Dharma Talk – Christopher Kakuyo Leibow

I want to start with a personal story. Let me paint you a picture. I’m about 43. I sit on the floor in a small room in a stranger’s house with my back against a wall. It’s late. I am watching reruns of Perry Mason on a 12-inch black and white TV. All my positions, what few I have, are in a closet. I am alone and have recently ended a failing relationship; I also just got laid off and found out that my dog was moving to California with my ex-wife (another failed relationship). I get up, walk down the hall, and waive to the odd man I am renting the room. I just had to leave; the walls were closing in. I get on my motorcycle; at least riding makes me feel free. It won’t start. Try again. It won’t start. I lean against it in silence. The sun is now setting. I take a long drag from my cigarette – and keep thinking how and the hell I ended up here – 43 years old, no house, no car, no job, no wife, no kids, nothing. I am 43 years old and have a suitcase of unpublished poems. Oh yeah, there’s that, a failed poet! Nothing but a 43-year-old failure. 

I was then reminded of an old song—The Lonesome Loser—and my sister, 14, sitting in the car’s back seat, said, “This song always reminds me of you. I don’t know why.” That was a hard day, but that day was the best day of my life—thank God for that day!

I want to talk about glorious, fabulous failure. I love these lines from the poet Longfellow.

Defeat may be victory in disguise;

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

It took me a long time to understand the truth in these lines; I didn’t get them that day either. That day wasn’t a great day; on that day, it sucked. 

It was rough. There was no epiphany until much later. It would have been hard for me at that moment to see clearly. I was heavy with disappointment, sadness, and shame. I appreciate these lines from Leo Babauta, author of Zen Habits. He writes. 

“I feel this heaviness in my chest when I fail. It can make me feel like crying. I feel lonely and I want to give up. I want to fall on a bed and shut out the world. But that doesn’t work, because the feeling follows me into bed, and actually intensifies until finally I have to get out of bed to try to escape it. Failure can hurt.”

We create all kinds of states of mind. We do it daily by the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that we make our world. It would have been hard to see the wonderfulness of that evening. I was in a failure, defeat, disappointment, and blame mind. I couldn’t see it yet.

I didn’t understand yet how glorious it was. When something fails, it doesn’t work. That is it. My motorcycle failed to start. That’s all. My first love after my divorce failed to blossom; my failed marriage was unable to continue, and my career failed to flourish. Most things we call failures in our lives have more to do with expectations than anything else. Another definition of failure is a lack of success or the inability to meet an expectation. I expected my motorcycle to start; I expected my relationship to last. This is the hardest part. I found these lines from Paula Thompson.

“The problem is that we can read too much into failure. Too often, we tie it to our sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-acceptance. The expectation we fail to meet is often our own, or one that we’ve created in our own head.”

These lines remind me of what Rev Koyo Kubose taught—that it was important to free ourselves from the tyranny of our expectations of ourselves and, just as importantly, others. We live our lives with so many scripts of how things should be, and when things don’t go as planned, we suffer. We look for reasons, we blame ourselves, and we blame others. We never consider that there is nothing wrong with reality, just our story of it.

I realize that the so-called expectations of how things should be have caused me much suffering. One of the most important lessons I have learned from the Dharma is that the things that cause us pain can also lead us to awaken. It’s similar to what we recite every Sunday: “Thank you, cruel adversity.” My self-labeled failures have humbled, opened, and broken me down. I create space and capacity to embrace something new by letting go of what is unnecessary or unhelpful.

The Dharma has transformed my relationship with failure, and I would like us to explore how we can collectively change our perceptions of it. We can stop identifying ourselves with our failures and instead see failure as a defining event or situation rather than something that defines who we are. Buddhism is particularly effective in helping us achieve this perspective.

Dogen, the father of Japanese zen, taught that at the heart of the Buddha way, or more precisely, to embody the Buddha way, we must make one mistake after another. You can extrapolate from those lines that the Buddha’s way is the way of continual mistakes. I can do that – my old tradition, that path of perfection to earn love – I failed at that, too. 

Rev Koyo taught that every spiritual journey starts in the dark, and every awakening experience starts with failure. Awakening and failure are interdependent. 

I want to look at both the Buddha and Shinran Shonin as examples. First is the Buddha.

The Buddha Failed. 

Did you know that the Buddha experienced failure before achieving enlightenment? Initially, he struggled in his quest.

The Buddha embarked on a journey to discover a path that would free humanity from the cycles of birth, old age, and death. He first studied under Alara Kalama, a revered holy man, and quickly mastered deep meditative states. However, this was not what he was seeking. Next, he sought guidance from another holy man, Uddaka, and learned even more, but he still did not find the answers he sought. He then joined a group of five ascetics, practicing severe austerity alongside them.

This journey lasted six years, during which he almost starved himself by renouncing all physical comforts and pleasures. At his weakest, the Buddha was so emaciated that his backbone was visible through the skin of his stomach, and his eyes appeared sunken, resembling those of a dead man. It was at this point that he realized dying would not provide the answers he was after. Ultimately, the holy men and the life of austerity did not bring him any closer to enlightenment.

