Nomon Tim offers a reflection on the theme of "No Gaining Idea," the topic selected for the community's June one-day sitting.

Stream audio:

Tim's talk notes:

[Molly and my moment during morning service. Accepting direction, or correction, with grace as a practice. Juniors and Seniors and how less heirarchical we actually are]

We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without any expectations, even of enlightenment. This does not mean, however, just to sit without any purpose.

This practice free from gaining ideas is based on the Heart Sutra.

However, if you are not careful the sutra itself will give you a gaining idea.

It says, "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form." But if you attach to that statement, you are liable to be involved in dualistic ideas: here is you, form, and here is emptiness, which you are trying to realize through your form.

So "form is emptiness, and emptiness is form" is still dualistic. But fortunately, our teaching goes on to say, "Form is form and emptiness is emptiness." Here there is no dualism.

When you find it difficult to stop your mind while you are sitting and when you are still trying to stop your mind, this is the stage of "form is emptiness and emptiness is form."

But while you are practicing in this dualistic way, more and more you will have oneness with your goal. And when your practice becomes effortless, you can stop your mind. This is the stage of "form is form and emptiness is emptiness."

To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body. Your mind follows your breathing. With your full mind you form the mudra in your hands.

With your whole mind you sit with painful legs without being disturbed by them. This is to sit without any gaining idea.

At first you may feel some restriction in your posture, but when you are not disturbed by the restriction, you have found the meaning of "emptiness is emptiness and form is form." So to find your own way under some restriction is the way of practice.

Practice does not mean that whatever you do, even lying down, is zazen. When the restrictions you have do not limit you, this is what we mean by practice.

You might have recognized this. It's Suzuki Roshi as recorded in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

When Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind came out in 1971 there were just a few English language books on Zen Practice.

There was a series of books by the lay Rinzai Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki published in the 1950's into 60's and there was Philip Kapleau's dramatic 1969 book The Three Pillars of Zen.

And the story of Zen both of these authors were telling was the story of the dramatic breakthrough into an awakened state.

D.T. Suzuki wrote

Satori is the raison d’être of Zen, without which Zen is not Zen.

And goes on and on about how everything in Zen is completely about creating these dramatic experiences.

And the Three Pillars of Zen gives blow by blow accounts of student and master in the dokusan room pushing and pushing towards awakening. (And it was to be fair also the first practical book on how to sit zazen and practice Zen). Many people were inspired to take up the practice by this book. If you've never read it I recommend it but do keep some pinches of salt read.

And to it's credit Three Pillars of Zen was also the first known English language book to really talk specifically with diagrams and everything about how to sit zazen. But the flavor and thrust of the book is everything Zen is in service of big awakening experiences.

I also read another dramatic telling of Zen as intense striving published in the early 70's called The Empty Mirror which is by this Dutch novelist who somehow gets the idea of training in Zen and is allowed into Daitoku-ji, with almost no Japanese! He trained there for a year. My favorite memory of that book was about night sitting, yaza, at the end of his first grueling day of life in the monk's hall the evening bell finally rings to go to sleep. Whew, he can't believe he survived the day. The monks in unison pull their futon anmd quilted blanked out of the cabinets at the ends of the ton. They lay down. And…suddenly they all get up! They scurry outside into the garden for the the practice of yaza - of night sitting - for another two hours. He doesn't himself have a big breakthrough that I remember but there's that valorizing the push push push intensity throughout the book. And a lot of beauty too, I found this book really moving back in the day.

Awakening - cosmic experience - suddenly everything is changed forever - deep insight into the true nature of reality.

It's a powerful tale.

And it's not wrong: there can be dramatic shifts that show up in subjective experience.

But the dramatic awakening story also creates a lot of problems and a lot of stress. What if your heart-mind just doesn't seem to work that way and you never get the special experience. There's no much of anywhere to go with that. Most likely you feel flawed and inadequate, or you might reject the practice.

