Leon Kackman, Rev. Master

 

This article was originally published, in serialized form, in the Portland Buddhist Priory Newsletter. This is a continuation from the Summer 2022 issue of the Journal.

Seeking Nothing: A Note on Finding and Having

“They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons.”

Occasionally, in our seeking, we find what we want and we get to have that thing. We might get what we want after a long period of working toward that thing. Or maybe it shows up early or along the way of our life as a gift. We might say to Bodhidharma, when we hear what he has to say, “you say seek nothing but I have what I want; don’t bother me with your negativity.” And Bodhidharma might just bow and go about his business.

And still, the Buddha and Bodhidharma have said what they have said and we have heard it. There is impermanence and there is “the sublime”.

Having heard, and for a moment recognized what we have heard, a little itch begins to take root in us: something like the thought, ‘at the very least, this thing that I have found will eventually be lost’ appears in the corner of our mind. Rev. Master Jiyu used to say something like, “all are called, few pay attention to the call, fewer still heed the call.” The truth of impermanence and “the sublime” are truths that we recognize in our own hearts; this part of us that recognizes these truths is called Bodhicitta or, “the mind that seeks the Way”.

When Bodhicitta is awakened within us, even in a small way, by ‘hearing’ the bell of “the sublime”, it starts that itch. The first meditation group that I was involved with recommended reading Chogyam Trungpa’s The Myth of Freedom. As I remember it, I found the book helpful but got diverted to something else. Only later, after I had established myself in practice, did I pick it up again and finish it. After I picked it up again, I had to laugh when I came across a section where he says, “don’t start to practice unless you intend to go all the way. If you start and then stop, it will always be as if there is something unfinished in your life.”1 I laughed because I could see that for me, the itch had started, the bell had rung and couldn’t be unrung. (Although I think for me, that bell had rung even before I encountered Buddhism.)

Eventually, if we follow this call, this itch, we will come to a place in our life where we have to look more deeply at what we have found. But a lot of the time, with the things that we cherish, we don’t want to look too closely. We want to avoid looking, because we fear that we will lose what we cherish, because we do not wish to admit that we have already lost it. How much suffering do we humans create by trying to keep things as they are? By trying to keep our “bodies from changing with the seasons”, in one way or another?

When I first went to Shasta Abbey, in the cloister between the kitchen and the Buddha hall, tucked into a small niche, was a diorama called the Kanzeon garden. I was there for an introductory retreat and for the orientation tour we stopped and looked at this diorama. The monk leading the tour said it was a three-dimensional representation of a traditional Buddhist mandala called the mandala of the six worlds, wheel of life or the Bhavacakra.

Explaining the complicated topic of the mandala of the six worlds is beyond the scope of this commentary (this webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhavacakra is a reasonable and more thorough introduction) except to say that there are two of the most important points of Buddhist practice contained in this type of teaching. One is that help and practice can be found in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. And the second is that there is something beyond the continuously cycling wheel of existence; the continuous cycle of ‘calamity and prosperity’.

Also, it should be said that in Buddhism it is taught, and so implicit in the mandala of the six worlds, that no realm is permanent: hell is not permanent; heaven is not permanent; our human situations are not permanent.

Anyway, the version in the cloister at Shasta Abbey was three-dimensional and was set up on a triangular slope about seven feet across at the lower base of the triangle. The slope was covered in green AstroTurf. Each of the six worlds, the hell realm; the animal realm; the realm of the hungry ghosts; the heaven realm; the asura realm – a type of aggressive god; and the human realm, was represented mostly in action figures of the day. He-Man and She-Ra were there; Barbie and Ken were there; Stretch Armstrong and a host of others including various monsters and the like were there.

As the monk explained some of the highlights of the diorama, she eventually came to a small scene set partly up the slope. (At the bottom of the slope were the lower realms – hell, hungry ghost and animal – at the top was the heaven realm with some richly attired figures on string caught in the moment of ascending.) Our small scene was part of the human realm and depicted a farmhouse facing downhill, away from the heavenly realm. Around the farmhouse there was a well-tended garden and the family was gathered on the porch, happily listening to live music.

