#teisho

first row: algera (anglia), alcera (abc), merin (meridian)

second row: grena (granada), tisha (tww), south (southern)

third row: greta (grampian) (my home region in fact!), teisho (tvs), theiro (thames)

Gold Dust Is Valuable (The Rinzai Roku, Case #53)

“Governor Wang visited Zen Master Rinzai one day. When they happened to pass the monk’s hall, the Governor asked Master Rinzai; “Do the monks in this monastery all study the Sutras?” “No, they do not,” answered Rinzai. The Governor further queried; “Then, do they practice meditation?” The Master replied again; “No, they do not.” The Governor was confused so he asked; “If they neither study the Sutras nor practice meditation, what then do they do?” Master Rinzai said; “All of my students are training to become Buddhas.” The Governor said; “Though gold dust is precious, in the eyes it clouds the vision.” Master Rinzai remarked; “And I almost took you for a common fellow!”

I have been reflecting lately on the reality that I have a really interesting mixture of students. On one hand I have a number of folks who live relatively lay, householder style lives, a place where I find myself increasingly in recent years. And on the other hand, I have a number of folks who live fairly stringent monastic style lives, replete with the robes, haircuts, daily liturgical schedules, and high ceremonial. Because of our varied locales around the country, usually these folks mostly engage one another on social media, and in retreat once a year so. Given the nature of 2020, however, and our ongoing social distancing precautions, with the continued closure of our temples, we initiated, as Roshi Al has, a number of Zoom programs where all have been invited to practice together, usually in the examination of our traditional collections of “Zen Case Studies” (or koans), and this has been an interesting exercise.

I’ve noted that my householder students are often highly educated, with secular jobs that reflect such efforts, and too, they’re often quite concerned with an academic, rational study and practice of Buddhism. On the other hand, I’ve observed that my monastic students tend to be a bit more earthy, deeply connected with matters of the heart, and are far more interested in liturgical and embodied meditative practices. This seeming division is well known to Buddhist history, and at times it has been posited as a division between sutra study and zen study, most often as an irreconcilable divide. That said, I’m not so quick to pass off Zen as mere meditation focused practiced. Indeed, I would contend that when Bodhidharma uttered his sacred verse (you know, “a special transmission outside of the scriptures, not dependent on words and letters, directly pointing at the mind and becoming Buddha”) that he did so not with the intention of forgoing sutra study, or scholarly, rational concerns, and certainly not to facilitate a mere trade off with such interests for the sentimentality, and typically reductionist romanticization that can be associated with the meditative and liturgical practices that often find themselves broadly situated under the banner of Zen.

As most of you know, Zen is something notoriously difficult to pin down and define as something of a “Gestalt,” or phenomenon possessed seemingly of more than its constituent parts. While a simple definition might be, somewhat accurately even, “concentrated attention,” or colloquially “meditation,” that doesn’t quite do this discipline justice. No doubt, shared Buddhist history across traditions is replete with individuals who have wholeheartedly cast themselves into the furnace of meditative fervor, and who have, after considerable number of years, decades even, done little but ruminate on their rather stagnant patterns of suffering and delusion.

On the other hand, Zen orthodoxy is filled with stories and hagiographies of personalities, such as the sixth patriarch Hui Neng who have come to rather complete, and integrated awakening experiences after relatively little practice or cultivation. In fact, Hui Neng is a particularly fascinating, idealized case, as this universal Zen ancestor’s cultivation consisted of little more than cutting wood and selling his wares in a marketplace while accidentally hearing a recitation of a sutra that seemed to attune his mind to the frequency of awakening. (How’s that for a gestalt?)

However, even the most devout proponents of the doctrine of “sudden” (rather than “gradual”) awakening would rarely, if ever, recognize such a phenomenon as actually happening in the real, lived lives of contemporary practitioners whose lives are strewn with rational factuality rather than filtered ideality.

