Category: Kusen

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411. The Blue Mountains Walking

Master Dogen’s Dharma Hall Discourse, number 23:

Deeply see the Blue Mountains constantly walking. By yourself know that the white stone woman gives birth to a child at night

Dogen then descended from his seat.

That is almost a word for word replication of a teaching by Zen master Daokai, who was active in the 11th and very early 12th century in China and who revitalised the Soto lineage. The only alterations which Dogen makes are adding ‘Deeply see’ and ‘By yourself’, and adding ‘white’ to  ‘stone woman’, to remove any ambiguity that the phrase might refer to an infertile woman. 

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Dogen’s replication of Daokai goes further than the repetition of his words because he also duplicates his actions.

The original record is that after Daokai said these words he just stepped down from the Dharma seat, and Dogen does the same.  So we have in this quote an enormous thing, the mountains [‘Thusness’],  and a smaller, specific thing, the stone woman [‘Thisness’].

For these Masters, the mountains are representative of the whole of interdependence. We can’t see the mountains walking because we’re within the mountains. Just in the same way as, although we might be sitting still, we can’t see that we’re hurtling through space.

‘The mountains walking’ is a way of talking about the interconnected life of all being through time. 

Yet it seems to me that one unseen thing for them, but not for us, is that in comparison to their world, in our world there has been an incredible speeding up of time.  It now seems that everything, not just the mountains, comes and goes in a blur. Your life comes and goes in a blur, and then it’s over.

So it’s important to emphasise the other aspect of the dynamic impermanence and interdependence represented by the Blue Mountains, and that is stillness. We experience both when we’re sitting Zazen. We experience the thought laden wind of interdependence, taking place within a larger container of Stillness.

When we’re sitting we become intimate with both impermanence but also with something different. We could variously call that the Eternal or the continuous present or Stillness or  Thusness. 

These two aspects mean that there’s  not simply one moment, then another moment, then another moment, then another moment.  Each moment is like a magnificent tree whose roots extend throughout the Earth and connect intimately with all other moments. We could call these two aspects the forward axis and the sideways axis.

So the mountains, our lives, the whole shebang aren’t simply coming and going in a blur, as if we’re in a bullet train speeding past them. 

There’s something else which is particularly relevant to us in this era of the dramatic speeding up of time.  It’s almost as if our feet don’t touch the ground. Not just literally: they don’t touch the ground of being. But when we sit, they do. Even if this speeded up time is pushing and pulling us, it is doing so within this stillness.

What of the stone woman? Obviously it’s absurd that a stone woman could give birth to anything. Yet we can understand that the reference to ‘night’ is a reference to non-duality. So the suggestion is that everything is alive and everything is giving birth. We’re giving birth to our children all the time. The children are known by various names: Beauty, Pain, Confusion, Clarity, Love, Rage. 

Which of them will outlast us?

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410. Indra’s Net

We can think of interdependence in terms of time, and we can think of it in terms of being. 

The Zen approach primarily takes the latter position.Very often we talk about zenki, full dynamic functioning.

In other words we are part of this Network of all beings, functioning together, like a body would. The Chinese tradition talks about the Buddha’s Dharma body.  Another frequent metaphor is Indra’s Net— the image of a network of infinitely faceted jewels of infinite number, all reflecting all.

In our experience of meditation it’s often possible for us to see this interconnection. There’s thought, and we can feel the emotion underneath that thought, and the body sensation prior to the emotion (obviously all happening very, very quickly) and the connection between the body and the surrounding world. Sometimes that’s sufficient for us to break the mirror of the self, the belief that we’re separate. 

That focus on interdependence as the interdependence of being is sometimes helpful for us to understand mental phenomena. It’s helpful for us to understand the often constant chatter of the self, like a fictional character constantly trying to talk itself into existence. 

It helps with the kind of everyday noise and nonsense that we seem to get in meditation,  which are like the echoes and shadows of experience. 

But where the emphasis on the interconnectedness of being isn’t so helpful is when practitioners feel oppressed by other things—classically those persistent negative emotions like anxiety, dread, depression, that kind of thing.

For that, an emphasis on the other way of looking at interdependence, focusing on time, is often helpful.  In other Buddhist traditions there’s much more of an emphasis on Karma. What we’re experiencing now is the product of past actions. This is helpful in giving us a broader and more spacious understanding of what we’re experiencing now, but the problem with it  (and you get this problem very frequently in the casual and careless way that non Buddhists talk about karma), is that we are liable to think of karma as being something which happens to a persisting self over time.  The problem with that is that it reimposes the familiar problem which Buddhism tries to overcome — this dichotomy of self and world (or of mind and body, as a subsidiary dichotomy).

