Real Zen for Real Life Course [8][21-22]

 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
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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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ZEN AND PHILOSOPHY:  THE KYOTO SCHOOL

LESSON 21

This lesson focuses on the relation between Zen and 

philosophy. By the time Zen started developing in China 

in the 6th century, Chinese Buddhists had already largely 

mastered the complex philosophies of the Buddhist schools that 

had been imported from India starting some 500 years earlier. 

Chinese Buddhists had even started developing some of their own 

philosophical schools, such as the Huayan school.

Zen Practice and Intellection

• it is sometimes said that huayan provides the philosophical theory for Zen practice. however, Zen does not understand itself to be simply the practical application of a theory. for Zen, this would be to put the cognitive cart before the holistic horse.

• abstract theory is seen as derivative of concrete practice, not the other way around. accordingly, for centuries Zen has emphasized embodied-spiritual practice over merely cerebral intellection. at times, however, this emphasis has unfortunately derailed the holistic path of Zen into the muddy waters of anti-intellectualism.

D. T. Suzuki and the Kyoto School

• More than anyone else, D. T. suzuki is responsible for having introduced Zen to america and the rest of the world over the course of his long and productive life. his writings on Zen span from the 1910s to the 1960s.

• especially in his earlier works, he often stressed the need to go beyond, or dig down beneath, cerebral intellection. suzuki viewed the intellect as subordinate to, or rather as lying on the surface of something deeper.

• however, suzuki increasingly stressed the need to develop what he called a “Zen thought” that would philosophically express “Zen experience.” as richard Jaffe points out, “suzuki was very deliberate in his project to create a modern Zen, or as he put it, ‘to elucidate its ideas using modern intellectual methods.’”

• suzuki even stressed the need to develop a “logic” of Zen, and he praised his lifelong friend and the founder of the Kyoto school, Nishida Kitarō, for his great achievements in this regard.

• The Kyoto school is a group of 20th- and 21st-century Japanese philosophers who have sought to bring Zen and Pure Land Buddhism into dialogue with Western philosophy and religion. Nishida’s most prominent successor was Nishitani Keiji, and Nishitani’s most prominent successor was Ueda shizuteru.

• all three of them were committed Zen practitioners as well as academic philosophers. Both Nishitani and Ueda were recognized as lay rinzai Zen masters. other philosophers associated with the Kyoto school who were also accomplished Zen practitioners and teachers include hisamatsu shin’ichi and abe Masao (known in the West as Masao abe). according to Ueda and other Kyoto school philosophers, Zen and philosophy should be related but not conflated.

Nishida’s Early Philosophy

• in the preface to his first book, An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida writes that, for him, “religion … constitutes the consummation of philosophy.” The book culminates with a section on religion in which he develops a dialectical and panentheistic conception of god.

• yet throughout, Nishida understands his method to be thoroughly philosophical. he sometimes even calls his method thoroughly scientific, not only because it is rational but also because he attempts to base his reflections purely on unadulterated empirical evidence.

• for Nishida, scientific accounts of reality are true, but they are not the whole truth. science does not even give us the whole truth of our experience of nature. Nishida thought that spirit

and nature—or mind and matter—are two halves of a whole, and that we only grasp half of reality if we separate one from the other.

Nishida’s View of God

• in An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida says that god is “the unifier of pure experience that envelops the universe.” The more we get back in touch with our own pure experience at each moment of our lives, the more we get back in touch with god as “an infinite unifying power that functions directly and spontaneously from within each individual.”

• Nishida does not look for the most profound religiosity in supernatural miracles. Like einstein, he thinks that the laws of nature are themselves god’s revelation, so there is no need for them to be broken for god to be revealed. rather, Nishida finds the most profound religiosity in a trans-mystical experience of the here and now, the experience of what he later calls “radical everydayness.”

• although Nishida’s view of god or Buddha—names which he often uses interchangeably—might seem closer to a monistic pantheism than to a dualistic theism, Nishida rejects both of these labels. in his last essay, written just before his death in 1945, he says that his understanding of the relation between god, the world, and the self could perhaps be understood in terms of “panentheism,” meaning not simply that “all is god” but rather that “all is in god.”

• however, Nishida goes on to say that even panentheism falls short of expressing the dynamically dialectical relation between god and the self. That relation ultimately occurs through what he calls “inverse correspondence,” which means that god and the self are both self-negating. god and the self enter into one another by way of negating or emptying themselves.

Stepping Back through Nihilism

• Nishida’s successor Nishitani was the first Kyoto school philosopher to take seriously the problem of nihilism. Like other thinkers, Nishitani associates the rise of modern nihilism with the ramifications of Nietzsche’s horrifying—yet also, Nietzsche thought, potentially liberating—proclamation that “god is dead.”