And that powerful story was a powerful influence and planted deep seeds. We probably wouldn't have the American Zen scene we do now without it. In the 60's and 70's it was a powerful fit to the countercultural seekers who filled the first Westernized meditation halls. (And whenever we talk about the "birth" of Buddhism in the West, let's remember that Buddhism had already been lived and practiced deeply in immigrant populations for as long as a 100 years by then largely unnoticed by the white intellectual literati and hippies).

And then along comes Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.  This humble, quirky, deep, book. Suzuki Roshi's charming version of English (which is much cleaned up by the editors of the book from the transcripts of what he actually said). That was my book, not Three Pillars of Zen which I did read early on. The Empty Mirror was a great tale but not a manual of the Dharma like ZMBM. I carried a copy with me everywhere I went for years. I'd open it up, read a few pages, not really understand them in the usual way of understanding anything, but I'd feel something. Something deep. Something would shift. There was magic in that book for me that I didn't understand but was strongly drawn to. Quiet and subtle magic.

We were talking a little on Thursday night about intensive practice. The stories of that in the tradition. There can be something happens when you push beyond your limits. And there can be something deeply valuable in those experiences. And they can also be really harmful. It depends. Janwillem van de Wetering, our Dutch novelist, was also a healthy 25 year old man who'd made a huge investment in getting himself into that situation and somehow that all added up to an important and valuable year of his life even if he didn't understand what was happening much of the time showing up with romantic notions of Zen, no context or prior training, and no Japanese. Can you imagine?

Anyway along comes Suzuki Roshi presenting the early Western Zen world with a completely different approach and understanding. Letting go of yourself isn't crushing your ego in all night zazen sweating bullets about the "mu" koan - it's actually completely being yourself. It is rigorous: the monastery Suzuki Roshi founded, Tassajara, retains the 3:50 am wake up that Suzuki Roshi experienced in his training at Eheiji to this day. So there is a big commitment but the spirit is the spirit of letting go, not the spirit of pushing through.

He said, "when you are you, Zen is Zen" and a zillion other expressions all pointing to this same understanding. There is effort, yes, but it's the effort of practice-verification, not the effort of improvement or problem solving.

It's like DT Suzuki and Kapleau Roshi lit the fire and Suzuki Roshi came along later with a bucket of water - pooooshhhhh. Let's all calm down a little here. Striving leads to nothing but suffering. Striving for enlightenment is….striving.

I think about it like:

One way to think about practice is there's something wrong with you, you aren't enlightened for sure and that's just the tip of iceberg of the disaster you are, and you need a total overhaul. So light the fire and get to work. Do the "inner work" - a funny phrase if you think about, what's being worked on, by whom, with what tools, what's being produced in this inner work.

But the other way to think about it is sitting down to let the rigid box we put around our core idea of inadequacy dissolve away. it may take a while, a really long while, but sooner or later we'll see our true nature. We'll realize there was never anything wrong to start with.

Or: actually it taking a long time for our deluded belief in our deludedness is only half way there. It's already clear. Just to sit down and be buddha nature. Right here, right now. No later involved.

Of course Suzuki Roshi didn't make up this idea of no gaining idea. He's channeling Dōgen. He's living into and sharing a Dōgen's fundamental teachings of practice-verification.  That's Suzuki Roshi's expression of Dōgen Zen.

And both of them are living into a core Mahayana teaching called the Three Doors of Liberation—Emptiness, Signlessness, and Wishlessness.

These three practices do appear in early Buddhist teachings, but are more commonly found in the Mahayana. In contemporary Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh frequently taught on these.

The third door—Wishlessness or Aimlessness—has a particular resonance in our own Zen tradition. It is a rich vein of practice in Soto Zen, from Dogen through to Suzuki and Sojun Roshi.

Scholar Edward Conze offers this gloss on Wishlessness (apranihita in Sanskrit):

The word apranihita means literally that one “places nothing in front,” and it designates someone who makes no plans for the future, has no hopes for it, who is aimless, not bent on anything, without predilection or desire for the objects of perception.

Late in his life, the recently departed Sojun Mel Weitsman, Suzuki Roshi's close disciple in Berkeley, lectured on the Three Doors of Liberation, and said this about Wishlessness:

Wishlessness means letting go and appreciating. Letting go and being able to appreciate everything around us just as it is. To accept myself just as I am. This is called virtue. Everyone has their own virtue, which is not the same as value. Value is comparison. We stop comparing ourselves to others.

