Expectations.
September 16, 2013 § Leave a comment
Smoke from a pipe drifts in the September air.
All about, monks are engaged in rigorous training.
For some time a servant in the temple has been neglecting his main job of preparing meals. He’s been doing zazen.
Some days ago he entered a deep Samadhi. Other monks kept an eye on him until finally, after three days; he got up from his zazen cushion.
“He had penetrated the heart and marrow of the Dharma,” writes Hakuin in a 1734 letter. “And had attained an ability to clearly see the karma of his previous lives.”
He went to the head priest but before he could set forth his entire realization the priest said, “Stop! Stop! The rest is something I have yet to experience. If you explain it to me, I’m afraid it might obstruct my own entrance into enlightenment.”
***
Hsiang-yen was quite learned in the Buddhist sutras but for years he made little headway in his meditations. He made up his mind to leave the temple and take up residence in a solitary hermitage. When he left, his teacher Kuei-shan didn’t even look at him.
One day a tile picked up by the broom hit a bamboo stalk and Hsiang-yen was immediately enlightened. After this he said, “It is not my late teacher’s religious virtue I revere. I revere the fact that he never once explained everything to me.”
***
It is with these events in mind that I pray the blunderings written here in “August Meditations” not lead you off the path.
Mind is moving.
August 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
In, “The Gateless Gate,” by Ekai, koan # 29 has two monks arguing about a flag. One said: “The flag is moving.” The other said: “The wind is moving.”
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by and heard their argument. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”
This koan touches upon our everyday experience of assigning a reality to thought and imagination that they do not properly possess. Take the photograph at the top of this post as an example. Is it a flag? Is it a flag reflected in a window? Or is it a flag, at all?
In his painting, The Treachery of Image, shown below, the Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s raised these same questions.
The painting is of a pipe and passport under which Magritte painted the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). When asked about this he reportedly replied that it was not a pipe, as you could not fill it with tobacco. Yet to the masses looking at this painting it is a pipe. As an example of how our mind works, this shows that our ideas, or constructs, are often given greater reality than our actual perceptions.
Marcel Duchamp takes this a step further in his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2; by showing the mind also animates its environment. In his 1912 oil on canvas, the conical and cylindrical elements are reconstructed by the mind into an image of someone walking down a flight of stairs. But is there, in fact, anything moving here at all but mind?
In its positive mode the mind’s ability to animate and impose substance where there is none, can give life meaning and give the impetus to turn dreams into reality. In its negative aspect it can cause great psychological suffering when invidious mental images and beliefs take hold to arouse fear and anxiety. An obvious example of this is where post-traumatic stress disorder creates a false conceptual world that is imposed over that actually perceived through the senses. When this happens, an individual reacts to threats long since passed as if they were still a current reality, making their life miserable.
Now one could think that a truly sane person realizes the unreality of his imaginings and deals only with what is actually perceived through the senses. That, however, would miss the vital point that without the mind’s ability to give life meaning, our world would be a hollow and despairing place. It is the mind’s ability to animate the world that makes us emotionally and psychologically fit. Sanity comes into question when the mind is left on automatic to assign reality to everything it imagines or thinks no matter how preposterous. The mark of a truly adjusted individual is one who has the ability to see the unreality in life while simultaneously appreciating its beauty.
From the Buddhist perspective Shikyo Eryo expresses these same ideas while attempting to explain Hakuin’s work. He writes,
“While the fundamental essence of Buddha wisdom is formless, each and every thing that exists in the actual world, in whatever shape or form, is reflected in it; it is as such phenomena that all things exist. Although they are originally devoid of shape or form, inasmuch as they appear as phenomena, they cannot be said to be non-existent; and although they appear as phenomena, inasmuch as they are essentially devoid of shape or form, neither can they be said to exist. Such is the mode of being that Buddha wisdom assumes. It represents the Dharma universe in its true suchness or ultimate reality, in which all existences are embraced within the one universal Buddha-mind.”
Black Tea.
