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Kusen

105. Samskara

Delusion and Enlightenment is the usual pairing in Zen, and in Buddhism generally, it’s often Samsara and Nirvana.
Enlightenment/ Nirvana seem distinctly other, and difficult to reach, like trying to jump over a high barrier with your feet stuck in mud.

It’s difficult to relate them to actual practice, and I wonder if a better pairing might be Samskara/ Nirvana.

Samskara appears everywhere, but due, possibly, to accidents of translation, it’s often ignored. It’s one of the five skandas for instance, variously – and unhelpfully – rendered as ‘volition’ ‘willing’ ‘mental formation’, among others.

But it’s fundamental. It is our endless tendency to do something with our raw experience. Constructing desire, memory, a mind, a self, a world, endlessly.

Nirvana is just simply not doing that. Just letting everything be. It’s not a state, or a place, it’s a non doing. It’s here and now, not some place else, some other time.

Our practice is a wobbling between these two, and an illumination of that.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 24

The Gateless Gate, Case 24

The case: A monk asked Feng- hsueh, “Speech and silence are concerned with equality and differentiation, how can I transcend equality and differentiation?”

Feng- hsueh replied, “I always think of Chiang-nan in March, Partridges chirping among the many fragrant flowers.”

Commentary:

In this koan story, the monk is asking a clear question about Buddhist Doctrine. The master replies with what appears to be a complete non-sequitur, quoting a poem, which isn’t even his own poem. So one might imagine that the monk is asking an intellectual question and the master is trying to defeat it. But perhaps we are better seeing the monk’s question as exemplifying him having a particular, heroic idea of practice. Smashing through barriers. The master is balancing – not correcting- that understanding by simply expressing his present feeling state.

If as practitioners our attention is always on progress, like a fly trying to find where there is no glass, we pay no attention to the ground, the ground of our feeling being. Which is not heroic, but real. Not somewhere in the future, but now.

The thinking mind freezes all things, and itself. Everything can be seen yet nothing can be felt. Our practice is a kind of thawing out, a softening, despite ourself.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 41

The Gateless Gate, Case 41.

The Case: Eko approached Bodhidharma and said, ‘My mind is not at peace, please pacify it.’

Bodhidharma said ‘bring me your mind and I will pacify it.’

After a while Eko said, ‘I’ve looked everywhere for my mind and I can’t find it.’

Bodhidharma said, ‘There, I have pacified it.’

Commentary: People, looking at us, might imagine that we are trying to remove something, like a person, inside a house, might want to clear the dirt from the window to enable him to see the world clearly. But there isn’t a person, and there isn’t a house either. The self is the dust cloud, innocently wishing the window clear; the wound, thinking some more picking will heal it.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 7

The Gateless Gate, Case 7.

The case: A monk said to Joshu, “I’ve just arrived at the monastery, please teach me”.

Joshu said, “Have you eaten your rice?” The monk said, “yes I have.” Joshu said, “Then wash your bowl.”

Commentary: In the Chinese monasteries the monks would eat a kind of rice gruel, vegetables would be cut very small and the gruel – the rice and vegetables – would be cooked and cooked until everything interpenetrated each other. So, the gruel was a symbol for dependent origination, the whole cosmos.

And before the monks could eat, they would chant, and that chant would express gratitude for the rice and an acknowledgement of where the food came from; an acknowledgement that the whole universe was feeding them. So the gruel was also the reality of dependent origination.

Likewise, in the bowl of this bodymind, our experience, all of it, is like this rice gruel. Our experience now, all of it, is given to us by this entire universe. If we reject it, it will putrefy. If we cling to it, it will never be digested. To wish it different is a wrong view, because it is an expression of the whole universe, this miracle of something rather than nothing.

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Kusen

104. The Mind of Practice

When we start sitting, what usually shocks is gaining an unwelcome familiarity with the mind: the inane repetition, the vacuity, the constant chatter. It’s only natural if we think the aim of practice is to change this mind. To think in that way is a trap.

