of bodily energy. So that's one thing that I experience in the face of impermanence.

And then there's a more kind of mental reaction that comes along with it, too. Perhaps in the face of death, or in contemplating death in an intellectual way, we sort of arrive at a bit of an impasse. Sometimes it's something that's very hard to understand. I think for me, in contemplating impermanence in this way, it was sort of hard to understand how we just carry on with our daily lives and not be addressing this very urgently, day by day.

So this question that came up—how to live in the face of impermanence—for me, this generated a lot of energy in wanting to find an answer, find a solution.

And there's a wonderful little student-master exchange in the Zen tradition that I heard recently that I just thought, "Ah, yes." The student asked the master one day, "What is the direct way to obtain Buddha's wisdom?" And the master replied, "There is nothing more direct than this question." I think that's it. The question's there, and you're off. They say the question's there, the way opens.

I was with a friend recently who sadly lost their pet. We were talking about this and what a traumatic experience this had been for this person. They'd actually been in the vet's with their pet when the pet was put down. They were administered, I suppose, an injection, and they were holding the animal. One moment the animal was alive, and the next moment they were gone.

This friend is a fellow practitioner, and he said to me (and excuse me, I'm paraphrasing him, but this was how I understood what he said to me), he said, "I've come through my practice to try and understand impermanence on some level. And I can try and understand our interrelatedness as human beings and as all life forms in the world, and there's ways in which I can understand birth. But I can't get my head around this. I don't understand this death. I don't understand where this member of my family has gone."

It just created a kind of a wall for him. And he said, "I'm trying to look at all the teachings that are out there, but there's nothing that's resonating with me right now."

And what I noticed was it gave rise to a kind of energy in him. Almost an anger that seemed very motivating. What he wasn't saying was, "So having had this experience, now I'm just going to pack up and not try anymore." It seemed to want to push him forward into something. And what that is isn't necessarily entirely obvious at first.

There was another Zen master in 17th-century China called Wuyi Yuanlai, who's also popularly known in Japan as Master Boshan. Master Boshan would be very happy with this situation with my friend. He would be very happy because he liked to hear his students express this kind of situation for themselves. He very much felt that this was the door that would open and lead students into practice and lead them toward awakening. There's a phrase that says, "Great doubt, great awakening." That's the idea. Great doubt, great awakening.

Master Yuanlai said, "If you genuinely inquire, you rouse this doubt and you wield it as a razor-sharp sword, whoever comes in contact with its blade will be annihilated." That strong, a wonderful image.

So I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Rinzai school of Zen. I know myself I'm only very faintly familiar. But one of the things that some people know about the Rinzai school is that they practice with koans. The koan is a kind of a situation or a puzzle that's given to a student. It's something that doesn't make sense, and it just stays with you. Eventually, it challenges a student's sense of the world, to the extent where their paradigms of the world would start to shift. There would start to be a fundamental kind of change.

So this was a great insight, I think, from the Rinzai masters, that something that gives people energy is problem solving. It's very hard to sit with a problem and just let it go. We have this desire to find resolution. So this is harnessed in some practices.

In summary, thinking about the different kinds of energies that arise from the practice and contemplation of impermanence, they can be things like fear, or even anger, doubt, longing, puzzling, problem solving, or joy. All responses that come from different parts of ourselves. Maybe different personalities for different people. Maybe some of us are more driven by questions. Maybe some of us are more driven by fear. Maybe some of us are driven by a sense of longing, a sense of wanting to connect with something we don't even quite know what it is.

And to address the last mention of joy, I think of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem Wild Geese, in which she says:

You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

She's talking about trusting ourselves and trusting what arises. Whatever it is that's bringing us here, letting the soft animal bodies love what we love, fear what we fear, long for whatever we long for.

Because first, if you're thirsty, you'll get yourself to water. And if you're hungry, you'll get yourself to food. If you're tired, you'll find your bed eventually. And so what is it in you that's bringing you here? What is it that's fueling your spiritual practice? What are you responding to?

I'll finish with a quote from another late Zen teacher called Kobun Chino^[3]. He said:

When you realize how rare and precious your life is, and how it's completely your responsibility how you decide to live it, how you manifest it—that's such a big responsibility that naturally, such a person sits down for a while. It's not an intended action; it's a natural action.

May all beings benefit from practice. May they be happy, may they be joyous, and may they be safe. And may every river run into the sea.

Q&A

So we have a couple of minutes left on the clock. If you have any responses, reflections, even questions?

Audience Member: If you live with joy the way you described it, and wisdom the way Buddhism describes wisdom, what is the state of awakening that might come at some point?

Vanessa Able: Could you repeat the question, sorry? So you mentioned that if you live naturally and let the better part of you, the loving part of you, manifest itself in real life, and have joy be the driving force, how does it lead to awakening?

In the moment when true joy is manifest—true joy as a response to life and the understanding of this conscious being—just that moment itself is awakening.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Vanessa Able: Thank you. Thank you for that question.

Audience Member: Yeah, I was hurrying to a retreat once and this bit of doggerel arose in my mind, something like, "I'm late, I'm late, I cannot wait, I must hurry up and meditate!" [Laughter] Anyway.

So thank you for mentioning doubt and uncertainty. It's interesting, the interplay between doubt and confidence, trust. And another thing is that another translation for anicca^[4] is uncertainty. So anyway, if you have any comments... What was the word you used, the translation that you translated? The three... whatever they are, is uncertainty or impermanence. Anatta^[5] is not-self, and [dukkha]^[6] is suffering, pain. And how do you experience them as interrelating?

Vanessa Able: So the Theravada term for those is the Three Characteristics of Existence^[7]. And so they are fundamental things that operate in our existence. They're demonstrably true. Yeah, thank you.

Audience Member: I just want to thank you for, early in your talk, raising the question of noticing how those thoughts will persist during meditation, and then wondering, "Can I do this? Or am I not dedicated enough? Or is there something wrong with me?" So I know that the persistence of daydreams during meditation is very common. Still, it's helpful to hear that even teachers sometimes have that experience too. Thank you.

Vanessa Able: Sometimes even more than sometimes! I didn't want to say that. [Laughter]

Thank you. Thank you all so much. Thank you. I wish you a good day and a good continuation of your weekend.