Real Zen for Real Life Course [6][15-18]

 Real Zen for Real Life Course Lecture Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

Course scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LESSON GUIDES
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Lesson 1 What is Zen? recovering the Beginner’s Mind . . . . . . . . . 3

Lesson 2 The Zen Way to Know and forget Thyself . . . . . . . . . . 10 

Lesson 3 Zen Meditation: Clearing the heart-Mind . . . . . . . . . . 17 

Lesson 4 how to Practice Zen Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 

Lesson 5 The Middle Way of Knowing What suffices . . . . . . . . . 34 

Meditation Checkup: The Middle Way of Meditation . . . . . . . . . . 42 

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Lesson 6 embracing the impermanence of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 

Lesson 7 The True self is egoless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 

Meditation Checkup: Lead with the Body and Physical stillness . . . . 62 

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Lesson 8 Loving others as yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 

Lesson 9 Taking Turns as the Center of the Universe . . . . . . . . . 71 

Meditation Checkup: from Mindless reacting to Mindful responding 77 

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Lesson 10 Who or What is the Buddha? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Lesson 11 Mind is Buddha: if you Meet him, Kill him! . . . . . . . . . 87 

Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Unavoidable Pain . . . . . . . . . . 95
===[5]
Lesson 12 Dying to Live: Buddhism and Christianity . . . . . . . . . 97
Lesson 13 Zen beyond Mysticism: everyday even Mind . . . . . . . .104 

Lesson 14 engaged Zen: from inner to outer Peace . . . . . . . . . 112
Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Distractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 

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Lesson 15 The Dharma of Karma: We reap What We sow . . . . . . 120
Lesson 16 Zen Morality: follow and Then forget rules . . . . . . . . 127 

Lesson 17 The Zone of Zen: The freedom of No-Mind . . . . . . . . 133
Lesson 18 Zen Lessons from Nature: The giving Leaves . . . . . . . 138 

Meditation Checkup: Three Ways of Breathing in and out . . . . . . .144
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Lesson 19 Zen art: Cultivating Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 

Lesson 20 Zen and Words: Between silence and speech . . . . . . . 154 

Meditation Checkup: Chanting as a Meditative Practice . . . . . . . .160
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Lesson 21 Zen and Philosophy: The Kyoto school . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Lesson 22 Just sitting and Working with Kōans . . . . . . . . . . . .168
Meditation Checkup: Walking Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
===[9]
Lesson 23 Death and rebirth: or, Nirvana here and Now . . . . . . 175 

Lesson 24 reviewing the Path of Zen: The oxherding Pictures . . .180 

finding a Zen Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

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THE DHARMA OF KARMA:

WE REAP WHAT WE SOW

LESSON 15

The term karma is a Buddhist word that has been adopted into everyday english vocabulary. however, our loose use of the word sometimes strays rather far from its meaning

in the teachings of Buddhism, also known as dharma. the dharma of karma is a teaching of causality. It is a teaching that our actions have both causes and effects that we should pay attention to.

Background

• The dharma of karma is concerned with mental and verbal as well as physical actions. The Buddha paid much attention to the mental karma of intentions and the verbal karma of speech. for instance, the idea of right speech in the Buddha’s eightfold Path includes refraining not only from lying but also from using rude and abusive speech, from belittling others, and from gossiping. The Buddha taught that we should not only speak truthfully but also kindly.

• Despite many popular treatments of karma, the basic Buddhist idea of karma is not that of a supernatural force which guarantees that what goes around comes around. The point of the teaching of karma is not to fully explain the present, much less to perfectly predict the future. The point is to understand that our actions have effects—not only on others but, first and foremost, on ourselves.

Situated Freedom

• imagine a man who starts drinking a cup of coffee in the morning. There are various social, psychological, and biological reasons that influenced him in his decision to form this habit. But, a Buddhist would say, nothing forced him to do it. There was at least an element of free choice involved. To some extent, he chose not to resist the biological urges, social peer pressures, and seductive advertisements.

Now imagine that at some point, he starts drinking two, three, or even four cups of coffee a day. he will begin craving coffee every morning. his self-created habit in turn created that craving.

Perhaps it even becomes an addiction.

• The good news is that he still has some freedom to change course. Think of the karmic effects of past actions as being like the momentum a large sailboat has as it moves in a certain direction across the ocean. The wind and the waves correspond to all the conditions of the present situation, including the effects that other people’s actions have on an individual.

• someone may be moving in a wholesome direction, but a strong side wind may blow that person off course. alternatively, someone may be moving in an unwholesome direction, but luckily, the winds of fortune happen to bring the person back on course. in any case, how a person trims the sails and steers the rudder of his or her “life-sailboat” is up to that individual.

• in the case of the man’s coffee addiction, he cannot suddenly stop craving it. if he tries to quit cold turkey, he may experience headaches and be unpleasant to be around. But he can wean himself down to two cups and then one cup a day. Perhaps with professional counseling, he may even learn to switch to herbal tea.

• Contrary to some popular past and present misconceptions, karma is not a teaching of determinism. it is rather a teaching of situated freedom. Quoting the words of the Buddha, the Theravada Buddhist monk and scholar Nyanaponika Thera emphasizes what he calls “the freedom inherent in the karmic situation.” he says that “the lawfulness which governs karma does not operate with mechanical rigidity but allows for a considerably wide range of modifications in the ripening of the fruit.”

The Fox Kōan

• The most famous kōan about karma is the so-called fox Kōan, which is placed second in The Gateless Barrier collection of kōans. The fox Kōan is meant to bring one back down to earth and, specifically, to keep one from falling into the trap of what has come to be known as “wild fox Zen.”

• in the story of the kōan, an ancient abbot of a monastery condemned himself to be reborn as a wild fox for 500 lifetimes by saying that an enlightened man “does not fall into karmic causality.” he was finally freed from the fox body after being taught that an enlightened man “does not obscure karmic causality.”

• The central question of the kōan is the relation between not falling into karmic causality and not obscuring karmic causality. To think that one has transcended the world of karmic causality—so that one does not need to pay attention to the causes and effects of one’s actions—is in fact to blindly fall into karmic causality in the worst way.

Living without Expectations

• Because karma is a teaching of situated freedom, it is also a teaching of responsibility. We make our habits, and our habits make us. That means that we are responsible for who we become. in a sense, this is a very self-empowering idea: you are what you make of yourself.

• it is important to bear in mind that the Buddha taught that the precise working out of the results of karma is one of the so-called unthinkables, meaning that exactly what cause or set of causes led to this or that effect is incomprehensible. he taught that the web of karmic causes and effects is so complex that it is impossible to calculate what caused a specific thing to happen.

• Bodhidharma replied, “No merit.” True merit, he implied, comes from acting freely and responsibly without any egocentric calculations of merit. This phrase, “no merit,” has become a basic teaching in Zen, and one often sees it written on scrolls of calligraphy.

•

yet this was apparently not all that Bodhidharma had to say about the dharma of karma. in another text attributed to him, we are taught to accept bad as well as good fortune as the results of our past karma.

• however, the Zen teaching of utterly accepting even disaster, illness, or death does not mean that we should not try to do anything and everything we can to prevent and alleviate such calamities. on the contrary, we can change reality—when it can be changed—only by accepting it in the sense of facing up to it.

one of the secrets to happiness—as well as to discerning what we can change and what we cannot—is to accept that what is happening is what is happening. a second secret to happiness is as difficult as it is liberating. it is to have, in one’s innermost heart, no expectations. every expectation sets us up for disappointment.

• even if an expectation is fulfilled, we merely break even. By contrast, if one works hard or gives freely without any expectation of reward, then one can truly appreciate as a gift the good results that may come one’s way. This is why Bodhidharma sought to free emperor Wu from his obsessions with earning merit.

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

• Bodhidharma goes so far as to say that one should take responsibility even for one’s misfortunes. This is hard to swallow on a metaphysical as well as on a practical level. in effect, he teaches us not say, “you reap what you sow,” but rather to say, “i reap what i sow.” The focus is always on one’s own responsibility for one’s own karma and one’s own circumstances.

• still, it is hard to refrain from generalizing his point, which problematically leads to pointing at others and their circumstances. When bad things happen to good people, as they often do, it does not seem right to think that they deserve it. The fact that bad things happen to good people is hard to explain in any manner whatsoever.

• There may be no really satisfying answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people. The Buddha and the Bible explain why bad things happen to bad people, but they don’t really explain why they happen to good people. This leaves us with questions: Why did god create sinners? Why did people start acting badly and producing unwholesome karmic effects to begin with?

in fact, the Buddha did not attempt to give an answer to the question of the origin of the universe and the beginning of bad karma. he taught us to attend to the workings of karma the best we can to become free and responsible. But he also taught us not to try and calculate why specific things happen to specific people or why the chains of bad karma started churning in the first place.

• The Buddha indicated that from time immemorial, we have been producing and reproducing bad karma on the basis of ignorance.

he also said that while the cycle of ignorance and suffering is without beginning, it is not endless, or at least it need not be.

We can put an end to ignorance and thus to needless suffering. This is the promise of nirvana.

SUGGESTED READING

Loy, “how to Drive your Karma.” Thera, “Karma and its fruit.” shibayama, The Gateless Barrier, chapter 2.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What does it mean to say that we make our habits, and our habits, in turn, make us?

2 Why is the teaching of karma not a determinism or fatalism but rather a teaching of situated freedom?

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ZEN MORALITY: FOLLOW AND THEN FORGET RULES

LESSON 16

Zen joins other schools of Buddhism in speaking of the socalled three learnings: morality, meditation, and wisdom.

this lesson focuses on morality. early Buddhists compiled

the Buddha’s moral instructions, largely consisting of monastic regulations, into a group of texts called the Vinaya. the moral regulations boil down to the precepts—that is, the basic rules for behavior that monastics and lay Buddhists vow to maintain.

Beyond Egoistic Conceptions of Good and Evil

• The 13th-century Japanese Zen master Dōgen stands out for the complexly philosophical nature of many of his writings and for his emphasis on morality. especially in his later years, Dōgen stressed the moral causality of karma, the practice of repentance along with meditation, and the importance of taking the precepts.

• Dōgen was not the first Zen master in Japan to stress the importance of the moral precepts. The teacher of Dōgen’s first Zen teacher, Myōan eisai, claimed that the precepts are the foundation for Zen practice. eisai made this claim in light of what he saw as a moral laxity in Japanese Buddhism at the time. in particular, eisai was criticizing a self-styled Zen teacher named Dainichi Nōnin.

• Nōnin stressed the antinomian and apparently amoral aspects of Zen, such as Linji’s teaching that people should just act naturally, eating when hungry and lying down when tired. Dōgen criticized Nōnin’s false understanding of what it means to act naturally, citing his Chinese Zen teacher rujing’s denunciation of “the heresy of naturalism.”

• another potentially misleading—if misunderstood—teaching of Zen in this regard is prominent Buddhist figure huineng’s key kōan: “Think not of good, think not of evil. at this very moment, what is your original face before your father and mother were born?” This kōan pushes practitioners to awaken to their true self—the pure awareness of their open mind and heart—rather than identifying themselves first and foremost with the particulars of their biology and psychology.

