A Life of Training

This is an edited transcript of the second of two Dharma talks given by Rev. Master Daizui at a retreat in the Netherlands which he led jointly with Rev. Hakuun.

I spoke yesterday about the importance of training wholeheartedly, of making one’s entire life an offering, an act of training. Now this is easy to talk about, and the various aspects of it are even easy to do. The hard part is to keep doing it. Today I would like to offer some practical advice on how to do that: how to make training one’s life (and life one’s training), twenty-four hours a day, day after day. The guiding principle, I think, is very simple. It was summarized in the advice given by Koho Zenji to my own master, Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, when she was a young monk in Japan. She was working in the guest department at the huge temple of Sojiji and was trying to do what was needed to help all the foreign guests who came to the temple. And, of course, she had far too much to do, so she went to her master and asked what she should do about this. He told her, “Do the best you can.” Well, she did not like that answer because she thought, “I have come ten thousand miles to study with this man and what does he tell me? Just do the best I can!” She had this reaction because she thought that what he meant was what we so often do mean when we say “do the best you can,” which is something like, “well, make a passable degree of effort and then forget it.” But after a while she realized that this was not what he was saying, and she thought, “Oh! The best I can do: that is different. That means the absolute best that possibly could be done.” So then she tried to do what she thought she should do, or what other people expected her to do, and got right back into worrying and doing way too much. Finally she realized that this is not what he had said either; he simply said, “Do the best that you can do.” Another way of putting this is “doing one’s honest best”: not what someone else thinks you should do, not even what you think you should do, but what, in inward honesty, you feel in your heart is truly the best and highest offering you have to make at this time, given the full context of all things. Thus to “do the best that you can do” is to make each moment a true offering with open hands: an offering to the Buddhas and an offering to the whole world. And as you would with any offering, you place it, as it were, on the “altar,” bow, and then depart. And by “depart” I mean simply that, having done the best you can do at that moment, you do not have ex­pectations. You make the offering pure by not having expectations about it after you give it. After you do each act in your life, you let go. And you trust that doing the best that you honestly know how to do is enough. And it is!

Now, with that as the guiding principle, let us look at some of the specific things that one may choose to do to make Zen training one’s life. Understand that what you do at any given point is not to be determined by some formula based upon what I say, but is to be guided by the principle of “the best you can do.” Suppose you do formal sitting meditation for half an hour each day: that leaves twenty-three and a half hours for something else! (laughter) Maybe we could cut that down to only twenty-three hours if we did a second half-hour of meditation in the evening. Actually, there is a point to doing meditation twice a day, if one can do so: meditation morning and evening is a good way of beginning the day and also not only of ending the day, but of beginning the sleep period. The time of sleep is, after all, how we spend much of our life, and bringing it within the scope of Buddhist training is significant. Fortunately, one of the inescapable facts about sleep is that you have to trust, and give up trying to be in control of every­thing, in order to do it! Thus simply allowing sleep to do its work is an important aspect of training, and trying to manipulate it is unwise. Nonetheless, there are a few things which I find that I can do to help prepare myself for the practice of sleep. The most important of these is to meditate for a bit before bed; the second most important is then to not do a lot of other things afterwards which will stimulate the mind. Now, some people find that reading or watching a bit of television relaxes their mind before bed, but my mind is easily stimulated into over activity, so I tend to avoid doing business in the couple of hours before bedtime, and I even refrain from most types of reading, television watching, radio listening, conversation, etcetera. I seem to do best if I simply meditate, then sit quietly for a bit and either read a very brief passage from a classical Buddhist text or just watch the stars come out or listen to the rain, then go to bed. And I trust the practice of sleep to do its work.

How much formal meditation one does during the day, of course, depends on your daily responsibilities, your health, how tired you are, and many other things. It is generally more effective, however, if you do what might be less meditation than you think ideal, but you do it almost every day, rather than doing a whole lot of meditation for a few days or a few weeks and then almost none for a while. I do not know how meditation does what it does, or even why it does it, but to use a metaphor, meditation seems to be the engine on the train of Zen practice. It seems to be what moves everything else forward. So, as with a train, a life of training does not go very far without an engine; unless, of course, it is rolling backwards down hill! However, there is only so much meditation of the formal sort that one can do in any day, or that is even wise to do in any day. It is excellent to go to intensive retreats from time to time where you do a lot of meditation with the guidance of someone who knows what they are doing. But trying to do that on your own without any guidance usually does not have good results. This is because, first of all, it means that one is greedy for the results, one is attached to something. Secondly it is because, for reasons that I also do not understand, doing too much meditation all at once gives a person what might be called a case of “spiritual indigestion.” Intensive retreats are excellent, but do not try to make your life into one; even Zen monks do not do that. So, the regular formal practice of serene reflection meditation is perhaps the most important of the practical things one can do to make one’s life an act of training, done in moderation and with continuity.

