UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud: Recent Episodes

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As I mentioned in the last installment, when thinking about content for the next Dharma Byte or UnMind podcast, I turn to my collaborators for inspiration: Hokai Jeff Harper, publisher of the newsletter, and Shinjin Larry Little, producer of the podcast. Jeff responded to a recent call for suggested topics with:

• To everything there is a season

• The wax and wane of householder zazen practice

• What we are feeling right now IS impermanence manifesting itself

In the last episode I delved into the first of these three, the seeming seasonality of everything as a universal principle. We might take a moment to remind ourselves that seasonality is also considered natural, as the waxing and waning of the four seasons. And, while somewhat arbitrary as a concept, is considered causal in terms of the natural sciences of biology, botany, and even psychology — as in "seasonal affective disorder." Arbitrary in the sense that, as Master Dogen says, "You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring." Now that we have gotten off the planet, any middle-schooler knows that the root causes of the seasons is a universal phenomenon. Unless they are being home-schooled by a flat-earther, that is.

In this segment we will take up the second, the waxing and waning of householder practice, moving the discussion to the social level. Which, of course, is part and parcel of our personal sphere of activity and influence.

Whether Hokai meant to point out the usual periodic waxing and waning of our personal commitment to meditation in the context of the many distractions assailing your average householder; or a more societal angle on how householder engagement has grown and diminished over time through the various Eastern countries of origin, compared to its prevalence and intensity in the West modern times, I am not sure. I think it may be more instructive to consider the alternative — monastic practice — and how it colors our perspective on our own, personal options for pursuing the dharma in the midst of life.

Zen householders often harbor a misconception that because we are householders — and not monastics — that we cannot hope to penetrate to the fundamental meaning of the teachings of Buddhism. This seems to be a widely shared meme in the Western culture, perhaps particularly in America. And it is based on a fundamental misconception — namely that the social sphere of Zen trumps the personal sphere —that you can tell a book by its cover, when it comes to Zen practice. But you can't.

Because we interpret the history of Zen Buddhism as primarily monastic, from its inception in India and its transmission through China, Korea, Japan and the Far East, we presume that the approach of material renunciation — leaving the householder life for that of the mendicant monk, nun, or hermit, or wandering on pilgrimage — is the most effective way, the only way, of recovering our Original Nature, or Buddha Mind.

While traditional prescriptions for practice definitely include divesting ourselves of our dependency upon, and predilection for, the pleasures and problems of our times, the renunciation recommended in Zen is not limited to merely rejecting and replacing one lifestyle for another. It is more a matter of seeing through the delusional aspect of any way of living. Including monasticism. This is true spiritual poverty.

Master Dogen articulated four levels of renunciation that members of his monastic community were either able or unable to embrace, which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere. They range from the ability or inability to relinquish attachment to family, home, inheritance, et cetera, to the inability or ability to relinquish our own opinions and biases regarding our own reality, regardless of outer appearances. The latter — Dogen's highest level of renunciation — would apply equally to monastic or householder. So apparently the main difference between the two lifestyle choices is that the former is relatively simpler compared to the complexities of the latter. In terms of the ability to realize the truth of Buddhism, lifestyle is just another form of pomp and circumstance.

If you find your practice — by which we usually mean meditation — is waxing and waning beyond your intentions and control, you might want to take a radical departure. Stop. Quit, with all the negative connotations that may have in our goal-oriented culture and society. Admit that you have failed, once again. Or rationalize that Zen may work for others, but it does not work for you.

In doing so — in "not doing Zen" — you will confirm your bias, and prove to yourself that, like everything else you have tried in life, it just didn't get the job done. Zen did not live up to your expectations. Now that you have resolved that untidy business you can get on with your life. Good luck with that.

It turns out that this kind of discernment, that Zen is something we started doing, so it is something we can stop doing, is a category error of the first degree. There actually is no such thing as "Zen." Zen is what we call this particular meditation sect of Buddhism, but like any other sect, it only exists as a construction of our societal mind. It is a learned thing that upon examination evaporates like a puff of smoke, or a cloud in the sky.

The etymology of "Zen" is one example of this misinterpretation. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the term Zen is actually a misnomer. It is phonetic Japanese for Ch'an, which is phonetic Chinese for Dhyana, which is a traditional form of contemplative meditation that the Chinese pundits assumed Bodhidharma was demonstrating when he would abruptly turn his back on them, facing the mountain wall instead. But the great sage was not doing dhyana. He was not contemplating anything in particular. He was demonstrating what is referred to in Japanese as shikantaza, which according to Master AI, means:

Shikantaza, often translated as "just sitting," is a foundational Zen practice that involves sitting in a quiet, meditative posture without focusing on any specific object or thought. It's about being present, aware, and simply experiencing the present moment.

If even this barebones definition does not capture the implications of the term, we have no one to blame but an artificial intelligence summarizing who knows how many verbal references on the large language model on which it has been trained. Defined as:

A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate human-like text based on the context provided. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of text data and learn to predict the next word or sequence of words in a text, allowing them to perform tasks like natural language processing, machine translation, and content generation.

So it has come to this. We are using artificial intelligence to define artificial intelligence.

With such developments as AI adding to the present overload of distractions, threats, alternative career choices, endless learning curves, and entangling relationships at home, work and play that householders have on their plates today, we can be forgiven for developing some ambiguity around adding to the list, or continuing to follow, yet another demanding regimen: Zen. Again, category error.

We are already practicing Zen, from the moment we are born — and even before we are born, in the traditional Buddhist view — whether we know it or not. Everybody else is likewise. "Zen" is what we call that fact. Zen is a word that points at something that is not a thing, and in fact does not exist as an isolate or instantiation of anything. It is "the whole catastrophe" to quote Zorba the Greek. If Bodhidharma was contemplating anything, it was everything, which beggars the concept of "contemplation."

In closing, let me quote myself again, from my closing statement from the last segment:

Next month we will take up the second suggestion, the waxing and waning of householder zazen practice. Been there, done that.

"Been there, done that" is not exactly true. I never began Zen practice, it began me. And I will never quit, though it may appear to be so to the outside observer. Zen is not something we can do. It is not in the realm of doing. So we cannot stop doing it, either. We either do it poorly or do it relatively well, like most things in life. Zazen is not something we have to do; it is something we get to do. Zen cannot wax and wane; it only seems to in our imagination. Perversely, there is no choice in the matter. The worse it gets, the better it is. "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences." Including a preference for what we

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"Zen in Our Time" and "Connecting the Dots" are themes that I have hit upon for 2025, forming the thread running through (one meaning of "sutra") all of my DharmaByte newsletter columns and online UnMind podcasts this year.

Contextualizing the teachings and legacy of Zen in modern times — without throwing the baby out with the bathwater — is key to transmitting Zen's legacy. Connecting the dots in the vast matrix of Dharma — while bridging the gap between 500 BC to 2025 CE in terms of the cultures, causes and conditions — is necessary to foster the evolution of Shakyamuni's Great Vow, from the closing verse of the Lotus Sutra's Lifespan Chapter:

I am always thinking: by what means can I cause sentient beings to be able to enter the highest path and quickly attain the Dharma?

As in so many aspects of our overloaded society, when contemplating the next column or podcast, the question always arises, "Where do I begin?" I turn to my collaborators — Hokai Jeff Harper, publisher of the newsletter, and Shinjin Larry Little, producer of the podcast — for clarity and inspiration. Jeff responded to my call for suggested topics with an intriguing trio:

• To everything there is a season

• The wax and wane of householder zazen practice

• What we are feeling right now IS impermanence manifesting itself

Instead of choosing one over the others, it occurred to me that all three are important. And they are interrelated, in a kind of fish-trap narrowing of focus, from the universal span of spacetime as a causal nexus for humankind; then homing in on the social level, considering the modern householder's vacillation in attempting to pursue what began long ago as a monastic lifestyle; and finally zeroing in on the personal: the intimacy of realization within the immediate flow of reality. I will attempt to treat them in succession over the next three installments, in the context of transmission of Zen's Original Mind.

TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON

If you find the 1960s Pete Seeger song popularized by the Byrds running through your brain, you are not alone. If you recollect the poem from Ecclesiastes — which I studied in a unique, small-town high school literature course — you may be hearing echoes of:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Or from Tozan Ryokai:

Within causes and conditions, time and season, IT is serene and illuminating

And finally, from Dogen Zenji:

Firewood becomes ash and it does not become firewood again.Yet do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future, and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past.

Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death...

Birth is an expression complete this moment; death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring; you do not call winter the "beginning" of spring, nor summer the "end" of spring.

There are many more such incisive and insightful references to time in the literature of Zen, as well as Western thinking, of course, most notably Master Dogen's fascicle titled "Uji," which translates as something like "Being-time," "Existence-time," or "Living time," as Uchiyama-roshi renders it. This 13th Century writing is said to have anticipated the theory of Relativity, Einsteins' prodigious accomplishment, perhaps the most important scientific breakthrough of the 20th Century.

But these few recollections from the rich legacy of Zen's written record will suffice for our purposes of connecting some of the dots in Indra's Net, or the modern components of the "Matrix of the Thus-Come One" as described in the Surangama Sutra.

Scanning the Biblical poem, it is striking to see so many various activities and reactions to the obligations and behaviors of daily human life listed in equally dispassionate terms, not implying false equivalencies, but for example to blithely assert that there is "a time to kill" and "a time to heal"; "a time of war" and "a time of peace" — in the same breath — is in itself breathtaking, considering the admonition against killing, or murder, found in the Ten Commandments as well as the first Five Grave Precepts of Buddhism.

Jumping to Master Tozan, or Dongshan, the founder of Soto Zen in 9th Century China, we find a hint of some resolution of the "whole catastrophe" in his reference to "IT" being "serene and illuminating," regardless of time and season, causes and conditions.

This "it" appears in various Buddhist sayings and teachings, as tathata in Sanskrit — the inexpressible; or inmo in Japanese — the ineffable, the essential. These all point to what I analogize as a "singularity of consciouness" that emerges in zazen, where we pass the event horizon of conventional perception — the mind collapsing inward of its own mass — returning to and revealing our Original Mind, merging subject and object, duality and nonduality, in mokurai — the resolution of all apparent dichotomies.

Earlier in Tozan's Precious Mirror Samadhi, or Hokyo Zammai, from which the above quote is taken, he magnifies the central place of this "it" in the experiential realm of Zen realization:

Although IT is not constructed, IT is not beyond words
Like facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each other
You are not IT but in truth IT is you

Master Dogen's coinage of "the backward step" captures this 180-degree attitude adjustment in the way we usually approach learning, self-improvement, and general development as human beings on the learning curve of reality. "From the very beginning all beings are buddhas," as Hakuin Zenji, 18th Century Rinzai Zen master, poet and artist states in the first line of his famous poem, "Song of Zazen."

For every thing there may be a season, but when it comes to the most important thing in Buddhism, there is fundamentally no change — from beginning to middle to end — of this "poor player," life, strutting and fretting his/her hour upon the stage. In another line from Chinese Zen, the third Ancestor in 6th Century China captures this succinctly:

Change appearing to occur in the empty world we call real
only because of our ignorance.

So, somehow, once again, we are getting it all wrong, backwards. Our recourse is, of course, to get our butts back to the cushion; trust the original mind; take the backward step; and embrace the revolutionary notion that WE are not IT, but in truth IT is US. I cannot resist the urge to close this segment with one of my favorite quotes from the great Master Pogo:

We have met the enemy and he is us.

It may be a comfort to realize that "mine enemy grows older" as we age. We just have to outlive our enemies, including our own ignorance.

Next month we will take up the second suggestion, the waxing and waning of householder zazen practice. Been there, done that.

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ZEN IN OUR TIME

“Connecting the Dots”

Some of you A few may have undergone formal training, in Zen or other meditative traditions, or you may be a relative newcomer to Zen.

The objective of this essay is Whatever your experience level, this course should help you sort the wheat from the chaff, to clarify for yourself which teachings of Buddhism are relevant to you, to provide some background on Zen Buddhism, how to integrate Zen practice into your daily life, and the importance of Zen’s unique style of meditation, and finally some approaches to integrating Zen practice into your daily life..

My approach to Zen may seem a bit different from others you may be familiar with. The reason for this is NOTE: Applying my professional training in design thinking, which influences how I see the world.

To augment more traditional text-based presentations of Zen and buddha-dharma, my training in graphic design, I have charted the basic teachings as 3D structures flattened into 2D charts, available upon request. This illustrates their interrelatedness, providing visual aids and mnemonics to help you visualize and remember them. The graphic models allow further analysis of overlapping and interconnected implications of what otherwise typically appear as linear constructs and literary outlines in the verbal formword. We are literally going to connect the dots to the degree possible.

Basics of Buddhism

Zen NOTE: Applying my training in graphic design, I have charted the basic teachings of Zen as semantic models, 3D structures flattened into 2D charts, for the sake of illustrating their interrelatedness, as well as providing visual aids and mnemonics for you to visualize and remember them. These will also allow you to do further analysis of the overlapping and interconnected implications of what otherwise appear as linear constructs in the written word. Buddhism is both very simple and complex at the same time. As we say in design circles, "simple in concept; difficult in execution." The amount of material available on Buddhism appears virtually endless. I am not a scholar, nor a historian, but it may be helpful to provide some background from the perspective of Zen practice, on the subject as I understand it

The Four Noble Truths

Buddha re-discovered these truths in his meditation and articulatedmeditation them in his "First Sermon.” He unfolds a model of "Four Noble Truths." This quartet constitutes a kind of take-it-or-leave-it description of reality, the causes and conditions of sentient existence, including the Eightfold Path, a thoroughgoing prescription for practice, covering the eight dimensions of leading a Zen life based on meditation. All of the teachings may be seen as corrective descriptions of enlightened realty and prescriptions for taking action based on the enlightened worldview.

Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths are traditionally translated as the existence of suffering, its origin in craving, the potential of cessation, and the path to follow in daily life, leading to cessation. This begs the question — WhatWhat, exactly, makes them so noble, after all? They can beare ennobling, but only if we embrace them. If we do, : they can enable us to live a life of compassion in the context of inexorable change, or "suffering." The Noble Truths do not change with circumstance. They do not interact with, nor react to, changes in circumstance.

The first of the four truths is that this existence — indeed any physical existence — is of the nature of suffering (Skt. dukkha). There is no existence without change, the universal dynamic. Galaxies colliding, the Big Bang — all is dukkha. As human beings, we are caught up in this change, and we tend to take it personally. We suffer not only physically, but also emotionally, mentally, and even socially.

The second truth is that most of our suffering is finds its origin in our own attachment and aversion,, craving, or thirst: clinging to the pleasant, and avoiding the unpleasant. Suffering is both natural —, as in aging, sickness and death —, and unnatural or intentional —, as in self-inflicted and mutually-inflicted suffering between human beings, and imposed upon other beings, sentient and insentient. On a personal level, Buddhism embraces suffering, rather than trying to avoid it.

The third of the truths offers hopeis that suffering can cease, but only through our embrace of it. The natural processes of aging, sickness and death cannot be avoided no matter how hard we try. They are built into existence itself. UnnecessaryIntentional and unintended suffering can come to an end, however, through relinquishing cessation, or at least lowering,the extent ofof our craving, modifying our craven behavior.

The Noble Eightfold Path

The fourth of the quartet posits that there is a way of living daily life as a path to cessation. Theusual interpretation of its eight points begins with worldview, or intention. In time our view evolves toward conformance to that taught by Buddha, through examining our thought, or understanding., "Right" view and thoughtwhich together comprise right wisdom.; Engaging in loving speech, kind action and a compassionate livelihood, add up toor right conduct. E; and engaging effort, mindfulness and meditation, we developas right discipline. The only real discipline in Zen is self-discipline, which applies to lay practice as well as monasticism.Wisdom, conduct and discipline constitute our tripartite path.

Fortunately, Zen offers a workaround. The primary focus of Zen is the practice of its highly focused method of meditation (J. zazen), integrating posture, breath and meditationattention, called “zazen” in Japanese. Zazen is like a magnifying glass, an indispensable and instrumental method for focusing attention awareness in an extremely tight awareness on our own direct experience. Which is where the origins of Buddhism arose, from the meditation of Buddha, Shakyamuni.

Visualizing the Eightfold Path as a 3-dimenional model of a cube illustrates that these eight components of the three primary divisions — the outer person, or conduct;, the inner person,or discipline;, and the fruit of the practice, the evolution of true wisdom — are all interconnected in complex ways. For example, the intersection of right speech and right action: “You talk the talk, but you do not walk the walk.” Your words do not match your actions. Each pairing of any two of the eight dimensions can be analyzed in such a manner. But the important thing is to be aware of them, and observinge how they affect our lives, and how our manner of living affects them.

The Six Paramitas

When we think of perfecting our practice of any activity, such as playing the piano, or high-performance athletics, naturally we form some sort of goal or expectation that we hope to realize. But the notion of perfection in Zen is not like that. There is an ancient Sanskrit term,from Sanskrit, “paramita,” that is sometimes translated as “perfection.”

There are six such, (sometimes expanded to ten,) such in traditional models. — The basic six-pack usually translatessometimes condensed as: generosity or giving;, precepts or (ethics);, energy or or effort;, patience or or forbearance;, meditation, contemplation or concentration;, and wisdom.

But in Zen, we instead look to discover their true meaning and application in our meditation. The founder of Soto Zen in 13th Century Japan, Master Eihei Dogen, was said to have commented, paraphrasing: asking In zazen, wwhat Precept (morality) is not fulfilled?

In Zen, the perfection of desirable personality traits, and the full comprehension of them, becomes possible only through diligent pursuit of wholehearted meditation practice. My Zen teacher, “sensei” in Japanperese, Soyu Matsuoka-roshi, would often say that we should always aim at the perfect posture in seated meditation, never imagining that we have achieved it. This amounts to “posture paramita.” We engage in a process of perfecting, in lieu of setting goals of perfection.

Eventually, with repetition, any endeavor such as practicing the piano, dance moves, sports, or martial arts forms, will reach a turning point, where it becomes truly musical, transcendent, and transformative. Your practice of meditation will likewise naturally go through several turning points in its evolution. Eventually, it will become what my teacher referred to as “the real zazen.” This is when posture, breath and attention all come together in a unified way. Not-two.

Zazen: Sitting Still Just Sitting; Still Enough, Straight Enough, For Long Enough

The focus of Zen is on the present moment, but the activity that is occurring moment by moment is ceaseless, relentless in its changing dynamic. We sit still in order to recover our original mind, in which stillness is not separate from motion. This is one meaning of an ancient Sino-Japanese term, “mokurai”: stillness in motion, motion in stillness. Silence in Zen, to take another example of mokurai,, is not the absence of sound. The silence is in the sound. And vice-versa. Same for stillness and motion.

Nonetheless, we emphasize the stillness partsays. It is difficult to slow down, let alone come to a full stop, in today’s world. When we do — sitting still enough for long enough — a whole new dimension of reality opens up for us. We enter the original frontier of the mind, discovered by Buddha two-and-a-half millennia ago, and passed on to us by the ancestors of Zen.

Concluding the Inconclusive

Like most things in life, Zen has to be experienced to be understood, from personal experience.

This is one instance of how the highly specialized training in Zen has a halo effect on daily life. If you have become accustomed to the extreme clarity of mind engendered in quiet meditation in the zendo, you will be better equipped to face the chaos in daily life

Two aspects of Zen that I have mentionedindicated remain foremost in my mind —- its irreducible simplicity of method, and the importance of finding the right teacher for you. I highly recommend you pursue both with diligence, as if your hair were on fire, as per Master Dogen.

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Speaking of watching your Ps and Qs, when taking up the way of Zen meditation, it may seem all too easy to get things backward. In fact, according to the great Zen ancestors, getting it wrong is a natural and necessary part of the process, expressed as "Fall down seven times, get up eight," apparently an old Chinese saying adopted by Master Dogen. He also said that hitting the bullseye depends upon the 100 prior misses. So we are inevitably immersed in trial and error.

In considering Buddha's original teaching in the First Sermon — outlining the Four Noble Truths, including the Eightfold Path — one aspect is often overlooked. Along with the fact that they consist of a description of reality and a prescription for practice, respectively, they also include four admonitions, or instructions for how to approach implementing them. I think of these as the four "charges," one accompanying each of the Noble Truths, namely:

4 CHARGES

Existence of dukkha - (we are to fully) Understand

Origin of dukkha - () Abandon

Cessation of dukkha - () Realize

Path to cessation of dukkha - () Follow

The translator's choice of "understand" in this context seems woefully inadequate, given that even Buddha himself pointed out that what he realized was beyond understanding, in any ordinary sense of the word. But setting aside the semantics, let's consider all four commands as outlining a process of assimilating and acting upon Buddha's teaching.

We are to fully understand, or comprehend, the existence of suffering in this world. We are to abandon its main source, or origin, namely our own craving. We are to realize the cessation of suffering, hopefully in this lifetime. And we are to follow the Path in our daily actions, so that everything we do becomes the path. And thus, as Buddha taught in the Lotus Sutra, widely regarded as his last teaching, there is actually no separate Path, if everything is the path. We are on this path whether we know it or not.

And, of course, we do not necessarily engage the process in the order implied by the sequencing of the sentence. In fact, we begin at the end, with the Eightfold Path. It, too, is usually laid out in reverse order of its implementation: Right wisdom: view and thought; right conduct: speech, action and livelihood; and right discipline: effort, mindfulness and meditation. Again, we begin at the end, with meditation, which leads to mindfulness and greater effort, which affect our conduct, and so on, leading eventually to right wisdom of understanding and worldview. Or so we hope.

But when we consider the difficulty of what Buddha did, and is asking us to do, it seems impossible on the surface — as do the Precepts, when considered as literal and absolute. So we are left with the prospect of figuring out what these directives actually mean, and how they might be accomplished, by contemplating them in meditation, which brings us full circle to where Buddha realized these truths, on the cushion.

In Zen meditation, we are encouraged to give up our reliance on the ability of the discriminating mind to analyze and understand, and instead to trust our intuition to come to an insight into reality that is not accessible to reason alone, what Master Dogen referred to as "non-thinking": neither thinking, as such, nor notthinking. So we are to find the sweet spot, the balance between these two aspects of our original mind. In light of this attitude adjustment to the way we ordinarily approach problem-solving, let me suggest another analogy to clarify the long and broad teachings of Buddha's tongue.

P's & Q's of Zen

Keying off of this common trope, engage with me in an experiment in semantics that may hopefully shed some light on buddha-dharma. Setting aside the "Qs" for now, I propose that we can frame the basics of Buddhism in alliterative form, as a collection of words beginning with P, or more precisely, "Pr," which turns out to be a substantial set of considerations to be assimilated before ("pre-") setting a course of action:

• Premises & Principles

• Predilections & Proclivities

• Prescriptions & Practices

• Promises & Predictions

Premises & Principles

Buddhism, and for that matter any body of teaching, is based on a set of premises, defined as:

... a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion: if the premise is true, then the conclusion must be true.

Another pr word pops up in the definition: proposition, which has a less definitive connotation, being a mere proposal, than a premise, which indicates a more settled basis. Premises, when proven out by experimentation or sheer experience, may become principles, much as hypotheses become theories (and with enough evidence, laws, or precepts) of the profession under consideration, such as science; or, well, law.

Predilections & Proclivities

However, Buddhism — dealing as it does with fallible human nature — also takes into account our predilections, proclivities, and predispositions, as well as any pertinent preconceptions we may be harboring. These words, too, have definitions and synonyms that often reflect each other, such as predisposition and predilection, i.e. sharing similar connotations of preference and propensity.

Prescriptions & Practices

When it comes to taking action based on the premises and principles laid out in Zen's teachings, and in light of the weaknesses of our predilections and proclivities, semantic hair-splitting does not help much, except perhaps to illustrate the subtlety of the task of discerning which prescriptions and practices might prove to be most productive for following the Zen Way under the present predicament in which we find ourselves.

The default mode of action prescribed in Zen is meditation, of course, but many of the practices surrounding and supporting it raise issues of protocols in a starkly different social and cultural environment than that in which the ancestors found themselves. This is the key challenge of propagating Zen today, in a context of over-choice on every level of society.

Promises & Predictions

The promise of Zen, however, remains the same, no matter the situational causes and conditions surrounding our life and practice. Success in penetrating the koan of existence, while not predictable, may be predicated upon the simple formula of sitting still enough, upright enough, for long enough that the effects of zazen begin to manifest. Buddha predicted the future buddhahood of many of his followers, including his cousin Devadatta, who reputedly tried repeatedly to assassinate the great sage.

Afterword

This familiar "Ps & Qs" phrase came to mind while mulling over the design of Buddha's initial teachings, and after reading Ben Connelly's excellent commentary on "Vasubandhu's Three Natures." The first page that comes up from an internet search on Ps and Qs tells us that the phrase can be traced back to the 1779 Oxford English Dictionary. The most plausible origin, of several possible provenances, is that it refers to early typography, where "p" and "q" were likely to be mistaken, one for the other, when setting lead type.

This factoid comes from a site hosted by The Guardian that you may want to check out if you are interested in the origin of words and phrases (etymology), semantic enigmas, and the evolution of language in general

In our next segment we will continue delving deeper into the design intent of Zen's teachings and their implications for living in times of increasing uncertainty. Other than death and taxes, the beneficial effects of Zen and zazen are one of the few things that are certain in life. But that does not mean that we should take them for granted. We have to put in the work, making "effort without aiming at it as Master Dogen prescribes.

Please plan to join our new online and onsite practice opportunities for 2025. My new Thursday evening Advanced Workshop, in particular, is designed to take a deep dive into the more subtle secrets of Zen and the details of zazen.

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In the new Thursday Workshop I have initiated for 2025, I am attempting to lay out in great detail what I believe to be the most natural way to meditate: zazen before Zen, so to speak. It may not be your daddy's meditation, but it is that of our ancient forefathers.

Meditation, after all, was not the exclusive discovery of the historical Buddha, and his realization could not have been the first in the long presence of humankind on the planet, just the first recorded in history. What he discovered represents a return to something more primordial than Buddhism; Buddha was not a Buddhist, after all.

Traditional teachings emphasize the perfecting of the Six Paramitas, which enumerate both personal and social dimensions of the place of Zen philosophy and practice in the cultures of India, China, Korea, Japan, and the far East. They are variously translated as charity, ethics, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom.

But in Zen practice, the perfecting of the paramitas in our daily lives is not merely a matter of remembering and agreeing with them in principle. It is, instead, recommended that we observe them in everything we do, within each dimension of the Eightfold Path; most especially including meditation, the eighth in the usual order, and the first place we begin to make effort. As Master Dogen is quoted as saying, In zazen what precept or ethical principle, is not fulfilled? The main method of Zen cannot be detached from the Eightfold Path, nor can it be left out of the process of perfecting the other five paramitas.

Posture Paramita

In fact, in zazen we begin by taking up another process of perfecting — perfecting the posture. Matsuoka-roshi would often say that you have to work your way through every bone in your body, and suggested that we develop an attitude of continually aiming at the perfect posture, never imagining that we have achieved it. This amounts to a practical application of Dogen's cryptic phrase, "making effort without aiming at it."

This is what I refer to as "posture paramita": an exploratory search for the natural posture. Much like the proposition that we are already enlightened but we don’t yet know it, this approach suggests that our posture is already perfect, but we keep interfering with it. Much of our training in zazen method is about how to stop doing that.

The Natural Way to Meditate

One of the misconceptions I would like to address up-front is that we can do zazen the "right" way — and its corollary, the "wrong" way. While the ancient teachings mention "right meditation" along with all the other "rights" in the Eightfold Path, this translators' choice is not meant to indicate that there is an absolutely right way to meditate, as opposed to wrong ways. The "right" in this construction is more like a verb than an adjective — as in righting a capsized boat, in order to continue sailing. Or righting a wheel that is out of round, so that it rolls smoothly. In Zen, we continually correct as we go, when we detect that we are off-course. The vacillation is built into our conscious mind, continually swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other.

For example, most practitioners interpret the instructions for zazen as strictly indicating that we are to sit stock still. Don't move. And empty the mind of thoughts. The former command to sit still may comprise a more pedantic obiter dictum in Rinzai praxis than in Soto Zen; the latter notion of the empty mind, a Western misconstruing of Master Dogen's "non-thinking." But most Americans, when first approaching Zen meditation, probably harbor these two ideas as a preconception. To which I say "good luck" with either of these notions, especially in combination.

Unless you give yourself permission to move, you will never discover why it is that we sit still.

Unless you give yourself permission to think, you may never realize what Dogen meant by "non-thinking."

This was Master Dogen's expression of the natural state of attention in zazen. It is neither thinking, nor not thinking, which are opposite sides of the same coin. We sit without relying on thinking, our default go-to in most other areas of endeavor.

Feeling Gravity

Take an example from early childhood. Gravity is said to be the "constant teacher." As a toddler just beginning to transition from crawling to walking, we stand up, we fall down. We stand up again, we fall down again. This natural process may be the origin of the old saying that Dogen adapted, "Fall down seven times, get up eight." I always wonder why he didn't say "get up seven."

We don't learn to stand and walk by thinking it through. At that age it is not likely that there is much thinking going on at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. We might better regard it as a process of adaptation. We are learning to navigate and negotiate the causes and conditions of our world, in which gravity is a major player, by trial and error. Which involves intuition and observation rather than intellectual analysis.

Similarly, the very act of sitting and facing a blank wall for extended periods of time is a counter-intuitive and counter-cultural act. That is, its simplicity sets aside the usual resort to thinking and analysis, bringing forth the intuitive, instinctual side of awareness.

Taken for Granted

Once we can successfully balance, standing and walking in the field of gravity, it becomes less and less of a concern, and eventually goes subliminal. We are less and less aware of its influence. Until we take up athletics, dancing, or some other activity that challenges our security in the face of gravitational attraction, such as mountain climbing or walking tightropes. Maybe bungie-jumping.

As Master Dogen was wont to say, after laying out an analogy to help us grasp the principles of Zen, "All things are like this." That is, we adapt to all sensations over time, becoming less acutely aware of all the multiple stimuli that are acting upon us at any given time. In doing so physically and sensorially, we take more and more of our world for granted, until some natural or manmade disaster comes along as a wakeup call.

Stepping Back

Another natural way to de-condition ourselves and recover our awareness of the fundamentals of our existence — like gravity — is to practice zazen. Finding and engaging the most natural posture — upright seated meditation — combined with the most natural breathing pattern, we afford ourselves the best opportunity for discovering, or recovering, our most natural, original mind.

As our attention withdraws from our usual ruminations over the ongoing conditions of our lives that we find unsatisfactory (dukkha) — in what Master Dogen referred to as the "backward step" — we naturally return to a more primordial state of awareness, sometimes referred to as "bare awareness," becoming aware of, or remembering, what it is to exist as a sentient being. This "returning to" is the root meaning of "refuge" — refugo, refugare from the Latin — rather than escaping or hiding out, we are returning to familiar territory, our true home.

I would say, remembering what it means to be a "fully conscious human being," but Zen's teachings caution us to accept that we are not necessarily fully conscious — in fact that we are largely asleep. The Zen Buddhist proposition regarding consciousness is relatively simple in concept, but difficult in execution, as we say of certain problems and processes in design thinking. That is, we were all asleep last night, and we all woke up this morning, and we all know the difference between the two. Although lucid dreaming sometimes calls the difference into question.

One key tenet of Buddhism, that I do not believe is characteristic of any other religious or spiritual practice, is that — as wide awake as we may seem to be at the moment — we are still asleep, to a certain degree. And that we can wake up — fully — as Buddha did. The honorific means, literally, the "fully awakened one." And that we will know the difference.

This suggests that we can do this on our own recognizance. We don't need no stinking teachers, as the threefold Lotus Sutra reminds us. Zen is pointing at something natural, primordial, that comes with the territory of being a human being. We look to teachings for guidance, but we cannot depend upon them, nor upon our teachers, for our own insight. In this matter, Zen is truly the ultimate in do-it-yourself, which helps to explain its appeal to the Western mindset of independent thinking, the cult of the individual.

As we turn our attention away from the pressing concerns of the social sphere, shining the bright light of Zen meditation upon the personal sphere, the natural process of sensory adaptation will set in. By stressing stillness and sameness over motion and change, we begin to experience motion in the stillness, on deeper and more subtle levels. As Matsuoka-roshi would often say, "Zen goes deeper." At bottom, we embrace the reality that these apparent differences are really not separate, that nothing has really changed from the beginning. It is what it is, what it has always been, and what it will always be: everchanging.

Please plan to join our new online and onsite practice opportunities for 2025. My new Thursday evening Advanced Workshop, in particular, is designed to take a deep dive into the more subtle secrets of zazen and Zen.

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In the previous segment of UnMind, titled "the least important thing," I closed with a call for submissions; quoting myself:

If you have any topics or areas of interest in Zen that you would like me to explore in 2025, please let me know. You know where I live.

Having received little response, I can only assume that this podcast is not gaining much traction out there, in spite of near-weekly continuity for the past three or so years. Or that those of you who are following it don't have any topics of interest related to Zen, at least none that you would like me to take up. Or some combination of both.

In this segment, the last one of the year, let me start with the obvious: the fact that actually, you do not know where I live. That is, none of us really knows what the rest of us are going through, on a year-in-year-out, day-to-day, hour-by-hour, moment-to-moment, basis, except in the most general sense. And that's okay. But we have to wonder whether everyone else is dealing with the same kinds of issues, such as anxiety over aging, sickness, and death, those personal dimensions of dukkha that Buddha taught we all face. Anxiety stems from the unsatisfactory nature of living in the face of impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality, universal aspects of the koan of existence. Are you feeling the angst?

Can you remember when it first dawned on you that this life — which seems so substantial, so perfect in so many ways, and that we once took to be permanent — is insidiously deceptive in that regard? That the causes and conditions of it are not part of what you bargained for, opting into birth? Assuming you had any choice in the matter.

Few of us would credit a claim of any real intentionality on our part that preceded birth. But in fact Buddha does, explicitly — or at least implicitly — in his explication of the Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Origination. It is his model of how things got to be the way they are — including, most crucially, our own presence in this world of sentient being. According to this cogent analysis, we come into being owing to our very desire to exist — the desire for knowing, or consciousness itself. Considered dispassionately, how could there be any simpler explanation for life?

Upholders of theism would have us believe that there is a separate intent to life, an intelligent "designer" operating behind the scenes, as author and director of its creation. The adherents of deism hold that the creator god is not directly involved, but simply got the ball rolling, perhaps by means of the Big Bang. Atheists deny outright any possibility of such disembodied intent, and agnostics try to walk the tightrope between belief and disbelief, according reality to the limitations of their senses and intellectual understanding. No woo-woo, in other words.

Most religious thinkers are resistant to the idea that we are simply a fluke of some kind, the result of a secular-reductionist chain of events beginning with material elements combining physically in a random process; yielding organic chemistry; leading to one-celled organisms; finally culminating in human beings, the absolute apex of evolution, or God's greatest creation. In our human opinion, anyway.

Most rationalist thinkers would probably push back on the equally simplistic notion that some creator god is to be given credit, or to be blamed, for our being here, and its corollary, that we have to pass the test of Her intent. On the one hand, this doctrine conveniently relieves us of the burden of accepting responsibility for our own existence; on the other, it tasks us with noodling out exactly what that intent might prescribe for the behaviors and attitude adjustments necessary to pass muster.

One logical consequence of this notion is that we assume that our reward will be in heaven, if anywhere, but certainly not on this earth. But we cannot escape or postpone the inevitable onset or aging, sickness and death, simply because we hold to a belief, however compelling. Unless you believe in a scientific possibility of eternal life as suggested by sci-fi speculations such as technologically-enhanced consciousness, uploaded to digital hardware and/or downloaded to new bodies, or the same old carcass rejiggered with endlessly replaceable parts, grown in tanks from genetic sources.

With apologies for that discursive ramble into weirder pastures, let us return to the focus of Zen on the present reality of the moment, devoid of any beliefs — religious, scientific or fantastical — that we may tend to turn to for comfort.

The Heart Sutra of Buddhist liturgy — a central, condensed summary of Buddha's teaching chanted on a frequent basis in Zen centers, temples and monasteries around the world — takes us through a long litany of what might appear to the uninitiated to be a thoroughgoing denial of reality as we know it.

Testimony as to what the iconic "Bodhisattva of Compassion" (Skt. Avalokiteshvara; Ch. Quanyin; J. Kannon) realized through meditation begins with the cryptic statement that s/he "clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering."

Remember that this model of the "five aggregates" (Skt. skandhas) represented the best science of the times as to what, precisely, sentient existence consists of, in its ultimate finality. Today we would paint a much more complex picture, but Buddha had to work with the sum total of information available at the time. Then he goes on to reduce all of reality to one fundamental dyad, which, like all dual pairs, cannot be separated:

Form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form; form itself is emptiness,emptiness itself form; sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.

Form, or appearance (Skt. rupa), constitutes our normal cognizance of the material world, with its near-infinite variations — the "myriad things," or "ten-thousand things" — and the names we give to them (Skt. nama), taken together as "name and form" (Skt. namarupa), "the one and the many," for short. This would be roughly equivalent to current terms such as phenomena and noumenon: particular things, and unitary sameness as their essence. This is a thread running through Zen teachings, indicating the nonduality of duality, or the "Harmony of Difference and Equality," as the famous Ch'an poem, "Sandokai," would have it. In our modern idiom, we would speak of the interchangeability of matter and energy.

The other four skandhas — Sensation, Perception, Impulse, and Consciousness itself — are similarly subject to deconstruction, though their position on the spectrum of energy and the psychological plane makes for a more convoluted analysis. Suffice it to say that the prefatory phrase, "given Emptiness" (Skt. sunyatta) indicates that all five are not what they seem to be, just as solid, liquid or gaseous matter is permeated with space, as we know today.

The monolog then goes on to negate all of the familiar dimensions of consciousness, including the Six Senses or realms (Skt. dhatus) of the Buddhist model of awareness:

Therefore given emptiness there is no form; no sensation; no perception;

no formation; no consciousness — no eyes; no ears; no nose; no tongue; no body; no mind — no sight; no sound; no smell; no taste; no touch; no object of mind; no realm of sight; no realm of mind-consciousness.

That last, the non-reality of "mind-consciousness" itself, indicates that the various findings, conclusions, and recommendations for practice, as well as all broader implications of insight into reality deriving from it, must also be set aside:

There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance; neither old age and death nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering; no cause; no cessation; no Path; no knowledge; and no attainment.

So where, we might be forgiven for asking, does that leave us? According to Zen, right back where we started. Nothing has changed; nothing that is not already real and true can be revealed by our meditation. Sitting still enough, upright enough, and long enough will simply allow us to see the delusionary aspect of our own interpretation of our own consciousness. "Until we come to no consciousness also," as the first translation that we recited at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago expressed it.

Let that percolate for a moment. If indeed Buddha, or Avalokiteshvara, or any one else, can come to a state of "no consciousness" — and come back from it, alive and well — what are we to make of that? This ultimate finality is what I like to call the "singularity of consciousness" —"That of which there is no whicher," as Alan Watts, my brother's favorite commentator on all things Zen, put it.

The AI summary leading off the search results (which may be the go-to virtual Zen master, or "buddha of the future," otherwise known as Maitreya) paraphrased:

to describe something beyond comparison, an ultimate reality or absolute that cannot be measured or ranked against anything else

Which is eerily similar to a concluding section of the longest Ch'an poem in Soto liturgy, the Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind:

No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relation-less state; take motion in stillness and stillness in motion; both movement and stillness disappear; to this ultimate finality no law or description applies.

So there you have it. All things are like this, to cadge another repeat Dogenism.

Let me close with best wishes for a happy new year; a happy new month; week, and/or day; happy morning, afternoon and evening; a happy hour or half; a happy minute, second, or moment. They are all equally empty. As the same poem reminds us in closing:

The Way is beyond language for in it there is no yesterday no tomorrow no today.

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In the last segment of UnMind, we looked at the implications of Master Dogen's expression, "the most important thing in Buddhism," from Fukanzazengi, the set of instructions for zazen he composed after returning from China. We speculated on what he could possibly have meant, by singling out one of the many points he made in the text.

I suggested that it may be more useful to consider the "don'ts," rather than the "do's," such as: not thinking, notinteracting, and not distinguishing between the absolute and relative, rather than speculate upon a single bumper-sticker summation of his broader points, as the singular, "main thing to do." In other words, maybe he is pointing at something holistic, in the visceral realm, rather than the intellectual.

This is in keeping with Buddhism's major teachings — that their meaning will be found in our direct experience on the cushion and in daily life, rather than in words, which can point at the truth but fail to express it in any comprehensive sense.

So when we consider the least important thing in Buddhism, it may be helpful to turn to the written record of the spoken teachings of Buddha himself, beginning with the First Sermon, reputed to be what he had to say to the five ascetics he had been training and traveling with at that point in his spiritual quest. It starts out with come "don'ts."

In that original dharma talk, Buddha essentially dismisses the extreme lifestyles of the rich and famous on the one hand — self-gratification writ large; and that of the ascetics themselves on the other, who had turned away from Siddhartha after witnessing him drinking goat's milk, violating their high standard of discipline, including virtual starvation. Buddha had landed in the Middle Way, after a night of extreme introspection.

Here we have to reiterate that "extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."

In articulating the Middle Way between the usual pursuits of the lay hoi polloi and the monastic minority, Buddha indicated the futility of both lines of endeavor — self-gratification versus self-mortification. The most balanced and natural approach is nether to deny the cravings born of body, mouth and mind, nor to overindulge them.

This suggests an innate trust in basic human nature — or we should say buddha-nature — our original nature, which is untrammeled by the limits and demands of biological needs and societal norms. Not exactly the noble savage, but the natural sage: a person who lives freely within the bounds of nature as well as those of society. Mr. Natural.

Amongst the least important things in Zen would be concerns about our social identity. As one contemporary author's mother told him, You would be a lot less concerned about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do. We all see ourselves as the marquee character in our own movie, with all others playing supporting roles. The trouble is, everyone else sees their reality the same way, with us as the bit players.

While the most important thing, or things, about Buddhism will necessarily lie within the personal sphere, the least important will be found in the social sphere. Those in the natural and universal spheres will fall in-between. For example, it is more likely that we can safely ignore developments in society that may indirectly threaten our livelihood, safety and security — such as which party is currently in power — than we can those from natural and universal sources — such as climate change, pandemics, and asteroids.

The most important things in Zen revolve around personal applications of the method — zazen — and the results of such training in terms of its effects directly upon the body-mind as well as attitude adjustments regarding our misconceptions of buddha-dharma, and some that tend to have a halo effect upon social life.

One major overlap is the practice of patience. Sitting upright, straight enough and still enough for long enough, we are forced to become much more patient with ourselves, our general ignorance and the monkey-business machinations of the discriminating mind — citta in Sanskrit — which serendipitously sounds like Cheetah, Tarzan's famous chimpanzee companion, making it easy to remember. Wisdom, or enlightened, mind — bodhiin Sanskrit — comes to the fore. Citta and bodhi, foreground and background mind, or analytical and intuitive mind, gradually or instantaneously, come into better balance: the original, unified mind, in which the apparent dichotomy is "not-two."

Much like central and peripheral vision, which collaborate interdependently to make up the whole of the sense of vision, the two aspects of mind are not in opposition to each other. Not competitive, but complementary. The most important thing, then, would be to allow them to work in harmony. Vacillation from one to the other is the natural way that intelligence and consciousness work. The least important thing would be to worry about them as being antagonistic to each other. We do not have to "empty our mind of thoughts." In fact, if we try to, the monkey will turn into a 600-pound gorilla. We will lose that battle. Better to allow the monkey free range. It will wear itself out eventually.

When citta finally exhausts its frantic coping mechanisms, it will lie down and take a nap. Then bodhi can manifest as the balancing act. The posture becomes a comfortable stretch, the breath like a sigh of relief. By relinquishing control, we sink into equanimity.

The Buddhist jargon term that addresses centered balance, or settling into "calm abiding" (Skt. Shamata) — and is often defined as the platform for insight (Skt. Vipassana) — is Samadhi: usually capitalized to emphasize the veneration and importance it is accorded.

While I think that — as much as possible — we should endeavor to reduce or eliminate the jargonized nature of much of the written record, it may be clarifying to characterize the method of zazen and its effects in terms of different kinds of "samadhis."

The first, the traditional form of the upright seated posture of the body in zazen, we might call physical samadhi — less stress, more equipoise, or equilibrium — basically coming into alignment with gravity.

The second, we might term emotional samadhi — less anxiety, more calmness. Since mind and body cannot separate, the most direct path to the "mind" is through the body.

The third, mental samadhi — less confusion, more clarity — particularly regarding the true meaning of buddha-dharma, what the teachings are pointing to in reality, which is only accessible within our direct experience. Experiential truth is the only truth in Zen. But we can misinterpret what we perceive. All perceived reality is virtual.

I propose that there is a fourth kind of samadhi, which I term social samadhi — less friction, more harmony — in relationships. This, of course, is what most people are looking for in the early stages of their meditative practice. But its manifestation is further down the road. It all begins with physical samadhi in zazen.

Amongst the least important things, one of the most important is to avoid creating expectations of your practice of zazen. Setting expectations is the way we approach most activities we associate with learning. We hope to learn something new, to find what is missing. But zazen, and its effects, is not really gaining something new, but remembering something long forgotten, and primordial: the natural posture, the natural breath, the natural state of mind. If we imagine that there is something fundamentally wrong with our mind, and that we have to "fix" it, then we are making a fundamental error, a categorical mistake, defined as "treating abstract concepts as though they had a physical location."

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our mind, or for that matter with the entirety of existence. The only thing wrong is our interpretation of reality, our own ignorance and uninformed opinions. As Master Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The least important things are TBD - to be determined. In your practice and daily life.

As we close out the winter season of the old year and anticipate the opening salvos of the new year, let us remember that there is no such thing as a year, and practice with an open mind. Open to possibilities that lie beyond our imagination, and are right before, and behind, our original face. Don't look in the mirror for it. It is the most important thing.

If you have any topics or areas of interest in Zen that you would like me to explore in 2025, please let me know. You know where I live.

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Well, now we know. That is, we know how the vote tally turned out. What we don’t know for sure is what will happen next. As I said in closing the last podcast, we are waiting for the next number of shoes to drop. But many of our fellow citizens are worried that they know all too well what is coming, ranging from your worst nightmare to the final establishment of Valhalla on Earth. But this time the hall will include only the living survivors, not those who died in battle, as in the Norse myth.

We have been here before politically, which will be remembered by all but those who voted for the first time in this election, who may have known only the recent history, and thus are doomed to repeat it, according to Churchill (who should know). The sanctification of former President George W. Bush by certain religious groups, particularly in his second campaign and term in office, presaged the elevation of the current President-elect to the status of being anointed by God to lead the country. Vilification by the other side reached similar levels of hysteria, if memory serves. One might regard the entire campaign as an example of confirmation bias on steroids. Both sides interpreted events — crowd size, 50-50 polls, mob hysteria at rallies — as confirming their most cherished hopes for victory. Only time will tell which, if either, is the extreme position out of touch with reality. Midterms may be the next major tilt of the teeter-totter.

Meanwhile, let us return to the central focus of Zen — reality itself, the ultimate in vacillation. Like a Taoist shaggy dog story, this may be good, but it could be bad. Through this lens, the question arises as to exactly how important — how relevant — the political landscape can possibly be, to the living-out of our daily Zen lives?

It might provide a bit of perspective to recall that Buddha did not buck the political establishment of his time in India. Which, if my poor understanding of history is correct, was based on the caste system — from the Brahmin, or priests at the top of the pyramid — to Sudra, or commoners, peasants and servants, at the bottom. Completely outside the box were the outcasts, out-of-caste members of the society — untouchables — who were employed as street sweepers and latrine cleaners. From an online search we find the following AI-assisted definition:

India's caste system is a social hierarchy that divides people into groups based on ritual purity and is passed down through families. It has been in place for at least 3,000 years and is considered one of the world's oldest social hierarchies. The caste system dictates many aspects of a person's life, including their profession, who they can marry, and their social standing.

The system apparently does allow for some upward social mobility as it functions in modernity, but it appears that originally, the level into which you were born pretty much determined your fate and future in society — what degree of influence you might have on the social sphere, and its degree of influence on your personal sphere. Needless to say, it was an asymmetrical relationship at best.

Buddha was born into the Kshatriya, or warrior caste, second only to the Brahmin. Which makes me wonder if he was basically a late-blooming draft-dodger, or resistant to implementing the military misadventures of his overlords. I am fairly certain that had he been born into the lower classes, or as an untouchable, he would not have been able to carry out his program of establishing Sangha, the original order of monks and nuns. It is notable that many who joined him were of his same caste, some related to Siddhartha Gautama by blood.

It is also noteworthy that whoever initially conceived the caste system, they justified it based on a notion of inborn “ritual purity.” Compare to today’s stiff-necked, toxic, entrenched and unyielding attitudes on racial and ethnic superiority.

In the last segment I encouraged you to vote, without consideration of how you vote or for whom, other than to vote your conscience and for the future. You may have been surprised, as I was, at the outcome, either distressingly disappointed, or irrationally exuberant. In either case, I suggest tempering your expectations as to what may transpire in the next four-year cycle. Again, we have been here, done this, seen this movie, and rode this rodeo, before. The pendulum swings. Though, admittedly, if it swings to far it may break its mount.

Uchiyama-roshi, in “Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom,” which we have been studying in the Tuesday evening Cloud Dharma readings this year, encourages us to look at our present life as if we had been aborted at the beginning. That way, we would never even have been here to suffer the vagaries of our lifetime.

A less extreme thought experiment is to imagine that you were born into another period in history. In any time, if you lived to the full “three-score-and-ten” lifespan of tradition, the passing political pageantry of a given period may or may not have had any substantial effect upon you. You may have perished in the Revolutionary War, or been enslaved during the Civil War, or you may have been so far removed from the fray that you survived relatively unscathed. In the context of geologic time, a human lifetime is equivalent to the blink of a gnat’s eyelash in human time.

In any case, how you lived and died mattered more within your personal sphere of experience and influence, than did the likely impact of your life on the social sphere. It is an asymmetrical relationship at best, and even more so as regards the natural and universal spheres. You may counter with the “great man” theory of history, but that assumes a lot, is over-simplistic, and in any case applies to very few individuals. Most of us are statistical placeholders.

So, what to do? I like the old aphorism, “tend to your own knitting.” Not much actual knitting is going on these days, of course, but it points to the same idea as Matsuoka-roshi’s response to the question of how to take up so-called “engaged Buddhism.” He would assume the zazen posture and say:

This is the most you can do.

A more ancient saying from a Ch’an poem of about 600 CE — third patriarch Sengcan’s Hsinhsinming; Trust in Mind — takes this idea to a new, nondual level:

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self

To come into harmony with this reality

just simply say, when doubt arises, “Not-two.”

In this “not-two” nothing is separate, nothing is excluded.

No matter when or where, enlightenment means entering this truth.

So I suggest that when doubt arises in the context of concerning and confusing developments in the social sphere — or even the natural or universal spheres — that we simply double down on Zen. In Zen, even the opposing political parties and their policies are “not-two.” This is not simple. Nor is it easy.

But where are you going to find the answers to the social and political dilemmas we face today, if not in your meditation? Remember the old spiritual, “O sinner man, where you gonna run to? All on that day?” Well, every day is “that day” in Zen. I remember an old friend quoting an Indian guru, repeating over and over: “Every day, every day, every day — you must die a little to become the Buddha!” He would do it with an exaggerated East Indian accent, his voice rising higher and higher with each recitation, until he had you in stitches, your stomach hurting from laughing. But, you say, this is not a laughing matter. Are you so sure?

It's either laugh or cry, as we say. Only you can determine whether your life is a melodrama, a tragedy, a comedy, or a tragicomedy. The frustration we feel in our inability to influence the outer spheres of our reality to move in the direction we want to see them evolve stems mainly from the futility of any such endeavor. The most we can do to have a direct influence is to put our attention and effort into the personal sphere, beginning on the cushion. The ripple effect hopefully ensues.

The Bodhisattva Vow to “save or free all beings” is not a directive to take to the streets and lead the charge toward the elusive “arc of the moral universe bending toward justice.” MLK was a modern bodhisattva who appreciated the limits of what he could do in this regard, but expressed a deep faith that however futile his efforts might be, this is the inevitable direction of existence. In Buddhism, it is the wisdom of waking up to reality, in which we pray “May all beings be happy.” But with reality as it actually is, with aging, sickness and death baked into the cake.

By their example, bodhisattvas help all beings to save themselves from their own ignorance, beginning at home, like any form of charity, and up close and personal. We have to get our oxygen mask firmly in place before we can effectively help anyone else. We do so by sharing with them the excellent method of zazen.

In the next episode of UnMind, the last segment of 2024, we will return to our primary focus on the practical aspects of Zen in daily life. The “design intent” of Zen and zazen, so to speak. Stay tuned. 2025 is the 85thanniversary year of Matsuoka-roshi’s coming to America. Please celebrate by intensifying your practice.

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DOGEN ON ZAZEN

Upon returning to Japan from China in 1227, at the age of 27, Master Dogen composed the first draft of Fukanzazengi, the tract in which he outlines the principles of seated meditation, or zazen, that he had learned under the tutelage of Master Rujing. In one of the English translations, about two-thirds of the way through the text, he asks a question of the reader:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism, how can you be satisfied with the transient world? Our bodies are like dew on the grass and our lives like a flash of lightning, vanishing in a moment.

At this point in the piece, he has said many things about the physical method of meditation, interwoven with suggestions of the philosophy, attitude adjustments and correctives to conventional wisdom that accompany the practice. So what he means to indicate as the most important thing is subject to speculation. This may reflect a translator’s choice anomaly, a known issue in the art of interpreting ancient teachings.

To home in on this most important thing more closely, let’s look at a brief, pointed poem, “Zazenshin,” that Dogen paraphrased from a Chinese version. It means something like “Acupuncture Needle” or “Lancet” – a very sharp instrument – for or about zazen:

Zazen-shin - Shohaku Okumura, trans.

The essential-function of each buddha

and the functioning-essence of each ancestor.

Being actualized within not-thinking.

Being manifested within non-interacting.

Being actualized within not-thinking, the actualization is by nature intimate.

Being manifested within non-interacting,

the manifestation is itself verification.

The actualization that is by nature intimate never has defilement.

The manifestation that is by nature verification

never has distinction between Absolute and Relative.

The intimacy without defilement is dropping off without relying on anything.

The verification beyond distinction between Absolute and Relative

is making effort without aiming at it.

The water is clear to the earth; a fish is swimming like a fish.

The sky is vast, extending to the heavens; a bird is flying like a bird.

So from this we may take it that the most important thing has something to do with not thinking and non-interacting, and not distinguishing between the absolute and relative. It is pointing at something intimate, undefiled by conventional wisdom, and that has nothing to do with our reliance on common understanding, and goal-oriented efforts. To which we can only respond, “Hmmm. Thank you Dogen, for clearing that up.”

MATSUOKA ON DOGEN

Clearly, this message is about something beyond words, that language can only point at, if it is beyond thinking itself. Let’s explore some more contemporary quotes from Matsuoka-roshi to see if we can zoom in on the meaning of these passages. O-Sensei simplified Dogen Zenji’s instructions for his American students, condensing them into three discrete areas: posture, breath, and attention. The following are three expressions he would use frequently, addressing questions about zazen:

Keep aiming at the perfect posture never imagining that you’ve achieved it

You have to work your way through every bone in your body

When your posture is approaching the stage of perfection,

it will feel as if you are shoving your head against the ceiling

The first, about aiming without achieving, makes Dogen’s “making effort without aiming at it” a bit more concrete by narrowly defining “it” as the upright posture. This is in keeping with the Zen premise that the zazen posture is the full expression of enlightenment, not merely a means to the end of enlightenment. It also reminds us that there can be no separation of body and mind in Zen, nor, indeed, in reality. And that the natural process of Zen is open-ended, based on aspiration as opposed to expectation.

The second indicates that this is going to be a steady, slow process on a visceral level, sitting “with muscle and bone,” as my senior dharma brother in Chicago, Kongo-roshi, titled one of his talks. There are a lot of bones in your body. And the bones, of course, are not separate from the skin, flesh, and marrow, the connective tissue, as Master Bodhidharma taught. “Working your way through” recalls the famous dictum from the poet Robert Frost, paraphrasing, “the only way out is through.”

The third seems to contradict the first, when Sensei describes what he frequently referred to as the “sitting-mountain feeling” that eventually comes from zazen. We are to aim at it without concluding that we’ve achieved it, because “Zen goes deeper,” as he would often say. No matter how seemingly complete and transcendent our immediate experience, it is not the end of the process, an attitude adjustment first articulated by Buddha himself in the “Fifty False States” section of the Surangama Sutra. The main admonition is that, no matter what happens in your meditation, not to imagine that you are now completely enlightened. Even Buddha returned to meditation for the fifty years of his life following his profound insight.

But this “shoving your head against the ceiling” sensation is something that I can personally attest to from my modest experience on the cushion. I suspect that when we pull back on the chin, stretching the back of our neck with strength, a specific detail of the posture emphasized by Matsuoka-roshi, it has the effect of shoving our skull against the scalp, which would then feel like the resistance of a solid, external surface like a ceiling. The entire body is a tension-compression structure, much like a camping tent, where the bones of the skeleton are the compression members under stress from the surrounding membrane of musculature, tendons and ligaments, like the canvas and ropes of the tent.

HAKUIN’S GAS PEDAL

The other end of the “tentpole” is the base of the spine, connecting to the coccyx, or tailbone. Hakuin Zenji, a famous Rinzai priest whose life span bridged the 17th and 18th centuries, from 1686 to1769, recommended that we push forward and down on the lower spine until we feel a bit of pain there. That sensation derives from stretching the hard tissue of the discs between the large lower vertebrae. Even more today than in his time, our posture tends to be c-shaped, sometimes referred to as a “cashew,” when we sit in the driver’s seat of our vehicles on the expressway, or the chair at our desk. The natural position of the spine is an “S-shape” curve, bending the lower back in the opposite direction, like a cobra rising from the floor, dancing to the tune of the snake-charmer’s flute.

I call this Hakuin’s gas pedal. Like the accelerator of your car or truck, if you keep your foot on it, pressing forward and down, the vehicle moves. If you let up on it, it slows to a stop. On the other hand, if you go pedal to the metal, it speeds out of control. The Middle Way again, in all its manifestations.

So the most important thing, as regards the posture, at least, may be keeping these two pressure points in play while sitting. If you do so, you can’t go far wrong in terms of sitting upright. Breathing and attention also come into the picture, but that may be a subject for another UnMind. Let me close this segment with a couple of aphorisms that have come to me in my practice.

ME ON ZAZEN

I do not claim to have the depth of insight and understanding of our ancestors, and recognize that context, while not determinative of Zen experience, certainly counts. What Buddha, Bodhidharma, the great ancestors in China, and Dogen himself managed to accomplish under relatively primitive conditions in no way compares to what we may expect to realize under relatively cushy but geometrically more complex circumstances. But as they did in their times we must do in ours — namely use what we know to inform our efforts in exploring what we do not know, and cannot know, in any ordinary sense. So, here, I want to introduce two terms that may have no counterpart in their language.

PROPRIOCEPTION MEETS VERTIGO

Proprioception is a term from modern physiology, defined as:

Perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body

Vertigo is defined as:

A sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height, or caused by disease affecting the inner ear or the vestibular nerve; giddiness.

In terms of our experience in zazen, then, proprioception would be akin to samadhi, or at least its early stages, when, as Matsuoka-roshi said:

When posture, breath, and attention all come together in a unified way, that is the real zazen.

Now, if there is “real” zazen, it implies that there must be “unreal” or “fake” zazen, or the false impression that we are doing zazen when we are not, really. Samadhi is a jargon term that I hesitate to use, as it implies that I know what it means while suggesting that you probably do not. Which sets up the false dichotomy of “you and I,” “us and them,” the in-group cognoscenti versus the great unwashed. Sensei also pointed out, at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, paraphrasing, “When you become dizzy, concentrate on your knees.” And “When you get nauseous, concentrate on your forehead.” Or it may have been the other way around. The main point is that you probably will get dizzy, and you probably will get nauseous, in zazen.

This brings up another coinage, for which I claim authorship:

Let not the spiritual be the enemy of the practical

I detect a vestigial strain of puritanism in the American culture that can infect our understanding and presentation of Zen, as a kind of belief system, a set of doctrines that one must subscribe to, in order to penetrate the inner sanctum of Zen’s purported spiritual secrets. This is anathema to the real Zen, as I understand it.

All of Master Dogen’s instructions in Fukanzazengi are physical, not mental, as Carl Bielefeldt points out in his “Dogen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation,” a wonderful, incisive line-by-line analysis of Dogen’s two extant revisions compared to the Chinese original. So let’s stay focused on the physical, and not get distracted by any woo-woo “spiritual.”

If we continue sitting without expectation, implementing the two pressure points until we feel tMatsuoka-roshi’s “sitting mountain feeling” of great stability — our head “pressed against the ceiling” — the body and mind will take us where we need to go. We trust our teachers’ intent and wisdom, and we trust our Original Mind, as indicated in the title of Hsinhsinming, the earliest Ch’an poem chanted in Soto liturgy.

If we sustain this posture — sitting still enough and straight enough for long enough — it will work its magic. Equilibrium will set in in the tension-compression system of muscle and bone of the body, leading to equipoise of the mind. Sustained for some time, the constancy of our proprioception will inevitably lead to vertigo — the flip side of solidity. “Mountains are always walking” — the planet is falling through space. There is “not even a toehold.” Emptiness is innately form, form innately emptiness.

In the next segment of UnMind, we will put a cap on “Election Year Zen,” my tenth and final concluding commentary on the 2024 campaign, now that we know how it all turned out. But like a centipede, or millipede, there are surely many more shoes to drop.

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The DharmaByte™ version of this segment will post in the STO newsletter the first week of November. This UnMind podcast will drop on Wednesday after election day, which is November 5th. The next segment of Election Year Zen will be posted on December 4th, barring unforeseen circumstances such as an outright armed revolution — or “the new civil war” as it has been billed in some quarters — an implied threat depending upon the outcome of the election. In Zen, of course, all future circumstances are unforeseen by definition. Unless you believe in prophecy.

In this segment I will encourage you to vote, which I understand may not be necessary. Indeed, I have already voted. I have no desire to influence how you vote in terms of partisan politics, or in favor of which candidate or party conforms more closely to my own view. You should “vote your conscience,” in the current term of art. Or vote for the future — which seems contradictory to Zen’s “being in the moment.” Remember, in Zen we do not deny the possibility of the reality of karmic consequences occurring over the “Three Times” of Buddhism — past, future, and present.

Low voter turnout is a concern of the professionals in this election and has always troubled me somewhat. I mean, how important is all this political posturing, when a large segment of the populace does not even exercise their right to vote? I do not mean to suggest that 100% turnout would somehow cure the many ills that befall our system of elected government. For one thing the third or more eligible voters who fail to turn out are not likely to be informed on issues, or qualifications of candidates on the ballots, let alone cognizant of the long-term effects of their vote.

I feel confident, however, that readers of my DharmaByte™ column and followers of my podcast share a significant enough degree of concern, and have a sufficient grasp of the stakes in the outcome, to make intelligent and caring choices. Otherwise, you probably would not be listening to this.

As I mentioned in the last Election Year Zen segment, I believe the most important measure of merit for a party or candidate to take office is the degree of their conformance to the principles of buddha-dharma, as I understand them. Quoting myself:

I leave it to you to decide whether or not, and to what degree, your candidate for the highest office in the land, the most powerful secular position on Earth, are in harmony with these compassionate aspirations. But remember that the teachings of Buddhism were never meant to be held up to criticize others, but to reflect back upon yourself and your own behavior. The “mirror of Zen reflects all” — the good, the bad, and the ugly — without discrimination. You and your behavior are also reflected in that Precious Mirror.

President Jimmy Carter made news recently, first by surviving to his 100th birthday, then by declaring that he wanted to live long enough to vote, one supposes for the opportunity to elect a non-white non-male president for the first time in history. I met President Carter during his successful run for the presidency, when he visited the office of the consumer research company that I joined in moving to Georgia in 1970. What do you suppose is so important in his mind about this election, that he expressed his intent to vote for or against one of the candidates? As the former president most famous for his contributions to humanity after his term in office, what do you make of this kind of commitment to the democratic process? I think we can assume that he harbors a belief in the long-term viability of the benefits of the democratic republic for the future of the human race, on a larger timeline than the next four-year election cycle.

Let us turn back to the acronym: V-O-T-E, with which I titled the opening haiku poem. One interpretation that came to me is: “Vote Once for Time Eternal.” At my age, it becomes obvious that however I vote, it will probably have little effect upon my personal sphere, with what little future time I have left. But it raises a question.

What are we voting for, exactly? The current trope is, “for the children.” Commentators and candidates take up the theme, appealing to the sentiment or question of what kind of country we will leave for the next generations of children and grandchildren.

I suggest that we expand our time horizon to a relatively infinite scale. In the Lifespan Chapter of the Lotus Sutra, on which I gave a dharma talk recently, the point is that Buddha’s physical death, or Parinirvana, is only apparent. The truth is that Buddha is still here, forever, but cannot be seen by ordinary vision. Thus, what Buddha was, or is, has only a circumstantial and temporary connection to the person known as Siddhartha Gautama, the conditioned self of incarnation.

Similarly, can we look at the act of voting in this election in a larger context? Not in the light of its connection to the short-term effects it may or may not have on the social sphere in the immediate aftermath, but more in line with the long-term vision expounded by Buddha, or at least attributed to him by his successors? That is, from the perspective of the natural and universal spheres, in which the personal and social are nested? From the “Loving Kindness” or “Metta” sutra, we find the following passage:

Let no one deceive another nor despise any being in any state

Let none by anger or hatred wish harm to another

Can there be any clearer directive than this as to how to conduct ourselves in the social sphere? Another pair of admonitions comes from the second Five Precepts we receive in the Soto Zen Discipleship ceremony:

See only your own faults — Do not discuss the faults of others

Know self and other as one — Do not praise yourself at others’ expense

Can we see the current campaign in these terms? Which of the protagonists — if either — is adhering most closely to these guidelines? Which is most blatantly violating them? If we interpret all political dialog as equally duplicitous, equally guilty of deceptive and despising attitudes and behavior, equally wishing harm to others, discussing their faults, and praising themselves at the expense of others, then we have no basis on which to make a choice. But abstaining from voting is, in itself, making a choice. We are all complicit in, if not responsible for, the result.

This is not to put all our eggs in the one basket of the social sphere, and the limited sub-sphere of political opinion. We should not be distracted from the natural sphere, in which we are witnessing the long-term consequences of self-centered actions of the species for survival and comfort of an ever-expanding mass of humanity, particularly in the form of climate change. Nor from the universal sphere, where we face potential extinction in the context of the geologic time scale, wherein even the history of the human race appears as a blip on the screen. Why vote at all, when the forces shaping reality have so little regard for our place in it? Mother Nature is no respecter of persons, let alone political parties.

Returning to the personal, we can detach, on the level of the absolute, from any implications of the present political climate, while engaging in action — voting, for example — on the level of the relative, understanding that our deeper aspirations may not work out in this lifetime.

I think we can presume that Buddha’s teachings were not meant solely to affect his followers at the time, but to set the bar for future generations as well. Even though the members of the original Order did not record them in written form for posterity, they went to great lengths to codify and chant them, enabling their memorization and preservation from one generation to the next over a period of four centuries or so. What we are doing in Zen today is, I believe, carrying on this tradition, in the modern milieu and vernacular. We are taking the long-term view.

A careful reading of the founding documents of the American experiment, such as the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, the Bill of Rights, et cetera, reveals a similar aspiration. Stated principles of freedom — the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — do not represent temporary expedients, but hopeful wishes for the future generations of people operating on their own free will. Notwithstanding the contemporaneous exclusion of slaves and women from the privileges enjoyed by white men of means, owners of private property. Like much of our retrospective reading of the history of Zen, we have to resist our penchant for interpreting cultures of a couple of centuries or millennia ago as if they were occurring in the light of modern social science.

So vote. But I suggest doing so in the spirit of buddha-dharma. Realizing and embracing the reality that you may not see any beneficial effect on your personal life, at least not anytime soon. We take this approach to meditation, which is, after all, the inmost personal experience possible. We set aside expectations as to the positive effects it may bring about, while continuing to hold an aspiration to realization. We approach it with the famous “don’t-know-mind” of Zen, assuming that whatever comes of it will be the natural consequence of the manifestation of our Original Mind. We sit not because we have to, but because we get to. We vote, not because we have to, but because we get to. Master Dogen said somewhere that at last, we are left with ambiguity. Enjoy the non-knowing.

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Welcome to UnMind podcast, number 165. In this segment, with a sigh of relief, we turn away from the horror show that is the climactic crescendo of the current 4-year election cycle, with its implications for climatic consequences — as we are witnessing with the 1-2 punch of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, Mother Natures’ odd couple of the moment and probable precursors of more to come. It is as if God’s eraser is being applied to the original plan for this nation, eradicating whole swaths of our occupation of what was once Her sacred wilderness.

In the face of such catastrophe — which we consider “unprecedented,” in the worn-out superlative of the day, “only because of our ignorance,” according to the great Ch’an poem Hsinhsinming, Trust in Mind. Whether innocent or willful, this ignorance causes us to question the bedrock assumptions we make about the importance and relevance of our most personal aspirations in the practice of Zen. Of course, the Earth has endured much worse in its lifetime, known as the “five major extinctions,” where many of the species prevalent on her fragile surface did not survive the change intact. The human species may now be facing a similar extinction, ironically, as an unintended consequence of our success in dominating the planet, or so we are told.

In this context, there seems to be little point in paying attention to the relatively trivial aspects of coping with everyday life, let alone hoping that the outcome of the election is going to make much of a difference, but that is precisely what I would like to share with you in what follows. Zen practice is eight days a week.

For the last year or so, I have been more committed than usual to regularly attend morning meditation at the Zen center, which for me incurs only a 10- to 15-minute drive, depending on traffic, from our home. Nonetheless, because it starts at 6:00 o’clock am, I have to exercise some diligence in going to bed a bit earlier than I might like, as well as getting out of bed, and out of the house, to arrive in time before the others do. In a city like Atlanta, the commute — to work and back, or anywhere else — becomes a part of the calculation. So I thought it might be interesting to you to hear a blow-by-blow account of what I go through as my morning routine. Perhaps it will encourage you to endeavor to visit the zendo in person more often, as one of many of the “damn your lousy excuses” from that chapter in “The Original Frontier.” Let me touch on some of the repeat highlights of negotiating daily practice around regular sitting in a non-monastic setting.

Getting There

Master Dogen reported that his teacher in China, Nyojo Zenji, made a vow to leave his bed “like a pair of old shoes” each morning. I am not sure of what kind of shoes they wore in those days, but in my case at least, old shoes can be a lot more comfortable than new ones. And with the process of aging, getting up and getting going each day can be a real adventure in recovery. Moving from the horizontal to the vertical in proprioception becomes an exercise in defiance of gravity.

Setting the Alarm

A great luxury of being semi-retired, or retired into full-time Zen, as I like to think of it, is the non-necessity of using an alarm. At last I have come into accordance with the old Zen saying, “When tired I sleep; when hungry I eat” — a description of reality, and a prescription for practice, from a time in which no one had a clock, let alone a motherboard embedded in a slab of silicon. I reluctantly set the alarm for 5:30 AM in order to be sure to arrive at ASZC in time to open for the 6:00-7:00 AM sit. When the alarm went off, I was already half-awake. As if my subconscious mind was aware of time as measured by the tick-tock of battery-operated electrons.

Dressing in the Dark

Committed to attending every morning for five weekdays, and to leaving the house just in time, my morning routine is quick and simple. I keep my Zen outfit readily available, so I can dress as quickly as possible, pick up the things I need, and be out the door.

This involves pulling on clothing in the dark, including my long-sleeved tee-shirt made of bamboo. Proceeding by touch in lieu of vision offers three ways to get it wrong, and only one way to get it right. If the garment has a label at the back of the neck that can be felt, it provides tactile clues to orientation to put the shirt on correctly. But If not, you might put it on backward; inside out; or inside out and backward. In one recent instance, I thought I had it right, because in lieu of a label at the back of the collar, my pullover has a small triangle on the front that can be identified clearly through touch. But when I returned home after zazen, and looked in the mirror, I found that the shirt was not on backward — but it was inside-out.

The pants I wear to sit in are also made of bamboo, soft and stretchy, so they tend to be clingy when I am pulling them on, so I perch on my bureau, or chest of drawers, and pull them on one leg at a time — they have tie-strings in front, so no problem in getting the front-to-back and inside-to-outside orientation correct there — but my left foot always tries to find its way into the pants pocket. I have to remember to put my socks on after my pants, because the enhanced friction of cloth-on-cloth increases the likelihood of becoming tangled in the leg of the pants.

Driving to the Center

At 5:30 AM it is still dark in Atlanta at this time of year, so I turn on the headlights. Our car does not have an audible warning if the lights are left on, so I have to be careful about turning them off once I reach the Zen center, and even more so after I return home, when it is light. I have managed to run the battery down more than once. Just another mindfulness moment.

Neighborhood traffic is light at this time of day, though where we live is very much an inner-city location. The route to the Zen center is only three miles or so, as a crow flies, but it passes through six stoplights and one stop sign at the various intersections along the way, which takes about ten minutes. Potholes are the bigger nuisance, and I know from the school of hard knocks where each and every one of them is. Sometimes, half-asleep, I forget, and am rudely reminded by the sudden bump and loud noise, like the kyosaku stick, which, as Matsuoka-roshi would often say, will “wake you up.”

If all goes well, I arrive within fifteen minutes or so of the start time, turn on the lights, burn a stick of welcoming incense, and settle in at the Doan, or time-keeper, station. One of our current fulltime residents is an early bird, so she is usually there to unlock the door and meet and greet any attendees even before I arrive. But residents are, by nature, transient. Again, we are not monastics, and the modern Zen center is not a monastery. It is more like a bivouac, a temporary gathering place where we reconnoiter to rest up and regroup before reentering the fray of the battle of everyday life. Retreats, or sesshin, are an extended version of this hunkering down, more like an attack on our life issues, than a retreat from them.

Attending

Soon, I am sitting in my spot with the clock, gong, and clacker-sticks at the ready to time the alternating bouts of sitting and walking meditation. If others arrive in time, I strike the gong three times at precisely 6:00 AM, which signifies the beginning of the period, marking the three bows the head priest usually makes before joining the group in zazen. If I suspect someone is coming but may be late, I wait until 5 minutes or so after to strike the gong. You can hear the cars arriving in the parking lot outside, and it is better to let the late-comers join before striking the starting gongs.

Sitting

Settling into the posture includes embracing the stubborn resistance of tendons and ligaments in the legs and knee joints to being folded into the pretzel-like figure of crossed legs or kneeling, the so-called “lotus” and “seiza” postures. I favor the more relaxed “Burmese,” or native American style of tucking the legs under, instead of twisting the knee joints to rotate the ankles and feet to turn the soles up, in the classic posture illustrated by various iconic statuary and images of the Buddha and bodhisattvas. Fortunately, these aspects of “sitting upright in Samadhi” are less important than that the spine, neck and head be oriented in one straight, vertical line, “between heaven and earth,” as Matsuoka-roshi used to say.

Timing

Being responsible for timing the sitting, both for oneself and for others, puts a different slant on our perception of time. We typically sit for two 25-minute periods with walking meditation of 5 minutes in between. I do not like looking at the clock, or timing my own sit at home, but when attending on others, I have to keep track of the time for their benefit. So the apparent friction between “self-and-other” raises its unlovely head, sometimes arousing a mild resentment, to accompany the natural resistance of the body to sitting still. When the time for walking meditation (J. kinhin) comes, we ring the bell twice, and strike the clacker sticks, twice at the beginning, and once at the end, of the five minutes or so. All signaling is non-verbal, in order to relieve the participants of the irritant of the human voice.

Chanting

At the end of the last period of sitting, we strike the bell once before beginning the morning service. The sound of the big gong (J. kane) is said to be the “voice of Buddha.” Reciting the daily feature chant from our “Zen Practice at Home” manual, we are reminded of the various teachings of our Indian, Chinese, and Japanese ancestors. When someone is in need of training, we stay behind for a half hour or so to go over the protocols or leading the service, or whatever details they want to review more closely.

Leaving

After “leaving no traces” by restoring the zendo to its pristine appearance, and shutting down the facility, I drive home by the reverse route that I followed coming to the morning session, with variations depending upon the local morning traffic that has increased dramatically over the span of a couple of hours. I know all the shortcuts to avoid the morning rush on the main north-south route of the neighborhood commute to work, as well as local parents escorting their progeny to the bus stop, to be picked up and safely transported to the local schools. It reminds me that Master Dogen once commented that what we are doing in Zen — zazen meditation and Dharma study — is developing “true intelligence.” I find myself hoping that the children being herded to their public and private institutions of learning will someday be exposed to this Dharma, the most refined level of education.

Arriving Home

Within a time span of approximately twice the duration of the earlier commute to the Zen center, given the exponentially increased traffic load, I arrive home again in the daylight of the rising sun. (Although, of course, the sun does not rise, nor does it set, technically speaking. But I digress.)

Sometimes, along the way, I will stop and pick up a couple of large lattes — one regular, one decaf — and perhaps a breakfast croissant, from one of the three or four coffee shops along the way, one of the perks of living in a lively inner-city setting. I am reminded of the historical factoid that coffee shops were once banned in the cities of Greece, when they had become hotbeds of revolutionary fervor. The social or political downside of being over-caffeinated, I suppose.

Other mornings I will make my own breakfast, or crawl back into bed, depending on the after-effects of the prior evening’s schedule and activities. Then, in 24 hours or so, I do it all over, once again. With enough repetition, it becomes routine, this daily practice of public, group zazen, bookended by sleep, work, rest and re-engagement in the passing pageantry of life. Best way to start the day.

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Returning to the twists and turns of the endless, meandering 2024 campaign for POTUS, and looming uncertainty of threatened challenges to the vote promising to bollix up the results, the question arises as to what this may have to do with Zen.

The dedicated Zen guy who produces the UnMind podcast suggested that we take up the premise of the “Bodhisattva ideal” in Buddhism, comparing and contrasting behaviors and apparent attitudes of the candidates — and politicians in general — to this lofty ideal and aspiration.

Somewhere in the copious Zen literature I came across the proposition that governmental leaders find themselves in positions of power owing to karmic merit accumulated in past lives, apparently whether they know it or not. We can suppose that this quaint notion arose in the context of predominantly Buddhist societies, such as that of Ashoka the Great in India, or in the later empires or principalities in China. It requires quite a stretch of the imagination to interpret our current political situation from that standpoint, though an online meme that one of the candidates is the “chosen of God” is even more ludicrous to contemplate.

Looking at the meaning of “Bodhisattva” thorough the eyes of Google, the first hit that comes up is from the University of Washington, Seattle-based home of the Huskies, the first thing that comes up on their homepage. We will defer any consideration of college football as the key branding element of UW, and higher education in general, for a later segment. Their more-or-less traditional definition of the Bodhisattva assumedly comes from their comparative religion department:

Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment. There are many different Bodhisattvas, but the most famous in China is Avalokitesvara, known in Chinese as Guanyin. Bodhisattvas are usually depicted as less austere or inward than the Buddha. — https://depts.washington.edu

Parsing this definition, I have a few quibbles. We prefer the use of “enlightening” beings as it indicates a process in which all of us comprise a work in progress, whereas “enlightened” indicates a state of completion. No true bodhisattva would ever claim to be enlightened in that sense. In the sense of enlightened self interest and the best interests of others, yes.

Then there is the idea of “entering paradise.” The Buddhist term “Nirvana” is not pointing at another dimension or plane of existence, but the true nature of this world in which we find ourselves — so-called “Samsara.” As Master Dogen reminds us, “actually, the Other Shore (of Nirvana) comes to us”; we do not go to it. As Shohaku Okumura-roshi once mentioned, “Everybody says they want to go to Nirvana. But when you go there, there is nobody there. Only bodhisattvas can go to Nirvana, and they choose to stay here. So our charge is to change Samsara into Nirvana.” This is what Dogen means by saying the other shore comes to us.

The reference to “many different Bodhisattvas” and the most famous being Avalokitesvara, Guanyin in China, or Kanzeon in Japan, reinforces the notion that bodhisattvas are a special class of beings, outside the kin or ordinary mortals — much like the icons of other religions, such as canonized prophets, saints and saviors, or demigods. My understanding of the Zen ideal is that we are all bodhisattvas, whether we know it or not.

And finally, the reference to their relatively diminished austerity seems somewhat overwrought. My reading of the original teachings attributed to Shakyamuni reveal a profound humility and accessibility, and a remarkable empathy for his audience, that any bodhisattva would aspire to emulate. Awakening of the Bodhi mind is concomitant with the Bodhisattva vow — to help all others before reaching the other shore — according to Dogen, who should know.

So how do our current carriers of partisan banners stack up against this image?

I would suggest that their motivations have little or nothing to do with entering paradise, for one. So in that, they are like bodhisattvas — but focusing their efforts on the present and immediate future of prosperity in the secular sphere — not the spiritual realm. In American politics, and perhaps that of Western countries in general, there is an underlying implication that behavior in the societal sphere is indicative of one’s “values,” which tend to land in the ethical, moral, and spiritual column. This may be a vestigial remnant of the puritan ethic that pervaded the early migrants to these shores, the after- effects of which we witness today, including in the performative permutations of partisan politics.

But, quoting myself in an earlier UnMind segment, there are brute behaviors of our fellow-travelers in this particular time and space that cannot be excused as politic:

When it comes to indiscriminate bombing of civilians and children, we are no longer in the realm of “politics.” If we are silent, we become complicit. Buddha, I believe, would have spoken out against this betrayal of compassion and wisdom. As did Matsuoka Roshi, concerning the corrupt regime in Vietnam, and other atrocities of his time. We can look to the teachings and meditation practice of Zen Buddhism to find a degree of solace and sanctuary from these insults to humanity, but we cannot run, and we cannot hide from them, ultimately. But we do not have to join the partisan divide, either.

In the same episode, we provided some historical context by referring to the foundational documents of the Founding Fathers, including the Declaration of Independence, with particular attention to the second section:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This begins to sound a lot like the Bodhisattva ideal applied to the salvation of others, at least in the secular realm. If we are all equal, we all have equal potential to wake up in the most comprehensive sense, as did Shakyamuni Buddha. We also innately deserve to be treated with the highest degree of respect from our peers. And each and all have equal claim to life — within the realistic constraints of aging, sickness and death; to liberty — in the sense of true liberation from our own ignorance, and the imposition of that of others upon our lives; and the pursuit of true happiness, which does not derive from materialistic sources.

Perhaps our political leaders are doing their level best to secure the rights, at least in their secular manifestation. But compare to the Bodhisattva vows, which address serving, or saving all beings, on another scale altogether; two translations give us a better insight into their broader and deeper meaning:

Beings are numberless I vow to free them

Delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them

Dharma gates are boundless I vow to enter them

The Buddha way is unsurpassable I vow to realize it

However innumerable all beings are

I vow to free them all

However inexhaustible my delusions are

I vow to extinguish them all

However immeasurable the dharma teachings are

I vow to master them all

However endless the great way

I vow to follow it completely

I leave it to you to decide whether or not, and to what degree, your candidate for the highest office in the land, the most powerful secular position on Earth, are in harmony with these compassionate aspirations. But remember that the teachings of Buddhism were never meant to be held up to criticize others, but to reflect back upon yourself and your own behavior. The mirror of Zen reflects all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — without discrimination. You and your behavior are also reflected in that Precious Mirror.

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When we mention Zen practice these days, we usually mean sitting in Zen meditation, or zazen. It was not always so. In Bodhidharma’s time, “practice” meant observing the Precepts in daily life, discerning to what degree our behavior is comporting to their admonitions. If memory serves, this is found in “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma” by Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine.

Similarly, when we speak of studying the Dharma, we typically mean reading the written record. It was not always so. When Buddha was alive, the teachings were spoken. You literally had to go listen to live lectures and, later, memorized recitation, to hear the Dharma. This was apparently true of all teachings of all sects at that time; the oral tradition prevailed. It was some four centuries after the Buddha’s death, when his utterances were first committed to written form.

With the advent of the Internet we have many more opportunities to “hear the true dharma” — a Dogen coinage with a deeper meaning — as expounded by others in the form of podcasts such as UnMind, audiobooks and other modern marvels. But we have to call into question whether we are hearing the Dharma truly. Whether the meaning we extract from listening to the efforts of others to express this subtle and inconceivable teaching is anywhere near to the original meaning that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, intended, or for that matter that of any of his many successors in India, China, Korea and Japan, and the other countries of origin.

I am not suggesting that we engage in a scholarly examination of the provenance and evolution of the Three Baskets — or Tripitaka in Sanskrit. I propose that we are challenged to attempt to render the meaning in the modern idiom, which involves extracting them from their original cultural context, and embedding them in ours, as well as expressing them in the vernacular, including the language of modern science and philosophy.

For one thing, this means divesting the ancient liturgical passages of jargon — primarily the obscure and seemingly mystical terms, mostly from Sanskrit — such as “samadhi” for example — that some contemporary writers seem prone to sprinkle liberally throughout their publications. The downside to this tendency is that it creates an impression that the author actually knows what these terms mean, whether you, dear listener,understand them or not.

Another consideration is what is called the “theory-laden” aspect of the semantics of language, as well as our interpretation of direct perception. This conditions the impact that Zen masters’ behavior, as well as that of their “turning words” — in Japanese, wato — can have on their students. This concept was introduced to me by George Wrisley georgewrisley.com, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Georgia, author of texts on Dogen and Zen, who generously made several technical contributions to my books, “The Original Frontier” and “The Razorblade of Zen.”

Professor Wrisley pointed out that, in the now-famous records of Zen students’ exchanges with their masters, including extreme gestures they resorted to, in trying to help the student wake up to the reality of Zen — shock tactics such as shouting, and sometimes striking with a fist or staff — each student’s reaction to the abuse was entirely dependent upon their belief, or innate “theory,” that the teacher was enlightened, and so could “do no wrong,” to oversimplify the point.

Ordinarily, if someone hits you with a stick, your reaction would not be one of profound insight, and undying gratitude for the “grandmotherly kindness” of your abuser. Today it would likely trigger a lawsuit.

The ancient ancestors of Zen seem to have an intuitive grasp of the importance of language and its effect on our perception of reality, as indicated in lines from the early Ch’an poems, such as:

Darkness merges refined and common words

Brightness distinguishes clear and murky phrases

And:

Hearing the words understand the meaning

Do not establish standards of your own

In Zen, of course, experience comes first, expression a distant second. The interim state, and where we can get it wrong, consists in our interpretation of direct experience, both on the cushion and off. As another ancient Ch’an poem has it:

The meaning does not reside in the words

but a pivotal moment brings it forth

And yet another:

Although it is not constructed

it is not beyond words

Hopefully we have, or will have in future, experienced this pivotal moment. Meanwhile, we are dependent upon words to parse this teaching, and to express it, both to ourselves as well as to others. We can use words to encourage all to go beyond language, and even ordinary perception, in direct experience in zazen. In the face of this design intent of the Dharma, the past efforts to translate it into various languages, and the present effort to paraphrase it into the modern idiom, seem worth the time and trouble.

In this spirit, let me share with you my paraphrase of the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, or Great Heart of Wisdom Teaching, with which, hopefully, you are familiar. This is a work in progress, subject to revision.

The typographical layout available on the UnMind podcast page is designed to facilitate scanning and reading the text while chanting it aloud, usually accompanied by drum and gongs. You might follow it with your eyes, while you follow my words with your ears. In this way, you will absorb a multi-sensory experience, which may be more revealing than hearing or reading alone. I will simply recite it here, a capella:

ESSENTIAL TEACHING OF PERFECTING WISDOM

When any and all Awakening Beings

deeply and directly experience the process of perfecting wisdom,

they clearly see that all five traditional components of sentience

are fundamentally free of permanence and separate self-existence;

this insight relieves all unnecessary suffering.

Respected seekers of the truth, know that:

the apparent form of our world is not separate from its impermanence;

impermanence is not separable from appearances;

“form,” or particles of matter, is innately “emptiness,” or waves of energy;

conversely, emptiness is innately form.

All sensations, perceptions, and underlying mental formations,

as well as consciousness itself, also manifest as complementary.

All existent beings manifest elemental impermanence,

imperfection, and insubstantiality:

they neither arise nor cease, as they appear to do;

they are neither defiled nor pure, but nondual in their nature;

they neither increase nor decrease in value or merit.

Therefore know that, given the relativity of the material and immaterial,

there can be no fixity of form; no tangibility of sensation;

no persistence of perception; no infallibility of mental formations;

finally, there can be no absolute entity of consciousness.

More immediately, the principle of complementarity entails that there can be

no eyes, ears, nose, or tongue, as such; and thus, no body;

likewise there can be no “mind,” as a separate substance;

it follows that, in spite of appearances,

there can be no independent functions of

seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching;

nor can there be unconstructed objects of the mind;

no independent realm of sight, nor that of any other sense organ;

nor any realm of mind-consciousness as a whole.

This means that there can be neither ignorance in the absolute sense,

nor any extinction of ignorance in the relative sense.

Neither can there be sickness, old age and death as absolute states;

Nor any extinction of sickness, old age and death as relative states.

In light of the implications of this insight,

suffering intentionally inflicted upon oneself and / or others can come to an end,

stemming as it does from confusion as to root causes;

while natural suffering such as aging, sickness, and death cannot end.

Thus there can be no isolated “path” leading to cessation of suffering;

there can be no essential “knowledge” to gain, in any conclusive sense;

and no “attainment,” of any consequential kind.

Since there is nothing to attain,

all Awakening Beings rely totally on simply perfecting their wisdom;

their body-mind drops away, functioning fully with no further hindrances;

with no dualistic hindrances, no root of fear is to be found;

far beyond confused worldviews,

they abide in nondual spiritual liberation.

All Awakening Ones of past, present, and future

rely on the perfecting of this deepest wisdom,

thereby attaining unsurpassed, complete, insight

and letting go of the attainment.

Rest assured that perfecting wisdom

is the most excellent method;

the serene and illuminating discipline; the unsurpassable teaching;

the incomparable means of mitigating all suffering;

and that this claim is true, not false.

We proclaim the transformational perfecting of wisdom:

Gone, gone to the other shore; attained the other shore; altogether beyond the other shore, having never left; the other shore comes to us; wisdom perfected!

I do not claim to have captured the essence of the original chant. The afore-mentioned Buddhist scholar and Ch’an translator Red Pine, in his modern translation “The Heart Sutra,” tells us that this condensed version of the larger sutra extolling the emptiness of all existence, including the Dharma, was published in China around 900 CE. This was done in order to counter a prevailing trend toward erudition as the indicator of enlightenment, a distortion of the true Dharma that has occurred more than once in history. Another famous example is that of Master Huineng, sixth ancestor in China, who publicly tore up copies of the sutras to make a similar point. Buddha-dharma is manifest in nondual reality as lived, not contained in writing as doctrine.

In a future segment of UnMind, we will take up another of my hopeful efforts at paraphrasing the Dharma. Meanwhile I encourage you to try your own hand — or more precisely, your mouth and mind — at putting one of the historical teachings into your own words. You might want to compose your own version of the Precepts, for example. When and if you do so, it may force you to consider the true meaning of these teachings which — through the sheer repetition of chanting them repeatedly over time — begin to sink into our stubborn monkey minds. But the downside of repetition is that they may become rote recitation, in which their deeper meaning and direct relevance to our contemporary lives may be lost.

Not to worry, however — combined with the nonverbal silence and deep stillness of zazen, where we can begin to experience the meaning of the expression — we cannot go far wrong.

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After taking a hiatus this summer, we return to the political fray with an eye toward its implications for our lives and our pursuit of a more perfect union with the teachings of Zen. It is a good thing that we did not try to say anything about the campaign at the beginning of August, in light of the whiplash nature of rapid-fire developments on that front. Anything we had to say regarding predictions or outcomes would have been instantly irrelevant on a day-to-day basis, rendered moot by the exhaustive political melodrama playing out in the media.

One of my online dharma dialogs brought up the question of agency, as in how much effect can one person really have on the direction the country is moving as a whole, not to mention the looming consequences of climate change on a global scale. It may help in setting the context, to recall my model of the Four Fundamental Spheres – those arenas of activity and influence that we all encounter on a daily basis.

The four spheres, visualized as nesting in a concentric array, start with the Personal at the center; surrounded by the Social, which includes the political; then the Natural sphere, the world of our surrounding planet and its atmosphere; and finally the Universal, extending into outer space. Our sense of agency and influence diminishes as we move outward from the Personal, inversely proportional to the influence of the surrounding spheres on our personal bubble. It is necessarily an asymmetrical relationship, an understatement of cosmic proportions.

Politics is the social sphere on steroids, we might say. It is a mixed blessing in that even those who emphasize our worst angels in the struggle to swing a majority, reveal, unintentionally, the dark underbelly of human nature. Which can be clarifying and even healthy, depending on what we do with it.

These days , many of my online dharma dialog calls, dokusan in Japanese, reveal the anxiety that comes with the uncertainty of living in “interesting times,” as in the ancient Chinese curse. We might prefer to ignore the political realm altogether, but unless you are willing to become a hermit and remove yourself from society in some extreme manner, you cannot avoid the consequences of the political actions taken by others, in the cultural hothouse of modern civilization, whether urban or rural. The question arises: Is Zen (& zazen) merely a coping strategy? Or is it only reinforcing our personal status-quo? Or, conversely, can it enable us to change and adapt?

I solicited suggestions for this reboot episode from my producer and publisher, the former being an American citizen currently living in the Southwest, the latter a Canadian living to the Northeast. Here is a sample of what they suggested:

I think there's something in here about a cautionary tale for people looking to religious leaders for signals on how to vote. I've seen some other Zen leaders on social media endorsing candidates - which is fine, but they wield a lot of power, and Zen really is about thinking for yourself on your cushion. Maybe religion is separate from politics, and that's ok.

It also might be interesting to discuss how to have compassion for the “other” – be it democrat or republican – as one cannot exist without the other; and neither are really separate.

I was gratified to see the reference to my past emphasis in this series on the value of independent thinking, and engaging in interdependent action, which I propose is one of the outputs of Zen training. As opposed to co-dependent thinking and action, another way of characterizing the partisan divide. If we are developing the ability to think independently of the political forces impinging upon us, and the freedom to act interdependently with cohorts on both sides of the divide, then our Zen training can contribute to evolving the more perfect union that is given lip service in the social discourse.

Referring back to the previous UnMind series of three segments on aging, sickness and death, the Three Marks of Buddhism’s worldview, I want to reiterate that the paranoid style in politics seems most likely to stem from irrational fear of aging, sickness, and dying, the personal dimensions of the universal traits of anicca, dukkha, and anatta, or impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self. When we throw the “Three Poisons” of greed, hatred, and delusion into the mix, the result is a true witch’s brew. This is the old “divide and conquer” strategy.

The question of how to have compassion for the “other” – be it democrat or republican – goes to a more non-dualistic reading of the seeming divide between irreconcilable opposites. When we look at what conservatives are trying to liberalize, and what liberals are trying to conserve, we see that the labels are not really getting to the essence of the conflict, but merely exacerbating it. The issue of factionalism was raised in the early founding documents of the American experiment as a potential threat to the republic, but since one party cannot exist without the other, and neither is really separate from the body politic, they are mutually defining, and can be complimentary. The real conflict goes to the personal dimension, where we find the question of: “How much is enough?”

How much is enough to live happily, and is there enough to go around? Are the global shortages of food, drinking water, clean air, housing, and the hierarchy of physical survival needs real, or are they the consequence of negligence and malfeasance on the part of greedy, profit-driven special interests?

Have we as a species been on a decades-long binge of “Hotel-California-everything-all-the-time” wretched excess and the bills are just now finally coming due? Can we all downsize our lifestyle to a level that relieves the burden of the disposable consumption society?

When we look to the example of our forebears in the history of Zen, and, indeed, in the early days of democracy in America, going back no further than my grandparents’ generation, we can detect vestiges of a much more moderate way of living that recognized reasonable limits to the answer to how much is enough.

Of course there were contemporaneous avatars of wealth and power, living out the lifestyles and fantasies of the rich and famous. And the human slaves of earlier periods in history have been replaced by the “energy slaves” of modern technology, as Bucky Fuller pointed out. In that sense, wealth, as the commonwealth, has been redistributed more widely, but there is still an unseemly preoccupation in some quarters with amassing financial resources beyond the scope of what any one person, family, or corporate entity, can possibly need, or spend, within one lifetime. Except, perhaps, as a defensive reserve to defend against future lawsuits. Or, perhaps, to invest in initiatives for future cultural evolution. But do we really need to terraform Mars, for example, when we cannot even make the Earth function as our home planet?

Back to the personal sphere of meditation, and its connection to the social sphere of politics. If we accept the suggestion that our Zen practice is indeed a kind of generalized coping mechanism, it begs the question, Coping with what? Master Dogen asks, about two-thirds of the way through Fukanzazengi–Principles of Seated Meditation:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism

how can you be satisfied with the transient world?

Our bodies are like dew on the grass

and our lives like a flash of lightning

Vanishing in a moment.

By this point in the long tract of instructions on physical method and philosophical attitude he picked up in China, the first piece he published as a manual of meditation for his student followers, he has made perhaps a hundred different points about what is important in Buddhism. So what he means by “the most important thing” is subject to some interpretation. Just as it is in our modern milieu. What is, after all, the most important thing? Not just in meditation, but in all your daily actions, as Dogen emphasizes in the same writing.

Media mavens, including pre-digital traditional channels and ever-expanding post-digital modes, are constantly promoting what they want us to pay attention to as “news,” what they consider the most important events and issues of the moment in the 24-7 news cycle. Most of it is designed to capture eyeballs, ears, and clicks, in order to develop ratings that are used to rationalize the cost of ad buys and other kinds of participation in the public arena, or direct sales. Which items are delivered to your doorstep in ever-greater frequency with minimal effort on your part. Except for disposing of the mountain of packaging and shipping materials.

Turning our attention back to the cushion and the wall, the most important thing at the moment cannot be the passing pageantry of the political campaign. Unless you are running for office, or working for someone who is. One important thing is to understand or appreciate the importance of the political to the personal, in particular, your personal sphere. While the central personal dimensions of aging, sickness and death can definitely be affected – directly or indirectly, positively or negatively – by the political arena, it is not typically the most proximate cause of any of the three. And the last thing that you are likely to be thinking, on your death bed, is that you wished you had spent more time on politics.

Some ancient sage said to “stamp life-and-death on your forehead and never let it out of your mind.” I am sure he was not morbidly obsessed with death, but that his life, and ours, takes a major part of its central meaning, and sense of urgency, from the fact that birth is the leading cause of death. This, to many, would seem to be wrong.

But if you think about it – or as Dogen says, “examine thoroughly in practice” – this idea that something is wrong, it appears that it may only be our opinion. We may be wrong. Reality cannot be wrong. Nature cannot be wrong. But we may be wrong. Only we human beings can get this wrong. And then we blame others, turning against our fellow human and other sentient beings. As the Tao te Ching says, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.”

We can blame our situation, with some justification, on others, including the pols. But the blaming does not solve the basic problem. Perhaps this is getting at the most important thing. Accepting and admitting that the suffering in the world that may be considered wrong, or unnecessary, is caused exclusively by human beings, based on their assessment of their world as somehow “wrong.” This is the kind of suffering that can end, seen in the clear light of emptiness in zazen.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Following on the previous UnMind series of three segments on aging, sickness and death, the Three Marks of Buddhism’s worldview, we will expand our scope to the broader world of international conflict, characteristic of our modern world, where Buddhism’s three conditions of existence are also manifested, if in a more universal form. Traditional definitions of these basic aspects of life are universal in scope: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self (Skt. anicca, dukkha, anatta). We can see clearly that in today’s world, these givens of existence are not warmly embraced on the social level in America, let alone on national or global levels, which surely follows from their avoidance on the personal level.

Beginning with Buddhism’s “compassionate teaching” – the Dharma – we find that along with the three marks of aging, sickness and death, Buddha promulgated the “Three Poisons,” usually rendered as “greed, anger or hatred, and delusion or folly.” What a witch’s brew is conjured, when we mix the six ingredients together.

In the context of aging, greed becomes the longing for longevity, the overreliance on meds to avoid the ravages of illness, and extravagant, catastrophic efforts at prolonging life at all costs. Anger and hatred arise when we are denied the ability to forestall aging, when we are overcome by a pandemic, and when we blame widespread death and destruction on others. Delusion and folly ensue when we act on our mistaken beliefs, attacking others for the natural consequences of our collective and individual actions. The unexpected consequences threaten us all, whether in our dotage or full-flowering youth, with the Four Horsemen – plagues, famine, and the predations of war, and not necessarily in that order. Just who is to blame for this situation and how can we hold them accountable?

In the worldview of Zen, everything, including charity, begins at home. To quote Master Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The first embrace of reality is to “study the self.” The second is to “forget the self,” as Master Dogen reminds us in his famous teaching, Genjokoan–Actualizing the Fundamental Point.Actualizing the fundamental point of existence requires that we embrace our own aging, sickness and death – the close-up-and-personal reality of impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality, including our precious self – while recognizing that greed, anger and delusion are fueling the fires of discontent, leading to blaming others for our personal predicament. Sometimes, others are to blame for making things worse, of course, just as we are to blame for making their world more crowded. Stop the world and let me get off. Would it were so simple.

The blame game can range from blaming our parents for our birth, on one extreme, to blaming those others most distantly related to us by blood. I read somewhere that the furthest removed any human being can be from any other human, biologically speaking, is something like 26th cousin, if memory serves. One wonders, with the growth in population, whether that tenuous kinship is getting closer, or further apart, as time goes by, with 8 billion people and counting.

I also read of a laboratory experiment, some years back, where they used the classic maze of rats to find out what happens when you simply keep adding rats to the maze, without letting any escape. At one point of increasing density, the rats begin attacking each other. They “blame” the others for their own discomfort, apparently. The analogy to human population should not be lost on anyone. The anxiety and outright hostility associated with immigration on a global basis is too obvious a parallel to ignore.

Or we can aim all of our blame at the political system, or the candidate du jour. Now that the “debate of the century” has landed with a thud, the rats are having a hard time deciding which of the two leaders of the rat pack is most at fault.

Much of the anger and hysteria we witness on ideological and political fronts of the public discourse seems motivated by underlying fears, exacerbated by perceived worsening conditions, including density of population. The identified “foreigners” – bringing unintelligible languages, peculiar cultural customs, and bizarre belief systems – induce anxiety, stereotyping and suspicion amongst native populations, triggering the threat of the privileged being “replaced” by them in the great scheme of things. This probably arises from a tribal, protective social instinct, linked to the survival of “our kind.” Hyped to the max by political opportunists, into the bargain.

But on a more personal level, this anxiety, amplified by mob hysteria, surely finds its origin in the triple threat of aging, sickness and death, that is inborn with each individual. Birth is the leading cause of death, after all, like it or not.

This perceived threat, however irrational, is tied to what biologists call the survival instinct, or imperative. Reality is not a respecter of persons. But biology is designed to privilege survival of the species over all comers, adapting to ever-changing circumstances. Natural and artificial changes in context often outpace and outmaneuver biology, engendering threats to survival, to cycles of “extinction panic,” or to actual extinction of the species, potentially including humanity. Cultural evolution – our ability to pass on technological advances to the next generation, and their ability to further improve on their cultural inheritance – is ensconced in the social sphere. But it likewise runs into trouble when it is not agile enough to keep up with the rate of change of conditions to which it is adapting, in the natural and universal spheres. Such as climate change. Aye, there’s the rub.

“Survival of the fittest” is the shorthand catchphrase for dumbing down Darwin’s elegant and complex theory on the “Origin of Species.” To find a cogent example of society’s collective resistance to this notion that we privilege the fit, we need look no further than the recruiting, drafting and conscription of young men and women – the “fittest” – into the modern military – the main mechanism oriented to societal survival – across the globe. Civilian leaders, and those at higher command levels, manage to keep a safe distance from the front lines, so as to return to fight another day, one assumes. But the survival of the oldest is not Nature’s way. It is not natural to put younger members of the species at risk to protect older members. Witness the wolf pack.

This biological imperative dictates an age-related triage, protecting those most likely to survive, to survive longer, and to reproduce. Yet humans do the opposite in wartime, and did it again in the face of the pandemic, by sending younger first responders into the fray, while protecting elderly and senior leaders through isolation, quarantine and access to medical care. Notwithstanding how miserable a failure that effort turned out to be, the point is still well-taken. Of course, from a practical perspective, the young provide the necessary numbers, and the vitality, needed on the frontlines. Even if senior members of society were willing to take point in crisis conditions, the question would be whether or not they are able to.

Setting aside such considerations of the neurotic societal implications of turning younger generations into cannon and virus fodder, what will it take to finally bring about world peace? Can we beat our swords into plowshares, turn intercontinental ballistic missiles into spaceships, cyberwar into cyberfun?

The current national debate is styled as a contest between democratic governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” striving toward a “more perfect union” of the republic; versus power elites exerting autocratic control over a hopelessly divided populace. The appeal of the latter is understandable for the “haves,” those who already enjoy a relative elite status of economic and social privilege. They stand to come out on top, liberated from the messy business of compromise with those on the bottom end of income equality. Likewise, the uneasiness of the “have-nots” is easy to understand. They see themselves as already victimized by the unlevel playing field, touted as equal opportunity for all.

This, it would seem, is the real wall that is being built, not on the border, but right down the middle of the country. Its building blocks consist of the institutions installed by the founding fathers, rearranged to reassert the original privilege of white, land-owning males. But is all this – the daily fare being served up by the media and opposing forces – really the root of the problem?

Whether or not we believe in an eternal soul, or reincarnation, as did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus, or resurrection, as do modern Christians, we finally come to face our mortality, in person. In Zen, the only mate who will accompany us to the grave is our deeds. Whatever wealth, honor, or powers of reasoning we have accumulated in managing and manipulating the vagaries of behavior and vicissitudes of fortunes encountered in life, they serve us little in the face of death. The same may be said of family, though better to die surrounded by loved ones than alone, or surrounded by hostiles, I suppose.

On the cushion we sit “without relying on anything” as Master Dogen reminds us in his version of “Needle for Zazen (Zazenshin),” including all the tricks, trash and trinkets we have assembled in our toolkit. Try as we might to think our way to enlightenment, or to reason ourselves into insight, we find ourselves failing again and again. Finally we must surrender to the chaos of not knowing, and abandon reliance on reason itself, spawn of philosophy and the other kind of Enlightenment. We find verification of our practice in “making effort without aiming at it.”

Needless to say, this is a very uncomfortable place to find ourselves, at a pass that is not really negotiable, in any ordinary sense. All the stages of grief prove futile in the face of the relentless process and progress of biology. We need to confront reality when we are young and vigorous, as in “Stamp life and death on your forehead, and never let it out of your mind,” paraphrasing a truth long lost to attribution. Life takes its meaning in the context of death. If you find that too morbid, just imagine what life would be like if we did not die. Its meaning would be entirely different, and not entirely positive.

When the grim reaper arrives, we may want to embrace her / his relentless, unsympathetic and unforgiving scythe, as being not at all different from the sword of Manjusri, hopefully cutting through our final delusions. Just as hopefully, the passing pageantry of life, particularly the concurrent social-political dimension, will have little or nothing to do with the circumstances surrounding the last breath we take. Preferable to die on the cushion, of course.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Closing out our exploration of the “three marks” of dukkha, in this episode we will take a look, close-up-and-personal, at death. In summary, our confrontation with and embrace of the three marks varies according to their universal natures, as well as to our personal nurturing in their recognition and acceptance.

Aging is predictable, but typically sneaks up on us, moving far too gradually to register in our youth, even nowadays with our ubiquitous mirrors, selfies, and TikTok videos – none of which our ancestors had in abundance. Today’s living generations may be the most self-conscious in the history of humankind. The famous “polishing a tile to make a mirror” koan anecdote reflected the fact that mirrors were originally of polished metal. Narcissus, remember, fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. By contrast, Tung-shan, a 9th century monk, was enlightened upon seeing his face for the first time, reflected in the water. A contemporary stand-up comic, who shall remain nameless, asked, “Did’ja ever look in the mirror in the morning and think, “That can’t be accurate!”?

Sickness, whether life-threatening or not, can land like a ton of bricks, flattening you for the moment – and often for the foreseeable future – with the rate of recovery dependent upon many factors, including aging. Sickness can often be the death-knell, as a diagnosis of cancer once was. As one ages, the body becomes less immune to the predations of bacteria and viruses, it seems. Today the threat of mental illness, leading to suicide, also looms large.

Usually, the threat of death from natural causes may be safely ignored, postponed, or even denied, until it can’t. But sudden death is even more unpredictable than sickness, and can come in such a variety of modes today, including natural and man-made disasters, which are popping up with greater and greater frequency, notably side-effects of climate change, such as the ever-increasing statistical rate of death from extreme heat. America seems to be the poster-boy for death by guns, accidental or intentional, now one of the major causes of death for children in the USA. Death from complications in childbirth is still far too common, particularly for non-white women. And then there is always stress, aggravated by habits such as smoking. If one thing doesn’t get you, something else will, in the end. Death and taxes, as we say.

I must note in passing that much of the hysteria we witness on ideological and political fronts of the public discourse seems motivated by an underlying fear, which appears to stem from the triple threat of aging, sickness and death. Witness the “worship of youth” culture, “self-improvement” programs, and anti-aging products aimed at prolonging vim and vigor and extending life itself as long as possible.

This primal, largely subliminal fear is often projected onto the identified “other,” a form of transference that – like the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue” trope – deflects self-criticism, in favor of defining each and every conflict in terms of self-preservation, and resorting to blaming others. As the Tao te Ching reminds us, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.” Buddha’s original analysis of the constructed self’s fundamentally dissatisfactory nature of reality, and our place, individually and collectively, writ large. The most dissatisfactory of all affronts and indignities to our ego are the three marks.

If, on the other hand, we could all embrace, in all humility, the realities of aging, sickness and death as being perfectly natural and okay, the resulting equanimity of outlook might go a long way to ameliorating the insane intensity of conflict in the world. Aging gracefully includes embracing illness and death as built-in, intrinsic to the natural order of things. How much of our time, energy, attention and resources are dedicated to resistance to this fact – a fundamental denialism that leads naturally to the abdication of truth – in favor of our favorite fantasies as to the nature and central meaning of life?

A young Rinzai Zen priest named Hasegawa published a book titled “The Cave of Poison Grass.” He mentioned the fact that most people seem to postpone confronting reality until, finally, they are on their death bed. He declared that this is too late – “like eating soup with a fork” – a memorable phrase. He insisted that we have to confront this “Great Matter” of life-and-death while we are young, and have sufficient strength and energy to overcome it.

In the lore of Zen there is a Till-Eulenspiegel-like narrative that captures its sometimes irreverent attitude toward life and death, supposedly a true story. A monk realized that he was to die soon, and began asking other monks what they knew about, or had heard about, others dying. He was curious to know if anyone had ever died standing on their head, but nobody had. So sure enough, when the time came, he stood on his head in the corner and died. His sister happened to be a nun, and when she came to visit for the funeral, the corpse was still standing there in the corner. In disgust, she kicked it over, declaring that he had never had any respect for anything in life, and he still had no respect in death. The story goes that they buried him upside-down.

An old saying in Zen says to “stamp life and death on your forehead and never let it out of your mind.” This is not a mark of morbid obsession with death, but simply recognizes that there is no life without death – birth is the leading cause of death.

Instead of bemoaning the fact that life inevitably passes back into the great remix that is the universe – the wave returning to the ocean – we embrace the inevitability of “shuffling off this mortal coil” as a kind of relief. As Mark Twain was said to have asked, when in his old age reporters inquired as to whether he wasn’t afraid to die, why would he be afraid of returning to where he came from?

It is the stuff of science fiction to imagine a future in which medical science has treated the phenomenon of dying as an unnecessary aberration, a kind of illness, and come up with techniques such as cryogenic freezing of human remains, genetic mutation, and cultivating transplant organs and limbs to achieve what is, for all practical purposes, human immortality. The question becomes, would you really want to live forever?

Life takes a great deal of its meaning from the inevitability of death, which is often considered in opposition to life. But Master Dogen treats both birth death as another nondual, complementary dyad, from Genjokoan–Actualizing the Fundamental Point:

Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash you do not return to birth after death

This being so it is an established way in buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death

Accordingly birth is understood as non-birth

It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth

Accordingly death is understood as non-death

Birth is an expression complete this moment

Death is an expression complete this moment

They are like winter and spring

You do not call winter the beginning of spring nor summer the end of spring

In this wonderful analogy, Master Dogen places birth and death on a continuum, each as an “expression complete this moment,” and yet undeniably entangled. We might ask: An expression of what? and the answer would seem to be “life itself.” So birth, which we celebrate, and death, which we mourn, are seen to be inflection points, rather equal in import, in the continuum of life.

When my older brother was dying in hospice, I spent about a week attending on him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. I picked up a pamphlet at the clinic where he was cared for, called “The Eleventh Hour.” It was written by a Christian woman, a clergy member or teacher of some sort, but she never once mentioned Jesus or God. One line I recall said something like, “Birth is the death of whatever precedes birth. Death is the birth of whatever follows death.” Very Zen.

I hope this brief foray into the most dispositive and determinative factors defining our life experience helps to allay any unreasoning fear you may have of these time-honored Three Marks. Along with Buddhism’s Three Poisons of greed, anger or hatred, and delusion or folly, they form the nexus of all that is wrong with the human universe in the personal sphere. When we move into the next outer layer, the social sphere, we confront them on a more global scale as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. Today we might be coerced to add even more unintended consequences to the deluge, including increasing population pressure and worldwide immigration, as well as advances in technology that tend to frustrate, rather than facilitate, our presumably inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Speaking of which, in the first UnMind episode of the upcoming month, we will look over our shoulder once again to the dread prospect of Election Year Zen, which is gaining on us, assessing whether or not we can see any light of compassion or wisdom at the end of that maddeningly long tunnel. Please add a seatbelt to your zafu and strap in.

The haiku poem on the “grim reaper” is from a 2020 series called “Dharma Dreams from Great Cloud.” The text, titled “Swords into Plowshares,” will form the basis of July’s UnMind. If you have any remaining questions as to why I feel it important to examine the current political pageantry from the perspective of ancient Buddhist teachings, which may strike you as outdated and irrelevant, please email me about it.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Continuing with a consideration of the realities of day-to-day Zen practice in the context of Buddhism’s central teaching of dukkha – natural suffering writ large – the second of the “three marks,” or characteristics of existence from a human perspective, is usually named as “sickness” or “illness.”

Please note in passing that illness, from the perspective of Chinese medicine – which may be closer to its cultural connotations in ancient India – denotes a lack of centeredness, or balance. Something is out of kilter – the yinyang of it all – when we fall ill. Nowadays, of course, we have much more access to many means of tracing and tracking the origins of our maladies, to environmental and other sources.

Quoting from the Tricycle web site again, we find a less personal, less specific definition of the three:

...all phenomena...are marked by three characteristics...: impermanence (anicca), suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). These three marks apply to all conditioned things—that is, everything except for nirvana.

Sickness is not called out specifically as one of the many causes of suffering or dissatisfaction, possibly for reasons of cultural context and medical acumen 2500 years ago. We will get around to that throwaway line exempting so-called “nirvana.”

I can personally testify to the dissatisfactory and suffering nature of sickness, from my experience contracting Covid-19 in 2022 and, more recently, a suddenly bloated GI tract blockage that had me hospitalized overnight, and bed-ridden for over a week.

The pandemic occasioned such wide medical suffering and social unrest that Shunei Oniuda, the president of Sotoshu Shumucho, Zen administrative headquarters in Japan, addressed it from the Buddhist perspective in a public message:

I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences for those who have lost their precious lives from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and offer a prayer that they may rest in peace. For those who have been affected by this illness, I pray that they will recover as soon as possible, and I would like to offer my deepest sympathy to their families and relatives who have also been affected by this illness. Also, my thoughts are with all those experiencing tremendous difficulties whose lives have been affected by the spread of this epidemic and the need to stay home.

Then Mr. Oniuda relates some interesting facts providing context for the present:

In the Kamakura Period of Japanese history when Dogen Zenji was teaching, there were times when cool summers caused by climate change often brought poor harvests. There were outbreaks of plague, and, during the Great Kanki Famine (1230-31), it is said that about a third of the population of Japan perished. In times such as these, Dogen Zenji emphasized that these were the very times to not neglect the Buddha Way.

Who is to know it the changes in climate at that time were as precipitous and global as those we are seeing today. As an island nation, Japan is likely more subject to extremes in weather because it is surrounded by ocean waters. A caveat – in our fraught divisive times, it may be necessary to point out that this recollection of similar disasters from the history of Zen – though on a much smaller-scale – is surely not intended to support either side of the ideological argument. Instead, it reinforces the premise that Zen is a practice fully prepared to meet, head-on, the vagaries of life, whether of natural, man-made, or a combination of those causes and conditions.

Note that he offers condolences to those who died first, rather than to the survivors; which is characteristic of Zen funerals. The sermon is actually directed to the deceased.

While emphasizing the need for disseminating accurate information, and recommending that all concerned follow the practical recommendations for exercising due diligence in preventing the spread of infection, President Oniuda refers back to the compassionate teachings of Zen’s founders, as they apply to this current, international crisis:

It is in such a time that the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, Dogen Zenji, and Keizan Zenji are necessary. Shakyamuni Buddha taught right view, right speech, and right practice in the face of the sufferings of sickness and death.

Right view, speech and practice – conduct exhibited in crises – do not follow the mob:

Even if people are agitated or anxious in the confusion caused by others who are fearful and buy up or hoard food and other goods, let us act calmly. Let us act in accordance with the spirit of Dogen Zenji’s teaching of the intention of first saving others before ourselves and in accordance with the Bodhisattva’s Four Embracing Actions. This is to naturally practice the way of benefitting others.

Compare to the panic mode triggered by the pandemic in most circles of the population. Then the President’s message brings it home, uniting both social and personal spheres:

Also, Keizan Zenji taught that we should have compassion and love for all things, that we should sympathize with others’ sufferings as if they are our own, and that with the mind of compassion we should be diligent in the practice of zazen. I encourage you to endeavor to practice zazen during this time that we must spend quietly at home.[1]

So the prescription for practice in Zen remains the same in good times or bad, whether we find ourselves in truly dire straits, or operating under relatively ordinary pressures of meeting the daily needs of ourselves and the community: Hie thee thither – back to the cushion. His message is directed not just to monastics but to householders as well. And by no means is zazen prescribed as an escape from the wolves howling at the gate, but the most direct and efficacious way to meet them where they are coming from.

Matsuoka-roshi would sometimes say, “If you get sick, you just get sick; if you die, you just die. But meanwhile, do what the doctor says.” He frequently made the point that his fellow countrymen and women were usually calm in the face of calamity, whether in the form of personal trauma of getting bad news in a clinical or hospital setting, or even a prognosis of eminent death. This equanimity he attributed to their having been raised in a culture that embraces aging, sickness and death as natural and foreordained, rather than in one that approaches them with fear and loathing. Even young children in Japan are, or used to be, exposed to the teachings of Buddhism, and the practice of zazen, as a regular part of their upbringing.

We like to think that Buddha’s experience under the Bodhi tree that night so long ago represented the absolute apogee of good health and wellness, in all its dimensions – physical, mental, emotional, and even social. Yet it included the robust embrace of the ineradicable marks of biological, sentient existence: impermanence manifested as aging; suffering manifested as illness, both physiological and psychological; and no-self arising as the specter of death, the fear of non-existence on the personal plane.

It seems that our modern obsession with youth and longevity lobbies against any wide acceptance of these natural marks, or transitions, of our existence as human beings. But all sentient beings are subject to their inevitability - no exceptions, theistic beliefs notwithstanding. Perhaps this may be seen as the true source of the neurotic aspects of this age of anxiety. We are confronted with these marks on a progressive basis, as we age and become increasingly infirm, or frail. It is best to engage them on the cushion, when we are young and strong, but better later than never.

In the next segment of UnMind, we will take up the meaning of death, in the context of Dharma as the compassionate teachings. Until then, do not hesitate to allow your view of aging, sickness and death, your personal take on mortality, to enter into your zazen. It cannot hurt, and cannot be avoided in the long run.

[1] Published on Soto Zen Net (www.sotozen-net.or.jp) on April 3rd, 2020

Translated by Soto Zen Buddhism International Center

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Returning from the political fray to the realities of daily life on Earth 2 — as the current popular trope would have it — I would like to delve into one of the teachings of Buddhism and Zen that may contribute to its misperception as being overly pessimistic. The “three marks” of dukkha, the Sanskrit word usually translated as “suffering,” or “unsatisfactoriness.”

Usually, “dukkha” is related to specific aspects of life, specifically “aging, sickness and death,” as the three characteristics of all sentient existence. From the Tricycle web site we find:

The Buddha taught that all phenomena, including thoughts, emotions, and experiences, are marked by three characteristics, or “three marks of existence”: impermanence (anicca), suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). These three marks apply to all conditioned things—that is, everything except for nirvana. According to the Buddha, fully understanding and appreciating the three marks of existence is essential to realizing enlightenment. (It is a schema that is accepted in both Theravada and Mahayana schools, but more emphasized in the former.)

Here we find a much broader, less personal definition of the three than “aging, sickness and death,” but as human beings, we are naturally more concerned with how they apply to our wellbeing most immediately and intimately, than how they function as universal principles. It seem to me that much of the chaos and uncertainty that we are currently witnessing in the social sphere is animated by the unsuccessful resolution of our personal relationship to these three marks, along with the built-in resistance to embracing them fully, with any measure of equanimity.

As an octogenarian, I can personally testify to the inevitability of the first two, and their power taking precedence over all other dimensions of daily life, in due time. All you have to do is live long enough to find out for yourself. However, the Buddha apparently came to this conclusion, or confrontation, relatively early in life, in his mid-thirties, when we would expect him to be in the prime of life, though 2500 years ago, life expectancy was not what it is today.

Let us consider each of them one at a time, from a problem-definition and problem-solving perspective. In passing, let me recall that the least emotionally-laden definition of dukkha is, simply, “change.” Nothing personal about it.

Buddhists may be said to believe these teachings, rather than “believing in” them, as some of the online commentary would have it. As with all of the “compassionate teachings,” one’s own first-person, experiential evidence will drive home the validity and veracity, as well as the long term priority, of these findings and conclusions of the Buddha. The only question becomes how – how do we comport ourselves in the context of these dominant aspects of our existence?

The existence of suffering itself Buddha said we are to fully understand. And from the above quote, that understanding must of necessity begin with recognizing and appreciating these three most immediate considerations of life, beginning with aging, or impermanence. It does not help much to place our own impermanence in the context of universal impermanence. Misery may love company, but not that much.

It might help to consider the question, When does aging begin? At the moment of birth? At the moment of conception? The current flap over in-vitro fertilization – as part of the larger ethical and ideological debate around all things related to birth control, or the larger category of reproductive health in general – illustrates that aging is actually well under way before conception. The eggs and sperm involved have limited viability, aging out of their own, micro-world shelf lives.

Owing to a welcome assist from modern medicine, many of us can expect to live increasingly long lives, with notable exceptions in the form of further life-threatening causes and conditions attributed to the very success, and lack of due diligence, of the human species.

In Zen, we hear various expressions such as “every moment reincarnation,” from my teacher, for instance. We read Master Dogen’s framing of birth and death as “expression(s) complete this moment.” Buddha himself was said to have mentioned something to the effect that, owing to impermanence, there must be permanence. His monks were said to have been happy to hear this. One of the theories that I have read, attempting to explain the success of Buddhism spreading throughout history in its countries and cultures of origin, is that Buddha’s followers were so relentlessly happy.

So there is a kind of pervasive optimism in Zen and Buddhism, which is hard to explain in the context of impermanence and aging, let alone sickness and death. But just consider, in your own mind for a moment, the possibility that there were no aging. That we would all remain “forever young,” in the memorable phrase from the Bob Dylan tune. What would be the implications, both long- and short-term, of this reversal of biology?

What if we did not age? (We can leave the discussion of illness and dying to upcoming segments.) Buddha rejected such speculation as ultimately futile, if taken seriously, but here, we want to treat it as a mere “thought experiment,” for the sake of shedding light on the actual causes and conditions of our existence, no harm no foul.

In design circles this is a recognized process, called “synectics,” engaging in the seemingly irrelevant on the chance that it might turn out to be relevant. It is related to “Hegel’s Dialectic,” seeing the existing “thesis,” a present manifestation of reality as impermanent, enabling our recognition and even ability to predict the emergence of the “antithesis” on the event horizon. The model goes on to predict the merging of thesis and antithesis into the new thesis, which arises, abides, changes and ultimately decays and disappears with the next cycle. And so on, and on, forever.

Not coincidentally, this terminology of “merging” is used discerningly by Master Dogen in his envisioning the process of Zen realization in Shobogenzo Bendowa, if memory serves (emphasis mine):

In stillness, mind and object merge in realization

and go beyond enlightenment

If we consider aging in this startling, single-point reflection, how does that look? Buddha says, toward the end of his First Sermon:

My heart’s deliverance is unassailable

This is the last birth

Now there is no more becoming

If indeed it is possible to come to the end of “becoming,” is that tantamount to the end of aging? Is the essence of what Buddha and Dogen realized is that everything “else” is obviously aging and becoming something else? And must include the one observing the change. And that it has always been thus, from the very beginning. So what could go wrong?

Just consider: If the very conditions that we all naturally worry about – all too often to an excessive, obsessive degree – have always obtained in the universe, long before our birth in this lifetime, and likely to persist and pertain long after our death; how can there be anything fundamentally amiss? Not that it’s the best of all possible worlds, thank you Pangloss. But really, as a design-build professional, I can fantasize that I was in charge, and made the primordial decisions that determined that, if there is to be sentient existence, what will that look like? How do I make that work?

But most ordinary human beings do not have that kind of hubris. They palm the fundamental questions off to a divine entity, the wizard’s intent hidden behind the curtain of appearances. We simply accept the givens, try to understand and embrace them, and go from there. But there must have been a “before” – before the Big Bang, or the alternative Bounce. There must have been something – the “sound of silence,” and maybe nascent thought — preceding the “Word.” But then, all heaven and hell breaks loose, and here we are. In this moment.

None of this explains anything, of course. Whatever framework we have been given to comprehend the brute fact of existence was totally made up by others. You learned that. And it can be unlearned. Zazen seems mainly a process of unlearning what we think.

The very idea and ideal of longevity has only one value in this context, according to my feeble grasp of Zen’s teachings: A better chance to wake up!

In witnessing – or better, contemplating – aging, I am oft reminded of the unforgettable couplet from musical Zen master Dylan:

Ah but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

My sense of the relevance of aging and impermanence in the context of meditation and Dharma teachings is that, like the questionable linearity of the so-called “arrow of time” in theoretical quantum mechanics, taking the view that time is passing in a direction may be entirely arbitrary. What we may perceive — and more problematically, what we may interpret — as aging, may indeed be true, but only half the reality, as with all dualistic thinking. Perhaps we are growing younger at the same time, disencumbering ourselves with learned inhibitions, rules and regulations that no longer apply, as we mature to embrace emptiness.

My idle conjecture on aging represents yet another variation on the theme of thinking independently and acting interdependently. This bears repetition: Sitting in zazen with the Zen community, we are nonetheless sitting alone. Any time we sit alone in zazen, we are joining the larger community of Zen practitioners. Somewhere in the world – at any time, day or night – someone is sitting in Zen meditation. We need flexibility of mind to approach Zen practice in this nondual sense, outside of time and space.

In the next UnMind segment, we will take up the more abrupt, if no more tangible than aging, mark of “sickness,” which for some reason is not called out as such in the early translation. Maybe the prevalence of illnesses of all kinds was so much a part of daily life that it did not emerge as a perceivable isolate in the social awareness of the time.

Meanwhile, as Buddha himself suggested, don’t take my word for any of this. Check it out for yourself, on the cushion, and off.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Once again, allow me to address the sentiment prevalent amongst many Zen groups that the political realm is, and should remain, outside the pale - when it comes to topics appropriate to the scope of Buddhism and Zen. The “tongue of the Buddha” represented by the short, curled ceremonial stick carried by Zen priests (J. nyoi or katsu) is said to be “long and wide,” encompassing all four spheres of influence and action in my semantic model of real world Zen practice: the personal; the social; the natural; and the universal. In the social sphere, the political climate surely played a huge role – in Buddha’s life and his decision to form the original order of Buddhist monastics – as well as in China, Japan, and other countries of origin.

In our present situation, the incoming flack from the campaign looks more and more like the damaging hail from the record-setting onslaught of tornadoes and hurricanes being visited upon an ever-wider swath of the United States each year, in an ever-lengthening storm season, leaving major and minor damage in its wake. Unintended karmic consequence on a geologic scale.

Looking into the rear-view mirror of history, we find that this — the issue of political leadership — has been a “known issue” throughout the development of Zen. From Taoism’s roots in China, in “The Way of Life, According to Lao Tzu” (Capricorn Books, 1962), translated by Witter Bynner:

17

A leader is best

When people barely know that he exists,

Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,

Worst when they despise him.

‘Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you’;

But of a good leader, who talks little,

When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,

They will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’

Compare to protestations of wannabe leaders competing in the current campaign.

Peering even further back into the fog of time, from “The Teaching of Buddha” we find the Buddha challenging philosophical and astrophysical speculation, as well as questioning the design intent of the optimum social order. In a shorter quote within a quote from last segment:

In the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal?... In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society?

He follows with the admonition that:

If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.

In other words, whatever the political situation in which you may find yourself, get your personal priorities in order. Like everything else in life, the present political realm is impermanent, imperfect and insubstantial, the three marks of dukkha, the universal principle of change. Which change we find, more often than not, not to our liking.

Then, after relating the famous metaphor of the man pierced with a poison arrow, he reminds us that:

When a fire of passion is endangering the world, the composition of the universe matters little; what is the ideal form for the human community is not so important to deal with.

Consider the various “fires of passion” now threatening our world on all fronts, and demanding a majority of our available bandwidth.

Later, putting a fine point on it, the sage focuses squarely on personal training, while not ignoring the social, natural, and universal matrix of problems in which a person, then or now, is firmly enmeshed:

The Buddha’s teaching contains what is important to know and what is unimportant.

Therefore, people should first discern what is the most important, what problem should be solved first and what is the most pressing issue for them. To do all this, they must first undertake to train their minds; that is, they must first seek mind-control.

We have received our marching orders. “Mind-control” in this context does not carry the modern connotation of “brain-washing,” but the “discipline” side of the Eightfold Path: right effort, mindfulness, and meditation. In discerning the “problem that should be solved first,” we can not simply ignore causality – including proximate causes of political influence upon our lives. Perhaps the best way to deal with the repugnant pettiness of partisan politics is to continue comparing to the prescripts of Buddhism and Zen.

The Repentance Verse, as translated by Shohaku Okumura-roshi in the Soto Zen Journal in February of 2004, on the Bodhisattva Precepts, is a good place to begin:

All the twisted karma ever created by me, since of old

Through beginningless greed, anger and ignorance

Born of my body, speech and thought

I now make complete repentance of it all

“Twisted” may have overwrought undertones of neurosis, unlike the translation we usually chant. We repent our “past and harmful” karma – the litany of unhelpful, self-centered actions, and unintended consequences thereof – that we now “fully avow.” In other words, we are ‘fessing up, admitting that “mistakes were made.” Note that all this, however, comes with the territory of being a human being subject to the “three poisons,” various forms of greed, hatred and delusion that, though “born of this body, mouth, and mind,” comprise the “three actions” that can get us into trouble.

How genuinely are our favorite candidates for public office manifesting this kind of self-awareness, accepting responsibility? How well are we, ourselves, doing in this regard?

Okumura-roshi highlights the next steps in the traditional Precepts ceremony:

The Three Refuges

We then take refuge in the Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha is the one who awakened to reality. The Dharma is reality itself, the way things truly are. The Sangha are the people who aspire to study and living according to the teaching of the reality of all beings.

Taking refuge means, literally, returning to our true origins: our awakened nature; the reality in which we find ourselves; and like-minded folks struggling on the path. In today’s political climate, the very notion of a shared reality seems under assault.

The Threefold Pure [Precepts]

Next, we receive the threefold pure precepts: (1) the precept of embracing moral codes, (2) the precept of embracing good deeds, (3) the precept of embracing all living beings. These three points are the direction we walk on the Bodhisattva path.

Morality, as conventionally understood, also seems to be on the chopping block, or at least up for sale, in this election year cycle. Perhaps it was ever so, with one party’s “good deeds” being another’s social injustice. How do we embrace “all living beings,” when there are so many of them, competing for the same resources? And where, we might ask, have all the bodhisattvas gone?

The Ten Major Precepts

The ten major precepts are: (1) do not kill, (2) do not steal, (3) do not engage in improper sexual conduct, (4) do not lie, (5) do not deal in intoxicants, (6) do not criticize others, (7) do not praise self and slander others, (8) do not be stingy with the dharma or property, (9) do not give way to anger, (10) do not disparage the Three Treasures.

We also express these prohibitory precepts with their positive side – “affirm life,” “be giving,” “honor the body,” “manifest truth,” and “proceed clearly” respectively – for the first five above, given to new initiates, for example. The second five are given to those who enter the formal path, with respect to the social consequences of representing Zen to the public, and so bear more scrutiny in the context of our political social servants. How closely are candidates for office at every level adhering to these admonitions, setting aside the Three Treasures, of which they may have little or no awareness.

We could go on, with endless examples from the written record of Buddhist principles. For example, if we look at the Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva path, we find:

Beings are numberless; I vow to free them

Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them

Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them

The Buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to realize it

Compare to various positions, platforms and policies proposed by pols and pundits – on immigration; income disparity; education; conventional truth; and the place of religion – in our efforts toward a “more perfect union.” How we doin’ on those fronts?

Jeffrey Lyons, a political science professor at Boise State University, found that “roughly three-quarters of kids who have two parents of the same party will fall on the same end of the political spectrum as their parents. As kids are growing up, their parents have an enormous amount of power in shaping their views.” (From: “Are Politics Hereditary?” – The Atlantic Jun 1, 2018).

If true, this demographic factoid simplifies the picture enormously. We might conclude that the vast majority of voters are going to be biased in favor of their family and social history from childhood – nature and nurture – and not likely to be persuaded by rational or ideological argument, to switch allegiances. So much for independent thinking.

So, once again, we return full-circle to the cushion. Do your own research, draw your own conclusions from your findings, and make your own recommendations to yourself for improving your chances of acting compassionately and wisely in the marketplace of politics, as well as within the community of folks who would rather not have to deal with politics at all. The ability to do so is surely more dependent upon our personal approach to meditation, than upon our social skills. Only if we are independent of the influence of ideology and partisan political pressures can we act interdependently for the good of all.

We will revisit the political scene in July, when we celebrate Jukai, true independence. Until then, “Don’t give up!”

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In looking forward and anticipating the future of Zen in America, once again it may behoove us to take a look in the rearview mirror. According to research reported by one of my future lineage successors – in a years-long series of talks he gave on the history of the transmission of Zen – things did not always go swimmingly when the big cheese finally kicked the proverbial bucket, to mix a metaphor or two. The resultant chaos was not quite as bad as that brought on by the “To the strongest!” gambit attributed to Alexander the Great, settling the question through violence rather than voting, an approach that has gained fresh meaning in recent political campaigns.

In fact, one might reasonably question the validity of any aging, declining leader naming their own successor in the first place, in the face of diminishing mental acuity and physical vigor. What part of “declining” do we not understand? How many political leaders have we witnessed who hang onto power way beyond what the dictates of the natural process of aging-out would suggest?

Matsuoka -roshi was born in November of 1912 and died in November of 1997. He was and is my “root” teacher, in the common parlance of Zen. It is his legacy and lineage that we celebrate during Founder’s Month each November, and which I have done all in my power to preserve, protect, and to propagate. Kongo-roshi, or Richard Langlois as I knew him in the 1960s, was O-Sensei’s immediate successor at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago (ZBTC). He was born in 1935, but died unexpectedly in 1999, only two years after O-Sensei’s parinirvana. This unfortunate turn of events brings to mind the oft-misquoted but always pertinent couplet:

The best-laid schemes ‘of mice and men’ gang aft a-gley,

and lea’e us naught but grief and pain, for promised joy

Thank you, Robert Bobby Burns, from his poem “To a Mouse.” This is not to suggest that planning, as such, is totally useless, or generally ineffective, but any succession planning is clearly a special case. In Zen’s historical record, the cohort left to pick up the pieces and carry on were comprised of more than one individual, in many cases.

It appears there is a common pattern of two or more Zen successors stepping in and divvying up the role previously played by the retiring guiding teacher. They were often of very different personality types, bringing different sets of skills and attitudes to the table, not necessarily the same as their mentor’s. This is also common in the business world, when the CEO is replaced by less-experienced executives.

It took me a few decades to realize that I am not Matsuoka-roshi, and that my students are certainly not me. I could not simply continue doing my best imitation of Sensei, oblivious to the fact that my students were approaching Zen practice very differently from my own early days. I had to have flexibility of mind to innovate, not just to imitate.

Nor can I compare myself to Okumura-roshi – who officiated my formal transmission –with his historical roots in traditional Zen training in Japan. His successor Hoko Karnegis was recently chosen – how and why, I have no idea, and do not need to know. But I do know that she, who generously wrote the foreword to my second book, “The Razorblade of Zen,” is definitely not a Shohaku clone. The character of the community changes with any change in leadership. But its mission and reason for being need not.

I recognize that as founder and guiding teacher of ASZC and STO, I am a “transitional figure.” As are we all – in the ultimate, biological sense – given the inevitability of “aging, sickness and death.” Matsuoka-roshi was certainly a transitional figure, becoming a living example of the “man without a country.” He was no longer fully Japanese, nor was he completely American.

It should be noted that all truly transitional figures necessarily appear as somewhat ridiculous, in the eyes of their contemporaries. It becomes necessary to embrace certain contradictions, many that are counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. If you don’t quite get the point, just picture myself, or yourself, fully enrobed, walking into a Starbuck’s.

These transitional aspects of grafting a living tradition onto a new host culture can be considered a necessary and temporary period of adjustment. It is going to entail, and even require, independent thinking, as well as Interdependent action. Perhaps more than anything, it will require focus and perseverance, keeping the eye on the prize, or at least on the ball, in light of the many diversions and apparent obstructions in the path. The Ch’an poem Sandokai–Harmony of Sameness and Difference puts it succinctly:

Not understanding the Way before your eyes

how do you know the path you walk?

Buddha himself is said to have recognized the many blind alleys and dead ends that can get in the way of the simple pursuit of the only truth that matters. In “The Teaching of Buddha,” chapter two, “The Way of Practical Attainment” we find the following:

1. in the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society? If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.

