THE WAY THINGS ARE
A Dharma Talk by James Ishmael Ford, Roshi, 3 September 2001
Boundless Way Zen, Henry Thoreau Zen Sangha

There are three fundamental aspects of the Buddha way:  meditation, morality and wisdom. Pure, simple attention is the heart of all the meditation disciplines within the Zen Buddhist discipline, whether we are counting or following our breath, sitting in shikantaza, or engaging koans. And morality, our engagement with the world in a harmonious manner is expressed succinctly in the Bodhisattva precepts. This evening I would like to explore a little more expansively that third aspect of the Buddha way, the nature of wisdom.

A word of warning. With Buddhism, where the core principles are in fact fairly easy to understand, it is possible, and I’ve seen it happen a little too frequently, for people to think because they have that intellectual understanding, they’ve achieved enlightenment. Sadly, this rarely is so. We’re talking about the most important things in our lives: our suffering, our joy, and our possible coming to a depth that is our true inheritance. So, don’t sell your birthright for a mess of pottage. Don’t confuse the finger pointing to the moon for that moon. Don’t settle for an intellectual understanding that falls so far short of the Buddha’s wisdom.

At the same time, there are occasions when we need someone to point to the moon for us. To shift the metaphor, there are times when we really need cookbooks if we hope to produce a good meal. If we are careful, if we remember to keep our eye on the prize, to remember the difference between a cookbook and a meal, then some intellectual understanding can indeed help to direct us toward our more visceral knowing, the authentic integration of our experience that is wisdom.

This talk is about some key ingredients for your own kitchen,  things you can mix together  to cook up something very tasty and very healthy. So, this evening let's talk about some of these ingredients for cooking our own selves, our own wisdom cake, if you will.

The first ingredient I want to talk about is emptiness. When one comes to a Zen hall just about the first thing one will encounter is the Heart Sutra. One of the briefer forms of the Prajanaparamita Sutra cycle, this text is chanted not only by us in this sangha, but by Zen practitioners around the world on almost any conceivable occasion. It speaks directly to the heart of the matter, to emptiness as that core ingredient which we need on our way to wisdom.

Here is the radical assertion, and the gateway to our own liberation. “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Form is exactly emptiness. Emptiness is exactly form.” All things, just as we encounter them, are real. Not a dream, not a delusion. The walls, the floor, the pillows upon which we sit, you and I, are all real. At the same time we exist in a world of causality where what we are, what that real is, is contingent, is temporary. But, within that passingness, we are very real. If you doubt it, just pinch yourself.

In this phenomenal world there is high and low. There are mountains and rivers. There is the good earth, upon which we stand, and the sky and the stars. There is joy and hunger and want and fulfillment. And this is important. Our feelings, our thoughts; everything about us is also real. Our dreams are real dreams. Our hopes are real hopes. Our fears and suffering are also real. As real as real can be.

But, there is also that passingness. As we come to understand what passingness is, we begin to open our eyes to another way of seeing. This is the critical point for us as we approach wisdom. The Buddhist technical terms for this, our common reality, are: anitya, the natural condition of impermanence, transitoriness; and anatman, meaning our own non-self or non-essentiality. So the assertion is this: You and I and all things are empty and impermanent. As such, while real, we along with every other real thing are passing.

Here the subtext of what the Buddha taught all those ages ago in the shadows of the Himalayas is the truth of that key ingredient which is emptiness: sunyata. Sunyata literally means emptiness or void. Sunyata is the emptiness of all conditions as in anitya. And sunyata is the emptiness of our very selves, as in anatman.

Within Buddhism there have been over the years many ways in which sunyata, this emptiness, has been understood. But, however differently nuanced the various understandings have been, from the beginning sunyata has been a central point. Sunyata is so central that I think it can be quite helpful to walk through some of the progression of Buddhist understandings of this core teaching over the years.

First we find it in the sutras, the sacred texts attributed to the Buddha himself, where sunyata is mainly understood as standing for the fundamental impermanence of things, as well as explaining those terms anitya, impermanence, transitoriness and anatman, the impermanence of persons. By the beginning of the first century before the Common Era, particularly in the Prajnaparamita cycle of sutras, our Heart Sutra and others, our understanding of this emptiness that is sunyata is extended to include even the categories of mind, the structures of creation.

Nagarjuna, a north Indian Buddhist monk living on the cusp of the second and third centuries of the Common Era, seems to have provided the first systematic reflection on the nature of sunyata. Through a process of critical dialectic, arguments designed to take any positive assertions about reality to their “reductio ad absurdum,” Nagarjuna used sunyata as a vehicle taking one from a relative understanding to an absolute understanding of the nature of reality, from being lost in the realm of forms, then seeing through them to our essential emptiness. (Or perhaps more correctly, our non-essential emptiness.)

He also appears to be the first Buddhist thinker to clearly note the identity of dependent co-arising and emptiness. This is a very important point. Dependent co-arising, paticca samuppada, is an essential insight on the Buddhist way, and is another core term for anyone practicing Zen to understand, another key ingredient for our cookbook. To understand it correctly is to understand how our suffering arises and, most importantly, how our liberation from suffering can be achieved.