• huineng is not saying that one should never again think of good and evil. rather, he is saying that we need to make such judgements from a nondualistic and non-egoistic awareness rather than a dualistic and egoistic distortion of the context in which we are making them.

• The teachings of huineng and Linji have been subject to misunderstanding and misuse. fortunately, Zen masters from eisai and Dōgen in medieval Japan to robert aitkin and reb anderson in modern america have been there to remind us of the sense and significance of the precepts and other moral teachings of Zen.

The Basic Moral Precepts

• Whereas eisai promoted taking the detailed hinayana as well as the Mahayana precepts, Dōgen paired the precepts down to the most important: the 16 bodhisattva precepts that he thought lay as well as monastic Buddhists ought to take. rinzai Buddhists today take a somewhat similar set of precepts. The bodhisattva precepts consist of:

• Taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma (the Buddhist teachings), and the sangha (the Buddhist community).

• The three pure precepts of observing prohibitions, doing good deeds, and benefitting all living beings.

• The 10 grave precepts, namely: not to kill, steal, misuse sex, lie, deal in intoxicants, criticize the faults of lay or monastic bodhisattvas, praise oneself and disparage others, be stingy with the dharma or material goods, become angry, or revile the three treasures of the Buddha, dharma, and sangha.

From Prescription to Description

• The precepts and other prescriptions for behavior in Zen are not meant to be fixed rules that one should unwaveringly follow regardless of time and place. While many of Dōgen’s writings are devoted to prescribing detailed monastic guidelines for everything from preparing food to washing one’s face and using the toilet, these are not meant to be legalistic rules for a community of fundamentalists.

• Dōgen affirms the 10th-century Chinese Zen master yunmen’s statement that “in expressing full function, there are no fixed methods.” Certainly, at first and for a long time, we need rules. Until we are able to discover that the spirit of the law emanates from within, from our own Buddha-nature, we need the letter of the law to provisionally guide us from without.

• yet we should not get stuck at the level of doing good and not doing evil simply because that is what someone else is telling us to do and not to do. We should not be content to simply follow the rules of an externally decreed prescriptive and proscriptive morality. insofar as we open the eye of wisdom, we open the heart of compassion—and, to that extent, our moral actions are increasingly done naturally and even effortlessly rather than artificially and forcefully.

Breaking the Moral Rules

• The ultimate moral and spiritual compass in Mahayana Buddhism is the vow to liberate all sentient beings from suffering. This is the first of the great Vows recited daily by Zen Buddhists: “however limitless sentient beings are, i vow to liberate them all.” Whether a particular act is good or not and whether a certain precept is a helpful guide to conduct in a particular situation can be determined in terms of whether it helps or hinders the fulfillment of the vow.

• The more one becomes motivated by this vow, the more this moral compass is discovered within and the less need one has for external prescriptions and proscriptions—that is to say, the more one naturally embodies the spirit of the law and the less bound one is to the artificial letter of the law. along with other Zen masters and the rest of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, Dōgen affirms that bodhisattvas may at times need to break the precepts out of compassionate use of “skillful means” in their endeavor to liberate all sentient beings.

• The most famous account of skillful means is found in the Lotus sutra’s parable about a

PROTECTING INSECTS

father who saves his children

from a burning house by telling them that their favorite toy carts are waiting for them outside. The point of this parable is that

The strictest of Jains wear a veil over their mouths and sweep the ground in front of

them to avoid accidentally

a bodhisattva can and indeed inhaling or stepping on any should use the expedient tiny insects.

means of telling a noble lie for the sake of ultimately conveying a liberating truth.

Pacifism and Vegetarianism

• Buddhism does not teach absolute pacifism, though nonviolence is a cardinal virtue in all three of the major religions that originated in ancient india: hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. it is the Jains who take this teaching to the most literal extremes.

• Before eating their vegetarian meals, Zen monastics chant a verse of gratitude and a vow to put the nourishment to good use. The Buddha himself was not an absolute vegetarian.

he did instruct monks not to encourage others to kill animals on their behalf, but he also told them to eat whatever was put in their begging bowls.

• indeed, the Buddha is thought by many to have died from eating some rotten pork that was served to him. given the pragmatic nature of the Buddha’s teachings, it is not surprising that in some lands in which people depend on eating animals for survival, such as Tibet, carnivorous Buddhist cultures have developed. The key question for Buddhists is how to minimize the suffering caused by violence since the complete abolition of violence is unrealistic.

SUGGESTED READING

aitken, The Mind of Clover. anderson, Being Upright.

ives, Zen Awakening and Society.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 how does Dōgen suggest that, in the course of practice, “do good” becomes a description rather than a prescription?

2 Why are bodhisattvas allowed to break moral rules in their use of skillful means?

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THE ZONE OF ZEN:

THE FREEDOM OF NO-MIND

LESSON 17

According to Zen, freedom is not really a matter of being free from karmic causality but rather a matter of freely participating in karmic causality. this lesson discusses

what it’s like to experience the freedom of moving in intuitive attunement with the fluid forces at work in ourselves and the world.

The Open Mind of a Child

• Zen masters speak of regaining a natural freedom and compassion that has gotten covered over and clogged up not just by social conventions but also by psychological forces—especially the greed and hate that are rooted in the primal delusion that our egos and our interests are separate from those of others. The famous modern Japanese rinzai Zen master yamada Mumon

was fond of quoting Jesus’s words: “Truly i tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

• as we grow up, we accumulate knowledge in our relentless pursuit of pleasure, profit, power, and prestige. We learn to judge things according to whether they help or hinder us in attaining these things. our minds are filled— clouded over and clogged up—with plans for procuring them.

• yamada rōshi says Zen meditation—zazen—is a matter of returning to the open mind and heart of a small child. it is a practice of emptying the mind, of returning to what Zen calls a state of mushin, which means “no-mind.” This an open mind that is able to respond to everything because it is not fixated on anything. Zen masters are not counseling us to become childish in our thinking but rather to become childlike in the sense of recovering the original purity and openness of our hearts and minds.

• “Being in the zone” is probably the best expression we have for what Zen means by the state of no-mind. for instance, when tennis players are able to forget about everything else and just concentrate on the serve, that’s when champions are born.

A Gateway into the Zone of Zen

• Zen is a practice of diving into the flow of life, of swimming in concert with its currents and being fully present each stroke of the way. We can get better at doing that through zazen.

• When we first sit in meditation, our minds are restless—running forward into the future, back into the past, or across the room into someone else’s business. Concentrating on the breath, we nonjudgmentally become aware of this restlessness. We acknowledge but do not get upset about the fact that we have the urge to fidget or even to get up and go do something else.

• Zazen is not just seated meditation in the literal sense but, more deeply and importantly, a matter of letting the heart-mind be seated.

it is a matter of finding and centering oneself in an inner stillness that remains undisturbed in the midst of movement.

Living without Why

• one of Zen’s most often repeated kōan questions is, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the west?” in other words, what was on his mind, what was his intention, in undergoing the arduous journey by means of which he transmitted Zen from india to China?

• The answer to this question must express the very essence of Zen because Bodhidharma is the figure of the enlightened heart-mind that strives to liberate all sentient beings by enlightening them. yet the Zen master Linji tells us that if Bodhidharma “had had any purpose,

he couldn’t have saved even himself.”

TRUE FREEDOM

• in the deepest sense, Bodhidharma’s

travels and deeds were unselfishly and unselfconsciously autotelic; they were ends in themselves rather than just being steps on the way to

Zen teaches that true freedom is not freedom from nature; it is freedom in nature, a

somewhere else. he teaches and liberates the same way that he sleeps when tired and eats when hungry. he brings peace to others because he is at peace with himself.

A Difficult Task

• of course, while living “without why,” wholly immersed in the activity at hand, may be a deep spiritual teaching, it is also a tall order. Most of us are capable of it only in fleeting moments, and we need to be patient with our need for reasons, goals, and hopes. Moreover, it must be acknowledged that this powerful teaching can and has been coopted by less enlightened and enlightening persons.

• Disturbingly, many Zen masters supported Japanese militarism leading up to and during the Pacific War, and they applied traditional Zen teachings such as no-mind to the mental training of soldiers. Many of these soldiers no doubt went on to fight bravely and honorably, but at least some of them went on to commit atrocious war crimes on and off the battlefield.

• The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna tells us that misunderstanding the teaching of emptiness is like grabbing a snake by the wrong end—if you grab it by the tail rather than the head, it will twist around and bite you. something similar could be said of the practice of no-mind.

SUGGESTED READING

Mann, When Buddhists Attack. slingerland, Trying Not to Try.

suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 how does what Zen calls no-mind and non-doing relate to what we call being in the zone and the flow experience?

2 What are the possible dangers of a half-baked “just do it” state of mind?

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ZEN LESSONS FROM NATURE:

THE GIVING LEAVES

LESSON 18

Freedom and responsibility, according to Zen, are not found 

by way of transcending the forces and flows of nature but 

rather by way of getting back in touch with them. This 

lesson discusses how virtues such as generosity can be learned by 

returning to a more intimate relation with the natural world.

Meditative Work

• Zazen and working on kōans are only part of what goes on in a Zen monastery. Much of the time, monks, nuns, and lay practitioners dwelling there are engaged in samu—that is, meditative work.

• samu is a practice of engaging wholeheartedly with the task at hand—cleaning, cooking, gardening, and so forth—in the concentrated yet fluid state of no-mind. samu also involves cooperating with one’s coworkers and communing with the natural world.

• in Zen monasteries today, except during the intensive meditation retreats known as sesshin, monastics generally spend more time in the active practice of samu than they do in the stillness of zazen. They grow and prepare most of their own food, chop their own firewood, and weed and rake their own gardens.

The Big Potlatch of Nature

• The great american Zen poet gary snyder spoke of the natural world as “the big potlatch.” snyder first practiced Zen in Japan at a monastery in Kyoto, shōkokuji. after returning to the United states, he combined his study of the way of Zen with his study of Native american ways of appreciating and participating in the wider world of wild nature. in one of his most celebrated works, The Practice of the Wild, snyder writes:

Most of humanity—foragers, peasants, or artisans … have understood the play of the real world, with all its suffering, not in simple terms of “nature red in tooth and claw” but through the celebration of the gift-exchange quality of our give-and-take.

• We need to learn how to better—more consciously and gratefully—participate in this great circulation of giving and taking. This is one of the lessons we can glean from shel silverstein’s book The Giving Tree. some see the tree in this story as representing a parent and the boy a child. But the tree in the story has also been understood to represent nature, while the boy represents humankind.

• as the boy grows up and eventually grows old, the tree gives and gives: apples to eat and later to sell, branches to swing on and later to make a house with, a trunk to cut down and carve out to make a boat with, and finally a stump for the boy to sit and rest on once he has grown old. The utterly unselfish tree never asks for anything in return. it finds its happiness in providing for the boy’s happiness. But the boy does not return the favor. The giving is a one-way street.

• one of the striking things about silverstein’s book is the fine line it walks between teaching and preaching. Like all great parables and children’s tales, it tells a story and lets us ponder the point. The tree in the story never blames the boy. it just continues to find new ways to grant him happiness.

• and yet, after playing with the tree as a child, the boy grows into a restless and egocentric man. The boy never learns to participate in the great potlatch of life.

