Zen Contemplatives
Chapter Two looks at the very heart of our dilemma – it is simple – we are caught in the divided delusion of right and wrong, good and bad – this divided mind keeps us from looking at the Source; the Oneness beyond words. Until we look and know the Source for ourselves, we will endlessly suffer; moving the rocks around in the river’s flow – trying to get it just right.
Image Credit: George Mann
FOREWARD by Fashi Lao Yue
When I would grumble about something to Ming Zhen, she would inevitably get to the point where she reminded me “everyone has sinned, and has been sinned against.” It was her way of telling me to be quiet – to stop complaining or thinking I am better than or less than any other being. This knowledge, although simple to read and even memorize, is not easy to practice. In this essay, Ming Zhen asks us to study the ego-self before the ego-self grabs hold with either attraction or aversion. A hard task indeed! For a very long time, we spiritual seekers find ourselves in a mess after we have grabbed something with the energy of attraction or aversion. These two energies are the harbingers of the three poisons of the soul – namely, greed, hate and delusion and all the various concomitants; the endless array of associated collateral. (i.e., worry, resentment, pride, envy, jealousy…)
Ming Zhen calls it being buried in our egos. I understand her to say as she says in Beckett’s quote, a dead mind. Dead in the sense its shape has taken on a name and form of becoming a such and such which we all know is deadly for any spiritual adept. To continue to see the sins of others is a fool’s view – and to worry about the other’s view of you is equally foolish. I can hear Ming Zhen laugh as she once again reminds us, “everyone has sinned, and has been sinned against.” Amen.
I have taken the liberty as editor for ZATMA to edit this essay towards a focus of helping us all to look at our ulterior defenses and to remember her way of telling us to be quiet.
Everyone has sinned, and has been sinned against.”
__________
Say what you will, you can’t keep a dead mind down.”
Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks
People buried in their egos – victims of their own poisonous anger, lust, or ignorance – find release only when they can spew that venom onto others. It’s the only catharsis they get. We hear them on moonless nights, stalking the land, targeting anyone within spitting range.
We need to remember this is us each and every time we find ourselves spewing venom.
To avoid the mess during these Nights of the Living Dead, the rest of us have to find a Refuge – and wait for sunrise. We are able to avoid the mess when we stop ourselves from discharging our own poisons. Then, if we are disciplined, we are able to seek Refuge. The Big Spiritual refuge of turning towards the Precious Buddha Mirror of our true image.
It helps to understand – if not the source of others venom – at least the display of it. Sometimes we encounter it “in kind” and sometimes “in degree.”
The “degree” is easier to see. We all feel that we’ve imposed ethical limits upon our behavior, limits that constitute a boundary between acceptable and unacceptable actions. “He is a terrible man. He beats his wife for no reason at all. (Pause) I beat my wife, too, but I make sure she deserves it before I strike her.”
In prison ministries we often see a rationalized hierarchy of crime. “I may be guilty of armed robbery, but I’ve never raped anybody!” Sometimes the hierarchy stumps us. A man who is serving three life sentences for multiple murders can say, with perfect equanimity, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a thief.”
Often, we find ourselves declaring such nonsense, as “I’d never do such a thing.”
No, it is difference in “kind” that gives us trouble. It is a matter of identity. Identification with a false self; a made-up identity. A change in kind is an apparent change in genus and species. We think we’re seeing one kind of animal, but in reality, we’re seeing its natural enemy. This is not quite the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” motif. The wolf knows he’s a wolf and the woolly garments are a conscious disguise. If caught with his toes or his tail showing, he knows he’s been busted. The wolf is not deluded enough to growl and bare his fangs and insist that his accuser is a vicious sheep hater – the only reason he could possibly have for calling him a wolf. This kind of response is a purely human one.
In such a self-absolving defense tactic, the person unconsciously assumes an identity opposite to that of his true victim, i.e., the person he can righteously accuse of having the very same faults as those that got him buried in the first place. If he is a fearful coward – one that would betray his country at the slightest inconvenience, he may emerge from his interment as a martinet, swaggering with stick and sneer, exhorting his subordinates to commit acts of cruelty upon some ‘cowardly’ enemy, deriding his men as wimps and unpatriotic pansies, and punishing them harshly if they are in any way reluctant to inflict such injuries. If there’s one thing he hates, it’s a coward.
Have any of us ever made such statements – in a ridiculous piety. Or perhaps its opposite?
Again, it is in the exaggerated response that we find a clue to the nature of this inversion.
It is when we do take time to reflect upon moral issues that we need to consider the motivation of those who so vehemently question other people’s morality – and this includes our own outcries as well.
Buddhists who’ve been buried in their own egos often get their disinterment passes by shouting that somebody in the vicinity is violating a Precept. It never occurs to them that they are shifting a burden of guilt onto someone else. Whether the transfer is hissed or shouted, the theme is always the same: the assumed superior stance of one person over another.
THE REFRAIN COMES AGAIN –
Everyone has sinned, and has been sinned against.”
Pointing accusingly at other people’s offenses requires scrupulously clean hands. This is a universal principle in law except, perhaps, in the judicial proceedings of the Cosa Nostra. When two men rob a bank, intending to split the loot, and one of them runs off with all the money, the victimized robber cannot charge him with theft or seek redress of his grievance in the civil courts.
Seeing that our hands are dirty requires a degree of self-awareness that we usually don’t possess.
As the Buddha said,
The faults of others are easily seen, but one’s own faults are seen with difficulty. One winnows the faults of others like chaff, but conceals his own faults as a fowler covers his body with twigs and leaves.”` (The Buddha, Dhammapada, XVIII, 252.)
Reminds us of Adam and Eve who made a poor effort to cover their shame with a leaf.
