Showing posts with label Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho. Show all posts

All Around, All at Once: Part 3: “Unfabricated”

https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/all-around-all-once-part-3-%E2%80%9Cunfabricated%E2%80%9D

Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge Osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, November 17, 2017

Each moment unfolds as a display of richness, of colours and forms and sounds, as a myriad of sensations. Sincere practice is allowing the whole bodymind to live as the brightness of seeing, the depth of sound, as ever-changing sensations, as the Luminosity of experiencing as a whole. And when we allow ourselves to do even a measure of this, there is a quality of questioning, of interest, of intimacy with everything that is being experienced. But to do this requires that we choose to stop following the congealing of attention into fabrications that lead to further contraction and inevitably, suffering.
Anzan Hoshin roshi says, in the series of classes on “The 8000 Line Prajnaparamita sutra”:

Fear is the underlying mechanism of self-image, the attempt to reify reality in the most basic kind of way by simply freezing it and contracting. And the conventions of consensual experience or the experience of those who are unlearned, those who have not studied their experience, those who have not heard the Dharma, who have not practiced it, those whose lives are based on the understanding of a culture which is itself founded on contraction, will allow themselves to fall into that fear and will allow themselves to be held back by that fear from their own freedom.

What this points to is that we must wordlessly examine absolutely everything, taking nothing for granted: not who we think we are, not our memories, not what we think the body is, not what we think the mind is, not what our tendencies and habits tell us to do, not what our anger or fear is telling us to do. Any state you experience, any stance, any structure of attention you experience is not necessary. They are all recoil. They are all self-inflicted damage.
As the Roshi explained in Class 4 of the series “The Development of Buddhist Psychology:

All conditioned existence gives rise to dukkha or unsatisfactoriness, suffering, contraction, confusion; that this suffering, this dukkha, is fueled by the mechanism of grasping, of trying to hold on to something when it cannot be held and by continually misunderstanding the nature of our experience.

“Dukkha” does not describe one particular kind of state and the "suffering" isn’t necessarily traumatic or dramatic. I mention this because sometimes students will describe a particular kind of state, such as boredom, as dukkha. For example, a student might describe a state of sinking mind, of disinterest, when what they really mean is boredom, and boredom is the result of stupidity klesa. In other words, boredom is a way of experiencing that is poisoned by a flattening of attention that you are fabricating, following, propagating. It is a kind of pouting that one is not being entertained. It is not as dramatic as the tantrums of anger or grasping. But it is still a childish tactic.
But dukkha refers to all states which are the result of conditioned experience, and all states create suffering, unsatisfactoriness and bondage.
The roots of the Pali word "dukkha" are "jur" and "kha." "Bad" and "space". The root metaphor behind this is the hole in a wheel through which the axle passes being blocked. So the word means obstructed space.
We need to learn that the space of who we are, which is present as seeing and hearing and just the fact of experience is already open. When you are in a state, you think you have no choice about that, but the truth of the matter is that you are not choosing. You are following compulsion. Choose to actually practise and open attention and the axle will turn freely.
It’s easy to cultivate states when you are sitting - states of boredom, states of calm, states of quiet, states of euphoria, shiny, shiny states. But all of these are dead ends because whatever is experienced within the state can only be the product of the state. The context is narrowed to the kind of content that suits it. And this is why such states can seem so convincing, and so compelling. This is why you fixate on them. There is no one who is better at lying to you than you are, and the thing that’s convinced by the lie is the same thing that’s doing the lying. It’s not magic once you understand how the trick works. The states define who and what is imagined as a self but is really just a process of obstruction and fabrication.

In Zen practice, however, what we are doing is attending openly, rather than fixating. You can’t ‘fix’ a state from inside of a state. You have to open around it and release it first. Anything you experience when attention is arranged in a structure (a state) is going to be biased and therefore cannot be true. Seeing these structures and learning to attend to them more and more openly with the whole of your experience is part of the many truths that zazen reveals. In the Class Six Outline in the series, “The Development of Buddhist Psychology”, the Roshi said,The Buddha has clearly seen that the root of dukkha was clinging to what could not be clung to. This clinging was the result of conceiving of the impermanent and dynamic exertion of experience to be a collection of real and permanent objects and entities, believing that this clinging will bring pleasure and satisfaction whereas it results only in suffering and confusion, and that what is selfless and beyond the personal is self and personal. The succession of these moments of grasping and confusion he called “samsara”, the “flow”. He called the cessation of this useless struggle and strategic approach to experience “nibbana”, the “blowing out”. In many places throughout the early texts, we find the Buddha again and again asking students to give up their spiritual and secular strategies and just understand something so obvious that it is often missed.

This is why we ask students to sit according to a schedule, why the Roshi has said so often that “the schedule IS Buddha”. The dreaded committed sittings and the schedule you have promised to follow is important because you have to make choices that go beyond compulsion in order to do it. It is something in your life that will insist that you go further than your habits and tendencies dictate and can invite you into the world of the Buddhas. The world of the Buddhas is unfabricated and unborn and you arrive there by releasing yourself into it.
We sit zazen and we do this practice because moment after moment, we do not understand. Any snippets of understanding that come and go are not enough. We cannot afford to entertain ourselves with our states, our thoughts, our interpretations, our fabrications. These are all part of how we misunderstand and will not help us to clarify our understanding. We cannot afford to be lazy. So this morning and throughout this Dharma Assembly, please make the effort to really practise the richness of colours and forms and sounds, the nuance of sensations. Allow the whole bodymind to live as the brightness of seeing, the depth of sound, as ever-changing sensations, and as the Luminosity of experiencing as a whole, by opening all around, all at once.

Labels: Anatta, Luminosity, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho, Zen 16 comments | |

The Touchstone of Breath

Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho-ajari:

http://www.wwzc.org/dhar…/touchstone-10-serenity-not-special

Self-image -- or the process of contraction that gives rise to a sense of self -- would much rather think about what's going on than really engage in what is going on. This is because through contraction, the sense of a 'self' sets itself up as the 'knower' of experiencing, as a some 'one' who is separate from what is being experienced.

When you sit zazen you can see this process of contraction and separation quite easily. You might begin by following the instructions to stay with the sensations of the breath and body, to open to seeing and hearing and pay attention to where you are and what is going on. But a few minutes later, you begin to drift into a storyline, in which the sense of self can seem to be at the center of the storyline.

In zazen, again, and again, when you come back to the breath and body, and refresh your practice, you see the storylines fall apart because there is no "one" at the center of experiencing. There is just this moment and the details that present themselves as the exertion of this moment which are constantly changing. Our practice is to release contraction, and instead of recoiling, learn to meet experiencing as it actually is. This is why we begin with this very simple practice of sitting cross-legged in the posture of zazen, opening attention to all of the sense fields instead of ignoring them to pursue internalized states and stances. And this is why, when we practise Anapanasati, or mindfulness of the breath, we come back to the touchstone of the breath, we mark the moment with the touchstone of this breath. We touch the breath and ground ourselves in this moment.

http://www.wwzc.org/dharma-text/touchstone-17-samantabhadra

Sitting here right now, there are so many sensations that you could be noticing. You might have sat in this same room countless times before, and everything around you might seem to be as it usually is. But is it? You have never experienced this moment of experiencing before. This is ALL new. What does it feel like to be sitting here? I mean bodily? What sensations are you noticing? Your hands rest in the Dharmadhatu mudra, thumbs touching. Feel your hands. There are 48 named nerves in each hand, which includes 3 major nerves, 24 named sensory branches and 21 named muscular branches. That's a LOT of nerves and they're all working, all relaying information, moment after moment. And that's just one range of sensation. There are others.

You might sometimes think that it's easier for you to experience the ‘benefits' of practice in your informal practice. That's because things are more on your terms when you are not sitting. When you are sitting, you will often tend to get bored; you'll want to propagate storylines and states just to have something to lose yourself in. Or you'll want to try to attain some sort of ‘special state' to make yourself feel better, so that you can feel as though something is happening. There's nothing in any of that. This is what happens when you allow yourself to follow that basic sense of poverty that I referred to earlier.

When you are sitting on the zafu, open attention to the richness of experiencing presented by Samantabhadra. You have never been here. You have never breathed this breath or heard these sounds or felt these sensations. The beginning and the end of the Path meet at the touchstone of this moment of this breath, so feel the breath, and use the touchstone as a place from which to open to the richness and wholeness of experiencing.

