Everyone seems to be interested in their “progress” in Zen practice. Whether we have been practicing for two weeks or twenty years, we sometimes wonder whether we’ve made any progress. This occurs to us even when we know that there is no such thing as progress in Zen practice. The only progress is realizing that progress is illusory.
Unlike in the martial arts, we don’t have a system of grades and rewards in Zen. We don’t have different colored belts to indicate where one is in their practice, to mark their achievements. No competitions to build up or confirm our confidence, or to tear it down. Of course some people insist on seeing ordination as a mark of distinction, like graduation from high school or college — it’s more like graduation from kindergarten.
It’s a familiar pattern: strong practice until ordination, then a slacking off, while they savor the view from the height of their little dunghill. This is a mistake. Bodhisattva ordination, monastic ordination, the shuso ceremony, even shiho, these are all aspirational; they are not graduations into some higher rank, some exalted realm of the enlightened. One only takes on at each stage the added responsibilities of continued practice with a greater realization of one’s incapacity.
There is only one belt in which to wrap yourself in Zen, and that is the black belt of your own Death. Congratulations! Until then, though, we are all works “in progress.”
In Buddhism, however, death is symbolized by white (the color of all colors) instead of black (the color of no color). The white belt in martial arts dojos is the color of the beginner.
So we go back to the cushion each time as a beginner, always to confront the same question: what to do now in this moment, how to live life here and now. The progress of yesterday is past, the achievements of yesterday have expired. Yes, we have made some improvements, we have perhaps dropped some delusions. But just as with the dharma gates that we penetrate (there is always another and then another to open), delusions are endless: we vow to drop them all.
Perhaps we have dropped the illusion of ambition — either because we have achieved our goal or failed to achieve it — but we have not dropped the delusion of hope. We have dropped the illusion of insecurity, only to replace it with the delusion of security. We exchange regrets for new fears, desires for new disillusionments, and so on.
Is this progress? Maybe. But we still go back to the same unanswerable question: how to meet this moment here and now.
Do we make progress? Robert used to speak of the “wisdom” that arises from Zen practice, a spontaneous, natural, automatic, and unconscious alignment with the cosmos, the order of things, the Dao, the Way. What sort of wisdom do we achieve? Can we call it progress?
From time to time in our practice we realize that something in our lives has changed, changed for the better — i.e., it has “progressed” — but this realization usually happens only after the fact. Satori can be —and usually is — very subtle, more like an evolution than a revelation. We look back on a difficult time like an expanse of water that we have somehow walked across and wonder: how did I get through that?
But we must not expect to be rewarded even for our unconscious miracles.
When the Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma about what merit he had achieved, Bodhidharma answered: “No merit. Vast emptiness.” When we can look upon our progress and say, sincerely, “no merit, vast emptiness,” then maybe we have made some Zen progress.
— Richard Collins
Gary Larson