Heart Circle Sangha Blog

I feel funny saying I am anything these days, but as I get ready to celebrate Easter with my family, having been raised Roman Catholic, I am contemplating what it is that I do that is “spiritual,” other than conceding that I am a “practicing zen buddhist.”. And even conceding that, I ask myself what that can possibly mean. Well, I suppose that means I am “staying present” which leads to the question of how and why I came to believe that doing just that could alleviate suffering–mine, as well as yours. Well, Yes, this is what I do in fact believe and try to manifest as best I can on a daily basis. And as I prepare for hosting Easter dinner with my family, many of whom are staunch believers in God and biblical scripture, I get a little nervous thinking about how to defend my behavior without the fixed grounding of the written Word. I will be asked just what it is that guides and helps me through Life. They will certainly not understand what “following the dharma” means or how it changes lives. Perhaps I need not to defend myself in any way at all, aside from practicing dharma and nonattachment with them, as well as all that I encounter, and letting them decide for themselves, as if even that matters. I will say to myself, however, that I am indeed celebrating Easter, after all, and so perhaps I ought to silently contemplate the Resurrection and what that means for me as a practicing buddhist. Just what is it that I can resurrect when I in fact let go, presumably as Christ did when he let go of everything? Yes, the final letting go, and, hopefully for me, the letting go that goes on from moment to moment to moment…, in that state of absolute poverty, as perhaps Thomas Merton would put it, where I may find absolute joy and abundance–yours as well as mine.

I recently saw two movies that reminded me of the value of spiritual practice and the importance of practicing immediacy in the midst of real concrete, true-to-life dilemmas. One movie, “The Descandants,” portrays George Clooney as the husband of a terminally ill wife on life-support. As he deals with business end of preparing for her eventual demise, he and his family learn of previously hidden aspects of her life which force each of them to confront deeply psychological and affect-laden issues which have ultimately to do with them, albeit triggered by an ostensibly random act (the accident that winds his wife in the hospital). The movie is about the them, not the deceased.

The other movie, “Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close,” portrays a young boy who tries to make sense of the sudden death of his father who dies during the terrorist attack on 9/11. Over a year after the catastrophe, we witness both the apparently unskillful (as well as occasionally seemingly brilliant) ways this young boy tries to make sense of this horrible tragedy.

Without analysing these plots– which I am sure can be explained on multiple levels– what struck me very viscerally were the portrayals of human beings in real situations for which no prefabricated answers, doctrine, or absolute value-system could possibly provide the answers. Both plots are, in fact, koan. Like the situation of the man hanging from a branch in one of the koans of the Gateless Gate,  these situations can only be directly experienced and lived rather than understood. I thought how often–and in either small ways or big–that this is the case as we live our lives from day to day. So many situations present us with double-binds, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” moments where the only plausible thing to do is to stay where you are, experience the not-known, and then act from there (As if one really could do anything else.). What struck me, also, was watching the gut-wrenching emotions and actions of those involved as they tried to deal with their predicaments.  However unskillful,  valiant, and even ludicrous the efforts of these characters were (After finding a key left in an envelope by his father, with the name “Black” written on it, the boy decides he will find everyone in New York whose name is “Black,” look them up, and eventually find the lock that the key will hold.), they were actions and behaviors that were perfectly understandable and appropriate in their given contexts, and they triggered real empathy and praise in those who observe and try to help them. The supporting actors (and by extension, the audience as well) become part of the spiritual trip as they seem to work their way through and into their own self-constructed world of Samsara. In the end, nothing is solved and life remains thoroughly open-ended. But the participants gain the only one “real” thing that matters to any concrete, living human being:  the compassion and love of those who try to help; those who stay in the game, as it were. In a poignant sense, this, I think, is the true bodhisattva path. I would think Dogen would wholeheartedly admire their methods, however delusional they may seem,  the way he does in the Shobogenzo when he seemingly inverts the usual teachings by saying, for example, that painted cakes can, in fact, satisfy hunger (That’s all you got sometimes!) and that rubbing a tile (the activity of rubbing or doing zazen) can make a mirror: Perhaps all honest and authentic activity is a form of mirror-making, doing something with whatever you’ve got, whatever life deals you.

So maybe these characters’ actions are, in fact, manifestations of the Buddha-dharma, regardless of however delusional they may appear. Dogen states many times that all dharmas are Buddha-dharma. He states in the Shobogenzo that, even among the novice, there is no separation between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana. As I become aware of my own practice, I’ve noticed that this realization of the emptiness of all activity and expressions has its own beauty and rightness, and this serves to engender compassion in everyone involved: both among those who act as well as those who seemingly just observe.  No one is left out in any given situation, which is always relational, whether this is perceived by the participants or not. As depicted in both of these movies, those who see this begin to mature and transform themselves, and always with the assistance of others who are also transformed in the process, a process that perhaps they, too, did not originally “sign up for.” What is beautiful and amazing is that all of this seems to occur spontaneously with letting go, leaving nothing to do or say except to invite the whole catastrophe in. What’s left is the ordinary magic of the moment, pregnant with possibility and love. Is there really anywhere else one can or choose to be?

Jakudo

Charlotte Joko Beck, one of the great pioneers of American Zen died on June 15, 2011 at the age of 94. She passed peacefully with her family.

Joko began Zen practice at the age of 40. She described herself as having had a nice life before becoming involved with Zen, but something was missing. She was divorced, with four children and working at the University of San Diego as an adminstrative assistant and teaching piano. She describes meeting Maezuni Roshi where he greeted her by gazing directly into her eyes and making contact. She was immediately interested in who he was and she wanted whatever it was he had. Thus she began to practice and study with him.

