Without Form

Essays

  • 42: The Beautiful Truth of Impermanence and Buddha Nature

    Impermanence and Buddha Nature
    Impermanence and Buddha Nature
    Impermanence and Buddha Nature

    Impermanence and Buddha nature have felt less abstract to me since turning 42.

    Table of contents

    I turned 42 this year.

    On our way to a vacation cabin in upstate New York, my daughter, who also loves Coldplay, brought up their song “42.” It’s a quiet, haunting track, and to be honest, it’s never been my favorite. But this year, it hit me differently. The lyrics kept echoing in my mind:

    Those who are dead are not dead

    They’re just living in my head

    And since I fell for that spell

    I am living there as well, oh

    Time is so short and I’m sure

    There must be something more

    I’ve been thinking about this song for weeks. It’s not because it’s some deep Buddhist philosophy; it’s not. It just spoke to something I’d been feeling all summer, something I couldn’t name until my daughter played it in the car.

    The number 42 is already famous in pop culture. In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer named Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years figuring out the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The answer it gives is 42. The catch is that nobody knows what the actual question is. Adams said he chose the number because it seemed ordinary, just a number that doesn’t stand out. Fans have their own idea: 42 is the ASCII code for an asterisk, which is the wildcard symbol in computing and means “anything.” So maybe the answer to the ultimate question is anything, everything, or simply whatever is right in front of us.

    Buddhism has its own way of facing these questions. There are five verses, said to come from Shakyamuni Buddha, recorded in the Upajjhatthana Sutta, one of the oldest Buddhist texts. These are called the Five Remembrances, and we’re told to think about them often. Not just occasionally, but regularly. The Pali word is abhiṇhaṃ, meaning frequently, because people tend to avoid these truths.

    1. I am of the nature to grow old; I cannot escape old age.
    2. I am of the nature to get sick; I cannot escape sickness.
    3. I am of the nature to die; I cannot escape death.
    4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
    5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

    I use the translation adapted by Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh for his Plum Village community. The original sutta is meant for everyone: monks, laypeople, anyone at all. These words aren’t just for monks. They’re for all of us.

    I have been sitting with these words all summer. And then my aunt sent me an envelope.

    The Envelope

    Before we left for the cabin, I noticed something in the mail from my aunt. A collection of old photos of my late father and extended family.

    There was my grandmother as a young girl, then as a young woman, standing next to my grandfather, whom I never met. There was my father as a little boy, holding a stuffed animal he called Wookie. Then I found a photo of a woman I didn’t recognize. I turned it over and saw, written in unfamiliar handwriting: Violet Hortense Suskind. My great-grandmother. I didn’t know her name until that moment. I had lived 42 years without knowing the name of the woman whose son had a son who became my father, who became me.

    I sat on my bed, holding a photo of someone I’d never thought about and whose name I’d never heard. I felt something strange: not sadness, but more like vertigo. I realized how many lives had to unfold, one after another, for me to be here. How many names I’ll never know. How many faces have already faded away.

    Then there was my father as a boy with a stuffed animal he called Wookie. That photo was harder to look at. He’s maybe five or six, grinning, with no idea what life will bring. He doesn’t know he’ll grow up, have children, get sick, and die. He doesn’t know his son will one day hold this photo and search for him in it. He’s just a kid with a stuffed dog, alive in a moment that ended long ago. The photo doesn’t keep him here. It just proves he was here.

    The Fourth Remembrance says: All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

    My father is dead. My grandmother aged from the girl in those photos into someone I barely recognized by the end. My great-grandmother existed for decades and I did not know her name until a Sunday afternoon in August.

    The separation has already happened, many times over. And yet here they all are, in a stack of photos, in my hands, in my face, in whatever thread of biology and history connects Violet Hortense Suskind to me across a century.

    The Pond

    We got to the cabin and I looked out onto the pond.

    It was advertised as a lake. But what I found was a body of water covered in lily pads, lilies, and thick vegetation. I had hoped to swim and kayak there with my family, but you couldn’t swim in it. You could barely see the water under all the green.

    I wish I could say I took this in stride, but I didn’t. I was annoyed. I had looked forward to floating in a lake with my kids, but instead, I got a swamp with clever advertising.

    But the pond hadn’t misled me. It was just being a pond, full of life. Frogs called from the reeds. Dragonflies landed on lily pads. Water lilies opened across the surface each morning, white and gorgeous, and closed again in the heat of the afternoon. Every day. The pond wasn’t broken. It just wasn’t what I wanted.

    While I was annoyed about the lake that wasn’t a lake, my sons were outside in the grass, dancing with blue dragonflies. They weren’t trying to catch or chase them, just dancing. The dragonflies hovered, the boys moved toward them, and the dragonflies lifted off and circled. The boys followed, laughing with arms out, and the dragonflies returned, starting the dance again. My sons didn’t care that the pond wasn’t a lake. They weren’t disappointed. They were fully present in the life that was happening, the life I almost missed because I was comparing it to what I had imagined.

    I think about this often in my practice. So much of our suffering comes not from what’s happening, but from the gap between reality and expectation. The pond was fine. My expectation was the problem. And what I expected, a clear, open lake, would have been beautiful, but also less alive, less interesting, less itself.

    The Body at 42

    I have noticed quite a few changes to my body over the last few months. Incessant heartburn that turned out to be a hiatal hernia. Prediabetes and a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) stuck to my arm, showing me in real time how sensitive my body has become to the slightest amount of carbohydrates. Migraines that rip through my head like a jackhammer on asphalt.

    None of this is catastrophic. I’m not dying. But something has changed, and it’s not going back. The body I had at 32 isn’t the body I have now. The foods I could eat without worry, the sleep I could skip, the quick recovery, all of that is gone. Not just for now, but for good.

