Dharma Talk, "How Does Buddhism See Mystery and Awe?"

I'm going to read you all something from this lovely book called The Way of Zhuangzi by Thomas Merton. This is just a collection. I've had this book for a long time. Let's see, when was this published? My copy, 1965. So it's kind of a yellow book. No, that's the copyright. I am not serious about that. I don't know when this particular edition was published here, but this is called The Breath of Nature. As I was thinking about our theme, something just pointed me right to this lovely text. In this text, there's a Chinese master, Master Qi, who's in dialogue with someone named Yu. Master Qi says, when great nature sighs, we hear the winds, which, noiseless in themselves, awaken voices from other beings, blowing on them. From every opening, loud voices sound. Have you not heard this rush of tones? There stands the overhanging wood on the steep mountain, old trees with holes and cracks, like snouts, maws, and ears, like beam sockets, like goblets. Grooves in the wood, hollows full of water. You hear mooing and roaring, whistling, shouts of command, grumblings, deep drones, sad flutes. One call awakens another in dialogue. Gentle winds sing timidly. Strong ones blast on without restraint. Then the wind dies down. The openings empty out their last sound. Have you not observed how all then trembles and subsides? Yu replied, I understand. The music of earth sings through a thousand holes. The music of man is made on flutes and instruments. What makes the music of heaven? Master Key said, something is blowing on a thousand different holes. Some power stands behind all this and makes the sounds die down. So, what is this power? During the pandemic, when we were all in lockdown, so this was during the summer of 2020, early part of the summer, those of us who just really love being in solitude and on retreat, I've talked to others who just relished that period. We couldn't go anywhere. We had to sort of be in our little pods wherever we were. I was teaching through Zoom. All my classes were on Zoom. But my social calendar was virtually non-existent. And believe me, it is quite full most of the time, almost too full sometimes. And so, I had plenty of time for retreat, for cooking food, for walking around the block at a time when someone who was on the other side of the street and unmasked would cause outrage in half the population, if you remember those days. And during one of my retreats, during that period of solitary retreat, I was living with two roommates at the time. We had a meditation room in our apartment, a beautiful space for practice. And in the absence of all that activity, in the absence of all that doing and relating and rushing from here to there and being in traffic and on and on, suddenly there was a profound opening from that meditation room. It was south-facing. The windows were south-facing. And I could always, sitting on my cushion, I could always see this blue open sky of late June. And in that quiet space, in that lack of dissonance and noise, there was a profound simplicity there amidst all the uncertainty of this new ailment, this disease that we were all learning about. And I began to write down some words, some poetry to a song that became Only the Fire. The song is called Only the Fire. And it will be not on our next album, but on the third one that I'm already have plenty of material for. The theme of it was something called Maha Shunyata. Maha is great. It is great, but it also means, literally means great. Maha and Shunyata, which is often, I think, poorly translated as emptiness. Really, it's related to quality of profound, spacious openness without form, without content. It is a very deep, profound experience of utter fullness without content. And it is luminous. It is bright. It is the mind. It is the ground luminosity of consciousness, just as it is radiantly shining in the words of the Buddha. So I began to write words to a song that we could play. I even came up with chords and with a motif and a drum part and such and began recording it at home. So what's interesting, that was when I really started to contemplate this notion of all, because within this Maha Shunyata, this state, this state of great emptiness was a fullness that could not be named. It was a fullness of presence and spaciousness of mind that had no words to it other than poetry. Often when I'm on retreat, that's the only language that makes any sense is poetic language. And there was an awe I was experiencing about the allness of all things. This, what we might call mystery, but it wasn't a cognitive form of mystery. We know perhaps intellectually what is a mystery, something that we don't have any knowledge about, or that just remains unseen somehow or hidden. You may have your own definitions of it. This wasn't that. This wasn't a cognitive sort of process. It was a profundity and almost being enamored with just the complete awesomeness of our cosmos and how everything is so deeply interrelated and interconnected, but at a visceral level of experience, not as just a good idea, or this may be what reality really is about. This is what inspired me. It stayed with me for weeks. And to some extent, it still does when I'm able to remember that this is the nature of things. In Buddhism, we're often taught that the point is, or the priority, is clarity, insight, and wisdom. This is what we seek to cultivate, or we at least seek to quiet the mind so that these qualities become more self-evident, and we're no longer running, as Margarita said, we're no longer running on this intellectual reasoning in which we strive to know things through our cognitive mind. So either we are on this path, whether it's a path of Dharma or Buddhism, or some other insight path or wisdom tradition, to know, to see clearly, to be wise in some way, and maybe to be skillful as well. The other side of this has to do with just the utter ordinariness of the awakened state. And I remember I used to go on Vipassana retreats a long time ago in California, where we were being taught that the state of awakening itself is just a completely ordinary state of mind. There's nothing special about it. There's nothing awesome about it. I have others heard teachings like this too. And yet, when you have the experience of profound openness and awareness, it is something that feels very different than just the ordinary, what in Tibetan Buddhism is called sem, S-E-M. This is the ordinary mind that is just going through life, projecting and pulling and grasping and rejecting the thinking mind. When that stops, and we have this experience of fullness, there is a deep visceral feeling something very unique and unusual, maybe because we haven't been able to access this for our entire lifetimes. And yet, it is actually quite familiar. It is so close in that we miss it through all the conditioning and all the experiences and feelings and thoughts that we have