Thomas Merton 

Pure Love

So far, though not explicitly dividing them, we have spoken about three

modes of contemplation. They are three possible beginnings.

1. The best of these kinds of beginnings is a sudden emptying of the soul

in which images vanish, concepts and words are silent, and freedom and

clarity suddenly open out within you until your whole being embraces the

wonder, the depth, the obviousness and yet the emptiness and unfathomable

incomprehensibility of God. This touch, this clean breath of understanding

comes relatively rarely. The other two beginnings can be habitual states.

2. The most usual entrance to contemplation is through a desert of

aridity in which, although you see nothing and feel nothing and apprehend

nothing and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety,

yet you are drawn and held in this darkness and dryness because it is the

only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace. As you

progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude, and the assurance of a

comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on

you more and more, until you gradually realize that it is God revealing

Himself to you in a light that is painful to your nature and to all its faculties,

because it is infinitely above them and because its purity is at war with your

own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.

3. Then there is a quietud sabrosa, a tranquillity full of savor and rest

and unction in which, although there is nothing to feed and satisfy either the

senses or the imagination or the intellect, the will rests in a deep, luminous

and absorbing experience of love. This love is like the shining cloud that

enveloped the Apostles on Thabor so that they exclaimed: “Lord, it is good

for us to be here!” And from the depths of this cloud come touches of

reassurance, the voice of God speaking without words, uttering His own

Word. For you recognize, at least in some obscure fashion, that this

beautiful, deep, meaningful tranquillity that floods your whole being with

its truth and its substantial peace has something to do with the Mission of

the Second Person in your soul, is an accompaniment and sign of that

mission.

Thus, to many, the cloud of their contemplation becomes identified in a

secret way with the Divinity of Christ and also with His Heart’s love for us,

so that their contemplation itself becomes the presence of Christ, and they

are absorbed in a suave and pure communion with Christ. And this

tranquillity is learned most of all in Eucharistic Communion.

He becomes to them a sensible presence Who follows them and

envelops them wherever they go and in all that they do, a pillar of cloud by

day and a pillar of fire in the night, and when they have to be absorbed in

some distracting work, they nevertheless easily find God again by a quick

glance into their own souls. And sometimes when they do not think to

return to the depths and rest in Him, He nevertheless draws them

unexpectedly into His obscurity and peace, or invades them from within

themselves with a tide of quiet, unutterable joy.

Sometimes these tides of joy are concentrated into strong touches,

contacts of God that wake the soul with a bound of wonder and delight, a

flash of flame that blazes like an exclamation of inexpressible happiness

and sometimes burns with a wound that is delectable although it gives pain.

God cannot touch many with this flame, or touch even these heavily. But

nevertheless it seems that these deep movements of the Spirit of His Love

keep striving, at least lightly, to impress themselves on every one that God

draws into this happy and tranquil light.

IN all these three beginnings you remain aware of yourself as being on the

threshold of something more or less indefinite. In the second you are

scarcely conscious of it at all: you only have a vague, unutterable sense that

peace underlies the darkness and aridity in which you find yourself. You

scarcely dare admit it to yourself, but in spite of all your misgivings you

realize that you are going somewhere and that your journey is guided and

directed and that you can feel safe.

In the third you are in the presence of a more definite and more personal

Love, Who invades your mind and will in a way you cannot grasp, eluding

every attempt on your part to contain and hold Him by any movement of

your own soul. You know that this “Presence” is God. But for the rest He is

hidden in a cloud, although He is so near as to be inside you and outside

you and all around you.

When this contact with God deepens and becomes more pure, the cloud

thins. In proportion as the cloud gets less opaque, the experience of God

opens out inside you as a terrific emptiness. What you experience is the

emptiness and purity of your own faculties, produced in you by a created

effect of God’s love. Nevertheless, since it is God Himself Who directly

produces this effect and makes Himself known by it, without any other

intermediary, the experience is more than purely subjective and does tell

you something about God that you cannot know in any other way.

These effects are intensified by the light of understanding, infused into

your soul by the Spirit of God and raising it suddenly into an atmosphere of

dark, breathless clarity in which God, though completely defeating and

baffling all your natural understanding, becomes somehow obvious.

However, in all these things you remain very far from God, much farther

than you realize. And there are always two of you. There is yourself and

there is God making Himself known to you by these effects.

BUT as long as there is this sense of separation, this awareness of distance

and difference between ourselves and God, we have not yet entered into the

fullness of contemplation.

As long as there is an “I” that is the definite subject of a contemplative

experience, an “I” that is aware of itself and of its contemplation, an “I” that

can possess a certain “degree of spirituality,” then we have not yet passed

over the Red Sea, we have not yet “gone out of Egypt.” We remain in the

realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire. The true

inner self, the true indestructible and immortal person, the true “I” who

answers to a new and secret name known only to himself and to God, does

not “have” anything, even “contemplation.” This “I” is not the kind of

subject that can amass experiences, reflect on them, reflect on himself, for

this “I” is not the superficial and empirical self that we know in our

everyday life.

It is a great mistake to confuse the person (the spiritual and hidden self,

united with God) and the ego, the exterior, empirical self, the psychological

individuality who forms a kind of mask for the inner and hidden self. This

outer self is nothing but an evanescent shadow. Its biography and its

existence both end together at death. Of the inmost self, there is neither

biography nor end. The outward self can “have” much, “enjoy” much,

“accomplish” much, but in the end all its possessions, joys and

accomplishments are nothing, and the outer self is, itself, nothing: a

shadow, a garment that is cast off and consumed by decay.

It is another mistake to identify the outer self with the body and the inner

self with the soul. This is an understandable mistake, but it is very

misleading because after all body and soul are incomplete substances, parts

of one whole being: and the inner self is not a part of us, it is all of us. It is

our whole reality. Whatever is added to it is fortuitous, transient, and

inconsequential. Hence both body and soul belong to, or better, subsist in

our real self, the person that we are. The ego, on the other hand, is a selfconstructed

illusion that “has” our body and part of our soul at its disposal

because it has “taken over” the functions of the inner self, as a result of

what we call man’s “fall.” That is precisely one of the main effects of the

fall: that man has become alienated from his inner self which is the image

of God. Man has been turned, spiritually, inside out, so that his ego plays

the part of the “person”—a role which it actually has no right to assume.

