Real Zen for Real Life Course [9][23-24]

 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

===

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DEATH AND REBIRTH: OR, NIRVANA HERE AND NOW

LESSON 23

Death is, quite literally, the business of Buddhist temples in 

Japan, including Zen temples. Most of their income comes 

from conducting funerals and memorial services. Yet 

these services do provide real comfort and community to grieving 

families. Doctrinally speaking, they are thought to transfer 

karmic merit to the departed person so that he or she goes to 

a better place. 

The Six Realms

• Traditionally in Buddhism, and still in many Buddhist countries, the better place one goes to after death has been thought of as one of the higher of the six realms of rebirth in samsara. The higher three realms are those of human beings, heavenly beings, and fighting spirits. The lower three realms are those of animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings.

Rebirths

• Japanese Buddhists use a term, reikon, that can be translated as the “soul” of the deceased person. however, if pressed, a Japanese Buddhist priest would say that this does not refer to an independent and unchanging entity.

for Buddhists, the rebirth that is thought to happen after death is not totally unlike the constant rebirth people undergo during this life. This moment-to-moment rebirth is going on all the time.

• a person’s personality is constantly developing along with thoughts and emotions, just as the cells of the person’s body are constantly dying off and being replaced. one’s childhood self has to disappear for his or her adult self to come into existence.

• Changes can be looked at from the perspective of discontinuity or from the perspective of continuity. if we focus on the greatest ruptures of discontinuity, we can speak of physical, psychological, or spiritual death. if we turn our attention to their aspects of continuity, we can also speak of rebirth.

• Undergoing a spiritual death and rebirth is at the heart of all the great religious traditions. it is the only way to enter the kingdom of heaven in Christianity, and it is the only way to resolve the one great matter of life and death here on earth for Zen Buddhists.

Transmigration through the Six Realms

• after the demise of the physical form of the body, Buddhists have traditionally thought that the bundle of the other four aggregates—the collection of psychological factors that makes up the mental and emotional aspects of our life-stream—eventually finds an appropriate new physical body in which to be reincarnated.

Usually, this rebirth as reincarnation is determined by karma.

• Karma can be good or bad, but, insofar as karma is at bottom based on ignorance and egoistic craving, it propels one to be reborn in one of the six realms of rebirth in samsara. even a great philanthropist, insofar as he or she gives out of a desire to be recognized as a giver, will at best be reborn as a heavenly being, which is merely the happiest form of life in samsara.

enlightened beings—Buddhas and bodhisattvas—are no longer driven by karma. however, they can voluntarily choose to be reborn in samsara out of the compassionate desire to endlessly work on behalf of liberating all sentient beings from suffering.

Zen Masters and Hell

• “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” according to Dante, those words are written over the gates of hell. Zen masters, by contrast, have high hopes for going to hell. for them, out of bottomless compassion, we should want to go to hell.

• When Zen masters do talk about life after death, they generally talk in parables about being reborn wherever they can be of the most service. The 9th-century Chinese Zen master Zhaozhou said that, when he dies, he “will be the first to fall to hell.” an astonished monk asked, “how can it be that such a great priest as you should fall to hell ahead of us all?” Zhaozhou responded, “Who will save you when you fall to hell unless i arrive there first and wait for you?”

A ZEN MASTER’S

CONFESSION

We need to be reminded of our impermanence, and we need to face up to our mortality, not primarily so that we can prepare for the afterlife but so that we can undergo the great spiritual death that allows us to live fully here and now.

When Confucius was asked about death, he replied: “We do not yet understand life—how could we possibly understand death?” Like the Buddha and Confucius, when asked questions about death, Zen masters are likely to turn the questioner’s attention back to life.

When Zhaozhou’s teacher, Nanquan, was asked by a disciple where he will go after he dies, he responded: “i am going to the foot of the hill to be reborn as an ox,” presumably so that he could work tirelessly in the fields in service of the poor farmers. These stories stress the central message of Mahayana Buddhism:

the vow to work on behalf of liberating all sentient beings from suffering.

