The core insight of Buddhism is that we suffer because there’s a split between self and world. ‘Self’ in the sense not that we have a subjective perspective, obviously we do, but in the sense that there’s some ongoing, continuous ‘something’ which is essential to us, and which we call self. In Buddhism we say that’s a fiction. But the insight creates two fundamental problems.
Firstly, if we suffer because of belief in a fictional self, how can meditation, which is quintessentially a practice of the self, help us see through that fiction, help us displace the self? And second, if what we’re looking for, at least in some sense, isn’t here already, why should it ever be?
Those two issues have been dealt with in various ways in the history of Buddhism. And one of the reasons for the apparent opaqueness of East Asian Buddhism for us is the unusual ways in which the Chinese and the Japanese have chosen, in a very practical way, to address these problems.
And one of the distinctive ways is seeing practice, not necessarily just meditation, but practice generally, not as the practice of the self, but the practice of Buddha or the practice of Bodhisattvas. So, for example, in the Pure Land school, there is the belief that if compassion arises within me, it’s not belonging to me. It’s not my compassion. It’s not personal compassion which I’m cultivating. It’s the compassion of the Buddha Amida.
And in a similar way, Dogen would say that when we practice, we’re not practicing from the perspective of the self, we’re throwing ourselves into the house of Buddha. At other times he might say it’s not you that’s sitting, it’s sitting Buddha.
These are ways that to us are hard to grasp, but which are eminently practical if we take them seriously rather than literally. The problem with taking them literally is we think that instead of the world being as it appears, it’s populated with these technicolor mythical heroic figures. That’s obviously ludicrous. But what’s not ludicrous is understanding that seeing in this way is meant to produce a feeling shift in us. In the example of compassion, it’s not that there’s a garishly dressed future Buddha hiding away in a mythical place, but rather that compassion, like love, is a universal quality. It’s not particular to me, and I don’t own it. It’s a universal quality which is transmitted through me in the same way as sunlight streaming through your window illuminates falling dust. The dust doesn’t acquire the qualities of light, but nonetheless becomes like a jewel, like a mirror.
Master Dogen’s view of delusion and enlightenment is expressed succinctly in the Genjokoan.
[In Tanahashi’s translation]: “to carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion, that the myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.”
The Zen Site [www.thezensite.com] have helpfully collected together a number of other translations of this passage, which we can usefully use as contrast.
Francis Cook translates it as “conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion, the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment”.
Nishijima’s translation is “driving ourselves to practice and experience millions of things and phenomena is delusion. When millions of things and phenomena actively practice and experience ourselves, that is realisation.”
It’s important for us to to note that the distinction which Dogen is making is between a practice which affirms or assumes the self and a practice which de-centres or [in his phrasing] drops off the self. For Dogen the practice of zazen is plainly the second.
We also need to pay attention to the word ‘jiko’ [ which is translated as ‘self ‘] has a double meaning. It means self in the usual way that we mean: ego. But it also means the bigger self: the whole of creation. Which is taken as being like a body: alive, differentiated, connected, changing. And that double meaning has an extra layer to it because obviously from the position of the bigger self Everything is part of the bigger self, including our personal, egoic sense of self.
And it’s fair to say in these translations, the sense of universal self is probably not conveyed. And the reference to what Tanahashi refers to as ‘the myriad things’, and what Nishijima refers to as ‘millions of things and phenomena’ needs to be clarified. What’s meant is everything within our experience when we’re practicing zazen. So obviously it includes what’s within our perceptual field, structures and trees and sky and all the rest of it. But also what’s arising within what we would normally think of as being the separate mental field of our thoughts, memories, emotions and suchlike.
And both form a whole. It’s not that there are two separate realms where perception is good, and the mental stuff is not good. They form a whole which in traditional language is ‘myriad things’. And which for Nishijima is ‘millions of things and phenomena’. It’s also important for us to understand that if we have a practice which thinks that we require to empty the mind or require to achieve a special state of consciousness, or need to acquire some special quality of consciousness which is called enlightenment, we’re going in absolutely the wrong direction. And similarly, when people use ridiculous language like ‘wanting non egoic experiences’, it’s just a disguised way of affirming the self.
The way to get out of all of that muddle is to do away with that false belief that the emotions, memories and so forth which arise within zazen are random junk, and that tranquility or unvarnished perception of things is good. And replaced by an understanding that everything that is arising within our experience is the universe practicing itself through us. You could also say it is interdependence. Everything that arises within our experience, no matter how unpromising, is interdependence.
