Category: Kusen

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368. The door is always open

A central idea within Mahayana Buddhism is the Dharmakaya,  the universal body of the Buddha — the whole universe is the body of the Buddha.

Although this is quite difficult for us, it’s a perspective which is fairly constant within Chinese Buddhism. It appears in various forms.

For example,in the Huayan school, the foundational idea is derived from the proposition that everything’s empty.  And because, like space, emptiness is one, there’s not a billion, billion pieces of emptiness.

And because that is so, each thing is all things and each thing is identical with each other thing. Identical, because different. 

There is a striking resemblance with Spinoza’s idea that there is nothing which is not God.

What this supports – and this is the real point –  is the insight that our liberation is not transcendent. There is not some other special place that we need to go to—it’s not attainment. 

It is understanding that our true nature and the nature of this world is not separate.  The perspective is immanent rather than transcendent. That changes everything.

The dharmakaya is ‘virtual’ in the Deleuzian sense: it only appears through individual things. These individual things are both in their particular dharma position, but also, in their emptiness, they escape from that particularity.

We’re not confined within the boundaries either of our own skin or of the feeble stories we tell ourselves. 

The dharmakaya, erroneously thought of as a proposition about the nature of reality, is quite abstract. Huayan makes it brilliantly real.  The whole universe, like a body, is whole, integrated, diverse and alive—each part is its own part and is also whole. 

We need to understand that the door is always open.

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The Moon in Water

Just when my longing
to see the moon over Kyoto 
one last time grows deepest 
the moon I behold this autumn night 
leaves me sleepless for its beauty.

Dogen  wrote this poem towards the end of his life.  It’s contained within a marvelous book by Steven Heine “The Zen Poetry of Dogen.” The poetry is a great way to engage with the feeling-ness of Dogen.

When he wrote the poem he was mortally ill and required to leave Eiheiji in the mountains and go to Kyoto for medical treatment.

Kyoto at that time was the center of Japanese society and culture, and was the society into which Dogen had been born.

In the poem he catches himself picturing the moon over Kyoto and then realizes that that moon is the same moon that he’s looking at right now. 

Dogen often uses the phrase “the moon in water”. In this poem is the realization that the moon reflected in the water of his imagination is the same moon which is reflected in the water of his eye now.

That moon is always the same moon. Without it being reflected in water there is no moon:  there is no moon apart from its reflection in the heart of another.

 It doesn’t matter if the water is tranquil and peaceful, energetic or disturbed. It doesn’t matter if it has one moon or a thousand, or countless shards of light .

Or if one moon has a billion oceans. 

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367. Liberation

Here in Glasgow in November all the leaves have fallen from the trees.

 We might talk about this by saying that autumn leaves fall.  In a slight variation of that, we may say within my life, in my 62nd year, in the autumn, I see the leaves fall.

These apparently innocuous containers of autumn and my life blind us to the evanescence, the aliveness of our actual life; autumn is the leaves falling—it’s nothing else

Your life is each event in it. There is no container of self. There is no container of time to enable self.

There’s two expressions that  we have in zen: one is genjo which means actualisation as in ‘genjokoan’ and the other is todatsu which means liberation.

Liberation means that each moment is complete; in its self-expression it is free from before and after.

And so, at least sometimes, we are not like a tramp impacted with the grime of our karma, trudging from babyhood to death.

 The kanji for Genjokoan signifies something like a person coming out of a house: something that was latent becomes vivid.

When we sit Zazen, and not just then, in other moments of our life, we give expression to something within us which we cannot name. It is like a little bird flying out of a burning house.   

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Reflections on Kinhin

Kinhin  – walking meditation –  has an anomalous position in our practice. Dogen doesn’t mention it, and it seems that it was introduced perhaps 500 years or so after his death, possibly  by Menzan Zuiho, a wonderful teacher who lived around the turn of the 17th century.

The original instructions I received for kinhin were pretty sparse.  It was basically taking a half step forward with each cycle of breath and rolling the weight from the back foot to the front foot.

I noticed in my years of being in the International Zen Association that the Kinhin got slower and slower and slower, in contrast to what we were originally taught by Nancy Amphoux. By the time I left people were moving very short distances indeed. I’m impatient with that sort of behaviour, because it purports to declare a profundity which is, I think, fake.

What is kinhin for? 

When I went to Sanshinji  in 2012,  I noticed that they did Kinhin a little differently. In a conversation with one of Okumura’s students, she said on the step forward, just before the out-breath, they placed the heel of the forward foot on the ground first. As the out-breath continued the weight was then rolled forward onto the front of the front foot, the toes slightly splayed. The effect of that was that on the roll forward, the weight went directly over the acupressure point on the sole of the foot, near the root of the big toe, called ‘bubbling spring’. 

