How Limitations Can Bring Us Freedom

Tonight I'd like to talk about how we put ourselves in chains,

How we tie ourselves up voluntarily to unleash our true nature,

To unleash awakening.

Many of you attended our Zazenkai on Saturday,

Which is this wonderful practice of sitting together for an entire day,

Where we come together,

We meditate,

Sitting,

Walking.

We spend an entire weekend day in silence,

In stillness.

And,

Of course,

It's never easy,

And many times we say to ourselves,

Why did I sign up for this?

But in the end it feels very nourishing and very powerful,

Most of the time.

And the great puzzle is why.

We make commitments at the beginning of each Zazenkai,

And they're really not that different from the commitments we make when we sit here tonight.

We commit to silence,

We commit to stillness,

Being unmoving.

And we commit to custody of the eyes,

Looking down,

Not looking at each other.

And the question is why these commitments,

Why is this necessary for the spiritual practice that we know as Zen?

Well,

Of course,

We put ourselves in these constraints because they are powerful tools for becoming intimate with our lives.

We commit to silence.

And think about how rare that is,

To have hours at a stretch where we don't speak,

Where no one around us speaks,

Where we're just present for the sounds that reach our ears from the outside,

The thoughts that run through our heads,

The sound of the breath,

The sound of our heart beating.

And we commit to stillness,

We commit to not moving.

Not an easy task,

Which,

As you know,

Is why we only sit for 25 minutes at a time before we do Kinhin,

Before we do walking meditation.

Because it is a hard task to be completely,

Utterly still.

Why do we do this?

Well,

Of course,

As we know,

Sitting absolutely still allows us to be present for anything that arises.

When my nose starts to itch and I'm just dying to scratch it and I don't.

When my knee starts to hurt,

When my back starts to ache.

All of this as a way to witness the arising and the passing away of everything,

Including knee pain.

And of course,

That is so empowering when it comes to building our confidence that we can be with whatever this moment brings.

No small empowerment,

If you think about it.

I mean,

When we deal with all kinds of emotional challenges and physical challenges,

Which all of us do,

Sitting still,

Being present for everything that comes up in body and mind allows us to truly know in our bones that we can meet whatever comes our way.

And custody of the eyes,

Not looking at each other,

Not looking around,

But really allowing ourselves to look inward,

To witness the workings of the mind and the body.

This is becoming intimate with our human life.

And so what we do is we contrive this elaborate container of silence and stillness and custody of the eyes in a zendo to allow us to become intimate with breathing and walking and sitting.

Recently,

I read a book,

A new book,

By a journalist named David Epstein,

And the book is entitled Inside the Box.

And his argument is that although most of us think that what we want and what we need is complete freedom in our lives,

That actually what makes us better,

What makes us more creative,

Often more productive,

Are constraints in our lives.

And he gives wonderful examples that we can all recognize.

You know,

Some of you know the story of the Apollo 13 mission and how it went dangerously wrong and then scientists on the ground were able to take all the constraints of outer space and come up with a way with whatever parts were left in the spacecraft,

This wounded spacecraft,

To bring the astronauts back home.

If you haven't seen the film,

It's a wonderful,

Exhilarating film.

And it's all about working within very tight constraints.

And if you think about the discipline of haiku,

17 syllables,

And that discipline has unleashed a flowering of magnificent poetry.

When resources are scarce,

When we lock ourselves in where we are locked in by circumstance,

People look harder at possibilities that they may have overlooked.

And so,

This new book makes this argument,

But our teachers have known this for millennia,

That constraints are a core part of what we do,

And it makes us better.

There's a phrase that's used often in Zen,

We bind ourselves without a rope,

And that's what we do.

If you think about it,

When we encourage approaching life with beginner's mind,

We bind ourselves without a rope.

We ask ourselves to set aside everything we think we know,

Everything we think we're expert in,

And just go back to that experience of being a beginner and ask,

What's here,

Right now?

