Zazen Essays

Basic Goodness

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:32:02 GMT

Basic Goodness

A noted writer on Zen, Heinrich Dumolin, has said that “the doctrine of universal Buddha-nature is the central dogma of Mahayana Buddhism” (Zen Enlightenment, Boulder, 2007, p. 103). Dumolin also quotes Dogen as saying, “All being is Buddha-nature” (p. 112).

Chogyam Trungpa, in Shambhala (also Boulder, 2007), calls Buddha-nature, when it applies to people, “basic goodness.” Much that Trungpa says about this concept may be helpful for zazen practitioners.

For one thing, the realization of one’s “basic goodness” comes from meditation. In Trungpa’s teaching, which is grounded in Tibetan tradition, the term, “meditation” differs from zazen only in omitting the mudra. Trungpa says that meditation is “the means of rediscovering ourselves and our basic goodness” (p. 20).

It seems that the intuition of one’s basic goodness comes when thinking is set aside, as in zazen. When one’s mind is cleared of thought, we realize that basic goodness is “the natural situation that we have inherited from birth onwards” (p. 30).

A reservation people may have about applying the idea of basic goodness to themselves is that they are aware of being flawed in this or that way. Certainly all of us have flaws. Trungpa addresses this issue directly, saying that “when we feel that our lives are genuine and good,” “we can see our own shortcomings without feeling guilty or inadequate” (p. 16).

Zazen practitioners who continue to sit regularly will realize their basic goodness.

Peaceful Mind

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:42:16 GMT

Peaceful Mind

In the collection of his talks entitled Food for the Heart (Massachusetts, 2002), Ajahn Chah says, “The serene and peaceful mind is the true epitome of human achievement” (p. 64).

I read these words soon after I began studying Buddhism years ago. I wondered, just how does one achieve a serene and peaceful mind? Continuing to read Ajahn Chah’s talks, I found that the chief method that he urged on his disciples was to observe their own minds, which was to observe the operation of the skandhas within them. I began this practice.

In Buddhist philosophy, the skandhas are a group of five aggregates that are said to constitute the entirety of a human being. They are form, which means all bodily sensations of sight, sound, movement, smell, and taste; liking and disliking; perception, which means awareness of bodily sensations and of emotions; mental formations, meaning thoughts and emotions; and consciousness.

When I began observing my mind, I followed Ajahn Chah’s advice to note that I had no control over the skandhas at all. I could see that this was true of bodily sensations: if there was something in front of my eyes, I saw it, if there was a sound near me, I heard it, without willing any of this at all. I could see that lack of control was also true of other skandhas. I could not prevent myself from preferring one person or thing over another; I could not prevent the welter of thoughts that streamed through my mind daily, nor prevent myself from feeling sad or happy or becoming angry.

Eventually it occurred to me that since I had no control over the skandhas, there may have been no I or me in my system. At this point, consciousness of self lessened. What the Buddha, in the Bahiya Sutta, said would happen, in part did happen. He said that when the “I” or “you” was no longer part of consciousness, stress vanished.

Ajahn Chah’s “serene and peaceful mind,” to a degree, did come about.

This left the question, if I wasn’t “I,” then who or what was I? Ajahn Chah called it Original Mind, but he thought it pointless to name it. For myself, without consciousness of “I” continually pressing on me, I couldn’t identify who I was except to say it was deeply joyful and I was very grateful for it.

Buddha-nature

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:33:06 GMT

Buddha-nature

I have been reading a book entitled Zen Enlightenment, Origins and Meaning (Boulder, 2007). The author is Heinrich Dumoulin, a Jesuit theologian who wrote extensively about Zen. Dumoulin’s book includes chapters on Dogen, especially on Dogen’s conception of Buddha-nature. Dumoulin says that “the doctrine of universal Buddha-nature is the central dogma of Mahayana Buddhism.” (p. 103)

I think that the concept of Buddha-nature may be frequently misunderstood. When I was a member of the Houston Zen Center, a dharma talk was given in which it was said that one’s Buddha-nature was revealed to a person once he or she had cleared away all the moral and emotional rubble within himself.

This view is not correct. Dogen’s concept of Buddha-nature, as Dumoulin explains, “comprises all physical and mental reality. No kind of being is potentially more real than any other kind. All beings are Buddha-nature to the same extent.” (p. 111) Dumoulin also quotes Dogen as saying, “All being is Buddha-nature.” (p. 112)

In light of Dogen’s concept of Buddha-nature, no part of a human being lies outside of this nature. The idea that “moral and emotional rubble” needs to be cleared away within oneself before one can realize his own Buddha-nature is nonsense.

When I began my study of Buddhism, I benefitted much from the writings of Pema Chodrun. She had such a solid understanding of Buddha-nature. In Start Where You Are (Boston, 1994), she says, “We’re always not wanting to be who we are. However, we can never connect with our fundamental wealth as long as we are buying into this . . . hype that we have to be someone else.” (p. 9)

That our whole selves are Buddha-nature is our birthright.

Reduction of Ego

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:23:13 GMT

Reduction of Ego

Chogyam Trungpa, in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Boston and London, 2002), says that “the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego.” (p. 15)

In his private meetings with each of his students, Trungpa took the risk of embarrassing or irritating them by exposing their continual awareness of themselves.

It is possible to function perfectly well without awareness of oneself. To walk down a street, a person needn’t, and usually doesn’t, think of putting one foot in front of the other. To empty a dishwasher, it isn’t necessary to think of putting the dishes in the cabinets. Many activities do not require awareness of self to perform them.

Sitting zazen does promote the gradual reduction of a sense of oneself. This reduction can also be fostered outside of zazen by deliberately discarding a sense of self when a person spots it.

My life has benefitted by pursuing this practice.

Resource for Problems

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:40:19 GMT

Resource for Problems

Whenever I am troubled or upset, to sit zazen is a great benefit to me. Sitting zazen lowers me into a well of patient resourcefulness, an aspect of “the hidden gem” that I wrote about in a recent essay.

As I sit, I do not deliberately think about what has upset or troubled me. I simply follow the usual zazen practice of attending to breathing and returning to it if my mind wanders. After the session, in time, I deal with my problem satisfactorily.

Available Universal Self

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:46:11 GMT

Available Universal Self

Kosho Uchiyama, whose Opening the Hand of Thought (Massachusetts, 2004) I have been writing about lately, was a Soto Zen priest (d. 1998) teaching at a monastery called Antai-ji near Kyoto in Japan. He was known for holding rigorous sesshins usually of five days duration, consisting of fourteen 50-minute periods of zazen interspersed with occasional kinhin and three meals followed by a bathroom break.

The reason for these sesshins, according to Uchiyama, was “to help everyone become their self which is nothing but universal self.” (p. 62) He described universal self as “a self that is living out a life connected to all things” (p. 85), a life that is “inclusive of the entire universe” (p. xxxi). He said that this realization of life as an interconnected whole was “what Shakyamuni became enlightened to.” (p. 82)

Uchiyama held his rigorous sesshins to bring participants to a realization of universal self. The same realization is possible for any zazen practitioner. Uchiyama said, “In zazen we let go of thoughts, lower our level of excitement, and live the universal self just truly being self.” (p. 84)

Universal self may be lived not only during zazen but also at any point in the day merely by putting thinking aside. It may take getting used to. It has greatly enriched my life.

Enlightened Mind

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 20:11:04 GMT

Enlightened Mind

Continuing to read Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought (Massachusetts, 2004), I read this rather, to me, striking statement: “…What Shakyamuni became enlightened to was . . . universal self.” (p. 82)

“Universal self” is Uchiyama’s term for a self that is “living out a life connected to all things” (p. 85), a life that is “inclusive of the entire universe” (p. xxxi).

Reading this triggered in me a concept of enlightened mind as an ongoing experience of life as a grand, interconnected whole, which experiences everything to be within himself or herself, and experiences every person and thing as lovable.

Enlightened mind emerges gradually and unnoticeably to a practitioner of zazen. The practitioner can’t imagine it so can’t aim at it. It happens simply of itself.

Living in the Now

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 23:11:54 GMT

Living in the Now

In Opening the Hand of Thought (Massachusetts, 2004), Kosho Uchiyama says, “. . . All that there is, is now.” “The past, present and future are all contained within the present.” (pp. 12-13)

To live in the Now is common advice given in Zen instruction. Lately I have been thinking about whether living this way has materialized in my own life. Actually I think I have gotten the knack of living in the Now.

Being a zazen practitioner, I am familiar with the process of putting thinking aside. To me, living in the Now in daily life simply requires putting aside thoughts of the past and future. I can do this at any time, any day.

Advantages come to me when I put these thoughts aside. Colors become more vivid, outlines of objects more precise. It is as though a film has been removed from reality. When I put thoughts aside like this, a sense of the interconnection and unity of life comes to me. I feel I am living among things as they are, with no complaints, and love of life comes into my heart.

Hidden Gem

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:42:02 GMT

Hidden Gem

Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought (Massachusetts, 2004) is one of the books that have influenced me greatly during my study of Zen. In rereading this book, I still find many valuable insights.

In a preface to the book, Uchiyama says, “What I want for you, the reader, is that you understand with your own intellect that Zen concerns the true depth of life that is beyond the reach of that intellect.” (p. xxx)

To me, the expression, “the true depth of life,” indicates what zazen practitioners experience when they put thinking aside and return to their breathing. This experience, being beyond thought, slumbers inexpressibly under the surface of consciousness. It cannot be described to anyone else any more than to oneself. It doesn’t need a name. It is a secret, invaluable, personal gem provided to those who sit zazen.

A Suggestion for Long-Term Practitioners

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:27:49 GMT

A Suggestion for Long-Term Practitioners

For long-term zazen practitioners, the ego gradually becomes less prominent in their lives. Whether they put it into words or not, they have learned that the ego is not substantial or real, but merely an idea that they can put aside. I think I have learned this.

I have experienced, however, that the ego continues to make an appearance now and then and to cause unfavorable emotion or behavior. I can react angrily to something someone says or does. I can feel unaccountably sad and despondent.

I think that other long-term practitioners may have similar experiences, finding themselves slipping occasionally in their feeling and behavior. I have learned, however, that there is no point to being hard on myself because of such slips.

Ajahn Chah in Food for the Heart (Boston, 2002) expresses what I think I have seen myself. He says that after a spiritual seeker has seen or sensed the unreality of ego, nevertheless the ego may reappear, much like “a child who likes to play and frolic in ways that annoy us.” He continues,

We should understand that it’s natural for a child to act that
way. Then we can let go and leave them to play in their own
way. So our troubles are over. How are they over? Because
we accept the ways of children. Our outlook changes and we
accept the true nature of things. We let go and our heart
becomes more peaceful. (p. 157)

Of course if the child misbehaves frequently, there may be a need for self-control. Otherwise, if you slip, just accept it and forget it.

Be Where You Are

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 02:33:50 GMT

Be Where You Are

In The Myth of Freedom (Boston and London, 2002), Chogyam Trungpa notes, “We never want to be just where and what we are; we always want to be somewhere else.” (p. 92) This remark points to a tendency of mine that I have been trying to overcome.

I moved to Houston from the Big Island of Hawaii about two and a half years ago. Since that time, I have thought of Hawaii frequently, wanting to return, and that has become very bothersome to me. My wife has many friends in and near Houston and is very pleased with our house here, which we could never have afforded in Hawaii. I am glad to see my wife so happy. On both our parts, then, a return to Hawaii is quite unlikely.

As a zazen practitioner, I am familiar with putting unwanted thinking aside and readjusting my attention. Whenever I become aware of thinking about Hawaii, I put that thinking aside and settle in to where I am. It’s like removing a transparent film from a photo. The photo brightens up.

When the photo brightens, I am in an attractive middle-income subdivision in southeast Houston. The homes are all large, two-story, red or sandstone brick. I find it pleasant to walk within the subdivision and observe the appealing and imposing homes.

Our own home is smaller than most of the others, but nice-looking from the street, red-brick, with well-trimmed bushes and a large tree. Within the house, there are hardwood floors except for kitchen and bathrooms, where there is tile. I enjoy walking around the spacious five-bedroom house, which my wife and I have furnished and decorated appealingly. I am happy here, with a study in an upstairs bedroom where I do my writing.

Moving into greater Houston, my wife and I love to dance, and almost weekly, after dark, we take a thirty-minute freeway drive to a dance hall in northwest Houston. I always marvel at the superbly maintained freeways and the bright lighting. Given the squishy nature of the Houston ground, the freeways and tall light poles must be secured by pilings maybe two-hundred feet deep. It is an engineering marvel.

Thus Houston brightens up for me when the thought of Hawaii leaves. I hope to be gradually fulfilling the teaching of Buddhism, which Trungpa says “teaches us to be what we are where we are, constantly.” (p. 93)

Personal Remarks about Zazen

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:47:10 GMT

Personal Remarks about Zazen

I am a 40-year practitioner of zazen. One might think that after all this time, I would find zazen uninteresting and routine. However, the reverse is true.

For one thing, for me each zazen session is very different from another. Following my breathing is the same as watching streams of energy as they flow through my body. No session is the same respective to the course and direction of this streaming. Each session is unique.

Another aspect of my own practice is that during it, I get in touch with a source of great power. In Zen, this power has various names, such as Original Mind, the Absolute, Buddhadharma, and so on. But names are one thing, reality another. The reality, to me, is that this power is mysterious and incomprehensible. It fills me with a sense of sufficiency, adequacy, and contentment.

I have reverence for zazen and consider it a holy practice.

Thoughts on Enlightenment

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 17:45:19 GMT

Thoughts on Enlightenment

In one of his talks in The Myth of Freedom, Boston, 1976, Chogyam Trungpa said, “We are just a speck of dust in the midst of the universe” (p. 6). These words struck me as reflecting the inner condition of an enlightened person. Trungpa continued, “If you are a grain of sand, the rest of the universe, all the space, all the room is yours, because you obstruct nothing, overcrowd nothing, possess nothing. There is tremendous openness” (pp. 6-7).

Freed from the idea of himself, an enlightened person lives in great spaciousness. Without the self-centered thought, “I have attained enlightenment,” he or she feels no barrier separating him from any thing or person. There is no sense of good or bad applied to incidents or people, rather he just observes things as they are and lets them go as they go.

He has imperturbable composure, able to be active and calm at the same time. His speech and behavior are spontaneous, and he does not retrospectively worry about what he has said or done. He has the sense that whatever life presents comes from a higher power. He feels that all existence is Buddha without exception or reservation.

The condition of enlightenment, in time, will likely come to a zazen practitioner who faithfully continues his practice. When it does, since his idea of himself will have virtually vanished from his mind, he may not notice the change at all.

No Gaining Idea

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:17:59 GMT

No Gaining Idea

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boulder, 2011), Shunryu Suzuki says, “We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without any expectations, even of enlightenment” (p. 25). The advice to not have any “gaining ideas” while meditating has become a commonplace in zazen instruction.

Not having gaining ideas while meditating does not mean that a person practices zazen without a purpose. A rational person would not pursue a practice as demanding as zazen without a reason. The reason or purpose, according to Zen Buddhism, is to wake up or become enlightened.

Ironically, however, this purpose cannot even be imagined by an unenlightened zazen practitioner. The core of an enlightenment experience is that the idea of one’s personal self, the “I” of oneself, drops from the mind. This condition can only be experienced. It cannot be imagined. .

It follows that when an unawakened person does zazen, he or she does so out of reliance on the teachings of an 800-year Zen tradition. He does so without being able to envision or imagine the goal at all. Nevertheless, he does progress towards the goal. The zazen practitioner’s “I” becomes less prominent in his life as he continues the practice, and this happens of itself. It is like getting wet in a fog, Suzuki says: “In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little.” Finally, he gives us this advice: “Just to be sincere and make our full effort in each moment is enough” (p. 31).

Inspiration in Zazen

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:35:46 GMT

Inspiration in Zazen

When I began practicing zazen and studying spiritual teachings, I was inspired by Nisargadatta’s I Am That (Durham, 1973). Nisargadatta Maharaj taught in his modest home in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India until his demise in 1981.

The spiritual practice that Nisargadatta recommended was to “establish yourself firmly in the awareness of ‘I am’” (p. 53). In explaining “I am,” he said, “try to feel what it means to be, just to be” (p. 60).

I was pleased to find that this deep feeling of being was familiar to me as I practiced zazen. When I put aside sensation, thought, or emotion and returned to my focus on breathing, I was resting in “I am” just as Nisargadatta described.

I was inspired to continue to practice zazen when I saw this. I was additionally inspired by Nisargadatta’s description of his own inner experience after he practiced “I am” for a few years. I hoped that I might approximate such experience as I continued my own practice.

Nisargadatta, for example, functioned perfectly well without a sense of his personal self or ego. He said that “one’s entire personal life may sink largely below the threshold of consciousness and yet proceed sanely and smoothly” (p. 32).

Even if a vestige of ego did arise, he continued, he could easily put it aside: “Occasionally an old reaction, emotional or mental, happens in the mind, but it is at once noticed and discarded. After all, so long as one is burdened with a person, one is exposed to its idiosyncrasies and habits” (pp. 31-32).

Finally, Nisargadatta said, no doubt of himself, that there “will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable” (p. 3).

May every practitioner find such inspiration to continue zazen.

A Useful Practice

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:56:36 GMT

A Useful Practice

Recently I started to reread Ajahn Chah’s talks in Food for the Heart (Massachusetts, 2002). This book helped me a great deal when, years ago, I began the practice of zazen and my study of Buddhism. I had read the whole book, which is quite lengthy, but as, just recently, I reread the first chapter, it seemed to me to encapsulate the whole of Chah’s teaching.

According to Ajahn Chah, the human mind is “intrinsically pure. Within itself, it’s already peaceful.” That is, the mind is intrinsically in an enlightened state, which Chah calls “Original Mind.” This seems equivalent to Suzuki Roshi’s “Big Mind.”

With most of us, the peace of this mind is beyond our awareness. However, there is a solution for this. Chah says, “If we know fully the true nature of sense impressions, we will be unmoved.”

“The true nature of sense impressions” might be said to be the theme of the rest of Ajahn Chah’s book. By sense impressions, he means the Buddhist skandhas, which comprise the entire activity of body and mind that we assume to be ourselves.

When I began to work with Chah’s teaching, I put into practice especially one part of it. This was the advice to observe the activity of the skandhas and to ask myself whether I had any control over it. For example, if I felt pressure on the soles of my feet as I walked on floor or pavement, did I ask to feel that. Or if I felt sad, I was to ask whether I had invited that feeling to come into my mind. Or if I found this or that thought in my mind, I was to ask whether I invited that thought to come to me before it did. Or if I liked or disliked something or someone, did I ask for that emotion before it came. And so on through the welter of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I experienced during the day. The answer to such questions, as I put them to myself, was always “no.”

The purpose of this practice is for the observer eventually to realize that he or she has no instrumentality in the workings of his own mind and emotions. In other words, he sees that his “I” or personal self has no relevance at all respective to the course of his life. In time, he simply drops his belief in his “I,” self, or ego, and from then on he rests in Original Mind.

To end with Ajahn Chah’s words, “Our practice is simply to see the ‘Original Mind.’” “Just this is the aim of all this difficult practice we put ourselves through.”

Breathing and Zazen

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:54:38 GMT

Breathing and Zazen

An important stage in zazen occurs when one stops breathing. Not literally, of course, but when a practitioner stops “doing” his or her breathing, that’s an important stage.

We breathe continually during our lives, both waking and sleeping, and we would perish if we did not. We also breathe automatically, without thinking about it. Just as blood circulates through our arteries and veins automatically, breathing takes place entirely on its own.

However, when a zazen sitter begins the practice, the usual thing is to “do” the breathing himself or herself. That is, the sitter makes a deliberate effort, as slight as it may be, to draw each breath in and to expel it. Let’s call this “doing” one’s own breathing. I don’t know why a practitioner begins this way, but I recall very clearly “doing” my own breathing when I started zazen many years ago.

Alternatively, a zazen practitioner can just “watch” his breathing and not “do” it. Switching to watching the breath can be facilitated by reflecting on the discussion above about the automatic nature of breathing; or it may happen, as in my case, that a sitter takes a breath without consciousness of it and sees that he has done so.

In any event, starting to “watch” the breath instead of “doing” it frees energies in the zazen process to reduce the workings of ego more quickly. So it’s worth trying.

Thinking During Zazen

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:46:49 GMT

Thinking During Zazen

Continuing to read Chogyam Trungpa’s talks in Smile at Fear (Boston and London, 2009), I was struck by this remark about meditation: “All kinds of thoughts arise naturally. If you have lots of time to sit, endless thoughts happen constantly.” (p. 15)

When I was a member of the Houston Zen Center, I assisted the head teacher in a weekly introductory class in Buddhist principles and zazen. The attendees were asked to meditate daily for at least ten minutes and discuss their experience during the next class. Many of these people expressed frustration about the continuing persistence of thinking when they were trying to keep their focus on breathing.

In my longtime practice of zazen, I have not noticed any diminishment of thinking. What I have noticed is that underneath my focus on breathing, thinking still goes on. It goes on in a kind of subterraneus fashion so that I cannot tell what any of the thinking is about. Also, when I end my zazen session, I cannot tell what the thinking has been about either.

In my experience, as long as I have a sense of myself at all as I practice, I am going to be thinking. That’s just the way the mind works, constantly spinning out thoughts. There is no point to being bothered by it.

Buddhanature

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:49:50 GMT

Buddhanature

In Smile at Fear (Boston and London, 2009), Chogyam Trungpa says that for someone on the spiritual path, at some point “you begin to realize that you have something in yourself that is fundamentally, basically good. It transcends the notion of good or bad. Something that is worthwhile, wholesome, and healthy exists in all of us.” (p. 8)

Trungpa continues about this realization, “According to the Buddhist tradition, that is discovering our buddha nature. He adds, “. . . The technique that seems to be the only way to realize this, is the sitting practice of meditation.” (p. 10)

The discovery of one’s buddha nature is subliminal. It lies under the surface of consciousness. It occurs when the meditator’s focus is solely on breathing and the idea of personal self drops from the mind. Trungpa says that in meditation, “you might find that you are not anything at all. Then, although you find out that you are not, you discover some glowing brilliance that exists within the experience of nonexistence.” (p. 12)

It follows that since the idea of personal self and the cognitive mind are at bay when the meditator senses his or her buddhanature, one’s sense of his buddhanature cannot be conveyed to another.

A meditator’s sense of his or her buddhanature is a private and incommunicable experience that is an immense resource in life.

Goal of Soto Zen

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 21:09:22 GMT

Goal of Soto Zen

I have been reading introductory comments on the Dhammapada, edited and commented on by Eknath Easwaran, a noted translator and author born in India. The book is The Dhammapada , ed. Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, California, 2007.

Mr. Easwaran has some comments about Buddhism that puzzle me. He says that in leaving his princely life, Siddhartha Gautama was seeking “a way to go beyond age and death.” (p. 34) Mr. Easwaran also says that the awakened Buddha “had found the way to that realm of being which decay and death can never touch: nirvana.” (39)

In my limited understanding, the achievement of “nirvana” means that a person is not born again into life and therefore does not die. This belief presupposes reincarnation, continual birth and death, which a Buddhist can experience countless times unless “nirvana” is achieved.

My puzzlement arises from my almost exclusive Buddhist background in Soto Zen. Soto Zen, in my view, is not concerned with escaping life by avoiding rebirth. To me, this is a foreign notion. It is also a notion that seems to be rejected by Dogen. In the essay, “On the Endeavor of the Way,” Dogen says, “. . . To think that birth and death has to be rejected is the mistake of ignoring buddha-dharma.” (The reference here is Kazuaki Tanahashi, ed., Moon in a Dewdrop, New York, 1985, p. 154.)

Soto Zen, to me, is concerned with achieving contentment in this life mainly through the practice of zazen. This practice gradually erodes the influence of ego in a person’s life, which allows for a free and contented existence. This existence in no way removes a person from aging and dying. The Buddha himself aged and died. Without the claustrophobic intrusion of ego, however, it is not likely that aging and dying will be a suffering experience. That is enough for me.

Putting Self Aside

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 03:07:19 GMT

Putting Self Aside

In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (2002), Chogyam Trungpa says that on a true spiritual path, “We must . . . give something up in a very painful way. We must begin to dismantle the basic structure of the ego we have managed to create.” He continues about the pain of this dismantling, “It will be terrible, excruciating, but that is the way it is.” (p. 81)

Trungpa’s words remind me of my experience when I joined my first spiritual group about 40 years ago. The group was a branch of a traditional, Muslim Sufi order in California. The order’s home was Istanbul. The leader of the group, a Sheikh, and advanced members of the group, were intent on exposing a new member’s ego to him or her. For me, this exposure, even if Trungpa’s “excruciating” may be too strong for it, led to many uncomfortable junctures.

For instance, if I approached the Sheikh with some profound religious insight, he would turn away completely unconcerned. The advanced members might do the same if I tried to impress them. In time, I got used to putting my sense of specialness aside and just functioning as an everyday joe.

In Sufism, putting one’s “I” aside made room for the love of God to enter the heart. I think that heart-opening may have happened with me to some degree. Certainly I eventually felt freer, lighter, happier.

Loss of Ego

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:04:55 GMT

Loss of Ego

I read a Zen story a long time ago about a monk who was walking along a cliff, lost his footing, and fell over the side. He grasped a root just as he fell and hung on terrified. Eventually his grip weakened and he fell three inches to the ground.

