Anutpattikadharmakshanti — Forest City Zen Group

Anutpattikadharmakshanti

Kuden Paul Boyle

Forest City Zen Group

London, Ontario, Canada

One of my long term practice questions has been (and continues to be), “how do traditional, foundational Buddhist teachings map onto or manifest in Zen practice?”. In the early days of my interest in Zen, I was intrigued and puzzled by the connection and disconnection of Zen from Buddhism. At that time, it seemed that at least some people saw “Zen” as something either separate from Buddhism or had only a remote connection to Buddhism. At the same time, the term “Zen Buddhism” would seem to imply that Zen was still a form of Buddhism. It was confusing for me. So, I’ve spent more than a few years examining this question. Over the course of this inquiry, I’ve developed an affinity for the Perfection of Wisdom teachings and the ethos of bodhisattva practice. I would like to talk about an aspect of Kshanti Paramita and how it manifests in the Soto Zen way of practice. This talk is not meant to be the final word on Kshanti Paramita, rather to give you some taste or an entry into how this might manifest in your practice.

Kshanti gets translated into English using a variety of different terms – patience, steadfastness, endurance, forebearance, acceptance, and receptivity. According the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, the practice of kshanti entails, bearing insults and injury from other beings, bearing adversity without being drawn away from the spiritual path, and patience regarding difficult points of Buddhist teaching until one comprehends the teaching. Based on my reading of Thich Nhat Hanh’s works, I’ve also used the term “inclusive tolerance” in reference to kshanti. In Mahayana Buddhism, the idea of kshanti was extended to something called in Sanskrit, anutpattikadharmakshanti, which gets translated as “the ‘acquiescence’ or ‘receptivity’ ‘to the nonproduction of dharmas’”.1 For the purposes of this talk, I am preferring the word “tolerance” as a translation for kshanti. So, anutpattikadharmakshanti can be thought of as “tolerance of unproduced dharmas”. It means we can tolerate or handle the truth about dharmas.

In order to understand the significance of an “unproduced dharma”, we need to understand what a “produced dharma” is and why it is a problem. For the purposes of this talk, a “produced dharma” is a state of mind, belief, or view which we take as axiomatically real. We assume that somethings are really real – like our self concept, or that the world is a certain way. This is what causes us to suffer – we have some idea of how we or things “should be” and when reality doesn’t match our view of what “should be”, we suffer.

We can break the term anutpattikadharmakshanti into parts. The first part of the word comes from the Sanskrit term anutpada which means “unproduced” which can be further broken down, the root patti means production, the an – is the negation prefix. The term dharma can be taken to mean “moment of experience”, “mental moment”, or “state of mind”, and we’ve already covered some translations for kshanti. The key here is the term “nonproduction”. This would be a synonym for “unborn” which can then be related back to the 12 links of dependent origination as well as the Heart Sutra (… all dharmas are marked with emptiness: they do not appear nor disappear …). So, the term anutpattikadharmakshanti refers to the point where the bodhisattva becomes tolerant of, or able to endure the truth that all dharmas are empty of self-nature or inherent existence. We are not perturbed that there is nothing to cling to. The bottom drops out, and we are OK with that.

Anutpattikadharmakshanti sounds pretty far out there, like some advanced level of practice. It might seem daunting and very far away from the immediate reality of our lives. But, maybe that’s just how we might be reading about them. In my experience, actually doing practice is very different from what we might read about Zen practice or think how it might be. I think it is important to remind ourselves a couple of things about bodhisattva practice. First, we won’t ever really know where we are in practice. As Chapter 9 of the Diamond Sutra cautions us, those who have attained a certain level of practice don’t think, “I have attained such and such level of practice” because if they do, it pretty much means they have attached to a notion of a self and haven’t attained that level of practice. As Dogen puts it in Genjokoan, When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas. Second, practice is always in the here and now. Our lives are exactly what they are. There isn’t anything else, and this life is our field of practice.

