Delusion and Denial

The poet saw the moon

dim glimmering

through the dewy windowpane.

It was a nineteenth-century moon,

soft as moths.

And he was on laudanum or opium.

Only yesterday when I asked her on the phone

why she sounded so happy, she replied,

“I’m on psychopharmaceuticals and in the country.”

Ah, that’s the ticket.

The Ticket ~ Harvey Shapiro

a well nobody dug

filled with no water

ripples

and a shapeless

weightless

man drinks

I didn’t see one thing on my trip

but I breathed and whatever I breathed was time

only one koan matters

you

15th century Zen Master Ikkyu turning words

from Crow with No Mouth translated by Stephen Berg

Fish Course: Get Up

Little bit push from Abba Sesoius.  Amazing how a dead Desert Father can reach rainy Oregon.

A monk looking for some guidance and encouragement goes to Abba
Sisoius and asks: “What am I to do since I have fallen?”

The Abba replies: “Get up”.

“I did get up, but I fell again”,

“Get up again.”

“I did, but I must admit that I fell once again. So what should I do?”

“Do not fall down without getting back up.”

Just in case you do not know them. The Desert Fathers were Hermits, Ascetics and Monks who lived mainly in the Scetes desert of Egypt, beginning around the third century. They were the first Christian hermits, who abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude. These original desert hermits were Christians fleeing the chaos and persecution of the Roman Empire’s Crisis of the Third Century. They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state. Christians were often scapegoated during these times of unrest, and near the end of the century, the Diocletianic Persecution was more severe and systematic. In Egypt, refugee communities formed at the edges of population centers, far enough away to be safe from Imperial scrutiny. Wikipedia for more

Rainy Day Blues

Sometimes my zeal flags. The flow of moment-after-moment-mindfulness becomes more concept and less intimate. That old quandary that troubled Dogen in his youth about the need for practice pops up. If everyone already has Buddha Nature, what’s the point of vigorous practice? Why go at it like my hair is on fire?

Serendipitously Elana at DailyZen.com offered up encouraging words from Rinzai and Kosho Uchiyama.

In The Record of Linji, Linji Yixuan (Rinzai) says:

The true practitioner of the Way completely transcends all things. Even if heaven and earth were to tumble down, I would have no misgivings. Even if all the Buddhas in the ten directions were to appear before me, I would not rejoice. Even if the three hells were to appear before me, I would have no fear. Why is this so? Because there is nothing I dislike.

For Rinzai, the appearance of all the buddhas in the past, present, and future was not something to rejoice over, nor was the appearance of the three hells something of which to be afraid. Of course, not being afraid of the appearance of some hell doesn’t mean that for Rinzai hell had no existence. For him, hell was a kind of scenery that was different from the scenery of the Buddhas. The point is that whether some hell, all the buddhas, or anything appeared before him, Rinzai saw all of these as the scenery of his life. For us this is nothing but the scenery of our zazen.

I hope that people who practice zazen will continue regular sesshins and daily zazen for at least ten years. It’s a tremendous thing to be able to give oneself to this kind of practice and not be caught up in distractions. Our deepest mental suffering will come up during these years of zazen, and we will be able to continue our practice only if we have the stability to see this suffering as the scenery of our life and not be carried away by it. Working through these ten years, we develop a posture of living out the reality of our true self.

If we lead this sort of life and sit zazen, at whatever age, there is no doubt that we will come to have a commanding view of who we are. When we live this way, not only zazen, but daily life itself, is such that we cannot find the value of our existence in what other people say or in things that we want. It is a life that is unbearable unless we discover the value of our existence within ourselves.

What is essential is for us to live out the reality of our true self whether we are doing one period of zazen, a five-day sesshin, or practicing for ten years or more.

The Activity of the Reality of Life

All of us, regardless of whether we realize it or not, are living out the self as the whole universe. Since this is such a critical point, I’ll repeat it here. Usually we make the idea of the small individual self the center of our world and become firmly convinced that this small individual self is our whole self, but this is not our true self.

The reality of life goes beyond my idea of myself as a small individual. Fundamentally, our self is living out nondual life that pervades all living things. This self is universal existence, everything that exists. On the other hand, we usually lose sight of the reality of the life of universal self, clouding it over with thoughts originating from our small individual selves.

When we let go of our thoughts, this reality of life becomes pure and clear. Living out this reality of life as it is – that is, waking up and practicing beyond thinking – is zazen. At this very point our basic attitude in practicing zazen becomes determined. The attitude of the practitioner in practicing zazen as a Mahayana Buddhist teaching never means to attempt to artificially create some new self by means of practice.

Nor should it be aiming at decreasing delusion and finally eliminating it altogether. We practice zazen, neither aiming at having a special mystical experience nor trying to gain greater enlightenment. Zazen as true Mahayana teaching is always the whole self just truly being the whole self, life truly being life.

We all have eyes to see, but if we close them and say that the world is in darkness, how can we say that we are living out the true reality of life? If we open our eyes we see the sun is shining brilliantly. In the same way, when we live open-eyed and awake to life, we discover that we are living in the vigorous light of life. All the ideas of our small self are clouds that make the light of the universal self foggy and dull. Doing zazen, we let go of these ideas and open our eyes to the clarity of the vital life of universal self.

We discover the attitude of zazen as true Buddhism when we believe that the truth of this small self as an individual entity is universal self and actually practice the reality of life in zazen. This zazen is referred to as the activity of the reality of life.

Kosho Uchiyama (1912-1998)
Excerpted from Opening the Hand of Thought – Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice

Checkout the rest of the post of “On The Way” The DailyZen Journal for January 2010. While you’re there stop by the Zendo.

Jim Harrison playfully makes the point.

I once thought that life’s what’s left over after I extricate myself from the mess. I was writing a poem about paying attention and microwaved a hot dog so hot it burned a beet-red hole in the roof of my mouth.

Jim Harrison After Ikkyu and Other Poems
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