One Body

By Zen Master Sokei An

Your body is not bounded by the surface of your skin, you know.  The sun and the moon are your body.  The ocean and rivers are your body.  The whole universe is your body.  The Buddha based his religion upon this Mind, this consciousness.  Sometimes you call it “one-body.”  Then you observe that your mind is as boundless as the sky, and the endless universe, and your present state, this moment is here…that is all.  All the teachings are in your heart, they are inherent, the intrinsic law of your nature.  You cannot find this anywhere outside yourself.

Suzuki Roshi on Sitting

You should not be tilted sideways, backwards, or forwards. You should be sitting straight up as if you were supporting the sky with your head. This is not just form or breathing. It expresses the key point of Buddhism. It is a perfect expression of your Buddha nature. If you want true understanding of Buddhism, you should practice this way. These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself the purpose of our practice. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind, so there is no need to try to attain some special state.

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

By Jane Hirschfield

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—

between you, there is nothing to forgive—

but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

Experimenting with Standing in Daily Life

By Charles Brooks, from Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

The reader who is interested in such experimentation may feel like trying it out deliberately …[as we have practiced it].  This is fine if you have the time and patience.  Otherwise, wait for some occasion when you are obliged to stand anyway.  There are bound to be plenty of them.  Perhaps you are waiting in line at the bank or in the supermarket or at some other location.  Instead of allowing your energies to sour into impatience or boredom, you may channel then into experiments like these.  You do exactly what feels agreeable and interesting, merely making the decision to forego your customary inertia and to give yourself, as fully as is practicable, to exploration.  You may explore anything that comes to you.  The only condition is that you give it your respect and time.  If you can explore without hopes or expectations, but with the same kind of care you might give to doodling at the telephone, something will come of it.

Reclaiming the Baby's Awareness

By Charlotte Selver, from Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

I wish you would once in a while look into the eyes of a healthy baby, and would see with what earnestness, interest, great power of concentration—a basic saying yes—such a child has. The child doesn’t yet want anything special; it is equally interested in everything that comes. When the child takes something and looks at it from all sides, or when somebody goes through the room and the child’s while attention follows…that is how we started. And it is also what we can come to—when this natural inner drive for full relating is unearthed and set free.

We wouldn’t be all the time so full of expectations and wishes, but we would be seeing more clearly that any world in which we live can be as astonishing as the world of the baby. And then all things are precious.

Something In Us Can Teach Us

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

In Zen they say, “Buddha is in everybody.” That's not a shallow statement. It means something. Buddha is in everybody. Buddha is in you and in you and in you and in you. Buddha is in all of us. That means something in us knows. Something in us can teach us. Something in us can inform us how it wants to be. So that we can feel whether we are coming in touch with another person in such a way that we can be open for the other person, or whether we are not open for the other. We can feel whether we speak the truth or whether we go a little off the truth. We can feel whether we're putting pressure on something or whether we only give our weight to it. We can feel whether we allow our breathing to function as it wants to function or whether we manipulate it. We can feel whether we're dealing with a person and letting the person have his own way of being or whether we manipulate him. And so on and so on. In other words we have the ability within ourselves--if we become more awake--to feel more clearly what our own nature has to tell us. That's the thing that interests me.

We Have Nothing to Teach You

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

We have nothing to teach you. We only help you to discover what is already there, inside you. Our method is that there is no method. It is a very sensitive inquiry, a very sensitive discovery which everybody makes for himself through his own experimentation into what we actually become aware of when we begin to use our biological equipment more sensitively, more sensibly. It's not an empty phrase to say, for instance, when something doesn't fit fully into reality that it is nonsense. And this sensing -- this possibility of becoming more alerted in our senses, and using them more fully and more altogether -- this is the content of our work.

A Whole-Life Path

Six Tenets of a Whole Life Path (from A Whole-Life Path: A Lay Buddhist’s Guide to Crafting a Dhamma-Infused Life, by Gregory Kramer):

Kramer identifies “six tenets” of what he calls a "whole life path". Writing from the perspective of a Theravada practitioner, he describes a practice of "the tenet sweep", where one asks, in sum, "What is my relationship to the Dhamma right now?" Kramer notes: "As you become more familiar with the content and attitude of the tenets, each bare tenet will reveal its full wisdom tone. Soon you might well be able to mentally touch each tenet using hardly any words. The tenet sweep is best undertaken with an attitude of kindness and patience. We are all ripening gradually in wisdom."

The “tenet sweep”:

1.     Ground in the Dhamma.  What teachings can I apply to my life right now?  Do I sense the working of natural laws: in my mind, in relationship, in the world?  Can I name them, learn from them?  As I study or reflect or engage in conversation, am I considering what I am saying from the standpoint of the early Buddhist teachings?  Other wisdom traditions?

2.     Engage all the teachings as practices.  Am I merely thinking about the Dhamma or actually practicing it right now?  When I read or hear about a teaching, do I put it to work in my life?  Which approaches to enacting the Dhamma fit best right now: close observation of thoughts and behaviors, deep reflection on the teaching, concrete physical actions and social engagement?

3.     Exclude no moment, experience or teaching.  Is this one moment, now, guided by wisdom?  Am in excluding anything from the path: my intimate personal life, my art or craft, my playtime?  Am I avoiding teachings that are difficult to understand?  Am I excluding teachings that challenge my belief systems?

