Dogen; Zazen Universally Recommended
…Therefore, stop your intellectual exercise of investigating words and chasing after talk; study the reverse way, turn the light and shine it back. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will appear. If you want such an experience, exert yourselves urgently…
(Version by Robert Aitken, based on the translation by Carl Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 1988.)
With breath, mu, hearing, we give ourselves over. Exhale, while sitting upright, back straight and chest open. Inhale. Giving ourselves over to this breath, to mu is like opening the drain valve at the bottom of a hot water tank – thoughts and concept drain down, emptying the vessel until only breath / mu remains.
Listening now, open the drain spigot and just hear; no need to wait for another circumstance to engage. Neither fast nor slow, who hears? Who hears? Who hears?
Once the spigot is open, we don’t need intention per se; gravity is always ready, and when releasing, gravity takes over. The funny thing about zazen, is that when left to its own devices, the spigot can close again, and we are lost in reverie. Giving over to mu, the spigot is open without having to bend down and turn a valve.
Re-reading the passage from Dogen’s “Zazen Universally Recommended”:
…Therefore, stop your intellectual exercise of investigating words and chasing after talk; study the reverse way, turn the light and shine it back. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will appear. If you want such an experience, exert yourselves urgently…
Dogen implies that an application of intention is necessary – stop our intellectual exercises, exert ourselves urgently. This doesn’t mean forceful, goal oriented, or evaluative. It arises from conditions, like water, light, and soil foster a carrot’s growth up toward the sun and down into the dark earth. The part we see is not the nutrition that feeds us. Yet the carrot is busy photosynthesizing with skillful use of light, carbon dioxide, water and its inherent chlorophyll. Project management software is not on the list of required ingredients.
This weekend is the proper environment to stop investigating words and chasing after talk. Study the reverse way, not by figuring this out, but by opening the drain of mind to see what will remain without words and talk.
A little later in Zazen Universally Recommended,” Dogen tells us this:
For studying Zen, one should have quiet quarters. Be moderate in food and drink. Cast aside all involvements and discontinue all affairs. Do not think of good or evil; do not preoccupy yourself with right or wrong. Halt the revolutions of your mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop your calculating thoughts, ideas, and perceptions. Do not try to make yourself a Buddha, much less be attached to sitting still.
Take Dogen’s suggestion about casting aside involvements and discontinuing affairs as the practice of letting go, letting go now. Even as we sit here, it can seem practical and necessary to protect ourselves by being alert to the dangers around us all the time. What would it mean right now to resist nothing that just is? To be at ease, utterly vulnerable to what may come next? Rest here, just as you are, without the need to be more than you are in order to survive and be loved. Give over to gravity and sit right here in body and mind. Let shoulders fall; drop the war on foibles and failures. Your original face is right here.
We all have reasons to be so watchful, alert. Each of us has been hurt, and knows we can be hurt again. Our original face is reflected fully in each tear on our cheek. Each of us know a broken heart when indivisibly connecting with the suffering of another. Our original face is reflected fully in each tear on the cheek of another, and each wail of pain. We can be as skittish as a cat, and take in the teaching of cats who trust themselves to sleep, and trust themselves to bound awake at a sound. Now, today, and tomorrow are the times to relinquish to breath, to relinquish to breath, and to relinquish once again. With release, we can hear our original face in the laughter of a stranger in the crowd, and see it in the hummingbird with wings beating, body still in midair.
This is retreat. You’ve already set the time aside to safely release all affairs, and there is nothing of good and evil here in this room – there is only me, you, us, bells and clappers. All of us will no doubt pick up our calculating thoughts and ideas soon enough without trying, so there is no danger of losing access to them when we need them. We just don’t need them now, so listen, fully at ease. There is no Buddha other than this here and now. Relinquish all to this breath.
In our koan curriculum, we meet two koans early in our study:
Stop the sound of the distant temple bell.
And another…
Put out that fire a thousand miles away.
It is tempting to take on these koans strategically, to run to the bell or call the fire department. There are environments in which those solutions would be fitting. Here, we are instead studying in the reverse way, turning and shining the light back. Instead, we intimately meet the sound of the bell and the heat of the fire.
