Stephen Mitchell on the Questioning Mind

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Mitchell, and author and translator who has dedicated much of his life to send practice. He is also married

to Byron Katie, one of our former guests. His new book is Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness, a biblical tale retold. Hi, Stephen, Welcome to the show. Glad to be with you. It is a real honor and a gift to have you on. I told you in the pre show conversation that you and I had about how much your work is meant to me. But you have translated a number of books, but you're you're well beyond just a translator. But your translations of The Dooda Ching and Letters to a Young Poet are my two favorite

books probably of all time. Certainly they're up there in the first few. So I'm really happy to have you on. Well, I'm so honored that you have taken them in so deeply. That's a very gratifying for me, wonderful, And we are going to talk about that. We'll talk about your latest book called Joseph in the Way of Forgiveness, a biblical tale retold. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves

inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandmother, and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Okay, Well, I probably have a different take on the parable than than most people. I think it's a sweet story and probably embodies all sorts of tribal wisdom. But for me, it doesn't, of course, fund to any reality. And what I mean by that is that there are many religious traditions I can think of the Jewish tradition that have this kind of duality embodied in their theology or mythology. Uh. In the Jewish tradition, there's supposedly a an evil inclination inside us and a

good inclination that are battling. Uh. Many other traditions do this too. The best thing that I know as an antidote to this kind of thinking is something from a brilliant old zen poem by the third founding teacher of zen Uh named Saint Son, and he said, the battle between good and evil is the primal disease of the mind. So whenever we see that kind of thing in in politics,

or in religions or in our own life. Usually we put ourselves on the side of good and put people that have hurt us or we don't like on the side of evil, and it makes for a very difficult life, a life of excluding. And when you actually look inside the mind, if you've done many years of meditation or sunk into meditative practice to a certain depth, you'll find that there's nothing corresponding to these entities, these good and evil entities inside the mind. In other words, in reality,

in experience, there aren't anything like this inside us. What's inside us are thoughts that we believe, and the process of getting to a point of awakening in Buddhist terms or enlightenment, is a process of undoing, of questioning the thoughts that we're believing, so that we can become people who live in harmony with the way things actually are, not the way reality seems when we superimpose our judgments and ideas onto it. So in reality, there's no such

thing as good and bad. When we create good, we're creating its opposite bad. When we create beautiful, we're also creating ugly. And in the practice of self realization, we see that all of that is insubstantial. There's just the great, brilliant, joyful reality that cannot be broken into two pieces or into any pieces. It's one hole. It's what is. And in my wife Byron Katie's beautiful phrase, loving what is is what we come to after sufficient, deep enough practice.

Everything that happens to us we see as good. There's nothing that's bad. There's nothing that a poses that good. You could also call it god. There's no struggle inside us. So I think that the Wolf parable may be helpful to many people. I can see how it would be, but ultimately it doesn't describe anything that's real, and ultimately I think it's something we have to grow beyond. So that's my take on it. That's a great take, and I think it's a great place for us to move

into a little bit deeper conversation about this. Because you're a long time Zen student. I am a Zen student and a long time meditator. And there's this idea which is not an idea. You could say, it's it's truth or reality that as you said, it's all connected, it's all reality. It doesn't break out into this good and evil in the way that we conventionally think it does.

And at the same time, there is this world that we live in that does have these characteristics and different types, and and and and will often talk about, you know, two sides of the same thing. There's the absolute and then there's the relative. And I'm kind of curious how you interpret how to make decisions about what's proper and right action in this relative world when you have that absolute perspective. How those two things work in harmony is

a question. Excellent question. And I'm going to cause another little problem for you, I hope not, but maybe and say that actually there's no such thing as the absolute and the relative. In that old Zen poem called absolute trust in the mind is one translation in that poem, the poet the zen Master says, I can express what the truth is. But here's what you should go back to every time you're in doubt. Not too it's not too so when you say absolute and relative, you've already

split the world into two. And the experience of someone who is living in a state of awakening is that there's never a decision that has to be made. Everything is obvious, everything flows, and life is very easy. So there's a union of if you want to say absolute and relative which are are not true in an ultimate sense. Uh that that has already fused in the life or in the mind one who is living in harmony with

the way things are. That's how i'd say it. So personally, I haven't had to make a decision in decades, So as you move through the world, the right action becomes apparent to you without having to think or decide yes. And again it's just the authentic action. The right part is a judgment that you know is at a later point in the process, if at all. Um it's simply action. It's action that's true to yourself, and you don't have

to think about it. You know, it becomes second nature and everything you do, everything you say, is simply an expression of your own reality. And it's always good and there's there's never a problem. It's the most astonishing thing to experience. And it's uh everything that the old masters said it was. I mean, there's nothing that they described about this state of awakening that is unworthy of the truth.