Like his successors in India, as well as those in China, Japan, and the Far East, the clarity of focus comes through loud and clear, in the context of the seductions of the universal, natural and social spheres. The ancestors of Zen are all speaking with one voice, as far as to where we are to direct our personal attention is concerned. Perhaps this singular emphasis – on avoiding the pitfalls and temptations of following cultural memes and tropes as to what is truly important in life – is even more critical in modern times.

When we finally join a fully functioning Zen community, we naturally become possessive and protective of it. We worry about its stability, from both fiscal and psychological perspectives. If its leadership appears unstable, we hesitate to invest too much time and effort into participating in it, both from personal practice and social administrative perspectives. These are natural impulses, and rational as well. We have all witnessed too many betrayals of our trust and confidence by misguided leaders of supposed religious and educational institutions, in America and elsewhere. This is why harmony is the main watchword for the Zen community. And the main reason its members are encouraged to be circumspect in discussing the supposed faults of others.

But I want to impress upon you a deeper confidence in Zen. Not to worry — Zen will survive. It was here before you were, and it will be here after we are all long gone. Zen has survived, and even thrived, for over two and a half millennia, and that is only the recorded history of it. It surely began long before Buddha’s life, and will survive as far into the future as the human species, which, admittedly, is looking a little iffy just now.

Zen will survive because it is not “Zen.” Zen is just a name, a label that we throw at something that has no name. This discovery of Buddha, even in our times, is primordial. It is nothing more than “waking up,” in the most universal, deepest and broadest sense of the word. It is awakening to reality. That simple fact may need our protection, from the vicissitudes of current cultural ignorance. But it comes with the territory of being a fully conscious human being. It will not go away with time, as long as humans survive.

This is why the definitive dimension of sangha is “harmony.” Fostering disharmony in the Zen community is a cardinal sin. As Master Elvis reminds us, “We can’t go on together, with suspicious minds.” The sangha itself is like a cloud – after my dharma name, “Great Cloud” – constantly evaporating and recondensing. If you do not think so, stick around for a while. We have had literally thousands of people come and go over the decades, and sometimes return after decades. That they come and go is no fault of our own, or of theirs. It is merely the manifestation of their life stories, the cloud endlessly evaporating and recondensing.

In Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks, “The Kyoksaku” and “Mokurai,” he shares his perspective on the future of Zen, including the meaning of a Zen temple. We are carrying forward his mission of propagating Zen in America, on the premise that he expressed, that Zen is relatively “dead” in Japan; and would find its rebirth in America:

A Zen temple is not a debating place — especially about Zen. Zen was never meant to be debated. It was meant to come into your lives to quiet them and for you to live as a Buddha. If you know Zen, your voice will be quiet and your words will be few. Great wisdom does not need many words to express itself. “Those who speak do not necessarily know.”

Master Dogen also mentioned of the tendency of individuals to want to express their understanding of Zen to all who will listen, including the local guiding teacher. It is a known issue in history, and one of many such attitudes that have persisted down to today. But if we see it for what it is – the natural desire of a person to have their own understanding of Zen recognized, and their efforts in support of the temple appreciated – this, too, can be accommodated in our ongoing program of propagation, as a teaching or learning moment.

Buddha himself was said to have been assailed by an earnest young seeker, who prevailed upon him to answer the “Ten Cosmic Questions” from what passed for the philosophy of the times: how it all began, how it will all end, et cetera. Which Buddha considered hopelessly speculative, somewhat specious, and not at all to the point of addressing the real problem at hand, that of dukkha. The young man insisted that unless Buddha answered, he, the young man, could not accept him as his teacher. Shakyamuni is said to have pointed out to this sincere but presumptive aspirant that he – Buddha, was under no obligation to be his – the young man’s, teacher. And he – the young man, was under no obligation to be his – Buddha’s, student.

We have adopted a similar motto for our practice centers, which was initiated by an early Rinzai pioneer to America, Sokeian-roshi: “Those who come here are welcome; those who leave are not pursued.” We have a similar middle-way approach to donations, first expressed by our initial practice leader of Southwind Sangha, our Wichita affiliate: “No donation required; no donation refused.”

All of the above represent variations on the theme of thinking independently and acting interdependently. Sitting in zazen with the Zen community, we are still sitting alone. Any time we sit alone in zazen, we are joining the larger community of Zen practitioners. Somewhere in the world – at any time, day or night – someone is sitting in Zen meditation. We need flexibility of mind to approach Zen practice in this nondual sense, outside of time and space.

In the first UnMind segment in June, we will return briefly to our exploration of “election year Zen,” with whatever challenges appear in the campaign in the interim. Until then... just keep sitting.

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We closed the last segment with a quote from Master Dogen from Shobogenzo Zuimonki, regarding monastic practice in 13th century Japan:

How do we practice the Way without being disturbed by the slandering remarks of others, and without reacting to the resentment of others, or speaking of the right or wrong of others? Only those who thoroughly devote even their bones and marrow to the practice can do it.

These instructions and admonitions for practicing the Zen Way and maintaining harmony in the Zen monastic community, from over 800 years ago, come across with great currency, as if Dogen may have been attending some of our past board meetings. It just goes to show that people have always been people, and that conflicts arising in day-to-day dealings with the propagation of communal Zen practice have not changed fundamentally over the centuries, and even millennia, since the inception of Buddhism.

I think it appropriate to raise some of these quintessentially Western attitudes that have come to my attention in the recent past, and especially during the pre- and post-COVID period we have all just come through.

Like most of Dogen’s teachings – which can sometimes come across as harsh shaming, or finger-wagging scolding – the old adage applies: “If you see yourself in this picture…” or “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Any and all criticism in Zen, whether implied or explicit, is intended to be reflected back upon ourselves, as in a Zen mirror, and not held up to denigrate others. This is in line with the Ten Grave Precepts, particularly those advising against discussing the faults of others, or praising oneself at the expense of others.

While we encourage independence of thinking in Zen, and further, claim that zazen is one of the only dependable ways of developing it to fruition, this does not imply that we then become the sole judge, and final arbiter, of all behaviors of others in the sangha. This is one of the many misconceptions, or delusions, that arise in community practice.

One of our longer-term members once declared, some decades ago, that, in his dealings with others, he saw himself as the kyosaku – the somewhat controversial “warning stick,” usually used to strike the shoulders to help you “wake up” during long retreats. He felt it was his role and, indeed, his responsibility, to administer the stick, metaphorically, to those he thought were out of line with the Zen Way. I reminded him, gently, that there is a reason why the stick has to be requested, in Soto Zen. We do not simply go around whacking people with it willy-nilly, without so much as a by-your-leave.

Dogen said somewhere that we should never regard ourselves as someone else’s “teacher.” If and when we put ourselves in the position of teaching others whatever we consider to be the necessary lessons in Zen, we should remember that in the design of communications, it is the message received – not the message sent – that counts. We may teach another person a lesson we think they need to learn, all right, but it is not likely to be the lesson we intended. Our actions will likely tell them more about us, than they do about them. Dogen admonished his young wards on this point, urging juniors, and seniors in particular, to avoid using harsh words and behavior in the unfounded belief that criticism, however warranted, will work to their benefit, or that of the target of their reproval, or of their fellow community members who may witness the confrontation.

In some general comments about one of the attitude adjustments that all students of the Buddhist way should adopt, Master Dogen stresses listening, over expressing your own limited understanding. Especially in the beginning of your practice and study of the buddha-dharma, which, remember, may require many decades to mature. His remarks seem as timely today as in the 13th century, and taken with the above quote, comprise as good a model of independent thinking and interdependent action that you may come across:

6 — 12

These days, many people who are learning the Way listen to a talk on the dharma, and above all want their teacher to know that they have a correct understanding and want to give good replies. This is why the words they listen to go in one ear and out the other. They still lack bodhi-mind and remain self-centered.

First of all, forget your ego and listen quietly to what others say, and later ponder it well. Then, if you find some faults or have some doubts, you may make criticism. When you have grasped the point, you should present your understanding to your teacher. Waiting to claim immediate understanding shows that you are not really listening to the dharma.

Note that the popular trope – “in one ear and out the other” – is apparently not of recent coinage. We have to be careful of a certain cultural arrogance, in assuming that our present situation is overly unique. “It was ever thus,” as we say. Or, in Zen terms: “Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we; we in the future shall be buddhas and ancestors,” taken from Dogen’s Vow. But to become buddhas and ancestors we have to learn tolisten, and that entails learning how to listen; which means learning how to hear.

You may protest that you already know how to hear! That is, you are hearing, and have been doing so all along. But training in design thinking, particularly in the Bauhaus tradition, says “not so fast.” You may think you are hearing, seeing, and feeling, but are you really? Drawing, photography, and the other visual arts are all considered ways of training the eye to truly see. The audial arts – music, singing, et cetera – are likewise ways of training the ear to hear. Kinetic body work – dance, theater, athletics and so on, train the body to feel, and to move in gravity with efficiency and elegance.

Similarly in Zen training we find expressions such as attributed to Dogen’s teacher in China, Tiantong Rujing, where he said something like, paraphrasing freely, “gouge out your eyes so that you cannot see and then you may be able to see for the first time...” cut out your tongue, plug up the ears, burn the body, etc. so that they may be replaced with the true body and senses of buddha-nature. This, obviously, on a much deeper level than the Bauhaus training is shooting for. But simply on a social level of discourse, the need to listen is greater than ever, what with all the voices vying for our attention.

With the recent burgeoning of interactive meetings on the internet – which incidentally, Master Dogen did not have to contend with, fortunately for him – we have witnessed a dramatic evolution of etiquette in public dialog. Standard admonitions include not interrupting the speaker; keeping your comments brief so that more attendees have an opportunity to participate; directing your comments to the moderator or guest panelist and avoiding cross-talk; and generally resisting the impulse to hijack the proceedings to pursue your own agenda.

This syndrome has long been a known issue in American Zen circles, where even in intimate, in-person settings, when called upon, certain members of the audience will suddenly turn to the audience to share their viewpoint, rather than deferring to the person hosting the dialog. This is at a minimum impolite, if not downright rude. But this is America, where all opinions are considered equal, especially by those who hold them.

Dogen goes on to modify his admonition to privilege a discerning silence over blurting out our opinion at every opportunity; giving it some time to gain clarity; then engaging the dialog in a respectful way. Application to today’s social media transactions is too obvious to point out, but I could not resist. Later on, Dogen repeats this instruction, indicating that the issue had arisen again, in real facetime dialog:

6 — 14

Students of the Way, when you practice with a certain teacher and learn the dharma, you should listen thoroughly again and again until you completely understand. If you spend time without asking what should be asked, or without saying what should be said, it will certainly be your own loss. Teachers always await questions from their disciples and give their own comments. You should ask again and again to make sure even of things that you have already understood. Teachers also should ask their disciples whether they have really understood or not, and thoroughly convince them (of the truth of the dharma).

Taking Dogen’s point, and following along the lines of appropriate attitudes and behaviors in the context of Zen community — including its traditional respect for seniority and today’s smugly iconoclastic attack on anything that smacks of authority — the usual caveats regarding comparisons between our practice of Zen and that of the ancients, particularly the social or sangha dimension, include the disingenuous excuse that in the time of Dogen and before, male patriarchy and misogyny were prevalent in society, so the societal norms, mores and memes do not apply to us in modern America. To which our female members and others would likely react with a great rolling

of the eyes.

Furthermore, the thinking goes, the practitioners of that time were primarily monastic. Thus, the rules and regulations (J. shingi) governing the behavior of nuns and monks were themselves not characteristic of the larger community in those days. That is, they were even less egalitarian than conventions prevalent in the cities and villages, among the leadership structures of the times, and so, therefore, how much more so today. A closer reading of history might expose the relatively mythological status of these notions, but we cannot be faulted too much for trying to back-plot our current views of what is right and wrong – including ethical behavior and social injustice – to a place in history where our perspective may have had little or no relevance whatsoever. We like to imagine that the arc of history is bending toward the modern concept of justice, as Master Martin Luther King suggests.

Admittedly, the language and culture of Buddha’s and Dogen’s times were somewhat determinative, if not dispositive, of the form and character of Zen practice of the time, both on personal and social levels. Particularly on the level of personal practice — by which term today, we primarily refer to zazen — the tangible differences might be somewhere in the 5% range of effectiveness on outcomes, including such technical developments as those of clothing and seating options. In other words, Zen “gear” has undergone its own cultural evolution.

But the age-old relevance of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path still holds. In the social sphere is where we will find the most salient differences that cause confusion, and to which we may point, if we are inclined to mount challenges to Zen orthodoxy.

In this regard — the social propagation of Zen — I want to share a few reminders about our root lineage. Matsuoka-roshi was definitely not in a class by himself. He belongs to a small, rarefied club of ancestors who not only took on the propagation of Zen in their time and cultural milieu, but also transported, imported, the face-to-face practice and transmission of Zen to a whole ‘nother country.

O-Sensei joins the likes of Bodhidharma, who sojourned to China, apparently on foot, from the Indian subcontinent around 500 CE. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Eisai Zenji and Master Dogen, who in the 12th and 13th centuries, respectively, traveled by sailing ship to China, bringing what they experienced there back to Japan. In the process Eisai revitalized Rinzai Zen, which had been predominant in Japan for centuries. Dogen Zenji introduced Soto Zen, emphasizing zazen over all other methods, around 1225.

Matsuoka-roshi brought Dogen Zen to this continent in 1940, though the much longer journey by steamship may have been relatively safer, than those of Eisai and Dogen in ancient times. The period between each of these seminal international importations of Zen averages just over 700 years.

I am gratified to be the recipient of the benefits of these great founders of our Zen past, as one of the current successors of Matsuoka-roshi. I am also somewhat concerned with the future of Zen, including the vitality of the branch of the tree that I have cultivated here in the Southeast Region of the USA. Thus this analysis. If you have any questions or comments on this subject, I would like to hear them.

Tune in to the next episode of UnMind as we explore the future of Zen in America a bit further, with an intent to understand how the hybrid nature of our online and in-person interface may effect face-to-face transmission, for good or for bad, or, more likely, both.

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Continuing with our theme: the importance of independent thought and interdependent action to the future of Zen in America, we must define the design intent of our program in the current context of uncertainty. The accelerating pace of change, including geometrically expanding attractions and distractions in the secular and now digital world, gives our task a certain urgency. As we touched on last time, from Master Dogen’s record of live teachings late in his career, Shobogenzo Zuimonki:

Even in the secular world, it is said that unity of mind is necessary for the sake of maintaining a household or protecting a castle. If unity is lacking, the house or the castle will eventually fall.

Similarly, Honest Abe declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The great unifying principle underlying Zen, then, is this “unity of mind.” But it begs the question of what precisely we mean, by “mind.” Usually our mind – the “monkey mind” anyway – is anything but unified. It may indeed be unified against all comers; or unified in its stubborn clinging to its own opinion; but it is not unified in the sense that I think Master Dogen meant. And it is not the mind characterized by dependent thinking and codependent action, as in “we are of the same mind,” or “like-minded people.”

As in the past, the future of Zen comes down to the transmission of this unified mind, which cannot be transmitted directly. Transmission of the method of unifying the mind – which is one meaning implied in the Japanese word sesshin, an intensive, extended retreat – is where we can focus our attention, and plan the design intent of our process around it.

In a present and future world increasingly transformed by digital technology and virtual engagement, we may need to rethink the traditional parameter of face-to-face transmission, honored as the most efficacious pedagogy in the history of Zen.

However, when we can meet in a virtual room from virtually anywhere in the world, the face-to-face connection becomes one of interfacing video screens. This option was not available in the history of Zen, to belabor the obvious. Objections to an argument that this kind of transaction may suffice to transmit the Dharma include that the perceived teacher-student environment may be colored by such tinkering as phony backgrounds and visual enhancements of lighting and filters, along with stage-setting and costuming designed to play to the camera. In the context of direct Dharma transmission, these amount to additional layers of delusion heaped upon the underlying distortions of conscious perception and conception built into the monkey mind.

What is missing in the virtual world is the rest of the story, what transpires behind the screen – the day-in and day-out mutual observation of behaviors and attitudes under less-than-ideal or challenging circumstances – wherein transactional exchanges of personalities and communication in the real-world dynamic of the teacher and student relationship enables “coming to accord” with the teacher’s worldview, which is hopefully “Right View.”

In Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi, he points out the importance of this relationship and its hoped-for outcome:

From the first time you meet a master, without engaging in bowing, incense offering, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.

Along with establishing the secondary supporting role of Zen’s protocols, rituals, and the written record, he goes on to declare that this “dropping off” of body and mind is tantamount to Buddha’s insight, and that it completely transforms your world:

When even for a moment you express the Buddha’s seal by sitting upright in samadhi, the whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.

Later in the same passage he profiles the transition that occurs when the student becomes the master:

Those who receive these water-and-fire benefits spread the Buddha’s guidance based on original awakening; because of this, all those who live with you and speak with you will obtain endless buddha virtue, and will unroll widely – inside and outside of the entire universe – the endless, unremitting, unthinkable, unnamable buddha-dharma.

The telling phrase is “all those who live with you.” A compelling question for lay householder Zen practitioners today is, Do we need to actually “live with” a teacher, or within a residential community, in order to apprehend the true Dharma? And if so, how do we go about implementing that design intent, within the practical constraints of maintaining a household, holding down a job, and raising a family? Or do we all have to become monastics? In which case, Zen is just another program for a privileged few.

Dogen’s effusive celebration of awakening to the truth of Buddhism as received wisdom includes – and is implicitly dependent upon – your relationship with your teacher. In Dogen’s narrative, he must be referencing his lived experience with Rujing in China. But it raises the question of exceptions to the general rule, such as the example of Shakyamuni himself, or Huineng, Sixth Patriarch in China. The case that one absolutely must have a teacher cannot be made – any more than it can be proven that one absolutely must practice zazen – in order to experience the insight of Zen.

In research circles, we hear phrases such as “participant observation” to define this kind of intimate, all-embracing investigation of another person’s world and approach to coping with it. The adage about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes captures the difficulty of getting far enough beyond ourselves, to be able to truly understand the worldview of someone else. In the martial, plastic and performing arts and crafts, as well as trades, guilds, and other apprentice-journeyman-master modes of learning, we see parallels to that of the Zen master and student, where the craft is transmitted mainly through nonverbal observation, closely following the approach of the trainer until it becomes second-nature to the novice.

But in the complex society that we encounter today, the possibility and potential payoff of living together, in order to effect a transmission of mind-to-mind seems more and more a pipe dream of a past reality that may no longer apply, and in fact may never have been the norm. Garnered from such collections as “The Transmission of the Lamp” from Song dynasty China, anecdotes from the millennia-long history of Zen begin to look like a mixed bag of long-term and short-term encounters and exchanges between masters and students, and master to master, as well as between students.

The resultant impression is that handing down the Dharma from generation to generation was largely a matter of monastics living in large and small communities, but also hermits living in isolation, being visited by other monks and nuns on pilgrimage, and occasional lively set-tos with lay people, women in particular. Notable exceptions to the monastic model include influential lay practitioners such as Vimalakirti in Buddha’s time, and Layman Pang and others later in China and Japan.

A line in the seminal Ch’an poem Hsinhsinming says, “For the unified mind in accord with the Way, all self-centered striving ceases.” The operative phrase here might be “in accord with the Way.” The “Way” being the Tao of Taoism. Which is a catchall phrase for the natural order of things, with which we want to come into harmony. This unified mind is the Original Mind, capital O – capital M – which we rediscover in our meditation, after sitting still enough and upright enough, for long enough.

So the central focus of our practice in the personal sphere has not changed, and our marching – or sitting – orders remain the same: hie thee to the cushion. With or without a teacher. Secure in the assurance that when the time is ripe, your teacher will appear. In due time, you may even find yourself in the unenviable position of being regarded as a teacher of Zen.

Further on in the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, the great founding Master talks about what it takes to herd the cats:

5 — 17

There is a proverb, “Unless you are deaf and dumb, you cannot become the head of a family.”

In other words, if you do not listen to the slander of others and do not speak ill of others, you will succeed in your own work. Only a person like this is qualified to be the head of a family.

Although this is a worldly proverb, we must apply it to our way of life as monks. How do we practice the Way without being disturbed by the slandering remarks of others, and without reacting to the resentment of others, or speaking of the right or wrong of others? Only those who thoroughly devote even their bones and marrow to the practice can do it.

Thank you, Dogen, for your candor and real-world practicality. It certainly resonates with my experience. If we read between the lines, we can see that Dogen’s life, and that of his monks, was apparently not always as ideally serene and transcendent as we may prefer to imagine. People are people, and were the same hot mess in 13th century Japan as they are today. Maybe even worse.

In the next segment we will continue with past as prologue to present, and present as perhaps prescient for the future of Zen. Your comments and response are, as always, welcome and encouraged. You know where to find me.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last UnMind segment on “Election Year Zen,” we stressed Zen’s emphasis on thinking independently and acting interdependently, as a kind of rule of thumb for approaching the quadrennial campaign and politics in general. Returning to the main theme running through the UnMind podcast, the intersection of design thinking and Zen, the importance of independent thought and interdependent action to the future of Zen in America, and the world at large, takes on an even more central role. Especially in the context of Buddha’s teaching of the codependent origination of all things sentient – the comprehensive model of the Twelvefold Chain. Physics might agree that even the insentient universe is co-arisen, despite the singularity of the “Big Bang.”

The following thoughts were first shared in my opening remarks for the Silent Thunder Order’s annual conference in 2022, themed “Clarifying Interdependence.” The title of my address was “Future Zen: Thinking Independently; Acting Interdependently”

Buddha himself was clearly an independent thinker, the original Order of monks and nuns, an example of interdependent action, choosing to relinquish their place in the social order and hierarchy of the time, with its rigid caste system. Buddha was also a problem-solver of the highest order, having defined the problem of existence itself in terms of suffering, and prescribed a solution based on the real-world context, articulated as the Middle Way, and modeled as the Four Noble Truths, including the Eightfold Path as the plan of action.

Simply stated, the propagation of genuine Soto Zen practice in America is the logical extension of that plan, but in order to realize that potential, we must adapt the design intent of the Zen mission to the cultural and technological evolution that has taken place over two-and-a-half millennia. Nevertheless, the basic challenge to practice has remained the same. As we chant in the Dharma opening verse:

The unsurpassed, profound and wonderous Dharma is rarely met with

even in a hundred thousand million kalpas.

Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it.

May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth.

Accepting that the unsurpassed Dharma is rarely realized, even under the best of circumstances, we proceed with the Zen mission with lowered expectations, commensurate with geometrically expanded distractions currently on offer. These days, Buddha would not draw the typical crowd that attends a professional sports venue, nor even smaller concert venues. He might attract a considerable following online, however.

Seeing and hearing the Dharma is now often first encountered online, via searching the plethora of web sites devoted to posting the teachings of Buddha and his successors, by following podcasts, or downloading audiobooks. “Doing your research,” as we say. For my generation, television may have been the medium in which one first discovered the hoofprints of the ox, in the form of the “Kung Fu” series of the 1970s.

Seeing and hearing the true Dharma – as well as accepting and maintaining it – is still, however, a low-tech enterprise, requiring only the instrument of the human body, sitting upright and still in meditation. Unfolding the meaning of it, however, is another matter altogether, a near-impossible order of difficulty. In effect, it has to reveal itself to us.

Meanwhile, we face a variety of conflicting interpretations of Zen, from the cultural milieu and idioms of today. For example, Zen is not really, or merely, a social program, as many of its proponents seem to feel. Interdependent action certainly entails the recognition of suffering in the form of social injustice, and the principle of karmic retribution does not explain or justify ignoring the suffering of others. The teachings of Buddhism are meant, first and foremost, to provide a mirror to ourselves, reflecting the good, bad, and the ugly without discrimination; focusing our attention upon our own follies, foibles, and foolishness; definitely not to be held up to criticize others.

Our implementation of the “design of Zen” to-date – including the incorporation of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center (ASZC) in 1977, and the umbrella organization of the Silent Thunder Order (STO) in 2010 – has been intended to establish and maintain a stable training center, along with a service organization as we attracted affiliate centers, to facilitate the process of propagating what is called “Dogen Zen,” with the same intent of its 13thcentury founder, and his successors, especially Keizan Jokin Zenji.

I use the term “design,” as this has been an intentional design process. ASZC is the home temple & training center of the STO network of affiliates, resulting from a group process of the individual efforts, financial support, and community service of hundreds of people over the past half-century or so. In carrying out this design intent, we are extending the legacy and lineage of our founding teacher, Matsuoka-roshi, who would frequently remind us that “Zen is always contemporary.” In a book surveying the origins of Zen in America, “Zen Master Who?” (2006), by James Ishmael Ford, we learn:

Soyu Matsuoka ranks with Nyogen Sengaki and Sokei-an as one of the first teachers to make his home and life work in North America. He also seems to be the first teacher to clearly and unambiguously give Dharma transmission to Western students.

I would add that these pioneers of American Zen also belong in the rarified ranks of those ancestors who traveled great distances and crossed cultural boundaries to bring the genuine practice to another country, a whole other continent, like Bodhidharma, and Dogen Zenji.

Sensei, as he modestly asked us to call him, also is credited with opening the first Zen meditation hall, or zendo, for westerners. Needless to say, I was one of those Western students he transmitted, though he did so informally, rather than by the formal standards of Soto Shu, the headquarters in Japan. We inherit his estimable legacy and lineage, as well as those of the Kodo Sawaki-Uchiyama lineage, thanks to Shohaku Okumura-roshi. We also enjoy a link to that of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi through Seirin Barbara Kohn-roshi, who graciously agreed to be my Preceptor for my formal Transmission, or “Shiho” ceremony, after hosting my 90-day training period at Austin Zen Center in 2007. We may be somewhat unique in the American Zen cohort, having received formal recognition from three recognized priests, including pre- and post-WWII generation Japanese patriarchs, as well as an American Zen matriarch. Let us do what we can to honor our predecessors. We honor them most appropriately by thinking independently and acting interdependently.

Before considering the future of Zen in America, we could do worse than to take a look at its past.

In the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, collected and compiled under the direction of one of his dharma successors, Koun Ejo Zenji, some of Master Dogen’s more offhand comments and spontaneous inspirations are recorded, apparently with little editing, much like our publications of “The Kyosaku” and “Mokurai,” the collected talks of O-Sensei.

Dogen instructed,

4 — 13

It is said in the secular world that a castle falls when people start to whisper words within its walls. It is also said that when there are two opinions in a house, not even a pin can be bought; when there is no conflict of opinions, even gold can be purchased.

Even in the secular world, it is said that unity of mind is necessary for the sake of maintaining a household or protecting a castle. If unity is lacking, the house or the castle will eventually fall. Much more, should monks who have left home to study under a single teacher be harmonious like the mixture of water and milk. There is also the precept of the six ways of harmony. Do not set up individual rooms, nor practice the Way separately either physically or mentally. [Our life in this monastery is] like crossing the ocean on a single ship. We should have unity of mind, conduct ourselves in the same way, give advice to each other to reform each other’s faults, follow the good points of others, and practice the Way single-mindedly. This is the Way people have been practicing since the time of the Buddha.*

Echoes of Honest Abe’s house divided against itself… a footnote explains the “six ways” reference:

*The unity of the three actions – those of body, mouth, and mind, keeping the same precepts, having the same insight, and carrying on the same practice.

This same precepts, insight and practice includes the harmony of sameness and difference, not an absolute identity. The milk-and-water bit reminds me of Sri Ramakrishna’s expression that, like the swan, you have to be able to drink only the milk, mixed with water, to grasp the truth of this existence. This is the nonduality of duality.

So here is the great unifying principle underlying Zen practice from the time of Buddha and Dogen down to the present. The past is prologue to the present, as is the present to the future, of Zen. This may not be true of our contemporary cultural and political institutions, however, as we are witnessing. Let us turn to Zen for something more substantial to hang our hopes on for the future.

We will have to leave it here for now. Be sure to join us for the next three segments of UnMind, which will round out this contemporary take on the design intent of future Zen.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last episode of UnMind, we concluded our review of the design intent of the Three Treasures of Buddhism. In this segment, we return to the current state of the campaign for political leadership of the country. My intent in these essays regarding the practice of Zen in an election year cycle is not to persuade or convince anyone of anything, other than the efficacy of sitting in zazen to straighten this mess out for yourself. I will try to make the case that it ‑ the political discourse ‑ is not at all disconnected from the Three Treasures. After all, the design of the three branches of government, and even partisan politics, are nothing more than manifestations of the community writ large – however subject to manipulation and distortion by special interest groups and individuals who may not honor the harmony of the larger Sangha, as their highest ideal.

To be clear, I am not interested in getting out the vote, or influencing your vote. I regard politics as only one of the multifarious – and perhaps nefarious – arenas of civic action available to us in modern times. But because the unremitting and relentless campaign is currently taking all the oxygen out of the air, and threatens to do so for some time, more than ever should we turn to our own council, and tend to our own knitting, on the cushion. Zen meditation provides a safe haven, a dependable redoubt, for refreshing our resolve to take action in the most compassionate way, but informed by the wisdom of the ancestors. The political pageantry of the moment is subject to the cardinal marks of dukkha – impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality – perhaps more than any other dimension of existence. We can regret, or rejoice, at its passing.

It is also a given that most of those in positions of power and influence do not have the wisdom and compassion of the Dharma forming their guiding principles, nor even that of the founding documents of the republic. Nor can we claim that the clarity of Buddha’s wisdom, or buddha-nature, resides at the heart of the American cult of the individual.

In spite of the complexity, confusion, and downright contrariness of human nature, in coming to terms with the polity, I think I speak for all the ancestors of Zen in saying that our recommendation remains the same, regarding the spectrum, or spectacle, of governance across the countries of the globe, and the span of centuries since the advent of Buddhism in India.

Physical samadhi is first in priority – more centered and balanced, less off-kilter, in the form of sitting upright and still, in zazen as well as kinhin, walking meditation. Then follows emotional samadhi – manifesting as more calmness, less anxiety. Then mental samadhi – fostering more clarity and less confusion, especially as to the deeper meaning and ramifications of the compassionate teachings. And finally, social samadhi – finding more harmony and less friction, in personal and social relationships. Girding our loins, as it were, with the “sword of Manjusri,” cutting through delusion, and reentering the marketplace with bliss-bestowing hands.

By starting at the center of things, the personal sphere, eventually we may find our way in the social, natural, and even the universal spheres of influence that surround us, bringing the eyes and ears, and helping hands, of the bodhisattva to bear upon the suffering of the world. A large dollop of humility, and perhaps a healthy sense of humor, may be in order.

We have introduced the notion that what we are doing in Zen training is, after all, only developing our penchant for independent thinking, along with its counterpart, a capacity for interdependent action. This is the tightrope we walk, while keeping all the balls in the air, of the many influences surrounding us. The nexus of near-infinite causes and conditions can bring about analysis paralysis if we succumb to the usual approach to defining and solving problems based on self-defense. What is called for is recognition and acceptance of the Japanese proverb cited by Master Dogen: “Fall down seven times; get up eight!” We need to give ourselves permission to fail in the social realm.

Partisanship in politics requires that we suspend independent thinking. We are often prevailed upon to subscribe to views and opinions that may not be fully vetted or justified, in order to take advantage of the opportunities of the moment, to win over sufficient numbers of voters to the cause. But when we examine the sources of the ideological divide, it seems that underlying factors, which would fall into the skandha of “mental formations,’ or unconscious volition, may play a greater role than we think.

Further to the point, a recent article in the New York Times by Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College, titled “Are You Thinking for Yourself?” approached the problem of ideological division from a demographical perspective:

If you’re trying to guess whether people are Republicans or Democrats, knowing a few basic facts about them will take you a long way. What’s their race and gender? How far did they get in school? What part of the country do they live in and is their community urban, suburban, or rural?

He goes on to support the point with examples, which we will not detail here. His basic conclusion is that your demographics often determine what you believe, in regards to your general worldview, as well as political leanings. A seemingly determinative factor is that of the influence of parents and family. A majority of partisans of the new generation reflect the ideology of their parentage, apparently going back for generations.

From this we might conclude that the vast majority of voters are going to be biased in favor of their family and social history from childhood – nature and nurture – and not likely to be persuaded by rational or ideological argument to switch allegiances. This suggests that the majority of campaign messages and ads attempting to sway so-called independents and moderates to join one camp or another may be a waste of time and money. It might be more effective to track the generational histories of constituencies, homing in on the genetically captive audience, known colloquially as “the base.” New coalitions may be limited by this unseen dimension, holding steady through generations.

Please indulge an exercise involving simple mathematics, something we do not often engage in to make a point about Zen, or the teachings of Buddhism. But we have to admit that a major factor in differentiating our lives and times from those of our Zen ancestors is the burgeoning population and geometrically expanding demographics of the modern age. Pardon me while I “do the math,” with an assist from my onboard calculator, using search results from online sources, both inaccessible to the ancients.

The current US population is estimated at about 333 million, of which roughly 240 million, or 72% of the total, are eligible to vote. In 2020, around 66% of those eligible actually registered and voted, a record, but representative of less than 50% of the total population. The Democrat candidate won the election with a little over 51% of the vote, while the Republican candidate lost, with about 47% of the vote. Political spending in the 2020 election totaled $14.4 billion – more than doubling the total cost of the also record-breaking 2016 cycle – according to opensecrets.org. So the last victory came at a cost of about $2000 a vote, if my math is correct.

Even though a record 60-plus percent of eligible voters turned out in the 2020 election, the final decision was made by a miniscule fraction – 0.03% -- of the total, assuming the count was accurate, and that my math is close enough for jazz. Throw in the electoral college, with its handful of “swing states,” and the final decision comes down to a cohort less than the population of the metro area of Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas.

Yet the winners (and losers) not only endeavor to rewrite history to favor their cause, they also claim to enjoy the mandate of “the American people,” a tiny portion of whom actually put them in office. Or threw them out.

The losing side famously claimed the election was stolen through voter fraud, though the electoral college tally came in at 306 to 232, a decisive difference, along with the overage of multiple millions of voters in the popular vote. But, as we hasten to say, that’s a story for another day. Who are we to argue the truth of politics? Zen calls upon us to challenge the truth of our very senses!

So we have to look at whatever leaders we get as being “the leaders we deserve,” in the context of a system demonstrably incapable of representing the “will of the people,” let alone “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The fact that a large percentage opt out, and others are disenfranchised, belies a foundational tenet of the democratic republic: “one man-one vote.” This remains an ideal, one that may be forever out of reach, even with our vaunted technical connectivity. It may come down to a matter of free will, or the inexorable ignorance of the modern hoi polloi. Nobody is legally required to vote, after all, which may be a good thing. Further into the article, Gross generalizes:

Although there are certainly people whose politics defy generalization, the underlying demographic tendencies are powerful predictors of belief – powerful enough that elections have become as much a turnout game as an exercise in persuasion.

Do tell. But if it takes $2 grand a pop to get a single person to the polls, one has to question whether it is possible to turn that massive a “push” into a “pull,” to borrow from marketing terminology. Of course, there are those who would question whether it is wise to target people who are disinclined to vote in the first place. How informed would their choices likely be, if they are finally dragged out of their inertia, and into the polls?

Gross concludes his essay with a turn to something deeper, the humanity underlying our behavior, including political activism:

By all means, let’s duke it out in the public sphere and at the ballot box. You’ll fight for you interests and I’ll fight for mine. That’s democracy in a big, diverse, boisterous nation.

But if we could bear in mind that we sometimes stumble into our most passionately held beliefs, the tenor of our discourse might be a bit saner and more cordial. The fact that we are all deeply social creatures, in politics and otherwise, underscores our shared humanity – something that we would be wise to never lose sight of.

Whether or not you agree with the implicit assumption that making the tenor of our public discourse saner and more cordial would be a good thing – many seem to feel the opposite, that the squeakier the wheel, the more grease it will get – most would probably agree with the appeal to our shared humanity, and recognize the lamentable truism of frequently stumbling into our most passionately held beliefs.

Aye, there’s the rub – that our actions within the social sphere, including the political arena, are too often based on belief, rather than reality. Here is where Zen comes in.

The deeper implicit assumption is that our shared humanity is necessarily a good thing. But I think Buddhism points to something deeper. We do not aspire to human nature in Zen – we aspire to buddha nature. Meaning to wake up to the deeper meaning and implications of our lives – our very existence – beyond the immediate and local causes and conditions impinging upon us, including the political machinations of our fellow travelers.

Again, my intent in these essays is to emphasize the necessity of the practice of Zen in an election year cycle, not to persuade you of anything, other than the efficacy of sitting in zazen to straighten this mess out for yourself. That said, or resaid, I do encourage you to vote. You will make the right choice, informed by your meditation, I am sure.

In the next episode of UnMind, we will return to considerations of more broadly focused adaptation of design thinking principles of problem definition and potential solutions in everyday life, of which politics is only one, if one of the most noisy and noisome.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last two episodes of UnMind, we continued our review of the design intent of the Three Treasures of Buddhism, first focusing on joining the Sangha, or Zen community; then on studying the Dharma. In this segment, we will analyze practicing what Buddha himself did, the central and indispensable method of Zen’s meditation.

I have written extensively elsewhere on how zazen differs from other styles of meditation. Herein we will examine its more physical aspects, and how they may help determine its effectiveness. While the other two legs of the Buddhist stool are necessary for a well-balanced Zen life on social and intellectual levels, zazen is the most crucial and pivotal practice on the personal level. According to Soto Zen, upright seated mediation is necessary to open the Dharma gate to genuine insight. It is Dogen’s “excellent method,” that he asserted “carries on the Buddha’s teaching endlessly.”

When we examine in minute detail the sitting posture, the full breathing cycle, and the focus of attention recommended in zazen, we cannot help but feel incredulous at its simplicity, that something so basic and simple as sitting still enough, upright enough, and long enough, could have any substantive effect on consciousness itself.

When it comes to design intent, usually we can look for ways to tweak the design of a given product or process, here and there, to see if we can improve it. Zazen is already so simple that those tweaks have been done, and long ago. There is not much to the method that can be further refined, or eliminated. The zafu itself, the sitting cushion, is likewise nearly irreducibly simple, a design presumably first developed in China.

In production processes used to implement various design-build systems, we look for what are termed “secondary” operations. They may force changes in the setup of the assembly line; or call for additional equipment; or require multiple phases. We may find that we can eliminate certain of these extra steps, or combine them with other operations, to make the process more efficient, i.e. streamlined. Early examples include the Ford assembly line. It is important to arrange the steps in any production process in the proper sequence, to avoid wasted time and motion. A technical early version of this approach is called “critical path management,” or CPM. One of its terms, the “true antecedent,” a critical piece in getting the sequence right, might apply to Zen.

What would be the true antecedent to insight ‑ Buddha’s awakening ‑ to take the least obvious, but penultimate example? In Soto Zen, we would lobby for zazen, probably. But, as Bodhidharma is credited with saying, meditation it is not absolutely necessary to insight. He indicated that all one has to do is “grasp the vital principle.” In other words, no causal connection can be dependably established between the act of sitting in zazen, and the triggering of Dharmic insight. It happens that most of us are not ripe and ready enough for that level of grasping, and we are carrying a lot of conceptual weight, so we need to spend some time in our meditation, to jettison the excess baggage.

The great Indian sage is also recognized for bringing the direct practice of zazen to China. He created a model during meditation of four levels of observation: the breath; physical sensations; emotional sensations or mood swings; and conceptual constructions. Notably, his four-pointed model is in itself such a construction. One conclusion that he drew from this approach is that, like the breath, we realize that the other three dimensions are impermanent, ever-changing. And so must be the observer.

Using Matsuoka-roshi’s threefold division into what he termed “dispositions” – posture, breath, and attention – we can examine them one at a time to determine their design intent. A caveat: “design intent” is more tightly focused than intent in general. It is connected to function, as in the old design saw coined by 19th Century architect Louis H. Sullivan, “form follows function.” Of course, our larger or deeper intent in practicing Zen goes to the Buddhist skandha of “mental formations,” sometimes rendered as intention, motive or desire; the multivarious purposes underlying the “three actions” of body, mouth, and mind. That may be a subject for another time.

For now, let’s begin by looking at the posture. Of the four cardinal postures – standing, sitting, walking, or lying down, as mentioned in the Metta Sutta – why would sitting be the posture of choice for meditation? For one, it is obviously the most efficient in terms of energy consumption, other than lying down, compared to which, sitting is more conducive to alertness, as we are accustomed to sleeping in a horizontal position.

The upright aspect of the sitting posture is crucial. Aligning our bilaterally symmetrical skeleton and musculature is the most direct way to achieve equipoise, a state of equilibrium within the forcefield of gravity. When the body is arrayed in this position, the spine and spinal cord become our “zero axis” in spacetime, the center of our being in the matrix of the proximate physical causes and conditions of existence. This is the physical basis of “samadhi” ‑ centeredness and balance ‑ the key to entering stillness.

Arching the small of the back, and pulling back on the chin, we establish two pressure-points, one at the base of the spine and one the base of the neck, which pull the spine into its natural s-curve, resulting in what Matsuoka-roshi described as a “sitting-mountain feeling,” one of immense stability. He would comment that when the posture is reaching a state of perfection, it feels as if you are pushing the crown of your head against the ceiling, like a column or post. But with the caveat that we always aim at the perfect posture, never imagining that we have achieved it.

Standing shares this upright alignment, but the entire weight of the body is delivered to the roughly square foot of the surface area of the feet and ankles, rather than distributed over the three-pointed base of the cross-legged posture (“full lotus,” J. kekka fuza), or similarly, the kneeling posture (J. seiza). Walking is obviously infinitely more complex, though walking meditation (J. kinhin) is certainly effective, dubbed “zazen in motion.”

Minimal supporting gear is the one concession that Zen seems to make to our natural desire for physical comfort, perching on a cushion (J. zafu) on top of a square mat (J. zabuton) or kneeling on the seiza bench. But I think the lift has to do with maintaining the proper disposition of the angle between the upright spine and the body’s main hinge at the hip joint. We sit slightly forward on the cushion or chair so that the hips are above the knees, at an angle of about 10 or 15 degrees to the floor. This allows the weight of the trunk and upper body to distribute equally between the knees resting on the mat and the “sitz” bones that form the bottom of the pelvis.

These two arching protuberances form a kind of built-in rocking chair, which, when the lower back is properly arched, provides a stable base on the cushion or kneeling bench, as well as on a chair. In the cross-legged postures in particular, when resistance arises in the knees or in the back, it is our body telling us that we are pitched too far forward, in the former case, or leaning too far backward, in the latter. Matsuoka-roshi often noted that we have to keep making small adjustments to the posture over time, “working your way through every bone in your body,” to finally find that “sweet spot” right in the middle.

The rocking motion that we are encouraged to engage at the beginning and end of each session of zazen helps us find the center of the upright and balanced posture. Starting with a large, arcing pendulum swing to the left and right, forward and back, and / or around in circle, we gradually decrease the length of the arc to a smaller and smaller swing, or spiral, until it comes to center. In this way we can correct our own posture from time to time, and particularly when first settling into the posture. It also allows for the body’s muscles and connective hard tissue to stretch and adapt for the greatest level of comfort. Zazen, as we say, should be the “comfortable way.”

Reversing this motion at the end of the sit, starting with a small, then gradually larger pendulum swing, allows the body to loosen up, and relieve any numbness that may have set in during the session. Numbness does not necessarily indicate poor circulation, but the natural adaptation of the body to sitting still for long periods of time.

In summary, we are looking to recover, or rediscover, the natural posture. In more primitive times, our ancestors sat around the campfire, sitting upright and still while hunting, in order not to spook the prey. Your body knows this posture. Listen to it. The design intent of the zazen posture is, in one sense, to return to our normal, natural posture, while remaining fully alert.

The same may be said of the breath. The natural breath adapts to the pressures of the moment. When walking or running, we palpitate, breathing rapidly, and often, irregularly. When we lie down to sleep, our breath slows down to a more regular rhythm. Sitting in zazen is a bit like falling asleep while staying awake.

Our body knows this natural breath, just as it knows the upright, balanced posture. In zazen, we relinquish our usual effort to control the body in terms of resistance to pain, allowing ourselves to go beyond our normal comfort zone. Likewise, we drop our tendency to control the breath, other than occasionally counting it, or some other measure of inducing more strict observation. We begin to see the breath slowing down as the body settles into stillness. If we pay close attention, we can feel our heartbeat slowing as well. We enter into a deeper stillness, our more natural state of being.

While adjustments to the posture are primarily physical, we move beyond the purely physical as we turn our attention to the breath and attention itself. Traditional zazen instructions emphasize attitudinal adjustments, observing the natural process of breathing and thinking with scientific detachment, and less controlling impulses. This is especially helpful in dealing with the tendency of discriminating mind (S. citta) to vacillate, from one extreme position to another, just as the breath is continually shifting from inhaling to exhaling. We are all bi-polar to some extent. The analytical function of the mind is skewed toward self-survival, triggering the so-called “monkey mind,” that frantic, chattering creature behind the all-too-familiar internal dialog.

The idea of “breath control” is ingrained in the culture, perhaps primarily through the popularization of yoga in the West, but also incorporated in such areas of endeavor as athletics, aerobic exercise, and technical training in singing, or playing wind instruments. The body is actually controlling the breath, in a subliminal context of oxygen deprivation relative to the degree of physical exertion involved in sitting, standing, walking, or lying down, exercising or running, as the case may be. Our degree of control over the breath on a conscious, intentional level is minimal. The main reason Zen meditation asks us to focus our attention on the breath is that, usually, we do not. Raising awareness of the cycle of breathing ‑ which is, after all, our main lifeline ‑ returns our attention to what is most important in life. The heartbeat represents a deeper level, the metronome of life.

When we turn our attention to attention itself, we have reached the apogee of attention, having come full circle. Now, we are paying attention to attention itself. Here is where we begin to see the genius of Tozan Ryokai’s cryptic: “Although it is not constructed, it is not beyond words; like facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each other.”

Bodhidharma was not contemplating the wall, as the visiting pundits of China thought; he was contemplating nothing in particular, everything in general. Or we might say he was contemplating contemplation itself. The “self selfing self,” as Uchiyama-roshi termed it, in his unique turn-of-a-phrase, conjuring a “turning phrase” (J. wato) to describe the indescribable, the ineffable essence of objectless meditation (J. shikantaza).

Here, once again, we have come to the end of language. As I closed the session on the design intent of Dharma, Buddhism’s truth is uniquely experiential. Master Dogen’s intent is the same as that of all Zen ancestors past, future, and present: apprising us of the futility of pursuing literal, linear understanding, especially in its manifestation as verbal expression. We are to turn our attention, instead, to the immediate and intimate, dropping away of the self of body and mind, before interpretation can interfere.

For more detail on Zen’s meditative approach to posture, breath and attention, listen to UnMind podcasts #119, #120 and #121.

In the next segment, we will return to examining the passing pageantry of the endless, unremitting quadrennial, election-year campaign, from the unique perspective of Zen Buddhism.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last segment of UnMind, we took up the most social of the Three Treasures: Sangha, or community. In this segment, we will continue with our analysis of the design of Dharma study; and in the next, that of Buddha practice, Zen’s unique meditation, or zazen. These three constitute the highest values and manifestations of Buddhism in the real world, and the simplest model for the comprehensive nature of living a Zen life. They are regarded as three legs, without any one of which the stool of Zen is unstable. Design intent is reflected in their modus operandi, message, and method, respectively.

Dharma study consists in reviewing and contemplating the “compassionate teachings,” the message transmitted by Shakyamuni and the ancestors down to the present day. While they were all, in effect, “speaking with one voice,” nonetheless Dharma ranks second in importance and emphasis, as an adjunct to meditation, just as Sangha comes in third, in providing the harmonious community and conducive environment for Zen. As referenced in Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi:

Grass, trees and walls bring forth the teaching for all beings

Common people as well as sages

The “walls” are the infrastructure that was built around personal and communal practice in the form of our sitting space at home, grass hut hermitages, and meditation halls of temples, centers, or monasteries. This is the millennia-old design-build activity of the ancestors attested to by the stupas of India and the monasteries of China, Tibet, Japan, and the Far East, the legacy inherited by modern proponents of Zen in the West.

Dharma likewise has been codified, collected, and contained in tangible documents, originally in the form of rice paper scrolls, now in books distributed worldwide in hardbound and paperback format. My own two current volumes in print ‑ “The Original Frontier” and “The Razorblade of Zen” ‑ were actually printed and bound in India, the home country of Buddhism They are also, or will soon be, available in electronic form, as eBooks and audiobooks accessible to virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime.

It is as if Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion – s/he of the innumerable eyes and ears needed to see and hear the sights and sounds of dukkha in the world, with innumerable arms and hands bringing the tools necessary to help ‑ has come to be manifested globally, in the form of the worldwide network of mobile media. By means of which her ongoing witness to the suffering of the world is also recorded for posterity. Thus, the potential for Dharma to have an effect on the world at large has expanded exponentially, as in the vow: “I take refuge in Dharma, the compassionate teachings.”

Taking refuge in the Dharma means returning ‑ or “fleeing back” ‑ to the original truths or laws of existence, and our place in it. Consider what the first teachings of Buddha really had to say, and what was their intended effect upon the audience. The First Sermon lays out the essential logic of the Middle Way, and its avoidance of extremes of attitudes and approaches to the fundamental problem of existence as a sentient, human being.

The design intent of the Dharma as expounded by Shakyamuni Buddha, was, as far as we can determine from the written record, to correct the conventional wisdom of the time, which I take to have been primarily based on beliefs and doctrines of Hinduism. One well-known example is his teaching of anatta or anatman, a refutation of the Hindu belief in a self-existent soul, or atman. Not being a scholar, I am basing this on my scant study of the canon and the opinion of others more learned than I.

Considering how the Dharma was first shared gives us an insight more technically oriented to the intent of its design. In the beginning was the spoken word of Siddhartha Gautama, similar to the Bible’s creation story. Buddha never committed a single word to paper, or so we are told. It is also said that he “never spoke a word,” a comment I take to mean that while language can point at the truths of Buddhism, it cannot capture them. Buddhist truth is uniquely experiential. It has to go through a kind of translation into language that is beyond language itself, as in the last stanza of Hsinhsinming‑Trust in Mind:

Words! The Way is beyond language for in it

there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today

Later given the honorifics of “Buddha, ‑ fully awakened one” and “Shakyamuni ‑ sage of the Shakya clan,” and others, ten in total, Siddhartha’s First Sermon to the five ascetics with whom he had been practicing, begins with:

O monks, these two extremes ought not be followed by one

going forth from the household life. What are the two?

There is devotion to the indulgence of self-gratification

Which is low, common, the way of ordinary people

Unworthy and unprofitable

There is devotion to the indulgence of self-mortification

Which is painful unworthy and unprofitable

Avoiding both these extremes the Tathagata has realized the Middle Way

It gives vision it gives knowledge and it leads to calm to insight to awakening to Nirvana

The intent of the content was to dissuade these monks from continuing to follow the dictates of their method of asceticism, which Buddha had found to be ineffective, to say the least. And to hold out the hope that if they were able to relinquish their own opinions of the truth they were seeking, and the method for apprehending it, they would be able to accede to the insight that he had experienced directly in meditation, the “middle way.”

“Tathagata,” by the way, is also one of the ten honorifics accorded to Buddha later in the course of his teaching career, meaning something like the “thus-come one.” It was most likely appended to this narrative when finally committed to written form, some four centuries after-the-fact.

But our point is that the spoken language was the medium in which the teaching was first shared. Buddha was said to have spoken Pali, which is similar to, and perhaps a dialect of, Sanskrit. The theory I have heard explaining why they were not recorded in written form is that they were considered sacred, and writing them down would have made them vulnerable to accidental or intentional change. The oral tradition was more dependable in terms of preserving them with their original intent intact.

So the “design intent” of Buddha’s use of kind or loving speech was not the usual intent of language in general. It was intended to encourage others to apprehend the “Great Matter” of life-and-death in the most direct way, the only way, possible. Buddha recognized that there was no way of sharing his experience with others in the ordinary sense, so he resorted to parables and analogies, to allow his audience to see themselves in the pictures he painted, and to transcend ordinary understanding in words and phrases, or the pursuit of information, the usual application of language.

The later codifying and organization of the original spoken teachings into the Tripitaka or “three baskets” was designed to allow teachers and students to study the voluminous canon in an orderly way, and to prioritize their approach to it in digestible bites. It was most likely understood that the existing literature of the time ‑ which had to be scarce, compared to today’s glut of publications – was to be absorbed in concert with practicing the meditation that had led to Buddha’s insight to begin with. As Master Dogen reminds:

Now all ancestors and all buddhas who uphold buddha-dharma

have made it the true path of enlightenment to sit upright

practicing in the midst of self-fulfilling samadhi

Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way

It was done so because teachers and disciples

personally transmitted this excellent method

as the essence of the teaching

In the authentic tradition of our teaching

it is said that this directly transmitted straightforward buddha- dharma is the unsurpassable of the unsurpassable

The design intent of the teachings has been, from the very beginning, the direct transmission of the buddha-dharma, what Matsuoka-roshi referred to as “living Zen.” In the daily lives of monks and nuns, frequent repetition of chanting selected teachings enabled the monastics to deeply assimilate them. Master Dogen was known for connecting each and every regular daily routine with brief recitations, such as the Meal Verse, in order to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane, the physical and the spiritual.

Codification of the koan collections of Rinzai Zen ‑ some 1700 strong according to tradition, later organized into five sets by Hakuin Ekaku Zenji, the 18th Century Rinzai master ‑ represent design efforts to structure the lore and legacy of Zen’s anecdotal history of exchanges between masters and students available in progressive levels of difficulty, enabling accessibility of the apparent dichotomies of Dharma. Soto Zen simplifies the approach even further by regarding zazen itself as representing the living koan, requiring nothing further to complement, or complicate, the process of insight.

All the various models of buddha-dharma developed by the ancients qualify as efforts in information design ‑ visualizing images and what is called “pattern-thinking” ‑ that allow us to grasp the form of the Dharma beyond what mere words can convey. The Four Noble Truths comprise the first historical example of these descriptive models, including the prescriptive Noble Eightfold Path. Tozan’s “Five Ranks” and Rinzai’s “Host and Guest” come later, but have the same design intent – to help their students get beyond the limitation of the linear nature of language. My semantic models of the teachings, published in “The Razorblade of Zen,” represent more contemporary cases in point.

Nowadays ‑ as testimonial evidence indicates, from one-on-one encounters in online and in-person dharma dialogs with modern students of the Way ‑ people are no longer studying buddha-dharma as they may have throughout history, when documents were rare. More often than not, they are reading more than one book at a time, in a nonlinear process I refer to as “cross-coupling”: simultaneously absorbing commentaries from one author or translator along with others; or perhaps comparing the teachings of more than one ancestor of Zen to those of a different ancestor.

This may be an artifact or anomaly of the ubiquitous presence and availability of Zen material in print form, as well as the encyclopedic scope of online resources on offer today. It seems that in every category, and every language, we have at our fingertips a greater textual resource than ever conceivable in history, dwarfing the great libraries of legend. We can “google” virtually anything – no pun - with a few strokes of a keyboard. In addition, Artificial Intelligence threatens to bring together summaries and concoctions of content at the whim of any researcher; documents are readily searchable for those who wish to quantify uses of words and phrases at any point in history, teasing out trends and making judgments as to the hidden patterns in historical evolution of ideas.

In this context it is difficult to ascertain the design intent of dharma as articulated today. It is not easy to discern the intent of the publish-or-perish, rush-into-print crowd, or to judge whether a given piece of contemporary writing is worth our effort and time to read.

Fortunately, Zen offers a wormhole out of this literary catch-22. Zazen provides recourse to an even greater inventory of databases, built into our immediate sensorium. We can always return to upright sitting, facing the wall. This is where we will find the nonverbal answers we are seeking so feverishly, and somewhat futilely, in “words and letters” as Master Dogen reminds us in his seminal tract on meditation, Fukanzazengi:

You should stop pursuing words and letters

and learn to withdraw and turn the light on yourself

when you do so your body and mind will naturally fall away

and your original buddha-nature will appear

This stanza is sometimes interpreted as a slam on the nature of contemporaneous Rinzai practice predominant in the Japan of Dogen’s time. But I think we should take a broader view of the great master’s intent. He is merely cluing us in to the fact of the futility of pursuing literal, linear understanding of the Dharma in its manifestation as verbal expression. We are to turn our attention, instead, to the immediate and intimate presence of the self of body-and-mind ‑ beyond, or before, words can interfere. Here is where, and now is when, we will witness the full force of the design intent of the Dharma.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the next three segments of UnMInd we will take up the Three Jewels, Gems, or Treasures: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha - the highest values of Buddhism - from the perspective of their design intent. Buddha practice - time on the cushion dedicated to recovering our original, awakened nature ‑ is the most important dimension in the Zen, or meditation schools. Dharma study – reviewing and contemplating the teachings transmitted by Shakyamuni and the ancestors down to the present day ‑ comes second in importance and emphasis, as an adjunct to meditation.

While participation in and service to the Sangha ranks third in the tripartite hierarchy, all three legs of the stool are considered essential to leading a balanced life of Zen. It will be most appropriate to take them in reverse order, beginning with Sangha, or community, the one most fully integrated with the social dimension. The Refuge Verse, usually chanted on a daily basis, and translated variously, reads:

I take refuge in Buddha

I take refuge in Dharma

I take refuge in Sangha

I take refuge in Buddha the fully awakened One

I take refuge in Dharma the compassionate teachings

I take refuge in Sangha the harmonious community

I have completely taken refuge in Buddha

I have completely taken refuge in Dharma

I have completely taken refuge in Sangha

The act of taking refuge may be interpreted in a variety of ways; from the New Oxford American Dictionary:

• a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble: he was forced to take refuge in the French embassy | I sought refuge in drink.

• something providing shelter: the family came to be seen as a refuge from a harsh world.

• an institution providing safe accommodations for women who have suffered violence from a spouse or partner.

Its etymological origin is defined as:

late Middle English: from Old French, from Latin refugium, from Latin re- ‘back’ + fugere ‘flee’.

Over the two-and-a-half millennia of the history of Buddhism, the communities of monks and/or nuns originating in India may indeed have comported with all of the above definitions at one time or another, with the possible exception of seeking refuge in drink, which may be more characteristic of lay practice. Certain modern Zen masters have been known for their fondness for sake and beer, as was Matsuoka roshi.

The dictionary definitions share a decidedly fraught connotation of seeking “shelter from the storm,” to quote Master Dylan. But when we look at the role of the Zen community in the context of modern-day America, we can see that taking refuge in the sangha has less wary, socially positive functions as well – beginning with that of providing community, itself. True community is an increasingly rare commodity in today’s mobile society, where we as householders may or may not know our neighbors; and if we do, we may not for long, as they, or we, may move several times in one lifetime. In ancient India, China and the Far East, people may have been more likely to stay put in their birthplace, unless they were driven to flee danger or trouble. Today, we have displaced persons approaching an estimated 110 million, the largest refugee population in history.

When we analyze the design intent of western Zen communities, which manifest a mix of traditional protocols and adaptations to modernity, we have to take into account that the monastic model is no longer the predominant form, outnumbered as it is by the expanding cohort of lay householders. People of all walks of life are taking up the practice of Zen in their daily lives ‑ including participation in programs offered by Zen centers and temples in their neighborhoods, or within a reasonable commute ‑ returning to families and professional livelihoods, partaking of practice opportunities when and where they can fit them in. I call this “guerilla Zen”: we hit it and run; hit it and run; engaging more formal training with a simpatico group, while sustaining daily practice at home, at work, and at play. Everything is eventually subsumed under Zen.

Churches and other associations share this paradoxical characteristic, caricatured by the “Sunday saints, Monday sinners” trope. Zen centers do not typically preach morality from the pulpit, but offer some degree of sanctuary in which members can retrench, to reenter the fray of daily life from a more balanced perspective and stance. This is reflected in the Sixteen Precepts of Zen, which we will not detail here, but include such social parameters as not killing, stealing or lying, not indulging in gossip, and so on.

The key characteristic by which a Zen sangha is defined is captured in the expression, “harmonious community.” We all belong to, or partake in, various communities and subgroups in our personal, family, and professional lives, but not all of them would meet the high bar of harmony that is associated with a Zen community, or that of a church. We are expected to leave our lesser angels at the doorstep, and aspire to a higher level of behavior, particularly with regard to our fellow seekers of awakened awareness.

Compared to other socially-determined groups, such as those found in retirement homes, extended care facilities, private clubs and gated communities, one difference is that a sangha welcomes all comers, however diverse in terms of age, gender, income, background and education, or other social factors by which groups tend to discriminate. “Birds of a feather” and all. Zen groups assume that members are like-minded in their pursuit of the Dharma, and it quickly becomes apparent when newcomers join a sangha for all the wrong reasons. Attendees joining Zen retreats or undertaking residential practice are analogized to stones tumbling in a stream, rubbing all the rough edges off, until we become smooth and polished – harmonious - in our interactions with others.

Several dimensions of the Zen environment yield clues to its design intent, and where it may differ from other communities. These will vary from group to group, based on the history and traditions unique to each lineage, the legacy of its founders, and, of course, personalities. Generally, we are encouraged to overlook minor superficial differences in protocols and procedures, focusing on the underlying intent of propagating Buddha practice - meditation; and promulgating Dharma – study of the teachings; the two highest-ranking values in Zen. Let’s look at a few characteristic behavioral forms and features to be found in multiple “practice places of buddha-tathagatas everywhere,” to borrow a phrase from Master Dogen:

OBSERVING SILENCE

An emphasis on observing long periods of silence is unusual in most public gatherings, noting exceptions such as monastic assemblies devoted to vows of silence, or Quaker congregations. Restraining speech can feel awkward, even artificial; but in time it becomes a welcome source of respite and relief from the usual pressure to engage in small talk in most social and fellowship settings. In Zen, special attention is given to being mindful while others are meditating, taking heed to move quietly, as well as foregoing unnecessary speech.

MAINTAINING SIMPLICITY

Visual simplicity complements acoustical silence in the form of clutter control, straightforward layout and organization of the space and furnishings, and movement through it. The meditation hall, or zendo, is a particular focus of this principle, but it applies to all the shared public spaces of the facility. The catchphrase is “leave no traces” - which has personal meaning in terms of attachment and aversion - but is manifested in communal environs by putting things back where they belong, fluffing sitting cushions, straightening shoes on the shoe shelf, and so on. Emphasis is on reducing distraction that might intrude upon or interfere with the experience of others.

CLEANING

Part of the process of achieving simplicity is the ritualization of temple cleaning, in Japanese, soji. Matsuoka-roshi would often say, “Cleaning is cleaning the mind.” The very act of decluttering the space relieves the mind of mental clutter. He would say “I like to keep it empty around here.” It is understood that “the dust itself is immaculate,” of course, that nothing is really “dirty” in any absolute sense. But attitudes and approaches “providing a space conducive to practice” – a unique definition of generosity, or dana, offered by a senior member of HH the Dalai Lama’s inner circle, when giving a talk at ASZC some years ago – are meant to accommodate the relative level of perception, that “cleanliness is next to godliness,” as cited by St. Thomas Aquinas.

TRAINING

Cleaning the environment is a specific activity within the larger category of Zen training in general. We train ourselves to serve the community through these various activities, while at the same time serving our own needs for simplicity, silence, and so on. We train in what has proved necessary to establish and maintain sustainable group practice in the public sphere. Aspects of how we approach this in the context of community may begin to bleed over into our personal lives at home and at work. We may find ourselves growing more attentive to our home or office environment, assuming more ownership and authorship over their functions, and their impact upon mindfulness on a daily basis. Training in Zen manifests this “halo effect,” a natural enhancement of Zen awareness.

BOWING AND CHANTING

The intent of Zen ritual may not be apparent at first blush, and so is widely subject to misinterpretation. It looks, on the surface, much like any other service one might observe, in Protestant or Catholic churches, as well as synagogues. Some are put off by the bowing and chanting, reading in such connotations as worship, public religiosity, and obsequiousness, which are all inappropriate projections. While the various formal protocols that have evolved around Zen practice have practical effects of cohering the community, their intent is largely personal.

The Buddhist bow, for example, represents, on one hand, the person we are trying to improve; and on the other, the ideal person we want to emulate, our original buddha-nature. But the palm-to-palm hand position, or mudra in Sanskrit ‑ called gassho in Japanese ‑ symbolizes that just as our two hands are part of the same body, these apparently opposing selves are also just one, or “not-two” as the Ch’an poem “Trust in Mind” reminds us. With repetition, the bow eventually becomes empty of inappropriate connotations. Like emptying a teacup, so that it can be refilled with deeper meaning.

Matsuoka-roshi would often remind us to “Chant with the ears, not with the mouth,” and that the concrete chanting, itself, is the true meaning of the chant. In other words, listen deeply to the chant, which is a Dharma teaching - not a prayer or worship - so that the act of chanting in a group becomes deeply meaningful on a personal level.

In professional design circles, these seemingly innocuous, everyday conventions of maintaining order in space, and harmonious dynamics in time, cannot be overlooked. They are, indeed, regarded as essential deliverables in retail and other commercial environments, where the adverse effects of clutter and noise can be measured in financial terms as loss of business and customer base. The influence of environmental factors may be less obvious in the personal realm. But in the world of Zen, they can provide powerful aids to finding and sustaining harmony with the Great Way, from Zen’s roots in Taoism.

For further pursuit of the symbolism and design intent of the Zen space and protocols, I refer you to Matsuoka-roshi’s early collected talks, “The Kyosaku,” where you will find a chapter on the various elements to be found in most zendos. Meanwhile, remember Master Dogen’s admonition in “Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi”:

Without engaging in incense offering, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit and thus drop off body and mind.

Sangha, community service, is important, but only to the extent that it provides the conducive environment for Buddha practice and Dharma study.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In this segment, as promised, we will return to the seemingly zero-sum game being played out in the political arena, under the rubric of “Election Year Zen,” episode #3.

As I pointed out in closing the second segment: This, too – “politics” is the Dharma. While the course of action that Buddha and the Ancestors of Zen undertook, within the constraints of their cultural context, may not have had obvious political motivations, the very act of establishing and maintaining Zen practice whether in the form of intentional communities such as a monastery, or less ambitiously, a neighborhood temple or even a hermitage the effect of doing so upon the local society, and by extension upon the powers-that-be of the era, must have had undeniable political ramifications. Variations on this theme are recorded throughout the history of Zen.

In our life and times, as of the last UnMind posting we had just passed Super Tuesday in this year’s campaign cycle, and now have witnessed the POTUS deliver the annual State of the Union (SOTU) address. Which has, willy-nilly, evolved into a “state-of-the-campaign” address, over the last several 4-year election cycles, as just another blip on the screen of the endless, unremitting campaign, earning its own alphabet-soup acronym S-O-T-U – abbreviation.

But before we get into the implications for Zen and its relevance to our lives, let me restate a caveat that not only bears repetition, but apparently, and unfortunately, requires it. That is, that Zen, or Buddhism, is not intrinsically political. Or, as is usually stated, it is apolitical. As I characterize it, using my favorite prefix, Zen is un-political.

Nonetheless, I am painfully aware that any message about politics, however well-intentioned, is in danger of being interpreted as political, even partisan, in nature. This is a modern catch-22 that has less to do with content than it has to do with context, owing to the highly partisan cultural and ideological divide that has infected the populace with a social and mental virus more virulent than COVID 19. I had forgotten that the virus had made its debut on my birthday, until I came across this reminder in the news feed:

How quickly we forget. I would say “how quickly they forget,” but that would lend to the “us and them” divisiveness plaguing us today. It is just that kneejerk a reaction. I didn’t read the promised “update on where things stand,” but we can assume that it claims some upsides, such as that the virus seems to have been relatively tamed, at long last. But one downside is that the political picture has, if anything, gotten worse.

Both sides of the chasm that is the partisan campaign seem to be bullish on their chances, but could not be more different in their platforms, or lack thereof. Whichever team you are pulling for, you may be reading, or dreading or reading into the content of this segment, to conform to your political perspective. I ask you to take a moment to evaluate whether or not that is so. It is a subtle, subliminal, and insidious phenomenon. A curse.

I sometimes wonder if my birth date is also more of a curse than a blessing. The tsunami and meltdown at Fukushima also occurred on March 11, earlier in 2011. If my birth is a kind of curse, it calls into question all of the Panglossian views of this existence as the best of all possible worlds. Maybe this is, in actuality, “Earth 2.” In the penultimate stanza of the Metta Sutta or “Loving Kindness Sutra” it says:

Standing or walking; sitting or lying down; during all one’s waking hours

let one cherish the thought that this way of living is the best in the world

Even this most benign paean to hope: “May all beings be happy”; would most likely be twisted to conform to a one-sided view of reality, if it became just another bumper-sticker in today’s cavalier campaign.

Moving right along: POTUS kicked off the SOTU with a reference to 1941, the year of my birth, citing FDR’s New Deal, which, incidentally, kicked off the alphabet-soup metaphor for the multivarious departments Roosevelt created – the FBI, the CIA, and so on and on and on. He also mentioned Harry Truman, claiming the mantle of both past presidents, while highlighting the current threat to the very institutions of government, and the emphasis on defending democracy, that they and Ronald Reagan, the other party’s past leading man, ostensibly championed.

Which brings us to another point about nonpolitical outcomes of purportedly political decisions: the WWII bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Which, for those of us who have inherited the legacy and lineage of Zen from our Japanese predecessors, constitutes a koan of truly agonizing proportions. Just as we cannot condone the “collateral damage” inflicted upon innocent civilians and children in the case of Russia and Israel relentlessly bombing Ukraine and Gaza, respectively; we cannot justify the nuclear hell released upon the citizens of Japan by the self-same POTUS “Give-‘em-hell-Harry” that we admire for the accomplishments of his administration. We all share that karma. The atrocity was committed “in our name.” I was about five years old.

Mass bombing of civilians is mass murder. It cannot be rationalized as an act of politics, but represents the collapse, the total bankruptcy, of the international political system. Resorting to brute force in conflicts that our so-called political leaders fail to settle politically means they should be relieved of duty. They are incompetent. This does not ignore the necessity of military defense, in proportional response to military aggression. But it does suggest that the tactics of nonviolent diplomacy need to arise earlier in the process of negotiating conflict, whether on an international, local, or personal scale.

Buddhism’s doctrine of the myth of self seems the place to start, in positing a Buddhist take on these destructive horror shows. And why the impulse to understand the “other,” and arrive at a mutually beneficial solution, does not arise earlier in the process, if ever.

The recent repurposing of the American military forces to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to Gaza may constitute a silver lining in the otherwise gloomy forecast. Let’s engage in a common design-thinking exercise, the “What if?” scenario. What if the overwhelming power of the military could be used as a non-partisan policing function, forcing a cease-fire before the conflict reaches a set limit of civilian casualties, say 5,000? What if humanitarian aid stood ready-to-go near the hot spots of the world, inserted into the area early on, before the match lit the tinderbox? To those who would argue that the expense would be unbearable, I simply point to the much more massive cost of the bombing itself, not to mention the daunting scale and scope of the cleanup and rebuilding of the aftermath, which, of course, profits certain interest groups immensely. We have a saying in design circles, that there is never enough time and money to do it right the first time, but there is always time and money to do it over. What if we could flip that formula, on a global basis. The alternative seems to be “Earth 2.” Some seem resigned to its ultimate triumph over reason and compassion, called “Armageddon”; others seem fully devoted to making sure that the apocalypse comes to pass, fulfilling their favorite prophecy. Proving them, finally, “right.”

It would be the ultimate irony, would it not, if the end of civilization, and the extinction of the human species, comes about not of necessity but from a failure of will, fueled by misinformation? That a small percentage of the population with their fingers on the buttons not only do nothing to prevent the final catastrophe, but actually help to bring it about, based on their religious beliefs? Which then turn out to be wrong! No rapture, no kingdom of God on earth ruled by a savior. Just the rubble of what was once a great potentiality, laid waste by ignorance. Not a dystopian future, but no future at all. The greatest category mistake and unintended consequence in history, accidentally bringing human history to an end. What if this planet of ours turns out to be Earth 2, after all?

This is your, and my, karmic koan-du-jour. Answer quickly, or receive thirty blows of my stick!

In the next series of segments, we will return to more prosaic, everyday explorations of Zen and design thinking, while keeping an eye on the ongoing campaign. In May, we will take another look at the developments to date, with a somewhat jaundiced eye to their relationship to the compassionate teachings. Meanwhile, study your ideology thoroughly in practice.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Monday, March 11, was my birthday, as I mentioned in the last segment of UnMind. Wednesday, March 27th, happens to be my late brother’s birthday. So in his honor, let us continue exploring the theme of Time — its seeming passage and constant presence. He was a professional jazz pianist and teacher of music, and so was fully immersed in time. Once upon a time, while discussing time signatures in music, such as four-four time, three-four time — the familiar waltz tempo — and so on, he leaned toward me, a mischievous smile on his face, saying that, “You know, there is also ‘one-one’ time” – counting off with his forefinger: “One-one-one-one.” He and I had many such dialogs at the intersection of music theory and Zen thinking. He has since passed on, sitting in with that great jazz combo in the sky. I bet he draws a crowd.

(Some of the material in what follows originally appeared as my Dharma Byte of the month, titled “Swords into Plowshares,” in 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing.)

In that message, and at that time, I made the point that privileging the survival of the oldest is not Nature’s way; it is usually the survival of the fittest. It is not natural to put younger members of the species at unreasonable risk, in order to protect the older members. This goes against the natural order, as we witness in survival strategies of wildlife, as well as in social structures of the earliest human tribes. The survival of the species dictates age-related triage, in favor of those most likely to survive, to live longer, and to reproduce. Exceptions always arise to prove the rule; Nature is not simple.

Yet humans reverse this natural logic, in wartime as in the example of the military draft, as well as in recruiting methods for police officers and firefighters. People in their late teens and early twenties often enter into dangerous occupations, in service to the larger community. Those who study such things tell us that neurological networks, including the brain, are not yet fully formed at that age, recognition and fear of mortality typically arising about the mid-twenties, when the brain finishes wiring, as we say. We were doing it again in the face of the pandemic, sending younger first responders into the fray, while protecting elderly and senior members by isolating and quarantining them.

I have reported on my own encounter with COVID 19, which dragged out for the better part of a year, beginning with a three-month up-and-down sickbed recuperation from congestion and other flu-like symptoms, followed by slow recovery of lost strength, flexibility, balance, energy, and the kind of “brain fog” associated with “long covid,” the lingering effects on the nervous system. As part of that recovery, I developed an aggressive approach to the sitting posture and its relationship to the breathing process of Zen meditation, as well as to walking meditation, with its focus on physical balance.

At about the time I began returning to morning meditation sessions, the new era of private billionaire space exploration was heating up, with more frequent launches than ever seen in the history of NASA. Perhaps this was a subliminal prompt to my beginning to count my breaths down to zero, in contrast to the usual counting up from one to four or more, and avoid counting beyond ten, as are common recommendations in Zen.

With an initial, deep inhalation, I would hold the breath for a count of eight or so, while doing a full-body crunch, tensing the core muscle groups, as well as my newly stiffened legs, and weakened arms and shoulders. With the exhalation, I would intone “nine,” then “eight” for the next cycle, and so on, down to “one,” and finally, “zero.” After repeating this pattern for a half-dozen times or so, I would settle more quickly and deeply into the period, while the counting and muscular effort naturally subsided.

A curious thing began to happen each time I would reach zero in the count. By then, my breath would have slowed to five or so cycles per minute, and I could feel my heartbeat. So I found myself counting my heartbeat, instead of my breath. Or rather, noticing how many heartbeats accompanied each cycle of breath. The heartbeat is clearly the metronome of our instrument, the body. And number, or counting, is clearly fundamental to our worldview, intrinsic to all design thinking and measurement, and basic to Zen’s nondualism: “leaping aside from the one and the many,” as Master Dogen reminds us.

As my breath slowed to a lower, slower tempo, my pulse also slowed, synchronizing with the breath. This resulted in a profound degree of stillness in both posture and breath, as well as fixed gaze, affecting my overall sphere of attention, reminding me of Matsuoka-roshi’s comment that the “real zazen” is manifested when the posture, breath and attention all come together in a “unified way.” And that it feels as if you are “pushing the crown of your head against the ceiling” — “mountain-still” stability. I began to feel that unification viscerally, encompassing the apparent “outside” and “inside” dimensions of awareness. Familiar, but more intense than ever before. I call this “returning to zero.”

There are many phrases in the lexicon of Zen that seem to be pointing to this same kind of experiential phenomenon, such as Master Dogen’s “backward step”; the ancient phrase “Shi-kan” meaning something like “stopping and seeing”; the “shamatha-vippasana” pairing of insight meditation; et cetera. The process of letting go — primarily of our own preconceptions, interpretations, and opinions of direct, sensory experience; and by extension, of our concepts and constructions of the world, trying to explain this reality to ourselves — seems inherent in all major systems of cultivating realization. That the method is so quintessentially physical, is what is striking about the Zen approach to just sitting still enough, straight enough, for long enough.

The idea, or concept, of “zero” has philosophical and psychological implications as well. The common trope of the “zero-sum game” is a case in point. The definition online:

A zero-sum game is one in which no wealth is created or destroyed. So, in a two-player zero-sum game, whatever one player wins, the other loses. Therefore, the players share no common interests. There are two general types of zero-sum games: those with perfect information and those without.

This amounts to another version of the meme: that if there are winners, there must be losers, so there can be no actual win-win. This ignorant assumption unfortunately informs much of what passes for political discourse, and socially conservative ideology.

I refer you to the lectures of R. Buckminster Fuller for a fuller exposition of the limitations of the view that there is not enough to go around, and the survival of the fittest means that we must, above all, ensure that we get ours, to hell with the losers. Such innovations as the guaranteed minimum income are beginning to crack the facade of this fundamental error.

The last line, concerning the dual nature of the zero-sum game being dependent upon “perfect information,” may provide a clue as to how the notion of winning and losing connects — or doesn’t — to the personal practice-experience of Zen. Beyond a direct “return to zero” — the personal dimension of awareness on the cushion — there is a returning to zero on the social level, as well as within the natural and universal spheres. In his rephrase of a Ch’an poem, Zazenshin, meaning something like “lancet” or “needle” of zazen, Master Dogen wraps up the penultimate stanza with:

The intimacy without defilement

is dropping off without relying on anything.


The verification beyond distinction between Absolute and Relative

is making effort without aiming at it.

This experience of “intimacy without defilement” is the zero sum point of zazen: nothing to be gained and nothing lost; nothing excluded and nothing extraneous, nothing to share with others – it is too intimate, too close in time and space. The fact that at this point we cannot rely on anything, is another aspect of Zen’s “zero” sum. We sit “without relying on anything” as Master Dogen reminds us, including all the tricks and trinkets we have painstakingly assembled in our toolkit. Our toolkit is exhausted, the tools we usually rely on, relatively or absolutely useless. “Absolute and Relative” constitute one of the last resorts of dualistic thinking; the fundamental bifurcation of “truth” in Buddhism is usually stated as absolute truth versus relative truth. So this “verification” must be of a different order altogether, one that is immeasurable. So far beyond any measurement, is this realization — though there is continuing effort, it is no longer aiming at anything.

This means that there is ultimately nothing of significance to gain or lose in relationships in the social sphere, nor do we have to distort our relationship to biology, our connection to the resources of Natural ecology. In terms of resolving the Great Matter of life and death, we can embrace the inevitability of aging, sickness and death as the central koan — one that comes bundled with birth — the illogical riddle of existence itself. We no longer have to rely on life, itself. Here and now, we arrive at the final zero-sum game.

Whether or not we believe in an eternal soul, and its resurrection, as do modern Christians; or in reincarnation, as did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus; or rebirth as taught by Buddha, as a corrective to reincarnation; we finally come to face our mortality close-up and personal. It is natural, and universal, whatever its interpretation by the social milieu in which we find ourselves. According to an old Zen metaphor, the only “mate” who will accompany us to the grave, is our deeds. Whatever wealth, honor, power, or powers of reasoning we may have accumulated in managing and manipulating the vagaries of fate and vicissitudes of fortune encountered in life, they serve us little in the face of death.

Try as we might to think our way to enlightenment, or to reason ourselves into insight, we find ourselves failing again and again. Finally, we must surrender to the chaos of not knowing, and abandon our reliance on reason itself — spawn of philosophy and that other kind of Enlightenment, the triumph of reasoning over belief. Instead, we find verification of our Zen practice in “making effort without aiming at it.”

Needless to say, this is a very uncomfortable place to find oneself, at a pass that is not really negotiable, in any ordinary sense. Paraphrasing Seikan Hasegawa, a Rinzai master, from The Cave of Poison Grass, he reminds us that putting off confrontation with this particular koan of aging, until we find ourselves on the death-bed, is futile: “like eating soup with a fork.” We need to confront this koan when we are young and vigorous — “Stamp life and death on your forehead, never letting it out of your mind” — another Zen pearl of wisdom long lost to attribution. Life takes its meaning in the context of death. If you find that too morbid, just imagine what life would be like if we did not die: Its meaning would be entirely different, and not entirely positive.

When the grim reaper arrives, we may want to embrace her relentless, unforgiving and unsympathetic scythe, as being no different from the sword of Manjusri, cutting through our final delusion. Preferable to die on the cushion, of course.

As Kosho Uchiyama reminds us, our whole world is born, and dies, with us. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” In contemplating our inevitable demise as a loss of something, we have to remember that it amounts to returning to where we came from, a kind of null hypothesis that the effect we are dreading is not measurable, or sums to zero:

In scientific research, the null hypothesis is the claim that the effect being studied does not exist. Note that the term "effect" here is not meant to imply a causative relationship.

That last caveat calls to mind the famous Zen koan concerning Baizhang, or Hyakujo, and the fox. The point goes to the question of whether or not an enlightened person would be subject to, or free from, the law of causality. The ancient master responds: “Free from,” and is condemned to be reborn as a fox for five hundred (fox) lifetimes. Baizhang kindly corrects his confusion with something like: “One with causality” or “We do notignore causality,” which liberates the old man.

If we fear death — or, conversely, seek it out; fearing life, instead — we have made an assumption that we know what life is, but do not know what death is; or, conversely, that we prefer death over life; or vice-versa. Either side of this formula ignores the fact that the overall equation inevitably sums to zero.

I came across a pamphlet titled “The 11th Hour,” in my brother’s hospice care clinic, wherein its Christian, female author clarified: Birth is the death of whatever precedes it; death is the birth of whatever follows” — refreshingly without bothering to define the “whatever.”

In the next segment — speaking of zero-sum games — we will return to pick up the monthly thread of “Election Year Zen,” now that we have surpassed Super Tuesday, in this year’s endless campaign cycle. This, too, is the Dharma.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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BRINGING ORDER OUT OF CHAOS

It might be said that the function of the discriminating mind (S. citta), in the most general sense, is to render what is perceived as chaos into what may be perceived as order. Of course, this is not an original idea, and has an associated idea that chaos, as we perceive it, may be thought of as a higher level of order, one that is not accessible to our perception. This idea resonates in both the world of Zen and that of art and design thinking.

One would have to speak of a relative degree of order versus a notion of absolute order. However chaotic reality may appear, it is following physical laws that suggest an underlying order that is simply not a respecter of persons, or of the sensibilities of humans. We must come into compliance with reality, rather than expect reality to conform to our expectations or preferences. This, I think, is the fundamental basis of the concept of the “Way” in Taoism, and an underpinning of Zen as it developed in China. However, the Way in Buddhism, as I understand it, is not a hypothesis or theory of objectified reality outside the observer, but exists only in complementary balance with the person.

Our observation of perceived order also exhibits relative degrees, or a spectrum from one extreme to another. For example, our house may be a mess inside, but look orderly on the outside, unless we get evicted and our possessions are dumped on the street. If you peer into parked cars on any city street, they will tell you a story about the person who drives them, or lives in them. Some definitely have that lived-in look, while others are pristine, even sterile-seeming, as are some homes. If you have ever seen the French movie, “Mon Oncle,” or “my uncle.” you may remember its satirical take on the super-white, stainless steel interior, and the housewife’s gloved approach to maintaining its spotless state. My best friend in high school lived in a home where the floors of the living rooms were covered with shag carpet, which was newly popular in the 1950s, but theirs was brilliant white. We had to remove our shoes to enter the house, which was peculiar to me at the time, but later became second nature after being exposed to the Japanese culture, beginning with the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, in the 1960s. Sensei had us stand at the door with a basket of clean socks to hand to the barefoot hippies coming in off of Halsted Street. In his eyes, they must have appeared as complete barbarians.

If you are in someone’s home as a guest, you might take a peek in the medicine cabinet. There you will see an indication of the sense of order of your host’s mind. (I have never done this, of course; it is very rude.) What is on the shelves, and where, and whether the medicines are outdated, may paint a portrait of how obsessive-compulsive — or happy-go-lucky — your friends may be. Bear in mind that for a couple living together, these issues become instantly, and infinitely, more complicated. Who does what and when, and who is responsible for the resulting mess, becomes entangled in the relationship. Master Dogen, who transplanted what is now called Soto Zen to 13th century Japan from his sojourn in China, used the word katto to identify entanglements, using the analogy of twining vines, like wisteria. This applies not just to the tyranny of possessions and environments, but to the subtle entanglements of relationships themselves.

Other examples of refined order, from the human perspective, include such storage-and-retrieval systems as fishing tackle totes and sewing boxes, where the necessity for “a place for everything and everything in its place” determines the efficiency and effectiveness of the endeavor of actually fishing or sewing. I inherited an antique sewing box, with its many spools of colored threads and implements of sewing wonderfully arranged in stunning order, formerly in the control of a friend’s grandmother. Somehow my son and daughter, under 5 years old at the time, got into it and turned order into chaos, probably in about 5 minutes, when the array of organization had likely developed over five years or more of grandma’s life. There was no way I could put it back in order.

Workshops are another example, where attention to the organization and design of the environment can begin to overwhelm the prospect of actually getting anything done. The project of organizing the process can distract our attention from doing the project itself.

In the course of organizing my various studio and shop environments over time, I have developed what I call the “Island of Sanity” approach. It took me 50 years or so to learn that table tops are not for storage. I strive to keep the tables clear of any clutter, including tools, even during the process of working. “Clear the decks” is the trope. The “work,” the piece under construction, or a painting, is the only item that is allowed to occupy the table top. I have found that laying tools on the table means that when I need to move the work, the tools often get in the way. So I keep a side table as home for the tools.

On the tool table, I keep the various tools in play in a neat array, rather than mindlessly piling them on top of each other. In the hurly-burly of executing a project, the tool table often becomes disorderly. I occasionally reorganize it quickly, so that the tools are side-by-side in a scannable row, not overlapping. This way I can quickly recognize and seize the particular tool I need when I need it. Others have refined these approaches.

Allowing a relative degree of perceived chaos in the work environment seems to be a necessary evil. Otherwise, we may be driven to distraction by trying to improve the process, and never finishing the project. What is sometimes called “completion anxiety” may set in. As long as we are working on a project, but have not brought it to conclusion, it can remain forever perfect in our mind’s eye. When it is finished, it is just what it is, warts and all: imperfect. Everything is somewhat imperfect; or at best, relatively perfect.

In my case, maintaining islands of sanity creates the proper balance for getting things done, with minimal stress on the mind and body. What the particular balance amounts to, and what works best for the individual, seems to be a personal trait. Some people can work efficiently in a virtual pile of clutter; others are highly dependent on a visually uncluttered workspace. Einstein’s office — which is preserved intact even today, as a memorial, just as he left it — is said to be an exceptional example of “meaningful clutter.” Whether yours is meaningful, or not, is up to you to determine.

Clutter control is a recognized discipline, a known issue in interior design of environments, whether working or living spaces, public or private. The “rising tide of clutter” can overwhelm any space. Just tune into one of the current spate of television shows on hoarding, to see some of the worst-case scenarios.

Contrast becomes important in being able to see the shape of a tool, to state another obvious point. Vertical walls for storing tools often consist of white pegboard for this reason. I have learned that I lose my eyeglasses less often if I remember not to place them on a dark surface, into which the dark frames blend and disappear. The inverse is true when retrieving a light-colored object. Dark backgrounds are called for.

Along with many of my contemporaries, In the 1960s I experimented with so-called psychedelic or psychotropic drugs. One memorable experience found me sitting in my basement shop, trying in vain to sort various items of hardware into appropriate category designations for storage and retrieval. All items share many characteristics in common with others, and it actually was not clear which were the priorities. For example, many fasteners (of which there are many kinds) may be made of metal, and so “go together,” but are designed to fasten many different materials, such as wood, as opposed to metal. In the case of fasteners, we end up with so many leftover screws, nuts and bolts, et cetera, from our projects, that it becomes a more-and-more time-consuming process just to keep what you may never use in some kind of order. I have seen everything from homemade systems utilizing salvaged glass jars, lids attached to the underside of shelves, allowing the jar to be unscrewed with one hand; to endless aisles suffering from over-choice, and designed systems for storing virtually endless categories, sizes and types of fasteners, in hardware and big-box stores. The world is really too much with us, in these categories.

An example from retail, that might not be obvious to the customer, but is well known to the insiders, entails the arrays of shoes at your local shoe store. The stock is usually stored in back, where the various sizes of a given style can be efficiently stacked and retrieved in labeled shoe boxes. The storefront, by contrast, displays all the shoes in their best light, putting our best foot forward, literally. Usually the smaller sizes are displayed, not only because they take less room, but because they are usually more aesthetically pleasing than bigger sizes of the same style and color, vestiges of ancient foot-binding in the East. A little-known fact is that the array has the appearance of more styles and colors than are actually in stock, because the merchandisers display them by style, by color and other attributes: the same shoe will appear in two or more displays throughout the store.

As a boy, I used to wonder why my father had so many pairs of shoes in his closet, when I had only one or two. Now I have more shoes than he did, accumulated over time, because the size of my feet stopped changing, and I found different needs, or lack of need, for different types and styles of footwear. Imelda Marcus is the poster girl for this category of disorder, with her 3,000 pairs of shoes.

Produce in a grocery store is another example. People generally like to pick over produce, selecting the best ones, leaving the fruits or vegetables that are less appealing in looks, apparent freshness, et cetera. For this reason, pre-packaged produce is a harder sell. This is why we see monstrous stacks of open produce in brightly-lighted bins, in most modern food supermarkets. Which, by the way, are destabilized when 10% are removed.

To see, a bit more clearly, how fundamental the process of sorting is to the basic function of perceived order — including storing and retrieving things — try to imagine a contrarian approach, such as displaying books by color, say, or clothing grouped by fabric, rather than size or style.

I have witnessed the tendency to over-organize — or organize by inappropriate groupings — in my own efforts to achieve order, in striving to make sense of my environment. One example is that I tend to group and store like things together, such as putting any and all writing pens in the same place. Or I may do the same with my collection of eyeglasses, which has accumulated over time through misplacing, replacing, and rediscovering spectacles. Problem is, I need a writing pen at different places at different times, yet I do not want to have endless writing pens scattered all over the place. I know people who collect fine writing pens, and wonder if it amounts to a compulsion, or a stubborn resistance to the decline of handwriting, in favor of the word processor — with which, incidentally, I am writing this essay, from handwritten notes scrabbled on various sheets of notebook paper, noted when I was away from my desktop.

We tend to blame linear thinking as the main culprit behind chaos, and all of this need for — and inability to find, or sustain — order. When we begin to consider that everything we regard as belonging to one category actually belongs to many others — perhaps an infinity of categories, if we parse it finely enough — a kind of insanity or cognitive dissonance, a lack of mental order — begins to come into play.

This is, in Zen, or Taoism, the point at which we begin to “confront the mystery,” from the Tao te Ching:

Caught by desire, we see only the manifestations;

Free from desire, we confront the Mystery.

“The one and the many” are indeed like the yen and yang of our discriminating mind. That phenomena and noumenon exist in complementary embrace, or the endless dance of becoming, is not immediately evident, when we are just trying to get through the day. This is why, and how, it becomes important to take a break, and to sit on it for a while. Hopefully, when we stop striving, the immanent order of emptiness underlying the alienating appearance of form will become manifest. But as Master Dogen mentions in Genjokoan, don’t look for it to appear in your perception:

Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge,

or is grasped by your consciousness;

although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be apparent.

The inconceivable may appear as chaos; the underlying order may not be apparent. Chaos may be embraced as a higher form of order, or an elevated degree of complexity, in which any discernible pattern is elusive; while perceived patterns of order may be similarly interpreted as artificially lower levels of chaos, or higher degrees of superficial simplicity. Upon closer examination, perceived simplicity devolves into the complexity of chaos, e.g. on the subatomic or quantum level; whereas chaotic complexity gives way to serene simplicity. “All things are like this,” to borrow another vintage Dogen-ism; the vacillation is built-in, from duality to nonduality and back. Enjoy the ride.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Monday, March 11, 2024 is my 83rd birthday, and coincidentally the deadline for this segment of UnMind, in order to drop on Wednesday the 13th. I did an exercise in visualizing my personal timeline this last year, and will share it with you in this installment. You will have to visit the website to see the illustrations (link), but for now, as we say in professional design circles — when a design board presentation got lost in checked baggage — “Picture this, guys!” Been there, done that.

I began by laying out my life in decades, starting in 1940 when I was conceived around July, born 9 months later in 1941, and — incidentally, not coincidentally — the year that Matsuoka-roshi arrived in America.

Picture a spreadsheet 10 columns across, headed 1940,1950,1960,etc. up to 2030; by 6 rows down, with categories: Geographical, Societal, Marital/Familial, Educational, Formal Zen, and Professional. You get the idea. Then fill in the blanks with locations like Centralia, IL (my home town), Chicago (where I did my advanced schooling), Atlanta, GA (my adopted home town), Europe and Japan, traveling on design and Zen business — my lifetime “ecological sweepout,” as Bucky Fuller calls it. Big events like WWII, Korea and Vietnam; the end of the Cold War; Covid, etc.; and lesser ones such as “Born 3/11/41,” 1st & 2nd Marriages, Father & Mother dying; BS & MS degrees, etc., populate the cells. Plus Zen turning points such as meeting Matsuoka-roshi, Lay Ordination, ASZC & STO Incorporation, publish date of my first major book, “The Original Frontier”; and finally, career benchmarks such as teaching at U of I & the School of the Art Institute, various corporate ventures, and my current art dealer, Kai Lin Art Gallery, complete the exercise to date. I recommend you try something similar, to get an overview of your life.

By the way, that expression, “conceived,” is interesting from a professional design perspective. We have what we call “concept design,” the initial stage of ideation, wherein few to none of the details of a design solution to a problem have been worked out. The spit-balling, brainstorming phase. Which seems to apply pretty aptly to that embryo in the womb — an inchoate mass of tissue that will, some nine months hence, come popping out into the world — if not “fully-formed,” as Buddha, in his miraculous birth, was said to have been. Not only that, but he immediately took seven steps in each of the cardinal directions; and, pointing one forefinger to the heavens above, the other to the earth below, declared: “Above the heavens and below the heavens, I alone am the most honored one!” If, indeed, this story is true, then, indeed, he would have had to have been. Or at least one of the most highly-honored ones.

But of course, we take this tale with a huge grain of salt, perhaps even a saltlick block, like we used to put out in the pasture for our horses, on the farm where I grew up. My only claim to fame regarding an unusual birth came to light when my mother later confessed that she had tried to abort me by jumping off the back porch, which was what passed for birth control in those days, today referred to as “reproductive health.” Mom and dad already had “a boy for you and a girl for me,” in the persons of my older brother and sister — one darkly handsome, the other blond and beautiful, respectively — and the budget from the newspaper route they ran was already strained. I got my revenge by being born with an enormous head, which, because I was upside-down in the womb, I attribute to all that jumping.

For some reason, my life seems to have morphed through the various “times-of-life” cycles — used to sort demographics in social research — in near synchronicity with the decades, as measured by an admittedly arbitrary calendar, called the Gregorian, which, according to the wizards of Wikipedia:

The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It went into effect in October 1582 following the papal bullInter gravissimas issued by Pope Gregory XIII, which introduced it as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day 'tropical' or 'solar' year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun.

Glad we got that cleared up. Now, we can see clearly the absolute degree of arbitrariness inherent in our concept of measured time. We can’t even measure the time of day, the calendar year, or the planet’s revolution around the sun, without resorting to infinitely endless decimal places. So much better than that antiquated Julian thing, though. And, “close enough for jazz,” to most intents and purposes.

As you can see by looking at the first chart, my geographical sweepout was rather limited to my home state of Illinois in my 20s, other than a couple of junkets to California, until I moved to Atlanta in my 30s, then finally went abroad on business in my 40s, and to the Far East in my 50s, on behalf of Zen. My family did not have the kind of resources that would have financed a “grand tour” of Europe in my formative years. This charting of your life on a single sheet of paper turns out to be an exercise in humility, when you realize how little you have done, and how brief your lifespan really is. We will return to this subject in the context of the “lifespan chapter” of the Lotus Sutra.

In the second spreadsheet, I extend the timescale to 80-year spans — extending back to 1460, and forward through 1540, 1620, 1700, etc., and finally my own era of 1940 through 2020 — shrinking my personal timeline down to two columns out of ten, roughly 20% of the larger span of five centuries or so. Visualizing only one row, encompassing the societal level, a distinct pattern emerges: major events, especially in the USA, seem to happen in 80-year cycles, going back to the Revolutionary War and Civil War and including World War II, which was just heating up when I came on the scene. Sure enough, when I Googled it, I found that this pattern of 80-year cycles is a known phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the “Strauss-Howe” theory, derived from critical events in the history of America, as well as the rest of the globe.

The Strauss-Howe generation theory describes a recurrent cycle of same-aged groups with specific behavior patterns that change every 20 years. According to this theory, an 80-year cycle is crucial, when every four generations is associated to a crisis that impacts the ongoing social order and creates a new one.

A startling personal finding popped out like a sore thumb: at 80 years old, I was 1/3 the age of my native country, the good old USA. A person 80 years old at my birth would have been born around 1860, the Civil War; one 80 years old at that time would have been born around 1780, the time of the Revolution. The reference to Armageddon in the final column, finally coming to pass within 80 years from now, is only partially, and hopefully, tongue-in-cheek.

Expanding the timescale even further, the third spreadsheet encompasses twenty-five centuries since the advent of Buddha in 500 BCE, to the current 2000’s, again shrinking my personal tenure to a vanishingly small portion, less than ten percent of the total, if I live to be 100. Which is unlikely. Although, as Matsuoka-roshi would often say, “Zen keeps the men younger, and the women more beautiful.” I can’t really explain my relatively good health and wellbeing in any other way.

To close this segment, let us consider some of the statements attributed to Buddha at the end of his life, in the Lifespan Chapter of the Lotus Sutra, ostensibly uttered as he was about to enter Pari Nirvana:

To the deluded and unenlightened I say that I have entered nirvana

although in fact I am really here.

For the sake of these sentient beings I teach that

the lifespan of the Buddha is immeasurable.

The light of my wisdom illuminates immeasurably

and my lifespan is of innumerable kalpas.

This has been achieved through long practice.

You wise ones do not give in to doubt! Banish all doubt forever!

The Buddha’s words are true never false.

Here, we find one of the most controversial of all claims in Buddhism, which begs credulity — similar to the resurrection of Jesus — along with that of his virgin birth. Even the idea of Pari Nirvana smacks of “woo-woo,” given our skeptical scientific setting:

In Buddhism, parinirvana is commonly used to refer to nirvana-after-death, which occurs upon the death of someone who has attained nirvana during their lifetime. It implies a release from Saṃsāra, karma and rebirth as well as the dissolution of the skandhas.

Bows to our fellow travelers at Wikipedia, once again. But while we can readily embrace the dissolution of the skandhas — or aggregated form, sensation, perception, intention and consciousness, upon the onset of death, it seems mere speculation that anyone might find total release from the ocean of Samsara, the cycles of karmic consequence and rebirth, that Buddhism teaches as theories of the laws governing sentient existence.

But Buddha seems to be pointing at something else, a kind of permanent existence that is not limited to the form of our present, impermanent body-mind. Like the timeworn analogy of the ocean and the waves, the eternal lifespan of Buddha implies that whatever is here has always been here, and will always be here, if in different form. A wave returns to the ocean, but does not, cannot, drown; being of one and the same substance.

I will leave it to you, as usual, to “thoroughly examine this in practice,” as Master Dogen kindly advises. This is not a cop-out. If reality could be explained in words, it would have become commonplace knowledge long before 2500 years ago. The original language of our original mind is still in place. All we have to do is develop “the eyes to hear and the ears to see” it. The method for developing this transcendent, trans-perceptual wisdom is stunningly simple: just sit still enough — and straight enough — for long enough. And listen up — to the “sermon of no words.”

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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As promised, at the beginning of each month in 2024, we return to the topic of “Election Year Zen,” with my “DharmaByte” column (DB) for the Silent Thunder Order monthly newsletter, followed by my first subsequent “UnMind” podcast (UM) of the month. To review the underlying rationale for this approach to a topic most practitioners would prefer to avoid, please refer to last month’s DB and UM if you have not already done so.

In an earlier DB from June of 2023, I had broached this subject gingerly, and I touch upon it in my second major book, “The Razorblade of Zen.” In the newsletter column, I make the point that partisan politics in general is not a topic we would recommend bringing up in the context of the meditation hall — in Japanese called the “zendo” — a sensitive point which had come up in dialog with one of our affiliated Zen centers (quoting myself again):

In a recent meeting with one of our affiliate centers, the focus was on “The Platform Sutra of Huineng,” in which he admonishes all to not find fault with others. One of the members who helps organize these events sent me some questions she wanted me to address, including the dilemma of how we are supposed to not find fault with people who are waging war on others, and committing atrocities such as bombing cities, civilians, and children. She was concerned that raising these issues might be too personal, in the context of a Zen community, where the underlying premise might be to provide some shelter and sanctuary from the insanity of the world. But I assured her that, no, these very events are apt examples of the very ignorance, and resultant unnecessary suffering, that are pointed to in the foundational teachings of Buddha. And that she is right to raise such questions in the context of Zen practice in modern life.

It is my understanding that in the monasteries, and perhaps the smaller temples in cities and villages of the countries of origin of Zen Buddhism, the custom is to have little or no speaking in the zendo itself. As I learned in 1989, when visiting Eiheiji, the training monastery established by Master Dogen in the 13th century, ceremonial services are typically conducted in an entirely separate building, as are formal talks and other forms of dharma study.

This tradition has carried over into the American Zen community, where we are encouraged to leave the zendo quietly after the meditation and gather in another chamber before engaging in dialog. So the idea that we preserve the sanctity of the zendo, and the sanity of its attendees, has some legs. There are good reasons for the specific designs of the protocols we have inherited from Zen’s storied past.

However, in most smaller temples and training centers, having multiple rooms, let alone separate buildings, in which to conduct various activities is a luxury that many cannot afford. This is the reason both the main altar (J. butsudan) and the smaller zendo altar dedicated to Manjusri are often in the same room, separated by space, or located on different walls of the meditation hall. So we compromise, and hold competing sessions at different times. The meditation hall becomes the dharma hall, then reverts back, when sitting in zazen. Silent, upright seated meditation is the hallmark of Zen, taking precedence over all other activities, fostered by instruction periods for newcomers.

However, Zen is not unconnected from reality outside the temple, and the zendo does function as a kind of social sanctuary, as does zazen itself, in the personal sphere. We can manage to accommodate both personal practice and social service functions in the same space, by scheduling them at different times. This does not mean, however, that everyone has to participate, just as everyone need not attend all newcomer instruction sessions. Which is why instructions are not given with every session in the zendo.

Members who do not want to discuss buddhadharma on any other than the personal plane are welcome to avoid attending dharma dialogs that have a social slant. But if we prohibit such discussions, we are sidestepping our civic responsibility, which, if you study the Buddhist canon, from Buddha on down to the present day, you will see that the ancient sages and their modern counterparts have not shied away from the subject.

When it comes to indiscriminate bombing of civilians and children, we are no longer in the realm of politics. If we are silent, we become complicit. Buddha, I believe, would have spoken out against this betrayal of compassion and wisdom. As did Matsuoka Roshi, concerning the corrupt regime in Vietnam, and other atrocities of his time. We can look to the teachings and meditation practice of Zen Buddhism to find a degree of solace and sanctuary from these insults to humanity, but we cannot run, and we cannot hide from them, ultimately. But we do not have to join the partisan divide, either.

To provide some historical context for this discussion, we refer to the foundational documents of the founding fathers of this nation, the oldest surviving democratic republic. In the prior installment on this matter, we quoted the famous first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Let us continue with the second section:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Aye, there’s the rub: if “all men” — which phrase we now define to include all women and all children, of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and countries of origin — are indeed created equal, and endowed with “unalienable rights,” then there is no rationale, no excuse, for waging war in which innocents are slaughtered as “collateral damage.”

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

If the very purpose of government is to secure such rights as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then the institutions of government — including first and foremost the military — must be prohibited from depriving citizens of any country of these rights, with or without the concept of a “Creator.” They go on to define the remedy:

— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

So here is the ostensible rationale for the recent attempts to overthrow the present government, though the events of January sixth clearly appear to have partisan roots. At the time of this writing, of course, this ultimate right was claimed in the context of Great Britain’s “crazy” King George, and his autocratic grip on the colonies. The history of protests of the original tea party and privileged Tories — loyalists and royalists, or “King’s men” — illustrates that the times were probably as divisive, or even more so, than our present partisan divide. Anticipating that this passage might be construed to lend support to purely partisan motives, the framers optimistically hang the hope of future jurisprudence on the dictates of prudence itself:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Leaving aside for now the determination as to which causes should be eschewed as “light and transient,” this suggests that this call to arms is based on the degree of oppression the hoi polloi are willing to bear. This returns to the theme of the last segments of UnMind, with their emphasis on the intersection of design thinking and Zen, where in both arenas, one of the central questions bearing on happiness and suffering is, How much is enough? If the majority of people are fat and happy, and “kitchen table” issues — the price of eggs, bread and butter — are relatively bearable, little attention will be devoted to overthrowing the government, no matter how corrupt. “Let them eat cake” works, if there is fairly widespread access to cake.

The division of the citizens into haves and have-nots, with those at the top of the game, the “one-percenters,” raking in wealth that is unimaginable, and inaccessible, to the rest, may be much more exaggerated today, as well as more obvious and available to scrutiny, owing to the ubiquitous availability of 24/7 real-time news media.

A recent newspaper column revealed the staggering increases in incomes of the country’s top three or four wealthiest individuals, compared to their more meager incomes of only a few years ago, alongside the minimum wage, which has remained static in the same time period, This disparity of incomes has national and international implications as an impetus to immigration, to make matters more complicated. You may argue that these captains of industry deserve the income they earn, but that stretches the concept of earning to the breaking point. You cannot “earn” this level of income in any rational sense of the word. Corporate income comes from “owning,” not earning.

We are not going to solve these problems in this analysis, but we can at least compare and contrast the current cultural norms and memes that attempt to justify them, with the teachings of Buddhism, such as encouraging us to engage compassion in dealing with our fellow travelers in the dusty realm of Samsara, the everyday world of patience. So we have to practice patience with a situation that seems to have no justification whatever, or very little from this perspective.

While the case can be made that not all people are created equal, it can be argued that to the degree reasonable, the playing field should be leveled. A child born with a silver spoon in their mouth, whether currently or 2500 years ago, is no more deserving than a child born into a family that doesn’t even own a spoon. To argue that those parents should not have children who cannot afford to have children ignores the reproductive drive of the species, which pays little regard to the material circumstances of its sperm donors and receivers.

Once a child is born, it has the same potential for realizing its buddha nature as any other child, regardless of the causes and conditions into which it is born. And we cannot misuse the Buddhist take on karma and karmic consequences to dismiss these disparities, nor the social injustices that often accompany them, out of hand. The teachings of Buddhism were never intended to be held up to others as a criticism or justification for inaction, but to be reflected back upon our own follies, foibles and failings. This is the “mirror of Zen,” which reflects the good, bad, and the ugly without discrimination. We come to see ourselves in this mirror, along with all others, in our extended dharma family. Buddha was said to have come to see everyone as his “children,” and not in a condescending way.

To close this segment, I will lean on Master Dogen’s admonition to “thoroughly examine this in practice.” Let us return to our cushions, but not turn our back on those who have not even been exposed to this excellent method. Our mission is clear. We need to wake up on every possible level. Compassion and wisdom — like charity — begin at home.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In our last segment of UnMind, on the meaning of “less is more” — a central axiom of design thinking coined by the famous architect, Mies van der Rohe — I introduced the notion that this adage may be usefully applied to Zen, as well. The simplicity of lifestyle and paucity of possessions surrounding the history of Zen, in China and Japan in particular, speaks to the general question regarding happiness and satisfaction in life: How much is enough? In this segment we will consider how “more” can often be “less.”

When we reach a certain level of stability in the normal stages of life in the “first world” countries of modern times, we may find that we have an overabundance of personal possessions: a complete household, and maybe a summer home as well, with the requisite home furnishings; maybe one or two vehicles, a boat, maybe even a private plane. At a certain point, unless we can manage the upkeep and maintenance of all our many acquisitions, our possessions begin owning us. That is, an increasingly large percentage of our time is devoted to taking care of the many things that we do not actually use very often, and probably don’t really need, in any realistic sense. Then comes the de-cluttering and downsizing, just to get back to a normal state of affairs — where we can spend our time on those aspects of life that we find most important and rewarding, such as family, friends — and, in Zen, personal insight into existence itself.

In examining our approach to Zen meditation, in the context of “less is more,” we see clearly that excess accumulation of material goods is not of much use, and can readily form yet another barrier to simplification of all the demands on our time and attention.

When it comes to meditation, we consciously choose to pay attention to the basics of existence, including the body and its posture, the breath and its pattern, and the mind and its machinations. In doing so, we witness the natural functions of the monkey mind as setting goals, ruminating over the past and worrying about the future, and so on. In order to simplify our task of waking up to reality as it is, we can recognize when we are setting goals, for example, and choose to stop setting goals, at least in terms of our meditation.

So I launched into the discussion of subtracting such elements from our practice, as we witness them arising, resulting in the concept of “goalless” meditation, which in itself may be defined as a “goal.” Or “timeless” meditation, where we set aside the burden of timing our sitting period, and allow ourselves to reenter real time, which has nothing to do with measurement. Eventually our meditation can become “effortless” — where we have been doing this for so long that, like driving a car, it really doesn’t require any conscious effort; and the physical effort has become second nature, so no big deal.

SENSELESS MEDITATION

Extending this idea, the various dimensions we observe in zazen, such as the six senses, yield the possibility of “sightless” meditation; “soundless” meditation; “odorless” and “tasteless” meditation; and even “sensationless” meditation, which would be akin to physical Samadhi, I suppose. It would also entail “weightlessness,” when our BMI and gravity come into perfect balance.

MINDLESS MEDITATION

And finally, “emotionless,” as well as “thoughtless,” or “mindless,” meditation — which latter would conventionally be interpreted as a pejorative. But in Zen, the “don’t-know mind” is valued most highly. Emotional Samadhi: less anxiety, more serenity; mental Samadhi: less confusion, more clarity. Eventually, “social Samadhi”: less friction, more harmony in relationships with others, as well as being comfortable in your own skin.

FORMLESS MEDITATION

From the perspective of posture, breath, and attention, which and when they all come together in a unified way, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say: “This is the real zazen”; we find ourselves practicing “posture paramita”: aiming at the perfect posture without ever imagining we have achieved it, another of Sensei’s Zen “secrets.” Through a process of profound sensory adaptation, we arrive at “formless meditation,” not only in terms of physical posture, or form, the first of the five aggregates, but also “mental formations,” the mysterious fourth skandha, meaning underlying motives, intentions, desires, and so forth, the psychological level of motivation. All gone away.

CONSCIOUS-LESS MEDITATION

The natural evolution of our approach to meditation would then naturally and logically lead to a kind of “conscious-less” meditation, an expression so countercultural that it requires a hyphen. The fifth aggregate comprehends the other four, in that we are, or become, conscious of form, sensation, perception, and mental formations, on deeper and deeper levels. Until we apprehend the “flip-side” of each, as the Heart Sutra indicates: “no form, no sensation, no perception, no mental formations”; “until we come to no consciousness also,” as the original English translation we used at Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago rendered the line. We are conscious of the other four — until we are not; and then we are conscious of consciousness itself — until we are not. This steady progression through — and adaptation to — the aggregates, outlined in the Surangama Sutra, is attributed to Buddha himself. So I am not just making this up as I go along.

BREATHLESS MEDITATION

That our meditation becomes “breathless” at some point may not be obvious — not in the sense of “breathless anticipation” — but in that we are not doing the breathing to begin with; the body is. So when we relinquish the idea of “control”: of the posture, the breath, and the direction of our attention; the natural posture, the naturalbreath, and the natural, or original, state of mind can come into play. We return to our original mind and body, which as Master Dogen reminds us, will unmistakably “drop off.” In good time.

OBJECTLESS MEDITATION

When our attention — and intention — come together in a unified or holistic way, then it may be said that our meditation has become “objectless.” Both in the sense of the senses and their objects merging in nonduality, and in the sense that we no longer can articulate any specific intention, underlying our practice. It has become “shikantaza,” the Japanese expression for the inexpressible unified field theory of conscious awareness. But we should not become enthralled with this as a concept, which threatens to morph into an expectation, rather than an aspiration. If we understand that “form and reflection behold[ing] each other” is the necessary and natural inflection point that meditation inexorably leads to — or returns to, to be more precise — we cannot go far astray.

CONCEPTLESS MEDITATION

This suggests yet another “less is more” dimension of meditation: that it can be utterly devoid of concepts, associations, or connotations, of any kind. This we might define as “pure” meditation, in the Zen sense of “purity” as nonduality, rather than conventional connotations of morality. No concept, however broad and deep its scope, can capture the breadth and depth of the effect, meaning, and implications of zazen. This is why the content and intent of Zen is sometimes referred to as “The Great Matter,” capitalized.

HEARTBEAT MEDITATION

On a less transcendent and more practical level, I would like to share with you some of my more recent discoveries in zazen fostered by my contracting COVID 19 in December of 2022, followed by a roughly three-month recovery period, amounting to an enforced “ango,” or traditional practice period, of ninety days. During this time, I lost a lot of strength, flexibility, balance, and coordination; and experienced the “mental fog” associated with the worst aftereffects of the pandemic, though I am not inflicted with “long covid” but only the exacerbated effects of aging in combination with the disease.

In taking the posture during this time, crossing my legs was increasingly difficult, and the resultant stiffness in my knees threatened to strain a tendon. So I took to sitting on the edge of the raised bench, with my feet on the floor. Getting up from the floor when manning the timekeeper (Doan) position became an agonizing exercise in finding the leverage to stand up. So I moved to chair-sitting. This adaptation to aging is not unusual, by the way — several veteran adepts have found that, by their mid-sixties, they could no longer sit in lotus posture.

In order to recover my ability to sit with stability while cross-legged, I began taking a more aggressive approach to the posture and breath, as well as to walking meditation, to compensate for the loss of my youthful vigor. My long-term engagement with kinhin, I am convinced, explains my relative sense of balance, compared to others my age.

In implementing this more active approach to the posture and breath, I discovered that I would begin feeling my heartbeat after holding my inbreath for a count of eight or ten, realizing that the tempo of the counting corresponded to the heartbeat. It is as if your heart is the metronome, counting off the time signature of your instrument, the body. By doing a full-body “crunch” while holding my breath, my spine would pop and pull into its natural s-curve, arching the small of the back forward and down, and pulling back and up on the chin, exaggerating the “cobra-rising” rigor of the upright seated posture.

Exhaling, I began counting the heartbeat instead of the breath, noticing how the two are synchronized. Gradually, as the breath slows down, so does the heart, from 2 beats per in-breath and out-breath to four, then longer sequences of pulsation as the outbreath, in particular, slows down to a soothing rhythm. Repeating this cycle of squeezing and letting go, the relaxation response begins to set in, embracing the squeeze-and-release cycle of the heart itself, allowing more relaxation time between pulses.

I could go on into more detail about how this rhythmic process smooths itself out until, as Matsuoka Roshi would say, the breath seems to come and go through the whole body, like a frog sitting on a lily pad, breathing by osmosis through the pores of the skin.

HEALING MEDITATION

I am convinced that this process of observing the integration of posture and breath has therapeutic, or healing, properties; which have immediate benefits of calming the nervous system, and long-term effects promoting longevity. The main benefit of longevity being that it affords a greater chance to wake up fully, in the Zen sense, during this brief lifetime.

You might consider expanding this discussion in your own words — such constructions as “compassionless” meditation — to consider whether the concept of compassion that you may be harboring actually conforms to the true meaning of the word, which is to “suffer with.” If you come up with any confounding notions along these lines, please feel free to share them with me. It may prompt a beneficial exchange as to the “limitless” meditation that is zazen.

In the next segment, we will return to consideration of “Election Year Zen” — with all the real-world ethics and civics implications that this focus implies. Please join in the dialog.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last segment of UnMind, the second installment discussing the sameness and differences I have noted in teaching Zen or design as a profession, I wrapped up the essay by mentioning the concept of “control,” as it might apply to either or both:

In meditation circles, we often hear phrases such as “controlling the breath” or “emptying your mind of thoughts.” These represent attitudes 180-degrees from that in Zen meditation, which is not one of exerting control, but rather relinquishing any real or imagined level of control.

Using that as a springboard for this segment, let’s examine our approach to Zen meditation, in the context of the well-known adage from minimalist design, “Less is more.” According to Google:

Minimalism is exemplified by the idea of “less is more” as first coined by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The idea that less may be more, in applying the method of zazen, is implicit in many dimensions of the character of Zen training, from Buddha’s Middle Way of moderation to the “chop wood, carry water” practicality of the Chinese history, the seven items a monk was allowed to own, and the sparse serenity of the zendo interiors of Japan, with their starkly minimalist sand and rock gardens.

The Institute of Design, during my years there in undergraduate and graduate studies, was housed in the basement of Crown Hall, while the Mies school of architecture was on the upper floor. His contribution to minimalist architecture lay in the combination of glass and steel to construct high-efficiency buildings, of which Crown Hall was an early archetype.

Another aphorism from design thinking that I mentioned:

...there are many design ideas that are simple in concept, but difficult in execution. Zen may be the poster boy for this truism. Zazen is irreducibly simple in design, but Zen can be maddeningly difficult in daily execution.

This is where I would like to begin this segment. Thinking about meditation, particularly Zen’s zazen — as I understand this “excellent method,” as Master Dogen repeatedly referred to it — it occurred to me that during zazen, as a process of “unlearning,” or “subtracting” the preconceptions we harbor as to our conventional take on reality, we might usefully question a variety of such attitudes and concepts, as to whether we are unintentionally, perhaps even unconsciously, striving to attain something as a presumed goal of our practice. Only if we recognize that we are doing so, can we then consciously relinquish that particular problematic attitude or opinion, and see what it is like to sit without it getting in our way. A number of these came up for me, which we can consider one at a time, perhaps extending into the next segment. They are expressed herein with the suffix of “-less,” which implies “the absence of.” Let’s begin with the very idea of goals in general, embracing the approach of “letting go” of our predilections.

GOALLESS MEDITATION

Of course, we all sit in meditation with some kind of goal, whether simply to calm the mind under stress; to get back to normal; or more deeply, to “wake up” to reality, which might be said to be the principle goal of Buddhism. But Master Dogen cautions us, in “Principles of Seated Meditation—Fukanzazengi,” to avoid taking goal-setting too far:

...think neither good nor evil, right or wrong

thus stopping the functions of your mind

give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha

In other words, resist setting up what seems a more lofty goal, in place of the pedestrian objectives we might associate with meditation. Which begs the question, can we do away with all goals and objectives, at least while we are sitting? We might say that it is not that Zen meditation has no goal, but it is just that the actual goal is too deep and too broad to be expressed in words, especially a priori. We meditate to discover the goal.

TIMELESS MEDITATION

Most instructions for meditation include imposing time constraints on it, for example by setting a timer, using an app with a built-in alarm, burning a stick of incense, or following the schedule of timed sessions on retreat, or during daily practice at a Zen center. When we experience the latter, sitting with somebody else tracking the time, we feel somewhat liberated from the necessity of thinking about the time, or paying attention to the clock; someone else is doing that for us. When we take a turn as time-keeper (“doan” in Soto Zen), we experience the discipline of being responsible for others’ time on the cushion. Both are highly recommended.

But someone once said that in zazen, “the barriers of time and space fall away.” When I see someone restively glancing at their watch in the zendo, I will often ask to borrow it. Then, they are unable to indulge their fidgeting obsession with time, at least while sitting.

This goes to the larger question of all the measurables associated with our meditation — such as how long we sit, how often, how regularly, et cetera — which are not as important as the immeasurable aspects: that we simply never give up. We keep returning to zazen, in good times or bad, for whatever time we have available for it.

I recommend that occasionally, perhaps the next time you sit in meditation, that you forego your tendency to time the period. Sit without any stopping time in mind. Then you may finally reenter real time, which is not measured; indeed, it is not even measurable. You may find that time is all you really have; that in fact, you have all the time there is.

This reality of real time versus measured time is captured in the sardonic expression — “The man who has one watch always knows what time it is; the man who has two never knows for sure” — attributed, as many such wisecracks are, to Chinese origin.

EFFORTLESS MEDITATION

In his paraphrase of a brief Ch’an poem about meditation, titled “Zazenshin,” meaning something like an “acupuncture needle” or “lancet” for zazen — something exceedingly sharp or pointed — Master Dogen points to the true meaning of “right effort” toward the end of the poem:

Intimacy without defilement

is dropping off without relying on anything

Verification beyond absolute and relative

is making effort without aiming at it

“Making effort” includes assuming the posture, which is not always easy, especially when we overdo it; and breathing, which can be labored, especially when we catch a cold, or during flu season.

I have heard that the posture should feel more like a stretching sensation than physical effort, and that the breath should be more like a sigh than belabored breathing. My root teacher, Matsuoka Roshi, said “the breath should be like a gate swinging in the breeze, first this way, and then the other way,” a rather pleasant, languid, relaxed image. And, he would say, “Zazen is the comfortable way.”

This should give us pause, in our pursuit of overweening effort, characterized as “macho Zen,” which we get from our impression of Rinzai’s more driven practice of externally-imposed discipline. I suspect that this meme is more a social dimension of the culture, than having anything to do with the reality of Zen practice — other than inculcating a sense of urgency: that we have no time to waste, in getting after this most important and central “great matter.”

In the next segment of UnMind we will continue with this exploration of the “less” side of the practice. As a semantic curio, the English meaning of the prefix “un” — which in my dharma name means “cloud” — connotes the “opposite” of something, or something very different, as in the “un-cola” campaign promoting the soft drink Seven Up, which I know dates me. It is similar in effect to the suffix “-less,” which connotes the “absence” of something.

If you have any suggestions along these lines for me to entertain in the next segment, let me know. My list is quite long, but there is always room for one more consideration to eliminate, from distracting us from our meditation.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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If you are paying an undue degree of attention to the details of my UnMind podcasts, you may have noted that the last segment was titled “Teaching Zen & Teaching Design,” while this one is “Teaching Design & Teaching Zen.” A trivial difference without a distinction, you might say. The emphasis on design thinking may have been a bit confusing, and Zen will be the major focus of this one. But either is here used as a foil for the other, in the spirit of “Harmony of Sameness and Difference,” the second great Ch’an Poem in Soto Zen liturgy, by Master Sekito Kisen:

Hearing the words understand the meaning

do not set up standards of your own

Not understanding the Way before your eyes

how will you know the path you walk?

In design circles we say that communication is not the message sent, but the message received. Thus, in parsing my words, and any potential relevance to you and your practice, I ask that you look past my clumsy use of language, which is itself dualistic in nature, to the nonduality of reality as experienced in your consciousness, especially in your meditation.

In the last segment I pointed out one obvious contrast between Zen thinking and design thinking: We do not think that we can think our way to enlightenment, in Zen. Meditation goes beyond thinking. Or perhaps more precisely, Zen’s shikantaza, the immediate, long-term effect of zazen, defined as “objectless meditation,” resides in that space that exists before thinking. Thought takes time, and so is always looking back on what has already transpired.

When it comes to practicing the method of zazen, as well as adapting Zen’s worldview, the common premise going in is that thinking, as such, is not going to prove very useful, though it is our most useful tool in apprehending, and recognizing, what Master Dogen referred to as “non-thinking”: neither thinking nor not thinking; the mental middle way.

Both design and Zen’s meditation process involve a trans-sensory level of learning, which in Zen may be more aptly defined as “unlearning.”

So it is not exactly accurate to say that we can “teach” Zen, though we do our best to share our experience, including some “do’s and don’ts,” in an interactive dialog. As Matsuoka Roshi would say, “We teach each other Buddhism.” I often learn more in a given exchange, say in dokusan, more than may the identified student. Shohaku Okumura Roshi once commented, during a dharma talk that he gave at the Atlanta Zen center, that he was only “the teacher” because we were there as “the students.” When at home, or in a different context, he was certainly no longer a teacher, as such.

We say that Zen cannot be taught, but that it can be learned. Learning Zen, versus learning anything else — especially something as tangible as product design — also differs in that the proof of the pudding, in Zen, is in a taste so intimate and personal that it cannot be shared with anyone. Whereas if I can sit in the chair you designed and built, I can tell for myself that you either know what you are doing, or not.

For example, my wife and I once had the distinct pleasure of an overnight stay in Wisconsin, in a small cabin that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, called the Seth Peterson Cottage. It was a lovely, compact building, in which neither Seth Peterson nor the great architect had ever set foot, both having died before it was complete. The relevance to our focus here is that while the building, and its lovely arboreal siting, were works of genius, the breakfast nook was very uncomfortable, consisting of flat banquettes with no cushioning. But they matched the walls, also clad with plywood. FLW was known for this emphasis on appearance over comfort, also evident in an exhibit of his higher-end home furnishings mounted at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum during my tenure there.

Zen and Design both entail apprentice modes of training. That is, developing a grasp of Zen is rather like the process of learning to build a Steinway grand piano. The master or journeyman and their apprentice exchange few words, instead the apprentice simply observing and imitating what his mentor does. In near total silence, the essential functions and processes are communicated through actions, not words. And eventually — lo and behold — the piano is ready to play.

This apprentice-journeyman-master triad is analogous to the initiate-disciple-priest model frequently found in Zen circles. The former wording may be more appropriate to our times than the latter — laden as it is with quasi-religious overtones, which do not quite fit the reality of being a Zen adept in America. Although we have great respect, bordering on reverence, for our teachers in Zen, we do not let it go to our heads when we find ourselves on the other side of the relationship. Or we should not, in any case. We who find ourselves in the awkward position of being expected to lead others in this most personal of all problem-solving arenas tend to think of ourselves as more like coaches. The student is like an athlete, who is endeavoring to reach the elite level of the sport. If they are not willing to do the work, no amount of coaching is going to help. If they are, it does not take much coaching to move the dial. This also applies to design.

After all, I cannot know for sure what another person needs to know, in terms of Zen. I can only know what it is that I do not know; and perhaps, how to go deeper; as my root teacher would say. He would often remark that it’s not what you say or do — in leading a Zen service, for example — it’s how you do it. That is, it is natural, and okay, to mess up: you may miss the gong at the time designated; blow a line in the chant, et cetera. But as long as you do not let that get in your way, or disrupt the focus of the others present, no harm, no foul. It is more in the attitude with which you approach things — a balance of wholehearted sincerity and lighthearted joy — that will convey the essence of Zen, than it is in the precision or accuracy of your performance. Zen requires an agile sense of humor, and a goodly dollop of humility.

Another dimension of the training process shared by Zen and design professionals is that of “training the trainers.” Although in both cases we are not really propagating a priesthood, but promoting a practice, the notion that our successors will carry on the tradition of training others is implicit in most professions, as well as in Zen. Zen should be approached professionally, rather than mystically, the latter being an example of unhelpful connotations often associated with Zen in the West.

One of my professors at the Institute of Design one day proclaimed that the main thing you pick up from your professors at university consists of their attitudes toward the work. I would add that you also pick up learning habits and a work ethic: learning how to learn, as the standard trope goes. The same goes for Zen. Attitudes need adjustment.

But the focus of Zen training is not exclusively in the realm of ideas, but rather in the realm of direct experience. Zen is not about reality, or what we can do to manipulate it, but a direct pointing at reality. This is how we approach it on the cushion, without relying on ideas, words and concepts.

In Zen as well as design, the issue of control comes into play. In planning, designing and building something, anything — from a chair to the Brooklyn bridge or Holland tunnel — we have to control the materials and processes that will achieve the end we are attempting to achieve. Otherwise, the chair will be uncomfortable, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s plywood benches, or we may build in a future disaster, like some of the dire engineering collapses we have witnessed from time to time. But trying to control everything has its limits.

In meditation circles, we often hear phrases such as “controlling the breath” or “emptying your mind of thoughts.” These represent attitudes 180-degrees from that in Zen meditation, which is not one of exerting control, but rather relinquishing any real or imagined level of control. We follow the body in assuming the posture, and we follow the breath, rather than attempting to control it. What’s sauce for the body is sauce for the mind. We let thoughts go, until they die down to dull roar, on their own. If you do not agree with this non-control, next time you are meditating, and Mother Nature calls, just tell her to buzz off: You are meditating just now. See how that works out for you.

Similarly, in design processes, you have to relinquish your tendency to force materials and processes into a mold that is unnatural for them to perform the way you want them to. The concrete has to be adequately reinforced for the tunnel or building to withstand the stresses of gravity, or hurricane-force winds. The fasteners cannot weaken the wood, or the chair will collapse.

I could go on, but will close with one more aphorism from design thinking: there are many design ideas that are simple in concept, but difficult in execution. Zen may be the poster boy for this truism. Zazen is irreducibly simple in design, but Zen can be maddeningly difficult in daily execution. It is not the fault of Zen, but rather of our stubborn monkey mind. But don’t give up. Only you can do this. You are the only one who can design your Zen life. Only you can redesign it, as reality intervenes.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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As I mentioned in one of the prior segments of UnMind: In zazen, as well as in Zen writ large, we embrace a directive from the first great Ch’an poem by Master Kanchi Sosan:

To move in the One Way

Do not reject even the world of senses and ideas

Indeed embracing them fully is identical with true enlightenment

This is the most direct testament I have come across to refute the charge that Zen is somehow anti-intellectual. Those of us who take up the Zen way do, however, recognize the limitations of the discriminating mind in dealing with nonduality, but we do not dismiss intellectualization outright. Our ability to analyze, dissect, and reconstruct information is one of the most powerful tools we have in confronting the various confounding issues we face in life. But it cannot solve the mystery of existence alone. Something else – call it intuition? — has to come into play on a level beyond thought. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Zen goes deeper.”

In this segment, I will attempt to address a subject suggested by one of our members, considering the distinctions I have found in my experience teaching Zen over the years, versus my professional background in design, formally beginning with my BS and MS training at the Institute of Design, Illinois Tech in Chicago — acronym ID+IIT if you want to look it up — followed by my tenure teaching at the U of I, Chicago Circle Campus, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Another complementary influence was my training in end-user research, primarily for new product development, with a Chicago-based firm. It was one of my main sources of income while in university, and the firm with which I moved to Atlanta in 1970. The integration of end-user research with each stage of creative development, from raw concept through refined concept, form, features, and styling, and so on, became the subject of my Master’s thesis, and is now the gold standard in the industry, the most obvious example being the end-user-participation approach to debugging initial releases of software apps.

As a starting point, one notable difference in design and Zen training may be that those who teach design on a professional level, and those who pursue it for advanced degrees, tend to refer to the overall method and approach as “design thinking,” which stresses analytical training to apply design as a generalist endeavor, rather than as a specialty. The premise is that the method employed in defining and solving any given problem of the applied design profession is thought to be basically applicable to any other problem-solving activity, in general terms. In research circles, the term “methodology” is often used to refer to the method followed in conducting the study; it actually means the study of method itself. Which is one area of intense focus in design itself, one of its more well-known proponents being Victor Papanek.

For example, the method employed in designing and building a chair is basically the same as that utilized in writing a book, both of which I have personally done. Of course, since the materials required, and the functions of the end product differ; the details of the process differ accordingly. But the overarching steps in the process are similar in nature, as in all problem-solving initiatives. The steps usually taken are roughly parallel to those for solving quadratic equations, acronym PEMDAS. Indulge my stretching the analogy a bit, but the recommended sequence for doing the mathematical operations is to solve the Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and finally the Subtraction, and in that order; otherwise the answer is not likely to be correct.

Metaphorically, solving the “parentheses” and “exponents” of the equation first, I take as roughly equivalent to defining the purpose and function of the end product: Who is the audience for this book, again? What is the point in designing yet another chair? What is the implicit thrust, or “root” of the problem, in other words?

Once the project’s underlying charge and challenge is clarified, then the ideation can begin; brainstorming and mind-mapping: consideration of all the possible materials available, such as hardwoods and furniture fasteners, in the case of the chair. Or the arc of the narrative of the book: What is in the first chapter; how do we end the last chapter; how many pages or words? Both of which I think we can regard as a kind of “multiplication” process. It may expand into future phases, with issues around getting the book, or the chair, published or manufactured, respectively.

Once everything that may prove to be pertinent to the design and production of the new thing has been teased out through free association — and documented so as not to be lost — the exercise shifts to dividing the formless mosaic of the mind-map into relatively distinct groupings, much like Buddhism’s five aggregates of sentient awareness. This I take as a form of “division.” Dividing the holistic concept into digestible bites in order to further develop the finer details. What options are there for furniture feet, finishes, and fabrics, if the chair is to be upholstered? What is the most logical sequence of chapters for the table of contents; how detailed do we need to make the footnotes or endnotes?

Prioritizing the categories to take them one at a time, we then examine each set individually as to their completeness, and flesh them out, including elements we may not have thought of in the first go-round. This is the role of “addition,” kicking in once we have neatly divided the whole into discrete parts, each of which benefits from individual embellishment. For the chair, this may include line extensions such as choices in fabric, variable sizes and features such as adjustability of an ergonomic model. For the book, it may include illustrations, graphic inserts and, these days, links to online content.

Finally, we get to the “subtraction,” the last in the sequence. For the book, this would comprise the familiar editing process, in the form of major block edits, detailed line edits, and excising text that may not earn the space it occupies in terms of contribution to the story line. For a chair, as a one-off and especially for mass production, it might entail identifying and eliminating unnecessary secondary operations in manufacturing, which prove unnecessary to the quality of the finished product.

In all creative processes, whether in a group or individual endeavor, these steps flow from first considering, defining, and redefining, the initial problem; then mapping out all the various aspects, dimensions, and components of the problem; sorting elements into relatively discrete groupings; then adding any overlooked components to flesh out the various categories; and, finally, editing: prioritizing, setting aside and/or eliminating any and all areas and items of concern that may be safely postponed for later consideration, focusing on those that are most central to a solution, and demanding immediate attention, before moving on to more peripheral issues. This cycle is not a one-and-done, of course; the evolution of the book or chair often requires recycling through the earlier steps repeatedly, until the final design has moved from concept to execution.

Such methods, like everything else these days, have now become ubiquitous online, where we find such apps as “Google docs” listed in 3,400,000,000 search results for “online group methods.”

To conclude this segment, let me add that I feel that my training in the Bauhaus method of design thinking at ID+IIT combined with training in research methodology uniquely positioned me to take on the propagation of Zen as an identified problem, and to focus on the definition of that problem, as it evolved over nearly 50 years to date. The research model enabled me to apply group process to the administrative side, studying the requirements of establishing a 501c3 not-for-profit corporation in compliance with the rules and regs of the IRS, and to manage the many dysfunctional aspects of board of directors’ governance. That the ASZC has been in virtually continuous operation is, I think, testament to the validity of this approach.

In the next segment, we will segue into consideration of these same approaches to the teaching of the unteachable, Zen. Stay tuned and keep practicing.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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After taking a holiday hiatus from my DharmaByte column and UnMind podcast, in collaboration with my publisher and producer, we have determined a new direction for 2024, or a new way of extending our past direction. As this is the quadrennial election year in the American national political cycle, we feel it is time, and timely, to address the relationship of Zen practice in particular, and the teachings of Zen Buddhism in general, to that of governing, and more broadly, our civic duty as citizens of the United States.

The differing definitions of “politic” versus “political” give us a clue as to the difference between engaging in the fray from the perspective of the Middle Way, and that of the usual partisan divide. Politic, according to the dictionary, means: “(of an action) seeming sensible and judicious under the circumstances” while “political” is rendered:“mainly derogatory — relating to, affecting, or acting according to the interests of status or authority within an organization rather than matters of principle.” We can see that what Buddha did 2500 years ago was the former, establishing the original Order as an alternative to the prevalent caste system, rather than going head-to-head with it.

While many adherents, propagators and proponents of Zen in America, including some members of our community, or sangha, have expressed a reluctance, even a repulsion, toward the political arena, we take the position that “You have to say something,” to quote the title from a book by Katagiri Roshi, as I did in my “War & Karma” segment from November of 2023:

I fear that if we in Zen do not try to address these terrible global realities in the context of Buddhism, it may be taken as an indication, or an admission on our part, that Zen, along with its teachings and practice, [may] have finally faded into irrelevance, in the face of such intractable 21st century problems.

Setting aside for now the quirkiness of quoting one’s own prior writing, let me restate the matter in terms of the political climate in general, and what it means from a Zen point-of-view, or at least from mine, informed by Zen practice and the teachings of Buddhism. If we shy away from the current campaign, with its extreme polarization and obvious threats to the operations of this democratic republic — as envisioned by the founding fathers — it may be tantamount to ignoring a train wreck, but one that is coming right at us. The Buddhist teachings of balancing wisdom with compassion may be uniquely suited to addressing the controversies of our time, the overarching theme of my second book, “The Razorblade of Zen.”

As a big-picture aside, consider the fundamental divide in Buddhist thought: We usually live in a dualistic frame of mind, coping with the everyday demands of life — in the 21st century as well as 2500 years ago. This is one of the great commonalities we have with Buddha and all of his descendants throughout Zen’s history in India, China, Korea, Japan, and on down to the present.

Yet Buddhism teaches that this “normal” worldview is somehow askew; that there is “the rest of the story,” referred to as nonduality. Zen holds that both can be true at the same time. The resolution of this apparent dichotomy is one of the many benefits of Zen meditation, but “it cannot be reached by feelings or consciousness; how could it involve deliberation?” according to Tozan Ryokai, founder of Soto Zen in China, circa 800 CE.

So we have to give up our intellectual approach, based on logic, to reach this meta-logical resolution, A.K.A. the ”Middle Way.” This applies to so-called politics as well.

A concession to those who may feel their knees impulsively jerking: I do not intend to rehash the debate about the participation of Japanese Zen practitioners in the atrocities of WWII, nor any other historical period or event, but mean to focus laser-like on the application of Zen practice to our current situation only. With some recourse to the foundational documents, and what they might mean in the present circumstances of life in America, some 250 years later.

