Emptiness In Practice, Part 1
I want to start out by thanking all of you for your presence and your practice. Sangha inspires me, encourages me to investigate the dharma deeply, motivates my practice and I am deeply grateful for our interbeing. As I frequently say, I am here because you are here, and I am who I am in this present moment because of you and all being.
I’ve taken the title of this talk from Shohaku Okumura’s book Living By Vow. He uses”Emptiness in Practice” as a subheading in his chapter on The Heart Sutra which we’re studying in Wednesday Evening Dharma. This section of the chapter follows the section Okumura Roshi titled “Emptiness in Theory.” I will explore both those phrases in today’s talk.
When I first contemplated the phrase—Emptiness in Practice—it occurred to me that I had previously been verbalizing and engaging with the word “emptiness” as a philosophical concept to unknot, as a theory.
Last month during a Sunday discussion we explored a phrase attributed to Bodhidharma: "Beyond words and letters.” Bodhidharma’s complete poem that contains this teaching is this: ”A special transmission outside the scriptures, Not depending on words and letters; Directly pointing to the mind, Seeing into one's true nature and attaining Buddhahood.” When we know the context of this teaching, we can understand more deeply what Bodhidharma was aiming at with his words. During the 5th or 6th century CE when Bodhidharma lived, Chinese Buddhist practice heavily focused on texts, scholarly debates, and memorization of complex sutras. With his dictum not to rely on words and letters, Bodhidharma shifted the focus from academic scholarship to meditation as central to practice.
His teaching, emphasizing that ultimate reality, enlightenment, and direct spiritual experience cannot be captured or transmitted by language or scripture, has been repeated throughout the ages as the key to Zen practice. It has inspired volumes of words and letters that have been written and spoken about going beyond words and letters.
I’ll share my contribution to the ongoing discussion that I hope is relevant in this particular time and place. Bodhidharma is not rejecting words and letters, he is not saying words are bad, unhelpful, or damaging and something else is good. He uses the word “beyond.” His teaching says to go beyond words and letters by engaging in sitting practice.
Words are not only helpful, they are essential to our practice. We gain conceptual understanding by studying books, fascicles, sutras, koans and treatises; listening to teishos of our ancestors and contemporary teachers. Our engagement with concepts act as a spur to realization, liberation, transformation.
The ongoing practice of awakening is to bring awareness to the immediate, direct, personal experience with conceptual understanding as a kind of foundation. Dale S. Wright in his highly recommended book, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, sums this up when he writes: “…the practice of theoretical thinking comes to fruition when it becomes second nature, when its abstract and awkward character has been converted into intuitive instinct…. Concepts provide what it is that we practice; apart from these concepts, there is nothing to practice.”
So to build on these ideas in the context of this talk—What is emptiness in theory and what is it in practice? Emptiness in theory is not nothingness or the void. It means that nothing is fixed, permanent or independent, that everything always is in constant flux and arises from causes and conditions that themselves are constantly changing, without own being and connected to everything else. There is nothing about which we can say: This will always, permanently be like this. Emptiness is sometimes called thusness or suchness—the way things are before we interject our human tendency to divide things up into dualities—this or that, good and bad, self or other, pleasant or unpleasant, gain or loss etc.
Hoko Karnegis, dharma heir to Shohaku Okumura and Senior Dharma Teacher and leader of Sanshin Zen Community, says that emptiness also means that “whatever idea, label, judgment we attach to this thing is meaningless on an absolute level. As soon as I decide whether I like this or not, give it a name and write a story about what it means for ME, in the next moment that thing has changed, I’ve changed, and the idea or label doesn’t fit. Thus, emptiness doesn’t mean that things and people don’t exist; it means that because they are deeply impermanent, there’s nothing about them we can hold onto.”
What is practice in theory? Practice is doing something methodically, regularly and usually by choice. Practice is also defined as doing something instead of just thinking about it, as in putting a plan into practice.
These are ways we theoretically think about, explore, and investigate the concepts of emptiness and practice. The question for today and everyday is how do we practice emptiness? What does the direct experience of emptiness feel like? How do I act when I directly experience the interconnection and impermanence of self and all being? How do I actualize this fundamental point here and now?
Emptiness in practice refers to shikantaza, of course, as over and over again we experience the body-mind in the present moment. As we sit on our cushions, we live no fixed self and notice the dynamic flow of all experience. We notice the constant moment by moment flux of body-mind, the coming and going of sensations of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, the impermanence of this form sitting on this cushion, the sounds outside the window, the silence, all things and experiences without fixed self-nature. We notice over and over again that not even the I I think am is fixed or permanent.
