There is no doubt that Discourse on the Inexhaustible Lamp (DTIL) by Master Torei Enji looks like a daunting tome. It is a book that many of us own, but few of us have read. Most Buddhist books we see on the shelves, and Zen books in particular, seem to favour the slender volume, some barely reaching more than one hundred pages. Faced with the nearly 600 pages of dense, elusive text of DTIL, one might be tempted to look for something that feels less like War and Peace and a bit more approachable, like an AI synopsis. Having lived with this book for a couple of years now, I would like to make the case for its defence.

I have written over the last year or so of the difficulties I encountered as I moved from London to a small town in rural Ireland. Now that I have largely found my feet, it be might helpful to look back on the whole experience to see the role that DTIL played facing up to life’s occasional difficulties and dark times.

First, I should confess that I have no great insight to offer about the nature of unhappiness and the release from it. I felt very bad for a while. I no longer feel bad. I cannot claim that anything I thought or that anyone said dispelled those blues. A demon locked me in a dungeon, a demon let me go. I am less addicted to ideas of causation than I used to be.

I remember reading DTIL in the hope of finding an illuminating phrase, something that would dispel my darkness. The more I tried to understand, the more stuck I felt in the mire. When I found “Abstract theory easily degenerates into intellectual questioning. Then the intellect becomes an obstacle to attaining the state of freedom and release” (p106), it was particularly helpful. Trying to understand the nature of our dungeon by examining the chemical composition of the walls is a waste of time. Now that it is summer, I often find houseflies buzzing against the windows of the house. Sometimes I try to let them out by opening the window. It can be very difficult since the flies reject offers of help and insist on head-butting the glass, seemingly sure that the next collision with reality will bring freedom. I imagine them grappling with the complex theories of glass and its translucent properties. Meanwhile, just above them is the open window.

As I read on, I became more engrossed in the book itself and less with the many insights it offered and more with the striking portrayal of the long haul of Zen practice even for those immersed in monastic life under the strictest masters.

My own toe-in-the-water version of the daily life practice, sitting just once a day (well almost), began to seem to be very half-hearted indeed.  Throughout the book, Master Torei recounts how those who imagine that they have reached some ‘understanding’ are challenged, if not completely demolished, by their masters. I am not claiming to have reached an ‘understanding’ but I do work under some kind of ‘theory’ of my life, although perhaps this is also just a ‘story’ that I can cling to without even knowing it.

We make assumptions and have expectations. We have hopes and dreams that might live deeply within us but which only make themselves known after they are challenged or even demolished. So much of my pain was associated with hopes and expectations that I had never acknowledged. I had more sticky attachments to my life than I realised.

However much we might try not to, we do pick and choose all the time. On reading any text, one line or passage will stick with us for some reason. At one point, for example, I found this line to be very inspiring,

“Initially, this training is a personal matter, and all that is required is to go on acquiring strength” p105

I took it to mean that it was up to me, now on my own, to keep working at it and build my spiritual muscles. I took it to mean that I had to stick with the daily life practice and get on with life. Shortly after reading this, I decided I needed to do something different away from my usual activities. I signed up for a course in guitar making at the technical college in the nearest city, nearly an hour away. It was in many ways a dispiriting activity since I had very little aptitude for the skilled crafts involved, but even worse was the way I could literally see the real-world effects of my wandering mind in the messed-up pieces of wood that stared back at me from the bench. Most weeks consisted of my spending three days undoing the mistakes I made in the other two. There were days when it was all I could do not to walk out, leaving a pile of firewood on the bench, in sheer frustration with my ineptitude.

Yet, bit by bit, I sanded and planed my way through to the end. I found a way to open myself up to the daily life practice amidst all of the distractions and disruptions. I used to blame my boisterous young classmates but they were nothing compared to the distractions generated by my own thoughts. I would settle my breathing and literally find my feet and go again, whatever the distraction. In the end I had something that looked a bit like a guitar, but the work and effort were far more important than the instrument itself.  I noticed, almost incidentally along the way, that while I had built up some resilience to the thoughts that wandered through my mind, I was still very much a cork bobbing in the ocean of my emotions, swept up and dropped down with each wave. Something to work with, perhaps.

On one occasion as I was reading DTIL I realised that it is never one thing, one phrase, one story. It’s all of it. Trying to pick bits out for easier digestion is fine, but the real power of the book, like the training, is seeing it in some kind of totality. The quote above might have served a purpose but that was based solely on the situation I found myself in at the time. On re-reading that whole section, I am not even sure that I understood it properly. Or, maybe, you can never read the same thing twice.   The person that read it the first-time round is no longer available to me. We try so hard to understand Zen and our practice. But any attempt to get our arms or heads around it is only trying to tear a clod of earth from the ground and say, “Now I understand the whole continent”.

As we go into the Zen practice it helps if we give it time. It’s normal to want to know how far we’ve progressed in the training but we expect to see results and sometimes far too early. I now suspect the possibility that  I know  so little  of where I am in this practice, that  I am in no position to judge as to whether it is “working” or not. I now realise that however great my suffering felt during the bad times, it would have been a lot worse without this practice. I have wondered sometimes, what it is that kept me going during the worst of it. All I can say for sure it that it wasn’t me. Something was helping me all along.

If it was you, Master Torei, Thank you.