As an aside, for a sort of overriding historical benchmark, let me point out that Buddhism is some 2500 years old. Which is ten times the age of the USA. From which we might conjure an analogy to a 100-year-old elder compared to a 10-year old pre-adolescent. Indeed, the behavior of the American political cohort, as well as that of most of the hoi polloi, along with the values underpinning that behavior, may be seen as rather like that of a ten-year-old, blithely and blindly in hot pursuit of pleasure and short-term self-gratification, embracing one half of a familiar admonition from Buddha’s first sermon; paraphrasing:

O monks, these two extremes ought not be followed by one going forth from the household life; what are the two? There is devotion to the indulgence of self-gratification, which is low, common; the way of ordinary people; unworthy and unprofitable. There is devotion to the indulgence of self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy and unprofitable.

He goes on to claim that he has found a way out of this seeming lesser-of-two-evils choice:

Avoiding both these extremes, the Tathagata has realized the Middle Way.

And to promise that the benefits of finding this middle way between the extremes pays off big-time:

It gives vision; it gives knowledge; and it leads to calm, to insight, to awakening, to Nirvana.

To clear up some of the jargon, “Tathagata” is one of ten honorifics accorded Buddha during his lifetime, meaning something like “the thus-come one.” “Nirvana” is the state of ultimate liberation, sometimes misrepresented as a separate dimension much like the Western concept of heaven or paradise, being a kind of polar opposite of “Samsara,” the everyday world of suffering.

The deeper teaching is that there can be no actual separation of samsara and nirvana, as they are interdependent and thus, mutually defining. the fault being, as usual, in the eye and mind of the beholder.

I hasten to add that, if this is good advice for monastics, how much more appropriate must it be for us householders, living in the midst of la vida loca?

It should be stated from the beginning that we do not view Zen as partisan in its outlook — it isn't right or left wing — though many would argue the point. And that is part of the point here — that while we will be mounting what may technically be defined as a series of “arguments” in future segments, it is not our intent to prove that either side of the ideological divide is indisputably in the right, and the other necessarily in the wrong. It may be possible that, as we hear repeatedly these days, “both things can be true at the same time.”

This is not to suggest a false equivalence, but to remember that, according to Zen, as well as modern brain science, different people actually do experience different realities, owing to the fact that our perceived reality is a reconstruction that occurs inside our minds, and cannot possibly reflect all the many aspects of any eventuality — the knowns; the known unknowns; and the unknown unknowns; to quote a former Secretary of Defense — that appear as the causes and conditions of a particular event.

Nonetheless, we might hope that by bringing the nondual approach of Zen to bear upon the dualistic thinking informing the political dialog, we may shed some light on the Middle Way as applied to the social sphere, all the while maintaining that any true insight into conflict resolution will necessarily begin in the personal sphere, in meditation.

To set the tone for the next segment, which will appear in the weekly UnMind podcast before the next monthly DharmaByte, let’s review the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

This seminal paragraph of this seminal document of the inchoate glimmering of the dawn of democracy will prove important, if introductory, to the idea of freedom in general — and its nature in Zen’s reality — in our further discussions of what bearing the social sphere of community, or sangha (including political ramifications) may have on our personal sphere of private practice of free will, with implications for the usual goal of happiness, as well as the transcendent goal of liberation in the spiritual sense.

Setting aside the “Nature’s God” terminology, which smacks intriguingly of traditional Buddhism’s “Vairocana Buddha” figure — the so-called “cosmic Buddha” — we might usefully consider conflating the “Laws of Nature” with some of the time-honored expressions of Dharma as law – i.e. the “law of the universe.”

A final assurance until next time we meet: To those groaning under the daunting prospect of weekly commentary on the passing political scene, not to worry: I will confine my comments on the campaign to a monthly Dharma Byte, followed by a single podcast expanding the text a bit on UnMind. The interim three weeks of podcasts will return to our overarching, ongoing thread of efforts to translate the liberating teachings of Buddhism and Zen into the contemporary idiom of the English language and the American culture. Please join us in this endeavor.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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This is UnMind, and I am producer Shinjin Larry Little. After restarting the UnMind podcast in April of 20-23 with episode 106, we’ve met you almost every week for the past 33 weeks with fresh insights and teachings from Great Cloud Michael Elliston Roshi. Due to multiple competing priorities at this time of year, we will take a brief and well-deserved break through the rest of the calendar year. We look forward to meeting you all, and the new year, with more fresh content and insights about the interface of Zen and Design.

As always, UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, in Atlanta Georgia, and the Silent Thunder Order. Find us on the web at A-S-Z-C dot O-R-G. We welcome your support of these teachings via paypall or venmo: to donate please visit the giving page on our website. Gassho.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In this segment of UnMind, I would like to return to the basics of Zen, after a foray into some of the darker topics of the times, in particular the horrific conditions of global strife in which we find ourselves immersed these days. It’s a bit like being trapped in the middle of a train wreck where we cannot turn our gaze away. Life has always existed on the edge of death, aging and sickness — the three cardinal marks of dukkha, or “suffering” — Buddha’s sine qua non of the conditions of existence as a sentient being.

But the sheer enormity of wasteful, infuriating carnage being inflicted upon human beings by other human beings in current hotspots around the globe — not to mention the local wildlife, livestock, and pet animals — has exceeded all bounds of dysfunctional perversity. It seems a vestigial throwback to more primitive times, and is beginning to look like proof positive of the apocalyptic vision of some religions: the Prince of Darkness, evil personified, indeed has dominion over the Earth, at least for now. The Great Deceiver is parading around in the guise of political leaders of supposedly enlightened government, celebrating the targeted collapse of civilization everywhere they direct their ire.

In this context it may seem irresponsible, and even insane, to turn our attention to examining the fundamentals of Buddhism and Zen, which encourage studying the self, forgetting the self, and hopefully realizing the true meaning and purpose of our existence, when the people actually doing the damage are the least likely to have any such inclination to self-examination, let alone any realization of compassionate insight for others. But, as they say, when the oxygen masks drop because the airplane is losing altitude, put yours on first, or you will not be able to help others. In Zen, zazen is your oxygen mask.

ZEN ≠ ZAZEN ≠ MEDITATION

Zen is not equal to zazen, and zazen is not equal to “meditation” as commonly understood. Zazen is not the same as other meditations, and the term “Zen” should not be considered interchangeable with “zazen.” It may seem heretical to propose that Zen is not equal to zazen, or that zazen does not fit the Western cultural definition of meditation. But bear with me. There are so many alternative styles of meditation today that it is past time to differentiate Zen’s method from the rest. And to clarify that — while Zen and zazen cannot be separated — the terms are not interchangeable.

Zen is not synonymous with its meditation method, zazen, simply because there is so much more to Zen as a way of life, a philosophy, and as a formative force throughout history. This has primarily been true of the history of the East, but following its introduction to America in the late 1890s, and especially after WWII, westerners in general, and Americans in particular, have become more and more interested in Zen, along with a parallel engagement with other meditative traditions and styles, such as Yoga, as well as other Buddhist and non-Buddhist variations.

Zen is known as the meditation sect of Buddhism, but zazen is not its sole method of teaching. Zen boasts an extensive literature and liturgy on buddha-dharma as experienced and expounded by its adherents, traditionally beginning with Bodhidharma’s journey out of India, and tracing its evolution through China, Korea and Japan, to the Far East. However, distribution of the Buddhist canon, in the form of written sutras and commentaries, had preceded the 28th Patriarch by centuries, and his bringing Zen from the West to the East was definitely focused on the direct practice of upright sitting, or what we now refer to as zazen, or more precisely, shikantaza. Likewise, zazen and shikantaza may usefully be parsed as to their relative definitions as method and effect, respectively. More on this later.

ZAZEN & MEDITATION

The Great Sage’s meditation practice inside that cave at Shaolin Monastery did not conform to the traditional style known as dhyana, or contemplation, though this is how the local punditry interpreted his “wall-gazing Zen.” But he was not contemplating the wall. Dhyana, in the classic definition, involves a subject, or mind, meditating upon an actual, tangible object — such as a tree, in one famous example (from Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi):

If you wish to follow in the ancient tracks

Please observe the sages of the past

One on the verge of realizing the buddha way

Contemplated a tree for ten kalpas

“Ten kalpas” is a mighty long time. The entire universe passes through only four kalpas in its cycle, known variously as the empty kalpa, or kalpa of formation; the kalpa of continuance; the kalpa of decline; and the kalpa of disintegration. So ten kalpas embrace two-and-a-half cycles of universal evolution. Long time. But we digress.

Generally speaking, dhyana, or contemplation meditation, continues until the observing mind finally runs out of ideas, exhausting all possible thoughts about the object; leaving a direct sensory awareness of the existential reality of what we call a “tree,” but without the overlay of conceptualization, categorization, and endless web of connections.

Bodhidharma, by turning abruptly to face the wall of the mountain, was demonstrating not contemplation, but shikantaza, or “objectless meditation,” which amounts to a kind of oxymoron, in conventional terms. Meditation is typically defined as focusing our attention on something, and so inherently implies a division of subject and object. If our direct experience in zazen eventually becomes objectless, then by definition it must also become subject-less (which, tellingly, is not a recognized construction in English; thus the hyphenation).

In the most salient sense, then, zazen transcends normal meditation. We might say that we transcend from the personal dimensions of posture, breathing, and paying attention to the senses, as well as the machinations of the mind — the “eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind” of the Heart Sutra — to a subtle awareness of something less definitive: meditating upon the whole, rather than any part. The observer is subsumed into the observed, like a holon in a holarchy. More on this later.

“Zen” is phonetic Japanese for “Ch’an,” which is phonetic Chinese for the Sanskrit “dhyana,” one of the traditional Six Paramitas, or “perfections” of Buddhism. Thus, because the origins of Zen meditation are not conflated with dhyana, but as going beyond contemplation, “Zen” is actually a kind of misnomer. Which is a good thing, because what Zen is pointing to cannot be named. In Taoism there is a similar idea, paraphrasing:

Naming is the source of all (particular) things

That which is eternally real is nameless

Zazen and shikantaza, as mentioned, can also usefully be parsed as to their relative functions as “method” and “effect,” respectively.

Holarchy & Holon

I first came across the term “holarchy” — as opposed to the more familiar “hierarchy” — in the form of a book, “The Essential Ken Wilber,” recommended by a member of the Suzuki lineage for its treatise on “integral spirituality.” The term, holarchy, was not coined by him, according to Google, which, like the old magic oracles, you can ask anything:

Arthur Koestler, author of the 1967 Book “The Ghost in the Machine,” coined the term holarchy as the organizational connections between holons (from the Greek word for "whole"), which describes units that act independently but would not exist without the organization they operate within.

Is a hierarchy a nested holarchy?

Instead of everything being explained in terms of smaller bits and ultimate particles—which was the way science worked in the modern era—we can now think of the universe holistically, organized in a series of levels of organization in a nested hierarchy or holarchy. At each level, things are both wholes and parts.

Some of the earliest examples of holarchic models may be found in the early teachings of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the Twelvefold Chain of interdependent co-arising, the Five Aggregates and Six Senses, and so on. My model of the Four Nested Spheres of Influence, with personal at the center, surrounded by the social sphere, then the natural world, then the universal, is also like this, a holarchy. These sets of components are not meant to be understood as entirely separate and apart from each other, but intricately interrelated, to use one of Matsuoka Roshi’s common expressions. In Zen, all seemingly disparate things are also connected, the ultimate expression of the current trope: “Both things can be true at the same time.”

We turn to zazen in our daily lives, in order to manifest a Zen life. Zen is the meditation sect of Buddhism, and zazen is the heart of Zen. The method of zazen is the main thing that we actually transmit, from one generation to the next. It is the same in music and other arts and sciences. No one can teach another music, as such, but someone can teach you how to play an instrument. It is up to you to find the music. Similarly, we can teach others this “excellent method” of zazen, as Master Dogen defined it. It is up to them to find the Zen.

The instrument we study, and play, in zazen, is the human body and mind, our essential inheritance enabling us to wake up fully, as did Buddha. Other species are not considered to have the level of consciousness necessary and sufficient to the challenge. Dogs may have buddha-nature, but like most humans, they may never realize it. Ironically, it seems that we have to stop “playing” the instrument of body-mind — that is, give up our impulse to control everything — in order to allow it to “drop off” (J. shinjin datsuraku) to reveal our true nature, which is not limited to this body and mind. Body and mind are not separate, and, again, both can be true at the same time. That is, mind and body may seem to be of different categories, yet they are intricately inter-related.

So sitting in zazen may be considered a subset of Zen, which is all-encompassing, and thus the holon of zazen is subsumed under the holon of Zen. But the necessity of zazen as central to apprehending the larger sphere of Zen, means that the two not only cannot be separated, but that the method cannot be separated from the larger effects, as in:

So minute it enters where there is not gap

So vast it transcends dimension

A hairsbreadth deviation and you are out of tune

This stanza from “Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind” by Master Kanchi Sosan, indicates another holarchy, that of the transcendent “IT” of Zen, and your personal relation to it. The slightest deviation on your part, in resisting or missing the point of this all-embracing teaching, is the primary source of your suffering. This basic idea of the asymmetrical nature of the relationship — of the holon of the “I” to that of the “IT” of Buddhism — is more directly captured some 200 years later, in Tozan Ryokai’s “Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi:

You are not it but in truth it is you

In zazen, as well as in Zen writ large, we are embracing the directive from the first poem, in which Master Sosan admonishes us, paraphrasing:

To move in the One Way

Do not reject even the world of senses and ideas

Indeed embracing them fully is identical with true enlightenment

Stay tuned.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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I sometimes ask the producer of the UnMind podcast whether there is any subject he would like me to address, that he thinks is timely, and that others might find to be of interest. He sent me the following note:

I was re-reading notes I've made in a Brad Warner book (“It Came From Beyond Zen”) and he made two points that are hitting me today. He interpreted Dogen's chapter “Kannon” and then commented on the interpretation:

To me the basic idea of this whole essay is that compassion is intuitive. You can assess a given situation and think about how to deal with it compassionately. And you might even come up with the right answer that way. But in actual moment-by-moment interactions, compassion isn’t a matter decided by thought. You have to be able to see your instantaneous intuitive response and then do it. This is hard. One of the reasons we practice meditation is to help us see our intuitive responses more clearly.

Then:

A little further along I have Dogen say, “You give yourself to yourself, and you give everyone else to everyone else.” That’s pretty close to the original. This is important. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of anyone else. There’s no great merit in burning yourself out for the sake of others, since you’ll only end up becoming a burden to those who’ll have to take care of you after you wreck yourself in the process.

Brad is a relatively younger and relatively famous Zen friend who has visited Atlanta from time to time; he and I once led a retreat together in Nashville, if memory serves. I agree with his point that compassion is basically intuitive, rather than entirely analytical. We speak of “practicing” compassion, and it is true that we can train ourselves to respond to individuals and situations more compassionately — that is, by seeing their side of the story, et cetera — but we should probably differentiate between practicing compassion and actually experiencing it. The word literally means “suffer with”: the prefix “com” meaning “with”; while “passion” is interchangeable with “suffering” as in “the passion of Christ.” Passion also means feeling strongly about something, as in “my passion is art” or music.

But back to the idea of experiential compassion, of which I have written before. When we realize that we are the recipient of compassion in the sense of suffering as allowing, as in “suffer the little children to come unto me” as attributed to Christ, we recognize that we exist by virtue of the universe allowing us to exist — in that “goldilocks zone” in space and time where our home planet is far enough from, and close enough to, the sun that it can support life as we know it. The determinative parameters apparently do not have to be off by much to eliminate the possibility of sentient life on Earth.

So in some sense, the planet is willing to suffer with us, until we become insufferable, which threshold we may have already transgressed, what with climate change and all. Religious belief systems aside, we may be hanging by a thread that is ready to snap.

Ergo, we exist by dint of the compassion of the universe in its willingness to support life. Now, when we attribute “willingness” to the unconscious universe, eyebrows will be raised. The root word of willingness is “will,” and if we attribute will to the impersonal world in which we live, the next question will be, “Whose will?” It is counterintuitive to attribute will, unless it is to a “who.” But we can also look at will — the will to survive, the will to exist, and the will to propagate the species, for example — as disembodied will. Associated with will is the notion of intent — on both conscious and unconscious levels.

Is it our intent to exist? Did we “will” ourselves into existence? Is there such a thing as “free will?” Or do all willful acts come with a price tag? Are we delusional in imagining that we are exerting free will in coming and going in this universe?

As students at the Institute of Design, Illinois Tech, we would occasionally attend a movie series offered at the University of Chicago, in which they screened foreign films that would not be readily available in commercial theaters. After the feature they would show a short film or a series, one of which was entitled “The Lost Planet Ergro” if memory serves. These were in the category of “so bad they are good.” One of the leading characters in the script, when hearing some far-fetched explanation of the latest sci-fi phenomenon shown in the film would solemnly declare, “That’s too deep for me.” After so many repetitions following so many scenes, it became unbearably funny.

This is the way I feel about the speculations mentioned above. Apparently, Buddha did not exactly suffer fools gladly, and rejected flights of fancy from the practical standpoint of whether of not they addressed the problem at hand, that of the daily suffering in life. His experience in meditation apparently resolved many of the conflicts and conundrums we face in our lives, compounded, as they are by, complications of modern civilization.

The story goes that, in the face of irreconcilable differences between the way he wished things might be, and the way that things really were, and still are, he resorted to meditation. He sat down, in all humility, and faced the fact that, with all of his intelligence, education, and privileged position in the caste system of his time, he did not really know what he most desperately needed to know.

The story continues that he resolved to sit there and die, if need be, to settle once and for all the dilemma of his estrangement from the world, owing to the seemingly needless suffering he witnessed on a daily basis. He learned — and we should resolve — to “suffer with” the true causes and conditions of our existence, as he articulated them: aging, sickness, and death, to begin with; along with social dimensions of being away from our loved ones, and/or being with people we do not like.

The depth and breadth of his insight still resonates today, in the validation of the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path as being as relevant to our times as to his. Although, as I mention in earlier episodes, the complexity of our context has multiplied geometrically.

If we take Buddha’s example and message to heart, we can see that the compassionate thing to do is to embrace karmic causality, and the causes and conditions within our personal, social, natural and universal spheres of action and influence. The atrocities we witness around the globe, which manifest as the opposite of compassion, and the quintessential nature of ignorance, do not lobby against the veracity of Buddha’s insight, but indeed confirm it in the most depressing manner imaginable. We do not have to imagine it because it is real, and has real karmic consequences.

The native American tribes had a unique take on this hypothesis, as expressed by one of their chiefs during the genocidal advent of the white European settlers. It went something like this: The tribal members who had been slaughtered in the conquest — men, women and children — would be reborn as future generations of the children of the invaders. The perfect retribution, big-time karmic consequence.

Whether or not you choose to honor or even consider this possibility, if those waging war on others, cavalierly bombing and otherwise laying waste to noncombatant civilians, were to believe that, like chopping down weeds after they had gone to seed, their very efforts are simply multiplying the future ranks of the perceived enemy, it might give them pause. If the “final solution” is genocide, wiping out the entire “other,” but it turns out not to work, but in fact simply kicks the can down the road a generation or two, the futility of the warring endeavor might finally come crashing home.

This conclusion will never be drawn in the context of theistic beliefs in the eternal soul, of course. Unless they allow for some version of rebirth or reincarnation. Buddhism does not hold out this possibility in order to debate or refute contrary ideas. But what if it is true? Wouldn’t the intrinsic irresolution, itself, perhaps contribute to a more moderate, compassionate approach to — if not loving thine enemies — at least recognizing that they may prevail, in spite of, or as a direct result of, our best efforts to eliminate them? As Master Dogen reminds us:

Yet in attachment, blossoms fall

In aversion, weeds spread

And as one of our members reminded us when we were weeding the parking lot of the prior Zen center: “Weeds are flowers we don’t want; flowers are weeds we do want.” But the herbicides that we spew over the land, in order to eradicate those flowers we identify as weeds in the patch, ultimately blow back our way, often taking our favorite blossoms with it. We are all, like it or not, forced to experience compassion, “suffering with,” suffering the ignorance of our fellow human beings. Suffering fools, if not gladly, as the saying goes. Karma and its consequences are not individuated; they come bundled with the species.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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I hesitate to add yet another voice to the cacophony of cries of agony, suffering, outrage and acrimony emanating out of Israel, Gaza, and surrounding Arab states, exacerbated by the 24/7 chattering class. Not to mention the ongoing carnage in Ukraine, which seems to have slipped under the global radar. But I fear that if we in Zen do not try to address these terrible global realities in the context of Buddhism, it may be taken as an indication, or an admission on our part, that Zen, along with its teachings and practice, have finally faded into irrelevance, in the face of such intractable 21st century problems. But as Katagiri Roshi reminds us, “You have to say something.” And Matsuoka Roshi did not shy from taking on the atrocities of his day. Check out his collected talks.

Actually, just the opposite is true. It is not that the Zen Way is a panacea, or that it offers a silver bullet that will somehow “fix” a situation that has been several millennia in the making. But Buddhism points to the fundamental origin of the problem, traditionally defined as “craving” or “thirst.” The difficulty is that we have to individually “abandon” that craving, in order to enable the cessation of suffering, not only for ourselves but for others. But the individuals directly affected by the war seem to have no power over, or protection from, the influence and actions of the masses.

So it would seem that our challenge may be to define the actual source of the conflict in the Middle East as originating in some form of craving, one that has been in force since long before the founding of Israel, just after the end of WWII. We must concede that the abandonment of that craving may or may not be possible, given the volatility of the situation, and the likelihood that cooler heads will not prevail for some time.

According to my limited understanding of Buddhism, craving begins before birth, innate in the very desire to exist. This idea amounts to a pre-Enlightenment or proto-scientific hypothesis, an attempt to explain Nature’s overwhelming fecundity, the irresistible will to life, manifested as the innumerable cascade of seeds, sperm, spores, and other forms of burgeoning life, populating the natural sphere in all corners of the planet.

In sentient beings such as humans, this craving is clearly inchoate, beginning before or at conception and continuing in the womb, arising out of basic ignorance of the causes and conditions of our own origins. Whatever level of awareness can be attributed to the developing embryo, it is of a relatively primitive nature, compared to its later stages of maturation.

Buddha made a noble attempt to model the process of growth of sentient beings, arising from primordial ignorance under the influence of mental formations, slowly differentiating the senses, and finally segueing through birth, aging, and death; then beginning another round through rebirth, in the teaching known as the “Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Co-Arising” (Skt: pratityasamutpada). Find the link to the illustration in the show notes for this segment.

Note that “mental formations” (#2) comprises the second link in the chain, arising in the womb out of the first link, the primordial sea of ignorance (#1) from which the universe arises. These formations are the motives, intentions and desires that underly all other dimensions of life, and which underpin our natural consciousness (#3) as a sentient being. The growth of the fetus continues, following its DNA blueprint — as we now know from modern genetics — resulting in a particular form (#4) of the organism; which leads to development of the six senses (#5), and contact (#6) with the outer world; which, in the context of the mother’s womb, would arise from subtle sensation (#7) and perhaps a level of subliminal perception (#8), such as hunger experienced as craving (#9); which then develops into clinging (#10); leading to “becoming” (#11) — in the most general sense of the word — in modern terms, ontogeny; and finally to birth (#12), which ultimately reverts to aging and death (#13). Then, according to this theory, the cycle begins all over again. Tradition has it that it takes three full cycles through the chain to complete the process.

So what does all this have to do with war, let alone the karmic consequences we might associate with war? Modern biology might find this model overly simplified, but I propose that we apply it to the arising of social awareness in the individual. We may find some linkage as to how a chain of conflicts arising between individuals can spread within a community, and between ethnic groups, eventually fueling international strife.

One of the guest speakers at a conference we held in collaboration with the Department of Religion of Emory University in 2000, structured around the scholar-practitioner divide and focused on the teachings of Master Dogen, was asked, during the Q&A following his address, whether Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, could truly engage in a dialog. His answer was “No.” As long as they are Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, no dialog is possible.

At the risk of repeating myself, allow me to take this moment to point out the obvious: Buddha was not a Buddhist, any more than Christ was a Christian. These concepts came into the vernacular following their life and death on Earth. They have now become additional labels for identifying and differentiating the constructed self.

During his recent peacemaking trip to Israel, president Joe Biden was quoted as saying something like: “Whether you are Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, if you give up who you are, the terrorists have won.” But Buddhism suggests that we should do precisely that. We are to thoroughly examine the reality of this “who you are” — the imputed or constructed “self” — with a judicious skepticism, particularly in meditation.

When we do so, we are told, we will see through the outer appearance of the self, penetrating to the emptiness at its core. This “emptiness” is an inadequate translation of the Sanskrit shunyatta, which points to the dynamic, ever-changing reality underlying all phenomena, and not a vacuous, woeful, or frightening void of nothingness, as it is sometimes interpreted.

Perhaps we can draw an analogous parallel between the progress of a single person through these stages of life, as articulated by Buddha, to that of the tribe, or community, a group of individuals united by a common gene pool and shared biological and geographical roots, as well as agreed-upon social mores and norms. When two such groups clash, the knee-jerk reaction is to point fingers and blame the other side for starting the current conflict. The response is always to reflect the blame back on the accuser, in a seemingly endless regress into the fog of history. Observers seem compelled to weigh in on one side or the other.

If we look at the suffering in an individual’s life, we might entertain the same question: Whose fault is this? Who started this? Whose idea was this? Theistic philosophies have a ready answer — that this life, with all its imperfections, is a reflection of God’s will — moving in mysterious ways that we cannot hope to comprehend. Applying this same nostrum to international strife seems largely an evasive maneuver, an avoidance of the responsibility of actually resolving the dispute in human terms.

In Zen, we embrace the idea that, if anyone is to blame for our individual life, it is us. The repentance verse expresses this notion concisely:

All my past and harmful karma

From beginningless greed, hate and delusion

Born of body, mouth, and mind,

I now fully avow.

“Avow” is a rather archaic term, meaning to assert or confess openly. In other words, we are owning it — assuming responsibility for the unintended consequences of our own behavior — we are not blaming others. We might want to blame our parents, and their parents, another endless regress, as the proximate cause of our own existence. Good luck with that. Even if they are at fault, we cannot hold them accountable, at least not for long. After their demise, we are left to face the same reality, without the scapegoat.

Similarly, in international conflicts, which often amount to tribal warfare on steroids, it might be helpful for all sides to own up to their own culpability in what has come to pass, as president Biden did in recalling the overwrought reaction to the 911 crisis. This would amount to a simple recognition and acceptance of one of the seminal marks of dukkha: “imperfection.” Admitting that “mistakes were made” — before the situation accelerates to an irresolvable level of mutually-inflicted violence.

One of the black marks on US exceptionalism — that of Hiroshima & Nagasaki — has become the mother of all mistakes that have ever been made on the global stage. The country that first dropped the Big Bomb on civilians is hardly in a position to lecture others on the morality of human decency in following the “laws of war,” the mother of all oxymorons. War is precisely the end of law, in any human sense of the term.

Where people — or, for that matter, any sentient beings of the same species — are separated, they tend to evolve in different directions. This principle of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” theory can explain a lot, such as the development of varying cuisines, dialects and languages, as well as the susceptibility of isolated populations to propaganda.

What if the appropriate authority, such as the United Nations, undertook a program of social exchange in all such closed-border situations as that of Israel and the Gaza strip? What that might look like would be providing safe passage from each side of the border to the other for limited groups of families or age groups, who would spend a limited amount of time in the company or homes of their counterparts in the “other” culture, the designated enemy. This is an old idea whose time may have come around again. If people get to know each other on a personal, more intimate basis, and “break bread” together, they are a lot less likely to turn on each other for no reason, and to find common ground.

Wasting the opportunity of a lifetime in the service of a questionable, survival-oriented self finds its analog in following political leaders who are similarly self-striving, finding at the end-of-the-day, or at the end of your life, that not only are they, your titular leaders, unappreciative of your loyalty, but that they even regard you with contempt, as part of the problem, or at best a pawn in their geopolitical chess game.

In the personal sphere of meditation, you may fight your own war, and hopefully find your individual salvation. Then, and only then, you may be able to share it with others in, and outside of, your social sphere. Good luck with that. Don’t give up.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last segment we ended with the suggestion that you, dear listener, might construct your own Noble N-fold Path based on your vision of the Noble Truths, with the proviso that you may have to articulate what the existence of suffering means to you, and how you might pursue a path to its cessation in modern times. In doing so you may discover that there are more origins of suffering in your life than simple craving, although craving is not simple.

You may also find, upon closer examination, that the cessation of suffering is going to require giving up more than your basic biological cravings, and that your personal path to salvation will have more than eight basic dimensions involved. However, most of the more detailed dimensions and distractions in daily life today will probably loosely correlate to those that the Buddha defined.

Let me know if, in the interim, you have thought about this, and engaged in the creative exercise I suggested — that you make an attempt to redefine the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path in your own terms. I would be interested to see what you came up with.

In this segment, as promised, I will attempt to expand the context further, integrating the original four as defined by Buddha with those surrounding spheres of influence that have impact on our daily lives, as well as on our contemporary practice of Zen, including the personal and social we have discussed so far, as well as the natural and universal spheres.

Go to the UnMind webpage to see my diagram of the nesting spheres of influence combined with the Four Noble Truths. The link to the page is in the show notes for this episode.

This illustration attempts to paint a picture of the comprehensive context of a modern Zen life and practice of the Eightfold Path, tying together our current, more expansive grasp of the surrounding universe, with Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. These are the Four Spheres, those surrounding layers of reality in which we find ourselves enmeshed, and are directly or indirectly influenced by, in the ongoing management of our lives. The most central is the Personal sphere, the next level out being the Social, then the Natural, and finally, the Universal. They are not truly separate, of course, but relatively so.

THE UNIVERSAL: EXISTENCE OF SUFFERING

Our meditative practice is centered in the personal experience we find on the cushion, the most intimate dimension, inseparable from the other three. Buddha’s teaching of the Existence of suffering — and his charge that we are to fully understand its existence — we might assume to lie within the innermost circle, the Personal. But its true home is in the outermost, the Universal realm. After all, nothing, anywhere in the Universe, is exempt from dukkha, as the principle of change. Galaxies colliding in outer space are an instance of dukkha.

That we are, each and all of us, caught up in incessant change, does not reduce dukkha to a merely personal concern, however, from either a positive or negative perspective. We are neither the chosen, most favored, beings in this spectacle; nor are we the sole victims. Dukkha is not a respecter of persons.

The universal dimension of zazen includes the physical posture sinking into a profound stillness, which lies at the heart of all motion (captured by the Ch’an expression “mokurai”); and settling into precise alignment with the field of gravity. The term used to name this profound equilibrium is “Samadhi.” Zazen-samadhi transcends the Personal and Social spheres, linking into the Natural and Universal forces of the planet and the solar system, as we hear in the Ch’an poem Hokyo Zammai—Precious mirror Samadhi:

Within causes and conditions time and season

It is serene and illuminating

So minute it enters where there is no gap

So vast it transcends dimension

A hairsbreadth’s deviation and you are out of tune

All change, from the most minute in the microcosmos to the outermost reaches of the universe, is a manifestation of dukkha, which is, however, “serene and illuminating.” All forms, including solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter in continual flux, provide examples of the Universal impinging upon the Personal. Our very life depends upon these three basic states of matter, as well as the functioning principles of organic chemistry, or biology, which overlap with the Natural. We cannot personally control, or negate, these influences to any significant degree. But we can come into harmony with them if we tune ourselves to their frequency.

THE NATURAL: ORIGIN OF SUFFERING

The Origin of suffering, usually translated as “craving” or “thirst,” Buddha taught that we are to abandon, again as fully as possible. Craving would most logically find its home in the Natural sphere, as it comes bundled with sentient life. As attributed to the plant kingdom, for example, to claim evidence of craving may seem a bridge too far, but we describe trees and grasses as thirsty, especially under increasingly common conditions of drought as one result of climate change.

It is even more difficult to defend craving as manifested in the mineral kingdom, though certain chemical reactions, and even the simple dynamic of osmosis, or wicking, via capillary attraction, appears to mimic a form of thirst, admittedly inchoate, and unconscious.

The main point is that while we tend to own our own feelings of craving, struggling with guilt and other obsessions as a consequence, they are clearly and largely a result of being a physical being — an animal — one endowed with painfully intense self-awareness. “Born of body, mouth and mind” is the operative phrase in Buddhism’s Repentance verse. Most of our suffering comes with the territory. And therefore we are not responsible for it, only for what we do, or do not do, about it.

The Natural sphere is not only the macro environment around us, but also the micro environ within our body, including the biological, chemical and electrical processes of breathing, digesting, and the rest of the inconceivable scope of life functions built into existence as a sentient being. It is all changing constantly, and subliminally to our typical awareness.

THE SOCIAL: CESSATION OF SUFFERING

The Cessation of suffering, which we are to fully realize, I position primarily in the Social sphere, though the most efficacious means for realizing it may reside in the most intimate inner circle of the Personal. A transformational event that Buddha identified as a “turning about in the inmost consciousness,” is tantamount to salvation in Zen. But this is not the salvation of an eternal soul in the afterlife.

Personal suffering of aging, sickness and death — including birth as the leading cause of death — is quintessentially Natural. This process follows the “Dharma” as the natural law of sentient life. It is natural, in the psychological sense, that we look for personal salvation in the face of such suffering. And it is understandable that we look to the social level — of advanced medical treatment, for example — for solutions to mitigate personal suffering. However, in the most fully developed and comprehensive of the Mahayana teachings, the Bodhisattva Vow, we find that no one individual can be saved while the rest remain mired in suffering. In Zen, the most central form, and cause, of suffering is our willful ignorance, and resistance.

THE PERSONAL: PATH TO CESSATION

The Eightfold Path, which Buddha challenges us to fully follow, I place primarily in the Personal sphere. It forms a bridge into the Social, most obviously, but has resonance with the Natural and Universal spheres as well. While the usual linear sequence begins with Right View, and ends with Right Meditation, in actual Zen practice, the sequence is reversed.

Some sects do not encourage students to meditate until they have some grounding in doctrine. Zen subscribes to the sink-or-swim approach, trusting the practice of upright, seated meditation to have an immediate, positive effect, encouraging followers to do follow-up research to clarify their experience. Engaging fully in Right Meditation, the practice of Right Mindfulness and Right Effort will follow naturally. These three comprise Right Discipline. This necessarily begins in the Personal sphere of practice-experience on the cushion, but mindfulness and effort obviously carry over into the Social realm.

Right Speech, Action and Livelihood, taken together as Right Conduct, are most engaged in the Social sphere, though our actions and livelihood clearly affect the Natural realm, as in examples of mismanagement of resources.

Finally, Right View, and Right Thought, when combined, comprise Right Wisdom in the threefold Path, complementing Right Discipline and Conduct. Wisdom consists in the evolution of our worldview to approximate that of the Buddha, or Buddhism, through trial-and-error, engaging the other dimensions of the Eightfold Path.

THE INSEPARABILITY OF PERSONAL, SOCIAL, NATURAL & UNIVERSAL

Dividing the Path into digestible bites does not imply that such separations are absolute. All diagrams are Venn diagrams, to a degree, whether of Buddhist teachings, or other areas of human endeavor. The personal cannot be separated from the social, the natural, or the universal, in reality, nor can wisdom, conduct, and discipline, whether right or wrong.

The natural sphere entails stewardship of the environment, including the survival of the species. Extinction of species in the ecosystem, as a result of insensitivity to long-term consequences, and callous disregard for the sake of short-term profit, becomes very personal in terms of its impact on individuals, social in its effect on whole communities.

Exhaustive mining of mineral resources provides another example of the connection between our personal needs and the dictates of Nature writ large. The most direct and obvious solution to the social and natural “tragedy of the commons” is for each individual to reduce craving on a personal level.

Zazen, which seems to be Personal, disengaged navel-gazing, is actually the most direct gate to the Social, Natural and Universal dimensions of our existence. When we leave the cushion and re-enter the fray, the benefits of our practice come with us. Please examine this thoroughly in practice — thank you, Dogen.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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To elicit the bigger picture of the place of Zen and zazen in our world of practice, I would like to refer you to a couple of semantic models illustrating the interrelationships, or operative interfaces, of the various components of the Four Noble Truths, along with the dimensions of the Noble Eightfold Path that we all encounter on a daily basis, both on the cushion and off.

Turning to Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, we see that they can be modeled as a system, the simplest geometry for which is the four-pointed tetrahedron (a “system” here defined as anything exhibiting an inside and an outside). The model shows their interconnectedness, from one to two to three to four, from two to three and four, et cetera. There are six relationships of the four points, to each other. How does the existence of suffering relate to its origin, craving? And so on and on.

Go to the UnMind webpage to see my diagram of the Four Noble Truths as a four-pointed tetrahedron. The link to the page is in the show notes for this episode.

The four are usually presented in a linear layout in text, beginning with the first Noble Truth of the Existence of suffering (dukkha), followed by its Origin; its Cessation; finally the Noble Eightfold Path, which leads to the cessation of suffering in daily life.

First, we must challenge the appropriateness of the word “suffering” to translate the meaning of the Sanskrit word, “dukkha.” Unfortunately, suffering is fraught with narrow connotations of human pain, not only physical, but emotional, mental, and even existential in nature. But I do not believe that this is the intended meaning of the original term. Buddha was expounding a universal principle — that of unrelenting, inexorable change — which we naturally interpret from the perspective of our personal angst, as “suffering.” The Noble Eightfold Path extends this description of reality into a prescription for practice in daily life. Visit the webpage in the show notes to see the diagram illustrating the interconnectedness and interdependence of the elements in the Eightfold Path. A common example: “you talk the talk but you do not walk the walk”; a functional disconnect between right speech and right action.

As you reflect upon the Noble Eightfold Path, consider how the interdependence of the eight dimensions reinforce each other: How does Right View influence Right Thought, or Right Speech? Where does Right Action connect with Right Livelihood and Right Effort? Is Right Mindfulness dependent upon Right Effort, and does it then lead to Right Meditation, or is it the other way around?

Zen tradition claims to transmit the “right meditation” practiced by Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha and progenitor of Buddhism. But we recognize the absolute relevance and modernity of his message, privileging the simplified approach of Zen. Note that the eight dimensions are numbered in reverse order: “right view,” number one, being more a result than a starting point; right meditation, number eight, is where we must begin.

As mentioned in UnMind number 131, “The Noble N-Fold Path”, the traditional division of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path may have to be updated to reflect the complexity of living in modern times. Nowadays we might want to add more dimensions to the original eight prescribed for practice in a simpler time. Perhaps today we would end up with a Noble Thirty-Two-fold Path as the last of the Sixteen Noble Truths.

In Un Mind number 131, I mused upon the notion of adding “right balance” to the mix, what with the geometrically expanded choices we face in pursuing right speech, action and livelihood, and the challenges of living a Zen life in the midst of over-choice: the temptations and distractions pulling on us from all directions while we navigate the tightrope and keep all the balls in the air. We hope that we can “have it all,” especially compared to our ancestors in Zen, but “living large” exacts a steep price.

To cite just a few of the dimensions of our modern milieu, distinctions with a tangible difference from ancient times, challenging our sense of balance today:

TRAVEL: Buddha’s “ecological sweepout,” to borrow a Bucky Fullerism, was limited to the radius he could reach on foot, by donkey or elephant, though there were likely significant incoming influences from the Silk Road and other trade routes. One of our senior priests made the point that for the first time in history, every individual on the planet is potentially only one plane ride away from every other person. This has all kinds of implications, some positive, some not so much, such as the boost it gives to viral vectors spreading disease globally with blinding speed.

TECHNOLOGY: The interconnectivity of masses of people around the world, with advances in applications that provide automatic translation of languages, live video and audio recording and reporting of events on an unprecedented scale and scope of detail and timeliness, is a double-edged sword, a tool that can be used for good or ill, depending on the intent of senders and receivers of the message. The old-school formulas - that “The Medium is the Message”; communication is not the message sent, but the message received - no longer hold in a world of technology that allows anyone to put any words they wish in the mouths of anyone they want. It is impossible to catch up with even the jargon that attempts to keep up with scams popping up like weeds in the garden. From a Buddhist perspective, the upside is that world-around digital media have established a technical analogy to Avalokiteshvara, who “sees and hears the suffering of the world,” and comes to help, in her mission as the Bodhisattva of Compassion. One can hope.

EDUCATION: In Buddha’s time, and for the vast majority of the development of human civilization, choices in education were severely limited, primarily to learning the trade or craft of one’s ancestral family. Compare to today’s nearly unlimited potential for social mobility, promising transcendence of the caste or class system, implicit or explicit, into which we are born. One current downside is the emergence of massive student loan debt, a significant burden for those who have elected to finance higher degrees, which do not guarantee a successful career with the ability to pay off that debt.

CORPORATIZATION: An awkward word to label an awkward development. Another significant difference in our world and that of the Buddha is the predominance of the corporate entity, which I suppose first reared its ugly head with the formation of the city-states of Greece, and reached its apogee in the Citizens United decision of SCOTUS. Not that corporations are necessarily bad; there are some that are dedicated to doing good, such as NFP 501c3s incorporated for various charitable missions. But the human beings populating the corporate entities, as members of the board and other controlling positions, are still human, and can do more harm with the collective power and reach of the corporation, than they might be able to do individually.

I could go on. For example, with the current spate of international wars, widespread drug addiction, and the senseless gun violence that have become our new, dystopian “normal,” were certainly not the norm 2500 years ago. But suffice it to say that Buddha did not have to cope with this scale and scope of the onslaught of global insanity, though the self-striving nature of humanity underlying the chaos has not fundamentally changed since his times. We would likely find it unlikely to find an apt analogy to Dogen’s time, let alone Buddha’s.

When we comprehend the Four Noble Truths as mutually interacting, but constrained within the limits of the context of early Indian subculture, we can update them to the 21st century by constructing our own menu of actionable items based on today’s realities. You could, with some imagination, build your own personal set of Noble Truths, four or more, and suss out the vectors of a modern Path that transcend those outlined by the Buddha. He would appreciate your efforts, I am sure.

Let me encourage you to engage in such a creative exercise between now and when we meet again. Contemplate what the “existence of suffering” means to you, how you are to “fully understand it”; what attitude adjustments and actionable items on your particular path may be undertaken to transform that suffering into the right view of wisdom. Remember to consider the relationships between the various path factors that you identify, rather than treat each in isolation.

In the next segment, I will attempt to expand the context even further, into those surrounding spheres of influence on our daily lives, as well as on our contemporary practice of Zen, well beyond the personal and social, to include the natural and the universal. Buckle up.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the next two segments: number 132 and 133 in the sequence, we repeat a subject that we took up in number 113 and 114; namely the buddha nature versus human nature; some of the sameness and differences between what we refer to as “human nature” and what we refer to in Zen as our “original nature,” or “buddha-nature,” “buddha” meaning “awakened one.” Please bear with the repetition; there is new material here as well. And much of what is to be said about the place of Zen in America bears repetition.

As promised in the last segment of UnMind, we will continue examining the social, or “corporate” expressions of human nature — versus what we call “buddha nature” — with an eye to those corporate entities growing out of Zen practice, such as the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and the Silent Thunder Order, as examples. Master Dogen mentions the constructions of humankind, indicating that they, too, are part and parcel of the nature and manifestation of buddha-dharma:

Grass, trees, and lands which are embraced by this Teaching

together radiate a great light and endlessly expound

the inconceivable profound dharma

Grass, trees, and walls bring forth this Teaching for all beings

common people as well as sages

and they in accord extend this dharma

for the sake of grass, trees, and walls

In India the original Order of monks and nuns apparently camped out in the woods, and when the monsoons came, retired to caves in the mountains. Eventually, patrons built dwellings for them, the first “walls” to house the followers of Buddha’s teachings. Somewhere I came across a saying, something to the effect that, when a precious jewel appears in the world, not to worry, a container will appear to protect it. The “precious jewel” is the buddha-dharma, and the container consists of the various temples, practice centers, and monasteries that have been established to protect and preserve it. The Dharma opening verse that we typically chant at the beginning of a discourse says:

The unsurpassed, profound and wondrous Dharma is rarely met with

Even in a hundred, thousand, million kalpas

Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it

May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth

Assuming we can “see and hear” the Dharma, it becomes our charge to “accept and maintain” it. In the context of modern society, this means not only providing the physical plant, the “walls” within which followers are invited to practice, but also providing the corporate structure that will enable others to maintain the program of promulgating Dharma teachings and propagating the direct practice of meditation, through their financial and in-kind donations. For this reason, and other related incentives, it becomes necessary to establish a 501c3 not-for-profit corporation in order to maintain Zen practice interfacing with other, governmental corporate entities. But some caveats are in order when doing so in the furtherance of Zen, in light of its skepticism regarding the constructed self.

Where Zen calls into question the reification of even the human entity, or being, and its extension to the concept of a self, the soul of theism, or atman of Hinduism; the reification of a corporate entity is seen as equally, or even more, suspect.

ASZC was incorporated in 1977 to facilitate the mission of meeting the public demand for what we refer to as genuine Zen practice, in particular its uniquely simple and direct meditation. What we refer to as “Soto Zen” or “Dogen Zen” is different from all the other alternatives on offer. Just as what Buddhism teaches as its worldview is starkly different from the various religions and ideologies dominant in our culture.

STO was incorporated in 2011 because the stress and strain on the board of directors and committees of the ASZC had become too much to handle, with the growth of our network of affiliates, which were meeting the increasing demand for Zen practice; and the growing awareness of ASZC and STO as meeting that demand in a uniquely user-friendly manner, stressing the practicality and best practices of householder Zen.

BUT

We should not be confused as to the reality or unreality of the corporate entities we have “established.” They are no more real than any other corporate entity, though we may feel that their existence as such is much more necessary and based on real human need. The human beings, or sangha, populating the corporate shell are real and existent dharmas, in its connotation of “dharma-beings.” The corporation is real enough, in that it can interact with other corporate entities, but is essentially a real but non-existent dharma being, a construct.

In spite of the “Citizens United” ruling of the Supreme Court, corporations are demonstrably not persons and should not have the “rights” accorded to human beings, in my humble opinion. All beings are capable of doing harm; corporate entities may survive their human components and thus become capable of extending the harm, or good, they do to future generations. Real persons, fortunately or unfortunately — your call — pass away eventually, but the harm they do often lives after them; thank you, Marc Antony. Sometimes through the corporations they formed during their lifetime.

There is a rather useful trope to apply to your personal relationship to the corporate entity that represents the community of fellow practitioners of Zen. These are some issues that have come up from time to time, phrased in the format of “IF-THEN”:

IF you find yourself obsessing over the wellbeing of the ASZC or STO, or your local affiliate center, including the management and succession of their leadership, THEN you may be getting distracted from your own, personal practice, which may be much more difficult to deal with, and less gratifying than engaging the social fray.

IF you feel under-appreciated for your efforts on behalf of the organization, THEN a couple of reminders: One — welcome to the club. Two — remember that we support the organizations because they support the practice of Zen. And in Zen there is “no self, and no other-than-self.” Our actions are neither entirely selfish, nor entirely unselfish, when it comes to Zen. Or you could argue that they are both selfish and unselfish.

IF you are engaging in certain activities, and feel that you are making sacrifices, for the sake of someone else in the sangha, including myself, THEN, please stop. A sense of emotional indebtedness will only grow, and can never be recompensed adequately.

As Master Dogen reminds us, we should not imagine that we are practicing Zen solely for our own sake, let alone for the sake of others. We should practice Zen for the sake of Buddhism itself. The 13th Century Master cautioned his followers not to call it “Zen,” that Zen is a made-up term. It is only Buddhism, he said. But even his nomenclature reifies “Buddhism,” as if there actually is such a thing that needs our protection.

Buddhism, like Zen, is also a made-up term. Shakyamuni was not a Buddhist, any more than Jesus Christ was a Christian. Buddha comes from a root word that means “awake.” Buddha means the “fully awakened one.” What he taught, and what his followers practiced — in a culture replete with Hinduism, where one imagines they encountered considerable resistance — came to be called Buddhism. As such, it is also subject to its own teachings of “impermanence, insubstantiality, and imperfection.”

IF you find yourself sharing your personal doubts and frustrations with your fellow travelers as to how the sangha is functioning, including its leadership, THEN you may be fomenting confusion, and resultant disharmony, in the sangha, a big “no-no” in Zen.

As the story goes, one of Siddhartha Gautama’s cohort of cousins, named Devadatta, was jealous of Shakyamuni’s revered status, including the lavish support he received from patrons, and repeatedly attempted to have Buddha assassinated. Yet Buddha predicted that Devadatta would eventually realize buddha-hood. If such transgressions

against the cohesion of the corporate Order of monks and nuns in those times could be regarded by Buddha as a kind of trial-and-error, coming of age saga, if over several lifetimes — we may be forgiven for the more minor errors in judgment that we may reasonably be expected to make in our efforts at community practice, and any resultant behaviors that may have unintended consequences.

In any case, it does not pay to overthink these considerations, certainly not to make them the focus of our personal practice. A monk complained that when sitting in zazen, the rain was dripping on him from leaks in the roof. The Master told him to “move down.” Why spend a lot of time patching and repairing an old temple building, when you should be about the business of your own awakening to Buddha’s insight? It is even more likely today that we will become enamored of the corporate entity and all its trappings, and lose sight of what brought us to Zen in the first place. The only thing that will accompany us when we go to our grave is our deeds. We have to leave the chimera of the corporation, along with the walls of the building, no matter how grandiose, behind — as well as the paperwork, thankfully. This realization should be accompanied by an immense sense of relief.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the next two segments: number 132 and 133 in the sequence, we repeat a subject that we took up in number 113 and 114; namely the buddha nature versus human nature; some of the sameness and differences between what we refer to as “human nature” and what we refer to in Zen as our “original nature,” or “buddha-nature,” “buddha” meaning “awakened one.” Please bear with the repetition; there is new material here as well. And much of what is to be said about the place of Zen in America bears repetition.

We often hear our fellow human beings idealizing human nature, implicit in criticisms of the behavior of others as “inhumane.” Which we may take to be well-intentioned, if somewhat self-aggrandizing. It implies that if only other humans around the globe were more “humane” in their treatment of others, we would see less suffering and atrocities stemming from humankind’s inhumanity to humankind, let alone the unspeakable miseries visited upon other, so-called “lower” sentient beings.

But I am afraid that our teachings from Buddhism cast a rather jaundiced eye on the veracity that idea. While, according to Zen tradition, we human beings are uniquely capable of waking up to buddha-nature, it does not follow that human- and buddha-nature are interchangeable. Far from it. Let us examine a few examples of what is conventionally meant by “human nature,” and some caveats to common attitudes and definitions, each claim followed by a “but”:

It is human nature to regard ourselves as independently existent entities.

BUT: According to Zen, we human beings are not self-existent entities. Nothing else is, either. Including corporate entities, such as the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, the Silent Thunder Order, even the government. This is the flip-side of the internet of connectivity in which we find ourselves enmeshed. Entities function only by dint of their connections.

It is human nature to want to join like-minded groups of people.

BUT: The Zen community, or “sangha,” like any group entity, is evanescent, imperfect, impermanent, and intrinsically insubstantial. This is why we refer to and visualize our members as being like the drops of water vapor in a “cloud” (J. un), constantly evaporating and recondensing over time, as people come and go.

It is human nature to hope to be appreciated for our contributions to a group, or cause.

BUT: It is somewhat inappropriate to express appreciation to anyone for what they do for Zen or Buddhism, as there is no “self,” as such, in it. It is normal to do so in polite society, of course. But Zen, while not antisocial in character, is asocial — conventional norms and memes of society are called into question, and subject to examination under the unrelenting glare of meditation.

It is human nature to expect that our social cohorts will fulfill our personal needs.

BUT: Our best laid plans often take a dystopian turn. Because a corporate entity is populated by individuals who have their own agendas, one’s personal perspective may have to be set aside in deference to the overall, long-term benefit of the group. We are encouraged to practice patience (S. kshanti) with this as a social dimension of the Precepts.

It is human nature to hope that our favored institutions will continue in perpetuity.

BUT: Nothing continues in perpetuity. Never has, never will. Eiheiji still stands, however, as a testament to what it once represented, which of course has changed over time.

It is human nature to feel disappointed when our expectations are not met.

BUT: We practice caution against developing unrealistic expectations of Zen, both of our personal practice as well as our social community. We go to Zen with the sangha we have, not with the sangha we may want.

I could go on. It is human nature to try to control the uncontrollable. And to blame others when we fail to do so. As the Tao te Ching reminds, paraphrasing, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.” Today we dismiss this as the “blame game.”

No matter how much harmony we are able to foster within the sangha, there are inevitably going to be periods of disruption and disharmony, triggered by personality issues, as well as external influences. We “do not discuss the faults of others,” but we often find it necessary to discuss their behavior from time to time, especially if it is disruptive.

THIS IS WHY WE ASPIRE TO BUDDHA NATURE

While exhorting others to remember and respect their humanity and encouraging humane behavior may be a natural, if unexamined, response to violations of injustice and offenses to our sensibilities witnessed on a daily basis, it ignores the fact that the great preponderance of the history of humankind consists mainly of these kinds of atrocities, committed under the umbrella of religious, ideological and political rationales. They represent the essence of what it is to be “human,” writ large, just as self-defense or self-preservation explains the great bulk of instinctive behaviors in the animal kingdom. Something is lacking, therein. We think it is our original, or “buddha,” nature.

Buddha nature simply means awakened nature. What we awaken to is, largely, the unreality of those things we take to be real, which cause us to react defensively to any perceived threat to our self-identity. As the great Ch’an master Sengcan reminds us, in his poem on trusting the mind:

For the unified mind in accord with the way, all self-centered striving ceases

HUMAN BEING VS CORPORATE ENTITY

This self-striving extends to corporate entities, prototypes of which were surely present in ancient China, as well as India and Japan. But today they seem to have taken on a life of their own, as an unintended consequence, characteristic of so many of our inventions. One model for taking an overview of this process we owe to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

If you search key words: “Hegel’s dialectic; synthesis of form,” the first item out of about 380,000 summarizes his concept as well as I can:

Hegel presents the dialectic as a three-part structure consisting of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. In human history, when the status quo (the thesis) is challenged by a new historical development or force (the antithesis), a new form of life emerges out of the synthesis of the two prior stages.

We might quibble with certain choices of terms, such as “a new form of life,” as this would be more appropriate when considering biological evolution, rather than social or cultural evolution, the latter of which I take to be what Hegel was talking about. Those entities that appear on the social/cultural horizon as forms of government, commerce, et cetera as the “antithesis” challenging prevalent norms, the “thesis,” which then react in survival mode, often taking on characteristics of the challengers, resulting in “synthesis,” the result of which becomes the new “thesis.” The process is ongoing and continuous.

An example of another binary subject to this process, and similar to comparison and contrast of human versus buddha nature, is that of the corporate entity versus the individual, which — while occurring in human history predating and including Buddha’s time — was not so prevalent or obvious a contradiction as it is in the era of the relatively recent “Citizens United” decision of the SCOTUS.

Today, corporate entities seem to be winning the competition for survival, or dominance, on a global scale. They appear to threaten the very meaning of the “individual,” those mere human entities that they are ostensibly created to serve.

In the next segment of UnMind we will continue this examination of the origin of social, or “corporate” expressions of human and buddha nature, with a focus on those growing out of Zen practice. Corporate entities such as the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and the Silent Thunder Order are familiar and salient examples of group dynamics intended to foster the individual pursuit of Zen practice. A real modern Zen koan. Stay tuned.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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The Noble Eightfold Path, the fourth of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, amounts to a prescription for practice, an octet of dimensions of daily life to pay strict attention to, in order to bring about Right View and Right Understanding, the dyad which, in combination, comprise Buddha’s idea of Right Wisdom. Right, or correct, wisdom in daily life will come about naturally through the daily observation and practice of Right Conduct: right speech, action, and livelihood; along with Right Discipline: right effort, mindfulness and meditation.

Needless to say, but I will say it anyway, in Zen, it all starts and ends with right meditation, opposed, we may suppose, to “wrong” meditation. And in truth, there are styles of meditation, and attitudes about it, that would be considered wrong, in the sense that they do not work well, or at least not as well as zazen, with its modus operandi of objectlessness. Such approaches as bompu Zen: meditating for health and happiness, wellbeing, i.e. ordinary goals and objectives of living; or gedo Zen: a practice that disregards the Buddhist underpinnings of Zen meditation, with its emphasis on transcending the self in order to penetrate to the depths of reality, in favor of some other framework such as Taoism or Confucianism from the original context in China, or a religious attitude of spiritual transcendence of ordinary life.

So even within the personal practice of meditation itself, there can be competing ideas that lead to confusion. More so when we consider the cultural context in which we are practicing Zen. Nowadays we might want to add more dimensions to the original eight attributed to Buddha’s prescription for practice in a simpler time. Perhaps today we would end up with a Noble Thirty-two-fold Path as the last of the Sixteen Noble Truths.

One of the more explicit dimensions might be called “right balance,” indicating what I have termed “social samadhi.” Along with physical samadhi in the posture, which fosters emotional samadhi: less anxiety, more calm; mental samadhi: more clarity, less confusion; we begin to find more harmony, less friction, in our relationships.

For Americans interested in pursuing a Zen practice, finding the right balance between the demands of household, work and family; and the necessary intensity of zazen practice may seem to be the most pressing and stressing dilemma in actualizing a Zen life in modern times.

We imagine that in simpler times, people had more time to spare, and could devote a greater share of their time to meditation and study. With all the touted time-saving devices of current technology, we still seem to have little or no time to ourselves. The current droll expression, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get” captures this syndrome. An ancient version of the same idea, from the Chinese Zen poem Hsinshinming—Faith Mind, says it a bit differently, with specific relevance to Zen practice with a Taoist slant:

To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult

But those with limited views are fearful and irresolute

The faster they hurry the slower they go

This is a critique of those who approach Zen practice with limited views, as well as those who do not practice at all, and an admonition to practitioners to be fearless and resolute in pursuit of buddha-dharma. This general mindset underlies Right Effort, and gives a clue to how we may achieve balance in our practice.

Usually when someone brings this issue up, it indicates that they suspect that they may not be practicing with sufficient intensity. They worry that it is not possible to find the time for zazen, both at home and away, without compromising obligations to family and career. For every project or task in which we invest the present moment, there are a dozen others that go wanting.

The source of this dilemma is the tendency of the discriminating mind to compartmentalize, dividing life into separate categories. The next step in the process is to set the various pieces in opposition to each other. Then we conceive of them as taking time to plan, engage, and complete. Thus, we are forever caught in the bind of measured time, another compartmentalized conception. Taking this concept of time for the reality of time, we see no way out.

Time-and-motion gurus, along with efficiency experts as well as life coaches, apply various techniques to this problem, such as making it visible. One such approach recommends drawing up a pie chart, in which we give a portion of the whole to each of our regular activities, whether based on a 24-hour daily, or weekly, monthly, or annual, cycle. Then we examine the activities to see if they are out of balance in some obvious way, looking to reduce one to make room for another, to arrive at a more desirable allocation of time to our goals and objectives. In other words, we use measured time to re-plan a measured dedication time to tasks.

If we closely examine this process, and pay attention to the singular subjects that appear to conflict, it becomes apparent that the boundaries are not so clear. What we sort into categories are aspects of life that are more related than opposed. This is not a simplistic assertion that all is one, just an admission of the not-two nature of life promulgated in Zen teachings, particularly those from China.

If, for example, we imagine that time spent in zazen is time neglecting our family, we might remember that when we do not sit in zazen for some period, our relationship to our family begins to deteriorate. We may secretly, subliminally even, resent the fact that we have to give up something for the sake of our spouse, children, or parents — or worst case, in-laws — with any lack of appreciation for our sacrifice on their part, adding insult to injury.

We cannot balance our relationships to others, when they are built on such underlying self-centered impulses to begin with. Our complaint that we do not have time to do zazen is a symptom that we do not understand either time, or zazen. When we do zazen, we are using our time to its utmost efficiency and efficacy. When we leave the cushion, this mindset goes with us. We eventually begin to find that we waste less time in futile pursuits, or in resentment and acrimony between ourselves and those making demands on our time.

This is especially true at work. A majority of people may report that they are happy with their work. But whether this happiness is genuine — or feigning contentment in fear of losing their job, or resistance to confronting genuine underlying unhappiness — is anyone’s guess. This was probably not included in the questionnaire. But most of our discomfort at work stems from relationships.

Compensation in terms of salary and benefits is always related to at least one other person, usually the identified “boss,” or management in general, especially where unions are involved. It is difficult to apply principles of compassionate engagement when the deck is stacked against us, with the other person holding all the trump cards. Often, we have no idea how much they themselves make for being our boss, but they know that — and more than we would like — about us.

Our subordinates present another set of interpersonal issues, where we find ourselves on the hot seat in terms of supervising their performance, dealing with personalities that can be difficult. We are uncomfortably aware of the interconnectedness of our role in the enterprise, particularly with those in close proximity. We also have to be mindful of the viewpoint of others higher in the chain of command, to whom our boss reports. And then, over time, these roles and relationships are as impermanent as any other elements in the Buddhist universe. As the old adage has it, “Be nice to the people you meet on the way up the ladder; they are the same people you will meet on the way down.”

Then there are client and supplier relationships outside the company; or students in the classroom; patients at the hospital. Patterns of relationships repeat, though the nature of the product or service varies. Sometimes disputes come out of left field, and we are blindsided with a conflict that begins to take up all of our time, including agonizing over it after work, over a drink. At the end of the day — so ubiquitous and overused a phrase that it is distasteful to repeat it — we begin to see home as a refuge from work. In some cases, work becomes a refuge from home. And the annual vacation becomes a refuge from both. Thus, our entire annual calendar is sucked into the relentless maw of time-consumption.

What if this is all just fantasy, simply the workings of our imagination? The monkey-mind is endlessly capable of playing such games. What about a real vacation, a time-out from this daily merry-go-round?

Zazen has been referred to as a mini-vacation, a brief respite from the rat race. One of the great secrets of Zen is that it really takes no time at all. In fact, Zen holds that we do not live in real time, unless we enter into it through zazen.

When we think of the entire scope of a project — such as writing the great American novel — we shrink back, in intimidation. The mountain seems insurmountable. But the mountain is climbed one step at a time, though we might prefer a helicopter. If we see a mountain as a series of molehills, it is not so daunting. The only question is, Which molehill is in front of us, at the moment?

If we think about all the other things that we do in a day, that take a half-hour or so, are there none that we could easily forego, for the sake of sitting for a half-hour? If not, how about fifteen minutes? Ten? Five? As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Sit five minutes: five-minute Buddha! Sit half-an-hour, Buddha for 30! But wouldn’t you rather be Buddha all day?”

By this, he did not mean sit zazen all day, needless to say. The effects of zazen are both immediate, and cumulative. They go with us, off the cushion. Our resistance to zazen is the molehill become mountain. I once consulted with a Canadian company named DYLEX. It is an acronym, meaning “Damn your lousy excuses!”This is a compassionate message for us. We don’t need no stinking excuses.

Zen and zazen is very powerful on a personal level. But its halo-effect on our multifarious activities off the cushion operates on a subtle plane. It is better to assume that it is working to bring about personal samadhi on a subliminal level, rather than look for it to manifest in some obvious way. Often, one’s fellow workers and colleagues notice it before we do.

This is what Matsuoka Roshi referred to as “confidence in everyday life,” one of the side-effects of Zen practice. Everything is already in balance, if not obviously so. It may not be apparent to our associates, either. After all, they are only human beings, like us. And they may not have the benefit of a practice like Zen meditation. We can afford to be a bit more balanced in practicing patience with them, in the midst of our shared suffering. We have the balancing effect of Zen. Thank Buddha!

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Continuing with our discussion of various turning points in living the Zen life, we will examine the Buddhist tradition of “leaving home” to become a mendicant, with its unexamined but intrinsic root question of what, exactly, we mean by “home.”

The monastic ideal of “leaving home” is repeatedly praised by Master Dogen in the ordination ceremony known, in Japanese, as “Shukke Tokudo” — which translates as something like “leaving home, sharing the dharma.” In lay householder practice, we do not literally leave home, of course, other than for the occasional extended retreat, or sesshin. But we interpret the meaning as deeply significant, even to the householder. Our true home turns out to be unrelated to geography, or any of the other relative circumstances of existence.

We might also question the reality of home-leaving in the life of monastics, as Master Dogen mentions regarding monks of his time (see Shobogenzo Zuimonki). He suggests that some cannot really relinquish their attachment to family, and all that it entails, for the sake of Zen. But it seems a near-prerequisite in order to “hear the true Dharma,” as he puts it in Dogen’s Vow (Eiheikosohotsuganmon).

Other monks, who are able to relinquish family and home, are not able to let go of their attachment to their body, and good health. They are not willing to put their life on the line, which is, after all, understandable. In this same poem, he quotes Ch’an Master Lungya: “In this life save the body; it is the fruit of many lives.” I take his point to be that an obsession with living a normal life as the scion of a family lineage, at the expense of Zen practice, is ultimately doomed to failure. As a famous analogy has it, family will not accompany you in death. Like other aspects of your life, including health and wellbeing, they will only go as far as the grave. Aging, sickness and death, the three major marks of existence, according to Buddhism, cannot be avoided in the long run. And Zen takes the long view.

But the third and most difficult level of monastic non-attachment pointed out by Dogen Zenji, is clinging to our own ideas and opinions, especially regarding all the above. Even monks who can realize the first two levels have difficulty with this last, unable to relinquish, or even to recognize, their erroneous worldview. The monk who can do this most difficult thing has the best chance of waking up during this lifetime.

Highest Level of Practice

This brings up an interesting point, a seeming contradiction, that Dogen does not go into. Achieving this last bit of letting go — of the “ties that bind” — implies letting go of our viewpoints. Including, most notably, those regarding the prior two levels — forgoing a normal lay life of family and friends, marriage, social status, and so on; and further, forsaking our attachment to our own health and, ultimately, our very life.

In other words, if we truly let go of all of our own opinions, this would necessarily include any preconceptions we harbor — such as that the most advanced monk or nun is necessarily detached from family and body. Not necessarily. In Zen, we give up our opinions of all such kinds of attachment. It is, after all, natural to be attached to both the body and our family; the distinction lies in the degree to which we are attached to them. This is the heart of the Middle Way.

A clear example of this principle is found in pain. We experience some pain in meditation. But we do not immediately react, doing something to make it stop right now. We sink into it a bit more than we usually would, going beyond our comfort zone. In doing so, we have an opportunity to truly experience the “pain” for what it really is.

Thus, we may discover that it is not so bad. Although even if we thought that the more extreme dictates of practice may turn out to be life-threatening, we should not shrink from it, according to Dogen. Nothing ventured, nothing gained on a scalable spectrum. Unless we are ale to set aside our preconception that pain = bad, we cannot learn from the experience. This principle then applies to all of our aversions to testy circumstances in life. Aversion is simply the flip side of attachment.

Master Dogen’s assessment of the levels of commitment of various monks ends with the rare case of one who is able to sunder ties to family, health and life; and, finally, to one’s own worldview. This is the highest and truest form of liberation from the random, but seemingly determinative, causes and conditions of our present human birth. But since the last test entails relinquishment of our personal opinion of “all the above,” this should lead to the conclusion that the life of the lay householder is not all that distinct from that of the mendicant monk or nun, at least in any way that really matters in the context of the Great Matter. It is a case of the well-known “distinction without a difference.” If the circumstances of one’s lifestyle are only that — circumstance — then by definition, they are not central to living the Zen life.

Following on this reasoning, we might propose that the lay person — who is able to relinquish all such opinions, and “succeed to the wisdom of the buddhas” (see Fukanzazengi) — represents the highest possible level of realization. This may explain why it is, in the history of Buddhism and Zen, that such lay persons as Vimalakirti, Emperor Ashoka, Layman Pang, and countless others, are so admired. In spite of having their plates full, constrained by domestic and even governmental duties, they were able to gain profound insight into the Dharma, without renouncing their ordinary life. Not to mention certain monks who were known to flout the norms of monastic life.

Of course, you cannot tell the Zen book by its cover, so it is best to appraise only your own practice, and not to judge others, from outward appearances.

Contemporary Lay Practice

Contemporary lay practice in America is surely vastly different from what it was, and is, in the countries of origin, today as well as in ancient times. My limited understanding suggests that most lay householders practiced dana — generosity — by supporting the monks and nuns of the local orders with offerings of food and material support, including currency and other forms of fungible goods such as metals and fabrics. The community was apparently engaged in other, interactive ways as well. Young children would be sent to the temples and monasteries for training, which probably amounted to finishing schools, including some study of Buddhism. The early monasteries of the East probably evolved into the institutions of higher learning, universities, as they did in the Middle East and in the West, in Europe, for example. But the actual practice of Zen meditation, specifically, was probably not widespread, even in China and Japan. It was, and is, primarily the purview of the monastics

Today, however — I think perhaps especially in North and South America, as well as in Western Europe — lay practitioners generally equate Zen practice with meditation. Particularly in the USA, we tend to be do-it-yourselfers. We are not satisfied with second-hand information, and look to direct experience as having its own value, in most everything we do.

Thus, Zen training is closely related to apprentice modes of professional training, as in a craft or guild. A novice becomes an apprentice to a master; and eventually a journeyman; finally certified as a master herself. But we must be careful about this idea of becoming a “Zen Master.” We do not master Zen — Zen master us. But only if we allow it.

As Master Dogen reminds us in the Genjokoan excerpt from Bendowa, meaning “a talk about the Way,” the first fascicle from his master compilation, Shobogenzo:

When buddhas are truly buddhas

they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas.

If spiritual awakening is simply awakening to reality, it would not necessarily include taking on a new self-identity as a “buddha.” It might, however, include seeing oneself, as well as others, in a somewhat different light. “Your body and mind, as well as the body and mind of others, drop away” as Dogen assures us in the same teaching.

Living the Zen Life Today

While we may admire, and hope to emulate, the life of a monk or nun, I believe we in America do not have enough grounding in the reality of that choice, nor in the cultures of the countries of origin, in which Buddhism and Zen originally arose. The choices we have today, in terms of maintaining Zen practice in the midst of life, are surely very different from those of ancient India, for example. Joining the Order meant leaving behind the conventional trappings of society, including family name and caste position, wealth, and so on, though some of Buddha’s top disciples seem to have been his blood relatives.

The original Order at first included men only, but even during Buddha’s lifetime, it expanded to include women. From what I have gathered, any adult from any level of the caste system of the time could join, as long as they were willing to forego the privilege and provenance of their upbringing. This, it seems to me, had to do with renouncing the self, in the conventional sense.

This tradition is what Master Dogen, some 1300 years later, referred to as “leaving home,” in laudatory language. Today, we join the community, or Sangha — and can even become ordained as a priest — without literally leaving home in the obvious, outer sense of the phrase. However, when we undergo Shukke Tokudo, lay ordination as a novice priest, the implication is that we leave our ostensible home, in order to find our true home, in universal homelessness.

Our True Home: Homelessness

This homelessness is considered the original, or natural, way of being, and has nothing to do with where we were born, or where we currently dwell, in the geographic sense. Circumstances of our birth, as well as our growing up, our livelihood, and our eventual death, are just that: circumstantial. They are not central to our being, though they may play an inordinate role in shaping our worldview; and, indeed, whether or not we are ever even exposed to the Dharma.

This human birth is considered rare in Buddhism, though with nine billion and counting (when I originally wrote this, it was seven billion), it may appear to be so common as to threaten the very survival of the species. By comparison to other life forms, such as insects, we are not even close to predominance on the planet, as measured in biomass. But the disproportionate effect that we as human beings have on the environment amounts to a crisis. We may want to broaden our scope from considerations of our own, personal mortality, to embrace the possibility of extinction of the entire species. There is no greater form of homelessness than to become extinct.

ASZC & STO as Collaborative Community

Each month, during our Second Sunday Sangha lunch and dialog at ASZC, we discuss issues of how we as individuals can join in the efforts of promoting true community, without compromising our own personal lives as householders and lay Zen people. Matsuoka Roshi predicted, and I concur, that the rebirth of Zen would be seen in America, and that its propagation would be primarily in the form of lay householder practice. He would often remark that “Zen is always contemporary.” That is, we don’t have to try too hard to make it contemporary.

We have just passed the sixth year anniversary of what might be considered one of the all-time great failures of community, that seen in Charlottesville, Virginia. It recalled to mind the greatest international example of decline of community in Germany, Italy, and later, Japan, which led to WWII. But Charlottesville is only a blip on the screen of the ongoing series of catastrophes, both natural and human, that have plagued the human community since the beginning of recorded history. The latest being the hell on Earth that is Ukraine, courtesy of the Putin regime in Russia. Any serious student of history is not at all surprised by the daily atrocities that we witness on the news. This is human nature in full flower. It is why we aspire to buddha-nature, instead.

Now we are in the throes of adolescence, in the growth of the Zen community in America. That there is a lot of confusion wreaked upon this process is to be expected, owing both to quirks of contemporary Western society, and the persistence of myths surrounding the origins of Zen practice in the seminal communities in India, China, Korea, Japan, and the far East. Most of the confusion arises, I think, from the supposed contrasts and apparent contradictions between traditional monastic, and contemporary lay householder, lifestyles.

So, as if we need one more thing to worry about, we do not want to become attached to the propagation of Zen as yet another preconceived project in its own right. We are privileged to be exposed to the Dharma, in the most humble sense of the term, and not merely by dint of circumstances of our birth, the source of most social privilege. Let us not miss this opportunity to join with the Zen community, and to serve its members in true collaboration. It is well within our enlightened self-interest to do so.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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In the last segment of UnMind, we touched on the typically fraught turning points in normal life of changing jobs, going through divorce, and becoming empty-nesters when and if the kids finally move out. And if they don’t move back in again. They say you should write what you know, so I am living up to that dictum.

In this installment we will touch on the traditional “marks” of dukkha: sickness, aging and death, and then turn to the subject of turning points in zazen itself. It is important that as we experience these pivot points in our practice, that we resist the temptation to interpret them negatively, as evidence of failure, and that we persist through thick and thin, assuming and accepting that we are no more in control of the progress of our meditation than we are in control of the pilgrim’s progress of our lives. Zen, and zazen, work on subtle and subliminal levels, beyond our control. We should take the advice of the third patriarch in China, and “trust in Mind.” In closing the last passage, we mentioned that the various time-of-life changes that we all go through, if we live long enough, are generally exploited in the service of selling ever-more narrow-niche categories of products and services, including ever-increasing scams inflicted on the unwary.

Sickness & Drugs

If you still watch the news on television, you belong to an ever-shrinking segment of the population, and can see this process in extreme. Commercials hawking every kind of cure for every imaginable disorder of body and mind, some truly unimaginable. The firehose of drugs coming out of Big Pharma’s pipeline is overwhelming, ostensibly to treat an ever-expanding cascade of illnesses of the aged and infirm, who are typically shown in highly affluent situations, joyfully engaging in cool, strenuous activities in luxurious settings. Each new wonder drug comes with an endless list of side-effects that make the cure sound worse than the illness. It leaves me wondering what they are going to do, when they finally run out of names for the next generation of cure-alls. Expect to see companion drugs designed to treat the endless litany of side-effects.

According to a Zen student who works in the industry, and who just happens to be a PhD neuroscientist, most of the new drugs are actually old drugs, in which a single atom of the molecule may have been tweaked, yielding the minimum legal requirement for calling it new. So much for claims of return on investment for multi-million dollar research.

Aging & Death

Speaking of aging, most of the turning-points that we associate with time-of-life — and other transitions in the normal process of “living la vida loca” — are basically attributable to aging. If we did not age, many of these passages would be impossible. Or at least, more of a choice on our part.

Death may be the penultimate turning-point in aging. That’s right, not the ultimate, but next to it. There is yet another, final turning point, even after death. It is called rebirth. Or its earlier version, reincarnation. In any case, something comes after death.

As with divorce, it is tempting to say that if you are against death, don’t get born in the first place. Birth is, after all, the leading cause of death. Birth is, we might say, an indeterminate turning-point. What comes after birth depends upon you.

In one of the most startling developments regarding cultural coping strategies for these turning-points, I recently came across a news article entitled “Putting the fun in funerals.” I am not making this up. Because you can’t make this stuff up.

In his teaching titled Genjokoan, which translates something like, “actualizing the fundamental point,” and which seems to touch on nearly everything in life, Master Dogen weighs in on the nature of birth and death, in the process refuting reincarnation:

Just as firewood does not return to firewood after it is ash

you do not return to birth after death

This being so, it is an established way in buddha-dharma

to deny that birth turns into death

Accordingly birth is understood as no-birth

It is an unshakeable teaching in Buddha’s discourse

that death does not turn into birth

Accordingly death is understood as no-death

Birth is an expression complete this moment

Death is an expression complete this moment

Then, with his usual default to concrete examples from the world of Nature:

They are like winter and spring

You do not call winter the beginning of spring

Nor summer the end of spring

Thank you Dogen, for clearing that up. I don’t pretend to understand this fully, but then Master Dogen himself does not claim to understand it. He merely lays it out as it is, take it or leave it. Interesting to contemplate that birth does not turn into death: Hallelujah! But wait a minute; death also does not turn into birth. What does that do to our aforementioned concept of rebirth?

As usual for vintage Dogen, after he bludgeons us with an uncomfortable truth, he turns to Nature to soften the blow. Some of us, however, would petulantly argue that winter is, indeed, the beginning of spring, and summer its end. The monkey mind is stubborn in all seasons.

I find it a particularly compelling expression of Dogen’s understanding that he refers to both birth and death as “an expression complete this moment.” It begs the question, “An expression of what?” An expression of lifewould seem the logical answer, but Master Dogen’s worldview does not depend upon simple logic.

Turning Points in Zen Meditation

Speaking of Dogen, we owe him — big-time — for the point when each of us turned to Zen. If he had not made zazen his cause célébre, we would probably still be smudging ourselves with smoke, engaging in Shamanistic shenanigans, hoping for some kind of revelation.

The turning points in zazen are too many to catalog. The Ox-herding Pictures touch on eight or ten of the main ones. I want to mention just a couple that come up frequently. I recognize that you, like me, are not 100% responsible for your short attention span, or your attenuated threshold of patience. Especially if you are in the midst of a turning-point of your own, at the moment.

First is comfort-level.

To those of you struggling with a critical turning-point in your life — or just the aches and pains, not to mention anxiety, confusion, and generalized angst that can sometimes accompany zazen, and not only at the beginning — it may be cold comfort, but zazen is supposed to be the “comfortable way.” I think the most reasonable rationale for this assertion is that any and every other way of meditation you may take up is at least as uncomfortable, in the long run, at least.

It has been my experience, and is my testimony, that there is a turning-point in zazen that comes about, when the posture does actually become comfortable. I can also assure you that it becomes comfortable not only in the physical sense, but that the nattering nabob of the monkey mind finally wears itself out, like a kitten or a puppy dog, and lies down to take a nap. Mental and emotional comfort ensue. Of course, your results may vary, especially with any significant change in your circumstances. That pesky turning-point, again.

Eventually, you may even become socially comfortable with zazen. That is, even though your spouse and other family members may not practice Zen, or even bother to understand it; and even though your in-laws insist on making a wedge issue of your devotion to Zen, this is okay with you. You no longer feel the need to explain, let alone to apologize, for doing zazen.

Of course, this turning-point may precipitate a turning-point in your relations to the others mentioned. But you may find that you are comfortable with that, too.

Another is the plateau effect.

After practicing for some time, even over many years, it may begin to dawn on you that it seems that nothing is happening in your meditation any more. Curiouser and curiouser, interesting things that used to pop up from time to time — in the form of creative ideas; resolution of a nagging problem; or cool sensation, vision, or hearing experiences — just aren’t happening. It seems clear that Zen isn’t working, or else you are not doing it right. You have flat-lined, plateaued.

Interestingly enough, Matsuoka Roshi mentioned this, and introduced me to a new Japanese word: cho-da. He said it means a “fall up.” You go along for some time, practicing your little heart out, but are getting nowhere. Nothing seems to be happening. Then, one day, if only you do not give up, you go through a cho-da. You fall up! It may be a small cho-da; it may be a large cho-da.

But, you fall up — to the next plateau. A plateau is, by definition, flat. So, once again, just when you thought it was getting good, nothing happening. The good news is you never go back. The bad news is that the plateaus just keep coming. No one knows how many there are.

Traditionally, there are said to be three major barriers in Zen. The first is physical, getting beyond your comfort zone to true comfort. The second is said to be sleep. Once you are cozy and comfortable in zazen, naturally, sleep would raise its ugly head. I have not heard what the third barrier is, but I suspect that it would involve some kind of plateau. Perhaps it is simply self-doubt. Matsuoka Roshi pointed out that by far the greatest cohort of Westerners who engage in Zen meditation are those who give up too soon.

So if you see yourself in any of these pictures, welcome to the club. If you are uncomfortable in zazen, welcome to that club. If you are plateauing, welcome to the flatliners club. Zen is the most exclusive club in the world. But it is all-inclusive. The only dues it demands of you is everything you have. But the payback is huge. What else can you do that will give you your whole life back? as Matsuoka-Roshi would often ask.

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In the last several series of the UnMind podcast, we have been exploring some ways of intentionally bringing Zen practice to bear on various situations and circumstances of daily life in America. By extension these might apply anywhere on the globe today, where revolutionary changes in technology and exploding population growth have taken hold. Again, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Civilization conquers us.”

In navigating the deeper waters of Buddhism, this world — including so-called “civilization” — is sometimes referred to as the “Ocean of Samsara.” Samsara is likewise referred to as the “Saha world of Patience,” in that it tries our patience — unrelentingly, and on a daily basis. Just when things seem to be going swimmingly, “Someone is always coming along to take the joy out of life,” as Grandma Nelly would often say. “Saha” is defined on Wikipedia as:

It is the place where both good and evil manifests and where beings must exercise patience and endurance (kṣānti).

Buddha likened his Dharma teachings to a raft, one that we ride — read: “cling to for dear life!” — sailing across the ocean of Samsara to the “other shore,” Nirvana. There are various turning points in the process of navigating the roiling waters — some positive, some negative — as with everything else in life. Whether they appear as positive or negative is largely a matter of interpretation, of course. The famous Ox-Herding Pictures illustrate various turning points on the Path, generalized to fit most anyone’s journey into what I call “The Original Frontier,” the title of my first book on Zen. By the original frontier I mean to point to the frontier of mind, itself. This is the frontier that Shakyamuni Buddha discovered, and entered, some 2500 years ago. It beckons to us still, today.

Perhaps the first turning-point in the process of spiritual awakening precedes discovering the hoof-prints of the ox, the first of the ten illustrations. These marks are sometimes interpreted as indicating one’s first inkling of the existence of the teaching, or buddha-dharma. The hoofprints resemble brush strokes, the obvious analogy being to the written record, which consisted of scrolls of painted calligraphy in ink in those times. Translation into today’s printed book format comprises the medium by which most of us first stumble across buddha-dharma.

However, something else — a prior turning-point— has to precede this event. In order to begin the quest for enlightenment, one has to feel that something is missing in their life. Otherwise, why would you even be looking? Master Dogen touches on this in his tract called Genjokoan (“actualizing the fundamental point”):

When you first seek dharma

you imagine that you are far away from its environs

But dharma is already correctly transmitted

you are immediately your original self

We are blithely skipping along with our everyday life, fat and happy, when one day it occurs to us: Is that all there is? “What’s it all about, Alfie?” However normal our circumstances may seem at the time, and however rich and full our life may appear, there seems to be something that is not quite right, something missing. Matsuoka Roshi emphasized this as the source of our anxiety, uncertainty, and the very unsatisfactoriness of Buddhism’s definition of dukkha, or suffering. Everyone feels this dis-ease, and some eventually come to Zen, to find what is missing.

Other turning points in life can precipitate a crisis of confidence, one which drives us to Zen in the first place, or makes us question whether Zen is really right for us. Or whether it works at all, for anyone. Let’s take a brief look at a few of the more obvious turning-points that come up with some frequency in life. These are FAQs brought up in private interview (J. dokusan) or practice discussion, from time to time. Perhaps you may see yourself in one of these pictures.

Changing Jobs

One of the most stressful turning-points that many people face today, and with ever-increasing frequency, is the need to change jobs. This may come about through a personal decision, or one made by one’s employer. Or one’s partner may receive an offer they cannot refuse, but it requires moving to another part of the world. In any case, the resultant demand for engaging in a job search, interviewing, and starting the new job, can be fraught and disruptive.

Some worry that they can not afford to continue their Zen practice during the transition, either from considerations of availability of time, or from a financial perspective, or both, as a supporting member of the Zen community. These judgments may not be true, or fully thought through, but the pressure feels very real at the time.

Zen practice — at home, or in a community — should not really be considered as necessitating an expense of either time or money, certainly not an expensive proposition. Zen is about the middle way between extremes, all about finding and maintaining balance in all things. In this sense, Zen is free. And portable.

When going through a job change, or any other stressful turning-point, you may need Zen meditation more than ever. It will help you to make the right choices and decisions, if you allow it. When you get back on your feet, and find yourself in a more stable position — financially and otherwise — there will be plenty of time and wherewithal to support your sangha, and your teacher. You really cannot afford not to continue practicing Zen, and even more so when you are in dire straits.

“Zen will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no Zen.” (With apologies to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.)

Divorce

Divorce, along with its true antecedents — unrequited love, unfaithfulness, or irreconcilable differences — is an even bigger bugaboo in today’s society than losing your job. Though you might not think so, based on the treatment of divorce in pop media. It is often the theme of comedy; the butt of alimony jokes; a target of shadenfreude; and, in some recently publicized cases, even celebrated — with ceremonies akin to a wedding. Divorce often accompanies, or triggers, a change in employment and residential status as well. They say “bad things come in threes.”

It is tempting to suggest that, if you are against divorce, just don’t get married in the first place. This may sound less crass, and may make more sense, in the context of the life of monastics. But we do not pretend to be Zen monks or nuns. They surely have their critical turning-points as well. Householders may just have a lot more of them on a daily basis, especially given the complex society of today.

I have been divorced once in my short life, and it is no fun. But the situation that led to the divorce was no bed of roses, either. Whatever the circumstances, divorce is definitely a turning-point. Whether it is “for better or worse” (a resonance on the wedding vows), it is, again, your call. If both sides are better off afterwards — as Buddha is said to have said about a “just war” — it may be considered a just divorce. Of course, there are always more than two sides to the dispute. Children often end up as pawns in the game, suffering even more short-term pain and long-term consequences than their parents do. Zen meditation is not a panacea, but can help to adjust to the new reality, even in these dire straits.

Empty Nesters

Speaking of parenting, there comes a time-of-life phase called “empty-nester,” at which point the rugrats are finally, and permanently (or so we hope) kicked out of the nest. Sometimes divorce follows on the heels of this exodus, and not coincidentally. The parents may keep the failed marriage together long past its shelf life, “for the sake of the children.” They may have decided to have children to “save the marriage” in the first place.

In the context of professional market research, based on sociology, I suppose, there are various such “time-of-life” categories, tracing the normal flow of maturation, through biological and culturally-determined changes, from womb to tomb. Like most other models from the soft sciences, these are employed mainly to structure the marketing of goods and services.

In the next episode of UnMind we will continue looking at turning points in our life, and how our practice of Zen meditation may help ease the transitions, and mitigate the sense of loss, as we move through the inevitable phases of “time-of-life.” As we witness the evolution of our own life, the evidence of the centrality of the teachings of Buddhism and Zen becomes ever more apparent, and not at all as pessimistic as they may have first appeared to us. The inevitability of aging, sickness and death, interpreted as negative developments in life, is accompanied by an increasing appreciation of their meaning and significance, and the importance of what we do with the opportunity. The good fortune of having been exposed to the Dharma and thereby being enabled to practice Zen and zazen in the context of the passing of time, is the real treasure of the Three Treasures. Please continue in your pursuit of Zen, no matter what stage of life you may be in.

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Continuing with the drive-time focus from the last segment is in keeping with the current thrust of UnMind. Each segment consists of a dissertation on issues typical of the USA, and coping with the international scope of global citizenship. Such concerns as over-consumption and the cult of the individual, plus lingering hangovers from 19th- and 20th-century ideas regarding right speech, action and livelihood, the right conduct sided of the Noble Eightfold Path, recur throughout as themes. The halo effect of right meditation proves to be our saving grace, in meeting, and managing to maintain, a genuine Zen practice in the face of daily life in a chaotic world.

I would like to key off of one of our Paramitas, or “perfecting practices,” the very first one, concerning Dana, or generosity. I suggest that you might practice generosity with yourself while driving in traffic, which may strike you as an odd concept. But if you can be truly generous with yourself, it is much easier to be generous with others.

According to my limited understanding of classical Buddhism, and likely the proto-Hinduism that preceded Buddhism, karmic consequences of our actions may be positive, negative, and even neutral. But there will be consequences, regardless. The judgment call as to whether a consequence may be regarded as positive or negative is based upon human perception and desire. Certain consequences, and outcomes, we want to happen; others we want to avoid like the plague. Incidentally, The first Plague of history turns out to be an unintended consequence of human activity. It was reputedly transmitted by commuters traveling along the Silk Road, with a generous assist from our rat cousins, and their fleas.

Nowadays, the greatest threat of pandemics is the enormous scope of human travel by land, sea, and, especially, by air. Every human being is, for the first time in history, one plane ride away from every other human being on the planet.

That any karmic consequence may be neutral — rather than necessarily positive or negative — may be a new idea to you. As an instance: if we continue breathing for the next five minutes, we are more likely to continue living. If we stop breathing for the next five minutes, then we will likely die. Whether this is a positive or negative consequence is, again, a judgment call. In most cases, life is preferable to death; but there are exceptions to the rule, which has become more of an issue with the life-extending technology available in modern medicine. The relatively neutral consequence is simply that life goes on, as long as we are breathing. But it may be in a vegetative state.

From a general, social perspective, life going on, and increased longevity, is considered a positive consequence, considering the alternative. In that sense, we are all consumers of life. So, the more, the better. From the perspective of Buddhism, we might say that longevity is desirable mainly in that living longer allows us more time, more opportunity, to awaken to the truth. This spiritual awakening is the highest value in Buddhism and Zen. “Buddha” means the “fully awakened one.” A consequence of Buddha’s life’s work is that we all have now been enabled to become aware of this truth, or Dharma.

For example, dukkha, a Sanskrit word usually translated as “suffering,” points to the unsatisfactory nature of this existence, encapsulated as “aging, sickness, and death.” This is the quagmire into which all sentient beings are born, and find themselves enmeshed. The wealthiest person in the world cannot turn back the clock, despite the hopeful claims of the medical and therapeutic professions; the cosmetics industry; plastic surgeons, et cetera. We see caricatures of this aspiration on a daily basis, for instance when certain botox and facelift icons appear on television. Or we see snapshots of the passing pageantry of life in Los Angeles and Manhattan, where women, in particular, as well as men, well into their 50s, 60s and older, strive to age gracefully by maintaining the outer appearance of an ingénue, or a dashing heartthrob.

No amount of wealth can prevent some forms of illness, in the final stages of life. Particularly when one’s lifestyle itself amounts to a cocktail of causes that accelerate the deterioration of body and mind, such as over-eating, smoking, taking recreational and diet drugs, and drinking alcohol to excess. The lifestyles of the rich and famous are often notorious for this kind of self-destructive dissolution, if you believe the press, which tends to exaggerate.

Science fiction to the contrary, no amount of wealth can forestall forever the death of this body and mind, in spite of earnest life-extending efforts in geriatric medicine and cryogenics. The sometimes frantic activities surrounding preservation of life, as witnessed in the Terry Schiavo case, for example, betray a profound fear of death and dying. This fear naturally emerges as a fear of aging, the evidence provided by visible, gradual, long-term, symptoms we see in the mirror each day. Of course, we do what we can, but it is futile to postpone the inevitable. An old Chinese poem includes the line, “Save the body; it is the fruit of many lives.” But we cannot save it in the sense of preserving it forever. Other than as a mummy, which historically has been the fate of some Zen ancestors as well as Egyptian royalty.

We who follow Zen do not arrogantly dismiss such fears as baseless. Nor do we pretend that Zen practice will allow us to go quietly into that dark night, though Zen’s history is replete with stories of masters dying with great dignity and composure. Zen is not overly optimistic in this regard. It does not present a pollyannaish view of existence, promising a heavenly rose garden after death.

Nor is Zen overly pessimistic. We don’t bemoan the fact that this existence is, intrinsically, of the nature of suffering, or impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality. We don’t insist that the natural process of aging, sickness and death is necessarily a negative consequence of existence. It is simply a consequence of existence. And, thus, our physical fate falls into the neutral category of karmic consequences.

In this way, Zen is simply realistic about the causes and conditions that we all face in life. Its teachings do not suggest, pretend, or imagine that there could be some other outcome. In Zen, coming to this clarity regarding karma is regarded as a kind of spiritual maturity.

We can usefully regard these causes and conditions, the “givens” of the equations of life, as natural koans, illogical riddles. Koans are not to be solved in the sense of finding a logical answer, as I get it. I understand that they are used as a central part of training in the Rinzai sect. In Soto Zen, we don’t make programmatic use of the 1700 or so classic koans in the record. But instead we recognize the reality in which we find ourselves, the very spacetime continuum — to borrow Einstein’s phrase — in which we are sitting at the moment, whether in the zendo or in the driver’s seat, as our immediate koan. This very reality “in front of your face” is the primordial koan. An ancient Chinese poem reminds us:

Emptiness here, emptiness there

but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes

“Emptiness” is used here to name the ideal of Buddhism and Zen: clarity of insight into the dynamic reality of existence. It does not indicate the “void” as the ultimate reality, set against our normal perception of everyday reality as being an illusion. This is not something we recommend obsessing over at full speed, or in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

But this infinite universe, standing always before our eyes, is the real koan, the koan of everyday existence. It is the meaning of everyday life that we have to penetrate, whether we realize it or not. There is no choice in the matter. Penetrating to the depths of it may result in realizing that “every day is a happy day; every day is a good day,” another old Zen expression. We should add “regardless” — regardless of circumstance, that is.

Most of our conventional cultural memes, as prescriptions for happiness — getting your go-to-hell-money; retiring to a life of travel and playing golf, and so on — can be seen, in this context, as avoidance techniques, evasive maneuvers. This kind of goal orientation amounts to a kind of self-indulgent cognitive therapy, in which we attempt to replace unpleasant thoughts — of failure, indebtedness, and so on — with pleasant ones. In which we attempt to conjure up a comfortable fantasy, in place of our dissatisfactory reality.

This is a natural tendency, and actively promoted by the culture, particularly in the West. So we should not beat ourselves up too badly over the fact that we have fallen for this societal scam. Most highly touted concepts of happiness are designed and intended as marketing devices to sell us products and services, as well as alternative lifestyles. Those that most closely match the archetypal American dream come with the highest price tag.

But the choices we have are not limited to only those that we think we can afford, within an economic paradigm. Zen is sometimes considered not immoral, but amoral, because it recognizes that we have complete free will at all times, and in every particular situation. That is, as long as we are willing to face the consequences — whether negative, positive, neutral, and unintended — of whatever actions we take.

For example, many people are out of work, looking for a job, or changing jobs. The world economy is forcing a re-evaluation of the definition of a “job” as paid employment provided by someone else. A job includes a place of work to which one goes every day, commuting to the office or factory; checking in or punching a time clock, under the watchful eye of management; and after putting in a sufficient effort for the day, returning to the comforts of home. These and other outdated cultural memes, customs and habits can affect our view of reality in subconscious, even insidious, ways.

But in our meditation practice, we are encouraged by Master Dogen — founder of Soto Zen in 13th century Japan, to stop the ordinary functions of the mind, setting aside all thoughts of good and evil, right or wrong. It is necessary to point out that this instruction, or advice, is intended to be followed mainly while we are on the cushion.

When we leave the cushion, and go into daily life — get into the car, and enter onto the expressway — we are constantly faced with choices of good and evil, right and wrong. We must make judgments regarding the behavior of others, which we cannot ignore beyond a certain point, as well as concerning our own behavior. Once again, in all of these instances, Zen is neither overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. It is simply realistic.

So this aspirational idea, that if we could somehow set aside all considerations of good and evil, right and wrong — that we can live blissfully unaware of all the obvious good and evil, right and wrong in the world and thus be happy — is tempered by the pragmatic nature of our Zen practice. Even when we sit on the cushion, we cannot completely avoid suffering, in the sense of the good and evil influences in our lives, and the right and wrong choices that we have made, and that we are forced to make, on a daily basis. The point is that it isour choice. And the consequences that flow naturally from the choice — from the action, or lack of action that we take — are also ours. Whether karmic or not.

Some old wise man said, “Through change, consume change.” Change is all there is. But we try to maintain status quo, out of fear of losing control. It is already out of our control.

As Ambrose Bierce pointed out in The Devil’s Dictionary, what we call an accident is, paraphrasing widely, actually the inevitable result of immutable physical law. So if you become distracted by this podcast, and run into the car in front of you, that so-called accident is the inevitable result of the immutable laws of physics, as well as of the choices you made that led to it. And, while you might have prevented it, if you did not prevent it, still, it was no accident. Your driving in traffic is no accident. Nor is listening to my podcast.

So be careful out there. If you consider that the driver of that vehicle that just recklessly cut in front of you may be someone you know and like, who is just under a lot more stress than you are at the moment, it may make it easier to respond to the situation in an appropriate manner, without adding the overlay of anger and condemnation that we reserve for strangers. It may also make you safer in the long run.

Once you are safely ensconced back on your cushion, you might remember what it was like when you were on the commute, and come to appreciate your zazen even more.

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Continuing with our exploration of how to actualize a thoroughgoing Zen practice in the midst of life in the 21stCentury, we will take a closer look at one of the situations in which many of us find ourselves: the daily commute. Which would have been the furthest thing from the mind of Shakyamuni Buddha, or his descendants in India, China, and Japan — though the denizens of those areas of the globe are now fully immersed in the consequences of overpopulation and modern transportation, just as we are in America.

This segment of UnMind was originally part of an early effort to launch a podcast called Drive-Time Zen, designed for drive-time on the expressway during the daily commute, or while traveling on highways and byways. Commuting to and from work too often results in stressful times spent in gridlock, especially in major metro areas such as Atlanta. Even driving to your favorite vacation spot can become an arduous chore. This phenomenon is a uniquely modern-day manifestation of suffering, not shared by the Founder and Ancestors of Zen. But it also presents a learning moment, an opportunity to remember and embrace the compassionate teachings of Buddhism.

Zen’s unique style of meditation, zazen, is central to success in this effort. Of course, driving in today’s high-speed conditions should not be considered an opportunity for meditation for obvious reasons, as intense meditation can alter perception. Altering perception at 60 or 80 miles per hour is not necessarily a good idea. But the cardinal aspects of Zen’s meditation — upright posture; deep, abdominal breathing; and above all, exercising your full, undivided attention — can be helpful while in the driver’s seat.

The conflation of stress, choice, and Zen outlines the three dimensions of the situation: the emotions that we feel; the source, and potential relief, of the stress; and the attitudes from Zen we bring to bear on the particular case of the commute. I ask you to consider a major contributor to the frustration and stress level we frequently feel while on the commute: we feel we have no choice in the matter.

From what we might call the liberated viewpoint of Zen — liberated from convention — the reality is that, ultimately, we indeed have no determinative choice in certain matters, such as aging, sickness, and dying. But that we have no choice concerning more trivial daily affairs — such as submitting to the commute — is largely a delusion. In all such instances, the truth is that we do have other choices. The real reason we do not entertain the possibility of doing something different, is our fear of the consequences, known or unintended, that may follow from our actions.

This goes to the concept of karma, from a root Sanskrit word kr, meaning “to do or make”; in other words, to take action. If we take action, any kind of action, karmic consequences are sure to follow. The theory is a bit like the more familiar formulation, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” from Newton’s Laws of Motion. However, there is not necessarily anything equal, nor exactly opposite, about the consequences that follow from actions we take in daily life. This is what makes the theory of karma so slippery. It is not a simplistic concept of linear cause and effect.

Other consequences in life — such as having a good marriage, a good job, an easy commute to work, and so on — are certainly better than the alternative, and may be conducive to spiritual awakening, as well. But they are not central to our basic happiness. We consider such attributes of life as peripheral, if not mere circumstance, though the daily grind can come to dominate our lives. But for those who follow the Zen way, the issue of awakening to our innate buddha-nature is paramount, a central concern, even in the midst of busy modern life. And the fact that most of us do not experience this kind of spiritual insight is regarded as the true source of our suffering and misery. Traffic congestion only exacerbates it.

Thus, the complex of circumstances that finds you driving in traffic while listening to my podcast on your daily commute, is just that: circumstantial. It can not be central to your happiness, though you may blame your frustration and distress on the circumstances.

Naturally, when we are unhappy, or angry, we look to hold something, or someone — other than ourselves — accountable. We can imagine that if only we did not have to drive to work every day, we would be happy. We complain that the powers-that-be should do something to fix this bumper-to-bumper mess. Or if only our company — the management, our boss — would simply allow us to use flex-time, or work from home to avoid the commute, then we would be happy.

But when we take an unvarnished look in the rearview mirror, on the many experiences of our lifetime, we will likely see that, indeed, the circumstances of our life have constantly changed, and frequently. Such stabilizing aspects of life as our career; place of employment; and friends and family connections; have often changed quite radically. And yet, we may not have been any happier for it, once we had settled into our new set of circumstances. Once the change becomes our “new normal,” we have the time to find other reasons to be dissatisfied, within the circumstances of our new situation.

If we are honest with ourselves, over time we come to see this disparity clearly, and its insidious effects. Things that we feel are “wrong” with daily life are easy to point out. But when those things change, we are all too ready, even eager, to put something else in their place. Or the fact that something changed that we did not want to change, becomes the updated version of what is wrong with the world. If not with the world, then what is wrong in my little world, that keeps me from being happy. And thus prevents my enjoying a completely wholesome lifestyle, and finding a fulfilling existence.

As a generic placeholder, we tend to relate all of these issues to income; or primarily, our relative lack of income. If only we won the lottery. If only we had inherited wealth. If only we somehow got lucky and struck it rich. Then, we could be happy. Because then, we wouldn’t have to commute to work. We wouldn’t have to do anything that we didn’t really want to do.

While there is some truth to this, and it is understandable that everyone is looking to get their “go-to-hell-money,” as it is called in business circles, retiring to a lifetime of ease, luxury, travel, godawful golfing; the ideal circumstances of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” that many admire and aspire to. We would have achieved what is generally consider “doing well,” or “success.” As a relevant aside, Taoism asks, with its usual, incisive subtlety: “Which is more destructive: success or failure?”

When we look at the actual lifestyles of the rich and famous, we begin to see a few cracks in the façade. This is not simply schadenfreude, or class envy. But from a Zen perspective, once we have all the money we need, other aggravations will dependably insert themselves into the niche formerly occupied by our pressing need to pay the bills.

All the circumstances of life, including driving in traffic congestion on the expressway — when subsumed into the larger context of fundamental causes and conditions of existence — can be seen as rather trivial, not so bad after all. If we find ourselves stuck in a traffic jam, whether commuting to and from work or not, this is, for the present moment, our koan. A koan is an illogical riddle — a conundrum — one that we are facing in the present moment, and attempting to penetrate the deeper meaning of it.

In fact, no one actually needs to commute to work, in any absolute sense. No one needs to be driving in the ever-increasing traffic nightmare on our expressways. But not many people are willing to face the consequences of refusing to do so. Without going into all of the other obvious options that you may have in your life (you know them better than anyone else), just consider the consequences. What would be the worst-case scenario, if you decided, tomorrow, that you were not going to do this anymore? Or what if you decided — right now — to quit? Pull off at the next exit, and go back home, text the boss or “call in well”? Tell your boss that you will not be coming in today, because you no longer need to. You are okay now. You have awakened from the nightmare.

And then, consider the range of consequences to follow. It would not be the end of the world. It might be the end of your world, as you know it now. But it would not be the end of the world.

The main point here is that when you tell yourself that you have no choice, you are lying to yourself. Zen recognizes that we always have a choice. We have the choice to do the right thing in the circumstance; we have the choice to do the wrong thing in the circumstance; and we have the choice to do what may turn out to be neither right nor wrong, but simply a necessary change. Which of necessity entails taking a risk.

It should offer some comfort, or relief, to realize, and accept, that you are caught in this present, unpleasant circumstance of the traffic jam because of choices you have made, and choices that you continue to make. What you may not realize is that you are absolutely free to do something completely different. That is, as long as you are willing to watch all those dominoes fall. If you are able to let go of all of the attachments that you have to the things that would change, in ways intended and unintended, owing to your change of choice, then you can do whatever you damn well please, as my dad often said of my mother. Recalling Johnny Paycheck’s hit, “Take this job and shove it!”

For the moment, however, you can postpone this fundamental decision, the liberating but terrifying recognition of the reality of choice, in the face of stress. There is no hurry. This decision will still be waiting there for you, when you return to it. As my grandma would say, “Don’t worry about finishing that work; it will still be there when you come back to it.” You can rest comfortably in your car for now.

So please breathe deeply, sit up straight, and pay full attention. Some of the benefits of meditative practice can hitchhike along with you, driving to and from work or whatever other destinations to which the road takes you.

Hopefully, this discussion will have given you a broader context in which you can clearly see that this consequence — this koan in which you are sitting behind the wheel — is really of your own making, part and parcel of your life. It is a temporary consequence of a cascade of decisions you and others have made. It is not an accident.

When you have an opportunity, download the next UnMind, tune in next time. It is a choice you are making. Meanwhile, gassho, name of the Buddhist bow in Japanese. I am bowing to you, wishing you the best. May you be well, on or off the road.

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ZEN AT WORK, AT HOME, AT PLAY

Following on the last segment of UnMind, this one is based on questions raised by the same member of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center community. She moved here from India, and later moved out of the Atlanta area. If you are interested having in a regular online dharma dialog with me, as she does, let me know. And If you have questions regarding the integration of everyday life with your Zen practice, please don’t hesitate to send them to me for future podcasts.

Last time, we considered some of the seeming contradictions with the compassionate teachings of Zen Buddhism that arise in the modern work space. This time we will look into some of the more personal aspects of our relationships, inside and outside of the formal Zen community, or Sangha

It seems to me that one of the submitted questions bridges all the various contexts of the social sphere of daily life, which refers back to my model of the Four Spheres of Influence that form the context of our practice, whether in ancient or modern times (see the illustration in the post):

1. [What does Zen have to say] on the nature of relationships?

This highly generalized question may appear too broad, at first glance. But this issue of relationships, and how we handle them, comes up repeatedly, in our daily lives. We all have multiple relationships that last for many years over our lifetimes, coming and going like the seasons. Others are daily interactions; some are infrequent, and many are once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. The most difficult tend to be with immediate family.

Someone said that the “dharma of marriage,” or something to that effect, is the most difficult of dharmas. One might substitute “family” for “marriage.” Some might insist on using “in-laws” as the determinative term. But all would admit that the closer the bond, the more fraught with emotion, like the old song, “You always hurt the one you love.”

But Zen challenges the very notion of our definition of relationships, beginning with that of the self. This approach is inherently circular, studying the self with the self, itself. In Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation, Master Dogen advises us to set aside all of our usual preoccupations with everyday concerns when entering into zazen:

For practicing Zen a quiet room is suitable; eat and drink moderately

Put aside all involvements and suspend all affairs

Do not think “good” or “bad” do not judge true or false

Give up the operations of mind intellect and consciousness

Stop measuring with thoughts ideas and views

Have no designs on becoming a buddha

That second line is also translated “Setting aside all delusive relationships.” Which begs the question, What relationship is not delusional, if any? Delusion is a central concern in Buddhism. Its seminal teachings question the evidence of our very senses, in the opening verses of the Heart of Great Wisdom Sutra:

[Given Emptiness] no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind

No seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, no thinking [until we come to]

No realm of sight [and all the rest; until we come to] no realm of mind- consciousness

For those of you who attend our services and chant this sutra, you will not recognize the phrases “until we come to” or “and all the rest,” which have been deleted from the current consensus translation that we have adopted. They appear in the first English translation that Matsuoka Roshi approved at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, my home temple. “And all the rest” stands in for repeating all the senses over again, and is inserted repeatedly as a kind of shorthand for making the original verses a bit briefer.

The other phrase, “until we come to” is more relevant to the overall meaning of the chant. It implies that the process of meditation — to which the Heart Sutra stands as a testament — entails a natural progress of segueing through deeper and deeper levels of apprehending “emptiness,” or shunyatta, in Sanskrit.

Beginning with our conscious awareness of form, feeling, thought, impulse, and consciousness itself; then expanding to the senses, one-by-one; then on to challenge our concepts of ignorance, including our attitudes toward old age and death. And finally, suffering itself, along with its cause and cessation; as well as the Path. Then, knowledge itself; and any idea of attainment that we may harbor. This section constitutes the most sweeping dismissal of all of our various dualistic concepts of Buddha’s teachings, along with our perception and conception of our own reality. Everything is called into question.

When it comes to the relationships between ourselves and others, it follows that as long as our apprehension of the self is delusional, then all relationships must be delusional. Only if and when we see through the self can we have an unbiased appreciation of relationships.

In this light, I ask you to consider what is the most singular aspect of any relationship that applies equally to all relationships, whether with intimates, family and friends, or inanimate objects, for that matter? In terms of people-to-people connections, most will offer something like “trust,” “love,” or “forgiveness,” et cetera. “Can’t we all just get along?” as the current trope has it. But Zen goes deeper, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say.

Remember that the three “marks,” or salient characteristics of suffering, Buddhism’s dukkha, are “impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality.” From this rather terse description, I would suggest that the first is the most salient aspect of any and all relationships: that they are impermanent, first and foremost. The good news is that a bad relationship is a temporary annoyance or worse; the bad news is that the good relationships are also fleeting.

That any relationship is guaranteed to be imperfect is common knowledge, though it does not prevent us from aspiring to perfection, especially in others, finding Mr. or Ms “right.” That they are insubstantial may be challenged as to the karmic consequences of, say, begetting children. That seems like a pretty substantial entanglement, and is probably the main rationale for the choice of most monastics to remain celibate.

Several of the other, related questions raised by our interlocutor would fall under this same examination in meditation. Such as, What does Zen have to say…

…on not deciding to marry?

…on fertility, or having children, or raising family?

…on the nature of jealousy?

…on forgiveness?

…on victim mentality?

…on self harm?

I think we can see that these are all variations on the same theme, tied to the reification of the self, and in the absence of insight into dukkha and shunyatta. This is not to be dismissive of these concerns, or to make light of them, but only to say that you will most likely find the answers to such questions on the cushion, or as an aftereffect of sitting in meditation, and not in my words.

In zazen we examine the very nature, and question the very existence, of this so-called self, the source of so much of our suffering. It is not that the self does not exist. It is just that it may not exist in the way that we think it does, which is causing all the trouble.

This is not a doom-and-gloom conclusion to come to. Buddhism is not pessimistic, and not overly optimistic. It is just realistic. And Zen represents its most realistic application to real life. To return to the Heart Sutra, we find that it pivots to a more hopeful, sunny conclusion, after freeing ourselves from the snare of the small self:

With nothing to attain a bodhisattva relies on Prajna Paramita

and thus the mind is with-out hindrance with-out hindrance there is no fear

far beyond all inverted views one realizes nirvana

All buddhas of past present and future rely on Prajna Paramita

“Prajna paramita” means “perfecting of wisdom” in Sanskrit, an ongoing and open-ended process. There is “nothing to attain” because we already have everything we need. The mind is originally, and naturally, “without hindrance.” It does not depend on anything we do or do not do. Our true self is already complete and sufficient to itself. We do not, or should not, really need relationships, to be happy. This is not a self-centered idea, but should allow us to sustain real and healthy relationships. If all we bring to a relationship is personal need, then it is bound to distort that relationship. If we are “happy in our own skin,” we may have something to offer in all of our relationships.

At the risk of repeating myself, my model of how this works, or should work, posits four dimensions, or levels, of samadhi, a Sanskrit term that has become part of the jargon of Zen. We may regard it as a kind of centered balance in the midst of all things, including relationships. I think we can demystify it by thinking of the zazen meditation posture as the ultimate in “physical samadhi.” Sitting in this upright posture still enough, for long enough, we begin to experience “emotional samadhi”: more calmness, less anxiety. The prevalent monkey mind relaxes into “mental samadhi”: more clarity, less confusion, particularly regarding the teachings of Buddhism. We begin to directly experience what Zen is pointing at. And finally, the goal we want to achieve in relations, “social samadhi”: less friction, more harmony at work, at home, and at play. Your results may vary, of course.

The “true self” is selflessness, “neither self nor other than self,” as the Ch’an poem has it. Just as our “true home” is homelessness. Whether you find that fact to be a cause for work, or play; for joy, or chagrin, is entirely up to you. “Examine it thoroughly in practice.”

This concludes my response to the questions under question. If you have more, I am open to considering them. You may find my email address on the ASZC website. I hope this has been useful, and encouraging to your practice.

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ZEN AT WORK, AT HOME, AT PLAY

This segment of UnMind is based on some questions raised by one of the members of ASZC. While she moved out of the Atlanta area, she stays in touch through weekly participation in my Online Dharma Dialog program. As an aside, if you think you may be interested in establishing a dialog about your practice, let me know via email — you can find my address on the ASZC web page.

This person was not born in the USA, and so has the compound complications in her daily life of assimilating into a foreign culture, and communicating in a second language, much as Matsuoka Roshi had to do in bringing Zen to America back in 1940. Her questions are as insightful and revealing as Sensei’s choice of areas of life in America to relate to Zen in his dharma talks. We will be publishing many of them in a new collection called “A Pioneer of American Zen: The Wisdom, Warmth and Wit of Soyu Matsuoka, Roshi.” Keep a sharp eye out for it in June of next year.

Let us turn to her questions, addressing each of them from a perspective of Zen and Design Thinking. They are primarily about relationships with other people, and how they affect your relationship to yourself, if that is not too redundant. We will take them on in a slightly different order than submitted, beginning with those that have to do with the work environment, and the community of colleagues we find there. These work-related issues, taken together, come under the rubric of “Right Livelihood,” on the traditional Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism.

1. How does one practice being grounded, or doing the right thing, in a competitive world?

The answer to any such question, from a Zen perspective, will necessarily include taking the issue to the cushion, in zazen, and then bringing any conclusions and recommendations from what transpires on the cushion back to the office, laboratory, or whatever context in which you find yourself working.

Let’s contextualize this issue a bit to begin with, looking at the bigger picture before boiling it down to any personally actionable items. I think it necessary and reasonable to suggest, and to take into account, that the very nature of the zeitgeist of right livelihood in our times adds to the stress load that we are carrying on our shoulders today. This is not your daddy’s job market. And it certainly is not the one that Buddha confronted, nor any of the other Zen masters in the lineage from India, China, or Japan. The very scope of manifold options available today, choosing between jobs and side hustles that may seem to offer advantages in terms of flex-time or working from home, versus employer preferences for dragging you into the office — entailing social dimensions of in-person contact with associates and management — may simply add to the frustration of making the right choice of career, and its accompanying working modality, for each individual.

Choices between careers that allow for remote employment and those that don’t are becoming yet another factor in whether one chooses to train in various trades, or aspire to what used to be called “higher learning.” This so-called higher learning basically amounts to preparation for a professional trade, instead of one based on hands-on skills and hourly labor, quaintly referred to as “blue-collar” jobs, or the Hard Working Americans politicians love to talk about. As if they themselves are hard-working. Many are opting for the simplicity of the latter, where they may make a dependable living wage, in many cases higher than their counterparts, in what used to be called “white-collar” occupations.

Naturally, time-of-life considerations come into play, as articulated by those who research these kinds of issues, such as part-time student employment, married with children, empty nester, the “sandwich generation,” and so forth. Daily life is so complicated these days that we may need to develop the “Sixteen Noble Truths,” and the “Fifty-four-fold Noble Path.” One dimension being paying off student debt.

As testament to the scale of complexity of this question, if you search “being grounded in a competitive world,” you get:

About 688,000,000 results (0.44 seconds)

Somewhere in that virtual warehouse full of pages you may find the kind of advice that fits your situation, but it is entirely possible that you will not. Access to unlimited information is not necessarily a solution to this problem, or any other aspect of living a Zen life, in the midst of the chaos of modern society. More information just adds insult to injury. But from the perspective of Design Thinking and Zen, let’s consider just the single aspect of what we mean by “competition.” Here, let’s include a second, corollary question:

1. How to avoid harboring resentment when you are with the same people on a daily basis, and you have some history [of conflict].

I developed a couple of concepts for exhibits, working with some of the subcommittees and sponsoring corporations in the leadup to the 1996 Summer Olympics here in Atlanta, who were then marketing the event around the emergent issues of recycling, reusing, and repurposing of waste materials. The various Atlanta-based sponsors wanted to get credit for their efforts in this endeavor, for being “environmentally friendly,” touting its implications for the ecosystem, the “good citizenship” of corporations, and so on. In one of many meetings, it dawned on me, with startling clarity, that the seeming distinction between competition and cooperation is one without a real difference. That is, in team sports, such as basketball or soccer, the outcome is usually determined by which team manages to better cooperate amongst its members, beating those who are beset by individuals showing off, “hot-dogging,” “show-boating,” and often missing the play that another member might have made.

Sports that are more dependent upon individual performance, such as skiing, speed skating, or swimming, are less dependent upon collaboration. That is, until one takes into consideration the training process that leads to elite performance. The athletes’ collaboration with their coach or coaches, and their level of ability to take direction, as well as the wisdom of the coaching staff, become determinative factors in their success.

For athletes already at or near the top of their game, the coach does not have to move their dial very much, raising the bar as high as humanly possible. Think Michael Jordan, or Katie Ledecky. However, as in Zen meditation training, if the athlete is not willing to do the work, no amount of coaching, however skillful, is going to help.

Bringing it back down to earth, one thing to consider is a truism: the strongest competition is to be found in cooperation. Or, better, collaboration. And remember, the modern theory of collaboration is that it is only possible, or at least most doable, between two individuals. Think Lennon and McCartney. Or Lenin and Trotsky.

If you are suffering from “bad boss syndrome,” or feeling excluded from the good-old-boy network at work, try homing in on each of your apparent competitors — or, worst-case, enemies — one at a time. Get them alone in a private setting, non-threatening and away from the fray, off-campus and out-of-office. Interview them as to their aspirations, beyond the obvious goals and objectives in the company. See if you cannot find some common ground on which to build a better, more collaborative relationship, while still keeping it professional. Try this with all your co-workers. Begin with the least competitive to yourself and work your way up the ladder. Remembering the old nostrum:

Be kind to those you meet on your way up the ladder; they will be the same ones you meet on the way down.

On the personal front, remember to foster the “halo effect” of Zen, in particular the three dispositions of zazen, when you find yourself stressing out at your work station or in the board room. Assume the posture. Follow the breath, counting if necessary. Expand your attention to include everything, without bias. As the ancient Ch’an poem encourages us:

Move among and intermingle without distinction.

Your body and mind will appreciate it — including your neuronal networks, heartbeat, and endocrine system. So will your fellow workers. They may begin wondering, and asking, how you can be so calm? when everyone else is freaking out, usually over trivia.

Extensions of this approach include chanting on the commute, meditating while walking through the campus and buildings where you work, and treating the vicissitudes of the day as Dharma. Buddha’s teaching, and the practice of Zen, is only one thing. But that “one thing” is all-inclusive. The Yogi welcomes adverse circumstance as grist to the mill. “Through change, consume change,” as the ancient admonition has it. And change, after all, is all there is. You will never run out of it.

Next time we will look at other more personal aspects of relationships, expressed in other incisive questions from the same, sincere source. If you find such issues bubbling up in your everyday swim in the ocean of Samsara, please don’t hesitate to send them to me — again, you may find my email on the ASZC web page. And check out my two available books on this timelier-than-ever subject: “The Original Frontier”; and “The Razorblade of Zen” (see links in the post). Meanwhile, keep on sitting. Someday you will find your zazen to be “still enough,” and for “long enough,” to overcome all obstacles at work, at home, and at play.

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THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO

In one of the recent segments of this podcast, titled “What if This is Hell?” I indulged a “what if” conjecture, speculating that this earthly life may not be some kind of test, as many religions conceive of it — wherein those who pass the test go to their reward in heaven, while those who fail are condemned to an eternity in hell — but that this level of existence, if there are levels, may actually be Hell itself, with a capital “H”. I then explored the implications of that supposition. In the last segment, titled “Change the World,” I carried the thread a bit further, issuing a challenge to consider: What would you actually do, if you had the power to change the world? Where would you begin?

Unfortunately, these days, everything is subject to being politicized, and even classified as partisan, especially if we dare to be even mildly critical of the status quo. So I want you to indulge me in a huge caveat, here. Please set aside any knee-jerk reactions to read a partisan or political slant into my discussion of the world as I see it, and my fears of where it may be going in the near future. I don’t have all the facts at my disposal, needless to say, which places me in the same class as all other current commentators and writers. Nobody has their arms around “the full catastrophe” — thank you, Zorba the Greek. These issues are not merely a matter of political opinion. They may turn out to be not only legal in their impact, but lethal in their unintended consequences.

In an early piece, lost somewhere in my ever-expanding archive of prior writings, I made the somewhat specious point that it is not lost on me — that those who are (or have been) most resistant to recognizing the validity of concerns over global warming, or the less threatening label, “climate change”; and those who have been loudest in sounding the alarm about it — tend to be reflective of the two dominant political parties, as currently defined.

I am also keenly aware of another correlation, that the former tend to populate the so-called “flyover,” rural areas of the country — let’s call them the “Reds” — while the latter are more concentrated in coastal, urban locales — let’s call them the “Blues,” in keeping with the tropes of the times, as well as Orwell’s characterization of the permanent state of global warfare in 1984, if memory serves, reporting on the battles between “the reds” and “the blues,” with our side constantly winning, of course.

Thus, my hopefully ironic point was, if worse comes to worst, and the coastal areas are flooded by rising ocean waters owing to the worst scenarios predicted by the “woke” faction coming true, some may welcome the idea that we will have a truly “red” country from coast to coast, though on a significantly smaller continent, as all of the “blue” coastal cities are now under water. A crude but compelling rendering of one potential consequence of our actions, or inactions, following from our inattention to Mother Nature’s mandates.

But seriously, folks. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the doomsday predictions — of what are, after all, the majority of scientists around the globe — are for real. The oceans are irreversibly warming, and the ice caps at both poles are melting. The South Pole being the most threatening, apparently being defrosted from underneath by warming Antarctic waters. When those ice cubes fall into the drink, that glass of tea is going to overflow, and quickly. To the tune of a ten-foot rise in the world-around oceans, according to those who do the math. Goodbye New York, LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Jacksonville, Miami, Savannah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, you say, we will just all move inland; head for the hills, the high ground.

The interior of the country is not exactly a paradisical refuge these days, what with natural-man-made disasters resulting in losses of crops, diminishing harvests, and resultant general mayhem disrupting country folks’ formerly pastoral lifestyle. Any refugees from the coasts will encounter forest fires, drought, flash floods, and geometrically expanding tornados and hurricanes, along with air pollution on steroids. What have historically been labeled as “once-in-a-lifetime,” “500-“ or “1000-year” events may now be annual, seasonal, or monthly, while increasing in magnitude each year

Further, in today’s divisive political climate, it is anyone’s guess whether the “blues” fleeing from the coastal deluge will find themselves welcomed, or confronted, by the “reds” — many of whom are armed to the teeth — as the scarcity of resources increases, and easy access to the necessities of life decreases.

Another major concern: major coastal flooding will not only take out major cities, or major parts of them, but will also disrupt the seaports through which much of the commerce of the world flows, including imports of fresh food increasingly shopped and shipped from other countries.

The most absurd example of this trend I have heard of had to do with a ship from China, a floating chicken factory, that regularly docks at a port in California to pick up a boatload of live chickens, then sails a wide circle in the ocean while “processing” them, only to return to the same dock and offload the meat. This is somehow more profitable than processing the chickens on the farm. And this is only one example of the international scale and scope of how the world “works” these days.

Throw in the possibility of yet another pandemic, with supply lines permanently — not temporarily — disrupted, and you begin to see the dystopian possibilities.

In this case, what’s a Zen person to do? One suggestion would be to not sweat the small stuff. And its corollary: it’s all small stuff. At least, our usual, trivial preoccupations are.

Those of you who follow my podcast may recognize the following anecdote, from UnMind #111: “Analysis and Analogy.” Please forgive the redundancy — and the absurdity of quoting myself — but the story has relevancy to our current thread of Design Thinking and Zen, in the dystopian present. It bears repeating one more time.

We once had a young man visit the Zen center who had trained with Tony Packer, the heir apparent to Roshi Philip Kapleau, who had famously turned down an offer to take up his mantle, the robe of a transmitted Zen priest. She had published a book on her approach to practicing Zen without calling it Zen, titled “The Work of This Moment” if memory serves, which I asked to borrow from him. One of her main points in the text was to avoid falling into “comparative thinking,” which was exactly what this young man had done. From the first time he joined the meditation sessions, he continually questioned and criticized each and every detail of the protocols we followed at that time.

To address his concerns, I invited him to give a guest talk on his opinions, or hers, which was received with the sympathetic skepticism you would expect from a community of folks who had all had similar reservations, as to the protocols of a practice inherited from Japanese and Chinese traditions.

I also made up a parable, or analogy, for him to consider. To wit: A monk is travelling through a remote mountain pass late at night, needing to get to the other side of the range. A sudden storm blows up, forcing him to seek shelter. Fortunately, he finds a cave nearby, and settles down to wait out the weather. But as his eyes adjust to the dark of the cave, and his sense of smell adapts to the stale air, he begins to notice the remains of carcasses strewn about the floor. Just as he realizes that he is ensconced in the lair of some kind of beast, and is preparing to make his escape, a large, furry silhouette appears in the entrance, blocking him from leaving. Standing there, shaking in fear, he asks himself: Now, what is the best way to confront this situation: standing flat on my feet, or up on my toes?

In a situation like this, the details are clearly not all that relevant, and can even create a distraction from what is, starkly, relevant: the “clear and present danger.”

Similarly, in the situation we are now confronting globally, details fall into insignificance. We are left with the question posed by Master Dogen, in Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation, when he asks:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism, how can you be satisfied with the transient world? Our bodies are like dew on the grass and our lives like a flash of lightning — vanishing in a moment.

If you have listened to UnMind #53: “Principles of Zazen,” this will sound familiar and, again, somewhat redundant, but if anything bears repetition, it is Dogen’s teaching. What is “the most important thing” in all of Buddhism?; after he has rattled off several pages of things to consider. The same question gets to the point in our present dire straits: what is the most important thing to do about it? How to go about “actualizing the fundamental point,” another Dogenism from his classic Genjokoan. This is the koan of the present moment in history, which may mark the end of history as we know it.

The end did not come in 1989, when Francis Fukuyama controversially and prematurely predicted that liberal democracy had triumphed, and in his 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” fulfilling the earlier vision of Hegel (see link in the post):

Hegel had argued that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states.

Would that it had come to pass, but like all visions of the future — utopian or dystopian — certain determinative factors were left out of the calculation. Just as legal trumps political, no pun intended; natural trumps legal and political. Mother Nature will not be denied, no matter how “evolved” we consider the machinations of humankind to be.

We are all complicit, if not equally responsible, for the kettle of hot water in which we find ourselves. The problem of human survival on a global scale is too vast and variable to be amenable to discrete definition, so we are forced to resort to the old trope to “think globally but act locally.” In Buddha’s time it was no different, the “act locally” part, that is, but in terms of thinking globally, they did not have the overwhelming glut of information that we “enjoy” today. But Buddha’s prescription for addressing the problems of life and society still apply today. Take good care of yourself and those around you.

Whatever comes to pass, and however our lives come to their conclusion, there was never any other ending to the story. What matters is what we do about it now. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, demonstrating the zazen posture, “This is the most you can do.” Zen is a way of action. If you get straight with yourself on the cushion — your life, your death — you will more likely know what to do, and when to do it, off the cushion. Don’t look to me, or anyone else, for specifics, but “Be a light unto yourself.” Spread the word.

ZEN VERSUS DAILY LIFE 7

Worst Case

We have lived to see

The worst-case scenario

Let us sit it out.

THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO

In one of the recent segments of this podcast, titled “What if This is Hell?” I indulged a “what if” conjecture, speculating that this earthly life may not be some kind of test, as many religions conceive of it — wherein those who pass the test go to their reward in heaven, while those who fail are condemned to an eternity in hell — but that this level of existence, if there are levels, may actually be Hell itself, with a capital “H”. I then explored the implications of that supposition. In the last segment, titled “Change the World,” I carried the thread a bit further, issuing a challenge to consider: What would you actually do, if you had the power to change the world? Where would you begin?

Unfortunately, these days, everything is subject to being politicized, and even classified as partisan, especially if we dare to be even mildly critical of the status quo. So I want you to indulge me in a huge caveat, here. Please set aside any knee-jerk reactions to read a partisan or political slant into my discussion of the world as I see it, and my fears of where it may be going in the near future. I don’t have all the facts at my disposal, needless to say, which places me in the same class as all other current commentators and writers. Nobody has their arms around “the full catastrophe” — thank you, Zorba the Greek. These issues are not merely a matter of political opinion. They may turn out to be not only legal in their impact, but lethal in their unintended consequences.

In an early piece, lost somewhere in my ever-expanding archive of prior writings, I made the somewhat specious point that it is not lost on me — that those who are (or have been) most resistant to recognizing the validity of concerns over global warming, or the less threatening label, “climate change”; and those who have been loudest in sounding the alarm about it — tend to be reflective of the two dominant political parties, as currently defined.

I am also keenly aware of another correlation, that the former tend to populate the so-called “flyover,” rural areas of the country — let’s call them the “Reds” — while the latter are more concentrated in coastal, urban locales — let’s call them the “Blues,” in keeping with the tropes of the times, as well as Orwell’s characterization of the permanent state of global warfare in 1984, if memory serves, reporting on the battles between “the reds” and “the blues,” with our side constantly winning, of course.

Thus, my hopefully ironic point was, if worse comes to worst, and the coastal areas are flooded by rising ocean waters owing to the worst scenarios predicted by the “woke” faction coming true, some may welcome the idea that we will have a truly “red” country from coast to coast, though on a significantly smaller continent, as all of the “blue” coastal cities are now under water. A crude but compelling rendering of one potential consequence of our actions, or inactions, following from our inattention to Mother Nature’s mandates.

But seriously, folks. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the doomsday predictions — of what are, after all, the majority of scientists around the globe — are for real. The oceans are irreversibly warming, and the ice caps at both poles are melting. The South Pole being the most threatening, apparently being defrosted from underneath by warming Antarctic waters. When those ice cubes fall into the drink, that glass of tea is going to overflow, and quickly. To the tune of a ten-foot rise in the world-around oceans, according to those who do the math. Goodbye New York, LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Jacksonville, Miami, Savannah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, you say, we will just all move inland; head for the hills, the high ground.

The interior of the country is not exactly a paradisical refuge these days, what with natural-man-made disasters resulting in losses of crops, diminishing harvests, and resultant general mayhem disrupting country folks’ formerly pastoral lifestyle. Any refugees from the coasts will encounter forest fires, drought, flash floods, and geometrically expanding tornados and hurricanes, along with air pollution on steroids. What have historically been labeled as “once-in-a-lifetime,” “500-“ or “1000-year” events may now be annual, seasonal, or monthly, while increasing in magnitude each year

Further, in today’s divisive political climate, it is anyone’s guess whether the “blues” fleeing from the coastal deluge will find themselves welcomed, or confronted, by the “reds” — many of whom are armed to the teeth — as the scarcity of resources increases, and easy access to the necessities of life decreases.

Another major concern: major coastal flooding will not only take out major cities, or major parts of them, but will also disrupt the seaports through which much of the commerce of the world flows, including imports of fresh food increasingly shopped and shipped from other countries.

The most absurd example of this trend I have heard of had to do with a ship from China, a floating chicken factory, that regularly docks at a port in California to pick up a boatload of live chickens, then sails a wide circle in the ocean while “processing” them, only to return to the same dock and offload the meat. This is somehow more profitable than processing the chickens on the farm. And this is only one example of the international scale and scope of how the world “works” these days.

Throw in the possibility of yet another pandemic, with supply lines permanently — not temporarily — disrupted, and you begin to see the dystopian possibilities.

In this case, what’s a Zen person to do? One suggestion would be to not sweat the small stuff. And its corollary: it’s all small stuff. At least, our usual, trivial preoccupations are.

Those of you who follow my podcast may recognize the following anecdote, from UnMind #111: “Analysis and Analogy.” Please forgive the redundancy — and the absurdity of quoting myself — but the story has relevancy to our current thread of Design Thinking and Zen, in the dystopian present. It bears repeating one more time.

We once had a young man visit the Zen center who had trained with Tony Packer, the heir apparent to Roshi Philip Kapleau, who had famously turned down an offer to take up his mantle, the robe of a transmitted Zen priest. She had published a book on her approach to practicing Zen without calling it Zen, titled “The Work of This Moment” if memory serves, which I asked to borrow from him. One of her main points in the text was to avoid falling into “comparative thinking,” which was exactly what this young man had done. From the first time he joined the meditation sessions, he continually questioned and criticized each and every detail of the protocols we followed at that time.

To address his concerns, I invited him to give a guest talk on his opinions, or hers, which was received with the sympathetic skepticism you would expect from a community of folks who had all had similar reservations, as to the protocols of a practice inherited from Japanese and Chinese traditions.

I also made up a parable, or analogy, for him to consider. To wit: A monk is travelling through a remote mountain pass late at night, needing to get to the other side of the range. A sudden storm blows up, forcing him to seek shelter. Fortunately, he finds a cave nearby, and settles down to wait out the weather. But as his eyes adjust to the dark of the cave, and his sense of smell adapts to the stale air, he begins to notice the remains of carcasses strewn about the floor. Just as he realizes that he is ensconced in the lair of some kind of beast, and is preparing to make his escape, a large, furry silhouette appears in the entrance, blocking him from leaving. Standing there, shaking in fear, he asks himself: Now, what is the best way to confront this situation: standing flat on my feet, or up on my toes?

In a situation like this, the details are clearly not all that relevant, and can even create a distraction from what is, starkly, relevant: the “clear and present danger.”

Similarly, in the situation we are now confronting globally, details fall into insignificance. We are left with the question posed by Master Dogen, in Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation, when he asks:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism, how can you be satisfied with the transient world? Our bodies are like dew on the grass and our lives like a flash of lightning — vanishing in a moment.

If you have listened to UnMind #53: “Principles of Zazen,” this will sound familiar and, again, somewhat redundant, but if anything bears repetition, it is Dogen’s teaching. What is “the most important thing” in all of Buddhism?; after he has rattled off several pages of things to consider. The same question gets to the point in our present dire straits: what is the most important thing to do about it? How to go about “actualizing the fundamental point,” another Dogenism from his classic Genjokoan. This is the koan of the present moment in history, which may mark the end of history as we know it.

The end did not come in 1989, when Francis Fukuyama controversially and prematurely predicted that liberal democracy had triumphed, and in his 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” fulfilling the earlier vision of Hegel (see link in the post):

Hegel had argued that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states.

Would that it had come to pass, but like all visions of the future — utopian or dystopian — certain determinative factors were left out of the calculation. Just as legal trumps political, no pun intended; natural trumps legal and political. Mother Nature will not be denied, no matter how “evolved” we consider the machinations of humankind to be.

We are all complicit, if not equally responsible, for the kettle of hot water in which we find ourselves. The problem of human survival on a global scale is too vast and variable to be amenable to discrete definition, so we are forced to resort to the old trope to “think globally but act locally.” In Buddha’s time it was no different, the “act locally” part, that is, but in terms of thinking globally, they did not have the overwhelming glut of information that we “enjoy” today. But Buddha’s prescription for addressing the problems of life and society still apply today. Take good care of yourself and those around you.

Whatever comes to pass, and however our lives come to their conclusion, there was never any other ending to the story. What matters is what we do about it now. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, demonstrating the zazen posture, “This is the most you can do.” Zen is a way of action. If you get straight with yourself on the cushion — your life, your death — you will more likely know what to do, and when to do it, off the cushion. Don’t look to me, or anyone else, for specifics, but “Be a light unto yourself.” Spread the word.

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Eric Clapton’s version of the song, “Change the World” — made popular on the soundtrack of the 1996 film “Phenomenon” — is mainly about personal relationships, as are most country-western or rock-and-roll songs. But we can take a larger view of the same idea. What if you could actually change the world, and to a substantial degree? What would you make different? In other words, what is your definition of the problem?

As a person trained in design-build processes and the philosophy of design thinking, which, again, is basically the practical application of problem-solving to daily life needs, I would like to think that I could improve things. But as a current trope reminds us, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi. So — what, exactly, is wrong with the world? And — what can be done about it?

Zen Buddhism’s Four Great Vows lay out some hopeful aspirations in this regard:

Beings are numberless I vow to free them

Delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them

Dharma gates are boundless I vow to enter them

The buddha way is unsurpassable I vow to realize it

Rendered in various translations and phrasings, these statements are defined as the vows of bodhisattvas, which means something like “enlightening beings.” Bodhisattvas are not limited to Buddhism, but include such luminaries as Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, et cetera. Those who dedicate their lives to helping others.

We may regard Buddhist bodhisattvas as a special breed of change-agents. They volunteer to be reborn again and again, endlessly, as often as needed to help all other beings cross over to the “other shore of Nirvana,” defined as complete liberation. And there are a lot of other beings, counting only the human species. This stands in contrast to the imputed goal of Buddhists to avoid being reborn. These amount to timeless vows, then, embracing the really big picture: the infinite and eternal life of the universe.

It might be a worthwhile exercise to consider those things that we tend to criticize in everyday life as being unsatisfactory, if not dead wrong. Unsatisfactoriness is one of the many meanings of Buddhism’s dukkha; “suffering” is the more common translation. But for example, how can death be “wrong”? The fact that everything that is born inevitably dies, cannot really be wrong, in any absolute sense. Murder, accidental deaths owing to drunk driving, and all manner of injustice visited upon innocent victims are, of course, wrong. But how can natural death be wrong, even when massive, such as in natural disasters? We grieve and mourn when death takes our loved ones, friends, and even our family pets. We can agree that it is not right, but can we really say that it is wrong?

Master Dogen admonishes us to “think neither good nor evil, right or wrong,” when doing zazen.

If you could fix it so that no one near and dear to you ever died, what would that look like? In my case, by now I would have a household of about a half-dozen dogs and maybe two dozen cats, all aged and infirm, feeding and cleaning up after them. But “Aha!” you say, “What if they never aged?” We could fix that, too — in the best of all possible worlds — thank you, Pangloss. Then I would have a menagerie of canines and felines all at each other’s throats. Or, perhaps, one permanent cat, and one forever dog.

I came across one answer to what is wrong with the world in a recent New York Times column titled “Who Truly Threatens the Church?” by David French; it begins:

There’s a popular story in Christian circles that’s literally too good to be true. According to legend, in the early 1900s, The Times of London sent an inquiry to a number of writers asking the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” The Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton responded succinctly and profoundly: “Dear sirs, I am.”

The real story is just as profound, but less succinct. In 1905 Chesterton wrote a much longer letter to London’s Daily News, and that letter included these sentences: “In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer his ideation is only a hobby.”

Chesterton is sounding like a closet Buddhist here. Those of us who take up the way of the ancient Sage of India take full responsibility for our lives, in particular what we do, or fail to do, with the opportunities life as a human being presents. The monastic model is one lifestyle variation on this theme. The householder track is another.