The point I remember about this was that the house was set up so that the people had their backs turned away from the part of the diorama representing working toward understanding the deeper aspect of life. It was explained that there was no problem with any of the things going on in the scene, just that there seemed to be a deliberate not looking at the deeper aspects or potential of life.

When we are confronted with the prospect of looking more deeply at what we have found, it can appear as if we are being asked to choose between practice and what we like or love; or between practice and our health; or between practice and our well-being; or…? But really, what we are asked is to look deeply and let go of that which cannot be held on to.

Often, when we consider letting go, our mind jumps to the conclusion that we are asked to get rid of or cut off the thing we hold onto; we think we are asked to break our commitments or renege on our responsibilities but this is far from the truth. Really, what we are being invited to do is to allow our mind, our relationships, our work, our recreation, our heart, “to change with the seasons”. We are invited to allow these things to be alive, even though that inevitably means that they will die.

When what we have found, whatever that might be, feels threatened, and particularly feels threatened by practice or the Dharma, perhaps we are not yet seeing things clearly? If, at that time of being threatened, we can turn toward the deeper matter, toward practice, toward “the sublime”, we have the chance of helping along the transformation that got us going on the path in the first place.

Seeking Nothing, Continued

“Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything.”

We can think that a teaching like “Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything” is too extreme, is too exotic; but, in our Sōtō Zen practice, this is what we are doing, in a small, steady way, each time we sit down to meditate. Sōtō Zen is, I understand, called “farmer Zen” in Japan. This is, in part, because it was originally practiced by the peasant class in contrast to Rinzai Zen which was practiced by the Samurai class.

There is also another meaning to this farmer Zen. In our practice, there is a need for the steady undramatic patience of a farmer. We get up in the morning and go to our meditation seat, patiently tending to the garden of our practice. Each time we choose to practice, in small or large ways, we are choosing ‘reason over custom’. The ‘custom[s]’ here are the ingrained habit patterns of our lives, especially those distorted by greed, hatred and delusion.

When we hold onto these habits and patterns, they tend to obscure and distort our True or deeper self; they distort the “Sublime”. When we wake up and “choose reason over custom”, we choose to practice, in a steady, step-by-step way; we harmonize ourselves with our True self.

In The Most Excellent Mirror―Samādhi, a poem by Tōzan Ryōkai, (807-869) recited (or sung, in our case) during the Sōtō Zen full morning service, the opening line reads:

The Buddhas and the Ancestors have all directly handed down this basic Truth:
Preserve well for you now have; this is all.2

Every day, at morning service, we hear, we are told: you already have what you need. This is what Bodhidharma is telling us when he advises us to discover where we seek; where we act on discontentment with what we have; where we fall into the trap of believing that we lack something on a fundamental level, and to let go of these distorting customs. One of my teachers used to say “the more I practice, the more ordinary I appear.” and Dōgen says, in Rules For Meditation, “…training and enlightenment are naturally undefiled; to live in this way is the same as to live an ordinary daily life.”

When we work toward “detach[ing] from all that exists and stop imagining or seeing anything”, we are entering fully the actual life that we have right now. This is an invitation to fully live the ordinary, wonderful life that we have right now.

As I write the following, I am sharply aware that what I say here will not do the subject justice. It is my hope that you will not take what I say as an attempt to be definitive on the subject but rather, it is an attempt to bring something up for consideration in meditation.

Practicing the Dharma

The fourth of the four practices, Practicing the Dharma is as follows (from the Red Pine translation):

Fourth, practicing the Dharma. The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure. By this truth, all appearances are empty. Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist. The sutras say, “The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.” Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma. And since that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging, they give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment. And to eliminate impurity they teach others, but without becoming attached to form. Thus, through their own practice they’re able to help others and glorify the Way of Enlightenment. And as with charity, they also practice the other virtues. But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all. This is what’s meant by practicing the Dharma Path.

