Feb
26. Bowing is one
of the universal practices in Buddhism; we see it in all schools
and traditions. Not only that; in many cultures, (e.g. India ,
Japan ), bowing is the standard form of social greeting. We now
know that even animals bow.
Suzuki
Roshi was fond of bowing and often taught about it. Once he said,
“We should bow even in our last moment.” We now know that he wrote
his college thesis on bowing. Suzuki Roshi kept his ritual observances
with us quite simple, but bowing was something he encouraged us
to do.
As
with many practices in Buddhism, bowing may have meaning for us
outside the ones intended. Bowing, particularly to an altar, has
intimations for us of “idol worship” and undemocratic subservience.
In order for Buddhism to work for us, we need to be able to digest
it. Sometimes this means adapting us to it; other times, it means
adapting it to us.
Suzuki
Roshi's Buddhist teaching lineage is the Soto Zen school of Japan,
and he was a Soto Zen priest. I spent many years before and after
Suzuki Roshi's death at the San Francisco Zen Center, but I have
also studied in other Buddhist lineages (Tibetan Buddhism and
Vipassana). What I learned by doing this is that there is a wide
variety of ritual practice and observance in these American Buddhist
lineages, ranging from almost no observance to quite a bit.
Japanese
Soto Zen has a lot of ritual observance, and some branches of
Soto Zen (though not all) emphasize a precise adherence to ritual
forms—a style that we see at the San Francisco Zen Center, Green
Gulch, and other Soto Zen centers throughout the country.
Vimala
Sangha was not founded as a branch of the Soto Zen school (though
that is its teaching lineage) and we have not automatically adopted
all of Soto Zen's ritual practices. Rather, as our website home
page mentions, Vimala Sangha honors all Buddhist schools and traditions,
and from the start we were committed to developing our ritual
forms and observances in that spirit. We began with the few simple
ritual observances that Suzuki Roshi taught us (how to sit, bow,
and walk). Beyond that, I would like to see us develop our ritual
practices as a group, with open discussion and time to learn and
understand the meaning and purpose of each ritual.
Soon
we are going to try a new ritual, the Well Being ceremony. This
is a ceremony that is widely performed in Zen Centers around the
country. In this ceremony, we chant the “Ten Line Compassion verse
of Kanzeon “ after which anyone may call out the name of a person
who has died, is ill, or who is in their heart. A true ritual
is transformative; it means something to us, and changes us.
The
meaning and purpose of this ritual is so clear that I hope it
can become the model for other rituals we may adopt.
I
look forward to doing the Well Being ceremony once a month, and
working together to develop other Vimala Sangha ritual practices
in a collaborative spirit. -- LEW
Feb
12. We
left off last blog with the notion of “ultimate refuge”, which
we can identify with zazen or sitting practice itself. We can
say it is ultimate because resting in pure being or open, spacious
awareness is not anything in particular, but it includes everything
in general. This is simultaneously a simple and also vexing idea,
partly because it is not an idea at all. We can't really grasp
what sitting is with our thinking mind, nor should we.
Sitting
practice puts the thinking mind to rest, since it is not at all
necessary. We may have thoughts while we sit, since thoughts are
a natural and normal artifact of waking consciousness. It is a
common misunderstanding that in sitting practice we suppress all
thought. The historical Buddha investigated this practice—a common
yogic practice in his time—and rejected it as a mere temporary
respite from the human condition, and not a true transformation
of suffering.
Nevertheless,
the thinking mind does not really need to be involved in sitting.
Suzukii Roshi described the mind of sitting practice as “ready
mind”. This means that all the equipment of waking consciousness
is fully mobilized and available, but it is not involved in anything.
He likened this state to that of a frog, sitting fully alert on
a lily pad. It appears that the frog is not doing anything, but
should a fly come by then zap! We see that all along
the frog was fully awake.
To
take refuge in this “ready mind” means to abide in a state of
alert receptivity, taking in everything, not excluding anything.
Actually, this state of mind is not really a “state”—as though
it is something we enter and exit—it is reality itself. It is
always accessible to us; in fact, it is us.
Even
though throughout the centuries Buddhism has produced a truly
massive amount of scripture, commentary, and teaching—and the
more than 10,000 books in English on the subject continue this
process—it is probably not an exaggeration to say that one period
of sitting practice is move valuable than any of that verbiage.
Our busy minds need verbiage; otherwise, we may feel disoriented
and confused. Words are a kind of refuge; I called them “teaching
refuge” in the last blog. But sitting practice—ultimate refuge—includes
all the words and goes beyond and beneath them. Sitting practice
itself is impossible to describe in words—not because it is too
complicated, but because it is too simple.
It
is the ultimate human activity. --LEW
Jan
25. In
our last few meditation sessions, I have been speaking about refuge.
The most basic prayer or affirmation in Buddhism, one followed
by all schools throughout history, is:
I
take refuge in Buddha
I
take refuge in Dharma
I
take refuge in Sangha
Buddha,
Dharma and Sangha—in ordinary parlance, the teacher, the teachings,
and the community—is known as the Triple Treasure. Refuge can
be understood in three ways, which I like to call teaching refuge,
heart refuge, and ultimate refuge.
First
of all, we should say a few words about refuge. Refuge is something
like “shelter from the storm”; it is a place or state of safety
and protectedness. We take refuge in many things—family, money,
a belief system. In Judeo-Christian religion, belief in God is
the essential refuge.
“Teaching
refuge” means to take refuge in the teachings and doctrines of
Buddhism—the four noble truths, the eight-fold path, and so on.
For Westerners who came to Buddhism as adults, through reading
books or hearing teaching, this is the initial refuge. To the
extent Buddhism's teachings resonate with our own intuition about
how things are, this kind of refuge is excellent. All Buddhists
understand and accept this kind of refuge.
“Heart
refuge” is the inner, emotional component of teaching refuge.
It is the warm feeling we have when we come to sit in meditation
with others, the sense of reverence and familiarity we sense standing
before a statue or picture of Buddha. Heart refuge comes naturally
to anyone born as a Buddhist in a Buddhist society, and may take
a while to cultivate as an adult convert. Meditation practice
opens our heart to this level of refuge, and makes us trust the
practice and teachings at a deeper level.
“Ultimate
refuge,” for us as meditation Buddhists, is meditation practice
itself. It is the vivid experience of simply being present, of
existing in this time and place. As Suzuki Roshi often said, “That
you are here is the ultimate fact.” Ultimate refuge is a particular
quality of contemplative Buddhist traditions such as our Zen tradition.
