Arousing the Way Seeking Heart

March 15, 2013 By 7 Comments

What is the Way Seeking Heart?

Sometimes it is referred to as the “thought of enlightenment” and in Sanskrit, bodhicitta (click here for the Wikipedia entry). In Guidelines for Studying the Way, Dogen takes up this issue, saying the various names for the Way Seeking Heart all refer to “…one and the same mind.”

The same and one mind. Hmmm.

What mind is that?

The first piece of reflection in the just-launched Vine of Obstacles: Online Support for Zen Training is about this essential question because it is a touchstone for our practice.

Vine of Obstacle students are beginning to dig into this and so today it’s on my mind too and I’ll offer a few reflections on the Way Seeking Heart.

“Just return to your first intention,” Katagiri Roshi used to say.

For me it was when I was a kid, laying in bed in northern Minnesota and hearing the fading sound of a far-off train. I knew then that I would die.

Dogen in Guidelines for Studying the Way (and elsewhere) encourages us to see impermanence of both this fleeting world and – turning the light of awareness around – the fleeting self too – the fleeting subject that experiences this fleeting world.

Like Issa’s poem when his baby daughter died:

This world of dew
Is a world of dew
And yet … and yet….

Cut through the bullshit, in other words, and drop prettying up the rawness of the Way Seeking Heart by calling it a “world of dew” or “unborn” or “three thousand worlds in a moment of thought” (Dogen’s examples) or any other cognitive reframing trick.

Just look at how selfish this very mind is, currying favor with phenomena constantly, for our own benefit, for our own fame and gain.

Just look at “…the breath going in and out, which ties a lifetime together: what is it after all?”

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Expressing a Dream Within a Dream Audio

March 4, 2013 By 1 Comment

Sweeping Zen Audio now has a couple more talks, “Expressing a Dream in a Dream,” from the sesshin at Deep Spring Temple in Pittsburgh last month. Click here.

And below is the excerpt from Dogen’s “Expressing a Dream in a Dream” (Tanahashi translation) that I was working with:

The path of all buddhas and ancestors arises before the first forms emerge; it cannot be spoken of using conventional views. This being so, in the realm of buddha ancestors there is the active power of buddhas going beyond buddhas. Since this realm is not a matter of the passage of time, their lives are neither long nor short, neither quick nor slow. This cannot be judged in an ordinary manner. Thus, the dharma wheel has been set to turn since before the first sign of forms emerged. The great merit needs no reward, and becomes the guidepost for all ages. Within a dream this is the dream you express. Because awakening is seen within awakening, the dream is expressed within a dream.

The place where the dream is expressed within a dream is the land and the assembly of buddha ancestors. The buddhas’ lands and their assemblies, the ancestors’ way and their seats, are awakening throughout awakening, and express the dream within a dream. When you meet such speech and expressions, do not regard them as other than the buddhas’ assembly; it is buddha turning the dharma wheel. This dharma wheel encompasses all the ten directions and the eight facets of a clear crystal, and so the great oceans, Mount Sumeru, the lands, and all buddhas are actualized. This is the dream expressed within a dream, prior to all dreams.

Every dewdrop manifested in every realm is a dream. This dream is the glowing clarity of the hundred grasses. What requires questioning is this very point. What is confusing is this very point. At this time, there are dream grasses, grasses within, expressive grasses, and so on. When we study this, then roots, stems, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits, as well as radiance and color, are all the great dream. Do not mistake them as merely dreamy.

However, those who do not wish to study buddha dharma believe that expressing the dream within a dream means speaking of unreal dream grass as real, like piling delusion upon delusion. But this is not true. When you say, “Within confusion is just confusion,” still you should follow the path in the vast sky known as “delusion throughout delusion.” You should endeavor to investigate just this thoroughly.

The expressing of the dream within a dream is all buddhas. All buddhas are wind and rain, water and fire. We respectfully maintain these names of buddhas, and also pay homage to those names of other buddhas. To express the dream within a dream is the ancient buddhas; it is to ride in this treasure boat and directly arrive in the practice place. Directly arriving in the practice place is riding in this treasure boat. Meandering dreams and direct dreams, holding and letting go, all freely flow like gusting breezes.

