Life's Not A Problem
Amy Gross interviews Zen teacher Joko about everyday practice, American Buddhism, and making koans out of monkeyshines
Charlotte Joko Beck, 81, started practicing Zen in the mid-sixties after raising four children on her own. She grew up in New Jersey, where she attended a Methodist church and “learned a lot of good quotes.” At Oberlin College, she studied piano, and later performed professionally “with little symphony orchestras—no big deal.” She supported her family by working as a schoolteacher, a secretary, and finally as an administrator in the chemistry department at the University of California, San Diego. When she retired in 1977, she went to live at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. In 1983, the Zen Center of San Diego opened—in two little houses, side by side, no sign—with Joko as teacher. She’s evolved her own way of teaching, which is always open to change. “I’ll pick up anything if it’s useful. It’s a question of seeing what really transforms human life. That’s what we’re interested in, isn’t it?” She’s just discovered Pilates, a form of exercise combining yoga, dance, and resistance training, and “probably I’m learning something there that will get mixed in, too.”
Why did you start practicing? I had a fine life. I was divorced—my husband was mentally ill—but I had a nice man in my life. My kids were okay. I had a good job. And I used to wake up and say, “Is this all there is?”Then I met Maezumi Roshi, who was a monk at the time. He was giving a talk in the Unitarian Church downtown. I was out for the evening with a friend, a woman, a sort of hard-boiled business type, and we decided to hear his talk. And as we went in, he bowed to each person and looked right at us. It was absolutely direct contact. When we sat down, my friend said to me, “What was that?” He wasn’t doing anything special—except, for once, somebody was paying attention.
I wanted whatever he had. I found a sitting group of two in San Diego, and I became the third. Maezumi would come down once in a while. Eventually, I began to go up to Los Angeles every week or two for the sittings. And occasionally I began doing sesshins with Soen Roshi. At one point I had a little breakthrough or “opening”—which I now think is a waste of time, but at the time, I thought it was important.
What was your “little breakthrough”? Just a sense of everything being whole and complete, with no time or space - no “me” - that sort of thing. It was terrifying! And I was furious. I went in and threw something at Soen Roshi. [laughs]. He ducked. I said, “You mean to say we sit and struggle and struggle just to realize this - that there’s really just nothing at all?” Because I didn’t really understand. He said, “Well, it’s not terrible; it’s just astonishing.”
You think it’s a waste of time to have a breakthrough? Not a waste of time, but it’s not the point. It doesn’t mean you know what to do with your life. You can sit for twenty years and be wasting your time. What I’m interested in is the process of awakening, the long process of development, which may, or may not, have breakthroughs as natural fruit. What genuinely concerns me is the necessity for a student to learn to be as awake as possible in each moment. Otherwise, it can seem as if the point of practice is to have breakthroughs. I’ve spent years thinking about this, and seeing how it’s ordinarily done, and I’m just saying there’s a way to teach so that people learn to use their daily life as practice - as the key to awakening. And that’s how we do it here.
How did you start this center? A group of people got together and bought the two houses, next door and this one. I had to have a place to live, and you need a place to sit, and I really wanted a little separation. We juggled space, and it isn’t ideal, but that’s part of why this place is interesting. Nothing has ever been quite right, but we learn to make do and make that our practice. A little chaos is often useful.
It’s in keeping with your book titles - Nothing Special, Everyday Zen - that this is a regular little suburban street and a regular little suburban house - nothing temple-like about it. Hopefully not. We’ve abandoned almost all of that. We keep a simple framework of practice, but we’ve dropped almost all the Japanese terms, and use American phraseology. No robes, no titles.
What’s a retreat like here? They’re crowded, hard to get into - we have to cut them off at fifty. The longest sesshin we do is five, six days. I’m not trying to get people into an extreme state of exhaustion. Five days seems to be just right. It transforms people enough for one go. We get up at five, we start at six, and we sit until ten o’clock at night.