What is the practical significance of the tolerance of unproduced dharmas? Consciously or not, we grasp (mental) objects because we believe two things: 1) the objects we aim to grasp are, in fact, “graspable”, and 2) that we have the ability to grasp these seemingly solid, substantial dharmas. For most people these seemingly solid, substantial dharmas include, the elements which build up their personal identities – their notions of a person, beliefs and views. These referents of personal identity and notions of self are called “supports” in the Diamond Sutra. These supports encompass many internal psychological referents, such as various narratives as well as external social and societal referents. In Yogacara teachings the belief in graspable objects and a subject who grasps them is called the “two-fold grasping” – grasping and grasping the grasper. When we become convinced (not intellectually, but through body learning by direct experience) that dharmas are “mind only” (or maybe better phrased, “only mind”) empty of duality2, we give up the delusion of substantial, solid, graspable dharmas, and we give up grasping at them. We may find that no longer need to grasp and cling to narratives about our lives, or other people, or situations. We start to let go of “shoulds” because we’ve come to see that they are just made up stories we have told ourselves. We might find that we aren’t worried about certain issues. Questions about life may somehow become settled without coming to an “answer” regarding them. We may become tolerant of not knowing. We may become tolerant of living in an empty (dependently arising) world. So, in my opinion, anutpattikadharmakshanti is the practice informed process of reorganizing our psyche away from adhering to “supports” for personal identity.

In Zen, we don’t really worry whether our practice is “advanced” or not. We simply practise, and put our full effort into our practice. Through our continued practice we wade out into deeper water without really knowing how far out we have gone into the water. At this point in my life, I’m suspecting that anutpattikadharmakshanti is an orientation with which we gradually align through the course of our Zen practice rather then being an abrupt transition to some discrete advanced spiritual state into which we suddenly find ourselves.

Anutpattikadharmakshanti is also an example of a dharma gate. When I was newer to practice, I imagined that dharma gates were these difficult to penetrate barriers, and that penetrating a dharma gate entails dramatically blowing the gate off of its hinges. A lot of human literature whether dramatic Zen enlightenment stories or the idea of the “hero’s journey” in mythology (like the Authurian Knights of the Round Table) tends to feed the idea that spiritual progress tends to be dramatic. Like we need to be some kind of Rambo version of Samanthabhadra bodhisattva blowing up dharma gates. That would be the Hollywood depiction of practice. I think the way it works in actual practice is that, penetrating a dharma gate is something we may not notice. So, rather than blowing the dharma gate off of its hinges, it is more like water flowing under the gate. In this case, the gate really isn’t a barrier for the water. So it is with Zen practice. We just practise wholeheartedly moment by moment without concern for where we are going, and after awhile, we might notice some changes. This isn’t to say there aren’t these dramatic instances of spiritual experience, but we shouldn’t count on them – just the steady Zen practice: zazen, and mindfulness in our activities everyday. Stones on a beach get worn smooth by the everyday action of small waves rather than the occasional tsunami.

In my experience, I’ve found it is useful to try to apply Buddhist teachings and other healthy spiritual principles to “easy” issues at first. Start small and grow from there. We can gain experience and confidence in applying spiritual teachings to the concrete circumstances of our lives. Then, as life goes on, we have the experience and confidence to apply these principles to more challenging or more subtle situations. We can extend this principle to practise with anutpattikadharmakshanti. We can practise with “easy” situation, like sitting zazen. In this context, I refer to zazen as “easy” not because I think zazen is easy, but “easy” because during a sitting we cut out or reduce the amount of distractions we normally have in our day to day lives. Thus, zazen practice supports our forays into the tolerance of unproduced dharmas.

How does Soto Zen support and encourage the practice of anutpattikadharmakshanti? I can think of several. First, and foremost, there is zazen. In addition, a few more come to mind: sesshin practice, temple cleaning, work practice, and chanting service.

Zazen is, of course, the foremost practice for helping us enter the tolerant acceptance of nonproduced dharmas. There is a lot that could be said about zazen and the tolerance of unproduced dharmas. Suffice it to say: We sit down, we let go of the extraneous busyness of our everyday life activities. We sit zazen, sitting in the midst of ever changing bodily sensations, sense inputs changing moment by moment. As the Hsin Hsin Ming puts it,

For the unified mind in accord with the way all self-centred striving ceases. Anxious doubts are completely cleared and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing. All is empty, clear and self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power.