Labels: Anatta, Luminosity, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho, Zen 0 comments | |

Not a Tourist

http://www.wwzc.org/dharma-text/touchstone-6-not-tourist

The Touchstone 6: Not a Tourist

by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, August 24th, 2013

The breath is always immediate, simple, direct. This is why it is the touchstone for mindfulness. It is something you can open to anywhere, at any time, for as long as you are breathing. It's not even really something you "do". The breath is already going on and all that is needed is for you to release attention from the ways in which it is usually bound, in patterns of contraction and recoil, and attention can just open to it. Simply. Directly.

And the touchstone of mindfulness of the breath is a path to greater and vaster simplicity. Let go not only of what attention seemed to be bound within. Let go not only of the habits of discursive thought and daydreams; let go also of the strategies of attention of being someone who is being mindful of the breath. Let it be just the breath breathing the breath, in just this moment. Let mindfulness be mindful.

If there is the sense that you are watching the breath from above it, from somewhere up behind the eyes viewing down, you've taken up the stance of an 'observer'. When this happens, you're not entering fully into your practice. The 'observer' has little discrimination. Watching is watching, whether it's watching thoughts, watching feeling tones, watching theories, ideas, concepts, about this or that, watching the breath. It doesn't really matter to it what it's watching providing it gets to watch, because as long as it's just watching it doesn't have to really do anything. It doesn't have to take any responsibility, it doesn't have to engage in what is going on at all. It can seem to be quite removed from what is really going on, free to maintain whatever agendas it views as important while ignoring almost everything that is really going on around it. A tourist.

This is a quote from the Fukanzazengi: How Everyone Can Sit by Eihei Dogen zenji:

In this and all other worlds, in India or in China, every place is marked by the seal of Awake Awareness. Upholding the essence of this Way, devote yourself to zazen, completely do zazen. You might hear about ten thousand ways to practise but just be complete and sit. What's the point of giving up your seat to go wandering around in dusty lands and countries? Take a wrong step and you'll miss what's there.
You've got what you need, the treasure of this body and birth, so don't waste your time. Keep to this as the basis of the Way of Awake Awareness. Don't be attracted by just a spark from the flint. Anyway, your body is like dew on the grass, your life a flash of lightning; vain for a moment and then vanished in an instant.

You who are in this excellent Lineage of Zen, don't blindly grope only a part of the elephant or fear the true dragon. Put all of yourself into this Way which directly presents your own nature. Be grateful to those who have come before and have done what was to be done. Align yourself with the enlightenment of the Awakened Ones and take your place in this Samadhi-Lineage. Practice in this way and you'll be what they are. The doors of the treasure house will fall open for you to do with as you will.

We miss so much of our lives through being inattentive. As the Gokan No Ge, the traditional Five Remembrances Meal Chant, says, Delusions are many, attention wanders. No matter where you are, no matter the circumstances you find yourself in, if you are not attending to experiencing, if you are not questioning into the nature of experiencing, you are missing most of what is really going on.

A tourist doesn't gain real insight into the experiences of people living in other lands and countries. They skim the surface of experiencing, noticing only the coarsest details. People will often say they want to travel to this place or that because they want to experience a different culture. You can't experience a different culture unless you live within that culture for many years, forming relationships and interacting with people, speaking their language, eating their food, reading their books, listening to their music, engaging in all of the details within that culture to take on its characteristics so thoroughly that you know it inside out. That is understanding another culture. Anything else is just being a tourist.

Being a tourist in one's own life is one of the characteristics of self-image. Self-image is very concerned with how things appear to be so the most superficial details will tend to stand out. We learn to dress according to what we think is our 'part', we learn to speak our 'part', play our 'part', fit in. It's really not comfortable and we tend to complain a lot, but we don't really have any better ideas about how to go about it all so we go along with it. But if there is a glimmer of real questioning within all of this, eventually we may find ourselves sitting on a zafu, facing a blank white wall, coming back to the touchstone of the breath, in order to question further into what it is that we are really experiencing - past the expectations and associations and assumptions that make up so much of what we think of as 'our lives'.

When you come to the monastery to attend a sitting once a week as an associate student or perhaps a few times a week as a general student, it's easy to forget that practice isn't just about the round and a half of sitting you do in the Hatto or the Zendo. It's about the WHOLE of your life. What you see while sitting in zazen is how your attention tends to move towards and away from whatever is noticed - a thought, a feeling, someone on the other side of the room coughing; the sound of a bird, the breath, back to a thought, an itch, a reaction to the itch, a reaction to the reaction. And on and on. Attention waxes and wanes, closes down with contraction, opens, sinks, opens, sinks again and you fall asleep. And then you're wide awake, feeling the breath for a moment, then lost in thought. And so it goes, throughout the round just as it does all of the rest of the time, through all of your waking and sleeping hours. But the difference between what is going on when you are sitting zazen and what is going on for the rest of the hours in your day is that if you are making an effort in your practice, that effort is to be more intentional about how your attention is moving.

Now, when I say "that effort is to be more intentional about how your attention is moving" this doesn't mean that being intentional means directing, aiming or focusing attention. The intention that is needed is to release attention from exactly that directing, aiming and focusing you engage in most of the time. The intention is to release attention into reality, beginning with the simplicity of the breath. And by 'reality', in this context I mean simply something that is going on, something you can verify through your actual experience. You are breathing. That is unarguably true. So we start with something that is very simple and completely true. We come back to the touchstone of the breath as a starting point from which we can open to more of what is true of our experiencing. We are breathing, but we are also experiencing the sensations of the whole bodymind sitting. Those sensations are not something we make happen, they are already going on. All that we need to do is let go of continuously distracting ourselves with thoughts and feelings and release attention into the breath and the sensations of the body. The bodymind is also seeing. You can see the white of the wall. That is unarguably true. You are hearing the sound of my voice, the pauses between the words I speak.

These sensations, this breath, these sounds and colours and forms, the experience of the bodymind and the space in which the bodymind arises - this is your life. You are not a tourist, visiting temporarily to have some kind of special experience. The practice of your life is the practise of whole bodymind in this moment, just as it is. You've heard the expression Progress into the ordinary? Well this is what it means.

Tourists like to watch other people's lives. They like to just pass through without having to do anything. They pick and choose the kind of experiences they think they want to have, living temporarily in a kind of bubble that floats above 'ordinary' life which allows them to watch what is going on and interact with it as little as possible.

This is just like the sense of being a watcher that can obstruct true mindfulness. It is like just being a tourist in the land of Zen.

A point of interest about the 'watcher' is that it likes to believe that it is being very subtle, very covert. It's as though it were back and away from what is going on, off at a safe distance from which it can observe and generate various judgments and notions about what seems to be going on. All by itself, all very secretive. Sometimes people will refer to the movements of contracted attention that are really what this observer is, as their "innermost thoughts and feelings".

But through the process of mindfulness practice, one begins to realize that in fact there is no 'inside' or 'outside' and the appearance of a secretive "self" or "me" who is at the center of experience watching and making judgments is nothing more than the self-image attempting to set itself up as a 'knower', a voyeur, a tourist just passing through, who watches, makes judgments, but never really engages in anything that is actually going on. Because it doesn't really considers itself part of what is going on.

Now sometimes the observer will show up as that thing that seems to be looking over your shoulder making judgments about everything you do. "You shouldn't have said that, you sound like an idiot". Sometimes it will do replays of events that occurred previously, echoing them back to you over and over again, re-writing what you should have said or should have done. It likes to pretend it's much more intelligent than the rest of you is, much more worldly. But it's only AFTER the fact that it has anything to say. And that is a dead give-away. There's actually nobody inside of that thing that's doing the observing, no entity that is more intelligent or more knowing than you are the rest of the time.

For many people, taking up the contracted stance of an 'observer' is so habitual that they don't realize they are doing this most of the time. It comes up in dokusan, daisan and practice interviews with students quite frequently. An extreme example of this would be when a student is facing the Teacher or a practice advisor waiting for some kind of 'big' experience. Like a tourist waiting to be entertained.