The essential insight of dependent co-arising is that we exist within a web of mutual co-creation. For those of us who are Unitarian Universalists,  we find here an analysis of our own intuitive theological image of the interdependent web of existence. And also a correction to an inclination we have to reify, to make things permanent and objective. The web is a picture to help us imagine it, but don’t get tangled in the threads of that web. This dependent co-arising is not a thing, but a process. It is the how of things, each arising and falling within this process.

Traditionally, this process of dependent co-arising is described as a twelve-fold chain, starting with:
Ignorance;
then out of that karmic formations which give rise to:
Consciousness; which gives rise to:
Self-awareness, which reveal the five physical senses as well as Cognition, which then gives rise to
Contact, then to
Feeling, then to
Craving, then to
Grasping, then to
Becoming, then to
Birth, then to
Decay and
Death, after which the chain repeats.

Within the reality of impermanence this seems to be an accurate description of the process, the how of it all. Certainly, however this might be nuanced, reality does seem to take shape in a flow of causal relationships very much like this, and the twelve-fold category points to that. Nagarjuna observed this process is sunyata; this process is emptiness.

This identification of the process of reality and ultimate reality provides a radical perspective on our lives. It speaks of our possible healing from the wounds of our existence. It points to how we can live fully within our impermanence and our broader reality. Here with this insight about the identity of our very selves with the flow of the universe that is itself in every way empty, we find we have all the ingredients we need to cook something for ourselves and for all beings.

And this is the point. Nagarjuna’s perspective was aimed at direct realization of our deepest reality. His method was logical and philosophical. As such he was a rigorous proponent of his negative-philosophy, relentless in his logical rigor. Following his death two schools emerged based on his teachings. One was the Prasangika, which continued this rigorous and relentless logic. Eventually it would be called the Madyamika. You don’t need to take notes on these different schools, but it is good to have some sense of how this played out historically.

The other school, the Svatantrika, allowed that some terms point more accurately toward emptiness than others. This second school gradually developed as the Yogacara, with a positive use of such technical terms as “consciousness” and “mind.” One such term I find very useful is tathagata garbha, Buddha-nature or sometimes “womb of the Buddha,” which in Yogacara is used a synonym for emptiness.

This would be further explored and expanded as Buddhism entered China and encountered Taoism.  Buddhists would see the Chinese term k’ung, “emptiness” in its organic use as the source from which all things arise as a further clarification of their original insight into the nature of emptiness as co-dependent arising. And just about equally important, I believe, this would further reinforce that sense of the feminine, the motherly, the womb of the Buddha, as a primary metaphor for the dynamic quality of sunyata.

By the time the Zen schools began to emerge in the early Middle Ages, this maturing understanding of emptiness as identical with the phenomenal world was firmly established. Here the world that we are becomes sacred, not to be despised or despoiled, but to be cherished as the very body of the Buddha. There are many consequences to this insight. For instance, with its full development we see such things as the emergence of naturalistic landscape paintings in Sung China, hinting for us at the sacred nature of the ordinary.

Any time we glance at the altar here at Henry Thoreau Zen Sangha we see how are the heirs to this perspective. The statue on our altar is a copy of a Sung period bodhisattva Manjusri. (Well, we’re almost certain about that. The Sung was also a period of experimentation and syncretizing. And, as I’ve mentioned before, our figure here has aspects that suggest another bodhisattva, Guanyin, or Kanzeon. I have it on good authority, however, that our figure here is eighty-percent certain to be Manjusri.)

Manjusri is the archetype of wisdom and is the traditional figure on Zen altars. Usually Manjusri is portrayed sitting atop a lion while brandishing a sword, ready to cut through our delusions. Our Manjusri is a somewhat androgynous figure, lounging on the lion. I really like this particular form. Here we find a way of wisdom where thingness and emptiness are reconciled.

Here in a comfortable fit, we find a dynamic understanding. All things are as they are. No thing has a separate reality. Manjusri: ordinary, languid, erotic, and real. Manjusri: our very wisdom, yours and mine, is lounging comfortably in the world, ready to leap from the body of the lion. Wisdom is ready to act. Wisdom in fact is action.

Small wonder, then, that social activists find this teaching particularly compelling. And not just activists: some contemporary Christians and other theists look at this teaching of emptiness and suggest it sounds very much like the God beyond the God of theistic mysticism. That which unifies all things our peace and our action is unnamable.

Still, if we, acting in the world but from the silence, see this that births us, sustains us, and eventually receives us as divine, what are we on the way of the Dharma to say in response? I hesitate to say a word at such a moment. As we move into this realm of experience at some point only silence is appropriate.

We need to remember, we’re only pointing to the moon. All this abstract presentation is simply pointing toward what you and I can experience at the heart of our being. 

The most important point within in this is our coming to understand the nature of dynamic reality, where emptiness and the realm of form not are each other - exactly! - but also inform each other. There is movement in this reality at least as we human beings experience it. It is dynamic, and it can be known. It means what we do counts. Everything we do, every choice we make, has consequences. Understanding both the “hows” and the “whys” of this is our way toward wisdom.