It is hard to say much about it, but it the deepest level of trust
we have in the practice.
More
on refuge next blog---LEW
Jan.
8, 2008. On New Year's Day evening,
by popular demand, we had our regular Tuesday night sitting. The
turnout was quite good. It seemed that many Sangha members wanted
to start the new year on their cushions! During the sitting, I
did a guided meditation on breathing in compassionate awareness.
Many
people are now familiar with the Tibetan Buddhist practice of
Tonglun, which literally means “sending and receiving.” This is
a practice in which the practitioner visualizes breathing in the
suffering of a person or group of people, and breathing out the
compassionate healing light and energy of Avalokitesvara, the
Bodhisattva of Compassion.
The
kind of detailed visualization taught in traditional Tonglun is
not characteristic of the Zen tradition, but Suzuki Roshi spoke
often about sitting with a warm and compassionate feeling in the
chest, or heart, and my own experience is that the breath is a
universal vehicle of compassionate connection. I discussed this
with a Tibetan Buddhist teacher whom I know well, and under whom
I have studied the traditional TongLun practice. I told her that
sometimes I find that I am spontaneously feeling my breath connected
to the breath of another person I am thinking about. What, I asked,
is the connection to TongLun? Is this a form of TongLun? Her response
was that TongLun is based on a quite natural and simple connection
between our breath and others' breaths, and that my experience
was indeed an intuitive version of the TongLun spirit.
Next
Blog I will describe in more detail the “Zen-style” sending and
receiving that we practiced on New Year's Day, and I will encourage
you to take it up as an extension and heart expression of our
Zen sitting way. --- LEW
Dec.
12. Recently I was at a conference with teachers from all three
meditation traditions--Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan Vajrayana.
Naturally, participants in the conference wanted to understand
the similarities and differences in doctrine and methods of the
three teaching vehicles.
Setting
aside Vajrayana for the moment, let us take a look at Vipassana--the
teaching tradition of such centers as Spirit Rock--and Zen. Doctrinally,
Vipassana comes from the Theravada, or Southeast Asian, stream
of Buddhist teaching, while Zen, which arose in China , is one
of the many schools of Mahayana, or Bodhisattva Vow, Buddhism.
There are many differences based on the cultural package ( Japan
vs. Thailand , for example) and underlying doctrine (Heart Sutra
vs. the Mindfulness Sutra). But what about the meditation practice
itself?
The
reality is that all schools of Buddhist meditation have the same
purpose--to help practitioners liberate themselves from ego-clinging
and open the heart of compassion through the realization of the
impermance and non-substantiality of all beings and things. In
other words, a Buddhist mature in practice is an open-hearted,
loving, generous person in all situations. This is true regardless
of what meditation tradition the person is from.
That
being said, Zen teaching, as compared with Vipassana, is probably
less conceptual, more aesthetic, intuitive, or even artistic.
Since I am a musician, trained in that art since a young age,
I can resonate with this--it is probably why I was attracted to
Zen in the first place. You can read many books about music; in
fact, I majored in music in college, and studied music theory,
great music from different eras, compositional and orchestration
technique. I also mastered the technical aspects of piano--scales,
arpeggios, fingering, and so on. But music itself--the essence
of making music as music--is not really something that can be
taught. You have to be around musicians, do music a lot, and more
or less pick it up. The technique itself is not music. In the
same way, the technique of Buddhist meditation is not exactly
Buddhism; in the end, Buddhism is you.
This
is probably true as much for Vipassana as it is for Zen, but the
Zen style of teaching meditation is to keep the teaching, the
"technique" if you will--to a minimum, and let the practitioner
pick it up in the doing of it. Guidance is less systematic, less
scripture based, more "body to body," as one of my Zen
teacher friends likes to say.
In
the end, it is more a matter of style and affinity than of content.
I am quite comfortable at Spirit Rock, and feel the teachers there
are teaching the same methods that I teach. But I carry a distinctive
"Zen" flavor, or style, which I picked up from my own
teachers, and which the Spirit Rock teachers can feel. In the
end, it is not the style or tradition or practice that counts
the most, but whether a person actually does the practice, and
brings everything to the practice. As Suzuki once said in answer
to a person who asked him, "What is Nirvana?" He replied,
"Seeing one thing through to the end." -- LEW
Nov.
24. I
have been talking for the last few weeks about feeling-tone, that
primal quality of experience that is pleasant, unpleasant, or
neutral. This is different, or more fundamental, than an emotion
per se. For example, there are various negative emotions—anger,
fear, jealousy—which each have their individual flavor, but all
have an unpleasant feeling-tone.
Feeling-tone
is fundamental to all life; every creature and living thing has
some version of it. In human beings, feeling-tone is far down
the neurological ladder. Except for those with meditation experience,
the ability to focus on pure feeling-tone is rare. Usually what
we focus on is the actions or thoughts that follow from it. The
life-story that we identify as self or ego includes a long history
of feeling tone, of wounds and rewards, pains and pleasures that
deeply condition our responses to things in the present.
Buddhist
teaching identifies our response to feeling-tone as a basic cause
of unnecessary human suffering. This is the second noble truth—the
cause of suffering is tanha. This term tanha is
usually translated as “thirst,” or "craving," but it
could equally be translated as “hunger.” Our literal hunger for
food is a good example of how tanha causes suffering.
The actual sensation of hunger is not so bad, actually. It is
not nearly as strong as cutting your finger or a migraine headache.
But hunger has “hooks” into our deep emotional life. Even a mild
sensation of hunger drives us to the refrigerator. We may not
even consciously be aware of any hunger pang sensation at all,
but we find ourselves opening the ice cream carton.
Hunger
by itself is all right, just as food itself is all right. There
is nothing wrong with basic hunger; it helps us survive, and takes
care of our need for nourishment. But our hunger does not stop
there; we also crave all sorts of intangible nourishments. Recognition,
companionship, wealth, power, safety, popularity, fame, are all
ego foods that we crave. And our craving never seems to stop.
Our ego needs can become insatiable.
This
kind of thirst/hunger leads directly to suffering to the extent
it is unconscious. When thirst/hunger is conscious, when the spaciousness
of meditation allows us to see it as it is, it ceases to be an
affliction. As the classic Zen saying goes, “When hungry, I eat;
when tired, I sleep.” Unpacked, this statement means, “I know
how to distinguish legitimate needs from ego needs. If my body
needs food, I eat food, but I do not eat food because I am lonely
or unhappy. My hunger is conscious.”
