Glasgow Zen GroupWe collect kusen from our teacher John Fraser. Kusen 口宣 means a teaching spoken from the mouth, some kusen are Koan commentary, or about Poetry or Sitting Instructions, the rest are numbered as general Kusen. This page is for all of these types of kusen. These are spoken towards the end of a zazen sitting. Several kusen have references and further information, as well as related videos, on the Latest page.
For Dogen, zazen is “dropping off body and mind” as a continuous process.
The phrase originates almost certainly with him, although he attributed it to his Master [Tiantong Rujing/Tendo Nyojo]. The phrase occurs in Dogen’s enlightenment story, where they’re all doing zazen late at night. The monk next to Dogen is drifting off to sleep, and Tiantong/Tendo, says something scolding to the monk like “Zazen is dropping off mind dust. Why are you sleeping?” And Dogen creatively mishears this in his inner translation to Japanese as ‘dropping off body and mind’, because the word ‘jin’ is a homonym in Japanese [but not Chinese], meaning both ‘body’ and ‘dust’.
The expression does not occur in Tiantong’s writings. And the phrase ‘dropping off mind dust’ appears quite often. We can’t know for sure. In any event, in Dogen’s universal recommendation of zazen, Fukanzazengi, what we notice is that there is a lot of instruction about how we should physically sit, and there’s very sparse instruction about how we should comport our mind in sitting. This strikes us as weird.
There are a number of paragraphs telling us about how to sit, how to place our legs, how to place our hands, not to lean, to keep our eyes open, all of that sort of thing. Yet so far as the mind is concerned, there is just a very short passage, which reads, “now sit steadfastly and think not thinking. How do you think not thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen”
And we are likely to question why there is a disproportionate amount of preliminary instruction about the physical aspect of sitting and very little about the mental aspect of sitting, because our tendency is to skip over these physical instructions as preliminary, since we assume the important part is Dogen’s instructions concerning the mind.
This mental bias is reinforced by how people talk about practice. Often you hear practitioners say that zazen is watching the mind. Or zazen is allowing our thoughts to come and go freely without becoming attached. Or zazen is when we notice that our mind is attaching to thoughts or emotions and bringing our awareness back to our posture. All those instructions are concerned with our awareness, with our mind. They’re not concerned with dropping off body.
Yet it’s clear that Dogen is giving instructions about dropping off body as well as dropping off mind. And he says in the text that this is a natural process. So you put your body in this particular posture, you put your mind in this particular frame, and the process will happen naturally. He says that several times.
So why do we tend to disregard these detailed physical instructions and be a bit frustrated because the instructions about how we comport our mind are so brief?
For a number of reasons. Dogen is writing this text in a culture which is obviously different from our own; it’s a much more physical, embodied culture, the practice that people are likely to have is likely to involve longer, more intense periods of practice. And, often overlooked but critically important, people are just more used to sitting cross-legged.
In the text, the only options that are given are to sit in full lotus if we can, otherwise half lotus. That’s it. So, presumably, that’s what they did. Yet if you go into a Western dojo, very few people are sitting in those positions. They are probably sitting in a kneeling position or a variant of the Burmese, or quarter lotus or, less frequently, half lotus. But hardly ever full lotus. We also sit for shorter periods of time, we’re stiff, and we’re often physically uncomfortable.
Sitting full lotus isn’t accidental. It’s a dynamic, balanced posture which connects our perineum to the earth and activates the spine, making the body an alive, non-conceptual whole.
Additionally, we’re the inheritors of protestant religious culture, which doesn’t really involve the body at all. It’s an activity of our mind. And we carry that viewpoint into meditation.
If we put all these things together, it’s quite difficult for practitioners to just naturally experience the dropping off of body which Dogen is talking about, because we’re sitting for shorter periods of time, we’re almost certainly in an unbalanced posture, we’re probably a bit physically uncomfortable, we’re stiff, and we have a predisposition to thinking of meditation as being a practice of awareness, a practice of consciousness. And the problem with all of that is that the distinctive vision which Dogen has of dropping off body and mind is subtly abbreviated to mind only.
Which renders zazen indistinguishable from other forms of meditation, apart from the ceremonial husk.
Calamitously.
Master Dogen described the practice of zazen as being the [continuous process of] ‘dropping off body and mind’.
It’s reasonably clear what he meant by dropping off mind, because he describes that process in quite a straightforward way in Genjokoan: in zazen, we allow all our experience to live fully, unconstrained by the assumption of ownership of this experience by the self.
