By Sunya-roshi, November 23, 2024
“Hard times and easy times alternate.
The Way lies therein.”
All over the world, for thousands of years, in hard times and easier times, human beings have found ways of expressing gratitude—not just in annual celebrations like our American Thanksgiving holiday, but every single day. Many native people still perform morning rituals: meeting the dawn with songs and prayers of praise and thanks, making offerings of corn or rice in gratitude to the forces that sustain life—celebrating the miracle of simply being alive in this amazing world of sunrise and sunset, moon and stars, the flow of day and night.
In many traditional cultures, such practices have long been considered essential for ensuring the continued generosity and good will of the Earth. Times of drought and scarcity, the destructive power of floods, hurricanes and fires, are linked to the failure of human beings to keep faith with the forces of Nature, an inability to “keep the balance true.”
Thomas Berry, the great American “eco-philosopher” who died in 2009 at the age of 95, reflected deeply on all this.“If the Earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence,” he once wrote, “it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.”
At the heart of gratitude is this sense of wonder and connection with all existence, a feeling of belonging, and the acknowledgment of the give-and-take that is the foundation of lifeitself. Certainly the recognition of the sacredness and interconnectedness of all life also lies at the heart of the Buddha Way. When we experience the truth of this for ourselves, directly, through intensified, deep, and sustained practice, then the teaching of No-self, of shunyata, comes alive. Then everything comes alive! We see that all beings, including we ourselves, are truly the “body of Buddha,” as Master Hakuin declares in his Chant in Praise of Zazen. When we touch into this fact, gratitude and wonder and joy naturally well up and stream through us, permeating our lives.
The experience of gratitude arises naturally from an open heart. To allow its transformative power into our lives we need to find our way out of the unhappy constriction of private, self-absorbed thoughts, to expand and deepen our attention to be able to sense our true relation to things and beings and the natural world.
Gratitude is also the other side of the coin of giving—it means being open to the possibility of someone else’s generosity. For many people this is the more difficult part: it requires a certain vulnerability and sense of self-worth to simply say “thank you.”
Modern research has shown that gratitude can change our brains in significant ways. Neuroscience reveals that the brain takes the shape of whatever the mind rests upon. As Rick Hanson points out in his book The Little Book of Gratitude, “If we rest our mind upon worry, sadness, annoyance, and irritability, it will begin to take the shape of anxiety, depression, and anger. If we ask our brain to give thanks, it will get better at finding things to be grateful for, and will begin to take the shape of gratitude. Everything we do creates connections within the networks of the brain, and the more we repeat something, the stronger those connections get.”
This echoes what the Buddha taught some 2500 years ago regarding samskaras—habit formations—one of the five components of personality, or skandhas. Now, neurological science has confirmed that whatever flows through our minds sculpts them in lasting ways. As Hanson writes, “The take-away message is that the experience of gratitude really matters, not just for our moment-to-moment well-being, but also in the lasting residues woven into our very being.”
Gratitude, then, is a spiritual practice—like compassion and resilience it is something we can consciously cultivate. As our teacher Roshi Philip Kapleau used to say, gratitude is the most refined of all our emotions. Many great thinkers, ancient and modern, agree with him.
“Gratitude,” Cicero said, “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” According to Aesop, gratitude is “the sign of noble souls.” Certainly gratitude has an intimate connection with reverence and awe. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
And yet in our world now, after centuries of guilt-evoking religious teachings and practices, and many decades of aggressive advertising, the grateful heart and capacity for wonder are being overcome by the powerful belief that has wormed itself deep into most of us: that we are separate and can never have, or be, enough, that we always need and want more—more stuff, more fame and wealth and power, more attractiveness, more love. Along with this pervasive sense of lack comes the bitter sense that we’re giving too much, being asked to do more than our fair share.
