Zen is not stoicism. Many people see it otherwise. Stone faces and stiff upper lifts, and a nonchallant attitude. But all the Japanese Zen teachers I have trained with were never shy about expressing their true feelings. I’ve seen Zen masters share their joys and sorrows, their hates and their loves, their equanimity and their anxiety. Never did they not care about what was going on around them. They felt it all and felt it fully.
This is really our practice in meditation: to open our hearts up to what we are feeling, and to not try to push away the pains of the world. We get absorbed in whatever it is we feel in the present moment, but not in a self-conscious way.
Zen encourages us to not only feel what we are feeling, but to get a sense of how others may be feeling. We practice putting ourselves in their shoes. When sitting extended meditation retreats we are encouraged to put ourselves inside the body of the Buddha, and feel what the Buddha feels on his moment of Enlightenment. As we allow ourselves to feel the presence of the Buddha inside of us, or of ourselves inside the Buddha, we come closer to the Buddha, and feel the energy and vibration of the Buddha, taking that on as our own.
It’s wonderful to feel the Buddha, but we don’t have to limit ourselves to him. I’d like to share a feeling I had with my father many years ago, and how his way of thinking shaped me.
My father was a brilliant man. He died unexpectedly (but not surprisingly) in my mother’s arms while they were having dinner and reminiscing about the past. In the middle of a conversation my mother heard a bursting sound at his heart, my father put his hand to his chest, his eyes rolled back, he lost all color in his face and died right there. His death was not surprising because he had been struggling his whole life with heart disease, and thanks to modern medicine dodged a heart attack and stroke years before.
He was brilliant in the sense that he knew a lot about, what seemed to me as a child growing up with him, everything. I could always go to him for help in my math and science homework. Upon preparing for his funeral service, I came across his doctoral thesis and I was floored by the science. His thesis was filled with mathematical formulas so complex it would take me years of study just to understand them. His doctoral dissertation was about heat transfer from one thing to another and the specific wording he uses was “change of phase.”
While I could not understand much of my father’s dissertation, I had a dream in which the following image came to mind, using the words “change of phase” in a Buddhist context:
“Change of phase,” of course, could be another way of talking about death. What we become remains somewhat mysterious.
Prior to my father’s passing I had been practicing the Chinese characters you see written above, and while thinking about their meaning I had been writing about a memorable interaction I had with my father many years ago.
Here’s the story:
My family and I were sitting on a small, canopied motorboat on a lake in central Pennsylvania on a hot and humid mid-summer day in late afternoon gently floating past a shoreline wall of greyish black sedimentary rock layers dusted with green lichen. I was in my late 20’s at the time, living at a Mount Equity Zendo, and visiting my parents for a short weekend vacation. I felt alone. My body and mind felt disjointed, like an arm dislocated from its shoulder socket. I was “reading” from a mental script patterned long ago that said the equivalent of, “You are a failure. You will never amount to anything.”
While sitting on the hard seats of the boat my father, out of what seemed to be left field, says, “These rocks are millions of years old.” His words, “These rocks are millions of years old,” like a good chiropractic adjustment, snapped me back to myself and helped me see the sacredness of the moment that I was in, regardless of my alone state. In that moment my father, without knowing or intending it, was my teacher. He shifted me out of my own funk and inadvertently affirmed my path. Now that he has passed away, when I think back on my relationship with him, there were numerous such instances that occurred where my father demonstrated what is commonly known as deep-time thought.
It’s a misunderstanding to think that thought is a distraction in meditation. Are all thoughts problematic? What about the thought of Enlightenment? When I first began practicing meditation, I heard the instruction about not getting caught in thoughts, but I think this is too simplistic an understanding of the role of thought within meditation. It’s true that thought needs to be put in its proper perspective, and that practice can help us let go of thoughts. But within practice we need to distinguish between mundane and deep thoughts.
The Chinese characters in the above phrase read, “take an attitude absorbed in thought / meditation when you are alone.” I received help translating this saying from my calligraphy teacher, Mariko Tachihara. She translated 思 “omoi” as “thought” or “meditation.” It could also be translated as “to ponder,” “to contemplate,” “feeling,” or “mood.”
The word “feeling” is very important in Japanese culture. When a deep feeling is paid attention to and followed, it can lead to a sense of aliveness. “Feeling” in this sense is not exactly the same as feelings or emotions as we commonly think of them in the West. In some meditation circles there is the practice of naming strong emotions such as anger or anxiety to diffuse them. In the context of zazen, however, we are not contemplating an emotion for the sake of understanding or naming the emotion or analyzing where the emotion came from, as important as that kind of practice can be. Rather, the “feeling” sensed in zazen is more of an intuitive sense that affirms what one is experiencing through the senses. It’s this feeling that eventually needs to be paid greater attention to than guidance from an external source.
If we break down 思, omoi, “feeling,” the top part means field, and the bottom means heart or mind. Heart and mind are used interchangeably in Japanese, and when a Japanese person says they are thinking, some will point to their heart rather than their head. In any case, feeling is not separated from thought.
Words, thoughts, and feelings, contrary to being simply a distraction in meditation, can shape the way we perceive reality in very positive and what Buddhism calls “wholesome” ways. When we focus our attention on something like, “these rocks are millions of years old,” we may get a deep feeling about what we are perceiving. Suddenly, what was ordinary becomes extraordinary. This is what this set of Chinese Characters means to me, “To feel deeply.” They could also be interpreted as, “Absorb yourself thinking deeply in the present moment [as in meditation].” Every moment is an opportunity to feel or think deeply about the life around and inside of us, just like what happened to me while riding on the boat with my father.
Our society values productivity, not a contemplative attitude. When we dare to see the world deeply, or to feel it deeply, it may initially seem like we are wasting our time. We might even use our Zen practice to disregard such deep intuitive feeling, but if we stay with this deep feeling we can enter deep time. A recent Lion’s Roar article entitled, “Can We Reimagine School Through a Buddhist Lens” says the following about productivity:
The author asks, “What if we loosened our hold on this need to be productive? How could we reimagine the purpose of schooling?”
Our schools value production and cognitively based learning, often missing the “feelings” behind learning. Cultivating a love of learning any subject, even economics, imbued with a deep feeling about what you are learning, as opposed to the greediness associated with gain or productivity, may seem foreign to many American students.
Because of this misguided kind of learning, sometimes we overlook the role of “feeling” within Zen practice, and see all thoughts or feelings as mere distractions. But thoughts, ideas, and the writings within sutras can inform and direct our meditation.
The words of Buddhist masters have the power to transform the way we think and feel. Consider the following from the Avatamsaka Sutra:
Some lands last an eon, some exist for ten eons, Or for more eons than atoms In a hundred thousand lands
Those rocks on the shore at that lake in Pennsylvania had been formed eons ago. Without having the eye that recognizes the deep feeling associated with my father’s words, “These rocks are millions of years old,” we might miss an opportunity for deep time thought, and the sense of unity that comes with connecting to rocks that are eons old. The atoms in our body are, likewise, as old as the cosmos itself. Yet, it is too easy, in our mentally (and environmentally) toxic society for many of us to live in forgetfulness and frivolousness, throwing away education like we discard a plastic fork. We often waste time in pursuits that are based in ego gratification and gain because that is the bedrock assumption of the United States: to live for “the pursuit of happiness.” But Buddhism teaches that happiness is neither dependent on acquiring pleasure and material resources, nor in disavowing the pursuit of pleasure and material sources, but in seeing deeply into the inter-connected nature of reality all around us. When we look deeply we can see that the age of rocks is not different from our own age.