Glasgow Zen GroupIn our practice, we are continually drifting in and out of delusion.
The delusion isn’t the intermittent noise; rather, it’s when our attention focuses on a kernel of thought/emotion, and our breathing becomes shallow. It’s a kind of trance state. In response, we throw the breath and attention wide open, unentrancing ourselves.
This learning to fall out of self enchantment is giving life to all things.
The body is the ground of being.
Our task as practitioners isn’t to change or empty the contents of our consciousness, but to fall backwards into the actual feeling, momentary state, which is prior to words, and prior to both thoughts and the type of thinking we call emotion.
The fog of the self collapses back into the ground, actualising space.
The ground upholds all things. Space contains all things. Thus are all things liberated from our love and hate, and so cease to be provisional and limited.
Thus each thing is everything, and has absolute value.
Zen teachers frequently talk about ‘the non dual dharma’, and we are all familiar with the standard dualities: mind/body, self/world, and so on.
Less attention is given to a very pervasive dualism: the container and the contained. So, our life occurs in time, the leaves fall from the tree in autumn, experience occurs in consciousness, and so forth.
For master Dogen, our lives do not exist in time, but in our lives, time exists. The container/contained duality is replaced by a sense of each thing being the full dynamic functioning of everything, The Whole Universe pivoting on each thing.
The Net of Indra is one of the most beautiful images in Buddhism. We are asked to imagine existence as an infinity of infinitely faceted jewels, in infinite space, each reflecting everything.
We can speculate that the image could be derived from looking up at the star filled sky, endless and infinite.
Of course, we now know that some of these stars are no longer there. We are just seeing their light. From the perspective of the star’s ego, it no longer exists. From the perspective of the universe, it does.
The teaching is like this.
Life–and death–is like this.
I must have chanted the Heart Sutra several thousand times, perhaps more.
If I imagine that these have occurred within my life, and my life occurs within time, suffering can never be alleviated.
Although it may sound absurd, if we say the Heart Sutra is chanting me, is chanting all practitioners, in all times, at this time, then something which we have held tight and concealed can start to alter.
And it is not just the Heart Sutra.
We have to understand that we are not the container of life, we are its’ expression.
The Buddhist way has both practice and study. Practice is primary, but study is necessary. Otherwise, we are likely to be blown about by our unexamined assumptions.
But theory can be a trap. One wall provides shelter, but four walls can be a prison.
Time is the cornerstone of delusion. Because there is persistence, things can exist. Because there are things, events can occur in time, they can occur in the world, they can occur in your life. And so, the original wholeness of our experience is stretched and dualised.
For Dogen, what is primary is exertion, expression, full dynamic functioning; the exemplar of which is zazen. It is not that time and space do not exist. Rather, they are aspects of full dynamic functioning.
It is our duty as Buddhists to save the beauty of this from being crushed under the railway tracks of linear time.
In the Fukanzazengi, Dogen says that the secret of zazen is non-thinking [hishiryo]. This is neither thinking [shiryo] nor not thinking [fushiryo].
By way of comparison, we can examine non doing. In the Chinese tradition there is wu wei, the watercourse way. Just as the water will respond appropriately to its environment, in non-doing we act appropriate to our actual situation, and that acting comes from a position of non-dualism, not ego. It is spontaneous fitting action.
Applying that to non thinking, we can envisage a state whereby thought is liberated from thought, language is liberated from language and the world, liberated from both, becomes vivid and alive. And this liberated thought and liberated world are no longer separate.
When we do zazen, we may imagine that we are sitting quietly. But our weight is dropping down into the earth.
We are pushing the earth with all our strength. And the earth is pushing back. We can feel this push up our spine, up through the top of our head. There is the appearance of stillness because there is balance; if there were not, we would fall down, into the earth, or fall up, into the sky.
Ourselves, the earth and all things are just facets of full dynamic functioning.
We are told that we should sit like a mountain. Zazen is described as the still-still state, the mountain – still state.
The mountain is the ground made visible. Just because the mountain endures and accepts everything, we cannot say it has no feeling. Because it is the ground made visible, it is all feeling.
Zazen is the great matter made visible.