Ordinary flaws, those convenient hypocrisies we devise to get out of uncomfortable positions or to gain personal advantages, are far easier to recognize than the ones that are not just covered by twigs and leaves but are buried beneath them.
If we haven’t yet used a defense mechanism to dig ourselves into a pathologic hole, we can try routine Buddhist self-help techniques. Success depends on luck and on having attained a certain proficiency in meditation. There is a line that is crossed when fascination becomes emotional involvement. Whenever we notice that we are aroused – by either attraction or aversion – we can try to analyze our response. Unfortunately, by the time we are emotionally “hooked” we have passed the point of disinterested observation and our conclusions are likely to be prejudiced.
Hsu Yun noted that the best time to become aware of our connection to a person or object is at the very beginning, when fascination has not yet progressed to emotional involvement. Initial actions and reactions are rather like the experience of seeing a dog pass a narrow window. By the time we’re aware that a dog is passing, we note only the dog’s body and then its tail. In order to identify the dog, we have to put a head on it… to go into our subliminal data banks and retrieve information of which we originally were not quite conscious. This task is referred to in the mondo concerning the master and the novice who asks when he will achieve enlightenment.
When you came here tonight,” the master asks, “on which side of the door did you leave your slippers?”
Naturally, the novice does not have the meditative proficiency necessary to recall details that his brain recorded, but which he made no conscious attempt to remember. Just as a journalist learns to ask the relevant questions, “Who?”; “When?”; “Where?”; “Why?”; “How?” and so on, we have to try to connect various stimuli, to establish a causal link, and try to determine the critical point – the point at which our interest was aroused. We often find that we make the same kind of mistake over and over. We can never “catch” ourselves before we fall into the trap. We need to be able to reconstruct the chain of impulses, the actions and reactions, the events that led us into the troublesome situations.
It’s only when anger, lust, and ignorance progress, unimpeded by constructive and corrective review, that we find that the defensive foxhole becomes a trench, and the trench a spiritual grave.
__________
The Take-Away by Fashi Lao Yue
In order to clarify the teaching, we need to call upon the Roman god, Janus. As many remember, Janus is the god of many things: beginnings and gates, transitions, time, duality and endings symbolized by having two faces.
When conflicts arise, Janus is the god involved; when conflicts end, he is the god involved. Making him the god of war and peace. It is safe to say that he represents the god of all duality which is the heart of this teaching. We have a tendency to split things along the classification of good and bad.
When we set ourselves in a position for one-side, we have lost half our face. We act out one side of Janus’s faces, forgetting the other side is true as well.
Most of the time we do not want to be reminded that we are dualistic; we hide one side of the face in favor of the other rather than recognize we have two faces. We dislike this so much we find it a real insult to be called ‘two-faced.’
We want to be single-faced – pure. Not knowing that purity is our real nature, we wish for it and pretend we are it. But time and time again we split towards a preferred tendency. Some of us prefer, for example, to begin something rather than end something or the other-way-round. There is an endless slough of how this plays out in our daily life.
In order for us to realize our real nature, we must recognize our tendency to split and make efforts to integrate our awareness. When we are far enough along on the spiritual path, we see the oneness in such a way that everything is our real nature and we surrender our human tendency in humility.
If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching,
please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
It certainly sounds bizarre: the ritual consumption of food or drink that symbolizes or transmutes into the body and blood of a god. Atheists love to mock the ritual and inexperienced theologians try to find rational explanations for it, but the answer to this seemingly barbaric practice is best answered by endocrinologists and perhaps a few priests who have witnessed the exclamations of mothers and the confessions and orations of lovers.
First, there can be no historical beginning for the ritual. Communion celebrations are surely as old as man’s capacity to feel and to demonstrate love. For as long as the parasympathetic nervous system has provided an undeniable connection between adoration and eating, there has been an innate desire to assimilate the beloved, to have him or her in every cell in the lover’s body. Nobody screams “cannibal” when a new mother cuddles her baby and nibbles playfully on the baby’s foot, cooing, “I’m gonna eat you up!” If there are six billion people in the world, they each have a mother and it would be nothing short of sensational to find even one of these mothers who did not make raspberries on her baby’s belly and say “Momma’s eat her little peachy cake all up! Yes, she is!” or something equally sinister.
In the mammalian world, the first post-partum meal is the exchange of flesh: the baby drinks its mother’s milk and the mother consumes the nutrient-rich placenta, raw, cooked or dried. While the practice was mostly discontinued a few hundred years ago, human placentophagy was revived during the 1970s. On Google’s pages and in YouTube, information about preparing the placenta for consumption can readily be found.
Likewise, in the first overwhelming stages of sexual infatuation, cannibalistic terms of endearment are used. A female will gush, “Oh, he’s so cute I could just eat him up!” and a male will start to call his beloved delicious food names… “Sugar,” “Sweetheart,” “Honey,” or even, in a return to the original, “Babe.” Putting one’s salivating mouth upon the beloved’s body, biting, sucking, licking, and nibbling – it’s all part of the parasympathetic nervous system’s accommodation of love and nutrition, the hormones of ecstasy and feeding. The verbs we use for eating are also used for love making.
Additionally, in the delirium of this infatuation, we find cases of urophagia as an expression of adoration – of merging substantive identities with the beloved by taking the beloved into oneself – actually digesting and assimilating what had been part of the adored body. The links between sex, food, and urine consumption are most clearly seen in the ancient holiday practice of drinking the urine of anyone who was brash enough to eat Amanita Muscaria (a.k.a. fly agaric, the toxic, red and white Santa Claus mushroom) – in order to appreciate its wild, maenadic erotogenic properties.