Setting aside the legendary versus the actual circumstances of this incident — which, by the way, is always a major consideration in contextualizing ancient teachings, Buddhist or otherwise, making them “relatable” to today’s context — it is clear that taking personal responsibility for the “full catastrophe” of our lives is not an exclusive premise of Buddhism. But it is definitely the starting point on the path of Zen.

In The Dhammapada, “The Path of Truth,” a pocket-sized book published by Parallax Press, 423 verses attributed to Buddha include inferences related to both lifestyles:

[20.15.] Death carries the unaware man away while he is still busily acquiring children and animals, much as a rampaging flood engulfs a sleeping village.

[16.] When death comes, [17.] neither children, father, or other loved ones can offer refuge. Aware of this, the wise behave well. Don’t postpone right action, but clear the path to Nirvana.

Note the implicit pejorative, “the unaware man.” It begs the question, “Unaware of what?” Which in turn recalls the old standard, “Where Do I Begin?” There are admittedly an infinity of things of which we are all unaware, in contrast with those we acknowledge. But I think Buddha is more pointed than that, indicating what Master Dogen later referred to as “the most important thing in Buddhism”: clearing the Path to liberation.

Somewhat eerie, his choice of analogy to a rampaging flood, especially in light of the recent cascading, catastrophic effects of climate change. Some things never change. But they can, and do, get worse.

Note also the peculiar expression, “acquiring children and animals.” This is a counter-cultural turn-of-a-phrase in today’s environment, where both Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino recently fathered children, while enjoying a ripe old age of octogenarians, like myself. In the agrarian context of Buddha’s time, if is doubtful that there was such a thing as “childhood” as we conceive of it, in the post-industrial, and post-Piaget, era. Children, like animals, were likely conscripted into the labor force, tasked with producing enough food to feed everyone. Which is still a worldwide problem. Not much progress there.

But there is also an implicit insinuation that having children, and thus preserving the human species, may not be the highest aspiration in life, as some would have it today. We are constantly entreated to remember the children, that we want to leave the next generation a better world than that in which we grew up. If this is truly a worthy goal, or one of the most worthy of many goals, I think we have to admit that we have failed, dramatically. If world peace is the true goal of Buddhism and world religions, we must confess that they have failed. After 2500 years of influence, Buddha’s prescriptions for the fundamental ills of the world have not been preventative, like a failed vaccination.

Not only have we failed to control population to any significant degree, we also have not managed to prevent wars between nations, which I suppose the cynic might point to as the ultimate form of population control. If these humanistic ideals comprise the reason-for-being of the world’s great religions, they have all failed, in spite of the fact that many of their ostensible believers hold positions of power around the globe. We may also say the same of leaders of science and philosophy, minus any positions of great power.

This rather overwhelming and oppressive picture may suggest, to some, a return to the perspective attributed to early Buddhism, where the big idea was to get off of the wheel of birth and death altogether, the ideal of the “never-returner.” To others, it may trigger the survival instinct, leading to a survivalist lifestyle, the dystopian determination to be the last person, family, or community alive on Earth. Back to the caves, squirreling away as many provisions as we can muster.

To the practitioner of Zen — as would be the case with Buddha himself, if he could time-travel to the present — it is hard to be surprised by the chaos we see erupting around us, as we have watched it accumulate inexorably for several decades now. But we may be forgiven for being aghast at the vast scale and scope of it. Anyone paying attention is beginning to sound like Chicken Little, because the sky is actually falling, all around us. It reminds of the surprisingly prescient old gospel song, “O Sinner Man — where you gonna run to, all on That Day?” Amongst other nightmares, the “rock was a-meltin’” and the “sea was a-boilin’.” At 90-degrees plus, the Gulf has become the bathtub of Mexico.

Turning, or returning, to our cushions in this scenario may look like the height of irresponsibility, but it may be our last resort. If it is too late to do anything to hold off the onslaught of Armageddon, the best strategy may be to prepare to face the inevitable. I wish I could shine some sunny optimism on the scene, but I am afraid it may no longer be “Morning in America,” ironically floated as a campaign ad in 1984. You can’t get any more Orwellian than that. More on what the future may look like in the next segment. Stay tuned.

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Let’s recall our initial outline of areas of interest we are using to compare and contrast the Zen life with our usual preoccupations. To refresh your memory, they were, and are:

— Lifestyle: Monastic versus Householder

— Physical: Zazen versus the four Cardinal Postures

— Biological: Meditative breathing versus everyday situations

— Psychological: Shikantaza versus ordinary attention

In this segment we will take up the last of the four — attention — the third disposition, after posture and breath, of Matsuoka Roshi’s simplified model of zazen, Zen’s upright seated meditation.

One of his repeat instructions was that, “When the posture, breath, and attention all come together in a unified way, this is the real zazen.” Which implies that we may think we are practicing zazen, when we are not. And what determines whether we are, or not, is, mainly, our attention. We can be sitting in the natural, upright posture; and following the natural, full breathing cycle, all the while paying attention to the wrong thing; or, perhaps better to say, not really paying attention at all, in the Zen sense.

So, let’s examine what we mean by “attention,” and later, how it works in zazen. In marketing and design circles, attention is regarded as a kind of commodity, upon which we may place a value. That billboard on the expressway attracts a certain amount of attention from the drivers passing by. The owner of the billboard can charge a certain amount of rent, based on the number of “eyeballs” exposed to its message, the client’s message.

In today’s post-print media market, we are saturated with electronic media competing for our attention, seeking to maximize the amount of “clicks” or “hits” a message gets online, as well as on “legacy” or “traditional” media channels such as film, broadcast television, radio, and print publishing.

So one way to think about paying attention in Zen, granted that it is a choice we make, is to ask ourselves: What is the most important thing to pay attention to? Of course, I can hear you responding with the hip and flip, too-clever-by-far, all-too-predictable trope: “Everything.” Like the hotdog joke — the Zen master will have one with everything. Which, seriously, raises the question of whether that is even possible. Actually paying attention to everything simultaneously, that is.

Master Dogen, in his seminal tract on zazen, Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation, at one point says:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism

how can you be satisfied with the transient world?

Our bodies are like dew on the grass and our lives like a flash of lightning

Vanishing in a moment

This lands about two-thirds of the way though the text, and by then he has said maybe a hundred or so things about Buddhism, so it begs the question, “Which of these is the most important?” But I think we can safely surmise that it has something to do with attention.

The legendary Master Bodhidharma, credited with bringing the direct practice of Buddha’s meditation to China at the end of the 5th century CE, taught that it is not necessary — or should not be necessary — to do zazen, but that we have only to “grasp the vital principle.” Of course, for most of us, we have to burn through a lot of zazen to be able to grasp the vital principle of Zen. Notable exceptions include Master Huineng, the sixth in the Chinese succession in the 7th century, who underwent a profound experience of insight without benefit of a teacher, or any prior practice. This rare event is traditionally attributed to “merit accumulated in past lives.” But such prodigies are few and far between.

My theory is that the main reason that most of us have to sit in zazen to such an extreme extent is that the load of ignorance, personal opinions, and rationalizations we carry on our shoulders has accumulated to that extent. In design and art circles, we speak of two different fundamental kinds of processes working with material media. One is “additive”: lumping clay onto an armature to build a bust of Napoleon, for example; the other is “subtractive”: chipping away the stone to reveal Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

I find zazen to be mostly the latter. We are chipping away at our own ignorant ideas and preconceptions of reality to get to the bottom of things. And it’s a long way down.

So what we have to pay attention to is, or may be, “everything,” in one sense; but by taking one thing at a time. And there are a lot of things in the pile we have accumulated. “Pile,” by the way, is one meaning of “skandha” — a “heap,” or “aggregate” — of many like things. Which gets a mention early in the Heart Sutra chanted frequently in most Zen wheelhouses around the world.

O Shariputra, form is no other than Emptiness; Emptiness no other than form

Feeling, thought, impulse, and consciousness are likewise Emptiness

So there you have it. The four aggregates of sentient experience of which we can be conscious — the form, or appearance, of things; the feelings, both tactile and emotional, that we experience on both instinctual and intentional levels; the stream-of-conscious thoughts relentlessly emitted by the brain; and the underlying impulses triggered both subliminally and on the edges of awareness. And finally, consciousness itself, can become conscious of consciousness, “form and reflection” beholding each other, in Tozan Ryokai’s memorable phrase from Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi.

Back to Bodhidharma, who refers to this same point in an oblique manner: The great Buddhist saint went on to say that if and when we do zazen — in spite of his reluctance to claim the necessity of doing so — there are four basic aspects of ordinary awareness that we can observe, or pay attention to: the breath; physical sensations; emotional sensations, or mood swings; and finally, the machinations of the mind: our various thoughts or concepts, about everything and nothing. A four-pointed model.

I think one of Bodhidharma’s main points is that in observing the breath, we note that it comes and goes momentarily — we never breathe the same breath twice. Likewise for physical, emotional, and conceptual phenomena — they are ever-changing, by nature impermanent. Well, “Duh!” you say. But these are four of the main aspects of what it is to be a sentient being — those we most associate with our personal identity: This is MY breath; I am hot or cold, in pain, or comfortable; this is MY moodiness; and these are MY ideas. And yet all four are essentially ephemeral, like “a bubble on a stream,” to borrow from Shakyamuni himself.

So where does this pervading sense of continuity come from, this “persistence of vision,” and all the other senses? And what are we to make of this contrarian stanza from Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind, by Master Sosan:

To move in the One Way

Do not reject even the world of senses and ideas

Indeed accepting them fully

Is identical with true enlightenment

As I discuss in excruciating detail in the chapter on “Deconstructing Your Senses in the Most Natural Way,” from my first book, ”The Original Frontier” (I know, I know, it is weird to be quoting from your own writing), as we settle into the relatively extreme stillness of zazen — fixed gaze and all — a kind of profound sensory adaptation begins to set in, which is also referenced in the Heart Sutra, just after the bit about the skandhas:

Given Emptiness

[there are] no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;

No seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching;

No realm of sight; no realm of mind-consciousness

So now we are getting a clue as to what to pay attention to in zazen. And the implication that things are not exactly as they seem to be, sensory-wise. If we simply sit still enough for long enough — and it is anything but simple — everything changes. Through the natural process of paying strict attention to the senses, the process of adaptation takes us through what is sometimes referred to as samatha, or samadhi — calming or stilling the mind; and eventually, and hopefully, vipassana, kensho or satori in Japanese; or what is referred to as “spiritual insight.” Which, by definition, is different from, but inclusive of, normal sight. Do you “see” what I mean? Then the Sutra goes on to say:

And so no ignorance; [and] no end of ignorance;

No sickness, old age and death; no end of sickness old age and death

Whoa! Here is a whiplash-inducing claim. Transcending the senses — as we ordinarily experience and interpret them — takes a seemingly sudden turn, eliminating the very ignorance that has been bedeviling us all along. It also magically relieves us of the burden of the three main marks of dukkha, or sentient suffering: sickness, old age, and death. This challenges our credulity. That those things we fear most in life: the loss of life itself, through the random crapshoot of contracting one of the innumerable fatal illnesses threatening us; or the natural process of aging out of life, just as we age out of our professions and familial responsibilities. Is it all just a figment of our imaginations?

In summation, we are all paying full attention every moment of our waking day. But, like the proverbial monkey jumping from limb to limb of the tree of consciousness, it seems random and pointless. The challenge, and the question, becomes what is the most important thing in the flux-and-flow of daily life to pay attention to, and more precisely, how?

I would submit that we begin with accepting, and even embracing, the flux-and-flow itself. Master Nagarjuna, 14th in the Indian succession, where Bodhidharma was 28th, said something to the effect that enlightenment entails “seeing into the flux of arising, abiding, and decaying.” And it seems to me that that “abiding” piece is one source of our confusion. If anything is abiding, it is not for long, not in geological time, nor in the quantum realm. So a big part of what we are observing, or paying attention to, is change itself, the passing pageantry of life.

I would suggest that, as a benchmark, simply paying more attention to posture and, more pointedly, your breath, will help extend the halo effect of your meditation into every situation you confront in daily life. It may also begin to bring home the deeper meaning of the seemingly trivial and mundane activities which otherwise amount to distractions.

There is much more to say about attention, of course, as there is about posture and breath. But for the sake of simplicity, and the practical constraints of this podcast, I will leave that to your imagination and to your discovery in zazen. And I will leave you with a final caveat concerning the nature of the realization of insight, as well as the limits of our imagination, from Hsinhsinming:

With a single stroke we are freed from bondage

Nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing

All is empty; clear; self-illuminating;

with no exertion of the mind's power

Here, thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value

For more on Soto Zen, its meaning and application to our modern life and practice, please check out our online and in-person schedules on the Atlanta Soto Zen Center website, and register for my Master Class on the Soto Zen liturgical verses.

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In the introductory segment to this UnMind series, we posited that amongst the many dimensions of everyday life, there are several contrasting pairs and sets of ideas that may be usefully employed to illustrate how our pursuit of a more comprehensive Zen life might be framed, including:

— Lifestyle: Monastic versus Householder

— Physical: Zazen versus the four Cardinal Postures

— Biological: Meditative breathing versus everyday situations

— Psychological: Shikantaza versus ordinary attention

Of course, it is impossible to truly separate these dimensions in the living dynamic of daily life, as will be seen, but it is necessary in order to simplify the presentation. In this segment, as promised, we will primarily discuss one of the physical dimensions: the zazen posture: upright sitting versus the four Cardinal Postures: normal sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. In context of the complexity of physical existence — which of course includes the biological and psychological, which we will take up at a later time — for now we want to focus simply on posture, specifically the zazen posture, which is very specific in itself. But we will get into its relationship to other aspects of posture, such as sitting at your desk, driving in traffic, running and crawling.

Remember where this all begins. It is something of a stretch to even regard the proprioception of an infant — their awareness of the disposition of their body in space — as a “posture.” Swaddled in their mother’s or father’s arms, lying in the crib, et cetera, the baby is probably only dimly aware of its separation from the environment, let alone the various postures its body assumes. Then as we grow, we learn to raise our head, prop our shoulders up off the mattress with our arms, turn over, sit up, and eventually stand, pulling ourselves up with the side of the crib. Eventually we escape the crib onto the floor, where we gradually learn to stand without assistance, and take the first tentative steps of our larger sweepout into the world.

Recall that before we sit, we are lying down; before we stand, we sit; before we walk, we crawl; before we run, we walk. There is a natural hierarchy of posture development, mostly determined by that relentless teacher, gravity. We will return to an examination of gravity on the cushion. Sitting, as Zen’s primary posture, is not an arbitrary choice.

Consider lying down as our initial posture, and when we are most at rest. It is the least aggressive of postures, an attribute captured by the common trope, usually expressed as an admonition, not to “take it lying down.” In other words, to not let yourself be a “doormat,” letting others walk all over you. This is the typical stance of the self-reliant, American cult of the individual, and sometimes takes a dark turn these days, when someone feels “dissed,” especially in a public situation. All too often ending in deadly violence, with guns a-blazing. So, “posture” can have a non-physical, or psychological connotation as well: the posture, or stance, that we take up in social situations.

But let’s keep it simple for now. Consider the supine or prone position of lying down. Surprisingly to me, “supine” means face-up, and “prone” means face-down, according to the dictionary. Then we have the well-known “fetal position,” and all the “tossing-and-turning” variations associated with sleeping, or the ravages of insomnia, fed by anxiety.

However, as I mention in “The Original Frontier,” when lying down to sleep, we can shift gears from our usual approach to getting some shuteye, to one informed by zazen. When we engage the upright sitting posture of Zen, the main physical difference between it and lying down is the axis of the spine and spinal cord in relation to gravity. This may seem unimportant at first glance, but I think it is critical to the way zazen works. Coming into balance, direct vertical alignment with gravity, is one of the “secrets” of zazen. “Samadhi,” a jargon term of the meditation business, means, roughly, “balanced” or “centered,” or both. Sitting up straight is also characteristic of most styles of meditation on offer, but other approaches do not emphasize it as much as does Zen.

This explains the stress — no pun intended — on arching the small of the back, pushing forward and down; while stretching the back of the neck, tucking the chin in with the face slightly downcast; thus creating two pressure points, one in the base of the neck pulling upward, the other in the base of the spine where it joins the tailbone, pushing forward and down. Maintaining these two pressure points keeps the spine aligned in a rigorous, and vigorous pose that feels more like a comfortable, refreshing stretching action than ponderous, muscular resistance training. It has been likened to a lion or tiger ready to pounce (like the lion asana in yoga, but not as exaggerated). I like my own analogy of a cobra rising off the floor — ready to strike the unwary, maybe — but perhaps only dancing to the music of the snake-charmer’s flute.

The horizontal positions — prone or supine — obviously change the relationship of the spine to the effects of gravity. We all know that we shrink with age, owing to our vertical stance, which began long ago on the savannah, ever since we stopped running on all fours.

At a certain point in my life, it became clear that taking naps in the daytime might be a good idea. When I first attempted to sleep when tired, either physically or mentally or both, I found it very difficult. Everything, from the relatively bright daylight, to the ambient sound, was a distraction, and struggling to sleep in the midst of it just wore me out even more. I tried tamping down the volume to a dull roar, by wearing a blindfold and earplugs, which only seemed to make things worse I began to wonder why I could not sleep when I wanted to, when at other times it seemed relatively easy to nod off. I began to look for the “switch,” that cellular-level toggle that the brain throws when it switches from conscious awareness to the unconscious, or the dream state.

I resorted to just paying full attention to whatever was happening — the random airplane flying over, traffic on the street, sounds emanating from the neighbors, the birds, peepers and crickets — and especially to body sensations. At first, it was easy to concentrate on one part of the body at a time: my head on the pillow, which felt surprisingly heavy, once I lifted it and released it. The relatively lightweight impressions of the extremities — hands and feet — was also a bit of a surprise, while the mass of the trunk, and upper legs and arms, seemed to be where the unrest was centered. I had learned of the “relaxation response” during my past engagement with hatha yoga, so I began running through that in an orderly fashion, squeezing and relaxing various muscle groups one at a time. But the intentionality of the exercise seemed to keep me awake. It was only when I surrendered to the totality of what was happening — seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking — sound familiar? — that I began to doze off. So yes, not zazen, but perhaps “neruzen” (in Japanese, za is “sit”; neru is “sleep”)

Later I learned a method which Hakuin Zenji, the famous 18th century Rinzai master, taught to his students, which you can find in either the first or second of Trevor Leggett’s early Zen readers. It is called “Naikan Tanden,” and has to do with synchronizing the breath with an exaggerated supine position. I will not go into detail here, but if you are interested in following up this thread, please let me know. Suffice it to say that one thing I discovered was that by stretching the body in an extreme, symmetrical supine position — flat on your back and extending the lower legs with feet pressed together, intoning the four visualizations Hakuin learned from his teacher — sure enough, after some time you begin to drop off. At the end of a long exhalation. Which we will talk about more in the segment on Zen breathing.

Recall the details of Master Dogen’s instructions for assuming the zazen posture, which we still follow, virtually verbatim, eight centuries later. Again, we will not go into detail here, assuming you have heard the instructions more than once by now. If not, again, do not hesitate to contact me. For now let’s look at another situation in which we find ourselves sitting: driving in rush hour traffic. The first podcast I ever recorded was called “Stress and Choice,” under the rubric of “Drive-time Zen.” I reasoned that the most stressful and common experience most of us have in modern times is the commute, to and from our place of employment. With the surge in remote working arrangements, this is changing somewhat, but in any major metropolitan area, is still predominate. The advent of self-driving vehicles may make a further dent in this dilemma, but that has its own stress-inducing aspects as well, so far as the technology has been refined to date.

So the amount of transfer, or halo-effect, that zazen can have on the driver’s seat may seem insignificant, especially if you haven’t tried it. Along with other Zen practices that we may take up later in the series, such as breathing, and even chanting, minor adjustments to your posture while driving can have an outsized effect. Simply sitting up straighter, applying the petal-to-the-metal approach to the lower spine, and pulling back on the chin to achieve the cobra posture, can help keep you alert and attentive to what is happening in front of your vehicle, behind it, and on both sides.

Our attention expands in zazen to take in everything, mitigating the possibility that you may get fixated on one aspect of the dangerous situation you are in — on the modern expressway at full speed — and helping you to maintain a degree of calmness while fully aware of the clear and present danger. It can also help you recognize that everyone else around you is in the same boat, but they may not have the advantage of training in the alert, upright posture of zazen. That is why they are doing foolish and dangerous things like speeding, jumping lanes, cutting others off, and generally making a bad situation much worse, in their heedless hurry to get where they are going. It reminds me of the line from Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind:

Living in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult
But those with limited views are fearful and irresolute
The faster they hurry the slower they go

Another specific suggestion will suffice to wrap this segment up; I will leave it to your creativity to conjure and discover more grafts from Zen practice, such as how your daily walking may be informed by your experience of walking meditation, or kinhin. The next time you find yourself doing some heavy lifting, such as yard work on a hot and muggy day, as I have been doing this summer, when you take a break to cool down and catch your breath, instead of slumping in a lawn chair, set a stool or bench in the shade and sit in the zazen posture, removing your work gloves and dropping your hands into the mudra, eyes downcast, et cetera. You should be able to feel and/or hear your heartbeat right away, if the exertion has been extreme enough, and you are probably panting at a rapid rate.

You might want to begin with counting the breath, but if and when you can hear or feel your heartbeat, count your pulse beating instead, and notice how many beats per cycle of breath, counting only the out-breath. If you are like me, you will notice that your breath soon slows down, and with it, your heartbeat. With each exhalation, let the lungs empty out as completely as comfortable; and allow a little pause before inhaling. As that moment becomes longer with each cycle, the inbreath becomes fuller, giving the body the oxygen it needs; and the exhalation becomes more like a sigh of relief, relaxing the body, the breath, and your heartrate. Soon you will be good to go again.

In the next segment, we will take up the unique approach to breathing characteristic of Zen. Meanwhile, keep breathing, of course, and slow down to the rapid rate of change of the present moment. You will be safer — and happier — because of it.

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Continuing our exploration of what aspects of Zen training we might reasonably incorporate into our daily life activities, we turn to the aspect of breathing. This we listed under the rubric of the biological: meditative breathing versus everyday situations. With an initial caveat to remember that we are not talking about breath control, but finding and following the natural breath in various circumstances.

Beginning with how we are instructed to breathe while sitting in zazen, the very fact that we are following instructions skews the process in the direction of controlling, but, much like Master Dogen’s “backward step,” we relinquish our tendency to control, while merely observing the breath as dispassionately as we learn to observe our own thoughts. The body is doing just fine with controlling the breath, thank you very much, and we would do well to stop interfering.

Nonetheless, because our habits of breathing have become as conditioned as our habits of thought, wiser and cooler heads have compassionately defined our approach to breathing as an adjunct to calming the mind. So we are told to begin with a full exhalation, pushing the breath out through the mouth in short bursts, the so-called “bamboo breath,” for the short sections of a bamboo culm, until the lungs are empty. Then allowing the in-breath to fill the lungs entirely. This amounts to a palliative to our tendency to palpitate, breathing rapidly and shallowly, in the upper part of the lungs.

Various ways of focusing our attention on breathing cycles, such as counting them in some simple way, are suggested as provisional methods for corralling our wandering mind, sometimes referred to as “monkey mind.” So already we can see that we cannot separate the “physical” or “biological” dimensions of the method from the psychological. Zen, and zazen, are one holistic practice. But we cannot address it in words in a holistic manner, language itself being dualistic.

However, after taking it apart intentionally, it will put itself back together naturally, in a more harmonious manner. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “When the posture, breath, and attention all come together in a unified way, that is the real zazen.”

This process of unification — or, to use Dogen’s term: merging — is not something we can force, of course. It has to take its own good time to integrate into our natural frame of mind, which again follows from assuming the natural upright sitting posture, and following the natural breath. The body knows this posture, and the body will show you this breath, if you but allow it to.

So, likewise, carrying the breath over into daily life also becomes a process of following, or observing, the breath as it naturally adapts to circumstances. We all experience this process during what Grandma used to call her “daily constitutional” — her morning or evening walk in the great outdoors. When setting out, if we pay attention, we may note that we are inhaling once with every four steps, exhaling with four or more. Then after a while, if we continue at the same pace, the breath picks up to every three steps, then two, then each step may coincide with an inbreath or an outbreath. In other words, we end up panting at a brisk pace. We may even have to sit for a moment to “catch our breath.” While sitting, the breath starts slowing back down as we build up the oxygen deficit that triggers the rapid breath.

At this point of relatively extreme exertion, you may be able to feel, and even hear, your heartbeat, at its more rapid frequency, and louder pulse. When sitting in zazen, this is the point at which I recommend switching to counting the heartbeat instead of the breath. You will notice that your heart is beating so many times per breath cycle: maybe four beats per inbreath, four per outbreath. If you continue paying undivided attention, you may note that the outbreath is becoming longer, the number of heartbeats extending, to perhaps six or so. You may also realize that the pulse itself is slowing down, as the breath is becoming fuller, again replenishing the oxygen the body needs.

Let me model this process for you, following my own natural cadence synchronizing my heartbeat and breath, which slows to about five cycles per minute. Your results may vary. “In — two, three, four; out — two, three, four; in — two, three, four; out — two, three, four; in — two, three, four; out — two, three, four. And so on.

It should be obvious that this same focus of attention on the breath will carry over into other situations, where our level of physical exertion is not exaggerated, but our emotional reactions may be triggering an acceleration of our heartbeat. Such as stressful meetings at the office, or encounters with perceived enemies or threats, even conflictual exchanges with family and friends.

Remembering to turn our attention to our breath, and in turn to our heartbeat, we can recognize that our feelings of discomfort or anxiety have a physical, biological source: a rapid heartbeat. And that our way of dealing with it can be on that level, rather than on the social level of argumentation and interpersonal conflict. We return to the inner, so to speak, to confront the outer. Turns out there is no separation of those apparent binaries.

As we extend the discussion to a more granular breakdown of time and action, as also suggested in the early going of this series, we see that we can apply this hyper-focus on breath to the many disparate events we confront in daily life, such as the different dayparts, as the restaurant industry identifies them, when the menu of interest changes: morning; afternoon; evening; nighttime — featuring breakfast, lunch and dinner, and so on. A focus on breath may go a long way to tempering our appetite for food, as breathing is a greater source of vital energy than is our intake of food. Not that we can live on air.

But if we pay greater attention to the daily chores mentioned earlier, such as taking our meals, while shopping for the food, with the additional angst occasioned by inflation, and other anxiety-inducing demands such as maintaining health and hygiene, housekeeping, and pursuing our livelihood, including the commute to and from work, focusing on the breath throughout cannot hurt, and may actually help.

Next time you are on the expressway, in rush-hour traffic, just turn your attention to your breath for a while. See if you are not surprised by the rhythm and possibly raggedness of it. You might have a sense of remembering, “oh, yes, of course, I had forgotten there for a moment,” caught up in the aggravating circumstances of the moment. Mindfulness is primarily a process of remembering. Remembering what is important, what is actually happening in the moment, what we can, or should, pay attention to, in spite of the innumerable distractions we encounter.

Again, by extension, we remember calendar events, and mark their passing with rituals, protocols and celebrations, such as birthdays and anniversaries, on an annual basis; more frequent occasions such as weekend routines, holidays and vacations. In fact, we time our lives against this sequence of repeat events, which have little or no basis in brute reality — there is no such thing as a “weekend” in nature, for example — but they have a certain reality in the social sphere. If you do not think so, just forget to wish mom or dad happy birthday next time. So what does this have to do with breathing?

All of these ways of marking time reduce to daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual events. But as the 8th century Ch’an poem, Hokyo Zammai—Precious MirrorSamadhi, by Tozan Ryokai, founder of Soto Zen in China, reminds us:

Within causes and conditions, time and season, IT is serene and illuminating

The emphasis is mine, capitalizing the “IT” in this statement, which is traditional for translators’ choices in rendering the importance of “what” (J. inmo) these teachings are pointing at. It is the inexpressible, the ineffable, the essence of all phenomena, the noumenon. From Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind, the earlier poem by Kanchi Sosan:

Understanding the mystery of this one-essence

we are released from all entanglement

So there is something else afoot, amid all the comings and goings of daily life over time, and inherent in all our conceptual markings of it: a more fundamental frequency, the pulse and breath of life and consciousness itself, or Mind with a capital “M.”

Throughout, and underlying, all of these changes experienced as varying concepts of time, there is a fundamental frequency, manifested biologically as heartbeat and breath, in a polyrhythm of complementary counterpoint. Remembering, and returning to, this basic tempo, and using these events as a daily reminder to do so, will help to tune us into the groove, following the metronome built into our body and mind.

This idea is not just based on my fevered imagination, or an overweening obsession with breathing and heartbeat. Buddha himself was said to have taught, paraphrasing, that “The mendicant, inhaling, realizes that they are inhaling. Exhaling, realizes that they are exhaling,” or something to that effect. Why would such a stupid-simple teaching be important, or necessary? Precisely because, usually — we don’t. As long as we are breathing, and our heart is beating, we don’t need to know. The brain simply turns off any conscious awareness of autonomic processes — until it doesn’t. When they stop, for example. Then all of our attention is suddenly on the heartbeat, and the breath. Serious as a heart attack, as we say.

So why not pay attention to this teaching, while we have the luxury of doing so voluntarily? Not only is the breath and heartbeat the rhythm section of our band — they comprise a barometer of where we are at the moment. Not only in terms of time, but also temperature (as in “chill” or “off the charts”). Following the breath, and your heart, will lead you to the Original Frontier of buddha-mind.

Next time we will attack the most complex of the three dispositions of body, breath and attention — that of paying attention to attention itself, with its implications for living the Zen life in the social sphere of community, or Sangha. Stay tuned, meanwhile, to your breath. And heartbeat.

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Continuing our exploration of the various dimensions of daily life in modern America, and how we might more intentionally, and mindfully, carry over the insights and influences of our Zen practice, “applying“ them in a beneficial manner, I suggested that this process would necessarily involve turning a perceived negative into a positive, converting a confrontational approach to one of collaboration and complementarity.

That is, the perceived conflict between those special activities that we traditionally associate with what we call Zen “practice” — such as sitting in meditation — and those we categorize as “not practice” — such as, say, dealing with a bad boss — is just that: a perceived conflict, and not an actual one. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “There is no dichotomy in Zen.” The dichotomy is in the eye, or brain, of the beholder.

I place the term “applying” in quotes to create a caveat — in regards to Zen training in general, and to its relation to daily life in particular — to caution against implying that this constitutes the true meaning and value of Zen, reducing it to a transactional activity, like any other self-improvement routine. It bears repeating that adopting this attitude would amount to missing the point entirely, or what is traditionally referred to as “gedo Zen.” In looking up this phrase, I came across a rather curious website called The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential (the link to the page is in the show notes). It offered a fairly complete, concise definition of gedo Zen that reads:

This is meditative exercise practised for spiritual and religious purposes but outside the path of Zen, by exponents of other religions. It includes Christian contemplation and the various forms of yoga. It also includes the practice of meditation by followers of Zen who see meditation as a means of achieving supernatural powers and abilities rather than for the purpose of self realization or for the welfare of all. Although this implies a rather lowly achievement for members of other religions, less traditionalist approaches (esoteric rather than exoteric) admit that higher forms of meditation are possible even by non-Buddhists, since Zen is the basis of all reality and all religion.

That last line caught my attention, as I did not expect anyone commenting in a public venue to give Zen that much centrality in the scheme of things, especially in the realm or religion. Many do not consider Zen to fit the category of religion as an institution. Zen does not allow a separation of the sacred and mundane, for example.

However, all religions as well as philosophical systems must include attitudes and approaches to the mundane aspects of life, whether exclusionary or inclusionary, the extremes being “evil,” or “of the devil,” versus “good” or “holy,” and “of the divine,” for example. This language is not characteristic of the way we frame expressions of Zen.

In fact, it seems preferable to speak of Zen in an idiom free of such fraught, emotion- and belief-ladened vernacular. Zen insight is often spoken of as “nothing special,” and a return to our “Original mind,” rather than as some sort of religious epiphany. So better not to venture too far down that rabbit-hole.

Returning to what Charlotte Joko Beck referred to as “Everyday Zen,” in an influential book of that title published in 1989, we can set aside for the moment whether or not Zen is, or may become, your religion, in the sense of a fundamental worldview that embraces spirituality as a natural component of corporeality. Here, we are concerned more with the “how” of engaging Zen practice in an integrated way, rather than the “why” of it. Our design of this process may be more likened to a transfer of skill sets. Again, “doing my research,” as we like to say these days, the first result of about 640,000,000 brought me to a page at the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning — again the link is in the show notes if you’d like to read for yourself:

“Transfer” is a cognitive practice whereby a learner’s mastery of knowledge or skills in one context enables them to apply that knowledge or skill in a different context. Because transfer signals that a learner’s comprehension allows them to recognize how their knowledge can be relevant and to apply it effectively outside original learning conditions, transfer is often considered a hallmark of true learning (Barnett & Ceci, 2002).

The link in the show notes will allow those with a special interest to pursue this item further. The phrase of interest here is the last, “transfer is often considered a hallmark of true learning.” Master Dogen somewhere says that Zen practice comprises the development of ”true intelligence,” or something to that effect.

Another mentor of mine, R. Buckminster Fuller, defines human intelligence in a similar manner. He says it is the ability to “extract the general principle from the many particular case experiences,” paraphrasing. An example is the concept of “fast” versus “slow.” The child finally “gets it” after being shown many disparate examples. Piaget promotes a similar principle in terms of learning in general.

In terms of the demands of daily life, which, when classified as “demands,” engender a knee-jerk resistance, I want to return to my prior comment that the process of Zen engagement may be characterized as turning a perceived negative into a positive.

Other common tropes suggesting this same attitude adjustment include “turning a push into a pull,” from the professional process of marketing products and services. This means public awareness of the item being marketed, creating a demand, so that the target audience seeks it out, rather than your having to put a lot of time, treasure and effort into ongoing promotion. Anyone wishing to know more about this is well-advised to look up “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell.

For those whose “right” livelihood — remember the Eightfold Path? — may entail marketing their own skill sets to potential employers or clients, this may simply mean developing a creative way of targeting your resume to the right prospects, or finding the right headhunter agency to keep your potential for future recruitment alive.

Regarding and referring to an identified “problem,” as an “opportunity” instead, is another variation on this theme. Much of this can be considered, and somewhat lightly dismissed, as the long-lived meme of developing and sustaining a “positive mental attitude,” a concept credited to Napoleon Hill in his 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich.” This popular idea, coinciding with the birth of my older brother, became so ingrained in the zeitgeist that it is still known by its acronym: PMA. Note that the subtitle prescribes a method: thinking; and promotes an objective: growing rich; that would fall short of those in Zen. Which often claims to have no objective at all.

Another common cultural trope suggests looking at what appear to be “either-or” — mutually cancelling choices — into “both-and” potentialities; another example of converting a confrontational approach to one of collaboration and complementarity. An example would be the notion that we can either sit in meditation — or take care of business — but not both. Whereas, as we mentioned before, we can adapt aspects of the zazen posture; the breathing; and the undivided attention of Zen; to virtually any situation. As we like to say, both things can be true at once, however seemingly contradictory.

A further extension of this idea takes to a practical level Master Dogen’s admonition in Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation:

Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Thus, having stopped the various functions of your mind, give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha.

However, when we sit, especially in the beginning as a novice, and even later, when more mature in Zen, during the beginning of each zazen session, we find we cannot really set aside all everyday concerns by sheer force of will. They keep inserting themselves into our awareness, as if they have a life of their own. Which they do. We call it the “monkey mind” — that survival-oriented, automatic and autonomic function of the mind to harangue and harry us with mostly self-critical memories and anticipatory anxiety about the future. Occasionally an “aha” or “eureka” moment occurs, in the less-inhibited frame of mind engendered in zazen, a possible solution to a given problem.

So, as an eminently practical approach to setting aside everyday concerns, and avoiding the trap of worrying about forgetting our big idea, I recommend that meditators simply keep an open notebook — paper or electronic — at their side when sitting. Then, when something important occurs out of the blue, we jot it down for later, and return to zazen. In this way, we take care of business to a moderate degree, while allowing the meditative process to go deeper and deeper. Both things can be done at the same time.

In the next segment we will delve further into this process, taking on the first of the three “dispositions” of zazen, as Matsuoka Roshi referred to them, the posture. And how it can have a halo effect upon other situations in life, in which we assume different postures, depending on the circumstances. Meanwhile, keep on sitting.

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I have used the term “versus” for many years, without ever looking it up in the dictionary. It is defined as “against (especially in sports and legal use)”; or “as opposed to; in contrast to.” So when we speak of Zen versus daily life or vice-versa, we imply that somehow the practice of Zen is necessarily set ”against” the other dimensions of life. This issue comes up frequently for experienced practitioners as well as rank newcomers. This segment will broach this subject and outline some of its parameters, which will be expanded in following episodes of UnMind.

Everything is Practice

The question often arises, after a person has been practicing zazen for some time, how, specifically, can we adapt some of the approaches and attitudes that we find on the cushion, to the rest of our day, off the cushion. Of course, this also comes up quite regularly with newcomers, to whom the standard reply is, “Don’t worry about applying Zen to your life; just apply yourself to Zen meditation. It will apply itself to your life, in a natural way. In fact, if you do try to apply Zen to your life, you will probably screw it up.”

However, Zen is not only for everyone, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say, it is also “Anyone, anywhere, anytime Zen.” But, as I mention in my first book, “The Original Frontier” the first of many excuses that most people cite for not practicing meditation is, “I don’t have time.” To have yet one more demand on our schedules is too much of a burden, just another activity competing for our scarce resources.

So the issue of integrating Zen practice into any and all aspects of everyday life becomes one of turning a perceived negative into a positive, converting a confrontational approach to one of collaboration and complementarity.

From the perspective of Design thinking, this enterprise comes under the category of how to design your life in general, but particularly focusing on what we can glean from our Zen practice, finding ways to incorporate its skillful or expedient means (S. upaya) into our everyday life. This focus was prompted by the publisher of my monthly newsletter column, “DharmaByte,” who suggested commenting upon:

Taking Zen off the cushion into daily life

Making space for practice in everyday life

Finding a balance between dharma practice and sitting

There are several sets of contrasts we may employ to structure the discussion, such as:

• Lifestyle: Monastic versus Householder

• Physical: Zazen versus the four Cardinal Postures

• Biological: Meditative breathing versus everyday situations

• Psychological: Shikantaza versus ordinary attention

The comparison of monastic and householder lifestyles, for example, revolves around the common conception, or misconception, that it provides a contrast between the ideal and the practical, respectively. In other words, anything less than a monk-like existence is an undesirable compromise. Mythology surrounding the mysterious and mystical aura of the life of the monk or nun is pervasive in a culture in which its reality is exceedingly rare. How many of us actually opt for that alternative in real life, however compelling its fantasy? How many Zen followers are living an “as if” lifestyle, picturing themselves as monastics when, in reality, they are householders in monk’s clothing?

Note: Buddhism’s historical attitude toward the householder-practitioner has always held that option in high regard, precisely because of the difficulty of maintaining balance in the everyday world of responsibilities and distractions. From the vantage point of those who have actually lived in a monastery and seen through its imaginary differences, life is mainly the same, on either side of the wall. In whatever path one chooses to walk, one will inevitably find that there are “circumstances beyond our control.”

Further, we can extend the discussion to a more granular breakdown of time and action, such as:

• Daypart: Morning; Afternoon; Evening; Nighttime (Routines)

Daily: Meals; Shopping; Hygiene; Housekeeping; Livelihood; the Commute

• Calendar Events: Weekly; Monthly; Seasonal; Annual (Weekend, Holiday, Vacation)

• Time of Life: Infancy; Preteen; Adolescence; Young Adult; Adult; Family; Middle Age; Empty Nester; Pensioner, Retiree; Survivor; Extended Care; Hospice

• Roles & Relationships: Child; Partner; Householder; Parent; Mentor; Caregiver; Leader;

• Lifetime: Aging; Sickness; Death

Aha – you see what I just did there? Sneaking in that quintessential Buddhist teaching, the Three Marks of dukkha, “suffering,” at the last moment, when your head was already going up and down in agreement. But after all, this whole question goes to the original teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, Buddha’s prescription for carrying out the principles of Right Wisdom in the context of Right Conduct and Right Discipline. So perhaps our analysis will shed new light on the relevance and meaning of these ancient teachings in the context of today’s more complex social realities. Speaking of social, other dimensions for the discussion open up:

• Loved Ones & Partners; Family; Parents; Children; In-Laws; Friends; Colleagues; Associates; Strangers; Enemies

• Home; Neighborhood; Village, Town, City; State; Country; International; Global

• Media: Social; News; Infotainment; Literature

• Technology: High, Middle & Low-tech; Home & Office; Personal & Social

Beginning with the instructions for zazen inherited from Master Dogen’s Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation, we break them down into three areas of focus: posture, breath, and attention, or mind.

• Posture: We can relate the upright, rigorous posture to other situations in which we “assume the posture” — at work, at rest, while driving in traffic, sitting or waiting in line, etc. Details of the posture, such as the fixed gaze, half-open eyes downcast, hands in the cosmic mudra, etc. can be resorted to in an instant. ‘Every minute Zen” becomes “Zen any minute.”

• Breath: Consider the full breathing cycle of the natural breath, followed in zazen, with techniques of counting, etc. We can do this anytime, anywhere.

• Attention: We can turn our attention to anything we wish, and away from distractions and annoyances. To our senses, for example: seeing, hearing, and feeling, altogether or independently, one at a time.

• Bowing: We can practice an internal bow, with no outer signs visible, when feeling grateful, for example. Or when dealing with the “negative bodhisattvas” in our lives, bowing in their direction, thanking them for teaching us the Dharma, in a way that we do not particularly appreciate, but recognize it as the dharma, or truth, of this relationship, even though they are blissfully unaware of it. The “bad boss syndrome” is one salient example.

These are just a few of the dimensions of everyday life where our practice-experience in Zen and zazen can have a halo effect on the difficulties that arise, and a positive effect on how we handle them. Managing difficult transitions, such as changing jobs, moving our home to another location, contemplating and going through divorce, as well as losing loved ones as we age, are all sources of additional stress, on top of the wear and tear of everyday aggravations.

In Buddha’s time, life was surely simpler, compared to the complexity of modern society. But of course the fundamental problems of life, described in his Four Noble Truths, were still the same as we find them today. Some things don’t change. And unfortunately, with all our much-vaunted advances in science and technology, developed in the interim of two-and-a-half millennia, some things have only gotten worse. We will take these issues on one at a time, and hopefully develop some skillful means for dealing with them more effectively, efficiently, and compassionately.

This introduction to the new series has amounted to a kind of survey of where we might go with this direction. If you have any suggestions for widening the scope please send them to my email address: taiunmelliston@gmail.com

For more on Soto Zen, its meaning and application to our modern life and practice, please check out our online and in-person schedules, and register for my Master Class at www.aszc.org.

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Hell to Pay

Having sown the wind,

we are reaping the whirlwind.

Mother Nature’s pissed.

WHAT IF THIS IS HELL?

The 1995 hit song released by Joan Osborne: “What if God was one of us?” reminded me of another mythical story called “The Rabbi’s Gift.” It is a tale of a rabbi visiting and giving a talk at a Christian monastery fallen on hard times, in which he suggests that one of the few remaining monks may actually be the Messiah in disguise. The monks come to embrace this notion as a distinct possibility, a What if…surely not myself, but maybe any one of you…may indeed be the promised Second Coming? and this very idea results in the revitalization of the monastery.

What with all the events happening in the world today, and within my living memory, the present seems to be an OCD reiteration of “the past as prologue.” This got me to thinking of another What if?: What if this Earth — and by extension, the whole present universe — is not positioned somewhere between heaven and hell, but actually is Hell, itself? Capitalized to indicate not the relative, everyday hell of good versus evil, but the Biblical realm of absolute Hell? Leaving aside for the moment the other possibilities, such as whether or not there may be a heavenly realm somewhere else, or another universe existing as a kind of purgatory — sandwiched between a paradisical slice of existence and a hell realm — as earthly existence is often conceived. Not in the subjunctive or speculative sense, but in harsh reality.

While in the throes of redrafting my recent “DharmaByte” published monthly in our STO newsletter, to post as this podcast, she who shall remain nameless informed me that a relatively obscure but famous-in-certain-circles writer, Cormac McCarthy, had died recently, at 89 years of age. At my age the obits form an increasingly noticeable, and frequent, focus. I followed the link to the online story, discovering that I was familiar with only one of his works, one that had been made into a movie, “No Country for Old Men.” What struck a chord for me was the following:

Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

It would be a “really dangerous idea” to naively trust that human nature is basically good, and will out in a benevolent way, in dealings with loved ones as well as with strangers. I have been mildly rebuked for remarking that in Zen, we do not aspire to human nature; we aspire to buddha-nature. Some might like to believe that the two are synonymous, but I beg to differ. What we see on TV every day is reflective of human nature. What Buddha discovered and transmitted is the latter, a potential for spiritual awakening that all human beings are said to have.

But sometimes, I must confess, I wonder if it is more likely that while many, most, or even all, human beings may have buddha potential; the likelihood of their realizing it is diminishingly small, approaching zero. Especially with the world population reaching its natural limit, approaching 10 billion, with resultant strain on limited resources. I believe the reason Matsuoka Roshi insisted that “Your enlightenment will be even greater than Buddha’s” is simply because it is so much more difficult now. If you do manage to wake up as he did in simpler times, in the midst of all this distraction and tumult, it will be a big f’ing deal, to quote POTUS. Later in the report, a touch of McCarthy humor, sorely needed in these trying times:

His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.

Love that expression — he never “committed” journalism — as if it were a crime. I assume it to be a quote or paraphrase. Reminds me of the Tang dynasty Ch’an poem “Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi” by Soto founder Tozan Ryokai that says, regarding buddha-dharma, “Just to portray it in literary form is to stain it with defilement.” There is nothing that cannot be defiled in some sense, reduced to brute vulgarity by the self-centered depredations of ignorant humankind. Our greater angels may never succeed in conquering our lesser devils. The arc of history may not, ultimately, bend toward justice. At least not human justice.

This conjecture is not entirely alien to conventional Protestant Christianity, as I learned when participating as a panelist on an online Christian-inspired interfaith dialog originating in South Korea, with the mission of promoting world peace. Two junior Christian minister panelists, one from Africa, one from the US, went to great pains to explain, to our equally young audience, just how is it that a loving God could permit such atrocities as are daily fare on the news, and increasingly in our neighborhoods, a question that naturally comes up more and more frequently.

They held that the doctrine of the Second Coming teaches that the Earth is currently, indeed, ruled by Satan; and that only when Christ is reborn on Earth will the Great Deceiver be defeated, and an eternal reign of peace on Earth will surely ensue.

Some anomalies in this belief came out as well, such as that Christ redux will live a normal life after vanquishing the Devil — including marrying and fathering children — and will naturally die, when his time has come! They did not clarify whether he is expected to retire to heaven to receive his reward, letting the kids take over the planet, one supposes. But I was intrigued by the notion that this branch of theism allows for a kind of rebirth — as taught in classical Buddhism — if limited to the “one and only begotten son of God.”

Whatever the future implications of my initial hypothesis — that we may literally be living in the real, one-and-only Hell — I think it reasonable that if we take an unblinking look at the operative conditions and emerging trends underway around the globe, for the moment ignoring their many possible causes, a telling description may emerge. A short list from the top of my head — and that you may feel free to embellish — includes, in no particular order:

National leaders betraying their own citizens, and waging war on other nations, approving of the bombing of civilians, including children, all the while claiming some just, altruistic or noble motive.

Religious leaders giving lip service to the gospel, benefiting from lavish lifestyles of the clergy, while abusing children and/or covering up the rapacious and predatory behavior of others.

Charitable leaders pocketing proceeds and ripping off their donors based upon good intentions and genuinely charitable instincts of their victims.

Government leaders at all levels promoting myths of free markets while on the take from the corrupting influence of lobbyists.

Spouses cheating on, abusing and murdering spouses.

Parents abusing and murdering children; children murdering parents.

Employers abusing employees; employees murdering employers.

Neighbors shooting neighbors; strangers killing strangers; psychotics shooting students, shoppers in stores, and partyers at festivals: in ever-greater numbers.

I could go on, as could you, to include reemergent ethnic and racial animus. Or, my personal top three: climate change; widespread pollution; pop-up pandemics. Pick your favorite natural-cum-manmade disaster du jour. But this is getting a bit depressing.

My basic question is: Does this not read like a fairly convincing, if not perfect, description of Hell? Or hell on Earth, at least? Isn’t it surely going to get a lot worse before it gets better? And the human race will not be satisfied with pillaging and plundering only this poor planet. We may have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” but instead of touching “the face of God,” we are plotting to colonize the moon, as a stepping stone to another whole, fresh planet to plunder.

Having recently launched its 27th space ship — more than our total launches in history — the private space industry in collaboration with NASA is planning to send astronauts on a ride around the moon and back, then to land on the moon once again, as a launching pad for a future junket to Mars. As a Sci-Fi junkie, I welcome these developments. But as a citizen, I regard them with a healthy paranoia, as to the intent and eventual use, or misuse, of our enhanced powers of world domination. Please indulge me in a flight of fancy:

Let us suppose that in the more distant future, the Mars colony has expanded to a sizable portion of the planet, while still reporting back to Mother Earth. At a certain point, what if we make another game-changing discovery. After re-establishing a breathable atmosphere, as once enshrouded Mars, we have had the luxury of time to discover that, indeed, the planet once hosted life, which is earth-shaking enough. But further, that it was in fact once occupied by an advanced civilization of intelligent beings, as imagined by an early astronomer, who discovered what he took to be the “canals” of Mars.

Suppose that we discover evidence of historical traces, indications of civilization, long obscured by eons of accumulated debris, much as we still find traces from ancient civilizations on Earth. Like Easter Island, say, but on a planetary scale.

We were hoping to colonize, and bring to life, a brand new world, a do-over of the Earth we have left in tatters. But Mars is revealed to be an ancient world, perhaps much older than the tenure of humanity. We now know that Mars was once similar to Earth. But some cataclysm must have occurred, wiping out all life. Or somehow, its denizens managed to blow it up.

With climate change looming back home — triggering all manner of natural disasters no longer exactly natural, but karmic consequences of humanity on a global level — we begin to accept the terrifying possibility that we may be truly alone in the universe. And that when and where life occurs, and even when it evolves to control its means of survival, a self-destructive Achilles’ heel kicks in.

Rather than as God’s chosen people, privileged to live in what could have been a kind of earthly paradise, as we would like to believe, we are instead doomed to be reborn, again and again throughout eternity, into this vast, hellish chiliocosm. “When will they ever learn?” on an infinite, and eternal, scale.

WHAT IF THIS IS SAMSARA?

To wrap this up on a more positive note, the implications of Buddha’s insight led to Buddhism’s cosmology, which is not blindly optimistic, nor overly pessimistic. It places human existence on one of six planes, with three others below — the realms of animals and insects; hungry ghosts; and the “Avici hell” realm; and two others above — the realm of the Asuras or angry gods; and “Tusita heaven.”

The model is based on various degrees of suffering or lack thereof, indicating that only human beings can come to full awakening as did Buddha, because our realm has a balance of just enough suffering, plus the ability to become aware of it as stemming from self-awareness, recognition of the problem being tantamount to solving it, the necessary antecedent to liberation. In the other five realms, there is either too much suffering to overcome, or too little to prod its denizens into the necessary realization, for transcendental awakening to occur.

The polar extremes of existence are known as “Samsara” and “Nirvana.” It is thought to be possible, but not likely, that humanity will wake up from their deep sleep and realize the true Way. Which could be tantamount to world peace. But that this can happen does not mean that it is foreordained. It could go either way. It should be noted that this model is not taken as literal, and that whether we find ourselves in Samsara — the world of patience; or in Nirvana — the state of liberation; is entirely up to us; that is, what we individually and collectively do about it. Heaven and Hell are self-created, according to Buddhism.

Master Dogen is said to have declared that actually, we do not go from the shore of Samsara to the other shore of Nirvana. The other shore finally comes to us. Matsuoka Roshi questioned the wisdom of spending your whole life yearning for an afterlife in a distant heaven that may or may not be there, rather than dedicating your attention to this life. Shohaku Okumura Roshi wryly commented in a dharma dialog at the Zen center, that everybody says they want to go to Nirvana. But if you go there, there is no one else there. Only bodhisattvas can go there, and they choose to stay here. So, he concluded, our mission is to transform this “ocean of Samsara” into Nirvana. I say to hell with all speculation.

You will have to determine for yourself which approach suits you, which model is a higher approximation of your reality.

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(A)theism

Theism, okay —

But not without its flip side

Both is and is not.

Continuing our discussion of addiction and theism, along with atheism, we will focus more tightly on alcohol, as one addiction amongst many. I contacted an associate we will refer to as Buddy C, who for some years has hosted a Taoist AA recovery group online, focusing on one verse of the Tao te Ching each week. I would join on one afternoon per month to add my two bits on the verse from the perspective of Zen. I interviewed Buddy regarding the twelve-step program for liberation from alcohol, which as I mentioned in the last segment, tends to receive a lot of attention in the press, though marijuana is beginning to challenge it for coverage, as it becomes legal in many states for medical and recreational purposes.

Perhaps the term “doppleganger” used in the last segment is not entirely appropriate to characterize atheism’s relationship to theism, since it means an exact double of a person or entity. Atheism is not a look-alike for theism, but one suspects that a contrarian belief has meaning only in the context of the belief being refuted. At best, it is a codependent relationship. But let us leave that debate to the experts. Let’s also set aside the broader definition of addiction as applying to all aspects of life.

For this segment I will structure my comments around Buddy’s email to me, outlining AA’s 12 steps to recovery from alcoholism. Using Buddy’s initial, in place of his last name, is in keeping with AA’s emphasis on anonymity in its approach, which is very Zen.

Buddy explained that the 12 steps are structured in 3 sections: Surrender; Inventory and Amends; and Maintenance. Beginning with surrender, the steps are expressed in the past tense, as if they are already accomplished. This calls to mind the introductory lines to Tozan Ryokai’s Ch’an poem Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi:

The dharma of suchness is intimately transmitted from West to East

Now you have it preserve it well

This presumes we already have this dharma, whether we know it or not. Perhaps we already enjoy the benefits of sobriety, whether we know it or not. This posits the made-up self versus the true self, a central dilemma in Buddhist thought, and perhaps in life in general.

Let’s look at what surrender entails in AA. In Zen, the very posture zazen is one of surrender.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Humbling, to have to admit to the fact that a mere physical substance is winning the battle. This is similar to the Repentance verse of Zen:

All my past and harmful karma

Born from beginningless greed, anger and delusion

Through body, mouth and mind

I now fully avow

Like the preceding verse, AA addresses a broader view of ourselves, rather than the specific issue of alcoholism. Zen also takes this broader perspective, asking not “Why me, Lord?” but “Why not me?”

Avowing, confession, and admission, are all the same act – fessing up to what we acknowledge as the reality of our existence, and our limited control over it. A key concept to remember is that our consequential actions, or karma, and the desires that trigger them, come with the territory of being a human being. To that degree, they are not our fault. Where we go off the rails is in how we react, or respond, to them. Buddy tells me that AA has an acronym for the main triggers of relapse when one is starting the recovery process: H-A-L-T — or “halt.” The letters stand for “hungry,” “angry,” “lonely,” and “tired.” The admonition is to stay alert to these emotional and physical states, and take action to cope with them before they have a chance to trigger craving for alcohol as our default reaction. Same for other O-C behaviors.

1. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Buddy pointed out that his understanding of what Zen is pointing to seems similar. Every book in our various reading groups suggests something similar, that there is something there that we can rely on, often expressed as buddha-mind, original mind, even buddhas and bodhisattvas — and if we go there, embracing the notion that there may be something beyond our puny powers as a human being, it can be a bridge to something greater. Matsuoka roshi would often speak of this power, if not in religious terms: “If you can put your whole self into this simple act of sitting, you will gain the power to put yourself into everything you do, and become the strongest person in the world.”

Note that Sensei was not referencing a supernatural power outside oneself, but in a very real sense it does not matter what worldview, Christian or otherwise, you bring to Zen. If you persist in sitting still enough for long enough, you will inevitably return to the clarity, and sanity, of the Original Mind of Zen.

1. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Buddy also took pains to make clear that this higher power doesn’t have to mean “God” — Him or Her — which universalizes the 12-step process, taking it out of the exclusive camp of Christianity, or any and all theistic traditions.

1. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Buddy made a point of emphasizing that addictive behavior is primarily based on fears: the fear of being embarrassed, by our family, for example. Or a generalized fear of not being enough, not good enough. Or a fear of being a failure, or not achieving the success we expect, about which the Tao te Ching has a compelling question: “Which is more destructive — success or failure?” Fear of not getting something we want, or losing something we have. These are all examples of living in the future, not in the moment.

The attitude in AA is to resist acting based on these fears. Buddy says the twelve steps reveal how we try to control, and attach to our expectations, arising out of stress, and anxiety that others will come to know our secrets. An example Buddy and others share, is that our son or daughter did not go to college, a wasted opportunity, a fear of shame and a source of anger about that, which affects your relationships. But this anger is misplaced; we are angry owing to our own failure to have helped the situation positively.

Similarly, Matsuoka Roshi would emphasize that the Precept of not indulging in anger does not mean that we never feel anger, which he likened to cutting water with a knife leaving no trace; but that we do not speak out of anger, which leaves a groove like cutting sand; nor act out of anger, which is like cutting stone — the scar takes forever to wear smooth again.

This inventory approach of AA recalls the so-called “mirror of Zen” — the undifferentiated awareness that reflects the good, bad, and the ugly, without discrimination. Buddy notes that the inventory includes how we have been harmed by others, as well as how we have harmed others. Recognizing the harm others visit upon us is the more natural, knee-jerk reaction to social transactions in general, at its worst engendering victim mentality. But here, we are to take a fearless look at our own part, the role we play in the transaction. This is akin to remembering the Buddhist Precepts, as we repeatedly break them. “Turning the light inward,” “peeling the onion back,” getting some relief from those fears in the process.

1. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.

This confessional approach is found in all religious and psychological systems, it seems. Buddy contends that the recovery process flipped his belief system upside down. He used to rely on his beliefs first, but now belief doesn’t matter so much — action comes first. Acting our way into right thinking, versus thinking our way into right action. Even if that action is only in the form of prayer, it begins opening your heart; you begin to change. I suppose you have to find the right person to open up to, just as you have to have an affinity with any other kind of mentor, including Zen.

1. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Being “entirely ready” would necessarily entail having entirely given up on our own futile efforts. In Zen, we have to “trust in Mind,” capital “M,” relinquishing our usual dependence on discriminating mind. If there is a God, one thing is sure — it’s not you. The “higher power,” however you conceive it, has to be other than self. In this regard, Buddy maintains, everyone has their own “god language”: the way they describe what is greater than themselves. This spiritual language comes with various dialects, much like spoken languages. Zen and AA alike encourage an openminded approach to life, including our approach to the idea of God.

1. We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Buddy mentioned that, for him, “God” is now experienced as “love” — love for others, as well as for oneself, I suppose. This is the message of the Metta Sutta, or “Loving Kindness Sutra,” attributed to Buddha. If you cannot in some way love yourself, you will have a difficult time truly loving someone else. In AA, self-love is realized by loving others; the act of love toward another changes us. Buddy also mentioned overcoming our character flaws. A great jazz singer I once knew said something similar: she said that if you love someone, you have to love their faults as well.

1. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

A more specific, and personal inventory. Buddy pointed out that when we are addicted, we stop maturing — in ways other than physical. I said I thought that the hangover the next morning would give you a clue, but he said some alcoholics never have a hangover. Instead, they take a drink, the “hair of the dog,” so they have a bit of a buzz going at all times. This is what is called a “functioning alcoholic,” and it leads to the familiar health issues associated with alcohol poisoning.

1. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Again, if you start using alcohol at the age of sixteen, you basically stay at that level of development as your body continues aging. This expression, “using,” is in reference to any drug of choice, so it is worth asking the question, when you are sober — “using to do what?” — to address the moment in which you find yourself, with all its unsatisfactoriness, one definition of Buddhism’s “dukkha” — suffering — or to escape from it. Drugs and alcohol are popular because they work — until they don’t.

One way out of this dilemma is to start helping others immediately, according to AA’s “Big Book.” In particular, to help another alcoholic. In one case, a person volunteered to work in the “wet brain” ward of the local hospital, where long-term alcoholics are disabled, their brains having been poisoned by drinking. There is a tradition in Buddhism of monks & nuns volunteering for hospice & funeral duty for similar reasons, to be near death and dying for their own sake of facing up to their own fears.

In both cases, mental and psychological disorders are seen as a three-part disease — on spiritual, mental & physical levels. The theory is that if you take care of the spiritual — helping others is helping yourself — the other two will take care of themselves.

1. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Buddy described this need for constant diligence and vigilance as analogous to the hand being unaware of the body. If we are unaware of what is happening — disconnected from the full context of our being-in-the-environment, we fall back into the fantasyland of addiction. Compassion can only be practiced in this moment. Unrealistic fears always pull us out of the moment into the past with regret, and into the future with worry, both of which are basic forms of fantasy.

1. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

If and when we fall off the wagon, thinking it okay to take just one drink, the trope is that “You have a drink; the drink has a drink, then the drink has you.” The alcohol or drug immediately affects your judgment, rationalizing the second drink, and here we go again.

Zen’s model of the mind includes what is referred to as “nen” in Japanese, incorporating three levels: first-, second-, and third-level nen. As I understand the term, translated as something like “thought-moment,” the three levels in reverse order are higher thinking, middling cogitation, and basic mentation, roughly corresponding to a simple model of the brain: neocortex, midbrain and brain stem.

When we sit still enough for long enough in meditation, our conscious awareness naturally proceeds through a process of adaptation, progressing from more complex thinking, sometimes called “monkey-mind,” to a simpler focus on sensory awareness, and finally to a merging of subject and object. So I suppose it can be considered a kind of regression, back to the Original Mind.

Perhaps drugs and alcohol have a similar effect, where for a time at least, when intoxicated, we are relieved of the burden of confronting the more complex nature of existence. One difference is that meditation cannot be addictive, although you might try to use it as an escape. Good luck with that.

1. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

In this regard, Buddy mentioned that “A drug is a drug is a drug,” yes — but “recovery is recovery is recovery,” no — Buddy noted that alcohol is mentioned only once — in the first step. Different addictive substances require different strategies for withdrawal. This was confirmed by a half-dozen MDs who once attended the Zen center as part of a rehabilitation program for their variety of addictions, which they explained do not depend on the substance alone, but on its particular interaction with the metabolism and psyche of the individual.

So both programs, Zen and AA, posit a kind of spiritual awakening or insight as an intermediate goal, so to say, but we are not done yet. When Master Dogen returned from his awakening experience in China, he claimed that his life’s work was over, but that he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. The work in the personal sphere was largely complete, but that of the social sphere was just beginning.

Similar to Zen’s expression, “Watch your feet!” Buddy says AA recommends keeping your head down, and being where your feet are, rather than relying on thinking to reason your way out of the problem of everyday life. This mentality is likened to walking with a dim flashlight at night, where you are seeing only the next step, i.e. doing the next right thing, and being vulnerable to what arises.

In Zen, this worldview is sometimes referred to as “living by vow” — an open-ended commitment to “being here now,” as Ram Dass titled his seminal book. In the prior segment I quoted the founder of Soto Zen in China, reminding us that “Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not, reality constantly flows.” Get with the flow, and get over the addiction. We are not in control, but we don’t have to be out of control.

Not yet sure where the next segment will take us on our exploration of this “Original Frontier” of UnMind, but please join me on the journey.

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Addiction

Addiction is real —

Born of body, mouth, and mind;

Not invented here.

In this segment of UnMind we return to a subject — if it can be reduced to a mere “subject” — that I explored publicly many years ago, when I gave a series of talks on addiction and Zen under the rubric of “sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll.” Which, at that time, seemed to cover the waterfront of possible addictions. I took the position that, from the point of view of Zen Buddhism — perhaps as distinct from more traditional Buddhism, as well as other philosophical and religious systems — “It is all addiction.” Everything, including life itself, may be regarded as a kind of addiction.

Zen teachings have this kind of all-inclusive flavor, captured in such expressions as Master Dogen’s frequent use of “All things are like this,” following one of his many apt analogies.

The premise was, and still is, based somewhat on the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of an addictive substance — referenced from the then-current edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” — which, if memory serves, defined an addictive substance as anything that, when withdrawn from an addict, results in a “significant degree of discomfort.”

Which would apply equally to air, water, food, warmth, and all the other hierarchy of fundamental needs as outlined by Maslow, perhaps extending to social or self-actualization needs — for acceptance, status, power, wealth and privilege, and so on, and finally, the need for transcendence — which is where Zen comes in, I suppose. In the context of a panoply of needs destructive to self and others, addiction to alcohol — while of historic and epidemic proportions, and thereby attracting a lot of the attention — may not be the worst, or most socially damaging, addiction to have to cope with. It depends.

Allow me to insert a caveat here, to counter the notion that some of the more controversial ideas that may come up in this discussion may have come from my root Zen teacher, Matsuoka Roshi. He made a few comments from time to time regarding human sexuality, for example; but we did not discuss at in any length or in great detail. And while he once gave a public talk on “LSD and Zen” at the local Y in Chicago, drugs were not a big item in his lineup of topics, either. He certainly was not obsessed with either sex or drugs, and had little interest in “rock n’ roll” — by which I meant the then American, now worldwide, addiction to “living large” — the “everything, all the time” wretched excess lifestyle captured in the lyrics of the popular song, “Hotel California.”

The few fragmentary comments I recall regarding sexuality included a self-effacing claim to have been a virgin his whole life. And that he regretted never marrying because he had no one to take care of him in his old age. He also pointed out that since I was “used to this” (i.e. sexual relations), I needed it; but since he wasn’t used to it, he didn’t. One day when I visited the Chicago Temple, I found him red-faced and giggling, as my senior dharma brother, Kongo roshi, mercilessly teased and regaled him with ribald tales of the kinds of sex acts that — according to Kongo, at least — gay men engage in. Kongo had that kind of merciless and sardonic sense of humor. But he could also be very tender and sympatico, to those who knew him well. He especially relished getting Sensei’s goat, especially on something that might be embarrassing to a traditional Japanese sensibility.

On another occasion, I happened to notice a Playboy magazine in Sensei’s bedroom, where we would store the donations from the altar, so I assume he had some curiosity about sex, in those days of nascent soft pornography, and wonder what he would have thought of the endless “cabinet of curiosities” of human sexuality on display on the internet today. I once overheard him comment, somewhat dismissively, when someone mentioned human orgasm: “Ha! Orgasm in every cell.” Which I took to be, possibly, a reference to satori. I did not inquire.

I suppose that sex can become an addiction, if pursued for pleasure or reasons other than procreation — which, some religious and philosophical systems seem to insist, is its only legitimate function. There seems to be sufficient evidence that porn can be addictive — testimony to the power of our imagination, translating pixels into lust. Which Buddha is said to have called a “snake amongst the flowers.” He also claimed to have been satiated with overindulgence and dissipation prior to his spiritual quest. As Shopenhauer reminds us, sexual desire is delusional: it is on behalf of the species, not us, personally.

Adherence to the monastic code of celibacy illustrates one extreme response to what is, after all, only biology. But the antipode, the sybaritic lifestyle emulated now — by elites from Hollywood to DC, indeed globally — saturates contemporary culture. Speaking of extreme lifestyles, the famous Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa, in his 1970s classic, “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,” warns against this kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder subtly infiltrating and infecting your own, personal practice path.

In terms of drugs, some time before Sensei delivered his talk at the Y — the text of which, incidentally, we have not been able to recover — he and I were discussing my psychedelic experiences, when he quipped, with his usual sense of humor, “Maybe you will be my LSD master, and I will be your Zen master!” He showed none of the paranoid, over-the-top, dismissive rejection that I had heard were characteristic of his contemporary Zen luminaries of the period. In his talk on LSD and Zen, he admitted that the descriptions of psychedelic experiences, as compared to those of kensho — a Japanese word for Zen insight — shared certain similarities that could not be lightly dismissed.

But he insisted that we who follow Zen do not recommend indulging in drugs, in order to render hoped-for insight, especially under uncontrolled circumstances. For one thing, an ingested chemical might trigger a reaction that the individual may not be ready for, in terms of psychic maturity, and an understanding of what it might mean. He went on to say that in Zen’s sitting meditation, with insight developing over time in a natural way, one will be fully prepared for whatever happens in the natural course of things. But again, the drug revolution was not a major area of interest for him.

If Sensei could be said to be obsessed with anything, it was the transmission of genuine Zen practice to his adopted country. In many ways, he was the archetypal “man without a country” — no longer really Japanese, nor yet truly American, in the cultural sense. He was focused like a laser on zazen.

Allow me a brief overview of theism and atheism, and how they fit into the picture of addiction as a general principle, at least as I see it from my admittedly limited perspective. I am not apologizing here, nor being overly modest. I assume my layman’s perspective on religion to be as clear, if less informed, as anyone’s. Theological concerns are so broad and deep, yet intimately personal, that even the most deeply informed theories carry little more weight than those of the average person on the street.

To come to a conclusion about whether “God” exists or not, for example, reliance on erudition, scholarship, or any other credentialing process would have little if any relevance. By contrast, study of a tangible science, such as biology or botany, or astrophysics for that matter, would have a more rational, reliable relationship to evidence and logic, rendering some opinions more valid than others.

Let us return to addiction, and how I think it relates to conventional religion — manifested as theism, and its inverse doppleganger — atheism. This latter belief, more serious commentators than I have insisted, constitutes the strongest form of theism. Which notion, from a Zen perspective, smacks of that compelling, oxymoronic logic that most pithy Zen aphorisms share: both can be true at the same time.

As is the case with any addiction, the seductive quality of sensory pleasure or comfort associated with the drug of choice comes to bear upon one’s judgment as to whether its indulgence constitutes a positive or a negative. The addict has to wake up to the fact of being addicted, as a negative, in order to have the determination to go through withdrawal. We all have to hit bottom, and put down the shovel, before we can begin climbing out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.

Similar to the temporary effect of intoxication, belief in God can be comforting, which feeling naturally constitutes first-person validation. Karl Marx, the 19th-century German economist, remarked that religion — by which one presumes he meant all forms of theism — is the “opiate of the masses.” Quoting: “If people are to know and understand the real world, they must give up superstitious beliefs because they have a narcotic effect on the mind.” If the thought of God makes me feel warm and fuzzy, that may become prima facie evidence of the presence of God. A self-fulfilling prophecy, or tautology, proven by the all-encompassing feeling of wellbeing. This is not to deny the epiphany of the saints, however. And the testimony of Zen adepts suffers from this same lack of provability, or the inability to disprove its claims in any scientific, third-party manner.

Atheism, on the other hand, may give one the same comfy feeling as an unflagging certainty of faith in a loving God. Instead, it may provide a smug sense of superiority, especially over those who adhere to a blind faith in what may be dismissed as mere superstition; or a need to explain the unexplainable with a myth of creation; or a belief in the divine intervention of a benign deity, however contrary the evidence — of natural disasters, for example. However, if this secular insistence upon “believing in” only those things for which there can be indisputable evidence comes to dominate our worldview, many ordinary and extraordinary insights of modern existence would have to be abandoned.

Master Dogen’s frequent appeals to the compassionate consideration of the buddhas and bodhisattvas smack of this kind of theistic resort to something larger, a greater power, than oneself. And the notion of a cosmic Buddha, “Vairocana” by name, seems to differ mainly in the semantics, from the theistic concept of a creator god. None of which seems all that germane to the problem at hand, as Buddha was known to dismiss such speculation. Matsuoka Roshi questioned the wisdom of going all in on a future existence in an unproven heaven, rather than focusing on the daily life we are living.

I would submit that the teachings of Buddha were not intended as contrarian ideas to be debated against the prevailing views of the Hinduism of the time; nor would I offer them as arguments against the theistic dogmas of our time. Dogen’s teachings were certainly offered as correctives to the prevalent practices of the other Zen sects, such as the Rinzai school, apparently predominant in 13th century Japan. But this does not mean that the teachings of Buddhism are accessible only by adherence to the tenets of one school. What Zen Buddhism points at is unvarnished reality, which is not captured by an ideology or belief system. It is what it is, and coming to apprehend buddha nature directly does not depend upon the horse you rode in on. Atheism, theism, Buddhism, any “ism,” has no direct connection to the truth, as clarified in the ancient Ch’an poem Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind [insertions mine]:

Now there are sudden and gradual [schools] in which teachings and approaches arise

With teachings and approaches distinguished, each has its standards

[but] Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not

Reality constantly flows

It is this constantly-flowing reality that reduces all teachings, belief systems, ideologies and philosophies to clumsy, humble fingers pointing at the brilliant moon.

We have not really sated our innate desire for clarity, or resolved the dilemma of inherent confusion here, but may be encouraged to reconcile ourselves to the abandonment of any reliance on comforting opinions or beliefs in our dogged pursuit of resolution of this fundamental problem of existence itself.

Please join again next time, when we will persist in our endeavor, however futile, to withdraw from our addiction to understanding that which is beyond understanding.

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Buddha Nature

Not what we think, but —

We fall into confusion.

Back to the cushion!

We left off last time with a discussion of the relative reality of human, versus corporate, entities — which may seem a bit far removed from the concerns of Zen practice. But, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Civilization conquers us!” One of the ways that so-called civilization interferes with our lives on a daily basis, to such a degree that we become inured to it — “death and taxes” being the only sure things in life — is the imposition of an interface with corporate entities everywhere we turn.

One connotation of my dharma name, “Taiun,” or “Great Cloud,” is that, like a big cloud in the sky, there are no barriers anywhere. This is what comprises the aspirational aspect of a Zen name – that I should find no barriers in daily life. Don’t need to tell you how that is working out so far.

Human entities are naturally given special status in the hierarchy of sentient beings by most philosophical and religious systems, such as the reification of the Self, the immortal Soul of Christianity, and the Hindu equivalent, the Atman. Corporate entities have recently been endowed with personhood by the Supreme Court, which has exacerbated the friction between the two types of entities struggling for dominance in governments around the globe.

My main concern here is that we human members of the harmonious communities (S. sangha) of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and the Silent Thunder Order avoid confusion as to our priorities in serving the sangha. One of which is the natural tendency to reify the imputed needs of the corporation itself — e.g. to survive in perpetuity — over the needs of the sentient beings that it is incorporated to serve. Let us entertain an “if-then” exercise to examine whether we may be sliding down this particular slippery slope:

IF:

1. You find yourself obsessing over the succession of the leadership of ASZC or STO,

THEN: you are getting distracted from your own practice.

1. You are disappointed because you feel under-appreciated for your efforts on behalf of ASZC or STO or both,

THEN: I have two suggestions for you. One: welcome to the club. Two: remember that you are supporting the organizations because they are propagating Zen practice. And in Zen there is “no self, nor other-than-self.” So your actions, and those of other members, are neither entirely selfish nor unselfish.

1. You feel that you are engaging in activities and making sacrifices for the sake of someone else in the sangha, such as myself,

THEN: Please stop. As Master Dogen reminds us, you should not even imagine that you are practicing Zen for your own sake, let alone the sake of others. You should practice Zen “for the sake of Buddhism itself.” But even this construction reifies Buddhism, or Zen, as if there is such a thing, and you alone have to protect it. The great Master also cautioned his followers not to call it “Zen.” Zen is a term some ancient person made up. Dogen reminded all that this practice is, basically, Buddhism.

But “Buddhism,” like Zen, is also a made-up term. Buddha Shakyamuni was not a “Buddhist,” any more than Jesus Christ was a “Christian.” Buddha comes from a root word that means “awake.” “Buddha” means the “fully awakened one.” What he taught, and what his followers promulgated and propagated — in a largely Hindu cultural context, where one imagines they encountered considerable resistance — in time came to be called Buddhism. Which, like anything and everything else, is not exempt from its own teachings of impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality.

1. IF —You are engaging others in the community, expressing your personal doubts and frustrations as to how the sangha is functioning, including concerns about the competence of its leadership, without bringing these concerns to that leadership,

THEN: You may be fomenting confusion and resultant disharmony in the sangha. Which is the closest thing to a cardinal sin in Buddhism.

One of Siddhartha Gautama’s apparently endless cohort of cousins, named Devadatta, was jealous of Shakyamuni’s status and the lavish support he received from patrons, as the story goes, and actually attempted to have Buddha assassinated. Yet Buddha predicted that Devadatta would eventually realize buddhahood.

None of these behaviors are irretrievable, and no one is irredeemable in Buddhism, but all of us, and especially those in positions of leadership in the sangha, are called upon to act with discernment and an overabundance of caution to ensure that we are embracing the broadest perspective, taking the long view, and not confusing the corporate entity with the human entities that embody it.

These are special, and especially niggling, concerns that arise in the public propagation of Zen, in particular in America, where the corporate versus individual conflict is on display on a daily basis. In this context we once again return to our mission to aspire to buddha-nature over human nature.

IT IS BUDDHA NATURE:

1. To recognize the limits of human nature.

BUT:Buddhism proposes that we are not limited to the constraints of our apparent human nature, but capable of awakening to our original buddha-nature through the Three Bodies, or trikaya: this biological, or Transformation body — nirmanakaya; becoming aware of the Essence body — dharmakaya, resulting in the manifestation of the Joy body — the samboghakaya.

This model of the true body is just a model, of course, and accepting this idea is of-a-piece with the embrace of the Three Minds — sanshin: the Magnanimous — daishin; the Nurturing — roshin; and the Joyous — kishin. That the body-mind of buddha-nature is already the reality goes without saying. Waking up to it is another matter.

1. It is buddha nature to find that all groups of people and individuals are originally like-minded.

BUT: Causes and conditions, such as ideologies and class divisions, bring about differentiation, a kind of social evolution.

1. It is buddha nature to realize that “In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other than self” and that “To come into harmony with this reality just simply say, when doubt arises, ‘Not two.’”

BUT: It is natural to encourage others by expressing appreciation for their generosity.

1. It is buddha nature to manage personal associations with others to meet their needs.

BUT: We cannot be 100% responsible for the lives or behavior of others, we can only do our best. You can lead a horse to water, but…

1. It is buddha nature to remember that nothing lasts forever.

BUT: Hegelian logic assures us that the existent thesis will be challenged by an antithesis, and the two will merge in synthesis, evolving the new thesis, endlessly.

1. It is buddha nature to hold an aspiration to perfecting the paramitas rather than an expectation of perfection.

BUT: An aspiration is by nature open-ended — unknown — expressed as a vow to persist in spite of doubts; whereas an expectation is defined as a goal or objective.

Again, I could go on. It is buddha nature to relinquish any attempt to control the uncontrollable. And to blame ourselves rather than others. Disharmony between others, as well as ourselves, is usually the result of unintended conflict between two points of view — where each person is attempting to defend the sangha, or the dharma, as they see fit. It is buddha nature to see the opposing views as complementary, so that the path to compromise and resolution becomes apparent.

This discussion of human- and buddha-nature is not complete. It will be completed only in your own experience with sangha, and your embrace of buddha-dharma. Good luck with your pilgrim’s progress.

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Human Nature

It’s not what we think.

We must kill to stay alive —

How “humane” is that?

One of the many modern cultural memes that Zen challenges — as well as any unbiased reading of history would, for that matter — is the hopeful notion that human nature is necessarily a good thing. We often use the term “humane” with this connotation, as defined by the dictionary:

• having or showing compassion or benevolence: regulations ensuring the humane

treatment of animals.

• inflicting the minimum of pain: humane methods of killing.

Ironic, wouldn’t you say, that the very word that connotes the highest degree of compassion or benevolence is commonly defined by our method of killing — mostly livestock but also wild animals. This at least recognizes one truism of Buddhism: that there is no life without death, and that to live it is necessary to kill, if not intentionally. That is, our very breath kills untold numbers of microbes with every cycle of inhalation and exhalation, relentlessly. Then there’s that dreaded occasion when we have to put down a beloved pet or working beast to put it out of its misery.

We like to think of ourselves, as human beings, as the acme of evolution — or God’s greatest creation — actually formed in His or Her image. On the other hand, human beings are the root cause of all, or at least most, of the unnecessary suffering in the world. I came across an old saying attributed to Zen, illustrated with the frowning and grinning masks of ancient theater, saying something like “Waking in the morning, he is an angel, or a devil — depending on circumstance!” So it is recognized in Zen that it is not just what we do personally, but the interface with the various causes and conditions surrounding us, that shapes our lives on a daily basis.

Usually when we speak of human nature, it is with a positive association with the highest good that human nature is capable of achieving. The saints of theism, as well as the Ancestors of Buddhism, are held up as exemplars of this achievement, through their altruistic behavior and self-sacrifice for the sake of others. It is true that they were all very human, of course, although the teaching style of a standout Zen Master like Rinzai, if we are to believe the stories, sometimes looks inhumane on its surface. The history of Zen is replete with stories of students who recognized the “grandmotherly kindness” of their former teacher in retrospect, only after they had moved on to another teacher, or independently experienced Zen’s insight.

Before delving into an examination of what we mean by “buddha-nature,” let’s consider some aspects of what we refer to as human nature, but from the perspective of Zen. Note that the “buddha” in buddha-nature is not capitalized. This indicates we are considering the innate potential of all human beings to recover their original Mind, and not the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, which would be capitalized.

WHAT IS HUMAN NATURE?

Let me list some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to me to be connected to Zen practice:

IT IS HUMAN NATURE:

1. To regard ourselves as existent entities.

BUT:According to Zen, we human beings are not self-existent entities. Nothing else is, either. Including corporate entities, such as the Zen Center corporation.

1. It is human nature to want to join like-minded groups of people.

BUT: The Zen community, or “sangha,” like any group entity, is evanescent, impermanent. This is why we refer to and visualize the sangha as a “cloud” (J. un), constantly evaporating and recondensing over time, as people come and go.

1. It is human nature to hope to be appreciated for our contributions to a cause.

BUT: It is somewhat inappropriate to express appreciation to anyone for what they do for Zen or Buddhism, as there is no conventional “self” in it. It is normal to do so in polite society, but Zen, while not antisocial in character, is somewhat asocial – the norms and memes of society are called into question, subject to examination in meditation.

1. It is human nature to expect our associations to meet our personal needs.

BUT: Our best laid plans often take an ugly turn. Because a corporate entity is populated by individuals who have their own agendas, one’s personal perspective may have to be set aside for the overall, long-term benefit of the group. We practice patience with this.

1. It is human nature to hope that our favored institutions continue in perpetuity.

BUT: Nothing continues in perpetuity. Never has, never will. Eiheiji, the monastery established by Master Dogen in 13th Century Japan, still stands, however.

1. It is human nature to feel disappointed when our expectations are not met.

BUT: We practice caution against developing unrealistic expectations of Zen, both of our personal practice and our social community, or sangha.

I could go on. It is human nature to try to control the uncontrollable. And to blame others when we fail to do so. No matter how much harmony we are able to foster within the sangha, there are going to be periods of disruption and disharmony, brought about by individual personality issues as well as external influences. We do not discuss the faults of others, but we do find it necessary to discuss their behavior from time to time, especially if it is disruptive.

THIS IS WHY WE ASPIRE TO BUDDHA NATURE

“Buddha nature” simply means “awakened” nature. What we awaken to is largely the unreality of those things we take to be real, including corporate entities such as the Zen center. Its leadership, however, in the form of its abbot or abbess, teachers, members, and board of directors, has to be regarded as more real than the constructed entity. Corporations can do harm, or good, as a result of decisions taken by the persons comprising their membership. Corporate entities may be very convincing, but they are unreal in the larger context, especially when taking the longer view of Buddhism’s teachings of impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality, as applying to all apparently existent entitles.

A corporate entity does not and cannot carry out the mission of the organization. Only living persons can do so, with an assist from nonliving entities, such as print publications, audio-visual presentations, and the physical plant housing the meditation hall (J. zendo). This is pointed to in a stanza toward the end of Master Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai—Self-fulfilling Samadhi (emphasis mine):

Grass trees and lands which are embraced by this teaching

together radiate a great light

and endlessly expound the inconceivable profound dharma

Grass trees and walls bring forth the teaching for all beings

common people as well as sages

and they in accord extend this teaching for the sake

of grass trees and walls

Note that the “walls” are those constructed by humans to house the zendo, providing a “place conducive to practice,” as Ven. Achok Rinpoche defined one meaning of “dana,” generosity, while giving a talk at the Zen center. From this it is clear that humankind — and the works of humankind — are not separate and apart from buddha-dharma, and in fact promote and support the propagation of “the realm of self-awakening and awakening others,” another of Dogen’s phrases.

What we refer to as “Soto Zen,” or “Dogen Zen,” is different from all the other entrees on the great smorgasbord of meditations on offer in our culture which, as we know, values variety of selection over all else. What Buddhism teaches as its worldview is starkly different from the various religions and ideologies, as well as many of the scientific worldviews, dominant in America. For more on this, check out my latest book, “The Razorblade of Zen.”

A little background on our corporate history may shed some light on why, in spite of the ultimately nonexistent nature of the corporation, we incorporated ASZC and STO. ASZC was incorporated in 1977 to facilitate the mission of meeting the demand for genuine Zen practice, in particular its uniquely simple and direct meditation, and to provide the necessary interface with other corporate entities such as city, county, state, and federal government, including the IRS. The laws of the democratic republic in which we operate allow supporters to deduct donations, if qualified.

STO was incorporated in 2011 because the stress and strain on the board of directors and committees of the ASZC had become too much to handle with the growth of our network of affiliates, which were meeting the increasing demand for Zen practice, and the growing awareness of ASZC and STO as meeting that demand in a uniquely user-friendly manner, stressing the practicality and best practices of householder Zen.

BUT:

We should not be confused as to the reality or unreality of the corporate entities we have “established.” They are no more real than any other corporate entity, though we may feel that their existence as such is much more necessary than most, based, as they are, on real human needs.

In spite of the “Citizens United” ruling of the Supreme Court, corporations are not persons and should not have the “rights” accorded to human beings. All beings are capable of doing harm; corporate entities survive their human components and thus become capable of extending the harm, or good, they do to future generations. Real persons fortunately pass away, but the harm they do also lives on long after them, to paraphrase Mark Antony.

In the next segment we will continue examining human versus buddha nature, in the context of all such constructions as corporate or personal constructions of the mind. Meanwhile, please focus on the personal over the corporate, emphasizing your personal practice in zazen over your role in the sangha.

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Your zazen may lead

To a kind of gravitas —

But it’s only Zen.

“Gravity,” the John Mayer song that won a Grammy in 2005, begins with the lines:

Gravity is working against me
And gravity wants to bring me down

Truer words, as we say. One of the four fundamental forces, as defined by Google:

There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range.

Gravity is said to be the constant teacher, for a toddler who is just learning to stand. Every time they finally get their balance — boom! — they fall down again. With repetition, they finally learn how to maintain balance even while walking, which has been described, dynamically, as falling forward and catching yourself with your feet. Some animals, like horses, are born ready to walk, with a little help.

With repetition over time, we adapt to gravity and lose awareness of it, until we don’t. Zen’s walking meditation, kinhin in Japanese, is a bit like learning to walk all over again. We raise our elbows to shoulder-level to act as outriggers for balance. If you find yourself losing your balance from time to time, you are doing kinhin correctly. Like a tightrope walker, we become more aware of the precariousness of our balance. We also become sensitive to the long-term effects of gravity on our body shrinking with age. I have lost about 3 inches so far, my own personal version of the incredible shrinking man.

When we feel we are losing our balance, an increasingly common and dangerous issue as we age, we experience a sense of dizziness, or vertigo. If we actually fall down, we experience the acceleration of gravity, with the unpleasant slam of our body mass on the ground. But typically we are unaware of the constant pull of the gravitational field. What we refer to as “weight” is the measure of the mass of an object, such as our body, in thrall to the gravitational mass of the Earth. It is said to be about six times that of the moon. One would assume from this that for every planetary or other celestial body, the mass of the being’s body, moving within the orbit or g-force field generated by the mass of the larger body, would determine the relative weight of that being, in that particular context. So what, you say?

Consider that in zazen, because we sit still for relatively long periods of time in an upright posture, our relation to gravity is relatively constant. So the ability to once again feel gravity as a constant comes into play. It becomes obvious when we are meditating that we are out of balance, leaning one way or the other, rather than sitting upright, which ordinarily we do not feel, having adapted to our usually crooked posture. This is why we do the rocking motion as we are settling in, to find our center in the field of gravity, like a metal filing lining up on a magnet.

Rising for walking meditation, we become acutely aware of moving in gravity, at an excruciatingly slow pace. And when we return to the cushion, we feel the immersive embrace of gravity, as we once again settle into the zazen posture. As we enter into deeper physical samadhi — equipoise or equilibrium — the forces of gravity and their impact on the various parts of the body even out, resulting in a sense of effortlessness, even a sensation of floating. Our sense of time undergoes a similar reorientation to that of our position in space, which will be a subject for a future segment of UnMind.

Falling back to gravity for the time being: If you picture yourself sitting on the globe of the earth, like a tetrahedron perched on a sphere, you can see that the peak of the tetrahedron would lie on a radius that runs to and from the center of the planet to the crown of your head. This illustrates what Matsuoka Roshi called “sitting-mountain-feeling,” which he used to indicate how one knows when the posture is perfectly balanced. He also described it as if the top of your skull is pressing against the ceiling. Extremely solid and stable. Of course, the human body is more complex than a geometric figure. But when all the bones of the skeleton are arrayed properly, and the tension or turgor in the musculature membrane is evenly distributed, it feels as if the body is composed of one material throughout — wood, stone, or metal. You have become a statue, so to speak, with gravity pulling down on you from below, atmospheric pressure bearing down from on high.

Gravity is a central operating principle of the universe, according to the science of (astro)physics; Dharma & karma may be said to be operating principles of reality, according to the teachings of Buddhism. Note that I said “teachings,” not “beliefs.” Buddhism is not a system of beliefs, but rather what we may call conjectures, concerning the true causes and conditions of our existence. One of which — a big one — is gravity. The most difficult-to-embrace aspect of the definition quoted above is its imputed “infinite range.” That it is the weakest of the fundamental four is a bit slippery as well. It certainly seems that it would have to be stronger than forces operating only at a microscopic level, and only at very close range. But gravity can not overcome these other micro-forces, fortunately for us.

It may be appropriate here to interject another parallel I find between science and Zen, according to my poor understanding of both: Even Einstein did not “understand” gravity; even Buddha did not “understand” Dharma, or karma. These principles, or phenomena — again, not beliefs — are beyond understanding, in any ultimate sense. This is not merely a semantic quibble, but goes to the essence of the concepts of gravity, Dharma, and karma. They are real beyond concept, in some sense, but also, in their ubiquity, not really “findable.” Like most fundamental phenomena, they cannot be isolated.

Let’s entertain a thought experiment regarding gravity, no offense to the great Master physicist. Who, by the way, was known to sit in a chair holding his pen, and drift off into a kind of meditative reverie, which he described as not exactly thinking, but “visceral” in nature. At a certain point he would lose consciousness, dropping the pen, which would wake him up. Then he would retrieve the pen and start over again. This sounds, by the way, similar to Hakuin Zenji’s “Naikan Tanden” healing exercise, with which you may be familiar, designed to help you get a good night’s sleep, and which we sometimes practice on overnight retreats.

When you are lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, picture yourself floating in space, safe and sound on your mattress. Once you can feel your whole body’s position, or proprioception, imagine that your bed suddenly disappears. What happens? You instantly fall to the floor with a thud, subject to Newton’s second law, the acceleration of gravity, at 9.8 meters or 32 feet per second squared, or “per second per second.” So the thud, accelerating only a couple of feet from the disappearing mattress to the floor, is already considerably more than your body mass. That’s going to hurt.

Now if you imagine the floor disappearing as well, you fall into the basement or crawl space, at a proportionately greater acceleration, and corresponding thud, or splat. So while we may perceive that we are relatively free of gravity, it is a form of delusion, based on sensory adaptation. Falling off a cliff, we would impact a series of surfaces with greater and greater force, as we approached the bottom. We are constantly in danger of being flattened like Wile E. Coyote, or sucked into a sinkhole or quicksand, if we step off the edge of whatever surface is between us and the slippery slope of the gravity sink.

“All things are like this,” again quoting one of Master Dogen’s favorite and frequent constructions. What we are actually feeling, at all times, is the pull and drag of gravity, along with our body’s resistance and adaptation to it. When we sit in zazen, a kind of reverse-adaptation sets in, where we become sensitized to the fact that we have adapted to sensory input, including most especially gravity, the most constant and unforgiving force acting upon us, but also a panoply of others, such as the effect of light and dark with the daily cycle of revolution of the planet. The latest fad in the meditation and retreat business, made famous by none other than Aaron Rogers, the celebrity professional football quarterback, consists of immersion in total darkness — requiring absolute shielding of the subject from any natural light. Zen instead recognizes that there is no need to go to that extreme, as indicated in the Ch’an poem by Master Sengcan: Sandokai—Harmony of Sameness and Difference:

In the light there is darkness

But do not take it as darkness

In the dark there is light

But do not see it as light

Perhaps the attraction of immersion in darkness can be understood from a Zen perspective, as suggested in a later Ch’an poem, Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi:

In darkest night it is perfectly clear

In the light of dawn it is hidden

These translations always beg the question: What, exactly, is referred to as “it”? It, of course, is the meaning and effect of the practice of Zen, its raison d’etre. It is also our reason for being, from a deeply philosophical perspective. Some great sage lost to my memory said something to the effect that knowing this “it” in the morning, it is okay to die in the evening. Master Dogen wrote, when returning from his sojourn in China, that his life’s work was finished. So this “it” is IT – is everything, the only thing in life truly worth pursuing. Which brings up the principle of gravity in another context: what is the most grave aspect, or dimension, of life? Declaring death to be the answer may be true, but a bit glib.

In Zen, as in most philosophical, religious schools of thought, and even in professions, such as medicine, we find precepts – fundamental tenets that are expressed as the wisdom and working principles of the field. In Buddhism, there are ten such that are referred to as “grave” precepts, those that determine or define key parameters of the life of a Bodhisattva or Buddha, not to mention that of a lowly follower of Zen. What is grave about them is that they address the most fraught dimensions of life and behavior, such as killing, stealing, lying, and so forth. For which everyone already harbors some kind of precept, though it may not rise to the level of conscious intent and awareness, as in Zen.

One final thought on gravitas, which, being a human perception operative mainly on the social level, does not carry the weight of gravity — no pun intended — and so is undeserving of the same degree of consideration. My only comment is that through the practice of meditation — that is, of the real zazen — it may appear that you develop a kind of gravitas, charisma, or magnetic personality, a depth of seriousness that others find intriguing or attractive, even before you have any real insight into the truth of Zen. Don’t let it go to your head. It is only a side-effect of zazen.

Not sure where the next segment will take us. Down another rabbit-hole in the wonderland of Zen and Design Thinking, for sure. Maybe the space-time thing. And maybe this time we will come out on the other side of the wormhole.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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You can analyze

Anything into nothing —

Apt analogy.

In this segment of UnMind we continue exploring the intersection of Design Thinking and Zen praxis. That last 10-dollar word we may take up in future under “Praxis & Practice.” They are not exactly synonymous. But for now I want to focus our attention on analogy, its usage in Zen teachings, and its reliance on the faculty or process of analysis, one of the most powerful tools of the human mind. In his seminal teaching, Genjokoan—Actualizing the Fundamental Point, Master Dogen makes a point of pointing out that he is using analogy in a very intentional way, to get his point across. After a long and varied passage — using firewood and ash to illustrate the relativity of time by analogy, then pivoting to the all-too-human experience and perception of birth and death as analogous to firewood and ash, followed by the famous section on the moon reflected in a dewdrop, further citing oceans and mountains as exemplifying the knowns and unknowns of duality versus nonduality, finally pausing to declare that “All things are like this” — he launches into an even longer passage on birds and fishes in their respective elements, ending with:

If the bird leaves the air it will die at once

If the fish leaves the water it will die at once

Know that the water is life and the air is life
the bird is life and the fish is life

Life must be the bird and life must be the fish

After this charming semantic reversal of conventional causality — citing life itself as the primary cause — he affirms that he is purposefully using analogy:

It is possible to illustrate this with more analogies

Practice-enlightenment and people are like this

“All things are like this” narrowed down to the nature of practice-enlightenment and people. He continues, finally arriving at the point of this series of analogies, addressing the “So what?” question:

Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it

this bird or this fish will not find its way or its place

When you find your place where you are practice occurs

actualizing the fundamental point

When you find your way at this moment practice occurs

actualizing the fundamental point

So the point of all this analogizing is to bring the person listening to the point of actualizing the fundamental point of Zen practice in their own space — “where you are” — and time — “at this moment.”

Note that “practice occurs”: it is not something that we do, not something that we can actually do. The etymology of “praxis” hints at this:

late 16th century: via medieval Latin from Greek, literally ‘doing’, from prattein ‘do’.

Just as Dogen points out, in Zazenshin—Lancet of Zazen, that the clarity of our original mind is “actualized within non-thinking” and “manifested within non-interacting,” here he indicates that the main thing we practice in Zen, in the form of zazen, is ultimately a form of “non-doing.” This idea also finds resonance with the first major Ch’an poem from the 7th Century, Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind:

No comparisons or analogies are possible

In this causeless, relation-less state

Take motion in stillness and stillness in motion

Both movement and stillness disappear

When such dualities cease to exist

Oneness itself cannot exist

To this ultimate finality no law or description applies

It is difficult to embrace the idea that any so-called state of awareness would have no cause. It seems obvious that something, some set of circumstances, must be determining, to some degree, the state of mind we are in at all times. We might want to altogether abandon, or at least challenge, usage of the term “state” to identify a level of awareness on this order of comprehension. The apprehension of nonduality — or duality within nonduality and vice-versa — may involve a kind of realization that cannot even be regarded as a form of awareness. Here words fail.

Amongst the words that no longer have any real relevance or resonance, when the above kind of conclusion comes about as a result of Zen training, is the term “Zen.” At this point it seems we have come to the end of analysis, in that the utility of analytical thinking has become the futility of relying on a kit of tools that have reached the limit of their usefulness. The spirit of inquiry now returns to a more primitive or primeval level of sheer observation, in which language and labels no longer stick. My teacher described this aspect of Zen as something “round and rolling, slippery and slick.”

A well-known female Zen teacher named Toni Packer (1927-2013) was known for turning down the offer to succeed Philip Kapleau Roshi, one of the first generation of formally recognized American Zen priests and author of an early classic, “The Three Pillars of Zen,” one of the first Zen books I remember reading. I became aware of Ms. Packer when a young man who had been practicing with her community visited us in Atlanta back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, if memory serves.

He began questioning the way we were doing things, from our style of walking meditation to our exposition of the dharma, based his exposure to Packer’s approach to taking the Zen out of Zen, and who had written a book that he mentioned. I asked to read the book, which surprised him; apparently he assumed that I was set in my ways. After reading the book, I suggested he give a guest talk to the group, since he felt so strongly about the matter. During the talk, in which he ran down the litany of all the challenges to our way of practicing, the reaction in the room was, in effect, that he seemed to think he was the only person who had thought of these seeming contradictions, when in truth every one listening had been there, done that, in the history of their practice. Ironically, the whole point of Packer’s book was to admonish the reader to avoid falling into comparative thinking.

Comparative thinking is fundamental to analysis itself. It is difficult to imagine any kind of analytical process that does not involve some form of comparison. But if you arrogate to yourself the ability to judge the practice of others, and especially to challenge established communities of Zen practitioners, this is to make a fundamental error, a type of category error. It presupposes that the efficacy of Zen and the method of zazen depends upon the particular performative rituals and the environmental setting that surround and hopefully support the central practice of meditation.

If the effect of Zen depended upon specific details of group practice protocols, an argument could be made that one approach is probably and provably more effective than another. But this would not explain the enlightenment of some of the outstanding Ancestors, such as Huineng, who experienced profound insight with no history of practice or dharma study. Others had no substantial insight until they had left behind the formal practice altogether, beginning with Buddha himself. As Master Dogen himself instructed:

From the first time you meet a master

Without engaging in incense offering; bowing; chanting Buddha’s name;

Repentance or reading scriptures

You should just wholeheartedly sit

And thus drop away body and mind

While Dogen surely engaged in all of these activities, he recognized that they were peripheral, to the personal experience of insight, and meant to be supportive, to the central practice of zazen, the effect of which does not depend on the peripherals. Nor does the essential process of divesting ourselves of the social, cultural and personal baggage we have accumulated during our short lifetimes depend upon our powers of analytical thinking.

You cannot analyze your way to Zen’s insight; you cannot think your way to spiritual awakening. But that does not mean that analysis or thinking is the problem. It is our misunderstanding of the functioning, and consequent misuse, of this powerful tool that is likely to be our downfall. One of my mentors from the world of design science, R. Buckminster Fuller, defined human intelligence as our ability to extract general principles from particular case experiences. After so many repeat experiences of witnessing fast- and slow-moving entities — such as rabbits and turtles, or rafts and rocket ships — the child comes to know the meaning of “fast” as opposed to “slow,” as a universal operative principle not limited to any particular example. “All things are like this,” to coopt one of Master Dogen’s frequent tropes, which captures the general utility of analogizing.

Likewise, the sheer repetition of taking up the posture, breathing, and open awareness of the method of Zen, holds out the possibility that under such intensive observation, the constructed self will implode, revealing the underlying “true self,” the practitioner having successfully extracted the general principle from the many case experiences of engaging unfiltered awareness again and again and again.

In the next UnMind we will take up another universally operative principle — gravity — compared and contrasted with its more human aspect — gravitas — and their relation to Zen and Design Thinking. Meanwhile please recognize the relative futility of depending upon analysis in your Zen practice, especially in meditation. You might instead consider how zazen compares and contrasts, by analogy, with the other operative dynamics of your life, such as your profession, or health and wellness initiatives.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Not symmetrical

But then nothing really is —

Only in our mind

In this segment of UnMind we continue where we left off, discussing the all-important mentoring relationship of teachers to students, and students to teachers, particularly the asymmetrical relationship in Zen training. The success of any mentorship depends almost entirely, 100% plus, on the sincerity and intensity of the student, more so than the teacher, as illustrated by the anecdote about my friend and fellow student at ID+IIT, JJ, who had an unfortunate run-in with one of my key design mentors related in the last segment. As a teacher of design at the U of I, Chicago Circle Campus, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I found myself on the other side of the equation and gained even more respect for my mentors. For those design students who did not seem to benefit greatly from my tutelage, I can fault them as well as myself. My story and sticking to it, anyway.

The well-known exchanges between Zen ancestors and their students, particularly those who eventually succeeded them in the lineage, are illustrative of this asymmetry. Bodhidharma, the first Zen patriarch known to history in China, for example, responded to his Chinese student and dharma heir, Huike, who complained of having a disturbed mind, by asking him to show him this mind. When Huike replied that when he looked for it he could not find it, the sage exclaimed “There I have calmed your mind!” or some such expression. These incidents are variously translated so please forgive my paraphrasing, as well as the spelling of the names. I am not a scholar.

My point here is that then Huike, in a similar exchange with his future successor, Sengcan, said something similar. The eventual third patriarch in China likewise complained of being “bound” by something, and Huike asked him what was binding him. When he could not respond, Sengcan suddenly realized there was nothing binding him and was liberated.

That Huike responded to his student in essentially the same way that his teacher Bodhidharma had replied to him illustrates that the teacher was not called upon to say or do something extraordinary, but instead had responded with an ordinary, mundane question. We might even conclude that Huike had merely imitated Bodhidharma’s approach. I think this makes the case that what triggered the profound event of the student’s transformative insight was not the skill or mystical power of the teacher, but was dependent upon the desperation of the student, combined with complete faith in the teacher.

Symmetry is a principle of Design Thinking, as can be seen in the design of most modern automobiles as well as vintage wheeled vehicles, such as the chariot Buddha used as an analogy to the skandhas, or the Conestoga wagons that settled the West. The practical reasons for this are pretty obvious when considering the function of the vehicle to move straight forward or backward in as friction-free a way as possible, as well as to navigate turns. But the adherence to symmetry in design goes far beyond the practical functioning of the vehicle, into the aesthetics of its overall form and features. One of the few notable exceptions to the symmetry norm may be seen in the Nissan Cube (see photo) introduced to the American market in 2009 and discontinued in 2014. We may most usefully consider this anomaly in the context of the adage, “form follows function.”

Seeing this startling design for the first time may cause whiplash as it surprises your expectations of symmetry. It features a wrap-around window on the rear and one side, which violates the usual bilateral symmetry of vehicle design. I wonder if it also created a hazard in case the vehicle rolls in a wreck, as the roof-support structure would apparently be greatly weakened by the lack of a fourth column in that corner. And that that partially explains its brief time on the market.

Of course, the power drive chain and other mechanical systems that make the modern vehicle function are not symmetrical in the simple sense – one only has to look under the hood to see the asymmetrical complexity of the modern combustion engine or that of the newer electric and hybrid vehicles.

The apparent bilateral symmetry of the human being and many other animals is similarly deceptive. Once the relatively symmetrical outer appearance is removed, as in surgery or an autopsy, the incredible complexity of the underlying system of nerves, glands, and organs is revealed. The skeleton and musculature largely reflect the symmetrical form of the outer appearance, and much like the drive train and wheels of the automobile, function to support the mobility and balance of the body in motion.

So the appearance of bilateral symmetry in both cases is just that – appearance, another word for form.

The famous formula coined by Buddha, that form (appearance) is, itself, emptiness — and vice-versa — reflects this greater reality. If we probe even further, down to the molecular and atomic levels, it becomes clear that while the constituent elements making up the appearance of symmetry of the object may themselves exhibit various kinds of internal symmetry, including radial and other three-dimensional geometries that transcend mere bilateral or mirror symmetry; there is no clear, fractal-like relationship of the micro-scale parts to the macro-scale whole. The forming processes of whatever metal, plastic, rubber, textile and other materials undergo in order to achieve the final form of the completed object obviously depend upon the properties of the materials, but their original, internal form has little to do with the final, external form. Like the fabled chariot, the whole exists only in the sum of the parts.

If we deconstruct the vehicle, like the chariot, it ceases to function, or to exist, as a vehicle. Likewise, the organism, human or otherwise, does not function or exist outside the particular assembly of its parts. Zen meditation is often referred to as a process of deconstructing consciousness, or the mind itself. Realization, according to Master Dogen in Jijuyu Zammai—Self-Fulfilling Samadhi, is the manifestation of this process (emphasis mine):

All this, however, does not appear within perception because it is unconstructedness in stillness; it is immediate realization.

Note that the term “unconstructedness” does not even qualify as proper English; the giveaway is the red underline the word processor uses to highlight a mistake. Dogen goes on to point out that “if practice and realization were two things, as it appears to the ordinary person, each could be recognized separately. But what can be met with recognition is not realization itself because realization is not reached by a deluded mind.” This indicates that anything that can be met with recognition is, by definition, a kind of delusion. Our very recognition of something we call “symmetry” is itself delusional. Upon closer examination it falls apart, seen to be, at best, a kind of approximation. The mind continually averages out all the contrary impressions of asymmetry to focus upon and reify the notion of symmetry.

The immediacy of realization the Master points to should be understood as immediate in both time and space. That is, in this “realization” what becomes real to us is not something that heretofore was distant from us and somewhere in the future, but always and ever present, and near at hand. So close as to be inaccessible to perception as such, like the water to the fish, or the air to the bird. As Dogen points out later in this same tract, even the idea of “realization” must be regarded with some circumspection:

[But] the boundary of realization is not distinct. For the realization itself comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of buddha-dharma. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge or is grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be apparent. Its appearance is beyond your knowledge.

That “the inconceivable may not be apparent” — one of my favorite Dogen lines and, I think, indicative of his sense of humor — must be one of the grand understatements of all time. How could the inconceivable in any way be apparent? This is one of the hallmarks of the asymmetrical nature of the relationship, the ability to use language but not be used by it. So to speak. o point at that which is beyond concept, let alone language. Concepts take time to form. Expressing them in language takes even longer. Using words to point at that which is beyond conception, and thus far beyond language, is difficult, but not impossible. Tozan Ryokai, credited with founding Soto Zen in China, reminds us of the inconceivable nature of Zen realization in his Ch’an poem Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi, pointed to as “it” (J. inmo):

Although it is not constructed it is not beyond words

Like facing a precious mirror

Form and reflection behold each other

You are not it but in truth it is you

It would be hard to find a more succinct and intriguing description of a symmetrical relationship than “Form and reflection behold each other.” Especially as the two elements of the sentence, “form” and “reflection,” indicating object and subject, respectively, are usually considered to be the opposite of symmetrical — comprising the material and spiritual dimensions of existence — or matter versus mind.

One more visual example of the apparent symmetry versus the actual asymmetry that we normally perceive is illustrated by an exercise called “Your Original Face” from a creativity workshop we conducted at ASZC, based on Huineng’s famous anecdotal koan. In the photos you see the same portrait of my face, divided down the middle axis and reconstructed to reveal the “left-face “ versus the “right-face” version of me. Looks like me, but… Note that the arched-eyebrow side in shadow connotes the evil me while the side in full light looks more like a saint. The “eyes have it” but so do the eyebrows and mouth.

Problem-solving is the action-oriented modus operandi of both professional design thinking and the Zen or Buddhist worldview. Designers define problems worthy of solving, often redefining those presented by clients, for financial as well as altruistic reasons. Siddhartha Gautama clearly interpreted the cultural norms, mores and memes of his times and his particular social standing in the caste system as problematic or unsatisfactory, and went on what we might romanticize as a spiritual quest to find a solution. His findings, conclusions, and recommendations constituted the content of the First Sermon, in which he laid out the Four Noble Truths, an extremely concise and complete description of the “problem” of sentient existence, particularly for human beings, including a thoroughgoing prescription for practicing in daily life, the Noble Eightfold Path, which, crucially, emphasizes the central method by which anyone can approach and — at least in theory — solve this problem for themselves, essentially by “doing thou likewise.”

Fortunately for us, he succeeded to a greater degree than most of his contemporaries. He and his followers transformed this personal experience into a socially inclusive program for like-minded people, the original Order of monks and nuns, as well as householders and leaders, in India. This is the origin of the legacy we have inherited and celebrate today.

As I said in the prior segment, in both design and Zen training, relationships to your mentors become all-important, shaping your views of the profession, and the practice and meaning of meditation, respectively. This is true of Zen in particular, and probably all asymmetrical relationships in general. Where we go from here we shall see, as we say, but wherever the road takes us, it will arrive at the intersection of Zen and Design Thinking. Meanwhile keep practicing.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Asymmetrical.

Of necessity it is —

But need not stay so.

Welcome back to UnMind, the podcast in which we tap into Design Thinking to inform our approach to Zen practice and daily life in modern times, especially in America. After the last series posted at midsummer last year — five episodes in which we summarized thirty-two prior segments on the intersection of Design Thinking and Zen — we decided to take a much-needed hiatus to reconsider the overall direction of the podcast itself.

The prior three segments on the Three Treasures of Buddhism — Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha — were the inaugural series of the reboot, examining what we would refer to as their “design intent.” That is, how “Buddha practice,” interpreted primarily as time in meditation, is designed; what effect it is intended to have; and the same analysis applied to Dharma and Sangha. These ancient concepts are subject to misunderstanding in a culture underpinned by Judaic and Christian memes. I chose to approach them from a “form follows function” perspective, an established meme in Design circles. An evolutionary biologist tells me this is reversed in biology: function follows form, sans Designer.

In the next series of segments we will take up various pairs of associated concepts to likewise hopefully shed some light on the connections between them that I glean from both Zen and Design angles. With this week’s installment we will examine the most dispositive and determinative — and often fraught — relationships within the professional field of Design as well as that of formal Zen training, those you enjoy with your mentors. AKA the teacher-student/student-teacher relationship.

In “Follow the Meander – An Indirect Route to a More Creative Life,” by Keisei Andrew Dietz, a long-time member of Atlanta Soto Zen Center (ASZC) who is a creativity and branding consultant as well as an excellent writer, he relates that following a long and feckless interview of my teacher, Matsuoka Roshi, by an FBI interrogator, the Enemy Alien Board of WWII in 1944 concludes by recommending:

The Board particularly wants to point out to the Department that in their opinion this subject is a dangerous alien enemy.

In the years leading up to the declaration of war with Japan, incoming Zen priests were suspected of being spies, as was eventually the entire Japanese population, which led to their infamous internment. When you read the text of the interview, especially if you knew Sensei, you can see that he was just honestly answering loaded questions by questioning why he would do any such thing as the interrogation suggested, such as going to Mexico, if such an order came from Japan. Why would he?

That the interrogator concluded that Sensei posed a threat is truly laughable. His intent in coming to America was entirely altruistic, bringing the compassionate teachings of Zen and its practical method of meditation, zazen, to the people of his adopted country.

The FBI agent did not understand that Sensei was, indeed, a “dangerous alien enemy,” but on a whole ‘nother level. His mission to America was indeed dangerous, in that it was intended to inculcate — in those Americans who became his students — an independence of thought, combined with an interdependence of action, that is truly subversive to any governmental effort to propagandize, or brainwash, its citizens. Political or ideological systems require dependent thought and codependent action on the part of their subscribers to be effective. Thus, introducing Zen to any society is the most subversive thing you can do. But no harm no foul. Sensei harbored no ill will.

Zen’s subversive influence has little to do directly with the social dimension, other than as a side-effect, but instead operates on the personal level. The nesting spheres model puts this in context (see diagram). Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “The Zen person has no trouble following the sidewalks.” In other words, it is not necessary to be nonconformists on the social level, e.g. fomenting a political movement as such, because Zen practitioners constitute such radical anomalies on the personal level.

The propagation of Zen in America is taking place on a near-subliminal level, like the innovative selling of Tupperware through invitational parties in peoples’ homes, instead of through retail stores. Zen followers do not usually make a public display of their practice, and its values do not provide a basis on which we would mount a campaign to reform society in our image. The real revolution begins at home, remaining virtually undetectable on the surface. True independence is as alien to conventional society as you can get. After all, society itself is subject to the three cardinal marks of Buddhism’s dukkha: impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality. Further, any society’s intentional evolution is exacerbated by human venality, as we witness on a daily basis here in the USA and all over the globe. Zen’s embrace of this kind of humility is illustrated in the closing lines of an ancient Ch’an poem, Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi, by Tozan Ryokai, founder of Soto Zen in 9th century China:

Ministers serve their lords; children obey their parents

Not obeying is not filial; failure to serve is no help

With practice hidden, function secretly like a fool like an idiot

Just to continue in this way
is called the host within the host

Very Confucian, the take on serving and obeying in the first two lines, but this does not amount to an unthinking endorsement of mindless conformity. “Fool” here is akin to “God’s fool,” which does not constitute a pejorative but indicates the highest praise. The term “idiot” in the modern idiom denotes “a person of low intelligence,” an “ignorant person,” or simple, abject stupidity. But the Greek root term stresses the “private person,” the aspect of simply being a layperson. The “host within the host” is the most intimate sphere of conscious awareness, being the person within the person, having little to do with any social interaction. Both can be true at the same time, as in “inner person vs. outer person.”

In Andrew’s estimable book, which lays out his recommended nonlinear approach to the creative life, he emphasizes the importance of finding and appreciating one’s mentors. After noting that he considers himself a “subversive in training,” he quotes my latest online Dharma Byte of that time (https://storder.org/dharma-bytes/), in which I wrote about Zen and revolution:

Zen is countercultural. The main social or political issue with Zen practice, fully understood, is that it leads to true independence. Not only of thinking, but even of motive. The personal revolution that zazen can bring about can also knock the supports out from under our unthinking obedience to the dictates of the culture.

“Follow the meander.” Highly recommended, both the book and the process. Admittedly it is a bit odd to be quoting another writer quoting myself. But Keisei is here treating me as a mentor, his mentor, one of several he mentions in the book. His sweeping account of the meandering role of mentors includes some interesting factoids about R. Buckminster Fuller, and my encounters with the great man, including one that a fellow Institute of Design student, studying photography under the direction of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind — two of my erstwhile and estimable mentors — captured on film (see photo).

Andrew notes the starburst clock apparently emanating from my skull while talking with Bucky, an intentional capture by my photographer friend, Steve Hale. Bucky always had this effect of blowing the minds of his audience, and still does. Search and find his recorded monologs in the cloud to see for yourself.

In training, in both Design and Zen, your relationships to your mentors become all-important, shaping your views of the profession, as well as the practice and meaning of Zen and meditation, respectively. Of course, there are many other fields in which this holds true, basically for any apprentice mode of training with a journeyman or master of the trade. But in Zen, mentors are regarded as familial-level relations of some degree of intimacy, such as “dharma-father” or -mother, -sister, -brother, -grandfather, -uncle, et cetera. Shakyamuni himself was said to regard others as his “children,” and not in a condescending way, and would often refer to his followers as “good sons,” if we are to believe the written record.

But Buddha was also known for not suffering fools gladly — “fool” being defined as “a person who acts unwisely or imprudently” or “a silly person” — in contrast to the “fool” in the great Zen poem above, where it connotes “a person devoted to a particular activity,” in this case, the secret practice of Zen. This point was illustrated several times in Buddhism’s early history, when upon one occasion — ostensibly the last major teaching that Buddha gave, now referred to as the Lotus Sutra — he was told that certain pundits had come to debate. He is said to have said something like, “They are free to go.” Even Buddha realized that he would not reach everyone with his message, and as Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Zen is not up for debate.”

Buddha also explained — when asked by his devout followers why it was that some people did not show him the respect they thought he deserved — that these recalcitrant seekers had been his students in past lives, and that he had treated them badly, and so they were unwilling to follow him in this lifetime. Master Dogen likewise admonishes senior monks not to treat juniors unfairly, a more modern variation on this same theme, from 13th Century Japan.

Perhaps the most neutral comment Buddha is said to have made on the teacher-student relationship arose from a confrontation he had with a young man he met on the road. This wannabe monk pressed the Great Sage to answer the “Ten Cosmic Questions,” as they were known — such as how it all began, how it will all end — et cetera. But Buddha demurred, explaining that these questions were really beside the point, irrelevant as well as hopelessly speculative, and bore no relation to the problem at hand, that of the suffering prevalent in this life.

The young man insisted that unless the Buddha answered these questions, he, the young man, could not consider him, the Buddha, to be his teacher. Buddha responded with a clarification that should be the hallmark of all mentoring relationships. He told the earnest but misguided youth that he, the young man, was under no obligation to be his student; and he, Buddha, was under no obligation to be his teacher.

This resonates with a contemporary teaching from Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, expressed in the so-called “Gestalt Prayer”:

I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.

I witnessed one memorable example of such an exchange in person, while pursuing my undergraduate degree at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. One of my most influential design mentors, the independent thinker, designer and education innovator, Ken Isaacs, had been invited to lead a special class, on the industrial design side of the program. As I was on the graphic design side, I had to jump through some hoops in order to be able to cross over and take his class. But I was determined to do so, knowing some of Ken’s history, and having read a cover story in Life Magazine on his work, specifically the “Knowledge Box” that he later installed at ID+IIT (see photo). My persistence had the side effect of opening up the ID curriculum for future students to custom design their curriculum across disciplines and moving away from specialization, and so turned out to be worth the hassle, on both personal and social levels.

In the eclectic class, which was held in a small auditorium in the basement of Crown Hall, the famous steel-and-glass architectural innovation by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (see photo), Ken put us through a series of mind-bending exercises he called “set-breakers.” Meaning not only thinking out of the box, but within the box, over and above and beyond the box, redefining and redesigning the box itself, so to speak. The first assignment was to “Translate yourself into terms other than verbal and present them to the class.” The second was to translate someone you knew in the class into terms other than verbal, and present that. As you might imagine, this led to considerable introspection on the personal level, and presenting a fellow student, a serious aspiring artist and my closest friend, led to some upheaval in our student-student relationship. But back to the teacher-student thing.

Another student in the class, with whom I had become close, and will refer to as JJ, was the son of a colonel in the army, if memory serves. In that familiar groove of rebellion against strong parental influence, he was a sincere and decent folk-singer and guitar-player who had hitchhiked from the far West to attend ID. With the long, unruly hair to finish the portrait. His attitude was also unruly, leading him to frequently and repeatedly interrupt Ken’s penetrating lectures and commentaries, with well-meaning but somewhat snarky comments of a critical nature. This he saw as his duty to truth, and speaking it to power, I assume.

Finally one day, about midway through the term, Ken stopped abruptly in mid-sentence with one of JJ’s remarks, and walked gracefully over to where he sat, standing in front of him. He leaned down face-to-face with his arms on the back of JJ’s front-row auditorium chair and said, very quietly and sympathetically, that he could try to address all of JJ’s problems directly, and would probably be able to help him out with them. But in order to do that, it would consume all of his time and — indicating the rest of us with a sweep of his head — he would have to turn his back on all the other students in the room. And that, unfortunately, he could not in good conscience do that. So he said I have no choice but to ask you to leave. Talking with JJ later, it was apparent that he had learned his lesson, a painful one, but too late.

In the next segment we will continue this discussion of the all-important mentoring relationship of teachers to students, and that of students to teachers, pivoting to the asymmetrical relationship in Zen training.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Designing Sangha

Sangha is the fruit

Of all of our endeavors —

If harmonious.

angha is also an operative dynamic of our world. Community already exists; it is just not always very harmonious. Why would Buddha have established the original Order of monks and nuns, when he had a perfectly serviceable community in the form of the Shakya clan, and enjoyed a position of high honor and privilege within it? Why do we seek out groups of like-minded folks, often turning away from the family and friends we grew up with? Why do we reject the smorgasbord of ersatz communities on offer in the wider society, and turn instead to groups who insist on sitting quietly for irrationally long periods of time, occasionally inviting someone to hit us with a stick?

It is because, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Civilization conquers us!”

One could argue the case that Buddha was basically a late-blooming adolescent, a rebel who rejected his father’s plans for his future; and potentially a draft-dodger who, as a member of the warrior caste, did not relish the idea of taking orders from the Brahmins, for instance to wage war on the neighboring tribes. One could also reasonably wager that had he been of the lower castes — an untouchable, for example — he would not likely have gotten away with his renegade movement.

I submit that we are doing essentially the same thing in America today that Buddha did when faced with the dilemma of introducing a “third way,” in contrast to the probably polarized choices that denizens of proto-Hindu India faced in his day and time. In my recent book, “The Razorblade of Zen,” I delve into the choices we face today between the extremes of theism and religion on one end of the societal spectrum, with rationalism and science at the other end. Zen presents as the Middle Way, positioned between, and inclusive of, the extremes. You don’t know where the middle is until and unless you go to the extreme.

This vacillation, from high to low, from sensations such as exhaustion or hyper-energetic, or swings in emotions from anxiety to serenity, extreme states from depression to mania, or from one concept to its opposite, seems to be built-in to the very manner in which our mind functions. As Master Dogen reminds us in Fukanzazengi:

Think neither good nor evil right or wrong

Thus stopping the functions of your mind

Give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha

So thinking good or evil, right or wrong is the natural functioning of the mind — monkey mind, that is.

Such thoughts, emotions and states can be experienced on a strictly personal level, but they tend to influence our behavior and reactions in the social sphere as well. Which is where Sangha comes into play. One of the prevailing memes about the residential or community practice in vogue today in Zen circles is that the process is akin to stones in a fast-running creek or river — they become smooth by rubbing against each other. This analogy to rubbing off the rough edges simply by being tossed into the same tumbler for some time has its limitations. Most communities are highly intentional in their design. They often include “mindfulness gotchas” built into the day-to-day routine of the practice place.

Consider that we all have other choices these days. Whether or not we live in an intentional community, and for how long, is largely dependent upon other factors, such as resources and alternatives, otherwise known as “privilege.” Most Americans practicing Zen today are vastly more affluent and thus more privileged, than was Buddha in his environ. This is one factor explaining the predominantly white and upper-middle-class skew of the leadership of American Zen. My generation is the second, after those members of my father’s cohort, the “greatest generation” who went overseas in WWII. They became the first generation of American Zen practitioners and priests, having been exposed to the virus in the Pacific basin. My teacher, like theirs, was Japanese. We are now beginning to see the first generation of younger Zen students who came by it honest — their parents were into Zen.

The current influx of 20- and 30-something Zen seekers are a different animal, having grown up in a post-digital and highly interconnected world, with access to most of its intellectual resources. This naturally affects how they engage with the world, and calls into question the place of Zen training, with its emphasis on face-to-face transmission of the Dharma. Why are they coming to Zen? Same reasons you and I did. I was in my mid-20’s when I met Sensei; he was in his mid-20’s when he came to America, as was Dogen when he travelled to China, all to find the secret of Zen, which was missing from life.

Sensei would often say the secret to Zen is “Confidence in everyday life.” I would add balance to that claim, recognizing the many more tugs and pulls that are keeping us off-balance today. But we also now have many more avenues for outreach and engagement. Pre-and post-COVID, I have enjoyed many long-term, robust Dharma dialogs online, with students I have never met in person. We are actively redesigning the interface of the teacher-student relationship in all fields, including Zen.

If we are to give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha, what about taking up the role of Bodhisattva?

The “idea of becoming a Buddha” is relatively easy to dissect and dismiss, along with the idea of becoming anything we are not already. Or giving up the idea may create a higher likelihood of actually realizing Buddhahood. In any eventuality, it would certainly change our relationship with our community. Or would it?

If we are already Buddha — that is, awake but not fully so — what effect would becoming even more awake have on our relationship to our Sangha? And by extension, to the community-at-large? Awake to what? is the question begged. Awake to the community as harmonious, that is, as genuine Sangha? Awake to our personal role in assuring that the community is as harmonious as possible, and maybe improving our performance in playing that role?

We have a relatively recent usage in the realm of politics of the adjective, “performative.” This points out what some may regard as the hypocrisy of certain pols who represent positions and policies as if they truly believe in them, as we say in the religion of ideology; but an underlying suspicion suggests that they are only performing for the audience to gain or retain the votes of their constituency. Whatever the utility of this critique, and its potential influence on the future of governance, it seems we might benefit from adapting and applying it to our own role within Sangha, and by extension to society in general. While “performing” in front of others, we might pay attention to the fact that we are performing, and consider whether our actions are merely performative, or genuinely in line with our intention.

Sangha is a two-way street. At least. We affect the practice of the community and the community affects our practice. It can go either way. Too much emphasis on fitting into the community, and your zazen may be neglected. Too much emphasis on personal practice, and disharmony may result. It’s a balance, like most things. And Sangha is not really necessary on the personal level: see Bodhidharma. On the social level, however, the design of the community becomes crucial to its survival and success, which is measured by its beneficial effect on its members Zen lives, no matter how many or how few.

If we can strike a balance between the three legs of the Zen stool — Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha — we may have a chance at experiencing the liberation that the Ancestors have assured us hangs in that balance. Zen is about true freedom or liberation: from self-imposed as well as societal constraints; it is innately apolitical. Freedom from cultural memes and mores, yes, but the Zen worldview is not a form of license; the “Zen person has no problem following the sidewalks,” as Sensei would often remind us. We followers of Zen are already the ultimate in non-conformity — no need to make a point of it. Finally, freedom from anxiety, analysis paralysis, weariness and confusion; but not based on a belief system about reality but a direct transformation of our grasp of reality.

In the next series we will look at the intersection of certain selected pairs of phenomena that I find to be related to both Zen and Design Thinking. Of course I would be hard-pressed to find anything that does not relate to both of these parallel influences on my life. Meanwhile please practice-practice-practice Buddha-Dharma-Sangha.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Designing Dharma

Dharma was the point

Of 2500 years —

And forever more

Matsuoka Roshi would often say that most people go through life with something missing; they don’t know what it is, but they definitely know it’s missing. Finally, he said, they come to Zen to find it. Zazen is, of course, not the only way to penetrate the truths of existence, but as Sensei claimed, any method that works — yoga, prayer, philosophy, martial arts, chanting, etc. — “will have something of Zen in it.” He would often mention examples of undivided attention in sports, like baseball —e.g. Willie mays — as evidence of the focus factor of Zen. Master Dogen expressed something similar, in a passage with which I am sure Matsuoka Roshi was familiar:

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind you think it already sufficient

When dharma fills your body and mind you understand that something is missing

Following this remarkable assertion in Genjokoan—Actualizing the Fundamental Point, he goes into a long analogy of the ocean appearing to be circular from our perspective when no land is in sight, and how all things are like this:

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions

You see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.

This “eye of practice,” vintage Dogen coinage, comes close to giving us a clue as to what Dharma is, and how we should expect to apprehend it in our own direct experience, rather than as a concept or belief. The implication is that our eye of practice can become more discerning through, well, practice. Nowadays we interpret Zen practice as indicating meditation itself, but of course it is all-inclusive of the various dimensions of life, as outlined in Buddha’s original Eightfold Path, a kind of prescription for practice.

In another passage, Eihei Koso Hotsuganmon—Dogen’s Vow, the great Master and Founder of Soto Zen in Japan indicates that the Dharma is a trans-sensory phenomenon, not limited to an object of perception as such:

We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives

To hear the true Dharma

That upon hearing it no doubt will arise in us

Nor will we lack in faith

“Hearing the true Dharma” does not imply hearing someone preaching the Dharma anymore than “seeing” what our eye of practice can reach implies visual perception. This is the “see” of “I see what you mean.” My best friend in high school used to say, with a mischievous grin, “Yes, but do you mean what I see?”

You could make the case for “feeling” the true Dharma as well, and go beyond the senses in your embrace of the Dharma as having to do with sensation altogether, as Master Dogen mentions in Jijuyu Zammai—Self-fulfilling Samadhi after a long, effusive description of realization:

When for even a moment you express the Buddha’s seal

By sitting upright in Samadhi

The whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal

And the entire sky turns into enlightenment

All this however does not appear within perception

Because it is unconstructedness in stillness

It is immediate realization

So by this we are to understand that expressing or hearing the true Dharma is a transformational experience, not subject to ordinary understanding. But this should not surprise us; what, of all the many phenomena we experience on a daily basis, can we be said to truly understand? That the Dharma is beyond understanding does not mean that it is not real, or that it must be unimportant. We do not “understand” birth, or death, nor most of what happens in-between.

At this point you may want to shout, in exasperation, “Please stop talking about Dharma and just tell me what it is!” If Dharma is beyond understanding, yet accessible to awareness, it is certainly beyond concepts, and far beyond words. Which brings up the central stanza from Tozan’s Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi:

Although it is not constructed it is not beyond words

Like facing a precious mirror

Form and reflection behold each other

You are not it but in truth it is you

So this unconstructed dimension of reality can be pointed at, if not captured, in words. Which explains the written record of some 84,000 sutras and the vast body of commentary on them from India, China and Japan. When it comes to the instructions for meditation, which Zen claims to transmit the method of Buddha himself, the words are not pointing at a description of reality, but rather offering a prescription for a do-it-yourself approach to entering into the true Dharma directly, through whole body-mind immersion.

So as Pogo the Possum famously reminds us, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The Dharma is already present in its multifarious manifestations, from the world of nature as well as the machinations of human kind, and beyond to the unlimited, inconceivable universe. The only thing coming between the true Dharma and ourselves is our own ignorance, both innocent and willful.

It may help to consider the contrarian position that we already hear the true Dharma, that in fact we cannot hear anything but the true Dharma. Elsewhere I have argued that anything and everything we hear has to be dukkha, the universal dynamic of change that we human beings interpret as “suffering.” In order to hear any sound, the sound has to emanate from some level of change. No change, no sound. Similarly, we can assume that any sound we hear, including that of human voices, constitutes an instance of Dharma. It cannot be otherwise. Confusion sets in when we understand the language that the human voice is speaking, particularly if they are speaking of the Dharma. Instead of witnessing the concrete event that happens to be producing intentional sounds directed toward illuminating the Dharma, we find ourselves bogged down in the dualistic concepts being expressed in language, which is inherently dualistic in nature. Both things can be true at the same time, as the popular trope has it.

The design of Dharma would then relate only to the spoken and written teachings, perhaps extending to the establishment of temples, monasteries and Zen centers as intentionally promulgating and propagating the practice. When we read the record of Buddha’s teachings, or sutras, assuming that they capture the events fairly accurately, we can see that the format for their live presentation was similar to the ubiquitous talk show of today. Typically a member of the Order would interview the sage, asking questions for the benefit of the audience. Occasionally Buddha would have a guest or two sharing the couch.

Our charge and challenge today is the same. How we present the Dharma to today’s audience will be the determining factor in its acceptance, assimilation, and effect upon the denizens of our world. In my opinion, Zen may be one of the few hopes we have for world peace in an increasingly mad world. How we introduce Zen to the madding crowd and whether we can make it accessible to all levels of society will greatly condition the influence that the “compassionate teachings” have on the future. This is why we emphasize householder Zen, rather than the monastic model, in the Silent Thunder Order.

If the Dharma were dependent upon a specific lifestyle or mode of living in the world, it would not be the Dharma. Imagine a world in which Zen has not yet been discovered and the method of its transmission is yet to be invented and designed. The bare manifestation of reality is still the Dharma. Or even further, a world on which there are no human beings to “hear” or “meet” the true Dharma, as we are told was the case a mere 250 to 300,000 years ago. The Dharma was already operative in that inchoate world.

Dharma has many connotations. A couple that are indicative of its deeper meaning are that of a “being” — from a minute particle to the largest galaxy; and that of “law” — as in natural law, or the way reality works. In this latter definition it is close to a principle of physics, or Taoism’s the “Way.” So Dharma as “teachings” in the form of words is merely pointing at the true Dharma that transcends words.

But language is one of the most powerful and precise media that we have available to convey meaning But in communications design, the message is the message received, not the message sent. Master Dogen was a master of the language, as was Matsuoka Roshi, doubling down in his non-native tongue of English. That these past masters used language instead of being used by it makes them exemplars of the approach to solving the problem of propagation of Zen today. In literary circles the advisory trope is “Write what you know.” The key to being able to share the Dharma assets is to hear, or meet the true Dharma, oneself. In a “publish or perish” climate, we can expect to find a lot of folks rushing into print at their first inkling into what they think they recognize as the Dharma, or its corollary in their vernacular.

That there is a true Dharma implies that there can be a false Dharma, or many such anomalies. Or we may quote one of the ancient but timely Ch’an poems on the subject, Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind:

There is one Dharma, not many

Distinctions arise from clinging ignorance

Once the subject of Dharma is identified and introduced into the vernacular, it becomes subject to the same distortions as any other topic of discourse. Zen offers a refreshing approach to this dilemma. We say with Dogen, in Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation:

You should stop pursuing words and letters

Learn to withdraw and shine the light on yourself

When you do so your body and mind will drop away

And your original Buddha nature will appear

Note that taking Dogen’s “backward step” is the opposite of attempting to understand by pursuing linguistic concepts. It is also, fundamentally, the opposite of “doing.” This is the intersection of Buddha and Dharma. By engaging in an intentional act of non-action, thinking non-thinking, and doing non-doing, the natural process of realization can take place. Do your best to do nothing about this.

In the next segment we will take up the third leg of the stool, that of Sangha, the harmonious community.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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Designing Buddha

Buddha was the first

To define design intent —

It hasn’t changed much.

In the next three segments of UnMind Podcast we will consider the Three Treasures of Buddhism — Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha — from the perspective of design thinking. That is, the method of Zen as consisting of Buddha practice: time on the cushion; Dharma study: researching and interpreting the teachings of the lineage masters; and Sangha service: the place and importance of community. We will devote one podcast to each of these three legs of the stool, as the saying goes, stabilizing the process of living a Zen life in our times.

Anyone-anytime-anywhere Zen. One of the premises of Zen practice is that it starts out as a specialized method, upright seated meditation, or zazen in Japanese, consisting of discrete periods of time in “silent illumination,” which is not necessarily silent and often not very illuminating. But over time we develop patience with it, which means patience with ourselves and our own impatience. Over time the halo effect of zazen begins to expand beyond time on the cushion to subsume all of our other activities in daily life until it is virtually 24/7. But don’t get ahead of yourself; this usually takes some time. You may be a prodigy or genius of Zen but you may be carrying more baggage than you imagine so better to err on the side of modesty and not develop grandiose expectations, and best to entertain none at all. However, the benefits of zazen will probably blossom in your life in unexpected ways. One of our more recent members who is a poet amongst other skills sent the poem below, which testifies to the remarkable accessibility of Zen meditation under any and all circumstances:

Waiting Room Zazen

Waiting room zazen—
Quiet as a zendo,
Almost.
Each patient in a chair
Staring at a cell phone
Or reading.

Sitting upright,
I lower my gaze.
Such stillness
In the midst of it all.
Too soon they call
My name.

—Renee Walker

Zazen is so simple in design that it is virtually irreducible. It doesn’t require a lot of equipment, other than a human body. The upright posture and natural breath can be employed anywhere, and this has an immediate and dramatic effect on attitude and attention. But this is more likely to come true after long practice on the cushion, preferably in a controlled environment such as the zendo. So both things are true at the same time. It is optimal to sit in a setting more conducive to meditation, but it is possible to meditate in environments not designed for that purpose.

Soto Zen’s worldview and approach is often compared and contrasted to other practices. There are many styles of meditation competing for attention these days, including “mindfulness” meditation, which differs in one key physical aspect from zazen: they recommend sitting with the eyes closed. Which raises a question of how mindful that can be, if it doesn’t even include the sense of seeing, our greatest source of sense data. Historically Rinzai and Soto Zen were often positioned at odds with each other, though many exponents of one school or the other, including Matsuoka Roshi, dismissed any difference as superficial or pedagogical in nature. Their historical provenance was probably largely politics.

From my perspective as a professional trained in design thinking, Soto Zen appears as simply the simplest. That is, we rely on the method of Zen meditation itself to carry the bulk of the load, less so on the influence of the teacher and other dimensions of the practice. The trappings of ritual, study and other appurtenances are supportive but not critical to the essential process. Again, the design of zazen is ingenious and deceptively simple: just sit still enough, long enough, and observe what happens.

Proponents of Soto Zen view Koan practice as somewhat superfluous or extraneous as well, in that in zazen, we are sitting smack dab in the middle of the real koan: the riddle of life itself. This does not mean, however, that the method of penetrating the illogical mysteries presented by koans, under the tutelage of an accomplished master, is not appropriate for some students of Zen. I have heard that some Rinzai teachers consider koan practice to comprise preparation for shikantaza, the experience of just sitting. So there is no real conflict between the two great schools in terms of meaning or objectives. All roads lead to nirvana if pursued with sincerity and diligence.

Matsuoka Roshi’s appreciation of Rinzai Zen was amplified by his respect for Hakuin, as indicated by his praise of Zazen Wasan, the great Rinzai master’s paean to zazen. In such considerations, we should keep in mind the all-inclusive embrace of Zen’s worldview, rather than falling into comparative thinking, or indulging in attitudes of exclusion. There is no my way or the highway in Zen; no absolutely right way or wrong way. Even if one wastes an entire lifetime in futile pursuit of a Zen fantasy, rebirth will provide the necessary course correction, just as the planet Earth will eventually recycle all of the waste matter with which the human species has polluted it. Zen takes the long-term view, but there is no time to waste.

