Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Here I try to summarize my own Zen practice and teaching in the briefest form. For me, Zen is a completely naturalized philosophical practice or a philosophical way of life. In the Korean Zen tradition I practice and teach, the path can be understood in terms of sudden awakening and gradual cultivation. A bodhisattva is someone committed to awakening and to helping other beings awaken and become free from dukkha. Through practice, we work to reduce our own dukkha while helping others do the same. The two primary virtues of the bodhisattva are wisdom (prajna) and benevolence (karuna). Wisdom motivates the awakening mind and benevolence motivates the bodhisattva path.

Dukkha
Dukkha is a Sanskrit word usually translated as “suffering,” leading to the popular misconception that the Buddha taught that “life is suffering.” Dukkha includes suffering, but also frustration, distress, dissatisfaction, even the feeling that things are not quite right, or the frustrated desire that the world and other people be exactly the way we want them to be at all times—my own ordinary dukkha. I usually leave dukkha untranslated because no English word captures enough of the relevant meaning.
Much of our dukkha involves a misalignment between reality and our expectations, desires, and demands about how reality ought to be. We crave reality to be different than it is, and then blame reality for not meeting our expectations. The Buddha taught “dukkha and the end of dukkha.” The unawakened mind experiences dukkha throughout life, but awakening our minds, learning to see reality clearly, and accepting reality as it is can reduce our dukkha. Accepting reality does not mean approving of everything that happens or refusing to change it. It means first seeing clearly what is actually happening. We cannot effect beneficial change in the world if we see the world through our preconceptions, prejudices, and limited interpretations.

Wisdom
Awakening (Sanskrit bodhi) may occur in sudden moments of insight, but practice and cultivation do not end with those experiences. Thus, I do not use the word enlightenment to translate bodhi. Seung Sahn called the awakening mind “don’t-know mind.” I understand this don’t-know mind as both seeing reality clearly and as awakening to the contingency of phenomena: nothing exists permanently, independently, or simply by itself. Everything arises through a web of causes and conditions.

Experiencing this contingency of phenomena—including the phenomenon of our own self—loosens our attachment to beliefs, views, opinions, ideologies, identities, and egos. A recurrent early Buddhist teaching asks us to regard the phenomena of our experience as “not mine, not I, not my self.” We can apply the same practice to our opinions, emotional responses, and identities. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings provide a similar perspective by teaching us detachment from “views.”

The famous Zen poem “Trust in Mind” (Xinxinming) states that “the Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences” and warns against attachment to “picking and choosing.” This does not mean that we never make distinctions or have preferences. We still distinguish true from false, helpful from harmful, wise from foolish. But we try not to mistake those distinctions for permanent and absolute features of reality or to build fixed identities around them. In Zen, we sometimes distinguish between ultimate and conventional truths. We function daily in conventional reality, but Zen allows us to sometimes experience ultimate reality. We still have selves, views, preferences, and opinions, but we know that they are contingent and impermanent, so we do not have to cling to them. We can engage others and act in the world without constantly defending an identity.

In this way, wisdom includes cultivating a range of intellectual and emotional virtues: intellectual humility, fallibilism, open-mindedness, cognitive flexibility, tolerance of uncertainty, charitable interpretation of others, willingness to revise our beliefs, and willingness to suspend judgment when the evidence is inadequate.

In our Korean Zen tradition, the hwadu provides one common practice for sudden awakening. Insight may also arise through open-awareness meditation, focused concentration, reading, studying koans, or unexpectedly in response to ordinary life situations. Awakening helps us distinguish reality from the stories and interpretations our conditioned minds construct about reality. With each awakening experience, we further cultivate don’t-know-mind.

Benevolence
Along with cultivating wisdom and awakening, Zen practitioners cultivate the way of the bodhisattva. In our sangha, we daily recite the bodhisattva vows: to help all sentient beings awaken, to see through all delusions, to embrace all opportunities to awaken, and to embody the way of the Buddha. Most of us probably begin practice with mixed motives, including the simple desire to suffer less ourselves. Through practice, however, the distinction between our own well-being and the well-being of others becomes less rigid. We gradually realize that harming others also harms ourselves and that helping others contributes to our own well-being.

Karuṇa is usually translated as “compassion,” but I prefer “benevolence.” Compassion etymologically means “to suffer with,” while karuna is commonly understood as the wish that others be free from dukkha. Merely adding our own suffering to another person’s suffering does not relieve anyone’s dukkha. Benevolence means recognizing another person’s dukkha, wishing them to be free from it, and, when possible, acting to help relieve it. It does not mean remaining emotionally untouched by another’s dukkha. It means being moved by suffering without becoming overwhelmed by it, so that we remain able to respond wisely and helpfully. It also does not mean we should become doormat bodhisattvas attempting to give people anything they desire, because most of us have desires that block our path to awakening.

Bodhisattvas cultivate a range of moral and intellectual virtues, including the “six parmitas” or “perfections” of generosity, ethical conduct, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom, and the “four brahmaviharas” or “immeasurables” of loving-kindness, benevolence, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Ethical conduct includes following the Buddhist precepts not to kill, steal, lie, engage in sexual misconduct, or harm ourselves and others through intoxicants that lead to heedlessness. The other virtues concern how we respond to ourselves and others in daily life, ideally with generosity, patience, wisdom, and benevolence, and at least without causing unnecessary harm.

Seung Sahn taught koans as a method for understanding the bodhisattva way through situation—relationship—function. Many situations in our lives become koans. What is the situation? What is our relationship to that situation? What is our bodhisattva function in that situation? If you are hungry, I feed you.

Zen Mindfulness
Mindfulness (sati in Pali, smriti in Sanskrit) is often taught today as “nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment.” But in Zen, mindfulness is more than this. The traditional word also carries the important sense of remembering. We become aware of the present moment, remember our bodhisattva intention and vows, and remind ourselves to respond appropriately. The common Zen meditation practices of just-sitting and open awareness cultivate our ability to become aware of what is happening, while our bodhisattva practice cultivates our ability to respond wisely and helpfully. Meditation helps us see the situation clearly. Wisdom helps us avoid imposing our attachments, assumptions, and fixed views upon it. Benevolence asks how we can respond without harm and, where possible, be helpful. Mindfulness means remembering to do this in the midst of ordinary life.