This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So, good morning. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis. And this morning... I'm going to be talking about the trickster character or avatar in our lives and in our spiritual practice and experience. Now, I've chosen this topic for a few reasons. Ed is leading the practice period in the fall, and the theme of the practice period is the Vimalakirti Sutra. And Vimalakirti... characterized as a trickster bodhisattva. So I thought it might be helpful for anyone who's going to be participating in the practice period or listening to the Dharma talks during the practice period to just know something about the trickster and that role in spiritual life and daily life.

[01:18]

So in a book, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, he describes the trickster as the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. So this figure is associated with between spaces, spaces of transition, including life and death. And he calls them these spaces of heightened uncertainty that the trickster imbues with the intelligence needed to negotiate them. So what is that between space? How do we negotiate it? And the trickster helps us, even though we don't always like how. So for those of you who have experience with Zen in general or Buddhist,

[02:25]

teaching in general, some of these descriptive terms are familiar or resonant, particularly, I think, ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty. Those terms come up a lot in Zen and Buddhist teaching. So Vimalakirti has a lot of the trickster qualities, and he's also seen as being a little bit too secure. to go into the deep ambivalence of the traditional trickster. But still, knowing trickster characteristics will help you understand what Vimalakirti is doing and what's happening in the sutra. Because what happens is he manifests himself as if sick. And he's visited by various people who live near the city where he is or in the city, officials, merchants, all different kinds of people, to inquire about his health.

[03:27]

And he takes that opportunity to teach them the Dharma. Well, the Buddha is nearby with some of his followers, and Pimla Kirti wonders why he isn't sending anyone to inquire. And the Buddha picks this up, you know, telepathically, whatever you want to call it, And he starts asking his followers, disciples, and these bodhisattvas to go and inquire about Vimalakirti's health. Well, this starts this whole comedy drama of these enlightened disciples and bodhisattvas who don't want to go because Vimalakirti, he makes fun of them, he challenges them, and in the debates they always lose. So none of them want to go see him. But Vimalakirti at the same time is using his illness as a kind of metaphor for inviting people into that uncertainty to meet him there.

[04:30]

So as I was thinking about Vimalakirti, I was talking to Ed a little bit about this. There's an echo of his story but it's not the same, but there's just kind of an echo in the story of Job in the Old Testament. In that story, the trickster is a figure, a heavenly being called Satan. And he's been given permission by God to test what they call Job's faith. So the book of Job dates from about the time of the Buddha's lifetime. So it's kind of interesting how things echo, you know, these reverberations. But it's a wisdom teaching. And so what's actually being tested is Job's understanding of his relationship with God. It's his understanding, his sort of true place in that relationship.

[05:35]

So basically Job's friends come to visit him. And they generally sort of preach to him that he must, all these terrible things, the loss of his children, his wealth, his everything, must be because he's done something wrong or that he isn't quite good enough. And he refuses to believe this. But in a way, you know, Satan's partly right about Job because the book, in order to clarify what's going on, there's They sort of tacked on an introduction and an end. And in the beginning, which sets up the whole drama of Satan sort of doing this and God approving it, it says that Job made burnt offerings to God just in case his children had sinned. So he's got a little bit of a bargaining thing going on, and this is kind of what's being questioned.

[06:39]

Through living his life as a good man, Job has become vulnerable to the trickster. And through the trickster, he becomes more accessible to God, who finally speaks to him. And what happens in that conversation is God places Job's life into the context of eternity or emptiness. And he does this by asking, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. And he keeps asking him questions like that. Tell me if you have understanding. So eventually this leads to a revelation on Job's part. But in the meantime, this Satan character, has become evil, you know, in our mythology.

[07:42]

And that's been read back into the story. So some of that wisdom aspect of what's going on there, I think, has been obscured. And this often happens to the trickster avatar. that avatar is demonized or whatever you want to call it, made evil, associated with death in a very morbid way rather than a revelatory way. But this role, this character, this function keeps resurfacing as an important aspect of the path to spiritual maturity. So as in various trickster stories, At the end of the book of Job, when Job had his revelation, his wealth is restored. He has another family. He forgives his friends for having doubted him, and all these things happen. And that's another twist often in these trickster stories, that once the revelation happens, there's this movement from death back into life.

