Living Buddhism

…..the Mind, essentially boundless in space and time, a metonymy and a metaphor, encompasses the entire Universe….

New Millennium, February, Northwest US, a Zen Center wakes up

American monks living Zen with their now old Teacher 

manifest Dogen’s Mind-to-Mind transmission

of American Soto/Rinzai patriarch’s Sanbo Kyodan tradition.

Breathtaking - the place itself captures the eyes, the mind,

or rather – seduces the soul

high in the mountains, between two streams

lodged into an ancient Indian sacred ground

the main building sheltered by fresh snow and pine trees. 

Being there, in predawn dark each morning - a rush uphill to the Zendo

to the smell of tea, coffee, to the warmth

to minds waking up to be themselves, with others, awaken

in total silence, human silhouettes, gazing inward to face the day.

Main meditation hall, Spartan and warm

timed by wooden block embracing 

long periods of Zazen, only candles flicker, enlightened. 

Living Zen community

work, Zazen, more work, never alone, never idle, some more work, more Zazen

nights in the dorm with dozen others snoring, farting, screaming at night –

human beings excreting themselves into the air of the mountain,

minds tormented by their nightmares, memories, insomniacs, maniacs, lawyers, therapists, junkies, carpenters, students - a cross section of the Northwest Buddhism,  mainly men but also many women, all ages, college age kids, retirees, extended family of people practicing spirituality together, working, eating, playing, all in one place, where intensity throws people together, into love and hate, into each other and into themselves in postmodern contemporary America.

They come with many questions, hungry for the spiritual, starving, suffering, thirsty, tired, lonely, depressed, jilted, exhausted, tortured - they ask

about the mind, God, self, truth, happiness, reality, end of suffering, love

about fascination, the mystery of entering the stream, a monastery, Zen training the unknown, the psychology of that mind, the experiences, never described before, the quality of mind in Zazen, all intensely personal, some selflessly academic.

Overwhelmed, the very first time – a feeling of coming home, of finding a place where the most inner part resonates with every thing around

a feeling of touching their souls.

First dokusan interview with the Teacher, the first koan

but there is also "MU" - a classic for new students, given

after the initial period of just sitting, counting the breaths, being the breath, observing the mind.

“MU” - being intimate, “being without”, intimate with the great Masters of Zen

intimate being Joshu, the question remains -  "What is MU".

Unexpectedly, an invitation to a ten day long meditation retreat – Sesshin

ten days of sitting cross-legged, twelve hours, ten days

knees, ankles, groin, the back, all in pain, swollen raw, burning, in flames

a chair is out of question, unshakably determined to take whatever comes

one is ready to die on the cushion

but the pain does not go away, there is no escape from it

the interminable unbearable - how long is the present moment?

Completely immersed in the pain, throwing every inch and muscle of the self into it

becoming one with it, there is no part which is separate

only then the pain disappears from consciousness, from awareness

there is no mind left to experience it, pain ceases to exist in the mind which cannot  feel it, the mind is the pain and there is no mind nor pain anymore.

Even if there is no trace of pain in the subjective for now, in time, after it merged with pain for a moment, the brain snaps out back to feel it, after all, isn’t pain supposed to be the brain’s warning signal of an internal danger?

Sitting there, for hours, the body a wound, the mind experiments

awareness turns off, subjectivity fades, thoughts quiet down, pure awareness of being there looses its subject, extending beyond this singular body, extending in time and space, infinite, floating freely without a self even being there

and then, suddenly, a moment comes when even that state of mind dissolves and disappears, the very mind disappears, there is no thing there anymore.

we know that we were NOT only some time later, when a sound or another distraction re-constructs Being and the Universe in us, snaps us back into knowing that we and things ARE.

The mind, its functions, awareness and consciousness deactivated by mind itself. That one, the self, the me, simply vanish and then come back and that going and coming opens us up to the mystery of the unknown.

Daily interviews with the Teacher, we talk about it and he only smiles gently confirms and encourages to keep going.

