Prepared text of Zoketsu Norman Fischer's Baccalaureate address
Following is the prepared text of "How to Survive Your
Promising Life," the 2014 Baccalaureate address by Zoketsu Norman
Fischer, Zen Buddhist priest, poet and founder of the Everyday Zen
Foundation.
Good morning, everyone. I am honored to be here this
morning with all of you. It is, literally, awesome to see – a sea, an
actual sea, of waving faces. I have no idea why I am here, but I feel
quite lucky to have the chance to reflect, to muse, to ponder with you
at this important moment in your lives. A moment is a moment.
It is a long while since I have been a university
student. I enjoyed that time in my life immensely. It was full and it
was exiting, a time almost completely devoted to study and exploration
of life's big questions, with a little fun thrown in, and powerful
friendships, and, yes, a certain amount of misery and angst. College is a
privilege, but it is not necessarily the easiest time of life. As with
all other times of life – but perhaps even moreso – there are highs and
there are lows. I hope today you are feeling the high.
But time passes and you forget. These days when I go
to university campuses, which I do from time to time, I feel as if I
were in heaven. I imagine that heaven must be exactly like a university
campus – everyone young and healthy, spending their time in social and
intellectual pursuits, flowers in season, the trees well trimmed, the
lawns manicured, the buildings more or less matching and clean. A
university is by definition a place of promise – and students are
promising individuals – you perhaps more than most because Stanford is
more than just another university, it is a great and storied university
that, these days, seems to be at the center of the universe. Because of
what you have received – not only from Stanford, but also from your
families and friends, who have given you a lot of love and support – you
now have the skills and the connections – and the obligation – to do
great things. And this means not only great things for yourselves: You
are expected to do great things for others, and for the world. We all
have high hopes for you, probably higher hopes than you have for
yourselves. Let's be honest – as much as we discuss and practice wise
punditry, we older people don't really know what the world will require
in the coming times – and we are a bit bewildered, and unsure, though we
hate to admit it. To grow old is to gradually cease to understand the
times in which you live. So we are placing our trust and our hope in
you. No pressure, of course. But the promise of the future really is
yours.
And yet the truth is, it is not going to be so easy
to survive your promising life. For one thing, there are a lot of
promising young people out there – not only here at Stanford, or here in
California, here in the United States, but also in Europe, in China, in
Latin America, all over Asia, and in India, and Africa – some of you in
fact are those people – bright, energetic, and mobile. With so
much competition, and so much anxiety about that competition, it is
possible that success, if it comes, will not come easily. It is also of
course possible that success will not come – or that it will come,
abundantly, but that you will not find it as meaningful as you had
expected. It is also possible that success comes, and you do find it
meaningful and satisfying – but only at first, when it is still bright
and shiny. And that later, the state and pace and social implications of
the successful and ambitious life you will have lived will wear you
down, and you'll find yourself tired and bewildered.
It's also possible that as time stretches on your
personal relationships will not work out as you had hoped, your sense of
yourself will not hold up to scrutiny, that there will be
disappointments and setbacks, acknowledged and unacknowledged – in
short, it is possible, even likely, that there is some pain awaiting you
as you go forth from this bright day – ruptured love affairs,
betrayals, losses, disillusionments – seriously shaky moments. It's
possible too that, as you move through the decades, it will become
increasingly difficult for you to maintain the idealism and the
hopefulness you have today. It's possible that one day you will find
yourself wondering what you have been doing all these years, and who you
have become. It's possible the life you wanted and have built will not
be as you'd expected it to be. It's possible that the world you wanted
and hoped to improve will not improve.
Anyway, you will keep busy, you will have things to
do. And you will try not to notice such feelings. You will try to deny
any despair or disappointment or discouragement or boredom you may be
feeling two, five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years from today. And
probably you will be able – more or less – to do that. But only more or
less.
I am sorry to say all these things to you on such a wonderful day and in such a beautiful place as this.
I realize that baccalaureate speeches are supposed to
be bright, uplifting, and encouraging. The folks at Stanford who
invited me to speak today sent me links to previous baccalaureate talks
so I would know how they usually go. The speeches I looked at were
wonderful – they were serious about challenges ahead – but they were
always positive. So, yes, I too intend to say something bright and
encouraging. But I thought I would be more convincing if I were also
realistic. And it is realistic to say that your lives from now on are
likely not going to be entirely smooth sailing. The skills you'll need
to survive may be more than or other than the skills you have been
focusing on so far in your life. The truth is, it takes a great deal of
fortitude and moral strength to sustain a worthwhile, happy, and
virtuous human life over time in the world as it actually is.
