Jody Hojin Kimmel's Articles on Lion's Roar

The emotions we wish we didn’t have, that we’d like to just get over? Those feelings, say Jody Hojin Kimmel, are not obstacles on the path — they are the path. Hongzhi was a twelfth-century Zen master in China who had a great influence on Dogen. The following is one of his practice instructions—it’s something we are to do: Emptiness is without characteristics. Illumination has no emotional afflictions. With piercing, quietly profound radiance, it mysteriously eliminates all disgrace. Thus one can know oneself; thus the self is completed. We all have the clear, wondrously bright field from the beginning. Many lifetimes of misunderstanding come only from distrust, hindrance, and screens of confusion that we create in a scenario of isolation. With boundless wisdom journey beyond this, forgetting accomplishments. Straightforwardly abandon stratagems and take on responsibility. Having turned yourself around, accepting your situation, if you set foot on the path, spiritual energy will marvelously transport you. Contact phenomena with total sincerity, not a single atom of dust outside yourself. —from Cultivating the Empty Field, translation by Taigen Dan Leighton with Yi Wu I’ve often said that if I could meet Hongzhi, I would probably ask him to read me his poetry while I lie on my back and watch the clouds. Maezumi Roshi wrote this about him: “The tongueless one prescribes with wordless sparklings, a medicine of nondual existence for the bodiless one. When we appreciate the effect of this medicine, we know that medicine, we know that Master Hongzhi’s 834-year-old relics are still fresh and warm and vitally universal.” And I might add, they are here with us today. We come together and collect our hearts and our minds, ceremoniously. Caerimonia, the Latin root of ceremony, means “with reverence, with sacredness, with healing.” So we collectively gather together our griefs, our joys, our sorrows, our broken trusts—in reverence, in sacredness—to restore and make whole what’s never been apart. We can and do divide just about anything. But we know from experience that we can close the divide. We’ve all had moments when we release the thinking, discursive mind, and just chant, just eat, just walk, and just be. We yearn to return to this natural space, experiencing a universe that is undivided and nondual. Perhaps, because we know that’s our nature, that is what we are continuously seeking. Wholeheartedness is sometimes used as one way of expressing virya, or energy, as joyful effort. I recall when looking over the seven factors of enlightenment, the phrase “joyful effort” gave me something, a little zing. I then found this quote by Thanissaro Bhikkhu: “The path doesn’t save all its pleasures for the end. You can enjoy it now.” I was so happy to hear that! Here we are, involved in the harvesting of the heart, or as Dogen would say, our body–mind, and we can enjoy that. Illumination has no emotional afflictions. The emotional body is a wonderful way to enter into anything and everything that needs to be seen. Some of us, growing up, may have been told we were too emotional. When my mother would say this to me, I would get even more upset. If she said those words today, I’d say back, very lovingly, “Thank you. It’s true.” Let’s not pretend. When we are no longer defining self on the level of emotion, our sense of self is liberated from our conflicted feelings. But we cannot get to this point by bypassing our emotions. We cannot avoid what we feel. When we come to a practice such as this, we can sit down with our emotions and feel them without holding on. Being awake on the level of emotion means no longer deriving a solid sense of self from how and what we feel. Usually our sense of self is enmeshed in what we feel. We say to ourselves, “I feel angry. I am angry!” Looking deeply into this, we can see that what we are really saying in that moment is my sense of self is fused with my anger. If we look even more deeply, we see we actually cannot be defined by an emotion that runs through the body. The fusion is an illusion. Seeing this is awakening through the heart. We discover what we feel, period—and what we feel doesn’t need to be avoided, nor does it define us. The more we shut out the body and our feelings, the more we retreat to thinking, which tends toward disembodying. The intensity of our compulsive thinking is in direct proportion to the extent to which we are not willing to experience our emotional body and therefore disassociate from it. When we are no longer defining self on the level of emotion, our sense of self is liberated from our conflicted feelings. But we cannot get to this point by bypassing our emotions in the hopes of arriving at some exalted state. We cannot avoid what we feel. Emptiness is without characteristics. Illumination has no emotional afflictions. With piercing, quietly profound radiance, it mysteriously eliminates all disgrace. My understanding of how Dogen sees this is that it’s like relying