Whole persons
Offered to No Barriers Zen on June 20, 2026
Below is an approximate transcript of a Dharma talk offered to No Barriers Zen on June 20, 2026. A recording of the talk is also available and, as usual, I recommend listening to the talk. Either way, enjoy.
Good morning, everyone. Today, we continue the series I decided to offer starting in January of this year, a series of talks inspired by Kobun Chino Otogawa’s talks on the Heart Sutra.
Kobun, by the way, is the “root teacher” for the Phoenix Cloud lineage, a family of sanghas around the world that share a specific and direct connection to him. Moreover, each sangha practices and shares his particular style and teachings with others (in their own way), thereby supporting a transmission of the style and teachings to future generations. And the Heart Sutra is a teaching significant across Buddhist lineages, schools, and traditions that trace a specific and direct connection to Shakyamuni Buddha. We can describe the sutra’s main insight as the emptiness (or: through-and-through interconnectedness) of all conditioned existence (that is, everything that is). So, Kobun is talking about that (and many other things) in his particular way, and I am talking about Kobun’s talking about that in my own particular way. All of it is very particular, yet all part of the same way.
From another point of view, Kobun’s words serve as a mirror; they reflect me to myself, how I am, what is alive and pulsing through this body-heart-mind. In addition, his words offer a structure to investigate what appears in the mirror, a never-ending effort open to all of us.
Three talks in—this talk being the third talk—I am beginning to see part of the outline of what the focus of this series is—or at least an important theme in the series. Relationships. In the first talk, I spoke about the Heart Sutra’s emphasis on through-and-through interconnection directly. (I called it “intimate interconnection” at the time.) When two things arise together, that arising happens when and through the two things forming an intimate (or inseparable) relationship with each other. Each becomes part of the other, conditioning how the other comes to be. One of the Buddha’s preferred expressions for this relationship was, “because this arises, that arises; because this ceases, that ceases.” Thich Nhat Hanh felt it important to add, “because this is like this, that is like that.” In March, I spoke about Sincerity, which I tentatively understand as when “the courageous, [vulnerable], and awakened heart [is] in intimate connection with its life, whether present in simple presence or demonstrated through thoughts, speech, and deeds.”
Here, I am interested in moving from the primarily philosophical and the awakened heart’s connection to the whole world to that heart’s connection to other hearts, other whole human beings, really, and also to itself, the whole human being of which it is a part. And I want to do this by way of some things Kobun says about how we can relate to a sutra, such as the Heart Sutra.
Whether you are new to Zen or have been around a little while, it is a certainty that you have come across a word or phrase that prompted your head to turn, maybe an eyebrow to raise, or a puzzled expression to appear on your face. In the Heart Sutra, for example, we meet the expressions, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.” What?! Dogen Zenji, our thirteenth-century Japanese ancestor and the founder of Soto Zen, when offering instructions for zazen (seated meditation), says to “let body and mind drop off.” What?!
In a talk titled “On Chanting,” Kobun describes one way we can relate to the What?! when it appears. He says:
We often try to understand what is the meaning of the sutra, what the sutra is teaching us, to interpret what the sound [word] means, how the sounds [words] are asking us to understand their meaning. When we study the sutra we very often forget the space which holds the characters [words], so naturally, in communicating with each word, we completely lose ourselves in each character [word] of the sutra and the sutra becomes a dictionary.
The experience described here is similar to an old almost-adage about a forest, a tree in the forest, and how the focus of our attention affects our relation to each and both together. If I am up on a ridge, let us say, and focus on the forest, I notice the shape made by the many trees, especially the arrangements of their points or tops; I see where the treeline meets the sky on the horizon; I may observe the way a large shape is carved by the river that runs through the forest; and so on. My perspective, what I see and appreciate, is the “whole thing.” What I miss, though, are the details of any one tree. If I am down in the forest, however, and I focus on a particular tree, I do not miss those details: the texture of its bark, a nest made by several birds, the observable knot or roots that peek up through the soil, the color and shape of its leaves. Yet, I do not see the forest as a whole; all those aspects I mentioned a moment ago are over my head—literally. And there are many other perspectives. Although presented as a binary, the possible perspectives are potentially infinite in variety, “like a palace, like a jewel,” to quote Dogen Zenji.
The sutra as a whole is the forest. The characters, sounds, or words are the individual trees, and the literary, philosophical, or religious features of the characters, sounds, or words are the features of a specific tree. And then there is then there is the space that holds all of this, not full but not empty either. (We will come back to this later.) In an effort to comprehend the meaning and significance of the word “emptiness,” I can forget about the whole sutra, what it is I ultimately want to understand and that for the sake of which I focused on a puzzling word in the first place.
I wonder if you can anticipate the analogy between how we can relate to a sutra where there is confusion, question, or an absence of understanding—“we very often forget the space which holds the characters […] and the sutra becomes a dictionary”—and how we can relate to another whole person (or ourselves) when there is the same.
The Buddha’s first teaching is recorded (supposedly) in the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta, or the Setting In Motion The Wheel Of The Dharma Sutra. In that sutra, the Buddha presents the first truth for the one who would be noble in this way:
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
He could just as well—maybe even better!—have said “in brief, relationships are suffering.” For in relationships we are united with what is displeasing (sometimes), separated from what is pleasing (sometimes), and we do not receive what we want in or from that relationship (sometimes). Perhaps the first appears as critical speech; the second as the fading of the “puppy-love phase”; and the third as an absence of encouragement when it feels as though it is most needed. You can substitute these examples for your own if you wish.
