SYNCHRONIZE BODY AND MIND
We old friends are gathering once again to look into the “Great Matter”–the Great Matter of our life and death; this life and this death. And coming together as good friends we practice sesshin. Sesshin means literally to unite,” “to unify.” We synchronize body and mind in the activity of just breathing, or in the activity of being upright in our posture– a nice, long, elegant posture, the ears in line with the shoulders, shoulders in line with the hip sockets, hip sockets in line with the sit bones. Sitting upright we are determined to be with the aliveness of this moment.
We have this wonderful and also challenging koan collection known as the Shōyō-roku in Japanese, the Ts’ung-jung-lu in Chinese, and The Book of Equanimity in English. Actually, the Chinese characters are translated in so many wonderful, different ways, with so many nuances, depending on how you hold them, or look at them. Sometimes this collection of 100 cases, or 100 mondos – or, we could say, 100 exchanges between self and self – is called The Book of Equanimity. Sometimes it’s called The Book of Serenity. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi called it The Book of Composure. Each translation has a slightly different flavor.
“Equanimity” has a kind of steady, solid, imperturbable quality to it. Our sitting, when we sit in that way, is called fudō-myōō in Japanese, “the one who doesn’t move.” It’s not a rigid kind of sitting, but a very, very steady, upright sitting. This still sitting, or mountain seat, or seat of equanimity and composure, is what this collection of koans is referring to. We all have this capacity to be upright with composure in the middle of our life experience.
That is what shikantaza practice is, or jujuyu zanmai, as it’s sometimes called. Jijuyu means to receive yourself freely, or to receive life in the activity of the moment freely. “Freely” in the sense that our intention as practitioners of Buddhadharma is to receive what’s going on in the spirit that it knows how to do itself. Our intention is not to meddle in it, not to patch it up, or to try and fix it, but to try and trust as best we can that this activity of the moment knows how to do us. This activity of the moment we call anicca, or impermanence. This loving, lively, wonderful intelligence that we all are knows how to do us in the form of ourselves. This is quite a challenge, isn’t it? It certainly is for me. Because I have so many opinions about how I should be, or that the quality of my zazen should be this way and not that way.
If it’s this way, it means that I’m confused, beleaguered, and slightly out of it. If it’s that way it means that I’m really making great headway and progress on my way to some kind of great...something. I don’t know what at this point but... something! Our faith in shikantaza, or quiet sitting – upright sitting, or silent illumination as it’s called – is a deep trust that this activity of life knows how to do us.
Our job as practitioners of Buddhadharma, as practitioners of the Way, is to melt down our thought-feeling and our opinions in the light of presence, of mindfulness. (Hopefully not a neurotic mindfulness, but more of a pure and uncontrived presence.) To let our ice, the rough edges of our frozen self that we spend so much time in, start to soften and melt in the sun.
One feels, walking outside the zendo, that it’s slightly chilly. But walking outside into the brightness of the sun, the sun softens us. The ice starts to melt, doesn’t it? It starts to drip and melt. The sun softens us and we begin to flower open a little more, we become able to trust a little more that we don’t have to hold on so tightly, we don’t have to have it all figured out or have it conform to some ancient and often twisted story we have of ourselves. How we should be. Or would be. Or, “How was I?” “How will I?” “How could I be?” All of that stuff.
The koans in the Book of Equanimity are stories, pointers, metaphors or folk tales that point to this capacity that we have as human beings to come to know ourselves in a gentle, deep, and clear way, a way that does not require so much thinking. We might frame it as an inquiry. Is there a way of being with ourselves that is a surer way than thinking about things? Is there a more satisfying way, a deeper way, a trustworthier, more immediate way of knowing our life, this life, than always objectifying it?
These koans are all about such activity. And the exchanges between these old worthies are, you could say, exchanges between “host” and “guest,” or “Big Mind” and “little mind.” Big Mind is our capacity to play host to the moment, or to receive it graciously, to receive the guests at the dinner party, all of them, with equanimity. Maybe there’s even some enthusiasm for the cast of characters appearing at the dinner party! For the guest, it’s a “come as you are party.” The guest’s job is to show up as herself. The encounter between the two is enlightenment. Guest and host become one. This is our intention and practice. These stories are the stories of people who have done what we’re doing, really. This wonderful ancient practice of Zen, of self-fulfilling samadhi, in which self meets Self and comes to know itself in the form of – comes to recognize itself.