    The Remembrances ask us to think about these truths on purpose, as a daily practice. We’re supposed to sit with them, to face aging, sickness, and death while we’re still healthy enough to do so. But at 42, your body starts to do the contemplating for you.

    The hernia doesn’t wait for you to reflect on sickness. It just shows up, burning in your chest at two in the morning. The CGM doesn’t care if you’ve accepted impermanence. It just tells you your blood sugar spiked after a piece of toast. The migraine doesn’t ask permission. It just comes, and you lie in a dark, quiet room and wait for it to pass. While you wait, you have no choice but to be in the body you have.

    The contemplation is supposed to prepare you. But what happens when reality outruns contemplation?

    No Old Age and Death

    In the Heart Sutra, there is a line that has always puzzled people who encounter it for the first time: no old age and death, and no end to old age and death.

    This is the Mahayana view from the side of emptiness. In the vast openness of śūnyatā, the categories we cling to, young and old, healthy and sick, alive and dead, fade away. They aren’t ultimately real. They’re constructions, and like all constructions, they have no fixed, independent existence.

    But the Five Remembrances stay on the ground. They sit right on the other side of that equation and say: this is what will happen to you. They don’t flinch or soften. They look directly at the things we spend most of our lives trying not to see.

    There is something in these words that cuts through every one of my defenses. They state what is true, over and over, until you either hear it or turn away.

    What stands out to me is that both the Heart Sutra and the Remembrances are true. The Heart Sutra says there is no old age and death. The Remembrances say you will age and die. The practice, I think, is to hold both at once: the vast emptiness that dissolves every category, and the specific, undeniable reality of a changing body, people who are gone, and time that keeps moving.

    Impermanence and Buddha Nature

    Dōgen addresses this directly in one of the longest and most important fascicles of the Shōbōgenzō. In Busshō, written in 1241 at Kōshō-ji, he takes up the question of buddha nature and turns it inside out.

    The traditional Mahayana teaching is straightforward enough: all sentient beings have buddha nature. It is a potential within us, a seed that can be cultivated and eventually realized through practice. Dōgen reads the same passage from the Nirvana Sutra and comes to a radically different conclusion. In Tanahashi’s translation, Dōgen renders it: “Living beings all are buddha nature.”

    Not have, but are. Your whole being, right now, just as it is, is already buddha nature. Complete, present, and inseparable from the impermanence that makes it so.

    And then he writes the passage that stopped me:

    The very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are the Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature.

    The impermanence of body and mind is buddha nature. The whole of it. Completely.

    The hiatal hernia is the Way. The prediabetes is the Way. The migraines are the Way, manifesting in a body doing what bodies do. The body at 42 is exactly the body it should be: impermanent, and therefore buddha nature, completely and without remainder.

    Dōgen takes the pain seriously. He is saying the pain is itself the thing you were looking for. Impermanence is the path. The only path there is.

    Most of us, when we hear the word “impermanence,” hear something negative. A warning. A reminder that we will lose everything we love. And that is true. The Five Remembrances confirm it. But impermanence is the condition for awakening. If nothing changed, nothing could manifest. If the body did not age, the teaching embedded in aging could never arrive. If the water lilies stayed open forever, they would just be decoration. They teach something exactly because they close.

    The fact that my body is different now than it was ten years ago, that my blood sugar spikes, my head aches without warning, my chest burns at night, these are the impermanence that Dōgen calls buddha nature. Literally. The real thing.

    He puts it another way in the same fascicle: “If you want to understand Buddha Nature, you should intimately observe cause and effect over time. When the time is ripe, Buddha Nature manifests.”

    The time is always right. That’s the teaching. Right now, in the body you have, with the blood sugar you have, in the life you’re living right now.

    The cabin had hummingbird feeders everywhere. Five of them, maybe more, hung from the covered porch and posts across the property. And the hummingbirds fought over one. They would swarm a single feeder, buzzing and diving and chasing each other away, ignoring the abundance hanging ten feet in every direction. Their wings beat so fast you couldn’t see them. Just a blur, and the bird hanging in the air, perfectly still, suspended by its own furious motion. Every now and then one would break away from the feeder wars and fly directly at my face and hover there, inches away, and look at me. Calm and steady. Just looking. As if it recognized me, or wanted to be recognized.

    I don’t know what a hummingbird sees when it looks at you. But I know what I saw when one looked at me. I saw something that can’t stop moving, yet seems completely still. Its life depends on the very impermanence that keeps it going. If a hummingbird stops beating its wings, it falls. The motion isn’t separate from the bird, it is the bird. That, I think, is what Dōgen means. Impermanence is buddha nature, just as wingbeats are the hummingbird.

    Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors

    In an earlier fascicle called Keisei Sanshoku, “Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors,” Dōgen tells two stories that have stayed with me.

    The first is about the Song dynasty Chinese poet Su Dongpo, who was also a Chan practitioner. One night, Su Dongpo was outdoors and heard the sound of a valley stream in the darkness. Something broke open. He wrote a poem about it afterward, describing the sound of the stream as the Buddha’s own voice preaching the dharma, and the shape of the mountains as the Buddha’s body. He had walked past streams and mountains his entire life. He had written about them, painted them, studied them. But that night, for whatever reason, he heard something he had never heard before.

    The second story is about a monk named Lingyun Zhiqin, who practiced for thirty years. Thirty years of seeking the Way, which Lingyun compared to looking for a lost sword. One spring day, he sat down at the foot of a mountain, looked out at a distant village, and saw peach blossoms in full bloom. That was it. Thirty years of searching, and the teaching arrived in the form of flowers he had walked past every spring of his life.

