Presented by: Henry C. Finney
Do your best and never mind the results. If things work out it’s very nice. If, in spite of everything, they do not, it’s very nice. Or the other way around. You might say that it’s all wrong and not nice at all. Both conclusions are correct. You can laugh and you can cry. It does not matter at all what you do, but personally I would prefer to laugh. And meanwhile we continue to do our best. For no reason at all. Don’t attach a purpose to it. And go on ’till you die, or become too old. Then rest. You may get sick. You may have an accident. Or everything may work with you. You may be healthy and famous and rich right up to the last minute. Whatever happens is quite immaterial. No purpose.
How do you (know)… that you are on the right path? (In a sense,) Buddhism is negative. It will tell you what it is not. When you insist that it must be something it merely allows for an open space, which you can fill in as you like. It is only specific about its methods. It tells you to meditate, to be conscious of what you are doing, to do your best. It tells you to earn your daily food in a decent manner. It prescribes kind speech and thought. It suggests that you should create your own situations, rather than being pushed around by yourself and others. It warns that you should not avoid your own doubts. It recommends trying things out for yourself. It abhors all dogma. It doesn’t like you to impose your opinions on others. And it stresses that you should know yourself, your own laziness, pride and greed, which, together, constitute the power which turns the wheel of life.
The Zen master is talking to his disciple. The disciple is always asking… He wants the teacher to give.
But the master does not give anything.
“So what do I have to let go?” the disciple asks, but the master has walked off and isn’t listening
He has to let go of himself. His ideas. Even the insight he thinks he has found. No attainments. Nothing at all. He has to forget his own personality, his own name
A Chinese allegory tells how a monk sets off on a long pilgrimage to find the Buddha. He spends years and years on his quest and finally he comes to the country where the Buddha lives
He crosses a river; it is a wide river, and he looks about him while the boatman rows him across.
There is a corpse floating on the water and it is coming closer.
The monk looks. The corpse is so close he can touch it. He recognizes the corpse; it is his own.
The monk loses all self-control and wails.
There he floats, dead. Nothing remains.
Anything he has even been, ever learned, ever owned, floats past him, still and without life, moved by the slow current of the wide river.
It is the first moment of his liberation.
GREETINGS:
Good morning, everyone. My name is Henry Finney. My wife Helen and I have been Unitarians for many years, and one of the things that drew us to Unitarianism originally was its openness to the great variety of human religious experiences. I would like to share with you this morning one variety that has become very important to me — Zen Buddhism.
PRESENTATION
I want to tell you today about an ongoing spiritual journey that began for me in 1984, but which, as you will see, really has much older roots. To help you make sense of my meanderings, I will tell you the punch-line before I relate the story. But be wary of the false illusion that I knew where I was going initially. On the contrary, my spiritual travels are more like artists’ experience of CREATING the very path on which they travel. In this sense, my title today is misleading, for it may falsely imply that taking the path of Zen is like taking a road whose destination is known. Except in the general sense of looking for happiness or self-realization, you don’t know the destination. Only afterwards does it seem like you did. As Van de Wetering wrote in that passage I read, “Do your best and never mind the results. Don’t attach a purpose (or final goal) to it.”
The punch line is that in the midst of a time of difficulties, I found a “way” — that is, a “method” or “procedure” for living my life in a deeper way than I had ever dreamed possible. It is a method that is simultaneously practical, psychological, socially responsible and religious — and, I might add, utterly compatible with Unitarianism. It was not a “conversion” to some kind of scarce virtue that “you too” can share if only you will just “convert!” It is more like a “do it yourself” method of living that requires hard work, but really doeswork. That “way” is Zen Buddhism — or as fellow Buddhists prefer to say, “Zen Practice.”
By “Zen Practice,” I mean a conscious and gradual cultivation of a state of mind that I can summon to some degree at will in whatever I’m doing. If my practice is strong and I chose to do so, focusing this state of mind on what I’m doing is like waking up. What I’m doing becomes everything for the moment, ultimately profound, or sacred, and yet utterly practical, or mundane. This may not seem like such a big deal — and after awhile it isn’t. But compared to the feeling of wandering in a wasteland — or as we say in Buddhism, being trapped in Samsara and delusion — it is a very big deal indeed.
