Tag: Kusen

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425. Zazen is not a practice of the self

The core insight of Buddhism is that we suffer because there’s a split between self and world. ‘Self’ in the sense not that we have a subjective perspective, obviously we do, but in the sense that there’s some ongoing, continuous ‘something’ which is essential to us, and which we call self. In Buddhism we say that’s a fiction. But the insight creates two fundamental problems.

Firstly, if we suffer because of belief in a fictional self, how can meditation, which is quintessentially a practice of the self, help us see through that fiction, help us displace the self? And  second, if what we’re looking for, at least in some sense, isn’t here already, why should it ever be?

Those two issues have been dealt with in various ways in the history of Buddhism. And one of the reasons for the apparent opaqueness of East Asian Buddhism for us is the unusual ways in which the Chinese and the Japanese have chosen, in a very practical way, to address these problems.

And one of the distinctive ways is seeing practice, not necessarily just meditation, but practice generally, not as the practice of the self, but  the practice of Buddha or the practice of Bodhisattvas. So, for example, in the Pure Land school, there is the belief that if compassion arises within me, it’s not belonging to me. It’s not my compassion. It’s not personal compassion which I’m cultivating. It’s the compassion of the Buddha Amida.

And in a similar way, Dogen would say that when we practice, we’re not practicing from the perspective of the self, we’re throwing ourselves into the house of Buddha. At other times he might say it’s not you that’s sitting, it’s sitting Buddha. 

These are ways that to us are hard to grasp, but which are eminently practical if we take them seriously rather than literally. The problem with taking them literally is we think that instead of the world being as it appears, it’s populated with these technicolor mythical heroic figures. That’s obviously ludicrous. But what’s not ludicrous is understanding that seeing in this way is meant to produce a feeling shift in us. In the example of compassion, it’s not that  there’s a garishly dressed future Buddha hiding away in a mythical place, but rather that compassion, like love, is a universal quality. It’s not particular to me, and I don’t own it. It’s a universal quality which is transmitted through me in the same way as sunlight streaming through your window illuminates falling dust. The dust doesn’t  acquire the qualities of light, but nonetheless becomes like a jewel, like a mirror.

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424. Delusion and Enlightenment

Master Dogen’s view of delusion and enlightenment is expressed succinctly in the Genjokoan.

[In Tanahashi’s translation]: “to carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion, that the myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.”

The Zen Site [www.thezensite.com] have helpfully collected together a number of other translations of this passage, which we can usefully use as contrast.

Francis Cook translates it as “conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion, the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment”.

Nishijima’s translation is “driving ourselves to practice and experience millions of things and phenomena is delusion. When millions of things and phenomena actively practice and experience ourselves, that is realisation.”

It’s important for us to to note that the distinction which Dogen is making is between a practice which affirms or assumes the self and a practice which de-centres or [in his phrasing] drops off the self. For Dogen the practice of zazen is plainly the second.

We also need to pay attention to the word ‘jiko’ [ which is translated as ‘self ‘] has a double meaning. It means self in the usual way that we mean: ego. But it also means the bigger self: the whole of creation. Which is taken as being like a body: alive, differentiated, connected, changing. And that double meaning has an extra layer to it because obviously from the position of the bigger self Everything is part of the bigger self, including our personal, egoic sense of self.

And it’s fair to say in these translations, the sense of universal self is probably not conveyed. And the reference to what Tanahashi refers to as ‘the myriad things’, and what Nishijima refers to as ‘millions of things and phenomena’ needs to be clarified. What’s meant  is everything within our experience when we’re practicing zazen. So obviously it includes what’s within our perceptual field, structures and trees and sky and all the rest of it. But also what’s arising within what we would normally think of as being the separate mental field of our thoughts, memories, emotions and suchlike.

And both form a whole. It’s not that there are two separate realms where perception is good, and the mental stuff is not good. They form a whole which in traditional language is ‘myriad things’. And which for Nishijima is ‘millions of things and phenomena’. It’s also important for us to understand that if we have a practice which thinks that we require to empty the mind or  require to achieve a special state of consciousness, or  need to acquire some special quality of consciousness which is called enlightenment, we’re going in absolutely the wrong direction. And similarly, when people use ridiculous language like ‘wanting non egoic experiences’, it’s just a disguised way of affirming the self.

The way to get out of all of that muddle is to do away with that false belief that  the emotions, memories and so forth which arise within zazen are random junk, and that tranquility or unvarnished perception of things is good. And replaced by an understanding that everything that is arising within our experience is the universe practicing itself through us. You could also say it is interdependence. Everything that arises within our experience, no matter how unpromising, is interdependence. 

