Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

— Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

Thirteen hundred years ago at Nan Hua Temple in China, when Master Huineng, the Sixth Zen Ancestor, taught his verses of “Formless Repentance” he offered his own version of the Bodhisattva’s Four Vows.

The sentient beings of our own minds are numberless, and we vow to save them all. The afflictions of our own minds are limitless, and we vow to eradicate them all. The teachings of our own minds are inexhaustible, and we vow to learn them all. The enlightenment of buddhahood of our own minds is unsurpassable, and we vow to achieve it.

Huineng’s first vow goes to the root of practice. “The sentient beings of our own minds are limitless, and we vow to save them all.” This is my personal work, each person’s work. Like Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The Theravadan scholar Nyanaponika Thera writes:

“There are within us countless seeds for new lives, for innumerable potential “beings,” all of whom we should vow to liberate from the wheel of samsara, as the Sixth Zen Patriarch expressed it.” (Nyanaponika, The Vision of Dhamma, 109)

Then, in a footnote he speculates:

“This may be a somewhat ironical reference by that great sage to the fact that the well-known Mahayanic Bodhisattva vow of liberating all beings of the universe is often taken much too light-heartedly by many of his fellow Mahayanists.”

Maybe so, but at our temple, the Bodhisattva Vows are chanted again and again, in our monthly precept recitation, after every dharma talk, as an element of many ceremonies. We use a more common formulation: “Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to awaken with (or save) them.” Although my understanding may be incomplete, and my actions may fall short — I don’t think these vows are taken lightly.

I am not a psychologist; I don‘t even play one on television. But as a 21st Century Zen person I have to translate the teachings of ancient buddhas and ancestors to get through the day. Eight hundred years ago, Japanese Zen master Dogen wrote:

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things…” (Genjokoan)

Psychology is literally the study of self, of spirit. The last hundred years — since Freud and many creative souls after him threw the light of awareness into the hidden corners of consciousness — could be called the Age of Psychology. Though Freud might be spinning in his grave, psychology has become the pillar of religion in the West. Western Buddhism has been so impacted by psychology that it is not always easy to see where religious praxis ends and therapy begins. As a Zen teacher I listen to students’ suffering, and much of that suffering is rooted in old wounds, habits, and patterns. One could call that karma or neurosis. It depends on what lens one sees through.

Buddhism itself is a collection of psychological systems, its wisdom and practices evolving variously across ages, nations, and cultures. The Buddha’s discovery of Dependent Origination, paticasamupadda, is about the system and workings of mind. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, the late Thai teacher, describes Dependent Origination and rebirth, unfolding moment by moment. “Grasping and attachment will give rise to becoming and birth.” In that moment of becoming and birth, which takes place in my mind, what is born is a “sentient being of my mind,” someone very close to me whom I must take care of.

Several hundred years later, the Yogācāra or Vijnanavada, arose as a vital expression of Mahayana Buddhism. This school located truth in mind or consciousness (vijñāna), rather than in things of the phenomenal world. Yogacara philosophers posited an enduring transpersonal consciousness called ālaya vijñāna (or Store-House Consciousness), where the karmic seeds of all our past action reside, ready to bloom in the present and future. This school greatly influenced Buddhist traditions of Northern and Eastern Asia, particularly the Zen schools. It also became a matter of debate and a touchstone for other doctrinal developments.

These approaches, along with that of other Buddhist and Taoist schools, are clear in the teachings of Huineng, Dogen, and all the great figures of Zen from China to Japan to America. But a painted rice cake doesn’t fill my belly. Such theories and systems themselves don’t dispel suffering. How can we save the suffering beings of our minds? How can I be of use to myself? Further, how do I study myself so that when I meet others — and when I meet myself — my own traumas and self do not block the path of liberation? The opportunities are numberless. For example:

• Waiting for a doctor’s bad news; living with a serious chronic illness;
• Feeling helpless with a self-destructive friend or family member, or being a citizen of a self and other-destructive nation;
• Enduring unjust accusations, or (maybe worse) just accusations;
• Losing my temper with a suffering but exasperating student, even when I have every intention to stay cool;
• Disagreeing with my teacher, or finding that my teacher disagrees with me;
• Wondering if I have the capacity bear the extent of another’s suffering — am I willing to take it in?