Recently, in re-reading Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (2002), I encountered a summation of the point of this story. Trungpa was asked during a talk, “Why is it so hard to let go of one’s ego.” He replied, “The idea of it can be extremely frightening, though not the real experience.” Trungpa continued that the fear is “that we will not be able to anchor ourselves to any solid ground, that we will lose our identity as a fixed and solid and definite thing” (p. 22).

I remember that when I began to practice zazen, I did feel some fear, and it may well have been fear of dropping ego. Eventually it went away. If a zazen practitioner experiences this fear, he or she can reflect that it is quite imaginary. If, by chance or grace, he does experience at some point the absence of the idea of himself in his mind, the experience will simply be matter-of-fact. Afterwards it will be full of marvelous insights.

Observations on Ego

Thu, 08 May 2025 18:32:28 GMT

Observations on Ego

I have been re-reading Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (2002). Trungpa says that the central goal of “spirituality” is “the complete elimination of ego” (p. 7). He says that the belief that we are solid personal selves, or that the ego is real, is “a fundamental myth,” “a huge hoax, a gigantic fraud” (8-9).

Adherents of Soto Zen are well-acquainted with the goal of eliminating ego. It can be said that the aim of zazen is the reduction of the influence of ego in our daily lives. Even if the “complete elimination of ego,” to use Trungpa’s words, is not attained, as is my own case, a practitioner can expect to reach a point where the activity of ego is like that described by Ajahn Chah in Food for the Heart (2002). Ajahn Chah says that such activity can seem to be similar to children who like to play and frolic, and that “we can let go and leave them to play in their own way” (157).

So detachment from the ego, so that it is not a bother, is an achievable goal for Soto Zen practitioners. The practice of zazen gradually accomplishes this detachment. There is an additional method by which detachment can be achieved. It has been very helpful for me simply to observe the contents of my consciousness, at any point during the day, and ask myself whether I invited that content to come there.

In the case of bodily sensations, it is obvious that one has no control over them. As I write this essay, the feel of the pen in my hand, my bottom on the chair, my feet on the ground, and so on, are quite inevitable and beyond my control. In the case of thoughts, likes and dislikes, opinions, motives and so forth, the issue of control is not so obvious. However, one can ask about any content in the mind, did I ask for that to come there.

For example, if I feel offended if someone does not return my “hello,” did I ask for that feeling to come into my mind? If I see a car passing in the street outside my window, did I ask to see that? Or if I hear a sound, did I ask for that? If I dislike the looks of someone who comes to my door, did I ask for this reaction of dislike? If I feel sad, did I ask to feel that, or if I feel happy, did I ask for that?

If a person asks that question of any mental content, he or she will answer the same – no, I did not ask for that to come there, I did not control it at all. If a person patiently pursues this little exercise, he will eventually detach himself from himself, which is the aim of Soto Zen.

The Riding Mower

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 18:58:36 GMT

The Riding Mower

Let’s suppose you live in a house that sits on two acres of grass. You have a very advanced riding mower that is self-propelled and has a laser feature that measures the height of the grass. Being self-propelled, the mower goes where it goes no matter whether you have other preferences. When mowing your vast lawn, you can just sit on the mower and think your thoughts or read a book, and the mower does the job all by itself.

According to Buddhism, if I am correct, this is a passable image of a person’s life. Usually a person’s life is governed by his or her thoughts, likes and dislikes, and bodily sensations, all of which are included in the term “skandhas.” Ajahn Chah’s Food for the Heart (2002) offers an extremely clear explanation of the workings of the skandhas, saying that “they come and go of their own: there is no ‘self’ that is running things”(48).

In life, we are forever on that riding mower that is self-propelled. We may think that we run our lives, but we don’t. In any event, that is my understanding of Buddhism.

Two Worlds

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 22:37:31 GMT

Two Worlds

In Zen Buddhism and in other spiritual traditions, there is the concept of living in two worlds. In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (1999), Thich Nhat Hahn speaks of a world of “relative truth” and a deeper world of “absolute truth.” He says, “The deepest level of practice is to lead our daily life in a way that we touch both the absolute and the relative truth” (128) He seems to be referring to the ordinary world of separateness and the intuitive world of non-separateness.

Similarly, in Opening the Hand of Thought (2004), Kosho Uchiyama says, “We live simultaneously as a personal self, an individual taken up with everyday affairs, and as a universal self that is inclusive of the entire universe” (xxxi).

Also, when I followed Sufism (Muslim mysticism), I learned that a “dervish,” a member of a Sufi order, was one who stood on the threshold. A person on a threshold is capable of being on either side of the door, and he or she can put a foot on both sides at once. In Sufism, one side is the ego-driven world of getting and spending, and the other the open-hearted world of unity and closeness with God.

As I look at my own consciousness, there are two worlds there as well. There is the ego-world, which, thank goodness, at my age of 86 and long practice, is rather faint; and the world in which I seem to dwell in amiable closeness with things and people. My ego gets stung with the usual slings and arrows, but I can fairly easily put ego aside and enter the other world.

There is another aspect to this “other world,” which I find clearly alluded to by Kosho Uchiyama. Referring to his life as a Buddhist priest, he says, “. . .This choice. . .has been given life by a great power that transcends my own willpower and thought, whether you call if chance, fate, life itself, or the providence of God” (34).

The renowned teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta, in The Ultimate Medicine (1994), has the same insight. He says that, in reality, in one’s life, one is “being lived”; “whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do” (97) In I Am That (1973), Nisargadatta says, “Accept life as it comes and you will find it a blessing” (491)

In my experience, to recall my insight that a beneficent power is the doer of my life solves most of my difficulties.

Atman vs Anatman

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 20:18:02 GMT

Atman vs Anatman

I recently viewed a lengthy video of a talk by Swami Sarvapriyananda contrasting the Hindu belief in Atman and the Buddhist principle of anatman.

The Swami said that in Hindu belief, Atman is an eternal Self. He said that one could use “God” to refer to it, and indeed the belief does bear resemblance to the Christian God the Father. In Christianity, God causes all things. The great spiritual teacher from the Hindu tradition, Ramana Maharshi (in The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, 1988, p. 9) says that “the supreme power of God makes all things move.” Moreover, in Christianity, God also causes our actions as human beings. Just so, in a reference I cannot find, Ramana Maharshi says that people are God as an engineer, God as a farmer, and so on.

In his talk, Swami Sarvapriyananda continued that Chandrakiti (died about 670), a Buddhist scholar teaching at the University of Nalanda in India, attacked the idea of Atman, advancing the Buddhist principle of anatman or non-self. According to the Swami, Chandrakiti argued that there could be no self within or in charge of the skandhas, or in other words the whole human being. Thus Chandrakiti refuted the concept of Atman as the ground of all existence that could also dwell in a person and determine his or her actions.

If I understand Swami Sarvapriyananda correctly, he is saying that there is no concept of Atman in Buddhism at all. The Swami is a Hindu monk and head of the Vedanta Society of New York. It is possible that he is not familiar with a strain of thought in Buddhism that is like the Atman concept.

This strain is to be found in Keizan’s Transmission of Light (2002). Keizan is considered the “Great Patriarch” of Soto Zen. He passed away in 1325, 72 years after the passing of Dogen, the “Highest Patriarch” of Soto Zen.

Keizan says, “Do you not realize that you respond when called and you get where you are going by following directions? This does not come from deliberate thought or conscious knowledge – it is the host within you.” (p. 26) Keizan’s “host” is “Old Shakyamuni Buddha.” He continues, “Old Shakyamuni Buddha is with you all the time, whatever you are doing; he is conversing and exchanging greetings with you, never apart from you for a moment.” (pp. 6-7) He continues about the Old Buddha, “. . .Totally unknown it follows and accompanies oneself, yet one does not discern it at all.”(p. 46)

Keizan’s Old Buddha is a benign power; he is a buddy who walks and talks with us. Benignity is also true of the Hindu Atman. The renowned teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta, was once asked, “Is destiny the same as grace?” He replied, “Absolutely. Accept life as it comes and you will find it a blessing.” (I Am That, 1973, p. 491)

Zazen practitioners may develop a sense of the benign Old Buddha. I recall that Reb Anderson, the head dharma teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center, once told a large audience at Green Gulch Farm that he could speak with Buddha and receive responses. Though zazen, one can grow into a sense of being accompanied and befriended by a kindly Old Buddha.

Meditation Advice

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 20:13:59 GMT

Meditation Advice

I have been re-reading Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action (2010). Trungpa offers advice on meditation that is well worth passing on.

He says that during meditation, a person should just watch his or her breathing and not “do” it. He says, “It is easy to feel the breathing, and one has no need to be self-conscious or to try and do anything. The breathing is simply available and one should just feel that.”(p. 78)

Just watching one’s breathing puts an end to personal efforting during meditation. Energies within the meditator are then freed to impel the person to enlightenment. Trungpa says, “. . .We have a kind of spiritual instinct in us and if we are willing to open ourselves then somehow we find our way directly.”(p.71)

If enlightenment does not emerge during meditation, which seems to be rare, it may emerge outside of it. The essay on this website, “Zazen and Ego,” discusses an enlightenment that occurs this way, with its hallmarks of loss of the idea of self and realization of the interdependent unity of the world.

It is not usual in Soto Zen to discuss enlightenment. Nevertheless, it is a reality for a zazen practitioner and may arise as a surprise anytime.

Two Enlightenments

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 21:40:19 GMT

Two Enlightenments

I have been re-reading Adyashanti’s The End of Your World. On p. 1 of this book, in speaking of awakening or enlightenment, Adyashanti says that during this experience, “the whole sense of ‘self’ disappears.” His mention of this aspect of enlightenment has given rise to some thoughts about this non-self aspect of enlightenment.

From the standpoint of this aspect, there are several points during the day when everyone probably experiences enlightenment. Especially when a person is engaged in a manual or intellectual task requiring concentration, the sense of self usually drops from his or her mind. For example, planting flowers, putting dishes into a dishwasher or cupboards, planning a meal, these are activities when a sense of self, or “I-consciousness,” may not be present. Normally a person is not aware of this absence.

There are instances, however, where a person is aware of the absence. In a different source than his book, in the Sun journal of 2007, p. 10, Adyashanti described such an experience he himself had. The essay on this website, “Zazen and Ego,” describes a similar experience of my own. In my case, I was completely aware of the absence of a sense of “I” in my mind. When I saw this absence, I was very startled but not discomposed.

Some Buddhist sources seem to present enlightenment as occurring only during meditation, which is a relatively rare experience. Adyashanti, however, as well as I, are talking about an enlightenment that occurs outside of meditation. Also, Adyashanti, in the words of the editor of his book, “insisted that it is a myth that a spiritual awakening is a rare experience” (p. xiii).

It is likely that many zazen practitioners have enlightenment experiences. To realize that the self has no real existence is a great advantage in life.

Meditation Stages

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 22:35:32 GMT

Meditation Stages

There have been two major stages in my own zazen practice. These were doing and watching.

I use the word “doing” for the first stage because of the effort I expended simply to breathe, as it seemed to me that I needed to deliberately draw in my breath and release it.

I made a transition from doing to watching when I saw that my breathing took place of itself and did not require my intervention. I don’t remember when this insight occurred, but I do recall that at some point during practice, I saw that a breath came in and went out entirely on its own. After all, in daily life, breathing does take place in exactly this way, so I was just seeing the truth.

When I ceased to “do” my breathing, the energy I was expending to do it was freed. Not only could I now just “watch” my breathing, but I could watch a good deal more.

There were flows of energy taking place in my body and heading mostly to my chest or heart area. When I followed Sufism (the mysticism of Islam), the ideal of spiritual development was to drop ego and open the heart. True heart opening in Sufism is very pronounced physically and enables a dervish (Sufi follower) to project love from his or her heart to another person, who can palpably feel it. The energy flows that I was now watching seemed to be opening my heart, and I was very grateful to be starting into this heart-opening process.

I could also observe that the activity that was going on in me during zazen was taking place entirely of itself. This was true not only of breathing and heart opening, but also of a lowering into a sense of oneness with everything. A Japanese priest, Gudo Nishijima Roshi, says about this sense of oneness, “We call the state ‘ineffable,’ or ‘dharma,’ or ‘truth,’ or ‘reality.’ But even these words are inadequate to describe the simple and original state that we return to in zazen.”[1]

I believe that persisting in zazen will take any person to these places.

Footnotes

Gudo Nishijima Roshe, Introduction to Buddhism and the Practice of Zazen, Windbell Publications, 2022, p. 13.

Zazen and Peace

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:38:41 GMT

Zazen and Peace

I have been attending a dharma discussion group that is reading Shohaku Okumura’s Living by Vow (2012). There is a chapter in that book on the Buddhist “three refuges” of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Reading the chapter occasioned in me some thoughts about sangha.

A Buddhist sangha is the community of people following the Buddha way within a particular Zen monastery or neighborhood Zen Center. I have been a member of four sanghas: the San Francisco Zen Center at Green Gulch Farm in California, the San Francisco Zen Center at Tassajara also in California, the Houston Zen Center, and the Daifukuji Zen Center in Hawaii.

A feeling of comradeship naturally develops within a sangha. Interpersonal quarreling does occur, however, if personal interests clash. Quarreling is resolved when the parties eventually come around to following Chogyam Trungpa’s expression of bodhisattva behavior. He says, “The bodhisattva vow is the commitment to put others before oneself.”[1] In other words, quarreling stops when ego is put aside.

In a broad definition of sangha, a community that follows the same religious path, there are Hindu sanghas, Christian sanghas, and Muslim sanghas. In an even broader definition, a sangha is a community pursuing the same goal. It could be said that this is the entire human community. All people aim for happiness and contentment, even if some in misguided ways.

If that very broad community of human beings is going to get along, the same thing is required as with narrower communities. To use Chogyam Trungpa’s words, “the commitment to put others before oneself,” or a certain degree of egolessness, is required.

Here is where zazen practitioners can do their part in fostering a peaceful world. Chogyam Trungpa says, “… Meditation brings a growing sense of egolessness.”[2] Just continuing to practice is a contribution to peace.

Footnotes

Chogyam Trungpa, The Heart of the Buddha, Shambhala, Boston & London, 2010, p. 87.
Ibid., p. 90.

Life After Enlightenment

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 01:11:04 GMT

Life After Enlightenment

As I understand it, an enlightened man or woman experiences the absence from his mind of the idea of his personal self, and also, simultaneously, experiences all life as being interconnected and unified.

With this firm realization of non-self and non-separateness, what kind of subsequent life does an enlightened person have? According to Chogyam Trungpa, an awakened person naturally flows into the third major school of Buddhism, after Hinayana and Mahayana, which is Vajrayana or Tantra. Trungpa has a chapter on Tantra in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (2002), as well as books on Tantra in Journey Without Goal (1981) and Crazy Wisdom (2001). I have used these sources to develop an idea of the course of life after a person has experienced enlightenment.

With the burden of ego virtually removed, an enlightened person gradually flows into many changes of character. For instance, he or she experiences an influx of expansive energy and a sense of great spaciousness. His heart begins to open, and he grows in compassion and generosity.

He also discovers a “fabulous and fantastic” world (Trungpa’s words), coming into contact with, so to speak, the essences of objects, where colors and brighter and vistas more precise. He experiences the “luminosity” of the world.

His own emotions become more recognizable and definite to him. He fully accepts them, whether positive or negative, and as a result they transmute into life-feeding energy.

With ego virtually gone, the enlightened person gradually gets used to living a kind of groundless life, without fear and the need to grasp for security. His behavior becomes spontaneous, worried hesitancy being gone.

These changes occur of themselves and are effortless and automatic. The enlightened person is borne along, by a power greater than himself, into a vastly expanded life.

Comparison: Nisargadatta, Buddhism

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 19:08:51 GMT

Comparison: Nisargadatta, Buddhism

The teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta, is best known through his talks in I Am That (1973). Lately, though, I have been re-reading his talks in The Ultimate Medicine, which were given during the year prior to his death in 1981.

The clarity and luminosity of these talks were very striking to me, as was, allowing for differences in terminology, the similarity between many of the views therein with those of Buddhism in general and Soto Zen.

Nisargadatta says, for example, “. . .To know that you are is itself a misery.”[1] In fact this is the Buddhist view, as is clear from the Bahiya Sutta, where the Buddha says that when, in your functioning and consciousness, “there is no you there,” this is the “end of stress.”[2]

The “you” in the Buddhist sutra is the ego, personal self, or I-consciousness. Nisargadatta’s term for this is “I-am” or “I-am-ness.”

In Nisargadatta’s view, in the fully realized person, “the ‘I-am’ consciousness is absent.”[3] If I am correct, this is also the view of Soto Zen, in which the goal of zazen is ultimately to function without a sense of personal self.

If this goal is accomplished, the result, in both Soto Zen and Nisargadatta, is abstraction from whatever a person is doing, thinking, feeling, etc. In Buddhist terminology, the five skandhas can be experienced as operating purely independently of the person. In Nisargadatta’s terms, regarding “the apparatus” “which is doing the working, thinking and talking,” “you are not that apparatus.”[4]

If we are not the skandhas or “the apparatus,” what are we? Nisargadatta says we are “the Absolute,” which is inexpressible. In my understanding, Buddhism or Soto Zen does not talk about who we are ultimately.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine , San Diego, 1994, p. 20.
The words in the essay can be found in the twelfth paragraph of the rather long Bahiya Sutta, which can be found in its entirely at https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html .
The Ultimate Medicine , p. 38.
Ibid., p. 52

Generosity

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:36:58 GMT

Generosity

I have been re-reading a book of Ajahn Chah’s talks entitled Food for the Heart. Ajahn Chah (d. 1992), associated with the Thai Forest Tradition, was the teacher of the well-known Jack Kornfield.

In a talk involving, partly, helpful aids in meditation, Ajahn Chah stresses the importance of generosity. He advises “doing away with. . .greed, through giving.”[1]]

This advice reminded me of talks I heard by Sufi teachers when I was a member of a Sufi order between 1970 and 1985. We were urged to give money away as a way of training ourselves in generosity. Especially, we were advised to look at how we felt when we parted with money.

I followed this advice. When driving, if I saw someone begging on a street corner, I would make a point of giving him or her money, sometimes having to make a U-turn to do so. When I began to do this, I could see the resistance or resentment I experienced as I gave the money away.

To see this resistance was the purpose of the giving exercise. In bonafide spiritual traditions, the goal of spiritual practice is to diminish the role of ego in our lives. In the Theravadan tradition, Ajahn Chah says, “We uproot views stemming from self-importance. We uproot the very essence of our sense of self.”[2] In the Mahayanist Zen tradition, Suzuki Roshi says that the goal of practice “means to die as a small being, moment after moment.”[3]

A characteristic of the ego is clinging, as in clinging to money. Every time a person sees this clinging, he or she makes some headway in eroding ego. No doubt many zazen practitioners do give money and experience this benefit.

Footnotes

Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart , Wisdom Publications, Massachusetts, 2002, p. 223.
Ibid., p. 214.
Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind , New York, 1970, p. 31.

Darshan with Ramana Maharshi

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:34:38 GMT

Darshan with Ramana Maharshi

“Darshan” is a term used in Hinduism to mean viewing an image of a deity or viewing a holy person. It applies in a remarkable way to the thousands of people, over time, who came to sit in darshan with Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950).

Ramana Maharshi underwent a powerful awakening when he was only seventeen, experiencing the death (as he termed it) of his sense of personal self and his firm establishment in knowledge of what he called the “Self,” usually, but also God, the Lord, Reality, one’s true nature or true being, the Heart, the Seat of Consciousness, Absolute Being, Bliss, the Master, and perhaps other terms.

If memory serves, “darshan” is a term used in Soto Zen centers to mean a private talk with the teacher. Darshan with Ramana Maharshi was vastly different. With many devotees sitting around him in his ashram in India called Tiruvannamalai, Maharshi sat in silence emanating loving energy. Sitting around Maharshi in this way was powerful for many people. For example, one devotee said that typically after sitting with Maharshi, he felt “peace in unity” for about ten days.[1]

In meetings outside of darshan, Maharshi did talk with devotees. In one such talk, someone, perhaps a social activist, asked him why he didn’t travel about and share his wisdom with “people at large.” Maharshi replied,

What do you think of a man who listens to a sermon for an
hour and goes away without having been impressed by it so
as to change his life? Compare him with another who sits in
a holy presence and goes away after some time with his outlook
on life totally changed. What is the better, to preach loudly
without effect or to sit silently sending out inner force?[2]

The opportunity to be in the presence of someone who sends out inner force in this way is not common in the West. I did have such an opportunity, however, when I attended a school called The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology many years ago in California. The coordinators of the school invited a man from India to come and sit in silence with those who wanted. I don’t know the spiritual history of this man, but as I sat with others around him, a palpable loving energy came over to me from him that affected me very powerfully. The very presence of such people can be a blessing.

Footnotes

The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Boston and London, 1988, p. 51.
Ibid., p. 49.

Buddhadharma

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:24:51 GMT

Buddhadharma

Zazen practitioners develop the ability to see the world without judgements of quality or morality, and to accept the manifold conditions and events of life just as they are.

In Buddhism, as I understand it, the entire world is Buddhadharma , or Buddha nature, in which everything is spread out in equal value and worth.Rumi spoke of it:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
And rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet
you there.
When the soul lies down in that
grass,
the world is too full to talk
about.

Shunryu Suzuki is best known for the collection of talks in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. There is a lesser-known collection of his talks in Not Always So. In this collection, Suzuki Roshi frequently underscores this vision of the uniform value of everything in life.

For example, he says, “. . .Buddha nature is found in the realm of the absolute where there is no good and no bad.”[1] This realm cannot be found by thinking or reasoning. The intuition of it comes when the thinking mind, personal self, or ego are laid aside during zazen. Then the vision of it comes, unspeakable and indescribable.

The goal of zazen may be said to be the virtual elimination of personal self in daily life. As Roshi says, “. . . Our effort is to get rid of self-centered activity.”[2] And again, “Usually . . . we are involved in judgments, so we say ‘this is right, that is wrong,’ ‘this is perfect,’ and ‘that is not perfect.’ That seems ridiculous when we are doing real practice.”[3]

The intuition that everything, just as it is, is the Buddhadharma or Buddha nature, is of immense value in times of personal turmoil or social unrest. May all who sit zazen come unshakably to this intuition.

Footnotes

Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So , Quill, an imprint of Harper Collins, 2003, p. 127.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 100/

Island of Peace

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 22:12:57 GMT

Island of Peace

I’ve been rereading Thich Nhat Hahn’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (New York, 1998). He advises us to “practice mindful breathing and return to your island of self” (p. 163). Let’s call this the “island of peace.”

Imagine yourself to be in a little boat on a choppy sea. You go up and down with the waves, alternating between elation and disappointment. You worry about capsizing. Eventually you spot an island, you row towards it, and soon you land where there is mild air, stability, and nothing to worry about. You have reached the island of peace.

As Thich Nhat Hahn says, you get to the island of peace through mindful breathing. He says that “mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment.” (p. 64). Zazen is the practice of coming back to the present moment. The practitioner puts thinking and conceptualization aside, when they occur, and returns to exactly what he or she perceives in the present, which is his breathing. That puts him on the island of peace.

For a zazen practitioner, it is easy to reach the island of peace outside of meditation. Whatever he is doing – taking a walk, washing the dishes, trimming the grass – he can put thinking aside and just attend to what he is doing or take in whatever his senses receive. The island will emerge and he will be at peace.

Higher Consciousness

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 21:36:01 GMT

Higher Consciousness

I have already written on my website about Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981). See “A Tribute to my Major Spiritual Teachers.” Lately, though, a particular characteristic about the consciousness of this man has been reoccurring to me. Quotations below are taken from I AM THAT, published in 1973, which is the best-known collection of Nisargadatta’s talks.

Nisargadatta experienced profound realization at 37 years of age. At this point he lost all sense of himself as a separate person and entered “the supreme state.” He remarks, “Whoever goes there, disappears.” Putting it another way, he says, “At the moment of realization, the person ceases.”

Prior to his realization, Nisargadatta was a shopkeeper in Bombay, India (renamed Mumbai in 1995). After realization, he wandered around India adjusting to his experience, and after a short time returned to Bombay and began teaching in a room that accommodated only about 20 visitors. Now and then he was asked about his own state of mind, and he generously complied.

He says,

Yes, I appear to hear and see and talk and act, but to me

it just happens, as to you digestion or perspiration happens.

The body-mind machine looks after it, but leaves me out

of it. Just as you do not need to worry about growing hair,

so I need not worry about words and actions. They just

happen and leave me unconcerned. . . .

Nisargadatta spoke about this self-abstraction in various ways. He said at another point, “I find myself talking to people, or doing things quite correctly and appropriately, without being very much conscious of them. It looks like I live my physical, waking life automatically, reacting spontaneously and accurately.” And another, “Why not admit that one’s entire personal life may sink largely below the threshold of consciousness and yet proceed sanely and smoothly?”

Besides this self-abstraction, Nisargadatta said that upon realization “will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable.” He lived a loving life.

Since the purpose of zazen is to reduce the influence of personal self in one’s life, a practitioner may eventually approximate Nisargadatta’s state of mind. Nisargadatta mentioned about himself, “Occasionally an old reaction, emotional or mental, happens in the mind, but it is at once noticed and discarded. After all, so long as one is burdened with a person, one is exposed to its idiosyncrasies and habits.” A practitioner may come to a condition of only the occasional resurgence of self, and that is certainly worth getting to.

