Gate 70: Effort as truth

Effort, as a part of the state of truth, is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we become proficient in realization.
進覺分是法明門、善知覺故（進覺分是れ法明門なり、善く知覺するが故に）。

We  discussed effort back at Gate 59; let’s do a quick review.  Energy or effort is what sustains our practice so that we can work with hindrances and pitfalls and develop some maturity and insight over time.  There’s an element of overcoming laziness and preventing backsliding, and understanding that no one can practice for us.  Teachers and sangha friends can point the way, causes and conditions can all be there, but we have to put in the hard yards.  

What we’re applying effort toward is the four exertions:

• cultivating wholesomeness
• maintaining it when it arises
• keeping unwholesomeness from arising
• making it go away when it’s already here

One of the important points in the earliest teachings is that our effort is not just for our own benefit; it keeps coming back to working for the wellbeing of ourselves and others.  There are a couple of aspects to making effort—there’s expending energy in a conscious striving toward something, trying to reach a goal, learn something, build something or get from here to there.  We expect to have a certain amount of control over what happens, and that’s a kind of individual effort, or effort by a group of individuals.

There’s also the perspective that the universe is expending energy simply because the universe is doing what it does.  I might plant seeds and say I’m growing a crop, but I don’t really have anything to do with it.  Causes and conditions are such that plants are growing day by day on their own.

We should also consider the second element of this gate, becoming proficient in realization.  The basic meaning of the words is to understand well, to have effective knowledge or a clear perception.  At Gate 59 we saw that the relationship between effort and wisdom worked both ways.  Effort helps us cultivate and manifest wisdom, we also need wisdom to discern where to put our efforts.  Otherwise, at best we could be wasting our time, and at worst we could be putting a lot of energy into something harmful even though we mean well.

That brings us back to this gate about effort and wisdom, and this constant attention to where our effort and energy are going is a recurring theme in our dharma family.  Sawaki Roshi, Uchiyama Roshi and Okumura Roshi all keep coming back to it.

Uchiyama Roshi simply says: To seek or follow the Buddha Way means to focus all your effort on the most genuine way to live, and to continually refine your life. (1)  In other words, we don’t forget to practice.  We stay focused on seeing the way Buddha sees and living the way a bodhisattva lives, and we try to let go of distractions and hindrances that pull us toward unwholesome activities and behaviors.  Not only are we helping ourselves with this, we’re putting ourselves in a much better position to be useful to others.

To continually refine our lives is to pay attention to our direction, making sure that we’re putting our limited human resources where we really want them to go and not wasting our time mistaking short-term happiness for long term contentment.  Okumura Roshi says: If diligence is misdirected, the harder we work the farther we deviate from the correct path.  Without the wisdom to see which way to go, our diligence is meaningless effort. (2)  Elsewhere he says that meaningless effort is the same as suffering—chasing things that don’t bring lasting satisfaction.

Sawaki Roshi hits this teaching over and over in The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo.  Here are some examples:
- Imagine looking back on our lives after we die.  We’ll see that so many things didn’t matter.
- If we have no money, we’re in trouble.  But it’s good to know there are more important things than money.  If we have no sexual desire, something might be wrong.  But it’s good to know there are more important things than sexual desire.
- Because they’re bored, people kill time by agonizing, falling in love, drinking, reading novels, and watching sports; they do things halfheartedly and incompletely, alienated from their lives, rather than living with determination in a decisive direction.  For them, life is ukiyo, the floating world: a place of floundering and wasting time doing random things.  (3)

He’s constantly asking us where our attention, effort, time and energy are going.

Making effort in practice can seem to be contradiction if we’re familiar with Dogen’s view that practice and  awakening are not separate.  Of course, this was his question too: if buddha nature or awakening are already here, why do we have to work hard and study the dharma and practice?  We’ve all also heard Sawaki Roshi’s teaching that zazen is good for nothing, as Okumura R oshi translates it.

