Don’t Fight the Water

Zazen in the Spirit of Shinjin

The Spring 2019 issue of Tricycle includes a marvelous teaching by Kenneth Tanaka entitled “The Seven Phases of a Drowning Sailor.” Apparently the story itself exists in Shin Buddhism, but Tanaka divided it up into seven parts to indicate stages of realization. He had in mind the Ten Oxherding pictures of Zen, and Andrew Archer created some wonderful illustrations to accompany the seven stages. It is a parable about our lives, and a particular moment resonated with me.

The first stage, Boarding the Ship, is just being born as a human being, enjoying the fact of being alive, perhaps realizing the rarity of a human birth. It is a basic contentment at being alive. It is followed by Falling off the Ship, which symbolizes a moment of difficulty in our lives. We are thrown for a loop and don’t know what do. In the story, three sailors who were standing on the ship appreciating the sunset feel a sudden lurch and are thrown into the water. The hero of our story, the sailor of the title, loses sight of his friends, but thinks he remembers passing an island and has an idea about which direction it is. The water is cold and choppy, but he is a strong swimmer and sets out to find the island. After swimming for an hour, though, he begins to run out of energy, and isn’t sure he’s heading in the right direction. He’s alone, and might just be swimming off into nowhere. He begins to lose faith, and feels himself starting to go down.

I actually experienced that part of the story in my own life. I too am a strong swimmer, and for years have swum for exercise. But in 1991, I had just moved to Cambridge, where my future wife was in Divinity School, and didn’t have a place to swim yet. A friend who helped us move suggested I come with him the next day and go for a swim at Walden Pond (where one of my great literary heroes had lived!). The pond wasn’t terribly long across—maybe a quarter mile?—and there was a rope across it indicating a section where a lifeguard was in charge. My friend suggested I swim beyond the rope, where there weren’t many people. That’s what he did. I knew I could swim that distance (though I was used to swimming in a pool, where you keep pushing off the side). The other factor I hadn’t counted on is that I’m extremely nearsighted. Without my glasses, I don’t know where the hell I am.

Halfway across the pond, weirdly enough, I bumped into a young woman. There was hardly anyone swimming outside the lifeguard area, but the two of us managed to run into each other. I laughed at what happened, apologized, let her continue. I was ready to swim again.

Except that running into her was weirdly disorienting. She seemed to have crossed my path, but hadn’t she, too, been swimming across the pond? Had I somehow gotten turned around? The water was cold, and apparently deep; I was far from a place where I could touch bottom. I treaded water anxiously, wondering which way to go. My heart pounded, and I started to feel out of breath, which made me lose my buoyancy. I was having trouble staying afloat.

I was in my early forties and in great swimming shape. With any confidence I could have dived down and searched for the bottom, or explored the underwater landscape, then started swimming again. For that matter, I could have swum the length of Walden Pond if I’d had to; I had great endurance. But as my heart started to pound and I lost my breath, I felt as if I’d been swimming for miles. I really was going down. I fought the water in my panic, and started to swim again, eventually made it to shore. The whole episode was terrifying.

Sometimes, when someone drowns in a lake, people wondered how it happened. “He knew how to swim,” they say. “He was a good swimmer.” I now think I understand. Something made him panic, and he lost his buoyancy. He couldn’t recover.

It’s stunning to think of all I would have missed if I had drowned that day: marrying my second wife, the many years I’ve lived with her, my son’s marriage, my grandchildren. But one thing stands out starkly: I would never have practiced Buddhism. My first class in meditation was several weeks away.

The sailor, in a more perilous situation, has a sudden and much deeper realization: he can float! The sea that surrounds him is not his enemy; it is his support. If he can let go and relax it will hold him up. In the parable that this story is telling, the moment of being thrown into the water is a life event—which all of us experience at some point—which makes us lose faith; the period of fighting the water is the sailor’s attempt to save himself through his own power. But that isn’t working, and just before he goes down, he has the miraculous realization that if he relaxes and gives up, he doesn’t have to save himself. The water itself will save him.

What the sailor has gone through, according to Tanaka, “symbolizes the Shin transformative experience called shinjin.” People translate this key term in various ways. Some prefer “entrusting heart.” Tanaka prefers “awakening.” But you suddenly understand that the reality you have been fighting, struggling against, “alone and afraid in a world I never made,” is not against you, it is your support. This is a subtle shift in consciousness, but it changes everything. It is the moment, in meditation practice, when you realize you can’t do this, that you can’t sit all that damn still, you can’t follow your breathing; the Anapanasiti Sutta has sixteen steps on the path to nirvana but you can’t achieve the first one, much less any of the others. So either you give up, and never sit again, or you give up in another way, and keep sitting. You just don’t try anymore.

That is what Eihei Dogen, a rough contemporary of Shinran, suggests from the get go. “The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation,” he says. “It is simply the dharma gate of enjoyment and ease. It is the practice-realization of complete enlightenment.” You’re going to give up sooner or later, Dogen seems to be saying. Why not give up from the start?

Most of us unfortunately don’t understand these simple instructions when we first hear them, or we manage to skip over them. We sweat bullets for ten or twenty years before we give up.

The assumption of Zen—all forms of Buddhism, actually—is that you’re already Buddha. There’s nothing to do. Realization is not figuring something out, as we sometimes use that word, but making something real. We make Buddhahood real by sitting there. We don’t have to do anything.

The supposed distinction between Zen and Pure Land practice is that Zen is a practice of self-power—the mistake the sailor was originally making, before he realized he could float—and Pure Land is the practice of Other Power, entrusting yourself to Amita Buddha. But the teaching of all forms of Buddhism, right back to the Pali Canon, is that there is no self, so the expression self-power is a contradiction in terms. If there is no self, of course, there is no other, so who are we entrusting ourselves to (and who are we, by the way?)? Who has the power? What is the power? Where is it?

In what may be his simplest teaching, a short text entitled Shoji, Dogen addresses these questions. It’s as if for once in his life he gave up all the obfuscation and difficulty and spoke clearly. He refers to our human life as birth-and-death.

“This birth-and-death is the life of a buddha. If you try to exclude it, you will lose the life of a buddha. If you cling to it, trying to remain in it, you will also lose the life of a buddha, and what remains will be merely the form of a buddha. Only when you don’t avoid birth-and-death or long for it do you enter a buddha’s mind.

“However, do not analyze or speak about it. Just set aside your body and mind, forget about them, and throw them into the house of the buddha, then all is done by the buddha. When you follow this, you are free from birth and death and become a buddha without effort or scheme. Who, then, remains in the mind?”

He continues with a paragraph whose first sentence indicates the man really did have a sense of humor, though we don’t often see it.

“There is a simple way to become a buddha. When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Seek nothing else.”

I think this is the same thing a Jewish Rabbi said some two thousand years ago, from the standpoint of his tradition. He wasn’t—according to my linguist brother, who teaches from the Greek—saying Believe in me and you will have eternal life, as the sentence is usually translated. He was advocating trust. Trust in me (that larger me that he had realized, and that we all actually are), and you will have eternal life. Or as Dogen would put it, you’ll be free from birth-and-death.

The Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn once said, “All religions converge one point.” I think this is that point. This is the thing every religion says.

Don’t fight the water. Float.