Direct mind without clinging- Huineng

Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi just came to Clouds in Water for a retreat.  He spoke about the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, which can be translated as “Understanding the profound mystery or intimacy of the Buddha’s teaching”.  It was a very succinct series of talks about what “mind” is in Buddhism and the different interpretations in Indian and Chinese Buddhism.  These talks were a series based on his new book: The Third Turning of the Wheel: Wisdom of the Samdhinirmocana Sutra.

He was working with clarifying our understanding of the Mind-only School of Buddhism.  His main translation for mind-only was conscious-construction-only.   If we have had a taste of a mind that is not working through language, naming, and ideas i.e. a quiet mind or a non-thinking mind or a single-pointed mind, then it becomes easier to understand the meaning of our world which is arising from consciously constructed thought.  Because of this contrast between silence and construction, we become more aware of our obviously constructed world.  It is not that the consciously constructed world is wrong or bad. This is what human minds do.  We construct.  This is the dilemma and paradox of being human.  We must learn to work with relative life and know it as a thought construction. Because of this knowing, we can begin to abandon our clinging to the suffering caused by our own storytelling. We begin to not take our storytelling so seriously and therefore we can enter into the moment that is always free of our constructed bondage.

Reb elucidates:

ALL phenomena have three characteristics:

1.     Imputational, imaginary, fantasy, made up of our thoughts, constructions and projections- our stories and our historic self.  What might be in Buddhist technical terms called the “dream”.

2.     The other-dependent, interdependent co-arising.  All phenomena appear because of an “other” cause.  We, and all objects are dependent on cause and effect.  We arise because that happened.  As Thich Nhat Hann often writes:  the self is made up of non-self elements.

3.     Thoroughly established – suchness.  This is the true reality of each moment.  You can call it, in the affirmative view – suchness, or in the view that negates – emptiness.  But however you label it, it is the eternal source penetrating all time, all space and all phenomena.   It is always present right here right now, completely unimpeded, and penetrated into the appearance of the phenomena of the moment.  I think this is what Huineng was suggesting in the phrase - Direct mind without clinging.

The analysis of the moment into three characteristics helps us not to cling to either side of the duality of form or emptiness.  Rather to see them as co-arising.  With this understanding, we can begin to have a correct relationship with our lives. We can learn how to live our human lives to the fullest.  It is an explanation to alleviate or be an antidote to, what some people could interpret as a nihilistic view of Buddhism; a misunderstanding of “everything is empty”.

In order to live our lives out to the fullest, we have to understand the implications of the first characteristic – that our minds very naturally impute on phenomena a whole fantasy of story, linear time, and desire-oriented attachments.  Even just bringing this understanding to consciousness, affects how we see our relationship to the fantasy stories we’ve created through our thought constructions.  Even this simple awareness makes a change in our clinging to the suffering caused by solidifying our stories.

It’s important to understand the second characteristic – the other-dependent.  We need to understand the impersonal nature of cause and effect. Cause and effect is a natural law of form and by itself, it doesn’t have an overlay of good or bad, it just performs its function naturally.  It does not have the power to refute non-virtue.  So if we do something that is tainted by our imputations, the effect will also be tainted.  Cause and effect is an unbiased mirror but its reflection can be afflicted by our clinging to our imputations and projections.   It can be the dependant co-arising of our afflicted projections or it can be the dependant co-arising of our awakening.  Our practice is to understand the on-going process of our delusions that are afflicted by our imaginations and then, in understanding this, convert this into freedom from clinging to our fantasies and our afflictions.

We like our fantasies because they are a diversion from what is actually going on moment-to-moment.  It is very difficult, radical, mind-blowing, to stay in direct contact with what is actually happening in this here and now.

In the absence of our attachments and our strong adherence to our projections, we can come to know suchness.  When you can see or taste that which is ultimately true and is not distorted by our projections, that tasting in itself will help you to relinquish the projections.  This seeing takes you to Buddhahood, Reb said, and it occurs always and simultaneously with the first two characteristics of projection and inter-dependence.

Pema Chodron teaches this in a quite simple way.  Her directions are to drop the storyline and abide with the underlying energy of the moment.  She encourages us to vow to do this interruption of the storyline over and over.

