Limitless, Ceaseless Trust

The following is an excerpt from a Dharma talk that I offered on Saturday 28 October, during the O-Bon Sesshin at O-An Zendo. You can listen to that Dharma talk in full here. The excerpt has been edited for this venue.

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Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi would talk often about trust, I am told, about the importance of a “limitless, ceaseless trust” in ourselves. Without it, he says, you cannot sit zazen even for one minute. When I heard this for the first time (and the fifth time, and the tenth time), I felt very confused. A limitless, ceaseless trust was not something that I believed that I had in myself. It turns out that I did—and you have it too, by the way. Seeing that trust in ourselves and feeling it in our bodies, however, is another matter.

Kobun says:

Forgetting yourself, and trusting, at this point, feels the same to me. To forget oneself is, with knowledge, to give up your human way of perceiving things, and give more room to see what is actually happening to your own self and to all other existences. When you forget your small self, the whole universe appears.

These words, Kobun tells us, were inspired by Dogen's final words on the subject of trust: forget yourself.

I remember days in the not-too-distant past when my life felt as though it had fallen apart and there was little to nothing left, save a reliable source of cat hair. I left (or: lost, perhaps) a career, seventeen years in, which had born some not insignificant fruit. That career was, I believed with great conviction, the whole of who I was. Sometimes we call this our “identity.” Who was I without a title and a position in a university? What was I now if not a failure, another member of the ever-enduring club for people whose lives had been ruined by alcoholism?

I was barely a month sober following a terrible relapse and had recently returned home from a treatment facility for severe substance abuse when I sat down across from my now Guiding Teacher. The Board of Directors for O-An Zendo had recently announced a search for someone to be Roshi’s apprentice and the temple’s teacher-in-training. I expressed a sincere desire to be considered for the position and my intent to send the materials to the Board of Directors.

That decision can plausibly interpreted as insane—and I say that not hyperbolically, but literally.

Yet what a gift that feeling of losing my identity was; what a shining display of confidence in myself that afternoon. Kobun suggests that the “first way to identify yourself as a Buddhist is to believe in yourself, utterly.” I could not see that that was what was happening then—I was not coming to believe; I already did believe—and I can see that now.

Dogen tells us that “only those who have the great capacity of genuine trust can enter this realm [i.e., the realm of all buddhas].” For “it cannot be reached by intellect—much less can those who have no trust or who lack wisdom know it." We would do well to notice the clear and direct statement that entering the realm of all buddhas cannot be accomplished by the intellect. Why? “As long as your brain is entangled, your knowledge is entangled with your own self-dynamic, inside of your skin, you are still a blind [person],” says Kobun. This is not to say that the intellect, and words and scriptures too, are verboten. Only that they are not where practice begins and ends.

When you cling tightly to your narrow way of seeing things—yourself, others, the world in which you live and through which you move—you cannot see anything other than what you see, bit and pieces of the whole at best. Sometimes we mistakenly take these bits and pieces for the whole itself. The message that Dogen and Kobun offer us is not so much concerned with reminding us that we are in a boat and can only see the shore as it appears from where we are in the ocean at that time. It is more concerned with encouraging us to flip the boat over and drown in the ocean. We are encouraged to forget ourselves.

When you do this, when you get out of your own way, sometimes you can feel the entire universe rushing forth to show you who you are: someone who has had, from the beginning, a limitless, ceaseless trust in themselves.