Tag: Buddhism

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.

The most famous Koan in Zen literature is probably Joshu’s ‘Mu’ koan which  famously starts with a monk asking Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” 

The question is disingenuous because by the time this dialogue, if it ever happened, could have taken place, the question of who has and who doesn’t have Buddha nature had been decisively resolved. 

In the seventh century, there was an argument within Chinese Buddhism, whether Buddha nature was a universal quality, something which all beings had, or if there were some classes of being who didn’t have it. The position was resolved in the most general and generous way possible by declaring that “all living beings had Buddha nature” [ per The Nirvana Sutra]. And that was extended, in due course. And Dogen reformulated that statement to something like, “all Being, Living,is Buddha Nature”.

Buddha nature and the universality of it is very characteristic of Chinese Buddhism, which in turn is intimately connected with the bodhisattva perspective that characterises the Mahayana tradition. The term ‘bodhisattva’ originally just applied to the 500 lives, the Buddha had before becoming Buddha. It gradually became more and more general over time, aided by sutras like the Lotus Sutra. And accompanying that was a shift from the idea of the buddhist path as having the destination for the individual practitioner of Nirvana, to the path having the destination of Buddhahood. And there was an emotional shift in tone too, from quiescence, tranquility, freedom, equanimity, and suchlike towards compassion.

When we sit zazen and  chant the Heart Sutra afterwards, immediately after that we chant the Bodhisattva vows, the first one being generally translated as, “all living beings I vow to free them”. How do we interpret that? The way it is formulated, it sounds as if me, having taken a vow to follow the bodhisattva path should comport myself towards all the beings in such a way as to alleviate their suffering.I don’t think that is a particularly helpful way for us to look at the bodhisattva vows, because I think it risks contributing to a kind of spiritual inflation, which is all too common anyway.

People puffing themselves up with a sort of ersatz compassion  does none of us any favours.

The  perspective of viewing all beings as potential Buddhas, all beings as [present] bodhisattvas, I think, can be better seen  in a different way. 

It’s not that I’m a bodhisattva, alleviating your suffering. It’s that to me, you’re a bodhisattva, and all beings coming towards me are bodhisattvas, because all beings are teaching me. All that I require to do, and all that anyone’s required to do, is to listen. So the shift that takes place in Buddhism isn’t a shift from, as it were, modest practitioners to heroic bodhisattva practitioners. The shift is moving from a struggle to free ourselves from a world which is seen as either negative or neutral, to participating fully in a world which is our ally. That is a huge shift. And it seems to me that in some respects, the Chinese created something entirely new, not just something which is now merely quaint or archaic which we can safely ignore in favour of junkshop volumes of ‘ here and now’ crap, which often passes for contemporary Zen teaching, but which is invaluable now.

 Because it pivots entirely our way of seeing the world.

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The Soto doctrine of Practice Enlightenment—  the unity of practice and realisation/enlightenment- seems at first blush and to put it mildly, implausible. 

The purpose of practice -the purpose of buddhism – is to overcome the primary duality of self and world. Common sense tells us that we can achieve that in one of two ways. Firstly, we can change our conceptual framework to deny  the existence  of a separate self. It’s easy to say. We can declare the unity of all being, and look around for corroboration of that assertion, in quantum theory, for example.

Yet somehow that never seems to make enough of a shift. So we then say—if I practise, and I practise seriously enough and long enough, I can achieve realisation.  

Realisation is the fruit of practice. 

Practice is putting in the hard yards for the reward of realisation . 

That’s a very attractive notion for us because it fits in with our general sense that we do something to get something, in this case a dramatic, miracle-like experience of non-separation. Being a vividly alive part of a vividly alive whole.

By contrast, the idea that somehow, just by sincerely practising, we’re already, as it were, in the ocean of realisation seems ludicrous.  Yet the idea that there’s practice and then there’s enlightenment is not an unchallenged view within the original Zen schools. For example, Zongmi (who was the fifth and last Patriarch of the Hua-yen school, and also a Patriarch in the Heze Zen lineage) was of the view that Enlightenment preceded practice. That is, we would have an experience of the wholeness of everything, which drove us  to practise, which was then deepened and integrated.

