Not Both. Including/excluding Dogen, Hakuin, Sutras, Emptiness, Zazen

Many people come to Buddhist practice for many reasons. Some who come to Buddhist practice stay with the religious background of their cultural heritage.   Some, such as myself, take up some official affiliation with Buddhism as a religion - in my case,  jukai or shòu jiè  (受戒).   To those of us who have received the precepts, Buddhist practice as a religious practice might be considered as pursuing the Great Matter a bit more deeply than those who aren't near a stream, let alone those who haven't entered It.

The immediate ancestral temple of my practice is Ryobo Zen An  (両忘禅庵 ), which means "Forget Both Zen Cottage."  "Forget Both" indicates a concept of the practice of non-duality in all one's affairs.  It is a good place for the mind to be when the mind is trying to be mindful. Hakuin, the reviver of Rinzai practice in Japan was a guy who sat a lot of zazen each day; often for 2 hours or more when not in sesshin, when of course there was substantially more zazen.  But Hakuin emphasizes in his writings that the practice is in fact to be done all the time. It needs to permeate every nook and cranny and interstice of one's existence, it needs to be dissolved into the marrow of the bones. "It's got be in the blood," as my EE 102  professor said about his AC circuits  and systems teachings.

So with all  of the foregoing said, I do think there is a bit of over-emphasis on meditation practices in some of conversations in the Buddhist blogosphere.   (I'm ignoring the pop-Buddhist celebrity Buddhist stuff today here as well, but obviously you can contextualize that in terms of what I'm writing in this post as well.)  I find it interesting that I have some agreement with one Sulak Sivarkasa, who until today, I was not aware that he was an "engaged Buddhist."

In 1953, I went to London to study. In our family background, which was middle-class and upper-class, being educated in Britain meant that you were educated properly, and that could help you get ahead. England was the place to be. While I was in England, I joined the Buddhist Society. Mr. Christmas Humphreys, founder of the Society, was a very great man.
But I did not agree with his approach. His view was that a Buddhist must concentrate on meditation, even when they are part of the society. He said that Christian men are wrong because they got involved in society and politics and lost their spirituality. To be Buddhist, he argued, you must concentrate on meditation. I felt that he was fundamentally wrong. Meditation is a good thing, but it does not mean only looking inwards. I realized that many Buddhists were from middle-class backgrounds. They didn't realize the suffering of the majority of our people. They didn't even question their own lifestyles. I think that is escapism, not Buddhism.

Of course, then he goes into social action, and if your place in the world is there, practice.  But that's not what this post is primarily discussing, but rather the practice in the whole shebang of your life. All of it.  So when Brad Warner says: 

One of the comments under the last piece [in Warner's blog] referred obliquely to Nishijima's "very personal and particular interpretation of Dogen." I have to assume he means Nishijima's ideas about the fourfold logical structure of Shobogenzo. This way of reading Dogen isn't simply a personal bias, but the result of decades of working with the text.

Nishijima has written a very detailed explanation of this way of reading Shobogenzo, which is available as a free download at:

Understanding Shobogenzo

I'm glad he pointed me in that direction, but I must still dissent a bit.  I actually do read Dogen kind of the way Nishijima does (though for some reason the results of Dogen's teachings seem even now somewhat less "active" than that bald devil Hakuin.)  But when Nishijima says the following, and remember,  Nishijima is writing linearly here, not in the way of Dogen:

Here I would offer some advice. In order to study Master Dogen’s Buddhism, I think that it is very important to rely on his teachings completely. We must be very exact in our study. If we only immerse ourselves half-way, accepting some of his teachings, and criticizing others, it will become impossible to gain a full understanding of the complete philosophical system which he expounds.

Dogen is useful, and a historically great teacher and yes, even philosopher, but there's no point as I see necessarily being an apologist for Dogen if being an apologist for your practice  is not skillful towards your practice.  There is no point in swimming every day if it is not useful for your practice.  While I personally think Hakuin has been a more profound and influential teacher in my life, and my teachers' lives, I cannot find it useful to be an apologist for everything Hakuin did. Nor, for that my matter, my teachers.  And I don't expect them to be apologists for me.  Naturally, of course Dogen sangha people will admire their founding teacher, and I admire Hakuin.  But there's a limit, I think; even Warner would admit that. Similarly, I find it absurd to condemn someone because of their inexhaustible and beginingless greed, anger, and delusion, especially when the results of that might in fact be one's own greed, anger and delusion.  And that, by the way, I'm sure is a sentiment that is some kind of similar sentiment that must animate Genjo Marinello's thoughts about Eido Shimano.  But that's another story.  But regarding the condemnation, I also don't mean this post to say to others, "See you got it wrong! It's really like this!!!"  Yet still I can't resist the link that says, you know, I don't want this post, or any other  to sound like this;  I suppose that is my beginingless greed, anger, and delusion popping up.  (And for the record,  it seems the Zennist fails to grasp emptiness, based on my take-away from that post. There. I said it.)