Basic Goodness

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:39:05 GMT

Basic Goodness

Chogyam Trungpa created a spiritual school in 1975 that he termed “Shambhala.” The school is a “secular discipline,” not tied to any specific religion.[1] In Tibetan thought, Shambhala was a kingdom, either real or legendary, that existed in the ancient past, and that represented “the ideal of an enlightened society.”[2] In the present day, there are practice centers that continue Trungpa’s Shambhala teachings in Canada, Europe, and the United States.

A student who follows these teachings is encouraged to experience “the complete primordial realization of [his or her] basic goodness.”[3] “Basic goodness” is known as “buddhanature” within Soto Zen and other Buddhist schools. Presumably Trungpa avoids the term because of the secular nature of Shambhala.

The training of a Shambhala student, Trungpa says, is “learning to rest in basic goodness.” He adds, “. . .That state of being is called egolessness.”[4] Egolessness is “letting go of any vestiges of doubt or hesitation or embarrassment about being you as you are.”[5] The complete acceptance and affirmation of “you as you are” is the realization of one’s basic goodness.

In Trungpa’s thought, meditation, which in his description is essentially zazen, is a powerful tool in realizing one’s basic goodness. He says,

In meditation you are neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ your experience.
That is, you don’t praise some thoughts and condemn others, but
you take an unbiased approach. You let things be as they are,
without judgment, and in that way you yourself learn to be, to
express your existence directly, nonconceptually.[6]

Except in rare cases, the egoless realization of one’s basic goodness may not be a condition that is attained permanently. However, if one makes a mistake, through meditation, Trungpa says, “There is no problem with cleaning things up if we realize that we are just returning them to their natural, original state.”[7] He continues, basic goodness is “the pure ground that is always there, waiting to be cleaned by us.”[8]

The subtitle of the book of talks from which these quotes are taken is The Sacred Path of the Warrior. Achieving, to some degree, egoless realization of basic goodness, the “warrior” of Shambhala “renounces anything in his or her experience that is a barrier between himself and others.”[9] He flows out in service to others and the great world.

Footnotes

Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Boulder, 2007, p. 213.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid. p. 181.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., pp. 105-106.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 59.

Bottom Dropping Out of the Bucket

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 20:58:24 GMT

Bottom Dropping Out of the Bucket

The Zen expression, “the bottom drops out of the bucket,” is an image of an enlightenment experience, in which the sense of personal self leaves the mind. The expression springs from the story of a certain Chiyono, a servant in a Zen monastery, who was advised by a nun to practice zazen. Chiyono was enlightened after only a few months while carrying water from a monastery well. She wrote about her enlightenment, “With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together, and then the bottom fell out.”[1}

The bottom falling out is more than an image; it is a physical description of what a zazen practitioner may experience as he or she, without aiming for it, awaits enlightenment. In my own case, as I sit, I am aware of a shifting force-field in my body, part of whose activity is to put a kind of shell of energy around me. For that shell to dissolve would be to have the bottom drop out of the bucket.

Whether the bottom will drop out of the bucket is problematic. A practitioner would be well advised not to aim for it, because that would constitute the “gaining idea” that Suzuki Roshi warns against, saying, “If you are trying to attain enlightenment, . . . you are wasting your time on your black cushion.”[2] In truth there is nothing a practitioner can do to trigger falling through the bottom of the bucket.

Even so, for a practitioner, as the sense of self gradually falls into the background and he becomes aware of his buddhanature, he lives in contentment and peace and usually drops any preoccupation with enlightenment.

Footnotes

The story and the quote are from treetopzencenter.org/chiyonos.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, New York, 1970, p. 100.

After Enlightenment, There’s Tantra

Tue, 21 May 2024 18:28:41 GMT

After Enlightenment, There’s Tantra

There are three major schools of Buddhism: Theravadan or Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana or Tantra. Practitioners of zazen are commonly followers of Soto Zen Buddhism, which is part of the Mahayana school. I have fairly good knowledge of the Mahayana and its emphasis on the Boddhisattva and compassionate service to all sentient beings. I know Hinayana mainly through the Bahiya Sutta, which advises the elimination of ego or the idea of a real personal self, and through the ideal of the Arhat, who has accomplished this elimination. However, when I began thinking of the three main Buddhist schools, I realized I had no knowledge at all of Vajrayana or Tantra.

So I turned to a book of talks by Chogyam Trungpa given at Naropa University in 1974. The book is Journey Without Goal, with the subtitle “The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha.” The The book revealed to me the very interesting fact that faithful zazen practitioners may seamlessly flow into Tantra.

As a result of zazen, the sense of personal self may at some point drop from the practitioner’s mind, which convinces him or her of the nonexistence of the self. This did happen to me, as I explain in the essay on this website, “Zazen and Ego (personal experience of loss of ‘I’).” Also, the result of continued practice is commonly that realization of non-self gradually grows in the practitioner’s mind. However it happens, this realization creates a flow into tantra; it is the ticket onto the tantra train. Trungpa says, “In order to us to get into tantra properly, . . . we have to go through the experience of nonexistence.”[1]

Having gone through this experience, the zazen practitioner is essentially an enlightened person. So an enlightened person gradually acquires some of the major characteristics of tantra. To acquire these, however, does not require deliberate effort on the enlightened person’s part. In the last paragraph of Journey Without Goal, Trungpa says,

I feel that it is absolutely important to make the practice of

meditation your source of strength, your source of basic

intelligence. You could sit down and do nothing, just sit

and do nothing. . . .You actually can survive beautifully

by doing nothing.[2]

I take this to imply that as the practitioner simply continues to meditate, he or she picks up the characteristics of tantra as a matter of course. As Trungpa says, “Vajra nature” is “the experience of the enlightened state of being.”[3]

Trungpa continues that Vajra consciousness is “a real state of being, a true state of being that is full and complete.”[4] Rather than “covering up separateness,” which I take to be an allusion to the Mahayana stress on non-separateness and unity of being, in Vajra consciousness, Trungpa continues, “we simply acknowledge the dualistic gap rather than trying to unify or conceal it.”[5] Trungpa adds, “In . . .Buddhist tantra, . . .we do not try to make sure that the world is part of us.”[6]

In tantra, acknowledging duality releases energy in the zazen practitioner. Trungpa says that energy is “simply the rubbing together of you and the phenomenal world, you and other.” He continues, “The split between self and other is taking place constantly, constantly creating energy, and we are always trying to work with it.”[7] “In Buddhist tantra,” Trungpa adds, “energy is openness and all-pervasiveness. It is constantly expanding. It is decentralized energy, a sense of flood, ocean, outer space, the light of the sun and moon.”[8]

In tantra, Trungpa also says, “We. . .surrender to groundlessness: there is no ground for us to develop security.”[9] In a condition of egolessness, we forgo feeling comfortably secure and grounded. We discover that “the universe is open space.”[10] With greater openness, which Trungpa calls “shedding our skin,”[11] “We rediscover the world that exists around us, and we begin to find that this world is fabulous and fantastic.”[12]

Once a person enters tantra, Trungpa says, “There is a continual sense of journey throughout the path.”[13] Along the journey, we develop “fearlessness”[14] and “endless spontaneity.”[15]

In effect, enlightenment, over time, galvanizes the meditator into a condition of life that is full of energy, open, spacious, fearless, and spontaneous. You can call this Vajra nature, tantra, or simply a very heightened level of being.

Footnotes

Chogyam Trungpa, Journey Without Goal, Boston and London, 2000, p. 24.
Ibid, p. 142.
Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 121.
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p. 140.

Results of Awakening

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 03:03:48 GMT

Results of Awakening

In Genjo Koan, Dogen says, “To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.” This is the core of Soto Zen Buddhism in a nutshell.

The main aim of Soto Zen, in my understanding, is to eliminate the sense of personal self in one’s daily life. Dogen’s “to carry yourself forward” is to experience life from the standpoint of personal self. From this standpoint, a person throws a mantle of self over everything, so to speak, and supposes himself or herself to be involved in or in control of everything. This is a fictional world. In reality, Dogen says, things “come forth and experience themselves.” Experience comes at you. You don’t influence or control it.

There are important implications for us if we awaken to the truth that we don’t influence or control experience. Ramana Maharshi, a great spiritual teacher from the Hindu tradition, says,

Since the supreme power of God makes all things move, why
should we, without submitting ourselves to it, constantly worry
ourselves with thoughts as to what should be done and how, and
what should not be done and how not? We know that the train
carries all loads, so after getting on it why should we carry our
small luggage on our head to our discomfort, instead of putting
it down in the train and feeling at ease? [1]

If we realize Dogen’s truth that experience comes at us, that we are not a mover of it, we can travel at ease and just watch things go by.

Footnotes

The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Mahaarshi, Boston and London, 1988, p. 9.

Zen Sickness

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 22:09:45 GMT

Zen Sickness

Reading Dogen recently, I came across a statement that was remarkable to me. Dogen said, “Those who practice know whether realization is attained or not, just as those who drink water know whether it is hot or cold.”[1}

This statement stood out for me because it was different from what had been implied by the Zen teaching I was familiar with, namely that realization or enlightenment had to be either transmitted or confirmed by an awakened teacher. Nevertheless, I think that Dogen’s statement is true, that self-confirmed realization does happen and that it is quite real for the person who experiences it. However, there is a big risk for such a person.

I remember a private talk I had many years ago with Reb Anderson, the head dharma teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center. I explained that for a short time, outside of zazen but facilitated by it, I experienced loss of the idea of myself and a simultaneous strong insight into the interdependence and unity of all things. I did not suppose that this was an enlightenment experience. Reb looked at me with some concern and asked, “What now?” After a moment, I replied, "I am just glad I have this [zazen] practice.” Reb smiled and seemed very relieved.

It was years after this exchange that I understood why Reb felt so relieved. I had apparently described an enlightenment experience to him. His concern was that I may have drifted into a bloated-ego state of mind in which I imagined myself to be superior, a great teacher, or destined for fame in some way. He was relieved because this bloated condition didn’t seem to be the case. I simply appreciated the zazen practice that facilitated my experience.

This brings me to the point I want to make about anyone who has a self-confirmed awakening. The risk is that the ego of the person may grab on to the experience and become bloated with the idea of superiority, greatness, and fame. I like to call this condition “Zen sickness,” although a web search will reveal another meaning for the expression. If the awakened person explains his or her experience to an aware teacher, the teacher may act as a check on possible Zen sickness. Outside of that, however, the only check on this sickness is the awakened person, and to avoid it may require a good deal of introspection and self-honesty.

Footnotes

Moon in a Dewdrop, Writings of Zen Master Dogen, New York, 1985, p. 156

Illusory World/Real world

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 21:48:24 GMT

Illusory World/Real World

In many ways, we live in an illusory world. The air pressure on our bodies at sea level is a crushing 15 pounds per square inch. We have an equal pressure within our bodies that pushes out and prevents our being destroyed by the external air pressure. We have no awareness of this tremendous interplay of pressures but exist in an illusory world that seems to be without it.

There is a force of gravity that rivets us to the earth. We are unaware of this action of being pulled to the earth but feel it, erroneously, as our own weight. The force of gravity also prevents any awareness of the awesome revolving of the earth at some 900 miles an hour. We think that we are standing on stable ground all the time.

Buddhism adds psychological levels to the theme that we live in an illusory world. According to Buddhism, people usually suppose that their idea of themselves represents a real entity. They suppose that this entity is in large part independent of the outer world. They also suppose that it can operate within the outer world by a will that is free of any determining force except itself. In my understanding, Buddhism says that this sort of world is an illusion. It is part of the illusion that items in the outer world are just as separate from each other as the felt self-entity is separate from them.

So much for Buddhism’s delineation of the illusory world. Buddhism also has a concept of the real world. In Zen Buddhism, the gate of entrance to this world is the practice of zazen.

In all schools of Buddhism, the idea of themselves that people have is a mere notion with no real existence. In fact the idea that the self really exists has to be dropped from the mind in order for the real world to be experienced. In this real world, there is no separateness at all, neither between an illusory self and items in the outer world, nor between items in the world. The world consists entirely of interconnected or interdependent items and constitutes a grand unity.

In Buddhism, moreover, since there is no real self, there is no self-will either. We do not motivate ourselves. Keizan, the “Great Ancestor” of Soto Zen, declares,

Do you not realize that you respond when called and you get where
you are going by following directions? This does not come from
deliberate thought or conscious knowledge – it is the host within you.[1]

Keizan refers elsewhere to this host as “Old Shakyamuni Buddha,” who is “with you all the time, whatever you are doing; he is conversing and exchanging greetings with you, never apart from you for a moment.”[2}

Since Kezan also says that the Old Buddha is “ultimately unknowable and imperceptible,”[3]his words about what motivates us are his metaphorical way of saying what a later spiritual teacher, from the Hindu tradition, Ramana Maharshi, also says:

Since the supreme power of God makes all things move, why
should we, without submitting ourselves to it, constantly worry
ourselves with thoughts as to what should be done and how, and
what should be done and how not? We know that the train carries
all loads, so after getting on it why should we carry our small
luggage on our head to our discomfort, instead of putting it down
in the train and feeling at ease?[4]

In the real world, a person feels close with people and things, feeling that he is the companion of everything. He or she also senses that his life is guided by a benign force. He lives in mental comfort, joy, and gratitude. May we all find the real world.

Footnotes

Zen Master Keizan, Transmisson of Light, Boston, 2002, p. 26.
Ibid., pp. 6-7.
Ibid, p. 87.
The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Boston and London, 1988, p. 9.

Die Before Dying

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 20:45:36 GMT

Die Before Dying

“To die before dying” is an expression I learned when I was a member of a traditional (Muslim) Sufi order many years ago. The expression also reflects the core goal of Zen Buddhism and the practice of zazen.

“To die before dying” means to drop from one’s mind the sense of personal selfhood variously referred to as ego, personal self, I-consciousness, and perhaps other terms. In Fukanzazengi, Dogen refers to letting go of the self as dropping body and mind. The aim of Zen Buddhism can be said to be to function in daily life without a sense of personal self or “me.”

Far from being a sort of airy mystical ideal, living without self is attainable. The great teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta, was asked during one of his talks, “How is the person removed?” He replied, “By determination. Understand that it must go and wish it to go – it shall go if you are earnest about it.”[1]

Zazen practitioners have a special advantage in dropping the self because they do it frequently during a zazen session. Whenever the sitter puts aside thinking to return to focusing on breathing, he or she has dropped the self. The same can be done in daily life. Whenever one notices an awareness of himself in his mind, he can just put it aside and continue what he is doing. Continuing to do this will make it easier and easier.

I remember, some fifty years ago in Oakland, CA, attending a talk by Swami Chidvilasananda of the Siddha Yoga spiritual school. There were maybe 1500 people in an auditorium with a large stage. When Chidvilasananda made her entrance from the side of the stage to sit on a throne-like seat in the center, there was such spontaneity and buoyancy in her stride and gestures that she seemed to be floating. I recognized that she was without a sense of personal self, and I longed for that kind of freedom.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, The Acorn Press, Durham, 1973, p. 441.

Immortal Sea

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 21:44:12 GMT

Immortal Sea

I am a member of a dharma-study group that is presently reading a book called Heartwood. In one of the chapters of that book, its author, Barbara Becker, speaks of being troubled by the condition of many of her older relatives, who have contracted Alzheimer’s disease. A Zen monk gives her a koan to ponder in order to ease her mind: “What is bigger than Alzheimer’s?”[1]

Reading this koan, I was put in mind of a reality experienced by many zazen practitioners, and available to all. This reality is hard to describe, but it is very well alluded to by William Wordsworth, the 19 ^th -century English poet. At the end of the ninth stanza of his poem, “Intimations of Immortality,” the poet says,

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.[2]

The “immortal sea” is supportive and sustaining for a zazen practitioner who experiences it. It may come to him or her in times of trouble and bear him along through them.

Footnotes

Barbara Becker, Heartwood, New York, 2021, p. 84.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, New York, 1959, p. 157

Sacred Life

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:42:07 GMT

Sacred Life

At present I am in living circumstances that I don’t care for, being in Houston, Texas and not on the Big Island of Hawaii where I used to live. I won’t go into how the relocation came about. I’ve noticed that even with the unpleasantness, my mood is positive and I am eager to begin each day. Words of Eihei Dogen keep occurring to me: “The great ocean has only one taste.” [1]

I do have some sense of Dogen’s perception of the undivided sacredness of life. Many of Dogen’s expressions of this perception, like the quote above, are very moving to me. He says, for instance, shortly after that quote, “Hundreds of grasses and myriad forms – each appearing ‘as it is’ – are nothing but buddha’s true dharma body. . . .” Whether coarse or fine, all things are the dharma body. Again, more plainly, Dogen says that it is a “limited view that separates ordinary from sacred.”[2]

The sacredness of life is also a theme of Chogyam Trungpa, who speaks of the “unconditional sacredness” of life.”[3] He says, “The whole of existence is well constructed, and there’s no room for mishaps of any kind.”[4] Far beyond the perfection of life, for Trungpa life is also full of wonder. He exclaims, “How wonderful the world is! How beautiful the world is! How exotic and how fabulous the world is!”[5]

Spiritual practice will bring a sense of the sacredness of life. After saying that all activities in living have “a sense of holiness or sacredness in them,” Trungpa adds, “. . .This approach always has to be accompanied by the sitting practice of meditation.”[6]

If it hasn’t already, the faithful practice of zazen will bring a practitioner to a sense of the joy and sacredness of life.

Footnotes

Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, New York, 1985, p. 62. This is a very useful book that collects many of Dogen’s important statements from his numerous talks and writings.
Ibid., p. 138.
Chogyam Trungpa, Smile at Fear, Shambhala Publications, Boston and London, 2009, p. 111.
Ibid, p. 97.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., p. 36.

The Power of Zazen

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:54:33 GMT

The Power of Zazen

Ordinarily I don’t think much about my own life. However, I was rereading Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action the other day. A section in this book spoke of the importance, in spiritual matters, of finding things out for oneself. Reading this, I remembered when in my own life I also decided to find things out for myself.

I became interested in Buddhism some 50 years ago (I am writing this in 2024) after I read Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Following the guidelines in that book, I began practicing zazen. However, I seemed to think that mastery of Zen Buddhism was mainly an intellectual activity, and I began to read voraciously about Buddhism in general. Without trying to list the books I read, let me say that eventually I came to feel that all this reading, even though often inspirational, was not going to move me closer to the Zen goal of waking up.

I had been practicing zazen on my own since reading Suzuki Roshi’s book. I did discontinue the practice for a period of 15 years when I participated in a traditional Sufi order and followed its very different rituals and routines. I took up zazen again when I left the Sufi group. By this time, I had virtually stopped reading in Buddhism. Resuming zazen, I put my faith solely in that practice.

Zazen is a completely non-intellectual process. It involves simply focusing on breathing and putting aside any thinking that occurs. Even if so-called enlightenment does not occur within a zazen session, the practice does facilitate an awakening experience outside of the practice. It is not uncommon to have such an experience. It happened in my own case, as I describe in an essay on this website entitled “ Zazen and Ego (personal experience of loss of ‘I’) ”

Zazen is also, ultimately, an effortless process. A practitioner will discover this when he or she realizes that his breathing occurs of itself and does not require any will or effort on his part. The essay on this website entitled, “ Breathing ,” may help to clarify this. When the practitioner realizes that he can drop the effort to breathe and just watch his in-out breaths, the full power of zazen is released.

In my case, this release has occasioned strong energy to flow into my chest area. As I simply watch the flow of this energy, time passes without my being aware of its passing. I “blank out,” so to speak. I am not asleep or I would fall off the chair I meditate on. Eventually my awareness of time comes back, and the signal (I use a timer on my celI phone) for the end of my 40-minute zazen session goes off.

I can’t say that I know what is taking place in my chest or what is happening in the “blank out” period. I do know that something powerful is going on, and I can just await the result.

Not Ourselves

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 22:28:52 GMT

Not Ourselves

I watched a Netflix film recently called “Wild, Wild Wind.” The main character had undergone an internal moral revolution toward the end of the film, evolving from selfishness to a selfless pursuit of justice. As he pursued the course that would take him to this end, a song played in the background that was very moving to me. It was called “Oh My Lord” and was composed and sung by Chris Chameleon, a South African musician. The song went like this, with the refrain of “Oh my Lord” sung in a very sweet and reverential way:

You made these hands

You gave them work

Oh my Lord.

You made these feet

And where they walk.

Oh my Lord.

Take me back, my Lord

Bring me home, my Lord.

Oh my Lord.

You made this heart

You made it beat

Oh my Lord.

You made these eyes

And all they see

Oh my Lord.

Take me home, my Lord

Bring me back, my Lord.

Oh my Lord.

You made this soul

And why it’s so

Oh my Lord.

This song, which is Christian, put me in mind of a view that is held in the spiritual traditions of all the major religions, that our lives are run by a power that is not ourselves.

As illustration, for the Christian tradition we have the song. I also remember from my Christian upbringing the principle that all things are caused by God.

In Sufism, the spiritual tradition of Islam, there are tales underscoring that we do not run our own lives. I remember a story in which a seer told a man he would soon die. Thinking he would escape his coming mortality by leaving the unhealthy air in his own city, he moved to another city, where he died within days.

As an aside, there is another parallel within Sufism to the Christian song. In Sufism, we have dwelled with Allah before birth. As we approached birth, however, an angel pressed our lips shut with a finger (hence the indentation under our nose), indicating that we were to forget the bliss of having lived with Allah. Thereafter, during our life on earth, we long to remember Allah and to return to him. The song says, “Take me home, my Lord/Bring me back, my Lord.”

Nisargadatta, from the Hindu tradition, is quite emphatic in asserting that our lives are not run by ourselves. He says, “Why do you talk of action? Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens, without being able to influence it in any way.”[1]

In the spiritual tradition within Buddhism, there is also the view that what runs our lives is something other than ourselves. For instance, Keizan in Transmission of Light asks rhetorically, “Do you not realize that you respond when called and get where you are going by following directions?”[2] Also in the Zen Buddhist tradition, Suzuki Roshi says, “. . .We create airplanes and highways. And when we repeat, ‘I create, I create, I create,’ soon we forget who is actually the ‘I’ which creates the various things; we soon forget about God.”[3]

To speak personally, the practice of zazen has brought about in me the sense that my life does take its shape by some power other than myself. Possibly Nisargadatta described my experience when he was asked during one of his talks how one recognizes spiritual progress. He replied, “. . . When one stops thinking that one is living, and gets the feeling that one is being lived, that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do, then that is sort of a criterion.”[4] If that feeling has come about in me, I’m sure it has also come about in other zazen practitioners. It’s part of the truth of life that a practitioner comes to see.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That , The Acorn Press, Durham, 1973, p. 238.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light , Boston, 2002, p. 26.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind , New York, 1970, p. 66.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine , Berkeley, 1994, pp. 96-97.

Being Nobody

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 23:52:33 GMT

Being Nobody

When I began serious reading in spiritual texts, decades ago, I was struck by a passage in I Am That , a book of talks by the renowned teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta. Nisargadatta had said, “Your true being is entirely unself-conscious, completely free from all self-identification. . . .” “To be , you must be nobody. To think yourself to be something, or somebody, is death and hell.”[1]

I was well acquainted with the discomfort of feeling that I was “somebody.” Feeling that I was “somebody,” I also felt vulnerable and defensive. To feel that I was “nobody” had a great appeal to me.

I reasoned that to eliminate the “somebody” feeling and to move to “nobody,” I needed to find a setting that would bring my “somebody” traits to the fore so that I could try to drop them. I chose a black dance hall and bar, the largest in the city of Houston where I was then, called The Red Rooster.

On my first visit, I found that, except for the band leader, I was the only white person there among at least 150 black patrons. In this setting, the self-identifications and pretensions of “somebody” beset me mightily. I dropped them as I spotted them, and rather soon, I was sitting in the bar as “nobody.”

“Nobody” had its advantages. Patrons readily started up conversations with me, and I with them. I felt open, comfortable, and at ease. Returning to The Red Rooster on a subsequent day, I met my future wife there.

Also, with my experience of eliminating “somebody,” later I could more easily spot other aspects of ego and, in my view anyway, move closer to the purpose of zazen, which is to eliminate ego in daily functioning. Chogyam Trungpa underscores this, saying, “. . .The main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego.”[2] Also see “ No You ” on this website.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That , The Acorn Press, Durham, 1973, p. 371.
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism , Boston and London, 2002, p. 15.

Encouragement for Zazen

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 20:57:42 GMT

Encouragement for Zazen

Practicing zazen can be dull. One sits and sits, and waits for what? The great teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta, was asked in one of his talks, “What am I to wait for?” Nidargadatta replied, “For the centre of your being to emerge into consciousness.”

So what is “the centre of your being”? Teachers of recognized spiritual attainment tend to speak in the same way about spiritual life, so I can move away from Nisargadatta for an answer to this question. Ajahn Chah, Jack Kornfield’s teacher from Thailand, has a very down-to-earth answer. He says, “The serene and peaceful mind is the epitome of human achievement.”

How does one get to “the serene and peaceful mind”? According to Zen Buddhism, the answer is the practice of zazen. When the practitioner is one-pointedly focused on breathing, he or she is already sitting in this mind. Since thought has been laid aside, he may not even be aware of this mind. However, with faithful practice, he will eventually come to serenity and peace in his daily life.

A Tribute to My Major Spiritual Teachers

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 23:22:23 GMT

A Tribute to My Major Spiritual Teachers

I began spiritual practice in my early thirties. I had just completed a long series of psychotherapeutic sessions to resolve childhood issues. The psychotherapist, thinking I could benefit from spiritual practice, suggested I read Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I learned how to do zazen from this book.