That is, all the multifaceted aspects of our experience can be expressed, and they don’t have to be stuffed into the small jar of self. Sometimes that is expressed in spatial terms. So we’ll say it’s as if in zazen our awareness is like vast space, within which everything can freely appear, manifest itself entirely then go.
And if we do not give attention to the body, people can quite often have the notion that this sense of vast spaciousness, once developed, is the same as non-duality. That if zazen had a destination, this would be it.
Yet that’s incorrect, because it excludes the actual fabric of being; this body and all others.
Dropping off body is more difficult for us to understand, but it needn’t be. It is simply to forgo an unconscious yet pernicious idea we have of the body as being like an object within consciousness.
Or another way of putting it is as being like a pictured body within the mind: when someone asks us to pay attention to our left hand, do we sense it, or do we look at it?
Dropping off body is dropping off that conceptual sense of the body, so we can actually experience it as it is phenomenologically. And what we notice when we’re sitting in zazen is that very often we will experience our body as being like charged space.
So it’s there [as a ‘something’] but not there. And there isn’t a clear boundary between body and world. There’s not a clear demarcation between this body and the body of all being.
And that is a much more immediate and natural sense of non-duality, which is beginningless and endless.
The earliest of the foundational zen texts is the “Shin jin mei”, The Verses of Faith Mind, normally attributed to the third patriarch, who [in the usual zen way] almost certainly didn’t write it.
There’s lots of different translations. The translation I like has a first verse which goes as follows.
“The Great Way is not difficult.
Just avoid picking and choosing.
When love and hate do not arise,
things cease to exist in the old way.”
An understandable way of reading this verse is to see the first two lines as encouraging equanimity, particularly in zazen, and to assume a repetition in the third and fourth lines. So on this interpretation, to say “The great way is not difficult. Just to avoid picking and choosing”, means that out of the cascade of thoughts, emotions, memories and so on that we experience during zazen, we don’t grasp on to some and push others away. So we’re not picking and choosing. We’re just allowing everything to come and go freely. And then, the second part of the verse: “when love and hate do not arise…” repeats that. So [in this interpretation] when attachment and aversion [love and hate] to the various aspects of our experience don’t arise, things cease to exist in the old way.
This is a legitimate [and usual] way of looking at the verse and is [arguably] better than nothing. But we can make a deeper interpretation, which doesn’t keep all our individualistic and dualistic assumptions hidden yet intact.
And that involves an interpretation where there isn’t repetition. In this reading, the first and second parts aren’t the same.
In this reading,“The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing.” doesn’t mean that when a thought arises we don’t grasp it or push it away. What it means is that when a thought arises in the way that we normally understand ‘thought’, we’ve already been picking and choosing, because what has happened is that out of the infinitely faceted nature of all the ‘objects’ of our experience, we’ve homed in on one aspect, thus delineating the ‘thought’ [or emotion, or memory, or sensory experience]
What we’re experiencing as a naturally arising thought which we’re then taking a position towards [of love or hate] is itself a collapse of our awareness around the ‘thought’. Thus we make ourselves unaware of all the corollaries of that thought: in emotional terms, in sensory terms, in memory terms, in karmic terms, in locational terms, and so on. So if we’re able to experience all these different aspects of each area of experience [each ‘thought’] then we’re not picking and choosing and then in consequence, love and hate do not arise. It is like becoming aware again of all the facets of a jewel, not just the one directly facing us.
Thus the reference in the third and fourth lines to love and hate isn’t referring to the individual thoughts, emotions or memories caused by a collapse in our awareness around that thought. It’s a process whereby either our awareness doesn’t collapse, creating the ‘thought’ by delineation and exclusion, or [more likely] when we become aware that it has collapsed, we open out again [‘opening the hand of thought’].
And that’s also what Dogen means by zazen being a dropping off of body and mind. The problem that we have with the usual interpretation, making the two bits of the verse the same, is they are just encouraging equanimity. And that aspiration does not break down either the primary dualism between self and world nor the secondary dualism between mind and body.
In fact, it introduces a third dualism between, as it were, the witness mind, the mind of awareness and the mind which is the conduit and handmaiden of these various ‘thoughts’.
In almost all of these Chinese texts, the Chinese are intentionally using ordinary language rather than technical language. But the difficulty that we have with that is that because it’s ordinary language we automatically try and fit it into our ordinary ways of thinking, which oftenf leaves us in a position of banality, disguised by the sonorousness of ‘Zen’
What Dogen refers to as The great mystical power is not restricted by circumstance, location or time.