Throughout much of the world, wherever we find birch and pine forests, we find frenzied religious rituals associated with this mushroom. Sometimes the mushroom would be boiled or fed to a deer so that the animal’s kidneys would filter out much of the toxic ingredients; but often the shaman would consume the mushroom and then, using his own kidneys to process the substance, he would urinate for his congregation who in turn would pass on their urine to others. It is an elixir of this hallucinogenic mushroom that is claimed to be the “Divine Soma” imbibed in Vedic India. Robert Graves, an authority on Greek myths who had steadfastly believed that the wild celebrations of Dionysus and other gods were alcoholic but otherwise drug-free orgies, re-evaluated the evidence and now acknowledges that mushrooms had indeed made their hallucinogenic way into Hellenic rituals. Further, as Wikipedia notes, “The Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro also proposed that early Christianity sprang from cultic use of the fly agaric in Second Temple Judaism and that the mushroom itself was used by the Essenes as an allegory for Jesus Christ.” There is virtually no civilization in the northern hemisphere that does not have in its ancient history religious rituals that involve the consumption of mushrooms and sacred urine. The fly agaric high was, sexually speaking, stratospheric and quite beyond the reach of mundane socio-religious law.
Set against this practice, the Last Supper request to consume bread as the body and wine as the blood of the Savior seems a distinct refinement in the practice of theophagy.
In Southern School Zen Buddhism, the Communion ritual follows the early Christian practice of “dismissing the catechumens.” While confirmed Christians were permitted to participate in the ritual, the newer members of the congregation were dismissed (hence, calling the Mass “the Missa” in many European countries). In Zen Buddhism only ordained members may participate. Lay members of the congregation are dismissed and the temple doors are shut. Altar boys pour water into a goblet and the officiating priest, after reciting the required mantras and making the required mudras – and often slapping the water with a small willow branch – consecrates the water which becomes the amniotic fluid that nourishes the Future Buddha – which was the ancient supposition regarding the function of amniotic fluid. The ritual, then, unites the priest with the gestation of Mithras-Maitreya-Miroku, the Future Buddha. However, for the ritual to be a valid communion and not just a liturgical drama, the participants must respond emotionally, and this requires gratitude and love for the hero-savior who did, in fact, save them from a life that had become unendurable.
Especially in Zen Buddhism, where participants are usually not raised in the religion, the ceremonies and rituals are not followed as a matter of custom. Most of us are converts to Zen, and our conversion comes as a rescue. We found ourselves depressed and agitated, disappointed in our relationships with family, friends, and work. We felt either unwanted or used, betrayed or ignored, filled with both regrets and accusations, and grudgingly tolerated by those who had become increasingly intolerable to us. Like Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata, we found ourselves standing amid the smoking ruins of our life and could not see a way to escape the desolation. And then we turned to Zen and the Bodhisattva’s great mercy filled us with new life. Rescued? You bet. Grateful? More than we can ever express. This new life, this rebirth, is of the Future Buddha now gestating within each of us.
Christians who assert that they have been reborn in the spirit claim also that they feel the same gratitude and love when they consume the sacramental bread, and whether or not they believe that it becomes the living body of their hero-savior who was sacrificed specifically for their redemption, the ritual accomplishes its purpose.
In Sir James Frazer’s overview of such universally observed rituals, The Golden Bough, we find under the heading, “Eating the God,” many examples of the sacramental regard of flesh and bodily fluids. The ritual is known among the more obviously primitive societies among us, as well as those who are the most religiously refined.
Frazer asserts that one motive for these rituals is simply the belief that the food source itself, “is animated by a conscious and more or less powerful spirit, who must be propitiated before the people can safely partake of the fruits or roots which are supposed to be part of his body.”
Breatharians notwithstanding, another motive is the obvious fact that we are made of whatever it is we eat and drink. Extending this into a spiritual realm, it becomes unassailable to some of us that feeding upon the flesh of a hero-savior imparts whatever spiritual property there was within him or her. The question then concerns the manner in which we consume the heroic savior or the divine inhabitant of grains or animals upon which we depend for survival. It may be a symbolic theophagy achieved by a special preparation of certain foods, or in ancient practices by the actual flesh of a sacrificed person who has been chosen to represent the divinity, or through a miracle of Transubstantiation of foodstuff into flesh.
Our atheistic friends always seem to confuse Communion rituals, which are, by definition, expressions of gratitude and love made by those who have been saved from sin, starvation or a deplorable existence, with cannibalism as a menu choice. There have been instances, probably many more than we know about, in which under conditions of extreme hunger people have resorted to consuming the flesh of the dead. The most publicized instance of such an event was the 1972 airline crash two miles high in the Andes mountains. Sixteen people survived the crash and during the two months they were stranded in the barren snow and ice, they subsisted on the flesh of the crash victims. All Roman Catholics, the men decided to consume the flesh ritualistically. Survivor Nando Parrado wrote, “Shortly after our rescue, officials of the Catholic Church announced that according to church doctrine we had committed no sin by eating the flesh of the dead. They told the world – as Roberto [Canessa] had argued on the mountain – that the sin would have been to allow ourselves to die.”
The attempts by atheists to link such extraordinary acts of spiritual exaltation with vampirism or cannibalistic lust fail because those of us who know better also know that those who disparage the rite are simply unlucky souls who have so far been excluded from the joy and peace of redemption. They have denied themselves the beauty of Michelangelo’s Pietá and Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus; they have limited their appreciation of the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, Tikal, and Notre Dame to architectural considerations. They are deaf to Mozart’s Requiem and Bach’s B Minor Mass. Against their sophomoric arrogance stand mankind’s most wonderful accomplishments. Were we to eliminate all the religiously inspired art, architecture, music, and literature from all the world’s civilizations – from the caves of Lascaux to the stage of La Scala – we would not have a brave, new world of clever atheists but a world that lacked awe and was more than a little dreary.
Maybe someday they will understand. It is devoutly to be wished.
