PAIN AND SUFFERING

Transcribed from a talk given Tuesday November 24, 2009. To hear the podcast of this talk, click HERE.

Eshu is giving a Dharma talk in the third sit. Radical! Ah, what a great opportunity! Thank you all for your patience. I sometimes am thinking, “Oh, Brad Warner was here last week, I’ve really got to say something good this week, really impress people, what am I going to talk about? No idea… and then all of a sudden, situations… circumstances arise, and like magic a talk is delivered. Mmm.

So tonight we have this situation where – you know, we say, “Oh, people should arrive at 6:45 so they can receive an orientation”…and then, a few minutes after seven, somebody arrived – Ah! What to do? We find our preferences rise up. And we say, “Damn, I was just starting to get into my sit and here comes a bloody newcomer, ah man, I have to go help this person. Aw.”

Practice is a really hard thing. We live in a culture that really encourages us to not spend time doing practices like this, to not spend any time looking within, looking at ourselves, looking at how we relate to the world around us. It encourages us and offers us all kinds of opportunities to distract ourselves, to make ourselves happy by grasping at other things. You know, “watch this” and “do that”, and “eat this” and “drink that”, and “smoke this”, and “screw that”, and it’ll all make you happy.

But sooner or later, for most of us – well for many of us, at least for some of us who have arrived here, it comes to a point that we say, “well maybe we ought to do something else. Maybe the resolution or the solution to our difficulties doesn't lie out there, doesn't rely on us grasping things that we take as being out there and trying to bring them inside.” We start to say, “Maybe I just need to look at why it is that I'm having difficulty”.

So when I see somebody come in the door, even if they're a little bit late, I jump up and I say, “Oh geez, here’s somebody who in spite of all the money and all the effort and all the myriad opportunities that are being thrown at them to pursue their happiness in external objects, here’s a person that's got up and made an effort to go and sit and look at the floor in the zendo for an evening”. So all the sort of ‘self’ stuff, all the “Oh, but I’m just sitting”, “Oh, how am I going to figure out what I’m going to talk about”, all “me”, kind of drops away. And I go “Oh, shit, I’ve got to go talk to that person and help them establish this practice”.

And this is really strange sometimes, I think, for people who sit with me, students of the Victoria Zen Centre, because I'm also the person that will close the door on a Zen student who’s five minutes late for a sit – “No, you can’t come in!” This is a different situation. And I hope – I don’t want to go on for too long about this but I hope for the members that you can understand…that you can grasp the difference in these two situations. One, the situation of a person who has committed to training, the other, a person who is curiously making their first step. Their first step to investigate what it is that brings us to suffer.

On the weekend during the zazenkai – once a month we have this crazy thing called zazenkai. It’s a one day intensive. We sit from six in the morning until five in the evening and the whole day is an immersion in formal Zen practice. And this weekend we had a guest teacher, Brad Warner. Brad spoke a little bit about anger and I wanted to bring up one particular aspect that he spoke about because I think it's something that goes far beyond anger. Anger, in my opinion, is – is one manifestation of suffering. Something that brings us to suffer. And what Brad was talking about is something that I think is really at the root of so much of how we suffer, whether it's anger or whether it's grief or whether it's self doubt.

Even – physical pain – which, you know, giving me the opportunity to speak in the third set provides an ample opportunity for us to experience this physical pain. And this is the gap that comes up between what we figure things ought to be like and our experience of them as they are. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the difference that we have between our experience of pain, difficulty, and what we can recognize as suffering.

Now the members – several of the members of the Victoria Zen Centre are headed towards sesshin. Sesshin is something that we do twice a year here in Victoria and it's a five-day intensive where we go from four in the morning until around nine-thirty at night. During this we have lots of opportunity to investigate pain and suffering. And usually when we talk about pain and suffering they’re synonymous, they’re the same thing. And what I want to talk about tonight is how we can understand them as being different, and that by clearly recognizing these two things – pain or discomfort, and suffering – as being not the same, as being different, I think it's an important window into practice.

Buddhism is focused at liberation from suffering. And I think that this is a really important thing to understand. Because when we come into Zen or Buddhism, we can think, “Oh, I’m going to be free from suffering, and that means that I'm never going to be uncomfortable again”, or “I'm never going to have anger again”, or “I'm never going to have grief again”, or “I’m never going to have self-doubt again”.

So I’d like to talk about this from a physical perspective, because it’s something – form, our bodies, are something that we can really look at quite easily. In our day-to-day activities we can understand, we can experience this, and we can experiment with it a little bit. When we’re sitting – you know, I think the most common places that we have pain is in our knees and in our back. And as we go through our lives we’ll have all kind – we’ll slam our fingers in doors, and all kinds of stuff. And when we do this what I want you to do is investigate that and look at the experience of it.