Suzuki Roshi’s was the first book that gave me invaluable inspiration and guidance as I began spiritual work. I have written an essay on Suzuki Roshi’s book, which is on this website as “ A Tribute to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind " , so I will not comment further on Suzuki Roshi in the present essay.

The books of five other teachers were extremely valuable to me in my early years of practice. The teachers are these, in order of their demise:

Ramana Maharshi, d. 1950 (The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi)
Nisargadatta, d. 1981 (I Am That)
Chogyam Trungpa, d. 1987 (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)
Ajahn Chah, d. 1992 (Food for the Heart)
Kosho Uchiyama, d. 1998 (Opening the Hand of Thought)

The personal notes I drew on for this essay are from the books in parenthesis after the above names. They are all readily available on the market, the first two in later editions than the one I cite in footnotes.

I conceived this essay out of curiosity about what drew me so strongly in the teaching of these figures.

Ramana Maharshi taught in south India in an ashram that grew up around him at the base of a holy hill called “Arunachala.” As a beginning practitioner, what struck me so powerfully in his teaching was his simple statement, “There is no such thing as the ‘I’”.[1] Our true nature, he says, is the divine Self, which is “that where there is absolutely no ‘I’ thought.”[2] To remove from my consciousness “I,” ego, or the idea of a solid personal self became an early goal of mine. Eventually I saw that the removal of ego was an immensely complicated matter, resisting a direct approach, and that the best route to it, for myself, was the silent practice of zazen. There are discussions of the subject of ego-removal scattered throughout the essays on this website.

Nisargadatta taught in his modest home in Mumbai, India. He spoke in very practical terms of how to set ego aside: “Whenever a thought or emotion or desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away from it. I am not talking of suppression. Just refuse attention.” Refusing attention, “you are at once in your natural state.”[3] One’s natural state is as a pure witness. Continued as a practice, this refusal of attention eventually allows a person to see that “you are pure being – awareness – bliss.”[5] Nisargadatta calls witnessing an “immense ocean of pure awareness.”[6] Nisargadatta also stressed that you are not the doer of your life. He says, “Realize that no ideas are your own, they all come to you from outside.”[7] He adds, “All happens by itself”[8] and “In reality things are done to you, not by you.”[9]

I found very valuable Nisargadatta’s advice to refuse attention to meandering thought or feeling. I could refuse my attention in this way and experience great spaciousness and heightened perception, where colors were brighter and vistas full of beautiful detail. In addition, Nisargadatta’s stressing that we are not the doer of our lives, as I saw the truth of this over and over, provided me with objective insight into my behavior. Errors were softened, achievements not naively owned.

Owing to a devoted editor, Chogyam Trungpa’s talks in both the United States and Europe have been published in very numerous books. The work in the above list is probably the best known.

Trungpa says quite plainly, “It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step outside of the bureaucracy of ego.”[10] He also says that attempting to eliminate ego “is merely another expression of ego.” Eventually “we begin to realize that there is a sane, awake quality within us.”[11] Putting it another way, Trungpa says, “. . .You only arrive at the other shore when you finally realize that there is no other shore.” “. . .We realize that we were there all along.”[12] Trungpa also says that an aspect of ego is “watching itself do everything.”[13] His term for this is “the watcher”[14], an unnecessary function.

As someone in the beginning stages of practice, I felt that I had many spiritual shortcomings. So it was illuminating to me to read Trungpa’s saying that we are all right as we are. We are already at the “other shore.” His mentioning “the watcher” was also very helpful to me. The “watcher” was easy for me to see as I walked within a social gathering or in a grocery store, wondering how I appeared to others; it was easy for me to spot the “watcher” and set it aside.

Of all these teachers, Ajahn Chah spoke most clearly to me about the workings of my own nature. There is an essay about Ajahn Chah already on this website entitled “Living with Original Mind.” Ajahn Chah was Jack Kornfield’s teacher in Thailand and is associated with the “Thai Forest Tradition.”

Ajahn Chah says that we have no control over the thoughts, moods, sense impressions, emotions, and so on that enter our minds. He likens the activity within our minds to someone’s climbing “up the mango tree and . . . shaking the branches to make the mangoes fall down to us.”[15] This erratic activity, he says, cannot constitute who we are. Who are is calmness and peace. He says that to be “serene and peaceful” is “the true epitome of human achievement.”[16]

For Ajahn Chah, a person becomes serene and peaceful by examining his or her mind. Commonly a person identifies with the contents of his mind, thinking “I am angry,” “I am sad,” and so on. This identification is a huge mistake. A person can discover his mistake by watching, either within or outside of meditation, his mental contents as they flash in and out of his mind. It is important for him to observe that he has no control over the thoughts, moods,, desires, likes or dislikes, and so on that enter his mind. Observing such things in his mind, he can ask, “Did I ask for that to be there?” Invariably he must answer, “No.” Observing this often enough, usually over long practice, he sees that there is no “I” in control of himself, and he drops his belief in “I.” At this point he discovers the serene and peaceful life that is his birthright.

The above is not a complete account of what Ajahn Chah says a person should observe about his mind. However, it is enough to allow me to say that the exercise of observing that I have no control over what enters my mind has been of great benefit to me. The ability to see that my mental contents are inconsequential has allowed me to live with a spacious and clear mind much of the time.

Another insight I acquired from Ajahn Chah is that even though my belief in a controlling “I” may disappear, the ego does not disappear. Nevertheless, knowing that I have no control over egoic responses, I do not have to take them seriously. I can regard them as I would “a child who likes to play and frolic.”[17]

Kosho Uchiyama taught at a small Zen Center near Kyoto, Japan. The center is variously spelled as Antai-ji and Antaiiji. Uchiyama held sesshins there that were especially long and rigorous.

Uchiyama’s core teaching is non-separateness, and on a very large scale. He says, “We live simultaneously as a personal self, an individual taken up with everyday affairs, and as a universal self that is inclusive of the entire universe.”[18] He says that “the reality of life,” which is “fundamentally connected to everything in the universe,” cannot “be grasped or understood through reason or intellect.”[19] We are “living out universal self” as we let go of thinking during zazen.[20] Uchiyama also says that each of us lives in his own world: “I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die.”[21]

Uchiyama’s idea that each of us lives in his own world allowed me to realize to some degree his vast conception of universal self. I saw that it was true that as I lived my life, I was simply moving around in my own head. For months, now and then, I would go for walks and try to see that everything I perceived was in my own mind. That included trees, pavements, vistas, people. I could come to feel that everything was inside me and that I was not separate from anything I saw or experienced. I also felt sometimes that there was a universal force that operated through me and determined my existence. I believe that I benefitted greatly from this period of time.

I don’t read books like this now. Doing zazen twice a day seems sufficient for me. I feel that the sense of not being separate from anything does grow in me. To quote Uchiyama again, “May . . . the actualization of our universal self be all our life work.”[22]

Footnotes

1.The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Boston and London, 1958, p. 38.

2. Ibid., p. 8.

3. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, Durham, 1973, p. 349.

4. Ibid, p. 316. 5. Ibid., p. 303. 6. Ibid, p. 205. 7. Ibid., p. 412. 8. Ibid, p. 451.

9. Ibid., p. 481.

10. Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Boston and London, 2002,

p. 15.

11. Ibid, p. 153. 12. Ibid., p. 184. 13. Ibid., p. 178. 14. Ibid., p, 73.

15. Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002, p. 195.

16. Ibid., p. 64. 17. Ibid., p. 157.

18. Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. xxxi.

19 Ibid., p. 12. 20. Ibid., p. xxxiii. 21. Ibid., p. 15. 22. Ibid., p. xxxvi.

Enlightenment Demystified

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:18:09 GMT

Enlightenment Demystified

Enlightenment consists of two factors. One is the vanishing of the sense of personal self from the mind, and the other is the firm realization of non-separateness. The latter depends on the former.

The realization of non-separateness is subliminal. It cannot be realized by the thinking mind.

Accompanying the two factors above is a sense of exuberant indomitability. Happiness and unhappiness are felt to be the same. Indomitable, a person cannot be defeated by life.

There is a question of whether enlightenment is sudden or gradual. Rinzai Zen strives for sudden enlightenment, which Dogen, in a reference I can’t find, described as “turning the body and flapping the brain.” In Soto Zen, sudden enlightenment is possible, but gradual enlightenment is regarded as the usual experience. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind , Shunryu Suzuki described gradual enlightenment as being thoroughly soaked in a light fog.

The notion of gradual enlightenment brings enlightenment within the reach of everyone. Sudden enlightenment is dependent on a special grace not allotted to everyone. Sufism has a term for this, “Barik Allah,” the grace of God, stressing that it is only this grace that can release one from the sense of personal self.

Enlightenment can be either abiding or non-abiding. In abiding enlightenment, the idea of personal self stays reliably at bay, or if it appears, it does so in a kind of ghostly fashion that can be dispelled easily. In non-abiding enlightenment, the personal self can still dominate a person, and special effort needs to be made to stay in enlightened mind.

Appreciation

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 20:17:17 GMT

Appreciation

A few months ago, both on the website and in the Daifukuji Newsletter, I explained my intention to move from Hawaii back to Houston, Texas. I was regretful about leaving Hawaii but optimistic about the move. I must say, though, that the move was very stressful. I have my wife and zazen to thank for the move’s not being more upsetting than it was.

In Hawaii, we lived in a 3-bedroom, 2-bath condominium. We had a good deal of furniture, plus a car, to ship to Houston. Closing dates for the sale of the condominium in Hawaii and the purchase of a house in Houston fell out in such a way that when we moved into the Houston house, we had a good 10 weeks in the house before we could receive the furniture and car. So there we were in a 5-bedroom, 3 & 1/2 -bath house that felt like an empty barn.

I will pass over all the frets that were involved in the purchases and other arrangements necessary to live in the barn before receiving the furniture and car. The resourcefulness, optimism, and energy of my wife were a great resource to me during this time.

And there was zazen. No matter the daily fretting, zazen each day put me in a space that made it bearable. I came to a deep appreciation of the practice. When I set thinking aside and just attended to breathing, I was lowered into a kind of deep peace, not cognizable or describable at all, that was very sustaining. Whatever it might be called, I was very grateful for the daily experience of it.

Breathing

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 22:32:05 GMT

Breathing

It is commonly heard that zazen is a simple practice that consists merely of following breathing. This matter of following breathing is in fact full of important implications.

For one thing, it is not we who breathe. As we go about our daily lives, we are not usually aware of breathing, and yet we breathe. As I sit in zazen, if I feel that I am taking breaths myself, I recognize that as a distortion of the truth. When I become aware of efforting like this, I try to back off from deliberate breathing and just watch the breath. I try to back out of breathing and just watch.

It takes some practice to do this. However, I recognize that backing myself out like this may eventually bring the realization, stressed especially by teachers from Hinduism such as Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi, that I am not the mover of myself but the moved.

Also, backing myself out like this is the essence of zazen, which is to render self less important in my life or to drop it completely. When the self abates or vanishes, who we truly are emerges. Our real personality comes to the fore, and we become truly ourselves. We become full human beings.

Goodbye to Suffering

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 22:34:33 GMT

Goodbye to Suffering

In Act III, Scene 1 of the play that bears his name, Hamlet utters his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, in which he refers to “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Thus he describes the suffering that the usual human being experiences off and on during his or her life.

Zen Buddhism offers a remedy for this suffering. Zen says that it is possible to set aside the “flesh,” or the ego, that is at the root of it. The ego is the “I-consciousness” or sense of personal self that we usually carry around with us. When we think or feel something, we suppose “I am thinking this, I am feeling this.”

There is a well-known Theravadan sutra (or sutta) called the Bahiya Sutta, which vividly explains the remedy for suffering. In the essay “No You” in the present collection of essays, the sutra is shown to say that if the “you” (meaning sense of “I” or the ego) is removed from consciousness, “This, just this, is the end of stress.”

I don’t remember how it came about, but many years ago I gave a talk to a group of Protestant ministers in which I explained the Buddhist view that the self or ego had no real existence and could be set aside. I was surprised by the indignant and outraged response that came from the ministers.

In another essay in this collection, “You Can Get It if You Really Want,” I try to reinforce the Buddhist view that the ego can be set aside by quoting Nisargadatta, a well-known spiritual teacher from the Hindu tradition. He was asked during a talk, “How is the person removed?” He replied, “By determination. Understand that it must go and wish it to go – it will go if you are earnest about it.”

In the same essay, I suggest to zazen sitters,

Just as during zazen, a practitioner puts aside thinking to return to breathing, so can the same be done in daily life when one notices an awareness of himself in his mind. Just put it aside, do whatever you are doing without it being in the road, and there you are.

I doubt that any of the Buddhist views or suggestions above would pacify the Protestant ministers, who reacted as though Buddhism was recommending killing oneself. In a way, though, that is what Zen is recommending. In another essay in this collection, “A Tribute to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” Shunryu Suzuki says, “To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being moment after moment.” Christian mystics have proposed the same death. Outside Hindu or Christian mysticism or Zen thought, I suppose that this approach may seem life-threatening.

Mystical Loadstone

Tue, 30 May 2023 23:15:28 GMT

Mystical Loadstone

I have been thinking lately of Jalaladin Rumi, the most well-known poet within the mystical tradition of Islam, or “Sufism.” Rumi belongs to the 13 ^th century and is associated with the Mevlevi Order of Dervishes, or the “whirling dervishes.”

These words of Rumi had been coming to my mind:

`There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do.

If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to

worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget

this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

Rumi is referring to remembering “the deep root of your being, the presence of your Lord.” For a person not to experience the presence and love of God in his or her heart is to forget one’s “dignity and purpose.”[1]

For mystical temperaments, the spiritual goal that is sought, whether it is the love of God, enlightenment, or an open heart, acts as a loadstone drawing the seeker to it in varying degrees of power. Rumi refers to the drawing (or “flowing”) activity of this loadstone in a little poem:

For sixty years I have been forgetful,

Every minute,

But not for a second has this flowing toward me

Stopped or slowed.[2]

For very large souls – Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad – the pull of the loadstone is immensely powerful, for saints such as Rumi or for other noted spiritual teachers the pull is also great, and for zazen practitioners in general there is a pull as well.

Zazen practitioners may not look on themselves as mystics, but it is useful for them to be in some degree aware of the pull of the loadstone. For me, this awareness keeps me on track and faithful to the hard work of sitting.

Footnotes

I found Rumi’s words online at http://rumidays.blogspot.com/2011/02/one-thing-you-must-do.html .
Found at http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/quotes/quotations/view/990/spiritual-quotation

The End of Your World

Mon, 22 May 2023 22:51:54 GMT

The End of Your World

Adyashanti’s The End of Your World is an extraordinary book about the awakening experience. In my reading in Zen commentary, I have not encountered a book that speaks so frankly about what it is to wake up and the challenges waking up may pose for the awakened person.

In Adyashanti’s terms, in an awakening experience, both the sense of self and the sense of separateness disappear from consciousness. The experience is rightly termed “awakening,” since the opposite sense of things, that one’s self and separateness are real, is equivalent to a dream state. Adyashanti approaches the experience as momentary; in fact, however, the experience may last for thirty seconds or longer.[1]

Adyashanti considers awakening to be either non-abiding or abiding, which might be dependent on the duration of the experience. In any event, if a person’s awakening is non-abiding, he or she is prone to reverting to an ego-driven condition. In Adyashanti’s words, he is prone to succumbing to the “gravitational field of the dream state.”[2] In abiding wakening, falling back into the dream state is only a fleeting factor.

Adyashanti approaches waking up as a time-bound, momentary experience. However, it is common for a sense of non-self and non-separateness to grow gradually in zazen practitioners as they continue to practice. Therefore, The End of Your World is really quite useful for any zazen practitioner, who may already be encountering some of the challenges of awakening.

Footnotes

See “Zazen and Ego” in this collection of essays.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World , Boulder, 2008 and 2010, p. 40.

The Perennial Source of Our Life

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:45:33 GMT

The Perennial Source of Our Life

Within Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (originally published in 1854), in the chapter, “Solitude,” Thoreau opposes the point of view that without human company we are lonely and unsatisfied. Thoreau says, “What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely,

. . . but to the perennial source of our life.”[1] He praises solitude and connection with this source.

As an aside, Thoreau’s attitude caused some of his contemporaries to view him as a curmudgeon, but those who knew him well found him friendly and sociable. When asked at a dinner once which item he liked best, he said jokingly, “the nearest,”

Zazen practitioners have the great privilege of access to what Thoreau calls the “perennial source.”This source goes by many names, such as the Absolute or Original Mind. It can be intuited only when the thinking mind is set aside, making it verbally or intellectually indescribable.

When I attended practice periods at the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara, every morning, after zazen, we chanted several hymns, among which was “Hymn to the Perfection of Wisdom.” I assume that this hymn is about the “perennial source.” Its opening lines are:

Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom, the lovely, the holy.

The Perfection of Wisdom gives light. Unstained, the entire

world cannot stain her. She is a source of light and from

everyone in the triple world she removes darkness. Most

excellent are her works. She brings light so that all fear and

distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness

of delusion.

Access to the perennial source, far from rendering one a solitary curmudgeon, allows him or her to retain the joy of living throughout the ordinary pleasures and pains of human life. Usually intuition of it comes gradually to a zazen practitioner. If it comes suddenly, it can be powerful and dramatic. In a source I can’t find, Dogen refers to its sudden occurrence as “turning the body and flapping the brain.” However a practitioner comes to an intuition of it, the perennial source is a friend who never leaves.

Footnotes

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Boston, 1997 and 2004, p. 126.

Remembering

Tue, 02 May 2023 23:40:55 GMT

Remembering

In reading Stanislav Grof’s monumental study of LSD psychotherapy many years ago[1], I found that human memory begins with the contractions that initiate the birth process. In the unconscious of every person, there lies the memory of these vibratory contractions, travel through the cervix and down the birth canal, and finally the ecstatic release of pressure and actual birth.

From the point of the contractions that begin birth, nothing is lost to human memory. All of a person’s experience can be recalled either by conscious effort or by controlled or spontaneous regression.

I am led to these reflections by discovering that I don’t like to remember my past experience. Our minds drift back to memories very frequently, which seems to be a normal process, and therefore I was surprised when I saw that I disliked drifting back like this. It is as though I feel about any memory, "What does it matter?”

In an earlier essay in this collection, “Zazen and Ego,” I described my experience of suddenly losing my sense of personal self and of my consequent realization of the truth of the Buddhist principle that the self or ego does not substantially exist. Since this realization, I have tried to discard a feeling of self and to discard self-reactivity, and to pretty much live without it, to live without a sense of “I.”

When I am without “I,” at least now and then, I see memories in a stark and unpleasant light. I frequently see the selfishness of my then ego-driven behavior. Perhaps I wounded a girlfriend. Perhaps I threatened someone with violence who had offended me. Perhaps I was unduly critical of someone. Memories bring a panoply of experiences in which I misbehaved because I felt that my personal self or ego was real and that it was due reverence, retribution was allowed to it, only its needs were important, and so on.

So it is no wonder that I don’t care for memories. They frequently represent a person that I like to think is different now and that it is inconsequential to remember.

Footnotes

Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, 1980.

The Big Leap

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 21:41:08 GMT

The Big Leap

Six years ago I moved from Houston, where I had lived for 16 years, to a small town on the Big Island of Hawaii called Kailua-Kona. This was a momentous move for me at the time. I had visited Kailua-Kona a few months before the move and knew it to be an appealing town. Nevertheless, the move was a leap into a virtual unknown. My wife-to-be made the same leap to come to Kailua-Kona shortly afterwards.

Now I am about to make another leap. My wife and I need larger living quarters than we have now. Since the cost of homes is so high in Hawaii, to find larger quarters we need to move back to Houston, where property values are quite reasonable.

I have a good deal of apprehension and sadness at the prospect of leaving Kailua-Kona. I have good friends associated with the local Zen Center, I have appreciated being able to publish some of my essays in the Center’s newsletter, and there are clubs in town where my wife and I have frequently enjoyed dancing. I have an emotional attachment to Kailua-Kona that makes leaving difficult.

Nisargadatta, the renowned teacher from the Hindu tradition, says that we do not live our lives, but that they are lived for us. He says that the truth of our lives is “that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do.[1]

I have indeed felt that way about my life for many years, that I am not the mover of it, but the moved. I suspect that all long-term zazen practitioners come to this sense of things as well. I have made many major relocations in my life, Chicago to small-town Indiana, Indiana to California, California to Texas, Texas to Hawaii. With each relocation, I have felt that I was a propelled figure.

Although there has always been a sense of loss in connection with the locations I have left, the new locations have always brought gains. If propelled from one place to another, that has always been, following Nisargadatta, in line with the truth of life, and the moves have always been fortunate. I trust that the coming big leap will be fortunate as well.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.

A Tribute to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 23:29:14 GMT

A Tribute to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

When I began a serious study of Buddhism, the first book I read was the collection of Shunryu Suzuki’s talks in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I read from its first paperback edition, 1973. I was immensely fortunate to have begun with this book. Not only did I begin the practice of zazen by virtue of this book, learning from its brief description of how to sit, but also I was influenced by it to follow a right spiritual path. Roshi says in the chapter, Control,[1] “To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment.” If “to die as a small being” is a person’s ideal as he or she starts on a spiritual path, he is certainly headed in the right direction.

The aim of Zen practice can be stated rather simply. It is to function in daily life without the sense of oneself in one’s mind. Thought, feeling, emotion, all can go on in a person without this sense of self. It seems to me that the absence of a sense of self is what Roshi means by “Big Mind,” which he often opposes to “small mind” in his talks. Big Mind is the mind without a sense of self, or awakened mind. Small mind is the ego, personal self, I-consciousness, however one wishes to put it.

The idea of living without self is enforced, either explicitly or implicitly, in every chapter of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. For example, in the chapter, Bowing, Roshi says, “In your big mind, everything has the same value. Everything is Buddha himself.” Viewed through small mind, that everything has the same value makes no sense. Aren’t there both good and bad, aren’t some things preferable and others not? That “everything is Buddha himself” can be realized only when the mind is without self and therefore free from the liking and disliking that ego is prone to.

The same conditions maintain respective to Roshi’s remarks in the chapter, No Trace. Roshi says, “You should burn yourself completely,” meaning, as I see it, that after you do or say something, you should not worry about its consequences or the impression it might have made. In other words, don’t leave any trace. Years ago, I was in a dharma-discussion group that was reading Roshi’s book, and a psychotherapist said about burning yourself completely, that it was impossible. Of course he was right if you are bringing small mind to your activities and conversations. If you are bringing Big Mind to them, however, the mind in which a sense of oneself is not present, then after doing or saying something, you simply forget about it. That is the normal behavior of a mind that is not carrying a sense of personal self.

Similarly, in the chapter, God Giving, Roshi says that we are used to thinking “I create” the advantages of civilization, such as airplanes and highways, whereas actually, in Christian terms, “everything was created by God.” The same idea can be found in Keizan’s Transmission of Light, where it is “the host within you” or “old Shakyamuni Buddha” that directs our behavior. [2] In the same way, Roshi says in the chapter, Buddha’s Enlightenment, “. . . Whatever we do is Buddha’s activity.” Small mind supposes that it is always the doer of its activities. In contrast, Big Mind, without a sense of personal self, feels that it is not the doer, or the mover, but that it is being moved.

The gradual effect of the practice of zazen is that ego or personal self drops into the background. As this happens, through zazen a person can share in the state of mind that Suzuki Roshi conveys, where everywhere one looks, there is Buddha, where one’s life is without worry about reception by others, where whatever one does seems to be beneficently guided, and so on. May all practitioners enter into this grace.

Footnotes

I wrote this essay from notes I had taken on the edition of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind mentioned in the first paragraph. I no longer have this edition and therefore cannot verify page numbers for quotations. Identifying quotations by their chapter in the book seemed a good alternative.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light, Boston, 2002, pp. 26 and 6.

You Can Get It if You Really Want

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:01:41 GMT

You Can Get It if You Really Want

Last night there was a hullabaloo coming from somewhere near my house. When I stepped outside to try to tell where it was coming from, Jimmy Cliff’s “You Can Get It if You Really Want” was blaring away.

That made some thoughts about zazen come to mind. The aim of zazen is easy to describe. It is to drop the idea of yourself from your mind, not only during zazen, but more or less all the time.

How do you do that? Nisargadatta, the great spiritual teacher from the Hindu tradition, was asked during one of his talks, “How is the person removed?” He responded, “By determination. Understand that it must go and wish it to go – it shall go if you are earnest about it.”[1]

Nisargadatta’s response may be a real eye-opener for many. Far from being a rare mystical experience, dropping the self can be worked at in a quite practical way. Just as during zazen, a practitioner puts aside thinking to return to breathing, so can the same be done in daily life when one notices an awareness of himself in his mind. Just put it aside, do whatever you are doing without it being in the road, and there you are. Just as Nisargadatta and Jimmy Cliff say, “You can do it if you really want.”

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, The Acorn Press, Durham, 1973, p. 441.

Impermanence and Permanence

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 20:17:28 GMT

Impermanence and Permanence

For a while I lived in a small incorporated community in Texas called Nassau Bay. It was near the Houston Space Center; astronauts used to live there and maybe still do. There was a lovely, rather large, artificial lake at the center of the community.

One day I was sitting on a bench next to the lake, enjoying the peace there, and suddenly I became aware of movement around me. There was constant movement that I could see in the grass around me, in leaves on the trees encircling the lake, in the light wind, in nutria (web-footed rodents) in the lake, and so on.