August 5, 2013 § Leave a comment
I’m hanging out this Monday listening to music by Marina Kanavaki. I’ve been moody all morning from mourning all night. Sunday’s left me dry trying to figure out what’s forever undefined. Time for some black tea, I think.
I walk the floor and pour water into the pot. Seems all I do is pour but this empty vessel is never filled up. Plugging in the kettle I reach into the pantry and take out some baked clay someone formed into a cup. It is the space within that makes it useful, said Lao Tsu. Into that space I place the tea bag and wait.
How slow the moments go as I wait for the kettle to boil.
Ready at last I pour, better stop short than fill it to the brim. Add honey and let the tea steep… something mysteriously formed.
As the steam rises I wonder which has the form. Is it the tea, or is it the cup alone?
I take a sip. It doesn’t feel “cuplike” on my lips. Is the tea beyond form? Or is this what Hakuin meant when he wrote, “Form, is the form of emptiness.”
I drink my tea, savoring every drop until the cup sits empty. Lao Tsu’s words rise up in my thoughts again, “Though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.”
Blind Men Crossing the Bridge
December 2, 2012 § 4 Comments
Hakuin Ekaku’s painting, “Blind Men Crossing the Bridge”.
Hakuin Ekaku’s “Blind Men Crossing the Bridge” is often described as a visual representation of crossing over to enlightenment. All Buddhists are familiar with this metaphor of crossing over through the Heart Sutra’s end chant that may be interpreted as, “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the other shore, all hail.” Hakuin wrote in his commentary on the Heart Sutra that, “The Chinese translation for this is ‘reach the other shore’. But where is that? The place where the Treasure is lies near at hand—take one more step! Is there a soul on earth who belongs on ‘this other shore’? How sad to stand mistaken on a wave-lashed quay!”
A simple interpretation of Hakuin’s painting is that the blind men are moving from right to left and to reach the other shore they must make a leap of faith as the bridge does not quite reach all the way. It is atypical of a Buddhist master, however, to represent enlightenment in the dualistic manner of “this” shore and “that”.
If we were meant to believe the other shore was on the left of the painting would Hakuin ask in his commentary where this other shore is and who belongs there? If the “place where the Treasure is lies near at hand” would we expect it to be at the end of some almost bridge, separate from us and not near at hand?
Examining Hakuin’s painting we see that all the artistic tension is in its centre. The blind men are struggling to cross a bridge. One holds sandals in his hands while reaching out with his staff, another reaches out with his fingers, the third is crawling forward with his sandals tethered at the end of his staff for balance. Tension is added with the viewer’s knowledge that the men in their blindness will take that “one more step” and fall into oblivion.
In light of this tension; the left and right shore with the suggestion of pine trees, the mountains floating in air and Hakuin’s own calligraphy, these seem more like borders, frame or a vignette for the central image of the men struggling to cross the bridge. It is the centre of the painting that holds our attention, not the “other shore” that the bridge fails to reach but, we may ask, is this really a bridge?
A bridge is a crossing that works to connect one side of a chasm to another. But the log in the painting does not reach the other side, so it is more like a jetty or a wharf than a bridge. And in spite of the painting’s title Hakuin identifies this log as a wave-lashed quay when he laments, “How sad to stand mistaken on a wave-lashed quay!” So is the log a bridge or a quay?
Incongruities between Hakuin’s commentary and his painting can be resolved by understanding that this great Zen Master’s painting is an invitation to question and directly bring us face to face with reality. If a log can be a bridge and then again a quay, then things truly do not exist independent of our concepts or from each other. As the Buddhist says, all things arise together and have no independent self-existence. Form, is the form of emptiness.
But “Blind Men Crossing the Bridge” is more than a statement of Buddhist philosophy. It is a depiction of our own (thought) wave-lashed mind at those times when life presents us with chaos and change. When we can’t decide if it is right to step into the unknown or better to choose the safe and the familiar. When fear grips our next step.
