Category: Kusen

Categories
Kusen

392. Firewood becomes Ash

The first writing of Dogen that most of us are likely to come across is the Genjokoan chapter of the Shobogenzo.

I came across it over 30 years ago. I found it very rich, evocative and poetic.

There’s a reason for that. Dogen wrote it for a lay follower, so it’s different in style from his other writings, where his monks were his audience.

In the chapter, there’s a particular passage which has always affected me very much. It goes as follows: (this is the Tanahashi translation)

 “Firewood becomes ash, and does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is after and the firewood before. Understand that firewood abides in its condition as firewood, which fully includes before and after, while it is independent of before and after.  Ash abides in its condition as ash, which fully includes before and after.  Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death”

The Nishijima translation is fairly similar: 

”Firewood becomes ash; it can never go back to being firewood. Nevertheless,  we should not take the view that ash is its future and firewood is its past. Remember, firewood abides in the place of firewood in the Dharma. It has a past and it has a future. 

Although it has a past and a future, the past and the future are cut off. Ash exists in the place of ash in the Dharma; it has a past and has a future. The firewood, after becoming ash does not again become firewood. Similarly,human beings after death do not live again”

In trying to understand this passage, which I don’t think I have been very successful in doing, what seems most problematic is the third sentence. 

The first sentence and the second sentence seem to be reasonably comprehensible. Dogen appears to be saying that although, in our karmic consciousness, firewood becomes ash, that’s  not actually true, because there’s no underlying essence. At one point in time there is firewood and then at another point in time there is ash.

So those first two sentences, I think, are understandable. 

The third sentence is harder. In the Tanahashi translation, that sentence reads; 

“Understand that firewood abides in its condition as firewood, which fully includes before and after”. 

That word ‘abides’ also occurs in the Nishijima translation.

For an English speaker, I think that that word ‘abides’ is unfortunate because, for me at least, it seems to suggest ‘endurance, continuity over time. 

Somehow the firewood has become ash. Yet in some mystical sense it still exists; it’s still abiding somewhere.  One of the reasons why we can make this (poetic yet false) interpretation, apart from the preceding sentences, is that it’s implicit in the word ‘abides’.

In some other transitions the same word is rendered as ‘remains’ which has an even stronger assumption of continuity.

The word in Japanese which is being translated as ‘abides’ means something like ‘dwell’ or ‘lives within’.

We can see how the translators produce the English word ‘abide’. But a better translation might be to talk about the ‘true home’.  The ‘true home’ of firewood—what firewood actually is, is the expression of firewood.

The true essence of ash is the expression of ash. There’s not an underlying something which just happens to have a whole lot of qualities on top of it which change over time, so at one point it’s firewood, and later on it’s ash, yet the ‘something’ endures.

The manifestation, the expression of firewood, is firewood: there’s no continuity.

The reason why there’s not is because this miracle of creation is not in the form that we imagine it to be. In other words, it’s not a vast assembly of discrete yet related objects which arise, persist, change and disappear through time. Rather, it’s the total dynamic functioning and expression of this unseeable unsayable oneness from moment to moment. It’s like a body, not a warehouse.

In that sense it doesn’t make sense to talk about past and future because talking about past and future assumes an underlying continuity which in reality isn’t actually there, and a separation which isn’t there either. 

But it’s very deeply ingrained in us, and necessary for us to function in society. I say “60 years ago I was a small child. In 10 years time I’ll be an old person”. Our language enables us to think that there’s an underlying Essence, even though there isn’t.

If we make that analysis, the other part of the sentence starts to make sense.  

What about (in Tanahashi’s version) “firewood.. fully includes before and after; while it is independent of before and after”?

What I take from that is that from the perspective of the self there is a ‘me’;  there is an ongoing me that is continuing and changing through time in a world of things which likewise are enduring and changing and perishing through time.

But if we don’t take the universe from this perspective of the Self, we can see that at every point the firewood, as it is, the ash as it is, is connected to everything. When the firewood is firewood, it is in a whole, alive, relational world. In a sense, each thing is the whole world.

We can see the world as uncountable beings, or as uncountable moments. If beings, it is as if we are seeing a billion threads, running parallel to each other. Where is the connection? In Uji, Dogen said Being is Time. And so, you can see yourself as this being, or as this moment. If this moment, then there is nowhere and no being which is not included in this moment. The countless moments and the countless beings are, as it were, threads running at right angles to each other. The loom of full dynamic functioning creates this miraculous fabric.