I think Practice Realisation is eminently understandable if we reflect on our own experience rather than trying to cobble together an impressive sounding, but fundamentally hollow, bricolage from the words of Dogen and others.   We owe it to ourselves and other practitioners to state our understanding of doctrine in terms of our actual experience. 

And although we may be wrong, it doesn’t matter, because our errors allow other practitioners to state their errors. And through that, we get somewhere.  We shouldn’t try to create a match between now and a constructed past. Yet in starting from our own experience, we can see that it arises within the interdependent network of all practitioners: past practitioners, practitioners now, and practitioners of the future.

This is my understanding of Practice Enlightenment: 

The emphasis we place on correct posture can be understood, in part, as an attempt to displace our dominant visual sense in favour of our somatic sense. 

Generally, as we go about our lives, we’re carrying around a picture or a number of pictures, and primary among them is a sense of what we look like from an external vantage point. Don’t take this too literally: it’s not a picture, it’s like a picture. 

And it’s the dominance of that visual sense [which is very connected to thinking] that is primarily responsible for our sense of separation, and hence our sense of  duality.  Our attempts to try and overcome that duality  by ideas, or by effort based on ideas, simply propagates and continues the dominance of that visual sense.  It’s inherently  self-defeating. And  even if we experience a dramatic sense of unity,  in due course it is appropriated to the self.

It becomes my Enlightenment, my wisdom. 

The doctrine of Practice Realisation is part of a means of displacing that visual sense in favour of a felt sense, a somatic sense.

Which explains the  emphasis on sitting properly, which creates the sense of a dynamic energised spine, connected with the earth and sky. It rediscovers our breath as being like a non-conceptional, alive, present and energetic presence at our core, around which our body is gathered. All of that helps manifests a sense of ourselves as somatic, three-dimensional, energetic beings.

And the paradox is that once we can experience ourselves in that way,  non-separation arises naturally. Not as a dramatic miracle. As an ordinary one. 

You need to use your own language. You may have a sense of all encompassing spaciousness. Or a deep sense of peace permeating everywhere. Or s sense of the universality of light. But what’s indisputable is if we can experience ourselves somatically, already we’re  not separate  from the rest of creation. That’s not to say that we’re not having thoughts and  ideas or that there’s the sense of intermittent mental interference and so on, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

It’s that primary sense  of  non-separation into which, as it were, through practice we can sink further into, as if we’re slowly walking into the ocean we were always standing in.

Practice Realisation seen in this way matches up with  Shikantaza, just sitting.

Simpletons think ‘just sitting’  means we’re not focusing on gain. It doesn’t mean that. It means that when we’re sitting, there’s just this Oneness of sitting, which includes everything.  This is what Isso Fujita calls One Piece Zen: all of creation, all of time is this One Piece.

When people talk of the benefits of meditation, they often cite compassion, equanimity and loving kindness.  These three are part of what the Indians called the Brahmavihara and the Chinese called the four universals.The remaining one is Empathetic Joy.

Contemporary talk is often about cultivating compassion or cultivating loving kindness. Yet there’s an error in understanding these four qualities as personal qualities to cultivate and retain. 

Why is that a mistaken view?

Because it’s part of a bigger mistake: meditation is a form of self improvement.

The corrective  lies within the original term Brahmavihara. 

Brahma is the Creator. Vihara means dwelling.  

What’s meant by dwelling  is we can, as it were, be within the house of compassion,  within the house of loving kindness  but it’s not our personal possession. It’s not our house.

Thinking of the four dwellings as personal qualities encloses that which should be open. We misunderstand compassion as kindness or concern. We misunderstand equanimity as serenity, when it means non discrimination. And we, tellingly, miss out empathetic joy entirely, because it doesn’t so easily fit a model of self cultivation. And, actually, mudita just means joy. Adding ‘empathetic’ gives it an attitudinal gloss, making it easier to squeeze it into the model.

There’s also another point though.

The self improvement model is just the latest iteration of an instrumental perspective which has bedevilled Buddhism from the start.  

The contrasting perspective is that the primary dwelling place of these virtues is in zazen.

We can see the Brahmavihara as four aspects of zazen. By throwing our self and our ideas of gain and loss to one side and just wholeheartedly sitting, we can dwell within these four virtues. Together with all beings.

What is ‘Mind’?

Dogen says in various places that Mind is walls, fences, tiles, etc. 

