Tag: Delusion and Enlightenment

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407. The Frame of The Mirror

We’re often drawn back to the same stories. One of mine is the “Polishing a tile” story, where Nangaku asks Baso what his intention is in practising zazen.  Baso replies, “My intention is to make a Buddha.”  

Nangaku  picks up a tile and starts polishing it with a stone.   

Baso says, “What are you doing?”

Nangaku says “I’m polishing a tile to make a mirror.”

Baso says, “How can you do that?”

( The story goes on. A full version is in the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo)

It’s a very rich story. A dominant contemporary way of looking at it is that we should be satisfied with our life. Our life with all its imperfections, with all our limitations and Imperfections,  we should accept it completely. We should not want our ‘tile’ to transform into a ‘mirror’, because we’re not wanting to be something else. We’re not wanting to become an enlightened being, because that’s just a more subtle form of craving. 

That’s a very legitimate way of looking at the story. Barry Majid, a very good American  teacher, takes that position.

But it seems to me that there’s another way of looking at this story. Obviously you can’t make a tile into a mirror. And likewise, you can’t make a limited karmic being into a Buddha. 

Nonetheless, a mirror is manifested—a Buddha is manifested. Our initial, and correct, understanding is that practice means that we can’t  change one thing, a tile, into another—a mirror. Alongside the mirror the tile remains. Alongside the Buddha space which is actualized in zazen our karmic self is still there. 

Yet it changes: it’s still there, but it changes. How does it change? 

The practitioner isn’t the mirror. The practitioner is the framework of the mirror. Something is manifested when we sit but we can’t see it, because our seeing is from our limited karmic perspective.  Likewise we can’t understand it. That’s why the Dharma is called wondrous.  But just like the frame of a mirror, although we can’t see the mirror, we can be intimate with it— that’s practice.

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384. Stilling the mind

We often hear the expression “stilling the mind.” 

And many people think that’s the purpose of meditation—to still the mind, to empty the mind of thoughts.

We need to understand that stillness is not the absence of movement. In the mind, or anywhere else. 

Stillness is Suchness. 

To put it another way, if we understand stilling the mind to be simply making the mind quiet, we are perpetuating the self—we are perpetuating dualism, in a slightly disguised way.

Who or what is it, if not the self, that is trying to control experience?

Who is it?

What we must understand about delusion is that it always locates itself in a slightly different position from where we think it is—that’s how it works. 

Rather than trying to control our experience, what we need to do is to drop off our attempts to control or to limit our experience. Anything else is just a form of spiritual narcissism.

It’s as if, in the dark, there is a great building, but the only part which is lit up is the attic. 

To our eyes that’s the only thing there, suspended in darkness.

 There’s all these familiar noises which we think come from the attic; like familiar people who we can’t quite see; We just wish they would be quiet.

 But our practice is not to make the attic—the mind- quiet. 

Our purpose is to illuminate the whole building.

And not simply the building but the ground and the vast space all around which, in their different ways, hold all being.

If we can do that, we can start to understand that the noise, which we think is up here somewhere, which we think is ours, is just one aspect of the whole vibrancy of the universe, of dependent origination.

That same vibrancy will appear in the mind as thinking, in the heart as emotions, in the body as feeling and energy and in the world as aliveness and intimacy.

That is our purpose.  

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359. Taken by an idiot

When we start practice, it’s as if we’re taken to a beautiful land manacled to an idiot. We imagine that if the idiot would stop the incessant babble, we could fully appreciate the space and the tranquility.

It takes us a long time to understand that this person, whom we view as an idiot, is dependent origination.

If it were not for the noise, the distress, the interference, of what we regard as our personal thoughts and emotions, we would never have been drawn to practice in the first place.

It’s as if what we regard as our thoughts and our emotions is a beautiful and powerful dragon, constricted within the small room of the self; which in turn is located in some limited imaginary space in our head. 

If that dragon is released from the room of the self,  is released from the head, it can manifest throughout the whole body.  This changes everything:  experience transforms from something like static or echo  to something like bright water, flowing vigorously throughout the body. In turn, this bright water can flow into and from the entire world. Then it is like space, like light.

