Forgetting The Self And How It Relieves Suffering

This dharma talk addresses the Buddhist idea that the self is actually a fiction -- a helpful construction that has no actual reality. And this recognition, which we glimpse in meditation, actually relieves suffering.

Transcript

Can everyone hear me?

Then I'll begin.

Tonight,

I want to talk about this mysterious passage we read from Dogen,

And particularly about this problematic thing we call the self,

And how the self is connected with suffering.

The selection we read tonight was from Dogen,

And as many of you know,

Dogen was a 13th century Chinese Zen master who was the founder of the Soto School of Zen,

Which is one of our lineages.

And this section that we read from the Genjo Koan may be one of the most famous passages in Zen.

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 actualized by the myriad things.

When actualized by the myriad things,

Your body and mind,

As well as the bodies and minds of others,

Drop away.

Dogen is famous for being difficult to understand.

And in fact,

There are entire support groups dedicated to gathering together to try to make sense of this brilliant man's writing.

He is considered one of the most important philosophers of all time,

Not just in Zen,

Not just in Buddhism,

But in human thought.

But not easy to understand.

And yet,

Those who read Dogen will say that Dogen actually is writing about things that are quite near to our experience,

Quite immediate,

And much more comprehensible if we know how to look at them.

So what is this about forgetting the self?

This month,

Lion's Roar,

Which is a Buddhist magazine,

Had a whole section called No Self,

No Suffering.

The promise that if we just let go of this pesky thing we call the self,

We won't suffer.

Well,

This weekend,

I had a very clear personal demonstration of what I believe Dogen is pointing us to.

So I was at a family reunion in a beautiful place in Vermont.

Little cabins,

Lovely food,

Going on hikes,

Seeing family I don't get to see very often.

And at our Saturday night dinner,

I was talking to some of the younger cousins who I rarely get to talk to.

And I made a joke.

I don't remember what the joke was,

But it was very clear that they had no idea what I was talking about.

So everybody was kind of stone-faced.

And then we went on talking,

And I began to have this sense that I was just out of touch with these lively people from a different generation.

And what I found was that I was more and more concerned that I was out of place,

That everything I said was kind of wrong,

Not very interesting.

And what I found was that I effectively removed myself from the activity.

I was so worried about how I was,

How I was coming across,

What my family thought of me,

And so preoccupied that I ceased to be present.

And I was suffering.

So here I am,

A Zen teacher,

Caught up in the same things I have always been caught up in from time to time.

And perhaps all of you recognize this state where you find yourself,

Sometimes without realizing it,

Just off down a rabbit hole of preoccupation with how you are and what people think of you,

A preoccupation with self,

Because the self is so vividly there at those moments,

And quite painful.

And that's when this theme,

No self,

No suffering,

Came to haunt me.

Well,

I wasn't free of self.

In fact,

I was plagued by self.

So I went back,

Actually,

And looked on my phone at the end of the evening and looked up Buddhism and suffering,

And sure enough,

I was reminded of the three big categories of suffering that the Buddha taught us were always there for us.

Three types of suffering.

First,

The very familiar types of suffering,

Physical and mental suffering,

Physical pain,

Mental pain,

Being separated from people we want to be with,

Being stuck with people we don't want to be with.

So much of that during the pandemic.

And then the second big category of suffering is impermanence.

This truth that everything that arises passes away,

That in Dogen's language,

Flowers fall even though we love them,

But also that things come to us that we don't want.

Weeds grow even though we dislike them.

That's what Dogen is talking about.

And of course,

Everyone we love will get sick,

Grow old,

And die,

Ourselves included.

That's the suffering of impermanence.

And then the third category of suffering is the suffering that's sometimes referred to as constructions.

It's all the stories we make up about ourselves,

About our lives.

And this is where the story of self comes in,

Because it's especially this made-up story of a separate,

Abiding self that needs to be shored up,

That will go on forever.

That story causes so much suffering.

And I had a vivid example of it this weekend.

The story got better for me after my Saturday night agonies,

Private agonies.

The next morning,

We went on a hike to a beautiful waterfall,

And I found myself standing in front of this magnificent sheer rock face with water pouring down.

The rocks,

The water,

The sound of the waterfall.

And with no effort on my part,

Suddenly everything was right there,

And there was no self activated.

I was not worried about the self.

I was simply there,

Simply actualized by the waterfall,

By the rocks,

By the bees buzzing around,

By the wildflowers.

Suffering not present.

Self not present.

