Talk on the Shobogenzo – Soku Shin Ze Butsu 3
Given by Mike Luetchford
20.9.2000
We got as far as page 52, near the bottom of the page. I’ll read:
This “mind here and now is buddha” that the Buddhist patriarchs maintain and rely upon is not seen by non-Buddhists and [people of] the two vehicles, even in their dreams.
The “people of the two vehicles” refers to the simile used in the Lotus Sutra, of three people travelling in three kinds of vehicle. There was the ox-cart, and I’ve forgotten the other one, two kinds of cart then, a cart pulled by a white ox. The two lower carts refer to intellectual Buddhists, that’s Buddhists who study Buddhism only through intellectual learning, and they’re called sravakas in Sanskrit, and the second vehicle is Buddhists who study Buddhism only through physical activity, and they’re called pratyeka buddhas. Then the third vehicle is people who practice Zazen, or study Buddhism through action. So he’s saying that people of the two vehicles, that’s the other two, sravakas and pratyeka buddhas, people who study Buddhism only with their mind or only with their bodies, can’t understand the real meaning of “mind here and now is buddha”. Which is maintained by the Buddhist patriarchs. So he’s suggesting that Buddhist patriarchs maintain it and rely upon it, they keep it going and transmit it. So it’s not a concept, it’s something real that they maintain with their body and mind.
Buddhist patriarchs alone, together with Buddhist patriarchs, posses hearing, action, and experience which have enacted and which have perfectly realised mind here and now is buddha.
That’s a strange sentence. “Buddhist patriarchs alone, together with Buddhist patriarchs” is a wordplay in Japanese and in Chinese which doesn’t come through in the English. But there’s a very well known phrase in Chinese which is yui-butsu-yo-butsu, and it means “buddhas together with buddhas”. So it suggests individual and collective at the same time; two faces of something so…
Dan: So it’s “Buddhist patriarchs alone” and then that’s like a group of people working on their own separately, and “Buddhist patriarchs together” is the whole group working together at the same time.
That’s right, or we can say when we sit in the Zazen hall, we’re sitting alone, but we’re also sitting in some ineffable way, together. So there’s one body, and there’s one body. And yui-butsu-yo-butsu catches that phrase, but what Master Dogen has done is substituted “Buddhist patriarchs” instead of “buddhas” in that phrase. So instead of using yui-butsu-yo-butsu, he’s put yui-busso-yo-busso, busso means patriarch. So he’s playing with words, which he does quite a lot. It works in Japanese.
Simon: The problem with “patriarch” is that there’s only one.
Only one?
S: There’s only one Buddhist patriarch in any one epoch, isn’t there?
No, no.
S: Well the line seems to be an unbroken line, there’s only one line because the patriarch is decided after the fact.
Well Buddhism has a very strange attitude because it believes in reality. So what Buddhism says is that there is only one line, this line. Now “this line” means this real line. However, if we think of it in the abstract we can say that there are lots of “one lines”, because, you know Master Deshimaru had several students and they all transmitted Buddhism. So Nancy transmitted Buddhism, right? So there are several lines, that’s theoretical. Actually….
D: Only one line has come to you…
…..there’s only one line. So there are many patriarchs, but there’s only one patriarch. So if you pursue Buddhism, if you pursue the truth, you will find the truth, and finding the truth is to become a Buddhist patriarch. We can say formerly, Buddhist masters of the past may have been grand masters of temples who received the special certificates and so on, but the real meaning of a Buddhist patriarch is somebody who has received from their teacher the Buddhist truth, and who has realised the Buddhist truth. That person is then a Buddhist patriarch, so there may be hundreds and millions, there may be only one.
Buddhas have continued to pick up and throw away hundreds of weeds, but they have never represented themselves as a sixteen-foot golden body.
That’s another strange sentence. He’s using similes which were very common, very well known to all his audience. “Hundreds of weeds” refers to a story about a master who said that his state was clear, like the hundreds of weeds, or grasses growing in the fields. In other words, he wasn’t abstracted, he wasn’t living in his mind, and he wasn’t distracted by sensual perceptions, he could just clearly see what was in front of him; hundreds of weeds.
D: That is to say instead of a lawn? Is that right?
No, it means beyond the words, “hundreds of weeds” or beyond the word “lawn”. It means when you’re sitting in Zazen, and you sometimes notice you’re thinking, and you straighten your posture, sometimes you feel your back or legs aching, and you adjust yourself, sometimes you’re just sitting there, and the wall is clear in front of you. And at that time you’re not thinking and you’re not feeling. It’s a very simple state rather like a baby, and that state is very clear, because you see what’s in front of you. But although you see the wall in front of you, you don’t have any thought “ah that’s the wall in front of me, there’s a pattern”, just, it’s there, a very, very simple stupid state, it’s clear. That’s what it means, so beyond the idea of a lawn or weeds or grasses or flowers, just the fact of seeing something clearly in front of you.