But we can get over that if we think of time, not as a medium within which people and objects persist and change, but rather of time in the sense of a series of moments. Each moment contains all of existence and all moments are interconnected—Dogen’s perspective of time. 

If we think then of interdependence as being both interdependence in terms of being and interdependence in terms of moments I think that is a helpful way for us to proceed.  

The origin  – we imagine – of Indra’s Net is people in classical times looking up at the night sky and seeing this extraordinary network of stars. It’s not much of an imaginative leap to think of all these stars as being a network of jewels. What we now know, which people then didn’t, is that when we’re looking at the stars we’re also looking at time. Because light takes so long to travel to us when we’re looking up at the sky we’re sometimes seeing light from stars which no longer exist and we’re not seeing light from stars that do exist but whose light hasn’t yet reached us

All the light we do not see

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409. Satori

The Japanese word satori is variously translated as realisation, verification, awakening and enlightenment, amongst others. The reason for this breadth is that it encompasses three distinct Chinese Expressions. 

The first is ‘practice realisation/verification: one hears the Buddhist teachings on impermanence, interdependence and so on. One then  practices and the practice verifies the teaching— you realise it’s true.

The second is something like asleep/awakening. We  awaken from the dream of the self or we awaken within the dream of the self. 

The third is delusion/enlightenment. The ideogram for it is quite interesting. The top part is something like ‘mind’ and the bottom part of it has these little legs.  The suggestion is that in a state of delusion these little legs, prompted by thoughts, carry us to this place, that place, and this other place, all without ceasing. By implication Enlightenment is the stopping of this -not  of the thought but being carried hither and thither without cease. And thus, by necessary  implication,  our aim as practitioners is not to void the mind, but it is to understand our egoic latching on to thoughts and those thoughts then taking us everywhere in the kind of habitual distracted agitated way that many of us experience.

What we need to understand is that these little legs of delusion can only take us somewhere when we’re on the ground of the self. Otherwise, the little legs don’t work. When we’re ‘standing’ on emptiness, they don’t work. 

This, all our mental activity, all our thinking doesn’t remain the distraction that (from a self-centred point of view) we think it is,  but rather becomes a manifestation of the interdependence of everything. So we don’t need to go looking for somewhere outside of ourselves to find the truth of what the Buddha was talking about. The very mundane activity of banal thought which, when we start meditation we think we need to get away from, is that very thing which, when seen from other than a self-centred perspective is, in itself, interdependence.  

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408. Dogen’s Four Foundations of Mindfulness

Master Dogen’s Dharma Hall discourse number 310:  

Our Buddha Shakyamuni said to his disciples there are four foundations of mindfulness on which people should depend.These four foundations of mindfulness refer to contemplating the body as impure; contemplating sensation as  suffering; contemplating mind as impermanent; and contemplating phenomena as non-substantial.

I also have four foundations of mindfulness: contemplating the body as a skin bag; contemplating sensation as eating bowls; contemplating mind as fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles; and contemplating phenomena as old man Zhang drinking wine, old man Li getting drunk.

Great assembly, are my four foundations of mindfulness the same or different from the ancient Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness? If you say they are the same your eyebrows will fall out [from lying];  if you say they are different you lose your body and life.

Are they the same or are they different?  If different, what are the differences? 

For starters, there’s a difference in tone.

In the Buddha’s formulation, the four foundations appear to be quite doctrinal. In Dogen’s formulation they  appear colloquial,  everyday and realistic. The Buddha’s formulation mentions the body as  impure. It also mentions suffering. Dogen mentions neither.

It seems to me that in the Buddha’s formulation the ghost of the self is still hovering, whereas in Dogen’s the nonduality of all beings is much more apparent. 

The Buddha’s formulation  in emotional tone is renunciatory. Dogen’s  tone is quite different. It evokes Wonder,  Joy, Acceptance and  Surprise. It’s very human.

Rather than saying  that everything is impermanent and impermanence is the cause of suffering. Dogen’s  formulation really starts from  thenassumption of nonduality, the aliveness and wholeness of everything. So impermanence isn’t the indicator of suffering,  it is a characteristic of  interdependent  wholeness.

Contemplating the body as a skin bag  is different from contemplating the body as impure. It’s much more realistic. We are this skin bag of blood and shit and bone and pain and beauty and memory and longing and love.  A bag that can tear at any moment, and in that moment we are gone. 

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407. The Frame of The Mirror

We’re often drawn back to the same stories. One of mine is the “Polishing a tile” story, where Nangaku asks Baso what his intention is in practising zazen.  Baso replies, “My intention is to make a Buddha.”  

