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405. Wall Gazing

Why do we sit facing the wall?

The familiar explanation is that we’re following the practice of Master Bodhidharma.  

In Zen legend, Bodhidharma arrived at a southern Chinese port from India  sometime in the middle of the 6th Century, then had a famous encounter with the Emperor. Following this, he went to Shaolin Temple, where he sat facing a wall for 9 years. Zen Legend also says that prior to Bodhidharma arriving in China, Chinese Buddhism had been purely scholastic. 

The legend is completely false.  Buddhism had been practised in China for over 400 years prior to Bodhidharma arriving. There were meditation manuals,  practice instructions, and communities of monks.

However, the expression which is translated as Bodhidharma “facing a wall” originates with him. According to John McRae, the phrase , ‘pi kuan’ literally means ‘wall gazing’, sometimes rendered as ‘ wall contemplation.’

A tragedy for our culture is that our capacity for symbolic and metaphoric thinking and expression has become terribly impoverished. We expect our learning to be explicit. So when we come across cultures where learning works differently, where it’s encoded within apparently simple practices and rituals, it’s quite hard for us to see. We just picture a man facing a wall.

But thinking about ‘wall gazing’ for a moment, the issue of whether or not Bodhidharma did physically meditate facing a wall hardly exhausts what the phrase has to tell us. 

Plainly, Bodhidharma wasn’t taking the wall as being the object of meditation because that would be a dualistic practice, quite different from zazen.

Classical Chinese is very terse. It doesn’t tell us who is doing the gazing, the practitioner or the wall. As the wall plainly isn’t a person, we think it’s obvious that who’s  doing the gazing is the practitioner. But if we leave it open, we can unpack the learning implicit in the phrase. 

If we say that it’s actually the wall that’s ‘gazing’, that opens everything up. The practitioner, in facing the wall, is facing away from the world. But the wall is facing the world. So it’s like a pair. And the wall is facing the world in a particular way: like a mirror, not like a person. With equanimity, accepting everything, not discriminating, rooted in the ground of all being. 

Just as all the apparently separate images in a mirror are part of the one reflective whole, then likewise, to the wall, everything facing it, including the practitioner, is part of this wholeness.

If we see things in that way we can see why Bodhidharma’s practice may have been new. Not because of his physical orientation (towards a wall, or anything else), but because of his meditative orientation. His practice was not simply the practice of the self, nor the cultivation of Consciousness or Wisdom or particular mental states;  it was – and is –  a wholehearted non dualistic engagement with everything, within everything.

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404. The Missing Body

When you ask people about their experience when they start practising zazen, they’ll generally talk about their internal dialogue. This seemingly endless compulsive chatter.

After a while they might also talk about more enduring negative emotional states which they often find disturbing and which they generally repress in the busyness of everyday life.

If you ask them what they experience somatically you’re not likely to get much of an answer.  The somatic experiencing of the body generally seems fairly invisible to practitioners except when the body is experiencing pain or where there’s some obvious manifestation of an emotional state like the heart racing or the palms  sweating, or something like that.

The problem is that the lack of somatic awareness and the missing language to describe somatic experiencing  are obviously related. If you turn your attention to, for example, what you’re experiencing at this moment at the back of your throat, there isn’t a language to describe that.  And because there’s not a language to describe it, there isn’t a language to retain it. And so the bulk of our lived life passes from present obscurity to past obscurity, like a vast hidden river underneath the debris of our mind.

Why is it difficult for us to have a somatic language? You can say that it’s because we have a quite intellectual culture that privileges thought, but I think there’s another reason:  if you pay careful attention to somatic experience it’s not one thing after another—the experience is fluid, dynamic, changeable and continuous. It’s like a four dimensional kaleidoscope of feeling rather than a selection of objects and events arranged in time.

It’s as if our evolutionary development has privileged  formulating the world – and ourselves – in terms of discrete things, objects or events, with these then interrelating in a particular way. Perhaps it helped us survive. 

But it doesn’t help us now. 

What we would need to properly describe somatic language is basically a language of process—words like surging, or declining, or bursting; all very different from how we habitually language the world and ourselves.

