Episode Details

A thousand times at least I asked my Guru to give Nothingness a name. Then I gave up. What name can you give to the source from which all names have sprung? –Lal Ded

Language has a trickster quality. At one moment it limits. We find ourselves hard pressed to find the word that captures a feeling, mind state or emotion. Other times, a single word can invoke so many meanings and associations that we are left with a number of mind tangents or in a conversation with people who have very different images in their hearts.

For example—the other day I was working with a colleague to come up with a name for an event that we are collaborating on. They wanted to use the word “vessel”, I said it reminded me of deep sea submarines, they said they thought of a cup or chalice, another friend said they immediately thought of blood flowing through their veins.

Needless to say, we scrapped vessel.

But, how often does this happen?

One of my favorite books as a college student was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (who is a Czech writer and somehow captures something I know so deeply in my bones growing up in a large close knit Catholic extended family with Czech ancestry). In the book he defines words according to the different characters, which opens up a reflection on how a single word also contains personal meaning based on our histories. 

We all have experience with hearing a word, and an image appears in our mind, and suddenly we are in a scene from 10 years ago—smelling the ocean, filled with longing for a lost love or time of connection—or something else.

Given our wide range of life experience and associations, how is it that we are able to communicate at all?

In spiritual practice, we play the trickster, using language we point beyond concepts to a truth outside of our shared vernacular— a secret language of the innermost heart.

Yet, the words themselves can act as traps. We say one thing, and the other side isn’t expressed. Our words amount to an incomplete teaching, a partial truth. 

As practitioners on this path of freedom—we learn to liberate language. To hear beyond the words. 

To—at times—forget words. 

Deviating from conventional conceptualizations — playing in pure potentiality. 

If a tree wasn’t a tree, what would you call it?

If love wasn’t called love, how would you name it?

What is the sound you would give to oneness? 

How would you capture Nothingness?

Don’t tell me about it, my teacher would say in sanzen, show me!

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For the month of September my dharma talks/podcasts will be exploring the relationship between the oneness and the many, or sameness and difference. We will be using the Zen poem by Shitou called the Sandokai, which is translated as the Harmony of Difference and Sameness or the Identity of Relative and Absolute. This podcast introduces the poem and some other teachings from Shitou, just to give you a flavor for his teaching style. On Monday Sept 16, I plan to zoom out and explore the ways sameness + difference show up in our lives + practice, exploring how we can practice integrating the teaching of one + many in our relational lives.

Another theme I have been reflecting on lately, and this very much is part the exploration of oneness and many—is the relationship between Spirit and Soul in dharma practice. Almost every retreat I have led in a Zen context, someone asks at some point, where is the joy? And while I have found great joy in simply sitting in the stripped down style of a Zen sesshin. I also know that Joy, Beauty, Art, Wonderment and Ecstasy are potent elements to the unfolding and embodiment of dharma in our lives.

Jogen and I have been envisioning a practice space