by Domyo Burk | Jul 17, 2014 | Things to Understand About the Nature of Practice
If you think of yourself as having a Zen practice, you should regularly ask yourself this question. On the other hand, if the question stresses you out, you’re missing the point of Zen practice.
I am coming to believe that the essence of Zen is learning to embrace paradox. This means learning to fully engage with life even when you encounter a situation where two apparently contradictory things are simultaneously true. In paradox, it’s not that one thing is sometimes true and the opposing thing is true at other times. It’s not that the situation looks a particular way from one vantage point, and looks another way from a different vantage point. In paradox, both things are fully true at exactly the same time.
When you consider how hard you’re practicing, the paradox is this:
- You can always practice harder, and should, and
- Perfect, complete practice is always – and instantly – available to you this very moment.
Let’s examine both sides of this paradox, and then how real practice is about fully actualizing both.
Practicing Harder
How “hard” you practice makes an enormous difference to your life, and to your ability to be awake for it. Hard practice is about effort and time. Practicing harder means you sit more zazen. It means you devote more time and energy to activities that strengthen your resolve and mindfulness, such as participating with sangha, Zen study, or meditation retreats. Practicing harder means you make sacrifices. You spend your vacation time at a Zen retreat instead of in Hawaii. Instead of sleeping in, you get up and sit. Instead of relaxing in your garden with a lemonade on a hot summer day, you go sit zazen in a stuffy zendo that smells of sweat. Instead of drifting on to a new, more interesting activity when Zen gets a little dull or grueling, you make a commitment to stick it out no matter what.
Hard practice moment by moment means being brutally honest with yourself. Are you being lazy right now? Chances are the answer is, “Yes.” In the context of practice, laziness means “the failure to apply what is wholesome.” At some level you know that you are indulging unhelpful habits or self-concern, but you do it anyway. At some level you know that such-and-such an action would be beneficial, but you don’t bother to do it. We make little excuses to ourselves all day long, pushing deep mindfulness and compassion around the next corner.
It’s not without reason that Zen master Dogen wrote, “Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire.”[1] Most of us who engage in spiritual practice have the experience, at some time or another, of feeling as if we have momentarily awakened from the dream that is our everyday life. This is a very liberating but disconcerting experience. It’s liberating because you can see how your everyday stresses and concerns are, in a sense, unreal, or not nearly as imperative as you thought. Waking up from the dream is disconcerting because you know you are going to fall asleep again.
Seeing your everyday life as a dream may sound dismissive or judgmental, as if you are concluding that normal human activities are petty and unimportant. That’s not the case. It’s just that when you see things from a greater perspective, priorities get realigned in a radical way.
It may help you understand this process of “waking up” if I use a different metaphor, one offered by an ancient Buddhist text called the Lotus Sutra. In the sutra’s parable of the burning house, a man’s children are playing inside a house that is on fire and full of all kinds of other dangers. He calls to his children, trying to convince them to come outside, but they are so wrapped up in their play that they ignore him. Eventually he persuades them to come out by convincing them even better playthings await them out of doors.
Of course, the parable of the burning house is an analogy for practice. The father is trying to get his children to practice – to let go of their attachment to their playthings and come outside, where a larger perspective will let them see how ephemeral life is. In summary: if we don’t practice hard to wake up, if we don’t let go of our fascination with the stuff of our lives, death will catch us unawares. And: when you look at things from a big perspective, even the most important concerns and projects of our lives appear like playthings. There’s nothing wrong with playthings, or play! But do you want to sacrifice your life for them?
Perfect Practice – Instantly
The parable of the burning house also holds the other side of our paradox about hard practice. The father convinces his children to emerge from the house by enticing them with visions of the wonderful playthings that await them outside. When they come out, what they find is practice. In the very act of leaving the house they have received the greatest reward they could have, and it isn’t another plaything. (The sutra makes the point that you could accuse the father of falsehood, but because this was an act of compassion it was okay for him to embellish the truth.)