We’ve been experiencing quite strong storms for the past few days which have blasted the eastern coast of Scotland. When we think of storms we’re likely to think of rain, of wind, of cold. In other words, concrete manifestations of underlying, vaster, dynamic weather patterns. So we are aware of the visible in so far as we can formulate it into discrete things but we’re much, much less aware of underlying processes.

This is very relevant to practise for several reasons. Firstly, if we aren’t somatically aware, then really we’re disconnected from our body. Which also means that we’re disconnected from ourselves. And in consequence, our meditation will be a practice of frustrated reachings for  tranquillity.

On the one hand we’ll have all these thoughts and emotions and on the other we’ll have a sense of spacious awareness which is sometimes concretely manifested in the breath and in a momentary stillness. But the body is missing.      

And so, somehow that spacious awareness is always, as it were, being polluted by the thoughts and emotions and the sense of self that we naturally experience, like the serpent farting in the Garden of Eden.

We feel that way because the whole experience isn’t grounded within what’s actually going on in our life and in our body. 

It’s important for us because if we understand the aliveness of this body then we can understand the aliveness of the body of everything.

 Because they’re not separate.

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403. The whole bodymind

In trying to understand the writings of Dogen and of the Chinese Zen Masters, an often difficult task, it’s useful to bear in mind what they’re trying to do, and the dilemma they’re attempting to resolve. 

They’re aiming to express nonduality yet they’re obliged to do that in language, which is intrinsically dualistic. They’re trying to express a wholeness which is realistic: not a wholeness dependent upon a special or disordered state of consciousness and not just  conceptual either. 

One of the ways that they accomplish this is that they appear to use the same word or the same phrase in two apparently dramatically different ways. For example, Dogen famously [in the Genjokoan] uses the word self [ jiko’] to mean both the “the ego” and also the “body of all being”.  

He does something similar with the expression ”body and mind”. When he describes zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’ he’s plainly talking about this person’s body and mind— the ongoing practice of dropping off that sense of separation.

Then on other occasions, when he talks about seeing things using the whole body and mind he’s not talking about this body and mind, he’s talking about the body and mind of all being, expressed through this body and mind. 

He’s able to do this because the whole of Chinese Zen rests upon the Flower Garland Sutra teachings, which is essentially that each thing in its uniqueness, in its differentiation, is all things. This person is not the same as that person, and precisely because of that, both this person and that person are all being. In this perspective, the two distinct meanings aren’t contradictory, but indicate how things really are.

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402. Original Face

The Japanese word usually translated as ‘original’ occurs in many distinctive phrases—‘original nature’, ‘original face’, ‘original person’, and so on. 

When we hear this phrase ‘original nature’ or ‘original person’, we might think that underneath the grime of our karma is something which is our true

Essence. 

The problem, as often occurs in the translation of Japanese terms to English, is the translation’s wrong. The Japanese word which is translated as ‘original’ has two parts. The first part does mean original or true, amongst other meanings.

But what of the second part?

That part means ‘portion’ or ‘part of’. So when you put the two together and add ‘person’, the phrase ‘original person’ doesn’t mean that there’s something inside of you which is originally you. What it is saying is that the ‘original person’ is everything in non-duality, and you are a part of that wholeness. 

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401. The other side is dark

In the Genjokoan [the Tanahashi translation], Master Dogen says,

When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging the body and mind, you intuit dharma intimately unlike things and their reflections in the mirror and unlike the moon and Its reflection In the water. When one side is illuminated the other is dark.

The Nishijima version of that same passage reads

When we use the whole body and mind to look at forms and when we use the whole body and mind to listen to sounds, even though we are sensing them directly, it is not like a mirror’s reflection of an image and not like water and the moon. While we are experiencing one side we are blind to the other side.

What you realise looking at these passages is what a nightmare job a translator has, particularly with a Japanese text like this which is fundamentally more dynamic than English and which, at the time, also didn’t have any punctuation.  

There’s three parts to this passage, the first part [again from Tanahashi],

When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body and mind, you intuit dharma intimately. 

What Dogen is talking about here is Enlightenment experiences which people have had, not in zazen but after zazen.

The reference to seeing forms is the famous story about Master Lingyun becoming enlightened upon seeing Peach blossoms. The reference to hearing sounds is an equally famous story where a monk was enlightened on hearing a pebble strike bamboo. 

