This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Life and Practice as a Jigsaw Puzzle - Liên Shutt. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Liên Shutt at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Thank you to all of you for being here. My name is Liên Shutt, and my pronouns are she and they. A special welcome to anyone new to IMC today.
I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been really tired lately. Yesterday, I took a nap. It was a little late, after 3:00, so my girlfriend and I decided to take what we like to call a “nano nap”—just a short nap. We don’t sleep that well, but we know we shouldn’t nap so we can sleep better at night, yet we were so tired.
When I lived at the monastery, I trained myself to take nano naps because we didn’t have a lot of time, and it was very hot and tiring. I lie on my back, and when I hear myself give a little snore, I wake up. Usually, it’s about 8 to 10 minutes. I noticed yesterday I was so tired that I did it three times. Each time I woke up, I realized I had so much anxiety in my chest—a real pressure and tightness. I know it’s from the conditions of the world, the nation, and for me, having lived in Egypt, the stuff in the Middle East is especially hard right now.
I’ve also done my share of distraction from the unease, the worry, the anxiety. I like to do jigsaw puzzles as a wholesome way of distraction. So, I’m going to talk to you about jigsaw puzzles. This teaching could be found in sutta number… no, I’m kidding. It’s from a very thick tome in my life, but not the suttas.
My father, who adopted me, used to love to do puzzles. It was one of the only family things we did that, in retrospect, didn’t have a lot of right and wrong, good or bad. With a puzzle, you do have a form, a final picture. I love doing puzzles. During the pandemic, it was so great, wasn’t it? Did you guys exchange puzzles? Whenever I get a new box, I’m very excited. You dump out the pieces, and it’s a little tedious at first, turning them all face-up so you can see the picture. You need to see what the picture is.
Then there’s a lot of sorting, evaluating, discriminating, and discerning that’s needed. In my family, we gather the edge pieces separately and put that together first. That’s how we go about it. There’s a certain amount of excitement and then confidence because you start to see pieces and think, “Oh, I know where that one’s going to go.” I get a sense of, “I’m going to be able to do this.” A lot of confidence. This is going to be so easy, so fun. I like it so much that even as I’m opening the box, I start to imagine when it’s finished. That last piece is always so satisfying, isn’t it? So already, I’m working towards that satisfaction.
In my family, we sort the edge pieces and then the other pieces, and we put together the edge right away. This puzzle that I got at Goodwill was a puzzle of birds with birch branches. I don’t know birds or trees very well, but there were six birds. I could identify a cardinal and a blue jay, but I don’t know what the other four birds were. There were some black ones with stripes and some yellow ones.
Someone was also doing the puzzle with me, and I’ll just say her name is Jane. She was saying that in her family, after they finished a puzzle, they sorted the pieces into bags so you don’t have to go searching for the edge pieces again. I thought, “Oh, that’s a good idea.”
As I sorted them into categories, I put the red ones in a pile, the yellow ones in a pile, and pieces with little eyes or a beak into other piles. That’s how we do it. As we go, we need to differentiate, and we start to see more and more of the complexity of what is just a cardinal, a jay, or a yellow bird. Some of the pieces seem very clear, and some are really blurry. You also start to see the subtlety of what makes up the feathers; a yellow bird can also have some ochre, some darker colors, some brighter colors.
At first, that’s the fun part. It’s so fun at the beginning when you see two pieces and you just know they go together. You click them together, and it’s so satisfying. You start to put the bird together, but then at a certain point, it isn’t so easy.
As we’re looking for different ways to put the picture together, we have different methods. At one point, Jane said to me, “I need a piece with two heads and three arms.” I gave her a piece, and she said, “No, no, I want the two heads to be this way and the two arms to be like this. You gave me two heads that way, so that’s not the right one.” I said, “Well, I like to go by color more than the shape of it,” but I thought, “Okay, that’s a different way.”
I also started to realize, how do we go looking for the pieces? Do we go looking for the missing piece? Here’s this cardinal, and I go looking for the piece that I think is missing. What is the energy that goes to look for that? I could get really obsessive, like, “I have to find this piece.” Do you do that with a puzzle? You just get obsessed with one little corner or one image. Is there a sense of lack until that missing piece is found?
