How many of you know the children’s song ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’?  When I was young, we sung this around Scout campfires and the lyrics began as follows:

We’re goin’ on a bear hunt 
We’re going to catch a big one, 
I’m not scared
What a beautiful day!
 
Uh-uh! 
Grass! 
Long wavy grass. 
We can’t go over it. 
We can’t go under it. 
Oh no! 
We’ve got to go through it! 

After that would be a series of obstacles including a river, mud, a dark forest and a cave.  All are approached with the same refrain:

We can’t go over it. 
We can’t go under it. 
We’ve got to go through it! 

So, what has this to do with practicing Zen with illness you might ask!  Well, in my experience, when faced with the symptoms of illness, and many other obstacles in life, our first thought is how can we get around this without having to face it.  Can we change it or avoid it in some other way?  While it is true that some situations can be changed, often the answer is the same as for the bear hunters – no, you have to go through it.

Suffering occurs because we wish our experience to be different than it is.  This is the source of craving spoken about in the second noble truth¹.  We do not want this job, but that one.  Our currently relationship is not making us happy but a new one would.  This party is boring, I want to be doing something else.  We push away unpleasant experiences and cling to those which delight our sense consciousnesses.  This is familiar to most of us as Buddhism101.

The same understanding is beautifully expressed in the Xin Xin Ming (Verses on Faith Mind) attributed to Jianzhi Seng’can, the third Zen patriarch²:

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

(translation by Richard B Clarke)

From personal experience, I can confirm that chronic illness is utterly horrible. Often you do not know what you will wake up with in terms of energy and symptoms can come and go in an unpredictable way.  Wanting to be anywhere else other than a body that is sick and in pain is not an unnatural desire to have, but our craving for something different produces suffering as heaven and earth are set apart.

There is a reason that the Buddha’s teachings have survived for over two millennia and continue to be relevant, and that is because they work.  Sitting with our experiences of pain, uncertainty and fear (or laying down with it if you cannot sit), we become more intimate with all of it.  This is not always pleasant but rather than having something solid meet something solid, there is instead a softening in the friction between ideas of pain and emotions and the actual experience of them. Heaven and earth start to move back together.  If we are listening with our whole body to what is going on, it is much harder to project our expectations onto them. 

Does that softening always happen?  No, and some days will be easier than others, but it is a practice that gets easier with time as we learn to dance with our illness as two parts of a whole rather than sworn enemies. Some days we might even see glimpses of a deeper wholeness that is dancing with us and within us. The entire universe is along for the bear hunt, through rivers, caves, pain, anger and everything that arises.

As well as straight sitting, sending metta to yourself, the pain, your body and the whole situation can also soften our resistance.  The Tibetan practice of tonglen has also been found to be helpful for many people with long-term illness.  I can often be found doing this when waking with pain sometime in the small hours, breathing in pain and breathing out joy, peace, comfort and ease; all of us connected within a vast web of human experience (admittedly at other times I might tune into the BBC World Service or listen to some relaxing music).

There is a Zen kōan about Master Ma³ as he neared the end of his life (case 36, The Book of Serenity)    

Great Master Ma was unwell.  The temple superintendent asked him, “Teacher, how has your venerable health been in recent days?”
The Great Master said, “Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha.”

Sun Face Buddha is full of energy and lives for hundreds of years, Moon Face Buddha is shorter-lived and less vibrant. Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha basically means ‘good days, bad days’.

Regardless of who you are, no one gets to be Sun Face Buddha all of the time, just as no one gets to win the lottery more than once (okay, maybe twice) or never have a bad hair day.

Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha. This is life, just as it is. Don’t miss it.

1. “And this, monks, is the noble truth of the origination of stress: the craving that makes for further becoming… i.e. craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming.”
— Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta ‘Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion’ (translation by Thannisaro Bhikkhu from the Access to Insight website)

2. The first six teachers in the Ch’an (Zen) lineage are known as the six patriarchs of Zen beginning with Bodhidharma who is said to have brought Ch’an to China.  Seng’can is the third of these, although some historians doubt whether he existed at all, which is actually pretty Zen.

3. Mazu Daoyi (709–788) was a Ch’an (Zen) abbot who founded a monastery near Nankang (present day Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province) and established the influential Hongzhou School.