In Shobogenzo-Zuimonki - the teachings Dōgen's student Ejo jotted down, Dogen offers this advice, his approach to wishlessness, no gaining idea, and the heart of Buddhist practice:

Simply do good without expectation of reward or recognition, be truly gainless, and work for the sake of benefiting others. The primary point to bear in mind is to drop your ego. To keep this mind you have to awaken to impermanence.

“Awakening to impermanence” might sound like a gaining idea—the quest for enlightenment or attainment. And our practice is to digest that it's not something outside of us: is always right here, if only we can let go of our goals and aims.

In fact, it is a “losing idea”—losing our self-centeredness and attachment to ego. This is such a radical shift, but maybe it is not so easy. This point is pivotal in the Heart Sutra when Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra: 

With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva depends on prajna paramita

And the mind is no hindrance.

Without any hindrance no fears exist;

Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in nirvana.

Dōgen himself never writes "no gaining idea" - I know as I now have a searchable PDF of the entire Shobogenzo! - but it's what's woven into everything he teaches.

The wonderful little koan at the end of Genjo Koan speaks to this:

Mayu, Zen Master Baoche, was fanning himself.

A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?”

“Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent,” Mayu replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”

“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk.

Mayu just kept fanning himself.

The monk bowed deeply.

There is something "to understand here". Dōgen's constantly admonishing us to look deeply, to explore and get curious about how things are. And yet the explanation is not a quotation or a teaching it's physical, it's embodied, it's right here and now. The master just kept fanning himself.

Wind here can be seen as a metaphor for practice-enlightenment and the whole story is exactly about the question that drove Dōgen along his spiritual quest in the first place. If we are all Buddha, why do we have to practice? The wind - buddha nature, awakening, just this as it is - is already everywhere - why would we need to make wind happen by fanning yourself?

If you're awakened why do you need to practice?

If it's not to get something - to generate some new you - why do you practice?

[mime fanning myself]

Do you understand?

Back to to the quotation I opened with: Suzuki Roshi's folding no gaining idea into form and emptiness, into the heart sutra.

What is it you think you could gain here at Red Cedar? What are you looking for in your practice?

We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without any expectations, even of enlightenment. This does not mean, however, just to sit without any purpose. This practice free from gaining ideas is based on the Heart Sutra.

However, if you are not careful the sutra itself will give you a gaining idea.

It says, "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form." But if you attach to that statement, you are liable to be involved in dualistic ideas: here is you, form, and here is emptiness, which you are trying to realize through your form.

So "form is emptiness, and emptiness is form" is still dualistic. But fortunately, our teaching goes on to say, "Form is form and emptiness is emptiness." Here there is no dualism.

Form is the appearance of form, emptiness is the empty nature of everything. Things appear, they have this appearance of reality, but they are truly just manifestation, just a brief flash of sensory experience. They change - but that's not quite right - if there's a they to change what's that they that's changing? Change is. Form is change. Emptiness is the space of change and interpenetration of all things.

I think I'm me, and you are you. That "I" is just an idea. Where is this "I".

And yet it's also true that "Form is form and emptiness is emptiness." That my experience this moment is exactly this subjective experience of Tim-ness arising according to conditions. According to my history and education, to all the many people who influenced me, by the situation we find ourselves in right now with me apparently giving a Dharma Talk and you apparently listening.

And what could possibly be gained here? Anything you can think of to gain is empty too. There's nothing solid there. If you look careful any goals you might have dissolve into vagueness and mist. "I want to be calm" - well what does that really mean? And so on.

A silly example from my life. I appreciate catching myself in the little things as that's where I find it more possible to notice these patterns:

I was checking Facebook yesterday and another mindfulness teacher I know is teaching a retreat on Mindful Self-Compassion that I've taught several times, but we've been having trouble making this retreat go at Mindfulness Northwest for the last several years and have pretty much given up on it. So maybe I'm carrying some little sense of failure around that.