Tenshin Reb Roshi also taught that the paramitas are how we get to this awakening and they are also the practice after we have digested this teaching.  The bodhisattva training of the 6 paramitas:  generosity, patience, ethics, enthusiasm, meditation and wisdom, is how we work with the world of imputation before and after seeing the illuminated mind.  Our practice is this constant study of the mind.  We study how we become disoriented and spun around, and then we are aware of our process of reorientation, over and over. 

Don’t misinterpret emptiness.  We are practicing correctly when our understanding and taste of emptiness brings us around to taking care of the conventional world even more.  In beginning to understand and use the 3 characteristic in all phenomena, this becomes the focus of the enlightenment process.  This awareness brings the development of true compassion for our stories.  We learn to walk in this world with a deep understanding that things are always free of all our ideas about them. Our ideas don't reach the inconceivable beauty of our lives.

Displaying the Buddha seal with one’s whole body and mind.

Dogen writes in Jijuyu Zanmai that “when one displays the Buddha mudra or Buddha seal with one’s whole body and mind, one is expressing unfabricated and profound prajna.”

The Buddha seal is like a stamp or a seal of authenticity.  Our effort to take the posture of a Buddha during zazen is allowing the Buddha seal to be stamped on us.  Strictly speaking, it is always stamped on us and on all beings and all phenomena. Our inherent Buddha nature is always present but in addition to that, consciously, we are abandoning our afflictions and allowing ourselves to surrender to the Buddha seal.  We are surrendering to a Buddha form and in doing that; we are letting go of all the resistances.

In order to sit zazen, especially during a longer retreat, the schedule and the form of sesshin force us to let go of our own desire system of like and dislike.  We let go of our greed, hate and delusion, and our clinging to any sense perceptions, in order to simply sit down and follow the schedule. 

This is as Dogen’s teacher Nyojo Zenji said, “Dropping off body and mind is to get rid of our 5 desires and 5 coverings.” The 5 desires are the grabbing on that comes through the 5 senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching).  The 6 covering are similar to the hindrances:  greed, anger or hatred, sleepiness or dullness, distraction, doubt, with the addition of ignorance.

 I didn’t really believe Katagiri Roshi when he said all I had to do was “sit down and shut up”.  I wanted there to be some huge peak experience where everything changes permanently and suffering disappears. Such a dualistic and compartmentalized notion I had!   What I didn’t understand is that the human act of sitting down and shutting up, of going beyond my belief systems and my desires, is in itself, dropping off body and mind.  Though there are moments of peak experience and there are subtle and gross levels of dropping off body and mind, the main point is that in any moment that you go beyond your own grasping and the afflictions of the 3 poisons; greed, anger and ignorance, etc; that is dropping off body and mind.  Our efforts are truly not in vain and our efforts are in the present moment, not the future.  Practicing in this way builds up the momentum of dropping off body and mind and that momentum brings a continually deepening understanding of what “dropping off body and mind” means.  

Our zazen belongs to the Buddha. It is the Buddha seal, no matter what our evaluations of it are.

As Shokaku Okumura Roshi says, “Take an upright posture, breath through our nose, keep our eyes open, holding our hands in Buddha mudra, let go of everything coming up in our minds, this is how we show our whole Buddha mudra/seal.  This action belongs to Buddha, not to any one of us. This action gives up owning these 5 skandhas.  We don’t use them during sitting.  We offers our 5 skandhas to Buddha, for the sake of Buddha.”

Be a white ox in the open field.

We often see our lives as full of impediments or hindrances.  When we look at our life in a linear way and with a progression of development, what we most notice is what gets in the way of that development.  We worry about these blocks, we fight all of our obstacles and wish for them to go away. 

What we are not seeing when we fight with our obstacles, is the boundless vastness of life itself that appears in each moment.  In the strictest sense, there are no impediments.  I remember Daido Loori’s booming voice announcing during sesshin, “Be the barrier, be the barrier.”

Suzuki Roshi has written, “So if you see things without realizing the background of Buddha nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering.  But if you understand the background of existence, you realize that suffering itself is how we live and also how we can embrace our lives just as they are. … The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.  This is to put everything under control in its widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind and find the mind that is everything.”

How can we feel this flow in our lives?  How can our pure awareness of the source in everything make us more relaxed and able to see our life more stablely and clearly?

