Tag: The Zen Lineage

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390. Not picking or choosing

The first lines of the Hsin-Hsin Ming, the Verses of Faith-Mind go as follows: 

“The great way is not difficult, only avoid picking and choosing.

 When Love and Hate do not arise, things cease to exist in the old way.”

It’s fair to say that the general way of looking at that passage is to say that the two parts are the same. In other words, the reference to ‘love and hate’ and the reference to ‘picking and choosing’ is the same thing. And on that assumption we think we primarily require to develop Equanimity,  particularly when we’re practising. From that comes the common instruction that we should allow our thoughts to come and go freely and not be attached to them — not try to push them away or dwell on them.

But that common perspective is both banal and a misunderstanding — the two parts are not the same.

The reference to ‘picking and choosing’ doesn’t  mean that our arising  thoughts are already formed and appear within our awareness. What I think it means is that for a thought to exist (in the normal sense), we require to engage in picking and choosing. We require, in other words, to constrict our attention in order that a mental object or a feeling object, like an emotion, is constructed. 

Because to do that we require to disregard all other aspects of that ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’; the somatic aspect of it, the karmic aspect of it, the environmental aspect of it and various other things. If a thought is arising for me, that thought indicates not that there’s something pre-formed that I should have an attitude of neutrality towards. 

No! 

The fact that the thought (in the normal sense) arises at all  is an indicator that I’m engaging in picking and choosing.  I’m constricting my attention, thus an identifiable thought arises.

It arises from my activity of constriction which I’m unaware of.  So when a thought arises what I require to do is not to take a position towards that thought but recognise that I’m engaged in picking and choosing. In Uchiyama’s words, I “Open the Hand of Thought ”; what I’ve put out of my awareness, in terms of my body, my environment, my karma, and so on is brought back into awareness. When it’s brought back into awareness the thought, as it exists in the old way, disappears. 

So the activity of not picking and choosing, in other words, the activity of not constricting my attention, which you could call the practice of non-duality, means that in consequence, love and hate do not arise, because love and hate require that constriction, because they need to have something specific to adhere to.

Things ‘cease to exist in the old way’ not because we have an attitude of neutrality towards them but because our unconstricted awareness is primarily a wholeness out of which, as if in a dream, specific things appear to arise and disappear.

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387. The Buddhas and Ancestors of the future

Almost all Zen practitioners are familiar with the legend of Bodhidharma: him arriving in a Southern port in China, having a bracing conversation with the emperor, going to Shaolin Monastery where he sat facing a wall for nine years.

In recent times historians have criticised that Legend as being well, a Legend. Many have doubted the existence of Bodhidharma as an actual person, particularly when so many things are attributed to him such as him being the creator of Kung Fu, Chinese Tantra and so on.

But in fact there was an Indian monk called Bodhidharma who did arrive in China from India in the sixth century. We know that because a researcher, Andy Ferguson, looked through the Chinese immigration records of that time and found him. Of course, that person isn’t really related to the legend at all. We know nothing very much about him. 

So who’s the real Bodhidharma? Is it that historical person about whom we know very little, or is it the Legend?

I say it’s the Legend.

Buddhism has an unusual view of the future. The future Buddha for instance, Maitreya, is existing now, albeit not in the human realm. In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha confidently predicts the future Buddhahood of many of the characters in that sutra.

The view that the past, present, and future are all existing now is called Eternalism.

It’s not simply the view of Mystics and religious figures. It was Einstein’s view. When one of Einstein’s friends died, Einstein said to his widow, “Oh, he’s just over that hill there.”

Yet there’s something about that metaphor of the whole of space-time being like a landscape that’s too static. 

More attractive -to me anyway -j is the view that the whole time-being is like a great ocean—dynamic, flowing in all directions. Time flows from the past to the present to the future, from the future to the past. 

It flows in all directions. The dynamic nature of our life flows in all directions and the dynamism of the whole universe is flowing through us.

In this sense, ‘Buddhas and Ancestors’ do not refer to historically located actual people.

