Facing Change Beyond Change
Jan Sendzimir JDPSN
For forty years my “day job” was focused on helping communities adapt to change: sudden outbursts of insects, flooding, or fire would add shock to the chronic stress of drought or economic decline. Climate change has only added to the anxious uncertainty arising from ever greater impacts. In our Zen community I am often asked, “How can we follow our true direction and help others in this time of great change?”
Change greets us daily from every direction. We recognize change by how much we work to deny it. We fix, clean, replace, heal, or grow things just to keep our world from changing too fast. But even if our little corner stays reasonably still, the larger world sometimes engulfs us with change so vast and powerful that all we can do is endure as the current carries us to a world we may not recognize. These days we often hear people say, “I no longer recognize my world.”
Many see our changing climate like this. The seasons come and go in ways new to us. Drought, hurricanes, fires, and floods surround us with overwhelming force, often stronger than anyone can remember. Millions of people are already on the move, fleeing rising seas, fires with smoke that pollutes the air across continents, and droughts that foreshadow those fires as the land turns to desert. Humans must learn to live in a world where we are no longer the “master of the landscape,” engineering everything to make it safe. Change is occurring at levels beyond our old understanding, change that we cannot control. We are facing change beyond change.
The rising tide of such big changes has been predicted for many years now. When students asked Zen Master Seung Sahn how to face great change, he replied, “Hide under the Path.” What does this mean? How does one keep an open and generous mind to support everyone in the face of change so vast that the future is hard to imagine? He didn’t pull any punches. Few places on earth have as many weapons as the Korean peninsula, and at times war seemed very near. When monks in Seoul fearfully asked what to do about missiles landing on their temple before war was even declared, he strode to the door, threw it open and shouted: “Welcome!”
But beyond the drama of such a wake-up call, how do we follow a responsible path day to day? We may try to lower the tension by focusing only on one kind of change, but deep reflection reveals that all these changes (to nature or to society) come together to upend everything around us: great change. We climate scientists shout warnings to wake people up to the need to find an answer, because even after a century of science no one has the answer. So, we all must learn new ways to live, and profound learning involves risk. Can our practice open us to the point where we risk learning new ways to live? How do we open ourselves to risk? You must open wider than you can imagine, according to Zen Master Ma Jo.
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Layman Pang asked Great Teacher Ma Jo: “Who is the man who doesn't accompany the ten thousand dharmas?” Teacher Ma replied: “Layman, wait till you've swallowed in one swig all the water of the West River, then I'll tell you.”
This is our practice. There is no edge to don’t-know, no frame in which we can comfortably nestle what concerns us. There is simply this world, this life—an ocean in which everything swims. Within this open frame we watch each thing arise and disappear. What is it that arises, perhaps again and again, and what disappears? What do we dwell on? Who is asking?
The waves wash back and forth. Some find the waves steepen and crash when charged with great emotion, like the fear arising that all this change feels like it is coming down on . . . ME! Why, some ask, should such awful uncertainty fall on me in this special time when I am alive? Who or what is this “I” that is asking? If we feel so special, it is easy to forget that humans have almost always faced change as profound as today. Consider a Zen student near the end of the Tang Dynasty (844 CE) in China when the emperor Wuzong, citing corruption and excessive wealth, ordered the burning of 4,600 Buddhist temples and 40,000 hermitages, along with forcibly returning more than 250,000 monks and nuns to lay life. A few surviving teachers fled to the mountains with a handful of followers.
What would it be like to practice Zen with all the temples and hermitages burning around you? Or consider a shepherd 9,000 years ago in the savannah that eventually became the floor of the Black Sea. The rising Mediterranean Sea came rushing up and over the Bosporus in a giant waterfall larger than the Amazon River. It made a lake that chased everyone away as its shoreline advanced outward two kilometers each day, creating the early Black Sea in only 300 days—as if an ocean could strike like lightning. Every culture surrounding the Black Sea is founded on the myth of the great flood, so the shock echoes to this day all over the world.
Like our ancestors facing wars, plagues, glaciers, and floods, we now turn to face great change and wonder what really helps. As we practice, we see more clearly how our fears trap us, wrapping ourselves around every sordid detail such that many do no more than complain. To truly break out of this trap you have to go down to the source. If we persevere and keep watching amid all the forms and dharmas that arise, we arrive at the root from which all these things grow: Mind makes everything.
Modern psychology has converged on this ancient Zen teaching. Current inquiry indicates that one of our brain’s main functions is as a “prediction engine.” From moment to moment the brain predicts what will challenge us next, and to help us meet that challenge it generates feelings, emotions, thoughts, and ideas. It is like a fountain creating the universe again and again, from microsecond to microsecond, faster than we can consciously think. Seeing this process frees us from the trap of “Inside/outside”, wherein all feelings and sensations arise from impacts from what lies “outside” of us. There is no outside. Each one of us is the author of our whole story. If we can own this great responsibility, then the flak doesn’t keep us from what we need to do. We know the flak. We wrote it.
Exposing the root, our questioning expands to where everything does not swirl around Me, so then what becomes possible? Perhaps in each moment it becomes easy to see exactly what is needed to do to help. As Zen Master Dae Bong said, “In war there are not two sides, there is only the side of suffering.” If there is no outside or inside and nothing to defend, then whatever stands before you, whatever work needs to be done, becomes clear. That frames our direction: address suffering where you find it. Address life or whatever needs a response where you find it. Our world offers many things besides suffering that may require a response. Some plant trees, others look after those who are weak or sick, and others raise children who are curious, open, and compassionate. There are as many ways to express our direction and invoke this compassionate world as there are people. All this builds a world where trust will help us to join hands and work together, taking the risks that we need to experiment and learn new ways to live.
Science has long warned us of the impending climate crisis, among other things, and tried to spread better understanding. But, even if we accept these truths, what will everyone do with that understanding? Practice points the way to use and build on that understanding as we help one another. Everyone has to work together to forge the way ahead, and our practice points each of us to the work right there at our feet. Understanding alerts us, and then our practice expands and directs us, revealing and unwinding the practical path forward to healing this world.