A talk given at the sesshin, 13 May 2023, New Orleans Zen Temple, by Richard Reishin Collins, Abbot
Sometimes we have to be a sangha of one.
We hear all the time about the Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. These can be very abstract terms, however, so I always encourage you to nail those down to concrete, recognizable examples in your life, anchoring these abstractions in your experience. For example: Buddha is the posture; Dharma is breathing; Sangha, attitude of mind.
We can find buddhas everywhere, all around us, if we just pay attention. It doesn’t have to be something on an altar, something holy, spiritual or special. It just has to be ineffably itself — tathata.
Dharma we find everywhere as well. In the patterns of our experience, we can learn the form and the formlessness of reality. This is especially true in what presents us with cases we can’t figure out. We call these koans when they appear in the literature, but the great koans are not to be found in books but in our own lives. These are what teach us — directly and deeply — about the nature of reality.
And sangha, which is less a congregation of people than an attitude of mind, the practice of mushotoku, with no intention of receiving any personal profit or gain. Sangha is an endlessly expanding community of mushotoku mind, so that even if you are doing zazen by yourself, you’re practicing with others. Even when you are doing zazen with others, you’re practicing by yourself.
Sometimes you don’t get to choose whether to practice in community with others or by yourself as a hermit. I am speaking of my own experience — because I’ve become a sangha of one for a while in the mountains of Tennessee.
It feels very comfortable for me, this weekend, to come back and sit with you here in the temple in New Orleans, very natural, a refuge. A refuge from a refuge.
But our sangha has always expanded and contracted over the years. In the old temple on Camp Street we had 16,000 square feet to expand into, and yet the ebb and flow was no different than it is now. Sometimes there would be up to twenty or so for a sesshin and yet sometimes there would be no one at all.
So a group of four or five sitting together feels abundant to me right now. But sometimes we have to be a sangha of one, like a stone dropped in a still pool. Like the Buddha at BodhGaya, in fact, where, as a sangha of one (we are told) he attained great awakening.
The main thing is to not choose. As it says at the very beginning of the Shin Jin Mei, as soon as you begin to pick and choose, you’re a mile off the path.
Sometimes I think I might prefer to be practicing with more people. Then I relax and settle into appreciating the freedom that practicing by myself offers. The main thing is that I learn from this experience. I have learned this: a refuge can become a hindrance. A sangha can become a problem. Our problems can become a refuge — paradoxically, perversely — when they preoccupy us so much that we forget what’s important. Our neuroses become our safe place. Our problems come to define us and occlude our vision with a cloudy mirror. Then we tend to forget that we are the only problem; we ourselves are the only refuge. This is the vortex into which preferences lead us.
Be careful, though. Not to choose does not mean not to act! It doesn’t mean to do nothing. It doesn’t mean you can’t decide. In fact, when you don’t make preferences you can act spontaneously, you can make those decisions that are necessary, not the unnecessary ones, not the ones that you overthink, but the things that need to be done.
A long time ago, some twenty years or so, when Robert Livingston Roshi wanted to open a restaurant on the ground floor of Camp Street, I asked him if he really wanted to be faced with all the decisions that running a business like that entailed. He said, “I have no problem making decisions.” Now I think I know what he meant.
An even longer time ago, back in the ‘80s, I was a young professor when I interviewed the poet Molly Peacock. She said something that I have always remembered. She said, “One day I decided to be happy.” She pointed out that the word decision is related to the word incision. To be decisive is to cut something away. It is to be incisive. There is a precision to it. Decide is also related to every kind of -cide, from pesticide to homicide, even deicide (the killing of gods), and so on. A killing, a cutting down, a slaying.
We say that during zazen, with hishiryo consciousness we “throw down” or “cast off” body and mind – shin jin datsu raku. We cut to the chase. We slay the Buddha that we meet on the road to reveal the real Buddha within ourselves. This is what we do every time we decide to come to zazen. We cut away the inessential. As Michelangelo said, he cut away what was inessential in the stone to reveal the statue within. We cut away what is inessential in ourselves, to find our true self: the one that we have not yet thought of, as Kodo Sawaki said. The living Buddha in our hara.
My wife Leigh and I moved to Romania in the early ‘90s. The first morning after we got up in our depressing cinder-block apartment, she went to the market to buy something to eat. As she stood at the counter, trying to decide what to ask for, the line of old ladies behind her started to scream at her. "Alegeți! Alegeți!” She didn’t know what that meant, but they were yelling at her to decide. “Decide! Decide!” Or literally, “Elect!” Select! Decide! Kill off your choices! Cut off your possibilities! Make up your mind!
In the Samurai tradition, of course, spontaneous decision-making is legendary. The Hagekure tells us that “one should make one’s decisions within the space of seven breaths.” This ability to focus with “an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit” is what allows the samurai “to break on through to the other side.” Hesitation in the martial arts is deadly. One deals with an attack spontaneously, automatically, naturally, not with a mind that “goes hither and thither.” A mind that is divided might soon result in a skull split open. You don’t think about it: you don’t worry about right or wrong. You go with your gut. Your hara.
When we practice on our own, though, we tend to overthink our practice. We think too much about the inessential. This activity is just waffling; it’s not deciding. We are not cutting the dross away, we are wallowing in it. We are trying to hold onto everything and to control it, weighing, picking and choosing, making preferences, all of which is very different from decisiveness. Someone who is decisive is not choosy, not picky, not bellyaching all the time about what is or is not appropriate.
As you have probably guessed, this kusen is more for me than for you, so that I can get back on track. But that’s our practice, that’s what a sangha is. We help each other. By helping each other we help ourselves. It doesn’t come down from on high from the Godo. The teaching goes both ways. We help each other to decide for ourselves.
Split Head Sculpture by Eric Kilby