106. Fixed ideas

Thich Nhat Hanh, 2006

In a recent talk in Dublin, the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of the happiness available to us in our everyday lives. We have only to “release our idea of happiness,” he advised, and return to the present moment, where the conditions for happiness are already to be found.*

Thich Nhat Hanh is not alone in offering this advice, nor is he unique in viewing ideas of happiness as obstacles to the experience itself. In his book Beyond Happiness, the Zen teacher Ezra Bayda deconstructs what he calls the “myth of happiness,” which holds that “we deserve to be happy, as if it were our birthright; that we will be happy if we get what we want; that we can’t be happy if we’re in discomfort.” For Bayda, as for Thich Nhat Hanh, our common human error lies in chasing an image of future happiness. Once we have shed that illusion, we can return “again and again to staying present with what we are experiencing right now.” Rather than try to manipulate our own or others’ lives, we can “surrender to life as it is.”**

As can be inferred from the congruity of Thich Nhat Hanh’s and Ezra Bayda’s views, Zen teachings often remind us that happiness is to be found  in the present moment, and that our notions of happiness, especially notions based on external conditions, only stand in our way. Yet in speaking of “releasing” our ideas of happiness, Thich Nhat Hanh has given this familiar teaching a fresh and energizing turn.

Derived from the Latin relaxare (“to relax”), the word release connotes freedom from confinement. Alternatively, it suggests the relinquishing of a right or claim. To speak of releasing our ideas of happiness is to suggest that we have been holding those ideas captive. We can let them go free. The word release also implies a claim to what Bayda would call a “birthright” or “sense of entitlement,” which is to say, a right to be happy on our own terms. To release that claim is to liberate ourselves from the suffering that ensues when the claim proves illusory, the sense of entitlement a hindering fiction. By releasing our ideas of happiness, we open a path to genuine happiness, whose roots lie in a wholehearted, open-minded embracing of our lives as they are.

And just as our ideas of happiness can be released, so can our other ideas, especially those that may be causing harm. The Buddha famously said that the aim of all his teaching was the end of suffering. Elsewhere he declared that nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as “I” or “mine.” The latter statement is sometimes understood to refer to material possessions, but it can also refer to our ideas, especially our fixed ideas, to which some of us cling at all costs, regardless of their tenuous connection to reality or their potential to inflict human suffering. To take but one example, there is the fixed idea of austerity, to which European governments have, until very recently, been clinging with all their might, against the best advice of Paul Krugman and other world-renowned economists. Whether that idea has been more toxic than beneficial is open to debate, but the tenacity of those who have embraced it has been self-evident.

To speak of clinging to ideas, economic or other, is not to denigrate thought or imply that thinking is inevitably linked to suffering. Without its ideas, the human mind would be a barren estate and the world a poorer place. What Zen teachings caution against is not intellection itself but our tendency to cherish and protect our ideas, as if they were private fortunes, and to identify with those ideas, as if they were us, and vice versa.

In reality, as the modern Zen master Kosho Uchiyama has put it, most of the ideas that cross our minds are as accidental as they are transient. To the extent that we are unaware of their comings and goings, we may view them as real and substantial—and fasten on them accordingly. By contrast, to the extent that we can live in awareness, we can see that our ideas, along with our memories, fantasies, and other mental phenomena, are no more solid than the chirp of a robin or the rumble of a passing truck. In a classic analogy from Zen teachings, our thoughts are likened to clouds in the sky—the sky-like nature of awareness. With practice we can learn to see them as such, while also observing our habitual clinging. In this way, we can, in Uchiyama’s words, “open the hand of thought,” releasing our pet ideas as if they were captive birds.

If you would like to test this proposition, may I suggest that you sit still in a comfortable, upright position and bring your awareness to your lower abdomen. Observe its rise as you breathe in, its fall as you breathe out. After a few minutes, shift your attention from your body to your mental life, and allow your awareness to illuminate your thoughts. Observe their arrival, duration, and departure. Note any tendency to pursue or cling to particular thoughts. At the same time, sense your capacity to release your thoughts, even those you most value. Practice this ten-minute exercise daily for a week or more, and see what becomes of your fixed ideas.