How do people practice here? Basically, new students usually learn to experience their body and label their thoughts. I don’t mean to analyze thoughts or pick them apart. It’s a little like vipassana, but instead of saying, “Thinking, thinking,” I like people to just recite their thoughts back. If you do that for three or four years, you’ll know a lot about how your mind operates.
How might you label thoughts? Mmm, “Having a thought about Mary. . . . Having a thought that I really don’t like Mary... Having a thought that I can’t stand the way she bosses everyone around.” That’s the way we think, right? And in time, as we watch our thoughts our thinking becomes more objective. But most people, instead of just having a thought about Mary, go further: “Gosh, I can’t stand her; she really makes me mad.” Now they’ve got an emotion. What we need to learn to do is to see the thought as a thought, and then feel the body tighten. The body is going to tighten if you’re angry with somebody, right? So just be the tightening. Forget the thinking at this point, and just be the anger, the tension or vibration. When you do that, you’re not trying to change your anger. You’re just being with it, totally. Then it is able to transform itself.
That’s transformation as opposed to change - a critical difference. Religion always is trying to change you: you know, “You’re not a good girl; be a good girl.” But here, in labeling and experiencing, you’re learning to be less emotional, less caught by every passing thing that goes on in your head. The anger gets a little weaker, a little less demanding, and at some point, you begin to notice the difference. Something that would have made you jump with anger - you can watch it. The observer is beginning to grow. And in experiencing the bodily tension, you’re not suppressing the emotion; you’re feeling it. You’re transforming the dualism of self-centered thoughts, opinions, and emotions into the non-dualism of direct experiencing. So when people come in to talk to me, after a few months I’ll probably say, “I want you to bring in an episode that bothers you and tell me how you see that as practice. Suppose somebody yells at you in an unfair way. What is practice?” We work through it, and the next week we do it again with another episode.
Amy Gross interviews Zen teacher Joko about everyday practice, American Buddhism, and making koans out of monkeyshines
Charlotte Joko Beck, 81, started practicing Zen in the mid-sixties after raising four children on her own. She grew up in New Jersey, where she attended a Methodist church and “learned a lot of good quotes.” At Oberlin College, she studied piano, and later performed professionally “with little symphony orchestras—no big deal.” She supported her family by working as a schoolteacher, a secretary, and finally as an administrator in the chemistry department at the University of California, San Diego. When she retired in 1977, she went to live at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. In 1983, the Zen Center of San Diego opened—in two little houses, side by side, no sign—with Joko as teacher. She’s evolved her own way of teaching, which is always open to change. “I’ll pick up anything if it’s useful. It’s a question of seeing what really transforms human life. That’s what we’re interested in, isn’t it?” She’s just discovered Pilates, a form of exercise combining yoga, dance, and resistance training, and “probably I’m learning something there that will get mixed in, too.”
Their own personal koan. Yeah. “I went to a party and my husband spent all his time looking at other women.” How do you practice with that? At first, students may have some ideas that are crazy and lead to even more upset. In time, they learn the difference between getting angry, arguing or shouting - and just experiencing the anger. This doesn’t mean we don’t take action in a situation - often we do. But we don’t do it in anger; we just face the facts of the situation. And we learn to deal with our life without our ego-centered emotions running the show.
How did your way of teaching evolve? One interest I always had was psychology, and at some point, I had probably read an enormous amount and, in sitting, began to see what to do with it.
Who were you reading? Karen Horney, for one, but all the standard texts, and slowly I began to evolve a practice that is classical but also therapeutic - though not therapy. I notice that a lot of people think, “Yes, you have a strong Zen practice, but since that won’t take care of any emotional problems, you need therapy, too.” I have great respect for therapy, but for most people - I’m not talking about disturbed people - I feel that practice can be a complete path.