• Today, we must confront the swelling sense that god does not exist at all. atheists may celebrate the demise of belief in god, while theists may bemoan it. But everyone must come to grips with the fact that modern science and the materialism of secular society have at least decentered the role of religion for many in the modern world.

• Nishitani views the crisis of nihilism as an opportunity to rediscover a more profound and more genuine religiosity, which many people would call spirituality. Nishitani claims that we must not flee from nihilism, closing our eyes and ears and just shouting our dogmatic beliefs to ourselves and at others.

• rather, we must go all the way through the bottom of nihilism. only if we “overcome nihilism by way of passing through nihilism,” he suggests, can we awaken to the true nature and home-ground of our existence.

• Nishitani speaks of this home-ground in Zen Buddhist terms as “the field of emptiness.” insofar as we think of the self and other beings as independent and unchanging substances, we are bound to experience the relative nothingness of nihilism as a threat to everything we believe we are and everything we believe we possess. however, if we “trans-descend” from what Nishitani calls the “field of being” through the “field of nihility” all the way to the “field of emptiness,” we can discover a creative and encompassing place of absolute nothingness of which Nishida spoke.

• in an essay titled “The issue of Practice,” Nishitani writes that the modern world has lost an understanding of the importance of holistic ways of practice in which the whole person—body, heart, mind, and spirit—are engaged and educated. We cannot, as it were, simply think our way through nihilism. The step back through nihilism needs to be done with the entirety of the self.

• Nishitani suggests that while the Japanese and other easterners have much to learn from the Western intellectual way of philosophical thinking, Westerners have much to learn from eastern ways of holistic practice. These ways include Zen meditation.

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “Commuting Between Zen and Philosophy.” Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good.

Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What is the Kyoto school, and how have some of its members connected the practice of Zen to the study of Western philosophy and religion?

2 What does Nishida Kitarō mean by pure experience and the place of absolute nothingness?

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JUST SITTING AND 

WORKING WITH KŌANS

LESSON 22

The first part of this lesson discusses Dōgen’s teachings 

regarding the strikingly and stringently simple method of 

shikantaza, which means “just sitting.” Then, the lesson 

moves on to look at Hakuin’s and other Zen masters’ teachings 

regarding the method of kōan practice. 

Just Sitting and Nonthinking

• Dōgen highly valued kōans. Legend has it that the night before returning to Japan from China, he copied by hand the entire text of The Blue Cliff Record. he also assembled his own collection of 300 kōans, and many of Dōgen’s own writings consist of insightful and creative commentaries on kōan literature.

• however, despite his prolific and profound commentaries on kōans, Dōgen expressly discourages “looking at phrases” while sitting in zazen. as one settles into “steady, immovable sitting,” rather than focus on the central term or phrase of a kōan, Dōgen instructs us to: “Think of notthinking. how do you think of not-thinking? Nonthinking.” These pithy and perplexing words are taken from a dialogue between the 8thcentury Chinese Zen master yaoshan and a monk.

THE KEISAKU

The silence and stillness of hours of meditation is occasionally broken by the sharp sound of the keisaku, which is sometimes called in english the warning stick or encouragement stick. The slaps on the back—which sound more painful than they really are—can have three different purposes. To begin with, they can be disciplinary. second, the slaps on the back are meant to help keep one alert and focused. finally, the slaps can be used to assist someone who appears to be on the brink of a breakthrough. The slaps are then intended and experienced as an encouragement to push onward. all three of these uses of the keisaku require great attentiveness and maturity on the part of the person wielding the stick, and so only advanced practitioners and teachers are allowed to act as monitors during zazen.

• The kind of thinking we are instructed not to engage in during zazen is the accustomed habit of the mind to look away from itself and toward things. The mind represents these things as objects. The habitually egocentric mind then weighs, measures, calculates, and evaluates these objects according to our interests, preferences, and plans.

• The question is this: how do we let go of this constant stream of egocentric, calculative thinking? Dōgen tells us to “just sit”— shikantaza. Just sitting entails neither chasing after thoughts nor chasing them off. rather, one should just let passing sensations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings come and go as they will. over time, they will naturally cease to command one’s attention.

• Nonthinking is not opposed to thinking. Zen is sometimes mistaken—by misguided proponents as well as mistaken opponents—as entailing and even promoting an antiintellectualism. Dōgen himself was a remarkably creative and critical thinker as well as an avid reader and prolific writer of texts, even though he advocated regularly stepping back from these activities to just sit at rest in the open awareness of nonthinking.

Just Sitting and Kōan Practice

• some rinzai Zen masters have expressed appreciation for shikantaza as the highest and hardest kōan. it gives you nothing in particular to focus on. The point of shikantaza is not to become enlightened but rather to realize that you already are enlightened. you do not need to become a Buddha because you already are one. however, you do need to realize this fact; you do need to awaken to your original Buddha-nature.