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* Thich Nhat Hanh, “Cooling the Flames of Anger,” Dharma talk, Dublin, Ireland, April 11, 2012. http://tnhaudio.org/2012/04/18/cooling-the-flames-in-dublin/.

** Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness (Shambhala, 2011), Kindle edition, 2060.

Photo by Duc (pixiduc).

105. Timeless flowers

Sakura at Maizuro Park

Although the nights have been cold of late, the peonies in our perennial garden are energetically pushing up. Their crimson stalks are nearly knee-high; their white flowers will soon be in bloom. That is the nature of hardy perennials and the origin of their name: they come back every year. Having watched this happen, year after year, can we still greet the return of spring flowers with the excitement, joy, and awe we felt when we were younger?

That is the question addressed by two poems written in two very different times and places. The first is a waka by the Japanese poet Saigyo (1118-1190), a one-time samurai who became a wandering Buddhist monk:

                        Hana ni somu

                        kokoro no ika de

                        nokoriken

                        sute hateteki to

                        omou waga mi ni

—

                        Why should my heart

                        still harbor

                        this passion for cherry flowers,

                        I who thought

                        I had put all that behind me?*

For anyone who has looked closely at cherry blossoms, whether in Kyoto or Washington, D.C., it may be hard to imagine not being moved by the flowers’ evanescent beauty. What astonishes Saigyo, however, is his own response. A mature adult, he had thought his heart was jaded. Instead, he found his passion for natural beauty unabated.

Quite another perspective may be seen in “When We Were Children,” a poem by the modern Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1915-1963):

                         When we were children words were colored

                        (Harlot and murder were dark purple)

                        And language was a prism, the light

                                    A conjured inlay on the grass,

                        Whose rays today are concentrated

                                    And language grown a burning-glass.

 

                        When we were children Spring was easy,

                        Dousing our heads in suds of hawthorn

                        And scrambling the laburnum tree—

                                    A breakfast for the gluttonous eye;

                        Whose winds and sweets have now forsaken

                                    Lungs that are black, tongues that are dry.

 

                        Now we are older and our talents

                        Accredited to time and meaning,

                        To handsel joy requires a new

                                    Shuffle of cards behind the brain

                        Where meaning shall remarry color

                                    And flowers be timeless once again.**

Revisiting his childhood, MacNeice remembers a time when he experienced words as colors. Harlot and murder, words with dark connotations, were heard, read, and felt as the color purple. Words were wedded to the language of the senses, and language itself was experienced as a “prism”—a multicolored wonder rather than a tool of the concentrated mind.

Recalling the perceptions of his childhood, MacNeice also remembers its sensuous joys. Playing near a hawthorn bush or climbing a laburnum tree, he relished the scents and colors of the natural world, as if he were eating them for breakfast. Sadly, the middle-aged adult can no longer see, smell, or taste in quite the same way. Whether from smoking or some other cause, his lungs are black. His tongue no longer savors what it encounters. In an ironic reversal of agency, MacNeice attributes the loss of sensory acuity to the “winds and sweets” that have “forsaken” the aging narrator.  In its absence, Spring is no longer “easy.”

In his closing stanza, MacNeice returns to his central theme: the lost unity of language and the senses. A skeptical modernist with a keen awareness of history, MacNeice was well-accustomed to using analytic language in the service of “time and meaning.” Yet he also found pleasure in the life of the senses, whether his subject was a bowl of roses in a bay window, seen against a background of snow, or a stream of images seen from a fast-moving train. Both as poet and literary intellectual, MacNeice endeavored to close the gap between word and thing, abstract concepts and the “incorrigibly plural” world of the senses, but as he acknowledges in his closing lines, that task requires a shift of orientation, a “shuffle of cards behind the brain.”