This is certainly a departure from the way you were trained. Many Zen practices are about suppression - sheer concentration and shutting out things. I realized that what you shut out is exactly what turns around and runs you. So I began trying to get students to work in a different way, and it proved to be effective. Dogen [the thirteenth-century Zen master] said that to study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self - your thoughts, etc. - is to forget the self. And to forget the self is . . . what? It’s to be enlightened by all things.
Suppose somebody has hurt my feelings - or so I think. What I want to do is to go over and over and over that drama so I can blame them and get to be right. To turn away from such thinking and just experience the painful body is to forget the self. If you really experience something without thoughts, there is no self - there’s just a vibration of energy. When you practice like that ten thousand times, you will be more selfless. It doesn’t mean that you’re a ghost. It means that you’re much more non-reactive, in the world but not of it. Dualism transforms into non-dualism, a life of direct and compassionate functioning.
You use several images for experiencing pain rather than running from it: stretching out on an “icy couch,” moving onto the “razor’s edge” - excruciating images. But they’re not excruciating - the minute you experience what you’ve been running from. For instance, suppose you’ve been humiliated. Well, nobody likes to be humiliated; it’s one of the yuckiest feelings in the world. We want to pretend it didn’t happen; we want to blame someone. To turn around and just to feel that - eech. But part of what sitting does, in time, is give you the strength to stay with it. And after a while - surprise! - it’s okay. And then it’s not only okay, but it begins to change things. It’s as if the sun comes up.
See, that is the gate to enlightenment. When you practice like that thousands of times, you’re a different person. There’s a true transformation, and that’s what practice is about.
Your experience is that whatever the emotion or experience, the fact of being in it one hundred percent turns into joy? Right. Because it wipes out self. There’s nothing left but openness. Not happiness, but openness - joy. Joy can also be sad. Perhaps you’ve had a grandmother die. She dies peacefully, and in a way it’s wonderful. It’s time - there’s no conflict about it, and there’s even joy, because that’s the way it is, and it’s fine.
In your talks, you refer to Christianity, Sufism, psychology - almost as often as you cite Zen sources. That seems like a step in the direction of Americanizing Zen - America as the idea of assimilating varied sources. It’s fine for Zen to be Americanized. But that doesn’t just mean it must look American. It means to practice in a way that’s best in this culture. Here, even though we can get badly stuck in our intellectual approaches, we need a base of that sort - but it needs to be handled carefully, or the tail will wag the dog. Anyway, I have nothing against centers where everyone who sits wear a robe. I have nothing against Japanese-type services - they’re very beautiful. It’s just not where my energy goes. What I’m interested in is, how do we all learn? How do we transform?
You describe yourself as a very persistent student. What was driving you? I have always been determined. I am determined about Pilates, and I am determined about anything I do. I’m not saying it’s a virtue. I’m just saying that’s how it is. But everyone has something that pulls them.
For some people it could be the magic belief in transformation, or the expectation of happiness - all those things you’re constantly warning your students against. Everyone starts practice with many false beliefs. We all start by thinking that something is going to fix us and make us feel better and more protected.
How does someone begin to see emptiness? I don’t think you see it. You have to be it. Emptiness simply means an absence of reactivity. When you relate to somebody, there’s not you and me and your little mind running its little comparisons and judgments. When those are gone, that is emptiness. And you can’t put it into words. That’s the problem for people. They think there’s some way to push for an experience such as emptiness. But practice is not a push toward something else. It’s the transformation of your self. I tell people, “You just can’t go looking for these things. You have to let this transformation grow.” And that entails hard, persistent, daily work. I simply wouldn’t let an irritable thought go through my mind without noting, “Oh, that’s interesting. What’s going on here?” I don’t mean analyzing it, but just stopping. There has to be that ability to stand back and say, “Yeah, interesting that I do that.” Right there. I may go back to it if I’m busy talking to you. But it’s been registered. I’m not going to let that one go by; it’s too interesting. It’s not good or bad. It’s just interesting to note that you do that.
