Category: Kusen

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182. Buddha Nature

At the Winter Retreat we talked about the Tathagatagarbha Sutra. Tathagata means ‘thus come’ or ‘thus gone’, and refers to the Buddha, and Garbha means womb, or embryo.

The Sutra gives expression to the idea in Chinese Buddhism that everything has Buddha nature; which Dogen later reformulated as everything is Buddha nature.

It uses eight similes to describe Buddha nature, six of which are to do with concealment.

Thus: a precious statue concealed in rags, gold concealed in dirt, hidden treasure underneath a house, and others.

The two anomalies are, first, a seed which grows into a huge tree, and second the simile after which the Sutra is named, a humble person carrying in embryo a great person. But which is great: the embryo or the womb? If we regard practice from an individualistic perspective, we obviously want to say the embryo, because how would it be meaningful to say that what is great is the womb?

Unless we broaden our gaze. We can then see it as a description of our practice together. We are within, and we uphold, this Buddha space. Both.

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181. The sixth ancestor

All the Zen lineages trace their ancestry back to the sixth ancestor Huineng, who, so the story goes, obtained a secret transmission from the fifth anscestor Hongren. In the story, Hongren asks his monks to write a poem about zazen. His chief disciple, Shenxiu, was the only one who responded. Huineng criticised the poem. In response, Hongren recognised Huineng as his true successor, and gave him transmission.

This is the poem, as often translated into English:

The body is the bodhi tree
The mind the bright mirror
At all times we should polish it
And not let dust collect

However, the original Chinese reads something like:

Body is bodhi tree
Mind like clear mirror stand
At all times diligently polish
Do not let dust settle

When we first hear the poem in its normal translation, we imagine that Shenxiu is talking about your body and your mind, and that your mind is like a bright mirror which needs to be kept clear of the dust of thoughts by the effort of Zazen. That ties in with an individualistic, mindful, psychological sense of what zazen is.

Except, the poem doesn’t actually say that.

Let’s consider the actual text.

The body is the bodhi tree. The bodhi tree is the tree under which the Buddha attained his enlightenment. So it is associated with that, obviously. But also, it is an unusual tree because it’s hollow. So it’s also a symbol of interdependence.

Is this the personal body, or not? Or both? Or neither?

When we hear that the mind is like a mirror, we form an image of a mirror, on a stand, in a room, that we polish through our effort, and so keep bright. But where in this image is the bodhi tree? Is it in the room, with the mirror, or not? And shouldn’t the (personal) body be the stand of the mirror? And what is the stand anyway, and how does it relate to the mirror/mind?

The original text doesn’t make clear who or what is being polished. The translations do, and it seems clear why. What would we be polishing, if not a mirror? It’s obvious, isn’t it?

But obviousness is the co-conspirator of deception.

If we rephrase it as something like “with vigorous effort, the dust does not settle anywhere”, we may start to get somewhere.

If dust appears in vast space, moved here and there by the vigorous life of the air, both illuminated by light, there’s no problem. The problem arises when the dust settles. Not because it becomes anything different, but because space is eradicated. There’s just dust, and the dust becomes fixed. And what it comes to rest on becomes fixed too, as ‘me’, ‘objective world’, ‘mirror’, and so on.

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Kusen

180. The path of all buddhas

Kusen collaboration artwork by Margaret Kerr

“The path of all buddhas and ancestors arises before the first forms emerge; it cannot be spoken of using conventional views”

Dogen, Shobogenzo

This is the first sentence of Chapter 39 of the Shobogenzo. What are we to make of it?

One of the first places the Glasgow Group practiced was an unkempt room in the International Flat, near the University. Nancy did an Introductory Day there in 1991. It was a bright cold winter day. Light flooded through the window, illuminating the dust in the air.

Dogen said that zazen was dropping off body and mind. He claimed he got this formulation from his teacher, Nyojo. But scholars have recently thought what Nyojo – a Chinese master – actually said to the monks practicing zazen was “you should drop off mind dust”, and Dogen’s creative genius reformulated it, because ‘dust’ and ‘body’ are homonyms in Japanese, but not Chinese.

What would we make of someone who was fascinated by the dust: how it moved, where it came from, the patterns it made, and so on, endlessly? If we were to say to this person that the movement of the dust was just the movement of the air, like objects bobbing on water, would it change him? And if it didn’t, wouldn’t we think we think he was a simpleton?

And isn’t the dust of our thoughts, illuminated by practice, absolutely like this? Non practitioners imagine that they spring out of nothing, but they don’t. And isn’t that fertile ‘no-thing’, that greater space, within and around and beyond, the path? The presence or absence of dust is neither here nor there. The light illuminates the space. And with it, the dust.