[08:50]

So there was Job right on the edge of death. he sort of brought back to life. So in some versions of the story of the Buddha, there's a figure called Mara. And Mara is a trickster figure that's also now considered evil. And is associated with death. But he appears just before the Buddha's enlightenment and challenges the Buddha. tempts him, mocks him. And Shakyamuni recognizes Mara and disarms him by touching the ground and saying, this is my witness for my right to enlightenment, is basically what he's saying. But without Mara's challenges, Shakyamuni might not have found that conviction and that confidence.

[09:53]

So Lewis Hyde further describes this archetype. The trickster is a boundary crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead. And in every case, the trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinctions. Trickster is the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone's sense of honorable behavior has left them unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right wrong that will get life going again.

[11:10]

So if you're in a transition period, or if you've ever been ill, close to death, You can sort of feel how that mysterious place is, and it's not so clear what your decision should be, how you negotiate it, how you perceive what's happening. Am I being punished? Have I done something wrong? Or is this an opportunity? Is this a... chance for some sort of transformation or change that will be a benefit to me and others even. So it's easy to misunderstand this role, and one of the things that happens is the trickster role can be taken on in the way of the charlatan, the person who sort of says the same thing over and over again and expects it to always be effective, or through

[12:14]

teachers or leaders having some sort of sexual confusion about their relationship with their students, or expecting servitude from their students. All that kind of stuff. We all know it. I mean, it's just... It happens. I think it happens to almost everyone. There's this kind of funny place. And Bernard Floor talks about the trickster, and he says about the development of the trickster in Zen. And he said... If folly has become a literary pose or a commodity, to what extent is it still really subversive? And that means transformative. And yet, the very familiarity of the charlatan-like repetition can be effective if the perspective of the observer changes or the student changes. So you can't even, you know, sort of find a fixed line And then the charlatan persona also invites its own form of tricksters, such as revelations of misconduct, or those usually come too late.

[13:25]

And what's interesting about this kind of charlatan trickster thing is that most of the time, people are sort of in competition to get that role of the charlatan. There's usually not a big change when there's a revolution sometimes. And so these power struggles are also part of this whole trickster thing. You can't quite catch things as being perfect or ideal or something. There's always some trickster activity going on. And a friend of mine a long time ago who was from the Theravadan tradition said that a teacher told her, trust the untrustworthy. And I worked with that a lot. Am I trustworthy? Is someone else trustworthy? I mean, what does that mean? And trust doesn't mean approval.

[14:27]

To trust the untrustworthy is to put yourself in that between place. You learn to recognize in yourself your place in what Hyde is calling the commerce at the gate. So what's going on in this trust and untrustworthy? How am I involved? How am I part of that bargain? So... You know, what makes for trustworthiness? Because it's very important, I think, particularly in spiritual practice. But neither rigidity nor lackness, you know, neither, you know, some sort of idealized teacher or sort of some charlatan really is a good foundation for this trustworthiness.

[15:30]

And, you know, but those... they're always available to the trickster. So still, you can't hold on to a particular one. So the understanding of this functioning of the trickster avatar depends on how we include ourselves and how we perceive what's going on. and not necessarily through the trickster's skill, because often the tricksters are completely clueless. They sort of step in and make a big mess, and they don't really know or in some ways care what the result will be. So often tricksters are most effective when they include themselves or when they end up being included in the transformative possibilities.

[16:32]

So you can't always tell who the trickster is, I'd say, because it shifts around. So I think the trickster is part of the spiritual tradition that is kind of ungraspable. And we have all these prescriptions for spiritual transformation, enlightenment, and Partly we need the variety because most of us don't really want it. We don't really want transformation or enlightenment. We want to get what we want, or we want some projected idea of what enlightenment or transformation will be, mostly to our benefit, of course. I mean, why wouldn't we think that? So transformation requires things like surrender and vulnerability and humility, and we're not even taught to value those things.

[17:33]

And it also requires negotiation of this liminality, betweenness, uncertainty, and ambiguity. And those are not very comfortable states to be in. But Hyde describes this between place as the state of being betwixt and between that is generative and speculative. The mind that enters it willingly will proliferate new structures, new symbols, new metaphors. So it's a place of possibility, but we don't know how things will turn out or what direction they'll take. So one way this works for me in my spiritual life, I guess, is when I'm preparing a talk or when I'm preparing a class. And as I'm doing the research and preparing, I often find out things I didn't know.