It's an amazing thing to experience, right, And you said not to you know, the master said not to now in uh Suzuki has a phrase not to not one which I think is interesting. It's it's not quite it's not really two, but it's also not quite one. You know, you're there, I'm here, you know, physical sense like I can't you know, I can't touch you right this second, right, So you're there, I'm here. But but it comes from a deeper place now, a criticism that is often leveled.

I get it sometimes, and I'm just curious your action to it. Is that this idea that it's all good and it's all okay is a privileged white idea because things in our lives generally are all good and okay, and we're in a position to recognize or realize that, but lots of other people their lives are very different. And what role do we have in helping in that way? And so just be kind of curious your thoughts on that, because that's a common criticism. Personally, I haven't heard that,

but I'm not surprised. First of all, it's not an idea, and second of all, it's not white. It's yellow. If anything, comes from many many great teachers in in India and China and Japan. So this is a gift to us from that culture. We began to take it on really in the in the sixties and seventies. And you know, those of us who began meditating of practice back then were and are sitting at the feet of these great yellow and brown enlightened masters. So to say that it's

white seems awfully silly. It seems to me, as far as privilege goes, that has a certain truth to it. Most people who come to meditative practice are coming from a somewhat educated background, and that entails some degree of privilege. But more important, they're coming from a vast hunger for the truth. It's probably true that poor people don't have the luxury of indulging that hunger because they have to support themselves and their families. But there are poor people

who who come to spiritual practice. I've met many, and when they're ready for it, it happens, however little money they have. I've I've seen people from extremely modest circumstances, and men are already backgrounds plunge into the practice with as much passion as anybody else. Uh As for what to do, I think Katie, my wife, has the best solution, which is to dedicate herself to making everybody in the world are as many people as possible aware that there's

a way out of suffering. Just as the Buddhist said, there is suffering, and it's very important to acknowledge that in our life. So there is suffering. The second noble truth is there's a cause of suffering, and that's just spectacularly important thing to understand. Katie makes it very simple when she says the second noble truth really means that when we believe our thoughts, we suffer. When we question our thoughts, we don't. And that's a very powerful formulation

of the second noble truth. The third noble truth is that there's an end to suffering, not just that it's possible to alleviate suffering, but that all suffering can be ended completely when you've awakened to the truth. What that means is that there's no longer any anger, any sadness, any fear. That it's possible for a human being to live in a state of constant peace and happiness. And and that's a radical thing to observer or to experience. So those for truth are what actually she teaches in

her own way. She never knew that there was such a thing as Buddhist teaching until I met her. Actually, So all this comes directly from the source with her and her job, as she conceives it, is to put this out to anybody who wants to listen for free on her website, so people can be as poor as they are, and if they have access to a laptop, they can learn how to practice self inquiry and the way she teaches it. That's a great response, Thank you.

I want to dig a little bit deeper into that idea of suffering and the end into suffering, because different people talk about suffering differently. Some people would describe suffering as the additional layer of mental consternation that we put on top of experiences that happen, and we usually do it on top of experiences that are quote unquote painful ones. Yes,

that's an accurate description. Okay, good. So your point is that it's possible to get to the point where we don't do any of that layering, and all we have is the base sort of quote unquote pain that shows up in life. Your back hurts, you feel the pain, but you're not adding to it by all the stories of why back pain is a terrible thing and what it's doing to your life, and all the fear that

comes to it. Exactly so so the distinction between pain, which is a physical phenomenon, and suffering, which is always a mental phenomenon, is really important. So you can feel pain and not project it into the future or suffer because of what you're remembering, even if if your memory goes back to a nanosecond before the present instant and all suffering comes from being uh stuck in a past or an imagined future, and I'm actually an imagined past

or an imagined future. If you actually, even with physical pain, Katie often says this, if you actually focus on the present moment, which doesn't exist because it's always gone as soon as you focus on it. If you if you focus on that place in between past and future, you won't be able to feel any pain because it's gone before the moment that you can feel it. So it's possible, even with physical pain, not to get caught up in physical experience. That's an awkward way of saying it, but

there it is. Let's change direction here a little bit, although it's not a radical change of difference, But I would like to ask you this is just for my own curiosity. Won't listeners gonna be like, why do I care? But I'm curious. Have you ever translated or done a version of the Heart Sutra. Actually, yes, I I just did one for a friend of mine who has a