When I was doing zazen this morning, I was getting a repetitive song from the early 80s. And the obvious thing was to just think that’s a distraction to be driven away. But liking or hating phenomena obscures its actual reality. We just see phenomena at the surface level. We don’t see the threads of connection which come from us.
That annoying song? I could see on reflection later that it connected to many other things. Specifically to a former friend, who I found out recently committed suicide. We would listen to that song together. And the song was sung by somebody who committed suicide.
I’m just using that as an example. Even the most unpromising things arising in our experience is us experiencing interdependence. It’s as if behind the apparent moron of our babble is a great person, extending everywhere.
The contemporary American Zen teacher Taigen Dan Leighton has written many wonderful books. One of my favorites is ‘Cultivating the Empty Field’ which is his translation of Master Hongzhi. It’s divided up into various sections. One of the sections is ‘Practice Instructions’ where there’s passages like this:
“you must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything, attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly, light and shadow altogether forgotten. Drop off your own skin and the sense dusts will be fully purified, the eye readily discerning the brightness. Accept your functionand be wholly satisfied”
When we hear ‘practice instructions’ like that we think that’s what I need to do so in my zazen I have to aspire to practice in the way that Master Hongzhi is describing,because they’re instructions.
I think that’s an unfortunate misunderstanding. I don’t think they are instructions. I think they’re descriptions of Master Hongzhi’s own experience.
If we take the instruction as a description, but a description of what zazen should be [and is with Hongzhi] there isn’t really a difference. But that’s what Hongzhi is getting at. What he’s talking about when he’s describing his practice of zazen, isn’t that you must replicate that practice, but rather the world of your zazen contains unseen vastness which is yours and which you require to find your own way of describing.
And that’s where sangha comes in. Because we can share our experiences with fellow practitioners in a spirit of compassion and love.
Because our orientation is very often psychological, what’s most obvious to us in zazen is whether our mind is peaceful or agitated. We tend to neglect the evolution that takes place, over time, within our true body. For example, it took me a tremendously long time, to understand the practice instruction of gently pushing out the lower belly when we were breathing in. It was a mistranslation. What it was getting at was when we are sitting in the correct posture, with our weight dropping down through our sit bones, our pelvis aligned correctly, our in breath without intention gently pushes our lower belly out, pushes our pelvic floor – almost imperceptibly – down, and pushes the back of our pelvis back, and all that is a dynamic and connecting movement. On the in breath you are pushing the earth, connecting to the earth, and on the out breath we just relax. And the sense of this energised pelvic bowl pushing the earth makes possible a way of feeling, which is as if our connection isn’t just a physical connection with whatever we are sitting on, it is the connection to the ground of all being. Our root is going down into this shared ground of existence which all other beings participate in.
Likewise, when I started sitting and I heard instructions for pushing up with the top of the head, those instructions misled me for a long time. But what I came to understand is that if our pelvis is aligned in the right position, there’s a natural up movement in our spine. And that pushes out through the crown of the head, the crown chakra and that’s as if we’re pushing the sky. But it’s not a conscious push, it’s a natural movement, An energetic movement of the spine that just –as it were– shoots our being upwards through our crown chakra.
Gradually I came to understand other components. What the Chinese referred to as the ‘jade pillow’, the area around the occipital joint also opens and participates in this up movement.
Our embodied awareness isn’t static: it gradually articulates itself. I became aware after a while that this push up wasn’t coming from my head, it was actually coming from down deep in my torso. That was where the energetic upward impulse came from.
Awareness isn’t a static. Once we realise something, it’s as if there’s the vast world of our zazen which ‘s possible for us to eventually describe as it is gradually revealed by the light of our awareness.
In a similar evolving way although I know intellectually that sitting in a balanced posture with the spine energised uncompresses the torso, it’s only very recently that I’ve come to experience this area around my heart expanding, uncompressing which has a wonderful energetic quality to it, but also an emotional, connecting quality to it. It’s as if the spine, when activated, is like a tree. The roots are going into the ground, the top branches are going up into the sky of spacious, empty awareness. And the heart, the branches, as it were, come out into the world. So, the compassion that we talk about so much in Buddhism is actualised in the body. You feel it, it’s as if there’s a living connection with all beings.
