Category: Kusen

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Kusen

240. One piece zen

Issho Fujita described our practice as “One Piece Zen”. That is, rather than the individual striving of this person, our practice expresses the dynamic unity of all beings, all being, all space.

The trap is to picture a cosmos, with us within it. To escape that trap, we need to feel this dynamic unity as something real, not imagined. That’s why the posture is so important.

In our posture, we have the actual experience of dynamic wholeness and aliveness with our liberated spines. We have the actual experience of vast dynamic space with our liberated breath.

So, our posture, from the perspective of the self, is the symbolic enactment of the two facets of this dynamic unity, and the unity itself. And, when body and mind is dropped off, this enactment is no longer just symbolic, but real.

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Kusen

239. Two swimmers

Buddhism is full of apparent opposites: Form and Emptiness, Language and Silence, Samsara and Nirvana, and the temptation is always to posit one of the pair as fundamental, and the other as inhibiting our access to it. But really, we need to understand these pairings as like the wings of the bird of our radical wholeness and aliveness.

Take the second one, for example. When we sit, it’s very common to think of whatever arises as obscuring silence, and we need to get rid of it. But if our language is superficial, why would our silence be profound?

What we need to understand is that language and silence are completely interwoven. Where one goes, the other follows. The real question is: What language? What silence?

They are like two people swimming across a stormy sea. Neither can reach the shore by their own efforts alone. But when one is exhausted, the other carries them. So neither drowns.

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Kusen

238. Only a buddha, together with a buddha

In Chapter eleven of The Lotus Sutra, there is the story of a stupendously large tower, many miles high and wide, containing both the remains and the living body of an ancient Buddha, which has lain concealed within the dynamic ground, and which emerges when it appears that the Buddha is about to preach The Lotus Sutra, hovering in mid air. Shakyamuni Buddha then joins the ancient Buddha in the tower, a Buddha alone, together with a Buddha.

It seems unlikely that anyone has ever taken this scene literally, so what is it trying to say?

It is extremely rich and potent obviously, but I would wish to draw attention to the depth of the ground and the height of the sky. One is reminded of the Buddha’s enlightenment, where he touches the ground, and sees the morning star, shining through vast space.

The ground – Being – is not static or passive. It is dynamic, full of expression. Likewise, space – Emptiness – is not ‘empty’, it is the location of the liberation of Being into full expression.

And when you sit, you are the dynamic ground. You are the plenitude of space. And when you breath and move, you are Emptiness, made real.

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Kusen

237. The Lotus Sutra

Within our strand of Buddhism, the most important sutra, by some distance, is The Lotus Sutra.

The sutra depicts a universe of unimaginable extent and duration, within which a large group of characters ebb and flow through an unimaginable number of lifetimes. The central message of the sutra, which is gradually unfolded, is that each being, at some point in the unimaginably vast future, will become a Buddha.

Think about this. Within this perspective, you are the past life of a future Buddha. Not only that, each event, each thought, each feeling in your life, no matter how apparently painful or useless, is part of the vast karmic tapestry which leads to this future Buddha. Were any of it to disappear, everything would unravel, so everything matters. Matters more fundamentally than we can properly express.

This future Buddha is holding your present, karmic self like a mother would hold a fitfully sleeping baby, and each dream, each flicker of that baby matters. Matters.

It’s a mythical presentation of the classic question in Chinese Buddhism: if everything is perfect, why doesn’t it seem so? And in its answer, nothing is excluded, nothing is to be harried into nothingness. It evokes a feeling through the creation of a magical world. The feeling is the important thing, not the myth.

What if you kept it?

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Kusen

236. Practice Enlightenment

Practice is not the suppression of noise. Neither is it the realisation of some pictured state of tranquility.

Rather, it is the actualisation of vast compassionate space. It is “vast” because it contains everything. All the noise and silence; all the pain and beauty.

At each moment of sincere practice we are within that realm of practice enlightenment. And so are all practitioners, in all times, and so this practice is beginningless and endless.

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Kusen

235. The needle

If we practice from the perspective of the self, there are always two persons: the person who experiences and the person who judges and assesses that experience. The sense is of incompleteness, frustration and disappointment. It is as if the Master always wishes the Servant to go through a door to a new world, but the Servant is useless, and either wanders off to nowhere in particular, or is immobile. And the door is nowhere to be seen.

