BG 169: The Most Fundamental Duality

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Episode Description:

We’re joined again by Zen Master Diane “Musho” Hamilton, this time to explore the most fundamental duality of masculine and feminine. Diane points out that if you have an objection to looking at it in these terms, you can also think of it as the polarity between receptivity and activity or between personal and impersonal. She describes this polarity, how it’s been helpful for her as a Zen teacher, and also how to look at compassion from this perspective.

Finally we talk about an approach that goes beyond these dualities, but doesn’t shy away from them. This approach of “not 2, not 1″ is characteristic of many Zen teachers and is a way of understanding non-duality in a completely different way.

This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, Integral Zen.

Episode Links:

• The Boulder Mountain Zendo
• iEvolve
• Karl Renz

Transcript:

Vince: You were giving a talk here in Boulder couple of months ago and you were saying that you were really interested in this dynamic between what you are calling masculine and feminine and that it was really helpful for you but not helpful for everybody but you did talk a lot about it and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this distinction and why it’s something that you’ve been focusing on lately and why it’s something that you’re interested in?

Diane: Yeah, I think that’s a great question because in a certain way since everything is one bright jewel, why would you make a distinction between something like masculine and feminine? The reason I make the distinction is because in my own practice and in my life, masculine and feminine occurs to me as the most fundamental duality in our experience and that all creativity is born of this polarity, when the masculine and feminine energy come together it has the most creative potential. So critics of using masculine and feminine would say there is no point to it, because first of all it can’t be defined. What do we really mean by feminine, and plenty of men have feminine traits, and why do women get to appropriate nurturing, and they’re not really more supportive than men. It may look different but there’s support—there is certainly receptivity—so there is a big objection to making this distinction.

And I understand that and I think it’s reasonable not to make the distinction, but I have just found in my own life that when I start to see first of all I am a woman, and I have a distinctive experience in myself of what I would call my feminine traits. And the basket of traits of mine that are masculine, which has more to do with direction and focus and purposiveness and impersonal identification and forwarding direction and pushing through regardless of obstacles—as opposed to a kind of receptivity and flow, a kind of embrace of what is as opposed to an impulse to change what’s happening. Again, even as I say it, I can hear people saying, “It’s certainly not male and female”, but for me the baskets, the gestalt—if you will—of masculine and feminine helps a lot in terms of holding a lot of qualities in one gestalt that I can work with.

So an artist has to have deep receptivity and really know how to cultivate and how to nurture a process, if you are a painter let’s say for instance. And at the same time there is a great film that came out quite a few years ago now, actually, of Picasso painting, where they filmed the canvas from the front. I guess they filmed it from the front and he painted from the back so you got to see the canvas come to light and you actually got to see his struggle and you got to really experience the interplay of this deep kind of receptivity, and then this kind of pushing up against and grappling with and seeing those two and how they interact, and, for me, I found that the more that I pay attention to that polarity, the more I can work with it.

So even in zazen, for instance, noticing that as I sit that there is a dimension of sitting which has to do with relaxation, has to do with opening, that has to do with receiving whatever is arising, if you will. And on the other side of that—the wakeful part of it, the purposive, straight spine, focused, upright present—that in a way there is always this dance between these two poles. So I think I tend to be interested in polarity generally and how to work with the energetic play. And so in my communications work, really teaching people and helping them see when they are receiving and how deeply they are receiving, versus when they are asserting and when they are forwarding an “I” position and what the dance of that is, so that you can become more skillful, you make it more conscious. So I would say that I am kind of traveling outside of conventional Zen practice to work in this way with masculine and feminine, but I have found it helpful in my own life.

Vince: Nice. And I get the sense for lot of people like, maybe one side of that is more comfortable. I certainly have seen the purpose and clarity and the masculine qualities, I am much more comfortable with that, and then lately in working with you I felt, oh, wow there’s this other side of me that I really need to learn how to open up to, and so it seems like there is some way in which at least becoming familiar with those two things is really helpful?

