Category: Kusen

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What is ‘Casting off body and mind’?

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.

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Kinhin

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.

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419. The Five Eyes of a Person

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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418. Practice Realisation

The Soto doctrine of Practice Enlightenment—  the unity of practice and realisation/enlightenment- seems at first blush and to put it mildly, implausible. 

The purpose of practice -the purpose of buddhism – is to overcome the primary duality of self and world. Common sense tells us that we can achieve that in one of two ways. Firstly, we can change our conceptual framework to deny  the existence  of a separate self. It’s easy to say. We can declare the unity of all being, and look around for corroboration of that assertion, in quantum theory, for example.

Yet somehow that never seems to make enough of a shift. So we then say—if I practise, and I practise seriously enough and long enough, I can achieve realisation.  

Realisation is the fruit of practice. 

Practice is putting in the hard yards for the reward of realisation . 

That’s a very attractive notion for us because it fits in with our general sense that we do something to get something, in this case a dramatic, miracle-like experience of non-separation. Being a vividly alive part of a vividly alive whole.

By contrast, the idea that somehow, just by sincerely practising, we’re already, as it were, in the ocean of realisation seems ludicrous.  Yet the idea that there’s practice and then there’s enlightenment is not an unchallenged view within the original Zen schools. For example, Zongmi (who was the fifth and last Patriarch of the Hua-yen school, and also a Patriarch in the Heze Zen lineage) was of the view that Enlightenment preceded practice. That is, we would have an experience of the wholeness of everything, which drove us  to practise, which was then deepened and integrated.

I think Practice Realisation is eminently understandable if we reflect on our own experience rather than trying to cobble together an impressive sounding, but fundamentally hollow, bricolage from the words of Dogen and others.   We owe it to ourselves and other practitioners to state our understanding of doctrine in terms of our actual experience. 

And although we may be wrong, it doesn’t matter, because our errors allow other practitioners to state their errors. And through that, we get somewhere.  We shouldn’t try to create a match between now and a constructed past. Yet in starting from our own experience, we can see that it arises within the interdependent network of all practitioners: past practitioners, practitioners now, and practitioners of the future.

This is my understanding of Practice Enlightenment: 

The emphasis we place on correct posture can be understood, in part, as an attempt to displace our dominant visual sense in favour of our somatic sense. 

Generally, as we go about our lives, we’re carrying around a picture or a number of pictures, and primary among them is a sense of what we look like from an external vantage point. Don’t take this too literally: it’s not a picture, it’s like a picture. 

And it’s the dominance of that visual sense [which is very connected to thinking] that is primarily responsible for our sense of separation, and hence our sense of  duality.  Our attempts to try and overcome that duality  by ideas, or by effort based on ideas, simply propagates and continues the dominance of that visual sense.  It’s inherently  self-defeating. And  even if we experience a dramatic sense of unity,  in due course it is appropriated to the self.

It becomes my Enlightenment, my wisdom. 

The doctrine of Practice Realisation is part of a means of displacing that visual sense in favour of a felt sense, a somatic sense.

Which explains the  emphasis on sitting properly, which creates the sense of a dynamic energised spine, connected with the earth and sky. It rediscovers our breath as being like a non-conceptional, alive, present and energetic presence at our core, around which our body is gathered. All of that helps manifests a sense of ourselves as somatic, three-dimensional, energetic beings.

And the paradox is that once we can experience ourselves in that way,  non-separation arises naturally. Not as a dramatic miracle. As an ordinary one. 

You need to use your own language. You may have a sense of all encompassing spaciousness. Or a deep sense of peace permeating everywhere. Or s sense of the universality of light. But what’s indisputable is if we can experience ourselves somatically, already we’re  not separate  from the rest of creation. That’s not to say that we’re not having thoughts and  ideas or that there’s the sense of intermittent mental interference and so on, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

It’s that primary sense  of  non-separation into which, as it were, through practice we can sink further into, as if we’re slowly walking into the ocean we were always standing in.