    Lingyun wrote a verse about it: thirty years looking for the sword, leaves falling and branches growing anew season after season, and then the peach blossoms, and no more doubt.

    Dōgen talks about both stories in Keisei Sanshoku because they show something important: the dharma arrives in ordinary forms. The sound of water you weren’t listening to. Flowers you weren’t looking at. A pond covered in lily pads where you expected a lake.

    I went to upstate New York expecting clear water to swim in with my family. Instead, I found a body of water so full of life it seemed to overflow. Lily pads layered on top of each other. Water lilies opened each morning and closed each afternoon, blooming and letting go, blooming and letting go, all week long. Frogs sang in thick reeds. Dragonflies were everywhere. I came looking for something else entirely, but something was being taught, right there, whether I was ready or not.

    Su Dongpo heard it in a stream. Lingyun saw it in blossoms. Maybe the lesson at the cabin was even simpler. Maybe it was just this: this is what’s here. This is what’s alive. Can you be with this, instead of what you wanted?

    The Ground

    I keep coming back to the Fifth Remembrance. It is the one that turns everything.

    The first four are about loss. You will age. You will get sick. You will die. Everyone you love will be separated from you. If you stopped there, the Remembrances would be unbearable. A list of everything you cannot keep.

    But the fifth says: My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

    This changes everything.

    Violet Hortense Suskind’s actions led to a son. That son’s actions led to my father. My father’s actions led to me. I didn’t know Violet’s name until I was 42. I’ll probably never know what she did for work, what she worried about, or what she loved. But her actions crossed a century and ended up in my body, in my children, in the simple fact that I’m here at all.

    The Coldplay song says the dead are still living in our heads, and that when we fall under that spell, we start living there too. The song describes this as a kind of haunting, beautiful but trapped. Then, with quiet desperation, it hopes that there must be something more.

    The Fifth Remembrance answers that question with a plain statement that reorients everything.

    It says there isn’t something more. There is only this: your actions. What you do with the body you have, in the time you have, with the people you have. That is the ground. It’s the only ground there is.

    And that ground isn’t abstract. It’s real. It’s choosing to sit zazen in the morning even when your head hurts. It’s choosing to walk with your daughter to the pond and watch dragonflies instead of complaining about the missing lake. It’s choosing to hold a photo of Violet Hortense Suskind and let yourself feel the vertigo of how far back you go and how little you’ll ever know. These are actions: small, ordinary, unremarkable. And according to the Buddha, they’re the only things you truly own.

    Not the body you had at 32. Not the lake you wanted. Not the father you wish was still alive. Not the great-grandmother whose name you just learned. This body. This life. This breath. This is what you have. This is what you are. And if Dōgen is right, this impermanent, aging, fragile, temporary body, all of it, every cell, is buddha nature itself.

    My daughter pressed play on a song in the car and reminded me, without meaning to, of something I have been circling for a long time. The dead are not dead. They are in my bloodline, my face, my hands, the name I just learned on the back of a photograph. Time is short. There may not be something more. But there is this: lily pads blooming on a pond that is not a lake, a CGM in my arm, a stack of photos of people I’ll never meet or see again, and the ground. I’m standing on the ground, and it’s made entirely of what I do next.

    Want to read more? Start here.

  • Something from Nothing

    Table of contents

    Emptiness is alive with possibility. Zen has long taught that emptiness is not a barren void, but the open condition from which form, thought, life, and the ten thousand things arise.

    The Thinking Reed

    Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher, once said:

    Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

    Pascal meant this as a statement of human dignity. Our greatness, he believed, lies in thought. We know we will die. The universe doesn’t. We are noble because we are aware.

    It is a beautiful passage, and for centuries it has stood as one of the clearest expressions of Western humanism, the idea that consciousness elevates us above the brute mechanics of the cosmos. Pascal was writing in the shadow of the new science of his day, the mathematics and physics that were beginning to reveal just how vast and indifferent the universe is. He wanted to preserve something for us, some foothold. And he found it in awareness.

    I return to Pascal often because his passage begins in a place we all recognize: this fragile human life, aware of itself, aware that it will end. Anyone who has sat in a hospital waiting room, or watched a loved one’s breathing change in the last hours, or simply looked up at the night sky and felt the vertigo of scale, knows what Pascal is pointing at. We are small. We will not last. And we know it.

    But as we sit with that awareness, another question opens. Do we possess awareness inside this small human life, or is this life one way awareness appears? Where exactly is the boundary between the universe and the knowing?

    Two Ways of Looking

    This is not a new question. It has been turned over for a very long time, in very different vocabularies. But it lands differently depending on where you sit with it.

    There are, broadly speaking, two ways to study reality. One turns outward. It measures, tests, builds instruments, sends probes to the edges of the solar system. It trusts what can be observed and replicated. This is the way of physics, and it has been staggeringly productive. In a few centuries it has revealed the structure of the atom, the age of the universe, the behavior of light across billions of years.

    The other turns inward. It sits down, faces a wall, and watches what arises. It does not measure. It does not theorize. It asks: what is this experience, before I name it? What is this awareness, before I claim it as mine? This is the way of zazen, and it has been practiced in one form or another for twenty-five hundred years.

    These two approaches do not often speak to each other. Physics looks at consciousness and sees neurons firing. Zen looks at physics and sees another set of concepts to put down. They use different languages, different standards of evidence, different criteria for what counts as understanding.

    And yet, both come to the same conclusion: that the ground of reality is not what we assumed it to be. The floor we thought was solid turns out to be moving. The separate self turns out to be woven from everything else. The nothing turns out to be fuller than sheer logic could ever expect.