If that’s too obscure, consider your own life. After all Dogen isn’t really talking about firewood. He’s talking about you.  

The carbon dioxide which left my lungs a moment ago hasn’t disappeared. It’s just disappeared from my perspective. The fleeting glance I gave someone, which I can’t remember, set off a ripple in that person, became part of that person’s changing dynamic expression, which also ripples out to others. Everything is like this. It is this miraculous fabric, infinitely dimensioned, shaken from all directions. Each moment of our life has an expression and significance which is invisible to us. And all these moments of our life are, as it were, having their own life, their own story, within the greater reality of all beings.

Categories
Kusen

The Book Of Serenity Case 18: Joshu’s ‘Mu’

The most famous Koan in the literature is Joshu’s Mu Koan. Its best known form is Case 1 of the Gateless Gate which (in the Robert Aiken translation) is: 

“A monk asked Joshu “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not? “

 Joshu said “Mu.”

The koan also exists in a longer form in Case 18 of the earlier Book of Serenity, which is in two parts. Two monks ask Joshu the same question. 

A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?” 

Joshu said,”Yes.”

The monk said, “Since it has, why is it then in this skin bag?”

Joshu said, “Because he knows he deliberately transgresses.”

Another Monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”

Joshu said, “No.”

The monk said, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature,  why does a dog not?”

Joshu said, “Because he still has karmic consciousness.”

In the Book of Serenity it’s the second question which is better known, so that’s the part which I’ll focus on.

A way of looking at these koans, which I think is a mistake, is that the teacher is wise and the student is ignorant and so they show the student being corrected by the teacher.

That perspective is very damaging for practitioners. It makes an effigy of the teachers, who become impossibly lofty, ahistorical figures, rather than flawed human beings sincerely engaged in practice.

A much better perspective is to re-see them as master and student together attempting to clarify aspects of this life. 

That being said, what do we make of this koan?

First off there’s the question,  “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”

It’s an odd question, because more than 100 years before this dialogue (if it ever was a historical dialogue) Chinese Buddhism had settled the issue of Buddha nature. There had been an argument whether all beings had Buddha nature or if some beings did not. It was resolved in favour of the more generous interpretation—that all beings had Buddha nature.

So in a way, the question is disingenuous.

Also the Chinese is terse, so it’s not clear from the Chinese if the monk is referring to an objective dog or if he’s referring to himself—does this dog have Buddha nature? The answer that Joshu gives, is either (in the Cleary translation of the Book of Serenity), ‘No’ or ‘Mu’.

‘No’ is not an accurate translation. Chinese and Japanese have three options to a question whereas we have only two. Both obviously have yes & no but they have a third option. In Chinese that third option is ‘Mu’ and in Japanese that third option is ‘hi’, as in ‘hishiryo’.

‘Mu’ is not the direct negative. It means something like —that’s not it or it’s different from that.

It tends to indicate some conceptual confusion with the question. For example if someone were to ask, “is the mountain flat?” then the answer would be ’no’ but if the question was, “is the mountain an introvert?”, the answer would be ‘Mu’ because the questioner misunderstood the nature of mountains, which don’t have psychological characteristics. Joshu’s answer  of Mu to the monk’s (apparent) question indicates that there’s a conceptual confusion.

In the question, I think the monk isn’t ignorant; he’s  inviting Joshu to confirm that there’s a common conceptual confusion with Buddha Nature. The question is brought out in the second half of the exchange when the monk asks his supplementary question,  “.. all beings have Buddha nature, why doesn’t a dog have Buddha nature?”.

The Chinese is more terse than the translation; it’s simply ‘karmic nature.’

I think this exchange isn’t about whether the dog has karmic nature in place of Buddha nature or that the dog (or monk) has  two Natures, that are somehow contesting the existential space of the dog, but rather that the phrasing of the initial question (intentionally) has an error in it.

That error is that the world is made up of dogs and human beings and walls and all the rest of it. Each of which has Buddha nature.  It’s an individual quality, like height, or dog-ness. 

With the Buddha Eye, all of existence is seen as a dynamic, interdependent and vivid whole. 

It’s our karmic nature which splits up the world for us into dogs and human beings and so on.