“The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure.”

This is a tricky one. I mean, is he saying that anything goes? That bad acts are really good acts? That causing harm is somehow permissible? No, “those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma”; we are “bound” to act according to the whole of the Dharma, including the Precepts. He is pointing to something here that is different and deeper than our ordinary understanding of things. He is actually not commenting on the things and situations outside of ourselves in a philosophical way; at least those things aren’t the significant part of what he is pointing at.

Let me repeat this: when talking about Buddhist Wisdom, we are not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of an action that takes place outside of ourselves, it is closer to say that we are talking about what happens within the individual and how they perceive or respond to an action.

What I mean is, imagine that some action occurs outside of ourselves that we witness. That action has consequences that are hard to bear for the beings in the vicinity of the action (maybe even us). What the Dharma is helping us to understand and learn is that we can change how we see and understand that action, and that new ‘seeing and understanding’, which is closer to being in accord with fundamental reality, will help us to understand the action and respond to it in a way that does not increase the suffering.

All through this Outline of Practice, Bodhidharma has been giving us kind advice about how we can shed our own conditioning which covers up our own wisdom. When we connect with our own wisdom, the world appears differently; we understand the world, and the events and things that appear in it, differently.

Most of us are driven by fears and misperceptions which we may only have a vague awareness of. We are like that person in the classic dream who is being chased by a monster. That person often doesn’t even know what the monster really is. But when that person decides to stop running, something changes. When that person decides they have had enough running, when they decide that whatever that monster might be, facing it is worth the benefit of no longer being caught in the endless running. When they stop and turn around, then they will be able to put to rest that suffering which is driving them. They will be able to face and accept what they are running from. Waking up from the dream is also significant, since we then have the opportunity to see that we have created both the running self and the monster.

Often we stop and turn around out of desperation and weariness: we have just had enough. But there is another aspect of our turning around which is this strange sense, this itchy feeling, that there is something more that we just aren’t seeing fully yet. We have this feeling, which can be vaguely vexing, that maybe the Dharma is really pointing to an experience that we do not yet fully know, but that we could know.

This itch, this sense, is what allows us to consider that we could actually be pure ourselves. While it is true that we are Pure, and our sense that the Dharma might actually offer us a way out of our suffering is accurate, we can still view this through the distorted lens of the discriminating self. We might think “I am a me and you are a you.” Because we think like this and hold onto that thinking, because we view the world from the perspective of the small self, we distort what purity is.

This is what Bodhidharma is saying when he says:

By this truth, all appearances are empty. Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist. The sutras say, “The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.”

The impurity of self is the result of looking at existence through the lens of the discriminatory mind. With the discriminatory mind, we try to define and solidify the self; this attempt to define and solidify is what makes the self impure.

When we hear that “all natures are pure” from the point of view of the self, we can mistakenly hear it as a confirmation of a view. We might have the view that “my self, with all these characteristics which I both like and do not like, is real and exists and is good.” When we hear the teaching that “all natures are pure”, we might mistakenly think that the self, as we conceive of it, is pure and is therefore true and reliable. But the view, the belief, that the self exists, in a way that can be held onto, is not a reliable view; this view about the self is what will cause us suffering if we hold onto it.

Of course, the Dharma regularly tells us that a view of a separate, unchanging self is a mistaken view and Bodhidharma reminds us of this when he says “the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self”. We can also see the effects of this unreliability by paying attention to how we react to circumstances that arise in our lives. How do we react when someone suggests that we are wrong? How do we react when someone suggests that we are bad? That we are impure? How do we react when someone does not confirm our ‘rightness’ or the purity of our small self? Do we feel these things as a threat? A judgement? When we are criticized, do we automatically and with heightened and inflamed emotion feel we need to defend ourselves? Feel we need to prove the other party wrong or incompetent? Of course, few of us will think that we are never wrong and therefore should never be told no, but how much effort do we put into creating a cloud of obfuscating dust with our vigorous assertions about how we should not be told that we are wrong?