I was an associate student when I first started having dokusan with the Roshi and I used to get into quite a lot of this in the beginning. I used to sit opposite him and as he spoke I would be coming up with all kinds of thoughts and opinions about what he was saying and how he was saying it and what it all meant about me and how I felt about it, whether I agreed with it, how it fit into what I thought I already understood, and on and on and on. All from up behind the eyes, in 'secret'.

What I didn't realize at first was that he was seeing all of this.

I don't mean that he was reading my mind or anything like that. Reading other people's minds even if it were possible would be very rude so he wouldn't do that. No, it was simply that he could see how my attention was. When attention is more open that is quite obvious. When it is contracted, that is quite obvious. Different kinds of contraction generate different kinds of textures that can be felt. And how a student responds or doesn't respond shows quite clearly how willing they are to be exposed to and and by the process of practice. Again and again and in so many ways the Roshi invited me to come out from my hiding places to meet with him and receive the Dharma. In some of my other Dharma Talks I've provided a few glimpses of exchanges I've had with the Roshi. Sometimes they were very uncomfortable; sometimes he could be quite fierce; sometimes very kind; but always in speech and action, through example, what I was being shown was the Dharma. I remember on one occasion a particularly snippy comment I made, which was I'm not learning anything. The Roshi responded simply by saying I am Teaching you, moment after moment in how I am. Pay attention.
The great debt of gratitude I owe my Teacher can never be repaid.

When you are called for daisan or a practice interview, the first question you are usually asked is How is your practice? This is first and foremost a reminder to practice, to really make use of the opportunity to meet with a monastic. A practice interview or daisan is meeting with the mind of practice. So it is about speaking from your practice, about your practice. Other topics may come up about your life or your activities outside of the monastery, but these are only relevant at all if the reason you are bringing them up is to clarify how you can practise with them. If you bring up something like your relationship with your husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend or work concerns or health concerns or the state of the universe, there is nothing a monastic really has to say about any of this unless you are speaking about it from the mind of practice, with the intention to practice with the reactivity that comes up about it. It's important to understand that your practice is your life. Your life is not your practice, not unless you're practising with it. Difficulties you may experience in your life would be going on whether you were practising or not. They don't come up because you're practising. And what a Dharma Teacher or practice advisor can offer you in the way of advice about these is to really allow mindfulness to inform your decisions; to practise as continuously as possible. That is what we do; that is what we are trained to do; that is what we are here for and that is what we have to offer you.

In the teisho series, Entering Completely: Commentaries on Bodhidharma's "Two Entries and Four Practicesby Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi:

A thought comes up, and we think that we have thought it, even though we don't know where that thought has come from, or where it goes. We pretend that we have thought the thought. We pretend that we are the thinker. And we are coloured by the contents of that thought, as we propagate the next thought, and the next thought, and the next thought, and continue this game of dancing around pretending that we are the thinker, pretending that we are the contents of the thoughts. We bind our experiences together into lumps and heaps, into piles of junk.

We get up in the morning, and once we get over that moment of panic of the first opening our eyes and realizing that there's a world there, and we collect together all of our thoughts and feelings for the day. We start to ramble around inside of our head, feeling a grudge about this, feeling anxious about that. We wake up in our usual bed, in our usual way, get out of bed into our usual room, and wander around through our usual world for the day, looking for some kind of satisfaction someplace, something interesting to happen to cut through this usualness, this pettiness. Desperately searching for something to make us happy, or at least give us some sense of being alive.

And yet, things are not bound together, nor are you tied. Sounds come and go. Thoughts come and go. The world comes and goes over and over and over again. When a thought comes up it is instantly gone. It is impossible for you to hold onto a thought. It is impossible for you to hold on to a sound. It is impossible to find any place to hold on, let alone to be able to pile things up in ugly heaps.

The world is not usual. The world is amazing. The world exerts itself as world, simply for the fun of it. In our search for something to make us happy, we pass over this basic joyfulness that is existence. And so the reason it is not manifest is only due to being wrapped in external objects and deluded views. We have a deluded view if we think that the world is the same moment after moment. We have a deluded view if we think that we can hold onto anything. We have a deluded view if we think that we are anything at all. We have a deluded view if we believe in time and space and body and mind and self and other. We have a deluded view if we think that we have to become Buddha. We have a deluded view if we think that we are not Buddha. We wrap ourselves in external objects when we hope that something will make us happy. Wrapping ourselves in external objects does not just mean collecting cars, and houses, and mink coats. Giving up wrapping ourselves in external objects is not as easy as selling your property and going off to live in a cave. Ceasing to wrap oneself in external objects means to come out into the open, to stop hiding, and to come out and play.

Practise the simplicity and honesty of opening attention to things just as they are. Release the strategies self-image entangles you in by coming back to the touchstone of the breath. Do this as much as you are able while sitting in zazen and then follow through and practise mindful speech while meeting with monastics in daisan and interviews. And beyond that, practise this simplicity as often as possible the rest of the time too. You're not a tourist in your life or in the monastery or in your practice and this is not some 'spiffy Zen thing' you do now and then. This practice IS the practice of your life as it really is, beyond your ideas and interpretations about it. And as the Roshi would say, Please, enjoy yourself.

Labels: Anatta, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho, Zen 0 comments | |

Breathing

Related: Contemplating/observing breathing (观呼吸)

Someone asked me about practices and said that this blog does not have much specific information about practices... which is true. I told him my practices evolved according to my understanding and some of it is described in my e-book.

I also pointed out this article, as it is is similar to the practice I currently do.

http://www.wwzc.org/dharma-text/touchstone-2-countless

The Touchstone 2: Countless

by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, January 26th, 2013

Breathing in, sky becomes breath. Breathing out, breath becomes sky. The breath comes and goes; thoughts come and go; feelings come and go; countless experiences come and go. Practising the posture of zazen, feeling into the countless sensations of the whole body sitting, feeling the breath and opening to the senses, we begin to understand, to experience directly, the vastness and richness of this life.

For moments here and there.

In truth, most students are really doing this practice of opening to Openness for only a split-second here and there in the course of a half-hour sitting round. It's not that you couldn't do this more continuously, that your practice couldn't be more open and clearer, but only that habitual patterns and tendencies are strong and attention will tend to follow them. Habitual patterns of attention are rather like dry channels that have been cut into a landscape by streams of water. Just as water will follow channels in the ground, your attention will tend to fall into and follow the narrow channels of habit and tendency instead of opening to richness.

So for a moment you may be sitting zazen, and you really are feeling into the sensations of the body sitting in an aligned posture, feeling the movement of the breath at the diaphragm and tanden, feeling your hands in the mudra, your legs crossed, your backside on the zafu. Peripheral vision is open and you are hearing whatever sounds there are that present themselves, and then a thought comes up: "I have a hole in my boot. I'm going to have to put my wet sock back on and my boot and it's going to be cold and nasty. Damn, I've got to remember to go look for new boots. I hate shopping and I don't want to spend money on boots. I'm saving for a new phone. Oooh, a shiny new phone. The breath. Right, the breath. I have to feel the breath. But oooh, that phone. No, feel the breath. Right. Breathing, breeeeeeathing....hmmm. There's a hole in my boot."

Of course, that's a very brief description of something that could come up. But sometimes these channels are cut very deeply and the compulsion to follow them is quite compelling. It could be about one's child or husband or wife, or an illness or a situation at work or financial difficulties, some past event, or what to make for supper. Thoughts and feelings come up simply because they can and they'll go on for as long as you focus on them and give them attention.

Attention can be round and wide, or it can narrow and congeal. The tendency is to focus attention and allow it to congeal into knots of contraction. These knots can vary in duration, from a few moments to hours, days, weeks, months, even years of contraction. And they can be about anything. I'll just mention here that what seems 'light' or 'open' to you may not be light or open at all. It's just as easy to be contracted over thoughts about what enlightenment might be like as it is to be contracted over breaking up with your girlfriend. Contraction comes about through a narrowing of attention, a congealing, directing and focusing of thought and feeling that becomes increasingly internalized.

Most people don't really question into what the process of contraction is, what really happens. But some do recognize that there is this tendency for people to become very scattered and spaced out or to become overly focused, obsessed with thoughts and storylines and feeling-tones. And this has given rise to many techniques and strategies designed to calm the mind and control the scattering or the focusing.