Diane: Yeah, I think so. And I always say don’t call it masculine and feminine, if it’s offensive just call it receptivity and directionality, or focused purposiveness versus open receiving, there are all different kinds of ways to talk about, it is a whole continuum of qualities. But, yeah, I think so and then sometimes I just feel that in the post-feminist period, that we talk about development as being identification, dis-identification an re-identification, so we are identified and embedded as women in whatever that means culturally, energetically, behaviorally and then we dis-identify in the process and feminism becomes a kind of dis-identification with those embedded roles and those embedded identifications.

But then there is another step in development where we re-identify, so to be able to re-identify fully as a female with feminine traits, whatever you think those are, that the fact that as you and I are speaking to each other, the quality of my voice conveys something about the nature of my body versus yours. And then everybody who is listening to us knows that I am a female and knows that you are a male and that why we wouldn’t be able to find a way to work with and acknowledge those differences and the samenesses—and this is partly the reason we don’t want to—is it’s just very hard to pin it all down. But it’s more for me like it’s a field of play, a field of exploration. What does that mean to our dialogue that I am the female and you are male? How is that affecting how we understand and receive each other, what would it be different if I were a male teacher sitting here. I think it probably would. So I don’t mind creating a little space to recognize the differences and the impacts of that because I am a woman teacher even though all my teachers were male.

Vince: Interesting. And that brings up an interesting question for me which is that traditionally Zen is a very sort of male lineage and practice. At least it has been in China and Japan and seems to be changing now in the West, but I know that in your lineage, so, the main Bodhisattva is Kanzeon, that your teacher’s place is the Kanzeon Zen center.

Diane: Yeah, used to be.

Vince: And it’s now the Big Mind center. And you said that Kanzeon was a really important figure for you and I was wondering if you could say maybe a little bit about—besides Kanzeon or including Kanzeon—how you have maintained a relationship to the feminine sort of quality of Zen, given that it’s such a strongly masculine using…the way we’re talking about masculine tradition?

Diane: Well, let me just make a couple of distinctions that might be helpful to the conversation. So we want to distinguish of course between male and female bodies and male and female identity because obviously there are transgendered people where the body and the identity don’t necessarily sync up, and people are working that out. So we want to make the distinction between body’s identity, between energies. You might say the human energy of masculine and feminine and what those qualities are, and then maybe even from a Daoist perspective, the principles. And I know that the Daoist tradition and the Buddhist tradition and the Hindu tradition actually describe masculine and feminine somewhat differently. If you look at how the feminine is described in Hinduism, it’s a little bit different than it is in Daoism.

But that you can’t ultimately separate these principles. That every experience, every moment of reality, in the moment beyond the unitive perception, there is masculine and feminine, there is giving and receiving. There is, in this moment right now, I am speaking and you are receiving me, so there is an exchange happening, this dualism is a play all the time, and so you can’t take that away. So Zen practice at some level is always masculine and feminine. It just is because the principles are always present. As I said in Zazen you are receiving you are open, you are spacious, at the same moment you are focused, upright and directional. Those are both present and I could go on and on talking about the different ways in which the principles and the energy of masculine and feminine are there. At the same time, it’s also true that Zen, like most of the religious traditions, was grown up by men practicing together, mostly monks sitting in a rigorous practice, with rigorous confrontations that have a kind of masculine style. It’s not so much about embrace as it is about challenge, although the embrace again always emerges. You can’t get rid of it, but it does have a kind of Samurai masculinity to it. That’s just true and yet paradoxically, the Bodhisattva of compassion in Japan, Kanzeon Bodhisattva is a feminine figure. She comes from Kuan-Yin in China, even though in India, Avalokitesvara, I believe, is a male and Chenrezig, maybe is both, I’m not sure, I know there’s some transgendered point in Kuan-Yin’s evolution.

Vince: They’re switching over.