small press. So it's going to come out in a very limited edition and probably won't come out in any other edition because, as you know, it's extremely short and would hardly make part of a book. So that's my answer. Yes, but it's quite recent and will be something that only very few readers will have access to. I'm gonna need to somehow get on your email list or whatever I need to do so I can get a copy that have. Well,

we'll figure something out. I'll tell you. I'll tell you that I translated Shunyata, which is usually translated as emptiness, I translated it as openness. Ah. That's the main thing I was going to be curious about is for listeners who don't know. The Heart Sutra is a very short

reading that is used in Zen very very much. Most Zen centers that you go to will chant the Heart Sutra at the beginning or during their chanting service, and a lot of it talks about this idea that form is emptiness and emptiness is form, and that word emptiness leaves a lot of Western minds sort of puzzle, going, well, what the heck does that mean? And so I was curious how you would translate that word. Yeah, openness has

its own problems. I think the problems with emptiness are acute because usually people think of emptiness as nothing, and it's not nothing. Um. So openness maybe is a little bit more useful, because what is really talking about is the mind that doesn't get stuck in its own judgments

and that doesn't believe its own thoughts. My old send master used to call it that don't know mind, which I think is a brilliant phrase because it allows us to live ourselves into it and see what the mind might be like when it doesn't attach to any of its own content, when it's completely open, completely free to um, not believe anything, simply to bathe itself in its own experience of of reality without judgment. It's a wonderful phrase, I think. I think so too, that don't know mind.

The other way. I've heard the phrase emptiness translated before it, and that I think is interesting, And I'd just be curious what you think is boundlessness? Oh that's a good way to do it. Yeah, that that works as well. Yeah, yeah, no, no limits, no limitations. All right, there is my overly nerdy part of this interview, and we will we will get back to other topics. But it'd be curious if you tell me a little bit about you did pretty

extensive zen training. Are you still involved in that tradition or or have you sort of internalized it to the extent that you're not, you know, actively, you know, there and and doing that. I'm kind of curious your relationship to it, you know, I don't know how many years

fifty years later. Maybe I was immersed in zen practice for seven years from nineteen seventy three to nineteen eighty, and immersion means doing nothing else, no writing, very little reading practice ranging from four hours a day to twelve hours a day, one seven day intensive meditation period every month, and then many individual retreats, including a number of one hundred days solitary retreats where the schedule was twenty hours

of meditation a day. So just to give your listeners an idea of how intensive that was, and it was very difficult of course in its own way too. Since nineteen eighty, I haven't done any formal meditation except for two many one hundred day retreats where I was sitting between midnight and three am every night for a hundred days. There were some interesting stories involved with that. But aside from that, I haven't done formal meditation since nineteen eighty

and it has all been internalized. I have, after I met my wife, done um intensive work in her method of self inquiry, and that has been amazingly helpful in unearthing thoughts that I hadn't been aware of even with all that experience of zen meditation, and giving me the tools to to question them and have them unravel in amazingly short time. So so that's basically my experience. And listeners, you are hearing an awful lot about his wife Byron Katie,

and we do have an interview with her. It's back in the archives. It's been a few years, but if you search for it you should be able to find it. If not, let me know, so thank you for that. Did you do co on practice as part of your zen studies? Yes, I did. Indeed, I studied with Sung San and and helped him write a book called Drop being Ashes on the Buddha, and then I studied for two and a half years in Maui with Robert Aitken Roshi and did Coan studies with both of them excellent.

I am in the midst of relatively early Coan study. UM. I've been meditating for a long long time, but I'm more recently this year have made a commitment to Zen practice. I mean, one of the dangers of doing a show like this, right is I talked to a different person every week, and I get all kinds of ideas, which led my personal spiritual practice to get kind of fragmented. And so I went, you know what, I want to just pick a path and for my personal spiritual practice

stay there. And so Zen is what I picked. And I've been doing co on work with a teacher and it's been a very interesting experience, very different than what I've done before. I'll bet yeah. Well, the Coon experience was was really helpful for me um and helpful also professionally for for writing. It not only taught me how to get to a state of um stillness, but also and more importantly, how to hold the questioning mind without any content, which is really what what you need to

do to work with collons uh. And it was devilishly difficult at first for years. It's more difficult for people like me who are it's not a question of intelligence, it's a question of intellectuality. So so I came. I started when I was a graduate student and with all sorts of ideas, and uh, it was. It was excruciating the first couple of years because there were so many thoughts going on in my mind and it was so difficult for me to experience even a short space of silence.

