Leaving Home
Kynan Sutherland Sensei
Leaving Home
DRAFT
Some of you will be familiar with the classical buddhist advice to “leave home”, inspired . This was inspired by the Buddha’s legendary rejction of the palace, which insists that:
“…all buddhas of past, present, and future leave the household and attain the way.”
So what does this mean for us as fathers, mothers, partners, children? As lay practitioners we do not “leave the household” in the literal sense. But we nevertheless step wholeheartedly onto the path to attain the Way. How so?
Over the years I’ve noticed that this can cause genuine anguish for some people. There can be a great desire to join a Japanese Monastery, or become a hermit in the wilderness, or enter a life of perpetual pilgrimage. There may or may not be an element of wishful thinking of fantasy at play here. But the question remains: how can I be authentic on the path? What does it really mean to “leave the household and attain the Way”?
I remember the first time I genuinely wanted to leave the household, when I was about six years old. I must have been furious with my parents – I don’t remember why – but I was determined to leave. Nothing was going my way, so I wrote a series of notes on large A4 sheets of paper, and then pasted them all the way from my bedroom, down the steps, down the corridor, to the front door, saying:
I’m leaving home.
I’m really leaving home.
I’ve had enough and no one loves me.
I’m not coming back.
You can all fend for yourselves.
Etc
I’m not even sure that I did leave the home at that time. I might have sat down on the front verandah for a while. But after it became patently clear that no one was as vexed as I was, I sheepishly returned inside and collected all the signs I’d pasted up, perhaps slinking back to my bedroom.
Staying at home was unsatisfactory, but leaving home was just as unsatisfactory. So what was I to do?
Is there a way to leave home and be at home at once?
Koan
To open this up, I’d like to offer a case from the record of Zhaozhou:
ZZ#204
A monk asked, “It is not yet clear to me, what about when someone vows to leave home and search for Supreme Wisdom?”
The master said, “If you have not left home, wisdom uses you; after leaving home you can use wisdom.”
At stake here is the idea of Wisdom. What is wisdom? How do we discover it? How do we use it?
The monk is evidently talking about himself. About his own vow to leave home and attain the Way. He may have travelled a long way to meet Zhaozhou – this could have been his first encounter. His question is earnest and to the point: What am I looking for?
Stones and Clouds
Wisdom is an intriguing matter. It is born of experience and of deep inquiry. We do not say someone is wise just because they’re smart. Wisdom goes deeper, and is more difficult to put into words.
I’m reminded of one of the dedications we make in our sutra service, recited by Elaine:
The Buddha and her/his teachers and his/her many sons and daughters turn the Dharma wheel to show the wisdom of the stones and clouds…
What is the wisdom of the stones and clouds? That is what we’re here to clarify in our practice. Without understanding the wisdom of the stones and clouds, we cannot receive the dharma and cannot convey it.
So what is the wisdom of the stones and clouds?
This is a questin that haunted Dongshan, the founder of the Soto (caodong) school of Zen. He was driven to understand the teachings of the nonentient after overhearing this exchange with the national Teacher Hui-chung:
A monk asked the National Teacher, “What sort of thing is the mind of the ancient buddhas?”
The National Teacher replied, “It is wall and tile rubble.”
The monk said, “Wall and tile rubble! Isn’t that something nonsentient?”
“It is,” replied the National Teacher.
The monk said, “And yet it can expound the dharma?”
“It is constantly expounding it, radiantly expounding it, expounding it without ceasing,” replied the National Teacher.
If wall and tile rubble can expound the dharma, then there’s certainly a lot of dharma being expounded around my house. And that’s before getting to the scrap metal pile, the compost bin, the woodstack and the drystone wall, all of which constantly, radiantly and unceasingly expound the Way.
Indeed, the Way is conveyed without fail by every being – sentient and nonsentient. After all, what do sentience and non-sentience actually describe? We’re becoming increasingly aware of the way trees communicate with each other, learn from each other. We know that water has a kind of memory. And clouds display their own kind of wisdom, responding intimately to conditions, moving seamlessly between states, responding naturally to situations as they arise.
The wisdom of the stones and clouds may look static like a stone, or transient like a cloud. But in zazen the apparent duality is dissolved. Stones move. Clouds stand still. The gap between sentience and nonentience is an invention of the mind. How might we experience then this no-gap?
Yunkaporta
Some of you will have encountered Tyson Yunkaporta’s book “Sand Talk.” In it he spruiks the value of sitting with the non-sentient to learn its lessons. This goes to the heart of aboriginal wisdom, within which:
[In this way of knowing,] there is no difference between you, a stone, a tree or a traffic light. All contain knowledge, story, pattern. To sit with this story, to discern the pattern, we need to begin by examining rocks.
It would be unhelpful to say, “Granite is an igneous crystalline mix of quartz, mica and feldspar.” It would also be unhelpful to waft around in a tie-dyed shirt hugging the rocks and asking them to divulge their secrets by communing with us through our navel piercings. You have to show patience and respect, come in from the side, sit awhile and wait to be invited in.”
This sounds a lot like zazen to me!