When pain arises in the body we become aware of it as a physical sensation. As the first sort of layer of awareness is just this general awareness, this sort of tingling experience. Just as when – if we close our eyes for a second, just sort of allow ourselves to relax, and then we suddenly pop our eyes open, the first thing that hits our eyes is light, color. And then there's layers that sort of pile on top of these experiences. We start to recognize shape, movement. We start to identify and name, compare, contrast. And then we start to judge, we start to discriminate between things.

And the same goes with physical sensation. When we first become aware of physical sensation there's no assessment, there is no comparison, there is not even a real clear identification of it. There’s just this awareness. Then as we start to investigate it more, as we start to think on it more, we begin to identify it– is that a tickle, or is that an ache? Is that an acute, sharp pain or is that a low frequency kind of a numbness that’s going on? We start to make these kinds of assessments.

And then beyond that we begin to judge. We begin to make value assessments. We begin to say “Pain. Oh, that’s pain. Pain is bad. I don't like pain”. And still we haven't entered into the round of suffering. This is just still this very physical experience, this experience of the faculty of form, physical sensation.

Suffering enters into it when we say, “This is what I'm experiencing and it should be otherwise”. We’re sitting there feeling pain in our legs and our expectation of the situation is that we should be comfortable, is that we should be free from difficulty, is that we should be at ease and away from pain. And the degree to which we fixate on that idea, that we fixate on that expectation, freedom from difficulty, freedom from pain – and its distance from our experience – is the degree to which we suffer.

And so it's the same when we are in a relationship, when we have a work situation, in our environment that we're in. If we're hot, we’re really hot. This is a great one if we're in a hot climate in California or something like that, it’s really hot. If your expectation is to be cool but you're hot, it's suffering, it’s miserable. “God, it’s humid, God, it’s hot, this is terrible”.

And you can also experience, you can practice this… breathing and letting go of our expectation, our assumption for things to be other than they our. Melting into the experience of heat. And we find that in a moment – and usually, only for a moment – the experience of suffering disappears. Haaaa [breathes out]. And then we separate again. We say, “But wait! I should be cool!” And the experience of that suffering comes up again.

And it’s the same with the physical body as we do zazen, as we're sitting for longer periods of time. If we practice, if we investigate this experience, we can find that as we let go of the expectation for things to be otherwise, as we let go of the anticipation of the bell, waiting for the period to end, we find that we can feel our legs, yeah, they’re sore. But that's it. There is no suffering attached.

We find that if we are in relationship and we can, even for a moment, let go of our expectation of what the other should be or should do or should say and just completely embraced or witness what it is that they’re doing or saying or being at that moment, then this suffering is diminished.

This is a difficult, difficult practice. It’s something that we engage in over and over again in formal Zen practice. We expect the bell to ring here, we expect so-and-so to walk there, and our practice is to investigate it, in the form of practice. Because what we find over and over again is that that expectation that we have, the way that we bind ourselves to an assumed or expected outcome, is not different inside formal practice as it is outside formal practice.

We have the opportunity to experience letting go into things as they are. The opportunity to embrace and become intimate with this moment as it is in our life. To let go of what things ought to be and for a moment experience our lives as they are. In doing so, to be free from suffering.

Having gained insight into this practice, having met with our expectations, having found ourselves stuck and attached to them and practicing haaaa [breathes out], just letting go, dissolving into things as they are, as we go forward into our lives we are encouraged and have some practical experiential basis to go forward into our relationships and into our work, and to do the same practice.

When we find ourselves getting tied up by what we expect, how we think things ought to be, we can remind ourselves, “Ah, this is no different. Breathe. Let go into it. Allow the suffering to drop away and to experience our lives just as they are”.

Yeah, OK [laughs]. Enough experiencing pain and suffering.

CHANGING SEASONS

Transcribed from a talk given September 2, 2008.


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The school of Zen that I was trained in is called, in Japanese, Nyorai Zen. Nyorai is the Japanese word for the Sanskrit tathāgata. This is a Sanskrit word that means “thus coming, thus going”. It is one of the titles of the historical Buddha, and it was the term that the historical Buddha himself used to refer to himself- “The one who has thus come, the one who has thus gone”. In Buddhism, we often talk about the investigation of this thing that we call self; this construct that we call “I am”. One fundamental principles of Buddhism or Zen is that it is our fixation, our obsession, our unquestioning acceptance of the permanent, lasting existence of a self that leads us to suffer.