The monk is intentionally asking Aunt Sally questions to clarify that Buddha nature is not a personal quality and by implication, that Enlightenment is not a personal quality either. We go astray when we take the world as it presents itself to our karmic consciousness. Or, if you prefer a more familiar language, the world as it presents itself to our socially and historically conditioned self.

We mistake those parts for reality and then attempt to impose qualities on them. Like asking how much the fat man in a dream weighs.

Categories
Kusen

391. Dogen’s view of delusion and enlightenment

In the Genjokoan, Dogen defines delusion and enlightenment.  

His definition of delusion is surprisingly straightforward. He says that to carry the self forward and to encounter the myriad beings is delusion. That’s it!

He doesn’t say delusion is thinking that Lourdes is the capital of France or that that mirage over there is really palm trees and water. It’s not some kind of misapprehension of the world. It’s a configuring and restricting of experience around the self. That’s it! 

In delusion, we go from being within experience to, as it were, our experience being our experience, being mine, taking place within me. In other words, we’re not within the world, the world is within us.  You can phrase it in various ways but I think that’s fairly easy to understand. Living it is another matter, obviously.

The position of Enlightenment is the reverse of that. He says that for the myriad things to come forward and illuminate the self is Enlightenment. At least, that’s the Tanahashi translation.

It seems those two definitions contradict each other but they don’t. The word which is translated as ‘self’, jiko, has two meanings. The first meaning, which applies when he is talking about delusion, means ‘self’ in the way we normally mean it: the ego. But, confusingly, when he turns to enlightenment, the second meaning applies. In this, ‘jiko’ means ‘universal self’. He doesn’t mean that there’s a big spiritual bicycle pump in me that puffs out the small self to fill the universe. He means the whole universe: the whole of manifestation, creation, expression.

That’s why the translation of the second part varies with different writers. It’s not that somehow all the things of the world come within the Treasure House of the Self, like some transcendent version of the Scottish Exhibition Centre. It’s that each thing in its own nature, ungrasped by the self, illuminates everything.

The appropriation of experience to a self stills the voices of all beings. Letting go of this lets all beings sing.

Categories
Kusen

‘Fatigue’ during Zazen

A very common problem in Zazen, particularly for beginners, is apparent fatigue. You often see people sitting, their heads, which feel heavy, gradually drooping forward, then they notice it and come out of it with a startle. Then they often stick their chest out and lift their head in a rather unrelaxed, mock heroic posture. And then you can see them gradually collapsing again like a slow motion  souffle, then taking up the heroic position again; up and down, like an accordion, often for the length of their sitting.

What’s helpful for fatigue in Zazen is to think of it in a different way. It’s not really about fatigue but about having a spine that’s insufficiently activated. If it were really about fatigue, the practitioner would be exhausted before and after Zazen, and they hardly ever are.

Rather than trying to make yourself do something with your mind, whose imperative is to urgently resume the ‘correct’ posture without anyone noticing,  it’s much better to make sure that your pelvis is in the right position; that your weight is going down through your sit bones. Then, just very, very finely and slowly, rock backwards and forwards on your sit bones.

Going from the back of your sit bones to the middle through the front very slowly, minutely.

As you’re doing that, on the in-breath you’re pushing down with the pelvic floor at the perineum, and on the out- breath you’re allowing the spine to lengthen. You’re not pushing up the top of the head, you’re not stretching the back of the neck,  you’re just allowing the spine to lengthen and be itself, like a young, unencumbered tree.

Categories
Kusen

390. Not picking or choosing

The first lines of the Hsin-Hsin Ming, the Verses of Faith-Mind go as follows: 

“The great way is not difficult, only avoid picking and choosing.

 When Love and Hate do not arise, things cease to exist in the old way.”

It’s fair to say that the general way of looking at that passage is to say that the two parts are the same. In other words, the reference to ‘love and hate’ and the reference to ‘picking and choosing’ is the same thing. And on that assumption we think we primarily require to develop Equanimity,  particularly when we’re practising. From that comes the common instruction that we should allow our thoughts to come and go freely and not be attached to them — not try to push them away or dwell on them.

But that common perspective is both banal and a misunderstanding — the two parts are not the same.

The reference to ‘picking and choosing’ doesn’t  mean that our arising  thoughts are already formed and appear within our awareness. What I think it means is that for a thought to exist (in the normal sense), we require to engage in picking and choosing. We require, in other words, to constrict our attention in order that a mental object or a feeling object, like an emotion, is constructed. 