Diane: Yeah, there is a switching over happening. So for whatever reason, Roshi actually named the Kanzeon Zen Center, Kanzeon because he precisely wanted to cultivate more quality of the feminine, of that kind of supportive embrace, nurturing, more flowing kind of energy as opposed to that really kind of intense, rigorous…which can get very heightened in Zen practice. So he did that and I just had funny magical experiences with Kuan-Yin and Kanzeon. I mean, it’s kind of, this is seriously Buddhist, seriously geeky, so I will be seriously risky. Which is to say that I actually have a kind of a, one of the royal ease postures in which Kanzeon’s in—a statue—that I, one night in the garden, literally the statue—and I was with two or three of my other friends and there was a certain sense of the circumstances that were happening—but at the same moment we all saw that she was breathing. And I know in a rational world, in a post-rational world that’s a risky thing to say, but for two hours she literally breathed. So I got very interested in this emanation of compassion, and particularly this feminine form of compassion. So I’ve paid a lot of attention to this energy, if you will, of Kuan-Yin, and I feel very informed by her in a certain way.

Vince: Nice. And I know one way that you actively are bringing in masculine and feminine into your teaching is with making a distinction between masculine and feminine compassion.

Diane: Yeah.

Vince: I guess Kanzeon would be more of, like, an embodiment of the feminine compassion principle.

Diane: Yes.

Vince: But we talked a lot in the teaching and exploring from the individual perspective, like from the “I” perspective, and the differences between these. I found it really, really helpful.

Diane: Well good.

Vince: So I was wondering if you could say something about this distinction.

Diane: Yeah. Well, I would say again to the listening audience if it doesn’t work for you to call it masculine and feminine, we don’t have to, because men and women have both qualities. But compassion conventionally takes the form—when we think of compassion—most of us what we think of is what we might call the feminine side, which is the embrace, the nurturing, the support, the quality of care, the quality of allowing things to be simply as they are; just really, really deep unconditional acceptance of what is. So this compassionate response that just feels like everything’s okay, that you’re perfect as you are, that things couldn’t be improved upon, and that there’s something very loving in all that, a very loving gesture. And people can identify with that.

But as we talked earlier about duality, that quality of compassion if it’s not joined with wisdom, in the Buddhist tradition, we talk about it becoming…referred to as idiot compassion. Where what happens, it becomes a kind of enabling or it reinforces qualities in people that just simply aren’t clarified, and aren’t healthy. You know, like addictive behavior that doesn’t get cut through that needs to. Or we don’t cultivate a healthy discipline because it’s all OK. So we start to see that the flip of that which is a more challenging energy and a more cutting energy—again, just a simple duality—referred to as the masculine, that kind of cuts through, that’s fearless, that isn’t attending to people’s feelings. It’s very impersonal and very catalytic, in a way.

I have an incident in my own history when my teacher was really furious with me, and just his rage or his anger coming towards me in like a thunderbolt quality and how much it woke me up and just heightened the situation. Where if he had just simply told me it was okay, I was kind of going to sleep. So we need both and we need to clarify this because some of us are really comfortable with the more feminine side and we get anxious about hurting someone or hurting someone’s feelings or being too reckless, if you will, which is fair fear. But the reverse is also true. Some people go around with just a little bit of a tough nature and forget that in order for that compassion to be effective, there has to be a really deep sense of care. So the two really always need to attend each other, it’s just a question of amount.

Vince: Nice. And it sounds like somehow having wisdom involved is like the key in seeing that.

Diane: Yeah, that’s right. And being able to really see clearly. I have a story about my own son. My son has Down Syndrome and when he was about 15 he was invited to be in a performance for New Year’s. And the great thing about having Down Syndrome is that everything is just very immediate. So when he got anxious, his fright just took the form of, he just got heavier and heavier and heavier. And pretty soon he was just in a pile on the floor. He was so anxious that he couldn’t even…he just looked like he collapsed. And my approach was to encourage him and to nurture him and to support him. And at a certain point I just said, “Oh, get up and get out there.” And when I did that he literally got up and walked out there. So it’s just this thing that sometimes compassion has to be a little bit more sharp and more direct.