The understanding that our ancestors have is that in one way we make effort to use our karmic circumstances to overcome hindrances to seeing clearly and manifesting prajna, and in another way, the effort being made isn’t our small, personal effort.  It’s the universe carrying out its function, and we happen to be a part of that universe.  In that way, there’s nothing to struggle with or on which to work hard.

Well, it’s one thing to hear that and know it intellectually, but it’s another thing to actually verify it by putting it into practice and living it every day.  Here’s how Uchiyama Roshi explains it:
Because we concretely are universal self there is no particular value in talking about it.  Yet if we don’t make every effort to manifest it, just knowing about it is useless.  To concretize the eternal, that is the task before us.  Even if we have a cup of cool, clean water sitting right in front of us, if we don’t actually drink it, it won’t slake our thirst.  The expression of universal self is a practice that is eternal, but to the extent that we don’t walk it ourselves, it won’t be realized it won’t be our path.  (4)

Here’s Okumura Roshi’s experience of that same point:
When I first studied the Buddha’s teaching I had difficulty accepting it.  It was not so hard to understand it intellectually.  It’s easy to understand as an abstract theory that the cause of suffering is ignorance and desire, or to see examples in other people.  But it’s difficult to see when we ourselves suffer and are ignorant.  It’s also hard to accept that we are deluded.  We believe that we are special, important and valuable.  It’s really not a matter of intellectual understanding, not a set of abstract hypotheses.  If we agree with the Buddha’s teaching, we need to practice it and make an effort to transform our lives.  (5)

All of these folks have reached a personal understanding about the need for concrete effort in practice, but they’re not losing sight of the other side, that effort, energy and activity are already the true nature of reality.  

Let’s take a look at what Dogen has to say about this gate in his fascicle on the 37 factors of awakening.

“Diligence as a limb of the truth” is never having plundered a market.  Both in buying oneself and in expending oneself, there is a definite price and there is recognition of worth. Though we seem to suppress ourselves and to promote others, a blow through the whole body does not break us. While we have not yet ceased expending the self on a word of total transformation, we meet a trader who buys the self as a totally transformed mind.  “Donkey business is unfinished, but some horse business comes in.”  (6)

This is all just another way to say yet again that practice and realization or verification are not two; this is one of his favorite teachings.  Now we step back and back to see how he got here.

“Diligence as a limb of the truth” is never having plundered a market.  Plundering a market is reference to Case 5 of the Blue Cliff Record, a collection of kōans originally compiled in China in 1125 CE.  Fortunately, we don’t need to examine the whole case here.  The line in question is “Where the King’s rule is a little more strict, it’s not permitted to plunder the open markets.”  It’s talking about a marketplace where a merchant tries to sell his goods at a certain price, but a customer wants to buy the goods at a much cheaper price.  Even though the merchant doesn’t want to sell at the lower price, somehow this customer convinces the merchant to do it.  What the text is getting at is: how do we know or decide what something is worth?  How much money, or how much effort?

If we’ve never plundered a market where the currency is effort, we’ve never tried to get away with something for nothing, or get by on less diligence with an attitude of oh well, good enough.  To do that is to be less than wholehearted in our practice.  It’s interesting how this image gives the feeling that we’re inclined to cheat or be a bit dishonest when we look at our own effort; we’re not always selfless bodhisattvas.

Dogen refers to this marketplace image again in Ikka Myoju, or One Bright Jewel:  No one would throw a tile away at a marketplace.  This quote comes from volume. 16 of the Dentoroku or Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, the awakening stories of the first 41 ancestors of our lineage.  In the story of Xuefeng Yicun, he says, “Recently having abandoned a brick, I got a piece of jade in return.”  In other words, he got something precious, a piece of jade, in exchange for something cheap, a brick or tile.  In this case, the precious jade is Buddha nature and the cheap tile is karmic consciousness.  However, Dogen is saying that kind of exchange can’t happen—“No one would throw away a tile at the marketplace”—because the tile and the jade are the same.  Our karmic nature and buddha nature are the same.  Even so, we usually want to practice in order to get rid of our delusion and get something called awakening.  That’s misplaced effort, and when we catch outselves doing that, we have to ask where our energy is going.