And for me, I want to share this because there is a continual evolution of our posture and our potential awareness of it, which is very often out of sight, but which is extremely valuable for us to give attention to.
I think there’s another point to be made. Our miracle power as human beings is description and empathy. We can feel what someone else is experiencing. But that miracle power isn’t accessed by a description of our emotions, nor by an intellectual description of what’s going on for us. It’s accessed through metaphorical and poetic language. That’s the miracle power.
The problem is that Hongzhi and all the other teachers who are earnestly trying to describe their practice with the language which they have available, are going to use metaphors which are very often particular to the culture, and are quite hard for us to understand. It’s quite hard for us to see that metaphors aren’t an idiosyncratic capsule of compressed meaning but are –as it were – a capsule of feeling, a seed of feeling which opens up something much bigger. And when we’re describing our posture it seems to me we’re obliged to talk in metaphorical terms, not least because the somatic energetic experiencing, the connective and feeling experiencing we’re having during zazen does not fit within analytical language, does not fit within an ordinarily descriptive language. Metaphor and poetry is necessary.
The mirror is one of the main metaphors of Chinese Zen. But it’s quite difficult for us to tie it in with other metaphors that we encounter frequently, ones concerned with space, illumination, emptiness and so on.
The metaphor of mirror crops up all the time. Sometimes ‘the ancient mirror’ or ‘the empty mirror’, and it appears in one of the most famous exchanges in Zen legend, an exchange involving the Sixth Patriarch. (Hui-Neng)
The Fifth Patriarch had asked his disciples for a poem to demonstrate their understanding. The head monk was the only one who wrote a poem. And that poem was anonymously critiqued by Huineng, who then secretly got the transmission and became the Sixth Patriarch.
The poem goes something like
“ body is the bodhi tree, mind the mirror bright, polish the mirror ceaselessly. And don’t let dust alight”
The nursery rhyme rhythm is my own, but you get the idea. On the face of it, this seems an accurate description of meditation. We can think of ‘dust’ on the mirror as being distracting thoughts, and we are ceaselessly, trying our best to put those distracting thoughts to one side and to keep the mind clear, like a mirror.
Huineng’s criticism was that the poem contained a fatal dualism. A dualism between, as it were, the person doing the polishing, and the mirror or, if you want to put it in a different way, between the self and the mind. And that fatal dualism is then amplified by a judgment about what is of value. So ‘dust’ is not of value, but the things of the world that might appear in the mirror perceptually are.
In considering the metaphor further, it’s helpful to rebut the assumption that when the Chinese talked about mirrors, they were talking about mirrors in our sense. It’s true that glass was invented quite a long time ago. The Chinese were familiar with it and would make mirrors of glass. But they weren’t mirrors in our sense, which appeared quite late, the technology appearing around 1835. When the Chinese talk about ‘mirror’, what they mean is a precious metal, bronze, for instance, which is polished so it becomes a reflector. And so there’s several things that we can tease out of that.
The first is that the bronze mirror is very precious. It’s made of precious metal, and requires a great deal of work to put ( and maintain) it in the state where it’s capable of reflecting the world. It requires continuous activity to keep it this way and not become dull. But although it’s precious, it’s a part of the world, it’s not separate or transcendent. It’s something within the world. And the second thing for us to eke out is the idea of depth. When we think of mirror, we probably think of us looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection and then making some sort of assessment about the reflection: “it’s me, but I’m not the reflection”, something like that, but for them the idea of depth is very important.
The depth of the mirror is the depth of the world. It’s the same depth. And within meditation, the masters would often talk in terms of ‘empty mirror mind’. Although it seems a bit baroque to us, in a sense, when I’m meditating this head is like an empty mirror, reflecting whatever comes before it. This gets us away from the fatal dualism of inner and outer reality which, like the senior disciple’s poem, often goes unnoticed in contemporary discussions of meditation.
One fatal dualism is between the activities of the mind, – thoughts and stuff like that, bad, and activities of the world, our perceptual awareness of the trees outside, the birds and all the rest of it, good. And the second, slightly more subtle, dualism is between the idea of us having as it were, a meditating internal space of awareness, consciousness, our personal awareness and the external space of the world. Within this head is my awareness which different from this adjacent but external space ‘outside’.