A man of about fifty who practices regularly in our sangha sits down across from me. We sit upright, almost knee-to-knee. After numerous attempts at reconciliation and accommodation, he has left his marriage and the home he and his wife have shared for twenty years. As we talk, he weeps. There are two young children in the picture, and for the last several weeks, his wife has not allowed him to see them. They are in conflict about money, child visitation, ownership of their house, and about how to proceed towards divorce. “I didn’t think it could ever come to this,” he says. “I’m angry all the time. How can she keep me from seeing my own kids? And what is she telling them about me?” Tears are streaming down his face, falling freely on the back cushion he sits on. “Every conversation or note leaves me furious. I never knew I had such anger in me.”

Lets step back and consider a way to understand this painful story. According to traditional Buddhist “cosmology” beings are born and live in six realms. Three lower realms are inhabited by:

1. Hungry ghosts or pretas — Their existence is marked by insatiable hunger and greed. Often they are depicted with swollen bellies and impossibly long, narrow necks.
2. Animals — Their characteristic is stupidity and prejudice. (Apologies to animal lovers who know better!)
3. The Hell realm, naraka is marked by hatred and aggression. It is a place of ceaseless conflict. Beings live there until their past negative karma is used up.

There are three higher realms.

1. Demigods or asuras, are sometimes known as fighting demons — envious, fiercely competitive, delighting in war and chaos. In past lives as humans they might have held good intentions, but nonetheless harmed others.
2. The Deva realm is a heavenly place, home to powerful beings who enjoy great but transient pleasures. Inhabitants are complacent, self-centered, and addicted to their pleasures.
3. The human realm (in which you are reading this right now) is our temporary home. Although it is marked by desire, passions, and doubt, it is also the realm within which one can fully awaken to the Buddha’s wisdom. This is our great opportunity for freedom.

There are actually countless realms within this Saha world of ours — saha translates as “the world to be endured” — and within the limitless world of our own mind. These six provide a useful but general template. One can consider these numberless realms as states of mind…pun intended. They have territoriality, a certain lifespan, and a wide influence on other states of mind, which are ceaselessly arising. The sentient beings of my mind necessarily affect the sentient beings of another’s mind. The ripples of thoughts and feelings extend, reinforcing and conflicting among us as widening circles that create family, community, society, even heavens and hells.

When certain emotions come up — say the anger and resentment my fellow sangha member feels as he faces a crumbling marriage — in that very moment a sentient being of one’s mind is reborn in a realm of suffering. In the anger he feels about a crumbling marriage and separation from his children, he might be reborn in a hell realm — the common hell realm of divorce, where one writhes around and sees no daylight of peace and harmony between partners who once loved each other. If he gives free rein to this being, it will tend to make a mess. There is a powerful habitual tendency to project our suffering outward and blame others for what one is feeling. Each sentient being embodies potentialities for complete enlightenment and terrible depravity. This simply seems to come with having a body. In one of his early sermons, Martin Luther King Jr. writes:

“There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Goethe, ‘There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue. …’”

Between teacher and student, between self and self one must learn the most basic way to help. I heard my Zen teacher friend Darlene Cohen say, “Sometimes all you can do is hold hands with each other while you both go to hell.”

If my training is sufficient and if I am quick enough, there is a space for practice that precedes the birth of a sentient being of my mind. The Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod describes the cause of suffering, the second of Shakyamuni’s Four Noble Truths, as “emotional reactivity.” Note: this is not the emotion itself. So long as human beings have bodies and minds, emotions will always arise. Suppression leads to what Freud called “the return of the repressed,” an almost inevitable and unpredictable experience of suffering in a future time and place. Repression itself is a kind of emotional reactivity. “Reactivity” is what happens after an emotion arises. We reject it, push it away violently. We blame others for causing what we feel. Or we cling to a feeling, believe it is real, desperately holding on for dear life. In the thrall of emotional reactivity, we are apt to assert — silently or out loud — “This is my truth,” as if it were the rock upon which Moses stood, rather than a flimsy raft on a stormy sea. If one can simply accept emotion as it comes up, shining a light of awareness on it, then emotions, thoughts, sensations, etc. are free to fall way as easily as they arose. If not, if we see reaction as a hardened truth, then a sentient being is born in one’s mind. Seen through the lens of the Buddha’s law of Dependent Origination, this is just one turning of the wheel of birth and death. Ajahn Buddhadasa writes that Dependent Origination (or paticcasamuppada) is:

“…a momentary and sudden matter, not an eternal matter. Therefore, the word jati, to be born must refer to birth in the moment of one revolution of Dependent Origination in the daily life of ordinary people, which is to say when mindfulness is absent…It’s easy to know: when greed, anger, or delusion arise, then the self is born in one “life” already.” (Buddhadasa, 14)

Meanwhile, it may seem I am treading close to Buddhist heresy, raising the banner of self, when the understanding and work of Zen, and all of the Buddha’s teaching, points to its unreality. Self has a compounded nature. Past and present circumstances of mind and physical reality create an impermanent “thing” that I provisionally call the self. Yes, it is empty of “own being” or some essence I can point to, but that is not to say that self is nonexistent. The challenge of dharma practice is to manifest True Self or Big Mind, taking responsibility for self, and for all the momentary selves that come and go on the ever-whirling wheel of birth and death. Another way to say this is that I take my words and actions seriously, but I try not to take myself too seriously. There is always room for a joke, or a wry, quizzical look at things. If a bumper sticker can be a field of spiritual truth, there is one on my Toyota van that says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

So, back to the matter at hand. Sentient beings of my own mind are limitless: I vow to save them all. Once a being is born in my mind, then what? If it has come to this point, then saving this being, like any other suffering being walking to and fro in this world or in my mind, means turning towards it with what Dogen Zenji called “parental mind” or roshin.

“Roshin is the mind or attitude of a parent…A parent, irrespective of poverty or difficult circumstances, loves and raises a child with care. How deep is love like this? Only a parent can understand it. A parent protects the children from the cold and shades them from the hot sun with no concern for his or her own personal welfare. Only a person in whom this mind has arisen can understand it, and any one in whom this attitude has become second nature can fully realize it.” (Dogen, Tenzo Kyokun)

This explains how we take can care of our suffering selves. It is a way of re-parenting ourselves. When a sentient being arises in my mind, I have to take care of it for its whole life. Sometimes that life may be just a few minutes. Sometimes it is a span of hours or days. If the wound is deep, a traumatized being may stay around for years, lurking in the corners of ones mind, leaping painfully to life when conditions are in place. But however long a sentient being dwells in my mind, I vow not to abandon it.

Parents don’t abandon children. Neither does a mother or father allow a child to do whatever it wants. For the sake of safety, limits and boundaries are set. But, the underlying principle of these boundaries is unconditional love, not domination. In dharma terms this means seeing each being as Buddha. Of course, this is often easier said than done.

Yesterday I had a series of frustrating and unpleasant telephone conversations, trying to deal with a glitch in my health insurance coverage. Each conversation entailed transfer to another faceless person, with long intervals of insipid music between bureaucrats. The music, intended to soothe, had the opposite effect. I got more and more angry, noting the impulse to globalize my sense of personal injustice, as in the old IWW motto, “An injury to one is an injury to all!” So as I waited and talked and waited and argued, a sentient being was birthed in my mind. In this case, it was an asura, or fighting demon, a being with good intentions, caught by aggression and anger. When I came to the unsatisfactory end of the line — at least for the day — I wanted to slam the phone into its cradle. I stopped to breathe and notice what was going on in my body. My chest was tight, my hands were shaking slightly, and there was an unsettled, slightly nauseated feeling in my stomach. A newborn demon was struggling for control.

At that moment, fighting back was fruitless. Yelling at insurance company employees — much as I wanted to — was going to be unproductive. Pretending there was no fighting demon in my own head was impossible, because it is not just mind over matter. When a being is born — out of stress, emotion, sickness, psychological or physiological imbalance — our nervous system reacts (another aspect of emotional reactivity), generating powerful neurotransmitters and hormones, that flow freely throughout the body. Asserting the obvious, because mind and body are inseparable, bodily activities (including zazen) affect mind, and mental activities strongly influence the body. The lifespan of a sentient being of my mind is directly linked to the presence of these neurochemicals in my body. Psychologist Paul Ekman calls what I am describing a “refractory” state.