What is it?
When we look at our lives, we often see a kind of dichotomy.
One side is what we variously call our conditioning, our karma, our fear, our anger, our pain, our poison.
And on the other is something else. What we might provisionally call love, or compassion or openness or something else.
And the two sides are dramatically different. And they don’t appear to be equal, often it’s as if love or compassion is like a tiny sliver of light within the darkness, perhaps even just a sliver within memory.
Whereas the poison that we experience sometimes fills up our whole awareness. It seems dominant.
But what we need to understand is that this poison that we have is limited by time and space and circumstances. It is not a genuine obstruction. And what we perceive as a sliver of light is in reality like a great fire. It is not a question of turning away or turning towards.
And this great fire endures.
Everything else is just noise and shadow.
How should we breathe during zazen? Master Dogen’s descriptions about that are surprisingly brief. He just says that your long breaths should be long, and your short breaths should be short. In other words, we should breathe naturally. But obviously we’re breathing naturally in the posture of zazen. So, an almost universal consensus has been reached that our breath should be centered on our lower abdomen. Those descriptions are brief, I think, because Dogen is very keen that we shouldn’t have a technique of breathing.
But notwithstanding that, quite often people do describe a technique of how to breathe in zazen. And the technique is very often that we focus on our exhalation. We have a complete exhalation and, towards the end of that exhalation, we’re pressing our lower abdomen out. Those instructions are wrong. And they’re importantly wrong for a specific reason. Dogen doesn’t wish us to have technical ideas of what to do once we put ourselves in the posture. Because if we do that, we’re still within the realm of the self. We’re not, in his language “throwing ourselves in the house of the Buddha” We’re still within our calculating mind.
So our zazen, as it were, is taking place within the sphere of the self, rather than the self being put to one side within the universe practicing zazen through you. So it might appear to be an obscure point, but it is actually very important.
The brevity of Dogen’s instructions are carried forward to the Soto school’s website where they give instructions for zazen, which repeats almost word for word what Dogen says about breathing and posture in the Fukanzazengi.
Taking it as a given that we should not have a technique, and specifically not a technique of breathing, then how should we breathe? It’s fair to say that most practitioners do probably have an emphasis on the outbreath. So, for instance, when I first started practicing with the AZI, what we were taught was to have a complete exhalation. And then, just as it were, waiting for a natural unwilled and uncontrolled inhalation: quite natural, quite uneventful, and then we start exhaling again.
And whilst it’s not right to impose a technique on top of that, we can observe what our experience is. And it seems to me that what our experience is when we’re focusing on our exhalation is like a down elevator in our centre, so our breath is going lower and lower and down our abdomen, into our pelvic bowl. And if we’re paying careful attention there is actually a slight push at the perineum; not a conscious push, just a downward push like a lift gradually going down, compressing what is beneath it. And then that downward movement on the exhale just stops, then there is a natural pause and then an inhalation which happens as above
It is equally possible for us to pay attention to our inhalation. And if we do, what we notice is, again on the inhalation, a downward pressure, but it’s a different downward pressure than on a long exhalation. So on the long, conscious exhalation, downward pressure is like something gradually coming down, like a delicately falling weight, compressing what’s beneath it. Whereas if the focus is on the inhalation, it’s like an energetic jump up, there’s a downward pressure on the in-breath, like a dancer pushing down before jumping up into the air, there’s an unfurling energetically of the spine. And so we experience this upward movement as well as the downward push, which people often try to artificially replicate by saying that we should push up with the top of the head, by which they mean the crown chakra, which is here, i.e. the fontanelle. Those instructions are terrible. Please ignore them.
But it’s true that on the inhalation in this way there is this energetic movement upwards. The attention that we pay to the exhalation, and potentially to the inhalation, are not exclusive of each other. We don’t have to choose particularly when we’re not trying to impose a technique there’s often a natural variance. And it seems to me that they also have different but related and complimentary benefits.
The focus on the slow deliberate exhalation, it seems to me, really helps with a kind of meditative absorption. So rather than some superficial and possibly quite rapid breathing in our upper chest, this slow, very embodied breathing really really helps our state of focus in zazen and it really helps with embodiment as well. So it acts as a kind of counter to the activities of our thinking mind. The focus on inhalation has, I think, a slightly different focus than the deliberate exhalation, which is a kind of absorption. The conscious focus on the inbreath has a much more energetic [rather than absorbitive] focus and that energetic focus, in its own way, is also very helpful. It’s not egoic. So it’s not taking place within the sense of self, but it’s also, I think, quite integrating with our environment [which enhances the non-ego] when we’re sitting, breaking down the self/world dualism. So it’s not as it were, our energy that’s unfurling on the in-breath. It’s a field quality. It’s something universal.
