Glasgow Zen GroupWe should distinguish between obstacles and delusion.
Obstacles are straightforward: a persistent tune, an idea that keeps returning, a scenario that keeps regurgitating itself. These seem a serious obstruction to our practice, but they’re not.
Delusion is our taking a position towards them. One aspect of delusion.
A person prone to waking in the night, who imagines himself an insomniac, would be unaware when he is asleep.
Similarly, although when we sit we are frequently in the balanced state, we cannot see it, since there is no one to see. It is as if we oscillate between the dreams of the mind and the dreams of the body.
My teacher would say that we are always passing through the balanced state, in this movement between body and mind.
It is not that there is a something. It is not that there is a nothing.
In zazen we lay down our arms.
We place one hand on top of the other. The world is unmanipulated and not held at bay.
It comes right up to the heart.
The Buddha said:
The Buddha’s true Dharma body
Is just like space
Manifesting its form according to things
It is like the moon in water
In talking about Emptiness, visual metaphors are often used. The familiar world is like a mirage, or an image in the mirror, or like the moon in water. And similarly, visual metaphors dominate practice; we need to see through the veil of illusion, as if the world or our consciousness is like an obscuring fog which will clear. ‘Kensho’ means to see into one’s true nature.
This was not Master Dogen’s view. In his rendition, ‘like’ is re rendered as ‘thusness’, ‘in’ is re-rendered as ‘middle’, and the character he uses for moon also means ‘full dynamic functioning’.
So, his re-rendering of the line is something like
It is/ thusness/middle/moon-in-water/total dynamic functioning.
It is important because it relocates Emptiness in this world, and re-conceptualises it as the vibrancy of the whole universe manifesting itself moment to moment. And our practice, rather than being a sustained exercise in disappointment, is giving all things life.
Giving all things life.
A principal way in which we maintain ourselves in delusion is imagining that our life and practice should be something other than it is. We locate delusion in the wrong place. We imagine that our transient thoughts and emotions are obstacles, and if somehow we got rid of them, we wouldn’t be deluded any more.
But this is precisely the idea that is the engine of delusion. When Dogen says that delusion is carrying the self forward to experience the myriad things, and realisation is the myriad things expressing and experiencing themselves. By ‘myriad things,’ he doesn’t just mean trees walls and sky. He means everything, including our thoughts.
If we obsess on our thoughts, it is as if we take all the light and concentrate it on that, so that everything else – the body, the senses, the breath – is in darkness. Throwing the light over all experience makes the dualism of thought and world impossible to sustain. We see the tremor and evanescence of our thoughts as one aspect of our aliveness, which is to say, the aliveness of everything.
We can talk of our practice and life in terms of form and emptiness, or delusion and enlightenment. We can also talk of both in terms of ground and space, earth and sky, heaven and earth.
In Inmo, Dogen comments on the phrase:
Those that fall to the ground get up relying on the ground. To get up without relying on the ground is, in the end, impossible.
One of the most difficult things for people to experience when they start zazen is their ungroundedness. They are caught up in a storm of thought and emotion. And through practice, they learn to experience falling back into the feeling, experiencing body, the ground.
We can experience this physically. If we sit properly, allowing our weight to drop down through our sit bones, then we can receive a reciprocal push upwards from the earth, up our spine and up through the top of our head.
This falling down and getting up is the activity of our lives. And in this activity, we actualise heaven and earth.
When we chant the Heart Sutra, we’re not just making a noise.
But we are making a noise. Seen from the concrete perspective, it’s just noise.
Seen from the abstract persective, it’s just meaning. But both these persectives are expressed and transcended by the simple action.
If we see zazen as a concrete act, we understand neither zazen or the concrete. If we see it abstractly, it’s lost too.
Question: If I do a good act, but with a conscious intention of doing good, does that negate the karma?
Answer: There are two dualistic assumptions buried in your question.
The first is that we can separate ourselves from ‘our’ experience, so there is an ‘I’ acting in ‘The World’. This is counter to our belief that practice is wholehearted action in the present moment, when our ordinary distinctions fall away, vivifying reality.
The second is that our actings take place in linear time, and that good or bad actings in the past have good or bad consequences in the future. But we say that the act and the consequence arise at the same time, the flower and the fruit occur at the same time, and this same time is all of time.
[Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 47]
Master Rinzai said that there was a true human being without rank who went in and out through our face.
When we hear ‘face’, we often think of Original face, the face you had before your parents were born.
If we pay attention, we can be aware of the musculature of our face; the fixed patterns we hold, the tensions, the habitual moving contours. And if we have this awareness, we can experience our face as a kind of mask. Indeed, we might identify our sense of self with this social face. If we didn’t have a face to present to the world, could we have a self to present to ourself?
Rinzai’s person without rank is something in us which is true and alive, and which can never be entirely suppressed by our social face. And so, he emerges. And sometimes, we suppress him. And so, he goes back in. This person without rank is our original face. There is not a true face behind our social face. There is not another self behind the self. There is just life channelled by us, like light falling through windows.
[Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 5]
In this story, Kanzeon’s hands and eyes are manifold. She does not have 84,000 hands and eyes. She does not have inexhaustibly many hands and eyes. They are manifold. And so, we can equate them with all existence. The whole world is one of the functions of Kanzeon. And these ‘hands and eyes’ suggest an interfolding of doing, being, perceiving and intuitively knowing, within the one vivid whole.
It is as if what has been on the butcher’s slab of western rationalism has abruptly risen up, illuminating everything.