In returning to God and to ourselves, we have to begin with what we

actually are. We have to start from our alienated condition. We are prodigals

in a distant country, the “region of unlikeness,” and we must seem to travel

far in that region before we seem to reach our own land (and yet secretly we

are in our own land all the time!). The “ego,” the “outer self,” is respected

by God and allowed to carry out the function which our inner self can not

yet assume on its own. We have to act, in our everyday life, as if we were

what our outer self indicates us to be. But at the same time we must

remember that we are not entirely what we seem to be, and that what

appears to be our “self” is soon going to disappear into nothingness.

One of the most widespread errors of our time is a superficial

“personalism” which identifies the “person” with the external self, the

empirical ego, and devotes itself solemnly to the cultivation of this ego.

But this is the cult of a pure illusion, the illusion of what is popularly

imagined to be “personality” or worse still “dynamic” and “successful”

personality. When this error is taken over into religion it leads to the worst

kind of nonsense—a cult of psychologism and self-expression which

vitiates our whole cultural and spiritual self. Our reality, our true self, is

hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness and void. What we are not

seems to be real, what we are seems to be unreal. We can rise above this

unreality, and recover our hidden identity. And that is why the way to

reality is the way of humility which brings us to reject the illusory self and

accept the “empty” self that is “nothing” in our own eyes and in the eyes of

men, but is our true reality in the eyes of God: for this reality is “in God”

and “with Him” and belongs entirely to Him. Yet of course it is

ontologically distinct from Him, and in no sense part of the divine nature or

absorbed in that nature.

This inmost self is beyond the kind of experience which says “I want,”

“I love,” “I know,” “I feel.” It has its own way of knowing, loving and

experiencing which is a divine way and not a human one, a way of identity,

of union, of “espousal,” in which there is no longer a separate psychological

individuality drawing all good and all truth toward itself, and thus loving

and knowing for itself. Lover and Beloved are “one spirit.”

Therefore, as long as we experience ourselves in prayer as an “I”

standing on the threshold of the abyss of purity and emptiness that is God,

waiting to “receive something” from Him, we are still far from the most

intimate and secret unitive knowledge that is pure contemplation.

From our side of the threshold this darkness, this emptiness, look deep

and vast—and exciting. There is nothing we can do about entering in. We

cannot force our way over the edge, although there is no barrier.

But the reason is perhaps that there is also no abyss.

There you remain, somehow feeling that the next step will be a plunge

and you will find yourself flying in interstellar space.

WHEN the next step comes, you do not take the step, you do not know the

transition, you do not fall into anything. You do not go anywhere, and so

you do not know the way by which you got there or the way by which you

come back afterward. You are certainly not lost. You do not fly. There is no

space, or there is all space: it makes no difference.

The next step is not a step.

You are not transported from one degree to another.

What happens is that the separate entity that is you apparently disappears

and nothing seems to be left but a pure freedom indistinguishable from

infinite Freedom, love identified with Love. Not two loves, one waiting for

the other, striving for the other, seeking for the other, but Love Loving in

Freedom.

Would you call this experience? I think you might say that this only

becomes an experience in a man’s memory. Otherwise it seems wrong even

to speak of it as something that happens. Because things that happen have

to happen to some subject, and experiences have to be experienced by

someone. But here the subject of any divided or limited or creature

experience seems to have vanished. You are not you, you are fruition. If you

like, you do not have an experience, you become Experience: but that is

entirely different, because you no longer exist in such a way that you can

reflect on yourself or see yourself having an experience, or judge what is

going on, if it can be said that something is going on that is not eternal and

unchanging and an activity so tremendous that it is infinitely still.

And here all adjectives fall to pieces. Words become stupid. Everything

you say is misleading—unless you list every possible experience and say:

“That is not what it is.” “That is not what I am talking about.”

Metaphor has now become hopeless altogether. Talk about “darkness” if

you must: but the thought of darkness is already too dense and too coarse.

Anyway, it is no longer darkness. You can speak of “emptiness” but that

makes you think of floating around in space: and this is nothing spatial.

What it is, is freedom. It is perfect love. It is pure renunciation. It is the

fruition of God.

It is not freedom inhering in some subject; it is not love as an action

dominated by an impulse germane to one’s own being; it is not renunciation

that plans and executes itself after the manner of a virtue.

It is freedom living and circulating in God, Who is Freedom. It is love

loving in Love. It is the purity of God rejoicing in His own liberty.

And here, where contemplation becomes what it is really meant to be, it

is no longer something infused by God into a created subject, so much as

God living in God and identifying a created life with His own Life so that

there is nothing left of any significance but God living in God.

If a man who had thus been vindicated and delivered and fulfilled and

destroyed could think and speak at all it would certainly never be to think

and speak of himself as someone separate, or as the subject of a grandiose

experience.

And that is why it does not really make much sense to speak of all this

as the high point of a series of degrees, and as something great by

comparison with other experiences which are less great. It is outside the

limit within which comparisons have meaning. It is beyond the level of

“ways” that correspond to any of our notions of travel, beyond the degrees

that correspond to our ideas of a progression.

Yet this too is a beginning. It is the lowest level in a new order in which

all the levels are immeasurable and unthinkable. It is not yet the perfection

of the interior life.

THE most important thing that remains to be said about this perfect

contemplation in which the soul vanishes out of itself by the perfect

renunciation of all desires and all things, is that it can have nothing to do

with our ideas of greatness and exaltation, and is not therefore something

which is subject to the sin of pride.

In fact, this perfect contemplation implies, by its very essence, the

perfection of all humility. Pride is incompatible with it in every possible

way. It is only something that a man could be proud of, or desire

inordinately, or in some other way make material for sin, when it is

completely misunderstood and taken for something which it is not and

cannot be.

