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Book Of Serenity, Case 36: Master Ma Is Unwell

Book Of Serenity, Case 36: Master Ma Is Unwell

The Case: Master Ma was unwell. The monastery superintendent asked, “Master, how is your venerable state these days?”
The Great Teacher said, “Sun face buddha, Moon face buddha”

Commentary: “unwell” is a euphemism. Master Ma (Baso) was mortally ill, and died the following day.

Sun Face Buddha was said to have a lifespan of 1800 years. Moon Face Buddha lived only one day and one night. Baso is talking about two aspects of experience, once our egoic self concern has dropped away.

The Universe can only express itself through each thing. If there were no things, there would be no light.

Sometimes, we are very aware that we are expressing something universal through this fragile, transient body. The Moon illuminates itself, and everything it casts its light on becomes part of it.

Other times, we forget this body, and are simply part of this illuminated world.

The light can only shine through each thing, and each thing will break.

The light will not break.

Artwork by Blair Thomson
Artwork by Blair Thomson
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Book of Serenity, Case 9 (adapted)

If we imagine that we have to excise our delusion, we are already divided. How can more cutting make us whole?

Book of Serenity, Case 9 (adapted)

The Case: Two sets of monks were arguing over a cat. Master Nansen, seeing this, held up the cat and said “If you can express something, I won’t cut it”

The monks said nothing. Nansen cut the cat in two.

That evening Nansen told Joshu what had happened. Joshu removed his sandals, put them on his head and left the room. Nansen said “If you had been there, the cat would have been spared”

Commentary: Dogen talks about this koan with Ejo in the Zuimonki. There’s no doubt that Dogen thinks that Nansen’s killing of the cat was regrettable, and he imagines, if he had been one of the monks, what he would have said in response to Nansen’s challenge. He says that he would have asked Nansen “Why don’t you cut the cat in one?” It’s such a brilliant remark that Ejo doesn’t understand it. The One-ness alludes to dependent origination obviously, both in terms of the cat, and in Nansen’s obligation as a teacher to unfragment his monks.

Both Nansen and the monks are caught: the monks are caught in duality: Because of their anxiety to say the ‘right’ thing to save the cat, true expression is impossible. But Nansen is trapped into carrying out his threat: unlike Joshu, his lack of flexibility necessitates him doing what he said he would: so we can’t say that if one of the monks had been like Joshu the cat would have been saved, because we can equally say that if Nansen had been like Joshu, the cat would have been saved too. Joshu demonstrates a deficiency in expression in both Nansen and the monks.

In Dogen’s remark, we can see a similarity with his interpretation of the polishing a tile story: activity and expression are two aspects of wholeness. Manjusri’s sword isn’t separating; it’s the whole active Universe expressing itself as a sword, as a cat, as undivided activity, as expression.

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Practice Instructions

Practice instructions: The different aspects of practice are different facets of non duality.

When we sit, we are just sitting. The mind, body and universe are this single piece of just sitting.

We completely exert ourselves, moment to moment, to cease this mental fabrication. Exertion is illuminated. The ground is equanimity.

When we do kinhin, we completely experience ourselves. We feel our feet on the ground, the push of the earth travelling through us, our intimacy with all beings, our complex aliveness. Experience is illuminated. The ground is joy.

When we chant, together, we are completely focused on wholehearted expression. Everything is illuminated. The ground is redemption.

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102. Illumination

The complete combustion of each moment is the illumination of the universe.

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Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 1, Case 8 (abbreviated and adapted)

Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 1, Case 8.

The Case (abbreviated and adapted):

One day Master Nangaku saw Master Baso practicing zazen and asked him, “What is your intention doing zazen?”

Baso said, “My intention is to become a Buddha”

Nangaku picked up a tile and started to polish it on a rock. Baso, astonished, asked what he was doing.

Nangaku said, ” I am polishing the tile to make a mirror”

Baso said ” How can polishing a tile make it a mirror?”

Nangaku said, ” How can sitting make you a Buddha?”

Commentary:

This is a very significant story, covering a mass of issues: intention, original enlightenment, time, cause and effect, and many others, but I would like to comment simply on Nangaku’s action.

A mirror is often used in Chinese Buddhism as a symbol of dependent origination. Just as when we look in the mirror and see lots of apparently distinct and separate things, when really it’s all the wholeness of the mirror, so it is with reality.

Nangaku doesn’t say he’s making the tile into a mirror, he says that he is making a mirror. The wholehearted act of polishing, or sitting, makes the mirror. Is the mirror. The static nature of the symbol is made dynamic. The tile stays a tile, yet the mirror is actualised, even although the tile can’t see it.

The tile can never see it. Other than with the mute eyes of the heart.

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101. The most wonderful thing

Hyakujo is asked by a monk, “What is the most wonderful thing in the universe?” and responds “Sitting here.”

Nyojo re-writes the response as, “Eating rice here”

Dogen comments “I would answer by raising high my staff here”

Hyakujo doesn’t mean that his temple is the best place to do zazen, or that zazen is the most special activity, which Nyojo underscores in his reformulation.

The important word is ‘here’. Something rather than nothing. Fully alive. The great miracle.