When the Buddhist sutras arrived in China, they arrived in a disorderly way. Sutras that had been written over quite a long period, more than 500 years, arrived randomly.
The Chinese needed to make sense of these often contradictory sutras.
One way was that they ordered them chronologically in terms of their content. So, for instance, they would say that the Flower Garland Sutra dated from the earliest period of the Buddha’s teaching because it dealt with his enlightenment experience, and the Nirvana Sutra was the latest sutra, because it dealt with the Buddha’s death.
Another way that they organised material was by breaking it down into different schools. This wasn’t helped by them erroneously thinking that Nagarjuna and his school came after Yogacara, the “consciousness only” school, when it was actually the other way around.
In the ninth century, coming towards the end of the prominence of Tang Dynasty Buddhism in China, Zen [and Hua-yen] Master Zongmi worked out a fourfold classification.
In his classification there were three cryptic teachings and one, as it were, explicit teaching: his teaching, zen teaching. And the classification was done that way because he would say that the meaning of the first three groupings was implicit. What’s meant by that is that the teachings are in a strange sense preparatory, something both destructive and constructive. The destruction is clearing away the whole mass of beliefs and structures which stop us from living fully, but what and how that life is is left implicit.
That’s why he called these teachings ‘teachings of cryptic meaning’.
In his scheme, you firstly have Hinayana which denies the existence of the self, but affirms the existence of dharmas, the constituent parts of reality.
The clustering around the illusory self, which is the cause of so much suffering, is broken. But the constructed world – constructed by our karma, by our culture, by language and so on, remains intact keeping a dualism between person and the world.
So as an antidote to that the second teaching arises,Yogacara, which denies the existence of both self, and dharmas, saying that everything is “mind only”.
But that creates further problems. If the mind exists, we can aspire to various stages of consciousness development. So clinging, attachment – the cause of our difficulties in the first place – can re-emerge in a more subtle form.
To remedy that we then have Nagarjuna, who says that both self and world and mind are all empty, so there’s nothing to cling to (or to seek to grasp).
But the problem which Nagarjuna makes visible is that his solution appears to suggest a sort of nihilism, where nothing matters. This misunderstanding seems to have been endemic ever since, and is often there in our own time whenever Nagarjuna is thought of as being a forerunner of modern philosophy rather than as a religious figure endeavouring to map out a positive life by demolishing what gets in the way of that, the whole conceptual world.
In Zongmi’s scheme this misunderstanding necessitates the fourth teaching, Zen, which is distinctive because it is the only one which is explicit about the purpose of Buddhism. Explicit because it has a clear and stated positive message. Which is the belief in what is variously called ’ or ‘mind ground’ or ‘Buddha potentiality’ or ‘Buddha nature’, amongst others.
Distinctive because for the first time, there is an explicitly stated positive basis for our true life, after all the negative obstructions have been cleared out of the way.
Yet, in Zongmi’s account, the teaching method of Zen teachers is the same as the first three approaches; it’s negative, to clear the conceptual nonsense out of the way. To remove the confusion which stops the student from seeing their true nature.
The language of classical ( 600-1300 AD) Chinese Zen is particularly difficult for us to understand, but we need to make the effort to understand it because if we don’t we’re likely in our Zen practice to be gradually subsumed by the dominant trend in the West, which is concerned with psychological wellness and individual development. And it’s important
also that we understand that language, not in some abstract or scholastic way, but in terms of our own practice.
A good example of a word which arises continuously (originally in the writings of the Chinese Zen masters of the Tang dynasty period and immediately before is ‘MIND’. By ‘mind’, confusingly for us, the Chinese sometimes mean exactly what we mean by mind: the configuration of thoughts, memories, self-identity and so on which make up what we call the self.
But what they also mean by mind is something entirely different from that. Which they sometimes call ‘mind-ground’, or use metaphors like the bright mirror. And what that means in relation to our sitting is that fundamental level of experience where, as it were, the space inside us and, as it were, the space outside us, is the one alive and charged space within which everything is held: these thoughts, this body, the bodies of all other beings. And the characteristics of that ‘mind’ are openness, calmness, serenity, compassion, and so on.