Any strategy or 'technique' you apply to bodymind already has an agenda because it is the product of the presumptions underlying how you experience the world and yourself which are themselves products of the process of locating a sense of a "knower" or "self-image", an "I". The agenda is to strengthen the sense of an "I" or a "self" that is "doing" the practice. If you engage in such practices, what you will actually be doing is practising self-image and if you practise self-image, what you end up with is self-image.

If you truly want to Wake Up, YOU need to get out of the way and allow the bodymind to sit as bodymind. You need to shut up and attend to what is already going on and allow the countless experiences to reveal themselves as the Total Field of experiences as the radiance of the luminosity of Experiencing itself. The bodymind is already breathing and it doesn't need your help, your direction, or any interference from you. It doesn't need you to concentrate on it or regulate it or count it. All that you need to do is feel into the breath at the diaphragm and the tanden but don't stop there. Use the breath as a touchstone, a place from which you can open to the whole of experiencing.

Recently I had a conversation with a student about a technique they had encountered, called something like 'conscious breathing'. This involved following the instructions of a recording and deliberately regulating the breath by focusing on it and counting it. Counting the breath is a practice used widely by many groups and organizations and students sometimes ask me why we don't use it, so I will explain. I have done this practice of counting the breath. In fact, earlier on in my own practice, the Roshi instructed me to do it for a time so that I would understand it and would be able to explain to students why we don't do it. Its aim is to settle and calm the mind by directing attention to a point of focus -- the breath and the counting. This will have the effect of seemingly 'calming' the mind, but it's important to understand what's really going on. You're not stupid and attention is not stupid. If you focus on something, what you are doing by focusing is seemingly making whatever it is that you are focusing on stand out or light up. It seems to become bigger, more important. It's much like looking through a telescope - something far away seen through the lens of a telescope looks much bigger than it is in real life. A cow standing on a distant hillside looks the size of Godzilla. But if you take the telescope away from your eye and see it in context, you'll realize you can barely see it, it's so small.

When you focus on the breath and count it, you're trying to limit experiencing to only the in-breath and the out-breath and the numbers. Those details can seem 'lit up' or much bigger, much more important than anything else because you've thrown a huge circle of darkness on everything around them. If you do that, you will be practising focusing. Of course the mind seems to become quieter -- as I mentioned previously you're not stupid and attention is not stupid.

If you force the mind to pay attention to only one or two details of experiencing, you're numbing it. You're deliberately choosing stupidity. You're putting up a wall of attention to exclude everything else. But what will happen outside of your dull little place of quiet is that the patterns of attention that spawn all those pesky thoughts and feeling tones are regrouping and when your wall crumbles, which inevitably it will, they'll come back with a vengeance. Traditionally, it's compared to holding an empty gourd under water; when you let go of it, it pops back up to the surface and bobs about wildly.

You see, it's not the scattering that's the problem, it's the focusing. When you focus attention on one thing, you do that by excluding everything else. You become so used to focusing on one thing and then another, that if something comes up unexpectedly, it throws you off balance. Your attention becomes less and less flexible, less and less able to open to life as it actually is, full of interruptions and surprises, and change.

A single moment of seeing a thought rise and fall as you open around it is worth years of counting the breath. Why? Because counting the breath or applying any other strategy to the breath will not show you anything about how attention moves towards and away from what is noticed, including thoughts and feelings. You're just swapping one set of thoughts - your storylines - for another set of thoughts, counting and concentrating on the breath.

In Anzan Hoshin roshi's book on the Buddha's Satipatthana sutta, "The Straight Path: Zen Teachings on the Foundations of Mindfulness", he says,

The practice is not to concentrate on the breath, but to just breathe the
breath. If you try to "concentrate" on the breath, what will happen is that you will
abstract yourself from the actual situation. You will create some kind of special
realm and you'll enter into conflict with yourself by trying to screen out what is
really just your own life. So, just sit and breathe the breath. When you get lost in
a thought, or in a feeling, you have separated yourself from the rest of your
experience. So when you have noticed this, gently return to this moment of
breathing in or breathing out.

He also says:

The practice is actually just being aware. It is not really about following the
breath or trying to produce some kind of feeling tone of "being one with the
breath." Zazen is the practise of experience as it actually is. This begins with
being mindful, and so you are using the breath to be reminded of that and to
show you what your mindfulness is like. Just sit and breathe. Do not try to
concentrate on your breath. You are not trying to make any particular mental
state happen, you are just seeing what's happening by looking into the breath.

Although some contemporary Soto Zen Teachers, especially those in the West, might have counted the breath and now instruct their students to do this, our own practice is based directly on Eihei Dogen zenji's foundations and those Awakened Ancestors who have come before him.

In the Eihei Koroku, Dogen zenji says,

In our practice the most essential matter is sitting in the correct posture. Next it is important to release the breath with a calm mind. In the Narrow Path there are two ways of doing zazen. The first is counting the breath and the other is to contemplate the body as impure. So a practitioner of the Narrow Path would control the rhythm of the breath through counting the respirations. However, the practice of the Awakened Ones and Ancestors is completely different from the Narrow Path. A Discourse says," You should never follow styles of practice of the Narrow Path which are based upon 'cultivation'. (EK 2:97)

and

The Shibunritsu and Kusha schools that are active in Japan currently are of this sort. The Vast Path way of balancing the breath is just to know that a long breath is long and a short breath is short. Breath rises and falls at the lower belly. Breathing in is breathing in and breathing out is breathing out. However the breath is, breathe in and breathe out from the lower belly. When you breathe in this way through the belly, the impermanence of your life becomes clear and the mind stills itself. (Eihei Koroku 2: 96)

And so in "The Straight Path", Roshi also says,

The body breathes. It breathes in and it breathes out. Begin with this. Know this moment of breathing. Attending to the breath, attending to the body, attending to movement, attending to sitting, standing, walking, or lying down, is attending directly to the experience of body. To see directly the rising and falling, the coming and going, the birth and death of each moment, is the Straight Path. So we begin with this body, we begin with this breath.

Note that he says "So we begin with this body, we begin with this breath". He doesn't tell us to focus on the breath or follow it or concentrate on it. Instead he is pointing to the practice of feeling into the breath and body, in the same breath, at the same time.

Just feel this breath as it is. Without focusing on it, without counting, without manipulating it, just breathe. Open attention to the sensations of the breath, but simultaneously open to the rest of the sensations of the bodymind sitting; open to seeing and hearing; open to as many details of experiencing as you are able, all at the same time, all in the same breath. Do this now, in this breath. And now again. And now again. At first it may seem very effortful, but that is because your attention is used to jumping about like a spoiled child. It has to learn to attend, to be available to the open intelligence of the Buddhas and Awakened Ancestors. It has to learn to be a 'big person' instead of a petulant child. And as you practise this, coming back to the breath again and again with each breath, practising this 'Beginner's Mind", over time you will find the gaps in your mindfulness will shorten.

Then you will begin to see what gives rise to those gaps, how they happen, how you get lost. But that will be for the next Dharma Talk.

As I mentioned in the previous Dharma Talk in this series, paying attention to the sensations of the breath, the real details of the real breath as it really is just brings about what is actually going on. It is not a matter of drilling down into the sensations to dig up some special thing, some kind of hidden ore that will make us spiritual or saintly. Or to construct some miracle device out of them that can let us float above our real lives. The simplicity of the practice is so honest and direct that it allows us to be really honest and direct.

Breathing in, sky becomes breath. Breathing out, breath becomes sky. You have never experienced this breath before. Earth and water, wind and breath, nothing held and no grasping. Just breathe and experience this measureless moment with the sensations of fingers and toes and belly and spine and colours and forms. Attend to what already is.

Labels: Luminosity, Maha, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho 0 comments | |

Too Intimate to be Personal

http://wwzc.webfactional.com/book/dharma-assembly-too-intimate-be-personal

Dharma Assembly: Too Intimate to be Personal

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, June 11, 2011

Intimacy is simply being open to the intimacy of experiencing which is already present and always available. This is what Zen practice actually is: opening to this openness, being a bodhisattva.

Intimacy is the recognition that everything within your life is alive AS your life. Every moment of experiencing, regardless of how you feel about it, regardless of what you think of it, is this intimacy, and everything you experience points to this intimacy whether you recognize it or not. Zen practice is seeing how we turn away from this intimacy and releasing this contraction.