Life recognizes life in the form of when we go outside and walk in these wonderful fall gardens. We go out and walk through the crunchy leaves. We kick the leaves. And shuffling through these crunchy fall leaves we remember in some deep way the many, many times we and the many beings have enjoyed walking through falling leaves. Not in a linear way, of course. We, as human beings, have walked in the fall leaves so many times. We’ve walked, run, played and jumped into great leaf piles as kids. Fall brings me personally memories of my many, many years of cross-country running. Running and shuffling through the leaves – there certainly is a capacity that we have to know the fall leaves, their crunchiness, in some immediate and mysterious way. It’s also a timeless way. It seems as though all of those walks in the fall leaves we have enjoyed meld into one timeless walk. We find ourselves, again, walking in the leaves.
It’s not what it seems; nor is it otherwise. I’m always amazed, even startled by this process of coming to know the self in this deeper, surer way. We’ve done many, many sesshins over the years; over the decades we‘ve done hundreds of them together. We circumambulate the stupa of ourselves again and again, very often in familiar ways, almost ritual ways. And this way in which we do our lives, round after round, circling the self, brings us back to the same place. Only it’s slightly different, isn’t it? We meet the same difficulties, the same ritual impasses, the same emotional imperatives, or the same thoughts of necessity again and again. But they reform and reshape themselves and it actually gets more wonderful, mysterious, and beautiful. And also more challenging–this rawness of the immediacy of it is as we do the practice. Like you, I want to fixate myself in some place that’s comfy. I always find myself thinking, “If only it would stop torturing me, or loving me, or whatever it does. I wish it would stop and I could be completely still forever.”
The bright activity of the Dharma appears and disappears endlessly. And this process of impermanence is not an intellectual idea but a bright loving mystery that lends us life, gives us clarity and love, and also utterly deconstructs us.
Sometimes, like this morning, I walk into the garden and I don’t know where I am, or who I am, or who is doing this walking. This groundlessness, or bardo of not knowing, can be scary, I think. “Maybe I’ll be arrested. They‘ll spot me as an alien, a stranger in a strange land!”
I remind myself of the encouragements that I have received over the decades from my wonderful Dharma friends and teachers – to trust in the capacity that we have to “not know,” to trust in the capacity we have to let go into something, not knowing how it will turn out. To trust this deconstruction process, the Tathāgata, the one who falls apart, just like this, and who is reborn just like this. Then I start to step into a brightness; I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.
I remember Kobun Chino Roshi, a person I spent time with, would translate the Heart Sutra chant “Gaté, gaté paragaté, parasamgaté,” as “Fall apart, fall apart, completely fall apart. Awake! Rejoice!” Sometimes there’s a comfy falling apart in which you think it’s kind of a safe, fine thing, a familiar falling apart. Then there are other kinds of falling apart that don’t seem so safe.
My consistent experience over the years – although this may not help us when we’re in the process of deconstruction – has been that there is something wonderfully wise about this process of letting go and not knowing and entering into the vast, groundless bardo of mystery. It‘s a mystery on so many levels.
Certainly there can be fear of this groundlessness, of not knowing. The problem, however, is not the groundlessness. If we are able to trust this groundlessness, our self-nature, the mystery, this pure possibility, we always discover hsin, or kokoro – “the very heart of what we are.”
I quietly say to myself, “Well, all right.” I pull up my boot- straps and say, “Off we go!” I push off from the shore. I cut the mooring lines and start to let this ship head out into the deep waters and swells of the ocean. Often one thinks, “The ocean is so vast, so wide, and my boat is so small!” But invariably in this process of appearing and disappearing and shape shifting and morphing, as one trusts and lets go, we find ourselves reborn in some brighter, clearer, more wonderful place.
