Category: Kusen

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265. Thrown Upwards

There are many visual metaphors in Zen which appear to be about reflection: the moon in water, the moon in a dewdrop, and the mirror. The crucial thing is not to see them dualistically: there isn’t a moon up in the sky; there isn’t a true person whose reflection in the mirror is false.

If we can see in this way, then we can see how the images are illuminating emptiness: it isn’t that a particular feature within the reflection is an illusion. Rather, it’s an illusion to regard that feature as being separate.

It is also helpful to see these metaphors as having a dual function: they both explain and describe zazen.

Sometimes we are like a mountain. Sometimes we are hanging in space. Sometimes we are a small bird, thrown upwards into the bright air.

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264. Actualising Kanzeon

In many of the Mahayana Sutras, there are long lists of bodhisattvas. In Zen, there are really only two: Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and Kanzeon, the bodhisattva of compassion.

Manjusri is generally the figure on the zen altar. He sits on top of a lion and wields a sword, to cut delusion. “Wisdom” is a misleading translation of prajna, which literally means ‘pre-knowledge’: that state of wholeness before we cut the world into pieces, either through language or adherence to a self. For this reason, his sword is unusual. He cuts the world into one.

We can see him as a description of one aspect of zazen, and if we can, we can then see Kanzeon as another, and the two of them as Not-Two.

Kanzeon is normally represented as having a large number of hands and eyes. The symbology is her capacity to see the suffering of living beings, and to assist them, but I think this multitude of hands and eyes is also descriptive of our state in zazen.

Manjusri is a definite figure, but, for Dogen at least, Kanzeon is equated with the whole of existence. In our dualistic way of thinking, the world is divided up into things, which then interact, but if we cast this aside, and de-centre this I/eye, we enter into the vast compassionate space which can hold the experience and perspectives of all beings (eyes) and the expression of those beings (hands). We are not cultivating compassion. It is cultivating us.

On this basis, we can then see why it is Kanzeon (compassion) practicing zazen in The Heart Sutra, which we chant after sitting, and why she is, as it were, practicing Manjusri (prajna), and vice-versa, and we can reconfigure the Heart Sutra as a poetic re-expression of the zazen which we have just experienced. Not just poetic, obviously.

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263. The One Dharma Gate

The earliest image we have of dependent origination is Indra’s Net. It’s a beautiful image, yet implausibly tranquil. And it ignores time. Of course, if the inspiration was someone looking up at the star filled night sky which, ironically, is seeing both space and time. But only from our perspective, now.

And for us, we might imagine dependent origination to be external to us, and our seeing of it to be impeded by the aches in this person’s body, the groans and gasps in this person’s mind.

But dependent origination isn’t tranquil or still. It is the exertion of all things. It is a great storm. And as you are sitting here, in the lull after the storm, this body is the debris of the storm. This mind is the echo of the storm. This body and mind is our dharma gate. The only one we will ever have.

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Kusen

262. Clouded Water Eyes

A famous passage in the Nirvana Sutra reads:

The Buddha’s True Dharma Body is just like space
Manifesting form according to circumstances
It is like the moon in water.

Nirvana sutra

I think this is a description of our state in zazen.

“the moon in water” is a metaphor for emptiness. It isn’t that the reflection doesn’t exist, it’s that it isn’t separate. The reflection is the expression of all the different aspects of the whole of reality working together: the moon, the water, the clouds, the clouded water eyes of the person witnessing it into being.

Each line informs the other. The third line is a poetic instance of the general statement of interdependence in the second.

And the purpose of the first line is to convey that “space” and “expression” are not in conflict: our aim is not to nullify whatever arises: thoughts, noises inner and outer, feelings, but not to fixate on them either, and thus to allow vast compassionate space to manifest, a space which can hold all this expression, like a mother holds her baby.

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261. In All Your Imbalance

The quintessential zen form is the koan. Stripped of later literary embellishment, the koan is – or at least purports to be – the recording of an actual exchange between two sincere practitioners. And we imagine that one of the characters in the exchange has more wisdom, and they are correcting the other, who has less.

I don’t believe that. I think it is more like a conversation, where one is illuminating the imbalance of the other. But not from a position of balance, but from a position of imbalance. And both positions are part of the great wholeness, which is dynamic because it is imbalanced. And being imbalanced it, like a person, a great person, can walk through time, and neither freeze nor fall.

We can look at the tradition in the same way. Nagarjuna is correcting the imbalance of codification, but in turn creates an imbalance which can veer into nihilism. Chinese Buddhism in response emphasises the dharmakaya, but this can lead to an imbalanced fixation on devotional practice, so is balanced in turn by the imbalance of Zen’s Iconoclasm, and so on, down to this exchange now.

I don’t want you to be balanced. I want you to be completely yourself, in all your imbalance, because if we aspire to balance, then Buddhism will become a prison, a religion. And there will still be walking, obviously, but in samsara, and samsara only.

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260. This twelve foot square room

Sometimes, when we are sitting together in this twelve foot square room, it is as if we are halfway between the individual and the universal: we are sitting on the same ground, breathing the same air; there is the same drone of karma for each of us, and the same opening into common vast spaciousness when that noise drops away.

It is as if this small room is a rock in the middle of a torrential stream: no one can jump from bank to bank, but we can land here. And here we can understand that this rock is the whole world. And although it is tiny, all beings may stand.

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Kusen

This world of samsara is a stormy ocean

This world of samsara is a stormy ocean
Sometimes we are drowning, clinging to the debris of the self
Sometimes we are ecstatic fish, thrown about like lumps of electricity
In the vast aliveness

In zazen, we are a high cliff, white as bone
The ocean’s push is a baby’s hand:
The Dharma is written everywhere
Like white ink on white paper

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Kusen

259. The cause of suffering

What is the cause of suffering? We often imagine – wrongly – that the Buddha said that desire was the cause of suffering. But he didn’t. He said that the cause of suffering was the three poisons of ignorance, attachment and aversion.

The most important of these three is ignorance: the other two follow on from that. Ignorance is a confusion about our true nature: instead of understanding our nature as relational, we falsely think we are beings encased in a self. Thinking in this way, it is only natural to want or to keep what we like, and discard what we don’t.

We confuse ourselves so easily because our society’s usual way of thinking of desire is to think of it in terms of a lack: something is missing.

The point isn’t technical, it’s of fundamental importance. If we misunderstand desire, if we can’t see it as the pulse and flow and expression of this great being, then we will aspire to a buddhism of false equanimity, a buddhism which is empty and lifeless. With the ghost of suffering inside.

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258. The four merits of meditation

The four merits of meditation are said to be intuitive wisdom, compassion, equanimity and empathetic joy – but these are not personal qualities.

Yet when the restless dust and debris of the self is stilled, it is as if it forms an archway, through and around which the vast living space containing these qualities can be actualized.

Through which all the mute things can be given voice.

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257. Like a womb

In the Tathagatagarbha sutra, Buddha nature is portrayed figuratively as a little Buddha inside each sentient being. Each being is a womb for the Buddha.

An ignorant or self centred person might imagine that through practice they would actualise a personal Buddha.

Except, the Buddha which is represented in each sentient being is the same Buddha. These same buddhas form a kind of fabric, containing all beings, like a womb. Each being is like the embryo in this womb of Buddha.

It is like space: in this moment, is the breath inside you yours, or not?

Is the dynamic space inside you as the expression of this breath yours, or not? How can we distinguish this inner space from the greater space which holds us?

Yet if Being collapses, space likewise collapses.

All these little tiles create the vast space of the temple.