That’s quite typical in Zen literature, where ‘Mind is World’ propositions are common.

At first blush, this looks like a state very different from our ordinary state. They seem to be statements of radical non-duality, primarily between Mind and World, and derivatively, between Mind and Body.

Although these statements seem to give a perspective dramatically different from what we now understand as original Indian Buddhism, I’m not sure that’s so. And though they also appear radically different from ways in which we talk and think about the Mind, again I’m not sure that’s true.

One of the earliest Buddhist texts is the Dhammapada, which is a collection of sayings in verse attributed to the Buddha.  At the very start there’s a statement: Mind precedes all mental states. Not ‘Mind precedes all disturbed mental states’ or ‘Mind precedes all conditional mental states’. All mental states.

I think that immediately gives us pause, because whilst a lot of meditation seems to be about calming the mind, I don’t think we’re necessarily justified in interpreting ‘Mind’ purely psychologically; as being the functionality of the brain, or similar.

Indeed, verse 37 of the Dhammapada says that the home of the mind is in the cave of the heart.  (Indians, like the Greeks, believed the mind is in the heart, not the head; I think it’s naive for us to simply take this literally, as anatomical ignorance)

Verse 37 also says the mind is without specific location. It wanders here and there. It’s using the metaphor of a person whose true home is in the cave of the heart but who wanders hither and thither throughout the world.

So for the Dhammapada, ‘Mind’ has a much broader range of meanings than  the psychological functions of self consciousness, or subjective experience.

If ( as is always useful) in examining the meaning of terms we start with our experience in meditation, it’s clear that  there isn’t the sharp distinction between mind and world that conceptual thinking conjures up. 

Our experience in meditation is both personal and universal. Obviously, it’s this person practising at this moment. Yet we can’t say that this sense of spacious awareness in meditation  belongs to me, that somehow is internal to me.

The whole phenomenology of meditative awareness is, to a greater or lesser extent, non-dual.

People experience that right from the get-go. It’s not something which only Enlightened people (whoever they may be) experience.

Additionally, common usages of mind which we have in the West are often different from what we imagine. For example Carol Gilligan, in her fieldwork on how patriarchy suppresses the voices of teenage girls observed that often they would make a distinction between ‘my brain’ and ‘my mind’.

And if we look around, we often get distinctions like that operating in the language, in different ways.

My personal favourite is Iain McGilchrist’s distinction between left and right brain hemispheres, but it’s widespread.  People will often make a distinction between ‘my mind’ and ‘my heart’ or ‘my mind’ and ‘my soul’. We don’t need to imprison experience within the categories of an imaginary observer in a white coat.

Nagajuna famously said trying to understand emptiness was like trying to pick up a poisonous snake. Without skill, you would be caught by the venom. And the most usual venom is nihilism. Poisonous Nothing.

It’s something which Buddhists have been accused of almost from the start: if everything is empty then nothing has any meaning. So we can do whatever we like. More broadly, emptiness, and hence buddhism, is attacked as a joyless pessimism—it’s vacuity, nothingness.

Buddhists have grappled mightily against this charge. One of the most profound refutations was by the Chinese Huayan School, those practitioners who focused on The Flower Garland Sutra and who primarily flourished in 7th Century T’ang dynasty China.

Their starting point is looking at the statement “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” in a different way. To just focus on the first part is unbalanced, we need to focus on both. If we do,  then everything: me, the wall, you, the trees, the birds; everything is, as it were, both form and emptiness.

Because emptiness is indivisible, like space or like the ocean, there isn’t a million billion bits of emptiness to correspond with the million billion forms, there’s just one emptiness. So every ‘thing’ – including you and me – is both particular and universal.

From that basic realisation they manifest a new world of interrelatedness and interdependence. Because emptiness reaches everywhere and is a fundamental aspect of form, of me and you, then, as it were, we penetrate everywhere, and so does everything else. And thus, everything, everywhere, interpenetrates me. This is the vision expressed in Indra’s Net.

In elucidating all of these ideas [and moving further away from erroneous conceptions of emptiness] they make use of the Chinese terms Li and Shi.

Li wasn’t originally a Buddhist term. It originally meant something like ‘underlying principle’. For example, that which causes the heavenly bodies to move predictably in the sky.