Ironically, when we get too concerned about waking up from the dream, getting out of the house, attaining the larger perspective, or knowing that we’re practicing hard enough, we are still letting ourselves be fascinated with playthings. Now we’re after “spiritual” playthings, but they’re still just distractions. We’ll find ourselves lingering at the door of the burning house, deliberating about whether to let go of the toy in our hand in order to go outside and see if there’s something better there. Maybe there is, but maybe we’ll regret letting go of what we have. Or, having momentarily left the house, we’ll find ourselves back inside, returning to our playthings as if we’re addicted to them. Being stuck in the house with the awareness that it’s burning can be even worse that never having seen our life from a larger perspective at all.
This brings us to the other aspect of practice, which is true all along, even as we have to work diligently, spend the time, and make the sacrifices: there is a sense in which practice operates outside of every rule known to humankind. It defies every definition, and is not bounded in space or time. While it doesn’t make any sense that you can practice perfectly, this moment, even after decades of laziness, it’s true. To think that practice is something more than this is delusion. Ultimately, you just put down your toys and come out of the house. It really is that simple.
You know this instantaneous, perfect practice. You know the peace of letting go of self-concern. You know the ease of putting aside all your worries and activities to just be. You know the feeling of deep intimacy with life that can be aroused by an inspirational story, a poem, a piece of music, or a grand, natural vista. If you can drop your playthings, including the spiritual ones that require you to keep track of your laziness, nothing keeps you from leaving the burning house.
And Yet… BOTH Are True at the Same Time
Most of us want to hold on to one side or the other of this paradox about Zen practice. Either we get stuck striving to awaken (or to awaken more, or to be awake more often), or we realize practice is instantly available to us at any time and leave it at that. The latter view is especially tempting. After all, why work so hard when you can just relax and enjoy life, and dip into awakened mind now and then?
The fact is, even though we can leave the burning house at any time, even though we can wake up from the dream of everyday life at any time, we usually don’t. We spend most of our time playing and dreaming, more or less happily. If we practice harder, we strengthen the habit of waking up and getting out.
But once the sincere intention to practice harder arises, we can avoid stress and heartache by keeping in mind the other side of the paradox: by practicing hard we’re just trying to learn how to make the choice to be awake, to take the larger perspective. There is no obstacle to awakening that we are trying to overcome with a good Zen practice resumé. And yet…
[1] From the essay “Zazen-gi” by Zen Master Dogen, as translated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, North Point Press, 1985
Image courtesy of markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by Domyo Burk | Jun 27, 2014 | Samadhi Power: Stopping and Seeing
Excerpted with permission from Idiot’s Guides: Zen Living by Domyo Burk
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As I mentioned earlier, you can’t recognize when you are living without the filter of your self-concept. The moment you think, “Ah, here I am, experiencing no-self,” the self-concept is obviously back. Still, you can learn to live with less-self, and this is definitely something you can appreciate and work on.
Ironically, Zen practice can make experiencing less-self more difficult, at first. All of the Zen tools, including zazen, mindfulness, and the precepts, involve you looking more carefully at your life and sense of self. Rather than feeling like you have less-self, you end up feeling like self is front and center all the time!
I remember taking walks as I was learning how to be mindful. I paid attention to my physical movements and sensations, and tried to let go of extra thinking. Naturally, I evaluated the success of my effort, and I noticed how unruly my mind was and how rarely I was fully mindful. Instead of walking with less-self, it seemed like I was walking with a big extra dose of self-consciousness. Unfortunately, there’s no way around this phase of the practice. As the Dogen quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, you have to study the self in order to forget the self.
Once you can manage to go about your life with less-self, this annoying self-consciousness is replaced by a more direct awareness of life. Your self-concept is entirely unnecessary to your full and effective functioning at this moment, so you learn to do without it. You are just washing the dishes, just eating, just walking. It’s a little like the way you used to do things, except for the absence of something. That something is your self-concern, which used to manifest in the background of your experience as low-level anxiety, vague dissatisfaction, anticipation, or regret, or as more intense things like anguish or a sense of meaninglessness.
The signs of self delusion—a sense of imperative, anger, resistance, greed, stinginess, physical tension—decrease as you live with less and less of a sense of self-essence. They still arise, but you can let go of them much more easily. You know all of these phenomena depend on your self-concept, which is a creation of your mind. You know how to return to life as it is, just breathing into the next moment, and things like anger or greed start to dissipate. Even if they don’t disappear completely, as their form begins to shift and break up like a cloud in the sky, you can’t regard them as entirely real.