To help resolve such dilemmas Hakuin presents us with a koan. “Is there a soul on earth,” he asks, “who belongs on ‘this shore’?”
The answer to Hakuin’s question is an expression that realizes emptiness is not separate from us, that it is here and now in the midst of form. “Blind Men Crossing the Bridge” is such an expression showing that, like blind men struggling to grasp emptiness that is all around them, we need only stop thinking in the midst of thinking and emptiness in form is realized.
Hakuin on the Heart Sutra
November 4, 2012 § 3 Comments
What is wide and vast? What is it that is great? How can it compare? Can wisdom be small? These are some questions Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku asked in his discourse on the Heart Sutra, perhaps the best known Mahāyāna Buddhist writing.
To the casual reader the Heart Sutra appears to negate all of the Buddha’s teaching. But commentaries written on it assert it takes the teachings of Buddhism to a level the Buddha intended but felt his followers of the time could not grasp. In asserting ‘form does not differ from emptiness and emptiness does not differ from form’ the Heart Sutra declares all form to be empty, not in a nihilistic sense but in the manner of transcendence of all form.
We are not thought, feelings, perceptions or ego-consciousness states the Heart Sutra. Individual essence comprehends these and all forms. We are identical with emptiness that is paradoxically also fullness. As Hakuin writes, emptiness is:
Ten million Mount Sumerus in a dewdrop on a hair-tip
The billions of space-time worlds in a fleck of foam on the sea;
Yet in spite of this identification of emptiness with fullness Hakuin states that those who think their true nature is “wide and vast” are wrong! Why is this?
Over the centuries Buddhism has renewed itself by stripping away false interpretations that have obscured its core message. Buddha’s original teachings were renewed by the Heart Sutra’s “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. Centuries latter Dogen renewed the teachings by asserting, “form is form and emptiness is emptiness”. When Buddhism began to stagnate under Dogen’s interpretation it was again renewed through the teachings of Hakuin.
Hakuin saw that people were interpreting emptiness as a subtle concept. In doing so he knew they would never understand their true nature as absolute emptiness and would subsequently fail to achieve enlightenment. To counteract this tendency Hakuin negated all interpretations of emptiness. He asked how it could be called great if there were nothing in the universe to which it could be compared. He said that those who called it wide and vast were wrong because as a description it leaves emptiness as no more than a concept that exists relative to something else. He stated that even though a Superior Man has a love of wealth (i.e., desires enlightenment), the Superior Man knew the proper way to get it. And that is by abandoning all subtle conceptualizations of emptiness that leave it as a ‘this” or ‘that’.
The intent of Hakuin’s question and assertions was to have us abandon subtle errors of thought that turn true nature into a subtle object. The intent was to have us abandon the false images or idols that we have placed before true nature. The intent is to have us realize that prajna paramita, the perfection of wisdom that “sees” true reality, cannot be measured in relative terms as big or small because the reality such wisdom sees is, Itself, neither relative nor absolute.
Drop all expectations of what Enlightenment is, states Hakuin. Uproot all concepts as you’d uproot weeds in a garden. Abandon all notions of it, even those of love, if you want to Know. Stop everything then drop even that stopping. And don’t say these words are cold and indifferent or that they are not to your taste for as Hakuin wrote, “One bellyful eliminates hunger for all time.”
Is the glass half empty?
October 22, 2012 § 10 Comments
Master Hakuin meditates on the eternal question, “Is the glass half empty?”
Form, is the form of emptiness.
October 14, 2012 § 4 Comments
Shakyamuni’s teaching (e.g., The Four Noble Truths, the Four Immeasurables) can be considered a positive formulation of Buddhism that was seemingly negated by the Heart Sutra’s “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. That negation, however, was more a refinement or extension of the teachings that took the understanding of the nature of reality to new and deeper levels. Centuries later, Dogen’s assertion that “form is form and emptiness is emptiness” brought the pendulum back to a positive expression of Buddhism where form is understood to be as important to understanding reality as is emptiness. Neither expression should be considered superior to the other. Both appeal to a specific personality type and both can be considered as statements that originated out of the needs of a particular moment in time.