We call buddhism wondrous dharma because it can’t be grasped by the mind. That being so, it is completely immaterial if your mind is empty or full, pregnant with wisdom or stagnant with the familiar idiocy. The East Mountain walking isn’t perturbed by the clouds at all.

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100. Mislocating Delusion

Delusion isn’t quite located where we think it is.

We imagine that it’s the apparently ceaseless thoughts and emotions which come up during sitting, but it isn’t. It’s our response. Uchiyama likened it to an ignorant person watching a play, mistaking it for reality, seeing a villain on stage, jumping up on the stage to remonstrate with the villain.

This is the practice. We keep finding ourselves up on the stage, realising what we’re doing, and leaving the stage, to sit with all beings.

That’s why an emphasis on consciousness is harmful, because we’re focused on the wrong thing. Whether we turn the mind from lead to gold, it’s still a headstone, weighing down on the body of the world.

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Practice Intructions

For a long time, I’ve given this instruction to people coming to Zen for the first time:

“When you sit just try your very best to maintain a present awareness. Your mind will wander. If it does, don’t be harsh on yourself. Just bring yourself back to this moment. Sometimes, it’s helpful to focus on the breath, or on the various aspects of your posture..”

I’m not sure if these instructions, although they might appear helpful, actually are. They might suit someone who is prone to distraction or dissociation, but are less useful for someone prone to strong feelings or sensations. But more generally, I think the instructions match up with a ‘mindfulness’ perspective, giving great weight to ‘presence’ and ‘awareness’, setting that up as a kind of standard [against which practitioners will tend to judge themselves, and judge badly] but without really encapsulating what buddhism is about.

So I now prefer to say something like:

When you sit, just allow your experience to completely be. Don’t judge it. Don’t interpret it, Don’t make a story of it, just allow it to be. You’ll notice that your mind always wants to do something with this moment to moment experience. It wants to define it [‘now I’m feeling sad’]. It wants to locate it [‘I’m doing zazen looking at a wall’]. It wants to interpret it [‘I’m feeling sad because..’]. It wants to judge it [‘I’m very distracted’]. Your experience does not come to you packaged as thoughts and emotions. This is construction too.

This endless activity of the mind is what buddhists call samskara, which is often -and clumsily- translated as ‘mental fabrication’. Nirvana is, moment to moment, ceasing to do that, allowing something other than the constructed world and self to swing open and shut

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99. Great Courage

The three prerequisites for practice are: great faith, great doubt and great courage.

I’ve tried to explain how faith and doubt are two facets of the one thing, but what is great courage? Is it simply the willingness to remain in this place of not knowing?

How do we become disconnected from our basic state of feeling being? It starts by judging our experience. Say that when we are little, we intuit that our mother can’t bear our distress. We learn that our experience isn’t simply a given, it’s something we can manipulate, explain, evade, build thoughts and stories around, appropriate to the self, and so on. A whole ego structure forms on top of the simple state of being feeling.

There’s always a gap–a way back into this simple state–but there’s a catch. The gap is the feeling we judged unacceptable in the first place. We can always find it, but it’s very hard for us to just stay with it, without going into the mechanism–I almost said demon–that we created to escape it.

And this simply staying with is great courage.

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98. Bendowa

In Bendowa, Master Dogen is asked a series of questions.

In answer four, he appears to make a naive statement about the relationship between theory and practice. In effect, he says we shouldn’t concern ourselves about the superiority or inferiority of teachings, but should only concern ourselves with whether practice is authentic or not.

But how is that possible? Don’t we necessarily have to have some idea of what practice is about before we practice?

We can begin to grapple with the statement if we consider two things: the nature of faith in buddhism and the difference between living and dead language.

First, faith. Following Stephen Batchelor, I would say that faith isn’t about making a series of propositions which one believes, but rather that faith is the courage to bracket all our beliefs, put them to one side, and try as best we can to give ourselves to our experience. That’s why words like ‘inconceivable’ are used.

It doesn’t mean that the truths of buddhism are very hard to understand, it means that the spectrum of experience which is being pointed at is outside the jurisdiction of the mind, and its tendency to ceaselessly fabricate. It is pra-jna, pre knowing, prior to conceptualisation. Our sincere effort to language truth is truth, which cannot be caught, only felt.

Second, language. I would say that dead language is the mind trying to grasp the world and itself conceptually, from the standpoint of ‘me’. Because it proceeds from ‘me’, the world is ‘myriad things’; nouns, not verbs. States, not expressions. Imagining Nirvana as a place or state we can reach and remain, rather than an in the moment not-doing.

In living language, the primary dichotomy of self and world is broken, since language – and everything else – is an aspect of dependent origination, which in turn is seen as dynamic expression stepping forward and backward, not a structure of cause and effect. Each expression, each this-now occupies its own dharma position, and at the same time, is the whole of dependent origination, and because of this, the expressive power of each this-now is infinite. One facet of that expressive power is language.

So, in authentic practice in the sense meant by Dogen, although we are drawn to practice by possibly superficial and unexamined notions of what practice is, if we practice from the position of faith, not us but practice, speaks.