Tag: Kusen – oldest first

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431. What is dropping off body?

Master Dogen described the practice of zazen as being the [continuous process of] ‘dropping off body and mind’. 

It’s reasonably clear what he meant by dropping off mind, because he describes that process in quite a straightforward way in Genjokoan: in zazen, we allow all our experience to live fully, unconstrained by the assumption of ownership of this experience by the self.

That is, all the multifaceted aspects of our experience can be expressed, and they don’t have to be stuffed into the small jar of self. Sometimes that is expressed in spatial terms. So we’ll say it’s as if in zazen our awareness is like vast space, within which everything can freely appear, manifest itself entirely then go.

And if we do not give attention to the body, people can quite often have the notion that this sense of vast spaciousness, once developed, is the same as non-duality. That if zazen had a destination, this would be it.

Yet that’s incorrect, because it excludes the actual fabric of being; this body and all others.

Dropping off body is more difficult for us to understand, but it needn’t be. It is simply to forgo an unconscious yet pernicious idea we have of the body as being like an object within consciousness.

Or another way of putting it is as being like a pictured body within the mind: when someone asks us to pay attention to our left hand, do we sense it, or do we look at it?

Dropping off body is dropping off that conceptual sense of the body, so we can actually experience it as it is phenomenologically. And what we notice when we’re sitting in zazen is that very often we will experience our body as being like charged space.

So it’s there [as a ‘something’] but  not there. And there isn’t a clear boundary between body and world. There’s not a clear demarcation between this body and the body of all being.

And that is a much more immediate and natural sense of non-duality, which is beginningless and endless.

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432. What is meant by ‘Dharma Position’?

In Dogen’s Genjokoan, there’s the following highly evocative passage. (using the Okumura translation)

“Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot become firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the Dharma position of firewood and has its own before and after. Although before and after exist, past and future are cut off. Ash stays in the position of ash with its own before and after.”

The material phrase in this passage is ‘Dharma Position’, (in Japanese) “hōi”. What does Dogen mean by Dharma Position? We can gain some understanding if we consider our actual experience in zazen. 

Sometimes it’s as if we’re experiencing ourselves and the whole world as one piece.

There isn’t an inner and an outer. There is just oneness. Obviously, there’s differentiation. But there isn’t duality. And from that actual experience, we can see that in this moment nothing is excluded. In this moment, there are congregations of expressions and activities. There is this person sitting, there’s the birds singing, there is light falling through rain, there is dharma rain making our obstinacy more pliable. And we can see that, in this single moment, absolutely everything is included: all being, all moments.What’s meant by Dharma Position is an actual occurrence in the present moment, which we can think of as a moment of experience, a moment of activity, a moment of expression; something like that. 

But what we don’t think of it as is a moment of activity in or from or by a being which continues from past to present to future. The example, which Dogen is using about firewood and ash, says that in our unexamined normal way of thinking, there’s an underlying something [never specified] which is first a seed, and then a young tree, and then a mature tree and then firewood and then ash. Of course, whilst Dogen is using a poetic example he’s really talking about your ash: your birth, your life, your death.

And the suggestion is that although in one sense, to organise things, it’s convenient for us to think that there’s a continuity, which we achieve by fracturing experience into objects that persist over time, in a deeper sense and in a sense which is essential to enable us to understand the depth of our life, there isn’t a continuity of an underlying essence. So, as it were, all the moments, of this life, of your life, of everyone’s life are separate and distinct, but also connected with all being and all moments as moments. There’s not an underlying continuity of beings in time. Of course, each Dharma Position is part of the tapestry of being/time. There appears to be a contradiction, but there really isn’t. And Dogen is drawing out the implications of the perspective of ‘no-self’, which is the founding insight of Buddhism.

To reconfigure the world as not as cause and effect between ongoing entities but rather an ongoing miracle of expression, of exertion, of experience. 

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433. Living Within Miracles

A monk asked Yunmen, “Where is the place the Buddhas go beyond Buddhahood?” Yunmen answered “Where the east mountain walks on water.”

 When we hear this – if we assume that Yunmen’s answer isn’t intentionally nonsensical – we’ll try and decode it. So we may say, “Well, the mountain is the symbol of the whole world of interdependence, which is flowing,like water would flow”; an early version of the process view.” 