And here's this other teacher and she's posted - in a sweet and skillfully written little bit of self-promotion on Facebook, that she's teaching it at Hollyhock, a groovy and lovely retreat center on Cortez Island up in B.C.

Darn it. I want that. I want to gain "teaching an MSC Intensive at Hollyhock" - that was were my mind went immediately. Jealousy is a gaining idea.

Megan Prager has something I want so I want it. (None of this is her fault even kind of - lovely person, more power to her).

And then I could watch that gaining idea evaporate. A little reframing helps in the world of form: Tim, you have zero time for another retreat you already get to teach many every year for goodness sakes.

But there was also something there happening in the world of emptiness: And I could see that little flare of inadequacy and comparison flicker up, and (pretty much) flicker out.

My jealous moment reading about Megan has some experiential reality to it: form is form, and it's also completely empty and unsubstantial and basically silly: form is emptiness.

So practicing with no gaining idea doesn't mean there are no gaining ideas. But we sit with them, we see the suffering they cause, we see through them, and let them go again. And again. And again. Catch and release.

Suzuki Roshi goes on

When you find it difficult to stop your mind while you are sitting and when you are still trying to stop your mind, this is the stage of "form is emptiness and emptiness is form."

But while you are practicing in this dualistic way, more and more you will have oneness with your goal. And when your practice becomes effortless, you can stop your mind. This is the stage of "form is form and emptiness is emptiness."

Instead of "stop" the mind, maybe relax the mind is clearer:

When you find it difficult to relax your mind while you are sitting and when you are still trying to relax your mind, this is the stage of "form is emptiness and emptiness is form."

We're trying - form - to see the emptiness of the mind. We're running around in circles.

But we're also practicing. It's okay to run around in circles. That may be our karmic work that just needs to happen. Eventually you get tired enough that you stop. Maybe you see what you're doing and you naturally stop running around in circles that can happen. Or maybe you get so exhausted that you just can't keep it up anymore. If you are still practicing awareness in that moment you can see collapsing in exhaustion as a great breakthrough instead of a failure. What a relief.

So maybe we aren't feeling the full beauty of it yet but we're still fanning ourselves on a breezy day in the mind. Even if we're still divided, still caught in gaining idea, a bit "dualistic" is how he says that here, we're gradually, sometimes smooth gradual, sometimes bumpy gradual, but inevitably living into  this no-gaining-idea.

He clarifies further:

To stop (or relax) your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body. Your mind follows your breathing. With your full mind you form the mudra in your hands.

Let the mind be the mind. If it's agitated sit as agitated Buddha. If it's fearful sit as fearful Buddha. If it's quiet and peaceful sit as quiet and peaceful Buddha. The thing is one isn't better than the other. Let it fill you completely. Be fully and totally as you are. When you are you, Zen is Zen.

And to remember here that zazen isn't taking a special posture so that you can do your "inner work" on the mind. The posture itself is zazen is fanning is awakening. Merge mind with breathing, with posture, with the mudra. We'd do well I think to pay a little more attention to our mudra practice.

And to finish the passage:

With your whole mind you sit with painful legs without being disturbed by them. This is to sit without any gaining idea.

At first you may feel some restriction in your posture, but when you are not disturbed by the restriction, you have found the meaning of "emptiness is emptiness and form is form." So to find your own way under some restriction is the way of practice.

Practice does not mean that whatever you do, even lying down, is zazen. When the restrictions you have do not limit you, this is what we mean by practice.

The freedom here isn't that we never feel any discomfort or doubt or constriction - it's that we can merge with that too - form is emptiness - we can fully allow that to be part of what's here and it doesn't need to limit us. We may still feel limited in the subjective way that we evaluate what's going on but our practice is to feel the emptiness, or boundlessness, of the whole thing.

This is not so mysterious. Haven't you been surprised more than once that sometimes when you were feeling really crummy but you somehow find a way to engage with whatever's going on it goes just fine? "I can't do it" is a relative experience, a form in which the idea of limitation expresses, and that "I can do it" is also empty of any substantial reality.

Letting go of gaining idea takes the wind out of the sails of "I'm not good enough" which is one of the strongest limitations, the most powerful restrictions, of all.