If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching,
please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
I once heard someone call the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah,” a guy you’d never invite to dinner.”
Why’s that? I wondered.
Well, Jeremiah was one tough cookie when it came to speaking his mind. He dared to tell the Truth because he saw the Truth. He was the mouthpiece of Divine knowledge.
Imagine sitting across from him over a slice of pizza?
He’d likely burn through your persona and façade and delineate all your selfish faults. In the mistaken defensiveness of our ego, we’d feel hurt and wounded. Refusing his gift of knowing the truth, we’d reject his ability to burn through our ignorance in order to set us free. Most of us would feel scorched and misunderstood and run off miffed declaring “Jeremiah is a guy you’d never invite to dinner!”
But…Jeremiah is a man worth listening to when it comes to the human heart. Remember his mission in life is to speak the Truth of divine knowledge. He’d go for the juggler of ignorance in the instinctual human heart.
Let us remember the instinctual man is us. It is when we get caught at the level of a person who goes after the things of the world without regard for anything but his own wants and desires. Most of us at one time or another react to life from this level. We do well to remember that this is the place where most of us begin. Life is all about ‘me’ when we are babies and we are subject to this instinctual level until we begin to grow up and awaken. We need to be trained and taught to recognize that life is not all about ‘me.’ Some of us never get very far from the instinct of all about me; leaving us at the mercy of our wild selfishness.
The opposite extreme of the instinctual man is the dogmatic one. Dogmatic mind is when we think, believe and function with the axiom, my way or the highway. The dogmatic mind is filled to the brim with our rules and our laws that become as hard as cement. It is what is known as a hardened heart – a heart of weights and balances used to judge ourselves and others. This stage also needs teachings and trainings to soften the defenses. Often, however, the hardened heart struggles with listening to teachings and trainings because this mind state is filled with thinking, believing and functioning written in stone: MY RULES ARE RIGHT! MY LAWS ARE RIGHT! Those caught in dogma have a great deal of difficulty listening. There’s no room to listen or hear anything. Adolescents, often a rebellious phase, are often filled with such hard, monumental thinking. But it comes from ignorance. There is a tendency to believe “I don’t need any help. I, alone, can do it.”
Those of us, however, who live according to some level of moral and ethical decency or a level of spiritual aspiration are still subject to mutability – meaning that even decent, spiritual seekers can be overtaken by the mind states of the heart. Here is where we might want to invite Jeremiah to dinner. But this willingness to burn off our ignorance comes after knowing the sage, prophets and divine incarnations reign from the throne of goodwill, a goodwill of wanting to liberate us from suffering. And yet, very, very few are willing and open enough to invite Jeremiah to dinner.
A teacher is helpful in this regard simply because the teacher’s job is to point out when we are going into a ditch and to help us to get back on the path. Jeremiah’s words are warnings against falling into the ditch. When we are in a ditch – filled with greed, hate and delusions of all sort we need the likes of a Jeremiah. But even then, the question remains “Will we heed his wisdom?”
In Zen Buddhism the teacher acts as a verification of the spiritual condition of the student. This verification may seem ominous or perhaps even unwanted, but I assure you it is a boon to one’s spiritual life. In my experience it is fire – a hot blaze that shows us the Way. We decide whether or not we are willing to use what is offered. It is not a mandate, but an offering. We can take it or leave it.
Jeremiah, I imagine, could point out who was who – being that his job was to speak as from the mouth of God. Here’s a sample of God’s mouthpiece exhorting us about ‘trust.’
Blessed are those who trust the Lord; The Lord will be their trust. They are like a tree planted beside the waters. That stretches out its roots to the stream. It does not fear heat when it comes, its leaves Stay green; in the years of drought it shows no distress. But still produces fruit. Jeremiah
Wonderfully, Jeremiah’s exhortation is very much a Zen Buddhist urging.
Here’s what it sounds like in Zen Buddhism:
I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Dharma, I take refuge in Sangha.
The teacher is not the refuge but helps the student with how to take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha with practices – such as:
Plant yourself like a tree in silence and stillness… Water your roots in the teachings of going against the stream. Don’t get jazzed by the heat or cold of the material world; there is no escaping the changing weather of life. Stay put. Don’t fret over the changes. Stay still and see what comes up. Something of some sort is inevitable.
This small smattering is a sample of what we need, whether we follow the words of a prophet, or the teachings of a Buddha. We need the constancy of exhortations to strengthen our resolve.
The caveat.
The LORD proclaims: Cursed are those who trust in mere humans, who depend on human strength and turn their hearts from the LORD. Jeremiah
What Jeremiah exhorts as cursed is in an ultimate sense true, only the unborn, undying eternal Beloved is to be fully trusted. But until we awaken, we need confidence in the teachings in order to make the climb to the summit.
OM NAMO GURU DEVA NAMO
Author: FaShi Lao Yue
Image credits: Fly, 2019
A Single Thread is not a blog.
If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching,
please contact editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
More tortuous than anything is a human heart. ,Beyond remedy; who can understand it.
This exhortation covers a lot of Zen ground. Here are some samples of what I mean.
Put no head above your own.
Of course, your head must be engaged with the unborn, undying divinity or you risk going off the rails. Composure, calm-abiding and steadfastness to stay on the spiritual mountain path (plant yourself by the waters, root yourself and don’t be afraid) are evidence akin to no fear and green leaves in drought.
There are many a Zen Buddhist story that address this staying-put and staying the course. Begin and continue in Zen, no matter what. And what is said as an encouragement to keep going and continue to practice. …more tortuous than anything is a human heart – beyond remedy without the Beloved and mysterious Truth – and who can understand it? A sage, a guru, a prophet, a master, a teacher.
There’s help for this tortuous heart but be careful where you go for help.