Conscious--a
good translation for the word Buddha— awake. -- LEW
Nov.
1. This
Tuesday I gave a talk about Halloween from a Buddhist point of
view. I started by noting that we live in a land of no festivals,
or very few, in the religious or sacred sense of the word. Certainly
each religion in America has its own celebrations, but as a whole
society we have almost no festivals that allow us to be “other”
than we ordinarily are, to join us together in sacred enactment.
I read that in the middle ages in Europe , there were 100 holidays
a year, many of them lasting for several days. What a time that
must have been! The daily grind and suffering of human life shared
and revealed in community.
Halloween
was of course originally a “pagan” holiday, co-opted by the Church
as “All Hallow's Eve”. “Pagan” just means country, or rural. It
was a time when the dark forces that each of us carry inside us
could be unmasked by wearing a costume, enacting what we hide.
There is release in this, and renewal. Buddhism grew up in 5 th
century B.C. in the polytheistic surround of Brahmanic Hinduism.
There were many gods, each representing a psychic force or energy,
some benevolent, some mischievous, some patently evil. Buddhism
understood each of these gods as just another kind of deluded
or unawakened being; the Buddha himself was supposed to have taught
the gods, who gathered around him in the 4 th watch of the night.
That's what these gods really wanted, after all; teaching about
liberation.
When
we sit in meditation, we enact this same drama. The container
of zazen posture, the stability of breathing and concentration,
allow what we think of as “ordinary consciousness” to broaden
and widen. We penetrate the unconscious energies of our psyche
with our own awakeness, and immediately liberate them. There is
a story about Milarepa, the 12 th century Tibetan Buddhist yogin.
Once when he was meditating in his cave, he was attacked by demons.
Today we would say perhaps he was threatened with psychosis. Instead
of meeting these demons with fear, he invited them in, and fed
them. They were satisfied, and dissolved. And the sixth ancestor
of Zen, Hui Neng, famously said, “Liberate all the sentient beings
of your own mind.”
That,
we might say, is the inner meaning of Halloween, and the way the
Halloween represents how zazen liberates us from afflictions,
from our own inner demons. The demons come to our door in our
sitting, like masked, costumed, fearsome beings, and we feed them.
We give them what they really want, which is awareness, or awakeness.
We dissolve them by seeing them as they are.
Halloween,
of course, has become trivialized and commercialized beyond all
recognition. It seems to be just another profit opportunity for
Walmart. But there is something else beyond kids and costumes
and candy. There is a yearning to bring forth that which imprisons
us—our fears, angers, revenge fantasies, disappoints, and tragedies—and
to celebrate them.
That
is why, in zazen, we do not push away our dark thoughts. We let
them arise, see them as they are, and watch them subside and disappear.
In the sacred container of zazen, they are harmless. They are
fed, and are satisfied. And then when we return to real life,
they are less sinister, less powerful.
We
need more festivals, inner and outer. We need more Halloweens.
More Halloweens, less bombs. -- LEW
Oct.
10. The
word “karma” has almost become an English word. We hear phrases
like “good karma,” “it's my karma,” and so on. Literally, the
word karma in Sanskrit means “action.” In Hindu philosophy
and teaching, it came to be synonymous with the good or bad results
of our actions, and is often associated with a fatalistic view
of life; our station in life is due to our karma from previous
actions or lives.
In
Buddhism, which is a liberative teaching, karma came to have a
somewhat different meaning. It still means “action,” but it specifically
means action in the present moment, that produces a result in
the future. The result of past action is, in Buddhism, termed
“fruit” or “result” of previous karma. The importance of this
distinction is that karma is something we are creating now; specifically,
it means to perpetuate or rekindle habitual or unconscious tendencies,
such as greed, confusion, and so on. The purpose of Buddhist practice
is to liberate ourselves from this ceaseless habitual tendency,
and to instead act from a spontaneous awareness of the present
situation, unhindered by past habits.
In
our meditation practice, this is particularly important. The container
of the zazen posture, and the concentrated awareness on our body
and breath, create some space around our habitual tendencies.
What's more, in that space of calm, we can see our habitual patterns
arise, persist, and fall away. In other words, we have awareness
of the whole cycle. This awareness means everything for our
liberative teaching. In that awareness, our habitual tendencies
lose their power. It is only when they operate unconsciously,
outside of our mindful awareness, that they produce suffering,
for ourselves and others. So it is not just that the regular practice
of zazen attenuate and reduce our reliance on habitual tendencies.
In each moment of aware zazen practice, these tendencies are liberated.
We
may think, Oh, I am overwhelmed with my distracted thoughts and
ideas in zazen; I am not at all liberated. Yes, but that very
“being overwhelmed” means that awareness is there. Outside of
zazen, in the rough and tumble of daily life, we are not nearly
as aware of our internal process. As our sitting matures, particularly
if we sit all day or several days, that overwhelmed quality dies
away, and we are able to rest in the calm space of awareness itself,
which holds everything, good and bad.
In
this way we can think of zazen as non-karmic activity, or an activity
outside the ordinary process of karma. Karma, in Buddhism, can
be defined as “habitual actions in the present.” Zazen is awareness
of karma, acceptance of karma, liberation from karma. -- LEW
Sept.19
Recently I have been working with
some other teachers in our Suzuki-Roshi Zen lineage on the subject
of "to study Buddhism is to study the self." This is
the famous dictum of Dogen, the founder of our Soto Zen lineage.
Suzuki Roshi had his own way of expressing this dictum; he said,
"To study Buddhism is to study yourself," and "When
you are you, then Zen is Zen."
In
our teacher group, we came up with our own paraphrase of "When
you are you, then Zen is Zen: "Study the self by being yourself."
"To study the self" sounds good; it is remarkably similar
to Socrates' core teaching, "Know thyself." But in practice,
what does it mean? What does the cryptic phrase "When you
are you, then Zen is Zen" really signify?
The
Zen tradition, among the various contemplative traditions of Buddhism,
is particularly intuition-based, and lack a specific meditation
curriculum or a specific set of guided meditation exercises (the
koan system, which are essentially oral teachings of
the classic Zen masters, is not exactly a curriculum, but that
is for another day). Zen is particularly suited for people who
want their meditation practice to be more self-guiding. Nevertheless,
we do have instructions, one of them being, "To study Buddhism
is to study the self." But what self? What does Dogen, or
Suzuki-Roshi, means by "the self" or "yourself?"