And when some masters make statements like “mind is world” that’s what they’re alluding to, mind not as a philosophical statement about the real nature of the universe, like some kind of contribution to quantum theory from eighth century China, nor Idealism, but mind as the fundamental level of experience, this experience during Zazen. And often they (the Chinese Masters) will use the metaphor of the ocean. And in understanding all these metaphors, it’s helpful to understand a distinction which they make between substance and function [sometimes nature and function].
So, nature/substance is the irreducible (underlying) specificity of what something is, and function is its various manifestations. in the case of water, for instance, the substance of its nature is that it’s wet (it’s always and necessarily this) but one of its functions (ie what it sometimes manifests as) is that it’s stormy, another of its functions is that it may save someone ( who is dying of thirst) or drown someone. There’s all these different functions, but the one underlying substance. And we can understand the mind on that basis as well. It is this underlying calm, open, aliveness. And (the waves of) our thoughts are, as it were, one function of that. The assumptions behind this are profoundly optimistic.
It’s not that we need to get rid of these thoughts, but that we need to understand them. So we need to understand that our thoughts at the outset, in one sense at least, are illusory: they are not something we need to get rid of, they are something that we need to understand.
So we need to make an effort to try and grasp this very different way of thinking. Otherwise we’ll just interpret the literature, particularly the Koan literature in a very superficial way.
Kodō Sawaki was a famously tough Japanese Zen master of the 20th century. He died in 1965. His successor was Kosho Uchiyama, who wrote ‘Opening the hand of thought’ and the wonderful contemporary teacher Shōhaku Okumura is a successor to Uchiyama.
So he’s a really influential guy. He was famously anti idealistic, which was a general trait, I think, of Japanese Zen teachers after the second world war, when an inflated, idealistic language of Buddhism had unhelpfully colluded with the inflated, self serving idealistic language of Japanese imperialism.
So the postwar environment really encouraged Japanese teachers to present Zen as being something very down to earth, something almost mundane, ordinary. And one of Kodō Sawaki’s most famous quotes was when he said that satori, enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house.
You can understand what he’s trying to get at. When we start practice, we might start with the idea that somehow we’re going to get something marvellous. We’re going to get compassion. We’re going to get wisdom. We’re going to get tranquility. We’re going to be able to break into this treasure house, and wear a crown of enlightenment on our foolish head.
And so the phrase is a sort of antidote to that. And I think you can take it in quite a number of different ways. But one of the ways that you can take it is that we don’t gain anything in zazen because we don’t need to gain anything. We are already complete. But we don’t understand that because we’re always viewing everything from our karmic position of needs, desires, dissatisfactions.
So we can look at it that way. But the phrase I think, and the way that Kodō Sawaki expresses himself generally, has often been used, in the West, to present Zen in an anti idealist way, about it being really about everyday tasks like washing the dishes, attending to your normal life. All of which is true, but unfortunately diminishes something.
The quote is often attributed as a re-quote of a famous Chinese zen master of the eighth century Sekisō. Sekisō is most famous for case 46 of The Gateless Gate where he talks about stepping off the hundred foot pole. And it’s interesting because it shows how the zen currency of trading in quotes and then reflections on quotes and quotes about quotes can often get very confused.
So the source of it isn’t actually Sekisō, it’s an exchange involving another master Ryūge, who knew Sekisō. And Ryūge is asked, “how did the ancient master” -that’s the reference to Sekisō-, “finally cease doing things and completely settle down?”. And Ryūge’s reply is It was like a thief slipping into an empty house. So you notice the word used: to slip in, not break into an empty house. So the thief just, in one interpretation, happens to find himself in this empty house which, from the perspective of the thief, is empty.
Dōgen, right at the end of the Fukanzazengi, his instruction for zazen, talks about ‘the treasure house’. And by the treasure house, he’s talking about, as it were, both something which is and always has been there, and what zazen does.The final sentence of the Fukanzazengi goes something like “the treasure house will open of its own accord. And you can do with it what you wish”. I suspect the Japanese is more vague than that, but pay attention to the first part. The treasure house will open of its own accord. In other words, we don’t need to break into the house of emptiness. We don’t need to break into the treasure house. And the reason why we don’t is that the treasure house opens up from the inside. From our sincerely and wholeheartedly doing zazen.
In the quote we might make a false assumption that there’s just this person, this thief, this clown, this idiot, this self-centered person. There’s just this person who somehow has to cure himself. But that is a completely absurd notion. The idea of using the self to change the self is as ridiculous as someone trying to pull their own head off: it is impossible.