After walking outside I came inside and was sitting in that space that we come and go in, the space of immediacy and tenderness and not knowing and vastness. I heard all of these breaths in the room. We all breathe differently. Some people breathe rather heavily and some you can’t hear at all. And for a moment I didn’t know if it was me breathing or not. You know how that is? I was waking up to the sound of breathing, as I sometimes do upon hearing my own breathing, and there was no way of knowing who’s who here in this soup, in this bouillabaisse – only that it’s happening.
The Book of Equanimity encourages us to sit upright in the middle of our experience. There is a quality of deep universality to our experience. We are not strangers in a strange land but start to open into a space of intimacy and connection.
This old guy, Ummon, is considered in the Zen tradition to be one of the greatest teachers of our long lineage tradition. A lot of people have gone this way over the millennia in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam – this particular, beautiful way of practicing just sitting. A lot of wonderful people have plowed the empty field before us and left trackless tracks in the zendo here. And we, too, will be doing this. People will follow us. We have this tradition, this lineage as practitioners, which is both literal and metaphorical. Ummon was a ninth-century monk who devoted his life to this practice of pure and total presence, to being with what’s happening. He was known for having very short answers when asked questions and was considered to be one of the greatest Zen teachers. He appears repeatedly in our koan collections. In the 48 cases of The Gateless Gate (Mumonkan) he appears ve times. In The Blue Cliff Record (Hekigan-roku) he appears in 17 koans. And in this collection, The Book of Equanimity (Shōyō-roku), nine koans feature Ummon.
The people who put these collections of exchanges, or mondos, together were pretty savvy. They picked exchanges that were true happenings, or encounters between people, or headed in that direction. You know how we remember important exchanges or moments in our lives with people? When a word awakens us or startles us, or turns the mind? Maybe it’s something that happened and we reflect on it. Or we get caught in it and think about it for years afterwards. “What did they mean? How could they have said that to me?” It can turn you in a wonderful way.
I remember sitting with Taizan Maezumi Roshi and I said, “I’m feeling so heartbroken today.” And he said, “Is that so?” That was my interview with him. I remember that now, 30 years later. “Is that so?” You could go so many places with it, can’t you? “Is that so?” But if it’s a turning word in your own Shōyō-roku book of life, then it’s something that‘s important to you. Maybe it‘s a tray of glue that sticks you. Or maybe it’s something that turns you and opens you. All of these encounters, the ones in your book, are metaphors and important words to study. We study these koans by enacting or becoming one with ourselves in the form of these stories. These koans are very lively.
Ummon; they say his capacity, his mind, was extraordinarily flexible and pliant and clear and unattached to a story of who he should be, at least as the metaphor goes, or our Zen ideal, if you will. (Though ideal is a tricky word to use.) We do admire a mind that is pliant, flexible, and open. A mind that is able to step into many of life’s situations and touch and taste and experience the bouquet of those moments without becoming completely lost or contracted. As practitioners of Zen we revere this mind. It’s called the Bodhisattva Way. And life manifests itself as this moment and there is no other.
This life, the life force, whatever we want to call it, is infinitely resourceful and infinitely wise and in infinitely loving. That‘s a fundamental core teaching of self-nature, of human life. We revere and we practice with great diligence, entering into more and more of life and finding that, more and more, our life is not seen as our impediment, or our problem, but our resource. If we are willing to find composure, sit upright, participate, show up, drag our miserable selves back into this room, it will make our lives better.
Ummon; we revere him because he has this position of being that one who enters into all of life; that one who is at the center of all experience that is bright and clear. When we talk about Ummon we are talking about you. Or I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about a capacity we have to appreciate life. That’s what Zen practice is – appreciating and enacting our appreciation in our life and then getting confused and coming back to the cushion and settling, and clarifying, and rubbing and scorching and polishing. And doing it again and again.
There were three marks that we might remember Ummon‘s teaching by, three encouragements, three innate capacities that we have when we’re not so caught up in self-gleaning. The first one is renouncing or cutting off the myriad streams of thought. His response, his way of being, was to renounce the myriad streams of thinking about. It’s called cutting off the streams, or renouncing the streams. Not in a muscular way, not in a judgmental way, just trusting this process of coming to know ourselves more intimately than we do through imagining that our life is an object outside of us.
