In this issue:
In the course of spiritual training it can happen that a particular bit of teaching will have a profound, even life-changing, effect. As Great Master Dogen writes in the Shushogi: “Even if it is only a single phrase or verse of teaching, it may be a seed to bring forth good fruit both now and hereafter.” And, a teaching may be heard ninety-nine times to no particular effect, and at the hundredth hearing it opens the heart of someone whose training readies them to hear it (as The Most Excellent Mirror Samadhi assures us, “When all conditions ripen…”). So do not be impatient if you keep hearing the same teachings again and again!
I experienced one such revelatory phrase of teaching in a dharma talk years ago as a lay person. The phrase was: Where there is hurt, there is self. The “rightness” of this teaching for me went straight into my heart-mind and lit up the fundamental nature of my suffering. It became a kind of mantra for me and has been a grounding point down the years of my training.
Based on our karmic inheritance, and experiences in this life, we have a sense of self-identity that seems deceptively solid and permanent, i.e., our egocentric self. When something or someone threatens to reveal the weak and tenuous nature of that self, we respond in “flight or fight” mode. It is often simply someone saying something that “hurts our feelings”; who does not appreciate our “specialness.” The list of possible insults, gross and subtle, to our self is depressingly long and we each have particular “buttons” that are especially sensitive to being pushed.
But what is it, really, that experiences hurt/resentment/indignation/ depression….? Nothing real, because whatever mental or emotional states we experience sooner-or-later pass away. But while they last, and we identify with them and grip them tightly, we suffer.
The misidentification of our essential Self with passing mental and emotional states is built into the very structure of our language, which makes it so close to us that it can be hard to see. In English, and some other languages, we say, “I am angry; I amhappy; I amdepressed…”. To remove the condition therefore begs the frightful question, “If I am not that, then who am I ??” Who, indeed: discovering that is the purpose of our training, of our life.
I was intrigued to discover that in other languages the construct is, “I have anger; I havehappiness; I havedepression…”. Or, “I am exper-iencing anger; I am experiencinghappiness; I am experiencingdepression.” Unlike the “I am that” languages there is a space between the passing state and the one experiencing it.
Deep within us, in our hara—our spiritual center—beneath the surface waves of thought and emotion, is our eternally abiding unborn, undying, unchanging Buddha Nature…our true I am. That is who we fundamentally are, and it is That which—if we open our heart-mind to It—absorbs and transforms our passing states with acceptance and compassion. And that is why pure meditation is so critically important to our spiritual life, because it takes us to that Place and proves Its Reality to us and puts our passing states in proper perspective.
The opening lines of the Scripture of Great Wisdom describe this Place as “void, unstained, and Pure.” It goes on to explain that It is void of all the conditions that make up the egocentric self. By our training in meditation and the Precepts we can know this Purity. If we train in these “for some time,” as Great Master Dogen teaches in Rules for Meditation, then “the Treasure House will open naturally, and [we] will enjoy It fully.”