Used
in this sense, "self" does not mean a specific entity
that we need to figure out. It means something like "the
terrain of inner experience" or "subjectivity"
or "awareness." We inquire into self as a question mark,
not an answer. Who is it that we are? What is the nature or quality
of our sense of selfness, of being here? Who or what is the experiencer
of our sensory and mental world?
Most
of us come to Buddhism as adult converts; to us Buddhism is something
exotic, something from another culture or land. So we do not have
the gut feel for it that a person does who grows up in a Buddhist
culture from childhood. Our picture or sense of what it might
be comes from books, from what we have heard on meditation retreats,
teachers, friends who practice meditation, and so on. It can be
a confusing picture, particularly since there are many different
schools and approaches.
Our
Zen way is to cut through all of this with recourse to direct
and practical simplicity. We sit down, we settle our body, we
tune into the breath, and commence our direct experience of who
we are. For that is what the word "study" means in practice:
to directly experience who we are without intermeditation
or concept. Just to be here, present for each breath, breath after
breath, thought after thought--it's too simple! How can that be
all it is?
Of
course, the coursing in it isn't simple. The self that we experience
and study is an amalgam of many things : history, memory, projection,
imagination, emotion, a melange of thoughts and ideas. How confusing!
And yet to sit down and simply swim in it, day after day, is a
kind of learning or study that is hard to grasp conceptually.
In the Zen approach, it is as though we are dropped into deep
water and somehow, without quite knowing how, we begin to move
our arms and legs and learn to swim, to stay afloat.
And
the practice proceeds from there. More next week... LEW
August
26. Last week one of the Sangha members mentioned a saying
she had had tacked to her refrigerator for many years: “Things
are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.” This may seem
at first glance like one of those quasi-mystical plays on words
we see around and about, but an astute Buddhist might recognize
it as a version of the Heart Sutra's central teaching, “Form is
Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.” One part of Buddhist meditation
is the first part, to recognize that things are not what they
seem, to experience the familiar world of the senses as a kind
of illusion or virtual reality—form is emptiness. The other part
of meditation is to understand that, while this is so, nevertheless
there is not some separate, better world called “emptiness” that
we need to get to. This world is IT, or in the words of one 17
th century Japanese Zen teacher, “This very world is the Pure
Land .”
To
see both sides as a single, multi-faceted jewel is the Buddhist
teaching of liberation. Many religions have taught that there
is some other, wonderful world, perhaps a heaven, which we can
attain later by living good lives now in this difficult, suffering
human realm. Even popular Buddhism has this kind of idea in its
teaching of the Western Paradise, or Pure Land . The actual teaching
of Gautama Buddha and his generations of successors is that liberation
is not to be found in some other place, but right here. This very
world is the Pure Land .
But
how can this be so? This world is full of suffering and woe, and
our modern industrial society with all its technological wonders
has, in the end, not made it less so, especially when we see through
the propaganda and seductiveness of media, advertising, and celebrity
culture. We may in fact be destroying the very planet we live
on in the service of chasing this “other world” of material success.
So it would seem imperative that we all understand, as soon as
possible, that “things are not what they seem.” This “waking up”
from our self-created reality has been the theme of several recent
movies and books, such as The Matrix.
But
“Emptiness is Form” means that this same suffering world also
has all the raw material in it for liberation, for deep happiness
and contentment. We don't need to invent anything else. We don't
need to be different than we are. We simply need to sit still
and see ourselves and others truly, as we are, and to love what
we see, unconditionally.
Buddhist
teaching is not the world of either/or, but of both/and. This
is difficult for people brought up with a Western idea of logic—up
and down, good and bad, right and wrong—to understand. Both/and
means that we accept the contradictoriness of what we see and
hear just as it is. Suffering and liberation arise out of the
same ground of consciousness. Good and evil are two halves of
the same morality. Nirvana and Samsara—liberation and suffering—co-exist
in the same terrain.
Both/And
is not accessible or comprehensible by our logical, rational minds.
But the heart of compassion embraces both/and instinctively. This
is the inner meaning of the Buddhist teaching of equanimity—we
come to see everything and everyone as having the heart essence
of a Buddha, an awakened being.
“Things
are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise” is like loving
someone fully. You see all the way through them, all their faults
and weaknesses, but that does not diminish your love, it increases
it. Only to love someone because of their good looks, their money,
or their charm is not really love in its widest sense. The refrigerator
slogan is only mysterious to the mind of words and phrases. Some
other part of us hears the slogan and gets it. We think, Yes,
it is so, but how? More next week… Lew
August
11. Ma Tsu was a 7 th century Chinese Zen teacher, one
of the founders of the Zen tradition. When he was ill, a colleague
came to visit him and they had this dialogue:
Colleague:
How are you?
Ma
Tsu: Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha
This
is a very famous Zen koan, case #3 in the Blue Cliff Record, one
of the main koan compilations.
The
dialogue on its face is very cryptic—that is, until you know that
Sun Face Buddha and Moon Face Buddha are characters in a scripture,
and that Sun Face Buddha lives 1000 years and Moon Face Buddha
lives one day. So now we understand a little more; the dialogue
is about illness, and about the relationship of Zen practice to
illness, and Ma Tsu's answer is something like “living 1000 years,
living one day…”
Suzuki
Roshi gave a talk on this story in 1969, after a serious bout
with flu that left him with a lingering cough. He started about
by making light of his condition—“I wonder if my vocal cords will
work today”—and then telling this story about Ma Tsu. Among his
comments were the following:
Ma
Tsu was saying that whatever happened to him, he can accept it
as it is. Ordinary people cannot do this, cannot except everything
as it happens. Something which is good we may accept. But something
which we do not like we don't accept. And we compare one to the
other.
This
is how it is with illness, and with life and a whole. We would
prefer never to be ill; in our fantasies, we would like to live
1000 years, just like Sun Face Buddha. If we were told we had
one day to live, like Moon-Face Buddha, we would be crushed and
distraught. Ma Tsu is referring to this very human state of affairs
in his statement, and revealing his own state of mind after a
lifetime of Zen practice. “Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha—yes,
I am a human being too, I know the parameters of like and dislike,
of wishing and wanting, and I accept what happens. Maybe I will
get well. Or maybe I will die. Nobody knows. I accept it, Sun
Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha.”
As
adult converts to Buddhism, we tend to idealize and aggrandize
its teachings. Oh yes, I will be greatly enlightened and everything
will just fine from then on, we think. “Sun Face Buddha, Moon
Face Buddha” is not like that. Sun Face Buddha is very good. It
is like any situation that is going well for us—wealth, fame,
falling in love. Moon Face Buddha is very bad, like a death sentence.