Over time, as we sit, determined to take refuge in the activity of meditation, day in and day out, steadily and patiently coming back to our cushion, we gradually begin to soften our grip on the self: we can come to gradually see that the self we are so bent on defending is just a continuously changing phantasm like the flame of a candle which cannot be held onto.

We all do this creating a self, holding onto and defending a self. And, we can all, no matter what suffering we come from, learn to let that self dissolve; we can learn to let it shift and change, dance, like that candle flame. We can dissolve our suffering if we persist in keeping going with our Dharma practice.

As I sit writing this I feel this unsettled feeling brought about by hearing some news about something that didn’t go my way. As I do the work of writing this, I notice the feeling arising and, letting go of it (even though the feeling doesn’t go away), I bring my mind back to the work. As I sit with it, I recognize it as that feeling like having the carpet pulled out from under me that often comes with betrayal or disappointment. In this case I know that there was no betrayal from outside of me, there is only the self having hoped that the thing would go my way and, grasping after that hope, I started to look at the situation as if, of course, it was going to go the way that I wanted. This is how we create suffering around the self, but also how we can train with the self and let go of the suffering and the habits of our own mind which create or increase suffering. Gradually, as I work on this, the feeling dissipates.

Steadily, patiently, I turn around and look; being willing to see what is there and the truth of what is there. Steadily, patiently, I ask myself is there a way that I am breaking the Precepts? Steadily, patiently, with as much gentle kindness and friendliness as I can muster, I release my grip on whatever I find myself holding desperately onto. I do my best to let go where I hold on. This is practicing the Dharma.

When we accept and know, in our blood and bones, the truth that all natures are pure, it is the basis for a boundless compassion and loving-kindness: a bit of a mystery but, nonetheless, true.

Practicing the Dharma, Continued

“The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure.”

In a note for this fourth practice, Red Pine says: “The Sanskrit word dharma comes from dhri meaning to hold, whether in a provisional or an ultimate sense. Hence the word can mean thing, teaching or reality.” This fourth practice corresponds with the fourth noble truth which is the means to the cessation of suffering. Practicing in accord with the Dharma is practice in accordance with reality, whether provisional or ultimate: thus, Buddhism has no argument with scientific reality, even though it does “hold” that there is something beyond conventional reality. It is interesting to me that Bodhidharma apparently bypasses volumes and volumes of Buddhist teaching and instruction on practice to focus on this one thing: “all natures are pure.”

This Purity is the “Pure” (shunyata) mentioned in the Scripture of Great Wisdom and is often translated as emptiness or voidness. Using the word “Pure”, in this context, underlines that emptiness in the context of Buddhist Wisdom does not mean a kind of blank non-existence. It would be closer to say that an “appearance” in existence is empty of a concept of a self: it is pure of the overlay of self or any concept or overlay.

“The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.”

We get confused by the idea of purity and impurity. We think of it like we might think of excrement. Excrement is impure, in a physical sense, because it makes us sick if we are not careful of it. Impure equals sickness, sickness equals bad. In this equation – which works provisionally in conventional truth – impure equals bad. Defilement equals bad. But this is all relative to our self; excrement is only bad relative to the self that does not want to be sick (which is reasonable).

In another important sense though, excrement is just a complicated thing in the world and is neither good nor bad. Excrement, in this sense, is just a step in the process of life. It even contains its own kind of life (which is why we have to be careful of it!). In this sense of it being neither good nor bad, excrement is pure; it is “free from the impurity of being” one thing or another. What Bodhidharma is pointing at here, relative to our mind, is that, if we have mental suffering around excrement, or around anything, (like, we have a mental or emotional aversion to dealing with whatever it is) we are quite possibly making it impure by holding onto a view of it. Letting go of our view of a thing or situation doesn’t mean that we somehow transform it into something that we no longer have to be careful of: like excrement, it could still make us sick. But not holding onto a view of a thing, enables us to deal with it most effectively.