Practicing in this way is how non-duality is actualized—not by some ego project to weld an imaginary world to an imaginary self, or to lift something fictional upwards.

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342. The Magician

In Nagarjuna and other Mahayana writings there’s a strange metaphor: that of a magician conjuring up an imaginary person. That is often used as a way of talking about emptiness: experience is real but at the same time doesn’t have a separate underlying essence.

We can also look at this metaphor in a more personal way. I’m the magician—you’re the magician. From our beauty and pain we have created this phantom of self, this imaginary person. But tragically, we are invisible to ourselves, we have forgotten our true nature.

From this perspective we can understand the Bodhisattva. The Bodhisattva is not someone who sees themselves, but someone who sees all other beings in their falsity and in their truth, the creator as well as the conjured person. Not from a position of pity or superiority but from a position of compassion and love.  

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314. What is ‘Nirvana’?

There’s a common belief that Nirvana is the reward for practice. So, as it were, if we put in the hard yards of meditation, at some point we attain Nirvana. It’s something we attain, like we would attain Enlightenment, on the same kind of thinking: attain and keep. We go from our ordinary, fallen human condition to the state of Nirvana. Nirvana is a noun. Paired with that is often an image of blowing out a candle – Nirvana is like blowing out a candle.

This is an almost complete misunderstanding of what Nirvana originally meant. For that, we need to go back to the Buddha’s first three sermons after his awakening. He gave the first two of these to the five ascetics whom he practiced with, before taking a different path. 

In the first sermon he outlined the truth of suffering. He talked about the four noble truths  and the noble eightfold path. In the second sermon he talked about No Self. Throughout, he talked to this small group of practitioners in a straightforward way.

The third sermon was different. It was given to a much larger group of practitioners, and is known as the Fire Sermon. The reason why it’s called that is because the Buddha used the metaphor of fire to describe our ordinary human condition. So he said that our eyes are burning, the objects of our eyes are burning, our mind is burning, our hearing is burning, and so on. Burning is the common theme, and the fires that he describes are what later became known as the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance.

To understand this metaphor you need to understand that the Sanskrit and Pali word for fuel (i.e what keeps the fire going) and the word for attachment are the same. The word is upadana. The suggestion of the metaphor is that the fires of greed, anger and ignorance which consume our lives are generated and sustained by the fuel of attachment –  attachment to a self, and to all the things which your self believes it requires.

The word Nirvana has two parts to it: the prefix NIR means out and VANA means blowing. So at first glance we think, ‘oh, that fits in quite well with the image of the candle being blown out,’ but we need to understand two things. Firstly, the word vana has a much broader meaning than our word ‘to blow’, which we would think of as a person blowing out. We wouldn’t think of it as a person breathing in, and we certainly wouldn’t think of it in terms of a general movement in the air – though figuratively we would understand if someone said ‘the wind is blowing’.

The contemporary Theravada monk and translator, a wonderful and generous man called Thanissaro Bhikkhu, renders ‘Nirvana’ as not-blowing. On his reading of it, Nirvana is not blowing on the flames with a bellows, with the breath, or with something similar, a blowing which will keep the fire going. It’s not doing that. However, this isn’t quite right. ‘Nirvana’ is transitive; there’s nobody doing the blowing, and there’s nobody refraining from blowing. In fact, the reference is to the fire blowing. In other words the fire – of greed, anger and ignorance – which is sustained by our attachment, is ‘blowing’. It is drawing in the air which helps to sustains it. The consequence of us not continuing to give fuel to the fire is that the fire gradually dies down, and when it does so it’s not ‘blowing’- and that’s Nirvana.
But you can see how this original metaphor could gradually change into the metaphor of blowing out the candle, and who else would blow out the candle other than the practitioner? But this is almost a complete reversal of the original meaning, and throws attention onto what the practitioner will get, rather than what they need to stop.

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304. Buddhist Language

Master Mazu (Baso) famously said, “Mind is Buddha”. He also said, “Ordinary mind is the Way”. Yet on other occasions he said, “Neither mind nor Buddha”.