This is the restless mind of weighing and measuring and comparing. When this calculative way of thinking takes over, it cuts us off from our own generous and grateful heart. No wonder some of our Zen ancestors called it the “thieving mind:” it robs us of our inborn joy, our sense of aliveness and intimacy, and easily leads to the cynicism, despair, and dystopianism that now seem so widespread. Under its influence people easily succumb to dark conspiracy theories. Certainly in our country now, millions of people feel isolated and afraid, and are blind to the miraculous, interdependent nature of their own life and all existence.
Our dharma practice is one true antidote to this tragic sense of lack and separation. Daily zazen gives us a way to keep from shrink-wrapping ourselves in negative, judgmental thoughts and delusions. It opens us to this living, breathing moment, and to the wonder of simply being alive on this planet, right here, right now. We become, as someone once said, “connoisseurs of the commonplace.”
Zen rituals give us ways to express gratitude on a daily basis, and through various ceremonies throughout the year. Placing the hands palm to palm in gassho, bowing, making prostrations with one’s whole being—these are nearly universal expressions of gratitude and mutual respect, embodied ways of affirming our interdependence.
In our chanting of Buddhist texts, we return the “merit power”—the positive energy generated by this practice—to buddhas and dharma ancestors, out of gratitude for their exertions and guidance, as well as to beings in great need. Our meal chants begin with “This food is a gift of the whole universe and the labor of countless beings . . .” Offerings of candles, incense, flowers and fresh water at an altar are all concrete ways to give thanks and to affirm our own Bodhi heart-mind.
Being Grateful in Hard Times
Over the years, in his annual talk before Thanksgiving, Roshi Kapleau never failed to mention the value of cultivating gratitude, not only for our obvious blessings—for times when things go well—but also (much more difficult!) for the hard times, the pain and problems in our lives.
For isn’t it usually our suffering that brings forth the deepest questioning and transformation, and that drives people into the arms of practice? Our own pain and the suffering of others can give birth to the deepest compassion, empathy, and inner strength, if we allow ourselves to open to it while rooted in our depths.
Now, with the global rise of authoritarian governments, and the death, destruction, and unimaginable misery in so many places on this planet, it’s easy to fall prey to feelings of outrage and hopelessness, and to simply cut off.
But especially at this time—whether the world is teetering on the edge or already in free fall—how can we afford to shrink back into the dark cramped cave of self-isolation? Whatever the circumstances, we who’ve taken up the path of the bodhisattva are clearly called upon to free ourselves from the fear and worry and resentment that harden our hearts, darken our minds, and wall us off from the ocean of gratitude within us.
Our daily zazen practice warms and melts down our pride and resentment and fears. Like the sun shining on a lump of hard beeswax, it returns us to a softer, more fluid condition. As we open to our essential unity with everything & everyone, the need to express gratitude—to say Thank You with our whole being—grows within us.
So many accounts of enlightenment experiences includethe sudden arising of “tears of gratitude and joy”—not for anything we can name, but simply to be alive, simply to be! As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke exclaimed, “Behold, I’m alive! . . .a surplus of existence wells up in my heart.”
* * *
Especially now, after the hurricane that devastated this beautiful region weeks ago, and the unsettling changes both in climate and our political landscape, many people understandably may feel hard-pressed to stay in touch with a thankful heart. But as some anonymous person once said, “If you can’t be thankful for what you receive, try to be thankful for what you escape.”
Here at our center in the mountains of western North Carolina, we are acutely aware of our good fortune in getting through the storm relatively unscathed, with free access now to clean water and electricity. We give deep heartfelt thanks for sangha and all the support we’ve received from so many to help out at a difficult time. Most of all we are profoundly thankful for the chance to continue our dharma work with others, near and far.
And for This—beyond name and form—that so generously breathes us, freely keeping us alive moment by moment, giving us the chance each moment to begin anew! As the Sufi master Rumi exclaimed, “For sixty years I have been forgetful every minute, but never for a moment has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed.”
What better way to show our gratitude than to bring This into the light of our conscious awareness through this practice, to realize it—make it real—in our own heart-mind and for the sake of all?