Encountering people and things with less-self is especially rewarding, because you can appreciate and see them for what they are. You don’t assess how they fit into your agenda, and subsequently either manipulate them to serve your interests or dismiss them as irrelevant. In fact, you stop dismissing anything. There still may be many things you end up not noticing, because less-self doesn’t necessarily give you unusual powers of attention, but you don’t look elsewhere out of boredom because the thing in front of you is just another grocery line, just another customer, or just another evening at home with your partner. Dismissing something as being unworthy of your care, attention, and appreciation involves looking at it in terms of your small self’s agenda.
Living without an agenda means everything is fascinating. Even the annoying and painful stuff. It’s all part of the unfolding drama of your particular human life, which is, as far as you can know, your one and only human life. Awareness of this results in a curiosity that sustains you throughout all of the work you have to do to live.
Photo by True New Zealand Adventures 
by Domyo Burk | Jun 11, 2014 | Personal Musings
When the shit first really hits the fan, denial is a natural human response. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they care so much. The possibility that there’s nothing they can do to help the situation is too terrible to face. This is at least partly why so little has changed since the incomprehensible slaughter of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, even though random violence continues and is probably even increasing.
Widespread random violence should be considered a conclusive sign that a society is suffering from a fatal illness. A society is coming apart at the seams when it contains a growing number of people who are so disconnected, lonely, and desperate they find gratification in seeking out and destroying completely innocent beings. Think about this. Sure, guns make the violence worse and need to be regulated. But for a moment, contemplate the internal hell that makes someone believe their best hope of relief is to see the life of child snuffed out in front of them – for no other reason than to see that life end. This isn’t about incidental killing during war, or being overcome with anger or aggression, or taking lives to make a political point. This is about a carefully contemplated hatred of life.
It’s a tragic mistake to vilify the individuals who commit random violence. Sure, every individual must be held accountable for their actions or placed where they can’t do further harm. But those who have acted out their hatred of life by killing are only the weakest among us and therefore the first to manifest the symptoms of our societal illness. When we simply label the perpetrators of random violence as “mentally ill,” we think we’ve solved the problem by placing it outside of ourselves, outside of our society. Instead, we create prejudice against a diverse group of people who suffer from mental illness, almost all of whom find random violence as unfathomable as everyone else does. We also create more alienation, hatred, and fear just when we need to be asking ourselves what is causing the most emotionally fragile and volatile among us to snap, and what we can do to help them.
What is our societal illness? We are so used to it we can hardly see it, so I’ll project our situation out a few decades.
Imagine this as an entry in history text:
The Industrial Growth Society
In the Industrial Growth Society, the comfort, pleasure, and freedom of individuals was prioritized over the health and long-term existence of the social and ecological systems on which all of life depended. Greater and greater material and technological productivity and ingenuity was encouraged by requiring individuals to compete with one another. People and nations who were successful in this competition ended up with more and more of the resources, and social systems were allowed to disintegrate because they ran counter to the self-interest of individuals. This resulted in a growing number of desperate people in extreme material or social poverty, some of whom committed extreme acts of random violence that demoralized whole nations. Inevitably, the industrial growth society self-destructed.
There are no simple answers because the answer is everything has to change. The whole way our society functions has to change. That said, we have to start somewhere, so lets get to work and help the following scenario come about:
The Life-Sustaining Society
The Industrial Growth Society was survived by the Life-Sustaining Society. It took a few decades to mature into full function, but its development was inevitable when people remembered that they could not function independently of one another, or of the systems in which they participated. People realized that the comfort, pleasure, and freedom of individuals had to be balanced with care for one another and for all living systems. They realized that the need for such care wasn’t an idealistic dream or an outdated spiritual idea, it was a real and practical necessity. Fortunately, much of the energy that individuals had previously spent competing with one another for resources was channeled into ingenious ways to restructure the society into a life-sustaining one.
by Domyo Burk | Jun 6, 2014 | Understanding: Fundamental Teachings to Investigate
Excerpted with permission from Idiot's Guides: Zen Living by Domyo Burk
No matter how many things you recognize are not part of your self-essence, you can still persist in believ-ing you have one. After all, it just feels like you do. Even if you manage to let the mind settle in zazen, and refrain from identifying any of your thoughts and feelings as self, there’s you sitting zazen!