…they have never represented themselves as a sixteen-foot golden body.
The sixteen-foot golden body is a synonym for Gautama Buddha, who was supposed to have a lot of characteristics which I can’t remember, but which are recorded. One of those was the sixteen-foot golden body, another was a golden curl of hair on his head, and special shaped ears and so on.
S: Right, yes, those characteristics were meant to be able to be seen only by special people.
Oh really? I didn’t know that, that’s why I’ve never seen them. Now the next sentence is very interesting and it’s connected to what we were just saying about seeing clearly in front of you.
The immediate Universe exists; it is not awaiting realisation, and it is not avoiding destruction.
Now this sentence refers to a concept or a theory which pervaded almost the whole of Indian Buddhism from the Therevadan side, and from Indian philosophy, that the world came into being, continued, then disappeared, and that things were born, stayed and then disappeared or were destroyed. And this constant coming into being, staying and disappearing, was the way that everything appeared. They were trying to explain reality, and what Master Dogen insists, is that although that theory may bring a picture into our mind, the Universe, that is reality, is just here at this moment; it doesn’t come from anywhere, it doesn’t go to anywhere. It’s just here. And when we’re in the state when the Universe is just here, then our mind here and now is buddha. So just to be in the present is a peaceful, simple state, without anything extra.
S: You know I was thinking about this as well the other day. I was thinking about, ok first everything changes, and then I was thinking….because I read a story about someone whose koan, in his life was just something to do with past, present and future, and he (inaudible) achieve realisation from this. And I was thinking well actually in Zazen in the dojo, it doesn’t really change, maybe you could say your mind changes, but….
Nothing changes.
S: Right.
That’s what Master Kodo Sawaki said.
S: Ok, alright, but it goes against, it’s not a way of realising the first noble truth is it?
Well we’ve got a problem, and that is, if we discuss reality there are contradictions, because there are different viewpoints. One viewpoint is nothing changes, another viewpoint is everything changes. And we can find enough evidence to fill a couple of universes for both points of view. But the two points of view are completely contradictory.
D: (inaudible)
S: They’re both in your mind?
They’re both contradictory because they are view points, viewpoints, but reality is beyond viewpoints. So reality itself is not contradictory, it’s puzzling and ungraspable, but it’s not actually contradictory. But our mind is contradictory, when we take this viewpoint or that. And if you remember in Genjo Koan, Master Dogen says if we take this viewpoint, we’re blind to that one. That’s why we have arguments, I take this viewpoint, you take that viewpoint. So there are four noble truths.
D: I think if you ever study anything like Sociology or Psychology, then that becomes extremely obvious because you have these extreme opinions on both sides of the equation, you have the Functionalist versus Marxist or whatever, and they’re both really into the way that they describe it. And clearly if you read the two of them it’s obvious, it’s always obvious that it’s just somewhere in the middle.
Right, so we can say Buddhism is the Middle Way. That’s the reason it’s the Middle Way. It’s what we get when we go down the middle between two contradictory points of view.
S: But it’s not avoiding the contradictory points of view.
No.
D: Because they are both valid, they’re both useful for finding the way.
We can find contradictions in Science, for instance the wave theory of light, and the particle theory of light. They’re both contradictory, they both explain it perfectly, they both exist, they are two ways of looking at something. So there are four noble truths, and each noble truth is a different point of view.
S: What was I thinking of? The (inaudible) and dukha.
Dukha? It’s translated as “suffering”, but I think it means something more like “frustration”, “discomfort”, “unhappiness”, it doesn’t really mean suffering as such. If you go back to the Pali for dukha, its original meaning is “unhappiness”. So it means when we’re not at peace. But it’s been interpreted to mean that the world is full of suffering, but my world’s not full of suffering, sometimes I feel unhappy and frustrated and sometimes I suffer, but my world’s not full of it. And then the only way of escaping suffering is to get rid of desire, but I can’t get rid of my desire, I’m 56 years old and I can’t get rid of my desire, can you?
D: The tail will never go through the window.
The tail will never go through the window?
D: Yes, it’s a koan about the ox, an entire ox goes through the window but the tail always gets stuck.
Ah, I prefer the analogy of the Ping-Pong ball, or a cork on the water, if you push it down it’s fine, but if you take your finger off it springs up again. That’s what desire is like, if you try and get rid of your desire, it’s fine until you take you finger off.
