CHAPTER 1

ENTERING THE GATELESS GATE

    Truly, is anything missing right now?
    Nirvana is right here, before your eyes.
    This very place is the Lotus Land,
    This very body is the body of the Buddha.

    —Zen Master Hakuin, "The Song of Zazen"

Several months before I turned sixteen, my mother died suddenly in an automobileaccident. As I struggled to come to terms with this heart-wrenching loss, Ifound myself losing something equally precious as well—my faith in thebenevolent, omniscient God who had guided and cared for me since childhood. Mywhole world of belonging and meaning collapsed within a few weeks. Grief-strickenand bereft, I didn't have the support necessary to help me process myfeelings. So I turned to the world of philosophy to help me deal with my pain.

In the American transcendentalists, I discovered intimations of a moremysterious, impersonal divinity that infused, animated, and yet transcended allthings. From Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, I made my way toGerman idealists like Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, who challenged myconventional way of knowing reality and pointed to a fundamental principle priorto thought. Learning that these philosophers had been influenced by the wisdomof Asia, I soon found myself on the doorstep of Buddhism and Zen.

In those days, books on Buddhism were scarce and often difficult to decipher.But in the few Zen books I could lay my hands on, I found images of masters whosat unperturbed as earthquakes rumbled around them and samurai swordsmenthreatened to cut off their heads. Troubled by the pain of a difficult childhoodand a longing for the mother-love I had recently lost, I desperately desired totranscend my suffering and awaken to the unshakable tranquillity and equanimitythese men and women had apparently achieved. After several years of reading,including college courses in Asian philosophy and experimentation with mind-alteringdrugs, I finally looked up Zen in the phone book and began weekly tripsto a little Zen center in midtown Manhattan for an evening of meditation andspiritual talk.

COMING HOME

On one particularly warm summer evening, as the pungent smell of Japaneseincense filled the meditation hall, one of the roshi's senior students, a womanmy mother's age, gave a talk that ignited a fire deep inside me and set me offon the pathless path. "Zazen [Zen meditation]," she said softly, "is the way tobring you to your long-lost home." As a college student with no home to returnto and no sense of a stable center or home within, I was profoundly touched bythese words. I yearned to discover my true home, the one I knew could never belost.

In that moment more than thirty years ago, I came face-to-face for the firsttime with the core paradox at the heart of the spiritual journey. According tothe books I read and the teachings I received, the home I so fervently soughtexisted right here and now, inside me. Being home, after all, it wasn't someexotic and unfamiliar Garden of Eden, but the place I inherently belonged, mybirthright, my natural state, the awakened nature that already shone forth frominside me. I was being told that Zen meditation was the way to go there, eventhough there was apparently nowhere to go. My mind simply couldn't wrap itselfaround this paradox, so I took the easy way out and shifted my focus fromdiscovering home to counting my breaths.

Many years later, when I finally did come home once and for all, I realized thatI had never been apart from it even for an instant. As one of my teachers likedto say, it's your nearest, your home ground, the silent presence gazing throughthese eyes, giving rise to these thoughts, animating these arms and legs. Notthe me you take yourself to be, but the one you really are—the mysterious,ungraspable subject of all objects, the "I am" prior to all characteristics. Yetsomehow my true home, apparently as near as breath itself, had remainedcompletely invisible to me, even though my teachers kept pointing toward it (asI'm doing now). As a result, I ended up searching for more than twenty years,sitting long hours in meditation, listening to countless teachings, readinginnumerable books, before I found myself where I had always been.

In our heart of hearts, don't we all yearn to return home, not to the family ofour childhood, but to the place where we feel completely free to beourselves—a place of total contentment, relaxation, and ease? You maynever have experienced such a home on this earthly plane, yet you may haveglimpsed the possibility from time to time. Perhaps you've had such intimationswalking on the beach, listening to music, or lying entwined in the arms of abeloved—a fleeting few moments of indescribable peace and love, when timeseemed to stop, space opened up, and you encountered something indescribablysacred and profound. But such experiences inevitably come and go, and you mayhave been left believing that you could never experience such peace consistentlyfrom moment to moment. Or you may have been so enthralled by the encounter thatyou spent years trying to re-create it through spiritual teachings andpractices.

This paradox of the home we've never left but must somehow rediscover isexpressed throughout the world's spiritual traditions by the universal parableof the prodigal son. Wandering off from his father's home in search of somedistant treasure, the prodigal forgets who he is and inadvertently stumbles homeyears later, where he is found by his father, welcomed back, and offered hisoriginal inheritance and birthright. In one version of the story, he finds atreasure map that leads him back home to the jewel buried beneath his ownhearth. In another, the prodigal, who has been reduced to poverty, discovers aprecious diamond that was hidden in his pocket all along.

These versions of the parable acknowledge the mystery of the spiritual journey:there's no place to go but here, yet the going is often inevitable because itwears us out, humbles us, and prepares us to receive the treasure with agratitude and appreciation we might not otherwise have experienced. By lookingto externals for answers and coming up empty again and again, we discovereverything we're not—pleasurable experiences, material possessions,spiritual accomplishments, blissful mind-states, anything that comes andgoes—and become more open to recognizing what we really are, theindestructible jewel of true nature, which as Jesus said is beyond rust anddecay.