And finally, Jeremiah goes to the penultimate.
The LORD proclaims: Cursed are those who trust in mere humans,
who depend on human strength and turn their hearts from the LORD.
In Zen Buddhism, take the backward step away from the world of things. Go against the stream.
Human beings by nature will disappoint one another. Our nature is frail until we awaken to the Lord of Truth – to the Truth of the Unborn, Undying Eternal. It is our plight. Our frailness is our unfortunate situation. Jeremiah speaks in no uncertain terms the mistake we make is when we put our trust in human beings rather than in THAT which never changes.
This truth guides and chides us towards a strong practice. But we must be willing to seek the Noble Truth. Knowing the wisdom of disappointment makes disappointment a boon – like a harbinger, a signal to take a look at the direction you were headed when you got disappointed.
When we disappoint ourselves and others, when others disappoint themselves and us. What do we do? Stop and answer this question for yourself. What do you do when you are disappointed?
Disappointment is a beacon of Light breaking into the mundane world giving us a glimpse at the truth of the Absolute. For many of us we get downhearted when we experience disappointment. Our inner views collapse around us and if we are lucky we remain standing in the rubble of our own desires for the world to be different than it is. But this type of collapse comes from blindness – a type of ignorant blindness of the world. The world, and all those things in the world which includes other human beings, are unreliable by nature. So, if you begin to see the nature of the things of the world you have a chance to see what really happens when you experience disappointment.
In short, our desires and wishes we project on the world have caused this inner turmoil. It is our attachment to wanting it to be different that brings up suffering. But if we see the world as it is, then we calm down. We calm down all our wishes and desires for the world to be different without bitterness.
In fact, when we experience disappointment in others, in ourselves we get a firsthand look at out real situation. Jeremiah, the prophet knew this truth. Tells us. What a gift.
One final note. The directive to labor without reward will serve any of us well and keep us out of harm’s way of a tortuous heart of another. We are being like the tree – no matter what, we work – we labor – we offer what we have to offer. We do the next thing. We do what the Grass Roof Hermitage Sutra by Shitou Xiquan ends with –
If you want to know the undying person in hut,
Don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.
OM NAMO GURU DEVA NAMO
Author: FaShi Lao Yue
Image credits: Fly, 2019
ZATMA is not a blog.
If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching,
please contact editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
Just seeing the photo reminds me of my work in the material world – the world known as the world of becoming. We can’t skip this world despite it being an apparent delusion – even the most devoted can’t skip the apparent world. There are after all, things to take care of – to give our energy to every day. The daily tasks, however, often become the daily beasts. There are times when we resist and buck against the reins of work – thinking there is something better to do, something more important to do than what comes into our life in the moment. We have difficulty seeing we, for the most part, have invited those things to come in. We resent and worry and delay and get edgy when the things of the apparent world show up in need of care. Our welcome sign goes dark and we stall or put off what needs our attention. And worse yet, we hurry through our work with our eye on something else; the next thing that promises someplace that is better or more appealing.
Our moods and mind states are the champing and faunching at the bit in our mouth – horses, especially race horses, often get impatient and nervous or angry and frustrated at the bit in the mouth. They, like us, want to be free of the discipline and steadiness the bit and bridle offers them. Equestrians of all stripes know the horse that accepts the bit and bridle is the meek horse – the one fit for the field of unexpected challenges. It is the meek, the yielding, disciplined horse that is the beloved, because it is trained to obey.
The practice is to drop all the moods and mind states, whether appealing or resenting, and WELCOME what comes into our life as our life. In order to practice this welcoming mind, the mind that does not get frustrated or angry or anxious and impatient, one needs to tame the mind.
To tame the mind in concentrated devotion we need to see what shows up in our life is from the Source. It is the real disguised as the unreal. Our very body falls into this understanding. Our body, that which is apparent and temporary is the real disguised in a body called you. The Source of the body is real, the body itself is unreal but we must remember it is a disguise of the Source. In the same way, everything is a disguise of the Source; a thing is not real in the sense it is temporary and apparent, but it is a disguise of the real – for it comes, proceeds if you will, from the Source. When we know this to be true, we remind ourselves of this Truth and we give our attention to the apparent reality of the Source by giving our concentrated devotion. One way to understand this is to know that what we put our hand to is NOT in service of getting and having or polishing up something for the small self – but is a devotional act of the heart.
Concentrated devotion is to tame a horse in such a way it is meek – trained to meet the unexpected challenges in the field of being alive. As most know, training an animal or a child requires attention and diligence. Concentrated devotion, which is a spiritual practice par excellent requires we see that everything, whether it be sweeping the floor or changing a diaper is an act of giving attention and care to the real Source of our being.
All the things – babies, children, dogs, friends, furniture, clothes, food, house, family, apartments, books – all the stuff needs concentrated devotion. YES! Everything is crying out for attention. In order to give concentrated attention, we need to be able to welcome all of it. Simplification in the form of minimizing our stuff and the patience to meet the things that come into our life are prerequisites to concentrated devotion.
Let me close with an example.
A woman practitioner was in her kitchen. She was caught in a state of begrudging – belittling and resenting the task of sweeping her kitchen floor. As she swept the floor, she realized how annoyed an aggrieved she felt sweeping when she suddenly remembered sweeping the floor in a monastery while on retreat. The memory stopped her to consider why was it that sweeping her kitchen floor felt like a burden while sweeping the monastery floor felt like a blessing? When she got to this point, she laughed – and realized she lacked concentrated devotion because she did not see her kitchen floor as being real, as a thing to look after with gratitude and obedience. She saw it is as a burden.
Concentrated attention is wisdom enacted in daily life with whatever shows up. We must learn this wisdom – train in it.
May this teaching encourage you to practice concentrated devotion.
