Three Greats of Zen →

Someone looking at this title might see it and say, “Oh terrific, Bodhidharma, Huineng, and (fill in blank with the name of whomever the Great Teacher in your lineage is). But that's not the focus of this blog or Dharma talk.

The first “Great” of Zen is “Great Faith”. There are a lot of Zen “purists” that will say, “It's only about seeing your True Nature. That's it. Period. End of story.” Are they parroting the words of Bodhidharma or another Great Teacher who has said the same thing, or have they actually realized their Buddhahood? One thing that I have heard from the “purists” is that there is unequivocally no “Faith” in Zen, or in Buddhism in general. No “god,” no “faith” might succinctly sum up the point. This simple statement may have originated in whatever it was that led to Buddhist practice in general, and specifically to Zen. Rebelliousness isn't necessarily detrimental to practice, and in fact can be extremely useful, but even rebellion must be applied as skillfully as any other element of practice.

If the rejection is the blanket rejection of all “religiosity,” it makes me wonder what the depth of their practice is, maybe who their teacher is, and what their objective is in Zen practice. Rightly so, they may come back with, “There is no goal in practicing Zen!” Fair enough...maybe. Is this rather definitive statement the result of reading, or realization? Are they secularists in Zen clothing? Is Zen practice self-identified as “cool?”

My own road to the Path isn't entirely unlike this. The religion in which I was raised was unsatisfactory, and I started reading about numerous other “spiritual” practices. When Buddhist collections showed up on the radar screen, it was an amalgam—as much Buddha as Bodhidharma, as much Milarepa as Mu. What I found was that the writings that broadly fell into the category of “Zen” were the ones that resonated with me, so that's the direction I went. If I were going to join a Zen sangha, I was willing to do whatever the Zen sangha did, in an odd twist of “When in Rome.” My practice literally started as an act of faith. What I was doing wasn't working, and I believed this Zen thing might. Then I had faith in that Zen would. I went through my phase of sitting zazen, as I was with a Soto group at the time, and we did the chants in English and Japanese, I heard words like mantra and dharani, we dedicated merit, the whole gamut of forms that constitute practice. And at the time, it was all real. All the ritual must have been for some purpose, although I had no clue what that was. But everything was directly associated with name & form, and it took a while to shake that off.

Then, as I suspect we all might, I went through the “thinking phase,” where everything was an exercise in intellect. “Form was emptiness, and Emptiness was form,” but only intellectually. It said it in the Heart Sutra, so I said it. This still has its allure, and find myself in it again more than I'd like to admit. Intellect as part of skillful means, fine. Intellect as a means to boost my ego, to prove I'm the smartest guy in the room, and other such “I”-oriented results, no so skillful.

Then came the “attached to emptiness” phase. I told myself that if I were ever to give a Dharma talk, the first thing I'd do is knock the statue of the Buddha off the altar, and hope that it broke into 84,000 pieces. We'd see how many people were still attached to their superstitions, we'd see who was attached to “form.” Fortunately I moved on from that idea long before ever giving a talk. In this phase is where anything like “faith” was looked on with disdain, and anyone who said it was looked on with pity.

At some point, the harshest edges of attachment to emptiness wore off, if only because I saw how unattractive a trait it was when I saw it in other people, mostly in the form of Zenternet trolls.

Now, on the one hand, we can say that there is absolutely nothing upon which we can hang our hats in Zen practice. The Diamond Sutra put it as, “All dharmas are no-dharmas, thus are they called 'dharmas'.” Think you have something to stand on, the Buddha swipes it away even before your feet land. The Heart Sutra even dismantles the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path: “...No suffering, no origination, no stopping and no path...” So how could there be such a thing as “faith,” and what possible purpose could it serve?