“For a while we are in a refractory state, during which time our thinking cannot incorporate information that does not fit, maintain, or justify the emotion we are feeling. This refractory state may be of more benefit than harm if it is brief, lasting for only a second or two…Difficulties can arise or inappropriate emotional behavior may occur when the refractory period lasts much longer, for minutes or perhaps even hours. A too-long refractory period biases the way we see the world and ourselves.” (Ekman, 39-40)

Whether I see this phenomenon in Buddhist or in modern psychological terms, after getting off the phone shaking and angry, I simply had to take care of myself, using tools of mindfulness, compassion, and patience. Sitting quietly I could feel the fear and grief underneath my initial reaction. What if I lose my insurance and can’t afford medical care? What if my chronic health problems flare up now, and my life is threatened? Alarming fantasies come up very quickly. If I acknowledged them, I experienced a slight softening. But a child’s insistent clinging returned. This was not going to be so simple. It was necessary to meet this new being on a physical level. So I took a hot shower and sat zazen for a short period. The fighting demon slipped away, having had a blessedly short life. I felt a great relief. At the same time I knew that a “seed” of this demon-being lay planted in the rich soil of my Store-House Consciousness, requiring only the proper stimulus and nutriments to come back to life.

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Dogen Zenji often returned to a verse from the Lotus Sutra: “Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the reality of all existence.” We have a choice. We can allow these beings to torment us, seeing them as somehow outside of our self. Or we can see them as suffering bodhisattvas, who can teach us important lessons.

There are countless ways to save suffering beings wherever they make their home. Zazen itself includes the full experience of body and mind. Zazen is as indefinable as love or friendship. No matter how I may try to analyze it, or break it down into elements and particular practices, I can’t get my mind around zazen. It includes all dharma systems — the perfections, the factors of enlightenment, the foundations of mindfulness, and so on — but is not limited by them. And it includes all sentient beings, who may arise momentarily and fade with the next breath. Zazen itself cultivates our capacity to see all beings — seemingly inside or outside — as Buddha.

Encountering suffering, zazen has an alchemical quality. Alchemy, the mystical study of transformation, appeared in cultures across the world from earliest times. Among its goals were universal life free from all illness, and the search for an alkahest, or universal solvent, which would dissolve all compounded things, freeing up the energy of transformation. In the vast circle of zazen one meets each being just as it is, accepts it, and lets it go freely on its way. Sometimes zazen rests on the breath — breathing in, meeting and accepting; breathing out, setting free. This is how one practices at the bedside of a friend who is sick or dying, holding her hand, breathing in alignment with her. If that kind of attention is enough and the moment of suffering passes, so be it. If a suffering being is more persistent, my effort will, of course, be more focused. That suffering being of my mind will become the object of my attention. What does this suffering look like, where does it live in my body, what is the specific quality of pain it brings? What does this being need? Not what does it say it needs, or what it cries out for or against, but what does it truly need in order to be free? Often, this is not immediately obvious. But if I keep turning towards rather than away, the alchemical power of zazen, the pure spirit of inquiry, of asking how, will sooner or later dissolve suffering, allowing the mystery of change to take place.

In the diverse religions of ancients mystery and miracle are one and the same. There is transformation. Demons become protectors, hungry ghosts feed the hungry, gods come down to earth and bring us peace. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” And human beings wake up right in the middle of the whole catastrophe (a word whose Greek root implies “turning over”). In this Saha world everything is turning, everything is burning. But if we can breathe freely and heal the numberless sentient beings of our own mind — never abandoning them, never turning away — then we will simply be awake. If, as Whitman writes, “I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab,” I may intuitively see just how to help people meet their own suffering. Liberation will ripple across the universe.

Acknowledgements: To my teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi, for pointing me towards the Platform Sutra so long ago; to Laurie Senauke, who has helped me clarify the ideas here, and who patiently endures being married to all the obstreperous sentient beings of my mind; to my Zen teaching colleagues in our SPOT (Shoguku Priest Ongoing Training) program — Darlene Cohen, Gary McNabb, Lew Richmond, Grace Schireson, and Steve Stucky — who are collaboratively refining a vision of Zen as everyday life.