Thus coming, and thus going. This moment that arises before us has as its content these two fundamental activities. Thus coming, and thus going. They are expressed in many different ways in Zen practice. We can talk about them as the activity of plus, and the activity of minus, the activity of birth, and the activity of death. As we go through our lives we have this tendency to continuously fixate one side or the other. We can talk about plus and minus, birth and death and past and future, inside and outside, unification and diversification. We’re always fixating on one side or the other. We always want to grasp on to one, or to judge one as being better and the other as being something to be avoided. We’re always running, and charging, and seeking one and trying to avoid the other.

I find September is a very interesting month, particularly the beginning of September because for many people, it can experientially demonstrates a moment...this moment...every moment...as holding both of these activities of plus and minus simultaneously. It is the end of summer...and so we’re sad to see it go. Simultaneously we are excited for the sparkling newness as of the fall season, the anticipation of what it has to offer.

Which do you fixate on? Which are you denying, avoiding?

For me, September second is always an interesting day, and this year, in particular, it is a very strong one in that it very much contains both of these aspects for me. Today at the Victoria Zen Centre we began the first day of a residential program for a student in the Zen Centre.

So we have a student living at the Victoria Zen Centre with myself and my family and this morning we began training. Also this morning was my son’s first day of grade three at school so a new routine and dropping him off to see his friends. September second is also the anniversary of my mother’s death when I was nine years old, so September second is this day where I can personally have this tendency to fixate or to want to block out certain aspects of this moment, certain aspects of what it is that I’m feeling or what it is that this moment gives rise to.

So in practice as we sit, as we awaken into this moment to become familiar, to embrace all that it has to offer, this practice is one of realizing the capacity of our minds, of our hearts to accept and to embrace this seeming paradox, tath-agata, tatha-agata, “thus coming and thus going”.

Our tendency is to always view these two directions, these two activities as in opposition, opposed to one another. We always have this desire or this habit of feeling like we always have to pick, choose, or judge one as being right or wrong. We always are opposing life and death, but it is birth and death that compose life. This moment, as I keep saying over and over again, has as it’s content all things and it’s important that as we practice, as we engage in simply sitting, bringing our body and our breath and our hearts and our minds into this moment that we embrace the completion of this moment which has as it’s content all things...the activity of plus, the activity of minus, the activity of birth, the activity of death, the in-breath and the out-breath. All of the things that you like, and want, and enjoy, and desire...and all the things that repel you...that you want to avoid, and that you want to get away from.

In this moment, as we practice together...let go. Let go of your judgement...let go of your choices...let go of your thinking mind...good this, and bad that. Simply embrace this moment just as it is. Complete. Whole. Just as it is, this very moment lacks nothing. Just as you are, you lack nothing.

Where is it that you need to go? What is it that you need to feel better? What is it that you think you’re lacking? Already in this moment...just as it is...there isn’t one thing lacking.

As we practice together in the Zendo...as we practice together in meditation...as we awaken to this moment...as we focus on our breath and open ourselves to this moment, we can, ourselves, experience the completion of this vast universe in this moment.

But what happens when we stand up, and we walk out into the world? For the most part we forget our own experience. We stick to old habit patterns of “I need this” and “I need to get rid of that”, of “I like this and I don’t like that”. We are beginning a new year and so I encourage all of you to remember this practice that we are doing right here and now. It’s something that can go with you wherever you go. It’s no further away from you than your breath. When you find yourself getting sucked into thinking “I like this”...”I don’t like that”...”I want this”... “I want to be away or rid of that”... simply return to your breath. Breathing in...breathing out. The activity of plus and minus. Tath-agata...tatha-agata. Thus coming, and thus going. If you’re able to remember this, if you’re able to connect with this practice as you go through your day to day lives, then you can say that you’re practicing Zen.

Registration for the October Introduction to Zen Meditation courses at the Victoria Zen Centre is underway. Visit our website for more information.

THE WALL

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Transcribed from a talk given Tuesday October 28, 2008.

Tonight I wanted to talk a little bit about `the wall’. Over the past weekend simultaneously at the Victoria Zen Centre, there are two introductory classes going on. And, this past session has been about emotions and some of the difficulties that arise within practice. Many people come and approach meditation practice, Zen practice, from many different perspectives and often I’m surprised by how taken aback or taken by surprise they are by the power of meditation practice.

I think many people come for their first time or two to try meditation as a means of calming their mind, as a means of settling down into their lives and experiencing what’s happening in this moment. And universally, when we come with this attitude we have this unquestioning attitude that the fact that our minds are busy, the fact that we’re busy is a bad thing. And that we need to do something about it.