It’s an energy acupressure point. It’s well known among Qigong people and Acupuncture practitioners. You stimulate that point in the roll forward and then, when you breathe in, you push down with the front of the front foot and roll the foot a tiny bit backwards at the same time. Again, that push would be going through the ‘bubbling spring point.’ 

I’ve been practicing Kinhin in that way since and what I’ve noticed is that – and perhaps this is just me –  that it’s easier to find the ‘bubbling spring point’ on one foot than the other. For me, it’s my left foot, and often I can’t feel it at all.

Quite a lot of my students are unable to find it.  And if they can’t experience it, those instructions don’t make much sense, and so their focus is more on rolling their weight from one foot to the other and from the back of the foot to the front.

If we experiment with how Kinhin could be,  we could pay more attention on the back foot. All that we’re told is that when all the activity is going on with the front foot, we’re keeping our back foot on the ground. Although, it’s very difficult to stop the heel of the back foot being slightly raised off the ground. 

I realised that when the weight is completely on the front foot, the back foot is positioned in such a way that the ‘bubbling spring point’ on the back foot  is naturally accessible. The back foot is, in effect, balanced on that point.

 I wondered, if instead of on an in-breath pressing down with the front foot, what it would be like if, on the in-breath, we pressed down on the ‘bubbling spring point’ on the back foot.

It’s slightly more convoluted: at the end of the outbreath, our weight is still on our front foot, but on the inbreath, we switch our attention to include the bubbling spring point of the back foot, so we might feel that point on both feet, or perhaps just the back foot. The benefit – at least for me – is a dramatically heightened consistency of awareness of the bubbling spring point, which in turn makes it much easier to experience the body as an energetic system, rather than just a mechanical one. You can feel the energy travelling up the body.

Conceptually it’s still a bit messy: it doesn’t feel correct to pay attention to both feet at the same time, rather than alternating attention. When we’re moving energy, it’s more natural to move it from one point rather than two. If we’re bringing the energy up the body and back down to the earth again, where do we bring it down to? 

But that conceptual confusion is secondary to being able to activate this energetic point. And once we do that, we can experiment with what feels right for us within an enlivened practice. For example, it may feel right to bring the energy up through the bubbling spring point of my right foot, and as I step forward to return the energy to the earth through the same point, whilst keeping within awareness the point on the other foot.

I don’t think we should innovate for the sake of it. We  should however foster open hearted inquiry into the various aspects of our practice, and share our experience with others. Because that upholds the vital quality of practice, which avoids degeneration into hollowed out repetition, which is characteristic of religion, and fatal to spiritual enquiry. 

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366. These Little Birds

One of the instructions we’re given when we start Zazen is that we should allow our thoughts to come and go freely, like clouds in the sky. That instruction can be quite helpful to people right at the start of their meditation practice to become aware of their mental chatter, and the possibility of not being imprisoned within that. 

But taken as a general instruction, it is both harmful and useless. It’s harmful because it sets up an unnecessary dichotomy between thinking and the absence of thinking; between mental noise, the noise of our thoughts, and silence. The consequence of that is to create, unintentionally, an ideal of meditation which essentially emphasizes silence and an absence of thoughts. That ideal, that perspective on meditation, is both joyless and austere. It’s also frustratingly unattainable. 

The instruction is useless because ‘thinking’ in no way encompasses the range of our experience, either during Zazen or otherwise. Alongside mental chatter we will experience – for example – the various manifestations of our imagination; we’ll experience auditory and visual (and other sensory) hallucinations; we’ll experience  emotions that we can’t name and don’t like. We’ll experience sensations that are very elusive and we’ll experience the movement and aliveness of our body and the world.

The purpose of meditation is not to kill thought: it’s not to kill this rich experience—it’s to liberate it.

When we’re on retreat at Ardfern, at the back of the house there’s a little tree. To it are drawn all these lovely little birds,all different colors. Some blue, some yellow, some green, some red. They’re all drawn to the aliveness and tremulousness of the little tree.

When you’re sitting, your little birds are drawn to your alive tremulousness. Sometimes the birds of thought, sometimes the birds of the imagination, sometimes the birds of movement and aliveness, sometimes the birds of emotion, sometimes the birds of sensation. Do not wish them away; if they come and go freely, everything is as it should be.

When we get carried away with ourselves, we might think of our steadfast sitting as being like a mountain, but we’re more like this little inconspicuous tree which, even though it’s small, its roots extend throughout the earth. because it arises in love, not fear, its branches reach throughout the sky.   

