Illumination and Serenity
Last week I outlined the importance of what I called “growing our fields.” The offering called for expanding the meeting spaces (or “fields”) that co-arise in our relationships with others, whether people, places, or things. The metaphor of a field—specifically, an expansive field—invites the possibility of distance without sacrificing connection. People, places, and things can settle into their proper place, allowing us to meet them in ways that are appropriate, skillful, and wholesome.
Yet the expanse of the fields that we co-create with others depends in part on our wisdom and compassion, or so says the Vimalakīrti Sutra, from which this metaphor of fields (in the sutra, “buddha fields”) comes. If we are open to exploring that suggestion, one starting point is the question:
How do we develop our wisdom and compassion, and thereby grow our fields?
I want to explore this question through part of a poem that I sat with while on retreat a few weeks ago.
Hongzhi Zhengjue is an eleventh / twelfth-century CE ancestor in the Chinese Chan Buddhism lineage. A prolific writer, we are fortunate that much of his work is extant. For instance, there are a few dozen short reflections on practice, many poems, and one hundred dialogues or stories that form the Book of Serenity.
One theme present throughout Hongzhi’s writings is the relation between Illumination, on the one hand, and Serenity, on the other. For example, we read in the Guidepost for Silent Illumination that
Only silence is the supreme speech, only illumination the universal response. Responding without falling into achievement, speaking without involving listeners. The ten thousand forms majestically glisten and expound the dharma. All objects certify it, every one in dialogue. Dialoguing and certifying, they respond appropriately to each other; But if illumination neglects serenity then aggressiveness appears. Certifying and dialoguing, they respond to each other appropriately; But if serenity neglects illumination, murkiness leads to wasted dharma. When silent illumination is fulfilled, the lotus blossoms, the dreamer awakens, A hundred streams flow into the ocean, a thousand ranges face the highest peak.
During the first evening service I held while on retreat, I recited the whole poem (not quoted above, by the way). The line But if illumination neglects serenity then aggressiveness appears immediately caught my attention. I do not read Chinese, so I am unaware of alternative translations for the ideogram that is here rendered “aggressiveness.” While I would not describe myself as an “aggressive” person, I do consider myself a reactive person—not necessarily in my behavior, but more in the internal dialogue that gets underway following some event, interaction, or situation. And that dialogue, if either largely ignored or fed and sustained, often contributes to the presence of anger, hatred, or ill will towards people, places, and things.
Hongzhi’s attention to the relation between illumination and serenity, then, directed my attention to, not something that is missing in my life, but a possible imbalance.
Possible imbalance. Both of these words deserve an extended comment. “Possible” because I do not and cannot say with certainty whether there is such an imbalance. Why? The number of causes and conditions because of which I appear as I do at any instant is ungraspable. Moreover, those causes and conditions are continually and constantly changing; they never remain the same, even for an instant. So, even if it were possible for me to grasp myself as I am at some particular time, I would immediately lose that which was grasped at some future time. Indeed, I would lose it in the next instant—necessarily.
This does not entail that general patterns cannot be discerned, perhaps. But we cannot stamp anything as “certain,” not even this declaration that “we cannot stamp anything as ‘certain’.” There is only the opportunity for exploration, the sort of exploration that is unending.
The word “imbalance” is similarly thorny. The suggestion that there might be an imbalance in the relation between illumination and serenity in my life implies that there could be a balance between them. In addition, there is the assumption that I can be aware of both the state of balance and the state of imbalance.
The implication and assumption, though only two in number, raise several up-in-the-cloud questions. What is this thing “balance” that might be missing? By what criteria am I determining its presence or absence? What are “illumination” and “serenity” anyway, and how are they related? Furthermore, might a fixation on these questions result in my “getting in my own way”? That is, might I unintentionally obstruct my effort to develop wisdom and compassion, and thereby expand the fields that co-arise in my relationship with others? Could I end up closing down, rather than remaining open, to life’s diversity and fluidity?
All of this is starting to look messy and feel overwhelming. Still, there is at least one point of clarity: reactivity in the form of an internal dialogue. The presence of that is clear.
What, if anything, is behind the reactivity?
One response starts with the word “judgment,” a word that has a rather negative connotation these days. I understand why. I am not sure that it needs to be that way.
Has someone ever said to you, “Stop being so judge-y?” I heard it when I was a teenager, when everything was dumb, lame, or stupid, and the only cool things were the things that I thought were cool. I suspect that many of us heard something similar during our adolescent years. Coupled with the injunction is an either explicit or implicit dismissal of judgments altogether.
I still hear it today too, only now it is from myself and to myself. I notice that my internal dialogue gets rolling following a judgment about some person, place, or thing, and mixed up in that dialogue is me admonishing myself for judging in the first place. Judgments are piling on top of judgments, on top of still more judgments. Does that mean, though, that I should dismiss outright the act of judging? Is the extreme warranted in this case?
No, not necessarily.
Two things happen when we form a judgment and it is important to distinguish them. First, there is a statement of how things are: I exercise three days a week; I occasionally write in my gratitude journal; I bought but have not opened a book on the Lotus Sutra. These are simple and direct statements of how things are.
What usually follows, though, and what is often objectionable, is some evaluation of how things are. So, I exercise three days a week and that is not enough, that is disappointing; I occasionally write in my gratitude journal and that is unacceptable, I am terrible at practicing gratitude; I bought but have not opened that book on the Lotus Sutra, so I should just give up and admit that I failed at being a Buddhist. I am being a little dramatic here, though only a little.
The second part—the evaluation of how things are—is extra and sometimes unnecessary. Yet it follows simple statements of how things are automatically in so much of our lives. I mention this not to encourage never evaluating how things are. Rather, I mention it to encourage doing so when it is appropriate.
You might try noticing over, say, an hour, how often you include evaluations alongside direct statements of how things are. Were all of them skillful or wholesome? If all of them were, that is great. If only some of them were, that is also great. If none of them were, that is still great. The important thing is awareness of our mental activity.
Hongzhi writes of our spirit, which is without obstruction, that its
[…] brightness does not shine out but can be called empty and inherently radiant. Its brightness, inherently purifying, transcends causal conditions beyond subject and object. Subtle but preserved, illumined and vast, also it cannot be spoken of as being or nonbeing, or discussed with images or calculations. Right in here the central pivot turns, the gateway opens. You accord and respond without laboring and accomplish without hindrance. Everywhere turn around freely, not following conditions, not falling into classifications. Facing everything, let go and attain stability. Stay with that just as that. Stay with this just as this.
How, then, do we develop our wisdom and compassion, and thereby grow our fields? This exploration suggests that one way is awareness of our judgments. Specifically, an awareness of our tendency to get blown around by evaluating things as either good or bad, or praiseworthy or blameworthy—evaluations that tend to flow from a feeling of isolation, or at least separation. Because of that, we suffer. So Hongzhi once more:
Many lifetimes of misunderstanding come only from distrust, hindrance, and screens of confusion that we create in a scenario of isolation.
The quotations of Hongzhi’s writings come from “Cultivating the Empty Field,” edited and translated by Taigen Dan Leighton.