Now we have the other twenty-three hours of our day. Well, actually you can meditate during the waking part of those hours too, but you just do it a little differently. That’s what the article “Every-minute Meditation” is about.1 As you can see from looking through it, what we call “mindfulness,” “working meditation,” or “every-minute meditation” involves taking the same mental approach that we use in formal meditation and applying it to the activities of daily life. In formal meditation our bodies are sitting down and looking at a wall: that is what we are doing. It may be a rather strange thing to do, but that is what we are doing! (laughter) And so, that is what our minds are aware of, and when they are aware of preparing lunch instead, we bring them back to being aware of what we are actually doing, which is sitting there looking at a wall. And when the mind wanders to what we are going to do when we go back to work tomorrow, we again bring it back to what we are actually doing, which is still looking at that wall. But suppose what you are doing now with your body is actually preparing lunch? In that case, we pay attention to lunch-making, and when our mind wanders, lunch-making is what we bring it back to, instead of wall-gazing. Let us say that we are chopping veg­etables; when our mind ceases to be aware of the vegetables, the knife, the board, and the chopping, and it wanders to what we will do at work tomorrow (or even to what it is like to sit and look at a wall), we bring it back to what we are doing: chopping vegetables. And when tomorrow comes, and we actually are at work, that is what we are doing. So that is what we pay attention to; we simply do our work, with mindful awareness. And when the mind wanders to yesterday’s vegetables, we bring it back to work. Do you see how this is the same principle, the same practice, as sitting meditation, except that we do it when we are doing other things? There are more details about this, which are in the leaflet here. I won’t go into all of them, but will mention just a few.

Just as the mind in meditation does not reject anything—it does not reject sounds that come or thoughts that come—but does not hold on to them either, so it is with meditation in daily action. It does not push anything away or hold on to anything. So, for instance, when one is chopping the vegetables for lunch, one is keenly aware of what one is doing but one does not concentrate so much that one blocks out everything else and refuses to be aware of it. In the practice of mindfulness, a person focuses on what they are doing, but it is not exclusive, it is not hard, it is not set; it is fluid. Suppose you are cutting the vegetables in every-minute meditation and your partner starts talking to you about how their day was at work; there is no need to become angry with them for interrupting your meditation. Because maybe it’s more important to stop preparing the vegetables for a minute and listen to your partner. After all, your partner deserves at least as much attention as a cabbage, I think! (laughter) So you switch the attention; you give your whole attention to your partner for a while and talk with them. That is now the focus of your mindfulness. And for that time it is probably best that you don’t continue chopping the vegetables, because you’ll probably chop your hands as well. So, this has to be a fluid practice, something which you do not hold on to tightly and try to make it “be the way you want it to be.” You take life as it comes, give your attention to what you sense to be truly most important at this moment, and are willing for that to shift from moment to moment.

A third aspect of a life of training is what I call inner honesty. One of Master Dogen’s most famous quotations is, “Always we must be disturbed by the Truth.” Now this does not mean that we go around in a permanent state of distress: it means that always we must be open to new things. This is part of what we spoke of yesterday, that “training is never a finished thing.” This is the first aspect of inner honesty: simply the willingness to see new things about yourself. This is not something that one can force to happen; all one can do is to be willing. The second part to this inner honesty is to be aware of one’s old tendencies and old habits of deluding oneself: the old things that all of us are used to telling ourselves about ourselves and the world, which we know aren’t completely true. The difficulty with these habitual little falsehoods is that we have been telling them to ourselves for so long that, even though we know they aren’t true, we tend to believe them anyway when we say them to ourselves. But sometimes we see what we are doing; sometimes we catch ourselves at it. Sometimes we know that we are telling ourselves things that aren’t really true. And that is the point at which we can do something about it. And what we can do is to stop it! I do not mean here to have an inner war, but simply to say to those little lies, “Hello there; I see you! And do you know what? I don’t believe you.” Simply doing this, time and time again (and preferably with a certain good humor), has profound effects on how we see the world. You see, it is not necessary, nor even wise, to try to tell yourself something else in place of the little lies; all you have to do is to stop entirely believing them. And when you have caught yourself telling yourself the old lies, and have stopped, what do you do then? Simple: go back to chopping the vegetables. This is a way in, a door, to “knowing without knowing,” to being one with things through the direct experience of the senses. And from that, inner com­passion, love, and wisdom arise naturally over the course of continued training.