4.     Find each teaching in the here and now.  Whatever teaching or practice I’m reflecting on or enacting, do I feel it is available for me to experience right now?  How is this teaching manifesting in my thought processes, in my bodily experience?  What is deeply true in this teaching, and how does it feel to touch that truth here and now?

5.     Let all the teachings in fully.  Which teachings are closest to my heart right now?  Which am I guarded against or pushing away?  Can I feel the possibility of an unintoxicated mind, balanced and clear?  Can I sense in my body the energy, challenge and possibility of the teachings?  Am I moved and inspired by this Dhamma-rich path?

6.     Engage the teachings individually, in relationship and socially.  Can I feel that the person I am with right now is a spiritual friend?  How am I treating them—with compassion, with generosity?  How might we engage the path together, right now, in our conversation or what we’re doing?  Could our togetherness be a doorway out of a heroic and lonely stance?  How am I supported and morally challenged by society and humankind as a whole?  How can I, alone and collaboratively, bring the wisdom of the Dhamma into these relational and social encounters?

Zen Master Seung Sahn on Chanting

Chanting meditation is an important aspect of daily Zen practice. At first you may not understand. But after you chant regularly, you will understand. Chanting meditation means keeping a not-moving mind and perceiving the sound of your own voice. Perceiving your voice means perceiving your true self or true nature. Then you and the sound are never separate, which means that you and the whole universe are never separate. Thus, to perceive your nature is to perceive universal substance. With regular chanting, your center gets stronger and stronger. When your center is strong, you can control your feelings, condition and situation.

[At Lotus Heart Zen] we practice together. At first, people come with strong opinions, many likes and dislikes. For many people, chanting is not easy: much confused thinking! However, when we do chanting meditation correctly, perceiving the sound of our own voice and those around us, our minds become clear. In clear mind, there is no like or dislike, only the sound of the voice. Ultimately, we learn that chanting is not for our personal pleasure, but to make our direction clear, in order to save all beings from suffering.

When you are chanting, you must perceive the sound of your voice, and when you do, you and the universe have already become one. Suffering disappears,; true happiness appears. This is called nirvana. If you keep nirvana, your mind is clear like space. Clear like space minds clear like a mirror. Red comes, red. White comes, white. Someone is happy; I am happy. Someone is sad; I am sad. Someone is hungry; give them food. The name for this is Great Love, Great Compassion, the Great Bodhisattva way. That also means Great Wisdom. This is chanting meditation, chanting Zen.

A Path With a Heart

From The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda

Submitted by Susan Suntree

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think is necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same; they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Darkness Is Asking To Be Loved

by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel| June 2, 2020  LION’S ROAR                          

If you’re still holding up and trying to meditate right now, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel invites you to fall down.

By now we have lost the tiny sense of peace we created for ourselves. Our composure is an idea long gone, reflected in the grinding of our teeth and locked jaws.

If you are still holding up trying to meditate, I invite you to fall down. Fall down on the earth. Come down here and smell the sweat of terror on your skin, overpowering the scent of agarwood. Come down on all fours and greet the darkness that reeks of death, reaches out its desperate hand and asks to be loved as much as we love the light it gives.

Breathe for those gasping for air.

Come down here on this earth and breathe for those gasping for air. Hear each scream as a bell that never stops ringing. Bury your face in the mud of this intimate place, in this shared disease and tragedy.

If you have nothing to say, now is the time for the deeper silence honed that does not apologize or seeks something kind to say. And yet the deeper silence is not quiet. It whispers in the dark and wakes you from the nightmare.

Come down here and be still on the earth. Let loose shame, rage, guilt, grief, pain, and make a river of it.

Come down here. Catch the love poems hidden in the shouting, watch the unfolding of the seasons from the ground, look up at the sky. And when it hurts from being down here so long, roll over and see what you couldn’t see from the other side.

Breathe out loud. No particular posture needed.

Fall down onto the earth. Fall off your soft cushions. Come down here. Come down here, where the only lullaby tonight will be the sound of your heart drumming the songs you were born with.

 

Equanimity: Walking the Tight Rope with a Grandmother’s Heart

By Roshi Joan Halifax on September 22, 2020

 

The Four Boundless Abodes of lovingkindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity were introduced to me by Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg in the early 1970’s. ...I was a Zen person, and a bit skeptical of such a “nice” practice. But Sharon told me to just do the practice, internally work with the phrases associated with each of the “abodes” and that they would change my life. Well, why not? I said to myself. And so I began....

 

But this evening, before autumn equinox, and in the midst of political turmoil, a global pandemic, climate meltdown, racist violence, and an upcoming election that looks complicated and compromised, my mind turns toward equanimity, the most challenging of the abodes for me...

... it was Bernie [Glassman] who gave me the strongest lessons about equanimity, that capacity to maintain balance in the midst of any conditions, no matter how strange, no matter how tough. He would sit in the charnel ground of Auschwitz and be an unshakeable presence in the midst of a grotesque and cruel history that was hard to even imagine and nearly impossible to stomach... He did this with imperturbable equanimity, a strong back, and also a soft front....

 

...One of the functions of equanimity is not to get blown off balance by any one of the “the eight worldly dharmas” of pleasure and pain; praise and blame; disgrace and fame; and loss and gain. One needs to put one’s center of mass over a base of support, like tight rope walkers..., not to be pulled off balance by the worldly winds. Equanimity protects us by giving us a base of support for the mass of our lives....