Giving without Expectations

• To some extent, we all realize that giving is important. But what does it really mean to give? The tree in The Giving Tree teaches by example. one of the profoundest lessons of the book is perhaps that to truly give or give back, we need to give without expecting a return gift.

• of course, we should respect and protect other people’s rights and entitlements, and it is often proper to stand up for our own. But even while fighting for justice and demanding results, to remain without expectations is a highly demanding but also deeply liberating spiritual practice.

• hindus call this karma yoga. in the Bhagavad gita, Krishna teaches this practice of immersing oneself totally in activities that benefit the world without obsessing over the “fruits of the act.” he promises that the karma yogi ends up experiencing the greatest fruits of her actions precisely because she is not attached to them.

POTLATCHES

The term potlatch is a Pacific Northwest Native american word for the lavish gift-giving feasts at which rich people would give much of their wealth away, assuring that goods were circulated among the entire community and neighboring tribes. Considered wasteful and contrary to capitalistic values of accumulation, it was strictly banned by european conquerors in the 19th century.

however, practices of potlatch in tribal societies around the globe serve to build and maintain relationships between human beings. it is, on the contrary, hoarding that severs the bonds between humans, creating a wealth gap that breeds resentment and false feelings of superiority.

Natural Gateways into Zen

• Zen Buddhism often emphasizes the lessons to be learned from the natural world. in this regard, it draws deeply on Daoism and also resonates with the indigenous Japanese tradition of shintō.

Thousands of temples and shrines can be found throughout both the cityscapes and the countryside of Japan, each one an oasis of natural beauty and a site of spiritual communion with nature.

• shintō shrines are often built around or near a magnificent tree or rock; a trickling stream sometimes runs through them or a gate stands out into a lake or bay. in China, Zen monasteries were traditionally built on mountains, and so head temple complexes in Japan, even those in the middle of metropolises, are still referred to as honzan—”main mountains.”

• The enlightening sounds of nature are often extolled by Zen masters. for example, the 13th-century Japanese Zen master Dōgen says, “The sounds of the valley streams are the Buddha’s long, broad tongue.”

• Zen masters often direct their students’ attention to natural things: the oak tree in the garden, the blue mountains, the sound of the valley streams. all beings are the Buddha-nature, teaches Dōgen.

• Natural beings are not deluded and thus have no need for enlightenment. They simply and freely give themselves over to their interconnected lives among the rest of the worldwide web of reality, taking what they need and giving back what they don’t without a thought.

• however, the ways in which humans are called on to participate in the way of nature are not the same as the ways in which other beings participate. We may learn something about stillness and sturdiness from watching a frog sit on a rock, yet we are neither frogs nor rocks: Not only do we need softer meditation cushions, but we are capable and called on to do many things that frogs and rocks cannot and need not do.

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “Natural freedom.” okumura, The Mountains and Waters Sūtra.

Wirth, Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What is the practice of samu (meditative work) in Zen, and how does it bring practitioners into a more intimate relation with nature?

2 What does Zen and Mahayana Buddhism in general call the perfection of giving, and how is it that we can learn this virtue from the natural world?

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Meditation Checkup: Three Ways of Breathing In and Out

the conclusion of Lesson 18 is a meditation checkup focused on the breath. to experience it in full, refer to the audio or video lesson. the following information serves as a summary of the checkup, which covers three methods of breathing in and out.

Breathing as a Cycle of Giving and Receiving

• This checkup’s first method is called breathing as a cycle of giving and receiving. it is, in effect, a meditative practice of becoming more open to the greatest gift we receive from leaves and also more aware of how we give back. To live, we need to repeatedly breathe in oxygen, which comes from marine plants, from rainforests, and from the leaves on the trees we see through the windows of our homes and offices.

• The beauty of our conspiracy with the leaves is that while our bodies take in oxygen and give back carbon dioxide, the leaves do the reverse: They take in carbon dioxide and give back oxygen. our lives depend on plants such as trees, and their lives depend on animals such as us.

• The next time you sit in meditation, after settling down and settling in, become aware of where your breath is coming from and where it is going to. follow your breath all the way from and all the way back to the leaves outside.

• Breathing in, become aware that the oxygen that enlivens you is a gift from the leaves outside and from all their cousins in the oceans and forests around the world. Breathing out, become aware that you are giving back to the leaves the carbon dioxide that they need to survive and thrive.

Exhaling the Self, Inhaling the Universe

• This lesson’s second method of meditation is called exhaling the self, inhaling the universe. it is not just a method of communing with nature; it is a method of uniting with the universe. it aims to dissolve the dualistic barrier that we habitually construct around ourselves—that is, the wall that we think and feel separates us from the rest of the world.

• once you have settled into a fairly concentrated stillness, begin this simple yet boundlessly mind-expanding practice:

1. on the out-breath, breathe yourself out into the universe. exhale everything you have and everything that you are. give up everything, totally trusting that the universe into which you release yourself will, in return, breathe life back into you.

2. on the in-breath, receive the entire universe into the vacated space of your heart-mind. Let the entire universe enter into your empty vessel. More concretely still, breathe the universe all the way through your chest and down into your belly. relaxing your abdomen muscles, let your belly expand so far that it feels as if it were taking in and harboring the whole universe.

• insofar as you have breathed yourself out completely into the universe, you have infinitely expanded your borders, which means that you have in effect dissolved them. if you want to possess everything, you have to give up all possessions. if you want to enter into a loving union with everyone and everything, you have to give up the egoistic sense of a self that is separated from others.

Cultivating Compassion

• Tibetan Buddhism employs a powerful meditation technique for cultivating compassion termed tonglen, which means “giving and taking.” all schools of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, understand the practice of a bodhisattva in terms of what is called, in Japanese, bakku-yoraku, which means “taking away pain and suffering, and giving peace and joy.” in Tibet, tonglen developed as a wonderfully concrete meditation method of visualizing this twofold practice.

• as taught by the second Dalai Lama in the 16th century, you are to begin this method by visualizing your mother and bringing to mind all that she has given you, starting with the fact that she literally and painfully gave birth to you. feeling compassion for all that she has undergone, generate a deep desire to relieve her of any pain and suffering she may be experiencing, and to impart to her peace and joy.

• on the in-breath, imagine yourself taking away her pain and suffering in the form of a dark cloud. Then, on the outbreath, imagine exhaling into her peace and joy in the form of bright light.

• having begun with your mother, or with whomever you are most easily able to generate feelings of compassion toward, move on to do the same practice for a while with regard to a friend. Later, when you are ready, do the practice with regard to a stranger. finally, and only when you are ready for the challenge, do the practice with regard to someone you are inclined to think of as an enemy.

Real Zen for Real Life Course [5][12-14]

 Real Zen for Real Life Course Lecture Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

Course scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LESSON GUIDES
===[1]
Lesson 1 What is Zen? recovering the Beginner’s Mind . . . . . . . . . 3

Lesson 2 The Zen Way to Know and forget Thyself . . . . . . . . . . 10 

Lesson 3 Zen Meditation: Clearing the heart-Mind . . . . . . . . . . 17 

Lesson 4 how to Practice Zen Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 

Lesson 5 The Middle Way of Knowing What suffices . . . . . . . . . 34 

Meditation Checkup: The Middle Way of Meditation . . . . . . . . . . 42 

===[2]

Lesson 6 embracing the impermanence of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 

Lesson 7 The True self is egoless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 

Meditation Checkup: Lead with the Body and Physical stillness . . . . 62 

===[3]

Lesson 8 Loving others as yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 

Lesson 9 Taking Turns as the Center of the Universe . . . . . . . . . 71 

Meditation Checkup: from Mindless reacting to Mindful responding 77 

===[4]

Lesson 10 Who or What is the Buddha? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Lesson 11 Mind is Buddha: if you Meet him, Kill him! . . . . . . . . . 87 

Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Unavoidable Pain . . . . . . . . . . 95
===[5]
Lesson 12 Dying to Live: Buddhism and Christianity . . . . . . . . . 97
Lesson 13 Zen beyond Mysticism: everyday even Mind . . . . . . . .104 

Lesson 14 engaged Zen: from inner to outer Peace . . . . . . . . . 112
Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Distractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 

===[6]

Lesson 15 The Dharma of Karma: We reap What We sow . . . . . . 120
Lesson 16 Zen Morality: follow and Then forget rules . . . . . . . . 127 

Lesson 17 The Zone of Zen: The freedom of No-Mind . . . . . . . . 133
Lesson 18 Zen Lessons from Nature: The giving Leaves . . . . . . . 138 

Meditation Checkup: Three Ways of Breathing in and out . . . . . . .144
===[7]
Lesson 19 Zen art: Cultivating Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 

Lesson 20 Zen and Words: Between silence and speech . . . . . . . 154 

Meditation Checkup: Chanting as a Meditative Practice . . . . . . . .160
===[8]
Lesson 21 Zen and Philosophy: The Kyoto school . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Lesson 22 Just sitting and Working with Kōans . . . . . . . . . . . .168
Meditation Checkup: Walking Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
===[9]
Lesson 23 Death and rebirth: or, Nirvana here and Now . . . . . . 175 

Lesson 24 reviewing the Path of Zen: The oxherding Pictures . . .180 

finding a Zen Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

===

=====

DYING TO LIVE: BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY

LESSON 12

This lesson looks at the relationship between Buddhism and christianity. over the past century, there have been many christians who have taken up the practice of Zen

meditation without leaving the church. In fact, there have been a number of catholic priests who have become Zen teachers. there have also been many Protestant clergy and laypeople who have claimed that their christian faith is compatible with and deepened by their practice of Zen Buddhism.

Early Encounters and Misunderstandings

• in Japan, there is a tradition of esoteric Buddhism called shingon, which was founded by Kūkai in the 9th century. for shingon Buddhists, the dharmakaya is the cosmic Buddha called Dainichi Nyorai—the great sun Buddha that is the source of all light and life in the world. indeed, all reality is thought to be the manifestation of Dainichi.

• When the first Christians arrived in Japan in the mid-16th century, the Jesuit missionaries led by francis Xavier were told by their Japanese translator that the word Dainichi is the best translation for the word God. These early Christian missionaries thought that the Japanese must have already received a partial or corrupted version of the gospel of Christianity. for their part, the Japanese thought that the missionaries had come from the western land of the Buddha, india, and brought with them new doctrines of Buddhism.

• This period of mutual appreciation based on mutual misunderstanding ended after the missionaries were confronted with Buddhist—and in particular Zen—doctrines of emptiness and nothingness. additionally, the pivotal Buddhist doctrine of no-self sounded like the antithesis of their core belief in an eternal soul.

• for centuries following this fateful first encounter in Japan, Buddhism—and specifically its doctrines of no-self and emptiness—became an object of both fascination and fearful condemnation for Western philosophers and theologians. only in the 20th century was the prejudiced misunderstanding of these teachings gradually reformed. however, no-self and emptiness remain the most intellectually and emotionally challenging doctrines of Buddhism for Westerners to wrap their heads and hearts around.

What is God?

• a relevant question for this lesson’s topic is: What does it mean to believe in god? When we ask questions like this, we assume a lot. To begin with, we assume that we understand what we are asking. in this case, we assume that we know what the word God means and what it would mean to believe in god. another question is whether god is male rather than female. additionally, how could we tell?