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365. Embodiment

In Buddhism two of the ideas most distant from our rational western perspective are the Tathāgatagarbha and the Dharmakaya.

The Tathagatagarbha is the faith that, at our core – not just our core, but at the core of all living beings –  is an embryo or womb of Buddhahood: a Buddha potentiality or actuality, which is covered over by our karma. It’s a very positive way of seeing: our essence is Buddha and our coverings, our karma is accidental. 

The Dharmakaya is the idea that the whole universe, seen correctly, is the body of the Buddha. The Chinese integrated those two ideas by saying that the Dharmakaya was what the Tathāgatagarbha became when those karmic obstructions were removed. 

Those two ideas are a bit of an embarrassment to the no-nonsense, modern idea of Zen. It’s hard to see, at least at first blush, how they’re related to practice at all: but actually they’re intimately related to practice. Specifically, they’re very related to embodiment.

When we think of ‘embodiment’ we often think that we’ll just physically become more vivid, like feeling our blood coursing in our veins, for instance. We’ll still be, as it were, an object in the world, but illuminated, special.

But in truth, what we notice when we become more embodied is, in a way that’s hard to describe, that we become less physical. We become more aware of ourselves as spacious and energetic.

One of the reasons why we place such an emphasis on sitting in a balanced posture is that that posture enables us to feel, at our core, something like the Tathāgatagarbha: a spacious and dynamic emptiness which, in its nature, is not distinct to others. 

It’s not individual to us in its nature—it’s universal. And when we directly see ourselves in terms of presence, energy, spaciousness and dynamic process, the boundaries which we impose between ourselves as conceived and the rest of creation become far more porous.

That’s a gradual process. The metaphor – not just metaphor – for all of this is the breath. When we’re sitting, breathing fully, our breath is one of the correlates to this dynamic spaciousness that we feel inside us. The breath that’s inside us and outside us is really the same breath: the space inside us and the space outside us is the same spaciousness.   

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364. What is Stillness?

Zazen is sometimes referred to as the still, still state.

What is meant by stillness?

What we need to understand is that stillness, in this context, does not mean the absence of movement in space—it means the absence of movement in time.

There is ‘stillness’ because what is vividly present to us now has not carried over from the past and will not carry over into the future. It is outside Time, our normal sense of time, because that has a flattening and distancing effect on our experience.  

This experience of stillness – suchness – is familiar, although overlooked. Sometimes we may simply chance upon it. For example, a tree in autumn with dramatic and fiery colors somehow catches us.  We’re not seeing the tree as an object in our consciousness within a structure of past, present and future. The tree is in a kind of communion with us, a charged field of being in presence.

In the Vimalakirti Sutra there’s a mythical representation of this. We’re asked to imagine a realm where, instead of a world of material things, there’s simply a world of fragrances. You can see in that imaginary world how it’s much easier to think of the instantaneous present because the continuity implied by objects – including the self – just isn’t there. Like a clumsy god who accidentally creates a world, once we crystallise experience into objects, Time adheres, like dust falling onto mirrors. 

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363. Sky Flowers

The history of Buddhism can, rather than being seen as a history of ideas, more usefully be seen, to a significant extent, as the creative development of metaphors over time. 

Unlike ideas, metaphors are intrinsically part of us. They arise naturally in us all the time. We dream and live within them. We respond to them in a different way than to ideas: in a far more intimate way. ‘Ideas’ are bestowed on us by our opponents.

An example of the development of metaphor in Buddhism is sky flowers. Sky flowers originated as a way of talking about delusion. Just as a person with cataracts would see colors and shapes in the sky which appeared to be flowers, when in fact there was just sky, ignorant people see a self when there is only dependent arising. 

In sky flowers we can understand delusion. Delusion isn’t an actual obstacle that we need to overcome,  it’s more a recognition that we have been seeing incorrectly. The metaphor ties together related tropes in Buddhism: Seeing, Space, Non-Obstruction, Emptiness and Illumination ( the word for ignorance in Sanskrit is avijya, darkness, the absence of light)

This originating metaphor is then taken on by the Yogacara school to illuminate their position that whilst experience is real (so the person with cataracts is actually experiencing sky flowers)  the underlying reality which that experience purports to represent isn’t real. We can never know the world in itself, we can only know our experience. There are obvious similarities with another frequent metaphor: the dream. 

When we later come to The Sutra Of Perfect Enlightenment, sky flowers is used as one of the practices of meditation to get us over a conundrum—if there’s no self, why do we need to practice? Surely we just need to realize that the true nature of things is Emptiness? That’s the sort of naturalistic fallacy which has plagued Zen from the time of The Platform Sutra, in which Hui-neng, directly perceiving reality through hearing a passage from The Diamond Sutra ( and not meditating at all) is deemed far superior to the seasoned meditator Shen-hsui.