In the polarized conditions of our current world, it is pretty challenging for most of us to maintain our balance and a good heart in the midst of so much negativity and uncertainty. One doesn’t want to be a by-stander, on the one hand, dissociated from the suffering within and around us. And many of us are very socially engaged, so socially by-standing is not an option. But one of the things I have learned from being a long time Zen practitioner is the gift of the “grandmother’s heart.” Eihei Dogen puts it this way: “You can understand all of Buddhism, but you cannot go beyond your abilities and your intelligence unless you have robaishin, grandmother heart/mind, the heart/mind of great compassion.”

A good grandmother doesn’t take her life personally. She is not a by-stander but rather one who “looks over;” she has the heart of equanimity informed by lovingkindness, compassion, and joy in the well-being of others; this kind of grandmother within us offers whatever she can, without expecting anything in return.

At this time of equinox, I think we could use a big dose of “grandmother’s heart,” a bit more of justice as well as love in our world. Life is in need of balance on this day of fall equinox, 2020. And life is in the balance. May we find our way to robaishin before too much more time passes.

 

We are all on that tight rope now, no matter what party we belong to, no matter our age, gender, ethnicity, neighborhood. Let’s find that immoveable center, that plumb line that aims toward gravity. Let’s find that strong back that supports our soft front, and let’s find or call out our grandmother’s heart.

Gratitude by Norman Fischer

All my life I have been contemplating a question of Heidegger’s that has always struck me as strangely profound: Why is there something, why not rather nothing?

Have you ever thought about that? We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn't working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all? Why should anything exist at all? Really there's no reason for it. Why not nothing rather than something? Nothing would be simpler.

… It would appear that none [of the creation of the universe] of that had to happen. Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it, and our recent appearance in this universe, although connected absolutely to all of it, the necessary causal fruition of it all, is literally gratuitous.

It seems to me that gratitude then isn't so much an emotion or a feeling as an actual fact, maybe even the primary fact, of our being at all. If we are, in other words, we belong, radically belong, are possessed by, embraced by, all that is, and gratitude is literally what we are when we are most attuned to what we are, when we plunge deeply into our nature, and stop complaining.

…When we do [sitting meditation], zazen, as Dogen tells us, we are not examining ourselves or trying to make personal improvements. We are sitting within Buddha's heart, releasing ourselves to that aspect of ourselves that deeply belongs to the universe and is grateful for it.

The Shambhala Warrior Prophesy

From Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Chapter Five, A Wider Sense of Self, pp. 100-102.

A story that inspires us both is a twelve-centuries-old prophecy from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  The heroes of this story are called Shambhala warriors.  The term Shambhala warrior is a metaphor for the Buddhist figure of the bodhisattva, one who deeply understands the core teaching of the Lord Buddha.  That central doctrine is the radical interdependence of all things.  When taken seriously, this leads to the recognition that if one person has the capacity to be a bodhisattva, then all others do too. 

Here is a particular version of the prophecy as it was given to Joanna by her dear friend and teacher Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche of the community of Tashi Jong in northwest India.  Read it as if it were about you.

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger.  At that time great powers have arisen, barbarian powers.  And although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common.  Among the things they have in common are weapons of unfathomable destructive power and technologies that lay waste to the world.  It is just at this point in our history, when the future of all beings seems to hang by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

You can’t go there, because it is not a place.  It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors.  You can’t tell whether someone is a Shambhala warrior just by looking at her or him, because these warriors wear no uniforms or insignia.  They have no banners to identify whose side they’re on, no barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy or behind which to rest and regroup.  They don’t even have any home turf.  The Shambhala warriors have only the terrain of the barbarian powers to move across and act on. 

Now the time is coming when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors – moral and physical courage.  That is because they are going right in the heart of the barbarian powers to dismantle their weapons.  They are going in the pits and citadels where the weapons are made and deployed, they are going into the corridors of power where the decisions are made.  In this way they work to dismantle the weapons in every sense of the word.

The Shambhala warriors know these weapons can be dismantled because they are manomaya, which means “mind-made.”  They are made by the human mind and thus can be unmade by the human mind.  The dangers facing us are not brought on us by some satanic deity or some evil extraterrestrial force, or by some unchangeable preordained fate.  Rather, these dangers arise out of our relationships and habits, out of our priorities. 

“So,” said Choegyal, “now is the time for the Shambhala warriors to go into training.”  “How do they train?”  Joanna asked.  “They train in the use of two implements,” he said.  Actually, he used the term weapons.  “What are they?” Joanna asked, and he held up his hands the way the dancers hold up the ritual objects in the great lama dances of his people.  “One,” he said, “is compassion.   The other is insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena.”

You need both.  You need compassion because it provides the fuel to move you out to where you need to be and to do what you need to do.  It means not being afraid of the suffering of your world, and when you’re not afraid of the world’s pain, then nothing can stop you. 

But by itself that implement is very hot; it can burn you out.  So you need the other tool, the insight into the radical interconnectivity of all that is.  When you have that, then you know that this is not a battle between the good guys and the bad guys.  You know that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.  And you know that we are so interwoven n the web of life that even our smallest acts have repercussions that ripple through the whole web, beyond our capacity to see.  But that is kind of cool, even a little abstract.  So you also need the heat of the compassion. 

