Embrace joy

Inspire hope

Cultivate love

Build intimacy

Celebrate life

Couldn’t put it better myself, folks. May all beings be happy in 2008 and after.

From Mishin tando, “Thank you to the Roshi for finding numerous Open Source Software resources so that Practice Council work can be done without resorting to being locked-in to proprietary software; […]”

Good that the Roshi took care of that, but also good that there was interest in it in the first place. It is a high-tech town, I suppose. Of course, that got me thinking, and:

There are a whole bunch of things on my 101 in 1001 list that ought to be really easy (and ought to be done by now), but which are still underway after multiple false starts: “Follow a workout schedule (gym or home) for a month”, “Restart my Zen practice”, “One week. No pop.”, “Eat homemade lunches at work for a week”, “Take a multivitamin every day for a month”, “Floss every day for a month”, “Cook dinner every night for two weeks”, “No clothes on the bedroom floor for two weeks”. There’s more, but you get the idea.

The reason that I have to add simple things like that to my 101 list — and the reason I haven’t checked them off yet — is that I’m way too resistant to routine for my own good. For example, a couple days per week I’ll get annoyed and/or end up running late in the morning because I can’t decide what to wear, or something I planned on wearing needs ironing or is in the laundry. Yet do I take ten minutes to plan the night before what I’m going to wear the next day? No. Sometimes I even think of doing it, but I still don’t.

Somehow I’ve got this idea that having routines like those mean giving up some sort of freedom. I need to disabuse myself of that idea. The freedom isn’t in abandoning routines outright and hoping everything will work out at the last minute — it’s in actively choosing when breaking the routine is right, and choosing to follow it otherwise.

When I listed “restart my Zen practice” in my list of 101 things, I meant that I need to get back in touch with the Zen centre and start doing regular zazen again. But like I mentioned before, zazen is only one of the things in the eightfold path. Mindfulness, effort, and intention are just as important, and paying attention to these trivial things I always put off seems like as good a mindfulness and effort practice as anything.

If Zen is about one thing, it’s about attention. Doing the same things daily, when those things need to be done, doesn’t have to be about mindless repetition. With attention, it can be an exercise in mindfulness, experiencing the moment.

We’ll see how that goes.

The reason that I’ve been explaining the basics of Buddhism is that one of the things on my list of 101 things is to restart my own practice. That meant that I knew I’d be writing a lot about it here, and that in turn meant that I’d lose you all pretty quickly if I didn’t fill you in on the basics! And while there are many interesting branches of Buddhism, Zen is my practice and I know very little about Theravada, Pure Land, and the other branches.

Way back on my initial post, someone asked about the differences between Buddhism and Zen. Zen is Buddhism, the same way that Lutheranism is Christianity, Reformism is Judaism, and so on. Zen is different from the other branches of Buddhism, but naturally can’t be different than Buddhism itself.

The problem is that what Zen is is not easy to explain. Or perhaps it’s too easy to explain. Here is what Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China, had to say:

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one’s nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Clear? No? Okay. Let me explain.

First of all, Zen is still Buddhism (or maybe “distilled Buddhism”). Remember how Gautama Buddha taught that suffering can be ended by following the Eightfold Path? Where many of the other branches of Buddhism concentrate on the study of Buddhist scriptures and philosophy, the fundamental teaching of Zen is this: The ultimate truth can only be perceived directly. You can’t acheive Enlightenment, the cessation of suffering, by reading about it and talking about it with scholars or monks. The understanding one must gain is an intuitive one. You can only acheive it by doing it.

While all of the elements of the eightfold path are important in a Zen practice, none is more so than meditation. The word “Zen” itself comes from the Chinese Ch’an, which comes from the Indian dhyana, or “meditation”. The fundamental practice of Zen is zazen, “sitting meditation”, but one’s practice should also involve the rest of the day as well, approaching all of one’s activities with attention and mindfulness.

