Ending Suffering
My understanding of what the Buddha taught is that there is a reason suffering happens, and that it is possible to end suffering. For me, the easiest way to understand this is to recognize how my suffering arises from wanting something other than what is.
I would not ask you to take my word for this; you have to find out for yourself. In Buddhism we don’t proselytize, for the simple reason that no one will undertake a spiritual practice like this one until they have suffered enough. People who are attracted to it only intellectually will use it as one more thing to dabble in, then they will go on and dabble in something else. And that’s fine. Buddhism does not say you should do this practice, or only superior people do this practice, or you are going to hell if you do not do this practice.
Encountering the path that leads to ending suffering is like seeing a bicycle for the first time and being told you can get on this contraption and ride it: it sounds incredible, although to anyone who has ridden a bicycle it is quite obvious that it can be done. But it is one thing to say, “This thing exists, and you can ride it if you want to,” and quite another to say, “There is a bicycle, and you must ride it, and you’re a bad person if you don’t.” As far as I know, the Buddha never said you shouldn’t suffer. He just explained how it happens.
Pain is inevitable, and suffering is what happens to you when you resist pain (or any experience). You suffer when you think there is something wrong with what happens, when you refuse to accept it, when you are separate from your experience. If you break your leg, it is going to hurt. The suffering arises from the attitude that “this is not my correct life experience. I am living a life in which I do not break my leg. There’s been a big mistake here.”
A common misconception is that you may break your leg, but if you are very advanced spiritually you will be able to control your sensations and not feel the pain. Some people see Buddhism as a way to do that, but for me, Buddhism encourages us to be fully present to whatever we are experiencing. If somebody else can do that trick with the disappearing pain, good for them, but that doesn’t help me. Whether I feel the pain or not, the point is there is no alternative life in which I did not break my leg. So nothing is a mistake.
The Buddha taught that suffering arises from the illusion of the self as separate from all that is. If you do not believe you are a somebody to whom things are happening, then nothing will happen to you. If we do not take life personally, we are not caught up in thoughts like “This happened to me because of that” and “If only I were this way, then that would not be happening.” This kind of struggle against what is — and not the pain of a broken leg — is how we suffer.
My teacher used to say that, after awakening, everything is exactly the same but completely different. And everyone who has let go of anything knows that this is the case. If you have a difficult relationship with a co-worker, for example, and all of a sudden you let go of that difficulty, that person does not change, but there is no longer any problem because you experience the situation differently.
We can never end suffering until we embrace the suffering as it happens. Once we ask, “What do I do?” it’s already too late. Fortunately, we can always have another shot at it, because in the next moment the suffering will arise again. Meditation practice involves sitting still as we bring all our suffering to be embraced in compassion. It doesn’t always feel like that, but that’s what we’re moving toward: sitting still in the heart and mind of compassion and drawing in everything that tempts us to leave that compassion, everything we suffer over. That is the practice of ending suffering.
A Project For Saving The World
In considering the problems that exist in this world, we somehow maintain the delusion that hatred is helpful. I hate pollution, so the whole time I’m driving my car I’m hating the traffic and hating the exhaust fumes and asking, Why doesn’t the Environmental Protection Agency do something about this? Of course, I have to drive; I lead a busy life. And I have to fly; I know it’s ecologically unsound, but how else would I get across the country? So here I am, trying to figure out who is doing something wrong, whom to hate. That is our usual approach to rectifying problems.
But the desire to deal with a problem does not have to be connected to feeling upset about it. This is an important awareness in spiritual practice.
Let’s imagine we are a group of people who decide we are going to “save the world” — not because we should, not even because we believe there is anything wrong with the world, but simply because we want to do so. We might decide that what we want to accomplish is helping orphans in Ethiopia: we will feed and clothe them and provide them with medical care and education.
In taking this on as our project, there are a couple of rules we will adopt: (1) we cannot blame anyone else; and (2) we cannot involve anyone else. In other words, we have to take complete responsibility. Our first act, then, isn’t to notify government authorities of their negligence and suggest how much money they should give us to solve this problem.
The motivation for us lies within our own spiritual practice. We suspect that helping orphans is more rewarding than going to a job that we don’t like just because it pays us a lot of money.
As we pursue this project, we get very excited and enthusiastic about it. That attracts other people; they can see that what we are doing is more enjoyable than what they are doing. Then they want to get involved in our project, so we teach them the two rules and let them help, too.
Remember that we are engaged in this project only because we want to be, not because we are angry, and not because we think there is something wrong that we can correct. Anger can make us work around the clock, sending telegrams, making phone calls, organizing rallies, etc. But if we are not upset, the momentum has to come from another source. It has to come from willingness. Rather than simply being carried along by emotion, letting righteous indignation fuel our actions, we must be willing to bring our attention back to the present each and every moment. When we are no longer in that out-of-control state where activity just happens, we have to draw upon a deeper source within ourselves.