 

In the Abbot’s Cell

The Knopf poet and translator David Young writes of Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (712–770), “As his society, one of the world’s greatest civilizations, slipped from a golden age into chaos and uncertainty, he responded imaginatively, with poems whose excellence still startles us. His unique development is partly a matter of artistic growth . . . and partly the response of the imagination to what Wallace Stevens called ‘the pressure of reality.’” In these lonely but somehow uplifting lines, written during a period of war and rebellion at midcentury, Du Fu is hiding in the Dayun (Buddhist) monastery in the capital, probably, Young tells us, to avoid being conscripted by rebel forces. (He adds that the constellation the poet refers to is Jade String, more or less our Big Dipper.)

In the Abbot’s Cell

I lie awake and watch
the flicker of the lamp

delicate odor of incense
helps to clear my thoughts

mostly filled with darkness
the central hall looms large

sound of a wind chime
tinkling below the eaves


The flowers just outside
are all invisible

but I can smell their fragrance
here in the quiet dark

one of the constellations
is setting behind the roof

passing the iron phoenix
fixed at the temple’s peak


Pretty soon the monks
will start to chant their sutras

the bell calls them to prayer
I stay in bed

before very long I’ll have to rise
and walk across plowed fields

facing the dust and wind
facing my fears and griefs.

Norman Fischer

All my life I have been contemplating a question of Heidegger's that has always struck me as strangely profound: Why is there something, why not rather nothing?

Have you ever thought about that? We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn't working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all? Why should anything exist at all? Really there's no reason for it. Why not nothing rather than something? Nothing would be simpler

... It would appear that none [of the creation of the universe] of that had to happen. Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it, and our recent appearance in this universe, although connected absolutely to all of it, the necessary causal fruition of it all, is literally gratuitous.

It seems to me that gratitude then isn't so much an emotion or a feeling as an actual fact, maybe even the primary fact, of our being at all. If we are, in other words, we belong, radically belong, are possessed by, emQ.raced by, all that is, and gratitude is literally what we are when we are most attuned to what we are, when we plunge deeply into our nature, and stop complaining.

...When we do [sitting meditation], zazen, as Dogen tells us, we are not examining ourselves or trying to make personal improvements. We are sitting within Buddha's heart, releasing ourselves to that aspect of ourselves that deeply belongs to the universe and is grateful for it.

http://www. gratefu lness.org/readings/nf _gratitude. htm

From Ecodharma, by David R. Loy

On the negative side, some traditional Buddhist teachings discourage us from social and ecological

engagement. If the spiritual goal is an individual salvation that involves not being reborn into this world of suffering, craving, and delusion, why should we be so concerned about what is happening here. In contrast to such an otherworldly orientation, however, many contemporary Buddhists doubt the existence of any transcendent reality and are skeptical of karma as an ethical law of cause-and-effect built into the way the universe functions. They understand the Buddhist path more psychologically, as a therapy that provides new perspectives on mental distress and new practices to promote this-worldly well-being. Otherworldly Buddhism (which aims to escape this world) and this-worldly Buddhism (which helps us harmonize with it better) seem bipolar opposites, yet they usually share an indifference to the problems of this world. Neither is much concerned to help it become a better place.

(from Introduction, p.4)

... So what does all this have to do with ecological engagement? In order to comprehend what Buddhism .. can contribute to understanding and responding to the eco-crisis, it has been important to clarify what

the spiritual path involves, in language avoiding cosmological dualism. If we view the ultimate goal as escaping from this world -whether the end of rebirth or dwelling in an emptiness indifferent to its forms and therefore immune to its troubles -or as simply harmonizing with the world and its institutions, then we are unlikely to engage fully with the social and ecological challenges that call out to us today.

One of my favorite Zen koans speaks to this. A student asks the master: "What is the constant activity of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas?" - what is special about how enlightened people live, moment by moment? Perhaps the student was wondering if they manifest some extraordinary powers. The master's reply is short and simple: "Responding appropriately." That's all.

How wonderful! But in order to respond appropriately, we need to understand our situation. lbn a Zen monastery it's easy to know what's appropriate: when the bell rings we put on our robes and go to the practice hall to meditate. But what about when we leave the monastery grounds and reenter the wider world, with its social and ecological problems? Realizing that our essential groundlessness is an inexhaustible potential enables us to respond appropriately to them.

Gandhi. famously said that our greatness as human beings lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves -but are those transformations really so independent? His own example suggests not. As we begin to wake up and realize that we re not separate from each other, nor from this wondrous earth, we realize that the ways we live together and relate to the earth need to be reconstructed too. That means not only social engagement as individuals helping other individuals but finding ways to address the problematic economic and political structures that are deeply implicated in the eco-crisis and the social justice issues that confront us today. This reclaims the goal of enlightenment from an exclusively individualistic model. Engagement in the world is how our personal awakening blossoms, and contemplative practices such as meditation ground our activism transforming it into a spiritual path.

(From Chapter 2, p.72)

Koans for Troubled Times

Joan Sutherland  

Lions Roar 4.18

How do we as Buddhists meet the challenges of our time? Joan Sutherland shares the history of koans, which were created to deal with a difficult period in Chinese history. From the Buddhadharma archive, originally published in Spring 2008.

