The Gateless Gate

In all areas of human endeavor we rely on the expertise of others—the dentist, the attorney, the chef. Why would the fulfillment of our spiritual needs be any different? It is only natural that in times of need we turn to spiritual guides for help.

            But therein lies the danger—the illusion that spiritual enlightenment is something we can attain second hand; the mistaken presumption that the footsteps of others can do the walking for us. The Chinese and Japanese tradition of Zen Buddhism is particularly focused on this common error.

One day, 13^th century Zen Master Ekai gathered his monks for a talk. Always eager for knowledge, the young aspirants leaned into the words of their venerable teacher, sure that they would be of enormous value. Ekai sensed the time was ripe for an unexpected lesson.

“The great path has no gates,” he said, “thousands of roads enter it. When one passes through this gateless gate he walks freely between heaven and earth.”

It isn’t difficult to image the monk’s sideways glances, checking to see if anyone understood a word of what the master just said. What the heck is a gateless gate?

            “Zen has no gates,” Ekai continued. “The purpose of Buddha’s words is to enlighten others. Therefore, Zen should be gateless. Now, how does one pass through the gateless gate? Even such words are like raising waves in a windless sea or performing an operation upon a healthy body. If one clings to what others have said and tries to understand Zen by explanation, he is like a dunce who thinks he can beat the moon with a pole or scratch an itching foot from the outside of a shoe.”

            Then Ekai launched into a series of koans—unanswerable riddles designed to confound and ultimately disengage the mind, clearing the way for authentic satori or enlightenment. Later Ekai wrote the following account of the event:

            “In the year 1228 I was lecturing monks in the Ryusho Temple in Eastern China, and at their request I retold old koans, endeavoring to inspire their Zen spirit. I meant to use the koans as a man who picks up a piece of brick to knock at a gate, and after the gate is opened the brick is useless and is thrown away. My notes, however, were collected unexpectedly, and there were forty-eight koans, together with my comment in prose and verse concerning each. I have called the book The Gateless Gate, wishing students to read it as a guide.”

            To this day, Ekai’s The Gateless Gate is regarded as a masterpiece of Zen wisdom—even if it is one of the most exasperating philosophical works ever recorded. At the playful heart of the project is the notion that enlightenment cannot be conceptualized, codified, or conveyed second-hand by anyone—no matter how clever or erudite. All words and teachings can do is shake us awake to an unmediated awareness of our own essential nature. The moment you try to describe or explain it, any nascent awareness vanishes. The more fervent the grasping, the lower the yield. The fact that someone wrote the koans down was frustrating to Ekai, because writing wisdom down often dooms it to domesticity, misunderstanding, and misuse. But we’re grateful to that nameless monk anyway because now, 900 years later, we too can be challenged by these odd and edifying riddles.

All quotes from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings compiled by Paul Reps (Charles E. Tuttle: Rutland, Vermont, 1958) 113-114.

[This piece first appeared in my column called A to Zen in the November/December 2023 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The First Teaching

 “Burying the lede” is a journalism term for when the most important idea is buried
deep within an article. (They invented a new spelling to differentiate it from the lead used to make typeface for the printing process.)

            A quick look at the first teachings of Jesus and Buddha reveals one thing: They most definitely did not bury the lede. Instead, their first teachings conveyed the central theme of what would become their life’s work.

            The gospels tell us that after Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, he went into the wilderness for forty days. When he returned the first thing he said was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 3:2) Repent is an awkward rendering of metanoia, meaning “change of mind.”

On the heels of his own profound transformation, Jesus begins his teaching career not with a demand for obedience, nor with a call to obsess shamefully about our mistakes, but with the suggestion that we simply let go of our old ways of thinking—our prejudices, our conditioning, and our second-hand explanations. What’s the point of learning new information, no matter how true and insightful that information, if the very cognitive routes by which we process that information are clogged with distorting, structural errors? It is not a new world we need, but new eyes and a new mind with which to see and understand the world.

            In India 500 years earlier a young seeker named Siddartha Gautama had his own spiritual transformation in the wilderness. After a long period of study, practice, and meditation, Siddhartha shifted, seeing through the fog of conditioned consciousness, glimpsing the essential nature of things, and thereby earning the nickname Buddha—“the one who woke up.”

            After his enlightenment Buddha walked out of the woods and met with a few old friends in a deer park near Benares. There he gave his first teaching—the Deer Park Sermon—the two core themes being the Middle Path and the Four Noble Truths.

            Born from his own experience, Buddha suggested avoiding the twin extremes of over-indulgence and self-mortification. Both paths are equally self-obsessed and lead nowhere. Instead, walk the middle path of moderation and follow the Four Noble Truths.