From “Cultivating the Empty Field, The silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi”

                                                            Translated by Taigen Dan Leighton

"Vast and far-reaching without boundary, secluded and pure, manifesting light, this spirit is without obstruction…. Subtle but preserved, illumined and vast, also it cannot be spoken of as being or nonbeing, or discussed with images or calculations. Right in here the central pivot turns, the gateway opens. You accord and respond without laboring and accomplish without hindrance.  Everywhere turn around freely, not following conditions, not falling into classifications.  Facing everything, let go and attain stability.  Stay with that just as that.  Stay with this just as this. That and this are mixed together with no discriminations as to their places.  ….. This is how truly to leave home, how home-leaving must be enacted."

Face everything, let go and attain stability.

We have to step out of our sense that we can control what is arising or what is going to happen next.  This is stepping out of leading our lives from our desire system of like and dislike.  When we acknowledge that we are not in control, our deeper spirituality is born.  This is the “don’t know mind” of Zen.  This is beginning to see the “bothness” of life.  We are both the flow and the hindrance.  Humility is the acceptance of being human and learning to live with and take joy in the reality of Bothness.

Now we can find peace and harmony with our own imperfections and those of others and begin to live with spiritual security.

Hongzhi continues:

“Settled, without a grasping mind, the matter of oneness may be accomplished.  Only do not let yourself interfere with things, and certainly nothing will interfere with you. Body and mind are one suchness; outside this body there is nothing else. The same substance and the same function, one nature and one form, all faculties and all object-dusts are instantly transcendent.  So it is said, the sage is without self and yet nothing is not himself. Whatever appears is instantly understood, and you know how to gather it up or how to let it go.  Be a white ox in the open field.  Whatever happens, nothing can drive him away.”

Burning the flame of your life

 From Katagiri Roshi:

“Zazen is not a means to an end, it does not produce enlightenment.  The zazen we do is shikan taza – just sitting.  This type of zazen is to just become present in the process of zazen itself or wholehearted sitting.  Enlightenment is not something you acquire after you have done zazen.  Zazen is not a concept of the process.  Zazen is to focus on the process itself.

All we have to do is what we are doing right now, right here.  Whatever kind of experience we have through zazen is secondary.  Whatever happens, all we have to do is to be constantly present right in the middle of the process of zazen.  This is the beginning and also the end.”

Uchiyama Roshi translates Samadhi as right acceptance.  Right Acceptance is to receive yourself and simultaneously the whole universe.

There is a great deal of difference between library understanding of Zen and zendo understanding.  Daido Loori called the zendo and sesshin, a bull-shit detector.  All of our concepts and ideas are stripped away.  We begin to understand zazen nakedly and at its core, we are taught not to hold on to anything.  Not only do we not cling but we also radically accept or radically include all things that arise.  This is non-preference in Zen.  We have to suspend the thought-function of the mind and activate the awareness function.  Entering pure awareness or process, subject and object can drop away.  In this functioning, we can receive ourselves (our historic karmic process) and the whole universal energies simultaneously.

This simultaneity is sometimes called identification.  Not only subject and object identify as one functioning but the particular phenomenon and the universe identify together.  Identification means that your daily life (each phenomena that arises) is exactly the same as the source of human life.  Katagiri Roshi writes, “What is practice? Practice is to manifest the object of your activity as a being that exists in eternal time.”

The underlying message of Dogen-Zenji is often similar to this.  He works from the basis of non-substantiation, which the Prajna Paramita sutras and Nagarjuna so explicitly demonstrated but he adds the component of practice – how do we live our ordinary lives from the perspective of the emptiness of all things?  Dogen asks how we can take care of constructed reality with the understanding of negation.

Katagiri Roshi wrote,

If you want to live with spiritual security in the midst of constant change, you have to burn the flame of your life force in everything you do.  If you think you have lots of time and many choices in your life, you don’t believe me when I say that you have to pay attention to every moment.  When a moment comes, whatever happens, just face your life as it really is, giving away any ideas of good or bad and try your best to carry out what you have to do.  You can do this; you can face your life with a calm mind and burn the flame of your life in whatever you do.