    I am not claiming these traditions say the same thing. They don’t. But they rhyme. And the rhyme is worth listening to.

    Hence

    In Maka Hannya Haramitsu, Dōgen’s commentary on prajñā pāramitā, he writes: “Form is nothing but form; emptiness is nothing but emptiness. Hence, there are the hundred blades of grass, the ten thousand things.”

    That word “hence” is everything. It would be easy to read the Heart Sutra as negation, as a kind of spiritual erasure in which all phenomena are dissolved into emptiness. That reading has a long history, and it misses the point. Dōgen’s “hence” turns in the opposite direction. The ten thousand things arise because emptiness is alive with possibility. Emptiness does not erase form. It gives rise to it. It is open, ungraspable, beyond any definition we can place around it. And we, these brief, fragile, thinking reeds, are among the things that arose.

    This is not metaphor. It is, in its own way, a cosmological claim.

    The Restlessness of Nothing

    A while back, Audible recommended A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University. I thought it was a Zen book at first. The title alone could have come from a teishō. That’s not what Krauss intended, of course. He takes on one of the oldest questions anyone has ever asked: why is there something rather than nothing?

    Krauss begins historically, and one of the more striking observations in the early chapters is how recently our picture of the cosmos changed. As he points out, as recently as 1917, the scientific consensus held that the universe was static, eternal, and consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by infinite dark emptiness. That was barely a hundred years ago. Within a single human lifetime, everything we thought we knew about the scale and origin of the universe was overturned.

    What replaced it was more unsettling and more beautiful than anyone could have anticipated. Modern physics tells us that what we call “nothing,” the vacuum of empty space, is actually alive with activity. Quantum fields fluctuate constantly. Particles blink into existence and vanish almost immediately, virtual particles that exist for durations too short to observe directly but whose effects can be measured in the behavior of atoms.

    According to Krauss, this quantum vacuum is not the serene void we imagine when we use the word “nothing.” It is, as he describes it, a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence.

    Krauss’s central argument is that the laws of quantum mechanics, when applied to gravity and the structure of space itself, suggest that something like this quantum instability may have given rise to everything. A fluctuation that persisted. A ripple that expanded. The universe beginning not from a divine act of creation but from the inherent restlessness of nothing.

    He puts it plainly in the book: “Nothing is unstable.”

    For a physicist, this is a technical observation about quantum field theory. But read it from a different seat, and it sounds like something else entirely. Nothing is unstable. Emptiness cannot remain empty. The void is not still. It is already in motion, already teeming with what has not yet appeared.

    Stardust

    There is a second idea in Krauss’s book that matters here, and it gets less attention than the quantum vacuum argument, but for me it cuts deeper.

    He writes that we study the universe from within it. Science asks us to look outward, measure, compare, test, study, and that has given us extraordinary insight. But even at the farthest reaches of inquiry, we find ourselves included in the question. The observer has arisen within the universe it is observing.

    This is not a mystical claim when Krauss makes it. He means it literally. The carbon in our cells was forged in stars. The iron in our blood and many of the elements composing our bodies emerged through stellar processes. As NASA explains, we are literally made of star material.

    The oxygen we are breathing right now was released by dying stars billions of years before the earth formed. He puts it this way: “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded.” He calls it the most poetic thing he knows about physics. We are, literally, stardust. The atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than the atoms in your right.

    Consider that for a moment. The matter composing the hand that holds this page, or this phone, was assembled inside a star, scattered across space in a supernova, drifted for millions of years as interstellar dust, coalesced in the accretion disk of a young solar system, and eventually found its way into a body that reads and wonders and asks why. The universe made you out of itself, not as a separate creation but as an expression of its own unfolding.

    Krauss also makes a haunting observation about the future. In roughly five billion years, the accelerating expansion of the universe will carry all other galaxies beyond the horizon of detection. Any civilization arising at that distant time will look out and see nothing but their own galaxy surrounded by darkness.

    They will have no evidence that the Big Bang ever occurred, no cosmic microwave background to measure, no redshift of distant galaxies to chart. They will construct a cosmology, and it will be wrong, and they will have no way to know it. The evidence will have literally moved beyond their reach.

    This means we are living in a window. Right now, the universe is still legible to us. The story of its origin is still written in the sky. But the sky is a temporary document. The fact that we are here, right now, able to read it, is itself a kind of fleeting circumstance.

    Turning the Light Around

    Our practice begins with this intimacy. In zazen, we turn the light around to look into the one who is looking. Where does a thought come from? Before it has words, before it becomes a story, before we call it mine, what is it?

    In Fukanzazengi, his universal instructions for zazen, Dōgen tells us to think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is a practical instruction even thought it sounds like a riddle to be solved.

    In zazen, we do not chase thoughts, and we do not suppress them. We sit in the space from which they arise, the space that was there before the thought appeared and remains after it passes. We let go of the operations of the mind, the sorting and grasping and narrating, and what remains is not blankness but a vast, quiet aliveness. Dōgen calls this the dharma gate of ease and joy.

    It is not a withdrawal from reality. It is a way of meeting reality without filters. And what you notice, sitting this way, is that nothing you encounter has the solidity you assumed. A thought appears, but when you look closely, it has no fixed shape, no substance you can hold. It arises through causes and conditions: memory, sensation, habit, body, breath. It appears and functions for a moment and passes.

    This is true of all that arises. A particle, a person, a mood, a star. Each appears through relation, each matters, and each is empty of any separate, permanent, self-existing nature.

    Krauss, coming from the other direction entirely, from outward measurement rather than inward attention, arrives at something structurally similar. Virtual particles arise from the quantum vacuum, persist briefly, and vanish. They have measurable effects during their existence. They are real enough to change the behavior of atoms. And yet they have no permanent, independent substance. They are fluctuations in a field. They are form arising from emptiness and returning to it.

