Tag: Kusen – oldest first

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Kusen

151. The five hindrances

Nyojo said to Dogen “Zazen is dropping off body and mind”

Dogen asked, “What is dropping off body and mind?”

Nyojo said, “When you just sit, you are free from the five sense desires and the five hindrances“

The five desires are the content of our experience: what, either in our mind or in our body, we see, feel, hear, taste or smell.

The five hindrances are our attitudes to that experience: the minds of attachment, aversion, torpor, agitation or doubt.

We are “free”, not because our experience is voided, but because, from moment to moment, there is the possibility of being completely intimate with our experience, with our whole body mind. “Desire” is a partial response. “Mind” is a partial response.

Once you discover that something is just a covering, whether it is there or not, are you not free of it?

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Kusen

152. The category of koans is never closed

The Case: There is a person, A, in complete darkness, in complete silence. This person has no memory, and no sense of the body. However, A is telepathic, but only with two other persons. The first person, B, has a shared language with A. The second person, C, is a mute, with no language. In the silence, when A is aware of B, A is aware of all the mental phenomena of B, expressed through a torrent of language. When A is aware of C, A experiences C’s whole being – how it is to be C – but without language.

The Inquiry:

Is A alive or dead? If alive, where is A?

If A experiences B and C at the same time, does one obstruct the other?

If one does not obstruct the other, how is each experienced? Is B within C, or vice versa, both, or neither?

In zazen, are we telepathic with ourselves?

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Kusen

153. Restlessness and torpor

Of the five hindrances, three seem more related to the mind and two – restlessness and torpor – seem more related to the body.

Restlessness and torpor often arise because we misconceive the relationship between breath and body.

What is the body? Often, we conceive it as something fixed and rigid, like a stone house. And we then imagine that there is a technique of breathing – long slow out breaths say, or a focus on the lower abdomen – that we need to apply.

But we are mistaken.

We place such emphasis on the posture because it enables the breath to breathe itself. This breathing is like a column of enlivened space, from the base chakra in the pelvic floor upwards to the crown chakra at the top of the head. And the body is like fabric around this column. When we breathe in, the column expands and the fabric moves. When we breathe out, the column contracts and the fabric moves. The whole body breathes. The whole body moves.

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Kusen

154. Yogacara

Eko said to Bodhidharma, “My mind is not at peace, please pacify it” Bodhidharma replied, “Bring me your mind and I will pacify it”.

After a while Eko said, “I have looked everywhere for my mind and I cannot find it”.

Bodhidharma said, “There! I have pacified it”

Bodhidharma was very influenced by the Yogacara school and its eight ‘consciousnesses’.

Yogacara is often – unhelpfully – referred to as mind-only, or consciousness-only. We can’t hear ‘Mind’ or ‘Consciousness’ without thinking of the personal mind, and we can’t hear talk of a progression of consciousnesses without imagining a spiritual capitalism with a progressively greater spending power. For this reason, it is better to translate Yogacara as experience-only.

The first six consciousnesses correspond with our five senses, plus mind. The seventh is self, and the eighth is alaya consciousness, which is said to have two aspects – suchness and delusion.

That delusion comes about because the original wholeness of experience – Suchness – is appropriated to the self.

‘I’ am experiencing.

Once there is a perceiver, a self, there is then a mind and from that, a body, then differentiation into the five senses. Like part of the Antarctic ice cap breaking away, there is first the fundamental split from Suchness. Then all the little agonies.

Eko could not ‘find’ his mind, because his real experience was not sliced up.

If you imagine that Suchness is somewhere other than here, you will never find it.

It is like looking for the ground standing on the ground.

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Kusen

155. Avoid picking and choosing

The verses of faith mind starts:

The Great Way is not difficult

Only avoid picking and choosing.

When love and hate do not arise,

Things cease to exist, in the old way.

It is not that things cease to exist, but that they cease to exist ‘in the old way’, that is, dualistically. Me here. The world way out there. Each of us, looking for ropes, looking for snares.

When we sit we relax our gaze; the world isn’t ‘out there’ any longer. It is not sliced up into this and that. Any longer

If our gaze is relaxed, then our gaze includes our eyes, and the whole head and the whole body. The gaze encompasses everything

Is this not ceasing to exist in the old way?

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Kusen

156. Undisplaced

The most common metaphors in Buddhism revolve around space. Enlightenment is compared to space. Likewise the teachings. Likewise the Dharmakaya, the universal body of Buddha. It is important that we understand what is meant by space. For us it implies vacuity, or absence. This is not at all how space is used in Buddhism.

Its use is more akin to brightness, or liberation, and the closest analogy is with water. Just as the fish does not realise he is in the ocean, the bird does not realise he is ‘in’ space. But there is a critical difference. If an object is placed in water, the water is displaced. If an object is placed in space the space is not displaced. Because space is everywhere, there is nowhere for it to be displaced to.

When we come into this room and sit, space is undiminished. And this place where we are sitting now contains both ‘us’ and ‘space’. If we examine our actual experience carefully, we can see this to be true.

So each ‘thing’ is both itself and space, both particular and universal, and one does not obstruct the other. We can in this way understand what Fujita means when he talks about practice as being ‘one piece Zen’.

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Kusen

157. Expedient Means

In Buddhism, the teachings are often referred to as ‘expedient means‘. One might imagine, wrongly, that you are being told something helpful and partially true today, in order to be told something wholly true tomorrow.

They are expedient because they help us escape from the truth/falsehood dichotomy, which lies atop our alive expression like a collapsed tombstone.

It is as if, in a dream, you picture yourself in a tiny windowless room, alone except for a doll, endlessly repeating the same nonsense. Which do you kill: the doll or the room?

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Kusen

158. Allowing thoughts to come and go

The practice of allowing thoughts to come and go freely and not attaching to them is an ancient practice. It goes right back to the origins of Buddhism.

But if we think the aim of this practice is just to make ‘the mind’ still, to make ‘consciousness’ empty; then our practice lacks compassion.

It’s for this reason that when Buddhism went to China and the Chinese truly made it their own, they changed the emphasis from emptiness to suchness. The unstatable state when we are no longer conceptually grasping experience, fabricating self and object, when everything is vivid and whole.

Not Nothing, but nothing that can be described. No-thing, because Everything.

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Kusen

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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Kusen

160. Stilling the mind

With application, stilling the mind is not difficult. What is difficult is dropping off the sense of self. The sense of something to gain, something to lose. Self separate from the alive wholeness of everything.

Dropping off the sense of self, or ‘me’, which is central to our practice, means we do not describe practice in terms of acquisition, aspiring to acquire wisdom, enlightenment, compassion or whatever.

That is why we describe our practice as the whole universe experiencing itself through this body.