And that is what Dogen is pointing to.

What I read this evening before we began our practice from James Ford is pointing to a similar idea.

James Ford talked about this whirlpool that is me.

The metaphor we often use for the self is a whirlpool.

We see it in a stream,

For example.

It's there.

It's a real thing.

And then all at once it disappears.

As the water that made that whirlpool and all the stones and the twigs flow back into that great flow of the stream.

David Loy is a Zen teacher and a philosophy professor,

And he writes about this nagging sense of self,

Particularly the sense that we are lacking.

He writes about what many of us experience,

And he says perhaps all of us experience at some level,

Which is a sense of lack,

That we're not enough,

That we don't have the right stuff.

And David Loy says that this fear prompts many of us,

Perhaps most of us,

To go through all kinds of effort to try to shore up the reality of a self that we have the intuition isn't quite real and certainly isn't stable or fixed.

And so he says many of us try to amass as much money as we can,

Or as much power as we can,

Or achieve as much as we can,

Somehow with the vain hope that it will make us more real,

That we grasp for something to make us feel like this self that I call Bob is abiding,

Will last,

And is good enough.

What does this mean for our practice?

Well again,

Dogen says something very practical.

He says to carry the self forward and illuminate the myriad things is delusion.

To carry the self forward to be the best tennis player in the world,

The best Buddhist in the world,

The whatever,

To carry the self forth to try to act on the world as a way to shore up the self is based on a story that isn't real.

And then Dogen says that the myriad things come forth and illuminate the self,

That's realization,

That's waking up,

That's me losing the sense of me that receded as I stood there in front of this magnificent waterfall.

Now my example was a moment-to-moment example of both the self taking over and causing me great suffering,

And then the self receding,

And my feeling enormous relief and aliveness as I was able to be more present in the world instead of self-preoccupied.

When we read texts like Dogen's,

We can imagine that we can finally let go of the self,

That body and mind can fall away and then we're done,

And then we're good,

Then there's peace and equanimity,

There's no suffering.

And of course that too is a story,

That I've come to understand that my experience of suffering preoccupied self and then peace and presence,

That those are moment-to-moment ebbs and flows of experience that all of us with hearts and minds,

All of us experience.

And I suspect we will all experience them until the day we die,

That there is no final landing place,

Which is of course the bad news,

But it's also the good news,

That those preoccupied states,

Those terrible hell realms of feeling not good enough,

Those too are temporary.

As some of you know,

I direct a study of adult life,

The same families we've studied for 85 years.

And so while we see this play out individually in our own lives,

This fluctuation between a preoccupation with self and a letting go into something bigger,

We see this in the people we've studied,

In the lives we've studied for so many decades.

We asked people when they were in their 80s,

As you look back on your life,

What is the thing you regret the most?

And the most common regret that people named was saying,

I worried too much about what other people thought of me.

That they were worried too much about the self and how the preoccupied self was coming forward in the world.

And when we asked those same people in their 80s what they were proudest of,

They all named things beyond the self.

I had a good partner.

A good relationship with my partner.

I raised good kids.

I mentored people.

I fought for good causes.

All of the things they named were not about self.

It wasn't about all the wealth I amassed,

Or how powerful I became,

Or what prizes I won.

And so we see this play out moment to moment in our own lives,

And we see it when we study people across their entire lives.

That in those moments and those periods when the self subsides,

And we can be present for something much bigger that includes the self,

That's what feels most meaningful,

Most fulfilling,

And brings the most joy.

So,

Our practice then.

What does it tell us about practice?

Well,

It talks about letting go of the expectation that we will ever finally let go of the self,

And the expectation that there will be a time when we finally stop suffering.

But rather,

That we can watch the ebb and flow of this self-preoccupation.

We can watch the coming and going of worries about whether we're good enough,

Or other people are good enough.

And watch ourselves relax into something bigger and more spacious.

Knowing that flowers do fall,

Even though we love them,

But that more flowers grow.

And so,

The encouragement from Dogen,

And from all of our teachers,

Is to study the self,

Cherish those moments when you forget the self,

And let yourself be actualized by all the birds and trees and flowers and ants and sticks and grizzly bears,

And by the joy of being together with the people we love.

When actualized by the myriad things,

Your body and mind,

As well as bodies and minds of others,

Drop away.

And that,

I would say,

Is the place we all have the chance to experience.

Thank you.

So,

Please,

Come forward with thoughts,

Ideas,

Confusion.

Reviews

Thank you