on what is concrete in our life—which cannot be relied on, except in relation to that which is like empty space. In other words, “Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.” Undivided. Our emotions and feelings are fantastic pointers, directly revealing the heart and what is unresolved in our being. For a long time, it can be hard to accept our “piercing, quietly profound radiance” revealing what is unresolved; we may not have the patience. For a while, I wanted to see this self as a completely resolved being. We all know how painful that can be—pretending to have it all together, while inside we are trembling with fear of being detected as a hot mess. We don’t want that to be seen, even by ourselves. Yet that’s really where it needs to happen. Eventually, what’s not serving us will either implode or explode—sometimes both. Just like when nature needs to come into accord with cause and effect, a natural balance will come. We can try our darndest to hold it all together, but eventually we learn that we’re able to respond in other ways. Many lifetimes of misunderstanding come only from distrust, hindrance, and screens of confusion that we create in a scenario of isolation. We are so used to being divided that there is almost a fear of being undivided, of being complete, even though that’s what we yearn for. So we end up grasping at a solid sense of self, hoping to maintain some security. After all, what’s on the other side? We don’t know. We hear that all the time—“don’t know”—but it’s a real thing! When we let go, it means we are leaping into the unknown. We won’t know ourselves in the ways we did before. Yet this offers an inkling of what we might call the liberated state. This is the revolution the Buddha taught: no longer defining ourselves through what we feel, our sense of self is liberated from conflicted emotions. Our bodies are great truth meters. I can’t lie very well—my mother could take one look at me and say, “You are not telling me the truth!” I was saying one thing, but my body and my complexion were saying something else. As soon as we go into emotional states like hate, jealousy, blame, greed, envy, we are perceiving from a state of division. So those emotions can serve as flags reminding us that we are not seeing the true nature of things. Having turned yourself around, accepting your situation, if you set foot on the path, spiritual energy will marvelously transport you. Contact phenomena with total sincerity. Emotional turmoil tells us we have an unconscious belief that isn’t true. This is good news, because if we can hang in there without shutting down, it will be revealed. That’s the hard work, but it means that if we see it, we are no longer unconscious. We can make the effort to inquire further and ask, “What am I believing about myself right now?” Be curious; remember that joyful effort is the energy we have to wonder, to question, to awaken completely. Curiosity is a way to study the self and also to forget the self. We might notice, “Oh, I am hating this person. I am hating this situation right now. Fascinating, fascinating.” Or we might say to ourselves, “This powerful feeling, it’s not me. Yet I so believe it is. I so believe it is.” Maybe we can turn the light around into not hating this illusion and seeing that this too is the “wondrously bright field from the beginning.” In this way, we enter the realm of possibility. Exploring what is possible in the moment is something very different from believing; again, we have to not know. I heard a story that demonstrates the power of our beliefs. A little boy said to his mother, “Mom, pretend you are surrounded by hungry tigers, all wanting to devour you. What would you do?” She said, “Oh! I would be terrified. I wouldn’t know what to do. What would you do?” And the little boy replied, “I’d stop pretending.” We can’t awaken from the neck up. The emotional body is an entry point into any illusion, any belief, anything that can cause a sense of separation. Zazen is the practice of coming back down to earth. And coming down to earth is not easy; we don’t always arrive intact. We’ve been living in our heads for a long time, perhaps lifetimes. And now we are being called from every direction to reinhabit the bodies we’ve left behind. The whole body comes along; we can’t awaken from the neck up. We must awaken the whole body–mind. As Dogen tells us, when we see forms and hear sounds with the whole body and mind, unreservedly, we will understand. When we do that, we will remember who we are. These days, we are inundated with the constant flow of information. I once read that when you order a single cup of coffee, maybe an “organic decaf vanilla latte extra hot,” you make more decisions than your grandparents made in a week. Ponder the levels of connection that our brains and hearts are trying to digest. In one month, many of us are connected with more people online and in person than our ancestors were in their entire...

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