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- Thursday, July 12, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007Mistaking the nature of things We are all, as a rule, habitually mistaking the nature of things.
Unfortunately, we do not believe that this is the case. The apparently concrete and substantial nature of our surroundings, as we ordinarily perceive them, fixes in our minds the absolute conviction that we understand how things are. For example, we believe we understand that trees are trees, flowers are flowers, and mountains are mountains. The source of arising of all that we perceive is so substantially different from, and alien to, the level of consciousness that we generally inhabit that we are, in fact, unable to know it or to describe it in words. Hence the repeated admonitions by Dogen that no matter what we think something is, it isn't. We must not think of enlightenment or no enlightenment, we must not think of realization or no realization--in fact, we must not think. Instead we are asked to inhabit a state. In a supreme twist of irony, we are left talking about silence and explaining that things should not be explained. If I had a nickel for every text I have ever read that goes on endlessly in words trying to explain how words cannot explain the truth, I would already be in retirement. One of the refreshing things about Dogen is that he did not fall victim to this type of hypocrisy. He did not discount the value of words; nor did Gurdjieff. Au contraire, both of them insisted that it is possible to understand significant things by means of the intelligence, and by means of the words we use to communicate. They both also insisted that what we would understand would be quite different than what we think we are going to understand. Truth, in other words, has a tendency to absolutely confound expectations. Perhaps that is one of the first signs we have encountered it. We must get rid of all our assumptions. In immediately abandoning everything that has come before, can we clear the way to grasp what is immediately before us, within this moment? Can our awareness be used as a sword to cut off the past, cut off the future? (See Christ's comments in Matthew, chapter 10, 34-40.) For me, pondering this question this morning in contrast to both the experience of this morning and the thoughts of this morning, I see that Truth is a substance. It is the only substance, and everything that we see around us and encounter is just a reflection of that substance. What do I mean by substance? There is a scent, a perfume that penetrates and suffuses all of reality, which in some moments I catch a whiff of. There is a clarity that lies on the edge of perception which penetrates this thing called "I" and dissolves it completely. Even though everything I perceive is real, nothing is real. Limitless acts of magic are taking place all around me at every moment. How is that? This state arises from that one, and yet there is a separation between the two that cannot be readily explained. The one certainty is that at every moment the two touch each other, I see for an instant how I constantly mistake the nature of things. As is so often the case, I am forced to turn once again to an examination of the nature of breathing, and the way in which air connects us to a much finer substance within life. I am still not sure that there is actually any other path to follow here. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Thursday, July 12, 2007The Middle Way As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I have been engaged for the past year and more in an attempt to read the comprehensive works of Dogen. This is a fairly massive undertaking; it has immersed me in the world of Buddhist theory and terminology, and colored a great deal of how I am thinking and what I am writing.
At this time in my life, my practice is to get up at about 5 a.m., make a tiny but stunningly powerful cup of espresso, and read a few pages of the Shobogenzo before I sit. This ritual is consistent enough that it helps form a foundation for the day that follows. In some senses, the coffee, the reading, and the sitting form a post around which everything else in life rotates. One of the things that has repeatedly struck me over the course of this effort is how consistent the effort is to interpret Dogen's work as a work of theory, and explain it in the context of Buddhist theory and terminology. This stands in stark contrast to my experience of Dogen's teaching as an effort to communicate practice. To me, almost everything Dogen speaks of is about practice of one kind or another. It may sound theoretical, but it repeatedly points us back to the active effort of questioning just what is going on here. The apparent density of ideas can be thinned out rather quickly if we are able to intimate the practice they refer to. This brings me to today's subject, which is the subject of the "Middle Way." The Buddha advised that the paths which suggested men go to extremes and push against the limits to attain spiritual mastery were flawed. Supposedly his insight was that a Middle Way was possible, a way in which effort was more balanced. A good friend of mine who is also a regular reader of this blog once pointed out to me, with what I think was entirely justifiable cynicism, that Buddha himself certainly pushed to the limits in a pretty extreme manner before attaining enlightenment. I mean, just how many years did he sit under that tree? ...Most of us already know that sitting anywhere for more than 30 or 40 minutes represents a fairly major effort. In our ordinary state, sitting still in an office chair for five minutes is more than most of us can expect to be comfortable with. The point of the Gurdjieff work is to undertake efforts in a more balanced manner. In this, we might argue, he was consistent with Buddha's insights. But we don't call it the Middle Way, we call it the Fourth Way. In contemporary Buddhism and in Buddhism in general, the Middle Way is understood to be a way of moderation, and the tenets of Buddhist behavior emphasize reasonableness, moderation, and an effort to take a balanced approach to every undertaking. As with other practices, there are an enormous amount of external rituals and behaviors that delineate the requirements for the practitioner. Everything ends up this way. No matter what the suggestion of the master is, the practice becomes external, because that is the only way we know how to understand things. What, however, if the Middle Way was an inner practice? This question can be carefully examined in light of Gurdjieff's enneagram and the multiplications that accompany it. The diagram contains detailed information about more than one Way within the iterations of 142857. A long-term study of this subject may offer suggestions about what the Middle Way is when understood in terms of inner practice. I believe that this meaning is quite specific and not amenable to subjective interpretation. One of the other surprising things to me about Dogen is that there are many passages in his Shobogenzo that intimate quite direct relationships between his own teaching and the teachings in the enneagram. At first I thought I was reading these inferences into the text because of my familiarity with Gurdjieff, but enough instances of this have arisen that I no longer think of it as coincidence. The school that Dogen learned from understood either the enneagram itself, or at the very least most of the basic principles contained within it. The Middle Way is not a way of behaving in life. The Middle Way lies within the organism. As we grow older, and our efforts deepen, everything slowly becomes much more inner. An inversion begins to take place. This is the same process as "thinning out" the density of Dogen's ideas: while retaining the ideas, as well as an appreciation of their structure and value, we learn to search deep inside ourselves. There we discover that all of the ideas stem from one root source, just as everything real emanates from one single point that does not exist in space or in time as we currently understand it. In the birth and growth of this understanding, it becomes more possible to abandon what we know and to stand naked in front of this moment: willing to receive it, hesitant to judge it, ready to respond to it. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Download 1.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
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