Glasgow Zen GroupOur lives do not exist in time. But in our lives, time exists.
Likewise, space. The budding tree births the sky.
Buddhist language is not a description of ‘reality’. It is a provisional language, aimed at liberation.
My first teacher said that we can’t break the mirror of the self with the head.
But if not with the head, then with what?
What.
Buddhist language is often quite abstract.
And so it is often difficult for us at first to understand the feelingness underneath.
So for example in the Surangama Sutra there is what appears to be quite an abstract discussion about perception.
We are told that false perception is like the moon in water. So in other words we imagine that each thing is a kind of concrete reality.
But every thing is just dependent on the causes and conditions of everything, from moment to moment. Were the water to be disturbed, the image of the moon would be shattered into a thousand shards of light. All things are like this.
The Sutra then talks about a second moon. It’s as if a person with cataracts looking at the moon sees another moon next to it. And by this – I think – is meant awareness of perceiving. So I see something but I am aware of the act of perception, and hence aware that my ‘seeing’ isn’t just noticing what’s there already. It’s a creative act. But I’m still going astray, somehow.
The real moon is unmediated experience itself, which is a description of our sitting.
When we sit, we are not concerned with inside or outside, identifying or classifying our experience. And when identifying and classifying arise, they are not meta phenomena, they are just aspects of experience.
We are simply experience.
It takes a little while to realise that this ocean of experience, this something rather than nothing is a miracle.
Is a miracle.
At the end of The Diamond Sutra we are told that we should view all things as “a flash of lightning, a bubble, a phantom, a dream”
At first blush, we think the first two are real, but momentary, and the second two are illusory.
We need to understand that having our face pressed tight against the unyielding glass of ‘Reality’ is a root cause of suffering.
All four are real, because all experience is real. Real, but not separate. We can see the lightening and the bubble as the momentary action of the whole universe, but likewise the phantom, likewise the dream.
If we can break this glass, we can discover the glory and beauty of our lives. Not in some future moment, but this moment.
In the Mountains and Waters chapter of the Shobogenzo, Dogen talks about how various different beings see what human beings see as water.
When we see water, fish see palaces. Gods see strings of pearls, hungry ghosts see blood or pus.
Dogen didn’t say that the fish, the Gods and the hungry ghosts are all mistaken, that they are mis-seeing water.
What we see as water is just one window, and there is an infinity of windows.
But for us, just one window. But looked through with which eye?
The eye that gives life, or takes it?
Dogen said that the path of all buddhas and ancestors is prior to the myriad things. That being so, it cannot be understood or explained by conventional means.
When we hear ‘path’ or ‘way’, we might imagine a path made up of the sutras, the words, the heads, the hearts, the hands of the ancestors.
And because there is such a path, here or somewhere, we can walk it.
Creation myths often take unpicturable chaos, which is then ordered into a pictured world.
It’s as if we can’t see the swirling of time without the picture of a clock. Or the surge of the ocean without a picture of it, first. But isn’t this picture world a loop? Isn’t the picture not a door, but a wall?
This life is not a million pictures. Our practice is not stepping onto this pictured path.
But rather, stepping from the hundred foot pole. Not falling
the words, the heads, the hearts, the hands.
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.
The Shin Jin Mei, The Verses of Faith Mind is attributed to Sosan, the Third Patriarch. The first line is “The Great Way is not difficult, only avoid picking or choosing.”
Well, we may readily think Sosan is being ironic, because when we start practicing, The Great Way seems very difficult indeed. Not just difficult, but impossible to see at all. It’s as if all we experience is a repetitive cascade of thought and emotion.
Yet somehow, with enough practice, we will step through this, and then The Great Way will be visible. And will be ours.
Sosan uses the term ‘faith mind’, because the faith is that this mind, this body, this experience is Buddha.
And we don’t see that, because in encountering what we deem this repetitive cascade of thought and emotion, we have already stepped forward into duality.
Our task is not to imagine that we can step forward further, this time into non duality, wholeness, but rather to fall backwards –
Master Dogen, in his instructions for meditation, said that when we practice zazen, we have to take ‘the backward step’.
That suggests that the world we ordinarily experience is constructed. But also, that what we are searching for is abundantly available to us, and always has been. It isn’t somewhere we’ve not been to yet, but somewhere we’ve forgotten. It is easy enough for us to say that the ways we demarcate the world is a construction, but harder to say – and to mean – for the self, or, as the Heart Sutra says, ‘the five skandas’.
To abandon one but not the other is useless, like collapsing all the props, yet leaving the actor on stage. Which is more essential to the delusion?
In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Dogen said that the five skandas are five pieces of prajna. Pra-jna. Pre-knowing. So, what is differentiated in the stepping forward into self and world is ‘one piece’, which is broken when we step forward, unbroken when we fall back, breaking and unbreaking, like space.
The most important thing for us to understand is that Zazen is not a practice of the self. It is a practice of the Buddha.
That being so, it is not concerned with purifying or perfecting the self. Or setting the self off on a journey.
It is not concerned with furnishing the house of the self with wisdom and compassion.
But rather, becoming completely intimate with the ground.
My first teacher said, “What is it which stops the Universe from collapsing?”
He didn’t answer. Of course, he didn’t need to.
When we chant the lineage, we chant the six primordial mythical buddhas, then the historical Buddha, then the generations of teachers following him, down to the present day.
The superficial problem – aside from the mythical buddhas – is that the lineage is made up. Some of the people named probably didn’t exist at all, and others almost certainly didn’t say or write what has been attributed to them.
In full knowledge of this, my teacher said that he accepts the lineage completely. How so?
Rinzai said that there is a true person – this person – who has no rank. This person is always going in and out through your face.
When we chant the lineage, all the names are provisional names, for this person.
And in the lineage of your own life, this person appears. All the demons, ghosts and false persons do not obstruct this person. And they don’t matter.