We are reminded and encouraged by our worthy, wonderful Zen elders to renounce while we’re here, as best we can, the “mind road,” the practice of thinking about life. Doing the crossword puzzle in bed with your lover is probably not the best way to go about finding satisfaction and happiness for you or another.
Ummon was one who enjoyed the intimacy of “not knowing.”
The second instruction is seeing that the lid fits the box without a lot of jiggle. In other words, he was engaged in a practice that encourages us to experiment with this way of appreciating life by cutting the gap between ourselves and our experience. Lid fitted to box. Cut off the myriad streams.
And the third capacity he taught is we can ride the waves, ride the energies of the moment. The deep currents and alive-ness of the moment are what we begin to taste, or step into, when we settle beneath cortex thinking–thinking down. Down, we start to settle, softening our eyes from the center white clouds of our vision, or our knowing. Our seeing slides down our backbone into the heart realm, the heartland, and then settles down, hopefully, deep in the hara and we peek out from our belly buttons.
In those places, we encounter a world of immediacy that is filled with currents. These currents – cutting off the mind road, cutting the gap between ourselves and our experience, and riding the wave of aliveness in this moment – are currents of smells and sights and sounds and emotion. They’re not a thought. Ummon is encouraging us to ride the energy of the moment, to enter into the energy of this world.
Those are the three. His great offering and calling. Now, it’s quite something if you are not thinking. Is there fault? Ummon said, “Mount Sumeru.”
Of course, we never really stop thinking. Thinking is what human minds do. We secrete thoughts endlessly. If one thinks that one should never think, or that thoughts aren’t secreted like saliva out of the brain, one is mistaken.
“Mount Sumeru...”
Mount Sumeru was a mighty mountain. Clearly, when we settle into our center of gravity, when we settle into the heartland, and we are upright in our posture – stable, clear, serene – we are Mount Sumeru. In the iconography of Buddhism we are the very center of the universe.
So we sit as Mount Sumeru. And from that position we enjoy a mountain view, we enjoy a mountain stability. We trust and know that the white clouds are the children of the green mountain, and that the green mountain is the mother of the white clouds.
White.
We old friends are gathering once again to look into the “Great Matter”–the Great Matter of our life and death; this life and this death. And coming together as good friends we practice sesshin. Sesshin means literally to unite,” “to unify.” We synchronize body and mind in the activity of just breathing, or in the activity of being upright in our posture– a nice, long, elegant posture, the ears in line with the shoulders, shoulders in line with the hip sockets, hip sockets in line with the sit bones. Sitting upright we are determined to be with the aliveness of this moment.
We have this wonderful and also challenging koan collection known as the Shōyō-roku in Japanese, the Ts’ung-jung-lu in Chinese, and The Book of Equanimity in English. Actually, the Chinese characters are translated in so many wonderful, different ways, with so many nuances, depending on how you hold them, or look at them. Sometimes this collection of 100 cases, or 100 mondos – or, we could say, 100 exchanges between self and self – is called The Book of Equanimity. Sometimes it’s called The Book of Serenity. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi called it The Book of Composure. Each translation has a slightly different flavor.
“Equanimity” has a kind of steady, solid, imperturbable quality to it. Our sitting, when we sit in that way, is called fudō-myōō in Japanese, “the one who doesn’t move.” It’s not a rigid kind of sitting, but a very, very steady, upright sitting. This still sitting, or mountain seat, or seat of equanimity and composure, is what this collection of koans is referring to. We all have this capacity to be upright with composure in the middle of our life experience.
That is what shikantaza practice is, or jujuyu zanmai, as it’s sometimes called. Jijuyu means to receive yourself freely, or to receive life in the activity of the moment freely. “Freely” in the sense that our intention as practitioners of Buddhadharma is to receive what’s going on in the spirit that it knows how to do itself. Our intention is not to meddle in it, not to patch it up, or to try and fix it, but to try and trust as best we can that this activity of the moment knows how to do us. This activity of the moment we call anicca, or impermanence. This loving, lively, wonderful intelligence that we all are knows how to do us in the form of ourselves. This is quite a challenge, isn’t it? It certainly is for me. Because I have so many opinions about how I should be, or that the quality of my zazen should be this way and not that way.