In this, if Zen is simply meditation, how can practitioners devote themselves to the discipline of silent sitting for decades upon decades and reap the harvest of neither sudden nor gradual cultivation? And further, how can luminary personalities such as Hui Neng seemingly devote no time to meditation, and stumble into the spiritual parenthood of not just myriad practitioners, but indeed, myriad schools and lineages?

In this, then, if Zen is not reducible to meditation, and if formal sitting is not required for awakening in Zen orthodoxy, why do we continue to hold the practice thereof so closely to our hearts? Indeed, Hui Neng’s story could be understood to be dismissive not only of run-of-the-mill meditation, but too of liturgy, precepts, and sutra study. Why bother with any of that, as we do?

Case fifty-three of the Rinzai Roku is a fantastic dialogue that exemplifies this dilemma. Governor Wang, holding to the classical dichotomy that posits an unquestionable divide between the sutric and meditative schools queries Master Rinzai on the training of his students, who seem to be possessed of neither this-nor-that, but rather of reality itself in the practice of Buddhahood itself. Responding then, to Master Rinzai’s cuttingly truthful characterization of the school of thought that makes up more than half of our Open Mind Zen School’s inherited dharma lineage, Governor Wang observes “gold dust is precious, but, in the eyes it clouds the vision.”

Friends, there is no doubt to me that sutric, rational, and scholastic rooted inquiry is a valuable, worth its weight in gold spiritual discipline. Too, there is no doubt that the meditative practice of sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention is a precious, worth its weight in gold spiritual discipline. That said, if we get too close, if we hold too tightly, if we allow our eyes to become organs of projection rather than perception in committing to any of this, it’s all poisonous, damaging, and blinding. Such is the potential nature of literally all orthodoxy (and likely heterodoxy, but we’ll leave that for another day).

Orthodoxy is generally defined as “conforming to what is generally or traditionally accepted as right or true; established and approved.” While the connotation of such a definition generally implies something ancient, venerable, and unchanging, it’s that unchanging notion that makes the usual implications of orthodoxy utterly incompatible with Buddhist teaching, which universally posits that literally all things are changing, transitory, in process, and ultimately insubstantial, and unreal in their immaterial nature.

Buddhist orthodoxy, therefore, must be alive and open to subtle refinement over time as generations come and go. As nothing is truly stationary, stagnant, or even comprehensive in any would-be stable position, the truest assertions are those which remain conversant with reality, and evolve not only with, but indeed for it.

At its best, rendering something as orthodox is to give it a particular status which reminds us that it (and the processes pertaining to how it came to be) is, or are, worthy of due consideration and particular attention over time. In this, orthodoxy must never become an untouchable status that renders a thing free from criticism or exempt from change. Rather, it should provide something of a shield from the flippant disregard and inconsiderate abandonment that Zen students, and certainly our rather shared post-religious, post-modern ever secularizing culture can itself frequently render.

It’s interesting to note that Buddhism was first founded by Siddhartha Gautama with his observation that existence itself is seemingly wrapped up entirely with pain and disappointment, or Dukkha. The Buddha asserted that this pain and disappointment is birthed from nowhere other than our own consciousness, and particularly, from our tendencies to incorrectly regard nature as anything other than what it is. Nature, then, the Buddha posited, is marked with impermanence (anicca), insubstantiality (anatta), and the ever-looming potential for dissatisfaction (dukkha), because human psyches seem so primed to be particularly averse to impermanence and insubstantiality.

The Buddha’s answer to this quandary, in alignment with the orthodox, sramanic suppositions of his time was to step away from it all. To increasingly renounce material nature so as to become unbounded from it, and to eventually leave it behind. This, of course, is the origin of the Zen school – contemplating the nature of existence, it’s innate problems, and stepping off the wheel in responding to the observations assumed to arise from that contemplation.

As Buddhism gained popularity and requisite adherence, it gained too critically discerning minds, each sincerely engaged with the burgeoning orthodoxy of Buddhism, but also with that of reality itself. Slowly, subtle divergences, caveats, and new directions appeared, and a multitude of schools of Buddhism became (and are becoming) established, each with their own sets of orthodox presuppositions.