From this perspective, much of our practice is coming to see where we hold onto some view or opinion about our self or about the world. As I mentioned earlier, the second noble truth says that the cause of suffering is attachment. We normally think of attachment to objects, things and conditions, but we should also be very careful to understand that attachment also applies to our views and opinions about everything. Being attached to our views and opinions is likely to be the most significant area where we create suffering for ourselves and others.

“Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma.” If we are suffering, if we are in conflict with others, especially with the Sangha, we might look into whether we can let go of how we are looking at things; let how we are looking at things change. If we are ‘practicing according to the Dharma’ – and practicing according to the Dharma is practicing in accordance with what is real – we can at least seriously consider the possibility that there is some further idea, opinion or way of looking at our life or the world, that we could let go of.

Again, though, in this Fourth Practice, Bodhidharma is pointing toward Emptiness or Purity: Shunyata. He eloquently points out that this Buddhist Emptiness is not about some indifferent, despairing, cold blankness.

And since that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging, they give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment.

That ‘that which is real contains nothing worth begrudging’ is not the source of despair, it is the source of freedom to respond to life from a place of positive generosity. “They give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret.” This place of ‘giving without regret’ and ‘without bias or attachment’, is giving from our deepest nature. When we let go of regret and bias and attachment, we open up to our deeper life; this practice is lively and not static.

Even our giving is an act of ongoing training: “and to eliminate impurity they teach others, but without becoming attached to form.” Being attached to form, holding rigidly to one way or another of doing things, is one way that impurity arises. Impurity is the delusive mind that covers up the Fundamental Purity; one of the primary delusions is the belief that the discriminatory mind and its projections are true, the sense that they are fundamentally reliable.

When we teach others, when we relate to others at all, we have to learn how to let go of all judgementalism about them or us. No matter my position, I am not better nor worse nor the same as another person. Just today, I happen to have the job of teacher and I have to take responsibility for that. As a teacher, it is expected of me, in practicing the Dharma, that I will look carefully at how I give rise to the impurity of pride and let that go; I must work to convert any pride or inadequacy that arise. Pride (“I am better than another”) and inadequacy (“I am lower than another”) are the evidence that we are enmeshed in the discriminatory mind. Converting pride and inadequacy is letting go of ‘the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient.’
“But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all.”

The six virtues are the six pāramitās:

• Dāna pāramitā: generosity, giving of oneself
• Śīla pāramitā: precepts, virtue, morality, discipline, proper conduct
• Kṣānti pāramitā: patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance
• Vīrya pāramitā: energy, diligence, vigor, effort
• Dhyāna pāramitā: meditation, contemplation
• Prajñā pāramitā: wisdom, insight

To practice the pāramitās while practicing nothing at all is to understand that the prajñā pāramitā permeates all of our life; practicing the prajñā pāramitā is to be actively alert to when we are holding on to anything in our minds or spirit and to let that go. This way of practicing allows our understanding to grow and deepen.

The Prajnaparamita one should know
To be the Greatest Mantra of them all,
The highest and most peerless Mantra too;
Allayer of all pain Great Wisdom is,
It is the very Truth, no falsehood here.
This is the Mantra of Great Wisdom, hear!
Buddha, going, going, going on
Beyond and always going on beyond,
Always BECOMING Buddha. Hail! Hail! Hail!2

This is what’s meant by practicing the Dharma. Practicing the Dharma is endlessly enriching, endlessly lively, endlessly profound.

 

Notes
1. Trungpa, Chӧgyam, The Myth of Freedom, Shambhala Publications, 1976.
2. The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity, Shasta Abbey Press, Mt. Shasta, 1988.