On your way into the monastery this morning, you walked through the Sanmon, the Mountain Gate, and up the stone path. On either side of the stones of the path, an array of colours met your eyes as the many different greens of ferns and moss, the small flowering plants and ground cover. The air in the monastery grounds, cooled by the water in the ponds, is cooler than the air down the street. Did you feel how it was soft on your skin? And as you walked on the path, step after step, you were being observed by countless birds from overhead branches or from inside the thick hedge, calling from all directions. Perhaps you noticed some of these details. Perhaps you were so caught up in just ‘getting into the building on time’ that you missed most of this.Perhaps you were even thinking about what you would do after you left or what was happening before you came or even last week or something that has never happened and never will. In any case, whether you were allowing attention to open to those details or not, there was intimacy with your life. The question is, how intimate were you with your life? How responsive were you? If your attention was folded down into contraction, you will have noticed very little about that walk up the pathway. So you see, this intimacy we are speaking of is not something you are ever denied, it is something you can choose to open to.

You don’t have to wait for experiencing to be arranged in a certain way or for you to be interested in how experiencing is to open to this intimacy. Even when you are not feeling well, when you’re tired or grumpy, you can still be intimate with experiencing. You can have a pounding headache and still open attention to the context in which you and the pounding of your head are taking place because you are aware of the headache. The question is - what is it that is aware? How is it that you are aware of anything at all? If you have a headache, trying to manipulate it with your practice isn’t going to cure it. Take an aspirin if you want to change it. But while it’s going on, practise with it. Practice isn’t about manipulating experiencing so that you can limit and contain it and only experience what you want to experience. You can’t control reality. You can influence it, but if your attention is contracted, you will inevitably influence it in ways that will deepen contraction.

Wanting to manipulate experience by turning practice into a strategy or a formula is a misunderstanding that beginning students in particular fall into. This strategizing comes up while sitting zazen, but also when you’re not sitting. It comes up concerning work issues such as dissatisfaction with a job or a career, or a living situation, but also with more personal issues such as relationships. This is why you spend so much of your sitting time pondering these issues - you think that if you just spend enough time thinking about them, you’ll reach some state of perfect mental clarity and you’ll know exactly what to do; you’ll have the formula for it, the cure. And of course, the fact that all of this is only going on inside your head and reality is not inside your head is something that you will tend to overlook when you’re really caught up in it.

Because you spend so much time thinking about strategies and designing formulas for yourselves, topics of this sort will also come up from time to time in practice interviews and daisan. It’s not that this is a problem - far from it, students are welcome to bring up any topic they wish to discuss in interviews and daisan. But I think it’s important to understand how limiting this can be.

If you ask a practice advisor to tell you how you should respond to your boss or your significant other when they say or do this or that, yes, the practice advisor could probably put together a response that would be very clever. But the problem is that if they were to do that, all they would be giving you is one of many possible solutions to this particular problem and it’s not YOUR solution. You won’t have learned anything from that. Why? Because what you’ve asked for is a formula that will only work in a very specific set of conditions. The next time an issue comes up, that formula won’t work because the circumstances will be different. And there’s no guarantee that it will work anyway, because the practice advisor or Dharma Teacher is not IN that situation and does not know all of the details of it.

What we can do, however, is talk about the habitual patterns that people tend to fall into so that they can recognize them and avoid certain pitfalls.

Everyone wants intimacy but there are many things people call ‘intimacy’ and most are not intimate at all. Many are what you settle for when you are not really being intimate with your life - the touchy-feelly kind of intimacy people try to share that comes and goes and goes and is gone more often than it is present. There are many patterns people engage in around this, so I will bring up a few of them.

Relationships aren’t all they’re made out to be. As Anzan roshi has often pointed out, ninety-five percent of the time you’re trying not to get in trouble with the other person. Another five percent can be nice or kind of nice, or just slightly better than not being in trouble. And for the last five percent, which is spread throughout, you’re in trouble. This is not intimacy, it’s the result of following habitual patterns that involve a lot of ‘leaning’. People who are in intimate relationships do tend to lean on each other a great deal and I don’t mean the kind of leaning one does with an injured hip. No, the other kind of leaning - wanting someone to prop you up, jolly you out of your states or distract you from them. When people are sad or angry or confused, there is the expectation that the other person will be available to hear their stories, sympathize with them and try to make them feel better and this can become more than a full-time job, it can become a life-long job. Even if there is something really serious going on, your first obligation as concerns your states, is to work with them yourself. Looking to another person to do this for you is sheer laziness. When both parties do this to excess, their time together is spent primarily looking at each other, continuously trying to gauge the kind of states that are present, day after day after day.

If I were to use a metaphor for good and bad relationships, it would be this: There are two people walking down the street together and as they walk, they are looking at the sky, the ground, the trees, the buildings and perhaps commenting on those. Or they might talk to one another about possibilities that may unfold for them or they may just walk together in silence. But they are attentive to the details of the walking, of their surroundings, and that of course includes each other, but without an enormous sense of problem. A bad relationship is like two people walking down the street but they are seeing nothing but each other. They watch each other, continually worrying about what the other is thinking, what facial expressions might mean, wondering what is going on in the other person’s mind, wondering about their relationship, wondering “do you love me?” which is stifling and claustrophobic.

Relationships with other people, be it with a significant other or family members or friends, provide us with countless opportunities to notice how the three klesas determine for us the criteria by which someone is worthwhile or not. If your attention is bound up by habitual patterns of contraction, then these will dictate how you view other people. Again, first and foremost, it is your responsibility to work with your own states and habitual patterns. Because these are so habitual and you feel so justified in propagating them, your attention becomes consumed by them and it is very difficult to for you to recognize that they are even present unless you make the effort to open attention. And I mean as much of the time as is possible. Any state you experience has one agenda and that is to continue itself. Practice is about interrupting states. It’s not convenient and it is never habitual. It requires an effort to open to reality in the midst of your life. But there is time to do this and there is space in your life to practice. If you can find the time to spend as much time as you do lost in habitual thoughts and feelings, you can find the time to practice.

The intimacy people wish to find in their relationships does not begin as romantic engagement. It doesn’t start with becoming personal with another person. Real intimacy is intimacy with your whole life and it is only to the extent that you can be intimate with your own life that you can be intimate with the life of another. I think this is really quite obvious. If your attention is so folded down that you are spending a good portion of your time lost in storylines and feelingtones and strategies, you make yourself unavailable and unresponsive to reality. Other people are not your thoughts and feelings about them.

If you are in a relationship that was formed on a weak foundation and you practice, it may fall apart. And that won’t be because practising will make you cold or indifferent. It will be because you will begin to understand what intimacy really is. If you are in a relationship that was built on a strong foundation and practise it will become even stronger, even more intimate. The reason for this is that intimacy is too intimate to be personal. The intimacy of the bodhisattva, of one who is opening to openness is not just intimacy with another person, it is intimacy with the whole of one’s experiencing. It includes other people but is not dependent on other people. And this intimacy is something you can practise right now.

When you are sitting and choose to open past your storylines to feel the actual contact of thumb against thumb, you are practising intimacy. A step in kinhin is intimacy with the sensations of the foot, the texture of the floor beneath the foot and the coolness of the air that passes beneath the foot as it is lifted to take the next step. And further, opening attention to the whole bodymind, balanced and at ease, intimate with the sensations of the warmth and weight of the hands held in shashu resting against the diaphragm, feeling the breath come and go; moving through the space of the room; opening to the seeing as you move through the space and the space moves past you and intimate with the space of experiencing in which all of this is occurring, When you pay attention to the sensations of the bodymind, the sounds you are hearing and the colours and forms you are seeing, you are opening past self-absorption - this same self-absorption that limits and constricts the relationships you have with other people. This intimate practice of zazen shows you how your attention abstracts and recoils from present experiencing so that you can release contraction and become intimate with the life that lives as all lives, as your life.

There is much more to look into concerning these topics and we shall continue to do so in the next Dharma Talk.

Labels: Luminosity, Non Dual, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho, Zen 0 comments | |

Tada!

