(Follow this link to see the August 2023 Priory Newsletter where this was recently published.)

Rev. Master Meiten McGuire – Victoria, B.C. Canada –

From Reflections on the Path: Zen Training in Everyday Life, the first book of Rev. Master Meiten’s teachings. It was published by the Vancouver Island Zen Sangha. Rev. Master Meiten died in January 2018 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was 92 years of age.

Rev. Master Meiten’s writings have been compiled in a new volume entitled Coming Home: Taking Refuge Within which is now available on Amazon.

The chapter “Being Comfortable” was published in the 2018 OBC Journal and is reprinted here by permission.

Wheel of life image from our library. A common feature of all depictions of the wheel of life or Bhavachakra is that a Buddha appears in all the realms of existence, even the hell realms.

That everyone likes to feel comfortable is probably a safe generalization. Being comfortable has two aspects, it seems to me: we work to hold on to what brings us comfort, and we seek to remove that which makes us uncomfortable. The rhythm of our lives comes out of responding to that comfort/discomfort continuum. In psychology, needs and desires are distinguished, a distinction Buddhism also makes as a middle way between asceticism and self-gratification. The Buddhist mendicant is allowed only four requisites, the basics needed for sheer survival in this world. They are shelter, clothing, food, and medicine when sick. For monks, life can be simple because their needs are few. It’s a good reminder for all of us that we really don’t need a lot, though we do need a few things. This recognition can help us move toward simplifying our lives, and as we rid ourselves of some of the outer clutter, the mind has a chance to become correspondingly quieter.

All of us need to look dispassionately at what motivates us in our moment-to-moment choices, our daily and monthly ones, and then in our bigger view of how our lives have been molded by choices made over the years. At some point, we’re compelled to do this when the comforts we’ve depended upon no longer do their job or when life pulls them out from under us. Initially, many of us struggle to readapt by again securing those comforts that were taken from us. So we eat more, work more, play more, drink more. We take drugs; we seek entertainment; we travel, etcetera. When these things no longer satisfy us, we have the golden opportunity to find true comfort in the only sure place: right within the heart.

One of the koans in Zen is “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” Bodhidharma was an Indian monk, the twenty-eighth ancestor in our lineage and the first ancestor of Zen. He came to China from India in the early sixth century, at that time a hazardous adventure to say the least. The journey is said to have taken him more than three years. Why would someone do that? I used to puzzle over this koan and wonder what its significance might be for me, instead of seeing it as an intellectual problem. It raises the question of why we take on tasks that are decidedly uncomfortable and uncertain from the point of view of our little self, this body/mind with which we identify. What prods us to do this? Indeed, in Bodhidharma’s case, as in Prince Siddhartha’s, why even embark upon a demanding religious life? Why did not Siddhartha stay in the security and comfort of the palace with his status as a prince? The answer is embedded right in the question: we are more than just this body / mind that wants to be comfortable and taken care of. We want and need for our growth to challenge our complacency. Life, of course, is quite unrelenting in providing challenges. Perhaps Bodhidharma was as fearful as most of us would be in facing an unknown, hazardous journey; still, he chose to say “yes” to that which was calling him. Perhaps he was more sensitive than most to that inner voice beckoning and whispering that there is more to life than just satisfying bodily and emotional urges – than simply eating, drinking, and being merry because tomorrow we may die. But how many of us are so fortunate?
It is only when we really know that the old status quo will no longer satisfy us that we are primed to look within for a spiritual solution to life’s unsatisfactoriness. We have to be convinced on this key point before we put real effort into a spiritual practice. Now that I’m “out in the world” after years of monastic life, I have been privileged to meet people who are searching spiritually. I see some who just put their little toe in the water of training while holding on to the belief that they don’t really have to do it, who cling to the view that there is some external fix-it-fast mode of living. I don’t see these people much at our meditation meetings and, if they do come, often they quickly disappear. That’s not a problem. They are just not ready yet to make a commitment to train; the time isn’t right for them. They’ll eventually cotton on because “the karmic consequence of suffering is compassionate,” even though that can sound puzzling initially. The inherent unsatisfactoriness of skimming only the surface of life will finally prod us to look more deeply into our lives to find life’s meaning. Sooner or later we begin more clearly to hear the all of the heart that guides us toward what is truly good to do and what isn’t. UntiI we are ready to hear it, we aren’t going to because we could well be asked to do that which is not comfortable to little self, which clings to certainty and comfort.

Bodhidharma came from the West because he was answering this inner call to take a journey into the unknown. He could have died on the way. He didn’t because something greater was at stake. The Buddhadharma was to come to China and he, answering his own call of the heart, brought it. If he asked “why me?” or balked because it was too uncomfortable or because he feared he wasn’t good enough or because his little mind couldn’t understand its significance, we wouldn’t have Zen today in the form we know it. We can bow to Bodhidharma’s great example and find how to follow it in our lives this very day. Every day we can put ourselves on the line and bow to that which points us to the way we can best serve all beings, rather than just stay stuck with what makes us comfortable. When we are sincerely doing our training, we know more and more that simply looking for what makes “me” comfortable is not good enough. We have too long cheated ourselves in the service of the ego and its comfort. Now is the time to move beyond that limitation. And the only way to do this is simply to do it – to rise to the challenge of moving into unknown territory. We aren’t going to refine our lives except by choosing to live differently from moment to moment, bringing to bear the sincerity of our spiritual practice. We all can do this. This is the promise of the Buddha. We can all respond to a bigger picture than our little conditioned self-images that want the safety and comfort of that which is familiar.

It always comes back to our letting go, in good faith and with confidence that the process of our longing finds fulfillment in the doing. We have to honestly and carefully examine ourselves and our motivations in order to understand where it is we are clinging. We bring up to the light of our awareness that which lies buried a little under the surface of our busy lives, and we examine it closely. Then we will see! Because what surfaces may not be comfortable, we don’t always want to do this. But with training we learn that to ignore this potential discomfort is something we do at our own peril because it brings that uncomfortable sense of being out of harmony with our own heart. This is what is really uncomfortable. Of course, many of us may not be called to do something as challenging as Bodhidharma. We simply have to put aside our ideas about what is big and important – those ideas that are simply about self- gratification. Our spiritual journey is often about little, seemingly insignificant, moment-to-moment choices that confront us. Our training commitment requires that we not be ruled so much by the consideration of the comfort-discomfort continuum and instead respond to that which is good to do, that which needs to be done now. Then we let it go, ready to move on to whatever comes next. We always ask our heart, our enlightened nature, what is it good to do, what is the next step, and we follow. Then we live in life’s simplicity and shed gradually the burden of self.