They refer to this flow.
In that sense we are the future Buddhas and Ancestors for Bodhidharma. And although we cannot see them, the Buddhas and Ancestors of our future are flowing towards us, the unknown waters meeting the past waters of our karma, creating this miraculous vortex of now.

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382. Verses Of Faith Heart

“The Great Way is not difficult

 just avoid picking and choosing. 

When judgments of good and bad do not arise

things cease to exist in the old way”

.

That’s the first verse of the Shin jin mei—the Verses of Faith-Mind, usually attributed to the third patriarch.

The word Shin, usually rendered as Mind also means Heart. So you could say ‘The Verses of Faith-Heart’, and that might be more appropriate. 

The Faith that is being talked of in these verses is Faith in Buddha Nature. Not that everyone has Buddha Nature in actuality or potentiality but rather – in Dogen’s words – everything is Buddha Nature. 

A lot of contemporary Zen people are embarrassed to talk about Buddha Nature. It doesn’t fit very well within our culture. It sounds quaint and esoteric.  So rather than talk about that Faith, which is the foundation of Zen, we’d rather have what is often a fatuous language of ‘here and now’, ‘presence’, ‘authenticity’, the pomposity of the language like fraudsters exchanging counterfeit notes with each other. 

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349. Not Mastery, Wholeness

The First Patriarch of the Hua-yen school in China was Dushan. Accounts of his life are almost entirely legendary: from him curing the sick and performing miraculous deeds, such as parting the waves of the Yellow River.

My favourite story is of Dushan being told that one of his monks had been possessed by a ferocious king dragon demon. Dushan went to see the monk, bowed to him, and sat quietly in front of him. Quite soon after,  the king dragon demon spoke in a rather apologetic voice saying, “I’m terribly sorry to have troubled you, I’ll just be on my way.”

The story is engaging, but it’s also seductive because we would like to be like the Dushan of that story;  banishing delusion, in a way omnipotent—certainly extremely powerful.

We need to sidestep the seduction. What we need to understand is that Buddhism is not a path of mastery—it’s a path of wholeness. 

In our actual experience, sometimes we are Dushan; sometimes the hapless monk; sometimes the demon; sometimes the ground that holds all beings upright; sometimes the space which contains them all. 

We’re not seeing the world from the vantage point of a master. We’re seeing the world from the endless vantage points of the world.

And there’s another way of looking at the story too.  

We can assume that in the story the dragon demon represents delusion. And so, we might imagine that the purpose of meditation is to banish delusion. And if we banish delusion –  the thinking goes –  surely all that’s left is wisdom, a wisdom pleasingly obvious, both to ourselves and to other people. 

This again is mastery. But we can also look on our practice not as the banishment of delusion but as the liberation of delusion from the body of our certainty—from the body of our love and hate. Imagine the vast energy of the dragon demon, chafing within the puny body of the monk.

It’s as if we’re always standing a little distance away from our delusion and, because of that slight distance,  it appears real. Real, permanent, known. 

But if we charge towards this delusion with our whole body, the body of Zazen,  then we can understand that it is none of these things. And more than one being is freed.

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347. Zen Master Zongmi

Zen Master Zongmi is a fascinating person. He lived from 780 to 840; almost right at the end of the classical development period of Tang Dynasty Chinese Zen. He was born about 10 years before Master Baso died. 

Zongmi produced a detailed commentary on the seven Zen schools that were in existence in his time, their practices and perspectives. 

He traced his lineage from Shen-hui who established The Southern School, but attributed that to his teacher Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch. 

Both are shadowy figures. Hui-neng, because although there was a Hui-neng historically, we know hardly anything about him. The ‘legend’ of Hui-neng, on the other hand, is almost entirely fictitious. 

Shen-hui is shadowy because, whilst very influential, he doesn’t appear in the subsequent lineage charts, possibly because of his schismatic qualities, possible because the dominant strain of Zen from the Ninth century onward, into the Song Dynasty, was Baso’s Hongzhou School (or rather, a peculiar later reconstruction of it, attributed – wrongly – to Rinzai), which traced its ancestry through Nangaku, another student of Hui-neng.