And yet, The “Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment” speaks of “faith-understanding” as the entry gate to practice. Asvagosa is the purported author of “Awakening the Faith in Mahayana.” Third Zen Patriarch Sengcan's Xinxin Ming is often translated as “Faith-Mind Transcription.” Faith is all over Dogen's writings. So “faith” is mentioned any number of times, and is still scoffed at by some. For a practice that is rooted in the “here&now,” there seems to be little room for faith. But it's there, even if we don't call it faith, even if we deny that it's even there. We have faith in the Buddha, faith in the Dharma, faith in the Sangha. But, faith, as such, really needs no object in Zen . Ultimately, what we have faith in is our own Buddha-Nature, and that it is possible for us to realize it, so we have faith in ourselves.

This is tempered by the second “Great” of Zen, “Great Doubt.” The saying is, “Great Doubt, Great Awakening; small doubt, small awakening.” With both Great Faith & Great Doubt, personal views are dropped. With Great Doubt, the personal view (conceptual thought) is to be destroyed by a kong-an. A huatou only leads to one direction, to Great Doubt. It's the “no-this” of the pairs in the Diamond Sutra. “If this is not-this, and only provisionally called this, that means there really is no 'this,' then what is left?” Good question. This is “Great Doubt,” when the rug everything we think we have to stand on is pulled out right from under us. It need not be a fearful doubt, just an issue of impermanence, maybe of perceptions being empty. My views will change over time. My faith now is not the same as when I started to practice. I can even have Great Doubt in my Great Faith. Neither will take it personally.

In the talk, I mentioned walking in the dark. My faith is that if I take a step, there's going to be something for it to land on when it comes down. My doubt is typified by my holding onto a chair or some other object for support, because the faith is tempered by, “not always so.” Taking the step anyway is where the third Great of Zen comes in:

Great Courage. In simple terms, it's what gets me to put my foot down even if I can't see what, if anything, it's going to land on. When we do anything that gets past our fear, anything that gets past our comfort zone, that's Great Courage. You can put it in the same mix with perseverance, diligence, effort, determination, whatever else may work for you. In the Sutras, they are called “Fearless Bodhisattvas,” not Bodhisattvas of convenience. As ZM Seung Sahn would put it, “Practice, practice, practice for 10,000 years, become enlightened, and save all beings.” And we do it, even though we “know” that all Bodhisattvas are no-Bodhisattvas, all beings are no-beings, and there is no saving to be done. If that isn't a nice concise explanation of the Three Greats of Zen, I'm not sure what is.

Click on the title to listen to the talk. View other blogs by Eunsahn Citta at:

http://nobodhiknows.blogspot.com/

and along with other great Buddhist bloggers also at:

http://progressivebuddhism.blogspot.com/

Dialectic, not Dualistic →

My first date with my partner was over coffee, discussing the relative virtues of Buddhism. Apparently she'd practiced with a Rinzai group a number of years previous, and was fine until the stick came out. Getting thwacked on the trapezius was not her idea of a spiritual practice. It's not for everyone. But as she's a therapist the discussion eventually turned to the type of therapy she practiced: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT. Since I'm not a therapist, and hadn't even heard of this before, I listened in rapt attention. (Since it was a first date, I probably would have been rapt if we'd talked about the weather).

I immediately heard things about that therapy that sounded, Buddhist-y to me. We go on further, and the discussion turns into one regarding Mindfulness, 1/8th of the Eightfold Path. Turns out the woman who devised DBT had some Buddhist training, and was using some of that in this therapy method. Of course, other than the Mindfulness part, what jumped out was also the “Dialectic.” To put it succinctly, that refers to two things constituting “and” not “or.” It’s a non-dualistic way of seeing events, thoughts, feelings, actions, and so on, as a whole rather than opposing separate elements. A very non-therapist way of putting the dialectic might be, “I don't like this! And I can get through it, it will pass.” My apologies to the therapist community for such a lame explanation, but in general it's a way to develop coping mechanisms to address the distress that life brings.

