Tag: Kusen

Categories
Kusen

95. Hsiang Lin

Master Dogen said that the way to realisation was through the body. But which body?

Blue Cliff Record, Case 17:

A monk asked Hsiang Lin, “What was the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?”

The Master said, “Sitting for a long time is hard, isn’t it?”

Bodhidharma famously sat facing the wall at Shaolin Temple for nine years. In answering the monk, the Master is drawing a comparison between his body, practicing, and the body of practice of Bodhidharma.

And given that we always sit with the body of practice, how can we say either that this body is the same, or different?

Categories
Kusen

94. Genjokoan

In the Genjokoan, Master Dogen gives a famous definition of delusion and enlightenment, saying that delusion is carrying the self forward to experience the myriad things, whereas in enlightenment the myriad things come forward and experience themselves.

I would say that we carry the Self forward primarily through language: “That is a wall”, “That is my confusion”, “There is that familiar unpleasant feeling, bitter in taste”.

And once we use the scalpel of words on part of experience, that detached part can be the object of our love or [more usually] of our hate. And, hard as we try, we can’t kill it again.

Buddhism is, for at least a moment, the restraint of this tendency. It’s not that we become intimate with our experience, because that’s dualistic, but that experience, somehow, is restored to life unfabricated.

Categories
Kusen

93. The Reality of Our Lives

All Buddhist language is an attempt to take us out of conceptual thinking, and to point us to the reality of our lives.

Because we are meaning-making-story-telling beings, we are always painting a world. Even if a teacher directs us to the activity of painting, we make a picture of his activity.

The whole lineage is this dialectic of freeing words and trapping words.

It is as if we are within a mountain made up of the bones of our ancestors. Our awakening voices, together, make what is solid empty.

Categories
Kusen

92. Senika

Senika appears in the Nirvana sutra as a kind of fall guy. He’s a Brahmin who believes that the body is the temporary home of the soul, which lives on after the death of the body.

Certainly, his soul has lived on, buried deep in our language. We make statements like ‘I am doing zazen’ or ‘I am living my life’ or ‘I need to be kinder to myself,’ and imagine we are saying something true.

Lying within the buried soul of Senika is the belief that the world is constituted of things, with attributes, acting.

This is the ground of delusion. Unless we can escape from it, buddhist teaching is entirely nonsensical.

Categories
Kusen

91. The Head and the Body

Artwork by Blair Thomson
Kusen 91 collaboration ‘wholeness dispersed no. 1’ by Blair Thomson

Those who fall to the ground, get up relying on the ground.

Interdependent origination is difficult for us because we have an unexamined idea of time: it is like an arrow, going from past to future, yet past, present and future don’t have equal weight. The past is like an accumulating avalanche, flooding into the empty space of the future. The present is the interface between the two. The ground is invisible.

When we sit, there is the opportunity to experience time in a different way. The head of the present moment is balanced on the body of the ground, and it can go anywhere.

Categories
Kusen

90. A Quality of This Moment

Artwork by Blair Thomson
Kusen 90 collaboration by Blair Thomson

Zazen is often called the mountain still state, the balanced state.

What we need to understand is that the state is momentary. It is a quality of this moment.

Not the person, the moment.

This moment rolls in and out of balance. When out of balance, self, world and linear time all arise, together. When in balance, it is not that the self and the myriad things are negated or affirmed but, as the shin jin mei tells us, they cease to exist in the old way.

Categories
Kusen

89. Tsuki

The Buddha’s true dharma body is just like space;

Manifesting its form according to circumstances,

it is like the moon in water

The image of the moon in water is one of the most familiar in Buddhism. The moon is Buddha, the water is the mind. When the water is tranquil, the moon is reflected perfectly.

It’s a dualistic image, obviously, and Dogen radicalises it by saying that the moon’s light is equally reflected, however the water is. What is important is not the form of the moon, but its expression. It illuminates the water. It illuminates the clouds. It illuminates the heavens. It illuminates itself. And apart from this illumination, there is no moon.

In the masterly Tsuki, Dogen revitalises the image as the active inter penetrating expressing everything.

The first line of the poem says something similar, but in a different way. When we come into the dojo and take our place, the space that was there before doesn’t disappear. It isn’t displaced elsewhere. Buddha doesn’t appear and the person vanishes. It isn’t like that. Both arise together.

We are space and person. Buddha and karmic existence. Particular and universal.

Categories
Kusen

88. Our Teachers, Walking

We honour our teachers by seeing them not as perfect, balanced, but by seeing them as unbalanced.

And us, unbalanced, balancing them. Momentarily.

The whole lineage, walking through time, always unbalanced. If it was not like this, there would be no Way.

Our teacher takes one step.

We must take the next.

Categories
Kusen

87. Full Expression

In zazen, our normal strategies of repression and distraction don’t work. We have no choice: everything that arises expresses itself. It isn’t me expressing mySelf, and so, it is full expression. Likewise, although the activity of zazen is full and complete activity, it is not the activity of the self.

If we can understand zazen as activity and expression, then we can understand the world similarly

In this sense, zazen is the full expression of Buddhist activity

Categories
Kusen

86. The Scenery of Your Life

Samsara is often described in terms of the six realms. The deluded person falls from one world into the next.

The Chinese called Samsara, the passing between the worlds of experience–Tao, The Way; the same term used by them for Awakening. They didn’t do this because they were short of words.

The practitioner travels between realms, and each realm is the scenery of his life at that moment. He is not caught. He does not fall. Although he travels, he does not choose to go. He does not choose to stay. The deluded person cannot travel. His feet, as it were, are stuck fast to the ground of each realm, and that ground is like a constantly collapsing building.

When we sit, it is as if all the worlds are travelling through us, like clouds through mountains.