We show patience and respect, come in from the side, sit awhile and wait to be invited in.
Whatever you are working with right now on the cushion – counting your breaths, breathing Mu, just sitting, a feeling your way into a particular koan – show patience and respect. Let what is happening come in from the side. Sit awhile and wait to be invited in. This is the teaching of the nonsentient.
Home Leaving
So what has this got to do with home leaving? Well, let’s recall those words of Zhaozhou:
The master said, “If you have not left home, wisdom uses you; after leaving home you can use wisdom.”
How might we be used by wisdom? How might we use it?
To be used by wisdom is to be a victim of circumstance. It is to be savaged and distorted by the stones and clouds as we habitually perceive them. It’s to be convinced that things are hard and only hard; that things are soft and only soft. It is to be stuck in a sense permanence versus impermanence, rather than permanence within impermanence. To be tossed around in this duality is to collide with the world and resist it at every turn.
The true nature of reality is wise – but we haven’t yet opened ourselves up to that fact.
Compare this to the eloquence of Ryokan, that great Japanese poet who left home to join a monastery, then left the monastery to join the world. He says:
If someone asks
About the mind of this monk
Say it is no more than
A passage of wind
In the vast sky
This is someone who has truly left home. Not caught in the world of form, not caught in the world of emptiness. He recognises the vastness of the sky and his place within it. He is free to embrace the freedom of his own life. Not strictly a monk, not strictly a layman. Perhaps a poet of his own life – as we all can be if we fledge from the many nests we create for ourselves.
Nest of emptiness
And that includes the nest of emptiness. A particularly haunting and spooky place. In Zen we call this “Zen sickness”. It describes the condition of being stuck in emptiness, oblivious to form, holding on to “the zero point of thew scale”.
You all know the trope: the one who is so cool, calm and collected in every situation. So much so that they can’t possibly be moved by what’s going on around them. If you are not moved by the world, you’re stuck. And in that sense, you’re useless, the furthest thing from a bodhisattva.
I remember my own teacher, Susan Murphy, telling me about a time she was at home and heard a child crying next door. It sounded urgent, so she raced over to see what was going on. The child has fallen and was injured – a sore knee, with blood running down the leg. She lifted the child up and helped her to the back door. When she knocked, no one seemed to be home, but the door was open. So she helped the child in and there, sitting quietly, was the father, meditating.
There’s a chilling quality to this story. When we leave home in a Zen sense, we are not leaving the world. We are not separating ourselves from the world. On the contrary, we are letting go of fixed ideas and any pretensions to ultimate security.
Constructed ideas are no longer a good fit with reality. So we take our refuge in the Way things are and respond to the complete moment we find ourselves in.
Using Wisdom
And that’s when we have the chance to actually use Wisdom.
At the peak of the pandemic I remember a near-neighbour telling me about two homeless kids who had taken shelter beside an unused car behind her house. This near-neighbour only became aware of the kids as the rubbish piled up. She noticing how rough the conditions were, how bleak as Winter approached.
She could have shooed them on. She could have called the police. But she didn’t. Something made her pause. They hadn’t caused any trouble. They were young, unruly, but not separate. So she bought them some food. She then bought them a tent and gave them some linen. They stayed for the winter months without causing any trouble. Then, one day, they disappeared like “a passage of wind / in the vast sky.”
This was not an easy thing for my near-neighbour to do. There were a lot of questions; should I be doing this? How can I help? She had her own family to look after and wanted to be respectful of all concerned. She grew fond of these kids and showed them great care without over-extending herself.
She used wisdom. She refused to turn away. She allowed herself to be taught by the situation, offering what felt possible, appropriate, given her modest circumstances and experience.
She demonstrated how to help some home-leavers find home.
And she demonstrated to herself that it was possible to leave home (the place we think of as secure and comfortable) without leaving home.
Vimalakirti
Perhaps the most famous example of “leaving home without leaving home” is found in the Vimalakirti Sutra. This is a vast, sprawling, infinitely illuminating text that we won’t look at in detail just now. But Vimalakirti holds a special place in the Zen tradition because he turns the traditional emphasis on strict monasticism upside down.
It’s said that Vimalakirti was a contemporary of Shakyamuni Buddha. It’s also said that he equalled the Buddha in wisdom. The only difference between them was that Vimalakirti was a householder: he had a family, he worked, he mingled with all people including gamblers and prostitutes, he engaged fully in the marketplace.
He did all of this without looking to benefit himself. As he says at one point:
“to be without benefits or blessings is to leave the household life!”
(Chapter 3)
To stop looking for applause, or rewards, or affirmation from “outside” is to leave the household life. To commit oneself to healing the gap between self and other is to leave the household life. To leave home without leaving home is to leave the household life.
True Buddha is in the House
In another famous koan Zhaozhou concludes by saying, “The true buddha is in the house.”
What is this house? Where is your true home?
Have you left home in the midst of being at home?
And when have you received the wisdom of the stones and clouds – in such a way that you can use wisdom instead of being used by it?
This article was first offered as a talk to the Melbourne Zen Group in 2016