Many Zen teachings and methods are aimed at getting you to drop this self illusion. One of my favorites is to imagine that you are long dead, but somehow, strangely, still aware. If you like, you can imagine your bleached-out skull sitting in a deserted, sunny meadow (go ahead and make it sunny, this isn’t supposed to be depressing). You have been dead for 100 years, so all the people who would personally remember you are also gone. Anything you worked for or possessed in life has disappeared or belongs to someone else. Many of the things you cared deeply about look very different, because things have changed so much. Your inventions or passions or causes may be obsolete. Given all of this, who are you? You can still imagine inherently ex-isting, but in what way? Then you think of being dead 300 years, or 500. This is a good exercise for focus-ing in on your belief in self-essence.
If you keep studying your self illusion, in the course of meditation you can notice something radical: when you are thinking, you have a conviction of self-essence. When you aren’t thinking, or at least not doing so consciously, the sense of self isn’t there. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to make this observation, be-cause the second you make it you are thinking. After a while, however, you are able to notice the moment of self-concept arising. Noticing it arise, you know there was a period of time when it wasn’t there.
This absolutely convincing sense of inherent, enduring existence—on which you have based everything—comes and goes! You’ve already stripped away all the things the self identifies with, and now you’ve called into question the only piece of evidence you have left: you feel like you inherently exist. If you don’t have that feeling for a period of time, either your feeling-sense is fallible, or … maybe … you don’t exist the way you think you do.
“If you realize that your activities are not based on thought alone, you let go of thought. Strangely enough, whether you think about it or not, the heavy meal in your stomach gets digested completely. When sleeping, we continue breathing the neces-sary number of breaths per minute and the ‘I’ continues to live. What on earth is this ‘I’? I can’t help but feel that this ‘I’ is the self that is connected with the universe.” — Kosho Uchiyama Roshi (1912–1998), from The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo
by Domyo Burk | May 30, 2014 | Understanding: Fundamental Teachings to Investigate
Excerpted with permission from Idiot's Guides: Zen Living by Domyo Burk
One Big Reality
One of the first things you realize once you get a good look at reality is that a lot of the things you previously thought were real were simply your concepts about the world. It’s kind of like you’ve been wearing a pair of glasses all your life that gave everything a certain hue and were covered with little stars. Naturally, you thought the world was that color, and you probably built your worldview around the constant presence of stars. And now they’re gone!
When you view reality without the filters of your preferences, expectations, and concepts, you notice that it’s your mind that creates the differentiation between things. All along you’ve believed that your mind was doing you a big favor by pointing out distinctions that actually existed, but now you see how conceptual distinctions are just an overlay on reality. Things are complete just as they are, without reference to one another. By its very nature this observation is difficult to explain using words and concepts, but suffice it to say things are not actually separate from each other. You create the separation in your own mind.
Now, obviously the world is populated with things that don’t overlap in space and time: people and objects, places and actions. Zen is not denying any of that, which would be silly. The point is that those objects don’t require any conceptual differentiation to keep them apart. The world does not depend on your mind! This may sound ridiculously obvious, but at some level you think it does.
There’s no reason for there to be a you separate from me unless we need to engage in a practical interaction where such a distinction is useful, such as when we conduct a business transaction (it matters that you are the one paying me). When we pass each other on the street and exchange a smile, there is no need for you versus me. We are simply part of one big reality that manifests in many ways.
Because we are all part of one big reality, you can also say that all beings and things are interdependent. Whatever you do affects my reality, and vice versa. My unique position in the universe is in part characterized by your presence, and because we share a big reality anything each of us does affects the other. This accounts for the fact that at a certain level, your suffering is my suffering, as discussed in the chapter on the precepts.