Because to do that we require to disregard all other aspects of that ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’; the somatic aspect of it, the karmic aspect of it, the environmental aspect of it and various other things. If a thought is arising for me, that thought indicates not that there’s something pre-formed that I should have an attitude of neutrality towards. 

No! 

The fact that the thought (in the normal sense) arises at all  is an indicator that I’m engaging in picking and choosing.  I’m constricting my attention, thus an identifiable thought arises.

It arises from my activity of constriction which I’m unaware of.  So when a thought arises what I require to do is not to take a position towards that thought but recognise that I’m engaged in picking and choosing. In Uchiyama’s words, I “Open the Hand of Thought ”; what I’ve put out of my awareness, in terms of my body, my environment, my karma, and so on is brought back into awareness. When it’s brought back into awareness the thought, as it exists in the old way, disappears. 

So the activity of not picking and choosing, in other words, the activity of not constricting my attention, which you could call the practice of non-duality, means that in consequence, love and hate do not arise, because love and hate require that constriction, because they need to have something specific to adhere to.

Things ‘cease to exist in the old way’ not because we have an attitude of neutrality towards them but because our unconstricted awareness is primarily a wholeness out of which, as if in a dream, specific things appear to arise and disappear.

Categories
Kusen

389. Who is at the door

Categories
Kusen

388. Sangha Buddha

In Zen legend, when Master Bodhidharma was approaching death,  he called together his four senior disciples and asked them to explain their understanding. 

The first three gave verbal answers. Bodidharma said to them respectively “you have my skin”, “you have my flesh” and “you have my bones”. The fourth disciple Huike (Eko) said nothing, simply did prostrations then returned to his place. Bodhidharma then gave the transmission to him.

That story was subsequently used in zen to justify an anti-intellectual stance, which continues to this day.

Though not from Dōgen. In Katto, he gave an entirely different interpretation of the story. In his view, it was a completely erroneous understanding to think that skin is superficial and marrow is profound. Or, as he said in another context “If your speech is superficial, why would your silence be profound?”

There’s an aspect to the story which I don’t think has been properly explored. In the translations, Bodhidharma appears to refer to his skin, his flesh, his bones, his marrow, but I don’t think that’s an accurate rendition.  He wasn’t talking about his own body.

Or just his own body. He was talking about the body of the True Teacher.

The True Teacher appears when sincere practitioners gather together.

What could you call that True Teacher?

You could say that we’re not him, that we’ll never be him, but we can be a part of him, this body of sincere practitioners.

I believe Bodhidharma was referring to the skin, flesh, bones, and marrow of The True Teacher, not his own puny body and mind.

In Buddhism there is the idea that the Buddha has three bodies; his historical body, the universal body (dharmakaya) ,and a third body, which is sometimes called the body of joy.

I think that the third body is more accurately rendered as the True Teacher; we could call that person Sangha Buddha. 

Thus we have the historical Buddha, the Reality Buddha and the Sangha Buddha.

Those three Buddhas are not three separate jewels But the one Jewel, seen differently.

Categories
Kusen

387. The Buddhas and Ancestors of the future

Almost all Zen practitioners are familiar with the legend of Bodhidharma: him arriving in a Southern port in China, having a bracing conversation with the emperor, going to Shaolin Monastery where he sat facing a wall for nine years.

In recent times historians have criticised that Legend as being well, a Legend. Many have doubted the existence of Bodhidharma as an actual person, particularly when so many things are attributed to him such as him being the creator of Kung Fu, Chinese Tantra and so on.

But in fact there was an Indian monk called Bodhidharma who did arrive in China from India in the sixth century. We know that because a researcher, Andy Ferguson, looked through the Chinese immigration records of that time and found him. Of course, that person isn’t really related to the legend at all. We know nothing very much about him. 

So who’s the real Bodhidharma? Is it that historical person about whom we know very little, or is it the Legend?

I say it’s the Legend.

Buddhism has an unusual view of the future. The future Buddha for instance, Maitreya, is existing now, albeit not in the human realm. In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha confidently predicts the future Buddhahood of many of the characters in that sutra.

The view that the past, present, and future are all existing now is called Eternalism.

