What is trust? What is trust in Zen?
The English word ‘trust’ comes from the Old Norse, traust, meaning confidence, protection, support. It’s like a moose crossing a frozen pond. The moose first gently places one hoof on the ice, touching it, testing its strength before putting weight on it. Then it does the same with a second hoof, and the next… Once the ice is tested, its ability to support the moose verified, it confidently ambles across the pond. The moose has faith in the ice, but not blind faith. It does due diligence first. The moose’s faith in the ice comes from a verifiable trust.
In the 1970’s Ronald Reagan, negotiating a nuclear disarmament policy with the Soviet Union, popularized a Russian proverb, doveryay, no proveryay, “trust, but verify”. The Zen way is closer to the moose’s way, verify but trust. But in Zen practice these activities are not sequential, they are more like a successively morphing yin-yang of ‘verify-trust’.
Paraphrasing Dogen Zenji, ‘verifying the self as the 10,000 things is delusion; the 10,000 things verifying the self is awakening’. In Zen, the self that is being verified is not the self which is limited to the mind of comparison, the mind of good/bad, like/dislike. Not the self enamored with who it is, what it likes, and how to keep it all intact. Since everything is changing and impermanent, this self of preference and permanence can be neither verified nor trusted. The self verified by the 10,000 things is the self of no-self. This ‘no-self-self’ is verified and trusted AS change and impermanence.
In verifying the self of no-self (and we could just as easily say ‘the mind of no-mind’) what is being trusted is ‘things-as-it-is’. Trust in things-as-it-is has some attributes: fluid, but not formless; receptive, but not passive; aware, but not discriminating; forthright, but not proud; it may even be assertive, but not aggressive; 10,000 more, but this is enough. How can it not be and be all these things? Because ‘it’ isn’t. There is no ‘self’ being ‘no-self’. If there was a self being a no-self it would be a self, no? The no-self-self is profoundly and absolutely unknowable. Here there is no ‘thing’ to trust and no ‘one’ to trust it. Things-as-it-is.
So how do we practice this simultaneity of verify-trust as the no-self-self?
The only trustworthy answer is, ‘as best we can’. When we stand up, we notice. When we fall down, we notice. The ‘we’ that notices without thinking (the mind not bound to comparison) is the no-self-self. This is true only if it is JUST noticing, not noticing plus all the cascading mental formations of the self of self.
And when we can’t notice without comparison? When the valence of the stimulus + memory is just too much. Then we verify-trust the Three Treasures, the precepts, our body, our breath…our Zen practice. We know what do, trust things-as-it-is, the true self of no-self.
This is…Trust in Zen.