SUGGESTED READING

halifax, Being with Dying. hoffmann, Japanese Death Poems.

ray, “rebirth in the Buddhist Tradition.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 What does Zen teach about death and the afterlife?

2 how does Zen suggest that nirvana is to be found in the here and now?====

===

REVIEWING THE PATH OF ZEN:

THE OXHERDING PICTURES

LESSON 24

This lesson comments on a classic and beloved text of the Zen tradition: the ten oxherding Pictures. the text consists of a set of pictures together with a preface and

poem appended to each one. the original pictures and poems were composed by the 12th-century chinese Zen master Kuoan. the prefaces were written by Kuoan’s successor Ziyuan. Kuoan’s original pictures no longer exist, but over the centuries, many artists have recreated them. the most famous rendition is that of the 15th-century Japanese artist shūbun, who established the Japanese tradition of ink painting.

Overview of the Pictures

• in Kuoan’s pictures, the biggest breakthrough comes in picture 8, when everything suddenly disappears, leaving only an empty circle. Before that, in picture 7, the ox suddenly disappears. The ox did not come on the scene until picture 3, which depicts the first breakthrough moment. This means that the ox is actually pictured in only four of the pictures.

• The quest the oxherder embarks on in picture 1 is a search for the true self; it is a journey of self-realization. The oxherder is the seeking self, while the ox is the self that is sought. in other words, the deluded self wants to awaken to its true self, and so sets out in search of it.

• The oxherder finds footprints of the ox in picture 2, and then first catches a glimpse of it in picture 3. in the next three pictures, he catches, tames, and rides the ox home.

Pictures 1 and 2

• The spiritual path in general, and the path of Zen in particular, begins with waking up to the problem that we do not truly know ourselves. in his preface to the first picture, Ziyuan tells us that we have turned our backs on our own true self; we have covered over our own originally enlightened mind.

in the first picture, the oxherder realizes that he has lost the ox; the deluded self realizes that he is deluded. he is still lost, but since now he knows that he is lost, he has become a seeker. Nevertheless, although he has now set out in search of the ox, he does not yet know where to search.

• in Ziyuan’s preface to the second picture, we read: “relying on the sutras, you understand the principles; by studying the teachings, you come to know the traces left behind.” That refers to traces left behind by those who have awakened to the true self. These traces are tracks that tell you which way to go on the path toward self-awakening.

• additionally, Ziyuan says that at this stage, the oxherder is still not able to “distinguish right from wrong” or to “differentiate true and false.” This suggests that an intellectual understanding of the unity of the universe all too easily falls into a one-sided grasp of oneness.

Picture 3

• initial awakening—one’s first experience of kenshō, or seeing into the true nature of the self—takes place in picture 3, which shows the oxherder catching a glimpse of the ox. When the oxherder first lays eyes on his lost ox, he is overjoyed.

still, at this stage, there has been only a glimpse of the true self. having found the ox, the oxherder must now catch and tame it.

Pictures 4–6

• The oxherder catches hold of the ox in picture 4, but now a struggle is taking place. Ziyuan’s preface states: “More stubborn than

ever and still wild, if you wish to tame it you must use your whip.”

• The philosopher Ueda says that although the text attributes stubbornness and wildness to the ox, these are characteristics of the oxherder at this stage. in fact, Ueda says it is the ox that appears to be pulling the oxherder onto the homeward bound path of awakening.

• however, there is another compelling interpretation given by the modern Chinese Zen master sheng-yen. he suggests that “the ox represents the mind and its activities.” as a matter of fact, the ox is referred to in many commentaries as the “ox-mind,” and it is not a stretch to understand this to mean the mind in all its unenlightened as well as enlightened activities.

Kuoan’s version of the Ten oxherding Pictures has the great merit of clearly depicting both the gradual and sudden aspects of training and awakening. accordingly, the ambiguity of the symbolism of the ox in Kuoan’s pictures can be understood as intentional. This intentional ambiguity is especially at play in the middle stages of the path—the stages depicted in pictures 4, 5, and 6—where it appears that the practitioner is both taming and being tamed by the ox.