The particular kind of zazen differs by sect. The Rinzai sect prefers more intense, active zazen, beginning with counting the breath, then concentrating on the breath without counting, and so on, and eventually adopting koan practice. Koans are the unanswerable, mystical-sounding questions of the stereotypical Zen master: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “What is your original face before you were born?” “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?”. Koans are not riddles or trick questions, not to be approached rationally. Koan practice is intuitiveness practice, helping you carefully escape the discursive nature of our typical perception, preparing your ability to directly perceive all things.

The Soto sect, on the other hand, practices shikantaza, “only sitting”. Shikantaza is meditation without a particular object of concentration. Instead of training your mind on the breath and then solving koans to teach yourself how to directly perceive the nature of things, shikantaza has you concentrate on nothing and everything; awareness of all phenomena and thoughts without interrupting perception, concentration on the present.

You can see what I mean about it being difficult to explain.

Without confusing you with more specifics and detail, it will probably suffice to know that the core of Zen is its directness — that you can’t study Buddhism, only experience it — and that the specific practices of Zen are zazen, and adoption of the principles of zazen into everyday life. The point of Zen is that it isn’t explainable, and the practice of Zen is directed at finding out what that point is.

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one’s nature and attaining Buddhahood.

That won’t stop me from writing about it, though.

In my next post I’m going to narrow the focus down to Zen specifically, but before that I’d like to talk a bit about where Buddhism as an organized religion began, with one man in ancient India, Siddhartha Gautama.

Looking at the word “Buddhism” and thinking about religion, one would be tempted to conclude that there is something or someone, probably named something like “Buddha”, that followers of the religion worship as a deity. But even though that picture at top right shows a guy with a shiny thing around his head, there’s no deity in the core Buddhist beliefs, and there isn’t even one guy named Buddha!

The life of the Buddha

The guy that people mean when they talk about “Buddha” was an Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived somewhere around 500 BCE. Shortly after his birth (which his mother did not survive), his father consulted a seer to learn his son’s future. The seer predicted that Siddhartha would become either a great king or a holy man. Having learned that, his father decided to do what he could to ensure his son became a king, because he wanted him to continue the royal line, and because he thought that “king” was a much better life than “holy man”.

So throughout his early years Siddhartha was confined to the palace, living the life due a prince, his every need met, and religion unspoken of. But doubts set in as to whether the princely life was all it was made out to be, and at 29 Siddhartha insisted that he leave the palace grounds to meet his subjects. His father knew he couldn’t refuse that request without making things worse, so instead he tried to pull a Potemkin, cleaning up the villages of filth and hiding the sick, old, and suffering.

As might be expected, that plan failed, and on his rounds Siddhartha saw a sick man, an old man, a corpse, and an ascetic holy man. Experiencing suffering of this scale for the first time he was deeply troubled by his discovery, and left the palace (and his wife and child) in the middle of the night to adopt the life of an ascetic monk, refusing all worldly goods including food and nearly starving to death. (That little fat statue? Not Siddhartha!) Hungry, he accepted a bowl of rice milk from a villager, and sat beneath a bodhi tree determined to remain there until he discovered the ultimate nature.

After 49 days he succeeded and reached Enlightenment — the full insight into the origin of suffering and its cessation — and shortly thereafter began to assemble a community of followers from the ascetics with whom he used to practice. He gave his first sermon, of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, to this community, and after they achieved their own Enlightenment they went out to spread his teachings to others.

Siddhartha’s role in Buddhism

So the original Buddhist was just a man, although a particularly wise (and maybe lucky!) one. He became a Buddha because he reached enlightenment — and all a Buddha is is one who has done so, and he became the Buddha because he was the first one to teach the Noble Truths, but he was neither the first Buddha or the last. Before him other men had reached that understanding but it had died with them or their followers, and after him there is a tree of Buddhas who have had understanding passed on from earlier ones and who in turn passed their understanding on to their own students.

(A brief digression for terminology you’ll encounter elsewhere: The teaching of the Buddha is the dharma; passing on that understanding to a student is a dharma transmission. The community of Buddhists, either locally or universal, is the sangha. Together, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha form the Three Treasures — look, a numbered list! — to which Buddhists dedicate themselves when they take formal vows. Enlightenment is nirvana, which you might have heard before. Note that it’s a level of understanding, not a place. You don’t go to nirvana.)