[18:40]

You know, here I have this idea I'm going to talk about such and such. And then I find out things I didn't know or context or interpretations I wasn't aware of. And the decision I have to make is whether to talk about what I found or talk about what I was looking for. And this is that place, you know. So... And this happened when I was preparing for the talk for the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend this year. I approached the topic with this sense of courage and openness, and I'm fairly well informed, and I have a speculative mind. But I was actually thrown by the feeling part, the kind of... that liminal aspect of it, and my sense of my own complacency and cowardice. And so I was just kind of stunned.

[19:45]

I thought, well, should I talk about what I was looking for, or should I talk about what I found? So I didn't, in that talk, mention that my family is of mixed race, my extended family. Mixed race, mixed ethnicities, mixed... every kind of background you can imagine, skin color and lots of poverty, you know, pretty consistent history of poverty. And so I have this experience of, you know, racist attitudes towards people in my family and all these things. And yet I look what is called white and middle class, whatever that means. And so I'm... I don't try to hold these worlds, you know. And I was actually in, I just remember I was in this workshop once. And we'd do the, you know, it was one of those life experience workshops where you'd go into these little caves and stuff like that in your mind.

[20:49]

And so they said, you know, bring your family, you know, bring your family in there. And after the exercise, they said, you know, I had such a hard time. bringing these white people and these dark people into the same room. And the person who was leading the workshop said, well, maybe you're trying to do that in yourself. Maybe that's the same thing that's going on in yourself. And I thought, yeah. Because here I am, you know, I'm caught in this kind of ambiguity and ambivalence about my identity. And I can't choose an identity because I don't have one. I'm sort of this mixture of things. And yet I have a responsibility. both to that ambiguity and to all the qualities of it, even though I can't claim any of it. It's almost like I'm more responsible. So that was going on in the background as I was trying to figure out how to talk about Martin Luther King. So this is what happens when you hit that place of whether you're going to talk about what you're looking for or what you found.

[21:59]

So, Hines suggests that negotiation of this between us offers a potency of creativity. And that, in Buddhist terms, that would be transformation. He writes, the agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for. And this can be a wonderful... or a horrible experience, or it can be both. And that's how transformation works. And I think it's one of the reasons we resist it, because some of it is just like, you know, twist something. And I think this is shown in our Zen koans. You can see this happening. So either there's a relatively gentle exchange of kind of words that maybe it doesn't make all that much sense, but there's fairly gentle, or there's some kind of violent act that happens in these.

[23:02]

But same as with the story of Job, these are wisdom teachings. And so, you know, they have to be interpreted through that context, not necessarily through exactly what is occurring, which might upset us, just like the trickster activities can upset us. So the stories are about people who are prepared to negotiate the between place. So they're students who've been wandering around, you know, talking to meeting all these teachers, or it's a student who's been with this teacher for a long time, or something like that. It's usually that. So in one called... Ching Shui, the solitary and destitute. A monk addresses his end master and says, I am Ching Shui, solitary and destitute. Please give me alms. And the master calls his name, and the monk replies, yes.

[24:08]

And the teacher says, you have already drunk three cups of the finest wine in China, and still you say that you have not moistened your lips. So these three cups could be the three trainings. Ethics, concentration or meditation, and wisdom. These are preparations. And the master is telling him he has all he needs. So it's just this sort of reassurance for saying, you're there. And so, of course, the next line is not always said, suddenly the monk was enlightened, right? And then there's another story. Gutai raises one finger. And in this, it's about a Zen master who, whenever anybody asks him a question, he raises a finger. So a visitor asks his assistant what his master preaches and that his assistant raises one finger.

[25:16]

And the teacher finds out and calls the assistant to him, and he cuts his finger off. And as the boy is running away, screaming, the teacher calls his name, the boy turns around, and the teacher raises his finger, and the student, the assistant, the attendant, is enlightened. The attendant is enlightened. When he holds up his finger. He doesn't get his finger. But... This is a wisdom story. So here he is at this place, and the trickster cuts his finger out. He runs away. The teacher calls his name. He turns around. He's still there. Raises his finger, and the attendant is enlightened. So the stories are about this preparedness. And that's when those koans happen.

