Tag: Kusen

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Kusen

65. The Jewel of Experience

1. Master Dogen said that we should not regard our body and mind as our personal possession. There isn’t an ‘I’ to possess. Self, mind and consciousness arise itching experience, not the other way round.

If this is so, we do not need to fret about purifying the mind. This erroneous aim inadvertently strengthens the mind/ world dualism, and all the suffering which flows from it

2. If everything occurs within the jewelled net of Indra ( dependent origination), how can it make any sense to talk of relative and absolute truth? Isn’t it better to describe delusion not as falseness – because nothing is false – but as clinging to or rejecting faces of the jewel? Hence, compassionate activity is liberating the myriad dharmas from my anger, greed and ignorance, and the dream of personal liberation is simply a pernicious and disguised example of delusion.

3. Each morning we wake to the dream of the self. But even so, we are born this day. We are born this day

4. Master Dogen said that we must arouse bodhi mind.

Our primary error as practitioners is to confuse this with our personal mind.

We then imagine that we must make our minds quieter, cleanse from it what we don’t want to be there.

Dogen said that bodhi mind is the mind that sees the impermanence of all things. All things. Not just rocks and trees, but all things, including your personal mind. And for him, as for Nagarjuna, impermanence is a synonym for dependent origination. The pulse of your mind and the pulse of the world is the same pulse.

If we can understand this, then we can understand how bodhi mind, the mind of practice, is the mind which is at one with all things.

If we can understand this, there is nowhere for dualism to cling

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Kusen

64. The Bodhisattva Vows

1. The first bodhisattva vow is:

All living beings, I vow to save them

We need to understand the dual meaning of I (Jiko). It means both the personal I, the ego, but it also means the I which is not separate from all of existence.

Taking the ‘I’ in the second sense, the vow is a simple statement. ‘Vow’ and liberation ( ‘save them’) are simply facets of non duality

2. The second bodhisattva vow is:

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them

We should not understand this as meaning that by great effort, sometime in the distant future we will have no more delusions forever after. That would be a wrong understanding.

We should understand that liberation and delusion, Buddha and Mara, are the two poles of our nature as human beings. We can get rid of neither.

However, when we practice Zazen, when we allow our delusions to freely arise in vast space; to live, to change, to disappear, then is this not ending them? Not forever, because time is a delusion too, but just for this moment

3. The third bodhisattva vow is:

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them

Because dharma gates are boundless, they are innumerable. And so, they are all dharmas.

If our mind makes each thing a word picture, there are two things, and they can never become one. If each dharma is a dharma gate, then we can ‘enter’ it, and dualism falls away. The vow is also a statement, a statement of non duality.

Because dharma gates are boundless, each dharma is vast beyond measure, and cannot be grasped. Each dharma is thusness

Because dharma gates are boundless, there is no boundary, no separation between each dharma. So, to enter one dharma is to enter all dharmas. To fully encounter one thing is to fully encounter all things.

4. The final bodhisattva vow is:

The Buddha Way, unsurpassable, I vow to realise it

What is the Buddha Way? It is dropping off body and mind. That is, it is decentering our sense of separateness, affirming the whole ness, the dynamic wholeness of everything, which we variously call emptiness, dependent origination, impermanence.

But our sense of self, and of the world as something out there, pleasing or obstructing us, is like a coat which, no matter how often we drop off, we still find around our shoulders again. It is our nature as human beings to clench the fist of the self. And so it is our vow as Buddhists ( to use Uchiyama’s phrase) to open the hand of thought, endlessly, for the rest of our lives.

If we think we have surpassed this, that we are enlightened, this is the most dangerous delusion.

5. Master Dogen said:

When human beings see water, fish see palaces, gods see strings of pearls, demons see blood, or pus.

He doesn’t say that the fish are mistaken, or that the gods are mistaken. But we want to.