So for the most part — and, specifically, my part, which is really what I’m trying to convey with all of this — Buddhists don’t worship Buddha, or consider him (or anyone else) a god, or even consider him supernaturally gifted in any way. He is a big deal, but not a big deal along the lines of Yhwh, Jesus, or Mohammed! He is the spiritual ancestor of the community of Buddhists today and the man who first taught the teachings that Buddhists follow, and it is because he was only a man that Buddhists know that his accomplishment is within their reach.

The path to the cessation of suffering is the Eightfold Path.

As I mentioned before, the fundamental problem of Buddhism is suffering. The Eightfold Path is the way out: a program of self-discipline by which one can attain the cessation of suffering. It is the core guide of Buddhist practice: everything that Buddhists do as Buddhists is connected to the eightfold path. In a sense, it’s the Buddhism HOWTO. This post runs a bit long, and for that I apologize, but there are eight things to talk about!

Before I talk about the Eightfold Path, I’d like to emphasize what it doesn’t say. Remember that the second Noble Truth observes that suffering is caused by attachment — clinging to a desire that things were not as they are — and that the third Noble Truth acknowledges that suffering can be stopped. From those one might be tempted to conclude that the way to stop suffering is to stop attachment.

This is, I think, roughly equivalent to observing that since overweight people have too much body fat, the solution is to take off the fat. While it’s probably accurate, it’s so impractical that it’s of no use. How do you take off fat, and more importantly, how do you prevent fat from coming back?

The same holds for attachment. Even Gautama Buddha — the man that people usually mean when they talk about “Buddha” as one person, and about whom I’ll write more later — tried extreme asceticism, but discovered that even self-denial and self-mortification were insufficient in quelling suffering. In fact, they brought on more attachment and suffering by drawing attention to the things being denied! We fallible humans can’t just turn desire off.

At the same time, we can’t satisfy desire just by giving in, either. No matter what we attain, there’s always more that we want, and illness, the loss of loved ones, and our own mortality always lurks around the corner.

So Buddhism suggests an alternative approach: the Middle Way, not because it is a compromise between self-denial and self-indulgence, but because it is a whole-cut alternative to those ineffective approaches.

* * *

The Eightfold Path is traditionally divided into three sections: wisdom, action, and mind. Before I list them, a brief word about the word “right”: All of the principles of the Eightfold Path traditionally begin with “right”. Some people substitute “ideal”, “perfect”, “appropriate”, or “wise” instead. I’m not sure that any of those five possibilities completely convey the meaning, but they’re enough to get the idea of what’s going on.

Wisdom:

Right Understanding

The understanding of the Four Noble Truths themselves. Right understanding is sometimes called “right view”. To begin to practice is to know the Four Noble Truths, and to master Right Understanding is to fully understand them.

Right Intention

The intention in “Right Intention” is the attitude with which one approaches Buddhism and the Eightfold Path. At its simplest level, Right Intention is the intention to follow the Eightfold Path. It also involves one’s reasons for practicing. This leads into a couple of things I’ll be talking about later: first, that Zen makes a distinction between particular levels of practice, and second, the concept of the Bodhisattva, one who delays his own enlightenment in order to assist all others in acheiving theirs.

Action:

Right speech

According to the sutra in which the Eightfold Path is set out, right speech involves “abstaining from lying, abstaining from divisive speech, abstaining from abusive speech, abstaining from idle chatter”. So practicing right speech is not only abstaining from speech which harms others, but from that which detracts from your own practice. This doesn’t mean “if you have nothing good to say, don’t say it”; sometimes it is necessary to say things that the recipient does not want to hear. But those things must be the truth, and must not be gossipy, and must not be delivered to be harmful. In short, right speech is speaking when beneficial and not otherwise.

Right action

Right action, or right conduct, is about the way a Buddhist behaves while going about his regular day. Specifically, the practice of right action involves following the five (sometimes ten) Buddhist precepts (another numbered list, and another upcoming post!): not destroying life, not stealing, not engaging in sexual misconduct, not lying, and not taking intoxicants which lead to carelessness.