The underlying impulse to practice Zen is sometimes characterized as “Buddha seeking Buddha.” This means that it is not exactly our personal mission to wake up to realization of the sort promised by Zen. Zazen is already the full expression of enlightenment, not something we “do” to attain enlightenment. We may regard it as “assuming the posture” of enlightenment, just as we assume the posture of surrender when we are arrested by the police. The cross-legged or kneeling postures traditionally associated with meditation, including Zen, are clearly non-defensive. One cannot easily flee or fight from this position. But what we are surrendering to is not an attack from outside, but the internal struggle with existence itself, with all its maddening contradictions.

The idea of innate enlightenment does not mean that we do not have to do any work to realize it, but that what realization reveals is, in some sense, already true. That we are already “buddha,” already awake, but not yet cognizant of the fact, is something like the difference between potential and kinetic energy. Matsuoka Roshi described zazen in an analogy that points to this dynamic, saying that it “looks like a mountain, but actually it is a volcano.” The underlying caldera of magma is building to a climax that will one day erupt. But he also described the experience of realization as something more subtle than a volcano erupting, more like the “parting of clouds to reveal the sun” than a sudden lightening bolt from the sky.

Which brings us to the subject of Samadhi, a jargon term in Buddhism that is so revered that it is usually capitalized in text. In Hakuin Zenji’s Song of Zazen he praises the Samadhi of zazen effusively:

Thus one true Samadhi extinguishes evil

It purifies karma dissolving obstructions

Then where are the dark paths

To lead us astray?

The Pure Lotus Land

Is not far away

Powerful stuff. If we experience genuine samadhi in our zazen, it apparently has a direct effect upon not only our immediate awareness and appreciation of the determinative causes and conditions of our existence, but also expiates or atones for our karmic actions of the past and mitigates any consequences in the present and future. Samadhi is the secret sauce of Zen meditation. It is our ticket to the Pure Lotus Land of legend.

Which raises the question, just what is this samadhi and where can I get some? The answer in Soto Zen is, of course, in zazen. My model of zazen samadhi consists of – surprise – four points, the inevitable, fundamental tetrahedron. I suggest we think of samadhi in four dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and social.

The physical posture of zazen is a model of balance, sitting upright in the midst of gravity, “leaning neither to the left or right, front or back,” as Master Dogen puts it with his usual spareness of expression. Where does that leave us? Exactly in the middle. Without going into his excruciating detail on the proper establishment and maintenance of the posture, we can see that it is essentially centered and balanced, as symmetrical a pose as possible for the human body, as clearly illustrated by the vast body of iconography — imagery and statuary of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas — as well as portraits of the known Ancestors of Zen.

The most visible thread running through the entire history of 2500 years and counting is this singular, central posture of the seated buddha. The other aspect of note is the non-binary or androgynous nature of these artistic representations, and their resemblance to the local population, rather than rendering and accurate ethnic representation of Shakyamuni, for instance. I understand that these illustrate the principles of buddha-nature being non-gendered, and as a potential to be realized by all human beings.

So once we have begun to experience what it means to enter into this exalted physical state of upright seated samadhi, the inevitable and predictable side-effects begin to set into place. Since the mind (J. shin, C. hsin—“heart-mind”) and body cannot separate, notwithstanding the Western view of mind over matter or the spirit as opposed to the incarnate body, emotional samadhi manifests to ever-greater degree with the normalization of physical samadhi: less anxiety, more natural calmness.

Mental samadhi likewise begins to manifest as more clarity, less confusion — particularly in regard to the reality that the Buddhist teachings are pointing to. We begin to experience in a direct, sensory (or better, trans-sensory), and concrete way the actual meaning of such seemingly obscurantist phrases as “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”

Eventually, by becoming more grounded in reality on the cushion, we begin to enjoy what I refer to as a kind of “social samadhi,” — less friction, more harmony in relationships with family and friends, professional associates and even strangers. In developing patience with ourselves on the cushion, we find we naturally have more patience with others. Take my word for this until it becomes true for you.

In the next segment we will take up the Treasure of Dharma, usually listed second of the three. Like buddha, dharma, and sangha will be seen to be forces of nature, operative dynamics of the universe.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

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It’s not personal.

But it manifests that way —

Universally.

As promised in the last segment, we will finish this series of five by taking up the remaining pair of combinations — the intersection of the Personal from the Four Spheres, with the Cessation of suffering from the Four Noble Truths, which involves the Eightfold Path previously touched upon. Personal Cessation is the only kind there can be, it seems. Even the Natural Cessation of physical death is not considered the end of suffering in Buddhism, owing to the principle of rebirth. Social Cessation does not seem that germane, other than the relatively decreasing engagement that comes with aging. But ask anyone in assisted living, palliative or hospice care, and you will find most of the issues that arise are social in nature. It must be admitted that if Cessation of suffering can and does actually occur in the midst of life, it must be a Universal phenomenon, as well as Personal. But the only dimension that counts must be the Personal, i.e. how we actually experience and embrace it.

The graphic illustrates the correlation of the Four Spheres of reality — the Personal, Social, Natural and Universal — with the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism — the Existence, Origin, Cessation, and Path to Cessation, of suffering, dukkha, a comprehensive model of lay Zen householder practice.

The Personal sphere is the bubble in which we sit when we assume the zazen posture. As mentioned, we do not thereby totally leave behind the Social, any more than we can escape the Natural and Universal spheres of influence, notwithstanding ancient claims to the contrary for the powers of meditation. But we can establish some distance between ourselves and others in meditation. Master Dogen hints at this in Fukanzazengi [Principles of Seated Meditation], his early tract on zazen:

Now, in doing zazen it is desirable to have a quiet room. You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships.

The operative phrase here is “forsaking all delusive relationships,” which begs the question: Which, if any, of the many relationships we have are not delusive? In another teaching, Genjokoan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point], Dogen lays out four transitions in Zen practice in descriptive, but cryptic, terms:

To study the Buddha way is to study the self
To study the self is to forget the self
To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things
When actualized by the myriad things your body and mind
as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away
No trace of realization remains and this no-trace continues endlessly

Another translation says something like: “to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things; to be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other and go on in traceless enlightenment forever.” This can be misinterpreted, I think, to indicate that this realization is a kind of “kumbaya” moment, where we see and embrace the fact that we are all alike, all in the same boat, et cetera, and why “Can’t we all just get along?” In other words, a Social interpretation of self and others, plural, and removing any apparent barriers. But I do not think this is what Master Dogen is getting at.

If instead we “remove the barrier between self and other,” singular, this identifies the fundamental relationship that we have to resolve, above and before all others. Like Bodhidharma alone in his cave, self-and-other are still present. This basic bifurcation in our apprehension of reality is akin to the Fall from Grace in Buddhism. It amounts to a kind of category error, one that develops in early childhood via the natural process called individuation, i.e. becoming aware of ourselves as individual beings separate from mom, the crib, and everything else. This is further reinforced by parents, teachers and peers, in conventional education. Which, in our culture, does not typically include meditation.

Not that this growing awareness of separate individuality is not true; it is just that it is not complete. The rest of the story is that we are intricately interconnected to all of our relationships, including with other human beings, but also sentient beings of other species in the animal kingdom, as well as plant life, and the insentient world. In other words, the Personal cannot be isolated from the Natural and Universal, let alone the Social. Master Dogen goes on to suggest that in zazen, however, we suspend judgment about all of this for the moment, at least for the time we are on the cushion:

Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right or wrong. Thus having stopped the various functions of your mind, give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha.

Note that “everything,” here, primarily entailing those judgment calls in the Social sphere, such as identifying “good and evil, right and wrong,” are to be set aside, in zazen. And that this kind of thinking represents the natural functioning of the mind, that is, the thinking or discriminating mind, known as citta in Sanskrit, the complement of bodhi, or wisdom mind. I think we can define these terms simply as analytical versus intuitive aspects of the total mind, or bodhicitta. This basic division of the mind into a dyad, or binary, we may take as the psychology or mind science of the times, as compared to the more complex models of the brain and its functions propounded by science today.

The main point here is that the ordinary functions of the mind —which we advisedly tend to label as “monkey mind” — reach a point of diminishing returns, though I don’t think we can literally stop them. Like a live monkey, citta will eventually wear itself out, lie down and take a nap. Trying to stop the functions of the mind intentionally only turns out to be more monkey business, as in the Ch’an poem Hshinshinming [Trust in Mind]:

Trying to stop activity to achieve passivity, the very effort fills you with activity

This is one of the many catch-22s that we find in Zen practice. And not only on the cushion, as Dogen goes on to remind us:

This holds true not only for zazen but for all your daily actions.

So the Personal Cessation of suffering may be experienced not as a sudden, irreversible event, like a thunderbolt from the sky, but a series of gradual, incremental cessations of our knee-jerk reactions to events. Both in the Personal sphere, particularly in meditation, as well as interactions with others in the Social and Natural spheres. This attitude adjustment may extend to other forces in the Universal realm, such as the effects of climate change. Or something as simple, but potentially deadly, as a sunburn.

One premise that has to be reinforced from time to time in Zen and other meditation circles, is that our practice does not, and cannot, reveal anything that is not already true. Meditation does not and cannot change anything, other than our personal apprehension and appreciation of our own reality. The revered Zen Buddhist saint, Bodhidharma, declared that it is not necessary to do zazen in order to “grasp the vital principle.” Which tells us that we do zazen for some other reason, namely to set aside all delusive relationships, for one example. Which suggests that we must be harboring a lot of delusive relationships, whether we are aware of them or not. Otherwise, why does zazen require so much time?

As I mention in The Original Frontier, the first reason most people give as to why they cannot do meditation, is that they do not have time. This is mainly because they look for immediate results, and give up when the novelty wears off, and they cannot detect sufficient positive feedback to encourage them to continue. According to the principles of zazen, and Personal Cessation, meditation does not necessarily take any time at all to take effect. Since we are getting in our own way, all we have to do is stop. Aha, you say — but that’s how they get you. Catch-22 déjà vu.

If the Cessation of suffering writ large is dependent upon case-by-case Personal Cessation of all those habits of thought and behavior that are getting in the way, how do we recognize and identify them, and relinquish our attachments or aversions to them that keep dragging us down? I think one of the key attitude adjustments is to recognize that we are not only receiving, but interpreting, our experience, even at the near-subliminal level in zazen. If we can set aside any interpretation at all — let alone judgments of good and evil, right and wrong, at least while we are on the cushion — then maybe we can move that dharma gate a little.

One last consideration before we leave this perhaps overly convoluted analysis of the intersection of the Four Noble Truths with my model of the Four Spheres of Influence, suggests another connection with the teachings of Buddhism. The spheres of internal and external reality correlate with the Three Treasures of classical Buddhism. Buddha, Dharma and Sangha track to the Personal, Universal and Social spheres. Briefly, Buddha — indicating practice on the cushion as a practical matter, but also our original nature, or birthright as human beings — is obviously a very Personal dimension of Zen practice. Of course, in light of its deeper connotations as “original nature,” it has Universal and Social implications. The study of and propagation of Dharma clearly involves a Social program of education — or “sharing the dharma assets,” expressed as a Precept — but also a Personal endeavor, climbing the Zen mountain. Again with Universal implications as Dharma, capital D, as the Way, or Tao, the law that governs the universe. Sangha is most obviously Social in character, but also Universal, representing the entirety of the human species from its origins hundreds of thousands of years in the misty past, to its current manifestation in facing the looming possibility of the Anthropocene Extinction, the sixth such global catastrophe on record. I could go on. But it is time to shift to another paradigm.

Meanwhile, please continue practicing in the holistic context of the Four Spheres and the Four Noble Truths, as well as the Three Treasures. Climbing Zen Mountain, and then descending.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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All are on the Path,

Though many do not know it.

This Path is no path.

The focus of this segment, the intersection of the Social Sphere and the Path to Cessation, sounds dangerously close to “sociopath,” a term that is becoming more and more familiar in the era of extreme divisiveness in the cultural and political landscape, not only in the USA but around the globe. What more appropriate designation for the president living in luxury in Russia, who finds it desirable to be constantly bombing and shelling civilians, women and children, in Ukraine? But then, what name is most fitting for a president who tries to steal an election? “Narcissist” doesn’t quite cut it.

When we return from our meditation to our family, or sally forth into the public fray — crossing the boundary between the Personal and Social spheres as shown in the graphic model — we enter the Original Frontier™ that Buddha must have encountered the night of his profound enlightenment some 2500 years ago. Perhaps the more accurate term would be “reenter,” as the Social sphere into which he had been born and raised had not changed — he had changed. In the 1960s, the “reentry problem” became a ubiquitous trope, designating that segue back into so-called normality, following a psychedelic-induced “trip” to what appeared to be another world. One of my design students at U of I, Chicago Circle campus, described it as “dumping out all of the drawers in the house in one big pile, and next day, having to put all that stuff back where it belongs.” A psychotropic, rather than alcoholic, hangover.

Of course, we never completely leave the Social realm, even when intently focusing on the Personal, in meditation. The influences of our particular social milieu are ever-present, even in the deep isolation of meditation. The Four Spheres are not only outside of us, they are also inside. The body’s biology and inherited DNA are obvious examples of the Natural. Subtle movements of chemistry and the neurological verge on the microcosmic Universal. As do such subtle phenomena as circadian rhythms, subliminal responses to sunlight, and the tidal pull of the moon.

Not that we are conscious of these influences. The inner Social sphere includes such unconscious elements as self-identity, i.e. association with family ancestry, including persuasions such as identifying with the political party that our parents favored. In receiving the Zen Buddhist lay precepts, we embrace interpretations of others regarding the avoidance of killing, stealing, lying, and so forth, on a conscious level. But we harbor built-in precepts inherited from parents and peers, all unbeknownst to ourselves. Zen’s Precepts often belabor the obvious. But they bear repetition.

Considering the intersection of the Social sphere with the Path, we call to mind its eight dimensions. Not capitalized here, in order to embrace them as Universal and Natural, as well as Social and Personal, rather than as holy writ. Right view and thought, or understanding, which together comprise right wisdom; right speech, action and livelihood, or right conduct; and right effort, mindfulness and meditation, taken together as right discipline. With our usual caveat that the term “right,” as used here, is more of a verb than an adjective. It indicates taking right action to correct our worldview and understanding, bringing them more into alignment with the worldview of Buddhism, or Buddha himself.

One could argue that effort, mindfulness and meditation live entirely within the Personal sphere of action, as exemplified by Bodhidharma, alone in his cave in ancient China. But we point to the halo- or ripple-effect of our personal discipline upon others around us, once we do leave the cushion and reenter the Social realm. Master Dogen is attributed with encouraging us to do one thing, and to do it well enough that we can even do it in front of other people. I have not been able to locate this saying in the written record, but in his famous Genjokoan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point] he declares that “Doing one practice is practicing completely.” This is analogous to the current Zen trope that asks, If you want to drill for water, would you drill a lot of shallow wells, or one deep well? This applies broadly.

In the fields of performing arts and athletics, connections of the discipline of Personal effort to Social performance becomes obvious, through repetition of rehearsal and practicing routines. As does the recommendation that “practice makes perfect,” notwithstanding the Buddhist tenet of fundamental imperfection. But the training, while clearly physical, is not only physical. Highly trained athletes are often guilty of making “mental errors.” Gymnasts, musicians, dancers and pole vaulters who persevere and break records, or move audiences to laughter or tears, are examples of this principle. They realize the non-separation of the Personal and Social, following the Path of process and progress through which we integrate inner discipline and outer conduct. In Zen as well as the arts, we arrive at a convergence in which wisdom emerges, on physical as well as mental and emotional planes.

Let’s take a brief look at each of the eight dimensions and its connection to the Social sphere, beginning where our practice begins, with right meditation. Sometimes rendered traditionally as contemplation or concentration, that there is right meditation suggests that there could be wrong meditation. Again, the usage is not exactly right versus wrong here on the Personal level of meditation practice, but we can agree that there may be wrong attitudes or usages of meditation in the Social context. For example, if we make a divisive or wedge issue of our zazen practice within the dynamics of our household, allowing it to affect our relationships to our family — spouse, children, parents, even in-laws — that might be an example of wrong meditation. An old saying holds that if your spouse and children are happy, your meditation is working. Adding an hour of meditation to our daily routine should not be a cause celebre, but can be inserted at an hour and in a place that does not disrupt or disturb anyone. In fact, practicing zazen should add to the harmony of the household, just as it does to the Zen community, or Sangha.

Right mindfulness in the Social realm would suggest extending this Personal caution and humility to the workspace, whether in the office or in the field. Making a display of wearing a wrist mala, for example, calls upon our fellow workers, managers and team members to respond, with questions or comments. While Zen practice has definite benefits in terms of our relationship to colleagues under the stressful conditions of productivity demands, making an issue of it with people who have little or no familiarity with Zen is not advisable. It introduces an irrelevant and even irritating element into a situation already fraught with potential for friction and conflict, e.g. along political or ideological lines. Not that we should be evasive about it, or try to hide the fact that we engage in a practice — meditation — that has its detractors, and does not yet enjoy the kind of mainstream acceptability that it is gaining.

A similarly inappropriate, and more common, phenomenon, is the tendency of some to insert their religious views into the business environment, when the business itself has little or nothing to do with religion. I have worked for a relatively large corporation where one of the partners held regular prayer meetings. He was also involved in an illicit affair with one of the employees. Along with being mindful of our practice, we practice mindfulness of context.

Right effort plays into the Social context as well, witnessed as our tendency to overdo and overthink all of these relationships, sometimes to the detriment of the relationship. In a comment I came across recently, a mother cogently summed up one example of this syndrome, suggesting that we would be a whole lot less worried about what other people thought of us if we realized how seldom they do. We have all been there, done that, when a colleague or boss makes a comment and we spend the next all-too-long period of time ruminating over it, fretting about what the person really meant, and insulted that they do not appreciate us for the contribution we make to the corporate cause.

There are innumerable books published about this, one I heard reviewed on television titled “Neanderthals at Work” by Albert J. Bernstein. He suggests that in the modern office setting you have three distinct types of coping strategies or views of the situation, one he called something like the politician, another the believer, and the third the genius. The “politician,” an example of the bad boss syndrome, schmoozes the people above them, while largely ignoring those lower on the ladder, or worse, criticizing them as a way of improving his position. The “believer” thinks the politician is immoral, feeling that as long as they come to work and do their job, they should not have to play politics. The “genius” comes out of the computer room to solve the problem du jour, but is often culpable in creating the problem. The politician looks down on the other two as naive, simply not understanding how things work in the modern office. Focusing on the boss is the natural approach to the reporting structure. The problem is not that these tendencies exist, but that their adherents do not understand each other, which exacerbates the friction between them.

Which brings us to another four-pointed model, my take on the traditional Zen jargon term, “Samadhi,” usually capitalized to stress the high regard in which it is held. I reduce it to the more prosaic “balance.” This concept is simple enough to grasp that no illustration is required. The first of the four is physical samadhi, the centered and balanced form of the zazen posture, leaning neither to the right or left, or front or back, as Master Dogen explains what it is not. From it, or along with it, comes the second samadhi, emotional balance: more calm, less anxiety. Thirdly we begin to experience mental samadhi: more clarity, less confusion. And finally, after some time, social samadhi: more harmony, less friction in our relationships to others. These four comprehend the inner-Personal and outer-Social benefits, or side-effects of Zen meditation practice.

Most people want to leap to the Social aspect right away, to handle interpersonal transactions with greater patience and compassion. But Zen goes deeper, of course. When the upright posture becomes more natural and comfortable, the heart-mind (J. shin) becomes calmer and clearer naturally. When one becomes more patient with the monkey mind, and more comfortable in one’s own skin through zazen, it becomes easier to have patience with others. But we have to be patient with the time that it takes to get over ourselves, and to divest ourselves of a lot of excess baggage we carry around. This is why Zen takes so long to penetrate to the deeper levels of Samadhi, as a transformational experience, sometimes regarded as the precursor to the fabled spiritual insight (J. satori) of Zen.

Summing up so far, we have looked briefly at the Universal Existence of Dukkha, change or suffering, that we are to fully understand; its Natural Origin, or craving, which we are to fully abandon — and which is built-into birth as a human being — which is considered the necessary condition for Buddhist awakening; and the Social Path recommended by Shakyamuni Buddha, which we are to follow to its ultimate conclusion in the Cessation of suffering. A caveat is in order as to this last claim. In the Heart Sutra we chant: “Given Emptiness, no suffering, no end of suffering.” This is not a contradiction, but indicates that the kind of suffering that can come to an end is that self- and mutually-inflicted suffering, intentionally and unintentionally, that we visit upon ourselves and others. The Natural suffering of aging, sickness and death, which come with the territory of sentient existence, do not, cannot, come to an end. But embracing that fact as reality, and perfectly natural, mitigates the suffering as a human meme.

Continuing, we will next take up the remaining pair of the combinations of the Four Spheres and the Four Noble Truths, the Personal and the Cessation of suffering, which necessarily involves the Eightfold Path to cessation. Personal Cessation is the only kind there is. Stay tuned one more time.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Not unnatural,

Suffering is only change.

It’s not personal.

Continuing where we left off last time, in this segment we will look at the intersection of the Natural sphere with Buddhism’s Origin of suffering. The graphic illustrating correlations between the Four Spheres — Universal, Natural, Social, and Personal; and the Existence, Origin, Cessation, and Eightfold Path to cessation of suffering — is included again for your convenience and reference.

In the Repentance verse of Soto Zen liturgy we chant:

All my past and harmful karma
Born of beginningless greed, hate and delusion
Through body mouth and mind
I now fully avow

“Avow” does not commonly appear in our daily vernacular, but it simply means to admit openly, or to confess. Monastics apparently had a more rigorous routine for confessing and repenting specific transgressions they may have committed, violations of what were known in India as Vinaya, in Japan as Shingi, basically the rules and regulations of conduct in the monastic setting. We have Master Dogen’s version, as well as Master Keizan’s from a few generations later, the two being known respectively as the “father and mother” of Soto Zen in Japan. One factoid that people like to point out is that there were hundreds more rules for nuns than there were for monks. Interpret that however you like. Or do your research. Usually the Three Treasure Refuges verse follows on the heels of Repentance:

I take refuge in Buddha
I take refuge in Dharma
I take refute in Sangha

I take refuge in Buddha the fully awakened one
I take refuge in Dharma the compassionate teachings
I take refuge in Sangha the harmonious community

I have completely taken refuge in Buddha
I have completely taken refuge in Dharma
I have completely taken refuge in Sangha

The condensation of repentance into a catchall phrase represents not just our usual laziness, I think, but a recognition that we may be engaging in karmic actions without knowing it. So just in case, we fess up to whatever we may have done, and “accept all consequence with equanimity,” as another version has it. And then we take refuge in the Three Treasures, just for good measure.

The line that indicates the connection between Origin and Natural is that bit about karmic consequences stemming from our very body, mouth and mind, the “Three Actions” of Buddhism. Another version has “born of body, mouth and mind,” which I think captures the meaning more precisely. That is, most of our desires, attachments and aversions, some of which get us into trouble, come with the territory of being born as a human being. As such, they are not exactly our fault. But what we do about it is our fault, or may be to our credit. There is the implication that we can “pay off” our accumulated karma, like a bad debt. The good news is that if we recognize that we did not create, or design, this situation in which we find ourselves, we can perhaps redesign our approach to it, embracing its seeming contradictions. Its “Designer” may not be so “Intelligent” as some would have us believe.

When you take an unbiased look at the Natural conditions of our birth and growth as part of a species, certain obvious limitations and undesirable aspects emerge. Does it really have to be so messy? Buddha identified these causes and conditions of circumstance, the matrix of existence, variously, such as: the reification of self emerging through the process of individuation as a child; the conventional wisdom of the social milieu into which we are born; and the predations of aging, sickness and death to which we are all subject. The necessity for survival of the species is not a personal goal, but one of the species itself, as Schopenhauer points out in “The World as Will,” his treatise on how we usually get it all wrong. That we are fulfilling our heart’s desire in pursuing the loves of our life is a kind of category error, based on a primordial ignorance of how this existence thing really works. Very Zen.

That the Origin of our suffering may thus be regarded as Natural should precipitate a sigh of relief. But these biological facts do not relieve us of the necessity of now dealing with the actual experience of our desires, and the onset of angst, regret, hope, and disappointed expectations, that ensue. The rollercoaster of Social life inserts itself into the mix with little regard to our opinion. Once we have experienced all the highs and lows, however, they average out when we slow to a stop, and step off of the train.

One of the unfortunate dimensions of life in modern society, vis-à-vis these known issues of Buddhism, is that they are not widely recognized as such, nor are they ordinarily part of the early curriculum in Western countries. We do not expose our youngsters to practicing meditation. Usually a young person begins hearing about Eastern wisdom when they are in their late teens or early twenties, when the onslaught of hormones has long since had its sometimes deleterious, and even disastrous, effects. Especially with the advent of widespread online accessibility to what we call “pornography.” As one of the Supremes famously intoned, I don’t know how to define it, but I recognize it when I see it.

It is ironic that the most natural of functions in the Natural sphere — that of reproduction of the species — becomes so distorted in its intersection with the Social realm of human behavior. But that discussion may be better left to the next segment, on the conflation of the Noble Eightfold Path with the Social sphere. For now let us just shake our heads at the willful blindness built into our concept of childhood, and our feckless efforts to control the process of maturation into an adult. It is a compelling example of the Social sphere interfering with the Natural sphere — the biological facts of existence — thereby exacerbating the Origin of suffering, our ignorance-fueled craving. What’s the matter with kids today?

One could argue that the Origin of our suffering is Universal, as is its existence. The role of Nature in the Universal scheme of things is intricately intertwined with the origin of life on this planet, and the possibility of life on others, in the “Goldilocks Zone” near — in astronomical units — to another star. Speculations as to the arrival of intergalactic spermatozoa in the form of ancient comets or meteors, delivering the foundational chemistry of organisms to our waiting, fertile planet, like sperm to egg, model the entire cosmos as analogous to a kind of organism, giving birth to stars, as in the famous “pillars of creation” image from NASA’s Hubble telescope, to the spark of life itself. These analogies are examples of our proclivity to find familiar patterns in the strangest of new information, now flooding in as images from the far reaches of science, thanks to the Hubble, and now the Webb, telescopes. Another is the familiar trope about developing fins at one stage of the fetus in the womb:

More than just a catchy phrase, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is the foundation of recapitulation theory. Recapitulation theory posits that the development of individual organisms (ontogeny) follows (recapitulates) the same phases of the evolution of larger ancestral groups of related organisms (phylogeny).

These cultural memes also indicate the comprehensive nature of the Ignorance, capital I, into which we are born, rather than into sin, according to Buddhism. Not the kind of willful ignorance that we have to learn, which can be considered a kind of sin, I suppose, if not against God, then against our original buddha-nature. Willfully ignoring the “compassionate teachings,” for example, as the Buddha’s legacy is characterized. They are compassionate in that they consist of descriptions of the suffering innate in existence, as well as our tendency to make it worse; as well as prescriptions for what to do about it, such as the Noble Eightfold Path. Which will be the subject of our next segment, in its relationship to the Social sphere.

Meanwhile, wrapping up our meditation on the Natural Origin of suffering, it is, or should be, transparent that there is no Existence without change, and so “change” is interchangeable with “suffering.” Everything that we see, hear, smell, taste, feel — and yes, everything we think — is the effect of change. We are literally hearing the sound of suffering, like Avalokiteshvara. And we are seeing it as well as feeling it at all times, in every moment. If nothing were changing, we could not perceive it. We never breathe the same breath twice, and we can never have the same thought, twice, though it may seem that we do. This is natural, and this inexorable, instantaneous change, is the true source of our suffering. Get used to it.

The fact that some forms of change provide welcome relief in our lives, while others seem to deliver more stress, should make it clear that dukkha is neutral. Suffering is not being inflicted upon us as a kind of punishment, though it may be considered a kind of test. Zen recommends embracing what life brings us as a natural consequence of our existence as a sentient being, even though we may not enjoy it at the time. Don’t worry, it will change. This does not mean, however, that we should not do anything about it, to improve our circumstances. This and other dimensions of behavior in the Social realm will be one focus of the next segment, reviewing the Path in its eight dimensions. Stay tuned.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Yes, universal!

Existence unlimited

to our perception

In the last session we concluded the introduction to this summary of the intersection of Design Thinking and Zen by linking Buddha’s Four Noble Truths to my Four Spheres of Influence and Endeavor as encountered in daily life. The semantic model shown illustrates correlations between the Four Spheres — Universal, Natural, Social, and Personal — and the Existence, Origin, Cessation, and Eightfold Path to cessation, of suffering. We will explore the connections of each in order, in the next four segments. These include: Universal Existence, Natural Origin, Social Path, and Personal Cessation, all linked to dukkha, the Buddhist term usually translated as “suffering.” As we will see, it has a broader meaning.

Sometimes overlooked in considering the Four Noble Truths are Buddha’s admonitions, charges, or challenges accompanying each. We are to strive to “fully understand” the existence of suffering; to abandon its origin, usually interpreted as craving; to realize its cessation, hopefully in this lifetime; and to fully follow the Noble Eightfold Path to the realization of suffering. That’s a tall order.

But if we take the Design thinking approach, we can regard the prospect of fully understanding the existence of suffering as just another example of fully defining the problem, albeit the most intractable and elusive of all problems, that of existence itself. The proposition that existence is a problem, or should be regarded as such, is itself subject to challenge. But most religions and philosophies characterize our existence as a human being as a kind of test, from Job’s Old Testament lament, to the triumph of reasoning of the Enlightenment, and theism’s personal epiphany of being reborn, as well as Zen Buddhism’s potential of spiritual awakening — kensho or satori in Japanese. Of course, the usual caveat applies, that the approach to solving this problem in Zen begins and ends with experience on the cushion, or informed by that process of personal introspection. As we often emphasize in interfaith dialog with other clergy and students online, world peace can only come about through the establishment of personal peace. Zen’s pop-up exam takes place in zazen, pass or fail.

Another way to phrase the first Noble Truth is that Existence is of the nature of suffering. That is, dukkha may be regarded simply as inexorable change. Galaxies colliding in space is an example of Universal Existence of change. It is not personal, but a universal principle. Human beings are necessarily caught up in it, through birth, aging, sickness and death, and tend to take it very personally. This is why it is called “suffering.” But this suffering is too laden with emotional and sentimental connotations to fit the definition of a universal principle. Suffering in the Buddhist sense has a connotation of allowing, as in “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” paraphrasing a comment attributed to Christ. He is also quoted as saying that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.

So in the face of universal change, we are reduced to the state of children. Innocent, perhaps, but still responsible for adapting to reality. We find examples of human suffering in all spheres of our existence, including personal issues of aging, sickness and death, which is also characteristic of the natural sphere, where our relationship to Nature is ever-more challenging, owing partially to our success as a species in dominating the planet and diminishing the resources of life support. But most of us are inclined to identify the sources of our suffering as social in nature.

These are all conjoined, as the pressures of living in modern society are certainly linked to the pressures of population. From stress on the commute to family unity at home, and comity at the office, much of our dissatisfaction with life in the fast lane stems from the fact that there are so many others queuing up in that same lane. And, of course, they are not usually as polite or considerate as you or I tend to be. In the modern idiom, they do not, or will not, stay in their lane, and out of ours.

Please excuse me if you have heard this before, but I think an experiment I read about is germane. The scientists involved simply took the classic rats-in-the-maze to a new level, adding more and more rats. At a certain point of overpopulation or crowding, the rats began attacking each other. In human terms, each began to blame the others for the situation. If memory serves, it revealed a kind of proportionality between the space available and the degree of occupancy, which may reflect a natural limit to the population of any species. There is a relevant question in Taoism, from the “Tao te Ching” of Lao Tzu if memory serves, which asks the question, something like, Which is more destructive — success or failure? The very success of a species may be akin to the growth of a virus, which finally exceeds the capacity of its host to sustain, leading to the death of the host but also of the parasite.

Another Taoist saying reminds us that, When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame, or some such admonition. What we see in politics these days is largely the blame game writ large, usually on a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t basis. Increasingly, decisions regarding spending decreasing resources are taken in this no-win kind of context. Even speaking out on a given issue, no matter what position one takes, is likely to bring down hostilities upon one’s head, from the cold waters of the social media. The very anonymity provided by the network fosters the tendency of many disgruntled fellow travelers to fire broadsides at every comment, no matter how reasonable or anodyne. The privacy of the original communication is often compromised, exposing the messenger to the mob, including searchable data such as the identities of their family members, along with contact and location information. Thus, the natural moan of stress and threat of living is amplified to a scream through the feedback process, like a mic and speaker facing each other. Humans are the worst enemy of humans.

When we turn from our social world — as restricted to human beings — to the natural sphere, we find other social animals, such as elephants and whales, who have their own networks, and presumably some level of stress emanating from them. Much more certainly they suffer from the dire circumstances in which they live as prey to other species, primarily the encroachment of humans on their turf, and as victims of the harvesting of ivory and other private parts for such human dalliances as trivial trinkets, and supposed aphrodisiacs. Our stewardship of the creatures of the Earth has demonstrated a downward curve for most of our history, but now that we are outnumbering as well as outmaneuvering our distant cousins, many are staring into the abyss of extinction. Which is where the Natural sphere is trumped by the Universal. From the perspective of the victim of extinction, it matters little whether the end comes as the result of a meteor or comet, or the slow erosion of viable food stocks and potable water. So-called “pets” and live exhibits such as zoos are the few remaining concessions to inclusion of lowly beasts in our social circle, now that the age of horsepower has long since passed.

When we look at the intersection of the Universal and the Natural, disregarding for the nonce the Social and Personal realms, we see that it is also not a respecter of persons, or dharma beings. The most awe-inspiring example may be the black hole, at least based on our current understanding of cosmic dynamics of change, dukkha on the largest scales we can envision. Whole galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets, moons and asteroids and all, provide the daily fare keeping the monster fed. We charmingly describe such processes with familiar tropes, such as that a black hole is “eating” its way through the universe, gobbling celestial bodies as we consume lesser animals and plants of the globe. A recent special on the blue whale identified them as the largest mammals to ever live on the planet — in the ocean, more exactly — as large as a Boeing 737. Yet they live on krill, one of the smallest animals on the planet. But the volume of their dining may be the closest living analogy to a black hole in the animal kingdom. Tens of thousands of tons of water in one gulp! Yet even this behemoth may be threatened with extinction, owing to the activities of the noisome human parasite.

In the face of such vast scales of existence, and with the looming threat of universal and natural chickens coming home to roost, through imminent climate change, the very idea that what we call suffering is indeed universal may be disturbing, even overwhelming. And as Master Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai —Self-fulfilling Samadhi, even if we manage to divest ourselves of our ignorance, and the “whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal, and the entire sky turns into enlightenment,” even then “all this does not appear within perception, because it is unconstructedness in stillness, it is immediate realization.” So the frustration with the ungraspable nature of this truth is baked in. But we mustn’t forget the micro, along with the macrocosmos. The microcosmos is also the manifestation of the universal existence of suffering, just on the other end of the scale spectrum. It recalls a line from one of our beloved Ch’an poems, Hokyo Zammai [Precious Mirror Samadhi], by Master Tozan, founder of Soto Zen in China:

So minute it enters where there is no gap — so vast it transcends dimension
A hairsbreadth deviation and you are out of tune

I hear an unspoken “but” or “however” before this last bombshell — any deviation, however slight, and we are “out of tune.” Like tuning an old-fashioned analog radio dial, a little to the left or to the right, we get nothing but static. Only when we hit the frequency dead on in the middle, do we receive the transmission with clarity. If we persist in our meditation, we can hopefully penetrate beyond the Personal, Social and Natural barriers, all the way to the Universal, which is not only outside us at the furthest remove, but also inside us, at the most intimate. As Master Hakuin reminds, actually there is no “inner,” nor is there any “outer.” It is all clear, clean through. Spacetime is neither space, nor time.

In the next segment we will take a look at Natural Origin, the origin of our suffering through the craving of our body, our mouth, and our mind. Stay tuned.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Both solve a problem —

though of differing import.

Zen’s is the broadest.

In the last session of live dharma dialog online at the Zen center — transcribed as the last podcast in the series on the most recent spate of mass shootings — the last participant worried that meditation would not help children in the classroom, owing to the complexity of the many personal and social issues they are confronting. Not least, the elephant in every public American classroom these days, the threat of yet another school shooter. The exchange went as follows:

But don’t give up! You’re creative.

No I won’t give up. Thanks very much for your teaching.

So I mean to encourage you similarly. No matter how bad it gets, don’t give up on your zazen practice. And be creative in your personal life and approach to problem-solving. I closed the last by stating that this concludes the dharma dialog that took place on this occasion. But the dialog continues. In the next four sections we will draw some interim conclusions as a kind of summary of Zen and Design thinking, or those aspects of this intersection discussed to date, namely the Four Noble Truths, the first teaching of Buddha, and the Four Spheres of influence and Endeavor, my attempt at a comprehensive model of the real world in which we live and practice Zen.

Buddha’s First Sermon, alternatively called “Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Law,” “The Middle Way,” or “The Four Noble Truths,” lays out his description of the reality that all sentient beings face, and his prescription for what action to take to deal with it, namely the Noble Eightfold Path. We will include my semantic models of these teachings, along with my configuration of the Four Spheres in which we live and practice — the Personal, Social, Natural, and the Universal. Hopefully we can draw some correlations between the two models to get a better vision of how our Zen life can proceed in the context of the current complexities of the world. The illustration below shows that my model of nesting spheres can be usefully associated with both quartets.

Before going into specifics of the four truths and their interconnectedness with the four nested spheres of our existence, it seems pertinent to ask the question: Why four? Why not five, or three, or six, eight, or twelve? I believe it has to do with what R. Buckminster Fuller developed and taught in his design science and geodesic geometry developments. The fourth point closes the system.

Interestingly, if not coincidentally, Sokei-an, the Rinzai priest who accompanied Soen Shaku on his trip to America to introduce Zen Buddhism to the West at a world convocation of religions toward the end of the 19th century, said something similar about the relationship of Buddhism to Christianity. Paraphrasing broadly, he commented something to the effect that Buddha appeared some 2500 years ago and counting, propounding a kind of compassion and wisdom that required the surrender of the self. 500 years or so later, Christ appeared, preaching a kind of divine love that “closed the teaching.” In other words, the two great religious systems are complementary, not competitive.

If we recall the many other teachings that are expressed in sets of four, there are the four fundamental elements of tradition: earth, wind, fire, and water. The four logical propositions, or tetralemma of ancient pedigree: it is; it is not; it both is and is not; it neither is nor is not. Then there are the four seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter. In a more contemporary context there are the four fundamental forces of the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces, potentially with a fifth or more lurking in the shadows of dark matter and dark energy. Modern biology posits four forces of evolution: mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection. The seemingly impossible phenomenon of an airplane in flight is also explained by four forces: lift, thrust, drag and weight. Orville and Wilbur must have figured that one out.

Setting aside for now the apparent contradiction that in each of these cases, we can find other qualified candidates for inclusion, such as space and consciousness, sometimes listed with the other four elements, remember that Fuller was positing the simplest model of any given system, which by definition has an inside and an outside. The tetrahedron is the first geometric shape to fill the bill. But it is deceptively simple in appearance. When we look at the connecting tissue between the four points, we see that there are six such, and each can be interpreted as cutting both ways, resulting in twelve aspects of interconnectedness between the four points. (See illustration if you cannot visualize for yourself.)

Not coincidentally, this number, 12, the familiar “dozen” from the Latin duodecim, pops up regularly here and there in the vernacular, in all sorts of categories of information: twelve lunar cycles or months of the solar year; the visible spectrum or color wheel; the hours of the day (in Master Dogen’s day, doubled to 24 in modern times), and not to forget the twelve apostles as an outlier, with Jesus making a baker’s dozen. You may counter that there are only three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow, in terms of pigment. But the hues that we can distinguish separately tend to fall into twelve combinations of the three primaries, the secondaries of violet, orange and green, and the tertiaries of red-violet and red-orange, blue-violet (or purple) and blue-green, yellow-orange and yellow-green, closing the circle. And then there is the Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Origination, Buddhism’s summary model of how things get to be the way they are, through life cycles of rebirth, aging sickness and death that are the lot of all sentient beings. Most importantly of course, those of the human persuasion.

We can point to many groupings of less than four, such as the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Or the three legs of the Zen stool articulated by John Daido Loori: faith, doubt, and perseverance. Or the Three Times, past future and present. For each of these triads, I would submit that the fourth point is YOU. You complete the tetrad, the four-pointed system, in your relation to the other three. Buddhism is like that. It included the observer from the very beginning. Buddha was a human being, and had no interest in expounding a theory of existence that did not include human beings as observers. The whole point of his teaching is the nature of reality and our place in it.

Other teachings such as the Noble Eightfold Path can be parsed into a tripartite grouping: Right Wisdom (view and thought or understanding and intention); Right Ethics or Conduct (Speech, Action and Livelihood); and Right Discipline (Effort, Mindfulness and Meditation) again with the caveat that the English term “right” is a limiting translation for the intended meaning. Buddha’s “right” is more a verb than an adjective, taking action to right our raft, sailing on the seas of Samsara. Again, the fourth component completing this model is, dear seeker, yourself.

While these enumerations may appear to be arbitrary, they do seem to function as memory aids, mnemonics, as well as revealing an underlying need and yearning for order, in conceiving a model of our existence, which can seem so chaotic and arbitrary in its manifestations. We can be forgiven a bit of conjecture in our efforts to explain the unexplainable and conceive of the inconceivable. As long as we are willing to return to the cushion, and contemplate our creative grasp of reality, I say: No harm, no foul. The monkey mind has some utility, if limited, in adapting to and embracing reality, warts and all.

In the next session we will return to consideration of the quartets of Noble Truths and nesting spheres. We will look at each of the pairs of correlates in order: Universal Existence — of sufffering, that is — Natural Origin, Social Path, and Personal Cessation, of dukkha. Stay tuned.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Final solution —

What if there isn’t any?

Back to the cushion.

We concluded the last segment on perhaps an overly pessimistic note, that engaging the current spate of daily atrocities through the established political process may never result in any of your preferred outcomes. But Zen encourages us to approach life like the superior player plays the game of Go. The inferior player gets bogged down in territorial fights in one corner of the board, and may win that battle, but meanwhile the opponent is winning in all other areas of the board. Strengthening our position may not be as obvious as we think, or where we should invest the effort – at home, at work, in the political arena? Where do we place our priority for action, with limited resources and time? The dialog continues:

Someone asks: We see these arguments go into the issue of gun control. But not much emphasis on the mental health.

I say: Well, other than as an excuse, an avoidance of tougher issues to confront or blame.

What kind of compassion from the Buddha — talking about gun control, I know that if they wouldn’t have guns, they would choose another weapon, which is the case in Japan. So the underlying issue is still there.

I say: Okay, so in Japan, what other weapon would they choose?

They would drive into a group of people by bus… so the scale is smaller but the underlying issue is the same. And so from you, to the shooter, or his environment, what kind of compassion or comment can you give me?

I say: Yeah, a different take on compassion is that we are already the recipient of compassion, the compassion of the universe just to allow our existence. Scientists, physicists, and people who know will tell you that it doesn’t have to be designed that way — there doesn’t have to be an intelligence in the universe, it can theoretically exist without any sentient beings. So I think we start from a root base like that. Although we arise out of ignorance, and not everything we do is intelligent, we don’t know for sure, ultimately. We don’t know much at all, really, about reality. But one thing is for sure, it allows us to exist. And so, if you feel the recipient of that compassion, and that’s meaningful to you, I don’t see how you would need to get anything from anybody else, after that. Some people attribute that feeling to God.

And so again, if the kids started practicing meditation and they were raised in an environment where the outer influences on them at an early age — when they are easily influenced, other-directed, and impressionable, the formative years — it might make a difference. I grew up in the 1950s, a pretty prohibitive environment, in many ways. And I now know, looking back on the mistakes I made, that a lot of them were reactions to what I was being told and pushed to do, and not to do.

So this same independent thinking, and interdependent action, I think is probably native to a child, at a certain age. Then as they grow, they are conditioned, educated by peer pressure, by parents, teachers and the culture, to look at the world this way, instead of that way. My suggestion would be that young children as soon as possible start doing meditation. And that they do it in some non-sectarian, non-religious way. So that they are able to develop a healthier relationship to aging, sickness and death, you know.

As soon as these children were killed, nobody has seen a photograph of any of them. It’s all hidden. When people get old, like me, they put you away in a home, so that nobody has to deal with you, except nurses and professionals. In the old days, Buddha’s time, corpses would be lying out in the open. Sick people would be there on the street. You couldn’t hide from it.

So I think that if you go down the analysis of what is wrong, it’s a vast kind of picture. But I think we could at least begin with meditation. That’s why the problem of what do we teach in schools — critical race theory, teaching abstinence, having classes on sexuality and gender, or not having any — all of these factors to my way of thinking are different facets of the same problem.

I think that for us, again, the revolution begins at home. I failed miserably in raising my kids in my first marriage. When I look back on that I try to do something about it. If you had a time machine you could maybe go back in time and try to fix things. In our marital relations and family we all make these mistakes. So, I think that if we can grow up — and wake up — and we can individually start behaving differently within our small circle, then maybe that ripple effect can effect others. I don’t see any other solution. No top-down solutions.

Someone asks: Lead by example.

I say: By example. Matsuoka Roshi made this point about the monks that immolated themselves in Vietnam. He said that they stopped the war, those two famous incidents of the monks immolating themselves. Most people in this country would say they’re crazy, they’re nuts. And would disagree that that did anything to stop the war. In some cases you may have to be willing to be the crucifixion. You may have to be willing to be the sacrifice. There are many stories in history of people like that. Altruistic self-sacrifice for the benefit of the larger group. What works in one situation may not work in another.

Someone asks: I think that teaching Zen in classrooms just wouldn’t work. I’m not really sure why because kids go through so much stuff during their lives with peer pressure and adolescence…

I say: We have a couple of examples of teachers in our communal history. In one case we discussed the rowdiness of kids, and I suggested maybe a kind of dokusan, or interview. It was a large class, unruly 12-year-olds, in that range. It was a big classroom, with a relatively private corner office, partially enclosed. He invited each student to come in during the day to talk to him when the others were working on assignment. One person at a time, taking turns. He just invited them to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. It didn’t have to be about the lesson or the class. He said that made a difference.

Another was a young woman at our Wichita affiliate. She had just taken a job at a school in a more affluent neighborhood, but still had the discipline problems she had had before. We talked through it, and I suggested looking at what we do at the zendo. We don’t boss people around and tell them what to do. We ring a bell, we have signals that everybody agrees to, to stop this and start that, et cetera. We chant vows, and so forth.

So she started with her kids. She bought a bell & brought it into the classroom. She would ring the bell ding-ding-ding-ding-ding like a rolldown, when she wanted their attention, like we do when we are going to give a toast at a wedding. That got their attention. And then she let them ring the bell for certain things that happened during the day as a regular thing. To get to take a turn ringing the bell was sort of a big deal. This was middle school. They put together four vows that they would chant or recite every morning together as a group. They had them do some meditation, just sitting still for a while and quiet, a quiet period. A lot of schools do that. And she said it was like a 180-degree turnaround.

So I think there is some evidence that some things can work. But you’re right. For a lot of children, what happens in the classroom is the least of their troubles. It’s what happens when they go home, and outside, in the neighborhood. Latchkey situations.

From a social perspective, we can look at how we can offer meditation in a non-sectarian way to private schools and private groups. Cracking the nut of the public schools, the county and so forth, you run right into the same political situation you saw happen after each of these shootings. There are too many people who are just looking for a job with the county, too much churning going on to get a program off the ground. But don’t give up! You’re creative.

No I won’t give up. Thanks very much for your teaching.

This concludes the dharma dialog that took place on this occasion. But the dialog continues.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Be realistic —

Give up your designs on life.

It has its own plan.

In the last segment we addressed the first few questions that arose from the Zen community regarding the most recent mass shootings in the context of buddhadharma and daily life practice, concluding with the point that Zen Buddhism is not overly optimistic on these issues, but certainly not pessimistic, either, as generally regarded by the uninitiated, owing to its emphasis on confronting suffering rather than trying to avoid it. Zazen practice is thought to engender an attitude not of resignation or hopelessness, but a practical approach to problem-solving, beginning with the premise that some problems are not amenable to quick resolution. In fact, we may not see the end of this particular insanity in American life in our lifetimes. To continue where we left off:

Someone asks: Thank you for your willingness to step forward and wade into these very painful events that occur, when so many spiritual and political leaders go silent, when a very massive loss of life occurs.

I say: Well, you can’t blame them. You’re bound to be misunderstood and maybe vilified, no matter what tact you take in the context of these emotionally sensitive affairs

Yes. I am speaking to you out of an emotional place. This Uvalde, this shooting at this school, has triggered a lot of emotions. Sadness, tears, anger, frustration. Wanting to do something. Not wanting to just stand back while these things occur. Getting even more angry when I hear what our political leaders who are bold enough to step forward have to say about protecting my right to go publicly into the community with assault weapons and bags of ammunition, like somehow that‘s patriotic and the right thing to do. I have a sense to bolt. I live in a community that actually puts assault rifles on their campaign signs. It feels toxic, and there’s actually a little bit of fear. To be fair, a lot of them are hard-working, good people. But I have this strong sense to bolt. But I don’t know where to go. I don’t particularly want to leave my state. But to find some kind of like-minded community, that would be required, I think, or maybe even leave my country. I am sharing these with you, and thank you for listening. I welcome your thoughts.

Sure. Well, I would say, Welcome to the club. I think you’re not alone. A lot of people have the same thoughts, escaping to Canada, and even fantasies of taking revenge. Why doesn’t someone go shoot up the NRA convention, you know? Like — you guys seem to think this is a good idea — well, here it is.

But you can understand the arguments on both sides, to some degree. Thich Nhat Hanh did a lot of work on world peace, and of course he came from Vietnam, where they saw massive atrocities that would probably make these look like child’s play, no pun intended. But he said in order to work for world peace, you must be world peace. You cannot take a side. And that’s hard. That’s hard to do. It’s really hard not to take a side, when some things seem so glaringly obvious, obviously wrong-headed.

Even logical comparisons fall short in the face of the stubbornness of fixed opinions. One that stands out starkly for me as just being a neutral fact, is that every other country that has brought access to weapons under control does not have this problem. And they do have all the other problems that this is blamed on, such as mental health issues. So that’s a glaring discrepancy to my way of thinking, but one that assumes that politics — unlike anything else in our culture — works on logic. And it is very clear that politics is probably one of the most emotional professions, or categories of activities, that we have in modern culture. Probably always was.

Buckminster Fuller, as you may know, was an indirect mentor to me. I met him a couple of times. I never was his student, but he was an influencer of my generation of design professionals. He called his design approach “anticipatory comprehensive design science.” He tried to anticipate problems before they happened. This is how he taught his students. Come up with solutions. Do the definition, do the analysis, the prognosis and so forth, and come up with solutions so they are sitting there, ready to go, when the rest of society recognizes: This is a problem. So that’s a big, heavy lift, to do that well. His geodesic domes were examples of that, along with a lot of other things that he did in his lifetime.

He was a philosopher as well, and wrote about a lot of subjects, including politics. He said it all began with Malthus and Darwin. Malthus did a world resource inventory, and concluded there’s not enough to go around, basically. Darwin developed his origin of species, which was then misinterpreted to mean survival of the fittest — meaning whoever is strongest, basically — and so the politicians said, Keep me in power, I’ll make sure we get ours. And to hell with the rest of the world. I said that. That was the robber barons period. Might makes right.

His other comment on politicians was something like, We turn to politicians for solutions to our problems. But if they had any solutions they wouldn’t be politicians. Politicians’ job number one is status quo — maintaining the status quo for themselves, for their constituents, for their sponsors. So that’s the beginning of the corruption, right there.

When we look at Buddha’s example, he did not become a politician. He had the opportunity. He was warrior class and was slated to be chief of the Shakya clan, which is close to a political position. But he would be reporting to the Brahmins, who were the number one caste; the warrior caste was number two. So you could say that Buddha was basically a draft-dodger. He didn’t want to do that. And he was highly placed and wealthy enough that he had the option to pull out of the usual social program assigned to people in his position.

So we want to have a realistic view of what Buddhism is about, and how it probably started, as well. Buddha apparently did not go against the political structure of the time, the caste system, head-to-head. One of our members, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, recently published a book titled “Caste,” in which she posits that actually, we live in a caste system, but we don’t call it that. She considers race to be just one of many aspects or dimensions of the total caste system in this society. Read the book.

What Buddha did — at least if the story has historicity — was to set up an alternative way of living. Like many of the communes in the 1960s into the 1970s tried to do here. I knew a lot of people who tried that. They were based on a lot of faulty premises, I think, which is why and how many or most of them failed. I think the difference is that Buddha’s community was based on meditation. It was also based on the ideas of impermanence and imperfection, and so forth, Buddha’s model of reality. But essentially it was based on the communal practice of meditation. That’s the glue that held it together, in my opinion.

I think we are doing something similar. We’re a bit like a Tupperware marketing approach going underground, into peoples’ houses, not going into the stores. We are trying to bring this practice into this culture as kind of an almost subversive activity. We are training people, if what I feel is true, we train people to think truly independently and find true freedom; and be able to act interdependently. It’s the most subversive political thing you can do. Because every political system depends upon people thinking dependently, and acting co-dependently. The real revolution starts at home, with each individual. Every top-down solution we have ever seen has not worked. Just after the revolution, guess who owned the dachas at the lake? The Bolsheviks. Same system, different players. Shuffle the deck, that’s all it is.

If you become truly independent, and are willing to act interdependently, then by the ripple effect, we will build a better society. We are fortunate to be in a democracy where we can do this without being persecuted. So far.

Someone asks: I’m hearing a lot of discussion about how to practice compassion and not let events like this just utterly annihilate you. You are called to witness suffering, to hear the cries of sentient beings and not turn away. We can’t take a pass, we can’t ignore the causes of suffering. We should avow our complicity in the structures here. I keep thinking about just how related we are as a species. Human beings do not have much genetic variation compared to other types of animals. We are all very similar. You are not more than fifteen, sixteen cousins away from most people on the planet. Just by the nature of life, you’re fourteenth-million cousin of your cat, or something, you know what I mean?

I say: And in terms of proximate causes, you’re only one airplane ride away from anybody else on the planet. Many exacerbating conditions such as this have never existed before in society.

Someone asks: That’s what I think when I think about starting here with human nature, and not getting into the fear that is obviously the goal of these fascist strikes on the heart of open society. It is not hard to see what’s really happening here. There is this act of terrorism, there is this radiating atmosphere of menace. It is intended to intimidate us. And Zen training is supposed to give us some impulse toughness, in order to persevere against that. And you’re right, that can be freedom.

I say: A historical claim of Zen has always been that it is a way of facing life, but it is also a way of facing death. That is why it has had such a tight relationship to the martial arts and the military throughout China and Japan. If you look at the consistent factor of Zen transitioning from India through China to Vietnam, Korea, Japan and the Far East, it’s like this — I hate to use a cliché like “beacon of light” — it’s just this constant thing that is moving through all this insanity. If you think that what we are facing is bad, try going back to China or Japan during their warring periods. Or Vietnam for that matter. The so-called history of humankind is “written in blood,” you know. And yet, Zen somehow survived.

So I think it’s pretty strong. I think you can’t go too far wrong, by emphasizing Zen as kind of the core of what you do. The center to which you return and reconsider, maybe, you know, Well I blew that one. Like the other day I tried to hold our monthly ZENtalk open-ended discussion via Zoom. I thought I had it all set up, but I couldn’t even find the way to get the meeting to start. Zoom Zen. Zen Zoom.

One of the connections between Design and Zen is that we experiment. We take a risk, we take a chance, and we fail, again and again. As Dogen said, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Another expression he used was, “The bullseye depends on the hundred misses.” So in Zen, we are not afraid to take action. In Design, we try to define the problem thoroughly before taking action, just as a hedge on your bet, you know. So that you are not only going on gut level intuition with your own confirmation bias and all that kind of stuff. We mitigate the risk to the extent feasible, but without analysis paralysis.

Design has historically been primarily a group process. Great inventions have come up in groups, not brilliant individuals in their ivory towers, as commonly thought. I think the same thing is true in Zen. Dogen, Bodhidharma, Buddha — they were all surrounded by groups of people who were all working together in a collaborative way to pull this off, make this Zen thing happen. It wasn’t a Lone Ranger, individual genius kind of proposition.

And I think that’s what we need to do now. We need to bind together as much as we can, and take collaborative action to do our best to create an alternative to this insanity that we see. Doesn’t have to be on a big scale. We don’t have to go up against “them.” Of course, some of our people are supporting politicians. It’s okay to get involved in the politics. I don’t see any reason not to. But don’t get your hopes up that that’s going to provide the final solution, that political action is going to make it all different. Human nature is a stubborn thing. Especially when facts are no longer that stubborn.

To be continued.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Inevitable —

Yet so unnecessary!

Enough suffering.

As mentioned in the first segment of this series, one Sunday at the Zen center we conducted a dialog on the recent school shootings and general dystopian state of affairs, as a kind of “dharma combat,” an open and frank discussion of how Zen practice does or does not address the ongoing chaos of modern life in America. In this and the two following segments we will close out this discussion, largely quoting the question-and-answer dynamic that transpired online and in person that day. As usual in Zen dialog, the answers more often than not raise more questions than they provide any pat answers.

Master Dogen, in Shobogenzo Bendowa — A Talk About Pursuing the Truth — includes a section of questions and his answers at the end. The format I have chosen, “Someone asks: I say:” below is adopted from that approach. After my brief introductory recap of the subject, quoting a couple of the paragraphs from the prior segment, we opened the floor for discussion. The following is what ensued.

Someone asks: What is the best we can do in a situation like this? How can we be centered in dharma without being numb to what’s going on around us? Where does the rubber meet the road between practice and avoidance?

I say: Mastuoka Roshi was once asked this question, regarding “engaged Zen.” He simply took the zazen posture, saying “This is the most you can do.” What I think he meant is that unless you gain clarity on the cushion, and resolve your personal conflicts with regard to life and death, you cannot really enter the fray in the public realm without adding to the confusion. As long as you have preconceptions, or a bias as to the outcomes, you cannot really engage in a balanced and compassionate manner. If on the other hand you can see both sides of the issue — or in today’s context, the many sides of the issue — you may be able to help.

Clarification is what we go for in zazen, but the path to it is fraught with confusion and frustration. In pursuing clarity in zazen, one thing that becomes clear is our own complicity, and the degree of responsibility we share in the details of our complex lives. We may be complicit in sharing the karma of our community, but not the direct responsibility, e.g. of the shooter as the proximate cause. Both can be true at once. We are complicit in, but not responsible for, the specific event. But we are definitely responsible for what we do about it now. Karma and its consequences continue through the Three Times — past future & present — according to Zen Buddhism. What we do in the present will probably comprise the most appropriate action, if we thoroughly examine the situation in zazen.

Zazen is not a panacea. It does not change anything by “spooky action at a distance” or magical thinking. But in terms of psychology it helps us to see ourselves and our place in this situation.

Someone asks: Is there any actual realistic thing we can do to face this situation? What can we do?

I say: I think we have to take the long view. This is not to say that we should not rise up in arms, and change everything we can change that is part of the problem. But if you look back on Japan — where our Zen teachers come from — during WWII, Japan and the United States were at each other’s throats. We witnessed the calamity of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the former of which was Matsuoka Roshi’s family home. And which to this day I don’t agree had to be done, and a lot of other people disagree with that atrocity as well. Nonetheless, Japan and USA are now allies We’re, quote, “friends.” So you have to look back on 50 years and say, Well, what was that all about then? It took generations dying off, for us to recover the relationship on a normalized basis between the two countries.

So I think that reflects the kind of patience that we learn to practice in Zen. The kind of patience that is not associated with outcomes. Parents with their children, children with their aging parents, et cetera, practice patience with each other and within society. We do, but it’s always connected to the outcome. I am going to count to ten, hold my breath, hold my tongue. I am going to be patient in this situation, because it’s going to work out the way I want it to.

In Zen I think we practice the kind of patience that says this may never work out the way I want it to. And yet I will practice patience with that, because that’s the nature of the beast. It’s suffering. It is impermanent, it’s imperfect, insubstantial, et cetera — all the teachings of Buddhism apply here.

I think what we are doing as practice leaders and practitioners is, as Matsuoka Roshi said, the most you can do. We are hopefully teaching people how to deal with their own ignorance, and potentially how to overcome it, by practicing meditation. It’s not passive. It is not a retreat from reality. It’s a way of girding your loins to go out and go back into battle, you could say. I think we are training armies of soldiers who can go into tough situations, and do probably closer to the right thing that has to be done.

I think that’s the mission of Zen. It could eventually lead to world peace, if we survive long enough, if we don’t blow the planet up entirely. And I think it’s our only hope for world peace, personally. I think that the other religions have largely failed. Not intentionally, not because of any particular fault that they have. Politics has failed, as well. From my perspective, the only thing that we have left is Zen.

I think we are already doing what we should do about it. It is just, Can we catch up to it in time? We are training individuals to think independently, and to act interdependently. That is the most we can do. The people we’re training, they will go out and take action. It is not my place to tell people what they should or should not do. For my part, I need to spend all my time training people this way. So that they will go out and become political, they will go out and join the movement. But the action they take will be from a more compassionate or wise, universalist kind of perspective, than from trying to help my team win, in this situation. Which is what we see with all of the so-called movements.

Matsuoka Roshi taught that Zen can bridge East and West. I think Zen can bridge this problem as well. It takes time, and we all have to do our best. Any chance I get I will speak out, as Matsuoka Roshi did, as you know if you’ve read his collected talks. He spoke out about Vietnam, about WWII, civil rights. He was very much a peacemaker and bridge-builder. It’s incumbent upon us to do everything we can, whatever we can.

Someone asks: When it comes to universalism — the ideas of emptiness and compassion — to me it seems logical that they would help people to understand that they don’t have to be so selfish, they don’t have to be so narcissistic and hateful. But how can we help people like that banish some of those delusions? Is there any way we can help them, even in a gentle way?

I say: Again, my opinion is, Zen can help. I’ve tried things like joining the Fulton County Interfaith committee. I was co-chair of the board of that committee for a year, when I began to see that what I was trying to do was never going to happen. I was trying to get the county to introduce meditation into the schools. I think: get them early. If you start people sitting in meditation when they are young, in middle school, elementary grade levels, then by the time they get to high school they might be more capable of dealing with things like hormonal rage, and all the rejection they receive from people around them. They might be able to have more of a sense of humor about it, and see it for what it is, and not take it personally. I sound like Johnny-one-note, but my answer is, get the kids sitting on the cushions.

I spoke about this a little bit on my recent podcast, about the “incels” the “involuntary celibates” at certain ages, adolescents primarily. They watch porn on TV or social media, and see that all the girls “want it” and so forth. And then they turn to their local community, and no one wants to have anything to do with them. And so their frustration mounts. The sexuality, the hormones, the social construct that we have, the religious backdrop, these are all contributing factors, as well as probably the killer, shoot-‘em-up computer games. Everything has something to contribute.

And it all seems, to my way of thinking, to be part of the same problem, like different koans. In Zen, there are 1700 classical koans, and they are all pointing to the same truth. The way I look at this problem, every dimension of it, like facets of a diamond, they are all part of it. And so it’s very difficult to get to the root cause, to the core of it. But I think Buddha identified that.

It’s the sense of self, needing to defend that self. Needing to empower and consume, for that person to have power and wealth, and to consume what everybody wants. It’s predictable — if you take a bunch of conscripts in their teens and twenties from Russia, and send them to invade a country with weaponry — it’s predictable what they are going to do. Because you have to dehumanize the population that you are invading, to begin with.

So none of this is surprising. Buddha would not be surprised by any of this. He would just be aghast at the scale of everything. And how, to this point, Buddhism has failed. We have failed to adopt these principles, the Precepts, Paramitas, et cetera. This is why we aspire to buddha nature — to wake up — and not to human nature. We are seeing human nature on display. Some people would probably resent that. They say, No, no, that’s inhumane. But look at how we treat the rest of the species — livestock and wildlife — and how we treat the planet. It’s human behavior. It’s humanity. And that’s not pessimistic. It’s not overly optimistic, either. It's realistic.

To be continued.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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The final lesson.

Cannot postpone forever;

learned now or never.

Each fifth Sunday, of which there are four per year (unless there is yet another anomaly I do not understand about the common calendar), we hold our version of what is called “dharma combat,” or hossen in Japanese. This exercise is based upon our understanding of how the ancestors of Zen structured their public discourse. Public, that is, in the sense that all members of a temple or monastery were invited to join the dialog. Whether they really went public with it is a matter for historians.

Another term, mondo, which I understand means “crossing of swords,” indicates a brief exchange, like the clashing of two samurai in the days of hand-to-hand combat, now long lost to history in the age of drones, except for the occasional storming of the capitol, much in the news lately as the January 6 committee initiates its prime-time presentations. Hossen is an extended exchange, which lasts longer than the typical clash of two swordsmen.

These exchanges between Zen masters and their students, or between two students training under the same master — that somehow got written down, with rice paper and brush, mind you — constitute a major part of the written record. Some are anecdotal, others evolve into one of the body of illogical riddles attributed chiefly to the Rinzai sect, known as koan or koans in English plural form, kung-an in Chinese. One connotation of the latter is “public case,” which defines the ever-changing koan of everyday life that we are facing in these challenging times.

I decided to focus one of our dharma combat sessions — which should really be disarmed to a less threatening terminology, such as “dharma dialog” — on the recent mass shootings, latest in a long history of illogical events that nobody wants to talk about, but cannot avoid discussing. Like a koan, they challenge our very grasp of reality.

In looking at this problem from both a Design and Zen perspective, the first thing is to try to define it as thoroughly as possible. I reasoned that having an open-ended dialog about it, in the context of a Zen exchange of our understanding of dharma, might bring out the many dimensions of the problem. Compared to responding to the perspective of sincere students of the Way, attempting to articulate the definition of this particular problem on my own might turn out to be a fool’s errand. The following is what I came up with in examining my own reaction, to be amplified by the dialog in due time. The transcription of that focus group will follow in future segments. Let’s enumerate the players.

The human constituents to be examined involve the victims, first and foremost, and their loved ones, the second tier of victims. Then the proximate community of witnesses, the third tier of victims. Fourth, the perpetrators, the shooters, who might be considered victims themselves, in some sense. Fifth, there are the enablers of the perps, those who directly profit from the mayhem, who can hardly be considered victims. Sixth, the onlookers, the vast media audience. And seventh, perhaps the last tier of victims, those running for their lives in other parts of the world, dealing with their own threats from local disasters, natural and man-made, and not helped by this local, disastrous distraction. And, eighth, the larger group of enablers, who indirectly profit from such catastrophes, be it from a financial or political perspective. If I have inadvertently left anybody out, I apologize. Any oversights may become clear in the dialog.

Looking at this koan from a Zen perspective necessarily entails comparisons with a cultural perspective, which is largely theistic, stemming primarily from belief systems of the Abrahamic religions. We see this in the vernacular of such terms as “evil” referencing the perps, references to God’s will, the victims being “laid to rest,” and so forth. Part of the pain suffered by all, amplified by media, is the sheer repetition of the same tropes, and reliance on the same memes, we have witnessed in past incidents. Which have the property of piling on, until the problem seems intractable by virtue of its very familiarity.

In this context I hope and feel that the Buddhist view, as I understand it, may offer some solace, and some promise for a long-term solution to this recurrent tragedy. One of the first memes to be compared and contrasted may be the belief of being “born into sin,” versus birth arising from Ignorance, the first link in the Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Co-Arising, Buddhism’s model of how things get to be the lamentable way they are. In broaching this comparison of spiritual hypotheses, I am fully aware that we are opening a virtual Pandora’s box, which we may not be able to close again.

Any and all discussions of such events, while emotions are still raw, are fraught with such possibilities. But with these events now occurring weekly, and likely to get worse, it seems we no longer have the luxury of not engaging in the dialog, at least, to begin to define potential solutions, and determine what action we may take, on both personal and social levels. The timeworn expression of good intentions, “to make sure this can never happen again,” begins to ring hollow in the face of the increasing frequency and viciousness of the attacks. So please bear with me. These suggestions are for you to take under consideration in your own view of, and response to, the situation, not as superior opinions.

At risk of repeating myself, let me emphasize once again that Buddhist teachings are not meant to be debated in comparison with other teachings of religion or philosophy, let alone ideology. As Buddha himself is said to have instructed on his deathbed, do not simply take his word for anything, but work out our own salvation. In that spirit we offer alternative ways of thinking, and approaching even the most difficult of traumas that the world has to offer. Again we ask, “What if?” and follow with “If, then…”

If we are indeed born into ignorance, rather than the “original sin” committed by primordial ancestors, then the perpetrators and victims, as well as all observers, proximate or remote, are facing the same problem. The victims are acting out of innocence, simply pursuing their lives in accord with the expectations of families, friends and community. This amounts to a kind of innocent ignorance, simply not knowing that they are, or may be, in danger.

The perpetrators act out of a different kind of ignorance, one that prompts them to turn their greed, anger and delusion — Buddhism’s Three Poisons — into attacks on others, in effect blaming others for their own suffering. Taoism, one of the root sources of Zen in China, is attributed with saying something like, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.”

What we always see, immediately following the latest atrocity, is the blame-game writ large. Everyone who may be held responsible for the terrible event seeks to deflect blame, citing “mental health,” the parents, the weapons manufacturers, et cetera. The list is truly endless. We all feel complicit to a certain degree. Which brings up one dual pair requiring clarification: complicity versus responsibility.

We can be complicit — which simply means “involved with others,” in a situation without being responsible for what takes place — or culpable, which means “deserving blame.” The degree of culpability is often a matter of closeness to, or distance from, the given event. The trigger man is obviously closest to the crime, but beyond that, it becomes less determinant. The expression, “What did they know, and when did they know it?” becomes determinative in the investigation of the timeline, or the “tick-tock,” the current term of art.

The “motive” of the shooters always becomes an obsession, at least of the news media and officials in the follow-up. In the light of the ever-accumulating history, it becomes more and more obvious that the motive does not matter, if knowing it does not help us stop the shootings. Where the perp is killed, either by himself or others, the main source of information regarding motives is lost, unless they have left a paper or virtual trail, up to and including a manifesto. On the other hand, it seems self-evident that the motives of all or most of these young men are the same: they want to deflect their own rage onto others, and perhaps draw attention or gain fame in the process. In other words, they have no real motive, in any rational sense. This is the basis of the argument that they are mentally ill. If they are mentally ill, the culpability of everyone else becomes a moot issue. But Buddhism would hold that we are all mentally ill, if not to the same degree. The main mental illness is ignorance of the truth, which we all share in common, and which defines the futility of these acts of desperation.

This is where the public “debate” turns ugly, from sympathy for the innocents to the witch hunt for the guilty. One group of well-meaning people will fault the manufacturers and sales distribution of the AR rapid-fire rifles, weapons of war. Others cite the lack of preparation and failures of the policing forces, running down the minute-by-minute timeline. All sides begin to turn on each other, like rats in an overcrowded maze. Accusations fly, complaining that the real root of the problem is elsewhere, as in a recent political opinion, quote, “every time a demented or disturbed individual does this they try to use it to support their radical agenda,” the “they” here being the opposite political party. But it cuts both ways. Either side could make the same statement, equally effectively. This is the definition of stalemate.

The very first of the Grave Precepts of Buddhism, translated variously, is “Affirm life – Do not kill.” Or in some versions, “I take up the way of not killing.” When we consider this objectively and absolutely, it is rendered impossible, of course. This human body has to continuously kill with its immune system, in order to survive. We have to kill in order to eat. But of course we do not have to kill indiscriminately, as in the mass shootings at various public venues, or in shelling civilians in Ukraine. We have to kill selectively, however, in order to maintain our lifestyles, whether in a modern urban setting, or in a tribal setting in the jungle. Death is inevitable, and only a matter of time. Violence is inherent, and only a matter of direction. As the charming political trope puts it, “It depends on whose ox is being gored.”

This winner versus loser mentality infects and underlies much of what is askew in human interactions. In truth we are all winners and losers. We have won the birthright of Buddhism — the potential for awakening — but in the end we inevitably lose this life through aging, sickness and death. So our time available for realizing this insight is severely limited. Meanwhile most of us go through life without even knowing that we have this ability, this capability and capacity to find what we are really looking for, instead of futilely pursuing other fantasies. It is truly pitiable, and applies to all of us equally. This is the wake-up call of Zen. I hope that you hear it in your life, and that all beings will be able to do so eventually.

To be continued.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Whose idea was this?

It certainly wasn’t mine —

Perhaps it is yours?

The thread running through this series is the underlying connection, the various links, between Design thinking and Zen, and how they differ from conventional thinking and religion. In considering the topics of the times, such as the spate of school shootings and other mass murders recurring on a daily basis now, it may seem to be stretching this idea to its breaking point. But just consider: What part of these events is not the result of some design of human intent? And how is the design of the conventional response working, or not?

After all, the federal government of the United States of America, and the governing bodies of its now fifty states or commonwealths, their counties, parishes (Louisiana) and boroughs (Alaska), cities, and other subdivisions, consisting of the repeat triumvirate of executive, legislative and judicial branches, did not fall out of the sky, like commandments from heaven. It was the product of intense debate documented in the Federalist Papers, and is the subject of continuing conflict concerning the nature of the democracy or republic the powers that be want to see evolve in the future. How is that working out?

In Design, we say that you cannot design around human nature. You have to take it into account, warts and all. The design of the government of the USA was putatively intended to limit its powers to those that, if unlimited, would appeal to the worst instincts of human nature. In other words, government of the people, by the people and for the people, as honest Abe put it, is intended to govern, or control, the people themselves. Especially those in power. But we have seen this original design intent corrupted again and again, and by guess who? The people in power at the moment. And those in power have again and again attempted to establish dynasties, wherein they not only retain power for life, if possible, but also hand it down to their children in perpetuity, potentially, like some permanent potentate. As recently lavished upon the royal family, under the rubric of the queen’s “platinum jubilee,” with grand — some might say gross — pageantry, in what was formerly Great Britain. Or witnessed in the Trumpist claim to entitlement in the USA. Not to mention the long, sad history of nepotist despots in South America and around the world. There apparently is no limit to human hubris, given the financial means to indulge it.

In the face of the many absurdist reality shows on offer, in their disappointment and frustration, people naturally turn to sources of comfort and solace, such as religion or science. This is one of the main themes of my soon-to-drop second book, “The Razorblade of Zen,” positing Zen as a third alternative. But religion gets mixed up with politics, when we begin to see the local melodramas and misuses of governance in the light of a larger plan, namely a “divine plan” of God, who we imagine to be interested in, and intimately involved with, the now-continuous campaigns of mere mortals for earthly power. This generally turns out to be an ugly marriage, birthing many ugly babies. As a current example, some evangelistic sects are reportedly being torn apart by political and ideological conflicts insinuating themselves into the church as wedge issues stressing its fragile fellowship, and begging the question of God’s will. Likewise, when we hope for a silver bullet from science, we are often disappointed.

Here, in the dark interior of this particular Pandora’s box, is where one of the approaches routinely applied in Design thinking may shed some light, or at least raise the appropriate challenges to conventional thinking. We call this particular exercise, “What if?” What if there were no government? How would you govern yourself? What if there actually is no god, at least not of the kind we imagine. Which, truth be told, is inevitably a projection of our own self-nature. What else would you expect from a person, in conceiving the kind of intelligence behind the creation and design of this world? Something inhuman? And therefore having little or no regard for your fate? That would not do. No, God, capital “G,” must surely be like us, or rather, like me. And probably more like me than thee, come to think of it.

The concept of a personal God, like that of a personal soul, provides too ready an answer, too often a substitute for confronting inconvenient truths, just another foil for reinforcing our dubious self-identity. Matsuoka Roshi would often address the question of the existence and nature of God. He would say, “In Zen, who is Buddha? You are Buddha! In Zen, who is God? You are god!” He never claimed that he was God, or that he was Buddha. What could he possibly mean?

I think we have to ask, What is Buddha? Again — aside from the capitalization indicating the historical Buddha Shakyamuni — “buddha” essentially means “the awakened one.” That is, consciousness itself. If this seems too simple and inadequate, your interpretation does not address the implications of consciousness. Or we might say, the miracle of consciousness. Nobody, not from the scientific end of the spectrum, nor from the religious perspective, really understands this phenomenon. Buddha himself did not understand it. The bare fact of sentient being is not something that can be understood.

So if there is such a thing as God, it must have something to do with this consciousness we share with all sentient beings, to differing degrees, of course. Perhaps what Sensei meant is that the very consciousness that raises the question — Who is God? — is the answer to the question. The “sparrow quote” proclaims a belief in the omniscience and omnipresence of God, from the King James Bible:

Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without God knowing it. And the very hairs on our heads are all numbered. So don’t worry; we are more valuable to him than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29-31)

The scientific question here would be “how,” as I suggest in my first book, “The Original Frontier.” How, exactly, does God register this relatively inconsequential event? Perhaps by dint of the sparrow’s consciousness — of its own death? Or that of its mate? By the thud of the carcass striking the ground, heard by the local coterie of sentient predators, who would regard it as a snack? Or perhaps the swarm of scavenger rodents and insects who strip the flesh from the bones of the corpse? All of the above?

In this analysis, “God” is all consciousness, mutual awareness of all sentient beings taken together. To a person who believes that there absolutely must be a separate “who” behind the “why” and “what” of existence, as well as the “how” — not to mention the “where and when” — it may seem self-evident that there is an “intelligent designer” behind what is arguably the intelligent design of the universe. But such a person, in order to discern the presence, must be ready and willing to consider the absence of God, as well. In other words, to take into consideration the possibility that there is no such God, as proof of concept. Otherwise, their God is an example of blind faith, a belief that is not seriously examined, but only adopted for convenience. If the reality of a benign overseer is to be proven out in one’s own experience, it must begin from a baseline of the absence of that presence. The only way to distinguish an object is to separate it from its ground. The inability to do so is a bit like an optical illusion.

So, what if there is no God? This would render our knee-jerk conventional resort to such aphorisms and euphemisms as “God’s will” and “God moves in mysterious ways” largely feckless, in the face of such horrors as the insanity of war and mass killings, at the hands of our fellow man. Or that the trigger-man is simply “evil,” which in this context is a religious statement. These simplistic pat answers are evasive maneuvers to avoid the question, actually. If there were no God, we would have to consider an alternative approach to the definition of the problem at hand. Which is the essence of Design thinking.

Assuming that there is no God on whom we can dump the blame, we have to move in a different direction toward a solution. This is a case of moving “what if” into the logic of “if, then.” If it is true that there is no God — remember, this is just a working premise, not an argument one way or the other — then we cannot turn to God, or our hopeful, self-centered characterizations of Him or Her to resolve our dilemma. We must turn to other sources. And what are those other sources? Usually, government. Back to the justice system and the powers-that-be. But if they are based on the same framework — “In God we trust” — then we are caught in a tautology, a forever self-fulfilling prophecy that can do no more than chase its own tail. “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” How to break out of this cycle?

Or we can turn to Science, with a capital “S,” for solutions. The arc of technology certainly holds out some hope that the men and women in white coats are working day and night, feverishly examining new ways to feed the burgeoning populace, shield the earth from the glare of an increasingly angry sun, cleanse the air and waters of the accumulated pollution of the last couple of centuries of industrial exploitation of resources, and so on. Until you discover that most of the work is dedicated to sustaining the interests and incomes of the very corporate powers-that-be who, after all, finance the research. Including the government and its profiteering complex, no longer limited to the military-industrial bugaboo of Eisenhower’s farewell address.

The so-called “soft sciences,” including such disciplines as sociology and psychology, also seem to offer some corrective, but only palliative, options. More counseling, more mental health assistance, more concern and care. To be layered on top of existing teacher-student-parent, employer-worker-industry, doctor-patient-treatment, and husband-wife-children triangles — to name a few — that are apparently failing to produce intended outcomes, instead resulting in acts of blaming, revenge and violence.

As Pogo the Possum famously declared, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” As a young person I was a big Walt Kelly fan, as well as being influenced as a child-artist by Walt Disney’s prodigious output. Mad Magazine was a big one as well, later on. These were the social media of my formative years, mainly print, the movies, and the infancy of television. One of the issues that separates generations, making intergenerational collaboration even more difficult, is this cultural disconnect. The images and influences that fill in the background of the passing pageantry of life are also evolving, more rapidly than we are as biological beings. Cultural evolution more readily explains the domination of the human species over its fellow sentient beings, than any increase in fundamental intelligence. We are becoming more and more of a burden on the environment, but are not getting any smarter.

Master Dogen is said to have commented that in Zen, we are about the business of developing true intelligence. This implies that there must be a kind of intelligence that is false. One modern meaning of intelligence, in military and international spheres, is data-gathering. That this kind of intelligence can be false is all-too-painfully obvious in miscalculations and errors that have led governments and their military dogs of war into misadventures around the globe, with America as the poster boy, until Russia, under the benighted guidance of their current potentate, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine. Again. But the kind of intelligence Dogen was pointing to was personal. Your intelligence or mine.

Intelligence and sentience, or consciousness, cannot be separated, whatever you may think of the IQ test. In zazen, by unlearning our erroneous views of our own direct experience through the senses, we develop the intelligence side of consciousness, in which perception and conception come more in line with reality as it is, outside our personal preferences. It is this kind of unsentimental, unbiased intelligence that we need to bring to bear on the ever-changing koan of everyday life that we are facing in these challenging times.

To be continued.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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How to think Design?

Nothing is sep’rate in it —

Nothing excluded!

During the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, like most other people I gained some wait and lost some of my vim and vigor. This is owing to the natural ravages of aging, sickness and death as taught by Buddha, I know, but I want to warn you that your Design thinking can lead you astray if you let it, in the sense that you begin over-thinking your daily practice, and fall prey to a common misunderstanding of Zen. This goes back to something Matsuoka Roshi once cautioned us about, to “Be careful about that one little thing that you allow yourself.” We tend to look at our daily lives as extremely complicated and demanding, even as we retire from our main vocation. We fill in the time with other preoccupations.

As householders there is always something. A new roof, new gutters, repairs and maintenance of the plumbing and electrical, the HVAC, the yard work, the whole catastrophe. A house’s job is to fall down. Ours is to prop it up. You don’t believe me, just let it go for a while. I don’t know what kind of landscaping Master Dogen may have had to deal with personally, but his expression: “Yet in attachment, blossoms fall, and in aversion, weeds spread” is not just a poetic whimsy. To this I can testify personally. This rainy spring we are letting our back yard go more so than usual, in the hopes of providing the neighborhood wildlife — bugs, bees, bats, birds and other beneficial critters along with pollinators — some degree of sanctuary from the golf course mentality that afflicts too many of our neighbors, with the constant spewing of noisy and polluting leaf-blowers, and spraying of herbicides and pesticides.

Then there is the occasional boundary dispute with otherwise very friendly folks who decide it would be a good idea to lop off some of the black bamboo in your cultivated stand, intended to provide screen between the yards, and to offer to the zoo for feeding the pandas. But I digress. You get the point.

The point is that all these worthwhile and perfectly understandable activities, set against a background of constant bad news from the larger community out there, can become a substitute for your Zen practice. As can joining the board of directors, managing the newsletter publication, and the various other necessary activities around operating a Zen center. Beware the substitution effect.

So the other morning I was the willing victim of an online scam for the first and last time in my life. The Home Depot, which is a few blocks from our house, and of which I am a loyal customer, owing mainly to the convenience factor — and had been a consultant to their headquarters here in Atlanta before retiring from commercial design into full-time Zen practice — was offering gifts, free but for a handling charge, simply for filling out a survey about shopping there. I did so with all sincerity and — surprise, I won! — a cordless power drill that was enticing to the point that I could feel it in my hand, even though I already own a perfectly fine and functional cordless power drill. But not the same brand — another justification for my power-tool lust.

But as I was filling out the necessary information to collect my prize, it occurred to me that as a frequent shopper, Home Depot already had this information on file. Further more, the first credit card number I entered was, naturally, the one issued by Home Depot, but it did not work. Then I entered my Amex card number which, voila! worked like a charm. My dawning suspicion was not enough to prevent me from clicking the “submit” button, however, and I was hooked. When the response told me I would have to wait a few days to collect my reward, I panicked. I told my wife “I think I just screwed up” or words to that effect.

She swung into action and shut down the Amex card, contacted their fraud division and in a few minutes I was talking to a nice lady with an accent — this on an early Saturday morning, mind you — from the Philippines. Once I could understand what she was saying, it took her only a minute or two to verify that I am indeed who I am, and to cancel payment on the $1800 dollar charge that the fraudsters had already made on the card, instantly, allowing for time zone changes. My wife kindly pointed out that in the address attached to the offer was “uk,” meaning this came from Great Britain, not my friendly neighborhood store. These guys are sitting up all night to pull off this fraud. Amex cancelled the old card and is promising a new one by the end of the month. I got another offer from Dick’s Sporting Goods, ironically also the employer of another former client.

Owing to my focus on catching up with household chores, working on multiple sources of revenue, and maintenance of my weekly podcast, daily online dialogs with Zen students, et cetera, I had not been sitting much in recent weeks. I was experimenting with my sleep patterns, which I have had the luxury of doing for years since semi-retiring, and was waking up later, sans alarm. Not in time to make the sunrise sit at the Zen center, but still attending every Sunday morning 9 am zazen. So when I checked my email at 8 am this particular Saturday morning, I was still half awake, in that dreamy state known as hypnopompic. Usually I wake up fully while sitting in zazen from 6 to 7 am at the center.

Meanwhile, my writing for publication side hussle had a resurgence, with the publisher approving a foundational work, a series of readers excerpted from Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks that we self-published as “The Kyosaku” and “Mokurai” many years ago. Collaborating with two of our practice leaders in Wichita and Chicago, I had already completed the first draft of half of the first manuscript, writing just after waking as early as 4 or 5 am, or in-between online dharma dialog calls. And feeling pretty good about my prowess as a writer, which I had never seen as part of my self-identity.

In cutting and pasting Sensei’s selected talks for the first reader, naturally I had to re-read them. In one of them I came across his recommendation that we sit often, “at least daily,” which I vaguely remembered but had slipped my mind. I have always held, in discussion with students, that to make Zen or zazen a “have to do” rather than a “get to do” is to distort its meaning, and potentially discourage yourself. I have instead related Matsuoka Roshi’s most frequent admonition to simply never give up. So it made more sense to me to de-emphasize something as measurable as daily sitting rather than set up arbitrary parameters around zazen. Yet here I was, falling for a scam, in the context of not sitting daily, at least in recent weeks. This is obviously not the way to follow the Precept to “proceed clearly.”

So I urge you to sit daily. At least sit, if not just sit. That is, at your desk, or behind the driver’s wheel on the commute. Or on the side of your bed. Take a moment. Or ten or fifteen minutes. Just keep sitting, even while you are doing other things. Especially if you are tempted by something online. Sit up straight. Breathe deeply. Return to your surroundings. Come to your senses. Okay, enough of that.

Back to Design thinking gone awry. While it is true that we all need to be preoccupied with the hassle and hangups inherent in being a householder, we are not necessarily designing our most effective or efficient approach to it. I am amazed on a daily basis by how much the yardwork tugs at my attention. When in actuality, I could be out there every day slugging away at it, and it would not make much of a difference in the long run. Certainly not in the nature of the great outdoors as home to the flora and fauna of the big city. Our parcel is a diminishingly small percentage of a percentage of the overall emerald city. But it is where we live. And the yardwork is one of my fitness regimens. An effective one.

In designing your approach to designing your life, I recommend that you include sitting as an intrinsic part of it. Whether you are outside sweating under the sun or drenched in the rain, or inside mopping up the “endless, unremitting, unthinkable, unnameable” dust accumulation — apologies to Master Dogen — consider an interval training approach to sitting. When you take a break from the inevitable, unavoidable grind, really take a break. Sit up and shut down, as some wag said. You will find it easier to blend activity with meditation as a constant, than to set it aside as something special. And the amount of time you spend in actual zazen — just sitting or sitting only — will magically expand on its own, until it becomes 24/7. We all know that there can be no actual separation of zazen and everything else. But that is one little fantasy that we can allow ourselves, if we are not careful.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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How to design Zen?

No need to redesign it —

It is already!

In this segment we will continue to explore the underlying or implied question of Buddhism: What is your worldview, exactly and in detail? And: How can you mount challenges to it? Again, there are multiple dimensions, or spheres of influence, to our world, namely the personal, social, natural, and universal. Also again, the influence we can have on these various spheres is a case of diminishing returns, as we move from the inmost personal dimensions of life to the outer realms of the world at large. And the relationship is asymmetrical — the outer dimensions can have a disproportionate effect upon the inner. Cases in point include mass shootings in the news again, and looming climate disasters.

“Didja ever notice...?” This familiar lead-in from standup comic routines is appropriate to any consideration of worldview, and to Zen and Design training. It is often the things we don't notice that trip us up, or get us in the end. Leaders of guided meditation — which zazen is not — will often use an expression such as “Notice that your anxiety triggers physical sensations, in your solar plexus…” Then they suggest what to do about it, such as “Hold that feeling…” et cetera. There is no real problem with this approach for newcomers, depending on the practice-experience of the person doing the guiding. But once one has been practicing meditation for some time, such guidance is not only not needed, it can be downright aggravating. We don’t need to be led by the nose to enlightenment. In fact it is probably guaranteed to get in the way. Zen recommends unguided meditation, with minimal instruction, and that mostly on the physical plane. Mental discipline will develop on its own eventually, in the most natural way, as body and mind cannot separate. Worldview can evolve but does not need to be guided.

Is your worldview accurate? The Eightfold Path lays out three constituents of daily practice. Right Wisdom, comprised of Right View and Thought; Right Conduct, meaning of Speech, Action and Livelihood; and Right Discipline in Effort, Mindfulness and Meditation. The first two form the axis of wisdom between our view and understanding of the reality we face. The second is the outer person, whose conduct is witnessed by others, and the third is the inner person, those things about us, good and bad, that may be hidden from the world. The theory is that by eliminating wrong views, we come to appreciate, and approximate, a worldview closer to Buddha’s own. This would then amount to the “right view” of reality, meaning one that is all-inclusive, not self-centered, and characterized by a balance of compassion and wisdom in our interface with, and reaction to, the four worldly spheres. The Path is thus a comprehensive outline or plan, a model of manifesting Zen in daily life.

Buddhism’s related teaching of the five Skandhas, or “aggregates of clinging” — beginning with Form, proceeding through Sensation, Perception, Impulse, and finally Consciousness itself — offers a complementary, complete model of sentient awareness. It may be considered an example of the science of the times, reflecting an intuitive grasp of biological sentience and its psychological aspects, or a design exercise in attempting to describe the discernible constituents of consciousness or worldview. Nowadays we can parse these differentiations to a nearly infinite level of detail, but the aggregate reality is still where we place our attention in Zen meditation.

The first four aggregates might be mistakenly interpreted as concepts, mere objects of differentiated consciousness. That is, we may think we are fully conscious of external forms as well as internal sensations, perceptions, and impulses. But we cannot be cognizant of all of them simultaneously, not at all times, when we are preoccupied with our mission of the moment. Sensation adapts to constant stimulus, and we can become numb to reality. “The world is too much with us” — shout out to William Wordsworth — and our adaptive reaction reflects the central line of his brief poem: “For this, for everything, we are out of tune; it moves us not.” In Hsinhsinming [Trust in Mind], Ch’an Master Sengcan reminds us similarly, “A hairsbreadth deviation and you are out-of-tune.”

On the other hand, we tend to focus our attention selectively. In doing so, we mistake our initial impression to be the way the world is, ignoring the greater reality: that the aggregates are also empty. This notion of emptiness — a translation of the Sanskrit shunyatta that may create as much confusion as clarity — is one of the most troubling for students of Buddhism and Zen. Without going into book length, perhaps the shorthand of comparing the nonduality of form and emptiness to that of matter and energy may give us the modern equivalent of the intuitive conception of 2,500 years ago. Form is that aspect of our worldview that we can perceive and conceive, its appearance as the material world, and emptiness is that invisible, energetic reality underlying the form, or matter. Science and Buddhism come to the same conclusion, that both things can be true at the same time.

We learn our worldview partly though agreement with our peers, as well as parents, teachers and others, unfortunately including politically-motivated ideologues. This may account for most of the mental objects of indirect conception that retroactively affect our direct perception. The extreme exemplified as traumatic memories leading to PTSD.

Tribal members tend to share the same worldview, as well as the same language, as do citizens of modern nations. But when it comes to sensations and perceptions that are not broadly shared by the larger community, we must resort to our own means, and develop an original conceptual framework, and language, for them. This is characteristic of Zen. We all have to reinvent Zen for ourselves, for it to become real in our lives, and to have any significant effect on our direct worldview. “Not understanding the Way before your eyes, how will you know the path you walk?” as another Ch’an poem, Sandokai [Harmony of Sameness and Difference], challenges us to consider.

The “Dreamtime” of aboriginal Australians is an example of a significant tribal preoccupation not usually seen in modern society, thought to date back to some 65,000 years ago. It has been supplanted in our times by psychological studies of dreams, perhaps. Meditative insight would be another example from the Buddhist tradition, the closest parallel in Christianity being centering prayer, and the epiphanies of the saints. We do not pretend to know the complete process by which the formation of our worldview takes place. But we want to posit that in Zen, it is not as simple and straightforward as it may seem. Our current worldview may be skewed. As a comic asks, “Did you ever look at yourself in the mirror, first thing in the morning, and think: That can’t be accurate!” Your view of yourself, the person with whom you are most familiar in the world, may not match the reality. Especially as we grow older, this contradiction continues to gain more clarity and force. This challenges our sense of self.

Our sense of a separate self is reinforced by our perception/conception of being a being in an environment. We definitely perceive the boundaries of where we end and it, the environment, begins. Our skin, for example, the outer shell of our body and its largest organ — while obviously separating our insides from the outside — simultaneously connects us to the environment, and so stands as an example of nonduality. It both is and is not a barrier, a membrane through which we absorb and excrete various forms of energy such as sunlight and temperature, as well as moisture and other chemicals, in exchange with the local environ. The same may be said of all the other senses as well.

If we leave the building, and go outside, it seems that now, we are in a different environment, which would argue that the environment is separate. And indeed, we may experience different environments, simply by traveling around the world in which we live. However, no matter where or how far we go, the being-in-the-environment dyad is still present. There is no existence of being without accompanying environment. Again, Zen teaching is largely belaboring the obvious, once it is pointed out. Like the punchline of a cosmic joke.

Thus, the being and its environment are relatively separable, but absolutely inseparable. Once the latter conception becomes our new normal perception, we can see that with every move we make, the environment responds with a seemingly equal and opposite move. If we lean left, it shifts to the right. If we move forward, it flows backward, through our senses, notably the visual, the auditory, and the tactile, and perhaps more subtly, the olfactory and even gustatory, depending on circumstance. Running into a burning house, for instance, all the senses are likely to be fully engaged. This sense of unity with the surround is a more normal state of awareness than the sense of isolation that comes with sustaining the sense of a separate self, today heightened by social media. It is probably acute in primitive tribal societies, where sensing the environment is directly connected to immediate survival.

So what does all this Zen stuff have to do with Design? The personal, social, natural and universal spheres of existence cannot be separated, according to Zen, nor can they in terms of Design. We are challenged to design our life and our world in such a way as to optimize the positive influences we have on the surrounding spheres in which our personal world is nested, and to minimize the negative effects that we have on them, and that they have on us. The media, materials and methods by and through which we actualize our plan in order to achieve and maintain this design intent vary by the individual, the context, and over time. The teachings of Zen fit into this process as expressed in the “Dharma opening verse” recited before each presentation of teachings in a formal setting: “The unsurpassed, profound and wondrous Dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred-thousand-million kalpas. Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it. May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth.”

The verse is relatively self-explanatory. The vast time span indicated may sound discouraging, until you come to the phrase “now we can see and hear it,” meaning both now is the only time it is met with, but also, thanks to our good luck, we can look and listen to someone expounding this teaching. The “ accept and maintain” it part puts the onus on us to make an attitude adjustment of acceptance if we find we are resisting as usual, and if not, to maintain the teaching for the sake of ourselves and others. “Thus the realm of self-awakening and awakening others invariably holds the mark of realization with nothing lacking, and realization itself is manifested without ceasing for a moment” as Master Dogen asserts with his usual unshakeable confidence.

Seeing and hearing the true Dharma, another vintage Dogen expression, relies on this “mark of realization,” which is the crux of the matter of awakening to the truth, whether on the personal or social level. All we need do in order to avail ourselves of this Dharma, which has the connotation of “truth,” is to put the emphasis on realization rather than understanding, and look for its manifestation moment by moment. In this way our worldview becomes something that already is, rather than something that we need to achieve. A little fine-tuning is needed, that is all.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Perfectly nat’ral,

A sitting tetrahedron —

Equilibrium!

We will continue our discussion of the influence of Design thinking on worldview, returning to one of my most influential mentors. I want to share more of my familiarity with R. Buckminster Fuller, who is perhaps the most underappreciated proponent of Design with a capital “D.” Some of the points I make will be redundant, but Fuller’s teaching, like Zen’s, bears repetition. They sink in gradually if at all.

Design itself, as a worldview, philosophy, and profession, is also largely misunderstood, I think, and has that in common with Zen. The first time I set out to develop my own design consultation business, I named it DesignScience, after Fuller’s description of his approach to solving large-scale problems in advance, a process he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science.”

Design is inherently a process of application to solving real-world problems. Science includes “pure science” or research, not directly targeted to a tangible output, such as solving mathematical conjectures or resolving seeming contradictions in physics’ Standard Model, for example. The closest approximation to pure design would be something like art, or sculpture, depending on its dimensionality. Often, experiments that look like play, or design for the sake of design, turn out to have application as an unintended consequence. In this respect, Design and Science have this dynamic in common.

I had the good fortune to meet R. Buckminster Fuller in person, to attend and listen to some of his lectures, and to be exposed to the thinking and teaching of this great, iconic American and mentor to my generation of design aspirants. Bucky’s life, philosophy and professional practice exhibited several parallels to Zen, from my perspective, and he anticipated much of the situation in which we now find ourselves, predicting many of the problems we are facing as a world-around society. Coming up with solutions is the heart of comprehensive anticipatory design science, anticipating burgeoning problems before it is too late. For example, he said over fifty years ago, that the main problem would not be energy, but access to water. Fresh drinking water was taken for granted in those days.

We are witnessing his prescience on a daily basis, especially here in Georgia, where our political leaders are tripping all over each other to solve a problem none of them apparently anticipated at all. Access to the main aquifers and rivers of the southeastern states, including Tennessee and Florida, has become a major point of contention, not likely to get better with the onslaught of warming climate.

He also had some cogent, if biting, things to say about the politicians of his time, which still hold true today. Pointing out, for example, the absurdity of our turning to our government leaders for solutions, when, if they had any solutions, they wouldn’t be politicians. Politicians’ primary role is maintaining the status quo, according to the great man. He put an edge on this by maintaining that people “blame the machines” (science and technology) for problems of modernity, and pointed out that if we turn off the machines, a billion people begin a slow death. Send the politicians a trip around the sun, however, and we’ll all keep eating, says Bucky.

I see a connection to Zen in Fuller’s cogent use of language, which is characteristic of the great Masters in Zen history. The story goes that he took a vow of silence for a couple of years, during which his wife handled all the necessary transactions, Bucky handing her written notes as needed. One wonders if this was a burden, or more of a relief, to her. He claimed that one day he realized that everything coming out of his mouth consisted of the ideas and words of others. With characteristic simplicity, and counter-intuitive thinking, he decided that stopping talking for a long enough time would allow him to find his own voice. And he had the discipline to pull it off.

After this period, which had to be very difficult, his voice emerged in a way that he used language, rather than being used by it, which is a principle of Buddhist teaching. We can see parallels to vows of silence often taken by monks and nuns, in Buddhist monasteries as well as those of other faiths. And in Master Dogen, 13th Century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, we see similar, uniquely creative use of language. Dogen is said, for example, to have used the Sino-Japanese equivalent of nouns as verbs, and vice-versa. So we can picture a “stone,” for example, in the dynamic act of “stone-ing,” or vitally being a stone, rather than as a passive object. My teacher, Matsuoka-roshi, expressed this in a similar way when he said that the stone in the garden is “alive.” A Japanese architect friend and colleague, who developed beautiful, authentic Japanese gardens to complement his buildings, once told me, “You know, you have to talk to the stones.” And in Japan, haul them down from the mountains.

When Bucky wanted to express something that transcended the dualistic nature of language, and for which the vernacular did not provide an adequate term or phrase, he would invent a new word. One that he may not have coined, but used frequently, is “tensegrity.” A portmanteau of tension and integrity, it conjoins tension and compression, but in a discontinuous connection. From the New Oxford American Dictionary, we find:

ten•seg•ri•ty

noun, Architecture

the characteristic property of a stable three-dimensional structure consisting of members under tension that are contiguous and members under compression that are not.

ORIGIN 1950s: from tensional integrity.

See the model illustrated below, with the link to its online source:

Such models built by Bucky’s students to employ the principle of tensegrity appear to be impossible. That is, you are looking at a bunch of sticks, or struts, which form a solid, spheroidal structure, but none of the struts touch each other. Instead, they are floating in a network of tensional cables, which connect to the struts at the ends. But it is counter-intuitive to grasp how the whole thing doesn’t collapse into a pile. It is as if the geometry holds itself together by some kind of magic. This reminds me of Master Dogen’s caution from his Genjokoan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point] regarding Zen insight:

Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge
and is grasped by your consciousness
Although actualized immediately the inconceivable may not be apparent
Its appearance is beyond your knowledge

Appearances can be deceiving. In the case of this model, it seems to illustrate, beautifully and powerfully, the principle of matter as energy from physics, and the Buddhist principle of form, or appearance, as emptiness. It is also challenging to the imagination — of anyone who has ever built anything with his or her own hands — to conceive of the process of building the damn thing. How in the world do you hold the elements in place, floating in space, while tying them together with string?

One connection of tensegrity to Zen is its relationship to the world-shattering equations mentioned above, namely E = mc2 and Form = Emptiness, Emptiness = Form. But also, more directly and simply, the same principle may be seen in the posture of meditation, particularly Zen meditation, or zazen.

In zazen, the classic, cross-legged posture of Buddhist meditation, the body takes the form of a tetrahedron. Bucky used the four-pointed geometry to represent the simplest form that could represent a system of any kind. A system, he defined, is fundamentally anything that exhibits an “inside” and an “outside.” This, I understand, is an engineering definition, but can apply to a building, a business, an organism, or any other isolate of our “particular case experiences,” another favorite Fullerism. Bucky defined intelligence itself as our ability to extract general principles from particular cases. Which is what we are attempting to do in this essay, if you hadn’t noticed.

Considering the principle of tensegrity applied to the human form in meditation, we can see that the skeleton supplies the compression members, while ligaments, tendons and muscle mass comprise the tensional net in which the skeletal frame “floats.” Of course, there is no absolute separation of inside and outside in the human body, nor is there in any other system.

This does not negate the utility of the concept, but simply subsumes the system in question into the larger system of its environment. Let's not quibble with philosophical entertainments while we are focusing on something practical. The relative and the absolute, in Zen, comprise a concrete reality in which they are a complementarity, not in competition. This does, however reveal the futility of trying to absolutely isolate an isolate. Hello, uncertainty principle.

This brings us to the constituents of tensegrity, which in the cases mentioned, are seen as components of differing materials and relative function, including the human body. Bucky often used the expression that they “always and only coexist,” when speaking of a pair of duals such as tension and compression. In the case of this pair, he noted that not only do they always and only coexist (never in isolation), but are also in a fixed spatial relationship. Namely, they manifest axes at 90 degrees to each other.

For example, in the struts and strings model, if one pulls on the two ends of a length of cable, it stretches to a degree, depending on its material and construction. While tension is applied to the length, the cross-section or diameter manifests compression, by becoming thinner. This is more apparent in a bungee cord, for example, or a rubber band, than in most fibrous cords. By the same token, if we compress a strut from its ends, the cross-section tends to expand, bowing out, again more apparent in certain materials, like rubber, than others. In a load-bearing column of a building, too much compression will cause it to bow and break.

On the other hand, if we attempt to compress the tensional components from their end points, or to place tension on the compressive elements, it doesn’t work. We don’t try to push a string uphill, and most compressive materials are not amenable to stretching. Thus a suspension bridge uses cable to suspend the slab from metal posts, not the other way around. Although the basic material may be similar on the molecular level. For example both posts and cables may be made of steel.

Getting back to the posture, the knees and buttocks form the three-pointed base of the tetrahedron, the head the apex. A regular tetrahedron, of course, say one built of sticks and balls as in molecular models, consists of six edges of identical length connecting the four balls. The form of the human body, while varying in size and proportion, compared to a tetrahedron, consists of three edges of relatively the same length, the thighs and calves of the cross-legged base; but the fourth strut, the spine, is longer, and upright relative to the plane of the floor. The arms, if braced by placing the hands on the knees, fill in the last two struts, as is taught in some yogic forms of meditation posture.

In zazen, however, the hands are dropped into the “cosmic mudra” or hand position, against the lower abdomen, where the wrists nest in the hip socket, so that the arms are at rest, not bracing the upright spine. The lower stomach muscles take up the slack, pulling forward and down to hold the trunk upright. When first taking the posture, we lean forward and back, swinging left and right, and ‘round and ‘round in a spiral, to bring the body into balance with gravity, centered in the weight of the body mass. Then we sit very still.

When after some time the posture has become second-nature, many report an experience of effortlessness, or even floating. The compressional elements of the skeleton have come into alignment with the gravitational field, and the tensional net of the musculature has come into equilibrium, balanced around the skeleton. No muscle group is completely relaxed, as this would place additional tension, or stress, on the complementary muscle group on the opposite side of the skeletal bones.

Thus the posture can be said to be in perfect equilibrium, or equipoise. A cautionary word from Bucky. He pointed out that an airplane’s engine is always out of balance, which is what keeps it running. And that if it ever reaches complete equilibrium, that is when it stalls, and the plane is likely to crash. But since we are sitting safely on our cushion, and close to the floor, there is no need to panic. You may, however, feel a bit of vertigo. Top of a 100-foot pole, you know. Precarious position to be in. One more step to take. Off the pole.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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It is laugh or cry —

the tragedy of humans

in hormonal rage.

This is one I did not want to have to write. But owing to the resurgence of mass shootings — emerging to fill the gap, now that the COVID pandemic has cut us some slack — I feel I would be remiss to continue along the lines of treating less controversial dimensions of design thinking, Zen, and the reality we face. Perhaps because I have recently re-watched some old videos of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, I am subject to irresistible flashes of standup routines parodying relentless social issues, in that half-awake, half-asleep state of awareness known as hypnogogic or hypnopompic, depending on whether you are retreating from, or returning to, full consciousness, reminiscent of the old Taoist Zhuang Zhou’s famous saying:

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

Butterflies, of course, are known for flitting from flower to flower, gathering nectar I suppose, but at the same time, distributing pollen for the reproductive needs of the plants in question, the flowers being their genitalia. A very public case of in flagrante delicto, usually considered an act of wrongdoing. Which brings up another quote, from the Precepts of Zen Buddhism as currently received in ceremony:

Honor the body; do not engage in sexual misconduct

Which, in turn, begs the question of which kind of sexual behaviors amount to misconduct, and which do not. A tellingly large portion of religious, philosophical and ideological beliefs is devoted to making the cultural norms on this question as explicit as possible, with variations from culture to culture, loosely construed as “values.” One need look no further than the animal kingdom, particularly that of the insect world, to find that, as far as Nature is concerned, anything goes, basically, and not to even mention the plant kingdom. If a human being were to emulate or imitate any one of thousands of behaviors found in the fecund orgy going on out there, they would be driven out of society with no mercy. Marquis de Sade, move over.

This discussion inevitably moves into treacherous territory, skating on the thin ice covering theistic beliefs in the creation of humankind, and God’s divine intervention from the get-go in our daily affairs, no pun. Theists, please forgive me in advance — I mean no disrespect — but as a designer I have to give license to an interpretation of Intelligent Design from a perspective embracing human frailty and folly. I find myself — or rather my unchained, dreamy unconscious — imagining the “design arguments” familiar from struggles with problem definition and solution in professional design circles, only the kind that must have arisen from time to time on “God’s Design Committee.” Any one experienced in a design-build organization at any scale will tell you that teams of specialists typically actualize the output of the conceptual Genius, who himself is far too busy with bigger things to be bothered with the details.

I suppose it would be theologically proper to speak of God’s “angels” discussing these ideas in process, probably a committee of elders and perhaps some creative youngsters. Delegated the task of detailing the nuts and bolts of God’s vision — as sentient beings evolve through the inevitable developmental stages, from the earliest glimmerings as single-celled organisms through ever-more complex forms, until finally arriving at the absolute apogee of all creation — thee and me, in all our homeliness.

A few perhaps impertinent questions naturally arise as to how, exactly, this might have transpired. Of particular relevance to the current topic would be those surrounding the reproductive design of the only being “made in God’s own image,” after all, and the lively debate that must have taken place amongst those responsible for final design intent — form, features and styling — and implementation. Surely there must have been some competing opinions as to best potential solutions.

For example — and this pivots toward the issue of violence and its possible root causes, so buckle up (or conversely, loosen your belt) — the cultural meme against masturbation. Not a historian, so not sure how widespread this prohibition has been in the development of civilization (using the term loosely), but certainly grew up in the inhibitory climate of the 1950s, myself.

As an aside, by the fourth grade, I could already draw pretty well, and had initiated a comic strip about our family’s pet fox terrier, a couple of years earlier. My best friend in middle school brought what was called an “eight-pager” in those days, a primitive form of pornographic comic book featuring Betty Boop and Dick Tracy, which he had obtained from his older brother. I decided to try my hand at drawing naked women, and turned out to be pretty good at it, minus the details, of course, of which I was blissfully ignorant. When one of my sketches came to the attention of the teacher, she demanded to know who was the ringleader. All my friends in the classroom pointed at me. My first betrayal. Busted at 10 for running a porn ring.

From a personal perspective, the intervening scope creep in porn — from the cartoon book I was exposed to, to the advent of Playboy Magazine, culminating in the cascade of virtual information overload available online today — is breathtaking. Whether this is having a majorly negative or positive impact on today’s youth, I am not sure. In one sense, it is better to know, than to have to imagine, the gross details of “bumping uglies,” as a Hollywood film so charmingly put it. In another sense, a bit of mystery does not hurt. Ignorance is not necessarily bliss, in all cases.

From a religio-theistic perspective — if I may be permitted the coinage — sexual exploration and giving in to our desires is not given much cover. From an early age we are admonished to not — as my beer-drinking, tobacco-chewing, Jehovah’s Witness maternal grandmother put it so delicately — “go around acting like dogs.” In every other respect, of course, we virtually worship the dog, which, spelled backwards, is… never mind. Dog has buddha-nature. Let it go at that.

But back to the committee: if God really didn’t want us to play with ourselves, why did S/he make our hands come out exactly where our genitals are located? They — the latter, that is — could have been located in the middle of our back, where they would be virtually unreachable. Which would lend new meaning to the song, “Back-to-back; belly-to-belly; well I don’t give a damn ‘cause I done that already.” I can remember from the tender age of six or so becoming aroused simply by sleeping on my belly. To this day I cannot see how that situation was somehow my fault.

I could go on. But to return to the main thrust of the dreamworld: When the assignment hit the desks of the co-chairs (Heaven must be highly organized), they would have called the committee together for some initial brainstorming, perhaps with some high-level aspirational direction from the Big Guy himself. The team had just successfully completed the exhaustive establishment of all manner of mammals around the world, and were basking in the glow of that accomplishment. So when considering this next task — the ultimate challenge of the top-of-the-line model of sentient beings, a cut above all other animals, requiring a breakthrough yet to be determined — what did they do? Like most design teams in that situation, they played it safe. Landing on a small refinement of the latest in that series, with some tweaking, that turns out to be what we cavalierly call the “hairless ape.” A caveat — no slur intended on other innocent bipeds, who would likely regard some of our behavior as unforgivable, or at least unconscionable. One of Buddha’s honorifics is translated “honored among bipeds.” Not making this up.

So when it came to the reproductive system of a species designed for eternal life in Heaven if not on Earth, what did they come up with? Mammal is a mammal is a mammal. I think it likely that at least one of the committee members, perhaps a few of the younger and less jaded, might have objected. “You’re telling me that this, our highest achievement, will have one with an innie and one with an outie — and have to stick the outie into the innie in order to reproduce? That’s disgusting.” “Yeah, that’s just another mammal, man!” “Why can’t we do something nice and clean, like we did with that amoeba. Just split in half, clean break down the middle. No muss, no fuss.”

Well, we can’t blame them. Maybe the obiter dictum came down that He Who Shall Not Be Ignored wanted it that way. Just wanted to make things a little more challenging for his only begotten. Like that just-another-ape thing. Give the old ego something to work on. Just spit-balling here.

Someone capable of thinking ahead would offer, “Well, then, for something this intelligent, we are going to have to make that feel really good. Otherwise you’re going to get pushback. Have to stuff a lot of nerve endings in there, maybe sacrifice some in the back. Where, remember, I was the one who suggested we put the reproductive junk in the first place.” Some ideas die hard.

So the tragedy of what we see happening today may have had comic cosmic beginnings. Nonetheless, it is necessary to take a sober look at where this particular madness is coming from. This constitutes a real exercise in problem definition. Which is our only hope of finding a solution.

When we look at the mass murders now taking place weekly, like some kind of insane competition — and the parallel phenomenon of so-called suicide-bombers (some would say homicide-bombers) from a different culture — an eerie commonality emerges. One theory I came across in what passes for cool and collected scrutiny today is that these incidents are largely the brainchild of young men, probably “incels” — involuntary celibates — a term coined relatively recently. Which suggests that the prevailing witches’ brew of seductive and restrictive cultural conditions may not have obtained in the past. Of course, a mere couple of centuries or so ago, no one person could have so casually pulled together the means of mass murder and destruction on offer, and on demand, today. Violent repression leads to violent expression.

Speculation on the pathology of the madness, meaning its true causes, abounds. In ancient times, in one particular city-state in early Greece, the local overlord decided it would be a good idea to parade all nubile young women through the streets, nearly naked. Purportedly in order that the young men could see what ladies look like under their clothes, to remove some of the mystery, and relieve the urge, to that degree. Young men, in turn, apparently competed naked in sporting competitions, presumably with young women permitted to watch. The important thing was who won the game, after all. Nowadays maybe scantily-clad cheerleaders represent the vestigial remains of those traditions.

Speaking of scantily-clad: “Quora Digest.” This site pops up on my email daily, maybe more than once. Under the guise of featuring factoids of general interest, including a heavy obsession with Beatlemania and Nazi stories, the lead item always has something to do with photos of youngish female celebrities: wardrobe failures, T&A, boobs and butts, beaver shots, et cetera. Soft porn. Rarely is the subject of the feature male nudity, and never their accidentally exposed parts.

With this kind of “infotainment” readily available today, in our hyper-sexualized media and culture, even to those most sheltered by parental controls, it is no wonder that the youth are obsessed with sex. Boys in full hormonal rage are confronted with images of nearly-naked women on all fronts, and the harder porn message is that they all want it, bad. But when they turn to their own immediate circle, they are met with rejection, ridicule and scorn. Their personal reality is badly out of sync with their perceived social reality. One definition of madness.

It reminds me of an incident a good friend in college once related. He was a lifeguard on the beaches of New York in his high-school days, when one day a little girl, maybe five years old, came running up to him wrapped in a towel. Suddenly she flung open the towel, revealing her stark naked body, shouting “No shame! No shame!” then ran off to accost her next convert.

I, too, wish we could all walk around naked, with notable exceptions. If the Emperor literally has no clothes, you could literally not un-see that. I had a friend in Chicago who, with his two girlfriends after his first marriage ended, were nudists. He was well-endowed, worked as a trainer in a gym, and was always encouraging everyone to get naked, asserting that if you did, you would not have much more to hide. I knew him well enough to know that he still had plenty to hide, fully starkers, though I did not tell him so. There’s more to that story, but I will leave you wanting more.

Suppression and repression are defined as pretty much synonymous in the dictionary, so I do not know which would be more appropriate to define the attitude toward sexuality, and its public presentation, in the context under consideration. Currently parents are up in arms over teaching critical race theory, the racial replacement conspiracy, and sexuality, in schools. I think these are all facets of one private problem. And that the violence we are witness to all too frequently is its public manifestation. Like most maladies, it is not going to get any better on its own. The question is, What to do? First, define it.

The reemergence of conservative ideology and values in countries dominated by Islamic extremists appears to be another example of this same syndrome. The cultural imperative may be the opposite — women required to go full burqa in public, accompanied by a male 24/7, et cetera, only serves to exacerbate the situation they are trying to control. Hiding the body may inflame the hormonal dysplasia afflicting the young men of the society. The proposed solution to the problem is different, but like the televangelist caught with the prostitute, making something absolutely evil is to make it absolutely irresistible. Especially if it feels good. Addiction occurs because the drugs work.

Bodhidharma, the great sage credited with brining Zen Buddhism to China, is reputed to have encouraged fellow monks to watch animals fight, in order to learn how to defend themselves without weapons against armed opponents, by whom they were frequently attacked. Religious jealousy and animus are not recent phenomena. This was one of the origins of the martial arts, according to the story. But he did not suggest that they observe animals for instruction in the romantic arts as well. Monks were mostly celibate, if you accept the historicity of the written record. Likewise, we are not going to go there. I leave to your imagination what kind of Kama Sutra might have emerged.

The disconnect between the social and personal worlds revealed by these mass killings, or even individual suicide, is a universal condition shared by all who have reached their maturity. Meditation is the direct way to resolve all such seeming contradictions. In this context, masturbation is not wrong, but meditation is better. Those who would argue that any waste of sperm is an abomination should consider the amount of semen in a typical ejaculation, estimated in the hundreds of millions. What are the odds that any but the most minuscule percentage will ever impregnate an egg? Do the math.

Buddha himself is said to have lived a life of dissipation and self-gratification under the care of his family, who wanted him to inherit leadership of the Shakya clan, rather than take up the life of an itinerant religious leader, as had been prophesied. He is said to have become so “refined” — we would say “jaded” — that he no longer desired anything. This disaffection, along with his reputed estrangement from the intense suffering he witnessed, led to his leaving home on a quest for salvation, the beginning of Buddhism.

But Buddha’s ultimate insight became the basis for the Middle Way, the instruction that the extremes of self-gratification and self-mortification were equally “unworthy and unprofitable,” and the Eightfold Path, completing the triangle of findings, conclusions and recommendations that any worthwhile research study must produce, in order to be useful to oneself or others. For him, and for innumerable followers of the Zen way, these teachings stand as a most comprehensive definition of the fundamental problem of existence. They also offer a universal solution. The only thing is to get on with it.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Falling through a curve —

Sum total of all forces…

Zen’s “total function”!

In this segment we will return our attention back to the more personal sphere of meditation practice. Beyond any consideration of what unlikely intersections we may find between Design thinking and the complex ethical and political issues of our times — other than personal solutions that may help mitigate the worst consequences of the seemingly incompetent or malicious intentions on the part of the powers that be — the deeper implications of some of the most advanced Design thinking and their association with Zen may not be readily apparent. One such example would be the Geodesic geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller, one of my many mentors. In case you are unfamiliar with it, a bit of background.

Bucky and his students started out exploring what would become a new branch of geometry by modeling what he called the “closest-packing” of spheres, in the form of ping pong balls or cast acrylic spheres, stacking and gluing them in various configurations. Spheres are the closest approximation to a point in space, having the same radius in all directions, and stand as reasonable analogies to atoms in a molecular structure, or molecules in the structure of the periodic table of elements, as the familiar stick-and-ball models representing the geometry or shape of microscopic components, such as DNA.

To illustrate the two simplest versions, imagine holding three balls in the palm of one hand, where they will nest and form a triangle. Then place a fourth ball on top, and you have a tetrahedron. This is the first and simplest geometrical solid that divides space into inside and outside, the technical engineering definition of a “system” according to Fuller. Theoretically, any system of whatever complexity can be reduced to four major components, or subsystems. If you can define the four major divisions, and describe their six connections — the edges of the tetrahedron — it can be said that you “understand” or comprehend that particular system, or so Bucky asserts.

So the tetrahedron is the shape that represents the first level of closest packing of molecules, or any other singular entities, with a void at the center. The second example starts with a single sphere at the center, packing one layer around it. Surprisingly, the classic solid that results is the rhombi-cube-icosahedron, the unique solid that Bucky referred to as the “vector equilibrium.” Its surface planes consist of alternating triangles and squares, six of the latter and eight of the former. He called it a vector equilibrium because the tensional vectors, representing the outer edges of the surface, are exactly balanced by the compressive vectors, meaning the connections between the outer vertices and the central sphere. Interpreted as vectors, as in a soap bubble, they are in equilibrium, represented by the distance between all points being the same.

I think the connection to Zen practice is pretty obvious, as our seated meditation posture, zazen, is basically a tetrahedron, especially when we brace ourselves by placing our hands on our knees. The arms complete the six edges of the tetrahedron. Similarly, the 12-pointed model of the rhombi-cube-icosahedron is the model for Buddhism’s Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Origination, with the 13th point being the center. I have used this geometry as semantic models of the main teachings of Buddhism (See Fig. 1). But how does Fuller’s geodesic geometry reflect Design thinking?

Fuller’s first application of geodesic design thinking was in the form of a map of the earth. The geodesic domes came much later. In this design, the continents are laid out on a triangular grid, called a tessellation, that allows the two-dimensional flat projection to be folded into a three-dimensional solid that represents the globe. (See Fig. 2) The outlines of continents and oceans are projected from the center of the Earth rather than from outside, like the familiar Mercator projection. Compared to that standard, this approach distributes the distortion in the projection evenly to every triangle, rather than exaggerating it depending on how far away the area is from the center. A second advantage is that the flattened map can represent a one-continent map as illustrated, or unfolded a different way, a one-ocean map, with the continents at the edges.

The question may arise, what is the design intent underlying this exercise? What would be the point in designing another kind of world map? Bucky was interested in precision in communication. It bothered him that scientists, who know better, would still refer to the sun as “rising” and “setting.” Far from picking nits, for Fuller these lazy tropes continue to reinforce ignorant conceptions of reality. It bothered him that the maps we were using distorted our perception of the interconnectedness of the world. You may argue that looking at a globe provides the same data — that is, accurate distances between points of interest — but this ignores the fact that you can see only one side of the map in 3D representation. It is more difficult to think and conceive in three dimensions, as the increased level of difficulty of three-dimensional chess illustrates. We tend to miss obscure connections, such as that the Japanese might fly over the North Pole to attack Pearl Harbor, the shortest distance from a world-around perspective.

Zen and Design thinking share this premise: that we are limited mainly by self-imposed strictures and ways of thinking, adopted from the cultural memes and worldviews of our community, parents and peers. Breaking out of these constraints is common to the mission of Design as well as that of Zen. The seminal teachings of Buddha himself were basically correctives to the received wisdom of the time. He would welcome these challenges to conventional thinking.

In fact one could argue that the foundational premise of Zen is that there is something missing in our apprehension of reality. Matsuoka Roshi would often say that people go through life with this sense of “something missing.” They don’t know what it is, to belabor the obvious, but they definitely know that it is missing. They come to Zen to find it. This “IT” is the big carrot that Zen and other insight-based endeavors dangle to attract sincere students of the Way. It is the “that” of suchness, in Japanese inmo, the ineffable realization of Buddha’s wisdom, to quote Master Dogen’s definition of the meaning of zazen. The implication is that our present “normal” awareness is limited by dualistic thinking, or in the worst case scenario, limited to dualistic thinking. Only you know for sure.

What is your worldview, exactly and in detail? How can you mount challenges to it? Bucky modified his worldview via the empirical scientific method — studying particular case experiences and deriving general principles therefrom — his definition of the standard operating procedure of human intelligence, itself. We can hopefully achieve higher approximations to reality by relinquishing the choke-hold that dualistic thinking has on our perception. In Zen, the way to that eventuality is zazen. Ride the cushion into that geodesic reality.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Such a lovely world —

if it weren’t for the people!

Let’s get rid of them.

In the last segment on Precepts & Putin, I finally got around to asking what all these ethical and political issues have to do with Design thinking, pointing out that even such large-scale dilemmas are subject to analysis and problem definition, with design intent being the underlying premise. What kind of intent rationalizes waging war, visiting death and destruction upon fellow human beings? What is the intent behind the design of the defense of Ukraine? Which of these is worthy of admiration and emulation?

Usually we ascribe good intentions to those programs of action designed to yield the greatest good for the greatest number. And usually the politicos profile their cause in those terms. But it seems that the majority of actions ostensibly taken on behalf of something greater than ourselves, upon closer examination, reveal the same old group of benefactors benefitting from corruption and graft, with other groups, such as draftees, conscripted or mercenaries, suffering the negative consequences. Not to mention innocent civilians. Designing around such human faults is the central problem of government.

Hypothetical solutions to international tensions include designing governing systems that will meet the needs of the populace without requiring the acquisition of goods and services, revenue and resources, from others, especially against their will. Setting aside the human motives in prosecuting a war of aggression, which may range from relatively rational impulses, such as gaining access to seaports and land bridges, to fantasies of power and glory, or myths and cultural memes. Self-sufficiency seems to be a worthy aspiration that has fallen by the wayside in a world-around pursuit of ever-greater consumption and materialistic lifestyles. The age-old question of how much is enough, manifested in traditional Zen monastics as limited to seven possessions, and in Design as the self-sustaining systems of minimal life support on the International Space Station. The question of reliability of the replenishment of supplies through a Russian-sponsored program came up as a sideshow of the Ukraine debacle.

So it is self-evident that Design as a problem-solving process has limitations. In cases of widespread madness, which is a known issue in history, but even more acute in an age of global interconnectedness through the internet of satellite-supported mobile media, the most we can do is design our personal response to the continuing crisis. In doing so, we may come up with an approach that has scalability, in other words that is widely adaptable by others. Hunkering down in basements and fortified buildings is the last-resort option we witness the survivors in the cities of Ukraine that are under siege. But we are all under siege, whether we recognize it or not.

During the Cold War we were told that the Soviet Union not only posed the threat of nuclear Armageddon, but actually had designs on invading the USA. I would try to imagine what that would be like. The logic of invading and trying to control something as sprawling and ungovernable as a whole country escapes me. It is now clear that even a small country like Ukraine is not going to be a pushover.

But in the absence of an aggressive incursion ever materializing — knock wood — we are still facing homegrown takeovers of the political system by factions that may not preserve the precious freedoms we have come to take for granted. Behind that wave of anxiety recycling at a frequency of every two years or less — the endless election campaign — we have the threat of another pandemic. And looming over all, on the not-too distant horizon, the emerging, relentless cataclysm of climate change. On what planet do you have to live, to decide that now would be the perfect time to wage a war?

Instead of throwing up our hands in despair, let’s consider the Design approach.

As designers, we are trained to approach development of the new in a systematic way, usually for a client group with fairly clear goals and objectives. One of the fundamental principles of applied design is that we focus our efforts on altering the environment, rather than attempting to alter the people directly, or for that matter, the various members of client organizations. Design stops short at the edge of psychology, or management training, although those systems are also subject to design, in a sense.

Another important principle is that the design process works best when conducted as a dialog, or an evolutionary group process. Methods have evolved for gathering and integrating input from large numbers of “stakeholders” or end-users into the design of any program. In fact, this was the topic of my Master’s thesis at the Institute of Design. Executed well, this approach generally results in more satisfactory, long-lived solutions than an “ivory-tower” approach, where a strong individual or subgroup develops and dictates decisions on design intent with little or no input from the folks they are trying to effect, the end users and purchasers of the product or service.

The process necessarily proceeds in phases, which, while not truly distinct and separate, have rather logical starting and ending points. These are usually defined as something like the following:

Phase I — Problem Definition
Phase II — Concept Design
Phase III — Design Detailing
Phase IV — Prototyping & Beta-testing
Phase V — Production & Distribution

We might be well-advised to look at our daily Zen practice in the light of these phases. While the design of anything new involves creative intuition, insight, and other immeasurable attributes, the process inevitably cycles through some version of these stages, with measurable results based on acceptance of the target market segments. Of course, the whole project often goes “back to the drawing board” — nowadays the computer interface — again and again, for revisions and re-development. In fact, the design process can be said to never be truly final, as it is responsive to ever-changing conditions and needs. This open-ended viewpoint may be frustrating to those who long for instant closure. In that, it is like zazen training. Design is akin to the Zen outlook, which regards nothing so dependable or “given,” as change. Let’s look more thoroughly at the first phase, Problem Definition.

The word “problem” has a somewhat negative connotation. Because in the business environment we generally want to emphasize the positive (business can be a somewhat paranoid context), we tend to use the word “opportunity” instead. Or we will refer to it as “Project Definition.” For our purposes, let's stick with “problem,” at least for now.

What, exactly, is the “problem”? Why do we want, or feel we need, to establish a Zen Center, for example? Why not just practice alone, assuming we've decided we want, or need, to practice? We can point to many teachings of the Ancestors which admonish us that the “real” Zen is not the province of the loner, but is to be found in the “marketplace” in concert and interaction with our fellow beings. We can also point to the practical, enlightened self interest aspects of forming a sitting group: the social and psychological support of the group for the individual, and the sharing of responsibilities, as well as understanding.

As we discussed at length in the “Priest & Householder” segment of the podcast, dana, the practice of generosity, includes providing the conducive environment for practice. Part of that aspect of being truly conducive to Zen practice is the respected tradition of face-to-face training, which has been set aside during the last two years of enforced isolation and social distancing owing to the covid pandemic. As in any creative process, it is natural to challenge any assumptions, including that the in-person form of training may not be necessary. So the stressors around the social dimensions of training — in any area of endeavor, including Zen — become a salient factor in redefining the problem of personal practice.

The haiku poem at the beginning of another segment reads:

Dharma and Karma

Dharma trumps karma,
but it is not an escape —
Consequences come

Some would fault Zen or Buddhism for failing to adequately address larger issues, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death, “…given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth…” Revelations chapter 6, according to Wikipedia, our current Bible, or Tower of Babble, depending on your viewpoint. Add to that the causes and conditions of climate change, covid, and access to nukes, and you have the devil not only in the details, but consequences on a global scale. Great timing for waging a war.

But it is not the fault of Zen Buddhism that we are facing these disasters. In fact, Buddhism teaches this very Dharma lesson, that karma is not individuated but collective. We share karmic consequences of the decisions of our leaders, however benighted. It is their very lack of dharma that is the problem.

It is possible, from the perspective of Design, to anticipate problems caused by human ignorance and willfulness resulting in interventions in the predictability of natural processes, such as climate cycles. It is within the realm of possibility that we can design and build personal sanctuary to survive the worst that Mother Nature can throw at us, in her efforts to bring about a rebalancing of the planetary forces that we have trifled with for the sake of short-term profit, ephemeral power, and self-aggrandizement.

For example, some tried and true approaches can limit the impact of weather upon our domiciles. Such as earth berm housing, covering the shelter with layers of earth to protect and insulate the interior from the elements. Use of unconventional building materials and joining systems can result in earthquake- and hurricane-proof construction, as one of the members of our former affiliate in Charleston, SC specialized in. He and friends rode out Hurricane Hugo in 1989 in one of his buildings, which didn’t lose so much as a shingle. Homes in the direct path of blowtorch-like tornadic winds face a different dilemma, but clearing surrounding forest, controlled brush fires and the like, as Native Americans performed as stewards of the forestland, can mitigate the damage.

Individual householders can take these drastic steps to protect themselves and their properties, if they have the wherewithal and perseverance. Survivalists have historically built bomb shelters and taken other extreme measures, including arming themselves to the teeth, in preparation for the worst dystopian futures imaginable. But the cost is enormous, both in resource investment, and quality of life.

On the other hand, persuading large groups of people, and governments, to forego their wasteful and indulgent lifestyles for the sake of practical adaptation to predictable outcomes of depleting and wasting resources for the sake of short-term goals, is, to say the least, a known issue.

The design of government, in the context of a world economy, where every functioning component is increasingly interdependent with every other — another familiar Buddhist principle — is another seemingly intractable problem. It is the “tragedy of the commons” writ large, where so-called leaders of local government gain power running on platforms of populism or nationalism, playing to the weakness of the people who want to believe that their lives and fortunes are independent of those of the rest of humanity around the globe.

It is apparently even a daydream in the eye of the wealthy that they, or their heirs, can escape Earth to settle another globe, such as Mars, in due time. This is where science fiction meets fantasy. And reality is left to take the hindmost, along with the Devil. Disposable planets.

On yet the other hand, we could adopt a stoic stance of resignation in the face of seemingly insolvable problems, doing what we can on a very local level to prepare for the worst. R. Buckminster Fuller, affectionately referred to as “Bucky,” called his approach “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” The idea is to anticipate emerging problems, causes and conditions — including human survival — on a more comprehensive basis, as predicted by “world-around” trends in resources, technology and behavior. And then, turning the trick, come up with solutions that we will be ready and able to deliver, when everyone else finally recognizes the problem. If it is not already too late, that is.

Fuller also had an interesting take on politicians and their role in this recurring dilemma. Paraphrasing, he said that we turn to the politicians for answers. But if they had any answers they wouldn’t be politicians. They would be out doing something positive, rather than doing their utmost to maintain status quo for themselves, their sponsors, and their constituents.

The latest example is the late Orrin Hatch, who just passed into his next cycle of “rebirth into the cycle of creation of suffering for ourselves or for others,” the last line of the Loving Kindness Sutra. His belief system as a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would not allow that notion. A United States Senator from Utah from 1977 — the year we incorporated Atlanta Soto Zen Center — to 2019, Hatch's 42-year tenure made him the longest-serving Republican U.S. Senator in history. Whether that record of feeding at the trough is worthy of emulation I leave to your discretion.

But I urge you to recognize that none of this would surprise Buddha. His teaching was described as his tongue, wide and long. There is nothing so outrageous as to be outside its all-inclusive embrace.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Dharma trumps karma

but it is not an escape —

Consequences come

Last Sunday we performed an initiation ceremony called “Jukai Tokudo” in Japanese. We had an international visitor and a couple of other candidates who were ready and willing to receive the initial precepts of Zen, declaring themselves Soto Zen Buddhists. We will do so again in November of this year, which is our Founder’s Month, honoring Matsuoka Roshi, our founding teacher.

It occurred to me that in this context, with all the consternation and pontificating over Ukraine — now segueing into the dismal fatigue syndrome of becoming yesterday’s news — we might revisit the fundamental question I raised for our Sunday dharma dialog a few weeks ago: “What the hell is wrong with Vladimir Putin?”

You may have participated in this discussion, so apologies in advance for any redundancy, but these points bear repeating. It is an inexcusable, but seemingly inevitable scenario, that we become fatigued at the repetition of atrocities, as if the victims being killed and maimed today are somehow not as worthy of our attention, the horror not as shocking, as we registered at the beginning of the aggression. As someone once said at the screaming of lobsters being boiled alive, “They are used to it.” But in light of the aspirational aspect of the Precepts, even this tragedy takes on deeper meaning.

In approaching this particular train wreck as a subject for dharma, I was careful to couch my terms, explaining that “what” is the fundamental question in Zen, rather than “why” or “how,” with “who, when and where” being pretty self-evident. “Who” the hell does Vladimir Putin think he is? would suffer from focusing on the wrong question, personalizing the issue to too great a degree. “Hell” is also carefully chosen in that, according to classic Zen philosophy, we human beings make our world into hell or heaven, and reap the karmic consequences thereof. “Wrong” is also understood to reside in the realm of “right” views and thoughts, as well as speech, action and livelihood, the social side of the Eightfold Path, with right mindfulness, effort, and meditation rounding out the inner, personal dimension of our all-too-human existence. In Zen, all opinions are not equal, and all teachings do not lead to nirvana.

I thought it might be worthwhile to consider Vladimir Putin’s behavior, and the attitudes that it seems to betray, in the light of the Buddhist Precepts, which many of us take up as guidelines or reminders, touchpoints to return to from time to time, as we witness our own actions as well as those of others. There is a hoary meme in Buddhism that government leaders — one of the Four Benefactors we appreciate in the Meal Chant — are in their position of power by virtue of merit accumulated in past lives. So the only set of criteria we can hold them to are those of Buddhist morality or ethics, or Shila. Which begs the question, does this mean that the millions of dollars spent campaigning are basically a waste of time and treasure? And as good Buddhists, aren’t we supposed to avoid discussing the faults of others?

How does the behavior of Putin, as well as President Trump and others in leadership roles, hold up in comparison to the admonitions of the Buddhist Precepts? First, we must remember that the Precepts of Zen have a history of their own. In India and China they may have been expressed and understood differently. Those we receive in modern times convey the current rendering of their meaning, sometimes translated as “morality,” but “ethical” conduct is probably more appropriate. It should also be mentioned in passing that Vladimir Putin is purportedly a Christian, so whatever precepts, lower case “p” he may be following would not necessarily resemble those of Buddhism or Zen.

The quotes regarding precepts in Zen are taken from an essay by Shohaku Okumura Roshi, one of my lineage teachers, in the Soto Zen Journal, “Dharma Eye.” This is a recommended online source of information of a scholarly nature for those of us practicing Zen in the West, its masthead shown below.

One of the first factoids that Okumura roshi points out is that there are variations in the precepts given to Zen practitioners over time, depending on factors such as lineage and the country. The scholars tell us that Master Dogen could not have received the sixteen precepts he handed down to us in our initiation and formal ceremonies today, as they were not done that way in China. Whether he modified those he received from his Tendai masters or cobbled together his best interpretation of the precepts he felt inclined to transmit as Bodhisattva principles, I leave to further scholarship. Quoting the journal:

Dogen Zenji received only the Bodhisattva Precepts

Dogen Zenji (1200-1253), the founder of Japanese Soto School, originally became a monk in the Japanese Tendai tradition in 1213. Therefore, he received only the Mahayana precepts. According to his biography, Dogen had some difficulty receiving permission to practice in a Chinese monastery. This was because he had not received the Vinaya precepts which was a requirement to be recognized as a Buddhist monk in China. However, he did not receive the Vinaya precepts. To his disciples and lay students, Dogen Zenji only gave the 16 precepts that were called Busso-shoden-bosatsu-kai (the Bodhisattva precepts that have been correctly transmitted by Buddhas and Ancestors). The nature of the Bodhisattva precepts we receive in Soto Zen tradition is quite different from that of the Vinaya precepts.

Okumura Roshi quotes one of those seemingly contradictory statements that appear so often in Zen literature, this one from the Brahma Net Sutra:

And in the introduction of the ten major precepts, the Sutra says, “At that time, when Shakyamuni Buddha sat beneath the bodhi tree and attained unsurpassable awakening, he first set forth the Bodhisattva pratimoksha.”