Alice in Wonderland provides an analogy. Imagine that we live IN the rabbit hole, rather than up here, where we think we do; and imagine that Alice (that is, you) had been in that crazy place all the time. The Zen frame of mind is like leaving the Mad Hatter’s tea party and coming out of the rabbit hole to reality, to sanity. I might have sub-titled my talk, “back out the rabbit hole,” except the Red Queen would probably have objected.
I will try to be more specific in a moment. But for now, think of this “practice” as a method for achieving some degree of non-attached, yet total engagement. But a caution. Except for the master, who has completed his or her “Zen studies,” you don’t just “turn on” this attitude, like flipping on a light. One’s ability to call it up depends on strong practice and hard work. The switch is instead a rheostat; if your practice is weak — perhaps because your are a beginner, or have gotten lazy — you get only a faint light. But then, even a faint light can help you avoid stubbing your toe.
Well, all of these metaphors will mean more if I share some of the experience that led to them. And maybe a good place to begin is with my mother’s response to my request at age eight to attend Sunday school. This was, after all, perhaps my first expression of interest in religion. Her response was simple. “Sure, fine with me,” she said. Period. End of exchange.
As you might infer, my family was not at all religious, maybe because there had been too much of that old-time nonsense in previous generations. My grandfather was a Methodist minister before he was swept away by the “social gospel” and became a sociologist, like me; and back a few generations more Charles Grandison Finney, one of the famed bible-pounders of 19th Century America, had exerted his religious karma on the family in ways that might baffle him now — Buddhism, I’m sure, was not part of his religious world view! Anyway, my parents never went to church and my request led nowhere.
However, my religious bent took other forms. One was a love of the arts, whose spirit is, I believe, closely akin to religion. I loved classical music, practiced the piano and violin, and grew up in a musical household. Both my parents played, and my father is a well-known classical composer. Later, I turned to visual art. I drew incessantly as a child, and have returned to art-making repeatedly throughout my life. Now, for me, drawing or painting from nature is, in effect, a religious experience. Perhaps this is where my later interest in Zen first revealed itself, for the closest thing to “being” nature, for me, is painting it.
As for so many people, my childhood years were both clouded and animated by a family dynamic that would leave an indelible imprint on me and later motivate much of the search that has led to where I am now. In a word, this dynamic was a tendency for my family to lack intimacy. This was no doubt partly due to both my parents having high professional aspirations and to consequent frequent and difficult absences, either by my parents, or by me at camp and boarding school, during my early years.
Jumping ahead to my undergraduate college days in the 1950s, my interests turned first to creative writing, and later to questions of social injustice, leading eventually to my graduate studies in sociology. On the way, I was active in various local civil-rights sit-ins and social action groups. Consistent with these interests, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan I finally settled on my first career of sociology — my second one being art. My wife Helen and I met in the research methods class, and in 1961 we were married. And wonder of statistical wonders, 34 years later we are still married, and it’s still looking good!
In 1961 I transferred to UC Berkeley to take my Ph.D. in sociology. I arrived just in time for the Free Speech Movement; my art-making “broke out” again, like some chronic medical condition; and a year before we left, in 1966, we had our first child, Catherine.
My first “real” job was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison — arriving just in time to kick tear-gas canisters back to the police, who were busy breaking up one of the first of many anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations. My continuing civil-rights interests also took Helen and me to the Delta region of Mississippi to deliver money and supplies to Fannie Lou Hamer on behalf of a local group, and later, to conduct research on a poor-people’s cooperative farm. There was little time for art, although I did squeeze in some local classes and worked on a sculpture in my basement. Our son Chris was born in Madison in 1970. Then, in 1973, Helen and I moved to the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Madison and Burlington were times of buckling down, of professional aspiration, of “publishing or perishing,” all at very high-pressured institutions. There was some publishing, and there was also some perishing and stress. I am not the speediest research writer, although enough to have earned the security of academic tenure. Several projects to which I was devoted bore only small fruits. But perhaps most of all, I had never resolved certain of those early family issues — issues which rearing one’s OWN kids seems somehow to re-awaken.