There is an unambiguous way to carry our practice as we sit in this room. The rituals and expectations together and to ourselves are clear. I will not write my grocery list during the period and need not enumerate the difficulties of the world as I sit. When two bells end the period, we know what to do – we bow, turn, rise and bow at the sound of the clappers, With our first step we carry our unambiguous practice of breath, of this sound, from our formal sitting to this step clockwise around the room.
In our retreat today it is our gift to be breath, to be mu, to be this sound while going to dokusan, getting our lunch and cleaning up. It is a gift to be breath while resting, and during the long walk this afternoon. Carrying our practice off the cushion is the bridge to carrying it everywhere.
This is the opportunity of the retreat, taking Zen from the cushion– ideas of self still flowing down the drain – step, step, look left and right crossing the street. In the kitchen, there is no one cooking, but there is a sizzle of onions in the pan. Even to say “cooking” may not be close enough to what’s going on. While emptying the water from the sink cleaning up after lunch, go down the drain with the soapy water. Disappear with the fading passage of a car.
In his commentary on case five of the Gateless Barrier, Robert Aitken tells the story of an encounter between Xiangyan (Hsiang-yen) as a young monk, and his teacher, Guishan (Kuei-shan). Xiangyan yen was struggling to understand, and one day, Guishan said to him:
I am told that you have been under my late master Pai-chang and also that you have remarkable intelligence. But the understanding of Zen through this medium necessarily ends in intellectual and analytical comprehension which is not of much use. Yet you may have some insight into Zen. Let me have your view as to your own being before your parents were born.”
Aitken, Robert. The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan) (p. 54). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
As might happen for you and I, Xiangyan reviewed his notes, returned to Guishan, declared his failure, and asked for help (teaching). Guishan said:
I really have nothing to teach you. And if I tried to express something, later you would revile me. Besides, whatever understanding I have is my own and will never be yours.”
Xiangyan burned his notes and resigned himself to life as a “a rice-gruel monk.” He relinquished himself to his koan of viewing his own being before his parents were born, and at the same time he relinquished himself to caring for the grounds of a tomb. In a talk during Twining Branches sesshin I spoke of Xiangyan fully hearing the sound of a stone swept against a stalk of bamboo – “Crack”!
We see in this prelude how Guishan told and tells all of us the limitations of our intellectual understanding of Zen. With little recorded of Guishan offering comforting words, Xiangyan left to find his way to an unconstrained view, which the stone opened for him.
Xiangyan shows up again in case five of the Gateless Barrier:
[Xiangyan]: Up a Tree
The priest [Xiangyan] said, “It is as though you were up in a tree, hanging from a branch with your teeth. Your hands and feet can’t touch any branch. Someone appears beneath the tree and asks, ‘What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?’ If you do not answer, you evade your responsibility. If you do answer, you lose your life. What do you do?”
Aitken, Robert. The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan) (p. 53). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
It is ironic, I admit, offering a Zen talk filled with words – can I speak it without using my mouth? Can you hear without reinforcing an idea that is outside of what is right here? Words and not-words are beside the point. Forget the question of speaking and not speaking. The question is yours as you navigate this day. What is Zen as you bow out of the kinhin line to use the restroom? What is Zen as you sit and your toe itches? What is Zen when you get in your car to leave for the day?
Zhengjue had his own ways to express the point, as in this from Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen:
The Backward Step and the Upright Cauldron
With the depths clear, utterly silent, thoroughly illuminate the source, empty and spirited, vast and bright. Even though you have lucidly scrutinized your image and no shadow or echo meets it, searching throughout you see that you still have distinguished between the merits of a hundred undertakings. Then you must take the backward step and directly reach the middle of the circle from where light issues forth. Outstanding and independent, still you must abandon pretexts for merit.
Zhengjue; Cheng-chüeh. Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi (Tuttle Library Of Enlightenment) (p. 40). Tuttle Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Zhengjue encourages us to release all until there is no shadow or echo, and to keep releasing still. Give up distinctions of merit even now. We have all had that sense of open mind burst with the recognition, “Nice, my mind is clear!” Abandon pretexts, merit, and abandon all that is unspoken. Abandon also any need to figure out what Zhengjue, Guishan, Xiangyan, or Dogen was trying to say. Abandon all those words as well. The way to do so is in now way grand, distant or out of reach. It is in this breath and hearing the sound of my voice.
Body and mind have already dropped away, yet we gather at the sound of the bell. Gather here now.