Table Of ContentZen and the Heart
of Psychotherapy
Robert Rosenbaum, Ph.D.
1st Edition
Preface and Meal Chant
..............................................................6
Acknowledgements
.....................................................................10
Credo
..........................................................................................12
Dogen’s Rules for Zazen
.............................................................13
Full Engagement: Dogen’s Rules for Zazen
..............................14
Awakening the Thought of Enlightenment
...............................29
Dogen’s Guidelines for Studying the Way
..................................30
Building the Sanctuary: Dogen’s Guidelines for Practicing the
Way.
............................................................................................32
Evolution
....................................................................................94
The Metta Sutta
.........................................................................95
Happiness, Suffering, and Psychotherapy: The Metta Sutta.
.....96
Tides
.........................................................................................157
The Sandokai of Sekito Kisen Daiosho
...................................158
Intimate Relationship: The Sandokai of Sekito Kisen Daiosho
..................................................................................................159
Dust
..........................................................................................178
Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom Heart Sutra*
.........................179
Empty Self, Connected Self: Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom
Heart Sutra
...............................................................................180
Freedom.
...................................................................................222
The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi by Tozan Ryokai
......223
Host and Guest: The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi by
Tozan Ryokai
............................................................................225
For Fran Tribe
..........................................................................287
Actualizing the Fundamental Point
..........................................288
Precepts
End Notes
Copyright © 1999 by Taylor Francis
Cover design by Urna Semper
Copyright © 2013 by Robert Rosenbaum
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means
including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author.
The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: June 1998 by Brunner/Mazel, a member of the Taylor Francis group
ISBN-0-87630-891-4
For my mother
--- her heart warmed Vimlakirti’s house
“When Goldie smiled, the sun came out.”
Preface and Meal Chant
When I began this book I was having troubles reconciling my family life, my
psychotherapeutic work, and my Zen practice.
Each morning I would wake up, go to the Berkeley Zen Center and meditate for an hour in
the calm still quiet. Then I would get into my car, drive down to the clinic in the large health
maintenance organization where I worked as a psychotherapist, and see client after client. Most
of my clients had chaotic life circumstances or serious medical problems; they initially saw me
only at the urging of the medical staff across the street and often came to therapy resentful at not
being helped by their doctor, or fearful of going crazy, desperate to find some relief from their
pain and suffering. At the end of the day I would drive back home and reunite with my wife,
back from her work, and our two young daughters. There we would try to handle the practical
tasks of keeping the family going, wrestling with the pushes and pulls each of us experienced as
we tried to juggle our individual needs with the life we spent together. Most nights, by the time it
came to go to sleep, I was utterly exhausted.
My wife and daughters were not attracted to Buddhism, and would sometimes get upset
when I took time from our family to go off to the Zen center. It was difficult to find a way to
apply meditation practice to family arguments: sitting down, ringing a bell and stopping to take a
few deep breaths before talking things out felt rather artificial, and certainly didn’t go over well
with my teenage daughter. Practice in the Zendo involved discovering how little I knew, learning
to temper my self-importance and bow humbly to my fellow practitioners and teachers,
attempting to let go of judgments and accept each thing as it is. This often did not mesh well
with practice in the medical center, where hospital consults required quick judgments and
confident assertiveness, and psychotherapy clients often looked for the security of professional
certitude and expert advice on how to change. As my Zen practice led me to respect my clients
more and more, how could I exercise my desire to bow to my clients without making them
uncomfortable? Meanwhile in the Zendo, as meditation started to arouse old psychological issues,
how could I reconcile the urge to weep with the silence of the meditation hall?
While I’ve been working on this book over the past several years my parents have died, my
sister has gone through a serious illness, my children have grown. One of my daughters suffered
her adolescence quite painfully; we felt heartbroken when she had to leave our household for a
while. At the same time, the circumstances of my work as a psychotherapist were also changing.
With the advent of managed care, the context in which I practice psychotherapy has altered from
a profession centered on client needs to a business oriented to the vagaries of profit and loss. In
my clinic we have always practiced brief therapy, but in the past this was governed largely by our
need to serve our community and meet the large demand with a small staff. Now our clinic has a
larger staff but practices brief therapy with one eye on economic indicators; measurements of
productivity and cost compete with, and sometimes threaten to overshadow, the experience of
working intimately in the service of a human being in pain.
