"Water filling drop by drop will fill the largest pot." 
--The Dhammapada, Chapter 9

One of the things I can pretty much count on with retreats is that almost immediately I come up against the truth of impermanence and the fact of eventual separation from everything that I'm attached to.  Most specifically, there's often a quality of sadness or deep loneliness around the fact that my relationships with my wife and daughter are finite.  It's not as though I'm surprised by this inevitability -- from the beginning, the teachings are very clear about this, and any sincere amount of practice pushes us pretty quickly up against it anyway.  No, it's more like, in a typical day, we can distract ourselves just enough to not have to really hang out with it and chew it up. 

It's one thing to hear or read (or even talk about) teachings on impermanence and selflessness, and another thing entirely to really lean up against them without yet again turning away into the endless stories and delusions we've come to mistake for who we are.  And while it maybe sounds so unappealing to really lean into impermanence, to really lean into our lack of a separate, fixed self, when we do -- when we know how to hang out in whatever sadness or loneliness or whatever it is that arises for us here -- when we stop running away from it, there's something we can't help but discover right in the middle of it:  Everything is precious.

Recently, someone said to me, "I had this insight the other day when I was sitting that I should just stop trying for a certain result with practice, and that I should just practice."  Now, I know for sure that this person had read or heard this countless times before, but maybe for the first time it had become his and not just someone else's view to be easily adopted or discarded.  But because our gaining ideas don't tend to hide shamefully forever at our first sighting of them, it's also essential to realize -- or maybe "accept" is a better word -- that yesterday's insight is only yesterday's insight.  Letting go is a continual process.  Insights undergo constant refinement, so we don't get to substitute our memories of yesterday's practice for the work of today. 

I remember once reading a Dharma talk – maybe it was a newsletter interview or something – from P'arang's teacher, Zen Master Soeng Hyang (a.k.a. Bobbie Rhodes).  She talked about how her daughter had almost been hit by a truck (or a bus, maybe), and Bobbie had saved her by running out and pushing her out of the way.  But, she said, there had been a split second of hesitation, too.  A split second of wondering if she really ought to go jump in front of a truck barreling down the road.  The point she made was that [at least] one of the kong-ans (koans) that she had passed with her teacher pointed to this very thing, to this moment where our choice is compassion or obvious self-preservation.  And she said something like, "My own daughter!, and I hesitated, and I realized I hadn't really passed the kong-an at all."  I remember being so grateful that a Zen master -- who had "passed" all the kong-ans -- was speaking of the fact that, basically, "passing" kong-ans in the interview room is the first step, not the last.     

My daughter, Jaya, is almost three, so what’s totally illogical to me makes perfect sense to her.  She’s very specific, too, and rigidity doesn’t even begin to describe her sometimes.  Lately, her thing is to wear "A B C D shirts," which are whatever little shirts she has that have writing on them.  Well, one of our rituals every night is for Jaya and me to go pick out pajamas, which these days means I hoist her up to pajama-drawer level, and she rifles through looking for just the right shirt.  So the other day, we're on our way upstairs and she's saying, "A B C D shirt," and I'm getting more and more nervous because all her A B C D shirts are in the laundry, and I'm not sure what the hell I'm going to do.  We get up there and when it's becoming clear that there might not be any A B C D shirts, she's starting to lose it, and I'm looking for the exits, and I pick up a pink turtleneck because last week it was turtlenecks, "Here, look Jaya, a turtleneck!" at which point she rips it from my hand and tosses it into the big random pile of clothes now on the floor, and she just loses it, falling down, rolling about the floor a flailing mass of screaming three-year-old.  Maybe a minute later, she gets up, looks into the pile, and plucks out the pink turtleneck, saying proudly, "Turtleneck!" and starts trying to put it on.  I don't even think she realized that this was the very same shirt I had just shown her!  "Turtleneck!" I say.  "Perfect!"

Clearly, the important thing for her was being able to find and choose her own shirt, whatever my suggestions might have been.  I think our practice is exactly like this, in a way.  It doesn't matter how many times we hear about impermanence or letting go or compassion or whatever, sooner or later we have to pluck these pink turtlenecks from the pile and try them on ourselves. 

On some level, we don't actually like this too much.  During his visit last year, Zen teacher Brad Warner told me that every question people asked him as a teacher really boiled down to one of two things:  "Will you take responsibility for me?" or "Are you enlightened?"  The answer to both, he said, is and will always be, "No."  In a way, the idea of a guru or someone or something outside of us that can be enlightened for us or take responsibility for us has a bit of universal appeal, I think, which is why it's apparently so easy for people to start cults – or for governments everywhere to keep people marching, for that matter.

I always get a little suspicious when I stumble across a kind of CV for some Zen monk that says, “Such-and-such Sunim has done X number of retreats and three arduous 100 day solo retreats deep in the mountains of Korea," etc. etc.  My gut response to this sort of thing is typically, So what?  I mean, this can be really inspiring, that someone has done so much practice like this -- but when I come across these kinds of lists, I tend to wonder how often their true purpose is more to impress than to inspire.  Or maybe someone who isn’t the monk wrote the bio, maybe to say, "Look at all this practice this other person has done.”  Either way, if it leads us to believe that if only we had time deep in the mountains of Korea and didn't have to deal with traffic in Detroit, we'd surely practice hard, how is this not harmful?  How does this not disrespect the inescapability of having to practice here, now whether that includes a strict diet of crushed pine needles on a mountaintop or another sopping diaper from a sick baby who hasn't eaten in two days? 

