Zen Self-Mastery & the Vow to Save All Beings
The Bodhisattva vow, “To Free/Save All Beings” means to free them from our own colonizing intention of how we think others should be. To free all beings is to practice Upeksha, accepting others as they are, where they are at. To be a Bodhisattva who frees all beings is to be able touch the suffering of others in a mutually nourishing way. To do this, we must seek to truly understand the suffering of others. Our purpose in this life as a Bodhisattva is to deeply understand the conditions that cause suffering to arise in ourselves & in the people around us.
As a practitioner of Zen our effort is to break through the problem of birth & death. Practitioners can also be called stream-enterers. Not every practitioner is called to the Bodhisattva path & a Bodhisattva is no better or worse than a stream-enterer. We are walking the same path but in a different way, with a different focus. When a stream-enterer has understood how to break through the problem of birth & death they will inevitably find themselves called to follow the Bodhisattva path, because it’s not enough to have some insight. It’s not enough to have a disembodied realization. It’s not enough to simply be enlightened about something like that. What we are given to know must be put into practice. That is the only way we can be solid in what we have been given to know about that problem of birth & death.
I have recently been told outright that I have no right to call myself a “Zen Master” because I have not been formally marked as one through somebody else’s formal tradition I have no use for. Which I found funny because I have never made such a claim about myself. But I feel as though in saying that to me, that person was formally recognizing me as a Zen Master, which got me thinking… I understand what a Zen Master is & I can recognize when somebody is not one. A Zen Master has broken through the problem of birth & death & lives life fully in the flow with purified intuition & shameless intention. I know this is true because this is how I live. This is what is written by Dogen & by Bodhidharma & by Huineng, among others. This kind of self-mastery has been the intentional focus of my practice for some years now. The Diamond Sutra teaches you cannot recognize a Buddha by forms. So someone need not be formally marked as a Zen Master in order to be one. We only need to be fully realized in the way I have just described.
I can tell you from my own experience, we know without a doubt when we have attained this self-mastery. I can also tell you it’s not the end, it’s not “nirvana” & it’s certainly not a reward. It won’t make you better than anyone else or want to put yourself above them, in fact, it makes me feel a lot more humble. It’s only the beginning of a very lonely path. Many people reject you when they begin to get a sense of what you are, especially people who call themselves Buddhist. Your presence waters seeds of hatred in them. They resent you & they don’t know why. That’s in the scriptures too, just look at Huineng (Platform Sutra).
A true Zen Master knows there is no such thing as a Zen Master. Most people would not recognize a true Zen Master that walked alongside them. They’d be too busy looking for signs, deluded by constructions of authority because they haven’t yet broken through. This is why you rarely find real Zen Masters at formal Zen Centers. We tend to stir up too much trouble. We can’t help it, it’s our nature to want to touch those dormant seeds sleeping behind all that social masking.
To a person trapped in dualistic thinking, to a person who hasn’t broken through, they confuse relinquishing ego with self-annihilation. The way that kind of person uses the word “emptiness” can demonstrate their delusion. This is because they haven’t understood that word is just a signifier, a seed in itself, pointing to something else. The word “empty” can be separated from what it is pointing to. Just say it another language.
Words as signifiers are fluid & highly context dependent. To overcome this attachment, we have to consider our own positionality in polluting the other person’s meaning with our own preconceptions. Let me explain…
My gas tank is empty…. does that mean I can throw a lit match into my gas tank? No, my gas tank is only empty of gas, but it is still full of fumes. It may even be partially full of a small amount of gas. By empty I might just mean the indicator light is on telling me it’s time refuel. So empty in this case is very nuanced & we have to ask, to listen, to observe, to be fully present in the moment to truly find out what empty means in this specific situation.
We might be idealistic & suggest that we can remove this subjectivity & be perfectly neutral. But the idea of total objectivity is just another face for dualistic thinking. It’s not possible. Our subjectivity is the grounds for our compassion & connection. When we have great affinity with certain kinds of others, our ability to relate to their suffering is also very great.
This does not mean we should discriminate against those we have less affinity with, but it means that I know that I will have a harder time finding a common overlapping collaborative space with certain kinds of people. Knowing this, I know there is nothing wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with me. We just don’t really rhyme easily & to make that effort takes great energy & there’s a good chance it can create unproductive conflict which can water suffering in us both.
A Bodhisattva is aware of what kinds of situations are going to be most helpful for where we are at right now. We listen deeply, we trust our intuition, & when we feel a twinge of resistance arising in others, we give those people space away from our presence so as not to continue watering whatever it is our presence is bringing up for them. This is also true for Zen Masters because a Zen Master is also a Bodhisattva.
Relinquishing ego therefore means I am woven from so many conditions that there is not a single thing I can point to that says “this is me, this is mine; this is not me, this is not mine”. & so I cease the effort to continue to construct that kind of reality for myself. Instead I focus on understanding in each moment what is depleting me & what is nourishing me & then focus my effort on doing the things that are the most nourishing. This is discernment: “This is good for me, this is not good for me”.
If something is depleting me but it is necessary in order to do what’s mine to do right now, then what is mine to do is to find a way to make it into something nourishing. Because “emptiness” also means nothing stays the same, nothing is stuck, nothing is permanent. I have thumbs & with my thumbs I can manipulate my reality into whatever I want. I can find the joy in something that is causing me to suffer simply by changing up my story. That is what it means to transcend dualistic thinking. We know there are infinite truths possible for any given situation & if I don’t like one, I can experiment with another & another until I find something that works for what I’m about right now in this moment. Whatever that truth is, if it resonates for me, if it nourishes me, if it energizes me, then it is correct, even if it causes others to suffer.
To be a Zen Master then is to trust so completely in what one is doing that the suffering of others is of little concern, because it has already been considered & accounted for long before my action was decided. Because when one is living in a state of that kind of self-mastery, the nature of suffering is understood & when the nature of suffering is understood, there is no delusion about any other beings needing to be freed or saved. Rather a Zen Master moves in a way that is in perfect alignment with the flow of how one has been woven, at peace & grounded in oneself, & integrating any inevitable karma kicked up like dust on the path into a deeper understanding of the nature of that path one has been called to walk along.
