Stay with this

A family member said to me: ‘Sanctuary cities exist to frustrate the attempts of the federal government to apprehend violent criminals who are not US citizens.’ Since my policy, for better or worse, is not to engage when my understanding and the other person’s are so far apart, I made myself scarce. But coming from a family member, this was a bit of a shock, and it left a trace—by which I mean that I observed my reaction forming itself into a story about the other person, a fixed view, an attitude. I’d like to examine this process of story-making, or attitude-formation, and to talk about how I approach it from the perspective of my Zen practice.

In the days after this incident, whenever I thought about my family member, I noticed that I had reached a conclusion. Whereas I used to think of him as a person who shared my views, more or less, now I had a label for him and I regarded him as a person who had adopted a fixed and unchanging position, on this issue, at least, and who if asked would always express his position in the same way.

This is the way I relate to other people, and not just those with whom I disagree. I attribute to the other person a more or less stable self, with opinions and feelings and preferences that do not change from day to day, or perhaps not even from year to year. This is what I call ‘knowing’ the other person. I have certain expectations based on my conception of who the other person is, and I insist on holding the other person to those expectations, which means that I hold them to an impossible standard of consistency that I would not dream of holding myself to…

Why do I do this? In all likelihood, it derives from my own illusion that I myself have a self that is coherent, fixed, and unchanging and that can behave in a consistent and totally reliable way. This fundamental delusion—the separate and autonomous self—serves to co-create a world that has the same qualities: measurable, comprised of fixed and unchanging entities, capable of being known and manipulated.

This is not the world that Buddhism describes to us. The world according to Buddhist teaching exhibits the four ‘marks’ of suffering, impermanence, no-self, and enlightenment. I do not have to believe this, especially since my senses frequently present a different, apparently more stable world. But I need at least a modicum of faith in order to practice in such a way as to verify the truth of the teaching: this is really a world in which everything changes, all the time, including the self that thinks it can stand apart from everything else.

To come back to my beloved family member: I had a label for him now, an attitude toward him. I regarded him as someone who did not share my understanding, and therefore as someone with whom I would henceforth be less friendly. Since he is a person I see quite a lot in the normal course of extended family life, I found my new attitude unpleasant, and I wanted to do something about it. I noticed that reasoning about the situation was the first strategy that presented itself—if you can call it reasoning. I thought, Oh, he probably didn’t mean it. I thought, He’s misinformed, he’s getting his news from the wrong places. None of this was working. I decided that there was really no necessity for him to share my view at all; it was unreasonable of me to require that the persons in my family circle feel the same as I do about politics or world affairs. So I wrestled with the problem like this, taking the mind road, as it were, and I succeeded only in solidifying the attitude I had formed in the first place: namely, that my family member was like this, and that he would always be like this, or at least for the foreseeable future, and I had better adjust my expectations accordingly.

In today’s reading, our ancestor, the 12^th century Chinese Chan Buddhist monk Hongzhi Zhengjue says, Stay with that just as that. Stay with this just as this. This is the way we practice. When something arises—a criticism of a family member, a feeling of disaffection—I stay with it, I meet it, I sit with it, I breathe it in and out. Stay with this. But the latter part of Hongzhi’s instruction is equally important: just as this. Stay with this without adding anything to it in the way of formulating a strategy, without saying, Oh, he didn’t mean it, or, Oh, it doesn’t matter. Just as this; without analysis—without turning away from the unpleasant reflection upon myself: I am someone who could write off a family member because he said something I did not agree with.

The practice of zazen is the practice of awareness—without interference. I have no expectation that my practice will fix things, or even that I can know exactly what the problem is. I simply meet the feelings that arise without preconception, with prejudice, without knowing. Just that. Just this.

Certainly there may be some relief from unpleasant feelings, even a feeling of freedom, if I am lucky. But there will probably be a second wave of feeling, and even a third. And Hongzhi’s advice is the same: Stay with that just as that. Stay with this just as this. This is why we call it practice.

Hongzhi goes on to say: That and this are mixed together with no discriminations as to their places. This is the truth of the matter, this is how it is in a world of impermanence and no-self, a world in which everything is shifting and changing and interpenetrating, a world in which there is no fixed and unchanging self to see things. I can infer this state of affairs by reasoning. I can say that all knowledge of the world is only an approximation and that what looks like stable phenomena and an unchanging self is just the surface. But only my practice can give me a direct experience of the reality—and grant me a moment of freedom from the tyranny of fixed views about myself and others.

This is not to say that I do not experience a self that I take to be myself and that others recognize. But it is not as solid or enduring as I think. Elsewhere Hongzhi says: You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Notice that he says ‘fabricated’ and ‘apparent.’ The tendencies of the delusive self are fabricated—meaning that they have no basis in reality—and its habits are apparent, which means that, however convincing, they are equally unreal. The way to be free is not to struggle with them or to attempt to eliminate them, but simply to give them plenty of room and as little credence as possible. Being that they are no more fixed and unchanging than the self that identifies with them, if left to their own devices, they will come and go without my having to confront them…

As it happens, the following week my family member was protesting passionately against the separation of families by ICE and the summary deportation of law-abiding persons who have lived and worked in the US for years. And while I was willing to take this at face value, I knew that I could not count upon my family member—or anybody!—to consistently conform to my expectations. Yet I go through life hoping to squeak by, to evade unpleasantness, to always encounter what I like. This is a strategy that is doomed to failure. My practice simply tells me to meet it—whether I like it or not.

To meet the flow of life as it arises in myself and others is a matter of continual adjustment, and of course it entails some suffering in and of itself. It’s like standing in an open boat and maintaining my balance while the boat rocks back and forth in the waves. It’s the practice of a lifetime, the practice of life, my very life itself.