When I was doing zazen this morning, I was getting a repetitive song from the early 80s. And the obvious thing was to just think that’s a distraction to be driven away. But liking or hating  phenomena obscures its actual reality. We just see phenomena at the surface level. We don’t see the threads of connection which come from us.

That annoying song? I could see on reflection later that it connected to many other things. Specifically to a former friend, who I found out recently committed suicide. We would listen to that song together. And the song was sung by somebody who committed suicide.

I’m just using that as an example. Even the most unpromising things arising in our experience is us experiencing interdependence. It’s as if behind the apparent moron of our  babble is a great person, extending everywhere.

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423. The Empty Mirror

The mirror is one of the main metaphors of Chinese Zen. But it’s quite difficult for us to tie it in with other metaphors that we encounter frequently, ones concerned with space, illumination, emptiness and so on.

The metaphor of mirror crops up all the time. Sometimes ‘the ancient mirror’ or ‘the empty mirror’, and it appears in one of the most famous exchanges in Zen legend, an exchange involving the Sixth Patriarch. (Hui-Neng)

The Fifth Patriarch had asked his disciples for a poem to demonstrate their understanding. The head monk was the only one who wrote a poem. And that poem was anonymously critiqued by Huineng, who then secretly got the transmission and became the Sixth Patriarch.

The poem goes something like 

“ body is the bodhi tree,
mind the mirror bright, 
polish the mirror ceaselessly. 
And don’t let dust alight” 

The nursery rhyme rhythm is  my own, but you get the idea. On the face of it, this seems an accurate description of meditation. We can think of ‘dust’ on the mirror as being distracting thoughts, and we are ceaselessly, trying our best to put those distracting thoughts to one side and to keep the mind clear, like a mirror.

Huineng’s criticism was that the poem contained a fatal dualism. A dualism between, as it were, the person doing the polishing, and the mirror or, if you want to put it in a different way, between the self and the mind. And that fatal dualism is then amplified by a  judgment about what is of value. So ‘dust’ is not of value, but the things of the world that might appear in the mirror perceptually are.

In considering the metaphor further, it’s helpful to rebut the assumption that when the Chinese talked about mirrors, they were talking about mirrors in our sense. It’s true that glass was invented quite a long time ago. The Chinese were familiar with it and  would make mirrors of glass. But they weren’t mirrors in our sense, which appeared quite late, the technology appearing around 1835. When the Chinese talk about ‘mirror’, what they mean is a precious metal, bronze, for instance, which is polished so it becomes a reflector. And so there’s several things that we can tease out of that.

The first is that the bronze mirror is very precious. It’s made of precious metal, and requires a great deal of work to put ( and maintain) it in the state where it’s capable of reflecting the world. It requires continuous activity to keep it this way and not become dull. But although it’s precious, it’s a part of the world, it’s not separate or transcendent. It’s something within the world. And the second thing for us to eke out is the idea of depth. When we think of mirror, we probably think of us looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection and then making some sort of assessment about the reflection: “it’s me, but I’m not the reflection”, something like that, but for them the idea of depth is very important.

The depth of the mirror is  the depth of the world. It’s the same depth. And within meditation, the masters would often talk in terms of ‘empty mirror mind’. Although it seems a bit baroque to us, in a sense, when I’m meditating this head is like an empty mirror, reflecting whatever comes before it. This gets us away from the fatal dualism of inner and outer reality which, like the senior disciple’s poem, often goes unnoticed in contemporary discussions of meditation. 

One fatal dualism is between the activities of the mind, – thoughts and stuff like that, bad, and activities of the world, our perceptual awareness of the trees outside, the birds and all the rest of it, good. And the second, slightly more subtle, dualism is between the idea of us having as it were, a meditating internal space of awareness,  consciousness, our personal  awareness and the external space of the world. Within this head is my awareness which different from this adjacent but external space ‘outside’.

The metaphor of ‘mirror mind’ applied to our experience of zazen removes those dualities. Not that that idea is original to me. In 1961, Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head’, where he talks about exactly this. He doesn’t, as far as I can recall, specifically mention the mirror metaphor, but it’s the same idea. So that in our conceptual mind, there’s a difference between internal and external. But in our actual phenomenological experience, when we’re meditating, there is no separation. And because there’s no separation, then our meditation is not striving to do something about our consciousness, to fix our consciousness. It’s enacting something. And that’s a very important distinction.

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422. Beating The Cart

In the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo, Master Dogen poses the question: What to do when the cart is stuck. Do you beat the ox or do you beat the cart?