For Saigyo, a poet-monk accustomed to the language and practice of non-duality, the direct apprehension of natural beauty may have come naturally. But for those of us who habitually divide subject from object, self from other, a direct encounter with natural phenomena is often impeded by language and dualistic thought, not to mention years of conditioning. “I must become a child again,” wrote the poet Thomas Traherne. But in what way is one to do that? By what means may we rekindle and cultivate a sense of awe?

For the American essayist Scott Russell Sanders, one such way is the practice of bowing. In his essay “A Private History of Awe,” Sanders recalls the recurrent experience, beginning in childhood, of losing all sense of a separate self. At such moments, “the fidgety self dissolves, as if it were a wave sliding back into the water, and there is only the swaying, shimmering sea.” Now in his sixties, Sanders has come to realize that this experience of oneness, accompanied by a sense of awe, is “life’s deepest truth.”  In keeping with that realization, he has made it a practice to sit in meditation every morning, trying only to be present, attentive, and open to whatever might occur. At the end of each sitting, Sanders rises, looks out at the waking world, and bows. This “little ritual,” as he calls it, is a way of cultivating respect and reverence for “all that lives.” It is also a way of honoring the “energy and glory in creation,” which causes the cherry tree in his yard to break into bloom and the seeds in his garden to push toward the sun.***

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* Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press, 1991), 39.

** Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems, ed. W.H. Auden (Faber, 1988), 80.

“***  Scott Russell Sanders, Earth Works: Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2012), 253-263.

“I must become a child again” is the closing line of Thomas Traherne’s poem “Innocence.”

Photo by STA3816, Creative Commons

104. Wait up!

It’s a Saturday morning, and Jack and Ian are playing catch in their backyard. Jack is twelve, his brother ten.  After they have tossed a softball back and forth for a while, Jack announces that he’s going for a ride on his bike. Without waiting for a response, Jack mounts his bike and pedals off. “Wait up!” cries Ian, his older brother already far ahead.

Although Ian is probably unaware of it, he has just used a phrasal verb. In contrast to simple verbs, phrasal verbs contain two or more words, which function as a single semantic unit. “Wait up” differs in tone and meaning from “wait,” and it also differs from “wait around” or “wait out.” Phrasal verbs are a challenge for non-English speakers, who sometimes leave out the “particle”—the second word—or get it wrong. “I take my hat to you,” a Japanese acquaintance once wrote to me, intending to offer a compliment but instead evoking an image of a vigorous assault.

In modern informal usage, wait up means “to stop or pause so that another can catch up” (American Heritage Dictionary). Employed as an imperative, the phrase bears a distinctive tone, which can range from pleading to judgmental to mildly censorious. It implores the one who has forged ahead to slow down, pause, or stop. And it implies that the one who has gone ahead has been less than considerate of the one left behind.

Wait up might be a motto for the conduct of contemporary life. And it might also be a motto for Buddhist meditation, of which Zen is one variety. Buddhist meditation consists of two general processes, known respectively as samatha and vipassana. Usually translated as “stopping,” samatha refers to concentrative meditation, which trains us to stop and pay attention to an object in the present, be it breathing or posture, a koan or a mantra. Vipassana is translated as “looking,” or “looking with insight,” and it employs the stability of mind generated by samatha to explore the nature of reality. In classical meditative training, “stopping” precedes “looking,”  the latter being sometimes described as the “harvest” of the former. But these two processes, however discrete, are understood to be aspects of a single practice.

“We have to learn the art of stopping,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, “stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down. How can we stop this state of agitation?”*

One reliable way is to sit still and bring attention first to our breathing and then to parts of our bodies, silently reciting the verses, “Breathing in, I know I am breathing in / Breathing out, I know I am breathing out. // Aware of my eyes, I breathe in / Aware of my eyes, I breathe out.” By employing this method and others like it, samatha practice calms our bodies, concentrates our minds, and heightens our awareness of our “habit energies,” or patterns of habitual behavior. “All our life,” wrote William James, “is but a mass of habits.” Together those habits propel us into the future, often without our knowing it. Samatha puts the brakes on that powerful forward drive.

