Category: Kusen

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Kusen

113. Suffering Is Not Inevitable

Master Dogen said that Zazen is the dharma gate of ease and joy.

To understand what he meant we need to consider the fundamental Buddhist insight that we suffer because we believe there is a self and that there are things which belong to the self. And because we think that in our ordinary life we constellate our experience around this. Like wrapping a bandage round and round a non-existent head.

Dogen also said that Zazen is casting off body and mind, and one of the things he specifically means is that when we sit, we cast off this sense of me and mine. So experience is unwound, fills everywhere. And we can understand that suffering is not inevitable.

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112. Having No Head

The whole Zen literature is a commentary on practice. Actual practice. Your practice.

Before spiritual language degenerates into religion, it is always the effort of a real person, using what is available, to describe their actual experience.

Always the effort of a real person to describe their actual experience. And because we too are that real person, it describes our experience. Not the experience of some far distant moment after decades or lifetimes of practice, but this moment, when we drop the familiar dualities of self and world, mind and body and so on. The language is often shocking and startling because it needs to be, to knock us out of our habitual configuration of experience around a ‘Me’.

For example, the writer Douglas Harding describes Zazen as being like having no head. He doesn’t mean that cognition, sensation and so on disappears. But rather that we lose the sense of this experience as mine. So rather than locating this aliveness within a space called me, there is just this aliveness, which fills everywhere.

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111. The Particular and the Universal

More On the Heart Sutra:

The Bodhisattva of Compassion….

Buddhists have a persistent difficulty with the Particular and the Universal. When we consider Avalokiteśvara/ dynamic full functioning/ dependent origination, we tend to make a picture of something vast, and lurch between that and our particularity now.

It was for this reason, I suspect, that Okumura said that practice was the five skandas seeing the emptiness of the five skandas.

We start with this experience, this particularity, this now, and it floods out everywhere, because it is unconstrained by the bell jar of the self.

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Kusen

110. The Sickness of the Self

Buddhism is a medicine for the sickness of the self.

It takes us a long time to realise it. What drives us to start to practice is a sense that something is missing. That we may be caught in the in breath of narcissism, or caught in the outbreath of depression. We may feel like there is dirt on our face which we can’t wash away.

But rather than something missing, something is not yet missing: the deep belief that there is a Me.

The fundamental belief in Buddhism is anatta, no self. In Zen we express this as emptiness. This belief is the foundation of everything else; Interdependence, total dynamic functioning and so on. It is why when we chant the Heart Sutra we chant that the Bodhisattva of Compassion, practicing Zazen, sees the five skandhas as empty and thereby relieves all suffering.

The oscillation, the breath, is not between the inflation and deflation of the self but between the five skandhas and everything, seen as vast compassionate space. We cannot lift ourselves, yet we are lifted up.

The sickness never really leaves us. But nonetheless, everything is illuminated.

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109. Prajñāpāramitā

The bodhisattva of compassion practicing Prajñāpāramitā (Zazen) sees the five skandhas as empty and thereby relieves all suffering.

So, the practice is seeing the emptiness of the five skandhas. Not as a preliminary to something else. Not in order to experience emptiness per se, or to experience something else. Not you seeing. The practice is seeing the emptiness of the five skandhas. That’s it.

That’s the practice. The five skandhas are form, sensation, perception, fabrication and consciousness. Form, this is my body. Sensation, my body is feeling something. The feeling is mine. Perception, that something I am feeling is sadness. Fabrication, I am feeling sad because…. Consciousness, ah there I go again.

Seen through emptiness, consciousness becomes compassionate vast space awareness. Fabrication is set aside and in that non doing is nirvana. Perception is set aside and the world is released from our mind. Hence Prajñā appears. This sensation, this body is part of an unbroken whole; the body of the whole world.

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108. The Ghost Cave

In Zen, the fixed self is sometimes referred to as the Ghost Cave.