When we have an experience like this, we realize that our ruminating and clinging are just burdens rather than a comfort we thought they would be. We build our confidence and conviction that dharmas are indeed empty, unborn, and unproduced, and what a relief it is!

Sesshin is another aspect of Zen practice which supports our investigation of anutpattikadharmakshanti. Aside from the zazen, one of the things we do during sesshin is to suspend our usual, societal social interactions. For example, when we encounter people walking by us during a break, we simply bow silently. We refrain from acting on our social/societal programming of a proper greeting of making eye contact, waving, smiling, making chit-chat and so on. We uproot these social referents to our identity. I think for the person who is new to sesshin (it was true for me), it can be a little disorienting initially, but it provides an important experience of the emptiness of socially constructed elements of personal identity. In my experience, as one’s experience in sitting sesshins increases we become more tolerant of this emptiness of our identity narrative.

Similarly, in sesshin, everyone has their responsibility. When everyone fulfills their responsibility, sesshin dependenly arises and it works. We enact and embody a sangha level dependent arising. If someone has issues with asserting too much control, sesshin can provide a much needed challenge to someone’s narrative that they need to be in control. It gives that person the opportunity to see the emptiness of their controlling self and become more tolerant of letting go of that control based notion of self.

Weekly temple cleaning is another opportunity to confront our clinging to notions of self. Many people in North American (especially US) culture have built up a notion of self around the Protestant work ethic. Many people have this idea that their quality as a person depends on how well and how completely they do an assigned work task. Temple cleaning flies in the face of that. The clappers are hit and temple cleaning is done, put away your broom and sponges. Too bad if that bathroom didn’t get completely cleaned the way your mother taught you to clean bathrooms. Temple cleaning gives us the opportunity to let go of our leaning on a notion of a “job well done” for a sense of identity. Again, this is a gentle foray into learning to tolerate the emptiness of our fabricated identities.

Chanting service and ceremonies are another practice opportunity which helps us let go of our ideas of how something or ourselves “should be”. When you are chanting (especially in Japanese), if you mess up a syllable, you can’t go back to correct it or fix it, the next syllable is already there. Let go of the self that wants to fix things. We do a lot of chanting in Soto Zen. There are plenty of opportunities to become tolerant of our dependently arising (that is, empty) chanting.

The Soto Zen practices I’ve mentioned as well as many more which I haven’t mentioned, all help to erode our reliance on what the Diamond Sutra calls “supports”. This is bodhisattva training – a practitioner who acts for the benefit of all beings in an unsupported way. Soto Zen (in North America at least) doesn’t emphasize talking about technical Indian Mahayana teachings, but when you look closely, you can see they are there in Soto Zen forms and activities. In my mind, that’s where it really counts – practice is what we do, not how much we know from books. In Soto Zen, the activity is the teaching. Spiritual transformation is in the doing.

Finally, I feel fortunate and grateful to have encountered Soto Zen during the course of my life. Having just received Dharma Transmission (or “Dharma Entrustment”), it is a good time to survey my life. I look back and get a sense of all the innumerable and unfathomable conditions, the choices made throughout my life, and this is where I am. “Wow! How fortunate I feel”, is pretty much all I can say. Zen practice is hard; it isn’t called the “long iron road” for nothing, and at the same time Soto Zen is a gentle spiritual path. I don’t know if it is true in general, but this is my experience which has been primarily formed by the kind and generous efforts of the teachers and Dharma friends with whom I’ve interacted over the years. It has been just what I needed. All of the teachers with whom I have interacted along this path have been generous, kind, compassionate, and gentle. I am deeply grateful for their guidance. I hope I can repay this kindness and compassion by acting in a similar way as I step into this new phase of my practice as a Zen practitioner. Thank-you.

1The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, p. 55.

2 In Yogacara Buddhism “emptiness” is defined as being “empty of duality” – that is, there is no independent subject and object in an act of cognition. Both the “see-er” and the “seen” are aspects of a single mind. As an aside, in Madhyamika Buddhism, “emptiness” is defined as “empty of inherent existence”.