The dharma wheel is just like this; turning the great dharma-wheel-world is immeasurable and boundless. It turns even within a single particle, ebbing and flowing ceaselessly within the particle. Accordingly, whenever such a dharma is turned, even an antagonist nods and smiles. Wherever such a dharma is turned, it freely circulates like the flowing breezes.

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Dogen: the Patron Saint of Passive Zen?

October 20, 2012 By 23 Comments

I was pleased this morning as I reviewed the comments to my recent posts about Soto Zen going to hell. Seems like as real a cyber conversation as we’ve had in these parts. Not everyone agrees, of course, and sometimes feelings flare.

One way to frame the disagreement is as a debate between inherent stability and full aliveness. As is often the case these days, Dogen is brought up as a proponent of inherent buddha nature with a slight twist – there is no enlightenment apart from practice and its corollary, practice is itself enlightenment.

Was Dogen, then, the patron saint of passive Zen, as one tongue-in-cheek commentator says?

The above drawing (not mine), represents the active and passive aspects of what Dogen taught (e.g., “Instructions for the Cook” vs. “Zazenshin”) and reflects the actual practice of Soto Zen. Obviously, there are the active (work) and passive (zazen) sides  of training. However, for Zen activity to be fully alive, the activity must spring from stillness. For the practice of stillness to be fully alive, interiority must be dynamically hopping along.

I like the drawing above, but from the view I’m expressing here, I’d like the two monks to be much closer. It isn’t about balancing two things but about the two aspects entwined and hopping along together, sometimes dangerously close to falling down, sometimes falling down. And then, pushing off the great earth, getting up and getting going again.

The form of zazen and the precepts, for example, are the containers for full aliveness, the ground rules for full-out boogie, optimally unfolding full aliveness. Without the intimate engagement of both aspects, practice is either boring and repressive or crazy and dangerous. The beauty of Dogen’s expression is how he points to full aliveness in stillness, still within full aliveness.

This is akin to Suzuki Roshi’s pre-politically correct “Hinayana practice with Mahayana spirit – rigid formal practice with informal mind.”

As my friend Nonin once said in a debate over the pure Dogen way to do oryoki meals, with Nonin not feeling the way that was being presented as pure, “Haven’t you heard? Dogen’s dead.”

So this conversation isn’t about authority, but about what Dogen wrote 750 years ago that can inform our practice-enlightenment now and especially for the next generation and beyond. The important point, then, is to take up the teaching and experiment with it … enjoying a good rant from time to time too. The old bugger certainly did.

Different people will come up with different results as they use the body-mind to test the teaching. No problem. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they’re all equal in power to illuminate one little corner of the world, as they say.

If it could be definitively demonstrated that Dogen totally favored one side or the other … well, ho hum. And that does seem to be the drift in contemporary Soto Zen – a rush to institutionalize, regulate, and normalize – making Zen safe and dull and utterly devoid of challenge and freedom.

A Zen teacher friend recently mentioned to me that when he read through the survey results of Soto Zen teachers that I’ve been groaning about, he found that when there was 60-70% agreement on some point, that he too almost always agreed. After our conversation, it occurred to me that I wished I said to him, “Yes, exactly the point. Ask safe questions tending to the norm and that’s the answers that you get.”

After 30-some years of study and practice, it’s my provisional view that Dogen was not advocating silent illumination or passivity. He was a creative. In fact, that Dogen did not advocate quietism makes him relevant today and is what keeps me coming back to his vivid expression of practice where the active and passive elements are in intimate conversation, with neither aspect dominating the other.

Even in his early years, when he was about 30, Dogen junked the “silent illumination” framing of zazen for the much more active “self-enjoyment samadhi.” Later it became “the acupuncture needle of zazen” as well, of course, as “dropping body and mind” and “earnest, vivid sitting.”

In the early period, as I was saying, it seems to me that he hadn’t fully resolved the nasty moral and practice implications of the original enlightenment teaching (“It’s all good” and “whatever” and “just sit”) that were vogue in his day. Here’s a passage from the “Self Enjoyment Samadhi” section of “Bendowa” with my comments inserted:

There is a path
(emphasizing the relative world with a beginning, middle and end)

through which the unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment of all things
(emphasizing the fundamental, giving possession of perfection to each of the myriad things with or without path) 

returns
(the 10,000 dharmas advancing to confirm the self)

to the person in zazen, and the person and the enlightenment of all things intimately and imperceptibly assist each other.
(the practitioner boogieing with the buddha).

