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Deep As the Ocean: Not Clinging to Divisions

Introduction

So good morning and welcome. Those of you here at IMC, thank you for coming and wearing your masks. I think the two places closest to us, two counties now, have some of the fastest-surging COVID rates, maybe in the country. Even San Francisco and Santa Cruz. I'm going to Santa Cruz today. I think Santa Cruz has the highest rate, at least in California. So I'm going down there for the next two weeks to teach a retreat.

The retreat topic is on my mind. Usually, our retreats have themes that we make up just before the retreat starts to tie the teachings and practice together. So I kind of want to do a trial run, mostly for my own sake. I want to talk a little bit about what's on my mind and tell you what the actual theme is.

First, I would like to tell a story from my life when I was a Zen student, and that will be illustrative of what I'm going to say. I lived at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin County for a while. As a new student there, I would go many times a day into the meditation hall. It used to be a very big barn that they converted—it had high ceilings and was a big rectangular building.

The way it was laid out, you'd go in from the back door, into the room, and down some steps. You'd come in at the back of the altar, and then you'd either go left or right to sit in the main part of the room. There was an aisle behind the altar. If you were on the left side of the room and you wanted to go to the right side of the room, you would always walk behind the altar. The rule was that you never walked across the middle of the room in front of the altar. I think the idea was that the Buddha was on the altar, and it was disrespectful to walk in front of the Buddha. So you would always walk all the way around. If you were at the deepest end of the meditation hall and you wanted to get to the other side—just two to three feet past that magical invisible line—you had to walk all the way around to get there.

As I was there, there were a variety of reasons for doing things in the room that brought me close to that midline, right down the middle of the Buddha's body. I could feel—my body would feel—like I was approaching a magnetic field or a force field as I approached that line. My body, these little micro-muscles in my body, would be pulling me away or be activated. This inner response wasn't entirely conscious, but it was subconsciously doing this. These feelings I had in my body—micro-muscles and excited energy—contributed to a sense that there was a force field here. The closer I got, the more I felt this force field, and then I would pull back.

That went on for a long time, but I didn't think about it too much; it was just what was. Then one day, I was cleaning behind the altar. There were some tourists who had just wandered off the street and were walking around to see what a Zen center was like. They wandered into the meditation hall, walked around, and walked right through that line.

Nothing happened. No lightning struck, they didn't get electrocuted, nothing happened. At that moment, I realized that that line was just a figment of my imagination. I mean, I was told not to cross the middle line, but the sense of a force field—my whole relationship to this line—just didn't exist. The line didn't exist, and my relationship to it was imaginary. It was all made up by the mind, and I had lived as if what was made up in my mind was a real thing. It didn't really exist, but it had an impact on me, and I behaved accordingly.

That was fascinating to see how the mind can project onto reality things that are not there and live as if they are there. To some degree, we do that with people. We project power or qualities onto people that may or may not be there. Sometimes we up the amplitude of some of these qualities in people and make them bigger than they are. It's not uncommon for people to go spend time with a spiritual teacher, especially if the teacher has an elevated importance in people's minds. Just being in the presence of the teacher feels like, "Wow, I'm in this wonderful field, this force field of the teacher." There might be a few things coming from the teacher, but it is elevated because of this same phenomenon: the mind is projecting and imagining and living as if this is real, rather than appreciating how much the mind is contributing to it and assigning it to the teacher.

Dividing the Wholeness of Who We Are

This idea that the mind contributes through its imagination, projecting onto reality things that are not there—or not there in the way that we're living them—is a very important principle to understand in the Buddha's teachings in relationship to ourselves. Because we do it to ourselves in different ways, and that is the theme of this retreat we're going to do.

The Buddha talked about five different ways in which we divide ourselves. By making these divisions, we're dividing the wholeness of who we are, and then we get attached to those divisions. We put a lot of value or importance into these divisions. Some people put more importance on one division than others do. But that projection—this idea of "this is where it's at," "this is important," "this is where the force field is," "this is where I am," or "this is my sense of who I am"—sometimes becomes another force field. It's something the mind has projected onto the reality of this being here, and we live in that projection in all kinds of complicated ways. We like it, we don't like it, we pull away from it, we hold onto it, we cling.

Beginning to appreciate how the mind does that is part of the function of mindfulness practice. The simplest way to understand this in the Buddhist teachings is that he talked about five areas where people cling. The word for this in Pali, the ancient language, is khandha^[1] (spelled k-h-a-n-d-h-a), which I think unfortunately the most common English translation is "aggregates." You aggregates, like you make cement with aggregates and stuff. That doesn't sound very appealing: "You have five aggregates and you get attached to them." For some of you, as soon as you hear that, your mind goes a little bit numb. What are they talking about here?