Yet for all its benefits samatha is also a limited practice, insofar as it focuses narrowly on the stability of the self. That is why samatha needs its complement vipassana, which trains the pacified mind to look into itself and examine the causes and conditions that have created its present state. If we are feeling angry, for example, we might discover that our anger stems from a friend’s unkind remark. But if we look more deeply, we may recall that our friend’s mother has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We might also find that both our propensity toward anger and our ways of managing it have roots in our family, our ancestry, and our culture.

In other words, by stopping and looking, we can become aware of our relationships, which in our rush to get ahead we may be leaving far behind. Many things can occasion that awareness, but the imperative “Wait up,” posted above our desks or in some other conspicuous place, can be an especially potent reminder. It can halt our forward momentum and return us to the present moment. No less important, it can prompt us to examine those relationships that we may be neglecting, despite their importance in our lives.

Such was the case with an Honors student whom I will call Jessica, who took my college course in meditation some years ago. An anxious young woman, who was enrolled in twenty hours of courses while holding down two part-time jobs, Jessica discovered through the practice of meditation that she was living with a deep sense of loss and a habitual resentment toward her father. Toward the end of the semester, Jessica got in touch with her father, and over the next few weeks, they resolved much of their conflict. As Jessica’s teacher, I found it instructive and heartening to observe how the simple practice of  “stopping and looking”—or, if you like, of “waiting up”—could help to alleviate suffering and reconcile a daughter to her father.

_____

* Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Parallax, 1998), 23 .

Photo “Child on a bicycle” by Werner100359.

103. Quiet persistence

Earthquake memorial monument, Kobe, Japan

Are you an extrovert or an introvert? And if you happen to be the latter, how do you cope in a culture biased toward extroversion?

That is the central question posed by Susan Cain, a former corporate attorney, in her new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. According to studies cited by Cain, introverts make up thirty to fifty percent of the American population. Numbering herself among that cohort, Cain explores ways by which introverts can navigate a culture enthralled by what she calls the Extrovert Ideal. Those ways include adopting an extrovert’s persona, creating a “restorative niche” in one’s daily round, and negotiating respectfully with extroverted colleagues, friends, and spouses.

Beyond these practical stratagems, introverts can cultivate a quality Cain identifies as “soft power,” or more specifically, “quiet persistence.” Dramatically exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi, that quality is also a mark of traditional Asian culture, where habits of quiet study and attentive listening are encouraged and rewarded:

Soft power is not limited to moral exemplars like Mahatma Gandhi. Consider, for example, the much-ballyhooed excellence of Asians in fields like math and science. Professor [Preston] Ni  defines soft power as “quiet persistence,” and this trait lies at the heart of academic excellence as surely as it does in Gandhi’s political triumphs. Quiet persistence requires sustained attention—in effect restraining one’s reactions to external stimuli.*

As a case in point, Cain recounts the story of Tiffany Liao, a daughter of Taiwanese parents, whose habits of quiet study earned her admission to Swarthmore and an appointment as editor-in-chief of her college newspaper. Liao attributes her success to her “quiet traits,” particularly her ability to listen attentively, take thorough notes, and do deep research prior to conducting interviews. In Cain’s phrase, Liao came “to embrace the power of quiet,”** and that power enabled her to realize her dream.

For Tiffany Liao, as for introverts generally, quiet persistence may be a key to worldly success, but that quality of mind also has a place in the world’s spiritual traditions, including Mahayana Buddhism, of which Zen is a late flowering. Mahayana teachings enjoin the practitioner to cultivate the six paramitas (“perfections of wisdom”). By so doing, the practitioner can eventually transform suffering and arrive at the “other shore” of wisdom and compassion. The six paramitas are generosity (dana), precepts (sila), patience (kshanti), diligence (virya), meditation (samadhi), and wisdom (prajna). “Quiet persistence” might be said to conflate two of the “perfections of wisdom,” namely patience and diligence. This is a natural pairing, for the two qualities are both compatible and complementary.