If we practice from the perspective of buddha, likewise there are two persons: self and buddha, but the sense is entirely different. There is nothing to get. There is nowhere to go. The sense is of spaciousness, warmth and intimacy.

I described this as like a parent holding their sleeping baby’s head, but it’s important not to fixate on any particular image. It is the function of these images to pierce the heart, not to gather in the head. The needle goes in first time, or not at all.

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Kusen

234. All expression is a miracle

Zazen is the Dharma Gate of ease and joy.

It is not effortful. We entrust our body and mind to zazen and let everything be.

Whether the mind is turbulent or peaceful we hold it like the earth under the ocean holds the weight of the water, maintaining it so it will not seep into nothingness. We hold it like we would hold a sleeping baby’s head, whatever the baby is dreaming.

If you listen carefully when the bell is rung you hear two noises.

The first, very brief, is a dull sound, the striker hitting the bell.

The second is the bell’s full expression.

If we thought the striking required to continue until it matched our idea of perfection, the expression of the bell would never be realised.

We need to understand perfection is a chimera.

Because all expression is a miracle.

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Kusen

Posture Instructions: The Breath

When we hear an instruction to keep returning our attention to the breath, we need to unpack that instruction.

It is an instruction primarily given to people who keep having random thoughts. For these people, the instruction is quite simple. But many people have different problems. They may experience thoughts with a persistent, distressing theme – thoughts of torture, for example – or they may consistently experience a particular difficult emotion or cluster of emotions, the common ones being fear, anxiety, boredom, dissatisfaction and such like. For these people, the instruction, without further explanation, is likely to feel at best unhelpful, and at worst an attempt to ignore or minimise their experience in favour of a vacuous serenity.

So, to unpack:

It is not regarding the breath as the object of concentration. It is not as if the breath and the distracting/distressing thoughts or emotions are like two irate fat men, ceaselessly competing to sit on the one chair of attention.

It is the breath, not your breath.

It is our actual experience of the breath as a dynamic, non conceptual moving space within us. There is no barrier between that space and the greater ‘external’ space. Thus, the entire body is hanging in space, and both are fluid. In this way, we directly experience both ‘form’ and ’emptiness’, and can thus access a vast compassionate space within which our distressing thoughts – along with everything else – can emerge, express and change.

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Kusen

Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 1, Case 13

A monk asked Master Jisai – “How is the moon when not yet round?”

The master said, “swallowing three or four moons”

The monk said, “And when the moon is round?”

The master said, “vomiting seven or eight moons”.

In this story the moon is a symbol of enlightenment, so the monk’s question really is: what is the person like before and after enlightenment?

The Master’s answer seems to be that before enlightenment the person is primarily conceptual. So, the various concrete moons the person experiences – the harvest moon, the waxing moon, the present moon and so on – all arise within [swallowed] the concept of ‘moon’, whereas for the enlightened person, the actual limitless manifestations of moon are – as it were- liberated [vomited] from the concept of moon.

This interpretation isn’t wrong but it can lead to a terrible literal Zen, where there is an unbalanced emphasis is on concrete reality and a lot of banal and formulaic talk about the Here and Now. And in this block of concrete Zen, delusion is considered as the other: thoughts, dreams, imaginings, visions and so on.

In his commentary on this koan, Dogen says that the whole world is expressed in the act of swallowing and the whole world is expressed in the act of vomiting. We should swallow the self and the whole world. We should vomit the self and the whole world

Or, to put it slightly differently – there is a dynamic folding and re-folding between wholeness-ising everything [swallowing], and releasing everything in its own vivid expression-ing [vomiting]

Which is our practice.

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Kusen

233. Bowing

Bowing is a modification of prostration.

When we prostrate, we de-centre the head, throwing it forward into the world, throwing it down on the ground of all being.

Our body is open and vulnerable. Our hands are without all the things of the self.

On entering the dojo we bow to the altar: to Buddha and to the flowers of emptiness. We bow to the incense that perfumes the space. We bow to our cushion. We bow to our fellow practitioners.

It is not that our cushion is a small person and you are great person or that Buddha is a great person and you are a small person. No. When we put our hands together and bow, a great person appears – not just in front of our hands, not just behind our hands. Not just in the hands themselves:

Everywhere.