By the time Hakuin Ekaku was born in 1686 the Japaneses Buddhist schools of Soto and Rinzai Zen had both fallen into decline. Hakuin revitalized the Rinzai School but was critical of the Soto School that took Dogen’s teaching to mean that simply calming oneself or sitting with a blank mind was true enlightenment. As Hakuin showed with his own experience, there are deeper levels of mind to fathom and one mustn’t stop with the first inklings of enlightenment.
Hakuin took Zen Buddhism back to the teachings of the Heart Sutra asserting that “form, is the form of emptiness”. To me, this phrasing perfectly unifies form with emptiness and emptiness with form and certainly deserves more attention.
Consider that in zazen one strips away all interpretations placed upon the forms that arise in consciousness so that they become empty of projected content. This is not unlike therapy wherein, for example, a client overcomes his fears by progressively stripping away all conditioned responses that keep the fear alive. But in zazen (and, of course, in all true meditation) all interpretations projected onto form are removed so that they are seen as they are, not as we wish or fear them to be.
As practice deepens, and more interpretations are removed, it becomes clear that all form is nothing more than modifications of consciousness. This understanding is not achieved through a mere intellectual consideration of form and consciousness but is a direct result of type of knowing that arises through practice that is neither perception nor cognition. But an intellectual understanding can be gained by considering that even the scientist tells us that subatomic particles do not have any form unless they are measured or observed. In other words, there is no form without an observer. So if form is dependent upon a conscious observer then form is a “modification” of consciousness.
In deeper forms of zazen and meditation there is an immediate knowledge of the I that is not relative knowledge, meaning it is not knowledge about the I or knowledge that is dependent upon descriptions, thoughts or feelings. As such, it is an “I” that is not dependent upon any object or form.
In practice one can know the “I” without form or as a mere inference, meaning one knows the “I” as emptiness. But it is not emptiness in the nihilistic sense of nothing at all. It is emptiness in the sense of pure potential wherein all things are made possible, all knowledge exists as pure meaning and the “I” is pure Light, or pure Consciousness.
To know consciousness as emptiness means we recognize that consciousness is all there is. All form is known as nothing more than modifications of consciousness. There is no body except that modification of consciousness we call a body. There is no chair to sit in except that modification of consciousness we call a chair. No book. No computer screen. No form at all, whether perceived or cognized, that is other than a modification of consciousness that we have assigned a name. In this way form, is the form of emptiness.
“A snowflake falling on a red-hot stove”
September 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed that, psychologically speaking; approaching problems that prevent us from knowing our Self often involves an increase in mental confusion. Personally speaking, the closer I get to understanding an underlying problem, the harder it is to put in words. It often seems I’m confronted with two overlapping interpretations, neither of which I can separate or see clearly.
This “dual interpretation” scenario reminds me of what I read somewhere about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the amygdalae. Basically speaking, in a non-PTSD brain specific signals are sent through one amygdala or the other, but in the PTSD brain signals go through both amygdala. A dream I had of being in theatre where two different movies were being played through two different projectors gives a better representation of the idea. Just imagine trying to make sense of two movies at the same time that are shown on the same movie screen, all the while thinking you’re watching one reel!
There is a parallel “dual interpretation” situation that occurs in physics when approaching absolute zero, the coldest anything in our universe can get. At temperatures inconceivably close to absolute zero, Einstein predicted we’d find a state of matter where particles would lose their individual identities. In the Bose-Einstein condensate, as this state of matter would come to be called, particles no longer exist separately with their own individual identities, but are all each other and are all one.
Compare the conditions in the Bose-Einstein condensate to the writing of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in, “Pathways Though to Space”. In that documentation of his mystical unfolding he wrote that the “I” in him that spoke was the same “I” in every self-conscious creature. In another section he elaborates, writing that the “I that speaks” sometimes becomes “We”, yet remains “I”. That there is a consciousness that harmoniously blends with other consciousness, merging his voice with theirs in a melodious Voice of Others.