We’ve been driven to distraction by the busy-ness of the wheels in our minds and we want to slow them down. But before we take up this seated meditation we never stop to contemplate why. Why is my mind so busy?

Now, my personal belief is that these kinds of things, these kinds of busy-ness, internal busy-ness doesn’t happen without a very good reason. It’s often not until people start to sit, people start to engage in a regular meditation practice, that they start to gain some insight into why it is their minds are so busy.

I often use this phrase when I’m giving talks here on Tuesday night, `to enter into this moment which has as it’s content all things’ and I think that many people think this sounds wonderful ... `to enter into this moment which has as it’s content all things’. But as we begin to let go of the busy-ness of our minds, as we begin to allow the distractions that we involve ourselves with, mentally, emotionally, and physically to melt away, as we come to truly enter into this moment with its contents, we find that all things means ALL things; all of these things that we find that are pleasant, but also all the things in this moment that we carry with us that are unpleasant, that are difficult, that are ugly, that carry with them shame and fear and guilt.

Suddenly, it begins to dawn on us why my mind is so busy. Sitting with this stuff, sitting with my own bag of stuff that I carry with me wherever I go is difficult, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unpleasant at times. Sometimes at this point, people get mad at Eshu, they get mad at meditation practice and they say `Hey, what happened to all that peaceful, warm, nice meditation that I was having for awhile. It’s your fault’.

It’s easy to externalize this difficulty when we’re experiencing it in practice, and being the guy with the bald head and black robes makes you a pretty easy target. But it’s important that when this arises in practice, we recognize who carries it, who brings it with them. Accepting responsibility for our own lives is a crucial aspect of practice. This dawning, this beginning of realization of practice; that we carry with us a whole mess is one way of understanding what I refer to as `the wall’.

For some of you who have been busy reading and studying about Zen practice, you will find that in our history the first patriarch of Zen in China was a man called Bodhidharma. He’s famous for this practice called nine years facing the wall. In some traditions in Zen Buddhism, this practice is literally done facing the wall, a physical wall, but in truth if you’re engaged in Zen practice it’s all facing the wall.

This wall is the obstacle, the difficulty, the discomfort that we ourselves carry with us all the time. It is these feelings of anger, hate, fear, grief, shame, guilt ... the things that we carry with us all the time that we don’t want to talk about... we don’t want to look at ... we don’t want to sit with, or to experience.

From the time that we’re very young, we develop many, many coping mechanisms to distract ourselves from them, to avoid them, to bring ourselves into a position where we just don’t have to think about them anymore. Depending on how significant that pain is, depending on how greatly we suffer from what we carry with us; the more drastic our techniques for distracting ourselves get.

We start with just thinking differently, thinking about something else, busy, busy, busy in the mind. But as the pain increases it begins to need more strength to distract ourselves from it. So we can get involved in all kinds of things, distracting ourselves with food, distracting ourselves with physical activities, distracting ourselves with drugs and sex and whatever else we can come up with.

In practice, we begin to take these backward steps, we begin to unload, disassemble all of these clever techniques that we have for not looking at what we’re carrying around with us. It’s at about this time that we realize that things are getting difficult, and we need to make a really crucial decision in our practice. Do you really want to change?

People approach Buddhism, and they hear about this teaching of `no self’, they hear about the teaching of `impermanence’ and the idea is captivating.This teaching is philosophically interesting and so we say, `that sounds really good, I’d like to get into that’. But as we continue to practice, we find that we are very attached to who it is that we think we are.

I think that many people, only think that we’re attached to all the good things that we think we are, but as we continue to practice, we begin to find that we’re also deeply committed, deeply immersed, deeply fixated with our own grief, our own anger, our own likes and dislikes and preferences. We’re even attached to our own failure.

If it’s familiar to us, we are it. So when we come to this place where we are confronting ourselves honestly, when we have entered into this moment with all things as it’s content ... good and bad, light and dark, pleasant and unpleasant ... we’re faced with this choice. Do I actually want to change? Because if we do we have to break through the wall... we have to do things which may be profoundly uncomfortable. We have to let go of aspects of ourselves which we have held up, glorified and fixated to as being `me’. “I’m this kind of person”, “I’m that kind of person”, “I like this and I don’t like that.” “Ooh, this kind of person is really not my style.” When we start to honestly see where these kinds of choices... where these kinds of fixations have brought us, we’re always faced with this choice... to let it drop... let it hit the floor... and arise as somebody new... to allow this old self to drop away, or to use traditional terms, to allow the old self to die, and to arise anew.