• Buddhists, even Pure Land Buddhists, do not believe in a transcendent being who exists independent of the being’s creation. Zen Buddhism is most compatible with panentheism. The term panentheism means “all is in god.”

• Many biblical passages lend themselves to a panentheistic interpretation, such as when god says, “Do i not fill heaven and earth?” and when Paul affirms the idea that “in him we live and move and have our being.” such a panentheistic conception of the biblical god does not, after all, sound so very different from many Zen pronouncements.

Experiencing the Unborn Buddha-Mind

• Buddhism teaches that everything that is born must die. This is the law of impermanence. everything that exists because of the conditions that allow it to exist will cease to exist when those conditions no longer hold.

• The good news—the gospel of Buddhism—is that there is something on the other side of the door: a doorway through which we can pass if only we can shed the bulky armor we’ve vainly attached to the fragile shells of our egos.

Buddhism calls this something that is no-thing the unborn, unmade, and unconditioned. in a famous passage from an early sutra, the Buddha teaches:

There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. if, monks, there were no unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned.

• Because there is the unborn, there is nirvana. The attainment of nirvana is the realization of the unborn. There was a tendency in early Buddhism to understand nirvana as somewhere beyond samsara—as a transcendent abode beyond this world of space and time.

• The Mahayana tradition, and especially the Zen school, brought nirvana back down to earth. The great 2nd-century Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna taught that nirvana is not a different place to be; it is a different way of being here. Life in this world for the unenlightened is samsara, but for the enlightened, life in this same world is nirvana.

• Zen masters call on us to realize the unborn here and now. and they tell us that we can fully do this only if we cease perceiving this world of ceaseless change as one of birth and death.

• rebirth, in Buddhism, is first and foremost moment-to-moment rebirth. each moment of change is, in a sense, the death of an old form and the birth of a new one. The boiling water disappears as water to become steam. a teenage adolescent has to die to be reborn as a young adult, and so on.

• Thich Nhat hanh points out that modern science agrees with

Buddhism in this regard. he quotes the french scientist antoine Lavoisier as saying, “Nothing is created, and nothing is destroyed.” and he remarks that this is just what the heart sutra tells us: “one form of energy can only become another form of energy.”

• yet we constantly suffer from worrying about death while we are alive. We do not simply live here and now, but, haunted by thoughts of our mortality, we run ahead in anticipation of death. The german philosopher Martin heidegger even claims that this anxious anticipation of death is the defining trait of being human.

• But what do religions like Christianity really teach about life and death? Does Christianity simply promise our anxious egos that they can live forever? or, rather, does not its core teaching say that we must die to our egos to be reborn in the eternal life of Christ?

Views on Death and Rebirth

• The idea of an existential or spiritual death and rebirth is not at all foreign to religions such as Christianity. indeed, it is at the very heart of Jesus’s teaching. in the gospel of Matthew, we read: “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” This teaching—that each of us must die to the old adam to be reborn in the true life of Christ—is repeated throughout all four gospels.

• Baptism is, as it were, a ritual drowning of the ego and resurrection of the true self. Perhaps one can even say that in the Christian tradition, Christ, as the incarnation of divine love, is the true self. This seems to be implied when st. Paul famously says, “i have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer i who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

• This core Christian teaching does not seem to be very far from the Zen master Dōgen’s teachings about life, death, and about enlightenment as a matter of “dropping off the body-mind.” Dōgen writes:

When you let go of both your body and your mind, forget them both, and throw yourself into the house of Buddha, and when functioning begins from the side of the Buddha drawing you in to accord with it, then, with no need for any expenditure of either physical or mental effort, you are freed from birth-and-death and become Buddha.

• it has been said that this particular text, and especially this passage, may have been composed by Dōgen for a Pure Land Buddhist rather than a Zen Buddhist audience because its language of letting actions come “from the side of the Buddha” rather than from one’s own efforts resonates with the Pure Land teaching of other-power more than it does with the Zen teaching of self-power. Be that as it may, Zen and Pure Land Buddhism are not as far apart as they are sometimes made out to be.

Conclusion

• The Dominican and german theologian Meister eckhart says that obedience is an imperfect releasement unto god’s will. as long as there is a duality between god and servant, there remains a trace of self-will that resists the one divine will. “Where there are two,” he says, “there is defection.” The purely good man is said to be “so much of one will with god that he wills what god wills and in the way that god wills it.” furthermore, in the final “breakthrough,” according to eckhart, “i stand free of my own will and of the will of god.”

• Ultimately, for eckhart, the complete abandonment of self-will also entails letting go of god’s will. one is then released into the “pure activity” of living “empty and free” and “without why.” in his most radical (and perhaps heretical) teachings, eckhart may be closer to Zen Buddhism than he is to either the orthodox teachings of Christianity or those of Pure Land Buddhism, which both preserve a distinction between the self and the higher or other power that it is called on to serve and be saved by.

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “Naturalness in Zen and shin Buddhism.” habito, Living Zen, Loving God

Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What does Zen mean by the great Death, and why it is necessary to pass through this experience to truly live?

2 how is the idea of a spiritual death and rebirth in Zen comparable to similar ideas in Pure Land Buddhism and Christianity?

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ZEN BEYOND MYSTICISM: EVERYDAY EVEN MIND

LESSON 13

The 14th-century christian mystic Meister eckhart once said, “I pray to god that he may make me free of god.” he also said: “the highest and final letting go, of which humans are

capable, is letting go of god for the sake of god.” Much like Zen kōans, these statements boggle the mind—yet also, for many, inspire the spirit.

Bowing to the Buddha

• The 9th-century Chinese Zen master huangbo taught that “if you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own Mind.” huangbo is thus a strong advocate of what his successor Linji calls “killing the Buddha”—that is, smashing all idols and casting away all objectifications of the Buddha as someone or something other than one’s true self.

• yet at the same time, huangbo was known for having a protruding lump on his forehead from touching his head to the floor so often in his lifelong practice of making prostrations to the Buddha. Before one is enlightened, one bows down to the Buddha because one has not yet realized that one is the Buddha.

• after enlightenment, one bows down to the Buddha because that is still the appropriate thing to do. Not only is it an ongoing reminder to oneself of what one truly is—a Buddha who compassionately bows down in service to everything and everyone—it is also a teaching to those around one of how they too can realize and remember this.

The Disappearing and Reappearing Buddha

• The practice of prostrations was explained by the 14th-century Japanese Zen master Bassui in this manner: “as for the practice of bowing down before the Buddhas, this is merely a way of horizontalizing the mast of ego to realize the Buddhanature.” Bassui implies that once the “mast of ego” has been brought down, the currents of the vast sea of the Buddha-nature, our true self, will naturally take us where we need to go.

• once the mast of ego has been leveled, we no longer see the Buddha as outside us but rather as our true self.

our interconnected individual lives are waves on the great ocean of the Buddha-nature.

• Zen is not atheistic any more than it is theistic. it rejects religious ideas and images no more than it clings to them. We can, after all, become attached to the idea of having no attachments.

• a monk once asked huangbo’s contemporary Zhaozhou: “how about when one arrives carrying not a single thing?” in other words, he was asking: What more is there to do once one has let go of all attachments? Zhaozhou responded: “Cast that down!” he meant to let go of your attachment to the idea of having let go of all attachments.

Everyday Even Mind Is the Way

• When he was a student, Zhaozhou once asked his teacher, Nanquan, about what the way—the dao—is. Nanquan answered that the way is “everyday even mind.”

• The Buddha-mind that is attuned to the way of the world should not be understood as some special state of consciousness, though altered states of consciousness can and do often arise in intense periods of Zen meditation. They can be euphoric, alarming, merely odd, or completely overwhelming.

• even advanced practitioners can mistake them for genuine breakthrough experiences. They are not. They might be caused simply by prolonged sensory or sleep deprivation. or they may be caused by the sudden resurfacing of repressed memories or other unresolved psychological issues. one may need to deal with such psychological issues through therapy rather than meditation, and, if so, this course advises that one do that especially before engaging in the rigors of kōan practice.

• altered states of consciousness and mystical experiences are referred to by the term makyō in Zen, a term that translates as “devilish states.” They can be a good sign that one has attained a certain intensity of concentration, but they are bad insofar as they distract one or fool one into thinking that they are the aim of Zen meditation. They are neither good nor bad. They just happen. While you are meditating, just let them come and let them go.

• The teacher Tanaka hōjū rōshi has said that the Zen expression “everyday even mind” refers to a mind that is placid like a waveless surface of water—a mind that is bright like a spotless mirror.

This mind is able to reflect and respond to the vicissitudes of everyday life with spontaneity, sincerity, and compassion because it is not obsessed with its own agendas.

• in short, by everyday even mind is meant both the equanimity that does not get egoistically attached to or fixated on anything, and the engaged everyday mind that is thereby able to fully and fluidly attend to the infinitely complex and ceaselessly shifting way of the world.

• however, if we try to grasp the everyday even mind, the grasping mind turns it into an object of knowledge. But if we don’t somehow come to know it, then we simply remain mired in mindless ignorance. once again, enlightenment involves a kind of intuitive wisdom rather than an objectifying knowledge.

Everyday Chores are the Way

• Zhaozhou went on to become a famous Zen master, and he sought to return his students again and again to the everyday even mind. in a story that has become a famous kōan, a monk, having just entered Zhaozhou’s monastery, requests instruction.

• in going straight to the master rather than just a senior monk, he is no doubt asking for the highest teaching and probably also wanting to test the master to see if staying in this monastery would be worth his while.

Zhaozhou asks the monk whether he had already eaten breakfast. The monk replies, “yes.” Zhaozhou’s reply was: “Then wash your bowls.”

• on one level, speaking metaphorically as Zen masters often do, Zhaozhou may have been asking whether the monk had already had an initial experience of awakening—he is asking whether he already had his breakthrough breakfast, so to speak.

• if so, then he needs to “wash his bowls”—that is, he needs to wipe his mind clean of the pride of having attained something. at the same time, in a more direct and literal sense, Zhaozhou’s instruction to “wash your bowls” indicates that enlightenment is ultimately to be found right in the midst of the chores of everyday life.

Zen as a Path of Trans-Mysticism

• Zen is not ultimately a matter of mysticism in the sense of a transcendent or otherworldly experience that transports one beyond the humdrum of the mundane world. The path of Zen leads rather to a wholehearted and fully mindful engagement in the extraordinarily ordinary activities of everyday life.

• accordingly, the modern Japanese philosopher and lay Zen master Ueda shizuteru interprets Zen as a path of what he calls non-mysticism. Ueda was also a foremost scholar of Meister eckhart. in fact, he first coined his term non-mysticism while writing on eckhart before he applied it to Zen. although he was initially struck by the profound parallels between the two, in the end, Ueda suggested that Zen goes even further than eckhart does in shedding the residues of an otherworldly mysticism.

• Meanwhile, the term trans-mysticism can be used to explain his illuminating account of the circuitous path of Zen, a path which, in the end, brings us back to everyday life. The path of trans-mysticism entails a double negation—that is, a twofold process of letting go.