Amy Gross interviews Zen teacher Joko about everyday practice, American Buddhism, and making koans out of monkeyshines
Charlotte Joko Beck, 81, started practicing Zen in the mid-sixties after raising four children on her own. She grew up in New Jersey, where she attended a Methodist church and “learned a lot of good quotes.” At Oberlin College, she studied piano, and later performed professionally “with little symphony orchestras—no big deal.” She supported her family by working as a schoolteacher, a secretary, and finally as an administrator in the chemistry department at the University of California, San Diego. When she retired in 1977, she went to live at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. In 1983, the Zen Center of San Diego opened—in two little houses, side by side, no sign—with Joko as teacher. She’s evolved her own way of teaching, which is always open to change. “I’ll pick up anything if it’s useful. It’s a question of seeing what really transforms human life. That’s what we’re interested in, isn’t it?” She’s just discovered Pilates, a form of exercise combining yoga, dance, and resistance training, and “probably I’m learning something there that will get mixed in, too.”
You keep talking about strengthening the observer, the witness. The truth is, we don’t want to observe, particularly if we’re upset. What do we want to do? We want to be upset, because then I remain the center of the drama. If I observe, I weaken that self-centered position.
Does the witness ever fade? The witness that observes fear, say, finally has to go into just being fear, just feeling fear and abandoning as much as possible the thoughts connected with it. Easy to say, hard to do. It’s the same thing for a musician. There’s a lot of self-conscious practice. But there are times when there’s just playing and you don’t even know you’re playing. There’s no witness, there’s nothing: just functioning. That’s the stage of the witness fading, just by growing selflessness. You’re no longer living your life to reach a goal, but just for the sake of living it. And that can include working very hard on a project, but there’s no ambition. No goals, and yet goals are steadily accomplished. There’s just living, enjoyment of life.
Why do you think so many people are turning to Zen, to Buddhism, now? Because people think something or someone will relieve them of their pain and disappointment. “I’ll try Zen.” But it’s only when you understand why this attempt is backwards that you can seriously begin a real practice. Not to get rid of pain and disappointment, but to put yourself right into them.
You’re very enthusiastic about the uses of disappointment. See, we usually live our lives out of the ceaseless hopes and expectations of this self-centered mind or ego. And if that works, if you’re unfortunate enough that it works - you want the ideal man, you get the ideal man; you get the ideal job; everybody loves you - then you forge ahead in your usual way until something comes along that stops you in your tracks. Usually, it’s a disappointment or disaster of some sort. What most people do then, naturally, is try harder. They want to be happy, so they look for a new formula, and that’s when they take up some sort of a practice, or go to church, or do something.
If you’re lucky, though, you continue to meet painful disappointment. “Gosh, it just doesn’t work; I don’t know what to do next - I’m baffled.” I always congratulate people who arrive at this crossroads - “Aren’t you lucky!” - because now the true path can be glimpsed. A real practice can begin. It doesn’t mean that if I get disappointed, I like it. But I know it now for what it is.
In the first years of practice, you say, there’s often a movement from unhappiness to happiness. What’s happening? The early years increase objectivity. The dominance of self-centered emotion (particularly “poor me”) is challenged; the body is more stable and strong. And at some point, under the pressure of practice and life’s inevitable disappointments, a turning point is reached. Resistance weakens, and we are more willing to investigate the ceaseless desires of the ego. You know the classic Zen vow: “Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them.” Well, you can’t want to put an end to desire - that would be just another ego project - but we can persistently practice: not with ambition “to get somewhere,” but with the one true desire that our practice benefit not just ourselves but all sentient beings.
What's so important about daily practice? It isn’t something that we want to do. But that’s what keeps you getting more porous all the time. A lot of people, though, even though their practice is going well, will read a book, and come in and say, “You know, Joko, in the three or four years that I’ve worked with you, everything in my life has transformed. I have a happy marriage now, I’m getting along at work, everything is totally different, and I feel much freer. But what about the real thing?” They mean, “When do I get enlightened?” And of course, they are walking the path of enlightenment - non-reactivity - but their understanding is partial. In time, if the work continues, they’ll see that the process itself is the real thing; it is the gateless gate.
