Reality Check

Zen talk 2013

Opening your heart on your cushion is not where it ends. ‘How can you sit meditating in perfect calm while the world around you is falling apart?’ someone once asked Thich Nhat Hanh. He began his answer with: ‘I hear that you do not meditate.’ Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness: those unfamiliar with these easily dismiss them as quietism, as a search for tranquillity detached from worldly concerns. Despite the title of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s first book, ‘Full Catastrophe Living’, you increasingly find mindfulness books with idyllic images on their covers.

To my amazement, you can also see quietism creeping into the emerging Western Buddhism. For instance when Linda Heuman exclaims in Tricycle: ‘Why would we devote our precious human lives to exploring whether meditation can lower blood pressure?’ Given that high blood pressure is one of the leading causes of cardiovascular disease and death, this is a particularly troubling development. What do we choose to devote our precious human lives to?

The problem is older than today. The Lotus Sutra opens with a rebuke of the arhats, who had rid themselves of all worldly desires and thereby secured only their own wellbeing. Rahulabhadra too, in his ‘Hymn to the Wisdom Beyond All Wisdom’, is unambiguous: wisdom expresses itself only through its action.

Hail to you who from eternity to eternity
are encircled by your perfectly pure action,
just as the new moon is surrounded by billions of stars,
Immaculate, Holy, and One.

These verses were written before the invention of the telescope. Unlike the average city-dweller today, most people at that time probably knew the position of the moon and the moon phase. The new moon is the phase after the last crescent of the waning moon has disappeared and before the first crescent of the waxing moon appears. The moon is then invisible. If you know it’s position, there is only a dark patch in the sky, surrounded by billions of stars.

Rahulabhadra personifies the Wisdom Beyond All Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) and compares her to the new moon. She too is invisible, but she manifests through her perfect action, which he likens to the billions of stars surrounding the moon. What, then, is the action of wisdom? Here too Rahulabhadra is clear: love, compassion, goodness.

He also uses the moon in another metaphor:
Hail, Fullness of all goodness and virtue.
As moonlight is one with the shining moon,
so are You one with the awakened ones,
with those who bear witness to You here on earth.

How does one bear witness to Prajnaparamita? Rest assured, not by going door to door with leaflets. (Have you heard of Prajnaparamita?) Writing about Prajnaparamita in a text like this is a relatively minor matter. Engaging in bitter disputes over doctrinal questions testifies rather to dogmatism and fanaticism. I always think that the truly enlightened — if that word holds any meaning at all — are not the great teachers, but unknown people you happen to meet on the street, who smile at you, after which you feel good without knowing why.

To bear witness to Prajnaparamita is to act. It is not doing something extraordinary. It requires no heroic deeds, usually quite the opposite. It expresses itself here, in this place, right now. Which makes it mostly very ordinary. Sometimes we think we must do great things. Solve the problems in the Middle East, for instance. But arguing about what we should do in the Middle East is infinitely easier — and less binding — than relating well to the people with whom we live and work. ‘This is the place’, the Avatamsaka Sutra repeats again and again.

Our workplace too is the place. For the physician, it is listening to the patient. For the young woman at the checkout, it is being correct and kind to that endless stream of customers, many of whom — well, some of whom — are not always equally correct and kind in return. For the researcher, it is the search for mechanisms that lower blood pressure. For the officer on a peacekeeping mission, it is the willingness to take on a responsibility others prefer to avoid, because they will inevitably find themselves in harrowing situations where the right decision is far from clear. This is the place. For everyone a different place, with different questions.

‘As moonlight is one with the shining moon.’ It is a much-used metaphor. There is no light without a source of light, no source of light without light. So prajna and karuna, wisdom and compassion, are one.

It is as in the koan where Yunyan asks his teacher Daowu: ‘How does Guanyin manage with all those arms?’ The answer is very simple: ‘No differently from someone reaching for their pillow in their sleep.’ Acting out of compassion happens in and of itself. Without thinking, without calculation. Compassion flows naturally from wisdom, as moonlight is one with the shining moon.

It is a beautiful but dangerous line of reasoning that has gotten many Zen students and teachers into serious difficulty. The Zen teacher Norman Fischer calls it a ‘… serious weakness in Zen: its deficiency in explicit teachings on compassion.’ That is why he integrates Lojong into his Zen teaching, a Tibetan practice directed at cultivating compassion.

But why? If wisdom and compassion are one, would it not be better to go all-out for wisdom, since the rest will follow in and of itself? That is indeed a line of reasoning sometimes made in Zen. Through intensive meditation practices, a breakthrough is aimed for, which is then verified by a teacher whose own breakthrough was once verified by their teacher. The illusion that can arise from this is that from that point on all action is automatically compassionate action, ‘like someone reaching for their pillow in their sleep.’ And, rest assured, nothing can go wrong anymore, it has all been verified. You can already see where this is heading…

We find the theme in the koans as well. When Juzhi cuts off his student’s index finger, this is praised as profound wisdom and compassion. But there are also warnings. In another koan, taking the form of a typical Chinese ghost story, an abbot is reborn as a fox for five hundred consecutive lives because he believed himself to be above the law of cause and effect, that is to say, of good and evil.

The problem presents itself most acutely in Japanese Zen because the various Buddhist traditions in Japan have grown much further apart than in their motherland China. In China, for instance, Pure Land Buddhism is not a tradition in itself. Amida and his vow to liberate all beings, even the most lost, form a seamless part of every tradition. In Chan monasteries too, Amida holds a special place. Compassion is there far more visibly present. It quite simply comes first.

So, what is it, then? Are wisdom and compassion one, or are they two separate matters to be cultivated separately? For me, wisdom and compassion remain one. Our practice cultivates both wisdom and compassion. It is not the case that wisdom comes first and then leads to compassion. The reverse is equally true. Compassion leads to wisdom. A merciless practice can never result in wisdom.

We can, however, view wisdom and compassion as each other’s reality check. Does your insight lead to greater connectedness with the people around you, or does it widen the gap further? Does your practice support you in your commitments and responsibilities, or are your commitments and responsibilities an obstacle to your practice? Does your compassion genuinely help the other, or does it become an artificial niceness that avoids the real issues? Do you act out of a moralizing sense of obligation, or from a deep feeling of connectedness?

Perhaps it is wise to have our practice verified, not by a certified teacher, but by the people around us. By those we get along with well and those with whom we are in conflict. By those who love us and those who hate us. As Krishnamurti once said: ‘If you want to know who you are, look at your relationships.’ Let that be our reality check.

For my own part, I can only say that this reflection moves me to profound humility.