Category: Kusen

Categories
Kusen

63. Something Luminous

Master Dogen said:

The path of all buddhas and ancestors arises before the first forms emerge.

So, the Buddhist state arises prior to the creation of the world. It is an active, dynamic state which is there before we create a world of light and dark, good and bad, me and you. It is a state prior to language and prior to concepts.

Much of our life is us putting layers onto our natural momentary feeling state; layers of thought, layers of emotion. And these layers attempt to answer the question we always put to this feeling state: what is this, and why now?

Because when we meditate we try and put this tendency to one side, meditation is an affirmation of the feeling state, and this simple feeling state is the way.

Categories
Kusen

62. Original Face

Whoever says that the Tathāgata goes or comes, stands, sits or lies down, he does not understand the meaning of my teaching. And why?

‘Tathāgata’ is called one who has not gone anywhere, nor come from anywhere.

Diamond Sutra, verse 29

The Buddhist state is instantaneous, immediate, and cuts off past and future.

‘Tathāgata’ means ‘thus come’ or ‘thus gone. The name itself is a description of reality; not ‘existence’ [because that would entail dualism], not ‘no existence’ [because that would entail nihilism] but something luminous, hovering in the background, behind our conceptualisations.

Categories
Kusen

61. The Still Still State

Dogen says that we shouldn’t distinguish between practice and enlightenment. Practice isn’t the means by which we attain enlightenment. Practice itself is enlightened activity.

And we can see that Dogen is challenging layers of dualism. If enlightenment is distinct from practice, there must be a person who attains it, and his enlightenment – and his personhood – is distinct from the world.

He is primarily challenging the primary dualism, that of Time and being. It is on this dualism that all the others rest. We are born, we endure, we die. Our lives take place in time. But this is a fundamental alienation from ourselves.

In wholehearted activity time does not exist.

Categories
Kusen

60. Practice Enlightenment

We are told that we should sit like a mountain. Zazen is described as the still-still state, the mountain – still state.

The mountain is the ground made visible. Just because the mountain endures and accepts everything, we cannot say it has no feeling. Because it is the ground made visible, it is all feeling.

Zazen is the great matter made visible.

Categories
Kusen

59. Pushing the Earth

When we do zazen, we may imagine that we are sitting quietly. But our weight is dropping down into the earth.

We are pushing the earth with all our strength. And the earth is pushing back. We can feel this push up our spine, up through the top of our head. There is the appearance of stillness because there is balance; if there were not, we would fall down, into the earth, or fall up, into the sky.

Ourselves, the earth and all things are just facets of full dynamic functioning.

Categories
Kusen

58. Hishiryo

In the Fukanzazengi, Dogen says that the secret of zazen is non-thinking [hishiryo]. This is neither thinking [shiryo] nor not thinking [fushiryo].

By way of comparison, we can examine non doing. In the Chinese tradition there is wu wei, the watercourse way. Just as the water will respond appropriately to its environment, in non-doing we act appropriate to our actual situation, and that acting comes from a position of non-dualism, not ego. It is spontaneous fitting action.

Applying that to non thinking, we can envisage a state whereby thought is liberated from thought, language is liberated from language and the world, liberated from both, becomes vivid and alive. And this liberated thought and liberated world are no longer separate.

Categories
Kusen

57. Full Dynamic Functioning

Time is the cornerstone of delusion. Because there is persistence, things can exist. Because there are things, events can occur in time, they can occur in the world, they can occur in your life. And so, the original wholeness of our experience is stretched and dualised.

For Dogen, what is primary is exertion, expression, full dynamic functioning; the exemplar of which is zazen. It is not that time and space do not exist. Rather, they are aspects of full dynamic functioning.

It is our duty as Buddhists to save the beauty of this from being crushed under the railway tracks of linear time.

Categories
Kusen

56. Walls

The Buddhist way has both practice and study. Practice is primary, but study is necessary. Otherwise, we are likely to be blown about by our unexamined assumptions.

But theory can be a trap. One wall provides shelter, but four walls can be a prison.

Categories
Kusen

55. Chanting The Heart Sutra

I must have chanted the Heart Sutra several thousand times, perhaps more.

If I imagine that these have occurred within my life, and my life occurs within time, suffering can never be alleviated.

Although it may sound absurd, if we say the Heart Sutra is chanting me, is chanting all practitioners, in all times, at this time, then something which we have held tight and concealed can start to alter.

And it is not just the Heart Sutra.

We have to understand that we are not the container of life, we are its’ expression.

Categories
Kusen

54. Indra’s Net

The Net of Indra is one of the most beautiful images in Buddhism. We are asked to imagine existence as an infinity of infinitely faceted jewels, in infinite space, each reflecting everything.

We can speculate that the image could be derived from looking up at the star filled sky, endless and infinite.

Of course, we now know that some of these stars are no longer there. We are just seeing their light. From the perspective of the star’s ego, it no longer exists. From the perspective of the universe, it does.

The teaching is like this.

Life–and death–is like this.