But what we don’t do is take the image seriously. Which is strange because many of us have had the experience of being in a boat on water, looking over at a mountain, and it appears that the mountain is walking on water. We have these magical experiences all the time. So, for instance, at this time of year in the early dusk, before people close the curtains and the lights are on internally, there’s an extraordinary mirror effect on the windows, intermingling inside and outside.

We can think of other examples. But what we would say is that this phenomenological world, where we appear to see magical things, where we appear to be living within miracles is just something that’s going on inside us. And what we do to eradicate those miracles is that we superimpose upon the world of our experience a conceptual world, which we call reality.

So we say “There’s a mountain over there. It’s not doing anything. It’s not walking on water. There’s the sky, there’s the water.”, and so on. What we need to understand is that our universe is not made up of lots of things acting on each other. It is a living dynamic whole, full of perspective and full of expression. And that perspective that we have of seeing the mountain walk on water is not some odd psychological thing that’s happening internal to us. It’s part of the dynamic expression of the whole universe. That relationship that we have with the mountain is part of the expressive creativity of the mountain. If we understand that and do not flatten our experience with this concretising ‘reality’, then we can live within miracles.

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434. Mind Is World

When the Chinese Zen masters make statements like ‘Mind is world’, they don’t mean that another world [or this one] is somehow inside your mind. They’re not taking an idealist position. They’re saying that everything is of one fabric, that the distinction we make between self and world, between thought and world, is incorrect.

It’s often difficult for us to understand what these masters are talking about, because one of the primary influences on classical Chinese Zen is Yogacara. And Yogacara, which has been mischaracterised as ‘mind only’, tends to be missed out from the influences on Zen. We think of Nagarjuna, of the movement around Buddha nature, of the Tiantai school, of the Huayan school; but we don’t think of Yogacara.

And until Professor Waldron’s recent book [‘Making Sense of Mind Only’], there’s actually very little in English for the general public about Yogacara. And that’s very unfortunate. Because Yogacara has a whole vision of mind, consciousness and world, which is extremely applicable to our practice.

One of the points that Yogacara  makes is that in the act of perception, both the object and the subject appear.

When I see something, when my, in their language, eye consciousness is engaged, both the flower appears, but also, as it were, the person appears.

The person who’s seeing the flower is not pre-existing. Although we can grasp that in theory, the tendency that we have is to say, well in this moment, I’m obviously seeing something. I might be mis-seeing it, or other creatures might see it differently. But there is a definite something ‘out there’ seen by an ongoing person ‘in here’,

So we can understand the point [which is same point that neuroscience would make] but we immediately undercut it by grafting on top an assumption that there is a real world out there.

And the value of meditation is that the ‘mental objects’ which appear when we’re meditating  -the thoughts, the emotions, the memories, the internal chatter. which create and maintain the self from moment to moment- it’s much clearer to see those as constructs, as not really existing. When we experience a thought, it’s easy, or or at least easier to move from what Yogacara would call the imaginary state where, as it were, I’m just seeing things [‘out there’] to the dependent state which understands that one thing is arising in consequence of many other things.

This particular thought is arising because of experiences that I had today; because of indigestion, because I’m irritated by the noise of traffic, or whatever. So, meditation helps us shift from a state of, as it were, naive realism which initially we perpetuate in meditation, thinking the contents of our experience come pre-formed and exist. [as they appear] It helps us move from that position to one of dependent origination. And from that position, it becomes easier to move into what Yogacara called the third state, which is the true state, which is that reality is ineffable. And so as it were, we see [ the flower] in two ways. We see it in its conventional form. There’s a flower, there’s a thought,there’s a mountain, and we see it in its vastness, its ineffability.

And so it’s very unfortunate that Yogacara is missed out of the influences on Zen that people acknowledge because when it is missed out, the risk is that we misunderstand the purpose of meditation. In error we think of it primarily in terms of psychological wellness, in terms of calming the mind, in terms of suppressing thought and inducing a state of contemplative peace, [or insight into emptiness] rather than addressing the fundamental cause of suffering: the assumed duality of self and world. And the overcoming of that duality is not to create a nihilistic state, but to create a state of vibrant aliveness. That we have, and always have had, but forget.