Several years ago, in the face of a creeping despair about the state of the world, I began to reread my favorite twentieth-century Russian and East European writers. Those folks knew how to keep small embers alive in a fierce wind: Anna Akhmatova, who turned love into a revolutionary act, and Adam Zagajewski, reassuring us that the good always returns, though at the maddening pace of an old gent on a bicycle, the day after the catastrophe.

People are worried, and we’re looking for ways to climb onto our bicycles and pedal out to see what we might do to help. Recently, I’ve been exploring what my own Zen koan tradition has to say about unending conflict, environmental disaster, the starvation of millions, and the small figure in the corner of the painting, tipping her head back to take it all in.

It turns out that the koan tradition was born at a similarly urgent moment in Chinese history. Twelve hundred years ago, a few Chan innovators had a fierce desire to leap out of the usual ways of doing things and into new territory—not to escape the catastrophe looming around them, but to more fully meet it. If they were going to be helpful they had to develop—and quickly—flexibility of mind, an easy relationship with the unknown, and a robust willingness to engage with life as they found it. Perhaps most importantly, they needed a really big view. For them, Chan practice wasn’t about getting free of the world; it was about being free in the world. The first koans are field notes from their experiment in the getting of this kind of freedom.

What does it mean for each of us to be wholeheartedly part of this world? How do we fall willingly into the frightened, blasted, beautiful, tender world, just as it is?

In the eighth century, Chinese culture was flourishing. It was an age of art and philosophy, prosperity and trade. At the same time, the strains of empire were beginning to show. A huge country with an imperial foreign policy has a long border to defend; the constant warfare took a lot of money to pay for and many soldiers to fight. The people were being taxed into poverty, and able-bodied men were on the borders making war rather than on the farms making food. Authority outside the capital began to break down, and life was growing harsher and more capricious.

Eventually the Tang government had to bring in mercenary armies from as far away as Asia Minor. For a while it worked just well enough: the mercenaries would come in and crush the latest incursion or rebellion, the government would pay them for their services, and they would head back home. But at mid-century this precarious status quo crumbled when one of the foreign armies refused to leave. They set up a rebel stronghold in the ancient capital of Changan, the City of Everlasting Peace.

This An Lushan Rebellion ushered in a decade of civil war, famine, and disease so devastating that two out of three Chinese died. Two out of three. And it happened in the blink of an eye. China went from being one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen to a nation devastated by conflict and starvation, and its population had shrunk by two-thirds in about ten years. A kind of order was eventually restored, but it would be centuries before the country fully recovered.

The great poet Du Fu was trapped in Changan during the An Lushan Rebellion, and he wrote a poem about it called “The View This Spring.” The poem contains two spare lines that sum it all up:

The nation is destroyed,
mountains and rivers remain.

Some Chan practitioners saw what Du Fu saw, from their own perspective: In our world things are always getting broken and mended and broken again, and there is also something that never breaks. Everything rises and falls, and yet in exactly the same moment things are eternal and go nowhere at all. How do we see with a kind of binocular vision, one eye aware of how things are coming and going all the time, the other aware of how they’ve never moved at all? How do we experience this not as two separate ways of seeing, but as one seamless field of vision?

Mazu (Ma) Daoyi and Shitou Xiqian, who became Chan teachers around the time of the An Lushan Rebellion, pushed these questions further. They asked, What does it mean for each of us to be wholeheartedly part of this world? How do we fall willingly into the frightened, blasted, beautiful, tender world, just as it is? Because, as Peter Hershock formulates it in his wonderful study of Chan1, “It’s not enough to see what buddhanature is; you have to realize what buddhanature does.”

Perhaps it’s significant that these two creative geniuses came from the margins of Chinese society; in unprecedented times, no one is an expert yet, and anyone might become one. Both lived long lives that spanned the eighth century, and both had connections to Huineng, the sixth Chinese ancestor; from Ma’s heirs came the Linji (Rinzai) school, while some of Shitou’s descendants formed the Caodong (Soto) line. They never met but had great respect for each other; in their day it was said that you didn’t really know Chan until you had studied with both of them. They had a sometimes spooky connection that had unsettling effects on the students who passed between them. Here’s a typical story: Once a monk went to see Shitou. The monk had carefully prepared for all the challenges he could anticipate, but Shitou caught him off guard by crying “Alas! Alas!” as soon as he saw him. Unable to respond, the monk consulted Ma, who slyly suggested that the next time Shitou cried “Alas! Alas!” the monk should puff twice. The monk went back to see Shitou, but before he could say anything, Shitou puffed twice.

In middle age, Shitou settled down on South Mountain in Hunan province. At first he built a meditation hut on top of a large flat rock, which is where he got his name, Shitou, or Stone Head. When the Buddhist temple next door invited him to live there, he refused, preferring the independent life of a mountain recluse. “Better to drown at the bottom of the sea for eternity than to seek liberation by following the wise,” he once remarked.

Shitou might have been a hermit, but he was a hermit in a lively neighborhood. South Mountain was one of the Five Holy Mountains of Chinese Buddhism and also the home of Taoist temples and a Confucian academy. Hundreds of recluses lived and practiced in the area, and Shitou also attracted many students over the years. Open-minded and curious, he was deeply influenced by Taoism and Huayan Buddhism, and the An Lushan Rebellion apparently only deepened his conviction that sectarianism causes nothing but suffering. He had seen where grand schemes and big ambitions could lead, and while differences between people were natural, he taught, when we start attaching values to the differences, we open the door to heartache. “In the Way, there are no Northern or Southern ancestors,” he said; there are only ancestors common to us all. No red states and blue states, he would say today, just Kansas and California and Georgia, in all their complexity.