And he comments on that. The phrase comes from an exchange between Nangaku and Baso about zazen’s purpose. It starts with Nangaku seeing Baso, his student, sitting in zazen. And Nangaku says, “What is your intention sitting  in zazen?” and Baso says something like, “I intend to become a Buddha”.

Nangaku then picks up a tile and starts polishing it with a stone. And Baso says, “What are you doing?” And Nangaku says, “I’m making a mirror”. And Baso says, “How can you make a tile into a mirror?” Nangaku says “Likewise, how can you make a person into a Buddha?”.

Dogen renders that story anew, which ordinarily puts Baso in a subordinate position. He equalises them. In Dogen’s rendering of the story, the exchange takes place after Nangaku gives  teacher transmission to Baso. Baso’s responses are given an equivalent weight to Nangaku’s statements, partially by re-formulating Baso’s questions into statements, eg “What are you doing?” becomes “You are doing What [Suchness]”

That  particular phrase about beating the cart  is very helpful in giving a sense of what is involved in our practice, shikantaza. And we can simplify things by saying that in the quote, the ox signifies the mind and the cart signifies the body.

Dogen’s interpretation is much more multifaceted and subtle than that. But if we make that distinction for present purposes, it is helpful for us in making sense of Dogen’s subsequent statement that sometimes in the Buddha way, we beat the cart rather than beat the ox. Because it seems to me that almost all approaches to meditation other than shikantaza are beating the ox.

Because they’re focused on mental resolve, intention and a directional focus. Meditation practice will take you from an inferior position to a superior one..

Shikantaza makes no sense within this mental, intentional framework. Within the mental framework, i.e. from the perspective of the ox, we are sitting in the faith of non-duality, in the faith that the boundaries that we put in place between ourselves and the rest of creation are illusory.

But from the perspective of the mind it’s  hard to avoid that  just sounding like pious nonsense.

The intention from that perspective of moving from one position to another is inevitably future focused. Which is why it’s stuck. But if we think of shikantaza from the perspective of the cart, from the perspective of the body, then it starts to make sense. The faith becomes something other than an intellectual assertion of non-duality.

It moves from the field of belief to the lived experience of intimacy and trust. From a body perspective, faith resumes its original meaning, not belief, but trust and  connection. And so our faith isn’t an intellectually asserted one of non-duality when we’re sitting, it’s just this simple intimacy that we have with all  beings.

With our immediate environment first, and then  gradually  seeping out to all beings, like ink spreading out on blotting paper. Equally, intention ceases to be something future orientated, something by which through effort we change our position, to  an intention of maintaining our position. So it’s present focused, not future focused. Dogen’s phrase is very helpful in illuminating his view of shikantaza and about our practice as letting the body leap free, to no longer be stuck.

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421. Dogen’s Instructions For Zazen

The first two texts Dogen wrote were the Bendowa and the Fukanzazengi. Both are instructions for zazen.

They are unusual texts. The Bendowa doesn’t seem to have within it anything  we would narrowly regard as instructions for meditation. The Fukanzazengi, which Dogen revised continuously throughout his life, does contain what corresponds with what we think instructions should be. But they’re very brief. So the instructions in the Fukanzazengi are “put aside all concerns, don’t think of good or bad.Think not thinking.”

And that creates problems for us as practitioners now, because the apparent brevity of those instructions leads us, I think, to a psychological interpretation of what zazen is, what shikantaza is: “it’s objectless meditation, it’s bare awareness. Meditation is simply allowing everything to come and go freely whilst abiding within non-attachment”…something like that.

But those psychological interpretations of shikantaza are fundamentally wrong and they minimise the extent to which the practice of zazen is dramatically different from many other forms of meditation, which are clearly starting from the practitioner’s  conscious awareness and then trying to change that awareness. And so, for instance, the means might be a mantra, or a visualisation.

Or one might have a koan to focus on  which is assumed to have a transformative effect over time.

So generally, the idea of most sorts of meditation is to start with the present experience of the practitioner and, through discipline, attempt to change that experience. So meditation is seen as a transformative activity over time.

And that, I think, fundamentally contrasts with shikantaza, which is not a process model at all and which is not primarily concerned with the experience of the practitioner. So in the Bendowa for instance rather than give us a lot of instruction about what shikantaza should be, Dogen starts with this passage, “When even for a moment you sit upright in samadhi, expressing the Buddha mudra in the three activities, the whole world of phenomena becomes the Buddha mudra and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.”