Almost as a response, my older quasi-religious interests reasserted themselves. My art “broke out” again. First ceramics, then drawing, then painting. Gradually it become more serious, and eventually a new professional aspiration. But making art was frustrating, for there was little time. Without formal art training, I had to be student and artist simultaneously, and that in the midst of intense teaching, research and writing. I began to be accepted into serious regional shows, to sell my work, to claim some prizes, and gradually to formulate a plan for graduate MFA training.
As part of my private religious renaissance, I even joined the Episcopal church briefly, loving its ritual, music and prayer. At last I was able to go to Sunday School! That Christianity is not my path, however, was harbingered by my son’s reaction to Communion one Sunday. Although not permitted at one time, many dioceses now permit the non-confirmed to take Communion. I asked Chris if he would like to. Since he had no idea what he was getting into, he rose and stood with me and the others in front of the altar.
No trouble with the Body of Christ — the wafers. But the Blood of Christ was alcoholic — sherry, I think. So, when the Priest came to Chris, he asked if Chris wanted a sip. Chris replies in a loud voice, “Oh, no thanks, I don’t drink beer.” Being asked to literally accept Christian dogmas was also a problem. Not long after, we joined the Unitarians. The way had actually been paved some years before by the words of the Unitarian minister who married us. In preparation for the ceremony, he had cheerfully explained that we could be wedded either “with or without God.”
The karma of earlier years and decisions could not be neutralized by new memberships, however, nor by picking up the paint brush once again. The difficulties and frustrations that had been building eventually erupted in the early 1980s into what we now neatly call a “mid-life crisis” — an overpowering sense of loss, from multiple sources, all at once. Counselling helped, but could not change the realities of biography. Circumstances prevented me from subscribing any longer to my own version of what is, I believe, a nearly universal illusion in the West — that one’s problems of living can finally be resolved, and the goals one seeks finally be realized, once “such-and-such” is achieved.
For different people, “such-and-such” can be achieving wealth, social status, scientific or academic accomplishment, professional reputation, rearing “successful” children, or love and acceptance by significant others. When several of these illusions crumble simultaneously, one’s sense of self can seem to collapse. Although from a Buddhist viewpoint, this sense of self is itself an illusion, the state of mind it’s collapse engenders makes a person rife for momentous changes. For some, the change can be a destructive or even dangerous. For others, the change can be an opening to growth.
For my part, I found myself searching for ways to resolve and leave behind the short-circuits of old and unresolved disappointments, to become more open to new possibilities. I had reached the limits of “rational” problem-solving, of words, of the “talking cure.” Therapy and words can’t undo history. At some point, if you don’t want your history jerking you about like a puppet on a string, that history has to be fully accepted. Rather than rejecting it, with the inevitable struggle that ensues (since you can’t undo it), you must find a way within and through the history. That can be hard.
Without knowing it, I had discovered the “First Noble Truth” of Buddhism — that life is lived in the midst of “samsara,” in the midst of unavoidable impermanence, change and suffering. About that time, I enrolled in a Unitarian “Building Your Own Theology” seminar. I was probably asking too much from the seminar, but in a much more serious way than in childhood, I was picking up again the religious search that had begun then.
One November Sunday morning in 1984, our Unitarian minister — a man named Robert Senghas — had invited a guest speaker for our normal service. I was there by chance, not to hear this particular speaker. Well, he began in so quiet a voice I could hardly hear, so I strained to catch his words. (My wife Helen’s response to his soft voice was to go to sleep!) Well, this tall, thin, bald-headed guy was quietly describing a 2,500 year old method for doing what I had been struggling to do, but with limited success so far. Namely, to free myself from dysfunctional habits of mind so as to find equanimity in the mist of stress, and more generally, to open myself to new possibilities for problem-solving and growth.