Mazu Daoyi was born in the far west of China near the border with Tibet, the son of the town garbage man. He began studying Chan when he was still young, and his studies eventually brought him to central China. For more than twenty years, during the time of the An Lushan Rebellion and its aftermath, Ma walked from one temple to another through the devastated countryside. Eventually he settled down in Jiangxi province, and his monastery became the great Chan training center of the age. Chan teachers usually take their name from the place they live and teach; Ma is the only one who is known by his family surname (Ma) and an honorific usually translated as Great Master (Zu).

Ma’s teaching style was direct, uncompromising, and often physical. It was clearly influenced by what he saw on his long walk through a devastated land. In those days, people came to the monasteries for a lot of reasons, from spiritual turmoil to the promise of steady food. But anyone who was looking for escape at Ma’s monastery was in for a shock. When he was once asked about the essence of his school, he replied, “Oh, it’s just the place where you let go of your body and your life.” That was quite a statement during a time when everyone knew people who had lost both. From Ma’s perspective, the situation was so urgent, and the need was so great, that there wasn’t time for people to despair or lack confidence or run away. It’s as if he were saying, “We need you to get clear right now about your own nature and the nature of life, so that you can roll up your sleeves and start doing something about it.”

Shitou and his descendants tended to emphasize reconciliation and the restoration of peace and stability in times of chaos. Ma’s line valued Chan’s independence from the mainstream, which allowed it to offer both a critique of the status quo and an alternative to it. Neither thought he had the one true way or tried to impose his view on the other. Ma and Shitou had different temperaments and ways of teaching, but they shared something fundamental: both were deeply affected by the sorrows of their age, and as a result both were determined to reimagine what Chan was for.

Until then, Chan was largely an introspective meditation practice; you looked inward to find your true self. Huineng, for example, described meditation as “clearly seeing your original nature inside yourself.” Shitou and Ma raised the eyes of Chan to the horizon. In Shitou’s words, “What meets the eye is the Way.” This true self you are looking for, they said, is not just here, in your own heart/mind, but everywhere. Everything you see is buddhanature; everything shines with that light. Everything you see is you—and this at a time when what you saw included blighted fields, refugees starving by the roadside, deserted towns, parents mourning their children killed in the wars. There’s something moving about the large and generous spirit of these two men who responded to the devastation around them by saying, This is all me. This is all you. They showed that the way to come to terms with life’s pains is not by turning away from them but by moving deeper into life and encouraging as many others as possible to join you. They embraced the great matter of their time: What do we do now, we one in three who survive?

Before Ma and Shitou, formal Chan teaching had consisted largely of lectures given to groups of students. The heart of Shitou’s and particularly Ma’s teaching was something new: an intimate meeting of two people, either alone or in front of a group. Awakening, they saw, happens in relationship. We meditate together and talk together, we hear birds calling and cars laboring up a hill. We tend a feverish child and recite the words of the ancestors. As Ma and Shitou did with each other, we find a deep communion with someone we’ve never met.

We spend a lot of time in the company of our thoughts and feelings, and sometimes we are a companion to silence. Even a hermit sits in a web of connections with things visible and invisible. Our meditation is made not just of the vastness and the deep engine of concentration; it is also made of these relationships. And then one day, for no apparent reason, something in particular comes to fetch us: the cook coughs or the morning star rises, and we fall open. A particular intimate meeting with a particular other opens us to an intimate relationship with life itself.

Practice is about making us fetchable. It helps us to recognize what gets in the way of our being fetched, and then it gives us a method to deconstruct the obstacle. Most people find this difficult to do on their own, and for Ma and Shitou, that’s where the power of intimate meetings comes in.

The earliest koans are records of Ma’s encounters with his students—encounters that could be mild, probing, or literally upending, but are never about winning an argument or making someone feel stupid. Over and over again—tirelessly, relentlessly—they are an invitation to freedom. In a time of crisis, talking about freedom or even modeling a free life wasn’t enough; these intimate meetings allowed people to experience freedom for themselves.

When Shitou was helping his questioners recognize and dismantle what stood between them and freedom, he tended to ring variations on Are you sure about that? His method was to take nothing for granted and to question everything, especially someone’s most cherished beliefs.

“What about liberation?” asked a monk.

“Who binds you?” countered Shitou.

“What about the Pure Land?”

“Who corrupts you?”

“What about nirvana?”

“Who keeps you in the cycle of birth and death?”

Ma, on the other hand, startled people out of their habitual thoughts and into another territory entirely, where the thoughts just didn’t exist anymore—the method of a high-risk demolitions expert compared to Shitou’s plank-by-plank approach. Once, when a questioner named Shuiliao asked Ma the meaning of Chan, Ma kicked him in the chest, knocking him down. This awakened Shuiliao, and he stood up grinning and clapping. Later he said, “Since the day Ma kicked me, I haven’t stopped laughing.”

Neither Ma nor Shitou allowed his questioners to remain for a moment in the position of someone who doesn’t get it. But they weren’t interested in replacing that position with a better one: I didn’t used to get it, but now I do. Their project was more radical: What’s it like to have no position at all? Shitou would challenge his questioner’s self-doubt, which is often the unacknowledged basis of a position.