After completing her studies with Maezumi, Joko broke with Maezumi and the White Plum Asangha lineage that he had founded. She felt the traditional training of koan studies did not adequately address all the psychological issues that needed to be addressed to be a Zen teacher. John Welwood, another Buddhist teacher also concerned about this omission, calls it the “spiritual bypass.” In her own teaching she worked directly with how students were leading their lives and instead of koan study or sometimes in addition to koans, directed their practice toward clarifying problems in their lives. She wanted them to see how much the self directed and misdirected their life. Unlike psychotherapy she did not reinforce the ego, but helped them discern how to let go of ego to find happiness and inner stability.

Although she had ordained and was a fully empowered Soto Zen priest, Joko also let go of the complex trappings of Soto Zen rituals that have always been a large part of Japanese Zen practice. She did not, to my knowledge, ordain priests although several of her successors were already priests ordained by Maezumi Roshi. The story is that she had a large and beautiful rock placed on the altar instead of a Buddha. She was primarily interested in the core issue of training minds and transforming students.

As one of the early women teachers, she became an important model for women students and younger women teachers. She worked, mothered and managed a committed Zen practice. Her Zen center was established in her own home thus further modeling the bringing of Zen practice into our everyday lives. Her signature teaching was “Nothing Special”, that our practice is just living our lives through waking up to what’s before us. Both her books, Everyday Zen: Love and Work and Nothing Special: Living Zen emphasized this point. She established, with some of her senior students, the Ordinary Mind School of Zen, dedicated to teaching this fundamental approach.

“Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form”

Although I have often struggled with the cryptic meaning of certain parts of the Heart Sutra, I always felt a connection to these lines, which invariably conjure up images of particles, waves, and the convoluted world of quantum physics.  This area of the “new physics” is fascinating because of its far-reaching implications, its potential to transform our perception and understanding of reality, and also its striking parallelism with Buddhist ideas, as well as with some other Eastern traditions that involve meditation.  It is actually very compelling to see how close today’s understanding of the universe comes to those ancient insights, so let’s dig into this further.

On a preliminary level, it is interesting to note that the atoms, which we often believe to be these compact bricks that make up our very solid appearing reality, are actually mostly empty  (actually 99.9% empty) since the nucleus of the atom is 100 000 times smaller than the atom and most of its mass is concentrated in the nucleus (the mass of the electron being negligible). The perception of solidity when we touch something actually comes from the repulsive interaction between the electrons of our skin and those of the object.

Also brought to mind is the particle/wave paradox (form/emptiness) according to which all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. An electron would for example behave either as a wave or as a particle depending on the situation.  Actually, Bohr and Einstein saw this electron as the transient manifestation or local condensation of an underlying field (“the quantum field”). Basically the field can take the form of particles and according to Einstein “the field is the only reality”.

Another very important and related issue in this area of quantum physics is the idea that what is being observed is not independent of the observer, and as a matter of fact, whether we experience a particle or a wave depends on whether there is an observer. Bohr said “Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems” and also that “Inseparable quantum connectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality”.  The universe is therefore not anymore seen as a collection of physical objects (form) but as an interwovenness of all its parts that includes the observer (emptiness).

This interconnectedness that seems to be such a characteristic of this more fundamental reality appears also in the experimentally verified Bell’s theorem (physicist John Stewart Bell), which postulates that when two independent particles are connected through what is called quantum entanglement, then the properties of these particles (such as spin) are correlated, independent of distance.  They are basically linked by instantaneous, non-local connections (meaning the connection does not occur via a signal), and this even if one particle is on Earth and the other on the other side of the galaxy, of which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.

It is consequently derived that since all particles are continually interacting, then “the non-local aspects of quantum systems is therefore a general property of nature’ (Davis).  Essentially, the universe is understood to be an unbroken wholeness, fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.

These concepts of quantum wholeness as well as the lines of the sutra also profoundly bring to mind the far-reaching theories of David Bohm (a physicist at Princeton University) for whom there are two orders of reality: “the implicate order” (meaning enfolded and reminiscent of the “emptiness”), which is an even much deeper non-manifest and hidden level of reality, and the “explicate order” (meaning unfolded and reminiscent of  “form”) which corresponds to our own level of existence.  Bohm sees the implicate order as a dynamic phenomenon from which all forms of the material universe flow as a result of countless enfoldings and unfoldings between these two orders. For example, Bohm sees the electron not as a separate particle but as a totality that is enfolded throughout the whole space and of which we see one aspect. The movement of the electron would result then from a continuous series of enfoldments and unfoldments. Also termed the holomovement due to its dynamic quality, it sustains the particles and is the ground to which all these particles return when destroyed (they are enfolded back).  In this theory, there is a constant exchange between these two orders of reality, and systems that are separate in the explicate order are contained within each other in the implicate order. Bohm calls this apparent separateness of the different “things”, “relatively independent sub totalities”: they are part of an undivided whole but still possess unique characteristics. Again, we have emptiness and form and as the Heart Sutra says: “Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form”.

For Buddhists and other eastern traditions, this emptiness (sometimes called the “Void” or the “Tao”) is also that interconnected reality which gives birth to forms, sustains them and reabsorbs them.  These two orders, the world of phenomena and the world of oneness, are deeply related as well: “ Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form”.

Is it really a wonder that by going deep within one’s consciousness or by going deep within the world of matter, one reaches almost the same understanding of the nature of reality?

Maybe not, since again according to Bohm, mind and matter are interdependent and correlated, both being projections of a higher reality (the emptiness), which is neither matter nor consciousness!