I had begun to study Buddhism in depth shortly before this, and eventually I realized that what I was observing in all the movement was what Buddhists called “impermanence.” It is a principle in Buddhism that movement and change, or impermanence, is a constant aspect of life.[1]

I am a member of a dharma study group that is reading a book called The Hidden Lamp. There is a koan in this book called “Miaoxin’s Banner.” Miaoxin is a wise nun who directs a guesthouse at her temple. There happen to be several monks staying at the guesthouse who are traveling to seek enlightenment. Miaoxin overhears them discussing the koan, attributed to the Sixth Patriarch, “What moves is not the wind nor the banner, but your mind.” She remarks to her attendants that in studying this koan, the monks are not “even getting close to the Dharma.” Later Miaoxin has occasion to speak to the monks, and she advises them, “What moves is not the wind, nor the banner, nor your mind.” Hearing this, the monks awakened.[2]

There are, naturally, various opinions about what the koan the monks were studying means. The advice that Miaoxin counters with, however, distinctly brings to my mind the idea of permanence. If movement, as in the monks’ koan, implies impermanence, then no movement, as in Mazoxin’s advice, implies permanence. It is by a glimpse into permanence that the monks wake up.

In spite of the Buddhist view of impermanence as inherent in life, is there in Buddhism also a belief in something permanent, stable, without change? Such a view can be found in Keizan’s Transmission of Light. Keizan is called the “Great Patricarch” of Soto Zen. He was born 15 years after Dogen passed (1253), who is the “Highest Patriarch” of Soto Zen.

Keizan says that there is a power existing outside time. It is “not in the realm of becoming and decay.”[3] He says that this power is “ single spiritual light that is eternal and stable.”[4] He refers to it as “a self which never changes through all time.”[5] According to Keizan, this self is in everyone, and he advises seekers to “maintain your true self.”[6]

The discovery and maintenance of one’s eternal true self is accomplished through zazen. In any event, I assume zazen is what Keizan is referring to when he says that to reach the true self,“. . .For the time being close your eyes – when the breath ends and the body ends and there is no house to protect you, all function is unnecessary, and you are like the blue sky with no clouds, the ocean without waves – then you’ll be somewhat in accord with it.”[7]

The aim of Zen might be said to be the discovery and nurturing of a stable and unchanging power in oneself, buoyant and supportive. This is what the monks woke up to, and so, through zazen, can we.

Footnotes

This is similar to a teaching of the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who said that you cannot step twice into the same stream.
The Hidden Lamp, Wisdom Publications in Massachusetts, 2013, p. 286.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light, tr. Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, Boston, 2002, p. 176.
Ibid., p. 201.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 190.

The Watcher

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 22:28:05 GMT

The Watcher

Years ago when I was reading a good deal of Buddhist commentary, one of the works most helpful to me was the collection of Chogyam Trungpa’s talks in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. In these talks, Trungpa speaks frequently of the “watcher.”

The “watcher” is a self-protective activity of the ego or personal self. It can operate when with others, as when one watches himself or herself when dancing in a dance hall; or simply with oneself, when one is aware of an “I” reacting to this or that and wondering whether it is proper to react like that.

All of us are familiar with the watcher. We wonder how our appearance or behavior is going to be received by others. We put a shirt or blouse on when someone comes to the door. We don’t express our views openly to everyone. We keep our behavior within acceptable bounds, watching ourselves so that no one disapproves.

Chogyam Trungpa says that “checking oneself” or watching oneself, is “an unnecessary kind of self-observance”[1]. A zazen practitioner can cast the watcher aside rather easily. The action is similar to dropping thinking when meditating. The rewards of dropping the watcher are considerable. The watcher removes a person from life. We are fully in life only when we are not watching ourselves. Drop the watcher, and what ensues is a more spontaneous, spacious, and expansive life.

Footnotes

Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala, Boston and London, 2002, p. 21.

Death As the Undiscovered Country

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:26:41 GMT

Death As the Undiscovered Country

In Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character Hamlet refers to death as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” I am not familiar with reputed claims of people returning from a brief, medically-declared death and reporting white light and so on. I have Hamlet’s view that what happens after true death is not known by any living human being.

I turned 84 recently, which is beyond the life expectancy of 80.7 years in my home state of Hawaii. My family is long-lived, I am in good health, and I have no expectation of passing away very soon. Nevertheless, at my age I suppose it is normal to be at least thinking about death, as I have been doing.

In hundreds of dharma talks that I have heard from Zen teachers, I have never heard anything about what happens after death. Zen stresses finding spiritual fulfillment in this life, and it seems to agree with Hamlet that what happens after death is unknown.

Assuming my own death is not sudden in some way, I see that it will be my last conscious living act. I don’t expect initially to feel agreeable about it. Even Suzuki Roshi, on his death bed, is reputed to have said, “I don’t want to die.”[1] Neither would I expect to go through the five stages of grief described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in On Death and Dying. She says that not everyone goes through these stages anyway [2], and the stages seem to be the personal self lamenting its demise. Zazen practitioners have a good chance of avoiding these stages, as the practice of zazen gradually relegates personal self to just background chatter in one’s life.

For myself, I would hope, upon dying, after an initial objection, to have an adventuresome attitude about the process. I will be heading into Hamlet’s “undiscovered country.” Don’t expect a report.

Footnotes

Suzuki Roshi’s words can be found in Kim Allen’s www.uncontrived.org/thank-you-for-your-great-effort.html , and in David Chadwick’s Crooked Cucumber, New York, 1999, p. 393.
A summary of these stages can be found at www.psycom.net/stages-of-grief .

The Eternal Rightness of Things

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:16:53 GMT

The Eternal Rightness of Things

I have been attending a dharma-study group that at present is discussing a book called The Hidden Lamp, a collection of koans with commentaries. One of the koans, from ninth-century China, is called “The Old Woman’s Relatives.” A monk asks an old woman living alone in a hut, “Do you have any relatives?” She answers, “The mountains, rivers, and the whole earth, the plants and trees, are all my relatives.”[1]

The old woman has realized that the whole world is the buddhadharma, and she feels herself to be a comfortable part of this world. In Zen, the buddhadharma is the world seen through enlightenment.[2]

That the whole world is the buddhadharma has been an inspiring idea to me over the years. In words that underscore this idea, Suzuki Roshi says, “In your big mind, everything has the same value. Everything is Buddha himself.”[3] And Dogen says, “Hundreds of grasses and myriad forms – each appearing ‘as it is’ – are nothing but the buddha’s true dharma

body. . . .”[4] Dogen also says, “The great ocean has only one taste.”[5]

The principle of the buddhadharma is that everything is always all right. The sense of the rightness of everything transcends reason and is beyond intellectual verification. I think this is what Dogen means when he says, “Now, the realm of all buddhas is inconceivable. It cannot be reached by consciousness.”[6]

The sense of the rightness of things lies at an intuitive level beyond reasoning. It is available to a zazen practitioner. Chogyam Trungpa says, “Through the practice of meditation, we begin to find that within ourselves there is no fundamental complaint about anything or anyone at all.”[7]

The intuition of the rightness of things will come to any persistent zazen practitioner. It is the source of strength and inner stability as one confronts the trials of life.

Footnotes

The Hidden Lamp, Massachusetts, 2013, p. 173.
The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, Boston, 1991, p. 30.
Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, New York, 1970, p. 44
Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop, New York, 1985, p. 129.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 148.
Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Boulder, 2007, p. 21.

Zazen Has No End

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 21:19:54 GMT

Zazen Has No End

When I began to read Buddhist commentary, years ago, I encountered the idea that you could reach a point in meditation when the insight you had acquired no longer had to be maintained. I may have encountered this idea in one of Chogyam Trungpa’s talks, but I cannot find the reference now. In any event, I took the idea to mean that if you became enlightened, you no longer had any need to meditate.

Enlightenment is the dropping of the sense of “I” and the consequent experience of non-separateness. This event may occur within zazen or another sort of meditation, or outside of it. Also, the event may be more or less profound for the experiencer. It may slip from his or her awareness eventually, or he may encounter all sorts of difficulties as he tries to adjust to it. A good source for the experience of a person after enlightenment is Adyashanti’s The End of Your World.

Enlightenment aside, the practice of zazen itself brings a growing sense of non-separateness. “Purpose of Zazen,” an essay in this group, explains the view of Kosho Uchiyama in Opening the Hand of Thought, that deepening the sense of non-separateness is an ongoing process in the experience of a zazen practitioner. Uchiyama says of himself, “. . . The longer I practice, the clearer it becomes to me that nothing is separated from me.”[1]

So in truth, as the title of this essay says, zazen has no end. The sense of non-separateness continues to deepen as one persists in the practice.

Footnotes

Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. 155.

How to do Zazen

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 19:00:44 GMT

How to do Zazen

Anyone in the general population who might want to try zazen may be fortunate to live near a Zen center. However, Zen centers are not distributed so liberally throughout the country that most people have access to them. For most people, developing a zazen practice is going to be an individual pursuit.

Figure 1

I will be recommending a version of zazen modified slightly from that found in Zen centers. Basically, zazen is a very simple practice of sitting with a straight back and focusing on breathing. You watch your breath come in and go out, returning to this focus whenever you notice that you have been distracted from it. If you cannot keep your back straight because of injury or a structural problem, I have known an enlightened person who had a deformed back that he could not move at all, so you can still find your way in zazen without a straight back. The important thing is simply to keep your back as straight as you can and try to keep your focus on your breathing.

How to sit while meditating is a matter of individual preference. There is a common posture of sitting cross-legged on the edge of a solid cushion, which can be placed on a mat. Sitting on the edge of the cushion allows the knees to sink to the floor or mat. This position is shown in Figure 1. In one form of this posture, one or the other foot (it doesn’t matter which) is placed on the opposite thigh, and the other foot crossed over onto the other thigh. For most people, this is an overly strenuous position. A modification is to place one or the other heel between the legs; the other heel is placed in the bend of the other leg, in the crease between thigh and calf. Or you may simply cross the legs while keeping both heels on the floor.

Figure 2

If sitting cross-legged is not comfortable, using a meditation bench enables you to sit on your knees, or you can also sit on the outer edge of a chair. Sitting on a chair, which is shown in Figure 2, is the way I meditate now because I have a sensitive knee that is painful to bend.

As the two figures show, the hands can be placed on or near the knees, palms down. This seems to me to be the preferable position for the hands. If you put a little pressure in your fingers to stabilize the hands, you can tell whether your back is drifting out of the straight position, leaning forwards or backwards or to the right or left. Movement in your hands will tip you off.

It is important not to expect anything when you are meditating, certainly not enlightenment. There is no spiritual state that can be accurately imagined. Spiritual states are like the taste of an orange; it is impossible to know it unless you experience it. Even if, while meditating, you do experience something that you feel is very positive, it is important not to expect or aim at a reoccurrence of the experience. It is best to consider meditation as practicing a skill, where you are simply trying to improve your ability to move from distraction back onto breathing.

Sit with your eyes open. As long as you are not going to sleep, if your eyes close naturally in the course of a session, just let them close. Also, you should try to sit in a location in your dwelling that is free from distraction, and also to face something that will not lead you to explore it visually, such as a wall or a suspended bath towel.

There are ancillary benefits to zazen that will encourage you as you proceed in the practice. Some of these are greater calm and clear-headedness, greater efficiency, and lessening of any tendency to get angry or upset. There is also a possible impediment that might emerge, which is discouragement because distraction is so hard to keep at bay. If you start with short sitting periods, as advised above, you will be less vulnerable to this. Keep in mind that the very core of zazen is to shift from distraction back onto breathing. There will always be distraction. It is as though to maintain a steady focus on breathing in and out is a strain for the mind, and the mind frequently seeks relief in distraction. This must be accepted as a normal part of zazen.

Zen Buddhism, and its characteristic practice of zazen, began in 13th-century Japan by a priest named Eihei Dogen. The practice has lasted for some 700 years. In spite of the advice of Zen teachers not to aim for anything while meditating, the practice must have had a purpose or no one would have taken it up.

The purpose of zazen is common to the major mystical traditions. This purpose is vividly expressed by Nisargadatta, in the Hindu tradition, who says, “All you need to do is to cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness.” [1] “Yourself” in this quotation is the “I” that we are all conscious of when we say or think, for example, “I am leaving the room,” “I am eating dinner,” “I have the opinion that….” This awareness can be called “I-consciousness.”

Without experiencing it, it is impossible to imagine the absence of I-consciousness from the mind. It is equivalent to enlightenment, which unless experienced also cannot be imagined. In the view of Adjashanti, a contemporary Zen teacher, enlightenment is the realization of non-separateness, and this realization comes to a person at the moment when I-consciousness is dropped. [2] “Non-separateness” refers to the condition of the world in which any individual phenomenon is not separate but interconnected or interdependent with all other phenomena. A person realizing non-separateness perceives the whole world to be moving as one grand thing, and feels himself or herself to be a comfortable part of this unified world, interdependent with it, merged with it, as everything else.

Since this essay is a addressed to people who will probably be meditating by themselves, it is significant that the Buddhist Theravada tradition, or early Buddhism, recognized that a person meditating without a teacher, and therefore outside of a community, could attain enlightenment. The tradition called such people “pratyeka-buddhas” or solitary buddhas.

Under the term of “mindfulness,” meditation is often approached as bringing only the “ancillary benefits” mentioned above. Zazen, however, as explained, has a purpose that goes way beyond that, namely dropping the self and enlightenment.

Although dropping the self can be sudden, more commonly it is a gradual process that occurs throughout the lifetime of a meditator. This gradual process is described by Nisargadatta, who says, “The dissolution of personality” is “like washing printed cloth. First the design fades, then the background, and in the end the cloth is plain white.” [3]

To get to “plain white” may not happen in one’s lifetime, or it may happen and one not recognize it. Dogen says, “When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas.” [4] In other words, when the self is dropped, you don’t think about yourself.

Zazen can be depended on to do its work of dropping the self without deliberate effort on the meditator’s part. Of course a person should follow a discipline of sitting regularly, twice a day for a specified time as suggested above, but beyond that zazen works automatically with no thought given to the process. Of key importance is simply, session after session, to move from distraction back onto breathing. If the self leaves suddenly, there is a sense of a grand culmination, but if it leaves gradually, which is the usual case, the zazen practitioner bit by bit feels lighter and freer, and there is always a gain.

Footnotes

Nisargadatta, I Am That, Durham, NC, 1973, p. 148.
The Sun, December, 2007, p. 10.
Nisargadatta, p. 401.
Dogen’s Genjo Koan.

Free Will in Buddhism

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 20:10:46 GMT

Free Will in Buddhism

Free will has been a long-standing issue in Western philosophy. Major Western philosophers have discussed it: Immanuel Kant, David Hume, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, among the main enlightenment philosophers. In contrast, according to an article by Katie Javanaud in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, “In a rare instance of scholarly consensus, it is generally agreed that proponents of classical Buddhism did not recognize what, in Western philosophy, is known as the free will problem.” [1] Ms Javanaud also quotes another scholar of Buddhist philosophy: “As one of the first scholars to discuss Buddhism and free will, Horner has commented that the will is simply ‘assumed to be free.’”[2]

Apparently, then, in Buddhism the issue of free will is not discussed, and the will is simply assumed to be free. To me the Buddhist assumption of free will is itself problematic. The reason for this is that the Buddhist conception of dependent co-arising, as I understand it, is that all things are powered by conditions outside of themselves, or “other-powered,” while the idea of free will is that the human will is self-powered.

I don’t know how to solve this conundrum. However, if any zazen practitioner happens to be troubled about it, he or she needn’t be for long. Whether one has free will is a concern of the ego. Let’s say that a person has completed a project of some sort that is important to him. It is just the ego in him that would be concerned about whether he could take credit for it. If ego isn’t active in him, it would not matter to him whether he could say, “I did this thing,” or not.

The main aim of spiritual practice, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, is to render the ego virtually powerless in a person. Nisargadatta, in the Hindu tradition, says, “This habit of referring to a false centre must be done away with; the notion: ‘I see,’ ‘I feel,’ ‘I think,’ ‘I do,’ must disappear from the field of consciousness.”[3] The principle of “anatman” in Buddhism maintains that in reality there is no “self” or “ego” or “I” at all in a person (or anywhere in the universe), so that any sense that “I do” or “I think,” and so on is an illusion.

The gradual effect of the practice of zazen is that the ego has less and less influence in the practitioner’s life. Eventually a practitioner is just not going to care about whether he has free will, if he ever did care about it. He can brush the whole subject off as a trivial concern.

Footnotes

Katie Javanaud, “Reformulating the Buddhist Free Will Problem,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2018, No. 46, p. 773. Ms Javanaud is a doctoral candidate on the faculty of the University of Oxford.
Ibid., p. 774.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, The Acorn Press, Durham, 1973, p. 292.

Dropping the Self

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 19:02:37 GMT

Dropping the Self

I used to be in a dharma-study group that was reading Zen Seeds. There is an essay in that book called “Everyone is in the Palm of the Buddha’s Hand.” The essay says that to realize that we are in the Buddha’s hand is to feel that we are sustained through life by a supportive and benign force, “the great lifeforce of the universe.” The essay continues that we become aware of this force when “the frame around the self is removed.”[1] The essay ends with a quote from Dogen’s Genjo Koan about forgetting the self.

This essay from Zen Seeds got me to thinking about the centrality of dropping the self in spiritual practice. Eroding the habitual idea of selfhood is embraced by the major mystical religions that I have some familiarity with. From the tradition of Soto Zen, Keizan, who is considered its “Great Patriarch,” says, “If you want to reach the true path clearly, you should give up your idea of self.” [2] Within mystical Christianity, Meister Eckhart says to his assembled monks, “I must sometimes point out that the soul wanting to perceive God must forget itself and lose itself.” [3] In the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta, speaking of the core of spiritual practice, says, “All you need to do is to cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness.”[4] In mystical Islam or Sufism, only when the idea of selfhood drops from the mind does the Friend, or Allah, enter the heart and fill it with love and bliss.

In the view of Adjashanti, a contemporary Zen teacher, enlightenment and dropping the self are synonymous. Adjashanti considers enlightenment, or awakening, to be the realization of non-separateness, and he says it occurs simultaneously with the disappearance of the idea of oneself from the mind. Of both “the oneness” and “the nothingness,” he says, “It all exists simultaneously.” [5]

In Zen Buddhism, especially in Rinzai Zen, enlightenment is often spoken of as sudden. However, I suspect that far more often enlightenment, or dropping the self, is a gradual experience that occurs over the lifetime of a meditator. This gradual process is described by Nisargadatta, who says, “The dissolution of personality” is “like washing printed cloth. First the design fades, then the background, and in the end the cloth is plain white.” [6]

For those who do zazen, dropping the self occurs on its own. I read somewhere that deliberately trying to drop the self is like sending a thief to catch a thief. You are going to deceive yourself if you try to measure how you are coming along in dropping the self. The idea of oneself naturally drops from the meditator’s mind within the tiny mental space that occurs between the meditator’s realizing that he is distracted and shifting his or her focus back onto the breathing. Repeated experience of this brief self-absence eventually brings “plain white.” Thoughtlessly!

Footnotes

Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds, Shambhala, 2019, p. 15.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light, Shambhala, 2002, p. 11.
Matthew Fox, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creatiion Spirituality, Doubleday, 1980, p. 140.
Nisargadatta, I Am That, Durham, NC, 1973, p. 148.
Luc Saunders and Sy Safransky, “Who Hears This Sound? Adyashanti on Waking Up From The Dream of Me,” The Sun, December, 2007, p. 10.
Nisargadatta, p. 40 1.

Just One World (samsara and nirvana the same)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 19:06:03 GMT

Just One World (samsara and nirvana the same)

In a book called Zen Seeds, written by the Japanese priest Shundo Aoyama, the author, a novice at the time, was asked by a Zen Master, “What does it mean to say ‘Life and death, as they are, is nirvana.’?” When the novice couldn’t answer the question, the Zen Master advised her to return after thirty years of practice and then try to answer. [1]

“Thirty years” of zazen is the conventional period in Zen to wait for enlightenment. So the Zen Master is saying, “You will know the answer to my question when you are enlightened.” Indeed the Zen Master’s question points to the core enlightened insight in Zen, that, to use Suzuki Roshi’s words, “In your big mind, everything has the same value. Everything is Buddha himself.”[2] Or as Dogen puts it, “Hundreds of grasses and myriad forms – each appearing ‘as it is’ – are nothing but buddha’s true dharma body. . . .”[3] Dogen also says evocatively, “The great ocean has only one taste.”[4]

The fundamental insight that everything is Buddha comes gradually to a zazen practitioner. Maybe it takes thirty years, maybe more or less, but it eventually comes. Again to quote Suzuki Roshi, who says that becoming enlightened is like walking in a fog:

"It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, ‘Oh, this pace is terrible!’ But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog, it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.[5]

You might say that progress is unconscious. To quote Dogen again, “When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas.”[6]

To return to Zen Seeds, Shundo Aoyama also says there, “People who are about to cross the bridge called Buddhism know that the Other Shore is a more splendid world than this mundane, deluded world.”[7] However, when you do get to the Other Shore, as Aoyama Roshi knows, you realize that there is no “Other Shore.” In Zen commentary, the world to be crossed over to the “Other Shore” is called “samsara,” the deluded world; it is contrasted with “nirvana,” the enlightened world. In Zen commentary, you also read that samsara and nirvana are the same things. In an enlightened mind, there are not two worlds, just one wonderful world. The sixth Zen patriarch, Hui-neng, says, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” [8] There is just one great and wonderful world.

Footnotes

Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds, Shambhala, 2019, p. 117.
Shunrya Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shambhala, 2011, p. 44.
Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, New York, 1985, p. 129.
Ibid., p. 62.
Shunryu Suzuki, p. 46.
Dogen, Genjo Koan.
Shundo Aoyama, p. 129.
The Platform Sutra.

No You (no self, no "I")

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 19:14:42 GMT

No You (no self, no "I")

I have a wooden statue in my study of Hotei. On the underside of the statue’s base is written, “In China, Hotei is the god of good fortune and the guardian of children.” The statue shows Hotei exploding in joy. Let us ask, in fantasy, why he may be so joyful.

There is a well-known Buddhist document called the Bahiya Sutta. Bahiya was a revered teacher himself, who humbly came to the Buddha to ask, “Teach me the Dhamma.” The Buddha responded as follows:

Then, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bahiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress.[1]

The Buddha refers to a condition of “no you” as being the end of the stress of life. No you is the absence of self-consciousness, I-consciousness, or ego. For a person who does not carry a sense of “I,” there is no sense of self.

In zazen, whenever the complete focus is on breathing, the sense of self disappears. Repeated experience of this eventually releases the meditator from the stress of life, as the Buddha says, the stress of being imprisoned in ego or personal self, the seat of greed, hatred, and delusion.

As for Hotei’s great joy, let’s imagine that it springs from being released from imprisonment in the ego. He’s freed, liberated. He is such a grand image of that freedom.

Footnotes

The words in the essay can be found in the 12 ^th paragraph of the rather long Behiya Sutta, which can be found in its entirety at this address: https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html

Letter to the Editor (recommends zazen to the general public)

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 19:38:30 GMT

Letter to the Editor (recommends zazen to the general public)

I moved to Hawaii in January of 2017, where I live now. Therefore I was in Hawaii for the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In October of 2020, I sent a letter-to-the-editor of the local newspaper advising the use of zazen to relieve the stress of the pandemic. The newspaper generously gave the letter a featured position in the paper and entitled it “A Little Advice for Hard Times.” Slightly modified, here is that letter:

As everyone, I am in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Being older and therefore especially susceptible to the virus, I stay at home except for grocery shopping, and that makes for a dull and uncomfortable day. I live south of the center of Kailua-Kona, and as I travel up Alii Drive to the grocery, I am distressed by the closed businesses and the empty streets.

I am fortunate to have the companionship of my wife to ease this period of time. I also have zazen. Within the religion of Buddhism, zazen is the main practice of the Zen Buddhist school. It is not necessary to know anything at all about Zen Buddhism in order to do the practice. Zazen means “sitting meditation” in Japanese. It is a very simple practice of sitting with a straight back and focusing on breathing. You watch your breath come in and go out, returning to this focus whenever you notice that you have been distracted from it. Zazen can be done sitting on a cushion or a meditation bench or a chair.

Zazen is a process of inward discovery. It is a launch into an internal sea that has unknown islands and inlets. When pursued regularly, in time it introduces you to a different and richer world than the day-to-day one. The phenomena in this world are interconnected, and the whole moves as one thing. You feel yourself to be a comfortably intimate part of this unified world, interconnected with it as everything else. Phenomena in this world are all of ultimate worth, being uniformly valuable, intriguing, interesting. You may feel a streaming sense of love in this world, in which you yourself are serene, peaceful, and loving.

Zazen is not a casual process but it need not be burdensome. In the beginning, it is best to practice it for short periods, say fifteen minutes, at times of day convenient for you, twice a day being sufficient. You can gradually expand the period of meditation to thirty or forty minutes, which are standard for zazen. You will want to be patient as you wait for the richer world to unfold. As you meditate, it is best not to think of aiming for this world, or of achieving any goal, but just to concentrate on your breathing, maybe treating the act of focusing as a skill that you are developing. Try not to be grasping after anything, but just focusing.

Manuals of meditation treat these points at length. However, you needn’t read a lot about meditation to get started. Just begin doing zazen. You will soon see if it is right for you, and then you can follow your own star.

Zazen and Philosophy (free will vs determinism)

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 19:49:56 GMT

Zazen and Philosophy (free will vs determinism)

Even though thinking is to be avoided in zazen, practitioners, without deliberation, do resolve a particular issue in philosophical thought, and in doing so enter a full life.