D: (inaudible)
Well no, I mean you know, we decide, “ok I am not going to get angry”, or “ok I’m going to be celibate for three weeks or three months”, then one day, boom, it all bursts out. So the thing is, how do we train ourselves? If we push ourselves under we pop out so it’s a problem, how to train ourselves.
D: I was talking to a friend of mine about this, and he was saying, because I have a concept in my head that I try to live by for a little while, then I’ll change it to another concept and try and live by that. And what I try and do is to practice it for a while consciously, then try and forget it, and then in practising something else continue doing it without thinking about doing it. So practising it sort of becomes habit, until you forget that you’re practising it. It’s not something that’s easy to do and it (inaudible).
Well that’s what we do with sport isn’t it? If you want to play golf or something you practice your swing until it becomes part of you, if you want to play tennis you do the same.
D: So the idea is to keep pushing the cork under the water until you can just leave you finger there without thinking about it?
No I don’t think so, I think practising something until it becomes part of you is completely different from pushing your desire down until it stays. I don’t think it’s possible to push our desire down until it stays.
D: So what do we do? Revel in them until we’re….?
No, instead of identifying what our desire is, and intellectually looking at ourselves and trying to improve ourselves, we should practice Zazen. And when we practice Zazen, our body and mind become balanced, and when our body and mind becomes balanced, we don’t have such strong desire. We have some desire, but it’s not so strong. When it’s not so strong it doesn’t disturb us, we can put up with being a (ship?) now and again. The problem that we have, is that we have big waves in our lives. So the problem is not that we have desire, but that it gets too strong, then we feel “oh I’m a terrible person, I’m terrible, I shouldn’t be….” Then we get miserable, and we get down, then we get up again.
D: But when you look back, all you see is the peaks and the troughs, you don’t concentrate on the bit in the middle, so when you think you look back at every trough you’ve ever been in, everything you’ve ever done rather, then you think “oh my god”. And when you think you’re being good you look back and you see all the peaks.
Yes, but if those peaks and troughs are not so high, they don’t disturb us so much. So for instance, if I very often lose my temper to such an extent that it disrupts my work and people will think I’m, you know not somebody to talk to, then I’ve got a problem. But if I just get irritable now and again, I can cope with it and other people can cope with it, they think, “oh he’s a bit irritable today”. So it’s a matter of degree. And what we do is we say, “oh I mustn’t lose my temper”, so I want to go from here to zero in one go. But we can throw that way out of the window completely, and just practice Zazen. Or train ourselves on a sport or something, which gives us the balanced state. But Zazen is the simplest way because we can do it in the house, we can do it in the dojo, we can do it when it’s raining, we can do it when it’s snowing outside and it’s simple, doesn’t have any extra bits. But because it’s simple without any extra bits it’s very boring. So sometimes we feel we want something a bit more exciting.
S: I was reading the biography of Shunryu Suzuki, there’s one bit about how he was spending time at Ehei-ji and how he was always messing things up and being criticised and (inaudible) and everything. I was thinking, well actually we don’t do anything like that, there’s no criticism of our leaders. So is it that we’re just very much softer sort of approach?
Well I think there’s two things there, one is, you’re practising Japanese tradition, but you’re not in Japanese society, so you don’t have the history behind the traditions which a Japanese person would have. So for instance Yoko comes here, and she sees what we’re doing, and the chanting, and she has a completely different feeling about it, than Dan coming into the dojo. So for instance wearing a black thing, is rather like in Japan, putting on a morning suit, but we don’t see it like that.
D: I think, to me, a lot…coming in and having, I’ve only been coming for the last few weeks but it does, some of it does seem a bit strange but I’m willing to do it anyway, because that’s how things are done here. What I want to do is sit, and if I have to do this to sit then I’ll do this to sit. But I think if I was going to set up a dojo, or when I’m doing it in my house I’m not going to the walking around, I’m just going to sit.
That’s fine.
Dan: I’ve lost my point.
Well we’ve got a tradition here, but the tradition is outside of the society in which it started. So in Eihei-ji they have this tradition, but there are hundreds of years of history behind it, and there’s a lot of very rigid attitudes. Shunryu Suzuki was a very stubborn, simple man, that what why he was so great, he was a true master. So he just did things as they appeared to him, but that conflicted with the very strict rules and hierarchy in Eihei-ji. So they were furious, they want you to obey exactly their rules, every one of them.
D: And…. I can’t agree with that.
Have you been to Eihei-ji? Have you lived in Japan?
D: No.
Well tell me your opinion.
D: I will do, I have lived in England and I when I look at all of this, I think that in Japan this would have been designed to make you feel comfortable and to feel at home. Coming in as a stranger from the outside, seeing it all it makes me feel uncomfortable, it’s a distraction.