A young woman saw the Buddha and his state and gave him the rice gruel she was carrying as an offering to a tree spirit, which probably saved his life. These lines are from Nubuo Haneda in Dharma Breeze.

“Tradition tells us that after Shakyamuni left his palace and became a seeker, he spent six years studying various doctrines and performing various practices such as yoga and meditation, he even took up aesthetic practice, but he had serious doubts about those practices. When Shakyamuni renounced those practices and received a pot of milk from a maiden to recover his strength his co practitioners thought the had failed and ridiculed him saying you have become a backslider and taken the easier lifestyle.”

Disheartened by his failures, Buddha sat under a fig tree, vowing not to rise until he achieved supreme awakening. I love this from Nubuo Haneda.

Shinran Shonin was eight years old when he received his ordination as a novice Tendai Buddhist monk from Jichin at the Shoren-in Temple. He was given the Dharma name Hannen. Later, he went to Mt. Hiei, the center of Tendai Buddhism, where he practiced as a monk, engaging in chanting and other spiritual practices for over 20 years.

At the age of 29, he took inventory of his life. Upon close self-reflection, he became frustrated to the point of feeling like a total failure, unable to achieve enlightenment. Amid this inner conflict and feeling of failure, he left Mt. Hiei.

During his time on Mt. Hiei, he realized certain profound truths, as he later expressed in his writings. 

“I am absolutely incapable of any religious practice.”

and also wrote this poem.

Like a fledgling attempting to fly against the wind,

Snow weighting its fragile wings,

I struggle

Powerless as I try to help myself.

Some may interpret this as defeatism, surrendering to a sense of failure, and I understand that perspective. However, Shinran did not succumb to it—he discovered a different path.

Like the Buddha before him, Shinran stopped attempting to transform himself into a completely new being. His new path could only be found through his failures on Mt. Hiei. By confronting his setbacks and descending the mountain, he encountered Honen, his teacher, and experienced an awakening.

These two examples illustrate that failure can significantly impact our lives, and we should learn to view it differently.

I want to share these lines from Costica Bradatan, an associate professor at Texas Tech.

“Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being, and that’s precisely the moment when, properly digested, failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise.”

And 

“Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are. “We need to preserve, cultivate, and even treasure this capacity. It is crucial that we remain fundamentally imperfect, incomplete, erring creatures; in other words, there is always a gap left between what we are and what we can be. “

If we let our failures give us space to reconsider and reshape our expectations, there is light; we can find hope. Instead of fearing failure, we can embrace it as a natural part of being human, and that’s when real progress occurs.

DT Suzuki once said that awakening is an accident and that Zazen ( zen meditation) makes you accident-prone. I think the same sentiment can be applied to failure. If awakening is by accident, embracing failure can also make you accident-prone. It is really about changing how we see and embrace failure.

Someone asked Thomas Edison about his 1000th failure to make the lightbulb. “How does it feel to fail so often?” He smiled and said, “I have not failed. I know 1000 ways how NOT to make a light bulb.”

What I learn from the Buddha and Shinarn’s example is a lesson on how to fail, how not to run away from failure but to welcome it and learn from it. Humility is vital – I define humility as the willingness to learn.

To be a student of my failures, I first need to be willing to learn. This can happen when we acknowledge that our failures do not mean we are failures. When we can say to our failures and our failing Namu Amida Butsu—come as you. As Rev Koyo would say, we can learn from the Buddha and Shinran that the key is to keep going amid our greatest failures.

There is an old saying in Japan: Two times down, three times up. 

For the Buddha, this meant stopping torturing his body and sitting at that spot under the bodhi tree with no preconceived ideas until he awoke. 

For Shinran, it was to come down from the mountain and embrace his limitations. Changing our relationship with failure is not just accepting that we fail but understanding that it is in failure that we can be transformed. I love this from Pema Chodron.  

“We say, ‘I’m a failure.” But what if failing wasn’t just “okay,” but the most direct way to becoming a more complete, loving, and fulfilled human being?”

Failure is integral to the path that we walk. That is why it is called Buddhist practice and not Buddhist Perfect. Consider this: we call it a practice, and with practice comes mistakes and failures—many of them. As Dogen reminds us, to embody the Buddha’s way means to learn from one mistake after another. Failure is a fundamental aspect of the Buddha Way.

So, moving forward, let’s lighten the mood. Let’s move beyond the binary of success and failure; instead, let’s play! Play exists beyond the concepts of success and failure—let’s engage joyfully in the field of the Buddhas. Come, join me in this dance.

I want to close with these lines from Bill Bohlman.

Only through this acceptance of our shortcomings, our bonbu nature, can we see the actual cause of suffering. Failure is not only an option; it is our default setting. We are incapable of liberating ourselves; to think so is to only go deeper into the delusion of our ego. …Namu Amida Butsu, is our guide. When we are able to bow and open ourselves to life as it is, [then] we are able to overcome suffering and be symbolically born in the Pure Land.  

Namu Amida Butsu.