And then he goes on to say, “All beings in the world of phenomena in the ten directions and the six paths at once learn pure body and mind, realise the state of great emancipation and manifest the original face.” And it goes on like that, in that tone. And the problem for us, with writing of that sort, is that we think it’s poetic or we think that it’s making a factual statement eg that my sitting zazen, transforms the world, which we think means well, you do zazen and transform the Crab Nebula, or something absurd like that.

But what we need to understand is that that apparently implausible passage is actually a description of our practice, it’s not the description of the world, not the world in the karmic sense of the word but in a Buddhist practitioner sense. It’s a description of practice. What do I mean by that?

It’s a description of practice because the practice of shikantaza starts with the faith in non-duality, it starts with the faith that we are not sitting in an isolated position: We are already intimate with all beings so, as it were, we’re sitting with all beings: fences, tiles, mountains, and so on.

It’s as if we are like a little tree in this forest of being, and we are that way from the get go. We’re not attaining non-duality, we are already in this non-dual state, which we can’t see within our perception. So the key to shikantaza, the key to zazen is a faith that we are already intimate with all beings

And faith makes it so.

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420. How should we understand the bodhisattva vows?

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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419. The Five Eyes of a Person

In the Diamond Sutra it’s said that there are five kinds of eye: the Physical/Flesh eye, the Heavenly eye, the Prajna eye, the Dharma eye  and the Buddha eye. 

The Flesh eye is our karmic way of seeing. It’s seeing the world with ourselves at the centre and how we can use the world to satisfy our needs and wants. The Heavenly eye is seeing the world as a Heavenly being would see it: from a distance, seeing structure, seeing systems and (for our purposes) seeing the world as linguistically constructed. So for example, seeing a particular tree as an exemplar of the word ‘tree’ rather than as a unique existent. The Prajna eye or wisdom eye is the eye that sees the emptiness of all things. The Dharma eye is the eye which sees the world as full of bodhisattvas, full of teachers. The Buddha eye is seeing the world as an alive feeling whole, like a body.  

There’s a risk of thinking this is developmental: we start off with the physical eye and we gradually work our way up to the Buddha eye.  Probably the pivot is having an insight into emptiness. On this view, once we develop the perspective of the Wisdom eye,we can move on to these higher stages. That’s a mistaken view in my opinion.

All five of these eyes are available to us now. 

Rather than seeing each eye as being independent, I think it makes a lot of sense if we see these eyes in pairs, as they would be for a human being. If you look at it that way, then we can see that, as it were, the pair of eyes for an unevolved person who hasn’t encountered Buddhism or anything analogous to Buddhism is the first two,  the Physical eye and the Heavenly eye. This person sees the world from the perspective of self needs and wants,  but the world that person sees is also linguistically constructed. The person’s not intimate with the beings in the world, they’re kind of linguistically abstract. I think that’s a much more realistic way of regarding an unevolved or very self-centered person.

It’s very rare indeed to encounter somebody who just sees through the physical eye and that’s it. The pivot is the wisdom eye, but not necessarily in a pattern of linear progression. One can see the Wisdom eye taken with either the Flesh eye or Heavenly eye can produce a kind of Zen or Buddhist sickness. You can see that the Wisdom eye and the Divine eye taken together just produce a sort of ‘nothing matters’ perspective that you would get from a teenage male existentialist or something like that. Similarly the Prajna eye, combined with the Flesh eye, just produces somebody who’s got a justification to do whatever they want because ‘nothing matters’. 

Insight into emptiness is a gateway to potentially seeing and living differently, but it can also simply be grafted onto a pre-existing egotism. 

And the Buddha eye is far from being something which just appears at the end of a long process of spiritual development. It’s there all the time but it’s not really recognised. When people are out in nature for example they very often have the sense of a deep connective intimacy with their environment but because that’s not reconcilable with a self-centred perspective, it’s misidentified as being something relaxing or soothing rather than an exemplar of something which is fundamentally different.

So in this way of seeing the five eyes one can, as it were, see them in combination, as you would with a person. This gets us out of our developmental model and into something which actually corresponds very well to our actual experience.

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418. Practice Realisation

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.

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417. The Self/World Problem

One of the primary issues in Zen is the problem of Duality–the sense that there’s a split between me and the world.

The temptation is to try and heal that split in the realm of thought. We  think the split is there because we think of ourselves as separate beings and hence regard the world as a resource: stuff to use, stuff to throw away. 

The cure for that would seem to be changing that perspective, replacing  selfish individualism with a matrix of ideas emphasising interconnection, compassion, kindness and so on.