Okumura goes on to make the literal case about this claim:

Pratimoksha is the text of the precepts, and here, it refers to the Bonmo-kyo. This means that the Bodhisattva precepts were established as soon as the Buddha attained unsurpassable awakening and even before he began to teach. Historically, this is not true. The Buddha did not establish any precepts or regulations before people made mistakes. In the Vinaya text, the stories explaining why the different precepts were made were recorded. When we read these stories, we can see that the Buddhist Sangha was a gathering of actual human beings. People made all sorts of mistakes even though they aspired to study and practice the Dharma under the Buddha’s guidance.

So the Vinaya, the rules and regulations governing behavior within the original Order, obviously evolved over time, like any other organizational protocols. The main rule governing the harmonious community, or sangha, is, of course harmony. Most communities we belong to are anything but harmonious, and even Zen groups are known to become rancorous from time to time. Human nature raises its head.

But the bit about Buddha establishing the pratimoksha in zazen that night I think we have to take on faith. What transpired within his experience in meditation was, and is, the essential meaning of the precepts. As Master Dogen is said to have asked, what precept is not fulfilled in zazen?

If we take the precepts as primeval and natural, built-in to existence and to be discovered, not made up, we can accept that translating them into language and written form is a mere approximation of their true meaning. This is why they seem impossible at first glance. They live in the realm of being, not doing.

Ceremonially, Zen precepts include and are preceded by a Repentance Verse and taking Refuge in the Three Treasures of Buddhism:

Repentance

At a precepts ceremony in the Soto Zen tradition, first we make repentance by reciting the following verse, “All the twisted karma ever created by me, since of old, / through beginningless greed, anger and ignorance, / born of my body, speech and thought. / I now make complete repentance of it all.”

There is another repentance verse taken from Samanthabhadra-sutra that says, “The ocean of all karmic hindrances arises solely from delusive thoughts. / If you wish to make repentance, sit in an upright posture and be mindful of the true nature of reality. / All faults and evil deeds are like frost and dew. / The sun of wisdom enables them to melt away. This verse clearly shows that our precepts are based on awakening to reality and wisdom of such reality.

Okumura is now leading us gently by the hand to the realization of the concrete reality of the Precepts.

The Three Refuges

We then take refuge in the Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha is the one who awakened to reality. The Dharma is reality itself, the way things truly are. The Sangha are the people who aspire to study and living according to the teaching of the reality of all beings.

We also take refuge, or return to, our original nature, which is called Buddha, or awakened. What we awaken to is the Dharma, which is ever-present, but does not depend upon our knowing it. The Sangha members are primarily vested in awakening to this same truth, or it is not truly a Zen community.

The Threefold Pure Precepts

Next, we receive the threefold pure precepts: (1) the precept of embracing moral codes, (2) the precept of embracing good deeds, (3) the precept of embracing all living beings. These three points are the direction we walk on the Bodhisattva path.

These are often translated as: Do no harm; Do only good; and Do good for others. And yet the truth of the Precepts is that they are beyond doing in the conventional sense. If we find what we are looking for in our practice, the Precepts become our natural intention. But we make mistakes. And resolve to try harder. Eventually our behavior may become consonant with the Precepts, by virtue of practicing zazen.

The Ten Major Precepts

The ten major precepts are: (1) do not kill, (2) do not steal, (3) do not engage in improper sexual conduct, (4) do not lie, (5) do not deal in intoxicants, (6) do not criticize others, (7) do not praise self and slander others, (8) do not be stingy with the dharma or property ,(9) do not give way to anger, (10) do not disparage the Three Treasures.

If this sounds like a laundry list of do’s and don’t’s or the 10 Commandments phrased a little differently, there is a kernel of truth in that. But we take up the way of following Zen voluntarily, not under threat of punishment by a vengeful God. They are not merely literal; in that interpretation some are impossible. We come to understand what they mean through the tried and true process of trial and error.

Zen and the Precepts are One

The Bodhisattva precepts we receive in the Soto Zen tradition are also called, Zen-kai (Zen precepts). This means that our zazen and the precepts are one. In our zazen practice, we put our entire being on the ground of true reality of all beings instead of the picture of the world that is a creation of our minds. By striving to keep the precepts in our daily lives, we strive to live being guided by our zazen.

So what does all this have to do with design thinking? Design thinking starts with problem definition and proceeds to problem-solving through design-build actions. Zen starts with Buddha’s definition of the central problem of existence as sentient beings and offers a method for arriving at solutions, zazen. In design, we speak of design intent, and strive to maintain its integrity through all the trials and tribulations that any existent object, program or system is subject to, including the test of time. Each of these solutions tends to have a weak link in the chain, which is where it eventually breaks down. The design approach is to take the failure as instructive, and redesign. The Zen approach is “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

Considering the Precepts in the light of design intent, we can see that they are meant to foster harmony in the social dimension, in transactions with other individuals and groups. They shine a bright light on the futility of having “designs” on conquering another country, especially in the context of impermanence and imperfection. Whatever gains are realized are only good for whatever is left of one lifetime. Which brings us back to our starting place. Is Putin evil? Or just ignorant?

Zen holds that the only thing that finally accompanies you to the grave, and affects life after death, is the deeds committed in this life. Whatever crusade you mount to defend your actions may be based on a category error. To die in the service of a cause greater than yourself may indeed be considered a noble deed. To kill others in the service of a cause you consider greater than or glorifying to yourself, while cowering behind your local cronies, is a crime, in karmic as well as human terms.

Putin may be surprised to discover that his reward in heaven is not what he anticipates. He may be surprised to find that that kind of heaven lasts about fifteen minutes, as an old Master once said. He may be disappointed to find that life moves on without him, as he conceives himself. And that any actual afterlife, including his potential rebirth, is not one of his choosing. He may be surprised that karma is not a respecter of persons, however powerful they may regard themselves. And that the Soviet Union, as well as Mother Russia, do not really exist, except in the fevered imagination of a limited mind.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Who is this Zen for?

Yes, you can practice alone —

sangha will survive.

No, this is not the beginning of a bad joke about a priest and a householder entering a bar. Though that certainly has happened a lot in history. No, this is about the anomalies and apparent contradictions that arise in the propagation of Zen in a hyper-secular society such as the good old USA, where a lay Zen priest, the very idea, lands with a thud, like the proverbial lead balloon. Another can of worms to open.

This issue has raised its head with furrowed brow again and again in the history of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center (ASZC) and its umbrella organization, the Silent Thunder Order (STO), and is sure to keep coming back like a bad penny, to coin another cliché, no pun intended. My role as guiding teacher and Zen priest has been the occasion, or the excuse, for mass defections of disgruntled senior students taking entire boards of directors with them, once in 2000 and again in 2010. So we are overdue for a repeat performance. And this is not an unknown issue at other Zen centers, if only in America.

Some feel that nowadays there is no more reason to have to have a physical Zen center, what with the advent of online meetings via Skype or Zoom, or whatever the yet-to-be-named inevitable successor applications arise as antithesis in the internet realm. Why pay for upkeep and maintenance of brick and mortar, not to mention supporting a priest? The entire world of retail, along with much of office space, is going virtual, after all. I must admit to a bias here, which you may interpret as selfish on my part, in that I have some skin in the game. A significant portion of my income — thankfully not a majority — is in the form of what is called, in IRS lexicon, a “minister’s household expense,” provided by donors to ASZC. I began receiving compensation for the first time in 2007, after formal transmission as a priest.

Let me address the personal dimension for a moment, as this is one of many examples of the friction that arises between the social and personal realms that I have modeled as nesting spheres. The choice of the word “nesting” lends a comfortable coloration to the association, like little birdies nesting in the tree, under the care of mommy and daddy birds, who bring them juicy worms. This analogy is not as off-base, or as quaint, as it may sound. Sangha, the Zen community, is our “dharma family” after all.

One reason that this issue comes bubbling up again to the surface of the pond that is the modern sangha, is partially that boards of directors are as impermanent as anything else. Corporate memory is ephemeral. Terms expire in a few years, BOD officers playing musical chairs in a game that most are neither trained to handle with equanimity, nor have the time and patience to become educated in governance of a 501c3.

All boards are widely acknowledged to be somewhat dysfunctional, especially for not-for-profit corporations. Member donors, who are usually paid nothing for their services, volunteer to help with administration of the very program that attracted them, i.e. Zen practice and meditation. But they often find that this duty, however well-intentioned on their part, is not what they came to Zen for. In fact, the sausage-making, as it is popularly caricatured, is precisely what they came to escape in daily life, or at least learn how to cope with on a more balanced basis. Thus, time on the board of directors, or its more demanding committee functions, is the number one burnout venue for earnest and erstwhile Zen practitioners. It is the third rail of Zen. At least in my experience of a half century.

One adverse element is meetings in and of themselves. The old Chinese adage: “Meetings are the bane of progress,” rings true. The accompanying stress is a recurrent surprise for participants. They cannot resolve the seeming contradiction that Zen should require such a level of humdrum. Conflicts arise as to apparently competing needs. Primarily the need to sustain a supportive communal practice, while minimizing turning Zen into just one more tiresome chore that adds to our personal stress rather than reducing it. This I call the “substitution effect,” one of many. Those doing yeomen service on the board, or in maintaining the facility, find that they are not meditating so much anymore, or as well as they used to. They begin to interpret their practice in terms of time they spend on intractable issues or trivial BOD matters, rather than on the cushion.

A quote from Master Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai [Self-fulfilling Samadhi] may surprise with its relevance to what seems a modern malady:

Because earth, grass, trees, walls, tiles and pebbles all engage in buddha activity,
those who receive the benefit of wind and water caused by them
are inconceivably helped by the buddha’s guidance, splendid and unthinkable,
and awaken intimately to themselves.

This is the true point of the practice, more likely to occur in the zendo than the BOD room.

A bit later:

Grass trees and lands,
which are embraced by this teaching, together radiate a great
light, and endlessly expound the inconceivable, profound dharma.

Here is the fruit of the practice, found in the natural sphere, leapfrogging the social trappings. But Dogen is reminding us that all aspects of life, including even walls and tiles, are expounding the dharma impeccably at all times, for those who have the eyes to hear and the ears to see.

Further:

Grass trees and walls
bring forth the teaching for all beings,
common people as well as sages,
and they in accord extend this dharma
for the sake of grass trees and walls.

Not only is nature constantly preaching full-throated dharma, but the very walls of zendos and buildings that Zen teachers and communities raise, providing places dedicated to Zen practice, constitute direct manifestations of the “realm of self-awakening and awakening others,” another Dogen construction.

Achok Rinpoche, one of HH the Dalai Lama’s inner circle, visited ASZC as a guest speaker in 2004, at the invitation of one of my senior students, who is a major supporter of Dharamshala, their home in exile in India. This was shortly after we had moved into the whole building, tearing down the concrete block wall that divided what is now our commodious meditation hall, and renovated the zendo to reflect a Japanese-like simplicity of interior design. The venerable monk paused briefly after mentioning that “Dana is providing the place conducive to meditation…” As his twinkling eyes wandered over the prevailing white walls and natural wood trim of the zendo, he complimented us for our very nice environment. But, he said, in Tibet, everything is white “…so we like a little more color!” It got a big laugh, but also brought home the same message that Master Dogen is trying to convey.

We do not own the building and grounds ASZC occupies. When the opportunity to purchase arose, we were recovering from the second defection of the BOD. So the current officers did not have the bandwidth to take on the responsibility. Because we do not own the property, we frequently hear complaints about the landlord. The 100-year-old bungalows that we call our Zen home, joined by the concrete block cube we call our zendo, would probably qualify as a tear-down, in real estate terms. It would definitely not be a wise investment to put much capital into the existing facility. Another Chinese saying applies: “When the opportunity is there, the capital is missing. When the capital is there, the opportunity is missing. When both capital and opportunity are there, then I am missing. What a world!”

This blame game harks back to similar complaints in an ancient story. A monk groused to the head master that the rain was dripping in on him in zazen. The master’s response? “Move down.” Why waste a great deal of time and effort in propping up a building, whose destiny is to eventually fall down? Even Eiheiji is ultimately impermanent. Rather than focus on your Zen practice, and perhaps lose your opportunity to wake up in this lifetime. Those who complain about the rent, unsatisfactory upkeep on the part of the landlord, are missing the point, in this sense. They are also misinformed.

Our landlady has generously cut the rent in half repeatedly during hard times over the twenty-plus years that we have practiced in this location. She replaced the peaked gable roofs of the two bungalows, and has patched and finally re-engineered the flat roof of the zendo, after the heavy rains of last year. (Incidentally, all flat roofs tend to leak. Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous flat-roofed buildings all leak. You can’t fool Mother Nature for long. Water will find a way.) Our landlady’s support of our little enterprise amounts to tens of thousands of dollars in investments and concessions. She and her husband, who had me at the revelation that he is a jazz guitarist, are two of our biggest supporters, dollar for dollar. Those who would complain should remember that had we purchased the place, those big projects, with their big numbers, would have fallen in our laps, and decimated ASZC’s budget, instead of theirs. Of course, we have been good tenants as well. We have probably purchased the place a few times over.

So at the risk of compulsively repeating myself, let me remind all that the outer pomp and circumstance of Zen — the robes, the walls of the zendos, et cetera — are not for us. They are for them. We are losing sight of the societal mission of Zen. As Master Dogen speculated on returning from China, bringing Ch’an to Japan may amount to a true mission. Them includes Dogen, Bodhidharma, and everyone in between, back to the founder Shakyamuni. We are indebted to them. They opened the gate wide. It is not for us to close it. Wearing ridiculous robes pays due obeisance to the lineage.

“Them” also includes a local minister of a neighborhood church with a vital congregation, a long-time member and zazen practitioner who invited me to speak and initiate a program of meditation at the church. When I let him know that we are gingerly moving back toward in-person or hybrid practice program, he texted: “Sensei — thanks for the note about the zendo being open again. That’s wonderful news!” and: “Would you like to meet for coffee sometime after this week?” So that is the reason we have a Zen center, in a nutshell. Our dharma-opening verse chanted before a talk says it a bit differently:

The unsurpassed, profound and wond’rous Dharma
Is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas;
Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it —
May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth

If we can manage to take off our blinders so that we can actually see and hear the true dharma, another Dogenism, we should not have much trouble accepting and maintaining it. First things first. We might usefully recall the Three Minds, Sanshin in Japanese: Magnanimous, Nurturing and Joyous. Sanshinji is the name of Okumura Roshi’s temple, which by the way is the humble basement of his home. It is magnanimous to open your doors to others, nurturing to offer them a place to practice, and joyous to share the dharma. Of course, that last can be done rather efficiently online. But if you imagine that getting shed of the physical Zen center would be a move in the right direction, please imagine again. Setting aside that ASZC is also the training center for the affiliates of STO, for which we are caretakers. That vagabond world of homeless Zen is where we came from. Indulge a look in the rear-view mirror.

Moving to Atlanta in 1970, I took a hiatus from public practice to reconstitute my personal and professional life. Four years later, I began offering meditation at the largest Unitarian church in town. Every week, I would haul large trash bags full of sitting cushions — the familiar Japanese zafu — into the building, and carry them home after. To make room for sitting, I would have to clear the clutter and shove the donated furniture out of the way to clear the walls, and put it all back before leaving. Later others helped. This went on for years.

When we moved to a suburban home, the commute became unworkable. I made the mistake of offering zazen in our little bungalow. Not a happy balance of personal and social spheres, having the public showing up twice a week in your living room. In the intervening years before ASZC landed in Little Five Points, we sat in storefronts, loft studio space, and for a while, once again in the living room of our first purchased home, where we still live. All this wreaked a certain amount of havoc on normal life.

Those who think, as some have suggested, that we can just rent a hall when and if we need it, and otherwise all sit at home, have not been there and done that. They were not around to witness the downsides of the itinerant, floating zendo. They are unaware of the hundreds who came before and made it possible to just walk in the door and join us on that fateful day they found their way to the center.

It is not just for us that we practice. It is also for others. Arousing Bodhi Mind is inseparable from the Bodhisattva vow. Without a center, newcomers have no place to come to for face-to-face training. Remember your first time.

Without walls, you can forget about hosting retreats, let alone practice periods of thirty or ninety days, formal practice for credentialing the next generation of practice leaders and priests. But I know where these folks are coming from, and fundamentally agree. I will continue practicing no matter what. I do not need the robes. I do not personally need the Zen center to practice Zen. But others do.

To anyone finding themselves sliding down this particular slippery slope, why not just stay home? Stay away from the Zen center for another year or so, post-covid, and maybe they will discover why we bother. If engaging the administrative side — which I feel is the highest form of service to the sangha — is too stressful, simply stay off the board. Don’t join a committee. Focus on zazen.

Meanwhile, my undying gratitude for those who find it possible to make the commitment. To those who give unstintingly of their time and treasure to the cause of propagating genuine Zen meditation and buddha-dharma: “You are the real one” as Matsuoka Roshi would often say. Please do all you can to encourage yourself and others in Zen practice. It is the most a bodhisattva can do.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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The Four Spheres are real —

as real as anything else —

but temporary

We left off with the promise that we would continue examining the can of worms called “anxiety.” To a fish or a bird, as Master Dogen analogizes, this would be a more attractive proposition. Growing up outside a small town in southern Illinois, we lived near the country club overlooking an artificial lake, where we and others would go fishing. I sold earthworms for bait on the road to the lake in front of our farmhouse. Amongst other things, I learned to lay sheets of cloth or paper on the ground so that the worms would voluntarily crawl to the surface. That way I didn’t have to dig them up. I don’t know if they experienced anxiety or not, but they would do their utmost to wriggle out of my grasp. One of Buddha’s early experiences of suffering in the world was said to be his observation of earthworms that had been plowed up, writhing in agony.

Anxiety is frequently encountered in meditation, including that around concerns as to whether we are doing zazen correctly, along with other obsessions of the worry-wart monkey mind. But also in daily life, especially when the unexpected happens, such as an emergent natural disaster like the current pandemic, or a man-made calamity like the war in Ukraine. When more than one such cataclysms are occurring simultaneously, the synergistic effect elevates the level of anxiety to panic proportions. You can’t spell “pandemic” without “panic.” To make matters worse, we often don’t know whether we should panic or not, depending on the proximity of the threat, and the quality of the information we have about it. Not to mention those lurking on the horizon that we are completely unaware of at present. One more thing to worry about. What you don’t know not only can hurt you — it can kill you.

In such cases, it is difficult to determine to what degree our “eye of practice” — Dogen’s phrase — can recognize or anticipate the clear and present danger with any accuracy. In the case of climate change, a scientific view from the perspective of extensive training and experience informs an opinion bearing more weight than those based on relative ignorance of atmospheric dynamics or confirmation bias. All too often in the polarized world, the latter wins out. If you have a bias, you want to confirm it.

The quote from Dogen’s Genjokoan [Actualization of the Fundamental Point] generalizes this reality:

Though there are many features in the dusty world
and the world beyond conditions
you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach

Needless to say, your eye of practice is your only bulwark against your own prejudices and opinions. Much of what our eye of practice can reach depends upon repetition, not only in Zen but in any field. And I think we can assume that no two person’s would be identical, though when “coming to accord” with your Zen teacher, one would presume they are in some wise congruent, at least as regards the degree to which we can grasp the implications of buddha-dharma. Certainly our eye of perception is not as dependable as our eye of practice, as Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai [Self-fulfilling Samadhi]:

All this however does not appear within perception because it is unconstructedness in stillness; it is immediate realization.

When calamity occurs, however, very few of us, other than first-responders, have enough significant repeat experience to train us as to how we should respond to the situation at hand. In Zen, contemporary causes and conditions may be regarded as variations on a theme. That in some sense, all people of all times have confronted similar threats to their comfort, health and life, and that Zen has always provided a resort, if not a sanctuary, in dealing with them. In this sense, nothing is new under the sun.

But on the other hand, humankind may have reached a tipping point that amounts to an existential threat to the species. In that sense, we may say that this situation is unprecedented, at least in recorded history. One thing is sure: the pandemic and other daily and looming disasters have illuminated some of the underlying premises of Zen, and its central method of meditation. Examining these things thoroughly in practice, another Dogen construction, makes it clear that some of the cultural maxims, memes and morsels of received wisdom are not to be believed. Let’s review a few:

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. No, not really. Not necessarily, anyway. In “Trial of the Will,” an article in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens, while dying of cancer, criticized this trope:

“Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America's homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive…

Aging and sickness actually make us weaker. We may effect a recovery, but the long-term diagnosis trends downward, in terms of vim and vigor. There are many prognoses for practicing healthier lifestyles that lead to longevity, including Zen meditation and its moderation in all things including diet, but nothing reverses the inevitable decline. But this is natural, according to Buddhism. Get used to it.

We are not in control of everything — Nature is. If you disagree, next time nature calls, tell her to take a hike. You are busy meditating just now. See how far you get with that. We do not control our breathing even though we may use that construction in the instructions for meditation, particularly of the yogic variety. Pranayama, as I understood it when first practicing yoga before I was exposed to Zen meditation, is purported to be a kind of breath control. Advanced yogis can ostensibly affect their body temperature, thaw out frozen sheets, et cetera. But if someone knocks you out with a baseball bat, your body will keep breathing on its own, thank you very much. Depending on how hard they hit you. The point is that the body is doing the breathing, and eventually will do the dying. There is not a whole lot that we can do to prevent that in the long run, though we postpone the inevitable as long as we can.

Our political leadership is woefully inadequate to the problem. I don’t know that anyone would seriously propose a theory contradicting this belaboring of the rather obvious. R. Buckminster Fuller, one of my mentors in the realm of design thinking, said something to the effect that we look to politicians for answers to our everyday problems. But if they really had any answers, they wouldn’t be politicians. They would be out doing something to actualize the solutions they had come up with. Politicians are the poster boys for maintaining status quo. Particularly their place at the public trough.

Emphasizing the economy over public health is short-sighted. Another goes-without-saying. But it depends on whose economy is getting gored. Yes, yes, yes, I could do the right thing that engenders the greatest good for the greatest number, but if it affects my pocketbook negatively it is difficult to convince me of its value. The tragedy of the commons writ large. Another cow will improve my lot, even though it inevitably degrades the lot we all share in common, the cow pasture.

Seeking fame and fortune is a waste of precious time. I once had a Zen student accuse me of seeking fame and fortune as my motive for propagating Zen. I took it as doubly insulting because I am obviously so incompetent at doing so. If I were in it for the money, I wouldn’t be in it. There are plenty of ways to make an honest buck. There is no money in Zen. If it were for fame, good luck with that. You are going up against a lot more interesting people who have a lot more entertaining subjects to present than Zen. Zazen is boredom on steroids.

We do not need to commute to work. We never did, actually. As long as you are willing to temper your lifestyle to meet your demands on a local level. It was only with the inception of the industrial revolution, with its assembly line production efficiencies, that everyone had to show up at the same place to get the job done. Nowadays that assembly line has been scattered all over the globe, resulting in the supply chain glitches that have further aggravated aspirations of the masters of the overall economy to achieve ever greater growth. It seems there is a natural limitation to growth on the corporate scale, just as there is on the personal level, though that does not keep the captains of industry from trying, however much the former impinges upon the health and vitality of the latter. King cotton, king coal, king oil, king nuke, they must grow, like a cancer, in order to deliver ever-greater profits to their owners. Their hosts may not be so lucky.

It may be that the pandemic will inspire a return to the village model, where everyone can work at home or close by, relying on the interconnectivity of world-around media in the information age. But someone still needs to deliver the goods. Enter Amazon. Maybe eventually everything can be delivered to your door.

If what you have to offer is good enough — a better mousetrap — they will beat a path to your door. Not no more. To compete with the big boys for the big bucks you have to already have the big bucks. Check out the cost of a Super Bowl commercial. Thirty seconds in 2021 was over half a billion dollars.

We can have clear skies, fresh air and clean water. For a brief period everyone was sheltering at home. The expressways and surface streets in the city were relatively quiet. You could hear the birds over the muffled sounds of traffic. There was no rush hour. The air was taking a breather. Everything other than the virus itself took a break. Then, of course, everyone got bored and started pushing to return to “normal.” The politicos got out in front of that parade, as usual. Who wants that kind of “normal”?

To close out this rather long segment, let’s return momentarily to the model of the Four Spheres of Influence (see diagram). It should be mentioned in passing that Zen finds no conflict with the findings of science — a point that my teacher, Matsuoka Roshi, would often make — and one that is endorsed by HH the Dalai Lama. But with the pressures of population growth and disruptions in the geological and geopolitical realms, that does not mean that everything is hunky-dory, whatever that means.

It is clear in the examples cited above that in the face of the current upheavals, the Universal intrudes upon the Natural, Social & Personal realms, sometimes with a vengeance. There is a direct connection between not only the atmosphere, but the sun itself, with the annual orgy of forest fires, for one example. Just as dependably, the Natural takes precedence over Social and Personal spheres, in terms of influence. Read Covid. The Social likewise impacts the Personal, negatively as well as positively. And the Personal is where we ultimately live, but only in the context of the Universal, with intervening Natural and Social spheres. It is no wonder that we feel caught in a trap, along with Master Elvis. And we really cannot go on together, with suspicious minds. Like a vice, when the heat is on, the surrounding spheres become more and more claustrophobic. Where you gonna run, oh sinner man, all on that day?

In Zen, we turn to the Three Treasures for refuge. In terms of where they live within the four Spheres, Buddha is Personal; Dharma is Universal; and Sangha is Social. They are all Natural, as is meditation, at least Zen’s approach to it. In zazen we find and follow the natural posture, the natural breath, and eventually find ourselves residing in the natural state of mind, awareness or attention.

In conclusion, let me suggest that pandemics remind us of basic buddha-dharma: that Life is fragile, and temporary at best. That the tropes that have come out of the collective experience are as unreliable as the ones cited above: we are emphatically not all in this together — witness the uneven distribution of vaccine. On the downside, we are all in this together — unless we all get immune to the virus, it will be the gift that just keeps on giving. Finally, we will not all get through this together, no matter how much the feel-good commentators and politicians vying for your support in dollars, ratings or votes argue to the contrary. Witness the half-billion cases and over six million deaths worldwide. Perhaps Mother Gaia just concluded that there are too many humans demanding too big a piece of the pie, and it’s time to give some of the other species a fighting chance.

Let’s leave it here, or there, for now. It is neither here nor there, as grandpa used to say. But it is now. Please stay tuned for more cans of worms to be opened. Here’s your daily koan: How did those worms get into that can, if it was closed?

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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I may not be done —

my race may be almost run —

not yet... not yet... not...

In the discussion devoted to Bodhidharma’s four observations in zazen, we mentioned anxiety and serenity as one of the polar binaries encountered in meditation in the category of emotional mood swings, as the great sage is said to have taught. Indeed, the mind seems to function as a pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other in all manner of ways. But we encounter anxiety in daily life as well, one of the motivating factors driving us to the cushion in the first place, classified in Buddhist thinking as unconscious Mental Formations underlying conscious decisions, one of the Five Skandhas.

Anxiety is a nearly inevitable emotion, or rather a complex mix of emotions and concepts, that everyone confronts sooner or later in life. Most of us, fortunately, do not have to face that level of life-threatening anxiety engendered by natural and man-made disasters, but which are becoming all-to-frequent in today’s geological and geopolitical dynamic. Naturally, this exacerbates our normal stress level. But according to Buddha, stress begins with the very reception of sense data into the nervous system. So stress may be considered natural and necessary, while distress is of our own making, or that of others.

Another source of anxiety and distress, and a benchmark for monitoring progress, is called the “degree of completion,” an extreme example illustrated by the photograph. This townhome development in my neighborhood caught my attention. Driving by once or twice a week, as I watched it rise from the teardown of single-family dwellings occupying those lots — a familiar sign of increasing density in the city, another source of stress — I found myself wondering — as the construction crews completed the contiguous units, then the painters, landscapers, et cetera — why this one lone unit on the end was left in its plywood-clad stage?

The next steps of getting it “closed-in and dry,” as an architect friend encapsulates the essential function of shelter — finishing the exterior, then the interior, et cetera — just never happened. The naked facade still sits there a year later, with sad, gaping window and door openings, the wood turning black from weathering, looking like an orphan stepchild, the other units fully occupied for some time. I wonder what the people who live there think. What does that weird “condo-in-progress” attached to the end of the building do for their property values? I am tempted to try to find out what went awry, but it would spoil the mystery.

Like learning to identify birds by their call. What we call them has nothing to do with what they really are. I would rather not know, really.

Another design anomaly: the façade of the building facing the street has all the attributes of an entrance — front doors, stoops and stairs, little fenced-in front yard, and all — but the residents obviously enter and exit from the back. The only thing accessible from the front footprint is the sidewalk, bordering what is a high-speed through-street, not exactly pedestrian-friendly.

Completion of current or final phases of projects is usually linked to dates certain, deadlines upon which a host of related tasks may depend, and which may determine the success or failure of the endeavor. Coming in over budget and behind schedule is assiduously avoided, except for government work, where the clients (you & I) are diffuse enough that no one can be held accountable to dollar discipline.

In design-build projects, stress and anxiety stem from a variety of sources, including the scope of the project, which often ranges from ambitious to impossible. The phenomenon of “scope creep” only adds to the blood pressure. And then there is contact anxiety, picked up from clients, bosses, and co-workers. Like any of the negative classes of emotions, flop sweat can spread like a virus when the pressure is on. Opening night jitters and stage-fright butterflies when speaking in public are classic examples.

A subtle syndrome that you may have experienced but not recognized as such is called “completion anxiety,” that peculiar resistance often encountered toward the end of the process, in which the last touches seem to take an agonizingly long time. Checking and rechecking details before presentation or launch of the project can grow to obsessive-compulsive levels, when none of them are deal-breakers.

One psychological aspect of the syndrome is that as long as the project, product or program is not complete, it can remain perfect in our minds. Once it is finished, it is what it is, warts and all. Of course, projects are never really complete. Time and change will bring about conditions that require a new phase of revision to the design.

Software is the poster boy for this kind of agile adaptation process. The rate of change in what has been called “cultural evolution” is only increasing. If you do not like the current applications you have on your smartphone, just wait ‘til next year’s issue. I was naïve enough to think that the Steve Jobses of the world had not thought of including a simple but ubiquitously convenient flashlight, when I saw a handyman In my dark basement use his that way. Silly me. A quick check of my iPhone revealed and there it was, the “flashlight” option. The ominous but certain sense that the world is passing you by becomes yet another source of existential anxiety.

A wonderful line from Master Sengcan’s Hsinhsinming — which I like to translate as Trust in Mind or The Trusting Mind — addresses a particular brand of anxiety toward the end, after a rather rapturous series of descriptions and implications of Zen insight:

Waste no time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this
One thing all things move among and intermingle without distinction
Living in this realization we are without anxiety about non-perfection

Suggesting that there is nothing more important in life than Zen realization, which all of Buddhism’s teachings point to, but which cannot be gotten from words and concepts. But have no doubt, and don’t bother to argue the point. It is just a waste of time. In fact, Zen has always taken the position that if you even begin to argue with others, you have already lost.

The middle line reprises the first line about the Way being easy for those who have no preferences. In reality, of course, this is a nearly impossible ask. But at the end of the day, as we say, most of the preferences we indulge turn out to be relatively trivial. But when it comes to taking a backward step and gaining an overview of existence itself, it becomes necessary to make some hard choices. If we harbor a preference for living over dying, and do everything we can to avoid the latter, the effort finally ends in failure, so the very aspiration is one of futility. Better to face the facts and do all we can, to not only age, but also to encounter illness, and to die, when our time comes as we also like to say, gracefully.

Aging, sickness and death are three cardinal marks of Buddhism’s First Noble Truth as applied to sentient beings. Another trio of attributes of existence as dukkha, suffering or change, includes imperfection. At least insofar as people are concerned. It’s doubtful that other denizens of the animal kingdom contemplate their lot as basically unsatisfactory. Imperfection joins impermanence and insubstantiality, which in human perspective also qualify as subsets of imperfection. We long for perfection, permanence and substantiality. Too bad. Non-perfection is where it’s at, my friend.

Yearning for perfection, and the frustration we feel in falling short, is a fault that we often attribute to others, usually to no avail. But also to our own behavior, and to outcomes of that behavior. We are our own worst critics. Particularly in regards to practicing a process, implementing or completing a project. If we regard our Zen and zazen practice as such a project, we might see the light as regards sources of anxiety that may be getting in the way. But we want to avoid setting up unrealistic expectations.

In the formal interview process (J. dokusan) we offer in Zen, practitioners often express anxiety about doing meditation right or wrong, as well as failing to live a compassionate life, in their attitudes and actions toward others. While we make the point that you cannot really do zazen wrong, you can certainly develop wrong or unhelpful attitudes and opinions about it, as well as towards Zen in general. Generally speaking, if you do not give up, and sit still enough for long enough, any such confusion will probably sort itself out. But as in all walks of life, it might be helpful to get some coaching from someone who has been there and done that — in other words, made all the mistakes. Zen masters are the go-to guys for what not to do.

Speaking of Zen masters: Eihei Dogen. He stands out as one pivotal person for the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan, as does Bodhidharma for China, and Buddha for India. Matsuoka Roshi stands as one of the earliest pioneers of Zen in America.

When Dogen returned from China in his mid-twenties, he is said to have remarked that he felt his life’s work had been completed, “dropping off body and mind” under the tutelage of Master Rujing in China. But he expressed a sense of urgency that the weight of the world was on his shoulders, and that his return to Japan may comprise a “true mission.” He largely succeeded, but that mission is still incomplete as of this day and time, when we are attempting to transmit the genuine practice of Soto Zen and its zazen to America. Meditation is becoming mainstream, but zazen is still little known or widely practiced. As some wag said, the first hundred years are the hardest.

Shohaku Okumura Roshi is a central figure in contemporary Soto Zen in America, and fortunately for myself and my students, one of the three established teachers who have kindly recognized my efforts. In some of his translations and commentaries, which we highly recommend to all, Master Shohaku has emphasized what he terms the “incompleteness” of our consciousness. He illustrated this with a simple example, pointing out during a talk at our center that he could see all of us in the audience, but not the altar behind him. He knows it is there, and can turn around to see it, but then he would not see us. This incomplete aspect of consciousness is built into our physiological makeup. So even completing our life’s work in Zen, the fruition of our practice, cannot overcome that kind of incompleteness. As Master Dogen says in Genjokoan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point]:

Though there are many features in the dusty world
and the world beyond conditions
you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach

The “eye of practice” sounds like something that might improve over time and with repetition, like any other form of practice. But we should not fall into the trap of thinking that we can measure progress stage-by-stage, as we can in most projects. How would you determine the degree of completion of your Zen practice? Are you 75–85% finished, even in your zazen? Are you feeling any anxiety about it?

We will continue in the next segment examining this particular can of worms we have opened up.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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It’s all personal —

but entangled seamlessly

with universal

This is the last of a quartet of essays on semantic modeling, an approach that emphasizes simultaneity of components in a system and how they interact with each other, a more geometric than algebraic framework for portraying causes and effects. This preference for simultaneous interface over linear causality is said to be characteristic of the Eastern mind in comparison with Western thinking, and is illustrated by Buddha’s Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Origination (not illustrated here), his own model of “how things get to be the way they are,” with which you are by now probably familiar.

Continuing with our exploration of intentionally applying analysis to subjects we usually approach intuitively, Zen and Zen meditation in particular, here is a blank version of the tetrad for you to print out and play with, penciling in various aspects of your practice and/or daily life you may want to get a handle on. You may treat the four components and their connections as representing critical relationships, between which you feel a need to strike a better balance. Such as your job, your family, your household, and a fourth area of endeavor such as a hobby or charity with which you are engaged. In examining the six connectors between the four components, you may discover a disturbing disconnect that is important to re-establish, or you may determine that one of the four principal areas is way too demanding of your time and resources, and you may want to begin emphasizing the others, in order to achieve a more harmonious balance between all four. Balance is characteristic of Zen’s middle way.

There may also be cases where you can think of three components but not a complementary fourth. This may require taking a backward step, one of Master Dogen’s coinages, to see the bigger picture. For example, the three marks of suffering, or dukkha, are often cited as “aging, sickness and death.” If you want to analyze their relationship with the tetrad diagram, you might want to fill in the fourth with “birth,” without which the other three would be meaningless. The exercise might reveal the goes-without-saying truism that birth is the leading cause of death, for example. If you can isolate only three components in a system you would like to look at, you are probably overlooking something. You can always include yourself as the fourth component, for instance in considering the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. What is your practice relationship to each of them? Them to each other?

We introduced the next graphic in earlier segments, also based on four components but expressed as nesting spheres. I term this one the Four Spheres of Influence, including the personal, the social, the natural, and the universal spheres, from inside to outside. This model represents our surrounding context in layers, from the closest and most intimate on the personal level to the most remote and impersonal on the universal level, with the interim social and natural worlds in between. But note that the degrees of influence are asymmetrical. Those incoming from the outside have an effect on our personal sphere that is massively disproportionate to the effect that we can have on the outer spheres. Can anyone say “covid”? Or “climate change”?

Of course, the continuing, seemingly intractable international armed conflicts and wars around the globe illustrate that we are in a perilous period in human history, in which an ever-smaller group of powerful people can have a devastatingly destructive impact on an ever-larger portion of the population. Witness Ukraine. The prospect of unleashing chemical or biological weapons looms, not to mention the dreaded arsenal of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Unlike Iraq, Russia really does have them.

But these four spheres can also be contrasted and compared by modeling them as a tetrad instead. In the next illustration we can structure the order as our personal sphere at #1, naturally; social comes second, natural third, fourth and finally the universal. Subsumed within the personal sphere are included the binaries of nature versus nurture, including DNA as a fundamental dimension of the former. Nurture would include the influences of parents and peers as well as academic and professional mentors. Personal includes such other aspects as our general health, age, and medical conditions, as well as diet and exercise regimens, and demographics such as time-of-life phases, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood, parenthood, empty nester, retirement, and the “golden years.”

Zen praxis as an overview combines the personal dimension of individual practice of zazen with the social dimension of group practice, in harmonious balance. The key term is harmonious, which is not always true of all the many social groups with which we associate. On the social level, relationships to family and friends go both ways, embracing not only their nurturing influence on us, but also our influence upon them, and mutual collaboration with colleagues. We can help foster harmony, or not.

A further extension into the larger community and culture, or social milieu, illuminates the various roles that we play in that context. Which of course changes with personal factors such as time-of-life, career choices, and the maturation of family ties. In Zen, we are chary of the clinging kind of self-identification that we tend to associate with those roles, as they are all temporary, for one thing, and our investment in the role tends to distort or inflate our sense of self. Where the social world becomes problematical is when our roles no longer match our actual function and place in the social system, when we find ourselves living as if circumstances have not changed, when in fact they have, out of our control. Technical difficulties in adjusting to reality.

The corporate entities in the social circle have intruded with ever-more influence in many of our personal lives, including the institutions of elementary, middle and higher learning where we get our education, join fraternities or sororities, which can have an overweening impact on professional careers, working with or against other corporations in business and political enterprise. Owing partly to world-around expansion of commerce and communications, these corporations represent an intertwined network of cities, states, nations and international groups of global citizens. And no, corporations are not persons.

The fourth component I place in the social sphere is that very technological evolution, which has gone global in its impact and influence. I think we have barely begun to scratch that particular surface, and that even the most farsighted amongst us cannot begin to predict where it will lead. Or whether it will be nipped in the bud by the unintended consequences — read climate change — that it has engendered. Everything seems to fulfil the old prophecy of carrying the seed of its own destruction. This would be one variation on the theme of emptiness, that while all things are definitely real they are also definitely not permanent. Poking the bear of Mother Nature out of her hibernation is never wise.

Moving to the natural world, I begin with the three elements of the earth with which we live in symbiosis, and which we have polluted, perhaps to an intractable degree: air, water and land; the atmosphere, rivers lakes and oceans, and the continents with their fragile layer of arable soil and fire-prone forest cover. The intricate nature of these components and their interrelationship to earth’s orbit around the sun is revealed in the whack-a-mole interplay of seasonal weather and climate dynamics, with increasingly unmanageable consequences of massive fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. Day and night are another obvious consequence of the interconnectedness of the planet and the solar system that we take for granted, but which harbor a secret of Zen, as touched on in Master Tozan’s Hokyo Zammai, Precious Mirror Samadhi:

In darkest night it is perfectly clear
in the light of dawn it is hidden

What the “it” is in this declaration I leave to you. It points at the deeper meaning of consciousness, with its internal illumination, no matter the external circumstances. But this insight, however profound, does not amount to an escape hatch from the pressing exigencies of the moment. We are all earthbound.

When looking at the earth itself, especially from space, as we have all seen, the first generation of human beings in history to be so privileged, we enter into the universal. Actually, of course, we have never left the universal. Its powerful influence has been impacting the presence of human life on the planet far before human beings appeared. One only has to look at the moon to see the literal impact of incoming from the universe in the craters formed by that impact. But the earth itself is constantly undergoing change of a universal order, in the form of plate tectonics and volcanic activity, to name a few. The connection to the moon is now being contemplated as a stepping-stone into the cosmos, the possibility of populating other planets, long a dream of science fiction visionaries. Unfortunately, if it actually comes to fruition, we may extend the disposable economy to include whole planets. There is already talk of sending trash into orbit, while it is already a major problem in rivers and oceans.

As we enter into that final frontier, after the moon comes old Sol and the solar system. Then onward and outward to the galaxy, the local cluster, and beyond. Again, how far we can go in this venture is limited by the physics and biology of reality. The point of diminishing returns on a cosmic scale is likely to be in our own backyard, relatively speaking. Especially considering the proposed expansion of the universe. Not only is the rainbow receding, it is doing so at an accelerating rate, if we are to believe the Hubbles of the world. Better to turn our attention to the immediate issues of survival on the third rock from this particular sun, than be distracted by the great cosmic what-if. But embracing the larger context and its jaw-dropping gobsmacking scale may help to encourage this kind of modesty. There is no real separation of the universal, natural, social and personal spheres. But where we can begin to take effective action is stunningly clear. Everything begins at home. And there is no time to waste.

In the next segment we will move on, setting system analysis and modeling aside, and take up other principles of Design thinking and their connection, however tenuous, to our practice of Zen and zazen.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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He was the great sage

who said no need for zazen —

if you grasp the truth

At the beginning of the last section on analysis and systems modeling, I suggested it may be worthwhile to delve a bit more deeply into applying the tetrad to the scope of activities in daily life as well as directly to Zen practice, particularly zazen. And that we would continue along these lines with yet another variation on the tetrad theme, looking at things from a four-pointed perspective. It turns out that there are many tropes and memes in Buddhism that consist of four parts, starting with the Four Noble Truths. Another is attributed to the 28th Patriarch in India, first in China, the formidable Bodhidharma. He is said to have suggested four areas of observation that are characteristic of meditation, at that time of course not referred to as Zen, or Ch’an, as it later was. The four main areas he defined are observing the breath, the physical sensations, the emotional mood swings, and the mental conceptions that we come up with in and about meditation.

The semantic model illustration includes my first draft attempt to fill out the four subsets within each of these four main objects of observation. You may want to substitute other aspects as you see fit. Under breath, I have listed very simple dimensions, such as inhaling and exhaling, counting and following the breath, which are characteristic of our typical instructions for breathing while in zazen.

The most important may be the last listed, that is that we follow the breath, rather than try to control it. This principle really applies to all the other dimensions of zazen meditation as well, such as that we actually follow the body in zazen. It knows, and will eventually teach us the natural posture, so we cannot really get it wrong unless we refuse to listen to what our body is telling us.

Under the physical component of the model, we find the five conventional physical senses, including that of the body itself, usually lumped under the tactility of the skin as the largest organ of the body. But “body” includes all the internal sensations of weight, the sense of balance and location in space, or proprioception, plus the many ancillary sensations such as itching and various aches and pains. The other organs of the physical body come into play in meditation, such as the eyes, for which we recommend practicing a fixed gaze, rather than closing them as is recommended in the popular forms of so-called “mindfulness” meditation. To which I query, how mindful can it be if it excludes vision, our primary source of incoming information? But I digress.

The ears are considered perhaps more accessible to the settling of the mind through deep listening, than the more acute stimuli received through seeing, and the resistance we encounter in the realm of feeling, the accommodation of the body to sitting still in upright meditation. The nose and tongue play a relatively minor role, in that they adapt very quickly to the lack of stimulation of fragrance and flavor. However, once we have become comfortable with the physical dimensions of meditation, the emotional and mental begin to kick in.

Under what the great sage classified as emotional sensations, or mood swings, I have listed four pairs of mood or affect that I have come across in my experience as well as in studying dharma and modern analysis of psychological phenomena. Elation or “bliss” is sometimes touted as the goal of meditation, as in “pursuing your bliss,” another pop trope of the New Age perspective on spiritual practice. In Zen, we recognize such highs as the natural vacillation between extremes with the lows, such as depression or milder forms such as ennui or melancholy. We are all bipolar, which becomes manic-depressive at its extreme manifestations.

Serenity versus anxiety is another way of saying the same thing, perhaps more influenced by the social sphere of our daily lives, which provide plenty of rationales for experiencing anxiety, and not many opportunities to settle into serenity. Thus the existence of Zen centers, temples and monasteries. As Master Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai [Self-Fulfilling Samadhi] (emphasis mine):

Grass trees and lands which are embraced by this teaching
together radiate a great light
and endlessly expound the inconceivable profound dharma

Grass trees and walls bring forth the teaching for all beings
common people as well as sages
and they in accord extend this dharma for the sake of grass trees and walls

Emphasizing the “walls” in this passage points to the “realm of self-awakening and awakening others” mentioned earlier in the same teaching, the efforts that the ancestors made to provide environments conducive to training. Achok Rinpoche mentioned this as a form of dana, or Buddhist generosity, in his guest talk at our Zen center some years ago. The walls of the zendo represent this extension of dharma for the sake of grass and trees, complementing the manifestation of dharma in the form of Nature.

Faith and doubt as a binary encapsulate another vacillation in the emotional sphere, which provide another contrast with pop spirituality as well as traditional forms of theism. A conventional interpretation of faith is that it brooks no doubt, and even regards the appearance of doubt as a crisis of faith. In Zen, you are advised to “keep your doubt at a keen edge,” an old saying its attribution lost to memory. The more doubt we feel, the more faith we are called upon to exercise, just as we manifest courage in the presence of a high threshold of fear, not the absence of fear. If we can take the appropriate action, in the face of great fear or doubt, we can be said to be courageous, or faithful, respectively. If our faith is dependent upon the absence of any challenge that would create doubt, it is a faux faith, and will not stand the test of time and circumstance. Even Buddha admonished us to not take his teaching on faith, but to test it out in the crucible of our own experience.

The last dyad, excitement and exhaustion, I have heard is a Tibetan description of the last vacillation that we can expect to encounter in meditation. Excitement at the prospect of some transformation being possible, some insight into the reality of nonduality, spiritual awakening, et cetera, however you might wish to characterize your aspiration to Bodhi mind. But at the same time exhaustion, extreme weariness at the continuing frustration of trying so hard and seemingly getting nowhere, plateauing again and again in your quest for understanding. Proceeding in the face of little or no indication of progress is the prescription for zazen. Like the last 10 yards of the hundred yard dash, it doesn’t get any easier as we approach what we hope is the finish line. And it doesn’t help to be reminded there is no finish line. The worse it gets, the better it is, expresses the ironic perversity of the dilemma. Just don’t give up was my teacher’s advice to me. And mine to you.

Lastly but not leastly in Bodhidharma’s model of meditation observation is the mental machinations we undergo courtesy of the monkey mind, but also as a natural process of the empirical method of observing primarily the evidence of the senses, but also reflection: going over and over it in our minds. This second part of empirical process is where we can go down the rabbit hole of rumination, obsessive-compulsive habit patterns of thought. But it is also the source of the highest achievements of the arts and sciences, when analytical reasoning is balanced by intuitive insight. This is testified to by the third Patriarch in China, the estimable Master Sengcan, in his poem Hsinhsinming — Trust in Mind:

If you wish to move in the One Way do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas
Indeed to accept them fully is identical with true Enlightenment

So we do not reject the sense-data coming in nor do we trust it to be 100% accurate. Nor do we turn away from the power of the mind to perceive, analyze and conceive higher and higher approximations to the reality of existence, as exemplified by the revolutions in the science of physics, and indeed the teachings of Buddhism. But, like chasing the rainbow, the closer we come to capturing it, the more it exceeds our grasp. However, we should not be discouraged and give up the quest.

In the dyads subsumed under the conceptual power of the mind I include the classic formulation of form versus emptiness, the translation of rupa and shunyatta into English. As in most cases, something is lost in translation, but fortunately we are not totally dependent upon words or language, but rely on our own experience in meditation to embrace the reality that these terms are pointing to. Form is the actual appearance of reality that we are all familiar with in our own awareness; emptiness is the underlying dynamic of ever-changing morphology. The essential nature of the material world is its immateriality.

Nihilism and eternalism are likewise traditional dualities debated in the history of, and probably predate, Buddhism. Either standpoint, that nothing exists but delusion or illusion, or that anything is eternally existent, as a worldview, is considered an extreme position that ignores “the rest of the story” so to say. Buddhism lands somewhere in the middle, holding that those things that seem permanent are actually changing, if at different frequencies, and that the absolute nonexistence of anything is a state of denial.

This is succinctly addressed earlier in the same Ch’an poem:

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality
To assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality

Further, to assert the absolute existence of things is to miss their reality. Things exist, but by virtue of emptiness. They arise, abide, change and decay. The abiding part is the mystery, the delusion. But that all things are impermanent can be argued as the proof of permanence. The aggregate condition of ever-changing causes is a permanent condition of change. From the same poem, toward the end:

Emptiness here Emptiness there
but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes
Infinitely large and infinitely small
no difference for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen
So too with Being and non-Being

“Being and non-being” is another phrasing of absolutes as extreme assertions about reality. But if “definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen,” the apparent separation of being and non-being comes under scrutiny. The antipode to this idea is that everything that exists now always has and always will, just not in the same configuration.

As the poem moves toward conclusion, Master Sengcan assures us:

To live in this faith is the road to nonduality
because the nondual is one with the trusting mind

So from everyday dualities such as proposed separation of body and mind, self and other, the analysis proceeds to consider the meta-binary of nonduality as opposed to duality itself, as such. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “There is no dichotomy in Zen.” Then where is the dichotomy? Are duality and non-duality simply concepts, generated by a fevered mind? Or are they general principles, extracted from particular case experiences, the very essence of intelligence applying the empirical method?

In the next segment we will entertain our last experiment with the tetrad analysis model, taking a closer look at what it reveals about the relationships between the four spheres of influence introduced in an earlier section as nesting spheres, as illustrated here. We will explore some of the relationships between the personal, social, natural, and universal spheres which, as a concentric model, paint a picture of proximate and distant surrounding causes and conditions of our existence, and the comprehensive context for our Zen practice.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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It’s not that simple.

But it helps to simplify —

at least in your mind.

Before leaving the discussion of systems and analysis modeling, and its application to daily life and Zen practice, it may be worthwhile to delve a bit more deeply into applying the tetrad to both. This exercise, which may feel a bit awkward in the beginning, may help you answer the question as to not what may be wrong with your approach — as we maintain, you cannot really do Zen wrong — but what may not be working as well as it could be, and where that lies within the components and connections of your personal practice. Take a look at the semantic model presented here. We have suggested that the four components of zazen as a method may be defined as posture, breath, attention, and thee. Using the analytical propensity of the intellect may help you clarify the connection between posture and breath as well as breath and attention, et cetera, fostering a more comprehensive grasp of zazen.

This entails eliminating the conceptual divide that we usually wedge between creativity and the discriminating mind. But thinking is not the enemy of creativity. Analysis can provide the prompts needed to consider alternative approaches and ways of thinking about zazen or anything else for that matter. The main attitude adjustment is that we drop the typical interpretation that there is a right way to meditate, or to raise children, or to wash the dishes, or make art or music, and that we must learn that way or we will never succeed. Again, reasonable parameters for practice in any field are reasonable, not right as opposed to wrong.

Stressing the senses is a common aspect of many of the Buddhist teachings, beginning with the “Heart of Great Wisdom” sutra, in which the Six Senses of ancient Buddhist physiology are listed right up front, following the Five Aggregates, in the context of the principle of emptiness (S. shunyatta):

Given emptiness [there is] no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no seeing, no hearing, no smelling, no tasting, no touching, no thinking.

Note that the listing of the organs is followed by their experiential functions, indicating that both their physical and experiential manifestation are equally empty of substantial reality. That is, all such differentiated percepts, as well as their receptive mechanisms, are devoid of self-existence, as well as being impermanent and imperfect. But I digress.

This traditional sequence arranges the senses from higher to lower levels of the electromagnetic spectrum, but note that mind, the ostensibly highest faculty, comes last, as a kind of catch-all. As I speculate in The Original Frontier, this is probably owing to the fact that the degree of resistance to settling into stillness is at its highest in the monkey mind, followed closely by the body, whereas the other senses tend to be more accommodating to sensory adaptation, given the moderated level of stimulation in meditation.

Another pertinent reference to the senses is found in Sekito Kisen’s Ch’an poem “Harmony of Sameness and Difference” (J. Sandokai):

All the objects of the senses interact and yet do not
Interacting they are linked together
Not interacting each keeps its place
Sights vary in quality and form
Sounds differ as pleasing or harsh

And later a briefer reference to the connection between the sense organs and their objects:

Eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes

Zen teaching often simply belabors the obvious. But we take for granted and overlook the wisdom that is inherent in the most seemingly mundane aspects of our experience, such as the six senses. When in actual fact, they are as miraculous as it gets. But again I digress. Getting back to the model, we can look more deeply into the connections between the four major sense realms under observation.

Consider the most common of these in the vernacular of philosophy and science, the so-called body-mind duality. In zazen, however, the connection of mind to body, #1–4 in our model, is not at all dualistic in nature. Body and mind are naturally complementary. Mind arises from body, the conventional precedent, which some adherents of spiritualist philosophy might dispute, claiming that the mind exists separately from the body as the ostensible true self, or soul, of theism. But in Zen, body also arises from mind. This assessment is validated by the holistic view of health, in which mental disorders can have a devastating impact on the body, and vice-versa. In this context, zazen appears therapeutic.

In zazen, we undergo a kind of sensory adaptation process, which becomes all-encompassing in the long run. But the different senses adapt at different rates, which is why I lump smell and taste, the functions of the nose and tongue, in with the tactile sensations of the body, in this model. Both smell and taste are engaged chemically with ingestion and digestion of food and drink, and the inspiration of breath and its accompanying odors and fragrances. This leaves a simpler model of four main senses as confronted in intensive meditation: feeling, hearing, seeing, and thinking. Remember that thinking, the function of the brain, is considered a sense-realm in Zen, largely automatic, like the others.

Thus the mind’s function of thinking is given the #1 position in this example, seeing as #2, hearing as #3, and feeling as #4. This sequence proceeds from the most complex but least tangible and most diaphanous realm of thought, through the next most complex, sight; then hearing, then the most tangible and gross level of sensation represented as touch, including the body, mouth and nose. This leads to examining the connections between the four creatively, suggesting implications in zazen:

1-2 Thinking that seeing is believing but also incomplete and ever-changing.
2-1 Examining vision and visualizing data through pattern recognition and grasping meaning.

1-3 Registering sound as “pleasing or harsh,” but also as threatening or comforting.
3-1 Surrounding sound fostering or interfering with concentration and assimilation.

1-4 Discriminating tactile feelings as pleasurable, painful, neutral or numb, or life-threatening.
4-1 Posture affecting alertness and acuity in discerning movement, proprioception, et cetera.

2-3 Seeing the image of sound — closing your eyes at the symphony.
3-2 Hearing the sounds of sight — watching 4th of July fireworks.

2-4 Seeing through touch — finding your keys in the dark.
4-2 Feeling with the eyes — sun blindness.

3-4 Hearing the sounds of the body — listening to your heartbeat.
4-3 Feeling the touch of sound — attending a rock concert.

I will leave you with another image to consider, using sight to channel data directly into the mind without passing Go, and not collecting $200. I call this the zazen scaffold, as it visualizes the biological matrix upon which our meditation depends. While zazen reduces action to its most immediate and simplest method — just sit still enough long enough — it does not ignore the context of, for example, karmic consequences over the Three Times; nor does it discount the complexity of what is actually happening all unknown to our consciousness. In the next section we will continue along these lines with yet another variation on the tetrad theme. Meanwhile please put your whole self into zazen. You will gain the power to put your whole self into everything that you do.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is a system?

It has inside and outside —

all dharma beings.

We ended the last section with the suggestion that you consider the design of your Zen practice from a creative perspective, rather than as a pat system that others can teach you to follow. More like jazz than classical music. In other words, be prepared to improvise. This does not entirely eliminate, but places reasonable parameters around, the issue of doing zazen right, as opposed to getting it wrong.

If you take this approach to zazen, you cannot get it wrong. Since it is essentially an experiment, even unexpected results are findings. The only thing is to modify the approach, redesign the bench test and perhaps modify your expectations, then mount the experiment again. Not only is there no success without failure, there is no control without relinquishing control. And no failure without success, actually.

In the context of Zen, any suggestion of systematic analysis is understood as applying to a work-in-progress, an approach in which the approach itself is subject to modification on the fly. Sitting by the seat of your pants may be an apt metaphor.

My approach to systems and analysis may seem laughably simple and naïve in the context of technical endeavors such as engineering and architecture, to name a few. But it is derived from an engineer of formidable accomplishments, one R. Buckminster Fuller, who I was fortunate to meet a couple of times in my education in Design thinking. His geodesic domes, while the most familiar and famous of his accomplishments, are only the tip of the iceberg of his body of work.

Amongst the insights I picked up from Bucky, as he is affectionately called by his disciples, is the concept of semantic modeling, as well as the definition of a “system” as any entity that has an inside and an outside. This would include most of the many particular things that we may name as being evident in our world, including biological organisms such as animals and plants, as well as insentient systems such as the planet, the solar system and galaxies. But of course, human organizations and business corporations qualify as well. So a system for analyzing systems would seem to be a natural and useful tool to have.

The simplest geometric figure that creates an inside and an outside is the tetrahedron. So the simplest, irreducible expression, or model, of any system, however complex, reduces it to four main components with their six connectors. Each connector may be considered a vector that works both ways. As Bucky asserted, if you can name the four constituent components, and describe the six connections, it can be said that you understand — or perhaps a better word, comprehend — the system under consideration.

The chart attached may be considered a 2-dimensional rendition of a 3-dimensional tetrahedron. Here the four are rendered as squares A, B, C, and D, the connecting edges as 1-6. Red and black color-coding allows discriminating primary and secondary objectives of the person analyzing the system, or the person we most want to effect, positioned as component “A.” Each component can be sub-divided into four internal units as well, to address more complex systems. More to come on that.

A simple example from brick-and-mortar retail would place, in order of priority, the customer first in A, store associates second in B, products and services in C, and the store environment itself last, in D. The most important marketing objective of management would then be to define how a customer perceives the store associates, or A-B. If the employees of the store drop the ball and alienate the customers, it really doesn’t matter much what merchandise you have, or the ambience of the environment. How you want associates to relate to and treat customers can be covered in a training program, B-A

The other components and their connections can be similarly defined in great detail. The secondary objectives relate to behind-the-scenes activities not directly visible to the customer but necessary to the operation of the enterprise, such as product knowledgeability training programs (B-C) and the flow of merchandise through the store, i.e. unloading the trucks and stocking the merchandise (C-D). In the era of online retail, some of the components have gone virtual, but the dynamic is similar.

Applying this chart to meditation as another example, looking at zazen from your perspective you might place yourself in A, posture in B, breathing in C, and attention in D. Then analyze your relationship to each of the three to reveal where you are having the most difficulty. Is it with your posture, your breath, or your attention? What is the relationship of posture to breath, or breath to your attention, et cetera?

Use this model to take a closer and more complete look at your livelihood, or any other dimension of the Eightfold Path. What are the four components of your everyday life? What objectives would you like to establish between them? How does zazen fit into that picture? What are your objectives for zazen? What are the relationships between the four observations that Bodhidharma proposed for zazen: breathing; physical sensations; emotional mood swings; and mental concepts?

Any dharma being, sentient or insentient, can be similarly analyzed. The archetypal teacup used as an analogy to existence and non-existence, form and emptiness, et cetera, would subdivide into form, function, materials, and forming process, for example. The four fundamental forces of physics would fit the model, indicating 6 connections between the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force, perforce expressed as mathematical formulae. Or there would be 12 formulations in total, if the relationships between the forces are asymmetrical, requiring that each be formulated differently as A to B or B to A. I leave it to those who can do the math.

To those who suggest that the tetrad, as I refer to it for short, is too simple to analyze most systems, which consist of more components, I offer the attached tetrad holarchy, a diagram that connects a system of tetrads into an expandable network, fractal in its scalability. Larger systems subsume smaller systems and smaller systems are integrated into larger ones using the same basic geometry. In the case of the retail example cited above, the three outside systems may represent vendors, advertising and other agencies, financing institutions such as banks, et cetera. The outer and inner connections may all be regarded as channels of communication between the associated organizations. I will not delve into more detailed discussion or explanation here but leave it to your imagination to play with the models to analyze, organize, and systematize your own systems, if that is not too redundant.

In closing, let us remember that the various teachings from Buddhism, from Buddha’s Four Noble Truths to the most complex enumerations of the 108 delusions, or the 52 stages of the bodhisattva, are all models of reality, from a Buddhist perspective. They all fit the modern trope of being the map and not the territory, and are meant to help you model your own reality on a sounder, more complete basis. Please take them and make them your own.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Discovery now.

Invention follows later —

in Design or Zen.

One more point about process in general may be worth noting before considering the processes of discovery and invention in particular. Like most words, “processing” can be used as a euphemism. The last message on the evening news was that this night was going to be the worst of the current invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military. Turning on the news this morning, the first station was talking about sports; the second about methane emissions from raising cattle. I did not dwell for long on the sports commentary, feeling that familiar frisson of disorientation that comes with the sense of living in two different worlds. Imagining rockets and tank shells landing in my cozy neighborhood in Atlanta, while somewhere on the other side of the world, local attention is raptly focused on today’s soccer game.

The methane discussion, while at least focused on a real problem, that of global warming, was not that much more rational. It hinged around the idea of raising so many million head of grass-fed versus grain-fed cattle, in order to reduce the amount of methane in cow “burps.” The additional cost associated with the former, according to the rancher and self-proclaimed scientist being interviewed, does not result from the manner of feeding, but that of “processing” the cattle. The fact that factory-farming allows for geographically compact organization of feed lots close to processing plants — the slaughterhouse, in more honest words — is the sum total of the problem definition, at least from the perspective of the interests committed to producing a grass-fed product to meet the demand of the market for beef. His proposed solution is to invest in building processing plants close to the pastures. The rest of the dialog was all about adding things like oregano and kelp to the diet of the cattle, as serious proposals to solve the problem.

By this time, a similar sense of losing my bearings from a focus on sports made me slightly dizzy. That these “products” to be “processed” are living beings was not once mentioned, nor the processing called out for what it actually is. Needless to say, any suggestion around reducing the consumption of beef, an obvious solution to the problem, crossed no one’s lips. This may be taken as yet another lively example of the tragedy of the commons, so common to our times, but from a deadly bovine perspective. Bossy is not likely to ever die of natural causes, whatever the method of feeding. Shout out to Big Mac.

Picking up the thread of how Design thinking may be related to Zen, as parallel processes of discovery and invention, the notion that what we call Buddhism or Zen originally had to be discovered or invented, may qualify as a radical departure from how most religions are regarded as originating in revelation, i.e. from a creator god. Then the apostolic imperative becomes convincing others of the validity of the claim, through performance of miracles, proof of prophecy, et cetera. In other words, propagation of the faith does not rely upon individual converts experiencing some such epiphany for themselves, with the notable exceptions of the recognized saints, but only believing the gospel, as interpreted by its messengers, prophets and priests.

In Buddha’s case, he took the contrarian approach that his claims depended on no one else, no authority from God — the Hindu Brahman or Ishvara — and no reliance on doctrine or scripture handed down from antiquity. This has to be the ultimate in personal responsibility, though Buddha did not claim exclusivity. Anyone could accede to the same revelation. There are stories of his performing miracles, but we have to take them with a dollop of… honey. Video recording was not ubiquitous in those days.

In a very real sense, Zen calls upon us to rediscover and/or reinvent the findings of Buddha for ourselves, then draw our own conclusions from our own experience, and base any recommendations upon that body of evidence, rather than from belief in what others tell us. Thus the record of Buddhism amounts to testimony of the ancestors, rather than holy writ. But it does not stint on the potential implications, for their times and social milieu, but also for ours. Zen is always contemporary.

Design, on the highest levels of the discipline, operates on a similar premise. Each of us is trained and encouraged to redefine the problem before us, rediscover its underlying raison d’etre, and to reinvent the best approach to resolving it. We cannot rely upon solutions from the past, merely adapting details to the current realities. Usually, any invention worthy of the name requires a wholesale revision of multiple dimensions of the process. Contemporary Design is an amalgam of the old and the new.

One of the main points I am trying to make in this present series is that the principles of both Design and Zen are ever-present in all dimensions of living, from the most trivial and mundane on the personal level, to the most crucial on social, natural and universal levels. We have clever sayings, like “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and “It’s all small stuff.” But the small stuff is not disconnected from the big stuff, as it turns out.

A mundane example: Spreading pine straw on our walkways, I realized that I used to do it differently. I would drop clumps of straw on the ground and then come back and spread them with a rake. But I noticed — discovered — that the professional lawn and garden crews in the neighborhood shake the clumps so that thin layers of straw fall on the surface, more like the natural process in a forest. Which results in a smoother, more tightly-woven layer on the ground. Since the walkways are underlaid with poly sheeting, which helps to suppress weeds without using chemicals, the straw tends to separate when it rains, revealing open areas of exposed poly. Adding more straw, I simply fill those spots in. But I do it by shaking thin layers over each other. It takes a little longer, but totally eliminates the secondary operation of raking. Which is a Design principle. Any time you can eliminate a secondary task, you do. You invest more time on the frontend but make it up on the backend.

I think zazen functions similarly. The more time we invest in the beginning, when the going is pretty rocky and we do not have much experience under our belt, the more patience we can practice with our initial resistance, the less we will have to deal with in future, generally speaking. Exceptions include major changes in living patterns, such as adapting to changing working or living situations, which entails an overabundance of stress, and the sledding in zazen proportionately rougher. Midlife crises would provide the poster-boy for this category of circumstance. However, if we did not have the advantage of doing zazen, the tough times might be even tougher. When the going gets tough, the wise get sitting.

References to “Zen bondage” made elsewhere are only partially tongue-in-cheek. We are in bondage already, if only to our own limited imagination. Bondage is known to have a comforting effect, along with its more unseemly connotations. Babies in swaddling cloths, cats in tight boxes, and dogs in calming sweaters are examples. We do have a blanket recommendation in Zen circles, to wear something comfortable and unrestricting, such as sweatsuits, or the newer stretch athletic clothing. But there is something akin to Victorian modesty in the mix as well. Clothing that is too revealing, or overly colorful, displaying distracting messages, such as some tee-shirts and sweatshirts, are generally discouraged, at least in public meditation sessions. In private, you are on your own. Which is where my suggestions of experimenting with support systems such as slings and strapping come into play.

You should feel free, in the privacy or your own home, to sit zazen like no one is watching. And to play with the gear, the costumes and equipment. We sure know how to have fun, as my mother used to say.

Again, Buddhism was inventive, and a process of discovery, from the very beginning. Buddha taught his followers to “Do thou likewise,” essentially. Understanding, I am sure, that no two instances of human practice-experience can possibly be the same. So I do not believe that the design intent of his instructions was for us to try to emulate his life, either as a young prince, or as the sage of the Shakya clan, to the letter. He encouraged all to find the middle way between the extremes, as he had done. Knowing that no one of those three paths would be the same, for any two people in history.

What Buddha handed down was like a jazz chart, containing the basic chord progression and melody. But as the musician performing the piece, we are expected to improvise, and fill in the blanks. Claude Debussy, whose “Claire de Lune” is the first and only piece of sheet music I ever taught myself to play on the piano, said “Music is the space between the notes.” John Cage, the modernist American composer and music theorist, said something similar, and backed it up with his “4’33’’,” a piano concert consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence from the piano. The audience and other ambient sources provide the sound.

Similarly, the ancestors of Zen were quite willing to improvise as needed, while grounding their teaching and practice on the legacy of their forebears, in particular their immediate progenitor. The lineage of Zen is a bit like that of music and the arts. Where, for example, the great classical and jazz greats had students and followers who inherited their mastery and philosophy, but then extended it into the next generation, allowing it to evolve with the changing circumstances of the time. Including developments in the technology of instrument-making. This universal process finds perhaps its clearest manifestation in Zen, where the instrument is this very body-mind, with which we have been born.

Of course, any position of authority in any field can be misused and abused. A robe can hide a lot of sins, whether in the form of a Catholic priest, a choir master, an Oxford don, or a Zen master. Mastery of a method to the degree that it impresses others is no guarantee that one has mastered oneself. We hold to the truism that we do not master Zen. Zen masters us. And we cast a wary eye on the outer trappings of the tradition for these reasons, as well as the inescapable fact that the overt, outer form of the profession or guild, school or sect, creates a recognizable boundary between oneself and others. While such a division can be useful and is perhaps necessary — as the dividing boundary between the stage and the audience — over-emphasis on appearance and protocol can add to confusion. Such as implying that unless you, too, get a robe, your practice of Zen is not genuine. The Zen robe has a wonderful draping effect, of anchoring you to the ground, or on the cushion, and imposes no restriction on the legs arrayed in the lotus posture. But it can become a kind of sanctimonious symbol. As the old saying has it, there is no stench of holiness in Zen.

Please consider the design of your Zen practice creatively. Do not be afraid to experiment. When you take this intentional approach, any imagined failure is not possible in reality. All malfunctions, whether of costume, gear, or monkey-mind, are temporary setbacks, from which you will recover quickly if you but pay attention and learn from them. And make any necessary adjustments. Or simply try something different. In this way, you engage your practice as YOUR practice. You broke it, you own it.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Process is the thing —

Outcomes only the result —

Some tweaking required

Matsuoka Roshi’s expression that “You have to work your way through every bone in your body” implies a kind of thoroughgoing process of potentially hundreds of micro-adjustments to the posture of zazen. While this may seem daunting, and an unnecessarily complicated way of looking at meditation, it is meant to be encouraging. It reminds me of the old cowboy tune, “Home on the Range,” where “never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.” Life on the range was not easy. Zen may promote a sunny view of reality, but it is one that is informed by the ever-present realities of aging, sickness and death, as were dependably present out there “where the deer and the antelope play.” And the cattle drive is endless.

Allow me to get a couple of pet peeves off my chest before proceeding to deconstruct processes versus outcomes. Along with the aforementioned overuse of “methodology,” where a simple reference to “method” would suffice, another attempt at sounding more intelligent or professional is the mispronunciation of the plural for process, which is “processes.” More and more we hear self-styled experts in public media refer to “pro-cess-es,” long “o,” long “e.” This mildly irritating but contagious tic is probably a kind of backformation from Greek-derived terms such as “thesis,” the plural for which is “theses.” Its effect on English usage is akin to the grammarians’ rule to not split an infinitive (which I just did), because it cannot be done in Latin.

This compulsion appears to stem from a preference for older languages with haughtier pedigrees over the vernacular, such as Chinese once was for Japanese, or Greek and Latin, and even French, for English-speaking peoples. Such foreign lingos were esteemed as official language of court systems, diplomacy, and government in general. Its use supposedly reflected the refinement, education and sophistication of the speaker, as well as implying some disdain for the street language of the hoi polloi. Similarly, malaprop pronunciations suggest an underlying urge to lend more credence to our utterings. They may represent vestigial remains of class distinctions, a kind of compensation artifice.

“Process” is also used as a kind of avoidance maneuver, a go-to default response to any challenge to due diligence, or demand for a report of progress, especially in the context of lagging behind schedule, or being over budget, for anticipated deliverables in any project, but again, notably predictable in military and government work. “We are in the process of…” say, “evaluating the situation…” is the kneejerk preamble to whatever excuses or real-world reasons may explain any delay or failure to meet expectations. This dodge is prevalent in political, military or policing operations in particular, in our highly fraught society. It is intended to make those who are called on the carpet at the moment to appear and sound competent, however egregious the complaint brought against them for dropping the ball. It amounts to a more professional, politesse circumlocution, meaning “it’s not my fault,” basic CYA.

With that aside, both Zen and Design emphasize process over outcomes, in getting to the heart of the matter, defining and hopefully solving problems du jour. A given outcome, such as a new software application, may be released for beta-testing in a less-than-perfect edition, with the understanding that users will help identify glitches to debug subsequent releases. A pre-digital-revolution example would be the “some assembly required” syndrome of the archetypal Christmas bicycle, or the inexpensive furniture from the discount store. Transferring the assembly part of the manufacturing process into the home and out of the factory, with more compact shipping thrown into the bargain, reduces cost to the customer. Whether this is a false economy depends upon the value the purchaser assigns to their time.

Similarly in pursuing spirituality, if you have the means and can afford the outlay, you can enjoy a luxury resort type of experience in an exotic locale, all your needs catered to by retreat center staffing. Or, you can enjoy the “shabby-chic” experience of do-it-yourself approaches more characteristic of Zen centers, where work (J. samu) and cleaning (J. soji) are a part of the experience. In the latter case, you help staff the necessary tasks entailed in staging a retreat, such as feeding and housing guests, emptying trash, etc., as well as facilitating program presentations such as dharma talks, and meditation itself. This communal approach embraces the social dimension with a do-it-yourself mentality.

If instead you practice Zen as a daily routine in your life, it does not exempt you from taking care of business, such as upkeep, maintenance and fulfillment of your personal needs as well as those of your family and friends, and your environment, as a householder. There is no escaping this practical demand. Thus, process is a feature of life, whether or not we are aware of it as such. Once we become aware of the process of living, whether in context of everyday life, or special circumstances such as the intentional community of a Zen center, or on an extended retreat, dependency on one or the other circumstance diminishes. Being in retreat in the mountains is not all that different from Zen at home.

The process of meditation, in particular, is precisely the same in both cases, or should be. The main difference is that on traditional retreat, all aspects of daily life are subjugated, or should be, to the opportunity to delve deeply into meditation. While the refrigerator turning on and off at home may remind you that you need to defrost it soon. The pluses and minuses of each situation can be taken as a challenge to be overcome, or allowed to interfere with our positive attitude in approaching Zen practice. Your choice.

Similarly, if we get over the hump in regard to the process of meditation and its relationship to external circumstances, we can do the same with expectations regarding outcomes. Each meditation session can be free of judgment as to its relative success or failure. In Design as well as in Zen, there is no success without failure. Somewhere Master Dogen makes the point that hitting the bullseye depends upon the hundreds of misses that preceded it. “Fall down seven times, get up eight” is apparently an old saying that Dogen co-opted. This is the attitude we inculcate in approaching zazen. The bigger the opponent, the harder the fall, as in the martial arts. Lowering our expectations favors the long view.

In Design, a failure indicates its own correction. We actually design for failure, that is, to control the extent and impact of any anticipated glitches, so as to salvage the project. This fosters an attitude of losing the various battles along the way, in order to win the war. Progress defined as one long series of mistakes, while paying strict attention so as to avoid making them again, a process of elimination of unneeded secondary operations, as well as sequencing of steps in the most efficient order. Concept sketches, models, and prototypes to test proof-of-concept are examples of strategies to minimize risk and cost, while allowing for human error and material failure. End-user considerations come into play as well. User-friendly operation must be anticipated. If we apply such thinking to our zazen practice, we may see that we may be doing certain things backward, and open up our minds to experimenting with process, setting aside for the moment any specific definitions of outcomes.

The expression often used in Design circles is, “What if?” What if we tried this a different way, for example doing an exercise program before sitting, rather than after, or before or after eating, or bathing, as has been our habit. What might be the outcome? Like any open-ended experiment, we don’t know until we try. And the first test of a new approach may not be definitive, or determinative of the go-forward. We may want to try the new approach again and again, keeping the new sequence of workout first, zazen last; but tweaking the workout itself so that the cool-down exercises segue more gradually and naturally into the stillness of zazen. Or we may modify zazen to fit other demands on our time.

What if we sat at a different time of day, in a different spot, and for a different length of time? What if we tried this over a period of weeks, or months, noting any differences, until we settle into a new zazen routine that we would never have imagined, without experimentation. What if we assume that all the ancestors of Zen had to go through some such winnowing process, in the evolution of the method over time, which resulted in certain notions about how to do zazen — and how not to do zazen — which were handed down as holy writ. What if specific instructions are revealed, through our experimentation, to have been embedded in the external circumstances of their day and time, and mostly irrelevant to ours? Or what if, instead, we find that we come to largely the same conclusions, and design decisions, that they did? Either way, we would never know, without trying. And our practice may not be as vital.

Another common usage of process may derive from the jargon of psychology. We, or they, speak of “processing” events that once happened to us, or that we anticipate, such as traumatic transactions like injury, death, divorce, change of employment, moving our residency, et cetera. In fact, meditation has become one of the default recommendations to “process” our experience, along with talking it out with our partners, or a professional. I suppose that we could say that when we settle into zazen, we are processing all the incoming data in our lives. It does seem to function like a great clearing-house, sorting and reorganizing the various conflicting dimensions of our worldview, and its disjunctions with reality. This is probably why many practitioners choose to sit first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Zazen, like Design, is one of the most integrative processes available. Many or most of the methods we learn in the normal course of education tend to be analytical, divisive rather than combinatorial. Zen and Design both emphasize putting things together, or building back better, as our current POTUS would have it. Of course, in order to rebuild, we have to tear down. But the latter process need not be negative. Recognition of this fact is represented in Design solutions by such common practices as knockdown (KD) furniture, which enables a more flexible approach to staging our lives, quickly setting up and taking down everything from Shakespeare in the park and rock concerts to the humble sleeping pallets in a Japanese home or hotel (J. futon), or the over-engineered Western equivalent, the Murphy bed. Building practices pre-engineered in Japanese architecture allow for future deconstruction and rebuilding of whole edifices, whereas Western construction usually requires total demolition.

If we imagine how this framework can be applied to zazen, we might contemplate how we can adapt to the inevitable onset of aging, if not sickness and death, in our future. How can we design our approach to simply sitting upright and comfortably so that physical and mental decline are mitigated to the degree possible? Most of the strategies that occur to me are pretty pedestrian and obvious, more a matter of attitude adjustments and regarding change not as compromise, but as innovation. The simplest adaptation may be just sitting in a chair. Ditch the crossed legs. Not essential.

Others include more blue-sky invention, such as “Zen bondage.” Developing straps, harnesses, and hammock-like devices that reinforce the tensional net of musculature holding the compressional struts of the skeleton in the upright posture. Future clothing for meditation may follow the current trend of engineered spandex for elite competition in sports, where garments are designed to be ever-more custom fitted to the body, supporting the specific dynamics of the sport. Old-fashioned body armor was heavy and cumbersome, but the metal-smiths tried to approximate the needs of the warrior’s body, like a human tin man. Future rigid costuming may include servo-motors and smart chips to reinforce aging joints. Inchoate inching toward this accomplishment is illustrated by today’s primitive knee- and back-braces. As a designer, I look for what kind of minimal support system might distribute stress more evenly along the length of the spine, rather than creating undue pressure on our aging lower backs.

Zen was an invention, and a process of discovery, from the very beginning. The ancestors manifested a willingness to challenge and change the received wisdom from prior generations, while not throwing the buddha-baby out with the used bathwater. They say that the difference between a good designer and a mediocre designer is that the former can still get excited. I am still excited about Zen, and look forward to reinventing it on the fly, in future. I encourage you to join us in this adventure.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Method and routine

may be hard to separate —

Work it out in time

In the last episode of our series on Design thinking and Zen, considering methods and materials, tools and techniques associated with Zen practice — as well as their place in the process of Design and problem-solving in general — it occurred to me that zazen is not the solution itself, but a recommended method for arriving at an ongoing solution to the problems life presents. This may be belaboring the obvious, but Bodhidharma is credited with saying something to the effect that it is not really necessary to do zazen, but only to “grasp the Vital Principle.” I capitalize V and P, as is the custom to highlight terms pointing to ineffable reality, such as “Emptiness,” or the “Uncreate,” from Muso Soseki’s letters to his students, two brothers who were shoguns of Japan at that time, titled Dream Conversations.

I feel I am in good company when I assert that zazen, or any method for that matter, cannot magically turn the trick for whatever you may expect from it. No method can work itself; you have to work the method. As to grasping the vital principle of existence, how could that be limited to sitting versus lying down, standing, or walking? Or running, swimming, sky-diving or bungee-jumping, for that matter? Not to confuse being “in the flow,” and its accompanying adrenaline rush, with the effects of zazen. That we sit stock still in zazen makes it an even more extreme action, triggering a consciousness of the relative flux and flow of time. Counterintuitively, stillness elevates awareness of subliminal movement.

We also promised that this episode will take a different tack in defining the problem of existence, and Zen’s unique approach to penetrating — as opposed to solving — it. While the Zen problem constitutes our fundamental koan, a gordian knot of universal proportions, it is no more subject to intellectual solution than the illogical riddles of Rinzai Zen tradition, which nonetheless are all pointing to it. While we may have to give up our usual strategies for problem-solving, we should not give up on the whole endeavor. Our ancestors claim to have come to resolution and peace on this issue. And so we should not despair, however frustrating a slog the journey becomes. Zen is not the problem. Our approach to the method has to be where the difficulty lies.

Taking Bodhidharma’s claim that penetrating to the essence of the Great Matter, the mystery of life, is not, indeed cannot be, actually dependent upon zazen puts any discussion of the details of the method into perspective. If the very practice of zazen is not absolutely imperative, how important is obsessing over the subroutines? One answer is that you might want to familiarize yourself with these techniques before you decide to not follow them, rather than decide not to follow them without being familiar with them. After all, the masters who refined Zen’s method over millennia past were quite accomplished in other dimensions of life. Anyone capable of copying monastery plans on sojourn in China with brush and paper, bringing them back to Japan, and building a copy, would likely be at least as competent in analyzing and codifying the method of meditation that inspired their demanding design-build endeavors.

If we understand that the investment of time and effort necessary for zazen to work its magic has nothing to do with the efficacy of the method, but everything to do with our stubborn nature and its accumulation of ignorant and self-serving ideas about reality, we can embrace the recommendations of the ancestors wholeheartedly. It is entirely our fault that the method of Zen does not deliver results to our expectations, let alone on our unreasonable timetable. This is the attitude adjustment dimension demanded of us by any worthwhile endeavor. If we persist in our resistance, we are not really applying the method. So just give up, and give in. Surrender is a vital part of the Zen method. Zazen posture is one of surrender: the fight or flight syndrome is impossible to act upon sitting cross-legged, at least in the physical sense. But the monkey can still mount a vigorous array of mental evasive maneuvers.

One example of such a maneuver involves counting breaths. While we may regard this recommended subroutine as a provisional aspect of the overall method of zazen, the monkey may seize upon it as something — better than nothing — to preoccupy itself. Are we counting correctly, in the most efficacious way? From one to ten? One to four and start over? Counting down from ten to zero? How many breaths per minute? Can we measure time counting the breath? How long can we keep up the counting without missing a beat? Et cetera ad infinitum.

I once had a visitor come in for the one-on-one interview (J. dokusan) that we sometimes offer as part of regular meditation sessions or retreats. After bowing respectfully and announcing his name, he declared that his practice was counting the breath. I asked how long he had been counting his breath. He said about three years. I suggested he may want to stop counting his breath for a while.

If and when a suggested or recommended technique goes from being an ancillary routine intended to help focus the attention, as the breath-counting is usually regarded — to an essential piece of the method, the instructions have gone from being a map of the territory to an imposed stricture. We cannot explore the territory if we have to stick to trails already blazed by those who have gone before. When the instructions so carefully considered and tailored by the ancestors are regarded as more like a jazz chart, on which we are to improvise — than the painstakingly detailed notation of a classical concert piece that we are to replicate as closely as possible to the original performance — we are less inhibited in our real-time experience of the music itself. Eventually we can throw away the written record entirely.

But in the meantime we may want to take to heart the encouragement of Tozan Ryokai, founder of Soto Zen in China, from his teaching poem Hokyo Zammai: Precious Mirror Samadhi:

Penetrate the source and travel the pathways
Embrace the territory and treasure the roads

Prioritizing penetrating the source does not mean that we can disregard traveling the pathways followed by our predecessors. The territory now is the same as it was for them, though our experience of it is necessarily unique, differing in time and space, as well as in person. We are not them and they are not us, but we should treasure the roads they have paved for this Great Vehicle, to stretch the analogy. However confounding the message handed down to us, rendered in translation from culture to culture and language to language, the Great Way that it is pointing to is right in front of our face, and directly beneath our feet. The teachings are like so many Burma Shave signs, alerting us to what lies ahead.

Like advertising, Zen teachings change over time, with developments in media and technology, but the basic message stays the same, like the annual Super Bowl commercials. The different approaches to selling the same old beer and vehicles each year illustrate the creativity of the writers and producers. We need to be equally or at least similarly creative in our approach to Zen. When we hear instructions for how to do zazen, we should take them as an approximation of what the actual method should be, rather than hard and fast rules. Even sitting still should be understood as relative, not absolute. Only by attempting to sit more and more still, for longer and longer periods of time, can we learn what is the point of not moving. But only by moving can we appreciate what is sitting still. If sitting still were somehow magically the trigger of insight, what would be the point of walking meditation (J. kinhin)? By witnessing the relative stillness of zazen, compared to the relative motion of kinhin, we begin to grasp the harmony of sameness and difference (shout out to Sekito Kisen) implicit in the contrast. Finally we come to embrace the principle of motion in stillness, and stillness in motion (Sino-J. mokurai).

Our approach to the entire complex of form surrounding the practice of meditation: the environmental conditions of ambient light, temperature and sound; the clothing and the equipment; and finally the method itself: posture, breath and attention; is informed by this middle way of finding balance between extremes. Those niggling differences that at one time may have caused distraction and irritation begin to fade into irrelevance, with repetition. Eventually we can sit through a thunderstorm, as Sensei said.

If identifying clothing as part of the method seems to be a bridge too far, consider sitting stark naked. Where would you sit, and on what kind of surface? Now expand the range of costume to include work clothes, party dress, military uniform, a medieval suit of armor, deep water diving gear, et cetera. It will become clear that appropriate clothing will support the method, while inappropriate garb will not. Even skinny jeans, the fashion choice of the hip, may cause bunching around the knees, inhibiting circulation and causing discomfort. Whereas spandex may support the necessary flexing of the muscular and skeletal system. In this context it is easy to get a perspective on why the ancient monks preferred to wear robes over the few other choices available to them. But it does not follow that robes are necessarily the best choice for sitting in meditation today.

Take one more simple example. When in zazen, we recommend a specific hand posture (S. mudra). That we refer to it as a mudra does not imbue it with any magical associations. Any hand posture is a mudra, though in Buddha’s India apparently a kind of gestural or sign language, having symbolic significance in iconography, the painted images and statues of various Buddhist figures of bodhisattvas and buddhas. But that is neither here nor there, one of my favorite English expressions. The hand position in zazen may be interpreted as rife with mystical meaning, but I want to consider it as a physical experience instead.

We are encouraged to place the hands palm up, one on top of the other, thumbs lightly touched forming a symmetrical, jewel-like ellipse. The wrists are rested on the thighs with the hands against the lower abdomen, and no stress or strain on the arms, so we do shoulder rolls and flap the elbows out like a chicken flapping its wings, to relax the arms.

Next time you try this, I suggest a kind of mini-koan that you may present to yourself. In principle, the hands and arms should come into balance with gravity, like the rest of the body in zazen. The effort required to sit upright in zazen segues from fidgeting and resistance in the beginning to a kind of equilibrium, or equipoise, or physical samadhi. So the question naturally arises, are my hands already in samadhi, complete balance with gravity, or not? In other words, how heavy are they, actually?

The same query made be made of your head, as you rest it on your pillow at night to sleep. The only way to come to some resolution of this question is to experiment. Try pushing your hands (or your head) down as hard as you can, pressing into the flesh of your thighs (or your pillow). Then lift your hands gently to see where you can definitely tell that you are holding them up, ever so slightly, with muscular support from your forearms. Do this again and again until you can find the midpoint at which you are definitely not holding them up, but also not pushing them down, either. Extend to the rest of your body.

While this may seem another monkey-mind distraction from just sitting, it illustrates the principle, again, that we may think we are sitting still, in perfect balance, when all unbeknownst to us (another favorite), we are actually tensed up, here and there in the posture. This was illustrated dramatically one day at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, in the 1960s when I had started my tutelage under Matsuoka Roshi. One day in zazen he was doing his rounds checking our postures, when he placed his forefinger, I assume, just under the bump at the back bottom of my skull — called an inion for anyone who cares — and lifted slightly. It was very subtle, but exactly what was needed, what was missing in my posture. He would often say that you “have to work your way through every bone in your body.” And of course, there are a lot of bones in the human body, at last count 206. So get to work.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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No matter the tool —

Whatever materials —

The method is Zen

In the last episode we ended by noting that the design of the method of Zen, as well as the equipment used in practicing it, were operative from the very beginning of the tradition. We said we would further explore the simplicity of both the method, and the gear needed to exercise it, in this segment. The broader scope of the intersection of methods and materials is a major concern in Design thinking, especially what is called design-build, the production dynamic of problem-solving in the material world.

Typically for any solution to a real-world problem, it is not enough just to come up with a bright idea. It has to be tested in the real world, subjected to a developmental process that may involve going back to the drawing board repeatedly, until all the ins and outs of form following function have been satisfactorily addressed. Additionally, cost considerations typically play a determinative role, driving efforts to “cost-improve” the innovation to meet the evaluation of the market, expressed as sales.

This rather mundane but familiar reality in the age of mass-marketing is useful as a metaphor for the development and propagation, or “marketing,” of Zen. Known for its extreme simplicity, material reserve and social restraint, the spread of Zen Buddhism nonetheless engendered some markedly extravagant cases of material consumption, as attested to by the colossal statuary, and imposing monasteries constructed in its countries of origin. The investment in material resources, talent and labor is only magnified by the fact that they were built by hand, in lieu of electricity or any other source of power, other than human muscle, and perhaps the occasional watermill. As someone who has a sense of what it takes to build something, touring some of these sites in Japan left me incredulous. It beggars the imagination that such edifices could have been accomplished absent an alien assist with laser-like precision tools, a sci-fi conjecture offered to explain the pyramids and other ancient, unexplainable wonders of the world.

A sociological perspective might suggest looking at the development of lay householder practice as a design innovation in Zen’s largely monastic history. Or the ideal of the homeless mendicant, in possession of seven basic items: three robes, a pair of sandals, sun hat, begging bowls, monk’s bag (equivalent of today’s ubiquitous backpack), et cetera, as a reductio ad absurdum of simplification, requiring no real investment in gear. Let alone whole buildings, as opposed to the monastic model, which required massive expenditures of time and treasure, energy and social capital to create whole communities, if somewhat codependent upon the societies of the times.

Separation of church and state was apparently rudimentary, and our imagined isolation of the monastic community from the larger population is just that — imagined. Yet the emergence of householder or lay practice, honored as its own legitimate avenue of pursuit of spiritual training, is a relatively recent development. Exceptions to the rule abound, such as Vimalakirti and Emperor Ashoka in India, Layman Pang in China, and others, but they prove the general rule.

Both approaches may be regarded as optional and historically successful solutions to the same set of problems, differing mainly in the design of delivery systems. In terms of contemporary location strategy, such as in the retail sector, the monastic model would fall into the category of the destination purchase — Big Box stores that draw shoppers from a radius of miles or more. The lay practice model would be more akin to the convenience store — the 7-Eleven, small units located at key intersections of traffic, currently tied to frequent stops, such as the gas station. Last I heard, there are something like 15,000 Soto and 8,000 Rinzai centers operative in Japan, most being small neighborhood temples.

Extreme examples for the monk would include the hermitage, a solitary redoubt in the fabled grass hut or an available cave. Versus the lone householder, who manages a practice without benefit of an organized community. What is necessary for sustaining Zen practice, like any other problem, is a huge variable. The personal dimension remains relatively constant through time, while the social dimension evolves.

The method of Zen, particularly its uniquely simple meditation, is the main action item we transmit to others, and in particular to the next generation. It is on them to bring it to fruition in their life, of course, but it is our responsibility to clarify the distinct and determinative aspects of zazen practice to the extent feasible. The dispositive message in promulgating our legacy is: Where Zen differs. That is, from the other forms of meditation on offer in the village square today. Which, by the way, were there from the beginning of the spread of Buddhism.

Materials required for Zen practice are minimal at base, largely reflecting social accretions garnered from the cultures through which it has passed. Again, the monk’s total toolkit was based on seven essential items, addressing the Design question: How much is enough? on a minimalist basis. Some wag put forth the notion that if you want to “sell” Zen to Americans, sell them the gear. Zen is a very material real-world approach, but not in the sense of spiritual materialism, Trungpa Rinpoche’s coinage.

If we examine today’s suggested equipment for zazen, it consists largely of the same simple furnishings that would be found in any Japanese Soto temple: the humble floor mat (J. zabuton) and round support cushion (J. zafu). Variations include foam blocks of Tibetan origin, kneeling benches (J. seiza), and wedge-shaped cushions designed for chair-sitting, that help sustain the proper upright posture of the spine, instead of slumping.

As a designer, I have a tendency to redesign everything, an urge that I need to keep in check to some degree. Accordingly, I have attempted the near-impossible: to improve upon the traditional gear for sitting upright for long periods of time. Particularly as I age, along with my contemporaries, the natural deterioration of the physical body suggests that additional attention may be appropriate to appurtenances and accessories designed to deal with the conditions of aging, inherent disabilities and other infirmities. No major breakthroughs yet, but we will keep on trying.

Turning our attention to the design of the method itself, aside from the particulars of time-of-life and general health, we find the simple division into three areas of focus that Matsuoka Roshi emphasized: posture, breath, and attention. I like to encapsulate these under the rubric of “natural”: assuming the natural posture, finding and following the natural breath, and eventually recovering the natural mind.

My use of “natural” may have had little or no relevance in the culture of the countries of origin, as they were perforce closer to nature than we are today. There were fewer buffer zones between the presence of aging, sickness and death than we see today, with our hospitals, clinics and extended care facilities with direct channels to the morgue and mortuary. Access to food, in the form of animal and vegetable products, was likewise not shielded from the reality of slaughter and butchering, with portions neatly packaged in sanitary packaging, as is normal today in much of the civilized world. What would be totally unnatural in earlier times is taken for granted today. So the term “natural” has resonance mostly in the social milieu.

The form of meditation in Buddhism, beginning with what must have been yogic training for Buddha, has probably gone through countless permutations. Early emphasis on posture is seen in yogic poses (S. asana), focus on the breath in complex exercises (S. pranayama), and attention directed to mystical or trance-like states, as well as to the attainment of paranormal powers (S. siddhi). Thus our current take on the purpose and practical effects of zazen may not necessarily comport with those at any time in its history. Zen is always contemporary, but we have to revise its presentation to fit our times.

When we research the techniques in contemporary Soto Zen meditation, such as counting the breath, we find that they may not be mentioned as such in the early records of instructions, such as Master Dogen’s Fukanzazengi. However, we can probably safely assume that some such approaches were conveyed in person, with the spoken teachings of the day. The written record, while impressively extensive, has to represent the tip of the iceberg in comparison with the live dialog, as it does yet today.

But the basic role of counting the breath in zazen is probably of a piece with that even in the earliest yogic teachings. Pranayama’s detailed proportioning — via counting so many beats for the inbreath, holding in, the outbreath, and holding out — were most likely approximations to the slower and deeper pace and volume of the breathing cycle actually experienced by adepts, in deepest levels of sustained mediation. In other words, a model of the natural breath, not its specific manifestation. The natural breath, for any human being, may be supposed to be similar, notwithstanding biological variations in lung size and capacity. Smaller mammals breathe at higher rates than larger mammals, in keeping with their variance in metabolism and heart beat, as well as their life span expectancy. Breathing is a variable.

Counting the breath, as taught in modern or ancient times, may be considered relatively peripheral to the ultimate purpose of zazen, as are rituals and protocols followed in group practice. Any such ancillary subroutine is clearly provisional, and subject to being transcended at some point in one’s experience. Some teachers say that after counting the breath, one should follow the breath, tracking its progress from inception at the tip of the nostrils, through the throat and into the lungs, hitting bottom in the stomach, i.e. abdominal breathing; then reversing the process, finally exhaling through the nostrils until the lungs are empty. This description, and its visualization, is also provisional in the larger context of reverting to the natural breath. Eventually, the breath will take care of itself, like a gate swinging in the breeze. Until then, it does not hurt to follow the approximation developed by our teachers, as a model.

So we should not ignore, nor should we get too attached to, the specific style of meditation or the instructions for doing it “right.” Understanding that the method of Zen has been highly refined over the centuries, we can imagine what it would be like if there were no legacy, no instructions recorded, and no support system for learning it, as represented by the infrastructure of Zen monasteries and temples. We would all have to sit down and invent, or discover, Zen for ourselves. This is a most startling aspect of the method as handed down to us. It is pointing to something primordial, a process that predates Buddhism itself. It is the most natural response to waking up to the profound and inconceivable problem of existence itself. This may be a problem without a solution. In which case the problem becomes how to live with this irreconcilable conflict. Zazen is not the solution itself, but is the method for arriving at it.

Next time we will take a different tack in defining this problem, and Zen’s unique approach to penetrating it. It is a koan, a gordian knot of universal proportions, yet not subject to intellectual solution. Don’t give up.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Let’s keep it simple.

It’s complicated enough

without our meddling.

In the last episode we said we would shift gears a bit from a general emphasis on the intersection of Design thinking and Zen as problem-solving activities, to a closer focus on some of the more salient details of both endeavors, and where we may find some overlap. This will necessarily constitute an exercise in finding harmony in comparing samenesses and differences in the two fields, which forms the title and substance of Sekito Kisen’s Sandokai, the briefest of the three major Ch’an poems we chant as liturgy in Soto Zen. The most relevant couplet for the conflation of Zen and Design is:

Existing phenomenally like box and cover joining
According with principle like arrowpoints meeting

The first line points to the province of Design and engineering, the manifestations of humankind’s ability to manipulate material phenomena through form following function, the foundation of cultural evolution, which explains the success of our species becoming the dominant sentient being on the planet. The second points at that elusive essence of existence, the underlying noumenon, that evokes the true nature and meaning of our world and our place in it. Almost impossible to suss out, like arrows meeting in mid air.

Zen has a history of emphasizing sameness over difference, especially with regard to the various schools of Zen that developed in history. Master Tozan Ryokai, founder of Soto Zen in China, makes this point powerfully in his masterful poem Hokyo Zamma: Precious Mirror Samadhi:

Now there are sudden and gradual in which teachings and approaches arise
With teachings and approaches distinguished, each has its standards
Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not
Reality constantly flows

Any differences in teachings and approaches, style and pedagogy, pale in comparison with the sameness of their focus and intent, in what we like to think of as distinctions without a real difference, at least in terms of goals and objectives. All rivers ultimately flow to the ocean, and all methods in Zen eventually reduce to the direct experience of insight. If not, they are not only not of Zen, but non-Buddhist in nature. And yes, we can speak of goals in Zen.

In this episode, a promised, we will focus more specifically on the method leading to Zen’s solution to the fundamental problem of existence. The approach Zen prescribes is, of course, zazen, but we will delve more deeply into some of the techniques and subroutines that we find helpful in meditation. Whatever pedagogical variants we may find between the branches or sects of Buddhism throughout its history, they fall under the rubric of method, more than that of purpose or philosophy. And since all branches of Zen have prioritized meditation to one degree or another, the variations tend to be in the area of subroutines of the zazen method, or communal support activities such as chanting. As Master Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai: Self-fulfilling Samadhi:

From the first time you meet a master without engaging in bowing, offering incense, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scripture
You should just wholeheartedly sit and thus drop away body and mind

Thank you, Dogen, for that clarification. This makes our marching orders crystal clear, while illustrating the difference between the absolutely central practice of zazen, and the relatively peripheral performance of the various monastic protocols of a more communal or devotional nature. You can spend your whole life going through the motions in a vain and ultimately futile attempt to conjure insight through indirect means. Or you can cut to the chase directly in zazen. Your choice. Or, of course, you can blend the two in an appropriate mix, as Master Dogen apparently did, in guiding the practice at the various monasteries he founded. But he never lost sight of the indispensable role of zazen. You can do without the rest.

I have chosen the principle of simplicity for this episode, which is a kind of unspoken precept of both Design and Zen, as a foil against which to discuss methodology, primarily that of Zen, but with some reference to Design. Simplicity is held in high esteem in both, as an aesthetic value as well as a functional objective. Even in higher science and mathematics, the simpler, more elegant solution to a given problem is regarded as most likely to be the correct one.

Methodology is not simply a fancier word for method, but is defined as the study of method itself. As such, it is a specialized but central focus of design processes, the idea being that our approach to problem-solving is itself a kind of meta-problem to be solved. If we are to engage and evolve the most effective and efficient approaches to solving the problem at hand, whether under contract to a client or redesigning to address our own needs, we must be open to questioning our SOP (standard operating procedure) from time to time. With the development of digital media and remote working online, the latest and greatest methods for group process has become a kind of cottage industry. Keeping up with them can demand our attention on a nearly full-time basis, like a medical doctor staying on top of new therapies and drug treatments.

Revisions to and variations on methods of meditation practice, as transmitted from generation to generation over the 2,500 years of its history as we know it, must comprise an inventory of innumerable twists and tweaks, most of which are probably not important enough to concern ourselves about. The fundamentally natural process of seated upright meditation — which in itself was probably a variation on meditating while standing, walking or lying down — is so basic and integrated with the human body that anyone sitting still enough for long enough will begin to experience its benefits. As long as they do not quit, which reveals another natural disposition of the human mind, the monkey side of it.

Sitting still enough for long enough raises some fundamental questions on its own. How still is still enough? How long is long enough? These two questions, while answerable only on a deeply personal basis, nonetheless are responsible for some of the simplicity of the design of Zen over time. Living in the age of Buddha some 2,500 years ago, time devoted to sitting in meditation would have had a different connection to the time necessary to devote to the demands of everyday life. We supposedly benefit from a glut of modern inventions and technologies deemed to be “time-saving.” But at the same time modern life seems to generate more and more time-consuming activities and preoccupations, partly to keep up with, and to be able to afford, all these devices that supposedly save us time. We think of living in simpler times as the antidote to our current busy-ness, but if we consider carefully we will probably conclude that there was nothing all that simple about previous chapters in history. The basics of aging, sickness and death were ever-present, and much more in-your-face than they are now, in our overly-medicated, comfort-obsessed, pain-averse culture.

Sitting still to a greater degree than may be natural was traditionally reinforced by strict discipline, imposed by seniors in the monastic environment, particularly that of Rinzai communities, rumor has it. Sitting longer must have also been a standard encouraged or imposed by peer pressure, the example of others. The natural herd instinct of competitiveness lends itself to this kind of conforming behavior. As did the threat of being ejected from the monastery, a sobering prospect in those days.

But being comfortable, while sitting still enough for long enough, is also emphasized in Soto Zen, and there is no reason to believe that it was not for those in the early days of developing the social framework for what is, after all, a very individual initiative, on the cushion. One person’s comfort may be another’s agony. Speaking of meditation cushions, this is one obvious overlap where Design and Zen come together as a necessity.

It is said that when Buddha left the band of ascetics with which he had been wandering the country, he acquired a bundle or sheaf of grass, then spread it out and used it to sit in meditation. He could have sat on the ground, but apparently his yogic training included the use of some kind of padding or equipment to enhance comfort and support the erect posture. We may imagine that he turned it on its side, leaving the binding tie in place, so that it made a kind of softly rounded mound, for him to straddle in some comfort. How he paid for it is another question for scholars to speculate about. Master Dogen makes a point of describing in detail the proper cushions and arrangement of the robe in Fukanzazengi, his seminal tract on the meditation he had learned in China.

So the design of the method of Zen, as well as the equipment to use in practicing it, was operative at the inception of the tradition. Later, issues such as durability and portability may have come into play, but it begs credulity to assume that Buddha would have carried the sheaf of grass with him down off the mountain, after that fateful night.

The simplicity of both the method, and the gear needed to exercise it, we will explore further in the next segment. Meanwhile, enjoy your practice of zazen, no matter how complicated you may be making it. Eventually you will redesign Zen for yourself, jettisoning all unnecessary accoutrements and extraneous attitudes. That is, if you do not cave to temptation, and give up too soon. Good luck with that.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is the problem?

Is there a real solution?

We have a method.

Last episode we promised a closer look at what we mean by “the problem,” and suggested that you might take another look at what you would define as your particular case example. What did you come up with? While it is true that the fundamental problem of existence is a shape-shifter, it seems to cycle through permutations back to its original form. Its iterations turn out to be variations on a theme.

One of the problems in writing is that we take the words we use for granted. A handy method for taking a look at them in greater depth is by referring to the universal definitive tool, the humble dictionary. This is not in itself a solution, of course. How each case is resolved depends upon the writer using the tool.

“Problem” is a word we use so often and so broadly that it becomes almost meaningless, if unexamined. You may have heard the expression, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” If you are like me you do not know whence it came. Another ubiquitous tool we have available today, much like a massively expanded dictionary, or its bigger sibling the encyclopedia, is Google. The generic for any search engine, having taken first position in the category some time ago. Like Kleenex is for facial tissue. Or Xerox once was for copiers. Looking it up, or “googling” it (which has become so vernacular that the word processor does not underline it in red), it turns out to be the coinage of Socrates. The very first entry on the internet “page” (incidentally defined as “one side of a sheet of paper” irony not lost on me) states that “Socrates believed that living a life where you live under the rules of others, in a continuous routine without examining what you actually want out of it is not worth living.”

It is worth noting that Socrates specifying “living under the rules of others… in a continuous routine” as aggravating conditions of the unexamined life, probably reflects his assessment of actual fellow citizens. These are the definitive characteristics of a state of slavery, which was widely practiced in ancient Greece. Googling further, we find that Socrates did indeed inveigh against the practice. Slavery as a societal problem has probably been with us since the dawn of so-called civilization, all the way back to prehistoric times. But that doesn’t make it acceptable, even in its many current disguises.

Getting back to the thread of this episode, a problem is generically defined as “a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome; a thing that is difficult to achieve or accomplish.” Or, as a modifier: “denoting or relating to people whose behavior causes difficulties to themselves and others.” And, as specifically related to physics and mathematics: “an inquiry starting from given conditions to investigate or demonstrate a fact, result, or law.” And more specifically to geometry: “a proposition in which something has to be constructed.”

A term’s etymology often sheds an interesting light on its original meanings. “Problem” derives from late Middle English: “originally denoting a riddle or a question for academic discussion.” Even earlier from Old French, via Latin, from the Greek, meaning “put forth” or “to throw before.” Coming full circle back to Socrates.

There’s a lot to unpack here, amplified by connections to Zen and Design disciplines. The “matter or situation” of life itself, as a problem, cannot be considered “unwelcome” exactly, though its salient characteristics as defined by Buddha — aging, sickness, and death — may certainly be regarded as harmful or undesirable to the living. In early Buddhism the Hinayana view of self-salvation regarded human existence as a kind of test “needing to be dealt with and overcome,” as do most religions. In Zen, the test is not simply a pass-fail. And we do not imagine a more perfect world to be found after death.

Design likewise regards certain aspects of human life as unwelcome and harmful, on both personal and social levels. As an application of artful, semi-scientific problem-solving, the definitions related to physics and mathematics may be more apropos. Design proceeds from “an inquiry starting from given conditions” as in science, but is intended “to… demonstrate a… result,” such as a new product or program, rather than to prove a fact or law.

Applied Design usually entails something that “has to be constructed.” In Design, the old must often be demolished to make room for the new and improved. The construction phase in architectural design is often preceded by demolition or “creative destruction.” Likewise in Zen as well. We may justifiably regard zazen practice as a process of actively deconstructing our own mind, to rebuild on a sounder foundation.

Buddhism certainly defines the problem of human existence as “relating to people whose behavior causes difficulties to themselves and to others,” as do most religious and philosophical systems. Zen, however, goes beyond the diagnosis of ignorance afflicting people, to the prognosis of meditation — as the most dependable approach to thoroughly defining the central problem. The natural process of contemplation, not overthinking, reveals potential solutions to life’s problems, in general and in detail. What we learn directly through observation on the cushion can modify our attitude and approach off the cushion, if we allow it to. This amounts to the purposeful actualization of the bodhisattva vow. We are not likely to be able to help others, if we are not even able to help ourselves.

Both Zen and Design encourage us to go beyond conventional definitions of the many problems of life, as well as the pat approaches and existing solutions on offer from others, notably in the “self-help” niche of modern publishing. This “going beyond” was a favorite expression of one of my formative teachers, when a student transcended the parameters of an assigned classroom problem. A most comprehensive example of going beyond is found in Hsinhsinming, Trust in Mind, by Master Sengcan, third patriarch in China. Toward the end he begins to summarize:

Emptiness here emptiness there
but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes
Infinitely large infinitely small
no difference because definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen

Definitions we may hold for such terms as “emptiness” and “infinity” come into question. We must go beyond them. “No boundaries” is an expression that Matsuoka Roshi used to explain the aspirational aspect of my first dharma name, Great Cloud, in Japanese, Taiun. Like a cloud flying in the sky, “no barriers anywhere.” Of course, every time I turn around, I run into another barrier. So, I have something rather concrete to aspire to, if I am to live up to my Zen name. It is a recurring problem.

The process of innovation in Design, as well as Zen, typically begins with self-study, evaluating our own personal needs and streamlining our efforts to meet them, before addressing similar problems as general conditions of society. This is broadly true of any process of invention. If we solve our personal problems of satisfying Maslow’s hierarchy of physiological needs for food, water, clothing, sleep and shelter, we are in a better position to help others do the same. The airplane oxygen mask syndrome. Same for safety and security. The higher needs of love and belonging, self-esteem and, finally self-actualization, take a little longer, and may require not a little creativity. Maslow may have been a closet Zen master.

It should be possible to aspire to satisfying higher needs while lacking the wherewithal on a subsistence level, you may argue. But this is the stuff of saints. It is not reasonable to expect this level of transcendence over circumstance from others, though you may demand it from yourself.

The Middle English derivation of “problem” as: “denoting a riddle or a question for academic discussion” sounds a lot like the koan practice of Rinzai Zen. But Rinzai himself would push back against the idea that koan training is designed to foster “academic discussion.” The endpoint of koan study is the same as that of zazen in Soto circles: to penetrate beyond the problem as framed, to the mystery at the core of existence. In other words, redefining the core problem.

Putting forth the proposition, or throwing the Great Matter before the assembly in dharma combat, however, is part and parcel of all Zen pedagogy. The question behind the questions put forth in Zen may be reduced to: What is the problem, exactly? And we are back, full circle, to problem definition.

Interchanges between masters and students as recorded in the Buddhist lineage often comprise the content of classic koan collections. But rather than functioning as a simple Q&A, where one party knows the answer and the other keeps trying until finally getting it right, these dialogs may more usefully be regarded as collaborative exercises in defining and redefining the fundamental problem in Zen. The student’s response to the probe posed by the master redefines the meaning of the exchange, furthering the dialog rather than bringing it to a conclusion. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “We teach each other Buddhism.” And what we are trying to grasp is “round and rolling, slippery and slick.” Ungraspable.

We might say that the Zen Problem, capital P, and the internal processes leading to its Solution, capital S, are not fundamentally different, whether the approach is Rinzai or Soto. Both are pointing at the same insight, while recognizing that such insight will necessarily be different for each individual. The external methodology is where we find the most obvious differences. Like any subject of education, the end result may be equally accurate and useful, but different schools stress differing methods in getting from here to there. But as Master Tozan says in Hokyo Zammai, Precious Mirror Samadhi:

Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not, reality constantly flows

This constantly flowing reality is captured in glowing terms by the ancestors of Zen in their poems of enlightenment, which we recite as liturgy. The implication is that the solution to the problem of existence in Zen comes not as an intellectual conclusion or mathematical formula, but as revelatory manifestation, an alteration in consciousness itself. Nothing actually changes, but everything is completely changed.

In our next episode we will focus more specifically on the method leading to the solution, the approach Zen prescribes to foster this change in awareness and attitude, and some of the techniques and subroutines that we find helpful. As a pedagogy, zazen has been refined over centuries and redesigned by hundreds of skillful masters in the lineage. We are fortunate to be the heirs of this model of simplicity directed toward defining and solving the most complex problem of all.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Chance is not random.

Synergy is arising —

in Design or Zen.

Welcome to the third episode of our new series on Design thinking and Zen. Note that we are capitalizing Zen, as is the custom, but also Design, as a reminder of its broader and deeper application to those uninitiated into its history and philosophy. The cognoscenti in both disciplines recognize the scope and breadth of each, in Zen referenced as the wide and long tongue of the Buddha. In other words, there is virtually nothing that does not in some way come within the purview of their teachings.

Last time, we promised to take a deeper dive into Design thinking this time, relating more of its method and techniques to those of Zen practice, and praxis. This last play on similar words was not intended exactly as a cliffhanger, but if you did not look them up, the fancy-sounding “praxis” carries the technical connotation of “practice as distinguished from theory,” as well as an “accepted practice or custom,” a very brief dictionary entry for a seldom-used term, other than in scholarly circles.

Definitions for the more common “practice,” go on for a page or so, summarized as “actual application or use of an idea, belief or method as opposed to theories,” the “customary, habitual, or expected procedure or way of doing of something,” or “repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it.” The three related examples cited are, respectively: teaching, self-defense training and medical practice; current nursing and child-rearing practices; language fluency and daily choir practice. So ubiquitous practice covers the waterfront. And this is only the noun form. Like many English terms, and appropriately for Zen, “practice” also functions as a verb.

So “praxis” in Design or Zen would distinguish those hands-on activities that result in actual tangible output, as distinct from the underlying theory, which may have been outdated by advances in technology or methodology within the discipline. “Zen is always contemporary,” Matsuoka Roshi would often say. Design, to be worthy of its name, must also remain “absolutely modern,” to borrow a phrase from the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Here we get a hint as to the dualistic construct of practice opposed to theory, in comparing Design and Zen. In Zen, it would correlate to the direct, non-verbal practice of observing buddha-dharma in zazen, as opposed to studying the written record of sutras and commentaries. Such as this one. Broadly speaking, the same bifurcation would apply to any selected area of endeavor. Training in all fields shares much the same dynamic, especially those of the apprentice-journeyman-master mode. In the applied art or science of Design, the documentation is as much or more visual as it is verbal. But the historical record’s relationship to current application is similar. Past is largely prologue to future design innovation. In Zen, we stand on the shoulders of giants who successfully adapted it to their times.

In professional Design, as in the Zen community, harmony within the group effects, and largely determines, the outcome of the project, in both worst-case and best-case scenarios. Personalities can get in the way of the creative process, but well-designed processes can compensate for personalities. There is no way to work around human nature, either in Zen or Design. Our lesser angels have to be taken into consideration without prejudice. But we do not try to change the people, in either case. We change everything else — the environment, the program, and the equipment — as needed. If we are successful, the people will be ready, willing and able to adapt, in positive ways. Skillful means are often indirect, to be most effective.

Of course, every profession in some sense entails problem-solving of some kind. But Design is focused like a laser on the issue of how to solve problems. Design studies include methodology, the study and assessment of methods themselves. We think of Design as primarily a problem-solving profession, usually addressing problems as defined by clients. The common syndrome is “leaping to a solution.” Clients often want to just sort of spit out the final idea, fully formed. Clients are often part of the problem.

Design clients bring all kinds of problems, usually within the specialty that your branding suggests: graphics, industrial, product, and now, website and social media. Everything is subject to design, or redesign. You can design furniture. You can design graphics, now for online small screen as well as print. You can design clothes. You can even design, or redesign, your life. That you can design or redesign anything can get to be a life-design issue. They say that if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. The social dimension is captured in the meme about the Japanese culture of conformity: “The nail that stands out will be hammered down.” If you are a professional designer, everything may look like it needs to be redesigned. You can waste a lot of time on projects you had no business, experience, or aptitude for taking on, for which the return is not worth it. There is a surprising amount of inertia inherent in physical design-build projects. You can leave most of it to others.

For example, cleaning periods at Zen centers — soji in Japanese — can be frustrating because they are often cut short, after only fifteen or twenty minutes. Which may not allow you to complete your task. You have to learn to leave finishing it to others, or to get back to it later. But of course, no task or project is ever completely finished. “Here comes another” was the old Zen man’s reply when the young monk asked why, at his age, he was still out there, sweeping the leaves. Problems, however you identify and define them, are part of a continuum. They just keep coming. But they don’t usually fix themselves.

One of the precepts of professional Design is that a problem must be defined as thoroughly as possible in order to determine the best solution. Definition is the crucial, true antecedent to any solution, from the familiar critical path management method, or CPM. The theory holds that if you thoroughly define the problem, then the most elegant and efficacious solution is likely to be inherent, even obvious, in the definition. Thus Design groups invest a lot of time in defining problems, rather than spit-balling solutions. In many cases the process ends up redefining the problem as perceived by the client. In any and all professions, even the experts are often plagued by tunnel-vision. A outsider viewpoint can help.

Zen is similar in that its approach is refined, or significantly redesigned, to meet the needs and context of each generation, like end-users sharing similar needs but different demographics. But certain basic principles survive the evolution of Zen practice over time, as they do in the development of Design. Many are common to both fields.

Such as simplicity. A very high value in design, its manifestations include such familiar classics as the bobby and safety pins, and all the basic machines including the wheel, featured often in caveman cartoons as an iconic placeholder for invention. In Zen, the design of meditation itself, as well as the classic meditation cushion, called zafu in Japanese, has become irreducibly simple over two-and-a-half millennia. I know, because I have tried to redesign both. Not much slop left in those tolerances.

You see all kinds of examples of problem-solving on the fly. At the health club I attend, they have a rather large whirlpool. On each of the four sides, there is a floor-tile sign that reads “No Diving.” It is not that large. And it is not that deep. It is obvious that If anyone ever did dive into it, they would immediately slam into the opposite wall. Yet here is someone’s solution to a perceived problem.

Another was a bumper-sticker I saw on a car in front of me. It reads “Be patient. Student Driver.” It occurred to me that we could all use one of these on the back of our cars. But if you think about it, you can’t really “be patient.” You either are patient, or you are not. We practice patience. In zazen, we develop patience on the cushion. Which then helps us be more patient with others. But you can’t just be patient. It takes practice. “Practice” is the root of “practical.” Zen is nothing if not practical.

Design also typically deals with practical problems, like storage and retrieval. I make the joke, based on a true story, that it took me about fifty years to understand that tables are not for storage. Shelves are for storage. Tables are work surfaces. As such, they must be kept clear, like the decks of the ship, empty of clutter. But you tend to scatter tools and materials on the work table in the heat of production, they end up getting in the way. Side tables, carts on wheels, and overhanging grids come into play.

Discipline in Design processes often amounts to paying attention to such details, just as it does in Zen. Both pay attention to detail, which is where God, or the devil, is to be found. Both Zen and Design are, by their very nature, practical in application. They work, however poorly or well, or work against you.

In post-digital filing systems, tangible paper folders have been replaced by on-screen instantiations, icons. File-naming protocol has become a thing, owing to the massive archives of information stored online. We forget what we called the document or folder, and randomly run key words through the search function, hoping to get lucky. Storage, without retrieval, is just organized chaos.

An example is the storage system I discovered at a mid-size retail design corporation when I joined them as a graphic designer. In pre-digital days, before the advent of computer-assisted-design, print production was fed by mechanical art, drawing-board paste-up, literally cutting paper images and type with knives, gluing them on mount boards, then photographing to produce plates for offset or silkscreens for printing. Storing art boards for reuse was a necessity, so they had built a room with counters against the walls, under which were vertical slots labeled alphabetically as initials for their clients, such as Zayre’s, a large retail chain at that time. As time went on, the number of boards that accumulated under the letter “Z” would overflow the slots allotted, so the whole arrangement would have to be revised.

I mentioned this problem to a teaching colleague from my tenure at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. An early computer design innovator, he was instrumental in founding SIGGRAPH, an annual conference on computer graphics started in 1974, a few years after I had moved to Atlanta. He explained, much as you would to an 11-year-old, the logic of the two-part system for storage and retrieval, common to public libraries. Books are not stored alphabetically, but listed that way in a card deck or other compact form, a quick scan of which tells you where the piece is stored. It does not matter that different client materials share the same shelf or bin, so the system can be expanded as needed. Which seems obvious once explained. Which, again, shares something with Zen. Once you begin to experience Zen, rather than think about it, some things seem obvious that were initially puzzling.

We may usefully extend the notion of storage and retrieval as a fundamental principle, and consider how it may apply to Zen. What are we doing in zazen in terms of storage and retrieval, in developing a Zen frame of mind toward everyday experience? Are we simply storing and retrieving experiences for further consideration? Or are we storing Zen teachings, and retrieving them as benchmarks for comparison to our own experience? How does the concept of storage and retrieval fit into the very personal scenario of “examining thoroughly in practice,” Master Dogen’s frequent trope? I leave the resolution of this koan to you.

One aspect of the special area called information Design is characterized by mnemonics, memory prompts. You may have seen my semantic modeling of Buddhist teachings, which visualize them as geometric forms. Historical teachings employ the device of enumeration, particularly from Buddha’s time. Remembering that there are four of these, six of those, eight or twelve parts to this, helps you to assimilate the complete concept, as well as to retain what is important, what to pay attention to, in Zen.

These days, we have all kinds of influences pulling us this way and that: social media, public television, politics, religion, and science, to name a few. All trying to tell us what is important to remember, what we should be paying attention to, what we should be doing something about, what we should be reacting to, what should be preoccupying our time and attention. In many cases, the message may be the last thing we should be concerned with, let alone obsessing about. Like the latest exercise device.

In Design we have this phrase, “The Worst Possible Solution,” a kind of nuclear option. If you can figure out what would be the absolute worst thing you could do in a given situation, it may suggest what you might do, that doesn’t go that far. Wrapping your mind around the worst thing as an extreme may be necessary to back up to a workable solution. For example, coming up with an improved concept for personal transportation, such as a new design for a car or truck. The worst thing for the client would be eliminating the need for a vehicle altogether, say by improving public transportation. But pushing the envelope that far may provide a more comprehensive context for envisioning vehicles that make sense in the next generation of transportation. Viable solutions may appear in the rear-view mirror.

Another Design exercise is called “Name that concept.” In developing and marketing an item or program, naming it becomes a vital part of cutting through the clutter of communication. Simplicity again. Note that book and movie titles have trended to fewer and fewer words, one if possible. Typically we tend to throw out different names, attempting to leapfrog. It is not done that way professionally. Chance or random processes are brought to bear. Nothing is truly random, but an element of surprise, the ”happy accident” embraces a lack of control. “Free association” yields a list of words positively associated with the idea. Random shuffling generates all possible combinations of pairs, hopefully yielding a name that names and captures the concept, but that you would never think up on your own.

Such methods typically involve three parts, the input, the chance process, and the output or yield.

These are the kinds of methods employed in design circles to enhance productivity. The attention to methodology inspires creativity, sometimes defined as a new combination of two preexistent things. We cannot really create anything new, but we can combine two or more things in new ways. This is an application of synergy, “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects: the synergy between artist and record company” as my laptop’s dictionary would have it.

Again, compare and contrast with Zen. The method of zazen is random in the same sense that no scientific experiment can ever be 100% exactly replicated. When we return to the cushion, everything — and I mean everything — has changed in the interim. The very sameness that we perceive, in combination with the difference that we do not, triggers a synergistic realization of the harmony of sameness and difference. Sound familiar? Sekito Kisen recognized this dynamic long ago.

Next time we will take a closer look at what we mean by “The Problem.” Meanwhile take a look at your own definition of your problem, and see if you are missing something. It may indicate the solution.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What did he intend —

the design intent of Zen?

We are still learning.

In the last episode of UnMind we closed with comments that Zen and design both entail individual effort as well as group collaboration, and that designing the most efficacious processes in each requires experimentation and creativity. We will continue this line of thinking in this episode, around design and Zen. We also suggested taking another look at what Buddha did, from this perspective. What problem did Buddha solve, would you say? Or what problem did he define?

Shinjin sensei, a senior teacher at Atlanta Soto Zen Center responded,

Well, the problem started when he was still living at home, at the palace. He left the palace and saw a sick person, a corpse, a mendicant monk, and an old person, and that started the problem. Why do we have to go through this at all? What’s the point, if that’s how we are going to wind up? That was the problem that was put in front of him. We are taught that his solution was essentially the Four Noble Truths, the lecture that he gave at Deer Park.

Yes, according to tradition, he defined the problem as “suffering.” But, the problem of what? I don’t’ think a client came to him, and said, “I got this problem I want you to solve.” Right? He defined the problem, according to the way it is interpreted — and I have some pushback on this — as suffering. The problem — of what? — is suffering? What would you fill in the blank with, there?

“I would say the problem of existence is suffering,” commented Shinjin.

So the problem of existence is suffering. Then we can deconstruct this statement, taking the last word “suffering” and ask, What did the Sanskrit dukkha really mean? We translate it into suffering, and then say OMG, Buddhism is so pessimistic. But I think dukkha simply means “change.” I am not a scholar, but I am pretty sure that if you look up the Sanskrit, it is going to have fifteen, twenty or thirty meanings. I think very simply he defined the problem of existence as change. From our human perspective, yes, we would tend to emphasize the suffering aspect of it. Things that we would love to change won’t change, and things that we don’t want to change keep changing.

In interfaith dialog around the themes of prophecy, we discover that the Abrahamic theistic religions, such as Christianity and Islam, agree that it is all going to come down to Armageddon, and it is all going to be different from then on. We are all going to live without aging, sickness and death, we will live forever in the presence of God, and there will be no change. I keep coming back at them on the panel, asking How can that work? How does that work, I mean? And the answer is always, “God’s mysterious ways.” It’s not logical; it does not make any sense. Not to mention that God supposedly set things up the way they function now. So why change all the rules all of a sudden?

Buddha’s definition of the problem, even though they were living in much more primitive or simpler times, would still be the same today. He would say, “No, no, that’s not it. That’s all ignorance.” The universe will continue to operate on the same basic principles of physics — or Dharma — that it always has. The proximate human problem is still the same as it was then: Ignorance of the primordial sort. Human aspiration to something less ambiguous is understandable, but founded on self-centered ignorance.

One aspect of Buddha’s definition of the problem is this reification of the constructed self. We have this myth, or this idea, of this “self” that we prop up and support, and identify with, self-identify, and redefine as we mature and age. “That’s the difference between me and you!” is the catchphrase. Praising myself at the expense of others. The Precepts come into play in these social interchanges. But Buddha looked at it and said, You know, I’ve checked this out thoroughly, and I find no evidence of the existence of this Atman, this so-called self, or soul. Sorry, I know you’re not going to like that, but that’s my testimony.

I think Buddha basically did a very fundamental exercise in problem definition. In doing so, he applied this method that we still apply, which is meditation: Sitting still; paying strict attention; going beyond thought; going deeper; and so forth. If there were no Buddhism, if there were no religion, if there were no philosophy, and you found yourself on this planet, you would have to come up with something like this. You would have to figure it out. In fact, everyone is practicing Zen whether they know it or not. They just may not be doing a very good job of it.

We are fortunate to have teachers who have refined the definition of the problem, and the prescription for practicing its solution over two and a half millennia.

When we think about Buddhism in the context of design or problem-solving, Buddha, from the story we are told, looked at the same life you and I are living — setting aside a lot of differences in 2,500 years — but the fundamentals are the same: aging, sickness and death. He went through a thoroughgoing process that we call “problem definition” in design circles.

Buddha saw a problem. For him, the problem was existence itself. The story goes that the suffering he witnessed estranged him from existence itself. In his mid-thirties — in what we may regard as a kind of extended adolescence, having been overly protected by his parents — he rebelled. He didn’t want to do what daddy wanted — to take over the family business as a warrior leader — and went off on a spiritual quest instead. We think of it as a net-positive thing that occurred, because although at the end of six years he sat down in desperation and resolved to die, he didn’t actually die. He survived. Then he began his career of teaching others to do likewise, about which he apparently felt some ambivalence as to whether he really had anything to teach or not. This reflects a kind of humility in the face of what had to be an overwhelming experience of transformation of world view. There is also a kind of humility around creativity in design. I think we find the same sense of humility in Zen.

Buddha’s story is an example of breaking the rules and going against the societal norms of his time. Had he not been of a high caste, he probably would not have gotten away with it. In design, we isolate and identify such syndromes of behavior, and codify them as legitimate techniques in creativity. We intentionally “break the rules,” for example by including chance processes we cannot control.

Considering what Buddha actually did, he defined the problem of human existence by thoroughly examining it in practice, as Master Dogen would later express it. He analyzed his experience and translated it into a coherent message for his fellow travelers and followers, including the prescription to “do thou likewise.” But also not to simply take his word for his conclusions. Check them out for yourself. And do not confuse the map for the territory. Be prepared to innovate, to improvise. To break the rules of Zen.

In zazen we say, Sit still. Sit for a long time. Quiet the mind. Or, as I repeatedly say, Sit still enough, for long enough. With the proviso that you alone can know what is still enough, and long enough. As long as you have any doubts about it, it is probably not yet enough. But we might also say, Oh really? What if I don’t sit still? What if I decide I am going to move at any time, or even all the time, when I am sitting? As another of our senior teachers often says, with her ironic smile, the Zen police are not going to arrest you! In other words, contrary to the received wisdom, improvise. See what happens. Give yourself permission to improvise and experiment. Buddha did, I guarantee you.

Breaking the rules. We approach Zen meditation, Buddhist studies and protocols as if we have to follow all these rules. You may say, Well, okay, but I have to sit still, don’t I? If you allow yourself permission, you may say, Wait a minute. Who am I to be telling myself I have to sit still? I am going to give myself permission to move. Then you might sit there, secretly moving for the whole period. Just pulsating, not forcing yourself to sit completely still. So you don’t start developing resistance in your knees, your back, and so forth. Coping with it as you go. What may happen is that you find out why it is that we sit still — by not sitting still.

Then there is that relative versus absolute stillness. Where is it?

People coming to the Zen center frequently say, “I didn’t know what zazen was until I stopped doing it. Then I figured out, Oh, that’s what it is, and started doing it again. When your world starts falling apart. But there is a middle way between the extremes of motion and stillness, called mokurai in Sino-Japanese, meaning something like motion in stillness and/or stillness in motion. Relative stillness is what we are going for, to enter into absolute nonduality. Same for all the measurables around zazen.

Sit for a long time, an hour, half-hour, sit as long as you can. Not necessarily at the same time. Maybe sit 10 minutes. Maybe try interval training all day long. Take 10 minutes at the desk. Take a deep breath and sit there. No one will notice. And then get back to work again. Or sit all day, one day.

Matsuoka Roshi captured this agile approach to zazen with his trademark economy of language, “Sit five minutes, five minutes buddha. Sit a half-hour, buddha for half an hour. But wouldn’t you rather be buddha all day?” Of course, we cannot sit 24/7. But we can adopt creative tactics to approximate it.

In the morning when you rise (shout out to Crosby, Stills and Nash) sit up on the bed for a while. Rather than panicking and running around like a chicken with your head off, as usual. Or when you are going to bed, just sit on the side for a while. As Bucky Fuller commented, all the questions you have been asking all day long, when the answers come flooding in at night, you can’t even remember the questions. Let them settle down. Then you can sleep. Perchance to dream.

As Master Dogen reminds us, when we rise from zazen to begin walking meditation — kinhin in Japanese — don’t rise “violently.” Rise gently and slowly, keeping attention in the belly, focused on the still point called the tanden. Negotiate the transition intentionally and attentionally, maintaining equilibrium while shifting from sitting to walking. Standing and bowing to each other, as we do in the zendo, makes the transition even more gradual and smooth. Same thing when you are going to sleep at night. Sitting on the bed and moving slowly, smoothly into lying down, segueing into sleep, horizontal zazen.

These kinds of transitions are built into Zen practice. We segue into the intensity of the still and silent meditation coming in from the chaotic and noisy street. Then, through chanting the service at the end of the sitting period, segueing back into the vehicle, and getting back on the expressway. The chanting helps with these transitions, Matsuoka Roshi explained. You can continue chanting on the commute.

You can be creative in how you approach everything, or anything. Somebody had to make this Zen thing up, at some point in time, after all. Buddha was probably taught meditation by somebody, some sort of yogic meditation. But then he likely made changes in he way he approached it, the way he taught it to others, and how he interpreted its meaning. He had to experiment in order to make those changes.

We have to have the flexibility of mind to imitate our teachers in the beginning. You have to trust them, putting yourself at their disposal. This doesn’t make any sense to me, but s/he said do this, so I am going to do this. At a later time, we have to have the flexibility of mind to innovate. I know at first I was just trying to imitate Matsuoka Roshi when I came to Atlanta and set up the first Zen center here. After a while it became very clear to me that not only was I not Matsuoka; my students were not me. I had to figure out ways to innovate approaches to training so that it worked with the situation. You know, you don’t practice Zen with the sangha you want; you practice Zen with the sangha you have!

Next time we will take a little deeper dive into design thinking, relating more of its method and techniques to those of Zen practice and Zen praxis. There is a difference in these two similar-sounding terms, which hopefully will become clear. In the meantime, look it up.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is the problem?

Buddha defined it as Dukkha —

I say Upaya.

We launched the UnMind podcast the third trimester of 2020, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Running through the end of 2021, they featured various individual episodes and series of commentaries on selected historical teachings of Zen Buddhism from India, China and Japan. We wrapped up with Matsuoka Roshi’s excellent overview on finding your way amongst the Zen ways, “Dhyanayana,” from Mokurai, the collection of his later talks from the 1970s and 80s. A most appropriate conclusion to the year, as he compares and contrasts various Zen approaches, recommending Soto Zen as the upaya, or skillful means, of our times. Of course, Sensei was somewhat biased in this regard, but he had an informed grasp of Rinzai and other Zen pedagogies on offer in Japan as well as the West. His focus was on isolating the vehicle best suited for our times. This is in line with the founder of Soto Zen in China, Tozan Ryokai, as reflected in his Ch’an poem Hokyo Zammai, Precious Mirror Samadhi:

Now there are sudden and gradual in which teachings and approaches arise
With teachings and approaches distinguished each has its standards
Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not reality constantly flows

The operative phrase here is that last: “reality constantly flows.” By recommending Soto Zen’s direct approach through upright seated meditation, zazen, Matsuoka Roshi directs our attention to the reality that is constantly flowing in front of our face. However diverse the choices served up on the spiritual smorgasbord of modern meditation in America, and however interesting the times in which we live, zazen is the most skillful means for dealing with the real koan presented by everyday life.

When we consider Zen’s central focus on zazen rather than, say, the koan practice of the Rinzai approach, we can evaluate it scientifically as a method. But like aerobics or calisthenics, we have to experience Zen meditation directly in order to clearly understand and appreciate how it works. Simply sitting still enough for long enough that the effects of zazen begin to set in place, whether sudden or gradual, short- or long-term, is irreducibly simple. But it entails some complexity on both personal and social levels.

In this new year, we introduce a departure from our past approach to the UnMind podcast. We will explore the intersection of design thinking and Zen practice, including creativity in general, the inflection point and perspective from which I have lived most of my life. In this new set of fifty or so episodes, we set the context with a model of the world as manifested in four concentric spheres, from the inner personal sphere to the outer social, natural, and universal spheres. Reality is constantly flowing in and through the interfaces of all four, as interactive spheres of influence.

Meditation is located in the inmost sphere, our personal intimate bubble. Here we find the posture, breath and attention of zazen, in O-Sensei’s tripartite breakdown. Likewise, you can locate the other dimensions of the Eightfold Path within each of these spheres, some crossing the boundaries between. The Three Actions of Buddhism are said to be of body, mouth and mind, bridging the personal and social, with some effect in the world of nature.

Sensei’s simple three-point model of Zen’s intentional-attentional approach to meditation includes a fourth point, namely yourself. This quartet completes a triangular pyramid, the simplest of regular geometric solids, in the three-pointed base of the cross-legged posture, with your head at the apex. A tetrahedron is the most stable of forms found in nature, such as molecules of carbon, which can manifest as soft as soot or as hard as diamond. Assuming the posture brings its stability into your life.

Crossing the boundary zone into the next sphere out, the surrounding social milieu, there arises the practical matter of finding time for zazen in the midst of our modern, hectic schedules. Add to that the social issue of how it affects our relationships at home, at work and elsewhere. Since we are not monastics, the world of the householder is the environ of our practice, extending to the workplace and other locales. In effect, it constitutes our monastery without walls.

Most of the friction in daily life is found at the boundaries between the spheres. The interface of the social with the natural is the inflection point of our current struggles with pandemic, and looming disasters associated with climate change. This is the passing pageantry of life, the backdrop to Zen.

The method of Zen, centered around zazen, is taken up as skillful means. This expression primarily refers to the pedagogy by which the ancestors transmitted Zen practice to their students. But the various means by which this transpired constitute a problem-solving activity. The example of the teacher is necessary to developing an appropriately receptive attitude toward the potential of leading a Zen life. But this is not the Zen of pop culture, so-called American Zen, but of Zen Buddhism, the genuine article. Including how and where it all started with the historical Buddha. The original Order in India was an experiment in intentional community, a radical departure from the caste system of the time, structured around the practice of meditation. As such, it was a design initiative.

There are many dimensions where Zen and design thinking overlap, particularly in the design of zazen. Various sub-routines such as counting the breath, posture correction, and walking meditation become natural extensions of Zen meditation. Zen protocols form bridges between the personal sanctuary of sitting and the social necessity of taking action in the world. Balance and centering, stillness or samadhi, is key to outcomes in both. Zazen itself is the most we can do to actualize “engaged Zen.”

Design done right is also a way of engaging the world and, like Zen, has developed an entire philosophy as a side-effect. Professional design training emphasizes skillful means in the form of sophisticated problem-solving schema. I was exposed to this worldview in my late teen years at the Institute of Design, Illinois Tech, under the rubric and tutelage of what is known as the Bauhaus method. Its origin was in the famous pre-World War II school in Weimar, Germany. Just as zazen is a process of immersing ourselves in our own sensory awareness, design-build activities require immersion in materials, tools and deliberate processes, both innovative and productive. Both methods are empirical.

Design and Zen both go beyond their popular misconceptions. Design is often relegated to interior design as dealing only with surface appearance, merely manipulating decorative materials, form and color to achieve a more pleasing aesthetic effect, basically superficial. But like Zen, design as a way of engaging reality goes deeper. It penetrates to the level of functionality, the essential underlying activity. “Form follows function” is a precept of design, akin to Master Dogen’s principle of zenki, “total function.”

