Sanshin Alexander, Rev.

I am in the retreat hut. There is a slow and irregular pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof. Still half-asleep, I rub my eyes, remembering that after meditation last night I discovered that a large candle on the altar had melted its side, allowing wax to drip and spatter silently on to blankets, clothing, a suitcase, a laundry bag and a metal folding chair. “How am I going to remove all that?” was the question in my mind.I’m slightly preoccupied with the question, but as it’s still dark I sit down to meditate. It will be easier to survey the extent of the spattering when daylight comes. And also there is the call to sit. It is the important thing. There is something that calls us here. We answer the call by coming.

Sometimes there is an external call: a recommendation or an invitation. Daikan Enō was directed to visit Daiman Kōnin on Obai Mountain. Dōgen was recommended to find a teacher in China to help him find an answer to his question. Rev. Master Jiyu was invited by Kōhō Zenji to come to Japan to be his personal disciple. These are the external calls.

There is also the inner call, the seed of what brings us here. Prince Gautama was called by an inner sense that he needed to look outside the palace walls; something he needed to see for himself. He answered the call and plumbed the depths of his response. Aged 7, Dōgen was moved when he saw the smoke rising as his mother’s cremation took place, and the way-seeking mind was aroused in him. Rev. Master Jiyu saw a monastic in the street when she was aged 5 and something resonated deeply within her. Arriving in Japan some 33 years later she realised in the midst of difficult conditions that she was desperate to meditate. The call can be subtle, or a deafening roar, and each day the call is there; the call is what brings us to face the wall, and there is always something that calls us.

Some time ago I was drawn to read the Surangama Sutra. And then in a recent OBC Journal article Rev. Master Jishō wrote about it,¹ which inspired me to look at it again.

The Sutra begins with a description of a time at the end of the Summer training period, when the Buddha was about to offer a great teaching, eagerly anticipated by the Assembly, and at the same time the King wished to honour the Assembly with a feast in memory of his father’s death. Ananda is the only disciple missing. He had accepted an invitation to stay out overnight, and then the next day he went unaccompanied on his alms round, and when passing a house of courtesans, he is drawn close to a young woman who tries to seduce him by chanting a spell. He is on the verge of breaking his vow of celibacy when the Buddha realises what is happening, and sends Manjusri to give him support, and also to support the young woman.On his return to the Assembly, Ananda bows before the Buddha and weeps in sorrow, regretting what he had done, and seeing that his practice was not fully developed.

The Sutra continues in the form of a dialogue in which Shakyamuni asks Ananda to explain his understanding of the nature of mind and the senses, and using a traditional system of logic, he patiently dismantles Ananda’s propositions. He teaches Ananda and the Assembly that mind is not located in our senses, nor in the objects of our senses:

Neither the objects nor the perceptions of them have an essential nature; they are all dependent on each other like intertwining reeds. Know therefore, that the establishment of perceived objects such that they exist separately within your awareness is the foundation of ignorance.²

Neither the objects nor the perceptions of them have an essential nature. The mind, which is our ordinary everyday mind of thinking, does not have an essential nature, and neither do the objects that the mind creates. Shakyamuni gives the example of someone pointing a finger at the moon: when we look at the finger we mistake it for the moon, and also when we look at the moon we mistake it for the finger; neither of them are our True Nature, but our attention can wander towards the finger or towards the moon.

There is wax that drips. There is the removal of it. When we are drawn to focus on the thing or the seeing of it we create an object, and there is separation; we are conscious of the object and the sense of it. This perception in itself is not of the True Mind, and at some level we know this. There is separation, and often a level of preoccupation, or fear, or worry or anxiety that goes with it. The thought of wax becomes an object of mind; the memory of wax becomes an object of mind.

As it says in Rules for Meditation: “The separation will be as that between Heaven and Earth … for when the opposites arise, the Buddha Mind is lost.” In Ananda’s case he was drawn towards what he was hearing. He was drawn towards the object of his senses and by the impact on his senses.

The Buddha’s teaching here is not to be drawn away from our true nature by following the objects of our minds. He uses the analogy of a knotted scarf to describe the way in which our sense-faculties, including the faculty of mind, bind together with our senses to create a knot. He tied six knots in the scarf, each representing one of the sense-faculties. The scarf is our True Nature, and when the Assembly see the knotted scarf they no longer see the original scarf. The scarf is changed into something else. It’s now a knotted scarf.

In order to untie the knots, in order to see with the True Mind, we need to redirect our attention inwardly: with each sense, Shakyamuni says, we need to reverse the direction we had been following, so instead of following the external objects of our sense-faculties we are returning our attention within, to stillness, and when we have done this for one sense-faculty we have done it for all of them:

“Extricate one faculty by detaching it from its objects, and redirect that faculty inward to what is original and true. Then it will radiate the light of the original understanding. This brilliant light will shine forth and extricate the other five faculties until they are completely free.”³

In other words, when sitting in zazen we dissolve the separation between mind and object. With the attention directed inwardly towards the still centre, there is only this.

Often it is these knots that we create in our everyday lives that call us back to meditation, this sense of ‘me’ and ‘something’. Mind and object, self and other. “He did this”, or “she said that”, or “I like this”, or “I don’t like them”. These things will arise. In his recent article on fear in the OBC Journal, Rev. Master Kinrei reminds us that we are not going to eradicate these emotions, these things that arise:

“It is a deeply mistaken view if we think we can live without fear and desire arising. They will always arise since they are one of the ways we need to relate to the world and the conditions of our life. But the liberation comes from learning not to cling to them so they can flow through our life like the weather.”⁴

Turning the light within dissolves the clinging. To see that we separate the objects of our senses and of the mind is to dissolve the clinging. As Dōgen says in the Kyōjukaimon, on the Precept ‘Do Not Steal’: “The mind and its object are one; the gateway to enlightenment stands open wide.”

Notes.

1. Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, Autumn 2020, p.5, Rev. Master Jishō Perry.

2. The Śūrangama Sutra, with excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable Master Hsüan Hua, Buddhist Text Translation Society 2009, p. 193.

3. The Śūrangama Sutra, with excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable Master Hsüan Hua, Buddhist Text Translation Society 2009, p. 182.

4. Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, Autumn 2020, p.15, originally published in the May-June 2020 Berkeley Buddhist Priory Newsletter, Rev. Master Kinrei Bassis.