Glasgow Zen GroupMy first teacher, Nancy Amphoux, asked her teacher – “How should I practice Zazen?”
Her teacher replied – “You should practice Zazen eternally.”
She said that she thought at first that what he meant was that she should practice Zazen for the rest of her life.
To practice eternally, it’s as if we are the ground on which all beings and all moments walk
Or the space within which all beings and all moments live.
Master Dogen asked “If the cart is stuck, do we beat the horse, or beat the cart?”
Almost all meditation teachers would say the horse, the mind. Surely that is the point of meditation? To empty and purify the mind.
But Dogen said that we should beat (give attention to) the cart, the body. How so?
Zazen is the way of liberation through the body. Not the body as thought. Not the body as object, but the body as it actually is. Because that body, completely alive, is already part of the body of the universe, completely alive.
Taigen Dan Leighton described the various aspects of our practice as ritual enactment and expression.
It isn’t moving slowly towards the Buddha, a speck in the ghost cave of the future. It is the living activity of Buddha now. It isn’t forming the thought of gratitude, and then giving form to that thought in the symbolism of bowing. No.
Awake-awareness, compassion, gratitude, generosity: they are not qualities of the self. They are pillars holding up the roof of the world.
The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.
Towards the end of his life, the Buddha said to his disciples “My true body is my teachings“
Out of this arose the idea of the dharmakaya, the Universal Body of the Buddha, and then, later, the Bliss Body. As ‘buddha’ inflated, ‘sangha’ shrunk.
But there’s another way to look at it.
The Buddha’s teachings weren’t written down in his lifetime. They were held in the bodies and minds of the disciples who heard them. They were brought out by those disciples. That’s where the teachings arose. Without a sangha, there would have been no dharma. That’s where the teachings were embodied. And from there, outward, to everywhere.
And it is this body – the Sangha body, both mythical and flesh and blood – which keeps giving birth to new buddhas.
When she was alive, I often thought Nancy Amphoux, who introduced me to zen, was a terrible teacher. It took me a long time to realise that I was a terrible listener.
When I last saw her, a week before she died, she gave me a bird’s feather. She explained that years before, when she’d been driving in France, she saw a fox attacking a bird. She stopped the car and got out. The fox ran away, but the bird was already dead. Some of its feathers were scattered on the road, and Nancy took them, and kept them.
As people came to say goodbye to her, she would tell them the story and give them one of the feathers. As she finished telling the story to me she gave me the last feather and said “There, all gone”
Often in the teachings, an apparently humble thing: a cat, a pillow, a broken ladle, a dead bird, symbolises the alive wholeness of everything, but unless we feel it, our understanding is useless.
I lacked even that understanding. And I didn’t ask her who the fox was, either
When we chant the lineage, we chant the six primordial mythical buddhas, then the historical Buddha, then the generations of teachers following him, down to the present day.
The superficial problem – aside from the mythical buddhas – is that the lineage is made up. Some of the people named probably didn’t exist at all, and others almost certainly didn’t say or write what has been attributed to them.
In full knowledge of this, my teacher said that he accepts the lineage completely. How so?
Rinzai said that there is a true person – this person – who has no rank. This person is always going in and out through your face.
When we chant the lineage, all the names are provisional names, for this person.
And in the lineage of your own life, this person appears. All the demons, ghosts and false persons do not obstruct this person. And they don’t matter.
The most important thing for us to understand is that Zazen is not a practice of the self. It is a practice of the Buddha.
That being so, it is not concerned with purifying or perfecting the self. Or setting the self off on a journey.
It is not concerned with furnishing the house of the self with wisdom and compassion.
But rather, becoming completely intimate with the ground.
My first teacher said, “What is it which stops the Universe from collapsing?”
He didn’t answer. Of course, he didn’t need to.
Master Dogen, in his instructions for meditation, said that when we practice zazen, we have to take ‘the backward step’.
That suggests that the world we ordinarily experience is constructed. But also, that what we are searching for is abundantly available to us, and always has been. It isn’t somewhere we’ve not been to yet, but somewhere we’ve forgotten. It is easy enough for us to say that the ways we demarcate the world is a construction, but harder to say – and to mean – for the self, or, as the Heart Sutra says, ‘the five skandas’.
To abandon one but not the other is useless, like collapsing all the props, yet leaving the actor on stage. Which is more essential to the delusion?
In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Dogen said that the five skandas are five pieces of prajna. Pra-jna. Pre-knowing. So, what is differentiated in the stepping forward into self and world is ‘one piece’, which is broken when we step forward, unbroken when we fall back, breaking and unbreaking, like space.
The Shin Jin Mei, The Verses of Faith Mind is attributed to Sosan, the Third Patriarch. The first line is “The Great Way is not difficult, only avoid picking or choosing.”
Well, we may readily think Sosan is being ironic, because when we start practicing, The Great Way seems very difficult indeed. Not just difficult, but impossible to see at all. It’s as if all we experience is a repetitive cascade of thought and emotion.
Yet somehow, with enough practice, we will step through this, and then The Great Way will be visible. And will be ours.
Sosan uses the term ‘faith mind’, because the faith is that this mind, this body, this experience is Buddha.
And we don’t see that, because in encountering what we deem this repetitive cascade of thought and emotion, we have already stepped forward into duality.
Our task is not to imagine that we can step forward further, this time into non duality, wholeness, but rather to fall backwards –
One of the three meanings of satori is awakening, in the sense of awakening from a dream, or awakening within a dream.
We’re liable to misunderstand the metaphor, as we equate dream with falsity, and awakening with truth, which is complete nonsense.
The issue is whether we partition and appropriate experience, or not. Awakening to the dream within the dream isn’t about seeing falsity, it’s about seeing wholeness. Wholeness, seeing.