Glasgow Zen GroupWe expect to see the Buddha, within us or behind us.
But no matter how hard we look, he is nowhere to be found.
Instead we see a fox of wisdom, a fox of piety, a fox of compassion, a fox of enlightenment and so on, for what seems 500 lifetimes.
We need to understand that this person is not a complete person, and never will be. This person is half a person. The momentary beingtime crashing against this half a person likewise is half a person.
Our practice is full of apparent opposites: delusion/enlightenment, true/false, dream/awakening, form/emptiness.
Silly people imagine that you throw away one and get the other. It’s not so.
These are all polarities, delineating the whole body of full dynamic expression. Without firewood, no fire. Without birds, no sky.
Therefore, this day, do not wish all the debris into nothingness. Do not grasp for false tranquillity.
This day, bring a great fire.
We say this life is like a dream. We say it because we want to point to something which is neither existence or non-existence, neither true or false. Something which can be experienced, but not grasped.
And by not being grasped, the backwards and forwards of expression and of meaning between the dreamer and the dream can be vividly enacted.
If we see trees in a field, to the human eye, they are separate. However, their roots are completely entangled. So, if one of them is stricken, the others will support it, they will not let it fall.
In wide, open awareness, the mind flows into the body and so the body flows: into the ground, into the sky.
So all things are lifted up.
A familiar metaphor to describe zazen, and this life generally, is the moon in water.
It is a development of the mirror metaphor. Just like a mirror the water, when still, will reflect everything perfectly. So, as it were, there will be a second moon in the water. But, disturbed by the wind of ignorance, the water is disturbed, and waves form.
The ignorance is the belief that we are separate. But the critical part of the metaphor is deep faith that the wave – our sense of self, what we would call personal thought, feeling and experience – is not different from the ocean.
This faith, not making the ocean and the mind tranquil, is what is critical. Even if the reflected moon is a billion shards of light, because the wind is no longer ignorance, everything is still.
In Chinese Buddhism the image of a mirror is very frequent, both to describe practice and to describe enlightenment.
It is quite difficult for us to understand, because when we think of a mirror we think of two: the image in the mirror and the owner of that image.
The whole point of the metaphor however is that there is not two: there is just the mirror.
In the mirror, what appears to be separate is really just part of the whole image.
So each individual thing is there and not there.
Similarly, and perhaps unlike the thing itself, we can look on the image with equanimity.
Understanding all this, we are inclined to see the mirror as being a description of how the universe is. But actually, it’s a description of how the practitioner is. It’s a description of practice.
The reflection is the whole body: the masks of the present moment reconnected with the faces of the past, the tendrils of thought dipping deep into bodily sensation. The mirror is infinitely angled: from the past to the present, from the mind to the body, from this body to all bodies, from the storm to the lingering debris; all directions.
We can’t see it with the eyes.
When we are sitting, practicing zazen, in this place, although we do not speak, we are not mute. We are fully expressing Buddhism.
Likewise when we speak from this place.
Likewise when we hear, from this place.
Expression, like love, is like a tiny bird flying from the heart. Much as we try, we cannot preserve it in pictures, or in words, or in stone.
We are not sheltering within a temple of words built long ago called Buddhism.
Indra’s net is the whole network of practitioners now and all times, extended everywhere, everywhere fully expressing illumination. If buddhist expression simply travelled from the past to now, it would illuminate nothing.
The past illuminates the present. The present illuminates the past. The present illuminates the present. Because of this, the stone bird flies everywhere.
More On the Heart Sutra:
The Bodhisattva of Compassion….
Buddhists have a persistent difficulty with the Particular and the Universal. When we consider Avalokiteśvara/ dynamic full functioning/ dependent origination, we tend to make a picture of something vast, and lurch between that and our particularity now.
It was for this reason, I suspect, that Okumura said that practice was the five skandas seeing the emptiness of the five skandas.
We start with this experience, this particularity, this now, and it floods out everywhere, because it is unconstrained by the bell jar of the self.
We practice within a deep faith that we exist within a dynamic whole, that we are part of everything. Part of everything.
That being so, it doesn’t matter if our mind is empty or full, quiet or busy. Whatever arises is part of this wholeness too. What we call delusion is asking to be seen, to be understood, to be ungrasped by our attachment and aversion, not eradicated, not cast into nothingness.
The complete combustion of each moment is the illumination of the universe.