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Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 47

[Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 47]

Master Rinzai said that there was a true human being without rank who went in and out through our face.

When we hear ‘face’, we often think of Original face, the face you had before your parents were born.

If we pay attention, we can be aware of the musculature of our face; the fixed patterns we hold, the tensions, the habitual moving contours. And if we have this awareness, we can experience our face as a kind of mask. Indeed, we might identify our sense of self with this social face. If we didn’t have a face to present to the world, could we have a self to present to ourself?

Rinzai’s person without rank is something in us which is true and alive, and which can never be entirely suppressed by our social face. And so, he emerges. And sometimes, we suppress him. And so, he goes back in. This person without rank is our original face. There is not a true face behind our social face. There is not another self behind the self. There is just life channelled by us, like light falling through windows.

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Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 5

[Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 5]

In this story, Kanzeon’s hands and eyes are manifold. She does not have 84,000 hands and eyes. She does not have inexhaustibly many hands and eyes. They are manifold. And so, we can equate them with all existence. The whole world is one of the functions of Kanzeon. And these ‘hands and eyes’ suggest an interfolding of doing, being, perceiving and intuitively knowing, within the one vivid whole.

It is as if what has been on the butcher’s slab of western rationalism has abruptly risen up, illuminating everything.

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Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 62

[Commentary on Shinji Shobogenzo, Book 2, Case 62]

Some people say that everything is one, but if that is so, how do we explain the obvious differentiation that we see?

If we say everything is one, the temptation is to think that there is a true world standing behind this world, which we need to get to. And so, we reconstitute the ego, this time as a battering ram.

Or, we take the familiar metaphor of clouds and sky, and imagine that the sky is somehow behind the clouds, that the clouds are an obstruction. But where does the sky begin, or end?

Our practice is not the eradication of anything. It is not breaking down the door of an empty house. It is the actualisation of space.

In vast space, each thing can have its own place.

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26. Suchness

Stillness is not the ceasing of activity; stillness is suchness.

When we see being direct, our normal categories fall away. Because linear time falls away, we call it timeless, and so, it is still.

Because causality falls away it is vivid, not a waystation to or from anywhere else.

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25. Dreams

The dream state and the waking dream state.

In dreams we imagine–at least later–that what we see is unreal, although really it is just our fractured heart taking on one form after another. We feel fully. We exert ourselves fully. We are always implicitly asking, “What is this?” How can we dismiss it so easily?

In the waking dream state, we cannot say that what we see is unreal, but why? We concede easily that what we see is what our culture and our language can see, and concede–less easily–that our emotions are flung randomly onto this thing or that, like paint falling from high windows. And the same question: “What is this? What is this?” And thus, a false world created. How different? How different?

In our dreams what we feel cannot be doubted. In our waking dream state what arises cannot be doubted. And the whole waking world conceals itself in the heart. Should the heart open, a world will spring out. The only true one.

Demons are the creators of false worlds. Equanimity is walking on the heads of these demons, partly in tenderness, partly in scorn.

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24. With All Of Us

Because zazen is wholehearted action in the present moment, it breaks down the false distinction between physical and mental.

For example, we will often come to zazen tired, or anxious, or distracted. We put our body into balance, and our breathing comes into balance. We breathe like a baby; from the belly, intercostally. And what we thought of as our mental process changes too.

Our heart sits on top of our breath.

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23. Time

My teacher, Nancy Amphoux, asked her teacher how she should practice zazen.

He said “You should practice zazen eternally”. Nancy said that at first she took this to mean that she should practice for the rest of her life.

Eternity means timeless, throwing away linear time. So, Now ceases to be a point and instead becomes vast space, containing everything. We could call it the eternal present. It is not that it is undifferentiated, rather that everything is vivid and whole. Things do not cease to exist, but they do not exist in the usual way, and so we call it Nothing, No-thing.

Time is the cornerstone of the house of delusion. If the stone is removed, the house must fall.

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22. Zazen Mountain

Zen is sometimes described as “the mountain still state”, and we are often admonished to sit like a mountain. Monasteries were frequently named after mountains; Teachers too.

At the most obvious level, the mountain can be seen as representative of equanimity, imperturbability. Whatever storm is raging, the mountain is undisturbed.

We can also see the mountain as the expression of something eternal. So, when we enter the mountain still state, we enter the same state as the ancestors and patriarchs.

But fundamentally, the mountain is the ground made visible, unavoidable. Whilst the ground beneath the feet of our thoughts is overlooked, the mountain is the ground thrown upwards. And the ground is being.

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21. This Frozen Mass

Menzan talked about “the frozen blockage of thought and emotion”; how it obstructs our practice and our life.

To understand what he meant, we need to distinguish between emotion and feeling. Feeling is our lived, momentary, felt response from moment to moment, fluid. Emotion is frozen feeling.

Something arises in the body. We then say “I am anxious”, then we speculate why we might be anxious, and the whole process of rumination starts. The thought and the emotion aren’t separate.

And we may imagine that this frozen mass obstructs our mind, but in fact it obstructs our heart. It is there like a blockage in the throat, preventing the heart emerging into the world.

If we do not understand this, our Zen will be too cognitive, it will lack feeling: Zen is not our liberation from feeling, but our liberation into it.

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20. Nonduality

I

Nonduality is not a mystical state, but a real one. It is abundantly available to us. We fall backwards into it each time the constructed self temporarily falls away. Our practice is a wobbling between the two poles of Self and nondual.

And we should not imagine an unattainable, undifferentiated state. Things continue to exist, but not in the old way. For example, a common metaphor for nonduality in the literature is the mirror. One looks at the mirror and sees apparently separate things, when really they are all part of the whole. But it is not a trick. Differentiation is there also. Differentiation is the face of the world.

Nonduality allows each thing its full expression.

II

Nonduality is not mystical, but real. It is not undifferentiated. On the contrary, each thing is fully expressed. Each thing fully exerts itself.

Similarly, our practice is not the pursuit of nonduality, but its expression. And each aspect of our practice is an expression of a different aspect of nonduality. So when we bow, we are not bowing to someone or something, because that would be separation. When we bow, we are affirming feelings which are nondual: gratitude, compassion, dignity, faith.

We bow down our head, and the head of the World is lifted up.

III

Zazen is not the pursuit of nonduality, but its expression. Because nonduality is the complete expression of each thing, each thing is everything. When we say that your zazen penetrates the entire Universe, don’t create a picture of planets and stars, because the Universe which is meant is not this constructed world, but your real experience.

When the constructed world falls away, there is just being. When we fall backwards from this constructed world, we fall into being.