In some schools there are descriptions of fifty-two different combinations of insight on the way to deepest understanding. In our Zen way five seem to be enough to give us a sense of how this dynamic happens. Tung-shan Liang-chieh, a ninth century Chinese master and one of the founders of the Ts’ao-tung or Soto lineage, our lineage, adapted five images out of the I Ching, the ancient Taoist classic of Change, to guide us into a deeper understanding of this dynamic quality of reality.

Called the Five Ranks, it has become the penultimate koan collection in training for both the Japanese Rinzai and Harada/Yasutani Zen curricula. Here we are confronted with the relationship between the “relative” or “apparent” or “phenomenal,” and the “absolute” or “real” or “empty.” And we begin to see the movement of our experience as we come to spiritual maturity.

The first rank, or mode, is arriving within the empty. Often people who’ve walked the way come to this experience and feel they’ve accomplished the goal. No doubt it is a profound accomplishment. When one “resolves” their first koan, they’re demonstrating this understanding. In the Harada/Yasutani school this is seen as so important, that for years and years, when one had this breakthrough during a sesshin, a formal Zen retreat, there would be a celebration and a formal public acknowledgement ceremony.

While we no longer do that ceremony, the significance of this experience is still truly at the heart of what our practice is about. Here all our energy, all our effort, everything that we’ve poured into our practice opens us to something. And this is it. Here we come to our own deeply personal experience of the empty: Silence. Here our own sense of who we are becomes unclear. We experience the real, but there is nothing to say, nothing to think. Silence. Here we rest, where we know the world of experience is nothing other than the great emptiness.

But in fact we don’t stay there. Reality is dynamic. Next we find our arriving within phenomena. The traditional image for this experience is of an old woman seeing herself reflected in an ancient mirror. Here we move from the darkness into the light, from the empty and out into the phenomenal universe. We see our own image and we know it really is empty; it is our original face, from even before when our parents were born. Here ideas of self and other vanish, and we know who we are. You know who you are. I know who I am.

Next we come to a place experienced as the grand synthesis of self and other. Here we find phenomena within the empty. Our actions are completely informed by our certain knowledge of our true nature. In the Rinzai tradition this is seen as where we live the enlightened life, where we find our actions informed by our deepest knowing of who we are. Here we find our true freedom in our actual actions. Here one has grown up, become a spiritual adult.

But still, our motion continues. The fourth rank is called the empty within phenomena. One image associated with this experience is that of the lotus flower within a sea of fire, an image also given to the enlightened life lived within the world. Everything is perceived within its uniqueness, alone, beautiful, never to be repeated. Here we really understand our neighbor as our very self. Here compassion manifests in every action, in every word.

And finally the fifth rank, the arrival within both at once. The traditional verse speaks of this moment as one where we fall into neither “yes” nor “no.” Others may strive, but at this moment the true student of the way unites everything. She sits quietly by the fire; he sits languidly astride the lion. Here the phenomenal and the empty so completely interpenetrate that there is no consciousness of either. The ancients speak of this moment as when self and other completely fall away.

Hopefully reflection on these five ranks givea us some sense of the exact identity of the phenomenal universe with our very selves and the emptiness that is sunyata. Also, I hope, this brief description opens us to sense the dynamic quality of these aspects of reality, how they differentiate and inform each other.

And I hope it speaks to the nature of wisdom on this way that is Zen Buddhism. This Zen way we are walking has nothing to do with retreat from the world. Rather it is about our most intimate connection with the world wherever we find ourselves, whether meditating in a monastery, washing dishes in our home, or doing business on Beacon Hill.

This briefest of descriptions of the Five Ranks is meant to show how our own personal experience of sunyata may genuinely inform our every action, allowing us to walk in the world with, as one commentary says, “bliss-bestowing hands.” This is the wisdom way of the Buddha.

Now, one more caution is important here. It would be a mistake to take the apparent teleology, the seeming direction of these five ranks as more than utilitarian. Again, the real world is dynamic, and the intricacies of relationship are so vast one can never say with certainty what a “direction” might or should be. We can experience all these spiritual states at different times without any specific progression.

So, don’t fall into a trap of words. Don’t get tangled in the web; don’t mistake my pointing finger for your experience. Rather, just open yourself to the possibility of actual experience, of actual intimacy. If we do this, if you do this, here you can find another tangling. As in that line from our ancestor Wu-men, commenting on the koan “Mu,” but also telling us about our true freedom: At the moment of your own realization of deepest intimacy, of knowing your identity with sunyata, “You will walk hand in hand with all the Ancestral Teachers in the successive generations of our lineage—the hair of your eyebrows entangled with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears.”

So here, then, is a little recipe. Now, you can take it, mix these ingredients, cook them through meditation practice and the disciplines of the Bodhisattva way, and within that come to taste for yourself. I hope you will. You’ll find this wisdom of the Buddha way is a nourishing meal.