    I said earlier that Zen and physics rhyme. Here is where the rhyme is most obvious. The physicist studies the quantum vacuum with particle accelerators and mathematical models and discovers that what appears to be nothing is actually seething with potential.

    The practitioner sits on a cushion, follows the breath, and discovers that what appears to be a solid, separate self is actually arising moment by moment from conditions that extend in every direction. One looks out through instruments. The other looks in through attention. They are not doing the same thing. But both find that the ground they are standing on is not a ground at all. It is a process.

    When Krauss writes that nothing is unstable, and when Dōgen writes that the ten thousand things arise from emptiness, they are both pointing at a universe that does not sit still. They are both observing that reality is not a fixed floor but a dynamic unfolding.

    All Buddhas Throughout Space and Time

    Now consider what has arisen from that unfolding. An estimated 117 billion human beings have been born since our species emerged, each one a fluctuation that persisted, drew breath, looked up at the sky, and asked: Why am I here? Before us: the fish, the fern, the first cell dividing in the ancient sea, the stars whose explosions seeded our very bones. All of it arising through causes and conditions, all of it form from emptiness.

    Krauss gives us another way to hold this number. Every atom of carbon in every one of those 117 billion people was forged inside a star. Every molecule of water they drank was assembled from hydrogen produced in the first minutes after the Big Bang and oxygen released by a dying star. The chain of causation runs back unbroken to the first quantum fluctuation, whatever it was, that set the expansion in motion. You cannot separate any human life from that chain. There is no point at which the universe stops and the person begins.

    We often chant together in our sangha: All buddhas throughout space and time, all bodhisattvas mahasattvas, Maha Prajña Paramita.

    All buddhas throughout space and time. That phrase reaches in every direction: backward through the 117 billion, forward into what has yet to be born, outward to whatever awareness may exist elsewhere in the cosmos. All of it prajña. All of it wisdom. All of it emptiness knowing itself.

    Just It

    This is where Pascal stops short. He says the universe knows nothing. But we are the universe. The awareness that hears these words, that notices this breath, is the universe becoming conscious of itself, woven from the same causes and conditions as the stars. Not separate from it, not superior to it.

    Just it.

    Dōgen, in the Shōbōgenzō fascicle Shōji (Birth and Death), addresses this directly. He instructs us not to try to escape birth and death, not to seek some separate nirvana apart from the world of change. If you search for a buddha outside birth and death, he writes, it will be like trying to go to the southern country of Yue with your spear heading north.

    You will cause yourself to remain all the more in birth and death and lose the way of emancipation. Just understand that birth and death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided. There is nothing such as nirvana to be sought.

    This is not resignation. It is a complete reorientation. Life and death are not a problem to be solved. They are the movement itself, the dynamic unfolding that Dōgen, in the fascicle Zenki (Total Dynamic Working), calls the full functioning of life. When you are alive, life is the total dynamic working of life. When you die, death is the total dynamic working of death. Neither is diminished. Neither is incomplete. Each moment is its own fullness.

    Consider something as ordinary as water freezing. Ice does not “become” water when it melts, in the way we usually mean “become,” as though ice were merely water waiting to happen. Ice is fully ice. It has its own structure, its own clarity, its own way of holding light. Water is fully water. Each state is complete in itself, whole in its own moment, not merely a stage on the way to something else.

    You would not say that winter is the beginning of spring, or that spring is the end of winter. Each has its own weather, its own quality of air, its own fullness. This is how life and death work. Not as a sequence in which one is the prelude to the other, but as two complete expressions that do not need to justify themselves by pointing forward or backward.

    This is what Krauss, from a very different angle, shows us about the particles that blink in and out of existence in the quantum vacuum. Each virtual particle is complete in its brief appearance. It does not fail by vanishing. Its arising and its vanishing are one event. It is not trying to become something permanent. Its nature is to appear and return, and in appearing, it has its effect on the world.

    Opening the Hand

    Each of us is a moment that arose from the great fluctuation, persisted a while, and will return. This is not a tragedy, though our society often tells us that it is. We live inside a culture that treats impermanence as a defect, aging as a disease, death as a failure of medicine or will. But life and death are not separate. They are one movement, intimately bound. To be born is to enter the world of change. To live is to receive form for a while. To die is for that form to open again into what made it possible.

    The blossom opens completely and falls completely. The falling is not a mistake in the blossom.

    That we do not last forever does not make this life a failure.

    Uchiyama Roshi, whose Opening the Hand of Thought is among the clearest modern expressions of Soto Zen practice, spent much of his teaching life on exactly this point. He described the self not as a bounded entity but as what he called jiko, the self that is the entire universe. Not the self that stands apart and observes, but the self that is the interconnected totality of all things, appearing for a time in this particular form, with these particular hands, in this particular life. To open the hand of thought, in Uchiyama’s teaching, is to let go of the grasping that tries to freeze the flow, to make the self permanent, to hold onto what is already passing.

    Your Suffering Is Valid

    Within all that has arisen is also our suffering. I want to be clear about that, because this is not an essay about how wonderful it is that we are part of some vast universe that arose from nothing. This is an essay about perspective. I know that each and every person reading this has suffered. Each of you has been through things that are heartbreakingly painful and emotional and messy, things that broke you, things you have rebuilt yourself around in spite of. Your suffering is valid. What you have been through is valid. And it is exactly what makes you human.

    Your problems, your suffering, the thoughts you carry: they all seem very important in the moment. And they are. But there is something beyond yourself to consider. There is a larger life happening, one that includes you but is not limited to you, and sometimes just remembering that helps.