As these oft metaphysical suppositions have been added, subtracted, and supplanted within these traditions, practices and eschatological suppositions have evolved accordingly. This is proactively happening too as Buddhism continues to mingle with modernity’s secular materialism, and post-modernity’s emerging trans-secular relativism.

When Siddhartha Gautama was alive and teaching, the religious milieu of the day widely supported the notion of postmortem reincarnation. Accordingly, the Buddha’s response to the perception of the impermanence, insubstantiality, and tendency toward dissatisfaction that seemingly define material reality was to separate oneself so far from it that one could become disentangled with it entirely, forgoing then reanimation on a physical plane after death, and thereby dissolving into the void in a “final enlightenment”.

In pondering the context and milieu of contemporary America, however, where notions of postmortem existence are increasingly anathema to the masses, and where dissolving into the void is to be assumed rather than to be striven for, orthodoxy has to evolve lest it abandon conversation and therefore relevance. While notions of the impermanent and insubstantial nature of reality have become nothing but more acceptable as legitimate assumptions in our day and age, the inextricability of suffering and dissatisfaction from those assumptions has become less so.

In Buddhist orthodoxy enlightenment has long been cast as multifold, as encompassing initial and final iterations. While so-called “final enlightenment” has been synonymous with dissolution into the void, initial enlightenment (or “entering the stream” as it’s sometimes called) has been understood as a related primer state, defined by its secession from suffering and dissatisfaction, while not having yet abandoned the substrate of impermanent and insubstantial material reality.

Various traditions have continuously produced and upheld various personalities said to have achieved initial awakening, and who have thereby become destined for the proposed final awakening of mahaparinirvana or voidous dissolution. Our own traditions of dharma transmission and inka shomei are certainly related to this practice.

That said, if, as modernity might postulate, one need not strive toward the inevitability that is the void, one’s relationship to the material reality that precedes that inevitability (the void and it’s appendant orthodoxy) must change. Without such change, how might we credibly define enlightenment, let alone multistage awakening, as being worth any striving, should a universal grace be afforded to all in the indiscriminate voidant dissolution of all, without regard for virtue or vice, for cultivation or ignorance?

Assuming that the enlightened persons identified within various traditions and histories as having been possessed of an experience of awakening to a reality beyond that defined by the suffering appendant to the impermanent and insubstantial reality of here-and-now are to be valued, enlightenment must be qualified as being entirely wrapped up within material existence, rather than standing in opposition to it.

As such, it is no longer acceptable to abandon life in the present, perceptible world for a potentially void hereafter, which is increasingly taken as a given rather than an uncertain goal, to be entered into through burying oneself alive in the renunciation of the world through planting one’s head in the sutras, or atop a mountain of zafus and zabutons.

Saliently, Master Rinzai said; “All of my students are training to become Buddhas.” Not sutra masters, not meditation adepts, not even disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha and his pre-modern assumptions, rather, Buddhas in and of their own accord. Full stop. This Buddhahood is attained not merely through studying the sutras, and not merely through practicing meditation. What then is this practice?

It’s fascinating to me, that Governor Wang, at once wrapped up in classical duality, suddenly finds clarity in his dialogue with Master Rinzai, seeing the “gold” in these aforementioned practices, and realizing their proper place, but that is to say not in unquestioned orthodoxy, as dust blindingly blown into the eyes.

“I almost took you for a common fellow,” Master Rinzai concludes, in an alive dialogue that has naturally come to be complied as but one case among many in a sutra-like compendium.

Where and how do we train to become Buddhas, rather than Buddhists?

It’s nearing 10:00am, central time anyway. How’s about we have a bit of conversation, of alive dialogue? The central discipline of Zen, after all, has never been sutra study or meditation, but rather dialogue with and in this very moment, not the moments of 2,500 years ago, 1000 years ago, or even 10 seconds ago. Right here, right now. What – is – this? And I don’t mean that hypothetically.