If it’s this way, it means that I’m confused, beleaguered, and slightly out of it. If it’s that way it means that I’m really making great headway and progress on my way to some kind of great...something. I don’t know what at this point but... something! Our faith in shikantaza, or quiet sitting – upright sitting, or silent illumination as it’s called – is a deep trust that this activity of life knows how to do us.
Our job as practitioners of Buddhadharma, as practitioners of the Way, is to melt down our thought-feeling and our opinions in the light of presence, of mindfulness. (Hopefully not a neurotic mindfulness, but more of a pure and uncontrived presence.) To let our ice, the rough edges of our frozen self that we spend so much time in, start to soften and melt in the sun.
One feels, walking outside the zendo, that it’s slightly chilly. But walking outside into the brightness of the sun, the sun softens us. The ice starts to melt, doesn’t it? It starts to drip and melt. The sun softens us and we begin to flower open a little more, we become able to trust a little more that we don’t have to hold on so tightly, we don’t have to have it all figured out or have it conform to some ancient and often twisted story we have of ourselves. How we should be. Or would be. Or, “How was I?” “How will I?” “How could I be?” All of that stuff.
The koans in the Book of Equanimity are stories, pointers, metaphors or folk tales that point to this capacity that we have as human beings to come to know ourselves in a gentle, deep, and clear way, a way that does not require so much thinking. We might frame it as an inquiry. Is there a way of being with ourselves that is a surer way than thinking about things? Is there a more satisfying way, a deeper way, a trustworthier, more immediate way of knowing our life, this life, than always objectifying it?
These koans are all about such activity. And the exchanges between these old worthies are, you could say, exchanges between “host” and “guest,” or “Big Mind” and “little mind.” Big Mind is our capacity to play host to the moment, or to receive it graciously, to receive the guests at the dinner party, all of them, with equanimity. Maybe there’s even some enthusiasm for the cast of characters appearing at the dinner party! For the guest, it’s a “come as you are party.” The guest’s job is to show up as herself. The encounter between the two is enlightenment. Guest and host become one. This is our intention and practice. These stories are the stories of people who have done what we’re doing, really. This wonderful ancient practice of Zen, of self-fulfilling samadhi, in which self meets Self and comes to know itself in the form of – comes to recognize itself.
Life recognizes life in the form of when we go outside and walk in these wonderful fall gardens. We go out and walk through the crunchy leaves. We kick the leaves. And shuffling through these crunchy fall leaves we remember in some deep way the many, many times we and the many beings have enjoyed walking through falling leaves. Not in a linear way, of course. We, as human beings, have walked in the fall leaves so many times. We’ve walked, run, played and jumped into great leaf piles as kids. Fall brings me personally memories of my many, many years of cross-country running. Running and shuffling through the leaves – there certainly is a capacity that we have to know the fall leaves, their crunchiness, in some immediate and mysterious way. It’s also a timeless way. It seems as though all of those walks in the fall leaves we have enjoyed meld into one timeless walk. We find ourselves, again, walking in the leaves.
It’s not what it seems; nor is it otherwise. I’m always amazed, even startled by this process of coming to know the self in this deeper, surer way. We’ve done many, many sesshins over the years; over the decades we‘ve done hundreds of them together. We circumambulate the stupa of ourselves again and again, very often in familiar ways, almost ritual ways. And this way in which we do our lives, round after round, circling the self, brings us back to the same place. Only it’s slightly different, isn’t it? We meet the same difficulties, the same ritual impasses, the same emotional imperatives, or the same thoughts of necessity again and again. But they reform and reshape themselves and it actually gets more wonderful, mysterious, and beautiful. And also more challenging–this rawness of the immediacy of it is as we do the practice. Like you, I want to fixate myself in some place that’s comfy. I always find myself thinking, “If only it would stop torturing me, or loving me, or whatever it does. I wish it would stop and I could be completely still forever.”
The bright activity of the Dharma appears and disappears endlessly. And this process of impermanence is not an intellectual idea but a bright loving mystery that lends us life, gives us clarity and love, and also utterly deconstructs us.