Session Start: Friday, 30 April, 2010

(9:38 AM) Thusness: The tata is very good. The Stainless is also good but just to be picky... the 'it' must be eliminated...stainlessness is the ungraspable of the arising and passing phenomena. Without essence and locality of any arising...nothing 'within or without it'.
(9:38 AM) Thusness: all the expressions in what u quoted are excellent.
(9:38 AM) Thusness: and all those phases of insight is to get u to what's being expressed. 🙂
(9:38 AM) Thusness: and all those phases of insights are to get u to what that is being expressed in the tata and stainless articles. It is the place where anatta and emptiness become obsolete. 🙂
(9:38 AM) Thusness: put this in the blog...great expression

John Tan also told me before my anatta realisation:

(11:20 PM) Thusness: u never experience anything unchanging

(11:21 PM) Thusness: in later phase, when u experience non-dual, there is still this tendency to focus on a background... and that will prevent ur progress into the direct insight into the TATA as described in the tata article.

(11:22 PM) Thusness: and there are still different degree of intensity even u realized to that level.

(11:23 PM) AEN: non dual?

(11:23 PM) Thusness: tada (an article) is more than non-dual...it is phase 5-7

(11:24 PM) AEN: oic..

(11:24 PM) Thusness: it is all about the integration of the insight of anatta and emptiness

(11:25 PM) Thusness: vividness into transience, feeling what i called 'the texture and fabric' of Awareness as forms is very important

then come emptiness

(11:26 PM) Thusness: the integration of luminosity and emptiness

Also see: Stainless

http://www.wwzc.org/book/tada

Dharma Assembly: "Tada!"

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
Dainen-ji, October 24th, 2009

People have all kinds of expectations, not only about how their lives will be, but how today will be, or how this moment will be. But reality is not an idea. It is what it is. Tada.
In the colder autumn air, the trees are changing colour and fallen leaves line the gutters of the streets. And seeing this, we know winter is coming. But although most of us sitting here today have seen this happen again and and again, year after year after year, we don't really know what the cold of winter will actually be like. We have memories of cold fingers, the sound of snow crunching underfoot, memories of having to put on many layers to protect ourselves from an icy wind. But memories of cold are not the reality of cold. It is what it is and we will know cold when it is...cold. Tada. And now, before the snow comes, we see the colour fading from our immediate world as the trees lose their leaves and bare branches stand out black against a graying sky. And mixed into, and swirling along with the leaves in the street, are discarded paper cups, gum wrappers, used Kleenex and the odd sandwich wrapper. All swirling in the wind. Is it beautiful? Is it ugly? Neither. Is it good or bad? Neither. It is Tada.
"Tada" is a Japanese word that means "Just, exactly, of course, just as it is." It is sometimes, as in the Teachings of Eihei Dogen zenji and Anzan Hoshin roshi, used as a synonym for the more techincal term "immo" or "tathata" in Sanskrit, which means Suchness. Suchness is the reality of all dharmas, all things or experiences. The "actual nature" is another technical term for this. It means that each thing is sunya or empty of all of our ideas about and knowledge of anything, that it is impermanent, that it is the radiance of the Luminosity of experience.
Impermanence is so blatantly obvious. We see our grandparents die, and as we ourselves age,we see our parents die. We see other people around us die. We know that all around the world countless people die every day. But when someone close to us dies, we are so surprised. We are surprised when our relationships change, when the economy changes, when our environment changes and we are surprised that we have to change and that what we do has to change because of these changes. We are surprised when we become sick, surprised when we let things slide and difficulty ensues. And most of this surprise is due to a conflict that comes about when our ideas about reality do not match up with what reality actually is. Reality is Tada: Things as they actually are. Suchness. Tada.
That itch behind your ear? Tada. That's it. The sensation of your hands resting in the mudra? That's it. The moisture you feel on your tongue? That's it. The movement of the breath? Just as it is. The form of the person sitting next to you? That's it. The release in your neck and spine when you straighten your posture? That's it. The sound of my voice and the quiet pauses between words? Exactly so. In the moment of Waking up from a thought, the recognition that streaming thoughts that can never settle on any one definitive "truth" because all that they can ever be is a continuously changing streaming? That's it. Tada.
The details of each thing stand out clearly and distinctly just as they are and experiencing is new and fresh, moment-to- moment. There is no need to embellish, to ponder, to strategize or hold on to anything whatsoever because each thing that is known is simply being known as detail arising within the Knowing of it. Tada. So simple.
But, of course, if you let attention narrow and focus, the distortion that focusing will produce is far from simple. We make such a big deal out of our stuff....
We can make a big deal out of a yawn: "Y-AAAAAAAAAAAAA-W-N".
Out of a sneeze "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-Choo!"
Out of a sensation "I have a....headache"; "I'm tired", "My knee hurts".
Out of a feeling tone (whiny, plaintive voice) "Oh but I thought I was supposed to....". "But you told me..."
Out of a stance "I'm right and I know I'm right and that's all there is to it".
Out of a petty memory: "I remember when you did that thing and how it made me feel and I will never, ever forgive you".
We can make a huge deal out of having to get up in the morning.
Out of having to go to bed at night.
Out of having to eat when it is time to eat.
Out of having to go to work.
Out of having to wait for a bus,
Out of which seat we get on the bus,
Out of simply having to sit down or stand up.
We make a big deal over the simplest of tasks.
Before we do them: "Ugh I have to do yada".
While we are doing them: "Ugh, when is this going to be finished?"
And even after we've done them "I did SUCH a good job of that. Never has such a good job been done of that thing by anyone, anywhere, and everyone else should acknowledge that."
We make a big deal of how we look at other people and how they look at us because we think it all "MEANS" something. It "MEANS" something about "ME".
"I am so sad. Look at my mournful eyes, so deep and full of feeling".
"I am so angry, look how I GLARE at you". (that one can be pretty funny).
"I am sick, look how haggard I am, how near death I am".
Just stop with the "yada yada yada." Just tada. Just practise.
But we can make a big deal out of anything and everything, including our practice. We can make such a big bloody deal out of being mindful that instead of just practising it's ME practising. Tadaaaaaaaa!
But that's the wrong kind of tada. The richness, the dignity, the intimacy of our experience just as it is, without all of our fabrications and contractions and manipulations is inconceivable. It is literally and completely beyond concepts and ideas and stories. In order to realize this, we need to just let go of our habits of attention in all of the ways they are manifested by body and mind.
The Roshi has pointed out that a sense of a "me" is more directly and basically a "sense of locatedness" and that along with it there is a directionality, as it can seem to us that attention moves from a central point, a "me", out and towards experiences. When this sense of locatedness first begins to form, it is the wordless presumption that knowing moves from "here" to "there" in order to know. And yet, this sense of locatedness as a self can itself be known and so obviously cannot be a "knower" or a "self". It is a freezing or crystallization of attention which is much like a frame and from this frame, attention seems to move out and towards what is known. This is why instead of just practising, it can seem to us that there is a "ME" that is practising.
In Rhythm and Song, a series of teisho on Dongshan Liangjie daiosho's text the Hokyo Zanmai, Anzan roshi recounts many mondo-kien or encounter dialogues between Great Master Dongshan and his students. One student was Xuefeng, who much later became a great Teacher after receiving Transmission from Deshan who unlike Dongshan did not mind beating students with his staff. But while he was studying with Dongshan, Xuefeng was still full of himself and full of ideas about Suchness and emptiness. Here is one story:
Once Xuefeng was carrying a bundle of firewood. When he arrived in front of the Master, he threw the bundle down.
The Master asked, "How heavy is it?"
Xuefeng said, "No one in the world can lift it!"
Dongshan asked, "Then how did it get here?"
Xuefeng didn't know what to say.
Poor Xuefeng. What a tool. He was a tool because he was trying to use everything around him as equipment to aggrandize himself. Even a bundle of firewood. Even the simple act of carrying it. For him even samu, caretaking practice, was about the profundity of his idea of his understanding of emptiness. What a tool.
In Rhythm and Song, Anzan Hoshin roshi calls out to us from what all of the Buddhas and Awakened Ancestors of our Lineage have realized and practised,
Intimacy is revealed when we release. We release when we realize that there is nowhere apart from us that we can drop away all of the things about ourselves that we wish were not the case; all of the thoughts and feelings and strategies that at times we are so tired of, and at others, so convinced of.
It is not as simple as that.
It is much, much, easier than that.
It is the simplest thing.
Nothing is true about us. Our nice thoughts do not make us nice. Our devious thoughts do not make us devious. Our bad thoughts do not make us bad.
A thought cannot make anything.
There is nowhere to hide because there is no need to hide.
There is nothing that is true 'about' us because we are that which is true. We are that which presents itself everywhere as everything and yet is itself nowhere at all, no thing at all.
You are this deep intimacy.
Where have you been?
So please join me in not just saying, but in actually being: Tada.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Labels: Emptiness, Luminosity, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho, Zen 0 comments | |

Stainless

John Tan also told me before my anatta realisation:

(11:20 PM) Thusness: u never experience anything unchanging

(11:22 PM) Thusness: and there are still different degree of intensity even u realized to that level.

