Category: Kusen

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Kusen

From The Recorded Sayings of Zen master Joshu by James Green, page 91, adapted

A monk asked Joshu, “The many blind men felt the elephant and each one spoke about a different part of it. What is the true elephant”

The Master said, “Nothing is unreal. ‘True’ is a dream”

The monk is making reference to a famous passage in the Nirvana Sutra, where various blind men feel different parts of an elephant. One feels the trunk, and believes he is touching a snake. Another feels the leg, and believes he is touching a tree, and so on. The suggestion is that the awakened person would simply see the elephant. That is, he would see reality as it is. The polarity is delusion/ enlightenment.

Joshu’s position is different. For him, it is our nature as human beings to be ‘blind’. That is what we need to wake up to. If we imagine that what we see is ‘true’ then we suffer through our arrogance. If we imagine that what we see is ‘false’ then the self asserts a sovereignty over experience which involves similar arrogance, though hidden, and similar suffering. If all our experience is held like something beautiful and precious, then suffering is diminished.

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Kusen

88. Our Teachers, Walking

We honour our teachers by seeing them not as perfect, balanced, but by seeing them as unbalanced.

And us, unbalanced, balancing them. Momentarily.

The whole lineage, walking through time, always unbalanced. If it was not like this, there would be no Way.

Our teacher takes one step.

We must take the next.

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Kusen

87. Full Expression

In zazen, our normal strategies of repression and distraction don’t work. We have no choice: everything that arises expresses itself. It isn’t me expressing mySelf, and so, it is full expression. Likewise, although the activity of zazen is full and complete activity, it is not the activity of the self.

If we can understand zazen as activity and expression, then we can understand the world similarly

In this sense, zazen is the full expression of Buddhist activity

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Kusen

Practice Intructions

It is of paramount importance for our pelvis to be in the correct position, our weight bearing down on our sit bones.

Posturally, this means that our trunk and head can be balanced, light, activated, vibrant and free of tension.

Energetically, the spine can uncompress itself, there can be a clear connection between the base chakra and the crown chakra.

Breathing wise, it is as if the upper body is directly sitting on our abdominal/pelvic breathing. The in breath isn’t pushing the lower belly out. There is no intentional pushing. It is as if there is an energetic ball at the centre of the pelvis. When we breathe in, the ball expands. The lower belly is pushed out. The area around the sacrum is pushed back. The pelvic floor pushes down.

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Kusen

86. The Scenery of Your Life

Samsara is often described in terms of the six realms. The deluded person falls from one world into the next.

The Chinese called Samsara, the passing between the worlds of experience–Tao, The Way; the same term used by them for Awakening. They didn’t do this because they were short of words.

The practitioner travels between realms, and each realm is the scenery of his life at that moment. He is not caught. He does not fall. Although he travels, he does not choose to go. He does not choose to stay. The deluded person cannot travel. His feet, as it were, are stuck fast to the ground of each realm, and that ground is like a constantly collapsing building.

When we sit, it is as if all the worlds are travelling through us, like clouds through mountains.

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Kusen

85. Spiritual Language

All spiritual language originates in the actual experience of a real person, who then tries to convey that experience in words, using the poetic and allegorical options open to him. That’s why these writings are often prefaced by “It is as if….”

When this language decays over time, religion arises.

It is as if a cascade of tiny birds floods out from the open heart, illuminating the sky

It is as if after a short while these birds turn to stone and fall to the ground.

It is as if people gather up these birds, their shape and colour intact though lifeless and, fascinated, give them names: ‘Buddha nature,’ ‘No Mind.’

It is as if they collect all the birds lying there and put them together, to form structures.

It is as if each structure is a prison.

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Kusen

84. Baso

As practitioners, we try to steer a course between, on the one hand, spiritual grandiosity and narcissism, and on the other, duality and separation.

To help us, Master Baso said ‘Mind is World’. He wasn’t talking about the personal mind obviously, although it’s true that the personal mind has the karmic world it creates, like a mirrored prison.

He meant the mind of awareness. The personal mind arises within this, as do all things. Hence, mind is world. There is nothing for our spiritual grandiosity to inflate into. There is nothing outside this mind, so there is no separation.

The light which falls on us is not our accomplishment. It does not belong to us. But if the world was empty of practitioners, where would the light fall?

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Kusen

83. Shikantaza

Our practice, shikantaza, is usually rendered as ‘just sitting’. And this is usually interpreted as meaning that we are not sitting with the expectation that we will gain something.

And of course, that’s true. But the practice isn’t me just sitting, it’s just sitting. Taken that way, the practice is an affirmation with the whole body and mind that the cause of suffering is separation, not impermanence.

Outside the open window, the noise continues. But the house is empty.

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Kusen

82. Five Pieces of Prajñā

In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Dogen says that the five skandas are five pieces of Prajñā.

When we hear ‘pieces’, we might imagine that we can put them together. To make a world. To make a person. But this putting together with the glue of the Self is the root of suffering; the root of delusion.  

Because each thing is a piece of Prajñā, each thing is all things. Because this is so, each thing is of infinite value, its expressions and facets without limit.

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Kusen

81. The Three Treasures

The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Dharma is reality, how things are, which includes the teaching how of things, as they are.

Buddha is the person who wobbles in and out of this reality, quintessentially in zazen.

And what’s Sangha? When we sit together, it is indisputable that a ‘something’ arises. We could call it the field of awareness. We could call it the Buddha field. And within that field is our noise. We don’t aim to eradicate our noise, but we are not within it. Because the field has no boundary, all beings are within it.

So we sit with all beings, for all beings.