For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and

glories to one’s own contingent and exterior self, cannot exist where one is

incapable of reflecting on a separate “self” living apart from God.

How can a man be proud of anything when he is no longer able to reflect

upon himself or realize himself or know himself? Morally speaking he is

annihilated, because the source and agent and term of all his acts is God.

And the essence of this contemplation is the pure and eternal joy that is in

God because God is God: the serene and interminable exultation in the truth

that He Who is Perfect is infinitely Perfect, is Perfection.

To think that a man could be proud of this joy, once it had discovered

him and delivered him, would be like saying: “This man is proud because

the air is free.” “This other man is proud because the sea is wet.” “And here

is one who is proud because the mountains are high and the snow on their

summits is clean and the wind blows on the snow and makes a plume of

cloud trail away from the high peaks.”

Here is a man who is dead and buried and gone and his memory has

vanished from the world of men and he no longer exists among the living

who wander about in time: and will you call him proud because the sunlight

fills the huge arc of sky over the country where he lived and died and was

buried, back in the days when he existed?

So it is with one who has vanished into God by pure contemplation. God

alone is left. He is the “I” who acts there. He is the one Who loves and

knows and rejoices.

Can God be proud, or can God sin?

Suppose such a man were once in his life to vanish into God for the

space of a minute.

All the rest of his life has been spent in sins and virtues, in good and

evil, in labor and struggle, in sickness and health, in gifts, in sorrows, in

achieving and regretting, in planning and hoping, in love and fear. He has

seen things, considered them, known them; made judgments; spoken; acted

wisely or not. He has blundered in and out of the contemplation of

beginners. He has found the cloud, the obscure sweetness of God. He has

known rest in prayer.

In all these things his life has been a welter of uncertainties. In the best

of them he may have sinned. In his imperfect contemplation he may have

found sin.

But in the moment of time, the minute, the little minute in which he was

delivered into God (if he truly was so delivered) there is no question that

then his life was pure; that then he gave glory to God; that then he did not

sin; that in that moment of pure love he could not sin.

Can such union with God be the object of inordinate desire? Not if you

understand it. Because you cannot inordinately desire God to be God. You

cannot inordinately desire that God’s will be done for His own sake. But it

is in these two desires perfectly conceived and fulfilled that we are emptied

into Him and transformed into His joy and it is in these that we cannot sin.

It is in this ecstasy of pure love that we arrive at a true fulfillment of the

First Commandment, loving God with our whole heart and our whole mind

and all our strength. Therefore it is something that all men who desire to

please God ought to desire—not for a minute, nor for half an hour, but

forever. It is in these souls that peace is established in the world.

They are the strength of the world, because they are the tabernacles of

God in the world. They are the ones who keep the universe from being

destroyed. They are the little ones. They do not know themselves. The

whole earth depends on them. Nobody seems to realize it. These are the

ones for whom it was all created in the first place. They shall inherit the

land.

They are the only ones who will ever be able to enjoy life altogether.

They have renounced the whole world and it has been given into their

possession. They alone appreciate the world and the things that are in it.

They are the only ones capable of understanding joy. Everybody else is too

weak for joy. Joy would kill anybody but these meek. They are the clean of

heart. They see God. He does their will, because His will is their own. He

does all that they want, because He is the One Who desires all their desires.

They are the only ones who have everything that they can desire. Their

freedom is without limit. They reach out for us to comprehend our misery

and drown it in the tremendous expansion of their own innocence, that

washes the world with its light.

Come, let us go into the body of that light. Let us live in the cleanliness

of that song. Let us throw off the pieces of the world like clothing and enter

naked into wisdom. For this is what all hearts pray for when they cry: “Thy

will be done.”

From - Seeds of Pure Love 

 Teisho given by Harada Tangen Roshi in the year 2000

 When I was young, I went to war as a kamikaze pilot. I had firmly made up my mind to give my life because I wanted to protect my parents, my brothers and sisters and my friends. Other pilots went before me, giving their lives in that final flight. I waited my turn. My turn did not come. The war ended just when I was about to fly. I was devastated, because I could not carry out my commitment to help. I wasn’t able to serve. I felt useless. All my comrades had given their lives and here I was, still alive, to what purpose? After that, again and again, just on the brink of death, my life was miraculously spared.

You too are perfectly protected. It just isn’t obvious to you. You are receiving all the care, protection and guidance and love of all the universe. You just haven’t been able to see it yet, but you will.

Before I started my Zen practice, my life was spared over and over again, and yet I couldn’t rejoice in life. I couldn’t appreciate it, not then; I felt only anguish and despair. Those who had died… Was their death in vain? Did they die, and that was it? These questions stayed with me; they took over my mind.

It was during that time that I was fortunate enough to be given an audience with the great master who was to become my teacher, Daiun (Harada Sogaku) Roshi. He told me, the first time I met him, that he understood my suffering. He told me that I could come to be in peace. I had sought to help those of our own country. I still wasn’t able to see beyond the narrow category of my own countrymen. My view was still so very, very limited, but he told me, that first day, that life does not end with the death of this body, that true life does not disperse like a mist, and that by knowing true life you can be at peace.

My teacher told me: ‘You yourself, you are still alive, so that you can forever and ever follow the path of giving. You can steadily for evermore give your life to save others.’ Even with the death of this body, the genuine life continues. There is something that does not die. My teacher told me that if I really wanted to understand the meaning of life, eternal life, that it would take all the determination and effort that I could possibly muster. Without thoroughgoing single-minded determination and effort, you will not be able to know truth; you will not be able to find the solution to your question, your problem; you will not realise truth if your aim is unclear and if your practice is weak. If you continue to think along the lines that you have given all you could possibly give, you won’t make it. You must continue, continue this one doing. He told me, as I tell you today, that your resolve must be absolute, you must be prepared to persevere with single-minded conviction and effort. I knew then that I would carry it through. Will you carry it through?