In the midst of these events I decided to receive lay ordination as a Buddhist practitioner and
commit myself to following the Buddhist precepts. At Berkeley Zen Center we mark this stage in
our practice by sewing a rakusu, a rectangular cloth with straps which we wear during meditation
as a symbol of donning Buddha’s robe. Our teacher writes our new Buddhist name and a poem
on the back of the rakusu. We assemble the rakusu by sewing together eight pieces of cloth to
make a new garment, meanwhile saying a short phrase, a kind of prayer, with each stitch.
Sewing the rakusu from different pieces of fabric, it became difficult to evade the question:
how do I make my life a whole cloth?
I didn’t find it satisfying to simply add some Buddhist practices, such as mindfulness
meditation, to my arsenal of therapeutic techniques -- even though I found adding these
techniques useful. Nor did it feel quite right to simply add psychological inquiry or some variety
of psychotherapy to the experiences that arose in meditation -- though again, this was a valuable
supplement. With my family uninterested in taking on Buddhist practice, it wasn’t possible to
have us meditate or go to the Zendo together; adding a moment of silence before a meal at home
or a family picnic at the Zendo didn’t quite satisfy the urge for integration.
How could I do psychotherapy practice, family practice, and Zen practice without adding to
or taking anything away from each one?
To help me puzzle out this issue, I decided to take each of the Buddhist texts we chanted at
the Berkeley Zen Center in the mornings and write a chapter on its implications for the practice
of psychotherapy and its relationship to the rest of my life. As I worked on this, I developed a
deep love and appreciation for these texts. I wanted to share these texts with fellow
psychotherapists and other people who didn’t necessarily practice Zen or Buddhism but who
might find in these texts some hints on how to live their lives and practice their professions. This
book is the result.
This book is about how to practice with our lives, and how to come to life in our practice.
Each chapter of the book examines some aspect of sewing together the practice of Zen with the
realization of psychotherapy, and its implications for daily life. The first two chapters present Zen
Master Dogen’s practical instructions and guidelines for practice. In the third chapter, the Metta
Sutta raises some basic issues of how to promote happiness for ourselves and others. The texts of
the last four chapters are somewhat less straightforward; they bring up questions about intimacy,
personal identity, what we can rely on, and how we find our way during our difficulties. Though
there is a logical progression to the chapters, each chapter can be read on its own if the reader is
interested in how a particular text might inform their psychotherapy or life circumstances.
This book, like the Zen writings which form its basis, raises more questions than it answers.
As you read it you may discover it does not teach anything new in the way of techniques or
necessarily suggest you do something different than what you are already doing. The book is not
about how to reconcile Buddhism and psychotherapy in theory, it is not about how as therapists
we can employ Buddhist methods for psychotherapeutic ends, nor even about learning Buddhist
techniques for our own self-improvement. While I provide many clinical examples1 and personal
anecdotes, the goal of this book is not to provide a manual for therapists or a set of prescriptions
for self-help: it doesn’t say what we should be doing to be good therapists, Zen students, parents,
or lovers (since I don’t know the answer to these questions) but rather, the book is about working
on how we can do what we are already doing so that we do it more whole-heartedly, bringing our
self fresh to each moment.
This is not easy, because many of the moments of our lives are painful. We have only a little
control over what life brings to us; often we can’t get what we want and we can’t avoid what we
don’t want. This is the beginning of both psychotherapy and spiritual practice, since it leads us to
the question of how we deal with what is in front of us.
Faced with difficulties in our lives, we often try to find out what we “should” be doing in order
to get to some better, more ideal state. We look for something to cling to, some thing to believe in.
As we grow from children into mature adults, we want to make something of ourselves, but often
feel we lack something. In our insecurity we think we must learn some special knowledge, attain
some special accomplishments, create some stable, secure identity to be our selves. We feel there
is something we must do in order to realize our lives. Gradually, as we deal with one event after
another, we realize that our lives have been works in progress from the moment we were
conceived, and that we are always being our self.
Most Zen students feel that they meditate to become enlightened. So we start to practice, and
every morning we wake up early, get dressed, and go down to the Zendo to sit on our cushions.
Gradually, the truth begins to dawn on us: we wake up before we meditate. We open our eyes
before we become enlightened. We go down to the Zendo not to run after and find a way to
possess enlightenment, but rather as a way to express our true nature, to realize our true selves.
Most people assume that clients come to psychotherapists in order to heal and become more
whole. In every psychotherapy session, though, as we talk to another human being, we are
listened to and start to listen. Gradually, we begin to hear the music we are making of our lives,
and the truth begins to dawn on therapist and client alike: the impulse that brings us to therapy is
the source of the healing. What is communicated is not so important as the communicating itself:
we go to therapy not to become some ideal person but to become who we are; in becoming who
we are we realize our true selves.