Comparing design thinking with Zen’s non-thinking, a host of congruent concepts, parallel processes and shared values becomes startlingly obvious. Beginning with intensive personal investigation of media and materials, whether inborn as body-and-mind in Zen, or those of the external world in design, the scope of application and resultant sphere of influence in each area naturally expands over time.

R. Buckminster Fuller, an exemplar and mentor to several generations of design professionals, called his process “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” His work influenced broad segments of society, with unique contributions to the educational and architectural fields, to the mathematics of engineering characterized by his iconic domes, including early design programs targeting the stewardship of global resources. His disciples are continuing these traditions yet today.

Both Zen and design disciplines entail individual effort as well as group collaboration. Designing and redesigning the most efficacious processes in each requires experimentation and creativity.

We will continue this line of thinking in the next episode. Meanwhile, look at what Buddha did. What problem did Buddha solve, would you say? Or what problem did he define?

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Rinzai or Soto?

It does not make much diff’rence —

if you are sincere.

In the last segment, we ended with Matsuoka Roshi’s cautionary tale about overreacting to the menu of Zen and other meditation teachers on offer today:

In all the world now there are many genuine teachers and many more pretenders. The popular Zen teachers of today may fade in a year or two.

He goes on to point out that with Master Dogen, and other teachers in the so-called unbroken face-to-face lineage from Shakyamuni on down, many of their stories are subject to revisionist history, which further amplifies his point on history as a great deceiver:

Of course, if you were a slightly dishonest scholar of the Sung era who wanted to justify the Lin Chi sect’s use of koans, it would be handy to make a venerable canon testify to that prior practice. This story, and that of Dogen, are just two specifics from modern Zen research to remind you to distrust historians a little. With bad information, it is easier to let yourself believe some embellished legends, and then wonder why they do not make sense in your own life.

Why should the history of Zen Buddhism be any different, after all? As soon as any record is written down, as usual by the victors, it is subject to error, intentional or accidental. While we have the ideal of the separation of church and state as a contemporary meme, it was not always so. Those who do not study history may be doomed to repeat it, but we cannot take for granted that the written record is any more than an approximation of what actually happened, and why. The who, how, where and when are often questionable as well. Not to be too paranoid, but Zen Mind is one of few things we can trust:

There is of course a second thing to distrust. There is nothing that is static, so do not look for an unchanging Zen tradition any more than you would look for an unchanging you. In examining Zen as it has been taught in all the different times and places in the last 2,500 years or so, the form has changed, and changed, and changed again. The original vinaya, or monastic rules, as set down by Shakyamuni Buddha to his disciples are no longer all practiced in the monasteries of modern China and Japan, and yet, the Zen practice is as authentic as the first practice of the historic Buddha.

Here is a fundamental koan on the history of Zen: its form changes but its essence does not. It is based on the innate quality of the buddha, or awakened, nature, as being natural, the birthright of all humans. The method, that is the only concrete thing that is transmitted in Zen, is what fosters this realization. It does not matter, in this sense, what the historical details really were. We do not claim the performance of miracles, for instance, other than awakening to the miracle of existence itself.

After going into tighter focus on the history of Zen in 9th century China, mentioning some of the standout “monsters” of Zen, as we like to refer to them, and remarking their differences, Sensei includes verbal and visual pedagogy:

Each of the three schools [Ikyo; Ummon Zen; and Hogen Zen sects] was based upon meditation practice and upon the use of verbal or diagrammatic means to reveal the light of inherent wisdom. Wei Yang of Ikyo Zen and his disciples used a series of circular figures that they would draw in the sand. By means of these illustrations and the terse descriptions that accompanied them, and by question-and-answer, called “mondo,” the Ikyo masters worked for the liberation of their disciples.

Socrates was not the only master innovating non-traditional teaching approaches. We are challenged to do likewise today.

Wrapping up his brief survey of this century-plus of Ch’an, Sensei summarizes:

Of the five schools of Zen, these three vanished. What is ironic is that Yun Men, founder of the Ummon sect, was the most popular of all the founders of the five houses of Zen in that century. And yet, the Ummon sect vanished. The two Chinese houses of Zen that lasted, and later crossed the shore to Japan, were Rinzai and Soto. These two I will discuss in a little more depth.

Matsuoka Roshi, like many of the early pioneers of Zen in America, was steeped in the history of Zen, developing a near-encyclopedic memory of teachings and the exchanges between the great ancestors. But for our immediate ancestors, the history of Zen was inseparable from the history of the country, Japan, itself. In our case, they may appear as interesting — if somewhat irrelevant — stories from a remote part of the world. Imagine what it would be like if they were intertwined with the story of America, from its founding to the Revolution, and the subsequent establishment of the Republic. Master George Washington. Fully enlightened Thomas Jefferson, Zenji. James Madison, dai osho. John Adams, Roshi. Brother Ben Franklin, that iconoclast rogue monk. Householders all. But I digress:

The Master I Hsuan (Gigen in Japanese) of Lin Chi Temple is credited with being the founder of the Lin Chi or Rinzai Zen sect. Lin Chi, as I Hsuan is also known, was a very intense, driven and severe disciple of Huang Po (Obaku Kiun in Japanese). He used beatings, shouting and other severe discipline in conjunction with koan practice to open the eyes of his followers. Although others before Lin Chi used these methods, under Lin Chi’s guidance, they became a most skillful means of teaching to obtain immediate enlightenment. Lin Chi also discoursed on more doctrinal issues, like the four propositions of Indian Buddhist logic; but such discussions were the common interest of Zen disciples in China at the beginning of the Five Dynasties period. Despite his strict and somewhat brutal methods, Lin Chi was also well able to discourse on the dharma in public debate, a teaching method now sometimes called “dharma combat.” After Lin Chi, however, the teaching style of the sect became more formalized, and less spontaneous. Nonetheless, it has proved itself to be a vital and effective teaching.

Where others see and tend to stress difference over sameness — the current political term of art being “divisiveness” — Sensei, and Zen teachers in general, tend to stress sameness over difference. The ultimate resolution of this binary is found in Sekito Kisen’s Sandokai — Harmony of Sameness and Difference. Matsuoka Roshi had friends who were priests in the Rinzai sect, one of whom visited the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, and was the guest speaker. Since it was in Japanese, I do not remember the content. But afterward, if memory serves, we began striking both shoulders with the kyosaku, the “wake-up” stick, instead of only the right shoulder. Sitting with a Rinzai group in Japan in 1987, I asked for the stick, and they struck down the back on both sides of the spine, rather than on the shoulders. I suspect that Matsuoka Roshi adopted the double strike as an influence of Rinzai, but do not know for sure.

He goes on to compare Rinzai with Soto, the tradition in which he trained at Sojiji, Keizan’s monastery:

The original Ts’ao Tung sect does not bear much resemblance to the modern Soto sect. In fact, old Lin Chi Zen is closer to modern Rinzai than Ts’ao Tung is to modern Soto. The masters Liang Chiai of Tung Shan monastery, and Pen Chi of Ts’ao Shan monastery are credited as being cofounders of the Soto sect, although Liang Chiai died thirty-one years before Pen Chi. Again the main practice was zazen, but the “finger pointing to the moon of enlightenment” took the form of the teaching of the five ranks.

The five ranks were a system of symbols used to differentiate among the levels of enlightenment. The ranks were the prince; the minister; the prince looking at the minister; the minister returning to the prince; and the prince and minister in harmony. Additionally, the idea of “host and guest” were used interchangeably with those of the “prince and minister.” Circular symbols in black and white as well as kua from the I Ching were also used to try to communicate this abstruse and complicated scheme of teaching. As those of you who have practiced Soto Zen know, we do not discuss the five ranks. Instead, we practice zazen-only Zen.

So here we find the reduction to zazen-only, the hallmark of simplicity of Soto praxis. Tozan’s Five Ranks constitute one of many such models that the ancestors designed to help their students visualize the big picture, while putting their main effort into the reality before their faces. The next sentence is a classic of stating the obvious, but with the resonance of Zen’s encompassing worldview:

Time passed, and change occurred. The Soto and Rinzai sects also changed. By the middle of the twelfth century AD, Rinzai had become the more popular Chinese Chan sect. The koan system became a regular feature of Rinzai practice. The word “koan” (kung-an in Chinese) translated literally means a “public case,” in this instance a public discussion of the truth of Zen. The koan were alogical problems which were given to disciples to solve. The solution of the koan could only be arrived at with an experience of satori, or some realization of enlightenment.

Sensei goes on to demystify this thing, the koan, explaining that,

…no intellectual solution to the koan is acceptable to the Rinzai masters because mental antics or logic are the chatter of the superficial self. Only after a hundred and eight thousand or more surface mind answers is the logical mind brought to a frustrated impasse. Then, and most suddenly at that moment, the eye of enlightenment sees with all certainty the solution to the koan.

Sensei traces the origin of the schism that developed between the two systems:

Two great Zen masters lived in the twelfth century China: Rinzai Master, Ta Hui (1189–1163 AD) and Soto Master, Tien T’ung (1091–1157 AD). These two contemporaries criticized each other’s version of Zen teaching. You will hear their positions repeated today, so it is instructive to know what they said.

And concludes his gloss on the history with a reconciliation of the conflict on the personal level:

When Tien T’ung died, his Rinzai dharma combatant, Ta Hui, hastened to attend his funeral rites. Soto and Rinzai Zen of the Sung dynasty ending time is fairly much how Rinzai and Soto are practiced today.

Puts one in mind of other famous contemporaries and their deaths, such as Huineng and Shenxui, of the so-called Southern and Northern schools of Ch’an. And, more recently, that of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who famously passed within hours of each other on July 4th, 1826.

Sensei then brings us to our present lineage founder:

It was not too long after Tien T’ung’s death that Dogen Zenji was born in 1200 AD in Japan.

We will not be able to fully cover this in-depth exegesis on the ways of Zen in the time we have available. I will share a few of the nuggets, with the hope that you will follow by studying the whole chapter and book. In concluding his remarks on Soto versus Rinzai pedagogy, Sensei uses some striking imagery:

Rinzai Zen moves from the outer world to the inner world like a fearless hunter questing for an elusive quarry. If, however, you can understand… Dogen’s “practice and enlightenment are the same”; and my “Five minutes of practice, five minutes a Buddha!”; you will know that Soto is just the opposite Zen of Rinzai.

The original nature is already present and shining… In Soto Zen, when we sit, we let this original nature shine as it is. When we simply stop interfering, this original nature will melt all our hardness; will untangle our confusion; will blunt all our sharp and jutting angles; and will balance us perfectly without any effort of the small self directing an assault on the great and enlightened self.

I think that this sudden enlightenment of the old Rinzai masters seemed so sudden because the way of koan inquiry into the original nature is not the way that the original nature is and acts. The practice of koan Zen applies an extra and angular energy to the primal radiant nature. It pits the small self’s desire for peace and harmony with all its own turbulence against the great and silent original mind. Only when the Rinzai practitioner succeeds in exerting a 180 degree polar opposite and artificial energy, does the seat of consciousness turn about on its axis. Suddenly, like two out-of-phase magnets that flip and lock together with inseparable force, the original nature and worldly nature become one, fused inseparably. It seems sudden and violent because koan Zen moves against the outward and outpouring current of radiant enlightenment.

All the while, the gradual Soto practice of zazen allows the original nature to dissolve the small, suffering and separated self, breath by breath. The end result does not seem, perhaps, as striking; but it is more sure as a Dhyanayana. No matter whether gradual or sudden, first remembering, then bringing the enlightened nature back into pre-eminence is the way of Zen.

Sensei concludes with an exhortation for Americans to practice the gentler approach of Soto Zen:

Today, I can absolutely recommend Soto Zen to you as the upaya and Dhyanayana of our time. If you are half-hearted, it will produce no ill effects; and, in fact, will improve some areas of your life physiologically, emotionally, or mentally. If you are sincere and determined to the end, Soto Zen will lead you surely, safely, and most harmoniously, to the supreme realization and to the subtlest Samadhi in this life.

Note the definition of zazen Samadhi as the “subtlest,” Master Dogen’s “fine mind of Samadhi,” or “subtle mind of Samadhi.”

Please take Sensei’s compassionate plea to heart. Just sit still enough, long enough, to let your true colors come shining through.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Skillful means or not,

it is still all up to you —

not your teacher’s fault!

In the last segment, we ended with Matsuoka Roshi’s simple but stunning summation of the essence of Zen training, or skillful means:

Ultimately, what form the upaya take are the conjunction of a particular teacher, and all that he or she is, with a particular student or group of students and all that they are. In the free flow of Zen the teaching will teach itself as long as the teacher doesn’t interfere, and as long as the student is receptive.

As promised, we reveal his conclusion from the above:

Really, this should lead to a conclusion. Next to conviction and perseverance in Zen training, picking the right teacher is most important. In ancient China and Japan, monks, nuns and laymen used to wander from temple to teacher and teacher to temple seeking the right teacher consonant with their own zeal, temperament and moment of development, a free soul who could show them very effectively the way from blindness to happiness.

It should be remembered that this does not mean that we look for a teacher who agrees with our understanding of Zen, however primitive. It is recommended to find one we do not agree with, in order that we can learn something new and different. After remarking that all the teachers of the past had their quirks and personality traits, as well as different methods of teaching, Sensei explains the mystery of transmission in greater detail:

This is the meaning of the heart-to-heart transmission of Zen understanding in masters and disciples of complimentary or contrasting affinity. Simply stated, how the schools of Zen developed were that the right disciples found the right teachers, and so learned about Zen in the very marrow of their bones. They achieved by that an understanding so deep, so pervasive, as never to be forgotten or disregarded again. This is the source and the life of Zen heart-to-heart transmission, tamashii to tamashii.

This illustrates that nothing is actually “transmitted” from master to disciple, but that the latter comes to apprehend the reality the former naturally occupies.

Then Sensei generalizes the place and process of Zen training in the larger context of history in general:

Whenever one looks at history, it is a play of great men and women in a boiling ocean of popular sentiment, stirred by distinctive currents of patriotism and war, of trade and poverty, and of culture and peace. Personal greatness and tragedy, collective order and chaos, are in continual ebb and flow.

Here is a global embrace of duality from the perspective of nonduality. It sounds as if he is describing the world of the 21st century, though this talk was given in 1985.

He goes on to issue some cautionary tales in looking for and evaluating a Zen teacher for yourself:

I warn you not to rely only on a particular human tradition, or a name alone, as an emblem of true transmission of wisdom. There are lazy, self-important and -indulgent priests who do possess the “right” credentials, not because they have penetrated to the core of life-and-death, but because they are clever in a worldly sense. Absolutely, you cannot trust them. It would be disastrous emotionally and mentally to do so. And yet, you can find this sort in Zen centers throughout the United States and Asia, urging those who are confused and lack conviction to seek the ultimate freedom and pay the proper tribute, or pay the proper tribute first, then seek the meaning of enlightenment later.

So a bit cynical take on the Americanization of Zen, but well-founded, even at that time in history. Unfortunately, his skepticism has been proven out in the decades since.

Then on a positive note:

Seek rather a teacher of genuine understanding, someone who may have a known name and high rank, or someone who may have neither. Nor should you simply judge a teacher by the number of disciples and students gathered around in what appears to be prosperous circumstances; judge rather by the nature and perseverance of the Zen practice of that teacher.

The formal path is something we offer, for those misfits who lean toward Zen as a serious preoccupation in retirement, when family and business obligations have been met. Lay practice may have some of the traditional trappings of the monastic model, but in America it is finding its own, creative path.

Yet more:

Most important in choosing a Zen path and a Zen teacher is your “root connection,” if it is there at all. You may not fully discover your root connection in a meeting, or in a week, or a month, or a short season of practice; but from the first, you will know, something of that connection. It will seem right for you. From the very beginning, the same things that motivate and fool you about the study of Zen have motivated and fooled others before you. They too have sought out a special teacher, school, sect, or way of Zen practice.

So it is on you to be proactive in this pursuit of a true Zen or Dharma father or mother, as the expression goes. We consider our relationships in Zen as an extended family, siblings and cousins, even the occasional in-law. In which we can be deceived, just as within any other family or group. Additionally:

I would like to discuss something about what your predecessors in the sangha, or group of Zen practitioners, have found to be deceptive and effective through the history of Zen. Actually, history is the first great deceiver, or, at least the little bit we do know about history. Just as the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon of enlightenment, neither is the record of history anything like the real experience. The common story, as it goes, is that Zen was handed down from Shakyamuni Buddha to Mahakasyapa, then from Mahakasyapa to Ananda, and so on to Bodhidharma, and so on to Dogen, and so on to the present.

It is true that there is this heart-to-heart transmission, but it is a romantic fallacy that there has been only one person in each generation since the death of Gautama Buddha who has carried the Zen flame of wisdom, who in turn taught and transmitted it to the next generation. The historical Buddha had many disciples, many who were very able.

So take your dose of Zen history with a large dose of salt. Historicity in Zen is trumped by direct experience, which reduces reliance on the brute facts of what in fact happened; the only important fact is what happens in your experience in the presence. The testimony of history is only valuable as a form of encouragement and a prod to your practice.

From such a practical perspective, Sensei continues:

You will find if you read enough, or reason it out long enough, that there have been many capable students throughout the past 2,500 years. Some were famous. Some made it their business to teach in large monastic communities, and some did not. Some were householders, as many of us are, who went about their regular lives. Those lives never got recorded by the historians, but they are there. Perhaps it is nothing more than a personal opinion, but my view of transmission is that in each generation, there has been one, or maybe several teachers, that have stood out, and who have embodied the spirit of that age in their personalities. These greater teachers have been more skillful at “skillful means” than their contemporaries.

Here is the parallel track of householders and monastics. Householder practice has always been held in high regard, from India through China, Korea and Japan, and the far East, and should be in the West of current times. Monastics change clothes and environment, but the basic elements of existence do not change, no matter how romantic or severe the surroundings. Further, the writers write the history:

There have been others in each age who have led enlightened lives who may have been teachers, but who simply were not remembered in collective history. Those who were in fact remembered were so popular in their time that historians could not have deleted their accomplishments from the record. Or perhaps, those Zen masters were very literary, or very talented at the arts. Because of this, either they, their literary disciples, or contemporary journalists and historians, wrote some account of what they did. The farther in time a generation or a century receded, the dimmer our collective recollection in oral stories is.

In retrospect, then, the notion surfaced that only those one-in-a-generation teachers carried the flame of Zen. In all that time, the heart-to-heart transmission has been occurring many times each generation as it did between Shakyamuni Buddha and Mahakasyapa. Very, very few have had the talent or words to even hint at this most subtle culmination of the Zen teaching. So, they did not.

The different perspectives of the scholar-historian and the practitioner of Zen also come into play, and this is a point of contention yet today, in consideration of continuing Buddha’s and Dogen’s mission:

Most historians of Buddhism, then, drew misleading conclusions about the lineage of Zen from the great silence and the few generational great voices. However, it is not one or two in a generation that are the sangha and who stand in the lineage of Zen. It is all of us who do study Zen seriously in any one generation who stand in the lineage of Zen in the Rinzai, Obaku and Soto sects.

The misleading conclusions of scholars include the notion that Master Dogen experienced a “decline” when he had established Eiheiji, and stopped actively writing. From our perspective as practitioners, that was the opposite of a decline, when he started live teachings to his monastics, who wrote them down. Then, with a typically creative turn of a phrase, he proposes:

Perhaps we will have to employ an army of psychics to reconstruct what actually happened in the history of the transmission of Zen.

This is a great example of Sensei’s ironic sense of humor.

Then with the practical twist of the observer, he suggests a dispassionate view of the present, to inform our rear-view-mirror impressions of the past:

Or, maybe we can just look at what is going on today that is similar. There are many teachers and many, many more students in any single generation. Just look at Zen in our own time in all of the United States, Western Europe, China, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam and all the other places that Zen is practiced.

Of course, we cannot follow all the living Zen teachers in the world today, nor can we rely on the visibility and celebrity of a given individual to sort out the who’s who of contemporary proponents of Buddhism. Social media and online access have opened the door to a far more ecumenical and interfaith approach to apprehending and appreciating the spreading of the gospel of Zen, but we must remain skeptical:

In all the world now there are many genuine teachers and many more pretenders. The popular Zen teachers of today may fade in a year or two. It may be someone else who is remembered better five hundred years from now, and will have a profound impact of the development of Zen.

The view from 30,000 feet, as we say today, is different from that of the boots on the ground. We may be in the traditional period of semblance, or even decline, of Buddhism, but that should not dissuade us from plodding on with our own practice, be it ever so humble. Whether we are remembered or not, five hundred years from now or next week, makes not a spitting bit of difference to our Zen lives today.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Amongst the many,

there is only one true Way:

the natural Zen!

“Dhyanayana: a Practical Guide Among the Ways Of Zen,” the first chapter in “Mokurai,” our collection of Matsuoka Roshi’s later talks, is unusually long. I suspect it was given to a large audience, such as at a university or symposium, rather than as a weekly address at the temple, which typically ran to 15 or 20 minutes. Owing to its length and detail, we will devote three segments to touching on its highlights.

It begins with the historical introduction of Zen to America:

In 1893, Rinzai Zen Master, Soyen Shaku journeyed to Chicago to attend the World Parliament of Religions. His presence and presentation sparked an immediate interest in Zen among some of the Americans attending the Parliament. As historical records have it, that was the first formal contact between Zen teaching and America. Much has transpired in the almost 100 years since Shaku Roshi came to America. Now, as more and more Americans are taking up the practice of Zen as a way of life, I would like to address a few words of advice to you about the right approach to the study of Zen.

Pretty straightforward and not much need for comment, other than that Shaku Roshi was of the Rinzai sect, as was his disciple Sokei-an, who would later establish a famous center in New York in the 1930s, the same decade that Sensei came to America.

He then touches on the inchoate Americanization of Zen:

Zen first gained a popular foothold in the cultural life of the United States a half-century after Soyen Shaku’s visit. Among some of the intellectuals of that time, among the circle of beat poets and authors, Zen became something of a philosophical fancy. It was portrayed in Jack Kerouac’s book, On the Road, as a philosophical motif in the dialogue of a group of itinerants touring across America) against a backdrop of their personal drama and social commentary. For the beat generation of the fifties, Zen was used as nothing more than a justification for new or non-conventional behavior. This was called “Beat Zen.” It was never really a school of Zen as are Rinzai and Soto, which are both founded in a tradition of serious practice. Nonetheless, “Beat Zen” did much to focus popular and literary attention toward Zen, just as the writings of Dr. Daisetsu Suzuki, a disciple of Soyen Shaku Roshi, did much to focus academic attention toward Zen. And so, from the popular discussion of Zen without direct experience that ensued, Americans created a mystique around Zen from all they had heard.

He then goes into an exhaustive list of all the terms and concepts associated with Zen from that period — such as “complete freedom,” “enlightenment,” “satori,” “insight,” “awakening,” “kensho,” and “liberation,” “nirvana,” “shunyata,” “emptiness” — which fill an entire paragraph. I take this as an example of his extensive research into the record of Zen in a second language, and an alien culture, the USA.

He summarizes his introduction:

These are all names used in connection with the culture of Zen. Most of them come from their origins in India, China and Japan. What they may mean depends on who explained them to you, or whether you learned them directly from your own experience and found a word to describe it later. I don’t want even to attempt to explain them all now, but I do want to shed some light on the practice of the three modern Zen sects — Rinzai, Obaku and Soto — that are practiced in America now. My hope is that my advice might serve as a practical guide in your choice of following one of the Zen paths. Further, I hope that it will confirm your own practice of Zen, and encourage you to renew your efforts.

This is vintage Matsuoka — basing your understanding on your own experience first, and finding words to describe it later — along with his intention to help us — you — in the assimilation of Zen in America, by emphasizing the traditional, but radical, Soto approach to direct experience. This is not a scholarly essay, but an exhortation to practice, Sensei’s manifestation of the Bodhisattva vow in action:

The way to study Zen is through your own direct experience in meditation. That is the primary path and essential characteristic of all the schools of Zen. Zen means meditation. The original Sanskrit word for meditation was “Dhyana,” translated into Chinese as “Chan,” then translated into Japanese as “Zen.” All of these words refer to the meditation school of Buddhism which began with the historical Buddha, Gautama Shakyamuni’s practice of meditation as the means to complete realization of the meaning of his life and of all life. The practice of zazen, or sitting meditation, is the necessary way of cultivation.

So there we have it. The manifesto of Dogen’s Zen in America is the same as his mission in the Japan of the 13th century: the promulgation and propagation of the simple, but difficult, meditation of Buddha.

Then he uses zazen to illustrate some critical differences between the existing sects of Zen itself:

The Zen sects differ as to the purpose of zazen in that Rinzai views zazen as a means to enlightenment; whereas Soto views zazen as the expression of enlightenment. Nonetheless, the Rinzai, Obaku and Soto sects all agree on the prime importance of zazen. Secondly, all the Zen sects agree that it is important to study with an authentic teacher or Zen master. It is through a living interchange between master and disciple that a disciple comes to a mastery of Zen in his or her own right. This interchange, called heart to heart transmission, whether long or short in time duration, is only effective if the Zen student has prepared him or herself adequately through the assiduous practice of zazen.

A clear and compelling exposition of the connection between zazen, the teacher-student relationship in Zen, and the often mystified transmission from heart to heart of the lineage going back to Buddha. In five brief but dense paragraphs, Matsuoka Roshi encapsulates the essential history of Zen, and its advent in the USA.

In what follows, Sensei covers some of the highlights of the historical transmission as recorded in writing, including Bodhidharma, Hui Neng and Hung Jen, the sixth and fifth ancestors in China, jumping to Hakuin in the 18th century, and the connection of the five houses of Zen in the Tang era to the later sects in contemporary Japan. Alternating with history, he drives home certain salient and eternal points:

For most of us, the chaos of this age of industrial progress — global economic and military turbulence; likely nuclear disaster from power plants or bombs; rapid erosion of the earth’s resources; the unbalancing of environmental patterns, unbalancing in its turn terrestrial life; and, finally, blinding, rapid social change — is too much for us to handle in a balanced way. Our minds and emotions are not simple, but rather are most confused, conditioned, and cluttered not only by our common human condition, but more so by all the accelerated turmoil of our time.

The only point of history, from Sensei’s perspective, is to learn from it and apply its lessons to the present. He compares and contrasts our current causes and conditions, contextualizing the masters of the past, while admonishing those of us in the present to recognize our advantages, as well as what we are lacking in pursuing Zen as a lifestyle:

From a statistical point of View, by far the largest group of Zen practitioners are those who begin the practice of Zen, and then because of a lack of conviction, initial difficulties or a lack of self discipline, discontinue their practice. Most of the Zen Temples in the United States are populated by this latter group. And really, the Zen sanghas of historic and modern India, China, Japan, Korea and Viet Nam are, and were, probably very similar. It is very easy to see when observing this group of Zen practitioners who start, then stop, that there is no LIVING enlightenment in them. Surely, some of these people, depending upon their abilities, their consistency, their intensity and their duration of practice have differing degrees of insight into various parts of their lives; and this is a good, and important, effect.

Zen, however, does not radiate through them body, mind, and moment. They do not continually remember their own original nature, and act freely out of it and through it. That is a pity. I suppose that it is also the law of averages. Like anything effective on planet earth, Zen teachers from Shakyamuni Buddha to today have had to adapt the teaching as pointed at by Bodhidharma to the culture, language and status of those students of the Zen way that they seek to lead. They have also had to adapt their teaching to the level of gifts and to the level of intensity of their Zen disciples.

The historically earlier teachers of Zen talked of two things: the essence of Zen, and the means to transmit this understanding. Teaching methods were referred to as “upaya” in Sanskrit; sometimes translated as “artificial means.” The teaching ways were sometimes called “upayakausalya” or skillful means. These were the ways that Zen masters used to charm, disarm, disprove, disagree, disengage, dissuade, dismember, or disabuse the disciple’s limiting habits and views so that he or she could become free to see with the eye of enlightenment.

I have always thought that all I need is a better class of student; thank you, Sensei. Seriously, though, it is still amazing to me every time I re-read his talks, how contemporary his message, how consistently he hits upon this note of unflinching dedication to zazen as what is missing in most people’s practice. I am also stuck by the difficulty of skipping over any part of that message, and can only encourage you to follow up with your own reading of these excellent teachings. He will return to the idea of upaya, and Soto Zen’s emphasis on meditation, as the upaya for our times.

He touches on his personal history:

Dr. D. T. Suzuki, who was my teacher at Columbia University, classified the Zen teaching methods as verbal and direct. Verbal methods involve paradox, transcending opposites, contradiction, affirmation, repetition and exclamation. Direct teaching involves shouting, beating, creating art works, practicing martial arts, or exhibiting some form of unorthodox behavior intended to show a student the Way. Ultimately, what form the upaya take are the conjunction of a particular teacher, and all that he or she is, with a particular student or group of students and all that they are. In the free flow of Zen the teaching will teach itself as long as the teacher doesn’t interfere, and as long as the student is receptive. Of course, as long as the student resists at all, the teaching is poured out to awaken her or him until it is successful, or until the student quits or the teacher dies. I am not even sure in those cases if the teaching really does stop.

Note how Sensei expands the concept of “teaching” and learning Zen to include following others who are not necessarily in your lineage, as well as non-verbal and unorthodox approaches. The statement that, “In the free flow of Zen the teaching will teach itself as long Zen’s method to its ultimate foundation — following the natural revelation of the truth, rather than having to force it. Let this guide our approach.

We will have to leave it here for now. In the next segment, we will begin with the conclusion that Matsuoka Roshi draws from the above. A real Zen cliffhanger. Tune in next time.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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See the real dragon —

but make sure you hear its roar —

the meaning of Life!

In the last segment we covered the first half of Matsuoka Roshi’s commentary on Hakuin Zenji’s “Song of Zazen.” Now we will review the rest, where he shifts gears a bit. Where we left off, he touches on our tendency to overlook certain details of our life and Zen practice, thinking we are doing enough already. But he warns us, we assume from his own, personal experience:

If there is error in our life, we cannot think it too small to be corrected, as we might think the mist too slight to be noticed. If we go on in these errors, we will travel farther from the truth and never find it.

I knew Matsuoka Roshi well enough to know that he did not consider himself perfect, by any means. But I think he was resolved to accept his karmic fate, whatever disappointments it may include. So I do not take his message to us to be a moralistic imperative from on high, but a personal note from a friend and fellow-traveler who wishes us the best, and to share his lessons from the school of hard knocks. The analogy of the mist accumulating to saturate our clothes cuts both ways — if you associate with positive circumstances and conditions, you will become soaked in those influences, just as surely as you will with negative ones. You have to exercise the discernment as to which are positive, or negative, for you.

Zen meditation destroys the erroneous thoughts by revealing this truth. It teaches us that all along, we have been living in this Enlightened world, but have been blind to it. It teaches us that our erroneous ways have kept us from seeing its light. The Buddha-nature is within each of us, but it has been long hidden by the errors of the past and the ignorance that for centuries has been the traditions of the world. We have been reared in these traditional ways of thinking and have been taught to desire and cling to that which is either unattainable or transitory. Both bring pain. We cannot have what cannot be caught and held. Our lives become unending searches for happiness which only end in disillusionment. Zen will reveal to us our true nature and the true nature of life, so that:

The moon which rests reflected in the water of the pure heart, when the wave breaks, becomes light!

The Buddha-nature is within each of us to become a light that will shine forth when our lives become inseparable from meditation.

So this last summary is the statement of Great Faith in Zen, that Buddha-nature is innate, our birthright. Zazen is the switch that flips on the endless moonlight of Zen.

A Zen priest once wrote that one sometimes hears that it is necessary to retire to a mountain away from the world, or perhaps to bury oneself in some old temple, to discard humanity and become a so-called hermit to practice meditation. Of course, for some, to attain realization into one’s true nature, it might be necessary to retire in this way for a time, but this is not the object for all. The priest continued, Zen means to
bring the power of Zen meditation to bear directly upon our present daily life, to vivify it.

Sensei captures the practical function of retreat in the householder’s practice of Zen. The monastic or hermitage model may be for some, but not many. Zen is for everyone, as we say. So moderation in the pursuit of Zen is in order. The use of the word, “vivify” is vintage Matsuoka. Zen brings life to our life.

Withdrawing into meditation, and then advancing and handling affairs — this advancing and withdrawing, movement and rest, together, must be Zen. A master says that going is Zen and sitting is also Zen. A Taoist classic says: “The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear which pervades heaven and earth. An ancient adds: “Meditation in activity is a hundred, a thousand, a million times superior to meditation in repose.” So greatly does he esteem meditation in activity.

Again, stressing the vacillation between ordinary affairs, and the sanctuary of meditation in the midst of life, this is our prescription for lay practice. The halo effect of zazen carries over into everything:

One of the Temple members who lives out of state has written to me that she has discovered this small secret… “Sometimes I notice that after practicing zazen anything I do is just right — washing clothes, cleaning the house, walking in the garden, etc. There doesn’t seem to be something else more important to be doing. I seem to be all there, not divided in my attention. Zen makes every moment meaningful.” [She] has written that now that her life of work and meditation has helped her to give up attachments, the more deeply she feels things. She wrote that it was like a miracle how deep her feeling has become and how alive her life is now.

You may have read passages like this in the American literature of Zen, which seem to suggest that this attitude is something you can and should intentionally cultivate, and apply when doing household chores. But Sensei stresses that it can only arise naturally, and that the mundane act of sitting still enough for long enough, is what triggers the carryover.

He returns to Hakuin’s song:

A sutra teaches that by the practice of meditation, the lake of the heart becomes pure and calm, and when the lake of the ordinary man’s heart becomes pure, the reflection that appears within it is of a Bodhisattva. When the well-spring of the heart is purified, the wrong paths which otherwise appear as a result of his wrong actions, to that man become as if non-existent. How should there be wrong paths for him? His heart has become the meditation room. In its purity, neither the wrong paths or the wrong actions could exist. The world of light, of virtue, appears and now our daily life has a changed meaning and deeper depth. In fact, for the first time, ordinary life becomes radiant with real meaning. This vitality that can fill our daily life is for each of us to find.

“His heart has become the meditation room,” while a curious construction in English, Sensei’s second language, captures the non-separation of the sentient being and its environment in a compelling phrase. But Sensei does not mean this metaphorically. He is describing the all-embracing compassion that one feels from zazen. Someone said that Zen is the pursuit of the understanding of meaning. But from Sensei’s description we can see that we do not, finally, understand the meaning of our life, but that life itself becomes imbued with its true meaning through the insight of meditation, which is beyond all understanding. He goes on to illustrate this with a true story of a real dragon:

Let me tell you the story of its discovery by one man, Kano Tanyu, an artist who was known to paint dragons that were so realistic that when a ceiling on which one had been painted fell down by chance, some said it had been caused by the movement of the dragon’s tail. When the ceiling in the Myoshinji Temple became dull, the Zen Master, Gudo, sent for Kano Tanyu to paint a dragon on his ceiling. But, Gudo told the artist, “For this special occasion I particularly want to have the painting of the dragon done from life.”

Naturally the painter was taken aback and said, “This is most unexpected. As a matter of fact, I am ashamed to say that I have never seen a living dragon.” The Zen teacher, however, agreed that it would be unreasonable to expect a painting of a living dragon from an artist who had never seen one, but told him to try to have a look at one as soon as he could. The painter asked wonderingly: “Where can one see a living dragon? Where do they dwell?” The Zen master answered: “Oh, that’s nothing. At my place there are any number. Come and see them and paint one.”

Tanyu went joyfully with the teacher and when they arrived, at once he asked: “Well, here I am to see the dragons. Where are they?” The teacher, letting his gaze go around the room, replied: “Plenty of them here: can’t you see them? What a pity!” The painter felt overcome with regret, and he undertook the serious study of Zen in the Temple of Gudo.

One day something happened, and he rushed excitedly to the teacher, saying, “Today I have seen the form of a live dragon!” The master answered: “Oh, have you? Good. But tell me, what did his roar sound like?” At this, the painter was again at a loss, and for another year, he labored on at his spiritual life.

What he painted at the end of that year was the dragon of Myoshinji, a supreme masterpiece in the history of art, remarkable for its technique, but far more for the life which the artist infused into it. It seems as if it contains the great Life which embraces heaven and earth, the universe and man. The experience of reality which Kano Tanyu attained when listening for the roar of the dragon transcended time.

This is the way our ordinary lives must become — infused with the sense of reality so that they transcend time, pain and desire. It is a life that finds that the Pure Land paradise is not far away; a life free from the wrong paths, a life of the Buddha.

That was quite a dose. But I felt that the whole story of Kano Tanyu, Master Gudo, and the living dragon whose portrait may be seen on the wall of Myoshinji, is of one piece. The “great Life” in the last paragraph is capitalized to emphasize the importance of living Zen, one of Sensei’s frequent tropes. When we see the dragon, we become the dragon, and we come alive in zazen.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Sitting Zen takes time —

but time is all that you have.

Please spend it wisely.

Following on the last segment — my commentary on Hakuin Zenji’s “Song of Zazen” — we will look at my teacher’s comments on the same poem. This is excerpted from the first of Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks in two volumes, The Kyosaku, a 400-page collection of 78 written talks on wide-ranging subjects that he had put together himself, from the early- to mid-1960s, a quite prolific period for his writing, ending about the time I met him. The second is a smaller volume of later talks. “Mokurai,” a 150-page set of 26 additional talks from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, that we collected later. We were unsuccessful at publishing these during his lifetime, unfortunately, when we did not have the digital equipment that finally made it possible. Both volumes are available on our websites.

Matsuoka Roshi’s commentary on the Song of Zazen, or Zazen Wasan, begins:

In Hakuin’s The Song of Meditation, there is a verse which is much worth reading and reflecting upon. It goes:

By the merit of a single sitting
He destroys innumerable accumulated sins.
How should there be wrong paths for him?
The Pure Land paradise is not far away.

For a quick comparison, let’s look at the translation that we used in my commentary:

Thus one true Samadhi extinguishes evils.
It purifies karma, dissolving obstructions.
Then where are the dark paths to lead us astray?
The Pure Lotus Land is not far away.

A substantial difference in the first line, distinguishing between the “merit of a single sitting” and “one true Samadhi,” claiming that one sitting can do the trick, versus the idea that the Samadhi of zazen is the one and only true kind. The following three lines are essentially the same, with the notable exception of the use of “sin” in Sensei’s version, which is an unusual choice in terms of Buddhism in general. The role of “sin” in Zen is replaced by that of ignorance. We are not born into sin, but into natural ignorance. Let’s pluck a few nuggets from Sensei’s commentary:

Hakuin is telling us that after just one sitting, our lives could be erased of the wrong paths that lead us away from enlightenment and instead, the life of the Buddha could be ours.

“How can this be?” you ask. If you ask this question, you have not yet fully understood that you are living in the world of enlightenment and you have not yet truly meditated. If you understand this verse, you have already become wise about the true nature of all things and your meditation has become a part of your life.

Hakuin wants to teach us the value of meditation, and the nearness of the world of Enlightenment. He tells us: “The Pure Land paradise is not far away” and asks how a man who has truly meditated could take the wrong path. He is telling us that such a man has discovered the wisdom that leads him only along the right road and that for him, sin does not exist.

Yet we must be careful in speaking of “sin” to avoid thinking of it in the Christian sense. “Sin” in Zen is not something by which a man will be judged at the end of his life, but instead is the thoughts, words and deeds which have been performed in error of the “right way”. They can have their effect any moment of one’s life. Their effect is to keep a man in the world of ignorance and to cause him, or others, suffering. The sins in Zen might better be called “errors” that can be erased with the wisdom of the truth.

Sensei reliably clears up the confusion regarding sin in Zen. He probably translated this poem from the ancient Japanese himself, as he did with his many quotes from Master Dogen featured in his talks. The main point here is that zazen is a kind of purification process, like smelting gold, an analogy from Buddha himself.

He then turns to the non-duality of samsara and nirvana, everyday life and liberation:

This verse of Hakuin instructs us about both the world of enlightenment and the world of ignorance. It cannot separate the two, because in reality, they are one. The world of ignorance is this world when we have not become wise to its true nature, and the world of enlightenment is this world when we have attained this wisdom.

The wisdom of the Buddha-nature that comes from meditation not only erases the errors of the past, but shows us the right way to think in the present. The future should not be our concern because it does not really exist; all that we can be aware of is the present moment. The future is a hope that the present moment will continue to be in our awareness and it is a dream about what it might contain. When your meditation is so sincere and deep that the wisdom of the true nature of things comes to you, your wrong ways of thinking will no longer exist and no thought will be given to either future or past. You will have found the world of Enlightenment in this world of illusion.

So the key to the world of Enlightenment — note the capitalization — is the sincerity and depth of our meditation, in which case it does not really take any great investment of time and repetition:

All this can happen in one sitting; it has been said to you many times before that one session of meditation is one session of the Buddha, whether it be one, five, or sixty minutes. One day of meditation is one day of being a Buddha. But, it is more likely that it will take more than one moment of meditation to fully realize the truth.

Aha — we knew there was a “however” coming. Note that Sensei is talking to the same audience that he has addressed many times before, which is a characteristic of all these teachings. They bear repetition, and the ancestors are perfectly happy to repeat them over and over until they sink in. His main point he expressed elsewhere as “Five minutes zazen, five minutes Buddha.” There is lag time in manifesting Buddhahood when one is sitting in zazen. No waiting for future results. But, again the but, it is not likely that you will have instant gratification. In this, Zen is very un-American. Continuing:

Perseverance in meditation and the Eightfold Path will reveal it to you. The Eightfold Path contains the “Right “ way to think and behave. We must not make the mistake of thinking that the right way is merely the right way of behaving. Although we may restrain ourselves from a deed, that by no way means that we are free from the error that has tempted us to perform it. The root of erroneous deeds is in erroneous thought. Zen Buddhism is a way of correcting these thoughts, so that the world of Enlightenment will become apparent to us.

In Zen, it is important that we meditate to become aware of the errors of our ways and then repent. Heartfelt repentance is a good sign that we are truly wise and that our ways will change. Our habits will not change until both our minds and emotions have been aroused.

Perseverance pays, balanced with faith and doubt, the “Three Pillars” that Kapleau Roshi expounded so eloquently. However, the Three Actions are not limited to those of the body, but include those of the mouth and mind. Intemperate or false speech, plus erroneous or craving thinking. Lusting in the heart apparently counts in all systems of spiritual praxis. Of course, it should be said that the only way we can correct these thoughts, usually, is by living with the consequences. We observe the Precepts by breaking them. The hope is that nirvana will come shining through, if only we persevere.

If we think the small errors we commit are insignificant, we will never become truly enlightened. Zen is a way that encompasses each moment and every movement, and every thought. If we fail to take the smallest thought, the slightest deed, the briefest second into its spirit, we will go on to find more thoughts, deeds and time in that which is not Zen in our lives. There is a poem that says the same thing. It goes:

In the evening, If it were rain we should seek shelter, But thinking: ‘It is only mist,’
We go on and become drenched.

We must realize that our lives are in the evening. We have only this moment in which to become enlightened. The night of death might come at any second. If there is error in our life, we cannot think it too small to be corrected, as we might think the mist too slight to be noticed. If we go on in these errors, we will travel farther from the truth and never find it.

On this cautionary note we will leave this first half of Sensei’s commentary, and continue in the next segment. I remember his saying this same thing in a more condensed form, “Be careful of that one little thing that you allow yourself.” In our practice we can have a subtle feeling of pride or arrogance, or maybe something even more subliminal, i.e. that owing to doing meditation and our other seemingly compassionate activities around Zen, we are gaining some sort of merit, mitigating our negative karmic consequences, and perhaps even approaching Buddha’s awakening. In this context it is easy for us to forgive ourselves some small imperfections. And besides, Buddhism teaches imperfection as one of the cardinal marks of existence, along with impermanence and insubstantiality. So we should not be too strict with ourselves.

This, my teacher warned, is what will get you in the end. Life is short, and by the time we have become immersed in Zen practice, we are likely in the twilight of our lives, so we are running out of time. Like the “Monk in the Fourth Dhyana,” we may be deluding ourselves and expecting to enter Tusita heaven on our death bed. If we are disappointed, the blame is not on Zen. It is on us.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Who you gonna call?

Where you gonna look for it?

Look in the mirror!

Stepping out of the Soto Zen lineage, we want to pay our respects to one of the great masters of the Rinzai lineage, Master Hakuin Ekaku. His life bridged the 17th and 18th centuries, so he was active during the colonial period, dying a few years before the Revolutionary War. A prolific teacher, calligrapher, and no-nonsense practitioner of Zen, he was a big advocate of zazen for his students, and is credited with reviving Rinzai Zen in Japan, established by Myoan Eisai some 600 years earlier, whose successor, Ryonen Myozen, traveled with Dogen Zenji to China, which culminated in Myozen’s death in China, and Dogen’s establishment of Soto Zen in Japan. Matsuoka Roshi dedicated a chapter of his collected talks to Hakuin’s Zazen Wasan — Song of Zazen, his translation differing from the one we will review, which is available online at: Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun.

This also happens to be the version that I have set to music, so I am somewhat familiar with it.

From the beginning all beings are Buddha.
Like water and ice, without water no ice, outside us no Buddhas.

That “all beings are Buddha” does not mean that they know it, however. As Master Dogen reminds us in Genjokoan, “When buddhas are truly buddhas, they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas.” The reference to the differing states of the fundamental element of water — its liquid and solid form — is sometimes used as an analogy to the transformative and morphing quality of our buddha-nature. It can flow into and conform to any vessel, any set of causes and conditions.

How near the truth, yet how far we seek.
Like one in water crying, “I thirst!”
Like the son of a rich man wand’ring poor on this earth
we endlessly circle the six worlds.

That we do not know our buddha-nature is the fall from grace, and leads to our pursuit of satisfaction in all the wrong places, and for all the wrong reasons. Like the monk or nun who carries the wish-fulfilling mani jewel sewn into the hem of the robe, we run around like chickens with their heads off, when what we are looking for has been right here, right now, all along. What a pity. The “six worlds” are the Buddhist cosmological realms, from Tusita heaven as the highest, to Avici hell as the lowest. So this indicates that this mindless pursuit transcends any one lifetime.

The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.
From dark path to dark path we’ve wandered in darkness,
how can we be freed from the wheel of samsara?

The primary delusion afflicting us, according to Buddhism, is that of the imputed or constructed self, which is not quite identical with the contemporary concept of ego, I think. The “self” questioned in Zen is not merely a psychological construction, but the physical body as well as the mind. Thus, in Master Dogen’s shinjin datsuraku, dropping off of body-mind, the emptiness at the heart of corporeal existence is not just a concept, either, but the dynamic reality of ever-changing impermanence. The dark paths would include those based on superstitions, myth, and beliefs. They are dark, not because they are evil, but because ultimately they shed no light on reality. The version I am most familiar with translates the last line as “how can we be free of birth and death?” It begs the question, how would we even know that we want to be free of this cycle of life, “samsara.” Do we really know the alternative?

The gateway to freedom is zazen Samadhi.
Beyond exaltation, beyond all our praises the pure Mahayana.

Here, Hakuin is talking about true freedom — including, I would suggest, freedom from the concept of getting free from birth and death. This would be contrary to the Bodhisattva vow to save all others, the operative dimension of Mahayana, the “greater vehicle.” Like the traditional American gospel song, “This train is bound for glory,” you are either on this bus or not. In Buddhism, we leave no one behind. We commit to returning to this battleground as long as necessary to bring our brothers and sisters home.

Observing the Precepts, Repentance and Giving,
the countless good deeds and the Way of Right Living, all come from zazen.

As Master Dogen similarly reminds us, “What Precept is not fulfilled in zazen?” And “Without engaging in incense offering, bowing, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scriptures, you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.” All of the protocols and implications that are characteristic of the Buddhist worldview and lifestyle stem from this central practice, just sitting still enough, for long enough, and letting go of all attachments, including those to our body and mind.

Thus one true Samadhi extinguishes evils.
It purifies karma, dissolving obstructions.
Then where are the dark paths to lead us astray?
The Pure Lotus Land is not far away.

This original self, discovered, or uncovered, in deep zazen, is the only true Samadhi — complete and natural balance within the physical, emotional, mental and social realms. We typically shy away from absolutist terms such as “evils,” substituting confusions or delusions, those frailties, follies and foibles to which we are generally vulnerable. Purifying our karma may seem indefensible as a claim, until we remember that purity in Zen has the connotation of nonduality. If we are resistant to the consequences of our actions, we defile our own karma, and create further obstructions. If we embrace it, we may see the light at the end of the tunnel. The “Pure Lotus Land” is, again, not “pure” in any absolute sense, or morally distinct from samsara, but is the other shore of nirvana coming to us, as Dogen promises. Our charge, our practice, is to see through the delusion of samsara, to the underlying reality of nirvana.

Hearing this truth, heart humble and grateful.
To praise and embrace it, to practice its Wisdom,
brings unending blessings, bring mountains of merit.

“Hearing this truth” does not naively imply that simply hearing words pointing to it will do the trick. We must vow to “hear the true Dharma,” as Master Dogen exhorts us to do in his famous vow. A natural state of humility and gratitude accompanies and informs this process. To put it into practice, fully embracing it and praising it, to oneself and others, entails the recognition of “unending blessings” and “mountains of merit” built into existence itself. Our practice, however worthy, does not create it.

And if we turn inward and prove our True Nature, that
True Self is no-self, our own self is no-self, we go beyond ego and past clever words.
Then the gate to the oneness of cause-and-effect is thrown open.
Not two and not three, straight ahead runs the Way.

Turning “inward” seemingly contradicts a saying attributed to Hakuin Zenji, whose writing is unusually descriptive for the Zen canon, where he asserted that there is no inside and/or outside, something like that. But we have to assume that the great master was perfectly capable of expressing himself on both relative and absolute levels. And zazen, it must be admitted, at least begins with a turning away from other distractions, and to that degree, turning “inward.” Wherein, of course, the rabbit hole we go down ends up coming out on the other side, or back where we started. Like a living Klein bottle.

Here he affirms, and reconfirms, that our “True Self is no-self,” hyphenated, so as to indicate an innate state, rather than an outright denial of self. No-self would then capture the emptiness that is at the heart of our so-called own self, as it is for everything else. This is going past any self-identification, or ego, no matter how sophisticated or clever our attributions. Here, the “oneness” of cause-and-effect, again hyphenated, I think indicates his understanding that they are not-two, as we heard in the poem Hsinhsinming — Trust in Mind, of the third ancestor in China. “Straight ahead” is the “Moving forward is not a matter of far or near” of Master Kisen’s Sandokai — Harmony of Difference and Sameness.

Our form now being no-form, in going and returning we never leave home.
Our thought now being no-thought, our dancing and songs are the Voice of the Dharma.

Form is the first of the five skandhas, or aggregates, of sentient existence. It is the space in which we all begin practicing zazen. But eventually, the boundaries of our own form become fuzzy, to the point of joining us to — rather than separating us from — everything else. When sensation sets in, it overtakes form, much as energy trumps matter. Segueing through the skandha of thought, impulse, and even, eventually, consciousness itself, it becomes clear that the whole enchilada is nothing more than the Dharma. Whatever we say and do expounds the buddha-dharma, whether we know it or not.

How vast is the heaven of boundless Samadhi!
How bright and transparent the moonlight of wisdom!

Here are Hakuin’s descriptive powers in full flower. Elsewhere I have read that, walking without a lantern on a dark, moonless night (remembering that there were no city lights in those days), if the surrounding darkness suddenly is infused with what seems to be moonlight, enlightenment is near. Matsuoka Roshi made the startling declaration that, “The light by which you see things comes from you!” Buddha was said to have told his students, after praising them for their progress in meditation, “But your minds have not yet begun to shine.” The moonlight brightening the night earth has long symbolized enlightenment.

What is there outside us? What is there we lack?
Nirvana is openly shown to our eyes.

Here is the inside-outside illusion again, expressed as the all-inclusive “don’t know,” “not-two” Mind of Zen. “Nothing lacking, and nothing in excess.” That this is the much-vaunted Nirvana relieves us of any notion that we have to go elsewhere, somewhere special, to find it. This is how the other shore comes to us, as promised by Master Dogen. There is no secret anywhere, no trick up the Masters’ sleeves.

This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land!
And this very body, the body of Buddha.

The “pure lotus land,” here not capitalized, perhaps intentionally, is nothing more than this very planet, that is our contemporaneous, and temporary, home. Again, not an imaginary paradise in some other dimension, an afterlife. This life, and this body, if we are to believe the great master, is the only true life and body of Buddha. It is only that we have to wake up to this truth. That is, we have to die to the limited self, with its attachment to body and mind as conceived, in order to be reborn in our original body, which is our true life, and our true home. “Outside us, no Buddhas. Like water and ice, without water, no ice.” This is already true, according to Zen, so all we have to do is to realize it.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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All of the teachings

are met within this zazen:

pure meditation!

In the last segment we ended with Keizan’s discussion of the Precepts, the true ones that go beyond mental characterization. These are the manifest Precepts, that do not depend upon our practice. They are natural, and universal. Such constructions as, “Do not kill,” “Do not steal,” and “Do not lie” become statements of the truth — that actually, the universe that gives us birth is that which actually ends life, and we cannot even own anything, let alone steal it. We cannot actually tell the truth, no matter how erudite, or glib, our speech. These, of course, are absolutist views of the Precepts, which also have relative meaning. In this segment we will continue with what the master says about the remaining two “aspects of spiritual training” he mentions. Beginning with mindfulness:

“Mindfulness” is the observing that there is nothing that is in excess. When seated in pure meditation, we let go of “body and mind,” abandon “delusion and enlightenment.” We are unchanging, immovable, unwillful, impervious. We are like a simpleton or a legless man. We are like a mountain or an ocean: no trace of “movement versus stillness” has yet arisen. When mindful, there is no fixed state of things.

Short and sweet, but comprehensive. Reminds again of Hsinshinming, “The Way is perfect like vast space — nothing lacking, nothing in excess.” Compare with the modern take on mindfulness, from the pop meditation of the same name, meaning “being in the moment.” In our anxiety- and uncertainty-ridden society, just being able to be in the moment for a moment or two, rather than obsessively ruminating over the past, or planning for the future, is certainly welcome. However, it does not begin to answer the question, Mindful of what? Keizan’s abbreviated answer is meant to focus like a laser on one key point, but we would be prone to include mindfulness of the Four Noble truths and other central teachings of Buddha. However, his main point here is that we should also not obsess over these teachings, as such. After all, they are only pointing at the reality in front of our face. Which has nothing extra, nothing truly separate, in mokurai, the complementarity of movement and stillness. He takes a similarly blunt approach to defining wise discernment:

“Wise discernment” is being selective within enlightened awareness. When seated in pure meditation, what is intellectually known spontaneously vanishes and self-consciousness is discarded. Your whole being’s Eye of Discernment possesses no “specialized insight”: It clearly sees Buddha Nature and is, from the first, not deluded.

Keizan uses this kind of expression, “from the first,” repeatedly. We will find Hakuin Zenji starting off his Song of Zazen with “From the beginning…” This captures the meaning of “refuge” in Zen — having the connotation of returning to the safe place from which we originated. It has all been like a bad dream, but we are the authors of that dream, and when we wake up, everything will be okay with us. The rest of the baggage that we carry with us — delusion, and the intellectual ramblings and self-centered striving that result — fall away. The emphasis on spontaneity means that this is not something we can do intentionally, but it can happen. Before launching into another litany of practical things like seeking a “good, quiet place,” a thick cushion, avoiding “mist, smoke, or fog” and “rain and dew,” keeping “your sitting place neat and clean,” et cetera, and repeating some of the prior instructions, he delves again into more specifically mental, or better, counter-mental, techniques:

This is the technique for meditating: Let go of, and abandon, awareness of thoughts; put to rest looking at mental fancies and images. Do not devise some notion of what “realizing Buddha-hood” is. Do not let right and wrong control you. Act as if you were saving your head which was ablaze!

Here we are hearing echoes of Dogen, for sure. Again, the “hair-on-fire” expression may have been a common trope in this period, much as it is currently. The “…give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha” is, again, pure Dogen. It begins to look like this document may have been a result of someone taking notes, or writing down a spontaneous talk given by Keizan Zenji to an audience. It has that kind of character, of jumping from point to point, and being careful to remember and transmit some of the golden nuggets he had inherited from the newly-developing legacy of Dogen’s lineage. Many of the passages sound like direct quotes, perhaps paraphrased, and morphed in translation, from various of Dogen’s written teachings, which have a more structured feel. Keizan is either quoting or channeling Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai when he says:

Do not get involved with the burning of incense, the making of bows, the reciting of the Buddha’s name, the undergoing of some penitential ritual, the reading of Scriptures, the holding on to a daily work schedule: just sitting, without “doing” anything, is what you should aim at above all.

This does not strike me as the kind of advice and encouragement to a kind of indolence that the parents of the young monks in Keizan’s charge would approve. But with a couple of notable exceptions, it seem lifted verbatim from his predecessor. It is notable that in the first line to Jijuyu Zammai, “practice” is the only thing that Dogen mentions and does not repeat in the following two lines, which seem to refute the first. Don’t take my word for it, check it out. Practice transcends the relative, absolute, and even the nondual Buddha Way, whereas “…delusion and realization…birth and death…buddhas and sentient beings,” the other binaries recited as examples, apparently do not. “Practice, practice, practice!” sayeth the Preacher.

Next, another whiplash:

As a general practice, when doing seated meditation, you should put on your kesa. (Remove it in the dark before dawn and at dusk, as you come out of the meditation state.) Do not omit this.

He segues instantly from recommending against following traditional protocols to insisting on wearing the formal robe. The kesa, for the uninitiated, is the quilt-like outer robe, which is typically donned at the beginning of zazen, and removed after. This seeming contradiction may be resolved by a sober analysis of what else the average monk would have available to wear, other than the robe, which can hide a lot of sins. The three undergarments in usage today — the juban, or undershirt, with some sort of boxer shorts; and the kimono and koromo, the Japanese and Chinese under-robes, respectively; may not have been universally in vogue. We do have to keep up appearances, to some degree.

There are some deep-dive details noted in the text that may be of importance to scholars and historians, another reason I suspect that this may have been recorded from a live presentation in the zendo, or lecture hall. Before going into boilerplate instructions for the posture, one mention by the master I think is useful to clarify some confusion that arises yet today:

Whilst on your mat… do not always sustain the cross-legged, “lotus” sitting position; range from a half-lotus position to, later, sitting with your feet under your spine. This is the method of sitting of the Buddhas and Ancestors: sometimes to do full lotus, sometimes half-lotus.

This is different from Dogen’s written record, but may have been characteristic of his live instructions. Remember that Keizan was born only 15 years after Dogen’s demise, so his teachers had lived with and learned from the great founder in person. Note the admonition, more than a mere suggestion, to “not always sustain the cross-legged” position. This will come as a relief to many contemporary practitioners, who have been told that they must assume the “correct” posture, and heaven forfend if you should move. Buddha moved. I guaran-damn-tee you, Buddha moved.

We recommend rotating through the various postures — over time, not continuously — to develop the requisite flexibility in the lower body, hips, knees, legs and ankles. Also sitting on a chair, including the ergonomic kind. Zen is always contemporary, as Matsuoka Roshi insisted. There is nothing magical in the lotus posture. It is, simply, more stable than the others, like the proverbial three-legged stool. What follows is familiar enough to those who follow Soto Zen praxis that we can skip it here. However, there are a couple of details that I think worth retelling, separated by more details in the text (italics mine):

Next, your should settle down in your sitting placed by swaying your body seven or eight times in ever smaller movements, then steadily sitting erect.

When you wish to arise from meditation, first, place your hands respectfully on your knees and sway your body seven or eight times in ever larger movements.

This is a small, but not insignificant, improvement over the written instructions in Fukanzazengi, as the “ever smaller” movements in the beginning help us to find the central “sweet spot” in the posture, where we come into equilibrium, or equipoise, with gravity, the most efficient and effortless proprioception. The “ever larger” pendulum moves at the end of the session likewise loosen the musculature, especially the lotus-position base, allowing us to rise without strain. This set of moves is most often forgotten by many contemporaries, but makes the approach to zazen more like any other physical exercise.

Keizan goes on to give similar instructions when rising and beginning walking meditation, when sleepy, and for breathing while walking, which he treats as an antidote to sleepiness, none of which I recall from Dogen’s documentation. Doesn’t mean they weren’t there, but Keizan’s emphasis does seem to be on some other syllables. Included in the advice for kinhin is the nugget:

Although you are walking, do it as though you are not walking: be calm and tranquil, and do not thrash your body about.

The last thing anyone who has done kinhin would associate with it, I think, is thrashing your body about. This rather comic image may reflect the young age at which some of the young monks, or unsui, would be sent to the monastery. Walking as if you are not walking is a wonderful idea. Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “Put your whole self into the walking” or “into the sitting. If you can put your whole self into this, you will gain the power to put your whole self into everything you do, and will become the strongest person in the world.” Today we might say that you will become the best version of yourself.

I often say that zazen is like “falling asleep staying awake.” In other words, like drifting off to sleep, our natural, busy monkey mind preoccupations tamp down to a dull roar, we begin to lose sensory awareness, maybe even experience sudden vertigo, and in general, lose the turgor associated with normal awakeness and anxiety. But while this process sets in, we stay awake and observe it rather scientifically. Keizan seems to concur, offering some evasive maneuvers to fight off sleep:

If drowsiness persists, you should make a vow, saying, “Because my karmic habits are already heavy, I am now shrouded in sleep. When will I awaken from my dark and confused wandering in the mind? I pray that the Buddhas and Ancestors will confer their great compassion on me and remove my dark and heavy suffering.”

I suspect that these techniques address what we might recognize as symptoms of sleep deprivation. The dawn-to-dusk design of retreats, and especially the time-honored tradition of sitting up all night on occasion, surely are meant to challenge the circadian rhythm, with notably direct effects on perception. The entreaties to Buddhas and Ancestors we might consider extraneous to this problem, but they tend to remind us that all of our lineage went through privations and self-discipline at least as trying as those we face, in the relative comfort of an environment fueled by electricity and fossil fuels, as well as indoor plumbing. We got no room to complain about our “dark and heavy suffering.”

Interestingly for a Soto Zen priest, Keizan also recommends that “If your thoughts are still not at rest, you should call to mind some short koan which your Master has given you to guide you, such as ‘What is It that comes like this?,’ ‘A dog’s not having Buddha Nature,’ ‘Ummon’s Mount Sumeru,’ Joshu’s oak tree,’ for instance: ‘bland talk is what meets the need.” So koans were not eschewed entirely in early Soto Zen, even when doing zazen, but were considered relatively bland, not disturbing to equanimity. He also recommends focusing on death to calm the mind, “the great matter where your breathing comes to an end and your eyes close forever.” Or, “focus on the ‘not-yet-born state’ before a single thought has arisen. In modern parlance, neither of these images would be considered especially calming. But then he predicts that even “when you are doing your daily activities, you will suddenly give rise to the two types of ‘emptiness’ — that of there being no personal self and of there being no permanent self in phenomena — and your scattered thoughts will, without fail, lose their force. Again, seemingly not very soothing.

In closing, he brings it home: “Then, what is right before your eyes will be your koan.” Which he rephrases, “At that moment, what the koan is is ‘right before your eyes.’” In between he notes, “You and it will not be ‘two things going around each other.’” Again, the great master seems to be throwing out, at random, all the fingers pointing at the moon that he can muster, in the hopes that one will stick. He ends with “Wholeheartedly do I pray for this; with all my heart do I so pray.” Can I get an amen?

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Contradictory —

that is pure meditation:

it is in your mind.

In the last segment we ended with Keizan’s “do not become involved in too many activities or too many studies,” weaving a complex web of contradictions in Zen practice, in particular those that inevitably arise when we attempt to share the Dharma with others. As Master Dogen says, “Thus the realm of self-awakening and awakening others invariably holds the mark of realization….” Without genuine insight, we are forever lost in the monkey mind’s niggling contradictions. Now the master veers back to zazen itself, with some down-to-earth suggestions, presumably based on his personal experience:

By no means sit in meditation in extreme brightness or dark, in extreme cold or heat, or the like, to say nothing of the places frequented by entertainers or gamblers. Within a monastery, at the home of good friends, deep in some forest or glen can serve you for this. By blue waters, in green hills are places to stroll quietly; near valleys, under trees are places for clearing the mind. Beholding impermanence, do not ignore it, for this encourages the mind to search the Way.

Again, the strange reference to meditating in public places of disrepute. We are left to wonder if there were schools extant that made public displays of their devotion in inappropriate settings. Or perhaps Keizan is putting his students on notice that if they are spotted in such places, it will not be for the purposes of Zen. Note that he does suggest the remote realms of nature, for sitting or walking, and “clearing the mind.” This seems an obvious meme of all cultures, but nowadays sitting outdoors is criticized by some as not the real zazen. Sitting inside the walls of a building is definitely less distracting, but in either case, Keizan’s emphasis on impermanence is germane. It applies to the self in any circumstance.

Next, Keizan goes into the equipment and environment of meditation and ceremonial halls, similar to the instructions in Fukanzazengi. It raises the question as to whether or not this seminal paper on zazen was available or not to the monastics just a few generations after Dogen. We get the impression that Keizan’s intent here is to cover any gaps in the promulgation of “pure meditation” that may have been perceived at the time, or perhaps only to flesh it out with more homely language to make it more accessible or, as we say today, more relatable to his followers. A lot can change in a couple of generations.

He does offer some mental attitudinal exercises, such as “Constantly dwelling with great benevolence and compassion, transfer the immeasurable spiritual merits of your seated meditation to all sentient beings.” This may be the root source of our Transfer of Merit, or Eko in Japanese, performed at the end of Zen ceremonies. And “Do not give rise to arrogance, conceit, or pride in your knowledge of the Dharma, for such attitudes lie outside the Way and are the methods of ordinary, everyday people.” Again, by criticizing “ordinary, everyday people,” Keizan’s message can be criticized as prompting the very us-and-them mentality that might lead to “arrogance, conceit, or pride.” Again, the inescapable koan.

Then, before going into some recommended hygienic practices around zazen, “…rinse your eyes and wash your feet before sitting,” he nails it:

Just sit, without “doing” anything: this is the essential technique for practicing pure meditation.

Finally, we cut to the chase. Non-doing follows on the heels of non-thinking, Dogen’s coinage. If we can regress to the point of non-thinking in zazen, neither thinking nor not-thinking, the next way station would be non-doing. This is akin to Dogen’s “being actualized within non-thinking, being manifested within non-interacting” from his brief poem, Zazenshin. If the effect of zazen is actualized in the normal state of awareness that he termed non-thinking, then it is manifested fully within non-interacting, which would be equivalent to non-doing, on the level of intention. Needless to say, actualization is something we can recognize and foster, through embracing non-thinking as our new normal; but manifestation is something totally outside the realm of doing. It is nothing-doing. It can happen, but we cannot make it. Referring to this as a “technique,” a translator’s choice, re-engages the duality dilemma. A technique is something we can apply intentionally. Non-thinking and non-doing are the absence of intent. In terms of intentional approaches to doing, Keizan provides a couple of memorable tropes:

Ten times having the urge to speak, let nine go past; let the moss grow around your mouth. Be like a fan in winter, or be like a wind chime hanging in space, which does not query which way the wind blows. Such are weathervanes for one who would tread the Way.

Shades of Master Dylan again. You don’t need a weathervane to know which way the Zen wind blows. Paraphrasing, for those of you old enough to remember. Conjuring images instead of laying out the logic of the practice, Master Keizan appeals to our intuition, our sense of channeling the experience of the insentient, the “sermon of no words.”

Pure meditation does not concern itself with teachings, practices, or realization and it encompasses the virtues of all three… Even though teaching is done with regard to pure meditation, it is not customary teaching; it is called “the way of direct pointing to Buddha Nature and single Transmission from mind to mind,” in which the Master gives his whole being to voicing the Truth; his words, from the first, do not have chapter and verse. It is the place where notions and ideas have come to an end, and the limits of reasoning are surpassed — one word encompasses the universe, even without the slightest shred of praise.

Here we have the bifurcation of Zen practice and zazen. In meditation, there is no further need for all the trappings of Zen practice, as Master Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai (Self-fulfilling Samadhi). The samadhi that we experience in zazen fulfils itself — it does not need anything to support it. Zen practice, however, involves the interaction with others, in the zendo, the monastery or practice center, and in the community at large. Here is where the necessity arises for agreed-upon standards of practice, in order that the community maintains harmony and can practice zazen in a conducive social environment. Sitting in your cave alone, not so much.

Keizan justifies his teaching as a full-throated effort to convey the essence of the teaching in the context of the method of meditation, understanding from the beginning that it has nothing to do with “notions and ideas” of a rational nature. Indeed, it surpasses language, as we learned from Hsinhsinming. One word, one gesture, expresses the whole of the truth, for those who have the eyes to hear and the ears to see. The underlined and, here and above, highlights the conjunction of both sides of the story. There is no actual separation of zazen and Zen practice, but all practices are not equal.

Keizan further explores and explains this: “On the one hand, A Master may speak of practice, but it is a natural, spontaneous practice free from defiling passions. It is called “having nothing that the body needs to do; having nothing the mouth needs to chant, even to itself; having nothing that the mind needs to seek after” — these are the Three Actions, which with practice become immaculate naturally. There is no special magic in doing specific things, even zazen; chanting incantations; or thinking better thoughts (another bow to Master Dylan). He extends further: “…the six sense faculties are naturally immaculate, without stain or flaw.” But he dismisses the traditional ways of interpreting the Four Noble Truths, the Twelvefold Chain, Six Paramitas and Ten Thousand Good Deeds of Bodhisattvas; they are trumped by “’the seeing of the Eternal before one’s very eyes’, which is therefore called ‘being a Buddha.’ Just reside at ease in the samadhi which the Buddhas themselves accepted and used.”

Then, “On the other hand, a Master may speak of personal confirmation, yet there is no confirming and there is confirmation.” After this apparent contradiction, he again effusively praises this as the “lord of samadhis” and curiously mentions “It surpasses any social rules of ‘being worldly’ or ‘being saintly”; It lays bare the emotional thinking behind ‘delusion versus enlightenment.’ How could this not be confirmation of Supreme Enlightenment?”

On that last, seeing is believing. We cannot take this at his word, even though we do not disbelieve. If and when we accede to this view ourselves, we may transcend the “worldly” and “saintly,” but up until then we live in separate worlds. Confirmation, if it is real, is not to be found in words, however eloquent. He also amplifies upon Dogen’s point that in zazen, all Precepts are already fulfilled:

Also, pure meditation does not stand against the Precepts, mindfulness, or wise discernment. Rather it combines with these three aspects of spiritual training…. When seated in pure meditation, we observe that there is no duality whatsoever; we cast aside the multitude of things and bring all conditions to rest. Neither the Teachings of the Buddhas nor the teachings of the world dominate us; emotional attachments to the Way and worldly feelings are both left behind. There is no “right and wrong,” no “good and evil,” for what is there to resist or cease from? This is what the Precepts that go beyond mental characterization are.

Now he seems to be cribbing directly from Fukanzazengi. Dogen advises to “set aside all everyday concerns, think neither good nor evil, right or wrong.” But Keizan is making a stronger statement, declaring that, actually, there is no right, wrong, good, or evil. But we should remember this is not a social motto, but only to be applied to us personally, reflecting our reality in the Zen mirror. This is not a rationale for tolerating injustice, or allowing oneself or others to become a doormat. It is necessary to proceed to this zero point, what I refer to as the “singularity of consciousness,” in order that we can shed our sentimental interpretation of societal and Buddhist teachings, along with all other confusion. This is passing the “event horizon” on the way to awakening. At the heart of the “Black Hole” of reality, none of these conditions obtain. When we return, however, nothing has really changed.

In the next segment, the last on Keizan Zenji, we will see what he as to say about mindfulness and wise discernment, the remaining two “aspects of spiritual training” he mentions. Until then, please take up his suggestions regarding pure meditation — which phrase, by the way, is not capitalized, indicating an attitude of humility towards something quite ordinary — in other words, the humble practice of zazen.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Pure means nondual —

like Original Nature:

pure impurity.

In the last segment we ended with Master Keizan’s declaration that the one who meditates becomes the One who is the True Person. He waxes effusive as he describes what this is like:

From the first, the wondrous, pure, bright Original Nature immediately appears before one’s eyes. One light continuing from the first ultimately becomes fully illuminating.

So True Person and Original Nature, both in caps, are interchangeable labels for the true self, the apparent object of our affection in pursuing this seemingly endless effort of zazen. These claims imply an end goal to the practice, something which, once attained, means that our life’s work is effectively done. This line is reminiscent of Hakuin Zenji’s “Song of Zazen.” In it, he claims, “Nirvana is openly shown to our eyes.” Those scholars and practitioners who refute that there is any transformative experience implied in the teachings of Buddhism have a lot of explaining to do. Nonetheless, we should not be too attached to our own idea of what these descriptions mean. If, for example, something appears before one’s own eyes, it must have been there all along. Meditation, and any understanding of what buddha-dharma is pointing to, can not have a material effect on external realities. If these claims and implied promises hold any water, it is because they are already true. Returning to the waves & ocean analogy, Master Keizan continues:

The waters of the ocean are all without increase or decrease. Likewise, the waves and billows have no withdrawing or turning back upon themselves. Thus, all Buddhas have appeared in the world for the sake of the Reason for the One Great Matter for which we train. Straightaway, they help sentient beings open up spiritually and see the way to go, that they may awaken and know Buddha.

That last being precisely what Keizan Zenji is attempting to do here, helping us to know Buddha. Likening the process to the irresistible surging of the surf as it crashes upon the shore, the impulse and impetus to awakening is thought of as a force of nature — buddha seeking Buddha. Whatever other labels we may choose to self-identify, all are bound to fall short of the mark. The term “buddha,” meaning fully awakened, is the placeholder for what we actually are. That is, the conscious potential to awaken to the truth of existence. Any other term would do as well to attempt to name the unnamable.

Keizan goes on:

Also, they have a wondrous method which does not entangle or distress or foster defiling passions: it is called “pure meditation.” It is, of course, the samadhi which all Buddhas employ, to their delight, it is also called “the samadhi that is the lord of samadhis.” If even for a little while you reside contented within this samadhi, then straightaway you will open your spiritual eye and clarify what your mind really is. Know well that this is indeed the right gate to Buddhahood.

So finally we get around to the method of zazen itself, here defined as “pure” meditation, and we are only mid-page on the second of seven-and-a-half pages of single-spaced text. Keizan Zenji seems much more focused than Master Dogen on the effects of zazen, “pure meditation,” rather than the method. It is advisable to recall that “purity” in Zen has none of the theistic connotations of irredeemable sin and religious morality, but the purity of nonduality versus dualistic thinking. Which Keizan reaffirms in the next few lines, below. Note that the Buddhas “employ” samadhi, as if it is an instrument, or tool, wielded against dualistic thinking. Again, the temptation is to form an image of samadhi, attempt to achieve it, and thereby force the gate to Buddhahood open through sheer exertion of will. But this is doomed to failure as it is another instance of dualistic thinking, as Keizan is quick to remind us:

If you are desirous of clarifying what your mind really is, let go of all your deluded, discriminatory knowledge and explanations. Put aside the teachings of the world and the teachings of the Buddha. Cut yourself free from all false and deluding opinions and sentiments. When you manifest the true Nature of the One Reality, the clouds of doubt and delusion that have accumulated will disperse, and the Moon of your Original Nature will once again shine clear and bright.

The master goes on in this vein for some time, quoting Buddha to reinforce his point. It should be noted again that all the buddhas and ancestors of Zen’s lineage were speaking with one voice. That is, they were all pointing at the same moon, no matter the multiplicity of fingers. The phrase “once again” is revealing, in that the meaning of “refuge” in Buddhism — as in taking refuge in the Three Treasures — has the sense of returning to whence we came. That our “Original Nature will once again shine clear and bright” means that it is always shining, but obscured by our ignorance. Matsuoka Roshi cautioned against expecting some dramatic event, like a lightning bolt out of the sky, but described insight as more like the “clouds parting to reveal the sun.” A majestic, but entirely natural and gentle, slow reveal.

In contrast to Fukanzazengi, which stresses almost exclusively the physical dimensions and techniques of the zazen method, Master Keizan expands the scope to include the necessity of developing the kinds of mental, attitudinal frames of mind, based on Buddhism’s basic teachings of the five skandhas, the five hindrances of “desire, anger, drowsiness, excitability, and doubt” as arising from ignorance, the first link in the twelvefold chain, and their relation to meditation. We should probably assume that his audience had recourse to Master Dogen’s writings, so Keizan’s intent is to add his two-cents’ worth. He also stresses the importance of recognizing and resisting the monkey mind:

Let your mind have no judgmental thoughts and fancies; let your body have no “business to attend to.” This is a primary point to heed, for, when you have brought the causes of your delusory thoughts to an end, the misleading mind will follow suit and become extinguished. When the misleading mind is extinguished, the Immutable Body will manifest, and you will understand and forever know. This is not a teaching of nihilistic annihilation nor is it a teaching of a perpetual personality ever on the move.

This reprises, in different terms, Master Dogen’s instructions to set aside all everyday concerns and give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha. But the English translation implies that we can bring the “causes of… delusory thoughts to an end,” which we know cannot be done as an intentional act on our part. We might say that when we relinquish our attachment to our own opinions and thoughts, opening up to the neutral, “don’t-know mind,” then the monkey will lie down and take a nap. Extinguishing the misleading mind is akin to snuffing out a candle for the time being, which can later be relit. The “Immutable Body,” again capitalized, provides yet another image for the true self, which, once experienced, becomes our new normal, nondual self-identity: Sengcan’s “In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self.” This teaching also transcends the binary choice of either complete annihilation of self, or self-in-perpetuity, the concept of the soul.

Restating another of the later stanzas of Sengcan’s “Trust in Mind,” where he cautions, “Waste no time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this,” Keizan updates the message:

The active pursuit of arts and crafts, medicine, and fortune-telling should all be left far behind. How much more so, singing and dancing, as well as seeking friendships, arguing, playing pranks, or engaging in debates and discussions.

He goes on to remonstrate against chasing after fame and fortune, reciting poetry and lyrics of various kinds (while admitting that the latter are, “by nature, the karmic effects of a pure attitude of mind”), even composing literary works, abstaining from all of which “will serve as a fine model for one who would tread the Path; it is what is adequate for a harmonious mind.” Obviously, this is for an audience of monastics, and not lay people, whose very livelihood may depend upon engaging in certain arts and sciences. Various forms of fortune-telling and playing pranks are now staples of the entertainment business. Debate was once a legitimate public method of propagating Buddhism, as in the middle period of Nagarjuna in India, so Keizan is admonishing against the vain discussions, idle chatter, and specious arguments mentioned in the ancient teachings from the Metta Sutta down to the present.

After criticizing attachment to either fine clothing and robes or to soiled and tattered versions, each of which represents the poles of ignorance, he cites practical recommendations for maintaining health:

Do not neglect taking care of your body’s life. Lacking sufficient clothing, food, or sleep is referred to as the three insufficiencies, for each is a cause of regressions and lapses. Also, do not eat any sentient being nor any stale of spoiled food, for they are not pure. … Likewise do not be addicted to fine and fancy foods… you ought to not sit immediately after a large meal… Monks, without fail, should restrain themselves as to the amount of food eaten. “To restrain intake” implies “in relation to your particular body.” Within three parts, eat two parts and leave one.

He even mentions that exceptions are granted to these dietary restrictions for medical purposes. Zen is nothing if not practical. Remember that the crowd he was addressing probably consisted of relatively young monks from various family backgrounds. The monastery was partly a kind of finishing school, for smoothing the rough edges of the young wards, unsui in Japanese. Compare to now, when our universities cater to the comfort and demands of the students and their parents. Compare to oryoki style eating, where the small nesting bowls and serving process pays strict attention to the control of portions. “Greed” is mentioned by Keizan, as well as in the Meal Verse, associated with overindulging in food. In our “greed is good” culture — shout out to Gordon Gekko — food is the last thing we would tend to associate with greed. Vast accumulation of wealth, far beyond one’s needs, or what is even possible to spend, has become the aspiration of many, and admired by virtually all of the citizenry.

After a long aside, Keizan returns to meditation itself, urging his monks to “not lean against fences, walls, partitions, meditation chairs, barriers and the like.” I suppose that this curious admonition probably derives, again, from young novices falling asleep during the long sitting sessions at the monastery, and propping themselves up so as not to fall over. In Japan today, a “chin board” is in use, which has a curved end to place under the chin while sitting, the base of the plank between the legs, so as not to fall over during overnight meditation. I am tempted to build and try one out, myself.

Next, Master Keizan walks us through a long litany of various kinds of experiences one may encounter in seated meditation, such as intense heat and cold, feeling heavy and light, et cetera. He cautions that these are the effect of unregulated breathing. Similarly, for afflictions of a mental and emotional sort, such as sinking or floating sensations, seeing Buddha or Bodhisattvas, having “sage opinions” or “penetrating insights” and the like, he dismisses as “illnesses from a disharmony of thoughts and breathing.” Then he reveals some curious “try this” techniques, or sub-routines:

Should such an illness occur, focus your mind on your crossed legs as you sit. Should your mind feel dull and depressed, focus the mind on the space between your eyebrows. Should your mind run riot, focus your mind down the ridge of your nose onto the tanden. Normally, when sitting, you should quietly focus your mind on the palm of your left hand. Then, should you sit for a long time, even though you do not force your mind to be focused, the mind will not of itself wander off.

Here is some gonzo oxherding in detail. Matsuoka Roshi mentioned focusing your attention on the forehead or the knees, depending on whether you feel dizzy or nauseous, respectively. This tells you that you will, at some point, feel dizzy or nauseous, or experience the things that Master Keizan, as well as the Buddha himself, in the Surangama Sutra, point out. These are emails and texting from the Original Frontier, from those who blazed the trails. We could do worse than listen up. Like the ox, Keizan is assuring us that the mind will eventually take care of itself, with no need for intervention on our part.

Reading and reciting scriptures is thrown into the mix of things to avoid overdoing, reprising Dogen. One of the most curious and, in a way, quaint, admonitions deals with inappropriate environments:

Do not by any means do sitting meditation during fires, floods, windstorms, or robberies, nor at the beach, in wineshops or brothels, in the houses of widows, or in the presence of female entertainers.

This conjures quite a picture of the interface of his monastics with the society of the times. It is not too far from a description of the kinds of crises and seductions prevalent today. I think the message is to avoid those situations not conducive to meditation, as well as not to resort to meditation as an escape. Master Keizan seems intent upon striking the middle way between all sorts of competing dualities. He goes on to include Dogen’s pushback against overreaching formality or complexity in general:

Although participating in massive Buddhist Services and working on huge construction projects are, by and large, fine activities, they are impracticable for those devoted to seated meditation. Also, do not foster a voice for voicing the Dharma or for teaching others how to turn their hearts around, for these things are subject to scattered minds and disordered thoughts. Do not encourage a delight in being in crowds or long to seek for disciples. Do not become involved with too many activities or too many studies.

This last line reflects Master Dogen’s take on doing one thing, rather than many, the modern trope expressed as drilling one deep well rather than many shallow ones in order to find water. You really have to wonder if the prepositional phrase, “by and large” was really in use during Keizan’s time, or if it is an example of creative translation. Large construction projects is a giveaway that the master is saying “do as I say and not as I do,” as he is credited with establishing monasteries, which involved heavy construction. We have visited several of these monumental examples of architecture from a period in which only hand tools were available, and none of the heavy equipment we take for granted today. We have also witnessed a few of what I consider massive Buddhist services, e.g. at Eiheiji, Dogen’s final stomping grounds.

The bit about assuming you are the voice of the Dharma, and overweening devotion to the notion that you are someone else’s teacher, is again characteristic of Dogen’s message as well. You may find it ironic, or even hypocritical, that Keizan would be admonishing fostering “a voice for voicing the Dharma or for teaching others” when that is precisely what he is doing here. I am further exacerbating the dilemma by adding commentary. There is no way our of this particular koan. It is built into consciousness itself, and the dichotomy is built into language. It should be mentioned that the hankering for large crowds of like-thinking people to bolster your own commitment to the practice is a syndrome that has survived to the present day. If your practice depends upon the presence of others, it is not yet genuine practice. Buddha comes before Dharma comes before Sangha, with its social seductions, including a concomitant complexity of ritual, at least in terms of the central focus of Soto Zen.

We will leave Keizan here for now, returning in the next segment as he himself returns to more specifics on zazen itself. He vacillates from practical, mundane commentary on the details of zazen to flowery descriptions of its effects, to more practical advice on how to conduct yourself in daily life, and back to more on the meditation method. As we say in Zen, it’s all connected. Keizan weaves a complex web.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Pure meditation —

how “pure” can it really be?

Just sit and find out.

Before moving into more contemporary teachings, such as Hakuin Zenji, an 18th-century Rinzai master much admired by Soto Zen for his embrace of zazen, and a few selections from my root teacher, Matsuoka Roshi, we will examine one of the teachings of Keizan Jokin, who succeeded Dogen in the fourth generation after his death in 1253. Keizan was born 15 years later, and is sometimes referred to as the Great Patriarch, Dogen the Highest Patriarch; or as the Mother and Father of Soto Zen in Japan, respectively. Keizan is known for popularizing Dogen’s Zen, and establishing many monasteries and practice centers in Japan.

I have chosen to comment upon Keizan Zenji’s “Instructions on How to Do Pure Meditation,” since the method of zazen was Master Dogen’s focus, and Keizan is credited with founding the modern practice of Dogen Zen in Japan. Matsuoka Roshi and his successors in America are carrying forward this mission and tradition. If you are familiar with, or review my podcast on Dogen’s Fukanzazengi, or the “Principles of Seated Meditation,” you may find some interesting contrasts here. They are distinctly different. Keizan’s instructions begin with some of the effects you may expect from zazen, rather than refuting conventional wisdom of the times, as did Dogen, with his statements and questions. The very first line reads:

Pure meditation opens us so that we may directly realize the Foundation of our minds and dwell content within our own Buddha Nature.

That “Foundation” is capitalized is a clue that it is a special term in the original, which is said to have been written in Chinese. The translator’s choice may only suggest what Master Keizan may have meant. It seems odd that Keizan would have written in Chinese after Master Dogen had written in Japanese a few generations earlier, but we will leave that to the scholars to sort out. The main point here is that by virtue of the unique method of zazen, sitting still enough for long enough, we may directly access the central truths of Buddhism. Master Keizan follows with:

This is called “displaying our Original Face.” It is also called “revealing the landscape of our Original Nature.” Body and mind both drop off, with no clinging to sitting up or lying down. Hence, there are no discriminatory thoughts of “this is good” or “this is bad.” You readily go beyond thoughts of “this is worldly” or “this is saintly.” You penetrate into, and go on beyond, the multitude of notions and theories about delusion versus enlightenment. You leave far behind the boundary between “ordinary beings” and “Buddhas.” Therefore, you cease to pant after the myriad phenomena and let go of all attachments to them.

So we hear echoes of Dogen from many of his familiar teachings, summarized as an introduction to zazen for Keizan’s audience, which we assume to be young monks and nuns who have attended one of the various practice places he established, and perhaps the uninitiated public. Uchiyama Roishi’s use of the term “landscape” we find here, perhaps in its first coinage. Later, in an effusive expansion on these themes, we hear the “moon in a dewdrop” made personal:

Whilst sitting in pure meditation, cut yourself free of Heaven and Earth: your whole being is as a solitary drop of dew.

Cutting oneself “free of Heaven and Earth” we assume to mean being free from any conception of their character, or the imagined separation of Samsara and Nirvana. The use of “pure” here should be taken to mean nondual, rather than indicating purity of some moral nature. Zen has been called “amoral” owing to its adherence to the Middle Way of Buddha’s teachings, but that is not the same as “immoral.” It is said that there is no “stench of holiness” around Zen.

After further attempts to capture a snapshot of the inconceivable insight that arises in zazen, Keizan refers to past masters’ wordsmithing:

The Great Master who was our Third Ancestor called It “Mind,” meaning “Original Nature.” The venerable Nagarjuna, as an expedient, called It “Body,” meaning “True Self.” The former points to the aspect of Buddha Nature, whilst the latter expresses the embodiment of the Buddhas.

The use of the term “whilst” gives away the fact that this translation is probably somewhat dated. Conflating “Mind,” capital “M,” with “Original Nature” attributed to Sengcan, and “Body” with “True Self,” all initial caps, gives a different slant to the meaning of body and mind dropping off. When our mind is seen as our original nature, and our body, simultaneously, as our true self, that very insight comprises the dropping off, which otherwise seems to propose an event that contradicts the reality of body-mind. The body that we perceive, and the mind that we construct, give way to reveal the unlimited nature of both. Simultaneously, the apparent body-mind of others is seen through as well. Keizan illuminates the timeless quality of this revelation:

This Original Nature is none other than Buddha. The radiance of the True Self arises from the ancient past and is dazzling in Its brilliance today.

Again, capitalizing It indicates the special pointing to our essential reality, or True Self, which otherwise cannot be captured in words, and includes “other.” This “It” is the inmo of Japanese, the ineffable, the “not-two” of Sengcan’s “Trust in Mind” poem. The “brilliance” recalls Buddha’s admonition that his students’ minds had not yet begun to shine. The master clarifies further:

Our minds, from the first, have no dual nature and our bodies differ in appearance. There is just mind and just body; do not speak of them as being different or as being alike. Mind shifts and perfects body; body manifests and its appearance diverges.

Cautioning against overthinking this, falling into comparative thinking, even trying to parse the sameness and differences we can conceive of regarding the so-called body-mind dualism, sometimes referred to as “Descartes’ Error.” The notion that a shifting in the mind “perfects” body seems contrary to Buddhism’s basic tenet of imperfection, but that is just the point, I think — such perfection can exist only in the mind. The fact that the appearance of the body is constantly diverging as we age is the manifestation of the other basic tenet of impermanence. This is obvious to anyone who owns a mirror. Someone recently told me that in a nunnery she knew of, there are no mirrors. This does not suggest that the nuns are vampires, just that their sense of self has nothing to do with vanity.

Then Keizan takes a turn into the larger implications of this personal transformation:

A single wave moves ever so little, and myriad waves come following after. No sooner have mind and perceptual consciousness arisen than myriads of phenomena compete to come in… Hence, the mind is like the ocean’s water, the body like its billowing waves. Just as there is no trace of a wave outside the ocean’s water, so there is not a single drop of water outside of, or apart from, the billowing waves. Water and wave have no separate existence; movement and rest are no different. Hence, it is said that the True Person of “birth and death, coming and going,” the Indestructible Body of the four elements and the five skandhas, is the One who now sits in meditation, who straightaway enters the ocean of Buddha Nature and accordingly manifests the embodiment of the Buddhas.

So here we have the familiar analogy to the ocean and its waves. “True Person” indicating the high regard in which the realization transcending the constructed self is held, and probably indicates a traditional phrase in Chinese.

The phrase “birth and death, coming and going,” is in quotes, but unattributed. I assume this quote is from an Indian or Chinese source familiar to Master Keizan and his students of the time. Birth and death are commonly referred to as coming and going, the inflection points in life through which buddhas appear and disappear in this world.

The “Indestructible Body,” also capitalized, is only indestructible in the form of its elemental components: earth, wind, water, and fire; and the skandhas of form, feeling, thought, impulse and consciousness. That the former would be considered indestructible seems reasonable — they are still present even after death; but that the skandhas are not destroyed is more difficult to accept. Perhaps the master means that, while the particular physical constituents of sentient being — the five aggregates and the six senses — disintegrate with death, they are present in all forms of conscious life, and so continue unabated in the form of the ocean and its many other waves. The important point is that the “One,” capitalized, who sits in meditation in the present moment, and is the sum total of the aggregated elements, et cetera, enters the ocean and bodily manifests the Buddha. Being the declaration of a Zen master, this does not indicate a mental concept, but a direct, visceral experience. It suggests that through zazen, we actually become conscious of the ocean in some transcendent form of awareness.

We will continue our examination of Keizan’s pure meditation in the next segment. Those who wish to research further can find this translation online.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Extensive record

of Master Dogen’s Zen mind

and still not enough

In the introduction to Dogen’s Extensive Record, Eihei Koroku, my copy a gift from Shohaku Okurmura, who collaborated in translating with the American Zen Priest Taigen Dan Leighton, Leighton reminds us that “…Dogen’s intent is not to present doctrines of philosophical positions, but to encourage deepening religious practice.” By which, of course Master Dogen means primarily zazen, but also to study these teachings from Buddhism thoroughly in practice, reflecting upon the more obscure or arcane lessons from Buddha on down through the Chinese masters in light of our own experience on the cushion. With the caveat that we are not to assume that a cursory or superficial examination of that experience is dependable. We have to sit still enough, for long enough, for any insight to transpire. How still is still enough? And how long is long enough? Only you can know for sure. If there is any doubt about this in your mind, it is not enough. Doubt itself has to sharpen into Great Doubt, it is said.

Shortly afterwards, in the same section, “Using Eihei Koroku as a Practice Tool,” after pointing out that practically 100% of Dogen’s teachings are oriented to the practice of zazen, he quotes Bob Dylan as reflecting the same spirit of inquiry in song: “A question in your nerves is lit, yet you know that there is no answer fit to satisfy, ensure you not to quit, to keep it in your mind and not forget, that it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.” Quintessentially American, the creativity in Dylan is more than matched by that of Dogen, in inspiring this essentially scientific, and yet poetic, approach to Zen.

Owing to the exhaustive and extensive, encyclopedic nature of this collection of Dogen’s teachings, 645 pages not including appendices, with most of the recorded live teachings being brief enough to fit more than one to a page, it is not possible to deal with in any comprehensive fashion here. Instead, I will offer the tiniest tip of the iceberg, quoting Dharma Hall Discourse number 431. This is not exactly an arbitrary choice on my part, as it is about where I am in the full re-reading of the text, cover-to-cover. This one is fairly typical in its length, as well as Master Dogen’s spontaneous approach to expounding upon well-known (at that time) historical events and classical teachings from Chinese Buddhism. It also touches on what I feel is one of the most compelling events in the history of Zen Buddhism, the first meeting and exchange of the Sixth Ancestor in China, commonly referred to as Huineng, with his teacher, the Fifth Ancestor Daman Hongren. It also resonates, in my opinion, with a contemporary issue of considerable concern, friction and frustration, that of immigration. [Brackets are by the translators.]

Southern Buddha Nature

431. Dharma Hall Discourse

I can remember, lay practitioner Lu [later the sixth ancestor, Dajian Huineng] visited the fifth ancestor [Daman Hongren].
The [fifth] ancestor asked, “Where are you from?”
Lu replied, “I am from Lingnan in the south.”
The ancestor asked, “What is it you are seeking?”
Lu said, “I seek to become a buddha.”
The ancestor said, “People from the south have no Buddha nature.”
Lu said, “People have south or north; the Buddha nature does not have south or north.”
The ancestor realized that this person was a vessel [of Dharma], and allowed him to enter the hall for lay postulants.

Although the fifth ancestor and sixth ancestor spoke like this, I, their descendant Eiheiji, have a bit more to say. Great assembly, would you like to understand this clearly? Although [Lu] picked up a single blade of grass, he had not yet offered five flowers.

The footnotes, which are another asset of this volume, are quite extensive in themselves, filling in the blanks for those readers who are not especially scholarly, such as myself. Here they explain that “Lingnan is a large section of Canton, in south China. People from Lingnan were considered provincial and ignorant.” This is where I find the resonance with the contemporary contempt, expressed in certain circles, for our neighbors to the south, in Mexico and beyond. But buddha-nature, much like human nature, cannot be consigned to only those who are like us. It’s either all or nothing, no exceptions.

Note that he starts by saying “I can remember,” which he does frequently. I think this may be equivalent to the traditional “Thus have I heard” introducing teachings attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha, as a way of authenticating them. Here, Dogen’s memory must be of an anecdote he has studied in writing, or one that his teachers had quoted. Nowadays of course we have the more labor-intensive requirement to thoroughly and accurately attribute any quote to its proximate source, usually in print format, but more and more from online search engines and live or recorded audio-video sources, such as this podcast. The Internet has at one and the same time made this infinitely more doable, and infinitely more complex. We literally have whole libraries at our fingertips, as opposed to scrolls of rice paper.

Also in Fukanzazengi, Master Dogen urges us to “…give up even the idea of becoming a buddha” when we begin zazen, after “stopping the function of your mind” to engage in judgmental discourse. Huineng’s declaration that this is indeed his purpose would thus normally be taken as the unenlightened view of the novice, but he had had some definitively profound experience leading up to this meeting, when overhearing a monk reciting the Diamond Cutter Sutra, a line defining the true nature of Mind had hit him like a ton of bricks. He had made his way to Hongren’s monastery to clarify the Great Matter, without having had any training in, or study of, buddha-dharma. He was said to be illiterate, at least in the context of his times, and was a relatively young man, somewhere in his mid-twenties. This also happens to be the age that our founder, Matsuoka Roshi, came to America, and my age when I met him in the 1960s in Chicago.

Hongren’s teasing statement that southerners have no buddha-nature is similar to what my fellow Zen students in Chicago said, when I announced that I was moving to Atlanta, in part to bring Zen to the South. They retorted, “Southerners do not do Zen!” I responded, “That’s the point!” So now we are the Southern School of Sudden enlightenment, as Huineng’s sect was later known. Actually, of course, the binary of sudden and gradual cannot be separated anymore than hot and cold, light and dark. We are suddenly awakened in the moment, or moment-after-moment, but it took the whole of history of the universe to get here. Lung-ya’s “Those who in the past were not enlightened will now be enlightened.”

Note that Hongren allowed Huineng to “enter the hall for lay postulants.” This tells us that by that time, lay practice was recognized, and perhaps “separate but equal” to that for monastics. Just as Master Dogen had respected the hierarchy in the Chinese monastery of his teacher Rujing, with himself as an outlander at the bottom of the totem pole, apparently the distinction between bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, versus lay men and women, had survived from Buddha’s India down to the 600s of the common era.

The “five flowers,” as another footnote informs us, “…may refer to the five houses of Ch’an that derived from Huineng’s influence. But Dogen’s statement implies the need to see multiplicity as well as the oneness of Buddha nature.” Again, contemporary perspectives on ideology reflected in ancient wisdom. The current term of art would be “diversity” rather than multiplicity, perhaps, but the implication is the same. The oneness is seen in the “single blade of grass,” an image that is frequently used in Zen literature to indicate the wholeness in the particular, the many reflected in the one. As Dogen says in Fukanzazengi, “The buddha-way is leaping clear of the many and the one…” The reality is that both things are true at the same time. Simultaneity takes precedence over linearity.

Dogen closes with his boilerplate signoff, including a claim to be descended from the old guys whom he remembers having this run-in, and follows with a clarification that is only clarifying if you already have a clue as to what he is talking about. This amounts to the tip of the tip of the iceberg — that part that may be brushed off by the wing of an eagle flying by once a year — to steal from an old metaphor for immeasurability. I hope it has been enough to dig deeper into this early genius of Zen, the founder of our Soto practice, in Japan’s medieval time. You could do worse than to at least read the Shobogenzo if you want more than cursory glimpse of Japan’s greatest thinker — one who taught the art of nonthinking.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Renunciation

is not simply leaving home —

it is homelessness!

Master Dogen was quite prolific as a writer, even by today’s standards. But we should remember that writing in those days, as well as publishing, was accomplished with rice paper, brushes and ink. Imagine what he might have done with a word processor. He apparently intended his master work, Shobogenzo, which tends to overshadow his other writings, to consist of 100 fascicles, or chapters, but he completed only 95 in his brief lifetime of 53 years.

At a conference on Eihei Dogen around 2000 in Palo Alto, after his signature lecture on Dogen’s collection of 300 koans, called the Mana Shobogenzo, I asked John Daido Loori, What could the other five have possibly been about? The old modern master huffed, “Good point!” and walked away.

This collection, subtitled as “Sayings of Eihei Dogen Zenji recorded by Koun Ejo” in a small volume published by the Soto sect in Japan, was translated by one of my teachers, Shohaku Okumura Roshi. I have selected a couple of examples from the six “books” of live teachings, and will number them for your future reference. I hope you delve into these wonderful postcards from the past in greater detail.

1-2 Dogen also said,[You] should maintain the precepts and eating regulations (one meal a day before noon, etc.). Still, it is wrong to insist upon them as essential, establish them as a practice, and expect to be able to gain the Way by observing them. We follow them just because they are the activities of Zen monks and the lifestyle of the Buddha’s children. Although keeping them is good, we should not take them as the primary practice. I don’t mean to say, however, that you should break the precepts and become self-indulgent. Clinging to such an attitude is an evil view and not that of a Buddhist practitioner. We follow the precepts of regulations simply because they form the standard for a Buddhist and are the tradition of Zen monasteries. While I was staying at Chinese monasteries, I met no one who took them as the primary concern.

So the great master, while lecturing to monks living at a monastery, insists that the strict protocols of monastic life are not the primary practice of a monk. That central position is reserved for zazen itself.

This tells us, as lay practitioners, that the lifestyle of the monastic, which we may hold in high esteem, and even long to emulate, is not crucial. We remember from Jijuyu Zammai — Self-fulfilling Samadhi — “Without engaging in incense offering, bowing, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance and reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.” The various rituals are the peripherals, plug-and-play supportive activities surrounding the true teaching found in meditation. The lifestyle of the householder is likewise not central to living a Zen life. Zazen alone is:

For true attainment of the Way, devoting all effort to zazen alone has been transmitted among the buddhas and patriarchs. For this reason, I taught a fellow student of mine… a disciple of Zen Master Eisai, to abandon his strict adherence of keeping the precepts and reciting the Precept Sutra day and night.

It looks like Dogen, while a student, played a somewhat subversive role in respect to his Dharma brothers. It reminds me of the tale of the young visiting junior monks, unsui, whom the abbot admonished not to go “imitating the senior monks around here.” When they saw him following the same protocols, they confronted him with the contradiction, to which he said, “I just have my devotion this way.” He was not imitating anyone. Dogen is attributed with asking, “In zazen, what precept is not fulfilled?” Wholehearted practice is not dependent upon the circumstances of our daily life. The real monastery has no walls. But regarding monastic life, Dogen’s wheelhouse, the master had a lot to say:

1-21 Dogen instructed, Students of the Way, you must be very careful on several levels in giving up worldly sentiment. Give up the world, give up your family, and give up your body and mind. Consider this well. Even among those who retreat from the world and live secluded in the mountains or forests, there are some who fear that their family, which has continued for many generations, will cease to exist, and who become anxious for their family members or their relatives.

This deals with renunciation. Members of many spiritual sects are known as renunciants, turning their back on the normal family and social lives of the times, becoming hermits or mendicants. In any time this would represent a radical departure from the societal norms, including its mores and memes. The fundamental purpose of one’s life would be re-examined, giving and extremely new meaning to the notion of the “unexamined life” not being worth living. Master Dogen would often focus our attention in zazen like a laser, exhorting us to examine his teachings thoroughly in practice, i.e. mainly in meditation.

Although some people depart from home and give up family or property, they have not yet given up their bodies if they think that they should not do anything physically painful and avoid practicing anything which may cause sickness, even through they know it to be the Buddha-Way.

Here I have experienced a trick of the memory, which modern studies have apparently proven is a dependable attribute of long-term memory — that it is not dependable. That is, we unconsciously modify and embellish our memories over time, e.g. to polish our self-image, or to make them more meaningful. In this case, I remembered this section as Master Dogen outlining several levels of monks, and how he evaluated them in terms of their ability to do true renunciation. Here I find no specifics of that construct as I recall, and have been freely paraphrasing. Continuing with the last bit as published in this edition:

Further, even if they carry out hard and painful practices without clinging to their bodily lives, if their minds have not yet entered the Buddha-Way and if they resolve not to act against their own will even if such actions are the Buddha-Way, they have not yet given up their minds.

In my revisionist memory, Dogen expresses ranking monastics in a holarchy of renunciation. The first-level renunciant does what I interpret as outward renunciation: turning their back on the social world, physically leaving home, and donning the clothing and appearance of a monastic. But s/he is unable to actually let go of attachment to family, and/or may harbor secret yearnings for fame and fortune, or status.

The second level can actually reject the blandishments of society and the security and comfort of the family tree, which I refer to as physical renunciation. But this person cannot forsake clinging to the comforts of a healthy body, and put their own life on the line for the sake of Zen.

The third level adept is able to lay down their life and limb for the sake of the mendicant lifestyle. But they are unable to give up their own willful opinion of all the above. For example, they may be able to perform the abandonment of home and hearth, health and longevity, but they may nourish a certain self-image, taking pride in their accomplishments. This is monkey-mind.

If, however, unlike the monkey, they are able to release their grip on all the cookies in the jar, thus liberating themselves from their own clinging mind, they may accede to the highest level in Dogen’s hierarchy. At this point, they have done true renunciation, seeing through all the various dimensions of their life, and especially the delusional aspect of their own construct of what it means. Thus, the highest becomes the lowest, and the householder becomes identical with the monastic. If, in the midst of everyday life, with all its complexity, we can still manage to see through to the underlying emptiness, we need not abandon it in favor of the monastic model.

Another comment on this came in response to a question raised by a nun in the congregation of Dogen:

3-2 Once, a certain nun asked, “Even lay women practice and study the buddha-dharma. As for nuns, even though we have some faults, I feel there is no reason to say that we go against the buddha-dharma. What do you think?”

Dogen admonished,
“This is not a correct view. Lay women might attain the Way as a result of practicing the buddha-dharma as they are. However, no monk or nun attains it unless he or she has the mind of one who has left home. This is not because the buddha-dharma discriminates between one person and another, but rather because the person doesn’t enter the dharma. There must be a difference in the attitude of lay people and those who have left home. A layman who has the mind of a monk or nun who has left home will be released from samsara. A monk or nun who has the mind of a lay person has double faults. Their attitudes should be quite different. It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely is difficult. The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few. Life-and-death is the Great Matter, impermanence is swift. Do not let your mind slacken. If you abandon the world, you should abandon it completely. I don’t think that the names provisionally used to distinguish monks and nuns from lay people are at all important.”

I quote Dogen without omission because I frankly cannot see that any part of his response is not germane and important to our understanding of lay versus monastic practice. He profiles this as a choice, but insists that we are either all-in, or we are not. However he does not indicate that just because one chooses one way or the other, one is not superior or inferior to the other. It depends.

Wholehearted practice does not depend on the choice so much as the commitment. Half-baked practice in either case would seem to be the point of what the translators refer to as an admonition. Because Dogen is sometimes characterized as the “father” of Soto Zen in Japan, and mistakenly characterized as overly stern, severe and authoritarian, I would respectfully submit that these instructions are like those given to a child, in the sense of compassionate guidance, or tough love, and not at all condescending, or admonishing. He is not taking sides or advising this nun, and by extension ourselves, as to which way is right for us. He is only encouraging us to recognize the path we walk, and not to confuse the one with the other. Followed to where they are leading, either way works. All roads on the Original Frontier lead to nirvana. Eventually.

Master Dogen touches on this point again in later references in Zuimonki, but we do not have time to comment on all of them. In 4-3, for example he reiterates, “The primary point you should attend to is detaching yourself from personal views. To detach yourself from personal views means to not cling to your body.” And later in the same section, “…if you have not detached from the mind which clings to your body, it is like vainly counting up another’s wealth without possessing even a half-penny of your own. I implore you to sit quietly and seek the beginning and the end of this body on the ground of reality.” Here we find another aphorism we might have assumed to be Western or biblical in origin. But the great master could as easily have been addressing these comments to a lay audience, rather than to his coterie of monks and nuns. And again, the way, the method for both, is, as always, zazen.

In another instance, in 5-20, he quotes an ancient master who said, “At the top of a hundred foot pole, advance one step further.” He goes on to reinforce his point with this familiar Zen trope:

This means you should have the attitude of someone who, at the top of a hundred-foot pole, lets go of both hands and feet; in other words, you must cast aside body and mind.
There are various stages involved here. Nowadays, some people seem to have abandoned the world and left their homes. Nevertheless, when examining their actions, they still haven’t truly left home, or renounced the world.
As a monk who has left home, first you must depart from your ego as well as from [desire for] fame and profit. Unless you become free from these things, despite practicing the Way urgently as though extinguishing a fire enveloping your head… it will amount to nothing but meaningless trouble, having nothing to do with emancipation.

Here we find the famous “hair on fire” trope we think originated with Dogen but now ubiquitous as the image of extreme urgency and intensity. This is followed by a rather long critique of the ignorance and misguided attitudes of recalcitrant and phony monks of the time, which we sometimes imagine to be a modern anomaly. But people are people, and were no different in Dogen’s day. Note the restatement, found elsewhere, of the idea that unless your commitment is total, Zen practice may be a waste of time.

As a final note, it should be mentioned that in many parts of his oeuvre, Dogen promotes the monastic alternative. In his times, as it is today, it was probably more difficult for a lay person, man or woman, to maintain a practice of meditation and Dharma study than for a cloistered monk or nun. In 6-9 he likens entering a monastery to passing through the “Dragon-Gate… where vast waves rise incessantly. Without fail, all fish once having passed through this place become dragons.” But he goes on to say,

The vast waves there are not different from those in any other place, and the water is also ordinary salt water. Despite that, mysteriously enough, when fish cross that place, they all become dragons. Their scales do not change and their bodies stay the same; however, they suddenly become dragons.

I take his meaning to be that all of us, wherever we find ourselves, are surfing the vast waves of samsara that are rising incessantly all around us. And we are all capable of undergoing this mysterious change, passing through the gateless gate, that is nothing more or less than returning to our original nature, while nothing else changes. He goes on to point out that the monastery — sorin in Japanese, which connotes a place pf practice in the forest — is “not a special place.” In transforming samsara to nirvana, our practice converts the mundane to the sacred, and vice-versa. My world and welcome to it (shout out to James Thurber), the monastery without walls.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is it, really —

this so-called upright sitting?

It’s your everything.

Possibly the briefest of all of Master Dogen’s written teachings, Zazenshin is his rewrite of a poem he found in China, as was his initial tract on the principles of seated meditation, Fukanzazengi. The title means something like “Acupuncture Needle for Zazen,” or the shorter “Lancet of Zazen” I have chosen. Something sharp, in other words, that can cut or penetrate to the heart of the matter. In this case, the “Great Matter,” as it is called. In Japan in 1987, I had the good fortune to have acupuncture — needles, electricity and all — performed upon my back. As our Japanese host promised, it made me feel “light.”

The essential-function of buddhas,
and the functioning-essence of ancestors;
Being actualized within non-thinking;
Being manifested within non-interacting.

Here again, as in the last segment where we covered his Vow, Dogen never mentions it — zazen — even once. But we all know what he is talking about. It — zazen — is the essential function of all buddhas of past, future, and present. You might suggest that their function is to teach Buddhism, to transmit the dharma to the great unwashed masses. But the singular, effective, and only way to do so is through zazen. Not only do they need to impress upon others the central need for them to practice this “excellent method,” as Master Dogen refers to it, but they need to do it themselves, before they can have any idea of why others must be encouraged to sit, or to have any street cred for promoting the practice. It is what buddhas do. It is how buddhas become buddha, awakened. Otherwise, no buddhas.

How this comes about is that it begins with “non-thinking.” We return to our natural state of non-thinking, that is. There is nothing automatic about thinking. It has to be learned, just like language. But long before we learn to think, we are already fully conscious. Consciousness does not rely on thinking. Thinking may come and go, but it is not fundamental to awareness. It doesn’t hurt, but it can get in the way of direct intuition. We can think that something is real when it is not, for example, and that what is real, is not. We can tell when we are thinking, or when we have been, for a minute. And we can tell when we have not, just the moment before. As soon as we recognize this, of course, we are back to thinking. Non-thinking is neither thinking nor not-thinking. It is that awareness that can be aware of thinking, but is not dependent upon it. It can also be aware of non-thinking, without having to think about it. But simply returning to a childlike state of non-thinking awareness is not Zen’s comprehensive insight.

Insight into deeper levels of reality — the nondual side of things — is broadly considered the “effect” of meditation, one of many, but cannot be attributed to meditation as its cause, as in linear causality. It is difficult, but not impossible, for individuals to experience profound insight without the prerequisite of zazen. Sixth ancestor in China, Huineng, is the standout historical exemplar of this phenomenon. Most of us have to spend considerable time in zazen, just to cut through the clutter of our own opinions about it. It being zazen, and everything else we might think about reality.

This insight is not manifested simply in non-thinking, however. According to Dogen, it manifests in “non-interacting.” A line from one of the Ch’an poems we have examined claims that “All the senses interact and do not interact; interacting they are linked together; non-interacting, each keeps its place.” We look at them as a Venn diagram, overlapping, as in synesthesia. If we come to experience non-thinking as our new normal, intellectual state of mind, we can begin to apprehend non-interacting as an even deeper, intuitive state of merging of the senses, and all that that entails for consciousness itself. If non-thinking, or the embrace of it, is a prerequisite, then non-interacting in general, i.e. in the sensory realm, can be conceived as the next level down the rabbit-hole. This investigation can be understood as a kind of deep and all-inclusive process of profound sensory adaptation. Sitting still enough for long enough, everything adapts, or neutralizes. This is non-interacting on a granular level, so to speak.

Being actualized within non-thinking,
the actualization is by nature intimate.
Being manifested within non-interacting,
the manifestation is itself verification.

Master Dogen further unfolds the last two lines of the prior stanza, like flower petals opening to reveal the interior of the blossom. If we can accept that it — zazen and its effect — is most naturally actualized within this primordial state of non-thinking, then we can further embrace the idea that this revelation is by nature “intimate.” Here Dogen means, as usual for him, intimate in both temporal and spatial modes. That is, we are awakening to what we already are — nothing is changing — but it is so close in time and space, like the water to the fish, that we cannot really share it with anyone else. We cannot even separate our “self” from “it.” This is Uchiyama Roshi’s “Self selfing self,” Okumura Roshi’s translation.

When we penetrate to the depths of consciousness itself, encountering the stillness that resides at the heart of motion there, the non-interacting manifested therein is itself the verification of our exploration. We have discovered the Original Frontier™ of mind that Buddha pioneered 2500 years ago. We have found the territory for which Dogen is laying out the map.

The actualization that is by nature intimate
never has defilement.
The manifestation that is by nature verification
never has distinction between Absolute and Relative.

It becomes clear that this new landscape has never been defiled, and cannot be reduced to ordinary understanding, Zen’s special meaning of defilement. In it, we verify that there has never been any distinction between absolute and relative, a hallmark of the world of linear logic we have left far behind.

The Intimacy without defilement
is dropping off without relying on anything.
Verification beyond distinction between Absolute and Relative
is making effort without aiming at it.

Again unfolding the deeper meaning of the prior lines, Dogen reveals that this personal insight, one that cannot be shared with others, nor reduced to common understanding, is experienced as the “dropping off” of the imputed body-mind of one’s self, as well as of that of others, as we first encountered in his Genjokoan. This cannot be done intentionally, and can happen only in a context of not “relying on anything,” i.e. not being able to rely upon the usual tricks and dodges we employ in confronting the various vagaries and vicissitudes of daily life. All such gimmicks must be left behind at this remove, on the cushion.

This verification, in which absolute and relative truths find no foothold — and that, again, can occur, but we cannot force it — is reduced to simply making effort without aiming at it, again, on the cushion. We continue to make effort as in the beginning of our meditation, when as a novice, the physical world of form, the body and its resistance to sitting still for long, was the first barrier. Then, as the posture became comfortable, emotional and mental distress may have set in, perhaps accompanied by the social stressors of family and friends who do not meditate, and do not understand why we do. When we run out of explanations, even to ourselves, we still have no choice but to continue. We are no longer aiming at anything that we can articulate, but we are still making the effort. It is not rational at this point.

The water is clear to the earth —
a fish is swimming like a fish.
The sky is vast and extends to the heavens —
a bird is flying like a bird.

But like a refreshing, cool breeze, or a summer rain on a hot day, Master Dogen assures us that all is well. Zazen should be the comfortable way, the posture more like a refreshing stretch, and the breath like a sigh of relief. This is perfectly natural, like a fish swimming like a fish, or a bird flying like a bird. We are just sitting, like a person sitting. The water becomes clear, and the sky vast, extending to the heavens. The “vast emptiness, nothing holy” of Bodhidharma’s expression of spiritual truth to emperor Wu opens up before us. When we are asked why we do what we do, i.e. zazen — or even who it is answering the question — we can honestly say, with Bodhidharma and Dogen, and with a sense of putting our burden down, “Don’t know.” Nobody really knows, not even Buddha.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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So, what is the point?

No — the point of life, itself?

Hearing the Dharma?

This segment and the next will each take up one of Master Dogen’s briefer teachings, this one known as Dogen’s Vow, the other as Zazenshin, variously translated as an “acupuncture needle” or “lancet” for zazen. These are often chanted together in service, probably owing to their relative brevity. But they also bookend the master’s teaching, so to speak. The vow paints a broad-brush picture of why we pursue this practice, as far as that can be expressed. Notably, it does not mention zazen directly. Whereas the needle poem homes in on the centrality of zazen, as the very transmission of the teaching.

We vow with all beings, from this life on throughout countless lives, to hear the true Dharma; that upon hearing it, no doubt will arise in us, nor will we lack in faith;
that upon meeting it we shall renounce worldly affairs, and maintain the Buddhadharma; and that in doing so, the great earth and all beings together
will attain the buddha way.

That’s quite a vow, and all in one breath. Note that the “true Dharma” implies that there could be “untrue” Dharma, which we are also capable of hearing, one would presume. And we vow to listen for it not just in this lifetime, but, effectively, forever. Which brings up the question, what do you mean “we,” white man? Of course, Master Dogen was not, technically, white. We are all red, under the skin. That “no doubt” whatever will arise in us seems to contradict the old Zen admonition to “Keep your doubt at a keen edge.” That gnawing doubt is the sword of Manjusri, programmed to cut through all delusions, if you but keep it sharp. Zazen is the whetstone.

Not lacking in faith, nor feeling doubt, means our trust in the ancestors’ teaching, and our trust in original Mind, remains unflagging, in the face of the mashup that passes for “worldly affairs” these days. Like one continuous pileup on the expressway, or an unending train wreck, all other inducements and various seductions of modern life are ultimately disappointing, if not dismaying. But actually being able to maintain the essential and ongoing Buddhadharma depends upon our “meeting it.” When and where does this meeting occur? Somehow, if we do so, not only all beings, but the earth itself will benefit. This may be a nod to the ecological stewardship of the environment, not as obvious an issue in those days.

Although our past evil karma has greatly accumulated, indeed being the cause and condition of obstacles in practicing the way, may all Buddhas and Ancestors who have attained the buddha way be compassionate to us and free us from karmic effects, allowing us to practice the way without hindrance.

May they share with us their compassion, which fills the boundless universe with the virtue of their enlightenment and teachings.

We tend to prefer the word “harmful” to “evil,” or perhaps, “counter-productive,” with reference to karma. The contemporary take on evil is laden with unfortunate associations from theism and the culture. Not that there is no evil abroad in the world, just that it consists mainly in the actions of people plagued by ignorance, e.g. of the Buddhadharma, or other compassionate teachings that lobby against their lesser angels. This accumulation of karma, like sludge clogging the kitchen sink drain pipe over time, conjures an image from the Beatles: “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight, a long time.”

Calling on “all Buddhas and Ancestors,” as he is wont to do from time to time, we find a bit cringeworthy. For us sophisticated 21st century humans, it smacks of superstition, or worse, religious belief. Do we actually expect those who have gone before to be able to “free us from karmic effects,” via some spooky action at a distance? I think we can afford to forgive Master Dogen this kind of construction, given that he lived in a time that most people still believed that illness was the consequence of the action of demons. And who are we to disagree?

My Dharma name, Taiun, means “great cloud.” Matsuoka Roshi explained that the aspirational aspect of it means that, like a big cloud floating overhead in the sky, there are no barriers anywhere. However, down here on the ground, I am continually running into one or another kind of barrier, or “hindrance.” Some of which, I am sure, would qualify as karmic in nature, and provenance. Just imagine being able to practice free of all such constrictions. Would that still qualify as legitimate “practice”?

In sharing their compassion, does Dogen mean that they actually take heed of our problems, or, like Job, is this the constant conundrum, or koan, of everyday life? Suffering with us, the literal meaning of compassion, may be taken to imply that the long-suffering saints of Buddhism do suffer fools gladly, we being the fools in question. That the “virtue of their enlightenment and teachings” fills the boundless universe, is tantamount to what is meant by merit, I think. Any merit is already built into this existence. It is up to us to realize it. It seems unfair that we may accumulate karma, but not merit.

Buddhas and Ancestors of old were as we; we in the future shall be Buddhas and Ancestors.
Revering Buddhas and Ancestors, we are one Buddha and one Ancestor.
Awakening Bodhi-mind, we are one Bodhi-mind.

This should be reassuring, that they were like us and we shall — not will — be like them. “Shall” carries the connotation of certainty, with the glaring caveat of “in the future.” Coupling this with the “countless lives” of the first stanza should disabuse us of any expectations of anything significant happening in the present lifetime. Could happen, but not likely. However, if it should come to pass that we gain an insight into this mystery, we will find that we are one with them. Here is another version of the wave and the ocean, only this time the little wave wakes up to the vast ocean, just in time. Needless to say, it is impossible for a wave to drown.

Because they extend their compassion to us freely, and without limit, we are able to attain buddhahood, and let go of the attainment.

So we get no credit for attaining buddhahood. No kudos, no golden ring or free ride on the merry-go-round. It is all up to them and their limitless compassion, remembering that we are, fundamentally, them. Attaining Buddhahood is an interesting construction. It is the attainment of non-attainment. Like the fish swimming in the ocean, and the bird flying in the sky, two of Master Dogen’s favorite analogies, what if one day the fish, or the bird, wakes up to the fact of flying; or the fish realizes that it is swimming, and that there is no end to the air, or the water? That would amount to quite an attainment for a fish, or a bird. But it would not change a thing.

Therefore the Ch’an master Lung-ya said, “Those who in past lives were not enlightened will now be enlightened. In this life save the body — it is the fruit of many lives. Before buddhas were enlightened, they were the same as we; enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old.”

What is the turning point that now enables the enlightenment of those unable to turn the trick in past lives? What changed, and when? Now that what, exactly, has occurred? Lung-ya was a student and dharma successor of Tozan Ryokai, accredited with founding Soto Zen in China. He lived during the 800s and 900s, in which the legacy of Bodhidharma and the first four centuries of Zen in China had been secured. Maybe this is what he meant by “now.” Now that these living buddhas and ancestors had transmitted their compassion to us “freely and without limit,” in the form of their recorded teachings, as well as their transmitted successors. Those living today, who were not enlightened in their past lives, now have a golden opportunity. If they do wake up, they will be “exactly as those of old.”

Quietly explore the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions, as this practice is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha.
Repenting in this way, one never fails to receive profound help from all Buddhas and Ancestors.
By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha, we melt away the root of transgressions, by the power of our repentance.

These “causes and conditions” are not limited to the specific circumstances of existence at Lung-ya’s or Dogen’s time. They are here with us now, and are not separable from the transmission of our own buddha-mind. Repenting our wasteful and self-destructive ways, we too can avail ourselves of this legacy from all Buddhas and Ancestors. Our lack of faith is not in a belief system, but in the process of meditation itself. As Dogen says elsewhere, “In zazen, what precept is not fulfilled?”

This is the true and simple color of true practice of the true mind of faith; of the true body of faith.

The “true and simple color of true practice” is one of my favorite turns-of-a-phrase by Master Dogen. The choice of the term “color” is compelling, whether literally what Dogen said, or a translator’s choice. We speak of our experience being colored by emotion, preconceptions, and misconceptions. Color carries the connotation of emotional overlays, which may or may not be appropriate to the situation at hand. Here, the term denotes accuracy, I think, a true and correct shading of the practice of the “true mind of faith,” one in which repentance is the guiding principle keeping us coloring within the lines. The use of “true body” of faith at the end I think suggests the predominance of the physical over the mental, or the real over the imaginary. The body can make no mistake as to this true practice. It already manifests the truth, in all its homeliness. Only the mind can get it wrong. But, as there is no separation of mind and body, all is well.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What are we doing?

Buddha’s great activity!

So is everything…

As we concluded in the last segment, following Master Dogen’s over-the-top, effusive description of what Zen’s awakening is like, he launches into some caveats and cautions about misinterpretation:

All this, however, does not appear within perception, because it is unconstructedness in stillness; it is immediate realization.

Importantly, this realization is not an object of perception. But it completely transforms our perception, along with conception, as well as the other four aggregates: form, sensation, mental formations, and consciousness itself. It comprises a thoroughgoing revamping of our world, and is “immediate” in both time and space.

If practice and realization were two things, as it appears to the ordinary person, each could be recognized separately.

Practice-realization is a unity; practice is not a means to the end of realization. If we practice this way, we are forever stuck in a time warp, looking for something that has to happen in the future. If we recognize practice as practice only, we ignore our aspiration to awaken. If we imagine realization to be something separate from ordinary mind, we ignore our present reality.

But what can be met with recognition is not realization itself, because realization is not reached by a deluded mind.

Any perception of something recognized, including realization, is delusional, because perception itself is biased in favor of survival instincts. As long as we are in the delusional mind, which depends upon perception and conception to sustain its view of reality, it cannot be realization.

In stillness, mind and object merge in realization and go beyond enlightenment.

Here at last is the secret, stillness itself. Merging implies combining two different things, such as lanes of traffic, or mixing chemicals. But mind and object, like form and emptiness, or practice and realization, cannot be separated from the beginning. In terms of body and spirit, this is known as Descartes’ error. That “mind and object merge in realization” means that we become aware that they are always and only co-existent, or “not two,” in Master Sengcan’s formulation in Hsinhsinming. To “go beyond enlightenment” means that when mind and object merge, there can be no such thing as “enlightenment” in this “causeless, relationless state.” Enlightenment is the path trod by bodhisattvas. With awakening, the Path is revealed to be “no path.” That is, everything is the path.

Nevertheless, because you are in the state of self-fulfilling samadhi, without disturbing its quality or moving a particle, you extend the buddha’s great activity, the incomparably profound and subtle teaching.

Even though nothing has changed, you are now manifesting the teaching and the activity of a buddha, without lifting a finger. Unless you are Gutei, who famously would simply lift a finger to demonstrate the reality of Zen. Buddha’s activity is so subtle, however, as to be below the radar of consciousness itself.

Grass, trees and lands, which are embraced by this teaching, together radiate a great light, and endlessly expound the inconceivable, profound Dharma.

The ten thousand things from horizon to horizon come alive with this realization. Nature itself expounds this Dharma, for those who have eyes to hear and the ears to see.

Grass, trees and walls bring forth the teaching for all beings, common people as well as sages; and they in accord extend this Dharma for the sake of grass, trees and walls.

Not only nature, but also the works of humankind — including the walls of the zendo — are included in this all-encompassing, effort to “bring forth the teaching.” Far from being out-of-place, unwelcome invaders, human beings alone, not only sages but ordinary folk, are capable of waking to this truth. Everything is exuding this light, and those who “do not see it as light” (thank you, Master Kisen) engage in skillful means to ensure transmission of this Dharma to present and future generations, through promulgating and propagating the practice of zazen. But it is all for its own sake, not for fame and fortune.

Thus the realm of self-awakening and awakening others invariably holds the mark of realization with nothing lacking, and realization itself is manifested without ceasing for a moment.

There are not two realms, one of “self-awakening” and one of “awakening others.” The unified field of enlightenment cannot be distinguished from that of realization, its mark being upright zazen samadhi. In this, there is neither anything extra, or anything missing. It is what has been missing in our lives, until now. Entering into real space-time of direct realization, it has always been thus, and always will be. This does not imply stasis, however, but “seeing into the flux of arising, abiding and decaying,” as Master Nagarjuna framed it. It is the vital quick of conscious life itself.

This being so, the zazen of even one person at one moment imperceptibly accords with all things, and fully resonates through all time.

This realization does not depend on others, and again, is not a matter of a mere change of perception. It is the birthright of every single human being, but most appear doomed to living and dying without ever discovering it. It is not discovered elsewhere, but by uncovering it where we are, in the midst of all things. It is not simply “inside” us, but recognizes no such separation as inside and outside. It is in total accord with the harmony of such difference and sameness. As such, it is “universal and absolute” as Master Dogen reminds us in Fukanzazengi. It is fully resonating, now and forever.

Thus, in the past, future and present of the limitless universe, this zazen carries on the Buddha’s teaching endlessly.

On a cosmic scale, the transmission of this primordial truth comes down to sitting still enough, for long enough. Always has, always will. Most importantly, it is endlessly carrying on in the present moment.

Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization.

Practice and realization cannot be quantified, and cannot be isolated from each other, nor from anything else. Even non-realization is necessary to practice, and non-practice is necessary to realization. Each moment is uniquely different in this unity.

This is not only practice while sitting; it is like a hammer striking emptiness: before and after, its exquisite peal permeates everywhere. How can it be limited to this moment?

We cannot limit Zen to zazen, but we cannot separate zazen from Zen. The ripple effect of zazen pervades all activities until our practice becomes 24/7. Furthermore, all antecedents and after-effects are not-two. The silence that is not the absence of sound, once the hit occurs, “permeates everywhere.” Silence is thunder. Can you not hear it?

Hundreds of things all manifest original practice from the original face; it is impossible to measure.

Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions... from galaxies to atoms, all beings, sentient and insentient, are in this together. Original practice is buddha activity; original face is primordial intent. Immeasurable.

Know that even if all buddhas of the ten directions — as innumerable as the sands of the Ganges — exert their strength, and with the buddhas’ wisdom, try to measure the merit of one person’s zazen, they will not be able to fully comprehend it.

Again, immeasurable. Merit is already inherent in zazen. Rest assured that even the buddhas do not get this. Buddhas do not understand Buddhism, let alone comprehend how, or why, zazen works. It just does. But don’t take my word for it, or Master Dogen’s. Check it out for yourself. On the cushion.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Oh, self-fulfilling!

What samadhi is that, now?

It is the real one.

Master Dogen’s written record is so extensive that it is difficult to select representative teachings, but also impossible to cover them all. The two we have reviewed so far, Fukanzazengi and Genjokoan, are recognized as basic to his message. I feel that this segment’s focus, Jijuyuzammai (Self-fulfilling Samadhi), is as well. Both terms in the title, “self-fulfilling,” and “samadhi,” require some explanation. I interpret the “self-fulfilling” part not as meaning fulfilling the self as we usually conceive it — the false, or constructed self — but that the samadhi discovered in zazen is self-actuating and, therefore, self-fulfilling. In other words, we do not make this happen through our effort, but it is there, waiting for us to uncover it.

Samadhi is interpreted in many ways in Zen literature. It is unfortunately sometimes wielded as mystical, in-group jargon, as if the author understands it, ostensibly from experience, while you, the reader, do not. This reinforces the kind of us-and-them-ism far too prevalent in our culture. We are called upon to de-mystify Zen, including such jargon. Samadhi is often rendered as “centered,” and/or “balanced.” That seems a sufficiently useful definition, if considered in multiple dimensions — physical, emotional, mental, and even social, balance — comes from Zen. Dogen begins by credentialing his thesis:

Now all ancestors and all buddhas who uphold Buddhadharma have made it the true path of enlightenment to sit upright, practicing in the midst of self-fulfilling Samadhi. Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way.

In other words, we are not just making this stuff up as we go along. All the great masters you may have heard and read about, revered, and tried to understand, their teachings — including Buddha himself — did exactly as we are doing. They all sat in upright meditation as their central practice.

It was done so because teachers and disciples personally transmitted this excellent method as the essence of the teaching.

So all the many thousands of teachings in Buddhism that we may choose to study, also stem from this method of zazen. Verbal teachings, as such, do not transmit the essential matter, but simply point at it. Upright sitting — still enough, for long enough — eventually reveals the “essence of the teaching.”

In the authentic tradition of our teaching, it is said that this directly transmitted, straightforward Buddhadharma is the unsurpassable of the unsurpassable.

All other schools of teaching, bodies of knowledge, philosophical views and practical instructions, take second place, at best. Buddha’s tongue is said to be long and broad. The “directly transmitted, straightforward” Buddhadharma is universal, and all-inclusive. The phrase “authentic tradition” implies that there must be traditions that are not authentic, such as competing approaches of other schools. As we heard from Master Tozan, “Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not, reality constantly flows.” Zazen is the instrument we use to focus like a laser beam on our immediate reality.

From the first time you meet a master — without engaging in incense offering, bowing, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance, or reading scriptures — you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.

Likewise all other practices — usually considered intrinsic to Buddhism — are second in priority to practice-experience in zazen, under the supervision of a true teacher. Such rituals are not absolutely necessary for us as individuals, though helpful, especially within a community. Dogen himself followed these forms. But we do not need to be overly distracted by concerns regarding social forms. If you have not yet met a true teacher, repetition of ritual may support you in your practice, until you do. These routines are meant to be personally supportive psychologically, and to promote harmony in the community.

Completely eliminating traditional so-called “Asian” protocols surrounding meditation — which some Americans have suggested — will only result in substituting new rituals in their place. The main point the master is making, of course, is his johnny-one-note insistence on sitting in zazen, with the emphasis on wholehearted effort. Dropping away body and mind, however, does not sound like a desirable goal, even if we could understand what Master Dogen means by it.

When even for a moment you express the Buddha’s seal in the three actions by sitting upright in Samadhi, the whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal, and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.

Now we’re talkin’. This is sounding a lot more attractive. There is nothing outside this realization, and nothing that can keep you from it, if only you do not give up on zazen. While not a causality, this is at least a correlation that we can draw, with confidence. The corollary would be that if you are not sitting upright in samadhi, chances are, such a transformation will elude you. And the bonus is that it does not take any time at all, actually. In Dogen’s effusive description, our world is utterly transformed, in the blink of an eye. The “three actions,” incidentally, are those of body, mouth, and mind. Just so you know.

Because of this all buddha tathagatas, as the original source, increase their Dharma bliss, and renew their magnificence in the awakening of the Way.

Here Dogen claims an explicit causal connection, which suggests a kind of magical thinking. But when you realize that the “buddha tathagatas” are merely your and my original natures, it comes full circle. These indicate traditionally cosmic or celestial beings, as they are manifested in you and me.

Furthermore, all beings in the ten directions and the six realms, including the three lower realms, at once obtain pure body and mind, realize the state of great emancipation, and manifest the original face.

Next comes everybody else. The “ten directions” are the cosmological dimensions, eight horizontal and two vertical: the apex over your head, the nadir beneath your feet. The “six realms” indicate traditional categories of sentient beings, with human beings in the middle, the titans or angry gods next level “up,” and the denizens of Tusita heaven at the top. Just below us, the hell realms of the “lower” animals and insects, then the hungry ghosts, and at bottom, the Avici hells. These heavens and hells are not conceived as actual places, but realms of our own making.

Our personal emancipation in Zen is all-inclusive, of all beings, as Buddha himself reported. We only imagine their bondage, of course, but our imaginations are powerful. “Pure body and mind” is not a reference to morality, and is not really obtainable, but describes our original, nondual state. Purity is a lack of confusion about the relationship of so-called duality to its nonidentical twin, nonduality. The “state of great emancipation” is the true state of our existence, but we bind ourselves to our own misguided opinions. Realizing that this is a kind of cosmic category error is the first step toward true liberation. The “original face” is the only face we can manifest, actually. But Dogen is talking about realizing this, not simply knowing it to be true.

At this time, all things realize correct awakening; myriad objects partake of the buddha body; and sitting upright under the bodhi tree, you immediately leap beyond the boundary of awakening.

Even the many seemingly inanimate and insentient objects, are not as they appear. They, too, are part of the whole buddha-body. You find yourself back in reality, for the first time in memory, crossing the boundary of the “Original Frontier™” along with all other beings, plus the ten thousand things. Returning to our original buddha-body, and re-entering real time and space, our true home. Yet, having never left.

At this moment you turn the Dharma wheel, and expound the profound wisdom, ultimate and unconditioned.

You yourself manifest and expound the true teaching without error, or ceasing; dwelling in the ultimate, “eternal moment,” beyond conditions.

Because such broad awakening resonates back to you, and helps you inconceivably, you will, in zazen, unmistakably drop off body and mind, cutting off the various defiled thoughts from the past, and realize the essential Buddhadharma.

Like an echo bouncing back from the distant valley, this awakening is a guaranteed slam-dunk, in which the apparent separation of self and other appears as it really is. You find yourself not at all alone, and not at all confused, in any negative sense. Clarity is not separate from confusion, and manifests as wonder, or awe. The “essential Buddhadharma” suggests that some Buddhadharma may not be as essential as this direct insight. Along with negative habitual thoughts, even your prior understanding of Dharma may constitute the “various defiled thoughts” that have bedeviled you in the past.

Thus you will raise up buddha activity at innumerable practice places of buddha tathagatas everywhere, cause everyone to have the opportunity of ongoing buddhahood, and vigorously uplift the ongoing Buddhadharma.

Buddha activity may be ongoing, but it is not raised up, unless and until we make the effort. This is effort without aiming at it, returning to the reality that precedes activity. In doing so, we benefit ourselves and others, a distinction without a difference. This is the bodhisattva vow.

Because earth, grass, trees, walls, tiles and pebbles all engage in buddha activity, those who receive the benefit of wind and water caused by them, are inconceivably helped by the Buddha’s guidance, splendid and unthinkable, and awaken intimately to themselves.

The ten-thousand things are all manifesting this activity of awakening, moment by moment, the four elements and fundamental forces included, inherent in nature as well as our bodies. The buddha’s guidance is innate, and not a mystical emanation from a separate spirit, or spooky action at a distance. Awakening intimately to ourselves is all-encompassing, and simultaneously intimate.

Those who receive these water and fire benefits spread the Buddha’s guidance, based on original awakening.

Receiving the elemental benefits of this practice directly, recognized as compassion of the universe for allowing our very being, is the only real merit. It cannot be accumulated, but can be shared, once we awaken to it. This awakening is original to the individual, and simultaneously the Buddha’s awakening.

Because of this, all those who live with you and speak with you will obtain endless buddha virtue, and will unroll widely, inside and outside of the entire universe, the endless, unremitting, unthinkable, unnameable Buddhadharma.

If you have original awakening, it will have a ripple effect on those around you. But only if you take the necessary action of sharing it with others. This means entering into the realm of skillful or expedient means, which are designed and intended to fit the recipient of the teaching. Communication is the message received, not the message sent. It all depends upon the sincerity of the aspiring student, as well as the genuineness of the teacher’s insight. Correctly transmitted, it empowers others to accede to the same wisdom. As a force of nature, it is endless and unremitting, yet remains unthinkable and unnameable. Not your usual topic of discussion at cocktail parties.

In the next segment we will continue with the second half of Jijuyuzammai, where Master Dogen continues his exposition of “buddha activity,” and goes into some of the caveats around misinterpreting his message so far. Please join when convenient for you. And do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or comments.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Is enlightenment

dewdrops reflecting the moon —

or is it your mind?