And it was like, you know, the whole sky was covered with clouds, and maybe once in a while every few months the clouds would open a peep and the sun would shine through, and then the clouds would close right back up, and there I was again as I was at the beginning. So it really required a huge amount of patients and perseverance, but I knew this was

my path and I wasn't going to let go. I felt like a bulldog who had gotten his teeth onto somebody's ankle, a postman's ankle maybe, And that was it. And so maybe just briefly, if you could explain in your words to listeners what co on work is, because they realized we just had a conversation about something that certainly some of our listeners know but some don't sure.

A coon is an existential problem or question m that's meant to catapult the student into a space of questioning, total questioning, and the rational mind cannot make headway with this kind of existential question. One of the old send masters says that it's like a mosquito trying to bite into an iron bull. No way of doing it. These questions have a great variety, but one of the famous ones that's an old Japanese question, is what is the

sound of one hand clapping? So if you try to figure that out, you'll be looking for quite a long time. And if you are able to get into this space of questioning and hold that for hours, for days, for weeks, for months maybe, or some people for years. I know of one zen master who worked on his first colon for nineteen or twenty years before he was able to

answer it. If you're able to rest in that space of not knowing and be comfortable in it and persevere, then one day the answer will presents itself to you, possibly in a in a spectacular, joyful way. Has happened with me when I answered my initial colon, So that that's what it's like. There are all sorts of other coons, and there's a whole curriculum of colons that was devised over the years by some of the teachings and masters, But it all comes down to being able to immerse

yourself in that space of active, glorious not knowing. The thing I found interesting about Cohen's is, as you say, the intellectual mind if it wants to con exhaust itself because it just there's no where to go. And I'm like you, you know, it's not so much a question. I like the way you said that, are being intelligent but having that orientation. My orientation is towards thinking, and

Cohen's help do that. And the only thing I found so interesting about them is they're always talking about and this goes back to what we talked about early on. They're always talking about true undivided reality. That's where it all points back to. And even knowing that that's sort of the orientation to try and take sort of helps position the mind that way a little bit, or at

least I have found that to be so. And like any really powerful spiritual practice, what is all about is the mind's relationship with its contents, and most people don't even realize that there's a difference between mind and what it thinks. One of the most important realizations for people to have, which really goes back to the Buddhist first noble truth, is something that was very elegantly put by an old Greek philosopher named Epictetus, who said, we don't

suffer because of what happens to us. We suffer because of what we think about what happens to us. And that's an amazing thing to understand that that changes people's lives in an instant, right, right, I think even slightly more fundamental than that is the idea, at least it was for me that these thoughts are just thoughts. Just because it shows up in my head does not mean it's a true thing, and it doesn't mean that it's it feels like it's us, right, It's like that's the voice,

and it feels like it's us. And realizing like that discursive voice that just secretes thoughts the way gland secrete their various hormones or whatever the gland does. Once that is realized, it can become a totally different relationship. This makes me think of one of the in some of the earlier Buddhist text where thinking is categorized as a sense like seeing and hearing. It's just it's just another

thing that happens that receives in stimulation and processes. And realizing that we don't have to believe it is such a fund lintal step, I think for anybody on a spiritual path. Yes, yes, And that's another reason why Katie's first question is so powerful. Is it true? If you've done self inquiry long enough and deeply enough, whenever any uh, stressful thought arises in your mind, instantly along with it

arises the question is it true? And it meets the thought, and the thought unravels by itself before it can cause any damage, before it can result in any action. So it's a it's a very powerful method. Indeed, let's talk a little bit about how you do your work, because you are a translator. But I've also heard you say that, and I can't remember which, particularly the Diamond Sutra and one of your books with Katie. You say that this is not so much a translation as an adaptation, And

I think that's an interesting way of doing it. But tell me sort of your process. You've done so many different things from Buddhist works, the Bogata Vita, the old ancient Greek tales, Christian stories. I mean, you've done the breadth is amazing. Talk to me about how you get into these things and what's important to you in making a translation. Well, sure, I can take a stab at it.