If we just allow all the mental activity to come and go, we realise that what we usually term ‘thought’ isn’t free floating. It’s as if it’s the visible tip of a long thread, which connects to our heart and to our body. And through them, to the heart and to the body of everything. The shimmering aliveness of everything, the isness we are part of.

Our little karmic mind exists within bigger mind, the mind of practice, which is not personal to you or me, the mind shared by all practitioners; the past, now, to come. Which holds everything

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 30

The Gateless Gate, Case 30.

The Case: A monk asked Baso, “What is Buddha?”

Baso said, “This very mind is Buddha”

Commentary: Baso’s ‘Mind is Buddha’ has been persistently misunderstood. People might think there is a special state of mind free from delusion, or a mind realm of Buddha, or that mind is true reality, or similar, but they are mistaken.

Baso said “This very mind”. That is: your mind now, your experience now, but unconstellated by the self, not stained by attachment or aversion. When we sit, we wobble between self and buddha.

The crucial issue is not what is true and what is false, but how we live.

Picture vigorous fish in the ocean: they might want to see the water clearly but they can’t: their activity blurs and distorts it. But this same activity is the ocean’s life. It is nowhere else.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 37

The Gateless Gate, Case 37

The Case: A monk asked Joshu: “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”

Joshu said “The cypress tree in the courtyard”

Commentary: The standard interpretation of this koan is that the questioner was caught by language. He thought the tree was an objective thing. He couldn’t see the being- ness of the tree, and so he couldn’t see the dynamic being- ness of everything.

But there is something else hidden in there. In our usual way of thinking, Bodhidharma travelled from India to China. The tree didn’t move at all. Likewise, we may act as if we are the subject and the world is the object; we are active and ‘things’ are passive.

If we look at a clutch of trees, we can often see the oldest tree, then, a little distance away, another tree, derived from the first, and so on. The tree is walking through time. We don’t see it, the tree doesn’t see it, but it’s there.

The path is walking and we are walking. Everything is expressing and exerting itself, together.

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Kusen

103. Within a dynamic whole

We practice within a deep faith that we exist within a dynamic whole, that we are part of everything. Part of everything.

That being so, it doesn’t matter if our mind is empty or full, quiet or busy. Whatever arises is part of this wholeness too. What we call delusion is asking to be seen, to be understood, to be ungrasped by our attachment and aversion, not eradicated, not cast into nothingness.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 1

The Gateless Gate, Case 1.

The case: A monk asked Joshu “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”

Joshu said “Mu” (no).

Commentary: There is an assumption buried within the question, which isn’t immediately obvious. But consider: why didn’t the monk ask ” Does Buddha nature have the dog?” ” Does Buddha nature have you?”, “Is Buddha nature all of creation?” or similar?

He did not because he assumed that the aim of spiritual life is the enhancement and enlightenment of the self, the steady or sudden uncovering of a jewel within us.

This colossal mistake is endemic. We need to understand that the aim of practice isn’t the liberation of the self from the world, but the liberation of the world – all of it – from the self. Enlightenment is universal, not personal.

We are like snow falling.

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Kusen

The Gateless Gate, Case 5

The Gateless Gate, Case 5.

The case: Hsiang- yen said: “It is just as though you were up a tree, hanging from a branch with your teeth. Your hands and feet can’t touch any branch. Someone appears beneath the tree and asks, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?” If you do not answer, you evade your responsibility. If you do answer, you lose your life. What do you do?”

Commentary: How many are in this story: two, one, or many?

Sometimes, when we sit, we feel completely concentrated and unified. Like the man holding onto the branch with his teeth, our complete effort in this moment occupies the whole space.

Then, it is as if, from within our experience someone, someone just like us, asks a question, makes a statement, or something similar. It is as if we are suddenly divided. Do we ignore it? Do we engage with it? Either way, we appear to fall into duality.

We need to understand that just as the man holding onto the branch is making a complete effort, just as the branch and the tree are making a complete effort, so the questioner is making a complete effort, entirely expressing his nature. We imagine a response is called for, but we are mistaken.

Likewise with delusion.