One of the concerns of Buddhist thought, as well as thought from Hindu sources prior to Buddhism, is the issue of free will vs determinism. Sometimes there is a good deal of self-contradictory commentary that issues from Buddhist writers and speakers on this issue. For example, Ajahn Amaro, writing in the journal Buddhadharma, says, “. . .What we experience in the present moment is preconditioned. It is the result of everything that has happened in the universe since at least the Big Bang.” “Our life is preconditioned.” To me this seems clearly to say that our actions are predetermined. However, continuing in the same paragraph, Ajahn Amaro says, “What we do here in the present moment is entirely our decision.”[1]

It is understandable to want to have it both ways, as Ajahn Amaro here, determinism and free will together. On the one hand, the principle in Buddhism of dependent co-arising says that nothing is self-powered; rather, all things are other-powered, that is, powered by causes and conditions outside of themselves. On the other hand, when it comes to applying this deterministic view to human beings, it seems to fly in the face of what most of them think they experience, which is that they make their own decisions and run their own lives. The idea that nothing is self-powered seems ridiculous when applied to themselves.

There are also Buddhist commentators who take a deterministic view. For example, Kaizan, the Great Patriarch of Soto Zen, says in a passage I have redacted a good deal, “. . .That which causes the eyebrows to raise and the eyes to blink” “cannot be discerned in seeing or hearing.” “. . . It is something whose name you don’t know. . . .” “. . .It causes you to be born, causes you to die, causes you to move and act, causes you to perceive and feel.”[2] Also Reb Anderson, the head dharma teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center, says, “What I am is actually what everything has made. In that sense, each of us is under control. The entire cosmos is controlling us, but individually we cannot control anything.” [3]

Some commentators from the Hindu tradition contradict in an even more explicit way the notion that man has free will. Nisargadatta says, “There is a universal power which is in control and is responsible.” “Just realize the One mover behind all that moves and leave all to Him.” “What is wrong in letting go the illusion of personal control and personal responsibility? Both are in the mind only.” [4] Again from the same teacher, “Why do you talk of action? Are you acting ever? Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching whgat happens, without being able to influence it in any way.”[5] Another teacher in the Hindu tradition, Ramana Maharshi, was asked, “What is the end of the path of knowledge,” and he responded, “It is . . . to be free from the feeling of being the doer.” [6]

Zazen, when pursued regularly and usually for a long period of time, brings a person to a sense of things that resolves the issue solidly on the deterministic side. As treated in other of these essays, as the personal self or “I” gradually drops away in zazen, there emerges an intuition that one is not bringing anything about himself, but rather that, to use Nisargadatta’s words above, “there is a universal power which is in control and is responsible.” In other words, as Ramana Maharshi says, one becomes “free from the feeling of being the doer.”

Even though “determinism,” similar to “fatalism,” carries negative connotations in English, the feeling of being “other-controlled” is liberating in practice. When the feeling of being a “doer” leaves the zazen practitioner, a weight is lifted from his shoulders. In a non-reflective or unconscious way, he turns his life over to “some unknown power.” In Buddhism, to my knowledge, there is no name for this power that is commonly agreed on. Nevertheless, sensing it is the ground of gratitude and reverence. It is the beginning of a truly religious life.

Footnotes

Ajahn Amaro, “Who’s Pulling the Strings?,” Buddhadharma, Winter, 2014, pp. 29-30.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light, Shambhala, 2002, p. 140.
Reb Anderson, Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation, Rodwell Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 42.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, Durham, NC, 1973, p. 151.
Ibid., p. 238
The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Shambhala, Boston and London, 1988, p. 17.

Zazen and Not Being the Doer

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 19:51:21 GMT

Zazen and Not Being the Doer

There is a juncture in the experience of a zazen practitioner when the person clearly sees that he or she is not doing their own breathing. That we don’t do our own breathing is of course the normal state of affairs, just as we do not cause our hearts to beat. As we go about our daily lives, our body does our breathing for us. However, when we sit to meditate, if we haven’t seen the contrary, we feel that we need to make some effort ourselves to bring the breath in and to expel it. Eventually though, as said, the perception comes that we are not doing the breathing ourselves. If the impression is firm enough, we can stop efforting to breathe and just watch our breath come in and go out.

This perception of not doing one’s own breathing may be the forerunner of a very large insight. Advanced spiritual teachers in both the Hindu tradition and in Soto Zen say that we are not the doer of our own lives. In the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta says that real spiritual progress has been made “when one stops thinking that one is living, and gets the feeling that one is being lived, that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do.” [1] Another teacher in the Hindu tradition, Ramana Maharshi, when he was asked, “What is the end of the path of knowledge,” responded, “It is to be free from the feeling of being the doer.”[2]

Similar statements can be found in the Soto Zen tradition. Keizan, born 15 years after Dogen’s passing and called the “ Great Patriarch” of Soto Zen, speaks of “that which causes the eyebrows to raise and the eyes to blink.” He continues, “. . .It is something whose name you don’t know even though it has always been living with you. . . . . .It causes you to be born, causes you to die, causes you to move and act, causes you to perceive and feel.”[3]

Modern Soto Zen teachers also speak of the agency of human action as something other than the person. Shunryu Suzuki says, “. . .We create airplanes and highways. And when we repeat, ‘I create, I create, I create,’ soon we forget who is actually the ‘I’ which creates the various things. . . .” Shortly after, he refers to this source of creation as the “big I.”[4] Also, Reb Anderson, the distinguished student of Shunryu Suzuki, says, “What I am is actually what everything has made. In that sense, each of us is under control. The entire cosmos is controlling us, but individually we cannot control anything.” [5]

There are various terms and concepts for what is held to be the ultimate doer: God, Allah, Original Mind, Buddha, the Lord, and so on. In mystical traditions that I have any familiarity with, the ultimate doer is considered to be unknowable. As Keizan says above, “it is something whose name you don’t know.”

However, a sense that one is not the doer leads to a profoundly relaxed life. As Ramana Maharshi wryly puts it,

Since the supreme power of God makes all things move, why should we, without submitting ourselves to it, constantly worry ourselves with thoughts as to what should be done and how, and what should not be done and how not? We know that the train carries all loads, so after getting on it why should we carry our small luggage on our head to our discomfort, instead of putting it down and feeling at ease?[6]

As zazen practitioners, we should patiently wait for the time, if it hasn’t come yet, when we can put our doer-luggage down and take an easy seat on the train of life.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, ed. Robert Powell, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.
The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Shambhala, Boston and London, 1988, p. 17.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light, tr. Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, Boston, 2002, p. 140.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Weatherhill, New York, 1970, p. 66.
Reb Anderson, Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation, Rodwell Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 42.
The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, p. 9.

Living with Original Mind (dispelling the illusion of "I")

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:13:20 GMT

Living with Original Mind (dispelling the illusion of "I")

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki says that during zazen, we can “resume our pure original state.”[1] Suzuki lists several terms for this original state. The term that stands out for me is “original mind,” for it is also used by Ajahn Chah, a teacher whose talks, collected in Food for the Heart, have been of very great value to me in my own spiritual practice. Ajahn Chah, now deceased, was the principle teacher of Jack Kornfield, who spent many years studying with him in Thailand. Ajahn Chah says of the mindfulness training in which he instructs his students, “Our practice is simply to see the ‘Original Mind.’” [2]

Ajahn Chah says that we are neither body nor mind. It is rather easy to see that our body is not us; unaided, we have no control over its ailments, aging, and death. That our mind is not us is harder to see. Ajahn Chah says that if we are not misled by the contents of our mind, our mind is in reality “Original Mind,” which is always serene and peaceful. If we can discover this Mind and live with it daily, we have accomplished our spiritual quest. He says, “The serene and peaceful mind is the true epitome of human achievement.” [3]

We are misled by our mental contents because we suppose that they constitute the sense of “I” that we carry around with us. So when we are angry, we say, “I am angry,” and similarly we say, “I am sad, I am happy, I am frustrated,” and so on. In reality, according to both Shunryu Suzuki and Ajahn Chah, there is no “I” that warrants grasping onto mental contents. Suzuki Roshi says, “According to the traditional Buddhist understanding, our human nature is without ego.”[4] And Ajahn Chah says flatly, “There is no I.”[5] With the delusion of having an “I” dispelled, we realize that we are, in Suzuki Roshi’s words, “Buddha nature,” and in Ajahn Chah’s, “Original Mind.”

So how is the delusion of “I” dispelled? Ajahn Chah requires of his students a mindfulness exercise in which they make certain observations about whatever comes into the mind. Outside of sleep, moods, thoughts, fantasies, plans, worries, and so on pass through the mind all day in practically a steady flow. Amusingly, Ajahn Chah likens this situation to sitting under a tree of ripe mangoes, with the fruit dropping at unpredictable times.

To whatever comes into the mind, Ajahn Chah asks his students to apply three observations: 1) the item is temporary, impermanent; 2) it causes dissatisfaction or suffering; and 3) it has the character of “non-self” in so far as the mind did not cause it to be there. In explaining this exercise further, I am going to focus only on the third observation, “non-self,” which was most helpful to me. About any mood, thought, etc. that one notices in the mind, one can ask the question, “Did I ask that to be there?” That is, prior to its appearance in the mind, did I ask for it to arise? The answer will always be “no.” Whatever comes into the mind comes there of itself. To return to the mangos analogy, it is as though, as Ajahn Chah says, “Someone else has climbed up the mango tree and is shaking the branches to make the mangoes fall down to us.”[6] We don’t make the mangoes fall.

When the person doing this mindfulness practice clearly sees that he has no control over what comes into his mind, he drops the feeling that he is his own mind. He then regards his mind to be like “a child who likes to play and frolic.” Ajahn Chah says, “Thinking and feeling will still be there, but that very thinking and feeling will be deprived of power.” The practitioner, detached from his mind, no longer thinks, “I am depressed, I am anxious, I am happy,” and so on, but that these feelings are simply his wayward mind operating on its own. At this point, the practitioner’s sense of “I” has been dropped and his “troubles are over.”[7] He has discovered the serenity and peace of his “Original Mind.”

A person might keep in mind that spiritual progress is always by degrees and may not result in a grand culmination. The mindfulness exercise proposed by Ajahn Chah can be performed by anyone inside or outside of a monastery. Both within meditation and for the hours outside of it, when the person becomes aware of something in his mind, he can ask, “Did I ask for that to be there?” When he sees that he did not summon the thing up himself, he can silently say, “no ownership,” to seal the observation. Bit by bit, he will become detached from his mind and experience greater peace in his life. So the exercise is worth it if one wants to try.

Footnotes

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, New York, 1970, p. 129.
Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002, p. 41.
Ajahn Chah, p. 64.
Shunryu Suzuki, p. 100.
Ajahn Chah, p. 138.
Ajahn Chah, p. 195
Ajahn Chah, p. 157.

Zazen and Ego (personal experience of loss of "I")

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 20:16:16 GMT

Zazen and Ego (personal experience of loss of "I")

Within a Buddha, presumably ego – personal self or “I” – has been permanently expunged. For most zazen practitioners, though, ego is going to hang around.

What may happen, however, is an experience, usually short-lived, in which the practitioner’s sense of “I” does leave the mind. A contemporary Zen teacher, Adjashanti, described this experience in an interview for a journal article published some years ago.[1] He referred to the loss of the sense of “I” very briefly, however, devoting most of his description to the experience of unity that accompanies this loss.

To elaborate on this loss, in my own case it was a totally unexpected, very startling, experience. As with Adjashanti, the experience occurred outside of meditation. With my daughter driving her car and me in the passenger seat, we were traveling from Lake Jackson, Texas to Houston. Looking out the front window of the car, I suddenly saw that the “me” I carry with me all the time, my consciousness of myself, my idea of “I,” was absent from my mind. As a way of casting about in my mind to find this idea, I looked out the side window, then the rear window. Gone! No idea of myself at all!

I knew that the idea would return. Sure enough, after something less than a minute, it did return. Its temporary disappearance, however, left quite a mark on me.

How real is something that can disappear like that? When you are not looking at a tree, you don’t have an idea of it, but if you shift your eyes to the tree, the idea of it enters your mind. But that wasn’t the case with the idea of “I” for which I deliberately cast about in my mind. The idea that I was looking for simply wasn’t there.

So how real is the vanished “I”? Not real at all! “Anatman,” or “no self,” is a major Buddhist belief, but now, in me, the belief had passed from belief to knowledge. I saw that in reality, I simply had no self. I knew that absolutely.

As I mentioned, “self” returned in me. I have to ask myself, what is the status of a self that I know isn’t real? I can’t embrace or own something that I know isn’t real. I can also see that I have no control over the way it reacts: if it is spoken harshly to, it feels stung; if it is cut off when speaking its mind, it feels irritated, and so on. I read something in Ajahn Chah’s Food for the Heart that seems to reflect my view of the self in me. Ajahn Chah, the teacher of Jack Kornfield, says that this self “is similar to a child who likes to play and frolic in ways that annoy us.” Ajahn Chah advises, “We should understand that it’s natural for a child to act that way. Then we can let go and leave them to play in their own way.” “We accept the ways of children.” “We let go and our heart becomes more peaceful.” [2]

Such good advice! Gradually, I think I am taking it in. If my wife says something that irritates me, I am learning that the irritation I feel is the child simply acting as it acts, with me not having anything to do with it, and I can brush the incident off pretty easily. So I’m learning, and as Ajahn Chah says, I feel, gratefully, that I am becoming more peaceful.

Footnotes

Luc Saunders and Sy Safransky, “Who Hears This Sound? Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream of ‘Me,’” The Sun, December, 2007, p. 10.
Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002, p. 157.

Zazen as an Altered State (can't share meditative experience)

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 20:18:56 GMT

Zazen as an Altered State (can't share meditative experience)

When I began to practice zazen in my early 30’s, I knew some other beginners who, in contrast to myself, were trying to share their enthusiasm for the practice with their families. By and large, they found their families unreceptive. The reason for that is that the state of mind of a person doing zazen is an altered state of consciousness. An altered state is simply a waking state that differs from day-to-day ordinary waking consciousness.

The term, “altered state of consciousness” or just “altered state” was possibly coined by a certain Charles Tart. At least Mr. Tart gave currency to the term in the 70’s partly through articles in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. I remember reading some of these articles and picking up the point that experience in an altered state could not be understood by a person not in that state. This made for a considerable divide between people who had had a mystical experience and the general public.

After sitting for a while in zazen, practitioners often experience a state of mind in which they feel unified with their breathing and other sensations, and in which, on the edge of consciousness, they may sense that everything is right with a unified world in which they are a comfortable part. Whether this state of mind can be called “mystical” or not, it is certainly an altered state, not an ordinary one.

Given that it is an altered state, the state of mind of a zazen practitioner cannot be shared with someone who is not also a practitioner. In the life of a beginning meditator, this may result in a feeling of loneliness. This feeling dissipates with the growth of a sense of self-sufficiency in the practice.

A Personal Statement about Zazen (dealing with negative feelings)

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 20:28:52 GMT

A Personal Statement about Zazen (dealing with negative feelings)

I would like to express my gratitude to zazen for being such a good companion to me over the years. I am 82 now. I’ll start with a little history.

I began the practice in 1972 when Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was first published. There is a short description there of how to do zazen. I was 34 and living in California at the time. It was easy for me to start the practice, as I had already resolved, through psychotherapy, some of the childhood issues that can trouble a beginning meditator.

For thirteen years after starting zazen, sensing a tremendous significance in the practice, I regularly followed a morning and evening sitting schedule. Toward the end of that span of time, I had come to a juncture where I felt quite blocked in going further. I think I was pushing too hard for an imagined enlightenment goal and had come to the “thick wall” that Suzuki Roshi warned about in the above book.

I was fortunate at that point to be introduced to a traditional (Muslim) Sufi order that followed non-meditation practices. Sufism is the mysticism of Islam. It focuses on opening the heart, which I felt much in need of. I followed the practices of Sufism solely for fifteen years, with great inward benefit, I felt.

I left the Sufi order for economic reasons, moved to Texas, and resumed zazen practice. This was in 2000. Starting zazen again, I was freed of the blocked feeling I spoke of, which has never returned. Instead zazen began to be a very valuable resource in handling my sometimes troubled daily life. It has seen me through the suicide of a loved twin brother, divorce, an unmerited firing by a shady company, the death of a loved wife after three years of cancer treatment, and other trials.

During these years of sitting, I found ways to use zazen to reduce or eliminate strong negative emotions. I found that feelings of fear, anger, worry, insecurity, and so on yield to a method that I may have learned from the writings of Charlotte Joko Beck. While concentrating on breathing as usual, the meditator tries to call up the negative feeling into his mind as precisely as possible, focus on the location in his body that seems mostly to hold the feeling, and sit in that mindful condition for a while. In some unexplained way, as meditators know, mindfulness of negative feeling reduces the feeling. Moreover, sitting in this way usually reveals the part that ego has played in giving rise to the negative feeling. Seeing that the phantasm of ego is at the root of the upset assists the meditator in dropping the upset.

Fortunately my life does not now have the sturm und drang that it used to have. Since the death from cancer of my previous wife eleven years ago, I have moved from Texas to Kailua-Kona, Hawaii and remarried. Presently I am leading a productive and peaceful life. Rather than relief from strife, zazen sessions now have more the character of a kind of dip into a pool of energy, expansion, and renewal.

Zazen and Energy (chakra energy)

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 20:28:51 GMT

Zazen and Energy (chakra energy)

I was a member of a traditional (Muslim) Sufi order in California for fifteen years. Sufism is the mysticism of Islam. Its goal is to open the heart so that it can receive the love of Allah. In traditional Sufi orders, there is a central ceremony performed weekly called “zikrullah” or “remembrance of God.” In the order I was in, this ceremony began with the men sitting on their knees in a circle, with the women standing in a line behind them, both swaying and chanting to the rhythm of “illahis” or Sufi hymns.

One of the chants had the words, “la illaha illallah,” meaning literally “”no gods, God,” or “there is only one God.” When the men chanted “la illaha” they would sway to the right and perform a half-circle movement from the base of the spine to the top of the head, and upon “illallah” they would complete the circle by moving their heads down energetically in the direction of the heart. In this manner they would move energy from the base of the spine to the heart. The aim was to loosen the muscular tension in the chest that made for emotional closure and blocked the love of God.

Although zazen is a more quiet activity, movement of energy also happens during it. With the repeated, momentary dropping of self that occurs when the meditator shifts attention from distracting thought back onto the breathing, energy moves up the spine.

The Indian chakra system may help to clarify this. In this system, the “chakras” are centers of bodily energy; the centers number seven in the simplest version of the system. They start with the “root chakra” at the base of the spine and move up to the “sacral chakra” in a position just below the naval, to the “solar plexus chakra” at the solar plexus, the “heart chakra” in the center of the chest, the “throat chakra” at the throat, the “third eye chakra” between the eyes, and finally the “crown chakra” at the top of the head. For chakra energy to become fixated especially in any of the lower centers can cause emotional and physical problems. Fixation in the root chakra, for example, may lead to insecure worry over money or personal acceptance; fixation in the solar plexus center may lead to a low sense of worth and lack of self-confidence. The aim in Indian healing is to balance chakra energy throughout the system.

Discussion of chakras is normally not part of Zen, but it does help to explain the movement of energy in a zazen practitioner as he continues to practice. Attending practice periods at longish intervals at the Zen monastery of Tassajara in California, I was able to observe the changes in some permanent resident students there. I remember a woman who was solitary and irritable the first time I saw her, but when I chatted with her at my next visit, she was light-hearted and cheerful. I also saw students who had gradually decided to become priests and teachers, who had no idea of doing that before. You might say that energy in the woman had become released from fixation in the root chakra, and that energy in the aspiring teachers had increased in the throat chakra.

Terminology aside, energy movement is what drives the changes in a continuing zazen practitioner. Practitioners increase gradually in self-acceptance, enjoyment in being alive, sensitivity to sensual experience, emotional availability, and so on. Some practitioners are aware of the movement of energy with them as they meditate; energy may stream at any place in the body, abdomen, chest, head. Awareness of such energy movement is not of any importance at all, and most practitioners are not aware of it. Energy inevitably takes its advancing course in a practitioner whether he is aware of it or not.

Zazen and Enlightenment (what Dogen meant)

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 20:32:43 GMT

Zazen and Enlightenment (what Dogen meant)

It is well accepted that Dogen’s view is that to sit in zazen is to sit in enlightenment. In “Fukanzazengi,” Dogen plainly says that zazen is “the practice realization of totally cultivated enlightenment” and that in zazen, meditators “gain accord with the enlightenment of the Buddhas.” In “Genjo Koan,” he says that when you first seek dharma, or begin zazen, “you are immediately your original self.”

There is an approach to enlightenment that removes it many years away from a beginning zazen practitioner. This approach stresses “sudden enlightenment,” which a meditator might expect to experience after 30 years or so after beginning zazen. Yet here is Dogen saying that even a beginner in zazen sits in enlightenment.

How do we resolve this discrepancy between the “sudden enlightenment” approach and Dogen’s view? It seems to me that the most important thing to ask is “What is enlightenment?”

I attended a retreat at Green Gulch Farm years ago. During this retreat, a renowned dharma student of Shunryu Suzuki, Reb Anderson, was giving a talk to a large audience. A bold fellow asked the question from the floor, “What is enlightenment?” After a long pause, Reb responded, “non-separateness.”

That non-separateness, or a deep sense of connection with things, is enlightenment seems also to be the view of another well-known Zen teacher, Adyashanti. In an interview in The Sun journal, he described an experience he had when (apparently) he was in his home. In this experience, he felt, simultaneously with the loss of I-consciousness, that he was the sound of a bird, he was the stove, he was the toilet; in short, he felt that “everything is one.” [1]

I think that if a person, while doing zazen, attends to what is going on in their mind, he or she will discover that a sense of non-separateness edges its way around the focal point of breathing. Non-separateness does not come into focus, but comes around the focus as a non-articulated sense of connection with things, a comfortable sense of unity.

This is the non-separateness that Reb Anderson and Adyashanti are talking about as constituting enlightenment. This sense of non-separateness is also, in my view, what Dogen has in mind when he says that zazen is “the practice realization of totally cultivated enlightenment.”

As one continues with zazen, the sense of non-separateness becomes stronger and can extend beyond sitting, accompanying one in daily life. Kosho Uchiyama says, “. . . The longer I practice, the clearer it becomes to me that nothing is separated from me.”[2] It is inherent in zazen that continuing with the practice brings this sense of connection. As Dogen says, again in “Fukanzazengi,” “Going forward in practice is a matter of everydayness.” Eventually non-separateness becomes a part of one’s ordinary life. .

Footnotes

Luc Saunders and Sy Safransky, “Who Hears This Sound? Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream of ‘Me,’” The Sun, December, 2007, pp. 5-15.
Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. 155.

Tips for Zazen (application of dependent co-arising)

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 20:34:43 GMT

Tips for Zazen (application of dependent co-arising)

There are principles in Buddhism that have helped me a good deal in zazen practice. These principles may also help others.

It is inherent in the Buddhist principle of dependent co-arising that nothing is self-powered. All things are brought about by causes and conditions outside of themselves.

Practitioners may criticize themselves for getting pulled away from their focus on breathing by worries about the day’s experience, fantasies about the future, thoughts of all kinds. All the time, however, the practitioner has no responsibility for any of the clamor that enters the mind. Just as everything else in existence, the meditator is not self-powered. That bothersome internal tumult is brought about by causes and conditions in his or her own mind that he has no control over.

A meditator may verify this non-responsibility by observing his own mind. For anything that enters the mind, the meditator need only ask, “Did I ask for that to be there?” The answer will always be “no.” So if one is thinking of eating mashed potatoes for dinner, there is the thought about it in the mind to be sure, but one didn’t ask for it and has no responsibility for it.

There is another idea that might be helpful. Since nothing is self-powered in the universe but is brought about by causes and conditions outside of it, nothing can be other than it is. Things just as they are, are absolutely right. They can’t be any other way. So as a person sits in zazen, whether the session is troublesome or peaceful, he or she can reflect that whatever is going on is absolutely right. You can sit in peace no matter what is going on inside of you. Everything going on is right.

Zazen and Limitless Discovery

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 20:32:46 GMT

Zazen and Limitless Discovery

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau says, “. . .My head is an organ for burrowing,” meaning burrowing “into the secret of things.”[1] A person doing zazen is also a burrower, finding his way into a reality that is continually unfolding. Each session is different. Each yields something deeper.

In the Genjo Koan, Dogen seems to refer to this continually unfolding reality that a practitioner encounters as his “eye of practice” gradually expands. He says,

. . .When you sail out in a boat to the midst of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time.

There is no substance to the idea that in zazen you can reach a certain point and are then finished. To a zazen practitioner, reality or the Buddhadharma, the enlightened world, is limitless. I am put in mind of this when I read in the Genjo Koan, “A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water.” A practitioner is swimming in the water of enlightened reality, in which there is no end. Kosho Uchiyama says, “. . .Although we live in the midst of enlightenment, the little we become aware of in life is just scratching the surface.”[2]

Again in Genjo Koan, Dogen says, “When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.” Enlightened or not, a zazen practitioner navigates in an unknown sea, in which there is always more to discover, but he or she doesn’t know what. He never gets to an end. He is a true explorer.

Footnotes

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Boston, 2004, p. 93.
Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. 20.

The Ultimate Guide in Zen (discussion of Keizan’s Transmission of Light)

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:36:06 GMT

The Ultimate Guide in Zen (discussion of Keizan’s Transmission of Light)

I began to practice zazen and to learn something about Buddhist philosophy at age 35 or so. The occasion was a two-month practice period at Green Gulch Farm, a San Francisco Zen Center establishment on the California coast just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. There I sat zazen with eighty or so other people in a vast zendo that used to be a barn.