The speaker enunciated the “Second Noble Truth” of Buddhism, without calling it that. The ancient teaching says that suffering is caused by the attachments and desires engendered by beliefs and ideas, and especially by the beliefs and ideas that make up what we call our “self.” It is called “delusion” in Buddhism, which teaches there is no enduring basis for the self OTHER than these conditioned beliefs and ideas. In Buddhism, our “needs” and “desires” are a product of this illusion of self. It sounded to me like the speaker was referring to those unhappy habits of mind from which I was struggling to get free. It became clearer later on that I was right. Even though one’s history can’t be changed, one’s automatic, dysfunctional thoughts and feelings about it can be let go. One can penetrate beyond the words, ideas and conditioning that constitute one’s “self” to the actual experience of who one really is, and that experience is transformative.
Buddhism is filled with the imagery of Manjusuri’s liberating sword, symbolizing the Third Noble Truth that there can be an end to the suffering caused by delusion. You let the thoughts come up — including all those that define your “self” and what it “needs” — you acknowledge them, and then you consciously let them go, returning to your breath. This is the basic practice of beginning Zen meditation. You do that again and again, for longer and longer periods, over a prolonged time, getting better and better at it, until mind itself begins to be cleared and transformed. You work at it until you can let distracting thoughts go at will, until you can empty yourself and be fully open to the here and now, to the newness and freshness of this very moment itself, rather than be possessed by the problems of before, rather than perceiving the moment through a filter of beliefs and ideas.
The speaker was John Daido Loori, now the Abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, New York. He is one of the successors to the late Taizan Maezumi-Roshi, founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Shortly after, I visited Loori’s Monastery. I began meditating regularly and started attending longer meditation retreats. The effects of daily zazen, or sitting meditation, were immediate — noticeably greater equanimity, concentration, perceptual awareness, better sleep, and a marked reduction of stress and stress-behavior.
During a period of residence at the Monastery a year later, I formally received the precepts that mark one’s becoming an ordained lay Buddhist. Much like the Ten Commandments, the precepts define the moral and ethical framework of Zen. Two years later, I travelled in Japan with Loori as part of a small group from the Monastery to witness formal Soto ceremonies marking completion of his long training. Also, during that time the Unitarian Minister who had invited Loori to speak initially and I together founded the Zen Center of Burlington as a means of supporting our ongoing Zen practice. All in all, my practice of Zen Buddhism is the most meaningful and powerful religious development of my life, and I would like to spend my few remaining moments telling you why — or should I say, “how.”
For above all, Zen is a practice, a method. That means “practice” as in “practicing the piano.” As in Zen, one cannot learn to play the piano by reading about it, or by merely understanding it. You must do it. The method of Zen, however, is much broader, being a method of living, or a way of “practicing one’s life.” As such, it is a life-long practice. It is intentional, conscious, disciplined and structured. But at the same time, it is intuitive, mystical, and requires a strong mix of both faith and questioning. It is a method of rebirth, a method for re-entering and flowering right in the middle of the chaos and suffering of Samsara. The Buddhist image for that is being a “lotus in the fire.” Because of the concept of Nirvana, I suppose, Zen has been linked with the false notion that Zen practice is escapist. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is being alive right now, with total concentration, in everything you do.
More concretely, Zen training takes certain forms — although it is vital not to confuse the form — what we call the “upaya” or “skillful means” — with the essence. It is to these forms that the “Fourth Noble Truth” of Buddhism refers. This fourth teaching refers to the practices of the so-called “Eight-Fold Noble Path.” Van de Wetering referred to these other practices in the earlier reading, but the most central of them all is zazen, or sitting meditation.
Buddhism has the metaphor of one’s mind being like a house full of chattering monkeys, jabbering out of control. Zazen quiets the monkeys and helps one realize that the house created by their jabbering — our “self” and it’s world — is only a seamlessly interdependent part of the universe containing it. Although it may take years — ten years for that anonymous poet I quoted earlier from A Zen Forest — the concentration of zazen can grow and eventually cause the walls of one’s monkey house to dissolve away, so that one can see beyond.