as we age. The other quality that we find in Buddhism is what's called beginner's mind or not knowing. And yet, I don't know about you, but for me, it's never been couched in wonderment. But not knowing is a state of clarity. It is a state of wisdom as not fearing, but it doesn't mean that you're, excuse me, not knowing implies not fearing. It's not like, I don't know, therefore I'm a little anxious about what I don't know. It's not that kind of not knowing. Not knowing does not mean that you are lost in uncertainty and anxiousness. It's not that kind, because that is second arrow. That is what we call discontent or suffering. So here, not knowing is a profundity of simply seeing reality just as it is in the moment without the filters, without the concepts, without all of these things. And it's seeing all things as they are and seeing what is beyond all things. What is it that holds all things? What we can call suchness or thusness. In Zen, this is a common term. So in any given moment, the suchness of being in that moment is not just bringing presence to life as it is, but it is also leaning into the presence of all other things. This is where, certainly in Vajrayana, the notion of bodhicitta, or love, or compassion, or Indra's jeweled net, or the Brahmajala, the jeweled net where all of our hearts are connected. It's not just a disembodied awareness, but it is that love, that intertwining, that inter-being, as Thich Nhat Hanh says it. And that's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome when you feel it that deeply. So perhaps it's a sense of interconnection, a sense of not just passively bearing witness to mystery, but also leaning into it, a willingness to encounter it, to meet with it, with humility, with a sense of simply wanting to abide in the comfort, in perhaps the trust, as some of you have mentioned, of mystery, or the faith that mystery is not a harmful, scary thing, but actually it could be that which supports every aspect of our lives, supports the path we're on, holds whatever we can't hold. The path does this. It holds whatever we are unable to hold, I think, as do any faith traditions that are deeply rooted within the heart. The other thing, too, is this sense, perhaps, that there is something beyond what we don't already know. And this certainly, I think, isn't, I think, encouraged enough in some of Buddhist traditions, that the path is leading you somewhere. And there can be a sense of inspiration. You know, we're often taught, don't focus on the goal, the path itself, just be in the moment, of course. And yet, there's something, there's some reason why we continue to show up on Sunday nights. There's some reason why we continue to sit on our cushion and quiet the mind. It's not just stress reduction. It's not just MBSR. It's great if that's what it is. And yet, MBSR, or secular mindfulness, or whatever it might be, becomes more profound when what the Buddha tells us in Satipatthana Sutra, the teaching of mindfulness, is that this is all you need for the realization of nirvana, or in the Pali language, nirvana. Well, that's a pretty important statement to ignore in a secular mindfulness program. The point here is that there is something the Buddha is saying, this path will get you, and it's a very practical one, to an end, or to perhaps maybe not an end, he doesn't say it that way, but to a state where everything opens up and becomes present to you in a different way. Suffering is diminished, if not eradicated, although certain forms of suffering are inevitable, such as the first arrow body, the pain of illness, of injury, those kinds of things. But the anguish that comes with that first arrow, what we call the second arrow, the mental suffering, begins to change because our relationship with it changes. All of this being perhaps having faith, shraddha, faith in the path, in the practice, and ultimately in the Tathagata, the Buddha nature, the heart of our own awareness, abiding gently, always, the unchanging, if you will. So the question then becomes, and here's a note I wrote down, I don't know what I think of this, but the question is, is it possible for mystery to become realized? Is it possible for mystery to become realized? In other words, is mystery something that needs to be solved in order to be awake? I don't think so. My teacher Leslie, she would tell us stories about being out in the desert and practicing with her community, and just the awesomeness of the desert sky, with the light so clear, you could almost see the Milky Way, just because there's no radiant light from cities and buildings. Yeah, no light pollution. The awesomeness. Just on our retreat a couple of weeks ago, I think, let's see, a couple of you were there. Justine and Ken were there. We went out and tried to do a, the idea was to go outside at night after we did this dance and percussion thing, and meditate on the moon and the stars in the sky. Well, it turned out to be very cloudy, and Marie, who's not here with us tonight, somehow was able in moments to park those clouds, and the moon just kind of appeared. And then when it covered up again, I said, Marie, go, and can you do that again? And she did, and sure enough, she was surprised too. Anyway, it was delightful. But the thing was that Kenpo, Kenpo Kalsung, who co-led the retreat with me, I think when he would look up at the night and the moon and such, I sensed in him a quality of bearing witness to the sky, to the clouds, to the moon, that had also recognition. It's not either or, in other words. And in that moment, I wasn't thinking about this theme, but in hindsight, and maybe I was going back and projecting into that moment, but I was thinking about that. I was thinking about the sense of recognition that can come with insight and clarity, despite the great, awesome mystery of the universe. That it's not as paradoxical as it might seem, remembering that paradoxes are only apparent paradoxes. They're only paradoxical to our rational thinking, to our comprehension, to our cognitive mind. But that the two can exist simultaneously. A sense of wonderment and profundity, and yes, mystery, and a sense of clarity and connection and insight. I think that's worth exploring, especially when we can quiet the mind, when silence can become a doorway. Just like Zhuangzi says to you in this passage, that silence becomes a doorway to that unity, that unification of clarity and insight and mystery. And maybe that's how we lean into it. We lean into mystery with a full heart, a wholeness, when we're not afraid of it, when we're not. And okay, if fear is part of it, so be it. It doesn't mean that that's a non-starter. But rather than just passively bearing witness, how do I open even more when there is mystery, lean into it, encounter it with all that I am? I think that could be transformational, especially if it inspires my heart to love more deeply, to be more compassionate on behalf of all beings.