When any of these general events or experiences show up in a particular way, I can (the all-important word) grasp it and even cling to it. Without pause or reflection but with a full-bodied reaction that particular action or bit of speech becomes the eye-brow raising character, sound, or word in the sutra, the single tree in my focus in the forest. And the grasping and clinging increases in intensity in proportion to the pain and suffering I feel—the greater the perceived harm, the quicker the grasp and tighter the grip.
When in my hands, the disruptive event is pulled apart. Its components are analyzed by themselves and in relation to each other—and more often than not in relation to things not present. Stories abound, some born from conjectures concerning childhood while others center on recent events. I lean into my observations while casting to one side any awareness that the range of my observations does not amount even to a hairsbreadth. I forget that “stories are fictions, [and] the truth doesn’t tell one,” so the poet William Bronk writes. I lose sight of the whole person, with whom I am in relationship, and from whom came forth a proximate cause of my present suffering.
And I think nothing of this singular direction of attention, save that somehow it will bring to an end that suffering. (It does not, by the way.) Yet, I do think something of my fixation—I can, anyway—when the roles are reversed. When it is my speech or actions that serve as a proximate cause of another’s suffering.
We are all different, all individual flakes of snow that fall silently on a winter’s day. At the same time, we are not entirely different, such that any and all points of comparison or likeness disappear. When I contribute to another’s suffering and am subsequently reduced to the size of a single tree or a head-tilting phrase, I feel directly how painful that is. “I am more than just this act!” I cry. “Why is that all you see?” All the more so do I feel that pain when the harmed person’s reaction or response is further harm in turn. It is as if I am being stabbed with a hot poker straight from the fire! Their focus is an action or bit of speech that, in one sense, is gone, vanished from the timeless present, and in another sense has not gone anywhere—it is continually reified through other causes and conditions, living on in their body-heart-mind.
With these two perspectives before us, an opportunity presents itself. As one Chinese ancestor puts it, here we can “pivot”—step outside of our habitual ego- or self-centered orientation toward all things and see with “Dharma eyes.” “Oh!”, I might exclaim, “this is what I have been doing to so-and-so all this time. Oh my! Although the same is happening to me now, I commit to never doing it to them or anyone else in the future—including me.”
Moreover, a moment ago I suggested that the Buddha could have said (and better) that “in brief, relationships are suffering” in place of “the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.” That is not quite right, actually. The Buddha’s direction to the five aggregates—the five categories of basic-person-parts—is important. I shall forgo an overview of the aggregates; you can ask me about them after the talk if you wish. A lesson from understanding them and their relations is that human beings are disposed to experience suffering (through attachment, craving, and clinging) by virtue of their constituent parts. We came to be in such a way, not to suffer, but to be able to suffer. The potential to experience suffering is part of what it is to be human—not the only part, but a significant part. Sometimes, I handle that well. Other times, not so much, and I contribute to a mess. And in the mess, I can lose sight of that with someone whom I am in a relationship with when I am harmed by them; they can lose sight of that with me, whom they are in relationship with, when I harm them.
Recognition of the universal capacity for suffering, born from nothing other than how each one of us is constituted, exquisitely different and simultaneously the same, can reinforce the personal insight that arises from studying someone else in relation to me and studying myself in relation to someone else. These three complimentary perspectives encourage a different way of relating to everyone and everything with which we are in relationship, whether a sutra, the forest, or a person.
The sentence that follows Kobun’s observation that we “very often forget the space which holds the characters [… and] we completely lose ourselves in each character [word] of the sutra and the sutra becomes a dictionary” reads:
Instead, we can see the space between the characters [words] as an opportunity to complete the situation.
“Complete the situation.” How? What does this mean? In a way, the situation is already complete. I am through-and-through interconnected with all things, the Heart Sutra, every mouse and turkey at Jikoji, and the ungraspable number of blades of tall grass at the ridge. And yet, I must needs be aware of that interconnection. The “space between the characters”—the sounds and words, the trees, and the thoughts, speech, and deeds of the whole people with whom I am in relationship—is where I am. It is where my life takes place, but I can miss it and my life if I am not attentive. In all places I am with whole beings. Each one is whole because it is a part of me. We are different, but not separate; we are one, but not the same.
What am I trying to say? Perhaps Kobun can help me. About the sort of perspective I am trying to describe, he says
You experience this during and after trusting each other and then recovering independence. It goes like, “You are actually myself,” you say to any single thing, or even any abstract existence. You say, “You are nothing but myself, but I am not you. I am not yourself.” And the same words you hear from another person about yourself. The other person says, “Oh, you are myself, but you are not my self. Is that so?” “Yes, it is so.” So complete identity, and what was your original self both drop off, no conversation necessary, and what remains is who you are. That person is who you are.
But this perspective is not the most important thing nor is it any of the other perspectives described above.
When I started the talk, I thought the most important things was to always “zoom out,” “see the big and broad point of view,” and “rest in through-and-through interconnectedness.” “Do not lose sight of the whole person,” is what I wanted to say.
What I really want to say, however, is this: do not get stuck. Do not get stuck in any one perspective. You will, to be sure, just as sure as I am that me, you, and everyone will continue to experience suffering. To the best of your ability, though, do not get stuck. Please keep shifting, please keep moving—please continue changing, growing, and learning.
Thank you.
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