            The first three of the Four Noble Truths are, simply put: life is characterized by suffering and dissatisfaction, suffering and dissatisfaction are primarily caused by attachments and cravings, and reducing attachments and cravings would reduce suffering and dissatisfaction. The Fourth Noble Truth is a list of action items called the Eightfold Path.

The first three Noble Truths are the diagnosis and prognosis. The Eightfold Path is the prescription, the behavioral and thought-level changes that would reduce selfish attachments, which would in turn release us from the wheel of suffering and dissatisfaction. Many of the eight suggestions have to do with learning how to think differently. In a word, Buddha is counseling metanoia. As he said in The Dhammapada, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: we are formed and molded by our thoughts.”

            Our mind is the tool with which we grip and hold the world. Before we can change the world, we must change our minds. And the work begins not with second-hand explanations but with the immediacy of self-examination, courageous purging, and loving transformation. As we suspected all along, wisdom is an inside job. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the July/August issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Love is the Mystery

There is a higher reality that words, concepts, and sermons can’t reach. We try to
point to this reality with carefully wrought language, theology, and doctrine, but the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The map is not the place. The menu is not the food.

For those of us who teach, preach, and write this news is somewhat deflating. We thought we were getting close to naming the mystery. But in the end, all we can do is cultivate in others a willingness to deepen into the mystery that wells up through the cracks of their own lives. This is why Buddha simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. This is why Lao Tzu wrote that “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.” Even Jesus seemed exasperated as he chastised his disciples in chapter thirteen of the Gospel of Thomas. “I am not your teacher,” he said. “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

If the teacher is not the message, and if the message cannot be received second-hand, then why do we gather in spiritual community to hear sermons about how to better ourselves and draw closer to the sacred source? As a guy who often gives those sermons, this strikes me as a particularly urgent question. What, in the end, are spiritual teachings for? Why do we need any of this?

You might as well ask a tree why it leans toward the sun. We love language, talking, and teaching because concepts are what we know. They’re how we know. In a way, they feed us.

First we perceive the world, then shape those perceptions into thoughts. As Adam named the animals, we name the concepts taking up residency in our consciousness, even going so far as to order them into hierarchies, because with naming comes judgment, prejudice, and bias. There is no such thing as value-neutral thought. We fall asleep and forget that we do not know the world as it is—we know only our thoughts about the world. This dynamic leaves us vulnerable to self-aggrandizing narratives that lionize us while diminishing the other. Prejudice seems baked into cognition itself.

Our innate need to discriminate and ascribe hierarchies must be deliberately disrupted and discarded. The good news is that the deeper part of us already knows this. Beneath the conceptual realm there is a concept-free field of awareness unbound by the limitations of thought. The world’s wisdom traditions call it by many names—Atman, Buddha-mind, spirit, inner Christ—and it is our essential nature. We have our being there. The conceptual mind is ill-equipped to experience this deeper reality. Realizing one’s sacred nature is more a process of  unlearning, of getting out of our own way. No matter how Herculean the effort, how can you become what you already are?

One of the most notable hallmarks of awakening is humility. Less and less do you need to prove that you are right. You recognize that every religion is true—that they all work, like maps, to show the way home. You stop straining and start softening. Freedom replaces fear and anxiety. You no longer argue about the meanings of words. All of the names of God are fine. Or none at all. In the end, only one word—love—serves us best as the name of the nameless mystery that we are. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2023 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Wordless Sermon

Zen Buddhism traces its origin to a single afternoon in the life of the Buddha.
One day Buddha gathered his followers for a dharma talk as he had done many times before. But on this day he simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. How would you feel if your minister tried that this Sunday in church? Awkward rustling sweeping through the congregation. Sideways glances turning to outright confusion. But on that long-ago afternoon, one man, Kashyapa, met eyes with Buddha and smiled.

When the Indian Buddhist teacher Bodhidharma brought Zen Buddhism to China in the fifth century CE he penned the famous mission statement of this nascent movement: “A special tradition outside the scriptures, not dependent on words or letters, directly pointing to the mind, and seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.”

As a movement, Zen Buddhism replaced all of the normal trappings of religion—scriptures and beliefs, devotion to deities, dependence on authorities—with the direct experience of life as it is, pulled into sharper focus through the practice of meditation. In fact, the Japanese word Zen is a rendering of the Chinese word Chan, which is a rendering of the Sanskrit word dhyana meaning “meditation.” At the heart of the entire Zen project is the claim that we already are what we seek. We just have to empty out enough to realize it.