Therefore, this zazen person
(this person who has become a zazen person, but not necessarily the person who does not practice, intimately entwines with buddha)

without fail
(stay with it practitioners, you are doing it!)

drops off body and mind, cuts away previous tainted views and thoughts, awakens genuine buddha-dharma, universally helps the buddha work in each place, as numerous as atoms, where buddha-tathagatas teach and practice, and widely influences practitioners who are going beyond buddha, thereby vigorously
(the bold highlight that this dance is not passive)

exalting the dharma that goes beyond buddha 
(ordinary being and buddha together go beyond buddha).

Dogen’s creative burst of dharmic, koanic fluency during his early 40′s in Shobogenzo fascicle after fascicle goes beyond his early work in intensely wrestling practice-enlightenment, active-still, sacred-profane. More about that in future posts. I use the above because it is often cited to support the all-zazen-is-enlightenment view while the meaning is considerably more nuanced.

Dogen this and Dogen that. How will I live? How will you live?

Myotai Treace once said, “You can’t live a bunny life and write tiger poems.”

What is the self?

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Relax, Enter, Add Value: A Sometimes Not-So-Easy Summary of How to Practice Zen

September 22, 2012 By 5 Comments

A monk said, “I’ve just arrived here and I beg the master to point out a gate whereby I may enter.”

Xuansha said, “Do you hear the sound of the water in the creek?”

The monk siad, “I hear it.”

Xuansha said, “Enter here.”

There’s some superbly simple Zen directions, echoed by Ginny White in The Zen Leader: 10 Ways to go From Barely Managing to Leading Fearlessly: “Relax, enter, add value” is her first Zen flip.

We’ve been working with that here in our practice period.

Lot’s of popular Zen begins and ends with “relax.” To enter the stream, however, it’s necessary to go beyond that and Enter!

The how of entering is another matter. We’re so trained to split from the phenomena before our eyes and ears and take a position like political talking heads – not in the game, just observing, taking sides, and blathering.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. Kinda fun. But the witness position does not exhaust the capacity for human life. It is also painfully conducive to conflict.

So first, relax. Whatever practice we’re working with – breath, shikantaza, mu, or other koans – requires that we relax and develop the softness of the quiet, gentle observer. Then the capacity to drop the observer and enter fully is possible.

Here’s a little Dogen on the importance of entering:

The right view path limb is hiding the body within an eyeball…. Those who do not hide the body within an eyeball are not buddha ancestors.

Instructions for entering the eyeball or entering the stream are scant by design. It is a creative process from start to finish and especially in the finish – “add value.” Xuansha in the interaction above wonderfully adds value by pointing to the entry point – “Enter here.”

Adding value is implicit in our interactions with one and other. In a conversation, for example, the very nature of the process is to engage and add value. How about in a dharma context?

Xuansha shows one moment of adding value in his “enter here.”

Dogen often shows adding value by entering koan narrative and then adding value by giving life to the mosaic of metaphors. For example, here Dogen points to this dynamic practice by adding value in the koan narrative, mixing and matching four or five different koans and fragments of Zen literature:

The power of mindfulness is to be a coarse person by grabbing another’s nostrils. Thus, nostrils grab the person. It is to hurl a pearl and attract a pearl, to hurl a tile and attract a tile. Not yet hurling is worth receiving thirty blows. Even if people in the world use it, it will not wear out.

And how about in our everyday life?

The other day at work in the school in which I’m an administrator I was trying to diffuse a conflict between two groups of young woman, some with babies. I spoke with one of the young women at the center of the conflict who especially hated one of the other young women. Ironically, all of these young woman are in very similar life situations. She opened up in stream-of-consciousness style at 90 miles-an-hour, describing in wrenching detail the source of the conflict going back to the sixth grade and then racing through the next several years of incidents involving rocks in socks (a nasty weapon), baby-daddies and baby-mommies, groups of kids showing up at her house at 2am, etc.

When she paused to take a breath, I said, “Wow. I’m so concerned for you with all this violence surrounding you. It seems like you’re racing down a dead-end street and the ending can’t be good for you. Even if it is all someone else’s fault, still the outcome may not be good. How can we help you find a good solution?”

“A good solution,” she shot back, “will be when I finally kick that little bitch’s ass for good.”

Sometimes adding value is not so easy.

The practice is to give it our best anyway.

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