• in picture 4, we witness an intensely ambivalent struggle. in picture 5, the oxherder is leading the now docile ox. yet in picture 6, he is leisurely riding on the back of the ox, playing a tune and letting the ox take him wherever he wishes. effort is giving way to effortlessness as practice becomes a way of life.

• in the many years it generally takes a Zen practitioner to go from stage 4 to stage 6, the great effort of practicing to become enlightened transforms into the wondrously effortless practice of enlightenment. This enlightened effortlessness is not a matter of lazily zoning out but rather a matter of living fully engaged in the zone of Zen.

Picture 7

• a major—though still not complete—breakthrough happens

in picture 7, which is entitled Ox Forgotten, Self Remains. in this picture, the ox has disappeared, and the oxherder sits alone by a mountain hut, at peace with himself and the world.

Ziyuan’s preface to this picture begins with the words: “The Truth is not two; the ox was just posited as a provisional topic.” The truth—the dharma—

is the ultimate truth about reality that Buddhist teachings are meant to express. for Zen, this is the true self—that is, the self that understands itself to exist as a part of the worldwide web of reality.

• one can imagine the story ending with picture 7. indeed, some spiritual paths do end with a sage at peace with himself on a mountaintop. such solitary sages leave the world behind or, at least, leave it as it is. for Zen, this is to have climbed to the top of a 100-foot pole, and yet to be unable or unwilling to leap off—to leap, that is, back into the world filled with dust as well as flowers.

Picture 8

• Picture 8 is entitled Person and Ox Both Forgotten. it is simply an empty circle, not a picture of anything at all. it is a great negation, an absolute emptying, of all forms.

it is said that there are 100 ways to draw this circle and countless ways to understand it. While the ways to understand the circle may be infinite, one of those ways is to understand it as a symbol of infinity. here, that means infinite possibility, a formlessness pregnant with all possible forms.

• The empty circle is often drawn so as to leave it open, reminding us that it symbolizes a dynamic way that never reaches a static completion. The empty circle can be understood and experienced as the creative source—as well as the peacefully encompassing abode—of all the multifarious things we experience.

Picture 9

• 

in picture 7 the seeker found his higher, truer self. in picture 8, even that needed to be let go of. Picture 9, which simply depicts a mountain stream flowing under a tree in bloom—without

an objectified self in sight—shows how it is easiest to do this in nature.

• it is relatively easy to let beautiful flowers and meandering brooks show themselves in all their natural splendor without getting in their way. as the open heart-mind of the empty circle, the true self makes room for the wonders of nature to manifest as they present themselves. alas, it is much harder to be enlightened and to enlighten others amid the hustle and bustle of the human world.

Picture 10

• Picture 10 shows an old sage coming down from the mountain, returning to the marketplace, and greeting a young man. it is a Zen depiction of the bodhisattva returning to the world to work on behalf of liberating and enlightening others.

• The figure with outstretched hands who appears in this last picture is a traditional forerunner not only of the modern proponents of engaged Buddhism but of all those persons, past and present, who bring the peace they have found to others.

• The long journey of the oxherder had reached a premature peak when he, no longer needing the provisional symbol of the ox, become a solitary sage on a mountaintop. in the end, however, his journey leads to a sacrifice of that solitude to bring solace to others.

• The enlightened and enlightening figure in picture 10 is traditionally associated with Budai, a 10th-century Chinese Zen monk who was nicknamed the Laughing Buddha. as legend has it, Budai was a wandering monk who would give away anything that was given to him.

• The Budai-like figure in picture 10 is shown with outstretched hands, offering gifts to the young boy in the scene—including, of course, the greatest gift of pointing the boy down the pathway toward his own enlightening journey. he is, as it were, passing the enlightening torch to the next generation of oxherder.

SUGGESTED READING

Loori, Riding the Ox Home. Ueda, “emptiness and fullness.” yamada, Lectures on The Ten Oxherding Pictures.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 if the ox that the boy is searching for represents the true self, why does it disappear in the last four pictures?

2 Who is the older man in the last picture, and why does the story end with him coming down from the mountain and entering the city?