The way that Tanahashi renders this next part, you intuit Dharma intimately, is a prime example of the translator’s dilemma: necessarily dualistic language is being used to try and convey a non-dualistic experience. The experience of hearing form with the whole body and mind is just very difficult to convey in words. It’s as if a monk sees these Peach blossoms not as an object in the world, not as him seeing these Peach blossoms, but rather that he sees them in their complete aliveness which is also the aliveness of the whole universe of which he’s an alive part.

It’s very dynamic. It’s not subject and object, it’s not dualistic, but it’s not undifferentiated either. It’s not that the particularities of that experience disappear, but rather that they’re experienced differently.

This is a very common theme in the enlightenment stories. People don’t have their Enlightenment experience when they’re doing zazen.They have their Enlightenment experiences when they’re fully immersed in zazen, when they’re soaked through with zazen, and when they come out of the Dojo and back into the world, the world floods them—that’s the enlightenment experience. Implicitly Dogen is saying that that’s the attitude that we should also have when we’re practising zazen. 

The second part of this passage is the contrast. He says in contrast that to fully engage body and mind is unlike things and their reflection in the mirror and unlike the moon and Its reflection in the water.  These are two very well-known images in Buddhism;  the idea that meditation is about calming the mind. If there’s a reflection in a clear bright mirror [ie clear of the dust of thought and emotion], that reflection shows itself exactly. And likewise, if the water of the mind is still, the Moon is reflected undistortedly. 

That’s a very standard idea of what meditation is, but Dogen’s saying that’s not zazen.  It’s not zazen for the reason stated in the last part which says when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark.

With the lack of punctuation the translators just chop this up into sentences in a way that makes sense to them but which isn’t unchallengeable.

It’s not clear if this reference to one part being illuminated and the other part being dark is referring to the first part, the fully engaged Body Mind, or the second. 

A lot of people think that it’s to the first, but the [ perhaps too] obvious interpretation is to say that it’s the second. The reason is that it just makes immediate sense. I’m facing the mirror of this computer screen. My face is illuminated and the back of my head is dark. The Moon is reflected in the water. The side of the moon that we see is illuminated and the other side is dark.

But the critical question is this: what does it mean to say that it’s dark?

If it refers to the second part, what I think that means is that the duality which is implicit in the second part isn’t immediately obvious. It’s ‘dark’. If meditation is about calming my mind that’s dualistic. If there is a  second [as it were] person who appears,  like a silent, imperturbable witness, that’s dualistic too. And Dogen is saying that’s not what our practice is about.

So I think it does refer to the second part. But it could also refer to the first.

But if you apply it to the first part, what you tend to get is an idea that when you fully experience something with  the whole body and mind, what is illuminated is the dharmadhatu and what is dark is particularity. It vanishes.

And that’s a very unfortunate interpretation, because it assumes that seeing things with the whole body and mind is a mystical experience. But it’s not a mystical experience, it’s a real experience. It’s the way that we actually are when we’re sitting. So people trying to find that mystical experience miss their lives and miss the miracle of zazen.

Yet there’s another way to understand ‘dark’. Just as in darkness particular things cannot be seen and so, in a sense, everything is whole, when we fully experience with our whole body and mind, it is not that particularity vanishes, that it’s literally ‘dark’, but it’s no longer experienced as separate.

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400. The Dharmadhatsu

Nagajuna famously said trying to understand emptiness was like trying to pick up a poisonous snake. Without skill, you would be caught by the venom. And the most usual venom is nihilism. Poisonous Nothing.

It’s something which Buddhists have been accused of almost from the start: if everything is empty then nothing has any meaning. So we can do whatever we like. More broadly, emptiness, and hence buddhism, is attacked as a joyless pessimism—it’s vacuity, nothingness.

Buddhists have grappled mightily against this charge. One of the most profound refutations was by the Chinese Huayan School, those practitioners who focused on The Flower Garland Sutra and who primarily flourished in 7th Century T’ang dynasty China.

Their starting point is looking at the statement “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” in a different way. To just focus on the first part is unbalanced, we need to focus on both. If we do,  then everything: me, the wall, you, the trees, the birds; everything is, as it were, both form and emptiness.