I have had a few years doing this blogging, and it has taken a while to find a "voice" for this blog, and I think it's kind of true for writing in general.  This weblog is, or should be, about Buddhist practice in real life, which includes, but is not solely about meditation, sutra study,  current events, Buddhist celebrities, but inevitably should come back to being about Buddhist practice, which takes place, hopefully, everywhere, and is densely permeating the whole universe. 

I hope my practice blogging helps.

Let's talk about death! And Father's Day!

This week I attended the memorial service for someone in my company (I'll call him "J") who had died after a long illness; he had toughed it out for severl years, but finally, he went rather quickly.

Yesterday, my son - who espouses strong atheism, albeit at the age of  8 - asked me what happens to the mind after death.  My first answer was it really does not matter; nobody really knows, but we should live our lives as if every day were our last.  As I was speaking to him, my son -wisely for his age- pointed out that to be born meant one will indeed die, but still he had the question what happened to the mind?  I was reminded of some words written a while back by Jean Paul Sartre...

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible
existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man is mortal!” And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death than…”

And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered NO. But the very cruelty of the enemy drove us to the extremities of this condition by forcing us to ask ourselves questions that one never considers in time of peace. All those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew any details concerning the Resistance asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex: it is the limit of his
own liberty, his capacity for resisting torture and death.

To those who were engaged in underground activities, the conditions of their struggle afforded a new kind of experience. They did not fight openly like soldiers. In all circumstances they were alone. They were hunted down in solitude, arrested in solitude. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?

I don't think I quite answered his question, despite these a few of these  beautiful words appearing in my head.  (I quoted more than is relevant here, simply because it's generally hard to find the extension of this famous quote of his elsewhere.) 

Of course death is like this torturer, and also to a certain extent Sartre, like many of his comrades experienced a certain psychological effect as a result of these experiences.  

Mumon in his commentary on Joshu's Mu ( 無) relates that on penetrating 無 one will be "free in his way of birth and death" according to the translation by Paul Reps.

Hakuin, in writing to a Nichiren nun spoke of his relatively shallow first experiences of what he thought was his  awakening:

In a loud voice I called: "Wonderful, wonderful. There is no cycle of birth and death through which one must pass. There is no enlightenment one must seek. The seventeen hundred koans handed down from the past have not the slightest value whatsoever." My pride soared up like a majestic mountain, my arrogance surged forward like the tide. Smugly I thought to myself: "In the past two or three hundred years no one could have accomplished such a marvelous breakthrough as this."

Shouldering my glorious enlightenment, I set out at once for Shinano. Calling on Master Shoju, I told of my experience and presented him with a verse. The Master, holding my verse up in his left hand, said to me: "This verse is what you have learned from study. Now show me what your intuition has to say," and he held out his right hand.

I replied: "If there were something intuitive that I could show you, I'd vomit it out," and I made a gagging sound.

The Master said: "How do you understand Chao-chou's Mu?"

I replied: "What sort of place does Mu have that one can attach arms and legs to it?"

The Master twisted my nose with his fingers and said: "Here's someplace to attach arms and legs." I was nonplussed and the Master gave a hearty laugh. "You poor hole-dwelling devil!" he cried. I paid him no attention and he continued: "Do you think somehow that you have sufficient understanding?"

I answered: "What do you think is missing?"

Then the Master began to discuss the koan that tells of Nan-ch'uan's death. I clapped my hands over my ears and started out of the room. The Master called after me, "Hey, monk!" and when I turned to him he added: "You poor hole-dwelling devil!" From then on, almost every time he saw me, the Master called me a "poor hole-dwelling devil."

One evening the Master lay cooling himself on the veranda. Again I brought him a verse I had written. "Delusions and fancies," the Master said. I shouted his words back at him in a loud voice, whereupon the Master seized me and rained twenty or thrity blows with his fists on me, and then pushed me off the veranda.

This was on the fourth day of the fifth month after a long spell of rain. I lay stretched out in the mud as though dead, scarcely breathing and almost unconscious. I could not move; meanwhile the Master sat on the veranda roaring with laughter. After a short while I regained consciousness, got up, and bowed to the Master. My body was bathed in perspiration. The Master called out to me in a loud voice: "You poor hole-dwelling devil!"

After I devoted myself to an intense study of the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan, not pausing to sleep or eat. One day I had an awakening and went to the Master's room to test my understanding, but he would not approve it. All he did was call me a "poor hole-dwelling devil."

Later on in that same writing, if my memory and the website I've quoted are correct, Hakuin says about the death of Nan-ch'uan:

If you wish to test the validity of your own powers, you must first study the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan.

A long time ago San-sheng had the head monk Hsiu go to the Zen Master Tsen of Ch'ang-sha and ask him: "What happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passes away?"

Ch'ang-sha replied: "When Shih-t'ou became a novice monk he was seen by the Sixth Patriarch."

Hsiu replied: "I didn't ask you about when Shih-t'ou became a novice monk; I asked you what happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passed away."