The metaphor of ‘mirror mind’ applied to our experience of zazen removes those dualities. Not that that idea is original to me. In 1961, Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head’, where he talks about exactly this. He doesn’t, as far as I can recall, specifically mention the mirror metaphor, but it’s the same idea. So that in our conceptual mind, there’s a difference between internal and external. But in our actual phenomenological experience, when we’re meditating, there is no separation. And because there’s no separation, then our meditation is not striving to do something about our consciousness, to fix our consciousness. It’s enacting something. And that’s a very important distinction.
In the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo, Master Dogen poses the question: What to do when the cart is stuck. Do you beat the ox or do you beat the cart?
And he comments on that. The phrase comes from an exchange between Nangaku and Baso about zazen’s purpose. It starts with Nangaku seeing Baso, his student, sitting in zazen. And Nangaku says, “What is your intention sitting in zazen?” and Baso says something like, “I intend to become a Buddha”.
Nangaku then picks up a tile and starts polishing it with a stone. And Baso says, “What are you doing?” And Nangaku says, “I’m making a mirror”. And Baso says, “How can you make a tile into a mirror?” Nangaku says “Likewise, how can you make a person into a Buddha?”.
Dogen renders that story anew, which ordinarily puts Baso in a subordinate position. He equalises them. In Dogen’s rendering of the story, the exchange takes place after Nangaku gives teacher transmission to Baso. Baso’s responses are given an equivalent weight to Nangaku’s statements, partially by re-formulating Baso’s questions into statements, eg “What are you doing?” becomes “You are doing What [Suchness]”
That particular phrase about beating the cart is very helpful in giving a sense of what is involved in our practice, shikantaza. And we can simplify things by saying that in the quote, the ox signifies the mind and the cart signifies the body.
Dogen’s interpretation is much more multifaceted and subtle than that. But if we make that distinction for present purposes, it is helpful for us in making sense of Dogen’s subsequent statement that sometimes in the Buddha way, we beat the cart rather than beat the ox. Because it seems to me that almost all approaches to meditation other than shikantaza are beating the ox.
Because they’re focused on mental resolve, intention and a directional focus. Meditation practice will take you from an inferior position to a superior one..
Shikantaza makes no sense within this mental, intentional framework. Within the mental framework, i.e. from the perspective of the ox, we are sitting in the faith of non-duality, in the faith that the boundaries that we put in place between ourselves and the rest of creation are illusory.
But from the perspective of the mind it’s hard to avoid that just sounding like pious nonsense.
The intention from that perspective of moving from one position to another is inevitably future focused. Which is why it’s stuck. But if we think of shikantaza from the perspective of the cart, from the perspective of the body, then it starts to make sense. The faith becomes something other than an intellectual assertion of non-duality.
It moves from the field of belief to the lived experience of intimacy and trust. From a body perspective, faith resumes its original meaning, not belief, but trust and connection. And so our faith isn’t an intellectually asserted one of non-duality when we’re sitting, it’s just this simple intimacy that we have with all beings.
With our immediate environment first, and then gradually seeping out to all beings, like ink spreading out on blotting paper. Equally, intention ceases to be something future orientated, something by which through effort we change our position, to an intention of maintaining our position. So it’s present focused, not future focused. Dogen’s phrase is very helpful in illuminating his view of shikantaza and about our practice as letting the body leap free, to no longer be stuck.
The first two texts Dogen wrote were the Bendowa and the Fukanzazengi. Both are instructions for zazen.
They are unusual texts. The Bendowa doesn’t seem to have within it anything we would narrowly regard as instructions for meditation. The Fukanzazengi, which Dogen revised continuously throughout his life, does contain what corresponds with what we think instructions should be. But they’re very brief. So the instructions in the Fukanzazengi are “put aside all concerns, don’t think of good or bad.Think not thinking.”
And that creates problems for us as practitioners now, because the apparent brevity of those instructions leads us, I think, to a psychological interpretation of what zazen is, what shikantaza is: “it’s objectless meditation, it’s bare awareness. Meditation is simply allowing everything to come and go freely whilst abiding within non-attachment”…something like that.
But those psychological interpretations of shikantaza are fundamentally wrong and they minimise the extent to which the practice of zazen is dramatically different from many other forms of meditation, which are clearly starting from the practitioner’s conscious awareness and then trying to change that awareness. And so, for instance, the means might be a mantra, or a visualisation.
Or one might have a koan to focus on which is assumed to have a transformative effect over time.