What I have mentioned so far—formal meditation, mindfulness, and inner honesty—are all what we might call “inner work”: things which go on inside of us and have effects on what we do on the outside. But Zen training also offers the possibility of working from what is outside to what is inner; we go in the other direction as well. In other words, what we have spoken of so far are the things that bring us to the Mind of Buddha. But one can also act like Buddha, to the best of one’s ability, and it will have profound effects on bringing your mind closer to the Mind of Buddha. What do I mean by “acting like Buddha?” Well, I mean doing things the way the Buddha did things historically, which is also the way people seem to do things who have been practicing for a long, long time. Of course, the details are different for each person and each society, for all of the Ancestors have been very different people, so we cannot copy the details. But one of the major things they have in common seems to be living an ethical life, being a decent human being, living without harming others. It is, after all, actually nonsense to spend a lot of time meditating and doing other inner practices and then, in our daily actions, to go in the opposite direction: to harm things, to create divisions rather than unity. Now, this “living like Buddha” is not easy to do, because we will be very tempted to have ideas about how it should be done. And, people being as they are, all sorts of other people will also have ideas about how you should do this. Thus we tend to get attached to a lot of thinking and planning and controlling, and maybe a lot of rules and fear and rebellion. But one does not have to do that. Simply bring your mind back to what you sense to be good, to what you sense to be gentle, to what you sense to be true. And, since we are not ever completely finished with the work of the heart, some advice is nonetheless useful. This is where I understand the Precepts to come in. I do not take them as rules imposed upon one, but rather as descriptions of “acting like Buddha,” heartfelt descriptions that have come down over many generations of other sincere trainees. And so I let them sit in my heart, as it were, not in my mind. And if one does that, together with the inner honesty I mentioned before, then they do their work in ways that I do not understand. But they have a powerful effect. I think I saw that most clearly when I visited the old Chinese monk in Malaysia who was the Precepts Master for my own master. His name was Venerable Seck Sian Toh. Having spent his entire monastic life of 50 years or more studying and practicing the Precepts, one might have expected him to be very stern and look somewhat like a sour prune. But that is not how he was: he was in love with the world and had a little twinkle of mischief in his eyes. Being with him is when I think that I realized that there is a lot more to these Precepts than simply rules.

I have one more thing to add, and that is taking refuge: the Three Refuges—Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Taking the Three Refuges is something that is almost a definition of what Buddhists are, so they must be pretty important. Again what I am about to say is not to be taken as a formula but simply as my sharing with you of my own “doors” into these things. For me, taking refuge in Buddha has something to do with recognizing that there is That which is greater than my little selfish “me” (sometimes it’s my little worried me, or little angry me). Now I don’t much care what I call this Something Greater; sometimes I say “Unborn Buddha Mind,” sometimes I say “Buddha Nature,” sometimes I simply say “That Which Is.” Some of my friends speak of “the Unborn” or “the Eternal.” Some speak of “Amida Buddha,” “Vairocana Buddha” or “Kanzeon.” Some speak of “the Higher Self.” I don’t much care what the words are, but there is more than this little self, and by taking refuge in That, it reminds me to step aside from this little self, and it reminds me that I can trust that there is Something that will be there, Something that actually is “steering the car” of my life, so I can let go. For me, taking refuge in the Dharma is to recognize the wisdom of all of the previous students of Buddhism over the last 2500 years. Since they have been so kind as to write things down to offer me their help, why would I not take it? To take refuge in the Sangha, for me, has several aspects. When there is a teacher or a senior available, I take their advice and I do not hide myself from them, for there is nothing to fear. Nothing, that is, except the loss of more of the bits of my little self, which may be an uncomfortable experience at the time, but that is why we are Zen students. The other aspect of Sangha refuge is to trust my fellow trainees and not to hide myself from them either, because together we have a wisdom that none of us has alone. And just by us being together, I learn from them. One of our long-term lay students put it in this way, she said: “Sangha does not happen until you’ve shelled enough walnuts together.” I love that: just being together, doing very simple things without hiding from one another, in simple trust of one another, makes something happen that we call “Sangha.” And that, my friends, is another one of those miracles about a life of training that I don’t pretend to understand

Note
1. Rev . Daizui MacPhillamy, “Every-minute Meditation” in An Introduction to Serene Reflection Meditation, 5th ed. rev. (Mt. Shasta, California: Shasta Abbey Press,1997), pp. 54–57