The Sanskrit word kshanti is often translated as “patience.” Other translations include “forbearance,” “endurance,” and “acceptance.” Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh prefers the word “inclusiveness,” which in his view comes closest to the original meaning:

Inclusiveness is the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. . . . When we practice inclusiveness, we don’t have to suffer or forbear, even when we have to embrace suffering and injustice. The other person says or does something that makes us angry. He inflicts on us some kind of injustice. But if your heart is large enough, we don’t suffer. . . . To suppress our pain is not the teaching of inclusiveness. We have to receive it, embrace it, and transform it. The only way to do this is to make our heart big.***

In classical Zen teachings, practitioners of kshanti paramita are likened to the earth, which accepts all manner of impurities and toxins. Practicing kshanti, we include, without complaint, the pleasant with the unpleasant, the wholesome with the toxic, accepting and transforming it all in a spirit of compassion.

To some, that may sound like culpable passivity, especially if the adversity takes the form of an oppressive regime. But in Mahayana teachings, the paramitas do not exist in isolation, and kshanti is balanced by virya paramita, translated variously as “diligence,” “perseverance,” and “persistence.” To practice virya paramita is to make a sustained, energetic effort. More precisely, it is to cultivate, with energy and persistence, such wholesome qualities as loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. As a practical technique, Thich Nhat Hanh urges us to keep the “energy of mindfulness” present as long as we can, once that energy has arisen. By the same token, we can decline to nourish such mental states as greed, envy, fear, and anger.

“Quiet persistence” shares common ground with the Japanese word gaman, which is rooted in Zen Buddhism and means “to be patient and persevere in the face of suffering,” or, more simply, “to bear with it.” By all accounts, the spirit of gaman was much in evidence in the aftermath of last year’s earthquake and tsunami. Foreign correspondents described the long lines at gas stations and cash registers, where people waited patiently without complaint. Commentators noted the absence of looting and price-gouging and the willingness of people to help each other out. And since then, the world has watched the steady persistence of the Japanese in rebuilding their stricken country. As Nicholas Kristof has remarked, gaman is “steeped into the Japanese soul,” and it may be indigenous to Japanese culture. But quiet persistence is a quality anyone can cultivate at any time, whether he or she be introverted or extroverted, traditional Asian or contemporary American.

_______________

*  Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World Where People Can’t Stop Talking ( Crown, 2012), Kindle edition, 200.

** Cain, 202.

*** Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Parallax, 1998), 185, 189.

See also Nicholas Kristof, “Sympathy for Japan, and Admiration,” New York Times (On the Ground), March 11, 2011, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/sympathy-for-japan-and-admiration/.

102. Consistency

Toward the end of the February 22 Republican primary debate, John King asked the candidates to define themselves in a single word. “Consistent,” replied Representative Ron Paul. In the ensuing commentaries, Dr. Paul’s response met with wide approval, even by those not partial to his views. “I’ll give him that,” Jon Stewart wryly remarked.

Ron Paul’s response stood out from the others, not only because it came across as honest and accurate but also because it pointed toward his history rather than his temperament. Where the others laid claim to laudable traits of character—courage, resolution, cheerfulness—Ron Paul alluded to his public record. By so doing, he appealed to conventional wisdom, which holds that a candidate may best be judged by what he or she has said and done. “Ask me,” wrote the American poet William Stafford, “if what I have done is my life.” Under most circumstances, the answer would probably be yes. And should the next question be, “Who am I?” the standard of judgment might well be the same. The self exists in time, and a person may best be judged by examining his or her background, actions, and abiding traits of character. By such means we hire an employee or choose a doctor or pick a President.