How many people have we ever met who have the ability, like Ma
Tsu, to face each thing as it comes, with composure and grace?
Not many. It is indeed the highest aspiration of a human being,
to be so at one with our fate that all our energy can be devote
to serving and helping others.--LEW
June
24. My good friend and dharma brother Gil Fronsdal, who
leads the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and also holds
a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies, reminded me recently that on the
Buddhist stupas and monuments of ancient India there are numerous
depictions of dancing, singing, musical instruments and drums.
These ancient structures were built to honor the memory of the
historical Buddha, and often housed a relic—a fragment of bone,
perhaps—that was believed to be from the physical body of the
Buddha.
Not
too much is known of the festivals and celebrations that were
held at these sites, but clearly they were events full of “joyful
noise,” to quote from our own Bible. Perhaps they were designed
for the laity, or perhaps the monks joined in. Both monks and
laypeople were considered part of the ancient Buddhist Sangha,
so I suspect the latter.
Anyway,
because it is the meditation aspect of Buddhism that has appealed
to the West, the Dharma has somehow taken on a rather solemn,
even tight-lipped quality, in many Western Buddhist centers. I
think ancient peoples, and even modern Asian ones, had a more
flexible or mutable sense of identity and appropriate behavior.
In Japanese Zen temples, for example, the meditation hall is indeed
a solemn, strict environment, where monks carefully observe silence
and exact formality. But those same monks in other circumstances
can be relaxed and friendly, and might even be found at the local
karaoke bar, singing Frank Sinatra songs. One of these monks once
told a group of us who were visiting his monastery that his favorite
English word was “flexible,” which he pronounced “flekshible.”
A flexible identity—not a bad term for the result of lengthy Buddhist
meditation practice.
Gil
also told me that when he was traveling in Nepal , he came upon
a festival with a crowd of people dancing to the music of a rather
wild band of drummers, flautists and vina (Indian lute) players.
When he got closer he realized that what the band was singing
was Buddham Saranam Gocchami— “I take refuge in Buddha.”
This chant is typically chanted in solemn monotone in Western
Buddhist centers, which is certainly all right. But the example
from Nepal tells us there are many ways to expressed Buddhist
devotion and understanding.
I
am a musician and composer, and some of you have heard me in concert
playing my new musical style, “Mantra Music.” I recently performed
some of these pieces for the first time at Gil's Redwood City
center, and they were very well received. It is a special contribution
of Western religious traditions to incorporate music as a sacred
offering. I think we need a joyful liturgy for our Buddhist chants.
I am going to keep working on this, remembering the friezes of
dancing celebrants on the ancient Buddhist stupas of India . --
Lew
June
10. In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi
says this about the breath:
In
this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The
air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging
door. If you think ‘I breathe,' the ‘I' is extra. What we call
‘I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and exhale.
It
is interesting to reflect on this passage as it relates to commonly
held Western notions of “self” or “ego.” We tend to think of ego
more as a distinct territory, with an inside and outside. Suzuki
Roshi characterizes the real territory as limitless. Instead of
an inside and an outside, he says, “the inner world is limitless,
and the outer world is also limitless.”
He
does not deny that there is an inside or an outside, however,
only that there is any separation between them. It is a common
misunderstanding to say that the Buddha taught ‘no-self,' or the
non-existence of a self. What the Buddha did teach is more nuanced
than that. Scripturally speaking (in the Middle Length Sayings
of the Pali Canon, which purport to be the sermons of the Buddha)
the Buddha taught neither the existence or non-existence of a
self. When pressed on the matter, he remained silent. The actual
reality of our experience is beyond categories. It is too intimate
and direct for that.
This
is the “swinging door” image. The door (our breath) swings back
and forth, but we don't identify with the outside, the inside,
the door itself, or anything else. We just rest in the limitless
terrain of awareness itself.
Digression:
I can't help, when I think of this swinging door, of the old TV
Westerns from the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the swinging doors of the
saloon. I don't know why those TV saloons didn't have regular
doors, but those swinging doors were an important prop for the
sheriff (or the bad guy) coming through the door into the saloon.
You could see the outside through the doors, and the door kept
swinging after the sheriff came through. There was some kind of
authority or power in those swinging doors. End digression.
So
Suzuki Roshi is encouraging us to understand the actual teaching
of the Buddha regarding the nature of the self, through our experience
of the breath. The breath is not something we own, it is just
something that happens in our field of awareness. And that field
has no boundary, it is limitless. This is not an intellectual
idea, or a philosophical teaching. It is an actual immediate experience
that each of us can have. This is the approach of Zen. Before
we even study Buddhism, we sit and experience ourselves as we
are. And we notice where our attention is.
At
first, our attention is centered in our thinking, and we think
that our stream of thinking and memory is who we are. Then we
learn, through developing focus and concentration, to follow our
breathing, and we think that is who we are. But eventually, or
even immediately, or at any time, we can drop any focus of our
attention and just rest in our limitless awareness.
As
Suzuki says in conclusion: “When your mind is pure and calm enough
to follow this movement [of the breath], there is nothing: no
‘I', no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.” -- LEW
May
28. Memorial Day. Let us pause to remember the grief,
the suffering, and the pain that is being experienced by every
family whose son or daughter has been killed or injured in a war,
past and present. This is a very large number of people. May their
anguish be eased.
I
have been talking recently about concentration and its relationship
to our practice. Suzuki Roshi, in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,
had this to say about concentration:
Suppose
you are sitting under some extraordinary circumstances. If you
try to calm your mind, you will be unable to sit, and if you try
not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort.
The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing,
or concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. However, to concentrate
your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true
purpose is to see things as they are. . . and to let everything
go as it goes.
There
is a lot of teaching packed into this paragraph. By “extraordinary
circumstance” he means some unusually severe suffering, such as
that being experienced by the families of our fallen military
today. You may have such suffering in your own life. He says,
“If you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit.” In other
words, when our suffering is that strong, we really can't calm
our mind. There is too much pain, too much power to our thoughts
and feelings. He goes on, “if you try not to be disturbed, your
effort will not be the right effort.” Trying to “muscle” our way
into calmness will just make things worse and make us feel like
a meditation failure. Besides, that will be an attitude of self-criticism
and non-acceptance. We really are suffering, and it is real. We
should not try to escape it through some temporary concentration
technique.
