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334. Skilful Means

The Heart Sutra is a – probably Chinese – attempt to condense and to get to the heart of the prajnaparamita sutras; a vast body of literature that started to be composed in India around the first century BC.

In these sutras, there’s a repetitive emphasis on three elements: prajna ( intuitive wisdom), compassion and skillful means. ‘Prajna’ (wisdom) is the ability to see the emptiness, the boundlessness and the lack of separation of all things. ‘Compassion’ is the feeling with all beings. 

The temptation, when we hear these three terms, is to think that they’re attributes of the person. This ‘person’ acquires the capacity to see emptiness and, seeing emptiness, this ‘person’ then develops compassion in their heart and then this ‘person’ acts towards other beings in the most efficaciously compassionate way using skillful means. 

However, to think of these three qualities as qualities of the individual is to fall into exactly the same kind of spiritual narcissism that plagues meditation today. 

Prajna doesn’t mean me seeing the emptiness of all other things. It means seeing the emptiness of all things, including this ‘person’. The wall of identity which surrounds this person and separates them from other beings is dismantled.

With those walls absent, what is there but fellow feeling? 

And skillful means, because it’s not a personal quality; because it’s a universal quality, can be seen as one facet of this infinitely faceted diamond of all beings; each facet expressing the whole diamond.

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332. A handful of jewels

Our true teacher is not within the boundary of a single person. If we believe that they are, then we will be like an old person, still looking for their perfect parent. 

In the Mahayana, the three core concepts are: prajna, compassion and skillful means.

We might imagine that prajna (intuitive wisdom) is the quality which the perfect teacher has; compassion is his orientation of that towards everyone else, and skillful means is his method of taking that wisdom and compassion to reduce the suffering of living beings. 

If we think in that way, we’re mistaken. What we need to understand is that the purpose of a teacher is to wake us up from the dream of the self. 

It’s as if we are sitting directly opposite someone. This person holds out their hand, revealing various precious jewels. We reach towards this person looking to take the proffered jewels, when suddenly they grab us by the wrist and pull us forward. 

It’s this movement which is the important thing. It’s this movement which enables, as it were, the cloak of the self and all its patterned nonsense of gain and loss to fall off. 

That cloak is a cloak of invisibility. Not obviously for the self and all the desires and strategies of the self – which are all too visible. What that cloak makes invisible is this great miracle of all being.

With the cloak of the self dropping off, what we understand is that our teachers’ incompleteness and our incompleteness and the incompleteness of all things is the hand that opens and reaches out to all things.

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284. Dogen’s Dharma Hall Discourse number 24: An expression never before expounded

‘In the entire universe, in the ten directions there is no dharma at all that has not yet been expounded by all Buddhas in the three times. Therefore all Buddha’s say, “In the same manner that all Buddhas in the three times expound the dharma, so now I also will expect the dharma without differentiations”. This great assembly present before me also is practicing the way in the manner of all Buddhas. Each movement, each stillness is not other than the dharma of all Buddhas, so do not act carelessly or casually, Although this is the case I have an expression that has not yet been expounded by any Buddha. Everyone, do you want to discern it?’

After a pause Dogen said, ‘ in the same manner that all Buddhas in the three times expound the dharma, so now I also will expound the dharma without differentiations.’

The passage that Dogen cites and then repeats is a direct quote from the Lotus Sutra.

 To understand this dharma discourse it’s helpful that we understand the several uses of the word ‘dharma’. It originally meant teaching, as in the Buddha’s teaching. ‘Dharmas’ are all the individual things within experience: fences, walls, mountains, thoughts, dreams and so on. And because the Buddha’s teaching is about reality, a very creative combining took place of these two senses of the word, on the already fertile soil of chinese culture. It came to be thought that all beings (dharmas)  proclaim the dharma. Or, more precisely that everything (all dharmas) is the dharma. 

Thus, the movements of Dogen’s monks while they were listening to him, or their stillness were all expressions of the dharma. 

Which leaves the question: in what sense was Dogen’s simple repetition of a phrase from the Lotus Sutra a new expression?

It was new because everything’s new.

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168. Five pieces of prajna

Master Dogen, in his instructions for meditation, said that when we practice zazen, we have to take ‘the backward step’.

That suggests that the world we ordinarily experience is constructed. But also, that what we are searching for is abundantly available to us, and always has been. It isn’t somewhere we’ve not been to yet, but somewhere we’ve forgotten. It is easy enough for us to say that the ways we demarcate the world is a construction, but harder to say – and to mean – for the self, or, as the Heart Sutra says, ‘the five skandas’.

To abandon one but not the other is useless, like collapsing all the props, yet leaving the actor on stage. Which is more essential to the delusion?

In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Dogen said that the five skandas are five pieces of prajna. Pra-jna. Pre-knowing. So, what is differentiated in the stepping forward into self and world is ‘one piece’, which is broken when we step forward, unbroken when we fall back, breaking and unbreaking, like space.

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82. Five Pieces of Prajñā

In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Dogen says that the five skandas are five pieces of Prajñā.

When we hear ‘pieces’, we might imagine that we can put them together. To make a world. To make a person. But this putting together with the glue of the Self is the root of suffering; the root of delusion.  

Because each thing is a piece of Prajñā, each thing is all things. Because this is so, each thing is of infinite value, its expressions and facets without limit.

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46. Prajñā

If we claim to know our experience, how can we avoid falling into dualism?

Prajñā, pre-knowing, is the state prior to knowing and naming. Zazen is the practice of Prajñā. We can also call it intimacy, because there is no separation.

We can also call it illumination; not because each thing is brighter, but because it is no longer smudged by the fog of the self.

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4. Wisdom isn’t Knowing

We often talk about Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, and Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, but we misunderstand Wisdom and Compassion.

We think that Wisdom is some state where we know and Compassion is another state where we feel. But what is rendered as Wisdom, Prajñā, isn’t knowing. It is a state before knowing where everything is intuitively whole.

If someone throws a ball at us unexpectedly and we catch it, we don’t catch it with our mind and we don’t catch it with our body. And Kanzeon is portrayed as having manifold hands and eyes. She sees and then she acts. She is never portrayed as having manifold hearts, bleeding or otherwise.