Tag: Buddhism

The Buddha talked about Nirvana a great deal. Usually he would talk of it in negative terms, so he might say, for example, that it wasn’t perception and it wasn’t no perception, things like that. 

But among the few positive statements he made about Nirvana, one in particular is very resonant. He said that Nirvana was the ground of the holy life.

From that, I think it’s clear that Nirvana is not an achievement, or a place, or a destination, or a state, but it’s an intrinsic faculty of us as human beings.

But if nirvana isn’t a state, or a place, then what are we to make of its apparent opposite, Samsara?

Samsara is normally explained in terms of the transmigration between the six realms of existence: the hell realm, the realm of hungry ghosts, the animal realm, the fighting demons realm, the heavenly realm, and the human realm.

I say that Nirvana and Samsara both arise within this practice of zazen. The ‘ground’ that the Buddha talks about is this body. The space which is there, which is common to all the realms of existence, is the space of our awareness in zazen, and the space which holds all these different aspects of existence. And it is the one space.

Nirvana and Samsara are both within us, and contain us, and are here, now. And if they’re not here, and now, then where are they?

Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is usually depicted as having myriad hands and eyes. The symbolism is clear: she sees the suffering of individual beings through her manifold eyes and she relieves that suffering through acting with her manifold hands.

But the name Kanzeon doesn’t mean someone who sees the suffering of the world, it means someone who hears the suffering of the world. 

So what are we to make of her manifold eyes and hands? 

Kanzeon is not the bodhisattva of kindness or good deeds, or pity; she is the bodhisattva of compassion, ‘feeling with.’ If her eyes and hands are manifold -limitless-  then the entire universe is hands and eyes, expressions and perspectives. And nothing else. We can’t simply see those hands and eyes from our limited perspective. If we were an ocean, we might imagine that each wave, each current was our hand and each glint of light was our eye. 

Why do we suffer? We don’t suffer because we feel pain, we suffer because we don’t feel anything. Or, we suffer because our experience of our feeling world is just a frozen and fixed mass of thought and emotion, that we can neither remove or dissolve.

 Kanzeon is identical with the practice of zazen because when we practice zazen we are in this simple feeling state, unconstrained by self, by ownership, by interpretation, by fear, by attachment.

When we are sitting, sitting in a balanced way, our experience of ourselves is not as something fixed or closed, but as something open and spacious, and rather than  experiencing ourselves as something in opposition to the world, it as if all being and all time is flowing into this person and leaping out of this person.

The Buddhist state has nothing to do with thinking or willing. We’re not spiritual warriors. We’re not on a hero’s journey. But because thinking – attempting to grasp reality with our minds – is so much a part of who we are as human beings, Buddhist teachers use expedient means.

In the Lotus Sutra the most famous story is the parable of the burning house. In that story,  an old, sinister and decrepit house is on fire. The father requires to get his children out but they won’t leave because they’re preoccupied with playing with their toys. Their toys are a little deer cart, a little goat cart and a little ox cart.

The father uses expedient means to get them out of the burning house, promising much better versions of their toys outside, where they’re met by an enormous, magnificent cart for each of them, drawn by an ox.

We’re told this is the one Buddha vehicle. The three toys correspond to: the sravaka – the person who seeks nirvana;  the pratyekabuddha – the person who  seeks personal enlightenment; and the bodhisattva, the person dedicated to saving all beings.

But it’s really noteworthy that although the vehicle waiting for the children outside is drawn by an ox, it’s completely different from the toy cart which one of the children was playing with. And you can see the point of this – a person who says their aim is to save all beings isn’t really a bodhisattva, he’s just a kind of insufferable person.

What’s required in entering into the Buddhist state, which is where this is a clever story, is falling backwards from a state of intellectualism. Back into, you could say, a childlike state of wonder, of gratitude, of astonishment, of aliveness. But we can’t get there with our head. We can’t enter this room, as it were, going in frontwise. We can only fall into it. We can’t enter it with our head. We can only enter it with our whole body.