Because emptiness is indivisible, like space or like the ocean, there isn’t a million billion bits of emptiness to correspond with the million billion forms, there’s just one emptiness. So every ‘thing’ – including you and me – is both particular and universal.

From that basic realisation they manifest a new world of interrelatedness and interdependence. Because emptiness reaches everywhere and is a fundamental aspect of form, of me and you, then, as it were, we penetrate everywhere, and so does everything else. And thus, everything, everywhere, interpenetrates me. This is the vision expressed in Indra’s Net.

In elucidating all of these ideas [and moving further away from erroneous conceptions of emptiness] they make use of the Chinese terms Li and Shi.

Li wasn’t originally a Buddhist term. It originally meant something like ‘underlying principle’. For example, that which causes the heavenly bodies to move predictably in the sky.

Shi is phenomena. Li and Shi completely interpenetrate, like form and emptiness, but without the nihilistic baggage that emptiness often seems to carry. 

The Huayan Masters adapt Li and Shi to fit within a re-envisioned buddhism, Li coming to mean something like emptiness and Shi something like form. The terms are usually translated into English as principle and phenomena, and they crop up all the time in the Chinese buddhist texts, for example, the Sandokai.

Their vision occurs in apparently nonsensical statements. Dogen, for example, talks about Mount Sumeru being contained within a mustard seed, which is a direct quote from The Flower Garland Sutra.  This interpenetration of everything is a radical restatement of dependent origination.

The particular innovation of the Hauyen school is to say not only that  form and emptiness don’t obstruct each other but  form and form don’t obstruct each other either.

The actualisation of this interpenetration and mutual non-obstruction they call the Dharmadhatu, The Buddha Realm. Zazen is often described as objectless meditation, but I don’t think that’s true. The Dharmadhatu, is the ‘object’ of meditation, while at the same time we, and everything else, are within it. That’s the real koan. And just as the Dharmadhatsu is like a body, so our body mind within Zazen is like the Dharmadhatu 

Excluding Nothing

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399. The Withered Winter Grasses

Dogen’s poem “Prostrations” can be translated in various ways. One is as follows: 

The withered grasses
beneath a field of snow
A white heron conceals itself 
using its own form.

Dogen

For Dogen, prostrations are the same as zazen. 

There are two versions of the poem. The difference is that one reads ‘ the withered/bowed grasses’, and the other reads ‘the winter grasses’. I prefer the first, because, given the snow, it is plainly winter, so the word ‘winter’ is superfluous.

The first two lines of the poem suggest to us that, just like the grass in winter, as it were, bows over, when we bow, something happens. The ‘snow’ happens.

The winter snow falls on the grass without the grass intending it, without the grass making it come about. Nonetheless, the snow falls and covers all the little grasses.  As it were, the snow makes the grasses a field of being, intimate with each other, intimate with the snow. 

Likewise, as practitioners, when we engage in this practice of prostrations, we’re not doing so alone. We are not an isolated blade of grass, but rather we are going forward with all beings. It is not a weight but a solidarity that causes us to drop to the ground.

The snow functions as an emblem of non-duality, wholeness, and intimacy.

The second part of the poem ( which tends to get more attention) centres on the white Heron, which is often used in Chinese poetry to indicate something noble, spiritual, powerful, and beautiful.

The two images of the snow and the Heron combine two separate images from The Jewel Mirror Samadhi, which was attributed to Dongshan although almost certainly not written by him. 

So in the second part of the poem we’ve got this image of what appears to be a still white field of snow ( non differentiation, peaceful equanimity, zazen) but within an apparent stillness, this very active Heron is concealing  itself. 

What that conveys for us is within our zazen, within our practice of non-duality, there is something vital and wondrous which is not our personal property, although we are intimate with it. It’s nothing to do with our ego. Yet is about to burst out of our heart, actualising space

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398. The two meanings of ‘Body’

The relationship between mind and body in our society is like the relationship between nobles and peasants just prior to a revolution.

Nobles are oblivious or ignorant or filled with fear even if the peasants do what they’re supposed to do, which they rarely do, and with surly resentment. There’s something about them. The nobles can feel something is in the air, but they dismiss it. They might, Antoinette like, play at being peasants with their dear friends the psychotherapists.