Conventional wisdom can sometimes guide us, but it can also lead us astray. And if we stop and look deeply into the present moment, as Zen teachings enjoin us to do, we may find that conventional wisdom tells but half the story. Viewed from a conventional vantage point—what Zen calls that of “ordinary mind”—the conditioned self does indeed exist in time. It is born, lives, and dies. Concrete evidence may be found in our family albums, resumes, browsing histories, and countless other sources. But from the standpoint of what Zen calls “enlightened mind,” which perceives a formless ground of being beneath the changing world of forms, the notion of a separate, historical self is seen to be a construct, a creation of the ego, which expends enormous energy in protecting its creation. “The past no longer is,” the Bhaddekaratta Sutra reminds us. Ghosted though we are by our actions, statements, and previous relationships, our past has no tangible existence. Nor is a solid, permanent self anywhere to be found.

What can be found, according to Zen teachings, is an ever-changing aggregate of “form, feeling, thought, volition, and consciousness.” Known in Zen as skandhas, these five elements comprise what we conventionally call the self. And the skandhas exist in a dynamic relationship, not only with each other but also with their environment, on which they depend for their continuing existence. Without sunlight, water, and fertile soil, the crocuses in our yard could not live for very long. Without the water, oxygen, minerals, and other nutrients we take from the natural world, neither could we. To imagine either the crocuses or ourselves to be separate entities, independent of changing surroundings, is to perpetuate a delusion. And to imagine a person as a kind of stone in a stream, impervious to the flux of conditions, is to ignore the impermanent, interdependent nature of both the self and its environment.

That is why, in Zen teachings, the entity we call the self is viewed in two disparate ways, as if through a stereoscope. Through one lens, as it were, the self is seen as the historical, time-bound form perceived by “ordinary mind.” Like a wave on the ocean, it arises, endures, and expires. Through the other lens, however, the self is seen as the ocean itself: a timeless nexus of dynamic relationships, whose primary frame of reference is space rather than time. Viewed from the latter standpoint, what we normally call a person is understood, in the words of the psychologist Reginald Pawle, to be “an activity in relationship.” And, as Pawle goes on to say, what we normally call a self is seen as a fluid being, whose consistency depends on its continuing awareness of its relationships:

Zen thought . . . asserts that continuity of self, psychological stability, occurs not over time, from the past to the future, but from continuing in relationship to one’s situation, in the present, from continuing through space rather than time. Zen thought posits that a time-based self is a fragile self because time is always changing. From this perspective it can be said that space is what the self is, time is what the self is not.*

Seen in this perspective, the self remains continuous and stable only to the extent that it remains in touch with its environment, which is to say, with the changing conditions under which it continues to manifest. “I am what surrounds me,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. By and large, Zen thought would agree, adding the proviso that to live in harmony with what surrounds us, we must remain present at all times. We must be fully awake.

This imperative has profound implications for the conduct of everyday life. It demands, first, that we remain ever-vigilant, ever aware of our conditioning, which would attach us both to our personal histories and to the illusion that things are solid and permanent when they are not. Beyond that, it demands that we remain acutely alert to changing conditions and our place within an unstable, unreliable environment, natural and social. Consistency matters, to be sure, as does that elusive factor known as character. But no less important is our capacity—or that of anyone who would be President—to respond, flexibly and compassionately, to whatever conditions may arise.

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* Reginald H. Pawle, “The Psychology of Zen Buddhism: Possibilities for Western Psychotherapy,” Japanese Journal of Psychotherapy,
vol. 30, no. 1 (February, 2004), 17-23.

Photo by Sean O’Flaherty

101. The ego filter

Let us imagine that it’s a Friday afternoon, and you are driving on the New York State Thruway. You are in the passing lane, going seventy-five miles per hour. The car on your right is not slowing down, and the SUV behind you is fast approaching. You can see its emblazoned grill in your rearview mirror. You do not want to increase your speed, but the driver behind you is leaving you no choice.

As the SUV draws closer, you feel your heart rate increasing, your anger arising. You can’t see the driver in your mirror, but you can well imagine him: an aggressive, insensitive lout, with no concern for anyone but himself. As you reluctantly speed up and move over, an epithet comes to mind, and you let it slip from your lips. It is not a nice word, but it gives you satisfaction.

