Not Seeing Our Own Bodies

We’re expecting more snow today. The picture above is what it might look like back in the woods, although the photo is from last year about this time.

I’m off soon to Deep Spring Zen Center up on Thirsty Hill near Pittsburgh for a weekend sesshin. We’ll be working on Gyoji or Continuous Practice as well as sitting a lot and meeting a bunch too in dokusan and dharma talk. But before I go I want to tie up some loose ends from the post-modern-power theme that I’ve been working recently.

Here’s an excerpt of Kusa’s comment on the post before last:

The concern here is twofold – first, there is more to be worried about in post-modernism as a theoretical framework than is usually expressed (although there is much in it that seems right on – perhaps all of it…); and we either have to be prepared to give up, as Buddhist teachers, students, practitioners, much of what we may believe about the Buddhadharma, or we should have good reason to believe our ideas about Buddhism are privileged in any respect.

I choose door #1: I don’t think ideas about Buddhism are privileged in any respect. Let’s give ’em all away. Certainly, this is the process that we undertake through the Mu koan, washing Mu through everything, and in shikantaza, dropping even dropping.

Which reminds me of a student that I met with recently for koan work. The student presented their response to the koan at hand and when I said something like, “Yes, that’s it!” the student said something like, “Yes it is and if you said it wasn’t, that wouldn’t change what I saw.”

Exactly. There might, of course, be something else to be seen and/or a clearer presentation, but this kind of confidence is really a good spirit for this work.

And yet that isn’t the full story. There is letting go, sometimes thought of as deconstruction of the phenomenal world, and there is reconstruction, what Dogen called “making manifest the great earth’s goldenness.” These two are like the front and back foot in walking.

In order for the incredible message of the buddhadharma to be clearly communicated to in the global culture, we need to drop a lot, especially frames about the teacher-student relationship, so that we can truly be in a teacher-student relationship. The parent-child frame is one idea that needs to be deconstructed. The teacher as the person who affirms a student’s understanding is another.

I’ll leave you with a koan that comes to mind that brings the deconstructive and reconstructive aspects together:

Jingqing asked a monk, “What’s that noise outside the door?”

The monk said, “The sound of raindrops.”
Jingqing said, “All beings have it backwards. They don’t see their own body and chase after objects.”