Is there a way to go looking for the piece that fits, for that “click,” that connection? Is it about looking for the right piece versus the wrong piece, the perfect piece? I start to realize that there’s an attitude to what I’m doing. It’s not just a matter of the task or the doing itself. Besides the excitement, there’s an attitude. Is this puzzle-doing one of sharing? Is it competitive? Is it taking over, or is it being too helpful? “Oh, here’s a piece, here’s a piece.” Am I offering too many pieces to someone? Often, you say, “Okay, I’ll take this bird, and you take that bird. I’ll do this corner.”
I like to do thousand-piece puzzles, so it takes more than one day. I have to admit that sometimes I’ve given myself a whole day and I can do a thousand-piece puzzle in a day. Those are such great days for me. But in general, they take several days, especially when you do it with other people. People start to say, “I’m doing this one, and I’m doing that one.” Someone was doing the cardinal, and they weren’t there some of the time, so I found a piece and put it in. Then I found another piece and put it in there. And I thought, “Oh, wait, maybe I shouldn’t be working on this.” Again, is this being too helpful? Is this doing something to the point where I’m taking over?
Then there’s the moment when you think a piece goes to one bird, but you realize it goes with other birds. A lot of puzzles, unless you choose a 100- or 300-piece one, are designed to be kind of hard. Even though you think you can tell the distinction between colors, they start to blend. So often, in this case, I had three birds I was working on at once. The other person was doing a bird of a similar color, and I offered them a piece. They were like, “No, no, that’s your puzzle part. You should keep on doing that.” And so, where’s the sense of whose part is which? How are we engaging with this?
When they said “your puzzle,” they walked away, and I thought, “Well, what happened here?” Where is it that when we’re engaging with something and it starts to be not so easy, the pieces aren’t clicking together, what you think is this bird isn’t this bird… when or how is it that we stop engaging in the activity? Sometimes you’re spending time with someone, and of course, my girlfriend and I are very busy these days. We’re both essentially gig workers. We go where we’re offered work, or teachings in my case, so we have very little time. Sometimes when we have time together, it’s very hard to decide, “What do you want to do?” So sometimes she’ll do a puzzle because she knows I want to, but then at some point, it feels like, is she engaging just to give in? So when she starts to go off, I have a feeling like, maybe I’m not forcing her by any means, but is there a way in which her interest in doing this is not her own?
At what point does it become staying against your will? You know, we’re talking about a jigsaw puzzle, but when is it that it doesn’t feel so smooth? What is it that makes us walk away and do something else? Maybe go get something to eat. Some of it’s just being hungry, but there’s also that awareness of when I need to divert my attention from what’s here.
Sometimes, though, moving away is to get a different perspective. I generally like to do my puzzle from one side, so if the picture is of trees going this way, I want to be here so I see the whole picture. But sometimes it’s helpful to go from a different angle, isn’t it? To look at the picture so that you can have a different sense of what might go there, what pieces might fit from a different perspective.
Then there’s the way in which sometimes I’m so frustrated that I will walk away for sure. And of course, if a puzzle has many pieces, we’re not doing it the whole time. A lot of the time, we go away and come back. Then I find myself just looking at the puzzle and finding a piece that’s been missing. Often when we do the edge, we can’t find all the edge pieces, and you just keep looking, but you cannot see them. Then you go away, you come back, and you find one. You’re like, “Ah, that’s it!” And when you find one, you have that energy—or I have that energy—in which I go, “Okay, I found that one, so there are more here. I will find more.” And then again, you find yourself getting obsessive. So I go away, and it becomes this sense of, “Ooh, maybe it’s lucky to go away and then come back.” This sense of, when is it my doing, and when is it that I let go? In some sense, it became kind of a joke, like it’s lucky we should just go away and then come back. Is it just fresh eyes? I don’t know. But my girlfriend and I sometimes impute the sense of luck. Is it really luck? I don’t know, but it feels that way.