The capacity for great satori - that’s not going to happen to the average person. The person who has a great opening is somebody who has been almost selfless for years, and maybe that last little chunk drops off. I mean, great satori doesn’t just fall out of the skies.
Of course, books like The Three Pillars of Zen can lead you to hope that enlightenment comes to everyone eventually - and with a big bang. I know, but mostly, these breakthroughs just increase the ego. A student may come to me and say, “Joko, this thing happened to me. I was taking out the garbage, and you know what?” I say, “Well, I’ll give you one minute to tell me” [laughs]. So they tell me - they have their minute. Then I add, “Okay. And how are you and your wife getting along?” Their “little moment” just means they’re beginning to be able to be present, if only for a few seconds. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they now know how to be with the criticism of a wife or anyone else.
So this process functions kind of as marriage counseling, family therapy? Not at all - it’s training in the process of practice. I’m not telling them, “You should be this or do that.” What I may say is, “If you don’t buckle down to a serious practice, instead of just talking about it, your marriage will probably end - with pain for many people.” And fortunately, they usually do that - and hopeless marriages become good marriages. At least, we haven’t lost a marriage yet. Instead of wanting the marriage to meet their own expectations, they begin to really experience their own anger and neediness, and the transformation to harmony begins. It’s hard practice! And, of course, wonderful. There are therapeutic outcomes, but it’s always practice. Always practice.
In your books, you keep saying that “the problem is never other people.” Never.
What about a woman whose husband swats at the kids, at her? Out. Leave. Physical abuse, you get out. You don’t need to say, “I’ll never see you again.” But with any physical abuse, just get out.
Charlotte Joko Beck, 81, started practicing Zen in the mid-sixties after raising four children on her own. She grew up in New Jersey, where she attended a Methodist church and “learned a lot of good quotes.” At Oberlin College, she studied piano, and later performed professionally “with little symphony orchestras—no big deal.” She supported her family by working as a schoolteacher, a secretary, and finally as an administrator in the chemistry department at the University of California, San Diego. When she retired in 1977, she went to live at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. In 1983, the Zen Center of San Diego opened—in two little houses, side by side, no sign—with Joko as teacher. She’s evolved her own way of teaching, which is always open to change. “I’ll pick up anything if it’s useful. It’s a question of seeing what really transforms human life. That’s what we’re interested in, isn’t it?” She’s just discovered Pilates, a form of exercise combining yoga, dance, and resistance training, and “probably I’m learning something there that will get mixed in, too.”
But wouldn’t you say he’s the problem here? Instead of answering directly, let me tell you what I have all students do within the first three to six months. I have them make three lists. And it’s fun; you could do it yourself. The first list is: “As a small child, what I was trained to be was. . . .” For instance, I was trained to be “perfect.” Never could show anger. Had to succeed at everything, get straight A’s, please everybody - the quintessential good little girl. We all sort of know what we were trained to be.
The second list is: “Right now, as an adult, what I require myself to be is. . . .” This may look as if it’s your list, but it really isn’t, since we use much of our first list - how we were trained - to form our ideas of how we should be now. And the list in itself may be fine - I require myself to be thoughtful, kind, patient, selfless, non-angry: the usual stuff - but until it’s really your list, you will have a hidden third list.
Now, the third list is more interesting: It’s the negative emotions hidden behind the second list. Suppose I have a good friend sick in the hospital. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m worn out, but still I think I should go see her - because my second-list requirement is what? I should be patient, loyal. . . . And I will go see her. But beneath the appropriate action will be what?