[26:20]

So what we're preparing for is the unexpected, the big surprise, negotiating this boundary between what we think we know and all the things we don't know or haven't imagined, because that is what will change us. So these meetings can be painful, confusing, but they can also be very funny. And, of course, liberating. So these three areas of training, ethics, concentration or meditation, and wisdom, are things that I've taught about. And also someone told me, and I know I've said this a million times, that I've given this advice, do what you came here to do. That's what I tell myself all the time. Just remember to do what you came here to do. Things are going to go wrong. Things are going to go right. Things are going to be good. Things are going to be bad. But just do what you came here to do. And that is both inspiring and encouraging and very difficult.

[27:30]

And you can't expect everyone else to be doing it your way. You can't expect others who are doing what they came here to do to be doing the way you're doing that. So you're just, you know, in the middle of how things are, I guess you could say. So Bernard Fore, in his examination of this Zen trickster thing and the development of that sort of avatar or functioning in Zen, talks about how it changed from the kind of holy fool or the kind of Chan trickster misbehaving to reveal emptiness. There's these stories of somebody burning a wooden statue of the Buddha to keep warm. And these wandering fools that come who would always be drunk or...

[28:42]

grow their hair, and all this stuff. And so that tradition started to shift towards the Bodhisattva tradition, which was more engaged with kind of what we call ordinary life. And part of the reason for this was to prevent the Chan tradition from becoming a tradition of charlatans. It's so easy to imitate the trickster and justify sort of our actions through imitating. So to prevent that, it started shifting into this idea of the Bodhisattva. And Bernard Ford says that in this interpretation or description, morality is followed by the perfections of concentration and wisdom. So there you have the three teachings again, the three trainings again. They just keep coming around. So these preparations, this intention, being prepared.

[29:43]

It's not about restriction, but it's about providing skill and self-awareness. And so that you can develop a way to negotiate these kind of inevitable, absolutely inevitable incursions and disturbances of the trickster energy and ambiguity. And this is what Lewis Hyde was referring to when he, his description of these spaces of heightened uncertainty and the intelligence needed to negotiate them. It's just as they, you know, some of the sutras say, you know, it's not about being smart. It's about this preparedness, doing the training, seeing how it works and... over time you're being changed in this subtle way, and then there's this moment where it's seen. And, of course, it doesn't stop. It doesn't mean you get it there and it's over, because even in the Buddha's life, Mara keeps returning.

[30:50]

If you've ever... I don't know if you have read this book, Living with the Devil, by Stephen Batchelor. He talks about how Mara returns in Buddha's life and the role he plays. So this role of the trickster is often interpreted as evil, annoying, distracting, unwelcome, disturbing. In the Vimalakirti Sutra, the disciples and the bodhisattvas don't want to visit Vimalakirti, as I said, because he's going to make them uncomfortable, he's going to challenge their understanding, and he's even going to make fun of them. And we too may laugh at them, but... They exemplify, you know, our own reluctance to be in that place. So we can sort of put ourselves there, put our notions of practice and enlightenment into that arena of the trickster or the transformer.

[31:51]

And, you know, examine the uncertain place of creativity where we find what we're not looking for. So I think for most of us, the trickster kind of functions in our lives intermittently, whether we like it or not, but we're not usually prepared to recognize how that role is related to transformation, development of character, and spiritual maturity. And Hyde writes, whoever the gods of portion are, they will drop things in your path. But if you search for those things, you will not find them. So you have to be ready. It's just about being ready. Prepared. Even though you're going to be surprised and it's not going to be what you thought. So in a way, we can honor the trickster's function best by not evoking it.

[33:02]

even though we're expecting it. Instead, the prophetic trickster points toward what is actually happening, the muddiness, the ambiguity, the noise. When a human mind recognizes what has been revealed, it is recognizing itself. Sounds like that. Buddhism. So the prophetic trickster points toward what is actually happening, the muddiness, the ambiguity. the noise. When a human mind recognizes what has been revealed, it is recognizing itself. So, I hope this talk has offered some perspective in considering Vimalakirti and the Sutra and in thinking about the role of the trickster in your life and in your Buddhist practice. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[34:08]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:22]

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