It’s not simply the view of Mystics and religious figures. It was Einstein’s view. When one of Einstein’s friends died, Einstein said to his widow, “Oh, he’s just over that hill there.”

Yet there’s something about that metaphor of the whole of space-time being like a landscape that’s too static. 

More attractive -to me anyway -j is the view that the whole time-being is like a great ocean—dynamic, flowing in all directions. Time flows from the past to the present to the future, from the future to the past. 

It flows in all directions. The dynamic nature of our life flows in all directions and the dynamism of the whole universe is flowing through us.

In this sense, ‘Buddhas and Ancestors’ do not refer to historically located actual people.

They refer to this flow.
In that sense we are the future Buddhas and Ancestors for Bodhidharma. And although we cannot see them, the Buddhas and Ancestors of our future are flowing towards us, the unknown waters meeting the past waters of our karma, creating this miraculous vortex of now.

Categories
Kusen

Dogen’s Zazen poem

Dogen wrote many poems directly or indirectly about Zazen, but there’s one in particular which is of considerable interest, because it’s almost an identical  poem to one written very shortly before.

In Steven Heine’s wonderful book, “The Zen Poetry of Dogen”  the earlier poem, which he’s entitled “Zazen Practice” goes as follows:

“The moon mirrored

by a mind free of all distractions 

even the waves, breaking

are reflecting its light.”

The slightly rewritten version is entitled ‘Zazen’

:

“The moon reflected

in a mind clear as still water 

even the waves, breaking

are reflecting its light.”

Both poems have a similar two-part structure. The second part, “even the waves breaking are reflecting its light,” is identical and the first part is almost identical.

The second part is something we’re familiar with in Dogen’s writings. He’s radicalising the traditional metaphor that ‘successful’ meditation is “like the moon being reflected in still water.”

In other words,  we’re undisturbed, we see reality as it is. He radicalises that by saying that the moon’s light is always there. So whether the moon is fragmented into a million pieces on the breaking waves or is in one piece when, for instance, it’s reflected on a still pond, it’s the same moon. 

By clear implication the purpose of meditation, as it were, is not quietude or tranquillity, but non-duality.  And that is seen in a way that’s not quietistic, but dynamic, inclusive, whole and expressive.

That’s a very important point in Dogen.  But why the slight change? 

I think that the first version of it retains a shred of dualism between ‘moon’ and ‘mind’. 

And, the use of ‘distractions’ comes with the possible implication that we should be free of them. Not distractions in the sense of splitting: the ego interjecting itself into the totality in a dualistic way, but distractions seen as mental activity full stop. Obviously the removal of the word takes away that erroneous implication.

The moon is always reflected, because – thanks to interdependence – everything is relationship. Everything is expression. Everything is experience. There’s not an original moon and then the moon’s reflection is added on later. The moon is always reflected: in the still pond of our eyes, in the tranquil water, in the waves, in our mind, and so on. 

And apart from that, the moon doesn’t exist. Because nothing does.

Categories
Kusen

386. The Great Mystical Power

In classical China there was a widespread belief that prolonged meditation gave one miraculous powers: the ability to read other people’s minds; to see past lives; to do extraordinary things with the body’s energy; and so on.

Now we think that claims like that are ludicrous. Yet we imagine, equally ludicrously, that through Zazen we might cultivate compassion, wisdom, happiness, joy. 

Dogen, in talking about these claims—the ability to read minds and so on, referred to them as the small mystical powers. They were small because they were limited by person, place, circumstance, and time.

In contrast he talked about the great mystical power. By implication he is talking about Zazen.The famous example which he gave was fetching water and carrying firewood. In other words, the most mundane tasks we can imagine. Contemporary zen people often talk about washing the dishes. 

What does Dogen mean when he talks about the great mystical power?

Last week I was with my mother at the seaside in Edinburgh. We were sitting on the promenade. On the low sea wall was a little Indian girl, playing with her mother. The mother had produced two straws and both of them were delightedly waving around these straws like magicians wands. Waving them at the sea, the sky, the birds, the sand and so on.

The little girl was so happy, so new.

And I suddenly saw that that little girl was manifesting the great mystical power. 

And the reason why Dogen referred to the small mystical powers as small was that they simply involved changing the world.

And that the great mystical power is not changing the world, it is renewing the world.

Renewing the world and in this way, stopping, like the hand of another on a falling person, the collapse into nothingness.