Sometimes, like this morning, I walk into the garden and I don’t know where I am, or who I am, or who is doing this walking. This groundlessness, or bardo of not knowing, can be scary, I think. “Maybe I’ll be arrested. They‘ll spot me as an alien, a stranger in a strange land!”
I remind myself of the encouragements that I have received over the decades from my wonderful Dharma friends and teachers – to trust in the capacity that we have to “not know,” to trust in the capacity we have to let go into something, not knowing how it will turn out. To trust this deconstruction process, the Tathāgata, the one who falls apart, just like this, and who is reborn just like this. Then I start to step into a brightness; I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.
I remember Kobun Chino Roshi, a person I spent time with, would translate the Heart Sutra chant “Gaté, gaté paragaté, parasamgaté,” as “Fall apart, fall apart, completely fall apart. Awake! Rejoice!” Sometimes there’s a comfy falling apart in which you think it’s kind of a safe, fine thing, a familiar falling apart. Then there are other kinds of falling apart that don’t seem so safe.
My consistent experience over the years – although this may not help us when we’re in the process of deconstruction – has been that there is something wonderfully wise about this process of letting go and not knowing and entering into the vast, groundless bardo of mystery. It‘s a mystery on so many levels.
Certainly there can be fear of this groundlessness, of not knowing. The problem, however, is not the groundlessness. If we are able to trust this groundlessness, our self-nature, the mystery, this pure possibility, we always discover hsin, or kokoro – “the very heart of what we are.”
I quietly say to myself, “Well, all right.” I pull up my boot- straps and say, “Off we go!” I push off from the shore. I cut the mooring lines and start to let this ship head out into the deep waters and swells of the ocean. Often one thinks, “The ocean is so vast, so wide, and my boat is so small!” But invariably in this process of appearing and disappearing and shape shifting and morphing, as one trusts and lets go, we find ourselves reborn in some brighter, clearer, more wonderful place.
After walking outside I came inside and was sitting in that space that we come and go in, the space of immediacy and tenderness and not knowing and vastness. I heard all of these breaths in the room. We all breathe differently. Some people breathe rather heavily and some you can’t hear at all. And for a moment I didn’t know if it was me breathing or not. You know how that is? I was waking up to the sound of breathing, as I sometimes do upon hearing my own breathing, and there was no way of knowing who’s who here in this soup, in this bouillabaisse – only that it’s happening.
The Book of Equanimity encourages us to sit upright in the middle of our experience. There is a quality of deep universality to our experience. We are not strangers in a strange land but start to open into a space of intimacy and connection.
This old guy, Ummon, is considered in the Zen tradition to be one of the greatest teachers of our long lineage tradition. A lot of people have gone this way over the millennia in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam – this particular, beautiful way of practicing just sitting. A lot of wonderful people have plowed the empty field before us and left trackless tracks in the zendo here. And we, too, will be doing this. People will follow us. We have this tradition, this lineage as practitioners, which is both literal and metaphorical. Ummon was a ninth-century monk who devoted his life to this practice of pure and total presence, to being with what’s happening. He was known for having very short answers when asked questions and was considered to be one of the greatest Zen teachers. He appears repeatedly in our koan collections. In the 48 cases of The Gateless Gate (Mumonkan) he appears ve times. In The Blue Cliff Record (Hekigan-roku) he appears in 17 koans. And in this collection, The Book of Equanimity (Shōyō-roku), nine koans feature Ummon.
The people who put these collections of exchanges, or mondos, together were pretty savvy. They picked exchanges that were true happenings, or encounters between people, or headed in that direction. You know how we remember important exchanges or moments in our lives with people? When a word awakens us or startles us, or turns the mind? Maybe it’s something that happened and we reflect on it. Or we get caught in it and think about it for years afterwards. “What did they mean? How could they have said that to me?” It can turn you in a wonderful way.
I remember sitting with Taizan Maezumi Roshi and I said, “I’m feeling so heartbroken today.” And he said, “Is that so?” That was my interview with him. I remember that now, 30 years later. “Is that so?” You could go so many places with it, can’t you? “Is that so?” But if it’s a turning word in your own Shōyō-roku book of life, then it’s something that‘s important to you. Maybe it‘s a tray of glue that sticks you. Or maybe it’s something that turns you and opens you. All of these encounters, the ones in your book, are metaphors and important words to study. We study these koans by enacting or becoming one with ourselves in the form of these stories. These koans are very lively.