• To begin with, one must let go of one’s habitual identification with the self-encapsulated ego. in the end, one must let go of even the mystical experience of union with the divine. it can be helpful to think of this process as taking park in four steps:

1. The first step is the transcendence of the ego, which is common to all forms of religious experience.

2. The second step is the experience of union with the divine. This is often considered to be the hallmark of mystical experience.

3. The third step, the breakthrough beyond mystical union to an absolute nothingness, can be understood as a self-overcoming of mysticism.

4. and the fourth step, the return to egoless activity in midst of the everyday world, completes this self-overcoming process of trans-mysticism.

• The experience of union with the divine is the peak of mysticism, according to Ueda. yet both Meister eckhart and Zen take the ecstatic momentum still further, such that eckhart talks about “breaking through” the persona of god to what he calls the “silent desert of the godhead,” the ineffable origin and ground of reality that lies beyond all distinctions.

• it lies beyond the Trinity and even beyond the distinction between creator and created. since it is utterly beyond or beneath anything that can be defined or described, eckhart sometimes calls this abyssal ground of the godhead nothingness rather than being.

• Zen also prefers to speak of the ultimate ground or nature of reality in terms of nothingness rather than being. Ueda follows other modern Japanese Zen philosophers in speaking of an absolute nothingness that underlies or envelops even the distinction between being and relative nothingness.

• eckhart teaches us to see all things in god or in the light of god. however, Zen ultimately teaches us to drop all references to the Buddha as anything outside of the everyday. indeed, Zen urges us to return from an experience of mystical or meditative oneness with the one to an undistracted mindfulness of the many.

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “Letting go of god for Nothing.”

Ueda, “‘Nothingness’ in Meister eckhart and Zen Buddhism.”

———, “The Zen experience of the Truly Beautiful.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What is meant by the Zen teaching that everyday even mind is the way?

2 Why is it better to speak of Zen as a path of trans-mysticism than as a school of mysticism?

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Engaged Zen: from inner to outer Peace

L14

Zen is not about acquiring supernatural or supernormal 

powers. The way of Zen is instead a matter of putting our 

feet on the ground and awakening, step by step, to the 

present moment—to the wondrousness of mundane matters and 

the weightiness of everyday errands

The Mahayana Affirmation of Lay Life

• one of the distinguishing characteristics of Mahayana Buddhism is that it breaks down the dichotomy between priesthood and laity. an affirmation of the spiritual depth of everyday lay life is exemplified in the legends and sayings of Layman Pang.

• in the early centuries of Buddhism and in so-called hinayana schools such as Theravada, up until very recently, meditation was for the most part practiced exclusively by monks and nuns. Laypeople would practice things like charity, especially in support of monks (and sometimes nuns), as well as morality: right speech, action, and livelihood.

• By doing these supposedly preparatory practices, lay people were thought to accumulate karmic merit, such that they would eventually be reborn as someone ready to leave home and devote themselves to the ultimately liberating practice of meditation. only if one was free from the chores of everyday lay life, it was thought, could one become a serious spiritual practitioner.

• The Mahayana reform movement called this way of thinking into question. The Vimalakirti sutra—a sutra composed around 100 Ce that became one of the most important for the Zen tradition— turns the privileging of priesthood on its head by having a layman be the teacher of monks.

• in the story of this sutra, the layman Vimalakirti has fallen ill, and the Buddha sends his attendant monks to pay their respects and to learn from him. The figure of the layman teacher Vimalakirti epitomizes the idea of the bodhisattva as an enlightened and enlightening being who, out of boundless compassion, remains in the world to work toward liberating all sentient beings from suffering.

• The Buddha sends both his hinayana disciples and his Mahayana bodhisattvas to Vimalakirti to inquire about his illness. Vimalakirti teaches them to free themselves from otherworldly aspirations and to find true spirituality in bodily existence and in the midst of the mundane activities of everyday life.

• a goddess appears in Vimalakirti’s room and teaches shariputra, one of the hinayana disciples, not to denigrate women’s bodies in particular. More than 1,000 years later, Dōgen tells his Zen community that they should “not discriminate between men and women” and that women are just as capable as men of attaining the highest enlightenment and becoming strong guiding teachers.

eight centuries after Dōgen, female Zen masters are finally being recognized, including Westerners such as Charlotte Joko Beck.

Meditation Retreats Are Not Escapes

• Vimalakirti teaches bodhisattvas that they must not think of remaining in the world to liberate others as a sacrifice of their own liberation, since such work in the world is in fact the highest form of liberation. Meditation should not be understood or experienced as an escape from the world. We need to be liberated not from the world of everyday life but rather from the desire to escape it.

• We do need to occasionally retreat from our busy routines and clear our hearts and minds. Meditation retreats are an exceptional way to do this. But we must be careful not to fall into the trap of escapism, especially as one gets past the initial physical and mental difficulties of meditation and begins to experience the deep peace and joy that it brings.

• Vimalakirti takes a step in breaking down the supposed dichotomy between meditation and everyday living when he reprimands shariputra for sitting in quiet meditation under a tree in the forest. “shariputra,” he says, “you should not assume that this sort of sitting is true quiet sitting!” rather, he goes on, “Not rising out of your meditative state of stillness and peace and yet showing yourself in the ceremonies of daily life—that is [true] quiet sitting.”

Being at Peace

• Vimalakirti’s criticism of shariputra’s attachment to practicing quiet and restful meditation in the forest is an important corrective to a tendency to view meditation merely as a means of escaping the noisiness and unrest of city life. Nevertheless, the contemporary Vietnamese Zen master and founder of engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat hanh, recognizes that to truly bring peace to the world, we need to be at peace ourselves.

• for this, most of us need to at least occasionally retreat from the street to the cushion and cloister. in between such retreats, however, to the street we must return, now with more to offer. it is interesting to note that Vimalakirti is presented not just as a layman, but as a rich layman. it is said that he uses his immeasurable riches to bring relief to the poor. on a metaphorical level, it is said that the great wealth possessed by bodhisattvas is the holy Dharma, the teachings that they unstintingly give to others.

Peace and Justice: Which Is Primary?

• The idea that we need to “be peace to bring peace” may cut against the grain of our inclination to not waste time by sitting around and navelgazing but rather to get out there and change the world for the better. of course, it is important to fight for equal rights and justice and to upset the stability of the status quo when the status quo leads to peace for some at the expense of others. The fight for justice, after all, has the aim of eventually establishing a truer and more universal peace.

• yet sometimes we lose sight of that ultimate purpose of our fight, and we end up

COMPLEMENTARY

TEACHINGS

Thich Nhat hanh is among the Zen masters who view the core teachings of Christianity and Buddhism as complementary as long as we look deeply into them and, more importantly, sincerely put them into practice. as the subtitle of one of his books suggests, Jesus and Buddha  wanting retributive justice more than, or even instead of, peaceful coexistence. We want to right the wrongs that have been done to us and to others even more than we want to heal the wounds of the world.

• Bernie glassman is an american Zen master who for decades has pioneered the combination of Zen practice with social activism. on a retreat with glassman, the comparative theologian Paul Knitter confessed to being torn between feeling like he needed to sit in meditation and wanting to get up and go to el salvador to try and help stop the death squads.

• glassman responded, “They are both absolutely necessary.” and then he left Knitter with a kōan-like admonishment: “But you won’t be able to stop the death squads until you realize your oneness with them.” in effect, glassman was echoing Jesus’s core teaching: if we don’t learn to love not just our neighbors and our countrymen but also even our enemies as ourselves, we cannot truly bring peace to the world.

SUGGESTED READING

King, Socially Engaged Buddhism.

Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, chapter 7.

Parallax Press, ed., True Peace Work.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 how does Mahayana Buddhism break down the barrier between retreating to the monastery and engaging in lay life?

2 What does it mean to say that we need to be peace to bring peace?

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Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Distractions

the conclusion of Lesson 14 is a meditation checkup focused on dealing with distractions. to experience it in full, refer to the audio or video lesson. the following tips serve as a summary of the checkup.

Discipling the Mind

• Dealing with distracting thoughts, like dealing with physical discomforts, is an important part of the practice of meditation. These are not prerequisites; they are part and parcel of the practice itself.

• The modern sōtō Zen master shunryu suzuki gives some very helpful advice: every time you catch your mind wandering and bring it back to the practice, this is nourishing your practice. returning again and again from mental tangents is what keeps the wheel of meditation in motion.

• another teaching suzuki rōshi gives in this regard is even deeper and broader. he says that if you want to control your mischievous mind, don’t try to control it. Do the opposite: give it a wide-open space in which to roam.

CHASING DISTRACTIONS

if you chase after distractions or try to chase them off, you will end up just feeding them more energy.

MedItatIon checKuP: deaLIng WIth dIstRactIons

Real Zen for Real Life Course [4][10-11]

 Real Zen for Real Life Course Lecture Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

Course scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LESSON GUIDES
===[1]
Lesson 1 What is Zen? recovering the Beginner’s Mind . . . . . . . . . 3

Lesson 2 The Zen Way to Know and forget Thyself . . . . . . . . . . 10 

Lesson 3 Zen Meditation: Clearing the heart-Mind . . . . . . . . . . 17 

Lesson 4 how to Practice Zen Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 

Lesson 5 The Middle Way of Knowing What suffices . . . . . . . . . 34 

Meditation Checkup: The Middle Way of Meditation . . . . . . . . . . 42 

===[2]

Lesson 6 embracing the impermanence of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 

Lesson 7 The True self is egoless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 

Meditation Checkup: Lead with the Body and Physical stillness . . . . 62 

===[3]

Lesson 8 Loving others as yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 

Lesson 9 Taking Turns as the Center of the Universe . . . . . . . . . 71 

Meditation Checkup: from Mindless reacting to Mindful responding 77 

===[4]

Lesson 10 Who or What is the Buddha? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Lesson 11 Mind is Buddha: if you Meet him, Kill him! . . . . . . . . . 87 

Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Unavoidable Pain . . . . . . . . . . 95
===[5]
Lesson 12 Dying to Live: Buddhism and Christianity . . . . . . . . . 97
Lesson 13 Zen beyond Mysticism: everyday even Mind . . . . . . . .104 

Lesson 14 engaged Zen: from inner to outer Peace . . . . . . . . . 112
Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Distractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 

===[6]

Lesson 15 The Dharma of Karma: We reap What We sow . . . . . . 120
Lesson 16 Zen Morality: follow and Then forget rules . . . . . . . . 127 

Lesson 17 The Zone of Zen: The freedom of No-Mind . . . . . . . . 133
Lesson 18 Zen Lessons from Nature: The giving Leaves . . . . . . . 138 

Meditation Checkup: Three Ways of Breathing in and out . . . . . . .144
===[7]
Lesson 19 Zen art: Cultivating Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 

Lesson 20 Zen and Words: Between silence and speech . . . . . . . 154 

Meditation Checkup: Chanting as a Meditative Practice . . . . . . . .160
===[8]
Lesson 21 Zen and Philosophy: The Kyoto school . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Lesson 22 Just sitting and Working with Kōans . . . . . . . . . . . .168
Meditation Checkup: Walking Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
===[9]
Lesson 23 Death and rebirth: or, Nirvana here and Now . . . . . . 175 

Lesson 24 reviewing the Path of Zen: The oxherding Pictures . . .180 

finding a Zen Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

===

===

MIND IS BUDDHA:

IF YOU MEET HIM, KILL HIM!