Ch'ang-sha replied: "If I were you I would let Nan-ch'uan worry about it himself."

Hsiu replied: "Even though you had a thousand-foot winter pine, there is no bamboo shoot to rise above its branches."

Ch'ang had nothing to say. Hsiu returned and told the story of his conversation to San-sheng. San-sheng unconsciously stuck out his tongue [in surprise] and said: "He has surpassed Lin-chi by seven paces."

If you are able to understand and make clear these words, then I will acknowledge that you have a certain degree of responsiveness to the teachings. Why is this so? If you speak to yourself while no one is around, you behave as meanly as a rat. What can anyone possibly prove [about your understanding]?

I remember at the age of nine how shocked I was at my grandmother's death; and the way in which my parents had handled it didn't exactly soften the blow for me, although they (obviously in retrospect) had bigger fish to fry mentally at the time.

My father died in 2001; he did get a chance to see my son before he died; today is Father's Day. 

I feel very much at peace with all that; and in the service for the man from my company who died, I was amazed at how the narrative still revolves around, "Death's no problem for us because of Jesus."  I was sad because so many many many alternate possibilities for peaceful, harmonious reconciliation with the notion of death were excluded, as was, in my view, an inability even to conceive of such alternates.

One alternate might be seen in the myriad of possibilities of the answers to questions from my son.   Perhaps my answer - a bit from Sartre, a bit from Suzuki Shosan -  was also in the direction of the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan. (Perhaps not.)

In something Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote he pointed out the issues arising from consciousness  - I think that was the area of intent of my son's question.  If a computer were sentient, could we know it? (Probably not - we can't even tell if anybody else besides us is sentient. Yes we take that "on faith" and yes, the subjective and objective spheres retain their character of subjectivity and objectivity despite their interdependent origination. )  So even if a smarty pants computer comes along, it wouldn't matter to us.

I did tell my son, "nobody really knows" what happens after you die, but I also did mention  that the idea that consciousness or awareness is irretrievably lost in death does not seem to be the case either.  It is manifestly obvious to me that the effects of those I have known and have died still hurtle forward in this world; where do these effects end and "their" consciousness begin?  Yeah, OK, if we're talking only about the meat computer between the ears, and its electrochemical phenomena,  it does the way of all meat.  But I don't think awareness actually is subsumed by that totality; it simply does not appear to be the case when I think about that spinning wheel.

I remember my father.  I remember J. Neither of them talked much about death, especially in the last months of their lives, and to the extent that such issues did come up, it was realistically expressed, at least in my father's case.  

I'd like to say I miss my father, but I feel  he's still here, regardless of whatever  happened to his consciousness.  I'm sure he's dealing with it fine.

A bit of advice from Hakuin

In case you were wondering about whether you were certifiably enlightened or not...

If you wish to test the validity of your own powers, you must first study the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan.

A long time ago San-sheng had the head monk Hsiu go to the Zen Master Tsen of Ch'ang-sha and ask him: "What happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passe[d] away?"

Ch'ang-sha replied: "When Shih-t'ou became a novice monk he was seen by the Sixth Patriarch."

Hsiu replied: "I didn't ask you about when Shih-t'ou became a novice monk; I asked you what happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passed away."

Ch'ang-sha replied: "If I were you I would let Nan-ch'uan worry about it himself."

Hsiu replied: "Even though you had a thousand-foot winter pine, there is no bamboo shoot to rise above its branches."

Ch'ang had nothing to say. Hsiu returned and told the story of his conversation to San-sheng. San-sheng unconsciously stuck out his tongue [in surprise] and said: "He has surpassed Lin-chi by seven paces."

If you are able to understand and make clear these words, then I will acknowledge that you have a certain degree of responsiveness to the teachings. Why is this so? If you speak to yourself while no one is around, you behave as meanly as a rat. What can anyone possibly prove [about your understanding]?

I also think it's a good way to measure Spiritual Hucksterosity.

HT to Gniz, whose post about Andrew Cohen (I just can't get over that people take that guy seriously) reminded me of this bit by Hakuin.

This Tathagata's True Meaning

Hakuin,in the Orategama, reads the Lotus Sutra differently than I've been reading it. He defines the "message" the thing that is propagated, as not the literal Lotus Sutra text itself, but rather the Awakened One's Meaning behind the Lotus Sutra. That's what will give the Multiverse ecstatic joy.

But Hakuin warns that "this meaning" is our meaning, as in Case 39 of the Mumonkan, as in what caused ancestors to lose limbs, to be threatened by wolves, and to be otherwise consensually posited on the knife's edge between life and death, as a "middle way" that might be middling enough for many people, but when it's your life it's YOUR life you're leading and with which you are resolving the Great Matter.

As they say in one of the standards bodies I've attended: "Document noted."

Which means: pay deep attention.

Which also means: the "conflict of interest" I wrote of earlier doesn't really enter.

It's not about the writer(s) of the Lotus Sutra.