OK, here is the uplifting part:
Your life isn't and has never been about you. It isn't and has never been about what you accomplish, how successful you are or are not, how much money you make, what sort of position you ascend to, or even about your family, your associations, your various communities, or how much good you do for others or the world at large. Your life, like mine, and like everyone else's, has always been about one thing: love.
Who are you, really? Where did you come from? Why
were you born? When this short human journey is over, where are you
going? Why – and how – does any of this exist? What is the purpose and
the point of it all?
Not even your Nobel Prize-winning professors know the
answers to these questions, the inevitable, unavoidable, human
questions. None of us knows the answers. All we know is that we are here
for a while before we are gone, and that we are here together. The only
thing that makes sense and that is completely real is love. Love is the
only answer. This is no mystery – everyone knows this. Whether your
destiny is to have a large loving family or to have no partner and no
family – love is available to you wherever you look. And when you
dedicate yourself to love, to trying your best to be kind and to benefit
everyone you meet – not just the people on your side, not just the
people you like and approve of, but everyone, every human and nonhuman
being – then you will be OK and your life – whatever it brings, even if
it brings a lot of difficulty and tragedy – as so many lives do – as
even the lives of very privileged and promising people sometimes do –
your life will be a beautiful life. As I promised, this is uplifting –
or at least I hope you find it uplifting.
But there's more. How do you love? How
do you make love real in your life? This doesn't happen by itself. It
takes attention, it takes commitment, continuity, effort. It won't come
automatically, it won't come from wishing or from believing or assuming.
You are going to have to figure out how to not get distracted by your
personal problems, by your success or your lack of success, by your
needs, your desires, your suffering, your various interests, and keep
your eye on the ball of love even as, inevitably, you juggle all the
rest of it.
To find and develop love you have to firmly commit
yourself to love. And you have to have a way, a path, a practice, for
cultivating love throughout your lifetime, come what may. Love isn't a
just feeling. It is an overarching attitude and spirit. It's a way of
life. It's a daily activity.
In my life I have cultivated love through a path of
spiritual practice, a life of meditation and study and reflection. I
think you also will need a path of spiritual practice. You also will
need some kind of religious life if you are going to survive this
difficult human journey with your heart intact and your love generous
and bright.
A spiritual or a religious life doesn't need to look
like what we have so far thought of as a spiritual life. The world now
is too various and connected for the old paths to work. Not that the old
paths are outmoded – they are as useful today as they ever were,
perhaps moreso. But they need to be re-formatted, re-configured, for our
lives as they are now. And above all, they need to be open and
tolerant, transparent and porous rather than opaque, and expansive
rather than exclusive. A spiritual life can and should be much more
lively and various and interesting than we have previously imagined. To
investigate at the deepest possible level the human heart and the
purposes of a human life that is essentially connected at all points to
and with others and the planet Earth can be – and should be, maybe must
be – deeply engaging and satisfying. There are a million ways to
approach it. But the main thing is, I think, that you need some
commitment, some discipline – and you need a regular practice, something
you actually do.
The most important characteristic – the defining
characteristic, I would say – of a spiritual practice is that it is
useless. That is, it is an activity that has no other practical purpose
than to connect you to your heart and to your highest and most
mysterious purpose – a purpose that is literally unknown, because it
references the unanswerable questions I mentioned a moment ago. We do so
many things for so many good reasons – for our physical or
psychological or emotional health, for our family life or economic life,
for the world. But a spiritual practice is useless – it doesn't address
any of those concerns. It is a practice that we do to touch our lives
beyond all concerns – reaching beyond our lives to their source.
For me that practice is and has been for a long time
sitting in silence. That's a good one; maybe it will also be good for
you. I certainly recommend it to everyone – regardless of your religious
affiliation or lack of one. But there are many others. Prayer, for one.
Whether or not you believe in God you can pray. You can contemplate
spiritual texts or art, poetry, or sacred music. You can walk quietly on
the Earth. You can gaze at the landscape or the sea or sky. And there
are many other such useless practices you can devise or invent.
You could practice gratitude – when you wake up every
morning, as soon as you put your feet on the floor from bed, sitting on
the side of the bed you can close your eyes, be quiet for a minute, and
say the word "grateful" to yourself silently, and just sit there for a
moment or two and see what happens. You could practice that right now…
Or you could practice giving – always making the
effort to intentionally say a word or offer a smile or material or
emotional gifts that confer blessings on another person.
