Tag: Zen

What Dogen refers to as The great mystical power is not restricted by circumstance, location or time. 

What is it? 

When we look at our lives, we often see a kind of dichotomy.

One side is what we variously call our conditioning, our karma, our fear, our anger, our pain, our poison. 

And on the other is something else. What we might provisionally call love, or compassion or openness or something else. 

And the two sides are dramatically different. And they don’t appear to be equal, often it’s as if love or compassion is like a tiny sliver of light within the darkness, perhaps even just a sliver within memory. 

Whereas the poison that we experience sometimes fills up our whole awareness. It seems dominant.

But what we need to understand is that this poison that we have is limited by time and space and circumstances. It is not a genuine obstruction. And what we perceive as a sliver of light is in reality like a great fire. It is not a question of turning away or turning towards. 

And this great fire endures.

Everything else is just noise and shadow.

When the Buddhist sutras arrived in China, they arrived in a disorderly way. Sutras that had been written over quite a long period, more than 500 years, arrived randomly.

 The Chinese needed to make sense of these often contradictory sutras. 

One way was that they ordered them chronologically in terms of their content. So, for instance, they would say that the Flower Garland Sutra dated from the earliest period of the Buddha’s teaching because it dealt with his enlightenment experience, and the Nirvana Sutra was the latest sutra, because it dealt with the Buddha’s death. 

Another way that they organised material was by breaking it down into different schools. This wasn’t helped by them erroneously thinking that Nagarjuna and his school came after Yogacara, the “consciousness only” school, when it was actually the other way around. 

In the ninth century, coming towards the end of the prominence of Tang Dynasty Buddhism in China, Zen [and Hua-yen] Master Zongmi worked out a fourfold classification. 

In his classification there were three cryptic teachings and one, as it were, explicit teaching: his teaching, zen teaching. And the classification was done that way because he would say that the meaning of the first three groupings was implicit. What’s meant by that is that the teachings are in a strange sense preparatory, something both destructive and constructive. The destruction is clearing away the whole mass of beliefs and structures which stop us from living fully, but what and how that life is is left implicit. 

That’s why he called these teachings ‘teachings of cryptic meaning’.

 In his scheme, you firstly have Hinayana which denies the existence of the self, but affirms the existence of dharmas, the constituent parts of reality.

The clustering around the illusory self, which is the cause of so much suffering, is broken. But the constructed world – constructed by our karma, by our culture, by language and so on, remains intact  keeping a dualism between person and the world. 

So as an antidote to that the second teaching arises,Yogacara, which denies the existence of both self, and dharmas, saying that everything is “mind only”.

But that creates further problems. If the mind exists, we can aspire to various stages of consciousness development. So clinging, attachment – the cause of our difficulties in the first place – can re-emerge in a more subtle form. 

To remedy that we then have Nagarjuna, who says that both self and world and mind are all empty, so there’s nothing to cling to (or to seek to grasp). 

But the problem which Nagarjuna makes visible is that his solution appears to suggest a sort of nihilism, where nothing matters. This misunderstanding seems to have been endemic ever since, and is often there in our own time whenever Nagarjuna is thought of as being a forerunner of modern philosophy rather than as a religious figure endeavouring to map out a positive life by demolishing what gets in the way of that, the whole conceptual world.

In Zongmi’s scheme this misunderstanding necessitates the fourth teaching, Zen, which is distinctive because it is the only one which is explicit about the purpose of Buddhism. Explicit because it has a clear and stated positive message. Which is the belief in what is variously called ’ or ‘mind ground’ or ‘Buddha potentiality’ or ‘Buddha nature’, amongst others.

Distinctive because for the first time, there is an explicitly stated positive basis for our true life, after all the negative obstructions have been cleared out of the way. 

Yet, in Zongmi’s account, the teaching method of Zen teachers is the same as the first three approaches; it’s negative, to clear the conceptual nonsense out of the way. To remove the confusion which stops the student from seeing their true nature. 

The language of classical ( 600-1300 AD) Chinese Zen is particularly difficult for us to understand, but we need to make the effort to understand it because if we don’t we’re likely in our Zen practice to be gradually subsumed by the dominant trend in the West, which is concerned with psychological wellness and individual development. And it’s important

also that we understand that language, not in some abstract or scholastic way, but in terms of our own practice. 

A good example of a word which arises continuously (originally in the writings of the Chinese Zen masters of the Tang dynasty period and immediately before is  ‘MIND’. By ‘mind’, confusingly for us, the Chinese sometimes mean exactly what we mean by mind: the configuration of thoughts, memories, self-identity and so on which make up what we call the self. 

But what they also mean by mind is something entirely different from that. Which they sometimes call ‘mind-ground’, or use metaphors like the bright mirror. And what that means in relation to our sitting is that fundamental level of experience where, as it were, the space inside us and, as it were, the space outside us, is the one alive and charged space within which everything is held: these thoughts, this body, the bodies of all other beings. And the characteristics of that  ‘mind’ are openness, calmness, serenity, compassion, and so on.

And when some masters make statements like “mind is world” that’s what they’re alluding to, mind not as a philosophical statement about the real nature of the universe, like some kind of contribution to quantum theory from eighth century China, nor Idealism, but mind as the fundamental level of experience, this experience during Zazen. And often they (the Chinese Masters) will use the metaphor of the ocean. And in understanding all these metaphors, it’s helpful to understand a distinction which they make between substance and function [sometimes nature and function].