Author: Fa Shi Lao Yue
If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching,
please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
The past is already past. Don’t try to regain it.
Don’t think there is something more important to do
than what you are doing right now.
Don’t worry about outcome.
Unimaginable.
The more I practice Zen Buddhism the more mind-boggling it is. I mean that literally. Zen Buddhism boggles the mind, expanding awareness in unfathomable ways. To practice Zen is to live aware of a changing world where nothing remains. If practiced in sincerity, it liberates.
I recommend it.
I especially recommend it for those who are seeking the high aim of knowing the Buddha-Mind, the Christ-Mind, the God-Mind – the Source by many unsayable, nameless names.
But remember – Zen requires all of you. Every speck. Nothing can be left out for later – it requests that you make a commitment of intimacy with yourself and the bright, luminous teachings – for those who have a high aim, a teacher is recommended; for those who don’t, well, carry on until you are struck with the high aim. But don’t give up. The Awakened Big-Mind is calling you.
Come and taste the Truth of the ever-present manifestation of the mystery afoot.
No matter how many mistakes are made, how many times you veer off – hurt yourself or others – compromise your rectitude – drift off into self-centeredness – don’t let that hinder your willingness to respond.
Find out who you truly are.
Forget your mistakes. Mistakes are traps keeping you from knowing who you truly are. In the midst of whatever comes – in all the struggles of life – Awakened Big-Mind ceaselessly awakens everyone.
Me and yes, you.
I encourage you to seek what you love, wide-open – without any intent to get something. Be sincere in your seeking. Sincerity will protect you while the power of thunder from above shows you your original nature.
May you be Happy, Safe from Harm and Peaceful in Mind.
May the merit of this practice benefit all beings.
Don’t give up.
Happy New Year
Author: Fa Shi Lao Yue
If for some reason yon need elucidation on the teaching,
please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
Sources
Layman Pang, Chan Practitioner
C. Huber, The Key
Rumi
…the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world.
Underhill
_____
The writing was taking such great effort, and the pages of words I sent on to my spiritual teacher said nothing.
Wait,” she said, “Stop writing and wait.”
I did not want to wait, but I couldn’t see another way to be while the writing went into hibernation. Reluctantly, I turned toward waiting even though it seemed less glamorous than writing; a pale and uninspiring alternative.
Days became weeks. Still I waited. But I yearned to write. I began to hunt for topics to write about, something from which to build a narrative, some idea with life in it. But nothing took hold.
Waiting was what showed up, every day.
Then, I remembered a poem about waiting, and turned to it for guidance. It is by T.S. Eliot, from The Four Quartets:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
This became my mantra: “Wait without hope, wait without love, wait without thought.” The mantra helped me. I felt the wisdom in hope, love and thought being hope, love and thought for the wrong thing. I could see how my pushing and yearning were bound to lead to writing that was nothing more than useless words on a page.
Still I could not let go of the hope for a speedy return to writing. The mantra could not hold back my desire. It gnawed at me, this hope that my wait could end. It sent me into more rounds of thinking: “Maybe this idea? Or this one?” My inner world became a battlefield where hoping and thinking and wanting joined forces to vanquish waiting. But waiting kept quietly showing up each morning, while I sat, pen in hand. The tension was painful and confusing.
One cold morning, huddled around the wood stove, I felt the deep depletion of the inner battle. I craved rest, an end to the pressure, an end to the obligation to write. I could not see that I alone was causing this pressure. I believed the pressure was coming from the outside.
I composed a letter to my spiritual teacher in my mind. “I am so tired. I need a break from writing. I will not be working on writing projects until further notice.” But then suddenly I remembered that I had already been instructed to WAIT. I could just WAIT. It was perfectly OK to wait.
The tension released, the battle was over. In the relief I felt as a small piece of suffering let go, I saw that waiting is always right here, when I surrender ideas and feelings, the ingredients of my self-concept.
I saw that the urgency to write, not wait, is my ego’s impulse to flee from no hope or thought. The push to know, to be in control, to find the right words and solve the mystery, this driving force topples me into thinking, feeling and suffering. I struggle to let go of knowing. I cling to being clever, being in charge.
I sing praises to the pain and frustration of the struggle that comes when I cling. I bow in gratitude to this living force of nature, the power of difficulty and the mystery that is veiled within it. Together they move me beyond what I can know, beyond what I could hope for without this terrible wonderful mysterious fulfilling power.
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.T. S. Eliot
Author: Lao Huo Shakya
A Single Thread is not a blog. If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching, please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
Ayya Medhanandi Breakfast Reflections
I’ve talked quite a bit about the tornado and eye of the tornado. And I spoke more about the winds circling around the eye than the eye itself. We tend to measure the speed and direction of such an intense wind storm but we don’t usually say much about the eye at its centre.
The interesting thing about the eye itself is that there is much to explore within that eye. That eye is actually eye-ness. It’s not an ‘I’, not a person. It’s not a personality. And it’s not ‘an eyeness’ either, because that could quickly be thought of as an ‘i’ with a ‘dot-ness’.
The most valuable and unique aspect of the Buddha’s teaching is that this I-ness is empty. It’s actually empty. But we mistakenly perceive it to be full – until we learn how to see.
And learning how to see is not something we can do conceptually. Our conceptual instrumentation is flawed. Not from birth, but from lack of training.
This particular path of practice and opening to this core which is coreless – that’s another thing. Language doesn’t capture it. It’s a core but it’s coreless. Like a banana tree. It’s a tree that has no core. Most trees if you cut them and look in, you find a core. But the banana tree has none. It’s coreless. And if you take it apart, there’s nothing inside it – nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.
So if you take this mind and study it deeply and look within it – look truly deeply within it! Look deeply within it and see through. You find nothing.