Laudable as it is to foster those qualities, that way of approaching the problem is fundamentally mistaken. The source of the duality is not at the level of mind or ideas, or not at least in this sense that we normally take that to be. Rather, the source of the duality is the dominance of our visual sense.

If we examine our experience carefully, we’re very often carrying around a kind of proto image of ourselves, seen, as it were, from the outside.

That visual sense is culturally our dominant sense. It is very connected to the Mind and to our sense of self. It dominates all our other senses, particularly our somatic sense, our momentary, felt, embodied sense. 

This explains some aspects of meditation which might appear to be otherwise odd. 

Why is there such an emphasis on posture for example?

Because if we’re sitting in the correct posture, our spine becomes activated. We have this sense of visceral aliveness we can’t really articulate, but which is clearly there.

And if our posture is correct, we experience our breath right at our centre.

When we’re breathing like this, we’re very aware of the constant interaction between our breath and our flesh, our breath and our bones

The breath is something which the mind can’t  conceptualise or temporise. 

But you can see it in other ways as well. For instance if we develop more of a sense of the interiority of the mouth; the fleshiness of your tongue, the depth of your mouth, this has a similar effect; alerting us to the aliveness ‘inside’. When we put our tongue on our hard  palate, it sometimes activates our third eye, it sometimes creates this curious sense of dynamic uplift in our head and neck.

All this reactivates our somatic sense. Which diminishes the visual sense. It doesn’t dispel it, but diminishes it. Paradoxically, by reactivating the somatic sense, the sense of ourselves as being three-dimensional rather than as if it were a visual two-dimensional image, breaks down that primary self/world duality.

It’s an illusion to think that duality has to be suddenly flipped over in some miraculous kensho experience.

It’s enough that its grip is gradually loosened.

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416. Like a person

The single best known phrase in  Zen is probably from the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness,  Emptiness is form”.

The Heart Sutra was almost certainly written in China and then  translated back into Sanskrit to create the appearance of authenticity.

Its fame is ironic, as the Chinese had considerable difficulty with the idea of emptiness.  When Buddhism first came to China with its form/emptiness pairing, the inclination the Chinese had was to equate it – wrongly – with their own categories of Li and Shi.

Li means principle. Shi means phenomena. We’re familiar with it in Zen because it’s in the Sandokai, a doctrinal poem written by Master Sekito in the 8th century.

It’s two different ways of seeing. Li is looking at things on a kind of systems basis and Shi is looking at particular phenomena. So for instance, the weather system would be Li and the raindrops would be Shi. Gravity would be Li and the planets would be Shi, and so on.

The reception of Buddhism was against a background of pre-existing Taoist thinking, which had, for example, the concept of the void, and which sounded quite like emptiness, but wasn’t. 

What’s interesting is that out of this apparent misunderstanding of  emptiness, a tremendously rich and unique tradition evolved. The Indian perspective is very much centred on the individual practitioner or group of practitioners, and the world is seen as either neutral or obstructive.  

The transformation which the Chinese created was of a completely alive practitioner within a completely alive world. The world is aiding, not obstructing the practitioner. 

This brilliant ‘error’ illuminates something very important.

The way in which we should encounter the sutras, the stories, the sayings shouldn’t be as a fixed and certain body of knowledge we require to learn. It’s more like meeting a person.  

A person who can change us. And also, critically, a person that we can change. Not change in the way that we could just integrate that person within our own systems and perspectives (“oh, he’s just like X”) but at a deep level, underneath thought and choice.

There’s a perennial temptation for us to often have an ideal of what our practice should be like, and to judge whether or not we’re achieving that. But it’s much better to regard our practice not as a conforming action, squeezing ourselves within what we imagine previous generations of Buddhists to have experienced, but as a creative and an expressive action of the whole of us, which the mind can’t see but which we can accept through faith.

We can understand Buddhism as being, in a sense, a history of evolving metaphors. Those metaphors, like a person, are not closed in meaning.

For instance, Dogen used the metaphor of darkness, which habitually referred to ignorance, in a novel way as non-differentiation and of intimacy.  Because in the dark we cannot see anything as separate from ourselves. Similarly for us, very well worn metaphors that the Chinese used, like the mirror, can live and change within us. New meanings can always come forward. 

That is one of our roles in a culture which is at the starting point of receiving Buddhism.

We stand against the natural tendency to assimilate Buddhism within our pre-existing categories. We stand against the seemingly opposite tendency to replicate the cultural forms of the civilizations from which we’ve acquired Buddhism. We are like a blind person painting. Or a deaf person singing.

By no means useless.