• if shikantaza is the slow-simmer approach to this realization, kōan practice is the pressurecooker approach. in both approaches, trust in the reality of one’s Buddha-nature leads to the confidence that arises from actually awakening to it. Initial-Barrier Kōans

• This lesson now turns to what

THE RIGHT TEACHER

if and when you ever become interested in engaging in kōan practice, you will need to find a Zen teacher to work with. he or she must be an authorized teacher whose personality and style are a good fit for you.

rinzai Zen masters like hakuin have had to say about working on a kōan, including the initial-barrier kōans used in rinzai training. hakuin formulated his own initial-barrier kōan: “What is the sound of one hand?” We know the clapping sound that two hands can make, but what sound does one hand make?

• The answer is not to slap one’s hand on the table or to snap one’s fingers. Kōans are not gamey riddles, and kōan practice is no joke. it is, physically and psychologically, an extremely demanding endeavor. indeed, spiritually speaking, it must become a matter of life and death.

• initial-barrier kōans prod one to dig down beneath all dualities. The one hand is the absolute oneness that embraces and pervades all dualities and differences. it is the absolute nonduality that does not even stand over against dualities, which would, after all, just create one more meta-duality. it is the one dimension, as it were, in which all differences exist.

• To awaken to it, one needs to put all dualistic intellection aside. and yet, when one awakens to it, one realizes that it does not annihilate differences or compete with them in any way. it is rather what lets them be in the first place.

The Rinzai Zen Kōan Curriculum

• While the initial barrier-kōans are crucial, they are but a first step on the very long road of an extensive kōan curriculum in rinzai Zen. after one has passed an initial barrier kōan, one is assigned many sassho. This term is often loosely translated as “checking questions,” but these are more similar to follow-up kōans in their own right.

• early kōans push one to go beyond and beneath words and doctrines to experience more directly the nondual reality they are meant to express. it is like being asked to actually taste a food rather than just read about how it tastes. Later kōans are often more concerned with cultivating an experiential understanding of the so-called dharma reason of Zen teachings. here, the intellect is reengaged, yet in a manner that allows it to remain rooted in and inseparable from the whole of one’s awakened self.

SUGGESTED READING

Loori, The Art of Just Sitting.

———, Sitting with Koans.

Miura and sasaki, The Zen Koan.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What is meant by nonthinking, and why is it not just a matter of zoning out or a state of unconsciousness?

2 What is a kōan, and what is one supposed to do with it?

Meditation Checkup: Walking Meditation

the conclusion of Lesson 22 is a meditation checkup that introduces walking meditation, which is known as kinhin in Japanese. the following information serves as a summary of the checkup. to experience it in full, refer to the audio or video lesson.

BACKGROUND ON KINHIN

Kinhin is more than just a break from sitting. in fact, walking meditation should be understood as a gateway into the most difficult and important practice of all—the practice of daily life. Kinhin is a matter of taking baby steps toward bringing the energized stillness and peaceful clarity awakened and cultivated in zazen into all the activities of our lives.

Tips for Kinhin

• Walking is one of the most common and supposedly simple movements we do. however, when you do it mindfully, you will discover its almost infinite complexity. at first, that discovery can also make it strangely difficult. suddenly you may feel clumsy; it may feel surprisingly unnatural. it will take some practice to be able to walk fully attentively yet utterly naturally.

• The other problem you may face during walking meditation is that the monkey-mind easily gets bored and tries to stir up trouble. Walking slowly around a room is not enough stimulation for it. it will demand some juicier mind candy than just walking slowly around a room.

MedItatIon checKuP: WaLKIng MedItatIon

• Kinhin is still a cold turkey approach to weaning ourselves off our mind-candy addiction. The point is to return to the present, not to exchange a worldly distraction for a spiritual one.

• This cold turkey approach can be tough. it is hard not to start daydreaming about dinner or start glancing at something or someone across the room. The following three-stage method can help.

• stage 1: as you walk, take each step as if it were the very first step you have ever taken in your life. imagine you had never— until right now—been able to walk. With each brand new step, completely forget about the previous step and take this one as if it were your very first. Be full of joyful awareness of just how wonderful it feels to actually walk. Practice this for five minutes or more.

• stage 2: as you walk, take each step as if it were the very last step you’ll ever take. reversing the last story, imagine that you are about to lose your ability to walk. fully take it in each step, and fully appreciate the experience. Practice this for five minutes or more.

• stage 3: as you walk, take each step as if it were both the first step you’ve ever taken and the last step you’ll ever take. in truth, each step is the first and last of its exact kind. every step is unique. Practice this for at least five minutes or for however long you can attentively sustain it.

• having practiced this three-stage method, you will be better prepared to walk out of the meditation hall into the wonder of the world. Taking each step as if it were your first and last is walking meditation.

MedItatIon checKuP: WaLKIng MedItatIon