Category: Kusen

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426. Enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house

Kodō Sawaki was a famously tough Japanese Zen master of the 20th century. He died in 1965. His successor was Kosho Uchiyama, who wrote ‘Opening the hand of thought’ and the wonderful contemporary teacher Shōhaku Okumura is a successor to Uchiyama.

So he’s a really influential guy. He was famously anti idealistic, which was a general trait, I think, of Japanese Zen teachers after the second world war, when an inflated, idealistic language of Buddhism had unhelpfully colluded with the inflated, self serving idealistic language of Japanese imperialism.

So the postwar environment really encouraged Japanese teachers to present Zen as being something very down to earth, something almost mundane, ordinary. And one of Kodō Sawaki’s most famous quotes was when he said that satori, enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house.

You can understand what he’s trying to get at. When we start practice, we might start with the idea that somehow we’re going to get something marvellous. We’re going to get compassion. We’re going to get wisdom. We’re going to get tranquility. We’re going to be able to break into this treasure house, and wear a crown of enlightenment on our foolish head.

And so the phrase is a sort of antidote to that. And I think you can take it in quite a number of different ways. But one of the ways that you can take it is that we don’t gain anything in zazen because we don’t need to gain anything. We are already complete. But we don’t understand that because we’re always viewing everything from our karmic position of needs, desires, dissatisfactions.

So we can look at it that way. But the phrase I think, and the way that Kodō Sawaki expresses himself generally, has often been used, in the West, to present Zen in an anti idealist way, about it being really about everyday tasks like washing the dishes, attending to your normal life. All of which is true, but unfortunately diminishes something. 

The quote is often attributed as a re-quote of a famous Chinese zen master of the eighth century Sekisō. Sekisō is most famous for case 46 of The Gateless Gate where he talks about stepping off the hundred foot pole. And it’s interesting because it shows how the zen currency of trading in quotes and then reflections on quotes and quotes about quotes can often get very confused.

So the source of it isn’t actually Sekisō, it’s an exchange involving another master Ryūge, who knew Sekisō. And Ryūge is asked, “how did the ancient master” -that’s the reference to Sekisō-, “finally cease doing things and completely settle down?”. And Ryūge’s reply is It was like a thief slipping into an empty house. So you notice the word used: to slip in, not break into an empty house. So the thief just, in one interpretation, happens to find himself in this empty house which, from the perspective of the thief, is empty.

Dōgen, right at the end of the Fukanzazengi, his  instruction for zazen, talks about ‘the treasure house’. And by the treasure house, he’s talking about, as it were, both something which is and always has been there, and what zazen does.The final sentence of the Fukanzazengi goes something like “the treasure house will open of its own accord. And you can do with it what you wish”. I suspect the Japanese is more vague than that, but pay attention to the first part. The treasure house will open of its own accord. In other words, we don’t need to break into the house of emptiness. We don’t need to break into the treasure house. And the reason why we don’t is that the treasure house opens up from the inside. From our sincerely and wholeheartedly doing zazen.

 In the quote we might make a false assumption that there’s just this person, this thief, this clown, this idiot, this self-centered person. There’s just this person who somehow has to cure himself. But that is a completely absurd notion. The idea of using the self to change the self is as ridiculous as someone trying to pull their own head off: it is impossible.

The fact is that when we’re sitting there are two things. There is this karmic self. And there is also the treasure house, a treasure house which cannot be seen by the karmic self [and hence is ‘empty’]. And that treasure house we could call the whole of existence. But we could also call it the true body. So when we’re sitting, we don’t need to give attention to the endless drivel that is generated by our mind. We just need to fully sit in the context of zazen. The treasure house is your true body, and will open up of its own accord. You don’t need to intend it. You don’t need to will it. That’s what practice enlightenment means.

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The Alive Spine

Master Dogen refers to zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’. Yet body and mind don’t disappear. But they are different, because they’re no longer labouring under the ownership of the self, which is really ownership by a ghost which haunts us. And because that liberation takes place, the body can exist in its power, beauty and expression, because it’s no longer an object within consciousness. 

Central to zazen is the enlivening of the spine. Sitting properly, our pelvis in the right position, our spine becomes energised, and we can express that in a number of different ways. So some people have expressed that enlivenment as being like the body is, as it were, suspended in space from above.

That’s personally, not something which I find resonant. My own inclination is to express it as the body in zazen being like a tremulous young tree. So the roots are going down into the ground and there’s this alive upward movement in response. And sometimes people can feel a sense of incipient energy in it, like a cork in a champagne bottle would feel.

These are all figures of speech to try and describe our actual experience. Choosing a variety of figures of speech makes sense because we are then likely to see these as just being provisional attempts to describe experience. Which leaves us free to find our examples which are equally provisional. So we don’t have to be, as it were, hanging about until we feel that our bodies are hanging in space, we’re free to find our own mode of expression.

So in my case, I would say that I experience my base, my pelvic floor as being like the roots of a tree going into the earth. I experience this area around my heart as uncompressing, lengthening, so my heart is no longer squashed, so it can, as it were, come out into the world. And the back of my head experiences widening. And I also experience a line of force like a needle going up in an imaginary space, not a real [physical] space, an imaginary [yet real] space between the crown chakra and the occipital joint. So not trying to push up the top of the head, which just creates tension, but just this effortless, as it were, needle of energy directing upwards.

This is all my language, not yours. And it’s fair to say as well that the aliveness of the spine is the same as the aliveness of the world. If we experience the spine as enlivened, our body is enlivened, and then we likewise experience the world in the same way. And again, we can think of this in figurative terms, so we could think of, as it were this tree being in the forest of beings, you could think of the alive spine as being like a lighthouse amid the glorious storm of creation. You can think of it in a whole number of ways. We just need to let our heart speak.

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425. Zazen is not a practice of the self

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.

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424. Delusion and Enlightenment

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.

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The Branching Heart

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 function and 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.

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423. The Empty Mirror

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.

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422. Beating The Cart

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.

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421. Dogen’s Instructions For Zazen

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

And faith makes it so.

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420. How should we understand the bodhisattva vows?

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.

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Kusen

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.