It's a very big question. At the beginning. I'll say that if I've fallen in love deeply enough, I may learn a language in order to read it in the original. That's what happened with Hebrew in the Book of Job and German with the poetry of Brilka, and a Greek with homer Um and some other languages. I don't learn a language for the sake of the language, but so that I can become more intimate with that consciousness that

I've fallen in love with. So it's like falling in love with a woman and wanting to marry her because you want to sink into a year's long state event missy, and always go deeper deeper. So my experience of doing that with the text is very much in parallel with my experience of marriage. It's subtle, and it's um not something that you can acquire a skill for. It's something that the skill has to be discovered. But what I'm doing is not translating the meaning of words. It's that

I'm translating the meaning plus the music of words. And if you don't translate music when you're translating a great poet like Lka or Homer, or a great text like um the Tao Ditching, or the or the Bug of Adgita Uh that are originally in verse, or the Book of Job, if you don't translate the music, you're you're

not translating the text. Because much of the meaning of the text has to do with the concision or the joyous subtlety, or the powerful beating rhythm of the original text, and not to reproduce that in English is to to fail in your job. In my job as a translator, I think it's both and rather than either or, and that's a very tricky thing to do. Um oftense, So what I do when I'm working on a translation or an adaptation is I'll get very still. It's again, it's

a meditative practice. I'll get very still and tune in stereophonically to the original language when I know it. And if I'm translating from a language I don't know, that's a different process, but not so different as you might think. But I'll have the music and meaning of the original in one ear, and in the other ear, I'll be listening for some equivalent music in English, and again talk

about don't know mind. It can sometimes be a long wait, but I'm having a practice in this to know immediately when I'm hearing that music, and when I do, it's just a question of writing it down and then I can make it more subtle and powerful in later drafts. But essentially, that first hearing is where the poem or the text comes into reality for me, and it's always a gift. It's nothing I can make happen. It's nothing I can force into existence. And it's the same as

with coon study. It's just a question of waiting till the answer presents itself to me in its own good time. That's wonderful, And I have about fifty questions following up on that, but I'm going to try and keep them relevant. So much of what we do here is try and

make it relevant for listeners. And I think you've said before a couple of things that your allegiance is to the spirit of the text, the literal meaning, and I think that that is a great spirit that that we can all bring into how we relate with great works is what is the spirit here? Not the literal meanings. So many people get hung up on exactly what the word is, and not that there's not a time and a place for that, but but you're really going for

what's the heart of this thing? Yeah, And in that work, as in I'm going to bring this up again simply because it's my experience. As in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are not opposites. You can be extremely faithful as you're being very free with the text because your allegiance is to the spirit of it, to the music of it, and not to the literal meaning. Um, although you don't

want to stray too far from the literal meaning. But that freedom is something that I learned early on when I was doing my real kid translations, because I went back to real cut. Most of your readers probably have heard of of Real Care, the great German poet who many people consider the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

But in any case, he himself was an excellent translator, and he translated some of the great works of one of the other master poets of the twentieth century a French poet named Paul Valerie, and he translated these poems in a stunningly beautiful way where he was on a very long leash. He made a very long leash for himself, and and strayed out into the not literal with with great abandon And yet it all sounded like the original poem, and it said exactly the same thing, though in a

different way. So I learned from real care to trust that instinct of what feels right, and to know that that kind of freedom was a higher faithfulness than the literal, constricted sense of it. And you know, this really is a very practical application of the word that you mentioned before, boundlessness. You can't give readers that sense of boundlessness if you're afraid of being unfaithful to the poet, or transgressing the

strict limits of literality, etcetera, etcetera. It's something that you come to and then realize that your faithfulness is the same thing as that boundlessness. That's great. When you say you learn a language in order to do the translation, I assume you learn that language in a different way than somebody who is trying to learn a language. To be fully fluent in it or speaking there's a different way you go about You're not going and getting uh. I can't even think of what the most popular uh,

you know, learning new language apps are. But but you're going about it in a different way. Yeah. For example, I can't order breakfast in German. I mean, I don't know the with all my German don't know these basic words, and I'm I'm often baffled by regular conversation because the German that I learned was real kiss German, which is very peculiar and beautiful and um sometimes esoteric and eliteis etcetera. And that's that's what I learned. So it's a kind

of subdialect of German, you might say. And the same with the the Hebrew of Job. I never learned modern Hebrew and the Hebrew of Job. I used to compare when people asked me about it, how how it was to learn Hebrew through working with Job. I would sometimes say, not entirely facetiously, that it's like learning English by reading Finnigan's Wake. Yeah, so it's not your standard English, right right, Well, that is a good place for us to wrap up.

You and I are gonna in the post show conversation, do a little bit of talking about your new book, which we didn't even get to. Oh, yes, we need to get to Joseph and the way of forgiveness. Yes, so we're going to talk about Joseph. And I could tell Joseph loves what is. Let's put it that way. And that's part of what I think draws you to that story, is your idea of loving what is. So

we'll talk about that in the post show listeners. You can get post show conversations, extra mini episodes, ad free episodes, all that stuff at one you Feed, dot net, slash join, and you also get the pleasure of supporting this show. So Steven, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you, pleasure for me to thank you. You're welcome. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed,

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