The word khandha also means branches of a tree, and it also means the trunk. It has both meanings. So which is really the tree? Is it the trunk? Is it the branch that goes off to the right or the branch that goes off to the left? Which is really the tree? Or is it the leaves at the end of the branches? "No, really what's the tree is what you can't see; it's the roots underneath, that's really the tree." If we have five different opinions here, which is really the tree? You could have a war: "This is the tree!" "No, not the tree!"

Why decide that any one thing is the tree? Why be attached to "this has to be the tree"? Why not let the tree just be a tree?

So we make these branches within the wholeness of who we are, we live in relationship to those, and we get attached.

The Five Khandhas

The first one the Buddha talks about is our appearance. The word is rūpa^[2] in Pali, which often is translated as "form" or the body, but the word more literally means appearance. It's what the eye sees. If I look down at this bell, the bell is the rūpa because it's the object of sight.

But the fascinating thing about the word appearance is that this appears to be a bell. Is it really a bell? Well, functionally it's a bell, but it could also be a begging bowl. A Buddhist monastic could go around like this in the streets, and people would recognize, "Oh, that's a begging bowl." It could be a spittoon. Some Buddhist teachers in Asia had these things about this size right next to them. It was fascinating to hear, in the middle of a dharma talk, them clear their throat in the loudest possible way and go [Laughter] and spit into this spittoon. I don't know if I could get away with that here!

Our physical appearance is a big part of it—how our body appears to us. It's very important to understand how our body appears to us, instead of how our body actually is, because how it appears to us has a lot to do with the choices the mind makes about what's important about ourselves.

For example, when I was a teenager, probably one of the most important appearances that I was attached to was my hair. I had very long hair. I had to worry about split ends. This was a big thing, the length of my hair. If I was thinking about my appearance during the day, I was mostly thinking about my hair. That's changed over the years! [Laughter]

Some people get very attached to their appearance. Their life is based on their appearance because a lot of their life energy goes into doing that. For example, professional bodybuilders. That has a lot to do with appearance; there might be other reasons to be a bodybuilder, but there are people who are very focused on their physical appearance. Some people are more focused on their beauty, or lack of beauty, than they are about the words they speak. They spend a lot of time preparing to go out so that they can be beautiful, going to salons, having their hair made up, having beauty contests.

Some of this concern with appearance is very painful because our society makes definitions of what's the right way to be appearance-wise, in all kinds of ways: physical appearance, skin color, race, height, size. The preoccupation with appearance is not just because people have an inner disposition that way, but society reinforces it with a lot of suffering. We end up with society participating in creating these force fields in the middle of our lives that now have heightened importance and value. All kinds of dysfunctional activity can exist around appearance.

The second thing the Buddha said that people select out of the whole, and choose to highlight, is what in Buddhist English is called "feelings" (vedanā)^[3]. But it's not emotions; it's whether things are pleasant or unpleasant. Some people are very focused on pleasure, very focused on pain, and what's unpleasant.

Within reason, it's a reasonable thing for human beings to be concerned with. To sit in a chair, be uncomfortable, and adjust it—that seems fine. But it's possible to select this thing about comfort and pleasure and make it a primary orientation around how we live our lives. Some people spend much of their day pursuing pleasure of all kinds, or much of their day activated around feeling pain. Pain is an unfortunate part of life, but to what degree is it selected out by the mind, given more importance than it actually is because of all the associations of what pain means, what's going to happen to me, and the imagination into the future? So pleasure and pain become a primary orientation in their life. That becomes their force field, what they cling to.

The third one has to do with our perceptions (saññā)^[4]. Our recognition of things, our ideas of what is. This is the simplest idea of things that the mind makes. For some people, their opinions, their stories, their ideas of how things are becomes what's most interesting for them, what they're focusing on. Simple ideas of right and wrong, simple ideas of beauty and ugliness, roles we have, identities we have.

Having the right ideas, being able to recognize what's happening in the world around us, and organizing according to ideas we have is how some people feel safe. It's how some people find their way. So some people are very focused on perceptions, ideas, and concepts. Because concepts are what you need to have in place to be safe or get around. People get very attached to ideas—concepts of roles, concepts of identity, concepts of what should be in society and how other people should be.

The fourth area the Buddha talked about is the inner mental world (saṅkhāra)^[5] that does all this constructing, that does all this imagining and prioritization. When I was in that meditation hall, the mind was imagining this line. The mind was imagining what would happen if I got zapped by walking close to it. I was living a deliberate life in relationship to something my mind had created. The fourth area is this area of deliberate construction: stories, ideas, intentions, plans, memories, the complicated inner world that we construct. Spinning stories is a nice way of seeing it. Some people get attached to their memories, attached to ideas of the future, and these loom really big. For some people, that's where they get bogged down, or things get narrowed into that world.

