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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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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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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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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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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.