Entering the Intimate Way
James Ishmael Ford
By what are you saved?And how?
Saved like a bit of string,
tucked away in a drawer?
Saved like a child rushed from
a burning building, already
singed and coughing smoke?
Or are you salvaged
like a car part—the one good door
when the rest is wrecked?
Do you believe me when I say
you are neither salvaged nor saved,
but salved, anointed by gentle hands
where you are most tender?
Haven’t you seen
the way snow curls down
like a fresh sheet, how it
covers everything, makes everything
beautiful, without exception?
Lynn Ungar, “Blessing the Bread”
For a number of years when I’d lead introductions to Zen and Zen meditation classes, I would say there are any number of reasons find themselves interested. Some had heard meditation was good for one’s health. In a similar vein, people were wracked with anxiety, and again, heard that meditation could lower one’s blood pressure.
I’d then say that while it’s true that meditation, including Zen’s specific kind of meditation is associated with some physiological shifts, including lowering blood pressure, that a simple cost benefit analysis would suggest this wasn’t the smartest way to go. You could achieve similar results to a half hour of meditation by watching an episode of “I Love Lucy.” And, frankly, it would be more fun to watch Lucy Ricardo and Harpo Marx mirroring each other. Heck, there could even be a Zen teaching somewhere along the line. All without the sore knees.
My point was that this didn’t bring enough motivation to the project. Zen is hard. Or, as the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn once said in a talk I attended, “Zen is boring.” Hard. Boring. Sore knees. Sore backs. When we’re looking to feel a little better, perhaps Zen isn’t the best thing going.
But, in recent years, I’ve stopped with that aside.
For one thing, I’ve noticed no one has a “good reason.” Our motives for taking up any spiritual practice are clouded. I know more than one person who converted to Christianity as part of a deal. In some desperate moment or another they cried out to God that if their fat were pulled out of this particular fire, they would henceforth embrace the Christian way. Should they extricate themselves or get extricated, the vast majority would quickly renege.
Many years ago my brother and I took a hike in the mountains above Palm Springs. We met some other hikers and at dusk we set out our sleeping bags near each other. And all of us shared cheese and bread and some fruit we’d packed in with us.
Then in the middle of the night it started raining. It quickly became dangerous. We all scampered up the side of the gully and no sooner were we as high as we were going to be able to get we could hear the water rushing down. It was terrifying. Our companions being to cry out to God to save them. One loudly promised to change and to become God fearing if he were saved.
The truth is I have no idea what came next for him. Most likely, given my observation of humans, is that by the next morning he’d completely forgotten his prayer. But for some, and I’ve met them, as well, that promise is kept. They have continued on. Some for a lifetime.
What I began to notice was that it wasn’t the motivation specifically. Well, other than that most fundamental of all our motivations for spirituality or religion. Noticing that there’s something wrong. We can see that wrong is a hundred different ways. The wrong, in fact, seems specifically cut for each of us. Guilt and shame, each a variation on a sense of not fitting, of not belonging range large in the hearts of people who choose to take on the way.
When I was thinking about entering a Zen monastery I asked the abbot how much faith did this whole thing require? I was told only the thought that possibly, maybe, something good could come of doing this. I was, and perhaps, I remain one of those of little faith.
But, what really drove me was some desperation. Some feeling things were not right.
And, however we frame it, that feeling that something’s not right is the nugget that starts us on the way. Your problem, your sense. My problem, my sense. There is no right or wrong in our choice of name, what it is we notice specifically in our lives. Rather it is a feeling there’s something wrong in the world, or, perhaps, it’s something wrong in my heart – which is the beginning of the beginning.
And immediately with that sense of wrong, there is a sense there is a right. We almost certainly can’t put a word to what the right is. Only that with a wrong, a right should, or at least might be able to follow. Call it a hunch. And with that a seed. In the Buddhism of the Great Way, the Mahayana, this sense, this hunch is called Bodhicitta. In Sanskrit Bodhi means “awakening” and Citta means “that which is conscious.” Bodhicitta is usually translated as the mind of awakening.
Here is the most natural of all natural experiences. In the midst of our suffering, our longing, our desperation, we capture a glimpse. Or, really, something touches us.
And with that, if we are lucky, and really notice some movement of some spirit within us, we turn our attention to the intimate way. It is with this that I think of those who in the midst of some terrible fix call out to God, and make a promise. I think of that promise that people sometimes make in the heat of disaster. They call on God. They call on Quanyin. The call on Mother Mary. They call on their own mother.
They. We. Us. You. Me.
And in that crying out, sometimes a promise is made.
In my older years I find myself interested in the Pure Land. The myth of it has Amida, a Buddha from a place far away from our time and place who makes a vow to save all beings. Within the Pure Land, by putting your trust in Amida’s vow, you are brought to a place where awakening is easy. Some would say that place given by another and the place achieved by the hard work of Zen practice is the same.
But the critical point, as I see it, is in fact the vow itself.
It is noticing something is wrong, feeling there can be a right, and making a promise to pursue that right.
We call it the original vow in the Zen way. In the Zen schools that vow is usually framed with four parts.
In the standard translation of the Sotoshu the four vows are:
Living beings are limitless; I vow to deliver them.
Mental afflictions are inexhaustible: I vow to cut them off.
Dharma gates are incalculable; I vow to practice them.
The buddha way is unsurpassed; I vow to attain it.
In the Boundless Way and Empty Moon Zen communities we say:
Beings are numberless, I vow to free them;
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them;
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them;
The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.
The Pacific Zen Institute offer another version, that I really love.
I vow to wake the beings of the world.
I vow to set endless heartache to rest
I vow to walk through every wisdom gate
I vow to live the great Buddha way.
And the poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen offered another version, connecting us to the natural world as the most intimate of intimate.
Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Consuming desires are endless; I vow to stop them.
Bio-relations are intricate; I vow to honor them.
Nature’s way is beautiful; I vow to become it.
Each of these versions, I believe, capture the essential elements of that primordial, primary vow. To notice there is hurt. To notice I am caught up with others. To desire to bring healing to the matter. And to begin and end knowing this is a family matter.
With this noticing, and this promise made to ourselves and on behalf of the whole hurting world, that is when we discover we’ve entered the intimate way.
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