The Sutra Of Perfect Enlightenment, to counter this, uses sky flowers as a way of dramatically showing that, in a sense, we need to provisionally affirm the self to start to practice. 

But once we do, our habitual ideas of self are progressively undermined by our actual experience, much as a fictional fraudster would, as it were, undermine himself by progressively revealing his various frauds, culminating in his fraud of self-creation.

Dogen, three centuries or so after The Sutra Of Perfect Enlightenment, takes advantage of the double meaning of sky in sky flowers to talk about the flowers of emptiness. 

And then in his hands, rather than a specific metaphor to talk about delusion it becomes a generalised way to talk in a wonderfully original way about the interdependent nature of reality. That very creative use of metaphor is characteristic of Dogen’s genius. 

(He does something similar with metaphor of the ocean and the waves which he radicalizes in a brilliant way in his poetry)

Later on from Dogen we have the Korean monk Kihwa who identifies sky flowers with the sense of the individual self, the individual body, and the sky as being the dharma body—the body of all reality. 

This is what is meant by turning the wheel of dharma.  Rather than learning and replicating ideas or metaphors we take them into ourselves, make them our own flesh then creatively respond with our whole being.  To do this is essential, because it ensures the continuation of Buddhism as a dynamic community of practitioners spread over space and time, creating new fabric from the same threads, so the miraculous garment will not fall into nothingness.

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More heresy about sitting

One of the curious things about Zen is that, whilst the central part of our practice, zazen, entails an intensely physical posture, and one which is very specific in its form, there’s very little discussion about that posture, apart from hackneyed instructions about having a straight spine, tucking our chin in and pushing up with the top of the head. 

Which, anyway, are wrong. The mind is forcing the body into a shape which only increases tension and reinforces an unconscious body/mind duality.

It’s helpful to remind ourselves that the Chinese and Japanese masters took it as a matter of course that people practicing zazen would practice in the full lotus position. 

But hardly any western zen practitioners can do full lotus.Quite often they might practice in half lotus or quarter lotus. Sometimes they practice in the burmese position. These alternative  cross-legged positions are not symmetrical.

Obviously when you’re in half lotus, your pelvis is tilting. But even if you’re in the burmese position, your pelvis isn’t symmetrical because one foot being in front of the other torques it.

By an odd coincidence, at the start of lockdown I started sitting much more. But also, because of a knee injury, I started sitting in a chair. I would sit on a little zafu, about half the height I would normally use, which I placed on a firm chair. 

Whatever else can be said for it, sitting on a chair is an even posture; there’s a clear balance between left and right. And I think because of that balance I became much more aware of my pelvic floor, much as I would have been had I ever been capable of full lotus.

In the Fukanzazengi and in other instructions about Zazen, we’re given an instruction that just before we start, when we’re in position, we sway from left to right, but we’re not given an explanation why.  I think the reason is that it balances our weight between our two sit bones, so we’re not inadvertently weighing down on one side more than the other, or having our spine off centre.

We’re balanced. Our physical weight is dropping down equally through our sit bones and energetically our weight is going down through our centre at the perineum, where, in the traditional Indian outlook, our first chakra is located.

What I’ve noticed, because of an increased awareness of my pelvic floor, is that my perineum isn’t an undifferentiated area. Specifically, I’ve noticed that if I move very slightly and slowly forward and back (my weight going slightly further forward on my pelvic floor and then slightly further back), I can find an area which  to me feels like (though may not anatomically be) a smooth, round bone. When my weight appears to drop down through that area, it does something to my posture.

It seems to produce what I experience as an energetic, pulsing response. It’s as if my spine becomes like a gently uncoiling snake, and there is sometimes pulsing in my third eye. The crown of my head and my thoracic spine feel as if they are effortlessly going up. Having an awareness of that precise position seems to make the posture deeper, my whole body and breathing dynamically integrated.

Because of all of this, I wonder if the instruction about swaying was incomplete and, hence, misunderstood. Should the sway be a delicate, deliberate sway, not just from side to side, but from front to back too?

My desire is to open up the physicality of Zazen from its subservient and given position, to make it a fruitful area for the exchange of experience, and enquiry. If we don’t do that, the risk is that zen will, with some exotic kinks, be incorporated into a dominant yet unbalanced western view of meditation, which doesn’t just privilege consciousness over alive embodiment, it doesn’t even see it. Which would be a catastrophe. 