Another hallmark of Zen is its refreshing dearth of boundaries. “Your entire life is Zen,” said Bodhidharma. Our natural proclivity for compartmentalization is gently (and sometimes not so gently) shaken loose in the practice of Zen.

After a recent talk on Zen Buddhism, a woman raised her hand and said, “I came here looking for something tangible, but this was all very abstract.” She was right. I felt her disappointment. She was looking for guidance. An old Zen story popped into my mind. Maybe this will help I thought.

A young man went to stay in a Zen monastery. They graciously took him in and he was invited to participate in all the activities of the community, primarily meditation and chores—lots and lots of chores. One week passed, then another, then another. But nobody was talking to him about Zen. His frustration grew. Finally, he worked up the courage to go see the master. 

“I came here to learn about Zen,” he exclaimed. “I have been here a whole month now and no one has said one word to me about Zen!”

“Have you eaten?” asked the master.

“Yes.”

“The go wash your bowl.”

Stories like this drive us into the immediacy of this moment, reminding us that true religion is not in books, beliefs, ministers, or rituals. All of those things are the plates we eat off of—they are not the food. Lived experience is the food. Every lunch is as sacred as a Eucharist. Washing your bowl sanctifies this moment as powerfully as any prayer. The mind asks for answers and explanations. But when the Buddha held up that flower, he was gently rebuking our tendency to build conceptual barriers between us and the here and now. 

Kashyapa understood what the congregation did not—that something sacred passes between us in every moment as if there are no barriers at all. Because there aren’t. Kashyapa passed the test, becoming the second patriarch after the Buddha. He understood the wordless sermon.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2023 issue of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Poetry of Nirvana

 Nirvana is one of those words like heaven, freedom, or God—it means so many different things to so many different people that it ends up meaning almost nothing. Let’s go back to the beginning and see if we can restore the essence of nirvana to its rightful clarity.

In Sanskrit, nirvana literally means “no wind.” Nir is a negating prefix (like unintentional or impossible), and vana in this context means breath or air that is moving. In its original sense then nirvana was a one-word poem connoting stillness, serenity, and the absence of agitation.

It certainly wasn’t a celestial realm reserved for the most devout—that idea would take shape much later.

As Buddha traveled and taught throughout India in the sixth century B.C.E., he used the word nirvana to describe the enlightened, awakened state. In this context, nirvana means “to extinguish” or “to blow out,” as in to blow out a candle. It’s a potent metaphor. When you blow out a candle, where does the flame go? I don’t know, but the conflagration is over. So too in the consciousness of nirvana no longer are we driven by the agitation of craving and fear. Not only is there nothing left to crave—there’s no one left to do the craving. In the state of nirvana we have transcended our ordinary egoic consciousness and entered a calmer state characterized by selfless compassion (karuna).

Would anyone around you even know if you had tasted nirvana? It’s not like you begin glowing, levitating, or spouting wisdom aphorisms. In fact, you probably just get back to work. As the Zen saying goes: “Before enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.”

But something happened as Buddhism evolved. In some of the devotional branches of Mahayana Buddhism nirvana came to be understood (especially in the minds of the laity) as an afterlife realm reserved only for the most devout Buddhists. While the original Buddha told his students “don’t follow me,” and “be lamps unto yourselves,” Buddha 2.0 required our purity, devotion, and adoration. How does this happen?

I guess we need gods, and in their absence, we create them. This impulse to devotion runs throughout the world’s religions. In mainline Christianity for example, it’s so much easier to worship Jesus than to follow him—to live as he lived. Setting celebrities, political leaders, and wisdom teachers up on celestial pedestals serves us in two paradoxical ways—it creates an aspirational ideal while releasing us from the arduous work of transformation.

But in original Buddhism, and arguably in the early Jesus movement as well, the emphasis was not on right belief (orthodoxy) or even on devotion, but on right action (orthopraxy). Nirvana was understood not as a reward for obsequiousness, but as an inner condition revealed only after the interfering impediments of egotism had sloughed off. The practice of renunciation, humility, meditation, and service untied all the knots and unlocked all the doors. The truth indeed will set you free.

Imagine a pond on a windy day, the surface choppy and silt from the bottom roiling up and muddying the water. Then imagine no wind—the pond’s surface returning to glass as the silt settles back to the bottom. Now, every cloud in the sky is reflected on its mirrored surface, and every pebble below a speckled jewel. From stillness comes clarity and depth. This is the poetry of nirvana.  

 

[This piece originally appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the September/October 2022 issue of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]