Vince: And I guess, maybe to come full circle, because at the very beginning of my question you talked about why even make this distinction, and I remember having have hung out with a couple Advaita teachers who are very uncompromising. I remember one guy, Karl Renz, he said, “The beloved and the lover”—he’s German—“the moment they’re born, that’s hell.” [Laughter] And he just kept sort of pointing back at that. I remember you talking about Huang Po and how he would always point back to the sort of absolute.

Diane: Yes.

Vince: I’m wondering if maybe you could say a little bit about that because I know you do that too, at times. It has kind of, like you were saying, the strength of Zen. So I wonder maybe if we could come back to that perspective.

Diane: What he’s really getting to is where there’s duality, there’s pain, right. Where there is two, there is tension. If there is a self and other, there is a natural tension, even if the tension could be erotic, that you’re drawn to each other, but there’s still a tension there. Or maybe the tension’s aggressive because you’re pushing away from each other, but that when we become one with what is, the tension, the hell as he described, it disappears, and that bliss and peace, and satisfaction and serenity simply are whenever the two become one, there is an attendant moment of tremendous calm, that’s just what it is. So if what you are looking for in life is peace, then a non-dual practice like Advaita or like Zen is really, as Bankei, Zen master Bankei said, anything short of that doesn’t scratch the itch, the itch of duality is only scratched by collapsing the subject-object and becoming one, and that’s where genuine peace resides.

But from a perspective of becoming, of evolving, of moving and changing, there is also a quality of passion and a quality of ecstasy to that. So it’s hell because it is changeable, but it is another dimension of our humanness that I think is really important—that peace and the non-peace of evolving, of changing, of growing, that there is no growth without discomfort. Every moment of growth involves a disequilibrium, a discomfort, a coming out of balance. And I like a spirituality that includes both, that isn’t simply about residing in a space of unitive awareness but actually, that we’re able to be one and two and that the stress and the pain and the difficulty is just simply part of it, it’s not something to be pushed away, particularly now. You don’t need unnecessary suffering and that’s the whole point of practice is to really not eradicate but just simply relax the ego so that unnecessary suffering isn’t there. But I think growth and evolution is—that’s what I like partly about the integral frame—is that it includes evolution, it includes unfolding, and where there is growth there is discomfort. So I wouldn’t be the one to constantly point someone towards unitive experience but rather to embrace both.

Vince: And you were saying that your teacher Genpo is also in that sort of style of teaching, where instead of always pointing back to the absolute, he points rather to the opposite of where someone is. Could you say a little about that? I found that an interesting point.

Diane: Well, I think his genius and the genius of the koan system in Zen practice is that it just keeps you moving. In other words, in one moment it’s oneness and the next moment it’s twoness and the next moment it’s misery and the next moment it’s freedom and the next moment it’s production and the next moment it’s lovemaking and the next moment it’s this. It’s all this but it has different qualities in that the mind, there is no resting place, that a true Zen mind is one which is available to whatever it is that’s arising. As Mother Teresa put it, Christ in all of his distressing disguises, all the ways in which reality is manifesting and to be able to play and be free in one and two, because one and two is what’s happening. One and two and the multiplicity of one and two. And Genpo is that way, Genpo Roshi, I should say. You rest here and two minutes later it is the next moment and he’s pulling the rug out so that you keep waking up until the next thing, you don’t get so comfortable in that place of, oh, it all just is what it is. So, it’s cool.

Vince: So wrapping up, is there anything that you would want to say to a group of listeners who is into a show called Buddhist Geeks?

Diane: That you are seriously Buddhist and seriously geeky, from what I can tell. And I think what I would like to say is that you are, the very fact that you are tuned into this program means that some part of you, of your seeking mind, of your Bodhi mind is awakened and just to support you in that search and in that longing and in the discomfort that comes with really seeking realization. And to continue to practice and continue to realize because there is tremendous dignity, and we’re so fortunate in the West to actually be able to receive these teachings. So to practice and realize these teachings, I would encourage everyone listening to continue on their path.