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Kusen

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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Kusen

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.

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Kusen

97. Avalokiteśvara

The Heart Sutra is the distillation of the vast Prajñāpāramitā sutras.

The version we chant divides into 2: an initial statement, then a long monologue by Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

The initial statement is:

The bodhisattva of compassion, practising Zazen actualises the emptiness of the five skandas and thus relieves all suffering.

This is a mythical rendering of our experience as we sit. The critical thing is that it isn’t a person sitting, and that emptiness is something felt, not a statement about the nature of reality Thus, we can say that emptiness, compassion, no-self and suffering relieved are all facets of Zazen.

This is a very different practice from one concerned with gain, or change.

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Kusen

96. Who’s What?

When I was little, I would point at things and ask my mother, “What’s that?”

And my mother would patiently reply “that’s a tree”, “that’s a car”, and so on.

As I kept asking the question, other voices would say, “That’s how things are.””This is life and this is death.” And so on.

So when I am looking at the world, looking at myself, it is always as if I am looking through the eyes of someone else.

And the mind’s eye, likewise. That’s why, when we practice, it’s very important that we soften our gaze. The world comes to us, not in the familiar way, but an intimate way.   Seeing this way becomes an aspect of a broader felt sense. The breath moving inside us. Our weight. The birdsong touching our ears.

Self or no-self? Isn’t the answer obvious?

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Kusen

The Blue Cliff Record, Case 23

The Case:
Once, when Pao Fu and Ch’ang Ch’ing were wondering in the mountains, Pao Fu pointed and said “Right here is the summit of the mystic peak”.
Ch’ang Ch’ing said “Indeed it is. What a pity”.

Pointing has a chequered history in zen, fingers pointing to the moon, and suchlike. It’s said that the ideogram for zen represents an eye on the end of a pointed finger. Given that meditation is often described in terms of seeing, seeing things as they are, then the temptation is to see the eye of meditation and the eye of zen as the same eye, the difference being that zen is an actional ‘seeing’ rather than a contemplative one, but still attending to how things are.

From this perspective, Pao Fu is pointing at suchness.

But what if the eye on the pointed finger isn’t seeing how things are, but is seeing the pointing? Given that Pao Fu isn’t pointing at anything -and who, or what else is ‘right here’ if it isn’t him? –
couldn’t we say that he is pointing at his nature – which is pointing? Hence Ch’ang Ch’ing’s ‘disappointment’.

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Kusen

95. Hsiang Lin

Master Dogen said that the way to realisation was through the body. But which body?

Blue Cliff Record, Case 17:

A monk asked Hsiang Lin, “What was the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?”

The Master said, “Sitting for a long time is hard, isn’t it?”

Bodhidharma famously sat facing the wall at Shaolin Temple for nine years. In answering the monk, the Master is drawing a comparison between his body, practicing, and the body of practice of Bodhidharma.

And given that we always sit with the body of practice, how can we say either that this body is the same, or different?

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Kusen

94. Genjokoan

In the Genjokoan, Master Dogen gives a famous definition of delusion and enlightenment, saying that delusion is carrying the self forward to experience the myriad things, whereas in enlightenment the myriad things come forward and experience themselves.

I would say that we carry the Self forward primarily through language: “That is a wall”, “That is my confusion”, “There is that familiar unpleasant feeling, bitter in taste”.

And once we use the scalpel of words on part of experience, that detached part can be the object of our love or [more usually] of our hate. And, hard as we try, we can’t kill it again.

Buddhism is, for at least a moment, the restraint of this tendency. It’s not that we become intimate with our experience, because that’s dualistic, but that experience, somehow, is restored to life unfabricated.

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Kusen

Posture Instructions

Since the online publication of Issho Fujita’s marvellous collection of essays, ‘Polishing A Tile’, it seems impertinent for others to give instructions about sitting posture except in one respect, the breath, which Fujita doesn’t seem, to refer to in detail.

Breathing is quite problematic as a topic. We don’t want to get into a mentality of trying to build up power in the dan tien in order to achieve something. So instead, we tend not to talk about it at all, saying only that we should breathe naturally, and that our breath will naturally settle down if we take up the correct posture. However, there’s a difference between awareness and intention. Between awareness and technique.

When we try to breathe abdominally, there’s a tendency to use muscular effort to push our belly out, but not notice that we do. Just as people who try to stretch the back of their neck by tucking their chin in, rather than allowing the natural uncompressing of the spine when the weight is dropping correctly through the sit bones, willing our posture to be a particular way is liable to create tension, tension we’re unlikely to notice.

I think also, if we imagine our breath coming in through our nose, going down through our chest and into our belly, there’s a tendency too to inhibit movement in our chest and back.

For me, it’s very helpful to be able to feel the whole pelvic area, not, as it were, as an object, but from the inside. If we can,we’ll notice the willed-ness of our abdominal breathing, but we’ll also notice what doesn’t move. Our lower back. Our pelvic floor. And once we get that awareness, there’s a number of things we can do. We can, for example, picture a golden ball at the centre of our pelvis. When we breathe in, the ball gets bigger, pushing the belly forward, pushing back against the bones of the spine and pelvis, pushing down to the pelvic floor. When our body moves in accordance with this, it’s different from willed movement. Once you regain your sense of movement, you won’t need the image any more.

An alternative, and one which I prefer, is to breathe from the perineum. This is the first chakra and where our weight drops down, between the genitalia and the anus. That is, you feel the in breathe coming in through your perineum, filling your pelvic bowl, pushing the belly gently forward, the lower back gently back, animating and enlivening the whole area, then passing upwards to the chest, the upper back, the neck, the head and all the while, no tension.

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Kusen

93. The Reality of Our Lives

All Buddhist language is an attempt to take us out of conceptual thinking, and to point us to the reality of our lives.

Because we are meaning-making-story-telling beings, we are always painting a world. Even if a teacher directs us to the activity of painting, we make a picture of his activity.

The whole lineage is this dialectic of freeing words and trapping words.

It is as if we are within a mountain made up of the bones of our ancestors. Our awakening voices, together, make what is solid empty.

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Kusen

92. Senika

Senika appears in the Nirvana sutra as a kind of fall guy. He’s a Brahmin who believes that the body is the temporary home of the soul, which lives on after the death of the body.

Certainly, his soul has lived on, buried deep in our language. We make statements like ‘I am doing zazen’ or ‘I am living my life’ or ‘I need to be kinder to myself,’ and imagine we are saying something true.

Lying within the buried soul of Senika is the belief that the world is constituted of things, with attributes, acting.

This is the ground of delusion. Unless we can escape from it, buddhist teaching is entirely nonsensical.