Practice Realisation seen in this way matches up with  Shikantaza, just sitting.

Simpletons think ‘just sitting’  means we’re not focusing on gain. It doesn’t mean that. It means that when we’re sitting, there’s just this Oneness of sitting, which includes everything.  This is what Isso Fujita calls One Piece Zen: all of creation, all of time is this One Piece.

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417. The Self/World Problem

One of the primary issues in Zen is the problem of Duality–the sense that there’s a split between me and the world.

The temptation is to try and heal that split in the realm of thought. We  think the split is there because we think of ourselves as separate beings and hence regard the world as a resource: stuff to use, stuff to throw away. 

The cure for that would seem to be changing that perspective, replacing  selfish individualism with a matrix of ideas emphasising interconnection, compassion, kindness and so on.

Laudable as it is to foster those qualities, that way of approaching the problem is fundamentally mistaken. The source of the duality is not at the level of mind or ideas, or not at least in this sense that we normally take that to be. Rather, the source of the duality is the dominance of our visual sense.

If we examine our experience carefully, we’re very often carrying around a kind of proto image of ourselves, seen, as it were, from the outside.

That visual sense is culturally our dominant sense. It is very connected to the Mind and to our sense of self. It dominates all our other senses, particularly our somatic sense, our momentary, felt, embodied sense. 

This explains some aspects of meditation which might appear to be otherwise odd. 

Why is there such an emphasis on posture for example?

Because if we’re sitting in the correct posture, our spine becomes activated. We have this sense of visceral aliveness we can’t really articulate, but which is clearly there.

And if our posture is correct, we experience our breath right at our centre.

When we’re breathing like this, we’re very aware of the constant interaction between our breath and our flesh, our breath and our bones

The breath is something which the mind can’t  conceptualise or temporise. 

But you can see it in other ways as well. For instance if we develop more of a sense of the interiority of the mouth; the fleshiness of your tongue, the depth of your mouth, this has a similar effect; alerting us to the aliveness ‘inside’. When we put our tongue on our hard  palate, it sometimes activates our third eye, it sometimes creates this curious sense of dynamic uplift in our head and neck.

All this reactivates our somatic sense. Which diminishes the visual sense. It doesn’t dispel it, but diminishes it. Paradoxically, by reactivating the somatic sense, the sense of ourselves as being three-dimensional rather than as if it were a visual two-dimensional image, breaks down that primary self/world duality.

It’s an illusion to think that duality has to be suddenly flipped over in some miraculous kensho experience.

It’s enough that its grip is gradually loosened.

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416. Like a person

The single best known phrase in  Zen is probably from the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness,  Emptiness is form”.

The Heart Sutra was almost certainly written in China and then  translated back into Sanskrit to create the appearance of authenticity.

Its fame is ironic, as the Chinese had considerable difficulty with the idea of emptiness.  When Buddhism first came to China with its form/emptiness pairing, the inclination the Chinese had was to equate it – wrongly – with their own categories of Li and Shi.

Li means principle. Shi means phenomena. We’re familiar with it in Zen because it’s in the Sandokai, a doctrinal poem written by Master Sekito in the 8th century.

It’s two different ways of seeing. Li is looking at things on a kind of systems basis and Shi is looking at particular phenomena. So for instance, the weather system would be Li and the raindrops would be Shi. Gravity would be Li and the planets would be Shi, and so on.

The reception of Buddhism was against a background of pre-existing Taoist thinking, which had, for example, the concept of the void, and which sounded quite like emptiness, but wasn’t. 

What’s interesting is that out of this apparent misunderstanding of  emptiness, a tremendously rich and unique tradition evolved. The Indian perspective is very much centred on the individual practitioner or group of practitioners, and the world is seen as either neutral or obstructive.  