Someone asked Shitou, “What am I supposed to do?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Where else can I find what I’m looking for?”

“Are you sure you lost it?”

Shitou’s responses aren’t dismissals; he really means what he’s asking. Why do you assume that you need to ask me, and what’s it like when you do? What is your deepest longing, and what if you realized that you already have what you long for?

In a similar way, Ma would challenge the assumption that if you don’t understand something, that’s a problem to be fixed. Someone once told Ma that he didn’t understand one of Ma’s famous sayings, that mind is Buddha. Ma replied, “The mind that doesn’t understand is exactly it. There’s nothing else.”

When we think there’s something wrong with not getting it, when the mind makes up commentaries about what it means not to get it—well, that’s mind being Buddha, but it’s usually hard to see it. To be wholeheartedly unsure, to sincerely take up a question like, What does it mean that mind is Buddha, I wonder? without veering off into commentary—that, Ma found, was a much more direct way for people to experience for themselves the mind that is Buddha.

When we think there’s something wrong with not getting it, when the mind makes up commentaries about what it means not to get it—well, that’s mind being Buddha, but it’s usually hard to see it.

But even that was sometimes too much chitchat for Ma’s taste. When someone froze because they didn’t know how to respond to his question, or tried to present the answer they thought displayed their accomplishment or would please him, Ma was likely to hit or kick or brusquely send them away. He’d put his hand over someone’s mouth just as they were about to speak. He tweaked noses and shouted so loud it deafened people for days. This style of teaching later became a menace and a cliché, but originally it arose from the urgency of the times.

Ma knew the power of our habits of bondage, and he also knew the power of being free of them, if only for a moment. He pulled the rug out with the hope of surprising us into free fall. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl2 once described the encounter with beauty in a way that Ma would entirely recognize: Beauty stops you in your tracks, so that it’s suddenly impossible to continue in the direction that a moment before seemed inevitable. Something pleasurable or attractive (like replacing old, flawed positions with new and improved ones) enhances the feelings you already have (NOW I’ve got it). On the other hand, genuine beauty, like suddenly having no position at all, stops the flow of your feelings (Nothing I thought applies anymore), and when they resume they’re moving in a different direction entirely.

Behind the shock tactics, Ma’s perspective was deeply optimistic and encouraging. Right here and right now, he invited, find your footing as a realized human being. Meet me eye to eye, as an equal. Drop the notion that there’s something to get. You already have it; let’s see it. In the language of his descendent Linji, let us be true persons without rank together, and let us see what becomes possible when we do.

Once we’ve done some serious deconstruction and experienced falling freely, we have to do something with that experience. A monk who carefully observed Ma’s method wrote about the time Ma kicked Shuiliao in the chest: “Emptiness, that idle land, is shattered. The iron boat sails straight onto the Ocean of the Infinite.”

Even the purity of emptiness, in which nothing ever happens, has to be left behind. There is a boat to build and sail, a vast sea to navigate. There are refugees to feed and orphans to rear, art to rescue from the bonfire and songs to write so people won’t forget. Ma was passionate that responding to our time is an essential part of realization. He once said that from the point of view of the bodhisattva, burying oneself in emptiness and not knowing how to get out is like suffering the torments of hell. As our hearts and minds open in meditation, it is actually painful not to open our hands as well. For Ma, hell wasn’t the trouble he saw all around him; hell was turning away from it, trying to escape into a separate peace.

Why is it an unfloatable iron boat that we have to sail? In Chan, iron boats take their place next to flutes without holes and stone women who get up to dance, representing the moment-by-moment miracle that emptiness appears as all the things of the universe—as redwood trees and freeway overpasses and the dark matter we can’t even see. We’re participating in the same miracle when, having experienced the free fall of emptiness, we step back into the thick of life to turn our awakening into matter.

How do we do that? Well, Shitou and Ma didn’t think it was by way of a practice that requires all kinds of special conditions to do it correctly. This may be the place where you lose your body and your life, but there’s nothing special about it, and certainly nothing that you can control through fear and fussiness. Ma maintained that “a person bathing in the great ocean uses all the waters that empty into it.” We launch that iron boat by truly understanding that wherever we find ourselves, whatever we’re faced with, that’s the Way. There are no detours from the Way; we can’t lose our Way. To engage and entangle ourselves with whomever and whatever we meet, to care about them, to throw our lot in with them—that is the Way. Every moment, every circumstance, is another chance to experience things as they are, rather than as we wish or fear them to be.

We turn the same warmth and curiosity toward our own heart/minds. Ma famously said that ordinary mind is the Way. We don’t reject our own thoughts and feelings; even in a desperate time, the grieving, the rage, the flashes of bravery and generosity in ourselves and in others—all of that is the Way, too. Even, maybe especially, the mind that doesn’t understand is exactly it. In our own time, anyone who claims to have an explanation for what’s going on probably doesn’t, whether it’s from a political or metaphysical or conspiratorial or any other perspective. It’s a good time to be asking questions, to appreciate the grounding of the ordinary mind in its impulses to make a warm breakfast on a cold day and to research what it would take to become carbon-neutral. In other words, there is a unity between our inner lives and the outer world, a continuum that only appears to be separated into pieces that are sometimes in conflict. Turn too far toward your own heart/mind and you become self-obsessed; turn too far in the other direction and you burn out. Bring an attitude of warmth and curiosity to both and the Way begins to open on its own. This is what Ma called living a natural life according to the times. Be part of what’s going on around you, and “just wear clothes, eat food, always uphold the way of the bodhisattva.” We might chuckle and think, Oh sure, clothes, food, way of the bodhisattva—nothing to it, right? Just so, according to Shitou. “Your essential mind is absolutely still and completely whole, and its ability to respond to circumstances is limitless.”