(11:23 PM) AEN: non dual?

(11:23 PM) Thusness: tada (an article) is more than non-dual...it is phase 5-7

(11:24 PM) AEN: oic..

(11:24 PM) Thusness: it is all about the integration of the insight of anatta and emptiness

(11:25 PM) Thusness: vividness into transience, feeling what i called 'the texture and fabric' of Awareness as forms is very important

then come emptiness

(11:26 PM) Thusness: the integration of luminosity and emptiness

Also see: Tada!

http://www.wwzc.org/book/stainless

Dharma Assembly: Stainless

Dharma Talk by

Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, June 9th, 2007

Everything is already open. The characteristic of each moment of experience or “dharma” is that it is annica or impermanent and sunya or empty, transparent and open. Another way of saying this is that everything is “stainless”.

The stainlessness of this moment is not only the fact that colours and forms are as they are or that sensations are as they are; the fact is that this moment cannot be grasped. There is no particular angle that you can take upon this moment because it is too vast and it is constantly changing. You arise within it, I arise within it, we all arise within it. When we realize this through our practice then we realize that we too are stainless.

Sitting in the posture of zazen, there is nothing to hold on to. Even if you were to grab onto your zafu to try to hold it firm or hold yourself firmly to it, there is still the zabuton underneath it and the floor beneath that, room all around you and the air and the light and the sounds drifting through the open windows. The moment is stainless, unconditioned, empty of boundary and this is where you can release whatever you are holding. There is no one who can possibly hold, nothing to be held.

The Buddha's Teaching of impermanence is not a feeling about things and it is not theoretical. It is not something that happens to things, let alone something that might or might not happen to things. It is how things always are. Stainlessness is not a mystical shining void, a special place, a special experience. It is what each and every moment already is.

How the bodymind experiences experience occurs as mind-moments. How many details are presenting themselves as you sit here facing the wall? Your noticing of them, when you notice them, even if you are noticing very few of them, is very, very fast. Faster than you can think about them.

As Anzan Hoshin roshi says in the text “The Heart of This Moment”,

In this open space, there is little for us to be deluded about; we are not acting out our fabrications and self-deceptions and so we can see them very clearly. Since there is little for them to fix themselves on, they don't have much weight and so we find that they can shift very quickly. Seeing this shifting is an essential part of Investigation. Seeing how attention alights upon one object, and then upon another and another and another. Seeing how these are not one thing and, although attention is continually being disposed through habit and impulse toward localizing, there is also a quality of shifting present. Despite the fact that attention is continually pulling and pushing, there is no continuity to what is being held, to what is being pushed. There is only this shifting, this changing. The impermanence of dharmas displays itself openly. In each moment of mind, in the arising of whatever presents itself, radical impermanence is revealed.

When we are practicing we can see the movements of attention towards habitual thoughts and feelings and when we choose to open attention through mindfulness practice, when we align with Reality, our actions are more and more guided by Openness itself. But when we stop practising, the space of open experiencing becomes cluttered with storylines and feeling tones; snippets of past experiencing; bits and pieces of current storylines; lumps and chunks of disjointed thoughts and feelings. Contraction leads to further contraction. Sometimes you get angry. You feel misunderstood. You think you know what everything is, what's going on, what will happen. One storyline leads into another and another. It looks like “this” and “this”. But you're not seeing anything. It sounds like “this and “this”. But you're not hearing anything. It feels like “this” and “this”. But you're not feeling anything. Except the state.

Out of all of details - the infinite range of details you could be noticing - why is this thought so important? Why this feeling? Why this state?

It’s rather like this: Let’s say you are looking out the window on a beautiful spring day, and you are seeing the leaves and branches of trees, sunlight and billowing clouds and birds. And then you notice a fly on the window screen. You begin to focus on it and the more you focus it, the bigger it seems to you. You can narrow attention so much that it can seem to you that only the fly exists and the world behind it and around it which you were seeing previously seems to disappear completely. But if you release the focusing, the fly doesn’t disappear; instead you see the fly together with the window, the trees and sky and birds – you see the fly in context.

Similarly, if you focus on a storyline, the world can seem to disappear. If you release the focusing, the world seems to come back into view. But of course, the world doesn’t really “come back into view”. It was and is there all along. And when you Wake Up from a thought, “you” don’t make the world reappear. You simply stop focusing and seeing sees.

But whether you choose to sit there focusing on a fly or a thought, or whether you choose to open around it to see that the fly is arising together with the whole world, no matter how your attention is in that moment, the world, the fly, you, the room you are sitting in and a vast range of other details are all already present, already occurring simultaneously. Even if you choose to fold attention down and make yourself stupid, the moment is still stainless. All you need do is let go of the focusing and openness is simply how things are.

In reality, you can never be separate from Openness. But you can't make things open. What you can do is simply release yourself, whole-bodily into the stainlessness of this moment. You can't release yourself into stainlessness by thinking about stainlessness. If you are sitting around thinking about impermanence, this is “gufu-shogyo-zen” or “fool's zen”. Emptiness or stainlessness cannot be contained in a thought because not only is the thought empty, stainlessness itself is empty. It's not a some “thing” or a something “else”. It is how everything is and all that you can do is shut up, get out of the way, and open to it. How do you open to reality? By practising reality with, as and through the bodymind. Open to the reality of the sensations of the breath, the seeing and hearing. Open to what you are experiencing in this moment. Release attention by opening to whole-bodily mindfulness and by opening to the details of the physical space around the bodymind. Align with reality.

In the “Development of Buddhist Psychology” series of classes, the Roshi says,

The run on from mind moment to mind moment is so rapid and the interaction between these in terms of content (for example smelling something, disliking it, blaming someone for leaving the washroom in such a state, thinking about the person's other faults and then stubbing one's toes, feeling annoyed about that and so on) is so rapid that the actual sequence of the shift from state to state is usually not recognized, let alone the shift from mind moment to mind moment.

Through attending directly to how we experience what we experience, it becomes clear that the conventional understanding of experience is simplistic and primitive because it takes what is really a process of moments of knowing and constructs these into monolithic lumps of content. We then begin to stumble over our own trips about these blocks and structures and feel that the situation has a permanence about it that makes real change impossible.

No matter how we might hide in it, no matter how convinced we might be of this stance, this feeling, this state, they arise and fall leaving us exposed again and again to impermanence, to anicca.

When we wallow about in the muck and mire of self-image and act from the three kleshas of passion, aggression and stupidity, our perception of ourselves and the world around us becomes entangled and obstructed. Experiencing becomes piled up and bundled together in tight, brittle formations of distorted thoughts and feeling tones. Like Jigsaw pieces of that don't fit together, but are forced into shapes to form bleak pictures. And when this happens, we talk endlessly to ourselves about who we are: seeking out blackness, calculating, mapping, propagating a sense of problem and separation. But as it says in a chant written by Joshu Dainen zenji,

Attention, attention.

All is always stainless,

each form is always formless.

Aligning ourselves with the Way,

each dharma is always Buddha Dharma.

The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us form as the congealing of attention into “views” of this and that, but all around these “views”, the world extends in all directions. It is only through focusing and narrowing attention and choosing to ignore the context in which a thought is taking place that we can convince ourselves that any view is true, is final, is justified.

If you saw someone sitting in the middle of the road, talking to themselves, hitting themselves with a rock, you might say “Stop talking to yourself. Look where you are.” You would recognize very clearly that such behavior is completely insane. But when you are sitting on your zafu, you are doing much the same thing if you are not opening to reality and are instead talking to yourself, torturing yourself with your storylines.