Koans are particularly good at doing this.

They are these little fragments and stories that are meant to jar us out of our habitual,

Tired old modes of thinking.

One of my favorite koans is the goose in the bottle.

The koan is very simple.

It's once a woman raised a goose in a bottle,

When the goose was grown,

She wanted to get the goose out.

How can you get the goose out of the bottle without breaking it?

Of course,

This koan and many of them impose impossible conditions,

And so the logical mind can't solve it.

We exhaust all the possible answers we can give,

And then insights emerge from seemingly nowhere beyond our thinking minds.

And if we think about sesshins,

Or days like the Zazenkai,

A lot of what we're doing is reducing life to its simplest essence,

Reducing how we sit,

How we walk,

How we behave,

So that we minimize the decisions we have to make.

Almost everything is prescribed.

I remember the first time I went to a sesshin,

A retreat,

I sat and was completely preoccupied with whether the showers were going to be too busy,

And I wasn't going to be allowed to take a shower every morning of the retreat.

And what I came face to face with was how completely attached I was to having a shower every day.

And of course,

I realized how silly it was,

But it seemed very important to me at the time.

That kind of constraint brought me face to face with my own attachment to things that matter very little.

The bowing,

The chanting that I first encountered in Zen,

I was put off by,

And I actually went up to my first teacher.

The first night I sat at Hank and said,

I'm really uncomfortable with this bowing and chanting.

And James Ford,

The teacher said,

Good.

He understood that these were the borders,

The ropes,

The binds that were going to show me my biases and my fears.

We take the precepts,

Which constrain us to certain behaviors,

To not killing,

To not stealing,

Not lying,

To give life greater meaning.

Some of us have Shokan relationships,

Relationships with a teacher,

As a way to limit ourselves to being guided by a teacher through the spiritual path and bowing to a teacher's wishes,

Something that's the antithesis of complete freedom.

Now,

All of these constraints can bring creativity,

They can bring awakening,

But there is a shadow side to them,

And Zen points that out.

There is a paradox with these limits in Zen,

That we teach that these disciplines matter,

These forms of bowing and lighting the incense,

That they matter,

That the rituals matter.

And yet,

It's possible to become imprisoned by these forms,

That they can become rituals without meaning or without compassion,

Where we hold each other rigidly accountable in judgmental ways for adhering to forms.

Or we can bow to a teacher in an unthinking way,

Manifesting loyalty to a teacher who perhaps is misguided or doesn't deserve it,

So there is this shadow side to constraints,

And Zen never wants us to forget that.

So the constraints serve as training tools,

They serve as containers within which we can wake up,

But they are never ultimate truths.

And of course,

Constraints ask us to prioritize what really matters,

What's most important.

I see this all the time,

Many people come to Doksan and say,

I'm not able to meditate,

I just can't make the time,

I can't get myself to sit on the cushion,

And I believe them.

Absolutely.

But what we can come back to is,

Okay,

How important is meditation?

Perhaps it's not the most important thing in your life.

Perhaps attending to your children,

Or to your job,

Or checking your email 50 times a day is more important than the stillness and the silence of Zazen.

But what we can do is call ourselves back to the question,

And to prioritize what really matters to us,

So that in the end,

We don't look back and say,

I wasted my life on freedoms that weren't really what I wanted.

So,

As you think about the constraints in your life,

As you think about what you want to make most important,

And what you want to leave aside,

Because we can't have all of it,

It's really worth coming back to this question of,

How can I use these limits,

These boundaries,

To wake up to my true nature,

To my Buddha nature?

And so,

I'll close with the reading at the beginning of the evening from Barry Magid,

Who writes about this.

He says,

Zen practice offers us this paradox,

A discipline that promises freedom,

A hierarchical relationship that fosters true independence,

A form that gives formlessness,

A transformation that allows everything to be just as it is.

Thank you.