However, in Zen, interdependence is not a philosophical theory to account for how morality functions, it’s a direct experience you can have. Although when you have it, it’s likely to feel surprisingly familiar. After all, you are part of the big reality whether you feel like it or not.
Bright and Precious
Viewed without the filters of conceptualization, the one big reality you’re part of appears bright, luminous, and precious. There’s no accounting for why this is, it’s just been proven again and again through the personal experiences of people from all kinds of spiritual traditions (as well as people without an identified spiritual practice). The filters with which you habitually view the world darken and limit it, while reality itself, even the ugly parts, is starkly beautiful in a strange, surprising way.
Sometimes you’ll hear this Zen teaching phrased as “things are perfect just as they are,” but to me perfection invites too much comparison, and anything you compare will fall short. I prefer the word “precious” because whether something is seen as precious is entirely up to the beholder, and you can hold something as precious that appears ugly, useless, or meaningless to someone else. Preciousness is about the viewer, not the inherent characteristics of that which is viewed.
I know a man who managed to drop his conceptual filters completely for the first time while looking at a can of tomatoes. Tears ran down his face as he suddenly appreciated how amazing and beautiful this tomato can was. Now, by regular standards there is nothing remarkable about a container of vegetables, but if you let go of any comparisons, any expectations whatsoever, the situation is very different. The entire universe in all its wonder and benevolence manifests right there in whatever is in front of you.
This may sound far-out, but imagine you live on another planet where life is very different from Earth, and a can of tomatoes falls from the sky. Without any earthly context or comparisons, it’s likely to be an object of wonder to you. What are these markings on the outside of the can? Why are there ridges along its sides? How do you open it? Who thought to put mushy red things inside a metal shell?
Eventually this ability to see things in such a direct, fresh way occurs not just in momentary peak experiences, but every day. The shape of a glass, the color of leaves on a tree, the sound of your child’s voice—any of these can suddenly appear to you without a filter, complete and luminous phenomena in and of themselves. From time to time they probably do, you just may not appreciate why.
by Domyo Burk | Sep 5, 2013 | How to Develop Your Zen Practice
A commentary on Zen Master Lin-chi’s teaching.
Quotations are from Chapter 11 of The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, translated by Burton Watson (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993)
The Master instructed the group, saying: Those who study the Dharma of the buddhas these days should approach it with a true and proper understanding. If you approach it with a true and proper understanding, you won’t be affected by considerations of birth or death, you’ll be free to go or stay as you please. You don’t have to strive for benefits, benefits will come of themselves.
If you approach the study of the Truth with true and proper understanding, you will already be enlightened. Isn’t this a paradox? How do we get to that true and proper understanding in the first place? Trial and error? Striving and striving until we finally find ourselves unaffected by considerations of birth or death – free to go or stay as we please?
Let’s assume that being unaffected by considerations of birth or death, or free to go or stay as we please, are some of the benefits Lin-chi speaks of. He says don’t we have to strive for them, and therefore we do not even have to strive for true and proper understanding. He cannot be saying no effort is required, or that there is no truth, no Dharma, and no benefits. He paints us into a corner and doesn’t let us go about things our usual way, and he doesn’t let us rest. What can we do? This isn’t about giving us answers, but about awakening in us the vital question of how to engage our lives. Naturally this will not be simple.
Followers of the Way, the outstanding teachers from times past have all had ways of drawing people out. What I myself want to impress on you is that you mustn’t be led astray by others. If you want to use this thing, then use it and have no doubts or hesitations!
We are in need of being drawn out… but we mustn’t be led astray by others. Lin-chi is not talking about choosing the right teacher, or being skeptical about teachings. These things need to happen, but they are not the most important thing. Once we have been drawn out of our waking dream, whether it is by a teacher, a disaster, or a falling leaf, the rest is up to us. Anyone who encourages you to look for ultimate satisfaction outside of your own body-mind is leading you astray. So, in a sense, anyone leading you is leading you astray. You find your own way through your inner landscape, a path no one can find for you or walk with you.