The finding of nothing is a very important discovery. We can’t discover it conceptually. It can only be discovered intuitively. During the process of discovering, necessarily we have to go through steps.
And those steps can be very painful.
There’s a beautiful analogy in the scriptures of a meditator being like a chicken in the egg and the meditation process is like the mother hen sitting on the egg – sitting on the egg and heating it up. And when the conditions are right, then there’s enough heat but not too much.
When the shell is mature and the little foetus inside is ripe to come out, then the thickness of the shell becomes something that the little chick can penetrate with its beak. And it starts pecking away until it makes a hole big enough for it to emerge.
But if the mother keeps getting up and leaving the egg, then these processes of the shell warming and the chick inside developing and the conditions for its breaking through never ripen.
So that can be used to describe a meditation practice which is sporadic. It does not have within it the right factors to develop the conditions for the mind’s ripening: the right warmth, the right attention, the right intention, the right clarity, the right consistency, the right commitment, the right effort, the right way of paying attention that warrants diligence, ardency, remembering to be present, to be studying, peering into the core so one-pointedly, so undistractedly that the whole process can mature and the chick can poke through the shell and see.
In this process, some of the necessary steps before the little chick can come out are its having to experience terrible pains, excruciating pains, unearthly pains – and at times very earthly pains. We feel all manner of pains: internal pains, external pains; what we think are pains, what we don’t think are pains; what we perceive to be mental pains, what we perceive to be physical pains; what we perceive to be internal pains, what we perceive to be external pains; what we perceive to be social pains, what we perceive to be psychological pains, what we perceive to be our pains, what we perceive to be other people’s minds pains.
We engage in receiving those pains in ways that are unbearable, and we blame others or we blame ourselves; or we don’t blame anyone. We just feel hopeless, helpless, lost, unequal to the task, incapacitated, inadequate, oppressed, pressured – wanting to get out, wanting to run away. Wanting, Craving. We fall back into deeper and deeper states of exaggerated craving. And this, of course, does not make the process of opening ripen.
It doesn’t lead to the celebration of that opening – that ability to see through. Instead, it misdirects us. We flap around a lot, and in our flapping we can create quite a mess. And we feel even worse for all our effort. Then we make up our minds – this is a waste of time, this is harming, this needs to stop. That’s very common. It’s classical. We feel sure,“This is harming.” So we have to stop!
That’s to our detriment because all of us are capable of opening. I know many women have described the pain of labour. Perhaps it’s one of the most intense pains that a person intentionally experiences – because she knows that the result is that the little chick is allowed to come out.
In this process we don’t realize that we are in labour. But we have other pains that simulate that. This is a mental pain. It’s a heart pain, not a physical pain. By mental we don’t mean brain. It’s really important to distinguish that. It’s not cerebral pain but it’s a pain of the heart.
So the pain of the heart is a cracking open. It’s a complete cracking open. It’s a seeing, it’s a bearing with. And it may be excruciating, but we bear with it. We bear with it, we take care. We take care of the body the best way we can. And we take care of the mind the best way we can.
We don’t accelerate. We don’t try to manipulate the process or speed it up. We are just patient with it, realizing that this is an important and difficult ascent. It’s an ascent of the highest mountain; or it’s a descent into the deepest possible space that exists in this world.
That’s how vast the journey is. How magnificent and immeasurable the whole process is. And it has to unfold karmically. We can’t intentionally speed it up because of craving, because of wanting a result, or expecting it to be a certain way and have it the way we like. This is all delusion – because the opening is a very major letting go. And that’s why it’s so excruciating – because we’ve been taught not to let go!
Yes, because we’ve been taught to cling, to own, to have, to possess, to increase, to inflate, to expand, to broadcast and receive results; to be gratified and have it pleasurable, have it satisfying, have it protecting us, keeping us well – so to speak – according to our socialized, acculturated definitions of getting well, and all of that.
But in this letting go, it’s like the letting go that those little boys in the cave in Thailand experienced. They’re in the dark, they had no food, they could barely drink water – just a little drip-drop from the walls of the cave. And they were terrified. Because they were alone, abandoned, lost, down in the bowels of the earth.
So what a magnificent thing they were able to do because their teacher helped sustain them and guide them to be like little chicks in the dark within a shell, breaking through and able to see within their own body-mind process the corelessness, fearlessness, true deathlessness, the dying to the craving to get out, to be rescued, to be found.
He was able to help them – and they were captive. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run, nothing to run to. No succor of any kind. No comfort. No tangible oxygen tank or hero to carry them away in his or her arms. There was just facing death, disappearance, destruction.
But within the corelessness of their own little body-mind processes, they could find some space, some place, some way of being that went beyond all the panic, anxiety, fear and helplessness. They were able to go beyond that and touch it.
It’s very much what we’re doing here. And it feels artificial – because it is. How many people would choose to climb into an oven and bake? Do that, even heat the place up, or overheat the body – and look at your mind.
So by our choice of staying within these cloisters, we’re like chicks in a little dark space, little Thai boys in a cave and we feel like we’re trapped. This is because the mind is too frightened, too immature, too unripe to go into that corelessness and let go of the world enough to be able to see through. Not just to see.
Seeing isn’t enough. We have to see through our conditioning. We have to see through our blockages. We have to see through our clinging. We have to see beyond our craving.
We have to see through our enslavement to having all the things that we can experience through the sense doors – and we have to only use the mind door, the heart door.
Sit in front of it. Sit in front of it and be with it, examine it, know it, taste it, touch it, until we see that it doesn’t exist. There is no door. It’s just an empty space. We are already in that. We are that. We’re nothing less than that – and yet – we are nothing.