    Krauss, for all his empirical rigor, arrives at something close to this in the final pages of his book. He argues that a universe without purpose should not depress us or suggest that our lives are purposeless. That through an extraordinary cosmic history, we find ourselves on this remote planet, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness, and that we should not despair but should, as he puts it, celebrate our brief moment in the sun.

    A physicist’s version of gratitude. A scientist’s version of what we might call, in the Zen tradition, appreciation for this unrepeatable life.

    The Whole in the Part

    Here is something biology teaches us that sounds like a dharma talk: every cell in your body contains the complete instructions for the entire organism. The cell in your fingertip and the cell in your retina carry the same genome, the same three billion base pairs, the same complete blueprint. The liver cell does not contain a partial set of instructions. It contains everything, the whole pattern, expressed in one particular way in one particular place.

    This is not a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and the whole. It is the relationship between the individual and the whole. Each of us, each brief human life, contains the entire universe expressed in one particular form. The carbon, the iron, the hydrogen, the billions of years of stellar evolution, the quantum fluctuations at the beginning of time: all of it is here, in this body, in this breath. Not as an idea but as the literal material of your existence. You are not a fragment of the cosmos looking in from the outside. You are the cosmos looking at itself from one particular vantage point, and that vantage point is no less complete for being local.

    This is what it means to sit in zazen. Not to become the universe, because you already are. Not to achieve some special state, because your ordinary state already includes everything. But to stop running long enough to notice.

    The Music

    Pascal chose the reed because it is fragile. The slightest thing can break it. And yet it knows. That knowing, he said, is our greatness.

    But there is something he didn’t say about reeds. A reed is hollow, and that’s not a flaw. That’s what allows it to sound. You can’t make music through something solid. The breath passes through the hollow place and becomes something it wasn’t before.

    We’re like that. Not despite our fragility but through it. Not despite our emptiness but because of it. Those things that broke you, that hurt you, those are the hollow places. And they are where the music comes from. The ten thousand things arise from emptiness, Dōgen says. Hence the hundred blades of grass. Hence the reed. Hence this breath, moving through this body, in this moment, becoming something it wasn’t before.

    Krauss shows us that the universe has been doing this from the beginning: making something from nothing, over and over, at every scale. Virtual particles flicker in the vacuum. Stars ignite and scatter their elements. Planets coalesce from dust. Life assembles itself from chemistry and light. And eventually, after 13.8 billion years of this restless unfolding, something arises that can sit still for thirty minutes on a cushion and notice that it is happening.

    That noticing is not separate from the unfolding. It is the unfolding becoming aware of itself. Not because human consciousness is special in the way Pascal meant, elevated above the machinery, but because this is what the machinery does. Through these hands. Through this breath. Through the hollow place where the music sounds.

    The physicist finds this from the outside, measuring the cosmic microwave background, tracing the abundance of elements, calculating the geometry of space. The practitioner finds it from the inside, following the breath until the one who is following dissolves into the breathing. Two ways of arriving at the same conclusion: that we are here, that anything is here, and that nothing refused to stay nothing.

    Pascal saw the universe crushing the reed, and the reed knowing it was crushed. What he didn’t see was the music. The hollow place isn’t where we’re diminished. It’s where prajña sounds, and where the universe, for a moment, hears itself.

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  • Stripping Ourselves Bare

    Table of contents

    “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.”

    Dōgen’s words in the Genjōkōan are probably familiar to all of us, and they open something vast. They are not a description of a distant goal. They point directly at what happens when we sit down on this cushion and turn our full attention inward.

    To study the self. We say this as though it were simple. But most of us have spent our entire lives studying everything except the self. We study how to be useful. We study how to be liked. We study the particular performance that will get us through the day without too much difficulty. We become very skilled at this. We have been practicing it since we were children.

    And in all of that practice, we have accumulated quite a wardrobe.

    The Wardrobe

    Think of what we wear every day. Not just the clothing on our bodies, but the clothing of who we present ourselves to be. The clothing of profession, of status, of social role: the one who holds things together, the one who is steady, the one who does not ask for too much. We put on these garments in the morning and we carry them all day. Sometimes we forget we are wearing them. We begin to mistake the garment for the body underneath.

    Uchiyama Roshi speaks to this directly. He said: “In zazen we let go of all the various ‘clothes’ we wear in everyday life and return to the naked self.”

    Return to the naked self.

    That phrase is worth sitting with for a long time. Not construct a better self. Not perform a more enlightened self. Return. As if what we are seeking has always been here, beneath the layers.

    This is what zazen asks of us. This is what zazen requires of us. Zazen requires us to strip ourselves bare.

    The Backward Step

    Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi, or Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen, the first text he wrote after returning from China in 1227, begins with what sounds like a contradiction. The Way, he says, is originally complete and all-pervading. Why, then, would we need to practice? The whole body of reality is beyond the dust of illusion. Who, then, would believe we need to sweep it clean? It is never separate from where you are. So what is the use of training?

    And then he turns.

    “However, if there is a hair’s breadth discrepancy, the Way is as distant as heaven from earth. If the slightest like or dislike arises, the Buddha mind slips out of sight through confusion.”

    This is the whole picture. Both things are true simultaneously. We are already complete, and we must practice. The Way is right here, and we miss it constantly. Not because we are broken, but because we are distracted. Because we have layered so much over what is already present that we can no longer feel it.

    Dōgen’s instruction is not to add something new. It is to stop:

    “Rest from following words and narratives, and learn the backward step of turning the light within, illuminating the mind. When you do so, body and mind will drop away naturally and your original countenance will manifest.”