However, Zongmi’s interest was primarily in his own School (usually known as the Southern School, which he called Heze), and the other main schools: the Hongzhou School, the Ox-Head School and the Northern School. 

He describes the differences between these Schools using the simile of a bright jewel, which he borrows from The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment.

In this simile there’s a bright jewel called the Wishing Jewel. Next to this bright jewel is placed a black object symbolizing ignorance. The effect of that black object is to make the jewel appear black. 

He details the doctrinal differences between the Schools by how each School would describe this.

He describes the Northern School as saying that the intrinsic nature of the jewel is bright but that somehow it’s covered over by this blackness. We need to wipe the blackness off before the brightness can be revealed. That’s an unfair characterisation of the Northern School’s teaching (‘Northern’ is the term coined by Shen-hui; the School called itself The East Mountain School) which was nothing like that, but it fitted  into the sectarianism fostered by Shen-hui.

The Ox-Head School is the School which almost certainly wrote the Platform Sutra,  and which adhered most closely to Nagarjuna’s teachings of emptiness. Zongmi characterises them as saying, “so far as the jewel’s concerned, the blackness doesn’t exist because nothing – not the blackness, not the jewel, not the brightness – really exists, because everything is empty (ie interdependent).”

Zongmi characterises Hongzhou as saying the blackness is the jewel and apart from the blackness, there is no jewel, because they fail to see the original brightness of the jewel.

Zongmi was almost certainly not attacking Baso himself, for whom he had great respect. He was aiming at some of Baso’s successors who, I imagine, he felt neglected the centrality of practice.

He characterises his own School as saying that the brightness of the Jewel (Buddha nature) is real but that the blackness (delusion) isn’t real. The blackness is simply an aspect of the brightness. All particular phenomena are simply a function of the Jewel’s brightness. 

Zongmi was also very interesting in having an unusual model of practice. His model is sudden awakening followed by gradual practice.  The sudden awakening is a kind of visceral recognition of the truths of impermanence, interdependence, no-self, non duality and so on. Some kind of rudimentary, urgent understanding of that, not simply as a kind of belief; but as something felt, followed by and grounding gradual practice. The function of practice wasn’t to ‘gain’ enlightenment, as everything is originally enlightened, but to attend to the karmic afflictions which have caused these illusions of separation and self to be generated and maintained.

Reading Zongmi acts as a corrective to the picture of Zen constructed during the Song Dynasty and projected backwards, with the reformulation of the Tang Masters of Baso’s lineage as iconoclasts. His habit of explaining common metaphors used in the Zen of his time is extremely helpful. And his theoretical  integration of Zen into wider Buddhism is useful in preventing us being trapped on Zen Island, swapping the same stories over and over.

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328. The nature of faith in Zen

In his practice instructions, Master Hongzhi advises us to practice with the faith that all beings are our ancestors. At least, that’s what we would take his instructions as meaning. 

What’s important to understand, with his instructions and those of all the other masters, is that they are not using representational language. They’re using descriptive language: they are not telling us how the world is or how it should be; or what practice is, or what practice should be, but rather, they’re describing what their world is and what their practice is. How it is for them.

Because all these masters are practising and existing within our common humanity, we can practice with the faith that what Hongzhi is saying is a true experience for him and so, with the faith that it can be a true experience for us. And, in a sense, faith makes it so.

The connection between expression and faith is different from what we might ordinarily imagine. Expression is not stating something universal, something out there which is ‘true’, but it is expressing how it is with this person. And through the expression of this person, we can come to understand that what this person is experiencing, I, too, can experience. Whether the jewel is endarkened or not, I can have faith that it is there.

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326. Bodhidharma’s ‘Wall Contemplation’

In Zen legend, Bodhidharma arrived in China from India, had his encounter with the Emperor and then went to Shaolin temple where he sat facing a wall for nine years. There’s pictures of this everywhere, showing Bodhidharma with dramatically bulging eyes.

