Water falling drop by drop

will fill the largest pot.

Likewise a person who performs good deeds

becomes goodness itself.”

Buddha, The Dhammapada

Zen practice as a whole is generally very unsexy. The gist of it is: “Let me invite you into a deep experience of our suffering so that you may be transformed.”

It’s a hard sell.

But maybe the hardest sell, and the most paradoxical skill, is the practice of Right Effort. Number 6 on the Noble Eightfold Path. And yet, it is a crucially important practice in our work of liberating all from suffering, starting with, but never only, ourselves.

You all know or have heard about the Noble Eightfold Path. When people first come to Buddhism and Zen, usually what is on their mind is the practice of meditation. And people usually come to this practice because they have heard that, in some way, meditation can so beneficial to their (generalizing here) suffering and oh so lonely selves. (And it can be, and…, but…that “welcome to your suffering” part...) So usually in the modern West people come to Buddhism after some exposure a secular mindfulness practice. The godfather of this secular mindfulness, Jon Kabat Zinn, defines mindfulness as, “Awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” Whatever effort there is in this definition has to do with paying attention but doing so without judgment. All good. Add to this the Zen ideal of making the “effort of no effort” and you might come to believe that this practice is learning how to make less effort- of merely accepting life as it is rather than making the effort to twisting into our idea of how it should be.

Fair enough. Because, yes, this is an important starting point. And it is also why the Buddha put Right View first on the Noble Eightfold Path. Right View is the experiential understanding, not just an idea that is isolated in the prefrontal cortex but an embodied experience, that all of life is interconnected. Or, even more deeply and more accurate is the twist that Thich Nhat Han put on this- all of life Inter-Is. We are not separate from anything, in a very real, lived, visceral way that exists below the level of cognition and language. We do not exist separately from the air we breathe, the water we drink, our ancestors are literally imprinted into our bodies, the future is what we are creating right now, and of course we are not separate from each other. Very concretely, my welfare is not separate from Palestinians’ experience of starvation and genocide, or Jews in Israel desperately believing their existence and safety are at stake. It is not separate from those being violently, mercilessly and lawlessly deported in the U.S., or from the I.C.E. agents acting violently from their delusions of separation. Etcetera and etc.. My welfare is intricately tied to yours, and to the welfare of every being on this earth that ever lived and will ever live.

How do we know this? Our practice teaches us this daily, and with every breathe. It is something that we need to experientially be reminded of, and learn to relax into, with every breathe. Right View means developing our capacity to let go of our own small personal “effort” to “be someone.” (Read: to protect our selves from uncertainty and vulnerability.) To move into and learn to trust the flow of life which is actually our true identity.

Shohaku Okumura puts this beautifully. “We don’t practice individually to improve ourselves; rather, we settle down peacefully within the network of interdependent origination and allow the universal life force to practice through us for all beings.”

Yes!

But then…

Why does the Buddha emphasize effort? And are we learning to let go of effort?

Sure.

And then…

Two foundational ideas that might be helpful in understanding what comes next are Karma and Alaya Vijnana (alaya), or storehouse consciousness. These two are deeply intertwined. Karma is simply the understanding that what I engage in now shapes my brain. This includes cultural karma- what my history and the history of culture (structural, political, historical…), what I am conditioned into. Roshi Greg Snyder says there is no such thing as a personal self- all of my thoughts, understandings and frameworks have been formed/conditioned by the boarder relationships of my context over the course of my life. Karma is where history, personal and cultural, collides with neuroplasticity.

In a nutshell, storehouse consciousness is the unconscious (usually) source of our thoughts and behaviors. In Buddhist terms, the source of actions of body, speech and mind. In this understanding it is the consciousness - the store house of the seeds that our Karma plants, that guides our actions. What we engage in terms of media, relationships, culture and our thinking shape our storehouse consciousness and thus determines our future “choices.”

Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “If you produce a thought of anger, hate and despair that is not good for your health or the health of the world. Attention plays a very important role. Depending on the kind of environment you land in and what you pay attention to, you have a greater or lesser chance of producing good thoughts and going in the direction of right thinking…You are responsible for you thought and that thought is your continuation.” (Emphasis mine.)

Note the word responsible.

Yes…we are connected to a life for force that is greater than our usual understanding of our self, and or task is to let that life force work through us for the benefit of all beings.

AND.

We have ways of thinking and acting that are embedded in our karmic habits, our storehouse consciousness, that we need to transform. Knots of consciousness that dam this force of life and so need to be undone.

Right Effort means doing the work of undoing these knots as they arise, of taking responsibility for creating a future oriented around compassion. The Buddha’s word for mindfulness was “heedfulness”. To be heedful means to not simply work with non discerning awareness. No! It means to work with awareness within the context of a set of values defined by our experience of Interbeing so that we can create a future that is aligned with these values. It is a practice not just of nonjudgmental awareness, but of ethics.

The brilliant psychologist, Lisa Feldman Barrett put it this way in her book How Emotions are Made in writing about what she calls the three types of responsibility. (Parenthetical additions are mine in what follows.) “The third type of responsibility relates to the context in your conceptual system. (My note- Read this as storehouse consciousness). A brain does not compute a mind in a vacuum. Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not completely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the influences you were pickled in…

If you commit a crime, you are indeed to blame, but your actions are rooted in your conceptual system (storehouse consciousness) and those concepts don’t just appear in a puff of magic. They are forged by the social reality you live in. Nevertheless, all animals shape their own environment. So as a human being, you have the ability to shape your environment, to modify your conceptual system, which means that you are ultimately responsible for the concepts you accept and reject.” (Emphasis mine.)

The effort of taking responsibility for your life, your environment, your storehouse consciousness and your impact on the cultural storehouse consciousness is Right Effort. And it never stops.

Buddhist Practice= Adulting.

And by doing so we also take responsibility for our part in shaping our collective storehouse consciousness- the cultural and structural context that we live and that is influenced by the way we show up to our lives here and now.

Uchiyama Roshi wrote that the task of life is to “concretize the eternal”. In your sitting practice over time, you will come to know and learn from the eternal flow of life that flows through everything.

And then get to work in concretizing this into specific actions that arise from love and wisdom.