Rev. Alan Hozan Senauke

I would like to talk about the question of relinquishment and renunciation as a principle of how we live. Coming at it from several Dharma perspectives, personal, inter-relational,  and systemic. What we let go of, what lets go of us.
 

A monk asked Master Sekito, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhadharma?”
Sekito replied, “No gaining, no knowing.”
“Can you say anything further?”
Sekito answered, “The expansive sky does not obstruct the floating white clouds.”

What’s the essential meaning of Buddhadharma? No gaining, no knowing. The expansive sky does not obstruct the floating white clouds. This idea of no gaining, no knowing is intimately connected with relinquishment, with refraining, and letting go. It’s what we do again and again. We train ourselves here in zazen (meditation). Some of you may have seen a book by Uchiyama Roshi, Opening the Hand of Thought. Relinquishment is just opening the hand of thought. When you open the hand of thought, your ideas, your desires, they just fall away, they fall through. They slip through your fingers. Like water running through your fingers. Or they drift away like clouds in an endless sky. It’s extremely relaxing. Usually we feel like we have to really hold on to something or it’s going to slip away. That causes a tremendous tension. It’s a really difficult way to live. And so we hold on to our likes and dislikes, we hold on to the things that we think we really want to have, we really need. We forget about the vast sky.

Suzuki Roshi wrote that, “Renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away.” Our youth will go away, our beauty – if we have any – will go away, our strength, our health, our parents, and our old friends will all go away. Our bodies and our lives themselves will slip away. This is a reality that most of us find hard to bear. We don’t really like this impermanence very much. We are always trying to cut bargains with it, or slip around it some way or other. It seems like a bad idea that the things we love will just go away. They’ll go away whether we let go of them or not. It’s very frustrating.

In our age many of us have cultivated a Burger King philosophy of life: you can have it your way. Sometimes we apply this philosophy to our zazen practice. We want to have our zazen practice. We want to have it in a nice mindful place, a safe place. We also want to have our good job, our satisfying work, and our wholesome family life, and our healthy bodies. I include myself very much in this. I want to have it my way. I have a notion that if I do my zazen right and show up at all the appropriate times, if I act responsibly, morally, then I can have it all these ways. Everything will be perfectly cooked.

But that is not necessarily the case. It is ignoring the reality of impermanence. It is ignoring the fact that this impermanence itself is perfection. None of the things that we treasure would be possible without what’s come before, without the arising and the falling away of other generations, beings, forms. All these things are constantly falling away and giving way to new life and new existence. What would it be like if everything created kept existing and piling up? Hard to imagine. And not a pretty sight. In fact we’re already plagued by things piling up. We call it garbage. And usually the things that pile up are precisely the former objects of our desire, things we think we are done with.

The scraps of food that we leave behind become compost. They’re worked on by the sky and the rain. There’s a chemical transformation and they become food again for other things that grow and blossom. We can use this food respectfully, then offer it back in one way or another. In theory this cycle of impermanence seems perfect and nice, until it gets to here to me. It works quite well, but I’d like to make a little personal exception.

That’s the point of our practice. How will we live accepting that impermanence, not foolishly trying to except ourselves? How will we live with other beings? What do we offer back willingly, freely, knowingly, knowing that our bodies themselves will be offered back whether we choose this or not? Our choice is extremely important. That choice is the place of practice. In the same way that we choose to return to our breath and posture as we’re sitting, we use what we learn about intentionally and choice, or about right effort – one of the points on the Noble Eightfold Path. We use that to chose how we live and how we offer ourselves. Zazen can be a kind of laboratory for intentionally.

I like what Suzuki Roshi said, that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away. I have had that very experience, with some surprise, with some resistance, with some fear, and with some odd regrets. Maybe you have had similar experiences. I travel for my work at Buddhist Peace Fellowship. I find myself in distant cities without a circle of family and friends, without familiar places and things around. A strange kind of desire comes up for me in those kind of settings. Many other people contend with desires that are stronger and more destructive. If only I could find the right thing to eat, or the right thing to buy, or the right person to be with, then this gnawing empty feeling would be assuaged, filled, it would go away. But now I understand that fulfilling desire will not end this sense of lack and incompleteness. Consumption probably never worked for me, but for most of my life I assumed consumption would work. If only I could buy my pleasures and satisfactions, I would be easier. It just doesn’t work any more.

But I try to use desires, likes, and dislikes. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the bell of mindfulness. Desires, likes, and dislikes themselves are bells of mindfulness, reminding me of practice. I am often able to ask myself a couple of simple, practical questions, “Is this important now? Do I really need this?”