So, nature/substance is the irreducible (underlying) specificity of what something is, and function is its various manifestations. in the case of water, for instance, the substance of its nature is that it’s wet (it’s always and necessarily this) but one of its functions (ie what it sometimes manifests as) is that it’s stormy, another of its functions is that it may save someone ( who is dying of thirst) or drown someone. There’s all these different functions, but the one underlying substance. And we can understand the mind on that basis as well. It is this underlying calm, open, aliveness. And (the waves of) our thoughts are, as it were, one function of that. The assumptions behind this are profoundly optimistic.

It’s not that we need to get rid of these thoughts, but that we need to understand them. So we need to understand that our thoughts at the outset, in one sense at least, are illusory: they are not something we need to get rid of, they are something that we need to understand. 

So we need to make an effort to try and grasp this very different way of thinking. Otherwise we’ll just interpret the literature, particularly the Koan literature in a very superficial way.

The Japanese word satori is variously translated as realisation, verification, awakening and enlightenment, amongst others. The reason for this breadth is that it encompasses three distinct Chinese Expressions. 

The first is ‘practice realisation/verification: one hears the Buddhist teachings on impermanence, interdependence and so on. One then  practices and the practice verifies the teaching— you realise it’s true.

The second is something like asleep/awakening. We  awaken from the dream of the self or we awaken within the dream of the self. 

The third is delusion/enlightenment. The ideogram for it is quite interesting. The top part is something like ‘mind’ and the bottom part of it has these little legs.  The suggestion is that in a state of delusion these little legs, prompted by thoughts, carry us to this place, that place, and this other place, all without ceasing. By implication Enlightenment is the stopping of this -not  of the thought but being carried hither and thither without cease. And thus, by necessary  implication,  our aim as practitioners is not to void the mind, but it is to understand our egoic latching on to thoughts and those thoughts then taking us everywhere in the kind of habitual distracted agitated way that many of us experience.

What we need to understand is that these little legs of delusion can only take us somewhere when we’re on the ground of the self. Otherwise, the little legs don’t work. When we’re ‘standing’ on emptiness, they don’t work. 

This, all our mental activity, all our thinking doesn’t remain the distraction that (from a self-centred point of view) we think it is,  but rather becomes a manifestation of the interdependence of everything. So we don’t need to go looking for somewhere outside of ourselves to find the truth of what the Buddha was talking about. The very mundane activity of banal thought which, when we start meditation we think we need to get away from, is that very thing which, when seen from other than a self-centred perspective is, in itself, interdependence.  

The Japanese word usually translated as ‘original’ occurs in many distinctive phrases—‘original nature’, ‘original face’, ‘original person’, and so on. 

When we hear this phrase ‘original nature’ or ‘original person’, we might think that underneath the grime of our karma is something which is our true

Essence. 

The problem, as often occurs in the translation of Japanese terms to English, is the translation’s wrong. The Japanese word which is translated as ‘original’ has two parts. The first part does mean original or true, amongst other meanings.

But what of the second part?

That part means ‘portion’ or ‘part of’. So when you put the two together and add ‘person’, the phrase ‘original person’ doesn’t mean that there’s something inside of you which is originally you. What it is saying is that the ‘original person’ is everything in non-duality, and you are a part of that wholeness. 

One of the reasons for the peculiar forms Chinese Buddhism took was a recognition that there’s an apparent contradiction at the heart of Buddhism. If we say that life is suffering and what causes suffering is desire, and so we should be free of desire, then isn’t that itself a desire?

Likewise in the Shin Jin Mei where it says “The Great Way is not difficult, only avoid picking and choosing”. Isn’t the intentional avoidance of picking and choosing itself a kind of preference? 

It’s because of this recognition that there was a shift within Chinese Buddhism from an intentional state to a natural state—from an intentional state to a spontaneous state. This, fortuitously, chimed in well with existing Chinese culture.

Yet we can’t will ourselves to be natural; we can’t will ourselves to be spontaneous; any more than we can will ourselves to be surprised. 

But despite that, naturalness and spontaneity plainly arise.

If we have naturalness rather than intentional action as our basic position, then we can start to understand two associated things. 

One is that enlightenment is already here, so we’re not required to drive ourselves forward to attain something that we don’t presently have. Rather, we need to change our perspective, take our blinkers off.

The second is the position of faith. Underlying naturalness is a deep faith that this world and this person is complete and perfect as is. We don’t need to keep flapping the wings of egotistical spiritual self-improvement for fear that we fall into nothingness. Rather, the ground of faith [Buddha Nature, if you want to use that language], is always here, like an invisible sun. 

The verses of faith mind starts:

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 is not that things cease to exist, but that they cease to exist ‘in the old way’, that is, dualistically. Me here. The world way out there. Each of us, looking for ropes, looking for snares.

When we sit we relax our gaze; the world isn’t ‘out there’ any longer. It is not sliced up into this and that. Any longer

If our gaze is relaxed, then our gaze includes our eyes, and the whole head and the whole body. The gaze encompasses everything

Is this not ceasing to exist in the old way?

Zen is transmitted I Shin Den Shin. ‘Shin’ is mind, or heart. So, from one real person to another. But how many is the real person? One, or many, or both?

‘Mind’ doesn’t mean the personal, karmic mind, obviously. And, likewise, heart.

In the Shiho, the document of transmission, the whole lineage is written out, one name after the other. And all the names are connected by a single red thread. A heart thread. So all the names are an expression of that heart.

This heart.