Every moment, every circumstance, is another chance to experience things as they are, rather than as we wish or fear them to be.

This fundamental wholeness and responsiveness is what Ma urged people to experience for themselves; it’s where Shitou invited us to rest. It’s the freedom of having no position; there’s no running around in circles waving our hands, no updating the inventories of everything that’s missing, and no illusion that what we’re capable of is determined solely by our will. Put all that down and things get big and alive. Our essential mind isn’t bounded by our skull, and our capacity to respond isn’t either. This aspect of realization also has everything to do with relationship: we feel whole and at peace and able to respond because we know we’re part of something very large. Remembering this even some of the time can make a huge difference; it can make us bold.

Many people feel that, at least as far as global warming is concerned, we’re entering uncharted waters. As in Ma and Shitou’s time, some of what we already know will continue to be helpful, a lot of it won’t, and we’ll often feel desperately inadequate to meet the work ahead of us. In eighth-century China, how did people get up every morning and pitch in, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to feed the vast majority of starving people or restore most of the ravaged land? The kindly, implacable Ma told them to go out and “benefit what cannot be benefited, do what cannot be done.” When they took his advice, his words became a kind of encouragement: Just because something is impossible, don’t let that stop you. Put down your despair and your hope, begin from no position at all, and look for what becomes possible when you do.

I have two quotes over my desk, that one from Ma next to Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Most of the work in the world is done by people who aren’t feeling very well that day.” These words encourage and console me, reminding me that doing what cannot be done gets done by people with all the ordinary human frailties. It gets done by us. For the times when we really get stuck and can’t find a way through, Ma suggested that we make ourselves into a raft or a ferryboat for others. Neither Shitou nor Ma offered any detailed blueprints for constructing such a raft, because it would be different in every situation; there’s no way to know ahead of time. But when we’re well and thoroughly stuck, if we help others to discover a way across, they’ll bring us along. Eleanor Roosevelt’s own life of service also turned out to be her way through a desperate personal unhappiness.

When all is said and done, how well did Shitou and Ma respond to their time? One of Ma’s heirs said that his teacher taught him two crucial things: First, that each of us is already endowed with the treasure of everything we need. Our enlightenment is already here, as is our kindness and our curiosity and our courage. Second, each of us is free to use that treasure to respond to the life around us. Our freedom to fall willingly into the frightened, blasted, beautiful, tender world, just as it is, is already here. To know for ourselves that we have that treasure and that we’re free to use it, no matter the circumstances—that, Ma’s heir concluded, is a happy life.

About Joan Sutherland

Joan Sutherland, Roshi is a teacher in the Zen koan tradition and the author of Vimalakirti & the Awakened Heart and Acequias & Gates : Miscellaneous Koans and Writings on Miscellaneous Koans. Her work is available at Cloud Dragon (joansutherlanddharmaworks.org).

 

Shakyamuni Buddha Holds up a Flower

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From Wu-men Kwan, Case #6; Indian Buddhism

Long ago on Gradhrakuta Mountain, Buddha sat down in order to give a Dharma talk before a vast assembly of followers. After sitting for an extended period of time in silence, he held up a flower. Everyone was silent. Only Mahakashyapa smiled.

At that moment Buddha said, "I have the all-pervading true Dharma, incomparable Nirvana,

exquisite teaching of formless form. It is not dependent on words, a special transmission outside the sutras and I, now, give it to Mahakashyapa."

Questions

1. Why did Mahakashyapa smile?

2. Why did Buddha pick up the flower?

3. What kind of Dharma transmission was given to Mahakashyapa?

4. If you were Mahakashyapa, how would you respond to Buddha's speech?

5. If you were Buddha and no one smiled, what would you have done?

6. What is the correct kind of transmission for Buddha to give to Mahakashyapa?

7. If you were Buddha and everyone smiled, what would you have done?

Wu-men's Comment

Goldjaced Gautama insolently degrades noble people to commoners. He sells dog flesh under the sign of mutton and thinks it is quite commendable. Suppose that all the monks had smiled-how would the eye treasury have bee; transmitted? Or suppose that Mahakashyapa had not smiled-how could he have been entrusted with it? If you say the eye treasury can be transmitted, that would be as if the goldjaced old fellow were swindling people in a loud voice at the town gate. If you say the eye treasury cannot be transmitted, then why did the Buddha say that h entrusted it to Mahakashyapa?

Wu-men's Verse

Twirling a flower,

the snake shows its tail.

Mahakashyapa breaks into a smile,

and people and devas are confounded.

Zen Master Seung Sahn's Commentary

The flower smiles; the Buddha's face is red.

Dedication

I dedicate this collection of kong-ans to my late teacher Seung Sahn

Dae Soen Sa Nim, who tirelessly and selflessly spread the Dharma throughout

the Western world. His inspiration and dedication lives on in my heart and it is my

fervent hope that you might find the flowering of your own self nature through the

study of these dialogs set forth by the ancient Teachers of the East.

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