I also acknowledge a strange kind of grief in the realization that sometimes I feel the desire for desire. Is that familiar to anybody? Then there’s an almost concurrent message, from experience, from practice, from a lot of things – this is not going to work. If I eat such and such, I’m actually going to feel bad. And if I buy such and such a thing, I’m actually wasting my money. There’s an inner voice that says, “But I want it.” What I really want is to get out of this suffering, greedy state of mind, I want to slip away from it or around it. And the voice of practice is telling me it won’t work. I have to let go of the this wanting, and try to be present, see what’s really going on, and stay with that, because that is, in fact, real, authentic, and bottomlessly deep. Whether I like it or not.
So with a symbolic gnashing of teeth, I step back and try to stay present. This comes up again and again: resistance, a desire to cling to my small self. There’s a desire to believe in desire, to believe that it can be sated, filled, and that I’ll feel better for the filling. I’m not saying that I don’t have my pleasures. There are lots of pleasures. I’m not discounting them. Or I’m not saying that one shouldn’t find life pleasurable, but in my experience, when one just seeks pleasures, when desire or need or lack becomes what drives us, that is when life gets problematic. I think this is precisely the Buddha’s teaching.

It’s subtler than that too, and this comes back to how we live. Right here for this particular day of sitting, our lives are fairly simple. Our business in sesshin (retreat) is just to let go of our preferences, our likes and dislikes, and make an effort to stay present. This is pretty challenging. I find myself flipping back and forth between preferences and release.

In daily life, in our wider life, the challenge is more intense. We have the Bodhisattva precepts. We have the second precept of not stealing, or not taking what is not given. When we look at that in an truly open-eyed way, what does that say about how we live? By whose efforts do we live?

To a small extent we live by our own labors and efforts.  But the greater portion of our lives is supported by people and beings all around the world, whose efforts we either take for granted or don’t see. Or whose efforts we exploit thoughtlessly. For me, a key element of Dharma practice is to see those things that are obscure to me. They are obscure because my life itself is imbedded in a system that is always trying to sell us things. It’s a system that’s run on desire. The profit system is run on desire. People in power (who we, in fact, give power to) are quick to sidestep sharp questions about what we really need: community, faith, love, creativity, the material requisites.

And those who depend on profit hide the real sources of things. It is often very hard to find out where things really come from. Lately it seems that about every small household object and toy that comes into our house is made in China. Some people are trying to organize a boycott of Chinese manufactured goods, but it’s hard to avoid. I wonder how are the people who make these things in China living? Are they living as we’re living? And now, are they wanting to live as we live, with our lifestyle of consumption? — which is precisely the kind of new religion they are being sold. The world and the environment simply cannot sustain that level of material wealth and theft of natural resources. That has really serious implications about our right in the west to “comfort” as we usually conceive of it. Here we begin to explore the need for renunciation.

Such questions are very troubling. It’s important in the context of our Zen practice to look as deeply as we can. To learn what impact our lives have on other people around the world. This is tremendously complex. I don’t have any simple answer or analysis, but I would urge you to think. In our meal chant we say, “Innumerable labors brought us this food. May we know how it comes to us.” Every head of lettuce has been picked by hand. And this, of course, calls to awareness the issue of legal and illegal labor and immigration. Someone in the kitchen has torn and handled every leaf of lettuce that we eat. The amount of time and labor and distance and interdependence of earth and sky and water that goes into a salad is almost unimaginable. Our whole lives are like that. I urge you to investigate.

Part of that investigation is to notice what things are relinquishing you, what things are letting go of you, what things are whispering from within you,”I don’t need this, this is not really sustaining my deepest intention to live whole, to live for the benefit of all people.” First,  listen to this quite voice that speaks truth about what wants to be let go of. Also investigate what you can let go of, what you think you really need. Look and listen without any judgment. The judgment is not so useful. Look at yourself kindly and patiently, because we live here, often surrounded by people who are living similarly to ourselves. But be tough-minded too, remembering how others around the world live to support us.

A month or two ago I traveled to Bangladesh. Compared to the way I saw people living there, everybody, across the board here in the United States, lives deeper in the bosom of privilege than many of the people I met in South Asia. Of course, I don’t mean to deny the fact that there is oppression and great distinctions of privilege and wealth among us.

But look at the intricacies of interdependence and look at your clear intention of practice, then observe what falls away. Things are always falling away. They will continue to do so. The more you can open the hand of thought – relinquishment and renunciation – and let what’s unnecessary slip through, the easier, the more graceful and harmonious kind of life you will be able to lead. You can come to understand that the really important things are there. The sky is there. The ocean is there. Life is there. Those things will not slip through your fingers. The only things that will slip through your fingers are your desires and your preconceptions. What is true will just remain. That’s what we are working at each time we turn around to face the wall, each time we enter the zendo (meditation hall). The Buddha laid out a “Noble” Eightfold Path. It’s a noble endeavor that we do together, sitting zazen, examining our interwoven lives. We do it with all our heart and mind.

Edited from a Dharma talk given at Berkeley Zen Center, Berkeley, California, USA in May of 1998.

Alan Senauke is a Soto Zen priest and a resident teacher at the Berkeley Zen Center. He is also Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and on the INEB Executive Committee.