Category Archives: Western Teachers

Teachers primarily of American and European cultures

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hope for the wrong thing

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Back to this demon, Hope.

Zen Peacemaker Bernie Glassman taught an entertaining and engaging retreat at Upaya on the Oneness of Life.  The entire two and a half days was an extravaganza of history, story telling and Zen Zingers interwoven with luminous descriptions of Indra’s Net and the beginning of the world as we not-know it.  I admit I’ve had some interesting preconceived notions of Glassman who has always struck me as the enfant terrible of the Zeniverse.  And thus he is – in part.  With a lot else.  Radical, no-nonsense and relatively intolerant of ego-centered questions – an interesting mix which seemed to elicit fascinating projections from the audience.

Things trundled along fairly well, as much as an experiential process does when lead by someone with half a century of practice, until Glassman offered his view of expectation and hope.  My notes are not illuminating but I recall his terminology got us all in a melee trying at once to convince him out of his definition and impress him with ours.  With no disrespect but it really is futile to fight delusion with delusion – which is what definitions end up being when we cling to them.  To give Glassman some credit though, his Socratic jiu-jitsu deftly threw us back onto ourselves and that in itself was a teaching.

However, not to be out-done by the moderately deluded, I entered the fray to prove how thoroughly deluded I can be.  Commenting on the process we seemed caught in drew a long blank stare from him.  Or maybe I had hit the pinnacle of Zen insight and he didn’t know what else to do with me.  It was worth the fleeting expanding of my ego before my anxiety kicked in and I blathered on about T.S. Eliot’s East Coker.

Glassman had defined “hope” as “being of the present,” as something he offered as “an expression of the love of all things.”  It only “makes sense when there is no self involved,” a “bearing witness which allows (him) to say it makes sense to make the four vows of the Bodhisattva.”  (I told you my notes don’t help!)

People in the audience leaped to re-define it as an aspiration, a desire, a wish – all of which he rejected with a twitch of an eyebrow.  I bravely suggested that his definition ran counter to Eliot’s lines in East Coker;  it was challenging me to re-think the idea of “Hope,” I opined.  In fact, I forged on in the throat-closing silence, his concept of hope seemed to be close kin to the Metta Sutta.

The what? he asked.

I gave up hope.

And maybe that was what he intended for all of us.  Stop messing with the concept and sit with not knowing what the heck it means.  And then see what arises as skillful means.

I don’t know.  Maybe.  Or not.  Only the Shadow knows when it comes to Zenmeisters.

Here’s T.S. Eliot’s take on it.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

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flinching from eudaimonism in buddhism

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Let me pick up on a hint of a theme from yesterday’s book review of Thich Nhat Hanh’s new novel, The Novice. Towards the end of the post, I commented that Thấy’s teachings offer an easy entry to Buddhism.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say he, like many teachers who are skillful, offers an apparently simple beginning to practice.  There is wisdom in this.  The teachings can be encouraging and lay a solid groundwork for deeper understanding as we continue on the path.  However, there is also a danger that we can fall into a flowery, vapid, and naive approach that gentle teachings can evoke.

It has always concerned me that “simple” is absorbed as “simplistic” and the evidence is rampant in the millions of catchy sayings that attempt to transport us from the truth of suffering into a facsimile realm of the Pure Land.  Tragically, this creates a blindness to the deeper teachings offered by teachers such as Thấy which are – under the child-like renditions – a complex integration of scripture and aids to practice.  Over the years, I have come to appreciate that his words, audio and written, are killing-sword koans whose edge we can skip over or on which we can impale our delusions.

I once said to a dharma teacher in Thấy’s tradition that Thấy offers an easy in but it’s a tough stay.  Practice, as Thấy teaches, demands an unrelenting devotion to being honest with oneself in every moment.  Try it for five if you question how hard this is.  And yet, the preponderance of his teachings seem to end up as sound bytes turning the nectar of compassion into a mind-numbing salve against the reality that the practice of Buddhism is not about salvation in this moment or any other.  It’s a true koan of our times.  How do such accessible teachings result in such a diversion from the intent of practice?

About the time of my struggle with this conundrum an email arrived pointing me to a delicious post by Glenn Wallis on “Flinching.”  As frightened as I am by the depth of Wallis’ erudition, I was compelled by his argument that there is a turning away from the truth of suffering, that we have developed a predictive, fallacious equation whose outcome variable is set as “deep joy.”  He refers to this perspective as “a eudaimonistic subterfuge” to which Buddhism is becoming heir.  If I grasp Wallis’ exegesis and in my simplistic terms, we Buddhists have taken a wrong turn in our understanding of the Dharma by making practice instrumental rather than intentional.  Not only have we let our fears about the true nature of reality get the better of us, we have become deeply desirous of a belief that a virtuous practice will reap a future of deep joy.  This utilitarian stance to practice is subtly subversive and the ground quickly becomes unstable because it is driven by avoidance of pain.  This is further emphasized by a recent retreat on the Tricycle page in which Rita Gross spoke out on “feel-good Buddhism.”

In psychotherapy, we call this a flight into health.  The patient, overwhelmed by what is required to make sincere and long-lasting change, suddenly gets better – a one-hit-one-session-wonder.  The therapist, anxious about the depth of intervention and the demands of sitting with the pain of the Other, flinches at the prospect and welcomes or even offers this endpoint of deep joy.  It is a collusion that creates a dynamic of mutual blindness.  Winding this thread back to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings, I wish had a peanut for every time I heard someone say, “If you just practice for three days, your depression will go away.”  Or, “If I could just sit in the presence of my partner’s anger and understand Interbeing, it will be ok.”  Well, if I had a peanut for each of these times, I’d be a happy elephant.

Here’s the unfiltered truth:  There are no promises.  Hope was a demon in Pandora’s Box.  Practice simply because there is no choice.  Don’t flinch from this.