Finding a Zen Community

this course concludes with tips on finding a Zen center near your home. a teacher and a community are invaluable aids to any meditator and student of Zen, and they are ultimately necessary for any committed Zen practitioner.

Three Things to Think About

• When checking out a Zen center, think about three things: the teacher, the school, and the community. These three attempt to emulate and embody what in Buddhism are called the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.

• To be a Buddhist means to take refuge in these three jewels. To take refuge in them means that they are your go-to resources for understanding what life is about and how to best live it. They are what you trust.

• at a Zen center, the teacher, the teachings and practices of the school he or she represents, and the community of practitioners that gather there together constitute the local portal or gateway through which you can access the three jewels. you should take care to find the gateway to the three jewels that you find most inspiring and trustworthy.

Finding a School

• you can do some research on the different Zen schools that have centers in your area. The two main Japanese schools are rinzai and sōtō. Many of the Zen centers in the United states and other Western countries belong to or derive from these two Japanese schools, although there are also many centers that are affiliated with Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese schools.

• The Zen that was originally introduced to the West by D. T. suzuki and others is rinzai Zen. however, in the meantime, sōtō Zen centers have become more prevalent in the United states. Part of the reason for this is the relative lack of qualified rinzai Zen teachers because of the rigors, the linguistic challenges, and the sheer length of the kōan curriculum used in the rinzai school. Many of the centers which do offer kōan practice in the West are affiliated with a new school that synthesized sōtō with elements of rinzai Zen: sanbō Kyōdan, later renamed sanbo-Zen.

• it is highly regrettable that two of the historically most prominent rinzai centers in the United states have both been rocked by scandals involving the sexual misconduct of their masters. sadly, such scandals have plagued some sōtō, sanbo, White Plum, and other Zen centers as well.

• on the bright side, some Zen centers have risen to the occasion and taken the lead in reevaluating the role of ethical precepts, rethinking the authority of the teacher, and reconfiguring institutions for coed monastic and lay practice. This course recommends that you investigate scandals and pay close attention to how centers have responded to them.

• There is no such thing as a good Zen center with a bad teacher. The teacher is at least as important as the school and tradition she or he represents. read what they have written and especially go and listen to them speak. see how they lead the group. Talk to them in person. No one is perfect, but you should have the sense that this is someone with whom you could practice and from whom you could learn.

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
===[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

===

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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?

===

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

Real Zen for Real Life Course [7][19-20]

 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

===

ZEN ART:

CULTIVATING NATURALNESS

LESSON 19

This lesson discusses the Zen-inspired artistic ways called 

dō, which is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese 

character for the term dao, as in Daoism. The lesson also 

talks about Zen gardens as one special form of Zen art, and it 

discusses some key concepts of Zen aesthetics. 

Cultivating Naturalness

• in Japan, art and culture are not typically seen as essentially opposed to nature and naturalness. The modern Zen philosopher

hisamatsu shin’ichi lists naturalness (jinen) as one of the distinctive characteristics of Zen art.

• hisamatsu is careful to distinguish this naturalness from mere unrefined “naïveté or instinct.” The artistic naturalness at issue here is “never forced or strained,” and yet that does not mean that it simply occurs in nature without human intention or effort.

• “on the contrary,” hisamatsu says, “it is the result of a full, creative intent that is devoid of anything artificial or strained.” it is the outcome of “an intention so pure and so concentrated … that nothing is forced.” hisamatsu concludes that it “is not found either in natural objects or in children. True naturalness is the ‘no mind’ or ‘no intent’ that emerges from the negation both of naïve or accidental naturalness and ordinary intention.”

• Culture allows us to actualize our humanity, and cultivation requires refraining from acting according to the arbitrary beck and call of every childish impulse and desire. and yet, the process of acculturation and humanization is not simply a departure from nature; it is rather the development of a specifically human capacity for participating in nature. This development requires a double negation: first a negation of uncultivated nature and second a negation of cultivated artificiality.

