Tag: Practice

Sometimes we think of zen meditation practice as developing equanimity. Quietening the mind.

But which mind? Certainly not the personal mind.

What is obvious when we start sitting is the incessant talking itself into existence, which the personal mind seems to engage in endlessly. Like an apprehended fraudster. Talking himself in. Talking himself out.

So if our aim is to have equanimity, it would be foolish to expect this mind to be silent, to drop away, and leave equanimity pristine behind it..

So what do we do?

This personal, karmic mind is occurring within the greater body-mind.

Do our thoughts extend to our felt bodily experience or not?

This bodymind is already sitting within vast space. Do our thoughts extend above our head or behind or in front of us?

Of course not. There is no boundary to this space. It extends everywhere, and holds everything. Practice like this.

Why do we practice together?

Practitioner monks in India would often practice on their own in their individual cells.

So why together? Because when we sit together we are enacting and making real the alive wholeness of everything. “All beings” is a concept, but we can sit with these beings, and thus all beings. We can’t touch “Space,” but we can touch this space.

It is not your practice of Zazen using your body. It is not your practice, it is the whole universe practicing zazen using this body.

Practice enables us to become aware of the causes of our suffering. When we start sitting we are very aware of thoughts and emotions, and in due course can see this as the manifestation of karmic mind, our personal karmic mind, which has its own way of suffering. It could be anxiety, dissociation, agitation, boredom, fear, it could be many many things.

It is completely understandable that we might want our practice to eradicate this noise, to void the mind. But voiding the mind would be a small practice. It is not our practice; it lacks dignity. It is a miser’s practice.

The ideogram in Chinese for delusion looks like it has little legs. The idea is that delusion is the little legs of our karmic mind. Taking us this way, this way, this way, and this way, ceaselessly.

On top of these little legs is the self. Practice is not to cut off the legs, but to unseat the self.

When seen in this way, the karmic mind is not our possession and is not our burden. It is the expression of the aliveness of everything. We can’t reach that aliveness from a void.

We can’t get to the heart by cutting.

Space is both the trope and reality of Buddhism. It makes possible freedom, expression, experience and unfolding.

When we start to practice, we can’t find space anywhere. Our mind feels like a mass of disgruntled demons, packed into a cellar. One part moves, and the rest move, in reaction.

We might imagine space in Newtonian terms, or as an absence, but that’s not what’s meant.

It is both figurative and real. It is not absence. Even though there are many of us in this room, it is full of space: above our head, in front of our heart, behind us. The space holds us.

This space holds all things. But not as something there before being. If there was no space, there would be no life. If there was no life, then there would be no space. If all the fish go, the ocean vanishes. If all the birds go, the sky collapses.

When we start sitting, what usually shocks is gaining an unwelcome familiarity with the mind: the inane repetition, the vacuity, the constant chatter. It’s only natural if we think the aim of practice is to change this mind. To think in that way is a trap.

If we just allow all the mental activity to come and go, we realise that what we usually term ‘thought’ isn’t free floating. It’s as if it’s the visible tip of a long thread, which connects to our heart and to our body. And through them, to the heart and to the body of everything. The shimmering aliveness of everything, the isness we are part of.

Our little karmic mind exists within bigger mind, the mind of practice, which is not personal to you or me, the mind shared by all practitioners; the past, now, to come. Which holds everything

The three prerequisites for practice are: great faith, great doubt and great courage.

I’ve tried to explain how faith and doubt are two facets of the one thing, but what is great courage? Is it simply the willingness to remain in this place of not knowing?

How do we become disconnected from our basic state of feeling being? It starts by judging our experience. Say that when we are little, we intuit that our mother can’t bear our distress. We learn that our experience isn’t simply a given, it’s something we can manipulate, explain, evade, build thoughts and stories around, appropriate to the self, and so on. A whole ego structure forms on top of the simple state of being feeling.

There’s always a gap–a way back into this simple state–but there’s a catch. The gap is the feeling we judged unacceptable in the first place. We can always find it, but it’s very hard for us to just stay with it, without going into the mechanism–I almost said demon–that we created to escape it.

And this simply staying with is great courage.

The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Dharma is reality, how things are, which includes the teaching how of things, as they are.

Buddha is the person who wobbles in and out of this reality, quintessentially in zazen.

And what’s Sangha? When we sit together, it is indisputable that a ‘something’ arises. We could call it the field of awareness. We could call it the Buddha field. And within that field is our noise. We don’t aim to eradicate our noise, but we are not within it. Because the field has no boundary, all beings are within it.

So we sit with all beings, for all beings.