Given that we’re on our own with this, how can we have no doubts or hesitations? It may help to consider what it is Lin-chi is referring to when he says “use this thing.” This translator Schloegel suggests it is “genuine insight.” Shimano Roshi translated this as, “If you want to act, just act.” Perhaps in the Chinese it is not so clear what “it” is, and this is not surprising. Something needs to be used without doubt or hesitation – what is it? We are left with another open question. What is ours to work with? Whatever it is, no doubts or hesitation means taking the risk of being wrong or making mistakes. No one cherishes the experience of disappointment, frustration, or looking stupid. But are we going to let these petty concerns keep us from exploring what we need to explore?
When students today fail to make progress, where’s the fault? The fault lies in the fact that they don’t have faith in themselves! If you don’t have faith in yourself, then you’ll be forever in a hurry trying to keep up with everything around you, you’ll be twisted and turned by whatever environment you’re in and you can never move freely. But if you can just stop this mind that goes rushing around moment by moment looking for something, then you’ll be no different from the [ancestors] and buddhas. Do you want to get to know the [ancestors] and buddhas? They’re none other than you, the people standing in front of me listening to this lecture on the Dharma!
Students don’t have enough faith in themselves, and so they rush around looking for something outside themselves. But even if they get something, all it will be is words and phrases, pretty appearances. They’ll never get at the living thought of the [ancestors]!
The self we need to have faith in has nothing to do with our skill or knowledge. If we rely on any of the details of who we are, we will fall short at some time and our faith in ourselves will be compromised. Or we will conclude we do not have enough skill or knowledge to take the ultimate leap. Then we’ll keep looking around for the things that will complete us, so we can be up to the task of claiming our birthright. As Lin-chi says, we’ll be “twisted and turned by whatever environment” we’re in. We’ll go rushing around moment by moment looking for something.
The mind that has passed its koan, the mind that has claimed its birthright, the mind of enlightenment, goes nowhere when queried or tested. When it is asked, “Where is your true nature?” it does not waver for a moment. It does not think about teachings. It does not think about past insights. It does not think about theories or philosophy. It does not mine science or nature for analogies. It has utterly given up looking anywhere other than here. Actually, it does not even look here. It is just open and alive.
This being who does not look elsewhere is the same being as has manifested as each ancestor and each buddha. It is only our own doubt that keeps us dancing about, seeking for assurances outside of our own direct experience. Lin-chi may sound harsh when he warns that students who rush around looking outside of themselves will “never get at the living thought of the [ancestors]!” This may sound like a judgment passed on all of us who are guilty of rushing around looking outside of ourselves, but Lin-chi is just saying that we won’t find what we’re looking for that way.
Make no mistake, you followers of Chan. If you don’t find it in this life, then for a thousand kalpas you’ll be born again and again in the three-fold world, you’ll be lured off by what you think are favorable environments and be born in the belly of a donkey or a cow!
Is this a Buddhist version of fire and brimstone? You might say so, in that it is supposed to be motivating. But we do not get condemned to the fire by someone or something outside of ourselves, we simply experience the results of our own choices. We keep getting lured off by what we think are favorable environments – situations that we think we make us happy and secure. We settle down into our nests and fall asleep again. But life keeps moving on… if we are born in the belly of a donkey or cow because of our negligence, we will end up being incapable of practice. Basically: you can practice now, but you may not be able to practice in the future.
Followers of the Way, as I look at it, we’re no different from Shakyamuni. In all our various activities each day, is there anything we lack? The wonderful light of the six faculties has never for a moment ceased to shine. If you could just look at it this way, then you’d be the kind of person who has nothing to do for the rest of his life.
What does it mean to “be the kind of person who has nothing to do for the rest of her life?” If we try to think about it rationally or philosophically it may not make much sense, but in our gut we know what this means. To have nothing we have to do for the rest of our lives – to be free to do, or not do, and just to be. To be sufficient, without anything we have to achieve or prove in order to earn our place in this world. A person who has nothing to do for the rest of his life may be very busy, or he may live very simply, but in neither case is he compelled.
Fellow believers, ‘There is no safety in the threefold world; it is like a burning house.’ This is no place for you to linger long! The deadly demon of impermanence will be on you in an instant, regardless of whether you’re rich or poor, old or young.