When we sit facing the wall, we’re evoking that. 

The Chinese phrase which is rendered as, ‘wall contemplation’, is ‘pi-kuan’. Classical Chinese is notoriously terse. The expression means simply something like, ‘wall gazing’. It doesn’t say who’s doing the gazing – if it’s a person gazing at a wall or if it’s the wall gazing, or something else. The phrase is original to Bodhidharma.

Because of the pictorial representation, we think, without inquiring further, that the phrase simply means that Bodhidharma practised zazen facing the wall. Except, that isn’t really an explanation at all.

Given that the wall is plainly not the object of meditation, the phrase, I think, only makes sense when we interpret it as meaning that when we are sitting, we are like a wall gazing onto the world.

What does that suggest? Firstly, that the wall, like a tree, or a mountain, is rooted in the being of all things. It’s non-dual. Secondly, that the wall doesn’t differentiate. So the wall will see all beings, in all states, with the same ‘gaze’. 

In that sense, the wall is like a stone mirror. If we look at it in that way, then we can see a connection between this idea of wall gazing and the Alaya consciousness that we encounter in Yogacara. Bodhidharma was known for bequeathing to his successor the Lankavatara sutra, which is a Yogacara sutra.

The phrase is evocative and open-ended. We should approach it as we should approach all the teachings; not as a ‘puzzle’ to be solved and then never returned to, but like a person. For all the sutras, for all the teachings, it is like we’re encountering a person, who is not exhausted by definition and classification but who, from moment to moment, offers the opportunity of a living exchange about practice, which can change us, and change them.

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Master Hongzhi’s Practice instructions. Number 9: The Misunderstanding of Many Lifetimes

‘Emptiness is without characteristics. Illumination has no emotional afflictions.’

With piercing, quietly profound radiance, it mysteriously eliminates all scars.  Thus,one can know one; thus the self is completed. We all have the clear, wondrously bright field from the beginning. Many lifetimes of misunderstanding come only from distrust, hindrance and screens of confusion that we create in a scenario of isolation. With boundless wisdom journey beyond this, forgetting accomplishments. Straightforwardly abandon stratagems and take on responsibility. Having turned yourself around, accepting your situation, if you set foot on the path, spiritual energy will marvously transport you. Contact phenomena will total sincerity. Not a single atom of dust is outside yourself.’

For practice the most important thing is faith. Not belief, faith.

Specifically, faith in two things.

Firstly that when we read descriptions of practice such as this, no matter how apparently fantastical they first appear, we should understand them as a sincere attempt by a practitioner, a practitioner like ourselves, to express their actual experience.

Second, that the actual experience that this practitioner has had is experience which is  also available to us. What we should not do is make the language of description literal. We should not for instance, think that we must experience the bright field that Master Hongzhi talks about and if we can’t experience that, our practice is worth nothing.

We need to understand that the experience that Master Hongzhi and other practitioners write about in their own way is available to everyone, but the experience of each person will be different, and hence the expression. Master Hongzhi  experienced a bright field. Other  people might experience a profound connectedness, or a great, luminous silence, or a sense of a dynamic interconnected body. If you wait impatiently for the bright field to appear, you will remain in darkness forever.

We are always striving to express our experience in language, but we must understand that our language and the language of all our teachers is descriptive language, and hence, to a greater or lesser extent, unique. It is not telling us  what we should experience. Each experience is another brushstroke in creation.

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277. The Mind Verses Competition

One of the founding myths of the Zen School in China is the Mind Verses Competition between Shen-xui and Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch. All the subsequent Zen figures–Baso, Sekito, Rinzai, Joshu, everyone–trace their lineage through him.

In the story, which is sometimes known as the mind verses competition, the Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen asks his monks to write a verse to demonstrate their understanding. His senior disciple,Shen-xui is the only one who responds. He composes a verse which reads: 

The body is the Bodhi tree

The mind a bright mirror’s stand

Always polish assiduously 

So that dust does not gather

In the story Hui-neng was resident in the monastery at the time, not as a monk but as a labourer, and he was illiterate. He asked someone to explain the verse to him and then asked someone to write his reply, which went as follows. 