Resentment. Resentment. My third list. In other words, I’ll go to see her partly because I love her, but partly because that’s what “good” people do - my first two lists. It’s obvious that the transforming practice - so I do what I do for the sake of doing it, not because I should - lies in the third list. It’s to experience the bodily tension of resentment without my thoughts of how I should be. That begins to weaken this whole conditioned shebang that we live out of. So, in answer to your question, the other person is never the problem. Again, suppose somebody mistreats you. Suppose someone tells lies about you at work. You could say, “I’m upset because she’s undermining me - I could lose my job.” But what you’re really upset about is that your requirement that life be fair - I should be fair, you should be fair - is being attacked. The problem isn’t what she does. The problem is that she’s attacking your second-list requirement, removing your cover so that you have to feel the unpleasant emotions of the third list. She’s brought your fear and anger into the open - exactly what all of us dislike.
And if these lies are truly threatening your job or reputation? We’re not talking about Miss Milquetoast here. We’re saying that if you really see your thoughts and experience your anger, you can then act without as much anger, maybe none. You could have lunch with her and say, “You know, we’ve had a good relationship and I do value you, and yet it’s come to my attention. . . . I wonder if we could talk about that. I wonder how you see that.” If you can speak without anger, it will be a very different ball game. Do you see what I mean?
You’re saying life isn’t a problem. Exactly, it’s you who’s a problem. It’s your reactivity. See, if you could really cease being angry with her, you would be a different person, not just with her but in hundreds of situations in which an attack seems to be coming your way. Your life would be more calm, you’d be better for yourself and other people. See, that person isn’t a monster. She’s a human being who is ignorant, or else she wouldn’t be doing what she’s doing. And if, as practitioners, our aim is to save all sentient beings - to use a goody-goody-sounding phrase - we want to benefit her in our interaction with her.
This is the enlightenment process. One idea that really hampers us is to believe that people get “enlightened,” and then they’re that way forever and ever. We may have our moments, and if we get sick and have lots of things happening, we may fall back. But a person who practices consistently over years and years is more that way, more of the time, all the time. And that’s enough. There is no such thing as getting it. Who, after all, would be getting it? There are just stages of selflessness.
When you sit now, what does your mind do? Nothing much. Thoughts come and go, and that’s fine - the mind is meant to think. I stay awake as much as I can. That’s all. It’s no big thing, except perhaps that I’m not all torn up by worrying, “I’ve got to get better.” My mind is fairly quiet, so I’m not bugged by my mind. I am the way I am, and that’s okay.
Did you start out being very reactive? Oh, I used to throw things at my husband. Bricks. Bricks at windows. Good girls have a lot of anger, you know. And when something sets it off, BOOM, it explodes. I wouldn’t say I was chronically like that, but sure, the anger was there all the time.
How does practice create transformation? You keep experiencing your fear instead of running around it or rationalizing it. You’re just afraid. You stay with it and begin to do things that frighten you, not to be virtuous, but so you can directly feel the body sensation we call fear. It’s very useful to do things you don’t want to do - make that phone call you don’t want to make or whatever it is for you.
With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up. Let’s say you notice that you have no patience with a certain person. Well, right there, you pay attention: “What’s this impatience?” As long as you’re capable of being annoyed, you can be sure that something will annoy you. When you no longer can be annoyed by little monkeyshines, you’ll find most everything agreeable. And of course, you have to watch your own monkeyshines. It’s great fun, really. It is! It’s fascinating to begin to watch our life unroll and to see what’s really going on.
I want to go back to your “little breakthrough.” You said, “Breakthroughs aren’t the point.” But can you get the point without the breakthrough? What primarily concerns me is the necessity for a student to learn to be as awake as possible in each moment. Otherwise it can seem as if the point of practice is to have breakthroughs. The usefulness of these openings exists only if they clarify life and our ability to live it and serve it. But until mind and body - usually through years of patient practice - cease to want an ego-centered life, the openings and their teachings cannot be distorted into ego successes. Only when mind and body are mostly free of reactivity can a true understanding of what life is become possible - not through a momentary breakthrough, but through an open and compassionate living of life.
Photos © Michael Lange
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