Category: Kusen

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172. The sangha body

The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Towards the end of his life, the Buddha said to his disciples “My true body is my teachings“

Out of this arose the idea of the dharmakaya, the Universal Body of the Buddha, and then, later, the Bliss Body. As ‘buddha’ inflated, ‘sangha’ shrunk.

But there’s another way to look at it.

The Buddha’s teachings weren’t written down in his lifetime. They were held in the bodies and minds of the disciples who heard them. They were brought out by those disciples. That’s where the teachings arose. Without a sangha, there would have been no dharma. That’s where the teachings were embodied. And from there, outward, to everywhere.

And it is this body – the Sangha body, both mythical and flesh and blood – which keeps giving birth to new buddhas.

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Kusen

171. The fox

When she was alive, I often thought Nancy Amphoux, who introduced me to zen, was a terrible teacher. It took me a long time to realise that I was a terrible listener.

When I last saw her, a week before she died, she gave me a bird’s feather. She explained that years before, when she’d been driving in France, she saw a fox attacking a bird. She stopped the car and got out. The fox ran away, but the bird was already dead. Some of its feathers were scattered on the road, and Nancy took them, and kept them.

As people came to say goodbye to her, she would tell them the story and give them one of the feathers. As she finished telling the story to me she gave me the last feather and said “There, all gone”

Often in the teachings, an apparently humble thing: a cat, a pillow, a broken ladle, a dead bird, symbolises the alive wholeness of everything, but unless we feel it, our understanding is useless.

I lacked even that understanding. And I didn’t ask her who the fox was, either

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Kusen

170. The zen lineage

When we chant the lineage, we chant the six primordial mythical buddhas, then the historical Buddha, then the generations of teachers following him, down to the present day.

The superficial problem – aside from the mythical buddhas – is that the lineage is made up. Some of the people named probably didn’t exist at all, and others almost certainly didn’t say or write what has been attributed to them.

In full knowledge of this, my teacher said that he accepts the lineage completely. How so?

Rinzai said that there is a true person – this person – who has no rank. This person is always going in and out through your face.

When we chant the lineage, all the names are provisional names, for this person.

And in the lineage of your own life, this person appears. All the demons, ghosts and false persons do not obstruct this person. And they don’t matter.

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Kusen

Blue Cliff Record, Case 63

The Case: at Master Nansen’s temple, two groups of monks were arguing about a cat. Nansen held up the cat and said “If you can speak then I will not kill it”. The monks were silent. Nansen cut the cat in two.

Commentary:

1. Who is the one person within the temple who carries a sword? Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. He sits on the altar, atop the lion of courage.

1.1. So is it a real sword? Or a real cat? Given that a humble pillow can symbolise dependent origination, what more could a cat signify? What are monks really likely to be arguing about?

2. Dogen, in Zuimonki, asks his students what they would have said in response to Nansen’s demand. And then volunteers that he would have said to Nansen, “Why don’t you cut the cat into one?” Wouldn’t you be happily cut in two if you could say something this brilliant?

2.1. Isn’t Dogen’s point that the cat -reality- has already been cut in two? Nansen does not kill it, because it has already been ‘killed’ by the sword of duality, wielded by the disputatious monks. But Manjusri’s sword is different. It cuts into one. How?

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Kusen

Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 3, Case 4

The Case (adapted):

Master Tozan was asked by a monk, “When we are going along a narrow path, how should be proceed?”

Tozan said, “Poisonous snakes are found even on a broad path, and I advise you not to attack one directly”

The Monk said, “If I do, what will happen?”

Tozan said, “Just at that moment, there will be no room for you to escape”

The Monk said, “Would you tell me about ‘just at this moment’?”

Tozan said, “All things are lost”

The Monk said, “Where have they gone?”

Tozan said, “Because of the grasses, we cannot find them”

The Monk said, “Master, if you go to the river bank you can get there at once”

Tozan rubbed his hands and said “The air now is poisonous”

Commentary:

Nagarjuna said that we should approach Emptiness as we would approach a poisonous snake. We cannot avoid it.

But if we attack it, we remain in duality. Likewise if we ignore it. We should pay careful attention to Tozan’s “you”.

Tozan was one of the founders of our Soto tradition, our narrow path. Unlike other traditions, we don’t engage with Emptiness “directly”. We don’t use koans. We don’t intellectually engage with it. We just sit. But isn’t that engaging directly? Because no “you” remains?

The Chinese Masters were keen that we didn’t misconstrue Emptiness as nothingness, or vacuity. Neither that we reified it. So they reconfigured Emptiness as Suchness, Is-Ness. The world is empty of our concepts and names, so what we choose to demarcate as distinct things ‘disappear’ and are lost. “Grasses” or “Myriad Grasses” is a way of talking about all beings, all things. In Suchness, we cannot find one thing as it is part of everything, which is whole.