The Buddha identified it: “dukkha.” He said it has a cause, that it can end, and following the Eightfold Path is the way toward that. Of course we Mahayana Buddhists chant, “No suffering, no origination, no stopping, and no path,” but rather that that being a contradictory, dualistic view, it's the dialectic view that one might find the Buddha saying in the Diamond Sutra: “All suffering is no-suffering, thus it is called suffering.” And there a lot of things we face every day that will fall into the category of suffering, or as I like to put it, “struggle,” or “distress.” (Suffering seems to have a more extreme connotation, where some might misdiagnose their dukkha because “it's uncomfortable, but it's not bad enough to be called suffering”). But even if it's no-suffering, no-struggle, no-distress, when you feels it, it can sure seem real enough, even if intellectually you know it isn't.

There are certainly enough issues we either face or ignore every day that could actually qualify as legitimate “suffering” though. Sometimes, the “facing,” might just take on the nature of an earnest discussion by a couple of erudite would-be philosophers, discussing the travails of mankind over cups of espresso while smoking Gaulaoises. If the action stops there, from a karmic standpoint, the action that comes from it immediately will most likely be bad breath. Eventually, however, that action may lead to an actual active action.

I've always admired idealists. Utopian idealists are sometimes needed to get the pendulum swinging in the direction of the ideal. Were it not for the quixotic windmill-tilters, there could be even more injustice than there still is. The US might still be bombing “those North Vietnamese godless commies into the stone age,” if it hadn't been for some who took to the streets and college campuses and tilted at the windmill of the US government, and eventually turned public opinion, however grudgingly, against supporting that war. Richard Nixon was the president who signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence. I'm guessing the Earth Day environmentalists might have had something to do with that.

Thich Nhat Hanh is often credited with bringing forth the idea of “Engaged Buddhism.” I also seem to remember him saying something to the effect of, “Is there any other kind?” Writing as a Buddhist, but not exclusive as a Buddhist, and not exclusively to Buddhists, it seems as we have an opportunity to become “engaged humans,” some of whom may identify as Buddhists. I think we can all agree on the general statement that there are problems in the world today, regardless of how we identify ourselves. We may not agree on what they are, or what to do about them, but if we look at the struggles, figure out what the cause is, have faith that the struggle can be conquered, and then devise a plan to do the conquering, then perhapsthere's a chance.

The Bodhisattva vow says we'll save all beings, not just the ones whose skin is the same color as mine, not just the ones who speak the same language as me, not just the ones who can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” There are plenty of people around who don't have, and can't afford, bootstraps. I can choose divisiveness; I can choose inclusiveness. I'm also not one of those who thinks inaction is a wise and wholesome course of action. All beings may be no-beings, but that's no excuse to overlook reality as it is right here, right now, from moment-to-moment-to-moment. Someone is hungry, feed him, not just tell him to read a book on sandwich making, or tape a picture of a sandwich to him, or tell him that his hunger “is made by thinking, that it isn't real.” The Avatamsaka Sutra will not fill his belly. And I suspect the Buddha might lose his peaceful, calm equanimity if we had a sandwich and didn't hand it over.

We may not be able to change the world, but we may be able to effect a change on some portion of it. So far as I'm concerned, a dialectic approach rather than a dualistic approach would be a start. We can see poverty as a problem. We can see it as a problem, and that there is a solution. We can see a problem, then dualistically deny there is a problem. We can see a problem, and blame those “_____” for creating their own problem. We can be democrats or republicans; we can be democrats and republicans.

I'm not one of the “end-of-the-world” types who think that it's never been worse than it is today. My gut tells me (if not statistics) that the struggles change, but the struggling has gone on for quite some time. I expect that will be the case in the future as well. My experience is that in order for things to change radically, things first have to get really bad, then even worse before anyone will admit to there being a problem. California and its water supply might be one of those issues that actually brings radical change, with contributions from all, not just one self-identified group or another. That of course assumes that they all drink water.