Except for brief relaxation periods when I walked and talked with my amiable roommate, this practice period was silent, consisting of sitting zazen, working on the grounds or buildings or in the kitchen, and listening to talks on Buddhist philosophy by the coordinator of the period.

I came away from this practice period with the notion that Buddhist philosophy, as represented in Zen at least, was a rather stark affair. Prior to my introduction to it, it had been expected by a Sufi order I was a member of that I become a practicing Muslim. Accordingly, for 15 years I prayed to Allah for help in following this Sufi path, and for relief from various troubles when they arose, and it was very comforting to do this. Now I come to Buddhist philosophy and find no God there, but rather a view of life in which a person was directed by an impersonal process of dependent co-arising.

My personal life was going along all right, and I was not distressed by this seemingly dark philosophy. However, recently I have been reading carefully a work by Keizan (1264-1325) called Transmission of light. Keizan is considered the “Great Patriarch” of Soto Zen, while Dogen (1200-1253) is the “Highest Patriarch.”

Keizan’s work conveys the view that our lives are directed not by an impersonal process but by “Old Shakyamuni Buddha [who] is with you all the time, whatever you are doing; he is conversing and exchanging greetings with you, never apart from you for a moment.”[1] It is not our eyes seeing or ears hearing, but we are lived by this kind “host” within us. Keizan says, “Do you not realize that you respond when called and you get where you are going by following directions?” [2]

Moreover, Keizan says that we live in an enlightened world, where “everywhere is free and clear, uncovered and pure.”[3] In this world, we ourselves are enlightened. Keizan exclaims, “Have you not heard it said that everyone’s light is brighter than a thousand suns shining at once?”[4] He continues, “. . . Your own fundamental nature is empty and luminous, spiritual and spacious.”[5] We are Buddha: “Buddha is none other than the basic nature of the mind.”[6] He says plainly, “Open as space without inside or outside, clear as pure water – such is the original mind that is in everyone.”[7]

This is such an exalted vision of the world and humanity that it is hard to understand it. Fortunately, Keizan says that there is a way to approximate an understanding:

If you want to reach this point, for the time being close your eyes – when the breath ends and the body ends and there is no house to protect you, all function is unnecessary, and you are like the blue sky with no clouds, the ocean without waves – then you’ll be somewhat in accord with it. [8]

Through zazen, Keizan is saying, you can come close to feeling that your life is directed by a kind power ever present with you, walking with you, and that you yourself, enlightened, are this kind power.

Footnotes

Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of light, Shambhala, 2002, p. 6.
Ibid., p. 26
Ibid., p. 34
Ibid., p. 36
Ibid., p. 76
Ibid., p. 87
Ibid., p. 99
Ibid., p. 190

Direct Perception

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 20:38:33 GMT

Direct Perception

I heard or read an anecdote some time ago about two Zen teachers. They were lounging about in a clearing outside their monastery, which was within a forest. After a while, one of them said, “They call those things trees.” These teachers were looking at the forest in a mode of direct perception, which is perception of anything without applying name or concept to it. One of the teachers dropped this mode for a moment and supplied the concept and name of “trees.”

It is the thinking mind that applies names and concepts to things so that it can reason about them, compare them, evaluate them, and so on. The thinking mind may suppose that it is dealing with things in themselves whereas it is merely touching ideas about them. For example, suppose a number of people are sitting in a circle looking at an elaborately decorative vase placed in the middle. If these people are asked what they are looking at, they will say “a vase,” as though they are all seeing the same thing. However, each person is looking at the vase from his or her own angle and is therefore seeing something different from everyone else. Each says he is looking at the same thing because he is applying the concept of “vase” to it. He is looking at a concept in his head and not at what he is actually seeing.

In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, the great Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, says that when the world is seen through an overlay of concept, “we are no longer able to perceive things as they are.” We can learn to see things as they are through an understanding of shunyata or “emptiness,” Trungpa says, which is “space, the absence of all conceptualized attitudes.”[1] He continues, “The experience of shunyata [is] seeing precisely and clearly what is.”[2]

When seen through direct perception, the world is a new world. Trungpa says, “If we see a red flower . . . in the absence of preconceived names and forms, . . . we also see the brilliance of that flower. If the filter of confusion between us and the flower is suddenly removed, automatically the air becomes quite clear and vision is very precise and vivid.”[3] In another collection of Trungpa’s talks I don’t remember, Trungpa speaks of “the blue of blue, the green of green,” and so on, as though in the new world you can see into the essence of color. Objects are also sharper, more defined; each flower, bush, lamp post is individual, not flattened out by concept into looking like every other bush or lamp post. If the world was drab before, it is not anymore. It is bright and dazzling, a substantial, luminous reality.

In zazen, the practitioner is used to putting the thinking, conceptualizing mind aside when it appears and returning to the focus on breathing. This means that any zazen practitioner can easily learn to enter a mode of direct perception whenever he or she likes just by dropping the conceptualizing mind. Try it when you are out for a rural walk, for example. Just switch your mind off, as you are used to doing in meditation, and note the change in what you are seeing. Direct perception is an activity well worth trying.

Footnotes

Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala, Boston and London, 2002, pp. 197-198.
Ibid., p. 200
Ibid., p. 217

Purpose of Zazen (non-separateness)

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 20:39:25 GMT

Purpose of Zazen (non-separateness)

Zazen practitioners are taught not to aim for anything as they sit. They are advised not to aim to be calm, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be free from suffering, and so on; in sitting, one is taught not to aim for any goal at all. However, if one is free of a goal or purpose when actually sitting, can we say that the practice itself, sitting regularly for a certain period of time, has a purpose?

A very straightforward and clear explanation of the purpose of zazen can be found in a collection of talks by Kosho Uchiyama (d. 1998), a Japanese Soto Zen priest, called Opening the Hand of Thought. Uchiyama says that within all of us, there is, aside from the personal self or ego, “a universal self that is inclusive of the entire universe.”[1] He says that the purpose of zazen “is to wake up this self that is inclusive of everything.”[2]

The purpose of zazen is to develop the awareness that one is not separate from anything. This is a gradual process whose unfolding is inexhaustible. People, events, situations – none of this is separated from a person. I remember when I was in Sufism, the head sheikh of the Sufis in America was asked while giving a talk what it was like for him to lead a life of unity from day to day. The sheikh said that when he encountered any new thing – a person, an object, an event – he put it in his heart; he gesticulated with his hand, picking things out of the air and putting them in his heart. The memory of this simple act of the sheikh has stayed with me ever since. Everything is part of you, says Uchiyama, but of course you don’t know what everything is. So there is no end to the process of putting things in your heart.

To conceive not being separate from anything, Uchiyama’s words may be helpful, that “I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die.” He continues, “Shakyamuni Buddha said it this way: ‘All worlds are my world and all sentient beings – people, things, and situations – are my children.’”[3] When we realize that the whole world is us, that we bring it in with us when we are born and it take it with us when we die, we realize non-separateness.

The purpose of the practice of zazen is to be one with the world. The world includes humanity as well as everything else. Uchiyama says that to treat our fellow human beings as literally ourselves is the hallmark of a truly advanced human race. He says, “When this becomes a world of . . . adults in which we watch over one another and care for and help each other, then humanity will have come of age and we may rightly say we have progressed.”[4]

For zazen practitioners, when we drop thought or ego to return to breathing, Uchiyama says, we “open our eyes to the clarity of the vital life of universal self.”[5]

In Uchiyama’s view, in continuing to sit zazen we are doing our part to move forward the ideal of a transformed world.

Footnotes

Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. xxxi.
Ibid. p. 15.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 136-137.
Ibid., p. 83.

Dual Vision (samasara and nirvana)

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 20:41:17 GMT

Dual Vision (samasara and nirvana)

When I was a “dervish” (member) in a Sufi order years ago, one of the sheikhs characterized a dervish as one who stood on the threshold. This characterization meant that a dervish was waiting to step from his or her ordinary mind into the consciousness of God’s love. Later in my life when I was following Zen, a teacher said that a zazen practitioner eventually became aware of two worlds, the everyday one of likes and dislikes and the non-discriminating world of nirvana. It struck me that you could very well regard that image of a dervish on the threshold as indicating living in two worlds.

Ultimately, in Zen, there is just one world. Zen says that samsara, the ordinary world, is the same as nirvana, the world of enlightened consciousness. Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan teacher, says in a collection of talks called Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, that eventually a zazen practitioner develops this consciousness. He says, “Through the practice of meditation, we begin to find that within ourselves there is no fundamental complaint about anything or anyone at all.”[1]

Continued meditation may bring about in practitioners a kind of dual vision. On the one hand, they become aware practically daily, through news reports, of murders, robberies, injuries, misfortunes of all kinds, and respond with appropriate horror or compassion; and on the other, they feel that somehow everything is all right, that there’s no complaint to be made about any of this.

Within Buddhist belief, in my understanding, the activity of interdependent co-arising operates inevitably. Therefore, there is a strong strain of determinism in Buddhism. By observation and intelligence, it is possible to trace the causes of any event or condition back far enough to see that it could not have occurred any other way. In the dual vision spoken of above, however, the sense that everything is right and proper is not the product of reasoning. It is an intuition of nirvana that comes with practice.

Intuitive dual vision also manifests itself in the personal life of a practitioner. On a day when everything seems to go wrong, he or she may feel frustrated, irritated, impatient, and somehow all that internal hurly-burly is all right. On another day, everything may be fine, and that’s all right. Happiness and unhappiness become the same in a practitioner’s mind. He or she may experience the condition spoken of in The Platform Sutra by the sixth Zen patriarch, Hui-neng, who said, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” Then one sails along in Zen practice with acceptance of everything.

Footnotes

Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Shambhala, 2007, p. 21

What Power Us? (ultimately unknown)

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:45:58 GMT

What Power Us? (ultimately unknown)

Some twenty years ago, I had moved from California to Nasa Bay, Texas. a beautiful community just outside of NASA where astronauts used to live (maybe still do). I had bought a house there and was unloading the dishwasher one day, putting dishes in cabinets, and when raising my arm to put one of these dishes away, I saw that my arm had moved without my willing it at all. That is, I saw that some other power had moved me, not myself.

It was profoundly shocking to me when I saw this. I had to stop what I was doing so I could recover. I had been studying Buddhism for perhaps a year at that point, and I was familiar with the Buddhist principle that in the entire universe there is nothing self-powered; rather, everything is powered by causes and conditions outside of it. However, knowing this hadn’t prepared me for the shock of actually experiencing being powered, in normal activity, by something outside of me.

Nisargadatta says that it is a sign of spiritual progress “when one stops thinking that one is living, and gets the feeling that one is being lived, that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do.”[1] Nisargadatta is speaking of a person who had a steady consciousness of being other-controlled, not of someone who, as I, had had a momentary glimpse of it. Nevertheless, it was reassuring to me when I read this passage from The Ultimate Medicine because it was hard for me to retain what I had seen. I was also reassured about being other-controlled by passages in Keizan’s Transmission of Light. Keizan is known as the “Great Patriarch” of Soto Zen. He asks rhetorically, “Do you not realize that you respond when called and you get where you are going by following directions.?”[2] In Keizan’s view, we are controlled by a power that “causes the eyebrows to raise and the eyes to blink.”[3] It “causes you to be born, causes you to die, causes you to move and act, causes you to perceive and feel.” Keizan continues about other-control even more vividly: “Even though you see things and hear sounds, it is not these eyes seeing, not ears hearing.”[4]

I am not sure why, after twenty years, I am again pondering this insight of mine while putting the dishes away. But lately the question has been pressing on me, who or what is the power that is in control of my life? Given the course of my life as I look back on it, although my life has been difficult at times, the power in control of it has been ultimately benign. It has taken good care of me. That I don’t know what it is, is echoed by Keizan, from whom I have read so much that is valuable to me. He says about this power, “. . . It is something whose name you don’t know even though it has always been living with you” and “naturally comes along with you.”[5] I can rest with the thought that this power is a very comforting mystery.

Footnotes

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, ed. Robert Powell, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.
Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light Shambhala, Boston, 2002, p. 26.
Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 189.
Ibid., p. 140.

Effect of Meditation (diminishment of ego, etc.)

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 20:47:41 GMT

Effect of Meditation (diminishment of ego, etc.)

Chogyam Trungpa (d. 1987), the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, is arguably the most influential Buddhist teacher in the modern world. In the last ten years of his life, he developed “Shambhala Training,” a program to encourage the practice of meditation among the general population. He felt that meditation had the power to change profoundly a person’s inner self and outer behavior.

Trungpa discusses some aspects of this change in talks published in 2007 in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. A major effect of meditation, according to Trungpa, is an eventual sense of the basic goodness of oneself. This is not “goodness” in a moral sense; it is a global acceptance and approval of oneself with shortcomings and flaws included. This acceptance gives rise to genuineness of behavior, being true to oneself in one’s relations with the world.

In Trungpa’s view, an awakening of the heart accompanies this self-acceptance. The ability grows to extend oneself to others, any sense of barriers between oneself and others gradually disappearing. There is a growing sense of inner richness that can give selflessly to others without feeling diminished.

In Trungpa’s view, egolessness gradually develops in the meditator. The meditator develops the ability to spot ego-motivated feeling or behavior in himself and to renounce it for the sake of others.

Finally, according to Trungpa, in the meditator there is a growing sense of being in command of oneself and being in command of one’s own world. One knows when to go to bed, when to get up, when to work and what to work at, and so on. And one lives with an open heart and shares it with others.

Just on my own, I would like to add that changes such as these come about as a matter of course in the meditator, without any deliberate effort to bring them about. In meditating, it is probably best to leave the developmental process alone and to let others observe any positive changes. Not thinking about them will promote the loss of ego, which is the ultimate goal of meditation.

Zazen as Refuge (personal statement)

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:48:38 GMT

Zazen as Refuge (Personal Statement)

There are the formal Buddhist refuges of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. I also like to think of zazen as a refuge. In my experience, it is a refuge from a mind that is sometimes burdensome.

Yesterday my wife left on a nineteen-and-a half-hour flight from Kona airport to Houston. There were layovers in Phoenix and Los Angeles, both long. Sandra rarely finds anything on restaurant menus that appeals to her, so she was going to be eating little or nothing during a layover. She was on a very long flight with not enough food. My, I did worry about her quite a bit during her flight.

That’s over now. But now today, I had an order I needed to place online. Web programmers often make mistakes. The clumsy web site that I needed to use double-charged the order to my credit card, as I found later when I checked the card data online. That led to fussy phone calls to get the double-charge straightened out. The memory of that troublesome transaction erupted in my mind several times in the day.

Both yesterday and today, I could look forward to the relief of zazen. In meditation, my fretful mind gave way to deep relaxation and a peaceful sense of the fitness of things. Zazen is such a wonderful refuge!

Zazen and Behavior (behavioral changes in practitioners)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 20:52:11 GMT

Zazen and Behavior (Behavioral Changes in Practitioners)

For fifteen years I was a dervish in a traditional (Muslim) Sufi order in California. During this time I heard numerous talks by my own Sheikh and visiting Sheikhs on moral topics. Some of the moral issues addressed were sexual misconduct, theft from employers, angry behavior, and possessiveness or non-generosity.

I left the Sufi order for economic reasons and moved to Texas. Living in the greater Houston area, and wishing to continue spiritual practice, I could find no traditional Sufism, but in time I found the San Francisco Zen Center. Thereupon I immersed myself in Zen, attending practice periods at Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm, and becoming a member of the Houston Zen Center, a branch of the San Francisco Zen Center. In the time spent in these venues, I attended numerous talks by various Zen teachers. Curiously, in contrast to the Sufi setting, at no time over another fifteen years did I ever hear a Zen teacher discuss a moral issue with an assembled sangha. At present I am a member of a Zen Center in Hawaii, and the fact remains the same there; there have been no talks with the sangha about moral issues.

Not that there is any necessity for such talks, in my view. Zen of course has its “Grave Precepts” that provide an ethical foundation for practitioners. These precepts are to avoid killing, stealing, misusing sexuality, lying, getting intoxicated, gossiping about the faults of others, praising oneself compared to others, being possessive (non-generous), harboring ill-will, and disparaging the treasures of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. It may be enough for Zen Centers to arrange for students to be aware of these precepts, which in my experience they do. Zazen itself, in the normal case, will bring about desirable behavioral changes.

Zazen itself does cause remarkable positive changes in people. At intervals when I would return to Tassajara between practice periods, I could see these changes in students I had encountered there previously. I remember one woman in particular who evolved over months from being retired, sulky, and irritable to being outgoing and cheerful.

In talks published in 2007 in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan teacher, summarizes some of the positive changes brought about by meditation. Trungpa’s version of meditation is very close to zazen. The changes he speaks of include discovery of one’s Buddha nature or the inherent goodness of oneself; awakening of the heart, which leads to generous extension of oneself to others; ability to renounce ego for the sake of service to others; and a sense of being in command of oneself and of one’s world.

These interior changes occasioned by meditation no doubt lie behind the positive changes in behavior that I saw in students at Tassajara. Zazen can be relied upon to bring about such changes. However, zazen can obviously be used for reasons not approved by Buddhism, such as to improve one’s focus in order to be a better conman, hitman, whatever. Zazen will also not make for positive changes in a deeply flawed character that acts on exploitative impulses. In the October, 2019 edition of the journal, Lion’s Roar, the Buddhist teacher, Trudy Goodman, discusses the problem of sexual abuse of students by Buddhist teachers. There have been Zen teachers, obviously zazen practitioners, who have engaged in such abuses. Zazen has no power to change the behavior of a person who does not restrain himself from acting out corrupt urges.

Zazen and the Internal Ocean (no end to spiritual experience)

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 20:55:15 GMT

Zazen and the Internal Ocean (No End to Spiritual Experience)

When I settled in the Big Island in January of 2017, I was romantically affected by its remoteness from other inhabited lands. Using round numbers, it is 4100 miles from the Big Island to Japan, 3100 to Alaska, 2400 to San Francisco, and 2600 to Polynesia. Those miles are by air over the vast Pacific Ocean.

So surrounding the Big Island are many miles of ocean. Again, when I arrived here, the romance of that unimaginable expanse of ocean, nearly seven miles deep on average, came home to me. In time, though, my wonder over the external ocean became secondary to the thought of the internal ocean of my own being.

To speak personally, but no doubt also for many other Daifukuji practitioners of zazen, when doing zazen I have the sense sometimes that I am an ocean that fills the universe and still expands with new inner experience. This feeling is on the periphery of my mind, never in focus. When reflecting on the internal ocean a short time ago, I thought of the words in the Christian Gospel of John, 14:12: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Putting aside how biblical commentators might interpret those words, to me they mean that zazen sessions are like launching in a vast, unexplored sea where there is always fresh and new internal experience. There are limitless possibilities in the ocean of zazen.

The Difficulty of Zazen

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 20:57:50 GMT

The Difficulty of Zazen

Zazen is a difficult practice. For a beginner, it is frustrating to be frequently distracted by thinking. If the beginner has a teacher, the teacher will tell him or her that this distraction is normal and not to criticize himself because it is occurring. Even a long-term zazen practitioner is frequently taken off his focus on breathing by fantasizing, planning, reminiscing, and so on.

Why does this distraction occur? A possible answer is that zazen is like presiding at your own funeral. To drop the thought process and return to breathing is to experience a little death as the self fades away. Although I can’t find the reference, I believe it was Chogyam Trungpa who said that the reason thinking keeps returning during meditation is to convince the meditator of his own existence. There is possibly a slight fear of obliteration that gradually emerges during an extended focus on breathing. Thinking comes in to say, “Don’t worry, you are still here!”

Paradoxically, we fear the very point of zazen, which is to drop the self or ego. This fear is illusory. There is a Zen story about a zazen practitioner who happened to fall off a cliff. As he started to fall, he grabbed on to a root extending from the wall of the cliff. He held on desperately to the root until his strength gave out, his hand loosened, and he fell three inches to the ground.

The fear of self-obliteration is a psychic myth. The reality is expressed in the Bahiya Sutta, where the Buddha says that when the “you” disappears from consciousness, “This, just this, is the end of stress.” Daily life is expansive and free without self-consciousness.

So yes, zazen is difficult, but the rewards of persisting in it are immeasurable.

The Heart Sutra

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 20:59:42 GMT

The Heart Sutra

In appreciating the The Heart Sutra, we might start with an understanding of Avalokiteshvara’s state of mind just before he starts speaking. He has been “practicing prajna.” According to a very handy source, the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, “prajna,” wisdom, is “insight into emptiness.”[1] What is “emptiness”? A definition that seems to me to make sense of the sutra is from the collection of talks by Chogyam Trungpa called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, where Trungpa says that “emptiness” in Sanskrit (shunyata) means “void” or “space, the absence of all conceptualized attitudes.” [2]

So Avalokiteshvara, in “practicing prajna,” has been doing a meditative practice that puts him into a non-conceptualizing state of mind. To use more common expressions, he has been dropping the thinking mind, the self, or the “you” as it is expressed in the Bahiya Sutta. In that sutra, the Buddha says that when the “you” has disappeared from consciousness, “This, just this, is the end of stress.”[3] Avaloitshvara experienced the same when he was practicing prajna; he “relieved all suffering.” Nisargadatta, the renowned Hindu teacher, said that the key factor in spiritual achievement was “to cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness.”[4]

When something is seen or experienced by a non-conceptualizing or non-thinking mind, that mind does not identify anything and does not distinguish, compare, or evaluate anything. There is only non-thinking perception taking place. This condition of mind is also called “direct perception.” To appreciate this state of mind, it may be helpful to imagine yourself looking down on a small town from a grassy hill above it. Suppose you are not thinking about anything you are perceiving; you are not identifying anything, considering its use, evaluating anything, nothing, just looking. There is a street you can see, but you don’t think “street.” There is a car, but you don’t think “car” or that the thing transports people. So from your non-conceptualizing or non-thinking perspective, there is no tree on the hillside, no street in the town, no car.

Avalokiteshvara proceeds to tell Shariputra, a chief disciple of the Buddha, how things look from the perspective of this non-conceptualizing mind. Such a mind does not make identifications or comparisons. Therefore the Bodhisattva explains that there is no distinction between form and emptiness. Also, to a non-thinking mind, there are things, but no identified or evaluated things, so there is no purity or defilement (neither defiled or pure) and no impermanence (no arising and ceasing, no growing and diminishing). Since a non-conceptualizing mind does not identify anything, from its standpoint, Avalokiteshvara continues, there are also no skandhas; there is “no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness.” In the same way, being non-identified, there are no senses (“no nose”), no objects of the senses (“no smell”), and no realms of “consciousness” connected with these senses and objects (all together the so-called “eighteen elements”). Not identified at all, there is no ignorance or its opposite, and no aging and dying as well as no youth and no living. Also, outside the thinking mind, there are no Four Noble Truths (“no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path”). There is also no level of scholarly mastery (“no knowledge”) to be obtained, and there is no enlightenment (“no attainment”) to seek.

Avalokiteshvara continues, “With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna” and maintains a non-thinking, non-conceptualizing mind. In doing so, the bodhisattva does not strive to awaken (“with nothing to attain”) but simply sits in meditation with a clear mind and ultimately “realizes nirvana” or “unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.” Sitting without striving to awaken is now common Zen advice. The sutra ends with the “Gate Gate” mantra, which urges bodhisattvas to “go beyond, go beyond” the thinking and conceptualizing mind and obtain Bodhi, the awakened state. Horray!

To speak in general terms about the sutra, it could be said that in Zen it is a maxim that spiritual Truth cannot be discovered within the thinking process. Thinking must be entirely set aside for enlightenment to come. It seems to me that basically this principle is what the Heart Sutra is urging. It says that when observed by a non-thinking mind, the core elements of Buddhist philosophical thought are inconsequential. There are no skandhas, no Four Noble Truths, and so on.

This uncompromising approach reminds me of a sentiment in Sufism that I encountered when I followed this spiritual school. The Heart Sutra does not include the risibility inherent in the Sufi approach. In Sufism, there is the favorite image of a donkey carrying a load of books. The donkey is the spiritually ignorant scholar who thinks that he can wake up to the love of God through study. The donkey could benefit from the Heart Sutra’s mantra of Gate Gate and throw aside its rational thinking all together.

It might also be pertinent that 20 years ago I attended my first practice period at Green Gulch Farm, in which Reb Anderson, the chief dharma teacher there, was the coordinator. During an informal talk with the attendees, Reb was giving an account of some of the major areas in Buddhist philosophy, such as impermanence and interdependence, and someone asked him whether it was necessary to study all these areas to wake up. Reb said no, that zazen was the only thing necessary to find enlightenment. This is what the Heart Sutra is saying in a nutshell, it seems to me. Knowledge isn’t necessary to wake up, just clearing the mind of thought in meditation.

Footnotes

The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, Shambhala, Boston, 1991, p. 171
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala, Boston and London, 2002, pp. 197-198.
The very long Bahiya Sutta can be found at http://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html . The words in the essay are in the 12 ^th paragraph.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, Durham, 1973, p. 148

Zazen and Self-Trust

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 21:01:02 GMT

Zazen and Self-Trust

Zazen is extraordinary in working almost entirely by itself. No agency is required of the practitioner other than shifting from distracting thought back onto breathing.

I remember years ago when I was listening to a talk by Reb Anderson, the head dharma teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center. After speaking of the Buddhist idea that the world was proceeding toward enlightenment, he was asked whether there was indeed a teleology in the universe that would eventually wake everyone up. Reb, of course, said “Yes.”