Shi is phenomena. Li and Shi completely interpenetrate, like form and emptiness, but without the nihilistic baggage that emptiness often seems to carry. 

The Huayan Masters adapt Li and Shi to fit within a re-envisioned buddhism, Li coming to mean something like emptiness and Shi something like form. The terms are usually translated into English as principle and phenomena, and they crop up all the time in the Chinese buddhist texts, for example, the Sandokai.

Their vision occurs in apparently nonsensical statements. Dogen, for example, talks about Mount Sumeru being contained within a mustard seed, which is a direct quote from The Flower Garland Sutra.  This interpenetration of everything is a radical restatement of dependent origination.

The particular innovation of the Hauyen school is to say not only that  form and emptiness don’t obstruct each other but  form and form don’t obstruct each other either.

The actualisation of this interpenetration and mutual non-obstruction they call the Dharmadhatu, The Buddha Realm. Zazen is often described as objectless meditation, but I don’t think that’s true. The Dharmadhatu, is the ‘object’ of meditation, while at the same time we, and everything else, are within it. That’s the real koan. And just as the Dharmadhatsu is like a body, so our body mind within Zazen is like the Dharmadhatu 

Excluding Nothing

In Zen legend, when Master Bodhidharma was approaching death,  he called together his four senior disciples and asked them to explain their understanding. 

The first three gave verbal answers. Bodidharma said to them respectively “you have my skin”, “you have my flesh” and “you have my bones”. The fourth disciple Huike (Eko) said nothing, simply did prostrations then returned to his place. Bodhidharma then gave the transmission to him.

That story was subsequently used in zen to justify an anti-intellectual stance, which continues to this day.

Though not from Dōgen. In Katto, he gave an entirely different interpretation of the story. In his view, it was a completely erroneous understanding to think that skin is superficial and marrow is profound. Or, as he said in another context “If your speech is superficial, why would your silence be profound?”

There’s an aspect to the story which I don’t think has been properly explored. In the translations, Bodhidharma appears to refer to his skin, his flesh, his bones, his marrow, but I don’t think that’s an accurate rendition.  He wasn’t talking about his own body.

Or just his own body. He was talking about the body of the True Teacher.

The True Teacher appears when sincere practitioners gather together.

What could you call that True Teacher?

You could say that we’re not him, that we’ll never be him, but we can be a part of him, this body of sincere practitioners.

I believe Bodhidharma was referring to the skin, flesh, bones, and marrow of The True Teacher, not his own puny body and mind.

In Buddhism there is the idea that the Buddha has three bodies; his historical body, the universal body (dharmakaya) ,and a third body, which is sometimes called the body of joy.

I think that the third body is more accurately rendered as the True Teacher; we could call that person Sangha Buddha. 

Thus we have the historical Buddha, the Reality Buddha and the Sangha Buddha.

Those three Buddhas are not three separate jewels But the one Jewel, seen differently.

Before he became the Buddha, the Buddha is said to have had 500 lives as a Bodhisattva. 

Originally the word ‘bodhisattva’ was only used for these previous lives. 

But here’s the thing: a Buddha is someone who fully understands the nature of interdependence—the fact that there is no fixed, immutable self. 

And that is a clue about how we might think about reincarnation, because to think about it seriously is not to think about it literally.

Ordinarily, reincarnation is thought of as there being a self or a soul that goes from one life to another. That’s obviously un-Buddhist in the sense that Buddhists deny that there is a fixed self. 

But also in a more subtle way. If this life, this existence, is simply one in a series of ongoing linked threads, then the fabric of all beings can never be woven.

So we oppose reincarnation in this sense, not because it’s implausible, but because it is banal, and it separates that which should not be separated.

And it does that by leaving unexamined the idea of this person. Almost the whole point of Buddhism is to claim that when we look seriously at our experience, it is very difficult for us to say there is a single, fixed, indivisible self. Rather, it is as if there is a multitude inside us:  certainly in my case a good number of idiots; some kind and wise people; lots and lots of beings, as it were.

The point of practice is not to elevate some of those beings and to exile others, but to actualize the vast compassionate space which holds all beings. 

Being.

When we practise, we’re practising within this small space—traditionally this 12 foot square space. Within this space everything matters and everything is interconnected. Nothing is background.