Following upon Master Dogen’s stunning simile of firewood and ash, and his pointed comments on birth and death, we turn to his famous “moon in a dewdrop” stanzas on enlightenment itself:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water: the moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon, and the entire sky, are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water.
You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky.
The depth of the drop is the height of the moon.
Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

Whether we are living in apocalyptic, or merely interesting, times, the promise of enlightenment still beckons. Like the moon on the water, nothing changes. Except everything, including the relative size and scale of the moon and the puddle, or the dewdrop. Like Indra’s net, the knots collect the drops of water, which all reflect each other, like the cosmos viewed from any vantage point. Somehow the same though different, as Master Kisen reminds us; entirely harmonic. Nothing changes, no new division of the new you and the old you. Insight only reveals the preexistent truth. You cannot hinder this revelation, no matter how rabid your monkey-mind. If not in this lifetime, then in a future one (again, not reincarnation) this is your destiny. The meaning and culmination of life is to wake up fully, to our original and innate Buddha-nature. If any doubt arises, just repeat “the depth of the drop is the height of the moon” as your mantra. The duration of the reflection in time is analogous to the dimension in space, as well as to our lifetime. Remember, Dogen only lived to be 53 years of age. Realizing the limitlessness of the moonlight takes no time at all.

When Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient.
When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.
For example, when you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean, where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way.
But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety.
It is like a palace. It is like a jewel.
It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time.

Back to the beginner’s mind. Initially, we imagine that we are already “wandering about in the world of enlightenment” as one translation of Fukanzazengi describes it, but we have “almost lost the absolute Way, which is beyond enlightenment itself.” Testifying as one who has been there and done that, the great master asserts that when Dharma does fill you completely, something is obviously missing in this picture. Matsuoka Roshi said that “People go through life with something missing. They come to Zen to find it.” Just because it is missing, however, you do not necessarily know what it is. You only know that it is missing, for sure. You might think of it as “the rest of the story.” Okumura Roshi speaks of this as our “incompleteness.”

Master Dogen conjures a lovely vision to help us picture this subtle reality, again derived from his direct experience, perhaps from his sailing to China, a hazardous journey in those times. The way the ocean looks from six feet off the surface is different than it looks to a fish, who lives there, or from 30,000 feet overhead. Then he goes on to make the obvious, seemingly unnecessary point:

All things are like this.

In other words, our perception and reconstruction of our world as we know it, is necessarily limited. We can see only what we can see, hear only what we can hear, and feel only what we can feel, think only what we can think. But then he introduces the idea of the “eye of practice”:

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions,
you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.

In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety: whole worlds are there.
It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet; or in a drop of water.

The “dusty world” is everyday samsara, the “world beyond conditions” we assume to be the formless of the “three realms” traditional to Buddhism. In any case, “you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.”

In 1987 I traveled to Japan, and incidentally underwent acupuncture with an aged medical sage, long white beard and all. He performed a cursory physical examination, and then proceeded to list, in Japanese, all the various conditions and potential health issues that I might have, with startling accuracy and comprehensiveness. This was by virtue of his eye of practice. He had seen so many thousands of individuals over his career that he could see things no one else, not similarly trained, could see.

Dogen is encouraging us to go beyond the appearance, or form, of things to their true nature, where we find “whole worlds.” This is a much more prosaic statement in the age of electron microscopes, than it was in his time. He arrived at this insight by virtue of his own eye of practice, refined through the intensity of his training in zazen. But this is not something to be found in exotic places; it is directly beneath our feet. Then, with the poet’s precision of language, he returns us to — wait for it — “or in a drop of water.” Which provides a neat segue to his next analogy:

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims, there is no end to the water.
A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air.
However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements; when their activity is large, their field is large; when their need is small, their field is small.
Thus, each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm.
If the bird leaves the air, it will die at once. If the fish leaves the water, it will die at once.
Know that the water is life, and air is life; the bird is life and the fish is life.
Life must be the bird, and life must be the fish.

Back to the ocean — for a fish who lives there, it is like an endless palace, as is the sky for a bird. They are in their respective elements. What is our element, as human beings? If we leave it, will we die? Not only the sentient beings, the bird and the fish, are life. Life also manifests as the very water and air we drink and breathe. Must life be us, as it must be the bird, and the fish?

It is possible to illustrate this with more analogies:
Practice-enlightenment and people are like this.

Dogen makes explicit exactly what he is doing — illustrating the difficult to comprehend via analogy. We look forward to hearing how we and practice-enlightenment can be similarly analogized.

Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird, or this fish, will not find its way or its place.
When you find your place where you are practice occurs — actualizing the fundamental point.
When you find your way at this moment practice occurs — actualizing the fundamental point.
For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’.
The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and it is not merely arising now.
Accordingly, in the practice-enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it; doing one practice is practicing completely.
Here is the place; here the way unfolds.

Firstly, like the bird or the fish, if we are unwilling to explore our element, we cannot hope to find our way, or our place. If and when we do, “practice occurs,” actualizing the fundamental point. We might elaborate, saying that practice is something that occurs naturally. It is not something that we do, or indeed, that we can do. “Place” — where you are; and “way” — at this moment; are placeholders, no pun, for spacetime. Your zero axis runs from the crown of your head down through your spinal cord. Mine runs through mine. Your world is yours, and mine is mine. As Matsuoka Roshi would say, “My enlightenment is mine, and yours is yours. I can’t get yours, and your can’t get mine.” It doesn’t belong to anyone, and is not subject to linear time. Thus, whatever is in front of your face, is it. Meeting it is mastering it. This is the one practice, which is complete. Here and now is the unfolding of the Great Way. But then, as is often the case with Dogen, there comes a big “but”:

The boundary of realization is not distinct, for the realization comes forth simultaneously
with the mastery of Buddha-dharma.
Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge, and is grasped by your consciousness.
Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be apparent.
Its appearance is beyond your knowledge.

So stop looking for it. That is, stop looking for something special to change. What already is, is all the special there is. Like a wet bar of soap, or like our concept of the momentary passing of time, it cannot be grasped. However, it is actualized immediately, but not as the result of something we do. We do not master Buddha-dharma; it masters us. But the resulting realization is simultaneous with that mastery. That the “inconceivable may not be apparent” has to be an all-time, world-class belaboring of the obvious. If inconceivable, how could it be apparent? To illustrate this existential catch-22, Dogen again turns to analogy, but one offered by another old buddha:

Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself.
A monk approached and said: “Master, the nature of wind is permanent, and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?”
“Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent,” Baoche replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”
“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk again.
The master just kept fanning himself.
The monk bowed deeply.

Master Dogen exhibits a near-encyclopedic retention of these incidents, quoting them often in his extensive record (Eihei Koroku), spontaneous live teachings documented by his Dharma heirs. The “wind” here probably should be taken as both the literal winds of the atmosphere, but also the fundamental element of movement, which manifests both inside and outside the body, as well as in social and other dimensions, the natural and the universal. Thus the wind is present, whether or not there is any literal wind, and the monk is implying that fanning is, or should be, unnecessary. Mazu’s reply, that he does not get the “reaching everywhere” part, is illustrated by continuing to fan himself. This is the nondual, nonseparation of our activities with natural and universal forces.

The actualization of the Buddha-dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like this.
If you say that you do not need to fan yourself, because the nature of wind is permanent, and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence, nor the nature of wind.
The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, the wind of the Buddha’s house
brings forth the gold of the earth, and makes fragrant the cream of the long river.

Buddhadharma, as a force in the world, penetrates all four spheres of existence: the personal, the social, the natural, and the universal. The permanence of the wind seems to contradict the doctrine of impermanence, but impermanence is not a doctrine. Nor is it separable from permanence. The nature of the wind being permanent is analogous to the teaching of dukkha as change. Because there is never any absence of change, change is a permanent attribute of impermanence. No need to tie yourself up in knots over this. We are beset by all kinds of “winds” — as movement, or change, itself. Just as there is no movement without stillness, and vice-versa, the wind of Buddhism blows no one ill. It turns the dross of the natural earth to gold, the symbol of enlightenment, not material goods, as wealth. And makes even the Milky Way a source of fragrant, affirming cream, the nourishment of universal ambrosia.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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All things do exist.

On the other hand, they don’t.

Truth is in-between.

This is the fascicle Master Dogen reputedly designated as the first for his master work, Shobogenzo, which I understand is a common term, meaning something like “true eye of the Dharma treasury,” used in China for collections of Dharma teachings. Bendowa, which means something like a “talk concerning the Way,” from which this section recited in liturgy is excerpted, titled Genjokoan, roughly meaning the “actualization of the fundamental point,” i.e. of Zen. Scholars and historians can provide greater clarity on the provenance and historicity of these various teachings. Naturally, there is more dependable documentation, the closer we get to present times. But, owing to Zen’s emphasis on direct experience, I think that these scholarly aspects of Zen teachings, while important, are not of primary concern for us. The main issue, as I see it, is whether they mean anything to you, in terms of your own practice of zazen. The whole point of Buddhism is to wake up, ourselves.

As all things are buddha-dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, and birth and death; and there are buddhas and sentient beings.
As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.
The Buddha way is basically leaping clear of the many and the one; thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas.
Yet in attachment, blossoms fall; and in aversion, weeds spread.

So there you have it. First, the relative: Yes, of course, all these things really do exist, in their own way. Then secondly, the absolute: On the other hand, and upon closer examination, they do not exactly exist, as there is no there, there; nothing that truly holds together, for long. But no worries, no need to get bogged down in either extreme, Zen’s third way: things do exist in the relative sense, specifically by means of their absolute impermanence. Both things can be true at once. Fourthly, however — and this is akin to the fall from grace — the very things to which we foolish human beings attach continue falling; and the very things that drive us crazy flourish like mad, no matter how much we try to prevent either. Flowers, after all, are weeds we do want; while weeds are flowers we do not want.

To carry yourself forward and experience [the] myriad things is delusion; that myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.
Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.
Further there are those who continue realizing beyond realization; [those] who are in delusion throughout delusion
When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.

The classic expression, “the myriad things” — meaning all things in existence, from the smallest particle to the largest astronomical cluster — is likely the way we should take Dogen’s meaning. Making definitive statements about “myriad things” without the “the” does not necessarily include all things — there could be exceptions. That all the myriad things “come forth and experience themselves” is similar to Buddha’s declaration that all things of the universe were enlightened simultaneously, including himself. What Buddhas realize is delusion; that is, they see the delusion built into awareness. Confusion about this is shared by all sentient beings. Anyone who recovers their buddha-nature is no longer a mere sentient being, but nonetheless, still a sentient being. Buddha means “awake,” so it must be possible to be more awake than usual. This seems pretty obvious. Awakeness, or awareness, like intelligence, must exist on a sliding scale, a spectrum, like everything else. We don’t necessarily notice what we actually are, whether Buddha or not. We can have weird ideas about it, of course.

When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly; unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illumined, the other side is dark.

Seeing forms and hearing sounds represent the whole sensorium, feeling feelings, smelling scents, tasting flavors, thinking concepts all included. This direct grasping of things, however, is not the same as grasping buddhadharma. Both sides are illumined, like reflections, both the item and its reflection are equally illuminated; otherwise, we would not see them. When we see things reflected in the Zen mirror, however, the “other side,” the side we do not see, is dark. The tree that we see clearly in the daylight does not know that it is a tree. From inside the tree, all is dark, though it follows the sun.

To study the Buddha way is to study the self;
To study the self is to forget the self;
To forget the self is to be actualized by [the] myriad things;
When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away.
No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

Here is the most-quoted stanza of the piece, which I refer to as Dogen’s four transitions. Studying the Buddha way, ironically, begins with studying the self, which seems counter to Buddhism’s emphasis on selflessness. Eventually we transition to forgetting the self, which necessarily involves engaging with the myriad things; they actually actualize us, not the other way ‘round. This reflects Master Tozan’s follow-up to the precious mirror, in which form and reflection behold each other: “You are not it, but in truth it is you.” Curiouser and curiouser. So far so good. But turns out that this forgetting is total. The self, which most of us identify as body and mind, drops away. And as if that is not enough of a whiplash, the bodies and minds of others do so, as well. Twilight Zone. No trace of this realization is to be found anywhere, and that condition is permanent. So what would be the point, if it all gets lost in the ether?

When you first seek Dharma,
you imagine you are far away from its environs.
But Dharma is already correctly transmitted: you are immediately your original self.

We approach studying the Buddha Way much like we do any other subject, imagining that somewhere in the literature, or maybe in the foreign lands of origin, we will find the true source. Certainly not in the self, with which we are way too familiar. But Master Dogen assures us that your happiness lies right under your eyes, back in your own back yard. We are already Dharma-holders; we just do not know it. Dogen’s use of the term “immediate” I think is special, meaning intimate in time and space.

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving.
But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves.
Similarly, if you examine [the] myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent.
[But] When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

One of the things I most admire about Dogen is his ability to draw on everyday yet revealing experiences that we all have in common, to illustrate his point. I grew up on a farm near a lake, where we would go fishing and boating, so remember this disorienting event clearly, from many times in a moving boat. It is a matter of where we direct our attention. If you pay attention, you can detect this same, seeming contradiction, when moving from sitting to walking meditation. As you move through the room, it flows through you. The totality of movement sums to zero, one meaning of “mokurai.”

A quick editorial note: all punctuation and bracketed insertions are mine, meant to enhance understanding of the text, for instance reinforcing the point about differentiating “myriad things” from “the myriad things.” I think this bears repetition. “Confusion” here means the kind of disorientation that may develop from our misinterpretation of sensory phenomena, amongst the most insidious of which is the impression that our mind and nature are permanent. This is the Atman of Hinduism, the “soul” of most theistic belief systems. It is non-threatening to recognize that the universe, with all its infinite beings may be impermanent, but when the pointing finger turns in our direction, we cringe. Again, if our practice becomes truly intimate, we will see that our “self” is included in this all-inclusive embrace.

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again.
Yet do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past.
You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood,
which fully includes past and future, and is independent of past and future.
Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past.
Just as firewood does not become firewood again, after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.
This being so, it is an established way in buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death.
Accordingly, birth is understood as no-birth.
It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth.
Accordingly, death is understood as no-death.
Birth is an expression complete this moment.
Death is an expression complete this moment.
They are like winter and spring: You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.

Another poetic analogy derived from the familiar, day-in and day-out reality of living in a time before coal was discovered. When warmth, cooking, metallurgy, et cetera, depended upon the wood-fired hearth. We make a logical, linear connection between the firewood and the ash, with the primal element of fire being the agent of change. In modern times, some would argue that this demonstrates the “arrow of time”: You cannot unburn the firewood. Others would argue that it only demonstrates the irreversibility of natural processes, revealing nothing about the nature of time. Master Dogen points out that in all instances, exemplified by the firewood in one case, the ash in another, the Three Times of Buddhism — past, future and present — are always and only coexistent. Matsuoka Roshi referred to this as the “eternal moment.” Firewood has past, present and future, whether it is burned or not; as does ash.

Suddenly, another vintage Dogen whiplash: just as ash does not revert to firewood, you do not revert to an earlier state, birth, after dying. That got real personal, real quick. Dogen’s assertion lobbies against popular conceptions of reincarnation. Rebirth, as taught by Buddha, does not make this claim: the one that dies is not the one reborn. Note that both birth and death are “expressions,” but not attributed to anything or anyone. One may say expressions of life itself, I suppose. Death is not opposed to life, but to birth. And both are inflection-points in the continuum of life. Neither somehow magically turns into the other. Thus, and this may be a logical leap, birth is no-birth, or non-birth as another translation has it, and death is non-death. Just as there is thinking, not thinking, and non-thinking, Dogen’s coinage. Each is complete in the moment, just like firewood, and ash. Or the seasons. Nowadays, of course, we refer to the annual fire season, hurricane season, or drought, flooding and virus seasons. Pump enough pollution into the atmosphere, and it’s “so long” to seasonality. Or “hello” to the end-times.

Next time we will continue with Master Dogen’s comments upon the nature of enlightenment itself. Stay tuned.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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For your heart’s content,

all you have to do is sit —

still, and long enough.

Picking up from where we left off in the last segment, Master Dogen has introduced the practical, stripped-down approach to method that is unique to Zen, our upright seated meditation, zazen. After reviewing his reference to nonthinking as the natural state of mind, and his declaration that it, along with the natural sitting posture and natural breath, form the very basis for zazen, we continue:

Zazen is not “step-by-step meditation.” Rather it is simply the easy and pleasant practice of a Buddha, the realization of the Buddha’s wisdom.

Master Dogen reminds us that, while to teach or even discuss anything, we have to break it down into distinct steps, digestible bites, zazen actually works on a holistic basis. It is better not to look for the particular stage of development, or progress, that we may be experiencing. This kind of linear thinking leads to expectations, specifically of the “next” stage, how to get there, and when we will arrive. The “final” stage being some construct of enlightenment, until we reach it we are forever frustrated. Zazen, instead, is the “seal” of Buddha, direct realization of wisdom, in real time and space. Let it go at that.

The truth appears, there being no delusion. If you understand this, you are completely free, like a dragon that has obtained water or a tiger that reclines on a mountain.

The Supreme Law will then appear of itself; and you will be free of weariness and confusion.

Note that the truth appears; we do not come to some conclusion. And that there is no delusion, from the beginning. Otherwise the truth would not appear to us. This represents the only true freedom, that is not dependent upon circumstance. Water to the dragon quenches its terrible thirst. A tiger reclining on a mountain is, at long last, truly home. The “Supreme Law” will, and must, “appear of itself.” Nothing we can do can make it appear, but if and when it does, we will be “free of weariness and confusion.” What could be more desirable?

Then Dogen returns from the inspirational to the practical:

At the completion of zazen move your body slowly and stand up calmly. Do not move violently.

There are practical reasons for moving carefully. Your body has adapted to the posture, and you may injure yourself by moving abruptly. But I think the larger implication is that there is really no dividing line here. Transitioning from sitting to standing or walking — or lying down, for that matter — does not divide Zen practice into compartments. We are not practicing only when sitting, and not practicing at all when not sitting. Zen practice is seamless. But all activities are not equivalent to zazen. It is truly special:

By virtue of zazen it is possible to transcend the difference between “common” and “sacred” and attain the ability to die while doing zazen or while standing up.

Transcending “common” and “sacred” — as attitudes projected upon reality — is illustrated by doing zazen at Eiheiji monastery in Japan, or in your basement. Same thing. Attaining the “ability to die” in any circumstance is a bit more challenging. In other translations, it is explained that many masters in the history of Zen have actually sat down and died, when the time came, as did Master Dogen. But that this would even represent a desirable attainment would raise eyebrows in skeptical America. Why would anyone want to develop such an ability? What would be the point?

Moreover, it is impossible for our discriminating mind to understand either how the buddhas and patriarchs expressed the essence of Zen to their disciples with finger, pole, needle, or mallet, or how they passed on enlightenment with a hossu, fist, staff, or shout.

Neither can this be understood through supernatural power or a dualistic view of practice and enlightenment.

Dogen profiles the transmission of Buddhism as something that is completely beyond ordinary understanding. That the most mundane thing, or simple gesture, in the hands of a master, will do to transmit the essence of Zen — and trigger an insight in their students — beggars the imagination. It has nothing to do with supernatural superstition, but turns on the nonduality of practicenlightenment.

Zazen is a practice beyond the subjective and objective worlds, beyond discriminating thinking. Therefore, no distinction should be made between the clever and the stupid.

Zazen is our gate to this reality beyond so-called subjectivity and objectivity. Discriminating thinking can help us to appreciate its unique method and place in our Zen practice, but ultimately must be set aside, in the process of apprehending its effect. We cannot think our way to insight. In fact, our very cleverness may form a barrier. “Stupid” may be an inappropriate choice. Sekito Kisen’s “human faculties are sharp or dull” provides a more neutral expression. The point is that insight does not play favorites.

To practice the Way single-heartedly is, in itself, enlightenment.
There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life.

A couple other distinctions pushing back against cultural definitions of enlightenment, repeating that practice itself is enlightenment, no need to attach to a goal or objective. And that daily life, just as it is, is not separate from the practice of zazen. It may make more sense to say that there is no gap between Zen and daily life, but Dogen was promoting zazen specifically, not Zen as such. In fact, he lobbied against using the contemporary term in place of Buddhism. For his students, and perhaps for lay people as well, he is making the point that sitting in zazen is entirely integrated with everyday concerns.

The Buddhas and patriarchs, both in this world and that, in India and in China.
have all preserved the Buddha-mind and enhanced Zen training.
You should therefore devote yourself exclusively to and be completely absorbed
in the practice of zazen.
Although it is said that there are innumerable ways of understanding Buddhism,
you should do zazen alone.

As a kind of credentialing of this teaching, similar to “Thus have I heard” as a traditional introduction to a sutra recitation, Dogen reminds us that this zazen is, and was, the practice of the ancestors. And thus and therefore, you would do worse than to devote yourself to this method. Doing zazen alone, in spite of the innumerable teachings, I take to mean we should at least do zazen, making it our sole refuge.

There is no reason to forsake your own sitting place and make futile trips to other countries. If your first step is mistaken, you will stumble immediately.

Rephrasing the third comment-question from the beginning of the tract, Dogen makes clear that he means to point out the futility of traveling far and wide to find the Dharma. This has a touch of irony, in that he himself has just returned from a long, arduous and dangerous journey to China. But the first step toward it is a step away from it, as it is “completely present where you are.” Do what he says, not what he did.

You have already had the good fortune to be born with a precious [human] body,
so do not waste your time meaninglessly.

We have the same basic equipment, the materials and tools to work with, that Buddha and Dogen had: birth as a human being, the necessary pivot-point (J. yoki) required for awakening. However, there is no time to waste. It has taken a long time to dig yourself into the hole that you find yourself in, and will take some time to dig your way out.

Now that you know what is the most important thing in Buddhism,
how can you be satisfied with the transient world?
Our bodies are like dew on the grass, and our lives like a flash of lightning,
vanishing in a moment.

After all this commentary, he assumes we have been able to extract his main point, the most important thing. The point of Buddhism is said to be the point of existence, itself. Again the sense of urgency, the plea to stop wasting time meaninglessly. And this in a world that had no internet, no social media, no TV, no radio, no electricity. Not wasting our time meaninglessly is more problematic today than ever.

Earnest Zen trainees, do not be surprised by a real dragon or spend a long time rubbing only one part of an elephant.

Exert yourself in the Way that points directly to your original [Buddha] nature.

Saying the same thing in different words. The “real dragon” I take to be the power of insight that we find in zazen, if we sit still enough for long enough. When we see the dragon, do we hear it roar? as the priest asked the dragon-painter, in a story related by Matsuoka Roshi. Wasting time investigating only one dimension of the whole, is Buddha’s admonition on blind men feeling different parts of an elephant. Instead, we should put our full exertion into the Zen way. It can only reveal the truth that is already true.

Respect those who have realized full knowledge and have nothing more to do.
Become one with the wisdom of the Buddhas and succeed to the enlightenment of the patriarchs.

This “full knowledge” of the truth of our existence represents the culmination of our life’s work. We have “nothing more to do.” Of course, Dogen and the other ancestors of Zen did plenty more, following their insight. They re-entered the marketplace, like the oxherd, with helping hands. But as for themselves, they had nothing more to do, nothing missing, nothing extra. This is the simple “wisdom of the Buddhas” and “enlightenment of the patriarchs.” We should make mention of the matriarchs of Zen, as well.

If you do zazen for some time, you will realize all this.
The treasure house will then open of itself; and you will be able to enjoy it to your heart’s content.

Again, trust in the original mind. If you simply sit still enough for long enough, this will become clear, like Buddha’s analogy of the jar of silty water, settling on the shelf until it becomes clear again. And again, you will not pry open the gate to the treasure house by might and main, or sheer willpower. But instead, it will “open of itself.” No amount of self-centered striving is going to help. But your heart’s content is guaranteed.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Though not far away,

you have to enter the gate

found on your cushion.

We have touched on some of the seminal teachings of Zen from the transmission of buddhadharma in India, its migration to China via the mission of Bodhidharma, and three of the teaching poems of Ch’an Buddhism selected for chanting in Soto Zen liturgy. No survey of Soto Zen would be complete without including Japan, and its foremost exponent and founder, Eihei Dogen, Zenji. In spite of his dying at the relatively young age of 53, Master Dogen’s prodigious output is intimidating. After being ordained in the Rinzai tradition, and traveling to China in his mid-twenties, where he had great insight under his teacher, Tendo Nyojo, or Rujing, he returned to Japan to introduce this zazen-centered practice.

His first written tract, Fukanzazengi — Principles of Seated Meditation, or Universal Guide to Zazen, as the translation below would have it, by Yokoi and Victoria — was apparently produced for the benefit of his students, and at their request. This is the version with which I am most familiar, having set it to music as part of my compendium of musical treatments I call SutraSuite™. In these guidelines, the great master seamlessly weaves practical instructions and profound philosophical teachings together. A sampling of this treatise will be the subject of this segment, with mercifully brief comment.

But we should remember that, as with the other “monsters of Zen” in this series, the most we can expect is a peek in the tent, brushing the tip of the iceberg, of this great literary legacy. For those who seek more, the international library of sources available on the internet provides an embarrassment of riches, more material than any one person can probably read and absorb in a lifetime. Of particular interest is a downloadable PDF of six comparative translations arranged in a grid by our own Jiryu Frederic Lecut, which you can find online at terebess.hu.

But we urge you to examine the true teaching on your cushion, in zazen, as Master Dogen would advise. Meanwhile, we can hope that this monologue will inspire greater effort in your endeavor.

Dogen hits the ground running with the first stanza:

Now when you trace the source of the Way you find that it is universal and absolute. It is unnecessary to distinguish between “practice” and “enlightenment.”

Dogen assumes that whoever is listening is already tracing “the source of the Way.” We once produced a t-shirt with “practicenlightenment” — one word, no hyphen — emblazoned on it. The way is everywhere to be found, and practicing Zen is, itself, enlightened behavior. That is, we are enlightened to the fact of something missing in our lives, and have, in our enlightened self-interest, begun pursuing buddhadharma to find it. That is our prosaic understanding of the “no enlightenment school,” as Okumura Roshi has described it. Not yet Buddha’s awakening, but the necessary prerequisite.

The supreme teaching is free, so why study the means to attain it?
The Way is, needless to say, very far from delusion.
Why then be concerned about the means of eliminating the latter?
The Way is completely present where you are, so of what use is practice or enlightenment?

These three statements, with their accompanying questions, relate Dogen’s correctives to prevailing memes regarding the Great Matter: studying to attain the supreme teaching, eliminating delusion, and practice that ignores the “Way before your eyes” are all futile endeavor. The last line is also translated as questioning the utility of pursuing enlightenment elsewhere, as on the traditional pilgrimage.

However, if there is the slightest difference in the beginning between you and the Way,
the result will be a greater separation than between heaven and earth.
If the slightest dualistic thinking arises, you will lose your Buddha-mind.

With Dogen, there is always a “but,” or a “however.” In spite of the fact that this is freely available to all, far from delusion, and completely present wherever you are in spacetime, if you see it as a separate, outer thing to be pursued, this is the Buddhist fall-from-grace. The Way is the “road to nonduality.”

For example, some people are proud of their understanding,
and think that they are richly endowed with the Buddha’s wisdom.
They think that they have attained the Way, illuminated their minds,
and gained the power to touch the heavens.
They imagine that they are wandering about in the realm of enlightenment.
But in fact they have almost lost the absolute Way, which is beyond enlightenment itself.

In what sounds like a criticism of others, but which is meant to be taken by the audience as one of those “if the shoe fits” or “if you see yourself in this picture” cautionary tales, Dogen warns against getting the big head, owing to some small peek-in-the-tent of buddhadharma that you may have encountered. Note that he asserts with Okumura Roshi that the Buddha Way is beyond, not about, enlightenment.

You should pay attention to the fact that even the Buddha Shakyamuni
had to practice zazen for six years.
It is also said that Bodhidharma had to do zazen at Shao-lin temple for nine years in order to transmit the Buddha-mind.
Since these ancient sages were so diligent, how can present-day trainees do without the practice of zazen?

Even the founders of Zen Buddhism in India and China themselves not only were proponents of zazen, but had to practice it themselves. This “had to” must be understood in the context of “in order to.” No one has to practice zazen, unless they want to penetrate to the depths of buddhadharma, to wake up. Or to transmit the Buddha-mind, which does not imply transmission to others. This transmission is from mind — lower-case “m” — to Mind, upper-case. If this transpires, then one may be enabled to help others effectuate the same transmission. Dogen is encouraging his students to practice, practice, practice.

You should stop pursuing words and letters and learn to withdraw and reflect on yourself.
When you do so, your body and mind will naturally fall away, and your original Buddha-nature will appear.

A bit of a knock on the Rinzai school, which was predominant in Japan in Dogen’s time. Koan study was referred to as “kanna Zen,” wrapped up in intellectual word-games. But to study the Buddha Way is to study the self, as famously phrased in Genjokoan, from Master Dogen’s first fascicle of his Shobogenzo collection. Body and mind falling away — shinjin datsuraku, from his transformational encounter with his Ch’an teacher, Rujing, is one of the most challenging phrases from Zen history. That your recovery of your original Buddha-nature is dependent upon this existential insight makes it even more necessary that we understand its implications. I like to think that if we simply sit still enough, for long enough, this will occur, as a natural process of profound sensory adaptation. This may be a modern definition of samadhi. The insight into our fundamental nature that accompanies this process may be the meaning of kensho. In any case, Dogen reminds us there is no time to waste:

If you wish to realize the Buddha’s Wisdom, you should begin training immediately.

“Immediately” I take to mean both in time and space, and that training is not only zazen. So we should immediately begin directing our attention to the reality of our surrounding circumstances. As to zazen:

Now, in doing zazen it is desirable to have a quiet room.
You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships.
Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right nor wrong.
Thus, having stopped the various functions of your mind, give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha.
This holds true not only for zazen but for all your daily actions.

Sounds like you could do zazen anywhere, but a quiet room is optimal, especially in these noisy times. The Middle Way applies to physical aspects such as diet, but what is meant by delusive relationships? Are there any that are not, at base, delusive? The tendencies of the judgmental, monkey mind are to be set aside, at least while we are on the cushion. The natural tendency to conceive of an outcome, such as “becoming a Buddha,” must also be jettisoned. Even off the cushion, we are to beware such seductions. This is the territory where Buddha’s enlightenment becomes “nothing special.”

Usually a thick square mat is put on the floor where you sit and a round cushion on top of that… With your eyes kept continuously open, breathe quietly through your nostrils… Finally, having regulated your body and mind in this way, take a deep breath, sway your body to left and right, then sit firmly as a rock.

These are the beginning, middle and end lines of a section in which Master Dogen outlines essentially the same instructions for zazen that we continue to use today, approaching a millennium later. The same simple equipment, the zabuton and zafu. Note the specific “continuously open” eyes, which we refer to as fixed gaze, which contemporary mindfulness meditation does not follow, urging meditators to keep their eyes closed. Which begs the question, How mindful can it be, if we exclude vision? Then:

Think of nonthinking. How is this done? By thinking beyond thinking and [not] thinking.
This is the very basis of zazen.

Carl Bielefeldt, in his exemplary study of “Dogen’s Manuals of Meditation,” a line-by-line comparison of the original Chinese Fukanzazengi with both of Dogen’s extant versions, makes the point that the Master does not give us any mental techniques, but that all his instructions are oriented to the physical. Here, however, we may have the exception to the rule. Non-thinking, assumed to be Dogen’s original coinage, points to a state of awareness that is not thinking, as such, but also not necessarily not thinking. Somewhere in-between, the Middle Way of mentality. As the “very basis of zazen,” it would compete with the posture, our usual association. But here, mind and body merge, in nonduality. The stillness of the posture, including the fixed gaze as a detail, manifests a one-to-one correlation with the stillness of the mind. “Mind and body cannot separate,” as Matsuoka Roshi often said.

That’s a wrap for this segment. Next week we will continue with and complete our exploration of Master Dogen’s Fukanzazengi. If memory serves, it was written in ordinary Japanese, which was unusual.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is so precious

About the mirror of Mind?

You cannot break it!

Finally we come to the third and last of the series, the middle-length liturgical poem from Ch’an Buddhism, Hokyo Zammai — Precious Mirror Samadhi by Tozan Ryokai, the founder of Soto Zen in China. Twice as long as Sandokai but only two-thirds of Hsinhsinming, we will have to compact our comments to squeeze it into a reasonably brief segment. So, jumping right in:

The Dharma of thusness is intimately transmitted by buddhas and ancestors
Now you have it; preserve it well

We can find sameness in the differing first lines, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences,” and especially “The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from the West to the East.” Preserving it well may have been more of an issue in the 800s than in the 600s and 700s. It is still an issue today. But are you sure that you really have it?

A silver bowl filled with snow; a heron hidden in the moon
Taken as similar they are not the same
Not distinguished their places are known

Again, I come down on the side of interpreting these compelling images as derived from direct experience, rather than abstract references to symbolism. The change in awareness and apprehension of nondual reality that come about through zazen may not be an object of perception, as Master Dogen reminds us, but it changes perception itself. That is, we recover our original mind, before we distorted it with delusional interpretation of experience. The difference, however, is so subtle as to be nearly indistinguishable, like the whiteness of the snow and the silver bowl, or the heron and the moon. Their separate places are known precisely when they are seen as inseparable.

The meaning does not reside in the words, but a pivotal moment brings it forth

A “pivotal moment” is experienced, not conceptually grasped through words, however eloquent.

Move and you are trapped; miss and you fall into doubt and vacillation

Moving toward it is a move away from it. Or, like the rainbow, causes it to recede ever further away. If you miss this simple point, you find yourself in doubt and vacillation. But the condition is not terminal.

Turning away and touching are both wrong for it is like a massive fire

It is burning, burning, burning, as Buddha taught. Like the sinner-man on the day of judgment, there is no escape. Everywhere you turn, there it is. But you cannot touch it, without getting burnt. It can, and will, touch you, however. The familiar nimbus, the flaming “halo” of Buddhist iconography, illustrates this. The increasing frequency and intensity of forest fires are manifesting it globally.

Just to portray it in literary form is to stain it with defilement

Actually it cannot be stained, and it cannot be reduced to defilement. But you can make this mistake. Nonetheless, you must say something, if you are to encourage others to practice Zen.

In darkest night it is perfectly clear; in the light of dawn it is hidden

Recalling Master Kisen’s darkness in light and light in darkness, it is more apparent when we are not overwhelmed with light and sound. This is why practice places are tuned to moderate levels of stimulus.

It is a standard for all things; its use removes suffering

There is nothing against which it can be measured. All the measurables we can come up with are arbitrary, against its immeasurable, all-penetrating clarity. Its use enables us to discern the difference between natural and intentional suffering, the former being built-in, the latter being unnecessary. In which case, even natural suffering is found to be no longer unbearable.

Although it is not constructed it is not beyond words

Words can point to it, but point to everything that is not it. It is the source of language, though as Master Sosan assures us, it is ultimately beyond language. Our consciousness is independent of language. Originally, consciousness is not constructed. It takes time and some work to do that. It will take some time and work to undo it.

Like facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each other

What is so precious about this mirror? Ordinary mirrors were surely precious in Master Tozan’s time, being handmade, but there is something extraordinarily precious about this Zen mirror. “Form and reflection” beholding “each other” is as close to a description of the nonduality of human consciousness as may be found. Each, taken together, is clearly not “other,” but not-two, to borrow from Master Sosan.

You are not it, but in truth it is you

Lest there still be confusion about self and other, form and reflection — and which is the subset of which — he kindly slaps you in the face with it. Otherwise, it is the wave, thinking that it is the ocean.

Like a newborn child, it is fully endowed with five aspects

A reminder that even a newborn child is as close to this truth as the most aged sage. The endowment? Aggregation of form, feeling, thought, impulse and consciousness. No sentient being excepted.

No going no coming no arising no abiding

The “unborn mind,” sometimes called the “uncreate.” Because it is unconstructed, it has no definable beginning or ending point. It does not begin with birth, does not end with death. While it appears to arise, abide, change and decay, it is only permanence that can apprehend impermanence. It is change.

“Baba wawa” is anything said or not?
In the end it says nothing for the words are not yet right

Like the newborn child, it is incoherent when it comes to expressing its truth. Long before language is acquired, the full expression of reality obtains. It does not rely on our knowing it, or on what we do or say. Matsuoka Roshi used to say, “You can talk all day and never make them understand.”

In the hexagram “double fire” when main and subsidiary lines are transposed
piled up they become three, the permutations make five
like the taste of the five-flavored herb, like the five-pronged vajra

No comment. I would have to study the I Ching to offer a credible interpretation. The five-flavored herb I take to mean all five basic flavors in one magical herb. Zen is tasteless, but nutritious, like water. The vajra is the thunderbolt, so one suspects this indicates some powerful mojo. The power of true self.

Wondrously embraced within the complete, drumming and singing begin together

Drumming and singing, again, probably have some traditional interpretation. I leave that to others. I take the drumming to be the initial pulse, the heartbeat, the vibrancy and thrum of inchoate life itself. The singing then would indicate the conscious celebration of life, which finds its beginning in drumming, but manifests later, in the full awareness of consciousness. They are of the same source, but different.

Penetrate the source and travel the pathways
embrace the territory and treasure the roads

This source is to be penetrated in the inmost consciousness, the seat of existence itself. The pathways are those blazed by our forefathers, both in the everyday sense of society’s history, and the particular directions established by our Zen ancestors. As Matsuoka Roshi would say, “The Zen person has no problem following the sidewalks.” The maps handed down to us are not the territory, as the saying goes, but we can treasure the roads, both internal and external, that lead to our original, true home.

You would do well to respect this; do not neglect it
Natural and wondrous, it is not a matter of delusion or enlightenment
Within causes and conditions, time and season, it is serene and illuminating

Cynics and skeptics abound, both today and in ancient times. It is difficult to accept that our birthright is so immediately accessible through so simple a method as just sitting still enough, long enough. But if we neglect this approach, in favor of the more intriguing and entertaining on offer, we may regret it. It is natural and wondrous, not artificial and ultimately disappointing. But the wonder of it is that it has nothing to do with delusion and enlightenment, other than sorting out our own delusion regarding enlightenment. No matter what the causes and conditions of this particular existence, no matter what season of the year, or of this life, we can return to this source, which is always there, serenely illuminating the reality of nonduality.

So minute it enters where there is no gap; so vast it transcends dimension
A hairsbreadth deviation, and you are out of tune

Again the measurables, the metrics, as we say today. Teensy-tiny beyond imagining, penetrating everywhere, inseparable from the all-encompassing, and in these days they did not have electron microscopes, or the Hubble telescope. But — and this is a big but — if you deviate even a hairsbreadth, which is pretty small, you get static. Like the old-timey analog radio dial. You have to be tuned in exactly. Zazen is your tuning fork.

Now there are sudden and gradual in which teachings and approaches arise
With teachings and approaches distinguished each has its standard
Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not, reality constantly flows

Huineng had done his thing by now, so the so-called sudden and gradual schools were a thing. Various teachings and approaches had arisen throughout history, so these were just the poster-boys at present. Once we stray from the natural and wondrous, we have the corporate standards in their place. But no matter how thoroughly we master them, and please their masters, it doesn’t change a thing. What they are pointing to is, and was, flowing in front of your face, all along. And behind your face, as well.

Outside still and inside trembling like tethered colts or cowering rats
the ancients grieved for them and offered them the Dharma
Led by their inverted views they take black for white
When inverted thinking stops the affirming mind naturally accords

You can spend the rest of your life as if you are actually sitting in zazen, or shikantaza, on the cushion, when you are not. Tethered to the practice out of fear, or other unworthy and/or mistaken motives, true masters see your suffering and try to help you overcome your ignorance. The monkey mind can believe that black is white, and vice-versa. As Matsuoka Roshi also said, “Some people can talk themselves out of existence.” But there is a natural way out of this dilemma. Let the monkey lie down, and take a nap. Voila!

If you want to follow in the ancient tracks, please observe the sages of the past
One on the verge of realizing the buddha way contemplated a tree for ten kalpas
Like a battle-scarred tiger; like a horse with shanks gone grey

To want to follow in the ancient tracks, of course, implies that one already has some idea of where they purport to lead. We can no longer actually observe most of the ancient sages, of course, as they were not recorded for posterity in any medium other than their imputed, spoken words, and then much more than secondhand once written down. However, we trust the record to the degree that it can yield guidance concerning blind alleys and dead-ends to avoid. One of these is looking for the quick fix. This sage, reputed to be Shakyamuni, perhaps in a former lifetime, contemplated a tree for a long, long time. Endless lifetimes, in fact. The tree itself would have to be ancient, of course, much older than a horse with shanks gone grey. Maybe a redwood. But contemplation was apparently not all serene and blissful. Else, whence come the tiger’s battle scars? Been there, done that — seen it all, somehow survived.

Because some are vulgar, jeweled tables and ornate robes
Because others are wide-eyed, cats and white oxen

Back to the quality of student we might expect, these days. Some are impressed by outer pomp and circumstance. But a robe can also hide a lot of sins. “Wrapping ourselves in Buddha’s teachings,” as we chant when donning the robe, is already true, in your birthday suit. But in either case, you do not necessarily truly know it, becoming “wide-eyed.” “Cats and white oxen” are two answers to the popular question, “What kind of animal would you want to be?” As opposed to monkeys and wayward oxen, they represent the realization of true Dharma, which may be wild and natural, but also tamable.

With his archer’s skill Yi hit the mark at a hundred paces
But when arrows meet head-on how could it be a matter of skill?

Whether arrows meeting head-on was a common trope of the times, or an unattributed sampling of Sekito Kisen’s original coinage of a century before, we will leave to the scholars. Yi apparently was an archer famous for his skill, but arrow points coming together — e.g. form and emptiness — is none of our doing. We must go beyond doing, to the point of non-doing, for nonduality to become clear.

The wooden man starts to sing; the stone woman gets up dancing

If it — the insight that Zen points to — does become apparent, we are told, even insentient, inanimate objects begin preaching and illustrating the living Dharma. Matsuoka Roshi said, “That stone in the garden is alive!” The world comes to life with this insight, including our own life, the “roar of a lion in a hollow tree.” Like waking from a dream that seems real, as in the old standard. We have to hollow out the tree, however.

It is not reached by feelings or consciousness; how could it involve deliberation?

It bears repeating, again, that this awakening is birthed in shikantaza, “objectless meditation” — which seems an oxymoron. How can there be meditation, if there is no object? How can there be a subject, if there is no object for the subject to reflect? In form and reflection beholding each other, there is no room for anything else, such as an observer. No observer, no feelings. No feelings, no consciousness, as such. Deliberation outlived its utility long before, jettisoned with all the other excess baggage.

Ministers serve their lords; children obey their parents
Not obeying is not filial; failure to serve is no help

A nod to Confucianism, but now in the context of personal liberation, liberation from all the above. It does not help to willfully avoid the sidewalks, trampling on the lawns and flower beds. One cannot be a minister, or even a son or daughter, in name only. Both parent and child must function as such, or give up the claim to filial piety, with all that that would entail in a Confucian society. If ministers do not serve their lords, they better have a really good reason. Simply failing to serve helps no one. We all serve one lord or another.

With practice hidden, function secretly like a fool, like an idiot
Just to continue in this way is called the host within the host

If we make a big deal of our practice, showing up fully robed at inappropriate times and places, for instance, or making a show of our understanding of Zen in conversations about other issues, we are not understanding the natural and wondrous nature of Zen. Everyone is already practicing Zen, whether they know it or not, for Zen isn’t anything in itself. It is simply the living out of life in the most conscious way possible. Functioning secretly, with regard to Zen, we are more likely to have a positive influence on others.

A fool, or an idiot, here, simply means someone who does not care what impression is made upon others, and largely lives outside the mainstream of cultural norms and memes regarding fame and fortune, reputation, and so on. In doing so, one manifests the innermost, most intimate understanding — the host within the host — which naturally informs all interactions with the guest, any guest, whether the inner chattering monkey, or transactions with others in the normal course of events.

Skillful or expedient means stem most naturally, and wholesomely, from the inner sanctum of the true self, where it is clear that there is “neither self nor other-than-self,” in this not-two road to nonduality. You cannot tell a book by its cover. So, no need to go changing our dust jacket to impress others.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Harmony is great!

But must include everything —

It’s the same diff’rence!

The second of the three main Soto Zen liturgical recitations from Ch’an Buddhism, Sekito Kisen’s Sandokai — variously translated as “Identity of Relative & Absolute,” “Merging of Difference and Unity” or “Harmony of Difference and Sameness” — is mercifully brief, especially compared to Kanchi Sosan’s Hsinhsinming — Trust in Mind. And while the three great masters do not simply repeat the same ideas in different terms, they are certainly pointing to the same aspects of Zen’s insight into practical reality, “chopping wood and carrying water,” as the trope goes. The mendicants’ dependence upon the begging bowl — as a business model for the earliest Order of monks and nuns in India — assimilated the social independence of Taoism, while fostering an interdependent connection to society more typical of Confucianism. This kind of self-sufficiency combined with social awareness is very American, if more characteristic of our grandparents’ generation. The first line sets the stage for what follows:

The mind of the Great Sage of India is intimately transmitted from West to East

China is laying claim to the self-same awakening to original Mind as expressed in Buddha’s awakening and its transmission to the 28 ancestors in India, culminating in Bodhidharma’s bringing it to China. The operative word here is “intimately” — indicating the face-to-face transmission of master to student. While buddha-dharma may have already made its way to China in written form, the method of Zen — i.e. zazen — with its reliance on intimate, in-person training, apparently had not.

While human faculties are sharp or dull, the Way has no northern or southern ancestors

A couple of Zen principles are combined here, the first being that the transmission of the Buddha Way is not dependent upon the relative intelligence, education or erudition of the individual, as it is more a natural birthright than an intellectual capacity. Huineng, sixth ancestor in China, is reputed to have been illiterate, and yet he became the founder of the so-called southern, or “sudden enlightenment” school, while his highly-educated, senior Dharma brother became the successor in the northern school, characterized as “gradual” in its process. The original Mind is present, to be uncovered, or recovered, in all human beings. This does not mean that quickness of intellect is a problem; but it is not necessarily an advantage. Huineng was quick enough. He spent only about nine months under tutelage of the fifth patriarch. But in truth, there was little or no difference between the northern and southern schools.

The spiritual source shines clear in the light; the branching streams flow on in the dark

Shohaku Okumura Roshi in Living by Vow, and others, have commented extensively on this brief poem. The symbolism involved in opposing light and dark is surely part of the intended meaning of the great sage, but I like to think he is simultaneously pointing at direct experience, in meditation, and as a result of meditation. The spiritual source shining “clear in the light” is referenced in Buddha’s own teaching, for example in the Surangama Sutra, where he goes into great detail describing the inner visions of the mind, and their implications. Branching streams here I assume to refer to the branches of Buddhism as it spread throughout China, and as a general statement that, whether in the light of day or in the darkness of ignorance, this truth is immanent, whether we know it or not.

Grasping at things is surely delusion
According with sameness is still not enlightenment

These two statements I believe go together, the first indicating that all ordinary pursuits, such as of wealth, pleasure, or simple satisfaction — or even the pursuit of knowledge itself, through the usual means of examining the myriad things in exhaustive detail — is not the Zen way. The holistic approach of the Buddha way can include the analysis, comparison, and categorization characteristic of science, but in the end it has to pull things together in a new synthesis. The delusional extreme is to fantasize that we will reach some sort of universal truth by taking everything apart, like Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” Plucking things from their living matrix, pulling them apart under a microscope, will not reveal their true nature. Yet merely regarding all the many particular things as somehow being the same, under a mere appearance of difference, is still an incomplete, one-sided view. We do not assert that all is one, but as Master Sosan reminds us, “To come directly into harmony with this reality just simply say when doubt arises, ‘Not two.’” Master Kisen goes on to illustrate this principle in personal terms:

All the objects of the senses transpose and do not transpose
Transposing they are linked together not transposing each keeps its place
Sights vary in quality and form sounds differ as pleasing or harsh

I say personal here, as he is bringing us back to our senses, literally. The objects of the senses would include the sights, sounds, and feelings we experience, along with thoughts, as the objects of the mind. If memory serves, another translation substitutes “interact” for “transpose,” which I prefer, in that it seems to more accurately capture what the great sage is pointing to. It is as if the senses overlap, as in a Venn diagram, as is experienced in extreme fashion by synesthetes, who see colors associated with hearing, and hear sounds associated with seeing. One assumes that the other senses, smell and taste, are similarly interconnected and interactive. We can all point to examples that we have experienced, including the sounds and sights of a fireworks display, which some find pleasing, where their pets find them frightening. The master repeatedly associates general principles with particular case experiences in this manner, reflecting R. Buckminster Fuller’s definition of intelligence.

Darkness merges refined and common words
Brightness distinguishes clear and murky phrases

Again, the reference to light and dark provides context for language, another contrast that Master Kisen engages repeatedly — phenomena as experienced versus principles as expressed in language. “Refined and common words” may refer to the erudite exegesis of buddhadharma, versus street language, which in the darkness of unknowable reality are merged in an equal inability to capture the truth in words, however refined. Some of the most famous expressions of Zen wisdom appear vulgar. “Brightness,” on the other hand — the direct, experiential light of wisdom, or insight — enables us to distinguish between artful and clumsy expressions, pointing at the truth that is beyond words.

The four elements return to their natures just as a child turns to its mother
Fire heats wind moves water wets earth is solid
Eye and sights ear and sounds nose and smells tongue and tastes

After contrasting the clarification that arises in meditation, and incoherent attempts to put it into words, the master turns to the functioning of insentient nature, through empirical observation and human-centered references, connecting raw elements to mother and child, as well as to the senses and their objects. The natural functioning of fire, wind, water and earth are conflated with those of eye, ear, nose and tongue, which of course manifest the four elements internally, in the form of biology. The inclusion of body and mind are assumed, as would be the other elements of space and consciousness.

Thus for each and every thing according to the roots the leaves spread forth
Trunk and branches share the essence; revered and common each has its speech

Here the dendritic form is deployed to envision the natural growth of all systems, including those of human origin, such as the “branching streams” of Buddhism itself, or the theory of evolution. Each and every essential being stems from shared roots, variations branching from the trunk, manifesting temporarily as leaves in season. The last sentence, which seems to be a whiplash into irrelevancy, is another reminder, in case we didn’t get it the first time, that language itself shares this quality. Those high holy things we hold in great reverence and those we consider common, even beneath our contempt, are rendered the same in that we alone identify them as different. Zen allows no separation of the sacred and mundane.

In the light there is darkness but do not take it as darkness
In the dark there is light but do not see it as light
Light and dark oppose one another like the front and back foot in walking

Returning to the trope of light and dark, the master once again conflates direct experience and its deeper implications. I favor the direct interpretation, in that the light of daytime is floating on a deep background of the dark of outer space, and the edge of darkness starts just at the limits of our peripheral vision. In the dark of night, light is manifest as the movement of energy on the neuronal networks. As a basic binary, light is always begetting dark, and vice-versa. Can’t have the one without the other. Spoiler alert: Hokyo Zammai, Precious Mirror Samadhi, touches on this idea: “In darkest night it is perfectly clear; in the light of dawn it is hidden.” Inner light is more obvious, in the absence of sunlight.

Each of the myriad things has its merit expressed according to function and place
Existing phenomenally like box and cover joining
According with principle like arrow points meeting

These three lines seem to hang together, but cover a broad insight, in my estimation. “Each of the myriad things” covers a lot of territory, sometimes referred to as the “ten-thousand things,” meaning all of the many things in existence. “Merit” may seem an odd choice to attribute to a thing, any thing, but I think stands for the absolute noumenon, or essence of a thing, while using “function and place” to denote phenomena, the unique and irreplaceable manifestation of each being and particle in its dharma location. Merit here does not express solely the utility of an object in the context of human needs, but its place in the ecosystem, and further, its deeper implications as “Myriad objects partake of the buddha body” in Master Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai, Self-Fulfilling Samadhi. “Existing phenomenally like box and cover joining refers to those things we can understand and control to some degree, while “according with principle like arrow points meeting” represents the near-impossible, the simultaneous apprehension of both form and emptiness in each and every phenomenological instantiation of reality.

Hearing the words understand the meaning; do not establish standards of your own

Once again we are parsing the closing comments into briefer one-liners, as each is replete with its own meaning, though intimately connected to the rest. We have already heard many words, but do we really understand the meaning, or intent, of the master? If we simply force or twist the more challenging ideas into pretzels of our own preference, we may miss the meaning altogether. Listen for echoes of these tenets in Tozan’s poem to come.

Not understanding the Way before your eyes, how do you know the path you walk?

The “Way before your eyes” reminds us of Master Sosan’s “Emptiness here, emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes.” This is partially a critique of substituting theory or doctrine for the evidence of your own senses, I think, such as that represented by the early models of the celestial bodies with Earth at the center. We may tout the theory of emptiness as if we know what it is, and thereby discount the preponderance of evidence. If the path we walk is comprised of comforting beliefs and self-fulfilling prophecies, in spite of evidence to the contrary, it amounts to just another fantasy.

Walking forward is not a matter of far or near
But if you are confused mountains and rivers block your way

These two lines I believe are meant to be considered together for their full import. “Walking forward” I think means to suggest real progress on the path, though there is no forward or backward to it. “Not being a matter of far or near” I take to mean that going on extensive journeys, pilgrimage, to find the truth, is a step in the wrong direction, for as Master Dogen reminds us in Fukanzazengi, Principles of Seated Meditation, “The Way is completely present where you are, so of what use is pursuing enlightenment elsewhere?” I also think it implies that that which is distant is not fundamentally different from that which is near, much like the modern astronomical view of the universe appearing the same from any vantage point. However, the very example of mountains and rivers constantly manifesting the body of Buddha and expounding the Dharma will only add to our confusion, unless and until we make the right move, which is to enter into stillness, or better yet, stillness in motion and vice-versa, mokurai.

I respectfully urge you who study the mystery: do not pass your days and nights in vain

Zen is nothing if not respectful. As far as we know, the person we are talking to already has the Dharma, and may grasp it more deeply than we do. If nothing else, our poor words are subject to the duality of the language itself, and so may be inadvertently fostering more confusion. If you are studying the mystery with single-minded diligence and single-hearted devotion, there is nothing more you can do, and nothing more that the old man can offer, other than to encourage you to go 24/7 in your endeavor. It is not a waste of time, in fact is the best use of your time, which is all you have. Zen is not in vain.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Who said it was yours?

What if they are all liars?

Who you gonna call?

The Hsinhsinming, the longest of the three Ch’an chants in the Zen liturgy, occupies three pages in the layout of the service manual, while Sandokai fills only one page, and Hokyo Zammai requires two. This gives you a rough idea of the variability of these three ancestors’ differing manners of expression, and their relative loquaciousness, in communicating The Great Matter to their contemporaries, over spans of almost exactly one century apiece. One suspects that someone suspected that their audience would also include future generations. Otherwise, why write it down? Although it is hard to imagine that they might have imagined folks like you and me studying them diligently, ensconced in our modern milieu.

You may recall that we left off the prior podcast close to halfway through, in my formatting of the poem:

If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion. To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult. But those with limited views are fearful and irresolute; the faster they hurry the slower they go.

Setting aside further commentary on discriminating, prejudice and opinion, and the likely progenitor of our contemporary trope, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get” (shout out to Zen Master Lewis Carroll), note that where the first line assures us that the Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences, here the Master is revising that difficult enough idea, with the even less dualistic point that it is neither easy nor difficult. It depends upon whether or not you are fearful and irresolute. Well, punk, are you?

Clinging cannot be limited;
even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray.
Just let things be in their own way
and there will be neither coming nor going. Obey the nature of things
and you will walk freely and undisturbed.

We see a lot of mindfulness acolytes these days preaching the gospel of not clinging, “just noticing,” et cetera. We might be forgiven for pointing out that some seem to be clinging to these fixed ideas, like the hapless survivors of the Titanic, clinging to furniture and other debris from the sinking vessel. If the very apostles of non-clinging cannot let go of their own clinging, what hope is there for the rest of us great unwashed? We are all noticing all kinds of things, all the time, for all the good it does.

Letting things be in their own way seems absolutely un-American. If there is anything we are good at, it is messing with things, rearranging the deck chairs. Trying to perfect the innately imperfect, shaping the world and everything in it to our niggling, humanocentric ideal of conforming to human need, as the living and breathing, “chosen” representatives of the gods, or God, on earth. The notion that if we can finally relinquish this stubborn idea of ultimate control, we will “walk freely and undisturbed” begs credulity, smacking of the Taoist ideal. But that “there will be neither coming nor going,” as a result? “Coming and going” is usually a generic stand-in for being born and dying. Merely letting go of O-C behavior, means that we will be free of birth and death? This is the old Hinayana ideal, to escape the wheel, slip the surly bonds of earthly existence. For Mahayanists, it seems a moot issue. Who cares?

When thought is in bondage the truth is hidden for everything is murky and unclear. The burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness. What benefit can be derived from distinctions and separations?

The unspecified implication is, in bondage to what? One might presume, to any kind of clinging, to ideas as well as the sensory, and other attachments, that bedevil us. The murk, and lack of clarity, is in one sense built in, and therefore not our job to clean up. But allowing thought — and by extension consciousness itself — to be forever mired in it, is definitely our responsibility. Who you gonna call?

The bit about judging bringing annoyance and weariness is, ironically, the favorite line of one of our senior teachers. Ironic, that is, in a paean to the relinquishment of all preferences. I insert the verb “making” in the last line — as in making distinctions and separations — which, again, seem built-in. But we tend to make way too much of them.

If you wish to move in the One Way
do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.
Indeed to accept them fully is identical
with true Enlightenment.
The wise man strives to no goals
but the foolish man fetters himself.

Aha! So there it is. At long last, is our get-out-of-jail-free card. We do not have to turn our back on the sensory realm, and our cherished ideas, in order to be Zen-cool. The empirical method is saved, hallelujah! Seriously, this means that Zen is not, and never has been, anti-intellectual. It just puts the thinking tool at the disposal of the higher intellect. If we establish any lesser goals, they simply become foolish fetters, inhibiting the process of going after the gold ring. And missing the free ride.

There is one Dharma not many; distinctions arise from the clinging needs
of the ignorant.
To seek Mind with discriminating mind
is the greatest of all mistakes. Rest and unrest derive from illusion;
with enlightenment there is no liking and disliking.

The one Dharma, of course, has to be divided into many, in order to present it in words. Raising a finger or throwing a whisk to the ground may demonstrate it completely, for those who have the eyes to hear and the ears to see. But seeking it with the thinking mind is like a dog circling its tail around the room, looking for the ideal place to plop down. It can continue forever, or at least for as long as there is life in the dog. May as well settle down right here and now. If we cannot rest in our unrest, we are badgered by illusion. In our own enlightened self-interest, we can give a “like” even to our natural state of unrest.

All dualities come from ignorant inference.
They are like dreams of flowers in air:
foolish to try to grasp them.
Gain and loss, right and wrong,
such thoughts must finally be abolished at once.

Inference is a cut above mere interpretation. It implies that we have given this some thought. Which in itself is an interesting proposition. Is thought really something that can be given? Both interpretation and inference, even after much thought, can be based on ignorance. In fact, we cannot possibly know all there is to know about any given set of circumstances, so our mental machinations are always based on a preponderance of ignorance. Tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Grasping at flowers in air is the stuff of dreams and romance. Foolish, but irresistible, when driven by hormones and other born-of-body-mouth-and-mind influences. There may be nothing to gain, and nothing to lose, but we have the right to be wrong. Abandoning such thoughts is perhaps more practicable than the idea of abolishing them.

If the eye never sleeps all dreams will naturally cease. If the mind makes no discriminations
the ten thousand things
are, as they are, of single essence.
To understand the mystery of this One-essence
is to be released from all entanglements.

Even dreams of flowers in air will naturally cease, if only the eye never sleeps. Makes me want to take a nap. Which eye is in question, here? The mind’s eye, in making no discriminations, takes in the unity underlying the appearance of the ten thousand things. We see what it means, so to say. Phenomena beget noumenon, and vice-versa. The last line may represent a questionable choice on the part of the translator, as surely the mystery of this “one-essence,” hyphenated, surpasseth all understanding. Being released from all entanglements suggests that it must be very lonely at the top.

When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state. Consider motion in stillness and stillness in motion; both movement and stillness disappear.

Does not say that all things are seen as equal. Seeing them equally is in the eye of the beholder, not an assertion of some sort of universal equality. If timelessness is reached, it must occur at this time, and it must have always been present. If so, spacelessness, which is not even a word, must also be reached at the same time. This comprises a sincere attempt to point to the singularity of Zen, that personal spacetime in which all the known laws of reality, all the marks and parameters of conscious awareness, collapse inward of their own mass, so to speak. The center cannot hold. That this has always been so means that it cannot be the effect of a cause, even of “first causes,” such as the Word. Nor is there in it any kind of relationship, such as that of the soul to God. The example of mokurai, “motion in stillness and stillness in motion,” may be the root source of Matsuoka Roshi’s liberal use of this term. In the context of emptiness, change, or nonduality, they merge, in a binary dance of mutuality.

When such dualities cease to exist Oneness itself cannot exist. To this ultimate finality no law or description applies. For the unified mind in accord with the Way, all self-centered striving ceases.

Here, there is no break in the flow of the message. Taking us full circle, Master Sosan makes it clear that he is not merely asserting “oneness” as the ultimate reality. Would it were so simple. No oneness, no twoness. You cannot simply pay your money and take your choice. The ultimate finality is not final, not even determinate. It is in flux. “Seeing into the flux of arising, changing, abiding, and decaying,” as Master Nagarjuna, 14th in India, would have it. This is undefilable, not reducible to ordinary laws or descriptions. But — and it’s a big but — somehow this does the trick. “Self-centered striving ceases.”

Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind’s power.

Here the flow is once again uninterrupted, and waxes effusive. As self-centered striving ceases with the ultimate finality of realizing no-self, just so any remaining doubts, and irresolutions. Which is also not a word in English. But we all know what it means. Vacillation. Pussy-footing this way and that, all around the problem, rather than facing it squarely. It turns out it is built into the way the mind works. True faith then becomes possible as the exercise of action, in the face of nagging self-doubt. Liberation in the midst of the bondage, and nothing to grasp, in the clinging. In the absence of exertion of the mind’s terrible power to discriminate, all becomes empty, clear, and self-illuminating. No need for task lighting.

Here thought feeling knowledge and imagination are of no value. In this world of Suchness, there is neither self nor other-than-self. To come directly into harmony with this reality just simply say when doubt arises “Not two.”

“Here” — meaning at the nexus of spacetime, the singularity of the “eternal moment,” as Sensei called it — our usual tricks, trinkets and trash are of no avail. “Sitting without relying on anything,” as Master Dogen puts it, in the spare reductionism of Zazenshin. “Suchness” explained socially: neither self nor other-than-self. Thus no possibility of acting selfishly, or selflessly. But this does not mean “all is one,” in the vapid simplemindedness of New Age thinking. “Not-two” is the most we can say about it, just as zazen is the most we can do about it. Coming into harmony with it is, again, the Tao raising its winking head.

In this “not two” nothing is separate, nothing is excluded. No matter when or where, enlightenment means entering this truth. And this truth is beyond extension or diminution in time or space; in it a single thought is ten thousand years.

Again no break in the flow, but we must chew this over in digestible bytes, b-y-t-e-s. We like to say there is no difference between us, can’t we all just get along? But Zen says we may not be truly separate, but vive la différence! Otherwise, how boring! Zen is all-inclusive in its social embrace, and mostly in its intellectual grasp, through we would beg to differ with certain belief systems afoot in the world. However, an enlightenment worthy of the name will include this inclusiveness. That it is beyond extension or diminution in time or space is another testament to the nobility of the Four Noble Truths. Like the noble gases, they are inert. They do not change with circumstances, causes and conditions, even when approaching the event horizon of your friendly local neighborhood black hole. A single thought encompassing ten thousand years is a bit more difficult to allow. Until you sit through a long retreat. Or consider Buddha’s thought of enlightenment. How long did that take? How long did it last?

Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small; no difference for definitions have vanished, and no boundaries are seen. So too with Being and non-Being.

Yeah, yeah, you can have your emptiness. What about this thing in front of your face? How far out does it go? How far in does it go? “So minute it enters where there is no gap. So vast it transcends dimension.” Oops, wrong poem. Spoiler alert. Down the rabbit hole, do we come out the other side? How big are you? How small? Here, have a bite — b-i-t-e — of this cookie, and find out. Not only no preferences at this remove, not even any differences, because not even any definitions, any more. Nor any boundaries, between the undefined. All made up, notes crumpled up and tossed in the cosmic wastebasket, the dustbin of futile ideas. But even Being and non-Being? Note the capitals. Denotes something big. The existential question, source of much existential angst. For Sosan it is a casual, throwaway line, like a Borsht-belt comic’s outdated groaner.

Waste no time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this. One thing, all things, move among and intermingle without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about nonperfection.

Wait a minute — we just learned that we cannot actually waste time, let alone on such trivial concerns. But of course the old man means “meanwhile” (shout out to Master Colbert) — up until, and when, we finally get this. The “this” in question is not only the most important issue in life, it is the issue of life itself. Meanwhile, keep on moving on, disperse while intermingling, nothing to see here, all distractions are equally without distinction in this regard. Living large — livin’ la vida loca — begins with jettisoning the very idea of nonperfection, with its excess baggage weighted down with anxiety. Travelin’ light.

To live in this faith is the road to nonduality, because the nondual is one with the trusting mind.

Okay — so as we come to the end, we are stretching less and less to mean more and more, like the drawn out ending of a romcom movie. The characters predictably depart and say their goodbyes in reverse order of their billing and onscreen time — first, the bit players and character actors, and, finally, the romantic leads. The trusting mind is the star of this show. Its romantic partner is nonduality. Together they make a lovely couple, and live happily ever after. Finally, just before rolling the credits, the denouement, the climactic, closing scene, a dramatic, uplifting summation of all that has gone before:

Words!
The Way is beyond language, for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.

The audience applauding, the curtain falling, slowly trudging out of the theater, exchanging smiles, wise and knowing looks, heads nodding in melancholy assent, all are mute, knowing that there are no words to describe, no concepts to capture, the wisdom of the Way. However, in doing so, they may be forgiven for imagining that what they have learned today will survive until tomorrow, and will not be relegated to yesterday. In other words, the tyranny of language has already begun to reassert itself. The popcorn was unusually good, though.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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A novel idea!

What if it’s untrustworthy?

Then what will you do?

In this next series of four UnMind podcasts, we will take a look at certain selected Chinese ancestors of Zen. In Japanese pronunciation, their names are Kanchi Sosan, Sekito Kisen, and Tozan Ryokai. One reason for focusing on these three is that written teachings attributed to them are featured as chants in the liturgy of Soto Zen. They lived about 100 years apart from each other, covering periods roughly in the 600s, 700s, and 800s, CE. I am fairly familiar with these works, having chanted them repeatedly and set them to music. And, of course, the lineage in China is so replete with monsters of Zen, such as Huineng, or Eno, Baso, Rinzai, et cetera, that we could never do them justice.

This quartet will complete the first year’s worth of 52 weekly podcasts, opening the door to focus on more timely and topical subjects. If you have any suggestions for talks on topics you would like to hear, please let us know.

Beginning with Sosan’s Hsinhsinming — “Faith…” or “Trust in Mind” — the longest of the three liturgical poems, we hear resonances of Taoism toward the end, one of the formative influences on the evolution of Zen, as it made its way east through China. The poem begins simply enough:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction however
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

A brief note on translation may be appropriate here. These are from the Japanese Soto-shu consensus publications, and are attributed to the original translators. I have noticed that in the two editions I have seen over the years, some of the English sources were changed. I suggest that you compare various translations in order to gain a more well-rounded idea of what the verses are pointing at, but we will not have time or space to consider more than one in this podcast. We will have to content ourselves with a brief commentary, in order to unpack Hsinshinming over two segments, this and the next.

The first line above seems simple and self-explanatory enough. Depending on what is meant by “preferences.” I suspect that the great sage does not mean choosing between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. The mention of both love and hate gives us a clue, but are unfortunately emotion-laden terms in our vernacular. Attachment and aversion may be the more neutral choice. So the smallest distinction setting heaven and earth apart, is akin to the fall from grace, eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil of course may be realistic judgments of the intentions and behavior of some human beings, and even applicable to our own actions in our weaker moments. But beyond the human species, it is problematic to attribute such traits to Nature. Our ignorance is the root cause of most, or all, of the trouble in the world. Even the most tragic natural disaster is exacerbated by human judgment calls based on love and hate, greed, anger and delusion, and the rest.

If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

You may have noted that I have segmented the text into sections that seem coherent, to me. I am sure the author did the same, but it may have been lost in translation, or in laying out the printed page. Sometimes there seems no logical connection flowing from one to the next. This, the second stanza, sets up seeing the truth, in distinction to Master Dogen’s hearing the true Dharma, in his famous Vow. Seeing, here, is not limited to the visual realm but grasping the truth, as in “I see what you mean.” Hearing is traditionally considered the more intuitive way of knowing, seeing the more rational. “Seeing with the ears” and “hearing with the eyes” is a traditional way of expressing Zen’s pointing at the merging of the senses in non-duality. Zen is sometimes defined as the pursuit of the understanding of meaning. The original mind is at peace with that.

The Way is perfect like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. Be serene in the oneness of things and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

Space in these days was considered one of the fundamental elements, along with the fab four, as well as consciousness. Perfection here is not a human judgment but a take-it-or-leave-it declaration of the absolute balance of forces in the universe and in nature. Human judgment, interpreting things from the perspective of self-striving, distorts our view, as is the reflection of the moon in roiling waters. Oneness here is not meant to oppose duality, but to encompass it in a greater unity. Later we will see that the great sage warns us against reifying oneness.

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity. As long as you remain in one extreme or the other, you will never know Oneness. Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and passivity assertion and denial.

Here is the catch-22 of practice. Doing anything may seem to get in the way of non-doing. If we try to empty the mind of thoughts, that too is thinking. Again, oneness is not to be conceived as something, but the absence of preferences and opposing activity to passivity. The two are mutually defining. The natural vacillation of the mind swings from one to the other, like a pendulum that may break its mount. We are all bipolar. The apparent conflict between activity and passivity becomes mental when it leaks over into expression, as assertion and/or denial. Here there is no break in flow to the next stanza.

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it
the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

So both denying and asserting our concept of dualistic reality versus nondual emptiness is in error. This leaks out, like water from a leaky bucket, when we try to talk our way to understanding. Not that some exchange of dharma dialog is not useful. The ancients, here present as Kanchi Sosan, were real talkers. If we listen not to their words, but to what they are pointing at, we will not be confused.

To return to the root is to find the meaning but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance.

Another nice pair of oppositions, appearances versus the root and source, where we find the meaning. This inflection point in our awareness is variously represented in somewhat descriptive language, such as “the moment of inner enlightenment.” Language itself is dualistic, so we have to take the “inner” with a grain of salt, as Zen recognizes no such separation of inner and outer. But we can quibble this to death. The important point is that the masters assure us there is a going beyond such seeming dichotomies. As Matsuoka Roshi used to say, there is no dichotomy in Zen. Which itself seems a dichotomy. The throwaway comment at the end is startling in its implications: Change is not real. How’s that for a dichotomy? What kind of ignorance sees change where fundamentally there is none?

Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.
Do not remain in the dualistic state;
avoid such pursuits carefully.
If there is even a trace of this and that,
of right and wrong,
the Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.

Fortunately the kind teacher relieves us of our burden: We can put down this futile search for the truth. When someone would make an assertion about the truth of Zen, while having tea with Matsuoka Roshi after the meditation service, he would lean over and say, “That’s just your opinion!” The “just” is the operative word here. Your opinion, even about your opinions, is just that — only an opinion. We endlessly pursue our own opinions down every blind alley, cul-de-sac, and rabbit-hole. This feverish activity is what disturbs the mind’s essential peace and results in terminal confusion.

Although all dualities come from the One, do not be attached even to this One. When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way nothing in the world can offend; and when a thing can no longer offend, it ceases to exist in the old way.

So now, Master Sosan begins backing us away from our attachment to the idea of oneness, or a fundamental unity that we like to feel is underlying all the duality. This is the New Age version of insight. All is one, right? Well, no. This represents yet another evasive maneuver, one aimed at dodging the sheer multiplicity and unpredictability of the many beings, often raising conflict in competing with each other. We are offended by our inability to comprehend this higher level of order, called chaos. But if and when we come to terms with it as it is, not as we might like it, the old man assures us that we see the existence of apparent conflict and dichotomies in a new way. Trust the old man. He is your mind.

When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist.
When thought objects vanish,
the thinking-subject vanishes;
and when the mind vanishes objects vanish. Things are objects because there is a subject or mind and the mind is a subject because there are objects.

The “things” in question exist only in your mind, at least in the way you think they do. They may indeed exist, but not as you think. Even your so-called “mind” does not exist the way you may think it does. If and when we are able to give up our predilection to choose between our opinion and that of a master, for example, that very lack of self-centered discrimination opens the door to a new mind, which is really the same old, original mind we have had all along. Everything old is new again. Then Master Sosan launches into this incredibly incisive, frontal attack on your frontal lobe. Not to mention the parietals. The objects that you think exist, exist because you think they do. Thinking they exist results from the fact that they do exist, but not as you think they do. When you see through objects as self-existent entities, that they are really works-in-progress, then the subject that thinks it sees them is also seen as non-existent in the same way. Nothing actually vanishes; it was never there to begin with. When “mind and object merge and go beyond enlightenment” (thank you, Dogen), it occurs in stillness. In this stillness neither subject nor object has yet arisen. It’s your happy place. You want to go to there.

Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.
In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world.

So here is a mention of relativity from over 1,500 years ago. Don’t quibble with the math. Relativity in the modern sense also includes the observer. I live in my spacetime and you live in yours. Never the twain shall meet. To understand the relativity of these two fundamental functions of the mind is to understand the relativity of all so-called binaries. Subject begets object; object begets subject. Form implies emptiness; emptiness is innately form. Never the twain shall separate. In Buckminster Fuller-speak, they are “always and only co-existent.” From the overview of universal emptiness, subject and object are co-arisen, and thereby indistinguishable. There is no head on top of this head. The whole world is your whole world, but you cannot get mine and I cannot get yours.

If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine, you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion. To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult. But those with limited views are fearful and irresolute; the faster they hurry, the slower they go.

Now the wily old fox is turning our attention from the personal sphere of untrammeled experience to the dismal realm of social status. Coarse and fine, however, applies to direct awareness as well as to choices in the material world of hair shirts versus haute couture. Master Dogen speaks of entering the “fine or subtle mind of nirvana.” Prejudice and opinion are temptations, not destiny. They are limited views, based on self-referential and defensive survival mode. This is not your fault. It is lizard-brain stuff. But we do not have to live in the brain stem. We can resolutely climb up into the outer cortex. If we slow down enough, we can live in the present moment. It is really all the time we have. In it, the “eternal moment,” as Matsuoka Roshi defined it, we have all the time there is.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What a Zen monster!

Walking back to India —

Dead, with one sandal!

Whatever you may think of the legends surrounding the 28th Ancestor in the Indian transmission, first in the Chinese lineage, it does not take away from the effect, that whoever that person was, or those persons were, had, upon the propagation of the direct practice of Zen to its second country of origin. India occupies the central mass of the vast subcontinent, and China stretches all the way to the Pacific coast, where the relatively tiny countries of Korea and Japan received the transmission from their larger neighbors, and the West largely from them. “The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from the West to the East,” as the first line of Sandokai: Harmony of Sameness and Difference,reminds us. And nowadays, from the East to the West. All depends upon from where you start.

It is tempting to delve into the various teachings attributed to Bodhidharma, such as his famous exchanges with Emperor Wu, when, asked how much merit the emperor had accumulated by building of temples, et cetera, the sage is said to have replied, “No merit!” Or the “Nothing holy!” response to his question regarding the central message of Buddhism; or the “Don’t know!” response to the question of who it is that is standing here, mouthing these absurdities. But we are limited in space and time for this tip-of-the-iceberg peek at this monster of Zen. Suffice it to say that, like Joshu’s “Mu,” the response is not merely a denial of the premise underlying the question, but a categorical dismissal of any such attempt to reduce the “what” of the teaching, or the “who” of the teacher, to common understanding.

Instead, I will lead us through the great master’s definition of the Grave Precepts of Buddhism, which, like his reactions above, cast them in a more universal and non-dualistic light, than any ordinary interpretation. My comments begin with the precept as expressed in our ceremonies of the Silent Thunder Order, for comparison. The document of origin online, from the Village Zendo located in New York, includes theirs, and Dogen’s comments as well. For further research, please visit their site.

Not Killing

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the everlasting Dharma, not giving rise to the idea of killing is called the Precept of Not Killing.

“Affirm life — Do not kill” is our positive expression of this prohibition. We are all aware that with each breath, our body kills microbes in large numbers, in order to preserve its own life. In the Repentance verse, we acknowledge our “past and harmful karma” with the proviso that it is “born… of body, mouth and mind.” In other words, it is not exactly our fault, that this is the way life works, by consuming and destroying other life, in self-preservation mode. The subtlety and mysteriousness of this self-nature includes its giving rise to the idea of killing. But killing is intentional, not natural. The main way that we kill is by denying the buddha-nature of another being. The life we are killing will eventually kill our life.

Not Stealing

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the unattainable Dharma, not having thoughts of gaining is called the Precept of Not Stealing.

“Be giving — Do not take what is not freely given.” Of course, whether something is given freely or not can become a matter of dispute. But having no thought of gaining, whether giver or recipient, can be seen to be the reality. Ownership may be determined by utility, but how long is that going to last?

Not Misusing Sex

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the ungilded Dharma, not creating a veneer of attachment is called the Precept of Not Misusing Sex.

“Honor the body — Do not engage in sexual misconduct.” Again, what is misconduct, is a matter of interpretation. Social norms and mores are not always our most reliable guide. The veneer of attachment may be associated with greed, one of the “Three Poisons.” We could do worse than study the 18th century philosopher Schopenhauer, on where our sexual desires really originate. Born of body.

Fourth Grave Precept: Not Lying

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the inexplicable Dharma, not preaching a single word is called the Precept of Not Lying.

“Manifest truth — Do not speak falsely.” Buddha’s “golden silence” is recognized as the fullest expression of this truth — that we cannot speak the truth. But we can, and do, manifest it, in spite of our own ignorance. If we so much as preach a single word, it is subject to misinterpretation. But this is no excuse for keeping your mouth shut, pretending that you understand. You must say, or do, something.

Not Giving or Taking Drugs

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the intrinsically pure Dharma, not giving rise to delusions is called the Precept of Not Giving or Taking Drugs.

“Proceed clearly — Do not cloud the mind with intoxicants.” This precept was once expressed as “not selling the wine of delusions, as indicated by the quote. How it has evolved to “drugs,” as a translation here, is anybody’s guess. Not that India, China and the rest did not have a vigorous pharmacopeia at hand. But intoxicants are not limited to substances, but can be indulged in the form of ideas, or ideology, cravings for creature comforts and power, status and prestige, et cetera. All of which are fundamentally delusory, and can become delusional. Would it were so simple.

Not Discussing the Faults of Others

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the flawless Dharma, not expounding upon error is called the Precept of Not Speaking of the Faults of Others.

“See only your own faults — Do not discuss the faults of others.” The quote indicates that not just the initial response to the behavior of others may be in error, but assuming one is correct in that judgment, and expounding upon it further, would represent the inflection point in this precept. Our assumption in witnessing the ignorance in the world, including its manifestation in ourselves, is that it is the fault of the individual, including oneself. However, the teachings of “born of body, mouth and mind,” and the interconnectedness of all things, lobby against this simplistic interpretation. It puts me most in mind of Huineng’s comment that, by virtue of his having “double vision,” he saw clearly his own faults, he did not see the faults of others. Then what did he see their behavior as manifesting, if not their own faults?

Not Praising Yourself While Abusing Others

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the equitable Dharma, not dwelling upon I-against-you is called the Precept of Not Praising Yourself While Abusing Others.

“Know self and other as one — Do not praise yourself at others’ expense.” Not dwelling upon “I against you” is equivalent to knowing “self and other as one,” or at least, “not-two.” While Buddhism does not insist that all is one, it recognizes that we are as connected as we are separate. This is a subtle difference from the prior, not discussing the faults of others, which necessarily also involves judgments and comparisons, in which the self wants to come out on top, naturally. We sometimes have to discuss the behavior of others, particularly when it becomes disruptive. But we do not have to see it as their fault. Then how do we see it — as what, exactly? Suffering? Ignorance? Theirs, or ours?

Not Sparing the Dharma Assets

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the genuine, all-pervading Dharma, not being stingy about a single thing is called the Precept of Not Sparing the Dharma Assets.

“Share generously — Do not spare the Dharma assets.” A question arises as to not only how to be generous, fulfilling the first Paramita, dana, but who is being generous to whom? Dharma assets are not only the financial and other material resources available to members to share with their teachers and other leaders of the sangha, but the Dharma itself. The monastics in countries of origin of Buddhism were seen to be sharing Dharma with the lay people, and even accepting dana from them was considered to represent generosity on the part of the monks and nuns, as much or more than on the part of the villagers. This was the means by which householders, who otherwise could not support the order by joining it, were enabled to do what they could, in terms of giving of assets, including time as well as physical items such as food, materials, and other valuables. “A single thing,” however, on the level of a Bodhidharma, includes life and limb, total dedication, without regard to reward or recompense.

Not Indulging in Anger

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the selfless Dharma, not contriving reality for the self is called the Precept of Not Indulging in Anger.

“Actualize harmony — Do not indulge in anger.” This one recalls an expression of Matsuoka Roshi regarding anger, which I am not sure was original with him, as it may have come from his extensive education in the history and literature of Zen. He would say that feeling anger, or “Having an angry thought is like cutting water with a knife. The water closes behind the blade and leaves no trace. Speaking out of anger is like cutting sand. It takes a long time for the wind to smooth over the groove. Acting out of anger is like cutting stone. The scars take forever to wear away.” Most of the anger we have felt throughout our lives, we have associated with, and blamed on, others or circumstances. But it is the same anger, again and again. It can have little or nothing to do with the identified cause. But anger does have a true source, as do all the other emotions. It is the constructed, or contrived, self.

Not Defaming the Three Treasures

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the One, not holding nihilistic concepts of ordinary beings and sages is called the Precept of Not Defaming the Three Treasures.

“Know intimacy with all things — Do not defame the Three Treasures.” Nihilistic concepts would necessarily preclude having intimacy with all things, I think is self-evident. The two worldviews — that the Chan Buddhist teachings to follow Bodhidharma’s advent in China would repeatedly rebuke — are those of the nihilist versus the eternalist. That things are necessarily nonexistent, or that they exist forever. The Middle Way expounded by Buddhism holds, essentially, that both things can be true at the same time. It is not a matter of whether or not things really exist, but how they exist. And the answer in Zen is that they exist by virtue of emptiness, the very characteristics of impermanence, imperfection, and insubstantiality that Buddha originally expounded as essential marks of existence, or dukkha, change. The Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, likewise exist in reality, but according to the same universal laws. Like the ocean and the waves, the impermanence of the one is defined and verified by the permanence of the other, or the many. That all things must come to an end implies that all things are still present, just not as things. Same for the Three Treasures. On supposes that not holding such views of “ordinary beings and sages” also means that one does not annihilate the other.

You may have noticed that each of Bodhidharma’s interpretations sets the context with “Self-nature is subtle and mysterious.” This may be his way of saying that our way of interpreting these precepts of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas will necessarily be based on our view of the self — ergo, self-serving. As a writer, I tend to eliminate as much duplication in text as possible, without sacrificing meaning. In this case, I chose to leave in the repeat, as I suspect that Bodhidharma may have even spoken this way, for emphasis. Note further that in the following expressions concerning the “realm of Dharma,” however, he does not. He bothers to attribute to Dharma many effusively admiring characteristics, namely:

… everlasting… unattainable… ungilded… inexplicable… intrinsically pure… flawless… equitable… all-pervading… selfless… [and, finally] the One.

So the self, with all its aggrandizing traits, can learn, through the precepts, to turn its attention to something more worthy of admiration, the Dharma, in all its many dimensions, including the Ten Grave Prohibitions. Which, on further consideration, only seem to prohibit behaviors and attitudes which do us no favors. The affirming side of each simply describes the natural life of a bodhisattva, baby — you and me.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Warning, practicers:

Spawn of the Five Aggregates —

Don’t be fooled again!

The original plan for this podcast series comprised a condensed commentary in six segments. This turned out to be impossible, given the scope and importance of the teachings therein. I decided to add a coda, as is often done in musical composition, to include the appendix on Buddha’s warnings to practitioners, or “practicers.” I find them compelling and affirming, in terms of my own experience in zazen. The last section boasts the cheerful title, “Fifty Demonic States of Mind,” with a similarly comforting subtitle, “Dangers May Arise with Advanced Practice.”

Here we are, trying to encourage people to practice meditation, and suddenly we have graphic content alerts. Buddha himself cautions that you may find these experiences unsettling, and your interpretation of them can lead to disaster. The fifty mainly warn you to avoid getting stuck, thinking are enlightened.

This puts me in mind of Carl Bielefeldt’s “Dogen’s Manuals of Meditation,” a line-by-line comparison of the two extant versions of Fukanzazengi, and the Chinese version from which he adapted the text. One line he chose not to use in his translation for his Japanese students says something like “As the path grows higher, demons flourish.” Bielefeldt speculates that Master Dogen wanted to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. To say nothing about mister in-between.

Finally we get to the good stuff, Buddha’s descriptions of various experiences that may occur at the far reaches of meditation, when the barriers of discriminating sense faculties he has been detailing begin to break down. These are grouped as Ten Demonic States of Mind associated with each Aggregate, namely Form, Sense-Perception, Cognition, Mental Formations, and the Aggregate of Consciousness. In conclusion, he reminds us once again that all five arise from delusion.

We will not be able to go into all fifty of these demonic states of mind. But I would like to touch on a few that caught my attention many years ago. When I first read the Surangama Sutra, I was gobsmacked by its direct relevance to zazen, and its descriptive power, illustrating the analogy of the Zen Mind to the limitations of one-sided interpretation of the nature of the senses. When I came to the fifty warnings, however, I could see that several of them dealt with issues that had arisen for me in my practice of Zen, and that have since come up with many of my students, in dharma dialog. This section features an unusual description of Buddha’s behavior at the beginning. Buddha rises from his seat, seeming ready to bring the dialog to a close, but then apparently changes his mind and reseats himself, saying:

You who still need instruction, you Hearers of the Teaching and you Solitary Sages, have now dedicated yourselves to attaining a great awakening — the supreme and wondrous enlightenment. I have now taught you the right method for practice. But you are still not aware of the subtle demonic events that can occur when you undertake the practices of calming the mind and contemplative insight. If you do not purify your mind, you will not be able to recognize demonic states as they arise. You will not find the right path, and you will fall into the error of wrong views.

He points out that “Demons may arise within you from the five aggregates. If your mind is not clear when this happens, you may well take a burglar to be your own child. Or you may feel satisfied with a small accomplishment, as did that monk who was ignorant of the Dharma. Having only reached the level of the fourth dhyāna, he made the false claim that he had become a sage. When his reward of celestial life had run its course and the signs of decay had appeared, he vilified the Arhats’ enlightenment, and so he was reborn in the Unrelenting Hell.” So the stakes could not be higher.

Buddha insures Ananda and the others that the demons have limited power, and cannot harm you unless you let them. The power of your meditation will protect you from possession. Then he takes us through the five Aggregates in order, outlining 10 such demonic episodes that may occur in each. The first, in Form, is that you may have an out-of-body experience. Then he issues a boilerplate admonition:

This state is called “the essential awareness being able to emerge into one's surroundings.” What the practitioner has gained is temporary. It does not indicate that he has become a sage. There is nothing unwholesome about his state unless he thinks that he is now a sage. If he does think he is a sage, he will be open to a host of deviant influences.

This introduces the essential warning: Don’t be fooled. You are not done yet. Keep on keepin’ on. He goes on to cover such events as hearing voices preaching the Dharma, cosmic visions of all sorts, seeing in the dark, the cessation of all sensation, clairvoyance and clairaudience at great distances, visions of oneself as a “good and wise teacher,” and a chameleon-like ability to change form and appearance. And all this, just in the Skandha of Form.

Next, transcendence of the skandha of Sense-Perception elicits depressive and manic reactions, confusion, the superiority complex, and/or becoming overjoyed and arrogant, sometimes arising simultaneously. Unchecked, these inevitably lead to erroneous and extreme behaviors. Such views as illusory infinite serenity, that there is no existence after death, and license to indulge all levels of satisfaction of desires may follow, along with indulging in the power to sway others. All end badly.

In Cognition, the litany of afflicted states continues, with dire consequences, even though one is now free of harmful anxiety, which brings about a state of wonder. It is as if Buddha is reporting recent scandals in televangelism, and misguided leadership of various sects and cults, including some Zen lineages. In every case, gravely misinterpreting implications of meditative states leads to reckless and lawless behavior. Misidentification of self or others as Bodhisattvas or Buddhas appearing in the world is familiar, as in the false prophets of other religions. Claims to enlightenment, and guaranteeing success or salvation to others, at a price, are contemporary examples. Buddha faults the power of wielding mass hypnosis, owing to delusional charisma, or gravitas, stemming from deep meditation.

Various paranormal powers, siddhis in Sanskrit, such as reading minds, knowing previous lives, levitating, walking on water, passing through walls, performing magic or miracles, etc., may indeed be achievable in meditation, but they are not to be valued or pursued. They are no more miraculous than the ordinary senses, and may lead to severe psychic dysfunction, including overweening infatuation for one’s teacher, and visions of living together in a better world. Think David Koresh, or Jim Jones.

Introducing Mental Formations, Buddha makes a startling statement:

Ānanda, when a good person who has been practicing samādhi has reached the end of the aggregate of cognition, the usual cognitive processes involved in dreaming will disappear from his mind. For him there will no longer be any difference between waking and sleeping… He will view all the phenomena in the world — the mountains, the rivers, and everything else — as mere reflections that briefly appear in a clear mirror… Only the true essence of consciousness remains.”

This resonates throughout the teachings of Zen, as in Dongshan’s Precious Mirror Samadhi, wherein “Form and reflection behold each other.” This section also gets into first causes of existence and life, and the ending of life; falling into the mistake of non-causality; denying the principles of rebirth and evolution across species; or that the mind and experience are everlasting, eternal. Or conversely, that all comes to a permanent end. Or that some entities are permanent, others impermanent, e.g. that your mind is permanent and everlasting but the beings within it are not. The same delusion applies to whole worlds. After confusing eternity versus impermanence, comes infinity versus finiteness, e.g. of one’s own mind. Such speculations regarding spacetime rarely result in anything positive. As Master Dogen says in Genjokoan:

Similarly, if you examine the myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

Forewarned is forearmed. The special confusion that may arise in wannabe sages is: “If someone seeking to learn his methods should come to ask him about his theories, he will reply: ‘I both come into being and cease to be. I exist and yet do not exist. I both grow and diminish.’ What he says is so confusing that no one can understand what he means.” Matsuoka Roshi once commented, with great irony, that, “There are people who can talk themselves out of existence.”

The good news is that we have the capacity to penetrate to this inner sanctum of reality; the bad news is that we can misinterpret it based upon self-striving desires. Buddha becomes minutely descriptive:

… he will be able to perceive the origin that is common to all lives. This origin will appear to him as a subtle, glimmering, vibrating mirage. This is the ultimate point, the pivotal point, at which the faculties and their objects meet… He will have reached the end of the aggregate of mental formations. He will be able to transcend the turbidity of individual beings… None of the ten kinds of celestial demons will have any chance to influence him.

Master Dogen points to this same inflection point in Jijuyu Zammai; Self-Fulfilling Samadhi: “In stillness, mind and object merge in realization and go beyond enlightenment.” Mental Formations also representing the underlying motives, intent and desire impelling our behavior, at this point one sits in zazen with no identifiable reason for doing so. It is the “…making effort without aiming at it… sitting without relying on anything” of Master Dogen’s Zazenshin, Lancet for Zazen. This being liberated from our demons is what is meant by becoming “unassailable” in Zen.

However, even at this point the practitioner may be assailed by internal confusions, such as denying causation, for example that of all beings coming and going, or for the ending of life, or distortions of the principle of rebirth, all of which are clarified in full awakening. And on again reprising confusions that yet may arise regarding the Four Elements, as well as the sixth, seventh and eighth consciousnesses, the 10 dhyanas, entering nirvana, etc. Terminal confusion. Again, too soon. Going to hell.

Finally transcending Mental Formations, our intrepid explorer enters the aggregate of Consciousness, or consciousness only, having left the other four skandhas far behind:

… when a good person who has been practicing samādhi has reached the end of the aggregate of mental formations, he may observe, within the clear light in the deep recesses of his mind, the vibrations which are the shared foundation of the nature of all beings in the world. Then suddenly the tiny hidden knot that holds together the intricate net of karma of his individual being during his many lifetimes will burst open, and he will lose his connection to the vibrating resonances of that karmic net.

Free at last, free at last! Sounds a bit like string theory, those “vibrating resonances,” the foundation of all beings. Then Buddha describes the shift in awareness in no uncertain terms:

He will now be on the verge of experiencing a great illumination in the sky of nirvana. It is as if he is gazing at the pale light of dawn in the eastern sky just as the rooster has finished crowing… The duality of observer and observed will have ceased… The pale light that he observed will not fade, and it will illuminate what has heretofore been hidden. This is the region of the aggregate of consciousness.

This recalls Master Dogen’s later expression in Jijuyu Zammai, that “When even for a moment you express the Buddha’s seal in the three actions by sitting upright in Samadhi, the whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.” Note that here we finally witness the “tiny hidden knot” of the net of karma bursting open, liberating us from entanglement. “The pale light that [s]he observed will not fade, and it will illuminate what has heretofore been hidden. This is the aggregate of consciousness.” We know that Dogen read the Surangama, but suspect that his effusive description, so similar to Buddha’s, is based on his own direct experience, not mere parroting.

The last about illuminating what has been hidden reminds me of an odd statement by Matsuoka Roshi, that “The light by which you see things comes from you.” This internal light pops up from time to time in the literature, but never as explicitly described as in the original mention here by Buddha himself. But wait, there’s still more:

At this point, although he has already done away with the coming into being and perishing of mental formations, he has not yet completed the journey to the wonder of his essential nature, which is nirvana. However, he will be able to merge his perceptual faculties so that they can function as one or function interchangeably.

This claim is attested to by a stanza in Sekito Kisen’s Sandokai, Harmony of Sameness and Difference. “All the objects of the senses transpose and do not transpose. Transposing they are linked together; not transposing each keeps its place.” It is as if the senses overlap like a Venn diagram, and we are all syntesthetes at base.

But alas, even at this point the advanced practitioner can fall into insidious beliefs leading to rebirth, for example that his consciousness is immortal, becoming “one of the adherents of the doctrines of the god Ishvara,” which I take to be the equivalent of some theism’s notion of the immortal soul. Or that awareness is universal, or that the elements are the source of existence, and thus appropriate to make “ritual offerings to water and to fire.” These beliefs were apparently touted by other teachers of the day.

Running down another litany of such erroneous interpretations of the teachings, Buddha mentions one that may apply most directly to us today, which is mistaking realization of the cessation of suffering as the end goal, missing the whole point of the Bodhisattva Path. “His companions will be ignorant members of the Sangha and supremely arrogant practitioners.” We have been witness to this effect, in the propagation of Zen to America. This is one form of Trungpa Rinpoche’s “spiritual materialism.”

Then following reassurances that in spite of all these barriers to overcome, everybody has the capability of transcending them, Buddha once again recommends the Surangama Mantra, and a cautionary tale:

If they cannot learn to recite it from memory, teach them to write it out and to place it in their meditation halls or else to wear it close to their bodies. Then no demon will be able to disturb them… You should hold in the greatest reverence all the teachings of the Thus-Come Ones of the ten directions. These are my final instructions.

Final instructions? Ananda summarizes briefly his eidetic memory, and Buddha recapitulates much of what has gone before, including detailing the delusory nature of each of the Five Aggregates in turn:

The Five Aggregates Arise from Delusion… In the subtle, true, wondrous understanding, in the fundamental, awakened, perfect purity, no death or rebirth remains, nor any defilement, not even space itself. All these arise out of deluded mental activity… The notion that things come into being due to causes and conditions and the notion that they come into being on their own are mere speculations born of beings' deluded minds.

Finally, finally, Buddha closes with “The Merit of Teaching the Śūraṅgama Dharma,” similar to plugging the Surangama Mantra earlier in the program. In sum, the merit is incalculable.

Perhaps one of the most directly relevant implications to contemporary Zen practitioners, as outlined in the Surangama Sutra, is that the process of zazen progresses through the aggregates one at a time, leaving behind the prior, which “have already ceased functioning.” It suggests that we segue from sitting in the realm of Form to that of Sensation, then Sensation-only, leaving Form behind. Then on through Perception and Formations until we find ourselves sitting in Consciousness only, transcending the prior four. You could say that Consciousness is the uber-aggregate, subsuming the others, in that we are conscious of Form, conscious of Sense-Perception, of Cognition, Mental Formations, and ultimately conscious of consciousness itself. But there comes a turning point in which even consciousness no longer obtains.

In the original translation of the Hannya Shingyo into English that we used at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, was the concluding line at the end of the long list of “given emptiness,” no this, no that, which said “… until we come to no consciousness also.” This is the singularity of Zen practice, that end-state that is not at all a state, but entry into the inconceivable. The point of awareness in which we cross the even horizon, and all known laws of reality collapse inward of their own mass. At this point, all such words as “awareness” and “inward” require quotation marks. The Way is beyond language, as well as concept. Please allow your mind to surrender to this possibility, especially when you are in meditation.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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Further instruction

Is apparently called for —

Don’t eat those onions!

Immediately on the heels of the last sections we explored, “Instructions for Practice,” and the testimony of Buddha’s posse, the “Twenty-Five Sages,” comes an excruciatingly long and detailed examination of what seems to be the entire litany of Buddha’s teachings, some directly relevant to the focus of the Surangama, others seemingly thrown in just for good measure, or simply because they were available. This discursive digression, from one subject to another, and yet another — like the featured acts of a modern television talk- or talent-show — lends credence to the supposition by some scholars that the whole sutra amounts to a pastiche of relatively disconnected teachings. The Ananda-focused narrative provides the through-line, pulling the smorgasbord together.

The whole thing runs to about 550 pages, in the new translation by the Buddhist Text Translation Society, Burlingame, California. We will squeeze a Reader’s Digest condensed version into this segment, suggesting that you follow up for detail.

Next on the program, we find two long solo performances from each of the guest stars, who need no introduction. First up, Avalokiteshvara, “The Bodhisattva Who Hears the Cries of the World,” testifies to the efficacy of the faculty of hearing, as the go-to gate to samadhi, running down all the major implications of audial insight. He famously vows to help all others in their quest, magically appearing in 32 various human and nonhuman forms suitable to their predispositions, and to provide protection to them in 14 kinds of dangerous situations, leading them to liberation. The original standup chameleon.

With no break, commercial or biological, Buddha cues up Manjusri to further explain, and expand upon, the limitations of the sense faculties and mind, hot buttons of the times. Manjusri dutifully heaps high praise on Avalokiteshvara’s method of relying solely on hearing, akin to promoting his fellow panelist’s latest book, or movie. One wonderful, circular question he asks of Ananda is, “Why haven’t you been hearing your own hearing?” Later declaring that “It is the easiest way to reach enlightenment.”

Both guest performers express gushing admiration for Buddha’s discourse — he is the star of the show, after all — along with some sympathy for the devil, in the person of Ananda, playing second banana to Shakyamuni. You can’t help listening for the laugh track. Or the theme song.

Occasionally, the unnamed master of ceremonies turns the camera on the live audience: Ananda and “all the others in the great assembly… were like someone who has traveled far from home on matters of business: although the traveler has not yet been able to return, he knows the road that will lead him home.” Rather than applause lines, Buddha’s intended effect on his audience is realization itself.

This rather modern analogy — being on the road — resonates with my coinage, “The Original Frontier.” Buddha was the historical discoverer, and explorer, of this strange realm of the mind itself. He blazed trails for the rest of us. During his time, he may have been the foremost inspirational speaker on the circuit, but would never have qualified for a TED Talk, let alone develop a following on Twitter.

Then, in what may be the earliest expressions of what later became Zen Buddhist precepts, Ananda receives “Four Clear and Definitive Instructions on Purity: On Sexual Desire, On Killing, On Stealing, and On Making False Claims.” These are four of the sixteen precepts that we receive yet today, as householders. We understand “purity,” however, as non-dual, not as a puritanical ideal of morality.

“Establishing a Place for Awakening,” follows, thoroughgoing instructions for how to set up an altar room for practice, detailing what kinds of statuary should be displayed. Of course, actual statues of buddhas and bodhisattvas would not put in an appearance for centuries after Buddha’s time.

Then comes the “The Śūraṅgama Mantra,” in phonetic Chinese. It is offered up for “people who cannot get rid of their stubborn habits.” A kind of catch-all cure-all, good-for-what-ails-you charm, talisman, or spell — if you will but recite it. To put a weird twist on it, a virtual “Buddha,” whom Buddha “makes appear” from his “unconditioned mind,” then recites all 554 lines.

This is followed by an effusive guarantee of the powers of the mantra to protect. Mantra magic. Your results may vary, of course.

Then follows yet another lengthy discourse, on the “Levels of Being.” The subtitle, “The Coming into Being of the World of Illusion,” reprises the title of a prior section. But this time, “coming into being” comprises a synopsis of the biology of the times. It details “Twelve Classes of Beings,” all of which are “bound to the cycle of death and rebirth in this world as a result of” various causes and conditions.

Next, for human beings only, a prescription for practicing and mastering “the samadhi of the Buddhas” is proffered. A formula of “Three Gradual Steps.” The first — I am not making this up — advocates:

A. Avoiding the Plants of the Onion Group

Aversion to the onion family (Vidalia onions excepted) is explained as a specific example of a general principle: that of avoiding, or eliminating, contributing factors. That is, factors that contribute to less desirable internal states and outflows, especially for the aspiring monastic. Onions were thought to arouse sexual desire when cooked, and anger when raw. Meat is included in this category, along with raw foods in general. This would constitute contemporary views on healthy diet and wellbeing, at that time. But modern attitudes toward nutrition are not all that much more sophisticated. See: obesity.

B. Ending Any Violation of the Fundamental Rules of Behavior

This second gradual step is another iteration on the precepts, as they were conceived at that time, focusing on celibacy, killing, stealing and lying. These evolved as rules for living together in the context of the Buddhist Order, called vinaya in Sanskrit. Both Dogen Zenji and Keizan Zenji produced voluminous monastic regulations, called shingi in Japanese, over three millennia later.

C. Avoiding Intentional Engagement with Perceived Objects

The third refers to the outflows through the six faculties of engagement — the intoxication of the senses and their objects — promising that eventually, no mental objects will arise, leading to “peaceful abiding.” Are you beginning to see a pattern here?

Next we are treated to another longish discourse on “The Fifty-Seven Stages of the Bodhisattva's Path,” detailing the stages of “Arid Wisdom, Ten Stages of Stabilizing the Mind, Ten Abodes, Ten Practices, Ten Dedications, Four Additional Practices, Ten Grounds” and finally, “Two Final Stages,” the first of which is called “Equivalent Enlightenment,” and concluding with the declaration:

Thus, having passed through these various stages — twelve stages in all, some counted singly, some in groups — they reach at last the stage of Wonderful Awakening, which is the unsurpassed enlightenment.

Here the numbering is getting a bit out of hand, but you can still count them on both hands, fingers and toes. Modern Zen teachers, such as Master Dogen, push back on this idea that zazen is “step-by-step meditation,” transpiring in clear, linear stages of development.

But it is clear that in Buddha’s time, breaking the path into digestible bites was an absolute necessity, especially when attending such a moveable feast as we are being served here. No one in the great assembly is taking notes on their mobile devices. They cannot get back to them later. But Buddha is merely pointing at the humble, homely truth — accessible to all, nothing hidden. However we slice and dice it, reality finally has to be holistic, both in the method of realizing it, and the resulting realization.

Now comes an interesting diversion: “Naming the Discourse.” This challenge to the host comes from the prompting of one of the guest celebrities, Manjusri. In design, we have a related exercise called “Name that Concept.” If an innovation is truly new, there will most likely be no phrase in the vernacular that adequately captures it. Thus, we must go to some absurd extremes in brainstorming:

The Sutra of the Supreme and Magnificent Dharma-Imprint of the Mantra of the White Canopy, Which Is Spoken above the Crown of the Great Buddha's Head, and Which Is the Serene and Pure Oceanic Eye of the Thus-Come Ones of the Ten Directions

This is the first mention, the longest and most unwieldy. The shortest entry in the contest is the last:

The Sutra of the Consecrating Mantra Phrases and the Myriad Śūraṅgama Practices of the Bodhisattvas

Which is pretty concise, and touches on most of the bases. Surangama means something like “heroic valor,” “heroic progress,” or “heroic march.” Reading it certainly requires a heroic effort.

Nowadays, you may have noticed that books, movies, television series, and other public media presentations, often have a one-word title, or at the most, a couple of words. This inevitable trend helps to cut through the clutter of competing offerings. The subtitle carries the load of explaining the title.

Then, just to set the proper tone for the warnings of the “Mara states” to come, what better than a trip to hell? Google “Mara,” and you find: “In Buddhist cosmology, Mara is associated with death, rebirth and desire. Thera has described Mara as ‘the personification of the forces antagonistic to enlightenment.’” Now, of course, we have to also Google “Thera.”

The subtitle gives us our first clue: “Ananda Requests Instruction.” The resultant title, “The Hells,” confirms our worst fears. Ananda asks how can there still be such destinies as hells, when “the essential nature of all Buddhas is the true reality?” and do they, the hells, conform to the formula of existing on their own, or are they based on the “deluded habits of living beings?” Graphic content alert: gory descriptions of hells, reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, based on various bad behavior and judgment calls.

I would second Ananda’s disbelief. I have always considered the threat of hell to be the curse of theism. It is bad enough that we suffer so, during our lifetime. Do we really need the threat of eternal perdition on top of that, adding the demeaning insult of the blame game, to the agony of existential injury?

But it is clear that early Buddhism, at least, thought, and taught, the reality of the hells, long before Jesus Christ came on the scene. However, in Zen, these hells are considered to be the product of our own minds, and, like everything else in reality, impermanent. In one famous incident in the history of Zen, a monk goes into hell intentionally, to save his mother. How did he do that? I suppose it was in a dream within a dream. My mother appeared to me in a dream the night she died.

Next, in “The Roles of Emotion and Thought,” Buddha explains how internal, as well as outer-directed, deluded habit-patterns develop, how autonomic processes entangle with mental desires and emotions, including the impulse to shun death, and to embrace life. Alive, we follow natural inclinations; after death, the various currents of our karma. These lead to all kinds of karmic consequences, unintended and intended, including falling into various kinds of hells, based on the degree of emotional dysfunction.

“Ten Causes and Six Retributions” follow, developing Buddha’s point that karmic retribution is brought upon ourselves by our intentional actions. This indicates, as an aside, that some actions may not entail karmic consequences, as they are not exactly intentional. A ray of sunshine at the end of the tunnel.

Then comes the familiar lineup of the usual suspects: 1, Sexual desire, joined with physical contact, leading to intercourse; shout out to Schopenhauer. 2, Craving, with attraction, leads to plotting. 3, Arrogance and self-superiority, to competitiveness. Hilariously, Buddha points out that when the “Thus-Come-Ones” see this arrogance, they greet it with an expression, “taking a drink of stupidity.” 4, Hatred, with defiance, leads to confrontations. 5, Enticing others, plus conniving, to entrapment. 6, Falsehood, joined with deviousness, leads to insults. 7, Festering resentment, nursing a grudge, leads to vengeance. 8, Holding wrong views, joined to rejecting the opinions of others, leads to mistakes, such as that the self is real. 9, Blaming, joined to defamation, leads to false accusations. 10, Disputatiousness, joined to engagement, leads to vociferous court proceedings. Who would have thought that in Buddha’s time the “see you in court,” hurled as an expletive, would echo as it does today? All these egregious habit-patterns are accompanied by the gnarly details of their consequences, along with the admonition to avoid them assiduously.

Then a summary — of actions of the sense faculties — as the root causes of these consequences and retributions. “The Seven Destinies Are the Result of Karma” brings to a close this dystopian vision of all that can go wrong if only we follow our instinctual pursuit of pleasure. Buddha offers a bit of hope:

Ananda, such is a detailed explanation of the seven destinies — of beings in the hells and of ghosts, animals, humans, ascetic masters, gods, and asuras. In their confusion, all are submerged in the attributes of the conditioned world. Their deluded mental activity leads them into rebirth in accordance with their karma. Within the wondrous perfect understanding that is the fundamental unconditioned mind, these destinies are like mirages of flowers seen in the sky. These destinies do not actually occupy any location; they are simply illusions. Even less do they signify anything real.

Well, now you tell us! After scaring us half to death with apocalyptic visions of eternal suffering… it’s all just overactive imagination? We have to cut Buddha some slack here, understanding that his original compassionate teachings have been strained through the filter of centuries of social, cultural and economic evolution, before they were committed to paper. Who can know how he may have couched his terms?

This is the last of the Surangama Sextet. But we are not done yet. There is more — an appendix on the Fifty False states that may occur in each of the stages of meditation, through each of the aggregates of Form, Sensation, Perception, Formations, and Consciousness. Stay tuned. Don’t go anywhere.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is instruction?

Who can tell you what to do?

The Thus-Come One can!

In this section of the Surangama, “Instructions for Practice,” we will have to skim over the highlights, as the scope and detail that Shakyamuni goes into is overwhelming. It begins with Ananda confessing his lack of practice, his habit of listening without applying what he hears. This smacks of Dogen’s Vow:

We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives to hear the true Dharma

With the caveat that:

Although our past harmful karma has greatly accumulated
Indeed being the causes and conditions of obstacles in practicing the Way

In other words, we are already fighting an uphill battle, but not a hopeless one. Later in the poem:

By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha
We melt away the root of transgression by the power of our repentance

The youthful Ananda is assailed by hormones, which are inborn. On top of that, Buddha sets a first principle, renouncing the Lesser Vehicle, Hinayana, practicing in accord with the Bodhisattva way, is the path to “bodiless Nirvana.” It requires that we overcome our “age-old habit of dependence on the objects of the senses,” in a pre-scientific world in which things were seen as permanent and substantial.

He goes on to frame the higher vehicle as not relying on the mind that “comes into being and ceases,” declaring that if we do so, we will not be able to “ride the Buddha's Vehicle to where there is nothing that comes into being or ceases to be.” We should shine the light of our understanding — of emptiness, or impermanence — directly on the material world: “Since all phenomena are subject to change and decay, how could any of them serve as a basis for the practice of Dharma?” This idea was not as obvious to the intuitive empirical method of sensory awareness as it is now, with modern science.

So several ideas are emerging here that deserve, or demand, comment. The lesser vehicle of self-salvation is to be renounced in favor of saving all others first, the Bodhisattva Vow. That this leads to a “body-less” state of being, seems to imply the existence of a separate spirit, i.e. a “soul.” But this is decidedly denied, in the teaching of no-self, no-soul. This is Dogen’s dropping off of body and mind.

Buddha then launches into what he terms the Five Layers of Turbidity:

In your own body, what appears as solid is composed of the primary element earth…moist/water… warmth/fire… movement/wind. Because… primary elements… [are] bound together, your pure, perfect, wondrous enlightened mind that understands is divided into the functions of seeing, listening, touching, and cognition. Turbidity, in five layers, comes about as a result.

So it is important to note that Buddha is not merely talking about the world around us, but the world within, as well. The import of the teaching is, after all, what it means to our own life and understanding. He goes on, as is his wont, using familiar analogies to illuminate the strangeness of our reality:

What is turbidity? Suppose that someone were to pick up some soil and throw it into clear water. The soil now loses its solidity, and the water loses its purity. Together they appear clouded or, we may say, turbid. The five layers of turbidity occur in the same way.

But then he makes an exception for the fifth element, space, as a phenomenon that does not decay:

You have never heard of space being broken into parts. Why? Space has no shape or form. Therefore, it can neither be divided nor put together again.

As you look into space throughout all ten directions… no separation can be made between space and your visual awareness of it. If only space existed… there would be nothing to be aware of it. If only awareness existed… there would not be anything for it to be aware of… space and visual awareness become entangled… With… entanglement, based on delusion, the turbidity of time comes into being. This is the first layer of turbidity.

What do I mean… by ‘beings and the world of time and space’? ‘Time’ denotes flux and change; ‘space’ denotes location and direction… the directions are north, south, east, west, northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest, above, and below, while time is divided into past, present, and future. Thus locations are tenfold and the flow of time is threefold, making ten directions and three periods of time. Because beings are entangled in illusion, they constantly move about in time and space, which become interconnected.

This may be the first instance in recorded history of the interconnectedness of space and time — i.e. spacetime — hello, Einstein! Master Dogen’s fascicle, Uji, “Being-” or “Existence-Time,” said to have anticipated the theory of relativity, makes the same point with regard to time itself. It has no meaning, or existence, outside of sentient being.

That time is regarded as a “turbidity” is astounding. It recalls a statement by D. T. Suzuki, in his early introductions of Zen to the West, that measured time was a wonderful invention, making possible the systemization of agriculture, the industrial revolution, and all that followed. But at the same time, it became a spiritual tragedy, as people took it to be the way time is. The very fact that you are listening to this podcast, in the time available to you, demonstrates how measured time has come to dominate our daily lives. But as Hsinhsinming reminds us, “Words! The Way is beyond language for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.” In other words, no time. A closing comment on space:

Although space can be defined as extending in ten directions and can be clearly understood as such, people in general only take account of north, south, east, and west. They do not consider above and below to be specific directions, and they see the four intermediate directions as merely relative to the others, while the four cardinal points are understood to be fixed. Therefore, we can say that space is fourfold and time threefold, and that the three times and four directions multiplied together make a total of twelve.

This reflexive enumeration of all things was, I suppose, a way of lending a veneer of science to the phenomena being discussed, as well as a mnemonic, a way of remembering the extensive teachings.

Buddha then goes into the other four layers. The second, perception, results from the faculties of awareness’ entanglement with the four elements. The third, afflictions, from entanglement of six consciousnesses with their perceived objects. The fourth, that of individual beings, arises from entanglement of thoughts and karma. Even though “beings ceaselessly come into being and perish” they “always desire to continue to experience the world indefinitely through their faculties of perception” and their “karma leads them to continually move from one land to another.” He proceeds through relentless logic to the fifth and final layer of turbidity, closing this dissertation with a passage remarkable for its clarity and comprehensive summing up of the conditions of existence:

The fundamental natures of your seeing, your hearing, and your other awarenesses do not differ from one another, but the six objects of perception separate them so that your awareness is forced to become differentiated. Although the six sense-consciousnesses share a single fundamental awareness, their functioning has become distinct. The consciousnesses and their objects are no longer in their correct relationship. They become entangled with each other, and with this entanglement, based on delusion, there is the fifth layer, the turbidity of lifespans.

This brief paragraph also summarizes for us the direction that our meditation must take, in reversing this “turbid” nature of our consciousness. In zazen, we must return to the undifferentiated original nature of awareness, the unity of the six senses, and their correct relationship to their objects. In doing so, we can at least realize the meaning and purpose of this present lifetime, whether or not it relieves us of future lifespans. Buddha sums up this trans-sensory challenge in no uncertain terms:

Ānanda, now you wish to transform your visual, aural, tactile, and mental awareness, together with the other kinds of awareness, into the permanence, bliss, true self, and purity of the Thus-Come One… The original enlightened understanding, which neither comes into being nor ceases to be, must be the basis of your practice.

This neither coming into being nor ceasing to be, sometimes called the “unborn mind” or “uncreate,” is a most difficult principle to apply to one’s own consciousness. But Buddha insists it is a major point. Then he frames one of his more famous analogies for stage-one meditation — stilling the mind — viewed as a precursor to stage-two — direct insight — referring back to the analogy of turbidity:

The process may be compared to the settling of turbid water. If you keep it undisturbed in a container so that it is completely still and quiet, the sand and silt in it will settle naturally, and the water will become clear. This may be compared to the initial stage of subduing the afflictions that arise from transitory perceptions of objects.

If you cannot leave it alone, but insist on picking it up and shaking it, the water will never become clear. This is the activity we call “monkey-mind,” the obsessive-compulsive behavior of the chattering, inner dialog, with its outflows into impulsive actions. Buddha then returns to the sense faculties, “Choosing One Faculty in Order to Liberate All Six”:

The second principle is… you must courageously dedicate yourself to practice in accord with the Bodhisattva Vehicle… let go of everything that has conditioned attributes… examine the source of your afflictions… which… have created your karma and nurtured its growth.

Buddha illustrates the source of our afflictions — which we usually blame on others or outside forces — with two striking exaples, “The Example of the Bell’s Sound” and “The Analogy of the Six Knots.” He rings his bell, asking Ananda if he hears. Ananda does hear. After a while he asks Ananda again if he hears. Ananda says he does not. Buddha chastises him, asking how can he hold to such contradictory views? Hearing is independent of the object of hearing, the sound of the bell. Then he goes on:

Ānanda, consider some worldly person who wishes to untie a knot. If he cannot see the knot, how will he know how to untie it?

Of course, we can untie a knot in the dark, so Buddha must mean the kind of knot that we are not even aware of, as when we are all “tide up in knots.” Suddenly Buddha launches into poetry, restating the principles covered thus far.

A knot must be untied according to a certain sequence,
And when the six have been untied, the one will vanish too.
Choose one perceiving faculty and realize your breakthrough.
Enter the current. Realize the true enlightenment.

This impulse to recap in a spontaneous outburst of poetry must have been a common talent in public speaking in those days, as we find it in many written records of the Indian transmission, and over a millennium later, in the Platform Sutra of Huineng, sixth ancestor in China.

Through an exhaustive analysis of the limitations of each of the six senses, Buddha demonstrates the relative degrees of efficacy of each of the faculties of perception, he gives each a value: The eye-faculty 800, owing to its ability to see clearly in only one of the three directions; the ear-faculty 1200, owing to its ability “to hear in all ten directions without exception”; the nose-faculty 800, owing to not functioning between breaths; the tongue-faculty 1200, for its ability to proclaim wisely both worldly and world-transcending wisdom, as languages differ, but meaning knows no boundaries; the body-faculty 800, as it has two-fold awareness upon contact and lacks awareness once there is separation, which is singular. Finally the mind, or cognitive faculty, scores 1200 for its ability to silently include within its scope all worldly and world-transcending phenomena in all ten directions and all three periods of time… it knows no boundary.

Whatever we may think of the logic of his argument, Buddha is engaging in a kind of reductio ad absurdum of our ordinary, unexamined appreciation of the senses. But he is not done yet. Using a precious scarf as a visual aid, Buddha ties six successive knots in it, continuing the dialog with Ananda:

B. You are right. The six knots are not identical. Let us examine how they were made. They were all created out of the one scarf; still, it would not do to confuse their order. The same may be said of the six faculties of perception. Within what is ultimately one, differentiation eventually arises. Suppose you were displeased by the six knots in your scarf and would prefer it to be a single length of cloth. How would you go about untying the knots?

Ā. As long as these knots are in the scarf, there will naturally be disagreement about which one of them is which. But if the Thus-Come One were now to untie them all and no further knots were tied, then there would be no question as to which was which, since there would be no first knot left, much less a sixth.

B. When the six are untied, the one will vanish is the same idea.

After assuring Ananda and the others that untying the knots will relieve the stresses of existence, Buddha demonstrates the method of untying, tugging on the scarf from one end, then the other. Ananda agrees that this is not the way to untie it, but you must pull on the scarf “from within each knot…then they will come undone.” This theme comprises the subject and title of one of Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks, “Unravelling Enlightenment.” Buddha follows with the next logical consequence:

Therefore, Ānanda, carefully choose one faculty of perception from among the six. If you untie the knot of that faculty, its objects will disappear by themselves. All delusion will melt away. How can what remains not be what is real?

And asks “…I now ask you: can we untie the six knots in this cotton scarf all at the same time?”

No, World-Honored One. These knots were tied in sequence in the first place, so now they must be untied in sequence.

The Buddha said, “The same may be said of freeing the knots of the six faculties. In the first stage of freeing a faculty, one understands that the self is empty. Once that emptiness is fully understood, one can become free of attachment to phenomena. Once one is free from attachment to phenomena, then both self and phenomena have been emptied and will no longer arise. This is the patience that the Bodhisattva develops by means of samādhi — the patience with the state in which no mental objects come into being.”

I have long thought that what we are practicing in meditation is, primarily patience. Patience with the self, patience with the monkey mind, patience with our own impatience. When one enters into the state in which no mental objects come into being, who would’ve thought that it would test one’s patience? It seems that having no objects in mind would not require any patience.

Buddha closes this section asking “Twenty-Five Sages” to testify to their enlightenment, questioning which sense faculty initially unraveled for them? Several mention hearing, as in Avalokiteshvara, “The Bodhisattva Who Hears the Cries of the World,” the title of one of the last teachings in this section.

Please listen up, gaze fixedly, and feel deeply, next time you are sitting in meditation. In other words, do thou likewise. Once one of the six knots unravels, the others cannot be far behind. Open up to what Master Dogen referred to as the “fine” or “subtle” mind of Nirvana.

Next segment, we will examine some of Buddha’s official warnings against misinterpreting the meaning of your experience at the far reaches of meditation.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is illusion?

Not what you may think it is —

Thought is delusion

Before we launch into the next section of the sutra on how the world of illusion comes into being, one more point on “The Matrix of the Thus-Come One” may be in order. The term “matrix” was popularized by the sci-fi movie of the same title, wherein the proposition that our perceived reality is actually a projection of a simulation controlled by others for nefarious purposes, links to ongoing conspiracy theories of the world actually being run by cabals of behind-the-scenes powers-that-be, seriously subscribed to by otherwise normal-seeming groups of people. But the meaning of matrix in Buddhism, and in general, is a bit different. A few examples from a dictionary include:

ma·trix|

1 an environment or material in which something develops; a surrounding medium or structure: free choices become the matrix of human life.

2 a mass of fine-grained rock in which gems, crystals, or fossils are embedded: nodules of secondary limestone set in a matrix of porous dolomite | such fossils will often be partly concealed by matrix.

• the substance between cells or in which structures are embedded: the lipid matrix of olfactory cells.

• fine material used to bind together the coarser particles of a composite substance: the matrix of gravel paths is raked regularly.

3 a mold in which something, such as a record or printing type, is cast or shaped

ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘womb’): from Latin, ‘breeding female’, later ‘womb’, from mater, matr- ‘mother’.

The matrix in which something is imbedded may be physical or conceptual, then. Interesting that it has the original connotation of “mother.” Buddhism has the term tathagatagarbha, defined as “the eternal and immutable matrix of all reality: the womb of the absolute and the essence of Buddhahood.” It is sometimes called the womb of the tathagatas, and is symbolized in ceremony by red drapery.

In the Buddhist context, the idea of the matrix seems even more outrageously speculative than in the film, in terms of its implications. If and when you do come into full awareness of the matrix of the true causes and conditions of your existence, it enables you to recover your original mind consciousness, “the wondrous, everlasting understanding — the unmoving, all-pervading, wondrous suchness of reality.” Nothing so mundane and paranoid as unseen forces controlling your world, determining your destiny, and robbing you of your birthright.

The most likely derivation of the idea of a matrix in Buddha’s time would have been from the mining and smelting of metals such as gold, from ore chiseled from veins in the stone matrix. The smelting process Buddha also likened to the process of meditation. Heating the ore, then scraping off the impurities, letting it cool completely; heating again, scraping again, etc. Repetition is key. And you have to let it cool completely before heating again, to achieve greater and greater purity.

Now to “The Coming into Being of the World of Illusion,” subtitled “Adding Understanding to Understanding,” which becomes a key point: Does enlightenment include understanding, or not?

Purnamaitrayaniputra gives Ananda a break by asking the leading questions in this exchange. The near unpronounceable names of some of Buddha’s disciples is partly owing to the German-like stringing of words together. For example, “putra” at the end, means “son of.” You are permitted to abbreviate. Purna, for short, claims to be one of those in the assembly who are “free of outflows,” meaning bad habits, and one that Buddha himself has praised as being most skilled in expounding the Dharma.

Nonetheless he confesses to not being able to understand the Dharma that Buddha is now preaching. Incidentally, it should be noted — and a source of some comfort — that others, such as Ananda, are considered enlightened, even though they have not put an end to their outflows. Thus, enlightenment is not perfect, nor final. Both people and phenomena, in general, are empty of a permanent, self-existent self. That august assembly was very much like our diverse audiences today, in other words.

Purna challenges Buddha’s assertion that all elements extend throughout the “Dharma-Realm,” which we may take to indicate the whole universe. If they did so — water and earth, say — then they could not come into being separately; and further, would commingle and annihilate each other. Think fire and water. And remember, these worthies did not have the advantage of the findings of modern science.

Before answering, Buddha qualifies his audience in terms of those Hearers, or Arhats, “who have no further aspirations,” and those who have not yet experienced the “two kinds of emptiness,” namely that of people and that of phenomena. He also states his purpose, to allow all to enter the “true aranya, the still and quiet place, the state of genuine practice that will lead you to become Buddhas.”

This idea of the true place of genuine practice resonates in Master Dogen’s Genjokoan:

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs,

actualizing the fundamental point.

When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs,

actualizing the fundamental point.

For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’.

The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and is not merely arising now.

Here is the place, here the way unfolds.

Thank you, Dogen. He understood the matrix of spacetime in the most intimate sense.

Buddha pivots from Purna’s concern — not understanding how the various features of the earth have come into being — to the basic issue of the relationship of enlightenment to that of understanding:

B: When we talk about this understanding which characterizes enlightenment, do we mean an understanding that is intrinsic to our inherent enlightened nature? Or does our inherent enlightenment lack understanding until we gain it when enlightenment is realized?

P: Our inherent enlightenment is characterized by understanding only when that understanding is added to it.

B: But an enlightenment to which an understanding is added cannot be a true enlightenment. Such an enlightenment would indeed lack understanding if understanding were not added. But an enlightenment that lacks understanding cannot be the true intrinsic enlightenment that is inherently pure and endowed with understanding. Therefore, if you think that an understanding must be added to your inherent enlightenment, you are falsifying the true understanding, the true enlightenment.

Then Buddha clarifies that along with enlightenment, what it is that needs to be understood, is namely, delusion itself: “That is, nothing need be added to true enlightenment, but once an understanding is added nevertheless, that understanding must understand something.” That something is the matrix.

Then he goes on to detail the subtle and coarse aspects of delusion. Again, Master Dogen reprises this idea in Genjokoan:

Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas;
Those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.
Further there are those who continue realizing beyond realization,
[those] who are in delusion throughout delusion.
When buddhas are truly buddhas,
They do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas.
Yet they are actualized buddhas who go on actualizing buddhas.

Buddha goes into an even more extended, some might say rambling, riff: on how the fundamental elements interact and generate the world as we know it; onto the human world of reproduction, touching on stages of fetal development; other species’ modes of birth, i.e. the biology of the day; karma; then into the distortions and perpetuations leading to karmic entanglements over eons of successive lives. It is an exhaustive monologue that covers many of the major tenets of Buddhism, as codified and recorded in later centuries. Subheads reveal some of the highlights: “The Buddha’s Enlightenment is Irreversible; The Interfusing of the Primary Elements; Delusion Has No Basis: The Parable of Yajnadatta.” And remember, poor Ananda is the memory prodigy who recollected all this for posterity.

In the end, it seems the Buddha cannot resist throwing Ananda’s transgression up in his face again, as we would say today. Sometimes true compassion looks like cruelty:

For you, awakening and nirvana are still so distant that you will have to spend eons in difficult practice before you will reach them. Your ability to memorize all twelve types of discourse spoken by the Buddha… has merely helped you to indulge in idle speculation. Certainly you have the ability to speak about causes and conditions and about things coming into being on their own with such understanding that people call you foremost in erudition; yet despite your many eons of accumulated learning, you were not able escape your difficulty with the young Mātaṅga woman… In the young Mātaṅga woman's heart the fires of lust were extinguished, and instantly she became a sage who is free of rebirth. Now she has joined a group of vigorous practitioners of my Dharma. In her, the river of love has gone dry, and so now you are free of her.

We may be forgiven for being somewhat skeptical as to Ananda’s appreciation for being “free of her.” But we have to be circumspect regarding any contemporary interpretation of Buddha’s intent. The state of healthcare in those days, including especially the consequences of sexuality, was quite primitive. The young woman joined others who represented the early embrace of gender diversity in the Order:

Therefore, Ānanda, the many eons you have spent committing to memory the Thus-Come One's esoteric, inconceivable, wondrous, and majestic Dharma are not equal to a single day spent cultivating karma that is free of outflows and is far removed from the two worldly torments of hate and love. The young Mātaṅga woman was a courtesan, and yet her love and desire were dispelled by the spiritual power of the mantra; now she is a nun named Prakṛti. She and Rāhula's mother, Yaśodharā, have both become aware of their previous lives, and they know that, among the causes of their actions during many lifetimes, their craving for emotional love was the cause of their suffering. Now they have escaped their bonds and have received predictions. Why do you then continue to cheat yourself by standing still, merely watching and listening?

So, a few things of interest here. Remembering that this discourse was committed to writing centuries later, mitigates the apparent self-aggrandizement of Buddha’s characterization of his own teaching, words crafted later by his dharma heirs. We like to think that Buddha had some modicum of humility.

My understanding is that Ananda led the charge, in getting Buddha and the elders of the Order to accept women into the community. So this narrative seems out of sequence with that history. Being released from “emotional love” would not typically be recognized as a value in modern society. But here, it is presented as a part of slipping the bonds of earthly existence, and receiving “predictions” — i.e. of future buddhahood, from Buddha himself. Sounds a bit like transcendental credentials.

Rahula was Buddha’s son, whose name means, “fetter.” Having a son, amounted to one more attachment to this world, that Siddhartha, at that time, was trying to renounce. That Rahula was later ordained, apparently represents a father-and-son rapprochement. This was, and is, a known issue.

By “cheat yourself,” Buddha is referring to looking for the wrong kind of love in all the wrong places. Standing still, in this case, means not practicing the essential methods of meditation, and thus, not progressing along the path to liberation. Ananda is not fully engaged. But then again, he is young.

When Matsuoka Roshi was asked about “engaged Buddhism,” which in the modern context connotes a social level of engagement — taking up altruistic causes, whether in the private, charitable, or political arena — he would take the zazen posture and declare, “This is the most you can do.” In the context of this section of the Surangama, it is also the most you can do about the dilemma of delusion. Good luck.

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.

Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell

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What is the Matrix

of the so-called Thus-Come One?

Just thus — this suchness.

Buckle up. If you thought the movie, The Matrix, was a mindbender, and just might be true, I will see you that and raise you “The Matrix of the Thus-Come One,” the third section of the Surangama Sutra. In many ways, Buddha’s message is similar to the idea that we are all living in some virtual reality, a simulation inseparable in perception from a true existence. Only in Buddha’s model, the VR goggles are your own, you alone can remove them, and there is no wizard or alien race pulling the levers behind the scenes.

Buddha kicks off this third section with the Five Skandhas, declaring “The Five Aggregates Are the Matrix of the Thus-Come One.” He begins by again addressing his hapless cousin’s delusional state:

Ananda, you have not yet understood that the objects we perceive are unreal and illusory. They are subject to change, appearing here and there and disappearing here and there. Yet these illusions, each with its conventional designation, are in fact within the essential, wondrous enlightenment.

He goes on to tell Ananda and the crowd what he’s going to tell them, which may be an artifact of the later recording of these teachings, or an indication of Buddha’s fiendishly razor-sharp intellect: “The same is true of the five aggregates, the six faculties, the twelve sites, and the eighteen constituent elements.” And, sure enough, he goes on to cover each of these in great detail, and in precisely that order. But he makes a general point here that will allow us to take a general overview of what follows:

It is an illusion that they come into being when both their causes and their conditions are present, and it is an illusion that they cease to be when either their causes or their conditions are absent. You simply have not yet understood that, fundamentally, everything that comes and goes, that comes into being and ceases to be, is within the true nature of the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, which is the wondrous, everlasting understanding — the unmoving, all-pervading, wondrous suchness of reality.

Thus begins the long descent into the rabbit-hole of ordinary perception, conception, and consciousness itself. Before moving on, however, he wants us to understand that if we fall into the trap of seeking proof of the constituents of our ordinary understanding, you are bound to be disappointed:

But, though you may seek within the everlasting reality of the Matrix of the Thus-Come One for what comes and goes, for confusion and awakening, and for coming into being and ceasing to be, you will not find them there.

Buddha proceeds to deconstruct, again with laser-like analysis, logic, and language, the conventional wisdom he has just asserted to be “topsy-turvy,” as expressed in the first English version of the Heart Sutra I ever learned. The subheadings include “The Aggregate of…: A…Form; B…Sense-Perception; C…Cognition; D…Mental Formations; and finally, E…Consciousness;” covering the Fab Five. We will look at the first, that of Form, to illustrate his process, then generalize to the remaining four.

He continues by asking how it can be that the five aggregates are, fundamentally, the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, whose nature is the wondrous suchness of reality? In this example, “a clear-sighted person looks up at a clear sky, where nothing but empty space is to be seen,” and “for no particular reason, this person happens to stare, without moving his eyes, until they are stressed to the point that he sees in the empty air a disordered display of flowers, along with various other images that are disordered and chaotic and lack any real attributes. You should know that the aggregate of form can be described in similar terms.” This apparently is the origin of the Zen trope “flowers in the sky,” which indicates confusion or delusion, or at worst, hallucination. The Japanese Zen term for this phenomenon is makyo.

Then Buddha introduces the idea that “this disordered display of flowers… does not come into being from space…” which is a bit weird considering our modern definition of space. But in those days, space was listed as one of the “seven primary elements,” along with the familiar four of earth, wind, fire and water, plus awareness and consciousness, rounding out the septet. Which, you can be sure, Buddha will delve into in depth, later on. This I think we can take as a kind of inchoate physics, or understanding of causality, in the epoch before the Enlightenment and modern science came to dominate our conceptual grip on reality. Here, things are much more on an intuitive basis.

Buddha also maintains that this apparition does not “come into being from the person’s eyes.” Then he expounds upon his claims with what passed for deductive or inductive reasoning, in that context:

Suppose, Ānanda, that the display of flowers did come from space. But what has come into being from space would have to be subject to disappearing back into space; and space would not be empty if things came into being out of it and disappeared back into it. But if space were not empty, there would not be room in it for those displays of flowers to appear out of it or to disappear back into it, any more than there is room in your body, Ānanda, for another Ānanda.

That last is a compelling, and convincing argument, if somewhat irrelevant to the case at hand. There is certainly no room in here for another me, I can vouch for that. Then after demonstrating that the same refutation would address the notion that the illusion comes from the eyes, Buddha mercifully concludes:

Therefore you should know that the aggregate of forms is an illusion. It does not come into being from causes and conditions, nor does it come into being on its own.

So this becomes the boilerplate formula for Buddha’s argument against taking the rest of the skandhas for real, knocking them down one after the other, so that all five are revealed likewise to be illusion.

Next, the Six Faculties take their turn on the chopping-block: the Eye-Faculty; the Ear-Faculty; the Nose-Faculty; the Tongue-Faculty; the Body-Faculty; and last, but by no means least, the Cognitive-Faculty. These are the familiar Six Senses that we chant about every time we recite the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra, which, after all, is nothing more than a listing of the Buddha’s teachings of Emptiness. We chant, “Given emptiness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind…” instead of “cognitive,” at the end of the line. But Buddha is differentiating true Mind from cognition only, here.

The term “faculty” may also seem odd here. In each case, Buddha explains that though the sense faculty is interactive with a range of the electromagnetic spectrum — seeing, for example, with light and darkness — sight may be dependent upon them, but they do not cause seeing. With a similar argument including that the sense faculties do not arise from space, he concludes:

In this way you should know that the eye-faculty is illusory. It does not come into being from causes and conditions, nor does it come into being on its own.

Just so. As is so for the Aggregates, just so for the Faculties, it follows that the rest follow suit. The Twelve Sites combine the sense faculties and their objects. Taken under consideration as pairs: “Eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes,” as the ancient Ch’an poem Sandokai would have it. They are “not-two”: not identical, but nonetheless inseparable. And, surprise, surprise:

Fundamentally, they are not dependent on causes or conditions, and yet they do not come into being on their own.

Buddha then makes quick work of the Eighteen Constituents, yet another compounding of the Twelve Sites, adding the third leg as “consciousness,” the field in which the sensory transaction takes place. The whole shebang is sometimes referred to as the Eighteen Realms (S. dhatu) of human sentience. Again, Buddha reduces the “coming into being” of these confections to their absurdist reality:

Therefore, you should know that the cognitive faculty and objects of cognition cannot be the conditions that are necessary for the coming into being of the mind-consciousness, because none of these three constituents — cognitive faculty, objects of cognition, and mind-consciousness — has an independent existence. Fundamentally, they do not come into being from causes and conditions, nor do they come into being on their own.

As if this is not enough to reduce us all to tears along with Ananda, Buddha then dissects the Seven Primary Elements with the same, merciless scalpel. Here, Buddha’s characterization of Ananda’s lack of insight is a medical analogy, remembering that the medicine of the time is not that of our time:

You are very learned, but you are like someone who can discuss medicines yet cannot identify them when they are actually set before him.

Buddha continues with an analysis of the primary elements as a whole, then proceeds to take them up one at a time, with analogies appropriate to each, to demonstrate the general principle:

…according to what you have said, the merging or aggregating of four primary elements brings about the various phenomena that are found in the world and that are subject to change. Let us suppose… that the primary elements have separate essential natures that cannot aggregate or merge. In that case, their external attributes, too, could not aggregate or merge any more than space can aggregate or merge with perceived objects. Suppose, on the other hand, that the essential natures of the primary elements can aggregate and merge. Then their aggregating and merging would not differ from the various changes that take place in the world and that cause things to arise and perish through an unending process of coming into being and ceasing to be.

Today, it is worth pointing out, we may take exception to the denial that space can merge with perceived objects. In fact, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity made the point that matter, or objects, are essentially more space, or energy, than stuff — on the sub-molecular, atomic and subatomic levels. Nonetheless, you have to give it to Buddha for interpreting reality based on sheer intuition and analysis. Then he gets personal:

Beings, too, are born and die, and having died they are born again, forever coming to life and perishing again, Ānanda, like a torch that is swung endlessly in a circle to form a wheel of flame, or like water that turns to ice and then becomes water again.

Here Buddha shows his adeptness with a turn-of-a-phrase, capturing two of his more memorable analogies for life and death in concrete examples from two of the four primary elements. Later, when he digs into the element of earth more deeply, no pun, we come across this remarkable passage:

Let us consider the nature of the primary element earth. It may take as large a form as a continent and as small a form as a mote of dust. In its most subtle aspect, the primary element earth appears as particles that are so fine that they can hardly be distinguished from space itself. If these minute particles were divided further into seven parts, they would then be as small as perceived objects can be. If they were divided yet further, nothing would be left but space.