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

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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?

====

Meditation Checkup: Three Ways of Breathing In and Out

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

Breathing as a Cycle of Giving and Receiving

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

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

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

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

Exhaling the Self, Inhaling the Universe

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

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

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

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

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

Cultivating Compassion

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

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

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

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

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

 Real Zen for Real Life Course Lecture Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===[2]

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

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

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

===[3]

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

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

Meditation Checkup: from Mindless reacting to Mindful responding 77 

===[4]

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

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

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

===[6]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

=====

DYING TO LIVE: BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY

LESSON 12

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

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

Early Encounters and Misunderstandings

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

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

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

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

What is God?

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

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

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

Experiencing the Unborn Buddha-Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Thich Nhat hanh points out that modern science agrees with

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

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

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

Views on Death and Rebirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

SUGGESTED READING

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

Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

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

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

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ZEN BEYOND MYSTICISM: EVERYDAY EVEN MIND

LESSON 13

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

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

Bowing to the Buddha

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

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

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

The Disappearing and Reappearing Buddha

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

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

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

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

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

Everyday Even Mind Is the Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyday Chores are the Way

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

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

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

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

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

Zen as a Path of Trans-Mysticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUGGESTED READING

Davis, “Letting go of god for Nothing.”

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

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

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

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

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

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Engaged Zen: from inner to outer Peace

L14

Zen is not about acquiring supernatural or supernormal 

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

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

present moment—to the wondrousness of mundane matters and 

the weightiness of everyday errands

The Mahayana Affirmation of Lay Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meditation Retreats Are Not Escapes

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

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

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

Being at Peace

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

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

Peace and Justice: Which Is Primary?

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

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

COMPLEMENTARY

TEACHINGS

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

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

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

SUGGESTED READING

King, Socially Engaged Buddhism.

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

Parallax Press, ed., True Peace Work.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

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

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

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Meditation Checkup: Dealing with Distractions

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

Discipling the Mind

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

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

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

CHASING DISTRACTIONS

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

MedItatIon checKuP: deaLIng WIth dIstRactIons