The dead weight of the self pushes the world flat, into an image. To then fret to what extent the image is true or false is to miss the primary repression

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Kusen

63. Something Luminous

Master Dogen said:

The path of all buddhas and ancestors arises before the first forms emerge.

So, the Buddhist state arises prior to the creation of the world. It is an active, dynamic state which is there before we create a world of light and dark, good and bad, me and you. It is a state prior to language and prior to concepts.

Much of our life is us putting layers onto our natural momentary feeling state; layers of thought, layers of emotion. And these layers attempt to answer the question we always put to this feeling state: what is this, and why now?

Because when we meditate we try and put this tendency to one side, meditation is an affirmation of the feeling state, and this simple feeling state is the way.

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Kusen

62. Original Face

Whoever says that the Tathāgata goes or comes, stands, sits or lies down, he does not understand the meaning of my teaching. And why?

‘Tathāgata’ is called one who has not gone anywhere, nor come from anywhere.

Diamond Sutra, verse 29

The Buddhist state is instantaneous, immediate, and cuts off past and future.

‘Tathāgata’ means ‘thus come’ or ‘thus gone. The name itself is a description of reality; not ‘existence’ [because that would entail dualism], not ‘no existence’ [because that would entail nihilism] but something luminous, hovering in the background, behind our conceptualisations.

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Kusen

61. The Still Still State

Dogen says that we shouldn’t distinguish between practice and enlightenment. Practice isn’t the means by which we attain enlightenment. Practice itself is enlightened activity.

And we can see that Dogen is challenging layers of dualism. If enlightenment is distinct from practice, there must be a person who attains it, and his enlightenment – and his personhood – is distinct from the world.

He is primarily challenging the primary dualism, that of Time and being. It is on this dualism that all the others rest. We are born, we endure, we die. Our lives take place in time. But this is a fundamental alienation from ourselves.

In wholehearted activity time does not exist.

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Kusen

60. Practice Enlightenment

We are told that we should sit like a mountain. Zazen is described as the still-still state, the mountain – still state.

The mountain is the ground made visible. Just because the mountain endures and accepts everything, we cannot say it has no feeling. Because it is the ground made visible, it is all feeling.

Zazen is the great matter made visible.

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59. Pushing the Earth

When we do zazen, we may imagine that we are sitting quietly. But our weight is dropping down into the earth.

We are pushing the earth with all our strength. And the earth is pushing back. We can feel this push up our spine, up through the top of our head. There is the appearance of stillness because there is balance; if there were not, we would fall down, into the earth, or fall up, into the sky.

Ourselves, the earth and all things are just facets of full dynamic functioning.

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58. Hishiryo

In the Fukanzazengi, Dogen says that the secret of zazen is non-thinking [hishiryo]. This is neither thinking [shiryo] nor not thinking [fushiryo].

By way of comparison, we can examine non doing. In the Chinese tradition there is wu wei, the watercourse way. Just as the water will respond appropriately to its environment, in non-doing we act appropriate to our actual situation, and that acting comes from a position of non-dualism, not ego. It is spontaneous fitting action.

Applying that to non thinking, we can envisage a state whereby thought is liberated from thought, language is liberated from language and the world, liberated from both, becomes vivid and alive. And this liberated thought and liberated world are no longer separate.

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Kusen

57. Full Dynamic Functioning

Time is the cornerstone of delusion. Because there is persistence, things can exist. Because there are things, events can occur in time, they can occur in the world, they can occur in your life. And so, the original wholeness of our experience is stretched and dualised.

For Dogen, what is primary is exertion, expression, full dynamic functioning; the exemplar of which is zazen. It is not that time and space do not exist. Rather, they are aspects of full dynamic functioning.

It is our duty as Buddhists to save the beauty of this from being crushed under the railway tracks of linear time.

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Kusen

56. Walls

The Buddhist way has both practice and study. Practice is primary, but study is necessary. Otherwise, we are likely to be blown about by our unexamined assumptions.

But theory can be a trap. One wall provides shelter, but four walls can be a prison.