Why do we privilege the stories of some guy on a mountain?  Why do we never hear, "Jane Smith sits for fifteen minutes every morning, no matter what, and keeps the precepts and works two jobs to feed her kids and keep her broken car just barely running”?  I suspect it's largely because it’s so much easier to convince ourselves that practice happens elsewhere, maybe by a select few.  Some monk on a mountaintop will take responsibility for us, maybe?

And, actually, in our Zen traditions we even inherit this as one might inherit rust on a car.  We have a lineage chart downstairs, for instance, that traces Still Point back through each generation to Shakyamuni Buddha -- something like 80 or 85 generations "from warm hand to warm hand" as the Zen saying goes.  But the fact is, if you look at all closely at the invention of lineage in China and Korea at different points in time -- and in Japan, too, I'm guessing -- you'll find that this teacher has a temple here and that teacher has a temple over there, and that since Zen's legitimacy has never resided in any particular sutra like many of the other sects, each teacher has had to argue for the legitimacy of his temple in a different way, namely that of lineage.  This has been going on at least since the death of Hui-Neng when his students were trying to gain a kind of social prominence over other practitioners, and probably vice-versa.  And if there's a gap somewhere a few generations back -- if you don't know who your teacher's teacher's teacher was, you just guess; you fill it in. 

But let's say you could know for certain that you had all your ducks in order, every generation accurately accounted for.  You'd find yourself back to the very moment from which every single Zen lineage on the planet has ever traced itself.  A moment on Vulture Peak where there was a huge assembly waiting for Shakyamuni Buddha to speak.  He waits.  They wait.  And finally, without saying anything, he holds up a flower.  No one responds, except for one of his chief disciples, Mahakashyapa, who smiles.  At this, the story goes, the Buddha hands over the flower to Mahakashyapa, saying, "My true Dharma I transmit to you."  So begins Zen's mind-to-mind transmission outside the scriptures.

The only problem is it never happened.  Never was a flower on Vulture Peak.  The story was added later, invented, because how are you going to argue for your lineage's supremacy if you can't trace it back to The Great Man himself?  Every single Zen lineage, then, is inaccurate from the very beginning.

Don't get me wrong.  "Warm hand to warm hand" is essential in our practice, I think -- in any sincere Dharma practice, and not just Zen.  But the problem with lineage -- aside from its basic groundlessness -- is everything it excludes.  It's a string of pearls without a body.

What actually did happen, as far as anyone can tell, is when the Buddha was approaching Parinirvana (um, death), his attendant, disciple, and cousin Ananda asked him about this very thing:  "Who will lead us after you're gone, Buddha?" 

"You'll be okay." 

"Yeah, but who will be your successor?" 

Etc. 

When the Buddha finally tired of deflecting the question, he replied:  "You have the teachings, Ananda!  You know how to practice!  What more do you want?  Be a lamp unto yourself."

Be a lamp unto yourself.  This isn't a ticket to arrogance, of course.  I can't imagine what gutter I'd be lying in if P'arang hadn't been such a good mirror for me along the way (which isn’t to suggest that I presume to be free and clear of all gutters).  But as a mirror, her function -- the function of any decent teacher -- is always to put the responsibility squarely back on the shoulders of her students.  She just can't do morning prostrations for me (as much as she'd be willing, I think). 

Be a lamp unto yourself.  Or, to borrow a phrase from a contemporary Japanese Zen teacher whose name escapes me, "No one can piss for you."  There's no way to avoid the fact that we have to do the work ourselves.  And, of course, also no way that we can endlessly avoid impermanence, try as we might.

When he was dying of AIDS in the Eighties -- could no longer get out of bed -- Zen teacher Issan Dorsey (who had founded the Zen hospice movement) was visited by his teacher, Richard Baker, who said, "I wish I could trade places with you right now."

"Don't worry, you'll get your chance," was Issan's reply.

We all will.

So what can we do?

"Water filling drop by drop will fill the largest pot."

I don't know how many -- if any -- of you made it your New Year's resolution to practice every day, but I'm going to tell you something my teachers used to tell me:  "Sit for five minutes every day."  And if you're like I was, you might think, "No, that's not enough.  I'll sit for one hour a day."  And if you're like me, you will sit for an hour every day.  For a few days.  And then you'll stop, because practice is not yet a habit, and it's too hard to find an hour of every busy day to do it. 

But at some point, I heard the wisdom in what I was being told.  I could always set aside five minutes a day, whether or not I lived on a mountaintop.  Every day.  And pretty soon that habit of five minutes became a habit of ten minutes. . . . 

So five minutes a day, plus the precepts -- maybe really take up a different precept each day, or each week:  Not to harm.  Not to lie.  Don't misuse sexuality.  Don't steal.  Don't misuse intoxicants. 

A jug fills drop by drop.

Every moment of our lives is Shakyamuni Buddha holding up a flower.  How are we responding?