Nangaku  picks up a tile and starts polishing it with a stone.   

Baso says, “What are you doing?”

Nangaku says “I’m polishing a tile to make a mirror.”

Baso says, “How can you do that?”

( The story goes on. A full version is in the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo)

It’s a very rich story. A dominant contemporary way of looking at it is that we should be satisfied with our life. Our life with all its imperfections, with all our limitations and Imperfections,  we should accept it completely. We should not want our ‘tile’ to transform into a ‘mirror’, because we’re not wanting to be something else. We’re not wanting to become an enlightened being, because that’s just a more subtle form of craving. 

That’s a very legitimate way of looking at the story. Barry Majid, a very good American  teacher, takes that position.

But it seems to me that there’s another way of looking at this story. Obviously you can’t make a tile into a mirror. And likewise, you can’t make a limited karmic being into a Buddha. 

Nonetheless, a mirror is manifested—a Buddha is manifested. Our initial, and correct, understanding is that practice means that we can’t  change one thing, a tile, into another—a mirror. Alongside the mirror the tile remains. Alongside the Buddha space which is actualized in zazen our karmic self is still there. 

Yet it changes: it’s still there, but it changes. How does it change? 

The practitioner isn’t the mirror. The practitioner is the framework of the mirror. Something is manifested when we sit but we can’t see it, because our seeing is from our limited karmic perspective.  Likewise we can’t understand it. That’s why the Dharma is called wondrous.  But just like the frame of a mirror, although we can’t see the mirror, we can be intimate with it— that’s practice.

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406. What is ‘Mind’?

What is ‘Mind’?

Dogen says in various places that Mind is walls, fences, tiles, etc. 

That’s quite typical in Zen literature, where ‘Mind is World’ propositions are common.

At first blush, this looks like a state very different from our ordinary state. They seem to be statements of radical non-duality, primarily between Mind and World, and derivatively, between Mind and Body.

Although these statements seem to give a perspective dramatically different from what we now understand as original Indian Buddhism, I’m not sure that’s so. And though they also appear radically different from ways in which we talk and think about the Mind, again I’m not sure that’s true.

One of the earliest Buddhist texts is the Dhammapada, which is a collection of sayings in verse attributed to the Buddha.  At the very start there’s a statement: Mind precedes all mental states. Not ‘Mind precedes all disturbed mental states’ or ‘Mind precedes all conditional mental states’. All mental states.

I think that immediately gives us pause, because whilst a lot of meditation seems to be about calming the mind, I don’t think we’re necessarily justified in interpreting ‘Mind’ purely psychologically; as being the functionality of the brain, or similar.

Indeed, verse 37 of the Dhammapada says that the home of the mind is in the cave of the heart.  (Indians, like the Greeks, believed the mind is in the heart, not the head; I think it’s naive for us to simply take this literally, as anatomical ignorance)

Verse 37 also says the mind is without specific location. It wanders here and there. It’s using the metaphor of a person whose true home is in the cave of the heart but who wanders hither and thither throughout the world.

So for the Dhammapada, ‘Mind’ has a much broader range of meanings than  the psychological functions of self consciousness, or subjective experience.

If ( as is always useful) in examining the meaning of terms we start with our experience in meditation, it’s clear that  there isn’t the sharp distinction between mind and world that conceptual thinking conjures up. 

Our experience in meditation is both personal and universal. Obviously, it’s this person practising at this moment. Yet we can’t say that this sense of spacious awareness in meditation  belongs to me, that somehow is internal to me.

The whole phenomenology of meditative awareness is, to a greater or lesser extent, non-dual.

People experience that right from the get-go. It’s not something which only Enlightened people (whoever they may be) experience.

Additionally, common usages of mind which we have in the West are often different from what we imagine. For example Carol Gilligan, in her fieldwork on how patriarchy suppresses the voices of teenage girls observed that often they would make a distinction between ‘my brain’ and ‘my mind’.

And if we look around, we often get distinctions like that operating in the language, in different ways.

My personal favourite is Iain McGilchrist’s distinction between left and right brain hemispheres, but it’s widespread.  People will often make a distinction between ‘my mind’ and ‘my heart’ or ‘my mind’ and ‘my soul’. We don’t need to imprison experience within the categories of an imaginary observer in a white coat.

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405. Wall Gazing

Why do we sit facing the wall?

The familiar explanation is that we’re following the practice of Master Bodhidharma.  