Once we do open ourselves to somatic enquiry, then all sorts of exploration becomes possible. For example, in kundalini yoga ( and tantra), much emphasis is placed on the coccygeal gland, located near the tip of the tailbone, which is closely associated with kundalini energy. To what extent is that engaged through the posture? Isn’t it legitimate to be at least curious about that?

It may be said that somatic enquiry has nothing to do with zen. But that’s disingenuous. We are given a very specific posture, which originated in yoga. If we close ourselves off to somatic inquiry, our view will become – and often has become – brittle and ignorant, and fetishises the posture rather than becoming intimate with it. And, I think, the joy and the heart of practice would be lost.

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362. Hishiryo

A very familiar story about how we should practice Zazen involves Master Yakusan. It appears at the start of the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo. 

In Tanahashi’s translation, the exchange reads as follows:

 Yakusan was sitting in Zazen.
A monk asked him, “In steadfast sitting, what do you think?”
Yakusan said, “Think not thinking.”
The monk asked, “How do you think not thinking?”
Yakusan replied. “Beyond thinking.”

The three material words in this exchange are ’thought’ or ‘thinking’ which is ‘shiryo’; ‘not thinking’, the direct negative, which is ‘fushiryo’;  and ‘other than thinking’ or ‘different from thinking’ which is ‘hishiryo.’ 

Tanahashi translates ‘hishiryo’ as ‘beyond thinking’. That isn’t universal. Nishijima, for example, translates hishiryo as ‘non-thinking’, which doesn’t exactly make it clearer what is meant.

This exchange, and how it appears to describe Zazen, has frequently been quite problematic for practitioners. Often there’s a tendency to think that ‘hishiryo’ – particularly when it’s translated as ‘beyond thinking’- is some special state that we need to attain. It also seems to make Zazen peculiarly intentional.

For me, what’s most puzzling is the initial question, because it seems an idiotic question for a monk to ask. The monk presumably has been Yakusan’s student for some time. He would plainly have received instruction about zazen. He’s not a layman, or a simpleton. Why does he ask a question which seems to show complete ignorance of Zazen?

The problem we have as western zen practitioners is twofold. First, what’s being said in texts like these (and in other Asian language texts) is often quite elusive to grasp. That’s made worse by being distantly separated in time and culture. 

The second is that we’re having to rely on translations from languages very different from english. We assume that there is one meaning only, but that’s not so. Classical Chinese is notoriously capable of multiple interpretations, which is exacerbated by a fondness for terseness.

You get very short statements which are capable of a number of different meanings. That creates problems for us.

The contemporary Estonian scholar Rein Raud has written, very interestingly I think, about Dogen. In his 2021 essay ‘Dogen and the Linguistics of Reality’, he retranslates this exchange, and answers my query about the monk’s apparently gormless initial question.

He re-renders the exchange thus:

 As Yakusan was sitting a monk asks “What is motionless thought?” ( That is, the ideogram for stillness isn’t a synonym for Zazen, it relates to the “thought,” making the question intelligent)
Yakusan replies, “It is the thought that occurs during ‘not thinking’. 
The monk asks, “What kind of thoughts do you have during ‘not thinking.’
Yakusan says,”Non thoughts.”

I think that this is a really much more helpful translation, much more understandable. Professor Raud  points out that there’s a problem with the habitual translation of  ‘hishiryo’ as a verb i.e non-thinking/beyond thinking.  He points out that the prefix ‘hi’ is appended to nouns, not verbs. It’s non-thought not non-thinking in the original Chinese text, which is then repeated in the Japanese. It’s only in English that it mysteriously becomes a verb. Similarly, ‘shiryo’ can either be a noun (‘thought(s)’) or a verb (‘thinking’), but in English it is much more frequently rendered as ‘thinking’, which heavily contributes to the overall impression in Tanahashi’s translation of Zazen being primarily intentional. 

‘Non thinking’ seems to be something we have to do. ‘Non thoughts’, on the other hand, seems much more understandable. There is mental activity, but it’s different from mental activity in the normal sense, because:

  • it’s not intentional
  • it’s not part of my internal conversation 
  • it isn’t mine, it’s just something else going on within experience
  • it’s not closed off within an imaginary mental space; it has correlates in the felt sense, in the body, it changes within a matrix of change which encompasses everything. The thought, as it were, remembers its embodiment

Why does this matter? It matters because it’s important for us not to explain away the teachings as ‘mystical’, capable of being understood only by those who are ‘enlightened’. Because that’s no explanation at all. And it contributes to a distorted master-driven version of Zen, where we imagine we have to open our mind. But we don’t need to open our mind, any more than we need to write the biography of a ghost.

We only need to open our heart.