In the Lotus Sutra, the world is compared to a burning house, and we are compared to children playing in the house, so wrapped up in their toys and play that they are oblivious to the flames. This may seem like a grim, pessimistic view of the world, but it points to the delusion all human beings share – that somehow our life will just keep going on. Things are not going to crumble down around us. Maybe they’ll change a little, we figure, but we cannot get our minds around the reality that we will lose absolutely everything. Outside the burning house is a whole world, and the opportunity to practice, so we are not doomed. But we have to be careful not to get so wrapped up in our toys that we forget what is really happening.
If you want to be no different from the patriarchs and buddhas, then never look for something outside yourselves. The clean pure light in a moment of your mind – that is the Essence-body of the Buddha lodged in you. The undifferentiated light in a moment of your mind – that is the Bliss-body of the Buddha lodged in you. The undiscriminating light in a moment of your mind – that is the Transformation-body of the Buddha lodged in you. These three types of bodies are you, the person who stands before me now listening to this lecture on the Dharma! And simply because you do not rush around seeking anything outside yourselves, you can command these fine faculties.
The Buddhist teaching on the three bodies of buddha is generally considered very profound and advanced. It is an attempt to describe different aspects or layers of reality – how the absolute becomes manifest in form. It is too complex to describe here. Suffice to say that such a teaching can pull you very far aware from yourself, while Lin-chi says the three types of bodies are you, right now. Teachings provoke us out of our complacency – they are ways to draw us out, as Lin-chi mentioned at the beginning. But then they can lead us astray if we start to look for their meaning outside, or even inside. Their meaning is found in your listening to the Dharma right now – they are nothing abstract, they cannot be grasped or located. They can only be manifested in this moment, a constantly moving target.
…But never at any time let go of this even for a moment. Everything that meets your eyes is this. But ‘when feelings arise, wisdom is blocked; when thoughts waver, reality departs,’ therefore you keep being reborn again and again in the threefold world and undergoing all kinds of misery. But as I see it, there are none of you incapable of profound understanding, none of you are incapable of emancipation.
Lin-chi actually said this to his assembled students, who were sitting and listening to the Dharma just as we are today. Just like his students, our thoughts waver. This is not a reason to feel inadequate, it is a reason to arouse the courage to stop looking anywhere else.
…The way I see it, we should cut off the heads of the Bliss-body and Transformation-body buddhas. Those who have fulfilled the ten stages of bodhisattva practice are no better than hired field hands; those who have attained the enlightenment of the fifty-first and fifty-second stages are prisoners shackled and bound; arhats and pratyekabuddhas are so much filth in the latrine, bodhi and nirvana are hitching posts for donkeys. Why do I speak of them like this? Because you followers of the Way fail to realize that this journey to enlightenment that takes three asamkhya kalpas to accomplish is meaningless. So these things become obstacles in your way. If you were truly proper [persons] of the Way, you would never let that happen.
Zen sacrilege! Committed out of compassion for us. Anything that causes us to look outside of ourselves gets in the way. And yet, what if there were no teachings at all? We would still be asleep. So we use teachings and practices like medicine, applying them as necessary, and giving them up when they become poisonous to us.
…Fellow believers, time is precious! You rush off frantically on side roads, studying Chan, studying the Way, clinging to words, clinging to phrases, seeking Buddha, seeking the patriarchs, seeking a good friend, scheming, planning. But make no mistake. Followers of the Way, you have one set of parents – what more are you looking for?’ You should stop and take a good look at yourselves. A man of old tells us that Yajnadatta thought he had lost his head and went looking for it, but once he had put a stop to his seeking mind, he found he was perfectly all right…’
Yajnadatta looked in the mirror one day and thought he had lost his head. He temporarily lost touch with reality, and when he came back to clarity and saw he had his head, it was not that he had found his head. It had, of course, always been there. As Zen practitioners, we try to avoid running around looking for our heads, even though we are experiencing the discomfort and worry resulting from having lost track of them. We take the counsel of people we trust who assure us our heads are still there, and we sit as still as we can. The delusion of being headless eventually wears off if we do not keep getting agitated by running about searching. This is hard practice. We really, really want to find our heads. And we should want to find them.
