Well, yes. It's time for another Practice Period, one I have been eager to join -- though I'm having problems doing so given the build up of other things.
The text for study is a translation of the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi by Dongshan, c. 850ce or so. (The link is to a somewhat different translation which includes the original Chinese.)
I recognized it from much earlier Buddhist readings I had done 50-60 years ago, but which I hadn't reviewed in many decades. Much of my Buddhist training and practice was absorbed at one point in my life -- mostly long ago -- and that was it: there was no need to return to the specific sutra or teaching. I think this is how most of us are educated. We receive a teaching in school or life appropriate to the grade or stage of life we're in and once taught the teaching is never returned to. If it is, it's probably due to a contrary teaching we pick up later in our education and life.
That seems to be a the root of some of the problems some of the participants and having with this text. To me, it's very simple, straightforward (though poetic) and... easy to grasp. But then, this isn't new to me. I absorbed it so long ago and in doing so, the text an the thinking of it became part of my being. It doesn't vanish because I haven't sat with it for a long time, and it isn't more difficult this time around than it was the first time around.
For many of the participants, however, this is their first encounter with it, and the whole concept of "thusness" or "suchness" (long academic treatise on the study-text) is new to them. Many, I've discovered, are PhDs, MDs, and so forth, with all kinds of advanced degrees, credentials, academic accomplishments, books written and read, and a certain level of regard if not renown in their fields.
Who would have thought this would be problematical? Well, it is. The tendency to overintellectualize the teaching is overwhelming.
It is when it comes to Zen and Buddhist teaching. Which, for the most part, is very simple and is a very different, almost an opposite approach to learning than they or most of us are used to. It can be very hard to accept if it shatters the mold of hard-won learning-living experience. And no, I am not immune as my struggles with the Mountains and Waters Sutra (and lingering disregard for Gary Snyder) have demonstrated.
It is human nature in some respects, and we practitioners of the 8 Fold Path are advised to respect that.
As I've learned that Zen grew out of the Japanese samurai culture of medieval times. It's adapted from the contemporaneous Chan Buddhism found in China which was taken to Japan by Dogen, and which spread rather quickly through the upper reaches of Japanese society. It was never -- and is not now -- a popular practice.
There are more Zen Buddhists outside of Japan than there ever were in Japan, and there aren't a lot of Zen Buddhists anywhere. It's a particular form of Buddhist practice that can be over-rigorous for many. And also kind of silly. When you're into it, you know how silly it is, and if you don't laugh, your practice is stunted.
Samurai culture is not the culture within which most of us live, and while Zen has tried to adapt, especially in the US, to different cultural expectations and norms, and has adopted a wide range of other Buddhist practices, outlooks and teachings (so much so that I hardly recognize it as Zen Buddhism any more) the samurai origins of the practice are not completely absent.
Samurai were warriors after all, and Zen was a way not so much to tame them as to give them the psychic tools to transcend warriorism and potentially become better warriors. Not all of that has disappeared in today's Zen practice, but it has definitely mutated.
Warriors are trained in a very narrow and specific manner. Zen opened that narrow path wide. Still does.
I've ruminated on the fact that what's presented as Zen these days in the US only superficially resembles its Japanese roots. Once Suzuki Roshi passed in 1971, Zen in America and subsequently elsewhere except in Japan became something else again. I've struggled with some of those changes, too.
There are plenty of those of us who practice now who struggle with those changes. Why not, we may wonder, just be Tibetan Buddhists if that's what seems right for the moment? Why not follow Tich Nhat Hanh directly in a hybrid Vietnamese/French Zen practice? Why maintain the trappings of Japanese Zen when that practice seems either obsolete or inappropriate?
We've moved on. Haven't we?
Then we get to study the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi and -- at least for me -- it all falls right back into place. "Thusness," "Suchness" is the core teaching and this is how it can be approached.
I was asked during the last ango I participated in whether I chanted, and I said no, not out loud. The Song is one of the chants used by this Zen Center (widely elsewhere, too) but chants, to me, are rote and ritual like the Pledge Allegiance signifying... what? As a child recites the Pledge, what? Meaning? Nah.
So chanting to me obscures the point and meaning of what is being chanted while reinforcing a tendency to be satisfied with repeated empty ritual. This is one reason I've never been a church-goer or felt tied to a religious institution.
But if "suchness" is the core of the teaching of Zen, what is it?
Wrong question. There's no answer.
I was considering that "dream" I had when I was late for zazen one morning during Spring Practice, the "dream" of leaving my apartment in San Francisco, walking to Union Square, sitting zazen on a bench with an old Chinese man for a while, then walking clockwise around the square and eventually to Market Street, up to Taylor, then up to Geary and back to my apartment where the whole thing started over again.
This sequence of events actually happened to me as I described it, and as I relived it in the "dream." I didn't know why it came back as clearly and suddenly as it did or why it repeated that morning, but I think my teacher understood though she wouldn't say. Of course, it was up to me to figure it out.
And this practice period, it seems to be figuring itself out.
Prior to my physical experience of those events in San Francisco so long ago (what, it would have been 1975? about then) I had sat zazen in my apartment on Geary St. daily. I had a zazen experience during which I entered what I came to call The Void. Nothingness. No sight, sound, color, thought, feeling, anything, just Emptiness. Initially, it was bewildering. I could enter and leave it with relative ease, but I didn't know what "it" was, and I recalled warnings from study-texts that said something like "this could happen while sitting zazen, and don't put too much store in it. It could be false, just another delusion, but one that could be dangerous. "
I took the warnings to heart, and as I didn't have a teacher at the time, I tried sorting through it on my own with whatever study-texts I had (I don't remember the titles except for "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Suzuki Roshi) and recognized/acknowledged that every time I sat zazen after that, the Void would return, and that was that. There wasn't another sitting experience.
So the events described in the "dream" of sitting with an old Chinese gentleman in Union Square happened shortly after a Void-Sit in my apartment. It was an instruction which I recognized as such at the time but didn't have the resources to fully appreciate. I knew "something had happened." But I didn't know what.
I may know now, thanks to the Winter Practice Period study-text of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi and the somewhat spotty participation I'm doing with the Zoom-sangha.
It is not really describable in words, however, nor will deeds necessarily clarify. But I understand better why I'm reluctant to become an official member of this sangha.
I go back to a very early teaching: "The Buddha is within you; the Dharma is you; the Sangha is with whomever you encounter on the Dharma Path."
The core of the Teaching (Dharma) is "Thusness."
In other words... no words.
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