Suzuki
Roshi recommends counting or following our breath as a way to
work with our suffering. He does not mean that this practice will
make our suffering go away, or even lessen it if it is strong
enough. But such a practice will give us the strength to face,
or accept, our suffering, one breath at a time. So, “to concentrate
your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen.” We are
not becoming concentration athletes, but we need the power of
concentration to give us the stability to face our life.
This
is a very subtle and often misunderstood point. Concentration
by itself can give us temporary relief, sometimes. But to rely
on concentration, or any special meditative state, actually makes
us less able to accept our terrible situation or state of mind.
Zazen gives us the courage to face things “as they are.”
I
remember once reading an interview with a commando, perhaps a
Green Beret or Navy Seal. He told the interviewer, “people think
we are some kind of supermen who don't feel fear. We aren't. Most
people can't imagine the kinds of things we are assigned to do.
We are as human as anyone; we feel fear, terror. But our training
allows us to do our job in the midst of our fear. We don't let
it stop us.”
This
is a little like our approach to zazen. The training of zazen,
the effort to follow our breath in the midst of our confused state
of mind, gives us the strength to do our job as human beings,
which is to work toward the easing of suffering for ourselves
and others. Whether we can concentrate perfectly is beside the
point. --- LEW
May
6. As I said last week, Zen practice, even enlightenment,
doesn't make us impervious. Wanting to be impervious is, to use
a psychological term, just another “ego position.” The ego would
like nothing better than to be unbothered by things. I think this
is still a fairly prevalent notion of spiritual awakening—thinking
that the awakened person is utterly serene, unaffected by the
slings and arrows that bedevil us poor mortals. How nice that
would be! Or so we think. Actually, that could describe a person
who is very depressed. Indeed, they are not affected by anything;
but are they happy? Assuredly not.
Actually
Buddhist meditation makes us more and more “pervious,” to coin
a term. That is, we wake up to things more and more. This begins
with our body in zazen. We think we know all about our body, are
completely familiar with it. But actually, large parts of our
body have gone to sleep, have become impervious—usually because
of some trauma or deep pain. That pain becomes stored in that
body place—perhaps it is in the shoulders or stomach—and muscles
and tissues coalesce around that place to keep it from feeling
that pain again. The wisdom of rolfing, which was a popular deep
massage technique a while back, was to press into these impervious
places and get them feeling again.
The
problem with rolfing, as with so many other such techniques, is
that the awakening is temporary. Until the underlying cause of
the problem is unraveled, the imperviousness returns. Zazen is
in one sense like an extremely slow, alchemical, self-rolfing
that isn't temporary. What is made awake stays awake and this
process goes on forever.
And
yes, there are times when the process of awakening unleashes itself
in an instant, suddenly, dramatically. Sometimes slow, sometimes
fast. Actually they are two halves of the same process.
The
body, of course, is not the primary terrain of Buddhist practice;
it functions as a metaphor and gateway for the actual terrain,
which is awareness itself. The physical body is one of many loci
of awareness; the breath is another, memory is another, sense
perceptions are another. Everything is simultaneously the cause
of our imprisonment, and the gateway to its liberation. That's
why we don't want to become impervious; that would rob us of the
best chance we have to be awakened in this life. We go with “pervious.”
(I'd like to collect all those words in English that only exist
today in their negative—such as inept, ruthless, and
so on. Or maybe it's been done. Must google…)--LEW
April
29. Suzuki Roshi once said, “When we sit, we don't think.”
And then a little later, he added, “When thoughts come, we don't
pursue them.” The average person might think, Oh, he's contradicting
himself. But actually, this is a very precise meditation instruction
that has embedded within it much wisdom about the nature of awareness
and the effort we make in sitting.
Clearly,
he is making a distinction between “thinking” and “thoughts that
come.” Thinking as an intentional, purposeful activity has a particular
quality that we become quite familiar with in zazen. There is
a sense of momentum, of energy, even of uncontrollability or obsessiveness,
to this kind of thinking. Sometimes the word “worry” covers this
kind of thinking, but it is wider than worry. It is a thought
stream that we consciously and intentionally create out of our
historical patterns of ego clinging. Technically, we would say
that such mental activity is karma, which literally
means “action.” I like to translate it as “intentional action
in the present moment.”
Contrast
to this the quality of “thoughts come.” As our mind and body calm
down in sitting, thoughts do come. The idea that the ideal zazen
state is one where there are no thoughts is mistaken, and in the
Zen tradition the Sixth Ancestor, Hui Neng, made this very clear.
To sit in a kind of vacant, thoughtless emptiness, or to strive
for such a state, is strictly speaking heretical from the Buddhist
point of view. Gautama himself, after having studied and experienced
such states, strongly rejected them.
Thoughts
do come, because thought is the natural activity of an awake mental
state. But these thoughts that rather passively arise are different
than the “thinking” thoughts that we string together with karmic
energy to mask some fear, or attraction, or confusion. Thoughts
which just “come” are not a problem, as long as we don't hitch
a ride with them and turn them into “thinking.” Or as Suzuki Roshi
said, with his wry sense of humor, we “don't invite them [thoughts]
to dinner.” In one door, out the other. They come and they go.
Then
the essence of awareness is unaffected, and undisturbed. Awareness
functions like a mirror—reflecting accurately what comes and goes,
without itself being soiled. “Great mirror mind”—this is one of
the many epithets in Zen to describe this kind of mind. “The moon
in water”—this was one of Dogen's favorite expressions too. Sitting
in the midst of thoughts arising and falling gives us great power
to accept things that happen to us; it doesn't make us impervious
to them. As Bodhisattvas we vow to sit in the midst of the suffering
of the world, and to experience it ourselves. But we can hold
it, like a crying baby, with love, even though it may break our
heart. -- LEW
April
20. The blogger has been busy. I should turn this work
over to “the one who is not busy “ (phrase from a famous Zen koan).
But I'm afraid I can't afford his rates in today's global economy.
During
our one-day sitting last Sunday, Suzuki Roshi said, at the end
of a lecture-commentary on Dogen's Genjo Koan: “You should become
like a rock. A rock doesn't know who he is.” He said this to describe
the life of Zen training—sitting, eating, working, day after day,
same thing, not much change. This is an interesting statement,
“to become like a rock.” We can take this two ways. In one ordinary
sense, a rock is lifeless, unfeeling, utterly immovable. In another
sense, a rock is completely reliable, and doesn't need any thinking
or planning to be what it is.