That is not to say that it was always easy for me. I struggled mightily, as you struggle. But I stuck with the practice — the one single way of practice — and made no excuses for myself. I did not allow my practice to fade out in feelings of discouragement. There were hard times. Even times when I thought I was not going to live through it. But I stayed with the practice, no matter what. And this is what each one of you must do. There were times when I could not breathe, times when all went dark before my eyes, times when I thought I was going to pass out. But even then I refused to give in to my old self-centred patterns of behaviour. I did not try to adjust the practice to do it my way. I stuck with the simple practice that was given to me.

I cannot stress enough to you the absolute importance of sticking to your practice no matter what. No adjustment is required; no calculation is needed. I went through the same thing that you are going through now, so I can tell you from personal experience what you must do. You must give your life to this, and refuse to let anything — any thoughts, ideas, attitudes — get in your way. Your ‘yes’ must be open. Your resolve must be like steel. Even though some people seem to be blessed and joyous, that doesn’t mean that they have true peace of mind, or that you would have true peace of mind in those circumstances, not deeply, not really. So ask yourself: Are you really going to be all right, no matter what?

There is a stone here in the graveyard upon which these words are carved: ‘We were once just as you are now. You will become as we are now.’ How is that? The fact is, everyone passes on. Impermanence is swift. No matter how blessed you may feel in your present circumstances, how easy-going, how secure and pleased you are, you cannot hang on to that world. It will be jerked out from under you. Impermanence is swift. The lining of your present life is death. The problem of life and death is no one else’s problem; it is yours to deal with. And then there are the many desires. You can’t get what you want; it never seems quite right, never enough. Dissatisfaction and frustration seem to surface. There are so very many people who worry about what would seem to be no problem at all. Liberation from suffering. The more you know of this world, the more you see it to be a giant exhibition of suffering. Everywhere you look, you see plenty of examples of misery.

What about you? Have you no pain, no suffering, no worries, no fears? If you honestly think: ‘Hey, not me. I can meet it as it comes, go with the flow. I am not afraid; I can always be at peace,’ then you are fooling yourself, giving yourself license, seeing yourself for what you are not. You are caught up in a ‘self’ notion, clinging to an ego idea. And lost in that ‘self’, you cannot hear the cry or see the tears of others. If you can overlook those tears, you are not a person of great peace of mind.

The depth of truth is bottomless. Your interconnection is bottomless. A single grass in the field is perfect Buddha. How utterly ONE are all things: the grasses, the trees, the great earth, the great sky. All being is born in relation to all things. This is the true self, the perfect self. No matter what, all is goodness. However, because of deluded perception, beings fail to realise their inherent Buddha-nature. Truth is universal and complete. Can you receive and embrace thoroughly this one truth?

There is something urging you to look deeper, something which seeks to be known. Don’t you see it yet? Isn’t it clear yet? You are sitting here because you cannot help but seek truth. The genuine seeks to know itself. Truth is seeking truth. That is why you are here, putting your heart and soul into meditation. Your time of awakening will come. No one is hopeless. Life is not mean. No one is left out. There is no one who is more or less Buddha than any other. True nature is never lost, never hidden from you. It only seems that you have to go looking for it. But you have had long lifetimes of fooling yourself, protecting self-cherishing. When you come to life again, to awakening, it will be so clear that there is no ‘self’ and no ‘other’. There is no opposition; there is just this one reality. What appears as opposition is simply the result of a self-centred view, which is of course an incorrect view. This bad habit and wrong view causes untold suffering for yourself and others. And you will continue to create suffering as you go on living in falsehood. You will continue to experience suffering, fear, a sense of lack, and you will not be helping anybody.

What you think you are, who you think yourself to be is so entirely mistaken. By grasping ‘self’ you obviously fail to see who you really are. You try to hold what cannot possibly be held, for where is there anything fixed? Change is swift. Because you try to hold on, you feel much anxiety; it’s inevitable. In those circumstances, how could you know true satisfaction? Dissatisfied, you look restlessly over here, over there. Your base camp is ‘I, me, mine.’ You grasp it, you seek to rely on it, but you are relying on a phantom. You grasp this phantom-self and ceaselessly try to satisfy it. What lengths we go to, in order to gratify the self! We get what we want for a time and then we lose it, up, down, up and down. We try to rely on our clever thinking. How could there be any true peace of mind? How could you even begin to give to the great universe as you receive? Your compassion could only remain half-baked, locked as you are in ‘I, me, mine’. If you are doing your practice because you have determined to receive life as it is, to come home to life, then you will meet true self.

We human beings rely on our discriminating intellect. How arrogant we are! ‘This is mine; this is what I deserve; credit should come here; this is the way it should be.’ We compare and contrast, and in so doing shrink our world to something very small. We get so down on ourselves, feel so very sorry for ourselves. Or, in turn, we are proud of ourselves. We wonder why the world doesn’t turn as we think it should. We become so dark and down, and then we joke in order to cover our insecurities. Lost in ‘self’ we can’t help wondering: ‘Where is the value of this, what am I doing this for?’ We wonder if there is any meaning in what we are doing.

What about you? Are you clear, crystal clear about what you are doing? What are you living for? Birth, ageing, illness and death come quick. Your world as you know it, is pulled out from under you in a flash.

It seems like no time at all since I first met my teacher, Daiun Roshi. I could only judge the world then by my own deeply held beliefs. To see the beauty, we have to break through such beliefs. Some fifty-five years have flashed by since then. And now, here, the universe is embraced in the One. I can assure you that all is well. All eternity is now, here. Bold, clear, dignified. Now, here, it is so vivid, so alive, so filled with joy, and waiting for you to see it. ‘I will do whatever I can to benefit others.’ This is just life as it is, naturally. Please, please see it: everything is alive. Great, greatly alive. This is the happiness of all happiness. And this ‘now here’ can never be destroyed. The light of your eternal life is shining brightly, now. What joy there is in this radiance!

Please, take care of yourself, your shining Buddha-self. Become for evermore able to appreciate your Buddha-self. That is not to say you become arrogant. There is no one to feel small, no one to be made small, no one to feel superior, no one toward whom you could feel superior. Who are you to feel vain and proud when your very source is all being? You are supported, you are nurtured, you are guarded by all being. Thanks to all being, together, one, is the universe. This breath is breathed, so close, always one, always together. Please never forsake the limitless treasure which is you yourself. Be in touch, simply do not look away. Grasp nothing, hold nothing. There is just now, here, fresh, new, alive. Just do your practice with good grace.