Moments later, the SUV passes on your left, and you see that the driver is not a lout at all but a petite, professional-looking woman in her thirties, who is keeping her eyes on the road, apparently unaware of your distress. And a few minutes later, after she and her SUV have long since disappeared, you realize that your anger, too, has disappeared and your clarity of mind is slowly returning. It is as if a veil, through which you were viewing the world, has gradually been lifted.

Shodo Harada Roshi, a contemporary Rinzai Zen master, has coined a suggestive name for that veil. He calls it the “ego filter.”  In his book Moon by the Window, he describes its effect on the ways in which we experience the world:

When we look out the window at the moon, it is always the same moon. But if any thoughts or desires come between us and the moon, what we see changes completely. . . . When we live with no separation between ourselves and what we are experiencing, we know the truly bright and clear mind that is our Original Nature. But as long as we carry around an ego filter, it’s impossible to experience this.*

As can be inferred from these observations, the “ego filter” consists of thoughts and their emotional subtexts, which come between our minds and our immediate experience. The moon itself is constant, but the ego filter colors what we see.

Lest Shodo Harada’s statement be misunderstood, it is important to note that the “ego” to which he refers is not that of Freudian theory. Nor is it quite the same as the “ego” of popular culture. In Freudian theory, the ego is one of three components of the psyche, the other two being the “id” and the “superego.” The ego mediates between the instinctual energies of the id and the moral and social values embodied in the superego. These days Freud’s theory is out of fashion, but his neutral, analytic term has survived in popular culture, where its aura is decidedly negative. In today’s American vernacular, the word ego evokes the Big Me, the Number One whom the egocentric person is always looking out for.

As used in Zen teachings, ego has a rather different meaning. In his article “The Psychology of Zen Buddhism,” the cross-cultural psychologist Reginald Pawle explains that in Zen the ego is seen not as the id’s executor but as the “root of mind,” the “principal operator” of the psyche. ** Zen teachings call it “discriminating mind,” and its function is to make dualistic distinctions: up from down, left from right, pleasant from unpleasant, good from bad, and especially, “self” from “other.” The ego picks and chooses, in accordance with our desires and aversions. Without it, we could not choose a detergent or read a map or wisely invest our savings. Indeed, we could not safely cross a busy street, much less drive a car.

Yet in Zen teachings the ego is also seen as the primary source of suffering, insofar as we identify with our preferences or posit a solid, separate, choice-making self. It is one thing to choose miso soup over cheeseburgers, PBS over Fox News, a Prius over a Hummer. It is another to conjure an immutable self who makes such choices, irrespective of changing conditions. “If you’re not sure whether you own an iron,” reads an ad for a popular men’s deodorant, “you’re a Mitchum man.” By such formulations, we reify our attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of behavior into fictive selves. More harmfully, we separate our illusory selves from others, and we pit our race, religion, gender, or economic class against the rest of humanity. By nurturing such habits of thought, Zen teachings tell us, we inflict suffering on ourselves and the rest of the world.

Shodo Harada urges us to “dig down” and “dig out” the illusory ego, to “get rid of the ego filter,” through the rigorous practice of zazen. By persistent effort, he assures us, we can find that place where the “water of clear mind is flowing freely” and “the ego isn’t directing our life.” That is a high aspiration, requiring years of patient practice. But should that practice come to fruition, we may find ourselves less tethered to the “me-story,” as Toni Packer has called it, and less inclined to divide “me” from “you” and “us” from “them.” And should we find ourselves being tailgated on the Thruway, we may find that we no longer see a virtuous driver being bullied by a bad one. Rather, we see a field of rapidly changing relationships: a dangerous configuration of cars and drivers, to which that entity we call the self would do well to pay full attention.

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* Shodo Harada Roshi, Moon by the Window (Shambhala, 2011), 21.

** Reginald H. Pawle, “The Psychology of Zen Buddhism: Possibilities for Western Psychotherapy,” Japanese Journal of Psychotherapy,
vol. 30, no. 1 (February, 2004), 17-23.