ENCOUNTERING THE GATELESS GATE

This paradoxical dance of seeking and finding wears different costumes indifferent traditions. In Zen, it's usually known as the "gateless gate." Untilyou crack the combination and pass through, you can't fully understand themeaning of the great Zen teachings, but all your mental effort inevitably provesfruitless before this enigmatic and impenetrable barrier. You need to bring yourwhole being to the process, not just your mind, and allow the paradox totransform you from inside. Many Zen koans pose some version of this paradox,disorienting the mind and evoking an answer from another dimension of knowing.

Consider the famous saying attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha: "All beings areinherently enlightened, but because of their attachments and distorted views,they can't realize this fact." I can still remember how these words short-circuited my mind the first time I heard them. "If we can't realize it, then howcan we possibly say we're enlightened?" I mused. "But if we're reallyenlightened, why can't we realize it?"

As a neophyte practitioner, I understood these words to mean that deep downinside me there was this enlightened nature that I somehow needed to discover,and meditation was a kind of excavation project designed to unearth it. Foryears I kept digging, sitting intensive retreats, contemplating koans, emptyingmy mind to make room for the influx of awakening. I was spurred on in thisarcheological exploration by my teachers, who offered encouragement in privateinterviews and lavished authority and cachet on those who passed koans quickly.Eventually I just wore myself out with the digging, so I set aside my shovel(and my monk's robes) and went back to living a more ordinary life. Yet theparadox continued to gnaw at me silently, from the inside.

The fact is, once you're gripped by the core paradox and recognize thatconsensus, everyday reality is merely a reflection of some deeper truth that'sclose at hand but hidden from view, you've embarked on a search that you cannever really abandon, no matter how far you seem to stray. The Zen masters saythat encountering the paradox is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball you canneither disgorge nor pass through. Until you digest it, you can never becompletely at peace.

Throughout the centuries, zealous Zen students have meditated long hoursstruggling to resolve this paradox, to return home, to discover their "originalface." In the Rinzai Zen tradition, practitioners bellow, "Mu" (the keyword from one of the most important koans) for hours in their fervor to breakthrough the gate. The tradition's stories are filled with notable examples ofthose who took their practice to even greater extremes, standing in the snow forhours, sitting at the edge of a precipice, walking on foot from master tomaster. "Monasteries are places for desperate people," my first Zen teacher usedto say, by which he meant people whose suffering, urgency, or intensity drivesthem forward on their long and often lonely search.

Many centuries ago, the Persian mystic poet Rumi described his own divinedesperation in these words:

    I have lived on the lip
    of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
    knocking on a door. It opens.
    I've been knocking from the inside!

Judging from this poem, Rumi struggles for a long time to penetrate the paradoxwith his mind, but the door eventually opens by itself, almost in spite of hisefforts, and reveals that he's been living in the secret chamber all along.Rumi's epiphany when he discovers that he's been looking from the inside outmirrors the surprise, relief, and delight of those seekers who wear themselvesout attempting to unravel the paradox and drop to the ground exhausted, only todiscover that they've never strayed from home, even in their most desperatemoments. "No creature ever falls short of its own completeness," says Zen masterDogen. "Wherever it stands, it does not fail to cover the ground."

Needless to say, this intense longing to crack the code and reveal the truth atthe heart of reality is as ancient and universal as humankind itself. You couldsay that it's in our DNA. According to the Sufis, God said to the ProphetMuhammad, "I am a hidden treasure, and I want to be known." In his yearning tobe loved and experienced, God set in motion an evolutionary pattern that reachedits pinnacle in the human capacity for spiritual awakening. God, or Truth, inother words, is seeking to awaken to itself through you, to see itselfeverywhere through your eyes and taste itself everywhere through your lips."That which you are seeking," wrote an anonymous sage, "is always seeking you."

Ultimately, your every desire—the desire for material things,relationships, career success, sexual gratification—is really the desirefor the peace you experience for brief moments when you attain the object ofyour desire. Of course, such conditional peace is fleeting, and you moverestlessly on to new objects and new desires in the hope of recapturing it.Until you know who you really are, know the freedom from desire that's the trueaim of every desire, you can never recognize the peace that can never bedisturbed or lost.

ESCAPING FROM THE PRISON

Though many people seem to "effort" and struggle for years to rediscover theirinnate awakened nature, others just seem to stumble on it inadvertently, withoutintensive meditation or deep inquiry. One friend of mine realized the emptinessof self quite unexpectedly while boarding a bus. Another asked the question "Whoam I?" just once and penetrated through the illusion of a separate self. Stillanother woke up one morning without her accustomed identity; instead, pureawareness seemed to move through her body and experience life through hersenses. But if you're like Rumi, you need to exhaust yourself with the knocking.

