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There was once an old Zen teacher who was known for the strictness and seriousness of her ascetic practice. She lived alone in a mountain hermitage, but now and then, a young, eager student would track her down and try to study with her. One fall, as the leaves on the trees were just beginning to turn, one such student found the remote hermitage and started shadowing the teacher. For days the hermit ignored the young man, who followed her as she gathered herbs, as she washed her clothes in a stream, as she cooked some simple food. Day after day, the teacher went about her business, while the student thought to himself that it all seemed so… ordinary.
One day, as the old woman was fetching water, the student blocked her path. “Please,” he said, “I just want to ask you one question. I’ve heard of your ascetic practice, but all I see is a hermit eating food and drinking water. Tell me, what is your ascetic practice?”
“My ascetic practice?” said the hermit thoughtfully. “My ascetic practice is that I don’t deceive myself.”
The word deception comes from the Latin decipere, which means “to ensnare,” “to take in.” But that term is derived from decapere, which means “to take from.” What is it that we take from others and from ourselves when we lie, or when we speak a half truth? Who are we really cheating, and of what?
Like a building whose foundation has been compromised, deception damages our sense of wholeness, of integrity, so that we are no longer of one piece, so that we become fragile, vulnerable. Like a Jenga tower, every time we tell a lie, we remove a wooden piece from the tower, compromising the soundness of the structure. The more lies we tell, the more holes we make in the tower, until, sooner or later, the whole thing topples, it crumbles. This is the paradox of not speaking truth—which is always a form of protection. Instead of shoring up our defenses, as we’d like it to do, instead of keeping us safe, it exposes us further and weighs us down. The self is heavy. The hidden self is heavier still. To lighten our load means to see that the self is not what we think it is, and therefore to question the need for protecting it.
From the perspective of Buddhist practice, the term “self-deception” is a tautology. The self is deception—at least in the way we usually understand it. We think of our “I” as individual, unchanging, and bounded by limitations. But the self we realize through zazen is undifferentiated, ever-changing, and limitless—not a self at all. To know this is helpful, because instead of evaluating our words in terms of right and wrong, truth or falsehood, we can ask when we speak whether what we’re saying reflects the truth about the way thing are, or whether it obscures it. This is what I’d like to stress: it’s less a matter of morality and more a matter of harmony. It’s not that withholding the truth is bad. It’s that it fractures what is whole and undivided.
“But there’s no way to always tell the truth,” someone said to me recently. “Living in society requires various forms of lying in order to fit in. There are all sorts of situations in which telling the truth is not the most appropriate action to take.”
I agree. We’re social creatures, and we want to belong, so when that sense of being part of a group, a tribe, a family, a community, is in danger, our reaction is to build a wall to hide behind. I know what it’s like to lie to protect myself. The problem is that it doesn’t work. The wall I’ve built walls me or parts of me off, splitting me into pieces. That’s what compromises my integrity—not the lying itself, but the fact that it doesn’t conform to reality.
We can’t contain something that needs to flow—it’s like trying to plug up a hole in a dam with your finger. Sooner or later, the water will get too strong, and it’ll do what water does when it builds up: it’ll flood. The practice, then, is to become ever more comfortable with our openness, with that feeling of being exposed, which paradoxically is what gives us the safety we seek. This comes from the realization of no self, which is a result of diligent meditation practice, primarily.
But off the cushion we can also practice speaking truth in terms of the three gates—or four gates, or five gates, depending on your source. (Someone once said, “Christians love God, Buddhists love lists.”) The three gates are: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? The four gates include the first three, and Is it timely? And the five gates add Is it beneficial?
When speaking, we can ask ourselves, do our words reflect what we know to be true? Do they reflect, as Master Dogen said of the precept Manifest truth—do not lie: “The dharma wheel unceasingly turns, and there is neither excess nor is there lack.” If there’s neither excess nor lack, then each thing, each person, each moment, is in its place—sometimes painful, sometimes wondrous. The work is to let this be what it is, and let that be what that is. And when this is harmful, to call it; and when that isn’t seen, to address or celebrate it. Which segues nicely into the other gates.
Are our words spoken out of a genuine desire to express love or gratitude or appreciation? Are they needed? Are they needed in this moment? And what constitutes that need? We can frame the answer to this last in terms of another question: will they help or will they harm, which is the fifth gate. That’s what it always boils down to: will my words, my actions, my thoughts help or will they harm?
It’s not always easy to determine the effect that we have on others. But with a bit of work and a good deal of honesty, we can become clearer about our intent, which fuels further practice. We never arrive at the end of the path. We never stop in our capacity to become wiser and more skillful. The fact that we’ll sometimes fail, we’ll sometimes fall, is not obstacle but opportunity.
“The precept is so short!” someone else said. “It doesn’t say much about how to go about it.”
I smiled. “I know. Just a few words, but in them fits a whole life.”
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