Bodhi originally has no tree

Nor the mirror a stand

The Buddha nature is always clear and bright

Where is there room for dust?

When the Fifth Patriarch heard Hui-neng’s verse, he secretly gave him the transmission, making him the Sixth Patriarch rather than Shen-xui, and Hui-neng then clandestinely left the monastery in the dead of the night.

The problem with the story is that it is completely made up. All those people existed, both would have been at Hung-jen’s monastery at some time,  but they certainly weren’t there together.

Shen-xui was a very prominent meditation teacher at the end of the Seventh century, and had the patronage of Empress Wu.

Hui neng is a manufactured person. There was someone of that name, that much we know, but we also know that everything attributed to him is created later, primarily in ‘The Platform Sutra,’which contains these verses. 

The interpretation given to these two verses over time was that Shen-xui’s perspective was deficient because it allegedly suggested a gradualistic model of practice: if we practice assiduously enough,we get the mirror.The criticism that Hui neng made is that practice serves no purpose unless we have a primary insight into emptiness. If we don’t have that insight we can practice as long and as hard as we like, to no effect

Let’s look at Shen-xui’s poem.

The bodhi tree is the tree under which the Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment. It’s a special type of Fig tree, with heart shaped leaves which lives for a very long time. I’ll talk more about it another time, but for our purposes, that’s not the part of the poem which is criticised, it’s the remainder which is accused of fostering a gradualistic approach. 

However, Shen-xui does not say that the personal mind is the mirror. He says that the mind is the mirror’s stand. 

To understand what that means you need to know that in the China of that period, mirrors were made of metal, so required to be polished consistently to retain their powers of reflection. And they were also round, so if they didn’t have a stand, they were likely to just roll away.

So the metaphor of the mind being the mirror’s  stand is quite a subtle metaphor. It’s clearly not saying that through practice I somehow attain enlightenment, but rather that it is the effort of my whole being, my body and my mind, which enables the mirror, which is not mine to manifest here. The mirror is not my personal possession, it is not something which I ever attain. 

So the criticism that is made of Shen-xui isn’t fair. And we don’t know if he even wrote the poem. But whether he did or not, I’ll comment on it further.

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Master Hongzhi’s Practice Instructions; Number 28

‘All Beings Are Your Ancestors’

‘Fully appreciate the emptiness of all dharmas. Then all minds are free and all dusts vanish, and the original brilliance shining everywhere. Transforming according to circumstances, meet all beings as your ancestors. Subtly illuminate all conditions, magnanimous beyond all duality, clear and desireless the wind in the pines and the moon in the water are content in their elements. Essentially you exist inside emptiness and have the capacity to respond outwardly without being captured, like spring blossoming, like a mirror reflecting forms, So Hongzhi (or Wanshi in Japanese) was an exceptional Soto zen master, active round about 1130 -1150 in Song dynasty China. He expresses himself in these wonderful, rich poetic terms, but they contain a trap for us, that trap is essentially that we imagine he is using symbolic language. So when he refers to moon we might say- he’s meaning enlightenment. When he refers to wind – he might mean delusion, or possibly interdependence. When he is referring to the pines – who knows maybe a practitioner, but it will be something. And the problem with us reading the Chinese masters that way is

that we don’t see what they are trying to do, which is essentially an act of description. Description through evoking a kind of feeling in us.

In his recent book on Hongzhi ‘Cultivating the Empty Field – The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi’

Taigen Dan Leighton does us a wonderful service, both in bringing this teacher to greater attention but also in setting the context and in setting the background of his teaching.

Please investigate this great master.

Finally Dan Leighton’s wonderful website – Ancient Dragon.org- also has a really helpful article which is called ‘Hongzhi, Dogen and the background to Shikantaza’ which really helps to establish the connection between Hongzhi and Dogen and hence illuminates a whole aspect of Dogen who I think all to often is seen as an ahistorical character.