The Manifestation of Simplicity

When I first entered Zen practice, Zen seemed like an enormous project with a very grand result.  I was thrilled by the idea that I could leave my suffering life behind, purify myself, and enter some Vermillion Tower in the high distant mountains.  I tried very hard.  I surrendered to the form and tried to impress my Zen Teacher with my diligence.  At one point, one of my Zen teachers said to me, “You are barking up the wrong tree.”  I was very mad at him.  I had given sweat, blood and tears, after all, for the zendo and its unending chores.  I had worked so hard.  How dare the world say, I had got it wrong!

There are many moments in a Zen life when you feel, “I have got it completely wrong.”  It is part of learning that our mental constructs are not “it”.  So we build up these constructs and then we tear them down, over and over, until we simply stop building them up anymore.  In my life, that took a very long time to unwind.

What is left is beautifully expressed in Katagiri’s language as the “manifestation of simplicity”.  This simplicity of practice/realization contains directions like; receive, let go, “just this”, openness and presence.  Dogen writes in Fukanzazengi:  “Going forward, is after all, an everyday affair.”  What I see now when I examine my mind, is how tenacious my patterns are of “trying to get somewhere else” or “productivity”.  The balance of doing and non-doing is very fragile.  It is very hard for me to non-do, to be, to manifest simplicity.  Is this day and its content enough?  Do I really understand and realize that this moment, exactly as it is, is the Whole Works?  Can I live my daily life in the pure sense of human activity, which I learn about through the experience of zazen?  This is the grist for the mill of practice.  Grinding out our patterns of evaluation and returning to the simplicity of what’s at hand to do, and sometimes within “do” is “not to do”.

I guess the “work” part of practice is learning to have a clear mind by letting go of our conceptualization.  Arising with this clear mind is the ability to hear silence.  Perhaps that does take a lot of sitting.  Our simplicity needs the openness of this formless awareness.   And yet accompanying sitting must be a deep development of acceptance and compassion for samsara (the world of cyclic suffering) in order to end up with simplicity.  It’s almost like going backwards from accomplishment to nakedness.

In a phone conversation with a dear friend, we were talking about aging and life.  We were talking about how we still have certain character flaws that we had been “working” on our whole life.  Though they might be somewhat better, they still arise.  Almost simultaneously, we laughed and said something similar:  “Well, we are now at the last resort – acceptance.”

In a 12-step Recovery story, a man writes:  “My serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations.  Keep my magic magnifying mind on my acceptance and off my expectations.”  This is a great expression of the manifestation of simplicity.  Our expectation and goals are all part of our conceiving of reality.  Even though we may have a goal, it can be manifested simply by the direction we are facing in the present moment and in the acceptance of what we perceive to be our hindrances.  In the radical acceptance of life as it is, we have to accept samsaric life on its own terms - the terms of cause and effect.   Through our radical acceptance of things as they are and our deep formless awareness, we find the simplicity to live.  Katagiri Roshi would say, at the end of his life, “just live!”

From Ryokan, 18^th century Zen master and poet:

Spring – slowly the peaceful sound

Of a priest’s staff drifts from the village.

In the garden, green willows;

Water plants float serenely in the pond.

My bowl is fragrant from the rice of a thousand homes;

My heart has renounced the sovereignty of riches and worldly fame.

Quietly cherishing the memory of the ancient Buddhas

I walk to the village for another day of begging.

The household of the Buddha-ancestors is our house.

“The day to day activities in the household of the Buddha-ancestors, is our house, our life and our activity.  This doing and not doing, is imbued thoroughly with the total dynamic functioning of moment-to-moment reality.  Nothing is left out and there can be great peace and ease in this understanding.”  Dogen-Zenji.

A friend sent me this quote this week and it was a continuation of my last blog.  What I’ve been contemplated, particularly in Dogen’s “Uji”  is how to manifest the  Wisdom of Equality.

The household of the Buddha-ancestors is our house.  Our day-to-day activities are the life and activity of the Buddha.  Can our concentration and mindfulness be strong enough to make this an expression of our own very life and truth?  We need a lot of mental strength (concentration energy) to interrupt our swirling stories in our minds and land us in the experiential sensations of the here and now. To allow our feeling heart/mind to know that this here and now is connected with the whole universe.  When we are able to do this, we have relief.

“This doing and not doing” are BOTH the dynamic functioning of the truth.  It’s hard for a human mind not to cling to one side or the other as “right”. 