Right livelihood

Right livelihood is essentially a particular case of right action: one should not involve oneself in a career, job, or similar position which results in harm to others. Five kinds of employment are specifically mentioned: trade in deadly weapons, animals for slaughter, slavery, intoxicants, or poisons. But generally, right livelihood means a livelihood in the spirit of the rest of the Eightfold Path. Where Right Action insists that you follow the precepts, right livelihood insists that your job not cause others to break them.

Mind:

Right effort

Right effort is essentially the effort involved in maintaining one’s Buddhist practice — following the Eightfold Path and the precepts. Where the other parts of the Path are the doing, right effort is the attitude: trying to improve one’s practice and get rid of negative impulses. Lying might break a precept, but trying to get rid of the need or desire to lie satisfies right effort.

Right mindfulness

In the West, this might as well say “mindfulness”, because we don’t really have a concept of wrong mindfulness — in the absence of right mindfulness, there just isn’t any mindfulness at all! Mindfulness, here, is something like attention or awareness: being fully engaged in whatever it is you are doing when you are doing it. (Mindfulness is, I think, what drives the connection between Zen and productivity which has been popular in the last decade or so.)

Right concentration

Here’s the one place where the Eightfold Path diverges, at least for some people, from being a list of good ideas that anyone ought to put effort into: right concentration directly refers to Buddhist meditation. I’ll be talking about Zen meditation, zazen, soon, but for now it’s enough to know that by “Buddhist meditation” this principle means the training of the mind to focus on a single object.

You might have noticed that a lot of the principles involve other principles. For instance, one must have Right Intention and Right Effort to engage in Right Action or Right Speech or any of the other principles; Right Livelihood depends on Right Action; and without Right Understanding, you wouldn’t be following the Eightfold Path in the first place! That’s expected — the Eightfold Path is meant to be that interconnected, and it isn’t a list of steps to be followed one at a time. Engaging in any means engaging in all.

So between the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, you’ve basically got the big picture of Buddhism now. And while a lot of the elements of those require a bit of trust or faith, you’ll notice that there’s no mysticism or supernatural interference involved at all. That (as well as the whole “cessation of suffering” business) is one of the things I particularly like about Buddhism: it’s a religion of action, something you do to improve your own situation and that of those around you.

Now that the very basics of Buddhism are out of the way (and please let me know about all of the things I’ve covered poorly or have otherwise confused you with!), shortly I’ll be talking specifically about what Zen is and how it relates to Buddhism as a whole. As always, if there’s something you want me to talk about, let me know!

Once all of these groundwork posts about the basics are out of the way, I’m going to go back to something closer to my usual blogging when it comes to Buddhism: what I’ve done, what I’ve read, what I think, rather than these long explanatory posts.

The Four Noble Truths are usually stated as follows, which is a bit opaque, so after the official version I’ll expand a bit on them all.

1. Life means suffering.
2. The origin of suffering is attachment.
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.
4. The path to the cessation of suffering is the Eightfold Path.

That’s it; that’s Buddhism in a nutshell right there. Buddhism has been called a “religion of action,” and there’s no clearer way to see that than those four statements: Here is a problem. Here is the root cause. The problem can be solved. Here is the solution.

Note that this isn’t specifically about Zen (yet). These are the fundamentals behind the Buddhism of the first Buddha, and the fundamentals of all of the sects of Buddhism today.

“Great, but what the hell is it on about?” Here’s my current understanding, explained as best as I can for now. Keep in mind that I’m essentially a beginner, though.

1. Life means suffering.

The fundamental problem that Buddhism seeks to fix is that people have a tendency to experience pain, whether physical or emotional. From the moment we’re pulled out of a comfortable womb into the world through to our last breath we are confronted by challenges, we experience desire and disappointment and fear, we become ill and grow old and watch the people we love experience all of these things. That’s not to say that life is only suffering, or that everyone’s suffering is to the same degree, but everyone experiences some suffering.

