Extract :
Introduction
R YOKAN’S
TEARS
DOGEN, A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY JAPANESE ZEN MASTER, ASKS,
“What is it that appears?”
This is also my question. What is it that appears? Who is it who is alive, in this body, in this world?
Time is strange. We live within it, depend on it, take it for granted, yet it relentlessly passes, and our lives slip through our fingers moment by moment. Where does time come from, and where does it go? How is it that every moment we are different, we grow, we develop, we are born, we die? What are we supposed to be doing with this life?
After many years of grappling with these questions during the course of my long spiritual practice, I have come to have a feeling for their answers. We don’t really know what appears, what time is, where it goes. But we are here to try to understand. And we all have our own way of understanding, and of expressing that understanding through the living of our lives.
Each of us has a place in this world. Taking that place, I have come to feel, is our real job as human beings. We are not generic people, we are individuals, and when we appreciate that fact completely and allow ourselves to embrace it and grow into it fully, we see that taking our unique place in this world is the one thing that gives us a sense of ultimate fulfillment.
Bantu tribesmen, it is said, sneak into the rooms of their children as they sleep and whisper in their ears, “Become what you are.”
To take our place is to mature, to grow into what we are. Mostly we take maturity for granted, as if it were something that comes quite naturally and completely as our bodies grow and our minds and hearts fill up with life experience. In fact, however, few of us are truly mature individuals; few of us really occupy our places. We are merely living out a dream of maturity, a set of received notions and images that passes for adu1thood~ What does it really mean to grow up? How do we do the work that will nurture a truly mature heart from which can flow healing words and deeds? Each of our lives depends on our undertaking the exploration that these questions urge us toward. And the mystery is that the whole world depends on each of us to take this human journey.
Taking our places as mature individuals in this world is not work we can do alone. We need others to help us, and we need to help others. For true maturity can never exist self-contained; it is relational, for we are relational beings, co-created each moment with what we come in contact with. Because we change, because we are open to and affected by the world, maturity must involve our capacity to know and love others.
The words of the epigraph to this book, “All real living is meeting,” are those of the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. He was making the profound observation that when we truly meet one another—beyond our defenses, beyond our preconceptions, beyond our needs and desires—and open ourselves to each other with the courage to step toward one another, then and only then can we be said to be completely alive.
Real maturity is always meeting what’s in front of you in this way. Although true maturity may be rare, we are all capable of it and can recognize it when we see it. When our lives are touched by a mature person, we feel it.
The Japanese Zen monk-poet Ryokan had a teenage nephew who was given to misbehavior. The boy’s mother didn’t know what to do with him, so she asked her brother for help. “You are a priest and a very good person. Maybe if you talk with him it will have some effect.”
Ryokan came to the house for dinner. The mother kept waiting for Ryokan to broach the subject of her son’s conduct, but the old monk just sat sadly eating. The meal finished, the dishes cleared, Ryokan made to leave. The boy helped the old man on with his sandals. As he was at work with the sandal straps he felt a warm drop fall onto his head. He looked up and saw Ryokan crying silently. After that night the boy no longer misbehaved.
We are all struggling with our own maturity; none of us can claim the job is finished to satisfaction. But we feel for each other, and that feeling softens and opens us, providing more room for us to grow. Although the process of maturing is endless, and all of us are in the midst of it, we can help each other through our human feeling, which is always wiser than we are.
Some years ago I undertook a project to mentor four adolescent boys in our Zen community. The time I spent with these boys became a deep exploration for me. I had already been teaching Zen for many years and had had many fruitful and close relationships with students. Practicing Zen together had been a good method for us to grow as human beings as we worked to understand and preserve an ancient religious tradition. But as I reflected on my Zen teaching in the light of the mentoring relationship I was undertaking with these four boys, a deeper sense of spiritual practice began to appear to me.
Spiritual practice, I gradually came to feel, is in essence the practice of maturity. The spiritual path leads us to the places we are meant to occupy in this world. Robes, chanting, ceremony, meditation, text study, and all the rest may be valuable in their own right, but their real purpose lies in the service of the path toward maturity. In spiritual practice we use these traditional techniques and practices as vehicles to warmly connect us so that we can help each other to find the true, lasting, and ongoing maturity that each of our lives requires.
Since I have come to feel this way about the spiritual path, I find my view corroborated everywhere in the religious literature I study. Truly growing up and into the fullness of our humanity is the great underlying theme of all religious teaching.
Buddhism, along with many other religious traditions, speaks of the possibility of a lasting and truly satisfying happiness that can endure even when times are tough. Such happiness can’t come from possessions or accomplishments, for these are transitory and will not suffice at the end of the day when life’s questions and contingencies loom large. In the end, secure happiness comes only with the solid feeling we have when we know that we have become the person we were meant to be in this lifetime—that we have matured and used the life we have been given in the best way we could.
When I think about the world of the future, with so many difficult choices ahead, 1 know that only mature people will be able to deal with what arises. I am heartened by the many people I know—young and old alike—who are concerned with their own maturity and willing to work toward it with full courage and energy. The development of human maturity does take much work and effort. But I am sure we are all capable of doing the work and enjoying its fruits. Maturity can’t be hurried or produced on schedule. Growth takes time. We have to steep ourselves for a while, like a good cup of tea. We need to go through what’s necessary for us to endure. We need time and commitment. Probably we also need some luck. But most of all we need encouragement and vision and mentors, grownups in our lives who can help.
Our particular lineage of Zen, founded by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, puts little emphasis on enlightenment. It’s not that we are unconcerned about enlightenment or that we are opposed to it. Enlightenment is certainly important. Personally seeing the truth of the teachings, breaking through the habit of selfcenteredness, opening out to something much wider, and having some clarity and flexibility—all of this is crucial. But just as important, or more important, as a sign of readiness to teach Zen is a person’s simple human maturity. Maybe someone is not very enlightened, or not enlightened at all. But if he or she is mature, it is good enough, for as Suzuki Roshi taught us, it is the ongoing practice, carried out with balance, faith, perseverance, kindness, and willingness to reach out to others, that is the most important thing. To practice like this takes a quiet and stable maturity.
It is humbling to realize what an immense job it is to truly accept the task of being human. There is so much room for growth and improvement, and the journey is endless. When you consider the lives of exemplary human beings—those who, like Jesus or Buddha, gave themselves totally to their paths— you begin to get a feeling for the depth and breadth that is not only possible but called for in each of us. It’s a challenge, maybe even an impossible challenge, but one that all of us have to undertake, for our humanness demands it of us and won’t let us settle for less.
Really growing up, becoming truly yourself—this takes openness and receptivity, inspiration, a loving heart, stability and persistence, trust in the world and in yourself. It takes a peaceful mind, but also an active, decisive, and courageous mind. It takes knowing how to live, knowing how to choose, and knowing how to share those choices with others.
What I have to say about all of this comes from my practice and experience through the years, but it is certainly not the last word. There is no last word. Maturity must be contemplated by each of us thoughtfully, and through action, as our lives unfold. |