The Monk finally alludes to the last part of the Heart Sutra – the Sutra on Emptiness – but for Tozan, this is exactly the sort of intellectual engagement he has disparaged, and so he dismisses the Monk.

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Kusen

Practice Instructions: Bringing attention to the body and breath

If our intention is sincere, it doesn’t matter if our mind is busy or quiet. Nonetheless, if we are very distracted, it is often helpful to bring our attention back to our body and breath. But what does this mean?

For myself, I often find it’s helpful to focus initially on the head: the lips, the tongue, the musculature of the eyes, the pressure of the forehead, the muscles of the jaw, and so on. The attention then seems to flow quite naturally to the rest of the body. We use the unspoken equivalence of head/brain/mind/self to re-embody.

Likewise with the breath. We can start by feeling it in the nostrils, then the throat, then flowing down into the chest, the stomach, the pelvis, so that the whole body is breathing.

This feeling-being-body is the ground of practice.

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Kusen

169. Zazen is not a practice of the self

The most important thing for us to understand is that Zazen is not a practice of the self. It is a practice of the Buddha.

That being so, it is not concerned with purifying or perfecting the self. Or setting the self off on a journey.

It is not concerned with furnishing the house of the self with wisdom and compassion.

But rather, becoming completely intimate with the ground.

My first teacher said, “What is it which stops the Universe from collapsing?”

He didn’t answer. Of course, he didn’t need to.

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Kusen

168. Five pieces of prajna

Master Dogen, in his instructions for meditation, said that when we practice zazen, we have to take ‘the backward step’.

That suggests that the world we ordinarily experience is constructed. But also, that what we are searching for is abundantly available to us, and always has been. It isn’t somewhere we’ve not been to yet, but somewhere we’ve forgotten. It is easy enough for us to say that the ways we demarcate the world is a construction, but harder to say – and to mean – for the self, or, as the Heart Sutra says, ‘the five skandas’.

To abandon one but not the other is useless, like collapsing all the props, yet leaving the actor on stage. Which is more essential to the delusion?

In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Dogen said that the five skandas are five pieces of prajna. Pra-jna. Pre-knowing. So, what is differentiated in the stepping forward into self and world is ‘one piece’, which is broken when we step forward, unbroken when we fall back, breaking and unbreaking, like space.

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Kusen

Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 1

The Case (adapted):

Nangaku approached the 6th Patriarch.

The 6th Patriarch said, “Where do you come from?”

Nangaku replied, “Mount Su”

The Patriarch said, “What comes thus”

Nangaku could not answer. He stayed in the 6th Patriarch’s service for 8 years. There was then a further conversation between them

Nangaku said, “when you said ‘what comes thus’, I could make no response”

The Patriarch said, “How do you understand the words?”

Nangaku said, “If I try to express it, I miss the mark”

The Patriarch said, “Do practice and realisation exist, or not?”

Nangaku said, “It is not that they don’t exist, but they cannot be tainted”

The Patriarch affirmed him.

Commentary:

This is a very rich koan story, often used to illustrate the inseparability of practice and realisation. It isn’t clear whether the 6th Patriarch’s second statement is a question (‘what comes thus?) or a statement (‘what/suchness/the ineffable comes, thus’), but either way ‘what’ and ‘it’ are often used to signify thus-ness, the ineffable.

I would like however to focus on Nangaku’s ‘if I try to express it, I miss the mark’

Is this a deficiency, or not? Normally we imagine the word to be like an arrow, hitting the mark of the thing signified. But this is dualistic. Doesn’t Nangaku ‘fail’ to hit the mark because the mark, the air, his sincere effort and the expression are all ‘hitting’ the arrow? And isn’t this full expression?

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Kusen

167. The Shin Jin Mei

The Shin Jin Mei, The Verses of Faith Mind is attributed to Sosan, the Third Patriarch. The first line is “The Great Way is not difficult, only avoid picking or choosing.”

Well, we may readily think Sosan is being ironic, because when we start practicing, The Great Way seems very difficult indeed. Not just difficult, but impossible to see at all. It’s as if all we experience is a repetitive cascade of thought and emotion.

Yet somehow, with enough practice, we will step through this, and then The Great Way will be visible. And will be ours.

Sosan uses the term ‘faith mind’, because the faith is that this mind, this body, this experience is Buddha.

And we don’t see that, because in encountering what we deem this repetitive cascade of thought and emotion, we have already stepped forward into duality.

Our task is not to imagine that we can step forward further, this time into non duality, wholeness, but rather to fall backwards –