We
have to understand this comment in the context of the Buddhist
world-view, which sees a rock in the latter sense. For us, rocks
are alive; therefore they can be an apt metaphor for the compassionate,
awakened state. I think he means rock in the sense of what follows:
‘A rock doesn't know who he is.” In other words, a rock is so
completely a rock that there is no need to rely on ego, no need
to protect some fragile, soft, terrified structure. A rock is
just completely there, ready for anything.
Living
in a Zen monastery such as Tassajara, day after (seeming) boring
day, is interesting. There is nothing much going on except the
dulling whining, like a mosquito, of one's impatient, doubting
mind, whispering “There is no point to this. Nothing is happening
here. I'm wasting my time. I could be having a V-8” (or whatever).
The voice that is saying this is not a rock. It is not ready to
really help someone. It is still, like a child, absorbed in its
own predilections, its own needs.
So
leave it to a Zen teacher to tell us to be like a rock, who doesn't
know who he is. This comment is easy to misunderstand unless you
knew Suzuki Roshi personally, who was warm, completely relaxed,
and radically present. Yet he was unbelievably solid is that mode;
he was set in it. It is perhaps not surprising that his hobby
was rock gardens, and he loved nothing more than to spend an afternoon
with a rock bigger than himself, nudging it and levering it with
a pry bar, to move it to where he wanted. We used to watch him
doing that, sweating in the hot summer sun in his light work robe.
He was not just one with his work, and with the rock. He was a
rock. If you approached him, he would greet you; but otherwise,
he had no need to know who he was. -- LEW
April
8. Today is the day traditionally celebrated as Buddha's
birthday in Japan , and perhaps some other countries (different
countries use different dates). In Zen, Buddha's enlightenment
day (traditionally December 8) is more important; the winter sesshin
or zazen retreat typically ends on that day. But Buddha's birthday
is important too; Suzuki Roshi, in an early lecture, said that
since the Buddha was a real person who lived in India , his birthday
recognizes his humanness.
The
ceremony to celebrate Buddha's birthday is family and child centered.
A special statue of the baby Buddha is set up. The posture of
this statue has one finger pointing at the sky, and one pointing
at the earth. This commemorates the moment in the scriptures when
the baby Buddha emerged from the womb and supposedly said, “Above
the heavens and below the earth, I am the world-honored one.”
Just as in Christianity, the baby Buddha was not conceived or
born the usual way. He was supposedly conceived by a white six-tusked
elephant that descended magically into his mother's womb; and
he was born by emerging magically from his mother's side.
Religiosity
aside, Gautama was indeed a human being, and his enlightenment
on seeing the morning star indicates that this liberation is accessible
to everyone. Over time, Buddhism expanded to include a whole pantheon
of celestial Buddhas, each representing some psychic force or
power; The Zen movement, which was a back-to-basics reform movement
that emerged in 7 th century A.D. China , wanted to return to
the simplicity and basic quality of Gautama as an ordinary human
being.
So
when we celebrate Buddha's birthday, we celebrate our own birthday.
It is said in scripture that to be born as a human being is as
rare as a turtle swimming in the ocean with one eye in its belly
finding a floating log, swinging his belly up, and seeing the
sun. In other words, quite rare. -- LEW
March
28. The blog rather fell off the map during a very busy
few weeks, my apologies. I have been battling a very mild stomach
bug, which nevertheless has been hanging on. Haven't been able
to get to everything. I talked last night about the quality of
feeling “almost well,” and the expectation behind it that “I am
well, I should be well.” I notice that I am impatient
with my insignificant malaise, which prevents me from accomplishing
everything I want to each day. What a waste of energy to think
that way! I need to be more accepting. When we are really sick,
we think, ‘Well, I am sick, I don't expect to be well. I'll just
go to bed and wait until I am better.” But when we are almost
well, we become impatient.
In
other words, we suffer largely because of our mental categories
and expectations, more than from what is really happening. Gautama
the Buddha distinguished in his own teaching between mental suffering,
which is curable through Dharma and practice, and physical suffering,
which is not. He is supposed to have died in great pain, from
having eaten spoiled food, but his mind remained calm; he spent
his last minutes calming his grieving disciples, and offering
them his last teaching. “Don't worry about me,” he said. “Be a
light unto yourselves.” He lived to the ripe age of 79. The decay
and dissolution of the body through old age is simply a fact.
To lament this fact is, at root, a mental obscuration.
So
to translate dukkha as “suffering,” as most Buddhist
writers tend to do, is not really accurate. I like “unnecessary,
or manmade, suffering.” The fundamental reason why we become ill,
or experience physical pain, is because we have a body. How wonderful
that the body works as well as it does, for as long as it does!
What a miracle! We should mostly be grateful. When illness comes,
when old age comes, as those things inevitably will, we need to
be mentally prepared through our practice. As for the injustice
and exploitation that people foist on each other: that is also
manmade, created through our ever-present delusions of power and
illusions of safety or possession. We must all work to clarify
these obscurations, in our own lives and in the larger social
sphere.
And
as for hurricanes, earthquakes, and so on—well, just as we have
a body, we live on a planet! Sometimes it shivers and shakes.
How fortunate it is not still covered with volcanoes, as it has
been in the past. We should be grateful. Natural disasters are
not always dukkha ; we need to remain calm, plan carefully,
don't build mansions on the seashore, and be ready when the warning
comes . However, when it comes to global warming—manmade!
Dukkha! Our consciousness has not grown to include planet-wide
implications of our careless and often self-centered uses of energy.
We will be paying the price for this lack of wider consciousness
for so many generations. I'm hoping that the Dharma teaching that
has come to us in this generation will be helpful in transforming
the inner, mental causes of global warming.
Of
course the most fundamental way to discern the nature and quality
of manmade suffering through sitting practice, when we can see
the actual arising and falling of the mental formations that create
it. See it, and see through it.--LEW
Feb.
1. My friend Surya Das sent me the following quote of
a twentieth century Korean Zen teacher:
To
practice the Tao
Is
to have a tender heart.
If
you say your Tao does not have a tender heart
What
petty larceny is this?
We
have been discussing the koan “Every day mind is Tao,” which is
one of the important teaching stories in our Zen tradition, one
that Suzuki Roshi talked about a good bit. Even though the story
is profound, there is nothing with an explicit emotional tone
in it. Nansen and Joshu are discussing Tao as “ultimate reality,”
or “path of wisdom.” But how does the Tao feel? Good, bad? Loving,
detached?