Or you could practice kind speech – on all occasions,
even difficult ones, committing yourself to speaking as much as you can
in kindness and with inclusion of others and their needs, their hopes
and dreams. Not just speaking from your own side.
Or you could practice beneficial action, committing
yourself to intentionally acting with a spirit of benefiting others, of
being of some use to others, in whatever way you can, even stupid ways
that seem not to be useful or beneficial but could be if you intend them
to be. For instance, you can practice benefiting others by wiping sink
counters in public restrooms, or in your own kitchen. Wiping counters
with a spirit of beneficial action – with that thought in your mind
intentionally – can be a daily spiritual discipline. Or you can cook a
meal with love for others, with a spirit of benefiting others. Even if
the meal is for yourself, you can benefit yourself with the good food,
that you paid close attention to when you prepared it, because one's
self, truly and kindly understood, is also another.
Or you could practice identity action – recognizing
that when you do anything, whatever it is, you are not, and cannot, do
it alone, by your own power. Inevitably whatever you do involves others
and the whole world, this Earth we live on, its life-giving sunlight and
plants and animals. So that every action we ever take involves others
and a world of support. You could notice that whenever you do anything.
Or you could practice compassion – going toward,
rather than turning away from, the suffering of others – and your own
suffering too. We all want to avoid pain, to make it disappear. But when
it's impossible to make the pain disappear you can go toward it rather
than running away – you can become softened by it.
I could go on and on. Spiritual practices are
unlimited – and they are imaginative. And – especially – full of love.
They come from love, they encourage love, and they produce love. When
you do them over time you find that you are living in a world full of
love. And for your life and for our lives collectively in the times to
come we are going to need love – lots of love. In good times, love is
lovely. Nothing can be better. And in hard times, love is necessary. It
turns tragedy into opportunity – something difficult and unwanted
becomes a chance to drive love deeper, to make it wiser, fuller, more
glorious, and more resilient.
A while ago my friend Fenton Johnson, who is a
wonderful novelist and writer and professor of literature, and a
lifelong spiritual practitioner – and who is sitting in the audience
today! – sent me an email about this talk. He wrote, "If I were giving
such an address I'd talk about the mystery of life, how one can and
should lay great plans, but how life has its own ebb and flow, and our
first duty is to be present to that ebb and flow, to realize that
failure and success are social conceptions that can be useful but that
in their conventional definitions have little to do with what really
matters, which is the study and practice of virtue." As Timothy Kelly,
who was abbot of Gethsemani Monastery, Thomas Merton's monastery in
Kentucky, said, "How one lives one's life is the only true measure of
the validity of one's search."
The Beat poet Philip Whalen was my dear friend and
teacher. Like me, he was also a Zen Buddhist priest. As a poet and a
spiritual practitioner, he couldn't do anything other than search. His
genius was that he could express the seriousness of his search while
maintaining not only his sense of humor and play – but also a clear and
sane knowledge that the whole thing is actually as ridiculous as it is
tragic. Here is a poem of his, written in the 1960s:
TO HENRIK IBSEN
This world is not
The world I want
Is Heaven & I see
There's more of them
The world I want
Is Heaven & I see
There's more of them
*
I've seen most of this world is ocean
I know if I had all I wanted from it
There'd still not be enough
Someone would be lonely hungry toothache
All this world with a red ribbon on it
Not enough
Nor several hells heavens planets
Universal non-skid perfection systems
I know if I had all I wanted from it
There'd still not be enough
Someone would be lonely hungry toothache
All this world with a red ribbon on it
Not enough
Nor several hells heavens planets
Universal non-skid perfection systems
Where's my eternity papers?
Get me the great Boyg on the phone.
Connect me with the Button Moulder right away.
Get me the great Boyg on the phone.
Connect me with the Button Moulder right away.
So please do seriously think about it – but not
without some joy and some lightness. Today you are closing the door on
one life and opening the door to another. Today you fall out of heaven.
Where will you land? What will you do there? What is really worthwhile
and what is just distraction – however much people tell you it is not?
You are the only one who can ask and answer these questions.
So I am saluting you this morning – you and the
wonderful life of promise you have lived up to this moment, and the new
life of challenge and difficulty and passion that you are entering.
Cheers and congratulations.