Glasgow Zen GroupIn this video John looks at Master Dogen’s famous formulation of Zazen as, ‘the continuous dropping off of body and mind.’ Dropping off the mind seems more apparent to us. Here, John look at some suggestions for dropping off the body.
In this video John discusses Dogen’s Fukanzazengi and the imagery used in some of his poems.
In this video John talks about how we understand faith in Zen. The expressions of Zen masters describe what they experience. They are not universal statements about the world. ‘Faith’ is that we too can experience what they have described.
In this video, John looks at the necessity of expressing ourselves fully. We imagine it’s hard for us as human beings to do this in every moment, since we have memory, perception and anticipation.
But we need to understand we are not smeared across time. We cannot illuminate this life with the half life of past or future moments.
Bodhidharma was famously said to have meditatively faced a wall at Shaolin Temple for nine years. But is this “wall gazing” to be taken literally as a person facing a wall, or it it a person practicing like a wall gazing at the world: rooted in equanimity and non discrimination?
Kusen No 319: Experiencing Emptiness in Zazen
In this video, John talks about visual imagery in the Mahayana sutras. Nowadays this can strike us as confusing – obstructing us from getting to the clear ideas we expect to be there. However, early Buddhism grew up in an oral culture without written records. Then, hearing was associated with intellect since this was how the sutras were transmitted and debated. By contrast, sight was associated with a kind of wholeness coming all at once without the mediation of the intellect. The imagery of the Pranjnaparamita sutras, then, is not making fantastical claims about the nature of reality. It’s a description of the ways in which different beings can see, in the full meaning of this.