So generally, the idea of most sorts of meditation is to start with the present experience of the practitioner and, through discipline, attempt to change that experience. So meditation is seen as a transformative activity over time.
And that, I think, fundamentally contrasts with shikantaza, which is not a process model at all and which is not primarily concerned with the experience of the practitioner. So in the Bendowa for instance rather than give us a lot of instruction about what shikantaza should be, Dogen starts with this passage, “When even for a moment you sit upright in samadhi, expressing the Buddha mudra in the three activities, the whole world of phenomena becomes the Buddha mudra and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.”
And then he goes on to say, “All beings in the world of phenomena in the ten directions and the six paths at once learn pure body and mind, realise the state of great emancipation and manifest the original face.” And it goes on like that, in that tone. And the problem for us, with writing of that sort, is that we think it’s poetic or we think that it’s making a factual statement eg that my sitting zazen, transforms the world, which we think means well, you do zazen and transform the Crab Nebula, or something absurd like that.
But what we need to understand is that that apparently implausible passage is actually a description of our practice, it’s not the description of the world, not the world in the karmic sense of the word but in a Buddhist practitioner sense. It’s a description of practice. What do I mean by that?
It’s a description of practice because the practice of shikantaza starts with the faith in non-duality, it starts with the faith that we are not sitting in an isolated position: We are already intimate with all beings so, as it were, we’re sitting with all beings: fences, tiles, mountains, and so on.
It’s as if we are like a little tree in this forest of being, and we are that way from the get go. We’re not attaining non-duality, we are already in this non-dual state, which we can’t see within our perception. So the key to shikantaza, the key to zazen is a faith that we are already intimate with all beings
The most famous Koan in Zen literature is probably Joshu’s ‘Mu’ koan which famously starts with a monk asking Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”
The question is disingenuous because by the time this dialogue, if it ever happened, could have taken place, the question of who has and who doesn’t have Buddha nature had been decisively resolved.
In the seventh century, there was an argument within Chinese Buddhism, whether Buddha nature was a universal quality, something which all beings had, or if there were some classes of being who didn’t have it. The position was resolved in the most general and generous way possible by declaring that “all living beings had Buddha nature” [ per The Nirvana Sutra]. And that was extended, in due course. And Dogen reformulated that statement to something like, “all Being, Living,is Buddha Nature”.
Buddha nature and the universality of it is very characteristic of Chinese Buddhism, which in turn is intimately connected with the bodhisattva perspective that characterises the Mahayana tradition. The term ‘bodhisattva’ originally just applied to the 500 lives, the Buddha had before becoming Buddha. It gradually became more and more general over time, aided by sutras like the Lotus Sutra. And accompanying that was a shift from the idea of the buddhist path as having the destination for the individual practitioner of Nirvana, to the path having the destination of Buddhahood. And there was an emotional shift in tone too, from quiescence, tranquility, freedom, equanimity, and suchlike towards compassion.
When we sit zazen and chant the Heart Sutra afterwards, immediately after that we chant the Bodhisattva vows, the first one being generally translated as, “all living beings I vow to free them”. How do we interpret that? The way it is formulated, it sounds as if me, having taken a vow to follow the bodhisattva path should comport myself towards all the beings in such a way as to alleviate their suffering.I don’t think that is a particularly helpful way for us to look at the bodhisattva vows, because I think it risks contributing to a kind of spiritual inflation, which is all too common anyway.
People puffing themselves up with a sort of ersatz compassion does none of us any favours.
The perspective of viewing all beings as potential Buddhas, all beings as [present] bodhisattvas, I think, can be better seen in a different way.
It’s not that I’m a bodhisattva, alleviating your suffering. It’s that to me, you’re a bodhisattva, and all beings coming towards me are bodhisattvas, because all beings are teaching me. All that I require to do, and all that anyone’s required to do, is to listen. So the shift that takes place in Buddhism isn’t a shift from, as it were, modest practitioners to heroic bodhisattva practitioners. The shift is moving from a struggle to free ourselves from a world which is seen as either negative or neutral, to participating fully in a world which is our ally. That is a huge shift. And it seems to me that in some respects, the Chinese created something entirely new, not just something which is now merely quaint or archaic which we can safely ignore in favour of junkshop volumes of ‘ here and now’ crap, which often passes for contemporary Zen teaching, but which is invaluable now.
Because it pivots entirely our way of seeing the world.
