Tag: Kusen

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Kusen

155. Avoid picking and choosing

The verses of faith mind starts:

The Great Way is not difficult

Only avoid picking and choosing.

When love and hate do not arise,

Things cease to exist, in the old way.

It is not that things cease to exist, but that they cease to exist ‘in the old way’, that is, dualistically. Me here. The world way out there. Each of us, looking for ropes, looking for snares.

When we sit we relax our gaze; the world isn’t ‘out there’ any longer. It is not sliced up into this and that. Any longer

If our gaze is relaxed, then our gaze includes our eyes, and the whole head and the whole body. The gaze encompasses everything

Is this not ceasing to exist in the old way?

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Kusen

154. Yogacara

Eko said to Bodhidharma, “My mind is not at peace, please pacify it” Bodhidharma replied, “Bring me your mind and I will pacify it”.

After a while Eko said, “I have looked everywhere for my mind and I cannot find it”.

Bodhidharma said, “There! I have pacified it”

Bodhidharma was very influenced by the Yogacara school and its eight ‘consciousnesses’.

Yogacara is often – unhelpfully – referred to as mind-only, or consciousness-only. We can’t hear ‘Mind’ or ‘Consciousness’ without thinking of the personal mind, and we can’t hear talk of a progression of consciousnesses without imagining a spiritual capitalism with a progressively greater spending power. For this reason, it is better to translate Yogacara as experience-only.

The first six consciousnesses correspond with our five senses, plus mind. The seventh is self, and the eighth is alaya consciousness, which is said to have two aspects – suchness and delusion.

That delusion comes about because the original wholeness of experience – Suchness – is appropriated to the self.

‘I’ am experiencing.

Once there is a perceiver, a self, there is then a mind and from that, a body, then differentiation into the five senses. Like part of the Antarctic ice cap breaking away, there is first the fundamental split from Suchness. Then all the little agonies.

Eko could not ‘find’ his mind, because his real experience was not sliced up.

If you imagine that Suchness is somewhere other than here, you will never find it.

It is like looking for the ground standing on the ground.

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Kusen

153. Restlessness and torpor

Of the five hindrances, three seem more related to the mind and two – restlessness and torpor – seem more related to the body.

Restlessness and torpor often arise because we misconceive the relationship between breath and body.

What is the body? Often, we conceive it as something fixed and rigid, like a stone house. And we then imagine that there is a technique of breathing – long slow out breaths say, or a focus on the lower abdomen – that we need to apply.

But we are mistaken.

We place such emphasis on the posture because it enables the breath to breathe itself. This breathing is like a column of enlivened space, from the base chakra in the pelvic floor upwards to the crown chakra at the top of the head. And the body is like fabric around this column. When we breathe in, the column expands and the fabric moves. When we breathe out, the column contracts and the fabric moves. The whole body breathes. The whole body moves.

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Kusen

152. The category of koans is never closed

The Case: There is a person, A, in complete darkness, in complete silence. This person has no memory, and no sense of the body. However, A is telepathic, but only with two other persons. The first person, B, has a shared language with A. The second person, C, is a mute, with no language. In the silence, when A is aware of B, A is aware of all the mental phenomena of B, expressed through a torrent of language. When A is aware of C, A experiences C’s whole being – how it is to be C – but without language.

The Inquiry:

Is A alive or dead? If alive, where is A?

If A experiences B and C at the same time, does one obstruct the other?

If one does not obstruct the other, how is each experienced? Is B within C, or vice versa, both, or neither?

In zazen, are we telepathic with ourselves?

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Kusen

151. The five hindrances

Nyojo said to Dogen “Zazen is dropping off body and mind”

Dogen asked, “What is dropping off body and mind?”

Nyojo said, “When you just sit, you are free from the five sense desires and the five hindrances“

The five desires are the content of our experience: what, either in our mind or in our body, we see, feel, hear, taste or smell.

The five hindrances are our attitudes to that experience: the minds of attachment, aversion, torpor, agitation or doubt.

We are “free”, not because our experience is voided, but because, from moment to moment, there is the possibility of being completely intimate with our experience, with our whole body mind. “Desire” is a partial response. “Mind” is a partial response.

Once you discover that something is just a covering, whether it is there or not, are you not free of it?

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Kusen

150. The body in zazen

When we say ‘body’, there is often an unconscious dualism. The standard dualism is body/mind, but this is supported by ingrained habits within our language.

So, we often talk about ‘head and body’ ; the idea that our body is our torso and limbs. If someone touches our face, we think of it differently to someone touching our back. We think of our ‘head’ resting on our ‘body’, and so on.

This does several things, none of them good. By identifying part of the body as ‘the body’, we create a distance and we objectify. We reinforce a sense that ‘I’ am an indeterminate confection of head, brain and mind, and that the ‘I’ is separate from ‘the body’.

To counter this, and with partcular reference to the body in zazen, it is very helpful to give particular attention to the aliveness of our head and neck: our tongue, the roof of our mouth, the pulsing of our eyes and forehead, the musculature of our jaw and neck, and so on. Attention to this flows into attention to the whole body.

The Whole Body of vast expression. Within which is ‘the mind’.

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Kusen

149.When one side is illuminated

When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.

There is a common idea that delusion is multifaceted, and nonduality is one. What if we are precisely mistaken?

Dogen said that being and time are one. He didn’t say that when you see being, you see time too. That is the habitual perspective, imagining that our life takes place in time: the smear between here and elsewhere, here and nowhere.

He meant that when you see being, you just see being. Time disappears. One side is illuminated, the other is dark. When you see time, ‘being’ is just the noise in the huge mirror of this moment.

And likewise with, for example, self and world, expression and exertion, all tangled together to fit within a person.

When one side is illuminated, the others are dark.

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Kusen

148. Karma

All the different Buddhist forms of expression are sincere attempts by practitioners like ourselves to describe actual experience.

Although the language might be conceptually very different, one does not exclude the other.

So in Tibetan Buddhism for example, there is a strong emphasis on karma, whereas in Zen the emphasis is more on the wholeness and oneness of everything (‘Zenki‘).

It’s easy to see how karma seems very apposite in describing some types of experience we have when sitting. Persistent feelings of shame for instance, seem more readily describable in terms of karma.

And other types of experience, the random mental noise, or the odd sense we have sometimes of thoughts that seem to come from elsewhere, might be more fruitfully described in terms of zenki.

But we need to understand that this karma, although I am experiencing it, is not mine. It is the cascading of life through time. This moment of experience is a drop of water on the tip of an icicle hanging from a glacier of infinite size.

When we imagine the wholeness of everything, zenki, we are inclined to focus on this moment. But if wholeness is simply this moment, there would be an infinite number of wholenesses and that is not so.

So this wholeness must include what we call the past and what we call the future. Pivoted on the drop of water.

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Kusen

147. Intimacy

The most critical point in practice is for us to be completely intimate with our experience. When we are, attachment, aversion, torpor restlessness and doubt do not arise.

But no matter how often we drop the cloak of the self we keep finding it’s there again, draping our head, draping our body. Hence the practice is endless.

Sometimes it’s us doing Zazen. Sometimes it’s the whole Universe expressing itself through this body.

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Kusen

146. A real person

Buddhism is not like a temple which, although we enter and leave, the temple remains.

Rather, it is like a real person.

When we come into the dojo to sit, he comes in with us. When we leave, he leaves.

Sometimes he is like an old man. Sometimes, he is like vast space. Sometimes a door. Sometimes a pillar.

Sometimes he is concealed in our heart. Sometimes, he is like dust falling through sunlight.