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<\/a>TWO ENTRANCES, FOUR PRACTICES\nA Meditation on Bodhidharma\u2019s Way and Ours<\/strong><\/p>\n
James Ishmael Ford<\/p>\n
3 February 2012<\/p>\n
Boundless Way Temple
\nWorcester, Massachusetts<\/p>\n
Be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart Ranier Maria Rilke<\/p>\n I no longer recall when I first heard the verse. But, somewhere early on it became the great pointer for me, an invitation to something I didn\u2019t fully understand, but which I fully desired.<\/p>\n A special transmission outside scriptures, It was sung to us by Bodhidharma, it was sung directly into my heart, it was a beacon that I followed, a distant light in the fog, the north star guiding me across the great ocean. <\/p>\n And, I no longer recall precisely when I learned that Bodhidharma never spoke these words. The four-line verse has no older textual foundation than the early twelfth century in the Collection from the Garden of the Ancestors. Which is, what, six hundred years give or take after the old monk died?<\/p>\n Whatever turmoil that roiled within me, fortunately I also realized the deeper truth continued, the pointer was right, we don\u2019t rely upon texts, however rich and wonderful they may be, we look within and without, making as few judgments as possible, and in that find who we are. Our way is dynamic and has taken shape within history, just as it should. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve long realized that what makes this way so important for me is the reality that if every Zen practitioner were killed and every Zen word written were burned, immediately after people would realize the way and describe it in terms recognizable by our ghosts. The mutability of Zen\u2019s history was just one more bit of evidence that the reality does not lie in ink on paper, or even words spoken, although and there\u2019s the wonderment of it all, they also do contain it.<\/p>\n As I grow older and find myself delving into the traditional texts with the eyes of what a generation or two ago would very much have been considered an old man, and even in our time, getting there, I find it like reading letters from a lover from long ago. The words touch my heart, even the lies comfort me, and the truths, the truths I find ever clearer. I continue to find new lessons, new pointers each useful in the ways I need them to be to direct my life as it is today to deeper insights, more healthy perspectives, and ever richer possibilities.<\/p>\n Of late, I find myself returning to our ancestor that red-bearded barbarian, who didn\u2019t sing the song, but did, really did; that song which caught my heart and directed my life\u2019s course. It turns out the oldest textual reference to a Bodhidharma is found in the Records of the Monasteries of Luoyang, dating from the middle of the sixth century of the Common Era. According to the scholar John McRae this Bodhidharma is a fairly stock-figure foreigner whose main purpose is to witness to the grandeur of Luoyang\u2019s monastic establishment. The first reference we get to someone generally recognizable as the founder of our school in China is found in the mid-seventh century Further Lives of Eminent Monks, a sequel to the Lives of Eminent Monks compiled roughly a century before. <\/p>\n This is a very important text. While many of the details that will flesh out Bodhidharma\u2019s story as the second of the three founding myths of our way, following the story of the Buddha\u2019s awakening and prior to Huineng\u2019s \u201cautobiography,\u201d are not yet in place, some important terms are introduced, such as \u201cwall gazing,\u201d skillful means,\u201d and \u201cputting the mind at rest.\u201d This biographical sketch also cites and even outlines \u201cThe Treatise on the Two Entrances and the Four Practices,\u201d which, as you know, we\u2019re reflecting on throughout this intensive practice period at the Temple. <\/p>\n At this point it is impossible to say who actually wrote \u201cThe Treatise on the Two Entrances and the Four Practices,\u201d although it has been published under Bodhidharma\u2019s name since the second half of the seventh century. His principal disciple Huike has always been associated with it, and some argue he compiled his teacher\u2019s message as the treatise, which was then later edited more or less into the document we have by the monk T\u2019an-lin. I find it interesting that all other texts attributed to Bodhidharma, in the consensus view of the scholarly community are of much later date. So, if there is a Bodhidharma teaching, this is it, including from pretty near the beginning \u201cwall gazing,\u201d \u201cskillful means,\u201d and \u201cputting the mind at rest.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the things that interest me about this document is how it stands in the place of our Zen orientation. The Dharma as we receive it in the Sutras is highly didactic, laid out in order, and formalized in stages each spelled out. Within this the anecdotes of awakening turn on the Buddha explaining things clearly and people realizing the truth of his teaching. Ta da! <\/p>\n Zen as we practice it, particularly within the koan introspection disciplines, plays out differently, as you may have noticed. Particularly if you try to get some simple from point \u201ca\u201d to point \u201cb\u201d instructions. Instead of lists and stages, stories are told. Sometimes with directions in them, but often even a point is hard to discern. We are, instead, each of us, invited to look within our own hearts, into a rich but also desolate place, a jungle or a desert, or a deep frozen mountain range. And as we trek all along the way surprises, shocks, offense and joy erupt, pretty much unbidden, often at the strangest moments, and from those moments, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and, strangely, mysteriously, our lives take new courses. <\/p>\n Now are these approaches different or the same? I suspect the answer is yes, different and the same. There are stylistic differences, no doubt. That\u2019s pretty obvious. But, there\u2019s something else to this document. If you\u2019ll pardon the metaphor which shouldn\u2019t be pushed too hard, we find a shift from a left-brain encounter that is more analytical that characterizes much of classical Buddhism<\/a> to a right-brain experience that is more intuitive and is very much characteristic of the Zen way as we normally encounter it. <\/p>\n
\nAnd try to love the questions themselves,
\nLike locked rooms and like books
\nThat are written in a foreign tongue.
\nDo not now seek the answer,
\nWhich cannot yet be given to you
\nBecause you would not yet be able to live them.
\nAnd the point is, to live everything.
\nLive the question now.
\nPerhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
\nLive along some distant day into the answer.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nNot founded upon words and letters;
\nBy pointing directly to one\u2019s heart mind
\nWe see into our own true nature and attain Buddhahood.<\/p>\n