 

So you should view this fleeting world— a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

From The Diamond Sutra

The Discourse about Nibbāna

Thus I heard: At one time the Gracious One was dwelling near Sāvatthī, in Jeta’s Wood, at Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. Then at that time the Gracious One was instructing, rousing, enthusing, and cheering the monks with a Dhamma talk connected with Emancipation. Those monks, after making it their goal, applying their minds, considering it with all their mind, were listening to Dhamma with an attentive ear. Then the Gracious One, having understood the significance of it, on that occasion uttered this exalted utterance:

“There is that sphere, monks, where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no air, no sphere of infinite space, no sphere of infinite consciousness, no sphere of nothingness, no sphere of neither perception nor non-perception, no this world, no world beyond, neither Moon nor Sun. There, monks, I say there is surely no coming, no going, no persisting, no passing away, no rebirth It is quite without support, unmoving, without an object,—just this is the end of suffering.

What is called ‘the uninclined’ Emancipation is hard to see, for it is not easy to see the truth, For the one who knows, who has penetrated craving, for the one who sees there is nothing no defilements.

There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned.

For the dependent there is agitation, for the independent there is no agitation. When there is no agitation there is calm, when there is calm there is no inclining. When there is no inclining, here is no coming or going. When there is no coming or going, there is no passing away and rebirth. When there is no passing away and rebirth, there is no here or hereafter or in between the two — just this is the end of suffering.”

(Tatiyanibbānapaṭisaṃyutta-sutta).

https://suttacentral.net/ud8.1/en/anandajoti?reference=none&highlight=false

The Teaching of Mazu

Translated by Thomas Cleary

The Way does not require cultivation – just don’t pollute it. What is pollution? As long as you have a fluctuating mind fabricating artificialities and contrivances, all of this is pollution. If you want to understand the Way directly, the normal mind is the Way. What I mean by the normal mind is the mind without artificiality, without subjective judgments, without grasping or rejection.

The founders of Zen said that one’s own essence is inherently complete. Just don’t linger over good or bad things – that is called practice of the Way. To grasp the good and reject the bad, to contemplate emptiness and enter concentration, is all in the province of contrivance – and if you go on seeking externals, you get further and further estranged. Just end the mental objectification of the world. A single thought of the wandering mind is the root of birth and death in the world. Just don’t have a single thought and you’ll get rid of the root of birth and death.

Human delusions of time immemorial, deceit, pride, deviousness, and conceit, have conglomerated into one body. That is why scripture says that this body is just made of elements, and its appearance and disappearance is just that of the elements, which have no identity. When successive thoughts do not await one another, and each thought dies peacefully away, this is called absorption in the oceanic reflection.

Delusion means you are not aware of your own fundamental mind; enlightenment means you realize your own fundamental essence. Once enlightened, you do not become deluded anymore. If you understand mind and objects, then false conceptions do not arise; when false conceptions do not arise, this is the acceptance of the beginning-less-ness of things. You have always had it, and you have it now – there is no need to cultivate the Way and sit in meditation.

Right this moment, as you walk, stand, sit, and recline, responding to all situations and dealing with people – all is the Tao. The Tao is the realm of reality. No matter how numerous are the uncountable, inconceivable functions, they are not beyond this realm. If they were, how could we speak of the teaching of the Mind-ground, and how could we tell of the inexhaustible lantern?

All phenomena are mental; all labels are labelled by the mind. All phenomena arise out of mind; mind is the root of all phenomena. A sutra says, ‘When you know mind and arrive at its root source, in that sense you may be called a devotee.

The Dharmakaya is infinite; its substance neither waxes nor wanes. It can be vast or minute, angled or smooth; it manifests images in accordance with things and beings, like the moon reflected in a pool. Its function gushes forth yet does not take root; it never exhausts deliberate action nor does it dwell in inaction. Deliberate action is a function of authenticity; authenticity is the basis of deliberate action. Because of no longer having fixation on this basis, one is spoken of as autonomous, like empty space.

The true Suchness of mind is like a mirror reflecting forms: the mind is like the mirror, and phenomena are like the reflected forms. If the mind grasps at phenomena, then it involves itself in external conditions and causes; this is what ‘the birth and death of mind’ means. If it no longer grasps at such phenomena, this is what ‘the true Suchness of mind’ means.

All dharmas are Buddhist teachings; all dharmas are liberation. Liberation is true Suchness, and not one thing is separate from this true Suchness. Walking, standing, sitting, and reclining are all inconceivable actions.

Dharma Mind Buddhist group

 The Nature of the Precepts

An introduction to Zen ethics

By Robert Aitken

FEB 19, 2009

The precepts of Zen Buddhism derive from the rules that governed the Sangha, or community of monks and nuns who gathered about Shakyamuni Buddha. As the religion of Buddhism developed through the Mahayana schools, the meaning of sangha broadened to include all beings, not just monks and nuns, and not just human beings. Community continues to be a treasure of the religion today, and the precepts continue to be a guide. My purpose in this book is to clarify them for Western students of Buddhism as a way to help make Buddhism a daily practice.

Without the precepts as guidelines, Zen Buddhism tends to become a hobby, made to fit the needs of the ego. Selflessness, as taught in the Zen center, conflicts with the indulgence that is encouraged by society. The student is drawn back and forth, from outside to within the Zen center, tending to use the center as a sanctuary from the difficulties experienced in the world. In my view, the true Zen Buddhist center is not a mere sanctuary, but a source from which ethically motivated people move outward to engage in the larger community. There are different sets of precepts, depending on the teachings of the various schools of Buddhism. In the Harada-Yasutani line of Zen, which derives from the Soto school, the “Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts” are studied and followed. These begin with the “Three Vows of Refuge”:

I take refuge in the Buddha;
I take refuge in the Dharma;
I take refuge in the Sangha.

Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha can be understood here to mean realization, truth, and harmony. These Three Vows of Refuge are central to the ceremony of initiation to Buddhism in all of its schools.

The way of applying these vows in daily life is presented in “The Three Pure Precepts,” which derive from a gatha (didactic verse) in the Dhammapada and other early Buddhist books: 

Renounce all evil;
practice all good;
keep your mind pure—
thus all the Buddhas taught.¹

In Mahayana Buddhism, these lines underwent a change reflecting a shift from the ideal of personal perfection to the ideal of oneness with all beings. The last line was dropped, and the third rewritten:

Renounce all evil;
practice all good;
save the many beings.

These simple moral injunctions are then explicated in detail in “The Ten Grave Precepts,” “Not Killing, Not Stealing, Not Misusing Sex,” and so on, which are discussed in the next ten chapters.

These sixteen Bodhisattva precepts are accepted by the Zen student in the ceremony called Jukai (“Receiving the Precepts”), in which the student acknowledges the guidance of the Buddha. They are studied privately with the roshi, the teacher, but are not taken up in teisho (Dharma talks), or discussed at any length in Zen commentaries.

I think the reason for this esotericism is the fear of misunderstanding. When Bodhidharma says that in self-nature there is no thought of killing, as he does in his comment on the First Grave Precept, this was his way of saving all beings. When Dogen Kigen Zenji says that you should forget yourself, as he does throughout his writing, this was his way of teaching openness to the mind of the universe. However, it seems that teachers worry that “no thought of killing” and “forgetting the self’ could be misunderstood to mean that one has license to do anything, so long as one does it forgetfully.

I agree that the pure words of Bodhidharma and Dogen Zenjican be misunderstood, but for this very reason I think it is the responsibility of Zen teachers to interpret them correctly. Takuan Soho Zenji fails to live up to this responsibility, it seems to me, in his instructions to a samurai:

The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, as is the one who wields the sword. . .

Do not get your mind stopped with the sword you raise; forget about what you are doing, and strike the enemy. Do not keep your mind on the person before you. They are all of emptiness, but beware of your mind being caught in emptiness.²

The Devil quotes scripture, and Mara, the incarnation of ignorance, can quote the Abhidharma. The fallacy of the Way of the Samurai is similar to the fallacy of the Code of the Crusader. Both distort what should be a universal view into an argument for partisan warfare. The catholic charity of the Holy See did not include people it called pagans. The vow of Takuan Zenji to save all beings did not encompass the one he called the enemy.³

This is very different from the celebrated koan of Nanch’uan killing the cat:

The Priest Nan-ch’uan found monks of the Eastern and Western halls arguing about a cat. He held up the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” No one could say anything, so Nansen cut the cat into two.⁴

Like all koans, this is a folk story, expressive of essential nature as it shows up in a particular setting. The people who object to its violence are those who refuse to read fairy tales to their children. Fairy tales have an inner teaching which children grasp intuitively, and koans are windows onto spiritual knowledge. Fairy tales do not teach people to grind up bones of Englishmen to make bread, and koans do not instruct us to go around killing pets.

Spiritual knowledge is a powerful tool. Certain teachings of Zen Buddhism and certain elements of its practice can be abstracted and used for secular purposes, some of them benign, such as achievement in sports; some nefarious, such as murder for hire. The Buddha Dharma with its integration of wisdom and compassion must be taught in its fullness. Otherwise its parts can be poison when they are misused.

“Buddha Dharma” means here “Buddhist doctrine,” but “Dharma” has a broader meaning than “doctrine,” and indeed it carries with it an entire culture of meaning. Misunderstanding of the precepts begins with misunderstanding of the Dharma, and likewise clear insight into the Dharma opens the way to upright practice.

First of all, the Dharma is the mind, not merely the brain, or the human spirit. “Mind” with a capital letter, if you like. It is vast and fathomless, pure and clear, altogether empty, and charged with possibilities. It is the unknown, the unnameable, from which and as which all beings come forth.

Second, these beings that come forth also are the Dharma. People are beings, and so are animals and plants, so are stones and clouds, so are postulations and images that appear in dreams. The Dharma is phenomena and the world of phenomena.

Third, the Dharma is the interaction of phenomena and the law of that interaction. “Dharma” and its translations mean “law” in all languages of Buddhist lineage, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The Dharma is the law of the universe, a law that may be expressed simply: “One thing depends upon another.” Cause leads to effect, which in turn is cause leading to effect, in an infinite, dynamic web of endless dimensions. The operation of this law is called “karma.”

Many people feel there is something mechanical in the karmic interpretation of the Dharma. “Cause and effect,” however dynamic, can imply something blind, so it is important to understand that “affinity” is another meaning of karma. When a man and woman in Japan meet and fall in love, commonly they will say to each other, “We must have known each other in previous lives.” Western couples may not say such a thing, but they will feel this same sense of affinity. What we in the West attribute to coincidence, the Asians attribute to affinity. “Mysterious karma” is an expression you will commonly hear.

Affinity and coincidence are surface manifestations of the organic nature of the universe, in which nothing occurs independently or from a specific set of causes, but rather everything is intimately related to everything else, and things happen by the tendencies of the whole in the context of particular circumstances. The Law of Karma expresses the fact that the entire universe is in equilibrium, as Marco Pallis has said.⁵

This intimate interconnection is found in nature by biologists and physicists today as it was once found by the Buddhist geniuses who composed Mahayana texts, particularly the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) and the Huayen (Garland of Flowers) sutras. These are compendiums of religious literature that offer important tools for understanding the Dharma, and thus understanding the precepts.

The Heart Sutra, which condenses the Prajnaparamita into just a couple of pages, begins with the words:

Avalokitesvara, doing deep prajnaparamita,
clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty,
transforming suffering and distress.⁶

Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of Mercy, who by his or her very name expresses the fact that the truth not merely sets you free, it also brings you into compassion with others. In the Far East, the name is translated in two ways, “The One Who Perceives the [Essential] Self at Rest,” and “The One Who Perceives the Sounds of the World.” In Japanese these names are Kanjizai and Kanzeon respectively.