LESSON 11

The Buddha is our true self, yet our ignorant egos stand in the way of realizing this. We thus see the Buddha as something outside ourselves, something that we can

believe in or not, and something that we can pray to and serve or not. We may even see the Buddha as something that we can one day become—but not as something that, deep down, we already are. as long as we see the Buddha as something outside ourselves, we can never see into the Buddha as our own true nature. this is why the founder of the Rinzai Zen tradition, the 9th-century chinese Zen master Linji, shockingly teaches: “If you encounter the Buddha, kill the Buddha!”

The True Buddha

• Linji’s point is that the socalled Buddha that one would encounter on the road somewhere—the Buddha that one would see as something or someone outside oneself—is not the real Buddha. in effect, he is telling us to smash all idols of the Buddha.

• The difference between an idol and an icon—that is, the difference between a false substitute and a genuine symbol—is crucial to all religious traditions. Jews and Muslims are stricter than Christians in forbidding all images of god.

• for centuries after the Buddha died, it was forbidden to make images of him. it was not until the 1st century BCe that Buddhists began to make sculptures and other images of the Buddha. They were inspired by greek sculpture and motivated by a compassionate desire to offer people a way to approach truths through beautiful and didactic forms.

• in the BBC documentary The Long Search: The Land of the Disappearing Buddha, the modern Japanese Zen master Ōmori sōgen, after practicing the martial art of sword fighting, bows to an image in an alcove. The narrator asks him, “is that the Buddha you are bowing to?”

• The Zen master answers that it is a form of Buddha, namely Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. he then adds: “When i bow to it, i bow to something in myself. That something i call compassion.” The image outside himself is merely a reminder of what, ultimately, he finds working in and through his own heart.

• The 9th-century Chinese Zen master yantou says, “haven’t you heard that what enters through the gate is not the family treasure?” in other words, whatever comes from the outside is not your true self. Buddha is nothing outside of one’s own heart and mind. one’s true heart-mind is the Buddha.

Buddhas are Unselfconscious

• The Zen master shidō Bunan gives this advice: “When one is compassionate and unaware of it, one is a Buddha.” and Dōgen—a quite philosophical Zen master—tells us that “When Buddhas are truly Buddhas, there is no need for them to be conscious of themselves as Buddhas.” Being self-conscious of oneself as a Buddha is somewhat like saying to oneself at a party, “i am really dancing so well, so natural and free.” That kind of selfconsciousness is a sure way to get out of the groove and step on one’s own feet.

The Zen school has also been called the Buddha-mind school. But what exactly is the Buddhamind that we can awaken to and realize as our true self? The 18th-century Japanese Zen master hakuin refers us to the traditional Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of the four types of wisdom. The Buddha-mind is said to manifest in these four ways:

as “great Perfect Mirror Wisdom, the Universal Nature Wisdom, the

Marvelous observing Wisdom, and the Perfecting-of-action Wisdom.”

• The first of these is the perfectly still, clear, and pure mind attained through deep states of meditation.

• The second wisdom of the Buddha-mind is the ability to see all things equally in this impartial light. all things are interconnected, and each one reflects the whole universe from its own vantage point.

• The third type of wisdom is the ability to discern differences: each thing is an utterly unique focal point of the universe, related to, yet different from, everything else.

• The fourth type of wisdom is the ability to put the awareness of both equality and difference into action.

Nondualism: Neither Idealism nor Materialism

• although it has been called the Buddha-mind school, the philosophy of Zen is neither an idealism nor a realism, neither a mentalism nor a materialism. it is, rather, a nondualism. The modern Zen philosopher Nishitani Keiji tells the story of the 10th-century Zen master fayan Wenyi.

• he was converted from a “consciousness-only” school of Buddhist philosophy to a Zen experience of nondualism when he was asked whether a big rock lying in the garden in front of him was inside or outside of his mind. fayan eventually realized that saying either inside or outside would not do justice to a direct and nondual experience of the rock.

• in such an experience, the rock is neither inside nor outside of the mind; the rock is the mind at that moment. Nishitani concludes that Zen nondualism can be captured no more by a one-sided subjective idealism than by an equally onesided naïve materialism.

• The universe is both mind and matter. Dōgen teaches that “there are two approaches to studying the Buddha Way: to study with the mind and to study with the body.” yet these two paths converge insofar as on the one hand, one discovers that “mountains and rivers, the great earth, the sun, moon and stars are the mind. … walls, tiles, and pebbles are the mind.” on the other hand, one realizes that “the whole world in all ten directions is this true human body.”

The whole truth of this nondual reality cannot be grasped objectively. indeed, such grasping always constricts its object and divorces it from the subject. it can be endlessly analyzed intellectually, but such analysis only breaks it apart into pieces which can never be entirely stitched back together without remainder, at least as long as the subject who is analyzing and reconstructing remains aloof from the object being analyzed and reconstructed.

• instead, holistic awakening is necessary. The practice of zazen is physical as well as psychological. The breath mediates these dimensions of the self as well as the inner and outer dimensions of self and world. Meditating on the breath holistically reminds us of the whole of reality.

What Is the Buddha?

• This lesson concludes with some famous kōans that deal with the question: What is the Buddha? Keep in mind that kōans and commentary on them are not trying to conceptually clarify an already settled doctrine. rather, they repeatedly push you to go one step further on a never-ending journey of deepening and developing experiential wisdom.

• after a practitioner named Mazu had become a Zen master, a monk once asked him, “What is Buddha?” Mazu answered, “Mind is Buddha.” in a comment appended to this kōan, however, the 13th-century Chinese Zen master Wumen chides: “Don’t you know that one has to rinse out his mouth for three days if he has uttered the word ‘Buddha’? if he is a real Zen man, he will stop his ears and rush away when he hears ‘Mind is Buddha.’”

in a sequel kōan in Wumen’s collection The Gateless Barrier, Mazu responds to the same question: What is Buddha? Mazu this time answers, “No mind, no Buddha.” Wumen approves, commenting:

“if you can see into it here, your Zen study has been completed.”

• The modern Japanese Zen master shibayama Zenkei explains: “earlier, [the monk] had come to Master [Mazu] seeking Buddha outside himself, and in order to break through his illusion [Mazu] told him, ‘Mind is Buddha.’ Now that [Mazu] sees that many disciples have become attached to ‘Mind is Buddha’ he says, ‘No mind, no Buddha’ in order to smash and wipe away their attachment to

‘Mind is Buddha.’”

• Mazu himself had clarified his apparently contradictory teachings. he responded to another monk who asked, “Why do you teach that ‘Mind is Buddha’?” Mazu replied, “it is in order to stop a baby crying.” The monk asked, “What is it like when the baby stops crying?” Mazu’s answer was “No mind, no Buddha.”

• one of Mazu’s successors commented, “‘Mind is Buddha’ is the phrase for one who wants medicine while he has no disease. ‘No mind, no Buddha’ is the phrase for one who cannot do away with the medicine when his disease has been cured.”

from the beginning, we are Buddhas. however, not realizing this, we seek the Buddha outside ourselves. The dis-ease we experience is of our own making. and even when we find a good teaching, we turn that medicine into a poison by objectifying the mind and attaching ourselves to the concept of Buddha.

• in conclusion, always keep in mind that the path of Zen proceeds by way of subtraction, not addition. although shopping malls, online markets, and even some temples are filled with trinkets and trophies of addition Zen, real Zen is subtraction Zen. Zen is not about adding new ideas and identities. it is a matter of freeing us from our fixations on the ones we already have.

SUGGESTED READING

addiss, Zen Sourcebook, 35–42, 47–51, and 250–251.

shibayama, The Gateless Barrier, chapters 18, 27, 30, and 33.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What do Zen masters mean when they say that “mind is Buddha”?

2 What does the Zen master Linji mean when he says to kill the Buddha if you encounter him?

Meditation Checkup:

Dealing with Unavoidable Pain

the conclusion of Lesson 11 is a meditation checkup focused on avoiding unavoidable pain. to experience it in full, refer to the audio or video lesson. the following tips serve as a summary of the checkup.

Posture and Bodily Rehabilitation

• Meditation can reveal how much posture matters. good posture improves our mental alertness, our mood, and so much more. sitting on the floor can improve one’s flexibility.

• it can be helpful to think of the practice of meditation as, in part, a practice of bodily rehabilitation. That will likely allow you to experience the physical discomforts involved along the way in a very different light.

• People tend to think of pain as a purely physical sensation. But the mental interpretation of the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of a painful sensation makes a huge difference in how people actually experience it.

• The meditator Drew Leder has explored and explained various valuable methods of dealing with physical pain. These include strategies of transcending as well as befriending the body.

Approaching Pain

• according to one Zen approach, in situations of unavoidable pain, the only way out is in. Like a bear caught in a bear trap, by fighting to escape the inescapable, people merely compound the pain. The only way out of inescapable pain is to go right into it.

MedItatIon checKuP: deaLIng WIth unavoIdaBLe PaIn

Real Zen for Real Life Course [3][8-9]

 Real Zen for Real Life Course Lecture Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

Course scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LESSON GUIDES
===[1]
Lesson 1 What is Zen? recovering the Beginner’s Mind . . . . . . . . . 3

Lesson 2 The Zen Way to Know and forget Thyself . . . . . . . . . . 10 

Lesson 3 Zen Meditation: Clearing the heart-Mind . . . . . . . . . . 17 

Lesson 4 how to Practice Zen Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 

Lesson 5 The Middle Way of Knowing What suffices . . . . . . . . . 34 

Meditation Checkup: The Middle Way of Meditation . . . . . . . . . . 42 

===[2]

Lesson 6 embracing the impermanence of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 

Lesson 7 The True self is egoless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 

Meditation Checkup: Lead with the Body and Physical stillness . . . . 62 

===[3]

Lesson 8 Loving others as yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 

Lesson 9 Taking Turns as the Center of the Universe . . . . . . . . . 71 

Meditation Checkup: from Mindless reacting to Mindful responding 77 

===[4]

Lesson 10 Who or What is the Buddha? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Lesson 11 Mind is Buddha: if you Meet him, Kill him! . . . . . . . . . 87 

Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Unavoidable Pain . . . . . . . . . . 95
===[5]
Lesson 12 Dying to Live: Buddhism and Christianity . . . . . . . . . 97
Lesson 13 Zen beyond Mysticism: everyday even Mind . . . . . . . .104 

Lesson 14 engaged Zen: from inner to outer Peace . . . . . . . . . 112
Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Distractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 

===[6]

Lesson 15 The Dharma of Karma: We reap What We sow . . . . . . 120
Lesson 16 Zen Morality: follow and Then forget rules . . . . . . . . 127 

Lesson 17 The Zone of Zen: The freedom of No-Mind . . . . . . . . 133
Lesson 18 Zen Lessons from Nature: The giving Leaves . . . . . . . 138 

Meditation Checkup: Three Ways of Breathing in and out . . . . . . .144
===[7]
Lesson 19 Zen art: Cultivating Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 

Lesson 20 Zen and Words: Between silence and speech . . . . . . . 154 

Meditation Checkup: Chanting as a Meditative Practice . . . . . . . .160
===[8]
Lesson 21 Zen and Philosophy: The Kyoto school . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Lesson 22 Just sitting and Working with Kōans . . . . . . . . . . . .168
Meditation Checkup: Walking Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
===[9]
Lesson 23 Death and rebirth: or, Nirvana here and Now . . . . . . 175 

Lesson 24 reviewing the Path of Zen: The oxherding Pictures . . .180 

finding a Zen Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

===

LOVING OTHERS AS YOURSELF

LESSON 8

“ove your neighbor as yourself” is one of the Bible’s main teachings. It first appears in Leviticus and is repeated throughout the new testament. In Leviticus, god

commands his people to love immigrants as well as fellow Jews. Jesus goes even further, telling us to love our enemies:

you have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But i tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven.

some have seen this call to “love your enemies” as Jesus’s most innovative as well as most radical teaching. yet scholars have pointed out both biblical and non-biblical precedents. five centuries earlier the Buddha taught boundless compassion and loving-kindness. in the Metta sutta, we read:

as a mother watches over her child, willing to risk her own life to protect her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings, suffusing the whole world with unobstructed loving-kindness.