Ummon; they say his capacity, his mind, was extraordinarily flexible and pliant and clear and unattached to a story of who he should be, at least as the metaphor goes, or our Zen ideal, if you will. (Though ideal is a tricky word to use.) We do admire a mind that is pliant, flexible, and open. A mind that is able to step into many of life’s situations and touch and taste and experience the bouquet of those moments without becoming completely lost or contracted. As practitioners of Zen we revere this mind. It’s called the Bodhisattva Way. And life manifests itself as this moment and there is no other.
This life, the life force, whatever we want to call it, is infinitely resourceful and infinitely wise and in infinitely loving. That‘s a fundamental core teaching of self-nature, of human life. We revere and we practice with great diligence, entering into more and more of life and finding that, more and more, our life is not seen as our impediment, or our problem, but our resource. If we are willing to find composure, sit upright, participate, show up, drag our miserable selves back into this room, it will make our lives better.
Ummon; we revere him because he has this position of being that one who enters into all of life; that one who is at the center of all experience that is bright and clear. When we talk about Ummon we are talking about you. Or I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about a capacity we have to appreciate life. That’s what Zen practice is – appreciating and enacting our appreciation in our life and then getting confused and coming back to the cushion and settling, and clarifying, and rubbing and scorching and polishing. And doing it again and again.
There were three marks that we might remember Ummon‘s teaching by, three encouragements, three innate capacities that we have when we’re not so caught up in self-gleaning. The first one is renouncing or cutting off the myriad streams of thought. His response, his way of being, was to renounce the myriad streams of thinking about. It’s called cutting off the streams, or renouncing the streams. Not in a muscular way, not in a judgmental way, just trusting this process of coming to know ourselves more intimately than we do through imagining that our life is an object outside of us.
We are reminded and encouraged by our worthy, wonderful Zen elders to renounce while we’re here, as best we can, the “mind road,” the practice of thinking about life. Doing the crossword puzzle in bed with your lover is probably not the best way to go about finding satisfaction and happiness for you or another.
Ummon was one who enjoyed the intimacy of “not knowing.”
The second instruction is seeing that the lid fits the box without a lot of jiggle. In other words, he was engaged in a practice that encourages us to experiment with this way of appreciating life by cutting the gap between ourselves and our experience. Lid fitted to box. Cut off the myriad streams.
And the third capacity he taught is we can ride the waves, ride the energies of the moment. The deep currents and alive-ness of the moment are what we begin to taste, or step into, when we settle beneath cortex thinking–thinking down. Down, we start to settle, softening our eyes from the center white clouds of our vision, or our knowing. Our seeing slides down our backbone into the heart realm, the heartland, and then settles down, hopefully, deep in the hara and we peek out from our belly buttons.
In those places, we encounter a world of immediacy that is filled with currents. These currents – cutting off the mind road, cutting the gap between ourselves and our experience, and riding the wave of aliveness in this moment – are currents of smells and sights and sounds and emotion. They’re not a thought. Ummon is encouraging us to ride the energy of the moment, to enter into the energy of this world.
Those are the three. His great offering and calling. Now, it’s quite something if you are not thinking. Is there fault? Ummon said, “Mount Sumeru.”
Of course, we never really stop thinking. Thinking is what human minds do. We secrete thoughts endlessly. If one thinks that one should never think, or that thoughts aren’t secreted like saliva out of the brain, one is mistaken.
“Mount Sumeru...”
Mount Sumeru was a mighty mountain. Clearly, when we settle into our center of gravity, when we settle into the heartland, and we are upright in our posture – stable, clear, serene – we are Mount Sumeru. In the iconography of Buddhism we are the very center of the universe.
So we sit as Mount Sumeru. And from that position we enjoy a mountain view, we enjoy a mountain stability. We trust and know that the white clouds are the children of the green mountain, and that the green mountain is the mother of the white clouds.
White.