The transformation which the Chinese created was of a completely alive practitioner within a completely alive world. The world is aiding, not obstructing the practitioner. 

This brilliant ‘error’ illuminates something very important.

The way in which we should encounter the sutras, the stories, the sayings shouldn’t be as a fixed and certain body of knowledge we require to learn. It’s more like meeting a person.  

A person who can change us. And also, critically, a person that we can change. Not change in the way that we could just integrate that person within our own systems and perspectives (“oh, he’s just like X”) but at a deep level, underneath thought and choice.

There’s a perennial temptation for us to often have an ideal of what our practice should be like, and to judge whether or not we’re achieving that. But it’s much better to regard our practice not as a conforming action, squeezing ourselves within what we imagine previous generations of Buddhists to have experienced, but as a creative and an expressive action of the whole of us, which the mind can’t see but which we can accept through faith.

We can understand Buddhism as being, in a sense, a history of evolving metaphors. Those metaphors, like a person, are not closed in meaning.

For instance, Dogen used the metaphor of darkness, which habitually referred to ignorance, in a novel way as non-differentiation and of intimacy.  Because in the dark we cannot see anything as separate from ourselves. Similarly for us, very well worn metaphors that the Chinese used, like the mirror, can live and change within us. New meanings can always come forward. 

That is one of our roles in a culture which is at the starting point of receiving Buddhism.

We stand against the natural tendency to assimilate Buddhism within our pre-existing categories. We stand against the seemingly opposite tendency to replicate the cultural forms of the civilizations from which we’ve acquired Buddhism. We are like a blind person painting. Or a deaf person singing.

By no means useless.

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415. The Brahmavihara

When people talk of the benefits of meditation, they often cite compassion, equanimity and loving kindness.  These three are part of what the Indians called the Brahmavihara and the Chinese called the four universals.The remaining one is Empathetic Joy.

Contemporary talk is often about cultivating compassion or cultivating loving kindness. Yet there’s an error in understanding these four qualities as personal qualities to cultivate and retain. 

Why is that a mistaken view?

Because it’s part of a bigger mistake: meditation is a form of self improvement.

The corrective  lies within the original term Brahmavihara. 

Brahma is the Creator. Vihara means dwelling.  

What’s meant by dwelling  is we can, as it were, be within the house of compassion,  within the house of loving kindness  but it’s not our personal possession. It’s not our house.

Thinking of the four dwellings as personal qualities encloses that which should be open. We misunderstand compassion as kindness or concern. We misunderstand equanimity as serenity, when it means non discrimination. And we, tellingly, miss out empathetic joy entirely, because it doesn’t so easily fit a model of self cultivation. And, actually, mudita just means joy. Adding ‘empathetic’ gives it an attitudinal gloss, making it easier to squeeze it into the model.

There’s also another point though.

The self improvement model is just the latest iteration of an instrumental perspective which has bedevilled Buddhism from the start.  

The contrasting perspective is that the primary dwelling place of these virtues is in zazen.

We can see the Brahmavihara as four aspects of zazen. By throwing our self and our ideas of gain and loss to one side and just wholeheartedly sitting, we can dwell within these four virtues. Together with all beings.

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414. Space

The physicist David Bohm said that matter was condensed light. Frozen light.

In Sanskrit the word for space is Akasha.

Akasha also means ‘sky’ and ‘ether’. In Hindu philosophy it is one of the elements. It’s positive, not negative.

When we think of space however,  we’re likely to see it in abstract,  Newtonian terms. We’ll think of space, as we think of time, as a kind of container that we live within, rather than something that lives within us. And we’ll think of it in terms of absence, vacuity. A negative.

Zazen is a way to recover an embodied, felt sense of space. And that’s important, because if we don’t have that, we’re liable to construe meditation and Buddhism in purely psychological terms.  While we tend not to talk of space much, a word that we talk about ad nauseam, awareness, is very often expressed in spatial terms: the space of awareness. But this is often collapsed into something psychological or internal.