    The backward step. This is not a metaphor for retreat. It is a description of what happens in zazen. We have spent our whole lives stepping forward, reaching for the next thing, the next identity, the next proof that we are adequate. The backward step is the reversal of that habit. We stop reaching outward and turn the light inward. We stop performing and start attending.

    And when we do, Dōgen says, body and mind drop away naturally. Not through force. Not through willpower. Not through the kind of determined striving we have been trained to bring to every task. Naturally. Like leaves falling from a tree when the season turns.

    What We Carry to the Cushion

    We come to the cushion carrying everything, and it is heavy. The meeting that did not go well. The conversation that is unfinished. The worry about tomorrow, the regret about yesterday. The role we played this morning at breakfast, the role we will play tonight. We carry our sense of who we are.

    And then we sit down, and face the wall.

    In zazen there is no audience. There is no performance required, no reputation to maintain, no role to fulfill. We are not here to be seen. We are not here to succeed. We sit, and in that sitting, who we really are beneath all of that begins to surface. This is what we are actually turning toward: not a wall, but our own true nature. Our Buddha nature. The thing that has been here all along, beneath everything else that usually comes up. This is our training. This is what we must do as bodhisattvas.

    But it is not easy. Anyone who has sat in zazen for more than a few minutes knows that the mind does not simply fall quiet when we ask it to. There are coverings within us that do not fall away so easily.

    The Five Hindrances

    Shakyamuni Buddha taught of five hindrances that obscure the natural clarity of mind.

    The first is desire: the reaching out toward something pleasant, something we want, the constant forward lean of a mind that believes it will be satisfied when it gets what it is grasping for.

    The second is aversion: the pushing away, the contraction around what is uncomfortable, the subtle or not so subtle refusal of what is present.

    The third is dullness and sleepiness: the sinking mind, the heaviness that pulls us down and away from clear presence, the fog that descends when we would rather not be here.

    The fourth is restlessness: the agitation, the scattered mind that jumps from thought to thought, unable to settle, unable to land.

    And the fifth is doubt: the gnawing uncertainty. Not the honest questioning that opens us up, but the doubt that paralyzes. The voice that says this practice is meaningless, that we are not capable, that nothing will change.

    Every practitioner knows these visitors. They show up reliably, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in combination. The first ten minutes of sitting might bring restlessness. The next ten might bring dullness. And then, just when you think you have settled, doubt arrives: Why am I even doing this?

    What the Buddha understood, and what our practice confirms, is that the five coverings are not enemies to be defeated. They are coverings. They are weather. They arise and pass, arise and pass. What we practice is learning not to be swept away by them. Not to believe that they are who we are.

    Because they are not who we are.

    The Vacant, Wide Open Field

    Hongzhi Zhengjue, the twelfth-century Chinese Chan master whose writings helped shape the practice of silent illumination, wrote extensively about what lies beneath the coverings. These teachings are collected in Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. His language is direct and startling in its beauty:

    “The field is vacant and wide open. It is something intrinsic from the very beginning. You must purify and correct it; clean it off, and get rid of various deluded conditioning and illusory habits. Naturally, you arrive at a place that is clear and pure, perfect and bright; totally empty, without any image; solitary and independent, not relying on anything.”

    This is the field that zazen uncovers. Not a special state we manufacture, but something that has been here from the beginning. Hongzhi is not asking us to create clarity. He is asking us to stop obscuring it. The deluded conditioning, the illusory habits: these are the garments Uchiyama described. Remove them, and the field is already there. It always has been.

    Hongzhi goes further in his Practice Instructions:

    “The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this you cannot be turned around by external causes and conditions. This empty, wide open mind is subtly and correctly illuminating.”

    Simply to sit serenely. Four words that contain the entire practice. Not to sit and do something. Not to sit and achieve something. To sit serenely. To let the wide open mind do what it does when we stop interfering with it.

    And then he adds a crucial detail: “Spacious and content, without confusion from inner thoughts or grasping, effectively overcome habitual behavior and realize the self that is not possessed by emotions.”

    This is not emotional suppression. It is the recognition that there is a self beneath the emotions, beneath the habits, beneath the grasping. A self that is not possessed by these things. The naked self. The one we are trying to return to.

    The Sleeping Monk

    There is a story that sits at the heart of Soto Zen, one that touches directly on what it means to strip away body and mind.

    In 1225, Dōgen was training at Tiantong Monastery in China under Master Rujing. During an intensive summer meditation period, Rujing was walking behind the rows of sitting monks in the darkened meditation hall. One of the monks, seated right next to Dōgen, had fallen asleep.

    Rujing took off his slipper and struck the sleeping monk, shouting: “To study Zen is to cast off body and mind! Why are you engaged in single-minded sleeping rather than single-minded sitting?”

    Hearing these words, something broke open in Dōgen. He rose immediately, went to Rujing’s room, and burned incense. Rujing asked why.

    “Body and mind have been dropped off,” Dōgen said.

    Rujing replied: “Body and mind dropped off. The dropped-off body and mind.”

    Dōgen hesitated. “Do not confirm me so easily.”

    Rujing said: “The dropping off is dropped.”

    This exchange is so compressed it can seem opaque. But what happened here is not abstract. In the dark hall, hearing Rujing’s shout, Dōgen experienced what the Genjokoan describes: the self was forgotten, and myriad things came forward to actualize him. The garments fell away. What was left was not nothing. What was left was everything.

    Rujing’s final phrase, “the dropping off is dropped,” matters deeply. It means that even the experience of liberation is not something to hold onto. Even the act of stripping bare must itself be stripped away. There is no trophy at the end. There is only this.

    Sitting with the Weather

    When we sit in zazen and the mind quiets, even briefly, even for a moment, what remains? What is there when we are not performing? When we are not protecting? When we are not arranging the furniture of our personality to look its best?