When challenged about this apparent inconsistency his successor Pai-chang said,

“All verbal teachings are just like cures for diseases. Because the disease is not the same, the medicines are also not the same. That is why it is said that there is Buddha and sometimes that there is no Buddha. True words cure sickness. If the cure manages to bring about healing then all are true words. If they cannot cure sickness they are false words. True words are false words insofar as they give rise to views. False words are true words insofar as they cut off delusion. Because the diseases are unreal there are only unreal medicines to cure them.”

There’s a lot buried within that text. The reference to views for example – giving rise to views –  clearly echoes Nagarjuna.

The metaphor of sickness and medicine is a direct reference to the final parable of the Lotus sutra, which describes the Buddha as like a wise physician.

 This idea of the Buddha as someone who cures sickness by expedient means, rather than someone who gives a correct view, is dominant within Chinese Buddhism.

When a person is sick that person is like a sleeping person – they’re entirely caught up in the sickness of the self. When a person is cured they are not released into any particular thing. They’re released into everything. They’re released into the world of all beings.

So language in Buddhism doesn’t have a truth function in the way that we would normally recognise it. Its function is to release us from clinging, grasping and attachment. It is to unclench us, to release us from grasping onto one thing and opening us to everything.

Because our inherent tendency to grasp and cling never goes away, we also require to be mindful about our desire to grasp wisdom. Or to grasp compassion. Or to grasp emptiness.

So the language will change in accordance with the situation of the person.

It’s not that as deluded beings we’re sick and then we come across Buddhism and we get well. No. This sickness and wellness is an intrinsic part of our nature as human beings. It does not change. It does not go away.

And so our language must always remain open.

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263. The One Dharma Gate

The earliest image we have of dependent origination is Indra’s Net. It’s a beautiful image, yet implausibly tranquil. And it ignores time. Of course, if the inspiration was someone looking up at the star filled night sky which, ironically, is seeing both space and time. But only from our perspective, now.

And for us, we might imagine dependent origination to be external to us, and our seeing of it to be impeded by the aches in this person’s body, the groans and gasps in this person’s mind.

But dependent origination isn’t tranquil or still. It is the exertion of all things. It is a great storm. And as you are sitting here, in the lull after the storm, this body is the debris of the storm. This mind is the echo of the storm. This body and mind is our dharma gate. The only one we will ever have.

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166. Awakening

One of the three meanings of satori is awakening, in the sense of awakening from a dream, or awakening within a dream.

We’re liable to misunderstand the metaphor, as we equate dream with falsity, and awakening with truth, which is complete nonsense.

The issue is whether we partition and appropriate experience, or not. Awakening to the dream within the dream isn’t about seeing falsity, it’s about seeing wholeness. Wholeness, seeing.

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159. The Narrow Gate

(With thanks to David Taylor)

Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Narrow Gate’. Note the words carefully. The gate isn’t hidden, or difficult to access, or far far away. It’s narrow. The sort of gate that a person would get stuck in. Neither able to go through, nor go back.

Zen is part of Mahayana. Mahayana means ‘Great Vehicle’. It’s ‘great’ because there’s nothing outside it. The whole chaotic miracle is there. That being so, there is no gate in, and no gate out. Enlightenment and delusion are both there, and nowhere else.

Delusion is taking experience and constellating it around the fiction of a ‘person’. The sort of person who might get fixated, who might get stuck. But enlightenment isn’t an attribute of a person, actual or potential: it’s universal.

In wholehearted expression and exertion, everything is the narrow gate.

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131. Living in a dream

In these days, it often feels as if we are living in a dream. But whose dream?

Awakening is one of the three meanings of Satori, Enlightenment.

So what is Awakening?

It isn’t waking up into a different world. It isn’t, asleep, imagining that the world is flat, and waking up, realising that it’s round. We have to get out of our fixation on truth and falsity. It is entirely useless.

It is just letting the ceaseless expression of life, flooding through us from moment to moment, be.

We awaken from the small dreams of ‘Me’: self and world, truth and falsity, hate and fear, clinging and so on.

But awaken into which dream?

Artwork by Blair Thomson
Artwork by Blair Thomson