154: Design of Future Zen part 2

UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

Continuing with our theme: the importance of independent thought and interdependent action to the future of Zen in America, we must define the design intent of our program in the current context of uncertainty. The accelerating pace of change, including geometrically expanding attractions and distractions in the secular and now digital world, gives our task a certain urgency. As we touched on last time, from Master Dogen’s record of live teachings late in his career, Shobogenzo Zuimonki:

Even in the secular world, it is said that unity of mind is necessary for the sake of maintaining a household or protecting a castle. If unity is lacking, the house or the castle will eventually fall.

Similarly, Honest Abe declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The great unifying principle underlying Zen, then, is this “unity of mind.” But it begs the question of what precisely we mean, by “mind.” Usually our mind – the “monkey mind” anyway – is anything but unified. It may indeed be unified against all comers; or unified in its stubborn clinging to its own opinion; but it is not unified in the sense that I think Master Dogen meant. And it is not the mind characterized by dependent thinking and codependent action, as in “we are of the same mind,” or “like-minded people.”

As in the past, the future of Zen comes down to the transmission of this unified mind, which cannot be transmitted directly. Transmission of the method of unifying the mind – which is one meaning implied in the Japanese word sesshin, an intensive, extended retreat – is where we can focus our attention, and plan the design intent of our process around it.

In a present and future world increasingly transformed by digital technology and virtual engagement, we may need to rethink the traditional parameter of face-to-face transmission, honored as the most efficacious pedagogy in the history of Zen.

However, when we can meet in a virtual room from virtually anywhere in the world, the face-to-face connection becomes one of interfacing video screens. This option was not available in the history of Zen, to belabor the obvious. Objections to an argument that this kind of transaction may suffice to transmit the Dharma include that the perceived teacher-student environment may be colored by such tinkering as phony backgrounds and visual enhancements of lighting and filters, along with stage-setting and costuming designed to play to the camera. In the context of direct Dharma transmission, these amount to additional layers of delusion heaped upon the underlying distortions of conscious perception and conception built into the monkey mind.

What is missing in the virtual world is the rest of the story, what transpires behind the screen – the day-in and day-out mutual observation of behaviors and attitudes under less-than-ideal or challenging circumstances – wherein transactional exchanges of personalities and communication in the real-world dynamic of the teacher and student relationship enables “coming to accord” with the teacher’s worldview, which is hopefully “Right View.”

In Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi, he points out the importance of this relationship and its hoped-for outcome:

From the first time you meet a master, without engaging in bowing, incense offering, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.

Along with establishing the secondary supporting role of Zen’s protocols, rituals, and the written record, he goes on to declare that this “dropping off” of body and mind is tantamount to Buddha’s insight, and that it completely transforms your world:

When even for a moment you express the Buddha’s seal by sitting upright in samadhi, the whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.

Later in the same passage he profiles the transition that occurs when the student becomes the master:

Those who receive these water-and-fire benefits spread the Buddha’s guidance based on original awakening; because of this, all those who live with you and speak with you will obtain endless buddha virtue, and will unroll widely – inside and outside of the entire universe – the endless, unremitting, unthinkable, unnamable buddha-dharma.

The telling phrase is “all those who live with you.” A compelling question for lay householder Zen practitioners today is, Do we need to actually “live with” a teacher, or within a residential community, in order to apprehend the true Dharma? And if so, how do we go about implementing that design intent, within the practical constraints of maintaining a household, holding down a job, and raising a family? Or do we all have to become monastics? In which case, Zen is just another program for a privileged few.

Dogen’s effusive celebration of awakening to the truth of Buddhism as received wisdom includes – and is implicitly dependent upon – your relationship with your teacher. In Dogen’s narrative, he must be referencing his lived experience with Rujing in China. But it raises the question of exceptions to the general rule, such as the example of Shakyamuni himself, or Huineng, Sixth Patriarch in China. The case that one absolutely must have a teacher cannot be made – any more than it can be proven that one absolutely must practice zazen – in order to experience the insight of Zen.

In research circles, we hear phrases such as “participant observation” to define this kind of intimate, all-embracing investigation of another person’s world and approach to coping with it. The adage about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes captures the difficulty of getting far enough beyond ourselves, to be able to truly understand the worldview of someone else. In the martial, plastic and performing arts and crafts, as well as trades, guilds, and other apprentice-journeyman-master modes of learning, we see parallels to that of the Zen master and student, where the craft is transmitted mainly through nonverbal observation, closely following the approach of the trainer until it becomes second-nature to the novice.

But in the complex society that we encounter today, the possibility and potential payoff of living together, in order to effect a transmission of mind-to-mind seems more and more a pipe dream of a past reality that may no longer apply, and in fact may never have been the norm. Garnered from such collections as “The Transmission of the Lamp” from Song dynasty China, anecdotes from the millennia-long history of Zen begin to look like a mixed bag of long-term and short-term encounters and exchanges between masters and students, and master to master, as well as between students.

The resultant impression is that handing down the Dharma from generation to generation was largely a matter of monastics living in large and small communities, but also hermits living in isolation, being visited by other monks and nuns on pilgrimage, and occasional lively set-tos with lay people, women in particular. Notable exceptions to the monastic model include influential lay practitioners such as Vimalakirti in Buddha’s time, and Layman Pang and others later in China and Japan.

A line in the seminal Ch’an poem Hsinhsinming says, “For the unified mind in accord with the Way, all self-centered striving ceases.” The operative phrase here might be “in accord with the Way.” The “Way” being the Tao of Taoism. Which is a catchall phrase for the natural order of things, with which we want to come into harmony. This unified mind is the Original Mind, capital O – capital M – which we rediscover in our meditation, after sitting still enough and upright enough, for long enough.

So the central focus of our practice in the personal sphere has not changed, and our marching – or sitting – orders remain the same: hie thee to the cushion. With or without a teacher. Secure in the assurance that when the time is ripe, your teacher will appear. In due time, you may even find yourself in the unenviable position of being regarded as a teacher of Zen.

Further on in the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, the great founding Master talks about what it takes to herd the cats:

5 — 17

There is a proverb, “Unless you are deaf and dumb, you cannot become the head of a family.”

In other words, if you do not listen to the slander of others and do not speak ill of others, you will succeed in your own work. Only a person like this is qualified to be the head of a family.

Although this is a worldly proverb, we must apply it to our way of life as monks. How do we practice the Way without being disturbed by the slandering remarks of others, and without reacting to the resentment of others, or speaking of the right or wrong of others? Only those who thoroughly devote even their bones and marrow to the practice can do it.

Thank you, Dogen, for your candor and real-world practicality. It certainly resonates with my experience. If we read between the lines, we can see that Dogen’s life, and that of his monks, was apparently not always as ideally serene and transcendent as we may prefer to imagine. People are people, and were the same hot mess in 13th century Japan as they are today. Maybe even worse.

In the next segment we will continue with past as prologue to present, and present as perhaps prescient for the future of Zen. Your comments and response are, as always, welcome and encouraged. You know where to find me.

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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [e-mail]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little