Master Dogen said that zazen was a continuous process of casting off body and mind: Shinjindatsuraku. Shin means heart mind, Jin means body and datsuraku means casting off or cast off.
Datsuraku has a double signification. It means in part casting off as similar to an intentional action, like an item of clothing that you would take off. It’s also like a natural falling away, like leaves would fall from a tree in the Autumn. But it’s important to understand that although it’s similar to an intentional action, it isn’t an intentional action, as that would be dualistic, and hence not zazen. It’s quite subtle. If I undress because I’m about to go to bed, in a sense it’s intentional, but in another sense it isn’t. It’s just what happens. It’s situational. We live or die by nuance.
Unfortunately Dogen doesn’t give us a lot of commentary on what he means by “casting off body and mind.”.
Arguably, and this might be controversial, we could look at this as a three-stage process [‘Process’ isn’t the right word, but let’s just use it anyway].
Firstly, when we initially come to zazen, we require to develop a certain equanimity about everything which arises. That’s usually characterised as thoughts and emotions. Thoughts tend to be emphasised more. We’re often told that we should just allow our thoughts to come and go freely,
Emphasising thoughts is unfortunate, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s not an accurate description of our lived experience which, if we analyse it closely, has much which can’t reasonably be considered thoughts. Memories are not thoughts, the workings of the imagination are not thoughts, imaginary dialogue, visual images, sounds — a great deal of the content of our experience isn’t thought.
Second, the problematic consequence of assuming that our experience in zazen is primarily thought is that it emphasises what many beginners experience, which is seemingly incessant inner dialogue. The problem with that is that the inner dialogue seems doubly dualistic: some mental thing that’s going on inside one’s head which is both sustaining a Mind/Body dualism and a Mind/World dualism which feeds a general but erroneous idea, namely that what we need to do to realise nonduality and have insight into interdependence is to eradicate our thoughts. That’s completely mistaken.
The second stage after we develop equanimity is “casting off body”, which is an experience that many zazen practitioners will have, although they probably wouldn’t phrase it that way.They’ll often talk about experiencing an expansive awareness, a vast spaciousness or something like that. “Casting off body” is essentially dropping off a conceptual idea of the body. That is, something with clear boundaries which is a kind of object in our consciousness and, in place of that, experiencing our body, not as something fixed or objectified, but something spacious and energetic and indefinable — part of the world. That is “casting off body.”
The third stage, “casting off mind” can build on the first two stages. “Casting off mind” starts from a position that we may well be experiencing [through sitting in the correct posture and having developed equanimity] this spaciousness in our experience. Yet we are still experiencing thoughts, emotions, memories, and all the rest of it.
This is where the dual meaning of datsuraku comes in.
The “casting off body” naturally comes from sitting in the correct energised zazen posture after having developed equanimity. It’s just natural to then experience openness and spaciousness. But “casting off mind” is closer to intentional.
What we require to do is to orientate and maintain an understanding that what we’re experiencing as distinct objects in our consciousness as thoughts, images, and so on are not, as it were, little cannonballs of thought or memory or image. They’re hollow, and inside each of them is interdependence. Everything which is arising in our experience has these threads of interdependence within it. Some of those threads are expressed somatically, but a lot of the threads are interdependence in terms of time. The content of our consciousness isn’t an obstruction to us seeing interdependence. It is interdependence. That’s one meaning of Baso’s saying “Ordinary Mind is The Way”
Interdependence in terms of Casting off Body is experienced in terms of space but interdependence in terms of Casting off Mind is largely [but not exclusively] experienced in terms of time. So we experience impermanence in those two distinct yet related senses.
Kinhin, the walking meditation that we do between zazen, is poorly understood.
Often it’s explained as just an opportunity to stretch our legs a little whilst maintaining a meditative focus so we can sit for longer, but we can also see it as an energetic practice.
It’s unclear the extent to which it was practiced at the time of Master Dogen. His Master, Nyojo, certainly mentions walking meditation, but with little description and without context. And Dogen, who wrote minutely about all aspects of practice, doesn’t mention kinhin. One view is that it may have been introduced into zen practice by Master Menzan in the 18th century. Almost certainly it came, directly or indirectly, from Qigong.
