The Transformation of Karma
One of our founders, Nancy Amphoux, liked to use the image of Zen practice being like ‘drops of water falling on a stone’. Wearing away the jagged edges, wearing it into different patterns, over weeks, months, years, decades, lifetimes... Creating new channels, new patterns, new habits – yet still the same stone.
The image represents the subtle transformation of karma. The wearing away of karma – personal habits that can be traced back to our past, to our culture and beyond – that happens naturally, unconsciously and automatically. Unlooked for, but observable.
Awareness in Zazen allows us to see more clearly the patterns, the stories that we tell ourselves and others, and to wear them more loosely. To allow them to naturally transform over time. But Zazen isn’t always or only gradual. Unlooked for, the clouds of the mind can suddenly clear, and the presence that is beyond the everyday self is tasted, is manifest through us.
Sometimes just for a moment, sometimes for longer, our everyday selves see what is always already there, always already beyond our personal self. The spring, the very source that naturally flows through us, manifested, unconsciously and automatically, through a life of practice.
One Moon, Many Shadows
contemplating the clear moon,
reflecting a mind empty as the open sky,
drawn by its beauty,
I lose myself in the shadows it castsThe moon and the shadows are inseparable: many shadows exist because of one moon.
Every time we chant the Hannya Shingyo, we chant the lines:
shiki soku ze ku
ku soku ze shikiform and emptiness are the same the many and the one are not separate
We can’t flee from the many, from the world of the form, in all its beauty, its sadness, its excitement, its terror. Zazen is not an escape. But rather an embracing and seeing beyond.
Even when lost in shadows, the beauty of the moon still shines.
Even when lost in the moon, the beauty of the shadows still calls.
Not Having Answers
To be alive, to be human, means to pass through difficulties and to live a life of joy and pain intermixed.
Suffering can come from many different directions, and from many different challenges that we face – from our response to the huge global threats that can impinge upon us, to our response to the suffering endured by those near and dear.
The challenges of relationships, of work, of our place in the world, of family, all inevitably cause us suffering.
Personally, I am feeling it more at the moment because of the difficulties my family is currently going through, and I’ve been trying to put into words how to respond through practice. The Tibetan teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, captured it very well in an interview I heard recently. He said, ‘One must let go, but not give up’.
In this context, letting go means, first of all, letting go of an idea that things should be different right now. Letting go of the sense that it’s unfair that life is like this. Why is this happening? Why can’t it be different?
So this letting go is accepting the reality of this moment, of this situation.
It also means letting go of the idea that we have the perfect answer, and also letting go of our attachment to a particular outcome.
Both the rejection of what is happening right now and the projection of some ideal hoped-for future take us away from what is necessary in this moment, and also inevitably cause suffering for us and maybe for those around us too.
It can cause conflict where someone else’s idea is different from one’s own. It might cause internal suffering from having some fixed idea of how things should be.
But according to Mingyur Rinpoche, letting go – in all these senses – doesn’t mean that we give up.
Not giving up means to be wholeheartedly present to the situation and to allow oneself to respond from this place: to respond to how things are right now, taking the next step, reaching out to those in suffering and taking them by the hand, whether that’s metaphorical or literal.
Acting from a place of letting go of expectation, letting go of an idea of how things should be, or how they must be in the future.
It’s not easy. It involves facing one’s inner pain, one’s inner demons, but in the end, it is the only way.
The only way is to not have answers.