There
is a lot of misunderstanding about Buddhist ideas of “detachment,”
or “non-attachment.” These terms are difficult to fully grasp
outside the full Buddhist culture in which they abide. In particular,
“detachment” might, in a Western psychological context, be a marker
or clue for depression. “I'm detached from everything, nothing
gets to me, nothing excites me.” We would say such a person has
a “flat affect.”
If
instead of concepts we turn to people, and look at such realized
teachers as Suzuki Roshi, or Thich Nhat Han, or the Dalai Lama,
or Kalu Rinpoche—just to name a few—flat affect is the farthest
thing from their emotional tone. They are tremendously emotional
people. Their presenting emotion is one of contentment, or happiness,
or kindness (The Dalai Lama has famously said that his religion
is kindness) but, for anyone who knows them well, the range of
their emotional life is wide—probably wide than that of an ordinary
person.
So
when the Korean teacher says “to practice Tao with a tender heart”
this is basic Buddhism to anyone steeped in Buddhist culture.
Any other artificial or intellectual ideas that knowledge about
ultimate reality makes one emotionally flat or “detached” is just
some overlay or projection out of our own cultural misunderstanding.
Certainly,
equanimity as an attitude and virtue is central to Buddhist meditative
cultivation, but this equanimity is worlds apart from not caring
about things, or having a flat affect. How so? Tune in next week,
same time, same station… LEW
Jan.
21. More on “Everyday Mind is Tao.”
I
often mention that there are two aspects to Buddhist meditation—concentration
and insight. We might more accurately say concentration and openness,
or focus and relaxation. One without the other is not quite right,
not quite liberative. Concentration by itself is just a skill.
Some people are quite interested in it. There are many concentrative
techniques. In Zen we like to use following the breath or counting
the breath. Counting the breath is good for people who really
want to know whether they are concentrated or not. Counting 1
to 10 may be “boring,” but if you get to 25 you'll know you've
gotten distracted. Try counting to 2 instead. The mind is so distractable!
Openness
/ relaxation is another matter. In most ways, concentration is
actually easier, because it requires conventional effort. Relaxation
is by definition the opposite of effort, but how do you cultivate
it? “Everyday mind is Tao” is an expression of the ultimate relaxation.
Actually, there is no need to relax anything. You are in the midst
of ultimate relaxation all the time—Being itself, awareness itself,
needs no adjustment, no release of tension. But how do we attain
such a state? That is what Joshu asked in the story: “How do I
accord with Tao?”
His
teacher answered, “The more you try to accord with it, the farther
you are from it.”
In
the end, a fully concentrated state of mind and a relaxed state
of mind come to the same thing. But there are many paths, many
byways on the way to that point. You notice that Nansen doesn't
say, “DON'T make any effort to accord with it.” Efforts are necessary.
Knowing ourselves does not come easily. If it did, the world wouldn't
be crazy. We are all Buddhas; so it is said. But at the moment,
almost all of us “Buddhas” are blind as bats.
Is
that why we sit with our eyes open? -- LEW
Jan.
16. An old Zen story goes as follows:
Joshu
asked Nansen, “What is Tao?” (What is the Path?)
Nansen
replied, “Everyday Mind is Tao.”
Joshu
said, “How do I accord with Tao?”
Nansen
answered, “The more you try to follow Tao, the more you lose Tao.”
The
story goes on, but this is the essence of it. This was one of
Suzuki-Roshi's favorite Zen koans; he taught from it a good bit.
As written, the story has a real Taoist flavor; it could have
come from the Tao Te Ching of LaoTzu. In fact, Chinese
Zen is about 40% Taoist, as befits the Chinese spiritual culture
of the time.
But
the story is also a wonderful teaching story about Buddhist practice,
the practice of sitting meditation, and right effort. The first
point of the story is the phrase “everyday mind is Tao.” This
is widely misunderstood, as is often the case when we accept someone's
English translation as the story, without looking further. “Everyday”
in this case does not mean “whatever distracted state of mind
I happen to be in, everyday,” or, more succinctly, it does not
mean “whatever mind.” “Everyday” means the mind that is with you
all the time, whatever you do, everyday, any time. In other words,
it means the essence of mind, awareness itself.
So
when Joshu presses further, “How do I accord with Tao?” we see
from Nansen's response that Tao is not something out there to
“accord” with. It is not a “thing,” not an “it,” not an object,
not a something. So what is it then? Already language is losing
us. “What is it?” is a construction, a concept, that has to do
with subject and object. “I see it,” whatever it is—a
dog, a cat, a pillowcase. We might be able to accord with a pillowcase
(maybe by sleeping on it!) but we can't accord with Being itself,
awareness itself, because “accord” is not an idea that has any
meaning in that realm. The harder we try to accord, furrowing
our brow and making great efforts, the more we wrap ourselves
up in knots.
Yet
it takes a lot of effort to sit! We can barely find time for it
when we come on Tuesday night to Vimala Sangha, much less on our
own in the course of a busy day. If our effort to “accord with
Tao” is wasted, then why do it at all?
Well,
once again, the sitting that we do does not exist in the realm
of “doing it” or “now I am sitting, trying hard to follow my breath.”
More next week… LEW
Jan.
7. Well! The New Year. My mind's a blank. (Isn't it supposed
to be? You might ask? Not when you have to write something, it
isn't.) Or as an old cartoon character used to say, I'm trying
to think and nothing happens!
Ok,
thinking: that reminds me. Once someone came to my teacher and
said, “My zazen is terrible. I'm thinking all the time.” He replied,
“What's wrong with thinking?”
We
have this notion—rather deeply embedded, I think—that meditation
is about attaining a state of mind where there is no thinking.
That is not completely wrong; indeed, there is such a state and
it is most blissful. But there is no liberation in it. In fact,
it is rather disconnected from everything that matters—specifically,
the suffering of all beings and things. Gautama himself—and I
daresay practitioners of every generation thereafter—came to this
place in their meditation and imagined for a while that “This
is it!”
Well,
it's not it. In fact, there is no “it.” Not the way we usually
think, anyway. To think there is an “it”—a moment or epiphany
that changes everything, that makes everything all right forever
after—is strictly speaking a heretical view in Buddhism. Why?
Simply put, because everything changes, including any “it” you
might come to.
Certainly
there are moments and periods of great transformation or release;
if you think there aren't any, that is also a heretical view.
Buddhism is first and foremost a path of awakening, of enlightenment,
and the life stories of every great Buddhist teacher include such
moments as part of their path.
One
such teacher was Te Shan, a master in the Chinese Zen tradition.
In his youth he was a master of the Di
