I thought I ought to write a little more about this idea of conscientious selfishness because I think yesterday’s post just muddled the issue. Sorry about that. This is the danger of blogging. I tend to feel that blog postings should be more immediate, unfiltered and un-fussed-over than regular articles. Maybe this idea is one I should have saved for a more well thought-out piece (of which this one you’re reading is also not). As I said yesterday I think the term I’ve come up with, “conscientious selfishness,” sucks dead donkey’s bollocks. It’s awful. It really doesn’t get at what I’m trying to describe. But it’s a provisional attempt to move the discussion of what Buddhist compassion is into a new area.
I’m not talking about the common garden variety of selfishness where a person tries to get everything for themselves while screwing the other guy. I’m using the word “selfishness” to indicate that what we’re talking about when we use the word compassion in a Buddhist sense isn’t a kind of sacrifice.
Nishijima Roshi used to say that the balanced state in Zazen allows a person to do exactly what they want. Most of us don’t really understand what we actually want. We imagine that we want to get all we can without any regard for anyone else. But that’s not true. We are intimately connected at the very deepest level with everyone and everything we come in contact with. At this level, what we want for ourselves and what we want for others is absolutely identical.
This is what I was trying to get at with my incredibly clumsy metaphor about sex yesterday (sorry again). I’m gonna try once more and hope for the best.
I wasn’t picturing some slob of a guy carelessly banging his wife until he was satisfied and then shuffling off to watch the game on TV. I was picturing times when both (or all) partners involved in the act of sex completely lose any sense of self and other. In those moments each one can do exactly what gives her or him the most pleasure while simultaneously and instinctively doing what pleases her or his partner(s) the most. At these times there isn’t any conscious attempt to please anyone other than her or himself because the very idea of self and other(s) has vanished.
Last night I went and saw Robyn Hitchcock at Spaceland, a club in Los Angeles and I clearly saw real compassion in action. I’m certain that Robyn Hitchcock doesn’t sit around writing songs because he wants to perform some kind of self-sacrificing altruistic act. He doesn’t perform in public for the sake of saving all beings. And yet that’s exactly what he accomplishes for me and for a lot of us who are his fans. But for him, these actions are purely natural, he’s doing exactly what he wants to do in precisely the way he wants to do it. In that sense his actions are utterly selfish, almost narcissistic. Yet somehow this seemingly self-absorbed activity, which he does only because it feels good to him, has helped me and a lot of other people more than he can ever know.
That’s the type of compassion I think Dogen was referring to when he likened it to a hand reaching for a pillow in the night. Real compassion is entirely unlike the idea of compassion.
On the other hand, Joshu Sasaki Roshi said, “Zen is not the way of saints. But sometimes it’s useful to imitate their behavior.” There are times when it’s hard to see what we really want. In those situations it may have some value to imagine what an idealized compassionate person would do and to take that action. Which I know contradicts what I said yesterday. But I think you have to be just as careful with this as you have to be when taking what seems to be the purely selfish course. In fact it may often be even more dangerous to act out of an idea of compassion than to simply do what you want.
If you come across a butterfly struggling to get out of its cocoon, you might imagine what an idealized compassionate person would do and then kindly help the butterfly out by reaching over and opening the cocoon for her. In doing so you’d be condemning that butterfly to a quick death. That struggle to emerge from the cocoon is how butterflies strengthen their wings. Without that struggle they never develop the ability to fly.
So you’ve got to be really, really careful when imitating the acts of your idealized compassionate person. In this case the seemingly “selfish” act of ignoring the butterfly’s struggle would be the most truly compassionate course. This is often the way when dealing with other people. Too much help offered in an inappropriate manner can be incredibly damaging.
This is where Zazen practice can help. By learning to be very, very quiet it sometimes becomes easier to see what you — and by extension everyone and everything in the universe — truly want to do.