Shikantaza practice is the practice of emptiness, the foundation upon which rests our awakened, aware lives. It is the practice—emphasize practice—of emptiness that engenders our ability to let be, let go, open the hand of thought so we experience the emptiness of this self we think we are and that we cling to as me. When we practice this emptiness of self, we also see that the person I face and with whom I am in relation is also empty, she is not an inherent, fixed self, but is also in constant flux.
Shohaku says: “All people and all things exist in ways other than how we see them. ...We develop the ability to see things clearly, closely, and deeply through the practice of letting go of thought. The practice of letting go of thought enables us to see people and things with fresh eyes,” says Shohaku. (p.170 Living By Vow) Our dharma brother Ensho shared in a Wednesday Evening Dharma discussion that he often silently asks this question when engaged with another person: “Who do you think you are talking to?“ If you think you know to whom you are talking, you are mistaken. If you think you know the you who is talking you are equally mistaken. This is emptiness in practice—we let go of thought over and over and over again so that we can see all things and beings with fresh eyes.
Why do we have to keep practicing this emptiness? In Living By Vow, [p. 164] Okumura says that we are never apart from reality, but we almost always lose sight of it because we imprison ourselves in our own narrow views, opinions, habit formations, what Okumura calls our “ready-made preconceptions or prejudices.” We lose sight of emptiness that teaches us that there is nothing at all to hold or grasp, and no one to do the grasping. Our preconceptions and prejudices that have been created by causes and conditions particular to each individual’s life, are so familiar, so comforting, so deeply engrained, we have to practice understanding them as ready-made, preconceived, or prejudicial. So deeply seated that we may act out ancient twisted karma without even being aware that we are doing so and acting in ways that are harmful to self and others and therefore to all being. Emptiness in practice, actually living emptiness, being the emptiness we are, means we practice not holding on or grasping over and over and over again.
Our tendency to judge, to divide all experience into dualities, makes us feel safe, as if we know what’s what, as if we’re in control. We are never in control. Surrendering to thusness, emptiness, is both liberating; we can relax and let it be. On the other hand, to live in this world we have to take a particular point of view. The third Zen Ancestor Sosan’s Faith in Mind poem starts with this often quoted verse: The great Way is not difficult; just avoid picking and choosing. The verse uses the word avoid, not the word eliminate. We have to pick and choose or we would not be able to move, literally. Each of us chose to get out of bed, get dressed, come to Sunday practice. We expressed a particular, personal point of view—I like to sit with sangha, I take refuge in the three treasures by logging on and practicing. We make choices all the time, and we practice noticing what motivates those choices—are our choices motivated by greed, hate, and delusion, by Mara, as we discussed last week, or are we motivated by bodhichitta, the awakened heart-mind that upholds the vows and precepts for the benefit of all being, including ourselves.
As we practice emptiness, we become more flexible, we cling less to our judgments and opinions and dig down into the core foundational teachings that are alive for us in this moment. We open to our lives as they are in this moment. This is how Dogen put it in Genjokoan: “To study the Buddha’s Way is to study the self. To study is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be realized by the ten thousand dharmas.” Emptiness in practice=study the self, forget the self, be that openness.
I said earlier that engaging in study and conversation gives us the tools with which we bring the dharma into our lives. Study and conversation give us stepping off points—I carry the words and concepts both in my conscious mind and subconsciously. They arise spontaneously as I live life. This is prajna—intuitive knowing. In previous talks I’ve used the metaphor of steeping tea in water. The tea leaves are the dharma, we are like water becoming tea. We become the dharma, we become the Buddha Way. At the same time we let go of dharma concepts when we notice we are clinging to them and they are becoming reified preconceptions that keep us from authentic action, from actualizing the fundamental point. We also notice when we grasp and cling to a phrase or a teaching without delving into what it may mean for us, when we accept a cursory understanding of it. We have faith and we trust that with patience we attain clarity and that clarity is for the time being; we let go of clarity and we experience whatever happens next. This is the whole-hearted practice of emptiness.
Theory and practice function together as we realize the Buddha way.
Dogen consistently encourages our practice with his admonition: “Investigate thoroughly.” Another way of saying this is: “Challenge your certainties.” Emptiness in practice is not to deny or reject conceptual thinking; it is to investigate and simultaneously avoid holding on to or reifying concepts. It is to drop all preconceptions (conceptions that exist prior to the moment we are living), pre-judgments (judgments and opinions that we hold inviolate regardless of the moment we are living) to notice the mind that seeks to know and pin down a “truth,” to recognize our tightly held opinions, and to respond to the reality of the moment we are living. This very moment has never been lived before and will never be lived again. Why drag your old, tightly held opinions and judgments into it? Live the emptiness you are. Live the newness of this very moment. What is happening right now?