It is the same when we try to find our willingness to meditate. When you first get home after a retreat, that rush of enthusiasm is so great that you can hardly go to work because you want to meditate all day long. Then that passes, more quickly for some people than for others. After a week, a month, two months, three months, there is no longer a spontaneous sense of “Yes, I want to do this.” At that point, you have to find your willingness to do it simply because it is the deepest desire of your heart.
It does not seem to me that we are here to fix the world. It is only an assumption that another world is possible; we have no experience of it ever being any different from the way it is. To my mind, that is the best argument for concentrating on the change we know is possible, which is the change that happens to people when they take on a helping project — for their own spiritual practice, as a means of personal transformation.
Correctness And Compassion
When I came out of the monastery, I lived awhile with an elderly woman, and I ended up taking care of her as she was dying. She wanted to eat meat.
What to do? Lecture her on the evils of consuming the flesh of other creatures and the bad karma of said activity? Or try to see, in the moment, what is the most compassionate thing for all?
Maybe the most compassionate thing would have been to deliver an enlightened discourse to this woman, who would have had her eyes opened to universal truth and ascended immediately into nirvana. Instead, I fried a chicken for her, knowing that I could be totally wrong, and willing to live with that possibility.
Service
The Zen monk Ryokan lived as a hermit, and, according to his poems, he spent his life going down to the village and playing with the children during the day and then going way back in the woods to be by himself. And there are others we know of in the Zen tradition who, like Ryokan, did not devote themselves to good works, who were not involved in fixing things. That is perfectly in keeping with Zen; Zen is not a practice of that kind of service.
There is, of course, the bodhisattva vow, which is not to enter nirvana until all beings have awakened, but that is not the same as doing good works. The bodhisattva vow does not require you to rush around and pick people up and drag them to nirvana at great personal cost to yourself.
For me, there is no such thing as service, the way the term is usually meant. The idea that we can do something for someone else requires that we draw a boundary between ourselves and the other person so there is someone else to receive our help. In that way, the idea that I am serving you perpetuates egocentricity.
In fact, all I am ever doing is my own spiritual training. For me, spiritual practice is service. If it takes the form of doing something that helps someone else, and I define that as “service,” fine.
Where we get into trouble is making that fundamental split between me and you. When I make that division, when I experience you as separate from me, it creates the illusion that doing something for you is different from doing for me. The problem with that approach is that, if I am doing something for you, I am going to want something back from you. Whether it’s thanks or some other response, I am going to want you to do something you may not end up doing. But if I am simply living and I understand that living is service, because there is nothing that can happen to you that does not happen to me and nothing that can happen to me that does not happen to you, then nobody owes anybody anything. We are all simply doing what we feel moved to do.
If we have not taken care of ourselves first, then we are acting out of need, and needy people can never be truly helpful because they come into a situation trying to get something. But that is not to say we should postpone service until we have completely resolved our problems. Service is simply more honest if it springs from wanting to be helpful, because feeling helpful furthers our own spiritual growth. We want to do this for ourselves, not because anyone lacks anything we are going to provide.
As long as we believe people need something from us, that there are things we need to fix out there, we don’t have to find the need within ourselves. We are busy trying to fix this and that and the other thing. Maybe we are being helpful, maybe not. But when we know that what we are attempting to do is end the suffering within ourselves, at least our effort will do away with some piece of suffering. And the clearer we get within ourselves, the more possible it is to be truly helpful out there.
It is not my experience that we are here to fix the world, that we are here to change anything. I think we are here so the world can change us. And if part of that change is for the suffering of the world to move us to compassion, to awareness, to sympathy, to love, that is a very good thing. But if we move away from ourselves in an effort to fix something “out there,” we probably lose our best opportunity to do good. We need to remember that, as long as there is an “in here” that needs something, there will he an “out there” that needs something.
Trying To Be Human
This idea says a lot to me: “We are not human beings trying to be spiritual; we are spiritual beings trying to be human.” That is one way of describing the illusion we suffer from, the fundamental illusion about who we are.
When we are human beings trying to be spiritual, we are trapped in the illusion; we believe in the content of our lives, and our beliefs never make it into conscious awareness where we can examine them and see the illusion for what it is.
But when we realize that we are spiritual beings trying to be human, we are not fooled by the illusion; we have a sense of well-being because we know that life is like a play in which we are participating. We know that when we are angry at someone, it does not mean there is something wrong with that person or something wrong with us for having strong feelings. The anger is simply an opportunity to see how it all works, and to let it be.
When we glimpse this view of life, we may experience a sudden awareness that there is nothing wrong, that everything is fine, and this is home, and I belong here, and nothing is going to hurt me. Each time we come back to that awareness, it becomes more and more familiar.
And the more we practice, the more that happens. That is the argument for practicing all the time.
Cheri Huber is trained in the Soto Zen tradition and teaches at A Center for the Practice of Zen Buddhist Meditation in Mountain View, California. These excerpts are from Trying to Be Human, a collection of Zen talks given by Huber and edited by Sara Jenkins. They appear here by permission of Present Perfect Books. © 1995 Present Perfect Books.
— Andrew Snee
