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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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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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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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430. The Great Way is not difficult

The earliest of the foundational zen texts is the “Shin jin mei”, The Verses of Faith Mind, normally attributed to the third patriarch, who [in the usual zen way] almost certainly didn’t write it. 

There’s lots of different translations. The translation I like has a first verse which goes as follows.

“The Great Way is not difficult.
Just avoid picking and choosing. 
When love and hate do not arise, 
things cease to exist in the old way.” 

An understandable way of reading this verse is to see the first two lines as encouraging equanimity, particularly in zazen, and to assume a repetition in the third and fourth lines. So on this interpretation, to say “The great way is not difficult. Just to avoid picking and choosing”, means that out of the cascade of thoughts, emotions, memories and so on that we experience during zazen, we don’t grasp on to some and push others away. So we’re not picking and choosing. We’re just allowing everything to come and go freely. And then, the second part of the verse: “when love and hate do not arise…” repeats that. So [in this interpretation] when attachment and aversion [love and hate] to the various aspects of our experience don’t arise, things cease to exist in the old way.

This is a legitimate [and usual] way of looking at the verse and is [arguably] better than nothing. But we can make a deeper interpretation, which doesn’t keep all our individualistic and dualistic assumptions hidden yet intact.

 And that involves an interpretation where there isn’t repetition. In this reading, the first and  second parts aren’t the same.

In this reading,“The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing.” doesn’t mean that when a thought arises we don’t grasp it or push it away. What it means is that when a thought arises in the way that we normally understand ‘thought’, we’ve already been picking and choosing, because what has happened is that out of the infinitely faceted nature of all the ‘objects’ of our experience, we’ve homed in on one aspect, thus delineating the ‘thought’ [or emotion, or memory, or sensory experience]

What we’re experiencing as a naturally arising thought which we’re then taking a position towards [of love or hate] is itself a collapse of our awareness around the ‘thought’. Thus we make ourselves unaware of all the corollaries of that thought: in emotional terms, in sensory terms, in memory terms, in karmic terms, in locational terms, and so on. So if we’re able to experience all these different aspects of each area of experience [each ‘thought’] then we’re not picking and choosing and then in consequence, love and hate do not arise. It is like becoming aware again of all the facets of a jewel, not just the one directly facing us.

Thus the reference in the third and fourth lines to love and hate isn’t referring to the individual thoughts, emotions or memories caused by a collapse in our awareness around that thought. It’s a process whereby either our awareness doesn’t collapse, creating the ‘thought’ by delineation and exclusion, or [more likely] when we become aware that it has collapsed, we open out again [‘opening the hand of thought’].

And that’s also what Dogen means by zazen being a dropping off of body and mind. The problem that we have with the usual interpretation, making the two bits of the verse the same, is they are just encouraging equanimity. And that aspiration does not break down either the primary dualism between self and world nor the secondary dualism between mind and body.

In fact, it introduces a third dualism between, as it were, the witness mind, the mind of awareness and the mind which is the conduit and handmaiden of these various ‘thoughts’. 

In almost all of these Chinese texts, the Chinese are intentionally using ordinary language rather than technical language. But the difficulty that we have with that is that because it’s ordinary language we automatically try and fit it into our ordinary ways of thinking, which oftenf leaves us in a position of banality, disguised by the sonorousness of ‘Zen’ 

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429. The Great Mystical Power

What Dogen refers to as The great mystical power is not restricted by circumstance, location or time. 

What is it? 

When we look at our lives, we often see a kind of dichotomy.

One side is what we variously call our conditioning, our karma, our fear, our anger, our pain, our poison. 

And on the other is something else. What we might provisionally call love, or compassion or openness or something else. 

And the two sides are dramatically different. And they don’t appear to be equal, often it’s as if love or compassion is like a tiny sliver of light within the darkness, perhaps even just a sliver within memory. 

Whereas the poison that we experience sometimes fills up our whole awareness. It seems dominant.

But what we need to understand is that this poison that we have is limited by time and space and circumstances. It is not a genuine obstruction. And what we perceive as a sliver of light is in reality like a great fire. It is not a question of turning away or turning towards. 

And this great fire endures.

Everything else is just noise and shadow.

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428. Implicit and Explicit teachings

When the Buddhist sutras arrived in China, they arrived in a disorderly way. Sutras that had been written over quite a long period, more than 500 years, arrived randomly.

 The Chinese needed to make sense of these often contradictory sutras. 