The nature of the energetic practice is that we’re activating the acupressure point on the sole of the foot called “bubbling spring”. It’s also called “kidney 1.“
When we take half steps forward, exhaling while rolling our weight from the heel to the front and slightly spaying our toes, we’re rolling over this point. When we breathe in, we’re pushing down on this point, activating and lengthening the spine so it’s as if we’re pushing up with the top of the head.
The activation of “bubbling spring” is grounding and energising and clarifying. Many people though can’t manage it on the front foot, or if they can, it’s often only on one foot. However, the back foot is also slightly raised and so is in the position of activating “bubbling spring” as well, so if you can’t get the activation from the front foot then you can push down on the back foot and that has a similar effect — not quite as powerful, but similar.
Kinhin also throws a light on zazen. People very often in zazen are troubled by recurring thoughts, persistent emotions and so on. But very rarely in kinhin because it’s plainly a moving and activating practice. By contrast, some people mistakenly think zazen is waiting for something to happen: waiting for our delusion to clear, for example.
Kinhin helps clarify the nature of zazen as being full activity in the present moment. Just as we have that pushing and elongating dynamic on the in-breath in kinhin, we also have it in zazen. If we’re sitting properly we’re balanced on our base chakra and when we breathe in, it’s as if we’re pushing down gently on the base chakra and pushing up with the crown chakra. Not in a forceful way, but in an energetic way.
If we practise in that way then we bring the body fully back into sitting. We’re practicing fully exerting both our body and our mind. This is completely different from thinking that the ‘point’ of zazen is to change our consciousness, or to do something with our mind. When people say “zazen isn’t meditation”, even though that’s not really true, that’s what they mean.
In the Diamond Sutra it’s said that there are five kinds of eye: the Physical/Flesh eye, the Heavenly eye, the Prajna eye, the Dharma eye and the Buddha eye.
The Flesh eye is our karmic way of seeing. It’s seeing the world with ourselves at the centre and how we can use the world to satisfy our needs and wants. The Heavenly eye is seeing the world as a Heavenly being would see it: from a distance, seeing structure, seeing systems and (for our purposes) seeing the world as linguistically constructed. So for example, seeing a particular tree as an exemplar of the word ‘tree’ rather than as a unique existent. The Prajna eye or wisdom eye is the eye that sees the emptiness of all things. The Dharma eye is the eye which sees the world as full of bodhisattvas, full of teachers. The Buddha eye is seeing the world as an alive feeling whole, like a body.
There’s a risk of thinking this is developmental: we start off with the physical eye and we gradually work our way up to the Buddha eye. Probably the pivot is having an insight into emptiness. On this view, once we develop the perspective of the Wisdom eye,we can move on to these higher stages. That’s a mistaken view in my opinion.
All five of these eyes are available to us now.
Rather than seeing each eye as being independent, I think it makes a lot of sense if we see these eyes in pairs, as they would be for a human being. If you look at it that way, then we can see that, as it were, the pair of eyes for an unevolved person who hasn’t encountered Buddhism or anything analogous to Buddhism is the first two, the Physical eye and the Heavenly eye. This person sees the world from the perspective of self needs and wants, but the world that person sees is also linguistically constructed. The person’s not intimate with the beings in the world, they’re kind of linguistically abstract. I think that’s a much more realistic way of regarding an unevolved or very self-centered person.
It’s very rare indeed to encounter somebody who just sees through the physical eye and that’s it. The pivot is the wisdom eye, but not necessarily in a pattern of linear progression. One can see the Wisdom eye taken with either the Flesh eye or Heavenly eye can produce a kind of Zen or Buddhist sickness. You can see that the Wisdom eye and the Divine eye taken together just produce a sort of ‘nothing matters’ perspective that you would get from a teenage male existentialist or something like that. Similarly the Prajna eye, combined with the Flesh eye, just produces somebody who’s got a justification to do whatever they want because ‘nothing matters’.
Insight into emptiness is a gateway to potentially seeing and living differently, but it can also simply be grafted onto a pre-existing egotism.
And the Buddha eye is far from being something which just appears at the end of a long process of spiritual development. It’s there all the time but it’s not really recognised. When people are out in nature for example they very often have the sense of a deep connective intimacy with their environment but because that’s not reconcilable with a self-centred perspective, it’s misidentified as being something relaxing or soothing rather than an exemplar of something which is fundamentally different.
So in this way of seeing the five eyes one can, as it were, see them in combination, as you would with a person. This gets us out of our developmental model and into something which actually corresponds very well to our actual experience.
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