What is the cause of suffering? We often imagine – wrongly – that the Buddha said that desire was the cause of suffering. But he didn’t. He said that the cause of suffering was the three poisons of ignorance, attachment and aversion.

The most important of these three is ignorance: the other two follow on from that. Ignorance is a confusion about our true nature: instead of understanding our nature as relational, we falsely think we are beings encased in a self. Thinking in this way, it is only natural to want or to keep what we like, and discard what we don’t.

We confuse ourselves so easily because our society’s usual way of thinking of desire is to think of it in terms of a lack: something is missing.

The point isn’t technical, it’s of fundamental importance. If we misunderstand desire, if we can’t see it as the pulse and flow and expression of this great being, then we will aspire to a buddhism of false equanimity, a buddhism which is empty and lifeless. With the ghost of suffering inside.

In early Buddhism, the four virtues of practice were said to be Metta, Karuna, Upekkha and Mudita, usually translated as loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and empathetic joy.

We’re very familiar with the first three, but not the fourth. Does this matter and, if it does, why?

It seems to me that the first three, when the fourth is excluded, make possible a kind of christianised buddhism, where the purpose of practice can be seen as the making of a great person, and, to aid that, the three virtues can be seen as personal attributes, cultivated by this person. So this person is benevolent, kind, steadfast. But the larger space is thrown into shadow by this inflated person, and joy is forgotten.

But if we take the four qualities together, I don’t think we can see the practitioner as a great, or potentially great person, but rather as a co-arising and relational person, and the qualities cease to be personal qualities, but rather are the qualities of a re-enlivened and re-envisioned open and relational space within, around and between us, which we directly experience when we practice.

Buddhism is a house built on these four foundations. The fourth might seem tiny, barely noticeable, but its removal will cause the house to buckle and tilt, imperceptibly at first. The house can remain standing for a very long time. But fall it will.

If we don’t understand the assumptions embedded in our language, it’s very difficult for us to understand buddhism.

One of the assumptions we have is that there shouldn’t be contradiction. Something is either one thing or another. Alive or dead. Active or passive. Good or bad. Fundamental or peripheral. High or low.

This leads us to misunderstand familiar buddhist metaphors like space, or mountains, or the ocean. We think that space is a metaphor for something – tranquillity, say – rather than the container and enabler of everything.

And not just buddhism. When 19th century European sanskrit scholars were translating tantric texts, they rendered ‘Supreme Being’ as ‘The Supreme Being’. It seems innocuous, but it’s not.

‘Supreme Being’ is an expression of being, not an entity. Just like the deepest depth of the ocean is part of the ocean. It’s not separate. Everything is working together in full expression. Like a real person. Not a corpse, tethered to a ghost.

It is useless to start from a general picture of Buddhism and try to match our experience to that picture. Both will be fakes. We have to start from where we are.

From where we are, in this room, twelve feet square.

So, for example, when we chant the first vow “Beings, numberless, I vow to free them”, we should not create an imaginary multitude of beings, we should start from our actual experience. This Being when the bell first rang. This Being now. This Being a child. This Being at death. This Being seen by each person within time’s scattering, in love, or hate, or indifference. This Being in the heart of those now gone. This Being in the heart of those not yet come. I vow to free them.

And from these Beings, like encroaching daybreak, to all Beings.

The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Towards the end of his life, the Buddha said to his disciples “My true body is my teachings“

Out of this arose the idea of the dharmakaya, the Universal Body of the Buddha, and then, later, the Bliss Body. As ‘buddha’ inflated, ‘sangha’ shrunk.

But there’s another way to look at it.

The Buddha’s teachings weren’t written down in his lifetime. They were held in the bodies and minds of the disciples who heard them. They were brought out by those disciples. That’s where the teachings arose. Without a sangha, there would have been no dharma. That’s where the teachings were embodied. And from there, outward, to everywhere.

And it is this body – the Sangha body, both mythical and flesh and blood – which keeps giving birth to new buddhas.