Then there’s doing this blue jay. I had all the blue pieces in front of me, and I’m putting them together, and they don’t fit. I keep on trying, but there’s a pretty limited number of pieces. So then I go to those piles where you’re not quite sure what is what, and I keep looking for pieces that I know go to the blue jay. I just keep looking and keep looking, and yet all the pieces are in front of me. All the pieces are in front of me.
Maybe you already got it, but what I’m trying to point to here is that there are patterns of thinking and perceiving, conditioned ways of processing and being with information and situations.
I mostly think I go to do a jigsaw puzzle because of the content. There’s a picture, you get it. A jigsaw puzzle has a very clear end result. It’s about putting it together; it’s a task. And yet, the process of how that picture comes together, how you engage with it, shows itself in the doing.
What did I list? Is it looking for a missing piece, a sense of lack? Is it about being competitive? Is it about “mine” and “yours”? I want to be very clear that noticing these habitual patterns of either perceiving or thinking, one is not better than the other. Noticing them is the key.
There is something in Buddhism called personality view, or sakkayaditthi1. How is it that when you make contact with something, all your habitual thinking around it—your papanca2, you could say, your grouping of stories that go with it—then solidifies into a sense of identity? Sometimes when we recognize a habitual pattern, we go, “I’m a competitive person. Oh no, I’m greedy. Oh no, I’m so right-and-wrong.” Or, of course, you do it to the other people you’re doing the puzzle with.
I would like to say that practice isn’t so much about figuring out whether I’m a greedy person or a competitive person. It isn’t so much to solidify a sense of self. It’s more about being aware and open in that moment of perceiving a pattern and maybe not rushing so much to interpret what it means. Can we stay there and see and investigate what is right there? What happens right there? Do I contract? Do I shame, be it self or other? What is the movement of both heart and mind at that moment?
I know that with practice, I think that a dharmic moment, a time in which I am practicing well, is when I’m compassionate and open—very classically, we could say, without greed, hate, or delusion. And yet, mostly in practice, I find I have greed, hate, and delusion a lot. And so to me, that’s a dharmic moment. That’s the opportunity. That’s the fun.
Really, in some ways, our practice isn’t just coming to a dharma talk or a meditation or a chant or a service. A dharmic moment is when we wake up. We have a sense of what is happening, a clarity of knowing, and we rush to figure out what we should do about it.
I’m not even telling you that this is what you should do. I’m suggesting that that moment is a moment. Can you just stay open and notice what happens right then? Very much in sensation, very much in the quality of feelings—by that, I mean emotions—very much in the quality of thinking.
And there is also a sense of choice in that moment. It isn’t purely a moment of awareness. It’s important, and in that moment, you have a choice of how you interact with what you’re aware of. And how do you keep on interacting with what you’re aware of? Even when I think, “Well, what happens right then?” I think of a whole process. I need to figure out the pattern, I need to go like this. And sometimes we see that as we practice, but the practice isn’t to necessarily look for that all the time. So it’s actually, what is here then? What is here then? What is here then? What is here?
I don’t know about you, but in the meditation, obviously, I’m giving a dharma talk, so I think about the dharma talk. Then I go, “What is here?” I think about having lunch with someone afterwards, so I brought lunch, but it’s in the fridge, and I want to remember the lunch. So I worry about that. And then I go, “Oh, what’s here?” What’s this moment of… you know, there’s a practice of going, “Ah, anxiety,” when I think “lunch.” Certainly. And in some ways, I’m saying that is part of this puzzle thing. And there’s also, what is right here? What is right here? What is right here?
So it’s the same heart and it’s the same mind doing a jigsaw puzzle, and the sitting down to do the jigsaw puzzle, and the doing of the jigsaw puzzle, and the getting up from the jigsaw puzzle, and the interaction about what you do with the jigsaw puzzle. Every moment is an opportunity to be aware, and not a task. There’s no having to finish the puzzle in some way.