Our culture is such a “doing” culture.  Our values and praise are skewed towards accomplishment.  However, a value of non-doing might help alleviate our high stress and anxiety.  So for Americans, it’s usually that we need to make spaces for non-doing.  We learn to meditate.  We allow unbounded openness to touch our day-to-day activities.  But either way, concretely producing, or sitting in silence and openness, either way, we are involved in the dynamic functioning of life itself, of the Whole Works.  Nothing is left out.

Spirituality and meditation does not land us in a vermillion tower - a heaven that transcends our day-to-day activity.  Rather we are encouraged to see our ordinary lives from the view of One mind and the mystery revealed in every form or activity.

There can be great peace and ease in this understanding.  This is the beginning of radical acceptance, which can imbue everything with peace.  Our karmic lives cannot be escaped.  Our karmic life has to be accepted as it is and seen through as impermanent. 

Contrary to what we think Buddha said, the first thing Katagiri Roshi said to me in 1973 was, “You can’t escape pain.”  What does that mean in the face of Buddha saying that he came to teach freedom from suffering?  So this is our great koan.  How can we see our suffering and the activities of our karmic life as the great manifestation of the One Mind?  Through that investigation, our karmic consciousness and the Buddha-nature can be seen dynamically functioning together and forming the great household of the Buddha-ancestors.  Then, our karmic life is revealed and seen as a household of a Buddha.

Holding up the Moon

“Who sweeps the ground and also sees the moon?

Holding up the moon, her sweeping is truly not in vain.”  Dogen-Zenji from Eihei Koroku

Our chores and repetitive actions that are the nuts and bolts of human activity are not simply mundane and therefore inconsequential. These activity; brushing our teeth, washing the dishes, changing diapers, answering emails, walking to the mailbox etc are not unimportant or insignificant to the meaning of life. They are not to be rushed through or ignored all together or handed off for someone else to do.

My son asked me in an existential moment, “What is the meaning of life?  I answered, “The present moment itself IS the meaning.  Nothing extra.”

If we see life from this view, we see that each moment is complete.  Each moment upholds both the vast and the particular. Each moment is the actual expression of Buddha, and all our life becomes the field for this expression. 

As Dogen says, “In the whole world, nothing is hidden.”  Which means that we actually can clearly see and have a connection with the mystery in each moment.  In an ordinary mind, we don’t see that “doing the dishes” is connected with the whole of life and we can’t see this connection because our discursive thinking is still out of control and circulated madly within all our fabricated stories.  To have a direct mind, is to do all our activities as holding up the moon, as connected with the universal perspective, and therefore, nothing we do is in vain.  That eases my soul.  Nothing I do is in vain.  Nothing is just trivia and wasting my time.  I can take care with even the smallest thing - putting the paperclip back in its magnetic box.  When I can receive life as a whole, than each moment, extraordinary or ordinary, is enough.

As Katagiri Roshi writes,

“There is no fixed form for engaging the way.  It is about how to live intimately with all things.”

There is no fixed form for engaging the way.  Whatever is in front of our noses is the current form and that current form flows easily and without obstructions into the next form.  Whatever is in front of our noses is the Buddha nature, is life on life’s terms.  We welcome each impermanent form as it flows into the next form.  This is practice and the moment of realization both. There is no form that is essentially more “spiritual” than another.  A ritualized form such as the morning service does not have an intrinsic value that is higher than, say, going to the bathroom.  They both are expressing the Buddha nature, which is held within their own uniqueness. And yet, both types of experience mutually influence each other.  We begin to realize the “wholeness” intrinsic in life.  To intimately penetrate what is in front of our noses, is to penetrate the whole works.  Nothing more.

Katagiri roshi continues by saying,

“Just be in the process of living

for which there is no fixed form

together with all things

with the true mind, the sincere mind and purity.

This “purity” is not opposed to dirty or sinful.  It is not an evaluative word.  This purity means to directly and clearly, contact, without clinging, this exact experience.

Dogen calls this, “penetrating exhaustively”.

Dogen writes from Uji, Beingtime:

Entirely worlding the entire world with the whole world

Is thus called penetrating exhaustively…….

One does nothing but penetrate exhaustively entire time as entire being. 

There is nothing remaining left over.