As we go through all this, we begin to have faith in ourselves. Having faith in ourselves doesn’t
mean thinking that I can personally handle anything that comes to me: rather, having faith in
ourselves involves a process of falling apart and discovering that somehow we come back together
again. We learn that having faith in ourselves requires that we have faith in life. Having faith in
life doesn’t mean we’ll get what we want or avoid pain: having faith in life involves having faith in
something larger than ourselves, though it includes our selves.
In Zen, we sometimes call this spacious largeness Big Mind, that mind which is not confined
to individual brains but which manifests as the universal, intimate inter-connectedness of all
things. When we have faith in this mind, therapists and clients can trust the therapy; Zen
practitioners can trust in the practice, lovers can trust in compassion and kindness. We can trust
that one thing follows and is related to another in what Buddhists call the Wheel of the Law. We
begin to sense that even in our difficulties, life and death, health and sickness are cousins,
members of some larger family we are also part of.
Getting married, having a child, doing meditation, seeing a client in psychotherapy -- all
require an act of faith. Reading a book requires an act of faith: who knows what you will find?
But having faith is not a question of clinging to a particular set of beliefs, a particular set of
Buddhist practices or psychotherapeutic techniques. Having faith involves the opposite: it
requires we let go of what we are clinging to.
As we hold on to less and less, we are more and more open to what this moment of
meditation, psychotherapy, or family life requires of us. How can we respond to whatever our
client says, our child requests, or our lover invites? How can we face our inner demons and the
oppressive tyrants of the world without returning greed for greed and hate for hate? This very
questioning is our faith, our mode of renewing ourselves, our Way of re-minding ourselves to
appreciate our lives. When we hold to our beliefs, we oppose our beliefs to others. When we are
clinging to no particular thing at all, we have pure faith and perfect freedom.
Life is full of dilemmas and snarls in which we can easily lose sight of this. When we are stuck
in our personal despair, it helps to re-mind ourselves of this larger picture. Practice is about how,
in the midst of the difficulties of our lives, we keep faith in mind.
This book is about how, in the midst of a psychotherapeutic practice which exposes us hourly
to the pains and difficulties of being human, we can keep faith in mind. In Japanese, the
character for “mind” is the same as the character for “heart.” Keeping faith in mind is ultimately
a matter of learning to live whole-heartedly. My hope is that this book may serve to increase your
appreciation of your life by facilitating the re-discovery of the sincere heart of your own practice.
Acknowledgements
We all have many ways of re-minding ourselves to appreciate our lives. Some of us say a
grace before our meal, a little expression of thanks for whatever is offered to us. At Berkeley Zen
Center, before we eat our meals we say a chant2 which I’d like to offer as a grace before the main
body of this book:
Innumerable labors brought us this food.
May we know how it comes to us.
Receiving this offering,
let us consider whether our virtue and practice deserve it.
Desiring the natural order of mind,
let us be free from greed, hate and delusion.
We eat to support life and to practice the way of Buddha.
This food is for the three treasures:
For our teachers, family, and all people
And for all beings in the three worlds.
The first portion is for the precepts:
The second is for the practice of samadhi:
The third is to save all beings.
Thus we eat this food and awaken with everyone.
Innumerable labors went into this book. It could not exist without the life of the tree that
went into its pages and the sweat of the printer that went into its ink. It could not exist without
the myriad human beings whose spiritual seeking gave rise to the Zen masters who wrote the
words to which I am responding. It could not exist without the patience and love of my wife, Judi
Davis, and our children, Anna and Bekka. It could not exist without the encouragement of my
sister Elana Rosenbaum and my brother-in-law David Levitin. It could not exist without my
loving parents, now deceased, and all their parents and family before them. It could not exist
without my friends who have offered support and suggestions; I would especially like to thank
John Dyckman, who worked as co-author with me on some similar projects. This book could not
exist without all the teachers I have had; I am particularly grateful to Ellen Dennis, who taught
me about generosity; to Taitetsu Unno, who introduced me to Zen by sponsoring a sesshin with
Joshu Sasaki Roshi; and to my Dharma teacher, Sojun Mel Weitsman.
This book could not exist without the practice of all the people who make the Berkeley Zen
Center possible, and the inspiring example of our teacher, Sojun Roshi. I would like to thank all
the Sangha members who took the time to review the manuscript and offered their
encouragement and advice. This book could not exist without all the clients who were willing to
share their lives with me, and all my co-workers who keep our clinic running.