Even those irritating koans of which almost everyone has heard — for instance, Hakuin’s famous koan, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” — are simply devices for helping the student to stop listening to the monkeys. Referring simply to “excitements,” rather than to monkeys, the late Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, described the goal of zazen this way:
…Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. If you become too busy and too excited, your mind becomes rough and ragged. This is not good. If possible, try to be always calm… Usually we become busier and busier, day by day, year by year, especially in our modern world. If we become… completely involved in our busy life, (then) …we will be lost. But if your mind is calm and constant, you can keep yourself away from the noisy world even though you are in the midst. In the midst of noise and change, your mind will be quiet and stable.
This a good description of what I referred to earlier as “the lotus in the fire.”
In my own experience, as the months and then years of zazen continued, a very gradual and then profound reintegration or resolution of mind — I am even tempted to say, of “personality” — has occurred. For some a dramatic and reorganizing breakthrough may occur. It was to such an experience that the concluding verse referred in the poem I read — “One midnight, by the lamplight, mind beyond matter.”
It is important to note, however, that these developments usually do not come without great effort. Zazen can be difficult — which is, by the way, one of the important reasons for studying with a teacher in a community context. Eric Fromm, the famed psychoanalyst, had great interest in zazen and likened it to a process of “de-repression.” All the things you’ve been trying to keep from the full light of consciousness come up! You confront all the issues of your life, both trivial and profound. How can I bear losing one of those most dear to me — my child, my spouse, my parent? What if I die, or fail, or loose my job? Or, just as important (to the monkeys of your mind), what if I miss my plane? What if my clothes don’t fit for the party on Saturday? You let it all come up, with all the attached emotions, and you consciously let it go. It’s not that you forget your history — that’s impossible. Rather, you learn gradually to be unentangled by it, to be “non-attached.” Just how difficult the process can be if pursued rigorously is suggested by the allegory of the corpse that I read earlier.
But why shouldn’t we expect that? We understand the necessity of rigorous training in competitive athletics or concert performance. Then why should spiritual training, discovering your own most fundamental self, what Niebur called your own “ground of being,” be any less demanding?
However, zazen and even enlightenment are not enough in Zen. To be stuck in the “stink” of enlightenment, or, in Suzuki’s phrase, to be all “excited” about Zen, is just another form of delusion. The ultimate point of Zen training is to apply the concentration, insight and compassion of zazen to every other dimension of living — to work, to family, to art, to social action. A Zen ideal is to live without separation, with compassion for the entire context of one’s life, at all levels. This includes compassion for others, of course, including those with whom conflicts arise, and even with one’s enemies.
Every evening Zen Buddhists end their zazen with a vow to “save all sentient beings,” which means to know intimately that their existence, their needs and their failings are yours as well. Solving the problems of the world — starting with your own, of course — isn’t somebody else’s responsibility. In Zen, it’s yours.
Also, as Van de Wetering explained in the opening reading, Buddhism “…suggests that you should create your own situations, rather than being pushed around by yourself and others…” How this possibility arises was clarified by Dogen Zenji, a great Zen teacher of 13th Century Japan. He explained that….
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self;
To study the self is to forget to the self;
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the
ten thousand things.
When the self is forgotten, the possibilities for “creating your own situations” expand to infinity. Thus, to forget the self is to be empowered. Empowerment, in turn, enormously expands what one is capable of doing, both for oneself and for others. It is for this reason that Zen so strongly emphasizes taking responsibility for one’s own situation, rather than blaming it on others.
Because Zen is a life-practice, it touches everything I do now to some extent. Equally accurate, all the different aspects of my life — work, art, family, social action, zazen — now constitute my Zen practice. There are ups and downs, as for everyone, times when practice is easier and stronger, times when it is harder and weaker. Old habits of mind persist. No magic. I am not a totally different person, as my wife Helen can tell you. But there is a new and ever-growing dimension of Zen mind; a growing ability to come out of the rabbit hole at will; and to increasingly muster some degree of non-attached commitment in most of what I do.