One way was that they ordered them chronologically in terms of their content. So, for instance, they would say that the Flower Garland Sutra dated from the earliest period of the Buddha’s teaching because it dealt with his enlightenment experience, and the Nirvana Sutra was the latest sutra, because it dealt with the Buddha’s death. 

Another way that they organised material was by breaking it down into different schools. This wasn’t helped by them erroneously thinking that Nagarjuna and his school came after Yogacara, the “consciousness only” school, when it was actually the other way around. 

In the ninth century, coming towards the end of the prominence of Tang Dynasty Buddhism in China, Zen [and Hua-yen] Master Zongmi worked out a fourfold classification. 

In his classification there were three cryptic teachings and one, as it were, explicit teaching: his teaching, zen teaching. And the classification was done that way because he would say that the meaning of the first three groupings was implicit. What’s meant by that is that the teachings are in a strange sense preparatory, something both destructive and constructive. The destruction is clearing away the whole mass of beliefs and structures which stop us from living fully, but what and how that life is is left implicit. 

That’s why he called these teachings ‘teachings of cryptic meaning’.

 In his scheme, you firstly have Hinayana which denies the existence of the self, but affirms the existence of dharmas, the constituent parts of reality.

The clustering around the illusory self, which is the cause of so much suffering, is broken. But the constructed world – constructed by our karma, by our culture, by language and so on, remains intact  keeping a dualism between person and the world. 

So as an antidote to that the second teaching arises,Yogacara, which denies the existence of both self, and dharmas, saying that everything is “mind only”.

But that creates further problems. If the mind exists, we can aspire to various stages of consciousness development. So clinging, attachment – the cause of our difficulties in the first place – can re-emerge in a more subtle form. 

To remedy that we then have Nagarjuna, who says that both self and world and mind are all empty, so there’s nothing to cling to (or to seek to grasp). 

But the problem which Nagarjuna makes visible is that his solution appears to suggest a sort of nihilism, where nothing matters. This misunderstanding seems to have been endemic ever since, and is often there in our own time whenever Nagarjuna is thought of as being a forerunner of modern philosophy rather than as a religious figure endeavouring to map out a positive life by demolishing what gets in the way of that, the whole conceptual world.

In Zongmi’s scheme this misunderstanding necessitates the fourth teaching, Zen, which is distinctive because it is the only one which is explicit about the purpose of Buddhism. Explicit because it has a clear and stated positive message. Which is the belief in what is variously called ’ or ‘mind ground’ or ‘Buddha potentiality’ or ‘Buddha nature’, amongst others.

Distinctive because for the first time, there is an explicitly stated positive basis for our true life, after all the negative obstructions have been cleared out of the way. 

Yet, in Zongmi’s account, the teaching method of Zen teachers is the same as the first three approaches; it’s negative, to clear the conceptual nonsense out of the way. To remove the confusion which stops the student from seeing their true nature. 

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427. What is meant by ‘Mind’?

The language of classical ( 600-1300 AD) Chinese Zen is particularly difficult for us to understand, but we need to make the effort to understand it because if we don’t we’re likely in our Zen practice to be gradually subsumed by the dominant trend in the West, which is concerned with psychological wellness and individual development. And it’s important

also that we understand that language, not in some abstract or scholastic way, but in terms of our own practice. 

A good example of a word which arises continuously (originally in the writings of the Chinese Zen masters of the Tang dynasty period and immediately before is  ‘MIND’. By ‘mind’, confusingly for us, the Chinese sometimes mean exactly what we mean by mind: the configuration of thoughts, memories, self-identity and so on which make up what we call the self. 

But what they also mean by mind is something entirely different from that. Which they sometimes call ‘mind-ground’, or use metaphors like the bright mirror. And what that means in relation to our sitting is that fundamental level of experience where, as it were, the space inside us and, as it were, the space outside us, is the one alive and charged space within which everything is held: these thoughts, this body, the bodies of all other beings. And the characteristics of that  ‘mind’ are openness, calmness, serenity, compassion, and so on.

And when some masters make statements like “mind is world” that’s what they’re alluding to, mind not as a philosophical statement about the real nature of the universe, like some kind of contribution to quantum theory from eighth century China, nor Idealism, but mind as the fundamental level of experience, this experience during Zazen. And often they (the Chinese Masters) will use the metaphor of the ocean. And in understanding all these metaphors, it’s helpful to understand a distinction which they make between substance and function [sometimes nature and function].