The following excerpt was sent to me by Julio Robles, who happens to be a Mexican national and lives in Japan. I'm neither of those, if you want to put walls up between us. But he has helped me, and I hope I've helped him, even though we're 10,000 miles apart. See if anything in the piece he sent me sounds familiar:

"We live in a country where the common people in general are sacrificed for the fame, peerage, and medals of one small group of people. It is a society in which the common people in general must suffer for the sake of a small number of speculators. Are not the poor treated like animals at the hands of the wealthy? There are people who cry out in hunger; there are women who sell their honor out of poverty; there are children who are soaked by the rain. Rich people and government officials find pleasure in treating them like toys, oppressing them and engaging them in hard labor.… However, the Buddha continually calls to us: “I shall protect you, I shall save you, I shall help you.”

 “My Socialism” by Takagi Kenmyō (Japanese, 1864–1914)

Takagi was one of those idealists who was executed on charges that have since been proven to be false. Deep bows to him, and all those who aren't afraid to tilt at a windmill or two for the sake of all sentient beings.

You can listen to the Dharma talk by clicking on the title.

"Don't Fill in the ________" →

I don't know when mothers (and maybe fathers) and teachers started saying it, or whether they still do, but when I was young, I'd be told, "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all." I'd like to amend that to, "If you don't have anything to say, don't say anything." Better yet, "If I don't have anything to say, don't say it."

Before the assembled monks, the Buddha held up a flower. The vast majority of them raised one collective eyebrow (well, one each anyway),and cocked their collective heads (again, one each) like a confused dog. But only Mahakasyapa smiled. To him, the Buddha transmitted the wordless, formless Dharma. One flower held aloft, one subtle smile. Before thought, Mahakasyapa smiles. And so, the legend has it, Zen is born, beyond words and scriptures.

The talk this week started with noting the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Bell is struck, no words, just silence. Bell is hit again, talking may resume. If you listen, there's a bit of a gap even after the second bell. I wanted to experiment with something, and I had to go with what was at hand. I didn't have a flower. I did however have a big blue Pilates ball. I held it aloft, and it elicited a smile. Correct response to the stimulus. If I'd looked menacing, looking like I might throw it, cowering might have been the appropriate response. But I didn't, and in return received a smile. No words yet, just a big old grin.

The assembled Bodhisattvas try to explain the entry to non-duality under the guidance of Manjusri. They take their turns, and do alright. But Manjusri tells them that all their explanations are in and of themselves dualistic. He turns to the layman Vimalakirti for his explanation. Vimalakirti says nothing, which has since become known as Vimalakirti's "thunderous silence". Great response. There was no explanation of non-duality that wouldn't involve some duality, even if it were only to juxtapose duality with non-duality. I've given this a shot when working through kong-ans with my teacher; sometimes it's acceptable. Sometimes not (dammit!).

Huineng said he had one thing that had no name or form. He asked if any of his monks knew what it was. Shenhui responds by saying "It's my Buddha-Nature". Nope. Years later, Nanyue Huairang comes back to Huineng and says, "To call it 'one thing'  is not correct."

In Zen meditation, we sit and walk silently, the only sound is the clap of the chugpi or bell, sometimes instruction from the meditation leader, and chanting. The silence allows us the space to investigate ourselves, to ask, "What is this?" that's doing the investigating. It allows us the space to listen. The incessant chatter can distract us from hearing the "cries of the world."

In the NYC subways, commuter rail lines, and most likely elsewhere, since 2001, they've put up these signs, "If you see something, say something." I'd like to amend that to, "If you see something, see something Hear something, hear something".

I picked up the big blue Pilates ball again at the end of the talk. I did throw it that time. A hearty laugh was had by all. Sometimes, laughter, or a silent smile is the correct response. And sometimes, we need to think silently, "Don't fill in the ___________".

Click on the title to listen to the Dharma talk from August 6, 2015
Go here to navigate to my blog:  http://nobodhiknows.blogspot.com/