Cheri Huber - Sweet Zen: Dharma Talks by Cheri Huber

Years ago, I left one of my first long Zen retreats with a vision of myself as tough. The retreat involved not only a rigorous schedule of sitting in meditation for many hours a day but also various forms of renunciation: silence, not looking at others, not reading or writing, a spartan diet, no caffeine.

In the valley below the retreat center, I stopped to get gas at a full-service general store, where my new self-image met its first challenge. Would a truly tough person succumb to the urge to buy an iced tea? I asked myself. No, I answered firmly. Not that I would never again enjoy iced tea, but succumbing at the very first opportunity would be the opposite of tough.

At the check-out counter, I found myself standing behind my Zen teacher, Cheri Huber, who had led the retreat. She was purchasing a package of cookies. They were round and smooth and slightly puffy, with a dark chocolate coating, and resembled (I realized later) Zen meditation cushions. But what I saw was the marshmallow cookies of my childhood. If ego had a heart, mine would have broken in that moment. Chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies? What true Zen teacher would eat anything so sweet, so soft, so childish, so un-Zen?

Foodor our ideas about itis a topic addressed in the first part of this book. The simple acts of eating, sleeping, working, and interacting with others can be associated with anxiety and regret, or resentment and envy, or any number of unhappy feelings. In Buddhism, such ordinary dissatisfactions are encompassed by the term suffering. The perspective Cheri offers in her teachings shifts our attention from the suffering itself to the process by which we cause ourselves to suffer. In the talks presented here, she shows how depriving ourselves will never result in spiritual freedom, while simple kindness to ourselves leads directly to compassion for all.

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Sweetness is not a quality we tend to associate with Zen. Zen has a reputation for being a rigorous, rather macho pursuit, the spiritual equivalent of boot camp. It is easy in Zen practice to focus on hardship, the discomforts and doubts that arise in long hours of sitting and working meditation. Indeed, among Zen students, one often hears rueful comment to the effect that, yes, indeed, suffering exists.

The existence of suffering is the first of the Buddhas Four Noble Truths. The second is the understanding that suffering is caused by our attachment to an illusory sense of self. The Third Noble Truth asserts that freedom from suffering is possible, and the Fourth tells how we find that freedom.

There is a human tendency, it seems, to cling to the truth that suffering exists while ignoring the truth that freedom is possible. But ending suffering is what the Buddhist path is all about. A great strength of Cheris teaching is her clear, unwavering focus on exactly how to proceed to end our suffering. In the meditation retreats she has been offering for more than twenty years, in her teaching at the Zen Monastery Peace Center she leads in California, in her numerous books and recordings, Cheri spells out that process in ordinary language. This book, based on informal talks given at retreats across the country between 1996 and 1998, is edited to preserve the compelling immediacy of her speech.

Some of the teaching included here sounds far from sweet. Zen practice can be truly hard, in the sense that it can be difficult to comprehend, difficult to undertake, and at times difficult to bear. When we find ourselves confronted with what appear to be overwhelming obstacles, it may be helpful to keep in mind that there is nothing in any deep spiritual practice that our egos will find attractive or easy.

Why, then, would anyone bother with spiritual practice? Because we have some sense, however nebulous, however fleeting, that we are more than our bodies, more than our feelings, more than our egos, and we want to know all of what we are.

My aim here is to bring some balance to the image of Zen as hard and tough and daunting, to reveal a deeper, sweeter truth at the heart of this path.

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The chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies symbolize for me what I think of as the hidden sweetness in Zen. Cheri sometimes mentions the sweetness she sees in people who come to her with their suffering. In that context, sweetness suggests purity, in the way we say fresh air is sweet, or spring water is sweet, or music is sweet, or a particular moment is sweet. To me, Zen practice is sweet in just that way. What I most value in what I learn from Cheri is how to be the opposite of tough: unprotected, open, tender, soft, and even, on occasion, sweet.

Sara Jenkins

There is nothing in spiritual practice, as I understand it, that stops us from doing anything, stops us from having anything, stops us from being anything. I do not see spiritual practice as a list of rules to limit our lives. That is what egocentricity is.

Egocentricity (or ego; not to be confused with the term used differently in psychology) is the false sense of the self as separate from anything else. Ego depends on the rules and beliefsthe conditioning we are given from birth, first by our parents and then by societyin an effort to protect the self. Because egocentricity is based in separateness, it is threatened by the oneness that is sought in spiritual practice. Ego projects its rules and beliefs onto spiritual practice, and we find ourselves fearing that if we pursue meditation, if we develop centered awareness, if we learn to live from our hearts, then we wont be able to sit on the couch and drink coffee and read magazines, we wont be free to go out with our friends, we wont get to enjoy life.

But there is absolutely nothing in spiritual practice like that.

The only thing that will be missing when we are living from our hearts is the suffering. Not that the suffering cannot be there; in our hearts, in the expansive awareness that develops through sitting meditation, there is plenty of room for all of our experience, including suffering. But there will no longer be any confusion that the small, separate, suffering self of egocentricity is who we are.

For example, we can get into a great snit about something, but we do not have to believe that it is real. Not that the great snit is not there, but it is taking place within a larger reality, like a play being performed on a stage. We can watch a play and feel it affect our emotions and thoughts and bodily sensations, but we are not confused that the play is our life; we never lose awareness that it is all happening on a stage and that at some point it will end and we will stand up and walk out of the theater. In the same way, we can recognize the snit as a very compelling illusion. We know that previously that snit would have taken us over completely, and for some period of time, we would have been so thoroughly identified with that perspective that the snit would constitute our entire reality. But once we enter sincerely into spiritual practice, those days are behind us, because we begin to see through the illusion.

Compassionate awareness is who we really are. Compassionate awareness is what is there when we stop identifying with the conditioned ideas of ourselves. Compassionate awareness was there before all of that; it will be there after all of that is gone; it is there in between all of that. Every time there is a gap in the internal voices of our conditioning, we slip into compassionate awareness. Every time we stop and turn inward, turn from distraction and suffering to find compassion for ourselves, it is there. Making that turn again and again develops a faith that is based on experiencenot a pie-in-the-sky, Pollyanna-ish thing, but a deep knowing from our life experience that everything that happens is our best opportunity to awaken and to end suffering.