• in Japan, the cultural art forms known as ways provide patterns and practices for cultivating natural spontaneity, harmony, beauty, efficiency, effectiveness, and creativity. These include the ways of tea, flower arrangement, calligraphy, incense, and various martial arts. The masters and practitioners of these often understand them to be rooted in Zen.

• Japanese ways include three stages called shu, ha, and ri. These terms mean “preserving,” “breaking with,” and “departing from.”

We can rephrase them in terms of “conforming,” “rebelling,” and “creating.”

• The three stages can be seen in the discipline of monastic training as well as in the Japanese ways that are inspired by Zen. in working on a kōan, for example, one has to learn to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of the Zen ancestors in the stories before one is able to make the kōan one’s own and present one’s response to it in full confidence. and only after passing many kōans could one eventually become capable of creating one’s own.

Zen Gardens

• one of the striking characteristics of Zen is the way in which nature, naturalness, art,

and beauty are deeply interwoven with spirituality. in Zen, art, nature, and spirituality are intimately connected. This is why Zen temples and monasteries always include gardens.

• in a sense, Zen gardens can be understood

as an art of literally representing nature: not reproducing it in an essentially different medium, but rather representing the macrocosm of the natural world in a carefully curated microcosmic space.

Many famous Zen rock gardens are designed as microcosmic representations of the macrocosmic natural world: raked sand evokes oceans and rivers, rocks mimic islands and mountains, and so forth.

• These gardens do not replicate nature in an artificial medium. They are themselves part of nature. Moreover, the human artists who cultivate these gardens and the spectators who view and commune with them are not supernatural aliens but rather natural beings recovering a sense of their place in the natural world.

• Japanese gardens often use a technique called shakkei, meaning “borrowed landscape.” The natural environment is allowed to appear as the background and even as an extension of the garden. Conversely, the garden appears as a part of the whole of nature.

Borderlines that Connect and Separate

• for Zen, the idea of nondualism does not mean that there are no differences. rather, it means that the borders that separate things are at the same time the membranes that connect them. on the one hand, the border between the inside of a Japanese temple or house and the garden outside is clearly marked.

• on the other hand, this is a porous border; sliding doors open so as to allow the circulation of air between the inside and outside regions of the world. something similar can be said for the fences, walls, or hedges that demarcate where the cultivated garden ends and the uncultivated environment begins.

• The world is made up of singular and distinct things, persons, and events which are, at the same time, intimately interconnected. for instance, a location’s tearoom and its garden are separate and yet connected. each one is not the other, and yet each one cannot fully be what it is without the other.

Wabi Sabi: Imperfect and Impermanent

• The Zen arts also remind us of the impermanence of all things and of the interconnectedness of life and death. They remind us that we cannot truly live unless we acknowledge our own fragility and mortality along with the ephemeral uniqueness of all that we hold dear.

• since ancient times, the Japanese have celebrated the poignant beauty of the cherry blossoms not despite but rather because of their ephemerality. Bursting into bloom for just a few short days, the cherry blossoms are most beautiful as they flutter to the ground. Nearly everyone takes time out of their busy lives to sit and sing under the trees, bathing in their transient beauty.

• a more specifically Zen aesthetic is that of wabi-sabi, a phrase infamously difficult to translate. Wabi-sabi can be sensed in the rustic simplicity and solitude of a weathered mountain hut as well as in the handmade and well-worn implements of the tea ceremony. imagine, for example, a chipped ceramic tea bowl that is cherished for its unique imperfections and aged earthiness.

• The aesthetic sensibility of wabi-sabi affirms what Buddhism calls the three marks of existence: the insubstantiality and impermanence of all things and the sorrow that accompanies a yearning to transcend this ephemeral and imperfect world. yet as the Japanese philosopher Tanaka Kyūbun points out, wabisabi also expresses a radical reaffirmation of our mortal lives once we let go of any world-negating aesthetic or spiritual aspirations toward otherworldly transcendence.

• The Zen aesthetic of wabi-sabi reminds us to appreciate the lives of things and our own lives because of—rather than despite—the fact that they are fragile and ephemeral. it manifests a mature spirituality that does not flee from the impermanence and imperfection of our lives and all that we care about.