If this awakening direction is part of the universe, it is too vast a process to require anyone’s intervention. It seems to me that the same is true of zazen. The changes it is causing in a practitioner, and the rate of them, are not affected by any intention to shape them on the practitioner’s part. Zazen is a process that needs to be let alone. The practitioner just needs to accept wherever it is going.

So is one going in the right direction? To think “yes” requires trust in the basic goodness of oneself. A particular book of Chogyam Trungpa’s talks is helpful and inspiring concerning this issue of basic goodness. In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Trungpa says, “Basic goodness is what we have, what we are provided with. It is the natural situation that we have inherited from birth onwards.”[1]

So in zazen, and in the inner life that stems from it, it is best not to try to push or pull for any particular outcome, but just to trust in oneself and to trust that, of itself, the process is going in the right direction. In any event, this is the advice that I give myself.

Zazen and the End of Stress

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:04:29 GMT

Zazen and the End of Stress

The predominance of ego in a person’s life can make for much inward trouble. A detailed description of this trouble can be found in Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. Among the inner disturbances that Tolle describes are identifying one’s worth with possessions, leading to a sense of diminishment when they are lost and envy of others who have more; worry about one’s reputation, feeling incomplete or that one does not have enough, worry about one’s external attractiveness, resentful inner criticism of others in order to put them beneath oneself, casting about for ways to elevate oneself, upset when one’s opinion is contradicted, and a fear of being inferior or inadequate. Of course this is just a partial list of all the inward hurly-burly that springs from ego.

The end of this hurly-burly is what the Buddha is apparently referring to in the Bahiya Sutta, where he says that when the “you” disappears in a person, “This, just this, is the end of stress.”[1] The American poet, Delmore Schwartz, called his ego, or his “you,” “the heavy bear who goes with me.”[2] Freedom from this heavy bear, when realized, brings the exuberant exclamations of delight that one finds in Zen accounts of awakening. To find that such a burden has been lifted from one brings joy and gratitude.

For most practitioners, the lifting of this burden is a gradual process. It can’t be deliberately brought about or rushed. For the practitioner, a sign that ego has lifted a bit is that he or she has a sense of freedom, space, and contentment.

Aging and Zazen

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:02:13 GMT

Aging and Zazen

When I was in high-school, I lived with an elderly great aunt who had a marvelous trait of laughing at herself when she had done something foolish. I remember her laughing about putting the salt and pepper shakers in the refrigerator. Now that I am older myself, I find I have some of my great aunt’s ability to laugh at herself.

I exercise quite a bit. Indoors I do pushups, weight curls, and abdominal exercises; outdoors I do rapid walking and jumping-jacks. I do this routine every other day. In a recent morning, I laid out the dumbbells and other appurtenances as though it was an exercise day. When my wife pointed out that I had done the exercises just the previous day, I found myself laughing at myself just like my great aunt. Also, frequently I find activities all through the house that I have neglected to complete, and then I have to go back and finish them. I can laugh at that too.

Declining mental and physical faculties are the experience of all people who live a normal life span. It is a great benefit to those who are older to have a sense of humor in response to this decline.

My great aunt had a good-humored acceptance of her aging entirely by her own nature. Zazen promotes this acceptance, too, in its gradual erosion of self, for the less self, the more humor and detachment.

Zazen and the End of Suffering

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 21:06:33 GMT

Zazen and the End of Suffering

Looking online, I see that there are many different explanations of what the Buddha thought ended suffering. To me there is a simple, all-embracing explanation, and that is the one that the Buddha gave in the Bahiya Sutta, which is that when the “you” is removed from consciousness, “This, just this, is the end of stress.”

I think that what the Buddha means by removing the “you” from consciousness is that the sense of “I” that we normally carry with us permanently disappears from the mind. In this way, the sutra continues, “in reference to the seen, there will be only the seen.” The sense “I am seeing” will have vanished. It is the same with “the heard,” “the sensed,” and “the cognized.” The sense that it is “I” doing these things will be absent.[1].

Is it possible for the sense of “I” to be erased from the mind like this? It seems to me that it certainly is or the Buddha wouldn’t have recommended it. The great Hindu teacher, Nisargadatta, thinks that deleting the sense of “I” from the mind can be worked at. When he was asked, “How is the person removed,” he replied, “By determination. Understand that it must go and wish it to go – it shall go if you are earnest about it.” [2]

The notion that removing the sense of “I” can be worked at is immensely important. Removal of “I” is the end of suffering. This is clear even with great discomfort. For example, if a person breaks his or her leg, that’s going to hurt a great deal. But the pain needn’t mean suffering. Suffering is self-referential. One must feel “I am in great pain,” “the world is treating me unjustly,” “I am in greater pain than anyone else has ever experienced,” and so on. Without the “I,” physical pain is just pain, sadness is just sadness, loneliness is just loneliness, and so on.

Any in-depth treatment of the skandhas (aggregates) in Buddhism will stress that we have no control over them and that they do not constitute who we are.[3] So the welter of thoughts, moods, likes and dislikes, physical sensations, and so on that course through our minds almost every minute of the day, they are not us. If a person clearly sees this fact, the part of him or her who sees it, it seems to me, is the “you” or “I” that the Buddha speaks of in the Bahiya Sutta. And the Buddha is saying that this “I” can be eliminated from the mind.

How is that done? According to Nisargadatta, as above, by wishing it to go. If zazen practitioners wish it to go, when they become aware of a sense of personal self within themselves, they can brush it away fairly easily. The mental action is the same as dropping thought or memory or fantasy when meditating and returning to breathing. Just brush the “I” away when you see it. Each brush is a step closer to the end of suffering.

Postscript: I am adding this postscript about a month after writing the above essay. Having experimented with the suggestion in the last paragraph to brush the “I” away, I have found that when I do that, I am firmly dropped into the spontaneous, unpredictable flow of the skandhas.

Reb Anderson, in Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains, describes this flow as a “fountain.” He says,

Moment by moment, I am a fountain, I am spontaneous creativity. I am not in control of this creativity, but I am its site: pure, universally connected creativity. Each one of us is such a site. Each one of us is a fountain of the universe. Each one of us is a place where the universe is expressing itself as a living location. . . . I can see the fountain; or, not see it so much as be it (because there is no ‘person’ here looking at a fountain). Just being a fountain, there is just the life of the fountain; there is just life.[4]

Being the fountain is the essence of mindfulness. With no “I” intervening between the experiencing consciousness and the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on that flow through the mind, there is just consciousness of this flow. As Reb Anderson says, “there is just life..”

Footnotes

https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html
The words in the essay can be found in the 12 ^th paragraph of the rather long Bahiya Sutta found in its entirety at this address.
Sri Nisargadatta Magharaj, I Am That, North Carolina, 1973, p. 441.
For in-depth treatments, see Ajahn Chah’s Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002; or Reb Anderson’s Being Upright: Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts, Rodmell Press, Berkeley, 2001.
Reb Anderson, Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation, Rodmell Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 42.

Love and Zazen (heart-opening)

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 21:07:35 GMT

Love and Zazen (Heart-opening)

In discussing love and zazen, I’ll start with some lines from a poem by Rumi. Rumi is the 13 ^th -century Turkish poet who was the head of the Sufi order commonly referred to as the “whirling dervishes.”

From Rumi’s poem:

Listen to the story told by the reed,

Of being separated.

Since I was cut from the reedbed,

I have made this crying sound.

Anyone apart from someone he loves

Understands what I say.

Anyone pulled from a source

Longs to go back.

Longing for the divine source of life is the characteristic state of mind of a Sufi dervish, maintained in prayer and in the Sufi ceremony of zikrullah. Zen is an emotionally reticent spiritual school and does not, in my experience, speak of love as a motive for zazen. In one of my earlier essays, “Zazen and Enlightenment,” I suggested that zazen practitioners, as they meditate, have “a non-articulated sense of connection with things, a comfortable sense of unity.” To long for this unity, which is, I think, common among zazen practitioners, is certainly love.

Following Dogen, to realize non-separateness is enlightenment. In Sufism, there is a stage beyond enlightenment, which is the opening of the heart. Heart-opening is a pronounced physical experience, which may take months or years, in which one’s chest flushes with love and in which one acquires the ability to project this love to another heart.

Again in my experience, this phenomenon of heart-opening is not spoken of in Zen. Nevertheless, zazen will take you there eventually. During a retreat some years ago, I had the privilege of being the personal assistant for the coordinating Zen teacher. Unmistakably this teacher’s heart was open, and he could project loving heart energy to me. My hope is that by and by zazen will open my own heart.

Effortless Zazen (progress is automatic)

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 21:14:18 GMT

Effortless Zazen (Progress is Automatic)

Zazen is virtually an automatic process. The practitioner does his or her part by sitting in the zazen posture with the intention to focus on breathing. Thereafter, the internal process of zazen operates of itself.

Thoughts, feelings, memories come to the sitter’s mind of themselves. The Buddhist teaching that we have no control over the skandhas can be easily verified by the person doing zazen, who need simply notice, when thoughts and so on come to mind, whether he or she asked them to come there. The answer is always “no” – they bubble up of themselves like a fountain.[1]

They also depart of themselves. Perhaps they appear as a respite from the slight energy that it takes to focus on breathing. When the respite has been enough, the focus on breathing reappears. The sitter need not bring the focus back himself. Thoughts drop away and the focus reappears automatically.

By rights, zazen is virtually an effortless process. The focus on breathing is more an intention rather than a big expenditure of energy. After the practitioner sits down with this intention, the zazen process consists mainly of looking. If the sitter is laboring, he or she can experiment with backing out of the laboring and just looking at the breath coming in and going out. If it seems to the sitter that he or she must do the breathing, he can reflect that outside of zazen, he breathes without any deliberateness or will at all. A person breathes all day without ever thinking about it. Breathing occurs of itself.

The key to just “looking” while doing zazen is to back the “you” or the “I” out of mind. Then it can be easily seen that by and large zazen proceeds by itself, like a train moving through a varied landscape.

The Continual Unfolding of Zazen (no end to insight)

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 21:16:15 GMT

The Continual Unfolding of Zazen (No End to Insight)

Zazen is a continually unfolding process. There is no backsliding. At the beginning of any session, you are at exactly the same inner place as when you ended the last session. There is continual progress.

There is no end to this progress. In the Bloodstream Sermon, Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen or Chan in China and the first Chinese patriarch, says of enlightened consciousness, “The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible.” Even after enlightenment, either sudden or gradual, spiritual insight continues. Dogen says in the Genjo Koan:

When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. For example, when you sail out in a boat to the midst of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this. Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.

Zazen practitioners can reflect that wherever they may be on the spectrum of spiritual insight, there is no end or conclusion to the spectrum. It doesn’t matter where a person is on the spectrum, everyone on it is equally ignorant.

Uprooting the Self (not possible completely)

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 21:18:53 GMT

Uprooting the Self (Not Possible Completely)

In Understanding Our Mind (previous title, Transformation at the Base), Thich Nhat Hanh says,

. . . We may think that we have pulled up the roots of being

caught in the idea of self. But those roots were there before

we were born and much more work still has to be done to

transform them. We must be careful and recognize the latent

tendency of attachment to self when it arises in one form or

another. [1]

Presumably we inherit roots of self from our previous incarnation. I know virtually nothing about reincarnation. But I want to point out the usefulness of Thich Nhat Hanh’s warning for zazen practitioners, not to suppose carelessly that self has been left behind. To leave it completely behind may not be at all possible.

In the early 1970’s, I knew a spiritually advanced psychotherapist who was also the editor of a journal in the field of transpersonal psychology. This person told me that when his editorial board, mostly meditation practitioners, got together periodically to decide on contents for an upcoming issue of the journal, they would sometimes fall into vociferous disagreements among one another, but that eventually someone would laugh, others would join in, and the group would return to itself. Here was an eruption of self among a group of spiritually developed people.

The mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra, Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate – go beyond, go beyond, go completely beyond – is an injunction to throw the self aside. It is an injunction to break free completely from one’s “I-consciousness” or sense of personhood. This jettisoning of the self produces Bodhi, the awakened state.

Even so, the self or ego hangs around. So thinks Ajahn Chah, Jack Kornfield’s main teacher. In Food for the Heart, Ajahn Chah says that in the development of a spiritual life, eventually the ego or self can seem like a mischievous child, who is “simply behaving according to its nature” and whom we can disregard and attend to other more consequential things.[2] So the ego or self hangs around, but we can attend to it mindfully and prevent any harm from it. It needn’t disturb us. We can brush it off.

Footnotes

Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind, Parallax Press, Berkeley, 2006, p. 226.
Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002, pp. 254-255.

The cause of Me (not self -powered)

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 21:21:12 GMT

The Cause of Me (Not Self -powered)

I saw a commercial a few days ago in which there was a young woman who jumped up exultantly and exclaimed, “I am the cause of me!” She had gotten this happy revelation. The commercial may have been for an ocean cruise of some sort, and the exultant young woman was to have realized that she was her own boss and could take such an adventuresome cruise if she wanted.

The idea that we are “the cause of me” won’t survive much introspection. On an obvious level, we don’t choose our nuclear family or the country in which we are born. Many years ago, having studied Buddhism for some time, I asked myself how I became a university English teacher. I discovered a web of factors, some having to do with innate proclivities and others with outside influences, none of which I had had any control over. These discoveries put completely out of the question that I could say “I am the cause of me” in respect to my profession as teacher.

The Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi (d. 1950), said, “. . .The supreme power of God makes all things move.”[1] In the Christian tradition, the mystic, Julian of Norwich (d. after 1416), said that “God does all things, even the very least.”[2] In Buddhism, the principle of dependent co-arising, in my understanding, betokens the march of inevitable cause and effect through our lives entirely independent of “free” human agency. Aside from plain observation, there is a considerable weight of spiritual opinion against the notion that anyone is “the cause of me.”

For some it is satisfying to think that we run our own lives, and they may bristle at the idea that we are not self-powered. Many zazen practitioners, though, probably sense the truth of the alternative, which is that we are other-powered. Another renowned teacher from the Hindu tradition, Nisargadatta (d. 1981), said that it is a sign of spiritual progress “when one stops thinking that one is living, and gets the feeling that one is being lived, that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do”[3] As ego gradually becomes less pressing in the zazen practitioner, the truth of being other-powered becomes more apparent.

Footnotes

The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Boston and London, 1988, p. 9.
Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Love, New York, 1997, p. 25.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.

Your Own World (discusses Uchiyama's Opening the Hand of Thought)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 21:25:55 GMT

Your Own World (Discusses Uchiyama's Opening the Hand of Thought)

I have been reviewing notes I took years ago on Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought. Uchiyama (d. 1998) was a Soto Zen priest whose 14-day sesshins in Japan were extraordinarily rigorous and concentrated, providing only for meals, sitting, and dharma talks throughout each long meditation day. Opening the Hand of Thought is a straightforward and very clear exposition of Soto Zen thought as explained by Uchiyama during these sesshins. The book also suggests, implicitly, how we can realize enlightenment in daily life.

The reason I started to review my notes is that the significance had finally dawned on me of a certain idea of Uchiyama’s, stated in the following way in his book. He says, “When I took my first breath, my world was born with me. When I die, my world dies with me.”[1] He continues, putting it another way, “Actually, I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die.”[2] If we think about it, each of us does live in his or her own world. When we walk around in our dwelling or in a woods somewhere, we are walking around through images in our own mind. Leaving aside the solipsistic question of whether the world really exists outside our mind, whatever the answer to that is, nevertheless when we walk about, we are walking amid our own mental images.

I suggested in an earlier Newsletter essay (January, 2022) that what Dogen meant when he said that sitting in zazen was to sit in enlightenment, was that when we sit, we are in a state of non-separateness. Similarly, Uchiyama says that when we “open the hand of thought” in zazen, which is to drop thinking, “we are one with the whole universe”[3]

With both Dogen and Uchiyama, being in non-separateness occurs in zazen. However, Uchiyama’s idea that we bring our own world in with us when we are born also moves being in non-separateness beyond zazen into daily life. What I have found is that as I go about daily life, if I think of the fact of functioning within my own mind, it increases my sense of non-separateness. I can appreciate the truth of Uchiyama’s saying, “Whether we realize it or not we are always living out our life that is connected to everything in the universe.”[4] To realize this connection is enlightenment. Uchiyama says, “The most essential point in carrying on our practice is to wake up this self that is inclusive of everything.”[5]

Footnotes

Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 15.

Enlightenment

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:28:06 GMT

Enlightenment

I’m not sure where the idea in Zen comes from that enlightenment is so rare and special that few can hope to experience it. The source may be D.T. Suzuki or Alan Watts or both. Happily there are counter indications in Zen that enlightenment is not either special or remote.

I remember a long time ago seeing a cartoon in some Buddhist journal that showed two monks sitting side by side, who had become enlightened. The one monk said to the other, “Is this all there is?” Refreshingly, that takes some of the specialness out of enlightenment. Similarly, in Uchiyama’s book, Opening the Hand of Thought, a certain Sawaki Roshi is quoted as saying, “I’ve had several big satoris and numerous small ones, and I can tell you that it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”[1]

As for the remoteness of enlightenment, the contemporary Zen teacher, Adyashanti, has published a book of his talks entitled The End of Your World. It is directed to those of his students who have had an enlightenment experience as well as to zazen practitioners in general. In the introduction to Adyashanti’s book, the editor says that the subject of the book is “the misconceptions, pitfalls, and delusions that can occur after an initial experience of spiritual awakening."[2] This is an interesting book, but what I mainly want to remark about it is that its intended readership must be considerable. Awakening experiences are no doubt more common than might be supposed.

Enlightenment is the prerogative of everyone. Thich Nhat Hanh says in Understanding Our Mind, “The seed of enlightenment is already within our consciousness. This is our Buddha nature – the inherent quality of enlightened mind that we all possess, and which needs only to be nurtured.”[3]

The best nutriment is a practice such as zazen. Since the advice of Zen teachers is not to have any “gaining idea” in zazen practice, enlightenment should not be deliberately sought during zazen or in any other way. Chances are that enlightenment is going to come in a kind of stealthy way as one continues to practice, just as one gets gradually wet in a fog without noticing it. See Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.[4]

Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether a person is enlightened or not. In an enlightened mind, everything is equally affirmative. Again in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki Roshi says, “In your big mind, everything has the same value. Everything is Buddha himself.”[5] That is the outlook of an enlightened mind.

Footnotes

Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. 174.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World, Boulder, 2008, p. xv.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind, Berkeley, 2006, p. 26.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, New York, 1970, p. 31.
Ibid., p. 29.

Waking Up (applies a long passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden)

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 21:29:55 GMT

Waking Up (Applies a Long Passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden)

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is the foremost literary expression of the spiritual life published in America (originally in 1854). At the end of the book, Thoreau says encouragingly, “The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands.”[1]

He continues with this stirring passage:

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterwards in Massachusetts, -- from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection andimmortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, -- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, -- may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last![2]

Given that this passage may be hard to read, with its 19 ^th -century penchant for long sentences and internal subordination, it seems to me to reflect the usually slow progress of a zazen practitioner towards waking up. As far as we know, Thoreau was not a zazen practitioner, but he says keep going in whatever route you have chosen (his was walks in nature) towards waking up. The last sentences of his book are, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”[3]

Waking up to a firm realization of non-separateness, or to the unity of life, is the goal of zazen. May we all patiently persist in practice, like the strong and beautiful bug, and eventually experience the dawning of our day

Footnotes

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Boston, 1997 and 2004, p. 311.
Ibid., pp. 311-312.
Ibid., p. 312..

Drop the Doer (emphasis by Hindu teachers on dropping the doer)

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 21:33:06 GMT

Drop the Doer (Emphasis by Hindu Teachers on Dropping the Doer)

It is normal to feel that we have control of things and of ourselves. That is the usual feeling we walk around with. I recently had occasion to review my notes on some major teachers in the Hindu tradition, and it was striking to me how strongly they felt that we should give up this idea of being the doer.

`Ramana Maharshi, answering the question, “What is the end of the path of knowledge,” says, “It is . . . to be free from the feeling of being the doer.”[1] An experiment can assist a person to be at least momentarily free of the doer-feeling. A long time ago in Texas, I attended lectures by a certain Vijai Shankar.[2] (A rather ponderous biography of him can be found at academy-advaita.com/en/Shankar.) In my lecture notes, I found this illuminating statement: “A mental effort to move the body never precedes a movement. The mind always comes after the movement.” When walking, doing housework, or some other simple activity, a person can verify that often the movement of the body does precede any thought of doing it. Repeated observation of this can bring the sense of not being the doer of one’s own movements.

The idea that we are not the doer of our lives can be found in Zen, in Reb Anderson’s Being Upright, for example, and in Keizan’s Transmission of Light. The Hindu teachers give the idea an even broader application, saying that we do not control either ourselves or anything outside of ourselves. Vijai Shankar says, “Man is not the doer. You have no agency in the happenings that unfold in life. No one is to blame. No one is praiseworthy.” Dr. Shankar continues, “Peace comes to you when you realize that you are not the doer and just watch your life. Your life happens to you like the images that appear on the screen of your vision.” He adds strikingly, “Life is a vast ritual powered by Krishna.”

Allowing for differences in theistic nomenclature, Ramana Maharshi has the same view as Dr. Shankar, saying, “. . . The power of God makes all things move.”[3] Also Nisargadatta says much the same: “Why do you talk of action? Are you acting ever? Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens without being able to influence it in any way.”[4]

The sense that you are not the doer can be cultivated. A method of cultivation might be the exercise I suggested above involving watching yourself doing some simple activity. Very often, intention can be seen to follow, not precede, a movement. Observing this, you may in time come to the conviction, expressed by Nisargadatta, “that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but is made to do.”[5] In this eventuality, to continue with Vijai Shankar’s words, “When you see that you can do nothing, then you will stop doing, and God will come to you.” This is the hope that I have for myself.

Footnotes

The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, Boston and London, 1988, p. 17.
There is a rather ponderous biography of him at academy-advaita.com/en/shankar.
Ramana Maharshi, op. cit, p. 9.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, Durham, 1973, p. 238.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.

Who we Are (intellctually unknowable)

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 21:35:20 GMT

Who We Are (Intellctually Unknowable)

There are two routes to discovering who we truly are. One of these is introspection.

The so-called skandhas in Buddhism are meant to comprise all the activity that takes place within a human being. Normally we assume that all of this activity is who we are. The kind of introspection that is useful in discovering who we are (or really are) is to ask about any of this activity, did we ask it to come about, do we control it?

For example, when you remove a cup of heated coffee from the microwave, did you think beforehand about removing it? It’s possible that you did, but commonly simple actions like this are done without forethought. So there’s no control here in removing the cup. When you walk, do you think about taking each step? Usually not. If you dislike someone, did you tell yourself to dislike him or her? Probably not. If you hear a bird sing, did you ask to hear it? No. If a thought comes into your mind, did you ask for it to come there? Not at all. Your being conscious of all this activity, if you are awake, can you stop it? No, if you’re not asleep, you are conscious, and that’s that.

Usually it takes a long time for such introspection to convince us that we do not control any internal activity and, therefore, that it is not us. At this point, the intellect is in a sense stunned, and the intuitive knowledge of who we really are can come home. However, we find that we can’t say anything about it.

Zazen practitioners find the same. When they are undistractedly focused on breathing, they do know who they are. They sit right in the middle of it. Can they say who they are? If they try to move the knowledge into consciousness, it disappears. So absolutely nothing can be said about it, or said in a way that would transmit it to anyone. Paradoxically, it is unknowable knowledge.

So both routes to the truth of who we really are lead to unknowable knowledge. Of course the routes can be combined. Combined or separately, though, they both lead to what I have always heard or read in Zen, that ultimate truth is not intellectually knowable. It escapes comprehension. It is purely intuitive, and the intellect has to be put aside in order to know it.

The Treasure Store (joy in living)

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 21:36:03 GMT

The Treasure Store (Joy in Living)

Dogen’s Fukanzazengi was written to recommend zazen to everyone. Within its last paragraph is the admonition to “devote your energies to a way that directly indicates the absolute.” The essay ends with the promise that if a person devotes himself in this manner, “Your treasure-store will open of itself, and you will use it at will.”

Dogen also has other terms in this essay for the “treasure store,” not only “the absolute” above, but also “your original face,” “suchness,” and of course “enlightenment.”

I suggested in an essay in the January, 2022 Newsletter, that “enlightenment” for Dogen was “a non-articulated sense of connection with things, a comfortable sense of unity.” And there are other aspects to the treasure store. For example, there is a sense of joy in living that is irrepressible. I heard that Abraham Maslow, the great psychologist, close to his passing, said that he regretted having to leave life, he loved it so much. Joy in life, love of it, is characteristic of an awakened person. So irrepressible is this sense of joy that it might be called “indomitability.” Nothing can shake it, not loss of loved ones or any other sadness.

That is not to say that a person who has uncovered the treasure store does not feel sadness or grief. I remember when I was a member of a Sufi order many years ago, the Sheikh of the order, during a gathering of the dervishes, was asked to characterize earthly life. He said, “Trouble.” There is plenty of trouble in life: loss of friends, stress in family relations, illness, old age, and death. In Sufism, to offset this trouble, there is “heart-opening,” the influx of the love of God into the heart. In Buddhism, there is awakening or the uncovering of the treasure store.

With the treasure store uncovered, there is a paradox that ensues, where although sadness and pain are still felt, an underlying joy does not leave. In Zen I have often heard that in an awakened life, happiness and unhappiness are the same. That is a good description of this paradoxical situation.