Through this practice, one which is not a practice of the self, those walls can become fluid, pellucid. And so, even although the room remains tiny, no beings are excluded.

In traditional Buddhism there’s an idea of the various Ages that the world goes through. 

In the time of  the historical Buddha, we’re in the first Age, which lasts for about 500 years.In that time, it’s easy for people to be liberated.  Following that there’s an Age that’s not quite so good.Liberation is much more difficult. Following that is an age that’s distinctly degenerate. Liberation is impossible. And following that agre, Buddhism disappears.  We simply have to wait for the next Buddha to come along

But I wonder if there’s a different way of regarding these Ages. 

You could say that all the ages are all there, all at the same time.  But one has more prominence than the others.  If you look at China, for instance, Chinese Buddhism doesn’t really acquire any of these distinctive characteristics until about 500 years or so after Buddhism first arrives in China.

At that point there is an incredible flowering of Chinese Buddhist culture, evidenced in, amongst others, the ‘Awakening the Faith in Mahayana’ and the writings the T’ien Tai school,  the Huayan school, the Zen school, and the Pure Land school.

Similarly, in Japan, it takes about 500 years or so between the arrival of Buddhism and the flowering that it had in the 13th century of distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism; specifically for us the Buddhism of Dogen but also Nichiren, Shinran and others that all appeared much about the same time. 

It seems to me that when Buddhism first goes to a different culture, that’s its degenerate phase. It’s degenerate because the characteristic way that civilizations will deal with something new is that they’ll either imitate it or they’ll attempt to assimilate it to existing ideas.

We can see this very clearly in the West.  In terms of imitation, we’ve all these people dressing themselves up as Asian monks and constructing dojos that purport to replicate medieval Japanese dojos and so on. 

And we have assimilationists.  Much [but not all] of the Mindfulness Movement would be in that category. They say well, this is Buddhism, but we can fit it within our ideas of wellness and individual development. We can  get rid of all the historical  barnacles that disguise that. 

I think that we are not, at least on the surface, in a great stage of Buddhism.  The degenerate stage occurs first and a long time into our future —hundreds of years perhaps, at that point, there’s the potential for us; both to take Buddhism seriously and to understand it; but also to have digested it.

So then what comes out of us is something valuable—something genuinely new. 

In the  Yogacara  perspective  there are said to be three natures:  the  conditioned nature, the dependent nature,  and the perfected nature.

The conditioned nature  is the way that the ordinary person  sees the world; as constructed of  familiar  objects, as seen conceptually.

The dependent nature, is seeing  everything as  impermanent, as interdependent. 

The  perfected nature  is seeing everything as  suchness. 

The metaphor  which is used to explain the distinction  between these three  natures is the metaphor of  a person with cataracts seeing  flowers in the sky. Flowers which obviously aren’t  there. In the conditioned nature, a person seeing these  flowers in the sky, unaware he has cataracts,  will think of  the sky flowers as real.

For the dependent nature  the person seeing these sky flowers  realises that he has cataracts and so he understands  that the phenomena of sky flowers,  is simply  generated  by  a matrix of causes and conditions.  The fact that he has cataracts,  the pattern of  light  playing  on his cataracts and so on.

In the perfected nature  the person with cataracts  understands that the sky flowers are  neither  real or  unreal. They’re not  real because they’ve no  self nature  yet they’re not unreal because all experience is real. That position,  where  there is plainly  experience but  where one cannot assert a self  behind that  experience, or behind phenomena, is suchness.

The problem  with  schemas such as this  is  that they can be quite  bloodless. It seems that they’re  inviting us  to  understand the world in a conceptual way. That’s very unfortunate  because what these apparent concepts are  designed to do  is to  take us into  an emotional,  feeling position, because that’s where we change. 

You could say that  in the dependent nature  it’s as if I’m travelling through  the landscape of my life—like in a  train or like a car. I’m seeing my life—but I’m seeing it  in a disconnected  way. It has a  slightly unreal  quality to it  and I’m  not  intimately  part of it. 

For the  dependent nature  it’s as if in a dream. I’m always running towards something, yet just as  I’m  approaching it, it vanishes into nothingness.

In the perfected nature  I understand – at a  visceral  level –  that all  experience  is a miracle.