Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

In monasteries around the world, monks since the time of the historical Buddha have chanted four vows that encapsulate the Mahayana Buddhist path. The standard translation of the first vow says, “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.” What does this mean? What exactly are we vowing to do?

transcendental liberating truth, we come back to our life as it is. Perhaps only when we forget our aspiration to become Buddhas can we really enjoy our lives as ordinary human beings. Let others decide whether we’re acting like a buddha or not. Abandoning self-improvement we exert ourselves fully and naturally as birds who enjoy frolicking in the

Real sitting isn’t a passive, low-energy drift through the zazen period. Sitting must be alert, active, aware. We should constantly have our antennae out to pick up every sight and sound and feeling that arises in our body. And we have to make that level of attention second nature, like a frog who seems to sit dreamily on his lily pad, but as soon

art is the replacement of indifference with attention. Nuances that we normally overlook, in shape, color, proportion, and so forth are made the objects of our attention rather than blurring into the background of our perception. Religion could be said to have much the same function, only…

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look at what our mind is doing moment after moment—in a way that really isn’t so different from watching our thoughts come and go in meditation. The main difference is that psychoanalysis also asks, “Just where did you get that idea?” In an ongoing dialogue with the analyst we look at our personal history of hope and dread, how when we were growing

Although both Buddhism and psychoanalysis can be said to share a common goal of relieving suffering, Kodo Sawaki Roshi’s admonition that zazen is “useless” should put us on notice that the “relief” being offered may be either indirect at best or, more likely, wholly different from whatever sort of relief we had in mind when we began to practice.

Anger, anxiety, judgment, and expectation are all habitual ways in which we try to set up a boundary and say, “that’s not me, that’s not the way I want life to go.” Rather than just trying to jump across that boundary, the first thing we have to do is to pay attention to the boundary itself, the anxiety itself, the anger itself, the desire itself.

During my training as an analyst, we had a phrase to describe that sort of “help”—the help that inflates the ego of the helper, and keeps the recipient of the so-called help in a forever needy, one-down position: “The helping hand strikes again!”

We are acknowledging that we are all in the same business of coping with suffering and finding out what it means to be fully human.