Kanjizai, the one who perceives the self at rest, clearly sees that the skandhas, phenomena and our perceptions of them, are all without substance. This is the truth that liberates and transforms. Kanzeon, the one who perceives the sounds of the world in this setting of empty infinity, is totally free of self-preoccupation, and so is tuned to the suffering other creatures. Kanjizai and Kanzeon are the same Bodhisattva of Mercy.

“Bodhisattva” is a compound Sanskrit word that means “enlightenment-being.” There are three implications of the term: a being who is enlightened, a being who is on the path of enlightenment, and one who enlightens beings. The whole of Mahayana metaphysics is encapsulated in this triple archetype. Avalokiteshvara is the Buddha from the beginning and also is on the path to realizing that fact. Moreover, this self-realization is not separate from the Tao (“the Way”) of saving others. For you and me, this means that saving others is saving ourselves, and saving ourselves is realizing what has always been true. As disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha, we exemplify these three meanings. Senzaki Nyogen

Sensei used to begin his talks by saying, “Bodhisattvas,” as another speaker in his time would have said, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Learning to accept the role of the Bodhisattva is the nature of Buddhist practice. Avalokiteshvara is not just a figure on the altar. He or she is sitting on your chair as you read this. When you accept your merciful and compassionate tasks in a modest spirit, you walk the path of the Buddha. When the members of the Zen Buddhist center act together as Bodhisattvas, they generate great power for social change—this is the sangha as the Buddha intended it to be.

The Hua-yen Sutra refines our understanding of the Bodhisattva role in presenting the doctrine of interpenetration: that I and all beings perfectly reflect and indeed are all people, animals, plants, and so on. The metaphor is the “Net of Indra,” a model of the universe in which each point of the net is a jewel that perfectly reflects all other jewels. This model is made intimate in Zen study, beginning with our examination of the Buddha’s own experience on seeing the Morning Star, when he exclaimed, “I and all beings have at this moment attained the way.”⁷

You are at ease with yourself when Kanjizai sits on your cushions—at ease with the world when Kanzeon listens through the hairs of your ears. You are open to the song of the thrush and to the curse of the harlot—like Blake, who knew intimately the interpenetration of things:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appals;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.⁸

We are all of us interrelated—not just people, but animals too, and stones, clouds, trees. And, as Blake wrote so passionately, what a mess we have made of the precious net of relationships. We rationalize ourselves into insensitivity about people, animals, and plants, forging manacles of the mind, confining ourselves to fixed concepts of I and you, we and it, birth and death, being and time. This is suffering and distress. But if you can see that all phenomena are transparent, ephemeral, and indeed altogether void, then the thrush will sing in your heart, and you can suffer with the prostitute.

Experiencing emptiness is also experiencing peace, and the potential of peace is its unfolding as harmony among all people, animals, plants, and things. The precepts formulate this harmony, showing how the absence of killing and stealing is the very condition of mercy and charity.

This is the Middle Way of Mahayana Buddhism. It is unself-conscious, and so avoids perfectionism. It is unselfish, and so avoids hedonism. Perfection is the trap of literal attachment to concepts. A priest from Southeast Asia explained to us at Koko An, many years ago, that his practice consisted solely of reciting his precepts, hundreds and hundreds of them. To make his trip to the United States, he had to receive special dispensation in order to handle money and talk to women. Surely this was a case of perfectionism.

Hedonism, on the other hand, is the trap of ego-indulgence that will not permit any kind of censor, overt or internal, to interfere with self-gratification. The sociopath, guided only by strategy to get his or her own way, is the extreme model of such a person. Certain walks of life are full of sociopaths, but all of us can relate to that condition. Notice how often you manipulate other people. Where is your compassion?

In the study of the precepts, compassion is seen to have two aspects, benevolence and reverence. Benevolence, when stripped of its patronizing connotations, is simply our love for those who need our love. Reverence, when stripped of its passive connotations, is simply our love for those who express their love to us.

The model of benevolence would be the love of parent toward child, and the model of reverence would be the love of child toward parent. However, a child may feel benevolence toward parents, and parents reverence toward children. Between husband and wife, or friend and friend, these models of compassion are always in flux, sometimes mixed, sometimes exchanged.

Seeing compassion in this detail enables us to understand love as it is, the expression of deepest consciousness directed in an appropriate manner. Wu-men uses the expression, “The sword that kills; the sword that gives life,”⁹ in describing the compassionate action of a great teacher. On the one hand there is love that says, “Don’t do that!” And on the other hand, there is the love that says, “Do as you think best.” It is the same love, now “killing” and now “giving life.” To one friend we may say, “That’s fine.” To another we may say, “That won’t do.” The two actions involved might be quite similar, but in our wisdom perhaps we can discern when to wield the negative, and when the positive.

Without this single, realized mind, corruption can appear. I am thinking of a teacher from India who is currently very popular. I know nothing about him except his many books. His writings sparkle with genuine insight. Yet something is awry. There are sordid patches of anti-Semitism and sexism. Moreover, he does not seem to caution his students about cause and effect in daily life. What went wrong here? I think he chose a short cut to teaching. My impression is that he underwent a genuine religious experience, but missed taking the vital, step-by-step training which in Zen Buddhist tradition comes after realization. Chao-chou trained for over sixty years before he began to teach—a sobering example for us all. The religious path begins again with an experience of insight, and we must train diligently thereafter to become mature.

One of my students taught me the Latin maxim, In corruptio optima pessima, “In corruption, the best becomes the worst.” For the teacher of religious practice, the opportunity to exploit students increases with his or her charisma and power of expression. Students become more and more openand trusting. The fall of such a teacher is thus a catastrophe that can bring social and psychological breakdown in the sangha.

This is not only a violation of common decency but also of the world view that emerges from deepest experience. You and I come forth as possibilities of essential nature, alone and independent as stars, yet reflecting and being reflected by all things. My life and yours are the unfolding realization of total aloneness and total intimacy. The self is completely autonomous, yet exists only in resonance with all other selves.