I’m also aware that doing a jigsaw puzzle is a way of… not really control. Maybe I’m just waking up to that part of myself around a jigsaw puzzle that is about control. I’m just noticing that right now. Because I was going to say, to do a jigsaw puzzle, you buy the picture, you already know what the end result is. Maybe it’s also about which ones you find interesting to put together. My father loved those Escher ones in the 80s, with the stairs going everywhere. He liked those kinds. And people liked to give him puzzles. You know how dads are; there are very limited things you feel you can give them. One time we got a puzzle of a black cat with two yellow eyes. It was a big square one. So much black. I do not like those kinds of puzzles.
I’ll confess, my favorite kind of puzzles are so busy, like a yard sale puzzle. You know those yard sale puzzles, or the garage that’s just filled with things? I know I like it because there are many little things I can put together, and then they’re done. And so that’s fun for me, to go from thing to thing. So obviously, my mind is inclined towards certain ways of being with conditions. And that’s okay. When I’m doing a jigsaw puzzle, at least when I do it, it’s for fun. It’s not a challenge in the sense of having to do something hard.
Is it that wanting to know what the end result will be? Again, that last piece is so satisfying. So how I do a jigsaw puzzle is really about engaging with the pieces, in the heart and the mind, as I am doing that, and with others.
The thing is also, puzzles come to you. Even if you go to Goodwill and buy one that has tape or Saran wrap around it, you can get home and there are pieces missing. What happens then?
So maybe you already have a jigsaw picture of the rest of your day, and you’re going to go and find the pieces to put in and who you’re going to do it with. And maybe you have a jigsaw puzzle view of the world and the image that you would like it to be. And that’s okay. You already have it. Might as well be okay with it.
And how it comes together, and how you respond as you interpret how it comes together, to me, is practice. Which actually isn’t different from living.
Maybe the difference as a practitioner is, is there an awareness of what is here? What is the heart’s and mind’s response? What is the heart and mind allowing for input? And what is the heart and mind as it negotiates the view we have chosen and the myriad things that come forth and reveal themselves to us?
Thank you for listening.
Liên Shutt: Are there any pieces you’d like to share with me? And I always invite people, maybe you’re a little shy, maybe you wouldn’t be the first one to talk, so give it a try. But it’s a choice.
Martha: Actually, Liên, your talk really moved me, particularly because my brother got Alzheimer’s. At the beginning of Alzheimer’s, he was very, very good at jigsaw puzzles. He could do ones that I couldn’t do. And then, of course, as the disease progressed, he had to do simpler and simpler ones, and eventually, he couldn’t do them at all. In fact, I remember a moment when we had the edge pieces there, and he took one out and put it in the middle. And I thought, “Oh, dear. Okay, it’s not about completing the puzzle, it’s about being together.” And eventually, he got to a point where he couldn’t put words together in a sentence, but he would say, “The pieces, the pieces.” So your talk is just making me think of my brother in very fond ways. Thank you.
Liên Shutt: Thank you, Martha. I feel it in my heart, that story. Thank you.
Ken: Hi, my name is Ken. Thank you for the talk. In part of your talk, you’d mentioned the decisions or making a choice. Can you expand on that in terms of, you know, you’re going through and doing the jigsaw puzzle, and you find a piece and you decide what you’re going to do with it, and how that relates to the dharma talk?
Liên Shutt: Well, that’s a lot to be said about choice. Let me see if I can frame it in a way that maybe resonates with your question. In some ways, I know that I see the world as like a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes I think, “Oh, I choose an image,” and then I say, “Oh, I’ve made a choice to work in this section.” And I think it’s useful because there’s so much here, especially when things feel overwhelming. Maybe now I’m getting my control thing in a little bit here, right? Because this is something I can do something about, and I can actually have fun doing it. But noticing when it doesn’t become fun is part of a moment of choice.
At first, we approach things by saying, “Do I have a choice or not?” And for many of us, we think, “Oh, I don’t have a choice here,” even though we’ve picked the picture and we say, “I’m going to work on this section.” Part of practice is realizing when that section that you made the choice on, when you think you don’t have a choice anymore. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit, I can’t put this together. And then what do you do then? Do you go off to do another piece? And you know, that’s not bad. In a jigsaw puzzle, we can say, “Oh, I’m just going off to do something over here.”