100. Paying heed

One April morning, twenty-five years ago, I found myself speaking with an elderly Irish farmer in his newly ploughed field. At the time I was living in County Monaghan, a rural midland county on the border with Northern Ireland. Prior to coming to Ireland, I had been reading the poems of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), who grew up on a farm in Monaghan and felt confined by the “black hills” of his native landscape. At the age of thirty-four Kavanagh left the family farm for Dublin and went on to become the most influential Irish poet of his time. The Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has acknowledged his debt to Kavanagh’s work.

“I knew Paddy,” the farmer told me, leaning on his spade. “His father was a shoemaker. His mother couldn’t read or write. His fields were up there, over that hill. Paddy kept his books in his fence—in between the stones. I’d see him reading there for hours at a time. He was not a good farmer, not good at all. He paid no heed to his fields.” As if to clinch the point, he drove his spade forcefully into the soil.

He paid no heed to his fields. What struck me about that comment, and what has continued to resonate, was not its content, which was easily refuted. Kavanagh did in fact pay heed to his fields, but his attention was that of a poet rather than a working farmer. What was striking was the farmer’s choice of words, particularly the word heed, which seemed to have come from an earlier century. The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines heed as “careful attention, care, observation, regard” and notes that its usage is “now chiefly literary.” Forty years on, at least in North America, it is rare to find the word on the page, much less in conversation. Heed has gone the way of the corset, the rotary dial phone, and my father’s Royal Empress typewriter.

In formal, literary usage the noun heed is most often the object of the verb take. “Take heed, my dear,” wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1689, “time flies apace.” More rarely, heed serves as the object of the verb pay, which has a rather different connotation. To take heed is to take note of, to grasp the significance of a thing or event or situation. But to pay heed is to extend oneself: to offer care and respect to the object of attention. Like its distant cousin “paying homage,” paying heed may be an act of duty, but it can also be an act of generosity, requiring an expense of effort in the service of something or someone other than oneself.

Defined in that way, the act of paying heed has much in common with the practice of Zen. “Attention, attention, attention,” wrote the poet and Zen master Ikkyu (1394-1481), when asked to define the essence of the practice. To follow the way of Zen is to pay sustained attention to whatever is occurring, within us and around us, in the present moment. Beyond that, it is to bring a particular quality of attention to things as they are: an intimate, inquisitive attention to whatever we encounter. Ideally, that attention is both wholehearted and continuous. From moment to moment, we pay heed to the world and to our lives.

Yet, as the Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays reminds us, few of us live up to that ideal. Preoccupied with the past, the future, and our abstract thoughts, we habitually ignore the present moment. In her book Taming a Wild Elephant, Bays proposes a counter-measure, which can serve to awaken us from our reveries. Periodically throughout the day, she suggests, we can ask ourselves the question, “What am I ignoring?” By so doing, we can attenuate our inner monologue and open our awareness to our surroundings:

Ignoring the countless sights, sensations, and sounds that impinge on our eyes, skin, and ears may be essential when we need to focus on getting tasks done, such as reading a book before an exam, writing a sensitive e-mail, or getting a high score on a video game, but all that sensory blocking takes energy. When we are able to let go of those invisible shields and open our awareness to all that surrounds us, it is like stepping out of a cramped, musty room and finding ourselves in a large alpine meadow.*

An antidote to excessive cogitation, this exercise is also a way of cultivating appreciation for our lives. Ceasing to ignore our sensory field, we avail ourselves of its spaciousness and beauty.

There is often wisdom in archaic phrases. Like the sayings of the elders, such phrases preserve vanishing perspectives: ways of seeing that have left or are leaving the world. It is fair to say that in a world of ubiquitous mobile devices and obsessive connectivity, the act of paying heed, like the phrase used to describe it, is itself endangered, if not already going extinct. In a culture enamored of its entertainments, Zen practice can help us return to our actual lives. In a world rife with distractions, it can help us pay heed to our fields.

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* Jan Chozen Bays, Taming a Wild Elephant (Shambhala, 2011), Kindle edition, 151.

Photo by Oliver Dixon