So, nature/substance is the irreducible (underlying) specificity of what something is, and function is its various manifestations. in the case of water, for instance, the substance of its nature is that it’s wet (it’s always and necessarily this) but one of its functions (ie what it sometimes manifests as) is that it’s stormy, another of its functions is that it may save someone ( who is dying of thirst) or drown someone. There’s all these different functions, but the one underlying substance. And we can understand the mind on that basis as well. It is this underlying calm, open, aliveness. And (the waves of) our thoughts are, as it were, one function of that. The assumptions behind this are profoundly optimistic.

It’s not that we need to get rid of these thoughts, but that we need to understand them. So we need to understand that our thoughts at the outset, in one sense at least, are illusory: they are not something we need to get rid of, they are something that we need to understand. 

So we need to make an effort to try and grasp this very different way of thinking. Otherwise we’ll just interpret the literature, particularly the Koan literature in a very superficial way.

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426. Enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house

Kodō Sawaki was a famously tough Japanese Zen master of the 20th century. He died in 1965. His successor was Kosho Uchiyama, who wrote ‘Opening the hand of thought’ and the wonderful contemporary teacher Shōhaku Okumura is a successor to Uchiyama.

So he’s a really influential guy. He was famously anti idealistic, which was a general trait, I think, of Japanese Zen teachers after the second world war, when an inflated, idealistic language of Buddhism had unhelpfully colluded with the inflated, self serving idealistic language of Japanese imperialism.

So the postwar environment really encouraged Japanese teachers to present Zen as being something very down to earth, something almost mundane, ordinary. And one of Kodō Sawaki’s most famous quotes was when he said that satori, enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house.

You can understand what he’s trying to get at. When we start practice, we might start with the idea that somehow we’re going to get something marvellous. We’re going to get compassion. We’re going to get wisdom. We’re going to get tranquility. We’re going to be able to break into this treasure house, and wear a crown of enlightenment on our foolish head.

And so the phrase is a sort of antidote to that. And I think you can take it in quite a number of different ways. But one of the ways that you can take it is that we don’t gain anything in zazen because we don’t need to gain anything. We are already complete. But we don’t understand that because we’re always viewing everything from our karmic position of needs, desires, dissatisfactions.

So we can look at it that way. But the phrase I think, and the way that Kodō Sawaki expresses himself generally, has often been used, in the West, to present Zen in an anti idealist way, about it being really about everyday tasks like washing the dishes, attending to your normal life. All of which is true, but unfortunately diminishes something. 

The quote is often attributed as a re-quote of a famous Chinese zen master of the eighth century Sekisō. Sekisō is most famous for case 46 of The Gateless Gate where he talks about stepping off the hundred foot pole. And it’s interesting because it shows how the zen currency of trading in quotes and then reflections on quotes and quotes about quotes can often get very confused.

So the source of it isn’t actually Sekisō, it’s an exchange involving another master Ryūge, who knew Sekisō. And Ryūge is asked, “how did the ancient master” -that’s the reference to Sekisō-, “finally cease doing things and completely settle down?”. And Ryūge’s reply is It was like a thief slipping into an empty house. So you notice the word used: to slip in, not break into an empty house. So the thief just, in one interpretation, happens to find himself in this empty house which, from the perspective of the thief, is empty.

Dōgen, right at the end of the Fukanzazengi, his  instruction for zazen, talks about ‘the treasure house’. And by the treasure house, he’s talking about, as it were, both something which is and always has been there, and what zazen does.The final sentence of the Fukanzazengi goes something like “the treasure house will open of its own accord. And you can do with it what you wish”. I suspect the Japanese is more vague than that, but pay attention to the first part. The treasure house will open of its own accord. In other words, we don’t need to break into the house of emptiness. We don’t need to break into the treasure house. And the reason why we don’t is that the treasure house opens up from the inside. From our sincerely and wholeheartedly doing zazen.

 In the quote we might make a false assumption that there’s just this person, this thief, this clown, this idiot, this self-centered person. There’s just this person who somehow has to cure himself. But that is a completely absurd notion. The idea of using the self to change the self is as ridiculous as someone trying to pull their own head off: it is impossible.

The fact is that when we’re sitting there are two things. There is this karmic self. And there is also the treasure house, a treasure house which cannot be seen by the karmic self [and hence is ‘empty’]. And that treasure house we could call the whole of existence. But we could also call it the true body. So when we’re sitting, we don’t need to give attention to the endless drivel that is generated by our mind. We just need to fully sit in the context of zazen. The treasure house is your true body, and will open up of its own accord. You don’t need to intend it. You don’t need to will it. That’s what practice enlightenment means.

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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.

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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.