In some ways, our practice is that we say there are certain things that you focus on. In my family, we focus on the border first, so there are some parameters of how we can view. And certainly, Buddhism will give you a view. The Four Noble Truths is the view of Buddhism. There’s suffering, there are origins of suffering (causes), there’s the end of suffering, and then the Eightfold Path. So in some ways, we can be given a view, but Buddhism isn’t actually… that’s just the map. The doing, the traveling, is where you start to see, “Oh, how do I relate to the view of the world?”
With practice, there are several ways of talking about it. You could say, “I need to keep on until I understand.” If I have chosen this view of the world, I keep on meeting it with the teaching of how to view. Buddhism gives you a teaching of how to view, right? The practice is that there are skillful ways and unskillful ways, for sure. And hopefully, it has less greed, hate, and delusion. That would be the main thing in Buddhism. When we have a choice, we go towards non-greed or renunciation. For hate, it’s metta3, so towards goodwill instead of ill will. And then towards karuna4, or compassion, instead of cruelty.
So yes, in some way, that’s it. But the doing, or the understanding that you always have a choice… because what is renunciation? I could tell you what the sutta says, with some notes, but until you go and practice it and realize what kind of choice you make and pay attention to what might be the result… that might be the other thing.
Don’t forget the first of the Eightfold Path is skillful understanding or skillful view of the world, which is the Four Noble Truths and—this is the part that people forget—karma5. Karma is the big, big, big view. And the big view is that things are dependent upon causes and conditions. And causes and conditions are dependent upon choice, volition. Karma means “action,” volitional action, actually. So it’s not just passive. We might think that things come to us and we passively receive them, but in each moment, we have a choice about what we do about it. Hatred certainly can come our way, and we can be taught hatred. Without a doubt, we’re all taught hatred. I have not met a person who has not been taught hatred. What do we do at that moment? Sure, there’s teaching to help us, but in that moment, we have a choice.
And yes, we have teachings to help us know how to make better choices, the choices towards non-harming. Some of that has to do with really having a sense of what is the motivation, which is the second part of the Eightfold Path: skillful thinking. This is the wisdom part. Thinking is not passive in Buddhism; thinking is always purposive because our thinking becomes beliefs, which then goes into the sila6 section of the Eightfold Path, which is the interactive part: skillful speech, skillful action, and skillful livelihood. So our thinking is really more… I like to say “motivation” because your thinking drives you. That’s why I like the word motivation. It gives you both the aspiration and the drive to do it. Gil Fronsdal likes “attitude.” To me, that feels a little bit more big, you know, “I have an attitude,” which can become a little tight. I like motivation because I feel like there’s a little bit more wiggle room. Does that answer your question?
Ken: In many ways, yes. Choice is so big.
Liên Shutt: Choice is so big. There is free will in Buddhism, for sure. Thank you.
Liên Shutt: Let’s dedicate the merit. For any merit we accrued this morning, we dedicate to ourselves. Let non-harming, love, and compassion center us and guide us as we meet the conditions of our lives, be it in a jigsaw puzzle or the rest of the world. This we wish for all beings in the ten directions and the three times. Thank you very much. Have a beautiful day.
Sakkayaditthi: A Pali term for “personality view” or “identity view.” It is the mistaken belief in a permanent, independent, and substantial self or “I” existing within the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness). ↩
Papanca: A Pali term often translated as “mental proliferation,” “conceptual proliferation,” or “objectification.” It refers to the mind’s tendency to take a simple sensory experience and elaborate on it with a cascade of thoughts, stories, judgments, and associations, often leading to craving, conceit, and wrong views. ↩
Metta: A Pali word for loving-kindness, goodwill, or friendliness. It is the first of the four Brahmaviharas (divine abodes) and is cultivated as an antidote to ill will. ↩
Karuna: A Pali word for compassion. It is the wish for others to be free from suffering and is the second of the four Brahmaviharas. ↩
Karma: A Pali word meaning “action” or “deed.” In Buddhism, it refers specifically to volitional action—the choices we make. These actions, driven by intention, lead to future consequences in this life and subsequent lives. ↩
Sila: A Pali word that refers to ethical conduct or morality. In the context of the Eightfold Path, it comprises Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood. ↩