What Is This Desire? by Zen Master Hyon Ja
From a Dharma talk at Providence Zen Center
We often think: “I don’t want to desire.” The Buddha said desire, anger and ignorance are the three things that can destroy our lives. So we try to take desire out.
But surrender doesn’t mean surrendering only to something beautiful. Surrender means all of it, appearing. The good and the bad. Desire and no desire. Anger and happiness. All of these are part of our lives. When we take one part out, we become small. That’s all there is to it.
And your desire is not my desire. Diego, who is sitting next to me – his desire is ice cream. Mine too. So in some ways we are similar.
But desire can also become very uncomfortable. “I’m feeling something, and how am I going to deal with it?” Maybe it isn’t even your desire. When we sit together in this room, we are much closer than we imagine. Where does my knee stop and Diego’s start? Does it stop here? Or here? Or were they always connected? You can’t define it. So in this room we pick each other up: hunger, tiredness at the end of the day, a restless mind. And very subtle rivers running in all of us.
At this point I have to tell you a funny story. Before I went on a long solo retreat, I asked Dae Kwang Sunim, with whom I practiced in this very room, what to expect. He said: “It’s not the aloneness. It’s not the same food every day. It’s when somebody or something touches you.”
Well. Remember I have Mexican grandmothers. So on the first day I said to the room, very loudly: “I don’t know who’s in here, but don’t you dare touch me!”
Nothing touched me in that retreat. Other things happened, just as strange, but not that. This is our wonderful mind at work.
So what is your job in that moment? Dealing with desire is function. It is practice. Come back and ask: “What is this desire?” And then leave it. Don’t put an answer in there. “Oh, it’s this, and that person, and so on.” Just ask, fully. With intensity, but without judgment. No need to moralize. That only gets in the way.
“What is this pain I’m feeling right now? What am I going to do?” Don’t know.
This don’t-know doesn’t mean you are helpless. It simply means surrender. You give the question to this mind. Maybe it isn’t only your mind. Maybe we are one mind. Where does my mind stop and Diego’s start? When did they ever go apart?
So when you sit, take time with what comes up. Why didn’t my grandmother tell me that forty years ago? Why did my mother die when I was so young? I was so alone. What is alone? Don’t answer. Just place the question into this mind. It’s like touching Indra’s net, the great cosmic drum. And there is a reward. It may take ten thousand years, sorry, but it will come. Anyway, we are traveling together.
Desire is the mind that is never enough. Always searching for more. I’ll tweak it here, boil it there, mix it here, and become an alchemist of my own life. And yet you can just let it go, in this very moment. It passes anyway. It comes and goes, and comes again and goes again. If we attach to it, we make it serious.
My first teacher used to say: being too serious is death. You get tired before your body even dies. So please, learn to dance a little along the way. Make the taquitos. Put enough chili in the food. Take your time to see what brings you joy.
What is this desire, right now?