But because when we’re meditating we’re not crumpled around the sense of self, an embodied sense of spaciousness becomes eminently achievable. Which has a number of implications. Firstly,  the boundary between body and world becomes much more fluid. Secondly, the connection between space and breath – breath as activated space; breath as energetic space – repatriates space from its false mental home. And thus we can see that underlying our mental chatter, our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations is something very very subtle.  It feels  tremulous, a sort of vibratory aliveness. Like condensed light.

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413. All These Lifetimes

Before becoming the Buddha, the Buddha is said to have lived 500 lives as a Bodhisattva. That is, as a compassionate, loving, and wise being who seeks the liberation from suffering of all other beings.

In the Lotus Sutra, [probably the most influential of all of the sutras for Chinese Buddhism, and hence Zen] it is said [by implication] that all beings will become Buddhas. It might be at an inconceivably distant time in the future, but all beings, without exception, even the least promising ones, will become Buddhas.

If you, albeit in the very, very far future, are going to become a Buddha, that’s the most important thing that could ever possibly happen to you. In a sense everything prior to that, including your life now, pales into insignificance. 

So in a sense, if you’re going to become a Buddha at some point in the future, you’re already a Buddha now. Thus we have the Chinese doctrine of the Universality of Buddha Nature which became an established feature of Chinese Buddhism prior to the formation of the Zen School in the 8th century.

Furthermore, if every being without exception is going to become a Buddha, then every being without exception is a bodhisattva now. That doesn’t mean you’re a bodhisattva,  it means that all beings you encounter are bodhisattvas.

All beings are teaching you.

This is the opposite of the spiritual inflation which is implied by thinking of practice as being a means by which you advance towards Enlightenment: you gradually elevating yourself out of the grime of the world and the unwelcome company of ‘unevolved’ beings.  It’s the opposite. All  beings, all the time, are teaching you, are moving you further towards your eventual Buddhahood. The world is not mud, but light.

They may be teaching from their wisdom; they may be teaching from their stupidity; they may be teaching from their love; they may be teaching from their hate; they may be teaching from their ignorance; they may be teaching from their antagonism towards you. It doesn’t matter: it’s all teaching.

It’s all compassion.

Contemporary Zen people are often quite embarrassed by apparently archaic talk of Buddha Nature. So we just get a lot of chuntering on about being ‘present’ and ‘grateful’ and ‘here and now’.  It’s Hallmark Zen. But the fact is, whether it seems ludicrous or not, if you can accept, even for a moment, that this is true—Everything Changes.

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412. The Tathagatagarbha Sutra

One of the distinctive features of Chinese Buddhism by the time the  Zen schools start to form, around the time of Mazu in the 8th century, is the universality of Buddha Nature.  One source of that is the Tathagatagarbha Sutra.

It was originally written in Sanskrit, but that version has been lost. We can only read it in translation back from the Chinese version. Tathagata is “ thus come”, a reference to Buddha. Garbha  has a wide range of meanings. 

We’ve come to think of the title as meaning that we’re figuratively carrying a Buddha in embryo inside us which is covered over by  our passions, our afflictions and so on. In due course, once we attend to these defilements, we can, as it were, give birth, manifest our Buddha. 

The Tathagatagarbha Sutra is 10 metaphors about Buddha Nature The one which gives us this idea about this Buddhist embryonic potentiality is the eighth example,  a vile and poor woman pregnant with a future World King.

This idea of something immensely valuable  covered over by something inherently unpleasant or nondescript  is the theme which dominates the metaphors. The metaphors exploit the surprising range of meanings of the word “Garbha”

Its dominant meaning, according to the English Sanskrit dictionaries, seems to be something like “interior or womb or embryo”. 

Then there are meanings derived from this, like “seed “.

But there are other meanings too. “Garbha” also means the “outer rim of a flower”, specifically the lotus flower. And that’s  the first and most revealing metaphor which is used in the Sutra. 