SUGGESTED READING

addiss, The Art of Zen.

Carter, The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation.

hisamatsu, Zen and the Fine Arts.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 Why does Zen think that, paradoxically, we need to cultivate naturalness?

2 how do Zen gardens enable us to experience the relationship between human art and the natural world differently?

===

ZEN AND WORDS:

BETWEEN SILENCE AND SPEECH

LESSON 20

Zen’s stance or stances toward language can appear to 

be highly ambivalent, paradoxical, and even at times 

contradictory. On the one hand, Zen masters repeatedly 

instruct their students to go beyond words. One must, they stress, 

holistically experience enlightenment oneself, not just read about 

someone else’s experience of it. On the other hand, Zen has 

produced more texts than perhaps any other Buddhist tradition.

Zen Texts

• Buddhism has no bible—no single infallible book of revelation.

it has hundreds of sutras, each proclaiming to be, in some sense, the words of the Buddha. and it has thousands of commentaries, philosophical treatises, and other types of writings. The Zen tradition alone has produced hundreds of volumes— and counting.

• The 9th-century Chinese Zen master huangbo hesitated to allow his lay disciple to record and distribute his teachings. in response to being handed a poem, huangbo responded: “if things could be expressed like this with ink and paper, what would be the purpose of a sect like ours?” some Zen texts even tell of masters tearing up sutras or burning the printing blocks of a popular kōan collection, urging their students not to get lost in the “entangling vines” of words and letters.

• however, such reticence or antipathy is only part of the story of Zen’s stance or stances toward language. indeed, striking affirmations of the expressive power of language abound in the Zen tradition. for instance, the 15th-century Japanese Zen poet Ten’in ryūtaku states this claim: “outside poetry there is no Zen, outside of Zen there is no poetry.”

Using Words to Point beyond Words

• To understand Zen, we must be able to understand both the limits and the expressive power of language. The Zen tradition often foregrounds the teaching that we need to first free ourselves from our linguistic strictures. it is said in this regard that words are at best like fingers pointing at the moon, not the enlightening moon itself.

of course, Zen teachers do not say that one should not read or listen to their teachings. as the modern Japanese Zen master yamada Mumon points out, “it is only because there is a teaching that there is something transmitted separate from it.” he suggests that the teachings are necessary but not sufficient for enlightenment.

• The 12th-century Chinese Zen master Dahui, who advocated the use of kōans rather than the practice of “silent illumination,” nevertheless stressed that the point of words is to point beyond words. This meant, for Dahui, to point back behind the differentiations of words to the mind that is the undifferentiated source of differentiations.

• No amount of intellectualizing about reality can help you solve the great problem of life and death, the problem of samsara. Dahui admonishes armchair intellectuals, saying, “your whole life you’ve made up so many little word games, when the last day of your life arrives, which phrases are you going to use to oppose birth and death?”

Midway between Silence and Speech

• Zen pushes us to go beyond language, yet it also insists that we must speak. Dahui pushes us to go beyond even a one-sided negation of words, saying: “This Matter can neither be sought by the mind nor obtained by no-mind. it can neither be reached through words nor penetrated through silence.”

a canonical reference to the transcendence of language is found in the Vimalakirti sutra, a highly revered text in the Zen tradition. The climax of this sutra is generally held to be the layman Vimalakirti’s “thunderous silence,” with which he demonstrates what it means to “truly enter the gate of nonduality” without using a word or even a syllable.

• The modern rinzai Zen master shibayama Zenkei warns us that Vimalakirti’s silence must not be misunderstood as silence in opposition to speech. indeed, earlier in the Vimalakirti sutra itself, a wise goddess reprimands the hinayana representative shariputra for remaining silent and for claiming that “emancipation cannot be spoken of in words.” The goddess teaches him: “Words, writing, all are marks of emancipation. … Therefore, shariputra, you can speak of emancipation without putting words aside.”

