Glasgow Zen GroupOne of the three meanings of satori is awakening, in the sense of awakening from a dream, or awakening within a dream.
We’re liable to misunderstand the metaphor, as we equate dream with falsity, and awakening with truth, which is complete nonsense.
The issue is whether we partition and appropriate experience, or not. Awakening to the dream within the dream isn’t about seeing falsity, it’s about seeing wholeness. Wholeness, seeing.
Dogen said that the path of all buddhas and ancestors is prior to the myriad things. That being so, it cannot be understood or explained by conventional means.
When we hear ‘path’ or ‘way’, we might imagine a path made up of the sutras, the words, the heads, the hearts, the hands of the ancestors.
And because there is such a path, here or somewhere, we can walk it.
Creation myths often take unpicturable chaos, which is then ordered into a pictured world.
It’s as if we can’t see the swirling of time without the picture of a clock. Or the surge of the ocean without a picture of it, first. But isn’t this picture world a loop? Isn’t the picture not a door, but a wall?
This life is not a million pictures. Our practice is not stepping onto this pictured path.
But rather, stepping from the hundred foot pole. Not falling
the words, the heads, the hearts, the hands.
In the Mountains and Waters chapter of the Shobogenzo, Dogen talks about how various different beings see what human beings see as water.
When we see water, fish see palaces. Gods see strings of pearls, hungry ghosts see blood or pus.
Dogen didn’t say that the fish, the Gods and the hungry ghosts are all mistaken, that they are mis-seeing water.
What we see as water is just one window, and there is an infinity of windows.
But for us, just one window. But looked through with which eye?
The eye that gives life, or takes it?
At the end of The Diamond Sutra we are told that we should view all things as “a flash of lightning, a bubble, a phantom, a dream”
At first blush, we think the first two are real, but momentary, and the second two are illusory.
We need to understand that having our face pressed tight against the unyielding glass of ‘Reality’ is a root cause of suffering.
All four are real, because all experience is real. Real, but not separate. We can see the lightening and the bubble as the momentary action of the whole universe, but likewise the phantom, likewise the dream.
If we can break this glass, we can discover the glory and beauty of our lives. Not in some future moment, but this moment.
Buddhist language is often quite abstract.
And so it is often difficult for us at first to understand the feelingness underneath.
So for example in the Surangama Sutra there is what appears to be quite an abstract discussion about perception.
We are told that false perception is like the moon in water. So in other words we imagine that each thing is a kind of concrete reality.
But every thing is just dependent on the causes and conditions of everything, from moment to moment. Were the water to be disturbed, the image of the moon would be shattered into a thousand shards of light. All things are like this.
The Sutra then talks about a second moon. It’s as if a person with cataracts looking at the moon sees another moon next to it. And by this – I think – is meant awareness of perceiving. So I see something but I am aware of the act of perception, and hence aware that my ‘seeing’ isn’t just noticing what’s there already. It’s a creative act. But I’m still going astray, somehow.
The real moon is unmediated experience itself, which is a description of our sitting.
When we sit, we are not concerned with inside or outside, identifying or classifying our experience. And when identifying and classifying arise, they are not meta phenomena, they are just aspects of experience.
We are simply experience.
It takes a little while to realise that this ocean of experience, this something rather than nothing is a miracle.
Is a miracle.
Our lives do not exist in time. But in our lives, time exists.
Likewise, space. The budding tree births the sky.
Buddhist language is not a description of ‘reality’. It is a provisional language, aimed at liberation.
My first teacher said that we can’t break the mirror of the self with the head.
But if not with the head, then with what?
What.
With application, stilling the mind is not difficult. What is difficult is dropping off the sense of self. The sense of something to gain, something to lose. Self separate from the alive wholeness of everything.
Dropping off the sense of self, or ‘me’, which is central to our practice, means we do not describe practice in terms of acquisition, aspiring to acquire wisdom, enlightenment, compassion or whatever.
That is why we describe our practice as the whole universe experiencing itself through this body.
(With thanks to David Taylor)
Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Narrow Gate’. Note the words carefully. The gate isn’t hidden, or difficult to access, or far far away. It’s narrow. The sort of gate that a person would get stuck in. Neither able to go through, nor go back.
Zen is part of Mahayana. Mahayana means ‘Great Vehicle’. It’s ‘great’ because there’s nothing outside it. The whole chaotic miracle is there. That being so, there is no gate in, and no gate out. Enlightenment and delusion are both there, and nowhere else.
Delusion is taking experience and constellating it around the fiction of a ‘person’. The sort of person who might get fixated, who might get stuck. But enlightenment isn’t an attribute of a person, actual or potential: it’s universal.
In wholehearted expression and exertion, everything is the narrow gate.
The practice of allowing thoughts to come and go freely and not attaching to them is an ancient practice. It goes right back to the origins of Buddhism.
But if we think the aim of this practice is just to make ‘the mind’ still, to make ‘consciousness’ empty; then our practice lacks compassion.
It’s for this reason that when Buddhism went to China and the Chinese truly made it their own, they changed the emphasis from emptiness to suchness. The unstatable state when we are no longer conceptually grasping experience, fabricating self and object, when everything is vivid and whole.
Not Nothing, but nothing that can be described. No-thing, because Everything.
There is a general instruction in many meditation schools that we should allow our thoughts to come and go freely, but what is meant by “thoughts”?
We are aware – all too aware – of what we might feel as the noise of our mind, but what we are less aware of is what lies behind this noise. If we reflect carefully, it appears that there is a ‘something’ which – as it were – endeavours to keep us in a familiar state, and usually a negative one : fear, dissatisfaction, boredom, dissociation, dullness.. the list is endless, and different for each of us, but it’s there. There, but difficult to see.
Rather than focus on purifying consciousness, what is essential for us is to be thoroughly grounded in the dynamic, living body, which means to be grounded in the breath, and to experience the breath as permeating the whole body. Everything moves with the breath: the bones of the pelvis, the bones of the head, the face, the legs. That movement from ‘mind’ to body loosens and liberates us, and is “beyond thinking”.