Yun-men said, “Medicine and sickness mutually correspond. The whole universe is medicine. What is the self?” I know of no koan that points more directly to the Net of Indra. Yun-men is engaged in the unfolding of universal realization, showing the interchange of self and other as a process of universal health. To see this clearly, you must come to answer Yun-men’s question, “What is the self?”¹⁰

Do you say there is no such thing? Who is saying that, after all! How do you account for the individuality of your manner, the uniqueness of your face? The sixteen Bodhisattva precepts bring Yun-men’s question into focus and give it context, the universe and its phenomenon. But while the crackerbarrel philosopher keeps context outside, Yun-men is not such a fellow.

Still, cultural attitudes must be given their due. As Western Buddhists, we are also Judeo-Christian in outlook, perhaps without knowing it. Inevitably we take the precepts differently, just as the Japanese rook them differently when they received them from China, and the Chinese differently when Bodhidharma appeared. Where we would say a person is alcoholic, the Japanese will say, “He likes saké very much.” The addiction is the same, the suffering is the same, and life is cut short in the same way. But the precept about substance-abuse will naturally be applied one way by Japanese, and another by Americans.

It is also important to trace changes in Western society coward traditional matters over the past twenty years. The Western Zen student is usually particularly sensitive to these changes. Christian and Judaic teachings may seem thin, and nineteenth-century ideals that led people so proudly to celebrate Independence Day and to cheer the Stars and Stripes have all but died out.

I don’t dream about the President any more, and when I talk to my friends, I find they don’t either. The Great Leader is a hollow man, the Law of the Market cannot prove itself, and the Nation State mocks its own values.

This loss of old concepts and images gives us unprecedented freedom to make use of fundamental virtues, “grandmother wisdom” of conservation, proportion, and decency, to seek the source of rest and peace that has no East or West. It is not possible to identify this source specifically in words–the Zen teacher Seung Sahn calls it the “Don’t-Know Mind.” He and I and all people who write and speak about Buddhism use Buddhist words and personages to identify that place, yet such presentations continually fall in upon themselves and disappear. We take our inspiration from the Diamond Sutra and other sutras of the Prajnaparamita tradition, which stress the importance of not clinging to concepts, even of Buddhahood.¹¹

Wu-tsu said, “Shakyamuni and Maitreya are servants of another. I want to ask you, ‘Who is that other?’”¹² After you examine yourself for a response to this question, you might want the Buddha and his colleagues to stay around and lend a hand. Perhaps they can inspire your dreams, and their words express your deepest aspirations; but if they are true servants, they will vanish any time they get in the way.

We need archetypes, as our dreams tell us, to inspire our lives. As lay people together, we do not have the model of a priest as a leader, but we follow in the footsteps of a few great lay personages from Vimalakirti to our own Yamada Roshi, who manifest and maintain the Dharma while nurturing a family.

The sixteen Bodhisattva precepts, too, are archetypes, “skillful means” for us to use in guiding our engagement with the world. They are not commandments engraved in stone, but expressions of inspiration written in something more fluid than water. Relative and absolute are altogether blended. Comments on the precepts by Bodhidharma and Dogen Zenji are studied as koans, but our everyday life is a great, multifaceted koan that we resolve at every moment, and yet never completely resolve.

---

NOTES

¹See Irving Babbitt, trans., The Dhammapada (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 30.

²D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1959), pp. 114-115.

³Takuan Zenji echoes Krishna’s advice to Arjuna:
These bodies are perishable, but the dwellers in these
Bodies are eternal, indestructible, and impenetrable.
Therefore fight, O descendant of Bharata!
He who considers this (Self) as a slayer or he who thinks
That this (Self) is slain, neither of these knows the
Truth. For It does not slay, nor is It slain.
“Bhagavad Gita,” II, 17-19
Lin Yutang, ed., The Wisdom of China and India (New York: Random House, 1942), p. 62.
The separation of the absolute from the relative and the treatment of the absolute as something impenetrable may be good Hinduism, but it is not the teaching of the Buddha, for whom absolute and relative were inseparable except when necessary to highlight them as aspects of a unified reality.

⁴See Koun Yamada, Gateless Gate (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1979), p. 76.

⁵Marco Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), p. 10.

⁶Robert Aitken, Taking the Path of Zen (San Francisco: Nort Point Press, 1982), p. 110.

⁷Koun Yamada and Robert Aitken, trans. Denkoroku, mimeo., Diamond Sangha, Honolulu & Haiku, Hawaii, Case 1.

⁸William Blake, “London,” Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Library, 1961), p. 75.

⁹Yamada, Gateless Gate, p. 64.

¹⁰See J. C. and Thomas Cleary, The Blue Cliff Record, 3 vols. (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1977), III p. 559.

¹¹See Edward Conze, trans., Buddhist Wisdom Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), pp. 17-74; and D. T. Suzuki, trans., Manual of Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 38-72.

¹²Comments attributed to Bodhidharma and comments by Dogen Zenji, which appear in each of my essays on the Ten Grave Precepts were translated by Yamada Koun Roshi and myself from Goi, Sanki, Sanju, Jujukinkai Dokugo (Soliloquy on the Five Degrees, the Three Refuges, the Three Pure Precepts, and the Ten Grave Precepts) by Yasutani Hakuun Roshi (Tokyo: Sanbokoryukai, 1962), pp. x–xvi; 71–97. These comments were also translated by Maezumi Taizan Roshi in the pamphlet Mindless Flower, published many years ago by the Zen Center of Los Angeles and now out of print. I have used Maezumi Roshi’s work as a reference in revising the translations that Yamada Roshi and I made originally. The comments attributed to Bodhidharma are believed by modern scholars to have been written by Hui-ssu (ancestor of the T’ien T’ai school of Buddhism) and adopted later by Zen teachers. I have retained the legend that Bodhidharma wrote them; after all Bodhidharma himself is something of a legend. Legends fuel our practice. My reference is a personal letter from the Hui-ssu scholar Dan Stevenson dated August 22, 1983.

From The Mind of Clover, 1984, by Robert Aitken