In the emptiness of all impurity in the mind, we begin to see through. We see not just the arising of phenomena in consciousness due to our attachment, and our wanting things to arise in consciousness so that we can feel alive, but we begin to see through to the ending of phenomena in the mind. We begin to see through to the ending of phenomena in the heart – taking up one by one the detrimental observations of phenomena, and what is detrimental to their emptying.
We see what is detrimental, we see what diminishes us – and what takes us back to clinging. We see that. We see how it begins and how it ends. We see the ending of it.
At first it’s very frightening to see the ending of things. But in seeing the endings, craving is also ended – the ending of craving and the ending of attachments. We see the ending of hanging on to things that we trust and that we don’t even know we’re hanging onto because we haven’t stopped long enough, perseveringly enough, committed enough to see through.
In observing the endings and not being terrified by that, we start to taste the interior. Tasting the ending, tasting the emptying out is a wonderful moment. And it gives us a sense of trust, an “O, what is that?” moment. Something to experience, to know, to feel, to be with – without being. To burn everything for that.
In the burning up of all that is familiar and safe that we think we know, we discover that which cannot be burned. We discover that which is unburnable. In that corelessness there is the unburnable, the pure, tasteless, nothing to cling to, nothing at all – that is a total freedom.
It’s difficult to trust that there is something we have without experiencing it. Faith is a difficult quality to develop. But without it we are lost – lost in our doubt, lost in our ideas, and our self-view – which is the biggest prison of all. In the meditation practice we have the opportunity to develop that trust through our own insight. No one else can give that to us.
Once we develop even a little bit of trust, and we spend even one moment in that place that is so pure, we want to give more and more to it. We are willing to stay in the cave to do that. It’s very rare that beings can stay in the cave. Most people want to run out into the sunshine.
But the imperceptible light within us is even greater. It can light up the whole world. In the dark of night, it can light up our hearts – even in the middle of the greatest storm.
With metta from,
The nuns’ community
Copyright © 2018 Sati Saraniya Hermitage, All rights reserved.
A Single Thread is not a blog. If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching, please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
More and more I have less and less to say. I am like an old rusty water spigot that drips single, slow drops on some indeterminable timetable. During times when everything seems to be going well I am able to see, more than see, I am able to accept the impermanence and emptiness of every deep down thing.
This morning when it was still dark I looked at a photo of a demolished house in Florida. I just stared at it. Speechless. Without comment of any kind.
And wondered whether or not I’d see the impermanence and emptiness if I were standing looking at all of those broken things.
When we lose a shelter of any kind we feel the disruption – we see it – know it. The nervous system in the body reacts.
Devastation of any kind brings a reaction whether we are ready or not. Devastation like a loud bang grabs us by the collar and shakes us up not as a punishment as some may suggest, as many may believe but as a chance to see the unreliable nature of stuff. Everything breaks up and falls apart – giving us, giving me the sense that everything perishes. And the perishing may be sudden or slow, may catch us unawares leaving us shaken to the core. A rude awakening, perhaps, but an awakening nonetheless.
What do we depend on when devastation comes to our home? How do we respond when the weather is not fair and sunny? Will our practice hold – or will we be blown down with the stuff?
There is no prescription. Nothing I can or want to prescribe. Not for myself or for anyone else. I meet what comes and wait for the things that have come to wake me up.
Right now my house is not in shambles, but it has been hit in the past. Right now – Bear, our oldest dog struggles for breath, suffers from tremors – thunder terrors and loss of muscle in his hind quarters. When I quiet the foolishness of the mind – when I meet what comes I am able to forget about me and meet all of it as the veil that covers his sweetness and life that is complete this moment.
I kneel down on the floor as he turns his grayish whiskered face in communion with my hand. I feel the sadness and joy. It is an almost unbearable sweetness. I tell him not to be afraid and tell myself that as well. I tell him he is OK – alright. Nothing is wrong. Not in a real sense. Nothing is wrong. He is OK despite his hard knocks. In the middle of his gums turning black, his struggle to get up; he is OK.
My work – my spiritual work is to keep the boat of me in the water without the water getting into the boat. What I mean is that my practice is to meet him and all the changes without drowning in me-thoughts, feelings, reactions, worry and all those conditioned mind-states. To see and know he is OK. Life is complete this moment.
When I get scared I get confused. What scares me is when I see the veil of his body as a permanent thing – which confuses me and rightly so. It is a delusion, a haunting ghost and I get scared. The confusion takes me to a crazy place where I think I am not a part of this veil of impermanence – that somehow I am separate from it looking on at his changing body and mind as though I am separate from aging, sickness and death. I laugh at such nonsense since my body and mind are challenged by constant ailments.
Somewhere I know the truth frees me from being stupid and ignorant. And then I am able to see that the body and mind, his and mine, are impermanent, I relax in the leaky boat of body and mind and enjoy his old face.
I am as impermanent as him. We are in this together. We are not apart. And never have been.
The most wonderful realization of knowing this is when unconditioned love, of an almost unbearable sort, comes unbidden and I know who I am – I am not afraid. I am OK. Everything is alright. I know at an immeasurable level there is nothing to get here – no thing. He has never been mine. Nor is our 3 year old poodle. Nor my partner. Nothing is mine. Nothing is permanent. This knowing is a clarity that frees me beyond any explanation I am able to put into words.
I am not the body, not the mind, not thoughts in my head, not the intellect storage area of information, not the breath, not all the conditions of a long life – All I am able to say is what I am not…not afraid. Not overcome by the world. Not made. Not a thing. When I know this – when I know Bear – and when I know the truth we, Bear and I and all myriad things, somehow are together beyond name and form. And it is bliss that I can hardly bear.
May this encourage all those who seek the truth.
Author: FaShi Lao Yue
A Single Thread is not a blog. If for some reason you need elucidation on the teaching, please contact the editor at: yao.xiang.editor@gmail.com
