Zen, Soul, and the lurrm Spiritual Life llff&jiij ™^M WmSw USA $25.00 CANADA $36.50 This is simply the best book that I have read in the past ten years. The Light Inside the Dark cuts through the many contem- porary illusions about the journey which is a life and offers a compass that can guide us to our true home." Rachel Naomi Remen,M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal In this landmark guide to the spiritual journey, respected Zen teacher and Jung- ian psychotherapist John Tarrant brings together ancient Eastern traditions and the Western view of the soul to offer a new understanding and a vivid description of the depths and heights of our inner land- scape. The Light Inside the Dark shows us how we can look into our darkest experiences and find the sources of joy there. In leading us on the journey of the interior life— the part of us that lies below the everyday life of work, family, and the physical world—Tarrant distinguishes between soul and spirit and shows how we can overcome the dichotomies of inner and outer, light and dark. To attain the deepest spirituality, he explains, no emotion need be denied: pleasure, anguish, desire, and contentment all form a part of the soul's great quest. Using real-life stories as well as the teachings of Zen Buddhist masters and the ancient Greeks to illuminate his discover- ies, Tarrant shows us how to live fully through difficulty and discover deep hap- piness in all aspects of daily life. 0998 The Light Inside the Dark The Zen, Soul, Light and the Spiritual Life Inside the Dark John Tarrant Foreword by Stephen Mitchell H&rpzrColYmsPublishers THE LIGHT INSIDE THE DARK. Copyright © 1998 by John Tarrant. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. FIRST EDITION Designed and typeset by David Bullen Design Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tarrant, John, 1949- The light inside the dark : Zen, soul and the spiritual life / John Tarrant. — 1st ed. p. cm. isbn 0-06-017219-3 1. Spiritual life 2. Spiritual life— Zen buddhism—Miscellanea. I. Title BL624.T37 1998 291.4—dc2i 98-17676 98 99 00 01 02 /rrd 10 987654321 For Sarah Contents ix Acknowledgments xiii Foreword by Stephen Mitchell 3 Chapter 1 Invitation to the Journey 11 Chapter 2 The Wildness Inside and the Creatures to Be Found There 27 Chapter 3 Descent into Night 55 Chapter 4 Love in the Dark Time 79 Chapter 5 Climbing into the Light 97 Chapter 6 The First Silence in the World 121 Chapter 7 The Enlightenment of Rivers and Grass 143 Chapter 8 Mortification: The Second Descent 171 Chapter 9 Character and Integrity 207 Chapter 10 Gifts from the Source 241 Notes Acknowledgments This book has been a ten years' work. During that time I dreamed it was a large fish, a transpacific yacht, a fishing boat, and a hot- rodded destroyer. Fish just appear, or don't appear I suppose, and are independent of us, but to the extent that this book is a vessel and a made thing, it has been built by many hands—the ideas, labor, and love of many friends. Stephen Mitchell, my old Dharma brother, supported the work from the beginning with friendship, advice, and money. Michael Katz once told me that, being too lazy to write his own books, he tries to get his friends to write them for him. Along with Stephen, he suggested I write this one and has been a good friend. Hugh Van Dusen has been most gracious and helpful. Two first-rate writers have touched each page: Foreword It is obvious from its first pages, its first sentences, that The Light Inside the Dark is a profoundly original and important book. You can feel the quality of John Tarrant's thinking in his finely wrought verbal intelligence, which is skeptical of abstractions and works close to the bone. With a prose rich in the things of this world, and an insight honed by twenty-five years of intensive Zen training, Tarrant has created not so much a synthesis as a brilliant reimag- ining of the great inner traditions of East and West. He maps the landscape of the inner life and takes us on a journey through it, so that we can feel its terrain under our feet, gaze into its abysses, and lie down under its stars. This is a beautiful, passionate, meticulously forthright book. It is not merely acquainted with the night but intimate with it, modest yet rooted in essential wisdom, personal yet informed by XIV Foreword the strength of what is beyond personality. The usual categories of psychology seem irrelevant here. At this depth, psychology itself is the reverse side of theology, and mysticism is as matter-of-fact as the glass of orange juice on your breakfast table. Here originality is largely a question of returning to origins: knowing the place we all begin from. Tarrant is not the first writer to distinguish between soul and spirit, two words that are vaguely synonymous both in the ancient languages and in ordinary usage. But he has broadened and clari- fied this distinction, and in doing so he has given us new words. Even more important, at a time when it is fashionable to favor soul over spirit, he has treated both sides of the dichotomy with his respectful attention, "an attention so persevering that it be- comes a kind of love." This impartiality allows him to penetrate deeply into the split that any dichotomy creates. We crave not only what the soul craves— depth, darkness, embodiment, the poetry and turmoil of this world, any element that allows us to suffer and mature; but also the cravings of the spirit— for light, purity, birth- and-death-lessness, the dazzle of true insight, the unshakable knowledge of our primal identity. We can't go deep unless we are willing to go high, since the way up and the way down are one and the same. Nor can we speak of spirit and soul in a fruitful way if we take the words too seriously. Ultimately, they are just a manner of speaking, as Tarrant knows very well. One of the delicious ironies of his book is that he is a teacher of Buddhism, which begins from the fundamental perception that there is no such thing as soul or Foreword XV spirit or self. No such thing? But this no-thing beams at us and de- mands our attention, like the "grin without a cat" that beams at Alice from another giver of non-directions. The journey that Tarrant takes us on leads to enlightenment and beyond enlightenment. On this journey, going means letting go. It's not all that hard to get enlightened; what is difficult is to keep giving up our sense of the world so that the world can come to us on its own terms, with its vast, pitiless, loving intelligence. At the end of the journey, we return to the simplest things with an im- mense recognition and gratitude, a recognition and gratitude that I hope you will feel as you arrive at the last pages of this book. Stephen Mitchell The Light Inside the Dark Chapter 1 Invitation to the Journey The Inward Voyage How lovely! Through the torn paper screen, the Milky Way. ISSA When we were children our days were full of wonder—the world unfolded itself and ourselves at the same time. In such an eternal afternoon the grass hums, the ball flies into the blue, and the girl sings the skipping-rope song: Cindereller dressed in yeller went upstairs to kiss a feller; made a mistake and kissed a snake. How many doctors did it take? The Light Inside the Dark imagining the time when she will be bitten by a life that is still being dreamed and has not yet arrived—though it is clear to her father, watching, that life is here for her now, utterly complete. Beneath or inside the life we lead every day is another life. This unseen life runs like a river beneath the city, beneath work, family, ambition, beneath our pleasures and griefs. "There is an- other world," says Paul Eluard, "and it is inside this one." In the helter-skelter, in the rush to get an education, to make a career, to make a family, to find material success, to hurry, to do, to survive, this interior life is often subjugated or paved over. The life that in the child is something vivid and whole goes further in- ward in the adult, where it usually slumbers until it is called forth. But this life beneath or within our ordinary life is irrepressible, un- stoppable: it comes up in loveliness like jonquils out of fallen snow, it rises in supplication like hands out of gratings in a pave- ment in India, and it bursts upward through our chests as the fountain of shock that is our reaction to evil news. It appears in dreams, revery, memories of childhood, in what we find beautiful, and in what we find ugly as a gargoyle, and appears too when we fall in love, when we fall ill, when we are lost on dark paths.