As truths go, I think that’s a hard one to argue with.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.

Buddhism postulates that suffering has a single general cause. Attachment is often expressed as “craving”. We often want things to be different than they are, and when we’re unable to cause that, we experience suffering. “Attachment” is a bit of a strange word to use there, but it makes sense if you think of some forms of craving as clinging to things that once were, or clinging to desires that will never be fulfilled. In fact, when we see someone who is so emotionally invested in an impossibility that it’s ruining the rest of their life, we say they “won’t let go”. They’re attached!

Examples are easy to come up with. We suffer because we wish we had a better car, or a better job. When a relative falls ill, we feel pain as we worry what will happen to them. We wish we were better-looking, or more popular, or richer. We get angry when people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, or when they do what they’re not supposed to do. We get doubly miserable when we have a cold, or a broken leg, or cancer, not just because it’s uncomfortable but because we want to be healthy again so we can get on with our lives. When we or people or pets close to us are incurably ill, we first wish that life could be prolonged, then we wish that their pain could end sooner.

Note that this isn’t talking about a solution at all, and that specifically it’s not simply saying that we shouldn’t want a better car, or wish that our great-aunt was in better health, or that we should just be indifferent to all of the things that come in and out of our lives: it’s simply an observation, sort of like a natural law, that the reason there is suffering in every life is that we crave things we do not have.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.

I don’t think there’s much to say about this one; it simply states that the suffering we all experience, from the first truth, is something that we ourselves can stop. It’s an important truth even though it doesn’t contain any deep concepts. This is essentially the promise of Buddhism!

Modern Christianity often talks about its “Good News”, which is a more upbeat and baggage-free translation of the New Testament Greek that brought us the word “gospel”. To Christians, the Good News of the bible is that God offers forgiveness through Jesus. All is not lost, because Jesus can get you into God’s good books.

The third noble truth is the good news of Buddhism. The first truth observes a phenomenon; the second postulates a cause for the phenomenon, and both of those truths are detached and impersonal. But the third truth addresses us directly: “You can escape the cycle of suffering and craving. Others have done it too.”

This is, more than anything, Buddhism’s article of faith. Because in general Buddhism does not require belief in supernatural beings, it’s often called a “philosophy” instead of a “religion”. I don’t want to get into that particular nitpicking here, but the third truth is what makes me consider it a religion. I mean, for all I know, maybe the cessation of suffering isn’t attainable; the only thing that inspires me to follow this path is that I believe it is.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering is the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path (there’s those numbered lists again!) is big enough to warrant its own post, which will be my next post on Buddhism. But for now, all that’s necessary to understand the Four Noble Truths is to know that the Eightfold Path is a program of self-discipline necessary to attain the cessation of suffering, and it’s a moderate program, between self-indulgence on one hand and asceticism on the other. This is why Buddhism is called “the middle way”.

And that’s all there is to it! In the comments to my intro post, Kalimonster mentioned that there was a lack of starter material in Buddhism, and that one sort of feels dropped into the middle of things expected to already know about everything. I hope I’m off to a good start in avoiding that problem, but I’m counting on you to let me know if it’s still incomprehensible!

I’ve been interested in Buddhism — specifically Zen — for a while, and have had a couple of abortive attempts at beginning practice. Even our wedding vows were inspired by those from a Western Buddhist ceremony. And now that I’m starting my overhaul, I’ve been thinking more about that. Beginning practice again is on my list of 101, and I know it will be an important balancing principle to the changes that I will be experiencing when I go back to school.

So I suppose this is your advance warning that I’m going to be writing a bit about Zen in the next little while. I’ll try not to get all religious on you, although I think that’d be hard with Zen anyhow, and I’ll try not to put you to sleep, too. But I’ll try to tell you the basics of this whole thing and what attracts me to it, highlight some readings I’ve enjoyed, and basically share my whole rediscovery of Zen. I hope you find it interesting.

Having said all that, is there anything you’ve wondered about Buddhism, Zen, North American Zen, or anything specific you’d like to read about? Let me know in the comments if you do, and I’ll try to address it in a later post.