We can see our practice as a kind of dynamic coming and going. From this place out into the illuminated universal and back again into the apparent personal, and so on, endlessly. The metaphor of cave, an opening in the mountain, is worth paying attention to.

The self is not characterized as a prison, something we are trapped within. Or something to be annihilated. Rather, it is to be understood. It is a Ghost Cave because we do not understand it. The ghosts are restless because they do not understand themselves.

This cave is part of the Great Mountain of all things. It is our only way inside this mountain. Dynamic, compassionate awareness pacifies the mind. Pacifies the whole mountain.

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Kusen

107. The Prajñāpāramitā Sutras

The vast Prajñāpāramitā sutras are condensed into the Heart Sutra, and the essence of the Heart Sutra is in the first line, which is a description of our zazen:

“The bodhisattva of compassion, practicing Prajñāpāramitā, sees that the five skandhas are empty and thereby relieves all suffering”

The most important thing is to see that it isn’t a person practicing Prajñāpāramitā (zazen). Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, is identified with the whole world. The person is the five skandhas, and for our purposes, the skandhas of mental formation and consciousness are the ones which matter; mental formation our ceaseless tendency to do something with our raw experience, and consciousness the awareness of that. Prajñā, pre-knowing, is the state prior to mental formation.

It isn’t a sequence; when one arises, all arise.

We are storytelling creatures who want to be truth telling creatures. That is another sort of story. But we can be truth experiencers.

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Kusen

106. The Gates of our Face

Rinzai said that there is a true person, entering and leaving through the gates of our face.

We often have the experience of our karma as being a kind of mask, stuck to our face, us mute behind it. And with the thoughts experienced when sitting, similarly it’s a kind of mask or screen. It’s as if our craziness and our normality hovers in front of us, like a fog, like a mask. The temptation is to wish it to be something different. To become the face of compassion. The face of Buddha.

If we think in this way we are still entirely within our karma. But if we can drop our aversion, then there is the possibility of illumination. Sometimes the mask, sometimes the face.

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Kusen

105. Samskara

Delusion and Enlightenment is the usual pairing in Zen, and in Buddhism generally, it’s often Samsara and Nirvana.
Enlightenment/ Nirvana seem distinctly other, and difficult to reach, like trying to jump over a high barrier with your feet stuck in mud.

It’s difficult to relate them to actual practice, and I wonder if a better pairing might be Samskara/ Nirvana.

Samskara appears everywhere, but due, possibly, to accidents of translation, it’s often ignored. It’s one of the five skandas for instance, variously – and unhelpfully – rendered as ‘volition’ ‘willing’ ‘mental formation’, among others.

But it’s fundamental. It is our endless tendency to do something with our raw experience. Constructing desire, memory, a mind, a self, a world, endlessly.

Nirvana is just simply not doing that. Just letting everything be. It’s not a state, or a place, it’s a non doing. It’s here and now, not some place else, some other time.

Our practice is a wobbling between these two, and an illumination of that.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 24

The Gateless Gate, Case 24

The case: A monk asked Feng- hsueh, “Speech and silence are concerned with equality and differentiation, how can I transcend equality and differentiation?”

Feng- hsueh replied, “I always think of Chiang-nan in March, Partridges chirping among the many fragrant flowers.”

Commentary:

In this koan story, the monk is asking a clear question about Buddhist Doctrine. The master replies with what appears to be a complete non-sequitur, quoting a poem, which isn’t even his own poem. So one might imagine that the monk is asking an intellectual question and the master is trying to defeat it. But perhaps we are better seeing the monk’s question as exemplifying him having a particular, heroic idea of practice. Smashing through barriers. The master is balancing – not correcting- that understanding by simply expressing his present feeling state.

If as practitioners our attention is always on progress, like a fly trying to find where there is no glass, we pay no attention to the ground, the ground of our feeling being. Which is not heroic, but real. Not somewhere in the future, but now.

The thinking mind freezes all things, and itself. Everything can be seen yet nothing can be felt. Our practice is a kind of thawing out, a softening, despite ourself.