Okumura Roshi says: We are not in the marketplace, so there’s no way to trade or exchange things by throwing away something we don’t want and getting something we do want. Yet often in our practice we have the attitude of a merchant; we want to get rid of our delusion and receive wisdom or enlightenment in return. This is exactly throwing away the tile and picking up the jewel. 

“Diligence as a limb of the truth” is never having plundered a market.  Both in buying oneself and in expending oneself, there is a definite price and there is recognition of worth.  We have to understand the nature of the marketplace and the nature of the transaction.  Sometimes we’re taking something in and sometimes we’re offering something outward.  When we’re taking something in, is it based on greed and getting all we can without much cost to ourselves?  When we’re offering something to others, are we looking for a particular level of payment or reward or recognition?  What value are we putting on our time and energy, and what value are we putting on our practice and on the bodhisattva life?

There’s no shortcut in practice, no way to get something for nothing, partly because we have to do our own work, and partly because there’s nothing to get.  If we think so, we’re not seeing the marketplace—our lives—clearly.

Though we seem to suppress ourselves and to promote others, a blow through the whole body does not break us.  Even though we’re making selfless effort on behalf of all beings rather than just ourselves, effort in itself strengthens our practice.  Because of wisdom or prajna, we see that our effort for all beings is not something we do at our own expense.  When we become exhausted by our work in caring for others, these days we call that compassion fatigue.  It’s what happens when we have an idea about who we’re supposed to be when we’re making effort, and how that effort is supposed to be received.  Then we get stuck, locked into a story, and we’re not free to let the universe do its practice through us.

Okumura Roshi says: [The Heart Sutra] points to the essential role of prajna in our efforts to fulfill our vows.  To follow the bodhisattva path, we study and practice prajna paramita, the wisdom that sees impermanence, no-self, emptiness and interdependent origination.  When we clearly see this reality: that we and other things exist together without fixed independent entities, our practice is strengthened.  We understand that to live by vow is not to accept a particular fixed doctrine but is a natural expression of our life force. (7)

It sounds a lot like what Uchiyama Roshi was saying earlier about the Buddha Way being about focusing all our effort on the most genuine way to live. 

While we have not yet ceased expending the self on a word of total transformation, we meet a trader who buys the self as a totally transformed mind.  “A word of total transformation” is a phrase that recurs in this tradition, sometimes called “a turning word.”  It’s something a teacher or master says to trigger awakening in a student or a visitor, causing the student to turn his understanding around and see a different perspective.  Yet, according to Dogen, while we’re still looking for turning words and teachings and making effort in our practice, the Buddha sees that we are already transformed.  Our understanding already includes seeing from the perspective of Buddha and we’ve already been turned.  It might remind you of Dogen’s famous teaching that the self advancing and confirming ten thousand things is called delusion, and the ten thousand things advancing and confirming the self is called enlightenment.

Now he’s going to hit this point one more time in the last sentence: Donkey business is unfinished, but some horse business comes in.  He didn’t make this up; this one also comes from the Dentoroku:  One day a monk asked Reiun, “What is the grand design or overall aim of the Buddhadharma?  Reiun replied, “The horse has arrived before the donkey has left.”

Over the centuries there have been various interpretations of the meaning of the donkey and the horse.  Some say they represent the tasks of everyday life and practice, that they just come one after another without any gap.  Others say the donkey is immaturity while the horse is someone mature or awakened.  The point is that everyone embodies both and is undeveloped in some things and more refined in others.  I think we can argue that Dogen’s point in using the quote here is to say that even while we’re still doing the donkey work of putting effort inwardly into our own study and practice, awakening is already here and we’re already in a position to spread that effort outwardly and carry the dharma into the world to save all beings.

The donkey is something less glamorous and in the marketplace he might not fetch as high a price as the beautiful horse.  It might not be seen as being as valuable and desirable, and yet donkeys are sturdy, strong and hardworking.  We can be tempted to bypass the day to day practice of getting on the cushion and letting go of thought in favor of reading an interesting dharma book, hearing a famous teacher give a talk, or learning to do an impressive ceremony.  We need to spend our time equally with the donkeys and the horses, and yet we need to not fail to see that the horse is already here even though we’re chasing around looking for it.