The truth is this practice, to do this, is not an easy endeavour. I’ve been teaching Zen in Victoria now for 10 years and there are not so many people that have been around that whole time. Many people come to this wall and decide “Naaa, I think I’ll just go back to distracting myself.” Make no mistake... this kind of transformation is not an easy game. It requires you to summon up the strength, all the strength that you have, and to give rise to the, dare I say faith, that if you let go of these things that you’re so attached to, you won’t just disappear.

As we enter into this moment, this moment that has as its content all things, we realize that there is an opportunity for us to become free. When we become transparently clear about the burden that we carry with us all the time, we realize that there is only one person that shoulders its weight. We begin to realize that in each moment we all have a choice to pick it up and continue to slug it along with us, or to let it drop.

My hope for each of us is that in each moment we are able to let this bag drop and to arise anew, to face each moment fresh, reborn, and to manifest a new and true you.

THE MAKING OF A ZEN MONK

Victoria Zen Centre to hold Victoria's first Buddhist Ordination

Doshu Lars Rogers has a first-hand understanding of suffering and impermanence. In February 2002, he found himself in the intensive care unit of Vancouver General Hospital more dead than alive having been air lifted from his family’s homestead on Malcolm Island just off of Vancouver Island’s north coast. The diagnosis was acute leukemia, and the prognosis was not hopeful. Immediate chemotherapy left Rogers with no memory of the events that took place for about a month after his arrival at the hospital. In May of 2002, he was released from hospital for two weeks before a scheduled bone marrow transplant “to make some good memories with (his) family”. Upon his return to hospital he was subjected to intense chemotherapy and full-body radiation to ensure that all blood making cells in his body were thoroughly and totally dead. Following the bone marrow transplant, another month of isolation followed waiting for these new cells to take up residence deep within his bones and begin producing healthy blood.

Doshu has practiced Zen Buddhism since 1975-at times passively, and at times with great energy and zeal. Living remotely, his contact with any kind of Buddhist community was infrequent, but he maintained a personal practice and attended meditation retreats occasionally with Toronto Zen Centre, Zen Centres in Oregon and Washington States, and the Victoria Zen Centre. His life path had seen him educated at the University of Toronto in astronomy, travelling through Asia and Europe with his wife Soshin Ruth McMurchy, training and working in electronics and making a living as an entrepreneur in that field. Doshu and Soshin have two children together, and when Doshu became ill, the whole family moved to Victoria so that they could be there to support him, and each other. As he lay in the hospital wondering if he would make it to the next mealtime which Doshu describes as “a yellow-green goo that was pumped through my nose-tube and into my stomach”, a visiting friend asked him what he wanted to do when he got out of the hospital. Doshu had spent much of his time (when he was conscious and/or coherent) reviewing his life, coming to terms with his impending death, and letting go of any regrets of his life; but realized that he hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of recovery. The question he was asked provoked a heartfelt response that he says surprised him. “My family and Zen practice are my priorities.”

When Doshu was discharged from hospital in July of 2002, after the bone marrow transplant had “taken”, it was into the caring hands of his friends and family. As he slowly recovered, struggling through periodic and frightening infections, and dealing with the depression that often follows such severe illness, he gradually began to regain his strength. His resolve and commitment to his priorities also grew stronger. Eventually he overcame concerns about his physical fragility and emotional instability and reconnected with the Victoria Zen Centre. Knowing that Zen Buddhist practice can be demanding physically, mentally, and emotionally, Doshu expected a rough ride but says he was very kindly and gently received by the Zen Centre community and it’s teacher Ven. Eshu Martin. “In hospital I started to experience life more as a gift than a given - connecting with Ven. Eshu and the loving community he inspires has allowed me to grow toward a life based on practice and giving, to face my fears and to uncover the life I have longed for but never before managed to create”, says Rogers.

“Doshu’s commitment to his family, to his community, and to Zen practice raises the bar for everyone that comes into contact with him”, says Martin, who also acts as the Buddhist Chaplain for the University of Victoria’s Interfaith Services. “As the Zen Centre has grown and developed, Doshu has been involved in every aspect, and provides a joyous, humble, and compassionate example for all of us to follow.”

Doshu’s increasing involvement and commitment has led to his completion of a program of training and education at the Victoria Zen Centre that will see him ordained a Zen Monk at the University of Victoria’s Interfaith Chapel on at 10am on July 19, 2009 as a part of the Zen Centre’s semi-annual commitment ceremony. The first event of its kind to be held in Victoria, it promises to be a deeply powerful and moving event for everyone present, and will deeply impact Doshu, his family, and the Buddhist community of Vancouver Island. For more information, please contact the Victoria Zen Centre office@zenwest.ca 250-642-7936.

The Victoria Zen Centre is a federally registered charity that was formed in 1980. For more information please visit the website at www.zenwest.ca