Tag: Practice

We don’t sit facing the wall because zazen is an individual practice; it isn’t.

We are always practicing together. Not practicing, together. Practicing Together.

We sit facing the wall because we are sitting with all beings.

If we were facing each other we will be sitting with these beings, not necessarily all beings.

And when we sit, one more person sits with us. You could call this person Vast Compassion Space.

It is as if the door of the tiny room of the Self is unlocked, and the prisoners there are released into this vast space, to express, to change, to live, to go.

Were this person not to appear, the door would remain closed. Each prisoner would remain locked into their repetitive forms and gestures.

You could also call this person Faith Mind.

Practice is not the suppression of noise. Neither is it the realisation of some pictured state of tranquility.

Rather, it is the actualisation of vast compassionate space. It is “vast” because it contains everything. All the noise and silence; all the pain and beauty.

At each moment of sincere practice we are within that realm of practice enlightenment. And so are all practitioners, in all times, and so this practice is beginningless and endless.

This practice is not your individual practice carried on together with other people. We are practicing together.

That being so, you are not a great person, and never will be, no matter how much effort you expend. But you are part of a great person. And you always were.

Sometimes this person is teacher and student. Sometimes, this person is the whole network of practitioners, in all times. Sometimes the entire universe. Sometimes the tree in the garden.

When we come into the dojo, this person comes in with us. When we leave, this person leaves. Were practice to cease, this great person would fall into nothingness, leaving only bones and fragments.

But it will not.

The koan stories recall the words between teachers and students, but a person is missing.

That person is the relational space between the teacher and the student.

We could call this space the true, momentary teacher

It’s not that this third person simply exists in the gap between the teacher and student, but rather that both teacher and student exist within this third person; this relational, alive space

Similarly we are not eleven people each pursuing our personal practice; there is a 12th person here.

The space between us. The space which contains us, which lifts us up into being

When people talk of the Dharmakaya, the Universal Buddha-body, they don’t mean something conceptual, they mean just this –

The most important thing when we start to practice is to have faith.

Not faith in Buddhism or a set of ideas, but faith in our own sincerity, in our sincere practice.

When we start it’s often as if everything which arises within experience is like a smoke or fog or noise; obscuring reality, choking, deafening or distracting us; and we wish rid of it.

But what we need to understand is that everything is reality, all of it. Give each thing space and see it so.

Our task is not to empty the mind, but to make it vast.

Whether we are practicing zazen or kinhin, we are always walking The Way. And yet, we are never balanced. Because of this, the Dharma will not perish.

Within our own practice, and within the practice of all practitioners, it is as if this practice is a real person, walking through time. The function of a teacher is not to embody the Buddha, but to fully embody themselves, in all their vivid expressed unbalancedness. And the function of the student is not to replicate their teacher, but to fully understand that they are

the other foot

Why do we sit facing the wall? We could say we’re re-enacting Bodhidharma, but what are we re-enacting?

In the customary telling, after his encounter with the Emperor, Bodhidharma went to Shaolin temple and faced the wall for nine years.

The Chinese phrase is pi kuan, which is usually rendered as ‘wall contemplation’. It doesn’t occur before Bodhidharma.

But given that he was not contemplating the wall, what does this mean, other than‘contemplation like a wall’, or, more radically, ‘the wall contemplates’? Whatever the actual location of Bodhidharma was, the primary meaning of the phrase has always been understood to be metaphorical, not literal.

In contemplation from the perspective of a person, we are likely to have the idea of present insufficiency and future gain. We may imagine that if all the inner and outer noise abated, Emptiness, Suchness might appear.

Contemplation from the perspective of the wall is entirely different. The wall is facing the person and facing the world, and all of it is a vivid, alive whole. Emptiness is immediately there. There is nothing to be eradicated, and nothing to gain. The wall is immovably grounded in great faith. We could equally say he spent nine years facing the ground, or the mountain, or vast space.

In the Eihei Shingi, Dogen gives exhaustive descriptions of how monastic life should be regulated: how to sit, obviously, but also how to sleep, how to clean your teeth, how to use the toilet, how the teacher should enter the dojo and how he should walk around it: everything. Or almost everything. The glaring exception is that he doesn’t say anything about the breath during zazen.

In fact, all he says about the breath, throughout his writings, is that we should take a deep outbreath when we start zazen, and that we should let a short breath be short and a long breath be long.

How should we understand this? Well, one way would be to acknowledge that an emphasis on the breath in modern practice derives from an unexamined assumption that zazen is an individual practice. If the primary thing is our own state from moment to moment, it is important how we regulate ourselves. And so teachers – including myself – give lots of descriptions about how breathing might be ‘better’

But what if this is an assumption that Dogen didn’t have? And what if we’re wrong? Could we explain Dogen’s apparent lack of interest in the breath as due to him having a different perspective, that zazen wasn’t individual experience and effort, but collective ?

From the perspective of the individual practitioner, practicing within an individualistic assumption, there is a switching back and forth between the individual and the universal, the Dharmakaya, and also the risk of a surreptitious inflation of the Self to cosmic proportions. This happens because both ‘self’ and ‘universe’ are constructions, they don’t arise within actual experience in the way we think they do.

But if the ‘subject’ of practice isn’t the individual but the collective of practitioners and the space between them, isn’t that a more fruitful way to experience the ‘One Piece Zen’ that Fujita talks about? And doesn’t that better accord with our actual experience?

The space where we practice together, and everything within it – the Sangha Body, as it were – is both the reality and metaphor of interdependence. And because it has no boundaries, it seeps out everywhere, like slowly falling water.

The most critical point in practice is for us to be completely intimate with our experience. When we are, attachment, aversion, torpor restlessness and doubt do not arise.

But no matter how often we drop the cloak of the self we keep finding it’s there again, draping our head, draping our body. Hence the practice is endless.

Sometimes it’s us doing Zazen. Sometimes it’s the whole Universe expressing itself through this body.