The fifth division of the whole is the consciousness (viññāṇa)^[6] that is aware of it all. The rest of it—that which knows that this is happening, that knows this is hearing, this is seeing, smelling, tasting, tactile sensations, mind activity. For some people, that's what they get attached to. People who do a lot of meditation sometimes get really attached to consciousness because everything else falls away. Everything else you begin to see is arising and passing, coming and going, it quiets down, and it doesn't seem like something to be so attached to. But for some people, consciousness seems to be the ultimate thing. "I'm not all these things. I'm not the world, I'm not my body, I'm not my thoughts, I'm not my beliefs." We'll select consciousness as a thing to be. "This is who I am."

Having that projection has people orient around that as being important. Some people invest their very sense of being and existing into consciousness. "Consciousness will continue after I die, so it's okay, I'm safe. I need to know who I am, and I know that I'm consciousness, and it's very comforting because consciousness is not the world, not the things in the world, so it's a place of safety and can't be touched."

I'm not saying that all ideas like that are wrong, but the point I'm trying to make today is the way in which the whole of who we are gets divided into these different realms. Once that division is made, each of these five branches can be a place of attachment, of clinging. For the Buddha, it's not that we were supposed to not make these branches necessarily; the Buddha was interested in how we over-make them, have too much focus on them, and then get attached to them.

The Buddha said that the way people are identified—the way people are apprehended or observed—is based on where their mind dwells. If it dwells on any one of these five areas, then people are reckoned or measured or understood by that way. If you spend a lot of time with your physical appearance, you're recognized and measured by that. You've seen people where you think, "Wow, that person has really put a lot of work and effort into it day after day, working out." That's the person who really puts a lot of care into their appearance, so that becomes their identity. With each of the other four, when there's a real attachment to that, the Buddha said people are reckoned or understood through that category. It's not just that we understand ourselves that way, but that's how other people end up understanding us as well.

Sister Khemā and the King

So then we come to this wonderful little teaching in relationship to all this, now that I've prepared the ground.

The Buddha had a friend who was a king. One day, the king wanted to hear some teachings from a really wise person. The Buddha wasn't around, and some of the other monks weren't around, so he was asking his advisors, "Who should I go listen to?" One of his advisors said, "Oh, there's this very wise Buddhist nun named Venerable Khemā^[7]. She is really wise, you should go visit her." The king said, "Great, I'll go visit Khemā."

So he did. He asked her a question which was a big preoccupation for people in ancient India. It's a preoccupation that maybe some people here in the modern West have as well: What happens when we die? Do we get reborn? Do we go to heaven? Is there any kind of continuation of us after we die, or is this life the only thing we have and know, and when we die, it's all over, it's done? What is going on here?

People would come to the Buddha and ask him questions like this. So this king came to Khemā and asked this common question you see in the suttas: "Does the Buddha exist after death?" To ask about the Buddha—because the Buddha was one of the most respected spiritual teachers of his time, not just because he had a lot of knowledge, but because he had attained something very important, the highest states of humanity that they knew of—if the Buddha exists after life, that tells me something about what I can expect.

So, "Does the Buddha exist after death?"

The nun said, "The Buddha has not declared this. The Buddha has not claimed that he exists after death."

"Then, reverend lady, does the Buddha not exist after death?"

"Great king, the Buddha has not declared this either."

"Then, reverend lady, does the Buddha both exist and not exist after death?"

"Great king, the Buddha has not declared this."

"Then, reverend lady, does the Tathāgata^[8] neither exist nor not exist after death?"

"Great king, the Blessed One has not declared this."

The king is a little bit exasperated, like, "That's all the possibilities! So, how does this work? What's going on here?"

She says to the king, "Well, I will ask you a question about the same matter. Answer it as you see fit. What do you think, great king? Do you have an accountant, or a calculator, or a mathematician who can count the grains of sand in the river Ganges? Thus: 'There are so many grains of sand, there are so many hundreds of grains of sand, there are so many hundreds of thousands of grains of sand'?"

The king says, "No, I don't have anyone who can count all the grains of sand."

"Do you have an accountant or a calculator or a mathematician who can count the water in the great ocean? Thus: 'There are so many gallons of water, there are so many hundreds of thousands of gallons of water'?"

"No, reverend lady."

"For what reason?"

"Because the great ocean is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom."

"So too, great king. That form, that appearance by which one describing the Buddha might describe him, has been abandoned by the Buddha, cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, obliterated so that it is no more subject to future arising. The Tathāgata, great king, is liberated from reckoning in terms of appearance. He is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom like the great ocean."

Then she does the same thing with these other five branches that people measure or see the Buddha by: by feelings, by perceptions, by these mental constructs, and by consciousness. That, the Buddha has cut off.