The body exists in two senses: one is as an object of the Mind. That’s our usual sense and when psychotherapists and similarly minded people say they’re interested in the body that’s really what they mean. 

The other, largely hidden sense is that the body is the heart of the world.

In practice we are required to endure the noise of the Mind: sinking through this first sense like a bird slowly diving through an oil slick, finally dropping into the clear water of the second sense.

When we drop into that second sense, we understand there is nothing that is missing.

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397. The flesh of the world

Of all the ideas in East Asian Buddhism, the hardest for us to take seriously is that the whole of reality is the Buddha’s true Dharma body. Or, in Dogen’s reading, all of reality is the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

But to take an idea seriously is not to take it literally.

What we’re dealing with here isn’t a concept, it’s a way of reconfiguring ourselves with the rest of creation, seen and felt as an alive whole. It’s hard for us, as it’s a right brain perspective in a left brain world.

This idea of all of reality being like a living body, whilst located within Chinese and Japanese culture, keeps recurring unexpectedly. For example, the modern French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty talked about “the flesh of the world”, by which he meant the entanglement we have with all creation.

Which is a very helpful way of looking at things, because it helps us locate the place of suffering.

When we look at Buddhist ideas from the perspective of our individualistic culture, we want to locate suffering as something internal to the person, some unresolved psychological issues, an imbalance which can be rebalanced.

So the contrasting idea derivable from Merleau-Ponty of the “Flesh of the world” being cut by the mirror of the self and that being the location of suffering, is very helpful as an antidote to that unconscious individualism.

And it’s particularly helpful as you can take from it that all the peculiar language of Mahayana Buddhism is an attempt to stitch together and to heal that fundamental wound.

Hence we get odd language; stillness which isn’t still; silence, which isn’t the absence of noise, and space, which isn’t the absence of things.  Again not conceptual language, not something to construct a world, but rather something to revitalize and reimagine ourselves within a world—within a world which is alive and whole and active and differentiated. As a body is.

The language that we use is an expedient means to stitch this wound together.

Whether the wound is stitched together or not, there always remains a scar.

The voices which  speak from the position of the scar are our Ancestors.

397. The flesh of the world
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396. A Stick of Incense

The Dojo is full of symbols;  explicit ones like the Buddha or the flowers on the altar and implicit ones: sitting facing the wall in a replication of Bodhidharma, the path we take around the room, and so on.

If we understand symbols as simply being a concrete code for an explicit meaning, the symbol is a dead symbol and is useless. If we take the flowers on the altar as a symbol of impermanence, or we take the Buddha statue as a symbol of wisdom and compassion, that can’t do anything.

The purpose of a symbol is not to convey meaning in a concrete form, but to create a shift in feeling.

And that shift can only happen if the symbol is open.

It’s as if it is an incomplete house which you can enter and change, extend and reconfigure. The symbol is something which is both already, intensely there and which you can actively engage with.

If the house is complete and the symbol is simply a closed meaning then the house is inaccessible. Not to your mind obviously, which is delighted with the free house, but to your heart. If you’re inside the house, the house is a prison.

Our responsibility as practitioners is to engage with both the symbols in the dojo and the symbols in our everyday life in an open way, where each changes the other. 

For example, the stick of incense that we light at the start of the sitting period;  it lasts for approximately the length of a sitting. You might think that it represents passing time, and so is similar to the altar flowers, which represent impermanence.

I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. 

When the incense is burning in the bowl of ash, both in its fragrance and in its smoke, it is penetrating the whole room. What it’s expressing is vital and essential and is connected with everything—the whole universe is flooding through. And what appears to remain afterwards is the stump of that incense which is embedded in the ash. But that isn’t so: that ash comes from all the incense burned before. What holds the present moment is the complete expression of all past moments.

When we’re sitting, the obvious temptation is for us to focus on those little stumps that are left in the mind bowl. But there is an opposite, heroic trap:  because the incense has expressed itself to exhaustion, we might think this wholehearted activity is an admonition to us to do likewise. But the ego can’t burn itself, because you can’t burn a ghost.

Those stumps of ego: thoughts, frozen emotions, recurrent imagery or memory and so on that we often experience as restrictions to our sitting: it’s that sense of restriction which is the delusion: those stumps are buried within the ground of all being. We should not wish them into nothingness.