In Zen legend, Bodhidharma arrived at a southern Chinese port from India  sometime in the middle of the 6th Century, then had a famous encounter with the Emperor. Following this, he went to Shaolin Temple, where he sat facing a wall for 9 years. Zen Legend also says that prior to Bodhidharma arriving in China, Chinese Buddhism had been purely scholastic. 

The legend is completely false.  Buddhism had been practised in China for over 400 years prior to Bodhidharma arriving. There were meditation manuals,  practice instructions, and communities of monks.

However, the expression which is translated as Bodhidharma “facing a wall” originates with him. According to John McRae, the phrase , ‘pi kuan’ literally means ‘wall gazing’, sometimes rendered as ‘ wall contemplation.’

A tragedy for our culture is that our capacity for symbolic and metaphoric thinking and expression has become terribly impoverished. We expect our learning to be explicit. So when we come across cultures where learning works differently, where it’s encoded within apparently simple practices and rituals, it’s quite hard for us to see. We just picture a man facing a wall.

But thinking about ‘wall gazing’ for a moment, the issue of whether or not Bodhidharma did physically meditate facing a wall hardly exhausts what the phrase has to tell us. 

Plainly, Bodhidharma wasn’t taking the wall as being the object of meditation because that would be a dualistic practice, quite different from zazen.

Classical Chinese is very terse. It doesn’t tell us who is doing the gazing, the practitioner or the wall. As the wall plainly isn’t a person, we think it’s obvious that who’s  doing the gazing is the practitioner. But if we leave it open, we can unpack the learning implicit in the phrase. 

If we say that it’s actually the wall that’s ‘gazing’, that opens everything up. The practitioner, in facing the wall, is facing away from the world. But the wall is facing the world. So it’s like a pair. And the wall is facing the world in a particular way: like a mirror, not like a person. With equanimity, accepting everything, not discriminating, rooted in the ground of all being. 

Just as all the apparently separate images in a mirror are part of the one reflective whole, then likewise, to the wall, everything facing it, including the practitioner, is part of this wholeness.

If we see things in that way we can see why Bodhidharma’s practice may have been new. Not because of his physical orientation (towards a wall, or anything else), but because of his meditative orientation. His practice was not simply the practice of the self, nor the cultivation of Consciousness or Wisdom or particular mental states;  it was – and is –  a wholehearted non dualistic engagement with everything, within everything.

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Dogen’s 2 ‘Zazen’ poems

Master Dogen wrote two virtually identical poems about zazen.

The earlier version [which is taken from Steven Heine’s translation] reads as follows:

The moon mirrored
By a mind free
Of all distractions, 
Even the waves breaking
Are reflecting its light.

The later version [again Heine’s translation] reads:

The moon reflected
In a mind clear
As still water
Even the waves breaking
Are reflecting its light.

In these translations, the two poems are remarkably similar. There’s two sections, and the second section, about the waves breaking, the last two lines of the poem, are identical in both.

The third line, which in Heine’s versions are different, are identical in the original Japanese, albeit with one important difference. The word ‘sumu’ in the earlier poem means ‘residing’, and goes with ‘uchi’, which means ‘within’ or ‘inside’, but in the later poem ‘sumu’ means ‘becoming clear’ so there is an association with ‘mizu’ [water].

As a translation choice, Heine renders the first lines of both poems very similarly, but in the earlier poem the Japanese gives a sense of being quietened, whereas in the later version the emphasis is more on clarity, in the sense ‘cloudedness disappears’, which matches up with the changed meaning of sumu.

Apart from that, what’s the difference?

I think the material difference is the second line and specifically the change in one word. The  second line in Japanese in the early version reads ‘kokoro no uchi ni’ and in the later version reads ‘kokoro no mizu ni’.There’s a change of one word: from free to clear.

Why did Dogen feel the necessity to change it? The purpose of the two poems is the same,  a description of zazen practice as wholehearted activity and not the cultivation of tranquillity understood as calmness, the absence of thought, the absence of emotions and so on. The two poems are identical in their description of meditation, not in terms of quietude or tranquillity but as fully engaged non-dualistic practice.

I think the reason for the change is that what the second version makes clear is that the essence of mind in zazen, the ‘water’ in the poem, isn’t to be still, it is to be clear. And if the mind is clear then it makes no difference if there’s a lot of activity [waves] or very little activity.