In this initial metaphor, the Buddha conjures up  Buddhas in the sky,  all of whom are seated  on lotus flowers. It’s a beautiful and magnificent sight. However, the Buddha then causes those Lotus flowers to become rotten and disgusting and to simultaneously conceal the Buddha inside.  The Buddha can still see the Buddhas inside these now rotting malodorous flowers, but ordinary people can’t. In the same way, a Buddha [ or ourselves through faith] can accept that within every person, no matter how ‘rotten’ is a Buddha. That’s not a developmental model; it’s not a future oriented model;  it’s a Here and Now model.

Most of the other metaphors which are used are like that. There’s a number of metaphors which are to do with something hidden. There’s valuable treasure hidden under a poor person’s house. There’s a gold statue of the Buddha wrapped up in shitty rags. There is another gold statue of Buddha hidden within its foundry blackness. There’s honey which is protected by an angry swarm of bees.  

The majority of metaphors are present focused. The only two which apparently aren’t are the eighth one, which we latch onto, as we think it matches the title, and another one which has to do with the mango seed, which has within it the capacity to give birth to a magnificent mango tree. I think that metaphor of the mango seed isn’t really future directed because, reading the text, the emphasis is on the indestructibility of the mango seed, not its potentiality.

I don’t think that these metaphors are pointing towards a future Buddha that we attain through faith or through effort but to a present Buddha, that somehow is hidden from us.

A number of things follow. On the face of it, it looks like the thing which is concealing the precious thing is either useless or disgusting.  

But it’s not useless. Without the shitty robes around the precious statue,  without the ground concealing the jewels and so on, in other words without the passions, the kleshas apparently obscuring Buddha Nature,  the thing that’s precious wouldn’t be there. So I think the Sutra is pointing to a more complex relationship between the kleshas and Buddha Nature.

Certainly from the point of view of an observer, the shitty robes are just disgusting and that’s that. We’re better off free of them.

But from the perspective of the robes it’s different. It seems to me one of the messages which is hidden within the sutra is that to become intimate with our Buddha Nature we require to become intimate with our kleshas. In other words we no longer regard our kleshas as something that we require to discard, get rid of, or transform.  

Rather we require to abandon our hate towards them. Abandoning that hate enables us to move from a vision of something which we find distasteful to becoming really acquainted with the kleshas in an intimate way.

What we understand then is that the kleshas do not have a fixed identity, and removed from the fixity of the self they aren’t what we think.  I think that that’s one of the themes buried within the Sutra.

Another interesting thing for us as practitioners is to reflect on the relationship between  the eighth metaphor, the  world King that is being carried within the body of a vile woman, and zazen.

If you look at our mudra during zazen, we’re holding our little fingers near the foot of our belly.  This  mudra  is representing the belief that we have this womb-like buddha space that the mudra manifests. At the mudra’s centre is this dynamic emptiness or potentiality of Buddha Nature. The hands are, as it were, the pelvic bowl and the thumbs are completing the shape.  The mudra is a statement of faith, a symbolic statement of faith about  Buddha Nature.

Yet we need to be careful what we mean by symbol. It’s not simply an encoded meaning: the mudra itself changes our state.  

If I am holding this mudra with an open heart in a position of faith towards the idea of the universality of Buddha Nature, then in a sense the mudra is within me now and manifesting this space of Buddha —this potentiality;  this ease and so on.

Right in my pelvic bowl. You can feel it.

There’s a temptation for us to think of metaphors as simply being encoded meaning rather than something broader, a way of seeing.  Those symbolic ways of seeing have inexhaustible meaning within them. Symbols are inherently both open in meaning and endlessly capable of new meaning.

But also, in themselves transformative, embodying and manifesting. We’ve lost our understanding of what a symbol is. But we can recover it. Not as a signifier, nor as a spell

as a door