Glasgow Zen GroupThe 93 generations since the Buddha, are like a real person walking through time. All the individual positions are unbalanced, all the individual teachers are unbalanced, and in their imbalance, they are fully expressing themselves.
Because this is so, the whole is a dynamic balance. That being so, we should not be like our teacher, we should be like our selves; balancing our teacher with our fully expressed imbalance.
And so, forward. And so, backward.
Sekiso said that Enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house.
Many people talk about practice as the cultivation of something: wisdom say, or compassion.
Is the thief trying to find the gold, or trying to find the light switch? Either way, he’s a thief.
We need to understand that practice is not the cultivation of compassion. It’s not the cultivation of anything.
It is compassion.
Why do we practice together?
Practitioner monks in India would often practice on their own in their individual cells.
So why together? Because when we sit together we are enacting and making real the alive wholeness of everything. “All beings” is a concept, but we can sit with these beings, and thus all beings. We can’t touch “Space,” but we can touch this space.
It is not your practice of Zazen using your body. It is not your practice, it is the whole universe practicing zazen using this body.
The flowers of emptiness have five petals: compassion, expression, gratitude, love and generosity. But where do they open?
My first teacher, Nancy Amphoux, said that zazen was like a huge underground river. I imagined a large river, underneath the desert of the self, pushing up flowers through the bitter earth.
She asked a person, ” Is Bodhidharma here, or not?”. The person said “not”. She struck him. She asked again, “Is Bodhidharma here, or not?”. The person said “he is here”. She struck him.
The cancer in her bones latterly made sitting impossible, so she would do prostrations instead. We traditionally make prostrations to our teacher, whether our teacher is here or there, here or gone. All our teachers. Even though there are mountains and rivers between us. Even if there is life and death between us. Between us.
Alive or dead? Alive or dead? Answer! Answer!
Where do the flowers open? Answer! Answer!
In these days, it often feels as if we are living in a dream. But whose dream?
Awakening is one of the three meanings of Satori, Enlightenment.
So what is Awakening?
It isn’t waking up into a different world. It isn’t, asleep, imagining that the world is flat, and waking up, realising that it’s round. We have to get out of our fixation on truth and falsity. It is entirely useless.
It is just letting the ceaseless expression of life, flooding through us from moment to moment, be.
We awaken from the small dreams of ‘Me’: self and world, truth and falsity, hate and fear, clinging and so on.
But awaken into which dream?
Eko said to Bodhidharma, “My mind is not at peace, please pacify it.”
Bodhidharma said, “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.”
In Eko’s question, we might easily pass over the most important word, ‘My.’ ‘My mind’ — but if we don’t pass over it, if we see the fiction of ‘my’ mind, ‘my’ experience. What is there to pacify?
We should be grateful for everything in the flood of experience, because it is that, and that alone, which clarifies the great matter.
Delusion isn’t being mistaken about something; the earth being flat, or there being penguins at the North Pole: it is taking experience and using it in creating and maintaining a sense of Self.
Often we experience this as a kind of incessant inner conversation. Whilst we might want it to stop, this too is Self-ing.
We change when we experience it as energetic noise, feeling it in the body. When we experience noise, we can experience silence. When we experience silence, we can experience vast space.
In Buddhism the whole universe is sometimes described as an ocean, and each of us, in this Dharma position, as a wave. So when we hear this we make a picture. We see an ocean, full of waves. But this picture of Buddhism is entirely useless. We are not invited to see the wave, but to be the wave.
It is the surging and crashing of this experience now which is our connection with everything. If we wish to eradicate the continuous wave of this experience, there is no ocean, just a picture.
Kodo Sawaki said, “I have wasted my whole life in zazen”
Pay attention to his words. He didn’t say he’d wasted his life. He said he’d wasted his whole life.
When we’re on Retreat at Ardfern, the house and the dojo are surrounded by trees, and each of these trees is alive with birds. In each moment, they are completely exerting and expressing themselves. They are, moment to moment, completely pouring out -wasting- their lives. There’s nothing left over.
Once, when we were sitting, there were two bangs on the large glass frontage to the dojo. Two birds had flown straight at us. One, striking the window, had broken his neck. The other, striking the window, had flown away.
Our tragedy as human beings is that we’re not like this. Often, the moment is only half combusted. And sometimes, for each of us, it is as if these half burnt fragments lodge like ash in our throat. We can’t swallow them. We can’t spit them out.
Zazen is like a great fire.
When we are sitting, practicing zazen, in this place, although we do not speak, we are not mute. We are fully expressing Buddhism.
Likewise when we speak from this place.
Likewise when we hear, from this place.
Expression, like love, is like a tiny bird flying from the heart. Much as we try, we cannot preserve it in pictures, or in words, or in stone.
We are not sheltering within a temple of words built long ago called Buddhism.
Indra’s net is the whole network of practitioners now and all times, extended everywhere, everywhere fully expressing illumination. If buddhist expression simply travelled from the past to now, it would illuminate nothing.
The past illuminates the present. The present illuminates the past. The present illuminates the present. Because of this, the stone bird flies everywhere.