And if the essence of  the mind is to be clear, we can see in practical terms how the water metaphor might play out. In the first version, at least in Heine’s translation, the word distractions is mentioned explicitly and it’s not mentioned in the second. It’s not mentioned in the second because the distractions are mentioned implicitly, by their absence. Often distractions are thought of in terms of dust, that’s often a metaphor that’s used like ‘mind dust’. We can see that water which is clear, whether enlivened or whether tranquil, will reflect moonlight. We can also see that dirty water – water which isn’t clear, water covered over with  the mind dust of picking and choosing, liking and hating whatever’s arising within experience  isn’t going to reflect the moon. The essence of the mind is clearness.

The essence of mind in Zazen is to be spacious: not  excluding anything, not  restricting attention to objects of love and hate but holding everything in equanimity, like space. That’s how we should practise.

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404. The Missing Body

When you ask people about their experience when they start practising zazen, they’ll generally talk about their internal dialogue. This seemingly endless compulsive chatter.

After a while they might also talk about more enduring negative emotional states which they often find disturbing and which they generally repress in the busyness of everyday life.

If you ask them what they experience somatically you’re not likely to get much of an answer.  The somatic experiencing of the body generally seems fairly invisible to practitioners except when the body is experiencing pain or where there’s some obvious manifestation of an emotional state like the heart racing or the palms  sweating, or something like that.

The problem is that the lack of somatic awareness and the missing language to describe somatic experiencing  are obviously related. If you turn your attention to, for example, what you’re experiencing at this moment at the back of your throat, there isn’t a language to describe that.  And because there’s not a language to describe it, there isn’t a language to retain it. And so the bulk of our lived life passes from present obscurity to past obscurity, like a vast hidden river underneath the debris of our mind.

Why is it difficult for us to have a somatic language? You can say that it’s because we have a quite intellectual culture that privileges thought, but I think there’s another reason:  if you pay careful attention to somatic experience it’s not one thing after another—the experience is fluid, dynamic, changeable and continuous. It’s like a four dimensional kaleidoscope of feeling rather than a selection of objects and events arranged in time.

It’s as if our evolutionary development has privileged  formulating the world – and ourselves – in terms of discrete things, objects or events, with these then interrelating in a particular way. Perhaps it helped us survive. 

But it doesn’t help us now. 

What we would need to properly describe somatic language is basically a language of process—words like surging, or declining, or bursting; all very different from how we habitually language the world and ourselves.

We’ve been experiencing quite strong storms for the past few days which have blasted the eastern coast of Scotland. When we think of storms we’re likely to think of rain, of wind, of cold. In other words, concrete manifestations of underlying, vaster, dynamic weather patterns. So we are aware of the visible in so far as we can formulate it into discrete things but we’re much, much less aware of underlying processes.

This is very relevant to practise for several reasons. Firstly, if we aren’t somatically aware, then really we’re disconnected from our body. Which also means that we’re disconnected from ourselves. And in consequence, our meditation will be a practice of frustrated reachings for  tranquillity.

On the one hand we’ll have all these thoughts and emotions and on the other we’ll have a sense of spacious awareness which is sometimes concretely manifested in the breath and in a momentary stillness. But the body is missing.      

And so, somehow that spacious awareness is always, as it were, being polluted by the thoughts and emotions and the sense of self that we naturally experience, like the serpent farting in the Garden of Eden.

We feel that way because the whole experience isn’t grounded within what’s actually going on in our life and in our body. 

It’s important for us because if we understand the aliveness of this body then we can understand the aliveness of the body of everything.

 Because they’re not separate.

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403. The whole bodymind

In trying to understand the writings of Dogen and of the Chinese Zen Masters, an often difficult task, it’s useful to bear in mind what they’re trying to do, and the dilemma they’re attempting to resolve. 

They’re aiming to express nonduality yet they’re obliged to do that in language, which is intrinsically dualistic. They’re trying to express a wholeness which is realistic: not a wholeness dependent upon a special or disordered state of consciousness and not just  conceptual either. 

One of the ways that they accomplish this is that they appear to use the same word or the same phrase in two apparently dramatically different ways. For example, Dogen famously [in the Genjokoan] uses the word self [ jiko’] to mean both the “the ego” and also the “body of all being”.  

He does something similar with the expression ”body and mind”. When he describes zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’ he’s plainly talking about this person’s body and mind— the ongoing practice of dropping off that sense of separation.

Then on other occasions, when he talks about seeing things using the whole body and mind he’s not talking about this body and mind, he’s talking about the body and mind of all being, expressed through this body and mind. 

He’s able to do this because the whole of Chinese Zen rests upon the Flower Garland Sutra teachings, which is essentially that each thing in its uniqueness, in its differentiation, is all things. This person is not the same as that person, and precisely because of that, both this person and that person are all being. In this perspective, the two distinct meanings aren’t contradictory, but indicate how things really are.