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179. This Body of Practice

Fujita described Zazen as ‘one piece’ Zen.

The one piece is everything.

The difficulty with this perspective is that we tend to oscillate between the individual and the universal.

And between self abnegation and self inflation.

Unless we challenge the individualistic assumption that is as natural to us as breathing. More, even.

But we should try:

Examine our actual experience. Our experience now is not that we are practicing with others, but we are practicing together.

Each of us with our sincere effort within this body of practice.

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178. The death of ritual

Ritual starts out as neither magical or symbolic, and neither does language. But both, in decay, reach these points, and then we’re in a fix: the corpse can’t see the living being.

At first, ritual is a complete effort in the present moment. It opens up our hearts like verandah doors opening up to sunlight. It’s not for anything. Its dignity and beauty is entirely itself. Ourselves.

Then superstition arrives. We imagine that we can do something with it. Redeem a dead person. Banish ghosts. Rearrange.

And that degeneration provokes the subsequent, Protestant one. So then ritual, like its child, language, must be symbolic.

It’s hard to grasp the measure of the loss

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177. The subject of practice

In the Eihei Shingi, Dogen gives exhaustive descriptions of how monastic life should be regulated: how to sit, obviously, but also how to sleep, how to clean your teeth, how to use the toilet, how the teacher should enter the dojo and how he should walk around it: everything. Or almost everything. The glaring exception is that he doesn’t say anything about the breath during zazen.

In fact, all he says about the breath, throughout his writings, is that we should take a deep outbreath when we start zazen, and that we should let a short breath be short and a long breath be long.

How should we understand this? Well, one way would be to acknowledge that an emphasis on the breath in modern practice derives from an unexamined assumption that zazen is an individual practice. If the primary thing is our own state from moment to moment, it is important how we regulate ourselves. And so teachers – including myself – give lots of descriptions about how breathing might be ‘better’

But what if this is an assumption that Dogen didn’t have? And what if we’re wrong? Could we explain Dogen’s apparent lack of interest in the breath as due to him having a different perspective, that zazen wasn’t individual experience and effort, but collective ?

From the perspective of the individual practitioner, practicing within an individualistic assumption, there is a switching back and forth between the individual and the universal, the Dharmakaya, and also the risk of a surreptitious inflation of the Self to cosmic proportions. This happens because both ‘self’ and ‘universe’ are constructions, they don’t arise within actual experience in the way we think they do.

But if the ‘subject’ of practice isn’t the individual but the collective of practitioners and the space between them, isn’t that a more fruitful way to experience the ‘One Piece Zen’ that Fujita talks about? And doesn’t that better accord with our actual experience?

The space where we practice together, and everything within it – the Sangha Body, as it were – is both the reality and metaphor of interdependence. And because it has no boundaries, it seeps out everywhere, like slowly falling water.

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176. Demons

Master Dogen described zazen as walking at full speed over the heads of demons.

Note the imagery carefully. The demons don’t belong to someone else; they belong to you: their heads live in your head, and you don’t need to be rid of them to be free of them. Yet, they enable the Way to be walked.

Because they don’t live in the vigorous body of practice. Beware the demon of acquisition. Beware the demon of wisdom.

It’s an odd inversion: the body walking over the head. Your head, obviously, but not your body. Rather, the body of the whole universe, expressed through this body.

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175. Practice zazen eternally

My first teacher, Nancy Amphoux, asked her teacher – “How should I practice Zazen?”

Her teacher replied – “You should practice Zazen eternally.”

She said that she thought at first that what he meant was that she should practice Zazen for the rest of her life.

To practice eternally, it’s as if we are the ground on which all beings and all moments walk

Or the space within which all beings and all moments live.

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174. The body in zazen

Master Dogen asked “If the cart is stuck, do we beat the horse, or beat the cart?”

Almost all meditation teachers would say the horse, the mind. Surely that is the point of meditation? To empty and purify the mind.

But Dogen said that we should beat (give attention to) the cart, the body. How so?

Zazen is the way of liberation through the body. Not the body as thought. Not the body as object, but the body as it actually is. Because that body, completely alive, is already part of the body of the universe, completely alive.

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173. Pillars

Taigen Dan Leighton described the various aspects of our practice as ritual enactment and expression.

It isn’t moving slowly towards the Buddha, a speck in the ghost cave of the future. It is the living activity of Buddha now. It isn’t forming the thought of gratitude, and then giving form to that thought in the symbolism of bowing. No.

Awake-awareness, compassion, gratitude, generosity: they are not qualities of the self. They are pillars holding up the roof of the world.