There's a traditional story about a man imprisoned for a crime he didn't commitwho attempts to dig his way to freedom with a spoon—rather like thecharacter played by Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption. After yearsof bone-wearying struggle, his hands calloused and bloody, he finally realizesthe futility of his efforts and gives up. Tears of frustration and desperationstreaming down his cheeks, he leans back against the door of his cell, only todiscover that it's been unlocked all along. No doubt his surprise and relief aresimilar to Rumi's. As implausible as this story may seem, the point isclear—the prison that you imagine constrains you doesn't really exist.

Indeed, the one who tries by every available means to escape from the prison isthe prison itself, as my teacher Jean Klein used to say. This formulation pointsdirectly to the source of our imprisonment—the mind that believes we'reimprisoned! Whether you can look directly at the source of the prison andrelease yourself from its grasp in the looking, or need to wear yourself outpounding on the bars, depends more on your karma than on your intentions. Eventhose who attempt to go directly to the source may suddenly find themselvesconfused and disoriented, standing once again outside the gate. "The onlyobstacle to complete realization is the thought 'I have not realized,'" said thegreat Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, but dispensing with that pesky thought can bethe work of a lifetime.

THE OPEN SECRET

Some spiritual traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, refer to the core paradoxas the "open secret": The truth of your being has never been hidden fromview—indeed, it's as plain as the nose on your face—yet it remains asecret because you don't know how and where to look, and the teacher's job is topoint you in the right direction. Instead of being advised to storm the barrieror crack the code through intensive practices, you're counseled to listen to theteachings and allow them to point you gently in the right direction. Then, in amoment out of time, the secret reveals itself to you.

In fact, the nose on your face is actually invisible when you're lookingstraight ahead; you have to maneuver your eyes in a particular way if you wantto see it. You're accustomed to focusing on external objects but rarely turnaround to look at the one who looks, the source of all seeing. "The eye can'tsee the eye," the sages say, because it's the medium through which you see. Yetyou can come to know the eye in a subtler and more indirect way, can apperceivethe source of seeing, through a direct and timeless recognition that bypassesthe mind.

The process is rather like solving a figure-ground puzzle where it's difficultto distinguish the image from the background. You pore over the picture withcuriosity and perhaps a little perplexity, until you suddenly realize that thevase you've been staring at is also two faces touching; once you see the faces,you wonder how you could ever have missed them. Or like rummaging around thehouse before an important appointment, frantically searching for your keys, onlyto discover that they were buried in your pocket all along. Or even moreembarrassing, like hunting for your sunglasses until someone points out thatthey're already perched on top of your head. "Ah, here they are," you say. "Iknew they were there somewhere." The recognition is immediate and quiteordinary—like opening the door to your home and stepping through.

ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE TRUTHS

Beneath the paradoxical metaphors of the open secret and the gateless gate liesa crucial philosophical distinction common to both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta:the two truths. At the level of absolute, or ultimate, truth, you're alreadyenlightened, already Buddha, already perfect and complete just the way you are,and everything in every direction shines with the same inherent perfection.Nothing needs to be added or taken away, figured out or improved, becausenothing is ever problematic. Past and future, cause and effect, do not exist,only this timeless moment, the eternal Now, in which manifest reality isconstantly springing forth in some mysterious and ungraspable way. At the levelof relative, or conventional, truth, you may not enjoy the peace and contentmentof Buddhahood because you haven't yet recognized your inherent perfection, andyou read teachings and engage in practices in order to experience the ultimatefor yourself. Problems are constantly arising and requiring your attention,situations demand improvement, and reality (at least at the superatomic level)closely follows the law of cause and effect.

Both truths apply simultaneously; rather than being mutually exclusive, they'reinseparable, and the goal of the spiritual enterprise is to acknowledge andembrace them both. In fact, they're merely flip sides of the same nondualreality that includes both the personal realm of thoughts and feelings and thetranspersonal realm of pure awareness; the apparent world of work, family, andrelationships and the essential world where everything is merely an expressionof the One. Even using words like realms, worlds, and levelsgives the mistaken impression that they're separate in some way, which they'renot. The Heart Sutra says that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form, in aformulation we'll be exploring again and again. Form is no other than emptiness,and emptiness no other than form. The mind can't wrap itself around thisparadoxical truth—you can only experience it directly, beyond the mind.

As an example, take your closest relationship. If you see yourself and yourpartner or friend only as two separate personalities attempting to learn yourlife lessons and maximize your potential for growth and development, you willdefinitely achieve a certain level of intimacy. But you may miss the deeperexperience of knowing that the two of you are already essentially one and thatlove is who you both are fundamentally, beneath the personal issues. When youembrace both truths, you can have the freedom and equanimity that comes withseeing the empty, luminous, dreamlike nature of these two apparently separateselves and at the same time enjoy the tenderness and openness that comes withrecognizing the humanness and vulnerability that this sacred emptiness haschosen to express through these forms. Only in the presence of both the absoluteand relative truths, the spiritual and mundane dimensions, can the deepestintimacy flourish.

STRAYING AWAY FROM HOME—AND RETURNING

If you've never left home even for an instant, why do you appear to stray,forget who you really are, and struggle to find your way back again? Believe itor not, this age-old question does not seem to have a satisfactory answer."Holding a begging bowl, a man with amnesia knocks on his own door," says theIndian poet Kabir.

(Continues...)