The fact is that when we’re sitting there are two things. There is this karmic self. And there is also the treasure house, a treasure house which cannot be seen by the karmic self [and hence is ‘empty’]. And that treasure house we could call the whole of existence. But we could also call it the true body. So when we’re sitting, we don’t need to give attention to the endless drivel that is generated by our mind. We just need to fully sit in the context of zazen. The treasure house is your true body, and will open up of its own accord. You don’t need to intend it. You don’t need to will it. That’s what practice enlightenment means.
Master Dogen refers to zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’. Yet body and mind don’t disappear. But they are different, because they’re no longer labouring under the ownership of the self, which is really ownership by a ghost which haunts us. And because that liberation takes place, the body can exist in its power, beauty and expression, because it’s no longer an object within consciousness.
Central to zazen is the enlivening of the spine. Sitting properly, our pelvis in the right position, our spine becomes energised, and we can express that in a number of different ways. So some people have expressed that enlivenment as being like the body is, as it were, suspended in space from above.
That’s personally, not something which I find resonant. My own inclination is to express it as the body in zazen being like a tremulous young tree. So the roots are going down into the ground and there’s this alive upward movement in response. And sometimes people can feel a sense of incipient energy in it, like a cork in a champagne bottle would feel.
These are all figures of speech to try and describe our actual experience. Choosing a variety of figures of speech makes sense because we are then likely to see these as just being provisional attempts to describe experience. Which leaves us free to find our examples which are equally provisional. So we don’t have to be, as it were, hanging about until we feel that our bodies are hanging in space, we’re free to find our own mode of expression.
So in my case, I would say that I experience my base, my pelvic floor as being like the roots of a tree going into the earth. I experience this area around my heart as uncompressing, lengthening, so my heart is no longer squashed, so it can, as it were, come out into the world. And the back of my head experiences widening. And I also experience a line of force like a needle going up in an imaginary space, not a real [physical] space, an imaginary [yet real] space between the crown chakra and the occipital joint. So not trying to push up the top of the head, which just creates tension, but just this effortless, as it were, needle of energy directing upwards.
This is all my language, not yours. And it’s fair to say as well that the aliveness of the spine is the same as the aliveness of the world. If we experience the spine as enlivened, our body is enlivened, and then we likewise experience the world in the same way. And again, we can think of this in figurative terms, so we could think of, as it were this tree being in the forest of beings, you could think of the alive spine as being like a lighthouse amid the glorious storm of creation. You can think of it in a whole number of ways. We just need to let our heart speak.
The core insight of Buddhism is that we suffer because there’s a split between self and world. ‘Self’ in the sense not that we have a subjective perspective, obviously we do, but in the sense that there’s some ongoing, continuous ‘something’ which is essential to us, and which we call self. In Buddhism we say that’s a fiction. But the insight creates two fundamental problems.
Firstly, if we suffer because of belief in a fictional self, how can meditation, which is quintessentially a practice of the self, help us see through that fiction, help us displace the self? And second, if what we’re looking for, at least in some sense, isn’t here already, why should it ever be?
Those two issues have been dealt with in various ways in the history of Buddhism. And one of the reasons for the apparent opaqueness of East Asian Buddhism for us is the unusual ways in which the Chinese and the Japanese have chosen, in a very practical way, to address these problems.
And one of the distinctive ways is seeing practice, not necessarily just meditation, but practice generally, not as the practice of the self, but the practice of Buddha or the practice of Bodhisattvas. So, for example, in the Pure Land school, there is the belief that if compassion arises within me, it’s not belonging to me. It’s not my compassion. It’s not personal compassion which I’m cultivating. It’s the compassion of the Buddha Amida.
And in a similar way, Dogen would say that when we practice, we’re not practicing from the perspective of the self, we’re throwing ourselves into the house of Buddha. At other times he might say it’s not you that’s sitting, it’s sitting Buddha.
These are ways that to us are hard to grasp, but which are eminently practical if we take them seriously rather than literally. The problem with taking them literally is we think that instead of the world being as it appears, it’s populated with these technicolor mythical heroic figures. That’s obviously ludicrous. But what’s not ludicrous is understanding that seeing in this way is meant to produce a feeling shift in us. In the example of compassion, it’s not that there’s a garishly dressed future Buddha hiding away in a mythical place, but rather that compassion, like love, is a universal quality. It’s not particular to me, and I don’t own it. It’s a universal quality which is transmitted through me in the same way as sunlight streaming through your window illuminates falling dust. The dust doesn’t acquire the qualities of light, but nonetheless becomes like a jewel, like a mirror.