Now, if we understand that these are really parts of who we are, what do you mean, "cut off appearance, cut off feelings, cut off perceptions, constructs"? That's who we are, isn't it? So then you don't exist?

I think how I understand this is: the Buddha has let go of any clinging, any constructing of these force fields, of these lines in the meditation hall in relationship to ourselves. The Buddha is not creating a sense of self-idea through what we call appearances. He is not involved in the world of appearances in an ordinary way. He is not involved in creating importance and creating a world around feelings, around perceptions, around stories and mental constructions, and even around consciousness. In some dramatic way, that tendency that human beings have has been let go, put aside.

Deep As the Ocean

In doing so, what is the Buddha? The nun says, "He is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom like the great ocean."

Maybe that's who you are. Hard to fathom, like the deep ocean.

As we have climate change and drought here in California, and technology improves and they're learning to harvest electricity from the tides and the waves, at some point we might move underwater. That's the only place we'll survive. Imagine that we'll divide up the ocean into one-acre square blocks, and we'll all buy squares in the ocean. We'll have our underwater home in our square. People in the future will say, "What's the ocean? Oh, the ocean is this place that's built by all these blocks of properties and all these lines." People will fight over the lines, and they'll have to get surveyors to come and get the right line. "How could you have crossed my line? Above me there are people, below me there are people, because I have these blocks." We've divided up the ocean.

Is that what the ocean is? Blocks of property owned?

Right now we have this beautiful Pacific nearby us. Deep, immeasurable. I go to the edge of the ocean sometimes and watch, and I marvel that it's been there for a long time. Humans come and go, civilizations come and go, and those waves have been lapping up on the shore, crossing the ocean for billions of years. The depth of it has been there for a long time. It's deep, it's immeasurable.

What a sad thing it would be if we divide it up into these lines and blocks, and think that that's real, and fight over it.

What if we allow our lives to be immeasurable? Undivided. Not attached to these things. For the Buddha, his freedom was to no longer live in these branches—as if one branch is the tree—but maybe being just the whole tree. Or maybe not even the tree. Is the tree separate from the soil, from the other trees, the birds that come to it, the nests that grow in it? Is it separate from the clouds and the rain that comes down, and the temperature, and the sun? Is it necessary to divide the world? Before humans came along, was it divided?

Certainly, functionally, it makes sense to divide. Human minds will divide to find their food and eat, and find the toilet—because if you don't, it's a mess! [Laughter] So it has some usefulness. But do we cling to it? Do we add more than is needed? Is there a way of living in an undivided world where we are undivided with it as well? Immeasurable, deep, where we cannot be reckoned. Because to reckon who we are is to make an invisible, constructed line down the middle of something.

Is there another way of living, of being? One of the functions of this meditation practice is to help us put to rest, at least temporarily, some of the divisions we live under. Some of the ideas, constructs, prioritizations, and choices we make about "this is important, this is what it's about," and to have an experience of—I want to say "ourselves," but not even of ourselves—just an experience of being alive that doesn't have to be defined by anything. It doesn't have to select anything from the suchness, the fullness, the wholeness of whatever is here.

What a big difference it is to know that that's possible. To know that this too is a refuge. It puts a little question mark behind the way we normally live our lives, so that we don't give too much importance to it. Our life is important, we care for others through some of these divisions. But the key is to not raise them, not solidify them, not say it has to be this way, but to be fluid and free. To pick up some of the divisions and ideas pragmatically and functionally when they're useful, and be ready to drop them when they're not useful to live a life.

These five divisions are one of the very important teachings of the Buddha, because this is the area where people cling. If we want to be free, we let go of that clinging.

Who are you when you've let go of clinging like that? That, the Buddha doesn't declare. He's not going to tell you who you are. Isn't that great? Just like he doesn't tell people who he is. If you allow me to tell you a little bit who you are, maybe then you're whole. And whole with what? Whole with the whole. What is the whole? I don't know, but we find out by not making it into anything.

May you reflect a little bit about this teaching. Maybe there are ways that you also live with imagined lines down the middle of your life that have had some influence on you, a force field or something. Maybe someone will snap their fingers and poof, you realize, "Wait a minute, that doesn't really exist," and you can be free.

So, thank you very much.

Announcements

One announcement I have is that next week, because I'm on retreat for these next two weeks, we have a guest teacher coming: Vanessa Able. She's a wonderful Zen priest from the local Zen center, Kannon Do in Mountain View. I've gotten to know her because she's been very much involved in supporting, and is almost a colleague with, the trainings I'm involved with in Buddhist chaplaincy. I train people in Buddhist chaplaincy, and she's been involved in this world. She's a wonderful person, and I think you're in for a treat when she comes next week.

Thank you.