    This is what Dōgen is pointing to. What he calls shinjin datsuraku: the body and mind dropping away. It is not something that happens to us once, dramatically, like a thunderclap. It is something that happens again and again, in small ways, in the gap between one thought and the next.

    When the clouds part, the mountain is there. Then the clouds return, and the mountain is still there.

    The five hindrances will come back. Desire will lean forward again. Aversion will contract again. Dullness will descend, restlessness will scatter, doubt will gnaw. This is not failure. This is weather. Mountains do not complain about weather. They stand in it.

    Hongzhi, in one of his most vivid passages, describes the practitioner who has learned to sit in this way:

    “Patch-robed monks should wither away and freeze the deluded thoughts of the mind, and rest from remnant conditioning. Single-mindedly restore and cultivate this field. Directly cut down all the overgrown grass throughout the boundary of the four directions. Do not allow a single speck of dust to defile this field.”

    And then, characteristically, he softens:

    “Wandering around, accept how it goes. Accepting how it goes, wander around. Do not be bounded by or settle into any place.”

    There is no rigidity in genuine practice. We cut through the overgrown grass, yes. But we also wander. We also accept. The field does not need to look perfect. It needs to be tended and lived in.

    Vulnerability

    To strip ourselves bare is to be vulnerable. And we human beings have a very hard time with that. Even when it is just ourselves, sitting alone on a cushion. Even then, we resist. We would rather be armored. Vulnerability feels like exposure. It feels like weakness.

    But is it? What if what we call weakness is simply the feeling of setting down something very heavy that we have been carrying for a very long time? What if the nakedness we are so afraid of is not exposure, but openness?

    Dōgen addresses this in the Fukanzazengi when he writes that zazen has nothing to do with intelligence or stupidity, with being sharp-witted or dull. “Making a wholehearted effort is in itself practicing the Way.” There is no prerequisite for vulnerability. You do not need to be qualified. You do not need to have your life sorted out. You just need to sit down and stop pretending for a little while.

    Something else we discover when we return to the naked self and set aside roles and reputations and accumulated stories is not emptiness in the sense of lacking. It is emptiness in the sense of the open sky.

    Silent and Serene

    Hongzhi wrote of this in his “Inscription on Silent Illumination,” perhaps the most important poem in the Soto tradition:

    “In stillness and serenity words are forgotten. What is before me appears in bright clarity. Looking closely things become spacious. Feeling deeply life becomes vibrant.”

    This is not a description of blankness. It is a description of what opens when we stop filling the space with our usual noise. Bright clarity appears before you. Not manufactured. Not achieved. What was always present becomes visible.

    And then:

    “Through darkness things are bright, and through concealment they are ever more manifest. A crane dreaming in the winter mist, autumnal waters, sounding from afar.”

    There is something breathtaking in this. Hongzhi is saying that concealment itself reveals. The darkness makes things bright. The coverings, the layers, the years of accumulated habit: when we finally sit with them instead of fighting them, they become transparent. The crane dreams in the winter mist, and the mist does not prevent the dream. It holds it.

    This is what the practice of silent illumination teaches. Silence is not the absence of noise. It is the presence of something deeper than noise. And illumination is not a spotlight we aim at ourselves. It is the natural radiance that appears when we stop generating so much static.

    Myriad Things

    When body and mind drop away, when we have, even briefly, set down the performance of who we are, we are not erased. Something opens. Myriad things come forward and actualize us. The sound of rain on the roof. The pressure of our knees on the zabuton. The breath moving in and out like a door swinging. We are not separate from any of this. We are not the isolated self we have been so carefully maintaining. We are this. We have always been this.

    Hongzhi points to this in the tenth of his Practice Instructions:

    “Simply drop off everything. Silently dwell in the self, in true suchness, abandon conditioning. Open-minded and bright without defilement, simply penetrate and drop off everything.”

    And then, having described the dropping away, he immediately describes the return:

    “Stepping back with open hands, giving up everything, is thoroughly comprehending life and death. Immediately you can sparkle and respond to the world. Merge together with all things. Everywhere is just right.”

    Everywhere is just right. This is not resignation. It is not passivity. It is the lived experience of someone who has set down the wardrobe and discovered that the world does not require them to be dressed. The world requires them to be present.

    This is not something we achieve. It is something we allow.

    The Perpetual Return

    And so we return to the cushion. Again and again. We return. We take off the clothing, one layer at a time. We sit with what is uncomfortable. We sit with the desire and the aversion and the dullness and the restlessness and the doubt. We do not fight them. We do not feed them. We breathe, and we let them move through.

    Dōgen understood that this is not a one-time event. In Fukanzazengi, he writes: “Constantly comport yourselves in such a manner and you are surely becoming this; the store of treasure will then open naturally and you will be able to receive and use it at will.”

    Constantly. Not once. Not on a retreat. Not during some peak experience that fades by Tuesday. Constantly. The treasure house opens not with a single dramatic unlocking but through the steady, daily practice of showing up and taking off the layers.

    Hongzhi says much the same thing: “If you practice the state like this for a long time, you will surely become the state like this itself.”

    This is the promise and the challenge of our practice. There is no shortcut. There is only the repeated willingness to sit down, face the wall, and let what is false fall away. The field is already vacant and wide open. The bright clarity is already here. We just have to stop covering it up.

    A mountain does not try to be still. A river does not try to flow. They just do what they do.

    And we must do what we do. We simply sit. We simply strip ourselves bare. We return, again and again, to the naked self that has been here all along.

    The next time you sit, as you set down whatever you have been carrying, whatever you have been wearing, ask yourself:

    What is still here when I have set everything down?

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