Tag: Kusen – oldest first

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Kusen

241. The world will not fall into nothingness

The dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham said dance is the fleeting moment of feeling totally alive.

But you feeling totally alive is the small miracle. Experiencing the great fabric of all things as totally alive is the great miracle.

Allowing all this experience to flood through you: like light, undiminished by love, or by hate, or by comparison or by analysis. The great miracle is like a vast clear river which leaves no residue. Great, because although manifested fleetingly, even so the world will not fall into nothingness.

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Kusen

242. The Robe Verse

The kesa and rakusu are symbols of interdependence, and its reality.

Before we put the rakusu or kesa on, we place it on top of our heads and chant the Kesa Sutra.

So, as it were, we are placing interdependence above the self.

The first line of the sutra has the character ‘datsu’, the same datsu within Dogen’s description of zazen: shinjin datsuraku, dropping off body and mind. That is, dropping off, from moment to moment, the belief that this experience is my experience.

So we are putting something on, interdependence, and dropping something off, our separateness.

That being so, our focus when we sit is not to bring anything about, or exclude anything, but to welcome everything. Because we are not just the symbol of interdependence, but the reality

which is not something which happens to us, or something we see, but what we are.

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Kusen

243. Not the wind of ignorance

The Moon In Water

Originated as a description of the mind we should aim for while meditating.

Still water perfectly reflects the moon. A still mind perfectly reflects reality.

But, when the wind of ignorance starts to blow, creating thought waves, the reflection is lost.

But for Dogen, the wind wasn’t the wind of ignorance, it was the wind of interdependence. And that interdependence was fully expressing itself in the dynamic interplay of wind, water, space and moonlight. The moon wasn’t up in the far sky, it was in the water.

It’s hard to overstate how so entirely different this is.

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Kusen

244. A fire engulfing your head

Dogen said that we should practice zazen like a person trying to extinguish a fire engulfing their head.

A lazy or stupid teacher might parrot this at his unfortunate students. I certainly have. The intention is to impart a sense of urgency. But it’s false. We need to pay attention to the actual words, the actual image.

First, why is it engulfing only the head? Because it is the fire of the self. It can’t be extinguished by the puny efforts of the self.

Second, the person is trying. He doesn’t succeed. There isn’t an end point. It is a continual effort. It is dropping off body and mind.

Third, the effort is made by the vigorous activity of the body. But whose body?

Which person? The person of all being. The body of all things.

It is not your effort, because that would be feeble. It is the effort of the whole Universe, like the pouring of a vast and endless river through an infinity of dharma gates.

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Kusen

245. The self of all things

“To carry the self forward to experience the myriad things is delusion.

To allow the myriad things to come forward and illuminate the self is enlightenment.”

As always, Dogen is quintessentially talking about zazen.

The myriad things are not just walls, trees, birds, fences and so on, but everything – dreams, memories, waking hallucinations: everything.

The word that is translated as ‘self’, ‘jiko’ means both the small self, the ego, and the self of all things, everything.

But which self is illuminated? One or other? Both or neither?

Even when we are within the wooden box of the small self, we can still see a sliver of sky.

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Kusen

246. This great miracle

Our practice does not start from a position of lack. We do not need to complete or perfect anything. We are not on a journey. We are not spiritual warriors.

Rather, we are like a child filled with wonder. We are like an old person, on the point of death, grateful to have lived, picturing the deep interweaving of all things, picturing – eyeless – the great miracle.

This great miracle is always present, like a mother. Sometimes she embraces me, and sometimes she lets me be. But whenever I drop the weight of my head, she lifts me up.

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Kusen

247. Within a zen shaped annexe

In the Courtyard of Master Joshu’s temple was a cypress tree. One day, a monk asked Joshu

“Does the cypress tree have Buddha nature?”

Joshu replied, “It does”

The monk asked, “When does it acquire Buddha nature?”

Joshu said, “ When the sky falls to the ground”

The inclination is to interpret his answer as something like this:

Buddha nature isn’t an attribute that can be acquired by individual things, or people. It is a mythopoetic way of describing the dynamic wholeness of all being.
So, it’s not that you, or anyone else, has Buddha nature. Rather, you and everything else are Buddha nature. In Joshu’s answer, “sky” means emptiness, so what Joshu is pointing to is different from an abstract understanding (and hence separation) of form and emptiness. Rather, it is the real experience of both, interwoven in the fabric of full dynamic functioning, or dependent origination, or Buddha nature.

But I think an interpretation like this falls into a classic zen error. We purport to debunk and leave the house of Buddhist theory, but actually never leave, remaining within a weird zen shaped annexe, perhaps called “concrete reality”, perhaps called something else.

We can’t understand practice through theory, but we can understand and explain theory through practice. But without theory, we would never start practice. But it’s not a catch 22, it’s a spiral.

In the exchange, when is the “When”?

When we practice. In your actual experience, when you are sitting, isn’t it as if your face, your head, your torso are hanging in space? And isn’t it as if your pelvis, your legs, your feet are part of the great ground? And isn’t this the sky falling to the ground? The ground falling to the sky?

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Kusen

248. The purpose of practice

I asked my first teacher if the purpose of practice is to become enlightened.

She said, ‘No. The purpose is to become a human being.’

But what does this mean?

It’s like a person who is a counterfeit painter, painting pictures of the world in the style of great artists. These artists are variously called Compassion, Wisdom, Presence, Enlightenment.

But the person knows that no matter how convincing the paintings appear to be, they are fake and will always be at risk of being seen as fake.

Yet what the person doesn’t understand is that these ‘great artists’ are demons. Falseness is the whole point.

This pictured world is flooding out of us at each moment; vivid, perfect. If we wish to be like human beings, we only need to be like small children: fearless, whole.

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Kusen

249. The body of the buddha

One of the most significant innovations of the Mahayana is the Dharmakaya; the idea that the whole universe is the body of the Buddha. It is a radical re-imagining and enlivening of our normal view, changing our picture of the universe from a collection of objective, separate and largely inanimate things, from which we are somehow separate, to one where everything is “alive” and expressive, within a greater, alive whole.

I believe it derives from our actual experience in zazen. When we sit, we are not within the primary alienation, which thinks of the body as an object, distinct from, yet controlled by, the self. Rather, we experience ourselves as activity and expression – aliveness – and there is no clear boundary between this body, and the great body of all being.

It is not that this small body becomes the great body, nor that this small deluded person becomes a great person, because this would simply be ego inflation on a grand scale. But rather, we are taken back into the heart of all being.

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Kusen

250. Wall Gazing

Why do we sit facing the wall?

We can say that we’re following Bodhidharma who, after his encounter with The Chinese Emperor, went to Shaolin Temple and “sat facing the wall” for 9 years.

Classical Chinese is very terse. The characters simply say “ wall gazing”. This can certainly mean gazing at the wall, or, slightly less literally, facing the wall, but they can also mean, amongst other possibilities, gazing like the wall.

And how does a wall “gaze”? Steadfastly and with non discrimination, allowing all things to be, maintaining the room of the world.