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
===[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

===

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?

===

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?

===

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?

===

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?

====

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.