Not long after I began practicing as a student of the Roshi near 17 years ago, I saw someone on a crowded street who made quite a strong impression. It was summer so he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. But in addition he was wearing an assortment of bags, many, many bags with many many straps crisscrossing his body. And from these bags protruded an assortment of gadgets and wires. He had such things as phones, transistor radios, and many other small items I couldn't identify – dozens of them. From these ran many cables and wires which were also looped around his body. He really was quite an alarming sight and people on the street gave him a wide berth as he looked like a walking bomb, armed and ready to go off at any moment. Except that the majority of his electronic devices were obviously so dinged up that they couldn't possibly work. Completely oblivious to the reactions of those around him, he stopped at a bench and sat down. As I was waiting for a store to open I stood not far away observing him for ten or fifteen minutes as he disconnected and re-connected wires, but it was apparent that nothing would or could work.

I remember being very struck by this man and had various thoughts about how he could have come to be in such a such a sorry state. I was looking at him, and then looking at me, and then looking at everyone else as it dawned on me that through focusing attention, he had become someone obsessed with fixing his own wiring. And that anyone, anywhere, can be equally disconnected from reality through focusing attention. And then I flashed on the range of thoughts, feelings, storylines that I had seen come up for me even while sitting on the zafu and realized that these – these thoughts and feelings and storylines, propagating them, rehearsing them, going over them again and again and again was what caused “me” to crystallize into what I think of as “me” and that all of this stuff must be questioned and released. What seems “normal” is simply what becomes habitual.

As it says in the Jijiyu Zanmai Doka, “Don't follow and become the forms of attention.”

We begin practising because we recognize that something about us should change, though we're not necessarily all that clear about what that is. Regardless of what we want to change or how we want it to change or the fact that what we want to change keeps changing, one thing is clear: we want change. We might start off practicing thinking that we want to change one or two details, a couple of things we don't like about ourselves, but we'll keep the rest. So we try to practice on our own terms, try to bend the practice into a shape that is acceptable to us. We focus on what we like or don't like, but as we continue to practise, what we begin to discover is that it isn't just what we perceive to be the ugly, gristly, uncomfortable bits that need change, everything needs to change. And as it changes, what it changes into also needs to be released to allow a space for further change The stuff we are “comfortable” with is just as bizarre as the stuff we are “uncomfortable” with.

Much of what we do when we first start practising is basically swapping one state for another. A state comes up that we don't like and then we pump up a feeling of openness to counter it. We get lost in thought and noticing that, don't like what we see so we attempt to pump up a state of silence (a jhana state) to counter that. But once in a while we actually remember to practise the instructions to actually feel the breath, the body, open to seeing and hearing. At first, we keep checking to see what the practice is doing for us, wondering how we are “progressing”, but eventually we realize that all of this self-considering must also be released. Trying to measure one's practice is a bit like running around the back yard with a wooden ruler trying to measure the sun or the moon. If you notice you are doing this, stop talking to yourself about yourself and practise. Why? Because the moment is measureless but fleeting and you are wasting time.

When the Roshi says “If it is closed, open around it; if it seems open, open further”, he is instructing us to open to the stainlessness of this moment in this moment. This is real change. What does he mean by “open around it”? He means that you should use the noticing of any detail of experiencing as a reminder to release the tendency to focus on that detail and open to the context in which that detail is taking place. If you are focusing on a thought, a feeling, one sound amidst countless sounds you are hearing, one aspect of the visual field amidst the countless details you could be seeing, open attention around that one thing by coming back to the practise of whole-bodily mindfulness, open seeing, open hearing. What the Roshi is talking about is releasing habitual thoughts and feelings and the movements of attention associated with them into stainlessness, opening and opening further, not stopping anywhere, not settling, not making yourself comfortable.

The truly odd thing is that when we become contracted, we really think no one else can see how we are; that no one else can see or feel how we distort and crunch our attention, that no one else can see or feel the circle of sharp knives we slash ourselves and others with. But the truth of the matter is that we are broadcasting how we are all of the time and if we settle into and propagate a state, it will make itself known. Nothing is separate from anything else. Everything arises together, at the same time, and each thing interpenetrates every other thing in the stainlessness of this moment. All around the states you experience, the world extends in all directions, but when you bask in a state all that you will let yourself see is the state. Don't be stupid. Open around it. Stop talking to yourself about what you think and feel about everything. If you were as interesting as you think you are, you wouldn't bore yourself so much when you sit.

Each day the sun rises and sets; the moon appears and vanishes as the sun rises again. The sky is blue and bright and then clouds gather and shower the earth with rain or snow or hail. The earth shifts, mountain ranges grow and recede, shorelines change. Beings are born and die, wave after wave after wave of beings coming and going. What could be solid in any of this? How could you be solid when your experience shows you the obvious impermanence of all things? How could it be possible that any state you experience could be solid in the midst of all of this impermanence?

I was once speaking with the Roshi about my father, now long dead, about his life, the things he thought important and commented on how strange it is that we struggle and endure and hope and fear and in the end nothing remains. The Roshi said , “Like an equation written on water, vanishing even as it's being written”.

Zazen is not just a matter of changing this or that about ourselves. It exposes us to and reveals the fact that change is what we always already are.

I speak and my words are already gone. You don't need to chase after them because you've already understood what you understood in the moment they were spoken. You see the wall, but there is no need for attention to move out and towards the wall, no need for you to try to “organize” the seeing. Just see. You don't need to look further into that moment of seeing because that moment is already gone and you've already seen. You don't need to find “meaning” in what was seen because meaning was already apparent and now there is THIS moment of seeing. It is what it is. It IS the wall. Open to peripheral vision. Just see. You feel sensations, but attention does not need to follow them. Just feel. You notice a thought and you don't need to look further into it. Just open to the experience of whole bodymind sitting on the cushion. Now. And now. Pleasant sensations, unpleasant sensations are felt, bright, distinct, gone. And now? What does it actually feel like to sit here in this moment of stainlessness?

All experiences are stainless when attention is not distorted. All dharmas arise, dwell and decay as one's world. Penetrate each moment of experiencing. Penetrate this moment of breathing; penetrate this wall, this floor, this mind, this world. When you get up from the zafu and walk, you are still walking in this world. All beings are met, all events are rising and falling and this penetration into one's world is the essence of our practice. Our practice is not separate from the world. Our practice is the practise of mind stainlessly arising as world and world stainlessly arising as mind.

Labels: Emptiness, Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho, Zen 2 comments | |

Report Abuse

- - - Followers

Search This Blog

Cloud Numbered Labels

Cloud Labels

Translate

Ads 300 x 600

Recent Posts

https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/all-around-all-once-part-3-%E2%80%9Cunfabricated%E2%80%9D

Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge Osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, November 17, 2017

The Touchstone 6: Not a Tourist

by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, August 24th, 2013

The Touchstone 2: Countless

by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, January 26th, 2013

Dharma Assembly: Too Intimate to be Personal

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, June 11, 2011

Dharma Assembly: "Tada!"

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
Dainen-ji, October 24th, 2009

The AtR AI Chat Bot

Total Pageviews

'Must Reads'

Free E-Books

Discussion Groups

Audio

Insightful Materials

Stickied Posts

Recommended Links

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

The Awakening to Reality Practice Guide and AtR Guide - abridged version

Recommended Blogs

(continued)

Popular Posts

Contact Form

Report Abuse

Subscribe To

- - - Followers

Search This Blog

Cloud Numbered Labels

Cloud Labels

Translate

Ads 300 x 600

Recent Posts

https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/all-around-all-once-part-3-%E2%80%9Cunfabricated%E2%80%9D

Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge Osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, November 17, 2017

The Touchstone 6: Not a Tourist

by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, August 24th, 2013

The Touchstone 2: Countless

by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, January 26th, 2013

Dharma Assembly: Too Intimate to be Personal

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho

Dainen-ji, June 11, 2011

Dharma Assembly: "Tada!"

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge oshoDainen-ji, October 24th, 2009

The AtR AI Chat Bot

Total Pageviews

'Must Reads'

Free E-Books

Discussion Groups

Audio

Insightful Materials

Stickied Posts

Recommended Links

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

The Awakening to Reality Practice Guide and AtR Guide - abridged version

Recommended Blogs

(continued)

Popular Posts

Contact Form

Dharma Talk Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
Dainen-ji, October 24th, 2009