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I’ve heard or read of venerable Zen teachers saying stuff like, “We are human beings, not human doings.” Personally, I find this trick of language a little cutesy, but that’s just me. I think they mean for us to emphasize our true nature rather than our behavior as the driver of our personal vehicle; that is, of us.
I’d like to suggest another way of looking at who and what we are as we live our daily lives. I’d like to suggest that there’s a harmony of being/doing that underlies everything we present as we live our lives. We are both human beings and human doings. There’s no opposition between the two. In fact, there are not two here: there’s only the harmony of being/doing.
And this applies not only to humans, but to all beings. Some trees (the deciduous ones) drop their leaves in autumn because that’s what those trees do. They don’t have to think about it or do anything to make it happen. It just happens, because that’s the nature of deciduous tree-ness. Flowers bloom in spring because that’s what those types of flowers do. They don’t have to think about it. It just happens, because that’s the nature of blooming flower-ness. And on and on.
All this is just essential nature manifesting as itself, as all its myriad forms. Or just manifesting itself (without the as). In Buddhist terms, we can look at all this as a perfect manifestation of the Heart Sutra’s form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form proposition. The nature of tree-ness and flower-ness is just that: emptiness (the potential) coming into form (the actuality) when the time is right.
I’m reading a book now, The Ground We Share (Robert Aitken and David Steindl-Rast, ed. Nelson Foster; Shambhala Publications, 1996; Diamond Sangha, 1994), which is a record of a dialogue between Robert Aitken Roshi and Br. David Steindl-Rast, conducted some years ago in Hawai’i. Early 1990s. These two worthies talked over a short course of days about intersections they found between Buddhist and Christian practice. It’s a fascinating conversation, and I recommend this book to you if you haven’t tasted it already.
During a discussion about knowing, wisdom, and heart (in short, the heart-mind), Br. David offers this, leaning for background on John’s gospel opening, “In the beginning was the Word…”:
… there’s something extremely valuable in Buddhism’s focus on the Silence within the Word. The Word is Silence that has come to Word. When people forget that the true Word comes out of Silence and wants to lead us back into Silence, then conversation becomes chitchat and, more broadly, life becomes superficial. So the focus in Buddhism on the Silence within the Word seems extremely valuable to me. Buddhism unravels the silence about the Silence.
For “Silence” in Br. David’s passage, we can read Buddhism’s “emptiness.”
Right after this passage in the book, Aitken Roshi replies:
There is a focus in Zen Buddhism on the silence within words. In one early text … we find the lines, “It speaks in silence, / In speech you hear its silence.” That is to say, the essential fact manifests itself in silence—and in speech as well.
What I read in this reply is that form expresses in silence; in form we can hear / see / taste / touch / perceive the Silence. All the five skandhas – our five senses – are present in silence. In the Silence. In emptiness. Again, we have the Silence within the Word, and the Word within the Silence. Again, form and emptiness. Again, the harmony of being/doing.
Now, you may feel this whole discussion – and this whole talk, if you like – devolves into some kind of metaphysical claptrap. But to me, it highlights an essential fact of life and living. What we are in this world, what we experience and what we do, is nothing more than essence manifesting in fact. And fact expressing essence.
The word (or Word, if you’re speaking in Christian terms) grows out of the Silence, and the Silence lives within the word. You don’t have one without the other. If we can keep this formulation (pun intended) before us from moment to moment, we may be able to keep ourselves in perspective as we go through our daily motions. And on those occasions when we seem to lose our way, we can call this formulation to mind and allow its immediacy to bring us back on track.
What are the two words we can’t seem to escape in our Zen practice? Just this. Just this.
Everything we do in any given moment grows out of the essential nature of being, of existence. And everything we are and do expresses within that essential nature. You could say that in actual fact, we are expressions of that essential nature. We’re not beings separate from it, but words within it.
Thomas Merton once wrote that we are words spoken by God. That’s his language, laid out that way because of his formation as a Christian practitioner. But really what he was saying, I think, was that we are forms, particular expressions of emptiness, living in a world which is itself an expression of emptiness. And emptiness, in its glorious plenitude, manifests as us, as anything, as everything.
That’s all.
Thank you.
EMPTY CLOUD ZEN 