Based on such teachings of the Buddha, in the tonglen method of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, one cultivates compassion and lovingkindness, beginning with one’s mother and gradually extending to

even those whom one considers to be one’s enemies.Lesson 8 LovIng otheRs as youRseLF

What Did Jesus Mean?

• Like the ethical teaching of the golden rule, the spiritual teaching of overcoming the separation between self and other is not unique to the Buddha and Jesus. five centuries before Jesus, around the same time as the Buddha lived in india, Confucius taught a version of the golden rule in China.

• a millennium after Buddhism was brought to China, the 11th-century neo-Confucian philosopher Cheng hao wrote: “Benevolent people regard heaven, earth, and the myriad things as one body. Nothing is not oneself. if you recognize something as yourself, there are no limits to how far [your compassion] will go.”

• The neo-Confucians adopted the notion of being “of one body” with heaven, earth, and all beings from Zen. and Zen can be said to have gotten the idea in part from the foundational Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, which contains the following lines: “heaven and earth are born together with me, and the ten thousand things and i are one.”

• This idea was introduced into Chinese Buddhist thought in the 4th century by sengzhao, an early Chinese Buddhist philosopher who interpreted Mahayana Buddhist thought in Daoist terms, effectively laying the groundwork for the development of the Zen tradition. he wrote: “heaven and earth and i share the same root. The myriad things and i are of the same body.”

Tat Tvam Asi: You Are Your Neighbor

• in india, the stress on the underlying oneness of all life is found not only in Mahayana Buddhism but also in many ancient texts of hinduism. one of the first Western scholars to learn sanskrit and study the ancient texts of hinduism was Paul Deussen.

• Upon reading the Upanishads, the recorded teachings of the ancient hindu sages, Deussen wrote that the Upanishads contain the “formula” of tat tvam asi, which “gives in three words metaphysics and morals together.” The term tat tvam asi means

“that art thou,” or “you are that.”

• The word that in this usage indicates brahman, the divine source and unity of all things and all people. Deussen reasoned that tat tvam asi gives the answer to the question of why you should love your neighbor. you should do so because “you are your neighbor.”

A Refrain

• Tat tvam asi is a refrain in the lessons the sage Uddalaka gives to his son shvetaketu in the Chandogya Upanishad. Uddalaka uses a number of analogies to get his son to awaken to the divine oneness underlying all the differences in the world. for example, he points out the fact that all the different vessels and figures made out of clay differ only in “name and form,” but at bottom they consist of the same substance.

• Uddalaka does not deny that people and things really do differ in name and form. his point is that, on a deeper level, there is an underlying unity of the universe. it is not enough to see, like a scientist, that all objects are made up of the same interchangeable flux of mass and energy.

The truly enlightening moment comes when we realize the unity of the seer with all that it sees, the unity of subject and object, the unity of the self and the divine ground of reality—in hindu terms, the unity of atman and brahman. (The term atman is the word meaning “self” that the Uddalaka uses.)

Tasting the Oneness of All Life

• in one of Uddalaka’s lessons, he tells his son to get a wide pail of water and to put a lump of salt in it. The next day, after it has dissolved into the water, Uddalaka asks his son if he can see the salt. his son says no. he then asks him to taste the water, and of course he can taste the salt.

• Crucially, Uddalaka asks his son to taste it not just in one place, but in several different places in the pail. it is the same taste everywhere. relevantly, Zen masters talk about the “one taste” of reality and of drinking the water and knowing for oneself whether it is hot or cold. We cannot see the salt of life. We cannot tell whether the water is hot or cold by just looking at it. We have to taste it for ourselves.

• only when we have managed to taste the oneness of all life can we begin to also see it in the midst of all of our myriad differences. only then, says Uddalaka, have we attained that spiritual wisdom in which “we come to know that all of life is one.”

• Notably, the Buddha taught the anatman doctrine. as in english, in indian languages such as sanskrit and Pali, the prefixes a- and an- express a privation or negation. Therefore, for centuries, monks and scholars have tended to distinguish Buddhism from hinduism (or Brahmanism) by contrasting the Buddhist anatman doctrine with the hindu atman metaphysics.

however, the matter is far from this simple. To begin with, there were and are many different hindu schools of philosophy and religion, often with very different understandings of what atman signifies.

• The Buddha was most concerned with refuting the notion of an atman understood as an unchanging and independently existing soul-entity. yet Uddalaka is talking about the self that unites rather than separates us from others. although Uddalaka’s stress on oneness may not allow for the complementary stress on difference we find in Zen, we should recognize a real kinship between his teaching and at least an important aspect of Zen.

• some passages that are clearly reminiscent of Uddalaka’s teaching can be found in The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a Zen classic. in the texts appended to the second and third pictures, these passages can be found:

it is now clear that the many vessels are composed of a single metal, and that the body of the ten thousand things is your self.

hearing the voice, one gains entry and meets the source wherever one looks. … it is like salt in water, or like glue in paint.

Zen Teachings

• Zen stresses the uniqueness and irreplaceable singularity of things, persons, and events at least as much and as often as it does the oneness of everything. Zen teachings agree with the band U2’s lyrics, “We’re one, but we’re not the same.” yet what exactly does this mean?

To begin to answer that crucial question, this lesson turns to a statement by the modern Korean Zen master Kusan sunim, several parts of which could easily be misunderstood. he says that to awaken is to realize that:

This world, mankind, and all the animals are no different from oneself. This is precisely the “great self.” … and as we know that it is not possible to separate any component from the rest of the world, both objects and the relative self cannot really exist. Therefore, the ‘great self’ is precisely ‘no-self.’”

• The paradoxical statement that “the ‘great self’ is precisely ‘noself’” is another way of saying that the true self is egoless. in other words, atman, correctly understood, is anatman because the self that is being negated in the anatman doctrine is the self that sees itself as separate from the rest of the universe. The self that awakens to its unity with the rest of the universe is the true self.

• When Kusan sunim says that “both objects and the relative self cannot really exist,” by “really exist,” he means exist as independent, self-subsisting entities. as long as we think that this is what it means to “really exist,” then nothing really exists. however, we could turn the matter around and say that since no such independently self-subsisting entities exist, this must not be what it means to exist.

To Exist Is to Coexist

• The modern Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat hanh says that we need to revise the definition of the most basic verb in the english dictionary: to be. We may be enthralled by hamlet’s question of “to be or not to be,” but maybe we should question what it means to be in the first place.

Nhat hanh’s suggestion is that, based not only on Buddhist philosophy but also on modern physics, we should redefine being as interbeing. “To be is to interbe,” he proclaims. in more familiar terms, we could say: To exist is to coexist.

• The term interbeing is Nhat hanh’s reformulation of the basic concept of the Buddhist philosophy of interdependent origination. More precisely, interbeing is a translation of a Chinese term, xiang-ji, which means “mutually to be.” in other words, it means that things which may seem to be separate and even opposed to one another in fact mutually belong to one another.

SUGGESTED READING

easwaran, the Upanishads, 176–200.

Loy, Nonduality.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What does Zen mean and what does it not mean when it says that we should realize our oneness with everything?

2 Why does Zen suggest that to exist is to coexist?

===

TAKING TURNS AS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

LESSON 9

Zen stresses not only the ultimate unity of the universe, but also the irreducible singularity of the different beings and events that make up the universe. not only is each person,

each life-stream, unique, but each moment of each life-stream, and each event of interconnection between life streams, is unique. everything—every event of interconnection at every moment—is unique. every event is a unique perspectival expression of the interrelated whole.

Unity in Diversity

• The lesson of multi-perspectival unity in diversity is given most vividly in the example of the jeweled net of indra found in the avatamsaka sutra. The universe is envisioned as a huge net, each knot of which contains a jewel that reflects and is reflected in all the others.

• Dushun, the first patriarch of the huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, a school that greatly influenced Zen, writes: “This imperial net is made all of jewels: because the jewels are clear, they reflect each other’s images, appearing in each other’s reflections upon reflections, ad infinitum.”

• each nondual event of reality holographically mirrors, in its own finite manner and from its own unique perspective, the infinite universe. it is important to bear in mind that, even if each singular event implies and mirrors the whole universe, it does so in an irreducibly unique and unrepeatable manner.

• The Zen masters in the literature of the tradition are a motley crew of unusually distinct characters. and the records of their encounters are filled with stories of playful competition and serious trickery, all for the sake of spurring one another along toward deeper insights into their oneness and their differences— into their unity in diversity.

The Mutual Exchange of Host and Guest

• The Zen phrase “the mutual exchange of host and guest” was taken up by tea masters who say that the point of the tea ceremony is not just for the tea master to be an excellent host to his or her guests. rather, the point is to make the guests feel so at home, so much on the same level, that a free exchange of these roles can take place in sharing and conversing over a bowl of tea.

The philosopher Ueda shizuteru writes that “the free exchange of the role of host is the very core of dialogue.” in a dialogue, sometimes it is proper to speak, while at other times, it is proper to listen. When your conversation partner is either too reticent or too talkative, it’s hard to engage in the give-and-take rhythm of a good conversation. additionally, Ueda writes:

on the ethical plane, the emphasis, obviously, falls on the moment of self-negation when the role of host or master is surrendered to the other. But this does not mean a one-sided sacrifice of self. at bottom it is a question of reciprocal exchange in “giving priority to the other.”

• in other words, in an ethical relation, each person is called on to be other-centered. only when people are willing to hold the

a transcendent theism that portrays god as wholly other and above us is common in the abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and islam. however, there are also other ways in which theologians and mystics in these traditions have understood and experienced god.

• The Zen understanding of ultimate reality is closer to a panentheistic understanding of god. Panentheism understands all reality to exist within a god who is greater than the sum of god’s parts. Panentheism is distinct both from dualistic theism, which maintains the separateness of god and the world, as well as from pantheism, which tends to completely identify god and the world.

• although orthodox Christian theologies have tended to favor a more dualistic theism, there are many Christian theologians, mystics, and philosophers—in ancient and modern times—who have understood god in panentheistic terms. one can find a panentheistic conception of god suggested by many passages of the Bible, such as when Paul affirms the idea that “in him we live and move and have our being.”