In Zen, sacred and secular are not separate. As Shibayama concluded in the flower poem I read earlier, “The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.” Sacredness in Zen is the focused state of mind you bring to what you are doing now — not day dreaming, or wishing for something different, or being bored and counting the moments until the end, or hoping “this” will lead to some great later achievement, or being distracted by your walkman while jogging. Just being attentive now, like the pianist when playing, or the karate practitioner when sparing. With sufficient concentration, what you’re doing is all there is. When that happens, what you’re doing is the most profound and sacred of all activities. Zen literature is full of sayings about this. Dogen, whom I quoted earlier, drove the point home in his recently translated instructions to the head monastery cook. His advice is relevant to all our activities, at home or at work.
…When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions. Maintain an attitude that tries to build great temples from ordinary greens, that expounds the Buddhadharma through the most trivial activity… Do not be negligent and careless just because the materials seem plain… Handle even a single leaf of a green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf… It is vital that we clarify and harmonize our lives with our work, and not lose sight of either the absolute or the practical.
Or, to draw from the writings of the late Shunryu Suzuki again, “to have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, pg. 76).
Well, this brings me to the end of my presentation, but before I conclude, would you please join with me in the responsive reading, Hakuin’s “Song of Zazen”:
RESPONSIVE READING: Hakuin’s “Song of Zazen”
ALL BEINGS BY NATURE ARE BUDDHA,
AS ICE BY NATURE IS WATER.
Apart from water there is no ice;
apart from beings, no Buddha.
HOW SAD THAT PEOPLE IGNORE THE NEAR
AND SEARCH FOR TRUTH AFAR;
like someone in the midst of water
crying out in thirst;
like a child of a wealthy home
wandering among the poor.
LOST ON DARK PATHS OF IGNORANCE,
WE WANDER THROUGH THE SIX WORLDS;
from dark path to dark path,
when shall we be freed from birth and death?
OH, THE ZAZEN OF THE MAHAYANA!
TO THIS THE HIGHEST PRAISE!
Devotion, repentance, training,
the many paramitas,
all have their source in zazen.
THOSE WHO TRY ZAZEN EVEN ONCE
WIPE AWAY BEGINNINGLESS WRONGDOINGS.
Where are all the dark paths then?
The Pure Land itself is near.
THOSE WHO HEAR THIS TRUTH EVEN ONCE
AND LISTEN WITH A GRATEFUL HEART,
treasuring it, revering it,
gain blessings without end.
MUCH MORE, THOSE WHO TURN ABOUT
AND BEAR WITNESS TO SELF-NATURE,
self-nature that is no-nature,
go far beyond mere doctrine.
HERE EFFECT AND CAUSE ARE THE SAME;
THE WAY IS NEITHER TWO NOR THREE.
With form that is no-form, going
and coming, we are never astray;
with thought that is no-thought, even singing
and dancing are the voice of the Law.
HOW BOUNDLESS AND FREE IS THE SKY OF SAMADHI!
HOW BRIGHT THE FULL MOON OF WISDOM!
Truly, is anything missing Now?
Nirvana is right here, before our eyes;
this very place is the Lotus Land;
this very body, the Buddha.
CONCLUDING “GATHA”
Allow me to conclude with a reminder that I heard at the end of almost every day when I lived at Zen Mountain Monastery:
Let me respectfully remind you,
Life and death are of Supreme Importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Awaken! Take heed!
Do not squander your life!
Biographical Footnote
October 1996
Since giving the preceding talk, Henry Chigen Finney has become a student of Jitsudo Ancheta, Sensei, who is Vice-Abott of Hidden Mountain Zen Center in Albuquerque and one of the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s Dharma successors. Chigen’s studies have included regular retreats at the Center, as well as a retreat with Ancheta Sensei in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico.
Numberless, numberless
Yellow leaves fluttering all over the earth.
THIS glowing, golden bough…. It knows.
Wandering aimlessly with credulous infant eyes…
Amazing! Marvelous!
Nothing remains the same as bright sun
burns away the morning mist.
Chigen
October 5, l996 in Cochiti Canyon, in
the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico
