Tag: Non Duality

The core insight of Buddhism is that we suffer because there’s a split between self and world. ‘Self’ in the sense not that we have a subjective perspective, obviously we do, but in the sense that there’s some ongoing, continuous ‘something’ which is essential to us, and which we call self. In Buddhism we say that’s a fiction. But the insight creates two fundamental problems.

Firstly, if we suffer because of belief in a fictional self, how can meditation, which is quintessentially a practice of the self, help us see through that fiction, help us displace the self? And  second, if what we’re looking for, at least in some sense, isn’t here already, why should it ever be?

Those two issues have been dealt with in various ways in the history of Buddhism. And one of the reasons for the apparent opaqueness of East Asian Buddhism for us is the unusual ways in which the Chinese and the Japanese have chosen, in a very practical way, to address these problems.

And one of the distinctive ways is seeing practice, not necessarily just meditation, but practice generally, not as the practice of the self, but  the practice of Buddha or the practice of Bodhisattvas. So, for example, in the Pure Land school, there is the belief that if compassion arises within me, it’s not belonging to me. It’s not my compassion. It’s not personal compassion which I’m cultivating. It’s the compassion of the Buddha Amida.

And in a similar way, Dogen would say that when we practice, we’re not practicing from the perspective of the self, we’re throwing ourselves into the house of Buddha. At other times he might say it’s not you that’s sitting, it’s sitting Buddha. 

These are ways that to us are hard to grasp, but which are eminently practical if we take them seriously rather than literally. The problem with taking them literally is we think that instead of the world being as it appears, it’s populated with these technicolor mythical heroic figures. That’s obviously ludicrous. But what’s not ludicrous is understanding that seeing in this way is meant to produce a feeling shift in us. In the example of compassion, it’s not that  there’s a garishly dressed future Buddha hiding away in a mythical place, but rather that compassion, like love, is a universal quality. It’s not particular to me, and I don’t own it. It’s a universal quality which is transmitted through me in the same way as sunlight streaming through your window illuminates falling dust. The dust doesn’t  acquire the qualities of light, but nonetheless becomes like a jewel, like a mirror.

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The mirror is one of the main metaphors of Chinese Zen. But it’s quite difficult for us to tie it in with other metaphors that we encounter frequently, ones concerned with space, illumination, emptiness and so on.

The metaphor of mirror crops up all the time. Sometimes ‘the ancient mirror’ or ‘the empty mirror’, and it appears in one of the most famous exchanges in Zen legend, an exchange involving the Sixth Patriarch. (Hui-Neng)

The Fifth Patriarch had asked his disciples for a poem to demonstrate their understanding. The head monk was the only one who wrote a poem. And that poem was anonymously critiqued by Huineng, who then secretly got the transmission and became the Sixth Patriarch.

The poem goes something like 

“ body is the bodhi tree,
mind the mirror bright, 
polish the mirror ceaselessly. 
And don’t let dust alight” 

The nursery rhyme rhythm is  my own, but you get the idea. On the face of it, this seems an accurate description of meditation. We can think of ‘dust’ on the mirror as being distracting thoughts, and we are ceaselessly, trying our best to put those distracting thoughts to one side and to keep the mind clear, like a mirror.

Huineng’s criticism was that the poem contained a fatal dualism. A dualism between, as it were, the person doing the polishing, and the mirror or, if you want to put it in a different way, between the self and the mind. And that fatal dualism is then amplified by a  judgment about what is of value. So ‘dust’ is not of value, but the things of the world that might appear in the mirror perceptually are.

In considering the metaphor further, it’s helpful to rebut the assumption that when the Chinese talked about mirrors, they were talking about mirrors in our sense. It’s true that glass was invented quite a long time ago. The Chinese were familiar with it and  would make mirrors of glass. But they weren’t mirrors in our sense, which appeared quite late, the technology appearing around 1835. When the Chinese talk about ‘mirror’, what they mean is a precious metal, bronze, for instance, which is polished so it becomes a reflector. And so there’s several things that we can tease out of that.

The first is that the bronze mirror is very precious. It’s made of precious metal, and requires a great deal of work to put ( and maintain) it in the state where it’s capable of reflecting the world. It requires continuous activity to keep it this way and not become dull. But although it’s precious, it’s a part of the world, it’s not separate or transcendent. It’s something within the world. And the second thing for us to eke out is the idea of depth. When we think of mirror, we probably think of us looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection and then making some sort of assessment about the reflection: “it’s me, but I’m not the reflection”, something like that, but for them the idea of depth is very important.

The depth of the mirror is  the depth of the world. It’s the same depth. And within meditation, the masters would often talk in terms of ‘empty mirror mind’. Although it seems a bit baroque to us, in a sense, when I’m meditating this head is like an empty mirror, reflecting whatever comes before it. This gets us away from the fatal dualism of inner and outer reality which, like the senior disciple’s poem, often goes unnoticed in contemporary discussions of meditation. 

One fatal dualism is between the activities of the mind, – thoughts and stuff like that, bad, and activities of the world, our perceptual awareness of the trees outside, the birds and all the rest of it, good. And the second, slightly more subtle, dualism is between the idea of us having as it were, a meditating internal space of awareness,  consciousness, our personal  awareness and the external space of the world. Within this head is my awareness which different from this adjacent but external space ‘outside’.

The metaphor of ‘mirror mind’ applied to our experience of zazen removes those dualities. Not that that idea is original to me. In 1961, Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head’, where he talks about exactly this. He doesn’t, as far as I can recall, specifically mention the mirror metaphor, but it’s the same idea. So that in our conceptual mind, there’s a difference between internal and external. But in our actual phenomenological experience, when we’re meditating, there is no separation. And because there’s no separation, then our meditation is not striving to do something about our consciousness, to fix our consciousness. It’s enacting something. And that’s a very important distinction.

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One of the primary issues in Zen is the problem of Duality–the sense that there’s a split between me and the world.

The temptation is to try and heal that split in the realm of thought. We  think the split is there because we think of ourselves as separate beings and hence regard the world as a resource: stuff to use, stuff to throw away. 

The cure for that would seem to be changing that perspective, replacing  selfish individualism with a matrix of ideas emphasising interconnection, compassion, kindness and so on.

Laudable as it is to foster those qualities, that way of approaching the problem is fundamentally mistaken. The source of the duality is not at the level of mind or ideas, or not at least in this sense that we normally take that to be. Rather, the source of the duality is the dominance of our visual sense.

If we examine our experience carefully, we’re very often carrying around a kind of proto image of ourselves, seen, as it were, from the outside.

That visual sense is culturally our dominant sense. It is very connected to the Mind and to our sense of self. It dominates all our other senses, particularly our somatic sense, our momentary, felt, embodied sense. 

This explains some aspects of meditation which might appear to be otherwise odd. 

Why is there such an emphasis on posture for example?

Because if we’re sitting in the correct posture, our spine becomes activated. We have this sense of visceral aliveness we can’t really articulate, but which is clearly there.

And if our posture is correct, we experience our breath right at our centre.

When we’re breathing like this, we’re very aware of the constant interaction between our breath and our flesh, our breath and our bones

The breath is something which the mind can’t  conceptualise or temporise. 

But you can see it in other ways as well. For instance if we develop more of a sense of the interiority of the mouth; the fleshiness of your tongue, the depth of your mouth, this has a similar effect; alerting us to the aliveness ‘inside’. When we put our tongue on our hard  palate, it sometimes activates our third eye, it sometimes creates this curious sense of dynamic uplift in our head and neck.

All this reactivates our somatic sense. Which diminishes the visual sense. It doesn’t dispel it, but diminishes it. Paradoxically, by reactivating the somatic sense, the sense of ourselves as being three-dimensional rather than as if it were a visual two-dimensional image, breaks down that primary self/world duality.

It’s an illusion to think that duality has to be suddenly flipped over in some miraculous kensho experience.

It’s enough that its grip is gradually loosened.

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.

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.

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.

When we start to sit, and probably for quite a long time afterwards, we think that Zazen is about changing our state: making us wiser, more compassionate, happier.

But after a while, we understand that Zazen is not about changing our state, although it does. It’s about addressing the Primary Wound of separation.

We don’t heal that wound by ornately decorating one side of it. 

If  we imagine that we become something great, like a warrior or a mountain, our practice is immature.

When we are sitting in the balanced position we’re weightless, like a little bird.

Not absent from the world but filled with it. Entirely in it.

The primary task of that little bird is not to ponder the motivations of herons or crows.

It isn’t to ask if the world’s entirely made of branches or not.

It is to sing Everything! Everything!

In the teachings, a phrase recurs, something like “to see things as they really are”. 

When we hear it, our temptation is to think of something akin to looking out through a smeared window—the smearing of our karmic conditioning.

And somehow, through practice, we will clear the window, so we can look through it undistorted, and see the tree as it is, the mountains as they are.

But this is just playing a familiar duality in a slightly different key.

A way out is  to consider the other senses.

We wouldn’t say “to hear things as they really are”; “to smell things as they really are”; or “to taste things as they really are”.  We wouldn’t say it because it’s obvious that there is an interweaving. There isn’t the false objectivity inherent in the unexamined act of seeing.

With taste, there is a ‘something’ to be tasted. There’s my capacity to taste and there’s my subjective experience of taste. We can see, obscurely perhaps, that this all forms a wholeness.

And applying that back to “seeing things as they are”, we need to reject the idea that there are specific things ‘out there’, just waiting for our eyes to fall upon them.  Likewise we need to reject the opposite idea that, somehow, everything is just a process in my brain. 

And if we do, the whole world is re-enchanted.   

Seeing the tree through a million, billion smeared windows. And that is one aspect of the full expression and aliveness, the full dynamic functioning of the tree. And of all things, all windows.

Mahayana  Buddhism,  in all its fantastical  detail  and complexity, is an attempt  to answer  two questions.   

The first: “Isn’t the wish  to be free from  desire  a sort of desire?” 

The second: “If we accept  the radical  interdependence of all being,  isn’t the wish  to be liberated  from that  interdependence a kind of  ignorance?” 

In the  attempt to  answer these questions  we can see the central  place  of compassion. 

But we need to understand what compassion  means.  

Primarily, we need to understand that  compassion is not  a personal  quality.  It’s not something which  you  cultivate  or accumulate.   It’s not  kindness  or pity  or  generosity.

It’s feeling  with, the self, as it were, is unfolded and recorded into this  feeling  with. 

It’s from  that starting point  that we can understand some of the more  fantastical,   or apparently fantastical  aspects of Mahayana. 

We can start to understand  both how practitioners  can be viewed as  bodhisattvas and how the world as a whole and the beings in that world can likewise  be seen  as bodhisattvas—as having a liberative  capacity. Because compassion is a universal quality that transiently locates itself within particular beings, like the air in our lungs, then it is continually being expressed everywhere.