• a Zen Buddhist might even say that god is the kenotic or selfemptying core of our being; god is our true self. god is the love that is found within our own hearts, beneath the self-centered passions of the ego.

Waves and Water, Mountains and Earth

• The classic Buddhist metaphor for the relation between the universal Buddha-nature that we all share and the mental and physical traits that distinguish us from one another is that of water and waves. The different waves are always moving, intersecting and influencing one another, sometimes clashing and sometimes dancing together.

at the same time, they are all waves of the same water; they share the same still depths beneath their sometimes beautiful, sometimes violent splashing about on the surface. The water is the waves, yet it also transcends them in their depths.

• To realize oneself as the center of the universe requires, paradoxically, letting go of all self-centeredness. it requires that one recognize that everyone else is also the center of the universe. it requires recognizing that we are each a unique expression of a formless field. as the 15th-century Japanese Zen master ikkyū says, all things and persons come from and return to the formless “original field” of emptiness.

Being the Center of Attention

• The true dynamic of the self, teaches Ueda, entails two kinds of freedom: freedom from the self and freedom for the self. Both of these are realized in and through genuinely dialogical encounters with others. Ueda uses the Zen ideas of host and guest when he says, “The free exchange of the role of host is the very core of dialogue.”

• genuine dialogue—and indeed the manner of being in any relationship that is genuinely mutual—is a matter of the free exchange of the roles of host and guest. in other words, it is a matter of taking turns being the center of the universe.

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “encounter in emptiness.”

Nishitani, “The i-Thou relation in Zen Buddhism.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 how does Zen stress our individuality and uniqueness at the same time as it stresses our unity or oneness?

2 What does it mean to say that we can take turns being the center of the universe?

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Meditation Checkup:

From Mindless Reacting to Mindful Responding

the conclusion of Lesson 9 is a meditation checkup focused on mindfulness. to experience it in full, refer to the audio or video lesson. the following tips serve as a summary of the checkup.

Nonjudgmental Awareness

• The key to the practice of mindfulness is the cultivation of nonjudgmental awareness of what’s going on in the present moment. according to the Buddha’s instructions for mindfulness meditation, after developing a concentrated state of mind by focusing on the sensation of the breath, one dispassionately observes other physical sensations, then feelings, mental states, and finally basic teachings that illuminate our experience of what the self is and what it is not.

• Novice and experienced meditators may on occasion experience rather intense feelings of pain or stiffness in their backs, knees, and other areas of their bodies. Try to patiently and nonjudgmentally attend to such painful sensations without adding excess mental anguish to the physical pain.

• Painful sensations generally cause people to mindlessly react by tensing up physically and mentally, which then leads to a stream of negative thoughts and interpretive evaluations. all of this makes these sensations feel much more painful than they actually are.

MedItatIon checKuP: FRoM MIndLess ReactIng to MIndFuL ResPondIng

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Background on the Name

• Buddha is not a proper name but rather an appellation that means “awakened one” or “enlightened one.” according to all Buddhist traditions, shakyamuni was neither the first nor the last Buddha.

• in a Japanese Zen monastery, such as shōkokuji, the lineage of enlightened teachers is chanted, beginning with six mythical Buddhas who preceded shakyamuni, then proceeding through the names of the indian, Chinese, and Japanese lineage, before ending with the previous Zen master of that particular monastery.

• although one does not typically refer to a living master as a Buddha in the Zen tradition, technically anyone who is fully enlightened is a Buddha. Because all humans are originally endowed with the Buddha-nature, we are all capable of becoming Buddhas. indeed, that is the whole point of Zen practice—to wake up to our true nature and become a Buddha in this very body.

• however, an individual flesh-and-blood person who is fully awakened to their true nature is not the only understanding of the name Buddha. To awaken to one’s Buddha-nature is to awaken to the fact that one’s true self is not confined to the flesh, especially if it is misunderstood to be dualistically cut off from the rest of reality.

The Various Traditions of Buddhism

• after shakyamuni’s death, or parinirvana—his ultimate attainment of final nirvana—in the 5th century BCe, his teachings were passed down orally for several centuries. over time, a schism arose leading to a major split between more conservative groups of Buddhists and more liberal or innovative ones.

• eventually, around the 1st century BCe, a movement that referred to itself as Mahayana, meaning “great Vehicle,” emerged. adherents of Mahayana came to derogatorily refer to the more conservative schools as hinayana, or “Lesser Vehicle.”

• it was thought that whereas adherents of hinayana aspire only to become arhats—accomplished sages who have liberated themselves from samsara—adherents of Mahayana aspire to be bodhisattvas, or enlightening beings who vow to liberate all sentient beings. Keep in mind that this is the Mahayana version of the difference between itself and the schools it calls hinayana.

• The so-called hinayana schools mostly died out, except for the Theravada, or “Doctrine of elders,” school, which still thrives today in sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and elsewhere. The Mahayana traditions spread to and still thrive today in central and eastern asia.

• in Tibet and Bhutan, Tantric or Vajrayana schools took root and flourished. in China, Korea, and Japan, Zen and Pure Land Buddhist schools, among others, developed distinct traditions. Theravada and Mahayana schools coexist in Vietnam.

• along with the arhat versus bodhisattva ideals, another major difference between the so-called hinayana schools and the Mahayana schools concerns their understandings of the name Buddha.

• a bodhisattva is someone who aspires to become or is well on the way to becoming a Buddha. according to the hinayana understanding, only an especially gifted person, and indeed only one such person in an entire eon, is capable of becoming a Buddha. The Mahayana traditions, by contrast, teach that everyone should aspire to eventually become a Buddha, which means that, to begin with, everyone should aspire to become a bodhisattva.

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The Mahayana image of the bodhisattva is that of someone who is on the verge of entering nirvana but who, out of compassion, turns back, forsaking their own complete liberation to work tirelessly on behalf of the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering.

• for the Pure Land Buddhist schools, amitabha (also known by the Japanese name amida) only became a Buddha on the condition that it would enable him to most

The Three Bodies of the Buddha

• relevant here is the Mahayana doctrine of the trikaya, or “three bodies,” of the Buddha: the nirmanakaya (or manifestation body), the sambhogakaya (or enjoyment body), and the dharmakaya or Truth Body of the Buddha. only the first of these three bodies, the nirmanakaya, refers to a flesh-and-blood body.

• The prime example of a nirmanakaya is shakyamuni Buddha. such an enlightened person is seen as a manifestation of the wisdom, compassion, and other virtues of the universal Buddha-nature.

• hinayana Buddhist schools also developed a two-body doctrine to explain the difference between the mortal flesh and blood of shakyamuni Buddha and the immortal virtues and truth or dharma to which he awakened. When they depict the Buddha in a statue, the physical form represents his rupakaya (or form body). The sometimes enormous size of the statue and the special marks, like long earlobes and the protrusion on the crown of his head, signify the virtues and verities of his dharmakaya (truth body).

• Meanwhile, a sambhogakaya is the celestial embodiment of a Buddha who over eons has accumulated an enormous surplus of karmic merit and who is able to aid others in overcoming obstacles on their way to enlightenment. his saving graces are enjoyed by earthly bodhisattvas through their meditative practices of visualization. Those who have faith in his grace are directly transported to his Pure Land after death.

Amida Buddha and the Pure Land

• The most famous sambhogakaya is amitabha—that is, amida Buddha. as the literal version of the story goes, a bodhisattva named Dharmakara became amida Buddha through eons

of spiritual practice. epitomizing the bodhisattva spirit of compassion, Dharmakara vowed from the beginning not to become a Buddha unless and until it meant that he could save anyone who sincerely called on his name.

• he achieved this, it is said, and he now sends down into the world his rays of light—beams of wisdom and compassion—from his Pure Land. insofar as we call on his name and utterly rely on his grace or “other-power,” we can be reborn in this paradise.

• yet the Pure Land is not simply a paradise to be enjoyed. rather, it is a land that is free of all the physical and psychological obstacles to attaining enlightenment and becoming a Buddha ourselves. in the Pure Land one can, for example, hear Buddhist teachings whenever one wishes and understand them without difficulty. in short, amida Buddha’s Pure Land is an optimal training ground for people to quickly and easily become Buddhas.

Merit Transfer, Other-Power, and Pure Land

• The idea of merit transfer was very important for the development of Mahayana Buddhism. in the beginning it was thought that by doing good deeds and spiritual practices, one could either enjoy the fruit of this good karma in this life, or one could save up this merit and spend it on attaining a better rebirth for one’s next life.

• early on, the idea developed that one could also dedicate one’s karmic merit to someone else, with an example being to assist a deceased loved one to attain a better rebirth. as with other teachings, Mahayana Buddhists radicalized and universalized the idea of merit transfer. The scholar Paul Williams writes that “in [the case of] Māhāyana … merit transference is always for the benefit of all sentient beings, usually in order that they may all attain perfect enlightenment.”

• This radicalized and universalized idea of merit transfer leads to the idea of a Buddha working on behalf of all sentient beings by way of establishing a Buddha Land or Pure Land. according to the earliest recorded teachings maintained by the hinayana schools, shakyamuni Buddha claimed to be nothing more than a person who had awakened to what it really means to be a person.

• he can teach us to do the same, but in the end, we have to do our own work. We have to study, live an ethical life, and meditate on our own, by means of our own effort. No one can do these things for us.

• By contrast, the Mahayana tradition of Pure Land Buddhism says that you can reach nirvana by taking a piggyback ride on the broad shoulders, the great Vehicle, of amida Buddha. indeed, according to shinran, the only way anyone has ever been able to get to nirvana is by the grace, the other-power, of amida Buddha.

• This is reminiscent of a Christian story about a man who, before he found Christ, always felt like he was walking alone, leaving only one set of footprints in the sand. after he found Christ, he always felt like there were two sets of footprints; he felt that Christ was his constant companion on every step of the journey of his life.

• But then, he fell on hard times, losing his job, his health, and his loved ones. Looking down, wondering how he could continue to keep walking, he again saw only one set of footprints. Why, he cried out, had Christ left him alone when he needed him most?

• however, then he heard an inner voice: “i have not left you alone, i am carrying you.” This Christian story about relying on a higher power to carry us through the lows of this life resonates deeply with Pure Land Buddhism.

The Truth Body of the Buddha

• Zen Buddhists do not usually speak of other-power, nor do they think of the Buddha in terms of a celestial sambhogakaya. it could be said that Zen Buddhists rely on self-power, but, unlike the Pure Land point of view, they do not think of this self-power as a form of ego-power.

• rather, they think of it as the power that naturally emanates from the true self, not as the willful force of the delusive ego. This true self is neither outside oneself nor limited to the borders of our physical bodies or mental processes. The true self is our Buddhanature. in other words, the dharmakaya of the Buddha—the ultimate truth of who and what the Buddha is—is the ultimate truth of who and what we are.

SUGGESTED READING AND VIEWING

BBC, The Long Search: The Land of the Disappearing Buddha.

harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism.

Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What are the three bodies of the Buddha, and how does this compare to the Christian idea of the Trinity?

2 Who is amida Buddha for Pure Land Buddhists? how does Zen understand the ultimate sense of the Buddha to be the true self rather than either a historical person or a transcendent savior?

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