There’s a classic example of this that I see during sesshin.  The sole project of our style of sesshin is letting go of thought continuously, from the moment the first zazen bell rings to the moment the last period of zazen ends.  The whole container is designed to minimize distraction and help us stay focused on this project.  There are only three activities on the schedule: eating, sleeping and zazen/kinhin, and we’re doing the first two in support of the third.  However, about halfway through the sesshin, it’s not uncommon that when the bell rings to end zazen and start kinhin, everyone stampedes out the zendo door, leaving me walking alone in the zendo.  Everyone’s come up with an excuse to leave the zendo because after all somehow kinhin is “break time.”  Everyone wants to “take a break” from zazen, get out of the zendo, and look at something other than the wall.  

It just shows that folk don’t yet understand what zazen is, what sesshin is about, what they’re here to do.  Often the common room is full of people standing around, staring out the window, or (worse yet) perusing the library.  They’ve just spent 50 minutes making effort to let go of thought; now they’re out there creating stories so they can spend the next 50 minutes letting go of those.  What are they doing?  From what are they escaping?  Boredom?  Why do they need to be entertained?  Recurring thoughts?  Are the thoughts they’re stirring up outside the zendo any easier to let go of?  What’s outside the zendo that’s any better or more helpful to their practice than what’s inside?  Where are they putting their effort— into creating hindrance and distraction, or into doing kinhin and letting go of thought?  How is it possible to “take a break” from zazen if letting go of thought is continuous?  Not letting go of thought during sesshin is simply a waste of time and the opportunity of this practice container.  Did we really sign up for that?

It’s basic craving and aversion, chasing and escaping, the bedrock of our delusion and suffering.  Skipping kinhin to look for somewhere else to put our effort doesn’t make a lot of sense.  We’re pretty sure we see the donkey, but we don’t see the horse that’s right in front of us.  We think it’s out in the common room or out on the lawn or in our sleeping spaces or something, anywhere but in the zendo during kinhin, so we’re misdirecting our effort.

Yes, our bodies can become fatigued from sitting period after period if we’re not used to it, but if our brains are becoming fatigued by zazen such that we need to “take a break” from it, something’s going on.  We’re probably putting energy and effort into judging and labeling our thoughts, pushing them away or suppressing them, but that’s not what we do in zazen.  We do only four things—take the posture, keep the eyes open, breathe deeply through the nose and let go of thought.  We need the wisdom to see the reality of zazen and the reality of the universe, and then we see that we need to make effort even though our vows are endless and there’s always something more to do.  Because our practice, work and study are never completed, we vow to make effort endlessly.  

We make that effort without evaluating, because evaluating is extra.  We can’t put a timeline or a deadline on practice and carrying out vows.  Okumura Roshi gets the last word on this; he says: Our effort is like raindrops; it doesn't create change in one day, or a few days, or a few years.  But if we just keep doing it, when conditions are ripe, it happens. (8)

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Notes:
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(1) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 195.  
(2) Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 138.  
(3) Uchiyama Roshi, K. (2014). Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo. United States: Wisdom Publications.  Quotes are from pages 75, 68 and 84 respectively.
​(4) Opening the Hand of Thought, p. xxxv-xxxvi.
​(5)  Living by Vow, p. 24.
​(6) Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, tr. Nishijima and Cross, vol 4. (2006). United Kingdom: Booksurge Publishing, p. 12.
​(7)  Living by Vow, p. 9.
(8) Living by Vow, p. 49.

Questions for reflection and discussion:

• How do you feel about where your energy is going in your practice?  Are there ways in which you'd like to consider redirecting that effort?
• How do you understand the two perspectives that we need to make individual effort in our practice and at the same time, the universe is simply carrying out its function through us?
  
• How do you decide how much effort is appropriate?
  
• What's been your experience of compassion fatigue, and how have you practiced with that?