Throughout the ages the Mystic has reported on the harmony of unified consciousness that awaits us all. But for those of us that have not yet passed through that Door the approach to unity, the absolute zero of our fundamental identity is filled with confusion. A confusion of which, as Lao Tsu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, we must “blunt the sharpness, untangle the knot, soften the glare.”
To untangle the knot I believe it helps if we understand that the fundamental problems that block our path to self-recognition are natural sources of confusion and dualistic thinking. From the ego’s perspective true nature is seen as a Void, an empty frightening area of the psyche that is paradoxically also one’s true self. On a psychological and emotional level it is a “hot iron ball” in the pit of your stomach; a bundle of energy that your fear if untangled would leave you in a limitless space where your safe, comfortable boundaries no longer exist.
The closer we are to solving our fundamental problems, the closer we are to our true nature. That’s because our true nature is wrapped in those problems, so unraveling them is identical to uncovering the Self. But as with the approach to absolute zero in physics, the closer we get to Self the more our language and understanding of the way of things are has to change both to accommodate the new reality and to properly understand the core problems related to uncovering our true identity.
One core problem lies in a fear that arises when the false self comes face to face with the true Self. One way to understand this fear is to consider that any time an illusion is exposed to the light of reality it is found to be a lie. Similarly, when the false meets the true Self the lie that we’ve been living is exposed. This can leave us with a feeling that some raw nerve has been exposed to the elements, with a tremendous feeling of vulnerability, of being found unworthy, being exposed and that there is danger in revealing self.
Understanding this fear on an intellectual level may be easy, but understanding it in our heart is another matter. That’s because the false self is part of a defense mechanism that protects us from hurt. Hurt that includes the aforementioned fears related to vulnerability, judgment, etc., but in the context of this blog the more significant matter lies in the dissolution of boundaries when nearing Truth.
When infinitely close to Self our everyday language and way of understanding are no longer adequate to the task of dissolving our problems. We become confused at this point not knowing how to describe the chaotic thoughts and feelings we’re encountering. The boundary between the false and true is dissolving leaving us feeling confused and perhaps with a sense of panic.
When the boundary between the false and true self begins to dissolve confusion arises over what is true and what is real. We ask, “Is it true I’ll be judged?” “Am I facing life or extinction?” “Is the danger in revealing myself or in being revealed?” “What do I do?” “What action is best, what not?”
If we try to answer these questions with usual, everyday language we only become more and more confused. So it is at this point everyday language is abandoned in favor of symbols, parables, koans or other expressions that point at reality but do not contain reality.
“What action do I take,” is replaced with “non-action”, “non-thought” and “non-mind”. Whether to reveal or not reveal oneself simply becomes “revelation”. Questions of life and death dissolve, as death has no place to enter. Questions around judgment are answered in the deeper understanding of Christ’s, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” And the question of who you truly are makes perfect sense in “the sound of one hand clapping.”
Problems dissolve when they are transcended. Like the people who debated over how to raise a bridge so a truck could be freed, we become mired in difficulty when we stay too focused on one part of a problem. Likewise, problems mount when language becomes our master because language, by its nature, can only see one side of a problem at a time. But when through an act of transcendence language becomes our servant, we see both polarities at once. The truck is freed by the simple act of letting air out of its tires, and we are not left to figure out how to move an entire bridge.
I have gone on at length today because I am struggling to clear my mind of the confusion that plagues it when digging deep: to understand the paradox that when we approach Love, we encounter fear. But in my writing perhaps I’m only palming off shoddy goods, like some little poor shopkeeper.
Hakuin said it better when he wrote,
Cherish the Great Charm of your own nature,
That turns a hot iron ball into finest sweetest manna;.
Heaven, Hell, and the Floating World of Men —
A snowflake falling on a red-hot stove.
Restoring Balance
August 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
August Meditations 