Ice Cream as an Analogy

• Whether Zen experience is expressed through speech or silence, the sense of what is said or not said may be only partially or not at all intelligible to those who are not acquainted with the reference—that is, with the experience itself. To make a crude analogy, one may read enough books about the differences between flavors of ice cream to be able to make a lot of sensible claims about them, but if one has not actually tasted those different flavors of ice cream, one does not really know what one is talking about.

• They may not have had scoops of ice cream 1,000 years ago in China, but they probably did have many flavors of dumplings. and they certainly did have hot and cold water. Cups of hot and cold water may look the same from the outside, but the experience of drinking them is very different, hence the Zen saying, “to know for oneself hot and cold.”

Therefore, we can understand why Zen masters would stress, in different contexts, both the limits and the expressive power of language. Taken on its own, a linguistic indication of an enlightening experience is like a sign saying that water is hot. yet taken in conjunction with the experience itself, linguistic expressions have the potential not only to convey but also to embody, evolve, and enrich the experience of enlightenment.

Exiting and Reentering Language

• The modern Zen philosopher and lay rinzai master Ueda shizuteru has written extensively on the question of language in Zen. Ueda’s illuminating interpretations of Japanese and Western poetry reveal both the limits and the expressive power of language. he shows how we can understand Zen’s apparent wavering between stressing either the limits or the expressive power of language not as a problem that plagues Zen but rather as a dynamic interplay that is essential to it.

• Ueda refers to the 17th-century Japanese Zen master Bankei as saying, in effect, that one must first “exit language” to attain the dharma eye with which to “exit into language” to understand and express the dharma in words. Ueda finds this bidirectional movement away from and back into language epitomized in the twin practices that lie at the core of the rinzai Zen tradition: zazen and sanzen, silent meditation and verbal interviews with a teacher.

The apparent contradictions in Zen between negating and affirming language can be understood as exhortations to participate in the interplay of this twofold movement. one must go beyond language to experience things afresh, and one must bring this fresh experience of things back into language.

• Philosophers since aristotle have pointed out that human beings are animals who are distinguished by their capacity for language. as hellen Keller’s remarkable story reveals, we cannot truly live as human beings without words. however, it is also true that we cannot live entirely enclosed inside them. rather, we live, as Ueda says, in the ceaselessly circulating movement of “exiting language and exiting into language.”

• Zen practice, especially the rinzai Zen practice of going back and forth between long periods of silent meditation and intense oneon-one interviews, slows down and intensifies this movement between exiting and reentering language. it is thus no surprise that this Zen tradition has spawned such an amazingly fresh and vibrant body of poetry and prose.

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “expressing experience.”

heine, “on the Value of speaking and Not speaking.”

Ueda, “Language in a Twofold World.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 how does Zen both stress the limits of language and celebrate the expressive power of language?

2 What does Ueda shizuteru mean by exiting language and then exiting into language?

Meditation Checkup: Chanting as a Meditative Practice

the conclusion of Lesson 20 is a meditation checkup focused on chanting. to experience it in full, refer to the audio or video lesson. the following information serves as a summary of the checkup.

Background on Chanting

• all religious traditions involve forms of meditation, prayer, or worship that involve memorizing, reciting, chanting, or singing words. one reason is so that we can emotionally internalize, embody, and be inspired by the words rather than just intellectually comprehend them. To emotionally internalize them means to allow them to become what literally moves us from within.

• The most commonly chanted text in Zen and in Mahayana Buddhism generally is the heart sutra. Compared to the four great Vows, chanting this text is for many less a matter of cognitively than of reflecting on its content. however, many dharma books are devoted to elucidating the sense of the heart sutra, and many serious practitioners do infuse their chanting with an understanding of its core teachings.

• The conceptual meaning is least important in the case of texts termed dharanis, several of which are very regularly chanted in Zen temples and monasteries. in Japan, they are written in Chinese characters that approximate the sound of sanskrit words, regardless of the meaning of the Chinese characters themselves. it is less important to ponder a dharani’s meaning than it is to vocalize the sound intently and correctly.

MedItatIon checKuP: chantIng as a MedItatIve PRactIce

====

---

===

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?

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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.