One night, in the dark dorm upstairs, little statuettes of sitting Buddhas come floating in the air. "There is no ‘MU’ there is no Buddha, there is no Self" they whisper, a lightening in the head, a realization, that the search, the images and concepts are completely empty, completely devoid of independent existence, creations of the mind, an instrument to construct worlds out of words and images, sensations, colors, sounds, smells and flavors, but they don't exist on their own. Frightening and liberating insight, “makyo” a delusion in Japanese, says the Teacher, go back to ”MU” show me what “MU” is.

And  “MU” becomes clearer, but how do you show it, if there is no self, if the self disappears what is “MU” then, how can a self “be” “MU” if there is no self to begin with in the first place? To know what MU” is intellectually, is not yet being “MU” or even if it is, one does not know that clearly enough to answer some of the testing questions...but it is coming closer....

And the struggle with the distinction between the real and the false

not possible to separate the truth from "not truth"

there is not a single thing a single thought, not a single speck of dust

that is not a part of the true and complete Universe

without beginning and without any clearly defined place and shape.

“Teacher, you often say that language and Reality are two different things?

"Yes", he nods. "Then what Reality does the language belong to? Is there a different one for language itself, are there two realities?”

"The Reality has to do with our direct experience, hearing the noise, tasting the fruit, feeling the wind breeze on your skin"

"Direct experience is an illusion, Teacher, it is nothing but a contrived construction of your mind, you can't reify it, you can't say that it has a different status from everything else”. He agrees. 

What is truth? What is real? " they ask

“Just this…..." is the Real

and “It” “is” what you make of it or what your mind makes of it, but even that is not true because one needs to ask what makes the mind in the first place, what makes the mind to be this mind, to work as it does, to keep constructing the Universe and itself ceaselessly in different forms, the “direct experience” is only and always just this…..,

already gone but back again, “just this……” always present, always here simultaneously inside and outside of you,  cant separate the two, can't really distinguish what's inside and what’s outside, it is an arbitrary decision / construction.

As they stay around questions begin to pile up, questions about the teaching itself, the Dharma, questions about the life in the Center itself, the dynamics of relationships, the power structure, the rules and their interpretation and enforcement, questions about the place of Zen in the larger picture of Buddhism in the US, the psychology of Zen training and its pitfalls, often hidden to Zen teachers themselves.

And they ask about the Dharma and the nature of the Mind.

In psychology, they say,  mind is often seen as being somehow encased in the brain and the scull, the mind is inside of the person's head.

But that naïve view is almost impossible to defend anymore. 

Where does the mind begins and where does it ends?

Does the mind have a beginning? What are its borders, where does it end?  

The mind is not located in any particular place nor is it limited to any location.

The mind is not a circumscribed entity, nor is it bound by any time frame,

the ideas and images that are the content of the mind come from the outside. 

Let's say we can recall an image of a person in our minds.

Let's say someone that we love.

The image is invoked in the brain and there is a way of perceiving it internally. But the image came from the outside, transmitted into our eyes by light waves, it is recreated internally inside of the brain as something that is stored and then recalled internally.

So the image came from the outside, it is a piece of the outside entering the brain and remaining there, the outside becomes the inside if we use the boundaries of our bodies as the border between outside and inside.

We are able to operate on the internally stored images, we can combine them, change them, reconfigure them in any way limited only by our visual imagination. But what underlies that internal manipulation of visual images?

They are essentially combinations and permutations of the common manipulations which can be done with external objects such as turning, twisting, bending, changing colors, stretching, flattening, cutting parts out, adding other parts, combining objects etc, as in the modern and conceptual art, the internal manipulations of representations are guided by the rules which are derived from rules used to manipulate external object. The rules are internalized along with the representations themselves. The internal life of images is an internalization of the outside world, the outside existing inside, and again the boundaries of the body, the skin surface, define the inside and outside.

...the Mind, essentially boundless in space and time, a metonymy and a metaphor, encompasses the entire Universe....