Our aim isn’t to eradicate delusion, but to actualise space.
Within vast space, each thing can have its own life.
Although it is natural to wish that our demons were gone, only demons can kill demons.
Categories
Tag: Kusen
Categories
38. Compassionate Mind
Compassionate Mind is essential for practice.
The noise in our head is like a small child. If we follow the noise, it will never grow up. If we hate or ignore the noise, we cut out our own heart. We need to hold the noise in vast, compassionate space; vast compassionate awareness.
It is this space which allows it, and all beings, to live.
Categories
37. Total Exertion
Non-Buddhists conceive of the Universe as things within space. And in the space between things there is room for judgement, room for manipulation.
For Dogen, the realm of nonduality is the realm of intimacy. It is not that there is no differentiation, but there is no gap, no void.
And within that intimacy, each dharma totally occupies its own space. One dharma does not obstruct another, just as one moment does not obstruct another. The total exertion of one dharma–the exemplar of exertion being zazen–is the total exertion of all dharmas, because there is no separation.
The total exertion of one dharma makes real the whole Universe.
Categories
36. Awareness
In zazen, we cultivate unadorned awareness. We simply allow our experience, without making any judgement.
This awareness operates at a number of levels. Most obviously, we are aware of our ego sustaining chatter. Then we are aware of our strategies to avoid our experience–distraction, fatigue, agitation, and so on.
And deeper still, we are aware of our habitual attitudes towards our experience while sitting: anxiety, frustration, hopelessness, resignation and so on, and this habitual attitude mirrors our attitude to our life generally, and so what is unconscious becomes conscious.
Awareness is like a deepening ocean. As it becomes deeper, it becomes clearer. And so, everything is illuminated.
Categories
35. Unburdening the Heart
Often our posture is quite poor. We slump, and it is as if our head weighs heavily on our body. Which is to say, our mind weighs heavily on our heart.
When we sit, we allow the spine to uncompress; the head is light and the torso can relax and fully breathe, giving the heart its full space.
The heart is not the seat of the emotions. Emotion is frozen feeling. It is part of the mind, not the heart. The mind is that mass of thought and emotion by which the ego perpetually talks itself back into half existence.
The heart is momentary felt experience. It is always there.
Categories
34. Obstacles
We should distinguish between obstacles and delusion.
Obstacles are straightforward: a persistent tune, an idea that keeps returning, a scenario that keeps regurgitating itself. These seem a serious obstruction to our practice, but they’re not.
Delusion is our taking a position towards them. One aspect of delusion.
Categories
33. The Balanced State
A person prone to waking in the night, who imagines himself an insomniac, would be unaware when he is asleep.
Similarly, although when we sit we are frequently in the balanced state, we cannot see it, since there is no one to see. It is as if we oscillate between the dreams of the mind and the dreams of the body.
My teacher would say that we are always passing through the balanced state, in this movement between body and mind.
It is not that there is a something. It is not that there is a nothing.
Categories
32. Undefended
In zazen we lay down our arms.
We place one hand on top of the other. The world is unmanipulated and not held at bay.
It comes right up to the heart.
Categories
31. The Moon In Water
The Buddha said:
The Buddha’s true Dharma body
Is just like space
Manifesting its form according to things
It is like the moon in water
In talking about Emptiness, visual metaphors are often used. The familiar world is like a mirage, or an image in the mirror, or like the moon in water. And similarly, visual metaphors dominate practice; we need to see through the veil of illusion, as if the world or our consciousness is like an obscuring fog which will clear. ‘Kensho’ means to see into one’s true nature.
This was not Master Dogen’s view. In his rendition, ‘like’ is re rendered as ‘thusness’, ‘in’ is re-rendered as ‘middle’, and the character he uses for moon also means ‘full dynamic functioning’.
So, his re-rendering of the line is something like
It is/ thusness/middle/moon-in-water/total dynamic functioning.
It is important because it relocates Emptiness in this world, and re-conceptualises it as the vibrancy of the whole universe manifesting itself moment to moment. And our practice, rather than being a sustained exercise in disappointment, is giving all things life.
Giving all things life.
Categories
30. Delusion
A principal way in which we maintain ourselves in delusion is imagining that our life and practice should be something other than it is. We locate delusion in the wrong place. We imagine that our transient thoughts and emotions are obstacles, and if somehow we got rid of them, we wouldn’t be deluded any more.
But this is precisely the idea that is the engine of delusion. When Dogen says that delusion is carrying the self forward to experience the myriad things, and realisation is the myriad things expressing and experiencing themselves. By ‘myriad things,’ he doesn’t just mean trees walls and sky. He means everything, including our thoughts.
If we obsess on our thoughts, it is as if we take all the light and concentrate it on that, so that everything else – the body, the senses, the breath – is in darkness. Throwing the light over all experience makes the dualism of thought and world impossible to sustain. We see the tremor and evanescence of our thoughts as one aspect of our aliveness, which is to say, the aliveness of everything.